Nat Wolfe; or, The gold hunters: A romance of Pike's Peak and New York

by Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

"Perhaps you expected him?"

"Me? Not so soon—that is, not until—why, Leger, what do I know of your friend Maurice's proceedings?"

Her husband's eyes, with a strange and deadly glitter in them, were fixed upon her face. She blushed, she stammered, she admitted that she was expecting him, and then attempted to withdraw from the admission. Pushing his chair back from the table, he said:

"I'm going out, Annie, to spend the evening. Don't sit up for me," and before she could spring to give him a good-by, or to help him with his muffler and gloves, he had seized his hat and coat, and the hall-door rung behind him.

Leger Carollyn bore a reputation for an unblemished moral character which added to the luster of his professional fame, and gave grace to his great mental accomplishments. But from boyhood he had been marked by two great faults, one of which, his unbending pride, was patent to every observer; but the other of which few understood, being one which his pride would enable him to conceal, and which had but few opportunities for making even himself aware of its existence. This second defect, in his otherwise noble nature, was jealousy—a jealousy, strong and terrible, of others, who shared the right of, or who gained by favor, the love of those selected by himself for his devotion.

This peculiarity had been betrayed, when a child, in his family, and had been the subject of the wisest and gentlest treatment from his excellent mother. His only brother, two years younger than himself, had been a thorn in his side—not because he did not himself love him, nor because he was ungenerous toward him in any other respect—but because he was jealous of every token of affection bestowed on another by the parents he so passionately adored. The proud, reserved and thoughtful child could not call forth those little endearments which the more vivacious nature of his brother provoked, but he longed for them none the less.

However, the gay, handsome boy died—died in his twelfth year—and left Leger the sole idol of his parents. He mourned for his brother deeply, he reproached himself secretly with every unkind thought he had ever entertained—and yet, as the months rolled on, he was conscious that he was happier now that his path was no longer crossed by a rival in the love of his parents. So the fault lay in his nature, undeveloped but not exterminated. It was not a mean jealousy—that is, it never stooped to trouble itself about rivals in fame or position—he never did a dishonorable act toward a rival schoolmate—nor, in later days, threw obstacles in the way of, or judged selfishly, those striving for success in his own profession. It was only that when he loved, he wanted, in return for his own almost startling passion, the whole interest and devotion of its object.

A man of such character would not be apt to flutter among the young ladies of his circle of society, or to fix his choice lightly upon the woman whom he should select to become his wife. So it chanced that at twenty-five he was still unmarried. At this time Dr. Carollyn, his father, passed away, leaving his son inheritor of the family-mansion, of the wealth which a long and lucrative practice had amassed, and of that practice itself, made valuable by the prestige of the parent's name. The mother had died nearly six years before, so that Leger Carollyn stood alone, with no relations either near or dear to him.

He had one friend, Maurice Gurnell, his classmate in college and his equal in society, a member of an old New York family of French extraction, and, as might be expected, the opposite in temperament of the young physician, possessing all the grace and gayety, the fluency of speech, and the love of the world which distinguishes his progenitors. Leger admired and loved his fascinating and brilliant companion, who esteemed and admired him in return; each being best pleased with those traits in the other most contrasted with his own.

While yet weighed down with deep melancholy by the loss of his father, Leger Carollyn was called, one night, to the bedside of a dying woman. The house to which he was summoned stood in a respectable, though not the most fashionable part of the city; the name he recognized as that of a family once well known to his father and always highly regarded by him, although much reduced from former affluence, and not mingling at all with general society for the past few years.