FATE’S DEVIOUS WAYS.
AT Boston it was not a matter of many months before Henry Wainsworth and
piety Tootbaker, having been made aware that Garde was no longer
provisionally betrothed to Randolph, resumed their former hopes and
attentions, as to attending Meeting and paying sundry little visits to
the Soams, when Garde could be expected to be seen.
Garde had become a subdued little person, wishing only that she might
not be seen by any one as she came and went on her simple rounds of
daily life. Her grandfather had recovered so that once more he pothered
about in his garden and read in his Bible and busied himself with
prattle, more childish than wise.
The old man saw little of his compatriots. He lived as one only
partially awake from a recent dread. He never discussed the colony’s
politics, for his friends, when they came to see him, spared him the
ordeal which invariably resulted from a mention of the word charter. On
this topic he was quite mad. Almost galvanically, the word produced in
his brain a mania, half fear, half fury, in which he seemed to conceive
that Garde was the author of woes to which nothing could ever give
expression. In such a mood, he was savagery itself, toward the patient
girl.
Gradually, so gradually that she could not have said when the impression
commenced to grow upon her, Garde discovered that Henry Wainsworth was
exceedingly kind, thoughtful and soothing, in her joyless existence.
There was something kindred in his own isolation, and in his very
bashfulness, or timidity, for it kept him so often silent, when he was
with her alone. She had always respected Henry. His patient devotion
could not but touch her at length. It was not so much a flattery as it
was a faithfulness, through all the discouragements she had given him
always.
This line of thought having been awakened in her breast, she noted more
of the little, insignificant signs which go to make up the sum of a
man’s real regard—the regard on which a woman can safely rely as one to
endure and to grow.
In the soreness of her heart, it was almost sweet to think of Henry’s
quiet attentions. It was calming. It lent a little spot of warmth and
color to her otherwise cheerless life. She could never love him, as she
had loved Adam—nay, as she loved him still,—but the dreariness of her
present days might find relief in a new sort of life. Out of the duties,
which as a housewife she would experience daily, surely a trust, an
esteem for Henry, great enough almost to be called a love, would come,
with the years.
She yearned to bury her sorrow. It was not a healthy, wholesome thing
for any young woman to foster. She had enjoyed her day of love, yes—her
years of love. She had felt like a widowed bride. To her, Adam’s kisses
had been like the first sacred emblems of their marriage. She had not
been able to conceive of permitting such caresses until she should feel
that their souls were mated and their hearts already wedded. But it
could never be the duty of a woman to mourn such a loss till she died.
And then—this newly contemplated union would make her forget.
But, if she could encourage Henry toward this possibility of a union
such as she thought upon, it would be her duty to be more cheerful, more
living in the every-day hours that were, instead of dreaming sadly and
morbidly upon her heart-break of the past.
It was not with a sense of gratifying her own longing for happiness that
she finally thought a marriage with Henry possible; there was a sense of
combating her own selfishness in it. It was a selfishness, it was
pampering the morbid in her nature, she felt, to continue indefinitely
in a “widowhood” of Adam’s love. It must also be admitted that Garde was
human, wherefore the element of pique was not absolutely lacking in her
being. No woman would ever wish a man she had rejected to believe that
she could not, or would not, marry elsewhere. She would wish to show
that other opportunities were not lacking, as well as she would desire
to have him know that her heart was not broken beyond repair.
Having spent at least a month upon these introspective and other
meditations, Garde appeared to Wainsworth so much more bright and
beautiful that there was no containing his emotions. The poor fellow
nearly broke his neck, metaphorically speaking, in a vain attempt to ask
her to become his wife, on the first occasion afforded, after he made
his discovery of her alteration in moods and appearance.
It was of no use to screw up his courage. It would not stick. He
determined to write what he could not utter, and then, when a moment
should be propitious, to deliver his written declaration into her hand,
to be read when he had fled the scene. To this end he composed an
elegant and eloquent epistle.
To avoid any possibility of making mistakes, Henry carefully deposited
his letter in the pocket of the coat he always wore to Meeting. This
pocket had been heretofore employed as a receptacle for things precious
over which he desired to exercise particular care.
Having without difficulty obtained permission from Garde to walk at her
side to church and back, poor Wainsworth lost appetite and sleep, while
waiting for the fateful day. When it came, he was in a nervous plight
which revealed to Garde the whole state of his mind. She felt her
sympathy for him expand in her bosom till she hoped it would burgeon
into love. Had he gone with her into her aunt Gertrude’s home, after the
service, Garde would doubtless have helped to simplify what she was well
aware he wished to say, but, alas for the timid lover, he dared not, on
this occasion, so jeopardize his courage.
He knew that if ever he got inside the house and faced her, alone, he
would not be able even to deliver his letter. But out of doors his nerve
was steadier. Therefore, at the gate having fortified himself against
the moment, he nervously drew from his pocket a good-sized packet of
paper and put it shakingly into her hand.
“I wish—I wish you would read—this letter,” he stammered. “Good-by. I—I
hope you will read it quite through.”
Garde looked at him compassionately. He was only made the more confused.
He bowed himself away with a nervousness painful to see.
“Poor Henry!” said Garde, with a little smile to herself. She knew what
to expect in the document and vaguely she wondered if she would not feel
more at peace when she had consented to become his wife. Her memory of
words and looks, behind which the figure of Adam, the sad boy-captive,
the love-irradiated champion of her cat, and then the melancholy
violinist in the woods—this had all, of late, been more than usually
strong upon her.
Garde’s cat had died within the week just passed. This event had served
to open up old tombs, containing her dead dreams. She had almost caught
herself wishing she had taken less to heart the story of Adam’s perfidy,
or at least that she might never have heard the story at all. But when
she had shaken off the spell which this past would persist in weaving
about her, she was resolved to accept Henry Wainsworth, so that her duty
might compel her to forget.
With a half melancholy sense of sealing her own sentence of banishment
from her land of bitter-sweet memories, she delayed the moment of
unfolding Henry’s letter. When she found herself alone, she laid it down
before her, on the table, and looked at it with lackluster eyes. But
presently, then, having tossed off the reverie which was stealing upon
her, she sighed once, heavily, and took up the papers with a resolute
hand.
She opened the stiff sheets and bent them straight. She read “Dear
friend,” and thought Henry’s writing had altered. Her eyes then sped
along a number of lines and she started with a new, tense interest in
the document.
The letter she held in her hands was the one which Adam Rust had penned
to Wainsworth, concerning his brother.
“Why!” she presently said, aloud, “why—he couldn’t have meant—” yet
Henry, she recalled, had asked her particularly to read all the pages
through.
She had only made a start into Adam’s narrative, yet her heart had begun
to leap till she could barely endure its commotion. She spread the
sheets out before her on the table, with nervous fingers. She read
swiftly, greedily. Her bosom heaved with the tumult of suddenly stirred
emotions. She made a glad little noise, as she read, for the
undercurrent of her thought was of a wild exultation to find that Adam
was innocent, that she was justified in loving him now, as she had been
justified always—that her instinct had guided her rightly when she had
helped him to break from the prison.
Her eyes were widely dilated. Her pent-up emotions swayed her till she
suddenly clutched up the sheets and crumpled them in joy against her
bounding heart.
“Adam!” she said, half aloud. “Oh, Adam! My Adam!”
She bent above the letter again, crooning involuntarily, in the
revelation of Adam made again his noble self by the lines he had written
so simply and innocently here upon the paper. She was reading, but
having, almost in the first few lines, discovered so much that her
intuition had far out-raced her eyes, she was hardly comprehending the
sentences that ran so swiftly beneath her gaze, so abandoned were her
senses to the sudden hope and the overwhelming joy which the revelation
compelled. She kissed the papers. She laid her cheek upon them, she
surrounded them warmly with her arms.
She felt so glad that she had loved him in spite of that horrible story!
Her soul leaped with exultation. She would not be obliged to marry
Wainsworth, to forget. She would never forget! She would wait for Adam
now—if need be till Judgment Day itself!
She kissed Adam’s writing again. She fondled it lovingly. It restored
him. It gave her back her right to love him. It was too much to think
upon or to try to express.
She had only half read it; the sense of the story had escaped her grasp.
It had been enough that Adam was guiltless. Her breath came fast; the
color had flamed to her cheeks. Her eyes were glowing with the love
which she had welcomed home to her throbbing heart.
She had risen, unable to control herself, so abruptly and unexpectedly
had the discovery come upon her. Now she sat down again at the table and
read the letter more carefully. It was such a sad little story.
“Unfortunately I sprained my ankle, and this delayed me,” she read,
where Adam had written. She pictured him now, limping through the
forest, with the little brown child, and her heart yearned over his
suffering, his patience and his self-sacrifice in coming back to the
cruel fate in store for him, there in Boston.
She thought of him then in the prison. She blessed the instinct of love
which had made her go to his aid. He was not an outlaw. He was not a
renegade. He was her own Adam.
Then she thought of the moment in which she had sent him away. After all
the heart-breaking trials he had already endured, she had added the
final cruelty. She remembered how he had limped, when she saw him
starting off, just before she had fainted at the window, that terrible
night. Longing to call him back, now, and to cry out her love,—that had
never died,—her trust, which should now endure for ever, and her plea to
be forgiven, she fancied she heard him again saying: “Garde! Garde!—not
forever?” and she felt a great sob rising in her throat.
“Oh, Adam!” she said, as if from the depths of her heart.
The hot tears, of joy and sadness blended, suddenly gave vent to the
pent-up emotions within her. They rolled swiftly down across her face
and splashed in great blots on the writing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------