The Cottage of Delight: A Novel

by Will N. Harben

Ten eventful years of toil and struggle for John Trott went by. True to the prophecy of Cavanaugh and other practical men, he succeeded. Step by step he rose till, on the death of Mr. Pilcher, he became an equal partner with Reed in the business. He and Dora still lived with the McGwires in the old house, which was now kept for roomers only. John could have well afforded to give Dora a more expensive home, but both he and she had become inseparably attached to these first friends of theirs in New York.

Dora, a tall, slender girl of nineteen, while not exactly pretty, was quite attractive. John had sent her to a select school for young ladies, and the polish and education she had received had not spoiled her. She was not ashamed of the fact that she and John had once been what they were. In fact, the McGwires knew all the circumstances connected with their clandestine flight from the South, and guarded well their secret.

Not once, even indirectly, had either John or Dora heard from their former home. Dora had almost entirely forgotten it, and, while John could not possibly do so, it had become like a dream of blended joy and pain which he persistently put aside. But at times a grim certitude fixed itself on him, that, having once loved, he could never love again. He never met a marriageable woman, no matter how attractive or willing she might be to receive his attentions, without feeling the presence of a certain barrier of contrast to an ideal embedded in his tragic past. There was a vast store of love and tenderness in him, and this he poured out on his foster-sister. He was a natural man and yielded to sensual temptations, but always with the after-result of feeling vaguely soiled and lowered, and was in continual strife with his passions. To-day they were conquered, to-morrow they held temporary sway. And there was a rebuke, always a rebuke which no reasoning could set aside—a rebuke rising out of the mystic sanctity of the short union between him and his bride. "Tilly!" The very name crept upon him unawares as from the exquisite mental pictures he was always trying to suppress. "Tilly!" He caught himself applying it to Dora, a slip of the tongue, which, better than anything else, revealed to him the psychic bonds between him and a personality lost to him forever. Once Dora asked him if he thought, by any chance, that Tilly might have died. He started, reflected for a moment, and then answered in a way that was a surprise even to himself. "No, she's living," he said. "If she were dead I'd feel it."

"That is no criterion to go by," answered Dora, who had become quite religious and was now a member of the Methodist Church. "Do you know what Harold would say about that?"

"Harold might say a lot of absurd things about it"—John smiled indulgently—"but he is no criterion, either."

"Well, I'll tell you what he'd say, and it is my opinion, too," the girl went on. "He'd say that the very intuitive feeling you say you have—your firm confidence of her existence, is due to the fact that she has passed from this plane of life, is now on another, and that she is always with you in spirit because she loved you once, still loves you, and wants to protect you. Don't you see how pretty that is, brother John? She has become, as Harold would say, your guardian angel, your very conscience. When you are tempted to do wrong she restrains you; and when you actually do something wrong she has a way of rebuking you through your intuition."

This argument displeased John, as all such theories did. He claimed, with many of his rather materialistic friends, that to believe in a blissful life to come only rendered one less useful in the present, and was a strong proof of innate selfishness in the individual who was seeking it for himself alone.

But he let Dora have her way, and why shouldn't he? Indeed, he was almost sure that she and Harold were falling in love with each other. Harold was preaching now in a small church on the west side of the city, and his mother and sisters and Dora were diligent helpers in many ways.

"I'm becoming sure," Mrs. McGwire said, with a smile, one day to John as they lingered at the breakfast-table after Betty and Dora had left, "that Dora and Harold are very much in love, and I'm glad of it. A minister ought to marry early, and your sister, of all girls, is the one I'd want for him."