A LOVE-LETTER
Some beautiful days followed, so beautiful to Grizel that as they
passed away she kissed her hand to them. Do you see her standing on
tiptoe to see the last of them? They lit a fire in the chamber of her
soul which is the home of all pure maids, and the fagots that warmed
Grizel were every fond look that had been on her lover's face and
every sweet word he had let fall. She counted and fondled them, and
pretended that one was lost that she might hug it more than all the
others when it was found. To sit by that fire was almost better than
having the days that lit it; sometimes she could scarcely wait for the
day to go.
Tommy's fond looks and sweet words! There was also a letter in those
days, and, now that I remember, a little garnet ring; and there were a
few other fagots, but all so trifling it must seem incredible to you
that they could have made so great a blaze--nothing else in it, on my
honour, except a girl's heart added by herself that the fire might
burn a moment longer.
And now, what so chilly as the fire that has gone out! Gone out long
ago, dear Grizel, while you crouched over it. You may put your hand in
the ashes; they will not burn you now. Ah, Grizel, why do you sit
there in the cold?
The day of the letter! It began in dread, but ended so joyfully, do
you think Grizel grudged the dread? It became dear to her; she loved
to return to it and gaze at the joy it glorified, as one sees the
sunshine from a murky room. When she heard the postman's knock she was
not even curious; so few letters came to her, she thought this must be
Maggy Ann's monthly one from Aberdeen, and went on placidly dusting.
At last she lifted it from the floor, for it had been slipped beneath
the door, and then Grizel was standing in her little lobby, panting as
if at the end of a race. The letter lay in both her hands, and they
rose slowly until they were pressed against her breast.
She uttered some faint cries (it was the only moment in which I have
known Grizel to be hysterical), and then she ran to her room and
locked herself in--herself and it. Do you know why that look of
elation had come suddenly to her face? It was because he had not even
written the address in a disguised hand to deceive the postmistress.
So much of the old Grizel was gone that the pathos of her elation over
this was lost to her.
Several times she almost opened it. Why did she pause? why had that
frightened look come into her eyes? She put the letter on her table
and drew away from it. If she took a step nearer, her hands went
behind her back as if saying, "Grizel, don't ask us to open it; we are
afraid."
Perhaps it really did say the dear things that love writes. Perhaps it
was aghast at the way she was treating it. Dear letter! Her mouth
smiled to it, but her hands remained afraid. As she stood irresolute,
smiling, and afraid, she was a little like her mother. I have put off
as long as possible saying that Grizel was ever like her mother. The
Painted Lady had never got any letters while she was in Thrums, but
she looked wistfully at those of other people. "They are so pretty,"
she had said; "but don't open them: when you open them they break your
heart." Grizel remembered what her mother had said.
Had the old Grizel feared what might be inside, it would have made her
open the letter more quickly. Two minds to one person were unendurable
to her. But she seemed to be a coward now. It was pitiable.
Perhaps it was quite a common little letter, beginning "Dear Grizel,"
and saying nothing more delicious or more terrible than that he wanted
her to lend him one of the doctor's books. She thought of a score of
trivialities it might be about; but the letter was still unopened when
David Gemmell called to talk over some cases in which he required her
counsel. He found her sitting listlessly, something in her lap which
she at once concealed. She failed to follow his arguments, and he went
away puckering his brows, some of the old doctor's sayings about her
ringing loud in his ears.
One of them was: "Things will be far wrong with Grizel when she is
able to sit idle with her hands in her lap."
Another: "She is almost pitifully straightforward, man. Everything
that is in Grizel must out. She can hide nothing."
Yet how cunningly she had concealed what was in her hands. Cunning
applied to Grizel! David shuddered. He thought of Tommy, and shut his
mouth tight. He could do this easily. Tommy could not do it without
feeling breathless. They were types of two kinds of men.
David also remembered a promise he had given McQueen, and wondered, as
he had wondered a good deal of late, whether the time had come to keep
it.
But Grizel sat on with her unopened letter. She was to meet Tommy
presently on the croquet lawn of the Dovecot, when Ailie was to play
Mr. James (the champion), and she decided that she must wait till
then. She would know what sort of letter it was the moment she saw his
face. And then! She pressed her hands together.
Oh, how base of her to doubt him! She said it to herself then and
often afterwards. She looked mournfully in her mother's long mirror at
this disloyal Grizel, as if the capacity to doubt him was the saddest
of all the changes that had come to her. He had been so true
yesterday; oh, how could she tremble to-day? Beautiful yesterday! but
yesterday may seem so long ago. How little a time had passed between
the moment when she was greeting him joyously in Caddam Wood and that
cry of the heart, "How could you hurt your Grizel so!" No, she could
not open her letter. She could kiss it, but she could not open it.
Foolish fears! for before she had shaken hands with Tommy in Mrs.
McLean's garden she knew he loved her still, and that the letter
proved it. She was properly punished, yet surely in excess, for when
she might have been reading her first love-letter, she had to join in
discussions with various ladies about Berlin wool and the like, and to
applaud the prowess of Mr. James with the loathly croquet mallet. It
seemed quite a long time before Tommy could get a private word with
her. Then he began about the letter at once.
"You are not angry with me for writing it?" he asked anxiously. "I
should not have done it; I had no right: but such a desire to do it
came over me, I had to; it was such a glory to me to say in writing
what you are to me."
She smiled happily. Oh, exquisite day! "I have so long wanted to have
a letter from you," she said. "I have almost wished you would go away
for a little time, so that I might have a letter from you."
He had guessed this. He had written to give her delight.
"Did you like the first words of it, Grizel?" he asked eagerly.
The lover and the artist spoke together.
Could she admit that the letter was unopened, and why? Oh, the pain to
him! She nodded assent. It was not really an untruth, she told
herself. She did like them--oh, how she liked them, though she did not
know what they were!
"I nearly began 'My beloved,'" he said solemnly.
Somehow she had expected it to be this. "Why didn't you?" she asked, a
little disappointed.
"I like the other so much better," he replied. "To write it was so
delicious to me, I thought you would not mind."
"I don't mind," she said hastily. (What could it be?)
"But you would have preferred 'beloved'?"
"It is such a sweet name."
"Surely not so sweet as the other, Grizel?"
"No," she said, "no." (Oh, what could it be!)
"Have you destroyed it?" he asked, and the question was a shock to
her. Her hand rose instinctively to defend something that lay near her
heart.
"I could not," she whispered.
"Do you mean you wanted to?" he asked dolefully.
"I thought you wanted it," she murmured.
"I!" he cried, aghast, and she was joyous again.
"Can't you guess where it is?" she said.
He understood. "Grizel! You carry my letter there!"
She was full of glee; but she puzzled him presently.
"Do you think I could go now?" she inquired eagerly.
"And leave me?"
It was dreadful of her, but she nodded.
"I want to go home."
"Is it not home, Grizel, when you are with me?"
"I want to go away from home, then." She said it as if she loved to
tantalize him.
"But why?"
"I won't tell you." She was looking wistfully at the door. "I have
something to do."
"It can wait."
"It has waited too long." He might have heard an assenting rustle from
beneath her bodice.
"Do let me go," she said coaxingly, as if he held her.
"I can't understand----" he began, and broke off. She was facing him
demurely but exultantly, challenging him, he could see, to read her
now. "Just when I am flattering myself that I know everything about
you, Grizel," he said, with a long face, "I suddenly wonder whether I
know anything."
She would have liked to clap her hands. "You must remember that we
have changed places," she told him. "It is I who understand you now."
"And I am devoutly glad," he made answer, with humble thankfulness.
"And I must ask you, Grizel, why you want to run away from me."
"But you think you know," she retorted smartly. "You think I want to
read my letter again!"
Her cleverness staggered him. "But I am right, am I not, Grizel?"
"No," she said triumphantly, "you are quite wrong. Oh, if you knew how
wrong you are!" And having thus again unhorsed him, she made her
excuses to Ailie and slipped away. Dr. Gemmell, who was present and
had been watching her narrowly, misread the flush on her face and her
restless desire to be gone.
"Is there anything between those two, do you think?" Mrs. McLean had
said in a twitter to him while Tommy and Grizel were talking, and he
had answered No almost sharply.
"People are beginning to think there is," she said in self-defence.
"They are mistaken," he told her curtly, and it was about this time
that Grizel left. David followed her to her home soon afterwards, and
Maggy Ann, who answered his summons, did not accompany him upstairs.
He was in the house daily, and she left him to find Grizel for
himself. He opened the parlour door almost as he knocked, and she was
there, but had not heard him. He stopped short, like one who had
blundered unawares on what was not for him.
She was on her knees on the hearth-rug, with her head buried in what
had been Dr. McQueen's chair. Ragged had been the seat of it on the
day when she first went to live with him, but very early on the
following morning, or, to be precise, five minutes after daybreak, he
had risen to see if there were burglars in the parlour, and behold, it
was his grateful little maid repadding the old arm-chair. How a
situation repeats itself! Without disturbing her, the old doctor had
slipped away with a full heart. It was what the young doctor did now.
But the situation was not quite the same. She had been bubbling over
with glee then; she was sobbing now. David could not know that it was
a sob of joy; he knew only that he had never seen her crying before,
and that it was the letter in her hands that had brought tears at last
to those once tranquil and steadfast eyes.
In an odd conversation which had once taken place in that room between
the two doctors, Gemmell had said: "But the time may come without my
knowing it." And McQueen's reply was: "I don't think so, for she is so
open; but I'll tell you this, David, as a guide. I never saw her eyes
wet. It is one of the touching things about her that she has the eyes
of a man, to whom it is a shame to cry. If you ever see her greeting,
David, I'm sore doubting that the time will have come."
As David Gemmell let himself softly out of the house, to return to it
presently, he thought the time had come. What he conceived he had to
do was a hard thing, but he never thought of not doing it. He had kept
himself in readiness to do it for many days now, and he walked to it
as firmly as if he were on his professional rounds. He did not know
that the skin round his eyes had contracted, giving them the look of
pain which always came there when he was sorry or pitiful or
indignant. He was not well acquainted with his eyes, and, had he
glanced at them now in a glass, would have presumed that this was
their usual expression.
Grizel herself opened the door to him this time, and "Maggy Ann, he is
found!" she cried victoriously. Evidently she had heard of his
previous visit. "We have searched every room in the house for you,"
she said gaily, "and had you disappeared for much longer, Maggy Ann
would have had the carpets up."
He excused himself on the ground that he had forgotten something, and
she chided him merrily for being forgetful. As he sat with her David
could have groaned aloud. How vivacious she had become! but she was
sparkling in false colours. After what he knew had been her distress
of a few minutes ago, it was a painted face to him. She was trying to
deceive him. Perhaps she suspected that he had seen her crying, and
now, attired in all a woman's wiles, she was defying him to believe
his eyes.
Grizel garbed in wiles! Alack the day! She was shielding the man, and
Gemmell could have driven her away roughly to get at him. But she was
also standing over her own pride, lest anyone should see that it had
fallen; and do you think that David would have made her budge an inch?
Of course she saw that he had something on his mind. She knew those
puckered eyes so well, and had so often smoothed them for him.
"What is it, David?" she asked sympathetically. "I see you have come
as a patient to-night."
"As one of those patients," he rejoined, "who feel better at mere
sight of the doctor."
"Fear of the prescription?" said she.
"Not if you prescribe yourself, Grizel."
"David!" she cried. He had been paying compliments!
"I mean it."
"So I can see by your face. Oh, David, how stern you look!"
"Dr. McQueen and I," he retorted, "used to hold private meetings after
you had gone to bed, at which we agreed that you should no longer be
allowed to make fun of us. They came to nothing. Do you know why?"
"Because I continued to do it?"
"No; but because we missed it so much if you stopped."
"You are nice to-night, David," she said, dropping him a courtesy.
"We liked all your bullying ways," he went on. "We were children in
your masterful hands."
"I was a tyrant, David," she said, looking properly ashamed. "I wonder
you did not marry, just to get rid of me."
"Have you ever seriously wondered why I don't marry?" he asked
quickly.
"Oh, David," she exclaimed, "what else do you think your patients and
I talk of when I am trying to nurse them? It has agitated the town
ever since you first walked up the Marrywellbrae, and we can't get on
with our work for thinking of it."
"Seriously, Grizel?"
She became grave at once. "If you could find the right woman," she
said wistfully.
"I have found her," he answered; and then she pressed her hands
together, too excited to speak.
"If she would only care a little for me," he said.
Grizel rocked her arms. "I am sure she does," she cried. "David, I am
so glad!"
He saw what her mistake was, but pretended not to know that she had
made one. "Are you really glad that I love you, Grizel?" he asked.
It seemed to daze her for a moment. "Not me, David," she said softly,
as if correcting him. "You don't mean that it is me?" she said
coaxingly. "David," she cried, "say it is not me!"
He drooped his head, but not before he had seen all the brightness die
out of her face. "Is it so painful to you even to hear me say it?" he
asked gravely.
Her joy had been selfish as her sorrow was. For nigh a minute she had
been thinking of herself alone, it meant so much to her; but now she
jumped up and took his hand in hers.
"Poor David!" she said, making much of his hand as if she had hurt it.
But David Gemmell's was too simple a face to oppose to her pitying
eyes, and presently she let his hand slip from her and stood regarding
him curiously. He had to look another way, and then she even smiled, a
little forlornly.
"Do you mind talking it over with me, Grizel?" he asked. "I have
always been well aware that you did not care for me in that way, but
nevertheless I believe you might do worse."
"No woman could do better," she answered gravely. "I should like you
to talk it over, David, if you begin at the beginning"; and she sat
down with her hands crossed.
"I won't say what a good thing it would be for me," was his beginning;
"we may take that for granted."
"I don't think we can," she remarked; "but it scarcely matters at
present. That is not the beginning, David."
He was very anxious to make it the beginning.
"I am weary of living in lodgings," he said. "The practice suffers by
my not being married. Many patients dislike being attended by a single
man. I ought to be in McQueen's house; it has been so long known as
the doctor's house. And you should be a doctor's wife--you who could
almost be the doctor. It would be a shame, Grizel, if you who are so
much to patients were to marry out of the profession. Don't you follow
me?"
"I follow you," she replied; "but what does it matter? You have not
begun at the beginning." He looked at her inquiringly. "You must
begin," she informed him, "by saying why you ask me to marry you when
you don't love me." She added, in answer to another look from him:
"You know you don't." There was a little reproach in it. "Oh, David,
what made you think I could be so easily taken in!"
He looked so miserable that by and by she smiled, not so tremulously
as before.
"How bad at it you are, David!" she said.
And how good at it she was! he thought gloomily.
"Shall I help you out?" she asked gently, but speaking with dignity.
"You think I am unhappy; you believe I am in the position in which you
placed yourself, of caring for someone who does not care for me."
"Grizel, I mistrust him."
She flushed; she was not quite so gentle now. "And so you offer me
your hand to save me! It was a great self-sacrifice, David, but you
used not to be fond of doing showy things."
"I did not mean it to be showy," he answered.
She was well aware of that, but--"Oh, David," she cried, "that you
should believe I needed it! How little you must think of me!"
"Does it look as if I thought little of you?" he said.
"Little of my strength, David, little of my pride."
"I think so much of them that how could I stand by silently and watch
them go?"
"You think you have seen that!" She was agitated now.
He hesitated. "Yes," he said courageously.
Her eyes cried, "David, how could you be so cruel!" but they did not
daunt him.
"Have you not seen it yourself, Grizel?" he said.
She pressed her hands together. "I was so happy," she said, "until you
came!"
"Have you not seen it yourself?" he asked again.
"There may be better things," she retorted, "than those you rate so
highly."
"Not for you," he said.
"If they are gone," she told him, with a flush of resentment, "it is
not you who can bring them back."
"But let me try, Grizel," said he.
"David, can I not even make you angry with me?"
"No, Grizel, you can't. I am very sorry that I can make you angry with
me."
"I am not," she said dispiritedly. "It would be contemptible in me."
And then, eagerly: "But, David, you have made a great mistake, indeed
you have. You--you are a dreadful bungler, sir!" She was trying to
make his face relax, with a tremulous smile from herself to encourage
him; but the effort was not successful. "You see, I can't even bully
you now!" she said. "Did that capacity go with the others, David?"
"Try a little harder," he replied. "I think you will find that I
submit to it still"
"Very well." She forced some gaiety to her aid. After all, how could
she let his monstrous stupidity wound a heart protected by such a
letter?
"You have been a very foolish and presumptuous boy," she began. She
was standing up, smiling, wagging a reproachful but nervous finger at
him. "If it were not that I have a weakness for seeing medical men
making themselves ridiculous so that I may put them right, I should be
very indignant with you, sir."
"Put me right, Grizel," he said. He was sure she was trying to blind
him again.
"Know, then, David, that I am not the poor-spirited, humble creature
you seem to have come here in search of--"
"But you admitted--"
"How dare you interrupt me, sir! Yes, I admit that I am not quite as I
was, but I glory in it. I used to be ostentatiously independent; now I
am only independent enough. My pride made me walk on air; now I walk
on the earth, where there is less chance of falling. I have still
confidence in myself; but I begin to see that ways are not necessarily
right because they are my ways. In short, David, I am evidently on the
road to being a model character!"
They were gay words, but she ended somewhat faintly.
"I was satisfied with you as you were," was the doctor's comment.
"I wanted to excel!"
"You explain nothing, Grizel," he said reproachfully. "Why have you
changed so?"
"Because I am so happy. Do you remember how, in the old days, I
sometimes danced for joy? I could do it now."
"Are you engaged to be married, Grizel?"
She took a quiet breath. "You have no right to question me in this
way," she said. "I think I have been very good in bearing with you so
long."
But she laid aside her indignation at once; he was so old a friend,
the sincerity of him had been so often tried. "If you must know,
David," she said, with a girlish frankness that became her better, "I
am not engaged to be married. And I must tell you nothing more," she
added, shutting her mouth decisively. She must be faithful to her
promise.
"He forbids it?" Gemmell asked mercilessly.
She stamped her foot, not in rage, but in hopelessness. "How incapable
you are of doing him justice!" she cried. "If you only knew----"
"Tell me. I want to do him justice."
She sat down again, sighing. "My attempt to regain my old power over
you has not been very successful, has it, David? We must not quarrel,
though"--holding out her hand, which he grasped. "And you won't
question me any more?" She said it appealingly.
"Never again," he answered. "I never wanted to question you, Grizel. I
wanted only to marry you."
"And that can't be."
"I don't see it," he said, so stoutly that she was almost amused. But
he would not be pushed aside. He had something more to say.
"Dr. McQueen wished it," he said; "above all else in the world he
wished it. He often told me so."
"He never said that to me," Grizel replied quickly.
"Because he thought that to press you was no way to make you care for
me. He hoped that it would come about."
"It has not come about, David, with either of us," she said gently. "I
am sure that would have been sufficient answer to him."
"No, Grizel, it would not, not now."
He had risen, and his face was whiter than she had ever seen it.
"I am going to hurt you, Grizel," he said, and every word was a pang
to him. "I see no other way. It has got to be done. Dr. McQueen often
talked to me about the things that troubled you when you were a little
girl--the morbid fears you had then, and that had all been swept away
years before I knew you. But though they had been long gone, you were
so much to him that he tried to think of everything that might happen
to you in the future, and he foresaw that they might possibly come
back. 'If she were ever to care for some false loon!' he has said to
me, and then, Grizel, he could not go on."
Grizel beat her hands. "If he could not go on," she said, "it was not
because he feared what I should do."
"No, no," David answered eagerly, "he never feared for that, but for
your happiness. He told me of a boy who used to torment you, oh, all
so long ago, and of such little account that he had forgotten his
name. But that boy has come back, and you care for him, and he is a
false loon, Grizel."
She had risen too, and was flashing fire on David; but he went on.
"'If the time ever comes,' he said to me, 'when you see her in torture
from such a cause, speak to her openly about it. Tell her it is I who
am speaking through you. It will be a hard task to you, but wrestle
through with it, David, in memory of any little kindness I may have
done you, and the great love I bore my Grizel.'"
She was standing rigid now. "Is there any more, David?" she said in a
low voice.
"Only this. I admired you then as I admire you now. I may not love
you, Grizel, but of this I am very sure"--he was speaking steadily, he
was forgetting no one--"that you are the noblest and bravest woman I
have ever known, and I promised--he did not draw the promise from me,
I gave it to him--that if I was a free man and could help you in any
way without paining you by telling you these things, I would try that
way first."
"And this is the way?"
"I could think of no other. Is it of no avail?"
She shook her head. "You have made such a dreadful mistake," she cried
miserably, "and you won't see it. Oh, how you wrong him! I am the
happiest girl in the world, and it is he who makes me so happy. But I
can't explain. You need not ask me; I promised, and I won't."
"You used not to be so fond of mystery, Grizel."
"I am not fond of it now."
"Ah, it is he," David said bitterly, and he lifted his hat. "Is there
nothing you will let me do for you, Grizel?" he cried.
"I thought you were to do so much for me when you came into this
room," she admitted wistfully, "and said that you were in love. I
thought it was with another woman."
He remembered that her face had brightened. "How could that have
helped you?" he asked.
She saw that she had but to tell him, and for her sake he would do it
at once. But she could not be so selfish.
"We need not speak of that now," she said.
"We must speak of it," he answered. "Grizel, it is but fair to me. It
may be so important to me."
"You have shown that you don't care for her, David, and that ends it."
"Who is it?" He was much stirred.
"If you don't know----"
"Is it Elspeth?"
The question came out of him like a confession, and hope turned Grizel
giddy.
"Do you love her, David?" she cried.
But he hesitated. "Is what you have told me true, that it would help
you?" he asked, looking her full in the eyes.
"Do you love her?" she implored, but he was determined to have her
answer first.
"Is it, Grizel?"
"Yes, yes. Do you, David?"
And then he admitted that he did, and she rocked her arms in joy.
"But oh, David, to say such things to me when you were not a free man!
How badly you have treated Elspeth to-day!"
"She does not care for me," he said.
"Have you asked her?"--in alarm.
"No; but could she?"
"How could she help it?" She would not tell him what Tommy thought.
Oh, she must do everything to encourage David.
"And still," said he, puzzling, "I don't see how it can affect you."
"And I can't tell you," she moaned. "Oh, David, do, do find out. Why
are you so blind?" She could have shaken him. "Don't you see that once
Elspeth was willing to be taken care of by some other person----I must
not tell you!"
"Then he would marry you?"
She cried in anxiety: "Have I told you, or did you find out?"
"I found out," he said. "Is it possible he is so fond of her as that?"
"There never was such a brother," she answered. She could not help
adding, "But he is still fonder of me."
The doctor pulled his arm over his eyes and sat down again. Presently
he was saying with a long face: "I came here to denounce the cause of
your unhappiness, and I begin to see it is myself."
"Of course it is, you stupid David," she said gleefully. She was very
kind to the man who had been willing to do so much for her; but as the
door closed on him she forgot him. She even ceased to hear the warning
voice he had brought with him from the dead. She was re-reading the
letter that began by calling her wife.