A Book o' Nine Tales Part 4

He moved uneasily where he stood in the darkness; then he took a stride forward and sat down beside her. They were silent a moment, his eyes fixed upon the first far sign of dawn, while hers searched the gloom for his features.

"Columbine," he began, at length, in a voice of strange softness, "it would have been better for us both if I had never come here."

"No, no," was her eager reply; "I cannot have you say that. You have put savor into my life that was so vapid before."

"But a bitter savor," he said.

"Bitter, yes," Columbine returned in a voice which, though low and restrained, betrayed the fierceness of her excitement. "Bitter as death; but sweet too, sweet as--"

She left the sentence unfinished. Below on the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sionately 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+ning, 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'oeil_.

Little that he recalled was of a nature to change the conclusions he had formed of his circ.u.mstances, 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 const.i.tution, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 a.s.sure you; though one of my ancestors was tried for witchcraft at Salem. Cousin Tom sent me this advertis.e.m.e.nt, and I knew at once that it must be you."

The advertis.e.m.e.nt 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."

Interlude First

AN EPISODE IN MASK.

AN EPISODE IN MASK.

[_Scene:--A balcony opening by a wide, curtained window from a ball-room in which a masquerade is in progress. Two maskers, the lady dressed as a peasant girl of Britany and her companion as a brigand, come out. The curtains fall behind them so that they are hidden from those within._]

_He._ You waltz divinely, mademoiselle.

_She._ Thank you. So I have been told before, but I find that it depends entirely upon my partner.

_He._ You flatter me. Will you sit down?

_She._ Thank you. How glad one is when a ball is over. It is almost worth enduring it all, just to experience the relief of getting through with it.

_He._ What a world-weary sentiment for one so young and doubtless so fair.

_She._ Oh, everybody is young in a mask, and by benefit of the same doubt, I suppose, everybody is fair as well.

_He._ It were easy in the present case to settle all doubts by dropping the mask.

_She._ No, thank you. The doubt does not trouble me, so why should I take pains to dispel it? Say I am five hundred; I feel it.

_He._ What indifference; and in one who waltzes so well, too. Will you not give me another turn?

_She._ Pardon me. I am tired.

_He._ And you can resist music with such a sound of the sea in it?

_She._ It is not melancholy enough for the sea.

_He._ Is the sea so solemn to you, then?

_She._ Inexpressibly. It is just that--solemn. It is too sad for anger, and too great and grave for repining; it is as awful as fate.