Chapter XVI

It was full two o'clock before I began to think of sleeping, but nevertheless I was on the rocks next morning at seven; and my punctuality was rewarded by the sight of Miss Lenox walking on the shore in a white dress. I clambered down and joined her before she seemed aware of my presence: then she turned and laughed softly in my face. "What an early riser you are!" she exclaimed. "You have brought excellent habits home from the lazy Old World."

"But it would be such a pity to miss 'the prettiest hour of the day'!" I retorted quickly.

"Were you surprised to meet me last night?" she asked.

"Perhaps so. I had at least not expected it. I was in Belfield on Wednesday, and supposed that you were there."

"You could easily have found out my whereabouts if you had called upon mamma. I should not have expected you to be in Belfield without going near our house."

"Mrs. Lenox has too often snubbed me in my boyhood for me to count upon her grace now," I returned. "But I hope your mother is very well."

But it was very droll to me that I had embarked upon something like an adventure for the sake of talking about old Mrs. Lenox. Still, Miss Georgy was well worth coming out to see with the flush of healthy sleep still upon cheek and lip and the morning light in her eyes.

"Mamma is well," said she soberly. "Poor papa too: though he is worked to death, he is still quite well."

"What does he do, then?" I asked. I knew that he was one of the book-keepers at the factories, but I wanted her to be the first to speak Jack's name.

"As soon as Mr. John Holt went into the business," she returned, very coolly, "he gave my father a position. He had promised to do it years before, and you know how well Jack keeps all his promises."

"Jack is faithful and true," I said, looking at her keenly. "No one will ever be able to say of him, 'That man has wronged me.'"

"What did he say about me?" she demanded suddenly, stopping short in her walk and facing me. "I shall have no disguises with you, Floyd: you know me too well. I never really loved Jack, good, kind and noble although I recognize him to be. When he offered me my freedom I took it. How could I have endured to wait for him, ruined, disgraced as he was, through the uncertainty and pain of years? It is impossible that he should be in a position to marry until my youth is passed."

Her voice was so tremulous and pleading, her eyes and lips so eloquent, that she needed no vindication. I pitied Jack more than ever, but still I no longer blamed her.

"You men have a hundred chances," she went on. "If the first fails you, you have no reason for despondency, for a better one is sure to come. We poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an encumbrance, upon him: he is better off without me."

"Nothing but devoted love could have held you to him in his trouble," said I. "If you did not feel that, your bondage through a hopeless engagement would have been a terrible burden."

"Tell me what he said," she murmured coaxingly. "Is he angry with me? does he complain of me?"

"No: no man could have spoken of you more kindly."

"Is he forgetting me?"

I met her look and smile with a curious thrill that I thought I had lived down years ago.

"I am afraid, Georgy," said I, "that you are not one of those women whom men forget."

"Jack will forget me. He is wedded to his business: he is angry with the world, maddened, desperate. I have walked out behind him at church in Belfield, and he has not seen me: I have met him driving in the streets, and he has not turned his head. The men who once trusted and believed in his father treated him shamefully after his misfortunes came, and Jack resented it: he goes about the place seeing nobody, holding his head high, and showing the men he meets that he asks no favor of any one of them. All the softness has gone out of him."

I told her how wrong her idea of him was, and presently found myself repeating many things that he had said. Before I ended I had even let her hear of our midnight stroll about the place and our look at the gabled room where we believed her to be sleeping. This pleased her.

"That is not unlike you," she remarked with charming complacency, "but I never before heard of Jack's doing anything so poetic."

"Jack is not a man to write poems," said I, "but he is one of the men poets write about. After you had gone up stairs last night Helen sang to her father, and the words of one of her songs were Heine's: it reminded me of Holt beneath your window."

"One of those German songs? I understand nothing but English."

"They have translated it, and it runs like this:

Silent the streets by night overtaken: This house my darling's presence did grace; But she the town has long forsaken, Yet there stands the house in the selfsame place; And there stands a man who upward is staring, His hands hard wringing in outbursts of woe!"

I paused and looked into her face.

"That is not all of it?"

"No: I will tell you the rest some day."

"Did Jack 'wring his hands in outbursts of woe'?"

"Good Heavens, no! I presume we both stood with our hands in our pockets: I was smoking a cigar myself. It is only in poetry that one may be picturesque in one's grief now-a-days."

"Did you think of me when you stood there, Floyd?"

Her little fingers closed on the edge of my coat and she looked up in my eyes. I smiled demurely. I was determined to be quite the master of myself with Georgina. I had suffered too much from her in the past not to be on my guard. Still, it was hard to resist the upturned face—the face with which was associated all the passionate inspiration of my early life—the face I had carried in my mind and heart through all my wanderings, finding none to compare with it—the face which always came with flash and quickness when I felt the warm desire and longing to love somebody which youth must always know.

I kissed her.

She looked at me startled, and ran ten paces away and sat down upon a rock.

"Upon my word!" she exclaimed, bursting into light laughter, "you have learned pretty manners abroad!"

"I am so glad you like them," said I, going up to her.

"But I don't like them at all," she retorted, shaking her head. "You remind me of a toy I used to play with years ago—a very pretty, harmless, inoffensive-looking toy, but which when touched unguardedly changed all of a sudden into a dreadful little fiend that flew right up into your face. Such a surprise is enough to make one's hair turn gray."

"At any rate, I have vindicated myself from the charge of being, 'pretty, harmless and inoffensive,' have I not? As for the gray hairs, I don't see one."

"I quite admired you last night," sighed Georgy, "you looked so interesting and innocent. Now—"

"Have I then suffered in your estimation?"

"I shall remember hereafter," she said with a delightful little laugh, "to whom I am talking. Now let us forget all about it. There are other things I want to talk about. I want to ask you how you like Helen."

"How I like Helen?" I did not fancy her question: I had never approved her tone regarding her cousin. "I think Miss Floyd very beautiful, and a very elegant girl besides."

"Do you like her proud cold manner?"

"Is she proud and cold? Perhaps so to Thorpe: certainly, she is the most unaffected child where the rest of us are concerned."

"She never forgets her wealth and position. I do not blame her: in her place I should be quite spoiled. Think of it!" she went on, with such eagerness that tears stood in her eyes: "Mr. Raymond left her everything—everything except a hundred thousand dollars which he gave to a college. She is so rich that she can lose a hundred thousand dollars and never feel it. It did not belong to the property, but came from a deposit which had accumulated ever since she was a baby. She begged her grandfather to do some good with it: she did not want to have everything herself. Might he not have given it to me?—Helen would have liked that—but no: he hated me too well for that. It has all gone for a dreary old professorship in the college where he graduated sixty years ago. And I am as poor as ever!"

"But Helen is generous with her wealth, I am sure: she will do a great deal for you."

"She gave me the money to buy the dress I am wearing, the very shoes on my feet;" and she granted me a delicious glimpse of French slippers. "But do you suppose I like alms? If I am a beggar, Floyd, it is from necessity, not because I have not plenty of pride. The child means to be good to me, I suppose, but it makes me bitterly angry with her at times that she has the right to be gracious and condescending. I am such an unlucky girl!"

But she laughed while she complained, and I echoed her laugh when she said she was unlucky.

"You unlucky!" I exclaimed. "You are one of those women who have it in their power to have every wish in life granted."

"I am not so sure of that. Besides, it is hard for me to know what I want now-a-days. I used to think if a fairy came offering me the fulfilment of my dearest longing, it would be easy enough to secure lifelong happiness at once: I should have asked for wealth. But now they are comfortable at home: they would not know how to spend more money than papa earns at the factory. And I am comparatively rich: I have almost five hundred dollars in my purse, part of the thousand which Helen gave me a month ago. I cried myself to sleep last night, I was so unhappy; yet, all the same, I am not quite sure what I want. Life is so dull! That is what ails me, I think."

I looked at her in uncertainty as to her mood, but she left me in doubt, and began telling me about society at the Point, her friend Mrs. Woodruff, and the houseful of guests. She told me stories with some scandalous flavor about them, enough to give them a zest; she mimicked all the earnest people and spoke with contempt of all the shallow ones; she appeared to have fathomed all the petty under-currents which influenced people's actions, detected every shade of pretension and studied all the affectations and habits of the men and women she saw intimately. All this, too, without betraying any personal liking for one of them, and seeming to regard them all as mere puppets, to some of whom she attached herself when there was anything to gain, and from whom she withdrew herself when there was anything to lose. But she was too clever to allow me time to think what qualities of mind and heart lay behind this philosophy, and I was very much diverted.

"I must take you to see Mrs. Woodruff," she remarked. "You will be welcome in the set as flowers in May. You are spending the summer here, I suppose?"

"I have no plans. Where my mother is I shall be for the present, I have been separated from her so long."

"How beautiful! But about your future, Floyd? Have you a career decided upon, or are you to be a gentleman of leisure?"

I flushed: "My resolution is not taken as to what I shall be—certainly not an idle man."

"I can tell your fortune," she said in a low voice. "You need not cross my palm with silver for it, either."

"With gold, then?"

"I will tell it for love, but it is a golden fortune. You will marry Helen Floyd."

"No," said I with decision and some anger, "I shall never marry Helen. You do me too much honor. She would never look at me; and if she would there is something within me which forbids my marrying a rich woman. But it is nonsense. For Heaven's sake don't allude to it again! The man who marries her will be, to my thinking, the most fortunate of men, but—"

"We won't talk about it," said she good-naturedly. "There comes Mr. Thorpe to bid us good-morning. Astonishing how well he likes the walk to The Headlands!"

It was Thorpe indeed, carelessly but irreproachably dressed as usual, and looking at us with a smile of internal amusement, which he was probably too well-bred to express in words, for he merely drawled a good-morning and remarked on the beauty of the day.

"You're a famous pedestrian in these days, Thorpe," I said, rising with a trifle of embarrassment from my seat as close to Miss Lenox's as the rocks permitted, "and an early riser too. When I got up this morning at half-past six I told myself that I should see nobody for three hours at least, yet both Miss Lenox and you equal me in my love for the early morning hours."

But Thorpe was indifferent, and I saw at once that his mind was too preoccupied to allow of his wasting a thought upon the reason of my rising earlier than usual. "If you got up at half-past six," said he coolly, looking at his watch, "you must be ready for your breakfast, for it is a quarter to nine."

"I shall go in," remarked Georgy, rising and shaking out her white skirts and putting herself to rights generally after the manner in which birds and women plume themselves. "Did you come to breakfast, Mr. Thorpe?" she inquired with bare civility.

"I thought of dropping in," he returned; and as I assisted Miss Lenox up the ledge I turned to see if he were following us. He seemed to be waiting, however, for us to get away, and when I gained another distant glimpse of him he was apparently searching for something in a crevice of the rocks. Yet we were scarcely on the back piazza, before he had rejoined us in high spirits, and I was conscious of a gleam in his eyes which I had never seen before.

I could not resist speculations upon the reasons of his intimacy at the house, but dismissed them all as idle, for I knew very well that the habits of a young man at a watering-place are made by the necessity of filling up the hours of the day with occupation. The cottagers have perfect leisure as a rule, and with amiable, courteous ways press upon all acquaintances an incessant hospitality; and Thorpe, always frivolous, had at once fallen into the general way. Here at The Headlands the house was still under the shadow of deep mourning, but his old acquaintance with Mr. Floyd and my mother made his frequent visits admissible. At any rate, beyond Mr. Floyd's unobtrusive sarcasm at his expense, I heard no objections to Thorpe's dropping in to breakfast. Mills brought him a plate, and he himself chose a seat at Helen's left hand, and devoted himself to her service in a way that I knew bored her immeasurably. He sugared her strawberries and creamed them generously, and she sent them to her parrot. "I will take some more strawberries, Mills," she said then, and treated Thorpe's further attempts to serve her with chilly disdain.

"Now that Floyd is here," said Mr. Floyd when we were through breakfast, "I shall indulge in laziness no longer, but shall sit by and see him work." And the result was that for the next two weeks he and my mother, Helen and I, all sat in Mr. Raymond's study for an hour or two every morning and looked over his papers. Two or three times Mr. Wickham the lawyer came from New York, and it was easy enough to see that Helen's property was so large, its investments so various, that its proper care was work enough for one man.

"I shall look about for a husband for her at once," Mr. Floyd said half a dozen times to the lawyer when we three men were alone: "nobody can expect me to waste my few energies in looking after all these interests."

"Depend upon it, sir," Mr. Wickham would return with an easy chuckle, "you will find the world full of young men who will be happy to relieve you of every responsibility regarding Miss Floyd's fortune."

"They shall none of them have her," her father exclaimed once, fiercely—"not one! No man but one who loves her for her sweet self alone shall ever have my little girl." At such times Mr. Wickham always looked at me with a critical curiosity which I could forgive in so old a friend of Helen's, but which at the same time robbed me of a certain composure I should have liked to carry through the difficulties of my present position. For I was, in truth, performing all the duties of an executor and mastering the details of the schedule of property, while Mr. Floyd sat by and made jokes upon the way Helen would spend her income.

"Hair-pins cost a great deal," he would affirm solemnly, "and pins. How much pin-money had the princess royal? Put down fifteen thousand dollars for hair-pins, black pins, white pins: what other pins do women use?"

"But," I would expostulate, "you must attend to this."

"And why?" he would ask, turning his fine melancholy eyes upon me. "Don't tire me out, Floyd."

We were alone, although my mother and Helen were almost within hearing on the balcony.

"I am willing to do everything for you, sir," I said, "but nevertheless it seems to me that it is scarcely prudent for you to entrust me with your duties. I am totally inexperienced; my knowledge of finance is the mere mastery of figures; I am—"

"Look here, dear boy," said Mr. Floyd in a kind but weary voice: "I am only trying to save you trouble. When I die you will take my place as Helen's executor and trustee. It would be harder then for you to learn the mystery of all these details by yourself. Now I am here to teach you."

Ellen W. Olney.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]