Chapter 6

A DEAL IN FUTURES.

"Why do you fret so much about it?" asked Rube, sitting beside his promised wife about a week after the old man was laid to rest. "You loved your father, of course, but--"

"There's the point!" exclaimed Mell. "I did not love him--not as a child ought to love a parent. What did it matter that his looks were common and his speech rude? His thoughts were true, his motives good, his actions honest, and now I mourn the blindness which made me value him, not for what he was, but what he looked to be. In self-forgetfulness and sacrificing devotion to me he was sublime. He went in rags that I might dress above my station; he ate coarse food that I might be served with dainties; he worked as a slave that I might hold my hands in idleness; and how did I requite him? I was ashamed of him; I held him in contempt. Oh, oh! My, my!"

"Come, now," remonstrated Rube, trying to stem the torrent of this lachrymatory deluge, and wondering what had become of all the comforting phrases in the English language, that he could not put his tongue upon one of them. "Do try to calm yourself, dearest. I know you are exaggerating the true state of the case, as we are all prone to do in moments of self-upbraiding. I never saw you lacking in respect to him."

"There's a great many bad things in me you never saw," blubbered Mell, breaking out afresh.

"Dear, dear!" said Rube, "I never saw such grief as this!"

"You--are--disgusted, I know?"

"Not a bit of it!" declared Rube; "just the contrary! I fairly dote on the prospect of a wife who is going to cry hard and cut up dreadful when anything happens to a fellow. It kind of makes dying seem sort of easy. But, come, now; you've cried enough. Let me comfort you."

"No, no!" cried Mell, shrinking away from him. "If you only knew, you would not want to comfort me. I do not deserve a single kind word from you. I am unworthy your regard. I am a weak woman, and a wicked one. Oh, Rube! I have not treated you right. That day at the picnic I was angry with some one else; I was piqued; I did not feel as I made you think I felt. I--that is--"

Here Mell broke down completely in her disjointed arraignment of self, thoroughly disconcerted by the young man's change of countenance. His breath came quick, a dark cloud overspread his features, and he lost somewhat of his ruddy color.

"Do you mean, then, to say I was but a tool, and the whole thing a lie and a cheat?"

Rube's thoughts sped as directly to their mark, as the well-aimed arrow from the bent bow.

"Don't be so angry with me," prayed Mell, "please don't! You don't know how much I have suffered over it. I say, at that time I thought I cared for some one else, and so I ought not, in all fairness, to have encouraged you; but, it is only since father died, that I have been able to see things in their true light. I have had a false standard of character, a false measure of worth, a false conception of human aims and human achievement. Out of the wretchedness of sleepless hours I have heard the under-tones of truth: Knowledge is great, but how much greater is goodness without knowledge than knowledge without goodness!"

Rube made no reply. He left her side, and, crossing the room, folded his arms and looked moodily out of the window. He was very simple in nature, somewhat slow, sometimes stupid; but loyal and true--true in great things, and no less true in small ones, and as open as the day.

Mell dried her eyes, and glanced at him anxiously. The worst part of her duty was now over. She began already to feel relieved; she began already to know just how she was going to feel in a few minutes more, the possessor of a conscience, void of offence before God and man. There's nothing like it--a good conscience.

"This beats all!" soliloquized Rube, at the window; "I'll be hanged if there's enough solid space in a woman's mind to peg a man's hat on! Now, just as things have panned out all right for Devonhough, here's a tombstone in my own graveyard!"

"Ha!" thought Mell, hearing, considering.

"_Just as things have panned out all right for Devonhough._"

What did that mean? Her throbbing, panting, bursting heart knew only too well. Clara had come to a decision--she would marry Jerome, and not the Honorable Archibald.

Rube had scarcely ceased to speak when Mell raised her head.

"Rube!"

Very soft that call!

Unheeding, Rube still looked out of the window and into the past. That day at the picnic--that beautiful day, that day of days; a pure, white, luminous spot in memory's galaxy of fair and heavenly things--that day she had not felt as she had made him think she felt; hence, he had been a cat's-paw, a puppet; and she--oh, it could not be that Mell was a dissembler, a hypocrite, a serpent!

"Rube!"

A little louder was this call.

He turned, he obeyed--no more able to resist the beckoning hand, the dulcet voice, the luring glance, than you or I the spells of our own individual Sirens and Circes.

He came back to her, but stood in gloomy waiting, his brow so dark, his expression so hard and cold and stern, that the girl on the sofa felt herself wilting and withering before him, as a frail flower in a deadly blast.

She did not say a word.

She only used two eyes of blue, and two big tears which rolled out of them, and down upon her velvet cheek, and splash upon her little white hand, with crushing effect--not upon the hand, but the beholder.

"Mell," said he, hoarsely, "what is all this? What is the meaning of it? I do not see your drift, exactly. Do you wish to be free?"

"I thought that would be _your_ wish," floundered Mell, "perhaps, when you heard of that other--other fancy--you know, Rube; if I had not told you anything about it, and it had come afterwards to your knowledge, you would have thought I had not acted squarely towards you."

"So much, then, I understand; but what are your leanings now? Don't beat about the bush; speak out your wishes plainly. I am not a brute. I would release a woman at the very altar, if her inclinations leaned in another direction. Do you imagine I would care to marry a woman, however much I might love her, whose heart was occupied by another? Where would be the sanctity of such a marriage? I would be the worse defrauded man of the two. So, Melville, if there is any one you like better than you do me, speak it now. Tell me plainly, do you care for me--or some one else?"

Now, Mell, here's your chance; hasten to redeem your past. He has put the whole thing before you in a nutshell. You know just how he thinks and how he feels. After this, you dare not further betray a heart so noble, so forbearing, so true! Tell him, Mell; tell him, for your own sake; tell him, for his sake; tell him, for God's sake! Come, Mell, speak--speak quick! Don't wait a second, a single second! A second is a very little bit of time, the sixtieth part of one little minute; but, short as it is, if you hesitate, it will be long enough for you to remember that you may live to be a very old woman, and pass all your life in this old farm-house, utterly monotonous and wearisome; that you will be very lonely; that you will be very poor; that you will be very unhappy; that you will miss Rube's jewels and Rube's sugar plums and Rube's hourly devotions, to which you have now become so well accustomed;--short, but long enough to remember all this. So speak, Mell, quick! quick! The second is gone before Mell speaks.

It was a long second for Rube.

"O Mell, Mell! can it be that you care for him and not for me? At least, let _me_ hear it--let me hear the truth! I can bear anything better than this uncertainty."

Even this bitter cry brought forth no response. The dumbness of Dieffenbachia lay upon Mell's tongue.

"I see how it is," said Rube, turning to go.

"No, you don't!" exclaimed Mell, pulling him back. She was now desperate. Her tear-stained face broke into April sunshine. "I do not care for that other. How could you think so? Once I thought so myself; it was a delusion. A woman cannot love a selfish, tyrannical, overbearing creature like that!--not really, though she may think so for a time; but you, Rube, you are the quintessence of goodness! you are worth a dozen such men as he!"

"So it's me!" ejaculated Rube. "I am the lucky dog! I am the quintessence of goodness!"

He drew a long breath; he sank comfortably back into the old seat and into the old sense of security, and addressed himself with a joyous air and renewed enthusiasm to the old rôle of love-making.

Just like a man--the very man who thinks he has such a deep insight into dark matters, who thinks he knows so much about everything in the wide world, especially women!

"You are the most conscientious creature alive!" declared Rube, happier than ever, over a nearly lost treasure. "The whole amount of your offence seems to be that you once thought you cared--"

"Yes--that's it! I once thought so."

"But _I_ once thought that I cared for another girl. You would not, for that reason, wish to send me adrift, would you?"

"No. Only I wish you hadn't!"

"Just the way I feel about it."

He laughed uncontrollably.

"Pretty one! Soul of honor! What other girl would have opened her lips about such a trifle? And now I will not be put off another moment. Name the day which is to make me the happiest of men."

The day was named, and Mell really felt more composure of mind and less disquietude of spirit than she had known for many a day. She had eased, to some extent, her guilty conscience. She had shed many bitter, if unavailing, tears over Rube and her dead father; and now, convinced that she could not help herself, and determined to make the best of it, her mind drifted complacently over the long stretch of prosperous years before her, wherein she would be neither lonely, nor poor, nor unhappy, nor unloved; with sugar plums to her taste and jewels in quantity--for there are just two things in this world every young woman is sure to love--tinsel and taffy.

A healing balm now poured itself, so to speak, into her life and future prospects.

Of Jerome she saw no more. He had gone home before her father's funeral. He had seemingly passed out of her life forever. She never so much as mentioned his name, even to Rube, and she even thought of him less frequently than of yore. How could she be expected to think of him with the wedding trousseau demanding all her thoughts and time?

But one day Rube came to the farm-house, worried, and told Mell, of his own accord, that it was about Jerome and Clara. There had been a row between them.

The Honorable Archibald Pendergast, as she well knew, was no ordinary man--neither, it seemed, was he an ordinary lover. Notwithstanding his late rejection, he had been paying Clara such marked attentions in Washington that a society journal had publicly announced their engagement; whereupon Jerome had delivered his ultimatum--she would marry him at once or else they were quits.

"And I don't blame him," declared Rube, "not one bit! He stood as much at her hands, and stood it as long, as a man _can_ stand. I never could have taken the same from you."

Ah, Rube, we little know, any of us, just what we are taking at any hour in the day and at the hands of our own friends!

It is well for us that we do not.

"And now," inquired Mell, scarcely able to articulate, so great was her agitation, "what is Clara going to do?"

"She is going to marry the Honorable Archibald," replied Rube, adding, with the breezy disgust of a sunny temper: "It's a confounded shame! He's old enough for her father, and I don't believe she cares _that_ about him! But he's a great statesman, and there's a good prospect of his getting into the White House some of these days; and some women love social eminence better than they do their own souls! I am glad you are not one of that kind, Mell--you will be content with your planter husband, won't you, Mell?"

"I have written him to come to our wedding," pursued Rube. "I like him as well as ever--even more! He's a splendid fellow! I hope he will come, but I think it hardly probable."

Mell thought, too, it was hardly probable. After this, things went wrong again with Mell. Her trousseau ceased to occupy her time and attention; her wayward thoughts waged internecine strife in regions of turmoil and vain speculation.

Meanwhile, Jerome made no sign.

"Woe is me!" wept Mell. Much had she wept since her father died; but a dead man is not half so sore a subject of weeping as a living woman's unworthiness, when it falls under her own judgment.

"To do right is the only thing," moaned the unhappy girl--"to do right and give no heed to consequences. I have learned the lesson at last. It has been a hard one. Henceforth I am going to do right though I slay myself in the doing."

She prayed that night as she had never prayed in all her life before. She asked for divine help in doing right by Rube. And she arose from her knees strengthened to do her duty, as she then conceived it.