The Fortunes of Oliver Horn Part 45

"Is your mother living!"

"Yes."

"Better send her word at once."

CHAPTER XXV

SMOULDERING COALS

The night wind sighed through the old sycamores of Kennedy Square. A soft haze, the harbinger of the coming spring, filled the air. The cold moon, hanging low, bleached the deserted steps of the silent houses to a ghostly white.

In the Horn mansion a dim light burned in Richard's room and another in the lower hall. Everywhere else the house was dark.

Across the Square, in Miss Clendenning's boudoir, a small wood fire, tempering the chill of the April night, slumbered in its bed of ashes, or awakened with fitful starts, its restless blaze illumining the troubled face of Margaret Grant. The girl's eyes were fixed on the dying coals, her chin in her hand, the brown-gold of her wonderful hair gold-red in the firelight. Now and then she would lift her head as if listening for some approaching footstep. Miss Clendenning sat beside her, leaning over the hearth in her favorite att.i.tude, her tiny feet resting on the fender.

The years had touched the little lady but lightly since that night when she sat in this same spot and Oliver had poured out his heart to her.

She was the same dainty, precise, lovable old maid that she had been in the old days of Kennedy Square, when the crocuses bloomed in the flower-beds and its drawing-rooms were filled with the wit and fashion of the day. Since that fatal night when Richard had laid away his violin and brother had been divided against brother, and Kennedy Square had become the stamping ground of armed men, she had watched by the bedsides of a thousand wounded soldiers, regardless of which flag they had battled under. The service had not withered her. Time had simply stood still, forgetting the sum of its years, while it marked her with perennial sweetness.

"I'm afraid he's worse," Margaret said, breaking the silence of the room, as she turned to Miss Clendenning, "or Ollie would have been here before this. Dr. Wallace was to go to the house at eleven, and now it is nearly twelve."

"The doctor may have been detained," Miss Clendenning answered. "There is much sickness in town."

For a time neither spoke. Only the low muttering of the fire could be heard, or the turning of some restless coal.

"Margaret," Miss Clendenning said at last--it had always been "Margaret" with the little lady ever since the day she had promised Oliver to love the woman whom he loved; and it was still "Margaret"

when the women met for the first time in the gray dawn at the station and Miss Clendenning herself helped lead Richard out of the train--"There is a bright side to every trouble. But for this illness you would never have known Oliver's mother as she really is. All her prejudices melted away as soon as she looked into your face. She loves you better every day, and she is learning to depend on you just as Richard and Oliver have done."

"I hope she will," the young woman answered, without moving. "It breaks my heart to see her suffer as she does. I see my own mother in her so often. She is different in many ways, but she is the same underneath--so gentle and so kind, and she is so big and broad-minded too. I am ashamed to think of all the bitter feelings I used to have in my heart toward her."

She stopped abruptly, her hands tightly folded in her lap, her shoulders straightened. Margaret's confessions were always made in this determined way, head thrown back like a soldier's, as though a new resolve had been born even while an old sin was being confessed.

"Go on," said Miss Clendenning. "I understand. You mean that you did not know her."

"No; but I thought her narrow and proud, and that she disliked me for influencing Oliver in his art, and that she wanted to keep him from me and from my ideals. Oh, I've been very, very wicked!"

"Not wicked, my dear--only human. You are not the first woman who did not want to divide a love with a mother."

"But it wasn't exactly that, dear Cousin Lavinia. I had never met anyone who obeyed his mother as Ollie did, and--and--I almost hated her for being his guide and counsel when--oh, not because she did not love him too, just as I did--but because I thought that I could really help him most--because I believed in his talent and she did not, and because I knew all the time that she was ruining him, keeping him back, spoiling his career, and--"

Again she stopped and straightened herself, her beautiful head held higher. Those who knew Margaret well would have known that the worst part of her confession was yet to come.

"I suppose I was hurt too," she said, slowly accentuating each pause with a slight movement of the head. "That I was LITTLE enough and MEAN enough and HORRID enough for that. But he was always talking of his mother as though she never did anything but sit still in that white shawl of hers, listening to music, while everybody waited on her and came to her for advice. And I always thought that she couldn't understand me nor any other woman who wanted to work. When Ollie talked of you all, and of what you did at home, I couldn't help feeling she must think that I and all my people belonged to some different race and that when she saw me she would judge me by some petty thing that displeased her, the cut of my skirt, or the way I carried my hands, or something else equally trivial, and that she would use that kind of thing against me and, perhaps, tell Ollie, too. Father judged Oliver in that way. He thought that Ollie's joyousness and his courtesy, even his way of taking off his hat, and holding it in his two hands for a moment--you've seen him do it a hundred times--was only a proof of his Southern shiftlessness--caring more for manners than for work. Mother didn't; she understood Ollie better, and so did John, but father never could. That's why I wouldn't come when you asked me. You wouldn't have judged me, I know, but I thought that she would. And now--oh, I'm so sorry I could cry."

"It was only another of the mistakes and misunderstandings that divided us all at that time, my dear," Miss Clendenning answered. "This dreadful war could have been averted, if people had only come together and understood each other. I did not think so then, but I do now."

"And you don't think me wicked, Cousin Lavinia?" Margaret asked with a sudden relaxation of her figure and something infinitely childlike and appealing in her tone. "You really don't think me wicked, do you?"

"Not wicked, dear; only human, as I said a moment ago. Yet you have been stronger than I. You have held on and won; I let go and lost."

Margaret bent forward and laid her finger on Miss Clendenning's knee.

"Lost what, Cousin Lavinia?" she asked, in surprise.

"My lover."

"When?"

"When I was just your age."

"Did he die?" asked Margaret in awed tones, overcome all at once with the solemnity of the hour and a strange new note in Miss Lavinia's voice.

"No, he married someone else."

"He never--never loved you, then." There was a positiveness now in her intonations.

"Yes, he did, with all his heart. His mother came between us."

Again silence fell on the room. Margaret would not look at Miss Clendenning. The little old maid had suddenly opened the windows of her heart, but whether to let a long-caged sorrow out or some friendly sympathy in, she could not tell.

"May I know about it!" There was a softer cadence now in the girl's voice.

"It would only make you unhappy, dear. It was all over forty years or more ago. Sallie, when she saw you, put her arms about you. You had only to come together. The oftener she sees you, the more she will love you. My lover's mother shut the door in my face."

"In your face? Why?"

Margaret moved closer to Miss Clendenning, stirred by a sudden impulse, as if she could even now protect her from one who had hurt her.

Miss Lavinia bent forward and picked up the bra.s.s tongs that lay on the fender at her feet. She saw Margaret's gesture, but she did not turn her head. Her eyes were still watching the smouldering embers.

"For no reason, dear, that you or any other Northern woman could understand. An old family quarrel that began before I was born."

Margaret's cheeks flushed and a determined look came into her face.

"The coward! I would not have cared what his mother or anybody else did, or how they quarrelled. If I loved you I would have married you in spite of everything."

"And so would he." She was balancing the tongs in her hand now, her eyes still on the fire. She had not looked at Margaret once.

"What happened then?"

Miss Clendenning leaned forward, spread the tongs in her little hands, lifted an ember and tucked it closer to its neighbor. The charred ma.s.s crumbled at the touch and fell into a heap of broken coals.

"I am a Clendenning, my dear; that is all," she answered, slowly.

Margaret stared at her with wide-open eyes. That a life should be wrecked for a mere question of family pride was something her mind could not fathom.