Читать книгу Mrs. Darrell - Foxcroft Davis - Страница 5

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Pelham and Darrell had reckoned upon spending three weeks in Washington, but it became a full month. They were practically adopted by Mrs. Luttrell, and found her large, handsome, old-fashioned house a centre of the best society, where they saw all that was worth seeing in Washington. At their own Embassy they soon became favorites, and it was after a ball there that a revelation came to Pelham. He had seen Elizabeth Brandon every day of their stay in Washington, and every day she had absorbed a little more of his strong, reserved, and silently controlled nature and had gained an inch or two in his reserved, tender, but devoted heart. He discovered that Elizabeth had both goodness and intelligence as well as charm and beauty. She was very young to him,—that is, in his own thirty years he had seen and known, realized and suffered, ten times more than Elizabeth during her twenty years of life. He recognized in her a naturally fine mind and taste for reading, a delightful and subtle power of accommodating herself to the mode and manner of any man she wished to please. How attractive this would make her to the man she loved and married! The thought almost dazzled Pelham’s strong and sober brain. He saw that she was a little intoxicated with the new wine of life, her beauty, her grace and popularity; she was quite unburdened with the cares and anxieties of richer girls who wore finer gowns and sighed for the partners who crowded around Elizabeth.

Pelham was not in the least disturbed by the fact that Darrell had fallen violently in love with Elizabeth and proclaimed it to him a dozen times a day. It was Darrell’s normal condition to be violently in love with some pretty girl; but frankly admitting that his pay and allowance were not enough for one, much less for two, there was small danger of his actually committing himself, so Pelham thought. Nor did he observe any difference in Elizabeth’s acceptance of Darrell’s attentions from those of any other man whom she liked—her manner was uniformly flattering and complaisant; in truth, he had very little conception of Elizabeth’s feminine power of concealment.

On the night of the ball at the British Embassy, Pelham, on his return to his hotel, sat in his own room, smoking and turning over an important question in his mind, which was “when should he ask Elizabeth Brandon to marry him.” He had not much to offer her in a worldly point of view. His own position was good, but no better than hers, and he discovered that General Brandon, who had been to England once or twice, had hobnobbed with persons of higher rank even than the peer of the realm who was grandfather to both Darrell and himself; but Pelham realized with an admiration as deep as his love that Elizabeth was not the woman to marry for either money or position. He was reflecting on what he should say to General Brandon next day, before speaking to Elizabeth, for he had old-fashioned notions as to the rights of fathers. He was wondering, in case Elizabeth accepted him, how General Brandon would take the proposition that she should come out to India and marry him there after the English fashion, and was in doubt whether General Brandon would fall on his neck and embrace him or kick him downstairs.

While he was considering these things, the door opened and Darrell walked in. He threw himself in a chair close to Pelham and, closing his eyes, went into a revery. Pelham looked at him goodhumoredly. No doubt he was dreaming about Elizabeth. He was a handsome fellow, no denying that, and candor, courage, and honesty were writ large all over him. Presently he roused himself, and leaning over towards Pelham, and blushing like a girl, for the first time in his life, he said in a whisper, “She loves me.”

Pelham received a shock such as he had never known before. He knew Darrell’s sincerity and real modesty too well to doubt him, and his mind took in immediately and quietly the calamity to himself which Darrell’s words implied. He sat still, so still that Darrell shook him. “Do you hear, old man? It was all settled to-night at the ball, not two hours ago, behind a big hydrangea in a flower-pot, and you’ve got to help me out. I am to see the Ambassador to-morrow and ask him to cable for two weeks’ additional leave, so we can be married before sailing.”

Yes, with Pelham the dream was over, the fairy palace had crumbled. The heavenly music had dissolved in air. The world had suddenly grown bleak and cold and commonplace, but pride and common sense still remained.

“It seems to me,” said Pelham, in a quiet voice, after a pause, “that there isn’t much left for me to do. You and—Miss Brandon have agreed, and the Ambassador can no doubt get you two weeks more leave—” Pelham stopped with a choking in his throat which he had never felt before in all his life.

“But why don’t you congratulate me?” cried Darrell. They had been like brothers all their lives, and Pelham was to Darrell his other self; while Darrell was to Pelham a younger brother whose excellence of heart and delicacy of soul made up for a very meagre understanding.

“I do congratulate you,” said Pelham, grasping Darrell’s hand, the old habit of love and brotherly kindness overwhelming him. “I think Miss Brandon the most charming girl I ever knew. Any man is fortunate to get her. But I don’t think you are half good enough for her, Jack.”

“That is just what I think,” answered Darrell, with perfect sincerity. “But no man is good enough for her as far as that goes, and I am not the man to be running away from an angel; but there are lots of things to be attended to. I must give my whole time to Elizabeth, and I cannot ask the Ambassador to see about transportation, tickets, and transferring luggage. You must do that, and pay for it all; and I will pay you back when we get our respected aunt’s fortune—fifty years or more from to-day.”

“Of course I shall do all that is necessary,” replied Pelham, “and there will be plenty to do. Getting married is heavy business, and taking a girl away to India at a fortnight’s notice—How did you have the courage to ask so much of such a woman?”

“I don’t know. It happened, that’s all, and I was in heaven. I shall be there again to-morrow morning at eleven o’clock, when I shall see Elizabeth.” He spoke her name as if it were a saint’s name.

The two men sat talking for an hour or two. Darrell’s manner in speaking of his acceptance by Elizabeth was not gushing, but expressed a deep and sincere passion, which he told Pelham, with perfect simplicity, was the first and only love of his life; and Pelham believed him. After parting from Darrell, Pelham sat up until dawn, wrestling with his own heart; but when the day broke he had conquered his anguish. He saw that Elizabeth had possibly entered upon a thorny path by marrying Darrell. He saw all the pitfalls which awaited a young and beautiful woman, the wife of a subaltern in a foot regiment in India. He foresaw that Elizabeth’s charming freedom of manner, her flattering attitude towards men of all sorts and conditions, which might answer well enough in America, would probably be misunderstood by others more or less strict than herself, and he determined to be her friend, and felt sure that she would soon need one. Darrell was the best fellow alive, but he was not the man to manage that complicated problem, a pretty, vivacious, innocent, intelligent, admiration-loving American girl, without family or friends, cast loose at an Indian station.

In the afternoon of that day, Pelham paid his first call on Elizabeth as the prospective bride of Darrell. He thought her more love-compelling in her new relation of a promised bride than he had ever seen her before; her shyness, her pallor, her tears, her deep feeling, her constant remembrance of what her father would suffer, endeared her to Pelham, and yet her willingness, like the Sabine women of old, to go with the man she loved was deeply touching. It was a deliciously old-fashioned love match, both Elizabeth and Darrell looking forward to an uninterrupted honeymoon for the rest of their lives—Elizabeth quite as much so as Darrell. Pelham at this interview was kindness and sympathy itself, and even in the midst of her dream of love Elizabeth felt the serious value of such a friendship as this quiet, silent, rather ugly young officer, sparing of words, but full of tact, was offering her.

When Pelham came out of the shabby old house which was Elizabeth’s home, he met General Brandon face to face on the steps. Pelham grasped his hand cordially. He felt acutely for the poor father who had to give up such a daughter, to go upon such a lifelong journey. Something prompted Pelham to say, “I congratulate my friend and cousin Darrell with all my heart, but for you who are to give up your daughter, I can only say that I feel for you more than I can express.”

“You should congratulate me, too,” replied General Brandon, gently. “It was written that I should have to give up my child, and since it had to be, I am glad to give her to a man as admirable in every way as Captain Darrell.” General Brandon would have said this about any son-in-law not an absolute blackguard. But accidentally he happened to be right, for Darrell was indeed admirable in many ways. “She will go far from me,” said the General, with a sudden break in his voice, “but that a father must be prepared for. May she be happy,—that is all I ask. Captain Darrell came to see me this morning and mentioned settlements. At the words I was somewhat offended, not being used to having such matters mentioned in connection with marriage; but I speedily found that his intentions were most generous, he merely wanted to give my daughter everything he had. On my part I endowed my daughter with all I had, seven bonds of the Egyptian government, for which I paid a thousand pounds in English money, the best part of what I received during my service with the Khedive Ismail. I believe they would now bring very little in the market, but no doubt in the course of time the Egyptian government will meet all of its obligations in full. We must not lose our faith, my dear Pelham, in human nature. I also wished to make over to my daughter the equity in my house, for I have never been able to pay off the mortgage which I acquired when I bought it; but this Captain Darrell most generously refused to accept. And when he told me that his pay and allowances would amount to something like five hundred pounds a year, I felt that it should be quite enough to support a young couple in India, at least for the present.”

Pelham had to look away and laugh, at the bare idea of two such innocents as General Brandon and Jack Darrell attempting to transact business, and the gravity with which General Brandon mentioned the Egyptian bonds would have provoked a laugh from a dead horse. But there was so little money concerned in the transaction that it really did not make much difference.

In the course of twenty-four hours, through the good offices of the British Ambassador at the Washington office with the War Office in London, a cablegram arrived, granting an extension of leave for fourteen days to both Pelham and Darrell. Their prolonged stay in Washington had already made it necessary for them to return to India by way of Suez, and to give up their transcontinental trip. The additional two weeks gave time for the wedding preparations, which were necessarily simple for a wedding tour of two days and the sailing from New York in time to catch the next steamer of the Messageries Maritimes at Marseilles.

Pelham saw Elizabeth nearly every day during the two weeks preceding the marriage, and every time he saw her the melancholy conviction came over him that she was the woman he was never to forget and never to cease to love.

Mrs. Luttrell took charge of affairs, as much as Pelham would let her. She gave the newly engaged pair a large and splendid dinner in honor of their engagement, and there were other festivities of the same nature given by other persons on a smaller scale. All of Elizabeth’s former admirers, and they were legion, sent her wedding presents, and the shabby house was nearly swamped with them.

Richard Baskerville was of great assistance to Pelham in putting things through, for it was Pelham who made the marriage possible. Darrell could do nothing but gaze into Elizabeth’s beautiful black eyes, and if Pelham would have let him, would have spent all the money necessary for their first-class passage to India in buying bouquets for Elizabeth. Between Richard Baskerville, already known as one of the cleverest young lawyers in Washington, and Pelham a sincere friendship sprang up, as the two men were alike in many respects.

On a bright, sunny day in February, Elizabeth Brandon became the wife of Jack Darrell. The wedding took place at a little suburban church where the seats were cheap enough for General Brandon, who was a strong churchman, to afford seats for two. There were neither bridesmaids nor groomsmen, nor any of the showy paraphernalia of a smart wedding. Elizabeth, as much in love as she was, yet felt too much the coming parting from her father to make her wedding a merry one; it was, rather, sad, as are many of the sweetest things in life. Pelham was best man, and the Ambassador, who had good-naturedly helped the matter along, was present. Also there were half a dozen fossils, old comrades and Virginia relations of the Brandons. Richard Baskerville and Mrs. Luttrell were there, and the society newspapers described Mrs. Luttrell as wearing a superb black-velvet gown and a magnificent ermine cape. Mrs. Luttrell’s black-velvet gown and ermine cape were a uniform which she had worn for the last forty years, replacing each velvet gown and ermine cape, as fast as they wore out, with new ones.

Her carriage took the bride and her father to the church, the bridegroom and his best man having preceded them in a cab. Elizabeth, in her simple white wedding gown, with magnificent old lace and her grandmother’s pearls, made an exquisite bride, and Darrell looked every inch a soldier in his scarlet tunic. It was a wedding where love and honor presided, yet Pelham’s heart was heavy at what might be the outcome.

There was a simple wedding breakfast at Elizabeth’s home, where were assembled a few persons, some of them, like the Ambassador and a couple of cabinet officers, sufficiently important to have delighted the newly rich to have secured as guests, and others, like the old comrades and the decayed Virginia relatives, so unimportant that the newly rich would not have touched them with a ten-foot pole. The bride’s health was drunk in cheap champagne. When she departed in her travelling gown for her two days’ wedding trip before sailing on that other tremendous journey to India, tears were in the eyes of most present, but General Brandon was dry-eyed and smiling. When he had bidden the last guest farewell and turned into his lonely home, which had that strange look of emptiness that follows a wedding or a funeral, Pelham returned with him.

General Brandon, seeing the sympathy in the eyes of Pelham, who had his own heartache, laid both hands on his shoulders and said, “My dear sir, believe me, I am at this moment a perfectly happy and delighted man,” and then suddenly wept like a child.

Pelham spent the next two days comforting and uplifting General Brandon, and felt himself comforted and uplifted by association with such a man. He said earnestly, at parting with the General: “Believe me, your daughter has the best of friends as well as husbands in Darrell, but she shall never want a friend as long as I live. India is a treacherous place to men who are out in the hot sun, and life is held there by a very uncertain tenure. So your daughter may survive us both; but as long as either one of us is alive, she shall be as well protected as if she were in your house.”

Two days after the wedding Pelham saw Elizabeth on the deck of the steamer which was to carry them to Havre. Her first words were, “How is my father?” and despite the deep glow of happiness which radiated from her soul through her eyes, she could not speak of him without tears. Nor did she at any time show any forgetfulness of him. She wrote him every day, and posted her letters at every stopping-place on that long journey to India.

Travelling makes people as well acquainted as marriage does, and by the time Captain and Mrs. Darrell and Pelham reached Marseilles, Pelham knew Elizabeth quite as well as Darrell did, and understood her far better. It was a delightful but saddening joy to Pelham when he found Elizabeth soon turning to him, rather than to Darrell, to answer her intelligent questions. In fact, Darrell himself, when she asked him, would say, “Pelham will tell you; he knows a lot more about those old classic beggars and Greek cads and ruffians than I do.” Elizabeth still found Darrell the most charming man in the world.

It was at Marseilles on a late afternoon in early March that Darrell said this to Elizabeth. The three were sitting at a table on the terrace of a café overlooking the old harbor, with its crumbling Vauban forts. The ships’ lights were twinkling against the dark blue of the water and the darker blue of the sky, while afar off they could see faintly the outline of the Château d’If, where Monte Cristo learned his language of the Abbé. Pelham had been telling Elizabeth the story of the city. The ancient Massilia, inhabited by a people whose talk was not, as the old Greek wrote, of seed-time or ploughing or harvest, but of

“Mast and helm and oar-bench,

And the stately ships wherein

They have all joy and pleasure

O’er the wet sea way to win.”

Elizabeth, with the keen delight of a mind newly awakened to books and travel, was capable of enjoying both. Her childhood and first girlhood had been spent in a secluded country house, where the books were few and old and of little value. The two or three years she had spent in Washington since her father’s return from Egypt, enriched only by his Egyptian bonds, had not been of a sort to develop her mind. They had chiefly been spent in dancing and flirting; but Elizabeth, with the Southern girl’s inevitable tendency both to dance and flirt, had that which often goes with it, a depth of intelligence and a serious understanding. It was a like seriousness of understanding in Pelham which attracted her so powerfully. Darrell, whom she still thought, and was to think for some time to come, the most charming man in the world, was never serious about anything except dogs and horses and Elizabeth. He took everything easily, especially life and death, and would have ridden up to a roaring battery or into any other of the many mouths of hell with a smile upon his lips. He did not quite understand why Elizabeth, in the midst of her bridal joy, often shed tears for her father, and although never showing the least impatience at it, or aught but the tenderest kindness, wondered why she should want anybody but him, as he wanted no one but her.

He was, like many men of his kind, perfectly modest, too high-minded if not too large-minded for jealousy, and thought it the most natural thing in the world that Elizabeth should turn to Pelham for sympathy and information, as Darrell himself had always done. At this moment he was very much interested in Pelham’s account of the ancient tunny fisheries, as they had just had among their hors-d’œuvres dried tunny fish, as well as their bouillabaisse. Elizabeth knew something of the man of yesterday who had made bouillabaisse immortal, but Darrell was surprised to hear that Thackeray had ever written verse. Pelham, sitting next Elizabeth and, although habitually a silent man, doing most of the talking, began to wonder sadly how long it would be before Elizabeth became desperately bored by her lover husband. No such thought entered Elizabeth’s mind; she only deemed herself twice fortunate in having the companionship of such a friend as Pelham as well as the love of her hero husband Darrell.

Next morning they sailed through Suez for Bombay. Elizabeth proved a good sailor and spent most of her waking hours on deck. Darrell lay back in his steamer chair and smoked, being quite satisfied with the spectacle of his charming Elizabeth tripping up and down the deck and talking with Pelham. The other passengers were not quite certain at first whose wife she was.

As they sailed over the blue Mediterranean, it was Pelham who told Elizabeth when they would come in sight of Stromboli; and it was on his arm that she watched before daybreak a great, pallid moon sinking into the black world of waters on the west, while on the east the dun sky, across which fled great ragged masses of dark clouds, was lighted by the vast torches of Stromboli waving like a blazing head of Medusa. Meanwhile Darrell was sound asleep in his berth. It would have taken more than ten Strombolis to have gotten him up on deck at that hour. But a gun, a dog, or a fishing-rod would have kept him up all night and made him as alert and watchful as if his life depended upon the issue. It was Pelham who showed to Elizabeth the sickle-shaped port of Messina, and told her of the ancient coins of the city, which bore a sickle upon them. And together, as they sailed along the desolate shores of Crete, they followed the itinerary of Paul of Tarsus.

When the ship made its slow way through the Canal to Suez, Darrell was roused to study it from the aspect of a military man. But it was Pelham, who had more military science in his ugly head than Darrell had in his whole handsome young body, who watched with Elizabeth the red flamingoes rising from amid the tamarisk trees. Once out of the Canal, Darrell again resumed his life of smoking, sleeping, eating, and adoring Elizabeth; but Elizabeth, who was being educated by Pelham, listened with the eagerness of an intelligent child to Pelham’s stories of those historic lands whose bleak, black-scarred, and rocky shores border the Red Sea. He told her of those strange Mohammedan people who inhabit this country, where nature is as fierce as man, and where “Allah is God of the great deserts,” as Pierre Loti says,—those people in whom Islam is incarnate. Together Elizabeth and Pelham watched the passage around Bab-el-Mandeb, the “Gate of tears.”

At last, on a hot, bright morning, they landed at Bombay, the great busy, dirty city, and after a week’s travel by night and day they finished their journey at Embira, in one of the remotest depths of the Punjab. Elizabeth had travelled far and fast, since that January night when both Pelham and Darrell had searched for the little pearl heart, dropped from around her milk-white throat; but she had travelled farther and faster than she knew.