The return to the hotel was merely a change from outdoor dreariness to indoor. The lobby was a gathering-ground for a scattering of disgruntled tourists, who had used their battle-field stop-over privilege only to find themselves marooned by the weather. Tregarvon smoked in solitary misery for what remained of the afternoon, and past the evening meal, begged some of the hotel stationery, and wrote a letter to Elizabeth Wardwell.
“It is a sin and a shame to write you after such a day as I’ve been wearing out here,” he began, “but you know my weakness for afflicting other people—for unloading my woes upon the nearest pair of sympathetic shoulders. Your shoulders have always been that; and sometimes I wonder that you can still stand up straight and queenly, as you do, after having carried so many of my burdens.” Here followed an account of the events of the exciting Saturday forenoon, and he tried, as well as the written words would serve, to transmit some picture of the boiler explosion, tagged with an attempt to portray the tenterhooks of suspense upon which the disaster had impaled him.
“You see where it leaves me,” he went on; “still in the air as to whether the Ocoee is something or nothing. For a few little minutes, after the drill had passed the eighteen-inch dead-line, I saw rose-colored, saw my chance to provide for the home-folks, and to ignore forever and a day, the Uncle Byrd legacy. But now I am no better assured than I was before we began drilling; and, to make it more interesting, Hartridge happened along after the explosion—the whole college turned out and came tramping over through the wood to see what had broken loose—and he says the sandstone dike is still under us. We shan’t know positively, of course, until we can get a new engine, and haul it by inches up the mountain, and drag it into place and set it going; and by that time I shall be a raving maniac.
“In all this new trouble, Poictiers has been all that you’d expect him to be; a friend to tie to. He doesn’t lend me money; he simply tosses me his purse. I have his last dividend check in my pocket at this present moment, and I’m to cash it to-morrow morning to pay for the new engine. I suppose I needn’t say that I should have been out of the fight down here long ago if he hadn’t joined me and given me a checking account. He is pure gold, Elizabeth; and yet——
“The gap represents a good half-hour, my dear cousin, in which I have been sitting here at this dinky little table in the hotel writing-room, trying to screw my courage to the sticking-place. What I have to tell you concerns four people, and you are one of the four. I’ve written you a lot about Richardia Birrell—she’s another one of the four—in the past few weeks, and I have been assuring myself all along that I have been telling you all there was to tell.
“That isn’t strictly true, Elizabeth. There was a thing that I wouldn’t admit, even to myself; but I had to admit it three days ago when Poictiers told me that he had asked Richardia to be his wife. I knew then what Richardia had done to me, and for a bad half-hour I—well, I’m not going into details; it is enough to say that I’m not fit to be your door-mat, Betha, dear—nor Poictiers Carfax’s, for that matter.
“What can I say for myself more than I have said a hundred times in the past? Nothing, I imagine; I’m simply hopeless where the eternal feminine is concerned. You’ve known it ever since we went to school together, and you’ve promised to marry me in spite of the knowledge. I shall not be a faithless husband, my dear—I know I shan’t be that; and this last and most humiliating lapse could never have amounted to anything, anyway, even if Poictiers had not slammed the door in my face. But it is your right to know about it; to know that for some few days or hours or minutes, as the case may be, I was daffy, foolish, a simpleton from the idiotic wards, with a slant toward depravity.
“You see now what an incredible friend Poictiers is. I’ve never thought of him as a marrying man, and I could swear, even now, that he isn’t in love with Richardia—though I don’t quite see how any free man with live blood in him could help being. Let that go: Poictiers has killed my temptation for me. He has asked Richardia to marry him, and he and she are good enough for each other—which is the highest praise I can offer to either. Poictiers will get a wife who could make any man happy; and Richardia will be able to restore the Birrell fortunes, which, as you have doubtless gathered from my earlier letters, are pretty sadly in need of a rich marriage.
“This leaves us two to face things as they are as best we can, Elizabeth. After what I have written down in this letter, can you still care enough for me, and for the conventions and the wishes of the families on both sides, to—not to forgive me; I’m not going to ask that—but to take me just as I am, and let things go on as before? I shan’t blame you in the least if you can’t, you know; but if it must come to a break between us, you must let me be the one to make the break. By all right and reason the Uncle Byrd legacy is yours; and whatever happens, I promise you I shall never touch a penny of it.