Winter Evening Tales

by Amelia E. Barr

"Liar!" Petralto retorted. "She loved me first; you can never have her whole heart. Begone! If I had you on the Guadalupe, where Jessy and I lived and loved, I would—"

The sentence was not finished. Lennox struck Petralto to the ground, and before I raised him, I persuaded the angry bridegroom to retire. I stayed with Petralto that night, although I was not altogether pleased with him. He was sulky and silent at first, but after a quiet rest and a few consoling Havanas he was willing to talk the affair over.

"Lennox tortured me," he said, passionately. "How could he be so unfeeling, so mad, as to suppose I should care to learn what chain of circumstances led him to find out my love and then steal her? Everything he said tortured me but one fact—Jessy was alone and thoroughly miserable. Poor little pet! She thought I had forgotten her, and so she married him—not for love; I won't believe it."

"But," I said, "Petralto, you have no right to hug such a delusion; and seeing that you had made no attempt to follow Jessy and marry her, she had every right to suppose you really had forgotten her. Besides, I think it very likely that she should love a young, rich, good-looking fellow like Will Lennox."

"In not pursuing her I was following Jessy's own request and obeying my own plighted promise. It was understood between us that I should wait patiently until Jessy was twenty-one. Even Scotch customs would then have regarded her as her own mistress and acknowledged her right to marry as she desired; and if I did not write, she has not wanted constant tokens of my remembrance. I have trusted her," he said, mournfully, "without a sign from her."

That winter the beauty of Mrs. Lennox and the devotion of her husband were on every tongue. But married is not mated, and the best part of Jessy Lorimer's beauty had never touched Will Lennox. Her pure, simple, poetic temperament he had never understood, and he felt in a dim, uncertain way that the noblest part of his wife escaped him.

He could not enter into her feelings, and her spiritual superiority unconsciously irritated him. Jessy had set her love's first music to the broad, artistic heart of Petralto; she could not, without wronging herself, decline to a lower range of feelings and a narrower heart. This reserve of herself was not a conscious one. She was not one of those self-involved women always studying their own emotions; she was simply true to the light within her. But her way was not Will Lennox's way, her finer fancies and lighter thoughts were mysteries to his grosser nature.

So the thing happened which always has and always will happen in such cases; when the magic and the enchantment of Jessy's great personal beauty had lost their first novelty and power, she gradually became to her husband—"Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."

I did not much blame Will Lennox. It is very hard to love what we do not comprehend. A wife who could have sympathized in his pursuits, talked over the chances of his "Favorite," or gone to sea with him in his yacht, would always have found Will an indulgent and attentive husband. But fast horses did not interest Jessy, and going to sea made her ill; so gradually these two fell much further apart than they ought to have done.

Now, if Petralto had been wicked and Jessy weak, he might have revenged himself on the man and woman who had wrought him so much suffering. But he had set his love far too high to sully her white name; and Jessy, in that serenity which comes of lofty and assured principles, had no idea of the possibility of her injuring her husband by a wrong thought. Yet instinctively they both sought to keep apart; and if by chance they met, the grave courtesy of the one and the sweet dignity of the other left nothing for evil hopes or thoughts to feed upon. One morning, two years after Jessy's marriage, I received a note from Petralto, asking me to call upon him immediately. To my amazement, his rooms were dismantled, his effects packed up, and he was on the point of leaving New York.