A Bartered Birthright
A Bartered Birthright
After debating the matter for ten years or so, John Hertford had made up his mind to adopt St. Petersburg as a place of residence, and was now on his way back to New York, to order his affairs to that end. He was not rich, but then he was not extravagant, and his moderate income was more than sufficient for the wants of a man who had no one dependent on him, and who had entirely made up his mind not to marry. He had been in love more than once in his life, and yet, ardent as his feelings had been for the objects who aroused that emotion in him, he had never had quite the feeling to make him long to call any woman his wife. The truth was owned to himself in his secret heart—that word “wife” possessed for him a significancewhich involved so much that he had often wondered, in early youth, if he could ever actually find, in one personality, all the qualities of mind and heart and person which he looked for. In maturer years, he had quite satisfied himself that the idea was absurd. So he abandoned his youthful dreams, without any great ado, especially as he had found that life had certain positive compensations for their loss. He made up his mind, however, that he could not accept less than his ideal in marriage, and so, with more or less contentment, he had shaped his life to the demands and dimensions of a bachelor existence, and was looking forward with pleasure to the more deliberate and satisfactory settlement of himself and his belongings at the brilliant capital on his return. He was not indolent, and his taste for art, music and literature gave him plenty of occupation to diversify the life of social pleasure in the midst of which he had cast his lines. He was a very popular man, and yet onecould hardly tell exactly why it was that men and women, and even children, liked him so. His face was strong and interesting rather than handsome, and his figure active and powerful rather than elegant. He had no especial charms of manner, except a supremely winning trait of gentleness, which would have made the eternal happiness of his wife—had there been such a being!
He was not looking forward with much pleasure to his visit to his native country, and had bound himself by the severest obligations to be back in a very short time; and now, on the first day out on his ocean voyage, he found himself wishing that the trip to New York was over, and that he was going back. There would be so many changes among his old friends—so many reminders of the painful fact that youth was passing—a thing he could ignore much better in Russia than in his own land!
He was, like many people whose attachmentsare warm when made, rather averse to making new acquaintances, from the fact that the ones already possessed kept his faculty of affection sufficiently employed. So, when he glanced over the passenger-list, it was rather satisfactory than otherwise to see there was no name he knew. He had plenty of books with him, and expected to find his time sufficiently occupied in reading, and in escaping from the bores by whom men crossing the ocean are apt to be beset.
It was early in December, and the weather was raw and cold. Hertford was well protected against it, however, and spent much of his time on deck. On the afternoon of the second day out, he had been comfortably settled for some time, absorbed in his book, when, amid the confused sounds of water and machinery and human speech, he heard some words spoken so near him that they compelled the recognition of his consciousness.
“It seems that’s her aunt, and not hermother,” the voice said: and glancing up, Hertford saw two women, who had placed themselves very near him and were evidently discussing some third party of travellers. “I heard the beautiful girl call her ‘Auntie,’ as I passed. I call the old one the ‘Rich Lady,’ until I can find out her name, because she’s so high and mighty and magnificent. They’ve got a foreign maid and man-servant with them, and more furs and rugs and foot-warmers and luxuries than any one on the ship. I want you to watch the Rich Lady when she speaks to those servants. I’ve heard her call them both by name, and they had foreign names unfamiliar to me; but I told someone yesterday evening that, as well as I could make out, she called the maid ‘Minion,’ and the man ‘Varlet’—perhaps her manner helped me a little to this understanding of her words.”
The speaker and her companion both laughed, and Hertford, amused, too, followed the direction of their eyes, and soonidentified the two persons under discussion. It was certainly true that they were surrounded by a greater evidence of magnificence in their travelling paraphernalia than any one else he had seen. Their deck-chairs, cushions, rugs, and superb furs made them seem almost unnecessarily luxurious. The older of the two had her large and bony frame stretched out at length on her deck-chair, and her harsh profile, with its thin, aquiline nose and thick, whitish eyebrows was thrown out in high relief against the dark-red cloak worn by her companion, whose head was enveloped in its pointed hood. The girl’s face was turned seaward, so that Hertford could not get a glimpse of it. But just as he had seen, in spite of heavy coverings, that the older woman’s figure was angular and thin, so he could see, in the younger one’s, suggestions of youthful vigor and loveliness. He was conscious of being interested by the mere pose of her head and turn of her throat. Her red cloak was gathered in atthe neck by an infinite number of fine, flat little plaits that broke into free and graceful folds about her shoulders, and covered her arms and hands. Hertford had given no more than a passing glance to the faces of the two women whose conversation he had overheard, and a glance was enough to satisfy him also as to the appearance of the girl’s companion; but for several moments he kept his eyes furtively upon the muffled figure and head of the girl herself. As he was looking, a more violent lurch than any that had preceded it tipped the vessel so far on its side that a great wave, which was advancing, broke over the deck and deluged everyone with the heavy salt water. In an instant it had receded, leaving the floor of the deck a running stream, and the water standing in little puddles on rugs and cloaks, and wherever it had found a hollow to fill. Most of the passengers laughed good-humoredly, and took it as a joke, while the deck-stewards were brushingthem off and mopping up the water. Hertford sat up and shook himself with a smile, and as he did so, he heard his nearest neighbor say:
“Oh,dolook at the Rich Lady!”
She had drawn herself upward in her chair, the picture of angry protest, and as the assiduous steward hurried to her assistance, she said, indignantly:
“Well! Are we likely to have much more of this?” Quite as if she had put up with as much from the ocean as she proposed to stand!
As the humor of the thing flashed upon Hertford, he glanced at the figure beyond, which had also taken an upright position, and he saw the very loveliest girl-face that he had ever set his eyes on. He not only saw it, but he exchanged with it a glance of sympathetic amusement, which, somehow, seemed to do the work of an acquaintanceship of weeks. If, as George Eliot so profoundly says, “A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on theaffections,” the reverse is equally true; and a sense of liking sprang into being in both of the individuals whose eyes met in that momentary smiling glance. In an instant they looked away from each other. And now the two foreign servants came hurrying up with towels and brushes. Hertford could not distinctly make out the hurried French sentences which the old lady addressed to them, but he soon comprehended the attitude which had suggested the names of “Minion” and “Varlet” to his bright little neighbor.
It soon appeared that it was the Rich Lady’s will to go below, and she got to her feet, shaking herself free from her furs, and motioning her niece to follow her. The girl rose obediently, and as the maid came to her assistance, Hertford noticed the gentle and amiable way in which she spoke to the servant, in strong contrast to the manner of the older woman. She, however, responded very submissively to her aunt’s wish,although he thought it possible that she would have preferred to stay. As she passed very near to Hertford she did not look toward him, and so he could venture to look at her. Her profile was exquisite, and her very manner of walking and holding her wraps was full of charm for him. When she was almost out of sight, he obeyed the strong impulse which prompted him to follow, and, leaving all his belongings, he did so, keeping them in sight until they had disappeared into one of thecabines-de-luxe, the number of which he easily ascertained. Then he went to the saloon, where he looked at the passenger-list. The names opposite the number of that state-room were:Mrs. Etheridge and Miss Sheldon; valet et femme-de-chambre.
He returned to his seat on deck, but his book had lost its interest. There was something in the glance of that girl’s eyes which was enthralling. It crowded everything else out of his mind. He sat there thinking for a long time; and he felt ita real satisfaction when, at last, from some deep recess of his memory he recalled a rhyme which represented to him exactly his present state of mind. He said it to himself, under his breath:
“But if Maud were all that she seemed,And her smile had all that I dreamed,Then the world were not so bitterBut a smile could make it sweet.”
“But if Maud were all that she seemed,And her smile had all that I dreamed,Then the world were not so bitterBut a smile could make it sweet.”
“But if Maud were all that she seemed,
And her smile had all that I dreamed,
Then the world were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.”
In the days that followed, Hertford became more completely absorbed in watching this young girl, and wondering and imagining about her, than he had ever been in anything in his life. He never saw her except at a distance, and even then he guarded his looks carefully. The two ladies seemed to have no acquaintances on board, and if they had had, it would have done him no good, for he knew no one to introduce him. Besides, he was not sure he wanted to be introduced. There was more room for the indulgence of dreams as things were now.
And he did indulge himself in dreams,without restriction. The more he saw of the beautiful young creature, the more adorable she seemed to him. He never met her suddenly, or even caught sight of her red cloak at a distance, that he did not feel a sudden stilling of his heartbeats, followed by thick throbbings that made his next few breaths difficult. Sometimes he would meet her taking exercise on the deck with her aunt, and sometimes she was on the arm of a French maid. Hertford noticed that when the latter was her companion she had generally a gayer and freer air, and he could see that there were the kindest feelings of sympathy and good-will between the two, in spite of their different spheres of life. The woman did not look as if she could have answered to the name of “Minion,” in this companionship! When, however, the young girl was with her aunt, Hertford often saw a look of constraint, and even sadness, on her face. This set him to conjecturing, and gave him a fear thatshe might be dependent upon this rich and exacting relative, and perhaps a victim to her tyrannies and caprices. The mere suggestion of it stirred in his heart depths of tenderness whose very existence was a surprise to him.
One afternoon, during the last days of the voyage, Hertford had been sitting a long time silently thinking. His thoughts were always on one subject now—the girl who, at this moment, sat in one of the long row of chairs, made fast against the rolling of the vessel. There were, perhaps, half a dozen people between them, but, although he had not looked toward her since he sat down, he had no consciousness of any human existence about him but hers. He felt, moreover, in his inmost soul, that she had a consciousness of him. He was sure that an electric current of sympathy communicated from his heart to hers. There was nothing whatever external to encourage him in his belief—not a look nor a sign, but it wasa thing stronger than either. And whenever he did meet her eyes, which was rarely, what was it that gave him that inevitable little shock, if it were not a meeting of such currents? Of course, his might be the positive and hers the negative, but he absolutely believed she felt it, too.
As he sat there, watching the cold flutter of the dingy white canvas that covered the life-boat, made fast in front of him, and which was shaken into strong ripples by the winter wind, making a crackling little noise, he liked to think that they both saw and heard the same things, and he longed to ask her if the ridiculous little cannon, with its canvas cover, did not remind her of a child on all fours, under a table-cloth, playingbogy. Why couldn’t he have a little innocent talk with her? The restrictions imposed by society seemed to him most absurd.
He became aware that the people between him and the object of his thoughts were, one by one, going away. At last,a man and a woman sitting next to him got up and went below, and now, with a quickening of the heart, he realised that the being nearest him, across that row of empty chairs, was the girl whose image had now out-crowded every other from his heart. The maid was on the other side of her, but they were both quite silent. Presently he ventured to turn his head and look toward her. Only her pure profile was in view, but he felt that she saw with her averted eyes that he was looking at her. Her rounded cheek seemed to return his gaze, and he was almost certain that it reddened.
Of course, he might be mistaken in thinking that she had any consciousness of his existence. He had no real evidence of the fact, but the unreal was enough for him. He was always frank, in dealing with himself, though often the reverse of it, in interpreting himself to others. For instance, he had always carefully concealed the fact that he was, by nature, sentimentaland romantic; but he knew it of himself absolutely. He was not at all surprised to find himself, now, in love with a woman to whom he had never spoken. It had always belonged to his old ideal of himself that he should love at first sight, if he ever loved at all, in the real sense. This girl—if her nature and character corresponded to her personality—was absolutely all that he ever dreamed of; and he had not a fear that, in knowing her, he should find himself disappointed. Indeed, what he felt was, that he absolutely knew her already. It gave him a slight twinge of regret to think she must be so many years younger than himself—it must be ten or twelve, for she could not be over twenty-two or twenty-three. But then she was a being with whom he might renew his youth—indeed, she had already called into fiery life all the most ardent impulses of his earliest manhood. He had made up his mind now that he would make it his first business, on landing, toget himself formally introduced to her. He had satisfied himself, by marks on their luggage, that their destination was New York, so he knew he was not in danger of losing sight of them. They were sure to belong to his own world, and he knew he could easily make their acquaintance. As he sat there, so near her that by a slight turn of the head he could see her, he felt impatient at the formalities and delays which must be gone through with, before he could go to her boldly and ask her to leave the irksome thraldom of her life with her rich, old aunt, and be his wife. That was exactly what he had to say to her, with as little circumlocution and delay as possible. His mind had never been more definitely made up about anything in his life. It was decidedly pleasing to him to think of her as poor, even though she had the surroundings of riches and luxury. Still, how different to be in the really independent position in which he could place her!
A little thing had happened one day during the voyage, that had touched and pleased him intensely. A poor man had died in the steerage, and a subscription paper was sent around to raise money for his family. When Hertford took it, he ran his eye rather eagerly down the column of names and figures and saw: “Mrs. Etheridge, $100.00,” and under it, “Miss Shelton, $1.00.” It went to his heart that she had had so little to give, but had not on that account refrained from giving what she could. “Shelton,” he kept saying over and over to himself, trying in vain to remember if he had ever known any one of the name. He knew the name of Etheridge as belonging to a rich and influential family in New York, but could recall no definite acquaintance even with them.
There was a lovely winter sunset that evening, and Hertford felt it a delight that his eyes took in the same scene as hers, and felt that the same emotions werearoused by it in both their hearts. When, at last, she spoke to the maid and rose to go below, he boldly resolved to make a move at the same time, and so he walked the length of the deck behind her, and followed her through the door. It was a delight to him even to catch the tones of her voice as she spoke to the maid. As they turned away in opposite directions, their looks just met. How was it possible, he asked himself, that he could feel what he did from the touch of her eyes, and she feel nothing? He did not believe it!
The next day they landed at New York, and he saw her met by friends whose ardent feeling showed how lovingly welcome she was. They whisked her away in a handsome carriage whose liveried servants, as Hertford observed, showed far more pleasure in their faces at welcoming the young lady, than her august and stately aunt.
Hertford was accorded a cordial welcome by his old friends, and the first thing hefound himself called upon to do was to attend a large ball. He felt disinclined for it, but the possibility of seeing the lovely face that haunted every sleeping and waking minute made him consent. One of his former circle of friends insisted on taking him, and as they drove through the streets, he confided to Hertford the fact that he was in love, and that he expected to see at this ball the object of his affection, who, it appeared, was a rich and charming widow. The former of these attributes was intimated very delicately, but the whole thing seemed to Hertford, in his present romantic state of mind, revoltingly vulgar. How impossible it would be to confide to his companion the feeling that possessed his heart! Any allusion to the money struck him as being unpardonable—and he simply could not understand a man’s finding it possible to be in love with a widow. He thought of the lovely maiden on whom his heart was fixed, and the mere memory of her fresh youngbeauty made his pulses quicken. But he forced himself to appear interested, and wished his companion all success and happiness.
“The success would certainly secure the happiness,” was the answer, “but the trouble is there are a dozen fellows, besides me, trying to marry her, and she declares she will marry no one.”
As they got out of the carriage Hertford dismissed the subject from his mind. He had not yet got himself up to the point of making definite inquiries about the lady of his love, and it seemed to him now impossible even to make a confidant of a man whose nature could permit him to talk about being in love with a rich widow!
As the two men walked about the rooms together, each was conscious of being on the watch, but Hertford, for his part, gave no sign. He met a few old acquaintances who remembered him still, but the place was very barren and irksome to him, in spite of its magnificent display, when suddenlyhis companion gave his arm a jerk and said: “There she is!”
But Hertford, too, had caught sight of something that made his heart thump suffocatingly. A few paces from him was a tall, imposing, angular figure with a familiar Roman profile, and at her side was the adorable being he had so worshippingly enshrined in his heart, looking so beautiful in her white ball-dress that his eyes were dazzled with the delight of this vision. Again, as her eyes met his, he felt that their spirits had touched. Out of the delicious confusion caused by that glance, he was roused by the consciousness that he was being formally introduced.
“My friend Mr. Hertford, Miss Shelton—and Mrs. Etheridge.”
At the mention of the former name, the tall and sharp-faced lady made him a gracious, if angular, acknowledgment; at the mention of the latter, the beautiful young creature in white looked up into his face and gave him a frank and lovelysmile. She seemed even to half-extend her hand, and was beginning to speak, when Hertford, bewildered, stunned, and only dimly conscious of what he was doing, made a hurried bow, and with some excuse, moved rapidly away.
With a numbed consciousness, and a bewilderment that scarcely allowed him to realize the objects before his eyes, he somehow got through the rooms and out into the street, and, finally, into his own room at the hotel. There he locked himself in, and, without turning up the light, threw himself upon his face on the bed. After ten minutes of such fierce unhappiness as he had never known before, he got up, turned on the light, and looked at his dishevelled figure in the glass. “Have I been crying?” he said to himself, seeing that his cheeks were flushed, his eyes red, and his face dampened either by tears, or by the sweat of pain. With his nature, romantic, sensitive, the blow was a terrible one.
He sat down in a chair, thrust hisfingers into his short locks, and rested his elbows on his knees. With the feeling in him that he could not give up this woman, even for this, he began to struggle with his disappointment. At first, it seemed intolerable that she had once belonged to another man—and he had to adjust his whole being to these changed conditions. He realized far more deeply than ever, how he had fixed his very soul upon her, and he resolved to go on and win her, if he could. He forced himself to realize the fact that she had loved another man, and had suffered for his sake the pangs of widowhood. It was some consolation to him to see that she had outlived them, and he was glad that youth and nature had asserted themselves and enabled her to regain her interest in life. No, he could not give her up, without her own refusal to be his wife. The fact that she had money, too, was intensely unpleasant to him. It was she—Mrs. Etheridge—who had given the hundred dollars to the poor man, andher arrogant-looking aunt, Miss Shelton, who had given the one dollar! The money was the girl’s, then—and she was the “Rich Lady,” after all! He could not get used to the idea.
But he had fought out the fight and choked down his disappointment, by the time the ball broke up, and Tom Kennedy, puzzled by his friend’s strange conduct, came in search of him.
When Hertford, in his disordered evening-dress, admitted him in answer to his knock, he was able to make up some excuse about having felt a sudden vertigo in the heated room, etc., and to carry it off with some likeness to truth.
“By Jove! I don’t believe she half liked your leaving—the lovely widow, I mean! (There’s but onesheto me now!) And it seems you had crossed on the steamer together without being acquainted! It’s a wonder she even noticed you—but she did—and she asked three or four times where you were gone. I begin tobe reconciled to your going back so soon, old man. She takes more interest in you than I exactly fancy.”
Hertford let him run on with this flippant sort of talk, for the sake of the information he let drop now and then. He discovered that the haughty individual who acted as her chaperon was in reality a poor relation, dependent on her bounty; though, as Kennedy said, she owed everything to this aunt, who had made this rich match for her, and had married her to a husband who died in a year, leaving her a millionaire. This made Hertford wince with pain. The whole interview was frightfully trying, and he was relieved to be alone at last.
He passed a sleepless night, and a restless, impatient morning. In the afternoon he inquired his way to Mrs. Etheridge’s house, and rang the bell, sending in his card for the two ladies. Miss Shelton, it turned out, was not at home, but after a few minutes spent in a magnificent drawing-room,down the long vista of which he could see into other superb apartments beyond, the young widow came to him.
Hertford was so entirely sure that they understood each other, that it was all he could do to keep from asking her, then and there, to be his wife. The restrictions of conventionality prevailed, however, and they kept to mere friendly discussion of the events of the voyage, and such things. It was so free and delightful, however, this long talk, that he stayed on and on, and when he rose to go, and she gave him her hand, he dared to hold it a second longer than was necessary, and to feel that the touch conveyed a message to her heart. It is certain that she blushed, as he looked down at her, and that the blush made her a hundred times more bewitching to his heart and senses than before.
The magnificence of the grand hall that he crossed in leaving her, and the suggestions of great wealth that he saw on everyside, grated upon him, but, as he walked away from her presence, he was too blissfully in love for that to matter much. He felt perfectly certain, in spite of the odious idea suggested by his friend’s coarse way of putting things, that the marriage had been a love-match; for it was absolutely impossible that the divinely good, and sweet, and modest creature from whom he had just parted, ever could have married from any motive but love. He even got up a sort of emotion of pity for the dead man, when he thought of what had been lost to him, and yet he felt any dealing of fate to be merciful, which opened to him the only chance of supreme and ideal happiness, which his life had ever offered.
He spent the next day with lawyers, absorbed in business affairs. In the evening he went to the theater, where he saw the woman he loved surrounded by a gay party. But she looked at him, as he passed, with a look that thrilled to his heart’s core, and all through the play he was happyin the sense that she thought of him, and even furtively watched him. Coming out, he met Tom Kennedy, who walked along the street with him, beginning at once to speak of Mrs. Etheridge. Hertford, with a certain reluctance, asked some question about Mr. Etheridge. He felt jealous of the man, and at the same time, sorry for him. He inquired how long he had been dead.
“O, three years, or such a matter. She’s only just come back into the gay world. No one can say she did not play her part with propriety. It was even more than could have been expected from a girl of twenty, to go into such long retirement for a husband four times her age.”
“What!” said Hertford, in a low, contained voice, swerving a little in his gait, but otherwise apparently calm.
“O, he must have been well on to eighty, I should think,” replied the other, “though his wretched old body was cosmetized and bolstered up with the utmost care tothe last. By the way—you saw him! Don’t you remember our laughing at the decrepit old dandy at the races that day when Hotspur won?—the old fellow who tried so hard to give a cheer, but couldn’t get up the voice, and who incessantly ‘wrestled with his false teeth,’ as I remember you put it? That was Etheridge. Don’t you remember him?”
“Yes,” said Hertford, coldly, “I remember him distinctly.”
A moment later, he had excused himself and returned to his hotel.
The next day, and the day after, he applied himself very closely to business, and was so successful in getting through with it, that he caught the same steamer on its return trip, and started back to St. Petersburg.
He had been gone a month, perhaps, when Mrs. Etheridge, who had been little seen by her friends, either in society, or at her own house, said abruptly one day to Tom Kennedy, to whom she hadnot been at home once since Hertford’s departure:
“Mr. Hertford once lived in New York—did he not?”
“O, yes—born and raised here,” was the off-hand response.
“Do you know,” she said, facing him unswervingly, though her cheeks reddened, “do you know whether he ever saw my—I mean Mr. Etheridge? Did he know him?”
“No—he never knew him, I’m sure, but he saw him once at the races. I was reminding him of it the last evening I saw him. But why do you ask?”
“I merely wondered if they ever met,” she answered, carelessly. “I never heard my husband speak of him.” She said the word out boldly this time.
“No—I fancy not,” said Kennedy. “They were not friends at all. In fact, Hertford had no idea he was the man you had married, until I told him.”
Kennedy was a little dull, and he wonderednow, why in the world she was interesting herself in such a trivial matter.
He had joined Mrs. Etheridge on the street, and he walked home with her. When they reached her handsome residence, and the doors were thrown open, she did not ask him to come in, but said good-bye rather abruptly. She crossed the magnificent hall and walked with a firm step up the grand staircase. Then, entering her own splendid apartment, she locked herself in and stood silent a few moments. Then she spoke aloud, safe from being heard in that lofty vastness.
“That was the man I could have loved,” she said, “the man I do love! And I might have married him!”
In a second, she added, in a tone grown thick and indistinct with tears:
“And he loves me, too! I know he does—or did, until he knew!”
She stretched out her arms, with her hands clenched hard, and saw herself reflected from every side in splendidly-framedmirrors, which gave back her image, from head to feet, in her elegant French costume. They showed her, too, the innumerable beauties of her luxurious rooms, hung with satin and carpeted with velvet.
She gave a cry of horror, and shut out the vision with her hands. Her birthright was gone, and this was her mess of pottage!