CHAPTER XXV
CLARENCE SPEAKS
Had Clarence Toxteth presented himself and his claims at the moment when the lady of his choice, panting and angry, had just escaped from the presence of her mother, his suit would have been disposed of in the most summary manner. It has been somewhere remarked, however, that women are creatures of changeable minds. By the time afternoon and the Toxteth equipage had arrived, the maiden's heart had so far relented, that she greeted her suitor as kindly as ever. As she rolled along in the luxurious carriage, her nimble fancy busied itself in picturing the future as it might be, if she chose to accept the man by her side. The very keenness of the senses, the fineness of perception which she possessed, made ready avenues by which temptations might enter. With tastes which demanded luxury, with at once the love and the knowledge of beauty, it was hard to deny herself the wealth which would put these things within her reach. To one who had been long the acknowledged leader among her associates, there was, too, a peculiar temptation to accept the hand of the wealthiest man in the village, making a brilliant match, and securing her position for the future. The weakness of Patty's nature that afternoon asserted itself; and all the way to Samoset she was rather silent, following in her mind a brilliant will-o'-the-wisp, which shone and glistened indeed, but led over dangerous morasses.
In the errand in relation to the costumes, the young people found themselves unexpectedly delayed; so that the short October twilight was already falling when they drove out of Samoset. By the time Wilk's Run was reached, it was so dark, that, in the shadow of the carriage-top, their faces were not visible to each other. As the gloom deepened, the courage of the young man increased; and when at length he could not see the eyes of his companion, he was able to speak the words which had all the afternoon been jostling each other in eagerness to obtain utterance. Unabashed with all others, Clarence found in Patty's clear glances a penetration against the embarrassment of which he strove in vain; but, that removed, he spoke.
"It may seem strange for me to say it," he began; "but I've quite made up my mind that we should get along nicely together."
"Have you?" she returned, laughing, but secretly uneasy. "We have never quarrelled, that I remember."
"Oh, no!" he answered, "of course not. I hope you don't think so meanly of me as to believe I'd quarrel with you."
"No," she said, smiling to herself; "but I might have quarrelled with you."
"I didn't mean that," said he. "But we get on so nicely together, that, I say, why shouldn't we be always together, you know?"
He could hardly have chosen a more unfortunate phrase in which to couch his proposal. There came over his companion a sickening sense of what it would be to live always with the man at her side. He attempted to embrace her with the arm not occupied with the reins; but she shrank back into the farthest corner of the carriage, filled with the bitterest self-contempt because she listened to him. This self-reproach was his salvation. The sense of her own weakness in letting him declare his passion, and of her dishonesty in keeping a silence which he might interpret favorably, so overwhelmed her with detestation for herself, that by contrast she for the moment almost regarded Clarence as an injured angel of honesty and devotion. From this odd mingling of feelings arose a sort of pity for her suitor; and, although she answered nothing, she suffered him to say on.
"I love you," he continued, "and I should be a fool if I didn't know that I have something to offer the girl who marries me."
"If I ever married," Patty answered in a constrained voice, "I shouldn't marry for what a man could give me."
"If that is true," she added to herself, "why am I listening to him at all? Oh, what a hypocrite I am!"
"Of course not," Toxteth said, answering the remark he heard. "But a man is no worse for having a few dollars, is he?"
"I suppose not."
"Then, why do you not say that you will marry me?" he demanded almost petulantly.
"I was not aware that you had asked me."
"I have, then. Will you?"
"I cannot tell," she said. "I cannot tell. Don't ask me to say more now."
"I must say," he retorted, rather offended, "that I can't be very much flattered by the way you talk."
"But you know how dreadfully sudden" —
The lie stuck in her throat, and refused to be uttered.
"Is it? How blind you must have been! Couldn't you see all summer that I was smashed?"
Patty was conscious of a wild desire to strangle her lover, and then fling herself under the wheels of the carriage. She longed to get possession of the whip, and lash the gray span into a gallop.
"I am fearfully cold and hungry," she said, feigning a shiver. "Do drive faster."
Clarence was ill pleased with the result of his wooing; yet the fact that he had not been absolutely refused made it needful for him to restrain his impatience. He whipped up his horses, and the carriage bowled along the road in a way that at another time would have filled Patty with delight. As it was, she was conscious of a passing thought that it lay in her power to become the mistress of this dashing equipage, and with the thought came fresh self-condemnation. At her gate she was only coldly civil to Clarence, who drove away, and relieved his feelings by swearing at his horses.
Patty ran up the path to the cottage like a hunted deer. She wanted to get away from Toxteth, to escape as far as possible from the sound of his voice, from the touch of his hand. On the piazza she encountered Tom Putnam, who had been calling at the house.
"How late you are!" he said, taking both her hands in his. "How you tremble! Do you think it prudent to ride in so thin wraps? We have all been worrying about you."
"Let me go!" she exclaimed, snatching her hands from his grasp, and half beside herself with shame and self-loathing. "Let me go! I hate you!"
And she darted into the house.
CHAPTER XXVI
MULLEN HOUSE
It is hardly to be wondered at that the sleep of Tom Putnam was not of the soundest that night. He recalled with painful minuteness the details of his relations with Patience, reviewing every word, every look, every gesture, from the evening of the thunder-storm until her passionate exclamation as she encountered him upon the piazza. It was not strange that he did not understand how that fierce declaration of hatred arose from love. When Patty suddenly found herself face to face with her lover, a sudden inner gleam, as with a lightning's flash, showed her clearly her own heart. With swift and terrible distinctness she saw how deep and strong was her love for him, and the miserable way in which she had been paltering with her own happiness and truth. With this came an equally rapid revulsion of feeling. She rebelled against this man for holding her heart in bondage, for constraining her love. Most of all she hated her own weakness; and upon him she wreaked her self-contempt. Knowing nothing of her mental combat, her lover could only wonder gloomily how he had deserved or provoked this bitterness, and in the watches of the night arraigned himself for a thousand fancied shortcomings which in love are crimes.
He fell into a troubled sleep towards morning, and awoke to find the sun staring in at his windows, astonished to find him so late in bed.
October this year was unusually warm and pleasant; and when, after breakfast, Mr. Putnam rode over to Mullen House, whither he had been summoned, he found the air soft and mild as in August. The place was a mile and a half from his home, standing a little out of the village, by itself. The leaves along the way were falling rapidly from the trees, and the sharp teeth of the frost had bitten the wild grapes and nightshade at the roadside. In some moist places the elms still remained full and green, while the brilliant sumach-clusters ran like a crimson line along the way.
The crickets chirped merrily like the little old men they are in the night-time, if the old fairy-tale be true. The asters and golden-rod flaunted their bright blooms over the stone walls. The distant hills looked blue and far.
The house to which the lawyer had been summoned was as singular as it was pretentious. In the lifetime of its builder it had been vulgarly dubbed "Mullen's Lunacy," – a name not quite forgotten yet. It was of stone, chiefly granite, although in a sort of tower which had been built later than the rest, the material used was a species of conglomerate. The building apparently had been modelled somewhat inexactly after some old English manor-house, and was a very noticeable object in a straggling modern village like Montfield. Mr. Mullen, its builder, had inherited, with a large property, a studious disposition, and a will as remarkable for its firmness as for its eccentricity. He had given his life to study, which came to nothing as far as the world was concerned, since it resulted in no productiveness. He had attained a high degree of scholarly culture, but manifested it chiefly in ways fairly enough regarded by his acquaintances and neighbors as affectations. He wore the dress of the Englishman of letters fifty years before his day, – an anachronism less striking then than now, it is true, but significantly symbolical of his habit of looking to the past rather than the present or future for mental nourishment. His mansion was furnished largely with antique furniture obtained in Europe, and was always associated, in the mind of Patty and Will Sanford, with the mediæval romances they had pored over in the old library in childhood. The Sanfords were among the very few Montfielders who were admitted at Mullen House, as the proprietor chose to style his dwelling, upon any thing like terms of equality. The doctor's family-tree struck its roots deeper into the past than did that upon which the eccentric scholar prided himself; and the two families had been friends for generations. The children had been made welcome to the childless mansion; and, when Ease Apthorpe came home to her grandfather's house, she found the brother and sister already almost as much domesticated there as at home. After the death of Mr. Mullen, the visits of the young people were less frequent; but the close friendship formed with Ease had never been loosened.
Mr. Mullen's youth had vanished early; but he had remained single until well towards middle life. Scandal had made free with his name in connection with Mrs. Smithers, both before and after he had married a timid wife, whom, after the fashion of Browning's Duke, he expected
"To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen
At the proper place, in the proper minute,
And die away the life between."
A sweet woman, who lived again in her grand-daughter Ease, was Mrs. Mullen, – a flower requiring sunshine and love, and who was as surely chilled to death by the frosty smiles of her husband as the four-o'clocks by the rime of autumn. Dying she left him two children, – Tabitha, the eldest, "a little faithful copy of her sire;" and Agnes, quite as true to the mother-type. Tabitha the father had kept at home, and educated himself. She grew up so like him, that she almost seemed an image into which had been breathed his spirit.
Tabitha Mullen was a woman of stately presence, with keen black eyes, and hair which had been like a raven's wing until time began to whiten it. She dressed always richly, wearing sumptuous apparel, rather because it was in keeping with her state as the only remaining representative of her name, than as if impelled thereto by any womanly vanity. She ruled her household with a rod of iron; and, from the boy who drove the cows afield, to the stately butler, the servants all stood in awe of her. This butler had once been a great scandal to the worthy people of Montfield; and even time had done little to change their feelings. He was one of Mr. Mullen's English innovations; and besides this objection, and the outrage of being a man-servant for indoor service, the butler was, in the minds of the village people, connected with the very questionable inversion of the natural order of things caused by five-o'clock dinners, and the still more outrageous habit of having wine at that meal. Miss Tabitha drank wine at dinner, and had it served by a butler in livery, because her father had done so before her. That Montfielders were shocked was a matter for which she cared no more than she did what missionary the King of Borrioboola-Gha ate for his breakfast. The absurdity of attempting to keep up the state of an old English mansion in a New-England village was a matter which the mistress of Mullen House did not choose to see; and that to which she chose to be blind she would not have perceived if illuminated by the concentrated light of a burning universe. So Mullen House and its mistress, its life and its state, existed in strange anachronism in the midst of the work-a-day world of Montfield.
Not an easy woman to live with was Tabitha Mullen, as her niece had found. Agnes Mullen, the younger daughter, had been reared by the sister of her mother; had married a young music-teacher with no fortune save the
"Lands
He held of his lute in fee."
Very happy had they been together, and perhaps, for that reason, had held but loosely to life, departing nearly together, as they believed to a better existence, soon after the birth of little Ease.
The orphan had grown up, snowdrop like, in the gloomy state of Mullen House, – a slender, graceful maiden, gentle and shy. Of yielding disposition, the Mullen strength of will had somehow been tempered in her to a firmness of principle. Hers was one of those natures which hold to what they believe true and pure with the same despairing clasp a drowning man fastens upon a floating spar, clinging with the strength of one who struggles for very existence. Desiring to yield every thing asked of her, she found the approval of conscience a necessity, – a character to make life in adverse circumstances hard but high, bitter but pure.
In some respects Ease's surroundings were fortunate for her peculiar disposition. The Episcopal form of worship which Miss Tabitha affected as most nearly like the Church of England was particularly suited to the needs of her niece, since it gave color and richness to a faith otherwise too sombre. The young girl's companionship with the Sanfords also had been of a nature calculated to brighten her life.
The relation between Ease and Will Sanford had never been quite the same as before since that Sunday afternoon at Wilk's Run. The young man felt no longer towards Ease as a dear friend simply. The presence of a rival had awakened in his heart the passion which had long lain there dormant. Love ceased to be a dream coldly ideal, and sprang up a living fire. He was conscious now of a keen delight in Ease's presence, very different from the negative pleasure her companionship had hitherto afforded him. The touch of her hand, the brushing of her dress against him, suddenly became events to be watched for and remembered.
This changed very little their outward demeanor, save that they might have seemed to an observer to have become somewhat reserved toward each other. The smallest chances had suddenly assumed too great an importance to be lightly indulged in. A virgin shyness enveloped Ease, which Will had not yet dared break through by the caresses he longed to bestow.
But all this has little to do, directly at least, with the visit of Tom Putnam to Mullen House. He had been not a little surprised by the summons, since no very cordial feeling existed between himself and Miss Mullen; and he had speculated, as he drove along, upon the possible nature of the business involved. His surprise was not lessened, when, after the slightest exchange of civilities compatible with very scant hospitality, Miss Tabitha suddenly came at once to the point by an abrupt question.
"Why," she asked, "have you brought that Smithers woman into the neighborhood?"
"Brought her into the neighborhood?" he echoed in astonishment.
"Yes, brought her into the neighborhood. She is living in your stone cottage at this moment. If you haven't any care for my feelings, you might have considered your own reputation."
"My reputation!" he repeated, puzzled. "What has that to do with it?"
"Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Shankland and Mrs. Sanford could tell you," she retorted with a scornful smile.
He was silent. Wrongly, it is true, but with the weight of a certainty, it flashed upon him that here was the key to Patty's sudden hatred. He turned sick at the thought of the gossip she must have heard; then, with a quick throb of pride, he raised his head in wonder that the woman he loved could believe this of him. He rose at once, and stepped towards the door.
"If you had hinted at your business," he said, "it would have saved my coming over. Whatever cause you may have to be sensitive in regard to Mrs. Smithers, I certainly have none; and you will allow, I think, that the stone cottage belongs to me."
Nor could Miss Mullen's persuasions move him. The thrust she had given his pride, thinking thereby the more surely to accomplish her object, had turned against her. He felt that to send away the woman who had become his tenant would appear an acknowledgment of the truth of the slander against him.
But it was with a heavy heart that he rode homewards.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE RUSTIC ROAD
Miss Flora Sturtevant was walking slowly along a lovely forest-road. It was near sunset, and the rays of light shot long bars of dusky gold between the tree-trunks. The robin, the thrush, and the oriole, still delaying through the warm autumnal weather, sang by starts amid the branches. The bright knots of ribbon upon Flora's dress, and the scarlet poppies in her hat, were touched and lighted by the glow, making all the hundred lights and gleams of the wood seem to centre about her figure. She carried in her hand a bunch of ferns and grasses, mingled with a few bright leaves; and she sauntered with the careless air of having come out merely for enjoyment.
The road had once been the county turnpike, but had long ago fallen into disuse. Now the trees met overhead, the grass and ferns had obliterated the marks of wheels, and, except for hunters or loitering pleasure-seekers, the way remained untrodden.
But Miss Sturtevant, idle and leisurely as was her mien, was not simply sauntering to enjoy the pleasure of nature. She was upon a diplomatic errand. Frank Breck had conducted her hither, and had turned back, that she might be alone to encounter a man who Breck knew was soon to pass this way. The lady was perfectly cool and collected. The idea of meeting in the forest a man to whom she had never spoken, and whose character she knew to be bad, seemed not to give her the slightest concern. Perhaps she expected Breck to remain within call; possibly her strong self-reliance made her insensible to fear.
At length the barking of a dog rang through the woods, and soon sounds of some one approaching were heard. Miss Sturtevant's lips closed with an expression of firmness, over which, however, instantly spread the veil of a smile. Shading her eyes with her hand, and half-turning where she stood, she looked off through the leafy spaces towards the setting sun, conscious that the first glimpse the new-comer caught of her would give him her figure at its best. So absorbed was she in gazing at the sunset, that she apparently did not hear the approaching stranger until he was within half a dozen feet of her. Then she turned suddenly, just as the dog ran up to her. She uttered a little exclamation of surprise.
"How you startled me!" she said, stooping to caress the dog, a handsome pointer. "What a lovely dog you are!"
"He is a kind o' handsome pup," the hunter said, replying to the remark addressed to his dog, – "handsome for a pup, that is," he added guardedly.
"Oh!" cried Flora, catching sight of the game which the man carried. "Oh, how perfectly lovely the necks of those birds are! What are they? What a fine shot you must be!"
"Well, middlin'," he answered, evidently flattered. "Them partridges was terrible shy."
"I've wanted a heron all summer," remarked she, still admiring the glossy necks of the birds. "The feathers, I mean; but I didn't know anybody who could shoot one."
"Herons ain't none too plenty round here," he said, "and it's all-fired hard to get a shot at one."
"Haven't I seen you before?" asked Flora, letting her trimly-gloved hand rest upon the dog's head. "Did you ever live in Boston?"
"I guess I did!" he returned. "I lived with Breck there for most seven years."
"Oh! then, you are Mr. Mixon. It is wonderful that I happened to meet you here. I've wanted to see you for a long time. Do you know who I am?"
"You must be Miss Sturtevant, ain't you? – the one who was so deused smart about the Branch stock."
"Did you hear of that?" she asked, laughing. "I suppose I am the one; but I didn't know I was so smart."
"All-fired smart is what I say," Mixon affirmed with emphasis. "What did you want of me?"
"You may think it strange," she said reflectively; "yes, I'm sure you will think it very strange that I know any thing about it; but you have some papers that I want to see."
Mixon's face instantly assumed an expression of intensest cunning. He leaned upon his gun, bending his head towards his companion. The dog stood between the strangely-matched pair, turning his intelligent face from one to the other. Flora pushed her hat back from her face as if for coolness, but in reality because she knew it was more becoming so. Her blue eyes shot persuasive glances upon the man before her; while her fingers toyed with the long silken ears of the pointer.
"Papers!" Mixon said. "What sort of papers?"
"Papers that old Mr. Mullen" – She left her sentence unfinished, not wishing to risk displaying her ignorance of the real nature of the documents in question. Mixon regarded her sharply.
"Do you know Frank Breck?" he asked. "Maybe, now, he might ha' mentioned this to you."
"I know a great many people besides Frank Breck," she returned, smiling. "I didn't need to go to him for information."
"It's mighty strange," Peter said in a deliberative way, "how many folks thinks I have papers they want. There's Breck; he's always at me. And Miss Mullen – she's sent for me a sight more times than I've been. And then Hannah Clemens, she thought I might have something would put her into her rights. Then there was Tabitha Mullen's lawyer" —
"Mr. Wentworth?" questioned Flora eagerly.
"Yes, that's him. He mittened on to me the other day."
"But I didn't know he had been here."
"He only came down one train," said Peter; "an' he went back on the next. Miss Mullen sent after me to see him. And now you take it up, and want some valuable papers. I wish I could supply you all; but I can't."
"But you can at least let me see" – Flora began. But Mixon interrupted.
"I can't let you see what I hain't got, can I? Somebody must ha' lost an awful precious dociment to make all this stir. – Come, Trip."
"Honestly," Miss Sturtevant said, in her fear that he would escape her, going so far as to lay her fingers upon his arm, – "honestl