Olivia soon saw that something was on his mind, but she did not suspect what it was. She had heard that Madame Koller was to leave the country, and she thought perhaps Pembroke needed consolation. Men often go to one woman to be consoled for the perfidy of another. Presently as they strolled along, she stooped down, and plucked some violets.
“I thought they were quite gone,” she said. “Here are four,” and as she held them out to Pembroke, he took her little hand, inclosing the violets in his own strong grasp.
There was the time, the place, the opportunity, and Olivia was more than half won. Yet, half an hour afterward, Pembroke came out of the garden, looking black as a thunder-cloud, and strode away down by the path through the fields—a rejected suitor. Olivia remained in the garden. The cool spring night came on apace. She could not have described her own emotions to have saved her life—or what exactly led up to that angry parting—for it will have been seen before this that Pembroke was subject to sudden gusts of temper. She had tried to put before him what she felt herself obliged in honor to say—that the Colonel’s modest fortune was very much exaggerated—and she had blundered wretchedly in so doing. Pembroke had rashly assumed that she meant his poverty stood in the way. Then he had as wretchedly blundered about Madame Koller, and a few cutting words on both sides had made it impossible for either to say more. Olivia, pale and red by turns, looked inexpressibly haughty when Madame Koller’s name was mentioned. Lovers’ quarrels are proverbially of easy arrangement—but the case is different when the woman is high strung and the man high tempered. Olivia received Pembroke’s confession with such cool questionings that his self-love was cruelly wounded. Pembroke took his dismissal so debonairly that Olivia was irresistibly impelled to make it stronger. The love scene, which really began very prettily, absolutely degenerated into a quarrel. Pembroke openly accused Olivia of being mercenary. Olivia retaliated by an exasperating remark, implying that perhaps Madame Koller’s fortune was not without its charm for him—to which Pembroke, being entirely innocent, responded with a rude violence that made Olivia more furiously angry than she ever expected to be in her life. Pembroke seeing this in her pale face and blazing eyes, stalked down the garden path, wroth with her and wroth with the whole world.
He, walking fast back through the woods, was filled with rage and remorse—chiefly with rage. She was a cold-blooded creature—how she did weigh that money question—but—ah, she had a spirit of her own—such a spirit as a man might well feel proud to conquer—and the touch of her warm, soft hand!
Olivia felt that gap, that chasm in existence, when a shadowy array of vague hopes and fears suddenly falls to the ground. Pembroke had been certainly too confident and much too overbearing—but—it was over. When this thought struck her, she was walking slowly down the broad box-bordered walk to the gate. The young April moon was just appearing in the evening sky. She stopped suddenly and stood still. The force of her own words to him smote her. He would certainly never come back. She turned and flew swiftly back to the upper part of the garden, and stood in the very spot by the lilac hedge, and went over it all in her mind. Yes. It was then over for good—and he probably would not marry for a long, long time. She remembered having heard Cave and her father speak of Pembroke’s half joking aversion to matrimony. It would be much better for him if he did not, as he had made up his mind to enter for a career. But strange to say this did not warm her heart, which felt as heavy as a stone.
Presently she went into the house, and was quite affectionate and gay with her father, playing the piano and reading to him.
“Fathers are the pleasantest relations in the world,” she said, as she kissed him good-night, earlier in the evening than usual. “No fallings out—no misunderstandings—perfect constancy. Papa, I wouldn’t give you up for any man in the world.”
“Wouldn’t you, my dear?” remarked that amiable old cynic incredulously.
CHAPTER XIII.
One of the drawbacks of Arcadia is that everybody knows everybody else’s business—and the possibility of this added to Pembroke’s extreme mortification. He thought with dread of the Colonel’s elaborate pretense of knowing nothing whatever about the affair, Mrs. Peyton’s sly rallying, Mr. Cole’s sentimental condolence—it was all very exasperating. But solely to Olivia’s tact and good sense both escaped this. Not one soul was the wiser. Olivia, however she felt, and however skillfully she might avoid meeting Pembroke alone, was apparently so easy, so natural and self-possessed, that it put Pembroke on his mettle. Together they managed to hoodwink the whole county about their private affairs—even Colonel Berkeley, who, if he suspected anything, was afraid to let on, and Miles, whose devotion to Olivia became stronger every day.