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He looked in vain into the stalls for the butcher who had sold fresh meat twice a week, on market days, and he felt a genuine thrill of pleasure when he recognized the red bandana turban of old Aunt Lyddy, the ancient negro woman who had sold him gingerbread and fried fish, and told him weird tales of witchcraft and conjuration, in the old days when, as an idle boy, he had loafed about the market-house. He did not speak to her, however, or give her any sign of recognition.
When their paths converged, Warwick kept on down Front Street behind her, it having been already his intention to walk in this direction.
Warwick’s first glance had revealed the fact that the young woman was strikingly handsome, with a stately beauty seldom encountered. As he walked along behind her at a measured distance, he could not help noting the details that made up this pleasing impression, for his mind was singularly alive to beauty, in whatever embodiment. The girl’s figure, he perceived, was admirably proportioned; she was evidently at the period when the angles of childhood were rounding into the promising curves of adolescence. Her abundant hair, of a dark and glossy brown, was neatly plaited and coiled above an
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“A woman with such a figure,” thought Warwick, “ought to be able to face the world with the confidence of Phryne confronting her judges.”
“It must be Rena,” he murmured. “Who could have dreamed that she would blossom out like that? It must surely be Rena!”
The girl was beaming with gratified vanity. What woman would not find such praise sweet from almost any source, and how much more so from this great man, who, from his exalted station in the world, must surely know the things whereof he spoke! She believed every word of it; she knew it very well indeed, but wished to hear it repeated and itemized and emphasized.
Nothing but death can remove that stain, if it does not
follow us even beyond the grave. Here she must forever be—nobody! With me she might have got out into the world; with her beauty she might have made a good marriage; and, if I mistake not, she has sense as well as beauty.”
“She may go,” replied the mother brokenly. “I’ll not stand in her way—I’ve got sins enough to answer for already.”
Many years before, Warwick, when a lad of eighteen, had shaken the dust of the town from his feet, and with it, he fondly thought, the blight of his inheritance, and had achieved elsewhere a worthy career.
The girl’s eyes lighted up. She would not have gone if her mother had wished her to stay, but she would always have regarded this as the lost opportunity of her life.
But Mis’ Molly believed that she would never come back, except, like her brother, under cover of the night. She must lose her daughter as well as her son, and this should be the penance for her sin. That her children must expiate as well the sins of their fathers, who had sinned so lightly, after the manner of men, neither she nor they could foresee, since they could not read the future.
The beautiful young girl across the street could never be anything to him. But he had saved her life once, and had dreamed that he might render her again some signal service that might win her friendship, and convince her of his humble devotion. For Frank was not proud.
“Ef you ever wanter come home, an’ can’t git back no other way, jes’ let me know, an’ I’ll take my mule an’ my kyart an’ fetch you back, ef it’s from de een’ er de worl’.”
Of course a negro would drive the carriage, but that was different from riding with one in a cart.
W‘ite folks has deir troubles jes’ ez well ez black folks, an’ sometimes feels ’em mo’, ’cause dey ain’t ez use’ ter ’em.”
“It is a pity,” he murmured, with a sigh, “that men cannot select their mothers. My young friend John has builded, whether wisely or not, very well; but he has come back into the old life and carried away a part of it, and I fear that this addition will weaken the structure.”
Finding that the blow had drawn blood, the young man took out a red bandana handkerchief and tied it around his head, meantime letting his eye roam over the faces in the grand stand, as though in search of some one that he expected or hoped to find there.
Frank?
The beautiful girl seated by Warwick’s side accidentally let a little square of white lace-trimmed linen slip from her hand. It fluttered lightly over the railing, and, buoyed up by the air, settled slowly toward the lists. A young rider in the approaching rear rank saw the handkerchief fall, and darting swiftly forward, caught it on the point of his lance ere it touched the ground. He drew up his horse and made a movement as though to extend the handkerchief toward the lady, who was blushing profusely at the attention she had attracted by her carelessness. The rider hesitated a moment,
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“She has been away at school; she came only last night,”
If George were but masked and you were veiled, we should have a romantic situation,—you the mysterious damsel in distress, he the unknown champion.
“It will be your privilege, Sir George,” announced the judge, “as the chief reward of your valor, to select from the assembled beauty of Clarence the lady whom you wish to honor, to whom we will all do homage as the Queen of Love and Beauty.”
Returning upon his tracks, the knight of the crimson sash paused before the group where Warwick and his sister sat, and lowered the wreath thrice before the lady whose token he had won. “Oyez! Oyez!” cried the herald; “Sir George Tryon, the victor in the tournament, has chosen Miss Rowena Warwick as the Queen of Love and Beauty, and she will be crowned at the feast to-night and receive the devoirs of all true knights.”
Rena, for it was our Patesville acquaintance fresh from boarding-school, colored deeply at this frank and fervid flattery, and could only murmur an inarticulate reply. Her year of instruction, while distinctly improving her mind and manners, had scarcely prepared her for so sudden an elevation into a grade of society to which she had hitherto been a stranger.
You are the most envied woman in Clarence at this particular moment, and, unless I am mistaken, will be the most admired at the ball to-night.”
You have a lovely white waist.
A dozen women here would give a year off the latter end of life to be in your shoes to-night.”
“It is a dream,” she murmured sleepily, “only a dream. I am Cinderella before the clock has struck. Good-night, dear John.” “Good-night, Rowena.”
she thought that her brother must be wealthy, and she felt very proud of him and of her opportunity.
His feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,—he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars.
He had no fear that the family secret would ever be discovered,—he had taken his precautions too thoroughly, he thought, for that; and yet he could not but feel, at times, that
if peradventure—it was a conceivable hypothesis—it should become known, his fine social position would collapse like a house of cards. Because of this knowledge, which the world around him did not possess, he had felt now and then a certain sense of loneliness; and there was a measure of relief in having about him one who knew his past, and yet whose knowledge, because of their common interest, would not interfere with his present or jeopardize his future. For he had always been, in a figurative sense, a naturalized foreigner in the world of wide opportunity, and Rena was one of his old
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Mrs. Newberry played the part of the female friend, without whom no woman is ever launched successfully in a small and conservative society. Her brother’s standing gave her the right of social entry; the tournament opened wide the door, and Mrs. Newberry performed the ceremony of introduction.
The fiction of chivalry made man serve woman; the fact of human nature makes woman happiest when serving where she loves.
“I think you ought to know, George,” continued Warwick, without waiting for a reply to his question, “that my sister and I are not of an old family, or a rich family, or a distinguished family; that she can bring you nothing but herself; that we have no connections of which you could boast, and no relatives to whom we should be glad to introduce you. You must take us for ourselves alone—we are new people.” “My dear John,” replied the young man warmly, “there is a great deal of nonsense about families. If a man is noble and brave and strong, if a woman is beautiful and good and true, what
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“Ancestors, indeed, for Rowena! I will tell you a family secret, John, to prove how little I care for ancestors. My maternal great-great-grandfather, a hundred and fifty years ago, was hanged, drawn, and quartered for stealing cattle across the Scottish border. How is that for a pedigree? Behold in me the lineal descendant of a felon!”
He said he loved you for yourself, and would never ask you about your ancestry.”
“If you were Albert’s nurse,” he replied, with a joyous laugh, “he would have to find another within a week, for within a week we should be married.”
She would never need to tell him her secret now. It would make no difference with him, so far as she was concerned; and
Tryon found the subject a little tiresome, and the doctor’s enthusiasm not at all contagious. He could not possibly have been interested in a colored girl, under any circumstances, and he was engaged to be married to the most beautiful white woman on earth. To mention a negro woman in the same room where he was thinking of Rena seemed little short of profanation.
“It is the Walden woman’s daughter, as sure as fate! Her name is Rena. Her brother goes by the name of Warwick. She has come to visit her sick mother. My young client, Green’s relation, is her lover—is engaged to marry her—is in town, and is likely to meet her!”
“If he found her out, would he by any possibility marry her?” “It is not likely,” he answered himself. “If he made the discovery here, the facts would probably leak out in the town. It is something that a man might do in secret, but only a hero or a fool would do openly.”
Would the young man’s love turn to disgust and repulsion, or would it merely sink from the level of worship to that of desire?
The general belief was that they were just as inferior as before, and had, moreover, been spoiled by a disgusting assumption of equality, driven into their thick skulls by Yankee malignity bent upon humiliating a proud though vanquished foe.
There is certainly as much reason in my helping the girl as the boy, for being a woman, she is less able to help herself.”
“To a woman with marriageable daughters all roads lead to matrimony, the centre of a woman’s universe. All men must be sized up by their matrimonial availability. No, he isn’t married.”
It was while they were standing before the hotel, before alighting from the buggy, that Frank Fowler, passing on his cart, saw Tryon and set out as fast as he could to warn Mis’ Molly and her daughter of his presence in the town.
When Rena’s eyes fell upon the young man in the buggy, she saw a face as pale as death, with staring eyes, in which love, which once had reigned there, had now given place to astonishment and horror.
she fell fainting to the ground.
The full realization of the truth, which followed speedily, had for the moment reversed his mental attitude toward her, and love and yearning had given place to anger and disgust.
