Vagabondia Part 30

"No, he will not," she answered her, quite steadily. "It will be as I said it would,--he will never come again."

But when they reached their room, the unnatural, strained quiet gave way, and she flung herself upon the bed, sobbing and fighting against just the hysterical suffering which had conquered her the night before.

It was the very ghost of the old indomitable Dolly who rose the next morning. Her hands shook as she dressed her hair, and there were shadows under her eyes. But she must go back to Brabazon Lodge, notwithstanding.

"I can say I have a nervous headache," she said to Aimee. "Nervous headaches are useful things."

"If a letter comes," said Aimee, "I will bring it to you myself."

The girl turned toward her suddenly, her eyes hard and bright and her mouth working.

"I have had my last letter," she said. "My last letters came to me when Grif laid that package upon the table. He has done with me."

"Done with you?" cried Aimee, frightened by her manner. "With _you_, Dolly?"

Then for the first time Dolly flushed scarlet to the very roots of her hair.

"Yes," she said, "he has done with me. If there had been half a chance that he would ever come near me again, the letter I wrote to him that night would have brought him. A word of it would have brought him,--the first word. But he is having his revenge by treating it with contempt.

He is showing me that it is too late, and that no humility on my part can touch him. I scarcely could have thought that of him," dropping into a chair by the toilet-table and hiding her face in her hands.

"It is not like Grif to let me humble myself for nothing. And I did humble myself,--ah, how I did humble myself! That letter,--if you could have seen it, Aimee,--it was all on fire with love for him. I laid myself under his feet,--and he has trodden me down! Grif--Grif, it was n't like you,--it was n't worthy of you,--it was n't indeed!"

Her worst enemy would have felt herself avenged if she had heard the anguish in her voice. She was crushed to the earth under this last great blow of feeling that he had altered so far. Grif,--her whilom greatest help and comfort,--the best gift G.o.d had given her! Dear, old, tender, patient fellow! as she had been wont to call him in her fits of penitence.

Grif, whose arms had always been open to her at her best and at her worst, who had loved her and borne with her, and waited upon her and done her bidding since they were both little more than children. When had Grif ever turned from her before? Never. When 'had Grif ever been cold or unfaithful in word or deed? Never. When had he ever failed her?

Never--never--never--until now! And now that he had failed her at last, she felt that the bitter end had come. The end to everything,--to all the old hopes and dreams, to all the old sweet lovers' quarrels and meetings and partings, to all their clinging together, to all the volumes and volumes of love and trust that lay in the past, to all the world of simple bliss that lay still unrevealed in their lost future, to all the blessed old days when they had pictured to each other what that future was to be. It had all gone for nothing in the end. It must all have gone for nothing, when Grif--a new Grif--not her own true, stanch, patient darling--not her own old lover--could read her burning, tender, suffering words and pa.s.s them by without a word of answer. And with this weight of despair and pain upon her heart, she went back to the wearisome routine of Brabazon Lodge,--went back heavy with humiliation and misery which she scarcely realized,--went back suffering as no one who knew her--not even Grif himself--could ever have understood that it was possible for her to suffer. No innocent coquetries now, no spirit, no jests; for the present at least she had done with them, too.

"You are not in your usual spirits, my dear," said Miss MacDowlas.

"No," she answered, quietly, "I am not."

This state of affairs continued for four days, and then one morning, sitting at her sewing in the breakfast-room, she was startled almost beyond self-control by a servant's announcement that a visitor had arrived.

"One of your sisters, ma'am," said the parlor-maid. "Not the youngest, I think."

She was in the room in two seconds, and flew to Aimee, trembling all over with excitement.

"Not a letter!" she cried, hysterically. "It is n't a letter,--it can't be!" And she put her hand to her side and fairly panted.

The poor little wise one confronted her with something like fear. She could not bear to tell her the ill news she had come to break.

"Dolly, dear!" she said, "please sit down; and--please don't look at me so. It isn't good news. I must tell you the truth; it is bad news, cruel news. Oh, don't look so!"

They were standing near the sofa, and Dolly gave one little moan, and sank down beside it.

"Cruel news!" she cried, throwing up her hand. "Yes, I might have known that,--I might have known that it would be cruel, if it was news at all Every one is cruel,--the whole world is cruel; even Grif,--even Grif!"

Aimee burst into tears.

"Oh, Dolly, I did my best for you!" she said. "I did, indeed; but you must try to bear it, dear,--it is your own letter back again."

Then the kneeling figure seemed to stiffen and grow rigid in a second.

Dolly turned her deathly face, with her eyes aflame and dilated.

"Did _he_ send it back to me?" she asked, in a slow, fearful whisper.

Her expression was so hard and dreadful a one that Aimee sprang to her side and caught hold of her.

"No,--no!" she said; "not so bad as that! He would never have done that.

He has never had it. He has gone away; we don't know where. It came from the dead-letter office."

Dolly took the letter from her and opened it slowly, and there, as she knelt, read it, word for word, as if it had been something she had never seen before. Then she put it back into the envelope and laid it down.

"A dead letter!" she said. "A dead letter! If _he_ had sent it back to me, I think it would have cured me; but _now_ there is no cure for me at all. If he had read it, he would have come,--if he had _only_ read it; but it is a dead letter, and he is gone."

There were no tears, the blow had been too heavy. It was only Aimee who had tears to shed, and it was Dolly who tried to console her in a strained, weary sort of way.

"Don't cry," she said, "it is all over now. Perhaps the worst part of the pain is past. There will be no house at Putney, and the solitary rose-bush will bloom for some one else; they may sell the green sofa, now, as cheap as they will, we shall never buy it. Our seven years of waiting have all ended in a dead letter."

CHAPTER XIV. ~ SEVEN LONG YEARS, BELOVED, SEVEN LONG YEARS.

AND so Grif disappeared from the haunts of Vagabondia, and was seen no more. And to Aimee was left the delicate task of explaining the cause of his absence, which, it must be said, she did in a manner at once creditable to her tact and affection for both Dolly and the unconscious cause of all her misery.

"There has been a misunderstanding," she said, "which was no fault of Dolly's, and scarcely a fault of Grif's; and it has ended very unhappily, and Grif has gone away, and just at present it seems as if everything was over,--but I can't help hoping it is not so bad as that."

"Oh, he will come back again--safe enough," commented Phil, philosophically, holding paint-brush No. 1 in his mouth, while he manipulated with No. 2. "He will come back in sackcloth and ashes; he is just that sort, you know,--thunder and lightning, fire and tow. And they will make it up ecstatically in secret, and pretend that nothing has been the matter, and there will be no going into the parlor for weeks without whistling all the way across the hall."

"I always go in backward after they have had a quarrel," said Mollie, looking up from a half-made pinafore of Tod's, which, in the zeal of her repentance, she had decided on finis.h.i.+ng.

"Not a bad plan, either," said Phil "We all know how _their_ differences of opinion terminate. As to matters being at an end between them, that is all nonsense; they could n't live without each other six months.

Dolly would take to unbecoming bonnets, and begin to neglect her back hair, and Grif would take to prussic acid or absinthe."

"Well, I hope he _will_ come back," said Aimee; "but, in the meantime, I want to ask you to let the affair rest altogether, and not say a word to Dolly when she comes. It will be the kindest thing you can do. Just let things go on as they have always done, and ignore every thing new you may see."

Phil looked up from his easel in sudden surprise; something in her voice startled him, serenely as he was apt to view all unexpected intelligence.

"I say," he broke out, "you don't mean that Dolly is very much cut up about it?"

The fair little oracle hesitated; remembering Dolly's pa.s.sionate despair and grief over that "dead letter," she could scarcely trust herself to speak.

"Yes," she answered at last, feeling it would be best only to commit herself in Phil's own words, "she is very much cut up."

"Whew!" whistled Phil; "that is worse than I thought!" And the matter ended in his going back to his picture and painting furiously for a few minutes, with an almost reflective air.

They did not see anything of Dolly for weeks. She wrote to them now and then, but she did not pay another visit to Bloomsbury Place. It was not the old home to her now, and she dreaded seeing it in its new aspect,--the aspect which was desolate of Grif. Most of her letters came to Aimee; but she rarely referred to her trouble, rather seeming to avoid it than otherwise. And the letters themselves were bright enough, seeming, too. She had plenty to say about Miss MacDowlas and their visitors and her own duties; indeed, any one but Aimee would have been puzzled by her courage and apparent good spirits. But Aimee saw below the surface, and understood, and, understanding, was fonder of her than ever.