Arrived at our dock, I hurried off to catch the train for London. The
Meyricks lingered for a few weeks in Wales before coming to settle
down for the winter. I was glad of it, for I could make my
arrangements unhampered. So I carefully eliminated Clarges street from
my list of lodging-houses, and finally "ranged" myself with a neat
landlady in Sackville street.
How anxiously I awaited the first letter from Bessie! As the banker's
clerk handed it over the counter to me, instead of the heavy envelope
I had hoped for, it was a thin slip of an affair that fluttered away
from my hand. It was so very slim and light that I feared to open it
there, lest it should be but a mocking envelope, nothing more.
So I hastened back to my cab, and, ordering the man to drive to the
law-offices, tore it open as I jumped in. It enclosed simply a printed
slip, cut from some New York paper--a list of the Algeria's
passengers.
"What joke is this?" I said as I scanned it more closely.
By some spite of fortune my name was printed directly after the
Meyrick party. Was it for this, this paltry thing, that Bessie has
denied me a word? I turned over the envelope, turned it inside
out--not a penciled word even!
The shadow that I had seen on that good-bye visit to Philadelphia was
clear to me now. I had said at Lenox, repeating the words after Bessie
with fatal emphasis, "I am glad, very glad, that Fanny Meyrick is to
sail in October. I would not have her stay on this side for worlds!"
Then the next day, twenty-four hours after, I told her that I too was
going abroad. Coward that I was, not to tell her at first! She might
have been sorry, vexed, but not _suspicious_.
Yes, that was the ugly word I had to admit, and to admit that I had
given it room to grow.
My first hesitancy about taking her with me, my transfer from the
Russia to the later steamer, and, to crown all, that leaf from Fanny's
pocket-book: "I shall love him for ever and ever"!
And yet she _had_ faith in me. She had told Fanny Meyrick we were
engaged. _Had she not_?
My work in London was more tedious and engrossing than I had expected.
Even a New York lawyer has much to learn of the law's delay in those
pompous old offices amid the fog. Had I been working for myself, I
should have thrown up the case in despair, but advices from our office
said "Stick to it," and I stayed.
Eating out my own heart with anxiety whenever I thought of my home
affair, perhaps it was well for me that I had the monotonous, musty
work that required little thought, but only a persistent plodding and
a patient holding of my end of the clue.
In all these weeks I had nothing from Bessie save that first cruel
envelope. Letter after letter went to her, but no response came. I
wrote to Mrs. Sloman too, but no answer. Then I bethought me of Judge
Hubbard, but received in reply a note from one of his sons, stating
that his father was in Florida--that he had communicated with him, but
regretted that he was unable to give me Miss Stewart's present
address.
Why did I not seek Fanny Meyrick? She must have come to London long
since, and surely the girls were in correspondence. I was too proud.
She knew of our relations: Bessie had told her. I could not bring
myself to reveal to her how tangled and gloomy a mystery was between
us. I could explain nothing without letting her see that she was the
unconscious cause.
At last, when one wretched week after another had gone by, and we were
in the new year, I could bear it no longer. "Come what will, I must
know if Bessie writes to her."
I went to Clarges street. My card was carried into the Meyricks'
parlor, and I followed close upon it. Fanny was sitting alone, reading
by a table. She looked up in surprise as I stood in the doorway. A
little coldly, I thought, she came forward to meet me, but her manner
changed as she took my hand.
"I was going to scold you, Charlie, for avoiding us, for staying away
so long, but that is accounted for now. Why didn't you send us word
that you were ill? Papa is a capital nurse."
"But I have not been ill," I said, bewildered, "only very busy and
very anxious."
"I should think so," still holding my hand, and looking into my face
with an expression of deep concern. "Poor fellow! You do look worn.
Come right here to this chair by the fire, and let me take care of
you. You need rest."
And she rang the bell. I suffered myself to be installed in the soft
crimson chair by the fire. It was such a comfort to hear a friendly
voice after all those lonely weeks! When the servant entered with a
tray, I watched her movements over the tea-cups with a delicious sense
of the womanly presence and the home-feeling stealing over me.
"I can't imagine what keeps papa," she said, chatting away with
woman's tact: "he always smokes after dinner, and comes up to me for
his cup of tea afterward."
Then, as she handed me a tiny porcelain cup, steaming and fragrant, "I
should never have congratulated you, Charlie, on board the steamer if
I had known it was going to end in this way."
_This way_! Then Bessie must have told her.
"End?" I said stammering: "what--what end?"
"In wearing you out. Bessie told me at Lenox, the day we took that
long walk, that you had this important case, and it was a great thing
for a young lawyer to have such responsibility."
Poor little porcelain cup! It fell in fragments on the floor as I
jumped to my feet: "Was that _all_ she told you? Didn't she tell you
that we were engaged?"
For a moment Fanny did not speak. The scarlet glow on her cheek, the
steady glow that was always there, died away suddenly and left her
pale as ashes. Mechanically she opened and shut the silver sugar-tongs
that lay on the table under her hand, and her eyes were fixed on me
with a wild, beseeching expression.
"Did you not know," I said in softer tones, still standing by the
table and looking down on her, "that day at Lenox that we were
engaged? Was it not for _that_ you congratulated me on board the
steamer?"
A deep-drawn sigh as she whispered, "Indeed, no! Oh dear! what have I
done?"
"You?--nothing!" I said with a sickly smile; "but there is some
mistake, some mystery. I have never had one line from Bessie since I
reached London, and when I left her she was my own darling little wife
that was to be."
Still Fanny sat pale as ashes, looking into the fire and muttering to
herself. "Heavens! To think--Oh, Charlie," with a sudden burst, "it's
all my doing! How can I ever tell you?"
"You hear from Bessie, then? Is she--is she well? Where is she? What
is all this?" And I seated myself again and tried to speak calmly, for
I saw that something very painful was to be said--something that she
could hardly say; and I wanted to help her, though how I knew not.
At this moment the door opened and "papa" came in. He evidently saw
that he had entered upon a scene as his quick eye took in the
situation, but whether I was accepted or rejected as the future
son-in-law even his penetration was at fault to discover.
"Oh, papa," said Fanny, rising with evident relief, "just come and
talk to Mr. Munro while I get him a package he wants to take with
him."
It took a long time to prepare that package. Mr. Meyrick, a cool,
shrewd man of the world, was taking a mental inventory of me, I felt
all the time. I was conscious that I talked incoherently and like a
school-boy of the treaty. Every American in London was bound to have
his special opinion thereupon, and Meyrick, I found, was of the
English party. Then we discussed the special business which had
brought me to England.
"A very unpresentable son-in-law," I read in his eye, while he was
evidently astonished at his daughter's prolonged absence.
Our talk flagged and the fire grew gray in its flaky ashes before
Fanny again appeared.
"I know, papa, you think me very rude to keep Mr. Munro so long
waiting, but there were some special directions to go with the packet,
and it took me a long time to get them right. It is for Bessie,
papa--Bessie Stewart, Mr. Munro's dear little _fiancée_."
Escaping as quickly as possible from Mr. Meyrick's neatly turned
felicitations--and that the satisfaction he expressed was genuine I
was prepared to believe--hurried home to Sackville street.
My bedroom was always smothering in its effect on me--close draperies
to the windows, heavy curtains around the bed--and I closed the door
and lighted my candle with a sinking heart.
The packet was simply a long letter, folded thickly in several
wrappers and tied with a string. The letter opened abruptly:
"What I am going to do I am sure no woman on earth ever did before me,
nor would I save to undo the trouble I have most innocently made. What
must you have thought of me that day at Lenox, staying close all day
to two engaged people, who must have wished me away a thousand times?
But I did not dream you were engaged.
"Remember, I had just come over from Saratoga, and knew nothing of
Lenox gossip, then or afterward. Something in your manner once or
twice made me look at you and think that perhaps you were _interested_
in Bessie, but hers to you was so cold, so distant, that I thought it
was only a notion of my jealous self.
"Was I foolish to lay so much stress on that anniversary time? Do you
know that the year before we had spent it together, too?--September
28th. True, that year it was at Bertie Cox's funeral, but we had
walked together, and I was happy in being near you.
"For, you see, it was from something more than the Hudson River that
you had brought me out. You had rescued me from the stupid gayety of
my first winter--from the flats of fashionable life. You had given me
an ideal--something to live up to and grow worthy of.
"Let that pass. For myself, it is nothing, but for the deeper harm I
have done, I fear, to Bessie and to you.
"Again, on that day at Lenox, when Bessie and I drove together in the
afternoon, I tried to make her talk about you, to find out what you
were to her. But she was so distant, so repellant, that I fancied
there was nothing at all between you; or, rather, if you had cared for
her at all, that she had been indifferent to you.
"Indeed, she quite forbade the subject by her manner; and when she
told me you were going abroad, I could not help being very happy, for
I thought then that I should have you all to myself.
"When I saw you on shipboard, I fancied, somehow, that you had changed
your passage to be with us. It was very foolish; and I write it,
thankful that you are not here to see me. So I scribbled a little note
to Bessie, and sent it off by the pilot: I don't know where you were
when the pilot went. This is, as nearly as I remember it, what I
wrote:
"'DEAR BESSIE: Charlie Munro is on board. He must have
changed his passage to be with us. I know from something
that he has just told _me_ that this is so, and that he
consoles himself already for your coldness. You remember
what I told you when we talked about him. I shall _try_ now.
F.M.'
"Bessie would know what that meant. Oh, must I tell you what a weak,
weak girl I was? When I found out at Lenox, as I thought, that Bessie
did not care for you, I said to her that once I thought you _had_
cared for me, but that papa had offended you by his manner--you
weren't of an old Knickerbocker family, you know--and had given you to
understand that your visits were not acceptable.
"I am sure now that it was because I wanted to think so that I put
that explanation upon your ceasing to visit me, and because papa
always looked so decidedly _queer_ whenever your name was mentioned.
"I had always had everything in life that I wanted, and I believed
that in due time you would come back to me.
"Bessie knew well enough what that pilot-letter meant, for here is her
answer."
Pinned fast to the end of Fanny's letter, so that by no chance should
I read it first, were these words in my darling's hand:
"Got your pilot-letter. Aunt is much better. We shall be
traveling about so much that you need not write me the
progress of your romance, but believe me I shall be most
interested in its conclusion. BESSIE S."
It was all explained now. My darling, so sensitive and spirited, had
given her leave "to try."