Darkness and Daylight - Mary J. Holmes (great novels of all time .txt) 📗

a wedding at Lake View, our Geneva home, but I did not ask the particulars. There’s a moral there, Edith; a warning to all foolish college boys, and girls, who don’t half know their minds.”

Edith was too intent upon her own matters to care for morals, and without replying directly, she said,

“Richard will tell you to-morrow or to-day, rather, of the engagement, and you’ll be guarded, won’t you?”

“I shall let him know I disapprove,” returned Victor, “but I shan’t say anything that sounds like Arthur St. Claire, not yet, at all events.”

“And, Victor, in the course of the day, you’ll make some errand to Brier Hill, and incidentally mention it to Mrs. Atherton. Richard won’t tell her, I know, and I can’t—I can’t. Oh, I wish it were—

“

 

“The widow, instead of you,” interrupted Victor, as he stood with the door knob in his hand. “That’s what you mean, and I must say it shows a very proper frame of mind in a bride-elect.”

Edith made a gesture for him to leave her, and with a low bow he withdrew, while Edith, alternately shivering with cold and flushed with fever, crept into bed, and fell away to sleep, forgetting, for the time, that there were in the world such things as broken hearts, unwilling brides, and blind husbands old enough to be her father.

 

 

The breakfast dishes were cleared away, all but the exquisite little service brought for Edith’s use when she was sick, and which now stood upon the side-board waiting until her long morning slumber should end. Once Mrs. Matson had been to her bedside, hearing from her that her head was aching badly, and that she would sleep longer. This message was carried down to Richard, who entertained his guests as best he could, but did not urge them to make a longer stay.

They were gone now, and Richard was alone. It was a favorable opportunity for telling Victor of his engagement, and summoning the latter to his presence, he bade him sit down, himself hesitating, stammering and blushing like a woman, as he tried to speak of Edith. Victor might have helped him, but he would not, as he sat, rather enjoying his master’s confusion, until the latter said, abruptly,

“Victor, how would you like to have a mistress here—a bona fide one, I mean, such as my wife would be?”

“That depends something upon who it was,” Victor exclaimed, as if this were the first intimation he had received of it.

“What would you say to Edith?” Richard continued, and Victor replied with well-feigned surprise, “Miss Hastings! You would not ask that little girl to be your wife! Why you are twenty-five years her senior.”

“No, no, Victor, only twenty-one,” and Richard’s voice trembled, for like Edith, he wished to be reassured and upheld even by his inferiors.

He knew Victor disapproved, that he considered it a great sacrifice on Edith’s part, but for this he had no intention of giving her up. On the contrary it made him a very little vexed that his valet should presume to question his acts, and he said with more asperity of manner than was usual for him,

“You think it unsuitable, I perceive, and perhaps it is, but if we are satisfied, it is no one’s else business, I think,”

“Certainly not,” returned Victor, a meaning smile curling his lip, “if both are satisfied, I ought to be. When is the wedding?”

He asked this last with an appearance of interest, and Richard, ever ready to forgive and forget, told him all about it, who Edith was, and sundry other matters, to which Victor listened as attentively as if he had not heard the whole before. Like Edith, Richard was in the habit of talking to Victor more as if he were an equal than a servant and in speaking of his engagement, he said,

“I had many misgivings as to the propriety of asking Edith to be my wife—she is so young, so different from me, but my excuse is that I cannot live without her. She never loved another, and thus the chance is tenfold that she will yet be to me all that a younger, less dependent husband could desire.”

Victor bit his lip, half resolved one moment to undeceive poor Richard, whom he pitied for his blind infatuation, but remembering his promise, he held his peace, until his master signified that the conference was ended, when he hastened to the barn, where he could give vent to his feeling in French, his adopted language being far too prosy to suit his excited mood. Suddenly Grace Atherton came into his mind, and Edith’s request that he should tell her.

“Yes, I’ll do it,” he said, starting at once for Brier Hill “‘Twill be a relief to let another know it, and then I want to see her squirm, when she hears all hope for herself is gone.”

For once, however, Victor was mistaken. Gradually the hope that she could ever be aught to Richard was dying out of Grace’s heart, and though, for an instant, she turned very white when, as if by accident, he told the news, it was more from surprise at Edith’s conduct than from any new feeling that she had lost him. She was in the garden bending over a bed of daffodils, so he did not see her face, but he knew from her voice how astonished she was and rather wondered that she could question him so calmly as she did, asking if Edith were very happy, when the wedding was to be, and even wondering at Richard’s willingness to wait so long.

“Women are queer any way,” was Victor’s mental comment, as, balked of his intention to see Grace Atherton squirm, he bade her good morning, and bowed himself from the garden, having first received her message that she would come up in the course of the day, and congratulate the newly betrothed.

Once alone, Grace’s calmness all gave way; and though the intelligence did not affect her as it once would have done, the fibres of her heart quivered with pain, and a sense of dreariness stole over her, as, sitting down on the thick, trailing boughs of an evergreen, she covered her face with her hands, and wept as women always weep over a blighted hope. It was all in vain that her pet kitten came gamboling to her feet, rubbing against her dress, climbing upon her shoulder, and playfully touching, with her velvet paw, the chestnut curls which fell from beneath her bonnet. All in vain that the Newfoundland dog came to her side, licking her hands and gazing upon her with a wondering, human look of intelligent. Grace had no thought for Rover or for Kitty, and she wept on, sometimes for Arthur, sometimes for Edith, but oftener for the young girl who years ago refused the love offered her by Richard Harrington; and then she wondered if it were possible that Edith had so soon ceased to care for Arthur,

“I can tell from her manner,” she thought; and with her mind thus brought to the call she would make at Collingwood, she dried her eyes, and speaking playfully to her dumb pets, returned to the house a sad, subdued woman, whose part in the drama of Richard Harrington was effectually played out.

That afternoon, about three o’clock, a carriage bearing Grace Atherton, wound slowly up the hill to Collingwood and when it reached the door a radiant, beautiful woman stepped out, her face all wreathed in smiles and her voice full of sweetness as she greeted Richard, who came forth to meet her.

“A pretty march you’ve stolen upon me,” she began, in a light, bantering tone—“you and Edith—never asked my consent or said so much as ‘by your leave’ but no matter, I congratulate you all the same. I fancied it would end in this. Where is she—the bride-elect?”

Richard was stunned with such a volley of words from one whom he supposed ignorant of the matter, and observing his evident surprise Grace continued, “You wonder how I know, Victor told me this morning; he was too much delighted to keep it to himself. But say, where is Edith?”

“Here I am,” and advancing from the parlor, where she had overheard the whole, Edith laughed a gay, musical laugh, as hollow and meaningless as Mrs. Atherton’s forced levity.

Had she followed the bent of her inclinations she would not have left her pillow that day, but remembering Victor’s words, “Unless I see it’s killing you,” she felt the necessity of exerting herself, of wearing the semblance of happiness at least, and about noon she had arisen and dressed herself with the utmost care, twining geranium leaves in her hair just as she used to do when going to see Arthur, and letting them droop from among her braids in the way he had told her was so becoming. Then, with flushed cheeks and bright, restless eyes, she went down to Richard, receiving his caresses and partially returning them when she fancied Victor was where he could see her,

“Women are queer,” he said again to himself, as he saw Edith on Richard’s knee, with her arm around his neck. “Their love is like a footprint on the seashore; the first big wave washes it away, and they are ready to make another. I reckon I shan’t bother myself about her any more. If she loved Arthur as I thought she did, she couldn’t hug another one so soon. It isn’t nature—man nature, any way; but Edith’s like a reed that bends. That character of Cooper’s suits her exactly. I’ll call her so to myself hereafter—Reed that bends,” and Victor hurried off, delighted with his new name.

But if Victor was in a measure deceived by Edith’s demeanor, Grace Atherton was not. Women distrust women sooner than men; can read each other better, detect the hidden motive sooner, and ere the two had been five minutes together, Grace had caught a glimpse of the troubled, angry current over which the upper waters rippled so smoothly that none save an accurate observer would have suspected the fierce whirlpool which lay just below the surface. Because, he thought, they would like it better, Richard left the two ladies alone at last and then turning suddenly upon Edith, Grace said,

“Tell me, Edith, is your heart in this or have you done it in a fit of desperation?”

“I have had a long time to think of it,” Edith answered proudly. “It is no sudden act. Richard is too noble to accept it if it were. I have always loved him,—not exactly as I loved Arthur, it is true.”

Here the whirlpool underneath threatened to betray itself, but with a mighty effort Edith kept it down, and the current was unruffled as she continued,

“Arthur is nearer my age—nearer my beau ideal, but I can’t have him, and I’m not going to play the part of a love-lorn damsel for a married man. Tell him so when you write. Tell him I’m engaged to Richard just as he said I would be. Tell him I’m happy, too, for I know I’m doing right. It is not wicked to love Richard and it was wicked to love him.”

It cost Edith more to say this than she supposed, and when she finished, the perspiration stood in drops beneath her hair and about her mouth.

“You are deceiving yourself,” said Grace, who, without any selfish motive now, really pitied the hard, white-faced girl, so unlike the Edith of other days. “You are taking Richard from gratitude, nothing else. Victor told me of your parentage, but because he saved your life, you need not render yours as a return. Your heart is not in this marriage.”

“Yes, it is—all