COLONEL SCHUYLER.
He looked up in some surprise when he saw the couple come in, and the
scowl between the eyes, of which Godfrey had spoken, was plainly
perceptible.
“My son is getting very familiar with that girl,” was his thought; but
he was very polite to Edith, who sat near to him, and during the dinner
he occasionally addressed some remark to her, while his eyes wandered
often to her face with a questioning look, which brought a bright color
to her cheek, and made her wonder if he was thinking of the young girl
who had looked at him from among the vine leaves and told him Abelard’s
name.
He was not thinking of her; he was only speculating upon the rare beauty
of the face beside him, and trying vaguely to recall where he had seen
one like it.
“In some picture gallery; a fancy piece, I think,” was his conclusion,
as with a growing interest in Edith he resolved to question his sister
concerning her at the first opportunity.
As yet he had only talked with Mrs. Sinclair of the past, and all that
had come to them both since their last meeting years ago. She had told
him of her life and failing health, so apparent to him that, as she
talked, he had involuntarily taken her thin hands in his, and wished he
had come to her sooner; and then he told her of himself and his children
and his wife, who, whatever she might have been while living, had died a
good true woman, and gone where neither a Rossiter nor Schuyler is
preferred, but only they who have His name upon their foreheads. Of
Godfrey he had spoken with all a father’s pride for his only son, saying
he hoped that this trip would tone him down somewhat and make him more
of a man and less of a wild, teasing boy; but of Edith he made no
mention. Indeed, he had not given her a thought until he saw her come in
on Godfrey’s arm, when there awoke within him a strange kind of interest
in her, and an inexplicable feeling that in some way she was to affect
him or his. He supposed her much younger than she was, and noticing
Godfrey’s evident admiration he inly resolved to leave London very soon
and take the lad out of harm’s way, if indeed any harm threatened him
from this beautiful woman, who fascinated and attracted him as well.
“Sister,” he said to Mrs. Sinclair, when dinner was over and they were
alone together, “who is this Miss Lyle? She has a remarkable face.”
Most women have a hobby, and Mrs. Sinclair’s was Edith, of whom she was
never tired of talking. She had liked her from the first, and two years
of intimate acquaintance had only increased her fondness for the girl,
and for hours she would sit and ring her praises if she could but find a
listener. So, now, when her brother said what he did, she began at once:
“Yes, she is a remarkable person every way. She has been with me more
than two years, and I like her better every day. Such a face and figure
are rarely seen in this country, and her manners would become a royal
princess; and yet she is only the daughter of a poor curate, who must
have made a foolish marriage with one not his equal. I cannot endure the
girl’s mother. I’ve never seen her but once, and then she impressed me
very unfavorably, as if she was not real, you know. Edith must be like
her father. He is dead, and the mother takes in lodgers.”
“Ah,” and Colonel Schuyler’s voice was indicative of disappointment, but
his next question was: “How old is this girl?”
“Twenty-seven, I believe,” was the reply, “though she looks much
younger.”
“Yes, she does. I thought her about twenty,” Colonel Schuyler said, and
with his fear for Godfrey removed, he arose and joined the young people,
who had just come through a side door into the music room.
“Edith,” Mrs. Sinclair called, “play something for my brother.”
It was Mrs. Sinclair’s right to command, Edith’s business to obey, and
without a word of dissent she sat down and played, with Godfrey on one
side of her and the colonel on the other, both listening with rapt
attention to her fine playing, and both admiring the soft, white hands
which managed the keys so skilfully.
“Edith, dear, sing that pathetic little thing,
‘I am sitting alone to-night, darling.’
You can surely manage that, it is written so low,” Mrs. Sinclair said:
and rising from the couch where she had been reclining, she came into
the music room, and explained to her brother: “Her voice is not strong
and cannot reach the higher notes. She had a great fright when she was
quite young, wasn’t it, Edith?”
“Yes,” Edith answered faintly, as she felt the iron hand closing around
her throat and shutting down all power to sing even the lowest note.
“I don’t like sitting alone at night, darling. I’d rather have somebody
with me, so give us your jolliest piece,” Godfrey said, making Edith
laugh in spite of herself, and lifting the invisible hand, so that her
voice came back again; and, at Mrs. Sinclair’s second request, she sang:
“I am sitting alone to-night, darling,
Alone in the dear old room;
And the sound of the rain,
As it falls on the pane,
Makes darker the gathering gloom.
“For I know that it falls on a grave, darling,
A grave ’neath the evergreen shade,
Where I laid you away,
One bright autumn day,
When the flowers were beginning to fade.”
Oh, how soft and low and sweet was the voice which sang the song of
which Abelard Lyle had been so fond, and there was almost a tear in
Godfrey’s eye, and the colonel was beginning to look very grave, when
the white hands suddenly stopped and fell with a crash among the keys,
while Edith gasped, “I can’t finish it; the iron fingers are on my
throat, just as they were that dreadful day.”
She evidently did not quite know what she was saying, and her face was
deathly pale.
“You are sick, Miss Lyle; come into the air!” Colonel Schuyler said, and
leading her out upon the veranda, he made her sit down, while Mrs.
Sinclair brought her smelling salts, and Godfrey hovered about
disconsolately, remembering the scene in the summer-house, and wondering
if she had such spells often. And, having knocked his head against his
father’s, when they both stooped to pick up Edith’s handkerchief, he
concluded he was _de trop_, and walked away, saying to himself: “I do
believe he is hit real hard. Wouldn’t it be fun to call that regal
creature mother!”
He laughed aloud at the idea, but did not think it would be fun, and did
not quite believe in his father’s being “hit,” either; but when half an
hour later he returned and found the Colonel still sitting by Edith, who
had recovered herself, and was talking with a good deal of animation, he
felt irritated and impatient, and went off to his room and wrote in his
“Impressions of Europe,” a kind of journal he was keeping of his tour,
and which he meant to show “the girls,” by way of proving that _one_
American could go abroad and not indorse everything he saw, and make a
fool of himself generally. His entry that night was in part as follows:
“Oakwood is a fine old place, with an extensive park, a smoke-house,
fine stables, a dog-kennel, and seven servants, to take care of two
unprotected females. Edith Lyle, aged 27, is the handsomest woman I ever
saw, even in America. Her features are perfect, especially her nose,
which might have been the model for the Greek Slave. Not a bit of a pug,
and her eyes are large and soft and liquid, as those of the ox-eyed Juno
(I like that classical allusion; it shows reading), while her ears are
the tiniest I ever saw,—just like little pink sea-shells,—and her
splendid brown hair, with a shade or two of yellow sunshine in it,
rippling back from her smooth white brow, just exactly curly enough, and
natural, too, I’ll be bound. She don’t put it up in crimps, not she.
Why, what a scarecrow Alice Creighton was, though, that time I caught
her with those two forks hanging down about her eyes, with a kind of
clamp or horse-shoe on them. I like people natural, as I am sure Edith
is. I wonder what makes her go off into a kind of white faint all of a
sudden. She did it twice to-day, and I would not wonder if she was given
to fits. The governor is hit, sure. I never knew him seem as much
interested in any one before. The idea of his leading her into the air
and then holding those salts to her nose till he strangled her,—bah!”
And, while Godfrey wrote thus in his journal, his father sat talking to
Edith, and wondering to find how much she knew and how sensibly she
expressed herself. Colonel Schuyler was not a man of many words, and
seldom talked much to any one, but there was something about Edith which
interested him greatly, and he sat by her until the twilight began to
close around them, and his sister came to warn him against taking cold
and exposing Edith, too. Then he went into the house, and, without
exactly knowing it, felt a little disappointed when she left the room
and did not come again.
Colonel Schuyler kept a journal, too, in which he occasionally jotted
down the incidents of the day; and that night, after recounting his
arrival at Oakwood and his grief at finding his sister so great an
invalid, he added:
“She is exceedingly fortunate in having secured a most admirable person
for her companion. Besides being educated, and refined, and beautiful,
Miss Lyle impresses me as a remarkable woman. Yes, as a very remarkable
woman.”
The next night Godfrey recorded:
“There is nothing quite so foolish as an old man in love! I wonder if he
thinks she can care for him!—and yet he blushed to-day when I found him
turning the leaves of her music and listening to her singing. I never
knew him listen two minutes to Alice and Jule,—and no wonder, such
operatic screeches as they make when Professor La Farge is there, and
the boys in the street stop and mock them. Edith’s voice is the sweetest
I ever heard, and so sad that it makes a chap feel for his bandanna.
Why, even father told auntie that her singing made him think of poor
Emily, meaning my mother! It is a bad sign when a live woman like Edith
Lyle makes a man think of his dead wife. I wonder what she thinks of
him! She looks as unconcerned as a block of marble; but you can’t tell
what is in a woman’s mind, and widowers are awful. Why, there have been
forty women after father already; but I must say he has behaved
admirably thus far, and never spoken to a bonnet outside our own family,
unless it were to Miss Esther Armstrong, and that is nothing. She is the
Hampstead school-ma’am, and has thrashed me more than twenty times.”
In Colonel Schuyler’s journal the record was as follows:
“I wonder if my dear Emily knows how much Miss Lyle’s singing makes me
think of her and her grave under the evergreen, where we did
‘Lay her away, one bright autumn day,
When the flowers were beginning to fade.’
Miss Lyle has a singularly sweet, plaintive voice, and it affects me
strangely, for I did not know I cared for music. Emily never sang, and
the young ladies at home make very singular sounds sometimes. It is
strange about her losing her voice, or rather her power to reach the
higher notes. It must have been a fearful shock of some kind, and she
evidently does not like to talk of it; for, when I questioned her a
little and advised her seeing a physician, she seemed disturbed and
agitated, and even distressed. Dr. Malcolm at Hampstead would know just
what to do for her, and she ought to have medical advice, for she has a
remarkable voice,—a very remarkable voice.”
When Colonel Schuyler liked a thing, it was _remarkable_, and when he
liked it very much, it was _very_ remarkable; so, when he wrote what he
did of Edith and her voice, he had passed upon her his highest encomium.
Four weeks went by, and he still lingered at Oakwood, and on the last
day of the fourth week wrote again:
“I fully expected to have been in France before this time, but have
stayed on for what reason I hardly know. It is very pleasant here, and
my sister’s health is such that I dislike to leave her so soon, even
though I leave her in excellent hands. Miss Edith is certainly a very
remarkable person, and I am more interested in her than I have been in
any one since I first met my dear Emily.”
Here the colonel paused, and laying down his pen went back in thought to
the time when he was young and first met Emily Rossiter, the proud,
pale, light-haired girl, whose two hundred thousand in prospect had made
her a belle in society, and little as he liked to own it now that the
daisies were growing above her, had commended her to his consideration.
His courtship was short, and wholly void of passion or ecstasy. She knew
he was a suitable match and she wished to go abroad, and accepted him
readily enough, and they were married without so much as a kiss
exchanged between them. He had so far unbent from his cold dignity as to
hold her hand in his own while he asked her to be his wife, but as soon
as her promise was given he put it back in her lap very respectfully,
and said, “That hand is now mine,” and that was the nearest approach to
love-making which he reached with Emily. After marriage he was scarcely
more demonstrative, though always kind and considerate, and when at her
father’s death it was found that her fortune was one hundred thousand
instead of two, he kept it to himself if he felt any chagrin, and never
in a single instance checked her extravagance, but suffered her in
everything to have her way. At the last, however, when she stood face to
face with death, and her life with him lay all behind, there came a
change, and he could yet feel the passionate kiss which the white lips
pressed upon his as they called him “dear husband.”
“Poor Emily,” he said, aloud; “we were very happy together.”
Just then, upon the terrace below there was the sound of a clear, sweet
voice, which thrilled him as Emily’s never had, and Edith looked up to
the windows of the room adjoining his, where Godfrey was calling to her.
It was a beautiful face, and as he watched her gliding away among the
shrubbery he thought how she would brighten and adorn his house at
Schuyler Hill, and how proud he should be of her when his money had
arrayed her in the apparel befitting his wife. Every barrier of pride
and prejudice and early training had gone down before Edith Lyle’s
wonderful beauty, and the proud, haughty man was ready to offer her his
name and hand on one condition. Her mother could not go with her, and in
taking him she must give up her family friends, if indeed she had any
besides the mother. He knew nothing against Mrs. Barrett, but his sister
disliked her, and that was enough, if he ignored, as he tried to think
he did, the fact that she took in lodgers and sewing. Many highly
respectable ladies did that, he knew, but he had a feeling that Edith’s
mother was not highly respectable, and he doubted if she was a lady
even. His sister, when questioned with regard to Edith’s family, had
reported the mother as a pushing, curious, disagreeable woman, who
assumed to be what she certainly was not.
“Edith is not like her in the least, and must inherit her natural
refinement and delicacy from her father,” Mrs. Sinclair had said, and
the colonel was satisfied if one side of the house was _comme il faut_.
As a Schuyler he could afford to stoop a little, and he felt that it was
stooping to marry his sister’s hired companion. As far as position was
concerned, he might as well take poor, plain Ettie Armstrong, the
village schoolmistress, who in point of family was undoubtedly Edith’s
equal. There was, however, this difference. The people at home could
know nothing of Edith’s antecedents, save that she was an English girl
and the daughter of a curate; while another fact, which outweighed all
else, was her exceeding great beauty and queenly style, which, with
proper surroundings and influence, would place her on the highest wave
of society. And he was ready to give her the surroundings and the
influence, and felt a thrill of exultant pride as he saw her in fancy at
the head of his table and moving through his handsome rooms, herself the
handsomest appendage there.
“I may as well settle it at once,” he thought, and the next day he found
his opportunity and took it, with what success the reader will learn
from a page in Edith’s diary.