"Proof positive," said Vance, laughing.
"I thought I should convince you. As an actual fact, the coins brought six hundred dollars at the Philadelphia mint, and the money was distributed among the finders."
"Imagine how many darkeys have stolen out here, since, to work at night with pick and shovel! I suppose that accounts for the depression of the sod."
"I myself found a George II. coin in the garden yesterday. See! If I were togive it to you, do you think it would bind you to continue to be 'some one else,' during the rest of your stay with us?"
He took the bit of copper she held out, wondering, as he had done the night before, whether this kindly mood meant coquetry, then deciding it was but the frolic spirit of a wholesome and untrammelled youth not to be restrained. Whatever it meant, he would profit by it. A creature so bright, so impulsive as this, his new-found cousin, was not within his ken, even if the occasional prick of her wit did keep him in an attitude of self-defence.
"Her cheeks are true apple-blossoms," he found himself murmuring, irrelevantly, as he pursued her through the tunnel of orchard boughs. "But her lips—what? Ah! bard beloved, I thank you—'Her mouth a crimson flower.' That's it. 'Her mouth a crimson flower.'"
"What are you talking about, back there?" exclaimed his guide, turning sharply to call him to account.
"Did I speak aloud? I was—ah—onlywondering where we are going to bring up?"
"Do I tire you? Perhaps you are not used to walking. Never mind; we shall soon reach the graveyard, and then you can sit upon the stone wall and rest."
"I think I can last to the graveyard," meekly said the young man, whose tramps in the Alps and Dolomites and Rockies had included of "broken records" not a few.
"Now, you are laughing at me," she said, suspiciously. "But you know I have never heard of you except as a lounger in clubs and a leader ofcotillons."
Vance thought it useless to protest.
They now reached an enclosure under a grove of maples, where, motioning him to sit upon a low wall tapestried with moss and fern and creepers, she perched upon the gnarled root of a tree, and, opening her book, prepared to become absorbed in it.
"Suppose you read aloud to me," he suggested, with cunning aforethought.
"This?" she said, doubtfully, surveyinghis verses. "Oh, no; I think not. You would hardly care forthis. It is something quite out of your line, don't you see? The writer gives expression to a perfectly straightforward, yet eloquent, expression of a true man's true feeling, about a thing of every day. It is not only that the words are lovely and the sentiment is noble, but the measure ripples like a stream—Why, what is the matter with you? One would think you know the author."
"I am afraid, upon reflection, that Ido notknow the author," he said, drawing back into his shell.
"If you did, I should get you to thank him for me for this," she resumed. "They say authors are always disappointing to meet, after one has idealized them through their writings. Buthewould not be. No; I would trust him, through everything, to be a noble gentleman. Of course he is unworldly. I believe he lives in a remote Territory, and despises petty conventionalities of society, especially those in New York. And I think he never even heard of that dreadful 400 of yours."
Vance, smiling at her girlish nonsense, felt himself, nevertheless, lapped in the Elysium of her speech.
Then her mood changed to pathos, as she told him the story of "Cousin Josey's" single episode of love, ending in the mound beside them, where slept the old man's bride-betrothed of seventeen,—a ward of his mother,—who had died of a tragic accident, forty years agone.
"And every day, since, he has come here. See, there are fresh wood-violets upon her breast. And the dear old man has never thought of such a thing as giving her a successor. Now, let us go. There are lambs to show you, and a lot of other things."
The passing cloud was gone from her April face. She was again radiant, and in some bedazzlement of mind he arose and followed her.
Townsend's acquaintance with his Virginia cousins had, as might have been expected, prolonged itself into a visit to Carlyle Hall; and he was on the eve of departure, after a stay of two weeks inthat delightful refuge, before he realized how much his fancy had begun to twine around the place and its inmates.
Sentiment for the young creature who was its ruling spirit he did not admit, other than the natural tribute of his age and sex to hers. Nor did he give her credit for more than temporary feeling on any point disconnected with her strong local attachments. Her father, her home, and those she grandiosely called her "people"—meaning, he supposed, the individuals indebted to Providence for having been born within the limits of her State—were the objects of Eve's warm affection.
Vance felt sure her courteous thought of him was the result of only transmitted consideration for a guest. So soon as he should quit the pleasant precincts of the Hall, he feared he must put aside his claim to even this consideration. This condition of affairs worried our young man more than he cared to admit to himself. To no one else would he have confessed that the fortnight had been spent by him in a daily effort to impress upon her a personality widely different from her conception of it.Now, at the end of his enterprise, he was conscious that he had not advanced in the endeavor; and this last evening in her company was correspondingly depressing to hisamour propre.
They were sitting together in a window-seat of the drawing-room, looking into an old-world garden with box walks, a sun-dial, and a blaze of tulips piercing the brown mold. From the western sky, facing them, the red light was vanishing, and in the large, dim room a couple of lamps made islands of radiance in a sea of shadows. In the library, adjoining, sat the Colonel, reading, his strong, handsome head seen in profile from where they were.
Sounds of evening in the country, the sweet whistle of a negro in the distance, alone broke the spell of silence brooding over the old house. Vance hesitated to further disturb it, the more so that Evelyn had been in a mood of unusual graciousness. Nor did he, in truth, feel prepared to broach the discussion of certain things he had put off until now.
"To-morrow," he said at last, with a genuine sigh, "I shall be on my waynorthward, and this beautiful, restful life will be among my has-beens."
"Too restful, I'm afraid," she cried, in her brusque, schoolgirl fashion. "Your Aunt Myrtle always speaks of Virginia as nothing but a 'cure,' which she is clearly glad to have accomplished and lived down."
"It has been a cure for me in another sense. I wonder if you know what you have done for me?"
"I?"
"Yes. Don't fence with me now. For once, believe in your cousin, who is, after this, going to leave you for a long time in peace. Tell me; when I shall have gone, and that big, comfortable 'spare room' is put in order again for the next guest, shall you sometimes think of the subject of your missionary labors in the past two weeks?"
"But I have never undertaken to reform you," she said, in a vexed tone. "It is absurd for you to think I imagined myself capable of that. The best I could hope for was that your visit should pass without our coming to open conflict.Papa could tell you I promised him to try that this should be so."
"Then I am indebted to your father for the modicum of personal consideration you have vouchsafed me?"
"And Cousin Josey—yes," she answered, with startling candor. "At the same time, I must say, I like you now better than I believed I ever could. It makes me wish with all my heart I could trust you."
Vance felt a sting that was not all resentment, or all pain. The expression of her eyes, so fearless, so intense, waked in him a feeling that, in the moment they had reached, he desired nothing so much in all the world as to win this "mere girl's" approval. The color deepened in his face, as he said:
"And yet you have given the author of those verses, who happens to be myself, credit for something in which you could place faith?"
"You—you?" she exclaimed, starting violently. "Ah no! Don't destroy my ideals."
"This may be wholesome, but it iscertainly not pleasant," he said, praying Heaven for patience.
There was nothing of her customary light spirit of bravado in the manner in which, after a pause, she next spoke to him.
"I hardly know how—for the sake of others, I mean, not on my own account—to ask if it is possible you have not, in connection with me, given a thought to one who was my daily, intimate companion all of last winter."
"That!" he interrupted, with a dry laugh. Why not arraign her for the wreck of me?"
"You understand me, I see," she said, with meaning. "Let me say this, then: that I hold a trifler with women's hearts to be the most despicable of characters. A man who is too indolent or too infirm of purpose to deny himself the pleasure he gets from watching his progress in a girl's affections is an offender the law mayn't reach, but he deserves it should. That he makes his victim old before her time, in his gradual, refined disappointment of her hopes, may not count formuch, in your estimation. But—but—oh! I could not have believed it of the person who wrote those verses!"
There were tears in her honest eyes, a tremor in her young voice. Save for these, Vance, who had walked away from her a dozen steps, would have continued to put distance between himself and this "angel at the gate."
As it was, he controlled himself sufficiently to return and say, in a hard, strained voice:
"I shall not attempt to change your estimate of me. But I am glad you have given me an opportunity to tell you that on the day I saw you first, I went directly from my aunt's house to ask Katherine Ainger to be my wife. Some day, when you are older, and know more of the world, and take broader views of poor humanity, all these things may seem to you different. Then you may, perhaps, admit that, with all my faults, I could never be such a cad as you have pictured. In the little time that we are together now, please, let us say no more about it."
He walked away, joining the Colonel,to engage that unsuspecting gentleman in an exhaustive discussion of politics.
Eve sat for awhile in her dusky corner, absorbed in thought. She had decided to say a few words to him, before he should go, that might contribute to her relief rather than his. But Vance gave her no opportunity to speak any words to him, except those of conventional farewell. Betimes, next morning, he took leave of his cousins; and the Virginia episode was over.
After he had left, Eve locked herself in her room, and gave way to a burst of tears.
In a railway carriage that had long before left Genoa with the ultimate intention of getting into Rome, a girl sat, tranced in satisfaction, looking from the window, throughout an afternoon of spring. To speed thus leisurely between succeeding pictures of a scenery and life she seemed to recognize from some prior state of existence—although now, in fact, seen for the first time—was a joy sufficient to annihilate fatigue.
The milk-white oxen ploughing the red fields; the peasant women at work amid young vines; the sheets of wild flowers; the pink and white and blue-washed villas, with their terraces and palms and flower-pots; the hedges of roses, and groves of olive and eucalyptus; above all, the classic names of stations, albeit placarded in a commonplace way,—made Miss Evelyn Carlyle, lately a passenger of a steamerarriving at Genoa from America, turn and twist from side to side of the carriage, and flush and thrill with satisfaction, after a fashion causing her father, who accompanied her, to rejoice that they occupied their apartment undisturbed.
As evening closed upon the scene, she at last consented to throw her head back upon the cushion of the seat, and admit she was a prey to the mortal consideration of exceeding hunger. Since leaving Genoa, a roll and some cakes of chocolate, only, had supplied the luncheon for a journey of ten hours. Therefore, when the train, stopping after dark at a little buffet, was promptly forsaken by its passengers, Eve and her father joined the eager throng craving refreshment at the hands of a perspiring landlord and his inefficient aids.
"If I could only make these fellows understand, perhaps they would stop to listen," said Colonel Carlyle, growing wroth at the struggling, vociferating, jostling crowd massed in a small room, snatching for food like hungry dogs.
"Allow me to—By Jove, it's theColonel!" said a voice behind him, whose possessor was trying to pass on.
"Ralph Corbin! Where did you drop from?" and, "Ralph, this is too delightful" were the greetings received by the young man thus unexpectedly encountered.
"I am on my way from Nice to Rome to meet—er—some friends who are expected there for the Silver Wedding festivities," said he, with becoming blushes.
"I know," exclaimed Evelyn, gleefully. "I was sure they had something to do with it."
"But it's uncertain whether they have returned from Greece yet; and it's awfully jolly to meet you, anyway, Eve, and the Colonel. Here, let's get some food, and I'll go in your carriage for the rest of the way, of course. I'd not an idea you were coming out this year."
"Nor we, until a fortnight since," said Eve.
Ralph capturing a supply of bread, and fruit, and roast chicken, they made off with their booty to the train, and the evening passed in merry chat and explanationof their plans. Evelyn, however, by no means lost the consciousness of her advance for the first time upon Rome; and when, after crossing the Tiber at midnight, and catching glimpses, on either side the railway, of ruins that heralded their vicinity to the goal of her hopes, she was keyed to high excitement.
Ralph laughed at her disappointment as the train ran slowly into a large, modern station lighted by electricity, and decorated with hangings of gold and crimson, a crimson carpet spread across the platform to one of the doors of exit. When they enquired of thefacchinowho took their bags in charge, what great arrival was expected, the man answered with an indifference worthy of democratic New York: "It is for the Silver Wedding of their Majesties, Signor; but there are so many Kings and Emperors and Princes in Rome now, we have ceased to take account of them."
"We have struck Rome at a crowded season," said Ralph, "and I don't know that you are going to like it overmuch. I say, Eve, if Somebody doesn't come foranother week or so, what a heaven-send you and your father will be to me for company!"
"That is the most cold-blooded way of making use of us to kill time with," said Eve; but she bestowed on him a well-pleased smile. To her, Ralph had been ever a chum,—a dear, good fellow, who was the best of company. His unexpected appearance here promised to add tenfold to her pleasure, while his hopes in the affair hinted at between them had been, for some time, familiar to her in detail.
"And all this while I have never told you," he went on, in his boyish manner, "that at Nice I fell in with that swell New York cousin of yours, Vance Townsend. Not half a bad chap, if he is rather close-mouthed. Shouldn't wonder if he's in Rome, now, like everybody else in this part of the world."
"Townsend?" said the Colonel, with animation. "Glad to hear there's a chance of seeing him. Just a year—isn't it, Eve?—since he visited us at the Hall. Well, there's no doubt we are in luck, if we meet Vance as well as you, Ralph."
"The funny part of it is," whispered the joyous Ralph to Evelyn, "some of the people we both knew in Nice put it into Townsend's head I was coming here to meet myfiancée. And you know, Eve, I am not engaged to her yet; her mother put us on probation for six months. The six months are out next week, though, and I don't think it would hurt Maud's mamma to hurry herself a little bit to get here, do you? How you will admire Maud's style, Evie! Her hair is dark as—" etc., etc., until Evelyn cut it short by jumping into the carriage drawn up in waiting for them.
Just now, she was not as well prepared to listen as usual. Certain feelings she had believed extinct proved themselves to have been merely dormant. Even the spectacle of Romeen fête, by night, its bands and fountains playing, its streets still filled with lively promenaders, did not wholly distract her from this sudden tumult of an emotion she was not prepared to define.
Constantly, during the crowded days that followed, while they drove hither and thither, attracted but provoked by the jumblingof ancient and modern in these haunts of history, she tried to persuade herself she was not ever on the alert to see somebody who did not appear. For, from among the many acquaintances and a few friends encountered in the streets of the sociable little city, Vance was persistently missing.
Ralph, however, whose sweetheart also kept her distance, proved his philosophy by devoting his days to the Carlyles; and thus, under a sky blue as the fabled Elysian fields of Virgil, the festal week went on. Wherever their Majesties of Italy and Germany passed in public, they were greeted by thoroughfares black with people, windows and balconies blazing with flags and draperies, the clash of bands and the clank of soldiery.
The coachman engaged for the service of our friends would contrive, wherever bound, to take on the way some passing show of sovereigns; and, upon a certain fair day, for no reason avowed, he drove them into the tangle of vehicles and people always seen surrounding the doors of the Quirinal Palace whenever there was achance to catch glimpses of royalties upon the move. There ensconced, the saucy, bright-eyed fellow stood up, pretended his inability to get out of the snarl, gesticulated, talked to his friends and threatened his enemies in the crowd, while visibly rejoicing in the opportunity to see all likely to occur in that coveted quarter.
"Look here, cabby, if you don't move out of this to the Baths of Caracalla in just two minutes and a half," began Ralph, at last, in emphatic English; but he had no reason to go on, as the driver, seeing the young man's face, gathered up the reins, and extricated himself with much dexterity from the crowd.
Neither of his passengers noticed that a gentleman, in a carriage just then crossing theirs, looked at them, leaned forward, gave orders to his coachman, and at once proceeded to follow on their tracks.
In the glorious ruin of the greatest of temples to athletic exercise, Evelyn drew a deep breath of delight. Nothing in Rome, not even the Colosseum, had so impressed her with the grandeur of bygoneachievement in architecture as this wondrous pile, with its vast spaces, the gray walls breached by Time, out of which maidenhair grew and crows were flying—"crying to heaven for rain," as the guide poetically explained; the stately columns of red porphyry grouped around the beautiful mosaic floors; the lace-like traceries of carven stone; the niches and pedestals from which marvels of old sculpture had been removed; over all, the air that is gold and balm combined!
Evelyn leaned against a column abstractedly, while Ralph and her father walked about, discussing with their guide facts and statistics of the Thermae. They had indeed strolled quite out of her sight, when a shadow on the pavement beside her caused her to look up. If an answer to thought be no surprise, then was not Evelyn surprised; for the person confronting her was Vance Townsend.
"I have known that you were in Rome ever since the night you arrived," he said, without preamble other than coldly offering her his hand. "I happened to be atthe station to meet an English friend, when you came out; and I saw you get into your carriage and drive away."
"Then you can hardly claim to have earned a welcome from us, now," she began to say, lightly, but found it impossible to go on, checked by the look upon his face.
"I make no pretences," he said, bitterly. "If you care to know that I have either kept you in view every day since, or else have gone for long rides into the country, where I saw nobody, it is quite true. I have done everything foolish, everything foreign to my principles and habits, to satisfy, or to get away from, the feeling the sight of you aroused in me. I wonder what you'd think, if I told you I've been wandering about pretty much ever since I parted with you, a year ago, trying to get you out of my head. Many's the letter I've written to you and destroyed. Twice I set out to see you, and once I got back into the neighborhood of your home. When I saw you in the crowd at the station here, I actually thought I was possessed—"He checked himself. "I beg your pardon. I have no right to say these things to you, I know."
"You? You?" she could only repeat, bewildered by the meaning in his tone and the expression of his eyes. "Is it possible that you—"
"That I fell in love with you that time when you were holding me to account for a thousand transgressions, committed or not committed? Yes, it is quite possible. That need not prevent our remaining good friends, need it? I hope I've too much common sense to ask you to indulge in a discussion of these points, now; during the past week, I've been engaged continually, and I trust with some success, in disposing of the last remnant of hope I may have cherished that some day things might work around to give me at least a chance."
"You make me very unhappy," she exclaimed.
"That is far from my wish," he said, more gently. "Just at present you ought to be walking on roses. There! Your father and Corbin are coming back thisway. I want to ask you to help me to excuse myself in your good father's sight, if I seem unsociable."
"One word," she said, the blood flaming into her cheeks. "It is due you to know that long ago, soon after you left us, I received a letter from Katherine Crawford,—a letter that made me understand many things I had judged harshly in your conduct."
"Mrs. Crawford has been always kind to me," he answered. "And no one rejoices more than I in her present happiness."
"Yes, she is happy,—perfectly so,—and her life is full of the duties that best suit her. She says it was all planned out for her by Providence, and kept in reserve until she was fit for it."
"So runs the world away!" he exclaimed, with a whimsical gesture.
After that, the others came, and there was much talk of the subjects naturally presenting themselves. When they moved out of the enclosure to go to the carriage, Vance walked with the Colonel, following Evelyn and Ralph.
"You will dine with us at our hotel this evening?" said the older man, at parting.
"I am sorry that I am engaged," Vance answered, with appropriate courtesy, "and that to-morrow I am off for Sicily. Sometime, later on in your wanderings, I shall hope to run upon you again. This is the worst of pleasant meetings in travel, is it not?"
When they were seated in the victoria, he shook Evelyn's hand last.
The day was finally at hand that was to bring Ralph's sweetheart—with her incidental father, mother, two younger sisters, and a governess—to the quarters engaged for them at Rome. In the young man's enthusiasm, he did not forget to wonder what cloud had passed over his Cousin Evelyn's enjoyment of the place, the sights, the season. He even consulted the Colonel as to whether Eve might not be unduly affected by the crowded condition of the town, and proposed for them to change to a quieter spot. And Eve's father, who had had his own anxieties on this point,prevailed upon her to give up the engagements she had made with apparent zest, and resort to Naples and Sorrento.
To Naples, accordingly, they went, the faithful Ralph accompanying them, at the cost of a night-journey on his return to Rome for the day that was to see his happiness in flower. He drove with them to their hotel, through the interminable streets, lined with palaces and thronged with paupers, and saw them ensconced in pleasant quarters facing Vesuvius, whose feather of smoke pointed to good weather. They dined together in a vastsalle-à-manger, where, in a gallery, was conducted during their repast a noisy and mirth-provoking concert of fiddlers, mandolins, and guitars,—the performers singing, shouting, dancing, as they played. There was an hour before his train left, in which, while the Colonel smoked upon the balcony of their sitting-room, Eve walked out upon one of the quays with her cousin; and this hour Ralph determined to improve.
In the last day or two, trifles had shown this astute young man that the depression of his cousin (for whom he cherished nogrudge because, a year or two before, he had been wild to call her wife, and she would not hear of it) had been coincident with the meeting in Rome with Townsend. That very morning, he had found at his bankers', had read and put into his pocket, a letter written by Vance on arriving at Taormina, which had thrown upon the subject a new and surprising light. Just how to convey his discoveries to Evelyn, the most proud and sensitive of creatures about her sacred feelings, he had not yet decided.
They talked of the bay, of the mountains, of Vesuvius. Calmed and enchanted by the hour and scene, Eve wore her gentlest aspect, and Ralph felt emboldened to begin.
"This is as it should be," he said, with an air of generalizing. "You will go to Sorrento and Amalfi and Capri, and your roses will come back. I shall not forget you, Evie dear, because I am getting what I most want in life. You have always been to me a thing apart, and I've told Maud so, over and over again. By and by, I shall bring her to the Hall, and lether see you at your best, as its mistress. For you are not quite the same over here, Evie, as in Virginia air."
"Perhaps I am growing old," she said, smiling. "But never mind me. We shall miss you, Ralph, and it will require the greatest heroism to do without you. After this journey, nobody need tell me that 'three is trumpery.' We know better, do we not?"
"Why not send for your other cousin to take my place?" said Ralph, seeing his opportunity. "He is at Taormina, and would come, undoubtedly. I had a letter from him this morning, by the way. The most characteristic letter,—just like the man."
No answer. Ralph felt as he were treading a bridge of glass.
"To explain it, I should have to go back to the evening of that meeting in the Baths of Caracalla. He came to me at the hotel, and after a friendly chat, just as he was leaving, took occasion to say some uncommonly nice things about my relations with (as I thought)Maud; so I thanked him, and gushed a little about her,maybe,—in my circumstances, a fellow's excusable,—and off he went, I never suspecting that he all the time thought I was going to marryyou."
Here Ralph was rewarded by a genuine start and a blush, but still Eve did not speak.
"A day later," Ralph went on, determined now to do or die, "something I recalled of our conversation made me realize the mistake he was under, and I wrote him a letter explaining it. Such a time as I had to find his whereabouts! His banker had no instructions to forward anything, and I won't tell you all the ups and downs of trying to get at him. Finally, in despair, I sent the letter, on the chance, to Taormina, and from there he answered me."
At this point, in revenge for her indifference, the diplomatist remained, in his turn, silent, until Eve, who could bear it no longer, turned upon him her beautiful young face, glowing in the evening light with an eager joy. "And—and?" she exclaimed, impetuously.
"He is a good sort—Townsend,"went on Ralph, reflectively. "I've an idea, Evie, that if you and he could have managed to hit it off, you would have suited each other capitally. He would be the kind likely to settle down into a country gentleman, too; and you would never be happy in town. He has brains and a heart, in addition to his good looks and manners, and a restrained force of character that would be an excellent balance for this little impulsive lady, whose only fault is that she jumps at conclusions instead of working to them."
"You are perfectly right about that, Ralph," she said, laughing away a strong desire to cry. "I am learning wisdom, however, with rapidly advancing years. And you do only justice to my Cousin Vance, in your estimate of him. No doubt," here she swallowed a nervous catch in her voice, "if he told the truth in his letter, he congratulated you upon being allied to some one other than the young person who made his visit to Virginia last year a very hard test of patience, to say no more."
She stopped, and tried to turn away herhead. But Ralph, looking her gently in the face, read there what gave him courage to launch the last arrow in his quiver.
"Whatever he said, I saw through it, Evie dear. And I—I could not wait to write an answer. I telegraphed my advice to come to Naples as fast as steam can carry him."
Shortly after her conversation upon the quay with Ralph (who, returning to Rome, had been duly translated into anticipated bliss), Eve and her father took advantage of a perfect Sunday for the excursion up Mount Vesuvius.
In a landau with two horses,—a third to be annexed on the ascent,—they traversed the long street formed by the villages of San Giovanni, La Barra, Portici, and Resina, stretching from the parent city—a street suggesting in the matter of population a series of scattered ant-hills. Such a merry, dirty, shameless horde of all ages, who, abandoning the dens they called homes, had issued forth under the sun blazing even at that early hour of morning in his vault of blue, to bivouacin the open highway, was never seen! Marketing, chaffering, vending, gossiping, cooking, eating, drinking, performing the rites of religion and of the toilet, the hum of their voices was like the note of some giant insect. It was when a stranger's carriage came in sight that the air became suddenly vocal with shrill cries for alms; vehicles and horses were surrounded, escorted by noisy beggars, whose half-naked children offered flowers, or turned somersaults perilously near the wheels.
Resina passed, they could breathe more freely. The street turmoil was succeeded by the peace of a country road mounting between lava walls, over which glimpses of sea, of deep-red clover in fields, of vineyard or lemon grove, were finally succeeded by glorious, unobstructed views of the mountains, bay, and city. In the region of recent overflows, they saw the most curious spectacle, to the newcomer, of fertile garden-strips of green, where clung tiny houses, pink or whitewashed, daring the mute monster overhead, while close beside them the mountain-side wasstreaked with ominous stains marking the spots where other homes had defied him just one day too long.
Higher still, in the track of the overflow of 1872, they experienced the striking effect of entering into a valley of desolation between walls of living green. Here, the lava in settling had wreathed itself into the forms of dragons couchant, of huge serpents, and other monstrous shapes that lay entwined as if asleep. Up above, arose the main cone of the crater, smooth as a heap of gun-powder, vast, majestic, cloud-circled; taking upon itself in the intense light a blooming purple tint; the smoke issuing from its summit now soon melting into space, now showing dense and threatening.
Evelyn, in whom the novelty as well as beauty of the scene had aroused fresh spirit, looked more like her old self than her fond father had seen her for many a long day. But it is fortunately not given to parents, however solicitous, to see all the workings of young minds; and the good gentleman would have been indeed surprised had he divined the mainspring ofher animation. While he was indulging in a few mild objections to the length and slowness of the drive, the rapacity of wayside beggars, the heat of the sun, etc., such as naturally occur to the traveller unsupported by sentimental hopes, to our young lady the condition of motion was a necessity, and the act of getting upward a relief.
For the plain truth was that, since the last talk with Ralph, Evelyn had given rein to a thousand emotions repressed, during the months gone by, with stern self-chiding.
Until now, recalling the year before when Vance had left her to an unavailing sense of regret for her harsh judgment of him, she had hardly realized what their intercourse together had meant to her. But the period of his visit was, in fact, succeeded by one in which her salt of life had lost its savor; and Evelyn, to her dismay, found that her affections had gone from her keeping to this man's, acknowledged to have been the suitor of her friend.
That Katherine had refused Vance,and straightway married another lover, made very little difference to one of Eve's rigid creed in these matters. To her, love declared was love unchangeable; with air her heart she pitied Vance for his disappointment, and blamed herself for having repeatedly wounded him without reason. By means of this mode of argument, she had naturally succeeded in raising Townsend to the pedestal of a martyred hero, which, it may be conceived by those of colder judgment, did not lessen his importance in the girl's imagination.
As the months had gone on, and she had had nothing from him save packages of books and prints sent according to promise, as to a polite entertainer who is thus agreeably disposed of by the beneficiary of hospitality extended, her feelings had taken on the complexion of hopeless regret for an irrevocable past. What Eve had henceforth to do, according to her own strict ordinance, was to live down the impulse that made her give her heart unasked. The stress of these emotions had, in spite of her brave efforts, so worked upon her health that the Colonel, as fond of homeas a limpet of his rock, determined to try for her the change of air and experience, resulting as we have seen.
And now, on this dazzling day, a "bridal of earth and sky" in one of the loveliest spots upon earth, she kept saying to herself, "By to-morrow—to-morrow, at latest—he will be with me! And then—and then—andthen—!"
The carriage halted at a little wayside booth for the sale of wines and fruit. A dark-skinned woman, bearing a tray of glasses, with flasks of the delusiveLachrymae Christi(made from the grapes ripened upon these slopes) came forward to greet them. On Evelyn's side, a hawker, with shells and strings of coral, and coins alleged to have been found imbedded in the lava near at hand, importuned her. But, rejecting the others, she beckoned to a pretty, bare-legged boy carrying oranges garnished in their own glossy, dark-green leaves; and so busy was she in selecting the best of his refreshing fruit, she hardly observed that another claimant for her attention had appeared close beside the wheel.
"Please go away, my good man," she said at last, laughingly, without giving him a glance. "Indeed, I want nothing you can supply."
"That is a harsh assertion," Vance said, in a low tone meant for her ear, and then proceeded to greet both his cousins outspokenly.
He had reached Naples early that morning; had ascertained at their hotel that they were engaged to start for Vesuvius at a given hour; fearing collision with a party of strangers, had set out alone to walk up the mountain and take his chance of intercepting them; and had waited here for the purpose.
"After you had been journeying all night?" said the Colonel, with unfeigned surprise. "Why, my dear fellow, in your place I should have—"
Just then he intercepted, passing between Evelyn and Vance, a look that startled him. That his sentence remained unfinished nobody observed. The Colonel drew back into his corner, as if he had been shot.
If she had divined her father's feeling,Eve could not have pitied any one who was gaining Vance. And Vance, at that moment, believed all the world to be as happy as himself!
To a love-affair so obvious, the ending naturally to be expected is of the old-fashioned and inevitable sort. In the beautiful Indian summer of the following autumn in Virginia, these two people were duly married at the Hall. From far and wide came relatives to wish them joy; it was like the gathering of a Scotch clan at the summons of the pipes. Prominent among the revellers at the dance following the nuptial ceremony was Cousin Josey, who, in a pair of antiquated leather pumps with buckles, led down the middle of a reel with his cherished "Lady-love." To please the old boy, Evelyn had worn the little string of pearls bought by him, years before, for a bride who was never to be. And so everybody was content, and one of the cousins said it was "exactly like a weddin' befo' the wah."
"No; no house-parties till the middle of July. Dear knows, what with a string of big dinners, my two little dances, and those tiresome Thursdays in January and February when everybody came, I have done all that could be expected by society from paupers like ourselves," said Mrs. Henry Gervase, settling herself in a wicker chair, on the veranda of her country home, and looking approvingly at her water-view.
"Paupers!" said a lady from a neighboring cottage, who had dropped in to call. Mrs. Gervase's friends rarely liked to commit themselves to positive comment upon her statements until certain which way the cat was meant to jump. Mrs. Luther Prettyman, the wife of the dry-goods magnate, whose good fortune it was to own the land adjoining the Gervase property at Sheepshead Point,—a recently famous resort for summer visitors on our far easterncoast,—now contented herself with a little deprecatory giggle that might mean anything, and waited for Mrs. Gervase to go on.
"Oh, well! everything is comparative; and on the scale by which people measure things in New York, to-day, we are simply grovelling in poverty. John,"—to her gardener,—"you have got that row of myosotis entirely out of line; and, remember, nothing but salvia behind the heliotropes. I like a blaze of scarlet and purple against a blue sea-line like this. Heavens! what a perfect afternoon! The atmosphere has been clarified, and those birches in the ravine 'twinkle with a million lights.' My dear woman, I make no apologies. Any one who wants me at this season of the year must take me as I am. After eight months of bricks and mortar, dirty streets, and stupid drives in the Park, I am fairly maudlin over Nature when I get her back in June.
"I went to a concert where Paderewski played a night or two before he left America; and I give you my word that while the music was going on I put up myfan and plainly heard the babble of this little brook of mine, and the lap of the waves over the rocks at high tide, with, now and then, the notes of the song-sparrow that comes back every year and perches on my Norway pine. Somebody said of me afterwards, at supper, that I had been having a little nap. They may say anything of me, I believe, and some idiot will be found to credit it. But please don't accept the newspaper report that I am to have Mr. and Mrs. This, or Mr. That and Mrs. T'other, stopping with me at Stoneacres during June. I am much too busy with my granger-work, and my husband too industrious doing nothing, to play host and hostess now."
"I did not know; I only thought—" ventured Mrs. Prettyman. "You see, everything is so dull here, socially, till August. And when one has a guest coming who is accustomed to a great deal of fashionable gaiety,—a young lady, a distinguished belle,—one naturally grasps at the idea of such pleasant house-parties as yours are known to be, dear Mrs. Gervase."
"We shall be dull as ditch-water," answered relentless Mrs. Gervase, turning around to survey the struggle of a fat-breasted robin to extract from the turf a worm that continued to emerge in apparently unending length. "And if youwillhave a girl out of season, why, put her on bread and milk and beauty-sleep, give her plenty of trashy novels and a horse to ride, and she'll do well enough."
"But—perhaps I am wrong—surely Mr. Gervase told Mr. Prettyman, when they were smoking on our veranda last Sunday, that you are expecting your nephew, Mr. Alan Grove."
"That's just like Mr. Gervase,—a perfect sieve for secrets," quoth Mrs. Gervase, contemptuously; "when I particularly requested him to mention Alan's visit to nobody. The poor boy is completely used up with work, and has engaged to get a paper ready to read before some scientific congress next month, and finds himself unable to write a line of it in town. Here, I have promised him, he may have absolute quiet—not be called on to play civility or squire-of-dames for any one; and, Imay as well warn younow, he's not to be expected to do ahand's turnof entertainment for your girl. Besides, I happen to know that he can't abide 'society' young women. He is plunged up to the neck in electricity, is poor, ambitious, clever, on the way to sure success; and I'm going to back him all I can, not put stumbling-blocks in his path."
"How plunged up to his neck in electricity?" asked puzzled Mrs. Prettyman.
"Electric law, my good soul; did you think it a new kind of capital punishment? The lucrative law of the future, I've heard wise men say. Simpkins!" hailing, with irresistible command, a butcher's cart that seemed possessed of a strong desire to drive away in a hurry from a side entrance to the house. "Simpkins!Oh! there you are; I meant to leave orders with the cook not to let you get away again to-day without a word from me. I noticed, on the book, that you had the effrontery to charge sixty cents a pound for spring chickens here in June. Now, don't tell me! The way all you natives do; you have a short season, and must make the most of it.This is not your season, or my season, either. Wait till August before you put on the screws. And your sweetbreads, eighty cents a pair, whenyou knowthat when Mr. Gervase and I first came here to live, you werethrowing sweetbreads away, till we taught you the use of them! Now, mind, I shall get tired of sending friends to you to be fleeced in August, if this is what you do to me in June."
"I must be running off," said Mrs. Prettyman, arising from her spot of shade and luxurious comfort in the deep veranda filled, though not encumbered, with picturesque belongings, with stands and pots of blooming plants in every nook. "I'll declare, nobody's flowers do as well as yours. And the wages we pay our head gardener! It makes me really envious."
This, be it known, was a clever stroke on the part of neighbor Prettyman. Secretly resentful of the tepid interest in the personality of her expected guest,—who, in the eyes of the house of Prettyman, was an event,—she yet did not dare attempt to bring the greater lady to yield sympathy upon the spot. Mrs. Gervase's weakestside was for her flowers. She possessed the magic touch that alone nurtures them to perfection, and with it the proud love of a parent for children that grow inclined according to her will.
"Hum! We do pretty well, considering this house is built on the ragged edge of nothing over the sea, and is swept by all the winds of heaven, in turn, and sometimes all together. And, in a climate where one goes to bed in the Tropics and wakes up at the North Pole, what would you have? John, there, though I'll not set him up by telling him so, has learned all I know about flowers, and picks up new ideas every day. By August, now, these beds and stands will be worth looking at. What did you say is the name of the young person who's coming to stop with you? If you've nothing better, suppose you and she and Mr. Prettyman come over to dinner Saturday. Alan has promised me not to work at night, and by that time my plants will all be in the ground and my mind at rest."
"Thank you so much," said the lesser luminary. "It is always a treat to dinewith youen famille; and it is—didn't I mention her?—Gladys Eliot who is coming to us to-morrow."
"Gladys Eliot! Why, she's gone with her people to London for two months. I saw her name in theTeutonic'slist last Thursday. Those Eliots would never in the world let slip another chance for her to make the great match they've set out to get."
"Nevertheless," said Mrs. Prettyman, with some show of spirit, "Mrs. Eliot, who is my old school-friend, wrote me, the day before they sailed, that Gladys had taken it into her head to stay behind, and begged me to keep her till her aunt can come up from Baltimore in July and take the girl in charge."
"Three weeks of Gladys Eliot!" remarked Mrs. Gervase. "My poor woman, I pity you. By the end of the month there will be no health in you. A professional beauty, who has run the gauntlet of four or five years of incessant praises, has been advertised like 'Pear's Soap,' in England and America, and has failed to make hercoup! I remember what AlanGrove said about her no longer ago than Christmas of last year: 'I haven't the advantage of Miss Eliot's acquaintance, but her and her kind I hold in abhorrence,—denationalized Americans; hangers-on of older civilizations that make a puppet-show of them; spoiled for home, with no rightful place abroad; restless, craving what no healthy-minded husband of their own kind can give them.' Bless me—andthose twoare going tomeet here!"
"I think Mr. Alan Grove need not concern himself," said Mrs. Prettyman, driven to bay. "Mrs. Eliot mentioned in her letter that Gladys—it is no secret, evidently—is nearly, if not quite, engaged to marry some one the family feels isin all respectsall they could have hoped for her."
"Then it must be either that Colonel Larkyns, the very rude man with large feet, who walked all over my velvet gown at the Egertons', last winter,—came over with Lord Glenmore, whom the Eliots tried for and couldn't get,—or else McLaughlin, the Irishman who made such a lot of money in Montana. The two menwere running evenly, 'twas said. Let me think—didn't I see her at Claremont on McLaughlin's coach, last month? Pray, my dear, are we to congratulate you on having Mr. McLaughlin, also, as a member of your household, before long?"
"Oh dear, dear!" continued the plain-spoken lady to herself, when poor Mrs. Prettyman, fairly routed, had retired without honors from the field. "Why is nature so heavenly kind to us in American places of resort, and 'only man is vile'? Why does this struggle for place, this pride of vogue, these types of our worst social element—I hate that word 'social,' it sounds vulgar; but what else expresses this for me?—follow one into this earthly Paradise? Here I have got myself into a pretty kettle of fish with Alan Grove. He will be bored to death and his visit broken up, for we can't rid ourselves of people who sit in our pocket, like the Prettymans in summer; and he will be running upon this Eliot creature perpetually. If Henry would help me, we might—but he is so abominably friendly and cordial with country neighbors, there'sno hope from him. Besides, if a girl is pretty, it makes no earthly difference to my good man whether she is a fiend of calculation and cold-heartedness. I declare, I've no patience with Henry, anyhow."
So saying, Mrs. Gervase went out to drive with the offender in question, behind a pair of sleek cobs, in a little buckboard of tawny wood with russet leather cushions and harness,—his latest present,—and soon, in cheerful companionship, forgot all sorrows amid such views of land and water as Sheepshead Point people think only Sheepshead Point can offer.
To reach Sheepshead Point, a boat steams daily, and several times a day, from a station on the line of a great railway skirting the eastern Atlantic coast. Issuing from a drawing-room car there, a young woman, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and jacket of sailor blue, with a loose shirt of red silk belted around a taper waist, her small head with its sailor-hat half shrouded from view in a blue tissue veil, walked lightly ahead of Mr. Alan Grove and, attended by an elderly maid, went far forward to stand in the bows of the boat.
Grove, struck by the grace and distinction of her carriage, looked again, and then was conscious of an actual fierce jump of the heart.
"Can there be two of them?" he asked of his inner man. "Doctors tell you if you keep your body in good order, and your mind healthily at work, you will never see a ghost—and yet—that's thedouble of the woman who sailed away from me last Thursday; who's haunted me during the six madly misspent weeks since I had the misfortune to be told off to take her in to dinner. Oh! no, it isn't. Yes, it is—by Jove, itisGladys Eliot."
He was never so astonished. Believing her to be at that moment on the ocean, nearing British shores, Grove was fairly staggered when Miss Eliot, turning, espied him and, by a graciously easy nod, summoned him to her side. Considering the manner of their parting a few weeks back, he wondered at himself for the immediate abjectness of his obedience.
It was a favorite phrase of Gladys Eliot's admirers to describe her as having a "Duchess of Leinster head and throat." Nature had certainly bestowed upon this daughter of nobody in particular in the Western Hemisphere a pose of a proud little head upon broad, sloping shoulders, as fine as that much-photographed great lady's. She had, in addition, a pair of innocent, Irish-blue eyes and a guileless smile; a voice, in speaking, that was sweet and low; and the best or worst manners inthe world, so critics said, according to the desirableness of her interlocutor.
"Mr. Grove! How perfectly extraordinary that you should be here," she exclaimed, giving him the tips of her well-gloved fingers, while the maid and dressing-bag withdrew discreetly into the background.
"Did you expect me to remain forever on the steps of the Claremont tea-house, like a monument of a city father, to adorn the suburbs of New York?"
"You are so quick-tempered, so unreasonable! How should I know you were going to take such dire offence? But please—I can't quarrel away off here, or even justify myself. If you are going to remain furious with me, at least gratify my curiosity first, and tell me how you came on this boat, and where you are going. Then, if you are so inclined, you may retire into your shell and sulk."
A soft light was shining in her eye. Her voice was pleading; her face, most beautiful. Grove, promising himself, in street vernacular, to "go off and kick himself" directly afterwards, took his placeat her elbow and gazed down hungrily upon her artless, changeful countenance.
"Rather tell me why you are not about to plant your triumphant banner on British shores once more. I read your name in the list of those sailing. The newspapers have given all of your summer plans in detail, all the country-houses that are to receive you, all the aristocrats that are to send invitations to dinner, to meet your ship at Queenstown."
She colored slightly. "As usual, you are making fun of me. What would be the use, since you won't believe me, of telling you my actual reason for backing out of this English visit, and letting my mother and sister go without me? No, I shan't flatter you by showing my real self."
"I have seen enough of your real self, thank you. I believe I prefer the unreal, the imaginary woman I suffered myself to fancy you to be for a brief space after our acquaintance began."
"Now you are rude," she began, her voice faltering ever so little, but enough to shake his equilibrium. He made a movement towards her; and she lookedhim in the face, trying to keep down the tingle of satisfaction in her veins. For Gladys's experience of men had taught her to recognize in a certain phase of incivility the existence of passion unsubdued. It is only indifference in his sex that can maintain an armor of polite self-control towards hers.
Grove caught the transient gleam in her eye, and read it aright. Immediately he was on the defensive, and his manner froze.
"I believe you know my aunt, Mrs. Gervase, in town," he said. "I think I saw you at one of her dances, in January."
"Mrs. Gervase is the dearest thing," interrupted Miss Eliot, conscious of blankness in her tone.
"She may be, but it would be a brave person who would tell her so. She is a delightful, but autocratic, personage; and one of the treats of the year for me is to get away to her and my uncle for a holiday, when they have no one else. This is one of those rare occasions. The cottage people who have come down to Sheepshead have a tacit agreement to keepto themselves, just now. They are supposed to be getting their houses to rights, and making gardens, and what not. Mrs. Gervase says they are really wearing out the past season's gloves, and putting tonics on their hair, and trying new cures and doses, for which there was no time before leaving town. The days will pass in doing as we please, and in the evening we shall dine well (for the Gervases have a corker of a cook), after which my aunt and uncle and I will take each a book and a lamp into some nook of the library, and read till bedtime. You can't imagine a life more to my taste."
"Prohibitory to outsiders, at least," said Gladys. "This is, as I suppose you mean it to be, awfully alarming to me; for I haven't told you that I am for three weeks to be Mrs. Gervase's nearest neighbor. I am going to visit an old friend of my mother's,—Mrs. Luther Prettyman."
Grove experienced a sensation of dismay. The Prettymans! Château Calicot, as he had dubbed their new florid "villa," built on the shore in objectionable proximity to his uncle's house, some threeyears back! He remembered the vines planted, the shrubs set out, the rattan screens hung, the final adjustment of chairs by Mrs. Gervase, in the attempt to shut out every glimpse of the Prettyman belongings from their place of daily rendezvous on the veranda at Stoneacres; his uncle's sly amusement when the cupola of the Prettyman stables, and the roof of a detestable little sugar-temple tea-house were projected on their line of vision, spite of all. Mrs. Gervase could not forgive herself for not having secured that point of land when land was so ridiculously cheap. On an average of once a day, she reminded her husband that she had begged him to do so, and he had put it off until too late.
Mrs. Prettyman, unvisited by Mrs. Gervase for many months after the red-brown gables of her costly dwelling rose into prominence at Sheepshead Point, had gradually found her way into quasi-intimacy at Stoneacres. Mrs. Gervase, protesting that her neighbor was commonplace, vacuous, a being from whom one could derive nothing more profitable than the address of a place in town to have one's lace lampshadesmade a dollar cheaper than elsewhere, allowed herself, in time, to take a mild but perceptible interest in Prettyman affairs. Through force of habit, she had grown accustomed to survey the Prettyman lodge-gates, in driving, without remarking upon "the absurdity of gilded finials to iron railings, at a rough, seaside place like this." Nay, the noses of the Gervase cobs were now not infrequently turned in through these gilded railings. Mr. and Mrs. Gervase dined periodically with the Prettymans. The Prettymans repaired more frequently to Stoneacres. Mrs. Prettyman made capital, in town, of her friendship with "dear Mrs. Gervase." This, Grove, like the rest of the world, had come gradually to know and accept. But it grated on him to hear that the woman who, so far, had furnished his life its chief feminine influence should be associated in this way with the mistress of Château Calicot. It belittled his one passion—now put away as dead, but still his own. This, indeed, set the crowning touch upon his misfortune of meeting her again.
"My dear boy, you might have knocked me down with a feather," said Mrs. Gervase, upon capturing her nephew at the wharf and driving away with him. "Tell me at once what you mean by knowing Gladys Eliot, and arriving with her in that intimate sort of way, just as I had, with infinite trouble, succeeded in bluffing the Prettymans with a mere dinner on Saturday! Now you will behavingto call.You, of all people, hitting it off with Gladys Eliot!"
"Give yourself no concern," put in Mr. Gervase, who was driving, looking back over his shoulder with a beaming smile; "I offer to throw myself into the breach. A woman as beautiful, as tall, as placid, as Miss Eliot commands the best homage of my heart. I forewarn you that I am going desperately into this affair. Such luck never came my way before."
"Stop at the confectioner's for the macaroons, Henry," said his wife, ignoring transports. "Alan, you are looking wretched. When I think of those ruddy, brown cheeks, and the look of vigor you brought out of your college athletics a few years back, I'm inclined to renounce mind and go in for muscle exclusively. Oh, that wretched grind of life in New York that crushes the youth and spirit out of you poor boys that have to toil for a living! Surely, it isn'tonlylaw that's worked such havoc in those pale, thin cheeks—"
"My dear Agatha, your sympathy would put a well man in his bed," said Mr. Gervase, whose keen eyes took in more of the actual situation than did his wife's.
"Oh well!—stop here, please; no, I won't get down, Jonas sees me; he will be out directly, with the parcel—you must see, Henry, that Alan has changed, even since—"
"Alan, let me tell you of a bill our friend Jonas, here, who is a bit of a horse-jockey, as well as local confectioner andpastry-cook, sent in recently to your aunt. He had been selling her a mate to her chestnut, and the account ran this way:
"'Mrs. H. GERVASE to I. JONAS, Dr.
Grove was glad to cover his various discomforts with a laugh. But he did not find it easy to elude the vigilance of Mrs. Gervase, who bided her time until an opportunity presented itself for an uninterrupted talk with him.
"Stretch yourself out on that bamboo couch, and let me put the pillows in," she said, when they two adjourned to the veranda, in the twilight after dinner. "It is such fun to have a boy to cosset once more, with my own lads at college, and three weeks to wait before I can get Tom and Louis back from New London after the boat-race."
"You have such an inspired faculty for making men comfortable," Groveremarked, from the depths of hisbien-être.
"Custom, I suppose. An only daughter, with a father and three brothers to wait upon till I married, and a husband and two sons to impose on me since. I should not know how to handle girls. I like them, of course,—find them all very well in their way,—but they bother me. Perhaps it is that there are no old-fashioned girls any more—no young ones, certainly. They come into the world like Minerva from Jove's brain. They are so learned, or clever, or worldly-wise, read everything, see everything, hear everything discussed, have no illusions—but, there, I can't explain my preference. Men are captious, obstinate, whimsical, by turns; disappoint one continually in little things—but in the main they are so broad and big; scatter nonsense into thin air; are so loyal and unswerving to their beliefs; know where they stand, and, having made up their minds to action, do not change."
"In short," remarked Grove, "you arelike the little servant-maid in Cranford, when they told her to hand the potatoes to the ladies first. 'I'll do as you bid me, ma'am, but I like the lads best.' My dearest auntie, there must be guardian angels specially appointed to look after our sex, and you are one of them. This is the age and America is the field for the unchecked efflorescence of young womankind. But when the conversation takes on this complexion, I feel it to be unfair not to allow the defendant the assistance of counsel; though, even if Uncle Henry were here, I am sure we should both be demolished speedily."
"Never mind Henry," said that gentleman's representative. "He has got a new letter from a man in London whom he keeps for the purpose of making him miserable with catalogues of sales of books and papers he can't afford to buy. But he potters over them, and marks the lists, and writes back to the man in London, and, as you know, we do manage to become possessed of much more dear antiquity than the house will hold or our income warrant. This time, he is buriedalive for an hour to come, for it is about a sale of Sir Philip Francis's letters and manuscripts at Sotheby's very soon."
"I don't believe the real 'Junius' announcing himself would get me out of this bamboo chair and away from this deepening of eventide upon the sea and islands, the afterglow of sunset melting into moonlight, the soft caressing of the salt air blending with those hidden heliotropes of yours! Now, dear lady, let's go back to the concrete. I knew, the moment your eagle eye fell on me this afternoon, you would find out all that in me is. For so many years I've been telling you my scrapes, I may as well out with the latest and biggest of them. Two months ago, I took Gladys Eliot in to dinner at the Sargents'. I kept it from you in town, for which you'll say I am properly punished. I fell in love with her, like a schoolboy with green apples, heeding not the danger of unwholesomeness. After that, I met her when and wherever I could push my way to her. I thought of her, sleeping and waking; received from her looks and tones and words that would, asthe lady novelists are so fond of saying, 'tempt an anchorite;'believedin her!"
"My poor child, how wretched!" said Mrs. Gervase, promptly.
"So it proved. Last but not least of the comedy,—I skip the details,—I was deluded into buttoning myself up in a fluffy, long-tailed, iron-gray coat that I got in London last spring and had not had time to wear, put on a bunch of white carnations, and drove out to one of those inane Claremont teas in my friend Pierre Sargent's trap, because, forsooth,sheasked me. For an hour I suffered martyrdom in that little greenhouse sort of a veranda, with people herded together gossiping, and not setting their feet upon the lawn over the river that they came out to see. Women talked drivel to me, waiters slopped tea over me, and we walked on slices of buttered bread. Thenshecame—on the box-seat of that brute McLaughlin's drag, having eyes for him only, so that every one talked of it!"
"I remember—and I could not imagine what brought you there. Yes, I sat down on a little cake and completelyruined my new porcelain-bluecrépon—those waiters were very careless. Jolly faded it trying to take out the spot, and Mathilde had the greatest trouble to match the stuff. Alan, that man McLaughlin ought to be drummed out of polite society. The girl who would receive his attentions, let herself be talked of as likely to be his wife, cannot at heart be nice. When your dear mother and I were girls, we would not havelookedat a big, vulgar creature like that, simply because he drove four-in-hand and was known to be rich. He would never have been asked to your grandfather's table. The materialism of this age takes, to me, no form more objectionable than the frank acceptance of such as he by women, old and young."
"Exactly," said Grove, grimly. "And when I met her at his side, she turned away from him one moment with a banal jest for me, and then quickly recaptured him, as if fearful he would escape. That, even my infatuation would not suffer. I turned on my heel, and, until I met her by chance on the boat to-day, have never seen her since."
"What can have been her reason for not going abroad?" said Mrs. Gervase, eagerly—a trifle suspiciously.
Grove was silent. In his ear sounded a dulcet voice, murmuring as the boat neared shore: "Perhaps, when you have consented to feel better friends with me, you will come and let me tell youwhy I stayed."
"You know, of course, that everybody says she is engaged? Her mother has hinted it to Mrs. Prettyman. If it be to this McLaughlin, then God knows you are well rid of her. If that be a blind, Alan dear,—you know it was always my way with you boys to scold about little things and let great ones pass,—I shan't add a word to your self-reproach; but I'll warn you—oh! I won't have the sin on my soul of letting you go unwarned. That woman, no matter whether she thinks she loves you or not, would make your misery. The parents of to-day don't trouble themselves to train up wives for the rank and file of our honest gentlemen. They create fine ladies, and look about for some one to take the expense of them off theirhands. It is common talk that the Eliots have been strained to their utmost means to carry their girls from place to place, with the expectation of making rich marriages. The beauty and success of this one has apparently blinded those poor people to the consequences of their folly. The girl has been brought up to fancy herself of superior clay,—her habits are luxurious, her wants extravagant.
"More than all, for five years she has been fed on the flatteries of society. Personal praise is indispensable to her. She has lived and consorted with the most lavish entertainers of the most reckless society in our republic. Even supposing that you won her beauty and graces for your own, what on earth could you expect to offer her in exchange for what she would give up? My poor, dear lad, I'm talking platitudes, you think; but you and Tom and Louis shall not be allowed to wreck your futures upon such as Gladys Eliot, while I have breath to speak. I'm afraid I think all marriages a mistake for young men. I know they are, as we measure and value things, in what we call 'fashionable life.'Go out of it, by all means, if you can. To takeherout of it you would find to be quite another matter. And now, after this long homily, I've one question to put. Answer it, if you like—if you think I've the right to ask it. After seeing her again to-day, do you feel there is danger in her proximity?"