A Voice in a Garden Crailey came home the next day with a new poem, but no fish. He lounged up the stairs, late in the afternoon, humming cheerfully to himself, and, dropping his rod in a corner of Tom's office, laid the poem on the desk before his partner, produced a large, newly-replenished flask, opened it, stretched himself comfortably upon a capacious horse-hair sofa, drank a deep draught, chuckled softly, and requested Mr. Vanrevel to set the rhymes to music immediately.
"Try it on your instrument," he said. "It's a simple verse about nothing but stars, and you can work it out in twenty minutes with the guitar."
"It is broken," said Tom, not looking up from his work.
"Broken! When?"
"Last night."
"Who broke it?"
"It fell from the table in my room."
"How? Easily mended, isn't it?"
"I think I shall not play it soon again."
Crailey swung his long legs off the sofa and abruptly sat upright.
"What's this?" he asked gravely.
Tom pushed his papers away from him, rose and went to the dusty window that looked to the west, where, at the end of the long street, the sun was setting behind the ruin of charred timbers on the bank of the shining river.
"It seems that I played once too often," he said.
Crailey was thoroughly astonished. He took a long, affectionate pull at the flask and offered it to his partner.
"No," said Tom, turning to him with a troubled face, "and if I were you, I wouldn't either. These fishing trips of yours--"
"Fishing!" Crailey laughed. "Trips of a poetaster! It's then I write best, and write I will! There's a poem, and a damned good one, too, old preacher, in every gill of whiskey, and I'm the lad that can extract it!
Lord! what's better than to be out in the open, all by yourself in the woods, or on the river? Think of the long nights alone with the glory of heaven and a good demijohn. Why, a man's thoughts are like actors performing in the air and all the crowding stars for audience! You know in your soul you'd rather have me out there, going it all by myself, than raising thunder over town. And you know, too, it doesn't tell on me; it doesn't show! You couldn't guess, to save your life, how much I've had to-day, now, could you?"
"Yes," returned the other, "I could."
"Well, well," said Crailey, good-naturedly, "we weren't talking of me."
He set down the flask, went to his friend and dropped a hand lightly on his shoulder. "What made you break the guitar? Tell me."
"What makes you think I broke it?" asked his partner sharply.
"Tell me why you did it," said Crailey.
And Tom, pacing the room, told him, while Crailey stood in silence, looking him eagerly in the eye whenever Tom turned his way. The listener interrupted seldom; once it was to exclaim: "But you haven't said why you broke the guitar?"
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!' I ought to have cut off the hands that played to her." "And cut your throat for singing to her?"
"She was right!" the other answered, striding up and down the room.
"Right--a thousand times! in everything she did. That I should even ap- proach her, was an unspeakable insolence. I had forgotten, and so, possibly, had she, but I had not even been properly introduced to her."
"No, you hadn't, that's true," observed Crailey, reflectively. "You don't seem to have much to reproach her with, Tom."
"Reproach her!" cried the other. "That I should dream she would speak to me or have anything to do with me, was to cast a doubt upon her loyalty as a daughter. She was right, I say! And she did the only thing she could do: rebuked me before them all. No one ever merited what he got more roundly than I deserved that. Who was I, in her eyes, that I should besiege her with my importunities, who but her father's worst enemy?"
Deep anxiety knitted Crailey's brow. "I understood she knew of the quarrel," he said, thoughtfully. "I saw that, the other evening when I helped her out of the crowd. She spoke of it on the way home, I remember; but how did she know that you were Vanrevel? No one in town would be apt to mention you to her."
"No, but she did know, you see."
"Yes," returned Mr. Gray slowly. "So it seems! Probably her father told her to avoid you, and described you so that she recognized you as the man who caught the kitten."
He paused, picked up the flask, and again applied himself to its contents, his eyes peering over the up-tilted vessel at Tom, who continued to pace up and down the length of the office. After a time, Crailey, fumbling in his coat, found a long cheroot, and, as he lit it, inquired casually:
"Do you remember if she addressed you by name?"
"I think not," Tom answered, halting. "What does it matter?"
Crailey drew a deep breath.
"It doesn't," he returned.
"She knew me well enough," said Tom, sadly, as he resumed his sentry-go.
"Yes," repeated Crailey, deliberately. "So it seems; so it seems!" He blew a long stream of smoke out into the air before him, and softly mur- mured again: " So it seems, so it seems."
Silence fell, broken only by the sound of Tom's footsteps, until, presently, some one informally shouted his name from the street below. It was only Will Cummings, passing the time of day, but when Tom turned from the window after answering him, Crailey, his poem, and his flask were gone.
That evening Vanrevel sat in the dusty office, driving himself to his work with a sharp goad, for there was a face that came between him and all else in the world, and a voice that sounded always in his ears. But the work was done before he rose from his chair, though he showed a haggard visage as he bent above his candles to blow them out.
