Throckmorton Part 2

"No, I have not forgotten you, George Throckmorton. But you and I are widely apart. Between us is a great gulf, and war and sorrow."

A deep flush dyed Throckmorton's dark face. He was not prepared for this, but he could not all at once give up this friends.h.i.+p, the memory of which had lasted through all the years since his boyhood.

"The war is over," he said; "we can't be forever at war."

"It is enough for _you_ to say," she replied. "You have your son. Where is mine?"

"As well call me to account for the death of Abel. Dear Mrs. Temple, haven't you any recollection of the time when you were almost the only friend I had? I have few enough left, G.o.d knows."

Here General Temple came to the front. In his heart he was anxious to be friends with Throckmorton, and did not despair of obtaining Mrs.

Temple's permission eventually. He held out his hand solemnly to Throckmorton.

"_I_ can shake hands with you, George Throckmorton," he said, and then, turning to Mrs. Temple, "for the sake of what is past, my love, let us be friends with George Throckmorton."

Throckmorton, who in his life had met with few rebuffs, was cruelly wounded. In all those years he had cherished an ideal of womanly and motherly tenderness in Mrs. Temple, and she was the one person in his native county on whose friends.h.i.+p he counted. He looked down, indignant and abashed, and in the next moment looked up boldly and encountered Judith's soft, expressive eyes fixed on him so sympathetically that he involuntarily held out his hand, saying:

"You, at least, will shake hands with me."

Judith, who strove hard to bring her high spirit down to Mrs. Temple's yoke, did not always succeed. She held out her hand impulsively. The spectacle of this manly man, rebuffed with Mrs. Temple's strange power, touched her.

"And this," continued Throckmorton, out of whose face the dull red had not yet vanished, turning to Jacqueline, "must be a little one that I have not before seen.--Mrs. Temple, I can't force you to accept my friends.h.i.+p, but I want to a.s.sure you that nothing--nothing can ever make me forget your early kindness to me."

Mrs. Temple opened her lips once or twice before words came. Then she spoke.

"George Throckmorton, you think perhaps that, being a soldier, you know what war is. You do not. I, who sat at home and prayed and wept for four long years, for my husband and my son, and to whom only one came back, when I had sent forth two--_I_ know what it is. But G.o.d has willed it all. We must forgive. Here is my hand--and show me your son."

Throckmorton, whose knowledge of Mrs. Temple was intimate, despite that long stretch of years, knew what even this small compromise had cost her. He motioned to Jack, who was surveying the scene, surprised and rather angry, from a little distance. The young fellow came up, and Mrs.

Temple looked at him very hard, a film gathering in her eyes.

"I am glad you have such a son. Such was our son."

The carriage was now drawn up, and General Temple looked agonizingly at Mrs. Temple. He wanted her to invite Throckmorton to Barn Elms, but Mrs. Temple said not one word. Throckmorton, in perfect silence, helped the ladies into the carriage. He did not know whether to be gratified that Mrs. Temple had conceded so much, or mortified that she had conceded so little.

Jacqueline in the carriage gave him a friendly little nod. Judith leaned forward and bowed distinctly and politely. General Temple, holding his hat stiffly against his breast, remarked in his most grandiose manner: "As two men who have fought on opposing sides--as two generous enemies, my dear Throckmorton--I offer you my hand. I did my best against you in my humble way"--General Temple never did anything in a humble way in his life, and devoutly believed that the exploits of Temple's Brigade had materially influenced the result--"but, following the example of our immortal chieftain, Robert Lee, I say again, here is my hand."

A twinkle came into Throckmorton's eye. This was the same Beverley Temple of twenty-five years ago, only a little more magniloquent than ever and a little more under Mrs. Temple's thumb. Throckmorton, repressing a smile, shook hands cordially.

"Neither of us has any apologies to make, general," he said. "I think that ugly business is over for good. I feel more friendly toward my own unfortunate people now than ever before. Good-by."

The general then made a stately ascent into the carriage, banged the door, and rattled off.

Short as the scene had been, it made a deep impression upon Judith Temple. Throckmorton's dignity--the tender sentiment that he had cherished for his early friends--struck her forcibly. The very tones of his voice, his soldierly carriage, his dark, indomitable eye, were so impressed upon her imagination that, had she never seen him again, she would never have forgotten him. It was an instant and powerful attraction that had made her hold out her hand and smile at him.

Throckmorton, without trying the experiment of hunting up any more old friends, turned to walk home. It was a good four-mile stretch, and usually he stepped out at a smart gait that put Jack to his trumps to keep up with. But to-day he sauntered along so slowly, through the woods and fields with his hat over his eyes and his hands behind him, that Jack lost patience and struck off ahead, leaving Throckmorton alone, much to his relief.

Throckmorton wanted to think it all over. In his heart there was not one grain of resentment toward Mrs. Temple. He thought he understood the workings of her strong but simple nature perfectly well, and he did not doubt the ultimate goodness of her heart. And General Temple--Throckmorton had heard something of the general's magnificent incapacity during the war--the bare idea of General Temple as a commander made him laugh. How sweet were Mrs. Beverley's eyes, and how demure she looked when she dropped them at some particularly solemn absurdity of the clergyman, as if she were afraid somebody would see the tell-tale gleam in them! The little girl, though, was the most fascinating creature he had seen for long. How strangely and how pitifully altered was the congregation of Severn church from the merry prosperous country gentry he remembered so long ago! And how quiet, how still was life there! All his usual every-day life was shut out from him. Within the circle of that perfect repose nothing disquieting could come. He stopped in the country lane and listened. Nothing broke the solemn calm except the droning of the locusts in the September noon.

Warm as it was, there was a hint of autumn in the atmosphere.

Occasionally the clarion cry of a hawk circling in the blue air pierced the silence.

"This, then, is peace," said Throckmorton to himself, and thought of the year of idleness and repose before him. "Nothing ever happens here," he continued, thinking. "Even the tragedy of the war was at a distance. As Mrs. Temple says, the men went forth, and those that came back will go forth no more."

Then he began to think over the way in which the people had completely ignored him in the churchyard, where they stopped and gossiped with each other, eying him askance. He knew perfectly well the estimate they put upon him. He could have supplied the very word--"traitor." This made him feel a sort of bitterness, which he consoled with the reflection--

"Most men of principle have to suffer for those principles at some time or other."

By this time he was at his own grounds, and Sweeney's honest Irish face, glowing with indignation, was watching out for him.

"Be the powers," snorted Sweeney to the black cook, "the murtherin'

rebels took no more notice of the major than if he'd been an ould hat--an' he's a rale gintleman, fit ter dine with the Prisident, as he often has, an' all the g'yurls has been tryin' to hook him fur twinty years, bless their hearts, an' the major as hard as a stone to the dear things, every wan of 'em!"

CHAPTER III.

Within a week or two after, one afternoon Mrs. Kitty Sherrard made her appearance at Barn Elms, with a great project in hand. She meant to give a party.

Party-giving was Mrs. Sherrard's idiosyncrasy. According to the usual system in Virginia, during the lifetime of the late Mr. Sherrard, there was much frolicking, dancing, and hilarity at Turkey Thicket, the Sherrard place, and a corresponding narrowness of income and general behindhandedness. But since Mr. Sherrard's death Mrs. Sherrard, along with the unvarying and sublime confidence in her husband, dead or alive, that characterizes Virginia women, had yet entirely abandoned Mr.

Sherrard's methods. The mortgage on Turkey Thicket had been paid off, the whole place farmed on common-sense principles, and the debts declared inevitable by Mr. Sherrard carefully avoided. As a matter of fact, the only people in the county who paid their taxes promptly were the widows, who nevertheless continually lamented that they were deprived of the great industry, foresight, and business capacity of their defunct lords and masters. Mrs. Sherrard gave as many parties in Mr. Sherrard's lifetime as she did after his death; but, since that melancholy event, the parties were paid for, not charged on account.

When this startling information about the coming festivity was imparted, Jacqueline, who was sitting in her own low chair by the fire, gave a little jump.

"And," said Mrs. Sherrard, who was a courageous person, "I'll tell you what I am giving it for. It is to get the county people to meet George Throckmorton. Not a human being in the county has called on him, except Edmund Morford, and I fairly drove him to it. He began some of his long-winded explanations. 'Aunt Kitty,' he said, 'what am I, even though I be a minister of the gospel, that I should set myself up against the spirit of the community, which is against recognizing Throckmorton?'

'What are you, indeed, my dear boy,' I answered. 'I'm not urging you to go, because it's a matter of the slightest consequence what you do or what you don't, but merely for your own sake, because it is illiberal and unchristian of you not to go.' Now, Edmund is a good soul, for all his nonsense."

Mrs. Temple was horrified at this way of speaking of the young rector.

"And I've intimated to him that I'm about to make my will--I haven't the slightest notion of doing it for the next twenty years--but the mere hint always brings Edmund to terms, and so he went over to Millenbeck to call. He came back perfectly delighted. The house is charming, Throckmorton is a prince of hospitality, and I don't suppose poor Edmund ever was treated with so much consideration by a man of sense in his life before." Mrs. Temple groaned, but Mrs. Sherrard kept on, cutting her eye at Judith, who was the only person at Barn Elms that knew a joke when she saw it. Judith bent over her work, laughing. "I met Throckmorton in the road next day. 'So you dragooned the parson into calling on the Philistine,' he said. Of course I tried to deny it, after a fas.h.i.+on; but Throckmorton won't be humbugged--can't be, in fact--and I had to own up. 'You can't say Edmund's not a gentleman,' said I, 'and he is the most good-natured poor soul; and if he had broken his nose, or got cross-eyed in early youth, he really would have cut quite a respectable figure in the world.' 'That's true,' answered George, laughing, and looking so like he did long years ago, 'but you'll admit, Mrs. Sherrard, that he is too infernally handsome for his own good.'

'Decidedly,' said I."

"Katharine Sherrard," solemnly began Mrs. Temple, who habitually called Mrs. Sherrard Kitty, except at weddings and funerals, and upon occasions like the present, when her feelings were wrought up, "the way you talk about Edmund Morford is a grief and a sorrow to me. He is a clergyman of our church, and it is not becoming for women to deride the men of their own blood. Men must rule, Katharine Sherrard. It is so ordered by the divine law."

"Jane Temple," answered Mrs. Sherrard, "you may add by the human law, too; but some women--"

"Set both at naught," answered Mrs. Temple, piously and sweetly.

"They do, indeed," fervently responded Mrs. Sherrard, having in view General Temple's complete subjugation. "But now about the party. The general must come, of course. I wish I could persuade you."

"I have not been to a party since before the war, and now I shall never go to another one."

"But Judith and Jacqueline will come."

At this a deep flush rose in Judith's face.

"I don't go to parties, Mrs. Sherrard."

"I know; but you must come to this one."