CHAPTER VII.
’TWIXT LOVE AND HATE.
When Desha was gone, Viola threw herself down among her cushions, actually sobbing aloud in her weakness.
Aunt Edwina exclaimed in alarm:
“There now, you have worked yourself into a nervous spell, talking over your accident. So I must give you some more of the drops the doctor left you.”
“Yes, please do! I feel wretchedly ill and nervous!” exclaimed the young girl; and when her aunt had left the room, she cried out aloud:
“What a cold-hearted wretch! I thought he was getting fond of me! And I—I—thought a great deal of him—more than Florian would like, perhaps, if he knew; but now I believe I hate the wretch more than I ever did before!”
And the angry tears almost blistered her fair cheeks, for the visitor’s seeming indifference had cut deep.
She was cruelly wounded, for she had cherished a private conviction that he was yielding to her fascinations, and the belief made her very happy, though she had not acknowledged to her own heart yet that she found him more attractive than any man she had ever met, Florian not excepted.
How much pique and vanity had to do with her emotion it is hard to say. If Desha had yielded weakly to her sway, she might have despised him. We ever prize the unattainable. It is
“The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the day for the morrow.”
Her capricious heart, thus repulsed by Desha’s assumed indifference, turned back awhile to Florian with renewed tenderness, finding in his devotion a balm for her wounded pride.
Feeling her enforced stay in the house until her strength returned most irksome, she welcomed with pleasure the frequent fond letters of her betrothed, though they were very despondent in tone.
Florian wrote that his father’s condition was most unsatisfactory. His partial paralysis did not yield to treatment, and he remained in a dying condition, which might terminate at any moment in his demise, or there was a remote possibility of his lingering many weeks in this unhappy state. Under the circumstances, Florian being the only son, it was quite impossible for him to leave Carlsbad. He must remain with his parents, divided between love and duty, his heart distracted with anxiety and grief.
“Ah, my darling, if you would but have come with me, how much happier I should have been!” he wrote most plaintively; adding: “Do you know that your letter was most cruel? It was filled up with my friend Desha and the handsome unknown who saved your life. Ah, my love, do not let either of these men steal you from me, for the loss of you would wreck my life! I do not care to hear about them. It is news of you, dearest, for which my lonely heart is hungry. If you could see me looking at your beautiful photograph and kissing it over and over, you would pity me and write some sweet loving words to show that you have not forgotten me in my enforced exile from your side!”
Viola’s heart was touched by the pathos of the poor fellow’s letter, and she brought out his photograph and looked at it with tender eyes, saying, as she often did:
“Poor fellow, how he loves me! He has a warm, true heart!”
And she thought bitterly of that cold, indifferent young statesman who had resisted all the allurements of her beauty, and who was doubtless wedded to his soaring ambitions.
In her bitterness at Desha, she wrote very tenderly to Florian, filling his heart with delight, and quieting his uneasiness by saying:
“You need not be jealous of Professor Desha; I seldom see him any more. He devotes himself to congressional affairs, and never goes into society now, so I suppose he has forgotten my existence. As for the young man who saved my life, he has never divulged his identity, and does not intend to, I suppose, and I should never give him another thought only that gratitude demands it. Ah, Florian, how I miss you these dull days while I must stay at home and get strong! It is so lonely that I get more time to think about my love for you. Yes, I do love you; you need never doubt that! I look at your photograph often, and kiss it, too, as you do mine! I think that whenever you come back I will let you announce our engagement and set the wedding-day. I wonder what Professor Desha will think when he hears it.”
Florian was in the seventh heaven when he received that letter.
It was the tenderest one she ever wrote him, for very soon she went out again into society, and amid her pleasures and her engagements had little time for letters, so that he found her a most unpunctual correspondent, though he entreated her to write frequently to cheer his dull days passed by the bedside of his invalid father and trying to comfort his grieving mother.
But whenever the brevity or the carelessness of her later letters grieved him, he turned to the sweet, tender one written under the impetus of her resentment against Desha, and found solace in the words:
“Yes, I do love you—you need never doubt that. I look at your photograph often, and kiss it, too, as you do mine. I think that whenever you come back I will let you announce our engagement and set the wedding-day.”
Such promises were certainly enough to pin a lover’s faith to, and Florian did not doubt her after that; he only adored her more deeply, and longed for the time of return, chafing in secret most bitterly against the fate that kept him from her side.
So months passed away until the winter was over, and in March Mr. Gay’s long illness ended in death, and his son was free.
It was a blessed release from severe pain suffered long, and the loving ones who had watched by him so fondly were resigned to the affliction, because they knew he had entered into rest at last.
Arrangements were made to convey his body to his native land for interment, and Florian’s heart leaped with joy at the thought of seeing his love again, and claiming the fulfillment of her sweet promises.
Of late Viola’s letters had been few and far between, and marked by a growing coldness that sent a chill to his warm heart, especially the last one, in which she said:
“I shall have something very important to tell you in my next letter.”
If Florian could have guessed what that important something was, it would almost have broken his true, loving heart; but before the next letter came he was on the ocean, en route for home, whither we will precede him in the gratification of our curiosity.