A Terrible Secret by May Agnes Fleming (world of reading txt) 📖

and good looks, and everything. If I marry the baronet, Dith, I shall take you with me to England, and you shall live happy forever after.

"I set out to tell you of the De Rooyter ball, and see how I run on. All New York was there--the crush was awful, the music excellent, the supper--heavenly! Sir Victor likes us Americans _so_ much; but then who could help liking us? Oh, it has been a charming winter--parties somewhere every night. Nilsson singing for us, some sleighing, and skating no end. I have had the loveliest skating costume, of violet velvet, satin and ermine--words can't do it justice.

"Hark! A clock down-stairs strikes five, and, 'Kathleen Mavourneen, the grey dawn is breaking' over the deserted city streets. As Lady Macbeth says, 'To bed--to bed!' With endless love, and endless kisses, ever thine own.

"BEATRIX."

She finished the letter--it dropped upon her lap, and her large, dark eyes looked blankly out over the cold, gray, rain-beaten sea. _This_ was the life she longed for, prayed for, dreamed of, the life for which she would have sold half the years of her life. The balls, the operas, the rose silks and pearls, the booths and merry-go rounds of Vanity Fair. She thirsted for them as the blind thirst for sight. She longed for the "halls of dazzling light," the dainty dishes, the violet velvet and ermine, with a longing no words can paint. She had youth and beauty; she would have suited the life as the life suited her. Nature had made her for it, and Fate had planted her here in the dreariest of all dreary sea-coast towns.

The rain beat upon her uncovered head, the cold wind blew in her face--she felt neither. Her heart was full of tumult, revolt, bitterness untold.

Beatrix Stuart's father had been her dead mother's cousin. Why was Beatrix chosen among the elect of Mammon, and Edith left to drag out "life among the lowly?" She sat here while the moments wore on, the letter crushed in her lap, her lips set in a line of dull pain. The glory of the world, the flesh-pots of Egypt, the purple and fine linen of life, her heart craved with an exceeding great longing, and all life had given her was hideous poverty, going errands in shabby hats, and her stepmother's rubbers, through rain and mud, and being waited upon by such men as Sam Doolittle. She looked with eyes full of passionate despair at the dark, stormy sea.

"If I only had courage," she said, between her set teeth, "to jump in there and make an end of it. I will some day--or I'll run away. I don't much care what becomes of me. Nothing can be worse than this sort of life--nothing."

She looked dangerous as she thought it--dangerous to herself and others, and ready for any desperate deed. So absorbed was she in her own gloomy thoughts, as she sat there, that she never heard a footstep descending the rocky path behind her. Suddenly two gloved hands were clasped over her eyes, and a mellow, masculine voice, sang a verse of an appropriate song:

"'Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, oh sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.'

"I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me, concerning young ladies who sit perched on rocks in the rain. Is it your favorite amusement, may I ask, Miss Darrell, to sit here and be rained on? And are there no lunatic asylums in Sandypoint, that they allow such people as you to go at large?"

She sprang to her feet and confronted him, her breath caught, her eyes dilating.

"Oh!" she cried, in a breathless sort of way, "it _is_ Charley!"

She held out both her hands, the whole expression of her face changing--her eyes like stars.

"Charley, Miss Darrell, and if it had been the Man in the Moon you could hardly look more thunderstruck. And now, if I may venture to propound so delicate a conundrum, how long is it since you lost your senses? Or had you ever any to lose, that you sit here in the present beastly state of the weather, to get comfortably drenched to the skin?"

He was holding both her hands, and looking at her as he spoke--a young man of some five-and-twenty, with grey eyes and chestnut hair, well-looking and well-dressed, and with that indescribable air of ease and fashion which belongs to the "golden youth" of New York.

"You don't say you're glad to see me, Dithy, and you _do_ look uncommonly blank. Will you end my agonizing suspense on this point, Miss Darrell, by saving it now, and giving me a sociable kiss?"

He made as though he would take it, but Edith drew back, laughing and blushing a little.

"You know what Gretchen says to Faust: 'Love me as much as you like, but no kissing, that is vulgar.' I agree with Gretchen--it is vulgar. Oh, Mr. Stuart, what a surprise this is! I have just been reading a letter from your sister, and she doesn't say a word of your coming."

"For the excellent reason that she knew nothing about it when that letter was written. Let me look at you, Edie. What have you been doing to yourself since I left, that you should fall away to a shadow in this manner? But perhaps your failing is the natural and inevitable result of my leaving?"

"No doubt. Life would naturally be insupportable without you. Whatever _I_ may have lost, Mr. Stuart, it is quite evident you have not lost the most striking trait in your character--your self-conceit."

"No," the young man answered; "my virtues are as lasting as they are numerous. May I ask, how it is that I have suddenly become 'Mr. Stuart,' when it has been 'Charley' and 'dear Cousin Charley' for the past two years?"

Miss Darrell laughed a little and blushed a little again, showing very white teeth and lovely color.

"I have been reading Trixy's letter, and it fills me with an awful respect for you and all the Stuart family. How could I presume to address as plain Charley any one so fortunate as the bosom friend of a baronet?"

"Ah!" Mr. Stuart remarked, placidly; "Trixy's been giving you a quarter quire crossed sheets of that, has she? You really wade through that poor child's interminable epistles, do you? I hardly know which to admire most, the genius that can write twenty pages of--nothing--or the patience which reads it, word for word. This one is Sir Victor from date to signature, I'll swear. Well, yes, Miss Darrell, I know the baronet, and he's a very heavy swell and a blue diamond of the first water. Talk of pedigree, there's a pedigree, if you like. A Catheron, of Catheron, was hand and glove with Alfred the Great. He's a very lucky young fellow, and why the gods should have singled _him_ out as the recipient of their favors, and left _me_ in the cold, is a problem I can't solve. He's a baronet, he has more thousands a year, and more houses in more counties than you, with your limited knowledge of arithmetic, could count. He has a fair complexion, a melancholy contrast on that point to you, my poor Edith; he has incipient, pale, yellow whiskers, he has an English accent, and he goes through life mostly in a suit of Oxford mixture and a round felt hat. He's a very fine fellow, and I approve of him. Need I say more?"

"More would be superfluous. If you approve of him, my lord, all is said in that. And Lady Helena?"

"Lady Helena is a ponderous and venerable matron, in black silks, Chantilly lace, and marabout feathers, who would weigh down sixteen of you and me, and who worships the ground her nephew walks on. She is the daughter of a marquis and a peeress in her own right. Think of that, you poor, little, half-civilized Yankee girl, and blush to remember you never had an ancestor. But why do I waste my breath and time in these details, when Trix has narrated them already by the cubic foot. Miss Darrell, _you_ may be a mermaid or a kelpie--that sort of young person does exist, I believe, in a perpetual shower bath, but I regret to inform you _I_ am mortal--very mortal--subject to melancholy colds in the head, and depressing attacks of influenza. At the present moment, my patent leather boots are leaking at every pore, the garments I wear beneath this gray overcoat are saturated, and little rills of rain water are trickling down the small of my back. You nursed me through one prolonged siege of fever and freezing--unless you are especially desirous of nursing me through another, perhaps we had better get out of this. I merely throw out the suggestion--it's a matter of indifference to me."

Edith laughed and turned to go.

"As it is by no means a matter of indifference to me, I move an adjournment to the house. No, thank you, I don't want your arm. This isn't the fashionable side of Broadway, at four o'clock of a summer afternoon. I talk of it, as though I had been there--I who never was farther than Boston in my life, and who, judging from present appearances, never will."

"Then," said Mr. Stuart, "it's very rash and premature to judge by present appearances, my errand here being to--Miss Darrell, doesn't it strike you to inquire _what_ my errand here may be?"

"Shooting," Miss Darrell said, promptly.

"Shooting in March. Good Heavens, no!"

"Fishing then."

"Fishing is a delightful recreation in a rippling brook, on a hot August day, but in this month and in this weather! For a Massachusetts young lady, Dithy, I must say your guessing education has been shamefully neglected. No, I have come for something better than either fishing or shooting--I have come for _you_."

"Charley!"

"I've got her note somewhere," said Charley, feeling in his pockets as they walked along, "if it hasn't melted away in the rain. No, here it is. Did Trix, by any chance, allude to a projected tour of the governor's and the maternal's to Europe?"

"Yes." Her eyes were fixed eagerly on his face, her lips apart, and breathless. "Oh, Charley! what do you mean?"

In the intensity of her emotions she forgets to be formal, and becomes natural and cousinly once more.

"Ah! I am Charley again. Here is the note. As it is your healthful and refreshing custom to read your letters in the rain, I need hardly urge you to open and peruse this one."

Hardly! She tore it open, and ran over it with kindling cheeks and fast throbbing heart.

* * * * *

"MY DEAR EDITH: Mr. Stuart and myself, Charles and Beatrix, propose visiting Europe in May. From my son I learn that you are proficient in the French and German languages, and would be invaluable to us on the journey, besides the pleasure your society will afford us all. If you think six hundred dollars per annum sufficient recompense for your services and _all_ your expenses paid, we shall be glad to have you return (under proper female charge) with Charley. I trust this will