Bessie's Fortune Part 29

And Neil had been worried and exasperated and wrought upon until he was half beside himself. His mother had wished him to accompany her and Blanche to the house of a friend near Edinburgh, and when he refused, saying he preferred to go to Stoneleigh, there had been a jolly row, as he expressed it, and his mother had charged him with his preference for the daughter of that bold adventuress, and had told him decidedly that if he ever dared to marry her he should never touch a shilling of her money either during her life-time or after, for once a.s.sured of the marriage she would so arrange her matters that he would be as great a beggar as Archie McPherson himself.

"A family of paupers!" she said, scornfully. "Your father has nothing to give you; absolutely nothing, and you can yourself judge, how, with your tastes and habits, you will like living at Stoneleigh with two meals a day, as I hear they sometimes do, blacking your own boots and building your own fires."

Here Neil winced, for he knew very well that he had no fancy for poverty, even if Bessie shared it with him But he told his mother he had, and consigned Blanche's ten thousand a year to a place where the gold might be melted, and said he loved Bessie McPherson better than anything in life, and should marry her if he pleased in spite of a hundred mothers. But he knew he should not--knew he could not face the reality when it came to the point. He was too dependent upon what wealth would bring him to throw it away for one girl, even if that girl were Bessie, whom he loved with all the intensity of his selfish nature--loved so much that for an hour or so after his interview with his mother, he balanced the two questions, Blanche with ten thousand a year, or Bessie with nothing. Naturally Blanche turned the scale, and then to himself, he said:

"I will go to Stoneleigh and live for a few days in Bessie's presence, and then I will say good-by forever and marry Blanche as mother wishes me to do. She is not so very bad except for her eyebrows and that horrid drawl. But Bessie, oh, Bessie, how can I give her up!" and the young man's heart cried out in pain for the sweet young girl he had loved all his life, and who, he was sure loved him. To do Neil justice, this was the bitterest drop in the cup--the knowing that Bessie, too, would suffer. "She has enough to bear," he said, "without an added drop from me, I wish she would get in love with some one else and throw me overboard. I believe I could bear it better. There's Jack he was awfully sweet on her in London, but he has only been to see her once since. He is too poor to marry, and there is no one else--yes, by Jove, there is!" and Neil started to his feet. "There is Grey Jerrold. He is just the man for Bessie to fall in love with if she could see him, and I'll bring that about."

It may seem strange that one so utterly selfish as Neil McPherson should have devised this plan to help him in his dilemma, but this in fact was only another phase of his selfishness. He knew it was impossible for him to marry Bessie, and felt that it was also impossible to give her up without other aid than his own feeble will. If she could prefer some one else to himself, it would be a help, however much his self-love might be wounded, and if another than himself must taste the sweetness he so coveted he would far rather that other should be Grey Jerrold, an American, even though he bore the rose away to foreign soil, than to have one of his own countrymen flaunting his happiness in his face, Bessie and Grey were suited to each other, he thought, and he would bring them together; so, when he heard from Grey of his intended trip to Carnarvon, he suggested that he defer it until the holidays and spend a day or two at Stoneleigh. Then he wrote to Bessie that he was as good as engaged to Blanche, and that she would probably fall in love with Grey, who was sure to do so with her. This done, he began to antic.i.p.ate the visit, which he said to himself was to be his last, and from which he meant to get all the happiness possible, he would kiss Bessie as often as he liked; he would hold her hands in his, the dear little hands which had worked so hard, but, which nevertheless, were so soft and pretty; he would look into the innocent blue eyes and see them kindle and droop beneath his gaze, and then there should be one long, never to be forgotten walk by themselves across the suspension bridge, through the straggling old town, and along the road by the river toward Beaumaris, and he would tell her everything, all his love for her and its utter hopelessness because they were both so poor, and he would say good-by forever, and bid her marry Grey Jerrold, and so remove temptation from him and make it easier for him to be true to Blanche.

It was much easier for Neil to form this plan than to be satisfied with it, and during the few days which elapsed before he started for Stoneleigh he was cross and irritable and even rude at times both to his mother and Blanche, the latter of whom finally treated him with a cold indifference which made him fear a little for the ten thousand.

"What if she should take the bits in her teeth and throw me overboard?"

he thought, and at the very last, he changed his tactics and devoted himself to the heiress with an a.s.siduity which left her little doubt of his intentions. Still, to her he did not speak, though to his mother he said, half irritably, as if it were something wrung from him against his will:

"Don't trouble yourself. I intend to marry Blanche in my own good time; but I will not be hurried, and am going to Stoneleigh first."

And he went to Stoneleigh and tried all the way there to think of Bessie as she looked in the park, in the old faded gown with the disfiguring puffs; tried to make himself believe that she had no manner, no style, and would not pa.s.s for a great lady among people city bred; that she was better suited to some quiet home such as Grey Jerrold might give her, were he happy enough to win her. Neil had no doubt that Grey would try to win her when once he had seen her, and he began at last to feel sorry that he had invited his friend to Stoneleigh, and to have doubts as to his ability to give Bessie up even to him. He was sure of it when he reached Stoneleigh and saw her with the brightness on her face and the sparkle in her eye as she welcomed him. She might not be as elegant or as stylish as Blanche, who had lived in the city all her life, but she was inexpressibly sweet and womanly, and there was in every movement a grace and quiet dignity which stamped her as a lady. And Neil recognized it as he never had before, and fought the battle over again all through the silent night, and was still fighting it in the morning when he went down to breakfast and looked at Bessie as she poured his coffee, in her gray dress and pretty white muslin ap.r.o.n, with the daintily frilled pockets, and just the corner of a blue-bordered handkerchief showing in one of them. Neil liked the dress and the effect of the blue handkerchief but he did not like the ap.r.o.n, it made her look so like a housemaid, and he told her so when breakfast was over and they stood a moment alone by the fire.

Reddening a little, Bessie answered him, laughingly; "Yes, you told me once before that you did not like my ap.r.o.n, and I know it would be out of place on your mother or Blanche, but it suits me, for you see I _am_ housemaid here, and clear my own table and wash my own silver and china.

Dorothy is old and has the rheumatism in her feet, and I must help; so, Mr. Aristocrat, if you do not wish to see me degrade myself, just go and take a walk, and when you come back the obnoxious ap.r.o.n shall be laid aside and we will practice that song you brought me."

Neil did not go out and walk, but staid in the dining-room and smoked his cigar, and looked at Bessie as she cleared away the breakfast dishes and washed the silver and china, with her sleeves drawn half-way to her elbows, showing her round, white arms.

"Yes, she is just suited to America, where, I believe, the women all wear ap.r.o.ns and wash their own dishes," Neil thought, as he watched her with a strange feeling in his heart of pain and happiness; happiness that for a few days at least she was his to look at, to love, to caress; pain that the days were so few and so short when he must leave her.

And then there arose before him, as in a vision, a picture of a quiet home amid green hedge-rows and sunny lanes, not a home such as Blanche's would be, with gorgeous surroundings and liveried servants everywhere, but such a home as makes a man better for living in it; a home where the housewifely Bessie was the presiding G.o.ddess, flitting about just as she was doing now, putting away the silver and china, brushing up the hearth, moving a chair here and another there, watering her pots of flowers in the conservatory, tea-roses and carnations and heliotrope and lilies all in bloom and filling the room with sweet perfume as if it were the summer-time, instead of chill December with its biting blasts sweeping against the windows.

"There!" Bessie said, at last, removing her ap.r.o.n, pulling down her sleeves, and smoothing her bright wavy hair, "I have dismissed the housemaid, and now I am ready to sing for you, or play chess, or do whatever you like."

But Neil was in no mood for singing or playing chess, or even talking much, and his fit of abstraction lasted all day, or until late in the afternoon, when Bessie began to speak of getting herself in readiness for Grey, who was to come in the evening train from Carnarvon. Then Neil roused, and as if he had nerved himself for the sacrifice, manifested a great deal of interest with regard to Bessie's personal appearance.

"I want you to get yourself up stunningly," he said, "so as to make a good first appearance. I have told Grey so much about you that he must not be disappointed."

"Ridiculous! I shall wear just what I wore yesterday, bow and all, for I like it," Bessie said, with a little defiant toss of her head.

She, too, had been thinking while Neil sat so silent and moody by the fire, and had decided that he had greatly changed for the worse since she had seen him last--that he was hard to please, moody, exacting, and quite too much given to criticising her and her dress.

"As if it is any of his business what I wear," she thought, and she took a kind of exultant satisfaction in fastening on the knot of ribbon he had condemned and which really was very becoming to her plain, dark dress.

"I suppose, Mr. Grey Jerrold, I must waste a clean collar and a pair of cuffs on you, though that will be so much more for me to iron next week," she said, as she stood before the mirror in her room, which was to be given to the coming guest, "I hope, sir, you will appreciate all I am doing for you, for I a.s.sure you it is no small matter to turn out from my comfortable quarters into that barn of a room where the wind blows a hurricane and the rats scurry over the floor. Ugh! how I dread it, and _you_, too!" she continued, shaking her head at the imaginary Grey, who stood before her mind's eye, black-eyed, black-whiskered, black-faced, and a very giant in proportions, as she fancied all Americans to be.

Her toilet completed, she removed from the room everything which she thought would betray the fact that it was her apartment, and carried them with a shiver to the chamber facing the north, where the rats scurried over the floor at night, and the wind blew a hurricane.

"There! I am ready for your Pythias! Do you think I shall pa.s.s muster?"

she said to Neil, as she entered the dining-room where he was sitting.

It would indeed have been a very censorious, fault-finding man who could have seen aught amiss in the beautiful young girl, plain as her dress might be, and for answer to her question, Neil stood up and kissed her, saying as he did so:

"He will think you perfect, though I don't like the ribbon, I don't like any color about you except your hair and eyes. I wish you would take it off."

"Mr. Jerrold may think differently. I am dressed for him, and as I like it I mean to wear it," Bessie answered, curtly, but with a bright smile, as she looked into Neil's face.

"Oh, well; _chacun a son gout_," he said, consulting his watch, and adding: "It is time I was starting for the station; the train is due in fifteen minutes."

When he was gone Bessie began to feel a little nervous with regard to the stranger coming among them. Hitherto she had thought only of the extra expense and the trouble he would give old Dorothy, whose feet and ankles were badly swollen and paining her so much.

"I may have to cook and serve the Christmas dinner myself," she said, "and I don't mind the work; only I do not want this American from Boston, where the women are so full of brains, to think me a mere dishwasher and chimney-sweep. I wonder if he is half as nice as Neil says he is, and if I shall like him. Of course I sha'n't, but I shall treat him well for Neil's sake, and be so glad when he has gone."

Then she proceeded to lay the table for supper, as they usually dined in the middle of the day. Dorothy's feet were more active then, and Archie preferred an early dinner. Everything was in readiness at last; the bread and the b.u.t.ter and the jam, with cold chicken and ham, and the kettle singing on the hearth; the curtains drawn and the bright fire making shadows on the wall and falling upon the young girl, who, as her ear caught the sound of footsteps without, ran to the window, and parting the heavy curtains, looked out into the darkness so that the first glimpse Grey Jerrold had of her was of her fair, eager face framed in waves of golden brown hair, and pressed against the window pane in the vain effort to see the dreaded American.

CHAPTER X.

GREY.

Between the man of twenty-three and the boy of fourteen, who had knelt upon the snow in the leafless woods and asked G.o.d to forgive him for his grandfather's sin, and had pledged himself to undo as far as was possible the wrong to others that sin had caused, there was the difference of nine years of growth, and culture, and experience, and knowledge of the world; but otherwise the boy and the man were the same, for as the Grey of fourteen had been frank, and truthful, and generous, and wholly unselfish, with a gentleness in his nature like that of a tender, loving woman, so was the Grey of twenty-three whom we last saw upon the steamer which was taking him away from home and the lonely woman watching so tearfully upon the wharf, and feeling that with his going her joyless life was made more desolate.

Since that time there had been a year's travel upon the Continent with his parents, and then he had entered at Eton, where he renewed his acquaintance with Neil McPherson, between whom and himself there sprung up a friendship which nothing had weakened as yet. Several times he had been a guest in Neil's home, where Lady Jane treated him with the utmost civility, and admitted that for an American he really was refined and gentlemanly. He knew Jack Trevellian, and Blanche, and all Neil's intimate friends, and had the _entree_ to the same society with them, whenever he chose to avail himself of it, which was not very often. He was in Europe for study, he said, and not for society, and he devoted himself to his books with an energy and will which put him at the head of his cla.s.s in Eton, and won him an enviable reputation for scholarship at Oxford, where he had now been for nearly four years, and where he intended to remain until his Aunt Lucy, and possibly his Aunt Hannah, crossed the sea and joined him for an extended tour.

Then he was going home for good to settle down and marry, he said, for in all Grey's dreams of the future there was always the picture of a happy home with some fair, sweet-faced girl in it, reigning equally as mistress with the dear Aunt Hannah, still living her solitary life in the old farm house, and keeping watch over that hidden grave under the bedroom floor, and laying up year by year the interest on the gold which was one day to go to the heirs of Elizabeth Rogers, of Carnarvon, if they could be found. But could they? That was the question both she and Grey asked themselves as the years went on and no trace was discovered of any such person either in or around Carnarvon, for Grey had been there more than once, and with all due precaution had inquired of everybody for the woman, Elizabeth Rogers, and finally, as he grew a little bolder, for Joel Rogers himself, who went to America many years before. But all to no avail; both Joel and Elizabeth were myths, and the case was getting hopeless.

Still, Grey did not despair, and resolved that during the holidays he would go again to the old Welsh town and try what he could do, and so it came about that he accompanied Neil as far as Carnarvon, where he proposed to spend a day and then go over to Stoneleigh on Christmas Eve, more to please Neil, who had urged him so strongly to stop there, than for any particular satisfaction it would be to him to pa.s.s the day with strangers, who might or might not care to see him. He knew there was a cousin Bessie, a girl of wondrous beauty, if Neil was to be believed, and he remembered to have heard of her, years ago, when he was a boy and first met Neil McPherson at Melrose. Faint memories, too, he had of hearing her talked about at the memorable Thanksgiving dinner which had preceded his grandfather's death and his own sickness, when they said he had asked Miss McPherson to send for her and stuff her with mince pie, as a recompense for the many times she had gone hungry to bed because there was not money enough to buy dinner for three. And all this came back to him as he stood in the station in Carnarvon waiting for the train.

"She must be a young lady now seventeen or eighteen years old," he thought; "and Neil says she is beautiful. But I dare say she is like most English girls--with a giggle and a drawl and a supreme contempt for anything outside the United Kingdom. I fancy, too, she is tall and thin, with sharp elbows and big feet, like many of her sisters. I wonder what she will think of me. People say I am more English than American, which I don't like, for if there is a loyal son of Uncle Sam in this world I am he. I can't help this confounded foreign accent which I have picked up from being over here so long, and I do not know as I wish to help it.

Perhaps it may help me with Miss Bessie, as well as my English cut generally," and Grey glanced at himself in the dingy little gla.s.s to see how he did look.

What he saw was a broad-shouldered, finely-formed young man, who stood so erect, that he seemed taller than he really was. A face which strangers would trust without a moment's hesitancy; large dark-blue eyes, thick brown hair just inclined to curl at the ends; and a smile which would have made the plainest face handsome and which was Grey's chief point of attraction, if we except his voice, which, though rich and full, was very sweet, and expressive of the genuine interest and sympathy he felt for every human being in distress or otherwise. No tired, discouraged mother in a railway car, trying to hush her crying infant, would ever fear that he would be annoyed or wish her and her child in Jericho. On the contrary, she would, if necessary, ask him to hold her baby for a moment, and the child would go to him unhesitatingly, so great was the mesmeric power he exercised over his fellow-creatures. This influence or power was inborn, and he could no more have helped it than he could have helped his heartbeats. But, added to this, was a constant effort on his part to make those with whom he came in contact happy, to sympathize with them in their griefs, to help them in their needs, to sacrifice his own feelings to their pleasure, for in this way he felt that he was in part atoning for the wrong done by the poor old man dead long ago and forgotten by nearly all who had known him.

Such was the Grey Jerrold whom Neil McPherson met at the Menai station and escorted along the road to Stoneleigh.

"I should have driven out for you, only there is no carriage. I think I told you that Mr. Archie McPherson is awfully poor," he explained apologetically as he saw Grey pull his fur cap over his ears, for the wind was blowing a gale and drifting the snow in their faces.

"I do not think you ever told me in so many words that they were very poor, but I had an impression that they were not rich," Grey said, adding, "I prefer to walk, and rather enjoy battling with a north-wester: it takes me back to New England, the very land of snows and storms."

They were in the park by this time, nearing the house, when suddenly the curtains of a window parted, letting out a flood of light into the darkness and Grey saw for an instant pressed against the pane a face which made his heart throb quickly with a kind of glad surprise as if it were a face he had seen before, while with it came a thought of his Aunt Hannah, and the lonely old house in the pasture land in far-off Allington. A moment later, and the face was looking up to his with a half fearful curious expression, which was, however, changed to one of great gladness as Bessie met his winning smile and the kind eyes bent so searchingly upon her. She had no fear or dread of him now, and she gave him her hand most cordially and bade him welcome to Stoneleigh with a warmth which made him feel at home, and put him at his ease.

"Perhaps you would like to go to your room at once, and Neil will show you the way," she said to him; then, in an aside to Neil, "my room, you know, at the head of the stairs."

Neil looked at her in surprise, while a cloud gathered upon his brow.

That Bessie should give her room to Grey seemed to him absurd, though he never stopped to ask himself where she could put him if not there Neil knew perfectly well the capabilities of the old stone house, and that spare rooms were not as plenty as blackberries, but so long as he was not incommoded it was no business of his to inquire into matters; nor could he understand that an extra fire even for a day was a heavy drain on Bessie's purse. But Grey's quick ear caught Bessie's whispered words, and before he entered the warm, pretty room at the head of the stairs he knew it belonged to her, and guessed why she had given it to him. Under any circ.u.mstances he would have known by certain unmistakable signs that it was a young girl's apartment into which he was ushered, and after Neil left him he looked about him with a kind of awe at the chintz-covered furniture, the white curtains at the window, and the pretty little toilet table with its hanging gla.s.s in the center, and its coverings of pink and white muslin.

Just then, through the door, which had inadvertently been left a little ajar, he caught the sound of voices in the hall below, Neil's voice and Bessie's and Neil was saying to her, disapprovingly:

"Why did you give your room to Grey? Was it necessary?"