True and Other Stories Part 22

"What then?"

"Not _her_," said the maiden, significantly.

"Really, Miss Douce," said Barrington, "you have surprised me--I had no idea--"

"Don't, for pity's sake, tell me again that you had no idea!" exclaimed Natalia.

"I beg your pardon, I meant to say something."

"What good can it do to say anything, when you have done your best to break our hearts?" she demanded. And here she brought out the handkerchief again, and began to look dangerously tearful.

"Goodness!" said the unfortunate man. "I'm sure I didn't mean to. I would a good deal rather stay at home than have you feel this way."

"You have caused me great suffering, whether you meant to or not,"

declared Miss Douce, with a quaver in her voice. Then, replying to his devotion: "Will you give up going, to prove your words? Will you stay at home?"

Barrington felt the glory upon his horizon beginning to fade. He braced himself by a chair with one hand; with the other he took Natalia's. "Do you ask this as a personal favor?" he said.

Miss Douce was weeping slightly again. "I don't want you to go," she answered, shyly, turning away her head. "Yes, for my sake, stay!"

At this crisis Rawsden, one of the junior boarders, who had just returned from business and had been met at the reception-bin by Mrs.

Douce with news of the dread trunk, pa.s.sed up-stairs and caught a glimpse of the tableau, from the hall. "Aha," he muttered (for he was a cynical youth)--"Hector and Andromache!" And then he glided on and up to his remote chamber.

Zadoc S. still hesitated a moment. "I shall not go immediately, in any case," he said, gently. "I shall be here some days yet."

"But why go at all?" urged the Andromache. "Is it irrevocable?"

"No," he answered, unguardedly. "I--I haven't got my commission yet. I'm only expecting it."

There was a sudden revulsion of feeling on this announcement. Barrington became aware that his position was not so heroic as it had been, and Natalia began to blush violently at having betrayed her feelings on a sham emergency. But, as it happened, neither of them thought of getting out of the trouble by laughing.

"You see, now, why I kept it to myself," he proceeded, awkwardly, after some delay.

Miss Douce had released her hand, and now rose abruptly. "Oh, yes," she said; "I suppose it was all very foolish of me--but--you will forgive me?"

"I a.s.sure you, I feel honored," cried Zadoc, warmly, "by your solicitude. And, if I dared--if you would allow me--"

Let me here confess that I haven't the slightest notion what Barrington, in that moment of impulse, was going to say. But explanation is made unnecessary by the fact that Miss Douce didn't allow him to finish.

"Don't say any more," she begged. "It is too painful. I must go and find my aunt, Mr. Barrington, to tell her there's a hope of your staying. For if your commission _shouldn't_ come--"

"I should wait, of course," he responded, captivated by her glance.

Naturally, after this, he went up to the room which Mrs. Douce's fancy had transformed into a headquarters, and wrote to his Washington friends not to get the commission. Of course, too, Mrs. Douce came gently rapping at his door, in the evening, with a face as solemn as an obituary notice, and with his bill in her pocket, whereon she had obediently registered the item of compensatory payment, which she had so scornfully rejected in the afternoon. Quite of course he said, with dignity: "You may leave the bill, but I have decided not to go." And then, by sequence, she affirmed--her face irradiated with joy--that she had brought the bill very reluctantly, in the first place, and, if he would excuse her, she thought she would _not_ leave it.

As a further matter of course, Miss Natalia, being informed of the abandonment of warlike measures, pretended not to care anything about the episode, and to feel that it was rather an impertinence than otherwise to bring it to her notice.

On the other hand, little Rawsden had been cracking his joke about Hector, etc., to a Miss Sneef, a rather pretty young boarder, whom he honored by confiding to her his more successful sarcasms; and, when she imparted to him, next day, the news of Barrington's capitulation, he had the presence of mind to smile pallidly and look as if he had known all about it from an early period of his existence. Without changing his tone, he muttered, dryly: "Antony and Cleopatra!"

V.

The two parties most concerned said nothing about it to each other for days. But the interval was not unemployed. Mrs. Douce, having now discovered her niece's inclination (if she had not known it before), was allured by a calculation, based on the fact that Barrington had always managed to pay his bills, and on the hope that if Natalia were to become Mrs. Barrington two permanent paying boarders might be secured, with possibly, in time, a half price besides. "One of these days, after all,"

she said to Barrington, whom she took an early opportunity of seeing alone, "you will be going off and leaving me, I fear."

"Oh, no," said he; "I've really given up the war!"

"But there are other things than war."

"Other things to carry me away, do you mean? Or other disasters?"

"Well, not exactly disasters," said Mrs. Douce, hastily; "I mean marriage."

"You don't call that a disaster, then?" Barrington inquired, wickedly.

"But what on earth has put this into your head?"

"It's much easier to get into my head than war. If you could think of such an unnatural thing as going to war, you might easily decide to marry," was the landlady's equivocal conclusion.

"What, I?" exclaimed Barrington, trying not to grow red, but doing so.

"I see I've made you suspicious."

At this juncture a faint ghostly voice was heard rising from the bas.e.m.e.nt, where the cook had long been buried, to the third-story banister, where they were talking. "Mrs. Douce, Mrs. Douce!" And Mrs.

Douce, giving him an arch look, observed, with a dry laugh: "I don't know what you're plotting." Then she obeyed the voice.

Whether this talk was the cause, or whether it was owing to the interest which Miss Natalia Douce's behavior with regard to the military trunk excited, Barrington's attention was more closely directed to her now, and he observed in her from day to day a deepening melancholy. She became listless, and fell into reveries. She played more than usual on the piano in the dowdy parlor, behind the bilious-looking but aristocratic vase; but there was less rumbling and twittering in her music than formerly, and there were more pensive strains. She played "Make me no Gaudy Chaplet" and nocturnes by sundry composers; she sang "The Three Fishers." All this was the more interesting, in that there was no apparent personal application in the music she choose, since no one had insisted upon her accepting a gaudy chaplet, and she was not wedded as yet to a fisherman. But one evening Barrington, coming down a few minutes before dinner, entered the parlor as she was wrenching from the key-board the last phrases of a funeral march in the "Songs without Words." He listened attentively until she had finished; then, after a moment's reflection, called out from the arm-chair he had taken: "But why do you play such mournful things, nowadays, Miss Natalia, especially before dinner? No wonder you have no appet.i.te."

Natalia didn't answer, but got up in silence and made for the door. On the way, however, she turned toward him with a look of indignation and a terrible flash of the eye. The next instant she was gone. She did not appear at dinner.

"What do you suppose is the matter with your niece?" Barrington blandly asked the aunt, at table. "I made a casual remark about her playing, just now, and she left the room without a word."

Mrs. Douce did not answer the question until the next day, when she came to Barrington's room. "I've found out all about it, now," she said. "The idea of asking me what was the matter, when you had been speaking to her in that way!"

"Good Lord!" cried Harrington, nettled. "What way? It was innocent enough; and I really don't like those tunes."

"After all that has happened!" continued the landlady, casting up her eyes.

"Well, _what_ has happened?" he demanded.

"Why, your thinking of going to the war--and--and Natalia's feeling badly, and--well, you understand, though I can't explain myself, you've put me out so with your abruptness."

"It's always my abruptness or my suddenness," complained Barrington.

"No; I _don't_ understand you."

Mrs. Douce's dusty face hardened and dried till it became a very desert of physiognomy. "Well," she said, "you are not a boy, and I--well, I am old enough, I suppose," with a catch of the breath, "to be your mother.

So we may as well speak plainly. You see that Natalia is deeply interested in you; you consented for her sake to give up going to the front; and now you coolly abandon her. Not content with that, you begin to taunt her with her melancholy. I little expected this, Mr.

Barrington. I little expected it."

"Oh, you're unjust!" said Zadoc S.