Chapter 18

A MAIDEN'S VOW

"A maiden's vow, old Calham spoke, Is lightly made and lightly broke."

As the cab rattled down the avenue, Winifred sank back against the cushions. She sat in the corner in a sort of daze, marking the glimmer of the electric lights, which seemed so many milestones in her life, as she passed them one after another. After all, it is experience which marks time, and in this day Winifred Anstice had tasted more of life than in many a year before. Crashing into her world of calm commonplace had fallen the dynamite bomb of an overwhelming emotion. Her present, with all its preoccupying trifles, lay in wrecks about her. For the future--it was too tumultuous to be faced.

She was like a person who has been walking in the darkness along a familiar road, and suddenly feels himself plunging over an unsuspected precipice. She was conscious of nothing but a gasping sense of dizziness--all control of herself and her life seemed passing out of her hands into those of another, and she scarcely knew whether to be glad or sorry. Was it only this afternoon that she had looked upon a marriage with Jonathan Flint as impossible? If she had thought so a few hours ago, why not now? Nothing had occurred since. No transcendent change had come over him or her--why should it all look so different to her now? Perhaps, she told herself, this mood too would pass like its precursor. She dared not feel sure of anything--she who had swung round the whole compass of feeling like a weather-vane before a thunder-storm.

These introspective reflections brought back irresistibly the feelings with which she had read Flint's letter, little dreaming that it was his,--the letter so full of wise and friendly counsel. She remembered how, as she read, she had been filled with a yearning desire to rise to the ideal her unknown counsellor had set before her, and filled too with a longing that Fate might send it in her way, to be something to him, to return in some measure the spiritual aid and comfort which she had received at his hands.

"Well," she told herself gloomily, "the opportunity had come, and this was how she had used it--not only by denying his petition,--that, of course, was inevitable, feeling as she did,--but by accusing him of selfishness, by insisting that he should accept her terms of friendship. _Friendship_, bah!--how stale and flat it sounded! Could she not have devised some newer way of wounding an honorable man who had offered her his heart?"

It seemed to her excited consciousness that she must appear to him a vain and empty coquette, eager to retain a homage for which she intended no return. When once he awoke to that view, his love would die out, for he was not a man to continue devotion where he had lost respect; and so it was all over, or as good as over, between her and him.

The cab lurched sharply across the tracks at Twenty-Third Street, jostling Winifred's flowers and fan out of her lap. The maid stooped to pick them up. As she returned them she caught a glimpse of the set look in the face of her mistress.

"Are you feelin' bad?" she asked.

"No, no, I am quite well, Maria, only a little tired--are we near home?"

"Yes'm, we've passed Gramercy Park, and there's the steeples of St. George's that you see from your windows."

"Yes, yes, I see. Here we are close at home. You may go to bed, Maria, after you have lighted the lamp in my room. I shall not need you to-night."

"Well, well," thought the maid, "something's the matter sure. I never knew no one more fussy about the unhooking of her gown. She can't do much herself, but she does know how things ought to be done, and that's what I calls a real lady."

"Winifred, my dear, is that you?" Professor Anstice called, as the rustle of his daughter's dress caught his ear on the stair.

"Oh, Papa, are you awake still?"

"_Still!_ Why it is not so very late!" said her father, as Winifred entered the study and threw herself into the deep upholstered chair beside the fire, which was just graying into ashes in the grate.

Her father was sitting in his cane-seated study-chair with a conglomeration of volumes piled about the table. His face, perhaps from the reflection of the green-shaded student-lamp, looked pale and worn. His shoulders, too, seemed to Winifred's abnormally quickened perception to have caught a new stoop. The fact forced itself upon her consciousness with a sudden, swift pang, that her father was growing old. She had never thought of age in connection with him before. To her he had been simply and sufficiently "my father," without thought of other relations or conditions; but now it rushed upon her with a wave of insistent remorse, that his life was slipping by, while she was doing so little for his happiness. A rather bare and dreary life it seemed to her now, as she contemplated its monotony; for Winifred had no appreciation of "the still air of delightful studies." Her world was peopled with live, active figures, always pushing forward, seeking, striving, loving. And her father had loved once. Yes, that too struck her now, almost with a shock of surprise. He, too, had asked for some one's love as ardently, perhaps, as Jonathan Flint for hers. More than that, he had won the love he sought. Won it and lost it again. Could it ever come to that for her? The thought smote her with an intolerable sharpness.

Mr. Anstice was a strange man to be the parent and guardian of such a girl as Winifred. The world for him was bounded by the walls of his study. Even his teaching seemed an interruption to the real business of his life, and he turned his back upon his class-room with a sensation of relief.

He was not a popular professor among the body of the students; but the unfailing courtesy of his manner, and the solidity of his scholarship, won the respect of the many, and the esteem and warm admiration of the few.

His bearing, in spite of the scholar's stoop, was marked by a certain distinction, and the lines of his worn face curiously suggested the fresh curves which marked his daughter's brow and cheek. The beauty of youth is an ivorytype; the beauty of age is an etching, bitten out by the burin and acid of thought, experience, and sorrow.

The prevailing mood with James Anstice was one of gentle weariness. He felt that his life was ended, and that the years were going on in a sort of monotonous anti-climax. Yet, in spite of this undertone of depression, his manner was responsive, genial, even gay at times, and he lived much in the reflected light of Winifred's youth and energy.

If it caused him some surprise that any one should want anything as much as Winifred wanted everything for which she cared at all, he treated her enthusiasms with amused toleration, and made as much effort to secure for her the successive desires of her heart as though they had assumed the same importance in his own mind as in hers.

To-night he forced himself away from his own train of thought with an effort, to throw himself into Winifred's evening experiences. He watched her for some time as she sat in silence, with head bent forward and gloved hands clasped about her knee.

"Well, little girl," he said at last, "you seem to have fallen into a brown study. Was the dinner so dull?"

"No, Papa, not dull exactly; rather brilliant in some ways."

"I understand--brilliant materially, dull spiritually, like the mantles those fellows wore in the Inferno--gilt on the outside, and lead within. 'Oh, everlastingly fatiguing mantle!' I am gladder than ever that I stayed at home."

"I am glad too, for I think you would have been bored, and when you are bored you make no concealment of the fact."

"Of course not,--why should I? If I seemed to be having a good time, I should be compelled to go through it again. No, society is organized for people under twenty-five. They really enjoy it. For the rest of the world it is a sham."

Winifred smiled absently.

"Who was there?" Professor Anstice asked at length, pushing away his books as if bidding them a reluctant good-night.

"Oh, no one whom you know, I think, except Mr. Flint."

"Flint? Does he go to such things?"

"Yes, and appears to find them sufficiently entertaining, though I fancy he must be decidedly over twenty-five. By the way," she added, with an elaborately careless aside, "what do you think of Mr. Flint, on the whole?"

"I think, for a clever man, he plays the worst game of whist I ever saw."

"Yes, yes," admitted Winifred, with light mockery in her tone; "but what do you think of him in lesser matters,--general character, for instance?"

The Professor looked at his daughter with a little quizzical sadness in his faded gray eyes. He began to perceive the drift of her banter.

"It would be difficult to state exactly what I think of him when you put it so broadly as that," he answered. "Flint's character is complex. He has in him the making of a fine man; but the question is, will it ever be made? He seems to me abnormally lacking in personal ambition,--does not seem to care whether he is heard of or not,--has a sort of contempt for the little neighborhood notorieties which give most men pleasure. It is as if he were taking a bird's-eye view of himself, and every one else, and they all looked so small that the trifling variations in prominence did not matter."

Winifred looked at her father in silent surprise. She had no idea that he had made such a study of the younger man. He paused for a moment; but meeting his daughter's absorbed gaze, he continued: "The thing which gives me most hope of Flint is his genuine devotion to truth. Positive or negative truth--it is all the same to him. Now, many a man is loyal to his convictions; but very few are loyal to their doubts. He will 'come into port greatly or sail with God the seas.' Fine line that, isn't it? The sound is quite majestic if you say it over aloud--'Come into port--'"

"But, Papa," interrupted Winifred a little impatiently, "you were talking of Mr. Flint."

"To be sure, so we were,--at least I was; but I should like to hear a little of your opinion of him. A woman's estimate of a man is always worth having, though not always worth heeding. You see too much in high lights and deep shadows, not enough by clear daylight; still, I should like to know how Flint strikes you. I remember at first you found him absolutely disagreeable."

"Yes, Papa."

"But of late you have seemed to change your mind, or at least to feel less prejudice against him."

"Yes, Papa."

A silence fell between them after this. At length Winifred rose and turned down the lights. Then she drew a low stool to the side of her father's chair, and sitting down by his knee began to rub her hand gently up and down over the broadcloth.

"Papa," she said after a while, "I haven't been very nice to you; have I?"

"Nonsense, child,--what put such an idea into your head? As if I had had any happiness in all these years since--since your mother died--except through my children!"

"Oh, yes, I know you have found your happiness in taking care of us, but I have found my happiness in being taken care of; and I have enjoyed having my own way and doing the things I liked, and now I would give--oh, so much!--if I had been different."

"What does this mean?" exclaimed Professor Anstice, anxiously fumbling about Winifred's wrist in the vain effort to find her pulse. "Are you ill? You have not had a hemorrhage or anything, have you?"

"Don't worry about me, dear! I shall live to plague you for many a year yet. I'm as well as can be, except for the mind ache." Here she gave a nervous little laugh. The Professor looked down at her, sitting there on the stool, her head drooping to the side as he remembered to have seen it years ago when she was a little chidden child. The waving hair hid her face from his sight,--all but the delicate oval of the cheek and the curve of the full, rounded chin.

"Winifred," he said gently, "I think you have something to tell me."

"Yes, I have, only I don't know how to begin."

"Is it, perhaps, about Mr. Flint?"

"Yes, about Mr. Flint," Winifred admitted.

"He has been asking you to marry him?"

"Yes, asking me to marry him," Winifred repeated, still like a child reciting her catechism.

"And you promised."

"No, I did not," Winifred answered with sudden energy; "I told him I never could, would, or should marry him,--that I would go on being friends with him as long as he liked, but on condition that he gave up the other idea entirely."

Professor Anstice reached out his thin white scholarly fingers and stroked the rebellious waves of his daughter's hair.

"Winifred," he said, "you are always acting on impulse. You never take time to consider anything, but jump and plunge like a broncho. Now let us talk this matter over calmly: I am afraid you have made a mistake--a serious mistake, my dear, though it may not be too late to remedy it."

"There is nothing to remedy," said Winifred, with a tremulous attempt at cheerfulness; "he asked me and I said 'No,' and he said he should never ask me again, and I said I hoped he wouldn't, or something like that, and so the matter ended; and I am always going to live with you and be good to you,--and you won't be sorry for that, will you?"

"I should be very sorry if it came about so. Listen, Winifred. Because you see me a delver in dusty old books, you think perhaps that I don't know what love is; but I tell you as I grow older it comes to fill a larger and larger part of the horizon, to seem perhaps the only reality. I don't mean just the love of a man for a woman, but the great throbbing bond of human affection and sympathy; and of all the kinds of affection, there is none that has the strength and toughness that belong to the love of husband and wife. I wish you to marry, Winifred,--I have always wished it,--only let it be to a true man, my dear,--let it be to a true man!"

"Father, he _is_ a true man," said Winifred, speaking low and with a timidity wholly new to her.

"I think so,--I earnestly believe it. He seems to me to have more ability, more strength, and more tenderness than he has shown yet. Some wrong ideas have twisted themselves persistently among the very fibres of his life and warped it; but it is not yet too late to tear them away."

"Some one else may do it," said Winifred, in exaggerated discouragement, "I let the opportunity slip by. He will never ask me again, and as for me--do you think I will ever go to any man with the offer of my love? Not if my heart broke for him!"

"He said he would never ask you again?"

"Yes, Papa; he said it twice."

"Well, if he said it twice fifty times, it was a lie, or would have been if he had not believed it himself at the time. Never fear but you will have a chance to tell him that you have changed your mind, and without any wound to your pride either."

"Oh, Papa!" cried Winifred, rising and throwing her arms about his neck, "you are such a comfort!"

The old clock on the landing of the stairway struck one.

"There, it is morning already," said her father. "Off to bed with you, else I shall have no one to pour out my cup of coffee to-morrow." As he spoke, he gently unclasped her arms from about his neck, but she would not go quite yet.

"If--if--all this should ever come about, are you quite sure you would be willing to have me leave you?"

"Quite sure, my dear. It is the natural thing, and what is natural must be right. Now, good-night."

Winifred wiped away the tears which had been hanging on the fringe of her eyelashes, and after a parting hug gathered up her wraps and swept away to her room. Her father watched her tenderly till the last trace of her gown had vanished up the stairs; then he closed the door softly, took a miniature from its case in the drawer, laid it on the table, and bowed his head on both arms above it.

"'Father and Mother both.' Yes, that was what I promised, and that is what I must be so far as I can, and may God help me!" he murmured.