"Here they are!"
The low exclamation, fraught with delight and ill-suppressed
impatience--genuine and artless as a child's--drew Mr. Wyllys to
join Jessie's lookout at the window.
The road and church-yard were full of the retiring crowd, and a
group of three persons was at the wicket-gate. A white-haired man,
of dignified and benign presence, bowed somewhat under the weight of
his threescore years and ten, walked with his arm about the
shoulders of one youthful and erect, who retarded his gait to suit
the measured tread of his companion.
"Stand back! don't let him see you until he comes in!" ordered
Jessie; and Mr. Wyllys retreated without having made other
observation of the lady at Mr. Kirke's side, save that she was of
medium height and neatly dressed.
Mr. Fordham's face brightened with pleasure and amazement at sight
of the figure standing at the head of Jessie's sofa.
"Orrin! you here?"
"In body and in spirit, Roy!"
Jessie's eyes were busy, as their hands lingered in the hearty clasp
of greeting.
"What a contrast!" she thought, 'twixt pity for the one and
exultation in the other.
The epithet most aptly descriptive of Roy Fordham's features and
bearing was "manly." The broad brow; the hazel eyes, rather deeply
set, that looked straight into those of the person with whom he
talked; the resolute mouth and square chin; his upright carriage,
stalwart frame, and firm step--all deserved it. His height did not
equal that of his cousin, but he seemed taller until they stood side
by side. Without relinquishing the visitor's hand, he turned, with
serious courtesy that became him well, to the lady who had entered
with him.
"Miss Kirke, allow me to present my friend and relative, Mr.
Wyllys!"
It was a formally worded introduction, for Miss Kirke was
punctilious in these matters. She bent her head graciously, but with
no effusive cordiality such as had gushed forth in her sister's
welcome to one with whose name she was pleasantly familiar.
"We are happy to see any friend of Mr. Fordham in our home," she
said in a clear monotone that accorded perfectly with her calm face
and reposeful demeanor. "My father, Mr. Wyllys!"
The back of the latter was to the lounge when Miss Kirke had
committed him to the host's care, and betaken herself to some other
part of the house; but he knew that Roy was bending over his
betrothed, smiling tender reproach into eyes that filled with happy,
foolish tears at his query--"Have you been very lonely?"
"Not at all! I have enjoyed the morning intensely. I could see into
the church very plainly, and hear much that was said. It was almost
as good as going myself."
"I told you you would be reconciled to the disappointment by noon."
"But not in the way you meant!"
The wilful ring was in the voice, loving as it was.
Mr. Wyllys' visage was a model of bland deference, and his answers
to Mr. Kirke's remarks pertinent, the while he was reflecting,--"You
are likely to have lively work on your hands, my good cousin, with
your Kate. I should hardly have cast the part of Petruchio for you,
either."
"I think I will have mine brought to me here, to-day!" he heard
Jessie say, softly, when dinner was announced.
Roy's reply was to lift her in his arms and carry her across the
hall to the dining-room, where one side of the table was taken up by
a settee heaped with cushions. She pouted and laughed as he laid her
down among these.
"I believe you imagine that I am losing moral volition as well as
bodily strength! I have taken my meals in this _a la_ fairy princess
style for seven days," she added, to Mr. Wyllys, when they were all
seated--"have personated Cleopatra and Mrs. Skewton to my own
content and my friends' amusement. I find it so comfortable that I
shall regret the recovery which will doom me to straight-backed
chairs, drawn up in line of battle against the table. If you want
to know the fulness and delight of the term, _dolce far niente_,
practise clumsy climbing among our steep hills, and the fates may
send you a sprained ankle--a not intolerable prelude to a month of
such luxurious indolence and infinitude of spoiling as I am now
enjoying."
"The indolence and the petting, might be less to his taste than they
are to yours," replied her father, indulgently.
"Don't you believe it!" said Jessie, with a saucy flash of her great
eyes across the table at the guest. "I have a notion that both would
be altogether to his liking. Unless I am mistaken, he has had
Benjamin's share of these luxuries already."
"You have been telling tales out of school, Roy!" said his cousin,
threateningly, as Mr. Fordham laughed.
Jessie anticipated the reply.
"You are wrong--and the accusation is unflattering to my perceptive
powers. You betray your ease-loving propensities in every motion and
accent. Don't frown at me, Euna! I am complimenting him, although he
may not suspect it. Indolence--not laziness, mind! but the graceful
_laisser-faire_ which sometimes approximates the sublime--is the
least appreciated of the social arts." Mr. Wyllys answered by a
quotation:
"'Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil--the shore
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean.'"
"The gospel of ease, of which Tennyson is the apostle!" said Roy.
"Sleep is never sweeter than when it comes to the laboring man, nor
is the shore so welcome to him who never leaves it, as it is to the
mariner who has gained it by toiling through the deep mid-ocean."
Jessie made a dissenting gesture.
"_Le jeu--vaut-il la chandelle?_"
"Yes--if rest and ease be the chief goods of life," was the
rejoinder.
It was made gently and affectionately, but Jessie appealed to Mr.
Wyllys, in whimsical vexation.
"Wouldn't anybody know that he is a college professor? He is a
merciless logician, and logic was always a bore to me. I don't know
the difference between a syllogism and a sequence. Poor Euna! what a
fearful trial she had in her pupil!"
"You use the past tense, I observe!" Mr. Wyllys remarked, demurely.
Everybody was tempted to badinage in talking with her.
"Because my days of nominal pupilage are over. The trial remains in
full force."
"_You_ may say that, my dear." Mr. Kirke laid a caressing hand upon
her head. "Your sister and I would hear the slander from no one
else."
Miss Kirke said nothing,--only smiled in a slow, bright way,
peculiarly her own. While Jessie could not speak without action, the
blood leaping to cheek and lip as did the fire to her eye and ready
retort to her tongue, her sister sat, serene and fair, observant of
every want of those about her, graceful in hospitality, hurried in
nothing, careful in all she said and did. She must have been
twenty-five years old, Wyllys decided, but she would look as young
at forty, after the manner of these calm-pulsed blondes. The soft
brown hair was put plainly back from her temples; her features were
like her father's, Greek in outline, but more delicately chiselled;
her eyes were placid mirrors--not changeful depths. Her dress was a
dun tissue that yet looked cooler than Jessie's muslin, and her lace
collar was underlaid and tied in front with blue ribbon. Mr. Wyllys
had an eye--and a critically correct one--for feminine attire, down
to the minutest details, and he approved of hers as befitting her
age, position, and style.
He noted, moreover, with surprise and approval, that there was not a
touch of rusticity in the appointments of the table and the bill of
fare. Old-fashioned silver, massive and shining; china that nearly
equalled it in value, and cut-glass of the same date, were set out
with tasteful propriety upon a damask cloth, thick, snowy, and
glossy, and ironed in an arabesque pattern. From the clear soup, to
the ice-cream, syllabubs, and frosted cake which were the dessert,
each dish bespoke intelligent and elegant housewifery. Yet the only
servant he saw was the lumpish girl who had admitted him. She
removed and set on dishes without a blunder, decent and prim in a
white cape-apron, directed, Mr. Wyllys was sure, in every movement,
by the mistress' eyes, unperturbed as these seemed.
Crude brilliancy--mature repose--thus he described the general
characteristics of the sisters' behavior, by the time the meal was
over. Both were strong, both women of intellect and culture. One was
as self-contained as the other was impulsive. He had never
before--and his acquaintance with the various phases of American
society was extensive--met the peer of either in farm-house or
country parsonage.
"I should as soon have looked for rare orchids in a daisy-field,"
was his figure.
The cousins went out for a walk in the afternoon, a ramble that led
them by a zig-zag path, to the summit of Old Windbeam. They had
climbed the hugest boulder of his knobby forehead, and sat upon it
in the shadow of a low-spreading cedar, smoking the cigar of
contentment, and surveying at their leisure the magnificent panorama
unrolled beneath them, when Orrin laid his hand upon his friend's
knee, with a half laugh that had in it a quiver of wounded
affection.
"Why have you left me to find all this out for myself, old fellow?
Did you doubt my sympathy, or my discretion?"
Roy did not turn his head, but his fingers closed strongly and
lingeringly upon his cousin's.
"I doubted neither. There was nothing I could tell you until very
lately. I came to Dundee, last September, to pass my vacation at the
hotel in the village below. There were excellent hunting and fishing
hereabouts, I had been told, and I brought letters of introduction
to Mr. Kirke from Dr. Meriden and Professor Blythe, who were his
college friends. Before my return to Hamilton, I asked and obtained
his permission to correspond with his younger daughter, confiding to
him my ulterior motive for the request. He consented and kept my
secret. Our letters were such as friends might exchange, and mine
were usually read aloud to her father and sister. When I reappeared
here at the beginning of our intermediate vacation ten days ago, she
received me without suspicion or embarrassment. She never knew what
my real feelings toward her were until last week--the day of the
accident. We were walking together when she slipped and fell. In the
alarm of the moment, for she nearly fainted with the pain, and I
thought the hurt far more serious than it afterward proved to be, I
spoke words that could not be misunderstood nor recalled. Not that I
would recall them! They secured for me the great blessing of my
life."
His voice changed here. Up to this sentence the story was a quiet
recitative he might have learned by rote, and uttered at the bidding
of one he felt had a right to hear it. The lack of spontaneity did
not offend the auditor. He appreciated his cousin's richer and
fuller nature sufficiently to understand that the most abundant
springs of affection and passion lay too far below the surface to be
easily forced into view. He saw, too, that the confession of his
wooing and winning was made with pain; that the spirit to whose
exceeding delicacy of texture and sentiment few did justice, shrank
from the revelation, even to his nearest of kin. He doubted not that
when the "alarm" of which Roy had spoken, cleft the sealed stone,
the hidden waters leaped to the light with power that swept reserve,
humility and expediency before them; that Jessie had listened to
pleadings more fervent, to vows more solemn than are poured into the
ear of one in ten thousand of her sex.
"Does she recognize this truth?" he speculated within himself.
"Or does she--the petted darling of an old man and an only
sister--receive all this as the tribute due her charms? account her
flippant talk, flashing eyes, and schoolgirlish arts an equitable
exchange for this man's whole being and life?"
His tact was marvellous to womanliness. His tone took its key from
that which last met his ear;--was slightly tremulous--purposely
subdued.
"Thank you for allowing me to share in your new happiness! I need
not tell you how heartily I congratulate you--how fervent is my wish
that your wedded life may be all sunshine. I believe the lady of
your choice to be worthy of your regard. I am sure she will have the
best husband in the land."
Roy gripped his hand hard.
"You are kind to say it. It is a step I might well tremble to
take--this asking a young girl who has lived in an atmosphere of
love and indulgence, and known care only by hearsay, to share my
toils, to divide with me the burden of whatever sorrow Providence
may send me in discipline or judgment; to endure my caprices, be
patient with my faults--be loving through and above all."
Orrin held down his head to hide a smile.
"I am continually reminded when the theme of our discourse is 'dear,
delightful woman,' of what Willis says of his chum in his 'Slingsby
Papers': 'It is seldom one meets with a spark of genuine chivalric
fire nowadays. Job lit his daily pipe with it.' If another lover
were to talk to me as you do, I should accuse him of rank
affectation. I believe you feel all you say. Miss Kirke should be a
proud and happy woman."
"She cannot abide that title," said Roy, smiling. "And, indeed, it
suits her as ill as it sits well upon Eunice."
"Is that the elder sister? I thought she was 'Una.' _That_ would be
a fitting name for the chaste beauty. I glanced down, involuntarily,
for the tamed lion couchant beneath her chair, when Miss Jessie
spoke it."
"She is 'Eunice' to everybody else. They had not the same mother,
and there is a difference of ten years in their ages. The first Mrs.
Kirke was, I judge, a sedate pastoress who looked well after her
household and her husband's flock. Her praise is still in the
churches of this region. She died when the little Eunice was at the
age of five. Four years afterward, Mr. Kirke brought to the manse a
beautiful woman--city born and bred, refined, accomplished, and
delicate. She fell into ill-health very soon. Bland as this climate
seems to us who live so much further North, it was harsh to her. She
was a South Carolinian, and her fondness for her old home grew into
longing during her residence among these mountains. Her invalidism
became confirmed after the birth of her babe. In memory of the sunny
bowers in which her girlhood had been passed, she gave it the
fanciful--you may think fantastic--name of Jessamine."
"It is odd, but pretty, and it suits her."
"Her fondness for the vine and fashion of wearing the flower may
appear to you and to others a girlish whim. In reality, they are the
motherless child's tribute to the memory of the parent whom she
recollects with fondest devotion, although she was but five years
old at her death."
"She told me she had known no home but this valley. The sisters were
not educated in the country, I take it?"
"The elder graduated with distinction at Bethlehem. It was her
mother's dying request that she should, at a suitable age, be sent
to the Moravian Seminary at that place. She was thorough and
conscientious in her studies, as in everything else, cultivating her
talents for music and modern languages with especial diligence
that, as she has told me, 'it might not be necessary to send little
Jessie from home to school.' The younger sister has had no teachers
except Eunice and their father, who is a fine classical scholar."
"And a man of far more than ordinary ability, I should suppose. Why
has he buried himself alive in this out-of-the-world region?"
"Because he is essentially unworldly, I imagine. He has here ample
opportunity for study, and he loves his books next to his children.
Then, his attachment to the parsonage and to his people is strong.
'I was ambitious of distinction in my profession, once,' he said to
me the other day, 'but that was before my wife's death.' It may
sound like exaggerated sentiment, but I believe he means to live and
die in sight of her grave. I have learned from Eunice something
about his love for her, and his grief at her death.
"I have given you this sketch of the family history that you may
better comprehend what passes in the household. My lodgings are at
the hotel, as are yours, but most of our time will, of course, be
spent at the Parsonage. I want you to know and like them
all--particularly Jessie. It may be that you can be of service to
her while I am abroad."
"What does she say to that scheme?"
"I have said nothing to her about it. I dread the task!" Roy looked
very grave. "Her father agrees with me that it is wiser to be silent
on the subject until my plans are definitely laid. I would prolong
the clear shining of her day while I can."
He arose, apparently anxious to dismiss the subject. "We must go!
Eunice's tea-table is ready at sunset."
"He cannot trust himself to discuss this matter of their
separation," said Orrin, inly, following the rapid stride of his
thoughtful cousin down the mountain. "One tear from his pert
Amaryllis would reverse his decision at this, the eleventh hour.
'Lord! what fools these _lovers_ be!'"
The manse meadows were gained by a rustic foot-bridge spanning the
creek which skirted these. Two young men, whom Mr. Wyllys rightly
supposed to be members of the "Committee upon Orator of the Day,"
were waiting here to speak to Mr. Fordham, probably to solicit a
copy of his address for publication, the considerate kinsman further
surmised, and sauntered on to the garden, leaving the other to
follow when he would. Lingering among the fragrant borders,
momentarily expecting Roy to rejoin him, he lost himself in a rose
labyrinth, so affluent of bloom and odor, that he did not know where
he was until warned of his proximity to the oriel-window by Jessie's
voice. Through a crevice in the creepers, he could see her lounge
set in the spacious recess, and the back of her head as she raised
it to speak to some one within the room.
"Roy described him as _distingue_ and fascinating!" she said, in an
accent of chagrin. "I call him positively homely! Don't you?"
Orrin should have moved--assured as he was that he was the subject
of unflattering remark. In his code, this was a reason why he should
remain acquiescent and hearken for more. Perhaps others who make
higher pretensions to the minor moralities would have done likewise.
"He is not handsome, certainly," returned Miss Kirke.
"You are disposed to be unreasonable because your expectations were
unduly raised."
"By his cousin who told me he was the most popular man in
Hamilton--one of the glass-of-fashion and mould-of-form kind, you
know," continued Jessie, in increasing vexation. "Am I to be blamed
if I lose at least the outposts of my temper when, having expected
an Adonis, I behold--"
"A gentleman!" Her sister finished the sentence. "Since he is that,
dear, and Mr. Fordham's cousin, he should be safe from our
criticism. At least, while he is our guest."
There was a pause before Jessie spoke again.
"Darling Euna! are you displeased with me?" she said coaxingly. "I
was cross and unladylike, I acknowledge. I ought not to--I did not
expect that he would be Roy's equal in appearance or manner, but I
am grievously disappointed."
"Not to be outdone in generous candor, I own that I am, also," was
the reply.
The elder sister approached the window as she said it; and Mr.
Wyllys effected a skilful retreat.
The labyrinth had its terminus in a matted arbor near the
church-yard fence. Sitting down in this, the subject of the recent
discussion indulged himself in a hearty but noiseless fit of
laughter.