’TWIXT LOVE AND HATE.
When Desha was gone, Viola threw herself down among her cushions,
actually sobbing aloud in her weakness.
Aunt Edwina exclaimed in alarm:
“There now, you have worked yourself into a nervous spell, talking over
your accident. So I must give you some more of the drops the doctor
left you.”
“Yes, please do! I feel wretchedly ill and nervous!” exclaimed the
young girl; and when her aunt had left the room, she cried out aloud:
“What a cold-hearted wretch! I thought he was getting fond of me!
And I--I--thought a great deal of him--more than Florian would like,
perhaps, if he knew; but now I believe I hate the wretch more than I
ever did before!”
And the angry tears almost blistered her fair cheeks, for the visitor’s
seeming indifference had cut deep.
She was cruelly wounded, for she had cherished a private conviction
that he was yielding to her fascinations, and the belief made her very
happy, though she had not acknowledged to her own heart yet that she
found him more attractive than any man she had ever met, Florian not
excepted.
How much pique and vanity had to do with her emotion it is hard to say.
If Desha had yielded weakly to her sway, she might have despised him.
We ever prize the unattainable. It is
“The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the day for the morrow.”
Her capricious heart, thus repulsed by Desha’s assumed indifference,
turned back awhile to Florian with renewed tenderness, finding in his
devotion a balm for her wounded pride.
Feeling her enforced stay in the house until her strength returned most
irksome, she welcomed with pleasure the frequent fond letters of her
betrothed, though they were very despondent in tone.
Florian wrote that his father’s condition was most unsatisfactory.
His partial paralysis did not yield to treatment, and he remained in
a dying condition, which might terminate at any moment in his demise,
or there was a remote possibility of his lingering many weeks in this
unhappy state. Under the circumstances, Florian being the only son, it
was quite impossible for him to leave Carlsbad. He must remain with
his parents, divided between love and duty, his heart distracted with
anxiety and grief.
“Ah, my darling, if you would but have come with me, how much happier
I should have been!” he wrote most plaintively; adding: “Do you know
that your letter was most cruel? It was filled up with my friend Desha
and the handsome unknown who saved your life. Ah, my love, do not let
either of these men steal you from me, for the loss of you would wreck
my life! I do not care to hear about them. It is news of you, dearest,
for which my lonely heart is hungry. If you could see me looking at
your beautiful photograph and kissing it over and over, you would
pity me and write some sweet loving words to show that you have not
forgotten me in my enforced exile from your side!”
Viola’s heart was touched by the pathos of the poor fellow’s letter,
and she brought out his photograph and looked at it with tender eyes,
saying, as she often did:
“Poor fellow, how he loves me! He has a warm, true heart!”
And she thought bitterly of that cold, indifferent young statesman who
had resisted all the allurements of her beauty, and who was doubtless
wedded to his soaring ambitions.
In her bitterness at Desha, she wrote very tenderly to Florian, filling
his heart with delight, and quieting his uneasiness by saying:
“You need not be jealous of Professor Desha; I seldom see him any
more. He devotes himself to congressional affairs, and never goes into
society now, so I suppose he has forgotten my existence. As for the
young man who saved my life, he has never divulged his identity, and
does not intend to, I suppose, and I should never give him another
thought only that gratitude demands it. Ah, Florian, how I miss you
these dull days while I must stay at home and get strong! It is so
lonely that I get more time to think about my love for you. Yes, I do
love you; you need never doubt that! I look at your photograph often,
and kiss it, too, as you do mine! I think that whenever you come back I
will let you announce our engagement and set the wedding-day. I wonder
what Professor Desha will think when he hears it.”
Florian was in the seventh heaven when he received that letter.
It was the tenderest one she ever wrote him, for very soon she went
out again into society, and amid her pleasures and her engagements
had little time for letters, so that he found her a most unpunctual
correspondent, though he entreated her to write frequently to cheer his
dull days passed by the bedside of his invalid father and trying to
comfort his grieving mother.
But whenever the brevity or the carelessness of her later letters
grieved him, he turned to the sweet, tender one written under the
impetus of her resentment against Desha, and found solace in the words:
“Yes, I do love you--you need never doubt that. I look at your
photograph often, and kiss it, too, as you do mine. I think that
whenever you come back I will let you announce our engagement and set
the wedding-day.”
Such promises were certainly enough to pin a lover’s faith to, and
Florian did not doubt her after that; he only adored her more deeply,
and longed for the time of return, chafing in secret most bitterly
against the fate that kept him from her side.
So months passed away until the winter was over, and in March Mr. Gay’s
long illness ended in death, and his son was free.
It was a blessed release from severe pain suffered long, and the loving
ones who had watched by him so fondly were resigned to the affliction,
because they knew he had entered into rest at last.
Arrangements were made to convey his body to his native land for
interment, and Florian’s heart leaped with joy at the thought of seeing
his love again, and claiming the fulfillment of her sweet promises.
Of late Viola’s letters had been few and far between, and marked by a
growing coldness that sent a chill to his warm heart, especially the
last one, in which she said:
“I shall have something very important to tell you in my next letter.”
If Florian could have guessed what that important something was, it
would almost have broken his true, loving heart; but before the next
letter came he was on the ocean, _en route_ for home, whither we will
precede him in the gratification of our curiosity.