Books: The Red Acorn
J >>
John McElroy >> The Red Acorn
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19
Three months of companionship with Ned Burnleigh, and daily
imbibation of that young man's stories of his wonderful conquests
among young women of peerless beauty and exalted social station
confirmed this feeling, and led him to wish for at least such
slackening of the betrothal tether as would permit excursions into
a charmed realm like that where Ned reigned supreme.
For the thousandth time--and in each recurrence becoming a little
clearer defined and more urgent--came the question:
"Shall I break with Rachel? How can I? And what possible excuse
can I assign for it?"
There came no answer to this save the spurs with which base
self-love was pricking the sides of his intent, and he recoiled
from it--ashamed of himself, it is true, but less ashamed at each
renewed consideration of the query.
He hastened home that he might receive a greeting that would efface
the memory of the reception he had met with in the street. There,
at least, he would be regarded as a hero, returning laurel-crowned
from the conflict.
As he entered the door his father, tall, spare and iron-gray, laid
down the paper he was reading, and with a noticeable lowering of
the temperature of his wonted calm but earnest cordiality, said
simply:
"How do you do? When did you get in?"
"Very well, and on the 10:30 train."
"Did all your company come?"
Harry winced, for there was something in his father's manner, more
than his words, expressive of strong disapproval. He answered:
"No; I was unwell. The water and the exposure disagreed with me,
and I was allowed to come on in advance."
Mr. Glen, the elder, carefully folded the paper he was reading and
laid it on the stand, as if its presence would embarrass him in
what he was about to say. He took off his eye-glasses, wiped them
deliberately, closed them up and hesitated for a moment, holding
them between the thumb and fore finger of one hand, before placing
them in their case, which he had taken from his pocket with the
other.
These were all gestures with which experience had made Harry
painfully familiar. He used to describe them to his boy intimates
as "the Governor clearing for action." There was something very
disagreeable coming, and he awaited it apprehensively.
"Were you"--the father's cold, searching eyes rested for
an instant on the glasses in his hand, and then were fixed on his
son's face--"were you too ill the day of the fight to accompany
your command?"
Harry's glance quailed under the penetrating scrutiny, as was his
custom when his father subjected him to a relentless catechism;
then he summoned assurance and assumed anger.
"Father," he said, "I certainly did not expect that you would join
these mean-spirited curs in their abuse of me, but now I see that---"
"Henry, you evade the question." The calm eyes took on a steely
hardness. "You certainly know by this time that I always require
direct answers to my questions. Now the point is this: You entered
this company to be its leader, and to share all its duties with
it. It went into a fight while you remained back in camp. Why
was this so? Were you too sick to accompany it?"
"I certainly was not feeling well."
"Were you too ill to go along with your company?"
and--there--was--some--work--in--camp that--needed--to--be--done--and
there was enough without me, and--I--I--"
"That is sufficient," said the elder man with a look of scorn that
presently changed into one of deeply wounded pride. "Henry, I know
too well your disposition to shirk the unpleasant duties of life,
to be much surprised that, when tried by this test, you were found
wanting. But this wounds me deeply. People in Sardis think my
disposition hard and exacting; they think I care for little except
to get all that is due me. But no man here can say that in all
his long life Robert Glen shirked or evaded a single duty that he
owed to the community or his fellow-men, no matter how dangerous or
disagreeable that duty might be. To have you fail in this respect
and to take and maintain your place in the front rank with other
men is a terrible blow to my pride."
"O, Harry, is that you?" said his mother, coming into the room at
that moment and throwing herself into her son's arms. "I was lying
down when I heard your voice, and I dressed and hurried down as
quickly as possible. I am so glad that you have come home all safe
and well. I know that you'll contradict, for your poor mother's
sake, all these horrible stories that are worrying her almost to
death."
"Unfortunately he has just admitted that those stories are
substantially true," said the father curtly.
"I won't believe it," sobbed his mother, "until he tells me so
himself. You didn't, did you, back out of a fight, and let that
Bob Bennett, whose mother used to be my sewing girl, and whom I
supported for months after he was born, and his father died with
the cholera and left her nothing, by giving her work and paying
her cash, and who is now putting on all sorts of airs because
everybody's congratulating her on having such a wonderful son, and
nobody's congratulating me at all, and sometimes I almost which I
was dead.
Clearness of statement was never one of Mrs. Glen's salient
characteristics. Nor did deep emotion help her in this regard.
Still it was only too evident that the fountains of her being were
moved by having another woman's son exalted over her own. Her
maternal pride and social prestige were both quivering under the
blow.
Harry met this with a flank movement.
"You both seem decidedly disappointed that I did not get myself
wounded or killed," he said.
"That's an unmanly whimper," said his father contemptuously.
"Why, Harry, Bob Bennett didn't get either killed or wounded," said
his mother with that defective ratiocination which it is a pretty
woman's privilege to indulge in at her own sweet will.
Harry withdrew from the mortifying conference under the plea of
the necessity of going to his room to remove the grime of travel.
He was smarting with rage and humiliation. His panoply of conceit
was pierced for the first time since the completion of his collegiate
course sent him forth into the world a being superior, in his own
esteem, to the accidents and conditions that the mass of inferior
mortals are subject to. Yet he found reasons to account for his
parent's defection to the ranks of his enemies.
"It's no new thing," he said, while carefully dressing for a call
upon Rachel in the evening, "for father to be harsh and unjust to
me, and mother has one of her nervous spells, when everything goes
wrong with her."
"Anyhow," he continued, "there's Ned Burnleigh, who understands
me and will do me justice, and he amounts to more than all of
Sardis--except Rachel, who loves me and will always believe that
what I do is right."
He sat down at his desk and wrote a long letter to Ned, inveighing
bitterly against the stupidity and malice of people living in small
villages, and informing him of his intention to remove to Cincinnati
as soon as an opening could be found for him there, which he begged
Ned to busy himself in discovering.
Attired in his most becoming garb, and neglecting nothing that
could enhance his personal appearance, he walked slowly up the
hill in the evening to Rachel Bond's house. The shrinkage which
his self-sufficiency had suffered had left room for a wonderful
expansion of his affection for Rachel, whose love and loyalty were
now essential to him, to compensate for the falling away of others.
The question of whether he should break with her was now one the
answering of which could be postponed indefinitely. There was no
reason why he should not enjoy the sweet privileges of an affianced
lover during his stay in Sardis. What would happen afterward would
depend upon the shape that things took in his new home.
He found Rachel sitting on the piazza. Though dressed in the deepest
and plainest black she had never looked so surpassingly beautiful.
As is usually the case with young women of her type of beauty, grief
had toned down the rich coloring that had at times seemed almost
too exuberant into that delicate shell-like tint which is the
perfection of nature's painting. Her round white arms shone like
Juno's, as the outlines were revealed by the graceful motions which
threw back the wide sleeves. Her wealth of silken black hair was
drawn smoothly back from her white forehead, over her shapely head,
and gathered into a simple knot behind. Save a black brooch at
her throat, she wore no ornaments--not even a plain ring.
She rose as Harry came upon the piazza, and for a moment her face
was rigid with intensity of feeling. This evidence of emotion went
as quickly as it came, however, and she extended her hand with calm
dignity, saying simply:
"You have returned, Mr. Glen."
In his anxiety to so play the impassioned lover as to conceal the
recreancy he had fostered in his own heart, Harry did not notice
the coolness of this greeting. Then, too, his self-satisfaction
had always done him the invaluable service of preventing a ready
perception of the repellant attitudes of others.
He came forward eagerly to press a kiss upon her lips, but she
checked him with uplifted hand.
"O, the family's in there, are they?" said he, looking toward the
open windows of the parlor. "Well, what matter? Isn't it expected
that a fellow will kiss his affianced wife on his return, and not
care who knows it?"
He pointed to the old apple-tree where they had plighted their troth
that happy night, with a gesture and a look that was a reminder of
their former meeting and an invitation to go thither again. She
comprehended, but refused with a shudder, and, turning, motioned
him to the farther end of the piazza, to which she led the way,
moving with a sweeping gracefulness of carriage that Harry thought
had wonderfully ripened and perfected in the three months that had
elapsed since their parting.
"'Fore gad," he said to himself. (This was a new addition to
his expletory vocabulary, which had accrued from Ned Burnleigh's
companionship.) "I'd like to put her alongside of one of the
girls that Ned's always talking about. I don't believe she's got
her equal anywhere."
Arriving at the end of the piazza he impetuously renewed his attempt
at an embrace, but her repulse was now unmistakable.
"Sit down," she said, pointing to a chair; "I have something to
say to you."
Harry's first thought was a rush of jealously. "Some rascal has
supplanted me," he said bitterly, but under his breath.
She took a chair near by, put away the arm he would have placed
about her waist, drew from her pocket a dainty handkerchief bordered
with black, and opened it deliberately. It shed a delicate odor
of violets.
Harry waited anxiously for her to speak.
"This mourning which I wear," she began gently, "I put on when I
received the news of your downfall."
"My downfall?" broke in Harry hotly. "Great heavens, you don't
say that you, too, have been carried away by this wretched village
slander?"
"I put it on," she continued, unmindful of the interruption, "because
I suffered a loss which was greater than any merely physical death
could have occasioned."
"I don't understand you."
"My faith in you as a man superior to your fellows died then. This
was a much more cruel blow than your bodily death would have been."
"'Fore gad, you take a pleasant view of my decease--a much cooler
one, I must confess, than I am able to take of that interesting
event in my history."
Her great eyes blazed, and she seemed about to reply hotly, but
she restrained herself and went on with measured calmness:
"The reason I selected you from among all other men, and loved you,
and joyfully accepted as my lot in life to be your devoted wife and
helpmate, was that I believed you superior in all manly things to
other men. Without such a belief I could love no man."
She paused for an instant, and Harry managed to stammer:
"But what have I done to deserve being thrown over in this unexpected
way?"
"You have not done anything. That is the trouble. You have failed
to do that which was rightfully expected of you. You have allowed
others, who had no better opportunities, to surpass you in doing
your manly duty. Whatever else my husband may not be he must not
fail in this."
"Rachel, you are hard and cruel."
"No, I am only kind to you and to myself. I know myself too well
to make a mistake in this respect. I have seen too many women
who have been compelled to defend, apologize, or blush for their
husband's acts, and have felt too keenly the abject misery of their
lives to take the least chance of adding myself to their sorrowful
number. If I were married to you I could endure to be beaten by
you and perhaps love you still, but the moment I was compelled to
confess your inferiority to some other woman's husband I should
hate you, and in the end drag both of us down to miserable graves."
"But let me explain this."
"It would be a waste of time," she answered coldly. "It is sufficient
for me to know that you are convicted by general opinion of having
failed where a number of commonplace fellows succeeded. You,
yourself, admit the justice of this verdict by tame submission
to it, making no effort to retrieve your reputation. I can not
understand how this could be so if you had any of the qualities
that I fondly imagined you possessed in a high degree. But this
interview is being protracted to a painful extent. Let us say good
night and part."
"Forever?" he stammered.
"Yes."
She held out her hand for farewell. Harry caught it and would have
carried it to his lips, but she drew it away.
"No; all that must be ended now," she said, with the first touch
of gentleness that had shaded her sad, serious eyes.
"Will you give me no hope?" said Harry, pleadingly.
"When you can make people forget the past--if ever--" she said,
"then I will change this dress and you can come back to me."
She bowed and entered the house.
Chapter V. The Lint-scraping and Bandage-making Union.
At length I have acted my severest part:
I feel the woman breaking in upon me,
And melt about my heart: My tears will flow.
-- Addison.
Rachel Bond's will had carried her triumphantly through a terrible
ordeal--how terrible no one could guess, unless he followed her
to her room after the interview and saw her alone with her agony.
She did not weep. Tears did not lie near the surface with her. The
lachrymal glands had none of that ready sensitiveness which gives
many superficial women the credit of deep feeling. But when she
did weep it was not an April shower, but a midsummer tempest.
Now it was as if her intense grief were a powerful cautery which
seared and sealed every duct of the fountain of tears and left her
eyes hot and dry as her heart was ashes.
With pallid face and lips set until the blood was forced from them,
and they made a thin purplish line in the pale flesh, she walked
the floor back and forth, ever back and forth, until a half-stumble,
as she was turning in a dreary round, revealed to her that she was
almost dropping from exhaustion.
She had thought her love for Harry had received its death-blow when
her pride in him had been so rudely shattered. But this meeting,
in which she played the part set for herself with a brave perfection
that she had hardly deemed possible, had resurrected every dear
memory, and her passion sprung into life again to mock and jeer
at her efforts to throttle it out of existence. With him toppling
from the pedestal on which her husband must stand, she had told
herself that there was naught left but to roll a great stone against
the sepulcher in which her love must henceforth lie buried, hopeless
of the coming of any bright angle to unseal the gloomy vault. Yet,
despite the entire approval given this by her judgment, her woman's
heart cried bitterly for a return of the joys out of which the
beauty had fled forever.
Hours passed in this wrestle with pain. How many she did not know,
but when she came forth it was with the composure of one who had
fought the fight and won the victory, but at a cost that forbade
exultation.
---
There was one ordeal that thus far she had not been called upon to
endure. From the day on which she had donned her sable robes to
that of Harry's return no one had ventured to speak his name in
her presence. Even her father and mother, after the first burst
of indignation, had kept silence in pity for her suffering, and
there was that in her bearing that forbade others touching upon a
subject in her hearing that elsewhere was discussed with the hungry
avidity of village gossips masticating a fresh scandal.
But she could not be always spared thus. She had not been so
careful of the feelings of less favored women and girls, inferior
to her in brightness, as to gain any claim for clement treatment
now, when the displacement of a portion of her armor of superiority
gave those who envied or disliked her an unprotected spot upon
which to launch their irritating little darts.
All the sewing, dorcas and mite societies of the several churches
in Sardis had been merged into one consolidated Lint-Scraping and
Bandage-Making Union, in whose enlarged confines the waves of gossip
flowed with as much more force and volume as other waves gain when
the floods unite a number of small pools into one great lake.
In other days a sensational ripple starting, say in the Episcopalian
"Dorcas," was stilled into calmness ere it passed the calm and
stately church boundaries. It would not do to let its existence be
even suspected by the keen eyes of the freely-censorious Presbyterian
dames, or the sharp-witted, agile-tongued Methodist ladies.
And, much as these latter were disposed to talk over the weaknesses
and foibles of their absent sisters in the confidential environments
of the Mite Society or the Sewing Circle, they were as reluctant
to expose these to the invidious criticisms of the women of the
other churches as if the discussed ones had been their sisters in
fact, and not simply through sectarian affiliation. Church pride,
if nothing else, contributed to the bridling of their tongues, and
checking the free circulation of gossip.
"Them stuck-up Presbyterian and Episcopalian women think little
enough on us now, the land knows," Mrs. Deborah Pancake explained
to a newly-received sister, whom she was instructing in elementary
duties. "There's no use giving 'em more reason for looking down upon
us. We may talk over each other's short-comings among ourselves,
private like, because the Bible tells us to admonish and watch
over each other. But it don't say that we're to give outsiders
any chance to speak ill of our sisters-in-Christ."
And Mrs. Euphrosyne Pursifer remarked to the latest agreeable
accession to the parish of St. Marks, with that graceful indirection
that gave her the reputation in Sardis of being a feminine Talleyrand:
"Undoubtedly the ladies in these outside denominations are very
worthy women, dear, but a certain circumspection seems advisable
in conversing with them on subjects that we may speak of rather
freely among ourselves."
The rising fervor of the war spirit melted away most of these
barriers to a free interchange of gossip. With the first thrill of
pleasure at finding that patriotism had drawn together those whom
the churches had long held aloof came to all the gushing impulse
to cement the newly-formed relationship by confiding to each other
secrets heretofore jealously guarded. Nor should be forgotten the
"narrative stimulus" every one feels on gaining new listeners to
old stories.
It was so graciously condescending in Mrs. Euphrosyne Pursifer to
communicate to Mrs. Elizabeth Baker some few particulars in which
her aristocratic associates of St. Marks had grieved her by not
rising to her standard of womanly dignity and Christian duty, that
Mrs. Baker in turn was only too happy to reciprocate with a similar
confidence in regard to her intimate friends of Wesley Chapel.
It was this sudden lapsing of all restraint that made the waves of
gossip surge like sweeping billows.
And the flotsam that appeared most frequently of late on their
crests, and that was tossed most relentlessly hither and thither,
was Rachel Bond's and Harry Glen's conduct and relations to each
other.
The Consolidated Lint-scraping and Bandage-making Union was holding
a regular session, and gossip was at spring-tide.
"It is certainly queer," said Mrs. Tufis, one of her regulation
smiles illuminating her very artificial countenance; "it is singular
to the last degree that we don't have Miss Rachel Bond among us.
She is such a LOVELY girl. I am very, very fond of her, and her
heart is thoroughly in unison with our objects. It would seem
impossible for her to keep away."
All this with the acrid sub-flavor of irony and insincerity with
which an insincere woman can not help tainting even her most sincere
words.
"Yes," said Mrs. Tabitha Grimes, with a premeditated acerbity
apparent even in the threading of her needle, into the eye of which
she thrust the thread as if piercing the flesh of an enemy with a
barb; "yes;" she pulled the thread through with a motion as if she
enjoyed its rasping against the steel. "Rachel Bond started into
this work quite as brash as Harry Glen started into the war. Her
enthusiasm died out about as quickly as his courage, when it came
to the actual business, and she found there was nobody to admire
her industry, or the way she got herself up, except a parcel of
married women."
The milk of human kindness had begun to curdle in Mrs. Grimes's
bosom, at an early and now rather remote age. Years of unavailing
struggle to convince Mr. Jason Grimes that more of his valuable
time should be devoted to providing for the wants of his family,
and less to leading the discussion on the condition of the country
in the free parliament that met around the stove in the corner
grocery, had carried forward this lacteal fermentation until it
had converted the milky fluid into a vinegarish whey.
"Well, why not?" asked Elmira Spelter, the main grief of whose life
was time's cruel inflexibility in scoring upon her face unconcealable
tallies of every one of his yearly flights over her head, "why
shouldn't she enjoy these golden days? Youth is passing, to her
and to all of us, like an arrow from the bow. It'd be absurd for
her to waste her time in this stuffy old place, when there are so
many more attractive ones. It ought to be enough that those of us
who have only a few remnants of beauty left, should devote them to
this work."
"Well," snapped Mrs. Grimes, "your donation of good looks to the
cause--even if you give all you got--will be quite modest, something
on the widow's mite order. You might easily obey the scriptural
injunction, and give them with your right hand without your left
knowing what was being done."
Elmira winced under this spiteful bludgeoning, but she rallied and
came back at her antagonist.
"Well, my dear," she said quietly, "the thought often occurs to
me, that one great reason why we both have been able to keep in the
straight and narrow path, is the entire lack of that beauty which
so often proves a snare to the feet of even the best-intentioned
women."
It was Mrs. Grimes's turn to wince.
"A hit! a palpable hit!" laughed pretty Anna Bayne, who studied
and quoted Shakespeare.
"The mention of snares reminds me," said Mrs. Grimes, "that I, at
least, did not have to spread any to catch a husband."
"No," returned Elmira, with irritating composure, "the poorer kinds
of game are caught without taking that trouble."
"Well"--Mrs. Grimes's temper was rising so rapidly that she was
losing her usual skill in this verbal fence--"Jason Grimes, no
doubt, has his faults, as all men have; but he is certainly better
than no husband at all."
"That's the way for you to think," said Elmira, composedly, disregarding
the thrust at her own celibacy. "It's very nice in you to take
so cheerful a view of it. SOMEBODY had to marry him, doubtless,
and it's real gratifying to see one accepting the visitations of
Providence in so commendable a spirit."
To use the language of diplomacy, the relations between these ladies
had now become so strained that a rupture seemed unavoidable.
"Heavens, will this quarrel ne'er be mended?" quoted Anna Bayne, not
all sorry that these veteran word-swordsmen, dreaded by everybody,
were for once turning their weapons on each other.
Peace-making was one of the prerogatives assumed by Mrs. Tufis, as
belonging to the social leadership to which she had elected herself.
She now hastened to check the rapidly-opening breach.
"Ladies," she said blandly, "the discussion has wandered. Our first
remarks were, I believe about Miss Bond, and there was a surmise
as to her reasons for discontinuing attendance upon our meetings."
The diversion had the anticipated effect. The two disputants
gladly quit each other, to turn upon and rend the object flung in
between them.
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19