SATURDAY AFTERNOON.
Mrs. Julia Meredith had arrived, and the brown farmhouse was in a
state of unusual excitement; not that Captain Humphreys or his good
wife, Aunt Ruth, respected very highly the great lady who had so
seldom honored them with her presence, and who always tried so hard to
impress them with a sense of her superiority and the mighty favor she
conferred upon them by occasionally condescending to bring her
aristocratic presence into their quiet, plain household, and turn it
topsy-turvy. Still, she was Anna's aunt, and then, too, it was a
distinction which Aunt Ruth rather enjoyed, that of having a
fashionable city woman for her guest, and so she submitted with a good
grace to the breaking in upon all her customs, and uttered no word of
complaint when the breakfast table waited till eight, and sometimes
nine o'clock, and the freshest eggs were taken from the nest, and the
cream all skimmed from the pans to gratify the lady who came down very
charming and pretty in her handsome cambric wrapper, with rosebuds in
her hair. She had arrived the previous night, and while the rector was
penning his letter she was holding Anna's hand in hers, and, running
her eye rapidly over her face and form, was making an inventory of her
charms and calculating their value.
A very graceful figure, neither too short nor too tall. This she gets
from the Ruthvens. Splendid eyes and magnificent hair, when Valencia
has once taken it in hand. Complexion a little too brilliant, but a
few weeks of dissipation will cure that. Fine teeth, and features
tolerably regular, except that the mouth is too wide, and the forehead
too low, which defects she takes from the Humphreys. Small feet and
rather pretty hands, except that they seem to have grown wide since I
saw her before. Can it be these horrid people have set her to milking
the cows?
This was what Mrs. Meredith thought that first evening after her
arrival at the farmhouse, and she had not materially changed her mind
when the next afternoon she went with Anna down to the Glen, for which
she affected a great fondness, because she thought it was romantic and
girlish to do so, and she was far being past the period when women
cease caring for youth and its appurtenances. She had criticised
Anna's taste in dress--had said that the belt she selected did not
harmonize with the color of the muslin she wore, and suggested that a
frill of lace about the neck would be softer and more becoming than
the stiff white linen collar.
"But in the country it does not matter," she said. "Wait till I get
you to New York, under Madam Blank's supervision, and then we shall
see a transformation such as will astonish the humble Hanoverians."
This was up in Anna's room, and when the Glen was reached Mrs.
Meredith continued the conversation, telling Anna of her plans for
taking her first to New York, where she was to pass through a
reformatory process with regard to dress. Then they were going to
Saratoga, where she expected her niece to reign supreme; both as a
beauty and a belle.
"Whatever I have left at my death I shall leave to you," she said;
"consequently you will pass as an heiress expectant, and with all
these aids I confidently expect you to make a brilliant match before
the winter season closes, if, indeed, you do not before you leave
Saratoga."
"Oh, aunt," Anna exclaimed, her brown eyes flashing with unwonted
brilliancy, and the rich color mantling her cheek. "You surely are not
taking me to Saratoga on such a shameful errand as that?"
"Shameful errand as what?" Mrs. Meredith asked, looking quickly up,
while Anna replied:
"Trying to find a husband. I cannot go if you are, much as I have
anticipated it. I should despise and hate myself forever. No, aunt, I
cannot go."
"Nonsense, child. You don't know what you are saying," Mrs. Meredith
retorted, feeling intuitively that she must change her tactics and
keep her real intentions concealed if she would lead her niece into
the snare laid for her.
Cunningly and carefully for the next half hour she talked, telling
Anna that she was not to be thrust upon the notice of any one--that
she herself had no patience with those intriguing mammas who push
their bold daughters forward, but that as a good marriage was the
_ultima thule_ of a woman's hopes, it was but natural that she, as
Anna's aunt, should wish to see her well settled in life, and settled,
too, near herself, where they could see each other every day.
"Of course, there is no one in Hanover whom you, as a Ruthven, would
stoop to marry," she said, fixing her eyes inquiringly upon Anna, who
was pulling to pieces the wild flowers she had gathered, and thinking
of that twilight hour when she had talked with their young clergyman
as she never talked before. Of the many times, too, when they had met
in the cottages of the poor, and he had walked slowly home with her,
lingering by the gate, as if loth to say good-by, she thought, and the
life she had lived since he first came to Hanover, and she learned to
blush when she met the glance of his eye, looked fairer far than the
life her aunt, had marked out as the proper one for a Ruthven.
"You have not told me yet. Is there any one in Hanover whom you think
worthy of you?" Mrs. Meredith asked, just as a footstep was heard, and
the rector of St. Mark's came round the rock where they were sitting.
He had called at the farmhouse, bringing the letter, and with it a
book of poetry, of which Anna had asked the loan.
Taking advantage of her guest's absence, Grandma Humphreys had gone to
a neighbor's after a recipe for making a certain kind of cake of which
Mrs. Meredith was very fond, and only Esther, the servant, and
Valencia, the smart waiting maid, without whom Mrs. Meredith never
traveled, were left in charge.
"Down in the Glen with Mrs. Meredith. Will you be pleased to wait
while I call them?" Esther said, in reply to the rector's inquiries
for Miss Ruthven.
"No, I will find them myself," Mr. Leighton rejoined. Then, as he
thought how impossible it would be to give the letter to Anna in the
presence of her aunt, he slipped it into the book which he bade Esther
take to Miss Ruthven's room.
Knowing how honest and faithful Esther was, the rector felt that he
could trust her without fear for the safety of his letter, sought the
Glen, where the tell-tale blushes which burned on Anna's cheek at
sight of him more than compensated for the coolness with which Mrs.
Meredith greeted him. She, too, had detected Anna's embarrassment, and
when the stranger was presented to her as "Mr. Leighton, our
clergyman," the secret was out.
"Why is it that since the beginning of time girls have run wild after
young ministers?" was her mental comment, as she bowed to Mr.
Leighton, and then quietly inspected his _personnel_.
There was nothing about Arthur Leighton's appearance with which she
could find fault. He was even finer looking than Thornton Hastings,
her _beau ideal_ of a man, and as he stood a moment by Anna's side,
looking down upon her, the woman of the world acknowledged to herself
that they were a well-assorted pair, and as across the chasm of twenty
years there came back to her an episode in her life, when, on just
such a day as this, she had answered "no" to one as young and worthy
as Arthur Leighton, while all the time the heart was clinging to him,
she softened for a moment, and by the memory of the weary years passed
with the rich old man whose name she bore, she was tempted to leave
alone the couple standing there before her, and looking into each
other's eyes with a look which she could not mistake. But when she
remembered that Arthur was only a poor clergyman, and thought of that
house on Madison Square which Thornton Hastings owned, the softened
mood was changed, and Arthur Leighton's chance with her was gone.
Awhile they talked together in the Glen, and then walked back to the
farmhouse, where the rector bade them good evening, after casually
saying to Anna:
"I have brought the book you spoke of when I was here last. You will
find it in your room, where I asked Esther to take it."
That Mr. Leighton should bring her niece a book did not seem strange
at all, but that he should be so very thoughtful as to tell Esther to
take it to her room struck her as rather odd, and as the practiced
war-horse scents the battle from afar, so Mrs. Meredith at once
suspected something wrong, and felt a curiosity to know what the book
could be.
It was lying on Anna's table as she reached the door on her way to her
own room, and, pausing for a moment, she entered the chamber, took it
in her hands, read the title page, and then opened it to where the
letter lay.
"Miss Anna Ruthven," she said. "He writes a fair hand;" and then, as
the thought, which at first was scarce a thought, kept growing in her
mind, she turned it over, and found that, owing to some defect, it had
become unsealed and the lid of the envelope lay temptingly open before
her. "I would never break a seal," she said, "but surely, as her
protector and almost mother, I may read what this minister has written
to my niece."
She read what he had written, while a scowl of disapprobation marred
the smoothness of her brow.
"It is as I feared. Once let her see this, and Thornton Hastings may
woo in vain. But it shall not be. It is my duty as the sister of her
dead father, to interfere and not let her throw herself away."
Perhaps Mrs. Meredith really felt that she was doing her duty. At all
events, she did not give herself much time to reason upon the matter,
for, startled by a slight movement in the room directly opposite, the
door of which was ajar, she thrust the letter into her pocket and
turned to see--Valencia, standing with her back to her, and arranging
her hair in a mirror which hung upon the wall.
"She could not have seen me; and, even if she did, she would not
suspect the truth," was the guilty woman's thought, as, with the
stolen missive in her pocket, she went down to the parlor and tried,
by petting Anna more than her wont, to still the voice of conscience
which clamored loudly of the wrong, and urged a restoration of the
letter to the place whence it was taken.
But the golden moment fled, and when, later in the evening, Anna went
up to her chamber and opened the book which the rector had brought,
she never suspected how near she had been to the great happiness she
had sometimes dared to hope for, or dreamed how fervently Arthur
Leighton prayed that night that, if it were possible, God would grant
the boon he craved above all others--the priceless gift of Anna
Ruthven's love.