Read Ebook: At Last: A Novel by Harland Marion

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Ebook has 1277 lines and 81593 words, and 26 pages

"I beg your pardon, Auntie! I did not notice that it had been brought in," apologized Mabel, drawing back, that Frederic might lift the loaded salver carefully to its place upon the board.

As they were closing about this, they were joined by Messrs. Barksdale and Branch, Miss Tabb delaying her appearance until the repast was nearly over, and meeting the raillery of the party upon her late rising with the sweet, soft smile her cousin-betrothed admired as the indication of unadulterated amiability. The breakfast-hour, always pleasant, was to-day particularly merry. Rosa led off in the laughing debates, the play of repartee, friendly jest, and anecdote that incited all to mirth and speech and tempted them to linger around the table long after the business of the meal was concluded.

"This is the perfection of country life!" said Frederic Chilton, when, at last, there was a movement to end the sitting. "But it spoils one fearfully for the everyday practicalities of the city--a Northern city, especially."

"Better stay where you are, then, instead of deserting our ranks to-morrow," suggested Rosa, gliding by his side out upon the long portico at the end of the house. "What does your nature crave that Ridgeley cannot supply?"

"Work, and a career!"

"You still feel the need of these?" significantly.

"Otherwise I were no man!"

"You are right!"

Her disdainful eyes wandered to the farther end of the portico, where Alfred Branch, in his natty suit of white grasscloth, plucked at his ebon whiskers with untanned fingers, and talked society nothings with the ever-complaisant Imogene.

"Come what may, you, Mr. Chilton, have occupation for thought and hands; are not tied down to a detestable routine of vapid pleasures and common-place people!"

"You are--every independent woman and man--is as free in this respect as myself, Miss Rosa. None need be a slave to conventionality unless he choose."

She made a gesture that was like twisting a chain upon her wrist.

"You know you are not sincere in saying that. I wondered, moreover, when you were railing at the practicalities of city life, if you were learning, like the rest of the men, to accommodate your talk to your audience. Where is the use of your trying to disguise the truth that all women are slaves? I used to envy you when I was in Philadelphia, last winter, when you pleaded business engagements as an excuse for declining invitations to dinner-parties and balls. Now, if a woman defies popular decrees by refusing to exhibit herself for the popular entertainment, the horrible whisper is forthwith circulated that she has been 'disappointed,' and is hiding her green wound in her sewing-room or oratory. 'Disappointed,' forsooth! That is what they say of every girl who is not married to somebody by the time she is twenty-five. It matters not whether she cares for him or not. Having but one object in existence, there can be but one species of disappointment. Marry she must, or be PITIED!" with a stinging emphasis on the last word.

Tom Barksdale and Mabel were pacing the portico from end to end, chatting with the cheerful familiarity of old friends. Catching some of thin energetic sentence, Mabel looked over her shoulder.

"Who of us is fated to be pitied, did you say, Rosa dear?"

"Never yourself!" was the curt reply. "Rest content with that assurance."

Her restless fingers began to gather the red leaves that already variegated the foliage of the creeper shading the porch. Strangely indisposed to answer her animadversions upon the world's judgment of her sex, or to acknowledge the implied compliment to his betrothed, Frederic watched the lithe, dark hands, as they overflowed with the vermilion trophies of autumn. The September sunshine sifted through the vines in patches upon the floor; the low laughter and blended voices of the four talkers; the echo of Tom's manly tread, and Mabel's lighter footfall, were all jocund music, befitting the brightness of the day and world. What was the spell by which this pettish girl who stood by him, her luminous eyes fixed in sardonic melancholy upon the promenaders, while she rubbed the dying leaves into atoms between her palms--had stamped scenes and sounds with immortality, yet thrilled him with the indefinite sense of unreality and dread one feels in scanning the lineaments of the beloved dead? Had her nervous folly infected him? What absurd phantasy was hers, and what his concern in her whims?

A stifled cry from Mabel aroused him to active attention. A gentlemen had stepped from the house upon the piazza, and after bending to kiss her, was shaking hands with her companions.

"The Grand Mogul!" muttered Rosa, with a comic grimace, and not offering to stir in the direction of the stranger.

In another moment Mabel had led him up to her lover, and introduced, in her pretty, ladylike way, and bravely enough, considering her blushes, "Mr. Chilton" to "my brother, Mr. Winston Aylett."

"And so you know nothing of this gentleman beyond what he has told you of his character and antecedents?"

Aunt Rachel had knocked at the door of her nephew's study after dinner, on the day of his return, and asked for an interview.

"Although I know you must be very busy with your accounts, and so forth, having been away from the plantation for so long," she said, deprecatingly, yet accepting the invitation to enter.

Mr. Aylett's eye left hers as he replied that he was quite at liberty to listen to whatever she had to say, but his manner was entirely his own--polished and cool.

Family tradition had it that he was naturally a man of strong passions and violent temper, but since his college days, he had never, as far as living mortal could testify, lifted the impassive mask he wore, at the bidding of anger, surprise, or alarm. He ran all his tilts--and he was not a non-combatant by any means--with locked visor. In person, he was commanding in stature; his features were symmetrical; his bearing high-bred. His conversation was sensible, but never brilliant or animated. In his own household he was calmly despotic; in his county, respected and unpopular--one of whom nobody dared speak ill, yet whom nobody had reason to love. There was a single person who believed herself to be an exception to this rule. This was his sister Mabel. Some said she worshipped him in default of any other object upon which she could expend the wealth of her young, ardent heart; others, that his strong will enforced her homage. The fact of her devotion was undeniable, and upon his appreciation of this Aunt Rachel built her expectations of a favorable hearing when she volunteered to prepare the way for Mr. Chilton's formal application for the hand of her nephew's ward. Between herself and Winston there existed little real liking and less affinity. She was useful to him, and his tolerance of her society was courteous, but she understood perfectly that he secretly despised many of her views and actions, as, indeed, he did those of most women. Her present mission was undertaken for the love she bore Mabel and her sister. It was not kind to send the girl to tell her own story. It was neither kind nor fair to subject their guest to the ordeal of an unheralded disclosure of his sentiments and aspirations, with the puissant lord of Ridgeley as sole auditor.

"Fred would never get over the first impression of your brother's chilling reserve," said the self-appointed envoy to Mabel, when she insisted that her affianced would plead his cause more eloquently than a third person could. "For, you, must confess, my love, that Winston, although in most respects a model to other young men, is unapproachable by strangers."

As she said "your accounts and so forth," she looked at the table from which Mr. Aylett had arisen to set a chair for her. There was a pile of account-books at the side against the wall, but they were shut, and over heaped by pamphlets and newspapers; while before the owner's seat lay an open portfolio, an unfinished letter within it. Winston wiped his pen with deliberation, closed the portfolio, snapped to the spring-top of his inkstand, and finally wheeled his office chair away from the desk to face his visitor.

"Is it upon business that you wish to speak to me?"

Winston heard her story, from the not very coherent preamble, to the warm and unqualified endorsement of Frederic Chilton's credentials, and her moved mention of the mutual attachment of the youthful pair, and never changed his attitude, or manifested any inclination to stay the narration by question or comment. When she ceased speaking, his physiognomy denoted no emotion whatever. Yet, Mabel was his nearest living relative. She had been bequeathed to his care, when only ten years old, by the will of their dying father, and grown up under his eye as his child, rather than a sister. And he was hearing, for the first time, of her desire to quit the home they had shared together from her birth, for the protection and companionship of another. Mrs. Sutton thought herself pretty well versed in "Winston's ways," but she had expected to detect a shade of softness in the cold, never-bright eyes and anticipated another rejoinder than the sentence that stands at the head of this chapter.

"And so you know nothing of this gentleman beyond what he has told you of his character and antecedents?" he said--the slender white fingers, his aunt fancied, looked cruel even in their idleness, lightly linked together while his elbows rested upon the arms of his chair.

"My dear Winston! what a question! Haven't I told you that he is my husband's namesake and godson! I was at his fathers house a score of times, at least, in dear Frederic's life-time. It was a charming place, and I never saw a more lovely family. I recollect this boy perfectly, as was very natural, seeing that his name was such a compliment to my husband. He was a fine, manly little fellow, and the eldest son. The christening-feast was postponed, for some reason I do not now remember, until he was two years old. It was a very fine affair. The company was composed of the very elite of that part of Maryland, and the Bishop himself baptized the two babies--Frederic, and a younger sister. I know all about him, you see, instead of nothing!"

"What was the date of this festival?" asked Winston's unwavering voice.

"Let me see! We had been married seven years that fall. It must have been in the winter of 18--."

"Twenty-three years ago!" said Winston, yet more quietly. "Doubtless, your intimacy with this estimable and distinguished family continued up to the time of your husband's death?"

"It did."

"And afterward?"

Mrs. Button's color waned, And her voice sank, as the inquisition proceeded. "Dear Frederic's" death was not the subject she would have chosen of her free will to discuss with this man of steel and ice.

"I never visited them again. I could not--"

If she hoped to retain a semblance of composure, she must shift her ground.

"I returned to my father's house, which was, as you know, more remote from the borders of Maryland--"

"You kept up a correspondence, perhaps?" Winston interposed, overlooking her agitation as irrelevant to the matter under investigation.

"No! For many months I wrote no letters at all, and Mr. Chilton was never a punctual correspondent. The best of friends are apt to be dilatory in such respects, as they advance in life."

"I gather, then, from what you have ADMITTED"--there was no actual stress upon the word, but it stood obnoxiously apart from the remainder of the sentence, to Mrs. Sutton's auriculars--"from what you have admitted, that for twenty years you have lost sight of this gentleman and his relatives, and that you might never have remembered the circumstance of their existence, had he not introduced himself to you at the Springs this summer."

"You are mistaken, there!" corrected the widow, eagerly. "Rosa Tazewell introduced him to Mabel at the first 'hop' she--Mabel--attended there. He is very unassuming. He would never have forced himself upon my notice. I was struck by his appearance and resemblance to his father, and inquired of Mabel who he was. The recognition followed as a matter of course."

"He was an acquaintance of Miss Tazewell--did you say?"

"Yes--she knew him very well when she was visiting in Philadelphia last winter."

"And proffered the introduction to Mabel?" the faintest imaginable glimmer of sarcastic amusement in his eyes, but none in his accent.

"He requested it, I believe."

"That is more probable. Excuse my frankness, aunt, when I say that it would have been more in consonance with the laws controlling the conduct of really thoroughbred people, had your paragon--I use the term in no offensive sense--applied to me, instead of to you, for permission to pay his addresses to my ward. I am willing to ascribe this blunder, however, to ignorance of the code of polite society, and not to intentional disrespect, since you represent the gentleman as amiable and well-meaning. I am, furthermore, willing to examine his certificates of character and means, with a view to determining what are his recommendations to my sister's preference, over and above ball-room graces and the fact that he is Mr. Sutton's namesake, and whether it will be safe and advisable to grant my consent to their marriage. Whatever is for Mabel's real welfare shall be done, while I cannot but wish that her choice had fallen upon some one nearer home The prosecution of inquiries as to the reputation of one whose residence is so distant, is a difficult and delicate task."

"If you will only talk to him for ten minutes he will remove your scruples,--satisfy you that all is as it should be," asserted Mrs. Sutton, more confidently to him than herself.

"I trust it will be as you say--but credulity is not my besetting sin. I am ready to see the gentleman at any hour you and he may see fit to appoint."

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