At Last Part 3

"Married! brother!" starting up in amazement. "You are not in earnest!"

"I should not jest upon such a theme," replied Winston, in grave rebuke.

"My plans are definitely laid. It is not my purpose to keep them secret a day longer. I meant to communicate them to yourself and Mrs. Sutton this afternoon, but yours claimed precedence."

Mabel sat down again, totally confounded, and struggling hard with her tears. The thought of her brother's marriage was not in itself disagreeable. She had often lamented his insensibility to the attractions of such women as she fancied would add to his happiness, and grace the high place to which his wife would be exalted. She never liked to hear him called invulnerable; repelled the hypothesis of his incurable bachelorhood as derogatory to his heart and head. This unlooked-for intelligence, had it reached her in a different way, would have delighted as much as it astonished her. The fear lest her consent to wed Frederic and leave Ridgeley might be the occasion of discomfort and sadness to her forsaken brother had shadowed all her visions of future bliss. She ought to have hailed with unmixed satisfaction the certainty that he would not miss her sisterly ministrations, or feel the need of her companions.h.i.+p in that of one nearer and dearer than was his child-ward. She had striven not to resent even in her own mind, his cavalier treatment of her lover; had hearkened respectfully and without demur to his unsympathizing calculations of what was possible and what feasible in the project of her union with the man of her choice. For how could he know anything of the palpitations, the anxieties, the raptures of love, when he was a stranger to the touch of a kindred emotion? He meant well; he had her welfare in view; unfortunate as was his style of discussing the means for insuring this--for he loved her dearly, dearly!

She must never question this, although he had dealt the comfortable persuasion a cruel blow; wounded her in a vital part by withholding from her the circ.u.mstance of his attachment and betrothal until the near approach of the wedding day rendered continued secrecy inexpedient. No softening memory of his affianced had inclined him to listen with kindly warmth to her timid avowals, or Frederic's manly protestations of their mutual attachment. He recognized no a.n.a.logy in the two cases; stood aloof from them in the flush of his successful love, as if he had never known the pregnant meaning of the word. Smarting under the sense of injury to pride and affection, her language, when she could trust her voice, was a protest that, in Winston's judgment, ill beseemed her age and station.

"Why did you not tell me of this earlier, brother? It was unjust and unkind to keep me in the dark until now."

"You forget yourself, Mabel. I am not under obligation to account to you for my actions."

He said it composedly, as if stating a truth wholly disconnected with feeling on his part or on hers.

"I have given you the information to which you refer, in season for you to make ample preparation for my wife's reception. And, mark me, she must see no sulkiness, no airs of strangeness or intolerance, because I have managed a matter that concerns me chiefly, as seemed to me best.

Say the same to Mrs. Sutton, if you please; also that I will submit to no dictation, and ask no advice."

Mabel's anger seldom outlived its utterance. The hot sparkle in her eye was quenched by moisture, as she laid her hand caressingly upon her brother's.

"Winston! you cannot suppose that we could be wanting in cordiality to any one whom you love, much less to your wife. Let her come when she may, she will be heartily welcomed by us both. But this has fallen suddenly upon me, and I am a little out of sorts to-day, I believe--excited and nervous--and, O, my darling! my oldest and best of friends! I hope your love will bring to you the happiness you deserve."

The tears had their course, at last, bathing the hand she bowed to kiss.

The simple ardor of the outbreak would have affected many men to a show of responsive weakness. Even Winston Aylett's physiognomy was more human and less statuesque, as he patted her head, and bade her be composed.

"If you persist in enacting Niobe, I shall believe that you are chagrined at the prospect of having the sister you have repeatedly besought me to give you," he said, playfully--for him. "You have not asked me her name, and where she lives. What has become of your curiosity? I never knew it to be quiescent before."

"I thought you would tell me whatever it was best for me to know,"

replied Mabel, drying her eyes.

If she had said that she was too well-trained to a.s.sail him with interrogatories he had not invited, it would have been nearer the mark.

"There is nothing relating to her which I desire to conceal," he rejoined, with some stiffness, "or she would never have become my promised wife. She is a Miss Dorrance, the daughter of a widow residing in the vicinity of Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts. I met her first at Trenton Falls, where a happy accident brought me into a.s.sociation with her party. I travelled with them to the Lakes and among the White Mountains, and, while in Boston, visited her daily. We were betrothed a week ago, and having, as I have observed, an aversion to protracted engagements, I prevailed upon her to appoint the tenth of next mouth as our marriage day. There you have the story in brief. I have not Mrs. Sutton's talents as a raconteur, nor her disposition to turn hearts inside out for the edification of her auditors."

"Does she--Miss Dorrance--look like anybody I know?" asked Mabel, hesitating to declare herself dissatisfied with the skeleton love-tale, yet uncertain how to learn more.

"A roundabout way of asking if she is pa.s.sable in appearance," Winston said, with his smile of conscious superiority. "Judge for yourself!"

taking from his pocket a miniature.

"How beautiful! What a very handsome woman?" the sister exclaimed at sight of the pictured face.

"You are correct. She is, moreover, a thorough lady, and highly-educated. Ridgeley will have a queenly mistress. The likeness is considered faithful, but it does not do her justice."

He took it from Mabel, and they scanned it together; she resting against his shoulder. She felt his chest heave twice; heard him swallow spasmodically in the suppression of some mighty emotion, and the palpable effort drew her very near to him. She never doubted from that moment, what she had more cause in after days to believe, that he loved the woman he had won with a fervor of pa.s.sion that seemed foreign to his temperament as the evidence of it was to his conduct.

The September sun was near the horizon, and between the bowed shutters one slender, gilded arrow shot athwart the portrait, producing a marvellous and sinister change in its expression. The large, limpid eyes became shallow and cunning; the smile lurking about the mouth was the more treacherous and deadly for its sweetness; while the burnished coils of hair brushed away from the temples had the opaline tints and sinuous roll of a serpent.

Mabel shrank back before the horror of the absurd imagination.

Winston raised the picture to his lips.

"My peerless one!"

CHAPTER III. -- UNWHOLESOME VAPORS.

"DORRANCE!" repeated Frederic, after his betrothed, when she rehea.r.s.ed to him in their moonlight promenade upon the piazza the leading incidents of her brother's wooing. "She lives near Boston, you say, and her mother is a widow?"

"Yes. What have you ever heard about her?"

"Nothing whatever. I was startled by the name--but very foolishly! I once knew a family of Dorrances--New Yorkers--but the father, a retired naval officer, was alive, and all the daughters were married. The youngest of them would be, by this time, much older than you judge the original of the miniature to be."

"She is not more than twenty-two, at the most," Mabel was sure.

Frederic's hurried articulation and abstracted manner excited her curiosity, and unrestrained by Winston's curb, it was not "quiescent."

The thought was spoken so soon as it was formed.

"There was something unpleasant in your intercourse with them, then? or something objectionable in the people themselves? Could they have been relatives of this widow and her daughter? The name is not a common one to my ears."

"Nor to mine; yet we have no proof to sustain your supposition. I should be very sorry--"

He stopped.

Mabel studied his perturbed countenance with augmented uneasiness.

"Was not the family respectable?"

"Perfectly, my shrewd little catechist!" seeming to shake off an uncomfortable incubus, as he laughed down at her serious face. "They vaunted themselves upon the antiquity of their line, and were more liberal in allusions to departed grandeur than was quite well-bred. When I knew them they were not wealthy, or in what they would have called 'society.' Indeed, the mother kept a private boarding-house near the law-school I attended. There were several sons--very decent, enterprising fellows. But one lived at home, and a daughter, the wife of a lieutenant in the navy, whom I never saw. I boarded with them for six months, or thereabout."

"You never saw the daughter! How was that?"

"I must have expressed myself awkwardly if I conveyed any such idea. I did not meet the seafaring husband who was off upon a long cruise.

The wife I met constantly--knew very well. You need not look at me so intently, love, as if you feared that some dark mystery lurked behind this matter-of-fact recital. If I do not tell you every event of my former life, it is not because it was vile. I could not sustain the light of your innocent eyes if I had ever been guilty of aught dishonorable or criminal. But even the follies and mistakes of a young man's early career are not fit themes for your ears. And I was no wiser, no more wary, than other youths of the same age; was apt to believe that fair which was only specious, and that I might play, uninjured, with edged tools. Nor had I seen you then, my treasure--my snow-drop of purity! Mabel! do you know how solemn a thing it is to be loved and trusted by a man, as I love and confide in you? It terrifies me when I think of the absoluteness of my dependence upon your fidelity--of how rich I am in having you--how poor, wretched, and miserable I should be without you. I shall not draw a free breath until you are mine beyond the chance of recall."

"n.o.body else wants me!" breathed Mabel in his ear, nestling within the arm that enfolded and held her tightly in the corner of the piazza shaded by the creeper. "The danger of losing me is not imminent to-night, at all events," she resumed, presently, with a touch of the sportiveness that lent her manner an airy charm in lighter talk than that which had engrossed her for the past hour.

The evening was warm and still to sultriness, and the moonlight, filtered into pensive pallor through a low-lying haze, yet sufficed to show how confidingly Imogene leaned upon her attendant in sauntering down the long main alley of the garden. Rosa was at the piano in the parlor, singing to the enamored Alfred. Mrs. Sutton had withdrawn to her own room to ruminate upon the astounding disclosure of her nephew's engagement, while Winston bent over his study-table busy with the interrupted letter his aunt had seen in his portfolio.

"There is no one here who has the leisure or the disposition to contest your rights, you perceive," said Mabel, running through a laughing summary of their companions' occupations.

"Betrothals are epidemic in this household and neighborhood," Winston was writing. "There are no fewer than three pairs of turtles cooing down stairs as I pen this to you, my bird of paradise. The case that next to mine--to ours--commands my interest is that of my sister. I came home to learn that the little Mabel I used to hold on my knee had entered into an engagement--conditional upon my sanction--with that traditional tricky personage, a Philadelphia lawyer--Mr. Frederic Chilton, at the door of whose manifold perfections, as set forth by my loquacious aunt, you may lay the blame of this delayed epistle. I know nothing of this aspirant to the dignity of brotherhood with myself, saving the facts that he is tolerably good looking, claims to be the scion of an old Maryland family, and that self-conceit is apparently his predominant quality."

"What is that?" asked Frederic, halting before the windows, of the drawing-room, as a wild, sorrowful strain, like the wail of a breaking heart, arose upon the waveless air.

Rosa was a vocalist of note in her circle, and she had never rendered anything with more effect than she did the song to which even the preoccupied strollers among the garden borders stayed their steps to listen. Through the open cas.e.m.e.nt Mabel and her lover could see the face of the musician, slightly uplifted toward the moonlight; her eyes, dark and dreamy, as under the cloud of many years of weary waiting and final hopelessness. Her articulation was always pure, but the pa.s.sionate emphasis of every word constrained the breathless attention of her audience to the close of the simple lay: