The eight years that followed were full of events for Tredennis. After
the first two his name began to be well known in military circles as
that of a man bold, cool, and remarkable for a just clear-sightedness
which set him somewhat apart from most men of his class and age.
Stationed as he was in the midst of a hostile Indian country, full of
perilous adventure, a twofold career opened itself before him. His
nerve, courage, and physical endurance rendered him invaluable in time
of danger, while his tendency to constant study of the problems
surrounding him gave him in time of peace the distinction of being a
thinking man, whose logically deduced and clearly stated opinions were
continually of use to those whose positions were more responsible than
his own. He never fell into the ordinary idle routine of a frontier camp
life. In his plain, soldierly quarters he worked hard, lived simply, and
read much. During the first year he was rather desolate and unhappy. The
weeks he had spent with the Herricks had been by no means the best
preparation for his frontier experience, since they had revealed to him
the possibilities of existence such as he had given no thought to
before. His youth had been rather rigorous and lonely, and his
misfortune of reserve had prevented his forming any intimate
friendships. His boyhood had been spent at boarding-school, his early
manhood at West Point, and after that his life had settled itself into
the usual wandering, homeless groove which must be the lot of an
unmarried military man. The warm atmosphere of a long-established home,
its agreeably unobtrusive routine which made the changes of morning,
noon, and night all something pleasant to anticipate; the presence of
the women who could not be separated in one's mind from the household
itself,--all these things were a sort of revelation to him. He had
enjoyed them, and would have felt some slight sadness in leaving them,
even if he had not left something else also. It was a mere shadow he had
left, but it was a shadow whose memory haunted him through many a long
and lonely hour, and was all the more a trouble through its very
vagueness. He was not the man likely to become the victim of a hopeless
passion in three weeks. His was a nature to awaken slowly, but to awaken
to such strength of feeling and to such power to suffer, at last, as
would leave no alternative between happiness and stolidly borne despair.
If fate decreed that the despair and not the happiness was to be his
portion, it would be borne silently and with stern patience, but it
would be despair nevertheless. As it was, he had been gradually aroused
to a vague tenderness of feeling for the brightness and sweetness which
had been before him day after day. Sometimes, during this first year of
his loneliness, he wondered why he had not gone farther and reached the
point of giving some expression to what he had felt; but he never did so
without being convinced by his after reflections that such an effort
would only have told against him.
"It wasn't the time," he said aloud to himself, as he sat in his lonely
room one night. "It wasn't the time."
He had been thinking of how she looked as she came to him that night, in
her simple pale-gray dress, with the little lace kerchief tied round her
throat. That, and his memory of the bright figure at the carriage-door,
were pictures which had a habit of starting up before him now and again,
though chiefly at such times as he was alone and rather feeling his
isolation.
He remembered his own feeling at her girlish pleasure in his gift, the
tone of her voice, her attitude as she sat afterward on the low seat
near him, her chin resting in her hollowed palm, her smiling eyes
uplifted to his. Her pretty, unstudied attitudes had often struck him,
and this one lingered in his fancy as somehow belonging naturally to a
man's dreams of a fireside.
"If the room and fireside were your own," he said, abstractedly, "you'd
like"--
He stopped, and, rising to his feet, suddenly began to pace the room.
"But it wasn't the time," he said. "She would not have understood--I
scarcely understood myself--and if we should ever meet again, in all
probability the time will have gone by."
After such thoughts he always betook himself to his books again with
quite a fierce vigor, and in the rebound accomplished a great deal.
He gave a great deal of studious attention to the Indian question, and,
in his determination to achieve practical knowledge, undertook more than
one dangerous adventure. With those among the tribes whom it was
possible to approach openly he made friends, studying their languages
and establishing a reputation among them for honor and good faith, which
was a useful element in matters of negotiation and treaty.
So it came about that his name was frequently mentioned in "the
Department," and drifted into the newspapers, his opinions being quoted
as opinions carrying weight, and, in an indirect way, the Herricks heard
of him oftener than he heard of them, since there had been no regular
exchange of letters between them, the professor being the poorest of
correspondents. Occasionally, when he fell upon a newspaper paragraph
commenting upon Tredennis' work and explaining some of his theories, he
was roused to writing him a letter of approval or argument, and at the
close of such epistles he usually mentioned his daughter in a fashion
peculiarly his own.
"Bertha is happier than ever," he said, the first winter. "Bertha is
well, and is said to dance, in the most astonishingly attractive manner,
an astonishing number of times every evening. This I gather not only
from her mother, but from certain elaborately ornamented cards they call
programmes, which I sometimes find and study in private,"--this came the
second winter. The third he said: "It dawns upon Bertha that she is
certainly cleverer than the majority of her acquaintance. This at once
charms and surprises her. She is careful not to obtrude the fact upon
public notice, but it has been observed; and I find she has quite a
little reputation 'in society' as an unusually bright and ready young
creature, with a habit of being delightfully equal to any occasion. I
gradually discover her to be full of subtleties, of which she is
entirely unconscious."
Tredennis read this a number of times, and found food for reflection in
it. He thought it over frequently during the winter, and out of his
pondering upon it grew a plan which began to unfold itself in his mind,
rather vaguely at first, but afterward more definitely. This plan was
his intention to obtain leave of absence, and, having obtained it, to
make his way at once to Washington.
He had thought at first of applying for it in the spring, but fate was
against him. Difficulties which broke out between the settlers and
certain hostile tribes called him into active service, and it was not
until the severities of the next winter aided in quelling the
disturbance by driving the Indians into shelter that he found himself
free again.
It was late on New Year's Eve that he went to his quarters to write his
application for furlough. He had been hard at work all day, and came in
cold and tired, and pleased to find the room made cheerful by a great
fire of logs, whose leaping flames brightened and warmed every corner.
The mail had come in during his absence, and two or three letters lay
upon the table with the eastern papers, but he pushed them aside without
opening them.
"I will look at them afterward," he said. "This shall be done
first--before the clock strikes twelve. When the New Year comes in"--
He paused, pen in hand, accidentally catching a glimpse of his face in
the by no means flattering shaving-glass which hung on the wall
opposite. He saw himself brown with exposure, bearing marks of thought
and responsibility his age did not warrant, and wearing even at this
moment the rather stern and rigid expression which he had always felt
vaguely to be his misfortune. Recognizing it, his face relaxed into a
half-smile.
"What a severe-looking fellow!" he said. "_That_ must be improved upon.
No one could stand that. It is against a man at the outset."
And the smile remained upon his face for at least ten seconds--at all
events until he had drawn his paper before him and begun to write. His
task was soon completed. The letter written, he folded it, placed it in
its envelope and directed it, looking as immovable as ever, and yet
conscious of being inwardly more moved than he had ever been before.
"Perhaps," he said, half-aloud, "_this_ is the time, and it is well I
waited."
And then he turned to the letters and papers awaiting him.
The papers he merely glanced over and laid aside; the letters he opened
and read. There were four of them, three of them business epistles, soon
disposed of; the sight of the handwriting upon the fourth made his heart
bound suddenly,--it was the clear, space-saving calligraphy of Professor
Herrick, who labelled his envelopes as economically as if they had been
entomological specimens.
"It's curious that it should have come now," Tredennis said, as he tore
it open.
It was a characteristic letter, written, it appeared, with the object of
convincing Tredennis that he had been guilty of a slight error in one of
his statements concerning the sign-language of a certain tribe. It
devoted five pages of closely-written paper to proofs and researches
into the subject, and scientific reasons for the truth of all assertions
made. It was clear, and by no means uninteresting. The professor never
was uninteresting, and he was generally correct. Tredennis read his
arguments carefully and with respect, even with an occasional thrill, as
he remembered how his communications usually terminated.
But this was an exception to the general rule. At the bottom of the
fifth page he signed himself, "Your sincere friend, Nathan Herrick." And
he had said nothing about Bertha.
"Not a word," said Tredennis. "He never did so before. What does it
mean? Not a word!"
And he had scarcely finished speaking before he saw that on the back of
the last page a postscript was written,--a brief one, three words,
without comment, these: "Bertha is married."
For a few moments Tredennis sat still and stared at them. The glass
across the room reflected very little change in his face. The immovable
look became a trifle more immovable, if anything. There was scarcely the
stirring of a muscle.
At length he moved slowly, folding the letter carefully and returning it
to its envelope in exactly the folds it had lain in when he took it out.
After that he rose and began to pace the floor with a slow and heavy
tread. Once he stopped and spoke, looking down at the boards beneath his
feet.
"Bertha is married," he said, in a low, hard voice. And the clock
beginning to strike at the moment, he listened until it ended its stroke
of twelve, and then spoke again.
"The New Year," he said; "and Bertha is married."
And he walked to the table where his letter of application lay, and,
taking it up, tore it in two and tossed it into the fire.
Four years elapsed before he saw Washington, and in the four years he
worked harder than before, added to his reputation year by year, and led
the unsettled and wandering existence which his profession entailed. At
rare intervals he heard from the professor, and once or twice, in the
course of his wanderings, he met with Washingtonians who knew the family
and gave him news of them. He heard of the death of Mrs. Herrick and
something of Bertha's life from the professor, and, on one occasion,
while in Chicago, he encountered at the house of an acquaintance a
pretty and charming woman who had lived in Washington before her
marriage, and, in the course of conversation, the fact that she had
known the Herricks revealed itself. She appeared not only to have known
but to have liked them, and really brightened and warmed when they were
mentioned.
"I was very fond of Bertha," she said, "and we knew each other as well
as girls can know each other in the rush of a Washington winter. I was
one of her bridesmaids when she was married. Did you know her well?"
And she regarded him with an additional touch of interest in her very
lovely eyes.
"Not very well," Tredennis answered. "We are distantly related to each
other, and I spent several weeks in her father's house just after her
return from school; but I did not know her so well as I knew the
professor."
"And you did not meet Mr. Amory?"
"There was no Mr. Amory then," was Tredennis's reply.
"Of course not," said Mrs. Sylvestre. "I might have known that if I had
thought for a moment. He only appeared upon the scene the winter before
they were married. She met him at a ball at the Mexican minister's, and
his fate was sealed."
Tredennis was silent a moment. Then he asked a question.
"Did you know him well?" he said.
She reflected an instant, and then replied, smiling:
"He was too much in love for one's acquaintance with him to progress to
any great extent. His condition was something like David Copperfield's
when he said that he was 'saturated with Dora.' He was saturated with
Bertha."
"They must be very happy," remarked Tredennis, and he did not know that
he spoke in a hard and unresponsive tone, and that his face was more
stern than was at all necessary.
"Naturally," responded Mrs. Sylvestre, calmly. "They have money, their
children are charming, and their social position is unassailable. Bertha
is very clever, and Mr. Amory admires her and is very indulgent. But he
could scarcely help that. She is that kind of person."
"She?" repeated Tredennis.
Mrs. Sylvestre smiled again.
"Bertha," she replied. "People are always indulgent with her. She is one
of those fortunate persons who are born without any tendency to demand,
and who consequently have everything given to them without the trouble
of having a struggle. She has a pretty, soft sort of way, and people
stand aside before it. Before I knew her well I used to think it was
simply cleverness."
"Wasn't it?" said Tredennis.
"Not quite. It escapes that by being constitutional amiability and
grace; but if it wasn't constitutional amiability and grace it would be
cleverness, and you would resent it. As it is, you like her for it. She
is pretty and charming, and has her little world at her feet, and yet
her manner is such that you find yourself wondering if she even suspects
it."
"Does she?" asked Tredennis.
Mrs. Sylvestre turned her attention to the other side of the room.
"There is Mr. Sylvestre," she said, serenely. "He is coming to us. You
must know each other."
And then Mr. Sylvestre sauntered up. He was a very handsome man, with a
rather languid air, which remotely suggested that if he took off his
manners and folded them away he would reveal the unadorned fact that he
was bored. But even he bestirred himself a little when Tredennis'
relationship to the Herricks was mentioned.
"What!" he said. "You are Mrs. Amory's cousin?"
"Only third or fourth," responded Tredennis.
"By Jove! You're in luck!" his new acquaintance returned. "Third or
fourth is near enough. I wouldn't object to sixth, myself. Do you see
her often?"
"I have not seen her for seven years."
Mr. Sylvestre bestowed a critical glance upon him.
"What's the matter with you?" he inquired, languidly. "There's something
radically wrong about a man who neglects his opportunities in that way."
He paused and smiled, showing his white teeth through his mustache. "Oh,
she's a clever little dev"--He pulled himself up with remarkable
adroitness. "She's very clever," he said. "She's delightfully clever."
"She must be," commented Tredennis, unenthusiastically. "I never hear
her mentioned without its being added that she is very clever."
"You would be likely to find the thing out for yourself when you met
her--even if you hadn't heard it," said Mr. Sylvestre.
When Tredennis returned to his room that night he sat down to read,
deliberately choosing a complicated work which demanded the undivided
attention of the peruser. He sat before it for half an hour, with bent
brow and unyielding demeanor; but at the end of that time he pushed it
aside, left his seat, and began to pace the floor, and so walked with a
gloomy face until it was long past midnight when he put out the light
and went to bed.