But Mrs. Berrien was not the only person who felt concern about the very unjust suspicion that might be cast upon Aimée. Lennox Kyrle, as he went out, with Percy Joscelyn’s angry question ringing in his ears, said to himself, indignantly, that it was shameful that such a misconception should be allowed for a moment to exist, and that, if Fanny had neither the courage nor sense of justice sufficient to induce her to speak, it was his plain duty to do so. Only one consideration deterred him, and this was the consideration Aimée had so artfully brought to bear, that to reveal the truth would on his part appear to be the revenge of a jilted man.
“My lips are sealed,” he thought, wrathfully, “and Fanny Berrien knows it, so she allows this child, who is too young and ignorant to understand what she is doing, to bear the consequences and the odium of her conduct. It is infamous, and I will not submit to it! Something must be done.”
But to declare in the warmth of righteous indignation that something must be done, and to decide what that something should be, were unfortunately very different things. Mr. Kyrle felt himself impotent in the face of the double force of feminine resolution arrayed against him, and yet he was determined that matters should not be left as they were. The more he thought of it, the more he was revolted by Fanny Berrien’s selfishness and duplicity, and the more eager he became that she should be made to bear the burden of her own misdoing. But how was this to be accomplished? He walked away from Mrs. Shreve’s door after asking himself the question, and finding no answer short of that method which would be open to the suspicion of being dictated by revenge. One thing, however, he determined—that he would not leave St. Augustine at once, as he had declared his intention of doing. That Fanny Berrien very much desired his departure, was in his present mood an incentive to remain. Yes, he would stay for a day at least, and see if circumstances might not make it possible for him to set matters in their true light.
At the hotel where he had taken up his quarters—for this was before the era of palatial hostelries in the quaint old Spanish town—he saw Mr. Meredith and Percy Joscelyn, and might have been amused by the glances, not of love, which both men cast upon him, but for the fact that he clearly understood the misconception in the mind of each; and to be held guilty of tempting a girl hardly out of childhood to elopement, was as outraging to his pride as to his sense of integrity. It is to be regretted that he did not encounter Miss Berrien at this period, for that lively and easy-going young lady would assuredly have heard some truths, clothed in caustic language, which might have proved of benefit to her. But instead of Miss Berrien, it was Aimée whom he encountered again, in a manner most unexpected to both. One of the girl’s greatest pleasures during her stay in St. Augustine had been to spend much of her time in an orange grove on the outskirts of the town, to which she had a right of entrance, as it belonged to Mrs. Shreve’s son. Other people also went there occasionally to walk under the picturesquetrees and pluck the golden fruit that gleamed out of the glossy foliage; but Aimée would take books or work with her, and spend hours alone in what seemed to her an enchanted world of soft sunshine, balmy air, and sweet odors. It was therefore a place that she felt she could not leave St. Augustine without seeing again—the more especially that, after the events of the morning and the tremendous change that seemed impending over her, she needed a little time for quiet reflection. And quiet reflection in the house with her aunt and Fanny was an impossible thing.
So it came to pass that, in the last hour of a perfect afternoon, Lennox Kyrle, who had been taking a walk while chewing the cud of unpleasant reflections, was attracted by the appearance of a figure coming along the road on which he was tramping. His sight was remarkably keen, and after an instant, although the person was still distant, he had no doubt who it was.
“It is that little girl!” he said to himself. “I call this good luck, for really the only thingI can do, as far as I perceive, is to make another appeal to her to tell the truth. Yet to go back to that house to see her was impossible. So it is surely a fortunate chance that brings her here—and alone, too!”
The next moment he feared that he had congratulated himself too soon. The figure paused an instant and then disappeared. Had she also recognized him, and desired to avoid meeting him? He thought it likely, but determined grimly that she should not succeed. Since to reach Fanny and scorch her with reproaches was impossible, his next best chance was to work upon Aimée, and this he vowed to himself that he would not be prevented from doing. If she had gone into some house, he would remain on the road until nightfall in order to waylay her on her return home; but if she had perhaps taken another road—The suspicion of this made him quicken his steps, so that a few minutes after Aimée’s disappearance he reached the spot where he had seen her last. No house was in sight, but it was evident that she had entered a gate which led into an orange grove, the beautiful alleys ofwhich he had admired as he passed it on his way out an hour before. Indeed, as he gazed eagerly and quickly down the green vistas filled with sunset light he perceived what he sought—the graceful form pacing slowly along one of the overarched ways.
To decide and to act was more a synonymous thing with Lennox Kyrle than with most men. He did not give a thought to any question of intrusion or trespass. He opened the gate and went in, striding quickly down the path in which he perceived the slender, girlish figure. He was not conscious at the moment of bestowing much attention upon the scene around him, but its aspect came back to him so vividly afterward, that the sensitive plate which we call memory must have retained it with unusual fidelity. Long afterward he could see distinctly the floods of level sunlight slanting through the tree-trunks and turning the very air to amber, the wealth of glistening evergreen foliage, the boughs laden with what seemed the golden apples of classic fable, the indefinable charm of the Southern atmosphere, and above all the delicate, childlikepresence like a vision of youth flitting down the sunlit vista.
But if there was a satisfaction to him in thus finding an opportunity to deliver the thoughts which had turned so hotly within him all day, there was not the least satisfaction for poor Aimée, when, hearing a quick tread advancing behind her, she turned to confront the last person in the world whom she had the least desire to see. She stood still, clasping her hands instinctively together as she uttered a low cry of dismay.
“O Mr. Kyrle!” she gasped. “I hoped—I thought you had gone away.”
Little as Kyrle was in a mood for smiling, he could not but smile at this ingenuous address. “I am sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “and to break my word—for I promised to go, didn’t I? But there are reasons that seemed to make it imperative for me to remain a little longer. And, as it chanced just now, while I was taking a walk, I saw you enter this place, and I hoped you would pardon me if I followed you.”
“But why?” inquired Aimée, far too disturbedto be polite. “Why should you want to see me, and why—oh,whyhaven’t you gone away? Fanny would be dreadfully worried if she knew you were still here.”
“What Miss Berrien might think does not trouble me in the least,” he replied, quietly; “but I am sorry to annoy you. I really did not think, however, that merely seeing me would annoy you so much. Why should it? I have no intention of harming any one.”
“Without intention you may do great harm,” she replied, quickly. “And I can not understand why you should stay, when you promised—”
“I will tell you why,” he said as she paused. “But is there no place where we can sit down for a few minutes? I will not detain you long.”
She pointed to a bench not far off, a favorite seat of her own, and one to which she had been on her way when he overtook her. “We can sit down there,” she said, with manifest reluctance, “but I do not see the necessity—”
“Never mind seeing it,” he said. “Simply oblige me—if I must put the matter on that basis. I am sure you will admit that I have been badly enough treated to merit a little consideration.”
“You have certainly beenverybadly treated,” said Aimée, her eyes softening with sympathy at the memory of his wrongs. “I hope you don’t think I forget it, or that I can ever cease to blame Fanny; but—but making things worse can not make them better. And it seems to me that you can only make them worse by staying here.”
“As far as Miss Berrien is concerned,” he said, as they walked toward the bench and seated themselves, “I assure you that I have not the least desire to make them either worse or better. It seems strange—does it not?”—he broke off abruptly, “that this time yesterday I was looking at the setting sun filled with thoughts of her, and longings for the moment that would bring us together, and that now there is not a woman whom I know in the world that I would not sooner entertain the thought of marrying. It is a great changeto be wrought in twenty-four hours. And do you know what has chiefly wrought it?”
“Her conduct, I suppose,” answered Aimée. “It was bad enough to have wrought anything; and yet,” she added, reflectively, “I don’t really believe that Fanny herself thinks it was very bad. She is—light, you know.”
“Yes,” assented Kyrle, dryly, “very light. However, what she thinks is a matter of no importance. And it is not her conduct to me that has chiefly wrought the change of which I speak, but her conduct toyou.”
“To me?” said Aimée, looking up at him with a startled expression. “Oh, pray, don’t think of that. You don’t understand—Fanny never meant to do me any harm. I was perfectly willing to go last night, and it was not her fault that Mr. Meredith, instead of going home, as he should have done, stayed on the sea wall and saw me.”
“Pardon me,” said Kyrle, “but I think it was distinctly her fault. To have sent you on such an errand was in itself absolutely inexcusable; but afterward to let it be supposed that you went of your own accord—that you werethe person about to elope—there is no language strong enough to characterize such cowardly duplicity. You wonder why I am still here? It is because I determined to see you, and say to you that if you do not tell the truth, I will. This shameful deception, this trading on the generosity of a child, shall not continue.”
Aimée looked up at him. When had she seen any one so moved with indignation and generous wrath? She thought again that this man was far from the ductile wax Fanny Berrien imagined him to be; but, righteous as his resentment and anger were, it would not do to allow him to act upon them. Yet how could she hope to influence or bend the fiery resolution that breathed in his look and words?
“It is too late,” she said at last. “I have promised, and I have made others promise, that things shall be left as they are, and nothing would induce me to speak. Fanny is selfish and thoughtless, but she never intended deception. It all—came about because Mr. Meredith frightened her, and she was afraid to tell the truth. Fanny is a little of a coward,you know. She is very sorry—really sorry, I assure you; but if she told Mr. Meredith now, he would never forgive her.”
“And so you advise her to continue to deceive a man whose affection for her should entitle him at least to fair dealing?” said Kyrle, bitterly. “Is a man, then, never certain of truth from a woman? In Fanny Berrien I am not surprised. But your eyes look as if you ought to know what honor and honesty are.”
The eyes of which he spoke filled with tears. No other reproach could have cut Aimée so deeply. Twenty-four hours earlier she would have said that honor and honesty were the forces that would always rule her life; and now—she could not deny that from this high standard she had ignominiously fallen. And how was it possible to explain what compelling impulse of gratitude had made it seem a duty to violate the strongest instincts implanted in her nature? She looked at Kyrle with the overbrimming crystal drops almost ready to fall, and he, meeting the pained humility of that look, felt as if he had struck a helpless child.
“I suppose it was wrong to have helped Fanny when it came to a question of deception,” she said, “but you do not know how unkind and ungrateful it would have seemed of me to refuse. It looked such a little thing—just to say that it was I whom Mr. Meredith saw last night. Andthatwas true. Oh, yes” (quickly), “I know that it is as bad to imply a falsehood as to tell it. But—but what could I do? I owe so much to my aunt!”
“I have no right to hold you to account,” said Kyrle. “Only let me ask if you think it possible to owe any debt of gratitude great enough to demand a sacrifice of integrity in payment?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, simply. “I am sorry if I have done anything very wrong, but I will tell you why I felt compelled to make almost any sacrifice to shield Fanny.” She hesitated a moment. It seemed a difficult subject to approach, and Kyrle was about to beg her not to distress herself in order to give him an explanation to which he had no claim, when she went on hastily: “You see, I am only partly an orphan. My father is dead, butmy mother is living and has married again. She is very much under the influence of Major Joscelyn—that is my stepfather—and I have always felt, though perhaps I was wrong, that she does not care much about me. The Joscelyns have never liked me; so I was very unhappy at home, when Aunt Alice came and took me away. I can not tell you how different life was to me when I went to live with her and Fanny. They have both been so kind and affectionate, they have done so much for me, of whom no one else ever thought at all, that there is not anything—notanything,” repeated the passionate young voice, “that I would not do for them. And I can not regret what I have done, though I am sorry it seems to you so wrong.”
“It is chiefly wrong to yourself,” said Kyrle. “I wish I could make you see this as I do. It is not less than a crime against your future to allow people to suppose—for what one person knows, many people are pretty certain to know—that you were not only engaged in a love affair, but on the point of eloping with me last night.”
A deep blush, beautiful in its tint but painful in its intensity, spread over her face. She looked away from him and her lip trembled. He saw that some instinct which had been dormant before was waking in her, and making her understand the outrage which such a misconception would do her childlike youth, and he pressed his advantage remorselessly.
“You can not possibly comprehend what injury the story might do your life at some of its most critical moments,” he said; “but your aunt, Mrs. Berrien, will comprehend, and to her I shall go. I am deeply enough concerned in the matter to have a right to demand that the truth shall be told.”
“If you go to my aunt,” said Aimée, turning upon him quickly, “you can distress her very much, but you can not tell her anything which she does not know. All that you have said about possible injury to meshehas said and I had much trouble in persuading her to let things be as they are. You must not think any wrong of her. She knew nothing until Percy Joscelyn, my stepbrother—who came in, you remember, this morning—charged herwith not having taken proper care of me, because he found you in Mrs. Shreve’s sitting-room with me. It was like his effrontery to dare to speak so to her!” the girl interpolated, with flashing eyes. “Yesterday no Joscelyn of them all would have cared what became of me; only Aunt Alice cared. But to-day, because it seems they have learned that I am rich, Percy ventures to insult her!”
Nothing could have surprised Kyrle more than this sudden flash of indignant anger in one who had seemed to him gentle to a fault. But he was a man of quick perceptions, and all the intense affectionateness, the passionate gratitude and loyalty of the girl’s nature, were revealed to him in that moment of emotion. He was deeply touched and interested, for in this instant he understood that it was no vulgar love of intrigue, no lack of rectitude, no obtuseness toward the finest things of life, that had made Aimée play her part in Fanny Berrien’s commonplace comedy of flirtation. Instead of comedy it had become tragedy to the girl, with her keen sense of honor, her high standard of loyalty, and her delicate instinctof the claim which love and trust given create in a generous mind. But there were motives, deep-rooted in her nature, strong enough to make her do violence to all these things and stand firm as Fanny’s shield. Kyrle almost forgot the point he was himself intent upon in his interest in the springs of feeling and action thus laid bare before him.
“And so,” Aimée went on, “when Aunt Alice heard that you had been there she knew, of course, what it meant, and she insisted on hearing everything. Then she said the truth must be told; that Mr. Meredith must know why I went out last night; that now I am rich—why are things so much more important when people happen to be rich?—it would not do for any one to imagine that I had been going to elope. But Fanny said that Mr. Meredith would never forgive her if he heard the truth now, and I begged Aunt Alice on my knees to let me do this little thing in return for all she has done for me. So at last she yielded, and I was very glad, and—and it can not be that you will go to her and make more trouble. Why should you concern yourselfabout me?” she demanded, turning to him with another but somewhat lesser flash in her eyes. “What is it to you if I do this?”
“Well, for one thing,” replied Kyrle, “I am myself somewhat concerned in it, for I assure you that I am not the kind of man to endeavor to persuade a girl of your age to elope, and naturally the imputation of having done so is not very agreeable to me.”
“Oh!” said Aimée, with a look of contrition, “I never thought of that. I forgot that it could not be pleasant for you to be suspected of such a thing. You must forgive me for being so selfish; and yet”—she paused an instant and gazed at him with a passion of entreaty in her eyes, which at that moment he thought were at once the most expressive and the most beautiful he had ever seen—“and yet,” she went on in a low, thrilling tone, “if you could only be generous and kind enough to allow it to be believed of you by the only person who knows anything about it, I, for one, should be grateful to you as long as I live!”
But for the gravity of her appeal Kyrlecould have laughed at the absurdity of the situation; and yet her simplicity, her utter lack of thought for herself, touched him again beyond measure. “My dear child,” he said—for in truth he did not recall her name—“I feel as if I might do almost anything, simply because you wished it; but you do not know what you ask in this matter. You tell me that you have become rich, which means important in the world, and yet you desire to darken the fair promise of your youth with such a story as this would speedily become in the mouth of gossip. It is impossible—it would be a shame! I can not consent to it.”
“But what can you do?” she asked, dropping appeal and regarding him now with nothing less than defiance in her dark eyes. “Is it not true that a gentleman is bound never to betray a woman’s secret? How, then, can you betray Fanny’s? As for me, I will never speak.”
There was no doubt of that. A hundred oaths could not have expressed resolution more firmly, more immovably, than those simple words. And what could Kyrle reply?He knew well that he could not betray Miss Berrien’s secret, and it was the consciousness of this that had made him so determined to influence Aimée. But now he was forced to own himself completely baffled. Aimée’s strength of will was greater than any force he could bring to bear against it, and there was nothing left but to accept the situation created for him as best he might.
“You are right,” he said at last. “A gentleman is bound in honor to keep a woman’s secret; so Miss Berrien is safe from me. If she chooses to shelter herself behind you, and you choose to allow her to do so, I have no power to prevent it. But I am sorry that I have failed completely to make you understand what a great mistake you are committing. To save an unprincipled flirt from the consequences of her double-dealing, you are laying a cloud on your own life at its beginning.”
“I care nothing about that,” said the girl, with honest indifference. “I am only sorry that Mr. Meredith should be deceived, and that you have to bear (though only in hisopinion) that imputation of which you spoke a few minutes ago. But I am going away to-morrow; and since it seems I am of some importance now” (a sigh), “I suppose the Joscelyns will keep me always; so he and everybody else will soon forget all about this.”
“I assure you that I shall never forget it,” said Kyrle. “It is an episode calculated to remain in a man’s memory. The heartless, selfish woman who has made a fool of me, I shall indeed have no trouble in forgetting; but the part you have played, mistaken as it is, I shall long remember. I only wish you had displayed such qualities as you have proved yourself to possess, in a better cause. Given a good cause, you would be a heroine. And now”—he rose as he spoke—“this time it is good-by. Since I have failed completely in the end for which I remained here, I shall return at once to the yacht. Will you shake hands with me and tell me your name? One should surely know as much as that of a young lady with whom he is supposed to have nearly eloped.”
But Aimée could not jest on such a subject.She gravely told him her name and put out her hand. For long he carried with him a picture of the slender presence, the delicate face looking wistfully into his, as if to make sure that this time he could be relied upon to depart, and the golden sunset glory seen through the orange boughs behind her.
“Good-by,” he said, gently. “I am sorry I have not moved you. Some day you will see that I am right, and I only hope you will not then too much regret that you did not follow my advice.”
He pressed her hand warmly, released it, and walked away, down the green vista of the grove.