MARION SANFORD.
As a school-girl Marion Sanford started by being unpopular. On first
acquaintance there were very few girls in Madame Reichard's excellent
establishment who did not decide that she was cold and unsympathetic.
Courteous, well-bred, self-possessed, she was to a fault,
but--unpardonable sin in school-girl eyes--she shrank from those dear
and delicious intimacies, those mushroom friendships of our tender
years, that are as explosive as fire-crackers and as evanescent as the
smoke thereof. The volumes of satire that have been written on the
subject have exhausted the field and rendered new ideas out of the
question, but they have in no wise diminished the impetuosity with which
such friendships are daily, hourly entered into, and they never will.
Ours is a tale which has little that is new and less that is didactic.
Army life and army loves differ, after all, but little from those which
one sees in every community. Human nature is the same the world over,
despite our different tenets and traditions. Boys are as full of
mischief and sure to get into scrapes as in the days of Elijah and the
bears. Girls have had their sweet secrets and desperate intimacies with
one another since long before Elijah was heard of. Nothing one can say
is apt to put a stop to what the Almighty set in motion. Let us not rail
at what we cannot correct, but make the best of it. Let us accept the
truth. School-girls meet, take desperate and sudden fancies, swear
eternal friendships, have eternal tiffs and squabbles, kiss and make up,
fall out again, and as they grow in grace and wisdom they keep up the
system, simply taking a new object every few months. It is one of their
weaknesses by divine right, over which common sense has no more control
than it has over most of ours.
But Marion Sanford had no such weakness. Being destitute of the longing
for intimate and confidential intercourse with some equally romantic
sister, she was spared the concomitant heartburnings, recriminations,
and enmities. She passed her first year at the school without an
intimate friend. She left it without an enemy. Hers was not the most
brilliant mind in the class. She was not the valedictorian of the school
on that eventful day when,
"Sweet girl-graduates with their shining hair,"
they listened in tears and white muslin to Madame's parting injunctions;
but her last two years at the old _pension_ had been very precious to
her. Grace Pelham was her room-mate, and Grace Pelham's loving arms had
opened to her when, motherless and heart-broken, Marion Sanford had
returned from the second year's summer vacation. Between the two girls
there had gradually grown a deep and faithful friendship, born of mutual
respect and esteem. It would be saying too much to assert that at first
there had been no differences. Four years at one school give
opportunities which are illimitable, but the present writer knew neither
of them in the bread-and-butter period, and was properly reproved by the
one and snubbed by the other when, in the supposed superiority of his
years and co-extensive views on the frangibility of feminine friendship,
he had sought to raise the veil of the past and peer into the archives
of those school-days. Partly from school-mates and partly from
observation the author formed his opinion of what Marion Sanford had
been as an undergraduate. What she became the candid reader must judge
for ----self.
For a woman she was reticent to a marked degree in discussing the faults
and foibles of others. She was slow to anger, loath to believe ill of a
man or woman, truth-loving, sincere, and simple-hearted. She had not
been the most studious girl at school. Deep down in her heart of hearts
she had a vein of romance that made the heroes of fiction the idols of a
vivid imagination. Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, Sir Galahad, Launcelot, William
Wallace, Bayard, Philip Sidney, were men whom she fondly believed to
have existed in other shapes and names time and again, and yet she was
staggered in her faith because the annals of our matter-of-fact days
told no such tales as those she loved of knighthood and chivalry.
Once--once she had found a modern hero. Heaven only knows to what a wild
worship would not that brief dream have expanded had she not seen him.
He was the elder brother of one of her friends at school,--a navy
officer,--a man who when his ship was cut down by a blundering Briton,
and sent to the bottom with over a hundred gallant hearts high-beating
because "homeward bound," he, the young ensign, gave his whole strength,
his last conscious minute to getting the helpless into the lowered
boats, and was the last man in the "sick-bay" before the stricken ship
took her final plunge, carrying him into the vortex with a fevered boy
in his strong young arms. Both were unconscious when hauled into safety,
and that ensign, said Marion, was the man she would marry. She was less
than sixteen and had never seen him. The nearest approach to a desperate
intimacy she ever had was with that fellow's sister: a girl of hitherto
faint attractions. At last the ensign came to the school,--such a day of
excitement!--and as a great, a _very_ great concession, Madame had
permitted that he should be allowed in her presence to speak with his
sister's most intimate friends. She was threatened with popularity for
the time being, and Marion was presented. The hero of her four months'
dream was a stoutly-built youth of twenty-five, with florid complexion
and hair, and a manner so painfully shy and embarrassed that additional
color was lent to his sun-blistered features. He had faced death without
a tremor and, in the most matter-of-fact way in the world, had saved
three lives at the imminent risk of his own, but he could not face these
wide-eyed, worshipping school-girls, and was manifestly ill at ease in a
very unbecoming civilian suit. Still, he wriggled through the interview
and made his escape, leaving only a modified sensation behind. The fatal
_coup_ occurred next day when, as prearranged, he came to say farewell.
This time Jack Tar had braced for the occasion, and was unexpectedly
hilarious and demonstrative. In bidding good-by to his sister he had
effusively embraced her, then turned suddenly upon Marion, and before
she could dream of what was coming, had caught her in his arms and
imprinted upon her fresh young lips a bacchanalian salute that left
thereon a mingled essence of Angostura bitters, cloves, and tobacco, and
drove her in dismay and confusion from the room to seek her own in a
passion of angry tears and disenchantment. Never before in her life had
she known such an affront. Never for long afterwards did she worship
modern heroes.
But while she sought no intimacies, as a school-girl her friendship and
affection for Grace Pelham strengthened with every week of their
association. Their last two years at school were spent as room-mates,
and then Marion had gone almost immediately abroad. Some hint has been
conveyed to the reader of a domestic unpleasantness in the Sanford
homestead. Sanford paterfamilias was a successful business man of large
means and small sensibilities. His first wife, Marion's mother, was a
New York beauty, a sweet, sensitive, refined, and delicate girl; in
fine, "a sacrifice at the altar of Mammon." She married Mr. Sanford when
she was eighteen and he thirty-eight, and she married him because the
family necessities were such that she could not help herself. Marion was
their first child, the darling of a young mother's heart, and later, the
pride of a fond father's. Yet, before that daughter was eighteen she was
called upon to welcome in the place of her idolized mother--who had died
after some years of patient suffering--the children's governess. It
marred all joys of graduation, so far as Miss Sanford was concerned. She
had gone home in obedience to her conviction of filial duty, and had
striven to make her little sister and her brother believe that the new
mamma was all that she should be. She had been conscientiously earnest
in her effort to like in her new rôle the ex-governess, whom she had
found it impossible to believe in before. The effort was a failure, due
quite as much to the jealous and suspicious nature of the lady of the
house as to Miss Sanford's unconquerable prejudice. Pretences for
rupture were easily found; the rupture came; Mrs. Sanford did all the
talking, Miss Sanford said nothing. When her father came home from the
city he found his new wife in tears and his daughter fled. The Frenchman
who wrote _les absents ont toujours tort_ was undoubtedly thinking of
the field as left in possession of a woman, and that Mrs. Sanford's
recital of the trouble was a finished calumny at Marion's expense we are
spared the necessity of asserting. In her few words written to her
father that day, Miss Sanford simply said that she was going to pay a
brief visit to the Zabriskies; but in less than a fortnight, with his
full consent and a liberal allowance, she went with them abroad. That
his experiences in his new marital relations were not blissful we may
conjecture from the fact that he soon found reason to believe that he
couldn't believe Mrs. Sanford. Unbelief grew to conviction and developed
into profound distrust. Still, as she not infrequently had to remind
him, she was his lawfully wedded wife, and held the fort. He aged
rapidly, and his struggles for the mastery were futile. She was young,
active, healthy, and wise as the serpent. He mourned for his absent
daughter, and when, yielding to her own yearnings, she returned to
America in the spring of the Centennial year, he sent for her to come to
him. She went, and remained as long as she could, but in leaving, she
told him, with eyes that filled and lips that quivered but never shrank,
that it was her last visit so long as her step-mother remained beneath
the roof, and he broke down and sobbed like a little child, but sought
not to dissuade her.
"Her mother's fortune," said the Mrs. Grundys of Fort Hays, was now her
own; but her mother had no fortune, and if she had, it would have been
shared by the two other children. In the old days her father had
laughingly bought and set aside for Marion's own account some government
bonds and some railway stocks; the latter at time of purchase being
practically drugs on the market. In fifteen years they were at a heavy
premium. When it came to parting, he had placed these bonds with all
their unclipped coupons to her credit at his banker's, and she was
mistress of a little fortune it seemed to her, which, added to the
liberal allowance he insisted on keeping up, gave her far more than she
could ever spend on herself even were her tastes extravagant.
She dressed richly; she would have nothing that was not of the best, but
she was never wasteful. It had been her habit to keep accurate account
of her expenditure, and to send her father a quarterly balance-sheet
that was a delight to his pragmatical eyes. He would have doubled her
allowance her last two years at school, but she would not agree to it.
She was in deep mourning and in sore distress, and money was the one
thing she had no use for. All the same he paid it to her account, as he
termed it, and in due time the money became her own. She had loved him
dearly despite his rough exterior and what she thought his lack of
appreciation of her gentle mother. But when he married the governess
before that second winter's snow had mantled the hallowed grave, her
soul rebelled in indignation and dismay. For a year her heart had held
out against him, and softened only when she saw that he was breaking
under the self-imposed burden,--a shrewish second wife. However, Mrs.
Sanford "held the fort," as has been said, and Marion, high-spirited,
sensitive, refined, and loving, was entering on her twentieth
year--without a home.
Was she pretty? Yes. More than pretty, said those who knew her best. She
was simply lovely. But alas for those to whom disappointment is sure to
come, she was a decided blonde.
A fairer, lovelier, whiter skin than Marion Sanford's was rarely seen;
her complexion was wellnigh faultless, her eyes were large, clear, full
of thought and truth and expression, and in tint a deep, deep blue,
shaded, like Grace Truscott's, with curling lashes, not so long, but
thick and sweeping; her hair was too dark, perhaps, for the purity of
her blond complexion. It was a shining, wavy brown, very soft, thick,
and luxuriant. She would be far more striking, said her commentators,
had she real blond hair, but those who grew to know her well soon lost
sight of the defect. Her mouth was a trifle large, but her teeth were
perfect, and the lips so soft, so sweetly curved, that one readily
forgave the deviation from the strict rule of facial unity when watching
her frequent smiles. In stature she was perhaps below, as Grace was
above, the medium height of womanhood, but her figure was exquisite. Her
neck and arms were a soft and creamy white, and the perfection of
roundness and grace. "She must lace fearfully," was the invariable
comment of the sisterhood on first acquaintance. In truth, she did not
lace at all. It was a fault beyond her control, but her waist was
perhaps too small. Her hands and feet were not like Grace's, long and
slender. They were tiny, but her hand was plump and white and might be
compressible. It was undeniably pretty, and her foot was always so
stylishly shod that its shape was outlined most attractively.
But what would have made Marion Sanford attractive had she been simply
plain instead of pretty, was her manner. Cold and unsympathetic had been
the original school-girl verdict pronounced because of her distaste for
imparting confidences. This was amended in her second year, abandoned
in her third, and would have been attacked, if asserted, in her fourth.
Over no girl's departure was there such frantic lamentation among the
younger scholars as over Marion's. They had learned to love her. To all
who were her elders there was gentle deference, to her equals and
associates a frank and cordial bearing without degeneration into
"confidences." To younger girls and to children Marion Sanford was an
angel, the sweetest, the gentlest, the kindest, the most winning girl
that lived. No matter who was with her, no matter what her occupation,
for them she had ever smiles and sunshiny greeting. It was to her the
younger girls soon learned to go in homesickness or troubles, sure of
welcome to her arms and comfort in her sympathy; it was to her that the
wee toddlers were never afraid to run for "sweeties," or refuge from
pursuing nurse-maids; it was to her that girls of younger sets,
accustomed to being snubbed and put down by those two years older, would
yield the outspoken homage of loyal subjects. She was Queen Marion to
the youngsters of the school, brave, wise, and, oh! so generous; while
to the chosen few in the class, who knew something of her love for the
heroic, she was Maid Marion, but only "Maidie" to one, her loyal and
faithful ally, Grace.
She was still abroad in the fall of '75 when that quiet wedding took
place which she was vainly implored to attend as first bridesmaid. Three
years had elapsed since her mother's death, but her heart was still in
mourning. But early in the spring of the Centennial year, after a stormy
passage, she was safely restored to her own land, and the evening after
the arrival of their party Captain and Mrs. Truscott were dining with
them at the Clarendon. There had been a brief, a very brief call from
her father and step-mother, and then she accepted Grace's invitation to
come to them at the Point. A slight illness of Mr. Sanford's made it
necessary to abandon the visit at the time, as she was telegraphed for
before she had been forty-eight hours at the Point. The month that
followed settled the question as to future relations with Mrs. Sanford.
She would meet her father whenever or wherever he wanted except under
that roof; on that point she was adamant, and he neither could nor did
blame her. And so it resulted that she was once more with Grace and the
"Admirable Crichton," as she had been accustomed to allude to him in her
letters for the past year; and up to the moment of his return from the
city he was the only hero who had appeared to her eyes in that
manufacturing centre where the article is supposed to be turned out at
the rate of fifty a year. It never had occurred to her that men so
particular about the cut of their uniform trousers, the set of a
"blouse," or the nice adjustment of the hair could by any possibility
develop heroic qualities, and yet Captain Truscott always looked as
though he had stepped out of a band-box.
It was late when she went to her room this lovely night in June. It was
true that she had one or two letters to write, but they were very brief.
She longed to have Grace come to her and tell her the result of her
interview with Jack, and she longed to know what that letter would say.
Never for an instant had it occurred to her that at a moment's notice a
home could be abandoned, a young wife left to mourn, a delightful
station left to anybody who wanted the place, and all as an every-day
incident of army life. That such things could be expected and demanded
in the midst of a mortal struggle for national honor was another matter
entirely,--something to be encountered once in a lifetime, and something
to be cherished in family tradition as grand, patriotic, heroic, and
worthy of keeping in remembrance from generation to generation; but that
to do all this merely as a piece of duty because one's particular
regiment happened to be setting forth on probably hazardous service, but
of a trivial nature as compared with the interests involved in the only
war she heard much talked of, why, she never dreamed of such a
possibility, and her ideas were no more vague than are those of the
general public on precisely the same subject.
Twelve o'clock struck from the great bell over at the tower, and still
Grace and her husband remained below. It was time--high time to go to
bed, said Miss Sanford, though still perplexed, anxious, and distressed.
Grace would surely come to her as soon as matters were decided. She
stepped to her window to take a good-night look at the moonlit plain.
Drawing aside the curtain, she peered through the blinds. Standing in
silence at the front gate, leaning on the iron fence and gazing fixedly
in the direction of the library window which opened toward the north,
there appeared the figure of a man. A moment he stood there motionless,
attentive. Then, without a sound, he swung back the gate, and quickly
and almost on tiptoe, it seemed to her, stepped up the walk, passed
through a broad, moonlit space, and was as quickly lost to sight and
hearing around the corner of the house. She recognized the form and
bearing at a glance. The man was Sergeant Wolf.