Before very long, that considerate lady looked into my face a moment, and then said decisively:
"Richard, thee is getting tired. We must all bid thee good-night at once."
Adah looked almost resentfully at her mother, and lingered a little behind the others. As they pa.s.sed out she stepped hastily back, and unclasping a rosebud from her breastpin laid it on the table beside me.
"It was the last one I could find in the garden," she said, breathlessly, and with its color in her cheeks. Before I could speak she was gone.
"It shall be treated with reverence, like the feeling which led to the gift," I murmured sadly. "Heaven grant that it may be only the impulse of a girlish fancy;" and I filled a little vase with water and placed the bud near the window, where the cool night air could blow upon it.
Still Miss Warren remained at the piano. "How singularly fond of music he is!" I thought.
I darkened my room, and sat at the window that I might hear every note.
The old garden, half hidden by trees, looked cool and Eden-like in the light of the July moon, athwart whose silver hemisphere fleecy clouds were drifting like the traces of thought across a bright face.
Motionless shadows stretched toward the east, from which the new day would come, but with a dreary sinking of heart I felt as it each coming day would bring a heavier burden.
But a little time pa.s.sed before I recognized Chopin"s Nocturne, to which I had listened with kindling hope on the night of the storm. Was it my own mood, or did she play it with far more pathos and feeling than on that never-to-be-forgotten evening? Be that as it may, it evoked a fiercer storm of unavailing pa.s.sion and regret in my mind. In bitterness of heart I groaned aloud and insulted G.o.d.
"It was a cruel and terrible thing," I charged, "to mock a creature with such a hope. Why was such power over me given to her when it was of no use?" But I will say no more of that hour of weak human idolatry.
It was a revelation to me of the depths of despair and wretchedness into which one can sink when unsustained by manly fort.i.tude or Christian principle. It is in such desperate, irrational moods that undisciplined, ill-balanced souls thrust themselves out from the light of G.o.d"s sunshine and the abundant possibilities of future good. I now look back on that hour with shame, and cannot excuse it even by the fact that I was enfeebled in mind as well as body by disease. We often never know ourselves or our need until after we have failed miserably under the stress of some strong temptation.
I was the worse the next day for my outburst of pa.s.sion, and the wretched night that followed, and did not leave my room; but I was grim and rigid in my purpose to retrieve myself. I appeared to be occupied with my mail and paper much of the day, and I wrote a very complimentary paragraph concerning the banker"s gift for the meeting-house. Mr. Hearn and Miss Warren were out riding much of the time. I saw them drive away with a lowering brow, and was not disarmed of my bitterness because I saw, through the half-closed blinds, that the young girl stole a swift glance at my window.
Adah was pleased as she saw how I was caring for her gift; but I puzzled and disheartened her by my preoccupation and taciturnity. She took the children off on a long ramble in the afternoon, and heaped coals of fire on my head by bringing me an exquisite collection of ferns.
The next morning I went down to breakfast resolving to take my place in the family, and make no more trouble during the brief remainder of my stay, for I proposed to go back to the city as soon as I had shown enough manhood to satisfy my pride, and had made Miss Warren believe that she could dismiss her solicitude on my account, and thus enjoy the happiness which apparently I had clouded. As I saw her pale face again I condemned my weakness unsparingly, and with the whole force of my will endeavored to act and appear as both she and Mr. Hearn would naturally wish.
"Richard," said Reuben, after breakfast, "I"ve borrowed a low phaeton, and I"m going to take thee out with Dapple. He"ll put life in thee, never fear. He"d cure me if I were half dead."
He was right; the swift motion through the pure air braced me greatly.
When we returned, the banker sat on the piazza. Adah was near, with some light sewing, and the connoisseur was leisurely admiring her. Well he might, for in her neat morning gown she again seemed the embodiment of a June day. She rose to meet me, with a faint accession to her delicate color, and said:
"The ride has done thee good; thee looks better than thee has any day yet."
"Reuben"s right," I said, laughing; "Dapple would bring a fossil to life," and the young fellow drove chuckling down toward the barn, making Dapple rear and prance in order to show off a little before Mr.
Hearn.
I sat down a few moments to rest. Miss Warren must have heard our voices; but she went on with an intricate piece of music in which she was displaying no mean skill. I did not think Mr. Hearn was as much interested in it as I was. His little girl came out of the house and climbed into Adah"s lap. She evidently liked being petted, and was not a little spoiled by it The banker continued to admire the picture they made with undisguised enjoyment, and I admitted that the most critical could have found no fault with the group.
After exerting myself to seem exceedingly cheerful, and laughing heartily at a well-worn jest of Mr. Hearn"s, I went to my room and rested till dinner, and I slept away the afternoon as on the previous day.
My plan was now to get sufficiently strong to take my departure by the following Monday, and I was glad indeed that the tonic of out-of-door air promised an escape from a position in which I must continually seem to be what I was not--a cheerful man in the flood tide of convalescence. Were it not that my kind friends at the farmhouse would have been grievously hurt, I would have left at once.
As I returned from my ride the next day, Mr. Hearn greeted me with a newspaper in his hand.
"I"m indebted to you," he said, in his most gracious manner, "for a very kindly mention here. So small a donation was not worth the importance you give it, but you have put the matter so happily and gracefully that it may lead other men of means to do likewise at the various places of their summer sojourn. You editors are able to wield a great deal of influence."
I bowed, and said I was glad the paragraph had been worded in a way not disagreeable to him.
"Oh, it was good taste itself, I a.s.sure you, sir. It seemed the natural expression of your interest in that which interests your good friends here."
When I came down to dinner I saw that there was an unwonted fire in Miss Warren"s eyes and unusual color in her cheeks. Moreover, I imagined that her replies to the few remarks that I addressed to her were brief and constrained. "She is no dissembler," I thought; "something has gone wrong."
After dinner I went to my room for a book, and as I came out I met her in the hall.
"Mr. Morton," she said, with characteristic directness, "if you had given a sum toward a good object in a quiet country place, would you have been pleased to see the fact paraded before those having no natural interest in the matter?"
"I have never had the power to be munificent, Miss Warren," I replied, with some embarra.s.sment.
"Please answer me," she insisted, with a little impatient tap of the floor with her foot.
"No," I said bluntly.
"Did you think it would be pleasing to me?"
"Pardon me," I began, "that I did not sufficiently identify you with Mr. Hearn--"
"What!" she interrupted, blushing hotly, "have I given any reason for not being identified with him?"
"Not at all--not in one sense," I said bitterly. "Of course you are loyalty itself."
She turned away so abruptly as to surprise me a little.
"You had no more right to think it would be pleasing to him than to me," she resumed coldly.
"Miss Warren," I said, after a moment, "don"t turn your back on me. I won"t quarrel with you, and I promise to do nothing of the kind again;"
and I spoke gravely and a little sadly.
"When you speak in that way you disarm me completely," she said, with one of the sudden illuminations of her face that I so loved to see; but I also noted that she had become very pale, and as my eyes met hers I thought I detected the old frightened look that I had seen when I had revealed my feelings too clearly after my illness.
"She fears that I may again speak as I ought not," I thought; and therefore I bowed quietly and pa.s.sed on. Mr. Hearn was reading the paper on the piazza. I took a chair and went out under the elm, not far away. In a few moments Miss Warren joined her affianced, and sat down with some light work.
"Emily," I heard the banker say, as if the topic were uppermost in his mind, "I"d like to call your attention to this paragraph. I think our friend has written it with unusual good taste and grace, and I"ve taken pains to tell him so."
I could not help hearing his words; but I would not look up to see her humiliation, and turned a leaf, as if intent on my author.
After a moment she said, with slight but clear emphasis:
"I can"t agree with you."
A little later she went to the piano; but I never heard her play so badly. A glance at Mr. Hearn revealed that his dignity and complacency had received a wound that he was inclined to resent. I strolled away muttering:
"She has idealized him as she did Old Plod, but after all it"s not a very serious foible in a man of millions."
Before the day pa.s.sed she found an opportunity to ask:
"Why did you not tell me that Mr. Hearn had spoken to you approvingly of that paragraph?"