Oh, how soft and low and sweet was the voice which sang the song of which Abelard Lyle had been so fond, and there was almost a tear in Godfrey’s eye, and the colonel was beginning to look very grave, when the white hands suddenly stopped and fell with a crash among the keys, while Edith gasped, “I can’t finish it; the iron fingers are on my throat, just as they were that dreadful day.”
She evidently did not quite know what she was saying, and her face was deathly pale.
“You are sick, Miss Lyle; come into the air!” Colonel Schuyler said, and leading her out upon the veranda, he made her sit down, while Mrs. Sinclair brought her smelling salts, and Godfrey hovered about disconsolately, remembering the scene in the summer-house, and wondering if she had such spells often. And, having knocked his head against his father’s, when they both stooped to pick up Edith’s handkerchief, he concluded he was de trop, and walked away, saying to himself: “I do believe he is hit real hard. Wouldn’t it be fun to call that regal creature mother!”
He laughed aloud at the idea, but did not think it would be fun, and did not quite believe in his father’s being “hit,” either; but when half an hour later he returned and found the Colonel still sitting by Edith, who had recovered herself, and was talking with a good deal of animation, he felt irritated and impatient, and went off to his room and wrote in his “Impressions of Europe,” a kind of journal he was keeping of his tour, and which he meant to show “the girls,” by way of proving that one American could go abroad and not indorse everything he saw, and make a fool of himself generally. His entry that night was in part as follows:
“Oakwood is a fine old place, with an extensive park, a smoke-house, fine stables, a dog-kennel, and seven servants, to take care of two unprotected females. Edith Lyle, aged 27, is the handsomest woman I ever saw, even in America. Her features are perfect, especially her nose, which might have been the model for the Greek Slave. Not a bit of a pug, and her eyes are large and soft and liquid, as those of the ox-eyed Juno (I like that classical allusion; it shows reading), while her ears are the tiniest I ever saw,—just like little pink sea-shells,—and her splendid brown hair, with a shade or two of yellow sunshine in it, rippling back from her smooth white brow, just exactly curly enough, and natural, too, I’ll be bound. She don’t put it up in crimps, not she. Why, what a scarecrow Alice Creighton was, though, that time I caught her with those two forks hanging down about her eyes, with a kind of clamp or horse-shoe on them. I like people natural, as I am sure Edith is. I wonder what makes her go off into a kind of white faint all of a sudden. She did it twice to-day, and I would not wonder if she was given to fits. The governor is hit, sure. I never knew him seem as much interested in any one before. The idea of his leading her into the air and then holding those salts to her nose till he strangled her,—bah!”
And, while Godfrey wrote thus in his journal, his father sat talking to Edith, and wondering to find how much she knew and how sensibly she expressed herself. Colonel Schuyler was not a man of many words, and seldom talked much to any one, but there was something about Edith which interested him greatly, and he sat by her until the twilight began to close around them, and his sister came to warn him against taking cold and exposing Edith, too. Then he went into the house, and, without exactly knowing it, felt a little disappointed when she left the room and did not come again.
Colonel Schuyler kept a journal, too, in which he occasionally jotted down the incidents of the day; and that night, after recounting his arrival at Oakwood and his grief at finding his sister so great an invalid, he added:
“She is exceedingly fortunate in having secured a most admirable person for her companion. Besides being educated, and refined, and beautiful, Miss Lyle impresses me as a remarkable woman. Yes, as a very remarkable woman.”
The next night Godfrey recorded:
“There is nothing quite so foolish as an old man in love! I wonder if he thinks she can care for him!—and yet he blushed to-day when I found him turning the leaves of her music and listening to her singing. I never knew him listen two minutes to Alice and Jule,—and no wonder, such operatic screeches as they make when Professor La Farge is there, and the boys in the street stop and mock them. Edith’s voice is the sweetest I ever heard, and so sad that it makes a chap feel for his bandanna. Why, even father told auntie that her singing made him think of poor Emily, meaning my mother! It is a bad sign when a live woman like Edith Lyle makes a man think of his dead wife. I wonder what she thinks of him! She looks as unconcerned as a block of marble; but you can’t tell what is in a woman’s mind, and widowers are awful. Why, there have been forty women after father already; but I must say he has behaved admirably thus far, and never spoken to a bonnet outside our own family, unless it were to Miss Esther Armstrong, and that is nothing. She is the Hampstead school-ma’am, and has thrashed me more than twenty times.”