CHAPTER XVI.BREAKING THE NEWS.
Godfrey returned to Oakwood two weeks before the wedding, and brought with him a young artist, Robert Macpherson, whom he had found in Rome, and who had accompanied him to Russia. As he had not received his father’s letter he was ignorant of the engagement, and Colonel Schuyler blushed like a school boy, and stammered and hesitated, when he tried to tell him. Godfrey had asked for Miss Lyle, and the colonel, after replying that she was with her mother, had continued:
“My son, you may be surprised,—no, you can hardly be surprised, knowing her as you do,—when I tell you that I am,—yes, I am about to,—am going to,—give you a new mother. Yes,” and the colonel walked to the window and spat on a rosebush outside, and wiped his face, and mustering all his courage, added: “Miss Lyle has promised to be my wife, and you will agree with me, I think, that she is a remarkable,—yes, a very remarkable woman.”
He had told his story, and waited for Godfrey’s reply, which came first in a low, suppressed whistle, and then in a merry laugh as he jumped up, and giving his pants a violent shake, said: “I agree with you, father; she is a very remarkable woman, or she would not consent to be my mother and Jule’s; My! won’t she pick her eyes out, and Aunt Christine will help her. Why,shemeant to have you herself!”
“Who, Christine?” Colonel Schuyler said, aghast at the very idea of wedding a woman whom he detested, even though she was a Rossiter, and the sister of his wife.
“Yes, she has set her cap at you ever since mother died, and she came up to Hampstead with all her wraps and confoundeddrugs, and raised Cain generally,” Godfrey replied, and his father smiled a pleased kind of smile, and, man-like, was conscious of a new interest in the woman who had “set her cap for him,” while at the same time he felt intense satisfaction in thinking of Edith in all her youth and brilliant beauty, and comparing her with Aunt Christine, whose body was one great receptacle of drugs, and who, Godfrey said, wore two flannel wraps in the summer, and four in the winter, besides shawls and scarfs innumerable.
Godfrey’s preference was evidently for Edith, and so his father said to him: “You do not object. You like Miss Lyle, I believe.”
“Like her? Yes, I rather think I do, and if she’d been younger, or I older, I’d have gone for her myself. She’s the most splendid woman I ever saw, but, by Jove, I’m sorry for her, though, for what with Aunt Christine, and Alice, and Julia, and Tiffe and Em, she’ll have a sorry time.”
The colonel frowned darkly, and his eyebrows almost met together as he answered with great dignity:
“Everybody in my house must treat my wife with respect; but, Godfrey, perhaps it may be well in your letter home to speak a good word for Miss Lyle, prepare the way, you know. You have great influence over Julia, or at least over Miss Creighton, which amounts to the same thing. I have written, of course, but would like you to do so, too.”
“Certainly, with pleasure,” Godfrey said, and there was a merry twinkle in his saucy eyes as he thought of the “hornet’s nest” he would stir up at home.
The colonel had that day written to his eldest daughter, Julia, in his usual dignified manner, that he was about to marry Miss Edith Lyle, “a lady of good family, the daughter of a clergyman, the friend and companion of my deceased sister, your late Aunt Sinclair. She possesses many and varied accomplishments, and is, what I consider, a very remarkable person, and I shall expect a kind reception for her, and that all due deference will be paid to her by every member of my household. Break the news to your Aunt Christine, and tell Mrs.Tiffe to have the rooms in the south wing made ready for Mrs. Schuyler. I have written to Perry about repairing them, but she must superintend it.”
This was in part the colonel’s letter, while Godfrey’s was widely different.
“We are in for a step-mother, sure,” he wrote, “and may as well make the best of it. Try to imagine father in love, will you? and such a love! Truly she is ‘a very remarkable person,’ as you will say when you see her. Just think of father’s marrying a red-haired woman of forty, with a limp and glass eye, which looks at you with a squint, and a crack in her voice, which sounds like Ettie Armstrong’s old piano, and quite as many aches and pains as Aunt Christine herself! But then, she’s nice, and I like her ever so much, while the governor,—well, it is something wonderful to see how far gone he is; and I tell you, girls, one and all, that if you do not treat this beauty with proper attention there will be the old Nick to pay! She will take your breath away at first, for, after all I have said, you have no idea how she looks, and Alice must hold on to her little nose, and Aunt Christine may as well lay in a fresh supply of pills and Crown Bitters, and get her a new galvanic battery. She’ll need them all to steady her nerves after the shock the bride will give her. I shall be glad to be home once more, though I do not believe I am greatly improved with foreign travel. I still shake down my pants, and say ‘by Jove,’ and don’t believe I shall be ‘so disgusted with New York because it looks so new and backwoodsey,’ or that I shall constantly quote ‘dear, charmingPar-ee.’ In short, I am just as much a ‘clown’ as ever, but by way of recompense I mean, if I can, to bring you the nicest kind of a travelled chap, Robert Macpherson, whom I met in Rome, and like so much, even if he does part his hair in the middle, and carry an eyeglass, and put perfumery into his bath, and wear ruffled night-shirts buttoned behind. He’s a good fellow, with money, and a profession, too. He is an artist, and his father was cousin to Lord Somebody or other, and I mean to persuade him to come to America with me for you girls to pull caps about. So you’ve something to live forbesides the new mamma, to whom I must pay my respects as soon as I have finished this letter. So no more at present from your brother,
Godfrey.”
Godfrey.”
Godfrey.”
Godfrey.”
The young scamp chuckled with delight as he read over this letter and thought what a bombshell it would be in the staid household at Schuyler Hill.
“I haven’t written a lie either,” he said; “I only told them tothink offather’s fancying such a person, and they will think of it, and Aunt Christine will have a fit and swallow more than a quart of her bitters, and take a shock strong enough to knock her down, and Jule’s back will be up, and Alice’s nose, and Em will cry, and Tiffe will snort her indignation, and there’ll be thunder raised generally.”
After these remarks Godfrey folded his letter and shook himself down, and looked in the glass, and started for Caledonia Street to call upon Edith. He found her at home, looking so beautiful as she rose to meet him, with the flush on her cheek, and the new expression of peace and quiet in her eyes, that he was conscious of a sharp pang of regret for the years which lay between them. Then, as he remembered the woman of forty, with the limp and glass eye, and thought of the consternation at Schuyler Hill when his letter was received, and the surprise when the bride herself should arrive, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, while Edith looked wonderingly at him, with a rising color in her cheeks.
“You must excuse me,” he said, as he held her hand in his. “It seems so ridiculous to think of callingyoumother.”
“Don’t do it, please,” Edith replied. “I’d rather you would not. Let me be Edith.”
And so the ice was broken, and Godfrey plunged into the subject at once, in his half-comical, half-serious way.
“Honestly,” he said, “I am real glad you are going home with us. I never liked any one outside of our family as well as I do you, and once I had serious thoughts of making love to you myself! I did, upon my word, but when I subtractedeighteen from twenty-eight, I said ‘no go.’ So far as years are concerned that is worse than Aunt Christine and father.”
“Who is Aunt Christine?”
“Have I never told you of her? Well, inasmuch as you are to be one of us, I may as well enlighten you with regard to the individuals whose step-mother you are to be. Aunt Christine is mother’s sister, an old maid, whose love died and left her his money. Since mother’s death she has been with us a great deal of her time, quarrelling with Mrs. Tiffe,—that’s the housekeeper,—bullying the servants, nagging the governess, and watching to see that father didn’t look at a bonnet with matrimony in his eye. You see, she wanted him herself, he forty-one and she forty-six, and looking almost a hundred, with all the drugs and nostrums she takes for her fancied ailments. She has the neuralgia, and catarrh, and dyspepsia, and bronchitis, and liver complaint, and doctors for them all, and has her room as full of bottles as an apothecary’s shop, and sits with a dish of tar under her nose, and takes galvanic shocks, and has her hair dressed every day, and wears the richest of silk and finest of lace, and really looks splendidly when she is dressed,—was handsome once, and is very exclusive and aristocratic, and proud of her Rossiter blood, and will never rest until she knows a person’s pedigree, root and branch.”
There were little red spots on Edith’s cheeks and neck as she thought of Aunt Christine finding her out, root and branch. But, after all, what did it matter, so long as her husband knew and did not care? she reflected, and grew calm again, and amused, as Godfrey went on:
“I like her, of course, for she is very kind to me, but I would not have father marry her for the world. Not that he ever thought of it, though she has; and the time he rode out with Ettie Armstrong, the schoolmistress, she was so angry, and wondered how he could let himself down, and he a Schuyler, who had married a Rossiter!”
“Ettie Armstrong! That’s a pretty name,” Edith said, while there came before her mind the vision of a dark-eyed girl whohad promised to care for Abelard’s grave, and to whom she had confessed her love for the dead.
“Yes, ’tis a pretty name,” Godfrey said; “though Ettie herself is not pretty. She is most an old maid, I guess, and teaches the village school, and thrashed me like fun the summer I went to her, but never hit me a lick amiss. Father rode with her once,—a mere happen-so,—and Aunt Christine was furious. I say, Edith, except his age, father is a catch, and you a lucky fellow. Why, half the women in New York and Hampstead are after him, and have been ever since mother died. Even at her funeral, when the clergyman, in eulogizing her and telling what a loss she was to her family, asked ‘Who is there to fill her place?’ twenty old maids hopped up——”
“Oh, Godfrey!” Edith exclaimed, shocked at his levity; “you should not talk that way.”
Up to this point Godfrey had rattled on as if he had never had a serious thought or known a genuine feeling of affection; but at Edith’s rebuke the whole expression of his face changed instantly. His chin quivered, and his voice trembled, as he said:
“You think me, no doubt, an unfeeling wretch, who never cared for anybody; but you mistake me there. I loved my mother so much that I never go to sleep at night without thinking of her in heaven, and praying, in my poor way, that I may go to her some day; and I feel her hand on my head, and hear her dying voice bidding me try to be good; and I have tried every day. I loved my mother dearly, and the knowing that father will marry again brings her back to me, and I’ve rattled on like a fool just to keep—to keep—to keep from crying outright for the mother who died.”
He was crying now, and Edith cried with him and held his head on her lap, where he involuntarily laid it, while he sobbed out his grief. Nor did she like him less for it. Indeed, the bond between them was stronger than ever, now that she saw how deep his feelings were, and that under his gay exterior was hidden so much genuine affection and sterling worth. As she would have soothed and comforted a brother, she soothed andcomforted him until the little burst was over, and lifting up his head, he said in his old playful way:
“There, I’ve had it out, and cried in your lap anyway. Quite a little tempest, wasn’t it? I say, Edith, you are not to think I don’t want you to marry father, for I do. I like you ever so much, and I’m going to stand by you through thick and thin, and at first there’ll be more thick than thin, for Julia will not be pleased with a step-mother, and Em will follow Julia, and Alice, who is there a great deal, will sniff any way, and Aunt Christine will ride her highest horse; but you are sure to win in the end. Only wear your most queen-like air, and keep a stiff upper lip, and act as if born to the purple, and you’ll conquer at last, with the governor and me to uphold you. It’s a grand old place, and you’ll be happy there. Who is that? Look quick, do,” he exclaimed suddenly, and glancing toward the window Edith saw a cab standing before the gate, and a plainly dressed woman coming up the walk.
“That is Mrs. Rogers,” she said. “She lodges here, but has been absent several weeks. We were not expecting her so soon.”
“Mrs. Rogers,” Godfrey repeated. “I don’t mean that woman. It’s the girl in the cab, with the bright hair and blue eyes, and the prettiest face I ever saw. I wish she’d look out again.”
“That must be Gertie Westbrooke, Mrs. Rogers’s daughter,” Edith said. “She is very pretty, I believe, though I have never seen her distinctly.”
“Pretty! I should think she was! Why, she’s beautiful. I wish Bob Macpherson could see that face and paint it. He went off this morning to find some friends of his, but he’ll be back to the wedding. He is an artist I found in Rome. You are sure to like him. I must go now. Good-by, mother that is to be.”
He kissed her fondly, and then hurried out to see again the face in the cab. Very curiously he gazed at the child, whose little fat hands went up to the eyes, ostensibly to push back the stray locks of auburn hair, but really to hide the blushing face. How pretty they looked as they lay like white rose leaves against the mass of bright wavy hair, and how Godfrey deploredthe absence of Robert Macpherson, and wished he were himself a painter as he walked away, carrying with him that image of Gertie Westbrooke, with the shy, timid look on her face, the bright hair veiling her soft blue eyes and the white hands brushing back the hair.