CHAPTER XXXVIII.
“Is not this Thursday?” suddenly asked my grandfather, at breakfast, a week or so after the events just described. “It is? Then this is the day for the Poythress’s return. Ah, now we shall have music.”
A man talking with another may look him in the face for an hour without knowing one of his thoughts; a woman will flash a careless glance across your face,—across it—no more,—and read you to the heart.
Alice and Mary beamed upon each other and ejaculated, “Lucy!” But Mary’s eyes had had time to sweep the features of the Don. “Won’t it be charming to have Lucy with us!” said she; but she hardly knew what she said. Her face, turned towards Alice, wore a mechanical smile; but she saw only the Don and the startled, almost dazed look that came over his face on hearing Mr. Whacker’s words. How brave a little woman can be! She turned to the Don and said,—a seraphic smile upon her face,—“You have never heard Lucy play. You have a great treat in store.”
“No,” replied he, dropping his napkin. “No,” repeated he, his eye fixed upon vacancy. He had heard with his ears and answered with his lips. That was all. Suddenly recollecting himself, he turned to her with a bow and a courteous smile: “Yes, it will be a great treat,—very great;” but his thoughts, mightier than his will, swept the smile from his features and left them pale and rigid as before.
How many thoughts crowded upon Mary’s heart in that instant! “What a silly school-girl I have been! A word here and a word there, during these last ten days, have made me forget the intense interest he obviously took in Lucy at first sight. After all, what has he said to me? Nothing, absolutely nothing! And yet I was so weak as to imagine—and now he has learned of a new bond of sympathy—music—between Lucy and himself. Why did I learn nothing but waltzes and variations and such trash? If only—too late! And he has seen so little of her! That dream, too,—that strange, terrible dream,—should have warned me. And now Lucy is coming. Lucy! is she, then, so superior to me? She is as good as an angel, I know; but I thought that I—wretched vanity again”—and she stamped her foot—“yet Alice has thought so too—else why—surely, he cannot have been trifling with me? Never! Of that, at least, he is incapable! Such a noble countenance as his could not—” And for a second she lifted her eyes to his—
“Yes, Zip, I’ll take one.”
“Girls,” said Alice, “just look at Mary; an untasted waffle on her plate and taking another!”
Mary gave one of those ringing laughs that so infest the pages of female novelists.
“Is there to be a famine?” asked one.
“Or is the child falling in love?” chimed in Alice; but without raising her eyes from her empty coffee-cup, in the bottom of which she was writing and re-writing her initials with the spoon.
To all the rest of the company these words seemed as light and careless as the wind. Not so to Mary. Her heart leaped; but, by some subtle process known only to women, she forbade the blood to mount into her cheek.
“I warn you to beware,” said Mr. Whacker. “Full many a heart has been lost in this house!”
“All hearts, I must believe,” rejoined Mary, with a bow and half-coquettish smile.
My grandfather placed his hand upon his heart and bent low over the table, amid the approving plaudits of the company. Charley did the same. “There are two of us,” he explained; “Uncle T-T-Tom and myself.”
“He is laughing now; how he seems to admire Mr. Frobisher! But why did he turn pale, just now, at the mention of Lucy’s name? I have never read anywhere of love’s producing that effect, certainly. Perhaps—perhaps, after all, he did not change color. My imagination, doubtless. No, I am not mistaken! Why, his brow is actually beaded with perspiration! incomprehensible enigma! would to heaven I had never met him! and yet—”
If any of my young readers shall be so indiscreet as to fall in love with enigmas, let them not lay the folly to my charge. I most solemnly warn them against it.
Poor little Mary watched the Don all that day with that scrutiny so piercing, and yet so unobtrusive, of which a woman’s eye alone is capable,—hopefully fearing to discover the truth of what she fearfully hoped was not true; but it was not before the sun had sunk low in the west, and she had begun to convince herself of the illusory character of her observations at the breakfast-table, that she got such reward as that of the woman who, after twenty years’ searching, at last found a burglar under her bed.
As the time approached at which the Poythress family should arrive (at their home across the river), my grandfather would go out upon the piazza every few minutes, and after looking across the broad river return and report that there were no signs of the carriage.
“It is not yet time by half an hour,” said Charley, looking at his watch.
“At any rate I’ll get the telescope and have it ready,” replied he, as he passed into the dining-room; returning, bearing in his hand one of those long marine glasses so much used at that time. “This is a remarkably fine glass,” said he to the Don.
The Don was seated behind Alice’s chair, helping her to play her hand at whist, if that name be applicable to a rattling combination of cards, conversation, and bursts of laughter.
“Last summer,” continued Mr. Whacker, “I counted with it a hen and seven small chickens on the Poythress’s lawn—”
“Mr. Frobisher!” cried Alice. “There you are trumping my ace!”
“Charley!” exclaimed Mr. Whacker, with reproachful surprise.
“And, Uncle Tom, would you believe it,—he has made three revokes already? What ought to be done to such a partner?”
Jones, who ought to have been back at the University long since, was, on the contrary, seated at a neighboring card-table. He remembered the scrape that Charley had gotten him into on Christmas Eve.
“I don’t think,” said he, soliloquizing, as he slowly dealt out the cards, “that I could love a partner who revoked.”
A smile ran around the tables. Charley bit his lip.
“What, Charley!” exclaimed Mr. Whacker. “The ace of trumps second in hand, and you had another!”
“I wanted to take that particular trick,” said Charley, doggedly.
Charley and Jones were sitting back to back, their chairs almost touching. Jones turned around, and, with his lips within an inch of the back of Charley’s head, spoke in measured tones, “He—is—after—a—particular—trick, Uncle Tom; hence his peculiar play.”
Every one laughed, even Charley. Alice’s cheeks rivalled the tints of the conch-shell; and Mary, charmed to see her for once on the defensive, clapped her hands till half her cards were on the floor.
I should not have said that everybody laughed, for my grandfather did not even smile. No suspicion of the state of things to which Jones had maliciously alluded had ever crossed his mind. He was totally absorbed in contemplation of the enormity of playing out one’s ace of trumps second in hand. And that Charley—Charley, whom he had trained from a boy to the rigor of the game according to Hoyle—that he should seem to defend such—so—so horrible a solecism! It was too much. He was a picture to look at, as he stood erect, the nostrils of his patrician nose dilated with a noble indignation, his snowy hair contrasting with his dark and glowing eyes, that swept from group to group of mirthful faces, and back again, sternly wondering at their untimely merriment.
“But, Uncle Tom,” put in Jones—
“No, no!” interrupted Mr. Whacker, with an impatient wave of his hand. “Nothing can justify such play.”
“But, Uncle Tom, suppose—”
“Very well,” replied Mr. Whacker, in a gentler tone, mollified by the anticipation of easy and certain victory, “very well; make your supposition.” And he assumed a judicial brow.
“Now, suppose that there is a particular hand—”
Billy paused.
“Well, go on.”
“A very particular hand.”
My grandfather’s eyes began to flash. The vast host of those who believe in playing “according to their hands” rose before his mind.
“Go on,” added he, controlling himself with an effort.
“Suppose there is a certain hand that a fellow—a hand that a certain fellow—for example—wants—wants—to get possession of.”
Charley winced, and Alice’s color rose in spite of her utmost efforts to look unconcerned.
“A hand that he wants to get possession of!” cried Mr. Whacker, with unspeakable amazement. “What gibberish is this? I was supposing all along that he had the hand!”
“No; but he wants it aw-ful-ly,” said Jones, with sepulchral solemnity.
Peal after peal of laughter arose, while Charley shuffled his cards with the vigor of desperation. Poor fellow, he had never been in love before, and—keen humorist that he was—he knew full well that no man could be in love without being at the same time ridiculous. My grandfather looked on, mystified but smiling. “This is one of your jokes,” said he, taking Billy by both ears.
“On the contrary, it is a case—ouch!—of the very deadest earnest that I have ever—smi-ling-ly beheld. But, honestly, Uncle Tom, suppose there was a suit—a suit, mind you—”
“C-c-c-cut the cards,” yelled Charley.
“A suit,” continued the implacable Billy, “that you were prosecuting—”
“Wished to establish, you mean.”
“Yes, a suit—”
“Uncle Tom,” cried Charley, almost upsetting the table, “I give it up. ’Twas an idiotic play I made.”
Billy threw back his head so that it rested on Charley’s shoulder. “When,” asked he, under cover of the general laughter,—“when are you going to cut your finger again?”
Just then Mr. Whacker appeared at the window and gave three brisk raps, and the girls went scampering out on the piazza, followed by the gentlemen, the Don bringing up the rear. There was a general waving of handkerchiefs, and the telescope passed from hand to hand.
“There they all are,” cried Alice, cheerily, peering through the glass with one eye and smiling brightly with the other: “Lucy and Mrs. Poythress on the back seat, her young brother and Mr. Poythress in front. They see us now,—there go the handkerchiefs! Ah, just look at little Laura, sitting in Lucy’s lap and waving for dear life! Here, Mary, take a look. How distinctly you see them!”
“Yes,” said Mary; but with the eye which seemed to be gazing through the telescope she saw nothing, while with the other she took in every motion of the Don. He was striding with irregular steps up and down the piazza, now mechanically waving his handkerchief, now thrusting it back into his pocket; at one time, as he stopped, his eyes fixed upon the floor; at another rolling with a kind of glare as he started suddenly forward. He strode past her, and his arm grazed her shoulder. She shivered. Had her companions observed it? She gave a quick glance, and was reassured. They were all waving in frantic, girlish glee, in response to the vigorous demonstrations across the River. The rainbow knew not of the neighboring thunder-cloud.
“What a terrible love,” she mused. “But, oh, to have inspired it!” He had not yet had the glass in his hand; she would offer it to him. Woman alone is capable of such self-sacrifice. She turned towards him as he was passing again, and, though a glance at his dark face almost unnerved her, she stood in his path and offered him the glass. A surprise was in store for her. Brought to himself, he looked startled at first, as though suddenly realizing who stood before him; and then, sudden as a flash of light, there came into his eyes a look so gentle and tender as to set her heart violently beating. Such a look, she felt, would have been a declaration of love in any other man,—but in an enigma?
“Take a look through the telescope,” said she, in a voice scarcely audible.
He raised the glass to his eye.
“Lucy is on this side,” said she, “with Laura in her lap.”
Her eyes were riveted upon his face now. What a change had come over it!
“Her mother sits next her; can’t you make out her white hair?”
The strong man’s lips quivered.
“She is dressed in black; can’t you see?”
His grasp tightened on the glass.
“She dresses always in black.”
The telescope began to tremble.
Just then Charley brushed quickly past her and stood beside the Don.
“That’s not the way to use one of these long Toms,” interposed he, with quiet decision. “They need a rest. Here, take this pillar.”
With a bow of acknowledgment the Don obeyed.
Mary’s eyes followed Charley with a searching look, as he carelessly sauntered off to the other end of the piazza, muttering half a dozen notes of a popular song; but his serene face gave no sign.