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

dragged through, the tortures I've undergone, listening to you shouting for 'Trixy,' would have driven any less well-balanced brain stark mad! May I sit down? Digging in the sunshine, and rowing with Johnny Ellis is awfully hot work."

"Digging in the sunshine is detrimental to the complexion, and rowing with Johnny Ellis is injurious to the temper. I object to both."

"Oh, you do?" said Miss Darrell, opening her eyes again; "it matters so much, too, whether you object or not. Johnny Ellis is useful, and sometimes agreeable. Charley Stuart is neither one nor t'other. If I mayn't dig and quarrel with him, is there anything your lordship would like me to do?"

"You may sit on this footstool at my feet--woman's proper place--and read me to sleep. That book you were reading aloud yesterday--what was it? Oh, 'Pendennis,' was rather amusing--what I heard of it."

"What you heard of it!" Miss Darrell retorts, indignantly. "You do well to add that. The man who could go to sleep listening to Thackeray is a man worthy only of contempt and scorn! There's Mr. Ellis calling me--I must go."

Miss Darrell and Mr. Stuart, in his present state of convalescence, rarely met except to quarrel. They spoke their minds to one another, with a refreshing frankness remarkable to hear.

"You remind me of one I loved very dearly once, Dithy," Charley said to her, sadly, one, day, after an unusually stormy wordy war--"in fact, the only one I ever _did_ love. You resemble her, too--the same sort of hair and complexion, and exactly the same sort of--ah--temper! Her name was Fido--she was a black and tan terrier--very like you, my dear, very like. Ah! these accidental resemblances are cruel things--they tear open half-healed wounds, and cause them to bleed afresh. Fido met with an untimely end--she was drowned one dark night in a cistern. I thought I had outlived _that_ grief, but when I look at you--"

A stinging box on the ear, given with right good will, cut short the mournful reminiscence, and brought tears to Mr. Stuart's eyes, that were not tears of grief for Fido.

"You wretch!" cried Miss Darrell, with flashing eyes. "I've a complexion of black and tan, have I, and a temper to match! The only thing _I_ see to regret in your story is, that it wasn't Fido's master who fell into the cistern, instead of Fido. To think I should live to be called a black and tan!"

They never met except to quarrel. Edith's inflammatory temper was up in arms perpetually. They kept the house in an uncommonly lively state. It seemed to agree with Charley. His twisted ankle grew strong rapidly, flesh and color came back, the world was not to be robbed of one of its brightest ornaments just yet. He put off writing to his friends from day to day, to the great disapproval of Mr. Darrell, who was rather behind the age in his notions of filial duty.

"It's of no use worrying," Mr. Stuart made answer, with the easy _insouciance_ concerning all things earthly which sat so naturally upon him; "bad shillings always come back--let that truthful old adage console them. Why should I fidget myself about them. Take my word they're not fidgeting themselves about _me_. The governor's absorbed in the rise and fall of stocks, the maternal is up to her eyes in the last parties of the season, and my sister is just out and absorbed body and soul in beaux and dresses. They never expect me until they see me."

About the close of April Mr. Stuart and Miss Darrell fought their last battle and parted. He went back to New York and to his own world, and life stagnant and flat flowed back on its old level for Edith Darrell.

Stagnant and flat it had always been, but never half so dreary as now. Something had come into her life and gone out of it, something bright and new, and wonderfully pleasant. There was a great blank where Charley's handsome face had been, and all at once life seemed to lose its relish for this girl of sixteen. A restlessness took possession of of her. Sandypoint and all belonging to it grew distasteful. She wanted change, excitement--Charley Stuart, perhaps--something different certainly from what she was used to, or likely to get.

Charley went home and told the "governor," and the "maternal," and "Trixy" of his adventure, and the girl who had saved his life. Miss Beatrix listened in a glow of admiration.

"Is she pretty, Charley?" she asked, of course, the first inevitable female question.

"Pretty?" Charley responded, meditatively, as though the idea struck him for the first time. "Well, ye-e-es. In a cream-colored sort of way, Edith isn't bad-looking. It would be very nice of you now, Trix, to write her a letter, I think, seeing she saved my life, and nursed me, and is your second cousin, and everything."

Beatrix needed no urging. She was an impetuous, enthusiastic young woman of eighteen, fearfully and wonderfully addicted to correspondence. She sat down and wrote a long, gushing letter to her "cream-colored" cousin. Mrs. Stuart dropped her a line of thanks also, and Charley, of course, wrote, and there her adventure seemed to come to an end. Miss Stuart's letters were long and frequent. Mr. Stuart's rambling epistle alternately made her laugh and lose her temper, a daily loss with poor, discontented Edith. With the fine discrimination most men possess, he sent her, on her seventeenth birthday, a set of turquoise and pearls, which made her sallow complexion hideous, or, at least, as hideous as anything _can_ make a pretty girl. That summer he ran down to Sandypoint for a fortnight's fishing, and an oasis came suddenly in the desert of Edith's life. She and Charley might quarrel still, and I am bound to say they did, on every possible occasion and on every possible point, _but_ they were never satisfied a moment apart.

The fortnight ended, the fish were caught, he went back, and the dull days and the long nights, the cooking, darning, mending began again, and went on until madness would have been a relief. It was the old story of the Sleeping Beauty waiting for the prince to come, and wake her into life and love with his kiss. Only in this instance the prince had come and gone, and left Beauty, in the sulks, behind.

She was eighteen years old and sick of her life. And just when disgust and discontent were taking palpable form, and she was debating between a jump into Sandypoint bay and running off, came Charley, with his mother's letter. From that hour the story of Edith Darrell's life began.


CHAPTER III.

TRIXY'S PARTY.

Two weeks sufficed for Miss Darrell's preparations. A quantity of new linen, three new dresses, one hat, one spring sacque--that was all.

Mr. Darrell had consented--what was there he could have refused his darling? He had consented, hiding the bitter pang it cost him, deep in his own quiet heart. It was the loss of her mother over again; the tender passion and the present Mrs. Darrell were two facts perfectly incompatible.

Mrs. Darrell aided briskly in the preparation--to tell the truth, she was not sorry to be rid of her step-daughter, between whom and herself perpetual war raged. Edith as a worker was a failure; she went about the dingy house, in her dingy dresses, with the air of an out-at-elbows duchess. She snubbed the boarders, she boxed the juvenile Darrell's ears, she "sassed" the mistress of the house.

"It speaks volumes for your amiability, Dithy," Charley remarked, "the intense eagerness and delight, with which everybody in this establishment hails your departure. Four dirty little Darrells run about the passages with their war-whoop, 'Dithy's going--hooray! Now we'll have fun!' Your step-mother's sere and yellow visage beams with bliss; even the young gentlemen who are lodged and boarded, Greek-ed and Latin-ed here, wear faces of suppressed relief, that tells its own tale to the student of human nature. Your welfare must be unspeakably precious to them, Edie, when they bear their approaching bereavement so well."

He paused. The speech was a lengthy one, and lengthy speeches mostly exhausted Mr. Stuart. He lay back, watching his fair relative as she sat sewing near, with lazy, half-closed eyes.

Her work dropped in her lap, a faint flush rose up over her dusk face.

"Charley," she responded, gravely, "I don't wonder you say this--it is true, and nobody feels it more than I. I _am_ a disagreeable creature, a selfish nuisance, an idle, discontented kill-joy. I only wonder, you are not afraid to take me with you at all."

Mr. Stuart sat up, rather surprised.

"My dearest coz, _don't_ be so tremendously in earnest. If I had thought you were going to take it seriously--"

"Let us be serious for once--we have all our lives left for quarrelling," said Miss Darrell, as though quarrelling were a pleasant recreation. "I sit down and try to think sometimes why I am so miserable--so wretched in my present life, why I hail the prospect of a new one with such delight. I see other girls--nicer, cleverer girls than I am every way, and their lives suffice for them--the daily, domestic routine that is most horrible drudgery to me, pleases and satisfies them. It must be that I have an incapacity for life; I daresay when the novelty and gloss wear off, I shall tire equally of the life I am going to. A new dress, a dance, a beau, and the hope of a prospective husband suffices for the girls I speak of. For me--none of your sarcastic smiles, sir--the thought of a future husband is--"

"Only vanity and vexation of spirit. But there _is_ a future husband. You are forced to admit that, Dithy. I wonder what he is to be like? A modern Sir Launcelot, with the beauty of all the gods, the courage of a Coeur de Lion, the bow of a Chesterfield, and the purse of Fortunatus. That's the photo, isn't it?"

"No, sir--not a bit like it. The purse of a Fortunatus, if you like--I ask nothing more. The Sir Launcelots of life, if they exist at all, are mostly poor men, and I don't want anything to do with poor men. My marriage is to be a purely business transaction--I settled _that_ long ago. He may have the form and face of a Satyr; he may have seventy years, so that he be worth a million or so, I will drop my best courtesy when he asks, and say, 'Yes, and thanky, sir.' If the Apollo himself, knelt before me with an empty purse, I should turn my back upon him in pity and disdain."

"Is that meant for me, Edie?" Mr. Stuart inquired, rising on his elbow, and admiringly gazing at his own handsome face in the glass. "Because if it is, don't excite yourself. Forewarned is forearmed--I'm not going to ask you."

"I never thought you were," Edith said, laughing. "I never aspired so high. As well love some bright particular star, etcetera, etcetera, as the only son of James Stuart, Esquire, lineal descendant of the Princes of Scotland, and banker of Wall Street. No, Charley, I know what _you_ will do. You'll drift through life for the next three or four years, as you have drifted up to the present, well looking, well dressed, well mannered, and then some day your father will come to you and say gruffly, 'Charles!' (Edith grows dramatic as she narrates--it is a husky masculine voice that speaks:) 'Here's Miss Petroleum's father, with a million and a half--only child--order a suit of new clothes and