第28章

"How are you, Norbert?" Joe began."Don't you remember me? I--" He came to a full stop, as the fat one, thrusting out an under lip as his only token of recognition, passed balefully on.

Joe proceeded slowly until he came to the Tocsin building.At the foot of the stairway leading up to the offices he hesitated for a few moments; then he turned away and walked towards the quieter part of Main Street.Most of the people he met took no notice of him, only two or three giving him second glances of half-cognizance, as though he reminded them of some one they could not place, and it was not until he had come near the Pike Mansion that he saw a full recognition in the eyes of one of the many whom he knew, and who had known him in his boyhood in the town.A lady, turning a corner, looked up carelessly, and then half-stopped within a few feet of him, as if startled.

Joe's cheeks went a sudden crimson; for it was the lady of his old dreams.

Seven years had made Mamie Pike only prettier.

She had grown into her young womanhood with an ampleness that had nothing of oversufficiency in it, nor anywhere a threat that some day there might be too much of her.Not quite seventeen when he had last seen her, now, at twenty-four, her amber hair elaborately becoming a plump and regular face, all of her old charm came over him once more, and it immediately seemed to him that he saw clearly his real reason for coming back to Canaan.She had been the Rich-Little-Girl of his child days, the golden princess playing in the Palace-Grounds, and in his early boyhood (until he had grown wicked and shabby) he had been sometimes invited to the Pike Mansion for the games and ice-cream of the daughter of the house, before her dancing days began.He had gone timidly, not daring ever to "call" her in "Quaker Meeting" or "Post-office," but watching her reverently and surreptitiously and continually.She had always seemed to him the one thing of all the world most rare, most mysterious, most unapproachable.She had not offered an apparition less so in those days when he began to come under the suspicion of Canaan, when the old people began to look upon him hotly, the young people coldly.His very exclusion wove for him a glamour about her, and she was more than ever his moon, far, lovely, unattainable, and brilliant, never to be reached by his lifted arms, but only by his lifted eyes.Nor had his long absence obliterated that light; somewhere in his dreams it always had place, shining, perhaps, with a fainter lustre as the years grew to seven, but never gone altogether.

Now, at last, that he stood in her very presence again, it sprang to the full flood of its old brilliance --and more!

As she came to her half-stop of surprise, startled, he took his courage in two hands, and, lifting his hat, stepped to her side.

"You--you remember me?" he stammered.

"Yes," she answered, a little breathlessly.

"Ah, that's kind of you!" he cried, and began to walk on with her, unconsciously."I feel like a returned ghost wandering about--invisible and unrecognized.So few people seem to remember me!""I think you are wrong.I think you'll find everybody remembers you," she responded, uneasily.

"No, I'm afraid not," he began."I--"

"I'm afraid they do!"

Joe laughed a little."My father was saying something like that to me a while ago.He meant that they used to think me a great scapegrace here.

Do you mean that?"

"I'd scarcely like to say," she answered, her face growing more troubled; for they were close on the imperial domain.

"But it's long ago--and I really didn't do anything so outrageous, it seems to me." He laughed again."I know your father was angry with me once or twice, especially the night I hid on your porch to watch you--to watch you dance, I mean.

But, you see, I've come back to rehabilitate myself, to--"She interrupted him.They were not far from her gate, and she saw her father standing in the yard, directing a painter who was at work on one of the cast-iron deer.The Judge was apparently in good spirits, laughing with the workman over some jest between them, but that did not lessen Mamie's nervousness.

"Mr.Louden," she said, in as kindly a tone as she could, "I shall have to ask you not to walk with me.My father would not like it."Joe stopped with a jerk.

"Why, I--I thought I'd go in and shake hands with him,--and tell him I--"Astonishment that partook of terror and of awe spread itself instantly upon her face.

"Good gracious!" she cried."NO!"

"Very well," said Joe, humbly."Good-bye."He was too late to get away with any good grace.

Judge Pike had seen them, and, even as Joe turned to go, rushed down to the gate, flung it open, and motioned his daughter to enter.This he did with one wide sweep of his arm, and, with another sweep, forbade Joe to look upon either moon ORsun.It was a magnificent gesture: it excluded the young man from the street, Judge Pike's street, and from the town, Judge Pike's town.It swept him from the earth, abolished him, denied him the right to breathe the common air, to be seen of men; and, at once a headsman's stroke and an excommunication, destroyed him, soul and body, thus rebuking the silly Providence that had created him, and repairing Its mistake by annihilating him.This hurling Olympian gesture smote the street; the rails of the car-track sprang and quivered with the shock; it thundered, and, amid the dumfounding uproar of the wrath of a god, the Will of the Canaanite Jove wrote the words in fiery letters upon the ether:

"CEASE TO BE!"

Joe did not go in to shake hands with Judge Pike.