CHAPTER IX.GODFREY SCHUYLER.
It was the day after Edith’s visit to her mother, and taking advantage of the hour when Mrs. Sinclair took her after-lunch nap, she went out with her book into the grounds, and strolled on until she came to a clump of trees at the farthest extremity of the park, where was a little rustic chair. This had always been her favorite resort, the place she sought when she wished to be alone, and here she sat down, ostensibly to read, but really to think,—not so much of the past as of the future. That her kind, indulgent mistress, who had been an invalid for so many years, was failing fast, was very apparent to her experienced eyes, and only that morning she had observed that the handkerchief Mrs. Sinclair held to her lips after a paroxysm of coughing had a faint coloring of blood upon it.
“And where shall I find a home like this when she is gone?” Edith asked herself, sadly. “I might go back to mother and help her with her sewing, and take Kitty’s place,” she said, shuddering a little as she thought of the small house in Caledonia Street, so different from the pleasant home which had been hers for more than two years.
She might go out as a governess again, but when she remembered the insult which she had twice received when a governess,once from the young man of the house, who looked upon her as lawful prey, and once from the master, a brutal wretch who could not withstand her beauty, she thought any life preferable to that. Her face and manner were both against her, and if Mrs. Sinclair died, her only safety was in her mother’s house.
“Yes, that will be the end of it,” she said, a little bitterly, as she remembered all her mother had hoped for her and what she had once hoped for herself.
So much was she absorbed in these reflections that she did not at first see the two gentlemen who had entered the Park by a side gate, and were walking slowly up the path, which led directly past the chair in which she was sitting. Two young gentlemen she thought them, for one at least was very young, with a supple, springy grace in every movement, while the other, whose step was quite as rapid, though it had more dignity and character in it, could not be old; or even middle-aged, with that fine, erect form, that heavy, silken beard, and wealth of dark brown hair. That it could be Col. Schuyler and his son she never dreamed, for though Mrs. Sinclair had said her brother was not forty-one, Edith, who, like most young people, held forty as an age bordering on antediluvianism, thought of him always as a grayish-haired man, with a stoop, perhaps, and a slow tread, and not at all like this man coming so swiftly toward her, and pointing out something in the Park to his companion. He had evidently been at Oakwood before, for she heard him say:
“We ought to see the house from this point. This must be a new path since I was here, and yet I remember that little foot-bridge. Your mother and I used often to come down to it; she liked to see the water falling over the white stones. That was nineteen years ago.”
“Hush-sh, father! look, there’s a young lady sitting in the shadow of those trees,” came warningly from the younger man, or boy, and then with a great heart throb, Edith knew who the strangers were and arose to her feet.
They were quite up to her now, and both removed their hats and stood with heads uncovered, while the elder said to her:
“I beg your pardon, miss, but will this path take us directly to the house at Oakwood? I was here many years ago and ought to know the way, but it seems a little strange to me.”
His voice was very pleasant and his manner deferential as he stood looking at her, while Edith replied that the path did lead directly to the house, which could be seen as soon as he reached the slight elevation yonder. Then with eyes cast down she stood waiting for him to pass on, she thinking of that one time when she had spoken to him from the window of the cottage in far-off Hampstead, and he thinking of the marvellous beauty of her face, and wondering who she could be.
“Some guest at Oakwood, undoubtedly,” he thought, and then he put another question to her and said, “Do you know if Mrs. Sinclair is at home this morning? I am her brother, Colonel Schuyler, from America, and this is my son Godfrey.”
With a bow to both gentlemen Edith replied:
“Mrs. Sinclair is at home, and is expecting you. I am Edith Lyle, Mrs. Sinclair’s hired companion.”
She said this proudly, and with a purpose not to deceive the gentlemen with regard to her position longer than was necessary. She had so often been spoken to by strangers in just the respectful, deferential tone with which Colonel Schuyler had addressed her, and then had seen the look of unmistakable interest give place to one of surprise and indifference when her real position was known, that she wished to start fair with these guests of her employer, and she was neither astonished nor disappointed when she saw the peculiar look she knew so well steal over the grave, proud face of Colonel Schuyler, who bowed as he said:
“Oh, yes. I knew she had some young person staying with her. Thanks for your directions. We shall find our way now very well. Come, Godfrey.”
But Godfrey was in no particular haste. A beautiful girl was attractive to him under all circumstances, whether the daughter of a hundred earls or the paid companion of his aunt, and his manner had not changed one whit when Edith announced herself as his inferior according to the creed of thebeau monde.
“Come, my son,” Colonel Schuyler said again, and then Godfrey passed on with a look at Edith, which plainly meant: “I’d enough sight rather stay with you, but you see it’s impossible.”
It was the old, old story; contempt from the older ones and impertinence from the younger so soon as she was known for a dependant, Edith thought, and a few hot, resentful tears trickled through the white fingers she pressed to her eyes as the two men walked away and were lost to view over the hill. And yet for once she was mistaken. Colonel Schuyler had felt no contempt for her; he never felt that for any woman, and the change in his manner, when he found who she was, was involuntary, and owing wholly to his early training, which had built a barrier between himself and those who earned their daily bread! He had taken Edith for the possible young lady of some noble house, and was disappointed to find her only the companion of his sister, but a lady still, judging from her manners and speech; while Godfrey would sooner have parted with his right hand than have been rude to any woman.
A dress, whether it hung in slatternly folds around a washerwoman, or adorned the daughter of a duchess, was sacred in his eyes, and though in a certain way he had all the pride of the Schuylers and Rossiters combined, it was a pride which prompted him to treat every one kindly. His mother, who had been very fond of him, had done her best to make him understand that, as a Rossiter and Schuyler, it behooved him to demean himself like one worthy of so illustrious a line of ancestry; but Godfrey did not care for ancestry, nor blood, nor social distinctions, and played with every ragged boy in Hampstead, and sat for hours with old Peterkin the cobbler, and kept little Johnnie Mack at Schuyler Hill all day when his mother was out working, and the child would have been alone but for this thoughtfulness. Everybody knew Godfrey Schuyler, and everybody liked him, especially the middle and poorer classes, to whom he was as the brightness of the morning.
An intolerable tease, Godfrey was something of a terror to his eldest sister Julia, whose imperious and sometimes insolent mannershe mimicked and ridiculed, while to Alice Creighton of New York, who he knew had been selected for his wife, he was a perpetual source of joy and annoyance,—joy when he treated her with that tenderness and gentleness so natural to him in his intercourse with girls, and annoyance when even with his arm around her waist he mimicked her affected ways and her constant allusions to “when I was abroad.”
In stature Godfrey was tall, with a graceful, willowy form, a bright, though rather dark complexion, soft, laughing blue eyes, with a world of mischief in them, and rich brown hair which clustered in curls about his forehead, and which he parted in the middle until his sister Julia, who did not like it, called him a prig and an ape, while Alice, who did like it, said it was “pretty, and just as the young noblemen wore their hair when she was abroad.” That was enough for Godfrey. If Alice Creighton liked it because she saw it abroad, he surely would not follow the fashion, and the next morning at breakfast his curly locks were parted on the side very near to his left ear, and a black ribbon bound two or three times around his head to keep his refractory hair in its place.
“If ever he went abroad he hoped he should not make a fool of himself,” he said, and now that he was abroad, he bristled all over with nationality, and wore his country outside as plainly as if he had had placarded on his back, “I am an American, and proud of it, too.”
Nothing was quite equal to New York in his estimation, and he was particularly averse to the rosy, healthy-looking girls whom he everywhere met, and in his first letters to his sisters and Alice he told them they were beauties compared with the English girls; “even if Alice’s nose was a pug and Jule’s forehead so low that it took a microscope to find it, and Em’s ankles no bigger than a pair of knitting-needles.”
But when he came upon Edith Lyle, in her simple white wrapper, with her perfectly transparent complexion, and the knot of blue ribbon in her golden-brown hair, he acknowledged to himself that here at last, even on English soil, was a woman more beautiful than anything he had ever seen across the water,and he took off his hat and stood uncovered before her as readily as if she had been the queen. That she was only his aunt’s companion, instead of the high-born lady he had at first supposed her to be, made no difference with him. She was a woman, and as he reached the little hill beyond where she was sitting, he turned to look at her again, and said:
“By George, father, isn’t she a beauty?”
Mr. Schuyler knew to whom his son referred, and answered, in his usual grave, quiet way:
“She had a fine profile, I thought. Yes, certainly, a remarkable profile.”
They were near the house by this time, and in the excitement of meeting with his sister and the long conversation which followed, Colonel Schuyler hardly thought of Edith again until dinner was announced and she came in with Godfrey. That young man had soon grown tired of listening to talk about people and things dating back to a time he could not remember, and had sauntered out into the grounds in quest of Edith, who was more to his taste than the close drawing-room and the invalid on the couch.
Edith was in the summer-house now, and Godfrey joined her there, and in his pleasant, winning way asked if he was intruding, and if he might come in and occupy one of the chairs, which looked so tempting under the green vines.
“It was an awful bore to hear old folks talk about a lot of antediluvians,” he said; “and if she did not mind he would sit with her awhile.”
Edith nodded assent and motioned him to a chair, which he took, and removing his soft hat and brushing back his curls, he said:
“Now let us talk.”
To talk was Godfrey’s delight; and to Edith’s interrogatory:
“What shall we talk about?” he replied:
“Whatever you like;” and when she rejoined:
“Tell me of yourself and your home in America,” he mentally pronounced her a fine girl, with no nonsense about her; and in less than an hour had told nearly all he knew of himselfand of his family. They had a splendid place in Hampstead, he said, not so big and rambling as the fine houses in England, but pleasanter every way, and more home-like, with such a fine view of the Hudson and the blue mountains beyond.
“You have never been in America?” he said, affirmatively, thus saving Edith the necessity of answering, “and so you do not know how beautiful the Hudson is. Why, it beats the Rhine all to nothing.”
“Have you seen the Rhine?” Edith asked, smiling at this enthusiastic youth, so wholly American.
“No,” and Godfrey blushed as he met her smile; “but I’ve read of it, and heard Alice Creighton rave about it by the hour, and still I know the Hudson is ahead. You ought to see it once in the neighborhood of the Highlands; the view from our tower is magnificent, with those blue peaks stretching away in the distance, and rising one above the other until I used to think them the stairs which led to Heaven.”
How Edith’s heart throbbed as she listened to his description of a place she, too, knew so well, though of her knowledge she dared not give a sign; and how she longed to question her companion of that grave on the hillside! But she could not, and as Godfrey evidently expected her to say something, she asked if he had always lived in Hampstead.
“No; I was born on Fifth Avenue, in a brown-stone front, so that the first breath I drew was sufficiently stuffy and aristocratic; but I went to the country when I was five or six years old. Father took the old house down and built the new one. I never shall forget it,—never, for the dreadful thing which happened.”
Edith knew just what was coming, and steeled herself to listen to the details of that tragedy which had colored her whole life. Again the fingers of iron were clutching her throat, while Godfrey told of the young man whom he liked so much, and who had saved another’s life at the loss of his own.
“And when they reached him, the grass was red with blood, and he lay white, and still, and dead.”
Godfrey’s voice trembled as he said these words, and hepaused a moment in his tale, while Edith clasped her hands tightly together and tried to speak, but could not for the smothered sensation choking and stifling her so.
“We buried him in our own lot, and bought him a grand monument, and there are many flowers round, the spot,” Godfrey continued: and then he glanced at Edith, and starting up, exclaimed: “Why, what is the matter? You are whiter than a ghost. You are not going to faint? You must not faint! I don’t know what to do with girls who faint. Alice did it once, or made believe, and I kissed her and brought her to quick.”
He did not kiss Edith, but he fanned her with his soft hat until she waved him off, and found voice to say:
“It is the heat, and your vivid description of that poor fellow’s death. Did you tell me he was married?”
She asked the question from an intense desire to know if anything had ever been said of herself in connection with the dead.
“No, he was not married, but there was some talk of anaffaire du cœurbetween him and a young English girl, who went off soon after. There’s a bug on your dress, Miss Lyle. Why,”—and, as if it had just occurred to him, Godfrey continued,—“your name is the same as his. It cannot be, though, that you were at all related. He lived up near Alnwick. On our way from Scotland, father and I hunted up his friends, a sister and widowed mother,—poor but honest women, as the biographers say. The mother lives with her daughter, and we gave them a thousand dollars, and the young woman promised to call her little boy after me. The Governor,—that’s father,—did not quite like it, I guess, but I don’t see the harm. Why, I’ve named three different Dutch babies in Hampstead, all the children of Mrs. Peterkin Vandeusenhisen. Two of them are twins,—and I called one Godfrey Schuyler, and the other Schuyler Godfrey,—while the third, which happened to be a girl, was christened Alice Creighton,—that’s a young lady from New York, fathers ward, who is at Hampstead a great deal,—and so proud! You ought to have seen her bit of a pug nose go up when she heard the Dutch baby baptized. Why, she nearlyjumped out of her skin when Mrs. Van,—as I call her for short,—on being asked for the name, replied: ‘Alice Creighton Vandeusenhisen, if you please.’ The last was a suggestion of my own, by way of making a more striking impression on Alice, because you see, Mrs. Vandeusenhisen had a son,—Peterkin, junior, who was in love with Miss Creighton, and used to send her cakes of maple sugar and sticks of molasses candy he made and pulled himself. You ought to see his hands! The day before the christening I dressed up like a gypsy and deceived the girls and told their fortune, and said Alice would marry a Dutchman, with a long name, likeVanduesomething. So complete was my disguise that they did not suspect me, and when Alice heard the name at church, Alice Creighton Vandeusenhisen, she started up as if to forbid the banns, and then catching sight of my face she understood it at once, and was so angry, and when we were home from church she cried and said she hated me and would never speak to me again. But she got over it, and last Christmas sent a wax doll with a squawk in its stomach to her namesake.”
Godfrey had wandered very far from the woman on the heather hills who had called Abelard Lyle her son, and though Edith wished to know something more of her she did not venture to question her companion lest he should wonder at her interest in an entire stranger. She had laughed immoderately at his account of the babies named for himself and Miss Alice, and when he finished she said:
“You must be very fond of children, I think.”
“Yes, I am. I’d like a houseful, and when I marry I mean to have enough boys to make a brass band. I told Alice so once, and her nose went higher than it did when she heard the baby’s name. She called me a wretch, and an insulting dog, and said she hated boys, and me most of all. I knew she didn’t, though, because you see,—well, Alice has ten thousand a year, and that will straighten the worst case of turn-up nose in the world. She is an orphan and father is her guardian, and he and mother and Uncle Calvert, that’s my half-uncle and Alice’s, too, put their heads together and thought she’d be a good matchfor me, and it is rather an understood thing that we will marry some time, but I don’t believe we are half as likely to as if they’d said nothing about it. A fellow don’t want his wife picked out and brought to him off-hand as Eve was brought to Adam.”
Here Godfrey paused, and rising from his chair shook down his pants, a habit of his when he was interested or excited, and as his sister Julia said, “had talk on the brain.” He certainly had it now, for Edith was the first one he had found whom he had cared to talk to since leaving the ship, and after two or three shakes he resumed his seat, and told her of himself particularly; how he was going to college the next year, if he was home in time, and after that intended to study law and distinguish himself, if possible.
“Mother was very proud of me, and hoped great things of me,” he said. “I do not wish to disappoint her, for though she is dead, I cannot help thinking that she knows about me just the same, and when I am tempted to yield to what you call the small vices, I always feel her thin white hand on my head where she laid it not long before she died, and said, ‘Be a good and great man, Godfrey, and avoid the first approaches of evil.’ Mother was what they call a fashionable woman, but she was good before she died, and so sure as there is a heaven, so sure she is there, and I’ve never smoked, nor touched a drop of spirits, nor sworn a word since she died, and I never mean to either.”
Godfrey’s voice was low and tender, and his manner subdued when he spoke of his mother, but very different when he touched upon his sisters and ridiculed Julia’s fine lady airs and Emma’s readiness to bestuffed,—his definition for believing everything she heard, even to the most preposterous story. They were at Schuyler Hill now, he said, and Alice was there too, studying with their governess, Miss Browning, who, between the three, was awfully nagged, though she was quite as airy and stuck-up as Alice and Jule, and called him “that dreadful boy!”
“Boy, indeed! and I most eighteen, and standing five feet ten in my socks, to say nothing of this incipient badge of manhood,”and he stroked complacently his chin and upper lip where the beginning of a brown beard was visible.
How he rattled on, his fresh young face glowing and lighting up with his excitement, and how intently Edith listened and watched the play of his fine features, and admired his boyish beauty! Surely in him there was nothing but goodness and truth, and as she looked at him she felt glad that his young life was spared, though she could not understand why her husband must have been sacrificed for him. Once in her bitterness she had felt that she hated Godfrey Schuyler, but she did not hate him now, and as she walked slowly with him toward the house, she would have given much to have been as fresh, and frank, and open as he was, instead of living the lie she was living. And to what intent? What good had the deception ever done her? What goodcouldit do her, and why continue it longer? Why not be just what she was, with no concealment hanging over her, and startling her ofttimes with a dread of discovery? Why not tell Godfrey all aboutherselfjust as he had told her ofhimself? Surely, his recent talk with her would warrant such confidence, and why not commence at once a new life by openness and sincerity, even though she lost her place by it?
“I’ll do it and brave my mother, who alone has stood in my way so long,” she thought; and she began: “Mr. Schuyler”—but before she could say more, he interrupted her with:
“Don’t call me that. I’m too much of a boy. Call me Godfrey, please, unless the name is too suggestive of ‘Godfrey’s Cordial,’ in which case say Schuyler, but pray leave off the Mister till my whiskers will at least cast a shadow on the wall. Why, I dare say I shall call you by your first name yet. You cannot be much my senior. How old are you, Miss Lyle?”
It was a question which a little later in life, when more accustomed to the world and its usages, Godfrey would not have asked; but Edith answered unhesitatingly; “I am twenty-seven.”
“Zounds!” said Godfrey. “You don’t look it. I did not imagine you more than twenty. Why, you might almost be mymother! No, it will never do to call you Edith. Father’s eyebrows would actually meet in the centre at such audacity on my part; that’s a trick he has of scowling when disagreeably surprised. Notice it sometimes, please. The only wrinkle in his face is that valley between his eyes.”
They were in the hall by this time, and bowing to her voluble acquaintance, Edith passed on to her room, where for half an hour or more she sat thinking of the strange Providence which had brought her so near to her past life, and wondering, too, what the result would be, and if she should tell Godfrey as she had fully intended to do, when he interrupted her with his tide of talk. It did not seem as easy to do it now as it had a little while ago; the good opportunity was gone and might not return.
While thus musing the dressing-bell rang, and turning from the window she began to dress for dinner with more interest than usual. Her salary would not allow a very extensive or expensive wardrobe, even if she had desired it, which she did not. Her taste was simple, and she was one of the few to whom every color and style is becoming. Whatever she wore looked well upon her, and in a little country town she would undoubtedly have set the fashion for all. Selecting now from her wardrobe a soft, fleecy, gray tissue, with trimmings of pale blue, her favorite color, she tied about her throat a bit of rich lace which Mrs. Sinclair had given her, and wore the pretty set of pink coral, also that lady’s gift. It was not often that she curled her hair, but to-day she let two heavy ringlets fall upon her neck, and knew herself how well she was looking, when, at the ringing of the second bell, she descended to the hall where Godfrey was waiting for her. He had thought her very handsome in her morning wrapper and garden hat, and when he saw her now he gave a suppressed kind of whistle, and with as much freedom as if she had been Alice Creighton, or one of his sisters, said to her, “Ain’t you nobby, though!”
It is doubtful if Edith knew just whatnobbymeant, but she set it down as an Americanism, and knew she was complimented.
“Allow me,” Godfrey said, and offering her his arm, he conductedher to the dining-room, where his aunt and father were already assembled.