"Miss Virgie," the name by which she was known among her simple and affectionate people, had indeed grown to be a very busy young woman, as she gradually assumed the cares of her many friends, who took pains to lay before her their most trivial woes with the desire to have her sweet, sympathetic company. In the companionship, of which she found time to give to each a little, there was a sympathy tempered by a happy knowledge of the ways to extract from a hard, work-a-day and seeming profitless existence the happiness to be had from little things. She carried into these prosaic homes the light that made her people forget their cares in the analysis of trivial causes. She would go deep into the woes of some poor soul, and, as she hushed a wailing infant into repose, or in other ways helped to lighten some aggravating burden, seeking out the source of their troubles and, taking each in turn, she would laugh them away as imaginary ills, or temper them with a sweet and sincere sympathy that never failed in good results. Her visits left a better reasoning and understanding of life, and satisfaction in doing one's duty even if there were no other reward than that of having done it well.
She loved intensely her wild surroundings. In her early girlhood she had had only her father's love, but George Brandt was not the kind of man to understand a child's ways. Men seldom do. She was, therefore, without the instinctive sympathy that only a mother can impart. She had been given books—always books. Lacking in the inventiveness that a mother permits full sway, her father attempted to furnish nothing as a pastime for Virgie but his own favorites. Yet she did not suffer for a lack of guidance into the mysteries that are always before child-life. The hills furnished rocky caves, into which she would worm herself, and there, surrounded by the fairies of her imagination, live in purer innocence than a less wholesome atmosphere could yield. She watched the mother quail guard her eggs until the great covey was a peeping fact hiding in the heavy brush, and at the end, when the little wings grew strong, they would rise in a mighty, startling whir when she approached too close. Tumble bugs and bumble bees, wasps and butterflies—these were the embodiment of fantastic conceptions. The ants built castles for her and did fascinating deeds of toil and carnival in their arenas of sand. Once a gopher sat on a fence and quirked his tail, obligingly vacating his tunnel home that it might receive her flower offering to fairyland. The sweet William petals never would terminate after a most arduous counting, but the heather-bell's day was done with her departure, and they drooped in sorrowful slumber out of loneliness. From these gentler things, which could teach only goodness and inspire only interested wonder, she grew into a knowledge at once beneficial and tending toward the sympathetic.
From her father she inherited that which was his best characteristic—a love of books—an inheritance that he cultivated to its last degree; and from her mother Virgie bore in counterpart that force that had been brought out in her later life through necessity. It was only natural that, with these two characteristics dominant, the knowledge gained from the studying of studies by great men and women, and the energy to do that which she was prompted to do, there was always the opportunity occurring to her active mind that she should drift among people and sway them with these forces. Her influence grew to be an important factor in the Ashville "meeting-house," and gossips had been known to say that Royal Kent, its young pastor, was merely Virgie's mouth-piece, so strongly did he feel her influence, though it was scarcely come to that.
"But we will have to do something, Miss Virgie; our finances are in an awful bad way, you know," said Kent the next morning after Harvey's visit, as he stood, one leg thrown over a corner of the kitchen table, and looking a picture of hopelessness.
"Yes, I know, but the old, stale amusements at which you ask people to give their hard-earned dollars at the same time you ask for their souls, is not productive of Christians. It leaves a bad flavor, and they will not go together," she answered.
"Then, why don't you suggest something else? It isn't like you to tear down and not build up."
"I have been thinking," she replied abstractedly, looking at him as though he did not count in her reasoning, "for some way to infuse a little novelty into it."
"Yes," he said, awaiting her solution with interest.
"I was wondering if we could not get up a nutting contest," she said slowly after a pause.
"A what?" he asked in surprise.
"A nutting contest."
"What good would that do?"
"Why, it would do just what you want to do, and the people would know from the start just what they were working for without any varnishing over of our real object."
"I don't see how you mean to do it. I don't quite understand," he said perplexedly.
"You must first get everybody interested in the contest," she said, beginning to unfold her half-formed plans. "Then we must place a sort of premium on labor by making the slow ones pay for what they do not do, and those who are energetic will have the tax taken off in proportion to their work."
"But how about the women members, especially the old ones?" he protested, as her idea grew clearer to him.
"Of course the old ones cannot do anything but get their boy and girl relations to help them out; but you will see the younger ones take hold all right, and, with everybody interested, the rivalry will be great fun. Do you not see what great results we shall obtain?" she said enthusiastically, and more confident as she progressed with the idea which was rapidly becoming more feasible to her, the possible results surging in upon her so fast that they tumbled over each other at the risk of becoming confused, which inspired her to convey them to her listener in quick, choppy sentences.
"There will be some who will be glad to pay just to get out of it, but they will take it in a good-natured way. Some will fail to gather enough, and they will have to contribute for their lagging efforts or inexperience. But I know that everybody almost will take hold if you tell them the right way, and the result will be that they will scour the country and bring in a harvest beyond the wildest dreams, and this harvest will be yours to market. The proceeds will be magnificent I will promise."
"I don't know," was all Kent said as he tried to foresee the end. He was a peculiar man this Royal Kent. Why he had chosen his present surroundings had never been explained any more than he had chosen to tell whence he had come; but that he was a respected idol among the women of his congregation was very evident in their affectionate references to "the parson." He had a way of rousing their sympathies with smooth, sweetly-modulated sentences, and, while his great size did not exactly intimidate them, still it had a dominating effect; but this, followed closely by his almost soothing tones, left an impression akin to the pleasant recovery from defeat, or, to better describe it, the re-assembling of jarred emotions into a sense of delicious quietude, and since all women are emotional, though in different degrees, these endowments had a wide range for action. They very naturally credited him with the more pleasing sensation, and it gave him an enviable popularity among them. But with the sterner portion of his followers he could never decide just how he stood, and, in truth, that portion was a little at a loss to know its own opinion; their impressions were so variable. At times his talks had the senescence of borrowed thought, and there could be no mistaking the lack of assurance that backed that thought, but in the main he seemed to have a hold on some deduction of his own, and then he would clothe it in an earnestness, though it might be assumed, that carried conviction, and for the time they would discard unpleasant impressions and try to condemn themselves for errors of judgment; yet, somehow, they could not feel secure in any reasoning.
This was unfortunate for Kent, as he was keenly alive to his own faults. He gathered the wrong impression and took the wrong manner of correcting it. Striving to create in their minds an understanding of what he desired to do, he held out to them possible results that somehow he could never quite reach, and in the failure they felt rather than questioned his insincerity. They were not given to analyzing a man's mind in its more delicate shading. Being men of deeds themselves, they judged by results that he did not or could not attain; they, in consequence, felt a slight distrust—an unconscious questioning.
Virgie had often aided him with advice, and it had almost always proven successful in results, though his own lack of force had at times caused him to fail in carrying her unique conceptions to a successful issue, and here now was another scheme, in answer to his request, of which he was very doubtful.
"What! don't you know?" she asked, and, with the confidence born of many successes, she was just the least piqued at his doubting the outcome of her suggestion.
"I was thinking how it could be pulled through," he replied, half apologetically.
"You don't need to 'pull it through' at all," she said, not to be discouraged. "All you need do is to make the announcement tomorrow and refer everybody to me as the manager, and I will see to all the pulling."
"That would not be fair, now, Miss Virgie. You make me feel like I was not to have a hand in it."
"Oh! you will have plenty to do," she answered gayly, and then, as she was going to respond to a rap on the front door, she added, "but you leave the details to me."
"Has the wanderer returned?" asked Harvey, after the happiest expressions in greeting Virgie. The sharp morning air, tempered by the slowly-rising sun, had exhilarated him to a most buoyant state of cheerfulness, and he had forgotten entirely his vexation of the previous day.
"Not yet," she replied. "Won't you come in?"
"I suppose I must make the best of it," he said, as he went indoors; but this added disappointment could not depress him for long, nor in any great degree, for the beautiful scenes through which he had just come had imparted too much of their glorious freshness to permit of a sudden reaction.
Virgie closed the door and followed him through the house to the kitchen, a little annoyed at the ease with which he accepted the freedom of her home, but she would not caution him against coming upon her other visitor, although she could anticipate his surprise in the sudden meeting, a result that she thought due him for the liberty he was taking.
Frank stepped into the kitchen without any particular reason for going there except the slight attraction of having been there before. Following out the impulse he happened at once upon Kent, the momentary embarrassment driving from him a sentence already prepared for Virgie.
The men looked at each other in genuine amazement. While the situation was an unusual one, there was more in it to strike them forcibly than the chance meeting. They were each an almost exact counterpart of the other. To one who might study them closely the differences would be easily discernible, but at the first glance, both near six feet tall, large and symmetrically built, and smooth-faced, they seemed of the same mould, and, as the resemblance struck them on the moment, they observed each other closely—earnestly.
"This is Mr. Harvey, Mr. Kent," said Virgie, after a time in which she enjoyed the situation for all it contained.
And then they shook hands heartily, each smiling at the other, conscious of what was in his mind, though they exchanged commonplace greetings without reference to it, each perhaps half hoping his new acquaintance might introduce the thought.
"You seem doomed to disappointment," said Virgie, trying to relieve the situation a bit, as the young men continued to look at each other in a helpless fashion, addressing herself to Frank.
"I did not have any thought but that he would be here," he answered. "But it is the unexpected that happens, and I suppose I must make the best of it," he added, nothing better than his first utterance recurring to him.
"I am sorry you appreciate our hospitality so little," she said.
"That is hardly a fair way to interpret my remark," he replied smiling. "I do appreciate it, and very thoroughly too, only it is the having one's plans so completely upset that makes it uncomfortable. Disappointments can be toned down considerable at times by introducing pleasant things, but somehow they cannot be buried entirely at will. It takes time to do that."
"Your apology is accepted," she replied jestingly.
"I am sure there could be no more acceptable hospitality, at least in these parts," said Kent, entering the conversation at the first opportunity.
"It was more than I could have expected under the circumstances," Frank replied.
"Well, if you are so grateful for our small civilities," said Virgie, purposely exaggerating his meaning, "I think we should be able to relieve the monotony of your situation the least bit more, and, as the outlook for your remaining with us a little while longer seems very probable, we might permit you to share in a little plan we are forming."
Quick to grasp the remotest possibilities, she had readily seen where she might relieve, in a measure, his trying position and at the same time make him an added force to her plans. She had unhesitatingly laid the foundation for his usefulness, and Harvey, too energetic not to accept a diversion from a situation which held only promises of complete idleness, readily fell in with her undisclosed suggestion.
"You may have my services so far as I am capable," he said; "but I would add that you must count on me only as long as I shall have to remain to wait for Mr. Snellins."
They accepted him into their scheme for replenishing the weak treasury of the meeting-house, and in the interchange of ideas there were suggestions that grew and improved as the plan unfolded to them. The men became mutually sympathetic, following Virgie's rapid lead until their talk drifted onto other things, and in the end they became interested in each other, and Kent promised that, if the day did not bring forth the missing Snellins, and if Frank was to remain in Ashville, that he, Kent, would call at the tavern for him after supper, when they could spend the evening together at Kent's home, an invitation which Frank readily accepted.
The day dragged itself out. Virgie went away on some errand, but returned early, and they dined as the day before, but, it being Saturday, both father and daughter were full of special work, and as soon as the meal was finished Virgie was off to visit some of the church members and obtain their support for the morrow. So Frank read as much as he could, and thought more, but when the evening commenced to arrive there was still no Snellins, and he was obliged to return without having accomplished anything.
Harvey was again filled with wondering, and this time at the strangeness of choice in the selection of such an odd setting as he found the educated and probably world-wise Royal Kent; and he spoke of Kent to "Si" at supper, hoping to find at least a partial solution, but the usually communicative "Si" for once failed to communicate, so he dismissed the thought from him and simply waited for Kent's arrival.
"Still with us, I see," Kent said, as he entered the tavern office, and aside, "Good evening, 'Si!'"
"'Evenin', Parson," "Si" replied.
"I am doomed, I guess," said Frank.
"You take it easy enough," laughed the parson, and then went on: "Get your hat and come on over to the house with me, where we can talk," and Frank, putting his hat on, the men left the room, where a speedy jumbling of voices indicated that their striking resemblance had not been lost on the "regulars."
The parsonage in which Kent lived was a very small affair, but it sufficed to the needs of its tenant. He led Frank at once to what he called his study, a misnomer insomuch as it bore every indication of recreation rather than of studious thought, and in the things with which he had surrounded himself Frank experienced a sensation of familiarity. They spoke of the worldly man and the college man combined, and not of the man whose life has been a constant seeking for truths, deeper truths, holier truths; yet, withal, he was not surprised, even if he had not expected to find them there, for the morning's acquaintance foretold these surroundings. They were of Kent. It was the man.