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Roy was at the dépôt Wednesday afternoon to meet his wife.
"You are not well, I am afraid!" she said, when they were in the carriage that was to convey them home.
"I am not sick, but I have had much to think of and to do, lately, and I may look somewhat jaded," he answered. "You left Eunice well, you say?"
"Quite well, thank you! You have overworked yourself in getting the house ready for me. You should have left that for me to do."
"It was not necessary. As it is, you will find much room for alteration and improvement, I doubt not. You were fortunate in meeting with a pleasant escort on your journey. Are you much fatigued?"
"No, but my head aches a little," turning her face to the window.
She was disappointed in her reception. The parting from Eunice had been a grievous trial; the journey filled with mournful thoughts of the past that now lay so very far behind her. In turning her back upon her parents' graves and her birthplace, she seemed to have parted company forever with the blithe girl who had been born and had grown up to woman's estate, careless and joyous as the swallows that had for a century built their nests in the belfry of the church-tower. She had almost forgotten how Jessie Kirke felt and acted. Yet she was thankful that in the midst of melancholy and dazement, her appointed way lay clear and open before her; that she had still a sure staff on which to lean,—the hope and resolve that she would do her duty bravely and well in the sphere for which her marriage-vow had set her apart. It was indicative of the generous temper and sound sense that never failed to assert themselves when the momentary tumult of passion had passed, which neither her faults nor the influence of the tempter had warped, that she had never, for one moment, blamed Roy for hurrying forward their marriage. They were "troth-plight," as her Scottish ancestors would have put it. She had said, "If you insist upon the fulfilment of my promise, I will submit to your decision." And she had not said it idly. He had taken her at her word, as he had the right to do, and by that pledge she would abide.
Lonely and tired, the sight of Roy's face in the crowd of strangers upon the platform of the Hamilton station had cheered her heart like a cordial. She forgot that he was her husband; remembered him only as a noble and faithful friend in whose presence she would be no longer solitary and sad. She was even conscious of a proud sense of proprietorship in the fine-looking, dignified man who was the first to enter the car when it stopped,—a consciousness that flushed her cheeks faintly, and quickened her pulses, as she introduced him to the gentleman who had acted as her escort and heard his well-chosen words of acknowledgment for the favor done him. He had not kissed her then—she supposed because there were so many looking on; but after taking his place beside her in the carriage, he might surely tell her that her coming gave him joy; repeat something of the rapturous anticipations that had overflowed his heart in writing his last letter, received by her the night before. His face was very pale, his eyes abstracted, his voice constrained. Anything more unlike the Roy she had known in Dundee could hardly be imagined, without changing the identity of the man. It was not surprising that a qualm of home-sickness weakened her heroic resolutions; put to flight her dreams of forgetting her unhappiness in the sustained effort to be and do all he wished.
Roy saw the struggle and surmised, in part, the cause of it; but what could he say to assuage or encourage? The caresses and fond words with which he had sought to console her in the earlier days of her desolation must, he now saw in the lurid light shed upon his honeymoon by that terrible letter, have aggravated her sufferings.
Professing to be her protector, he had played the part of a brutal ravisher; had torn her,—shrinking and crying out against the loathed union she felt would "be a sin—a fearful sin," from her free, happy girl-life, and bound her, soul and body, in fetters more hateful and enduring than manacles of steel. After the first shock of horror and of grief, he forgot the wrong he had sustained in his overmastering compassion for her. And he could not free her! Loving her better than he did his own happiness and life, he was powerless to ensure her peace of mind by restoring her to liberty. Had he been other than the true Christian and true man he was, the distracting anguish of that conviction would have driven him to madness and to suicide, as a sequel to the fearful vigil that followed the discovery of his real position.
Light came with the morning, and strength for the day. His course was plain—to mitigate the rigors of her fate by such kindly deeds as a brother might perform for the promotion of a sister's welfare; by abstaining from even such manifestations of affection as are a brother's right. There should be no formal explanation until she had recovered from the fatigue of her journey, and begun to feel at home in her new abode. Thus much he could and would do, and await the result.
"What a pretty, pretty house!" exclaimed Jessie, as the carriage drew up at the gate of a cottage on the southern slope of one of the hills on which the handsome town was built.
She had meant to praise his selection of a residence however ordinary its appearance, but her enthusiastic admiration was genuine.
Roy smiled, but not with the glad gleam she looked to see.
"It is good and kind in you to say so! If you can be satisfied here, I ask nothing better or grander."
A tidy girl opened the door, whom Jessie recognized with pleased surprise as a former servant in Dr. Baxter's family.
"Why, Phoebe! This is homelike! How very generous in Cousin Jane to give you up to me!"
"She said you might find me useful, Miss Jessie! I beg your pardon—Mrs. Fordham!" replied the girl, dropping a courtesy.
Jessie colored, Roy thought, painfully, at the as yet unfamiliar name. He interfered to save her further embarrassment, in the shape of congratulations.
"You will show her to her room, if you please, Phoebe. And then let her have a cup of tea. She has a headache. Your trunks will be sent up in the course of half an hour, Jessie, but I would not advise you to wait for them, or take the trouble of changing your travelling-dress. You must begin your life here by doing just as you choose in such matters."
He met her in the hall when she ran down, ten minutes later, fearful lest she had kept him waiting, and led her into the supper room; letting her take her place behind the tea-tray without one of the tenderly gallant speeches with which a bridegroom would naturally install his bride in the chair always appropriated by the mistress of heart and home. He was attentive to her wants, and talked as much as usual—perhaps more—in the endeavor to put her at her ease; telling how the flowers upon the tea-table and in her chamber were sent over at noon from Judge Provost's conservatory; that the silver service was a present from the Baxters, the bronze mantel-clock from Fanny Provost, who was very anxious to see her and resume their old intimacy. Selina Bradley had sent the chased silver butter-bowl, and other Hamilton families had testified their good-will by elegant and suitable gifts.
"I am every day more glad that you spent last winter here," he said. "You do not come as a stranger; have already pleasant associations with our town and its inhabitants, and gained a foothold, I find, in many hearts."
He had unwittingly dealt as direct a blow at the secret panel that hid the skeleton in her heart, as he had at Orrin Wyllys' indurated conscience the previous evening.
Jessie had no words in which to reply; sought to conceal her confusion by steadfastly regarding the pattern on her plate—one of a set of china Roy had purchased in Dresden, she discovered, presently, when she remarked upon its beauty.
"I had no idea you had such exquisite taste!" She made a bold attempt to break through the nameless but powerful constraint that kept down everything like easy or merry converse on her part. "I expect to be in a state of perpetual astonishment on that score for a long time to come. I did not know that learned scholars ever condescended to consider such petty details of domestic life as porcelain and carpets."
He put back his chair without replying directly to the compliment, at which, to her mortification, he looked rather pained than pleased.
"If you have finished your supper, perhaps you would like to go over the house?" he said, politely. "Or, if you are tired, we will postpone it until to-morrow."
"I should greatly prefer going now!" catching at the prospect of some mitigation of the growing stiffness.
The survey was a quiet progress for the most part, certainly not accomplishing the end she had hoped for. Roy said little, and Jessie felt very awkward, as door after door was opened, and she appreciated the thoughtfulness that had ministered to her comfort, from first to last, yet was forbidden by the mysterious spell chaining her tongue, to thank him who had wrought it all. But when they reached the sitting-room, where the flames were crackling and curling among the wood on the hearth, and her chair and fire-screen awaited her, the home-restfulness of the scene broke down the ice wall. The feelings that had gathered to oppression upon her heart, overflowed her eyes and choked her articulation.
"This is too much!" she exclaimed, catching Roy's hand in hers, and gazing tearfully into his face. "Oh! what am I—"
She could say no more.
"The mistress of this room and this house!" responded Roy, in kindly seriousness. "One who has a right to expect every attention I can bestow. This is your sanctum. Nobody shall enter it without your permission."
Jessie tried to smile playfully.
"Excepting yourself!"
"When you want me, I shall come!" was the evasive reply.
"Surely you will not wait—"
The remonstrance was cut short by a tap at the door, signalling Mrs. Baxter's impetuous entrance.
"My dearest lamb!" she cried, with a strangled sob, clasping her cousin in her embrace.
"The doctor would come the instant he had swallowed his tea!" she tried to cover Jessie's emotion and her own by saying, when she could speak clearly. "I told him it was barbarously unfeeling and unromantic; that, according to all rules of etiquette and sentiment, you should pass this evening without the intrusion of company. But he was obstinate. I don't believe you two have the remotest conception of his favoritism of you!"
Meantime, the doctor had, in his odd fashion, slipped his hand under the young wife's chin, and raised to the light a strangely agitated face—eyes swimming in tears, forehead slightly puckered with the effort after self-control, and little eddies of smiles breaking up around the mouth. Roy saw in it the whole history of the shipwreck of her heart and life, and her womanly determination to keep the knowledge of the disaster to herself. Would the physiognomist's keenly solemn gaze detect as much?
Neither of the lately wedded pair was prepared for the remark with which he released the blushing Jessie.
"I wanted to see if the heart of her husband could safely trust in her. My daughter! do you know what a good man you have married?"
"Do not raise her expectations to an unreasonable height, my dear sir!" interposed Roy, in time to forestall her reply. "And let me thank you, in her name and in mine, for the honor you have done us in this early visit."
The doctor accepted the compliment and the chair that the host wheeled forward, in profound silence. The conversation had been carried on by the others for several minutes before he again joined in. He was aroused then by his wife's laudations of Orrin's generosity as displayed in his bridal present.
"I don't see how you can take it so quietly!" she berated the recipient. "One would suppose pianos were given away every day! And you should value the instrument the more highly because it is the gift of your great admirer and true friend, Mr. Wyllys. I assure you, Mr. Fordham, nothing could exceed his care of and devotion to her, for your sake and in your name, of course! while you were over the seas and far away."
"True friend!" echoed the doctor's dryest, most rasping tones. "Humph!"
" Now , my love, I do implore that you will not drag forward that most unjust and unreasonable prejudice in the present company!" cried his wife, in a nervous flutter from her bonnet-crown to her gaiter-tips. "If I have failed to convince you that it is groundless and absurd, oblige me by withholding the expression of it, here and now!"
"My good Jane!" returned the imperturbable spouse—"Where else could the truth be so fitly spoken as in the hearing of judicious friends? I am sorry to say, Mr. Fordham, that my excellent wife and myself do not agree respecting Mr. Wyllys' character and actions."
"Doctor! doctor!" ejaculated the frantic woman, plunging forward, at an angle of forty-five degrees, to pluck his sleeve. "You forget that you are addressing Mr. Wyllys' cousin!"
"A candid man, and a fair judge of human nature and motives, nevertheless," her lord went on to say, with a stiff little bow in the direction of the person named. "The only safe rule among friends is candor. It is seldom I attribute sinister purposes to one whom I do not know certainly to be malevolent or hypocritical, but when I declare it to be my firm conviction that Orrin Wyllys—(of whom the best thing I know is that he has descended physically from the same stock that produced your husband, my child!)"—this to Jessie—"when I affirm that I believe him to be a wolf who ravens safely and reputably under the cowardly cover of sheep's clothing, I am not, as my dear Jane here would persuade herself and you, the victim of causeless prejudice."
"Dearest, I entreat!" broke in the wife, at her last gasp of distress.
His discourse moved on majestically. There were four knots in his handkerchief already.
"From the moment I heard Mr. Wyllys caution Mrs. Baxter not to allude in her letter of invitation to our Jessie, to information he had supplied relative to her person, residence, and education, I distrusted the singleness of his desire for the resumption of Mrs. Baxter's intercourse with the family of her early friend. When the invited guests arrived, and I learned that the terms of their previous intercourse entitled him to become her cavalier on all occasions; her preceptor and referee in doubtful cases of conscience and conduct;—when I compared this circumstance with his careless and apparently accidental mention of her to Mrs. Baxter, and his pretended indifference to her coming, I made up my mind that he was particularly interested in her for some reason he did not care to divulge. I believe still that this was the case. I believe that, knowing her to be betrothed to his cousin, he strove, consciously and systematically, to win her from her allegiance. I thank God that he did not succeed; that she has given herself and her happiness into the keeping of a true and honorable gentleman!"
"I am grateful to you, doctor, for your staunch friendship for myself, and your paternal guardianship of my wife!"
Roy Fordham's full, pleasant tones reached Jessie's ears like an angelic benediction through the seething chaos that was swallowing her up.
"I am glad, moreover, that you have, in the present company, introduced the subject of your misgivings regarding my cousin's behavior while I was away. I appointed him my proxy before I left my betrothed and my native land. The attentions that misled you into doubt of his right dealing were paid in that character. I cannot have you undervalue the 'true and honorable gentleman' I know Orrin Wyllys to be. He is my friend !"
The doctor tugged at his cravat-bow and stared into the chandelier. Mrs. Baxter gulped down all the solicitude she could swallow, and threw all the rest into the deprecating look she cast upon Roy. He stood before his zealous old superior—courteous, kind, but earnest in defence of his absent friend—the model of gallant manliness, thought the abject creature, cowering in the shadow of Mrs. Baxter's chair, half dead with remorse and the dread of additional questioning.
The love of this man she had trodden under foot! forgotten affection and duty to him in the mad, wicked delirium wrought by the wiles of one whom Roy, in the simplicity of his integrity, still accounted honest and faithful. A cheat and a coward Jessie had written Orrin down since that early September day when he confided to her the fact of his engagement, and shrank visibly at the suggestion of Roy's anger at his shameless breach of faith. She stigmatized him now, in the council of her thoughts, as a liar from the beginning. He had manoeuvred, then, to procure Mrs. Baxter's invitation for herself, while he denied to her that she had ever been named between them until after this was sent; had inveigled her away from the shelter of her father's roof and the guard of her sister's care, that he might establish his fell influence over her. Would not Roy, with all his generous trust in his cousin's honor and friendship, compare the doctor's mal-apropos statement with her confession of the change in herself, and arrive at a tolerably correct perception of the truth that would blast her forever in his sight, as not merely weak and fickle, but forward and unmaidenly?
When the throbbing of her heart would let her listen intelligently to what was going on, the doctor had been beguiled into a dissertation upon Druidistic history, by Roy's exhibition of a paper-weight in the form of an altar, encircled by a wreath of mistletoe, graven out of a bit of stone he had picked up at Stonehenge. His considerate spouse carried him off before one-third of the knots in his handkerchief were untied. Her valedictory, like her salutatory, was a diffuse apology for their intrusion upon the sacredness of the installation-eve.
"But the doctor—dear, blundering man! is amenable to no laws of conventionality," she subjoined, with an indulgent shrug and sigh.
It is questionable whether either of the persons addressed regretted the breach of etiquette. The time had gone by more swiftly and comfortably than if they had been left to themselves. As it was, an embarrassing silence followed the visitors' departure. Roy stood on the rug, facing the fire, motionless and thoughtful. Jessie, trembling in a nervous chill that changed her fingers into shaking icicles, durst not attempt to speak.
Fordham finally came out of his reverie with a start, and turned toward her apologetically.
"You are sadly tired! Our good friends were very welcome, but they have kept you up beyond your strength. May I take you to your room?"
She murmured a disclaimer of the imputation of excessive fatigue, but took his proffered arm, and they mounted the stairs together.
A bright fire burned in the large front chamber, flashed gayly back from the gilt fleur-de-lis of the delicately tinted wallpaper and the frames of the few pictures. A cosey armchair stood ready for Jessie, with a foot-cushion below it, and the marble slabs of bureau and mantel bore fragile wealth of Bohemian and frosted glass and Parian ornaments.
"Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?" inquired Roy, not offering to sit down. "Wouldn't a glass of wine do your head good?"
"I think not. I need nothing, thank you!" without raising her eyes from the carpet.
"I hope you will be quite rested by morning," he continued, with the same ceremonious gentleness. "I may as well explain to you that, foreseeing how frequently I shall be obliged to sit up late at my studies, I have had the chamber opposite prepared for myself. So I will bid you good-night now."
He held out his hand. She placed hers within it, silently, eyes still averted.
"Good-night, and pleasant dreams!" he repeated, with a kindly pressure of the chill fingers.
An impulse she could not control or define drew her to her feet. "Won't you kiss me, Roy?" she asked, in sorrowful humility.
She did not see how bloodless were the lips that obeyed. The salute was, to her apprehension, cold and reluctant, and, without another syllable, he passed on to the outer door. There he stopped—hesitated, with a backward glance at the drooping figure, standing where he had left her—and returned.
"I had not intended to say it yet," he said, agitatedly. "There have been times when I questioned the propriety of any attempt at self-justification. But I would not have you think worse of me than I deserve for my selfish recklessness in hurrying on our marriage. I received this letter"—giving it to her—"last night. It furnishes the clue to much that I now see ought to have checked my unseemly impatience to claim the right I believed was still mine. This was the communication to which you referred when you pleaded that the contents of your last letter should have hindered my proposal. I supposed, in the haste and excitement of the moment, that you meant the false rumor of your mother's insanity which had been treated of in a former communication, the receipt of which, let me say here, hastened my return. Not that I dreaded insanity for you, but because I gathered from your letter that you were unhappy and a prey to morbid fancies, and I hoped to be able to do you good by diverting these. If this 'last letter' which you hold had reached me in season, your request should have been granted."
He paused to master his own emotion, or to give her opportunity for reply. He may have hoped yet, in the face of the evidence to the contrary he had had, that she would retract her declaration. "I love you no longer" might represent that she was possessed by "morbid fancies" when it was penned; that under the sharp tutelage of sorrow, her affections had regained their balance.
She only sat still, her face hidden in her hands. There was a crouch in her attitude that suggested an unpleasant idea to the observer. It was that she feared him—his wrath and the results of this explanation. He forgot his sufferings in the desire to remove this apprehension if it existed.
"My only hope now is, that since I know what I should have perceived from the beginning, I may spare you annoyance, if not misery, by consulting your wishes and respecting your repugnances. If I could set you free, I would. My heaviest burden is the consciousness that this is impracticable. But it is my desire that, from this time, you should cease to regard me as your husband, and try to think of me as your friend. For we may still be that to each other—may we not, dear Jessie?"
She was moaning as in mortal pain.
"This kindness kills me! I had rather you should say that you hated me!"
"But that would not be true," said the gentle voice. "And henceforward we will be very frank and just in our dealings with one another. We will try, moreover, to put vain regrets out of sight, and to do the duty of the day; to serve our fellows and honor Him who has some merciful intent in leading us through these dark waters. Now, my child, this subject need never be renewed. Our Father knows our sorrows. To Him we will look for strength. He knows, too, the sincerity of my sad heart when I say how deeply it afflicts me to feel how much more grievous is your trial than mine."
Folding in his the hands she extended in a speechless passion of tears—her lips trying vainly to form a petition for pardon—he prayed the God of all consolation to have her in His holy keeping; to give her joy for weeping, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Then, bidding her again "Be comforted and sleep," he went out.