At Last Part 25

"And Alfred Branch has gone to tender his services to the family! There is something romantic in his constancy to a memory. From the day of Rosa's death, he has embraced every chance of testifying his respect for and wish to serve her friends. He is a sadder wreck than was Mrs.

Tazewell. You would hardly recognize him, Mabel. His hair and beard are white as those of a man of sixty-five, and his face bloated out of all comeliness."

"White heat!" interjected Mr. Aylett. "He can not last much longer."

"And all because a pretty girl said him 'Nay!'" pursued the wife.

Mr. Aylett and Mr. Dorrance made characteristic responses in a breath.

"The greater blockhead he!" said one.

The other, "His was never a rightly balanced mind, I suspect. I always thought him weak and impressionable."

"Are your adjectives synonymous?" asked Mrs. Aylett playfully.

"Generally!"

Her brother had been reading at a distant window, while the daylight sufficed to show him the type of his book. He now laid it by, and came forward into the redder circle of radiance cast by the burning logs. He was in his forty-third year, saturnine of visage, coldly monotonous in accent, a business machine that did its work in good, substantial style, and undertook no "fancy jobs." He had ama.s.sed a handsome fortune, built a handsome house, and married a handsome woman, all of which appendages to his consequence he contemplated with grim complacency. As regarded spiritual likeness, mutual affection, and a.s.similation of feeling and opinion, he and his wife had receded, the one from the other, in the fourteen years of their wedded life. There had been no decided rupture.

Both disliked altercations, and where radical opposition of sentiment existed, they avoided the unsafe ground by tacit consent. Mabel's uniform policy was that of outward submission to the mandates of her chief.

"After all, it makes little difference!" she fell into the habit of saying in the earlier years of matronhood, and he interpreted her listless acquiescence in his decrees as faith in the soundness of his judgment, the infallibility of his decisions. No woman of sense and spirit ever becomes an exemplar in unquestioning obedience to a mortal man, unless through apathy--fatal torpor of mind or heart. Of this fact in moral history our respectable barrister was happily ignorant. He was no better versed in the lore of the heart feminine than when he accepted Mabel Aylett's esteem and friendly regard in lieu of the shy, but ardent attachment a betrothed maiden should have for the one she means to make her husband.

He respected her thoroughly, and loved her better than he did anybody else. She was the one woman he recognized as his sister's superior--supremacy due to the influence of single-minded integrity and modest dignity. What Mabel said, he believed without gainsaying; while Clara's clever dicta required winnowing to separate the probably spurious from the possibly true. If his tone, in addressing his wife, was seldom affectionate, it was never careless, as that which replied to his sister's raillery.

"Generally," he said in his metallic, unmodulated voice. "The man who would cast away health, usefulness, and fortune in his chagrin at not winning the hand of a shallow-pated, volatile flirt, must be both silly and susceptible."

"Rosa Tazewell may have been shallow of heart, but she was not of pate,"

answered Mr. Aylett, with a cold sneer. "She was a fair plotter, and not fickle of purpose when she had her desires upon a much-coveted object.

Her marriage proved that. She meant to captivate Chilton before she had known him a month--yes, and to marry him, as she finally did. Her intermediate conquests were but the practice that was to perfect her in her profession. Does anybody know, by the way, if he has ever taken a second wife to his bereaved bosom?"

A brief silence, then Mrs. Aylett said, negligently, "I think not.

Mrs. Trent, Rosa's sister, was expatiating to me a month since upon the beauty and accomplishments of his daughter, and she said nothing of a step-mother. Father and child live with a married sister of Mrs.

Chilton, I believe."

"I had not heard that Rosa left a child," remarked Mabel, interested. "I understood that two died before the mother."

"Only one--and that the younger. Miss Florence is now twelve years old, Mrs. Trent says. I saw her at church once, when she was visiting her grandmother and aunts. She is really pa.s.sable--but very unlike her mother."

Mabel did not join in the desultory talk that engaged the others until supper-time. There was a broken string in her heart, that jangled painfully when touched by an incautious hand.

"Twelve years old!" she was saying, inwardly. "My darling would have been thirteen, had she lived!"

And then flitted before her fancy a girlish form, with pure, loving eyes, and a voice melodious as a mocking-bird's. Warm arms were about her neck, and a round, soft cheek laid against hers--as no human arms and face would ever caress her--her, the childless, whose had been the hopes, fears, pains--never the recompence of maternity.

She had been to the graveyard that day--secretly, lest her husband should frown, Clara wonder, and Winston sneer at her love for and memory of that which had never existed, according to their rendering of the term. She had trimmed the wire-gra.s.s out of the little hollow, above which the mound had not been renewed since the day of her baby's burial, and, trusting to the infrequency of others' visits to the neglected enclosure, had laid a bunch of white rose-buds over the unmarked dust she accounted still a part of her heart, 'neath which it had lain so long. People said she had never been a mother; never had had a living child; had no hope of seeing it in heaven. G.o.d and she knew better.

"Clara, I wish you to attend Mrs. Tazewell's funeral this afternoon,"

said Mr. Aylett at breakfast the next day but one after this. "There were invidious remarks made upon your non-appearance at her daughter's, and I do not choose that my family shall furnish food for neighborhood scandal."

"My dear Winston, you must recollect what an insufferable headache I had that day."

"Don't have one to-day," ordered her husband laconically. "Mabel, do you care to go?"

"By all means. I would not fail, even in seeming, in rendering respect to one I used to like so much, and whose kindness to me was unvarying.

You have no objection, Herbert?"

"None. I may accompany you--the day being fine, and the roads in tolerable order."

The funeral was conducted with the disregard of what are, in other regions, established customs that distinguish such occasions in the rural districts of Virginia.

Written notices had been sent out, far and near, the day before, announcing that the services would begin at two o'clock, but when the Aylett party arrived at a quarter of an hour before the time specified, there was no appearance of regular exercises of any kind. A dozen carriages besides theirs were cl.u.s.tered about the front gate, and a long line of saddle-horses tethered to the fence. Knots of gentlemen in riding costume dotted the lawn and porches, and within-doors ladies sat, or walked at their ease in the parlor and dining room, or gathered in silent tearfulness around the open coffin in the wide central hall.

The bed-room of the deceased was a roomy apartment in a wing of the building, and to this Mabel was summoned before she could seat herself elsewhere.

"Miss Mary's compliments and love, ma'am; and she says won't you please step in thar, and set with Mistis' friends and relations?" was the audible message delivered to her by Mrs. Trent's spry waiting-maid.

Herbert looked dubious, and Mrs. Aylett enlarged her fine eyes in a manner that might mean either superciliousness or well-bred amazement.

But Mabel was neither surprised nor doubtful as to the proper course for her to pursue. Time was when she was as much at home here as Rosa herself, and Mrs. Tazewell's partiality for her was shared by others of the family. That she had met none of them in ten or twelve years, did not at a season like the present dampen their affection. They would rather on this account seize upon the opportunity of honoring publicly their mother's old favorite.

The chamber was less light than the hall she traversed to reach it.

She recognized Mary Trent, the daughter next in age to Rosa, who fell upon her neck in a sobbing embrace, then the other sisters and their brother, Morton Tazewell, with his wife, and was formally presented to their children.

Finally she turned inquiringly toward a gentleman who stood against the window opposite the door, with a little girl beside him.

Confused beyond measure, as the hitherto unthought-of consequences of her impulsive action in sending for her friend rushed upon her mind, Mrs. Trent faltered out:

"I forgot! You must excuse me, but I was so anxious to see you. My brother-in-law, Mr. Chilton. He arrived yesterday--not having heard of mother's death."

And for the first time since they looked their pa.s.sionate farewell into each other's eyes under the rose-arch of the portico at Ridgeley, on that rainy summer morning, the two who had been lovers again touched hands.

"I hope you are quite well, Mr. Chilton," said Mabel's firm, gentle voice. "Is this your daughter?" kissing the serious-faced child on the forehead, and looking intently into her eyes in the hope of discovering a resemblance to her mother.

Then she went back to a chair next to Mrs. Trent's, and began to talk softly of the event that had called them together, not glancing again at the window until the outer hall was stilled, that the clergyman might begin the funeral prayer.

"The services will be concluded at the grave," was the announcement that succeeded the sermon; and there followed the shuffling of the bearers'

feet, and their measured tramp across the floors and down the steps of the back porch.

The daughters and daughter-in-law let fall their veils and pulled on their gloves, and Herbert Dorrance beckoned somewhat impatiently to his wife from the parlor door. While she was on her way to join him, she saw his complexion vary to a greenish sallow, his mouth work spasmodically, and his eyes sink in anger or dismay.

Winston Aylett likewise noted and knew it, for the same look of abject terror he had observed upon the hard Scotch face when Mabel enumerated upon her fingers those she accused of having robbed her of her babe.

The wife attributed it to displeasure at seeing Frederic Chilton among the mourners. Her whilom guardian, never charitable overmuch, inclined the more to the belief begotten within him by other incidents, to wit: that his brother-in-law's talk was more doughty than his deeds, and his real sentiment upon beholding the man he boasted of having flogged as a libertine and coward, was physical dread for his own safety. Watchful alike of the other party to the ancient quarrel, he was rewarded by the sight of Chilton's irrepressible start and frown, when Mabel put her hand within her husband's arm, and stood awaiting the formation of the procession. The discarded lover gazed steadfastly into Dorrance's countenance in pa.s.sing to his place, in recognition that scouted a.s.similarity with salutation, but his eye did not waver or his color fade.

"I would not be afraid to wager that this is but another version of the fable of the statue of the man rampant and the lion couchant," thought Mr. Aylett, following with his wife in the funeral train down the gra.s.s-grown alley leading through the garden to the family burying-ground. "It would be an entertaining study of human veracity if I could hear Chilton's story, and compare the two. He is either an audacious rascal, or there is something back of all that I have heard which will not bear the light."

It was not remorse at the thought of the total alteration in his sister's life and feelings that had grown out of this imperfect or false evidence, but simple curiosity to inspect the lineaments and note the actions of the cool rascal whose audacity commanded his admiration, and note his bearing in the event of his coming into closer contact with his former foe, that prompted him to single him out for scrutiny among those whose relations.h.i.+p to the deceased secured them places nearest the grave.

For a time the widower was gravely quiet, holding his child's hand and looking down steadfastly into the pit at his feet, perhaps remembering more vividly than anything else a certain sunny day in March, many years back, when another fissure yawned close by, where now a green mound--the ridged scar with which the earth had closed the wound in her breast--and a stately shaft of white marble were all that remained to the world of "Rosa, wife of Frederic Chilton." But, while the mould was being heaped upon the coffin, he raised his eyes, and let them rove aimlessly over the crowd, neither avoiding nor courting observation--the cursory regard of a man who had no strong interest in any person or group there. They changed singularly in resting upon the family from Ridgeley. A stare of stupefaction gave place to living fires of angry suspicion and amazement--lurid flame that testified its violence in the reddening of cheeks and brow, in the dilating nostril and quivering lips. Then he pa.s.sed his hand downward over his features, evidently conscious of their distortion, and striving after a semblance of equanimity, and looked again in stern fixity, not at her from whom he had been parted in the early summer of his manhood, nor at his successful rival, nor yet at the guardian who had offered him gratuitous insult in addition to the injury of refusing to permit his ward's marriage with a disgraced adventurer--but at Mrs. Aylett, the chatelaine of Ridgeley, the wife whose serene purity had never been blemished by a doubting breath; chaste and polished matron; the admired copy for younger and less discreet, but not more beautiful women. He surveyed her boldly--if the imagination had not seemed preposterous--Mr. Aylett would have said scornfully, as he might study the face and figure of some abandoned wretch who had accosted him in the public thoroughfare as an acquaintance.