Chapter 31

THE CONTRACT.

For nearly a week longer, Neil remained at Stoneleigh, growing more and more undecided as to his future course, and more and more in love with Bessie, whose evident depression of spirits after the departure of Jack Trevellian and Grey Jerrold had driven him nearly wild. All the better part of Neil's nature was in the ascendant now, and he was seriously debating the question whether it were not wiser to marry the woman he loved, and share his poverty with her, than to marry the woman he did not love, even though she had ten thousand a year. Yes, it was better, he decided at last, and one day when Archie had gone to Bangor and he was alone with Bessie, who sat by the window engaged in the very unpoetical occupation of darning her father's socks, he spoke his mind.

The storm, which was raging at Christmas, had ceased, and the winter sunshine came in at the window where Bessie was sitting, lighting up her hair and face with a halo which made Neil think of the Madonnas which had looked at him from the walls of the galleries in Rome.

"There!" she said, as she finished one sock, and removing from it the porcelain ball, held it up to view. "That is done, and it looks almost as good as new."

Then she took another from the basket, and adjusting the ball inside, began the darning process again, while Neil looked steadily at her. Had Grey Jerrold been there, he would have thought her the very personification of what a little housewifely wife should be, and would have admired the skill with which she wove back and forth, over and under, filling up the hole with a deftness which even his Aunt Hannah could not have excelled. But Neil saw only her soft, girlish beauty, and cared nothing for her deftness and thrift. In fact he was really rebelling hotly against the whole thing--the socks, the yarn, the porcelain ball, and more than all, the darning-needle she handled so skillfully. What had the future Mrs. Neil McPherson to do with such coarse things? he thought, as, forgetful of his mother's anger, he began:

"I say, Bessie, I wish you would stop that infernal weaving back and forth with that darning-needle, which looks so like an implement of warfare and makes me shudder every time you jab it into the wool. I want to talk to you."

"Talk on; I can listen and work too. I have neglected father's socks of late and have ever so many pairs to mend," Bessie said, pointing to the piled-up basket, without looking at the flushed, eager face bending close to her.

But when Neil took her hands in his, and removing from them the sock and darning-needle, said to her, "Bessie, I did not mean to tell you, at least not yet, but I cannot keep it any longer. I love you and want you for my wife," she looked up an instant, and then her eyes fell before the passionate face, and she cried:

"Oh, Neil! You are not in earnest! You do not mean what you say. You cannot want _me_. I am so very poor. I must take care of my father, and then--there is--there is--oh, Neil, I am sorry if it is wrong to say it--there is my mother!"

She put the whole hard facts before him at once, her poverty, her father, for whom she must always care, and her mother, the greatest obstacle of all.

"I know all that. Don't you suppose I thought it out before I spoke?" Neil said, drawing her closer to him as he continued: "I am going to tell you the whole truth about myself, and show you my very worst. I am a great, lazy, selfish fellow, and have never in my life done any one any good. I have lived for myself and my pleasure alone. I am not one quarter as good as Grey Jerrold, or even Jack Trevellian."

At the mention of Grey, Bessie gave a little start, for a thought of him seemed to cast a shadow over the sky, which for a moment had been very bright, if Neil really and truly loved her. But the shadow passed as Neil went on, rapidly:

"I never had any home training; that is, never met any opposition to my wishes. Everything bent to me until I came to believe myself supreme; but, Bessie, I know that there is in me the material for a man, something like Grey Jerrold. I speak of him because he represents to me the noblest man I ever knew, and I always feel my inferiority when I am with him, and show at my worst by contrast. You know what I mean. You felt his power when he was here; the tone of his voice; the way he put things; the indescribable something which makes him so popular everywhere, I don't know what it is. I would give the world if I possessed it. I have watched him many a time at Eton and at Oxford and elsewhere, when he was surrounded by a lot of London swells, young lords and sons of earls, who would cut me dead, but who took to the American at once and made him more than their equal. Once I asked him how he did it and if it were not an awful bore always to consider others before himself. I shall never forget the expression of his face as he hesitated a moment and seemed to be looking far off at something in the past. Then he said: 'Sometimes it is hard; but long ago, when I was a boy, I made a vow to live for others rather than myself, to try to make somebody happy every day with a kind word or act or look, and only think, if I live to a good old age, how many people's lives will have been a little sunnier because of me. Suppose I commenced this plan at fourteen and that I live to be seventy, which is not very old, it will make over twenty thousand, and that surely ought to atone for a great deal--don't you think so?--and in a way my life is a kind of atonement.' That is what he said, or the substance of it, and I have often thought of it and wondered what he meant by an atonement."

In his enthusiasm over Grey, Neil forgot for a moment what he had been saying to Bessie, who had listened intently, and who exclaimed:

"Twenty thousand people happier because of him. Oh, Neil, that is worth more than the crown of England I wish you--I wish we could be like him."

"You _are_ like him," Neil said, coming back to his original subject. "You make me think of him so much in your sweet forgetfulness of yourself and your thoughtfulness of others, and, Bessie, I am going to try to be like him, too, if you will help me, if you will be my wife, by and by, when I have made a man of myself, and am more worthy of you. Will you, Bessie, will you promise to be my little wife when I come to claim you?"

He had her face between his hands and was looking into her eyes where the tears were shining, as she said to him:

"Neil, you do not know what you ask, or all it involves. I cannot leave my father, and there is Blanche. You are as good as engaged to her; you said so in your letter."

"I know I wrote you so," Neil said, "because I wanted to fortify myself against doing just what I have done, but I shall never marry Blanche Trevellian; if you tell me no, I shall remain single forever; but you will not, Bessie. You will not destroy my last chance to be a man. You do love me, I am sure, and you will love me more when you know all I mean to do. I shall not separate you from your father. He shall live with us, and Anthony and Dorothy too; though not here at Stoneleigh, except it be in the summer when the roses are in bloom. Father has a small house in London, in Warwick Crescent; he will let us live there, and--and--"

Here Neil stopped, for he remembered his mother's threat of disinheritance if he should marry Bessie, and he knew she was capable of performing it and if she did how was he to live even in that small house in Warwick Crescent? But Bessie's eyes were upon him; Bessie's upturned face was between his hands, and poverty with her did not seem so very terrible. They could manage some way, but he would be frank with her, and, he continued, at last, "Bessie, I shall not deceive you, or pretend that mother will receive you at first, for she will not. She means me to marry Blanche, and will be very angry for a time, and perhaps refuse to give me my present allowance, so we may be very poor; but that I shall not mind if you are with me. Poverty will be sweet if shared with you, who, I know, are not afraid of it."

"No, Neil," Bessie said, getting her face free from his hands, "I am not afraid of poverty, and I do love you; but--"

"But what?" Neil cried, in alarm, as be caught her hands in his and held them fast, "You are not going to tell me no? Surely you are not?"

"No, Neil. I am going to tell you nothing as yet. I was only thinking, that if we are so poor, couldn't you do something? Couldn't you work?"

It was the same question put by the girl Daisy to the boy Archie years before in the old yew-shaded garden, and as the boy Archie had then answered the girl Daisy, so the man Neil now made reply:

"I am afraid not, my darling. It is not in the McPherson blood to work, and I dare not be the first to break the rule."

"Don't you think Grey Jerrold would work if he were poor?" Bessie asked, and Neil replied:

"Grey is an American, and that makes a difference; every body works there, and it does not matter."

"Then let us go to America and be Americans, too," Bessie said, but Neil only shook his head, and replied:

"I could never live in that half-civilized land of equality, where the future President may be buttoned up in the jacket of my bootblack. I am an out-and-out aristocrat and would rather be poor and be jostled by nobility than be rich and brush against Tom, Dick and Harry and have to bow to their wives."

Bessie gave a little sigh, for this was not at all like Grey Jerrold, whom Neil was going to imitate; but before she could speak, he continued:

"We shall pull through somehow in London, and in time mother will come round when she finds I am determined. So, Bessie, it is settled, and you promise to be my wife when I can fix things?"

He was taking his consent too much for granted, and Bessie did not like it, and said to him:

"No, Neil; it is not settled for sure. I can never be yours without your mother's sanction. Think what you would be taking upon yourself--poverty, father and me!"

"The _me_ would not be so very bad," Neil said, drawing her closely to him, and caressing her hair as he talked, advancing argument after argument why she should consent to a secret engagement, the greatest argument of all being the influence such an engagement would have over him, helping him in his new resolution to be a man after the Grey Jerrold order; for Grey's name was mentioned often in the strange plighting of vows, and when at last Bessie's consent was won to be Neil's wife as soon as his mother was reconciled, her mind was almost as full of Grey as it was of Neil, who, now that she was his, became the most tender and devoted lover during his remaining stay at Stoneleigh, and Bessie was happier than she had ever been in her life, though there was one drawback upon her happiness: she would like to have told her father, but Neil had said she must not, and she obeyed, wondering to herself if Grey would have bound her to secrecy.

Grey was a good deal mixed up in Bessie's thoughts after Neil was gone, and she often found herself thinking:

"More than twenty thousand happier because of him! Could any life be nobler than that, and why should not I imitate it?"

And then Bessie began the experiment of trying to make somebody happy every day; and the butcher's boy of whom she bought the meat, and the girl who brought the milk, and the man of whom she bought their bread, and the beggar woman who came to the door for cinders and cold bits, found an added graciousness of manner in the young girl who smiled so sweetly upon them and interested herself so kindly in their welfare, and who, in her limited sphere, was imitating Grey Jerrold, and trying to make a few people happier, even though she could never hope, like him, to number twenty thousand!