Mr. Prince looked at her curiously. "I mean your stepmother," he said gravely. "I never had the pleasure of meeting your mother."
"No: MOTHER hasn"t been in California these twelve years."
There was an intentional emphasizing of the t.i.tle and of its distinction, that began to coldly interest Prince after his first astonishment was past.
"As I come from your stepmother now," he went on with a slight laugh, "I must ask you to go back for a few moments to that point. After your father"s death, your mother--I mean your stepmother--recognized the fact that your mother, the first Mrs. Tretherick, was legally and morally your guardian, and, although much against her inclination and affections, placed you again in her charge."
"My stepmother married again within a month after father died, and sent me home," said Carry with great directness, and the faintest toss of her head.
Mr. Prince smiled so sweetly, and apparently so sympathetically, that Carry began to like him. With no other notice of the interruption he went on, "After your stepmother had performed this act of simple justice, she entered into an agreement with your mother to defray the expenses of your education until your eighteenth year, when you were to elect and choose which of the two should thereafter be your guardian, and with whom you would make your home. This agreement, I think, you are already aware of, and, I believe, knew at the time."
"I was a mere child then," said Carry.
"Certainly," said Mr. Prince, with the same smile. "Still the conditions, I think, have never been oppressive to you nor your mother; and the only time they are likely to give you the least uneasiness will be when you come to make up your mind in the choice of your guardian.
That will be on your eighteenth birthday,--the 20th, I think, of the present month."
Carry was silent.
"Pray do not think that I am here to receive your decision, even if it be already made. I only came to inform you that your stepmother, Mrs.
Starbottle, will be in town to-morrow, and will pa.s.s a few days at the hotel. If it is your wish to see her before you make up your mind, she will be glad to meet you. She does not, however, wish to do any thing to influence your judgment."
"Does mother know she is coming?" said Carry hastily.
"I do not know," said Prince gravely. "I only know, that, if you conclude to see Mrs. Starbottle, it will be with your mother"s permission. Mrs. Starbottle will keep sacredly this part of the agreement, made ten years ago. But her health is very poor; and the change and country quiet of a few days may benefit her." Mr. Prince bent his keen, bright eyes upon the young girl, and almost held his breath until she spoke again.
"Mother"s coming up to-day or to-morrow," she said, looking up.
"Ah!" said Mr. Prince with a sweet and languid smile.
"Is Col. Starbottle here too?" asked Carry, after a pause.
"Col. Starbottle is dead. Your stepmother is again a widow."
"Dead!" repeated Carry.
"Yes," replied Mr. Prince. "Your step-mother has been singularly unfortunate in surviving her affections."
Carry did not know what he meant, and looked so. Mr. Prince smiled re-a.s.suringly.
Presently Carry began to whimper.
Mr. Prince softly stepped beside her chair.
"I am afraid," he said with a very peculiar light in his eye, and a singular dropping of the corners of his mustache,--"I am afraid you are taking this too deeply. It will be some days before you are called upon to make a decision. Let us talk of something else. I hope you caught no cold last evening."
Carry"s face shone out again in dimples.
"You must have thought us so queer! It was too bad to give you so much trouble."
"None, whatever, I a.s.sure you. My sense of propriety," he added demurely, "which might have been outraged, had I been called upon to help three young ladies out of a schoolroom window at night, was deeply gratified at being able to a.s.sist them in again." The door-bell rang loudly, and Mr. Prince rose. "Take your own time, and think well before you make your decision." But Carry"s ear and attention were given to the sound of voices in the hall. At the same moment, the door was thrown open, and a servant announced, "Mrs. Tretherick and Mr. Robinson."
The afternoon train had just shrieked out its usual indignant protest at stopping at Genoa at all, as Mr. Jack Prince entered the outskirts of the town, and drove towards his hotel. He was wearied and cynical.
A drive of a dozen miles through unpicturesque outlying villages, past small economic farmhouses, and hideous villas that violated his fastidious taste, had, I fear, left that gentleman in a captious state of mind. He would have even avoided his taciturn landlord as he drove up to the door; but that functionary waylaid him on the steps. "There"s a lady in the sittin"-room, waitin" for ye." Mr. Prince hurried up stairs, and entered the room as Mrs. Starbottle flew towards him.
She had changed sadly in the last ten years. Her figure was wasted to half its size. The beautiful curves of her bust and shoulders were broken or inverted. The once full, rounded arm was shrunken in its sleeve; and the golden hoops that encircled her wan wrists almost slipped from her hands as her long, scant fingers closed convulsively around Jack"s. Her cheek-bones were painted that afternoon with the hectic of fever: somewhere in the hollows of those cheeks were buried the dimples of long ago; but their graves were forgotten. Her l.u.s.trous eyes were still beautiful, though the orbits were deeper than before.
Her mouth was still sweet, although the lips parted more easily over the little teeth, and even in breathing, and showed more of them than she was wont to do before. The glory of her blonde hair was still left: it was finer, more silken and ethereal, yet it failed even in its plenitude to cover the hollows of the blue-veined temples.
"Clara!" said Jack reproachfully.
"Oh, forgive me, Jack!" she said, falling into a chair, but still clinging to his hand, "forgive me, dear; but I could not wait longer.
I should have died, Jack,--died before another night. Bear with me a little longer (it will not be long), but let me stay. I may not see her, I know; I shall not speak to her: but it"s so sweet to feel that I am at last near her, that I breathe the same air with my darling. I am better already, Jack, I am indeed. And you have seen her to-day? How did she look? What did she say? Tell me all, every thing, Jack. Was she beautiful? They say she is. Has she grown? Would you have known her again? Will she come, Jack? Perhaps she has been here already; perhaps,"
she had risen with tremulous excitement, and was glancing at the door,--"perhaps she is here now. Why don"t you speak, Jack? Tell me all."
The keen eyes that looked down into hers were glistening with an infinite tenderness that none, perhaps, but she would have deemed them capable of. "Clara," he said gently and cheerily, "try and compose yourself. You are trembling now with the fatigue and excitement of your journey. I have seen Carry: she is well and beautiful. Let that suffice you now."
His gentle firmness composed and calmed her now, as it had often done before. Stroking her thin hand, he said, after a pause, "Did Carry ever write to you?"
"Twice, thanking me for some presents. They were only school-girl letters," she added, nervously answering the interrogation of his eyes.
"Did she ever know of your own troubles? of your poverty, of the sacrifices you made to pay her bills, of your p.a.w.ning your clothes and jewels, of your"--
"No, no!" interrupted the woman quickly: "no! How could she? I have no enemy cruel enough to tell her that."
"But if she--or if Mrs. Tretherick--had heard of it? If Carry thought you were poor, and unable to support her properly, it might influence her decision. Young girls are fond of the position that wealth can give.
She may have rich friends, maybe a lover."
Mrs. Starbottle winced at the last sentence. "But," she said eagerly, grasping Jack"s hand, "when you found me sick and helpless at Sacramento, when you--G.o.d bless you for it, Jack!--offered to help me to the East, you said you knew of something, you had some plan, that would make me and Carry independent."
"Yes," said Jack hastily; "but I want you to get strong and well first.
And, now that you are calmer, you shall listen to my visit to the school."
It was then that Mr. Jack Prince proceeded to describe the interview already recorded, with a singular felicity and discretion that shames my own account of that proceeding. Without suppressing a single fact, without omitting a word or detail, he yet managed to throw a poetic veil over that prosaic episode, to invest the heroine with a romantic roseate atmosphere, which, though not perhaps entirely imaginary, still, I fear, exhibited that genius which ten years ago had made the columns of "The Fiddletown Avalanche" at once fascinating and instructive. It was not until he saw the heightening color, and heard the quick breathing, of his eager listener, that he felt a pang of self-reproach. "G.o.d help her and forgive me!" he muttered between his clinched teeth, "but how can I tell her ALL now!"
That night, when Mrs. Starbottle laid her weary head upon her pillow, she tried to picture to herself Carry at the same moment sleeping peacefully in the great schoolhouse on the hill; and it was a rare comfort to this yearning, foolish woman to know that she was so near.
But at this moment Carry was sitting on the edge of her bed, half undressed, pouting her pretty lips, and twisting her long, leonine locks between her fingers, as Miss Kate Van Corlear--dramatically wrapped in a long white counterpane, her black eyes sparkling, and her thorough-bred nose thrown high in air,--stood over her like a wrathful and indignant ghost; for Carry had that evening imparted her woes and her history to Miss Kate, and that young lady had "proved herself no friend" by falling into a state of fiery indignation over Carry"s "ingrat.i.tude," and openly and shamelessly espousing the claims of Mrs. Starbottle. "Why, if the half you tell me is true, your mother and those Robinsons are making of you not only a little coward, but a little sn.o.b, miss. Respectability, forsooth! Look you, my family are centuries before the Trethericks; but if my family had ever treated me in this way, and then asked me to turn my back on my best friend, I"d whistle them down the wind;" and here Kate snapped her fingers, bent her black brows, and glared around the room as if in search of a recreant Van Corlear.
"You just talk this way, because you have taken a fancy to that Mr.
Prince," said Carry.
In the debasing slang of the period, that had even found its way into the virgin cloisters of the Crammer Inst.i.tute, Miss Kate, as she afterwards expressed it, instantly "went for her."
First, with a shake of her head, she threw her long black hair over one shoulder, then, dropping one end of the counterpane from the other like a vestal tunic, she stepped before Carry with a purposely-exaggerated cla.s.sic stride. "And what if I have, miss! What if I happen to know a gentleman when I see him! What if I happen to know, that among a thousand such traditional, conventional, feeble editions of their grandfathers as Mr. Harry Robinson, you cannot find one original, independent, individualized gentleman like your Prince! Go to bed, miss, and pray to Heaven that he may be YOUR Prince indeed. Ask to have a contrite and grateful heart, and thank the Lord in particular for having sent you such a friend as Kate Van Corlear." Yet, after an imposing dramatic exit, she re-appeared the next moment as a straight white flash, kissed Carry between the brows, and was gone.
The next day was a weary one to Jack Prince. He was convinced in his mind that Carry would not come; yet to keep this consciousness from Mrs. Starbottle, to meet her simple hopefulness with an equal degree of apparent faith, was a hard and difficult task. He would have tried to divert her mind by taking her on a long drive; but she was fearful that Carry might come during her absence; and her strength, he was obliged to admit, had failed greatly. As he looked into her large and awe-inspiring clear eyes, a something he tried to keep from his mind--to put off day by day from contemplation--kept a.s.serting itself directly to his inner consciousness. He began to doubt the expediency and wisdom of his management. He recalled every incident of his interview with Carry, and half believed that its failure was due to himself. Yet Mrs. Starbottle was very patient and confident: her very confidence shook his faith in his own judgment. When her strength was equal to the exertion, she was propped up in her chair by the window, where she could see the school and the entrance to the hotel. In the intervals she would elaborate pleasant plans for the future, and would sketch a country home. She had taken a strange fancy, as it seemed to Prince, to the present location; but it was notable that the future, always thus outlined, was one of quiet and repose. She believed she would get well soon: in fact, she thought she was now much better than she had been; but it might be long before she should be quite strong again. She would whisper on in this way until Jack would dash madly down into the bar-room, order liquors that he did not drink, light cigars that he did not smoke, talk with men that he did not listen to, and behave generally as our stronger s.e.x is apt to do in periods of delicate trials and perplexity.
The day closed with a clouded sky and a bitter, searching wind. With the night fell a few wandering flakes of snow. She was still content and hopeful; and, as Jack wheeled her from the window to the fire, she explained to him, how, that, as the school-term was drawing near its close, Carry was probably kept closely at her lessons during the day, and could only leave the school at night. So she sat up the greater part of the evening, and combed her silken hair, and, as far as her strength would allow, made an undress toilet to receive her guest. "We must not frighten the child, Jack," she said apologetically, and with something of her old coquetry.
It was with a feeling of relief, that, at ten o"clock, Jack received a message from the landlord, saying that the doctor would like to see him for a moment down stairs. As Jack entered the grim, dimly-lighted parlor, he observed the hooded figure of a woman near the fire. He was about to withdraw again, when a voice that he remembered very pleasantly said,--