Throckmorton Part 25

At intervals Mrs. Temple received kind and sympathetic letters from Throckmorton, and replied to them with letters worded with her own simple eloquence. In Throckmorton's letters he spoke of Jacqueline rather as if she had been his child than his promised wife. Among them all Jacqueline's memory was that of a child. Throckmorton sent kind messages to Judith; and Mrs. Temple, when she wrote, conveyed short but expressive replies from Judith.

Two years had pa.s.sed. So quiet and uneventful had been their lives, that Judith would have had difficulty in persuading herself that the years were slipping by, but for little Beverley, now a handsome, st.u.r.dy urchin, whose long, fair hair had been cut off, and who emerged from dainty white frocks into kilts. The grandfather and grandmother daily more adored the child. Judith thought sometimes they were fast forgetting Jacqueline. The gra.s.s was quite green over Jacqueline by this time, and the head-stone had lost its perfect whiteness. But to Judith there was no forgetting. She had loved the child as if she had been her own, and she loved Throckmorton still. Jack wrote to her at intervals, his letters always containing some allusion to Jacqueline. Judith thought sometimes, with wonder, that Fate should not in the first instance have united those two young creatures, boy and girl.

One night, two winters after Jacqueline had gone away, Judith, who every night before going to bed went to her window, and, drawing the curtain, looked long toward Millenbeck, saw a bright light s.h.i.+ning from the hall-door and two of the lower windows of the house. Every night, as she gazed at it, she had seen it black and tenantless, and utterly deserted; but, now--

"Throckmorton has come!" she said to herself.

Next morning he came over early to see them. He found General Temple the same General Temple--courteous and verbose. His health being very good, he was an Episcopalian for the time being; but, whenever the gout appeared, he had his old way of lapsing into Presbyterianism. Mrs.

Temple was the same, and yet not the same. Throckmorton saw a change in her. She, the most unyielding of women, had become easy and indulgent.

Simon Peter and Delilah came in to speak to him, and a wifely rebuke, administered in the pantry, was distinctly audible to Throckmorton:

"Huccome you ain' taken off dat ole coat, n.i.g.g.e.r, an' put on dat one mistis give you, fur ter speak ter Ma.r.s.e George Throckmorton? He su't'ny will think we all's po', ef you keep on dat er way."

"We _is_ po', but we is first quality, 'oman!"

Judith, who had great self-command, could control her eyes, her voice, her manner; but happiness, the outlaw, at seeing Throckmorton again, brought the red blood surging to her cheeks. Throckmorton, who was exactly like his old self, was surprised and inwardly agitated at it.

They spoke some tender words of Jacqueline, all of them sitting together in the old-fas.h.i.+oned drawing-room. Her little chair was in its old place, but Judith sat in it; and even the ragged footstool on which Jacqueline had toasted her little feet was near it. Throckmorton noticed all these things with tenderness in his dark eyes. He was a little grayer than before, but he was the same erect, soldierly figure; he had the same simple but commanding dignity.

He walked home in a curious state of emotion. In those two years he had not ceased thinking deeply over that short episode, so full of happiness and pain--the happiness a little unreal, and vexed with many pangs; the pain very real, but with strange suggestions that, after all, the happiness held more possibilities of wretchedness. He could think, for Jacqueline's sake, how much better off she was, lying so peacefully in the old grave-yard, than if she had lived, so weak, so captivating, so unthinking. What would life have been to her? And so, at forty-six, after having experienced more than most men, he began the a.n.a.lysis of his own emotions, and realized that all he had known of love was perilously like a mirage. He had entered into a fool's paradise, but he knew that he of all men could least be satisfied there. His reason, his intellect, always overmastered him in the end; and what was there in this bewitching child to satisfy either? Jacqueline, young, was a dream; Jacqueline, old, was a fantasm. All this had come to him soon after Jacqueline's death, in that period of self-searching that followed. But, when he had got thus far, which was some time before his return to Millenbeck, a great change came upon him. He began to feel a sort of acute disappointment. He had loved and suffered much for that which he felt would not have made him happy had he gained it. All that love, grief, pa.s.sion, had been vain; here he checked himself; the memory of his girl-wife was sacred from even his own questionings; and so was that later love, but the necessity for checking himself told volumes. And then, by slow degrees, the image of Judith Temple had stolen upon him.

It was very gradual, it was many months in coming, but, when at last it dawned upon him, it was a sort of glorious surprise. How stupid, how blind had he been! Where were his doubts and questionings? Could anybody doubt Judith Temple's sympathy and understanding? He remembered the quaint words of the Jewish king, "The heart of her husband doth safely trust." He had seen enough of the way these weaker women had striven to bend him, but Judith had the beautiful charm of bending herself. She could be whatever the man she loved desired her to be. Throckmorton at once felt that any man married to Judith Temple would indeed be free, and how sweet would it be to see that proud spirit that yielded but seldom bend to his will! That homage, so rare and precious, was what women of her type paid to the master-pa.s.sion. Most women that he had ever seen yielded to the predominant influence; but women like Judith Temple bent their heads and smiled and played at humility, but yielded not one inch of their soul's standing-ground until the moment came.

Throckmorton, who possessed true masculine courage, admired this kind of feminine bravery. He felt that to conquer such a woman would be like capturing a Roman standard. And how utterly those proud women surrendered when they did surrender! He could fancy Judith's brave pretenses melting away; how charming would be her sweet inexperience!

How quickly she would persuade herself that there was nothing so wise, true, just as love! Throckmorton, although he had silenced his discernment, had never strangled it, and he began to study and know Judith. But there was no suspicion in his mind that she cared anything for him; and, when he made up his mind to return to Millenbeck and see her again, he was anything but sanguine. He felt that if he failed it would make infinitely more difference to him than anything that had ever happened to him in life before. He was absolutely afraid, and fear, he knew, when it came to men like him, meant something overmastering.

Throckmorton sighed when he realized his want of courage. He knew it would be forthcoming in an emergency; he had felt that in battle, where his first tremors never made him doubt for an instant that when the time came to use his courage it would be there; but it was a new thing to fear his fate at the hands of a woman. But the woman had become much more to him than any other woman had ever been; she was so much to him that it rather appalled him.

Nevertheless, anxieties or no anxieties, he went about winning Judith with the same coolness and deliberation he did everything else. He had two months' leave, and he determined to spend it all at Millenbeck.

Judith might break his heart, but she should not defraud him of those months in her society that he had promised himself for a good while before. For a long time past in his pleasant quarters at his post, in his regular round of duty, in the part he took in social life, he had comforted himself with the idea that, whether he was destined to this greater happiness or not, he would at least see this woman of all women; he would hear her soft voice, listen to her talk, seasoned with a dainty, womanly wit. n.o.body should deprive him of that. He began to remember with a frown Jack's turpitude about Judith's letters. As soon as Jack found out that his father wanted to see those friendly, kindly letters, he made great ado about showing them, playing the major very much as he would a peculiarly game and warlike salmon. The cast in Throckmorton's eye was apt to come out so savagely at these times that he was, as Jack said, positively cross-eyed. But after Jack had worked him up into a silent rage, he would then produce the letters.

Throckmorton had always taken women's letters as highly indicative, and Judith's were so refined, so sparkling in spite of the narrow round in which she lived, that Throckmorton's countenance immediately cleared and the cast disappeared from his eye as soon as he had got hold of one of these cherished epistles, all of which had been by no means lost on Jack.

Throckmorton went and came between Barn Elms and Millenbeck in the most natural and neighborly way in the world. He brought books over to Judith, and often read aloud at Barn Elms in the evenings. General Temple, still hard at work on the History of Temple's Brigade, which now approached its seventh volume, found Throckmorton a mine of information.

A soldier from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, Throckmorton had a queer diffidence about speaking of his profession, in marked contrast to General Temple, who declaimed the science of war with same easy confidence with which Edmund Morford explained the inscrutable mysteries of religion. As Throckmorton watched General Temple stalking up and down the quaint old drawing-room, haranguing and expounding, the idea that this man had been intrusted with the fate of battle perfectly staggered him. His sense of humor was keen, and, between his professional horror of General Temple's methods and the utter absurdity of the whole thing, he would be convulsed with silent laughter. Judith, the picture of demureness, would give him a glance that would almost create an explosion. With much simplicity General Temple would add:

"At that time, my dear Throckmorton, I was unfortunately separated from my command. I conceive it to be the duty of the commander of troops to set them an example of personal courage, and so I occupied a slightly exposed position."

Throckmorton did not doubt it in the least. The general's incapacity was only exceeded by his courage.

Throckmorton's native modesty, as well as the fact that he knew a great deal about the war and his profession, kept him comparatively silent; but finding that, when he talked with General Temple about battles and campaigns, Judith's face gradually grew scarlet with suppressed excitement, and that like most women she was easily carried away by the recitals of adventure, he artfully took up the thread of conversation and surprised himself by his own eloquence. It was not like the almost forgotten Freke's polished and charming periods, but it was none the less eloquent for being rather brief and pointed; and once or twice when Judith paid him some little compliment, her speaking eyes conveying more meaning than her words, Throckmorton would be seized with a fit of bashfulness, and clapping his rusty but still cherished blue cap on his head would go home and never say "war" for a week.

Their lives were so quiet, so shut out from even the small world of a provincial neighborhood, that nothing was known or talked of about them.

Judith, who was capable of revenge, felt a deep resentment against the county people. She, who before Jacqueline's death had been all sweetness and affability, showed a kind of haughtiness to the people who were well enough disposed to make amends to the Barn Elms family. Throckmorton noticed, when she went out of church behind General and Mrs. Temple, holding her boy by the hand, that the father and mother stopped and talked as neighbors in the country do, but Judith made straight for the rickety carriage which Simon Peter still drove.

The two months were nearly over. Throckmorton and Judith had seen much of each other, but there had been no exchange of intimate thoughts between them but once. This was one afternoon when they were alone at Barn Elms, that Throckmorton talked openly of Jacqueline.

"It is not treason to her, poor child," he said, "but--it was--a mistake. I truly loved her. I had thought that love was impossible to me after the loss I suffered so many years ago. But it was a madness; and, however delicious the madness of youth may be, when a man has reached my time of life he knows it to be madness. I have never dared to think what would the ultimate end have been had she lived and married me. The certainty one has of happiness is the life of love; but that certainty I never had. I never knew whether Jacqueline's love would be enough for me, even had it been mine; and I could never shake off a horrible fear that mine would not be enough for her."

Judith, who had listened silently to this, suddenly leaned forward and gazed at him involuntarily. The thought in her mind was, that no ordinary woman would be enough for Throckmorton. He could give much, but he would ask for much. Like all men of commanding sense and character, he was exacting.

Throckmorton could not follow her thought--he only saw her deep and expressive eyes, the pensive droop of her mouth, all the refined beauty of her face. He began to think how she would blossom out under the influence of happiness; what a happy, merry, delightful creature she would be if she loved; and something in his fixed and ardent gaze made Judith draw back, and brought the slight flush to her face, that meant much for her. She trembled a little, and Throckmorton saw it. When he returned to Millenbeck, he sat up half the night smoking strong cigars--the prosaic way in which his agitations always worked themselves off--lost in a delicious reverie of what might be. Here was a woman who appealed to his pride as much as to his love. Throckmorton, who was practical as well as romantic, thought it a very good thing for a man to marry a woman he could be proud of. Yet, when the last embers of the library fire had died out, and the cigars had given out too, and he began to be chill and stiff, sitting in his great arm-chair, he felt discouraged, and said almost out aloud, "I don't believe she will marry me."

It grew toward the last days of Throckmorton's stay. He had gone to but few places in the county. The temper of the people toward him had changed since he first came there; every year had brought its crop of tolerance, but it had ceased to be of importance to him. Indeed, but one thing mattered to him then--whether Judith would marry him. But he deliberately put off the decisive moment until the very afternoon before he was to leave. He had in vain tried to find out whether the friendly regret at his going that she expressed concealed a deeper feeling, but Judith was too clever for him. She had gone through the whole range of feeling since she first knew him, and now was better armed than she had ever been before.

He walked over to Barn Elms on that last afternoon, feeling very much as he had done years before, when, after long waiting, with the thunder of cannon in his ears and the smoke of musketry before his eyes, the order had come for him to move forward. It was well enough to think and plan before--but now, it was time to act; and, just as in that time of battle, he became cool and confident as soon as he was brought face to face with danger.

He timed his visit just when he knew Judith would be taking her afternoon walk with little Beverley. Sure enough, she was out. He stayed a little while with General and Mrs. Temple. When he rose to go, he said, quite boldly, to Mrs. Temple:

"I am going to find Judith."

He had never called her by her name before, and did it unconsciously.

Mrs. Temple, though, who was acute as most women are about these things, looked at him steadily. Throckmorton colored a little, but his eye had never drooped before any woman's, not even Mrs. Temple's. But she, after a little pause, laid her hand on his shoulder--he was not a tall man, like General Temple, and she could easily reach it--and said: "I hope you--will find Judith, George Throckmorton."

He went forth and struck out toward the belt of fragrant pines, where he knew Judith oftenest walked. It was spring again--April, with the delicious smell of the newly plowed earth in the air, and the faint perfume of the coming leaves--the putting-forth time. The entrancing stillness that all people born and nurtured in the country love so much was upon the soul of Nature. The dreamy and solemn murmur of the pines seemed only to make the greater silence obvious. In a little while he saw Judith's graceful figure coming his way. She wore a pale-gray gown, and a large black hat shaded her face. In her hand she carried a branch of the pale-pink dogwood, that does not grow by open roads and farm-fields, but in the depths of the woods. Beverley, with another branch of dogwood across his shoulder, like a gun, marched st.u.r.dily ahead of her. Throckmorton, who had carefully guarded his behavior since he had been home, was quite reckless now. He meant to risk it, and since all depended on the cast of a die, prudence was superfluous. He took Judith's hand and held it until he saw the red blood steal into her face. He looked at her so, that she could not lift her eyes from the ground. Beverley, however, claimed his rights. He and Throckmorton were great friends.

"How you _is_?" he asked, offering his chubby hand and looking up fearlessly into Throckmorton's face. The child had lost his mother's shy, appealing glance. He was a little man, instead of a baby, as he often told her proudly. "I'm going to be a soldier, I am," was his next remark, "and I'm going to be a brave soldier."

"That's right," said Throckmorton, "and, as I'm a soldier, too, perhaps I'll help you along."

"Will you make me a soldier?" asked Beverley, pus.h.i.+ng his cap back off his curly head.

"Yes, if you will go immediately home--all by yourself. You see--it isn't far--just along the path and through the gap, to the orchard, and then to the house."

Beverley looked meditatively at the distance. It seemed a perilous way for a six-year old. Judith stood, crimson and helpless. Throckmorton was a masterful man, and, when he took things in his own hands, he was apt to have his own way. She knew at once what he meant, and it gave her a kind of shock--she seemed about to be transported to another world. This sending away of her child was what n.o.body had ever done before.

Throckmorton, smiling, said to the boy, "A soldier shouldn't be afraid."

"I'm not afraid of nothin'," answered Beverley, stoutly. Judith stooped toward him, and the child threw his arms about her and kissed her--a kiss she pa.s.sionately returned. She felt it to be her farewell to him as the first object of her existence. She knew that he was to be supplanted. The boy trotted off, not looking behind once.

"See how brave he is, for a little fellow," she said, still blus.h.i.+ng.

"Yes, very brave. But you are a woman of great courage. You gave some of it to that boy."

Throckmorton was no laggard in love. He lost not a moment. He, who was by nature reticent, became, under the influence of the master-pa.s.sion, bold and ready of speech. Judith, who was by nature of a sweet and humorous talkativeness, became eloquently silent--her heart seemed to melt into an ineffable softness and yielding. She said one thing, though, as they turned to walk home through the delicious purple twilight:

"I think men can love more than once; but I don't think women can love but once."

Throckmorton perfectly understood her.

When they walked together across the lawn, under the gnarled locusts and poplars, they saw General and Mrs. Temple standing on the steps of the old house, with little Beverley between them. Throckmorton watched Judith jealously to see if there was anything like shame or apology in her look; but she, who could not look him in the face when they were alone in their secret paradise, now held her head up proudly. n.o.body could have told, from Throckmorton's quiet self-possession, that anything unusual had occurred; but never before had he known anything like the deep delight that now enthralled him.

THE END.