CHAPTER XXVI
"I don't know how to tell you, Mrs. Harold, what has happened," began Dr. Kirby. "I cannot explain it even to myself." The Doctor was evidently very unhappy, and much disturbed.
He was in the sitting-room of the house on the river – a place not so desolate after eight months of Margaret's habitation there. She could not restore the blossoming vines to the stripped exterior, she could not bring to life again the old trees; but within she had made a great change; the rooms were fairly comfortable now, green blinds gave a semblance of the former leafy shade.
But more than the rooms was the mistress of them herself transformed. The change was not one of manner or expression; it was the metamorphosis which can be produced by a complete alteration of dress. For Lanse had objected to the simplicity of his wife's attire, and especially to the plain, close arrangement of her hair. "You don't mean it, I know," he said, "but it has an appearance of affectation, a sort of 'holier than thou' air. I hate to see women going about in that way; it looks as if they thought themselves so beautiful that they didn't mind calling attention to it – with sanctimonious primness, of course; it's the most conspicuous thing a woman can do."
"It's not a matter of principle with me; it's only my taste," Margaret answered. "I have always liked simplicity in others, and so I have dressed in that way myself."
"Alter it, then; with your sort of face you couldn't possibly look flashy; and you might look prettier – less like a saint. There, don't be enraged, I know you haven't a grain of that kind of pose. But it seems to me, Margaret, that you might very well dress to please me, since I regard you as a charming picture, keeping my hands off." And he laughed.
The next steamer that touched at the long pier (it was not two hours afterwards) took from there half a dozen hastily written letters to carry north.
"What in the world – why, I hardly knew you," Aunt Katrina said, ten days later, when her niece came over to East Angels to see her; now that Lanse was better, she could come oftener.
"Lanse wished it," Margaret answered as she took her seat.
"And very properly. You certainly had a most tiresome way of having your things made – so deadly plain; it looked as if you wanted people to think you either very Quakerish or very miserable, I never knew which."
"If I had been miserable I shouldn't have paid so much attention to it, should I? It takes a great deal of attention to dress in that way." She spoke, if not smilingly, then at least in the even tone which people now called "always so cheerful."
"Oh, I don't know what you really were, I only meant how you looked. I am glad, at least, that you acknowledge that it takes a great stock of vanity to go against all the fashions. Well, you don't look Quakerish now!"
"You like the dress, then?"
"It's lovely," said Aunt Katrina, scanning every detail from the hat to the shoe. "Expensive, of course?"
"Yes."
"And Lanse likes that?"
"He wishes me to dress richly; he says it's more becoming to me."
"I think that's so nice of him, he wants you to look, I suppose, as well as you can" said Aunt Katrina, magnanimously. "And certainly you do look a great deal better."
Whether Margaret looked better was a question whose answer depended upon the personal taste of those who saw her; she looked, at least, very different. The sumptuous wrap with its deep fringes, the lace of the scarf, the general impression of costly fabrics and of color in her attire, brought out the outlines of her face, as the curling waves of her hair over her forehead deepened the blue of her eyes. On her white arms now, at home in the evenings, bracelets gleamed, the flash of rings came from her little hands; her slender figure trailed behind it rich silks of various light hues.
"You are a beautiful object nowadays, Margaret," Lanse said more than once. "Fancy your having known how, all this time, without ever having used your talent!"
"It's my dress-maker's talent."
"Yes; she must have a great deal to carry out your orders."
He was especially pleased one evening. She came in, bringing his newspaper, which had just arrived by the steamer; she was dressed in a long gleaming gown of satin, with long tight sleeves; she wore a little ruff of Venetian lace, there was a golden comb in her dark-hair. A fan made of the bright plumage of some tropical bird lay against the satin of her skirt; it hung by a ribbon from the broad satin belt, which, fastened by a golden buckle, defined her slender waist.
"You look like a fine old engraving," he said.
She stood holding the paper towards him. But for a moment he did not take it, he was surveying her critically; then he lifted his eyes to her face, there was a smile in them. "You did it – do it – to please me?" he said.
She did not answer.
"Because you think it your duty to do what I wish. And because, too, you are a trifle afraid of me!" He laughed. "It would have an even better effect, though, if you wouldn't take it quite so seriously; couldn't you contrive to get a little pleasure out of it on your own account? – I mean the looking so handsome."
She gave him the paper, and went across to her work-table. "I am delighted to look handsome," she said.
"No, you're not. It was probably easier for you to dress as you used to – plainly; more in accordance with your feelings, women like to be in accordance. When they're completely satisfied, or very unhappy, they brush their hair straight back from their faces. Well, yours curls enough now!"
"The truth is, Madge, you're too yielding," he resumed after a short silence. "I take advantage of it, of course – I always shall; but you would get on a great deal better yourself, you might even have had more influence over me (if you care about that), if you had been, if you were now, a little less – patient."
"I suppose there's no use in my repeating that I'm not patient at all," answered Margaret. She was taking some balls of silk from the drawer.
"You want me to think it's self-control. Well, perhaps it is. But then, you know, unbroken self-control – "
"Would you mind it if I should ask you not to discuss it – my self-control?" Her hands were beginning to tremble.
"Put your hands in your pocket if you don't want me to see them," said Lanse, laughing; "they always betray you – even when your voice is steady. What a temper you've got – though you do curb it so tightly! At least you're infinitely better off than you would have been if you had happened to care for me. That's been the enormous blessing of your life – your not caring; just supposing you had cared! You ought to be very thankful; and you ought to reckon up your blessings every now and then, for fear of forgetting some of them; we ought all to do that, I think."
He said this with great gravity. Not that he felt in the least grave; but it was a way Lanse had of amusing himself, once in a while, – to make remarks of this sort with a very solemn face.
He looked at her for a moment or two longer as she sat with her eyes bent upon her knitting. "You're in the right chair," he said at length, "but you're sitting too straight. Won't you please take that footstool, put your feet on it, and then lean back more? You long lithe women look better that way."
She did not move.
"Come," he said, "you're furious; but you know you ought to humor me. It's only that I want my picture more complete – that's all."
And then, with nervous quickness, she did what he asked.
It was upon the morning following this little conversation that Dr. Kirby made his appearance at the house on the river and declared that he could not "explain."
"Tell me without explaining," Margaret suggested.
But this at first seemed to the Doctor even more difficult than the other alternative; it would have been so much more in accordance with his sense of the fitness of things to ascend this stumbling-block which had fallen in their path by means of a proper staircase, carpeted steps of probabilities, things he had foreseen – intuitions. But in fact he had foreseen nothing; he felt that he could not make a staircase. So he gave one great hard bound.
"Garda is engaged," he announced. "To Lucian Spenser."
Margaret was greatly astonished. "I didn't know he was back," she said.
"He has only just come. She went up to Norfolk with my cousin, Sally Lowndes" – here the Doctor stopped, gazing at Margaret inquiringly.
"Yes, I left it to you to decide about her going – don't you remember?"
"I decided wrongly. Sally was obliged to go, and anxious to take Garda – I was in Charleston, and I allowed it. I had no business to!" said the Doctor, slapping his knee suddenly and fiercely. "I distinctly disapprove of much travelling for young girls – mere aimless gadding about. But I have been corrupted, to a certain degree, by the new nor – the new modern ideas that are making their way everywhere at present; I could bury my head in a hay-stack! When did you hear from her last?"
"I had a letter from Norfolk immediately after her arrival."
"Before she had met him. And nothing since?"
"Nothing."
"Yes, she said she should rather have me tell you than write herself."
"She thought you would be on her side."
"No, madam, no; she couldn't have thought that – that would be impossible. But she was good enough to say that I should, in the telling, be certain to make you laugh. And that was what she wanted."
Moisture glittered suddenly in his eyes as he brought this out. He pretended it was not there, and searching for his handkerchief, he coughed gruffly, complaining of "a cold."
"I certainly don't laugh," said Margaret. "But perhaps we need not be so – so troubled about it, Doctor. The first thing now is to have her come home."
"She's back in Charleston."
"Oh!"
"Yes. As soon as I received Sally's letter – she wrote at once – I started immediately for Norfolk. I saw Mr. Spenser – in my quality of guardian it was proper that I should see him. And I brought the two ladies home."
"And not Mr. Spenser too?"
"I don't know anything about Mr. Spenser!" Then, after a moment, "I reckon he will follow," the Doctor murmured, dejectedly.
"And I – who thought he was in Venice!"
"He was in Venice until a few weeks ago. I don't know in the least what brought him home. And I don't know in the least what brought him to Norfolk, unless it was, as I was told, some insane fancy for sketching the Dismal Swamp; – of all places in the world the miry old Dismal! And to think that I should have let Garda go there, at just that moment! It's a combination of fortuitous chances which seems to me absolutely infernal! – I beg your pardon, madam" – here the Doctor rose, bowing ceremoniously, with his hand on the broad expanse of beautifully starched linen, which kept its place unmoved over his disturbed breast. "It is not often that I am betrayed into language unsuited to a lady's presence. I ask you to excuse me."
"You do not like Mr. Spenser," said Margaret.
The Doctor stared. "Do you?"
"I suppose it is not so much whether we like him, as whether we approve of him for Garda. But I am afraid she would not listen to us even if we should disapprove."
"I think you are in error there," said the Doctor, beginning to walk to and fro with quick short steps. Much as he liked Margaret, it was with anger that he answered her now.
"I must tell you what I think, mustn't I?" said the other guardian, gently. "And I think she has cared for him a long time."
"It is impossible for me to agree with you. Long time? Permit me to ask how long you mean? In the mean while she has been engaged to another man – Evert Winthrop. Do you forget that?"
"I don't think she realized fully – she was very young; she is extremely impulsive always," answered his colleague, wandering rather helplessly for a moment among her phrases. Then she spoke more decidedly. "But now she knows, now she is sure; she is sure it is Lucian she cares for."
"She is fanciful, and this is only another fancy. Sally, too, has been much to blame."
"I do not think Garda is fanciful," said Margaret. "And – it is not a childish feeling, her liking for Lucian Spenser."
The Doctor stopped on the other side of the room. Then he came back and stood gazing at Margaret in silence. "You are a woman, and you are good," he said at last. "She is very fond of you, she tells you everything, and you must know. If therefore you say that she – "
"Yes," answered Margaret, "I do know. I am sure she cares for him very, very much." Here some of Garda's extraordinarily frank expressions about Lucian, and the delight it gave her to even look at him, coming suddenly into her memory, over all her fair face there rose a sweet deep blush.
The Doctor turned away and dropped into a chair.
"There is nothing against Mr. Spenser, I believe," Margaret began again, after a short pause.
"It isn't that. No, I believe there is nothing." He sat there, his figure looking unusually small, his eyes turned away.
Margaret asked some questions. By degrees the Doctor answered them. He said that Lucian was possessed of "a genteel income." He had not accepted his wife's large fortune; she had left everything to him, but he had immediately given the whole back to her relatives, retaining only the profits of some investments which she had made, since their marriage, under his advice; this sum the Doctor described as "a competence."
"When is Garda coming home?" Margaret asked.
"She says she isn't coming; she says she knows you have no place for her here – no time; and she doesn't wish to stay with any one but you."
"She does not mean that. I think she should come, she has been in Charleston a long time; Mrs. Lowndes has been wonderfully kind."
"Oh, as to that, Sally likes to have her there. She says it has made her 'young again' to see Garda. And to admire (I don't know what she meant by that) Adolfo Torres."
"Is he there still?"
"He is there still. He doesn't believe in the least in Garda's engagement."
"He didn't believe in the other one," said Margaret. And then she was sorry she had said it, for the Doctor jumped up and seized his hat; it was still insupportable to him, the thought of those two engagements.
"He's a hallucinated idiot!" he said, violently. Then, controlling himself, he took leave of Margaret, bowing over her hand with his old stately ceremony. Mr. Harold was in the garden? He would go out and see him there. It was most satisfactory, certainly, the improvement in Mr. Harold.
On the present occasion the Doctor found Lanse on a couch which he had had carried out to the garden; here he lay contentedly smoking, and looking at the river. Lanse liked the Doctor; it was an ever-fresh amusement to him to realize that his large, long, muscular self was committed to the care of that "pottering little man." The Doctor was not in the least "pottering." But Lanse really thought that all short men with small hands, who were without an active taste for guns, were of that description. The sad Doctor made but a brief visit this time; then he started homeward. He had still the news about Garda to tell in Gracias. At present it was known only to ma.
Garda did not comply with the wish of her friends, and return to them. She wrote a dozen letters about it, but in actual presence she remained away. Most of these epistles were to Margaret. As time went on she wrote to Margaret every day.
But her letters were not letters at all, in the usual sense of the word; they were brief diaries, rapidly jotted down, of the feelings of the moment; they were pæans, rhapsodies, bubbling exclamations of delight; none of them ever exceeded in length a page.
They seemed to Margaret very expressive. She did not know what Garda might be writing to the Kirbys, the Moores, and Mrs. Carew; but what Garda wrote to her she kept to herself.
This was the girl's first letter after Margaret's note urging her to return:
"Margaret, I can't come – don't ask me; for none of them there would sympathize with me – not even you. It isn't that I want sympathy – I never even think of it. But I don't want the least disagreeable thing now when I am so blissful– bliss is the only word. Lucian comes in every morning on the train. The Doctor said that of course he would not stay all the time in Charleston. So to satisfy him Lucian stays four miles out.
"Oh, Margaret, everything is so enchanting!
"Garda."
"Dear Margaret, – Every morning I watch until he opens the gate" (she wrote a day later), "and then I run down to meet him in the hall. We don't stay in the house, we go into the garden. Mrs. Lowndes says she loves to have him come, because he reminds her so much of Mr. Lowndes – 'Roger,' she calls him. And she says it makes her young again in her heart to see us. And perhaps it does in her heart, but the change hasn't reached the outside yet. I am expecting him every minute, there he comes now.
"Garda."
"Dear Margaret, – If I could stay with you, I would come back to-morrow," she wrote in answer to a second letter from Margaret, which urged her strongly to return. "But I know you don't want me now – that is, you can't have me – and where else could I stay? The Doctor hates Lucian – he may pretend, but he does. If I should stay at the rectory, Mrs. Moore would be sure to say, how pleasant for Lucian and I to read poetry on the veranda, because that is what she and Middleton used to do when they were engaged. But Lucian and I don't want to read any poetry on verandas.
Garda."
"Dear Margaret, – Lucian has gone for the night, and there's nothing else to do, so I thought I would write to you. Mrs. Lowndes has just been in. She brought a daguerreotype of Mr. Lowndes, taken when he was young, and she says she knows exactly how I feel, because she used to feel just the same; when she was at the window, and saw 'Roger' coming down the street, the very calves of her legs used to quiver, she says. Roger must have been stout – at least he is in the daguerreotype, and he wore glasses.
"Lucian is painting me; but I only wish I could paint him. Oh, Margaret, he is so beautiful!
Garda."
"Dearest Margaret, – I'm so glad I am alive, it's so nice to be alive. People say life's dreadful, but to me it's perfectly delicious every single minute. I thought I would tell you how happy I was before going to bed, – I love to write it down.
Garda."
The Doctor went up to Charleston again. He was much displeased with the course things were taking, he spoke with a good deal of severity to Sally Lowndes.
Sally, who was soft-bodied as well as soft-hearted (her figure was a good deal relaxed), shed tears. Then, recovering some spirit, she wished to know what the Doctor had expected her to do? It was true that that sweet Garda had left off her lessons (up to this time she had "had instruction," that is, teachers had arrived at fixed hours); but Sally was decidedly of the opinion that a girl who was so soon to be married should be relieved at least of "school-room drudgery."
"Nothing of the sort," said the Doctor; "she should be kept even more closely to her books. Your ideas are provincial and ridiculous, Sally; I don't know where you obtained them."
"From my mother," answered Sally, with a pink flush of excitement in her faded cheeks. "From my grandmother too – who was yours also. It is you who are changed, Reginald; it has never been the custom in our family to keep the girls down at their books after sixteen."
This was true. But the very truth of it made the Doctor more angry. "I shall take her back with me," he said.
"She doesn't wish to go."
"That makes no difference."
And then Sally "supposed" that it was not his intention to drag her back "in chains?" Mrs. Lowndes was evidently much displeased with Cousin Reginald.
The Doctor took Garda to a remote part of the garden. Here he placed before her in serious words the strong wish he had that she should return with him to Gracias.
Garda laughed out merrily. Then she came and kissed him. "Don't ask me to do anything so horribly disagreeable," she said, coaxingly.
"Would it be disagreeable?" asked the Doctor, his voice changing to pathos.
"Of course. For you're not nice to Lucian, you know you're not; how can I like that?"
"I will be – nice," said the Doctor, borrowing her word, though the use of it in that sense was to him like turning a somersault.
"Would you really try?" said Garda. She came behind him, putting her arms round his neck and resting her head on his shoulder. "You never could," she said, fondly. And then, as though he were some big good-natured animal, a magnanimous elephant or bear, she let him feel the weight of her little dimpled chin.
"I am weak because I have loved you so long, my child. I might insist; you are my ward. But it seems to me that you ought to care more about doing a little as we wish, Mrs. Harold agrees with me in thinking this."
"Margaret is sweet; I love her dearly. But, do you know" – here she disengaged herself, and began with a sudden inconsequent industry to gather flowers – "it's so funny to me that you should think, either of you, for one moment, that I would leave Lucian now."
"He could come too. A little later." The Doctor was driven to this concession.
"But I shouldn't see him as I do here, you know I shouldn't. Here we do quite as we please; no one ever comes to this part of the garden but ourselves; we might be on a desert island – only it would have to be an island of flowers."
"And you care more for this than for our wishes?" began the Doctor. Then he took a lighter tone. "Of course you don't; you will come home with me, my child; we will start this afternoon." Watching her move about among the bushes as she gathered her roses, he had fallen back into his old belief; this young face where to him were still so plainly visible the childish outlines of the little girl he had been used to lead about by the hand – even of the dimpled baby he remembered so well – he could not bring himself to realize that it had gained older expressions, expressions he did not know.
"I'm very sorry, dear," Garda answered, generally. And then she knelt down to peer through a bush which might perhaps be holding its best buds hidden.
The Doctor, completely routed by the word which she had without the least effort used – the maturity of that "dear," addressed her at last, though unconscious that he was doing so, in the tone of equality. "It isn't as though you had anything to bear, like the prospect of a long engagement, as though there were any difficulties in the way; your marriage is to come so soon," he pleaded.
"Soon?" said Garda. "Six long months! Do you call that 'soon?'" She stopped gathering roses, and sat down on a garden bench. "Six months! I must see him every day, and for a long while every day; that will be the only way to bear it." Then her words ceased; but her splendid eyes, meeting the Doctor's (she had forgotten that he was there), grew fuller and fuller of the loveliest dreaming expression, until the poor guardian – he realized that she would not perceive his departure – could not stand there and watch it any longer. He turned abruptly and went away.
"Dear Margaret, – The Doctor has gone" (Garda wrote the next day). "And I am afraid he is displeased. Apparently we please no one but ourselves and Sally Lowndes! Margaret, when my wedding-day really comes at last, nobody must touch me but you; you must dress me, and you must put on my veil, and the orange-blossoms (from the old East Angels grove – I won't have any others). And then, just before we go down-stairs, you must say you are pleased. And you must forgive me all I have done – and been too – because I couldn't help it. I shall come over from Gracias, and go down on my knees to Mr. Harold to beg him to let me be with you, or rather to let you; he must, he shall say yes."
But Lanse was not called upon to go through this ordeal.
He had already said, "You go!" in rather a high-noted tone of surprised remonstrance when Margaret suggested, some time before, that she should go herself to Charleston and bring Garda back. "And leave me shut up alone here!" he added, as if to bring home to her the barbarity of her proposal.
"The servants do very well at present."
"They don't look as you do," Lanse answered, gallantly. "I must have something to look at."
"But I think I ought to go."
"You can dismiss that 'ought' from your mind, there are other 'oughts' that come nearer. In fact, viewing the matter impartially, you should never have consented in the beginning, Madge, to take charge of that girl, without first consulting me." Lanse brought out this last touch with much judicial gravity. "Fortunately your guardianship, such as it is, will soon be over," he went on; "she will have a husband to see to her. Apparently she needs one."
"That won't be for six months yet."
"Call it two; as I understand it, there's nothing but dogmatic custom between them, and as Florida isn't the land of custom – "
"Yes, it is."
"Well, even grant that; the girl is, from all accounts, a rich specimen of wilfulness – "
"Of naturalness."
"Oh, if they're guided by naturalness," said Lanse, "they won't even wait two."
And it was not two, when early one morning, in old St. Michael's Church in Charleston, with Sally Lowndes, excited and tearful, as witness – their only one save an ancient little uncle of hers, who had come in from his rice plantation to do them the favor of giving the bride (whom he had never seen before) away, Edgarda Thorne and Lucian Spenser were married.
The Rev. Batton Habersham, as he came robed in his surplice from the vestry-room, could not help being conscious, even then and there, that he had never seen so beautiful a girl as the one who now stood waiting at the chancel-rail – not in the veil she had written about, or the orange-blossoms from East Angels, but in an every-day white frock, and garden hat covered with roses. The bridegroom was very handsome also. But naturally the clergyman was not so much impressed by Lucian's good points as by Garda's lovely ones. Sally Lowndes was impressed by Lucian, she gazed at him as one gazes at a portrait; Lucian looked very handsome, very manly, and very much in love – a happy combination, Sally thought. And then, with fresh sweet tears welling in her eyes, she knelt down for the benediction (though it was not given to her), and thought of "Roger," and the day when she should see him again in paradise.
The Rev. Batton Habersham, who was officiating in St. Michael's for a week only, during the absence of the rector, was a man unknown to fame even in his own diocese. But it is possible to do a great deal of good in the world without fame, and Batton Habersham did it; his little mission chapel was on one of the sea islands. Always thereafter he remembered the early morning marriage of that beautiful girl in the dim, empty old Charleston church as the most romantic episode of his life. Fervently he hoped that she would be happy; for even so good a man is more earnest (unconsciously) in his hopes for the happiness of a bride with eyes and hair like Garda's than he is for that of one with tints less striking. Though the relation, all the same, between the amount of coloring matter in the visual orbs or capillary glands, and the degree of sweetness and womanly goodness in the heart beneath, has never yet been satisfactorily determined.
An hour later the northward-bound train was carrying two supremely happy persons across the Carolinas towards New York – the Narrows – Italy.
"Well, we have all been young once, Sally," the little old rice planter had said to his weeping niece, as the carriage drove away from the hospitable old mansion of the Lowndes'. Garda had almost forgotten that they were there, Sally and himself, as they had stood for a moment at the carriage door; but she had looked so lovely in her absorbed felicity that he forgave her on the spot, though of course he wondered over her choice, and "couldn't imagine" what she could see in that "ordinary young fellow." He went back to his plantation. But he was restless all the evening. At last, about midnight, he got out an old miniature and some letters; and any one who could have looked into the silent room later in the night would have seen the little old man still in his arm-chair, his face hidden in his hand, the faded pages beside him.
"It is perhaps as well," said Margaret Harold. She was trying to administer some comfort to Dr. Kirby, when, two days later, he sat, a flaccid parcel of clothes, on the edge of a chair in her parlor, staring at the floor.
Mrs. Rutherford was triumphant. "A runaway match! And that is the girl you would have married, Evert. What an escape!"
"She has escaped," Winthrop answered, smiling.
"What do you mean? Escaped? – escaped from what?"
"From all of us here."
"Not from me," answered Aunt Katrina, with dignity. "I never tried to keep her, I always saw through her perfectly from the very first. Do you mean to say that you understand that girl even now?" she added, with some contradiction.
"Yes, I think I do —now," Winthrop answered.
"I don't envy you your knowledge! Poor Lucian Spenser – what could have possessed him?"
"He? He's madly in love with her, of course."
"I'm glad at least you think he's a fool," said Aunt Katrina, applying her vinaigrette disdainfully to her well-shaped nose.
"Fool? Not at all; he's only tremendously happy."
"The same thing – in such a case."
"I don't know about that. The question is, is it better to be tremendously happy for a little while, and unreasonable; or to be reasonable all the time, and never tremendously happy?"
"Oh, if you're going to talk rationalism– " said Aunt Katrina.
Immediately after her return from Norfolk, in the interval before Lucian came, Garda sent for Adolfo Torres. When he appeared she begged him to do her a favor, namely, to leave Charleston for the present.
"Is it that you wish me to return to Gracias?" asked Adolfo. "The place is a desperation without you."
"You need not go to Gracias if you don't want to; but please go away from here. Go to the Indian River," she suggested, with a sudden inspiration.