Joscelyn Cheshire Part 33

"I am glad. That is the right way to take his defeat. Your father is old and worn with annoyance, but Eustace is young enough to meet the struggle and win his way. Trust me; all will be well with him in the end," and Joscelyn's eyes were on Betty's window over the way.

"Edward Moore joins us in New York," Mary said, with a blush.

"And I shall not be there to play the part of bridesmaid! Well, I shall content myself with putting a handful of rice and an old shoe into your trunk."

After the Singletons were gone, Joscelyn was very lonely, for the only house at which a welcome always met her was Mistress Strudwick's.

"You may say what you please, Amanda Bryce, but that girl comes here when she likes, and stays as long as she pleases; and if there is anybody I'm gladder to see, I do not know who it is," said the stanch old lady.

Soundly she lectured Joscelyn at times, but the fault-finding always began and ended with a caress, so there was no sting in it. Here the girl sometimes met Betty; and the older woman, seeing the desire of their hearts s.h.i.+ning in their faces, encouraged them to be friends.

Here, too, Janet Cameron often came, and after the visit walked home openly with her arm in Joscelyn's, making merry little mouths at Mistress Bryce as they pa.s.sed her door. These visits and walks were Joscelyn's chief pleasure, and she stood sorely in need of recreation, for of late she was thinner and more irritable than her mother had ever seen her.

"You need a course of bitters," Mistress Strudwick said, opening her medicine-box one day.

"I have been taking such a course for eight years."

"Yes, Amanda Bryce's tongue drips not with honey! But I shall talk with your mother, and between us we will take you in hand and get the edge off your nerves." So Joscelyn dutifully yielded herself to her two physicians, who took much delight in the teas and tonics they brewed for her.

During all these autumn and winter weeks, Richard Clevering had lain in the field hospital at Yorktown, racked with pain and fever from the wound he got when--singing a song of the Carolina hills--his regiment stormed that gun-girt bastion on the British left, and the colonies were free!

Things would have gone better with him had he been content to lie still and let the bones knit; but he could not stay away from that last scene of the surrender, which made all the privations of the past worth while.

To miss that was to miss the joy of life, the glory of the fight, the crown of the conqueror; and so he had pretended to be much stronger than he was, and had gone to stand in his place when the British, with silent drums and cased banners, marched from their surrendered fortifications, and stacked arms between the martial lines of French and Continentals.

The sight compensated him for the pain the exertion entailed, so that he never complained when, afterwards, the surgeon shook his head gravely over the fever that flushed his veins. He had had his heart's desire; he would bear its results.

But in the early part of January, seeing a tedious recovery still ahead of him, and the hospital facilities being so limited, he asked to be sent home to be cared for by his own people. There would be no more fighting, and his stay was an unnecessary burden upon the army officials, whose hands were full trying to keep down the spirit of insurrection that was fermenting the camp over the delay in the soldiers' pay. To relieve the strain upon the moneyless army coffers, many of the men who had been invalided were allowed to return to their homes. Thus it was, that Joscelyn, unconscious of the extent of the hurt that had come to him--for he had written no particulars home--and also of his dismissal, answered a knock at her door one bleak January day, and gave a great cry at sight of the weary man leaning against the veranda railing, with an empty sleeve pinned helplessly to the bandaged arm beneath.

"Richard Clevering!"

"Ay, Richard come back with a crushed arm, but a sound heart to claim you, unworthy though he now knows himself to be of such a prize, Joscelyn, Cornwallis has struck his martial colours, will you surrender to me for love's dear sake?"

He had come into the hall and closed the swaying door against the wind, while she retreated backward until she stood close to the wall, her hands behind her.

"I owe you life and all the grat.i.tude that means, but it is out of my love for you, which has grown with every hour of my absence, that I ask this--will you come to me, Joscelyn?"

She did not speak, but slowly she shook her head, her eyes meeting his with a curious compa.s.sion. For one long minute he looked at her, searchingly, yearningly; then his outstretched arm fell to his side.

"Then is the war not over for me," he said sadly.

He went with her into the sitting-room, and, with the luxurious hearth-glow brightening his face and taking that deathly pallor out of it, the while her magnetic presence kindled a tempestuous fire in his veins, he told her the story of that final surrender and of his hurt, softening the former narrative as best he might, remembering how she had wished it otherwise. Then with a half-whimsical, half-pathetic touch upon his bandaged arm, he said:--

"The surgeon said that with time and care this would heal, but the accident has left me but one hand wherewith to begin that other campaign which means so much to me,--for if I win you not, I might as well have perished at the hands of the Redcoats."

As she listened, while the afternoon wore away, she was conscious of some change in him. Not that his tone showed less of resolution to achieve his purpose; it was rather an absence of the over-weening self-confidence which had so offended her in the past. Five years of warfare and baffled wooing had taught him something of self-distrust, something of humility which became him well. The empty sleeve and the emaciated, listless figure touched her with a quick pity, in such violent contrast were they to his former robust activity and superb proportions, so that she sighed and turned her face aside.

And he, on his part, was studying her, finding again, with a thrill of joy, the same saucy curves about her lips, the same glinting blue lights in her eyes that had held his heart captive in the past; and noting, too, the touch of womanly dignity which had in some wise supplanted the impetuosity of the old days. The girl of eighteen had become a woman of twenty-three since that day she had laughed down upon the Continentals marching away to Valley Forge. But there was not an attraction lost; rather was every charm ripened and perfected by the hallowing touches of growth and development. If he had loved her in the past, a thousand times more did he love her now in her splendid womanhood. Had she cared for Barry? Always the question was a stab; and with it now there came the first quick doubt of the final healing of his arm. Could she ever love him if he should be maimed like this forever?

Looking up suddenly, she found his eyes upon her face in such a wistful gaze that she flushed involuntarily, and a painful silence fell between them. Intuitively she felt that this was not the same Richard who had gone away, this earnest, tender man with not a trace of arrogance in his manner. Had he always been like this, they need not have quarrelled. She had been willing to overlook much had he only left her a right to her own opinions, and treated the views her father had taught her with respect.

"Do you know," she said, breaking the pause with a little nervous laugh, "that if you are to preserve the good will of your neighbours, you must stay away from me?"

"Then do I this minute forswear their friends.h.i.+p, for to stay from you would be to remain outside of Paradise. Only tell me one thing,--you did not hate me for the news I wrote you of Barry?"

"Nay, it was the one of your letters I felt drawn to answer."

He took her unresisting hand and kissed it softly. "If you loved him, I would I had died in his place."

And then again that silence fell between them, while at his heart was biting that most helpless of all jealousy--the jealousy of the dead.

Against a living rival one may contend with hope; but when that on which the heart is set has come to be but a memory, incapable of blunder or cruelty, the contest becomes useless, or pitifully unequal. Yearningly Richard's eyes studied the face before him, and yet he would not ask her the question that burned in his heart. Some day she would tell him the truth of her own accord; until then he must wait and suffer.

His return, she foresaw, was to be to her at once a relief and an embarra.s.sment, for she would not consent to his making public her share in his escape of the winter, lest it look like a plea on her part for a cessation of hostilities.

"I have held my own against them all these years; I will not ask for any terms, now that the end has come, and my side has gone down in defeat,"

she said.

"But, Joscelyn, think how they would adore you for such a service to their country! My information was most useful to General Greene."

"I did it not for sake of their country."

"Well, then, for sake of their countryman. They love me, if you do not."

He leaned toward her laughing, yet pleading; and she noted how honest and pleasant were his eyes. But she held to her point against all of his arguments; and so he was feign to yield except in regard to his mother; there he was firm.

"I never dreamed but that she knew, for the quick movements of the last campaign left no time for letters to reach me from home. Had I not thought you would tell her as soon as the British were well out of town, I should have asked a furlough, and come home to set you right. To think what you have suffered for saving my poor life!"

And so it was that half an hour later Mistress Clevering came hastily in without the ceremony of knocking, and taking Joscelyn in her arms,--to Mistress Ches.h.i.+re's amazement,--said many grateful and affectionate things.

"When I think of what you have done for us, I am bowed down with humiliation for the cruelty with which I have requited you. Oh, my dear, my dear! had you only told me and your mother at the time, things would have been very different."

"Yes," answered the girl, demurely, "so different that Master Clevering's life would have paid the penalty of his daring. Nay, it was a game at which only one could play with safety. You could have done naught but share my anxiety, and that were no help."

"And to think how I have scolded and blamed you for the quarrel between me and Ann," said her mother, tearfully; but Joscelyn's tender answer comforted her.

"And here comes Betty to make her peace with you, too," Aunt Clevering said, as the breathless girl entered.

"Oh, Betty and I have been friends these many weeks, as dear Mistress Strudwick can testify," Joscelyn said, putting her arm affectionately around Betty, who with a grateful cry had sprung to her side. And from the doorway, Richard thought he had never seen a more beautiful picture.

Thus was the breach that had yawned between the two families healed; and the sorest ache in Joscelyn's heart was cured as she witnessed the happiness of her mother who, with a firmness scarcely to be expected, had given up her old friend and held stanchly to her daughter, although she held that daughter to blame. It was touching to see her childish delight in the renewal of the old relations. A dozen times a day she was in and out of the two houses, for Richard's wound afforded her many pretexts for kindly ministrations. He never left his bed except to lie on the sofa by the window, for his strength seemed suddenly to have failed him after the sustained effort he had made to reach home. Often he wished Joscelyn would come in her mother's stead; but for her own reasons the girl kept her distance, so that sometimes he did not see her for days together. And every day that she stayed away the jealous pain bit deeper into his heart.

But one day she came of her own accord. There had been a knock and the sound of a man's voice at the door, followed by the maid making some excuse for Mistress Clevering; and presently, when all had grown silent, Betty came through the sitting-room with a face so white that Richard called out from where he lay to know what was the matter. But she did not stop to answer, and so he waited in a troubled doubt while the clock ticked off a slow twenty minutes. Then the door opened, and Joscelyn came straight up to his couch, a strange light of pleading in her eyes.

"Richard," she said, and his face brightened, for she had taken to calling him Master Clevering with a formality he hated. "Richard, if a man be true and honest and loves a woman, should he not have the chance to tell her so and win her?"

"Most a.s.suredly."

"And old feuds and differences of a former generation, with which he had nothing to do, should have no weight to hold him back?"

"Why--what mean you?"

"This; that even as you love me," and a brilliant colour dyed her cheeks at mention of it, "so does Eustace Singleton love Betty."