Bryant's wife was quite displeased when Eliot came frankly to her to
ask that a separate suite of rooms be provided for his girlish bride.
"Do you hate her so much, then?" she queried, arching her pale brows
disagreeably.
He started and looked annoyed.
"Who said I hated her? You are very much mistaken in the idea,
Sylvie," he said, curtly. "I love Una quite as well, I have no doubt,
as Bryant loves you."
"Why, then--" she began, but he interrupted quickly:
"Simply because the love is all on one side yet. My wife is wedded, yet
not won. Her heart is that of a child still, and although she bears my
name, I will claim no rights save a lover's until I win her woman's
love."
Mrs. Bryant had only been acquainted with Una an hour, but she could
have told Eliot a different story from that. Her quick eyes had seen
the wealth of tenderness in the dark orbs of Una as they rested now
and then on her husband's face, but Sylvie was more angry than any one
supposed over this unexpected marriage. She was not unselfish enough to
open the eyes of the blind young husband.
"Oh, very well, if you choose to make a chivalrous goose of yourself,
Eliot," she answered, tartly, "I suppose she can have the best suite of
guest-rooms--the ones I have been fixing up for my sister. But I can
write a word to Ida not to come."
"Of course you will not. There are other rooms," he said, impatiently.
Sylvie shrugged her shoulders.
"Ida's used only to the best," she said, insolently.
He regarded her for a moment in stern silence. Underneath his usual
gentle, nonchalant manner slept a will that was iron when needful.
After a moment he said firmly:
"See here, Sylvie, my wife has the same right in my father's old house
that Bryant's wife has. You have the best suite of rooms in the house,
she must have the next best. If you have put anything from your own
purse into the rooms, it can be removed into another room for Ida's use
when she comes. Una knows, for I have told her, that the Van Zandts are
poor--that we have nothing but this big, old-fashioned house, and such
a small income that barely buys our sisters' dresses, and I have to eke
out the rest by hard work. She does not expect anything luxurious, but
I shall see that she has the best I can afford."
So the gage was thrown down, and Sylvie picked it up at once. She
had the petty meanness to strip Una's rooms of all the pretty things
she had placed in them for Ida, and they looked rather bare when she
finished her task of despoliation. But Maud and Edith brought the
prettiest things from their own rooms to fill up the void, indignant at
her petty spite.
"I know what is the matter. She is mad because she can not marry Eliot
to Ida now. It's what she's been fishing for all the time," Edith said,
indignantly; and the sisters made a generous compact to fight the
battles for the new-comer that their clear young eyes already saw were
inevitable.
There was one person who took kindly at once to Una, and that was the
middle-aged governess, Mrs. Wilson. When she had come first to teach
the little Van Zandts, she had been a forlorn young widow, having
lately buried her husband and her only child. She had taught Eliot when
a little lad, and she had taught his sisters, growing gray in patient
service of her well-beloved pupils. Now, in the fair, innocent face
and great, dark eyes of Eliot's wife, she fancied a resemblance to the
little daughter that had been in Heaven so long.
"I shall love to teach her all that I can," she said, with a dimness in
her gentle brown eyes. "I love to look at her beautiful face with those
solemn eyes so much like my dead Elsie's eyes."
And loving her first for Elsie's sake, she soon grew to love her for
her own. Never was there pupil so eager to learn, so thirsty for
knowledge, so untiring in application as was the neglected Little
Nobody, as Mrs. Van Zandt still called her contemptuously in her
thoughts.