A Book o' Nine Tales. Bates Arlo

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      “Miss Grant wasn’t very pretty,” he observed, lying lazily back and looking up into the blue October sky, “at least not as I remember her; but she was very good company, only a little given to sentimentalizing. She had a guitar, and I will confess I did hate to see that guitar come out.”

      “She would be pleased if she could hear you,” laughed Columbine. “What was there so frightful about her guitar?”

      “Oh, when she had that she always sang moony songs, and after that—”

      “Well?” demanded Miss Dysart, mischievously.

      “Oh, after that,” he returned, with an impatient shake of his shoulders, “she was sure to talk sentiment.”

      His companion laughed merrily. The faint, almost unconscious feeling of jealousy which had risen at the mention of this engaging young lady had vanished entirely in the indifference with which Mr. Tom spoke of her. She moved her head with a happy little motion not unlike that with which a bird plumes itself. Her soft, low laugh did not really end, but lost itself among the dimples of her cheeks.

      Tom regarded her with shining eyes.

      “Not that I should mind some people’s talking sentiment,” he said with a smile.

      She raised her laughing gaze to his, and, as their eyes met, the meaning of the look in his was too plain to be mistaken. She flushed and paled, dropping her gaze from his.

      “And did nothing especial happen on the voyage?” she asked, with a strong effort to regain her careless manner.

      “Not that I recall,” he answered, putting his hand beside hers upon the rustic table so that their fingers almost touched.

      A moment of silence followed, broken only by the chirping of a few belated crickets, that, despite the advancement of the season, had not yet discontinued their autumnal concerts. The two, so quiet outwardly, sat with beating hearts, when suddenly a wandering breeze brought into the summer-house a puff of smoke from the burning salt meadows. It was laden with the fetid odor of consuming animal matter, and so powerful was it that both involuntarily turned away their heads.

      “Bah!” Columbine cried. “How horrible! There must be a dead animal of some sort there that the fire has reached.”

      She stopped speaking and gazed with surprise at Tom, who had buried his face in his hands with a groan.

      “What is it? Has it made you ill? It is gone now.”

      He lifted a face white with emotion.

      “No,” he said, “it has not made me ill—physically, that is; but it has done worse, it has made me remember.”

      “Ah!” she exclaimed. “What is it? is it so terrible?”

      She leaned toward him, and to poor Tom she looked the incarnation of enticing loveliness. Sympathy and interest—not unmixed, she being a woman, with curiosity—sparkled in her eyes, yet he nerved himself to tell her all that had come back to him.

      “That smell of burning hide,” he began, “brought it all up in a flash. The ship got on fire; Miss Grant clung to me; there was just such an odor leaking out around the hatches from the hold where the flames were at the cargo; she—I—when everything else was right, when the fire was out, I was all wrong.”

      “I do not understand,” Columbine said.

      She drew away from him, her cheeks pale, her very lips wan. She did not meet his gaze, but sat with downcast eyes.

      “I was engaged to Miss Grant. I did not pretend to love her, but I thought we were all bound for the bottom, and”—

      He stopped helplessly; her eyes flashed upon him.

      “And if a lie would soothe her last moments,” she said, bitterly, “you—No, no; I beg your pardon.”

      “I remember more,” he went on, wrenching each word out as if by a strong effort of will. “The shock, and, perhaps, previous seeds of disease, were too much for her father; he died the day before we landed. She was alone in the world, she had no protector, and I—I married her at once, to protect her.”

      A sparrow flew up into the lattice outside the arbor without noticing the pair within, so dead was the stillness which now fell upon them. At length Columbine rose and stood an instant by the table which had been between them. She wavered an instant, then stooped and kissed him upon the forehead. Then without a word she turned from the arbor and fled swiftly to the house.

VI.

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      Left alone in the summer-house Tom’s first feeling was a great throb of joy; but it gave place almost instantly to an aching pang of misery. To be assured of Columbine’s love would have been intense happiness an hour before; now it could only add to his pain. He raged against the toils in which fate had entangled him, yet defiance to helplessness and every paroxysm of rage at destiny ended in a new and humiliating consciousness of his own impotence. He felt like one who walked blindfolded, with light granted him, not to avoid missteps, but merely to see them after they were taken.

      One thing at least was clear to Tom—that he must leave the Dysart mansion. To go on seeing Columbine day after day, with the knowledge at once of their love and of the barrier that stood between them, was a position too painful and too anomalous to be endured. Both for his own sake and for Miss Dysart’s it was necessary that he delay no longer. Where he was going he was not at all clear; that he left to circumstances to decide. He quitted the arbor and walked toward the house, so intent upon his painful thoughts that at a turning of the path he ran plump against old Sarah, who was hurrying along with a face full of anxiety.

      “Oh, mercy gracious, Mr. Thomas!” the faithful creature cried; “I’m sure I beg your pardon! But you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”

      “So I have,” he answered. “Where are you going with that spade?”

      “To the salt meadows,” she answered. “The fire’s sure to come into the lower garden if we don’t ditch it, and if it does, there’ll be no stopping it from the house.”

      “What!” exclaimed Tom. “Where are the men?”

      “There ain’t no men,” old Sarah returned, philosophically. “Why should there be?”

      “But you are not going down to ditch alone?”

      “ ’D I be likely to stop in-doors and let the house where I’ve lived fifty years burn over my head?” demanded she, grimly.

      “Give me the spade,” was his reply. “A little work will do me good.”

      Old Sarah remonstrated, but it ended in the strangely matched pair going together to the meadows below.

      The dry sphagnum was readily cut through with the spade, and it was not a difficult, although a СКАЧАТЬ