"The worst is over; I am safe," Grove decided. "But I like her all the better for that womanly holding back. Now, to live down my folly as best I can."
He threw himself into hard work, and the days passed healthily. Mrs.
Gervase had begun to relax her vigilance, to breathe almost free of care, when, upon one of his morning rides, ahead of him in a forest glade, he espied Gladys Eliot, in the saddle, attended by one of the Prettyman boys, a youngster of thirteen, mounted on a polo pony in process of "showing off" his and his master's accomplishments.
At the sound behind them, both Gladys and the boy turned to look; and Grove saw that he could not retreat without a decided lack of dignity.
He therefore rode by them, receiving from Miss Eliot a faint and chilly nod; from the boy,--an acquaintance of last year,--a more cordial salutation.
"I say, Mr. Grove, _can't_ Punch take that fallen tree?" cried out the lad, in shrill treble. "_She_ says it's dangerous, because the bank is caved. Hold on one minute, and I'll show you he can clear it, bank and all."
Punch, proving nothing loth, jumped the obstacles in question gallantly, but on the far side slipped on something, and spilled his rider among a bed of tall bracken, in which the boy lay, lost to sight. Both Grove and Gladys were in a minute at his side, shocked at finding him white and senseless.
"It was not the fall," she said, rapidly. "He has heart-trouble, and his mother is always anxious about a sudden shock for him. He will outgrow it probably, the doctors say. Here, you hold him in your arms, while I get water from that brook. I know what to do, and he will soon come to himself."
Grove found himself silently obeying her behests. He was struck by her prompt presence of mind, her deftness, and good sense. "What an admirable trained nurse is lost to the world in her!" he thought, and, when all was done, and the boy gave token of returning life, sat still, content to crush down moss and ferns, awkwardly holding his burden, while Gladys knelt so close that her breath in speaking fanned his cheek.
"It wasn't Punch's fault. I've got a big bee buzzing in my head," were the welcome words they at last heard from the sufferer.
"Yes, I know, Jim dear, but don't talk now till the big bee flies away," and the boy, closing his eyes, appeared to sleep.
"Lay his head on my lap, and then, if you don't mind riding back and ordering some sort of a trap, without letting his mother know--"
"I can't leave you here. It is too far from home, and the country hereabouts is quite bare of dwellings. Nor would I like you to ride so far alone. There; let him sleep, and we will watch him till he wakes.
No doctor could have treated him more cleverly than you."
"It's the result of a 'First Aid to the Injured' class I went to once, perhaps. But I always had a knack with ill people," she said, dropping the deep fringes of her eyes upon damask cheeks.
That evening, Grove could do no less than call to inquire after Master Jim, who, not much the worse for his attack, kept his adoring mother in durance at his bedside, while Grove sat watching the opal flushes die out of a western sky, in company with Gladys. Quite another Gladys was this, in all save beauty and her dulcet voice, from his enslaver of town life.
And now, to Mrs. Gervase's ill-concealed dismay, visits, meetings, rides, boating, began and continued daily. Grove was teaching Miss Eliot chess, he said, and the other things were what they call upon the stage "incidental divertisements."
A fortnight of glorious weather had passed thus, when, on the eve of Grove's return to town and work, he asked Gladys to go out in a boat with him to watch the sunset on the water.
"Now you have told me there is no reason I may not speak, I can wait no longer for an answer," he said, as, resting on his oars, he scanned her face eagerly. "When a man tears his heart out and throws it at a woman's feet, surely he offers something. But that, you know, is my all. If you can consent to share the kind of life mine has got to be for the next five or six years, I think I see daylight beyond. By that time, your first youth will be gone, you will be forgotten by the people who court you now, you will be a nobody in their esteem. To me, you will always be the one woman of the world. You will have the full love of my heart; and you shall see what that means, when a true man pours it upon you unrestrained. I don't pretend to be worth it, Heaven knows. But I do say you have never before been loved by a man like me, and you know it and feel it thoroughly. It's for you to take or leave me, accepting consequences."
"What a stand-and-deliver kind of love-making," Gladys tried to say; but she was deeply stirred. Remaining silent, her eyes filled with tears; her head drooped towards her breast.
"Gladys!" cried he, exultingly.
"Don't you see, now, the real reason why I could not go abroad?" she said, smiling on him brightly, and lifting, at the same moment, her ungloved left hand to put back a loose lock of hair that the wind had blown across her cheek. Grove, gazing at her with his whole soul in his eyes, became aware of a ring upon the fourth finger,--a ring of such conspicuous brilliancy and choice gems as to convey but one meaning,--and his expression changed.
"Oh! I hate it! I shall give it back!" she exclaimed, a burning blush settling upon her face. "I did not mean--it was an accident. I hate it, I tell you! Why do you look at me like that?"
She tore the ring from her hand, and impetuously put it out of sight.
Presently, as Grove, in mechanical fashion, resumed his rowing without a word, she cried out, passionately:
"Why do you not ask me to explain all the--circumstances of my life since I saw you last? Why can't you understand that a girl situated as I am has temptations that at times seem to her irresistible? Need I mortify myself by telling you that I am _driven_--driven till I feel as if I would do anything to get rest from eternal lectures about what a rich marriage has got to do for me--and for others? Yes, you are right in saying that a man like you never before asked me to marry him. Because I feel that--because--because--Oh! you are cruel not to speak--to help me! How can I put into words that I am willing to give up all--"
It was impossible, facing the rigid coldness of his face, to go on.
She sat in wretched silence till they reached shore, and he gave her his chilly hand to help her upon the float. Then the touch of her fingers sent a tremor of relenting into his veins.
"Oh, if I could! If I could! But he too--that other one--believed.
Tell me; he does not still believe in you?"
"I hate him," she said, doggedly. She shivered a little, as the quickened breeze of evening struck her thinly-clad form.
Grove, clasping her hand, gazed into her eyes with a desperate resolve to read her heart.
"Let me go--it is no use," she said, turning away from him.
And, with a sigh deep as Fate, he loosened his hold of her--forever.
On Frenchman's Bay
Chapter I
From Maxwell Pollock, Esq., No. -- Fifth Avenue, New York, to Stephen Cranbrooke, Esq., ---- Club, New York.
"May 30, 189-.
"My dear Cranbrooke:
"You will wonder why I follow up our conversation of last evening with a letter; why, instead of speaking, I should write what is left to be said between us two.
"But after a sleepless night, of which my little wife suspects nothing, I am impelled to confide in you--my oldest friend, _her_ friend, although you and she have not yet grown to the comprehension of each other I hoped for when she married me three years ago--a secret that has begun to weigh heavy upon my soul.
"I do not need to remind you that, since our college days, you have known me subject to fits of moodiness and depression upon which you have often rallied me. How many times you have said that a fellow to whom Fate had given health, strength, opportunity, and fortune--and recently the treasure of a lovely and loving wife--has no business to admit the word 'depression' into his vocabulary!
"This is true. I acknowledge it, as I have a thousand times before. I am a fool, a coward, to shrink from what is before me. But I was still more of a fool and a coward when I married her. For her sake, the prospect of my death before this summer wanes impels me to own to you my certainty that my end is close at hand.
"In every generation of our family since the old fellow who came over from England and founded us on Massachusetts soil, the oldest son has been snatched out of life upon the threshold of his thirtieth year. I carried into college with me an indelible impression of the sudden and distressing death of my father, at that period of his prosperous career, and of the wild cry of my widowed mother when she clasped me to her breast, and prayed Heaven might avert the doom from me.
"Everything that philosophy, science, common sense, could bring to the task of arguing me out of a belief in the transmission of this sentence of a higher power to me, has been tried. I have studied, travelled, lived, enjoyed myself in a rational way; have loved and won the one woman upon earth for me, have revelled in her wifely tenderness.
"I have tried to do my duty as a man and a citizen. In all other respects, I believe myself to be entirely rational, cool-headed, unemotional; but I have never been able to down that spectre. He is present at every feast; and, although in perfectly good health, I resolved yesterday to put the question to a practical test. I called at the office of an eminent specialist, whom I had never met, although doubtless he knew my name, as I knew his.
"Joining the throng of waiting folk in Dr. ----'s outer office, I turned over the leaves of the last number of _Punch_, with what grim enjoyment of its _menu_ of jocularity you may conceive. When my turn came, I asked for a complete physical examination. But the doctor got no farther than my heart before I was conscious of awakening interest on his part. When the whole business was over, he told me frankly that in what he was pleased to call 'a magnificent physique,'
there was but one blemish,--a spot upon the ripe side of a peach,--a certain condition of the heart that 'might or might not' give serious trouble in the future.
"'Might or might not'! How I envied the smooth-spoken man of science his ability to say these words so glibly! While I took his medical advice,--that, between us, was not worth a straw, and he knew it, and I knew it,--I was thinking of Ethel. I saw her face when she should know the worst; and I became, immediately, an abject, cringing, timorous thing, that crept out of the doctor's office into the spring sunshine, wondering why the world was all a-cold.
"Here's where the lash hits me: I should never have married Ethel; I should, knowing my doom, have married no one but some commonplace, platitudinous creature, whom the fortune I shall leave behind me would have consoled. But Ethel!
high-strung, ardent, simple-hearted, worshipping me far beyond my deserts! Why did I condemn her, poor girl, to what is so soon to come?