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Orrin was shocked into sober sincerity by the fierce, curt utterance.
"My dear Jessie! what has happened?"
"Don't ask me!" walking on, without looking at him.
Orrin kept step with her for several moments, studying the eyes that, black and disdainful, stared straight before her, and the mouth set in a close curve of pride, before he spoke again.
"I will ask nothing just now, except that you will take my arm, and allow me to be your escort. This is a lonely road."
"It suits me the better, then!"
He waited a minute more, and, with gentle force, undid her right hand from its hold upon its fellow, and drew it within his arm.
"I see that my society is unwelcome, Jessie, but it is not right for you to be so far from home at this time of day without a protector. I shall not compel your confidence. When you are ready to give it, my sympathies or services are at your command, as they have always been since I became your guardian in the absence and with the sanction of my cousin."
The hot sparkle was a blaze as she looked up.
"Yes! and you, too, must have known it! You, who pretend to be my friend! My trust has been blind and foolish throughout. You were ready enough to counsel and warn me about other things. Why did you never tell me of Roy Fordham's former engagement? of the love-affair (save the mark!) that clashed with mine? You have said again and again that you respected me—that my happiness was of value in your estimation. Did not respect or humanity urge you to spare me this bitter humiliation?"
Unaffectedly amazed though he was at the onslaught and the information she imparted, Orrin yet refrained from explicit denial.
"Who has been talking to you?" he asked, instead.
She dashed through the story in the same impetuous strain, ending it with—"He ought to have told me this, and so ought you! I can forgive anything but deliberate deception."
Orrin mused.
"You are excited—"he began, slowly.
She interrupted him—"Who would not be? I am not a stone!"
"Nobody said that you were, or ought to be," smiling a little. "I was about to say that the displeasure you feel is perfectly natural—just what any woman with a heart would experience in the circumstances. But let us investigate before we condemn. What is your ground of complaint against my friend and your betrothed? Did he ever tell you that you were his first and only love?"
"I do not know that he asserted it in so many words," she replied, with a vivid blush. "But I certainly inferred as much from what he has said."
"Every woman's inference is the same when she listens to a declaration of affection. Who but a fool would preface such by a confession of how many times he had rehearsed it to other ears? Few men reach the age of twenty-five without having had two or three grandes passions . I do not maintain, as a gentleman did once in my hearing, when taxed with being engaged in his fortieth love-suit, that in this, as in most other things, practice makes perfect. But I hold that you cannot accuse Roy of deceiving you, unless he has declared expressly that he had never loved or wooed until he met you. Happy are those who are not visited by the ghosts of by-gone—and, as they deemed, buried—affections upon their bridal eves! Ghosts that are hard enough to lay, as many a miserable married, not mated one can testify."
"None such shall stand between me and him whom I marry!" cried Jessie, vehemently. "If Roy Fordham once loved—if he still regrets this girl—has one pang of compunction in the review of her fidelity and her sorrow; if he repents, never so slightly, his relinquishment of her upon insufficient cause—he shall go back to her. I will have a whole heart, or I will quit him, a pauper in love. Divided allegiance is worse than desertion."
"Be assured of one thing!" returned Orrin, emphatically. "Roy Fordham 'regrets' no past action of his own. His judgment is as calm as his measures are decided. If he suffers his heart to go out of his keeping, he does it in the persuasion that he could not act more prudently, more in accordance with his best interests, than to intrust it to her whom he has chosen. But should he, nevertheless, discover, from subsequent developments, that he was mistaken, he would recall affections and troth without weak hesitation. If Miss Sanford's story be true (which, please observe, I am far from admitting), we may still rest content in the knowledge that he pursued what he thought was the wisest course—performed what seemed to him a simple and imperative duty. He is, of all men I know, the most clear-headed and conscientious. If his ideas upon certain subjects appear to me to be over-strict, if his conduct, in cases that would be trying emergencies to me, looks like an exercise of superhuman resolution or self-denial, I do not, therefore, question his wisdom or my failings. His standard of right is so elevated, his views of duty are based upon—"
"Don't make labored excuses for him which you feel, in your soul, are paltry sophisms!" burst out Jessie, impatiently. "Is it your belief that he was ever betrothed to this girl? And, if so, did he cast her off upon the barbarous pretext Hester Sanford named? I have tried to think it all out," she continued, putting her hand to her head, like one dazed or stunned, "but nothing is fixed and clear. He was at the seashore two summers ago, after he visited Dundee. He did go to B—— the following winter—twice—both times to attend the weddings of friends, he told me. These things he made no secret of. That does not look like guilt. And yet—Tell me what to believe—how to act!"
"If I were in possession of the exact truth, you should have had it before now. I am as ignorant as yourself of all except the facts you have stated. He has friends—relatives whom he esteems—in B——. I recollect that he was with them at the sea shore late in his vacation, and that he spent Christmas before last in the city which is their home. This is the extent of my actual knowledge touching this mystery. He is reticent in the extreme with respect to his personal affairs. I never heard your name; never suspected that he was not heart-whole prior to my first visit to Dundee. I can only judge him in this, as in every case, by what I know of his principles and past conduct. He is incapable of what he would consider a dishonorable, much less a base deed! Try and trust him; forget this tale which may be a fiction, out-and-out, and hope for the best!"
"Christmas before last!" murmured Jessie, in stifled accents. "He was corresponding with me then! He had told my father that he meant—Oh!" stopping short, and stamping her foot with feverish energy upon the frozen earth—"Is there no way of ending this horrible suspense? no one who can put me out of this pain? I would give my right hand if I might stand face to face with Roy Fordham, for ten minutes! just long enough to bring my accusation, and hear his defence!"
"I am thankful that this cannot be!" said Orrin, composedly. I understand him better than you do in some respects. To doubt is to insult him. One sentence of 'accusation,' and your power over him is gone forever. Be guided by me, Jessie! You are not in a fit condition to decide for yourself upon your safest mode of action at this critical juncture. It is an oft-repeated maxim of human law that every man is innocent until proof brings his guilt home to him. Two things are patent from our present standpoint. When Roy asked you to marry him, he was free to do so,—the previous engagement, assuming that such had ever existed, having been dissolved some months earlier than the date of his proposal to you. Again—and on this head I can speak confidently—he is thoroughly satisfied that his choice is a judicious one. This is not the first time I have wanted to say this to you. He may not be an ardent suitor, because his is not a passionate nature, nor is he given to demonstrations of emotion. But he is more than contented. He is sincerely attached to you—"
"Which means that he will fulfil his part of the contract of marriage unless my sister should die of consumption before the wedding-day arrives!" Jessie checked his defence of his kinsman by saying, with a rasping laugh.
Wyllys looked deeply pained.
"We will defer further conversation about this matter until you are calmer," he said, with a manifest struggle. "You are not ready for it just yet, or you would not sneer at my well-meant, if ineffectual, attempt to set your mind at rest."
"With unfeeling arguments! with special pleadings that freeze the blood at my heart!" she pursued, unappeased and desperate. "If this is the ablest defence you can set up for your client, you do well to defer the further consideration of it. I have prayed you for bread, and you give me a stone! I have said—'Let me have the plain truth!' and you tantalize me with fine-drawn theories and exhortations to patience and faith. I am tempted to believe that you are in the league to deceive me!"
"Jessie! Jessie! take care! You do not know what you are doing!"
It was entreaty—not reproach. He seemed to crave a personal boon—deliverance from impending trial of his strength or feelings. Jessie rushed on headlong, deaf to the significance of the petition.
"Your advocacy is worthy of the cause you have espoused! And while you expatiate upon your cousin's cool head and colder heart, and recommend me to make sure of this pattern partner—yes! that is the way you put it—I am being torn by pride and wounded affection and incertitude, as by raging wild horses! It is easy for you to talk sensibly and even eloquently of what appeals only to your reason!"
"Child!" seizing her elbows, and bringing her to a stand-still in the middle of the road, facing himself, "does it cost me nothing, do you think, to plead this cause? There are no wild horses for me then! No 'Might-have-been' dogging my steps and haunting my pillow! No furies of betrayed confidence and remorse menacing me! I tell you, your pettish jealousy, your slight heat of resentment that will be gone before to-morrow morning, is, in comparison with what I endure, a summer breeze to a tornado,—the flicker of a match to the fires of Gehenna!"
He released her, and she walked on beside him, bewildered and giddy; almost oblivious of her individual grievances in the thought of the passion that had fired his eyes, found vent in his hurried sentences. The sun was down. They were in a rough country-road; stone fences on either hand; the naked hedge-rows seeming to shiver in the still, freezing air. The hard orange dye of the west was beginning to melt slowly into a gray as cold. It was a heartless, dreesome afternoon.
Jessie never forgot it, or the interval of awful silence that succeeded Wyllys' unprecedented outbreak. Not daring to glance at his face, she had a second surprise, when he, at length, suggested, in a tone tranquil to coldness, that they should retrace their steps. Could she be dreaming now? Or were the strange, wild words echoing confusingly in her brain, dictated by her distempered fancy?
"It will be late before we reach home, as it is," Orrin offered, in support of his proposition. "And the air grows keener every moment."
Nothing more passed between them until they were again upon the bridge, where he stayed her, for a moment, that he might rearrange her furs.
"You are not used to this biting weather! Are you tolerably comfortable?" he asked, in his usual brotherly way.
"Quite comfortable—if you are not angry with me!" she answered, enboldened by the little attention and his tone.
"You silly child! I have never had a thought of you that bordered upon unkindness. We have both been hasty and unreasonable in judgment and in language, this afternoon. Your warmth was excusable. Mine was culpable weakness. You will hate me, in time, if I forget myself in this manner. It was selfish and wicked, besides being unmanly. Don't contradict me! I know what I am saying now, at any rate. To exchange an unpleasant for a painful subject—promise me that you will not allude to Miss Sanford's narrative in your letter to Roy."
"I shall write to him by to-morrow's mail, and tell him all!" said Jessie, with a return of stubbornness.
"You will regret it all your life! If he is guilty, he will be offended at your arraignment of him by letter, which must, of necessity, be formal and incomplete as to testimony—you having but one witness, and that by no means a reliable one. Should he be innocent, you inflict severe and needless pain; put yourself in the position of a touchy, suspicious, exacting fiancée , whose troth he will ever thereafter hold by a slight tenure. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' is a sage motto, unless they can bark to some purpose. If you will allow me, I shall make it my business to sift this story carefully, and apprise you of the result—if I have to cultivate an intimacy with Miss Sanford in order to get at the truth. Meanwhile, we will depend upon what we are certain of—Roy's integrity and the nicety of his honor. At the risk of being again taken to task for special pleading, let me say that he is, in my estimation, as nearly faultless as mortals ever grow to be. You cannot act more rationally than to think as much as possible of him, and as little of his vaurien cousin as is consistent with common benevolence."
It was silvery-gray twilight out-of-doors when they gained Mrs. Baxter's door, and they found a rosy twilight of summer within her firelighted parlors, balmy, moreover, with the spiciness flowing out in the genial temperature, from the latest bouquet presented by Mr. Wyllys.
The donor, playfully gallant, and bent, it would seem, upon effacing the memory of his late excited speech, was chafing Jessie's numb fingers before the fire, and she laughing in spite of herself at his sallies, when Mrs. Baxter tripped in.
She always entered a room bouncingly, generally with the added effect of being pushed in by some unseen hand from behind. She recoiled, momentarily, at the tableau upon the rug, and Jessie observed it with a sick, guilty qualm that made her snatch away her hand from Orrin's hold.
He was not discomfited.
"Here is a frozen wayfarer I picked up on the bridge, my dear madam, taking an un constitutional," he said. "Mindful of your known charity and condescension, I took the liberty of bringing her in to be treated by you as her needs require. If I may advise you in a matter in which you are so much wiser than myself, I recommend that a cup of warm drink—gruel, panada, or posset—and a reasonable amount of admonition, tempered to suit the exhausted state of the patient, be administered without delay. As an additional precaution against rheumatism, pleurisy, or bronchitis, a glass of hot lemonade, with"—affecting to whisper—"a tablespoonful of Jamaica rum or old Bourbon, at bedtime, would be eminently judicious. My impertinence culminates in the petition that you vouchsafe to bestow upon my unworthy but chilly self a cup of the nectar in common use upon your table under the name of souchong."
Jessie slipped away to her chamber while her cousin was replying in suitable terms to this nonsense, and did not reappear until the tea-bell had rung twice.
She had been crying, Mrs. Baxter saw at once, and she was still very pale. It had been a violent fit of weeping that had exhausted her to languor of expression and movement. The doctor spoke cheerily to her as she seated herself beside him.
"Well, my little girl, how are your spirits, this freezing night? Do they follow the mercury, or rise as it descends?"
An unfortunate question, but it brought a faint glow to her face.
"I shall be more lively when I have had my supper," she said, averting her eyes. "I am cold and tired now."
The doctor bent his head and raised his hand to ask a blessing, and then bade his wife "pour out Jessie's tea, forthwith. She looks as if she needed it," he subjoined, uneasily, watching her with eyes that were very keen when he was awake to what was passing in the everyday and material world.
Jessie sipped the scalding liquid, swallowing each spoonful with a tremendous effort, when it trickled down the lump that obstructed larynx and epiglottis, wishing, the while, that the doctor would subside into one of his fits of learned abstraction and knot his handkerchief, instead of staring so solemnly at her; expecting, every second, to hear him demand—"What have you been crying about, my daughter?"
She was very grateful to Orrin for his persistent and, in the end, successful attempts to draw the fire of the searching regards; and, rallying her wits and courage, she, at last, joined in the conversation. Mrs. Baxter, likewise, was less voluble than was her wont. Appreciating the fact, recognized by the majority of his acquaintances, that Mr. Wyllys was not a marrying man, she aroused herself to ponder, in serious earnest, upon what was likely to be the result of his fraternal intimacy with her ward. Orrin had made all straight with her at the outset, even before Jessie entered her house as a visitor, by representing himself as an old friend of the family, and speaking of Mr. Kirke's daughter in a grandfatherly strain, that entitled him to become the platonic cavalier of the rustic débutante . But platonic grandfathers did not squeeze pretty girls' hands en tête-à-tête in the twilight—"or they should not," reasoned the duenna; and Jessie's red eyes and pallid complexion increased her misgivings to dreads. She had been asleep all winter until to-night, she thought, shudderingly, and had awakened upon the edge of a precipice. If through her neglect or misplaced confidence, Ginevra's child should come to grief, she would rue, to the latest day of her life, the invitation that had enticed her from home and safety, to lose her heart to the designing arts of a man of the world.
Orrin had small temptation to prolong his stay into the evening. There was incipient disfavor in the hostess' eye, which was not neutralized by her stereotyped smile. The doctor betook himself to his study when he arose from the table, and Jessie shaded her face from fire and lamp-light by a hand-screen, complaining that she was stupid after her walk in the wind.
"I promised to go up to Judge Provost's to-night," he said, at the end of an unsatisfactory half hour. "Won't you join our party for billiards and music? Miss Fanny charged me not to come without you."
Jessie did not raise her regards from the screen.
"No, thank you! I have had enough billiards for one day. And I am in an intensely unmusical humor."
"I really ought to 'do' the polite to Miss Sanford," continued he, lightly to Mrs. Baxter's ears, significantly to Jessie's. "I have been shamefully remiss since her appearance among us. Miss Fanny took me to task for it, an evening or two since, and I was obliged to plead 'Guilty.' I have paid her very little attention except in public, and that has been confined to a dance or two at each party."
Mrs. Baxter, profoundly indifferent to Miss Sanford, and the degree of court he offered her, yet strove to look interested.
"That is a little remarkable, Mr. Wyllys, considering your reputation for gallantry and hospitality, and she is invested with more substantial charms than any of our Hamilton belles can boast."
"I am afraid my taste for the substantial has not been properly cultivated," was the reply.
Jessie was silent and gloomy, and Wyllys secretly lost patience with her.
"I thought her more of a woman!" he said, inly. "She acts like a fractious child, inconsolable for the loss of a toy. I gave her credit for more depth of feeling, more power of endurance."
She called up a faint symptom of a smile, in response to his adieux, and relapsed into taciturnity and the shadow of her screen, when he had departed. Mrs. Baxter flitted about the rooms like a perturbed guardian angel; poking the fire that her charge's feet might be warmer; dropping a curtain to shut out a draught from the back of her neck; pushing forward a brioche for her use, and giving her chair a gentle tug nearer the grate, before she essayed verbal consolation.
Finally, she leaned upon the back of Jessie's seat and made several mesmeric passes over her brow and scalp, the fringe of the scarlet scarf it was her pleasure, to-night, to sport twisted around her right wrist, brushing the chin, and tickling the nose of her young relative.
"Does your head ache very badly now, my sweet?" breathlessly solicitous.
"Not at all—thank you, cousin!"
"I am de lighted to hear you say so! You don't think you have really taken cold, my precious—do you?"
"Oh, no! I never take cold!"
"Mr. Wyllys seemed very anxious lest you had," Mrs. Baxter remarked, quite too earnestly. "I say, 'seemed,' for these ladies' men are not models of sincerity, always, however charming they may be as parlor companions. If I had a daughter, my love—and it is the great sorrow of my life, as it is of the doctor's, that we never had one—if I had a daughter, just blooming into womanhood, affectionate, susceptible, and unsuspecting, I should caution her to be on her guard against a too-ready credence in the flattering tongues and the more insidious flattery of demeanor and action of gentlemen who are honorable in all things else. I respect Mr. Wyllys"—she continued, the passes faster and more agitated, and the silken fringes bobbing up and down before Jessie's vision. "I honor his many estimable—admire his many shining qualities. But I am fearful that in his otherwise commendable desire to please and make happy, he may excite hopes—or expectations may be the better term—he never intended to engender. There is in every community, my darling Jessie, a class of men—pardon me for saying that it is fortunately a small class—who do not care or intend to marry except for convenience, or pecuniary gain—perhaps not even then. Yet they are generally the pets of their respective circles, especial favorites with ladies. Why, I cannot say, unless it be that they endeavor to make themselves agreeable to the entire sex, instead of concentrating their attentions upon one woman. Mr. Wyllys is a notable example of this order of carpet knights."
Entirely out of breath by this time, she withdrew her hand from her guest's head, to press it upon her own palpitating bosom, while her gulp of emotion was as loud as the cluck of a brooding hen.
Jessie lowered her screen with a gesture of haughty amusement.
"If your object is to warn me against attaching undue importance to Mr. Wyllys' friendly attentions, Cousin, I can disabuse your mind of fears for my peace of heart, by assuring you that it is not threatened from that quarter. I ought to have told you, long ago, of a circumstance that exculpates Mr. Wyllys from the charge of trifling, and renders the notice he bestows upon me altogether harmless and proper. I am engaged to be married to his cousin, Mr. Fordham, and he knows it. This makes all safe for us both—does it not? I am sorry I did not apprize you of this state of affairs when I first came to you. It would have been more honorable and kind to you—and an act of common justice to Mr. Fordham, if not to Mr. Wyllys."