CHAPTER VIII.
“MY DARK-EYED WILL!”
When Leonard Yorke reached home after the tragic occurrence at The Oaks, he was met in the hall by Jessie Glyndon. She was very pale, and her eyes bore the traces of recent weeping.
“Oh, Mr. Yorke,” she began, as soon as she saw him, “your mother is very ill! When I arrived home from The Oaks and broke to her the news of Mrs. Arleigh’s sudden death, she was fearfully overcome. She had retired, of course; but she was not sleeping, and as I passed through the hall she heard me and called me. I went to her, and then I told her what had taken place. She grew as pale as death, and started up in bed, as though about to arise, and her eyes looked wild and frightened, and she trembled in every limb.
“‘Oh, no, no!’ she cried, piteously, looking up into my face with such a pleading look, and something like terror—actual terror. ‘Rosamond Arleigh is not dead—not dead! Don’t say that she is dead, Jessie! Heaven forbid! for then it would be too late—too late for reparation!’
“And then she fell back upon the pillow in a dead faint, and it was a full hour before the housekeeper and I could restore her. We sent for Doctor Danton. He was at The Oaks; but his assistant came, and at last she is quiet and has fallen asleep. Come into the breakfast-room, Mr. Yorke; you look completely worn out. I have ordered breakfast served.”
He followed her obediently. He could not speak, for his heart was too full. Leonard Yorke’s mother was the dearest thing on earth to him, except the girl he loved, and the thought that she was ill cut his tender heart like a knife. He went into the breakfast-room and seated himself mechanically at the small round table covered with snowy damask and glittering with delicate china and costly silver. Jessie Glyndon began to pour the fragrant coffee from the steaming silver urn, and as she waited upon him, Leonard’s eyes rested carelessly upon her face. She was not a beauty, but the face was full of interest. Tall and regal in figure, she had a pale, colorless complexion, lighted up by deep-gray eyes. Her hair was golden-brown. Somehow, as her slender hands fluttered in and out among the silver breakfast service, Leonard felt a thrill of interest in his mother’s companion which he had never felt before.
“Miss Glyndon,” he began, abruptly, “are you familiar with Captain Venners’ handwriting?”
A swift crimson flushed her pale cheek, her head drooped, and her eyes studied the pattern of the pretty green-and-white carpet at her feet.
“I? Yes, I believe that I know it very well. Why do you ask, Mr. Yorke?”
Leonard’s face grew stern.
“Because I have found a poem which I think he wrote,” he returned, slowly—“a poem dropped upon the floor of the library at The Oaks by Violet Arleigh, the woman I love. Will you look at it, Miss Glyndon? Perhaps you can settle the question. For my part, I am confident that Will Venners wrote it.”
He had drawn the unfortunate poem from his pocket as he spoke—poor Will’s labor of love, which was destined to reach the one for whom it had been intended at last, but not in the way that he had expected, nor the results which truth compels us to record. Jessie Glyndon drew back a little, and her face was very pale.
“No, Mr. Yorke, I don’t care to see it,” she was beginning; but something in Leonard’s swift glance of surprise stung her woman’s pride, and she took the poem from his hand.
Slowly she read it, and as she read it over with the belief that it was written for Violet Arleigh—that the sweet, tender words were meant for another woman, a stern, cold look settled down upon Jessie’s face, and her heart grew hard as a stone toward dark-eyed Will. When she reached the lines:
“And I thought, ‘Love’s soul is not in fetters;
Neither space nor time keeps souls apart;
Since I can not, dare not, send my letters,
Through the silence I will send my heart,’”
she laid the poem abruptly down upon the table and turned away.
“Well,” queried Leonard, with a ring of impatience in his voice, “is it Will Venners’ work, Miss Glyndon? Do you identify the writing?”
Her heart was beating eighteen to the dozen, and she felt a strange, cold sensation creeping over her; but with a wonderful effort she controlled her agitation, and the voice which made answer did not even tremble as she replied:
“Yes, it is Will—Captain Venners’—handwriting, Mr. Yorke; I know it.”
Leonard pushed back the empty coffee-cup from beside his plate.
“Then, by Heaven!—I beg your pardon, Miss Glyndon—what does he mean by writing such stuff to Violet—Miss Arleigh? I may as well tell you now as later that I fully expected to make her my wife!”
“He would not have dared to write poems to her if she did not encourage him!” cried Jessie, indignantly, with all a woman’s bitter judgment of her sister-woman whom she believes to have come between herself and happiness. “Of course Miss Arleigh was willing, or Will Venners would never have spent all the time necessary to write a poem—a lengthy one like that—to bestow upon her. You know how indolent he is. A man with great natural ability and talent, he requires an incentive—some deep motive to interest and urge him on. He must certainly have cared for, and believed that he had a right to care for, the woman for whom these lines were written!”
Ah, Jessie! quick-tempered, swift to judge, sensitive to a fault, you have spoken truly! The pretty lines were written for the woman whom Will Venners loved, but not for Violet Arleigh.
It was a sad mistake all around, as complete a game of cross-purposes as one would wish to see.
Miss Glyndon returned Will Venners’ unfortunate poem to Leonard Yorke, then with her head very erect and a round red spot burning like a flame upon each pale cheek, she left the breakfast-room and slowly ascended the great circular stair-case which led from the immense entrance hall up to regions above. A few moments later she opened the door of a pretty sleeping-room all in pale pink and white—her own sanctum—for here at Yorke Towers the hired companion was as well lodged and as kindly treated as an honored guest.
Miss Glyndon locked the door behind her, then she went straight over to an old-fashioned escritoire which stood beside an open window, and took from a small drawer a package of letters. Not many, nor were they very lengthy, but they had been carefully preserved, bound with the orthodox blue ribbon, and each letter bore the signature, “Yours, as ever, Will.”
Seating herself, she glanced over them. Not a word of love in any of them, oh, no! but there was a certain something in the tone, and an occasional word which his pen let slip, which betrayed strong inner feelings. Their perusal sent the red blood into the reader’s pale cheeks, and made the gray eyes grow misty. When the last one was read, she laid the package upon the escritoire, and going over to the mantel, took from a small silver easel a photograph of Will Venners. One long, long look. I am afraid to attempt to translate the hidden meaning of that eager, devouring gaze. She pressed the pictured face to her lips.
“Good-bye, fair sweet dream,” she whispered, “my dark-eyed Will, good-bye! Yet—no, he was not mine, he was never mine” (the gray eyes flashed wrathfully); “he has only been amusing himself with me, the poor dependent—Mrs. Yorke’s hired companion. He is an outrageous flirt, I have known it all the time, yet still—fool that I have been—I have allowed myself to dream, and to be led on and on, to believe him, to—to—oh, Will, Will, I wish I were dead and could forget you! I shall have to be dead before I can forget you, my beautiful, dark-eyed lover! So that dream is over.”
With trembling hands she placed the photograph with its bright smiling face and firm, sweet mouth upon the package of letters, a regular funeral pyre. Then with set lips and cold, shaking hands she placed the entire package in a large envelope, sealed it decisively, and addressed it in a plain hand to “Captain Will Venners, Southern Athletic Club, New Orleans, La.”
Two hours later it was on its way to New Orleans and its unhappy recipient, who immediately on its receipt decided that this world is a delusion and a snare, and life is not worth living.
