University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
STANTHORNE.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 494EAF. Page 052. In-line Illustration. Decorative chapter heading. Decorative urn surrounded by ivy.]

WHILE gray dawn crept into his rooms,
Stanthorne lay in waking dreams.

A slight happening had greatly
changed him. He turned the matters of yesterday
over and found the happening. All his
life his mother had been dearest of created beings
to him. Women generally he honored;
in his enthusiasm he had as often idealized men
as women; but now an individual fascination
possessed him.

Love comes to you according to your
nature. If you are corrupt, he is corruptible.
But if, in the darkness and wrestling of this
world, you hold him as a being divine, he will
bless you like the Angel of God. In that man
or woman who carries a child-heart into maturity
love becomes perfect purification.

Stanthorne had a dashing, daring spirit, which
led him all over his native land, and even afar
on great waters. And in these rovings he probably

touched smirch. But his wholesome nature
never took to it. Now, while the dawn
climbed up its ladder of tints, and he knew this
strange life rushing through his veins, he felt
unworthy of it. He wished he were a better
man, who dared to confess to himself that he
loved such a woman. A door stood open, half-revealing
his den and his implements of daily
labor. His ambition at once joined hands with
this new motive power. What could he not accomplish
for her approval!

It was Helen Dimmock's habit to begin every
day's work by talking with her organ. Sometimes
she unlocked the church only to stop a
few moments; but oftener she came early and
spent whole hours there.

Billy Sinks never failed her. If she passed
the house where he ate and slept, while he sat
at the morning meal, he promptly chucked his
rations into his jaws and rose after her aloft,
where he chewed his breakfast between strokes.
Helen Dimmock never knew this item of his
devotion.

Stanthorne passed Grace Church on his return
from breakfast to his office. Hearing the organ
he hesitated by the steps, but the unconscious
siren aloft drew him farther. He went in and
found a quiet, dusky seat under galleries, where
he could listen without being seen. Here he
sat, a happy thief, while he should have been
producing an editorial and filling up various

crannies of his paper. When the organist
closed her instrument he rushed to the office,
and charged the senior's head full of ideas from
the battery of his own restlessness and brilliancy.

Thus he formed a habit of going to church of
mornings. No papist was so zealous as he became.
The sexton, busy about affairs, grew to
notice this young man, and to smile approvingly
on his rapt eyes and bright face.

It was his fashion of enjoying Helen's society
until he might approach her. Stanthorne had
very little vanity and self-consciousness. The
more he wished to make her his friend, the less
deft he grew at setting about it. His bold, go-easy
manner parted off him like a cleft mask in
her presence.

Sometimes he broke a paragraph in the middle
and dashed out of office for a long tramp.
How he communed with himself, and how his
Mother Nature reassured her trembling, impassioned
boy, I cannot relate.

But do not infer that he worked less. On the
contrary, new vigor and spirit cropped out in
his style. Love is that fountain of perpetual
strength which poor Ponce de Leon sought so
far. Because Stanthorne was becoming a lover
he was becoming a better worker. His sketches
reached farther over the country; his paper
gathered earnestness and lost flippancy, and he
originated so many taking and brilliant witticisms

that editors in surrounding counties lived
off his columns for months.

At first it was enough for Stanthorne to know
that he loved, but the desire to be beloved took
its overpowering turn. Though he grew quick
at interpreting her moods through her touch on
the organ, and thus gathered many lines of her
nature into his hand, he held them jealously and
silently.

They met and greeted each other on the street
every day. He took the trouble to be sometimes
present at choir-rehearsals with the tenor,
an acquaintance of his; and he wrote up an
organ concert given in Grace Church so genially
as to waken jealousy in the breasts of neighboring
choirs.

By degrees he made Helen Dimmock feel his
friendship, and her quiet acceptance of it for
awhile sufficed him.

Then he grew impatient standing in the vestibule,
and pushed his way and got himself admitted
to her house.

Nina at once made friends with Stanthorne,
and he lost no time in winning George over to
be his ally also. So on divers evenings he laid
eager hand on the bell, trembling before the
temple of his divinity.

These evenings were always happy ones.
Stanthorne, with George on his knee, and Nina's
sweet, sympathetic face near by, looked at his
love and glowed with talk and ardor, or he stood

beside the piano and sung with her and loved
her through every tone.

He felt as if he were in a boat rising and falling
on the swells; though the oars rested not in
his hands, yet for a time the motion intoxicated
him, and he rode toward his fair island in all
reverence slowly.

Being a determined lover, he would risk no
avowal until he could hope for one in return;
and what encouragement of this nature did
Helen Dimmock give him? Always tenderly
kind to him as she was to everybody, without
prudery or boldness; enjoying his companionship
because she was young like himself; she
yet gave him no special marks of favor which
a vain or a hopeful man might receive as signs
of capitulation.

His life resolved itself into a circle which he
rounded weekly; on Sabbath day he rested and
worshipped with her; during the rest of the week
he worked and worshipped beside her as often as
she could see him.

But one afternoon, as he sat in his office, the
busy pen fell from his hand and his young face
glowed. The thought of her had been with him
all day. He decided to go to her that evening,
and, begging audience, to tell his love. If she
could accept him as her husband, God be
thanked! If not— Stanthorne dropped his
head in his hands and determined he would go
in any event—

When a small boy waited upon him with a
thin yellow envelope, the sight of which drove
the blood back upon his heart.

He tore it open and read a despatch from his
native town:

So Stanthorne was whirled hundreds of miles
away in steam and smoke that night, clenching
his hands in agony because he could not go
faster, and forgetting the woman of his first love
in utter grief and despair over the woman who
first loved him, and who was dying!