“Sylvia, can you keep a secret?�
“Of course I can,� answered Sylvia promptly.
“Then—I am going away to-morrow morning, to be gone a year, perhaps longer. This is the last sail I shall take upon the river for a long, long time.�
Sylvia’s eyes were full of regret. Although she had seen Skelton at a distance nearly every day of her life when he was at Deerchase, and had also seen him upon the rare occasions that visits were exchanged between the two places, yet he had all the charm of a new and dazzling acquaintance to her. She never remembered speaking a word with him before, but there was a delightful intimacy between them now, she thought. She expressed her regret at his going so volubly that Skelton was forced to laugh; and she wound up by flinging her arms around his neck and kissing him violently. At this Skelton thought it time to leave. His last glimpse of Sylvia was as she stood swinging her wet, white sunbonnet dolefully on the sandy shore.
That night a terrible storm came up. It flooded all the low-lying fields, swept over the prim gardens at Deerchase, and washed away a part of the bridge between Deerchase and Belfield. When, at daylight in the morning, Skelton, with Bob Skinny, left Deerchase, everything was under water, and trees and shrubs and fences and hedges bore witness of the fury of the wind and the rain. Skelton’s last view of Deerchase was a gloomy one. He meant then to be gone a year; he remained away fifteen years.
CHAPTER IV.
Meanwhile things went on placidly enough around the silent and uninhabited Deerchase. The negroes worked the plantation under the overseer’s management, and the house was well cared for, as well as the grounds. Every year there was an alarm that Skelton was coming home, but he never came. At last, like a thunderclap, came the news that he was married to an English woman of rank and wealth.
Sylvia Shapleigh was then eighteen, pretty and full of romance. That one interview with Skelton had been with her the dividing line between childhood and womanhood. She brooded over it, and as she grew older she fell in love with an imaginary Skelton, who was to come home and make her the grandest lady in the county. She began to look upon Deerchase as her own, and could picture vividly to herself her gay and splendid life there. She was haughty to the young squires who openly admired her, and secretly declared herself meat for their masters. She was proud and spirited to the last degree, and it seemed to her in her arrogance and inexperience, that Nature had destined her for something great; and what could be greater than to be Mrs. Richard Skelton?
When the news came of Skelton’s marriage, Mrs. Shapleigh was luckily away from home on a visit of several days. Sylvia, on hearing of the marriage, rose and went to her own room, where she gave way to a passion of disappointment as acute as if the bond between Richard Skelton and herself were a real one, instead of the mere figment of a child’s imagination. It made no difference that it was wholly baseless and fanciful. In that simple and primitive age, romantic young things like Sylvia had plenty of time and opportunity to cultivate sentiment. The only really splendid thing she ever saw in her life was Deerchase, and she saw it whenever she chose to turn her eyes toward it. She knew nothing of the power of new scenes to make one forget the old ones, and the extreme prettiness of the story that she made up for Skelton and herself charmed her. But then came this sudden disillusion. In the twinkling of an eye her castle in Spain fell, to rise no more.
But Sylvia, in common with most people who possess thinking and feeling powers of a high order, had also a great fund of sound good sense, which came to her rescue. She learned to smile at her own childish folly, but it was rather a sad and bitter smile: the folly was childish, but the pain was startlingly real. She did not like to look at Deerchase after that, because it brought home to her how great a fool she had been. And then, having lost that illusion—sad to say—she had no other to take its place. Nothing is more intolerable to a young, imaginative soul than to be turned out of the fairy kingdom of fancy. It is all theirs—palaces, smiling courtiers, crown jewels, and all—and they revel in a royal summer time. Then, some fine day, the pretty dream melts away and leaves a black abyss, and then Common Sense, the old curmudgeon, shows himself; and when, as in Sylvia’s case, the palace would be rebuilt, the flattering courtiers recalled, the recollection of the pain of its destruction is too keen. Driven by common sense, Sylvia concluded to live in the real world, not in the imaginary one. This wise resolve was a good deal helped by the grotesque form the same picture that had been in her mind took in Mrs. Shapleigh’s. Sylvia could not help laughing any more than Mr. Shapleigh could when Mrs. Shapleigh was all for his sending a letter to Skelton, reproaching him for his “shameful treatment of Sylvia.�