She was very faithful to the shabby household at Downport. Her letters were never careless or behind time, and no one was ever neglected in the multiplicity of messages. She would be the most truthful and faithful of loving women a few years hence, this handsome Theodora. There was some reserve in her manner toward Denis this evening. She attended to Miss Elizabeth"s octagon-st.i.tch, and left him to amuse Priscilla. He had not seemed very much pleased to see her in the morning, and besides, Priscilla was plainly his business. But when the carriage was announced, and she returned to the parlor, after an absence of a few minutes, drawing on her gloves, and b.u.t.toning her pretty jacket close up to her beautiful slender, dusky throat, Denis took his hat and accompanied her to the carriage. He did not wait for the footman this time; but, after a.s.sisting her to get in, closed the door himself, and leaned against the open window for a moment.
"I want you to deliver a message to Lady Throckmorton for me," he said.
"May I trouble you, Theodora?"
She bent her head with an unpleasantly-quickened heart-beat. It was very foolish, of course, but she felt as if something painful was going to happen, and nothing on earth could prevent it.
"Business has unexpectedly called me away from London--from England," he explained, in a strange yet quite steady voice. "I am obliged to go to Belgium at once, and my affairs are in such a condition that I may be compelled to remain across the channel for some time. Be good enough to say to Lady Throckmorton that I regret deeply that I could not see her before going; but--but the news has been sudden, and my time is fully occupied; but I will write to her from my first stopping-place."
"I will tell her," said Theodora.
"Thank you," he replied, courteously, and then, after a short hesitation, began again, in the tone he used so often--the tone that might be jest or earnest. "And now, there is something else, a subject upon which I wish to ask your unbiased opinion, my dear Theodora, before I say good-bye. When a man finds himself in a danger with which he cannot combat, and remain human--in danger, where defeat means dishonor, do you not agree with me, that the safest plan that man can adopt is to run away?"
Her quickened heart might almost have been running a life-and-death race with her leaping pulse, but she answered him almost steadily.
"Yes," she said to him. "You are quite right. He had better go away."
"Thank you," he returned again. "Then you will give me your hand and wish me G.o.d-speed; and, perhaps--I say perhaps--you will answer me another question. This morning, when you spoke to me through the carriage window, you began to say something about being glad. Were you going to say--" He broke off here, sharply. "No!" he exclaimed. "I will not ask you."
"I was going to say that I was glad to see you," Theo interrupted, gravely. "I was glad to see you. And now, perhaps, you had better tell the coachman to drive on. I will deliver your message to Lady Throckmorton; and as I shall not see you again, unless I am here in July--of course you will come back then--good-bye, Mr. Oglethorpe."
She gave him her hand through the carriage-window, and, for a moment, he held it, to all appearance quite calm, as he looked down at the lovely face the flare of an adjacent gaslight revealed to him against a background of shadow.
"Good-bye," he said, and then released it. "Drive on," he called to the coachman, and in a moment more, he stood alone watching the carriage turn the corner.
CHAPTER V.
THE SEPARATION.
"Mr. Denis Oglethorpe has gone away. He will not come back again until July, when he is to marry Miss Gower."
This was the last entry recorded in the little pink-and-gold journal, and after it came a gap of months.
It was midnight after the memorable day spent in Broome street that the record was made, and having made it, Theodora North shut the book with a startled feeling that she had shut within its pages an unfinished page of her life.
It was a strange feeling to have come upon her so suddenly, and there was a strange kind of desperateness in its startling strength. It was startling; it had come upon her without a moment"s warning, it seemed, and yet, if she had been conscious of it, there had been warning enough.
Warning enough for an older woman--warning enough for Denis Oglethorpe; but it had not seemed warning to a girl of scarcely seventeen years. But she understood it now; she had understood it the moment he told her in that strained, steady voice that he was going away. She had delivered his message to Lady Throckmorton, and listened quietly to her wandering comments, answering them as best she could. She had waited patiently until Sir Dugald"s barbarous eleven o"clock supper was over, and then she had gone to her room, stirred the fire, and dropped down upon the hearth-rug to think it over. She thought over it for a long time, her handsome eyes brooding over the red coals, but after about half an hour she spoke out aloud to the silence of the room.
"He loved me," she said. "He loved me--me. Poor Priscilla! Ah, poor Priscilla! How sorry I am for you."
She was far more sorry for Priscilla than she was for herself, though it was Priscilla who had won the lover, and herself who had lost him forever. She cared for him so much more deeply than she realized as yet, that she would rather lose him, knowing he loved her, than win him feeling uncertain. The glow in her eyes died away in tears, but she was too young to realize despair or anything like it. The truth was that the curious enchantment of the day had not been altogether sad, and at seventeen one does not comprehend that fate can be wholly bitter, or that some turn in fortune is not in store for the future, however hopeless the present may seem.
In this mood the entry was made in the little journal, and having made it, Theodora North cried a little, hoped a little, and wondered guilelessly how matters could end with perfect justice to Priscilla Gower.
The household seemed rather quiet after the change. Mr. Denis Oglethorpe was a man to be missed under any circ.u.mstances--and Theo was not the only one who missed him. Lady Throckmorton missed him also, but she had the solace of her novels and her chocolate, which Theo had not. Novels had been delightful at Downport, when they were read in hourly fear of the tasks that always interfered to prevent any indulgence; but in those days, for some reason, they were not as satisfactory as they appeared once, and so being thrown on her own resources, she succ.u.mbed to the very natural girlish weakness of feeling a sort of fascination for Broome street. It was hard to resist Broome street, knowing that there must be news to be heard there, and so she gradually fell into the habit of paying visits, more to Miss Elizabeth Gower than to her niece. The elder Miss Gower was always communicative, and always ready to talk about her favorites, and to Theo, in her half-puzzled, half-sad frame of mind, this was a curious consolation. The two spent hours together, sometimes, in the tiny parlor, stumbling over Berlin wool difficulties, and now and then wandering to and fro, conversationally, from Priscilla to the octagon-st.i.tch, and from the octagon-st.i.tch to Denis.
Priscilla was p.r.o.ne to reserve, and rarely joined them in their talks; and, besides, she was so often busy, that if she had felt the inclination to do so, she had not time to indulge it. But she was even more silent than she had seemed at first, Theo thought, and she was sure her pale, handsome face was paler, though, of course, that was easily to be accounted for by her lover"s absence.
She was a singular girl this Priscilla Gower. The first time Theo ever saw her display an interest in anybody, or in anything, was when she first heard Pamela"s love-story mentioned.
She was sitting at work near them, when Theo chanced to mention Arthur Brunwalde, and, to her surprise, Priscilla looked up from her desk immediately.
"He was your sister"s lover, was he not?" she said, with an abrupt interest in the subject.
"Yes," answered Theo; "but he died, you know."
Priscilla nodded.
"The week before their wedding-day," she said. "Mr. Oglethorpe told me so."
Theo answered in the affirmative again.
"And poor Pam could not forget him," she added, her usual tender reverence for poor Pam showing itself in her sorrowing voice. "She was very pretty then, and Lady Throckmorton was angry because she would not marry anybody else; but Pamela never cared for anybody else."
Priscilla got up from her chair, and, coming to the hearth, leaned against the low mantel, pen in hand. She looked down on Theodora North with a curious expression in her cold, handsome eyes.
"Is your sister like you?" she asked.
Her tone was such a strange one that Theo lifted her face with a faint, startled look.
"No," she replied, almost timidly. "Pamela is fairer than I am, and not so tall. We are not alike at all."
"I was not thinking of that," said Priscilla. "I was wondering if you were alike in disposition. I think I was wondering most whether you would be as faithful as Pamela."
"That is a strange question," Miss Elizabeth interposed. "Theodora has not been tried."
But Priscilla was looking straight at Theo"s downcast eyes.
"But I think Theodora knows," she said, briefly. "Are you like your sister in that, Theodora? I remember hearing Mr. Oglethorpe say once you would be."
Theo dropped her ivory crochet-needle, and bent to pick it up, with a blurred vision and nervous fingers.
"I cannot tell," she said. "I am not old enough to know yet."
"You are seventeen," said Priscilla. "I knew at seventeen."
Theo recovered the needle, and reset it in her work to give herself time, and then she looked up and faced her questioner bravely, in a sort of desperateness.
"If I knew that I loved any one. If I had ever loved any one as Pamela loved Mr. Brunwalde, I should be like Pamela," she said. "I should never love any one else."
From that time she fancied that Priscilla Gower liked her better than she had done before; at any rate, she took more notice of her, though she was never effusive, of course.
She talked to her oftener, and seemed to listen while she talked, even though she was busy at the time. She said to her once that she would like to know Pamela; and, emboldened by this, Theo ventured to bring one of Pam"s letters to read to her; and when she had read it, told the whole story of her sister"s generosity in a little burst of enthusiastic love and grat.i.tude that fairly melted tender-hearted old Miss Elizabeth to tears, and caused her to confide afterward to Theo the fact that she herself had felt the influence of the tender pa.s.sion, in consequence of the blandishments of a single gentleman of uncertain age, whose performances upon the flute had been the means of winning her affections, but had unhappily resulted in his contracting a fatal cold while serenading on a damp evening.
"He used to play "In a Cottage near a Wood," my dear, most beautifully,"