CHAPTER VIIICONFIDENCES AND COMMUNINGS
Irene had not passed a very pleasant evening and was in a bad humor, and as we entered the house she complained loudly of the condition of her organdie, which she declared spoiled with the dew, beside having a big spot of mud upon it.
“I had no business to sit there so long in that damp, poky place. I am chilled through, and Mr. Travers was just as uncomfortable as I was and wanted to get away.”
Neither of us answered her, and she said no more until she was in her room, divesting herself of her limp organdie and wet boots.
“Well!” she began, a little sharply, and Rena, from her room, answered:
“Well?”
Then there was silence until Irene had unbuttoned her boots and kicked them off across the floor, when she continued:
“What did you think of him?”
After a moment Rena replied:
“It is evident he is not a ladies’ man, but he is a gentleman.”
“He may be a gentleman, but is the most awkward specimen I ever saw,” Irene rejoined. “Think how he sat in the parlor, with his neck bent forward in that dreadful chair, and his feet sprawled out in front of him.”
“That was the fault of the chair,” Rena said, and Irene replied:
“Why didn’t he take another? I tried to have him, and not make such a spectacle of himself, acting as if looking for some place in which to hide every time I spoke to him! I call him a muff, a stone, on whom I could not make the least impression. Small talk! He don’t know the meaning of the words, and I never spent a more stupid time than I did sitting there in the woods, trying to make him talk.”
Rena was bathing her face as she listened to this tirade and did not at once reply. She was rather happy than otherwise. She had made up with Tom, who had put himself on the same plane with herself in deception, and Tom’s good opinion was everything to her. He was her dear old Tom again, although it did not seem to her she could use that term as freely as she once had done. She could say it to herself and think it, but there had come over her a change removing Tom from her in one wayand bringing him nearer to her in another, and the change had been brought about by contrasting him with Reginald Travers. She had watched the latter very closely. Nothing had escaped her, and while saying to herself, “I never could have loved him,” she had mentally made excuses for what seemed shy and awkward in him, and had felt a pity for him that he was being deceived, and a contempt for herself for deceiving him. “Tom was right; he is not the man to be tricked,” she thought, while the peculiar relation in which she stood to him made her wish to defend him against Irene’s attacks.
“He is certainly a gentleman,” she repeated. “Not as handsome as Tom, of course; few men are; but still good-looking. Naturally he would be nervous under the circumstances. He will appear better by and by, and I really do not dislike him as I thought I should, but I wish that horrid will had never been made, or being made that I had been left out of it or you put in my place.”
“I!” and Irene spoke scornfully. “Haven’t I told you that I made no more impression upon him than if he had been a stone? He was all the time wanting to get up and run away when we were sitting under the pines. He did show some concern when I stood by the well. I wish I had thrown myself in. I would if I had been sure of not beingdrowned. I am not quite ready yet to go after Nannie.”
Why Irene should be in such a temper Rena could not understand. For herself it did not matter what Mr. Travers was, or how he appeared. He could never be anything to her. She had settled that before she saw him, and the conviction had been strengthened when she walked and sat with Tom in the moonlight. There was but one man in the world for her and that was Tom, she thought, as she bade Irene good-night, and left the young lady stalking about her room like a restless spirit. She did not think as badly of Reginald as she had pretended, and had ridiculed him to Rena with a view to disenchant her should she by any chance fancy him. He was bashful and awkward in many respects, and seemingly wholly impervious to her charms, and that irritated her. “But I’ll conquer yet, I am resolved,” she said to herself as she sat down in her dressing-gown by the open window and looked across the fields to the hill or plateau on which the McPherson house stood. She could see its tower and chimneys and roof and felt sure it was a palace compared with the house in Claremont, with its ceilings so low that she could almost touch them as she walked. How she hated it, with all its dull routine of duties, its sweeping and dusting and dish-washingthree times every day, and its terrible Monday’s wash, and Tuesday’s ironing, and Wednesday’s baking.
“Ugh!” she said, going over with the list which her hard-worked mother was left so often to struggle with alone, while she was enjoying herself in Europe and elsewhere. “I’ll get out of it, and through Mr. Travers, if possible, no matter how cold and stiff he is, and proud. I wonder what he would say if he knew I had once been a factory bug! It was horrid—the time I worked there—up in the cold wintry mornings before light—and hurrying for fear I should be late and docked—I am worthy of a better position and I will have it, too—and this proud Reginald Travers shall yet make love to me or my name is not Irene.”
Just what the probability was of Reginald’s ever owning the McPherson place she was not quite sure. That part of the will was a little hazy in her mind, except the fact that in any event Mr. Travers was to have ten thousand dollars of old Sandy’s money. “That is something with what he already has,” she said, “and he is worth trying for. He was not pleased with me and would a great deal rather have talked with Rena. I saw it and felt it, but I’ll make him care for me, or at least go so far in his attentions that when he learns his mistake and how muchI am interested, he will have too much honor to give me up, especially as there is no hope of Rena. I was rather too forward, perhaps, to-night, to suit his prudish views. Hereafter Barkis will not be quite aswillin’. I’ll try Rena’s kittenish ways, though it will be something like a cat aping the pranks of its offspring.”
She laughed as she thought this, and then, conscious that she was growing cold, she cast a last look at the tower and roof of the McPherson place, and kissing her hand to it said softly:
“Good-night, my dear. Sleep well. You will find an Ireneà la Renanext time we meet.”
“Did you speak?” Rena asked, rousing up, and Irene replied:
“I said ‘good-night, my dear,’ that’s all.”
“Good-night,” Rena answered, drowsily, while Irene crept to bed and fell asleep with the thought in her mind: “This is the chance of my life and I shall improve it.”
Meanwhile at the McPherson place there were half confidences exchanged between the young men and secret communings on the part of both. There had been comparative silence on the way home, Reginald keeping in advance of Tom, who tried in vain to keep up.
“Looks as if he were running away from somebody,”Tom thought, and once he called out: “Don’t go so fast. There’s nobody behind you but me.”
Rex did not answer, but kept on until they reached the house, when he went at once to his room. Tom stayed outside and lighting a cigar sat down upon the piazza to enjoy the beauty of the night and think of Rena’s eyes as they looked at him under the pines and feel in fancy the touch of her fingers as she brushed his sleeve and picked a pine-needle from his neck.
“I believe she is coming to time,” he thought, “and if it were not for this infernal will business she’d soon be where I could speak again. But I know Rena. She’s got it in her little wilful head that she must study Rex, or some such nonsense. Then there is this confounded farce with Irene posing as Rena, and Rena as Irene, and I looking on and compounding a felony and beginning not to care after all my high and mighty protests against it. I don’t believe I want to break it up now, for, by George! Rex would go in strong for Rena, if he knew she was the one. I saw his eyes shine two or three times when she was talking, while Irene never moved him any more than a fly moves an elephant when it lights on him. I know what she is up to. She means to make him so much in love that when he finds his mistake he’ll stick to her, as he would, if he were half-wayinterested and thought she cared. That’s Rex. Poor Rex, I shall have to go down on my knees to him yet. I wonder if he has gone to bed.”
Going to the door of Rex’s room he knocked and then entered unceremoniously. Rex was standing with his back to him removing his coat and vest and did not at once look round.
“I won’t keep you up more than a minute,” Tom said, “I just wanted to know what you thought of the girls. You hurried home so fast I couldn’t ask you. Isn’t Irene a stunner?”
“Why, yes,” Reginald replied, putting on the vest he had just taken off. “She nearly took my wits away. I never had many, you know, and I believe I was more stupid than usual to-night. Why, I didn’t know anything when Miss Burdick’s eyes were on me, and it was worse with the little one, Rena you call her. I caught her looking at me a great deal. Why did she, I wonder, do you know?”
Tom laughed and said:
“A cat may look at a king. Perhaps Rena admired you. Irene did, I am sure. I saw it in her eyes. They are very handsome.”
“Yes,” Rex said, “very handsome and sharp to see through a fellow and I never felt so small in my life, or appeared so badly as to-night, sitting in that abominable chair in that hot room, and again underthe pines on a damp board. I could not be myself. Did Rena notice it, or say anything about it?”
“Upon my word he is getting a good deal rattled,” Tom thought, as Rex removed his vest a second time and began to put it on again wrong side out. “See here,” he said, “something has made bad work with what few brains you have. You’d better go to bed. No, Rena said nothing about you. Why should she? Good-night.”
“Good-night,” Rex responded, then added hastily, “eh, Tom——”
“Well, what is it? Hurry up. I’m half asleep,” Tom answered, with a feeling that Rex was about to speak of the will, in which case he felt that he should tell the truth at all hazards.
Just for a minute it had crossed Rex’s mind to make Tom his confidant, and had he been encouraged he might have done so. But Tom’s answer was not inviting, and he replied:
“Nothing—that is, nothing much; it will keep. Good-night again.”
He closed the door upon Tom, and long after that young man was asleep and dreaming of Rena, he sat by his window, looking across the fields in the direction of Mrs. Parks’ house, just as Irene was looking across the fields toward the McPherson place. He had been anxious to see the girl selected for himby Sandy McPherson and had determined to like her, if possible. In fact he had a kind of morbid idea that it was his duty to like her, if she seemed to care for him. There had been no doubt in his mind as to which was the one. The will had said distinctly Irene Burdick, not Rena, and he had accepted Irene without questioning, or a thought that he was mistaken. Tom had prepared him somewhat for Irene’s beauty, but not altogether. He had seen a great many pretty girls north and south, but never one like her. She had thought him shy and indifferent, and he was all that, but nothing about her had escaped him, and her face and figure came up distinctly before him as he sat by his window, coatless and half undressed, but never thinking of the wind which was blowing up from the sea.
“She is superb,” he thought. “Perfect in form and feature, a little too tall, with too much hair on the top of her head. Splendid hair, though. I wonder how she would look with it down. She carries herself like a queen, and there is no one in Richmond to compare with her, but there was something somewhere, I don’t know what, which rasped—yes, that’s the word—rasped my nerves like a file. Now the little one rested me and I rather liked meeting her eyes, which are more like Nannie’s than Miss Irene’s. I believe I could—no, I don’t believe Icould, either. I was never cut out to marry any one, never meant to, and don’t know as I mean to now. I don’t want to, and I won’t be driven into it, either, just for money, though that is a consideration, for I have not a very large bank account and should like a little more, and if this girl should happen to fancy me, I shall try my best to reciprocate. She did look grand, standing on that well curb, with her arm raised like the goddess of Liberty. She is beautiful and the next time I see her I shall try and be more like Tom, who well might look happy, with no bewildering will to worry him, and the little one beside him.”
When an idea or name was lodged in Reginald’s mind it generally stayed there. Rena was the little one as compared with Irene, and his last conscious thought as he went shivering to bed was of the little one whose eyes were like Nannie’s.