CHAPTER XV
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THE HOUSE OF CARDS BEGINS TO FALL.
Everard had been in his father’s office five weeks or more, when, on a rainy morning early in November, just as he was settling himself to his books, and congratulating himself upon the luxury of a quiet day, his father came in, and after looking over the paper, and poking the fire vigorously, seated himself opposite his son, and began:
“Everard, put down your book; I want to talk with you.”
“Yes, sir,” Everard replied, closing the book and facing his father with an unaccountable dread that something unpleasant was coming.
“It’s never my way to beat round the bush,” the judge began; “I come to the point at once, and so I want to know if you and Bee have settled it yet?”
“Settled what?” Everard asked; and his father replied:
“Don’t be a fool and put on girlish airs. Marrying is as much a matter of business as anything else, and we may discuss it just the same. You don’t suppose me in my dotage, that I have not seen what is in everybody’s mouth,—your devotion to Beatrice and her readiness to receive it; wait till I’m through,” he continued, authoritatively, as he saw Everard about to speak. “I like the girl; have always liked her, though she is a wild, saucy thing, but that will correct itself in time. Your mother believed in her fully, and she knew what was in women. She hoped you would marry Bee some day, and what I wish to say is this: you may think you must wait till you get your profession, but there is no need of that at all. You are twenty-two. You have matured wonderfully the last two years, and I may say improved, too; time was when I could hardly speak peaceably of you for the scrapes you were eternally getting into, but you dropped all that after your poor mother died. I was proud of you at Commencement. I am proud of you now, and I want you to marry at once. The house needs a mistress, and I have fixed upon Christmas as the proper time for the wedding, so if you have not settled it with Bee, do so at once.”
“But, father,” Everard gasped, with a face as white as snow, “it is impossible that I should marry Beatrice. I have never for a moment considered such a thing.”
“The deuce you haven’t,” the judge exclaimed, beginning to get angry. “Pray, let me ask you why you have been racing and chasing after her ever since you came home, if you never considered the thing, as you say? Others have considered it, if you have not. Everybody thinks you are to marry her, and, by George, I won’t have her compromised. No, I won’t! She could sue you for breach of promise, and recover, too, with all this dancing, and prancing, and scurripping round the country. If you have not thought of it, you must think of it now. You surely like the girl.”
He stopped to take breath, and Everard answered him:
“Yes, father, I like her very much, but not in that way,—not as a wife, and I never can. It is impossible.”
“Why impossible? What do you mean?” the judge said, loudly and angrily. “Is there somebody else? Is it that yellow-haired hussy who made those eyes at me, because, if it is, by Jove, you are no son of mine, and you may as well understand it first as last. I’ll never sanction that, never! Why don’t you answer me, and not stare at me so like an idiot? Do you like that white-livered woman better than Beatrice? Do you think her a fitter wife for you and companion for Rosamond?”
Everard had opened his lips to tell the truth, but what his father said of Josephine sealed them tight; but he answered his father’s last questions, and said:
“No, I do not think her a fitter companion for Rossie than Beatrice, and I do not like her better.”
“Then what in thunder is in the way?” the judge asked, slightly appeased. “Have you any fears of Bee’s saying no? I can assure you there. I know she won’t. I am as certain of it as that I am living now.”
Suddenly there shot across Everard’s mind a way of escape from the difficulty, a chance for a longer respite, and he said:
“If I were to ask Bee to marry me and she refused would you be satisfied?”
“With you? Yes, but, I tell you she won’t refuse. And don’t you ask her unless you intend to stick to it like a man,” the judge replied, as he rose to end the conference.
“I shall ask her, and to-night,” was Everard’s low-spoken answer, which reached his father’s ears, and sent him home in a better frame of mind.
He was very gracious to Everard at dinner, and paid him the compliment of consulting him on some business matter, but Everard was too much pre-occupied to heed what he was saying, and declining the dessert excused himself from the table, and went to his own room.
Never since his ill-starred marriage had he felt so troubled and perplexed as now, when the fruit of his wrong-doing was staring him so broadly in the face. That his father would never leave him in peace until he proposed to Beatrice, he knew, and unless he confessed everything and threw himself upon his mercy, there was but one course left him to pursue,—tell Beatrice the whole story, without the slightest prevarication, and then go through the farce of offering himself to her, who must, of course, refuse. This refusal he could report to his father, who would not blame him, and so a longer probation would come to himself.
In his excitement he did not stop to consider what a cowardly thing it was to throw the responsibility upon a girl, and make her bear the burden for him. To do him justice, however, he did not for a moment suppose Beatrice cared for him as his father believed she did, or he would never have gone to insult her with an offer she could not accept.
He knew she was beautiful and sweet, and all that was lovely and desirable in womanhood, but she was not for him. She, nor any one like her, could ever be his wife. He had made that impossible; had by his own act put such as she far out of his reach. But when he reached Elm Park and saw her, so graceful and lady-like, and heard the well-bred tones of her voice, and remembered how pure and good she was, there did come to him the thought that if there was no Josephine in the way, he might in time have come to say in earnest to this true, spotless girl what now was but a cruel jest, if she cared for him,—which she did not in the way his father believed she did;—he was her friend, her brother. The Feejee missionary, whose name she saw so often in the papers, and who had recently been removed to a more eligible field, had never been quite forgotten, though there was nothing left to her now of him except a faded pond-lily, given the day she told him no, and with his kiss, the first and last, upon her forehead, sent him away to the girl among the Vermont hills, with the glasses and the brown alpaca dress. She had no suspicion of the nature of his errand, and was surprised when, as if anxious to have it off his mind, he began, impulsively:
“Beatrice, I have come to say something serious to you to-night, and I want you to stop jesting and be as much in earnest as I am, for I,—I am terribly in earnest for once in my life. Bee,—I,—I feel as if I were going to be hung and do the deed myself.”
But his face was white as marble, and his voice shook as he continued:
“I am going to tell you something,—going to ask you something,—going to ask you to be my wife, but you must refuse.”
It was an odd way of putting it, and not at all what Everard had intended to do. He meant to tell her first and offer himself afterward as a mere form, but in his agitation and excitement he had just reversed it,—had told her he was there to ask her to marry him, and she must tell him no! and a look of scorn sprang to her eyes as she drew back from him and said, “You presume much on my good nature, when you tell me in one instant that you propose asking me to be your wife, and next that I must refuse you if you do. What reason have you to think I would accept you, pray?”
He knew she was indignant, and justly so, and he answered her with such a pleading pathos in his voice as disarmed her at once of her wrath.
“Don’t be angry with me, Bee. I have commenced all wrong. I believe my mind is not quite straight. I did not come to insult you. I came because I must come. I want you for a friend, such as I have not in all the world. I want your advice and sympathy. I want,—oh, I am the most wretched person living!”
And he seated himself upon the sofa, and sat with his face buried in his hands, while Beatrice stood looking at him a moment; then, going forward she laid her hand softly on his head, and said, “What is it, Everard? What is it you wish to tell me?”
Without looking up he answered her:
“Oh, Bee, I wish I were dead! Sit down beside me and listen to all I have to tell.”
She sat down beside him, and listened intently to the story Everard told her in full, concealing nothing where he was concerned, but shielding Josephine as far as was possible. Rosamond’s noble sacrifice of her hair was explained, and her mistake about Joe Fleming, who in her imagination still existed somewhere in whiskers and tall boots, and was the evil genius of Everard’s life. Here Beatrice laughed merrily once, then questioned Everard rapidly with regard to every particular of his marriage, and the family, and the girl. Where was she now and what was she like?
“You have seen the picture, Bee,” he said. “I showed it to you that day I broke my head, two years ago, and you said she looked as if she might wear cotton lace, while mother, to whom I showed it, too, hinted at dollar jewelry, and Rossie said she looked as if she were a sham.”
Here Everard laughed himself, but there was more of bitterness than mirth in it, and Beatrice laughed, too, as she said:
“That was rather hard;—cotton lace, dollar jewelry, and a sham, though, after all, Rossie’s criticism was really of the most consequence, if true; perhaps it is not. Have you her picture now?”
He passed it to her, and with a shrewd woman’s intuition, quickened by actual knowledge, Beatrice felt that it was true, and her first womanly instinct was to help and comfort this man who had brought his secret to her.
“Ned,” she said to him, and the name, now so seldom used, took her back to the days when she first came from France and played and quarreled with him. It made her altogether his sister, and as such she spoke. “Ned, I am so sorry for you; sorrier than I can express, and I want to help you some way, and I think it must be through Josephine. She is your wife, and by your own showing you were quite as much in fault as she.”
“Yes, quite,” and Everard shivered a little, for he guessed what was coming.
“Well, then,” Beatrice went on, “ought you not to make the best of it? You took her for better or worse, knowing what you were doing. You loved her then. Can you not do so again? Is it not your duty to try?”
“Oh, Bee, you do not know, you do not understand. She is not like you, nor Rossie, nor mother.”
“Well, try to make her like us, then,” Beatrice replied. “If her surroundings are not such as please you, remove her from them at once. Recognize her as your wife. Bring her home to Forrest House and I will stand her friend to the death.”
Everard knew that Bee meant what she said, and that her influence was worth more than that of the whole town, and if he could have felt any love or even desire for Josephine, it would have seemed easy to acknowledge his marriage, with Bee’s hopeful words in his ear and Bee’s strong nature to back him, but he did not. He had no love, no desire for her; he was happier away from her, happier to live his present life with Beatrice and Rossie; and, besides that, he could not bring her home; his father would never permit it, and would probably turn him from the door if he knew of the alliance. This Bee did not know, but he told her of the great aversion his father had conceived for the girl whom he stigmatized as the yellow-haired hussy from Massachusetts, “and after that, do you think I can tell him?” he asked.
“It will be hard, I know,” Beatrice replied, “but it seems your only course, if he insists upon your marrying me.”
“But if I tell him you refused me, it may make a difference, and things can go on as they are until I get my profession,” Everard pleaded, with a shrinking which he knew was cowardly from all which the telling his father might involve.
“Even then you are but putting off the evil day, and a thing concealed grows worse as time goes on,” Bee said. “You must confess it some time, and why not do it now. At the most your father can but turn you from his door, and if he does that take your wife and go somewhere else. You are young, and the world is all before you, and if there is any true womanhood in Josephine, it will assert itself when she knows all you have lost for her. She will grow to your standard. She has a sweet, childish face, and must have a loving, affectionate nature. Give her a chance, Everard, to show what she is.”
This giving her a chance was just what Everard dreaded the most. So long as his life with Josephine was in the future, he could be tolerably content, and even happy, but when it looked him square in the face, as something which must be met, he shrank from meeting it.
“Oh, I cannot do that, at least, not yet,” he said. “It will hamper me so in my studies. I cannot tell father, and bear the storm sure to follow. Josephine must stay where she is till I see what I can do.”
“But is that best for her?” Beatrice asked. “What sort of a woman is her mother? She may be a lady, and still be very poor. What is she, Everard?”
He had refrained from speaking of Josephine’s antecedents to Beatrice. He would rather she should not know all he knew of the family. It would be kinder to Josephine to spare her so much; but when Beatrice appealed to him with regard to the mother, he told just who Mrs. Fleming was.
Bee Belknap was a born aristocrat, and some of the bluest blood of Boston was in her veins. Indeed, she traced her pedigree back to Miles Standish on her father’s side, while her mother came straight down from a Scottish earl, who married the rector’s daughter. She was proud of her birth, and the training she had received at home and abroad had tended to increase this pride, and it was hard for her to understand just how people like Roxie Fleming could stand on the same social platform with herself. She knew they did, but she rebelled against it, and for a moment Josephine’s cause was in danger of being lost so far as she was concerned. She had thought of her as probably the daughter of some poor, but highly respectable farmer, or mechanic, whose mother took boarders, as many women do to make a little money, and whose daughters, perhaps, stitched shoes or made bonnets, as New England girls often do, but now that she knew the truth she stood for a moment aghast, and then, her strong, sensible nature asserted itself and whispered to her, “a man’s a man for a’ that.” Josephine was no more to blame for the accident of her birth than was she, Beatrice Belknap, to be praised for hers. “I’ll stand by her all the same,” she said to herself, but she did not urge quite so strenuously upon Everard the necessity of telling his father at once, for she felt sure the irascible judge would leave no stone unturned to ascertain who his daughter-in-law was, and that the ascertaining would result even worse than Everard feared.
“It may be better to keep silent a little longer,” she said, and meanwhile she’d turn the matter over in her own mind and see what she could do to help him.
“But in order to have any peace at home I must tell father that you refused me,” Everard said, “and I have not yet gone through the farce of offering myself, or you of refusing the offer.”
Then, with the ghost of a smile on his face he arose, and standing before Beatrice, continued: “Bee, will you marry me?”
“No, Everard, I will not,” was Bee’s reply, as she, too, rose, and looked at him, with eyes in which the hot tears gathered swiftly, while there came to her suddenly a feeling that she had lost something which had been very dear to her, and that her intercourse with Everard could never again be just what it had been. It is true, she had never seriously thought of him as her future husband, but she knew that others had thought it, and with his words, “Bee, will you marry me?” it came to her with a great shock that possibly, under other circumstances, she might have answered yes. But all that was over now. He had put a bar between them, and by neither word nor look must she tempt him to cross it; so, brushing her tears away with a quick, impatient gesture, and forcing a merry laugh, which sounded not unlike a hysterical sob, she said, “What children we are, Everard.”
Yes, they were children in one sense, and in another the man and woman was strong within them, and Everard saw something in the girl’s eyes which startled him, and made his heart throb quickly as he, too, thought “_it might have been_.” But with the instincts of a noble, true man he forced the new-born feeling down, and taking both her hands in his held them while he said:
“You must forgive me, Bee, for seeming to insult you with words which were a mere farce. You have been my friend,—the best I ever had,—and your friendship and society are very dear to me, who never knew a sister’s love. Can I keep them still after showing you just the craven coward and sneak I am?”
“Yes, Everard, you may trust me. I will always be your friend, and your wife’s friend as well,” Beatrice replied, and then Everard went away, and she was left alone to think of the story she had heard, and to realize more and more all she had lost in losing Everard. The boy, whom she had teased, and ridiculed, and tormented, and who had likened her to his grandmother, had become so necessary to her in his fresh young manhood, that it was hard to give him up; but Bee was equal to the emergency, and with a little laugh she said:
“On the whole I am glad there is one man whom I cannot get upon my string, as Aunt Rachel would say; but that this man should be the boy who I once vowed should offer himself to me and be refused, or I would build a church in Omaha, is mortifying to my pride. He has offered and been refused, and so the church obligation is null and void. But I must do something as a memorial of this foolishness, which I never dreamed of until to-night. I wonder if Sister Rhoda Baker don’t want something for her church by this time. I’ll go and see to-morrow, and take her mother to ride. It’s an age since I gave her an airing, and my purple velvet will contrast beautifully with her quilted hood and black shawl.”
Bee Belknap was a queer compound, and when, next morning, the distant relative who lived with her as chaperon, and whom she called Aunt Rachel, said to her: “What was that Forrest here for so late? I thought he’d never go,” she answered, readily:
“He was here to ask me to marry him, and I refused him flat.”
“You refused him! Are you crazy, Beatrice?” Aunt Rachel exclaimed, putting down her coffee-cup and staring blankly at the young girl, who replied:
“Yes. Have you any objections?”
“Objections! Beatrice Belknap! I thought this was sure. See if you don’t go through the woods and take up with a crooked stick at last. Do you know how old you are?”
“Yes, auntie. I am twenty-three; just eleven months and fifteen days older than Everard, and in seven years more I shall be thirty, and an old maid. After that, tortures cannot wring my age from me. Honestly, though, Everard was not badly hurt. He will recover in time, and maybe marry,—well, marry Rossie; who knows?”
“Marry Rossie! That child,—homely as a hedge fence!” was the indignant reply of Aunt Rachel, who was not always choice in her selection of language.
“Rosamond is fifteen, and growing pretty every day,” Beatrice retorted, always ready to defend her pet. “She has magnificent eyes and hair, and the sweetest voice I ever heard. Her complexion is clearing up, her face and figure rounding out, and she will yet be a beauty, and cast me in the shade, with my crows-feet and wrinkles; see if she does not; but I cannot afford to quarrel any longer; I am going to take Widow Ricketts out to ride, so good-by, auntie, and don’t be sorry that I am not to leave you yet. You and I will have many years together, I hope.”
She kissed her aunt, and went gayly from the room, singing as she went. An hour later and she was whirling along the smooth river road, with the quilted hood and black shawl of Widow Ricketts, who, unused to such fast driving, held on to the side of the little phaeton, sweating like rain with fear, and feeling very glad when at last she was set down safe and sound at her daughter’s door without a broken neck.
Rhoda’s church was wanting a new furnace, and Bee’s check for fifty dollars made the heart of the good Nazarite woman very warm and tender toward the girl who had once pretended to have the “power,” just for the fun of the thing! On reaching home Bee found a note from Everard, which had been left by a boy from the village, during her absence, and which ran as follows:
“DEAR BEE:—After leaving you last night, I went to father, who was waiting for me, and goaded me into telling him _everything_ there was to tell of Josephine. Of course, he turned me out of doors immediately, and said I was no longer his son. I might sleep in my room during the night, but in the morning I must be off. But I did not sleep there. I couldn’t, with his dreadful language in my ears. If I had been guilty of murder, he could not have talked worse to me than he did, or called me viler names. So I packed a few things in my valise, and staid in the carriage-house till it was light. Now, I am writing this to you, and shall have some boy to deliver it, as I take the first train South. I have given up law, and shall find something in Cincinnati or Louisville which will bring me ready money. If you should wish to communicate with me, direct to the Spencer House. I shall get my mail there a while, as I know the clerk. Don’t tell Rossie of Josephine. I’d rather she should not know. God bless her and you, my best friends in all the world. And so, good-by. I’ve sown the wind, and am reaping the whirlwind with a vengeance.
J. E. FORREST.”
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