"BUT AS FOR HER, SHE STAID AT HOME."
To aid thy mind's development, to watch
The dawn of little joys, to sit and see
Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects, wonders yet to see!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss.
--BYRON'S CHILDE HAROLD.
To Bruce Conway the months of slow and tardy convalescence seemed like
dead weights on his impatient, restless soul; to Grace Winans, in her
splendid but strangely silent home, where but few guests were received,
and which she rarely left, time passed as it did to Mariana in the
Moated Grange. But for all that, the summer passed like a painful
dream, and the "melancholy days" had come; "time does not stop for
tears."
Mrs. Conway had prevailed on Bruce to compromise his intention of going
abroad again by spending the winter with her amid the gayeties of
Washington--the "Paris of America."
How far a pretty face had influenced him in making this decision
it is impossible to say; but Mrs. Conway, in her gratitude to the
Clendenons for their kindness to her idol, had fairly worried them
into consenting to let Lulu pass the winter with her in the gay
capital city. For Lulu it may be said that no persuasion was needed
to obtain her consent, and how far her fancy for a handsome face had
influenced _her_, we will not undertake to say either. However this
may be, the Washington newspapers duly chronicled for the benefit of
fashionable society the interesting intelligence that the elegant Mr.
Bruce Conway, the hero of the much talked of Norfolk duel, and his
still brilliant aunt, Mrs. Conway--both so well known in Washington
circles--had taken a handsome suite of rooms at Willard's Hotel for the
winter. And the newspapers--which will flatter any woman in society,
be she fair or homely--added the information that Mrs. Conway had one
of the belles of Norfolk for her guest--the lovely Miss C.--concluding
with the stereotyped compliment that her marvelous beauty and varied
accomplishments would create a stir in fashionable society; and thus
was Lulu Clendenon launched on the sea of social dissipation.
A deep flush of shame and annoyance tinged the girl's dimpled cheeks,
as leaning back in a great sleepy hollow of a chair in their private
parlor, skimming lightly over the "society news," she came upon this
paragraph about a week after their arrival.
Bruce Conway, lounging idly in an opposite chair, marked that sudden
rose-flush under his half-closed lids, and wondered thereat.
On her pallid cheek and forehead came a color and a light.
"As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the Northern night," he
spouted, in his old non-commital fashion of quoting Tennyson to pretty
girls.
She glanced across at him, her color brightening, "all the spirit
deeply dawning in the dusk of hazel eyes," but she uttered no word.
"Well, Brownie, what is it?" he queried, giving her the name he often
called her for her nut-brown hair and eyes.
"This."
She folded down the paragraph and tossed it across to him, with a
willful pout of her red lips, and watched with solicitude for the
sympathetic indignation she expected to read in his eyes.
He finished it, and laughed.
"Umph! Some people wake up and find themselves famous. Well, what is
the matter with that? Is not the notice sufficiently flattering?"
"It is not that!" She sprang up and began walking excitedly up and down
the floor. "I do not like it--I--it is a shame to drag a young girl's
name before the public that way. It puts a modest girl to the blush.
A 'stir in society,' indeed!" her lip curling, a comical anger in
her brown eyes. "I have a great mind to go home to mamma and Brother
Willie."
Bruce Conway opened his sleepy eyes in polite amazement at this
home-bred girl, whose pure modesty recoiled from what was so grateful
to the ears of most modern belles.
"Well, but you are a novelty," he laughed. "In these days of women's
rights, and shoddyism, and toadyism, and all the rest of the isms!
Why, the majority of the belles of society would give their ears for a
notice like that! That is why they court the journalists--assiduously
inviting them to receptions, soirees, and the like. They always
expect a flaming compliment. And new arrivals are always honored by a
flattering notice. The thing is quite _a la mode_."
"Well, I do not like it. I think it is an abominable fashion,"
persisted the little maiden.
"I agree with you," said Bruce, seriously. "It is 'brushing the
delicate bloom from the grape.' But don't air such opinions in public,
Lulu, or Barnum will be wanting you for one of his curiosities."
His glance turned from her and roved down the society column--then
he rose, his face a trifle paler, and crossing to the window, read
a paragraph almost directly beneath the one which had incited the
indignant protest of the little Norfolk beauty.
"And by the way, society will miss its most brilliant jewel from its
setting, in the absence of the youthful and lovely Hon. Mrs. Winans, of
Norfolk. Rumor reports that the fair lady is so devoted to her infant
son that, with the concurrence of the indulgent Senator, she gladly
foregoes the dissipations of fashionable life to watch the budding and
unfolding of his infantile charms."
And it, this grandiloquent style society, which knew perfectly well all
about the difference between Senator Winans and his lovely wife, was
informed that he did not intend to bring her to Washington during the
ensuing session of Congress.
Conway ground his firm white teeth.
"So he dares show the world how he neglects her," crushing the paper
viciously in his hand as though it were Paul Winans himself. "Poor
Gracie--poor wronged and injured girl!" sighing deeply. "Neither Winans
nor I was worthy of her."
Lulu, who had resumed her seat, looked up wondering at the clouded brow
and unintelligibly muttered words. He smiled, subduing his emotion by a
strong effort of will.
"You have not told me yet what are your plans for to-day--ah! here
comes my lady aunt. Dear madam, will you kindly designate what are your
plans for to-day, and command your humble servant?"
Mrs. Conway smiled her brightest smile on her idol.
"Let me see," glancing at her watch: "only ten o'clock. You can be off
for your morning cigar and stroll on the avenue--when you come back we
will have decided."
He rose, handsome, smiling, _debonaire_, but desperately ennuied, and
glad, if truth must be told, to get away. Small talk was a bore to
him just then, in his perturbed mood. He picked up Lulu's embroidered
handkerchief that she had carelessly let fall to the floor, and
presenting it with a jaunty "by-by," went his way followed by their
admiring eyes. He was his aunt's acknowledged idol; Lulu's unconscious
one.
Mrs. Conway plunged at once into the subject of amusements for the day.
"Let us see--there is Mrs. R's reception at two--we musn't fail them.
You will see the _creme de la creme_ there, my dear. When we get away
we will have a drive over to the little city of Alexandria; at six,
dinner; at eight, the opera; at twelve, you and Bruce shall have an
hour for the German at Mrs. Morton's ball, and then--well, home again."
"Quite an attractive programme," smiled her companion, from the depths
of the "sleepy hollow."
Mrs. Conway smiled musingly, as she fixed her dark eyes on the pattern
of autumn-tinted leaves that trailed over the velvet carpet.
"Yes," she said, with the indifference of one who is used to it
all, "it is last season over again; it is all very charming to one
unaccustomed to the round. Poor Gracie was here last winter--these, by
the by, were her rooms then, the handsomest suite in the hotel--we went
everywhere together. She enjoyed it all so much."
A look of interest warmed the listless gaze of Lulu. The pet curiosity
of her soul was Grace Winans, heightened, perhaps, by an indefinable
jealousy that went far back into the past, when Grace Grey's
violet-pansy eyes had been the stars of Bruce Conway's adoration. She
said, regretfully:
"Is it not a wonder that I have never seen Mrs. Winans? And there is no
one I would like so much to see. Is she so very beautiful?"
"'Perfectly beautiful, faultily faultless,'" was Mrs. Conway's warmly
accorded praise, "and as lovely in mind as in person. She inherits both
qualities, I believe, from her mother, who was, I have heard, the most
amiable and beautiful woman in Memphis to the day of her death."
"Ah! Is Mrs. Winans not a Virginian, then?"
"No, only by adoption. Her father was a slave-holder before the
war--one of the out and out aristocrats of Memphis. He was a colonel
in the Confederate army, and killed at the head of his regiment during
the first of the war. He was a very noble young fellow, I believe, and
devoted to his wife and little daughter. The wife died broken-hearted
at his loss, and left this little Grace to the care of relatives, who
placed her in a boarding-school, where she remained until the close of
the war freed the slaves her father left her, and she was penniless. I
advertised about this time for a companion; she answered, and I engaged
her. She has been in Virginia ever since. She was just sixteen when she
came to me--a charming child--she is about twenty-one now."
A tender throb of sympathy stirred Lulu's heart as she listened.
Brought up in the warm fold of a mother's love, caressed, petted,
beloved, all her life, she could vaguely conjecture how sad and
loveless had been the brief years of Grace Grey's life.
"I regret that Bruce's unfortunate affair has, in some sort, put an end
to our intimacy," Mrs. Conway went on, pensively. "I was fond of Grace,
and had grown so used to her in her long stay with me, that she seemed
almost like one of my own family. I would have been proud of her as my
daughter. She might have been something almost as dear but for--well,
let us call it an error of judgment on my part and my nephew's." She
paused a moment, sighed deeply, and concluded with, "I would like you
to know her, Lulu. Your brother admired her very much, I think."
"I think he did," Lulu answered, simply.
"Next week Congress convenes," said the older lady, brightening; "then
I shall take you quite frequently to the capitol to hear the speeches
of the eminent men. Winans will be there, I presume. I hear he has been
traveling all summer, but he must, of course, be here in time for the
session. He is quite a brilliant speaker, and was excessively admired
last session."
"Has all the far-famed Louisiana eloquence and fire, I presume?" says
Lulu, curiously.
"Yes, although he has been many years away from there, but he has the
hot temper and unreasoning jealousy of the extreme South, as one may
see from his cruel treatment of his wife and child."
"I have just seen him," said Bruce's voice at the door.
"Seen whom?"
"Winans, to be sure, the man you're talking of," sauntering in and
flinging his handsome person recliningly on the divan and looking
extremely bored and fatigued in spite of the shy smile that dawned on
Lulu's lip at his entrance.
"Where did you see him?" Mrs. Conway queried, in some surprise and
anxiety.
"Oh, tearing down the avenue on a magnificent black horse as if he were
going to destruction as fast as the steed would carry him--that is just
his reckless way though."
"You recognized each other?" his aunt made haste dubiously to inquire.
"Oh, certainly," says Bruce, with a light smile. "I threw away my cigar
to make him a polite bow; he returned it with a freezing salutation,
but there was something in his face that would have stirred a tender
heart like Brownie's here into pity for him, though stronger ones like
mine, for instance, acknowledge no such sentimental feelings."
"How did he look?" queried Brownie, unmoved by his half-jesting
allusion to her.
"Like a proud man who was trampling on the heart he had torn from his
bosom to save his pride; pale, cynical, melancholy, defiant--pshaw!
That sounds like a novel, doesn't it, Lulu?"
"Poor Paul Winans!" she answered only; but the compassion in her voice
for him was not so great as the pained sympathy that looked out of her
speaking glance for Bruce Conway.
For Lulu saw with preternaturally clear vision, the struggle that was
waging in the young man's soul; saw how truth, and honor and every
principle of right were battling for one end--the overthrow of the love
that having struck down its intertwining roots in his soul for years,
was hard to be torn up. She pitied him--and, ah! pity is so near akin
to love.
Something of her pity he read in her expressive face, and straightway
set himself to work to dispel her gloom. Bruce never could bear to see
the face of a beauty overshadowed.
"Brownie, have you tried that new song I sent you yesterday?"
Lulu confessed she had not.
"Try it now, then," he answered, rising, and throwing open the piano.
She rose, smiling and happy once more, and took the seat at the piano.
He leaned by her side to turn the pages, and presently their voices
rose softly together in a sweet and plaintive love-song. But his heart
was full of another, and, as he turned the pages for Lulu with patient
gallantry, he remembered how he had turned them for another, how his
voice had risen thrillingly with hers in sweeter songs than this,
mingling with her bird-like notes as it never should "mingle again."