"Men are all stupid, of course," Winthrop answered.
"What makes all she has done for me the more remarkable," Garda went on, not heeding his tone, "is the fact that she doesn't really like me, she cannot, I am so different. Yet she goes on being good to me just the same."
Winthrop made an impatient movement. "Suppose we don't talk any more about Mrs. Harold," he said.
"I must talk about her, when I love her and trust her more than anything."
"Don't trust her too much."
She drew her arm from his, indignantly. "One night she came way down the live-oak avenue after me, with only slippers on her poor little feet, to keep me from going out in the fog with Lucian – sailing, I mean. What do you think of that?"
"I don't think anything."
"Yes, you do; your face shows that you do."
"My face shows, perhaps, what I think of the extraordinary duplicity of women," said Winthrop.
"Duplicity? Do you call it duplicity for me to be telling you every single thing I think and feel, as I have done to-day?"
"I was speaking of Mrs. Harold."
"Duplicity and Margaret!" exclaimed Garda.
They had reached the end of the orange aisle, and she no longer had his arm. "I can't discuss her with you, Garda," he said. And he went out into the sunshine beyond.
But Garda followed him. She came round, placed her hands on his shoulders, and pushed him with soft violence back into the shade. "Why do you speak so of her? you shall tell me. Why shouldn't I trust her? But I do and I will in spite of you!"
"Do you mean to marry that man, Garda?" asked Winthrop, at last, as she stood there holding him, her eyes on his, thinking of her no longer as the young girl of his fancy, but as the woman.
"I don't know," answered Garda, her tone altering; "perhaps he won't care for me."
"But if he should care?"
"Oh!" murmured the girl, the most lovely, rapturous smile lighting up her face.
Winthrop contemplated her for a moment. "Very well, then, I think I ought to tell you: she cares for Lucian herself."
Garda's hands dropped. "It isn't possible that you believe that – that you have believed it! Margaret care for Lucian! She doesn't care a straw for him, and since I have begun to care for him again, I verily believe that she has detested him; he knows it too. Margaret care for him! What are you thinking of? I care, not Margaret; I've done nothing but try to be with him, and meet him, and I've seen him more times than she knows. Why – it gave her that fever just because she had to do something for him; that last afternoon before he went away (I promised her I wouldn't tell you; but I don't care, I shall), I had asked Lucian to meet me at the pool in the south-eastern woods, and then I thought that I should rather see him at the house after all, and so I started a little earlier, and was on my way to Madam Giron's, when I came upon Margaret. I had to tell her, because she wanted me to go home with her and of course I couldn't. And then, suddenly, we saw Dr. Kirby coming, and I knew it must be for me – he had found out in some way my plan – and I knew, too, that it would be dreadful if he should meet Lucian; I was sure he would shoot him! And I was going to run over and warn Lucian – there was just time – when Margaret said she would do it, and that I had better go back up the path and stop the Doctor, keep him away from there entirely, if possible, which was, of course, much the best plan. So I did. And she went to Madam Giron's. And I am convinced that it was the cause of her illness – it was so disagreeable to her to be mixed up in anything connected with Lucian."
Garda had poured out this narrative with all the eloquence of the warm affection she had for her friend. Now she stopped. "She doesn't like Lucian because she doesn't understand him," she said. Then she repented. "No, it isn't that, he isn't the person for her. Lucian will do for me; but not for Margaret." And she looked at Winthrop with one of her sudden comprehending glances, clear as a beam of light.
But he did not respond to this. "When you met her that afternoon, Garda, where was she?" he asked; he seemed to be thrusting Garda and her affairs aside now.
"I told you; in the south-eastern woods."
"Yes. But where?"
"In the eastern path, at the end of that long straight stretch beyond the pool – just before you get to the bend."
"And then?"
"Then I went back up the path to meet the Doctor. And Margaret went down the path and across the field to Madam Giron's."
At this instant appeared Celestine. She had gone to the entrance of the aisle which was nearest the house, and looked in; then, seeing that they were at the far end, she had left it and come round on the outside.
For something forbade Celestine to walk down that long vista alone. They would probably hear her and turn; and then there would be the necessity of approaching them for fully five minutes step by step, with the consciousness that they were looking; she could not stare back at them, and yet neither could she look all the time at the sand at her feet – which would be dizzying. Celestine always took care of her dignity in this way; she had a fixed regard for herself as a decent Vermont woman; you could see that in the self-respecting way in which her large neat shoes lifted themselves and came down again when she walked.
"Mrs. Rutherford would like to see you, Mr. Evert, if you please; she isn't so well, she says."
"Nothing serious, Minerva, I hope?"
"I guess there's no occasion to be scairt, Mr. Evert. But she wants you."
"I will come immediately."
Celestine disappeared.
Garda and Winthrop turned back towards the house through the orange aisle.
"Mrs. Rutherford has never known, has she, that we have been engaged?" asked Garda.
"No."
"There is no need that she should ever know, then; she isn't fond of me as it is, and she would detest me forever if she knew there had been a chance of my becoming in reality her niece. I don't want to trouble her any longer with even my unseen presence; I want to go away."
"Where?"
"It doesn't make much difference where. It is only that I am restless, and as I have never been restless before, I thought that perhaps if I should go away for a while, it would stop."
"Yes, you wish to see the world," said Winthrop, vaguely. His mind was not upon Garda now.
"I don't care for 'the world,'" the girl responded. "I only care for the people in it."
Then, in answer to a glance of his as his attention came back to her, "No, I am not going after Lucian," she said; "don't think that. I am almost sure that Lucian will go abroad now; he was always talking about it, – saying that he longed to spend a summer in Venice, and paint everything there. No – but I think I might go to Charleston – the Doctor could take me; he has a cousin there, Mrs. Lowndes; I could stay with her. Margaret will oppose it. But the Doctor is my guardian too, you know; and I hope you will take my part. Of course I should rather go with Margaret anywhere, if she could only go; but she cannot, you know Mrs. Rutherford would never let her. So she will feel called upon – Margaret – to oppose it."
They had now come to the end of the aisle. "Promise me to take my part," said Garda. Then, perceiving that his attention had left her again, "See what I am reduced to!" she confided to the last orange-tree.
Winthrop brought himself back. "I don't see any reason why you shouldn't go to Charleston if the Doctor will take you," he said; "you must speak to him about it."
"Well, I won't keep you; I see you want to go. – All the same, you know, I liked you," she called after him as he went out in the sunshine.
He glanced back, smiling.
But Garda looked perfectly serious. She stood there framed in the light green shade; "I should like ever so much to go back to the time when I first cared for you!" she said, regretfully.
Winthrop found Mrs. Rutherford much excited. Betty, tearful and distressed, met him outside the door, and in whispered words confessed that she had inadvertently betrayed the fact of his engagement, to dear Katrina; "I can't imagine, though, why she should feel about it as she does – as though it was something terrible," concluded the friend, plucking up a little spirit at the end of her confession, and wiping her eyes.
"She won't feel so long," said Winthrop, – "you can take comfort from that; my engagement is broken."
"BROKEN?"
"Yes; by Garda herself, ten minutes ago." And leaving Betty to digest this new intelligence, he went in to see his aunt.
His aunt had had herself put into an arm-chair: an arm-chair was more impressive than a bed. "I feel very ill, Evert," she began, in a faint voice; "I never could have believed that you would deceive me in this way."
"Let me undeceive you, then. My engagement – for I presume it is that you are thinking of – is broken."
"Did you break it, Evert?" pursued Aunt Katrina, still in affliction.
"No, Miss Thorne broke it. Ten minutes ago."
"A forward minx!" said the lady, veering suddenly to heat.
"It is done, at any rate. I suppose you are glad."
"Of course I am glad. But I should be gladder still if I thought I should never see her face again!"
"That is apropos – she is anxious to go to Charleston."
"Let her go," said Aunt Katrina, with majesty.
"She is afraid Margaret will object."
"I shall object if she stays! But oh, Evert, how could you have been caught in such a trap as that, by a perfectly unknown, shallow, mercenary girl?"
"Unknown – for the present, yes; shallow – I am not prepared to say; but mercenary? If she were mercenary, would she have let me off? Would she have broken the engagement herself, as she did ten minutes ago?"
"I wish you wouldn't keep repeating that 'ten minutes,'" said Aunt Katrina, irritably. "Who cares for ten minutes? I wish it were ten years." Then her mind reverted to Garda. "She has some plan," she said.
"I don't think she plans. And now that this trouble is off your mind, my dear aunt, will you excuse me if I leave you? I have still only just arrived, and I was up at dawn. Shall I send Celestine to you?"
"Celestine is busy; she is refolding some lace – Flemish church."
"Your Betty, then."
"My Betty has behaved in the most traitorous way."
"When she was the one to tell you?"
"She should have told me long before."
"Why she, more than any of the rest of us?" asked Winthrop, rising.
"Because she must have made a superhuman effort not to; because she must have fairly kept herself in a strait-jacket to prevent it – in a strait-jacket night and day; for eight long months has Elizabeth Gwinnet done that!"
"Don't you think, then, that you ought to have some pity for her?" suggested Winthrop.
He went out. And then Betty, who was sitting, dazed and dejected, on the edge of a chair outside the door, hurried in, handkerchief in hand, to make her peace with dearest Kate, her long limp black skirt (all Betty's skirts were long) trailing in an eager, humble way behind her.
Winthrop had said that he wished to go to his room. The way to it was not through the drawing-room; yet he found himself in the latter apartment.
Margaret sat there near one of the windows sewing, sewing with that even motion of hand, and absorbed gaze bent on the long seam, which he had told himself more than once that he detested. The heavy wooden shutter was slightly open, so that a beam of light entered and shone across her hair; the rest of the room was in shadow.
Winthrop came towards her; he had closed the door upon entering. She gave him her hand, and they exchanged a few words of formal greeting – inquiry and reply about his journey and kindred matters.
"Garda has broken her engagement to me; I presume you know it," he said.
"I knew she intended to do it."
"She tells me that you have tried to dissuade her?"
"Yes; I thought she did not, perhaps, fully know her own mind."
"We must give up the idea that she is a child," he said. "We have been mistaken, probably, about that all along."
Margaret sewed on without answering.
"You are very loyal to her; you don't let me see that you agree with me."
"I didn't suppose that you meant any disparagement, when you said it."
"She tells me that she doesn't care for me any more." He took a book from the table beside him, and looked absently at its title. "We must allow that she has a great facility as regards change."
"She has a great honesty."
Winthrop sat down – until now he had been standing; he threw aside the book. "You certainly can't approve of it," he said, – "such a disposition?"
He did not pay much heed to what he was saying, he was absorbed in the problem before him; face to face with Margaret, he was asking himself, and with more inward tumult than ever, why she had been so willing to have him think of her, as, after what he had seen, he must think? During his two weeks of absence – the evening before on that long pier in the rain – he had felt a hot anger against her for the unconcern with which she was treating him. But now that he knew the real history of that last afternoon, now that he knew that it was Garda who had planned the meeting with Lucian, Garda, not Margaret, who had been on her way to that solitary house, the problem was more strangely haunting even than before. She had saved Garda from compromising herself in the eyes of the man to whom she was engaged – yes; but she had done it at the expense of compromising herself, Garda, meanwhile, remaining ignorant of the greatness of the sacrifice, since she did not know, as Margaret did, that he, Winthrop, was sitting there in the wood beyond the bend.
Certainly it was an immense thing for one woman to have done for another; you might say, indeed, that there was nothing greater that a woman could do.
Then came again the galling thought that Margaret had not found the task so difficult, simply because she was indifferent as to what his opinion of her might be; she knew that she had not been in any sense of the word to blame – that was enough for her; what he knew, or thought he knew, troubled her little.
But no, that could not be. Margaret Harold was a proud woman – you could see that, quiet as she was, in every delicate line of her face; it was not natural, therefore, that she should willingly rest in the eyes of any one under such an imputation as that. Surely, now that Garda had, of her own accord, broken off her engagement, and confessed (only Garda never "confessed," she merely told) that her old liking for Lucian had risen again, surely now Margaret would throw off the false character that rested upon her, would hasten to do so, would be glad to do so; there was no necessity to shield Garda further. She had made the girl promise not to tell him the real version of the events of that last afternoon; didn't this mean that, if the circumstances should ever change so that it was possible to give the real version, she wished to give it to him herself? The circumstances had changed; and now, wouldn't she take advantage of it? Wouldn't she be glad to explain, at last, the reasons that took her to Madam Giron's that day? Of course she supposed that still he did not know; it would not occur to her that Garda might break her promise.
But still her hand came and went above the white seam. And still she said nothing.
He waited a long time – as long as it was possible to sit there without speaking. Then he went back to his last remark – which she had not answered; annoyed by her silence, he went from bad to worse. "I shall be surprised if you approve of it; – you have such a regard for appearances."
She colored. "I am not very successful in preserving them then, even if I have a regard."
"Oh, you don't mind me," answered Winthrop, in a tone which in spite of himself was openly bitter.
She looked up, he could see that she was much moved. "We must do everything we can for Garda now," she said, rather incoherently, her eyes returning to her work.
"You have done altogether too much for her as it is; I don't think you need trouble yourself so constantly about Garda, you might think for a moment of your other friends."
He was absolutely pleading – he could scarcely believe it of himself. But he wanted so to have her set him right! He wanted her to do it of her own accord – show that she was glad to be able to do it at last. There was no longer any question of saving Garda; Garda had, in her own eyes at least, saved herself. He waited for his answer.
She had given him a frightened glance as he spoke, the expression of his face seemed to take her by surprise, and break down her self-possession. She rose, murmuring something about being obliged to go.
"You are sure you have nothing to say to me, Margaret?" he asked, as she went towards the door.
"Say? What do you mean?"
"I am giving you a chance to explain, I long to have you explain. I find myself unable to believe – " He stopped. Then he began again. "I am sure there is some solution – If I have not always liked your course in other matters, at least I have never thought this of you. You know what I witnessed that afternoon, as I sat there in the woods; one word will be enough – tell me what I must think of it – and of you." He was trying her to the utmost now.
A painful red flush had darkened her face, but, except for that, she did not flinch. "You must think what you please," she answered.
Then she escaped; she had opened the door, and now she went rapidly down the hall towards her own room.
He stood gazing. If he had not known she was innocent, he should have set down her tone to defiance; it was exactly the sort of low-voiced defiance which he had expected from her when he had supposed – what he had supposed.
But his suppositions had been entirely false. Did she still wish him to believe that they were true!
It appeared so.
CHAPTER XXIV
Garda Thorne went to Charleston. Margaret gave her consent only after much hesitation; but Dr. Kirby was from the first firmly in favor of the plan. He himself would take his ward to the South Carolina city (for Garda, the Doctor would draw upon his thin purse whether he were able to afford it or not), she should stay with his accomplished cousin Sally Lowndes; thus she would have the best opportunity to see the cultivated society of that dear little town.
This last sentence was partly the Doctor's and partly Winthrop's; the Doctor had spoken thus reverentially of Charleston society, and Winthrop thus admiringly of Charleston itself, which had seemed to him, the first time he beheld it, the prettiest place on the Atlantic coast, a place of marked characteristics of its own, many of them highly picturesque; his use of the word "little" had been affectionate, not descriptive. He had found a charm in the old houses, gable end to the street; in the jealous walls and great gardens; in St. Michael's spire; in the dusky library, full of grand-mannered old English authors in expensive old bindings; in the little Huguenot church; in the old manor-houses on the two rivers that come down, one on each side, to form the beautiful harbor; in the rice fields; in the great lilies. The Battery at sunset, with Fort Moultrie on one hand, the silver beaches round Wagner and the green marsh where the great guns had been on the other, and Sumter on its islet in mid-stream – this was an unsurpassed lounging-place; there was nothing fairer.
The Doctor had been much roused by the breaking of Garda's engagement. Garda had told him that Evert had not been to blame. But the Doctor was not so sure of that. He felt, indeed, that he himself had been to blame, they had all been to blame; ma, Betty Carew, the Moores, Madam Ruiz and the Señor Ruiz, Madam Giron – they had all been asleep, and had let this worst of modern innovations creep upon them unawares. For surely the foundations of society were shaken when the engagement of a young lady of Garda's position could be "broken." "And broken, ma," as he repeated solemnly to his little mother a dozen times, "without cause."
"Well, my son, would you rather have had it broken with?" asked ma at last.
The Doctor had had an interview with Winthrop. And he had been obliged to confess (still to ma) that the northerner had borne himself with courtesy and dignity, had given him nothing to take hold of; he had simply said, in a few words, that Garda had asked to be released, and that of course he had released her.
The Doctor himself had fervently desired that she should be freed. But this made no difference in his astonishment that the thing could really be done, had already been brought about. Garda had wished it; he himself had wished it; and Winthrop had obeyed their wish. Nevertheless, Reginald Kirby was a prey to rage, he was sure that somebody ought to be severely handled. In the mean while it seemed a wise course to take Garda to other scenes.
Adolfo Torres returned from Cuba before Garda's departure. He bade her good-by with his usual gravity; then, exactly three hours later, he started for Charleston himself. He kept punctiliously just that amount of time behind her, it was part of his method; on this occasion the method caused some discomfort, since, owing to the small number of trains in that leisurely land, it obliged him to travel with the freight all the way.
A week later a letter came to Evert Winthrop. It was a letter which gave him a sharp surprise.
It bore the postmark of the little post-office out in the St. John's where he had sat in the rain, and the contents were as follows:
"Dear old Lad, – I am here – on the river. Could you come over for a day? I am very anxious to see you.
"Lansing Harold."
At the last intelligence, Lanse had been in Rome.
There was a scrawled postscript:
"Say nothing, I write only to you."
Winthrop's relations with Margaret since they had parted, on the day of his return, at the drawing-room door, had been of the scantiest; they had scarcely exchanged a word. She avoided him; he said to himself that she had turned into ice; but this was not a truthful comparison, for ice does not look troubled, and Margaret looked both troubled and worn. When he was present she was impassive; but her very impassiveness showed – but what did it show? He could think of no solution that satisfied him any more than he could think of a solution of the mystery of her apparent desire that he should continue to believe of her what he had believed.
And now, to make things more complicated, Lanse had dropped down upon them!
Winthrop made a pretext of another hunting expedition, drove over to the river, and embarked again upon the slow old Hernando, which brought him in due course to the long pier; here, sitting in the United States chair, was Harold.
It was a long time since Winthrop had seen Lanse. He thought him much altered. His figure had grown larger; though he was still but forty-one, none of the outlines of youth were left, there was only an impression of bulk. His thick dark hair was mixed with gray, as also his short beard; and the beard could not conceal the increased breadth of the lower part of the face, the slight lap-over of the cheeks above the collar. His dark eyes, with the yellow lights in them, were dull; his well-cut mouth was a little open, giving him a blank expression, as though he were half asleep.
But when this expression changed, as it did when the silent postmaster suggested, by a wave of the hand, that his guest should move the government chair a little in order not to be in the way of the passengers who might land, the alteration was so complete, though not a feature stirred, that Winthrop laughed; Lanse serenely stared at the 'coon-skin-hatted man as though he did not exist; his gaze restored perfectly, for himself at least, the space of light and air which that public servant was mistakenly filling.
All this Winthrop witnessed from the deck, as the Hernando was slowly swinging her broad careening side towards the pier. Lanse had not recognized his figure among the motley crowd of voyagers collected at the railing; it was not until the ropes had been made fast by the postmaster (who was also wharf-master, showing much activity in that avocation), and the plank put out, that the lessening crowd brought Winthrop's figure more into relief. He waved his hand again to Lanse; and then Lanse, springing up, responded, and all the old look came back; the dulness vanished, the heaviness became subordinate to the brightening eyes and the smile, he waved his hand in return. They met with gladness; Lanse seemed delighted to see his cousin, and Winthrop had never forgotten his old affection for the big, good-natured, handsome lad of his boyhood days.
The pier was soon left to them; every one else departed, and the two men, strolling up and down, talked together.
At length Lanse said: "Well, I'm glad Margaret's as you describe" (but Winthrop had not described her); "for I might as well tell you at once what I'm down here for – I want her to come back."
"Come back?"
"Yes. I have her promise to come; but women are so insufferably changeable."
"She isn't."
"Isn't she? So much the better for me, then; for she knew the worst of me when she made that promise, and if by a miracle she has remained in the same mind, my road will be easy."
"I don't mean to push myself into your confidence, Lanse," said Winthrop, after a moment's silence; "but I think I will say here that I have always as strongly as possible disapproved of her course in leaving you." He made himself say this. It was true, and say it he would.
Lanse laughed, and turned down the brim of his soft hat to keep the sun from his eyes. "I'm not going to lie about it," he answered. "I would have told you at any time if you had asked me; she couldn't help leaving me."
Winthrop stared.
"It's a funny world," Lanse went on. "Come along up and get something to eat; then we'll go off in the canoe, and I'll tell you the whole story; you've got to hear it if you're to help."
An hour later the two men were floating away from the pier in a small boat built upon the model of the Indian's birch-bark canoe. Lanse, an expert in this as in almost all kinds of out-door exercise, wielded the paddle with ease, while Winthrop faced him, reclining in the bottom of the boat; it could only hold two. Lightly it sped out towards deep water, the slightest motion sent it forward; its sides were of such slender thickness that the two men could feel the breathing of the great soft stream, which had here a breadth of three miles, though in sight, both above and below, it widened into six. These broad water stretches were tranquil; from shore to shore the slow, full current swept majestically on; and even to look across the wide, still reaches, with the tropical forests standing thickly on their low strands, was a vision of peace for the most troubled human soul.
Kildee plover flew chattering before the canoe while they were still near land. Far above in the blue a bald-headed eagle sailed along. Lanse chose to go out to the centre of the stream – Lanse never skirted the edge of anything; reaching it, he turned southward, and they voyaged onward for nearly an hour.
He did not appear disposed to begin his narrative immediately; and Winthrop asked no questions. Every now and then each indulged in a retrospective remark; but these remarks concerned themselves only with the days of their boyhood, they brought up the old jokes, and called each other by the old names. Winthrop, after a while, branching off a little, suggested that this warm brown tide, winding softly through the beautiful low green country, was something to remember – on a January day, say, in a manufacturing town at the North, when a raw wind was sweeping the streets, when the horse-cars were bumping along between miniature hills of muddy ice, when all complexions were dubious and harassed, and the constantly dropping flakes of soot from myriad chimneys failed to convey a suggestion of warmth, but rather brought up (to the initiated) a picture of chill half-heated bedrooms, where these same harassed complexions must undergo more torture from soap and water in the effort to remove the close-clinging marks of the "black snow."
"Oh, confound your manufacturing town!" Lanse answered.
"I can't; I'm a manufacturer myself," was Winthrop's response.
At length Lanse turned the canoe towards the western shore. A creek emptied into the river at this point, a creek which had about the breadth of the Thames at Westminster; Lanse entered the creek. Great ragged nests of the fish-hawks crowned many of the trees here, making them resemble a group of light-houses at the creek's mouth. They met an old negro on a raft, who held up a rattlesnake which he seemed to think they would admire. "Fibe foot en eight inch, boss, en ferteen rattles."
"That's African Joe," said Lanse. "I've already made his acquaintance; he was born in Africa. – You old murderer, what do you want for showing us that poor reptile you have put an end to?"
Old Joe, a marvel of negro old age, grinned as Lanse tossed him a quarter. "'Gater, massa," he said, pointing.
It was a black lump like the end of a floating log, – an alligator submerged all but that inch or two of head.
"That's the place I'm looking for, I think," said Lanse; "I was up here yesterday."
And with two or three strong strokes of the paddle he sent the canoe round a cape of lily-pads, into the mouth of a smaller creek which here came, almost unobserved, into the larger one. It was a stream narrow but deep, which took them into the forest. Here they floated over reflections so perfect of the trees draped in silver moss on shore that it was hard to tell where reality ended and the picture began. Great turtles swam along down below, water-moccasins slipped noiselessly into the amber depths from the roots of the trees as the canoe drew near; alligators began to show themselves more freely; the boat floated noiselessly over one huge fellow fifteen feet long.
Lanse was aroused. "I tell you, old lad, this isn't bad," he said.
"I don't care about it," Winthrop answered; "it's sensational."
Over this remark Lanse indulged in a retrospective grin. "Old!" he said. "You've been getting that off ever since you were twenty. Who was it that called Niagara 'violent?' The joke is that, at heart, you yourself are the most violent creature I know."