CHAPTER XV.

A DISCLOSURE.

The day following that on which Reynolds received his wound brought letters to Moreton from his home in England, with intelligence of the sudden death of his father, and a request for him to come at once. This summons was so urgent and peremptory that nothing short of immediate departure could be thought of. So he went; but not without Cordelia's promise to become his wife, and not before he had reached a full understanding with Mr. Noble on the subject. It was hard for him to break away from the sweet meshes in which he was entangled, and hard for him to leave Reynolds lying there pale and emaciated, with little more than the breath of life in him; but he could not stay. He promised to come back within two months, little thinking at the time that he would never see Birmingham again, or at best for some years to come. But so it was. When he reached England he found that the best interests of his father's estate required the sale of the American property, and that he would have to give his entire attention to the home affairs.

Soon after Moreton's departure Mr. Noble, following the fashion of thrifty Americans, seized upon a most favorable offer and changed his place of abode to New York City, where he became the chief of a strong banking establishment in which he had hitherto held a subordinate interest. So that by the time that Reynolds was beginning to gather strength and to forge well past the point of danger from his hurt, he was left alone with the DeKay household. No invalid ever had more careful nursing or had thrown around him more charming influences. General DeKay gave his entire time and attention to ministering to the needs of his guest, appearing to feel that, in some way, as a host, he had been careless and thus to blame for the almost fatal misfortune to one of his party. He had formed a great liking for Reynolds, beginning no doubt with the young man's excellent shooting in the first day's sport, and made stronger by the manly qualities and magnetic influence he possessed in a marked degree; and this liking shaped itself during Reynolds' illness into an attachment very rarely engendered between men.

Mrs. Ransom, after the first great shock of the adventure had spent its force, exhibited a quiet courage and fortitude in strong contrast to her girlish weakness up at the ruin. She was tireless in her efforts, hopeful, even when the doctors doubted, and cheerful when every one else appeared ready to despair. She seemed to rely, with perfect confidence, on Reynolds' power to overcome the effect of the hurt, and when his enormous vitality began to assert itself, she went about the house with a gentle smile on her lips and a serene light in her beautiful eyes that told how her heart rejoiced. To know that he was under the same roof with her and that he loved her and that he was getting well, filled her with a contentment little short of perfect happiness. She was not an intellectual woman, as the phrase goes; she knew little of the world's philosophies and sophistries, but she was a true woman, full of feminine sentiment, cleverness and earnestness: shy, wary, elusive, and yet outright and artless, at times, as any child. Her beauty was of that rarer Southern type which is the opposite, in most features, of the fiery, passionate, voluptuous, tropical model which has been unjustly copied into art and literature as the representative one.

Beauty that shrinks from self-advertisement and delights in blooming in a sheltered place where the light is never over-strong, secretes such essence and fragrance, takes on such modest and delicate color, and holds about it an atmosphere so subtly individual, that it is not within the power of brush or pen to portray it so easily and effectually as it may that other and coarser and possibly more vital sort. It is this beauty that a pink ribbon to-day or a bunch of violets to-morrow, or any other simple bit of adornment, seems so perfectly suited to as to appear a part of the wearer. If Agnes Ransom was rather below the best womanly stature, the casual observer would not have noticed it, for her bearing was high and her development strikingly balanced, or rather, so evenly balanced as not to be striking, and her movements had the smoothness and rhythm of a perfect lyric. She was a woman whose love would be of lasting value to a true man, and to love whom would generate nothing lawless or short-lived in the masculine nature. If Cleopatra stands as one type of eastern beauty and passion, Ruth stands as another. A woman like Agnes Ransom may be taken as representing very fairly a certain class of Southern women who carry about with them, even in old age, a girlishness and simplicity, combined with a shyness and exclusiveness often mistaken for either prudery or unfriendliness. Plantation life is, to an extent, a lonely one in a climate where it is possible and pleasing to spend much time out of doors, and where all the influences of out-door nature tend to generate repose. One can not but observe what seems to be the effect of these influences in determining the physical and mental contour of the Southern girl. She is slender, well developed, lithe, graceful, rather inclined to repose, not strikingly intellectual, has strong domestic inclinations and bears about with her an air of provincial innocency and naïveté that has a marked flavor of the isolation and the freedom of the plantation. Mrs. Ransom had been very little in city society; a winter in New Orleans and a few visits to Savannah limiting her experience beyond that obtained from a residence in the dreamy, isolated little old place of her birth, Pensacola. She was not a Catholic, but the rudiments of her education had been obtained in a convent, and something of that demure quietness and quaintness of manner characteristic of the nun had remained with her. No doubt her short and trying married experience had modified her charms of person and character to an interesting extent, adding an inexpressible value to her beauty. A trace of lingering sadness, slight but always present, gave a mild emphasis to the purity of her face and the low music of her voice. Such a woman could not fail to touch the heart of a fervid and passionate man like Reynolds, whose whole nature had been introverted for years, and whose life had been so long repressed and stagnant.

During the half delirium of his fever, while the inflammation of his wound was at its worst, he lay and watched her come and go, his heated vision making an angel of her about whose ethereally lovely form halos and rainbow colors played fantastic tricks. Sometimes the apparition was double, and then one of the angels took the form of poor little Milly White, whose haunting, hungry face flashed with a heavenly light. But as he grew stronger and the fever left him, it was Agnes Ransom, the pale, sweet, earnest little woman, that controlled his every thought. He was content to lie there and patiently wait on nature's slow work so long as she hovered near. He felt securely fixed in her love. Every word, that in the stress of agony, she had uttered up there in the ruin, lay like some divine germ in his heart, growing and strengthening with every moment. He did not seek to have her say more and he said little himself. When she fetched flowers from the out-door conservatory, grand cream-white and blush camellias, roses, jasmine and violets, and arranged them on the odd little mahogany table by his bedside, he would whisper some tender phrase of thanks and love, and then she would sit by the window and read aloud to him some forgotten romance, such as is to be found in every ancient Southern library. Happy invalid! to have such balm for his wound! And so the days of his convalescence drew by, not in pain and fretfulness and impatience, but freighted with the richest gifts of love. He was like one in some favored nook of fairy land, realizing the tenderest visions of dreams.

One day, near the first of March, when he had grown able to sit propped up on a sofa by a window, whence he could look out over the broad landscape to where the sky came down to the tufted woods, or turn his eyes upon short silvery bits of the river, he said to her:

"I shall soon be able to go away. I feel my strength coming back with every breath."

She looked up from the needlework that she chanced just then to have in hand, and, with one of her slow, sweet smiles, shook her head.

"You must not begin to hurry. You must be patient, ever so patient. A moment of haste might cause a month of trouble. You can not afford to run any risks."

"Oh, I am patient," he replied. "I really find myself dreading to get well, selfish wretch that I am. Do you observe that I never take into consideration the immense trouble I am causing all of you? I think of nothing but the charmed life I am living--the sweet comforts I am receiving."

"I really believe you are getting well," she said. "When you talk in that strain I know you are but trying to hide a longing for your mountain air and the freedom of your hermitage."

"You do me wrong," he responded, with an earnest resonance in his voice. "I am so content to be as I am that when I go to sleep I do not even dream of being well."

"I am glad of it, for the doctor says that a quiet mind is the best salve for a healing wound."

"You had better not convince me that the doctor is right, for I might be tempted to get restless in order to prolong my period of delicious convalescence. Beware, if you don't want me lolling in easy chairs or propped on cushions and pillows for you to minister to all the season."

"Oh, I shall know it if you begin to take on the air of a professional invalid, and shall discharge you at once," she exclaimed, with a light laugh. "You won't be interesting as a--a sham! I hate shams and deceits and hidden things of every sort."

He looked at her with such a sudden, though barely noticeable change of expression in his eyes, that her quick intuition told her of some serious thought that had leaped, unbidden and unwelcome, into his mind.

"Hidden things," he said, with a peculiar smile. "Hidden things are often much better hidden than disclosed, and it is a mercy to the world that secretiveness is one of the strongest elements of human nature."

"Perhaps so," she said, growing grave and thoughtful. "But it would be so much better if there were never any need to exercise one's secretive faculties."

"Oh, a dormant faculty would be contrary to the economy of nature. Even confession catches a precious fragrance from the transgression long hidden away. Conscience would not even be ornamental, much less useful, if it bore no treasure of sins known to it only." He spoke in an airy, idle manner, but there went with his tones a ring of something not quite pleasing.

"You shock me," she exclaimed, in perfect earnestness, a cloud gathering in her eyes. "I hope you do not believe in such ugly and dangerous doctrines."

Immediately he gathered in his straying thoughts and crushed down the memory that was nagging at his consciousness. He felt with sudden clearness how easily he might turn away from him the confiding earnestness of this sensitive woman, and attract from her instead the interest born of a doubtful sort of fascination.

"I don't believe in them," he smilingly answered. "I was merely giving rein to an idle whim of the moment. On the contrary, I believe in perfect frankness in all things. Confession and forgiveness are together the safety-valve of society, as they are chief among the Christian virtues."

"Yes," she said, with a sort of relief in her tone. "There is as much to ask as to grant in that law. I could not quite respect myself if I should deceive any one, and I should feel it a triumph of duty over the strongest bias of my nature if I should thoroughly forgive one who had willfully deceived me."

"But you would forgive such an one," he hastily exclaimed, looking almost eagerly into her eyes.

"I should feel it incumbent upon me to try with all my might," she responded.

"One who would deceive you in a matter of any moment," he observed, with a warmth and vehemence that fairly startled her, "would deserve never to know forgiveness. He would be a monster outside the limitations of the Christian code."

"You shouldn't say that," she replied, a pink spot appearing on either cheek. "It would be a great deal worse to deceive some one more ignorant and much weaker than I. I have had many opportunities, denied to a large number of young women. I ought to know better how to evade the evils of falsehood and deceit."

Reynolds did not speak for some minutes. A swell of the fragrant south wind came through the window, and the first mocking bird of the season was singing in a magnolia tree at the further angle of the house. The drowsy charm of spring's earliest stirrings hovered in the sky, the air, the far-spreading fields and the shimmering glimpses of water. Something like the warning of a distant, scarcely audible voice was ringing in his ears. Below his dreamy happiness he could feel the beginnings of a vague uneasiness.

"I know, I know," he presently said, and he did not realize the almost brutal directness of his words, "yours was a bitter and burning disappointment. You deserved every thing that you hoped for, nothing that you received."

Her face grew pale and flushed at once, so that the spot on either cheek shone like carmine on a milk-white ground. She looked helplessly at him with her lips slightly parted and her eyes beaming, as if through a haze.

"Oh, I have pained you!" he exclaimed, with such a penitent and sorrowful intonation that she made a weak effort to smile. "Forgive me," he went on rapidly. "I seem in an unfortunate groove to-day. You know I would not wound you for the world."

"It relieves me that you have said what you have," she replied, after a pause, "for it tells me that you know my past. I wanted you to know, and I could not tell you. I did not see how I ever could begin or how----"

"Let it pass, let it go by like the wind," he murmured; "the future is all ours, we will make it as pure and lovely as the sky yonder, won't we, love?"

She crossed her hands in her lap and smiled on him with tears in her eyes. How grand and beautiful he appeared to her, reclining there, with his stalwart limbs outstretched and his manly face beaming with love. It was a quick, uncontrollable impulse that caused her to say, with a tender tremor in her voice:

"I wanted you to know that I loved him and that if he were alive now I would still love him, notwithstanding all that has happened."

"Yes, yes, that is all right, all right," he quickly responded. "It is sweet of you to feel so; but he is--he is not alive, you know, and--"

"Sometimes I have dreamed that it is not true--that he is not dead, but may be living yet. I never could get the particulars, the country was in such turmoil and he was so far away. Somehow the thought has haunted me that some day he will come back."

A strange grim look settled on Reynolds' face.

"He will never come back," he said.

"No," she replied, "I know he will not. It is foolish for me to allow the thought to enter my mind, but it will, and I can not drive it out."

"You must, Agnes, you must," he exclaimed with a rush of passion, "for my sake, love, for my sake."

She sat for a moment in silence, and then, as the tears welled up afresh in her tender eyes, she replied:

"You know how gladly I would, but I can not. It grows upon me since--since I have known you, and it will not be banished. Sometimes I find myself actually going to the door to look--"

"Hush! Oh, Agnes, I can not bear it," he cried, his face growing pale with extreme excitement. "My God! I shall have to tell you all."

"Tell me all?" she plaintively, inquiringly murmured, looking wonderingly at him, for something in his voice, his face, his manner had given to his words a mysterious power.

"Yes, I will tell you, though it drive me from you forever. I see that I must, that it is my duty." He paused and hesitated. "I know," he went on, "that I am rushing into the dark, but I trust you, Agnes, and I know you will do right--you will do no hasty thing. Remember, oh, remember how I love you."

"I can not understand--what is it you mean?--what--"

"No, you can not understand, but you will; it requires but a sentence." Again he faltered, and with his eyes fixed upon hers in a way that almost terrified her, seemed to be rapidly choosing his words before continuing.

"I am the man who fought with your husband, and--"

"No, no, no!" she exclaimed, holding her hands out toward him, her face ghastly.

"Yes," he resumed, "yes, it is so. He was to blame. He forced it upon me. I could not escape him. He would have killed me."

She let her hand fall in her lap and sat in a helpless, horrified attitude.

"You will hate me now, Agnes, but I have disclosed my secret and my dreadful duty is done. For the sake of my great love, say no bitter word."

She did not speak. How could she? Such a disclosure coming so suddenly and unexpectedly and from his lips, crushed her into that silence which is next to the silence of death.

He trembled now and his voice broke as he said:

"Do you see how hard it is? I refused to fight with him, because I did not believe in the practice of dueling, and then he forced an encounter in the street of San Antonio. I did every thing to avoid him, but I could not. I had to--to do what I did. Can you comprehend, Agnes?"

Still she remained speechless, motionless, bowed down and awfully pale.

"I don't want to make any unmanly excuses--I would spare him for your sake; but he was all in the wrong, and it would be----"

She stopped him with a quick gesture.

"I can not hear this now--I am too weak and excited. I must go. Excuse me. I _must_ go." She arose almost with a spring and passed swiftly out of the room.

A feeling of desolation swept, like a breath of noisome air, through the breast of Reynolds. It was as if the whole world had become a desert and his life a dreary, void waste. And yet there was a sense of relief, as if a great load had been cast aside. A load indeed, but not all the load he carried. He tried in vain to feel that his whole duty was done. He hid his face in his hands, but he could not shut out the truth. His whole past life lay like a fiercely illuminated panorama under his inward gaze. Ah, by what a zig-zag path, through what torments, had been his course! And how he had always panted for happiness! Must it end here? He raised his head and smiled in a way that would have been terrible to see. He clenched his hands, his eyes flamed. All the melodramatic fierceness and fervor of the old South had come upon him. He was ready with desperate courage to fight all the world.