Читать книгу A Comedy of Elopement - Christian Reid - Страница 4

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Twilight had given way to night, and the sky was thickset with golden stars, when the two girls reached the door of their boarding house. A stream of light from the dining room, and a clatter of knives and forks and voices announced that supper was in progress, so they turned at once into that apartment.

A party of about a dozen people—chiefly feminine—were gathered round the table. One of these, a handsome middle-aged lady, looked up when the two entered.

“Why are you so late, Fanny?” she asked. “You know that I do not like you to be out after dark without an escort.”

“But it is so hard to get in before dark, mamma,” said Miss Berrien, taking her place at the table. “It is lovely on the sea wall at twilight, and the air—oh, what a feeling it gives one! Do you suppose it can be ozone?—ozone in the air, I mean? Well”—as nobody appeared able to answer this question—“whatever it is, it is wonderful in its effect. My appetite is a most serious fact, and I am quite ready to do justice to your good things, Mrs. Shreve.”

Mrs. Shreve—an elderly faded widow, who presided at the head of the table—smiled faintly. The faintness of the smile was not owing to any disapproval of her young boarder’s appetite, but was due to the fact that, like a good many other estimable people, she lived persistently in the shadow rather than in the sunshine of life.

“I like to see people with good appetites, Miss Fanny,” she said in a tone which seemed to imply that appetites were perhaps a slight mitigation of the sadness of existence. “Try the cup cakes; they are nice to-night.—Why, Miss Aimée, you are not eating anything!”

“I am not hungry, Mrs. Shreve,” replied Aimée, who could not say that she was incapacitated by excitement from eating, and who looked with amazement at Fanny’s gastronomic performances. How a girl on the eve of a promised elopement, with a lover on his way to meet her, could exhibit such a keen appreciation of cup cakes and other delicacies was quite beyond Aimée’s comprehension.

Her attention thus directed to the latter, Mrs. Berrien glanced at her.

“What is the matter with you, Aimée?” she asked. “Your eyes are shining as if you had been listening to a ghost story.”

“She has been listening to a moral lecture,” said Miss Fanny, giving Aimée an admonitory touch under the table, “and she is reflecting upon it.”

“Nothing is the matter with me, Aunt Alice,” said Aimée. “I have no appetite—that is all.”

“Want of appetite is very far from being the trifling thing that most people consider it,” said an elderly gentleman on the other side of the table, who certainly himself had no ground for complaint on that score. “There is no effect without a cause, and no physical derangement which may not be attended with the most serious results. If people would only be warned in time—”

“I suppose nobody would ever die,” interposed Fanny, a little flippantly; and then, feeling that to talk of dying to a company chiefly composed of invalids was not the extreme of tact, she went on hastily: “O mamma! who do you suppose I met at the hotel to-day? Your old friend Mr. Denham, who is here for his throat—that same throat of which he has been talking ever since I can remember. I also saw the English gentlemen who are going soon on that hunting expedition which Mr. Meredith thinks of joining, and which I should like to join, too.”

“I have no doubt the party would be glad to receive you as a recruit, Miss Berrien,” said one of the ladies with a smile. “At least it is easy to answer for one member of it.”

“Yes, I think I might count on his vote,” returned Miss Berrien, composedly.

After tea this young lady retired for some additions to her toilet, while Aimée—who felt as if she lived, moved, and had her being in a dream—went into the parlor and sat down ostensibly to read. She was usually a great bookworm, having been a devourer of all kinds of literature from her earliest childhood, and to-night she had a novel which at another time would have absorbed all her attention. But for once the letters danced before her eyes and conveyed no meaning to her mind. The romance of reality in which she was so soon to play a part engrossed all her thoughts. How would she acquit herself? What would she be called upon to do? How could Fanny possibly be so composed when her fate was hanging in the balance? These questions formed the burden of Aimée’s reflections, while her head was bent and her dark eyes rested on the open page of the book which she held.

Suddenly, however, she roused with a start, for some one said, “How are you, this evening, Mr. Meredith?” and looking up she saw Miss Berrien’s lover number two crossing the room.

A man with whom the world went well and easily was Mr. Meredith, evidently. Rather short, rather stout, rather rubicund, but not ill-looking, and apparently not cast by Nature for that villainous part which is assigned in melodramas to the obnoxious suitor, Aimée’s gaze followed him with a species of fascination. This man, commonplace as he appeared, was, unconsciously to himself, one of the dramatis personæ in the romance now proceeding. “If he could know!” thought the girl, with a thrill.

Exemplifying the proverb that ignorance is sometimes bliss, Mr. Meredith sank easily into a seat and began talking to one or two people, without observing the solemn young eyes regarding him from a shady corner. “If he could know!” Aimée thought again when Fanny entered, bright, sparkling, coquettish, and gave him her hand as he came eagerly forward to meet her. If there was a single weight on Miss Berrien’s mind, a single cloud on her spirit, no one could possibly have suspected it; and Aimée began to wonder somewhat if the whole thing was not a jest, when, in the midst of the lively banter which with Fanny generally did duty for conversation, she sent a sudden, swift glance across the room, which made the wondering girl understand that it was reality after all.

The glance conveyed a warning, and fearing lest she might unguardedly betray to Mrs. Berrien’s quick observation that something unusual was in the atmosphere, Aimée rose and with her book in her hand went quietly from the room. As her slender young figure passed, two ladies near the door looked up and nodded a kindly good-night.

“What a sweet girl that is!” said one of them. “She seems the embodiment of gentleness.”

“She is so pretty, too,” said the other. “At least, she promises to be pretty—and there is so much mind and soul in her face!”

“Poor child! I fancy it is doubtful what will become of her,” said the first speaker. “Her father is dead, and her mother has married again—married a certain Major Joscelyn, who is very much gone to pieces in all respects. I know the family well, and Mrs. Berrien was talking to me about the Joscelyns—whom she dislikes exceedingly—the other day. Aimée, you see, is her brother’s child, and for that reason she has her with her at present. ‘I found that the Joscelyns were simply making her a drudge,’ she said, ‘and her health was breaking down under it, so I decided to take her for a time at least. Perhaps, when Fanny is married, I may adopt her altogether.’”

“She can well afford to do so if Miss Fanny establishes herself in life as well as that,” responded the other, glancing significantly across the room.

Aimée meanwhile—altogether unconscious of being a subject of discussion—went to the chamber which she shared with her cousin, and, without striking a light, sat down by the open window through which even at night the air came with balmy softness. She felt strangely puzzled, and strongly averse to the service which she had pledged herself to perform; yet the idea of retreating did not for a moment occur to her. She had promised Fanny, and she must perform whatever was exacted from her in fulfillment of that promise. But how much she shrank from this fulfillment it is difficult to say. This impetuous lover, whom Fanny herself was afraid to face, what would he say, what would he do? Would he rage with passion, or be overwhelmed by despair? Aimée decided that she would prefer passion to despair, for she had a most tender heart, and the sight of distress always unnerved her. She pictured to herself the Ariel lying off the bar, with the eager lover pacing her deck, sure that happiness was within his grasp, fancying no doubt that Fanny, like himself, was counting the hours to their time of meeting; and then a picture of the scene in the parlor below—of Fanny gay and enchanting, of Mr. Meredith fascinated and amused—rose before her mental vision. “How can she?” the girl thought. “How can she? To bring a man here just to disappoint him! It is—yes, it is shameful!”

As she so sat and so thought, a clock tolled out ten strokes. Soon thereafter the different inmates of the house—being chiefly of middle age and quiet habits—were to be heard exchanging good-night salutations on the staircase and in the hall, several doors closed, and then Aimée heard her aunt’s footsteps approach her chamber. There was no light, and the girl hoped it would pass on—for she had the feeling of a conspirator, and dreaded to be addressed by one whom she felt as if she was betraying—but Mrs. Berrien paused, opened the door and looked in.

“Are you asleep, Aimée?” she asked.

“Oh, no, Aunt Alice,” replied Aimée’s voice from the window. “I am sitting here.”

“What! in the dark, and by an open window! Are you trying to take cold? What is the matter?”

“Nothing at all,” answered Aimée, conscious that guilt was in every cadence of her voice. “It is so warm that I did not think I could take cold, and I—I like to look at the stars.”

“Close the window at once and go to bed,” said Mrs. Berrien. “You need not wait for Fanny. She will probably not be up for some time. Why are you so foolish and so peculiar, my dear? It is better for you to stay down-stairs in the evening.”

“I will hereafter, if you desire it,” replied Aimée, lowering the window as she spoke. She was always docile to the least suggestion, but at that moment she would have promised obedience in anything, to atone for the deception she was aiding to practice.

“Well, good-night,” said Mrs. Berrien. “Have you matches at hand?”

“Oh, yes,” answered the girl, glad not to be obliged to show her face.

As her aunt went away, she threw herself on the outside of her bed, and lay there almost motionless, but wide awake for another hour—the delightful hour for which Mr. Meredith invariably waited, for in it he had the society of his pretty ladylove to himself. Fanny, however, who always sent him away punctually on the stroke of eleven, was to-night not remiss in doing so. Ten minutes after that hour the door of the chamber opened, and that young lady appeared, bearing a light which flashed full in Aimée’s face.

“Oh!” she cried, “how you startled me with your great, solemn eyes! You foolish child, have you not been asleep? I hoped when you went away so early you would take a good sleep, and be fresh and ready for my little errand.”

“I am ready,” answered Aimée, “but as for having gone to sleep, how could I? It is all too exciting!”

“One would think it was you who were going to elope,” said Fanny, putting down her lamp. “As for me, I am so tired of men, that if it were not for mamma I would go into a convent, where I would never hear of them again. You can not fancy how Mr. Meredith has been tormenting me, until I have half promised to marry him just to get rid of him.”

“But you will not get rid of him if you marry him,” said Aimée, with her eyes more great and more solemn than ever.

“Simpleton!” returned Fanny. “Of course not; but between promising and doing a thing there is a very great difference, as poor Lennox will find out to-night. Dear me!”—sitting down meditatively on the side of Aimée’s bed—“I wonder what made me such a fool as to imagine for a moment that I would go with him? The mere thought makes me shudder—to be running off wildly and being seasick (the idea of my forgetting that I always am seasick!) instead of going to bed comfortably and getting up to-morrow to torment Mr. Meredith by flirting with one of those handsome Englishmen!”

“O Fanny, are you not ashamed!” said Aimée. “To think what Mr. Kyrle must be feeling at this moment, while you—”

“Yes, really, I am ashamed!” said Fanny, hastily. “It is abominable conduct, I know. But you see I am shallow—shallow as that”—indicating about a quarter the depth of her little finger—“and I can’t help it if one nail drives out another in my mind. I wonder if it is my mind or my heart, by the by? Well, anyway, in me. It is not my fault that I am shallow; and, on the whole, I think I rather like it. One has a much easier life. Isn’t it a great deal wiser for me to make the best of things as they are, for instance, than to be distracted about Lennox Kyrle, who I really like better than anybody else in the world, if I let myself think of him?”

“I—I don’t know,” said Aimée, who found this question too deep for her solving. “You must decide, of course.”

“I have decided,” said Fanny. “Things are best as they are. But now we must have done with talking and proceed to action. In the first place, I will tell you exactly what you must say to Mr. Kyrle when you meet him.”

“Yes,” answered Aimée, beginning to shiver at that anticipation.

“You are to say,” went on Fanny, “that I feel it is impossible for me to take such a desperate step as to elope with him; that it would break mamma’s heart; and—and that it would ruin his life, for I should only tie him down to hopeless poverty. Say that I am sorry, and blame myself dreadfully, that my feelings will not permit me to see him, and that—be sure to make this point emphatic!—he must not dream of attempting to see me. My resolution can not be changed. I am sure I can trust you to put it all as well as possible, Aimée—you have a great deal of tact and judgment.”

“But why not write it?” demanded Aimée, whose dismay was not soothed by this compliment.

“My dear child, could he read a letter in the dark?” asked the other, impatiently. “Besides, I never write; I have learned too much of the mischief that lurks in ink. Tell him all this as quickly as you can—and be sure to make it very positive about his not trying to see me—and then run back to the house as fast as possible. How lucky it is that we live so near the water, else I could not let you go!”

It is safe to say that, in this view of the case, such lucky proximity was something for which Aimée did not feel very grateful as she rose to prepare for the expedition. Her courage was sadly failing, not so much on account of the lonely walk through the midnight streets, as from the realization of the strange and awkward position in which she would be placed. She was trembling like a leaf from nervousness and excitement as Miss Berrien enveloped her in a large, dark cloak, and drew the hood over her head.

“Now,” said Fanny, glancing at her watch, “it is time for you to go. I hate—oh, I hate dreadfully to send you! If there were any other way—”

“But there is none,” said Aimée, trying to smile. “And I am not afraid.”

“It seems so cowardly to send you,” said Fanny, half under her breath. “Yet I can not trust my own resolution if I met Lennox!—and then if it should be discovered—”

Her pause said more than many words. At that moment the Meredith diamonds, and all that the Meredith diamonds represented, shone brightly before her eyes. To risk the loss of them by keeping this midnight tryst, was more than she could dare. And the girl before her looked up with brave, generous glance from under the dark hood.

“Don’t think of it, Fanny,” she said. “If you were discovered, what would everybody say? while if I am, it does not matter. Nobody knows or cares about me! Come, now, and let me out. You’ll wait downstairs to let me in, will you not?”

“Yes, indeed, I shall wait and count every instant. For Heaven’s sake come back as quickly as you can! And be certain, very certain, that it is Lennox Kyrle to whom you speak. It would be awful if you gave the message to any one but him!”