Aunt Rachel Part 19

"You sha'n't goo out wi' nothing on your stomach," said the servant, who had been watching and waiting to see what he would do. Ezra, to satisfy her, poured out and drank a cup of coffee, and then walked out into the street, bending his steps in the direction of Rachel's cottage. Twice on the way he paused and half drew from his waistcoat-pocket the yellow old note which had so long lingered on its way to him, but each time he returned it without looking at it, and walked on again.

He stood for a moment at the wicket-gate, and then opening it pa.s.sed through, suffering it to fall with a clatter behind him. His hand trembled strangely as he lifted it to the door, and he knocked with a tremulous loudness. When he had waited for a time he heard Rachel's footsteps tapping on the oil-cloth of the pa.s.sage which divided her toy sitting-room from her bandbox of a parlor. His gray face went a shade grayer, and he cleared his throat nervously, with the tips of his thin fingers at his month. He heard the rattling of the door-chain, but it seemed rather as if it were being put up than taken down, and this suspicion was confirmed when it was opened with a little jar and stopped short at the confines of the chain. Rachel's face looked round the edge of the door. He had time to speak but a single word--"Rachel!"

The door was vigorously slammed in his face, and he heard the emphatic tapping of footsteps as she retired. He stood for a minute irresolute, and then, quitting the porch, walked round the thread of gravelled foot-path which led to the back of the cottage. He had but rounded the corner of the building when the back door closed with a clang, and he heard the bolts shot. Next, while he still stood irresolute, he saw Rachel approach a window and vigorously apply herself to the blind cord.

In the mere instant which intervened between this and the descent of the blind she looked at him with a profound and pa.s.sionate scorn. The old man sighed, and nodding his head up and down retraced his steps, but lingering in the pathway in the little garden, and surveying the house wistfully, he was again aware of Rachel, who faced him once more with an unchanging countenance. This time she appeared at the parlor window, and a second time the blind came down between him and her gaze of uncompromising scorn.

"Eh, dear!" he said, tremblingly, as he turned away. "Her's got reason to think it, poor thing. It's hard to find out the ways o' Providence.

If it warn't for good it couldn't ha' happened, but it's a heavy burden all the same."

CHAPTER XIII.

Ezra walked home and sat there alone until evening. His house-keeper routed him from his armchair for dinner and tea, and at each meal he made a feeble pretence of eating and drinking, and, having been scolded for his poor appet.i.te, went back to his old place. He sat there till the room was dark, scarcely moving, but wearing no very noticeable sign of pain or trouble. The story was so old, and the misfortune it related was so long past mending! He had been gray himself these many years, and the things which surrounded him and touched him had long since shared all his own want of color.

There was no relighting these old ashes. And yet, in defiance of that avowed impossibility, they seemed now and again to glow. They warmed him and lighted him back to a perception of lost odor and dead color. They stung him into some remembrance of the pain of years ago. And then, again, they were altogether cold and lifeless.

He said vaguely in a half whisper that it was a pity; and the phrase rose to his lips a hundred times--oftener than not an utterance purely mechanical, and expressing neither regret for Rachel nor for himself, nor sorrow for their division. When he was not thinking of her or of himself, he murmured that this was how it had come to pa.s.s, and did not seem to care or feel at all.

When the gloom was deepening in Ezra's ill-lighted chamber, though the light of the summer evening still lingered outside, the house-keeper came in and drew the blinds, and left behind her a single candle, which left the room as dusky as before. Shortly after this Reuben came in, and Ezra, nodding, signed him to a chair. The young man took a seat in silence.

"Well, lad," said his uncle, when to the young man the continued stillness had grown almost ponderous. The seconds had seemed to drop one by one upon him from the audible ticking of the old clock in the next room, each with an increasing weight of embarra.s.sed sympathy.

"Well, uncle?" returned Reuben, trying to speak in his ordinary way, and only succeeding in sounding shamefully flippant and unsympathetic to his own ears.

"I've a mind to have a talk with you," said Ezra. "Is the door shut?"

Reuben rose to see, and murmuring that it was closed, resumed his seat.

He waited a while in expectation that his uncle was about to confide in him.

"When beest going to make up your mind to pluck up a courage and speak to Ruth?" the old man asked.

"To Ruth, sir?" returned Reuben. The question staggered him a little.

"To Ruth," said Ezra.

"I have spoken," answered Reuben. "We are going to be married."

"That's well," the old man said, mildly. "But I looked to be told of any such thing happening. Thee and me, lad, are all as is left o' th' old stock i' this part o' the world."

"Don't think I should have kept you ignorant of it," said Reuben. "I only knew this morning. I have not seen you since till now."

"Well, lad, well," said Ezra, "I wish thee happy. But I'm sure you know that without need of any word o' mine. I asked because I meant to give out a bit of a warning agen the danger of delay. Theer's not alone the danger of it, but sometimes the cruelty of it. It's hard for a young woman as has been encouraged to set her heart upon a man, to be kept waitin' on the young man's pleasure. You see, lad, they'm tongue-tied.

Perhaps"--he offered this supposition with perfect gravity--"perhaps it's the having been tongue-tied afore marriage as makes some on 'em so lively and onruled in speech when marriage has set 'em free."

There was a definite sense in Reuben's mind that the old man was not saying what he wished to say, and this sense was strengthened when Ezra, after moving once or twice in his seat, cleared his throat and began to walk up and down the room.

"Had you read that letter as you brought to me this morning, lad?" he asked, coughing behind his hand, and trying to speak as if the thing were a commonplace trifle.

"I read it because I thought that it must be addressed to me," said Reuben. "I had written to Ruth, and she told me to look in Manzini for her answer. I found nothing but that letter in the book."

"Why, how was that?" asked Ezra, without turning towards him.

"Her own note had been taken away before I got the book." Reuben felt himself on dangerous ground. It was unpleasant to have to talk of these things, and it looked impossible to reveal Rachel's eccentricity to Ezra, knowing what he knew.

"Ah!" said Ezra, absent-mindedly. "You read the letter then!" He went on pacing up and down. "You understood it?"

"I--seemed to understand it," said Reuben. Ezra came back to his chair and seated himself with a look of half resolve.

"Reuben," he began, in a voice pathetically ill-disguised, "it was something of a cruelty as that letter should ha' been found at all after such a lapse o' time. The rights of the case was these: As a younger man than now--I was six-an'-thirty at the time--I wrote to--I wrote an offer of myself in marriage to a person as was then resident i' this parish.

The day but one after I wrote I had to go up to London to see to some affairs as was in the lawyer's hands relating to thy grandfather's property. He'd been dead a year or more, and the thing was only just got straight. While theer, I heard Paganini, and I've told you, more than once, I never cared to touch a bow theerafter. I found Manzini on the music-stand and closed the pages. He was open theer as I had left him, for I was a bit particular about my things, and mother used to pretend as her dursn't lay a hand upon 'em. I waited and waited for th'

answer. I met the person as I had wrote to once, and bowed to her. I've remembered often and often the start her gave, as if I'd done her some sort of insult. I could never understand how or why. I did not know as I had gi'en her any right to treat me thus contemptuous. I thought her set a value upon herself beyond my deservin's, and I abode to bear it. In the course of a two-three weeks she left the parish, and I made up my mind as her'd left despising me. I won't pretend as I might not ha'

found her letter if her had been less prideful and disdainous, for in the course of a little while I might ha' gone back to the music if things had gone happier with me. But it would ha' been kinder not to know the truth at all than find it out so late."

He had spoken throughout in what was meant for his customary tone of dry gravity, but it failed him often, though for a word only. At such times he would pause and cough behind his wasted hand, and these frequent breaks in the narrative made its quiet tones more touching to the hearer than any declamation or any profession of profound regret, however eloquently expressed, could possibly have been.

"Have you explained to her since you received the letter?" asked Reuben.

"Don't you think, uncle, that she ought to know?"

Ezra looked at him in a faint surprise. He supposed he had guarded himself from any suspicion of betraying his old sweetheart's personality.

"Yes," he said, still bent upon this reservation. "It happens as the person I speak of came back to Heydon Hay some time ago, and was within the parish this very day. I went to make a call upon her, and to show how Providence had seen fit to deal with both of us, but her refused to exchange speech with me. You see, Reuben," he went on, coughing with a dry mildness of demeanor, "it's doubtless been upon her mind for a many years as I was making a sort of cruel and unmanly game of her. Seeing her that offstanding, it seemed to me her valued me so lowly as to take my letter for a kind of offence. It seems now as it was me, and not her, as was too prideful."

They were both silent for a time, but Reuben was the first to speak again.

"She ought to know, uncle. She should be told. Perhaps Ruth could tell her."

"My lad, my lad!" said Ezra, mournfully reproving him. "How could I tell another of a thing like this?"

"Well, sir," Reuben answered, "I know now how the idea came into her mind, though I was puzzled at first. But she is strongly opposed to my being engaged to Ruth, and came down to tell Mr. Fuller this morning that I was a villain. I am thinking of her own lonely life, and I am sure that if Ruth and I are married she will never speak again to the only relatives she has unless this is explained. For her own sake, uncle, as well as yours, I think she ought to know the truth."

He was looking downward as he spoke, and did not see the questioning air with which Ezra regarded him.

"You know who it was, then, as wrote this letter?"

"Yes," said Reuben, looking up at him. "Ruth knew the handwriting."

"Reuben!" cried the old man, sternly. He rose with more open signs of agitation than Reuben had yet seen in him, and walked hurriedly to and fro. "Reuben! Reuben!" he repeated, in a voice of keen reproach. "Ah!

when was ever youth and folly separate? I never thought thee wast the lad to cry thine uncle's trouble i' the market-place!"

"No, uncle, no! Don't think that of me," cried his nephew. "I did not know what to do. I asked Ruth's advice. I could not be certain that the note was meant for you. And--guessing what I thought I guessed--I was afraid to bring it."

"Well, well! Well, well!" said Ezra. "It's been too sad an' mournful all along for me to go about to make a new quarrel on it. Let it pa.s.s. I make no doubt you acted for the best. Art too good a lad to tek pleasure in prying into the pain of an old man--as--loves thee. Leave it alone, lad. Let's think a while, and turn it over and see what may be done."

He went back to his arm-chair, and Reuben watched him in sympathetic silence.

"I know her to be bitter hard upon me in her thoughts," said Ezra, after a time. "The kind of scorn her bears for me is good for n.o.body, not even if it happens to be grounded i' the right. It might be a blow to her at first, but it 'ud be a blow as 'ud carry healing with it i' the long run. Let the wench tek the letter. It'll be easier for her to get it at a woman's hands."