Mr. Incoul's Misadventure. Saltus Edgar
impossibility into an allurement. What pleasanter thing could there be than the winning of one’s own wife? The idea was so novel it delighted him. For the moment he preferred it to any other; beside it his former experience seemed humdrum indeed. But why had she wept? Her reasons, however, he had then no chance to elucidate. Miss Barhyte returned as abruptly as she had departed.
“Forgive me,” she said, advancing to where he stood, “it was stupid of me to act as I did. I am sorry – are we still friends?” Her eyes were clear as had she never wept, but there were circles about them, and her face was colorless.
“Friends,” he answered, “yes, and more – ” He hesitated a moment, and then hastily added, “It is agreed, then, is it not, you will be my wife?”
“I will be your wife?”
“As Balzac’s heroine was to her husband?”
“You have said it.”
“But not always. If there come a time when you care for me, then I may ask you to give me your heart as to-day I have asked for your hand?”
“When that day comes, believe me,” she said, and her delicious face took on a richer hue, “when that day comes there will be neither asking nor giving, we shall have come into our own.”
With this assurance Mr. Incoul was fain to be content, and, after another word or two, he took his leave.
For some time after his departure, Miss Barhyte stood thinking. It had grown quite dark. Before the window a street lamp burned with a small, steady flame, but beyond, the azure of the electric light pervaded the adjacent square with a suggestion of absinthe and vice. One by one the opposite houses took on some form of interior illumination. A newsboy passed, hawking an extra with a noisy, aggressive ferocity as though he were angry with the neighborhood, and dared it come out and wrestle with him for his wares. There was a thin broken stream of shop-girls passing eastward; at intervals, men in evening dress sauntered leisurely to their dinners, to restaurants, or to clubland, and over the rough pavement there was a ceaseless rattle of traps and of wagons; the air was alive with the indefinable murmurs of a great city.
Miss Barhyte noticed none of these things. She had taken her former seat on the sofa and sat, her elbow on her crossed knee, her chin resting in her hand, while the fingers touched and barely separated her lips. The light from without was just strong enough to reach her feet and make visible the gold clock on her silk stocking, but her face was in the shadow as were her thoughts.
Presently she rose and rang the bell. “Archibald,” she said, when the man came, and who at once busied himself with lighting the gas, “I want to send a note; can’t you take it? It’s only across the square.”
“I’ll have to be mighty spry about it, miss. The old lady do carry on most unreasonable if I go for anybody but herself. She has laws that strict they’d knock the Swedes and Prussians silly. Why, you wouldn’t believe if I told you how – ”
And Archibald ran on with an unbelievable tale of recent adventure with the landlady. But the girl feigned no interest. She had taken a card from her case. On it she wrote, Viens ce soir, and after running the pencil through her name, she wrote on the other side, Lenox Leigh, esq., Athenæum Club.
“There,” she said, interrupting the negro in the very climax of his story, “it’s for Mr. Leigh; you are sure to find him, so wait for an answer.”
A fraction of an hour later, when Miss Barhyte took her seat at the dinner table, she found beside her plate a note that contained a single line: “Will be with you at nine. I kiss your lips. L. L.”
CHAPTER III.
AFTER DARKNESS
When Miss Barhyte was one year younger she had gone with her mother to pass the summer at Mt. Desert; and there, the morning of her arrival, on the monster angle of Rodick’s porch, Lenox Leigh had caused himself to be presented.
A week later Miss Barhyte and her new acquaintance were as much gossiped about as was possible in that once unconventional resort.
Lenox Leigh was by birth a Baltimorean, and by profession a gentleman of leisure, yet as the exercise of that profession is considered less profitable in Baltimore than in New York, he had, for some time past, been domiciled in the latter city. From the onset he was well received; one of the Amsterdams had married a Leigh, his only sister had charmed the heart of Nicholas Manhattan, and being in this wise connected with two of the reigning families, he found the doors open as a matter of course. But even in the absence of potent relatives, there was no reason why he should not have been cordially welcomed. He was, it is true, better read than nineteen men out of twenty; when he went to the opera he preferred listening to the music to wandering from box to box; he declined to figure in cotillons and at no dinner, at no supper had he been known to drink anything stronger than claret and water.
But as an offset to these defects he was one of the most admirably disorganized young men that ever trod Fifth avenue. He was without beliefs and without prejudices; added to this he was indulgent to the failings of others, or perhaps it would be better to say that he was indifferent. It may be that the worst thing about him was that he was not bad enough; his wickedness, such as there was of it, was purely negative. A poet of the decadence of that period in fact when Rome had begun to weary of debauchery without yet acquiring a taste for virtue, a pre-mediæval Epicurean, let us say, could not have pushed a creedless refinement to a greater height than he. There were men who thought him a prig, and who said so when his back was turned.
It was in the company of this patrician of a later day that Miss Barhyte participated in the enjoyments of Mt. Desert. Leigh was then in his twenty-fifth year, and Miss Barhyte was just grazing the twenties. He was attractive in appearance, possessed of those features which now and then permit a man to do without beard or moustache, and his hair, which was black, clung so closely to his head that at a distance it might have been taken for the casque of a Saracen. To Miss Barhyte, as already noted, a full share of beauty had been allotted. Together they formed one of the most charming couples that it has ever been the historian’s privilege to admire. And being a charming couple, and constantly together, they excited much interest in the minds of certain ladies who hailed from recondite Massachusettsian regions.
To this interest they were indifferent. At first, during the early evenings when the stars were put out by the Northern Lights, they rowed to the outermost shore of a neighboring island and lingered there for hours in an enchanted silence. Later, in the midsummer nights, when the harvest-moon was round and mellow, they wandered through the open fields back into the Dantesque forests and strayed in the clinging shadows and inviting solitudes of the pines.
From one such excursion they returned to the hotel at an hour which startled the night porter, who, in that capricious resort, should have lost his ability to be startled at anything.
That afternoon Mrs. Bunker Hill – one of the ladies to whom allusion has been made – approached Miss Barhyte on the porch. “And are you to be here much longer?” she asked, after a moment or two of desultory conversation.
“The holidays are almost over,” the girl answered, with her radiant smile.
“Holidays do you call them? Holidays did I understand you to say? I should have called them fast days.” And, with that elaborate witticism, Mrs. Bunker Hill shook out her skirts and sailed away.
Meanwhile an enveloping intimacy had sprung up between the two young people. Their conversation need not be chronicled. There was in it nothing unusual and nothing particularly brilliant; it was but a strain from that archaic duo in which we have all taken part and which at each repetition seems an original theme.
For the first time Miss Barhyte learned the intoxication of love. She gave her heart ungrudgingly, without calculation, without forethought, wholly, as a heart should be given and freely as had the gift been consecrated in the nave of a cathedral. If she were generous why should she be blamed? In the giving she found that mite of happiness, that one unclouded day that is fair as June roses and dawns but once.
In September Miss Barhyte went with her mother on a visit in the Berkshire Hills. Leigh journeyed South. A matter of business