Just for an instant he held her in his arms before he put her down. Her face was very near his and he might have kissed her if Jeff, who seemed to be omnipresent, had not rolled up in time to prevent it. Releasing her he said, “You are now mine. God bless you and make me worthy of you.”
Helen did not answer, but went at once to her room and, throwing herself upon the bed, burst into a paroxysm of tears. Glad, happy tears she tried to think they were, for had she not secured what she came to Ridgefield to secure in case she found it worth the trouble. And he was worth it, she told herself, over and over again. He was a man of whom any woman might be proud and fond.
“I shall disappoint him every day,” she said. “He is far better suited to Alice.”
The mention of her cousin reminded her of the letter she was going to write, and, after a hurried supper, during which she said but little to her mother, she commenced it. On the first line in immense letters were the words: “WE ARE ENGAGED; the prize is mine!” Then she went on to describe the drive and the means she took to bring Craig to the point.
“You know I am an experienced hand in love-making, and its different phases,” she wrote, “while he is a mere baby;—actually stammered and blushed when he asked the important question, the twenty-first put to me. I told him that, and I could see it staggered him a little, but he soon recovered and I do believe he is happy, while I respect him because he didn’t get down on his knees; he couldn’t very well in that narrow buggy, with Dido running away from a baby-cart. That was what happened, and maybe is the reason that he was so cold in his wooing. Didn’t even touch my hand, and it was lying where it would have been very convenient for him to take if he wanted to. He really acted as if I were a choice piece of pottery, not to be meddled with. On the whole it was a very matter-of-fact affair, something like this: He, after two or three coughs, and getting very red in the face, ‘Will you be my wife? Behave, Dido, what ails you?’ She, very much surprised, so much so in fact that without stopping to think, she replied, ‘Yes, if you wish it. I think it was the baby-cart that frightened Dido.’
“That’s about as it was, and we were engaged, and went at once to talking of the future,—or he did. Wished to be married by Christmas. But I said no. I must have one more winter in dear old New York before settling down as a model wife in stupid Boston. Of course I didn’t talk that way about Boston. But he is to wait until spring, when we are going to Europe, and you are going with us! I settled that at once. I could not stand a year’s travel alone with any man, with no right to look at another or let him look at me, and nobody to talk things over with. I began to feel lonesome until I thought of you, who always do me good. You know I am tricky and false and all that is mean that way. You found out more of it here than you knew before, and your great, pure, white soul rebelled against it, but I know you like me and I like you better than anybody in the world, except, of course, mother and Craig. He wants me to call him that, and——well, I’ll not enumerate my likes and dislikes. I want you to go with us, and Craig wants you, and you are going. So make your arrangements to give up that schoolhouse in the spring and see the old world, and help me through the British Museum, where I have never spent more than two hours, but shall have to spend days with Craig, who thinks me rather intellectual. I have arranged how to manage. I shall have a headache and be tired, and wait while you and Craig examine every coin and piece of old yellow parchment, and all the broken-nosed and broken-legged statuary. Ugh! I shudder to think of it, and the many more tiresome places, in which Craig will revel. We shall stand by Mrs. Browning’s grave in Florence and stare at the house where she lived, and sail past the Browning palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and I shall be expected to go into raptures over Sordello and that other queer name, Paracelsus, about which I know nothing and care less.
“Poor Craig! He is getting awfully cheated. There is nothing real about me, except my face. I am fairly good looking and I mean to make him a good wife. He is easily gulled; shy men always are, or he would see through me. Mr. Hilton does, I am sure. I wish Craig had as much fun and fire in him. But comparisons are odious, and sometimes injurious to one’s peace of mind. It is something to be Mrs. Craig Mason of Boston, with a fine establishment on Commonwealth Avenue, and one can’t have the world. Did I tell you Craig was going to Boston with his mother to-morrow to be gone some days, and I am wicked enough to feel relieved. I know exactly what to say to a man to whom I am not engaged, but what to say to one to whom I am engaged is a different thing. The excitement is over and only a dull surface of things left. I shall have time to think and get myself well in hand before he comes back. He is to bring several engagement rings for me to choose from, and will look at a house on the Avenue which is for sale and which he thinks will suit me.
“And you are to live with us! I have settled that in my own mind. I cannot live alone with a man and that man my husband, and know I am roped in,—done for,—finished; no more need of any little harmless tricks and deceptions, which are my very life. I believe I am growing wicked, so I’ll stop. Burn this letter as soon as you read it. It sounds heartless, and as if I didn’t care for Craig, when I do; but, oh, Alice, I wish I could turn myself inside out in the lap of some good woman and tell her all I feel. But I can’t. Mother would be horrified and so would you, and each for a different reason. I know you pray, and so do I, in a stupid, mechanical way, but I can’t to-night, nor ever again, perhaps, but you, who never did a mean act in your life, can pray for me.
Your wicked
“Cousin Helen.”