He sat down in a chair, thrust his fingers into his short locks, and rested his elbows on his knees. With the feeling in him that he could not give up this woman, even for this, he began to struggle with his disappointment. At first, it seemed intolerable that she had once belonged to another man—and he had to adjust his whole being to these changed conditions. He realized far more deeply than ever, how he had fixed his very soul upon her, and he resolved to go on and win her, if he could. He forced himself to realize the fact that she had loved another man, and had suffered for his sake the pangs of widowhood. It was some consolation to him to see that she had outlived them, and he was glad that youth and nature had asserted themselves and enabled her to regain her interest in life. No, he could not give her up, without her own refusal to be his wife. The fact that she had money, too, was intensely unpleasant to him. It was she—Mrs. Etheridge—who had given the hundred dollars to the poor man, and her arrogant-looking aunt, Miss Shelton, who had given the one dollar! The money was the girl’s, then—and she was the “Rich Lady,” after all! He could not get used to the idea.
But he had fought out the fight and choked down his disappointment, by the time the ball broke up, and Tom Kennedy, puzzled by his friend’s strange conduct, came in search of him.
When Hertford, in his disordered evening-dress, admitted him in answer to his knock, he was able to make up some excuse about having felt a sudden vertigo in the heated room, etc., and to carry it off with some likeness to truth.
“By Jove! I don’t believe she half liked your leaving—the lovely widow, I mean! (There’s but one she to me now!) And it seems you had crossed on the steamer together without being acquainted! It’s a wonder she even noticed you—but she did—and she asked three or four times where you were gone. I begin to be reconciled to your going back so soon, old man. She takes more interest in you than I exactly fancy.”
Hertford let him run on with this flippant sort of talk, for the sake of the information he let drop now and then. He discovered that the haughty individual who acted as her chaperon was in reality a poor relation, dependent on her bounty; though, as Kennedy said, she owed everything to this aunt, who had made this rich match for her, and had married her to a husband who died in a year, leaving her a millionaire. This made Hertford wince with pain. The whole interview was frightfully trying, and he was relieved to be alone at last.
He passed a sleepless night, and a restless, impatient morning. In the afternoon he inquired his way to Mrs. Etheridge’s house, and rang the bell, sending in his card for the two ladies. Miss Shelton, it turned out, was not at home, but after a few minutes spent in a magnificent drawing-room, down the long vista of which he could see into other superb apartments beyond, the young widow came to him.
Hertford was so entirely sure that they understood each other, that it was all he could do to keep from asking her, then and there, to be his wife. The restrictions of conventionality prevailed, however, and they kept to mere friendly discussion of the events of the voyage, and such things. It was so free and delightful, however, this long talk, that he stayed on and on, and when he rose to go, and she gave him her hand, he dared to hold it a second longer than was necessary, and to feel that the touch conveyed a message to her heart. It is certain that she blushed, as he looked down at her, and that the blush made her a hundred times more bewitching to his heart and senses than before.
The magnificence of the grand hall that he crossed in leaving her, and the suggestions of great wealth that he saw on every side, grated upon him, but, as he walked away from her presence, he was too blissfully in love for that to matter much. He felt perfectly certain, in spite of the odious idea suggested by his friend’s coarse way of putting things, that the marriage had been a love-match; for it was absolutely impossible that the divinely good, and sweet, and modest creature from whom he had just parted, ever could have married from any motive but love. He even got up a sort of emotion of pity for the dead man, when he thought of what had been lost to him, and yet he felt any dealing of fate to be merciful, which opened to him the only chance of supreme and ideal happiness, which his life had ever offered.
He spent the next day with lawyers, absorbed in business affairs. In the evening he went to the theater, where he saw the woman he loved surrounded by a gay party. But she looked at him, as he passed, with a look that thrilled to his heart’s core, and all through the play he was happy in the sense that she thought of him, and even furtively watched him. Coming out, he met Tom Kennedy, who walked along the street with him, beginning at once to speak of Mrs. Etheridge. Hertford, with a certain reluctance, asked some question about Mr. Etheridge. He felt jealous of the man, and at the same time, sorry for him. He inquired how long he had been dead.
“O, three years, or such a matter. She’s only just come back into the gay world. No one can say she did not play her part with propriety. It was even more than could have been expected from a girl of twenty, to go into such long retirement for a husband four times her age.”