At Last Part 16

His reply was just what she had foreseen and guarded against.

"It would have been a kind and worthy deed, had you written to warn me of my danger, and advised me to make my defence in person. As it was, I was thrown off roughly and pitilessly--my demand upon the brother for the particulars of the accusation against me--my appeal to the sister--loving and earnest as words could make it--for permission to visit her and learn from her own lips that she trusted or disowned me, were alike disregarded. Mr. Aylett's response was a second letter, more coldly insulting than the first--hers, the return of my last, after she had opened and read it, then the surrender of my gifts, letters, notes, everything that could remind her that we had ever met and loved.

Mrs. Sutton, too, my father's old and firm friend, deserted me in my extremity. And she must have been acquainted with the character and extent of the charges preferred against me. I had hoped better things from her, if only because I bear her dead husband's name. Did she never speak in your hearing of writing to me?"

"She did--but said, in the next breath, that it would be useless, since the minds of the others were fully made up. I knew she thought Winston arbitrary, and Mabel credulous; but she was afraid to interfere. As for myself, what could I have told you that you had not already heard? I could only hope that the cloud was not heavy, and would soon blow over.

From the hour in which it cast the first shadow upon her, Mabel was estranged from me--the decline of our intimacy commenced. The Ayletts take pride in keeping their own counsel. Winston, who never liked me, and whom I detested, was as confidential with me in this affair as my old playfellow and school-mate. Believe me when I declare that if my intercession could have availed aught with her, I would have run the risk of her displeasure and Winston's anathemas by offering it."

"I do believe you! Nor need you expatiate to me upon the obduracy of the Aylett pride. Surely, no one living has more reason than I to comprehend how unreasoning and implacable I find it is. I looked for injustice at Winston Aylett's hands. I read him truly in our only private interview.

Insolent, vain, despotic--wedded to his dogmas, and intolerant of others' opinion, he disliked me because I refused to play the obedient va.s.sal to his will and requirements; stood upright as one man should in the presence of a brother-mortal, instead of cringing at his lordship's footstool. But he was powerless to do more than annoy me without his sister's co-operation."

"She stood in great, almost slavish, awe of him," urged Rosa, in extenuation of Mabel's infidelity.

"Aye!" savagely. "And love was not strong enough to cast out fear! She was justifiable if she hesitated to entrust herself and her happiness to the keeping of one she had known but two months. It was prudent--not false--in her to weigh, to the finest grain, the evidence furnished by her brother to prove my unfitness to be her husband. But having done all this, she should have remembered that I had rights also. It was infamous, cowardly, cruel beyond degree, to cast her vote against me without giving me a chance of self-exculpation. Her hand--not his--struck the dagger into my back!"

Again Rosa's fingers involuntarily (?) stole into his, to recall him to a knowledge of where he was, and there were fresh tears, ready to fall from her gazelle eyes, when his agitation began to subside.

"My poor child!" he said, penitently. "I am behaving like a madman, you like a pitying angel! We will have no more scenes, and you must oblige me by forgetting this one, as fast as may be. From to-night Mabel Aylett is to me as if she had never been. To n.o.body except yourself have I betrayed the secret of my hurt. After this, when you think of it, believe that it is a hurt no longer."

Rosa "had out" her fit of crying when he went away, betaking herself to her chamber and locking the door that her aunt might not surprise her while the traces of tears disfigured her cheeks. But she was anything but broken-hearted, and only slightly sore in spirit in the retrospect of what had ensued upon her communication to the discarded lover. He had, indeed, given more evidence of his unconquered pa.s.sion for Mabel than she had expected. His undisguised pleasure in renewed companionship with herself; his excellent spirits during the greater part of the evening; his unembarra.s.sed reply to her aunt's malapropos observation, and fluent chat upon other themes, had misled her into the hope that the ungenerous and uncivil conduct of the Ayletts had disgusted and alienated him from sister, no less than from brother. It was a disappointment to discover that it cost him a terrible effort to p.r.o.nounce Mabel's name, while the abrupt intelligence of her marriage had distracted him to incoherent ravings, which had nearly amounted to curses upon the authors of his pain.

"And all for a woman who could bring herself, after being engaged to Frederic Chilton, to marry that dolt of a Dorrance!" she said, indignantly. "I wonder if he would have been consoled or chagrined had I painted the portrait of the man who had superseded him. It is as well that I did not make the experiment. He would be magnanimous enough when he cooled down--which he will do by to-morrow morning--to pity her, and that is next to the last thing I want him to do. Thank goodness! the denouement is over, and the topic an interdicted one from this time forth. Now for the verification or refutation of the saying that a heart is most easily caught in the rebound. There was some jargon we learned at school about the angle of incidence being equal to that of reflection. You see, my dearly beloved self," nodding with returning sauciness at her image in the mirror before which she was combing her hair, "I undertake this business in the spirit of philosophical investigation."

She needed to keep her courage up by these and the like whimsical conceits, when the forenoon of the next day pa.s.sed away without a glimpse of Mr. Chilton. He had not yet left his card for the Masons, nor called to inquire after her health, when the summons sounded to the five o'clock dinner. A horrible apprehension seized and devoured her heart by the time the dessert was brought on, and there were no signs of his appearance. He had, ashamed to meet her after last night's exposure of his weakness, or dreading the power of the reminiscences the sight of her would awaken, left the city without coming to say "Farewell." That is, she had driven him from her forever!

The room went around with her in a dizzy waltz, as the notion crossed her brain.

"The sight and smell of all these sweets make me sick, Aunt Mary," she said, rising from the table. "My head aches awfully! May I go to my room and lie down?"

"Try some of this nice lemon-ice, my love!" prescribed the plump matron.

"The acid will set you all straight. No? You don't think you are going to have a chill, do you? Father!" nudging her husband who was burying his spoon in a Charlotte Russe, "this dear child doesn't want any dessert. Won't you pilot her through the crowd?"

"Only to the door, uncle! Then come back to your dinner!" Rosa made answer to his disconcerted stare. "I can find my way to my chamber without help."

She could have done it, had she been in possession of her accustomed faculties. But between the harrowing suspicion that engrossed her mind and the nervous moisture that gathered in her eyes with each step, she mounted a story too high, and did not perceive her blunder until, happening to think that her apartment must lie somewhere in the region she had gained, she consulted the numbers upon the adjacent doors, and saw that she had wandered a hundred rooms out of her way, She stopped short to consider which of the corridors, stretching in gas-lit vistas on either hand, would conduct her soonest to the desired haven, when a gentleman emerging from a chamber close by stepped directly upon her train.

CHAPTER XI. -- IN THE REBOUND.

"I beg your pardon!" said a deep, familiar voice. Then the formality vanished from face and address. "Is this YOU?" holding out his hand in hearty friendliness that instantly dispelled Rosa's forebodings. "What or whom are you seeking in these wilds?"

The crystal beads glistened upon her lashes in the fulness and joy of her deliverance from doubt and fear, and before she could twinkle them back, broke into smaller brilliants upon her cheeks and the bosom of her dress. It was very babyish and foolish, but it is to be questioned whether she could have contrived a more telling situation had she studied it for a month.

"What is it!" inquired Frederic, kindly, not releasing the fingers that twitched, more than struggled, in his. "Have you been frightened?"

"Yes," with grieved, but fearless simplicity, "I was frightened because I thought I had offended you--perhaps driven you away--and that I should never be able to ask your forgiveness for my cruel abruptness last night! In thinking about and worrying over this, I somehow lost my way, and was just trying to remember by what route I reached this strange neighborhood, when your appearance startled me."

"You did not know, then, that this is Bachelor's Hall--the haunt of unmated Benedicts, wifeless visitors to the city, and celibate M. C.'s?"

he rejoined, pleasantly. "Let me be your guide to more desirable as well as more accessible quarters!"

On the stairs he bent to scan her blushing countenance.

"How am I to punish you for your naughty distrust of my friendship and common sense? I have been too busy all day to spare a minute for social pleasure. I dined at two o'clock, having an appointment at three, returned at half-past five, and was just coming down to your parlor to look you up. Another bit of unimportant news, with which I should not have annoyed you if you had not merited a little vexation by your preposterous fancies, is, that, instead of taking an early train to Philadelphia, I have to-day entered into engagements that will oblige me to prolong my stay in this place until the first of February."

He looked bright and cheerful, ready for sport or badinage. Rosa caught herself wondering many times during that evening, and the succeeding days of the three weeks they pa.s.sed under the same roof, if she had dreamed of--not beheld with her bodily optics--that one stormy burst of pa.s.sion which had been his farewell to the hope of a final reconciliation with Mabel Aylett.

He never spoke of her again, or referred, in the most distant manner, to his visit at Ridgeley. The omission was an agreeable one to Rosa for several reasons. Silence, she believed, was to oblivion as a means to an end. Judging from herself, she adopted the theory that people were apt to forget what they never talked of themselves, nor heard mentioned by others. Furthermore, she was relieved from the necessity of concocting diplomatic evasions, dexterously skirting the truth, to say nothing of plump falsehoods. These last cost her conscience some unpleasant twinges. To avoid narrating in full what had happened was a work of art.

A downright lie was a stroke of heavy business, unsuited to her airy genius--and when the Aylett-Chilton complication was upon the tapis, it was difficult to avoid undertaking such.

For three weeks, then, Mr. Frederic Chilton and the Virginian belle visited concert, theatre, and a.s.sembly-room in company, sat side by side in the spectators' gallery of House and Senate chamber, walked in daylight along the broad avenues from one magnificent distance to another, and on home-evenings--which were not many--chatted together familiarly, the well-pleased Masons thought confidentially, by the fireside in the family parlor. It must not be inferred from their constant intercourse that he had the field entirely to himself.

Gallants of divers pretensions--first-cla.s.s, mediocre, and contemptible--considered with a practical eye to "settlement," hovered about the fascinating witch as moths about a gas-burner, and had no citable cause of complaint of non-appreciation, inasmuch as she shed equal light upon all, save one. "My very old friend, Mr. Chilton,"

she was wont to denominate him in conversation with those who inwardly called themselves fools for their jealousy of a man of whom she spoke thus frankly, with never a stammer or blush; yet they acknowledged to themselves all the while that they were both suspicious and envious of his superior advantages. However backward Frederic may have been in the beginning to monopolize the notice and time of his "sisterly friend,"

he was not an insensate block, who could not perceive and value the compliment paid him by her partiality--ever apparent, but never unmaidenly. Impute it to whatever motive he might, the distinction t.i.tillated his vanity, touched, at least, the outermost covering of his heart. It might be pity, it might be pleasant, mournful memories of other days--it was most likely of all a sincere platonic affection, for one with tastes and feelings akin to hers that gave l.u.s.tre to her eyes, and gentle meaning to her smile when he drew near. At any rate, it would be churlish not to accept the preference these conveyed, and to like her and his position as her chosen knight better every day; it was inevitable that he should marvel--not without melancholy-at the flight of time that brought so soon the day of parting.

The Masons, with himself, were engaged to attend a large party on the last evening of January. Without a.n.a.lyzing the impulse that constrained him to do so, he had refrained from reminding Rosa that his stay in Washington was so nearly over, and, with masculine consistency, he was half disposed to be affronted that she had forgotten what he had said to her of its extent. He had never seen her more lively--in more radiant spirits and looks--than she was upon the night of the 30th. He had dropped into her aunt's parlor about ten o'clock, and detected Rosa in the act of dragging her new ball-dress from the box in which the mantua maker had sent it home.

"Conceive, if you can--but you can't, being a man--what I have undergone for an hour and more!" she cried, at seeing him. "My treasure--the darlingest love of a dress I have ever ordered--was brought in exactly two seconds before a brace of honorables--lumbering machines that they are! knocked at the door. So, lest they should brand me as a frivolous doll (as if anybody with a soul, and an infinitesimal degree of love for the beautiful, COULD help admiring the divine thing!), I pushed the poor box under the sofa, and there it has lain in ignominious neglect, like a pearl of purest ray serene smothered in an oyster, all the time they were here. I was purposely cross and stupid, too, in the hope of getting rid of them the sooner. If you despise what most of your undiscriminating s.e.x call fancy articles, consider a woman's fondness for a ravishing robe despicable and irrational, Mr. Chilton, you need not look this way. You could hardly have a severer--certainly not a more appropriate--punishment."

"You depreciate my aesthetic proclivities," he rejoined, catching her tone. "You would not trust my bungling fingers to help excavate the gem, I know; but I may surely use my eyes--admire, as we bid children do--with my hands behind my back."

Notwithstanding his boast of knowingness in the mysteries of feminine apparel, he could not have told of what material the divine robe was made--except that it was some shiny white stuff, with wide embroidery upon the flounces. But Rosa, her aunt, and cousin had gone into ecstacies over it, and instigated by kind-hearted Mrs. Mason, the enraptured owner had rushed off to Mrs. Mason's chamber to try it on, returning presently in full array, elate at the "perfect fit," and insisting upon a unanimous declaration that she "had never before worn anything one-thousandth part as becoming."

"It is a winsome, fantastic, enchanting little being!" remarked Mr.

Chilton, in soliloquy at his dressing-table, the next evening. "I hope she will enjoy the gathering to-night, as she hopes to do. Will she miss me at the next she attends?"

Then--laughing at the sentimental visage portrayed upon the mirror--"It would be the acme of ludicrous folly for me to disturb myself on that score. We have had a pleasant time together--she and I--and tomorrow it will be over. There is the whole story--except that, in a month I shall cease to think of her, unless her name is accidentally uttered in my hearing--I wish I could forget some other things as easily!--and she will probably be the affianced darling of one of the lumbering Honorables--the elder and homelier of the brace, I fancy, since he is the wealthier, and the humming-bird should have a fitting cage."

Expressing in his composed lineaments and firm stride nothing like disconsolateness at the programme, he flung his cloak over his arm, took his white gloves in his hand, cast a pa.s.sing glance at the gla.s.s to see that his whiskers and hair were in order, and ran down the two flights of stairs lying between Bachelor's Hall and the Masons' private parlor.

"Come in!" said a plaintive voice, in answer to his knock.

Rosa was alone in the cosy apartment. She was curled up in a great padded chair, set upon the hearth-rug. Her dress was a plain black silk; she wore a scarlet shawl, and her head-gear was some odd, but distractingly pretty construction of white lace, a square folded in two unequal triangles, and knotted loosely, handkerchief-wise, the points in front, under her chin.

"Not ready!" exclaimed Frederic, in merry reproach. "You, the model of punctual women!"

"I am not going!" sighed the humming-bird, dolorously. "I have had a horrid sore throat all day--and--a--headache--and Aunt Mary got frightened, and forbade me to put my head out of doors."

"That is a heart-rending affliction! And could you not send the incomparable dress as your representative?"

"Don't laugh!" she said, jerking away her head. "I cannot bear it to-night--not that I care the millionth part of a fig for all the parties in christendom; and as for the dress, you think that I haven't a soul above such frippery and gewgaws: but I wish I had never seen it. I shall never wear it as long as I live!"

And out came the laced cambric to absorb the gathering dew.

"There is something in this I do not understand," said Frederic, setting a chair for himself close to hers. "Are you really suffering? I imagined that yours was a case of simple cold, and that Mrs. Mason advised you to remain indoors chiefly on account of the weather. It is raining hard!"

"I am glad it is!" she replied, with the manner of one bereft of human sympathy, and extracting gloomy delight from the unison of nature with her morbid broodings. "And my throat isn't nearly so painful as I made Aunt Mary believe. I did not want to go out. Parties are an awful bore when one is sad-hearted."