"They would not, I mean, sir. She will not marry John Hughson. You are a gentleman, sir, and could tell me if I--would be taking an unfair advantage--if I asked her--to marry--me. I am sure--I love her enough."
Jamie dropped his voice quickly on the last words, so that they were inaudible to Mr. James Bowdoin, who had suddenly laughed.
Old Mr. Bowdoin turned angrily upon his son.
But Jamie"s face had turned to white. He rose respectfully. "Don"t say anything, sir. I have had my answer."
"Forgive me, Mr. McMurtagh," said James Bowdoin the younger. "I"m sure she could not have a kinder husband. But"--
"Don"t explain, Mr. James."
"But--after all, why not ask her?"
"Nay, nay," said Jamie, "I"ll not ask the child. I would not have her make a mistake, as I see it would be."
"But, Jamie," said Mr. James kindly, "what will you do? She can hardly go on living in your home."
"Not in my home? Where else has the child a home?"
There are certain male natures that fight crying. An enemy who looks straight at you with tears in his eyes is not to be contended with.
And Jamie stood there, blushing fiery red, with flashing eyes, and tears streaming down his cheeks.
"James Bowdoin, you"re a d----d fool!" sputtered his irate sire. "You talk as your wife might talk. This is an affair of men. Jamie," he added very gently, "you are quite right. My boy"s an a.s.s." He put his hand on Jamie"s shoulder. "You"ll find some fine young fellow to marry her yet, and she"ll bring you--grandchildren."
"I may--I need hardly ask you to forget this?" said Jamie timidly, and making hastily for the door.
"Of course; and she shall stay in her old home where she was bred from a child, and, d----n "em, my grandchildren shall go to see her there"--But the door had closed.
"James Bowdoin, if my son, with his d----d snicker, were one half so good a gentleman as that old clerk, I"d trust him with--with an earl"s daughter," said the old gentleman inconsequently, and violently rubbing a tingling nose.
"I think you"re right, governor," said James Bowdoin. "Did you notice how spruced up and young the poor fellow was? I wish to goodness I hadn"t laughed, though. He might have married the girl. Why not? How old is he?"
"Why not? Ask her. He may be forty, more or less."
"What a strange thing to have come into the old fellow"s life! And we thought it would give him something to care for! I never fancied he loved her that way."
"I don"t believe now he loves her so much _that_ way--as--as he loves her," said old Mr. Bowdoin, as if vaguely. "She isn"t worth him."
"She"s really quite beautiful. I never saw a Spanish girl before with hair of gold."
"Pirate gold," said old Mr. Bowdoin.
PART TWO: ROBBERY.
I.
No plummet ever sank so deep as Jamie sank the thoughts of those few months. No oblivion more vast than where he buried it. No human will so strong as that he bent upon it, bound it down with. No sin absolved was ever so forgotten. One wonders if Jamie, at the day of judgment even, will remember it. Perhaps "twill then be no more the sin he thought it. For Jamie"s nature, like that of spiny plants, was sensitive, delicate within, as his outer side was bent and rough; and he fancied it, first, a selfishness; then, as his lonely fancy got to brooding on it, an actual sin. James Bowdoin"s unlucky laugh had taught him how it seemed to others; and was not inordinate affection, to the manifest injury of the object loved, a sin? Jamie felt it so; and he had the Prayer Book"s authority therefor. "Inordinate and sinful affections,"--that is the phrase; both are condemned.
But he kept it all the closer from Mercedes. It did not grow less; he had no heart to cease loving. Manlike, he was willing to face his G.o.d with the sin, but not her. He sought to change the nature of his love; perhaps, in time, succeeded. But all love has a mystic triple root; you cannot unravel the web, on earth at least. Religious, s.e.xual, spiritual,--all are intertwined.
Jamie and Mercedes lived on in the little brick house, as he had promised. Only one thing the Bowdoins noticed: he now dressed and talked and acted like a man grown very old. His coats were different again; his manner was more eccentric than ever. His hair helped him a little, for it really grew quite white. He asked Mercedes now to call him father.
"Jamie is posing as a patriarch," said Mr. Bowdoin; he smiled, and then he sighed.
Old Mr. Bowdoin did not forget his promise to have his granddaughters call upon Mercedes. Now and then they sent her tickets for church fairs. But it takes more love than most women have for each other to give the tact, the self-abnegation, that such unequal relations, to be permanent, require. The momentary gush of sympathy that the Bowdoin girls felt, upon their grandfather"s account of Sadie"s loneliness, was chilled at the first haughty word Mercedes gave them. It takes an older nature, more humbled by living than is an American young lady"s, to meet the poor in money without patronizing, and the proud at heart without seeming rude. So this attempted intimacy faded.
Jamie gave his life to her. His manner at the office altered: he became proud and reserved. More wonderful still, he shortened his time of attendance; not that he was inattentive while there, but he no longer observed unnecessary hours, as he had been wont to do, after the bank closed; as soon as Mr. James Bowdoin left, he would lock up the office and go himself. His life was but waiting upon Mercedes.
When he was in the office he would sit twiddling his thumbs. The pretense at bookkeeping, unreal bookkeeping, he abandoned. The last old ship, the Maine Lady, had served him in good stead for many years; he had double-entered, ledgered, and balanced her simple debits and credits like a stage procession. But now he made no fiction about the vanished business.
It was characteristic of Jamie that still he did not hanker for more money. He recognized his adopted daughter"s need for sympathy, for emotions, even for love, if you will; but yet it did not occur to him that he might earn more money. His salary was ample, and out of it he had made some savings. And Mercedes had that impatience of details, that _ennui_ of money matters, that even worldly women show, who care for results, not processes.
It had always been the custom of the McMurtagh family to pa.s.s the summers, like the winters, in the little house on Salem Street; but this year Jamie rented a cottage at Nantasket. He told the Bowdoins nothing of this move until they asked him about it, observing that he regularly took the boat. To Jamie it was the next thing to Nahant, which was of course out of the question. But the queer old clerk was not fitted to shine in any society, and Mercedes found it hard to make her way alone. They wandered about the beach, and occasionally to the great hotel when there was a hop, of evenings, and listened to the bands; but Mercedes" beauty was too striking and her manners were too independent to inspire quick confidence in the Nantasket matrons; while Jamie missed his pipe and shirt-sleeves after supper. He had asked, and been forbidden, to invite John Hughson down to stay. Still less would Sadie have her girl acquaintances; and all Salem Street"s kindliest feelings were soured in consequence. There was an invitation from Nahant that summer, but it seemed, to Mercedes" quick sense, formal, and she would not go.
She had had her piano moved down "to the beach," at much expense; and for a week she played in the afternoons. But even this accomplishment brought her no notice. People would look at her in pa.s.sing, and then, more curiously, at her foster-father: that was all. Mercedes, in her youth, could not realize how social confidence is a plant of slow growth. The young girls of the place were content with saying she "was not in their set;" the young men who desired her acquaintance must seek it surrept.i.tiously, and this Mercedes would not have. The people of the great hotel were a more mixed set, and among them our couple was much discussed. Something got to be known of Jamie,--that he was confidential clerk to the well-known firm of Boston"s older ship-owners, and that she was his adopted daughter. Soon the rumor grew that he was miserly and rich.
Poor Jamie! He thought more of all these things than Mercedes ever supposed. What could he do to give her friends of her own age? What could he do to find her lovers, a husband? McMurtagh slept not nights for thinking on these things. John Hughson he now saw to be impossible; Harley Bowdoin was out of the question; but were there not still genteel youths, clerks like himself, but younger, some cla.s.s of life for his petted little lady? Jamie had half-thoughts of training some nice lad to be fit for her,--Jamie earned money amply; of training him, too, to take his place and earn his salary. Every discontented look in Mercedes" lovely face went to Jamie"s heartstrings.
One day, going home by the usual boat, he saw his dear girl waiting for him on the wharf. It always lightened Jamie"s heart when she did this, and he hurried down to the gangplank, to be among the first ash.o.r.e and save her waiting. But as he stepped upon it he saw that she was talking to a gentleman. There was a little heightened color in her cheeks; she was not watching the pa.s.sengers in the boat. Jamie turned aside through the crowd to walk up the road alone. He looked over his shoulder, and saw that they were following. When nearly at their cottage, he turned about irresolutely and met them. Mercedes, with a word of reproach for walking home alone (at which Jamie"s old eyes opened), introduced him: "Mr. David St. Clair--my father."
"I made Miss McMurtagh"s acquaintance at the Rockland House last night,--she plays so beautifully." Then Jamie remembered that he had gone out to smoke his pipe upon the piazza.
He looked at the newcomer. St. Clair was dressed expensively, in what Jamie thought the highest fashion. He wore kid gloves and a high silk hat; he had a white waistcoat and a very black mustache. Mercedes had blushed again when she presented him, and suddenly there was a burst of envy in poor Jamie"s heart.
II.
No girl, before she came to love, ever scrutinized a suitor so closely as old Jamie did St. Clair. The little old Scotch clerk was quicker far to see the first blossoms of love in her heart than Mercedes herself, than any mother could have been, for each one bore a pang for him; and he, who had renounced, and then set his heart to share each feeling with her, who had wanted but her confidence, wanted but to share with her as some girl might her heart histories, now found himself far outstripping her in conscious knowledge. He did not realize the impossibility of the sympathy he dreamed. He had fondly thought his man"s love a justification for that intimacy from which, in natures like Mercedes", even a mother"s love is excluded.
All Jamie"s judgment was against the man, and yet his heart was in touch with hers to feel its stirring for him. The one told him he was not respectable; the other that he was romantic. His career was shadowy, like his hair. In those days still a mustache bore with it some audacity, and gave a man who frankly lived outside the reputable callings something of the buccaneer. St. Clair called himself a gentleman, but did not pretend to be a clerk, and frankly avowed that he was not in trade. Jamie could not make him out at all. He hoped, indeed, he was a gentleman. Had he been in the old country, he could have credited it better; but gentlemen without visible means of support were, in those days, unusual in Boston.
Poor Jamie watched his daughter like any dowager, that summer. But the consciousness of his own sin (for so now he always thought of it) troubled him terribly. How could he urge his lady to repel the advances of this man without being open to the charge of selfishness, of jealousy? Jamie forgot that the girl had never known he loved her.
He made feeble attempts to egg on Hughson. The honest teamster was but a lukewarm lover. His point of view was that the girl looked down upon him, and this chilled his pa.s.sion. He had come to own his teams now.
He never drove them. He was a capitalist, an employer of labor; and, at Jamie"s request, he came down one night, in black broadcloth and red-handed, to pa.s.s the night. But it did not work. When Mr. St. Clair called in the evening, he adopted a tone of treating both Jamie and Hughson as elderly pals, so that the latter lost his temper, and, as Mercedes claimed, insulted his elegant rival.
Then Jamie bade Hughson to come no more, for his love for Mercedes was so true that he felt in his heart why St. Clair appealed more to hers.
But the summer was a long and anxious one, and he was glad when it was over and they were back in Salem Street. They had made no other acquaintance at Nantasket. "Society" to Jamie remained a sealed book.