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Chenoweth, a youth as open as out-of-doors, both in countenance and mind, observed plaintively to Tappingham Marsh in a corner, while they watched Miss Betty's lavender flowers miraculously swirling through a quadrille: "Crailey, you know, well, Crailey's been engaged before!" It was not Mr. Chenoweth's habit to disguise his apprehensions, and Crailey Gray would not fish for bass forever.
The one block between him and that forbidden ground seemed to him miles long, and he felt that he was running as a man in a dream, and, at the highest pitch of agonized exertion, covering no space, but only working the air in one place, like a treadmill. All that was in his mind, heart, and soul was to reach Crailey.
To redeem the gloom he had lit a single candle, which painted him dimly against the complete darkness of his own shadow, like a very old portrait whose background time has solidified into shapeless browns; the portrait of a fair-haired gentleman, the cavalier, or the Marquis, one might have said at first glance; not describing it immediately as that of a poet, for there was no mark of art upon Crailey, not even in his hair, for they all wore it rather long then.
He beat the time for the thunderous cheers that they gave; the procession described a circle on the lawn, and then, with the band playing and colors flying, passed out of the gates and took up the march to the wharf. "The flag, the flag!" whispered Crailey, following it with his eyes. "It shows that you helped make it, Fanchon, it's so beautiful.
When the work was quite finished, she went all over it again with double thread, not facing the superstition of her motive, which was to safeguard her lover: the bullet that was destined for Crailey might, in the myriad chances, strike the flag first and be deflected, though never so slightly, by one of these last stitches, and Crailey's heart thus missed by the same margin.
"I have never seen a play, except the funny little ones we acted at the convent," she said, "but isn't that the way they speak on the stage?" Crailey realized that his judgment of the silence bad been mistaken, and yet it was with a thrill of delight that he recognized her clear reading of him. He had been too florid again. "Let us go." His voice was soft with restrained forgiveness.
In good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town. Many a youth swore to avoid the roisterer's company for all time, and, within two hours of the vow, found himself, flagon in hand, engaged in a bout that would last the night, with Mr. Gray out-bumpering the hardiest, at the head of the table.
As he entered the gates and went toward the house he glanced up at the window which overlooked his garden from the cupola. Crailey was not the only man in Rouen who had been saying to himself all day that each accustomed thing he did was done for the last time.
As Crailey Gray never danced with Miss Carewe, it is somewhat singular that she should have been the inspiration of his swinging verses in waltz measure, "Heart-strings on a Violin," the sense of which was that when a violin had played for her dancing, the instrument should be shattered as wine-glasses are after a great toast.
He felt himself lost, toppling backward into an abyss, and the uselessness of his destruction made him physically sick. For he need not have been there; he had not wished to come; he had well counted the danger to himself, and this one time in his life had gone to the cupola-room out of good-nature. But Bareaud had been obstinate and Crailey had come away alone, hoping that Jefferson might follow.
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