THE LOST DREAM.
“Bertha! Bertha!”
For a moment Waldon was beside himself—all the broad lands of Willow
Bend, the mansion gleaming with lights, and the girl who could make him
master of them, were nothing to him. He fairly hated the things for
which he had sold himself and murdered another. All his old passion for
the beautiful woman who had fled from him blazed up with a burning
thirst to reconquer her, and escape the pink and white beauty who waited
for him so impatiently on the veranda. He could see her passing in and
out through the French windows like a drifting cloud, while the other
had pushed him from her with angry, burning words, and leaped, as it
seemed, into the very depths of the river.
Waldon went close to the very edge of the water, and looked up and down
in a vain search for some boat. But he saw nothing. Bertha’s tiny craft
was sweeping down the shadows of the bank. She used no oars, but sat in
the stern with her face covered, sobbing as if her heart would break,
and whispering to herself:
“He loves me yet! he loves me yet!”
Had Waldon caught one glimpse of the boat, he might have followed it,
for difficulties always made him rash; but he saw nothing, and believed,
for a while, that Bertha had drowned herself to escape the rude caresses
with which she might have deemed herself insulted. Shocked by the fear,
he fell upon his knees and sobbed like a girl.
A faint sound from the river brought Waldon to his feet again. Lydia had
taken up the oars, and down through the rippling silver of the moonlight
that little craft was going, with arrowy speed, carrying Bertha away
from him through that path of light, while he stood his old self again,
wondering at the sudden passion that had so nearly swept him away from
the path he had laid out for his future.
Waldon strode into the moonlight, and walked up and down the bank,
congratulating himself that this one great temptation had been broken up
by the girls own act. He looked, out upon the noble landscape over which
the dew glittered like a mantle of jewels; groves, pastures, off-lying
farms and houses for working men, stretched up and down the river,
glorified by floating mist that grew luminous in the moonlight. His
vision could not reach the extent of property that might be his in
exchange for the girl who had just left him.
“Fool! fool!” he exclaimed, sneering at his better self, “for so many
idiotic minutes, while the thrill of her voice, and the glamour of her
beauty was upon me, I was ready to give this up and not think it a
sacrifice. I wonder what it is that comes over me sometimes, and makes
almost a superior being of me! More than once it has marred my fortunes.
This time I will keep the angel under foot. It always grows powerful
when that girl is by me. She must not come near me again. I wish her no
harm—Heaven knows I have down her enough—but if she struggles, I must
throw up a wall of brass between us. If people will have explanations, I
must give them. No romance or sentiment shall swamp me with all this in
view!”
“Waldon, Mr. Waldon, do come in! I’m sure the damp air is not good for
you, and it looks so strange. People will see me sitting all alone, as
if you had given up caring for me; and—and I think you have.”
“Foolish child,” said Waldon, gathering the cloud of white muslin, from
which this complaint came, close to him with one arm. “I never loved you
better in my life! The sight of this landscape inspires me with new
emotions. How beautiful it is! I can never forget that you are the
central figure, lady-bird.”
Waldon took a satanic pleasure in thus uttering, half-veiled, the value
this girl was to him.
“Ah! now you are talking poetry. But why don’t you write it out for me?
Writers always do when they care for one; but I have never had a single
line, except—except—”
“Except what, lady-bird?”
“Except some lovely lines that Mr. Hyde slipped into my hand. He writes
beautifully! Oh, what a naughty word, Mr. Waldon! I never heard you
swear before. Let me go; it frightens me!”
In order to facilitate her going, Mary clung to Waldon’s arms with both
hands, and laid her head partly on his bosom, where fresh oaths against
young Hyde’s impudence were seething.
“Don’t be angry—forgive him, for my sake. One can’t help being loved,
you know; and he, poor follow, has no idea about us!”
Waldon made no answer to this plaintive appeal, but strode into the
house, half carrying the clinging loveliness to which he was more than
ever pledged for life.
Meantime Bertha sat dreaming in that little boat, sometimes with her
hands clasped and her eyes uplifted, full of troubled delight, as if a
great hope had found birth in her heart. And this is what that hope was
saying:
“He loves me—he loves me yet! Whatever the evil thing is, it has not
conquered his love. That _she_ can never have!”
The boat swept downward, plowing up music from the silvery ripples, and
Bertha’s heart beat time to the oars, while her eyelids closed over
unshed tears, and her lips quivered with the thought of kisses he had so
madly rained upon them. At first she had been angry and frightened by
this impetuous outburst; but love is lenient to faults that prove its
power, and while burning blushes came with the memory of his fault, she
forgave it, because even that was a proof that his heart had never given
her up.
Bertha had no plan in this—no definite hope that her broken life would
ever again unite with that of the man who was to have been her husband;
but those few sweet words singing at the bottom of her heart were enough
for the hour—on the morrow reason would come and strangle them, like
unfledged birds in a nest.
Lydia, who knew everything, saw the brightness of her young mistress’
face, and uttered faint moans as she bent to the oars—beyond that the
girl never opened her lips.