"But it is not to be expected," he broke out at last, without any reason whatever,--"it is not to be expected that you can contend against everything. You are tired of disappointment, and I don"t blame you.
I should be a selfish dolt if I did. If Gowan had been in my place he could have married you, and have given you a home of your own. I never shall be able to do that. But," with great weakness and evidence of tribulation at the thought, "I didn"t think you would be so cool about it, Dolly."
"Cool!" cried Dolly, waxing wroth and penitent both at once, as usual.
"Who is cool? Not I, that is certain. I shall miss you every hour of my life, Griffith." And the sad little shadow on her face was so real that he was pacified at once.
"I am an unreasonable simpleton!" was his next remorseful outburst.
"You have said that before," said Dolly, rather hard-heartedly; but in spite of it she did not refuse to let him be as affectionate as he chose when he knelt down by her chair, as he did the next minute.
"It would be a great deal better for me," she half whispered, breaking the suspicious silence that followed,--"it would be a great deal better for _me_ if I did not care for you half so much;" and yet at the same time she leaned a trifle more toward him in the most traitorous of half-coaxing, half-reproachful ways.
"It would be the death of _me_," said Griffith; and he at once plunged into an eloquently persuasive dissertation upon the height and depth and breadth and force of his love for her. He was p.r.o.ne to such dissertations, and always ready with one to improve any occasion; and I am compelled to admit that, far from checking him, Dolly rather liked them, and was given to encourage and incite him to their delivery.
When this one was ended, he was quite in the frame of mind to listen to reason, and let her enter into particulars concerning her morning"s efforts, which she did, at length, only adding a flavor of the mysterious up to the introduction of Miss MacDowlas.
"What!" cried out Griffith, when she let out the secret. "Confound it!
No! Not Aunt MacDowlas in the flesh, Dolly? You are joking."
"No," answered Dolly, shaking her head at the amazed faces of the girls, who had come in during the recital, and who had been guilty of the impropriety of all exclaiming at once when the climax was reached. "I am in earnest. I am engaged as companion to no less a person than Miss Berenice MacDowlas."
"Why, it is like something out of a three-volumed novel," said Mollie.
"It is a good joke," said "Toinette.
"It is very awkward," commented Aimee. "If she finds out you are engaged to Griffith, she will think it so indiscreet of you both that she will cut him off with a s.h.i.+lling."
"Indiscreet!" echoed Dolly. "So we are indiscreet, my sage young friend,--but indiscretion is like variety, it is the spice of life."
And by this brisk speech she managed to sweep away the shadow which had touched Griffith"s face, at the unconscious hint at their lack of wisdom.
"Don"t say such a thing again," she said to Aimee afterward, when they were talking the matter over, as they always talked things over together, "or he will fancy that you share his own belief that he has something to reproach himself with. Better to be indiscreet than to love one another less."
"A great deal better," commented the wise one of the family, oracularly.
She was not nineteen yet, this wise one, but she was a great comfort and help to Dolly, and indeed to all of them. "And it is n"t _my_ way to blame you, either, Dolly, though things _do_ look so entangled. _I_ never advised you to give it up, you know."
"Give it up," cried Dolly, a soft, pathetic warmth and color rising to her face and eyes. "Give it up! There would be too much of what has past and what is to come to give up with it. Give it up! I wouldn"t if I could, and I could n"t if I would."
CHAPTER VII. ~ IN WHICH A SPARK IS APPLIED.
IT was several days before Bloomsbury Place settled down and became itself again after Dolly"s departure. They all missed her as they would have missed any one of their number who had chanced to leave them; but Griffith, coming in to make his daily visits, was naturally almost disconsolate, and for a week or so refused to be comforted.
He could not overcome his habit of dropping in on his way to and from his lodgings, which were near by; it was a habit of too long standing to be overcome easily, and besides this, he was so far a part of the family circle that his absence from it would have been regarded by its other members as something rather like a slight, so he was obliged to pay them the delicate attention of presenting himself at least once a day. And thus his wounds were kept open. To come into the parlor and find them all there but Dolly, to see her favorite chair occupied by Mollie or Aimee or "Toinette, to hear them talk about her and discuss her prospects,--well, there were times when he was quite crushed by it.
"If there was any hope of a better day coming," he said to Aimee, who, through being the family sage, was, of course, the family confidante, "if there was only something real to look forward to, but we are just where we were three years ago, and this sort of thing cannot go on forever. What right have I to hold her to her word when other men might make her happier?"
Ainice, sitting on a stool at his feet and looking reflective, shook her head.
"That is not a right view to take," she said, "and it is n"t fair to Dolly. Dolly would be happier with you on a pound a week than she would be with any one else on ten thousand a year. And you ought to know that by this time, Griffith. It is n"t a question of happiness at all."
"I don"t mean--" he was beginning, but Aimee interrupted him. Her part of this love affair was to lay plans for the benefit of the lovers and to endeavor to settle their little difficulties in her own way.
"I am very fond of Dolly," she said.
"Fond of her!" echoed Griffith. "So am I. Who isn"t?"
"I am very fond of Dolly," Aimee proceeded.
"And _I_ know her as other people do not, perhaps. She does not show as much of her real self to outsiders as they think. I have often thought her daring, open way deceived people when it made them fancy she was so easy to read. She has romantic fancies of her own the world never suspects her of,--if I did not know her as I do, she is the last person on earth I should suspect of cheris.h.i.+ng such fancies. The fact is, you are a sort of romance to her, and her love for you is one of her dreams, and she clings to it as closely as she would cling to life. It is a dream she has lived on so long that it has become part of herself, and it is my impression that if anything happened to break her belief in it she would die,--yes, _die!_" with another emphatic shake of the pretty head. "And Dolly is n"t the sort of girl to die for nothing."
Griffith raised his bowed head from his hands, his soft, dark, womanish eyes lighting up and his sallow young face flus.h.i.+ng. "G.o.d bless her,--no!" he said. "Her life has not been free from thorns, even so far, and she has not often cried out against them."
"No," answered Aimee. "And when the roses come, no one will see as you will how sweet she finds them. Your Dolly is n"t Lady Augusta"s Dolly, or Mollie"s, or Ralph Gowan"s, or even mine; she is the Dolly no one but her lover and her husband has ever seen or ever will see. _You_ can get at the spark in the opal."
Griffith was comforted, as he often found himself comforted, under the utterances of this wise one.
His desperation was toned down, and he was readier to hope for the best and to feel warm at heart and grateful,--grateful for Dolly and the tender thoughts that were bound up in his love for her. The tender phantom Aimee"s words had conjured up, stirred within his bosom a thrill so loving and impa.s.sioned, that for the time the radiance seemed to emanate from the very darkest of his clouds of disappointment and discouragement. He was reminded that but for those very clouds the girl"s truth and faith would never have shone out so brightly. But for their poverty and long probation, he could never have learned how much she was ready to face for love"s sake. And it was such an innocent phantom, too, this bright little figure smiling upon him through the darkness, with Dolly"s own face, and Dolly"s own saucy, fanciful ways, and Dolly"s own hands outstretched toward him. He quite plucked up spirit.
"If Old Flynn could just be persuaded to give me a raise," he said; "it would n"t take much of an income for two people to live on."
"No," answered the wise one, feeling some slight misgivings, more on the subject of the out-go than the income. "You might live on very little--if you had it."
"Yes," said Griffith, apparently struck by the brilliancy of the observation, "Dolly and I have said so often."
"Let me see," considered Aimee, "suppose we were to make a sort of calculation. Give me your lead-pencil and a leaf out of your pocket-book."
Griffith produced both at once. He had done it often enough before when Dolly had been the calculator, and had made a half-serious joke of the performance, counting up her figures on the tips of her fingers, and making great professions of her knowledge of domestic matters; but it was a different affair in Aimee"s hands. Aimee was in earnest, and bending over her sc.r.a.p of paper, with two or three little lines on her white forehead began to set things down with an air at once business-like and vigorous, reading, the various items aloud.
"Rent, coals, taxes, food, wages,--you can"t do your own was.h.i.+ng, you know,--clothes, etceteras. There it is, Griffith," the odd, tried look settling in her eyes.
Griffith took the paper.
"Thank you," he remarked, resignedly, after he had glanced at it. "Just fifty pounds per annum more than I have any prospect of getting. But you are very kind to take so much interest in it, little woman." "Little woman" was his pet name for her.
She put her hand up to her forehead and gave the wrinkles a little rub, as if she would have liked to rub them away.
"No," she said, in distress. "I am very fond of calculating, so it isn"t any trouble to me. I only wish I could calculate until what you want and what you have got would come out even."
Griffith sighed. He had wished the same thing himself upon several occasions.
He had one consolation in the midst of his tribulations, however. He had Dolly"s letters, one of which arrived at "the office" every few days.
Certainly they were both faithful correspondents. Tied with blue ribbon in a certain strong box, lay an immense collection of small envelopes, all marked with one peculiarity, namely, that the letters inside them had been at once closely written, and so much too tightly packed that it seemed a wonder they had ever arrived safely at their destination. They bore various postmarks, foreign and English, and were of different tints, but they were all directed in the one small, das.h.i.+ng hand, whose _t"_s were crossed with an audacious little flourish, and whose capitals were so p.r.o.ne to run into whimsical little curls. Most of them had been written when Dolly had sojourned with her charges in Switzerland, and some of them were merely notes of appointment from Bloomsbury Place; but each of them held its own magnetic attraction for Griffith, and not one of them would he have parted with for untold gold. He could count these small envelopes by the score, but he had never received one in his life without experiencing a positive throb of delight, which held fresh pleasure every time.
Most of these letters, too, had stories of their own. Some had come when he had been discouraged and down at heart, and they had been so full of suns.h.i.+ne, and pretty, loving conceits, that by the time he had finished reading them he had been positively jubilant; some, I regret to say, were a trifle wilful and coquettish, and had so roused him to jealous fancies that he had instantly dashed off a page or so of insane reproach and distrust which had been the beginning of a lover"s quarrel; some of them (always written after he had been specially miserable and unreasoning) were half-pathetic mixtures of reproach and appeal, full of small dashes of high indignation, and outbursts of penitence, and with such a capricious, yet pa.s.sionate ring in every line, that they had seemed less like letters than actual speech, and had almost forced him to fancy that Dolly herself was at his side, all in the flush and glow of one of her prettiest remorseful outbreaks.
And these letters from Brabazon Lodge were just as real, so they at least helped him to bear his trials more patiently than he could otherwise have done. She was far more comfortable than she had expected to be, she told him. Her duties were light, and Miss MacDowlas not hard to please, and altogether she was not dissatisfied.