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At Last: A Novel

by Marion Harland · English · Gutenberg #5622 · 482,242 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: At Last: A Novel

Author: Marion Harland


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5622]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT LAST: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team







AT LAST

A Novel

By Marion Harland

New York: 1870




AT LAST



CHAPTER I. -- DEWLESS ROSES.


Mrs. Rachel Sutton was a born match maker, and she had cultivated the
gift by diligent practice. As the sight of a tendrilled vine suggests
the need and fitness of a trellis, and a stray glove invariably brings
to mind the thought of its absent fellow, so every disengaged spinster
of marriageable age was an appeal--pathetic and sure--to the dear
woman's helpful sympathy, and her whole soul went out in compassion over
such “nice” and an appropriated bachelors as crossed her orbit, like
blind and dizzy comets.

Her propensity, and her conscientious indulgence of the same, were
proverbial among her acquaintances, but no one--not even prudish and
fearsome maidens of altogether uncertain age, and prudent mammas,
equally alive to expediency and decorum--had ever labelled her
“Dangerous,” while with young people she was a universal favorite.
Although, with an eye single to her hobby, she regarded a man as
an uninteresting molecule of animated nature, unless circumstances
warranted her in recognizing in him the possible lover of some waiting
fair one, and it was notorious that she reprobated as worse than
useless--positively demoralizing, in fact--such friendships between
young persons of opposite sexes as held out no earnest of prospective
betrothal, she was confidante-general to half the girls in the county,
and a standing advisory committee of one upon all points relative to
their associations with the beaux of the region. The latter, on
their side, paid their court to the worthy and influential widow as
punctiliously, if not so heartily, as did their gentle friends. Not that
the task was disagreeable. At fifty years of age, Mrs. Button was plump
and comely; her fair curls unfaded, and still full and glossy; her
blue eyes capable of languishing into moist appreciation of a woful
heart-history, or sparkling rapturously at the news of a triumphant
wooing; her little fat hands were swift and graceful, and her complexion
so infantine in its clear white and pink as to lead many to believe and
some--I need not say of which gender--to practise clandestinely upon the
story that she had bathed her face in warm milk, night and morning, for
forty years. The more sagacious averred, however, that the secret of
her continued youth lay in her kindly, unwithered heart, in her loving
thoughtfulness for others' weal, and her avoidance, upon philosophical
and religions grounds, of whatever approximated the discontented
retrospection winch goes with the multitude by the name of
self-examination.

Our bonnie widow had her foibles and vanities, but the first were
amiable, the latter superficial and harmless, usually rather pleasant
than objectionable. She was very proud, for instance, of her success in
the profession she had taken up, and which she pursued con amore; very
jealous for the reputation for connubial felicity of those she had
aided to couple in the leash matrimonial, and more uncharitable toward
malicious meddlers or thoughtless triflers with the course of true love;
more implacable to match-breakers than to the most atrocious phases of
schism, heresy, and sedition in church or state, against which she had,
from her childhood, been taught to pray. The remotest allusion to a
divorce case threw her into a cold perspiration, and apologies for such
legal severance of the hallowed bond were commented upon as rank and
noxious blasphemy, to which no Christian or virtuous woman should lend
her ear for an instant. If she had ever entertained “opinions” hinting
at the allegorical nature of the Mosaic account of the Fall, her theory
would unquestionably have been that Satan's insidious whisper to the
First Mother prated of the beauties of feminine individuality, and
enlarged upon the feasibility of an elopement from Adam and a separate
maintenance upon the knowledge-giving, forbidden fruit. Upon second
marriages--supposing the otherwise indissoluble tie to have been cut
by Death--she was a trifle less severe, but it was generally understood
that she had grave doubts as to their propriety--unless in exceptional
cases.

“When there is a family of motherless children, and the father is
himself young, it seems hard to require him to live alone for the rest
of his life,” she would allow candidly. “Not that I pretend to say that
a connection formed through prudential motives is a real marriage in
the sight of Heaven. Only that there is no human law against it. And
the odds are as eight to ten that an efficient hired housekeeper would
render his home more comfortable, and his children happier than would
a stepmother. As for a woman marrying twice”--her gentle tone and eyes
growing sternly decisive--“it is difficult for one to tolerate the idea.
That is, if she really loved her first husband. If not, she may plead
this as some excuse for making the venture--poor thing! But whether,
even then, she has the moral right to lessen some good girl's chances
of getting a husband by taking two for herself, has ever been and must
remain a mooted question in my mind.”

Her conduct in this respect was thoroughly consistent with her avowed
principles. She was but thirty when her husband died, after living
happily with her for ten years. Her only child had preceded him to the
grave four years before, and the attractive relict of Frederic Sutton,
comfortably jointured and without incumbrance of near relatives, would
have become a toast with gay bachelors and enterprising widowers, but
for the quiet propriety of her demeanor, and the steadiness with
which she insisted--for the most part, tacitly--upon her right to be
considered a married woman still.

“Once Frederic's wife--always his!” was the sole burden of her answer
to a proposal of marriage received when she was forty-five, and
the discomfited suitor filed it in his memory alongside of Caesar's
hackneyed war dispatch.

She had laid off crape and bombazine at the close of the first lustrum
of her widowhood as inconvenient and unwholesome wear, but never assumed
colored apparel. On the morning on which our story opens, she took her
seat at the breakfast-table in her nephew's house--of which she was
matron and supervisor-in-chief--clad in a white cambric wrapper, belted
with black; her collar fastened with a mourning-pin of Frederic's hair,
and a lace cap, trimmed with black ribbon, set above her luxuriant
tresses. She looked fresh and bright as the early September day, with
her sunny face and in her daintily-neat attire, as she arranged cups
and saucers for seven people upon the waiter before her, instructing the
butler, at the same time, to ring the bell again for those she was to
serve. She was very busy and happy at that date. The neighborhood was
gay, after the open-hearted, open-handed style of hospitality that
distinguished the brave old days of Virginia plantation-life. A merry
troup of maidens and cavaliers visited by invitation one homestead after
another, crowding bedrooms beyond the capacity of any chambers of equal
size to be found in the land, excepting in a country house in the Old
Dominion; surrounding bountiful tables with smiling visages and restless
tongues; dancing, walking, driving, and singing away the long, warm
days, that seemed all too short to the soberest and plainest of the
company; which sped by like dream-hours to most of the number.

Winston Aylett, owner and tenant of the ancient mansion of Ridgeley--the
great house of a neighborhood where small houses and men of narrow means
were infrequent--had gone North about the first of June, upon a tour
of indefinite length, but which was certainly to include Newport, the
lakes, and Niagara, and was still absent. His aunt, Mrs. Sutton, and his
only sister, Mabel, did the honors of his home in his stead, and, if the
truth must be admitted, more acceptably to their guests than he had ever
succeeded in doing. For a week past, the house had been tolerably well
filled--ditto Mrs. Sutton's hands; ditto her great, heart. Had she not
three love affairs, in different but encouraging stages of progression,
under her roof and her patronage! And were not all three, to her
apprehension, matches worthy of Heaven's making, and her co-operation?
A devout Episcopalian, she was yet an unquestioning believer in
predestination and “special Providences”--and what but Providence had
brought together the dear creatures now basking in the benignant beam
of her smile, sailing smoothly toward the haven of Wedlock before the
prospering breezes of Circumstance (of her manufacture)?

While putting sugar and cream into the cups intended for the happy
pairs, she reviewed the situation rapidly in her mind, and sketched the
day's manoeuvres.

First, there was the case of Tom Barksdale and Imogene Tabb--highly
satisfactory and creditable to all the parties concerned in it, but not
romantic. Tom, a sturdy young planter, who had studied law while at the
University, but never practised it, being already provided for by his
opulent father, had visited his relatives, the Tabbs, in August, and
straightway fallen in love with the one single daughter of his second
cousin--a pretty, amiable girl, who would inherit a neat fortune at her
parent's death, and whose pedigree became identical with that of
the Barksdales a couple of generations back, and was therefore
unimpeachable. The friends on both sides were enchanted; the lovers
fully persuaded that they were made for one another, an opinion
cordially endorsed by Mrs. Sutton, and they could confer with no higher
authority.

Next came Alfred Branch and Rosa Tazewell--incipient, but promising at
this juncture, inasmuch as Rosa had lately smiled more encouragingly
upon her timid wooer than she had deigned to do before they were
domesticated at Ridgeley. Mrs. Sutton did not approve of unmaidenly
forwardness. The woman who would unsought be won, would have fared
ill in her esteem. Her lectures upon the beauties and advantages of a
modest, yet alluring reserve, were cut up into familiar and much-prized
quotations among her disciples, and were acted upon the more willingly
for the prestige that surrounded her exploits as high priestess of
Hymen. But Rosa had been too coy to Alfred's evident devotion--almost
repellent at seasons. Had these rebuffs not alternated with attacks of
remorse, during which the exceeding gentleness of her demeanor gradually
pried the crushed hopes of her adorer out of the slough, and cleansed
their drooping plumes of mud, the courtship would have fallen through,
ere Mrs. Sutton could bring her skill to bear upon it. Guided, and yet
soothed by her velvet rein, Rosa really seemed to become more steady.
She was assuredly more thoughtful, and there was no better sign of
Cupid's advance upon the outworks of a girl's heart than reverie. If
her fits of musing were a shade too pensive, the experienced eye of the
observer descried no cause for discouragement in this feature. Rosa was
a spoiled, wayward child, freakish and mischievous, to whom liberty was
too dear to be resigned without a sigh. By and by, she would wear her
shackles as ornaments, like all other sensible and loving women.

Thus preaching to Alfred, when he confided to her the fluctuations
of rapture and despair that were his lot in his intercourse with the
sometimes radiant and inviting, sometimes forbidding sprite, whose wings
he would fain bind with his embrace, and thus reassuring herself, when
perplexed by a flash of Rosa's native perverseness, Mrs. Sutton was
sanguine that all would come right in the end. What was to be would
be, and despite the rapids in their wooing, Alfred would find in Rosa a
faithful, affectionate little wife, while she could never hope to secure
a better, more indulgent, and, in most respects, more eligible, partner
than the Ayletts' well-to-do, well-looking neighbor.

But the couple who occupied the central foreground of our match-maker's
thoughts were her niece, Mabel Aylott, and her own departed husband's
namesake, Frederic Chilton. She dilated to herself and to Mabel with
especial gusto upon the “wonderful leading,” the inward whisper that had
prompted her to propose a trip to the Rockbridge Alum Springs early in
July. Neither she nor Mabel was ailing in the slightest degree, but she
imagined they would be the brighter for a glimpse of the mountains and
the livelier scenes of that pleasant Spa--and whom should they meet
there but the son of “dear Frederic's” old friend, Mr. Chilton, and of
course they saw a great deal of him--and the rest followed as Providence
meant it should.

“The rest” expressed laconically the essence of numberless walks by
moonlight and starlight; innumerable dances in the great ball-room, and
the sweeter, more interesting confabulations that made the young people
better acquainted in four weeks than would six years of conventional
calls and small-talk. They stayed the month out, although “Aunt Rachel”
 had, upon their arrival, named a fortnight as the extreme limit of their
sojourn. Frederic Chilton was their escort to Eastern Virginia, and
remained a week at Ridgeley--perhaps to recover from the fatigue of the
journey. So soon as he returned to Philadelphia, in which place he had
lately opened a law-office, he wrote to Mabel, declaring his affection
for her, and suing for reciprocation. She granted him a gracious reply,
and sanctioned by fond, sympathetic Aunt Rachel, in the absence of
Mabel's brother and guardian, the correspondence was kept up briskly
until Frederic's second visit in September. Ungenerous gossips, envious
of her talents and influence, had occasionally sneered at Mrs. Sutton's
appropriation of the credit of other alliances--but this one was her
handiwork beyond dispute--hers and Providence's. She never forgot
the partnership. She had carried her head more erect, and there was
a brighter sparkle in her blue orbs since the evening Mabel had come
blushingly to her room, Fred's proposal in her hand--to ask counsel and
congratulations. Everybody saw through the discreet veil with which
she flattered herself she concealed her exultation when others than the
affianced twain were by--and while nobody was so unkind as to expose
the thinness of the pretence, she was given to understand in many and
gratifying ways that her masterpiece was considered, in the Aylett
circle, a suitable crown to the achievements that had preceded it. Mabel
was popular and beloved, and her betrothed, in appearance and manner, in
breeding and intelligence, justified Mrs. Sutton's pride in her niece's
choice.

The old lady colored up, with the quick, vivid rose-tint of sudden
and real pleasure that rarely outlives early girlhood, when the first
respondent to the breakfast-bell proved to be her Frederic's god-son.

“You are always punctual! I wish you would teach the good habit to some
other people,” she said, after answering his cordial “good-morning.”

“None of us deserve to be praised on that score, to-day,” rejoined he,
looking at his watch. “I did not awake until the dressing-bell rang. Our
riding-party was out late last night. The extreme beauty of the evening
beguiled us into going further than we intended, when we set out.”

“Yes! you young folks are falling into shockingly irregular habits--take
unprecedented liberties with me and with Time!” shaking her head.
“If Winston do not return soon, you will set my mild rule entirely at
defiance.”

Chilton laughed--but was serious the next instant.

“I expected confidently to meet him at this visit,” he said, glancing at
the door to guard against being overheard. “Should he not return to-day,
ought I not, before leaving this to-morrow, to write to him, since he is
legally his sister's guardian? It is, you and she tell me, a mere form,
but one that should not be dispensed with any longer.”

“That may be so. Winston is rigorous in requiring what is due to his
position--is, in some respects, a fearful formalist. But he will hardly
oppose your wishes and Mabel's. He has her real happiness at heart,
I believe, although he is, at times, an over-strict and exacting
guardian--perhaps to counterbalance my indulgent policy. He is unlike
any other young man I know.”

“His sister is very much attached to him.”

“She loves him--I was about to say, preposterously. Her implicit belief
in and obedience to him have increased his self-confidence into a
dogmatic assertion of infallibility. But”--fearing she might create an
unfortunate impression upon the listener's mind--“Winston has grounds
for his good opinion of himself. His character is unblemished--his
principles and aims are excellent. Only”--relapsing hopelessly into
the confidential strain in which most of the conference had been
carried--“between ourselves, my dear Frederic, I am never quite easy
with these patterns to the rest of human-kind. I should even prefer a
tiny vein of depravity to such very rectangular virtue.”

“You are seldom ill at ease, if human perfection is all that renders
you uncomfortable,” responded Frederic. “There are not many in whose
composition one cannot trace, not a tiny, but a broad vein of Adamic
nature. What a delicious morning!” he added, sauntering to the window.

“And how sorry I am for those who did not get up in time to enjoy the
freshness of its beauty!” cried a gay voice from the portico, and Mabel
entered by the glass door behind him--her hands loaded with roses,
herself so beaming that her lover refrained with difficulty from kissing
the saucy mouth then and there.

He did take both her hands, under pretext of relieving her of the
flowers, and Aunt Rachel judiciously turned her back upon them, and
began a diligent search in the beaufet for a vase.

“Do you expect us to believe that you have been more industrious than
we? As if we did not know that you bribed the gardener to have a bouquet
cut and laid ready for you at the back-door,” Frederic charged upon the
matutinal Flora. “Else, where are other evidences of your stroll, in
dew-sprinkled draperies and wet feet? Confess that you ran down stairs
just two minutes ago! Now that I come to think of it, I am positive that
I heard you, while Mrs. Sutton was lamenting your drowsy proclivities
after sunrise.”

“I have been sitting in the summer-house for an hour--reading!”
 protested Mabel, wondrously resigned to the detention, after a single,
and not violent attempt at release. “If you had opened your shutters you
must have seen me. But I knew I was secure from observation on that side
of the house, at least until eight o'clock, about which time the
glories of the new day usually penetrate very tightly-closed lids. As to
dew--there isn't a drop upon grass or blossom. And, by the same token,
we shall have a storm within twenty-four hours.”

“Is that true? That is a meteorological presage I never heard of until
now.”

“There is a moral in it, which I leave you to study out for yourself,
while I arrange the roses I--and not the gardener--gathered.”

In a whisper, she subjoined--“Let me go! Some one is coming!” and in a
second more was at the sideboard, hurrying the flowers into the antique
china bowl, destined to grace the centre of the breakfast table.

“Good-morning, Miss Rosa. You are just in season to enjoy the society of
your sister,” Frederic said, lightly, pointing to the billows of mingled
white and red, tossing under Mabel's fingers.

The new-comer approached the sideboard, leaned languidly upon her elbow,
and picked up a half-blown bud at random from the pile.

“They are scentless!” she complained.

“Because dewless!” replied Mabel, with profound gravity. “It is the
tearful heart that gives out the sweetest fragrance.”

“I have more faith in sunshine,” interrupted Rosa, a tinge of contempt
in her smile and accent. “Or--to drop metaphors, at which I always
bungle--it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to be good.
All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their
fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the
blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous balderdash, according to my
doctrine. A buried thing is but one degree better than a dead one. What
it is the fashion of poets and sentimentalists to call perfume, is the
odor of incipient decay.”

“You are illustrating your position by means of my poor oriental pearl,”
 remonstrated Mabel, playfully, wresting the hand that was beating
the life and whiteness out of the floweret upon the marble top of the
beaufet. “Take this hardy geant de batailles, instead. My bouquet must
have a cluster of pearls for a heart.”

“What a fierce crimson!” Frederic remarked upon the widely-opened rose
Miss Tazewell received in place of the delicate bud. “That must be the
'hue angry, yet brave,' which, Mr. George Herbert asserts, 'bids the
rash gazer wipe his eye.'”

“More poetical nonsense!” said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold
“geant” to pieces down to the bare stem, “unless he meant to be comic,
and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near the bush,
and ran a thorn into the pupil.”

No one answered, except by the indulgent smile that usually greeted her
sallies, however absurd, among those accustomed to the spoiled child's
vagaries.

Mabel was making some leisurely additions to her bouquet in the shape
of ribbon grass and pendent ivy sprays, coaxing these with persuasive
touches to trail over the edge and entwine the pedestal of the salver on
which her bowl was elevated; her head set slightly on one side, her
lips apart in a smile of enjoyment in her work and in herself. It was
a picture the lover studied fondly--one that hung forever thereafter in
his gallery of mental portraits. Beyond a pair of fine gray eyes, the
pliant grace of her figure and the buoyant carriage of youth, health,
and a glad heart, Mabel's pretensions to beauty were comparatively few,
said the world. Frederic Chilton had, nevertheless, fallen in love
with her at sight, and considered her, now, the handsomest woman of his
acquaintance. Her dress was a simple lawn--a sheer white fabric, with
bunches of purple grass bound up with yellow wheat, scattered over it;
her hair was lustrous and abundant, and her face, besides being happy,
was frank and intelligent, with wonderful mobility of expression. In
temperament and sentiment; in capacity for, and in demonstration of
affection, she suited Frederic to the finest fibre of his mind and
heart. He, for one, did not carp at Aunt Rachel's declaration that they
were intended to spend time and eternity together.

Still, Mabel Aylett was not a belle, and Rosa Tazewell was. Callow
collegians and enterprising young merchants from the city; sunbrowned
owners of spreading acres and hosts of laborers; students and
practitioners of law and medicine, and an occasional theologue, had
broken their hearts for perhaps a month at a time, for love of her,
since she was a school-girl in short dresses. Yet there had been a date
very far back in the acquaintanceship of each of these with the charmer,
when he had marvelled at the infatuation which had blinded her previous
adorers. She was “a neat little thing,” with her round waist, her tiny
hands and feet and roguish eye--but there was nothing else remarkable
about her features, and in coloring, the picture was too dark for his
taste. Why, she might be mistaken for a creole! And each critic held
fast to his expressed opinion until the roguish eyes met his directly
and with meaning, and he found himself diving into the bright,
shimmering wells, and drowning--still ecstatically--before he reached
the bottom whence streamed the light of passionate feeling, striking
upward through the surface. What her glances did not effect was done by
her dazzling smile and musical voice.

As one of her victims swore, “It was a dearer delight to be rejected by
her than to be accepted by a dozen other girls--she did the thing up so
handsomely! And yet, do you know, sir, I could have shot myself for a
barbarous brute when I saw the pitying tears standing upon her lashes,
and heard the tremor in her sweet tones, as she begged me to forgive her
for not loving me!”

Those she had once captivated never quite rid themselves of the glamour
of her arts; remained her trusty squires, ready to serve, or to defend
her always afterward.

Aunt Rachel, intent, during the short pause, upon the movements of the
servant who was setting the smoking breakfast upon the table, glanced
around when all was properly arranged, to summon the two to their
places--but something in Rosa's attitude and countenance held her
momentarily speechless. Mabel still bent over her roses, in smiling
interest, and Frederic Chilton was watching her--but not as the third
person of the group about the beaufet watched them both between her
half-closed lids, her black brows close together, and the glittering
teeth visible under the curling upper lip.

“She looked like a panther lying in wait for her prey!” Mrs. Sutton said
to her niece, many months later, in attempting to describe the scene.
“Or like a bright-eyed snake coiled for a spring. The sight of her sent
shivers all down my spine.”

Her interruption of the tableau sounded oddly abrupt to ears used to her
pleasant accents.

“Come, young people! how long are you going to keep me waiting?
Breakfast is cooling fast!”

“I beg your pardon, Auntie! I did not notice that it had been brought
in,” apologized Mabel, drawing back, that Frederic might lift the loaded
salver carefully to its place upon the board.

As they were closing about this, they were joined by Messrs. Barksdale
and Branch, Miss Tabb delaying her appearance until the repast was
nearly over, and meeting the raillery of the party upon her late
rising with the sweet, soft smile her cousin-betrothed admired as the
indication of unadulterated amiability. The breakfast-hour, always
pleasant, was to-day particularly merry. Rosa led off in the laughing
debates, the play of repartee, friendly jest, and anecdote that incited
all to mirth and speech and tempted them to linger around the table long
after the business of the meal was concluded.

“This is the perfection of country life!” said Frederic Chilton, when,
at last, there was a movement to end the sitting. “But it spoils one
fearfully for the everyday practicalities of the city--a Northern city,
especially.”

“Better stay where you are, then, instead of deserting our ranks
to-morrow,” suggested Rosa, gliding by his side out upon the long
portico at the end of the house. “What does your nature crave that
Ridgeley cannot supply?”

“Work, and a career!”

“You still feel the need of these?” significantly.

“Otherwise I were no man!”

“You are right!”

Her disdainful eyes wandered to the farther end of the portico, where
Alfred Branch, in his natty suit of white grasscloth, plucked at his
ebon whiskers with untanned fingers, and talked society nothings with
the ever-complaisant Imogene.

“Come what may, you, Mr. Chilton, have occupation for thought and
hands; are not tied down to a detestable routine of vapid pleasures and
common-place people!”

“You are--every independent woman and man--is as free in this respect
as myself, Miss Rosa. None need be a slave to conventionality unless he
choose.”

She made a gesture that was like twisting a chain upon her wrist.

“You know you are not sincere in saying that. I wondered, moreover,
when you were railing at the practicalities of city life, if you were
learning, like the rest of the men, to accommodate your talk to your
audience. Where is the use of your trying to disguise the truth that all
women are slaves? I used to envy you when I was in Philadelphia, last
winter, when you pleaded business engagements as an excuse for declining
invitations to dinner-parties and balls. Now, if a woman defies popular
decrees by refusing to exhibit herself for the popular entertainment,
the horrible whisper is forthwith circulated that she has been
'disappointed,' and is hiding her green wound in her sewing-room or
oratory. 'Disappointed,' forsooth! That is what they say of every
girl who is not married to somebody by the time she is twenty-five. It
matters not whether she cares for him or not. Having but one object in
existence, there can be but one species of disappointment. Marry she
must, or be PITIED!” with a stinging emphasis on the last word.

Tom Barksdale and Mabel were pacing the portico from end to end,
chatting with the cheerful familiarity of old friends. Catching some of
thin energetic sentence, Mabel looked over her shoulder.

“Who of us is fated to be pitied, did you say, Rosa dear?”

“Never yourself!” was the curt reply. “Rest content with that
assurance.”

Her restless fingers began to gather the red leaves that already
variegated the foliage of the creeper shading the porch. Strangely
indisposed to answer her animadversions upon the world's judgment of her
sex, or to acknowledge the implied compliment to his betrothed, Frederic
watched the lithe, dark hands, as they overflowed with the vermilion
trophies of autumn. The September sunshine sifted through the vines in
patches upon the floor; the low laughter and blended voices of the four
talkers; the echo of Tom's manly tread, and Mabel's lighter footfall,
were all jocund music, befitting the brightness of the day and world.
What was the spell by which this pettish girl who stood by him, her
luminous eyes fixed in sardonic melancholy upon the promenaders, while
she rubbed the dying leaves into atoms between her palms--had stamped
scenes and sounds with immortality, yet thrilled him with the indefinite
sense of unreality and dread one feels in scanning the lineaments of the
beloved dead? Had her nervous folly infected him? What absurd phantasy
was hers, and what his concern in her whims?

A stifled cry from Mabel aroused him to active attention. A gentlemen
had stepped from the house upon the piazza, and after bending to kiss
her, was shaking hands with her companions.

“The Grand Mogul!” muttered Rosa, with a comic grimace, and not offering
to stir in the direction of the stranger.

In another moment Mabel had led him up to her lover, and introduced, in
her pretty, ladylike way, and bravely enough, considering her blushes,
“Mr. Chilton” to “my brother, Mr. Winston Aylett.”




CHAPTER II. -- AN EXCHANGE OF CONFIDENCES.


“And so you know nothing of this gentleman beyond what he has told you
of his character and antecedents?”

Aunt Rachel had knocked at the door of her nephew's study after dinner,
on the day of his return, and asked for an interview.

“Although I know you must be very busy with your accounts, and so
forth, having been away from the plantation for so long,” she said,
deprecatingly, yet accepting the invitation to enter.

Mr. Aylett's eye left hers as he replied that he was quite at liberty
to listen to whatever she had to say, but his manner was entirely his
own--polished and cool.

Family tradition had it that he was naturally a man of strong passions
and violent temper, but since his college days, he had never, as far as
living mortal could testify, lifted the impassive mask he wore, at the
bidding of anger, surprise, or alarm. He ran all his tilts--and he was
not a non-combatant by any means--with locked visor. In person, he
was commanding in stature; his features were symmetrical; his bearing
high-bred. His conversation was sensible, but never brilliant or
animated. In his own household he was calmly despotic; in his county,
respected and unpopular--one of whom nobody dared speak ill, yet whom
nobody had reason to love. There was a single person who believed
herself to be an exception to this rule. This was his sister Mabel. Some
said she worshipped him in default of any other object upon which she
could expend the wealth of her young, ardent heart; others, that
his strong will enforced her homage. The fact of her devotion was
undeniable, and upon his appreciation of this Aunt Rachel built her
expectations of a favorable hearing when she volunteered to prepare the
way for Mr. Chilton's formal application for the hand of her nephew's
ward. Between herself and Winston there existed little real liking and
less affinity. She was useful to him, and his tolerance of her society
was courteous, but she understood perfectly that he secretly despised
many of her views and actions, as, indeed, he did those of most women.
Her present mission was undertaken for the love she bore Mabel and her
sister. It was not kind to send the girl to tell her own story. It
was neither kind nor fair to subject their guest to the ordeal of
an unheralded disclosure of his sentiments and aspirations, with the
puissant lord of Ridgeley as sole auditor.

“Fred would never get over the first impression of your brother's
chilling reserve,” said the self-appointed envoy to Mabel, when she
insisted that her affianced would plead his cause more eloquently than
a third person could. “For, you, must confess, my love, that Winston,
although in most respects a model to other young men, is unapproachable
by strangers.”

As she said “your accounts and so forth,” she looked at the table from
which Mr. Aylett had arisen to set a chair for her. There was a pile of
account-books at the side against the wall, but they were shut, and over
heaped by pamphlets and newspapers; while before the owner's seat lay
an open portfolio, an unfinished letter within it. Winston wiped his pen
with deliberation, closed the portfolio, snapped to the spring-top of
his inkstand, and finally wheeled his office chair away from the desk to
face his visitor.

“Is it upon business that you wish to speak to me?”

He always disdained circumlocution, prided himself upon the directness
and simplicity of his address. This acted now as a dissuasive to the
sentimental address Mrs. Sutton had meditated as a means of winning
the flinty walls behind which his social affections and sympathies were
supposed to be intrenched. Had her mission been in behalf of any other
cause, she would have drawn off her forces upon some pretext, and
effected an ignominious retreat. Nerved by the thought of Mabel's
bashfulness and solicitude, and Frederic's strangerhood, she stood to
her guns.

Winston heard her story, from the not very coherent preamble, to the
warm and unqualified endorsement of Frederic Chilton's credentials, and
her moved mention of the mutual attachment of the youthful pair, and
never changed his attitude, or manifested any inclination to stay
the narration by question or comment. When she ceased speaking, his
physiognomy denoted no emotion whatever. Yet, Mabel was his nearest
living relative. She had been bequeathed to his care, when only ten
years old, by the will of their dying father, and grown up under his eye
as his child, rather than a sister. And he was hearing, for the first
time, of her desire to quit the home they had shared together from her
birth, for the protection and companionship of another. Mrs. Sutton
thought herself pretty well versed in “Winston's ways,” but she had
expected to detect a shade of softness in the cold, never-bright eyes
and anticipated another rejoinder than the sentence that stands at the
head of this chapter.

“And so you know nothing of this gentleman beyond what he has told you
of his character and antecedents?” he said--the slender white fingers,
his aunt fancied, looked cruel even in their idleness, lightly linked
together while his elbows rested upon the arms of his chair.

“My dear Winston! what a question! Haven't I told you that he is my
husband's namesake and godson! I was at his fathers house a score of
times, at least, in dear Frederic's life-time. It was a charming place,
and I never saw a more lovely family. I recollect this boy perfectly,
as was very natural, seeing that his name was such a compliment to my
husband. He was a fine, manly little fellow, and the eldest son. The
christening-feast was postponed, for some reason I do not now remember,
until he was two years old. It was a very fine affair. The company was
composed of the very elite of that part of Maryland, and the Bishop
himself baptized the two babies--Frederic, and a younger sister. I know
all about him, you see, instead of nothing!”

“What was the date of this festival?” asked Winston's unwavering voice.

“Let me see! We had been married seven years that fall. It must have
been in the winter of 18--.”

“Twenty-three years ago!” said Winston, yet more quietly. “Doubtless,
your intimacy with this estimable and distinguished family continued up
to the time of your husband's death?”

“It did.”

“And afterward?”

Mrs. Button's color waned, And her voice sank, as the inquisition
proceeded. “Dear Frederic's” death was not the subject she would have
chosen of her free will to discuss with this man of steel and ice.

“I never visited them again. I could not--”

If she hoped to retain a semblance of composure, she must shift her
ground.

“I returned to my father's house, which was, as you know, more remote
from the borders of Maryland--”

“You kept up a correspondence, perhaps?” Winston interposed, overlooking
her agitation as irrelevant to the matter under investigation.

“No! For many months I wrote no letters at all, and Mr. Chilton was
never a punctual correspondent. The best of friends are apt to be
dilatory in such respects, as they advance in life.”

“I gather, then, from what you have ADMITTED”--there was no actual
stress upon the word, but it stood obnoxiously apart from the remainder
of the sentence, to Mrs. Sutton's auriculars--“from what you have
admitted, that for twenty years you have lost sight of this gentleman
and his relatives, and that you might never have remembered the
circumstance of their existence, had he not introduced himself to you at
the Springs this summer.”

“You are mistaken, there!” corrected the widow, eagerly. “Rosa Tazewell
introduced him to Mabel at the first 'hop' she--Mabel--attended there.
He is very unassuming. He would never have forced himself upon my
notice. I was struck by his appearance and resemblance to his father,
and inquired of Mabel who he was. The recognition followed as a matter
of course.”

“He was an acquaintance of Miss Tazewell--did you say?”

“Yes--she knew him very well when she was visiting in Philadelphia last
winter.”

“And proffered the introduction to Mabel?” the faintest imaginable
glimmer of sarcastic amusement in his eyes, but none in his accent.

“He requested it, I believe.”

“That is more probable. Excuse my frankness, aunt, when I say that it
would have been more in consonance with the laws controlling the conduct
of really thoroughbred people, had your paragon--I use the term in no
offensive sense--applied to me, instead of to you, for permission to pay
his addresses to my ward. I am willing to ascribe this blunder, however,
to ignorance of the code of polite society, and not to intentional
disrespect, since you represent the gentleman as amiable and
well-meaning. I am, furthermore, willing to examine his certificates
of character and means, with a view to determining what are his
recommendations to my sister's preference, over and above ball-room
graces and the fact that he is Mr. Sutton's namesake, and whether
it will be safe and advisable to grant my consent to their marriage.
Whatever is for Mabel's real welfare shall be done, while I cannot
but wish that her choice had fallen upon some one nearer home The
prosecution of inquiries as to the reputation of one whose residence is
so distant, is a difficult and delicate task.”

“If you will only talk to him for ten minutes he will remove your
scruples,--satisfy you that all is as it should be,” asserted Mrs.
Sutton, more confidently to him than herself.

“I trust it will be as you say--but credulity is not my besetting sin.
I am ready to see the gentleman at any hour you and he may see fit to
appoint.”

“I will send MR. CHILTON to you at once, then.” Mrs. Sutton collected
the scattering remnants of hope and resolution, that she might deal a
parting shot.

“Winston is an AWFUL trial to my temper, although he never loses his
own,” she was wont to soliloquize, in the lack of a confidante to whom
she could expatiate upon his eccentricities and general untowardness.
His marked avoidance of Frederic's name in this conference savored
to her of insulting meaning. She had rather he had coupled it with
opprobious epithets whenever he referred to him, than spoken of him as
“this” or “that gentleman.” If he took this high and chilly tone, with
Mabel's wooer, there was no telling what might be the result of the
affair.

“Don't mind him if he is stiff and uncompromising for a while,” she
enjoined upon Frederic, in apprising him of the seignior's readiness to
grant him audience, “It is only his way, and he is Mabel's brother.”

“I will bear the latter hint in mind,” rejoined the young man, with the
gay, affectionate smile he often bestowed upon her. “I don't believe he
can awe me into resignation of my purpose, or provoke me into dislike of
the rest of the family.”

Mabel was in her aunt's room, plying her with queries, hard to be
evaded, touching the tenor and consequences of her recent negotiations,
when a servant brought a message from her brother. She was wanted in the
study. The girl turned very white, as she prepared to obey, without an
idea of delay or of refusal.

“O Auntie! what if he should order me to give Frederic up!” she
ejaculated, pausing at the door, in an agony of trepidation. “I never
disobeyed him in my life.”

“He will not do that, dear, never fear! He can find no pretext for
such summary proceedings. And should he oppose your wishes, be firm of
purpose, and do not forsake your affianced husband,” advised the old
lady, solemnly. “There is a duty which takes precedence, in the sight
of Heaven and man, of that you owe your brother. Remember this, and take
courage.”

Mabel's roses returned in profusion, when, upon entering the arbiter's
dread presence, she saw Frederic Chilton, standing on the opposite side
of the table from that at which sat her brother at his ease, his white
fingers still idly interlaced, his pale patrician face emotionless as
that of the bust of Apollo upon the top of the bookcase behind him. It
was Frederic who led her to a chair, when she stopped, trembling midway
in the apartment, and his touch upon her arm inspirited her to raise her
regards to Winston's countenance at the sound of his voice.

“I have sent for you, Mabel, that I may repeat in you hearing the reply
I have returned to Mr. Chilton's application for my sanction to your
engagement--I should say, perhaps, to your reciprocal attachment. The
betrothal of a minor without the consent, positive or implied, of her
parent or guardian is, as I have just explained to Mr. Chilton, but
an empty name in this State. I have promised, then, not to oppose
your marriage, provided the inquiries I shall institute concerning Mr.
Chilton's previous life, his character, and his ability to maintain you
in comfort, are answered satisfactorily. He will understand and excuse
my pertinacity upon this point when he reflects upon the value of the
stake involved in this transaction.”

In all their intercourse, Frederic had no more gracious notice
from Mabel's brother than this semi-apology, delivered with stately
condescension, and a courtly bow in his direction.

It sounded very grand to Mabel, whose fears of opposition or severity
from her Mentor had shaken courage and nerves into pitiable distress.
Frederic could desire nothing more affable than Winston's smile; no more
abundant encouragement than was afforded by his voluntary pledge. Had
not the thought savored of disloyalty to her lover, she would have
confessed herself disappointed that his reply did not effervesce with
gratitude, that his deportment was distant, his tone constrained.

“I appreciate the last-named consideration, Mr. Aylett, I believe,
thoroughly, as you do. I have already told you that I invite, not
shirk, the investigation you propose. I now repeat my offer of whatever
facility is at my command for carrying this on. No honorable man could
do less. Unless I mistake, you wish now to see your sister alone.”

He bent his head slightly, and without other and especial salutation to
his betrothed, withdrew.

Odd, white dints came and went in Winston's nostrils--the one and
unerring facial sign of displeasure he ever exhibited, if we except a
certain hardening of eye and contour that chiselled his lineaments into
a yet closer resemblance to marble.

“He is very sensitive and proud, I know,” faltered Mabel, hastily
marking these, and understanding what they portended.

“You need not like him the less on that account, always provided that
the supports of his pride are legitimate and substantial,” answered her
brother, carelessly transferring to his tablets several names from a
sheet of paper upon the table--the addresses of persons to whom Frederic
had referred him for confirmation of his statements regarding his social
and professional standing.

“I hope, for your sake, Mabel,” he pursueds pocketing the memoranda,
“that this affair may be speedily and agreeably adjusted; while I cannot
deny that I deprecate the unseemly haste with which Mrs. Sutton and
her ally have urged it on, in my absence. Had they intended to court
suspicion, they could not have done it more effectually. You could not
have had a more injudicious chaperone to the Springs.”

“Indeed, brother, she was not to blame,” began the generous girl,
forgetting her embarrassment in zealous defence of the aunt she loved.
“It was not she who presented me to Mr. Chilton, and she has never
attempted to bias my decision in any manner.”

“I have heard the history in detail.” Had his breeding been less fine,
he would have yawned in her face. “I know that you are indebted for Mr.
Chilton's acquaintanceship to Miss Tazewell's generosity. But in strict
justice, Mrs. Sutton should be held responsible for whatever unhappiness
may arise from the intimacy. You were left by myself in her charge.”

“I do not believe it will end unhappily,” Mabel was moved to reply,
with spirit that became her better than the shyness she had heretofore
displayed, or the submissive demeanor usual with her in tête-à-têtes
with her guardian.

He smiled in calm superiority.

“I have expressed my hope to that effect. Of expectations it will be
time enough to speak when I am better informed upon divers points. I
am not one to take much for granted, am less sanguine than my romantic
aunt, or even than my more practical sister. Assuming, however, that
all is as you would have it, your wish would be, I suppose, for an early
marriage?”

“There has been little said about that,” responded Mabel,
reddening--then rallying to add smilingly--“such an arrangement would
have involved the taking for granted a good many things--your consent
among them.”

Winston passed over the addenda.

“But that little, especially when uttered by Mr. Chilton, trenched upon
the inexpediency of long engagements--did it not?”

Mabel was mute, her eyes downcast.

“I agree with him there, at any rate. You are nineteen years of age; he
twenty-five. Your property is unincumbered, and can be transferred
to your keeping at very short notice. Mr. Chilton represents that his
income from his patrimonial estate, eked out by professional gains, is
sufficient to warrant him in marrying forthwith. I shall see that no
time is lost in making the inquiries upon which depends the progress of
the negotiation. Business calls me North in a week or ten days. I shall
stop a day in Philadelphia, and settle your affair.”

The frightfully business-like manner of disposing of her happiness
appalled the listener into silence. The loss of Frederic; the
destruction of her love-dream; the weary years of lonely wretchedness
that would follow the bereavement, were to him only unimportant
incidentals to her “affair;” weighed in the scale of his impartial
judgment no more than would unconsidered dust. For the first time in the
life to which he had been the guiding-star, she ventured to wonder if
the unswerving rectitude that had elevated him above the level of other
men, in her esteem and affection, were so glorious a thing after all; if
a tempering, not of human frailty, but of charity for the shortcomings,
sympathy for the needs, of ordinary mortals, would not subdue the
effulgence of his talents and virtues into mild lustre, more tolerable
to the optics of fallible beholders.

Unsuspicious, with all his astuteness, of her sacrilegious doubts,
Winston proceeded:

“In the event of your marriage, you would desire, no doubt, that Mrs.
Sutton should take up her abode with you? You would find her useful in
many ways, and she would get on amicably with her husband's godson.”

“I do not think she expects to go with me,” answered Mabel, staggered by
his coolly confident air. “I certainly have never entertained the
idea. I imagined that she would remain with you, while you needed her
services.”

“That will not be long. I shall be married on the 10th of October.”

“Married! brother!” starting up in amazement. “You are not in earnest!”

“I should not jest upon such a theme,” replied Winston, in grave rebuke.
“My plans are definitely laid. It is not my purpose to keep them secret
a day longer. I meant to communicate them to yourself and Mrs. Sutton
this afternoon, but yours claimed precedence.”

Mabel sat down again, totally confounded, and struggling hard with
her tears. The thought of her brother's marriage was not in itself
disagreeable. She had often lamented his insensibility to the
attractions of such women as she fancied would add to his happiness, and
grace the high place to which his wife would be exalted. She never
liked to hear him called invulnerable; repelled the hypothesis of
his incurable bachelorhood as derogatory to his heart and head. This
unlooked-for intelligence, had it reached her in a different way, would
have delighted as much as it astonished her. The fear lest her consent
to wed Frederic and leave Ridgeley might be the occasion of discomfort
and sadness to her forsaken brother had shadowed all her visions of
future bliss. She ought to have hailed with unmixed satisfaction the
certainty that he would not miss her sisterly ministrations, or feel the
need of her companionship in that of one nearer and dearer than was
his child-ward. She had striven not to resent even in her own mind, his
cavalier treatment of her lover; had hearkened respectfully and without
demur to his unsympathizing calculations of what was possible and what
feasible in the project of her union with the man of her choice. For how
could he know anything of the palpitations, the anxieties, the raptures
of love, when he was a stranger to the touch of a kindred emotion? He
meant well; he had her welfare in view; unfortunate as was his style of
discussing the means for insuring this--for he loved her dearly, dearly!

She must never question this, although he had dealt the comfortable
persuasion a cruel blow; wounded her in a vital part by withholding
from her the circumstance of his attachment and betrothal until the near
approach of the wedding day rendered continued secrecy inexpedient. No
softening memory of his affianced had inclined him to listen with kindly
warmth to her timid avowals, or Frederic's manly protestations of their
mutual attachment. He recognized no analogy in the two cases; stood
aloof from them in the flush of his successful love, as if he had never
known the pregnant meaning of the word. Smarting under the sense of
injury to pride and affection, her language, when she could trust her
voice, was a protest that, in Winston's judgment, ill beseemed her age
and station.

“Why did you not tell me of this earlier, brother? It was unjust and
unkind to keep me in the dark until now.”

“You forget yourself, Mabel. I am not under obligation to account to you
for my actions.”

He said it composedly, as if stating a truth wholly disconnected with
feeling on his part or on hers.

“I have given you the information to which you refer, in season for you
to make ample preparation for my wife's reception. And, mark me, she
must see no sulkiness, no airs of strangeness or intolerance, because
I have managed a matter that concerns me chiefly, as seemed to me best.
Say the same to Mrs. Sutton, if you please; also that I will submit to
no dictation, and ask no advice.”

Mabel's anger seldom outlived its utterance. The hot sparkle in her
eye was quenched by moisture, as she laid her hand caressingly upon her
brother's.

“Winston! you cannot suppose that we could be wanting in cordiality to
any one whom you love, much less to your wife. Let her come when she
may, she will be heartily welcomed by us both. But this has
fallen suddenly upon me, and I am a little out of sorts to-day, I
believe--excited and nervous--and, O, my darling! my oldest and best of
friends! I hope your love will bring to you the happiness you deserve.”

The tears had their course, at last, bathing the hand she bowed to kiss.
The simple ardor of the outbreak would have affected many men to a show
of responsive weakness. Even Winston Aylett's physiognomy was more human
and less statuesque, as he patted her head, and bade her be composed.

“If you persist in enacting Niobe, I shall believe that you are
chagrined at the prospect of having the sister you have repeatedly
besought me to give you,” he said, playfully--for him. “You have
not asked me her name, and where she lives. What has become of your
curiosity? I never knew it to be quiescent before.”

“I thought you would tell me whatever it was best for me to know,”
 replied Mabel, drying her eyes.

If she had said that she was too well-trained to assail him with
interrogatories he had not invited, it would have been nearer the mark.

“There is nothing relating to her which I desire to conceal,” he
rejoined, with some stiffness, “or she would never have become my
promised wife. She is a Miss Dorrance, the daughter of a widow residing
in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts. I met her first at Trenton
Falls, where a happy accident brought me into association with her
party. I travelled with them to the Lakes and among the White Mountains,
and, while in Boston, visited her daily. We were betrothed a week ago,
and having, as I have observed, an aversion to protracted engagements,
I prevailed upon her to appoint the tenth of next mouth as our marriage
day. There you have the story in brief. I have not Mrs. Sutton's talents
as a raconteur, nor her disposition to turn hearts inside out for the
edification of her auditors.”

“Does she--Miss Dorrance--look like anybody I know?” asked Mabel,
hesitating to declare herself dissatisfied with the skeleton love-tale,
yet uncertain how to learn more.

“A roundabout way of asking if she is passable in appearance,” Winston
said, with his smile of conscious superiority. “Judge for yourself!”
 taking from his pocket a miniature.

“How beautiful! What a very handsome woman?” the sister exclaimed at
sight of the pictured face.

“You are correct. She is, moreover, a thorough lady, and
highly-educated. Ridgeley will have a queenly mistress. The likeness is
considered faithful, but it does not do her justice.”

He took it from Mabel, and they scanned it together; she resting
against his shoulder. She felt his chest heave twice; heard him swallow
spasmodically in the suppression of some mighty emotion, and the
palpable effort drew her very near to him. She never doubted from that
moment, what she had more cause in after days to believe, that he loved
the woman he had won with a fervor of passion that seemed foreign to his
temperament as the evidence of it was to his conduct.

The September sun was near the horizon, and between the bowed shutters
one slender, gilded arrow shot athwart the portrait, producing a
marvellous and sinister change in its expression. The large, limpid eyes
became shallow and cunning; the smile lurking about the mouth was the
more treacherous and deadly for its sweetness; while the burnished coils
of hair brushed away from the temples had the opaline tints and sinuous
roll of a serpent.

Mabel shrank back before the horror of the absurd imagination.

Winston raised the picture to his lips.

“My peerless one!”




CHAPTER III. -- UNWHOLESOME VAPORS.


“DORRANCE!” repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she rehearsed
to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the leading
incidents of her brother's wooing. “She lives near Boston, you say, and
her mother is a widow?”

“Yes. What have you ever heard about her?”

“Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name--but very foolishly! I
once knew a family of Dorrances--New Yorkers--but the father, a retired
naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were married. The
youngest of them would be, by this time, much older than you judge the
original of the miniature to be.”

“She is not more than twenty-two, at the most,” Mabel was sure.

Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her
curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not “quiescent.”
 The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.

“There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then? or
something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have been
relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a common one
to my ears.”

“Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition. I should
be very sorry--”

He stopped.

Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness.

“Was not the family respectable?”

“Perfectly, my shrewd little catechist!” seeming to shake off an
uncomfortable incubus, as he laughed down at her serious face. “They
vaunted themselves upon the antiquity of their line, and were more
liberal in allusions to departed grandeur than was quite well-bred. When
I knew them they were not wealthy, or in what they would have called
'society.' Indeed, the mother kept a private boarding-house near
the law-school I attended. There were several sons--very decent,
enterprising fellows. But one lived at home, and a daughter, the wife of
a lieutenant in the navy, whom I never saw. I boarded with them for six
months, or thereabout.”

“You never saw the daughter! How was that?”

“I must have expressed myself awkwardly if I conveyed any such idea. I
did not meet the seafaring husband who was off upon a long cruise.
The wife I met constantly--knew very well. You need not look at me so
intently, love, as if you feared that some dark mystery lurked behind
this matter-of-fact recital. If I do not tell you every event of my
former life, it is not because it was vile. I could not sustain
the light of your innocent eyes if I had ever been guilty of aught
dishonorable or criminal. But even the follies and mistakes of a young
man's early career are not fit themes for your ears. And I was no wiser,
no more wary, than other youths of the same age; was apt to believe that
fair which was only specious, and that I might play, uninjured, with
edged tools. Nor had I seen you then, my treasure--my snow-drop of
purity! Mabel! do you know how solemn a thing it is to be loved and
trusted by a man, as I love and confide in you? It terrifies me when I
think of the absoluteness of my dependence upon your fidelity--of how
rich I am in having you--how poor, wretched, and miserable I should be
without you. I shall not draw a free breath until you are mine beyond
the chance of recall.”

“Nobody else wants me!” breathed Mabel in his ear, nestling within
the arm that enfolded and held her tightly in the corner of the
piazza shaded by the creeper. “The danger of losing me is not imminent
to-night, at all events,” she resumed, presently, with a touch of the
sportiveness that lent her manner an airy charm in lighter talk than
that which had engrossed her for the past hour.

The evening was warm and still to sultriness, and the moonlight,
filtered into pensive pallor through a low-lying haze, yet sufficed to
show how confidingly Imogene leaned upon her attendant in sauntering
down the long main alley of the garden. Rosa was at the piano in the
parlor, singing to the enamored Alfred. Mrs. Sutton had withdrawn to
her own room to ruminate upon the astounding disclosure of her nephew's
engagement, while Winston bent over his study-table busy with the
interrupted letter his aunt had seen in his portfolio.

“There is no one here who has the leisure or the disposition to contest
your rights, you perceive,” said Mabel, running through a laughing
summary of their companions' occupations.

“Betrothals are epidemic in this household and neighborhood,” Winston
was writing. “There are no fewer than three pairs of turtles cooing down
stairs as I pen this to you, my bird of paradise. The case that next to
mine--to ours--commands my interest is that of my sister. I came home to
learn that the little Mabel I used to hold on my knee had entered into
an engagement--conditional upon my sanction--with that traditional
tricky personage, a Philadelphia lawyer--Mr. Frederic Chilton, at the
door of whose manifold perfections, as set forth by my loquacious aunt,
you may lay the blame of this delayed epistle. I know nothing of this
aspirant to the dignity of brotherhood with myself, saving the facts
that he is tolerably good looking, claims to be the scion of an old
Maryland family, and that self-conceit is apparently his predominant
quality.”

“What is that?” asked Frederic, halting before the windows, of the
drawing-room, as a wild, sorrowful strain, like the wail of a breaking
heart, arose upon the waveless air.

Rosa was a vocalist of note in her circle, and she had never rendered
anything with more effect than she did the song to which even the
preoccupied strollers among the garden borders stayed their steps to
listen. Through the open casement Mabel and her lover could see the face
of the musician, slightly uplifted toward the moonlight; her eyes, dark
and dreamy, as under the cloud of many years of weary waiting and final
hopelessness. Her articulation was always pure, but the passionate
emphasis of every word constrained the breathless attention of her
audience to the close of the simple lay:

    “Thy name was once the magic spell
       By which my thoughts were bound;
     And burning dreams of light and love
       Were wakened by the sound.
     My heart beat quick when stranger-tongues,
       With idle praise or blame,
     Awoke its deepest thrill of joy
       To tremble at thy name.

    “Long years, long years have passed away,
       And altered is thy brow;
     And we who met so fondly once
       Must meet as strangers now.
     The friends of yore come 'round me still,
       But talk no more of thee,
     'Twere idle e'en to wish it now,
       For what art thou to me?”

    “Yet still thy name--thy blessed name!
       My lonely bosom fills,
     Like an echo that hath lost itself
       Among the distant hills,
     That still, with melancholy note,
       Keeps faintly lingering on,
     When the joyous sound that woke it first
       Is gone--forever gone!”

“A neat conceit that last verse, and the music is a fair imitation of a
dying bugle-echo!” said Winston Aylett to himself, resuming the writing
he had suspended for a minute. “That girl should take to the stage. If
one did not know better, her eyes and singing together would delude him
into the idea that she had a heart. Honest Alfred evidently believes
that she has, and that the patient labor of love will win it for
himself. Bah!”

Frederic and Mabel retired noiselessly from their post of observation,
as “honest Alfred” made a motion to take in his the hand lying prone and
passive upon the finger-board. They exchanged a smile, significant and
tender, in withdrawing.

“We understand the signs of the times,” whispered Frederic, at the upper
turn of their promenade. “Heaven bless all true lovers under the sun!”

“Don't!” said Rosa, vehemently, snatching away her hand from her
suitor's hold. “Leave me alone! If you touch me again I shall scream!
I think you were made up without nerves, either in the heart or in the
brain--if you have any!”

Before the aghast Alfred rallied from the recoil occasioned by her
gesture and words, her feet were pattering over the oaken hall and
staircase in rapid retreat to her chamber.

“You are really happy, then?” queried Mabel. “Quite content?”

“Did I not tell you awhile ago that I was not satisfied?” returned
Chilton. “Two months since I should, in anticipation of this hour, have
declared that it would be fraught with unalloyed rapture. I was
happier yesterday than I am to-day. It is not merely that we must part
to-morrow, or that your brother's precautionary measures and disapproval
of what has passed between us have acted like a shower-bath to the
fervor of my newly born hopes. I am willing that my life should be
subjected to the utmost rigor of his researches, and another month, at
farthest, will reunite us. Nor do I believe in presentiments. I am more
inclined to attribute the uneasiness that has hovered over me all the
day to physical causes. We will call it a mild splenetic case, induced
by the sultry weather, and the very slow on coming of the storm presaged
by your dewless roses.”

He laughed naturally and pleasantly. Having confessed to what he
regarded as a ridiculous succumbing of his buoyant spirit to atmospheric
influences, he shook off the nightmare as if it had never sat upon him.

Mabel was grave still.

“There is something weirdly oppressive in the night,” she said, in a
low, awed tone. “But the burden you describe has weighed me down since
morning. While Rosa was singing, I felt suddenly removed from you by a
horrid gulf. What if all this should be the preparation to us for some
impending danger?”

“Sweet! these are unwholesome vapors of the imagination. Nothing can be
a disaster that leaves us to one another,” was the text of Frederic's
fond soothing; and by the time Mrs. Sutton descended from her chamber of
meditation, to remind Imogene that the seeds of ague and fever lurked in
the river-fogs, the couple from the piazza came into the lighted parlor,
all smiles and animation, wondering, jocosely, what had become of the
recent occupants of the apartment.

Neither reappeared until breakfast-time next morning. Rosa was like
freshly-poured champagne, in sweet and sparkle. Alfred, rueful and limp,
as if the dripping clouds that verified Mabel's prediction had
soaked him all night. He was dry and comfortable--to carry out the
figure--within twenty minutes after his beloved fluttered, like a tame
canary, into the chair next his own--in five more, was more truly her
slave, living in, and upon her smiles--adoring her very caprices as he
had never admired another woman's virtues--than he had been prior to the
brief, but tempestuous scene over night. She was the life of the
party assembled in the dining-room. Imogene had caught cold, walking
bareheaded in the evening air, and Tom condoled with her upon her
influenza and sore-throat too sincerely to do justice to the rest of
his friends and his breakfast. Mr. Aylett was never talkative, and his
unvarying, soulless politeness to all produced the conserving effect
upon chill and low spirits that the atmosphere of a refrigerator does
upon whatever is placed within it. Mrs. Sutton's motherly heart was
yearning pityingly over the lovers who were soon to be sundered, while
Mabel's essay at cheerful equanimity imposed upon nobody's credulity.
Frederic comported himself like a man--the more courageously because
the host's cold eye was upon him, and he surmised that sighs and
sentimentality would meet very scant indulgence in that quarter.
Moreover, he was not so unreasonable as to descry insupportable
hardships in this parting. By agreement with Mr. Aylett and his sister,
he was, if all went prosperously, to revisit Ridgeley at the end of six
weeks, when his design was to entreat his betrothed to name the wedding
day. The prospect might well support him under the present trial. He
bore Rosa's badinage gallantly, tossing back sprightly and telling
rejoinders that called forth the smiling applause of the auditors, and
commanded her respectful recognition of him as a foeman worthy of her
steel.

“Nine o'clock,” said Winston, at length, consulting his watch, and
pushing back his chair. “The carriage will be at the door in fifteen
minutes, Mr. Chilton. The road is heavy this morning, and the stage
passes the village at ten.”

“I shall be ready,” responded Frederic. “I am sorry your carriage and
coachman must be exposed to the rain.”

“That is nothing. They are used to it. I never alter my plan of travel
on account of the weather, how ever severe the storm. This warm rain can
hurt nobody.”

“It is pouring hard,” remarked Mrs. Button, solicitously. “And that
stage is wretchedly uncomfortable in the best weather. I wish you
could be persuaded to stay with us until it clears off, Mr. Chilton,
and”--making a bold push--“I am sure my nephew concurs in my desire.”

“Mr. Chilton should require no verbal assurance of my hospitable
feelings toward him and my other guests,” said Mr. Aylett,
frigidly--smooth as ice-cream. “If I forbear to press him to prolong his
stay, it is in reflection of the golden law laid down for the direction
of hosts--'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.'”

“You are both very kind, but I must go,” Frederic replied, concisely
and civilly, following Mabel into the parlor, whither the other visitors
were fabled to have repaired. As he had guessed, his betrothed was the
only person there; the quartette having dispersed with kindly tact, for
which he gave them due credit.

“Don't think hardly of me, dear,” he began, seating himself beside her
on the sofa.

“Allow me to offer you a few of the finest cigars I have enjoyed for
many years,” said Mr. Aylett, entering in season to check Frederic's
movement to encircle Mabel's drooping form with his arm. “You smoke, I
believe? You may have an opportunity of indulging in this solace in
an empty stage. At least, there is little probability that you will be
denied the luxury by the presence of lady passengers. I procured those
in Havana, last winter. In case you should like them well enough to
order some for yourself, I will give you the address of the merchant
from whom I purchased them.”

He wrote a line upon a card, as he might sign a beggar's petition--with
a supercilious parade of benevolence--and passed it to the other, who
accepted it with a phrase of acknowledgment neither hearty nor grateful.
Then the master of the house paced the floor with a slow, regular step,
his hands behind him; his countenance placidly ruminative, his
thoughts apparently engaged with anything rather than the pain upon the
corner-sofa, whose leave-taking he had mercilessly marred. Frederic dumb
and furious; Mabel equally dumb and amazed to alarm, knowing as she
did that her brother's actions were never purposeless, sat still, their
hands clasped stealthily amid the folds of Mabel's dress; their eyes
saying the dear and passionate things forbidden to their tongues.
Neither would feign indifference, or attempt a lame dialogue upon other
topics than those that filled their minds. Mr. Aylett was not one to pay
outward heed to hints when he chose to ignore them. He kept up his walk
until the carriage was driven around to the front door, informed the
parting guest that it awaited his commands, likewise that he would
need all the time that remained to him if he hoped to catch the
stage; without leaving the room, called to a servant to bring down Mr.
Chilton's baggage, and did not lose sight of his sister's lover until
the last farewell was said, and Frederic bestowed inside the vehicle.
There was nothing offensively officious or malicious in all this.
Having declared as an incontrovertible dogma, that a ward could form no
engagement without the formal sanction of her legal guardian, he saw fit
to put the seal upon the decision at this, their adieu, in a manner they
were not likely to forget. An hour's harangue would not have imbued them
with the sense of his authority, his determination to exercise it, and
their impotency to resist it, as did this practical lesson.

Mrs. Sutton could scarcely restrain her tearful remonstrances against
what was, to her perception, an act of arbitrary and wanton cruelty, and
other spectators had their views upon the subject.

“Very inconsiderate in Aylett! I wonder how he would like the same game
to be played upon himself!” commented Alfred, aside, to his Dulcinea.

Her lip curled in disdainful amusement.

“As if he had ever done an inconsiderate thing since he put off long
clothes! There is method in all this, if we were clever enough to fathom
it.”

Within herself, she determined that she would solve the enigma before
she was a week older.

Frederic cast one hasty, eager look at the portico, as the carriage
turned out of the yard. Mabel stood in the foreground, her figure framed
by the climbing roses drooping over the front steps. She was very pale,
and, forgetful for the moment of the observation of the bystanders,
leaned slightly forward, her eyes strained upon the carriage-window--one
hand laid upon her heart, the other resting against the pillar nearest
her, as for support. She waved her handkerchief, in response to his
smile and lifted hat, and simultaneously with this interchange of adieux
her brother took her by the arm.

“You are getting wet there, Mabel! Come into the house! It is well I
have come back to look after you!”


CHAPTER IV. -- “FOUNDED UPON A ROCK.”


If Mrs. Sutton had raised horrified eyes and despairing hands upon
learning the date of her nephew's proposed marriage, it was because
she miscalculated his executive abilities, and the energy she had never
until now seen fairly put forth. Within three days after his return, the
homestead was alive with masons, carpenters, painters, and upholsterers,
engaged by the prompt bridegroom on his passage through Richmond; and so
explicit were his orders as to the minutest detail of the work appointed
to each, that he could safely leave the scene of action at the time
appointed for the flying trip northward, to which he had referred in his
dialogue with Mabel on the afternoon of his arrival.

The party of visitors had emigrated to other regions, a couple of days
after Frederic Chilton's departure, with the exception of Rosa Tazewell,
who accepted Mabel's invitation to prolong her sojourn, the more
willingly since she “flattered herself she could be of use in the
general upheaving of the ancient foundations, and establishment of
the new. If there was one thing she enjoyed above another, it was a
tremendous bustle--a lively revolution.”

She made her boast of personal utility good by installing herself
forthwith as Mrs. Sutton's aid-de-camp, and rendering herself so far
indispensable in the work of reconstruction that Mr. Aylett deigned to
ask her not to desert her post in his absence.

“Yours is the genius of renovation, Miss Rosa,” the potentate was
pleased to say in his handsomest style. “Do not, I beg of you, forsake
my aunt and sister in their need. Let me feel that I leave one head as
the motive-power of the multitudinous hands.”

She agreed, in the same strain, to oblige him--a decision greeted
with satisfaction by the pair in whose behalf he besought her friendly
offices. The versatile invention and deft fingers of the little
brunette were welcome to the heavily-taxed housekeeper, as were her
gay good-humor and words of cheer and affection to the younger of her
companions. The two girls became more confidential in six days than
eighteen years of neighborly intercourse had sufficed to make them.
Mabel's innate delicacy and excellent common sense would, in ordinary
circumstances, have barred effusiveness upon the theme nearest
her heart, but love at nineteen is rarely discreet, even when the
persuasives to communicativeness are less powerful than were the sorcery
of Rosa's sympathy and the confessions that paved the way to answering
and trustful communicativeness on her friend's part.

They were having what she called “a good, long, comforting, as well as
comfortable chat” over their sewing in Mabel's chamber on the afternoon
of the eighth day of Winston's absence. The weather was lovely, with the
mellow brightness and balmy airs that make Virginian autumns a joy and
glory until November is half spent, and the atmosphere held, at sunset,
the warmth and much of the radiance which had set the day--a perfect
gem--in the heart of the golden month. Into the eastern windows gazed
the full moon, a crimson globe upon the hazy horizon, while Venus lay,
large and tremulous, among the dying fires of the west.

“'Lovers love the western star,'” quoted Rosa, merrily, taking Mabel's
work from her and throwing it upon the bed. “Come and enjoy the holy
hour with me.”

They leaned together upon the window-sill, their young faces tinted
by the changeful hues of the sky, both thoughtful and mute, until Rosa
broke the silence by a heavy sigh.

“O Mabel, you should be a happy, happy girl; blessed among women. You
can love--freely and joyously--and have pride and faith in the one
beloved.”

“As you will some day,” rejoined the other, drawing nearer to her, “when
you, in your turn, shall know the unspeakable sweetness of unquestioning
faith--of utter dependence upon him to whom you have given your heart.”

“Utter dependence!” echoed Rosa. “That would mean utter wreck of
heart, hope--everything--should the anchor give way. It is a hazardous
experiment, ma belle!”

The other looked down at her with simple fearlessness.

“'For it was founded upon a rock!'” she repeated softly; yet the
exultant ring of her accent vibrated upon the ear like a joyous
challenge.

Rosa's fretful movement was involuntary.

“Mine would drag in the sand at every turn of the tide, every rise
of the wind, if I were to follow your advice, and say 'yes' to the
pertinacious Alfred,” she said reproachfully.

“Don't say advice, dear!” corrected the other. “I only endeavored
to convince you that there must be latent tenderness beneath your
sufferance of Mr. Branch's devotion; that if you really were averse to
the thought of marrying him, you could not take pleasure in his society
or enjoy the marks of his attachment which are apparent to you and to
everybody else.”

“Can't you understand,” said the beauty, petulantly, “that it is one
thing to flirt with a man in public, and another to cherish his image
in private? There is no better touchstone of affection than the holiness
and calm of an hour like this. If Frederic were with you, the scene
would be the fairer, the season more sacred for its association with
thoughts of him and his love. Whereas, my Alfred's adoring platitudes
would disgust me with the sunset, with the world, and with myself, for
permitting him to haunt my presence and hang upon my smile--foppish
barnacle that he is! If you knew how I despise myself sometimes!”

“Dear Rosa! I shall never try again to persuade that you care for him
as a woman should for the man GOD intended her to marry. But why not act
worthily of yourself--justly to him, and reject him decidedly?”

“Because”--her face shrewd and wilful as it had been sorrowful just
now--“I am by no means certain that I can do better than to marry him.
He is rich, good-looking (so people say!), well-born, gentlemanly, and
pleasant of temper. An imposing array of advantages, you see! I might go
further, and fare very much worse. We shall not expect to pass our days
in gazing at sunsets and walking in the moonlight, you know. It is not
every woman who can marry the man she loves best. While the right to
select and to woo is usurped by the masculine portion of the community,
it must, perforce, be Hobson's choice with an uncountable majority
of feminines. I should not complain. The stall allotted to me by
Hobson--alias Fate--might hold a worse-conditioned animal than my
worshipping swain.”

“What a wicked rattle you are!” Mabel said, affecting to box her ears.
“I could not love you if I believed you to be in earnest. As to
your figure of the stabled steed--this disapproving customer has the
consolation that she need not accept him, unless she wishes to do so.
She has the invaluable privilege of saying 'no' as often and obstinately
as she pleases.”

“I deny it,” said Rosa, perversely. “Parents, in this age, do not make a
custom of locking up refractory daughters in nunneries or garrets until
they consent to wed Baron Buncombe or my Lord Nozoo, but there are,
nevertheless, compulsory marriages in plenty. Society warns me to make
a creditable match, upon penalty, if I decline, of being pointed out
to the succeeding--and a fast-succeeding generation it is! as a
disappointed old maid--passée belle, who squandered her capital of
fascinations, and has become a pauper upon public toleration, while
my mother, sisters, and brothers are growing impatient at my many and
profitless flirtations, and anxious to see me 'settled.' My mother's
pet text, since I was sixteen, has been her prayerful desire that I, the
last of her nestlings, should make choice of a tenable bough and helpful
partner, and set up a separate establishment before she dies. When that
event occurs, I shall be, in effect, homeless--a boarder around upon my
rebukeful relatives, who 'always thought how my trifling would end,' and
who will be forever scribbling 'vanitas vanitatum,' upon the tombstone
of my departed youth--my day of beaux and offers. You may shake your
head and look heroic with all your might! You are no better off than
I, should your brother see cause to refuse his consent to your marriage
with Mr. Chilton. He could, and probably would, coerce you into another
alliance before you were twenty-one. There are so many ways of
letting the life out of a woman's heart, when it is already faint from
disappointment! The spirit is oftener broken by unyielding, but not
seemingly cruel pressure, than by outrageous violence. And Winston would
show himself an adept in such arts, if occasion offered.”

“Rosa Tazewell! you are speaking of my brother, my friend and
benefactor! one of the best, noblest, most disinterested creatures
Heaven ever made!” cried Mabel, erect and indignant. “You have no
warrant--I shall never give you the right--to asperse him in my
presence. He is incapable of cruelty or unfairness. It is my duty to
obey him, but it is no less a pleasure, for he is a hundred-fold
wiser and better than I am--knows far more truly what is for my real
advantage. As to his conduct in this affair of Frederic and myself, you
cannot deny that it has been generous and consistent throughout. He has
been cautious--never harsh!”

“So!” said Rosa, scrutinizing the flushed countenance of the other, her
own full of intense meaning, “you HAVE had your misgivings!”

Mabel reddened more warmly.

“Misgivings! What do you mean?”

“That the uncalled-for vehemence of your defence is a proof of disturbed
confidence, of wanting belief in the infallibility of your semi-deity.
The trailing robes of divinity have been blown aside by a chance breath
of suspicion, and you had a glimpse of the clay feet. I am glad of
it. Scepticism is the parent of rebellion, and the time is coming when
fealty to your betrothed may demand disloyalty to the power that now
is.”

Mabel's smile was meant to be careless, but it was only uneasy, and gave
the lie direct to her asseveration.

“I have no apprehensions of such a conflict. Winston's word is as
good as another man's oath. It is pledged to my marriage with Frederic
Chilton, in the event of the prosperous issue of his inquiries into
his, Frederic's, character and prospects. That these will be answered
favorably, I have the word of another, who is every whit as trustworthy.
Where is there room for doubt?”

The brunette shook her head--unconvinced.

“Have your own way! I can afford to abide the showing of the logic of
events.”

“And I!” retorted Mabel, hastily, turning from her, without attempting
to dissemble her chagrin, to answer a knock at the door.

It was a servant, with two letters. The annoyance passed from her brow,
like the sheerest mist, as she read the superscriptions--one in her
brother's handwriting, the other in Frederic's.

Rosa interfered to prevent the breaking of the seals.

“I am going to leave you to the undisturbed enjoyment of your feast,”
 she said, in her most winsome manner. “But--won't it taste the sweeter
if your antepast is the delight of forgiveness? Say you are not angry
with me--mia cara!”

“You are a ridiculous child!” Mabel bent to kiss the pleading lips, then
the great, melting eyes. “Who could be out of temper with you for half a
minute at a time? You did try my patience with your nonsense, but since
it WAS nonsense, I have forgotten it all, and love you none the less for
your prankish humor--you gypsy!”

“She calls my prophecies humbug--turns a deaf ear to my warnings!” cried
the incorrigible rattle, clasping her hands above her head and rolling
her eyes tragically. “I have a lively appreciation, at this instant, of
Cassandra's agonies when Troilus named her 'our mad sister!'--

      'Woe! woe! woe!
    Let us pay betimes
    A moiety of that mass of moans to come!'”

Laughing anew at her frantic rush from the chamber, Mabel sat down in
the broad window-seat to read her love-letter.

Frederic was too manly in feeling and habit of speech to deal in florid
rhapsodies, but each line had its message from his heart to hers. He
loved her purely and in truth, and there was not a sentence that did not
tell her this, by inference, if not directly. He trusted her--and this,
too, he told her, more as a husband might the wife of years than a lover
of her he had won so lately. Their hopes were the same and their lives,
and she dwelt longest upon the sketched plans for the future of these.
It brought him closer to her than anything else--put her secret and
reluctant imaginations of evil, and Rosa's daring insinuations, out of
sight and recollection. She read slowly, and with frequent pauses,
that she might take in the exquisite flavor of this and that phrase of
endearment; set before herself in beauty and distinctness the scenes he
portrayed as the adornment of the prospect which was theirs.

The second and yet more deliberate perusal over, she folded the sheet
with lingering touches to every corner, thrust it into the envelope,
and drew it forth again to peep once more at the signature--“Forever and
truly, your own Frederic;” pressed it to her lips, then to her heart,
and bestowed it securely in her writing-desk, before she unclosed her
brother's epistle.

With her finger upon the seal--a big drop of red wax, like a petrified
blood-gout, stamped with the Aylett coat-of-arms--she leaned through
the casement to watch for the flutter of Rosa's white dress among the
vari-colored maples shading the lawn--sang a clear, sweet second to the
song that ascended to her eyrie:

    “Why weep ye by the tide, ladye?
       Why weep ye by the tide?
     I'll wed ye to my youngest son,
       And ye shall be his bride.
     And ye shall be his bride, ladye,
       Sae comely to be seen;
     But aye she loot the tears down fa'
       For lock o' Hazeldean.”

“MY DEAR MABEL” [wrote the lord of Ridgeley]--“I wish you, so soon as
you receive this, to communicate with Jenkyns and Smythe concerning the
new parlor furniture I ordered from them. In talking it over, Clara and
I have decided that it had better be covered with maroon, instead of
green, as you advised. I enclose a sample of damask which they must
match exactly. I would I write direct to them, but think it likely that
Jenkyns, the managing man of the firm, is in your neighborhood at this
time. He told me, when I was in town, of his intention to visit Mrs.
Wilson, his sister, I believe, who lives on the White Oak road, about
three miles from Ridgeley. Send for him, and put the samples into his
hands. If he cannot get the precise color in Richmond, let him order it
from New York.

“The carpets for the parlor, dining-room, and Clara's chamber I have
bought in Lowell. Clara accompanied me thither, and gave me the benefit
of her taste in the selection. I have resolved, also, to purchase
wallpaper in Boston to match these. Say as much to Jenkyns. I shall
have the boxes directed to his care and instruct him further respecting
making the carpets and hanging the paper when I return.

“Ask Roberts (the mason) whether it will be practicable to build
a fire-place in the large lower hall. Another chimney would be an
unsightly appendage to the roof, but Clara agrees with me, since
studying the plan of the house I brought on for her inspection, that a
flue could be run through the closet in your room into the rear one of
the west chimneys. She thinks the hall must be freezing cold in winter,
and caught eagerly at my idea that a blazing fire at one end would
lighten the sombre effect of the oaken wainscot and lofty ceiling.
I proposed to tear down the panelling, but she was horrified at the
thought. I could not take more pride and interest in preserving the
antique character of the home of my forefathers than does she. She will
have it that the hall, thus improved, and hung with a few old pictures,
some bits of ancient armor, and carpeted with maroon and green will be
truly baronial. You and she will agree admirably in your enthusiastic
love of the venerable, and in your aesthetic tastes. I congratulate
myself hourly upon my good fortune in securing such a companion for
myself, and such an instructress for yourself. You cannot fail to derive
infinite benefit from intercourse with her.

“This brings me to another subject to which I desire to call your
immediate attention. I wish her to select a couple of dresses suitable
for your wear on the night of our reception-party, and at others which
will, undoubtedly, be given in our honor. She objects to doing this
unless I obtain from you a written request that she should thus aid me.
She fears you may consider her action 'premature and officious.' Write
to her at once, requesting her to do this sisterly favor for you,
setting forth your distance from the city, the meagre assortment of
the goods to be had in the Richmond stores, etc., and giving her carte
blanche as to cost and style. It will be an inestimable advantage to
your appearance on the occasions named should she oblige you in this
particular. I earnestly desire that you should look your best at your
introduction to her.”

“'Maroon and green!' a 'baronial' hall, and new party-dresses for
insignificant me!” Mabel stopped to say aloud in great amusement. “What
would my sage brother have said to such paltry memoranda six months ago?
He is an apt scholar, or he has an able teacher. Ah, well! love is a
marvellous transmogrifier!”

With this apothegm from the storehouse of her lately acquired wisdom,
she passed to the next paragraph.

“Now for another matter about which I meant to write to you yesterday,
but I was prevented by our expedition to Lowell. The evenings I of
course devote to Clara. I have not been so engrossed by my own very
important concerns as to neglect yours. I stopped a day in Philadelphia,
illy as I could afford the time, to make such investigations as I could,
without exciting invidious suspicion, into the character of the person
whom I found domesticated at Ridgeley on my return from my summer tour.
The information I picked up in that cautious city was so meagre and
tantalizing as to provoke me into the belief that he had selected his
references with an eye to the slenderness of their knowledge of his
personal history. Accident, however, has since placed within my reach
a means of learning all that I wish to know. Without wearying you with
explanations, which, indeed, I have no time to write--being engaged
to drive out with Clara in an hour from this time--I will transcribe a
portion of a letter received by me, two days since, from a gentleman of
unexceptional standing, and upon whose word you may safely depend.

“He says: 'In reply to your queries as to my acquaintanceship with one
Frederic Chilton, now a practising lawyer in the city of Philadelphia,
I would, if conscience permitted, repay your frankness by evasion of a
disagreeable truth. But in the circumstances which induced your
appeal, I have no option. Hesitation or concealment would be unkind and
dishonorable. I knew the man you speak of well--I may say intimately,
while we were fellow-students in the----law school, in 18--. He was
then--what I have but too much reason for believing him at this
day--a plausible, unprincipled man of pleasure. Our intercourse, which
commenced at the card-table, terminated with a severe horsewhipping
I administered to him in punishment of an offence offered a married
lady--a relative of my own. Taking advantage of the protracted absence
of her husband, who was a naval officer, he offered her many attentions,
received by herself as tokens of innocent and friendly regard, until he
forgot himself so far as to make her open and insulting proposals, even
urging her to consent to an elopement, and threatening, in the event of
her refusal, to ruin her by infamous calumnies. Her father was infirm;
her husband in a foreign land. His base persecution would have met with
no chastisement, had not I espoused the terrified woman's cause.
These are the bare facts of the case. He merited a flogging--as you, a
chivalric Virginian, will admit. I--a Northern man, with cooler blood,
but I hope, as true a sense of honor and right as your own--inflicted
this, as I am prepared to testify before any number of witnesses.'”

[Mabel was reading very fast, her eyes hurrying from side to side of the
page, her face blanching, and her hands more numb with every word.]

“The above is a verbatim copy of that portion of my friend's letter
which pertains to your affair,” continued Mr. Aylett. “I shall write to
Mrs. Sutton's protege by the mail that carries this, informing him of my
opportune discovery, through no instrumentality of his providing, of the
poverty of his claims to the title of gentleman, and the audacity of
his pretensions to my sister's hand. Have what letters, etc., you have
received from him ready packed to return to his address when I
come home. My principal regret, in the review of the unfortunate
entanglement, is that he ever visited Ridgeley and was known in the
vicinity as your suitor. You will suffer from this, in the future, more
than you can now suppose. A woman hardly ever outlives such a stigma.

“You may expect me on Thursday next, the 21st, at which time I hope to
see most of the alterations I have ordered in an encouraging state of
forwardness. Should Jenkyns be in town when you get this, write out my
directions clearly and in full, and send them, with sample of damask, by
mail.

“Your affectionate brother,

“WINSTON AYLETT”

The clammy, nerveless hands dropped--the fatal sheet below them--into
Mabel's lap. She did not cry out or moan. Things stricken to the heart
generally fall dumbly. It was not her cramped position within the
window-seat that paralyzed her limbs, nor the chill of the twilight that
crept through vein and bone. For one sick second she believed herself
to be dying, and would not have stirred a muscle or spoken a syllable to
save the life which had suddenly grown worthless--worthless, since she
was never to see Frederic again; be no more to him than if she had
never laid her head upon his bosom; never felt his kisses upon lip and
forehead; never lived upon his words of love as rapt mortals, admitted
in trances to the banquet of the gods, eat ambrosia, and drink to
divinest ecstacy of nectar--the elixir of immortal life and joy,
sparkling in golden chalices.

She had had her dream--ravishing and brief--but the awakening was
terrible as the struggle back to life from a swoon or deathful lethargy.
As to thinking, I believe nobody thinks at such seasons. Nature shrinks
in speechless horror at sight of the descending weight, and when it has
fallen, lies motionless, gasping in breath to enable her to support
the intolerable anguish, not speculating how to avert the next stroke.
Frederic and she were parted! Had not Winston said so! And when was he
known to reverse a verdict! She had nothing to do but sit still and let
the waters go over her head.

Rosa was seated upon the upper step of the west porch, her chin cradled
in her hand, her elbow on her knee, gazing on the darkening sky, and
crooning Scotch ballads in a pensive, dreamy way. Mabel, from her perch,
eyed her as if she were a creature belonging to another world--seen
dimly, and comprehended yet more imperfectly. Yet it could not have been
half an hour--thirty fleeting minutes--since the two had talked as dear
friends out of the fulness of their hearts. Where were the hopes and
happy memories that had made hers then a garden of pleasant things, a
fruitful field which Heaven had blessed? In that little inch of time,
the flood had come and taken them all away.

Would the dry aching in her throat and chest ever be less? Tears
had gushed freely and healthfully after her last leave-taking with
Frederic--the looked farewell, which was all Winston's surveillance had
granted them. She had been wounded then by her brother's singular want
of tact or feeling. She had not the spirit to resent anything to-night,
unless it were that God had made and suffered to live a being so
wretched and useless as herself. She supposed it was wicked--but she did
not care! She ought to be resigned to the mysterious dispensations of
Providence--that was the prescribed phraseology of pious people. She had
heard the cant times without number. What more would they have than her
utter destitution of love and bliss? Was she not miserable enough to
satisfy the sternest believer in purgatorial purification? to appease
the wrath even of Him who had wrought her desolation? It must be the
judgment of a retributive Deity upon her idolatrous affection that she
was bearing--her worship of Frederic. Yes, she had loved him; she loved
him now better than she did anything else upon earth--better than she
did anything in Heaven.

In the partial insanity of her woe and despair, she lifted her gray face
and vacant eyes to the vast, empty vault, beyond which dwelt her Maker
afar off, and said the words aloud--spat them at Him through hard, ashy
lips.

“I love him! I love him! You have taken him from me--but I will love him
for all that!”

Heaven--or Fate--her blasphemous mood did not distinguish the one from
the other--was a robber. Her brother was pitiless as the death that
would not answer to her call. Between them she was bereaved.

It was but a touch--the lightest breath of natural feeling that broke
up the hot crust, that shut down the fountain of tears--Rosa's voice,
tuneful and sad as a nightingale's, chanting the border-lays she loved
so well:

    “When I gae out at e'en.
     Or walk at morning air,
     Ilk rustling bush will seem to say
     I used to meet thee there.
     Then I'll sit down and cry,
     And live beneath the tree.
     And when a leaf falls in my lap,
     I'll oa' it a word from thee.”

She had sung it herself to Frederic the night before he left her, and as
she finished the artless ballad, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

As he would never do again!

“My darling! my darling!” she cried aloud.

Then the grief-drops came in a flood.




CHAPTER V. -- CLEAN HANDS.


The servant who summoned Mabel to supper brought down word that she was
not feeling well, and did not wish any.

“Not well! Bless me!” exclaimed Mrs. Sutton, starting up. “Rosa, love,
excuse me for three seconds, please. I must see what is the matter. I
do hope there is no bad news from--” (arrested by the recollection that
there were servants in the room, she substituted for the name upon her
lips)--“in her letters.”

“I don't think she's much sick ma'am,” said the maid. “She is a-settin'
in the window.”

“Where I left her with her letters, an hour and more ago,” observed
Rosa. “Don't hurry back if she needs you, Aunt Rachel. I will make
myself at home; shall not mind eating alone for once.”

Not withstanding the array of dainties before her, she only nibbled the
edge of a cream biscuit with her little white teeth, and crumbled
the rest of it upon her plate in listlessness or profound and active
reverie, while the hostess was away. She, too, had her conjectures and
her anxieties--a knotty problem to work out, and the longer she pondered
the more confident was she that she had grasped at least one filament of
the clue leading to elucidation.

Mabel had not stirred from her place--sat yet with her brother's letter
in her lap, her hands lying heavily upon it, although her muslin dress
was ghostly in the stream of moonlight flowing across the chamber. She
had wept her eyes dry, and her voice was monotonous, but unfaltering.

“I am not really sick, aunt, but I have no appetite, and having a great
deal to think of, I preferred staying here to going to the table,” was
her answer to Mrs Sutton's inquiries.

“Your hands are cold and lifeless as clay, my child. What is the matter?
It is not like you to be moping up here, alone in the dark.”

“Won't you leave me to myself for a while, and keep Rosa down-stairs?”
 asked Mabel, more patiently than peevishly. “Before bed-time I will see
you in your room, and we can talk of what has disturbed me.”

“My daughter,” murmured the gentle-hearted chaperone, trying to draw the
erect head to her shoulder, as she stood by her niece.

Mabel resisted the kindly force.

“No, no, aunt. I cannot bear that yet. I have just begun to think
connectedly, and petting would unnerve me.”

This was strange talk from the frank-hearted child she had reared from
babyhood, and while she desisted from further attempts at consolation,
Aunt Rachel took a very sober visage back to the supper-room with her,
and as little appetite as Rosa had manifested. The meal was quickly
over, and by way of obeying the second part of Mabel's behest, the
innocent diplomatist begged Rosa to go to the piano.

“I always enjoy your delightful music, my dear. It makes the house more
lively.”

“Thank you, dear Mrs. Sutton. I should take pleasure in obliging you;
but if Mabel is out of sorts, I don't believe she will care to have the
house lively to-night,” was the amiable rejoinder. “Moreover, I am dying
to finish 'David Copperfield.' Will you allow me to curl myself up in
the big chair here, and read for an hour?”

Mrs. Sutton gave a consent that was almost glad in its alacrity, and
pretended to occupy herself with the newspapers brought by the evening
mail, until she judged that Mabel had had season in which to compose her
thoughts. Then she muttered something about “breakfast,” “muffins,” and
“Daphne,” caught up her key-basket, and bustled out.

Rosa's book fell from before her face at the sound of the closing door.
The liquid eyes were turbid; her features moved by some passion mightier
far than curiosity or compassion for her friend's distress.

“I have done nothing--literally nothing, to bring this on!” was the
reflection which brought most calm to her agitated mind. “If it should
be as I think, I am guiltless of treachery. My skirts are clear. My
hands are clean! Yet there have been moments when I could have dipped
them in blood that this end might be attained!”

Too restless to remain quiet, she tossed her book aside and wandered
from side to side of the room, halting frequently to hearken for Mrs.
Sutton's return, or some noise from the conference chamber that might
alleviate her suspense.

“I tried to put her on her guard,” she broke forth at length, bent, it
would seem, upon self-justification against an invisible accuser. “I saw
aversion in Winston's eye the day he came home to find the other here.
He would never forgive his slave the presumption of choosing a husband
for herself. Did I not tell her so? Yet this has caught her like a
rabbit in a trap--unprepared for endurance or resistance. The spiritless
baby! Would I give him up, except with life, if he loved me as he does
her?”

It was not a baby's face that was confronting Mrs. Sutton's just then.
It was no weak, spiritless slave who sustained the pelting shower of her
comments, her wonderment and her entreaties that Mabel would refuse to
abide by her brother's decision--her guardian though he was--and if she
would not write to Frederic with her own hand, empower her aunt to apply
to him for an explanation of the disgraceful mystery.

“We should condemn no man unheard,” she argued.

“It is but fair to give him an opportunity of telling his side of the
story.”

“Winston's letter will inform him of what and by whom he is accused,”
 said Mabel. “He will have the opportunity you speak of. I should not be
content with my brother's action, were this not so. I have been over
the whole ground again and again, since sunset. We--you and I--are
powerless. This story is either true or false. If what we have read
really happened, what could arise from our correspondence with the
offender against honor and virtue? It would but complicate difficulties.
If he is unjustly accused, he can prove it, and put his slanderers to
shame without our promptings. Our interference would be an intimation
that he needed our championship.”

“I believe he will clear himself of every stain,” returned Mrs. Sutton
earnestly. “This is either a vile plot concocted by some secret foe, or
the Frederic Chilton mentioned here,” pushing the letter away from her
on the table, with a gesture of loathing, “is another person.”

“That is very unlikely!”

Mabel leaned her forehead wearily upon her hand, and did not finish the
sentence immediately.

“I will be candid with you, aunt, upon this subject, as I have tried to
be in every other confidence with which I have burdened you. Frederic
Chilton was a student in the law-school, which was also attended by
Winston's correspondent, and at the date specified by him. I have reason
to think there was something unpleasant--something he wished to conceal
from me, and perhaps from everybody else, connected with his stay there.
He referred to it ambiguously on the last evening of his visit here, as
a folly, a youthful indiscretion. I have the impression, moreover, that
a married woman was mixed up in this trouble, whatever it was--a lady,
some years older than himself, whose husband, a naval officer, was
absent upon a long cruise. This may be the germ of the story related
here, and it may have nothing whatever to do with it.”

In saying “here,” she pointed to the letter. Both avoided touching it
as it lay between them, the big seal uppermost, and looking more like
bright, fresh blood than ever, in the lamplight.

“My dear, all this proves nothing--absolutely nothing--except that
the shock and overmuch solitary musing have made you morbid and
unreasonable.”

Mrs. Sutton assumed a collected air, and delivered herself with the mien
of one who was determined to submit to no trifling, and to credit no
scrap of evidence against her friend which counter-reasoning could set
aside.

“My husband's godson--we must remember he is that, Mabel!--could never
be guilty of the infamous conduct ascribed to this Chilton by Winston
Aylett's anonymous friend. I am accounted a tolerable judge of
character, and I maintain that it is a moral impossibility for my
instincts and experience to be so utterly at fault as these two men
would make you believe. As to the corroboration of your 'impression,'
that would be consummate nonsense in the eye of the law. Let us sift
the pros and cons of this affair as rational, unprejudiced beings
should--not jump at conclusions. And I must say, Mabel”--was the
consistent peroration of this address, uttered in a mildly-aggrieved
tone, while the blue eyes began to shine through a rising fog--“it
seems to me very singular--really wounds me--is not what I looked for in
you--that you should rank yourself with my poor boy's enemies!”

“I, his enemy!” The word was a sharp cry--not loud, but telling of
unfathomed deeps of anguish, from the verge of which the listener drew
back with a shudder. “I would have married him without a single glance
at the past! Let him but say 'it is untrue--all that you fear and they
declare,' and I would disbelieve this tale, instantly and utterly,
though a thousand witnesses swore to the truth of it. Or, let him be all
that they say, I would marry him to-night, if I had the right to do it.
But I promised--and to promise with an Aylett is to fulfil--that I
would be ruled by my guardian's will, should the investigation, to which
Frederic himself did not object, terminate unfavorably for my hopes, and
contrary to his declaration.”

“It was a rash promise, and such are better broken than kept.”

“Your Bible, Aunt Rachel--to-night, I cannot call it mine!--commends him
who swears to his own heart and changes not,” replied the niece, with
restored steadiness. “It would have been the same had I refused my
consent to Winston's proposal. I am a minor, and who would wait two
years for me?”

“Anybody who loved you, provided your trust in him equalled his in you,”
 said Mrs. Sutton, slyly.

Mabel's answer was direct.

“You want me to say that I do not believe this tale of Mr. Chilton's
early errors; to brand it as a mistake or fabrication. You insinuate
that, in reserving my sentence until I shall have heard both sides of
it, I show myself unworthy of the love of a true man; betray of what
mean stuff my affection is made. I suppose blind faith is sublime! But
for my part, I had rather be loved in spite of my known faults, than
receive wilfully ignorant worship.”

The daring stroke at Mrs. Sutton's hypothesis of the inseparable union
between esteem and affection, excited her into an impolitic admission.

“My child, you make my blood run cold! You do not mean that you could
love a man for whose character you had no respect!”

“There is a difference between learning to love and continuing to love,”
 said Mabel, sententiously. “But we have had enough of useless talk,
aunt. In two days more Winston will be here. Until then, let matters
remain as they are. You can tell Rosa as much or as little as you like
of what has happened. She must suspect that something has gone awry.
To-morrow, I will look up this Mr. Jenkyns, and deliver the messages
with which I am charged--likewise consult the mason about the 'baronial'
fireplace,” smiling bitterly.

“You never saw another creature so altered as she is,” Mrs. Sutton
bewailed to Rosa, in rehearsing the scene. “If this thing should turn
out to be true, she is ruined and heart-broken for life. She will
become a cold, cynical, unfeeling woman--a feminine copy of her granite
brother.”

“If!” reiterated Rosa, testily. “There is not one syllable of truth in
it from Alpha to Omega! I know he is your nephew, and that it is one af
the Medo-Persian laws of Ridgeley that the king can do no wrong; but
I would sooner believe that Winston Aylett invented the slander
throughout, than question Fred Chilton's integrity. There is foul play
somewhere, as you will discover in time--or out of it!”

To Mabel, Frederic's spirited champion said never a word of the event
that held their eyes waking until dawn--each motionless as sleepless
lest her bed fellow should discover her real state.

“I have had no share in causing the rupture. I am not called upon to
heal it,” meditated she. “In this, the law of self-preservation is my
surest guide.”

Her resolve to remain neutral was sharply and unexpectedly tested the
next afternoon.

The two girls went out for a ramble about four o'clock, taking the
beaten foot-path that led through cultivated fields, and between wooded
hills, to a small post-town two miles distant. The day was sunless, but
not chilly, and when they had outwalked the hearing of the murmur of
rural life that pervaded the barnyard and adjacent “quarters,” the
silence was oppressive, except when broken by the whirr of a partridge,
the melancholy caw of the crows, scared from their feast upon the
scattered grains knocked from over-ripe ears of corn during the recent
“fodder-pulling,” and, as they neared it, by the fretting of a rapid
brook over its stony bottom.

The pretence of social converse had been given up before the friends
cleared the first field beyond the orchard. Rosa's exquisite tact
withheld her from obtruding commonplaces upon the attention of a mind
torn by suspense--distracted between disappointment and outraged pride,
and Mabel had not besought her sympathy in her grievous strait. They
walked on swiftly, the one staring straight forward, yet seeing
nothing; the other, although thoughtful, losing not one feature of
the landscape--the light-gray sky, the encircling forest, the yellow
broom-straw clothing the hill-sides, the crooked fences, lined with
purple brush, golden-rod, black-bearded alder and sumach, flaming with
scarlet berry cones and motley leaves. It was her principle and habit to
seize upon whatever morsels of delight were dropped in her way, and she
had a taste for attractive bits of scenery, as for melody. There was no
reason why the evil estate of her companion should debar her from quiet
enjoyment of the autumn day. She was sorry that Mabel was suffering.
It was unpleasant to see pain or grief. Smiles were prettier than glum
looks. She hoped she had enough humanity about her to enable her to
recognize these facts. But, in her soul, she despised the girl for her
tacit acquiescence in her brother's decree; contemned her yet more for
her partial credence of the rumor of her lover's unworthiness. It was as
well, taking these things into account, that Mabel was not communicative
with regard to the great change that had befallen her since this
hour yesterday, when she had exultingly proclaimed that her trust was
“founded upon a rock.”

“Varium et mutabile semper faemina!” reflected Rosa, who knew that much
Latin--and attracted by the waving of the bright grasses beneath the
waves of the rivulet they were crossing, she stopped to lean over the
railing and poke them aside from the stones with a chincapin switch she
had picked up a little way back.

Mabel did not look around; apparently did not observe that she walked on
alone.

“I dare say she would not miss me for the next mile!” soliloquized the
idle lounger, snatching foam-flakes from their nestling-places behind
the rocks, and watching them as they danced down the stream.

Something, whiter and more regular in shape than they, lay upon the
margin of the brook, partly concealed by a clump of sedge. A letter,
with the address uppermost! Rosa's optics were keen. She easily made out
the direction upon the envelope from where she stood. It was Frederic
Chilton's name in Mrs. Sutton's quaint, old-fashioned “back-hand”
 chirography. An hour before, as Rosa now recollected, she had seen, from
her window, a negro man take the path to the village, arranging some
papers in the crown of his tattered straw hat. He had dropped this, the
most important of all, probably in stooping to drink from his hollowed
palms at the spring-stream. However this might be, there it lay--the
warning to the calumniated lover that his traducers were making clean
(or foul) work with his fair fame in the quarter where he wished to
stand at his best; perhaps citing him to appear and answer the damaging
charges in person before the same tribunal.

“If she would only let me drop him a friendly line asking him, for her
sake, to contradict this horrid slander!” the distraught matron had
sighed, last night, in her recapitulation of the conversation with her
obdurate niece. “But she will not hear of it.”

“I hardly think he would like it either,” Rosa had rejoined. “It would
hint at distrust on your part or on hers. Mr. Aylett's letter should be
sufficient to elicit the defence you crave.”

“You are in the right, perhaps!” But Mrs. Sutton had looked miserably
discontented. “Yet to be frank with you, Rosa, Winston is not apt to
be conciliatory in his measures when he takes it into his head that the
family honor is assailed. I am afraid he has written haughtily, if not
insolently, to poor Frederic.”

Rosa had no doubt of this, even while she answered, “Neither haughtiness
nor downright insolence would prevent a man who has so much at stake as
has Mr. Chilton, from taking instant steps to re-establish himself in
the respect of the family he desires to enter. This is a very delicate
matter--take what view of it we may. Hadn't you better wait a few days
before you interfere? Nothing can be lost--something may be gained by
prudent delay.”

“And I suppose Winston WOULD be very much displeased at my
officiousness, as he would term it,” had been Mrs. Sutton's reluctant
concession to her young guest's discreet counsels. “But it is very hard
to remain quiet, and see everything going to destruction about one!”

She had evidently reconsidered her resolution to let things take their
wrong-headed course, and in virtue of her prerogatives as match-maker
and mender, had thrust her oar into the very muddy whirlpool boiling
about the bark of her darling's happiness.

Rosa wrought out this chain of sequences, with many other links,
stretching far past present exigences and possibilities, ere Mabel's
figure disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill rising beyond the
brook. Should Frederic Chilton receive that letter, in less than a
week--in three days, perhaps, for he was a man prompt to resolve and to
do--he would present himself at Ridgeley to speak in his own behalf--an
event Rosa considered eminently undesirable. Certainly Mabel's
pusillanimity merited no such reward. She had no right to question the
rectitude that one she professed to love, nor her aunt the right to act
as mediator. If Mabel Aylett, with her found sense and judgment, and
her inherent strength of will, would not hold fast to her faith in her
affianced husband, and defy her brother to sunder them, let her lose
that which she prized so lightly.

If the epistle, soaking slowly there in the wet, had been committed
to Rosa's charge, she would have scorned to intercept it; would have
deposited it safely and punctually in the post-office. As it was, if
she left it alone, Frederic would never get it, and Mrs. Sutton remain
unconscious of its fate--unless some other passer-by should perceive and
rescue it from illegibility and dissolution; unless Mabel should espy
it on their return-walk, or, coming back, the next moment, to seek her
truant mate, catch sight of the snowy leaflet of peace in its snuggery
under the sedge.

A startled partridge flew over Rosa's head from the thither rising
ground, and in the belief that he was the harbinger of the approach she
dreaded, she dislodged the envelope from its covert, with a quick touch
of her little wand, and it floated down the stream.

Slowly--all too gradually at first--swinging lazily wound in the eddies,
catching, now against a jutting stone, now entangled by a blade of
grass--Rosa's heart in her throat as she watched it, lest Mabel's
footsteps should be audible upon the rocky path, Mabel's hat appear
above the spur of the hill. Then the channel caught it, whirled it over
and over, faster and faster, and sucked it downward.

Mrs. Sutton was at the tea-table with the girls that evening, when
Johnson, the sable Mercury, showed himself at the door, to inform his
superior that he had “got everything at de sto' she sent him fur to
buy.”

“You mailed the letters, Johnson?” said the mild mistress, rather
anxiously.

“All on dem, Mistis!”

“The unconscionable liar!” thought Rosa, virtuously, “he ought to be
flogged! But it is none of my business to contradict him.”

She did not say now, “My hands are clean!”




CHAPTER VI. -- CRAFT--OR DIPLOMACY!


“YOUR letter notifies me, in general terms, that the answers returned
to your inquiries as to my antecedents and present reputation are the
reverse of satisfactory. You feel constrained, you add, in view of the
information thus obtained, to interdict my further intercourse with your
sister or any other member of your family. Since I cannot battle with
shadows, or refute insinuations the drift of which I do not in the least
comprehend, may I trouble you to put the allegations to which you refer
into a definite and tangible shape? Let me know who are my accusers, and
what are the iniquities with which they charge me. The worst criminal
against human and divine laws has the right to demand thus much before
he is convicted and sentenced.

“As to your prohibition of my continued correspondence with Miss Aylett,
I shall consider her my promised wife, and write to her regularly as
such, until you have made good your indictment against me, or until I
receive the assurance under her own hand and seal that my conduct in
thus addressing her is obnoxious to herself.

“I have the honor, sir, of signing myself

“Your obedient servant,

“FREDERIC S. CHILTON.”

The cool contempt of the reply to his imperative dismissal of whatever
claims the presumptuous adventurer his aunt had encouraged believed he
had upon Mabel's notice or affection, was likely to irk Winston Aylett
as more intemperate language could not. It did more. It baffled him, for
a time. He could, and he meant, to withhold the lover's letter from his
sister's eyes. He could--and upon this also he was determined--command
her, in the masterful manner that heretofore had never failed to work
submission, never to meet, speak, or write again to the man he almost
hated; will her to forget her childish fancy for his handsome face and
glozing arts, and in the fulness of time, to bestow her in marriage upon
a partner of his own providing. He had no misgivings as to his ability
to accomplish all this, if the blackguard aforesaid could be kept out
of her way until that remedial agent, Time, and lawful authority had a
chance to do their work.

But he was openly defied to prevent communication between the betrothed
pair, unless his injunction had Mabel's endorsement; and, upon alighting
from the stage at the village, on his return to Ridgeley, he had taken
from the post-office, along with the impertinent missive addressed to
himself, one for Mabel, superscribed by the same hand. From the first,
he had no intention of transferring it to the keeping of the proper
owner, It was forwarded in direct disobedience to his commands, and the
writer should be made to understand the futility of opposition to these.
For several hours, his only purpose respecting it was to enclose it,
unopened, in an envelope directed by himself, and send it back to the
audacious author, by the next mail. He was balked in this project by
no fastidious scruples as to his right thus to dispose of his ward's
property. Nature, or what he assumed was natural affection, concurred
with duty in urging him to hinder an alliance by which Mabel's happiness
would be imperilled and her relatives scandalized. But when, in the
solitude of his study, he vouchsafed a second reading to Frederic's
letter, preparatory to the response he designed should annihilate his
hopes and chastise his impudence, a doubt of the efficacy of his schemes
attacked him for the first time. “Under her own hand and seal,”
 were terms the explicitness of which commended them to his grave
consideration. His next thought was to oblige Mabel to indite a formal
renunciation of her unworthy suitor. There were several objections to
this measure.

Firstly, he disliked whatever smacked of scenic effect, and women were
apt to get up scenes--hysterics, attitudes, and the like--upon trivial
provocation, He wanted to get the thing over quietly and soon.

Secondly, he was not very sure that he should find in Mabel the docile
puppet she had appeared to him for so many years of tutelage. She
had matured marvelously of late. Her very manner of meeting him that
afternoon impressed him by its self-possession and freedom from the
emotion that used to gush from eyes and lips, in happy tears, and
broken, delighted greeting at his approach. For aught he knew to the
contrary, she might have accepted his fiat as just, if not merciful, and
not a dream of rebellion been fostered thereby. The grave tranquillity
of her demeanor might arise from the chastening influences of the
mortification she had sustained, and a consciousness of ill-desert
that bred humility. He would fain have believed all this, but until he
broached the subject to her, his incertitude could not be removed, and
in a step so momentous as that which he meditated, it behooved him to
try well the solidity of the ground beneath him.

Lastly, our blood-prince of the kingdom of Ridgeley was, whether he
confessed it or not, acting under orders.

“Be very tolerant with that poor little deceived sister of yours!” his
fiancee had implored, her diamond eyes bedimmed by quick-springing damps
of commiseration. “Recollect that the consciousness of wasted love is
always harder to bear than what is commonly known as bereavement. If you
find her refractory, be patient and persuasive, instead of dictatorial.
Craft often effects what overt violence would attempt in vain.”

“Craft!” The word struck unpleasantly upon the Virginia lordling's ear,
and he echoed it with a suspicion of a frown upon his brow. “I am not an
adept in chicanery!”

“But you are a born diplomatist!” seductively. “And because I am of the
same credulous sex as our mistaken little darling, you will not proceed
to open warfare with her, even should she be both to resign her lover?
It is the glory of the strong to show charity to the weak and erring.”

For her sake, then, our flattered diplomatist would try the effect of
guile, instead of brutality, upon the helpless girl, the balance of
whose fate was grasped by his shapely hand. For one base second, the
idea of attempting an imitation of his sister's handwriting flashed
through his mind. But he was a gentleman, and forgery is not a
gentlemanly vice, any more than is counterfeiting bank-notes. Finally,
the author of craft--the subtle, refined virtue bepraised by his
bride-elect--the devil--came to his help.

Mabel, like most other girls, had a dainty and fantastic taste in
the matter of letter-paper and envelopes. She used none but French
stationery, stamped with her monogram--a curious device, wrought in two
colors--and at the top of each sheet stood out in bas-relief the
Aylett crest. With these harmless whimsies Frederic was, without doubt,
familiar. If his letter were returned to him, wrapped in a blank page,
taken from her papetiere and within one of her envelopes, it would not
signify so much whose handwriting was upon the exterior. Papetiere
and writing-desk were in Mabel's bed-room, but she was in the parlor,
practising an instrumental duet with Rosa--a favorite with Miss
Dorrance. Winston had brought it south with him, and asked his sister
to learn it forthwith, in just the accent he used to employ when
prescribing what studies she should pursue at school. There was nothing
in his errand that he should be ashamed of, he reminded himself with
impatient severity, as he traversed the upper hall on tip-toe to the
western chamber. He had, on sundry previous occasions, sought, in the
receptacles he was about to ransack, for sealing-wax, pencils, and the
like trifles. Mabel was too wise a woman not to keep her secrets under
lock and key, and if there were private documents left in his way, he
was too honorable to pry into them.

Shutting the door cautiously, that the snap and blaze might not betray
him, he struck a wax match, warranted to burn a minute-and-a-half, and
raised the lid of the desk. His unseen but wily coadjutor had guided him
cunningly. In fingering a heap of envelopes in order to find one large
enough for his purpose, he brought to light one addressed to “Mr.
Frederic Chilton, Box 910, Philadelphia, Penn.”

Upon the reverse was a small blot that had condemned it in Mabel's
sight, as unfit to be sent to her most valued correspondent, and which
she had not observed before writing the direction. Selecting another,
she had thrown this back carelessly into the desk, meaning to burn it
when it should be convenient, and forgotten all about it.

The livid dints were deep and restless in Winston's nostrils, as seen by
the light of the tiny taper he raised to extinguish, when his prize was
secured. The devil supplied him with another crafty hint, as he was in
the act of folding one edge of Frederic's letter that it might fit into
the new cover. Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem
to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer's hands
with contumely? Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish. Stratagem,
to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was
bungling, not diplomacy. His hand did not shake in divesting the
closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior
was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof
of pure old blood. He averted his eyes lest he should see a line the
lover had penned to his mistress. The letter slipped smoothly into the
quarters prepared for it--smoothly as Satan's mark usually goes on until
his tool has made his damnation sure.

“Well done?” said Diabolus.

“That was a clever hit!” chimed in his assistant, complacently, after
he had put the sealed envelope into his portfolio for safe-keeping, and
burned the torn one he had removed. “Nobody but an idiot or a madman
would persist in following a girl up after such a quietus.”

He replied to Frederic's note to himself shortly and with disdain, using
the third person throughout, and informing Mr. Chilton with unmistakable
distinctness that Miss Aylett had offered no opposition whatever to
her brother's will in this unfortunate affair. So far as he--Mr.
Aylett--could judge, her views coincided exactly with his own. Mr.
Chilton's letters and presents should be returned to him at an early
day, and thus should be finished the closing chapter of a volume which
ought never to have been begun.

All this done to his mind, he set the door of his room ajar, and watched
for Mabel's passage to hers.

He had not to wait long. The young ladies had fallen into habits of
early retiring of late--a marked change from their olden fashion of
singing and talking out the midnight hour. Himself unseen, Mr. Aylett
scrutinized the two mounting the stairs side by side--Rosa's dark,
mobile face, arch with smiles, while she chattered over a bit of country
gossip she had heard that afternoon from a visitor, and the weary calm
of Mabel's visage, the drooping eyelids, and, when appealed to directly
by her volatile comrade, the measured, not melancholy cadence of her
answer, The girl had had a sore fight, and won a Pyrrhian victory. She
was not vanquished, but she was worsted. Some men, upon appreciating
what this meant, and how her grief had been wrought, would have had
direful visitings of conscience, surrendered themselves to the mastery
of doubts as to the righteousness and humanity of stringent action such
as he had just consummated. He was not unmoved. He really loved his only
sister, as proud, selfish men love those of their own lineage who have
never disputed their supremacy, and derogated from their importance. He
said something under his breath before he called her, but the curse was
not upon himself.

“The low-bred hound!” he muttered. “This is his doing!”

Mabel halted at the stair-head, the blood suddenly and utterly forsaking
her cheeks when he spoke her name, although his address was purposely
kind, and, he thought, inviting.

“Can you spare me a moment?” he continued, smilingly, to win her
advance. “I will not detain you long. I know you are agonizing to have
your talk out, Miss Rosa.”

Rosa laughed, with a saucy retort, and turned into her chamber.

Mabel entered her brother's, and without speaking, took the seat he
offered. She was to be sentenced, and she must reserve her forces to
sustain the pain without a groan.

“You saw Jenkyns--did you not?” began Mr. Aylett, with the manner of one
at peace with himself, and those of his fellow-men whose existence he
chose to acknowledge.

“I did. He made memoranda of your orders, and said all should be done as
you wished.”

“I ordered the masons, this evening, to begin the hall-chimney
to-morrow. While the work is going on, you had better occupy some other
bed-room. I shall hurry it forward, day and night, or it will not be
done in season for us when we return from our bridal-tour. The carpets
must be down, and the paper dry by the fifteenth at farthest. Clara
bought your dresses, and offers to have them made, if you will send
her an accurate measurement. You are about her height, although not so
well-proportioned. Your figure is angular, where hers is round. She is
your senior by several years, yet one might easily mistake her for a
girl of twenty, her complexion is so fresh. Her twenty-five years show
themselves in nothing except her ease of manner, maturity of thought,
and elegance of diction.”

He would have sneered at this strain in another as hyperbolical and
fatuous. The absurdity of it in his mouth consisted mainly in the cool
arrogance of the assumption that whatever belonged to him was above
adverse criticism, and would be maligned if it were referred to without
appending an encomium. Much of fervor might and did mingle in his
thoughts of her he was to wed, but none warmed his enumeration of her
perfections. He did nothing con amore, unless it were exalting the
dignity and glory of the Aylett name, and maintaining his right to
support their ancient honors.

Mabel did not respond to his gratuitous praise of the fair and
benevolent Clara. While he was talking, he seemed to recede a great way
from her; his tones to ring hollowly upon her hearing, his form to grow
indistinct. Was he playing with her suspense, or could it be that he--a
being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on
which she was stretched--no suspicion that every one of his deliberate
sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture? The
Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of
suffering save intense pallor; made this less palpable by screening
her eyes from the lamp-light with a paper she took from the table, and
thereby throwing her features into deep shadow.

“But it is not my intention to trouble you with matters that concern me
alone,” he pursued, without varying his intonations. “As I anticipated,
Mr. Chilton declines explaining the ugly story relative to his earlier
career of dissipation and deceit, which I forwarded to you. He indulges,
instead, in a tirade of personal abuse touching my right to control you,
declaring his purpose to pursue you with letters and attentions until
he shall be discarded by yourself. We will not stay to discuss the
gentlemanliness and delicacy of his behavior in this regard. I merely
declare, that, having had a fair opportunity of honest confession or
denial of statements detrimental to his principles and pursuits,
and having shirked both, he has placed himself outside the pale of
respectful consideration. Has he written to you since his receipt of my
letter?”

“No!”

Mabel was staring at a figure in the carpet, on a line with her feet.
Had she regarded her brother never so attentively, she would have
detected no change in his countenance. He did not prepare questions
without also studying how to deliver them.

“I am glad he has the moral decency to forbear carrying out his threat
of persecution.”

He could say it with the greater hardihood in the remembrance that the
“persecution” had been attempted.

“I wish he had written!” rejoined Mabel, abruptly, but without passion.
“He was right to protest against accepting his dismissal from any other
than myself.”

She had not removed her eyes from the spot on the carpet, or lowered the
paper screen. She looked like a statue and spoke like an automaton.

Mr. Aylett's nostrils quivered ominously.

“Is it your wish to recommence the correspondence I have ended?”

“You know that I would strike off my right hand sooner than do it. But
if he had written to me, I should have answered his letter, if it had
been only to bid him farewell. Since he has not chosen to do this, I
cannot take the initiative.”

If Winston had never entertained a favorable opinion of his own sagacity
prior to hearing this avowal, it would have forced itself upon him now.
How timely was the thought, how felicitous the accident, that had aided
him to ward off the disaster of renewed intercourse!

Involuntarily his fingers crept nearer to the closed portfolio.

“No good could have come of that!” returned he coldly. “When an
amputation is to be performed, wise people submit to it without
useless preliminaries. The exchange of farewells in this case would
be inexpedient in the highest degree. You would compromise yourself by
continued acknowledgment of this fellow's acquaintance. My will is that
you and the world should forget, as soon as it can be done, that you
ever saw or heard of him. The connection was degrading.”

“Don't abuse him, brother! Let the knowledge that we are parted forever,
satisfy your resentment. Since he has not appealed to me from your
verdict, I am left to suppose that, upon second thoughts, he has
resolved to acquiesce in your will. I do not blame him for the change
of purpose.” Still impassive in feature and voice, still not withdrawing
her fixed gaze from that one point upon the floor. “He, too, has pride,
and it matches yours. I do not say mine. I question, sometimes, if I
have any.”

“If your conjecture be correct, you cannot object to return the letters
you have already received from him,” said Winston, pressing on to the
conclusion of a disagreeable business. “Since you are not likely to
add to your stock of these valuables, you do not care to retain them,
I suppose? I believe the rule is total surrender of souvenirs when a
rupture is pronounced hopeless.”

“I shall keep them a week longer!”

She assigned no reason for the resolution, and her manner, without being
sullen, aggravated her brother into wrath, the effusion of which was a
withering sneer.

“Your hope in his repentance is creditable to the strength--or
weakness--of woman's love. But have your way. The illustrious record of
his former life is a powerful argument in favor of clemency. In a week,
then!”

He nodded dismissal, wheeled his chair around to the table, dipped a pen
in the standish, and pulled an account-book toward him.

He was surprised and not pleased, nevertheless, that Mabel retired
without other reply than a simple “Good-night,” said without temper,
or any evidence of excitement. A month before, a milder sarcasm, the
lightest breath of reproof, would have brought her to his feet in a
paroxysm of tears, to implore pardon for her contumacy, and to promise
obedience for all time to come. She was getting beyond his control the
while she offered no open resistance to his government. Was sorrowful
shame, or her infatuation for the adventurer he cursed in his heart
by his gods, the influence that was petrifying her into this unlovely
caricature of her once bright and affectionate self?

She presented herself, unsummoned, in his study at the expiration of
the period she had designated, a pacquet in her hand, neatly done up and
sealed.

“I will trouble you to direct it,” was all she said, as she laid it
before him.

“This is done of your own free will--remember!” he said, impressively.
“In after years, should you be so unreasonable as to regret it, there
must be no misconception on the subject between us. If you wish, at
this, the eleventh hour, to draw back, I shall not oppose you.”

“You will write the address, then, if you please!” was Mabel's reply,
showing him the surface intended for it.

Then she left him.

“A sensible girl, after all! a genuine Aylett, in will and stoicism!”
 commented the master of the situation, beginning in his round, legible
characters, the inscription he hoped never to trace again. “So endeth
her first lesson in Cupid's manual!”

He never knew that Mrs. Sutton had bolstered the Aylett will and
stoicism into stanchness at this closing scene. In a fit of despondency,
she had that morning imparted to Mabel the fact that she had written to
Frederic, ten days before, and had no answer, although she had besought
an immediate one.

“I have expected him confidently every day for a week,” she lamented. “I
didn't suppose he would stay at Ridgeley, after what has happened;
but there's the hotel in the village, and, as I told him, he could
accomplish more by an hour's talk with you than by fifty letters. It is
very mysterious--his continued silence! He always appeared so frank and
reasonable. Nothing else like it has ever occurred in my experience--and
I have had a great deal, my dear!”

“I am sorry you wrote, aunt,” replied Mabel, sorrowfully dignified.
“Sorry you have subjected yourself to unnecessary mortification. I am
past feeling it for myself. We cannot longer doubt that Mr. Chilton
desires to hold no further communication with any of us.”

Within the hour she made up the pacquet and carried it to her brother.




CHAPTER VII. -- WASSAIL.


ALMOST sixteen months had passed since the dewless September morning,
when Mabel had gathered roses in the garden walks, and her brother's
return had shaken the dew with the bloom from her young heart. It was
the evening of Christmas-day, and the tide of wassail, the blaze
of yule, were high at Ridgeley. Without, the fall of snow that had
commenced at sundown, was waxing heavier and the wind fiercer. In-doors,
fires roared and crackled upon every hearth; there was a stir of busy
or merry life in every room. About the spacious fire-place in the
“baronial” hall was a wide semicircle of young people, and before that
in the parlor, a cluster of elders, whose graver talk was enlivened,
from time to time, by the peals of laughter that tossed into jubilant
surf the stream of the juniors' converse.

Nearest the mantel, on the left wing of the line, sat the three months'
bride, Imogene Barksdale, placid, dove-eyed, and smiling as of yore,
very comely with her expression of satisfied prettiness nobody called
vanity, and bedecked in her “second day's dress” of azure silk and her
bridal ornaments. Her husband hovered on the outside of the ring, now
pulling the floating curls of a girl-cousin (every third girl in
the country was his cousin, once, twice, or thrice-removed, and none
resented the liberties he, as a married man, was pleased to take), anon
whispering in the ear of a bashful maiden interrogatories as to her
latest admirer or rumored engagement; oftenest leaning upon the back
of his wife's chair, a listener to what was going on, his hand lightly
touching her lace-veiled shoulders, until her head gradually inclined
against his arm. They were a loving couple, and not shy of testifying
their consent to the world.

“They remind me irresistibly of a pair of plump babies sucking at
opposite ends of a stick of sugar candy!” Rosa Tazewell said aside to
the hostess, as the latter paused beside her on her way through the hall
to the parlor.

“The candy is very sweet!” replied Mrs. Aylett, charitably, but laughing
at the conceit--the low, musical laugh that was at once girlish in its
gleefulness, yet perfectly well-bred.

Mr. Aylett heard it from his stand on the parlor-rug, and sent a
quick glance in that direction. It was slow in returning to the
group surrounding him. He had married a beautiful woman--so said
everybody--and a fascinating, as even everybody's wife did not dispute.
In his sight, she was simply and entirely worthy of the distinction he
had bestowed upon her; an adornment to Ridgeley and his name. From
their wedding-day, his deportment toward her had been the same as it was
to-night--attentive, but never officious; deferential, yet far removed
from servility; a manner that, without approximating uxoriousness, yet
impressed the spectator with the conviction that she was with him first
and dearest among women; a partner of whom, if that were possible, he
was more proud than fond--and of the depth and reality of his affection
there could be no question.

She declined to seat herself in the circle, although warmly importuned
by her guests thus to add brilliancy to their joyous party, yet remained
standing near Rosa, interested and amused by the running fire of
compliment and badinage that went to make up the hilarious confusion. If
the family record had been consulted, the truth that she had counted
her thirty-second summer would have astonished her husband, with her new
neighbors. Apparently she was not over twenty-five. Her chestnut hair
was a marvel for brightness and profusion, her broad brow smooth and
white, her figure, as Winston had described it to his sister, rounded,
even to voluptuousness, yet supple as it had been at fifteen. In her
cheeks, too, the blushes fluctuated readily and softly, and when she
smiled, her teeth showed like those of a little child in size and
purity. Her voice matched her beauty well, never loud, always melodious,
with a peculiar, gliding, legato movement of the graceful sentences, for
the pleasing effect of which she was indebted partly to Nature, and
much more to Art. She appeared on this evening in a green silk dress,
matronly in shade and general style, but not devoid of coquettish
arrangement in the square corsage, the opening of which was filled with
foam-like puffs of thulle, threatening, when her bust heaved in mirth
or animated speech, to overflow the sheeny boundaries. A chaplet of
ivy-leaves encircled her head, and trailed upon one shoulder; her
bracelets were heavy, chased gold without gems of any kind; a single
diamond glittered--a point of prismatic light at her throat. Her
wedding-ring was her only other ornament.

“Very sweet, I grant you, and very flavorless,” returned Rosa. “And
alarmingly apt to turn sour upon the stomach. I had rather be fed upon
pepper lozenges.”

“You should have been born in the Spice Islands,” said the hostess,
tapping the dark cheek with her fore finger. “But we could not spare you
from our wassail-cup to-night, my dear Lady Pimento!”

She bent slightly, that the flattery might reach no other ear. She may
not have known that Rosa's Creole skin was at a wretched disadvantage,
as seen against the green silk background; but others noticed it, and
thought how few complexions were comparable to the wearer's. She had the
faculty of converting into a foil nearly every woman who approached her.

“Thank you! So I am pimento, am I?” queried Rosa, pertly. “And each of
us is to personate some condiment--sweet, ardent, or aromatic--in the
exhilarating draught! Which shall Mr. Harrison here be?

“'Cinnamon or ginger, nutmeg or cloves?'”

“That is a line of a college drinking-song!”

The speaker was a young man of eight-and-twenty; who sat between Rosa
and Mabel, and whose attentions to the latter were marked. Of medium
height, with sandy hair and whiskers, high cheek-bones, that gave a
Gaelic cast to his physiognomy; which was remarkable for nothing in
particular when at rest, and followed somewhat tardily the operations
of his mind when he talked, he would probably have been the least likely
person present to rivet a stranger's notice but for the circumstance
that he played shadow to the host's sister and was Mrs. Aylett's
brother. With regard to the feeling entertained by the former of those
ladies for him, there were many and diverse opinions, but his sister's
partiality was unequivocally exhibited. Of her three brothers, this--the
youngest, the least handsome, and the only bachelor--was her favorite.
She took pains to apprise his fellow-guests of this interesting fact by
petting him openly, and exerting her fullest artifices to bring him out
in becoming colors.

“It is,” she answered him now, admiringly. “What a memory you have, my
dear Herbert! Now I am never positive with whom to credit a quotation.
I recollect, since you have spoken, that your famous quartette-club used
to render that with much eclat, and how it was encored at the brilliant
private concert you gave in behalf of some popular charity or other.”

Thus encouraged, Mr. Dorrance proceeded to enlarge the fragment:

    “Nose, nose, jolly red nose!
     Where got you that jolly red nose?
     Nutmeg and ginger, cinnamon and cloves,
     These gave me this jolly red nose.'

“You did not quote the third line correctly, Miss Tazewell.”

“Never having been a college bacchanalian, I am excusable for the
inaccuracy,” she retorted. “I did not even know where I picked up
the foolish bit. Having ascertained the origin to be of doubtful
respectability, I shall never use it again.”

“My sister has alluded to our quartette-club,” pursued Mr. Dorrance,
turning from the caustic beauty to Mabel, without noticing the
impertinent thrust. “It was the most successful thing of the kind I ever
knew of, being composed of thoroughly-trained musicians--amateurs, of
course--and practising nothing but classic music, the productions of the
best masters. There is something both instructive and elevating in such
an association.”

“Especially when the theme of their consideration is the 'Jolly Red
Nose,'” interposed the wicked minx at his other elbow.

Two giddy girls tittered, unawed by Mrs. Aylett's proximity and her
brother's owl-like stare at his critic.

“You may not be aware, Miss Tazewell, that the lyric to which you
have reference is celebrated, both for its antiquity, and the pleasing
harmonies that must ever commend it to the taste of the true lover of
music; although I allow that to a disciple of the modern and more flimsy
school of this glorious art, it may seem puerile and ridiculous,” he
remarked, in grandiose patronage. Then, again to Mabel, “There were four
of us--as I said--all students. What is it, Clara?”

“I have dropped my bracelet upon the floor, between you and Miss
Tazewell,” stooping to shake out Rosa's full skirts from which the
trinket fell with a clinking sound.

Three gentlemen darted forward to pick it up, but her husband noted
approvingly that while she accepted it graciously from the lucky finder,
and thanked the others for their kindly interest in the fate of her
“bauble,” she held out her arm to her brother, that he might clasp it
again in its place. Affable always, winning whomsoever she chose to
admiration of her personal and mental endowments, she never departed
from matronly decorum. The company agreed silently, or in guarded
asides, that she was charming. No tongue--even the most reckless or
venomous--ever lisped the dread word, levity, in connection with her
name.

“Take care, my dear brother! you will pinch me!” those near heard
her say, and she twisted the golden circlet that the clasp might be
uppermost.

Rosa's alert ear caught the hurried murmur which succeeded, and was
muffled, so to speak, by her affectionate smile of gratitude.

“What were you about to say? Will you never learn prudence?”

“The dove has talons, then?” mused the eavesdropper, “But what was he in
danger of revealing?”

If the interdicted revelation had connection, close or remote, with the
famous quartette club, he kept well away from it after this reminder,
beginning, when he resumed his seat, to discourse upon the comparative
excellence of wood and coal fires, of open chimney-places and stoves.

Mrs. Aylett smiled an engaging and regretful “au revoir” to the circle,
and passed on to look after the comfort and pleasure of her elder
visitors, and Rosa soon discovered that her awakened curiosity would be
in no wise appeased by listening to the steady, pattering drone of
Mr. Dorrance's oration. Oratorical he was to a degree that excited the
secret amusement of the facile Southern youths about him. With them,
the art of light conversation had been a study from boyhood, the topics
suitable for and pleasing to ladies' ears carefully culled and
adroitly handled. To amuse and entertain was their main object. Erudite
dissertations upon science and literature; abstruse arguments--whatever
resembled a moral thesis, a political, religious, or philosophical
lecture met with the sure ban of ridicule from them, as from the fair
whose devoted cavaliers they were. If they laughed, when it was safe
and not impolitic to do so, at the ponderous elocution of the Northern
barrister, they marvelled exceedingly more at Mabel's indulgence of
his attentions. That a girl, who, in virtue of her snug fortune and
attractive face, her blood and her breeding, might, as they put it, have
the “pick of the county,” if she wanted a husband, should lend a willing
ear to the pompous platitudes, the heavy rolling periods of this alien
to her native State--a man without grace of manner or beauty--in their
nomenclature, “a solemn prig,” defied all ingenuity of explanation, was
an increasing wonder outlasting the prescribed nine days. He rode with
the ill assurance of one who, accustomed to the sawdust floor, treadmill
round, and enclosing walls of a city riding-school, was bewildered
by the unequal roads and free air of the breezy country. He talked
learnedly of hunting, quoting written authorities upon this or that
point, of whom the unenlightened Virginians had never heard, much
less read; equipped himself for the sport in a bewildering arsenal
of new-fangled guns, game-bags, shot-pouches, and powder-horns, with
numerous belts, diagonal, perpendicular, and horizontal, and in the
field carried his gun a la Winkle; never, by any happy accident, brought
down his bird, but was continually outraging sporting rules by firing
out of time, and flushing coveys prematurely by unseasonable talking and
precipitate strides in advance of his disgusted companions.

Yet he was not a fool. In the discussion of graver matters--politics,
law, and history--that arose in the smoking-room, he was not to be put
down by more fluent tongues; demolished sophistry by solid reasoning,
impregnable assertions, and an array of facts that might be prolix, but
was always formidable--in short, sustained fully the character ascribed
to him by his brother-in-law, of a “thoroughly sensible fellow.”

“No genius, I allow!” Mr. Aylett would add, in speaking of his wife's
bantling among his compatriots, “but a man whose industry and sound
practical knowledge of every branch of his profession will make for him
the fortune and name genius rarely wins.”

With the younger ladies, his society was, it is superfluous to observe,
at the lowest premium civility and native kindliness of disposition
would permit them to declare by the nameless and innumerable methods in
which the dear creatures are proficient. To Rosa Tazewell he could not
be anything better than a target for the arrows of her satire, or the
whetstone, upon the unyielding surface of which she sharpened them. But
she showed her prudential foresight in never laughing at him when out
of his sight, and in Mabel's. At long ago as the night of Mr. Aylett's
wedding-party at Ridgeley, her sharp eyes had seen, or she fancied they
did, that the hum-drum groomsman was mightily captivated by the daughter
of the house, and she had divined that Mrs. Aylett's clever ruses for
throwing the two together were the outworks of her design for uniting,
by a double bond, the houses of Dorrance and Aylett. She knew,
furthermore, that Herbert Dorrance had travelled with the Ridgeley
family for three weeks in October, and that he had now been domesticated
at the homestead for ten days. Mrs. Aylett's show of fondness for him
was laughable, considering what an uninteresting specimen of masculinity
he was; but the handsome dame was too worldly-wise, too sage a judge of
quid pro quo, to entice him to waste so much of the time he was addicted
to announcing was money to him, for the sake of a good so intangible as
sisterly sentimentality.

Unless there were some substantial and remunerative ulterior object to
be gained by his tarrying in the neighborhood, cunning Rosa believed
that “dear Bertie” would have been packed off to Buffalo, or whatever
outlandish place he lived in, so soon as the bridal festivities were
over, and not showed his straw-colored whiskers again in Virginia in
three years, at least, instead of running down to the plantation every
three months.

“If such an ingredient as the compound, double-distilled essence of
flatness is to be infused into the wassail-cup, it is he who will supply
it!” thought the spicy damsel, with a bewitching shrug of the plump
shoulder nearest him, while engaged in a lively play of words with a
gentleman on her other hand. “What can possess Mabel to encourage him
systematically in her decorous style, passes my powers of divination.
Maybe she means to use him as a poultice for her bruised heart. In that
case, insipidity would be no objection.”

Mabel had not the air of one whose heart is bruised or torn. That she
had gained in queenliness within the past year was not evidence of
austerity or the callousness that ensues upon the healing of a wound.
The Ayletts were a stately race, and the few who, while she was in her
teens, had carped at her lack of pride because of her disposition to
choose friends from the walks of life lower than her own, and criticised
as unbecoming the playful familiarity that caused underlings and
plebeians--the publicans and sinners of the aristocrat's creed--to
worship the ground on which she trod--the censors in the court of
etiquette conferred upon her altered demeanor the patent of their
approbation, averring, for the thousandth time, that good blood would
assert itself in the long run and bring forth the respectable fruits of
refinement, self-appreciation, and condescension. The change had
come over her by perceptible, but not violent, stages of progression,
dating--Mrs. Sutton saw with pain; Rosa, with enforced respect--from the
sunset hour in which she had read her brother's sentence of condemnation
upon her then betrothed, now estranged, lover. After that one evening,
she had not striven to conceal herself and her hurt in solitude. Neither
had she borrowed from desperation a brazen helmet to hide the forehead
the cruel letter had, for a brief space, laid low in the dust of
anguished humiliation.

If a whisper of her disappointment and the attendant incidents
crept through the ranks of her associates, it died away for want of
confirmation in her clear level-lidded eyes, elastic footfall and the
willingness and frequency with which she appeared and played her part
in the various scenes of gayety that made the winter succeeding her
brother's marriage one long to be remembered by the pleasure-seekers
of the vicinity. She had not disdained the assistance of her
sister-in-law's judgment and experience in the choice of the dresses
that were to grace these merry-makings, and, thanks to her own naturally
excellent taste, now tacitly disputed the palm of elegant attire with
that lady. Her Christmas costume, which, in many others of her age,
would have been objected to by critical fashionists, as old-maidish and
grave, yet set off her pale complexion--none of the Ayletts were rosy
after they reached man's or woman's estate--and heightened her distingue
bearing into regal grace. Yet it was only a heavy black silk, rich and
glossy as satin, cut, as was then the universal rule of evening
dress, tolerably low in the neck, with short sleeves; bunches of
pomegranate-blossoms and buds for breast and shoulder-knots, and among
the classic braids of her dark hair a half-wreath of the same.

She had the valuable gift of sitting still without stiffness, and not
fidgetting with fan, bouquet, or hand-kerchief, as she listened or
talked. Rosa's mercurial temperament betrayed itself, every instant, in
the bird-like turn of her small head, the fluttering or chafing of her
brown fingers, and not unfrequently by an impatient stamp, or other
movement of her foot that exposed fairy toe and instep. Contemplation
of the one rested and refreshed the observer; of the other, amused and
excited him. Mr. Dorrance's phlegmatic nature found supreme content in
dwelling upon the incarnation of patrician tranquillity at his right
hand, and he regarded the actions of his frisky would-be tormentor very
much as a placid, well-gorged salmon would survey, from his bed of
ease upon the bottom of a stream, the gyrations of a painted dragon fly
overhead.

A lull in the general conversation--the reaction after a hearty laugh at
a happy repartee--gave others besides Mabel the opportunity of profiting
by his learned remarks.

“But does not that seem to you a short-sighted policy,” he was urging
upon his auditor, with the assistance of a thumb and forefinger of one
hand, joined as upon a pinch of snuff, and tapping the centre of
the other palm; “does not that appear inexcusable profligacy of
extravagance, which fells and consumes whole surface forests of
magnificent trees--virgin growth--(I use the term as it is usually
applied, although, philosophically considered, it is inaccurate)
giants, which centuries will not replace, instead of seeking beneath
the superficial covering of mould, nourishing these, for the exhaustless
riches, carboniferous remains of antediluvian woods, hidden in the
bowels of your mountains, and underlying your worn-out fields?”

Rosa was shaking with internal laughter--she would give no escape except
through her dancing eyes.

Indeed, Mr. Dorrance's was the only staid countenance there, as Mabel
said, pleasantly, moving her chair beyond the bounds of the ring, “I,
for one, find the combustion of the upper forest growth too powerful,
just at this instant. This is a genuine Christmas-storm--is it not?
Listen to the wind?”

In the stillness enjoined by her gesture, the growl of the blast in the
chimney and in the grove; the groaning, tapping, and creaking of the
tree branches; the pelting sleet and the rattle of casements all
over the house brought to the least imaginative a picture of out-door
desolation and fireside comfort that prolonged the hush of attention.
Tom Barksdale's pretty wife slipped her hand covertly into his tight
grasp, and their smile was of mutual congratulation that they were
brightly and warmly housed and together. Rosa, preternaturally grave and
quiet, lapsed into a profound study of the mountain of red-hot embers.
Several young ladies shuddered audibly, as well as visibly, and were
reassured by a whispered word, or the slightest conceivable movement of
their gallants' chairs nearer their own.

“I think we have the grandest storms at Ridgeley that visit our
continent,” resumed Mabel thoughtfully. “I suppose because the house
stands so high. The wind never sounds to me anywhere else as it does
here on winter nights.”

Yielding to the weird attraction of the scene invoked by her fancy, she
arose and walked to the window at the eastern extremity of the hall,
pulling aside the curtain that she might peer into the wild darkness.
The crimson light of the burning logs and the lamp rays threw a strongly
defined shadow of her figure upon the piazza floor, distinct as
that projected by a solar microscope upon a sheeted wall; sent long,
searching rays into the misty fall of the snow, past the spot from
which she had her last glimpse of Frederic Chilton, so many, many months
agone, showing the black outline of the gate where he had looked back to
lift his hat to her.

What was there in the wintry night and thick tempest to recall the
warmth and odor of that moist September morning, the smell of the
dripping roses overhead, the balmy humidity of every breath she drew?
What in her present companion that reminded her of the loving clasp that
had thrilled her heart into palpitation? the earnest depth of the eyes
that held hers during the one sharp, yet sweet moment of parting--eyes
that pledged the fealty of her lover's soul, and demanded hers then and
forever? His conscience might have been sullied by crimes more heinous
than those charged upon him by her brother and his friends; he might--he
HAD--let her go easily, as one resigns his careless hold upon a
paltry, unprized toy; but when her hand had rested thus in his, and
his passionate regards penetrated her soul, he loved her, alone and
entirely! She would fold this conviction to her torpid heart for a
little while before she turned herself away finally from the memories
of that love-summer and battle-autumn of her existence. If it aroused
in the chilled thing some slight pangs of sentiency, it would do her no
hurt to realize through these that it had once been alive.

She saw a shadow approaching to join itself to hers upon the whitened
floor without, before Mr. Dorrance interrupted her reverie by words.

“The fury of the tempest you admire proves its paternity,” he said, with
a manifest effort at lightness. “It emanates from the vast magazines of
frost, snow, and wintry wind that lie far to the north-east even of my
home, and THAT is in a region you would think drear and inhospitable
after the more clement airs of of your native State.”

“We have very cold weather in Virginia sometimes,” returned Mabel, still
scanning the sentinel gate-posts, and the pyramidal arbor-vitae trees
flanking them.

Her gaze was a mournful farewell, but she neglected none of the
amenities of hospitality. She was used to talking commonplaces.

“We feel it all the more, too, on account of the mildness of the greater
part of the winter,” she subjoined.

“Allow me!” said the other, looping back the curtain she had until now
held in her hand. “Whereas our systems are braced by a more uniform
temperature to endure the severity of our frosts, and high, keen
blasts.”

“I suppose so,” assented Mabel, mechanically, and unconscious as himself
that meaning glances were stolen at them from the fireside circle, while
the hum and conversation was continuous and louder, for the good-natured
intent on the speakers' part to afford the supposed lovers the chance of
carrying on their dialogue unheard.

“But our houses are very comfortable--often very beautiful,” Mr.
Dorrance persevered, keeping to the scent of his game, as a trained
pointer scours a stubble-field, narrowing his beat at every circuit;
“and the hearts of those who live in them are warm and constant. It is
not always true that

    “'The cold in clime are cold in blood;
     Their love can scarce deserve the name.

“I have thought sometimes that that feeling is strongest and most
enduring, the demonstration of which is guarded and infrequent, as the
deepest portion of the channel is the most quiet.”

If his philosophical and scientific talk were heavy and solid, his
poetry and metaphors were ponderous and labored. Yet Mabel listened to
him now, neither facing nor avoiding him, looking down at her hands,
laid, one above the other, upon the window-sill, the image of maidenly
and courteous attention.

Why should she affect diffidence, or seek to escape what she had
foreseen for weeks, and made no effort to ward off? She had come to the
conclusion in October that Herbert Dorrance would, when the forms he
considered indispensable to regular courtship had been gone through
with, ask her to marry him, and coolly taken her resolution to accept
him. This morning, on the reception of a handsome Christmas gift from
him, and discovering in his actions something more pointed than his
customary punctilious devoirs, and in his didacticism the outermost of
the closing circle of pursuit she had furthermore concluded that his
happy thought was to celebrate the festal season by his betrothment. She
was quite ready for the declaration, which, she anticipated, would be
pompous and formal. She would have excused him from “doing” the poetical
part of it; but, since it was on the programme, it was not her province
to interfere.

“I am no enthusiast,” he next averred,--Rosa would have said, very
unnecessarily--“the tricks of sighing lovers are beyond--or beneath--my
imitation. I could not 'write a sonnet to my mistress' eyebrow,' or
move her to tearful pity by sounding declarations of my adoration of
her peerless charms, and my anguish at the bare imagination of the
possibility that these would ever be another's. But, so far as the
earnest affection and sincere esteem of an honest man can satisfy the
requirements of a good woman's heart, yours shall be filled, Mabel,
if you will be my wife. I have admired you from the first day of our
meeting. For six months I have been truly attached to you, and seriously
meditated this declaration. Your brother is satisfied with the exhibit I
have made of my affairs and my prospects, and sanctions my addresses.
I can maintain you more than comfortably, and it shall be one of the
principal aims of my life to consult your welfare in all my plans for my
own advancement. I have been settled in the large and flourishing
city of Albany about seven years, and--ignoring the trammels of mock
humility, let me say to you--have, within that period, gained to a
flattering extent the confidence of the most respectable portion of the
community; have built up an excellent and growing business connection,
and secured the entree of the best society there. These are the
pecuniary and social aspects of the alliance I propose for your
consideration. Through my sister, and by means of the intimate
association into which her marriage with your brother has drawn you and
myself, you have been enabled, within the twelvemonth that has elapsed
since our introduction, one to the other, to learn whatever you wished
to know with respect to my personal character, my tastes, temper, and
habits. It has given me heartfelt pleasure to discover that these
are, in the main, analogous to your own. I have built upon this
similarity--or harmony would be the better word--sanguine hopes of our
future happiness, should you see your way clear to accept my proffered
hand, consent to link your future with mine.”

“I beg to lay the 'ouse in Walcot Square, the business and myself,
before Miss Summerson, for her acceptance,” said magnanimous Mr. Guppy,
thus clinching his declaration that “the image he had supposed was
eradicated from his 'art was NOT eradicated.”

It was more in keeping with Rosa's character than Mabel's to recollect
the comic scene in the book they had read together lately, but the
latter did remember it at this instant, and despite the momentous issues
involved in her immediate action, was strongly tempted to laugh in her
wooer's solemn face.

Then--so abrupt and fearful are the transitions from the extremes of one
emotion to another--arose before her another picture. As in a
dissolving view, she beheld herself walking with Frederic Chilton in
the moonlighted alleys of the garden; midsummer flowers blooming to the
right and left, her head drooping, in shy happiness, as the lily-bell
bows to shed its freight of dew; his face glowing with the ardor
of verbal confession of that he had already sought to express by
letter--heard his fervent, pleading murmur, “Mabel! look up, my darling!
and tell me again that you will not send me away beggared and starving.
I cannot yet believe in the reality of my bliss!”

These were the love-words of an “enthusiast”--these---

The vision vanished at the short, hard breath, she drew in unclasping
her locked hands, and lifting her grave, tranquil eyes to the level of
her suitor's.

“I will follow your example in repudiating spurious sentiment, Mr.
Dorrance. I believe you to be a good, true man and that the attachment
you profess for me is sincere. I believe, moreover, that my chances of
securing real peace of mind will be fairer, should I commit myself to
your guardianship, than if I were to surrender my affections to the
keeping of one whose vows were more impassioned, who, professing to
adore me as a divinity, should yet be destitute of your high moral
principle and stainless honor. When I was younger and more rash in
judgment and feeling, I was led into a sad mistake by the evidence of
eye, ear, and a girl's imagination. I ought to tell you this, if you
have not already heard the story. I will not deceive you into the
persuasion that I can ever feel for you, or any other man, the love,
or what I thought was love, I knew in the few brief weeks of my early
betrothal. But you must know how that ended, and I have no desire to
repeat the mad experiment of risking my earthly all upon one throw of
fate. If friendship--if esteem, and the resolve to show myself a worthy
recipient of your generous confidence--will content you, all else shall
be as you wish.”

In her determination to be candid, to leave him in no uncertainty as to
her actual sentiments, she had concerted a response but a degree less
stilted than his proposal. She would have been ashamed of it had he
appeared less gratified.

His dull eyes brightened; his face flushed and beamed with unfeigned
delight, and in his transport he said the most natural and graceful
thing that ever escaped him during his wooing.

“I am content! The second love of Mabel Aylett must ever be more to me
than the first of any other woman!”

True, he nearly spoiled all the next minute, by producing from his
pocket a wee velvet case, from which he extracted a valuable diamond
ring, and proceeded, then and there, in the shadow of the accommodating
curtain, to fit it upon her finger. He had foreseen that she would not
be hardly won, and with characteristic providence had prepared himself
for the event.

The blood leaped to Mabel's temples and the fire to her eye, at the
prompt seal set by the practical non-enthusiast upon the contract, but
she bit her lip, and submitted after a second of thought. He owed his
exemption from rebuke to her memory of his latest utterance. She could
not mistake the tone of genuine feeling, and she overlooked the breach
of taste that followed; treasured up the heart-saying as one of the few
souvenirs she cared to preserve of his courtship.

“If he is content, I need not be miserable,” was the consolatory
reflection with which she took upon herself her new and binding
obligations.




CHAPTER VIII. -- THE FACE AT THE WINDOW.


MRS. AYLETT was in her best feather that night; the suave chatelaine,
the dutiful consort; the tactful warder of the interesting pair whose
movements she had not ceased to watch from the moment they took their
places with the party about the fire-place in the hall until she, alone
of all the company, saw Herbert Dorrance draw the diamond signet from
its receptacle, and the sparkle of the jewel as it slipped to its
abiding-place upon Mabel's finger.

Lest something unusual in their look or behavior should excite the
suspicions of their companions, make them the focus of inquisitive
observation and whispered remark, the diplomate passed again into
the hall, sweeping along in advance of them when they deserted their
curtained recess, and would have joined the rest of the company.

“Are we to have no dancing this evening?” she said, in hospitable
solicitude. “It wants an hour yet of supper-time. The exercise will do
you all good, particularly the young ladies, who have not stirred beyond
the piazzas to-day. I have been waiting for an invitation to play for
you, but my desire for your welfare has overcome native humility. Will
you accept my services as your musician?”

The suggestion was acceded to by acclamation, and while one gentleman
led her to the grand piano which stood between the front windows of the
drawing-room, and another opened a music-book which she named, a set was
quickly formed in the long apartment, the soberer portion of the crowd
ranging themselves along the walls as lookers-on.

Mrs. Aylett was a proficient in dance-music. She never volunteered
to perform that which she was not conscious of doing well. She had
occasionally taken the floor for a single quadrille, to oblige a favored
guest--always a middle-aged or elderly gentleman--or moved through
a cotillion with ease and spirit as partner to her husband, but
she declined dancing, as a rule; was altogether indifferent to the
amusement, while she delighted to oblige her friends by playing for them
whenever and as long as they required her aid. Without saying, in so
many words, that she disapproved of the waltz for unmarried ladies,
and frowned upon promiscuous dancing for matrons, she yet managed to
regulate the social code of the neighborhood in both these respects, was
imitated and quoted by the most discreet of chaperones and belles.

Mr. Dorrance was Mabel's partner; Rosa stood up with Randolph Harrison,
a gay youth, who was her latest attache; Tom Barksdale led out a
blushing, yet sprightly school-girl, and Imogene was his vis-a-vis
supported by an ancient admirer, who had comforted himself for her
preference for another man by falling in love with a prettier woman.
The room was decorated with garlands of running cedar--a vine known
in higher latitudes as “ground-pine,” and which carpeted acres of the
Ridgeley woods. The vases on the mantel were filled with holly,
and other gayly colored berry boughs, while roses, lemon and orange
blossoms, mignonette and violets from the conservatory were set about
on tables and brackets, blending fresher and more wholesome odors with
those of the Parisian extracts wafted from the ladies' dresses and
handkerchiefs.

Mr. Aylett had--accidentally, it would seem--his wife understood that
the action was premeditated--stationed himself at an angle to the piano
that allowed him a fair view of her, and did not grudge the merriest
bachelor there his share of enjoyment, while he could keep furtive watch
upon the changeful countenance, the Sappho-like head, and the delicate
hands which one could have thought made the music, rather than did the
obedient keys they touched. The wedded lovers had taste and pride in
equal proportions, and a parade of their satisfaction in one another for
the edification or amusement of indifferent spectators would have been
revolting to both, but the ray that sped from half-averted eyes, from
time to time, and was returned by a kindling glance, also shot sidelong
beneath dropped lashes, said more to each other than would a quarto
volume of stereotyped protestations and caresses, such as Tom Barksdale
dealt out profusely to his beauteous Imogene. Clearly, neither Mr. nor
Mrs. Winston Aylett was fond of sugar-candy.

Mabel's faith in the sincerity of her sister-in-law's agreeable sayings
and ways was not invariable nor absolute. She liked her after a certain
fashion; got along swimmingly with her, the amazed public decided “SO
much better than could have been expected, and than was customary with
relations by marriage, and not by descent;” yet her more upright nature
and different training helped her to detect the petty artifices with
which Clara cajoled the unwary, moulded the plastic at her will. But she
had never questioned the reality of her love for Winston. As a wife,
her deportment was exemplary, her devotion too freely and consistently
rendered to have its spring in policy or affectation. She gloried in her
handsome, courtly lord, and in his attachment for herself. Whether she
would have espied the same causes for loving exultation in him, had
he been a poor clergyman or merchant's clerk, was an irrelevant
consideration. The master of Ridgeley was not to be contemplated apart
from the possessions and dignities that were his inalienable pedestal.
Clara Dorrance was a clever woman, and she had given these due weight in
accepting his hand; and they may have had their influence in moving
her to unceasing, yet unobtrusive endeavor to make herself still more
necessary to his happiness, to strengthen her hold upon him by every
means an affectionate and beloved wife has at her command. She had done
well for herself--she was thinking while he concluded as silently within
himself that the slight pensiveness tempering the expressive face was
its loveliest dress.

She--beautiful and penniless, ambitious, and a devotee of pleasure--yet
dependent for food and clothing upon her mother's life-interest in
an estate, not one penny of which would revert to her children at her
decease; without kindred and without society in the elegant suburb they
had inhabited for four or five years, might have been elated at a
less brilliant match than that she had made. The “best people” of the
aforesaid suburb were exclusive; slow to form intimacies with their
unaccredited neighbors, and very hasty in breaking them at the faintest
whiff of a doubtful or tainted reputation. And of the second best the
Dorrances had kept themselves clear. Having met and captivated her
wealthy lover on a rarely fortunate summer jaunt, made in company with
her eldest brother, his wife, and two relatives of the last-named, Clara
did not repel him or disgust the best people of Roxbury by indiscreet
raptures over, or exhibition of, her prize.

“I feel with you an invincible repugnance to throwing open our hearts to
the inspection of the unsympathizing world, at the most sacred moment
of our lives,” she said, in stating her preference for a quiet
morning-wedding, a family breakfast, and instant departure upon their
bridal-trip. “If I begin to invite my friends and neighbors, our
cottage--lawn and garden included--would not contain them, and after
all were asked whom I could remember, as many more would be mortally
offended at being forgotten.”

The bridegroom gladly acquiescing, with a compliment to her womanly
delicacy, the ceremony was performed in the presence of the bride's
nearest relatives; an elegant repast was served, at which the Dorrance
plate made an imposing show, and Clara turned her back upon the scenes
and reminiscences of her past life to commence the world anew.

Yes, she had done very well for herself--how wonderfully well she knew
better than did any one else, and at this date she had fresh cause for
self-gratulation. Through her, Herbert, her favorite brother, was
likely to form an alliance which would be a timely and substantial
stepping-stone to his aggrandizement and wealth. There were more reasons
why she should hold her head higher--why the blood should clothe her
cheek with a richer carmine, and a smile encircle the mouth, as one
swift glance took in the spacious, luxurious room, thronged with
well-dressed aristocrats, her husband the stateliest, most honored of
them all, yet her fond thrall; the splendid apparel in which his wealth
had bedecked her, the queen of the scene--more reasons, I say, for the
ineffable thrill of pleasure that coursed, a rapid, intoxicating stream,
through her veins, than grateful affection for the author of all these
goods. With a Sybarite's dread of pain and loneliness, she seldom
trusted herself to look at the dark curtain in the background, against
which her latter-day glories shone the more dazzlingly. But to-night
she felt safe upon her throne--sat, the lady of kingdoms, sultana in the
realm of her spouse's heart and in his domain, and could stare full upon
the past--could measure, without shuddering, the height of her actual
and assumed estate above--

Mr. Aylett stepped forward in haste and concern at the deadly pallor
that overspread her face--the look of horror, fear, loathing, before
which smile and brightness fled, blasted into wretchedness. The
revellers stopped in their giddy measure at the discordant jangle,
preluding a dead silence.

Mabel, chancing in the evolutions of the set to be nearest the window,
and noting the direction of the fainting woman's eyes, was quick enough
to see a shadow flit across the yellow square of light upon the snowy
floor of the portico--a man's shape, as it appeared to her, crouching
and slinking out of view into the darkness.

“She saw something, or somebody, through the window, and was
frightened,” she said, in a low voice, checking Tom Barksdale and
another gentleman, who would have pressed with the inconsiderate crowd
toward the senseless figure Mr. Aylett had laid upon the sofa. “Will you
see what it was?”

The request cleared the room directly of all the men of the assembly,
with the exception of Winston and Dr. Ritchie, a young physician, who
was superintending the administration of restoratives to Mrs. Aylett.

She was reviving rapidly when the search party gave in their report.
There were fresh tracks upon the piazza, and these they had traced to
the back of the house, losing them there in the drifting snow, the wind
blowing like a hurricane, and ploughing what had fallen and what was
descending into constantly changing heaps. But the watch-dogs had
been unchained, and four of the negro men detailed as sentinels, the
gentlemen engaging to make the round of the premises again before
bed-time.

The effect of this communication was the reverse of tranquillizing
upon the patient. The wild, terrified look in her eye resembled the
unreasoning fear of lunacy as she seized her husband's arm.

“Indeed, indeed they must not. It is not right or safe to make such a
serious matter of my foolish nervousness. I am not sure there was any
one there! It was probably an optical delusion. I was plunged in a
reverie, thinking of happy, peaceful, lovely things”--with the sickly
feint of a meaning smile into his face--“and, happening to look at
the window, I fancied that I saw”--with all her self-command her voice
failed here, and she put her hand before her eyes for a moment before
she could go on--“I thought I saw--SOMETHING! It may have been a human
face--it may have been the shadow of the curtains, or the reflection of
the lights upon the glass; but it startled me, appearing so abruptly.
Please say no more about it. If it was a living creature, it must have
been one of the servants, tempted by curiosity to peep at the dancers.”

“It will prove to be a costly indulgence to him, if I can discover who
the rascal was,” said Mr. Aylett, decisively. “I would not have had you
so startled for the worth of all the lazy hounds on the premises.”

His wife laid her hand upon his.

“It is Christmas night, my love, and the poor fellow is excusable. He
showed excellent taste. It was a very pretty scene. I shall not soon
forgive myself for throwing it into such 'admired disorder.' Miss
Scott”--[to a musical spinster]--“may I tax your politeness so far as
to ask you to take my seat at the piano? I must go to my room for a few
minutes,” raising her finger smilingly to her displaced ivy wreath. “If
you would testify your tolerance of my folly, please go on with your
amusement. I shall be encouraged to return when I hear the music.”

Her collected, urbane self once more, she took her husband's arm, and
passed through the opening ranks of her friends, bowing to this side and
that, with apologetic banter and graceful words of regret--still very
pale, but changed in no other respect.

“A singular episode in an evening's entertainment,” said Mr. Dorrance,
leading Mabel to her stand in the re-forming set. “I never knew Clara
to succumb before to any type of syncope or asphyxia. She is a woman of
remarkable nerve and courage. And, by the way, how preposterous is the
common use of the word 'nervous.' The ablest lexicographers define it as
'strong, well-strung, full of nerve,' whereas, in ordinary parlance,
it has come to signify the very opposite of these. When I speak of a
nervous speaker or writer, for example, what do I mean?”

“One who imbibes unwholesomely large quantities of strong green tea,
and sees hobgoblins peering at her through the window-panes!” said Rosa,
sarcastically artless, tripping by in season to overhear this clause of
his small-talk.

Mabel's imperturbable good-breeding prevented embarrassment or
resentment at the interruption. At heart, she was vexed that Rosa should
omit no opportunity of shooting privily and audaciously at her practical
admirer, but to betray her appreciation of the impertinence would be to
subject herself to imputations of sensitiveness on his account.

“I saw the hobgoblin without the aid of green tea,” she rejoined. “There
was really some one upon the porch, but why the apparition should scare
Clara out of her wits, I cannot divine. The negro is an incurable Paul
Pry, and, next to dancing a Christmas jig himself, is the pleasure of
seeing others do it.”

Mrs. Aylett verified her brother's encomium upon her nerve by
reappearing in the saloon by the time another set was over, and just
before the announcement of supper, radiant and self-possessed, prepared
to do double social duty to atone for the fright she had caused, and the
temporary damp her swoon had cast over the festivities.

The revel went joyously forward--Christmas-games and incantations, the
dexterous introduction, by a jocose old gentleman, of a mistletoe-bough
into the festoons draping the chandelier, and divers other tricks,
all of which were taken in excellent part by the victims thereof, and
vociferously applauded by the spectators. The great hall-clock had rung
out twelve strokes, and two or three methodical seniors were beginning
to whisper to one another their intention to take French leave of the
indefatigable juniors and seek their couches, when a continued tumult
arose from the yard--barking and shouts, and voices in angry or eager
dispute.

Unmindful of the nipping air, the ladies flew to the windows and raised
them, while the gentlemen, in a body, rushed out upon the porch, many to
the lawn--the scene of the disturbance.

“They have caught him!”

“There are several of them--a gang of thieves, no doubt!”

“No! I see but one! They are bringing him to the house!” were morsels
of information passed over the shoulders of the foremost rank of
inquisitive fair ones to the rear, but none were able to answer the
returning inquiries.

“Who is it?”

“What does he look like like?”

“Does he offer any resistance?”

“Do you suppose he is a burglar, or only a common vagrant?”

“I thought the Ridgeley grounds were never infested by prowling beggars,
or other vagabonds,” said a lady to Mrs. Aylett, who prudently remained
near the fire, even then shivering with the cold, and casting uneasy
looks at the windows.

“Mr. Aylett is a model to his brother magistrates in his treatment of
such nuisances,” remarked another “His name is a terror to strollers,
whether they be organ-grinders, peddlers, or incendiaries.”

Mrs. Aylett, excessively pale, applied her vinaigrette to her nose, and
trembled yet more violently.

“I believe he is very strict,” she assented. “But I am really afraid
those ladies will take cold! The snow-air is piercing. And they
are--most of them--heated with dancing. Cannot we prevail upon them to
close the windows, now that the mysterious prowler is secured? We shall
hear all about him when the gentlemen return, and they will not stay out
of doors longer than is necessary.”

They began to pour back into the room, while she was speaking, laughing,
and talking, all together shaking the snow-powder from their hair and
hands, and anathematizing the cold and their thin boots. The particulars
of the midnight disturbance were quickly disseminated. The ebon
sentinels had, directed by the barking of their canine associates,
discovered, under a holly hedge on one side of the yard, a man lying
upon the earth, and almost buried in the snow he seemed not to have
strength to throw off. He was either drunk or so nearly frozen as to be
incapable of answering coherently their demands as to what was his
name and what his business upon the premises. The interrogations of the
gentlemen and the ungentle shakings administered by his captors elicited
nothing but groans and muttered oaths. He could not, or would not, walk
without support, and to leave him where he was, or to turn him adrift
into the public road, would be certain death. Therefore Mr. Aylett
had ordered him to be confined for the night in a garret room. In the
morning he might be examined to more purpose.

“But he ought to have a fire, and something hot and nourishing to
drink!” exclaimed Mrs. Button, upon hearing the story. “He will freeze
in that barn of a place--poor wretch!”

“I imagine he has no need of additional stimulants,” said Mrs. Aylett,
dryly, again resorting to her smelling-bottle. “From what the gentlemen
say, I judge that he had laid in a supply of caloric sufficient to last
through the night. And the first use he would make of fire would be
to burn the house over our heads. His lodgings are certainly more
comfortable than those selected by himself. There is little danger of
his finding fault with them. What manner of looking creature is he?”

“An unkempt vagabond!” rejoined Randolph Harrison, rubbing his blue
fingers before the fire. “His clothes are ragged, and frozen stiff. I
suppose he has been out in the storm ever since it set in. There were
icicles upon his beard and hair, his hat having fallen off. It is a
miracle he did not freeze to death long ago. It is a bitter night.”

“Did you say he was an old man?” inquired the hostess languidly, from
the depths of her easy chair.

“He is not a young one, for his hair is grizzled. But we will form
ourselves into a court of inquiry in the morning, with Mr. Aylett as
presiding officer--have in the nocturnal wanderer, and hear what account
he can give of himself. Who knows what romantic history we may hear--one
that may become a Christmas legend in after years?”

“You will get nothing more sensational than the confessions of a
hen-roost robber, I suspect,” said Mrs. Aylett, more wearily than was
consistent with her role of attentive hostess.

Her husband noticed the tokens of exhaustion, and interposed to spare
her further exertion.

“Our friends will excuse you if you retire without delay, Clara. You
still feel the effects of your agitation and faintness.”

This was the signal for a general dispersion of the ladies--the
gentlemen, or most of them, adjourning to the smoking-room.

Since the late extraordinary influx of visitors, Mabel had shared her
aunt's chamber, but, instead of seeking this now, she went straight from
the parlor to the supper-room, where she found, as she had expected,
Mrs. Sutton in the height of business, directing the setting of the
breakfast-table, clearing away the debris of the evening feast, and
counting the silver with unusual care, lest a stray fork or spoon had,
by some hocus-pocus known to the class, been slipped into the pocket of
the supposititious burglar.

“Aunt,” began Mabel, drawing her aside, “that poor wretch up-stairs must
be cared for. It is the height of cruelty to lock him up in a fireless
room, without provisions or dry clothing. If he should die, would we be
guiltless?”

Mrs. Sutton's benevolent physiognomy was perplexed.

“Didn't I say as much in the other room, before everybody, my dear? And
didn't SHE put me down with one of her magisterial sentences? She is
mistress here--not you or I. Besides, Winston has the key of that east
garret in his pocket, and I would not be the one to ask him for it,
since he has had his wife's opinion upon the subject of humanity to
prisoners.”

“I shall not trouble him with my petition. I discovered by accident,
when I was a child, that the key of the north room would open that door.
If I order, upon my own responsibility, that a cup of hot coffee, and
some bread and meat be taken up to him, you will not deny them to me, I
suppose?”

“Certainly not, my child! but I dare not send a servant with them.
Winston's orders were positive--they all tell me--that not a soul should
attempt to hold communication with him. And what he says he means.”

“Then,” replied Winston's sister, with a spark of his spirit, “I will
take the waiter up myself. I cannot sleep with this horror hanging
over me--the fear lest, through my neglect or cowardice, a
fellow-being--whose only offence against society, so far as we knows
is his dropping down in a faint or stupor under a hedge on the Ridgeley
plantation--should lose his life.”

“Your feelings are only what I should expect from you, my love; but
think twice before you go up-stairs yourself! It would be considered an
outrageous impropriety, were it found out.”

“Less outrageous than to let a stranger perish for want of such
attention as one would vouchsafe to a stray dog?” questioned Mabel, with
a queer smile. “Roger! pour me out a bowl of coffee at once. Put it on
a waiter with a plate of bread and butter--or stay! oysters will be
more warming and nourishing. I am very sure that Daphne is keeping a
saucepanful hot for her supper and yours. Hurry!”

The waiter, whose wife was the cook, ducked his head with a grin
confirmatory of his young mistress' shrewd suspicion, and vanished
to obey her orders, never dreaming but she wanted the edibles for her
private consumption. He enjoyed late and hot suppers, and why not she?
Thanks to this persuasion, the coffee was strong, clear, and boiling,
the oysters done to a turn, and smoking from the saucepan.

Taking the tray from him, with a gracious “Thank you! This is just as
it should be,” Mabel negatived his offer to carry it to her room, and
started up-stairs.

Mrs. Sutton followed with a lighted candle.

“Winston or no Winston, you shall not face that desperado alone,” she
said, obstinately. “There is no telling what he may do--murder you,
perhaps, or at least knock you down in order to escape. Winston talks as
if he were the captain of the forty thieves.”'

“He is pretty well hors de combat now, at any rate,” smiled Mabel, but
allowing her aunt to precede her with the light to the upper floor. “And
should he offer violence--scalding coffee may defend me as effectually
as Morgiana's boiling oil routed the gang. MY captain had to be carried
up-stairs by four servants, who left him upon a pile of old mattresses
in one corner of the room. Here we are!”

They were in a wide hall at the top of the house, the unceiled rafters
above their heads, carpetless boards beneath their feet. Mabel set her
waiter upon a worm-eaten, iron-bound chest, and went further down the
passage to get the key of the north room. Her light footstep stirred
dismal echoes in the dark corners; the wind screamed through every crack
and keyhole, like a legion of piping devils; rumbled lugubriously over
the steep roof. The one candle flickering in the draught showed Mabel's
white bust and arms, like those of a phantom, beaming through a cloud
of blackness, when she stooped to try the key in the lock of the
prison-chamber.

After fitting it, she knocked before she turned it in the rusty
wards--again, and more loudly--then spoke, putting her lips close to the
key-hole:

“We are friends, and have brought you supper. Can we come in?”

There was no answer, and with a beating heart she unlocked the door,
pushed it ajar, and motioned to Aunt Rachel to hold her candle up, that
she might gain a view of the interior.

The wan, uncertain rays revealed t

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