"Forgive me," she exclaimed, impulsively. "I had no right to be so thoughtless. I beg your pardon."
"There is no occasion. You are right. It is certainly better to laugh than to cry over the inevitable, especially as things are righting themselves. But we, or, rather, I, must go into the house. It is growing cool."
IV.
Life at the old Dysart place went forward in a slow and decorous fashion, little allied to the bustling manners of the present day. Mr.
Dysart was getting now to be an old man, albeit it is doubtful if in any abundant sense he can ever have been a young one. In any case he had, by long burrowing among musty records and genealogical parchments, acquired a dry and antique appearance, as, to use a somewhat presumptuous yet not inexact metaphor, certain scholarly worms had taken on a brown hue from continued dining on the bindings of his venerable folios. He inhabited a remote and essentially unworldly sphere, from which the existence of his daughter was wholly separate. He was conscious of her presence in an unrealizing way; was even aware that just now she had in the house a guest who had come ash.o.r.e from a wreck. But that was the affair of Columbine and old Sarah; he could not of course be expected to loosen his hold upon the clew which he hoped would lead him to the exact connection between the Dysarts and the Van Rensselaers of two generations back, to pay attention to a chance waif from that outer world with which he had never considered it worth his while to concern himself.
As far as Mr. Tom was concerned, Mr. Dysart might as well not have existed. They did once meet in the pa.s.sage before the study door when the invalid in his first days of walking was one rainy morning wandering restlessly about the halls; but the owner of the house hurried furtively past, as if he were the interloper and the other lord of the manor; and even when the convalescent was well enough to join the family at table, Mr. Dysart was very seldom there, so that the meals were for the most part taken _tete-a-tete_ by Columbine and her patient.
The result of such a situation is evident from the beginning.
Exceptional natures might be imagined, perhaps, that would not have grown dangerously interested in each other under such circ.u.mstances; but at least these two drew every day closer together. Neither had any tie belonging to the past; or, more exactly, Columbine had none, and he, for the time being, at least, had no past. His helplessness and the mystery enshrouding him would have appealed to the heart of any woman, and Columbine had no distractions to fill her life and crowd out this ever-deepening interest. Of Mr. Tom, her beauty and freshness, her simplicity, which was so far removed from insipidity, her innocence, which never suggested ignorance, won the respect and admiration long before he was conscious that love, too, was growing in his heart.
There came a day, however, when he could no longer be ignorant of the nature of his feelings.
The two had gone past the arbor and down to the sh.o.r.e. Columbine was seated upon a rock, while Tom lay at her feet, idly tossing pebbles into a pool left among the sea-weed by the ebbing tide. The maiden wore that day a dress of gray flannel, almost the color of the stone upon which she sat, trimmed with a velvet of orange which no complexion less brilliant than hers could have endured. She twisted in her fingers a spray of goldenrod, yellow-coated harbinger of autumn.
"The summer is gone," Columbine remarked, pensively. "It is getting late even for goldenrod."
"Yes," he echoed, "the summer is gone. I lost so much of it I hardly realize--"
He broke off suddenly, a new thought seizing him.
"Why!" he exclaimed, "how long I have been here! I ought to have taken myself off your hands long ago. How you must think I abuse your hospitality!"
"Nonsense!" she returned, brightly; "you of course cannot go until you are well. It is necessary that you at least conjure from the past the rest of your name before you start out into the world again. Make yourself as comfortable as you can, Mr. Tom; you won"t be let loose for a long time to come yet."
Despite the lightness of her manner her companion fancied he detected a shade of some hitherto unnoted feeling in her words; but whether dread of his departure or desire to be rid of him he could not divine. The latter thought struck him with a sudden chill. The love which had been fostered in his mind by this close and intimate companionship was not unmixed at this moment with a fear of being thrown upon his own resources while ignorant alike of his place and his name. He clung strongly to Columbine as to one who understood and sympathized with his strange mental weakness. The color flamed into his pale cheeks with a sudden throb of intense emotion; then faded, to leave him whiter than ever.
"Besides," Columbine continued, after a moment"s pause, her glance still downcast, "why shouldn"t you stay? Your being here makes no difference to papa; he smokes and grubs after the roots of his ancestral tree the same as ever; and as for me," lifting her eyes with a sudden smile that showed all her dimples, "you know how much you amuse me. You are as good as a continued story, and are alive, too, the last being a good deal in this desert."
He returned her smile with effort. His moment of intense feeling had so overpowered him that he felt weak and faint.
"How white you are!" she exclaimed, noting the wanness of his face; "you should have had your _bouillon_ long ago. A pretty condition you are in to go roaming off by yourself!"
She tripped lightly off towards the house for the forgotten nourishment, and Mr. Tom was left to his reflections. He raised himself, as her graceful figure vanished, then sank back upon his rug with something like a groan. All in an instant the knowledge had come to him that he loved her. He had gone on from day to day conscious only of thinking of his own history, which, bit by bit, he was disinterring from the past, as men bring to light some buried city, and insensibly Columbine had become dear to him before he was aware.
He buried his face in his hands in a despair which was in part the result of his strange mental confusion; in part arose from his physical weakness. He did not reflect then that his case was not necessarily hopeless; that nothing in his life which remembrance had recovered need raise a barrier between himself and Columbine. Afterward this thought came to him and brought comfort; now he was overwhelmed by a sense of impotent misery. Helpless in the hand of fate, it seemed to him that this love, of which he was newly aware, was but a fresh device of malignant destiny. He did not even consider whether his affection might be returned; he only felt the impossibility of offering his broken life to Columbine,--of binding her to a past that was uncertain and a future that was insecure.
Tears of weakness, and scorn of that weakness, came into his eyes. Their traces were still visible when Columbine returned.
"Come," she said, ignoring the signs of his agitation, "you have told me nothing on the story to-day. Just down there," indicating by a pretty sweep of the hand a little pebbly cove lying just below them, "is where Sarah and I found you."
"And I would to G.o.d," cried poor Tom with sudden fierceness, "that you had left me there."
Columbine made, for the moment, no reply to this outburst. She insisted upon his drinking his _bouillon_, despite his protests of disinclination, and then brought him back to the tale of his life.
"There is an air of improbability about my story," he said, after a little musing. "Indeed, so much so that I myself begin to doubt the truth of it. In the first place it seems particularly arranged to baffle inquiry. Whenever I recall a person to whom I might send for verification or information, I straightway remember that he is dead, or that my wanderings have carried me beyond his knowledge. I am apparently as far as ever from knowing who I am or what I am. And, besides, suppose your beautiful theory, that my memory acts as it does because the impressions of youth are strongest, is not true? You put me in the same category with those whose memory is weakened by age; but this may be all moonshine. Perhaps this history, to which I am painfully adding every day, is something I have read, and only a fiction after all."
"But why suppose so many tormenting things?" returned Columbine, brightly. "The fault of the age, they say,--we know very little of it here, but cousin Tom sends me a paper occasionally,--is unrest; and whoever you are, a little tranquillity will scarcely be likely to harm you. Go on with the life and adventures, and never mind now whether they are true or not. At least they are interesting. You broke off yesterday in a most exciting account of a tiger hunt."
"Ah, yes; I got the rest of it together this morning. Where did I leave off? Had we reached the second jungle?"
V.
The salt meadows were on fire. The pungent odor of burning peat and saline gra.s.ses floated over the Dysart place and about the arbor one October morning when Tom sat there meditating. He was thinking of Columbine, and of his pa.s.sion for her. His health now seemed firmly re-establishing itself, and his memory had gone on over the old track of his life in its singular method of progression until he felt confident that he should ultimately be in possession of all his past.
He reviewed what he remembered, as he sat this morning inhaling the aromatic scent of the burning lowlands, and the result was not unsatisfactory. He had recovered from oblivion his life up to the time, three years before, when he took pa.s.sage home from India, and his financial affairs at that period were in an eminently satisfactory position. He recalled that he had been regarded on shipboard as a person of more consequence than the British officer who, with his daughter, occupied the cabin of the Indiaman with him; and he trusted that no untoward circ.u.mstances of the interval had placed him in a condition less desirable.
He had reconciled himself to remaining at the Dysart mansion by turning over to old Sarah a goodly portion of the money contained in his travelling-belt, and blessed himself that his wandering life had led him to form the habit of always going thus provided. He sat now waiting for Columbine to appear, and fondly picturing to himself the delight of telling his love when the time came that he dare speak. Each day increased his attachment, and he believed, as every lover will, that his love was returned. A smile of brooding contentment, so deep that even the impatience of his pa.s.sion could not disturb it, dwelt upon his face as he inhaled the fragrant odors from the burning marshes, and listened for the step of the maiden he loved.
She came at last, moving along the garden paths between the faded shrubs, a gracious and winning figure. She was dressed that morning in a gown of russet wool, with a bunch of gold and crimson leaves at her throat, and never, in Tom"s eyes, had she looked so lovely.
"I shouldn"t have been so late in getting here," she said, as she took her accustomed seat, "but Sarah is greatly concerned about the fire in the salt marshes. She says it is thirty years since they burnt over, and she presages all sorts of dire calamities from that fact."
"That they haven"t burnt over for thirty years?"
"Well," Columbine returned with a pout, "she is not at all clear what she does mean, so it isn"t to be expected that I shall be. We will go on with the life and adventures, if you please."
"But suppose I haven"t remembered anything more?"
"Nonsense," retorted pretty Columbine; "you never really remember. I am convinced that you make it all up as you go along; but you tell it so seriously that it might as well be true. And in any case it does credit to your powers of imagination."
His story now was of his voyage from Calcutta. He told of moonlight nights in the Indian ocean, of long days of sunny idling on deck, and all the pleasant details of a prosperous voyage over Southern seas.
"Miss Grant wasn"t very pretty," he observed, lying lazily back and looking up into the blue October sky, "at least not as I remember her; but she was very good company, only a little given to sentimentalizing.
She had a guitar, and I will confess I did hate to see that guitar come out."
"She would be pleased if she could hear you," laughed Columbine. "What was there so frightful about her guitar?"
"Oh, when she had that she always sang moony songs, and after that--"
"Well?" demanded Miss Dysart, mischievously.
"Oh, after that," he returned, with an impatient shake of his shoulders, "she was sure to talk sentiment."
His companion laughed merrily. The faint, almost unconscious feeling of jealousy which had risen at the mention of this engaging young lady had vanished entirely in the indifference with which Mr. Tom spoke of her.
She moved her head with a happy little motion not unlike that with which a bird plumes itself. Her soft, low laugh did not really end, but lost itself among the dimples of her cheeks.
Tom regarded her with shining eyes.
"Not that I should mind some people"s talking sentiment," he said with a smile.
She raised her laughing gaze to his, and, as their eyes met, the meaning of the look in his was too plain to be mistaken. She flushed and paled, dropping her gaze from his.
"And did nothing especial happen on the voyage?" she asked, with a strong effort to regain her careless manner.