CHAPTER XXXVII.THE TRAVELLERS,
Were Miss Creighton, Miss Schuyler, Miss Emma Schuyler, Miss Barton, Godfrey, Robert and Tom; and they made a very merry party as they entered the car at the Thirty-first Street station, and with their dash and style and self-assurance of manner seemed to take entire possession of the road and ignore the presence of every one.
“Three gentlemen to four ladies; that’s lucky for one of us,” Tom Barton said, as he quietly appropriated his sister andEmma Schuyler to himself, leaving Julia as a matter of course to Robert Macpherson, and Alice to her betrothed.
Good-natured Tom did not care a picayune with whom he talked or sat, so long as he knew he was to dine at Schuyler Hill, and see Gertie with the wonderful eyes and hair, and the shy drooping of her lids and the bright color coming and going in her face just as it did when she told him there was no hope, but bade him be a man all the same for her sake and the sake of the fair girl he would find some day to take her place in his heart. Tom knew he shouldn’t find the girl, but he was trying to be a man, and even Julia Schuyler tolerated him now, and divided her coquetries between him and Robert Macpherson, who was unusually quiet and studied the scenery from the window more than he did the dark, handsome face beside him.
Alice was satisfied to talk with Godfrey, and no one in the car who watched her could help guessing what he was to her, or that she was more delighted with the state of affairs than he. Alice was not Godfrey’s choice, though he was engaged to her, and had been for four days, during which time she had made the most of her new dignity, and shown her lover to as many of her friends as possible, and chosen her own engagement ring, and looked at a corner house far up town, which she wished Godfrey to secure at any cost, as her heart was set upon it. And Godfrey acquiesced in everything, and got the refusal of the house, and went with her to look at some rare bronzes and a $5,000 painting, on which her heart was also set, and played the devoted lover as well as he could, with no shadow of genuine love in the whole affair so far as he was concerned. How he came to be engaged he hardly knew, except that his father desired it, while Alice herself expected it, and people had talked of it so long that he had gradually come to consider it as something he must take as a matter of course, just as he took the measles, and the mumps, and the chicken-pox. And yet it was very sudden at the last. “A word and a blow,” he said to Robert, who asked why he looked so white when, after the deed was done, he went to call on his friend at the hotel.
“White,” Godfrey replied. “I guess you’d be white, too, ifyou’d been and gone and got engaged as I have! Why, Bob, I feel as I did when I was a little shaver, and swallowed a rusty copper, and Aunt Christine slapped me on the back, till the copper flew half way across the room, and I was black as your hat. I say, Bob, hit me a cut or two, and see if I can’t throw this up.”
With a merry laugh Robert replied:
“I don’t believe you’ll throw up thirty thousand a year as easily as you did the rusty copper; but tell me about it. How did it happen, and when?”
“Why, you see,” Godfrey rejoined, “I always supposed it would have to come, father was so anxious, and mother, too, before she died; but I guess a chap is never in a hurry to take what he is sure of, and I’ve staved it off, and never even looked love at her, except in a joking way, until this morning, when I went to call upon her at Uncle Calvert’s, and found her so pale and pensive, the result of that abominable sea-sickness, from which you know she suffered the voyage home. Now there is nothing strikes to my stomach quite so quick as sea-sickness, and I felt sorry for her, and when she told me how lonesome she was at Uncle Calvert’s, with the everlasting din of those street cars in her ears, and cried a little, why, I—I—I began to feel kind of, well, just as any chap would feel sitting by a nice girl, who, he knows, expects to marry him, with a tear running down the side of her nose, and so it was very easy for me to pick up her fat, white hands,—shehaspretty hands,—and pat them a little, and say: ‘Suppose we get married, Alice, and then you can live with me, and not have to stay in this poky house. Shall we, Alice?’”
“‘Yes, Godfrey,’ she said, and then,—well, I’ll leave something to your imagination, only the thing is settled, and we are to go to Tiffany’s this afternoon and get the ring, and to-morrow we look at that show-house up town, which Larkin built and failed in, and I am to write to father, and the news will be over Hampstead when we get there, and I feel, as I told you, much as I did when I swallowed the cent!”
This was Godfrey’s account of his engagement, from whichthe reader will infer that so far as his heart was concerned there was very little of it in the matter. But he did not love any one else, and that was in Alice’s favor; and she managed him so adroitly that he made a very well behaved lover, deferring to all her wishes, and treating her with attention, and even a show of tenderness when they were alone.
Once, on the day before they went to Hampstead, Robert said to him:
“By the way, Schuyler, is ‘La Sœur’ at the Hill?”
“‘La Sœur!’ Gertie, you mean,” Godfrey replied. “I really do not know whether she has left school or not. Nobody ever mentions her in any of their letters, and I’ve lost track of her entirely. I wrote to her two or three times when she first went off to school, but she did not answer, and so I gave it up. Why, it’s four years and a half since I saw her. She must be a young lady by this time. I say, Bob, do you suppose she is as sweet and pretty now as she was when you painted that picture? I thought her then the daintiest creature I had ever seen.”
Before Robert could reply there was a knock on the door, and Tom Barton was ushered in. He had come from Hampstead by the morning train, and called to see his old friends when he learned where they were. With Gertie fresh in his mind, Godfrey said to him:
“Barton, do you know if that little girl we almost pulled caps over once is at the Hill now?”
“Do you mean Miss Westbrooke?” Tom said, in a tone which made Godfrey turn quickly to look at him, while a suspicion which hurt him strangely flashed through his mind.
“Yes, I mean Miss Westbrooke. She is a young lady now, I suppose. Is she at home, and pretty as ever?”
Tom had heard from his sister of Godfrey’s engagement, and as the world had long ago given Robert Macpherson to Julia Schuyler, he had nothing to dread from either, and launched forth at once into praises of Gertie Westbrooke, the most beautiful creature upon whom the sun ever shone, as well as the purest, and sweetest, and best.
“Why, there is not a man, woman, or child in Hampstead that would not fall down and worship her if she wished it.”
“Upon my word, Tom, you must be far gone,” Godfrey said, with that littlehurtstill in his heart. “I should not wonder if you and I were in the same boat, eh?”
He looked curiously at Tom, who answered him frankly and sadly withal:
“No, Godfrey, she won’t have a drunken dog like me. She told me so herself,—not in those words, to be sure, but in the sweet, gentle way she has of telling the truth for one’s good. I swore then I’d reform, and I have not been drunk in a year, and if I ever am a man again, it will be Gertie Westbrooke who saved me, Heaven bless her!”
There was a tremor in Tom’s voice as he said this, and then added, abruptly:
“Yes, she’s at the Hill. You’ll see her when you get home.”
And so when Godfrey sat at last in the railway car beside his betrothed, to whom he paid the attentions she required of him, his thoughts were not so much with her as with the girl at Schuyler Hill, whom every man, woman and child admired, if Tom’s word was to be trusted. Alice, too, thought of her, and calling across the aisle to Julia, asked:
“Is that Westbrooke girl at Schuyler Hill?”
“I believe so,” Julia replied, adding, as she saw the look of interest in Robert’s face: “I think she is a kind of companion for Mrs. Schuyler, and will, perhaps, be little Arthur’s governess. You know father educated her for a teacher?”
“I saw her last winter,” Rosamond Barton said; “and really, girls, she has the most beautiful face and form I ever looked at. Everything about her is perfect. You’ll have to paint her again, Mr. Macpherson. Your first picture does not do her justice now.”
Robert bowed, while Julia said, snappishly:
“Indeed, I am most anxious to behold this paragon. I have not seen her either for two years or more. She had a very red nose then.”
“Yes, but it came from a bad cold,” Emma quickly interposed,ready now as ever to defend the right; and then the conversation touching Gertie ceased, and a few moments after the whistle sounded, and the party had reached the Hampstead station.
They walked to the house, and Gertie watched them as they came up the avenue,—Tom, Rosamond and Emma, Robert Macpherson and Julia, and lastly Godfrey and Alice, he carrying her shawl and travelling satchel, and she looking up into his face in that matter of course, assured kind of way she had assumed since her engagement.
But Godfrey had other occupation than attending to her and her pretty coquetries. His eyes had travelled up the road, across the lawn to the broad piazza, and the young girl standing there, clothed in white, with the blue ribbons round her waist and the bright hair on her neck. And that he knew was Gertie; not much taller than when he saw her last, but grown and rounded into beautiful womanhood, which showed itself even at that distance, though not in all its fulness. That came to him when at last he stood with her hand in his looking into her upturned face and drinking in with every glance fresh draughts of her wondrous beauty, which so bewildered and intoxicated him that until Alice spoke to him twice and asked for her satchel he did not hear her. Then releasing Gertie’s hand, he turned to Alice and said:
“I beg your pardon. I did not know you were speaking to me.”
Then he kissed Edith, and tossed little Arthur in his arms, and shook his father’s hand, and greeted the servants with his old freedom and kindness of manner, while Gertie stood just where he left her, thinking how differently it had all happened from what she had expected.
Mr. Macpherson had been glad to see her, and had shown it, and so had Emma and Rosamond, while Alice had offered her two fingers, and said, in a formal way, “Happy to meet you,” and Julia had offered one finger with a nod and a “how d’ye do, Gertie,” but Godfrey had not saidone word! He had merely taken her hand and held it, and looked at her, not quiteas friend looks at friend after an absence of years, but in a way which puzzled and perplexed her, and made her heart throb quickly, and the color deepen on her cheeks. How handsome he was, and how changed in some respects from the tall, slender youth, who seemed all legs and arms, but who now in the fulness of manhood was not one inch too tall. All the lankness of his boyhood was gone, but the grace and suppleness remained, and his erect form and square shoulders would have become the finest officer that ever drilled his pupils at West Point. On the face, once so smooth and fair, there was a rich brown beard now, and the hair had taken a darker tinge, and curling a little at the ends lay in thick masses around his broad white brow. Even his eyes were softened, though they still brimmed with fun and mischief, and tenderness, too, as Gertie knew when they were gazing into hers.
“What do you think of Godfrey?”
It was Tom Barton who asked the question, and starting from her dreamy attitude, Gertie replied:
“I think him the most splendid-looking man I ever saw.”
“That’s so,” Tom answered, warmly, while Gertie, who had no wish to talk with him further then, passed into the house and went to her own room.
It was six o’clock, and with a hasty glance at herself in the mirror, and a thought that her personal appearance mattered nothing to any one, she went down to the parlor, where the family usually assembled before going in to dinner. They were all there now, talking and laughing in little groups, except Godfrey, who stood apart from the others, leaning his elbow on the mantel and watching the door as if expecting some one to enter. He had mentally commented on the ladies as they came in, pronouncing Edith beautiful, Julia handsome, Emma graceful and stylish, Rosamond pretty and sweet, and Alicestunningand fashionable; and now he was waiting for the girl in the simple white muslin, who came at last, without the aid of Parisian toilet or ornament of any kind, and eclipsed the whole, just as the morning sun obscures the daylight and makes itself the centre of light and glory. There was no shadow ofembarrassment perceptible as she entered the parlor, but her manner was that of a daughter of the house rather than an inferior, as she crossed the long room and joined the group by the bay-window. There was a supercilious stare from Julia, a little nod from Alice, and a welcoming smile from Edith, Emma, and Rosamond; and then the conversation flowed on again until the dinner-bell rang, and the party filed off in pairs to the dining-room. As a matter of course, Godfrey took Alice, while Julia fell naturally to Robert, and Tom was left with three girls on his hands.
“I can’t beau you all, so I guess I’ll take my pick,” he said, as he offered his arm to Gertie, while his sister and Emma followed behind.
And so it came about that Tom was seated between Gertie and Julia Schuyler, who, not satisfied with the attentions of Mr. Macpherson, tried her best to attract Tom also, and keep him from talking to Gertie.
“Not any wine?” she said, as he drew his glass away when the decanter was passed. “That is something new. You’ll surely take a little with me. It is some of father’s very best.”
Tom knew that as well or better than she did, and the smell and the demon in the cup moving itself upright was tempting him sorely, while Julia’s seductive smile and words of entreaty were more than he could endure, and forgetting what even a taste involved he raised the glass, while Rosamond, sitting opposite, looked pale and anxious, and distressed. But ere a drop had touched his lips, a hand pressed his arm, and a soft voice said, “Don’t.”
Instantly the glass went down upon the table with so much force that the wine was spilled upon the cloth, while Julia muttered, under her breath, “Upon my word!” as she cast a lightning glance upon Gertie, whose face flushed, but whose blue eyes smiled approvingly upon poor Tom, and intoxicated him almost as much as the colonel’s best wine could have done, only in a different way.
“You are a darling,” Rosamond whispered to her, when at a late hour she and her brother were saying good-by to theyoung people at the Hill. “Nobody but you could have kept Tom from drinking. I shall tell mother about it.”
Tom, too, subdued, and ashamed that he had been so near falling again, and very grateful to his deliverer, whispered his words of thankfulness.
“You are my good angel, Gertie; but for you I should have been as drunk as a fool by this time. Heaven bless you as you deserve!”
Then the brother and sister went away, and the young ladies, tired and sleepy, started for their rooms, Alice looking around for Godfrey, with whom she would gladly have tarried a little longer to hear the soft nothings which she liked and had a right to expect from him. But Godfrey had disappeared, and only Gertie stood at the end of the broad piazza, leaning against a pillar, with the moonlight falling full upon her as she looked off upon the river and the mountains beyond, wondering at the strange unrest which filled her soul, and at the coldness of Godfrey toward her. As yet he had not addressed her a word since he came home, neither had she spoken to him. To be sure there had been a reason for this, for since the moment of his arrival, when he held her hand in his and looked so curiously at her, he had been occupied with some one else. His seat at dinner had been far away from hers. After dinner she had sat an hour or so with little Arthur, whom she always put to sleep, and on her return to the drawing-room she had at once been claimed by Tom Barton, who kept constantly at her side until he bade her good-night. So Godfrey was not so much to blame, and she acquitted him of intentional neglect, but felt a little hurt and grieved, and was saying to herself, “He does not care for me now,” when a voice said, close to her ear, “Gertie!”
It was Godfrey’s, and he was there beside her, looking into her face, on which the moonlight shone so brightly. He had eluded Alice, and when he heard her voice in her own room he stole out upon the piazza, intending to walk up and down a while before retiring to rest. First, however, he made the circuit of the building and glanced up at the room inthe south wing, which he had heard from Edith was Gertie’s. But the windows were dark; Gertie was not there; or, being there, must have retired, and he retraced his steps to the piazza in front, where he saw the little, white-robed figure leaning over the railing. That was Gertie, and he went swiftly to her side, and spoke the one word, “Gertie,” which brought the color to her cheeks, while the sparkle of the blue eyes, lifted so quickly, kindled a strange fire in his veins, and made him shiver as if he were cold.
“What, Godfrey?” Gertie answered softly, her eyes confronting him steadily a moment, and then dropping beneath his ardent gaze.
“Gertie, do you know you have not spoken to me since I came home? And I thought you would be so glad to see me.”
There was reproach in his tone, and it went to Gertie’s heart, and her voice trembled as she replied:
“I am glad to see you, Godfrey, gladder than you can guess. I thought so much of your coming, and then when you came home you never spoke to me.”
There certainly was a tear on the long eyelashes, and tears on Gertie’s eyelashes were very different things from tears on Alice’s nose, and the impulsive Godfrey snatched up the hand which rested on the railing and held it fast in his own, as he said:
“Do you know why I did not speak to you? I could not, I was so completely confounded and bewildered to find you what you are. Tom Barton,—by the way, Gertie, you certainly have no intention of marrying Tom Barton, if he reforms a hundred times?”
“No, Godfrey, I have not.”
“I thought so. Well, Tom raved about you by the hour, and said you were beautiful; but that does not express it. I wonder now if you know just how you look.”
She did not answer him, and he went on:
“It is more than four years since I saw you, and I had you in my mind as the little girl I used to tease at the cottage, andwho used to criticise me so severely.Petiteyou are still, it is true, but so changed in everything else, so completely a woman, that for a few moments I think I must have been sorry, feeling as I did that I had lost my little mentor in more ways than one.”
He was looking fixedly at her, with strange, wild words trembling on his lips, but there was a bar between him and the bright beauty which so dazzled and fascinated him,—a thought of Alice, the light from whose window was shining down upon the shrubbery, and whose voice, as she leaned from the casement, was heard saying to some one: “Yes, she really is very pretty, but has nostylewhatever.”
“Style be——” Godfrey did not say what, for a look in the blue eyes checked him; but he deepened his grasp on the hand he held, and his breath came hard as he said: “Gertie, you have not yet congratulated me upon my prospects. Do you not think I have chosen well?”
To Gertie it did not seem as if he had chosen well. He had nothing in common with Alice Creighton, but she did not tell him so, and she was wondering how she should answer him, when again the voice above them rang out, clear and loud:
“I have no fear of that. Her pretty face may attract Godfrey, and lead him to say soft nothings to her on the sly. All men do that, but I fancy I have influence enough to keep him from going far astray.”
“Oh, Godfrey, I must not stay here any longer. It is too much like listening. Let me go, please!” Gertie said, trying to release her hand.
But Godfrey held her fast, saying to her:
“It is not listening. If Alice does not wish us to hear, let her talk in her room, and not out of the window. I cannot let you go yet. I want you all to myself for a little while. I may not get another chance.”
He smiled bitterly, and then laying his disengaged hand on Gertie’s shoulder he suddenly asked:
“Why did you not answer my letters, Gertie?”
“Your letters, Godfrey! What letters? I never received a line from you,” Gertie said, while Godfrey rejoined:
“Never received a line from me! That is very strange!—and I wrote to you three different times. Think, Gertie,—try to recall it. Fours years ago, when you first went to school, and I came home and found you gone, I wrote from here how disappointed I was not to see you, and asked you to correspond with me, and let me be your brother. You were my little sister, I said; I adopted you as such, and I said a heap moresoft nothings, as Alice might call them, though I was very much in earnest at the time, and to myself called you ‘La Sœur’ always. And you never received that letter?”
“Never, Godfrey. I should remember that, and you say you wrote again?”
“Yes, from Andover; and sent my photograph, and asked for yours in return, and bet fifty dollars with some students that I’d show them the handsomest picture they ever saw, and I waited so anxiously for it; but it never came, and at last I wrote again, and told you to go to thunder! I did, upon my word, I felt so piqued and slighted, and I said I meant to go to the bad, and smoke, and drink, and swear, and do everything I could think of.”
“Oh, Godfrey, Godfrey! You didn’t, though, I hope!” Gertie cried, while her fingers tightened around the hand holding them so fast.
“Yes, I did,—for a little while. I drank a lot of wine, which went to my head, and smoked three cigars, which went to my stomach, and made me feel worse than sea-sickness, if that were possible. I was crazy as a loon, and smashed everything in my room, and sang uproarious songs; and, when one of the tutors came to see what was up, I called him a fool, and threw the wash-bowl at his head. Of course I was reprimanded, and reported to father, who came to see about it, and paid for the furniture, and talked so good that I promised to do better, and I did. And you say you never received those letters?”
“Never, Godfrey. I should have answered them,” Gertie said, while Godfrey continued: “And if you had, Gertie,—I might,—oh, who knows what might have been!”
He was holding both her hands and looking down upon heras no man ought to look upon a girl when he is engaged to another. Some such thought as this must have crossed Gertie’s mind, for she released herself from him suddenly, and said:
“It is very late, Godfrey. I must go in now.”
“No, Gertie, please,” and he still tried to detain her. “Wait a little longer. I am yours to-night; to-morrow I am some one’s else, and must come under orders, you know.”
He spoke ironically, and then as he saw that Gertie was really leaving him, he continued:
“By the way, Gertie, one thing more, and you may go. Do you remember the forlorn sick little girl who sat on the deck years ago, and the bold, impudent fellow who made her so angry, and the promise she gave him on certain conditions?”
Gertie’s cheeks were scarlet, as she replied: “Yes, Godfrey, I remember it.”
“Well, then, can you redeem the promise now?”
There was the old saucy look in his eyes, mingled with another look, which Gertie could not mistake, and stepping backward as he bent toward her, she answered him: “No, you arenota gentleman, or you would not remind me of thatnow!”
She was gone, and he heard her step as she went up the stairs and through the hall of the south wing to her own room, and he was alone in the quiet night, wondering what spell was upon him, and if it really were himself standing there, so bewildered and perplexed.
“I’ll walk down the avenue and back as fast as I can, and see if that brings me to myself,” he said, and he tried it, and went to the little cottage, where Gertie used to live, and stood leaning over the fence, and recalling the time when he first saw her there working in the garden with the flush on her cheeks, and her bright hair floating back from her face.
And then he remembered her as he had just seen her, grown to glorious womanhood, with eyes whose glances intoxicated him as he had never been intoxicated since the memorable college spree. Then he walked back again to the house on theHill, every window of which was darkened, and whose inmates were asleep. But for himself, he felt that he should never sleep again with those two conflicting sensations battling so fiercely in his heart, one cutting like a sharp, keen knife, when he remembered Alice and the words spoken to her less than a week ago, and the other thrilling him with ecstasy and a sense of delicious joy when he thought of the sweet, serene face on which the moonlight had fallen, softening and subduing, and making it like the face of an angel.
Godfrey was in love! He knew it at last, and exclaimed:
“I amin love with Gertie Westbrooke, and believe I have been ever since I first saw her years ago in London. But the knowledge of it has come too late. No Schuyler ever yet broke his word, and I shall not break mine. But if she had received my letters it might have been so different.”
And why had she not received them? How could three letters go astray? Certainly he directed them aright. He surely did the one sent to Schuyler Hill. He had written to his father at the same time and received an answer to that. Why, then, did Gertie not get hers? Had there been foul play, and if so, where and by whom? Suddenly there flashed into his mind a suspicion which made him start, while a strange gleam shone in his eyes, as he said:
“I’ll know the truth to-morrow.”
It was to-morrow now, for the early summer morning was shining on the mountain tops, and tired and excited, Godfrey went at last to his room to get a little rest before the household was astir.