A Book o' Nine Tales. Bates Arlo
the fierceness of her excitement. “Bitter as death; but sweet too, sweet as—”
She left the sentence unfinished. Below on the shore the full tide was lapping the stones with monotonous melody. Save for their iterance, the stillness was almost as deep as the marvellous silence of a winter night which no sound of living thing breaks.
“Whatever comes,” Columbine murmured a moment later, her voice changed and softened so that he had to bend to catch her words, “I am glad of all that has happened; glad of you; glad, always glad.”
He caught her passionately in his arms and covered her downcast head with kisses, while she yielded unresistingly to his embrace, although she sobbed as if her heart would break. In the east the promise of the dawn shone steadily, increasing slowly but surely. It became at last so strong that Columbine, opening her swollen lids, was able to distinguish objects a little. At that moment she became conscious that the arms of her lover had loosened their hold upon her. She looked into his face with sudden alarm. Mr. Tom had fallen into a dead faint.
VII.
The afternoon sun was shining into Tom’s chamber windows when he awoke. Ten hours of heavy sleep had had a wonderfully revigorating effect upon him, and despite some stiffness he awoke with a sense of renewed power. His repose had, too, a far more remarkable effect than this. Before his eyes were open he said aloud, as if he were solemnly summoning some culprit before the bar of an awful tribunal:—
“Thomas Wainwright!”
The sound of his own words acted upon him like an electric shock. He started up in bed, wide awake, his eyes shining, his whole manner alert, joyous, and confident. He was nameless no longer. Treacherous memory had yielded up its tenaciously kept secret, and at last he emerged from the shadowy company of the nameless to be again a man among men.
He sprang from his couch and made his toilet with impatient eagerness. As he dressed he remembered everything in an instant. That baffling mystery of his family name seemed the key to all the secrets of his past, and, having yielded up this prime fact, his memory made no further resistance. His whole life lay before him, no longer laboriously traced out, bit by bit, but unrolled as a map, visible at a single coup d’œil.
Little that he recalled was of a nature to change the conclusions he had formed of his circumstances, except the single fact that his wife had not outlived her honeymoon. The shock of her father’s death, and, perhaps, some seeds of malaria contracted in India, had proved too much for her delicate constitution, and Tom, eagerly reviewing his newly recovered past, felt a pang of unselfish sorrow for the unloved bride who had for so short a time borne his name, that name which he now kept saying over to himself, as if he feared he might again forget it.
He hurried downstairs, and in the old-fashioned hall, stately with its wainscoting and antique carved furniture, he met Columbine coming towards him. Like his, her eyes shone with a new light, her lips were parted with excitement, and her step was eager.
“Good-morning, Mr. Wainwright,” she fluted in a voice high with excitement and joyousness. “I heard your step, and could not wait for you to get to the parlor.”
“Good heavens!” cried he, stopping short in amazement. “How did you know? Are you a witch?”
“No,” she laughed, pleasure and excitement mingling rather dangerously in her mood. “Nothing of the sort, I assure you; though one of my ancestors was tried for witchcraft at Salem. Cousin Tom sent me this advertisement, and I knew at once that it must be you.”
The advertisement she showed him was cut from a New York paper, and called, with a detailed description of the personal appearance of the missing man, for tidings of one Thomas Wainwright, of Baltimore, supposed to have perished in the wreck of the Sound steamer, and whose large estate was unsettled. Tom read it over with mingled feelings.
“Bah!” he said. “When I get home I shall only have to look over a file of the daily papers to read my obituary. Fortunately I have been back from India so few years that they cannot say a great deal about me.”
“De mortuis,” returned Columbine, smiling. “They will only say good of you. I congratulate you on having found your name.”
“I had it before you told me,” he said.
He took her hands in his and looked at her tenderly.
“I have all my past, too,” he went on. “I am free; I have nothing to hide; nothing stands between us. Will you be my wife, Columbine?”
She grew pale as ashes; then flushed celestial red; but her eyes did not flinch.
“I trust you utterly,” she answered him. “And I love you no less.”
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