A Fair Mystery: The Story of a Coquette. Charlotte M. Brame
heaven to me: your frown, despair. Why be cross with me, darling? I would give all I have on earth to save you from one unhappy moment."
"I am tired," she said, "and I cannot forget the Castle, Earle. I wish so much that I had been born to live in such a place; I should have been quite at home and happy there."
"Are you not at home and happy here?" he asked.
"No," she replied. "Happy in a lonely, dreary farm-house!"
"With the kindest of parents, the sweetest of sisters, the most devoted of lovers, it seems to me, Doris, that you have all the elements of happiness."
She did not even hear him; she was thinking of the grandeur she had seen.
"I call that something like life," she continued – "luxury and gayety. I would sooner never have been born at all than be condemned to spend all my life here."
"But it will not be spent here, my darling; it will be spent with me."
His face glowed; the rapture of content came over it. There was no response in hers.
"I shall change Brackenside for Lindenholm," she said. "I cannot see that it will make much difference. It is only exchanging one farm-house for another."
"But I who love you am in the other," he said, gently. "Oh, Doris, you pain me so greatly! I know that you do not mean what you say, but you wound me to death."
Again she hardly heard him.
"I should very much like to know," Doris continued, "if it is fair to place me, with a keen, passionate longing for life, gayety, and pleasure, here, where I have none of the three."
"None of the three!" he repeated, sadly, "and I find heaven with you." He knelt down in front of her, where he could see her face, and he drew it gently down to his own. "I will not believe you mean this, my darling; if I did believe it I should go mad. Your beauty-loving, artistic nature has been aroused by what you have seen, and it makes you slightly discontented with us all. You ought to reign in a palace, my darling, because you are so beautiful and brilliant; but the palace shall be of my winning. You shall have every luxury that you have seen and envied."
"When?" she asked, briefly, bringing his castle in the air suddenly to the ground.
"Soon, my darling – you do not know how hard I am working – soon as I can possibly accomplish it."
"Work!" she replied. "A man may work for a lifetime and yet never earn sufficient to build a house, much less a castle. Look at my father, how hard he works, yet he is not rich, and never will be."
"But my work is different from his, Doris. There have been poets who have made large fortunes."
"And there have been poets who starved in a garret," she replied.
"But I have not that intention," cried Earle, with a look of power. "I will win wealth for you – the thought of you gives me skill, nerve, and courage for anything. Have patience, my darling!"
"Oh, Earle, it was so beautiful!" she cried, pitilessly interrupting him; "and that Lady Estelle wore such a beautiful dress! She has a strange way of moving – it produces a strange effect – so slowly and so gracefully, as though she were moving to the rhythm of some hidden music. And those rooms – I can never forget them! To think that people should live and move in the midst of such luxury!"
He raised the white hand to his lip.
"They are not all happy, Doris. Oh, believe me, darling! money, luxury, magnificence cannot bring happiness. Sooner or later one wearies of them."
"I never should," she answered, gently. "If I could live twenty lives, instead of one, I should never weary. I should like every hour of each of them to be filled with pleasure."
"That is because you have had so little," he said, wistfully. "You shall have a bright future."
Just at that moment Mattie Brace entered the room, and Doris looked at her with a smile.
"A little brown mouse, like Mattie," she said, "can easily be content. You are happy as the day is long, are you not, Mattie?"
The quiet brown eyes, with their look of wistful pain, rested for one moment upon Earle, then the young girl said, calmly:
"Certainly I am happy and content. Why should I not be? I always think that the same good God who made me knew how and where to place me, and knew best what I was fitted for."
"There," said Doris, "that is the kind of material your model women are made of. I shall never be a model woman – Mattie will never be anything else."
"Mattie is quite right," said Earle. "There is nothing so vain and so useless as longing for that which we can never attain. Come, Doris, you look better and brighter than you did when I first came in. Tell me all about your day at the Castle."
She told him of the duke's kind reception, of Lady Estelle's condescension, of all the beautiful things she had seen, and how the duke's daughter had given her some flowers, and talked to her. But not one word did she say of Lord Charles Vivianne. It was better, she thought, not even to mention that.
"I am sorry you ever went near the Castle," said Mattie, gravely. "I do not think you will ever be quite the same girl again, and I have a presentiment that in some shape or other evil will come of it."
And Earle, as he heard these words, turned away with a heavy sigh.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE COQUETTE AND THE MAN OF THE WORLD
Earle wondered much what had happened to change his lady-love so completely. Looking back, he found that she had never been quite the same since the day she went to the Castle. At first he thought it merely a girlish feeling of discontent; that it would pass away in time as the remembrance of all the luxury and splendor she had seen faded from her. Every morning when he arose he thought, "It will come all right to-day; she will put her sweet arms around my neck, and bend her beautiful face to mine, and tell me she is sorry – oh! so sorry, that she has been cold to me."
But the days passed on, and that golden dream was never verified; the coldness seemed to grow greater, and the shadow deeper.
Once, when she was walking out with Earle, she saw Lord Vivianne. He was walking down the high-road, and she knew well that he had been at the farm to look for her. Her heart beat when she saw him as it had never done for the man she had promised to marry. Earle was an ordinary man; this was a lord, and he had been purposely to look for her. He looked so handsome, so distinguished; she turned almost involuntarily from him to Earle, and the contrast was not in the poet's favor. Lord Vivianne was beautifully dressed in the most faultless and exquisite taste. Earle had not the advantage of a London tailor.
As they drew nearer, Earle, quite unconscious that Doris had ever seen the stranger before, made some remark about him.
"He has a handsome face," said Earle, "but it is not a face I like; it is not good."
"Good!" repeated Doris; "that is like you and Mattie. Earle, you think every one must be good."
"So they must," replied Earle.
Then they were both silent, for the stranger was just passing by. He looked at Doris, but he did not bow or speak to her; only from his eyes to hers there passed a strange gleam of intelligence. He did not think it wise to make any sign of recognition before the young escort who looked at him with such keen, questioning eyes.
"He would only begin to ask half a hundred questions about me, which she would find it difficult to answer," he thought; so he passed on in silence, and for a few minutes Doris was beside herself with vexation.
"It is all because this tiresome Earle is with me," she thought. "If I had been alone he would have stopped and have talked to me. How can I tell what he would have said? Perhaps he would have asked me to marry him – perhaps he is going away, and he wanted to bid me good-bye. Oh, if I could but see him alone!"
She looked again at Earle, and it seemed to her that in comparison with this other young man he was so inferior, she felt a sudden sense of impatience that made her unjust to him.
Earle thought no more of the stranger who had passed