In a few weeks the echoes of the tournament died away, and Rena's life
settled down into a pleasant routine, which she found much more
comfortable than her recent spectacular prominence. Her queenship,
while not entirely forgiven by the ladies of the town, had gained for
her a temporary social prominence. Among her own sex, Mrs. Newberry
proved a warm and enthusiastic friend. Rumor whispered that the lively
young widow would not be unwilling to console Warwick in the loneliness
of the old colonial mansion, to which his sister was a most excellent
medium of approach. Whether this was true or not it is unnecessary to
inquire, for it is no part of this story, except as perhaps indicating
why Mrs. Newberry played the part of the female friend, without whom no
woman is ever launched successfully in a small and conservative
society. Her brother's standing gave her the right of social entry;
the tournament opened wide the door, and Mrs. Newberry performed the
ceremony of introduction. Rena had many visitors during the month
following the tournament, and might have made her choice from among a
dozen suitors; but among them all, her knight of the handkerchief found
most favor.
George Tryon had come to Clarence a few months before upon business
connected with the settlement of his grandfather's estate. A rather
complicated litigation had grown up around the affair, various phases
of which had kept Tryon almost constantly in the town. He had placed
matters in Warwick's hands, and had formed a decided friendship for his
attorney, for whom he felt a frank admiration. Tryon was only
twenty-three, and his friend's additional five years, supplemented by a
certain professional gravity, commanded a great deal of respect from
the younger man. When Tryon had known Warwick for a week, he had been
ready to swear by him. Indeed, Warwick was a man for whom most people
formed a liking at first sight. To this power of attraction he owed
most of his success--first with Judge Straight, of Patesville, then
with the lawyer whose office he had entered at Clarence, with the woman
who became his wife, and with the clients for whom he transacted
business. Tryon would have maintained against all comers that Warwick
was the finest fellow in the world. When he met Warwick's sister, the
foundation for admiration had already been laid. If Rena had proved to
be a maiden lady of uncertain age and doubtful personal attractiveness,
Tryon would probably have found in her a most excellent lady, worthy of
all respect and esteem, and would have treated her with profound
deference and sedulous courtesy. When she proved to be a young and
handsome woman, of the type that he admired most, he was capable of any
degree of infatuation. His mother had for a long time wanted him to
marry the orphan daughter of an old friend, a vivacious blonde, who
worshiped him. He had felt friendly towards her, but had shrunk from
matrimony. He did not want her badly enough to give up his freedom.
The war had interfered with his education, and though fairly well
instructed, he had never attended college. In his own opinion, he
ought to see something of the world, and have his youthful fling.
Later on, when he got ready to settle down, if Blanche were still in
the humor, they might marry, and sink to the humdrum level of other old
married people. The fact that Blanche Leary was visiting his mother
during his unexpectedly long absence had not operated at all to hasten
his return to North Carolina. He had been having a very good time at
Clarence, and, at the distance of several hundred miles, was safe for
the time being from any immediate danger of marriage.
With Rena's advent, however, he had seen life through different
glasses. His heart had thrilled at first sight of this tall girl, with
the ivory complexion, the rippling brown hair, and the inscrutable
eyes. When he became better acquainted with her, he liked to think
that her thoughts centred mainly in himself; and in this he was not far
wrong. He discovered that she had a short upper lip, and what seemed
to him an eminently kissable mouth. After he had dined twice at
Warwick's, subsequently to the tournament,--his lucky choice of Rena
had put him at once upon a household footing with the family,--his
views of marriage changed entirely. It now seemed to him the duty, as
well as the high and holy privilege of a young man, to marry and
manfully to pay his debt to society. When in Rena's presence, he could
not imagine how he had ever contemplated the possibility of marriage
with Blanche Leary,--she was utterly, entirely, and hopelessly unsuited
to him. For a fair man of vivacious temperament, this stately dark
girl was the ideal mate. Even his mother would admit this, if she
could only see Rena. To win this beautiful girl for his wife would be
a worthy task. He had crowned her Queen of Love and Beauty; since then
she had ascended the throne of his heart. He would make her queen of
his home and mistress of his life.
To Rena this brief month's courtship came as a new education. Not only
had this fair young man crowned her queen, and honored her above all
the ladies in town; but since then he had waited assiduously upon her,
had spoken softly to her, had looked at her with shining eyes, and had
sought to be alone with her. The time soon came when to touch his hand
in greeting sent a thrill through her frame,--a time when she listened
for his footstep and was happy in his presence. He had been bold
enough at the tournament; he had since become somewhat bashful and
constrained. He must be in love, she thought, and wondered how soon he
would speak. If it were so sweet to walk with him in the garden, or
along the shaded streets, to sit with him, to feel the touch of his
hand, what happiness would it not be to hear him say that he loved
her--to bear his name, to live with him always. To be thus loved and
honored by this handsome young man,--she could hardly believe it
possible. He would never speak--he would discover her secret and
withdraw. She turned pale at the thought,--ah, God! something would
happen,--it was too good to be true. The Prince would never try on the
glass slipper.
Tryon first told his love for Rena one summer evening on their way home
from church. They were walking in the moonlight along the quiet
street, which, but for their presence, seemed quite deserted.
"Miss Warwick--Rowena," he said, clasping with his right hand the hand
that rested on his left arm, "I love you! Do you--love me?"
To Rena this simple avowal came with much greater force than a more
formal declaration could have had. It appealed to her own simple
nature. Indeed, few women at such a moment criticise the form in which
the most fateful words of life--but one--are spoken. Words, while
pleasant, are really superfluous. Her whispered "Yes" spoke volumes.
They walked on past the house, along the country road into which the
street soon merged. When they returned, an hour later, they found
Warwick seated on the piazza, in a rocking-chair, smoking a fragrant
cigar.
"Well, children," he observed with mock severity, "you are late in
getting home from church. The sermon must have been extremely long."
"We have been attending an after-meeting," replied Tryon joyfully, "and
have been discussing an old text, 'Little children, love one another,'
and its corollary, 'It is not good for man to live alone.' John, I am
the happiest man alive. Your sister has promised to marry me. I
should like to shake my brother's hand."
Never does one feel so strongly the universal brotherhood of man as
when one loves some other fellow's sister. Warwick sprang from his
chair and clasped Tryon's extended hand with real emotion. He knew of
no man whom he would have preferred to Tryon as a husband for his
sister.
"My dear George--my dear sister," he exclaimed, "I am very, very glad.
I wish you every happiness. My sister is the most fortunate of women."
"And I am the luckiest of men," cried Tryon.
"I wish you every happiness," repeated Warwick; adding, with a touch of
solemnity, as a certain thought, never far distant, occurred to him, "I
hope that neither of you may ever regret your choice."
Thus placed upon the footing of an accepted lover, Tryon's visits to
the house became more frequent. He wished to fix a time for the
marriage, but at this point Rena developed a strange reluctance.
"Can we not love each other for a while?" she asked. "To be engaged is
a pleasure that comes but once; it would be a pity to cut it too short."
"It is a pleasure that I would cheerfully dispense with," he replied,
"for the certainty of possession. I want you all to myself, and all the
time. Things might happen. If I should die, for instance, before I
married you"--
"Oh, don't suppose such awful things," she cried, putting her hand over
his mouth.
He held it there and kissed it until she pulled it away.
"I should consider," he resumed, completing the sentence, "that my life
had been a failure."
"If I should die," she murmured, "I should die happy in the knowledge
that you had loved me."
"In three weeks," he went on, "I shall have finished my business in
Clarence, and there will be but one thing to keep me here. When shall
it be? I must take you home with me."
"I will let you know," she replied, with a troubled sigh, "in a week
from to-day."
"I'll call your attention to the subject every day in the mean time,"
he asserted. "I shouldn't like you to forget it."
Rena's shrinking from the irrevocable step of marriage was due to a
simple and yet complex cause. Stated baldly, it was the consciousness
of her secret; the complexity arose out of the various ways in which it
seemed to bear upon her future. Our lives are so bound up with those
of our fellow men that the slightest departure from the beaten path
involves a multiplicity of small adjustments. It had not been
difficult for Rena to conform her speech, her manners, and in a measure
her modes of thought, to those of the people around her; but when this
readjustment went beyond mere externals and concerned the vital issues
of life, the secret that oppressed her took on a more serious aspect,
with tragic possibilities. A discursive imagination was not one of her
characteristics, or the danger of a marriage of which perfect frankness
was not a condition might well have presented itself before her heart
had become involved. Under the influence of doubt and fear acting upon
love, the invisible bar to happiness glowed with a lambent flame that
threatened dire disaster.
"Would he have loved me at all," she asked herself, "if he had known
the story of my past? Or, having loved me, could he blame me now for
what I cannot help?"
There were two shoals in the channel of her life, upon either of which
her happiness might go to shipwreck. Since leaving the house behind
the cedars, where she had been brought into the world without her own
knowledge or consent, and had first drawn the breath of life by the
involuntary contraction of certain muscles, Rena had learned, in a
short time, many things; but she was yet to learn that the innocent
suffer with the guilty, and feel the punishment the more keenly because
unmerited. She had yet to learn that the old Mosaic formula, "The sins
of the fathers shall be visited upon the children," was graven more
indelibly upon the heart of the race than upon the tables of Sinai.
But would her lover still love her, if he knew all? She had read some
of the novels in the bookcase in her mother's hall, and others at
boarding-school. She had read that love was a conqueror, that neither
life nor death, nor creed nor caste, could stay his triumphant course.
Her secret was no legal bar to their union. If Rena could forget the
secret, and Tryon should never know it, it would be no obstacle to
their happiness. But Rena felt, with a sinking of the heart, that
happiness was not a matter of law or of fact, but lay entirely within
the domain of sentiment. We are happy when we think ourselves happy,
and with a strange perversity we often differ from others with regard
to what should constitute our happiness. Rena's secret was the worm in
the bud, the skeleton in the closet.
"He says that he loves me. He DOES love me. Would he love me, if he
knew?" She stood before an oval mirror brought from France by one of
Warwick's wife's ancestors, and regarded her image with a coldly
critical eye. She was as little vain as any of her sex who are endowed
with beauty. She tried to place herself, in thus passing upon her own
claims to consideration, in the hostile attitude of society toward her
hidden disability. There was no mark upon her brow to brand her as
less pure, less innocent, less desirable, less worthy to be loved, than
these proud women of the past who had admired themselves in this old
mirror.
"I think a man might love me for myself," she murmured pathetically,
"and if he loved me truly, that he would marry me. If he would not
marry me, then it would be because he didn't love me. I'll tell George
my secret. If he leaves me, then he does not love me."
But this resolution vanished into thin air before it was fully
formulated. The secret was not hers alone; it involved her brother's
position, to whom she owed everything, and in less degree the future of
her little nephew, whom she had learned to love so well. She had the
choice of but two courses of action, to marry Tryon or to dismiss him.
The thought that she might lose him made him seem only more dear; to
think that he might leave her made her sick at heart. In one week she
was bound to give him an answer; he was more likely to ask for it at
their next meeting.