When a witch is young: a historical novel

by Philip Verrill Mighels

Garde was painfully disappointed in him. His flippancy had, as he intended it should, deceived her. She shut that little door of her heart through which her soul had been about to emerge, ready to reveal itself to and to speak welcome to its mate. She did not cease to love him, emotional though she was, for love is like a tincture, or an attar,—once it is poured out, not even an ocean of water can so dilute it as to leave no trace of its fragrance, and not until the last drop in the ocean is drained can it all be removed or destroyed. No, she was pained. She desired to retreat, to take back the overture which, to her mind, had been a species of abandon of her safeguards and so patent that she could not conceive that Adam had failed to note its significance. Yet she gave him up for a soulless Pan reluctantly. That playing, which had drawn her, psychically, physically, irresistibly to his side, could have no part with things flippant. It had been to her like a heart-cry, which it seemed that her heart alone could answer. And when she had found that it was Adam playing—her Adam—she had with difficulty restrained herself from running to him and sobbing out the ecstasy suddenly awakened within her. The memory of the music he had made was still upon her and she was timidly hopeful again when she said:

“How long have you been practising here?”

Adam mistook this for a little barb of sarcasm. His mind was morbid on the subject of Wainsworth and of Garde’s evasiveness of the evening before. He put on more of the motley.

“Not half long enough,” he said, “by the violence I still do to melody; and yet too long by half, since I have frightened the birds from the forest. There is always too much of bad playing, but it takes much bad practising to make a good performer. I am better at playing a jig. Shall I try, in your honor?”

“Thank you, if you please, no, I would rather you would not,” said Garde. It was her first Puritanical touch. If she had given him permission to play his jig, very many things might have been altered, for Adam would have revealed himself and would have opened her heart-doors once again, such a mastery over everything debonair in his nature would the violin have assumed, with its spell of deeper emotions, inevitable—with Garde so near.

Adam laughed, well enough to appear careless. “I commend your judgment,” he said, “though I have always thought, even after last night,—ah, by the way, where is your companion, Mistress Prudence somebody?”

He had parried his own tendency to get back to the tender subjects and memories flooding his heart, but not in a manner to gladden Garde. Indeed, the ring of artificiality in everything he said made her less and less happy.

“Her name is Prudence Soam. She is my cousin, and she is at home,” said Garde, quietly. “If you would care to see her again, I will tell her of your wish.” She could readily understand how any one might like Prudence, knowing what a sweet, good girl her cousin was, but it caused her an acute pain to think she had cherished the image of Adam in her heart for seven years, only to find now that he had been inconstant.

She suddenly thought of the meeting of the evening before. Adam’s willingness to present her—in the presence of Prudence—with that something which he had brought her from his first trip to Hispaniola, appeared to her now in a light, not of his stupidity, but of his deliberate intention to show her that he had not preserved a sacred dream of their childhood friendship, as she had so fondly hoped he had. She even wondered if he might not have seen, known and cared for Prudence before. She concluded that he cared for Prudence now, and certainly not for herself. Then she thought he might think of that something, which he had wished so to give her—that something from Hispaniola,—and she feared he might present it to her now. This would have been too much to bear, under the circumstances.

Adam was indeed thinking on this very subject, but Wainsworth—his friend—arose like a specter in his meditations, and all that Garde had said had confirmed him in his belief of her coldness to himself, so that he preferred to seem to forget the trinket, which would have been at once the token of his love and constancy.