True and Other Stories Part 16

"And break his heart?" she asked, looking up at him with an effort at reproach.

"I speak to you as his brother," answered Sylv--"his brother, whom he sent here of his own accord to watch over you; and I say that it would be wrong. You would not be happy yourself, and you would find it impossible to make him happy."

Adela drew her hand away. "But I have promised him! And I will keep my promise."

As she spoke she rose erect: he could hear her close her teeth with a grating sound.

"I don't intend to argue about it," he said. "You are free to settle everything your own way. It appeared to me like I must tell you my opinion. That's the end of it, Deely." He paused. "I got a letter from Mr. Lance; says he's got back, and is coming up to see you. But _I_ am going away to-morrow."

Adela started violently. "_You_ going away!" Then she trembled toward him and laid her hands on his shoulders. "Oh no, no! Don't leave me now, Sylv. Don't go away!"

"I must," he replied. "I've got through. I've done all I can. I must go back to work for Mr. Lance."

Adela's hands still rested on his arms. He could hardly move them otherwise than to enfold and sustain her. Unable to support herself, she drooped and sank toward him for an instant.

"Dear--dear--sister," he almost groaned, "don't despair! Don't give way!

I wish I could save you from suffering."

She recovered herself and stood upright before him, looking into his eyes. She trembled, and he longed to embrace her once more, holding her to his heart for as long as he should live. But neither of them made any movement toward such a renewal of her dependence upon him. Steadily, yet with a kind of doubt and fear, they gazed at one another; and the whole story of their hearts was made clear. But not one word of pa.s.sion was uttered.

"I must leave--must leave to-morrow," Sylv repeated, as they started simultaneously to go back to the school; "and I think I will send Dennie up here." Instead of advancing this proposition with the courage he wanted to show, he made it sound like the knell of all their hopes.

Nerving himself, he added: "Shall I tell him you've forgiven him?"

This time, by a prodigious effort, he spoke bravely; yet his eyes, without his knowledge, seemed to beg her to come to the aid of his failing fort.i.tude.

"Shall I tell him?"

"Yes."

"And that you're ready to go with him now?" The faltering look had vanished. A white, still light of triumph rested on his paling face.

"Yes," said Adela again, with trembling lips.

CHAPTER XIII.

LANCE AND ADELA.

Sylv was on the point of beginning his journey, when Lance walked into his boarding-place with a hearty salutation.

"Isn't this very sudden?" he asked, with p.r.o.nounced astonishment at Sylv's new move.

"It looks so to you," said the young man. "But I've been thinking it over a long time. It isn't best for me to stay here."

Lance saw that something was held in reserve, but could not conjecture what. "Suit yourself, Sylv," he returned. "If you're satisfied, I ought to be."

"Besides," said Sylv, with the air of having already given one reason, "I ought to do some of that work I promised for you."

"It _would_ be an advantage to begin exploring the swamp before warm weather comes on," Lance agreed.

"Well, sir, I'm ready to go at it right straight off," said the other.

There was a disproportionate grimness in his tone and manner, Lance imagined. The declaration had apparently cost him an effort.

"Lord bless me, Sylv," he exclaimed, abruptly, "how thin and pale you've grown! I didn't fairly notice it until this moment. It evidently won't do you any harm to have a change."

"No, sir. I have not been feeling well."

"All right. Wait till the afternoon train, and I'll go back to Beaufort with you. I only want to see Adela for a while. Will you come along?"

He did not really want Sylv to accompany him; and perhaps this was manifest in his way of speaking. Yet he was somewhat surprised when the young man, turning aside and pretending to adjust some of the articles in the forlorn miniature trunk he had been packing, said: "No, thank you, Mr. Lance. I said good-by to her last night."

"It's just as well, that way," said Lance, nervously. "I have something important to tell her, and it will be better to see her alone."

Sylv straightened up, and glanced at him almost fiercely. A suspicion occurred to him. "Something important?" he asked. But he did not dare to demand particulars.

Nor did it rea.s.sure him much, either, to have Lance answer, "Yes; I'll tell you about it afterward."

For his part, Lance, in noticing Sylv's abstracted behavior, recalled what Jessie had said as to throwing the young fellow so much with Adela, and wondered whether there was any confirmation of her fear in the constraint which had overtaken his _protege_. But he was so anxious to see Adela, that he did not stop to reflect on that point more than a moment.

Ushered by the matronly princ.i.p.al of the academy into its scrupulously dusted but threadbare parlor, he awaited the girl's advent with a good deal of trepidation. The window-blinds were closed, and the interior was pervaded by a mock twilight. When Adela at last made her appearance, her figure, from the opposite side of the room, looked so dim and uncertain that Lance was strongly reminded of the first time he ever saw her--the time that she rose out of the earth, as it were, and again crumbled back into it.

"Miss Reefe!" he said, scarcely above a murmur.

"Oh, Mr. Lance! Sylv told me you were coming." And she approached him through the dimness of the room, groping, one might say.

They shook hands formally, and to Lance's distraught fancy it seemed as if her fingers withdrew themselves with the recoil of absolute dislike from the touch of his own.

"You're not glad to see me, I'm afraid," he began, boldly.

"Oh yes--yes I am. What makes you think so?"

"I can hardly tell, but I think I should know if you were. It is so dark here I can barely see you. Shall I open a shutter?" He made a movement to do so.

"It is light enough for me," Adela answered; and he at once desisted from his purpose. "Won't you sit down?" she asked.

He accepted the invitation.

They conversed for a few moments about her studies and about what he himself had been doing since they last met. But at length he said: "You never would be able to guess, Adela, why I have come to see you to-day.

You told me a very interesting story once--do you remember?--about your people. That was a legend; but now I have a true story to tell _you_, which is connected with yours. Would you like to hear it?"

"I always like stories better than anything," said the girl. "Do tell it to me."

Thereupon Lance narrated the tale with which we are familiar, adding the details of the picture, the first clew which he had caught in her resemblance to Jessie, and the extraordinary coincidence of the old rhyme from Wharton Hall. Adela listed intently, without interposing a syllable; but he could hear her breath coming and going, and occasionally she sighed. She was seated in a chair near his own; but, though his eyes were growing used to the gloom of the apartment, he felt her presence more by the warm irradiation of her vitality through the air than by actual vision. From time to time there was an audible flurry of light feet and flitting skirts in the pa.s.sageway without, or in the rooms above, indicating the movement of young women from one point to another of the scanty scholastic edifice; and once a desk-bell rang punctiliously from a distance. But otherwise they were uninterrupted. As Lance proceeded with his story, the dimness of the light and the random brus.h.i.+ng of the breeze against the shutters aided a species of hallucination that laid hold of him. While he retraced the mazes and the by-paths of the tradition that led back so far into the forests and the obscurity of an earlier epoch, the gloom of the wilderness itself seemed to surround him; the leaves of an unknown forest-land muttered and rustled in his ears; he felt like an explorer; he was making his way, he could fancy, toward the goal of his long striving and his hara.s.sed desire. Should he not meet, at the end of his wanderings, the object of his search?

When he had finished the story he said: "_You_ have Indian blood in your veins, Adela."