A Country Sweetheart. Dora Russell
up at the fresh, bright face bending over him, and he forgot many things that he ought to have remembered. As for May Churchill she also felt perfectly happy. She had never known anyone she liked half so much as Mr. Temple, she was thinking. “And he is so good-looking, too,” pretty May also reflected, glancing down on John’s brown head.
These two, in truth, were fast drifting into that dangerous stream where too often lives are wrecked and hearts are broken. Standing on the marge the golden tide flows by, and we only see the shining surface, not the rocks below. But sweet are these hours; sweet the dawn, the dream, of joys to come! The dawn may cloud, the dream be broken, but the coming shadows seem far away.
It was only the early dawn for John and May. Neither of them, indeed, had for a moment reflected that this meeting would make any difference in their lives. Feelings are strange and subtle, and creep in unawares to the human heart. They only both felt very happy, and the world seemed very bright. Bright to them, and dark and black to jealous eyes watching them from the higher ground above.
These jealous, fiery brown eyes were those of young Henderson of Stourton Grange. He had hoped to meet May Churchill during the afternoon in Fern Dene, as she often went there, and to his rage, when he arrived at the crest of the hill above the Dene, he saw May again with John Temple.
He could see John look up in her face, as he knelt on the ground, and May look down and smile on his. Henderson had gone to the Dene in a most unhappy and unsettled state of mind, and this sight seemed to half-madden him. His brow grew black as night, and a bitter curse broke from his lips.
“But if I swing for it, this shall not be,” he muttered.
Then he thought darkly of his interview with Elsie Wray the night before, and now this girl stood as an obstacle in his way. He had not dared openly to refuse to marry her, yet he never meant to do so. He feared her; she might fulfill her threat, and write or go to May Churchill, and then he knew that in that case all hope of winning May was over.
“I must try to get her to go away,” he thought, frowning and knitting his black brows. “But then there’s that confounded old fool, her father.”
It was certainly a miserable enough position in which he found himself. Bound by his honor, by a hundred promises, to marry one woman, and passionately in love with another! He stood mentally cursing his folly, his fate, and the unhappy girl who had trusted him too much. But give up May he would not. There was a dogged obstinacy about this young man; the sullen, unreasonable obstinacy of a low order of mind, and when once he had determined on a thing nothing would turn him from his purpose.
So gnawing his thick, red underlip beneath his brown mustache, and grinding his strong white teeth in his wrath, he watched the two below dallying on the green sward. He did not seek to interrupt them. He had already learnt to hate the smiling indifference of John Temple’s manner to him, and he knew he could not rely on his own temper. No; he saw them arrange the ferns they had got in May’s little basket; he saw them stand side by side, looking at the bubbling stream, and then he watched them leave the Dene and cross the rustic bridge which led to it.
They were still together when he lost sight of them, and then he turned homeward, with a gloomy brow and an angry heart. As he strode on, various plans crossed his brain. But of one thing he was determined. Cost what it might, he would get rid of Elsie Wray.
As he neared Stourton Grange, a substantial square stone house, standing in an extensive well-kept garden, he encountered a tall, good-looking lady in deep mourning. This was his widowed mother, and Tom Henderson was her only son. Her face brightened when she saw him, and she put out her hand when she met him, and laid it on his arm.
“My dear, how lucky that I should come upon you,” she said, smiling affectionately.
Young Henderson’s smile in return was a somewhat forced one, and her fond eyes instantly perceived this.
“Something is worrying you, Tom,” she said, quickly. “What is it?”
Tom did not speak; something was worrying him, more than worrying him, but it was not a thing he could exactly tell his mother.
She looked up fondly into his eyes.
“My dear,” she asked, “can I help you in anything? I am sure there is something wrong.”
“You are quite right,” he answered abruptly.
“What is it, Tom? Surely you can trust your mother.”
“Oh, I can’t tell you about it.”
He said this very impatiently, and Mrs. Henderson looked at him anxiously.
“Is it about some woman, Tom?” she said.
Tom replied by a sort of a groan.
“I wish you would marry, Tom,” continued Mrs. Henderson, earnestly. “Many mothers don’t wish their sons to marry because they say it takes them away from themselves, but I don’t feel this. Your happiness would be mine. Tom, a little bird has whispered to me that you run after a certain very pretty girl; is this true?”
“You mean May Churchill?” answered Tom Henderson; “well, I certainly do admire her very much.”
“And—are you engaged to her?”
“No; there are always worries in the way.”
“Not surely—”
“Mother, I may as well tell you that I have made a fool of myself, but I must get out of it.”
“But Tom—”
“There! don’t talk of it like a good old woman; I’ll get out of it, that I’m determined.”
Mrs. Henderson did not say anything more. She walked on with her hand through her son’s arm, feeling very anxious. Tom Henderson had been a wayward boy, and he was a wayward man, and his mother was conscious perhaps that she had spoilt her only child. She had heard a rumor—got one of those painful hints which friends do not scruple to give—about her son’s connection with Elsie Wray of the Wayside Inn. But she had never spoken of it to Tom. She was a delicate-minded woman, and extremely attached to him, and there were subjects on which Mrs. Henderson felt she could not speak to her boy.
The mother and son walked home together and then parted, Mrs. Henderson to see after some household arrangements, Tom to retire to his own room to write a letter to Elsie Wray.
Let us look over his shoulder as he sat, pen in hand, with his black brows knitted and his handsome face distorted with the angry passions in his heart. He began:
“Dear Elsie,” and then paused. He did not in truth know what to say. He knew he was acting shamefully, but he told himself it was folly to sacrifice the happiness of his whole life because a foolish girl had loved him too well.
Again he began “Dear Elsie,” on a fresh note-sheet, and this time continued his letter:
“Dear Elsie: Our interview of last night was very unsatisfactory, and I want to see you again, and I hope we will come to some lasting agreement. I am quite willing to come down handsomely for any supposed wrong I may have done you, and I hope you will act like a sensible girl and accept my proposition. Will you meet me to-night at nine o’clock, on the ridge above Fern Dene? It’s a quiet place, and we can have our talk out there without being interrupted as we were last night. There is always someone about near your house, seemingly. But do act sensibly, and don’t make a row about what can not be helped now.
“Yours sincerely,
“T. H.”
He finished this letter, and then put it in his pocket and walked to the stables, and gave it to his groom. This man was engaged rubbing down a horse when his master appeared, and he seemed quite accustomed to receive such missions.
“Take that over to Miss Wray, Jack,” said young Henderson; “make some excuse—have a pot of beer or something—but give it into her own hands, and no