The Lost Guidon | Page 4

but he had never experienced a more ardent glow of gratification than upon overhearing a friend's remark: "Girard is great! Anybody would imagine he was used to all this!"
No strategist was ever more wary. He would not undertake to dance, for he readily perceived that the gyrations in the ball-room were utterly dissimilar to the clumsy capering to which he had been accustomed on the puncheon floor of a mountain cabin. He had the less reason for regret since he was privileged instead to stroll up and down the veranda,--"promenade" was the technical term,--a slender hand, delicately gloved, on the sleeve of his gray uniform, the old regimentals being de rigueur at these reunions. A white ball-gown, such as he had never before seen, fashioned of tissue over lustrous white silk, swayed in diaphanous folds against him, for these were the days of voluminous draperies; a head of auburn hair elaborately dressed gleamed in the moonlight near his shoulder. Miss Alicia Duval thought him tremendously handsome; she adored his record, as she would have said--unaware how little of it she knew--and she did not so much intend to flirt as to draw him out, for there was something about him different from the men of her set, and it stimulated her interest.
"Isn't the moon heavenly!" she observed, gazing at the brilliant orb, now near the full, swinging in the sky, which became a definite blue in its light above the massive dark mountains and the misty valley below; for the building was as near the brink as safety permitted--nearer, the cautious opined.
"Heavenly? Not more'n it's got a right to be. It's a heavenly body, ain't it?" he rejoined.
"Oh, how sarcastic!" she exclaimed. "In what school did you acquire your trenchant style?"
He thought of the tiny district school where he had acquired the very little he knew of aught, and said nothing, laughing constrainedly in lieu of response.
The music of the orchestra came, to them from the ball-room, and the rhythmic beat of dancing feet; the wind lifted her hair gently and brought to them the fragrance of flowering plants and the pungent aroma of mint down in the depths of the ravine hard by, where lurked a chalybeate spring; but for the noisy rout of the dance, and now and again the flimsy chatter of a passing couple on the piazza, promenading like themselves, they might have heard the waters of the fountain rise and bubble and break and sigh as the pulsating impulse beat like heart-throbs, and perchance on its rocky marge an oread a-singing.
"But you don't answer me," she pouted with an affectation of pettishness. "Do you know that you trouble yourself to talk very little, Captain Girard!"
"I think the more," he declared.
"Think? Oh, dear me! I didn't know that anybody does anything so unfashionable nowadays as to think! And what do you think about, pray?"
"About you!"
And that began it: he was a gallant man, and he had been a brave one. He was not aware how far he was going on so short an acquaintance, but his temerity was not displeasing to the lady. She liked his manner of storming the citadel, and she did not realize that he merely spoke at random, as best he might. He was in his uniform a splendid and martial presentment of military youth, and indeed he was much the junior of his compeers.
"Who are Captain Girard's people, Papa?" she asked Colonel Duval next morning, as the family party sat at breakfast in quasi seclusion at one of the small round tables in the crowded dining-room, full of the chatter of people and the clatter of dishes.
"Girard?" Colonel Duval repeated thoughtfully. "I really don't know. I have an impression they live somewhere in East Tennessee. I never met him till just about the end of the war."
"Oh, Papa! How unsatisfactory you are! You never know anything about anybody."
"I should think his people must be very plain," said Mrs. Duval. Her social discrimination was extremely acute and in constant practice.
"I don't know why. He is very much of a gentleman," the Colonel contended. His heart was warm to-day with much fraternizing, and it was not kind to brush the bloom off his peach.
"Oh, trifles suggest the fact. He is not at all au fait."
He was, however, experienced in ways of the world unimagined in her philosophy. The reunion had drawn to a close, ending in a flare of jollity and tender reminiscence and good-fellowship. The old soldiers were all gone save a few regular patrons of the hotel, who with their families were completing their summer sojourn. Captain Girard lingered, too, fascinated by this glimpse of the frivolous world, hitherto unimagined, rather than by the incense to his vanity offered by his facile acceptance as a squire of dames. For the first