The Place Beyond the Winds | Page 9

bent to one side and eyes and lips smiling, Priscilla listened until something within her caught and responded to the tripping notes. At first she went cautiously, feeling her way after the enchanted music, then she gained courage, and the very heart of her danced and trembled in accord.
"Fine! fine! Now--slower; see it's the nymph stepping this way and that! Forward, so! Now!"
And then, exhausted and laughing madly, Priscilla sank down upon a rock near the musician, who, seeing her worn and panting, played on, without a word, a sweet, sad strain that brought tears to the listener's eyes--tears of absolute enjoyment and content. She had never heard music before in all her bleak, colourless life, and Dick Travers was no mean artist, in his way.
"And now," he said presently, sitting down a few feet from her, "just tell me who you are and what in the world prompts you to worship, so adorably, that hideous brute over there?"
Between fourteen and twenty lies a chasm of age and experience that ensures patronage to one and dependence to the other. Travers felt aged and protecting, but Priscilla grew impish and perverse; besides, she always intuitively shielded her real self until she capitulated entirely. This was a new play, a new comrade, but she must be cautious.
"I--I have no name--he made me!" She nodded toward the grinning skull. "On bright sunny afternoons in spring, when flowers and green things are beginning to live, he lets me dance, once in a great while, so that I can keep alive!"
Priscilla, with this, gave such a beaming and mischievous smile that Travers was bewitched.
"You----" But he did not put his thought into words; he merely gave smile for smile, and asked:
"Did he teach you to dance?"
"No. The dance is--is me! That's why he likes me. He's so dead that he likes to see something that is alive."
"The whole world would adore you could it see you as I just have!"
Then Travers, with the artist's eye, wondered how dark hair could possibly hold such golden tints, and how such a dark face could make lovely the blue, richly lashed eyes. He knew she must be from Lonely Farm--Jerry-Jo used to speak of her; lately he had said nothing, to be sure, but this certainly must be the child who had once cried over a book of his. Poor, little, temperamental beggar!
"Come up and deliver!" Travers gave a laugh. "I'm Robin Hood and I want you to explain yourself. Why do you bow down before that brazen and evil-looking brute?"
Priscilla hugged her knees in her clasped hands, and said, on the defence:
"He's the only god that answered my prayer. I tried father's God and--it didn't work! Then I fixed up this one, and--it did!"
"What was it you wanted?"
"I wanted to learn things! I wanted to go to school. I prayed to have father's heart softened, but it stayed--rocky. Then I began to worship this"--the right hand waved toward the bleached and grinning skull--"and my wish came true. I told the schoolmaster. Do you know Mr. Anton Farwell?"
"I've heard of him."
"I told him I wanted to learn, and after he got through laughing he said he'd been sent by my god to teach me all I wanted to know; but of course he can't do that!"
"Do what?" Travers was fascinated by the child's na?vety.
"Teach me all I want to know. Why, I'm going to suffer and know many things!"
"Good Lord!" ejaculated Travers; "you won't mind if I laugh?"
"I don't think there's anything to laugh at!" Priscilla held him sternly. "Have you ever suffered?"
The laugh died from Travers's face.
"Suffered!" he repeated. "Yes! yes!"
"Well, doesn't it pay--when you get what you want and know things?"
"Why, see here, youngster--it does! You've managed to dig out of your life quite a brilliant philosophy, though I suppose you do not know what that is. It's holding to your ideal, the thing that seems most worth while, and forcing everything else into line with that. Now, you see I had a bad handicap--a clutch on me that made me a weak, sickly fellow, but through it all I kept my ideal."
Priscilla was listening bravely. She was following this thought as she had the music; something in her was responding. She did not speak, and Travers went on talking, more to himself than to her.
"Always before the poor thing I really was, walked the fine thing I would be. I thought myself straight and strong and clean. Lord! how it hurt sometimes; but I grew, after a time, into something approaching the ideal going on before me, thinking high and strong thoughts, forgetting the meannesses and aches--do you understand?"
This was a fairy story to the listener. Rigid and spellbound she replied:
"Yes. And that's what I've been doing--and nobody knew. I've just been working hard for