“Tom’s letter you have not read yet. That may comfort you. I’ll bring it directly,” Aunt Esther said: and in a moment I had it in my hand and was studying the superscription:
“Miss Norah Burton,
“The Oaks,
“Middlesex.
“Not to be opened till the wedding-day.”
Then for a moment there was a feeling in my throat as if my heart were rising into my mouth, but I forced it down, and breaking the seal, read the letter, which was so much like Tom. He had been out to sea three days, and there was a ship in sight by which they hoped to send messages home, so he was trying to write in spite of the fearful condition of his stomach, which he described as a kind of raging whirlpool.
“Dear Norah,” he began, “I am sitting on deck on a coil of rope, and am sicker than a horse. I’ve thrown up everything I ate for a month before I left England, and everything I expect to eat for a month to come; but I must write a few lines of congratulation to Mrs. Archibald Browning, as you will be when you read this letter. Norah, I hope you will be happy; I do, upon my word, even if I did talk against him and say I meant to marry you myself. That was all bosh, for of course a venerable kind of a girl like you never could think of such a spindle-shanked, sandy-haired gawky as I am. Archie is far better for you, and I am glad you are his wife, real glad, Norah, and no sham, though last night when I sat on the deck and looked out over the dark sea toward old England and you, there was a lump in my throat as big as a tub, and, six-footer as I am, I laid my head on the railing and cried like a baby, and whispered to myself, ‘Good-by, Norah, good-by, once for all.’ I was bending up double the next minute, and that cramp finished the business, and knocked all sentiment out of me, so that to-day you are my sister, or mother, or grandmother, just which you choose to call yourself, and I am very glad you are to marry Archie. I mean to be a rich man, and by and by pick up some English girl in India, and bring her home to you. There it comes again! that horrid creep from the toes up. I wonder if the whale felt that way when he cast up Jonah. Oh, my gracious. I can’t stand it. Good-by. Yours in the last agony,
“Tom Gordon.”
I had been out in a yacht on the Irish coast, and been sea-sick, and I knew just how Tom felt, and could imagine how he acted, and I laughed aloud in spite of Archie dead and the great pain at my heart. In fact, the laugh did me good, and with Tom’s letter under my pillow I felt better than before I read it.
It was four months before we heard from him again, and then he was so sorry for me, so kindly sympathetic, that I cried as I had not cried since Archie died. Tom was well and happy, and liked the country and his employment, and to use his words was having a “gay old time,” with some “larks of chaps” whose acquaintance he had made. Regularly each month we heard from him for a year or more, and then his letters became very irregular, and were marked with a daring and flippancy I did not like at all. Then followed an interval of silence, and we heard from other sources that Tom Gordon, though still keeping his place and performing his duties to his employer faithfully, was growing fast into a reckless, daring, dissipated man, such as no sister would like her brother to be. I was his sister; he was my brother, I said, and I wrote him a letter of remonstrance and reproof, telling him how disappointed I was in him and begging him to reform for my sake, and the sake of the old time when we were children together, and he had some respect for goodness and purity. He did not answer that letter. I think it made him angry, and so I could only weep over the wayward boy, and pray earnestly that Heaven would save him yet, and restore him to us as he used to be before he strayed so far from the paths of virtue.