The Puritans Part 56

"I don't like being endured," he retorted, between fun and earnest.

"Besides, she's so much money"--

"You are not such a cad as to be afraid of her money, I hope."

"Not in one way, but don't you see now that she has so much, and I have lost Aunt Hannah's"--

"Really, Maurice," she interrupted brusquely, "you must learn not to speak your thoughts out like that! I'm not asking you to go to propose to Bee. You have the theological habit of taking things with too dreadful seriousness. Come with me for a call, and don't bother about consequences and possibilities."

Maurice blushed at his own folly in betraying his secret scruples, but his cousin spared him any farther teasing, and they went on their way peacefully. It seemed to him when he entered the stately Frostwinch house that it had somehow been transformed. Everything was much as it had been in the lifetime of Mrs. Frostwinch, yet to his fancy all looked fresher and more cheerful. He smiled to himself, feeling that the change must simply be the result of his knowledge that this was now the home of Berenice; yet even so he could not persuade himself that the alteration was not actual. He felt joyously alert as he followed Mrs. Staggchase to the library, where Bee was sitting with old Mrs.

Morison.

He had never been in this apartment before. It was high, and heavily made, with an open fire on the hearth, and enough books to justify its name. Berenice came forward to meet them, and Mrs. Morison remained seated near the fire.

"I am so glad to see you, Mrs. Staggchase," Bee said cordially. "It is just one of those dreary days when it proves true courage to come out."

"And true friendship, I hope," the other answered, pa.s.sing on to Mrs.

Morison. "My dear old friend, I wish I could believe you are as glad to see me as I am to see you."

Berenice in the mean time gave her hand to Maurice graciously, but with a certain grave courtesy which he felt to put them upon a purely ceremonious footing.

"It is kind of you to come," she said. "Grandmother will be glad to see you."

Maurice tried hard to look unconscious, but he could not help questioning her with his eyes. She flushed under his eager regard, and drew back a little.

"I am very glad of the chance to see--Mrs. Morison," he answered.

Bee flushed more deeply yet. Then she turned mischievously to Mrs.

Morison.

"Grandmother," she said, "it seems that Mr. Wynne came to see you and not me."

The old lady greeted him kindly.

"I am glad to see you looking so well, Mr. Wynne," she said. "I hope that your arm does not trouble you at all."

"Not at all. I was too well taken care of at Brookfield."

Mrs. Staggchase laughed, spreading out her hands.

"There," said she gayly, "you see! He has only been in my hands a few weeks, but I call that a very pretty speech."

"He probably has a natural gift for pleasing speeches," Berenice remarked meaningly.

Maurice crimsoned, but his education had not proceeded far enough for him to have any reply.

"Well, take him away, Bee, and give him tea or gossip. I want to talk to your grandmother about old friends, and you young people won't understand."

"He may have tea if he is tractable," responded Bee. "We are evidently not appreciated, Mr. Wynne. Will you ring the bell over there, please."

He did as he was directed, and then followed her to the tea-table at a little distance from the fire. He was full of a troubled joy, the mingled delight of being with her and the consciousness that he had firmly determined in his own mind that he had no right to show her his feelings. He said to himself that he could bear anything else better than that she should think of him as a fortune-hunter. Her wealth loomed between them as a wall which it were dishonorable even to attempt to scale. His brain was busy phrasing things which he longed to say to her, words seemed to seethe in his head, yet he found himself strangely tongue-tied and awkward. When most of all he desired to appear at his ease, he was most completely uncomfortable and self-conscious.

A servant came with the tea, and he was able to cover to some extent his uneasiness by serving the ladies. When this was done, and he sat nervously stirring his own cup, he found himself searching his mind in vain for those things which it would be safe to say. His brain was full of things which must not be said. He could think only of things which it was not safe to utter; and his discomfiture increased as he saw Miss Morison watching him with a half-veiled smile.

"By the way," she said at length, when the silence was becoming too marked, "I fulfilled your request."

"My request?" he echoed, unable to remember that he had made any.

"Yes. Have you forgotten that you came to ask me"--

He put out his hand impulsively.

"Please don't!" he interrupted. "It is bad enough to remember what an unmitigated idiot I was without the humiliation of thinking that you remember it too."

"I remember," she responded, with a sparkle in her eye, "that you did not seem to relish the mission on which you were sent. However, I accepted the intention, and I have promised the men a continuance of their stipends." Her face grew suddenly grave, and she added: "I can't joke about it, though. I really did it because Cousin Anna would have wished it."

They were silent now because they had come so near a solemn subject that neither of them cared to speak. The thoughts of Maurice went back to the day he had come to do the errand of Father Frontford, and his cheek grew hot.

"I hope you will believe," he said eagerly, "that I had really no idea of how very ill your cousin was. She seemed so well when I saw her that it was all unreal to me. I wish I could tell you how sorry I have been for you. I have thought of you."

She raised her eyes to his, and they exchanged a look in which there was more than sympathy. Maurice felt her glance so deeply that for the moment he forgot all else. Obstacles no longer existed. He was looking into the eyes of the woman he loved, and thrilling as if her heart was questioning his. It seemed to him that her very self was demanding how deep and how true had been his thought of her in her time of sorrow. He bent forward, sounding her gaze with his, trying to convey all the unspoken words which jostled in his brain. Her eyes fell before his burning look, and her head drooped. The room was darkening with the coming dusk, and they sat at some distance from the others. He laid his hand on hers.

"Berenice!" he whispered.

She rose as if she had not noted.

"Don't you think it is time for lights, grandmother?" she said in a voice so unemotional that it sent a chill to his heart.

"It is certainly time for us to be going home," Mrs. Staggchase interposed, rising in her turn.

And far into the night Maurice Wynne vexed his soul with vain endeavors to decide what Berenice meant by her treatment of him.

x.x.xIV

WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED Hamlet, iv. 7.

The grief which Philip felt over the apostasy of Maurice overshadowed for a time every other feeling. He sorrowed for his friend, praying and yearning, searching his heart to discover whether his own influence or example had helped to bring about this lamentable fall; he turned over in his mind plans for bringing the wanderer back to the fold; he ceased to think about the coming election, and thought of his ill-starred love hardly otherwise than as a possible sin which had helped perhaps to lead to this catastrophe.

Affection between two men is much more likely to be mutual than that between two women. Men are more generally frank in their likes and dislikes, they are as a rule more accustomed to feel at liberty to be open and to please themselves in their familiarities; and it seems to be true that men are more constant in friendship, as women are said to be more constant in love. Affection between women, moreover, is apt to be founded upon circ.u.mstance, while that between men is more often a matter of character.

The fondness of Philip and Maurice for each other was of long standing; it had arisen out of the mutual needs of their natures, and was part of their growth. Philip was the one most dependent upon his friend, however, and now he felt as if he were torn away from his chief support. He reasoned with himself that he had been letting affection for his friend come between him and Heaven; he tried to feel that Providence had interfered to break down his idol; yet to all this he could not but answer that Maurice had been always a help, and that it was impossible to believe that Providence would accomplish his good by the hurt of his benefactor. He did a.s.sure himself that his suffering was the will of a higher power, and as such to be acquiesced in and improved to his spiritual good. If the voice of his secret heart, that inner self from which we hide our faces and whose words we so obstinately refuse to hear, cried out against the cruelty of this discipline, he but closed his ears more resolutely. To listen would be to yield to temptation. He would not see Maurice; he hardly permitted himself to read his friend's letters. He answered these notes by fervid appeals to the wanderer to return to the fold, to be reconciled with the church, to take up again the priesthood he had discarded. Hard as it was, he still strove for what he felt to be the other's lasting good.

Lent ended, and the gladness of Easter came upon the land; the spring showed traces of its secret presence by a thousand intangible and delicate signs in sky, and air, and earth: there was everywhere a stir and a quickening, a blitheness which belongs to the vernal season only.

Philip felt all these things by the growing sharpness of the contrast between his mood and that of the world without. His melancholy and unrest seemed to him to grow every day more intense and unbearable.