“Even so; that I should love you was inevitable, you might have foreseen that! How could I meet you day after day, be near you, be your friend, and not come to love you! I only wonder that I was able to hold my peace so long as I did!”
“Then I was not at fault, none of the blame was mine?”
“None,” he assured her; but he was white to the lips.
“Then if I am not at fault I shall never forgive you!” There was a ring of triumph in her tone. She had wished his own words to vindicate her.
“Perhaps you may. It may even come to forgiveness,” he said. “No, I shall never forget the advantage you have taken!”
“I have paid you the highest compliment I could,” he said steadily. She made him a scornful gesture, and though his cheeks burnt, he went on. “That I have loved you, that I do love you, is my right; my own unworthiness, of which you cannot be more aware than I am, has nothing to do with it.”
Understanding her as he did, he fully realized her sense of outraged decency; he could think of it as nothing else. If he had loved her less, if he had parted from any portion of his high esteem and reverence for her, he would have urged his suit, he would have appealed to her pity, her generosity, and above all he would have urged the depth and constancy of his devotion; but he felt he could make no such appeal to her; the most he could hope was that when her anger against him had somewhat abated, she would see that he had taken no advantage of her; and that she would respect him for the restraint he had until now put upon himself. He knew her better than to suppose she would ever feel flattered by the declaration he had made. Whatever her secret vanities were, and he supposed they existed, they were not of that strictly feminine character that could pardon what she had first deemed an offence, because later she found this very offence included a compliment; and he was quite certain she would never look back to that moment with any feeling even remotely approaching satisfaction. The most he dared to hope for was that they might gradually return to their former relation, where he could begin again with tireless patience to recover the ground he had foolishly lost, since he had no thought of giving her up; that never occurred to him as possible. She had become as necessary to him as the very air he breathed. He knew that for the past years he had been living for these interviews with her, which had meant so much to him, while they had meant nothing to her. At the thought that they might be denied him in the future he turned sick at heart; the possibilities of such a thing seemed to sweep away the whole purpose of existence, to rob him in a twinkling of all that made his life worth while. He was sick with the dull ache that filled his heart. It was more than the mental appreciation of an impending catastrophe; it was a definite physical anguish. But the hope that had meant so much to him in the past, came to his rescue again. What did it matter if he waited years merely for her tardy forgiveness, the whole of his life belonged to her! His tenderness and patience should be infinite; and the time must surely come when the last vestige of her anger would have faded from her heart, and they could begin anew. He told himself that this was the one great emotion he should know. But for her, he lived in a world of dull commonplace; and she, whether she were aware of it or not, without intending it, had glorified his life.
In realizing what his love meant to him, he, for the first time fully realized what her love for Stephen Landray might still mean to her. He felt endless compassion for her. How she must have suffered, and she had always shown such courage. It made her all the more desirable that her own constancy had been so fine and true.
“You must forgive me!” he said. “Think that I forgot myself, and forget if you can what I have said!”
But she had no forgiveness for him; little things she might easily overlook, or they passed her by without being even noticed, but this was a hurt that only time could heal. Her pride was a stubborn thing, and it was her pride, her very self-respect, that he had hurt.
He glanced into her face and saw how far he was from forgiveness. In the telling of his love he had roused her anger to no purpose; he had destroyed the very thing that had been her stay through all these years, and there was nothing left her! He had cheapened each sacrifice he had made; for in her eyes he had performed each service, each generous act, with the idea that it would help to win him her love; he felt he could not argue with her, the justice or the injustice of her feeling for him, there was something fixed and final in this attitude of hers.
“You must try and forgive me!” he repeated.
“I shall try,” she said.
“Which means you will fail!” he retorted bitterly.
“Am I so unjust?” she demanded haughtily.
“I wish you might see it and feel it for one moment, as I see it and feel it!” he said, with hoarse emotion. “It might move you to mercy!”
“You are asking for friendship now?” she said.
“Yes”—he hesitated—“yes, friendship.”
“Will you be content with that?”
“Can it ever be friendship after this? Will it not be less—or more?”
“Less,” she said.
“I suppose so,” he admitted dully. “It's a small matter to you; but an hour ago I would have said it was a matter of life and death to me! You suffered—you loved!”
“You have no right to speak of it!” she cried. “Because I have trusted you—” She broke off abruptly.
“And I suppose you think I have taken advantage of your trust! I did not know until now—that is, I could not have imagined that a man could so offend a woman merely by telling her that he loved her.” She did not answer him; and after a moment's silence he went on. “Can you tell me how out of the wreck I seem to have made, I can preserve some portion of your esteem? In Heaven's name, let it be friendship if it is nothing more!”
“Wait!” she said, not unkindly; and then softening, “Oh, how could you, when you knew that I trusted you; that has been the cruelest part of it!”
“It was so easy,” he said. “But we look at it from such hopelessly different points of view.”
“You are never to speak to me of this again; you are to forget what has passed to-day, and I shall try, too! You must promise me!”
But he did not answer her directly.
“So you are going to impose silence on me; isn't that a little hard? Not,” he added bitterly, “that I find myself with any inclination to anything else!”
“It is necessary if we are to meet in the future,” she said quietly.
“But isn't it an unnecessary condition?” he persisted.
Her anger toward him seemed to have passed, and his courage was reviving. He threw aside his baffling manner and said frankly: “I'm more sorry than I can say, Mrs. Landray; and you shall not find me unworthy a second time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
BENSON carried with him continually now a sense of hurt; and out of this came a certain subtle change in the very fibre of his love itself. He lost something of the spirit of worship, he seemed to be struggling for dominance. The reserve of his former attitude toward Virginia was lost. Once he had hoped to win her love, now he felt that he must compel it. He always came back to the one rankling conviction that she had been unjust; that she had allowed him to make sacrifices and to do for her in numberless ways she should not have permitted, unless she were willing to accept, not his love necessarily, but the full consequences of their intimacy, since it was perfectly incredible to him that any man could know her as he had known her, and not come to love her; he came to blame her that she had not understood.
It was not unnatural perhaps that the after effect upon Virginia of Benson's declaration was less pronounced than upon himself. Her active anger was of brief duration only, and she soon forgave him his unlucky utterances in remembering his real kindness. She would have liked him to know this; but she was sensible it would be unsafe to show it, and after all, a marked but kindly reserve was only a reasonable precaution. She was sorry for him, and his restrained manner in her presence only tended to deepen her feeling of pity; yet she considered him both a foolish and presumptuous young man.
In the first stress of her emotion she had meditated radical and salutary treatment of him. She had even thought of asking him to retire from the management of the estate; but she had decided that this would be a needless severity. When they met she was ceremoniously kind, but either Jane or Stephen was present. At first Benson had been rather inclined to smile at this; it struck him as being such a distinctly feminine maneuver; but the chaperonage when it was firmly persisted in, ended by becoming rather galling; it argued such a lack of confidence, as well as a fixed unwillingness to allow him to ever again revert to the subject which he had most at heart.
Virginia had found that even Dr. Long's select academy, with its modest fees for tuition, was out of the question; and was forced to send Stephen to the public school. At first Sam West drove him into town each morning, returning for him in the afternoon, and Benson pointed out to Virginia that when the winter actually set in these drives would be rather a hardship for the boy, and proposed that he stay with him when the weather was severe.
“Oh, no, I couldn't think of that!” said Virginia. “He would be such a care to you.”
“You leave that part of it to me, Mrs. Landray,” answered the lawyer good-naturedly.
“And I should miss him dreadfully, and he might be homesick!”
“He probably will be at first; but you'll be sending him off to college presently; this will prepare you both for that time.”
“Well, perhaps, when the roads get very bad indeed.”
After his first experience in town, Stephen carried Virginia such an enthusiastic account of his host's kindness that it won from her a grateful little letter of acknowledgment and thanks.
From the start Benson exerted a certain influence over the boy that was destined to increase with his development. The lawyer was the first man he had known of his own class; all his short life had been passed among women, they had been his companions and friends; and he slowly abandoned the reserve with which he had first met Benson's advances, until finally he talked to him almost as freely as he would have talked to Virginia herself.
If Stephen had never known men, it was equally true that Benson had never known boys, his father having made his own youth a period of the most rigorous industry; he had also been quiet and studiously inclined; the latter a characteristic which he noted Stephen did not appear to possess. He remembered that the boy's father and uncle, while they were educated men, had possessed a much greater respect for books than knowledge of them; and it impressed itself upon him that Stephen was most unlikely material from which to recruit a member of one of the learned professions. In short the boy evinced an utter and astonishing lack of curiosity concerning the lawyers well selected library which had been placed at his disposal. When Benson commented on this fact, Stephen informed him quite frankly that he didn't care for books; he had all the reading he wanted at school.
“How would you like to be a lawyer, Stephen?” Benson asked him on one occasion.
“I shouldn't like it, Mr. Benson,” he said promptly.
“Why not, Stephen?”
“I don't know, only I just know I shouldn't.”
“But you've got to do something,” urged Benson.
“I suppose so,” said the boy slowly. “My Aunt Virginia wants me to be a professional man, but I tell her that is all nonsense.”
“But to please her,” suggested Benson.
“I'd do a good deal to do that, but what I want is something out of doors. And I'd want there should be a great deal of money in it, whatever I did!”
“And if you got a great deal of money what would you do with it?” asked his host.
“Give most of it to my Aunt Virginia, and keep some for myself,” answered Stephen.
“That's a first-rate idea,” said Benson.
“They, my father and uncle, must have had a lot of money once, Mr. Benson.”
“Yes, they did—a fortune.”
The boy frowned.
“Well, I wish it hadn't been lost; then there wouldn't be this talk about my being a professional man. What are all the professions anyway, Mr. Benson?”
“The law, medicine, the ministry—”
“Oh, well, I guess I'll have to argue my Aunt Virginia out of that notion!” he said in evident low spirits.
Stephen was rather good looking and mature for his years. All his ideas, such as they were, were well thought out and definite. He was dark like his father, and had the Landray air of high breeding; indeed, his manner toward Benson was one of courteous and restrained good-fellowship, he was neither boisterous nor familiar; and the lawyer, considering those points which were most in his favour, decided that while in some respects he was only an average boy, he yet possessed certain fine possibilities of manhood, though he was forced to own he did not quite know what they were, and was dubious as to their practical value. He remembered that his father and uncle had both been exceptional men, but he would hardly have called them successful men.
If Benson's opinion of Stephen was not wholly complimentary, no doubt of the boy's capacity or brilliancy ever entered Virginia's mind. He was a Landray, and she was sure he would develop into such a man as his father had been. She felt that the future of the family rested entirely with him, and had her own ideals of what this future must be.
She had so fixed upon a profession for him that he soon ceased to combat the idea, though it was peculiarly distasteful to him; and this distaste grew as he grew, until his apathy on this one point was so great that Virginia's confidence was shaken somewhat; however, during the second winter of his attendance at the public school he delighted her by suggesting the law, since it seemed to him that with Benson's help it could be mastered with rather less personal inconvenience than any other of the professions; and probably it would be all right, but he had his doubts, still to please his aunt he was willing to make the effort; and so the law it became.
The following winter he worried through Humes's “History of England,” and then in very low spirits took up Blackstone, and felt that he was hopelessly committed; but he bravely guarded his speech that she might not know how great a sacrifice he was making.
In his fancy, speculating on his future, he saw himself as he saw Benson, digging away at his desk, among piles of papers, or delving into yellow calfskin volumes; or arguing his cases in the stuffy little court-room; or returning dusty or muddy, according to the season, from the round of the circuit courts; and this cheerless prospect filled him with a secret anguish that time in no wise abated. He did not dare tell any one what he would really have liked to do, which involved leaving home and going West; the life there, as he imagined it was the only kind of life he could think of with any degree of satisfaction. But this he knew could never be for him; so he plodded grimly on in his studies, and while he was not brilliant he wasted no time, but persevered in his uncongenial pursuits with a dogged tenacity that went far to atone for his lack of heart in his work. It would not have been so bad, if he had not felt he was surely building toward a future in which he could take no vital interest.
One day, during his fourth year in school, his teacher was called from the room, and on his return went to Stephen's desk.
“You are wanted, Landray, at home,” he said. “No, there is nothing wrong there,” he added, seeing the startled look on the boy's face. Outside in the hall Stephen found Sam West.
“What is it, Sam?” he asked anxiously.
“I don't know, but your aunt sent me in for you, she wants to see you. Wants you should go back with me right away.”
“But what is it, Sam? You're sure she is not sick?” he persisted, in vague alarm.
“No, she ain't sick; she's all right. I was in town this morning and took a letter out to her; she read it, and sent me in for you; that's all I know about it,” Sam explained.
On reaching home Stephen hurried into the library where he found Virginia waiting for him.
“There is nothing the matter with you, is there, Aunt Virginia?” he questioned anxiously. “You're not sick, are you?”
“Oh, no, dear—were you alarmed?” Virginia asked.
“Well, yes, I was!” he answered. “You see I couldn't make out why you should send for me.”
“Sit down, Stephen. I have heard from Dr. Stillman. Sam brought me the letter two hours ago.” Her manner was very gentle, and the boy saw that her eyes were red as with weeping.
“Is there anything the matter with my mother?” he asked quickly.
“Yes, dear,” said Virginia softly.
“She's sick?”
“Yes, she has been very ill, Stephen.”
He looked up into her face.
“You mean—” he began, with strange hesitancy.
“She is dead, dear. Your mother is dead.”
“Dead?” he repeated. He did not seem to understand. “When did it happen?” he asked at length.
He saw that his aunt expected some show of emotion from him, but he was conscious of no emotion beyond surprise. With the years that had intervened since her going away, his mother's letters had grown less and less frequent. She had long since ceased to write him with any regularity, and when her rare letters did reach him, they had been a burden to him rather than a pleasure. He had not known how to answer them.
“Would you like to see Dr. Stillman's letter?” Virginia asked.
He shook his head.
“No; you tell me what he says,” he replied.
“It is very brief, it was posted over four months ago. She died in upper Burmah, where she said they were going in the last letter we received from her, you remember, dear?”
He nodded slightly.
“It seems that her death was very sudden, a fever of some sort. Aren't you very, very sorry, dear?”
The inadequacy of his emotion, as she felt it, was a shock to her. “Why, yes, of course I am!” he said. “I wish I remembered her better. You'd like me to show a good deal of feeling, wouldn't you? but how can I, when I don't remember her so very well? You're the only mother I've had, you've been a real mother to me! I suppose you feel it more than I do, and you're surprised at it.”
“And you don't remember?” asked Virginia with tender pity; pity for him, and pity for the dead woman.
“Oh, yes, I do, in a way. I remember her saying good-bye and going off in the carriage. I watched her drive away from the hall window up-stairs, and you came to me there, and found me crying, you were crying, too; I remember a lot about her before that, long before that; and I remember him—the doctor, I mean. Why, I must have been a good-sized boy when they left!”
“Yes,” said Virginia sadly.
“I thought it was longer ago than that,” he muttered.
There was no use in his trying to show a grief he did not feel; his aunt would have detected the false ring if he had attempted it; yet he wondered, disquietingly, that he was so little stirred.
He never asked to see Dr. Stillman's letter, and only read it when he found that Virginia was really anxious he should; and then having read it, he returned it to her without comment beyond the words, “I don't like him!” meaning the doctor; but then, as a child, he had not liked him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
TOM BENSON, a younger brother of old Jacob Benson had emigrated to Ohio some time in the early twenties. He was a superior sort of a mechanic, and when Newton Bendy established his iron works, Tom sought and found employment with him.
He was an excellent workman, acquainted with all branches of his trade; and Bently did not disdain to acknowledge that his foreman knew more of the practical conduct of the shops than he did himself.
“But don't tell Tom Benson I said so!” he always added, when he had been dwelling on the Yankee mechanic's skill and judgment. “He don't need any boosting from me! Why, I expect he could go to Carthage to-morrow, and get double the wages I'm paying him!” But Tom Benson had no idea of going to Carthage, or anywhere else. Yet if Bently supposed that he was not aware of his own value, he was grievously mistaken in his man.
This was proved one day by his leaving his bench and walking into the office with his coat on his arm, where without waste of words he coolly proposed to Mr. Bently that he take him into partnership.
Bently, when his first surprise had somewhat abated and he had found words which he deemed adequate to the occasion, intimated that he would see him damned long before he would even vaguely entertain such an idea; whereat Tom Benson turned on his heel, merely remarking in an offhand way:
“Well, you know where to find me when you want me!”
“I sha'n'. want you, I'm done with you, Tom!” said Bently ungraciously enough.
“Oh, no, you ain't!” retorted the mechanic, slipping into his coat. “You'll want me the worst kind of a way before the month's up! Who've you got to set them engines you're making in the shops?”
“What's to hinder me from getting out and doing that job myself?” demanded Bently.
Benson laughed in his face.
“Maybe you think I can't!” cried Mr. Bendy.
“I ain't said it,” answered Benson briefly, and with that he walked out of the office.
At the end of just two weeks, work was at a standstill in the shops, and on the two most important contracts Bendy had ever been able to secure. Then he sent for Tom Benson. His messenger—it was Williams, the bookkeeper—found the mechanic in his room at his boarding-house. He was sitting by his open window in his shirtsleeves, his elbows on his knees, his chin sunk in his palms, and the stem of a short black pipe clinched between his teeth. He heard Williams quietly, then he said:
“Tell Bendy he knows where to find me when he wants to see me. I sha'n'. stir out of here for two weeks more.”
This word being conveyed to Bendy, he swore he would close the shops rather than again hold any communication with the obdurate mechanic.
“Me go to him, when it's been me paying him wages? I guess when his money's gone he'll think differently about who's to do the running back and forth! I'll quit business before I'll jump at the snapping of his fingers!”
But a week later when it seemed this was the very thing he would be forced to do, he sent his bookkeeper once again to the mechanic.
“Sort of smooth him down, Williams!” he said. “He always was a cross-grained cuss! Make him the prettiest speech you can, but fetch him back herewith you, we're just playing hell with them two jobs!”
And Williams found Tom Benson still by his open window, still in his shirt-sleeves, still with his chin in his palms, and still smoking. He interpreted Mr. Bendy's request for a speedy audience with all possible tact.
The mechanic remained unmoved.
“Bendy knows where to find me when he needs me; and don't you come back here, Williams, unless you want I should throw you down them steps.”
But Bendy waited yet another day in the hope that Tom Benson would relent, then he hurried to the mechanic's boarding-place. The latter heard him on the stairs, and as he entered the room, put out a long muscular leg and courteously kicked a chair toward him. He pointed to it with the stem of the pipe he had taken from between his teeth.
“Set down,” he said.
“What's your proposition, Tom?” demanded Bendy gruffly. “Me—oh, I ain't making none now. I'd a gone to you if I'd one to make like I done before, but your coming to me sort of made me think—” Here he broke off to ask, “How are you getting on with them engines anyhow?”
“All right,” said Bendy, with stern untruth.
“That's good,” was Benson's only comment.
“Come! what's your proposition, Tom?” urged Bendy irritably. “Oh, well, you ain' needing me so very bad, I guess you made a mistake in coming round.”
“What would you say to a fourth interest in the shops?”
“I wouldn't even say thank you,” shifting his position to spit out of the window.
“You wouldn't!”
“I wouldn't. That was to have been my proposition three weeks ago, but the parts of them engines warn't laying about the shops then, like so much scrap iron. That makes a difference.”
“I suppose you're standing off for more of an interest! Pretty underhanded of you to creep up like this!”
“Well, I'm going to stop creeping. I reckon this will set me on my legs good and fair,” and Benson grinned.
“Is it a half you're after, Tom?” demanded Bendy sourly.
“Well, yes, make it a fair half, and I'm your man!”