XXIIIAt Westwood House
THE autumn Sunday afternoon figured as the flawless half of a day of perfection, with the sky a vivid blue and the hardwood forest of the mountain top, lately touched by the first sharp frosts, a riot of gorgeous coloring. On the broad veranda of the ancient manor-house of Westwood the conversation, which had been desultory at best, languished in sympathy with the reposeful spell of time and place and the peaceful surroundings.
With a gently worded phrase of apology to his daughter’s guest, the judge had pleaded an old man’s privilege, dragging his chair to the farther end of the veranda and lighting his corn-cob pipe in courteous isolation. Tregarvon marked the bit of old-fashioned chivalric deference to Elizabeth, and wondered how many men of his own generation would be as thoughtfully considerate of the small amenities.
The thought was one of a series emphasizingthe gross incredibility of the theory involving Richardia’s father in the conspiracy against the Ocoee. That the white-haired, ruddy-faced Chesterfield of Westwood House might challenge an antagonist, give him the choice of weapons, and afterward kill him unflinchingly, was easily conceivable. But that he would descend to the methods of the dynamiter or the midnight assassin was momently growing more and more unbelievable.
With Elizabeth for hisvis-à-visin her broad-armed veranda chair, Tregarvon was finding it increasingly difficult to fix his attention upon the Ocoeean mysteries. For some reasons—the unfamiliar surroundings, the gap of absence so suddenly and unexpectedly bridged, or because there was some subtle change in her—his cousin was singularly reticent. While the talk remained general she took her part in it; but whenever it threatened to become a dialogue, Tregarvon was instantly made to feel the raising of the barrier.
Since the guilty flee when no man pursueth, Tregarvon fancied he need be at no loss to account for Miss Wardwell’s attitude. She had doubtless received his confession letter—though no mention had been made of it—and beyond that, she and Richardia had in all probabilitybeen comparing notes. He could feel the presence of the Damoclean sword suspended above his head, and was looking forward unjoyously to the moment when chance, or design on the part of Carfax and Richardia, would give Miss Wardwell her reproachful opportunity.
The dreaded moment came when Miss Richardia, who had been discussing autumn flowers with Carfax, asked the golden youth if he would like to see her chrysanthemums and asters in the sheltered posy-patch in the rear of the manor-house. And when they were gone, Tregarvon was left alone with his responsibilities.
It was Miss Wardwell who first broke the little silence which followed the departure of the flower seekers, and her manner was distinctly at variance with her accustomed attitude of serenity and self-possession; was rather the manner of one marching reluctantly but firmly up to the mouth of a loaded cannon.
“Were you tremendously shocked yesterday afternoon when you learned that I was coming?” she asked.
“It is no use to deny it,” he confessed bravely. “It was a complete surprise—as you probably intended it to be.”
“No; I didn’t intend it—until just at the last.Richardia has been asking me to come down, and she knew a week or more ago that I was coming. I supposed, of course, she would tell you, and didn’t know that she hadn’t told you until I received her last letter, just as we were leaving.”
“You came with your father and mother?”
“Yes. Pennsylvania has been building some monuments on the old battle-fields, and papa is one of the commissioners. He and mamma didn’t particularly wish to be bothered with me, I imagine, but I had to come. Have you guessed why, Vance?”
Tregarvon thought he knew the constraining reason very well, indeed, but he was not quite courageous enough to say so. Instead, he temporized, as a man will, postponing the instant when the hair-hung sword must fall.
“I’m the poorest of mind-readers,” he protested. “I can’t even read my own, at times. But I suppose you have my letter, and you thought it ought to be answered in person.”
“I have had many letters from you: which one do you mean?”
“The one I wrote a week ago to-day in the hotel in Chattanooga.”
She shook her head slowly. “No; your last letter was written two weeks ago, and it waspostmarked ‘Coalville.’ I remember you said you were writing after Poictiers had gone to bed.”
Tregarvon groaned inwardly. The thing which he thought had been safely done had not been done at all; it still remained to be done. He was bracing himself to take the plunge when she went on hurriedly:
“You were saying just now that you couldn’t read your own mind—sometimes. I wish I might read it now—this moment, Cousin Vance!” She was trying to look him fairly in the eyes and was not succeeding very well.
“Read my mind?—heaven forbid!” he gasped. Then he came to his senses and tried to repair the terrible misstep. “You know—er—you know what I mean; a man’s mind is seldom fit for a—a good woman to look into, Elizabeth.”
“Yours is, always,” she asserted loyally, and he winced as if she had struck him a blow. “I assure you I haven’t known you all my life for nothing, Vance. And it was because I had known you as no other woman ever will, that I was willing to try to make you happy.”
He was wondering dumbly how much of this he could stand when she continued, quite calmly, though the brown eyes were looking past him.
“As I have said, I had to come: there is a crisis; and with your letters before me, I couldn’t write. We agreed once, you remember, to go around the sentimental field instead of going through it; but—but you haven’t been living up to the spirit of that agreement in your letters.”
Tregarvon found his handkerchief and mopped his face. The matchless autumn afternoon had grown suddenly sweltering for him.
“You mean that I’ve been writing you love-letters? I’m a brute, Elizabeth. I——”
“Please don’t make it any harder for me than you are obliged to,” she pleaded gently. “If you stop me now, I shall never be able to go on. I have come all the way down here to say something to you; something that I couldn’t write, and a thing that every added letter of yours was making more difficult to say. But one word from you now will make it easier—if it is the right word. Tell me, Vance; hasn’t this separation proved to you that we couldn’t—that cousins ought not to marry?”
Slowly it ground its way into his brain that the worst had befallen; that Elizabeth, really and truly in love with him, now, had guessed, either from his letters or from Richardia’s, the true state of affairs; and that womanly prideand affection had brought her to the scene of action to commit martyrdom.
“Oh, by Jove!—you mustn’t, Elizabeth!” he broke out in a sudden access of contrition. “I can’t allow you to outdo me in pure generosity that way! And, besides, there is Uncle Byrd’s money.”
“I have thought of that, too,” she said, quite judicially. “But, Vance, dear, we must simply rise superior to all the mere money considerations. Richardia has been telling me about your prospects here—your mine—and your brave struggle to make something out of nothing. You will need Uncle Byrd’s money; you are needing it now. And I—if we—well, I shall not need it, anyhow,” she ended rather incoherently.
“The Lord help me, Elizabeth!” he groaned, entirely ignoring the white-haired, white-mustached figure smoking peacefully at the farther end of the veranda. “I don’t deserve——”
“I know you don’t,” she agreed instantly; “you deserve ... well, you deserve something quite different. But whatever happens, and whatever you say, I must do what I came here to do. I—I have made a discovery, Cousin Vance.”
“Of course you have,” he said desperately. “I knew you would, sooner or later, though I havetried awfully hard to make myself believe that there wasn’t any discovery to be made.”
“I know: but seriously, Vance; deep down in your heart, you don’t really care, do you?”
“Why, Elizabeth! Of course I care. And I have blamed myself straight through from the first.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” she protested quickly. “It is all my fault, or my—no, I simplywon’tcall it a misfortune.”
“Your fault?” he queried. “You mean because you didn’t suspect it and choke it off right at the beginning. But I haven’t give you a chance to do that, have I?”
“I didn’t suspect it,” she said musingly; “I was very far from suspecting it. It came all at once, like a blow, you know; and then it was too late to ‘choke it off,’ as you say.”
The man, the true man, in him rose up in its might to buffet him into the path of uprightness and straightforwardness. “No; it is not too late, Elizabeth,” he assured her gravely.
“Yes, it is,” she objected with pathetic earnestness.
“No,” he insisted. “We must still make good. Do you know what people at home will say if our engagement is broken now? They will saythat I made it impossible for you to carry out Uncle Byrd’s wishes; and that I did it deliberately, to get the money for myself.”
“But you haven’t!” she cried in wide-eyed astonishment. “Iam the guilty one.”
“You?”
“Yes. This is what I came all the way from Philadelphia to say to you, Vance. Do you remember, one time when we were trying to ‘galvanize,’ I think that was the word you used, ourselves into the sentimental ecstasy supposed to be the normal condition of engaged people, I told you jokingly that if I ever found any one whom I could really lo—like better——”
“Elizabeth!”
She nodded, soberly and looked away from him. “Yes; it is true; and I had to come and tell you. You may despise me; it is your privilege.”
Tregarvon got up and took the necessary step to the veranda end which gave him the view into the rearward flower-garden. They were there, Carfax and Richardia, bending together over the chrysanthemums. When he turned back to face his cousin he was smiling grimly.
“As our cattle-ranching cousin in the West would say, you mustn’t ‘rawhide’ yourself too severely, Elizabeth. Leaving the dollars out ofit—and I’ll find a way to leave them out if I have to throw them to the birds—I’m getting about what I deserve; which is the glad hand all around the block.”
“You are bitter, and I can’t blame you,” she said, with something alarmingly like a sob at the catching of her breath. “But really, at the very bottom of it all, you don’t care so very much, do you, Vance?”
“Don’t I? I’d be a mighty good specimen of the superman if I didn’t care. Who is this fellow who, coming after me, is preferred before me?”
“I—I can’t tell you that.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because—oh, you are perfectly savage with me!—because he has had no right to speak, nor I to listen. He hasn’t spoken; he may never speak. But that doesn’t make any difference.”
“No,” said Tregarvon wearily; “nothing makes any difference now. But I told you a moment ago not to reproach yourself too bitterly. I am in precisely the same sort of a boat myself, Elizabeth—without your good hope of getting ashore.”
“You?Vance!”
The grim smile came again, and he said—thoughrather in shame than in malice: “It hurts a little, doesn’t it?—when it is the other way about. For nearly a week I have been thinking that you knew. I told you all about it, you know, in the letter I wrote last Sunday night in Chattanooga; the letter which seems to have gone astray. That is why I was so slow in getting your meaning: I was looking for you to dagger me the other way around, you know.”
Miss Wardwell was no longer embarrassed, but she was well-nigh tearful.
“I suppose it is one of those horridly pretty Southern girls in the school,” she said half-spitefully. “Have you——”
“No,” he hastened to say; “I have been almost as decent as the other fellow; the fellow you won’t name for me. I haven’t asked her to marry me.”
“And she?”
“She is going to marry a man old enough to be her father—if she doesn’t reconsider and marry a young donkey of a millionaire.”
Rucker, following an order which had been given him earlier in the day, was tooling the yellow car up the weed-grown carriage approach, coming to drive the two young men back to Coalville. Also, Carfax and Miss Birrell werereturning from the posy-patch. Miss Wardwell stood up and put her hands into Tregarvon’s.
“I’m sorry and happy and miserable all in the same breath,” she said. “I shall be here for a few days. Papa and mamma are going over to the Shiloh battle-field after they leave Chattanooga, and I shall stay until they come back. You’ll come again, won’t you?”
He was able to smile down into the brown eyes of beseeching. The stabbed-vanity pain was passing—a little.
“Most certainly I shall come, as often as you can get me an invitation, and as my job on the Ocoee will permit. I don’t propose to lose my best cousin just because I happen to have lost a lot of other things.”
This was the key-note of the cheerful tone which he contrived to preserve throughout the leave-takings. But at the car boarding he let Carfax have the tonneau to himself, taking the seat beside Rucker for the better chance it offered for a needed interval in which to bind up the wounds of the piercedamour-propre.