Then Jimmie lifted up his head, and looking straight in Tom’s eyes, said,
“Forgive me, old Tom. I was inclined to be jealous of you. Rose said you were more suitable, and I know you are; but, Tom, I did love Annie so much, after I had swallowed the first husband, which cost me a great effort, for a widow is not the beau ideal I used to cherish of my future wife. Tom, you don’t care for Annie, do you?” he continued, in a startled tone, as something in Tom’s face affrighted him.
Tom would not deceive him then, and he replied,
“I have,—that is,—yes, I do care for her, and I had commenced a letter, but——”
“Don’t finish it, Tom. Do this for me,—don’t finish it!” Jimmie exclaimed, eagerly, knowing now how the hope that Annie might relent had buoyed him up, and kept him from utter despondency. “Don’t send it, Tom; leave her to me, if I can win her yet. She may feel differently by and by: her husband is only one year dead. Let me have Annie, Tom,” and Jimmie grew more vehement as he saw plainly the struggle in Tom’s mind. “You’ve had your day with Mary. Think of your years of married life, when you were so happy, and leave Annie to me. At least don’t try to get her from me,—not yet,—wait a year. Will you, Tom?”
Few could resist Jimmie Carleton’s pleadings when they were so earnest as now; and generous Tom yielded to the boy, whom he had scolded, and whipped, and disciplined, and loved, and grieved over, ever since the day their father died and left him the head of the family.
“I will wait a year and see what that brings to us; and you, Jimmie, must do the same, then Annie shall decide,” he said at last, and his voice was so steady in its tone, and his manner so kind, that Jimmie never guessed how much it cost the man who “had had his day,” to unlock the little desk and take from it the letter intended for Annie Graham and commit it to the flames.
They watched it together as it crisped and blackened on the coals, neither saying a word or stirring until the last thin flake had disappeared, when Tom bent to pick up something which had dropped from the desk, when he took out the letter. It was Mary’s picture, and in her lap the baby which had died when six months old.
“Yes, I have had my day,” Tom thought, as he gazed upon the fair, sweet face of her whose bright head had once lain where he had thought to have Annie’s lie. “I have had my day, and though it closed before it was noon, I will not interfere with Jimmie.”
And so the compact was sealed between them, and Jimmie slept sounder on his soldier bed that night than he had slept before since Annie’s refusal. Jimmie was not selfish, and as the days went by and he reflected more and more upon Tom’s generosity, his conscience smote him for having allowed his brother to sacrifice his happiness for a whim of his. “She might have refused him, too, and then again she might not; at all events he had a right to try his luck,” Jimmie reasoned, until at last his sense of justice triumphed and he wrote to Annie an account of the whole transaction.