East Angels Part 66

"I don't know anything about Mr. Spenser!" Then, after a moment, "I reckon he will follow," the Doctor murmured, dejectedly.

"And I--who thought he was in Venice!"

"He was in Venice until a few weeks ago. I don't know in the least what brought him home. And I don't know in the least what brought him to Norfolk, unless it was, as I was told, some insane fancy for sketching the Dismal Swamp;--of all places in the world the miry old Dismal! And to think that I should have let Garda go there, at just that moment!

It's a combination of fortuitous chances which seems to me absolutely infernal!--I beg your pardon, madam"--here the Doctor rose, bowing ceremoniously, with his hand on the broad expanse of beautifully starched linen, which kept its place unmoved over his disturbed breast.

"It is not often that I am betrayed into language unsuited to a lady's presence. I ask you to excuse me."

"You do not like Mr. Spenser," said Margaret.

The Doctor stared. "Do you?"

"I suppose it is not so much whether we like him, as whether we approve of him for Garda. But I am afraid she would not listen to us even if we should disapprove."

"I think you are in error there," said the Doctor, beginning to walk to and fro with quick short steps. Much as he liked Margaret, it was with anger that he answered her now.

"I must tell you what I think, mustn't I?" said the other guardian, gently. "And I think she has cared for him a long time."

"It is impossible for me to agree with you. Long time? Permit me to ask how long you mean? In the mean while she has been engaged to another man--Evert Winthrop. Do you forget that?"

"I don't think she realized fully--she was very young; she is extremely impulsive always," answered his colleague, wandering rather helplessly for a moment among her phrases. Then she spoke more decidedly. "But now she knows, now she is sure; she is sure it is Lucian she cares for."

"She is fanciful, and this is only another fancy. Sally, too, has been much to blame."

"I do not think Garda is fanciful," said Margaret. "And--it is not a childish feeling, her liking for Lucian Spenser."

The Doctor stopped on the other side of the room. Then he came back and stood gazing at Margaret in silence. "You are a woman, and you are good," he said at last. "She is very fond of you, she tells you everything, and you _must_ know. If therefore you say that she--"

"Yes," answered Margaret, "I do know. I am sure she cares for him very, very much." Here some of Garda's extraordinarily frank expressions about Lucian, and the delight it gave her to even look at him, coming suddenly into her memory, over all her fair face there rose a sweet deep blush.

The Doctor turned away and dropped into a chair.

"There is nothing against Mr. Spenser, I believe," Margaret began again, after a short pause.

"It isn't that. No, I believe there is nothing." He sat there, his figure looking unusually small, his eyes turned away.

Margaret asked some questions. By degrees the Doctor answered them. He said that Lucian was possessed of "a genteel income." He had not accepted his wife's large fortune; she had left everything to him, but he had immediately given the whole back to her relatives, retaining only the profits of some investments which she had made, since their marriage, under his advice; this sum the Doctor described as "a competence."

"When is Garda coming home?" Margaret asked.

"She says she isn't coming; she says she knows you have no place for her here--no time; and she doesn't wish to stay with any one but you."

"She does not mean that. I think she should come, she has been in Charleston a long time; Mrs. Lowndes has been wonderfully kind."

"Oh, as to that, Sally likes to have her there. She says it has made her 'young again' to see Garda. And to admire (I don't know what she meant by that) Adolfo Torres."

"Is he there still?"

"He is there still. He doesn't believe in the least in Garda's engagement."

"He didn't believe in the other one," said Margaret. And then she was sorry she had said it, for the Doctor jumped up and seized his hat; it was still insupportable to him, the thought of those two engagements.

"He's a hallucinated idiot!" he said, violently. Then, controlling himself, he took leave of Margaret, bowing over her hand with his old stately ceremony. Mr. Harold was in the garden? He would go out and see him there. It was most satisfactory, certainly, the improvement in Mr.

Harold.

On the present occasion the Doctor found Lanse on a couch which he had had carried out to the garden; here he lay contentedly smoking, and looking at the river. Lanse liked the Doctor; it was an ever-fresh amus.e.m.e.nt to him to realize that his large, long, muscular self was committed to the care of that "pottering little man." The Doctor was not in the least "pottering." But Lanse really thought that all short men with small hands, who were without an active taste for guns, were of that description. The sad Doctor made but a brief visit this time; then he started homeward. He had still the news about Garda to tell in Gracias. At present it was known only to ma.

Garda did not comply with the wish of her friends, and return to them.

She wrote a dozen letters about it, but in actual presence she remained away. Most of these epistles were to Margaret. As time went on she wrote to Margaret every day.

But her letters were not letters at all, in the usual sense of the word; they were brief diaries, rapidly jotted down, of the feelings of the moment; they were paeans, rhapsodies, bubbling exclamations of delight; none of them ever exceeded in length a page.

They seemed to Margaret very expressive. She did not know what Garda might be writing to the Kirbys, the Moores, and Mrs. Carew; but what Garda wrote to her she kept to herself.

This was the girl's first letter after Margaret's note urging her to return:

"Margaret, I _can't_ come--don't ask me; for none of them there would sympathize with me--not even you. It isn't that I want sympathy--I never even think of it. But I don't want the least disagreeable thing now when I am so _blissful_--bliss is the only word. Lucian comes in every morning on the train. The Doctor said that of course he would not stay all the time in Charleston. So to satisfy him Lucian stays four miles out.

"Oh, Margaret, everything is so enchanting!

"GARDA."

"DEAR MARGARET,--Every morning I watch until he opens the gate"

(she wrote a day later), "and then I run down to meet him in the hall. We don't stay in the house, we go into the garden. Mrs.

Lowndes says she loves to have him come, because he reminds her so much of Mr. Lowndes--'Roger,' she calls him. And she says it makes her young again in her heart to see us. And perhaps it does in her heart, but the change hasn't reached the outside yet. I am expecting him every minute, there he comes now.

"GARDA."

"DEAR MARGARET,--If I could stay with you, I would come back to-morrow," she wrote in answer to a second letter from Margaret, which urged her strongly to return. "But I know you don't want me now--that is, you can't have me--and where else could I stay? The Doctor _hates_ Lucian--he may pretend, but he _does_. If I should stay at the rectory, Mrs. Moore would be sure to say, how _pleasant_ for Lucian and I to read poetry on the veranda, because that is what she and Middleton used to do when they were engaged.

But Lucian and I don't want to read any poetry on verandas.

GARDA."

"DEAR MARGARET,--Lucian has gone for the night, and there's nothing else to do, so I thought I would write to you. Mrs. Lowndes has just been in. She brought a daguerreotype of Mr. Lowndes, taken when he was young, and she says she knows exactly how I feel, because she used to feel just the same; when she was at the window, and saw 'Roger' coming down the street, the very calves of her legs used to quiver, she says. Roger must have been stout--at least he is in the daguerreotype, and he wore gla.s.ses.

"Lucian is painting me; but I only wish I could paint _him_. Oh, Margaret, he _is_ so beautiful!

GARDA."

"DEAREST MARGARET,--I'm so glad I am alive, it's so nice to be alive. People say life's dreadful, but to me it's perfectly delicious every single minute. I thought I would tell you how happy I was before going to bed,--I love to _write it down_.

GARDA."

The Doctor went up to Charleston again. He was much displeased with the course things were taking, he spoke with a good deal of severity to Sally Lowndes.

Sally, who was soft-bodied as well as soft-hearted (her figure was a good deal relaxed), shed tears. Then, recovering some spirit, she wished to know what the Doctor had expected _her_ to do? It was true that that sweet Garda had left off her lessons (up to this time she had "had instruction," that is, teachers had arrived at fixed hours); but Sally was decidedly of the opinion that a girl who was so soon to be married should be relieved at least of "_school-room_ drudgery."

"Nothing of the sort," said the Doctor; "she should be kept even more closely to her books. Your ideas are provincial and ridiculous, Sally; I don't know where you obtained them."

"From my mother," answered Sally, with a pink flush of excitement in her faded cheeks. "From my grandmother too--who was yours also. It is _you_ who are changed, Reginald; it has never been the custom in our family to keep the girls down at their books after sixteen."