Gretchen: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

It was a mean speech to make, and all Tom's audience felt it to be so, while Jerrie crimsoned with resentment and answered hotly:

"Faded or not, I shall care more for Harold's flowers than for all the rest which may be given me."

This was not very encouraging to three at least of the young men, who were intending to make the finest floral offering they could find, to the girl whom in their secret hearts they admired more than any girl they had ever seen, and who, had she made the slightest sign, might have been installed at Grassy Spring, or Tracy Park, or Le Bateau, within less than a month. But Jerrie had never made a sign and had laughed and chatted and flirted with them all, not excepting Tom, who had long ago dropped his supercilious air of superiority and patronage when talking with her, and who treated her with a gentleness and consideration almost loverlike. Horribly jealous of Harold, whom he still felt infinitely above, although he did not now often openly show it, he had encouraged the visits of the latter to Tracy Park, and by jokes and hints and innuendoes had fed the flame which he knew was burning in his sister's heart.

"There will be a jolly row when mother finds it out," he said to Maude one day; "for you know she holds her head a great deal higher than Hal Hastings, who isn't the chap I'd choose for a brother-in-law. But if you like him, all right. Stick to him, and I'll stand by you to the death."

This was to Maude; while to his mother, when she complained that Harold came there quite too often, and that Maude was running after him too much, he said:

"Nonsense, mother! let Maude alone. She knows what she is about, and would not wipe her shoes on Hal Hastings, much less marry him. She is lonely without Nina and Jerrie, and not strong enough to read much herself, and Hal amuses her; that's all. I know. I have talked with her. I am keeping watch, and the moment I see any indications of love-making on either side I will give you warning, and together we will put my fine chap in his proper place in a jiffy."

Tom was a young man now of twenty-seven, tall, and finely formed, with all his mother's good looks, and his Uncle Arthur's courtliness of manner when he felt that his companions were worthy of his notice, but proud, and arrogant, and self-asserting with his inferiors, or those whom he thought such. He had never overcome his unwarrantable dislike of Harold, whom he considered far beneath him; but Harold was too popular to be openly treated with contempt, and so there was a show of friendship and civility between them, without any real liking on either side. Tom could not tell just when he began to look upon Jerrie as the loveliest girl he had ever seen, and to contemplate the feasibility of making her Mrs. Tom Tracy. His admiration for her had been of slow growth, for she was worse than a nobody—a child of the Tramp House, of whose antecedents nothing was known, while he was a Tracy, of Tracy Park, whom a duchess might be proud to wed. But he had succumbed at last to Jerrie's beauty, and sprightliness, and originality, and now his love for her had become the absorbing passion of his life, and he would have made her his wife at any moment, in the face of his mother's opposition. By some subtle intuition he felt that Harold was his rival, and whatever he could do to lower him in Jerrie's estimation he would do without the least hesitation.

It was Tom who had insisted that Harold's basket should be bought in New York, where there was a better choice he said, and he had himself selected flowers which he knew were not fresh, and would be still worse twenty-four hours later.

"Why don't you get yours here, if it is the be-best place?" Billy Peterkin had asked him, and he replied:

"Oh, we can't be bothered with more than one basket in the train. I can find something there."