Throckmorton Part 16

"I think I shall," gravely responded Throckmorton. "I can not explain things to you that you can only learn by experience. I have not forgotten--I never can forget--your mother, who made my happiness during our short married life. I have been twenty years recovering from the pain of losing her enough to think of replacing her."

Jack had recovered himself a little while Throckmorton was speaking. The wound was only skin-deep with him.

"And is it to be immediately?" he asked.

"As soon as I can bring it about," replied Throckmorton; "but I have got to bring my dear, obstinate old friend Mrs. Temple round first"--here both of them laughed--"so you will see the necessity of keeping the affair absolutely quiet."

"You had better join the church, sir," said Jack, who was himself again.

"That will be your best card to play."

"Very likely," responded Throckmorton, good-humoredly, "but I think I can win the game even without that."

In the bright morning sunshine out-of-doors Throckmorton began to take heart of grace about Jacqueline. Jack did not seem to think it such an unequal match. With love and patience what might not be done with any woman? Throckmorton began to whistle jovially. He went out to the stable lot to take a look at the horses, as he did every morning. Old Tartar, that had carried him during four years' warfare, and was now honorably retired and turned out to gra.s.s, came toward him whinnying and ready for his morning pat--all horses, dogs, and children loved Throckmorton.

Tartar, who had lost an eye in the service of his country, turned his one remaining orb around so as to see Throckmorton, and rubbed his n.o.ble old head against his master's knee. Throckmorton noticed him more than usual--his heart was more tender and pitiful to all creatures that morning.

Toward noon he went over to Barn Elms. The morning was intensely cold, though clear, and the fields and fences and hedges were still white with snow. For the first time Throckmorton noticed the extreme shabbiness of Barn Elms.

"Dear little girl," he said, "she shall have a different home from this."

When he reached the house he was ushered straight into the plain, old-fashioned drawing-room, and in a moment Mrs. Temple appeared, perfectly unsuspicious of what had happened or what was going to happen.

"Good-morning," cried Throckmorton--something in his tone showing triumph and happiness, and in his dark face was a fine red color. "Mrs.

Temple, I came over to make a clean breast to you this morning!"

"About what?" asked Mrs. Temple, sedately.

They were both standing up, facing each other.

"About--Jacqueline." Throckmorton spoke her name almost reverently.

A sudden light broke in upon Mrs. Temple. She grew perfectly rigid.

"Jacqueline!" she said, in an undescribable tone.

"Yes, Jacqueline," answered Throckmorton, coolly. "I love her--I think she loves me--and she has promised to marry me. You may depend upon it, I shall make her keep her promise."

Mrs. Temple remained perfectly silent for two or three minutes before recovering her self-possession.

"You are forty-four years old, George Throckmorton."

"I know it. I never lied about my age to anybody."

"You are in the Yankee army!"

"Yes, I am," responded Throckmorton, boldly, "and I shall stay in it."

"And my daughter--"

"For G.o.d's sake, Mrs. Temple, let us talk reasonably together! I am not going to take your daughter campaigning."

"It isn't that I mean, George Throckmorton. I mean the uniform you wear--"

"Is the best in the world! Now, my dear old friend--the best friend I ever had--I want your consent and General Temple's--I want it very much, but it isn't absolutely necessary. Jacqueline and I are to be married.

We settled that last night."

Mrs. Temple, with whom n.o.body had ever taken a bold stand before, looked perfectly aghast. Throckmorton saw his advantage, and pressed it hard.

"Have you any objection to me personally? Am I a drunkard, or a gambler, or a cad?"

"You are not," responded Mrs. Temple, after a pause. "I think you are, on the whole, except my husband and my dead son, as much of a man--"

Throckmorton took her hand and pressed it.

"Thank you! thank you!" His grat.i.tude spoke more in his tone than his words. "And now," he cheerfully remarked, "that you have given your consent--"

Mrs. Temple had given no such thing. Nevertheless, within half an hour she had yielded to the inevitable. She had met a stronger will than her own, and was completely vanquished.

Jacqueline came down, and Throckmorton had a half-hour of rapture not unmixed with pain. If only his reason could be silenced, how happy he would have been! He did not see Judith; he had quite forgotten her for the time.

CHAPTER XI.

Throckmorton, who was nothing if not prompt, had infused so much life and spirit into his love-affair that at the end of a week it was settled that the wedding should take place the last of February--only a month off. Jacqueline's trousseau was not likely to be imposing, and the few, feeble reasons which Mrs. Temple urged for delay were swept away by Throckmorton's impetuosity. It was not the custom in that part of the world for engagements to be formally announced; on the contrary, it was in order to deny them up to the very last moment, and to regard them as something surrept.i.tious and to be hid under a bushel. General Temple had magniloquently given his consent, when Throckmorton went through the form of asking it. Mrs. Temple still shook her head gravely over the matter, particularly over the brief engagement, which was quite opposed to the leisurely way in which engagements were usually conducted in her experience; but Throckmorton seemed to have mastered everybody at Barn Elms. For himself that period was one of deep joy, and yet full of hara.s.sing doubts. The more he studied Jacqueline under her new aspects, the stranger things became. It cut him to see how little real consequence either her mother or her father attached to her. Judith seemed to be the only person who was concerned to make Jacqueline love him; to regard the girl as a woman, and not as a child. For Jacqueline herself, she was as changeable as the weather. Had she been steadily indifferent to him, Throckmorton would have thought nothing necessary but a manly fight to win her; but sometimes she showed devoted fondness for him, and, without rhyme or reason, she would change into the coldest indifference or teasing irritability. Throckmorton told himself it was the coyness and fickleness of a young girl in love; but sometimes a hateful suspicion overcame him that there was in Jacqueline an innate levity and inconstancy that went to the root of her nature. The evident delight she took in the luxury and pleasures that were to be hers--the horses, carriages, pianos, and flowers at Millenbeck--was rather that of a child dazzled with the fineries of life. Her love for them was so unthinking and uncalculating that it did not shock Throckmorton; yet how could he, with his knowledge, his experience of men, women, and things, help seeing the differences between them--differences that, had his infatuation been less complete, would have appalled him? As it was, just as Judith had predicted to herself, he often came to her for sympathy and encouragement--not expressed in words, but in the subtile understanding between them. Judith always spoke in praise of Jacqueline; she artfully managed to show Throckmorton the best of her. But for Judith the marriage could never have been hastened on, as Throckmorton desired; for, as soon as she found out Throckmorton's wish, she went to work on Jacqueline's trousseau with a sort of desperate energy that carried things through. Jacqueline could have no fine silk gowns, but she was to have piles of the daintiest linen, of which the material cost little, but the beautiful handiwork lavished upon it by Judith was worth a little fortune. Jacqueline herself, spurred on by Judith's industry, sewed steadily. As for Judith, the fever of working for Jacqueline seized her, and never abated. She even neglected her child for Jacqueline, until Mrs. Temple, with stern disapproval, took her to task about it. Judith, blushing and conscience-stricken, owned to her fault, although n.o.body could accuse her of lacking love for the child. But still she managed to sew for Jacqueline, sitting up secretly by night, and with a pale, fixed face--st.i.tch, st.i.tch, st.i.tching! Jacqueline could not understand it at all; and when she asked Judith about it once, she was so suddenly and strangely agitated that Jacqueline, a little frightened, dropped the subject at once. But, in truth, this was to Judith a time of new, strange, and terrible grief and disappointment.

How she had ever permitted Throckmorton to take up her whole heart and mind she did not know any more than she could fathom now how she ever came to mistake an early and immature fancy for a deep and abiding pa.s.sion, and had suffered herself to be married to Beverley Temple. She endured agonies of remorse for that, and yet hourly excused herself to herself. "How could I know," she asked herself in those long hours of the night when men and women come face to face with their sorrows. But all her remorse was for Beverley. As for the hatred she ought to feel for Throckmorton as the slayer of her husband, she had come to laugh it to scorn in her own mind. But, like all true women, she respected the world--the narrow circle which const.i.tuted her world--and she felt oppressed with shame at the idea that the whole story might all one day come out, and then what would they think of her? What would they do to her? She could not say, as she had once said, "I do not believe it." She had heard it from Throckmorton's own mouth. She would have to say, "I knew it, and went to his house, and continued to be friendly with him, and spoke no word when he wished to marry Beverley's sister." She could not divine the reason of Freke's silence, but, torn and hara.s.sed and wearied with struggles of heart and conscience, she simply yielded to the fatalism of the wretched, and let things drift. Sometimes in her own room, after she had spent the evening with Throckmorton and Jacqueline, seeing clearly under his perfectly self-possessed exterior his infatuation for Jacqueline, she would be wroth with him. Judith, the most modest and una.s.suming of women, would say to herself, with scorn of Throckmorton: "How blind he is! To throw away on Jacqueline, who in her turn throws it to the wind, what would make me the proudest creature under heaven! And am I unworthy of his love, or less worthy than Jacqueline?" To which her keen perceptions would answer rebelliously, "No, I am more worthy in every way." She would examine her face carefully in the gla.s.s, holding the candle first one side, then the other. "This, then, is the face that Throckmorton is indifferent to. It is not babyish, like Jacqueline's; there are no dimples, but--" Then the grotesqueness of it all would strike her, and even make her laugh.

The fiercest pain, the most devouring jealousy never wrung from her the faintest admission that there was anything to be ashamed of in cherishing silently a profound and sacred love for Throckmorton. He was worthy of it, she thought, proudly. Toward him her manner never changed--she was mistress of some of the n.o.bler arts of deception--but sometimes, although working for Jacqueline, and tending her affectionately, she would be angry and disdainful because Jacqueline did not always render to Throckmorton his due. She almost laughed to herself when she compared this horror of pain and grief which she now endured with the shock and pity of Beverley's death. She remembered that the joy her child gave her seemed almost wicked in its intensity at that time. What pa.s.sions of happiness were hers when she would rise stealthily in the night and, taking him from his little crib, would hold him to her throbbing heart; and often, from the next room, she could hear Mrs. Temple pacing her floor, and could imagine the silent wringing of the hands and all the unspoken agonies the elder mother endured for _her_ child! Then she would swiftly and guiltily put the child back in his cradle, and, with remorse and self-denial, lie near him without touching him. Often in that long-past time, when she met him in his nurse's arms, she would fly toward him with a merry, dancing step, laughing all the time--she was so happy, so proud to have him--and, looking up, would catch Mrs. Temple's eyes fixed on her with a still reproach she understood well enough. Then she would turn away from him, and, sitting down by Mrs. Temple, would not even let her eyes wander to the child, and would remain silent and unanswering to his baby wail.

But in this first real pa.s.sion of her life, the child, much as she adored him, was secondary. He was her comfort--she would not, if she could, have let him out of her sight or out of her arms--but he could no more make her forget Throckmorton than anything else; he could only soften the intolerable ache a little, when he leaned his curly head upon her breast; and as for that easy and conventional phrase, the goodness of G.o.d, and that ready consolation that had seemed so apt at the time of Beverley's death, she began to subst.i.tute, for the mild and merciful Divinity, a merciless and relentless Jehovah, who had condemned her to suffer forever, and who would not be appeased.

At first, the secret of the engagement was well kept. Only Jack Throckmorton, who behaved beautifully about it, and Freke, knew of the impending wedding. Freke's behavior was singular, not to say mysterious.

He was so cool and unconcerned that Jacqueline was furiously piqued, and could scarcely keep her mind off her grievance against him for not taking her engagement more to heart, even when Throckmorton was with her. Freke's congratulations were quite perfunctory--as unlike Jack Throckmorton's whole-souled good wishes as could be imagined. One morning, soon after the news had been confided to Freke, he came into the dining-room, where Judith was sewing, with Jacqueline, also sewing, sitting demurely by her side.

"Making wedding finery, eh?" was Freke's remark as he seated himself.

"Yes," answered Judith, quietly, without laying down her work.

"I want to see how much Jacqueline will be changed by marriage--You mustn't flirt with Jack, little Jacky."

He said this quite good-humoredly, and Jacqueline turned a warm color.

"And don't let me see you running after the chickens, as I saw you the other day. That wouldn't be dignified, you know; it would make Major Throckmorton ridiculous. You must do all you can to keep the difference in your ages from becoming too obvious."

Judith felt a rising indignation. Jacqueline's head was bent lower. She dreaded and feared that people would tease her about Throckmorton's age.

Freke saw in a moment how it was with her, and kept it up.

"Throckmorton is sensible in one way. His hair is plentifully sprinkled with gray, but he doesn't use art to conceal it."