Throckmorton Part 7

But, as Mrs. Temple often said, Freke was unquestionably a gentleman; he was mild-mannered to a degree, and his very impertinences were brought out with a diffidence that frequently hoodwinked General Temple. He was not nearly so handsome as Beverley, being much shorter and sandy-haired, in contrast with Beverley's blonde beauty; but Mrs. Temple always felt in the old days, with a little pang of jealousy, that this ordinary-looking boy, with his exquisite manners--not the least affected or effeminate, but simply the perfection of personal bearing--could put Beverley at a disadvantage. The two had little in common, and had never met after their school-days, when General Temple, in the innocence of his heart, had sent Freke abroad, to reform, until the very time of Beverley's death. Freke, whose courage was as flawless in its way as General Temple's, had come home during the war and enlisted in the Southern army. A strange fate had placed him close to Beverley when he was killed. He had held Beverley's dying hand, and to him were intrusted the last messages to the mother and the young wife, who waited and prayed at Barn Elms. Nothing on earth but this could have brought Mrs.

Temple to tolerate Freke at all, after the sensational career which had begun with the pistol scene. Moreover, to increase the abnormal conditions about this unregenerate being, as the Temples considered him, he was perfectly irresistible. How it was, General Temple gloomily declared, he didn't know, but Freke had the most extraordinary way of insinuating himself into the good graces of both men and women--not by any affectation of goodness, for there was a frankness about his wickedness that was peculiarly appalling to General Temple. Freke was no handsomer as a man than as a boy; he had been steadily making ducks and drakes of his fortune since he was twenty-five; yet, somehow, Freke always seemed to have a plenty of friends, solely by the charm of his personality. The most serious escapade that had come to General Temple's knowledge since Freke was of age was his running away with a Cuban girl in New Orleans, and afterward getting a divorce by some hocus-pocus, and thereafter, with serene confidence, he bore himself as an unmarried man.

Now, divorce was practically unknown in that old part of Virginia, and the Temples regarded it as in the category with murder and arson; so that this final iniquity of Freke's would have quite put him beyond the pale, but for those hours he spent kneeling on the ground with the dying Beverley.

General Temple had a sort of Arab hospitality that would not have begrudged itself to the Evil One himself, and to tell Freke that he was not welcome under the roof of Barn Elms, where his grandfather and his grandfather's father had lived, was an enormity of which he was not capable. And Mrs. Temple was no manner of use to him in the case. In vain he tried to shuffle the decision off on her. Mrs. Temple would not accept it. Like the general, she sighed and groaned, and turned it over in her mind; but always came back that picture of Beverley lying bleeding and dying, and Freke risking his life to stay by him. So at last, after a week of mutual misery, one night, in the privacy of the "charmber," Mrs. Temple, watching the general stalking up and down during one of his fits of midnight restlessness, said, tremulously:

"My love, we must let Freke come. We can not refuse it--for--for Beverley's sake."

So the next morning a letter was dispatched to Freke, written by General Temple with considerably less cordiality than usual, and very feeble rhetorically, expressing the pleasure his uncle and aunt felt at the prospect of a visit from their nephew.

The next day, as soon as the direful news of his coming was made known to Jacqueline, she rushed off, as she always did, to give Judith the startling information.

Judith heard it with a strange feeling of repulsion, which she at first imagined was that infinite disapproval she felt for Freke; but, if he came, all of that terrible story about Beverley would have to be told over. Judith had not yet come to a clear understanding of herself, but she had begun to shrink from that dwelling on Beverley which seemed to give Mrs. Temple such exquisite comfort.

"Everything that looked at Freke fell in love with him," announced Jacqueline. "Of course, he is as handsome as a dream--something like Mr.

Morford, I dare say."

There were two or three faded photographs of him at Barn Elms, and none of them gave the idea of great beauty; but photographs in those days were not very artistic reproductions.

Judith laughed a little uneasily.

"I wish he wern't coming, Jacky," she said. "He is too--too startling a person for quiet people like ourselves. There is one comfort, though: he will soon get tired of us."

Within a week or two came a very well-expressed letter from Freke, thanking his uncle and aunt for their hospitable invitation, and saying that on a certain day he would land from the river steamer at Oak Point.

Jacqueline was immensely taken with the letter, which was written on paper the like of which she had never seen before, and was sealed with a crest.

Two immense trunks arrived in advance of the expected visitor. Mrs.

Sherrard happened to be at Barn Elms when the luggage appeared. Mrs.

Temple's face expressed her misery.

"Jane, you have my sympathy. A more unmitigated scamp than Freke doesn't live," was Mrs. Sherrard's remark.

"Kitty," feebly protested Mrs. Temple, "he is my husband's nephew."

"The more's the pity."

As a rule, the reputation of incalculable wickedness hurts n.o.body, in the opinion of the very young. The more Mrs. Temple preached and warned, holding on to that one saving clause, Freke's devotion to Beverley in his dying hours, the more attractive he seemed to Jacqueline. At last one afternoon, when the carriage returned from Oak Point Landing with the much-talked-of Freke, Jacqueline, who had been curling her hair and prinking all day for the visitor, came down into the drawing-room, and the expression of acute disappointment on her face said loudly:

"Is this all?"

For Freke was neither surpa.s.singly handsome nor any of the superlative things Jacqueline had fondly imagined him to be. He was not even as handsome as Throckmorton, and Jacqueline thought him no beauty. Freke was under middle height, and his hair was as sandy as of old, and not too abundant. His features were ordinary; and Jacqueline, not being a physiognomist, did not take in the piercing expression, the firmness and intelligence that redeemed them from commonplaceness. He did look unmistakably the gentleman, Jacqueline grudgingly admitted. _This_ the adorable, the irresistible, the--But Jacqueline was too disgusted to continue.

Freke, who read Jacqueline like an open book, and suspected the advance impression she had received, could hardly keep from laughing out aloud at the girl's air and manner. He talked a little to her, somewhat more to Judith, but chiefly to Mrs. Temple.

It was late in the afternoon when he had arrived, and tea was soon announced. Directly it was over, Mrs. Temple marshaled a solemn procession into "the charmber" to hear Freke's description of Beverley's last hours. She went first with Judith, followed by Freke and General Temple. Mrs. Temple had tried to get Jacqueline to come, too, but Jacqueline, who had a horror of weeping and tragedies, begged off; and Mrs. Temple, who really attached but little importance to the girl at any time, did not press the point. The door of the room remained closed for two hours. Jacqueline, who had got tired of Delilah's company and the cat's, went up-stairs early, but not to bed. She waited until she heard Judith's door open, and then went and knocked timidly at the door.

"Come in," said Judith, in an unfamiliar voice. Judith was sitting before her dressing-table, and had already begun to unbraid her long, rich hair. But her eyes were fixed with a hard, staring gaze on her own image in the gla.s.s. The mother had wept at Freke's recital; the widow had remained pale, tearless, and turning over in her troubled mind the immaturity, the transitoriness of that first girlish love-affair that had resulted, as so few first loves do, in a sudden marriage--a quick widowhood. And she had a terrifying sense that she had betrayed herself to Freke. There was one particular point in the narrative, when he described how the dead man had got his death-wound. Beverley had run across a small body of Federal cavalrymen, himself with only an advance guard, and, _a la_ General Temple, had immediately dashed at them, as if a cavalry scrimmage would affect one iota the great fight that was impending the next day. Beverley himself had engaged in a hand-to-hand tussle with a Federal officer--both of them had rolled off their horses, and the struggle between them was more like Indian warfare than civilized warfare--and Freke described, with cruel particularity, how the two men fought in the underbrush, and crushed the wild rose and hawthorn bushes, each one trying vainly to draw his pistol--and at last a shot rang out, and Beverley turned over on his face with a wild shriek and a death-wound. The Federal officer had got his arm entangled in his bridle-reins, and Freke thought every moment the excited horse would trample the wounded man to death; and then, a squad of Confederates coming up, the Federals had made off, the officer mounting his horse and getting out of the way with nothing worse than a few bruises. All the time he was telling this he was eying Judith, who did not shed a single tear. Mrs. Temple wept torrents, and even so did General Temple. For poor Judith, whose reading of Freke was not less keen than his reading of her, it was misery enough to feel that, after all, her widowhood was not very real, and that the mourning, the entire giving up of the world, the devotion to Beverley's parents, was, in some sort, a reparation; but that it should escape her--for Judith with the eagerness to make amends, of a generous nature, had readily adopted Mrs. Temple's view--that it was a crime not to mourn for Beverley.

Jacqueline slipped down on her knees beside Judith, and, nodding her head, gravely said:

"Mamma didn't get _me_ into the room. Ah, Judy, dear, why won't they let us forget him--"

"Jacqueline!" cried Judith, turning a pale, shocked face on her.

"I say," persisted Jacqueline, who had one of her sudden fits of courage, "why do they trouble us to remember him? I hardly knew him; he was always off at college, and then in the war; why won't they let us mourn decently for him? And then--and then--everybody wants to forget griefs. I do."

Judith rose and shook her off impatiently. "I wish Temple Freke had never come here," she said.

"I do, too," answered Jacqueline, getting up. "I am afraid of him. O Judith, what two poor creatures are we!"

"I know I am," suddenly cried Judith, breaking into a storm of tears. "I know there is no peace for me anywhere!--" Judith stopped as suddenly as she had begun. How could she put it in words, the ghastliness of this perpetual reminder of that which in her heart she longed to forget--this feeling that had been growing on her for so long, that she ought to feel more remorse for marrying Beverley Temple than grief at losing him--that all this solemn mourning for him was like those state funerals, where there is a great service, a catafalque, a coffin, mourners--everything except a corpse? And to her candid soul how wicked, heartless, and unnatural it seemed! Jacqueline's eyes, so full of meaning and fixed on her, troubled her. She got up after a minute and walked over to the window. The red glow of the fire and the dim candle-light did not prevent her from seeing clearly into the moonlight night. She drew the old-fas.h.i.+oned white curtains apart and looked out. The somber trees loomed large and black, but up on the hill, a quarter of a mile away, the light from Millenbeck gleamed cheerfully. From two windows on the lower floor and two on the upper, as well as the great fan- and side-lights of the hall-door, a ruddy glare streamed steadily. Presently Jacqueline came and stood by Judith, timidly.

"Do you know," she said, "it seems queer that three strangers should come into our lonely lives--in this quiet life here? And the one I like--the one I like best--is Jack Throckmorton. I can't talk to the others."

Judith, who had got back a little of her composure, smiled at this.

"You talked away fast enough with Major Throckmorton."

"Oh, yes, but I didn't feel at home with him. Jack and I understand each other. I know what he means when he talks to me. I don't always understand Major Throckmorton. Judith, is my cousin Freke a very wicked man?"

"So people say," replied Judith in a subdued voice, which had not altogether overcome its agitation.

"He isn't handsome enough to be very--very attractive," said Jacqueline after a pause.

But the rule of contrary seemed to suddenly prevail at Barn Elms then.

Within a week everybody in the house had succ.u.mbed more or less to Freke's charm. General Temple found him invaluable in the preparation of the History of Temple's Brigade; and Freke, who had a store of military knowledge among his great fund of general information, easily persuaded the general that he was a military historian of the first order. When the general began his evening harangues, Freke always had an example pat of a certain occasion when Prince Eugene, or the Duke of Marlborough, or some equally distinguished leader had successfully pursued General Temple's tactics. All this General Temple laboriously transcribed in his ma.n.u.script. Judith, who very much doubted whether Freke were not making it up as he went along, had her suspicions confirmed when Freke would occasionally turn his expressive face on her and actually wink with appreciation of the general's simplicity. Judith was indignant, but she could not help laughing at Freke's genuine humor. Mrs. Temple showed her regard for the returned prodigal by taking him into the "charmber" one day and reasoning in a motherly way upon Freke's duty to return to his wife. Judith was astounded after a while to hear Mrs. Temple's gentle but intense laughter making itself heard outside the room. Freke, with the most good-natured manner in the world, sitting in the rush-bottomed chair, with one foot over his knee, began to tell Mrs. Temple some of his marital experiences with his Julia. Mrs. Temple at first put on her severest frown and fairly groaned aloud at his declaration that he didn't know whether he was married or not in Virginia, as his divorce was got in one of the Northwestern States; but, divorce or no divorce, he wouldn't tempt Fate again in another matrimonial venture even with a creature as beautiful as Helen, as wise as Portia, and with a million in her own right. Then he began to tell of the adventures between Julia and himself which had led to their separation, winding up with a description of their final scene, when Julia threw a dish at him and he in turn threw a bucket of ice-water over Julia. Before this, though, Mrs.

Temple's laughter had been heard. Freke issued from the room the picture of innocence, and at peace with himself and all the world. Mrs. Temple, on the contrary, was an image of guilt. Never had she before in her life been beguiled from a moral lecture into unseemly laughter--and laughter on such a subject! Mrs. Temple's conscience rose up and fought her, and she began to think that all her moral foundation was tottering.

Surprises were the order of the day. One night, just after family prayers, when the gout, and the doubt whether anybody at all was to be saved, had caused General Temple to make a more pessimistic, vociferous, and grewsome prayer than usual, in which he called the Deity to account for so grievously afflicting the Temple family, Freke, whom Judith had caught smiling in the midst of General Temple's most telling periods, quietly announced that he had that day bought Wareham, a place within two miles of Barn Elms.

It was not much of a place, being at most about three hundred acres, with a small, untenanted house on it--and property went for a song, anyhow, in that part of the world--but, nevertheless, the news was paralyzing to General and Mrs. Temple. Judith, who was developing a certain dislike and distrust of Freke that grew daily, could hardly forbear laughing at the mute horror of General and Mrs. Temple over this unlooked-for news. Freke went on to say that a very little would make the place habitable for him, and he liked the fis.h.i.+ng and shooting to be had--especially the shooting, as the birds had had four years' rest during the war. Then he said good-night pleasantly, and went off to bed.

"This is the dev--I mean this is most unfortunate, my love," remarked General Temple, dismally, to Mrs. Temple, at two o'clock in the morning following this, as he paraded up and down the "charmber," declaiming against Freke's iniquities.

Next day, Mrs. Sherrard came over, and the direful news was communicated to her by Mrs. Temple, with a very long face. Mrs. Sherrard's eyes danced.

"Now you'll know what it is to have a nephew that one would like to be entirely unlike what he is. That's my trouble with Edmund Morford. You know, I hate a humbug--and Edmund is a good soul, but a dreadful humbug."

"Katharine!" exclaimed Mrs. Temple. "A minister of the gospel--"

"Go along, Jane Temple! You have no eyes in your head where ministers of the gospel are concerned. Edmund is perfectly harmless--that's one comfort."

"I wish I could say the same of Temple Freke," Mrs. Temple rejoined, dolefully.

It would be a week or two yet before Freke could take possession of Wareham. Some beds and tables and sheets and towels had to be procured, and meanwhile he stayed on at Barn Elms. It would not have taken a very astute person to see what the charm was. It was Judith.

When the knowledge first came to these two people--to Judith, that Freke's eyes followed her continually; that, as if by some power beyond his will, his chair was always next hers, his ear always alert to catch her lightest word--to Freke, that this young country-woman, with her spirited, expressive face, her untutored singing--for music was one of his weak points, or strong ones, as the case might be--her gentle sarcasm when he essayed a little sentiment, pretty and tender enough to please a woman who knew twice as much as she; that at first sight, without an effort, she had conquered his bold spirit--it is hard to say which was the most vexed and disgusted. Judith found it easy enough to play the inconsolable widow where a man who aroused a positive antagonism like Freke was concerned, and denounced him in her own mind as a wretch for daring to fall in love with her. And Freke--after New York women and Creole women, French, Spanish, Russian, English, and Italian women--to have been loved and petted, and virtually made free of women's hearts; that this unsophisticated Virginia girl, who had never seen six men in her life, should simply take him off his feet, and that, without knowing it--was simply infuriating. In the privacy of his bedroom, as he smoked his last cigar before turning in, he swore at himself with a self-deprecation that was thoroughly genuine. What did he want to marry again for, anyway? Hadn't he had all he wanted of that pastime? And, of course, being a divorced man, Judith would see him chopped into little pieces before she would marry him--and then the staggering thought that, even if he were not divorced, the odds were against her marrying him at all--it was altogether maddening. But he did not lose his head completely. Judith's indifference--nay, dislike--saved to him his discretion. But had she warmed to him for one little moment--Freke, in thinking over this sweet impossibility, lay back in his chair and watched the smoke curling upward, and was lost in a delicious reverie--when suddenly, the utter preposterousness of it came to him, and he threw the cigar into the fire with a savage energy that nearly wrenched his arm off. No, the little devil--for he was not choice of epithets in regard to this woman--would throw him away with as little conscience and remorse as he threw that cigar away! Like all men of many love-affairs, he regarded love-making as an aesthetic amus.e.m.e.nt; and while it was absolutely necessary for its perfection that the woman should be desperately in earnest--for Freke did not mind a tragic tinge being given to the matter--it was nonsense for a man to permit himself to be drawn into heroics--and yet--but for the indifference of this girl, who was always half laughing at him--he would not answer for any folly he might commit.

Then there was Jacqueline. She exactly suited him as a victim to his charms, sardonically expressing it to himself. She, too, was not particularly impressed with him as yet, but that was due to her ignorance. He could easily enlighten her, and she would be led like a slave by him; he could make her believe anything. So, in default of Judith, he might as well amuse himself with Jacqueline; and, by resolutely concealing his gigantic folly, he would in the end overcome it. But he felt like a man who, having a head to stand champagne and brandy and absinthe and every other intoxication, comes across something that looks as harmless as water, but which sets his brain on fire and makes him a madman.