Jessamine Part 4

"Please do not order lights!" he said to Eunice who arose with him.

"No illumination can be preferable to the mountain moonlight. It is radiance clarified to purity."

It revealed to him, from his seat upon the music-stool, a picture he was artist enough to enjoy. Jessie's white dress and pillows were flecked by the irregular tracery of vine-shadows, but, through an opening in the leafy lattice, the moon poured a stream of light upon her face and bust, revealing even the gleam of the betrothal ring upon the hand supporting her cheek. Roy had opened the piano, and now stood at her feet in the shade, leaning against the wall--a dark, motionless sentinel, with folded arms and bowed head, listening to the music, or watchful of her.

The player essayed no scientific surprises; no juggling complication of fingers and keys. He began with a moonlight sonata, the original theme of which might have been rung by fairy hands upon the jessamine bells, "giving their delicious secrets out" under the weight of summer dew. From this he strayed into the "Midsummer Night's Dream,"--thence to the most beautiful of the musical paradoxes, "Songs Without Words," and there rested.

"More, please!" entreated Jessie, in dreamy delight.

Both hands were folded under her cheek now, and she had not moved since he finished the fairy sonata.

"This is Elysium!" she added, softly.

"But sing, Orrin--won't you?" asked Roy.

So long as his cousin's music brought his darling more pleasure than did conversation with himself, the generous fellow would contribute in this way to her gratification.

"You wouldn't have wondered at or blamed me, if you had ever heard him sing," said a broken-hearted wife to me once, in reviewing the circ.u.mstances of her early acquaintance with the man who had married, neglected, brutally ill-used, and finally deserted her. He was bully, ruffian, liar, cheat, and drunkard, but he sang like an angel, giving to words and music a depth and delicacy of expression that sounded to the listeners like heavenly inspiration. With the visage of a Caliban and the appet.i.tes of a satyr, he yet moved others to smiles, tears, high and holy aspirations, to solemn or wild enthusiasm, religious or patriotic. His musical genius was the talisman by which he made himself popular, courted, envied, pa.s.sionately beloved. Orrin Wyllys' voice, his exquisite taste in and knowledge of music would have won him social distinction had he been awkward in carriage, boorish in manner, and an ignoramus. There was not another amateur performer in his circle who could ever hope to equal him in effective and scientific execution. In the keeping of some--of many--the gift would have been a joy and a beneficence.

He had none more dangerous--and he knew it, lightly as he affected to esteem it.

If his first selection on this occasion harmonized less perfectly with the hush and chastened l.u.s.tre of the evening than his unsyllabled melodies had done, he was excusable since it developed the best tones of his voice. It was Mrs. Norton's sea lyric--"The Outward Bound." His auditors felt the rush of the favoring wind that had sprung up at dawn; heard the flap of the sails as they filled, and the creak of the line that strained at the anchor; saw the knot of parting friends; the close, tight hand-clasp, that helped force back the tears from eyes that would fain smile farewell.

"It is a fine old song," said Mr. Kirke. "I heard it many years ago.

I thank you, Mr. Wyllys, for reviving the memory."

"This generation has nothing that can compare worthily with the music of other days," replied Orrin's voice from his shaded corner.

"The true lover of the art must turn from the _potpourri_ of the modern opera, the unflavored whey of fas.h.i.+onable ballads, with the craving of him who, having tasted the mellow wine, refuses the new--for he saith, 'the old is better.'"

Jessie moved like one awaking from a trance--spoke with feigned lightness.

"'To weep is a woman's part!' I don't like that line of your song, Mr. Wyllys. If your 'Outward Bound' had admitted mothers, sisters, and wives to the parting banquet, they would have borne themselves as bravely as did their masculine comrades, and without the aid of the 'sparkling brimmer,' which is, I suppose, the poetical name for a potion known, hereabouts, as 'mountain dew' or 'Dutch courage.'

But if poets of the stronger s.e.x are to be believed, Niobe was the prototype woman."

"Your quarrel is with one of your own s.e.x, Miss Jessie; not with me or mine," was the cool rejoinder. "Mrs. Norton wrote the offensive line."

"There is something very like it in Kingsley's 'Three Fishers,'"

said Roy, to cover Jessie's trifling discomfiture. "Let us have that next."

Mr. Wyllys sang it, giving to the refrain a weary sadness, exceeding pathos. He knew how effective this was when he saw Jessie's hand steal up to her eyes. She did not plead for "more," or cavil at "Men must work and women must weep," when he left the instrument, and went back to the window where Eunice was sitting.

"If you and your father are not afraid of the dew, I should like to see the mountains in this light," he said, persuasively. "Dare you walk for a little while upon the porch?"

The three went out together.

"Don't stay here, Roy!" begged Jessie. "The view must be fine to-night. It is not fair that you should be tied to my side all the time. I feel as if I were defrauding your cousin of his share of your society."

"You must continue to upbraid yourself with the theft, then,"

answered Roy, reseating himself upon the ottoman, and drawing her head to his shoulder. "Or, rather, my pet, you must cease to imagine that I could prefer any society to yours, any scene to the delightful seclusion of this, our betrothal nook. Orrin knows all.

He has fine tact, and comprehends how precious to me is every hour pa.s.sed with you."

This was a plausible solution of the reserve which puzzled and pained her. Jessie tried to receive it in full faith, and forgot to watch the forms strolling back and forth before the two windows which opened upon the piazza. When the party broke up for the night, she extended her hand to Orrin in cousinly freedom.

"I mean to make my trial effort at sitting up, to-morrow," she said, blithely. "And we will have some music. Euna doesn't sing, but she will play our accompaniments, since Mr. Fordham disdains the piano."

"I threw a number of instrumental duets into my trunk yesterday,"

said Orrin to Miss Kirke. "I did not then know why I did it. I understand now that I had some intuition of coming enjoyment. May I bring them up to-morrow?"

Jessie had never been jealous of Eunice in her life. Her disposition was as generous as it was impetuous. She did not care, she said to herself, in reviewing the evening that sent her to her pillow tired but sleepless, that Mr. Wyllys had openly preferred her sister's companions.h.i.+p to hers; that he had scarcely noticed her proposal about the music in his desire to play with Eunice. But she was conscious of a discordant jar in memories that would else have been all brightness, whenever she reverted to her repeated efforts to scale the barriers of the strangerhood that ought not to have existed between them for a moment after he heard Roy's story--and the adroit rebuffs that had met each of these.

Eunice had helped her undress and seen her comfortably laid in bed, kissed her affectionately, and promised to be with her early in the morning. By the time the door was shut, Jessie had propped her head upon her crossed arms, and lay with wide-open eyes gazing through the unshuttered windows at the broad, straight brow of Windbeam, black and majestic in the mountain moonlight; listening to the stealthy whispers of the vine-leaves about the cas.e.m.e.nt, and living over the events of the day--an exciting one in her quiet life. Her thoughts of Roy were all of prideful joy. Her heart was very tender, very quiet in the glad humility that possessed her as she pondered upon the fact that he had chosen her--an undisciplined, unsophisticated country girl, to share the career she was sure would be n.o.ble and distinguished. Something more than usually fond in Eunice's silent caress at parting from her for the night, brought up a host of reminiscences of the motherly love with which this sister had guarded and nurtured her--the youngling of the household. Such a bright, sweet day her existence had been! In all her sky there was not a cloud, save this light vapor of discontent with herself that the introduction to Roy's relative--the first of his old friends whom she had ever met--should have been so unsatisfactory.

"His reserve actually increased as the hours went on," she reflected. "His manner was more free and cordial while I was telling him the story of old Davie Dundee than after Roy had explained to him what we are to one another. Perhaps he thinks an engaged young lady should be demure and dutiful, having no eyes or ears for any one except her betrothed. Perhaps it is as Roy says, and he fears to intrude upon our _tete-a-tetes_. I must convince him that we are not so selfish. Roy declares that his cousin approves heartily of our engagement--that he said many pleasant things of me, else I should fear that he had taken a dislike to me, from the beginning, that he thought Professor Fordham might and ought to have done better. I must make him like him for myself--not merely because I am his kinsman's choice."

From which soliloquy the reader will perceive that Mr. Wyllys had led off with a winning card.

CHAPTER IV.

A week had pa.s.sed since the Dundee Centennial, and life in the parsonage had been in outward aspect like the weather--still and sunny. The oldest Dundeeian had never known before so early and genial a season. Eunice's roses were in luxuriant bloom; the clover-meadows were pink and fragrant; the forests had burst into full leaf.a.ge; the strawberries upon the southern terrace of the kitchen-garden were swelling globes, white on the nether, scarlet upon the upper sides.

The ways of the household, always simple and methodical, were not otherwise now. Roy spent a couple of hours each forenoon with his betrothed. Orrin rarely made his appearance until two or three hours after dinner when the cousins came up from the hotel together, and did not return to their lodgings before ten o'clock at night. Mr.

Kirke had daily interviews with Mr. Wyllys in the course of the walks and drives they took in company, and brought home accounts of his suavity, wit, and varied information, which were endorsed by Eunice, which Jessie heard with growing bewilderment at the chance or purpose that withheld her from partic.i.p.ation in what was freely enjoyed by her father and sister. Even their music practice had not melted the ice that lay, an impa.s.sive ma.s.s, just beneath the surface of his deportment whenever he approached or addressed her. Her liveliest sallies and most friendly overtures, met with a response, ready and civil, indeed, but so unlike the gentle courtesy, the kindliness and graceful deference of his behavior to Eunice that nothing but a spirit determined and unsuspicious of evil as was our heroine's could have kept her to her resolve to win his friends.h.i.+p.

Roy found her very charming under the light veil of pensiveness this secret solicitude cast over her. She never intimated to him that his kinsman had not met her expectation in every respect. She was thankful, instead, that her betrothed did not see for himself that all was not right between them. Some day, when the frost was quite dispelled, they would laugh over it together--over her fears, her innocent stratagems for the accomplishment of her object, Orrin's stateliness, and Roy's blindness to her perturbation. She had patience and hope. She would await the vanishment of the mist, pa.s.sing content, meanwhile, with the heart-riches that were hers beyond peradventure. She had not heard of the German University scheme. It was unlike Roy Fordham to hang back from making a revelation which must come in the end, which delays could not soften, and which could cause no more distress now than if it were withheld until the close of his vacation. His judgment said that Jessie would better endure the prospect of the separation while he was with her, to lead her thoughts to the great and manifest advantages that would accrue to him from the year of foreign study, and--overleaping the gulf of absence--to paint the delight of re-union. Mr. Kirke represented that Jessie was a girl of sense and strength; that she would be better pleased to be confided in, and consulted as his future wife, than be blinded and petted as a child; and Roy, acquiescing in this opinion, still put off the evil hour.

Was it loving consideration for her--or presentiment--that struck him with dumbness?

The lovers sat on the piazza, one afternoon, just after the sunset repast. Jessie's "trial effort" had been made with ease that augured rapid recovery, but she was forbidden to walk without a.s.sistance, or to bear her whole weight upon the injured foot.

"While I feel strong enough to run a race with you down to the mill," she said, pointing to a venerable building, a quarter of a mile distant. "You can form no idea of the perversity of the restless thing that used to be a manageable member, when I had leave to walk, or sit still as I liked. I have a terrific attack of the fidgets!"

"Penalty of insubordination--a return to the lounge and oriel-window!" smiled Roy, in warning.

"That would be no punishment at all! When I am strong and active again I mean often to play helpless, upon that dear old lounge, to lie within the window and dream. I love it!"

Her voice sank in an intonation of ineffable tenderness that went to Roy's heart in a pang, not a thrill. This evening he meant to tell her that for many months she must sit alone in what he had named their "betrothal-nook;" that the year they had agreed upon as the period of their engagement must be pa.s.sed apart, the one from the other. He had made up his mind to another thing. If she asked the sacrifice at his hands, he would abandon the cherished hope of years, the fruition of which seemed now so near, and she should never guess the extent of his self-denial. She was so dear to him!

this incarnation of frolic, pa.s.sion, and of fancies--gay, graceful, as whimsical as various--but all beautiful to him; she, whose eyes deepened and softened and glowed with the tender cadence of those three words--"I _love_ it!" He had never succeeded in telling Orrin why he loved her. His spoken a.n.a.lysis of her character was cold and imperfect. Had Orrin uttered aloud his unflattering, "pert Amaryllis," Roy would have resented the epithet warmly, yet acknowledged, secretly, that his own portrait of her was hardly more like the reality. He could not describe her trait by trait, feature by feature. But for himself, he knew that she was the embodied glory of his life; that every ray that kept his heart warm and bright with a very summer of gladness, could be traced to her,--her love, and the influence the consciousness of this had upon his thoughts of the present, and dreams of days to come.

"The oriel is enchanted ground to me. We will build one like it, in our own home, and cover it with jessamine and wisteria," he said, noting, with loving amus.e.m.e.nt, the crimson flush that always bathed her face at direct allusions to their marriage. "Orrin shall sketch it for me. He is a universal genius, and his taste is marvellous.

His bachelor apartments are a notable exception to any others I ever saw. They are furnished _almost_ as well, kept almost as neatly, as if he were married."

"Isn't he a bit of a Sybarite?" queried Jessie, abruptly. "If he has a fault--or, no! you wouldn't own that he has--but, isn't his foible a love of luxury--of comfort, if you prefer to call it so--bodily and mental?"

"He is certainly not indolent. I know no other man who will work more persistently, although quietly, to gain a coveted end. And if he loves the ease of the flesh, why so do we all--don't we? His philosophy teaches that it is folly for one to be miserable, when he can as readily be happy and comfortable. His has been a prosperous life, thus far. He has known little of sorrow or trial. Should these come, they will ripen, not sour him, for the original material is good. I am the more anxious that you should know and appreciate him because--"

The gate swung open to admit a visitor--a farmer's lad, in whose attempts at self-education the young professor took a lively interest.