VIII.
But when she left him he felt rather weak for a moment, as if his city malaria had returned upon him with a double force. As Elvira showed no signs of returning, he amused himself by turning over the leaves of the family photograph album. Face by face revealed the stern, set, arid, Puritan features, the hard, determined chins, and the “firmness,” which, in the person of the Hon. Ephraim, he felt still dominated and controlled the public affairs of East Village. He threw down the album with a feeling of impotent rage against the survival of this colonial “narrowness,” as he liked to call it. He walked out of the house and wandered, much crestfallen and full of malaria, along the village street toward the hotel. A great many farm wagons were tied along the sidewalk, and there were numbers of fresh-cheeked country girls walking in threes and fours, and sweeping the sidewalk as they went. Upon a slight elevation stood a white wooden meetinghouse, with a white steeple, and it gave him a chill even on that warm morning to look at it—it looked so cold. Small groups of hard-featured farmers in fur caps stood on the corners of the streets discussing, presumably, the crops. He wondered if the fur caps were needed in that arid, bleak region to keep warm the natives’ sense of Right and Wrong? He made his way out, beneath some beautiful elms, into a small, old-fashioned burying-ground, where he discovered that “erring sinners” apparently comprised the only element of those who were requested to “Pause and Read.” Feeling himself to be now, for some reason, a distinctly immoral person, he read some of the quaint epitaphs, to which he was invited, in a spirit of humility, which presently changed to amusement. In death as in life, the hard, stern old village characters preserved on their headstones a fund of grim humor for the “sinner,” which in Archibald’s instance made him smile. “Oh,” he sighed to himself, “I long to take her away from all this sort of thing—forever!”
He took a long walk in the afternoon, and returned to the hotel to find a coldly worded note from Elvira inviting him around to tea. He removed the stains of his walk, and dressed himself with his usual care. He found Elvira waiting for him beneath the high white pillars, in an unbecoming, and as it seemed to him, forbidding dress of black. Her face seemed unusually stern and relentless. There were traces of tears in her red eyelids, but the tears were dried away now, and her eyes were very bright and hard.
“Don’t say anything now. Father feels very deeply about it. We have had a long talk. When he heard of the—of the unfortunate house affair—he was so angry I could hardly pacify him.”
Archibald’s heart sank within him. He fairly shivered.
“He said that he did not want me to lower my standard,” continued Elvira, in her clear, musical, passionless voice. “And I told him that he need have no fears. I wanted to see you first, and tell you. Let us not have any feeling about it.”
“Any feeling!” exclaimed Archibald. “Why—how can we help it!”
“Let us act as if we had never understood one another. I will go back to the city with you, and Aunt Perkins and I will find some other place at once.”
“Go back with me—and expect me to show no feeling! Elvira, this is preposterous!”
“Then I will go back alone.” She compressed her lips, just as he had observed her father do.
“I beg pardon, Elvira, do you mean—can you mean that I can never—I can never hope!”
She nodded her pretty flower-like head gravely. “Come in to tea, won’t you?” she said, coolly. “I want father to hear you talk about Art.”
He turned on his heel. At last he, too, was angry.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “But if I go back to the hotel now, I shall just have time to pack my valise and catch the evening train.”
He walked rapidly away, leaving her standing upon the white-pillared portico, looking with pure, sweet, upturned face, like a saint who has for all time renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. Had he looked back, Mr. Jerome Archibald’s tender heart would have been touched by her attitude; he would have returned, and, against her will, clasped her in his arms and covered her pale lips with warm kisses. It might have melted her high “standard” a little. But he let a night intervene without seeing her, and the entering wedge of her high sense of duty did its work before morning. He determined to remain another day and make a further trial. When he called the next day she was obdurate. “Love cannot be built upon deceit and untruth,” she said, sententiously. “I was not frank, you were not. It is better that we should part. I could never hold up my head—I could never face the world. I know what they would call me. They would call me an adventuress! and they would hate me for being successful. Yes—your mother, your sisters—everyone.”
“But you were perfectly innocent about it, Elvira.”
There was a little pause.
“I, too, was innocent. I meant no more than to have you near me, where I could learn to know you—love you—and now, really, it seems as if you had built up a mountain of ice between us, don’t you know.”
She merely shook her head.
When Archibald returned to the city his malaria compelled him to go away again almost immediately to Newport. There, a few weeks later, his agent wrote him that he had succeeded in renting the house “at an exorbitant figure to a very rich tenant without children”—thus fulfilling his mother’s conditions to the letter. He went back to the city, recovered in health, to pack up a few personal effects, and found to his surprise that Miss Perkins and her niece were, at the moment he arrived, in the house. They had taken board on Ninth Street, and had gone up to take a last look of the charming interior where, Elvira guiltily acknowledged, life had been “so wrongly pleasant.” He found Elvira holding a fan in her hand and seated pensively in an old Venetian chair in what was formerly her studio. As he entered the room she rose, blushing a most vivid red, and as rapidly turning pale again.
“Mr. Archibald!” she exclaimed. “I did not know you were in the city!”
“I have been here only an hour,” he said, stiffly.
“It is time for us to go;” and she turned to the door.
“Elvira!” His face looked sick and ghastly.
“Well?” She drew herself up very coldly.
“Are you made of stone?”
“Mr. Archibald, what can you mean?”
“My child, you are capable of grinding one who loves you into powder—like—er—a millstone!”
“Aunt Perkins!” she called out, “let us go!”
“No,” he cried, “I will not let you go. You shall hear me! I love you! Do you hear? And you shall not leave this house until you say you will be my wife! I know you care for me—everything tells me so—but you will wear your own and my heart out with your hard, cruel conscience! What brought you here? You loved me! Why have you been sitting in this room? You love me, Elvira—I know it—I feel it!”
Gently he drew her to him and kissed her. She laid her head on his shoulder and breathed a little contented sigh. “I don’t think this—is right!” she said.