On the Church Steps Part 8

The packet was simply a long letter, folded thickly in several wrappers and tied with a string. The letter opened abruptly:

"What I am going to do I am sure no woman on earth ever did before me, nor would I save to undo the trouble I have most innocently made. What must you have thought of me that day at Lenox, staying close all day to two engaged people, who must have wished me away a thousand times?

But I did not dream you were engaged.

"Remember, I had just come over from Saratoga, and knew nothing of Lenox gossip, then or afterward. Something in your manner once or twice made me look at you and think that perhaps you were _interested_ in Bessie, but hers to you was so cold, so distant, that I thought it was only a notion of my jealous self.

"Was I foolish to lay so much stress on that anniversary time? Do you know that the year before we had spent it together, too?--September 28th. True, that year it was at Bertie c.o.x's funeral, but we had walked together, and I was happy in being near you.

"For, you see, it was from something more than the Hudson River that you had brought me out. You had rescued me from the stupid gayety of my first winter--from the flats of fashionable life. You had given me an ideal--something to live up to and grow worthy of.

"Let that pa.s.s. For myself, it is nothing, but for the deeper harm I have done, I fear, to Bessie and to you.

"Again, on that day at Lenox, when Bessie and I drove together in the afternoon, I tried to make her talk about you, to find out what you were to her. But she was so distant, so repellant, that I fancied there was nothing at all between you; or, rather, if you had cared for her at all, that she had been indifferent to you.

"Indeed, she quite forbade the subject by her manner; and when she told me you were going abroad, I could not help being very happy, for I thought then that I should have you all to myself.

"When I saw you on shipboard, I fancied, somehow, that you had changed your pa.s.sage to be with us. It was very foolish; and I write it, thankful that you are not here to see me. So I scribbled a little note to Bessie, and sent it off by the pilot: I don't know where you were when the pilot went. This is, as nearly as I remember it, what I wrote:

"'DEAR BESSIE: Charlie Munro is on board. He must have changed his pa.s.sage to be with us. I know from something that he has just told _me_ that this is so, and that he consoles himself already for your coldness. You remember what I told you when we talked about him. I shall _try_ now.

F.M.'

"Bessie would know what that meant. Oh, must I tell you what a weak, weak girl I was? When I found out at Lenox, as I thought, that Bessie did not care for you, I said to her that once I thought you _had_ cared for me, but that papa had offended you by his manner--you weren't of an old Knickerbocker family, you know--and had given you to understand that your visits were not acceptable.

"I am sure now that it was because I wanted to think so that I put that explanation upon your ceasing to visit me, and because papa always looked so decidedly _queer_ whenever your name was mentioned.

"I had always had everything in life that I wanted, and I believed that in due time you would come back to me.

"Bessie knew well enough what that pilot-letter meant, for here is her answer."

Pinned fast to the end of f.a.n.n.y's letter, so that by no chance should I read it first, were these words in my darling's hand:

"Got your pilot-letter. Aunt is much better. We shall be traveling about so much that you need not write me the progress of your romance, but believe me I shall be most interested in its conclusion. BESSIE S."

It was all explained now. My darling, so sensitive and spirited, had given her leave "to try."

CHAPTER IX.

But was that all? Was she wearing away the slow months in pa.s.sionate unbelief of me? I could not tell. But before I slept that night I had taken my resolve. I would sail for home by the next steamer. The case would suffer, perhaps, by the delay and the change of hands: D---- must come out to attend to it himself, then, but I would suffer no longer.

No use to write to Bessie. I had exhausted every means to reach her save that of the detectives. "I'll go to the office, file my papers till the next man comes over, see f.a.n.n.y Meyrick, and be off."

But what to say to f.a.n.n.y? Good, generous girl! She had indeed done what few women in the world would have had the courage to do--shown her whole heart to a man who loved another. It would be an embarra.s.sing interview; and I was not sorry when I started out that morning that it was too early yet to call.

To the office first, then, I directed my steps. But here Fate lay _perdu_ and in wait for me.

"A letter, Mr. Munro, from D---- & Co.," said the brisk young clerk. They had treated me with great respect of late, for, indeed, our claim was steadily growing in weight, and was sure to come right before long. I opened and read:

"The missing paper is found on this side of the Atlantic--what you have been rummaging for all winter on the other. A trusty messenger sails at once, and will report himself to you."

"At once!" Well, there's only a few days' delay, at most. Perhaps it's young Bunker. He can take the case and end it: anybody can end it now.

And my heart was light. "A few days," I said to myself as I ran up the steps in Clarges street.

"Miss f.a.n.n.y at home?" to the man, or rather to the member of Parliament, who opened the door--"Miss Meyrick, I mean."

"Yes, sir--in the drawing-room, sir;" and he announced me with a flourish.

f.a.n.n.y sat in the window. She might have been looking out for me, for on my entrance she parted the crimson curtains and came forward.

Again the clear glow in her cheek, the self-possessed f.a.n.n.y of old.

"Charlie," she began impetuously, "I have been thinking over shipboard and Father Shamrock, and all. You didn't think then--did you?--that I cared so very much for you? I am so glad that the Father bewitched me as he did, for I can remember no foolishness on my part to you, sir--none at all. Can you?"

Stammering, confused, I seemed to have lost my tongue and my head together. I had expected tears, pale cheeks, a burst of self-reproach, and that I should have to comfort and be very gentle and sympathetic.

I had dreaded the _role_; but here was a new turn of affairs; and, I own it, my self-love was not a little wounded. The play was played out, that was evident. The curtain had fallen, and here was I, a late-arrived hero of romance, the chivalric elder brother, with all my little stock of property-phrases--friendship of a life, esteem, etc.--of no more account than a week-old playbill.

For, I must confess it, I had rehea.r.s.ed some little forgiveness scene, in which I should magnanimously kiss her hand, and tell her that I should honor her above all women for her courage and her truth; and in which she would cry until her poor little heart was soothed and calmed; and that I should have the sweet consciousness of being beloved, however hopelessly, by such a brilliant, ardent soul.

But Mistress f.a.n.n.y had quietly turned the tables on me, and I believe I was angry enough for the moment to wish it had not been so.

But only for a moment. It began to dawn upon me soon, the rare tact which had made easy the most embarra.s.sing situation in the world--the _bravura_ style, if I may call it so, that had carried us over such a difficult bar.

It _was_ delicacy, this careless reminder of the fascinating Father, and perhaps there was a modic.u.m of truth in that acknowledgment too.

I took my leave of f.a.n.n.y Meyrick, and walked home a wiser man.

But the trusty messenger, who arrived three days later, was not, as I had hoped, young Bunker or young Anybody. It was simply Mrs. D----, with a large traveling party. They came straight to London, and summoned me at once to the Langham Hotel.

I suppose I looked somewhat amazed at sight of the portly lady, whom I had last seen driving round Central Park. But the twin Skye terriers who tumbled in after her a.s.sured me of her ident.i.ty soon enough.

"Mr. D---- charged me, Mr. Munro," she began after our first ceremonious greeting, "to give this into no hands but yours. I have kept it securely with my diamonds, and those I always carry about me."

From what well-st.i.tched diamond receptacle she had extracted the paper I did not suffer myself to conjecture, but the doc.u.ment was strongly perfumed with violet powder.

"You see, I was coming over," she proceeded to explain, "in any event, and when Mr. D---- talked of sending Bunker--I think it was Bunker--with us, I persuaded him to let me be messenger instead. It wasn't worth while, you know, to have any more people leave the office, you being away, and--Oh, Ada, my dear, here is Mr. Munro!"

As Ada, a slim, willowy creature, with the _surprised_ look in her eyes that has become the fashion of late, came gliding up to me, I thought that the reason for young Bunker's omission from the party was possibly before me.

Bother on her matrimonial, or rather anti-matrimonial, devices! Her maternal solicitude lest Ada should be charmed with the poor young clerk on the pa.s.sage over had cost me weeks of longer stay. For at this stage a request for any further transfer would have been ridiculous and wrong. As easy to settle it now as to arrange for any one else; so the first of April found me still in London, but leaving it on the morrow for home.

"Bessie is in Lenox, I think," f.a.n.n.y Meyrick had said to me as I bade her good-bye.

"What! You have heard from her?"

"No, but I heard incidentally from one of my Boston friends this morning that he had seen her there, standing on the church steps."