He returned the pressure of her fingers, longing to cover them with kisses.
"I"m afraid," responded he, "that I"ve very little claim to glory on account of anything I did for you. I certainly don"t deserve the credit of having saved you. I only wish I did."
She laughed gayly, springing up from her seat, and he realized that his voice had lost all trace of unfriendliness. He told himself recklessly that he did not care; that if he were a thousand times a priest he could not but be kindly to Berenice.
"Come," she laughed, "we have been through a real adventure; and that"s more than happens to most people if they live to be a hundred."
Suddenly she became grave. "I can"t bear to think of it, though," she added. Then she turned toward him, and spoke with seriousness. "At least, Mr. Wynne, I am not so flighty that I do not thank G.o.d for my escape yesterday."
"Amen," he responded.
She walked over to the window, and stood looking out at the sunny day.
The fire burned cheerfully on the wide, red hearth, and Maurice looked into its glowing heart thinking gratefully of his preservation and of the friendly refuge into which he had been brought. No reverent man can come face to face with death and escape without some feeling of awe and of grat.i.tude to the power which has preserved him; and Maurice was filled with a sense of how great had been the hand which could bring him through such peril, how kind the protection which had preserved Berenice unscathed. Humility and tenderness overflowed his heart, and the inward thanksgiving which his spirit breathed was as sweet and as unselfish as if a personal pa.s.sion had never invaded his breast.
"It seems to me," Berenice remarked from her place by the window, "that the woods on the hills over there are already beginning to show signs of spring. There is a sort of delicate change of color in them that means buds beginning to grow."
Before he could reply, the door opened, and Mehitabel presented herself with a card.
"Oh," said Berenice, as she received it, "already!"
There seemed to Maurice something of impatience or dismay in her tone.
She excused herself and went out, leaving the old servant with Wynne.
As soon as the door closed, Mehitabel turned upon him at once.
"Do you know him?" she demanded.
"Know whom?"
"This sprig that"s come from Boston to see Miss Bee?"
Maurice looked at her with a sharp sense that he ought not to allow her to go on, yet with a desire to know more so burning that he could not refrain.
"I didn"t even know that anybody had come from Boston to see Miss Morison," he replied; "so that it isn"t easy to say whether I know him or not."
"His name is Parker Stanford, and he"s all the signs of being better"n his grandfathers and knowing it through and through. He"s too fond of his looks to suit me."
"I don"t know him," Maurice answered, "except that I"ve heard my cousin, Mrs. Staggchase, mention his name. He"s very rich, I believe, and a good deal of a leader in society."
"Humph," sniffed Mehitabel. "He may be a leader in society, but he"s as selfish as a sucking calf!"
"You seem to know him pretty well," commented Maurice. "I suppose you"ve seen him often."
"Never saw him in my life till this minute. Young man, I"ll tell you this, though. Every woman with any brains knows what a man is the minute she claps eyes on him; only if he"s good-looking, or awful wicked, or makes love to her, or forty thousand other things, she"ll deny to herself that she knows any bad about him."
"Then it seems to be much the same thing as if your s.e.x weren"t gifted with such extraordinary insight," Maurice responded, laughing.
"If women didn"t cheat themselves there wouldn"t be no marriages,"
Mehitabel retorted, grinning, and retired in evident delight over her success in repartee.
As for Maurice, he became wonderfully grave the moment he was left alone.
XII
THE ONLY TOUCH OF LOVE Two Gentlemen of Verona, ii. 7.
_To be_ is an irregular verb in all languages, but always regular is the verb _to love_. There are many sides to the existence of mortals; but to love is the same for high and low. Any mortal knows little enough about himself; but a mortal in love knows nothing. Love is a bewildering and a bedazzling fire, wherewith the eyes of youth are so blinded that they are able to see clearly neither within nor without.
Often it happens, indeed, that the first intimation the heart has of the presence of the divine flame is the bewilderment which fills the mind.
Berenice had long been contentedly and unenthusiastically convinced that, she was to marry Parker Stanford. She approved of him; he was wealthy, well-born, agreeable enough, and apparently very fond of her.
She had not, it is true, become formally engaged to him. When he had asked her to become his wife she had teasingly asked for time for deliberation; but this was not because she felt any especial doubt about ultimately accepting him. She was pleased, maiden-like, to dally, and shrank from being formally bound. Her pulses had not yet stirred with the unrest which love awakens. Her vanity had been pleasantly aroused, and for the rest she was in all the ignorance of those whom pa.s.sion has not yet made wise. She regarded marriage rather as an abstract thing; she was familiar with the idea that it was a matter of social arrangement and necessity, to be looked upon as a part of life.
She had, it is true, some vaguely sentimental notion that love was a necessity, and being persuaded that the match before her was a desirable one, was persuaded also that she was in love with Stanford.
At least she was sure that he was in love with her, and as she liked him, that answered. To find a man amusing, agreeable, handsome, and fulfilling the social requirements of a desirable husband seemed to her unsophisticated mind to love him. She was pleased with her lover; she was not insensible of the triumph of having won the attentions of one of the most sought-after men in her set; to pa.s.s her life in the well-ordered establishment which he would provide seemed to her a decorous and desirable method of fulfilling the destiny of a woman. She was willing that the event should be postponed indefinitely, it is true; and the man himself in her considerations of the future was something of a shadow; a shadow pleasant enough, yet so remote as to count for nothing intimately important. She was somewhat less sophisticated than most modern girls, inheriting that New England nature which is slow to understand emotion and endowed with the power rather of tenacity than of spontaneity of pa.s.sion.
When on the day previous Stanford had come to the train to see Berenice off, she had been especially gracious. She had been in particularly good spirits, full of amus.e.m.e.nt that Mr. Wynne was to be her neighbor on the train, and that he did not know it. She had chanced to send for tickets with Mrs. Wilson, the pair had laughingly planned the arrangement, and Berenice had promised herself some entertainment in teasing the young cleric on the journey. It pleased her, too, that Stanford should take the trouble to come to the station, especially as Kate West, who had tried so hard to secure him despite the fact that she was ten years his senior, chanced to be meeting a friend and to be there to see. She allowed herself to smile on her lover with more warmth than usual, and was a little vexed as well as a little amused by it afterward. On the train she reflected that if she were to be so gracious Stanford would press his suit more warmly than she wished; yet on the other hand it occurred to her that if she were to be engaged to him, she might as well get it over. Why not marry in the spring and go abroad? She wished much to go to Bayreuth for the Wagner operas in the summer, and the aunt with whom she had hoped to travel was not willing to go. Besides, she really could not afford the trip, and at least Stanford had plenty of money. The idea of marrying with a thought to his wealth was distasteful, and she at once said to herself that she could not do that; but if she were to marry him--As the train rolled on she had filled in the talk with Wynne with speculations whether it might not be as well to let Stanford propose once more, and have matters settled.
These cogitations, however, she interspersed with reflections that her traveling companion had a beautiful eye and a finely cut nostril; that he was on the whole a fine-looking man, handsome and well made, if he were not disguised in that detestable clerical garb; and that his hands were distinctly those of a gentleman. She liked the tones of his voice and the carriage of his head, smiling to herself at the thought that in the latter there was hardly so much meekness as was to be expected in one of his profession. She laughed at him almost openly, for to the young woman of to-day there is apt to be something bordering on the ludicrous and unmanly in a youth who is preparing to take orders, no matter how great her respect for the completed clergyman. Berenice felt something not entirely free from a trace of good-natured contempt for deacons in the abstract, not dreaming that she might be led to make an exception in favor of this especial deacon in the concrete. She became more and more alive to the attractions of Wynne, although up to the time of the accident she hardly realized the fact.
From the moment, however, that the rescuer said to her that Maurice had saved her life, her feeling was changed. She felt that she had failed to do Wynne justice; that she had allowed his ca.s.sock to be the sign of a lack of manhood; she accused herself of having wronged him. She began now to exalt him in her thoughts, and to regard him as a hero. She had long been aware of the effect that she had on him. From the morning when she had encountered him at the North End, and had met the quick, troubled glance of his eye, full of doubt and of fire, she had been conscious that he was not indifferent to her presence. She had not reasoned about it; but it gave her pleasure. It was a pa.s.sing breath of homage, pleasing like a breath from some rose-bed pa.s.sed in a walk. Up to the moment, however, when she said to herself that he had risked his life for her, Berenice had never consciously thought of Maurice as a lover. When she saw him lying insensible, depending upon her, a new feeling kindled in her breast. She would not think of it; she shrank from it, and refused to acknowledge it to herself. Yet for her the world was altered, and however she might try to hide the fact from her heart, secretly she felt it fluttering and throbbing deep within her breast.
When the telegram came in the morning announcing the visit of Stanford, her first thought was one of gratification. The act was friendly, and it gave her a pleasant sense of importance. The reaction came instantly. The purport of the visit flashed upon her. She remembered how she had smiled on Stanford yesterday,--Yesterday that now seemed so far away that she looked back to it over distances of emotion which made it strangely remote. She felt that she must receive him; but she found herself seeking for the means of making him understand that what he hoped was forever impossible. She certainly could never marry him.
She was sure that the thought could never have been seriously in her mind. The idea of belonging to him, of having no right to think of another man with tenderness, became all at once too repugnant to be endured. She would not consider why her att.i.tude was so different from that of yesterday; she only insisted vehemently in her thought that now first she really knew her own mind. Her cheek burned at the reflection that Stanford was probably sure of her consent to be his. It seemed to give him a claim upon her; to shut the door upon all other possibilities; to s.m.u.tch the whiteness of her soul and render her unworthy of any man whom she might some day come to love. To remember that in her secret thought she had actually contemplated being Stanford"s wife made her cringe.
She stood by the window with the telegram in her hands, twisting it to and fro, wondering what it was possible for her to do. She thought of excusing herself from her visitor when he should come, but the evasion seemed to her unworthy, and she was eager to free herself from even the suspicion of belonging to him. She felt that she could not breathe freely until she were clear of the faintest shadow of any claim, even in Stanford"s secret thought. She must belong once more to herself.
It was at this point in her musings that Wynne came into the library.
He was pale and sunken-eyed, and the tinge of his sprouting beard gave to his face a certain virility which startled her. It imparted a trace of something perhaps remotely animal and brutal, subtly altering his whole expression. He became in appearance at once more vigorous and more human. For the first time Berenice saw a suggestion of the possibility that this man might be a master; and the strength in man that makes a woman tremble also makes her thrill. Some inward voice cried in her ear: "Here is the reason why Parker Stanford is repugnant!" But she denied the accusation indignantly in her mind, putting the thought by, and refusing to see in Wynne anything more than the man to whom she had cause to be grateful. Yet in that part of her mind where a woman keeps so many things which she declines to confess to herself that she knows, Berenice from that moment kept the fact that this man before her had touched her heart.
She made a strong effort to greet Wynne frankly, and to conceal from him the feeling which his coming excited. She would have died rather than show him how glad she was that he had come. She saw the eagerness of his glance when he entered, and she felt the warmth of his greeting.
She noted the change in his manner, and fancied it arose from his fear lest he betray himself. She set herself to overcome his reserve; and when she had succeeded she sprang up with a gay laugh, light-hearted and full of a delicious, incomprehensible pleasure. She wanted to break out into singing, so sweet is the delight of new love unrecognized save as simple joy in living.
The entrance of Mehitabel with the card of Mr. Stanford brought her back to earth.
"Already?" she said, feeling as if she were defrauded that thus her moment of enjoyment was cut short.
She could not trust herself for more than a word of excuse to Wynne, but hurried to her chamber to collect her thoughts and to examine her toilet before she descended to her visitor. Some inward personality seemed to be trying properly to frame the speech by which she should make Stanford understand that it was idle for him to hope longer; while all the time she was thinking of the man whom she had just left.
Stanford was holding out his hands to the blaze in the fireplace when she entered the parlor, for the morning was a sharp one. Berenice saw with appreciation how satisfactory he was in all his appointments and in his bearing; how well kept and how well bred. She felt, however, for the first time that he was perhaps a little too faultlessly attired for a man, and she glanced at his cleanly shaven cheek with an acute memory of the stout black stubble on the face she had left behind her, yet carried still in the eye of her mind.
"Good-morning," she said, giving the visitor her hand, and making her manner at once as cordial and as unemotional as possible. "It was too good of you to come all the way up here in this cold weather, just to see me."
He pressed her hand with eagerness, and so meaningly that the color flushed into her cheeks. His air seemed to her to have in it a suggestion of intimacy which was irritating beyond endurance.
"There was nothing good about it," he answered. "I had to a.s.sure myself by actual sight that you were safe; and, besides, it gave me an excuse for coming, and I was only too glad of that."
"Sit down," Berenice said, ignoring the compliment. "It really was frightful; but I came through safe. Grandmother wouldn"t let me see the paper this morning; but I know the details must have been horrible."