“YOUR letter notifies me, in general terms, that the answers returned
to your inquiries as to my antecedents and present reputation are the
reverse of satisfactory. You feel constrained, you add, in view of the
information thus obtained, to interdict my further intercourse with your
sister or any other member of your family. Since I cannot battle with
shadows, or refute insinuations the drift of which I do not in the least
comprehend, may I trouble you to put the allegations to which you refer
into a definite and tangible shape? Let me know who are my accusers, and
what are the iniquities with which they charge me. The worst criminal
against human and divine laws has the right to demand thus much before
he is convicted and sentenced.
“As to your prohibition of my continued correspondence with Miss Aylett,
I shall consider her my promised wife, and write to her regularly as
such, until you have made good your indictment against me, or until I
receive the assurance under her own hand and seal that my conduct in
thus addressing her is obnoxious to herself.
“I have the honor, sir, of signing myself
“Your obedient servant,
“FREDERIC S. CHILTON.”
The cool contempt of the reply to his imperative dismissal of whatever
claims the presumptuous adventurer his aunt had encouraged believed he
had upon Mabel's notice or affection, was likely to irk Winston Aylett
as more intemperate language could not. It did more. It baffled him, for
a time. He could, and he meant, to withhold the lover's letter from his
sister's eyes. He could--and upon this also he was determined--command
her, in the masterful manner that heretofore had never failed to work
submission, never to meet, speak, or write again to the man he almost
hated; will her to forget her childish fancy for his handsome face and
glozing arts, and in the fulness of time, to bestow her in marriage upon
a partner of his own providing. He had no misgivings as to his ability
to accomplish all this, if the blackguard aforesaid could be kept out
of her way until that remedial agent, Time, and lawful authority had a
chance to do their work.
But he was openly defied to prevent communication between the betrothed
pair, unless his injunction had Mabel's endorsement; and, upon alighting
from the stage at the village, on his return to Ridgeley, he had taken
from the post-office, along with the impertinent missive addressed to
himself, one for Mabel, superscribed by the same hand. From the first,
he had no intention of transferring it to the keeping of the proper
owner, It was forwarded in direct disobedience to his commands, and the
writer should be made to understand the futility of opposition to these.
For several hours, his only purpose respecting it was to enclose it,
unopened, in an envelope directed by himself, and send it back to the
audacious author, by the next mail. He was balked in this project by
no fastidious scruples as to his right thus to dispose of his ward's
property. Nature, or what he assumed was natural affection, concurred
with duty in urging him to hinder an alliance by which Mabel's happiness
would be imperilled and her relatives scandalized. But when, in the
solitude of his study, he vouchsafed a second reading to Frederic's
letter, preparatory to the response he designed should annihilate his
hopes and chastise his impudence, a doubt of the efficacy of his schemes
attacked him for the first time. “Under her own hand and seal,”
were terms the explicitness of which commended them to his grave
consideration. His next thought was to oblige Mabel to indite a formal
renunciation of her unworthy suitor. There were several objections to
this measure.
Firstly, he disliked whatever smacked of scenic effect, and women were
apt to get up scenes--hysterics, attitudes, and the like--upon trivial
provocation, He wanted to get the thing over quietly and soon.
Secondly, he was not very sure that he should find in Mabel the docile
puppet she had appeared to him for so many years of tutelage. She
had matured marvelously of late. Her very manner of meeting him that
afternoon impressed him by its self-possession and freedom from the
emotion that used to gush from eyes and lips, in happy tears, and
broken, delighted greeting at his approach. For aught he knew to the
contrary, she might have accepted his fiat as just, if not merciful, and
not a dream of rebellion been fostered thereby. The grave tranquillity
of her demeanor might arise from the chastening influences of the
mortification she had sustained, and a consciousness of ill-desert
that bred humility. He would fain have believed all this, but until he
broached the subject to her, his incertitude could not be removed, and
in a step so momentous as that which he meditated, it behooved him to
try well the solidity of the ground beneath him.
Lastly, our blood-prince of the kingdom of Ridgeley was, whether he
confessed it or not, acting under orders.
“Be very tolerant with that poor little deceived sister of yours!” his
fiancee had implored, her diamond eyes bedimmed by quick-springing damps
of commiseration. “Recollect that the consciousness of wasted love is
always harder to bear than what is commonly known as bereavement. If you
find her refractory, be patient and persuasive, instead of dictatorial.
Craft often effects what overt violence would attempt in vain.”
“Craft!” The word struck unpleasantly upon the Virginia lordling's ear,
and he echoed it with a suspicion of a frown upon his brow. “I am not an
adept in chicanery!”
“But you are a born diplomatist!” seductively. “And because I am of the
same credulous sex as our mistaken little darling, you will not proceed
to open warfare with her, even should she be both to resign her lover?
It is the glory of the strong to show charity to the weak and erring.”
For her sake, then, our flattered diplomatist would try the effect of
guile, instead of brutality, upon the helpless girl, the balance of
whose fate was grasped by his shapely hand. For one base second, the
idea of attempting an imitation of his sister's handwriting flashed
through his mind. But he was a gentleman, and forgery is not a
gentlemanly vice, any more than is counterfeiting bank-notes. Finally,
the author of craft--the subtle, refined virtue bepraised by his
bride-elect--the devil--came to his help.
Mabel, like most other girls, had a dainty and fantastic taste in
the matter of letter-paper and envelopes. She used none but French
stationery, stamped with her monogram--a curious device, wrought in two
colors--and at the top of each sheet stood out in bas-relief the
Aylett crest. With these harmless whimsies Frederic was, without doubt,
familiar. If his letter were returned to him, wrapped in a blank page,
taken from her papetiere and within one of her envelopes, it would not
signify so much whose handwriting was upon the exterior. Papetiere
and writing-desk were in Mabel's bed-room, but she was in the parlor,
practising an instrumental duet with Rosa--a favorite with Miss
Dorrance. Winston had brought it south with him, and asked his sister
to learn it forthwith, in just the accent he used to employ when
prescribing what studies she should pursue at school. There was nothing
in his errand that he should be ashamed of, he reminded himself with
impatient severity, as he traversed the upper hall on tip-toe to the
western chamber. He had, on sundry previous occasions, sought, in the
receptacles he was about to ransack, for sealing-wax, pencils, and the
like trifles. Mabel was too wise a woman not to keep her secrets under
lock and key, and if there were private documents left in his way, he
was too honorable to pry into them.
Shutting the door cautiously, that the snap and blaze might not betray
him, he struck a wax match, warranted to burn a minute-and-a-half, and
raised the lid of the desk. His unseen but wily coadjutor had guided him
cunningly. In fingering a heap of envelopes in order to find one large
enough for his purpose, he brought to light one addressed to “Mr.
Frederic Chilton, Box 910, Philadelphia, Penn.”
Upon the reverse was a small blot that had condemned it in Mabel's
sight, as unfit to be sent to her most valued correspondent, and which
she had not observed before writing the direction. Selecting another,
she had thrown this back carelessly into the desk, meaning to burn it
when it should be convenient, and forgotten all about it.
The livid dints were deep and restless in Winston's nostrils, as seen by
the light of the tiny taper he raised to extinguish, when his prize was
secured. The devil supplied him with another crafty hint, as he was in
the act of folding one edge of Frederic's letter that it might fit into
the new cover. Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem
to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer's hands
with contumely? Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish. Stratagem,
to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was
bungling, not diplomacy. His hand did not shake in divesting the
closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior
was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof
of pure old blood. He averted his eyes lest he should see a line the
lover had penned to his mistress. The letter slipped smoothly into the
quarters prepared for it--smoothly as Satan's mark usually goes on until
his tool has made his damnation sure.
“Well done?” said Diabolus.
“That was a clever hit!” chimed in his assistant, complacently, after
he had put the sealed envelope into his portfolio for safe-keeping, and
burned the torn one he had removed. “Nobody but an idiot or a madman
would persist in following a girl up after such a quietus.”
He replied to Frederic's note to himself shortly and with disdain, using
the third person throughout, and informing Mr. Chilton with unmistakable
distinctness that Miss Aylett had offered no opposition whatever to
her brother's will in this unfortunate affair. So far as he--Mr.
Aylett--could judge, her views coincided exactly with his own. Mr.
Chilton's letters and presents should be returned to him at an early
day, and thus should be finished the closing chapter of a volume which
ought never to have been begun.
All this done to his mind, he set the door of his room ajar, and watched
for Mabel's passage to hers.
He had not to wait long. The young ladies had fallen into habits of
early retiring of late--a marked change from their olden fashion of
singing and talking out the midnight hour. Himself unseen, Mr. Aylett
scrutinized the two mounting the stairs side by side--Rosa's dark,
mobile face, arch with smiles, while she chattered over a bit of country
gossip she had heard that afternoon from a visitor, and the weary calm
of Mabel's visage, the drooping eyelids, and, when appealed to directly
by her volatile comrade, the measured, not melancholy cadence of her
answer, The girl had had a sore fight, and won a Pyrrhian victory. She
was not vanquished, but she was worsted. Some men, upon appreciating
what this meant, and how her grief had been wrought, would have had
direful visitings of conscience, surrendered themselves to the mastery
of doubts as to the righteousness and humanity of stringent action such
as he had just consummated. He was not unmoved. He really loved his only
sister, as proud, selfish men love those of their own lineage who have
never disputed their supremacy, and derogated from their importance. He
said something under his breath before he called her, but the curse was
not upon himself.
“The low-bred hound!” he muttered. “This is his doing!”
Mabel halted at the stair-head, the blood suddenly and utterly forsaking
her cheeks when he spoke her name, although his address was purposely
kind, and, he thought, inviting.
“Can you spare me a moment?” he continued, smilingly, to win her
advance. “I will not detain you long. I know you are agonizing to have
your talk out, Miss Rosa.”
Rosa laughed, with a saucy retort, and turned into her chamber.
Mabel entered her brother's, and without speaking, took the seat he
offered. She was to be sentenced, and she must reserve her forces to
sustain the pain without a groan.
“You saw Jenkyns--did you not?” began Mr. Aylett, with the manner of one
at peace with himself, and those of his fellow-men whose existence he
chose to acknowledge.
“I did. He made memoranda of your orders, and said all should be done as
you wished.”
“I ordered the masons, this evening, to begin the hall-chimney
to-morrow. While the work is going on, you had better occupy some other
bed-room. I shall hurry it forward, day and night, or it will not be
done in season for us when we return from our bridal-tour. The carpets
must be down, and the paper dry by the fifteenth at farthest. Clara
bought your dresses, and offers to have them made, if you will send
her an accurate measurement. You are about her height, although not so
well-proportioned. Your figure is angular, where hers is round. She is
your senior by several years, yet one might easily mistake her for a
girl of twenty, her complexion is so fresh. Her twenty-five years show
themselves in nothing except her ease of manner, maturity of thought,
and elegance of diction.”
He would have sneered at this strain in another as hyperbolical and
fatuous. The absurdity of it in his mouth consisted mainly in the cool
arrogance of the assumption that whatever belonged to him was above
adverse criticism, and would be maligned if it were referred to without
appending an encomium. Much of fervor might and did mingle in his
thoughts of her he was to wed, but none warmed his enumeration of her
perfections. He did nothing con amore, unless it were exalting the
dignity and glory of the Aylett name, and maintaining his right to
support their ancient honors.
Mabel did not respond to his gratuitous praise of the fair and
benevolent Clara. While he was talking, he seemed to recede a great way
from her; his tones to ring hollowly upon her hearing, his form to grow
indistinct. Was he playing with her suspense, or could it be that he--a
being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on
which she was stretched--no suspicion that every one of his deliberate
sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture? The
Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of
suffering save intense pallor; made this less palpable by screening
her eyes from the lamp-light with a paper she took from the table, and
thereby throwing her features into deep shadow.
“But it is not my intention to trouble you with matters that concern me
alone,” he pursued, without varying his intonations. “As I anticipated,
Mr. Chilton declines explaining the ugly story relative to his earlier
career of dissipation and deceit, which I forwarded to you. He indulges,
instead, in a tirade of personal abuse touching my right to control you,
declaring his purpose to pursue you with letters and attentions until
he shall be discarded by yourself. We will not stay to discuss the
gentlemanliness and delicacy of his behavior in this regard. I merely
declare, that, having had a fair opportunity of honest confession or
denial of statements detrimental to his principles and pursuits,
and having shirked both, he has placed himself outside the pale of
respectful consideration. Has he written to you since his receipt of my
letter?”
“No!”
Mabel was staring at a figure in the carpet, on a line with her feet.
Had she regarded her brother never so attentively, she would have
detected no change in his countenance. He did not prepare questions
without also studying how to deliver them.
“I am glad he has the moral decency to forbear carrying out his threat
of persecution.”
He could say it with the greater hardihood in the remembrance that the
“persecution” had been attempted.
“I wish he had written!” rejoined Mabel, abruptly, but without passion.
“He was right to protest against accepting his dismissal from any other
than myself.”
She had not removed her eyes from the spot on the carpet, or lowered the
paper screen. She looked like a statue and spoke like an automaton.
Mr. Aylett's nostrils quivered ominously.
“Is it your wish to recommence the correspondence I have ended?”
“You know that I would strike off my right hand sooner than do it. But
if he had written to me, I should have answered his letter, if it had
been only to bid him farewell. Since he has not chosen to do this, I
cannot take the initiative.”
If Winston had never entertained a favorable opinion of his own sagacity
prior to hearing this avowal, it would have forced itself upon him now.
How timely was the thought, how felicitous the accident, that had aided
him to ward off the disaster of renewed intercourse!
Involuntarily his fingers crept nearer to the closed portfolio.
“No good could have come of that!” returned he coldly. “When an
amputation is to be performed, wise people submit to it without
useless preliminaries. The exchange of farewells in this case would
be inexpedient in the highest degree. You would compromise yourself by
continued acknowledgment of this fellow's acquaintance. My will is that
you and the world should forget, as soon as it can be done, that you
ever saw or heard of him. The connection was degrading.”
“Don't abuse him, brother! Let the knowledge that we are parted forever,
satisfy your resentment. Since he has not appealed to me from your
verdict, I am left to suppose that, upon second thoughts, he has
resolved to acquiesce in your will. I do not blame him for the change
of purpose.” Still impassive in feature and voice, still not withdrawing
her fixed gaze from that one point upon the floor. “He, too, has pride,
and it matches yours. I do not say mine. I question, sometimes, if I
have any.”
“If your conjecture be correct, you cannot object to return the letters
you have already received from him,” said Winston, pressing on to the
conclusion of a disagreeable business. “Since you are not likely to
add to your stock of these valuables, you do not care to retain them,
I suppose? I believe the rule is total surrender of souvenirs when a
rupture is pronounced hopeless.”
“I shall keep them a week longer!”
She assigned no reason for the resolution, and her manner, without being
sullen, aggravated her brother into wrath, the effusion of which was a
withering sneer.
“Your hope in his repentance is creditable to the strength--or
weakness--of woman's love. But have your way. The illustrious record of
his former life is a powerful argument in favor of clemency. In a week,
then!”
He nodded dismissal, wheeled his chair around to the table, dipped a pen
in the standish, and pulled an account-book toward him.
He was surprised and not pleased, nevertheless, that Mabel retired
without other reply than a simple “Good-night,” said without temper,
or any evidence of excitement. A month before, a milder sarcasm, the
lightest breath of reproof, would have brought her to his feet in a
paroxysm of tears, to implore pardon for her contumacy, and to promise
obedience for all time to come. She was getting beyond his control the
while she offered no open resistance to his government. Was sorrowful
shame, or her infatuation for the adventurer he cursed in his heart
by his gods, the influence that was petrifying her into this unlovely
caricature of her once bright and affectionate self?
She presented herself, unsummoned, in his study at the expiration of
the period she had designated, a pacquet in her hand, neatly done up and
sealed.
“I will trouble you to direct it,” was all she said, as she laid it
before him.
“This is done of your own free will--remember!” he said, impressively.
“In after years, should you be so unreasonable as to regret it, there
must be no misconception on the subject between us. If you wish, at
this, the eleventh hour, to draw back, I shall not oppose you.”
“You will write the address, then, if you please!” was Mabel's reply,
showing him the surface intended for it.
Then she left him.
“A sensible girl, after all! a genuine Aylett, in will and stoicism!”
commented the master of the situation, beginning in his round, legible
characters, the inscription he hoped never to trace again. “So endeth
her first lesson in Cupid's manual!”
He never knew that Mrs. Sutton had bolstered the Aylett will and
stoicism into stanchness at this closing scene. In a fit of despondency,
she had that morning imparted to Mabel the fact that she had written to
Frederic, ten days before, and had no answer, although she had besought
an immediate one.
“I have expected him confidently every day for a week,” she lamented. “I
didn't suppose he would stay at Ridgeley, after what has happened;
but there's the hotel in the village, and, as I told him, he could
accomplish more by an hour's talk with you than by fifty letters. It is
very mysterious--his continued silence! He always appeared so frank and
reasonable. Nothing else like it has ever occurred in my experience--and
I have had a great deal, my dear!”
“I am sorry you wrote, aunt,” replied Mabel, sorrowfully dignified.
“Sorry you have subjected yourself to unnecessary mortification. I am
past feeling it for myself. We cannot longer doubt that Mr. Chilton
desires to hold no further communication with any of us.”
Within the hour she made up the pacquet and carried it to her brother.