Through One Administration

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

"She used to be as frank as a child," he said, "and have the lightest way in the world; and I liked it. I am a rather feather-headed fellow myself, perhaps, and it suited me. But it is all gone now. When she laughs I don't feel sure of her, and when she is silent I begin to wonder what she is thinking of."

The thing she thought, the words she said to herself oftenest were: "It will not last very long." She said them over to herself at moments she could not have sustained herself under but for the consolation she found in them. Beyond this time, when what she faced from day to day would be over, she had not yet looked.

"It is a curious thing," she said to Arbuthnot, "but I seem to have ceased even to think of the future. I wonder sometimes if very old people do not feel so—as if there was nothing more to happen."

There was another person who found the events of the present sufficient to exclude for the time being almost all thought of the future. This person was Colonel Tredennis, who had found his responsibilities increase upon him also,—not the least of these responsibilities being, it must be confessed, that intimacy with Mr. Richard Amory of which Bertha had spoken.

"He is very intimate with Richard," she had said, and she had every reason for making the comment.

At first it had been the colonel who had made the advances, for reasons of his own, but later it had not been necessary for him to make advances. Having found relief in making his first reluctant half-confidences, Richard had gradually fallen into making others. When he had been overpowered by secret anxiety and nervous distrust of everything, finding himself alone with the colonel, and admiring and respecting above all things the self-control he saw in him,—a self-control which meant safety and silence under all temptations to betray the faintest shadow of a trust reposed in him,—it had been impossible for him to resist the impulse to speak of the trials which beset him; and, having once spoken of them, it was again impossible not to go a little farther, and say more than he had at first intended. So he had gone on from one step to another until there had come a day when the colonel himself had checked him for an instant, feeling it only the part of honor in the man who was the cooler of the two, and who had nothing to risk or repent.

"Wait a moment," he said. "Remember that, though I have not asked questions so far, I am ready to hear anything you choose to say, but don't tell me what you might wish you had kept back to-morrow."

"The devil take it all," cried Richard, dashing his fist on the table. "I must tell some one, or I shall go mad." But the misery which impelled him notwithstanding, he always told his story in his own way, and gave it a complexion more delicate than a less graceful historian might have been generous enough to bestow. He had been too sanguine and enthusiastic; he had made mistakes; he had been led by the duplicity of a wily world into follies; he had been unfortunate; those more experienced than himself had betrayed the confidence it had been only natural he should repose in them. And throughout the labyrinth of the relation he wound his way,—a graceful, agile, supple figure, lightly avoiding an obstacle here, dexterously overstepping a barrier there, and untouched by any shadow but that of misfortune.

At first he spoke chiefly of the complications which bore heavily upon him; and these complications, arising entirely from the actions of others, committed him to so little that the colonel listened with apprehension more grave than the open confession of greater blunders would have awakened in him. "He would tell more," he thought, "if there were less to tell."