"You were foolish," observed Jack, smiling coldly.
"But do you forgive me now?"
"I forgive nothing: a bad action is a bad action. But I could not sleep when I did not know where you were: I got up and studied, for I was so tormented."
But Jack was so equable, so gentle! There was never a trace of harshness in his treatment of us. Indeed, it was only in his unfailing rectitude that he surpassed us, for, our senior although he was, he could barely keep up in our classes. Harry was the quickest of the three, but with a mortal hatred of hard study: he had an easy capacity for mastering knowledge without tedious assiduity; and, as he was resolved to be a painter, he held all mental acquirements as subsidiary to his master-passion for gaining dexterity and skill with his pencil. He could have done anything at his books had he expended any high endeavor, but he always let his chances slip by him, and allowed me to carry off the prizes which he might far more easily have won. I was by nature and habit rigidly conscientious, and discontented with myself unless I did my best. I hated cheap successes, and I was shy of praise, as my performances always fell short of my ideals. Mine was no studious disposition, and I had plenty of physical inclination to shirk lessons and lie beneath the forest boughs watching the birds all day; but there were detached lines that I used to repeat to myself aloud over and over again in lonely places, caring far less for their meaning than for the immeasurable music of the words.
CHAPTER III.
I could write many chapters about our life at Belfield, and perhaps of all I have to tell nothing would be so well worth telling. Belfield is a quiet place on the shore of Long Island Sound, placidly sleeping through the summers and autumns beneath the shadows of its immemorial trees. We went to school on the hill: below us was our ancient church built in far-off colonial times, and connected with many a story of Revolutionary times, to which we used to listen greedily: George Lenox had one of which we never tired.
"My grandfather," said he, "went to church the Sunday after the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, and when the clergyman read the prayers for the royal family he stood up in his pew and cried out that no such prayers must be read in Belfield—that George III.'s name was no longer the name of our friend, but of our worst enemy. The minister rose and shut up his prayer-book forthwith, raised his hand and pronounced the benediction, and the church was closed until the end of the war. We were good Federalists, we were," continued Mr. Lenox, "but we had one staunch Tory and Churchman in our family. After the church was closed my grandfather's family used to attend Presbyterian meeting on the hill, close by where your schoolhouse now stands; but their old dog, Duke, would never go past the church when he followed his master out on Sunday mornings: he would not go to Presbyterian meeting—not he: he stretched himself on the great millstone before the closed church-door."
When Jack, Harry and I sat together on the high "back seat" at school we had a good view down the hill at the weather-stained old church, with its imperishable gilt vane on top of the tall spire. Often enough our vagrant eyes wandered that way, but not that we cared for green slopes or colonial church or venerable weathercock. The truth of the matter was, that we oftentimes saw Georgy Lenox walking along the quiet street under the elms. To tell of our early life in Belfield, and say nothing of the influence which was already moulding the lives of at least two of us, would be to give an incomplete and partial picture. I was an imaginative boy, and Jack was the reverse, yet we were both desperately in love with the same girl. As for Harry, nobody ever decided what he felt toward her. They continually quarrelled when they were together, and Harry sometimes took pains to abuse her in her absence: he never read of an unworthy trait in a woman but he at once pointed its meaning at her. He called us "spoons," etc. for caring about her, yet, all the same, she must have been invested with an endless store of associations in his mind, for his portfolio was full of sketches of her; which seemed to furnish his ideals of feminine beauty. She was not only Rowena, but Rebecca as well (with only a change of complexion), Helen of Troy and Joan of Arc, Cleopatra and the Madonna, Marie Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor. Still, Jack and I each felt that he was not one with us in his devotion to her, and we made no confidences to him respecting her. For Jack and I talked about her incessantly when we were together: when we saw her in the street below us we nudged each other, and together felt the thrill, the inextinguishable rapture, of beholding the sunny gleam of her golden hair and her quick, graceful gait.
We were not rivals. I do not know how the thought of her came to Jack in those early days, but he had a habit of decision, and I dare say had made up his mind that she was to be his wife. He had plenty of pocket-money, and could buy her trinkets, ribbons and gloves: I had no money, and my tribute to her was of flowers and fruits. It was natural to both of us to offer her all we could; and it was equally natural to her to receive our largesse with a smile and laughing thanks if it pleased her, and a cool, indifferent shrug of contempt if it failed to suit her.
I carried the thought of her into all my occupations. Were I planting my mother's flower-beds, were I writing my composition, it was all the same: the question was, "Will it please Georgy?" Not that it mattered; and I well knew that I was a fool for it all, for she was steadily indifferent to any matters in which she had no personal concern, and despised my pains with scant ceremony. I too held in contempt my small efforts to please her, and fell a-dreaming of the wonderful things I was sure to do some time. Not that she was slow in telling us what she wanted, and her demands upon us were not of the sort that appertain to heroic achievements; yet I felt, all the same, that let me once be a hero I must win her approbation. I can remember her sitting in our garden at home under the laburnums, with the greenery making a background for her fresh girl-face. From her babyhood her beauty had been remarked, and at ten years old she was as used to compliments as an old woman of the world. Mrs. Lenox had long since resigned expectation for herself, but she was not yet too hopeless to indulge in passionate belief of a brilliant future for her daughter; and when I used to listen to the gorgeous day-dreams of the two, I felt dejectedly that my own most radiant visions were by comparison the offspring of a lifeless and gloomy fancy. There was nothing problematical or idealistic in their ideas of a happy destiny. What they wanted was, in the first place, money; in the second place, money; thirdly and finally, money. I doubt whether Mrs. Lenox ever resigned herself to the sway of fiction or poetry, but I am sure that had she studied Shakespeare she would have thought Iago's advice to Roderigo shrewdly comprised the worth of all aspiration. She and Georgy longed for dress, jewels and laces; great houses panelled with mirrors and carpeted with velvet; magnificence and pomp and circumstance about their every-day life; horses, carriages, invitations, theatres, operas,—all the pleasures which throng toward people with lined pockets and idle lives. Their wants were innumerable, their taste and fancy a harp of a thousand strings upon which caprice and vanity could play an endless variety of tunes. Mrs. Lenox had once enjoyed the luxuries she still coveted so ardently, yet Georgy, who had never known wealth, or even the easy-assured comforts of life, had instinctively the keener perception of the two for the worth of costly surroundings and possessions. No princess who had breathed perfumes all her life, trod on velvet and been served on gold and silver, could have felt a more vital necessity for luxury than Georgy, who had always lived among shabby things and known few but shabby people. She was born with the looks, manners and tastes of what we call an aristocrat, and her mother worshipped these traits in her. When one day she flung away her dinner because it was not to her liking, and went out of doors and pulled the peaches ripening against the wall, and ate them instead, Mrs. Lenox felt that such fastidiousness foreshadowed a destiny more than common. For her to tear her hats to pieces and cut her dress or apron in shreds because they did not suit her was a frequent caprice, and one we had all laughed at again and again—except Jack, who was thrifty by nature and respected the worth of things like a sensible economist. It was generally he, however, who replaced the ruined garments, and by the time he was sixteen he had attained quite a nice taste in millinery from his frequent purchases for Georgy. Mrs. Lenox always had a fit of weeping when such presents came and were displayed by Georgy as trophies, for she was still too proud not to be cut deeply by every fresh humiliation; but her belief in her daughter's future carried her through the present, and she pacified her scruples in regard to her course with Jack or anybody else who made outlay for her daughter by remembering that all such services would be balanced by and by when the natural order of things had been restored.