Mary Jane Holmes

“ But Alice and Gerard knew them, and they were all there, Tom and Bessie with the rest, Tom by far the handsomest young man of all the young men, and the one most at his ease, while Bessie, in her pretty muslin dress, with only flowers for ornament, would have been the belle of the evening, but for the hostess, whose brilliant beauty, heightened by the appliances of dress, which so well became her fine figure, dazzled every one as she stood by her husband’s side in her gown of creamy satin and lace, with diamonds flashing on her white neck and arms and gleaming in her hair. ”

“ Thea was evidently the centre of attraction, as, with her hat off and her curly bangs pushed back from her forehead, her white fingers swept the strings of the banjo with a certain inimitable grace, and her brilliant, laughing eyes looked up to the young man, who was bending over her with his back to me so I could not see his face. I only knew he was tall and broad-shouldered, with light brown hair which curled at the ends, and that his appearance was that of one bred in a city, who has never done anything in his life but enjoy himself. ”

“ Her last friend had said good-bye, and she was feeling very forlorn, and wondering where Bertha could be, when he came rushing up, bringing so much life and sunshine and magnetism with him that Mrs. Hallam began to feel doubly forlorn as she wondered what she should do without him.
“Oh, Rex,” she said, laying her head on his arm and beginning to cry a little, “I am so glad you have come, and I wish you were going with me. I fear I have made a mistake starting off alone. I don’t know at all how to take care of myself.” ”

“ But Milly had not come back, and the years had crept on and he was a man honored among men, and in his busy life had but little leisure for thought beyond his business. It was seldom now that he looked at the dark brown curl, or the little pea in the pod, hard as a bullet, and shriveled almost to nothing. But when he did he always thought of the summer day years ago and the young girl on the steps and the sound of the brook gurgling over the stones as it ran under the little bridge. And it all came back to him now, with news of Mr. Thornton’s bride, though why it should he could not tell. ”

“ Mildred Leach; it does not seem possible.”
Then he arose and walked rapidly away, and when the evening boat left Ouchy for Geneva he was on it, going he cared but little where, if by going he could forget the past as connected with Mildred Leach.
“I cannot marry her family,” he said many times during the next few months, when he was wandering everywhere and vainly trying to forget her, for always before him was the face he had never admired so much as when he last saw it, flushed and pale by turns, with a wondrous light in the brown eyes where tears were gathering. ”

“ On the bed in a room off the kitchen Mildred’s mother was lying with a headache, and both the kitchen and the bedroom smelled of camphor and vinegar, and the vegetables which were cooking on the stove and filling the house with the odor which made the girl faint and sick, as she leaned against the door-post and longed, as she always was longing, for some change in her monotonous life. ”

“ Bessie exclaimed, in her impulsive way, “and mother will be glad too. She sent the pinks because they are her favorite flowers and she says they remind her of Milly, who used to love them so much; that’s my sister, who has been abroad many years. I scarcely remember her at all.”
“Oh,” came like a moan from Mildred, who felt as if a blow had struck her heart, it throbbed so painfully at the mention of her old name by the sister who did not know her, and for an instant she was tempted to scream out the truth and bring the foolish farce to an end. ”

“ He wanted a real girl, not a made-up one, with powdered face, bleached hair, belladonna eyes, and all the obnoxious habits so fast stealing into the best society. Little Louie Thurston had touched his boyish fancy, and he admired her more than any other woman he had ever met; Grace Haynes amused and interested him; but neither she nor Louie possessed the qualities with which he had endowed his ideal wife, who, he had come to believe, did not exist. ”

“ When I was eighteen Rex Hallam came to Jacksonville and ran over to see us. If he had been handsome as a boy of fourteen, he was still handsomer as a man of twenty-one, with what in a woman would be called a sweet graciousness of manner which won all hearts to him; but as he is a man I will drop the sweet and say that he was kind alike to everybody, old and young, rich and poor, and had the peculiar gift of making every woman think she was especially pleasing to him, whether she were married or single, pretty or otherwise. ”

“ Miss Kizzy knew Doris was pretty, but never had the girl’s beauty struck her as it did now, when she saw her with Grant and felt an indefinable foreboding that the Hepburn line was in danger.
“Doris is a flirt, and Grant is no better, and I’ll send for Dorothea at once. There is no need to wait until autumn,” she said to herself, as she went down stairs and out upon the piazza, where Beriah and Desire were already, for both had seen him from the parlor and had hurried out to meet him. ”

“ More dead than alive, Mrs. Hallam had clung to the chair in momentary expectation of going down, never to rise again, and in that awful hour it seemed to her that everything connected with her life had passed before her. The old, yellow house, the grandmother to whom she had not always been kind, the early friends of whom she had been ashamed, the husband she had loved, but whom she had tried so often, all stood out so vividly that it seemed as if she could touch them. ”

“ Louie had had rather a hard time after Rex left her in Paris, for, as if to make amends for his Jekyll mood on the ship, her husband was unusually unreasonable, and worried her so with sarcasm and taunts and ridicule that her heart was very sore when she reached Ouchy. The excitement of the voyage, with Reginald as her constant companion, was over, and she must again take up the old life, which seemed drearier than ever because everything and everybody were so strange, and she found herself constantly longing for somebody to speak a kind and sympathetic word to her. ”

“ Of course I shall prove true; and who is there to meet, unless it is my Lost Star, as I call her, for whom I believe I am as persistently searching as Aleck is for the missing link, for I never see a group of young American girls that I do not manage to get near enough to see if she is among them, and I never see a head of chestnut-brown hair set on shoulders just as hers was that I don’t follow it until I see the face, which as yet has not been hers. And in this I am not disloyal to Thea, whom I love better than any girl I have ever known, and whom I will make happy, if possible. ”

“ Hallam Homestead is not for sale.”
As she talked, Bertha grew each moment more earnest and excited and beautiful, with the tears shining in her eyes and the bright color on her cheeks. Mrs. Hallam was not a hard woman, nor a bad woman; she was simply calloused over with false ideas of caste and position, which prompted her to restrain her real nature whenever it asserted itself, as it was doing now. Something about Bertha fascinated and interested her, bringing back the long ago, with the odor of the pines, the perfume of the pond-lilies, and the early days of her married life. ”

“ Something seems to be drawing us together strangely.” Then he spoke again of his visit to the Homestead, while Bertha became wonderfully animated as she talked of her home, and Rex, watching her, felt that he had never seen so beautiful a face as hers, or listened to a sweeter voice. “I wonder if I am really falling in love,” he thought, as he helped her from the boat, while she was conscious of some subtle change wrought in her during that hour on Lake Geneva, and felt that life would never be to her again exactly what it had been. ”

“ But Maude is young, and in my dream she wore the bridal dress at the last, and I saw my own grave, with you beside it and Maude, and both so sorry because I was dead. But it is better so, and I am glad to die and be at rest. If I could be what I once was, oh! how I should cling to life! For I love you so much! Oh, Max, do you know, can you guess how I have loved you all these years, and what it has cost me to give you up? ”

“ I do not believe it of Rex: he never despised any woman; but it is hard to hear such things, and sometimes when Fred is worse than usual and I have borne all I can bear, I go away and cry, with an intense longing for something different, which might perhaps have come to me if I had waited, and I hear Rex’s boyish voice just as it sounded under the magnolias in Florida, where we played together and pelted each other with the white petals strewing the ground. ”

“ Mildred had already won the reputation among her servants of being rather eccentric, and thinking this one of her cranks, the man drove on, while she went into the grounds, where the dead were lying, the headstones gleaming white through the clump of firs and evergreens which grew so thickly as to conceal many of them from view, and to hide completely the figure of a man seated in the shadow of one of them not very far from the graves to which she was making her way. Hugh had also been up the mountain road on foot, and coming back had struck into the cemetery as a shorter route home. ”

“ Entering the salon on his hands and knees, he made his way to the end of the table on which Louie lay, and near which Mrs. Hallam was clinging desperately to a chair as she crouched upon the floor. It was at this moment that the double X which had sent Bertha into Rex’s arms struck the ship, eliciting shrieks of terror from the passengers, who felt that the end had come. Steadying himself against a corner of the table, Phineas called out, in a loud, penetrating voice:
“Silence! This is no time to scream and cry. It is action you want. Pray to be delivered, as Jonah did. ”

“ The passengers, who were told that there was no real danger, kept up their courage while the day lasted, but when the night came on and the darkness grew deeper in the salon, where nearly all were assembled, many a face grew white with fear as they listened to the howling of the wind and the roaring of the sea, while wave after wave struck the ship, which sometimes seemed to stand still, and then, trembling in every joint, rose up to meet the angry waves which beat upon it with such tremendous force. ”

“ I am not afraid of Aunt Kizzy. She never raps me; and if you are so awfully particular, we’ll whisper, while I tell you all my secrets, and you tell me yours,—about the boys, I mean. Girls don’t count. Tell me of the fellows, and the scrapes you got into at school.”
It was in vain that I protested that I had no secrets and knew nothing about fellows or scrapes. She knew better, she said, for no girl could go through any school and not know something about them unless she were a greater softie than I looked to be. ”

“ Aunt Kizzy scolds me so, and I—I can’t help it, and I’m going to Meadowbrook to teach or do something, where I shall not trouble any one again.”
“No, Doris,” Grant said, in a voice more earnest and decided than any she had ever heard from him. “You are not going away from me. You are mine and I intend to keep you. I will play a hypocrite’s part no longer. I love you, and I do not love Thea as a man ought to love the girl he makes his wife, nor as she deserves to be loved; and even if you refuse me I shall not marry her. ”

“ Had I dared I would have written to him and assured him of my love, but I could not, so great was my dread of Keziah, who exercises a kind of hypnotic power over us all. She tried to keep Desire from the man of her choice, and might have succeeded, if death had not forestalled her. She sent Tom away from me, and only yielded to Maria, who had a will as strong as her own and married whom she pleased. But she, too, died just after her husband, who was shot in the battle of Fredericksburgh, and we have no one left but her boy Grant, who is almost as dear to me as Gerold was. ”

“ She must be the one referred to, for no human being could ever accuse Squint-Eye of any degree of beauty. And yet how the father and sister loved her, and how the old man’s voice trembled when he spoke of her, always with pride it seemed to Rex, who began at last himself to feel a good deal of interest in her. He knew now that he was occupying her seat, and that the rose-bud he had fastened in his button-hole was put there for her, and he hoped his aunt would treat her well. ”