Jessamine Part 28

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 embarra.s.sment, 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 f.a.n.n.y Provost, who was very anxious to see her and resume their old intimacy. Selina Bradley had sent the chased silver b.u.t.ter-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 a.s.sociations 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. n.o.body 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sure 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!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 ent.i.tled him to become her cavalier on all occasions; her preceptor and referee in doubtful cases of conscience and conduct;--when I compared this circ.u.mstance 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 G.o.d 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.