Part 2

The days passed rapidly. Mr. Treherne and Miss Stuyvesant saw each other at table, walked the deck together, and to the casual observer seemed to be mutually entertained. But although they were in so many ways companionable, they both felt an intangible barrier between them in the national prejudice that their first conversation had developed—a prejudice probably latent in every person, however cultivated or travelled, although in this particular case both of these young people flattered themselves that they were singularly broad-minded.

The last evening of the voyage, as they were walking up and down the deck, Mr. Gordon-Treherne determined to broach the subject which he felt they had both avoided.

A larger acquaintance had brought out the fact that Miss Stuyvesant had read for honours at an English University, and Mr. Treherne was obliged to admit that in this case the higher education of women (which never strongly appealed to him), had not detracted from her personal charm. She, on the other hand, discovered that he knew a great deal about _her_ country, and considered its possibilities almost unlimited; but she felt that he looked down upon its newness, and she resented his opinion of American men, whom he described as clever and agreeable in their relations with each other, but servile in their attitude toward women. The dangerous topic of national characteristics had not been touched upon until to-night.

Now Mr. Treherne is saying, “I hope you have forgiven my frankness in telling you exactly what my impressions were of America. I could not help seeing how charming and bright the women were, and I wondered if they did not despise the slavishness of their husbands and lovers. While the men are toiling to get rich, their families come abroad, their wives thus educating themselves beyond their husbands, and returning home, find themselves less than ever in sympathy with their surroundings. I never wonder when an American girl, who has had a chance to see the world, marries a foreigner of family and education.”

If Mr. Treherne had been closely observing his companion, he might have remarked an ominous expression crossing her face, but she only said—

“I have had several friends in Europe whose fathers’ fortunes have found them titles, and on the occasions that I have stayed with them, they did not seem wildly enthusiastic over the equality of companionship. The head of the house had generally gone to town, or was taking a run over to Paris, and I wondered if it suited a woman very well who had been accustomed to have a small court about her at home, to find herself restricted to a husband so little her companion that she scarcely ever saw him.”

“But then you see, Miss Stuyvesant, she knows he is not down in Wall Street, or in some exchange, staking all his fortune on the rise and fall of stocks.”

“No,” she rejoined; “in the cases of my friends the women have to consider that their husbands are probably at Monte Carlo or Ostend. But really, why should we discuss it, Mr. Treherne? No one would ever fancy _you_ admiring an American woman, and I, for my part, if I marry at all, would only marry an American man.”

With which delightfully feminine declaration, Miss Stuyvesant says “Good-night,” and abruptly leaves the astonished Treherne to realise that he has not made a good finish. Not that he cares seriously for Miss Stuyvesant; but Treherne is accustomed to find that women like him, and this girl, his instinct warns him, does _not_ approve of him and his opinions. He feels annoyed, but there seems to be nothing to explain; his training and the circumstances of his life have made him conservative. He does not wish to love, nor does he especially approve of a young woman, however attractive, whose ideas differ from his own so materially.

And so next day, when he bids a formal “good-bye” to Mrs. Barry and Miss Stuyvesant, he tries to feel that in England he has more manly occupations than doing the agreeable to a young woman, and that woman an American. This is exactly what Mr. Treherne does _not_ feel, nor does he mean to indicate it by his manner at parting. And so he goes off, consoling himself with the reflection that he certainly has found Miss Stuyvesant a pleasant companion for a sea voyage.

Three weeks later, in London, when the season is at its height, Miss Stuyvesant, who is looking radiant in a French gown, meets Mr. Gordon-Treherne at Lady Clanmore’s ball. She is on the arm of the American ambassador, and as she crosses the room with that unconscious grace of hers he feels that every man present would be glad to know her, to talk with her as he has talked, and something at that moment tells him that she interests him more than any woman has ever interested him before. Just then she sees him, and he fancies that a rather annoyed look crosses her face. Then she smiles, and he comes over and speaks to her and to her escort, who seems to know everyone.

“Will you give me a dance, Miss Stuyvesant?”

“Yes, but I have only this one waltz left. You see, you Englishmen _do_ think that American girls are good partners—in a ball-room,” she adds slyly.

“I see I am not forgiven,” he says; and then the waltz begins.

What a waltz! Gordon-Treherne has had many good partners in his day, for he has always been a dancing man; but never has he seen anyone dance like this girl. When they stop she is scarcely out of breath, and he has only time to say, “Let me thank you.” For her next partner had already claimed her, when she turned back and mischievously remarked, “And you, you dance extremely well—for an Englishman.”

It occurred several times afterward to Miss Stuyvesant that he could do a great many things extremely well; and if he had only been born in America she might have preferred him to honest Jack Hamilton, who had loved her since she was a school girl, and who was doing exactly what Mr. Treherne had described in that last obnoxious conversation—staking his fortune in an Oil Exchange, hoping that some day he could induce Miss Stuyvesant to give up her Bohemian life for the luxuries of a wealthy American home. In an indefinite way she had thought she might do so in the end, but, while she gave no promise, she was sure that Jack would never change. And so she had drifted on pleasantly and thoughtlessly, caring nothing for the men she met until this one, with his strong opinions, crossed her path, and for _him_ she believed she entertained the most indifferent feelings. He had simply disturbed her. She did not think his ideas correct, but there was a sense of justice in the girl that made her think herself narrow and bigoted for not being able to judge things from other standpoints than her own. It was exactly what she was criticizing in Mr. Gordon-Treherne.

“It will be better to avoid any more discussions,” she thought, and so the two did not meet again until one glorious autumn morning, when the house party at Lady Clanmore’s rode out to the first meet of the season. Miss Stuyvesant headed the cavalcade, escorted by Lord Clanmore, and as they came up to the meet she saw Mr. Gordon-Treherne, who was riding a restive thoroughbred, and looking what he was—an excellent rider. He was talking to a handsome woman, beautifully gowned, who was driving a perfectly appointed trap.

“That is Lady Diana Gordon,” Lord Clanmore is saying. “She is Treherne’s cousin, and rumour has it that the old estates of Gordon and Treherne are liable to be joined.”

Miss Stuyvesant feels for a moment as if she were slipping from her saddle, and then Treherne sees her. He raises his hat, and she smiles back an odd, unconsciously sad little smile, which he has only time to remark, when the hounds move off. And now all the recklessness in the girl is aroused; she knows she rides as few women can, and during the run she follows her pilot, Lord Clanmore, so straight that the whole field is lost in admiration of her.

Treherne alone has noticed the set look in her face. “Is she ill?” he wonders, and he determines to keep her well in view. He has hard work, for she is on a vicious little mare which she insisted upon riding, and as she takes fence after fence Treherne grows more and more anxious. The hounds have come to a check just beyond a clump of trees in the next field. Miss Stuyvesant turns her horse’s head, and Treherne sees she intends to take a short cut through a dangerous low-boughed copse which intervenes. “Stop!” he calls, but she does not hear him, and he knows his only plan is to head her off, if possible. Turning sharply, he enters the field from the other side; as he does so, he hears the crashing of boughs, and sees Miss Stuyvesant’s mare coming straight towards him. Each moment he expects to see her swept from her saddle, but she keeps her seat bravely. He calls out to her to turn to the right, for before her in her present path is a strong low-hanging branch of an old oak, which Treherne knows she cannot pass safely. An instant after, he sees she has lost control over the mare, and he heads his own horse straight towards her. With a quick, skilful motion he grasps her bridle just as the horses meet. There is a mad plunge, and Mr. Treherne, still clinging to the other reins, has dropped his own and is dragged from his saddle. He helps the girl to dismount from her now subdued, but trembling animal. Miss Stuyvesant looks very white, and Mr. Treherne is offering her his hunting flask, when Lord Clanmore gallops back to them.

“Your empty saddle gave us a great scare, Treherne. Are you hurt?”

For Mr. Treherne, too, has suddenly grown very pale.

“It’s nothing, Clanmore, just a little wrench I gave my arm; that’s all.”

And Miss Stuyvesant remembers how skilfully that arm had lifted her from her saddle. In that moment she knows she loves him. Every vestige of national prejudice is swept away, and poor Jack Hamilton’s chances are gone for ever.

The next day Mr. Treherne managed to write a few words with his left hand and send them back by Miss Stuyvesant’s messenger, who came to enquire after him. He said—

“DEAR MISS STUYVESANT,

“Many thanks for your kind enquiries. I shall be restricted to using my left hand for a time, but I must tell you how plucky I thought you yesterday. The stupid doctor has forbidden me to leave the house, but unless you wish to increase my feverish symptoms please send me some token by this messenger to assure me you have forgotten my first impressions of your country. As soon as I am able I shall beg you in person to reconsider your decision about marrying ‘only an American.’ My happiness depends upon your marrying an Englishman who is

“Entirely yours, “E. GORDON-TREHERNE.”

When Miss Stuyvesant read this note she took two beautiful little silk flags—one a Union Jack, the other the Stars and Stripes, and tying them together with a lover’s knot she sent them to Treherne.

* * * * *

In after years Mr. and Mrs. Gordon-Treherne’s friends remark the deference which they pay to each other’s ideas; and the entwined banners, which occupy a conspicuous place in the library, are called the “FLAGS OF TRUCE.”

III. One Woman’s History out of Many.

“Sister Faithful” she was called by the Edgecombe people. Her name was really Faithful Farrington, but no one ever said “Miss Farrington.” She had been born in the old Manor House, where for fifty years she had spent the most of her time. Her father, old Nathan Farrington, had been content to live the life of a recluse after his wife’s death, finding his greatest happiness among his books, and in directing the education of his two children. Francis Farrington, the son, had gone out to India in early life, and had risen high in the Civil Service. He had lost his young wife, and after many years of valuable work had returned, an invalid, to Edgecombe, where he found in his sister the most tender and sympathetic of companions. He was content enough to allow the whole responsibility of the estate to rest upon her patient shoulders. She, for her part, grew up to know a great deal about science and literature, but absolutely nothing of society or the world. When she was thirty her father died, and, besides her brother out in India, and a distant cousin, who was a Professor in some London college, she had no one nearer than the old nurse who had tried to fill the place of a mother to her.

Having a considerable fortune, she lived on in her old home, attended by the same faithful servants, exactly as she had always done, except that when the long winter evenings became tedious, and books failed her, she invited some of her townswomen in to tea and played a rubber of whist. Her days were filled with good works; every cottager in the neighbourhood knew her, and she knew them and sympathized with all their sorrows. Wise in her charities, she was the vicar’s most invaluable assistant, and it is to be doubted whether he, in his _rôle_ of spiritual adviser, was as much loved and revered as “Sister Faithful,” whose tireless hands constructed wonderful garments for the babies, and whose name was borne by half the children in consequence.

No breath from the outside world had ever touched this woman. Once she had gone to Paris with her father, but it remained in her mind simply a lovely picture, a little larger and more daring in colour than the pictures she had seen at the Louvre. She had been up to London several times, but that was to make notes at the British Museum. Her life was in no way different from that of most of the women she had known.

Once she had seen an item in a journal that struck her forcibly; it mentioned that there were eight hundred thousand more women than men in Great Britain, and that a good proportion of them were matrimonially eligible women as regarded property and accomplishments, but that they were of the middle classes, where marriage was most infrequent. Sister Faithful had remarked then that she knew a great many attractive women who were not liable to marry. She wondered why, for her education had made her logical. And then she reviewed her own life. All the male members of the families of her friends had gone to larger towns as soon as they were old enough; the girls, after a touch of boarding-school, had come home to assume simple household duties, and, an occasional curate excepted, they did not often meet young men.

“Sister Faithful,” having for her constant companion a man who lived in books, had rather a better-trained mind than most women. It had not been allowed to wander, and her greatest weakness was her way of bestowing charity. She did not like to account to anyone for it, and so tired mothers, who sent their offspring to her for a holiday, were apt to have them returned in new and wholesome garments, which showed that a heart calculated by nature to be a motherly one was bestowing its bounty quietly on other women’s children. Strange to say, Sister Faithful had not given any thought to marriage for herself. That she should ever leave her father, marry, and have children of her own seemed impossible. She was quite content to accept life as she found it, and improve the morals and manners of the children of the lower classes about her. And now she was fifty, and until her brother’s return she had lived alone.

She had remembered yesterday that it was her birthday and had celebrated it by inviting the school children to tea in her garden, which was in its loveliest summer dress. In the evening she had received a letter from her distant and unknown cousin, the Professor, whom she had only met in those long ago excursions to London, saying he was “tired”—“worn out,” his doctor said—and he had written to see if his cousin would take him in for a few weeks’ vacation. “I shall live out-of-doors,” he wrote, “and I promise in no way to disturb your life. I want only my books, and to wander about over your beautiful country.” She wondered if she had been hasty when she wrote back to bid “welcome to our nearest of kin and our father’s friend.” She remembered that after all he was really a cousin once removed, and a little younger than herself, and that when her father had liked him he was very young indeed. A glance at the mirror re-assured her. She was very free from vanity, and she realized she was no longer young. The villagers called her beautiful, but perhaps their sensibilities, sharpened by the lack of beauty about them, were keener in detecting their benefactress’ fine points.

Thanks to her healthy, regular life, Sister Faithful at fifty was very good to look upon. The soft hair, worn lightly back from the low, well-shaped forehead, was only faintly tinged with grey, and her skin was as smooth and fresh as that of a woman of half her age. It was not the firm, quiet mouth, nor even the gentle, sweet brown eyes that attracted one most; it was the unconsciousness of the woman, the very annihilation of self, as it were, without affectation, that made one long to know _why_ she was constantly giving without any question of return. No man had ever told her she was beautiful; her father’s friends had approved of her, but then she ministered to their comfort, when they came to stay at Edgecombe. She attended to everyone’s wants, and seemed to have gone through life without dreaming that in some larger sphere she would have been considered a very attractive woman. Not that she was perfect; she had her idiosyncrasies—as who has not? but she had a disciplined, well-trained, unselfish nature, that overbalanced any faults. Even now her one consideration was for Cousin Emerson, who was to arrive the following day. Would he be comfortable in Edgecombe? Would he not be lonely with her and only an invalid host to look after him? These, and other doubts crossed her mind, and, as a relief, she spent the entire day overlooking the sweeping and dusting of the already clean house.

Next day, the evening train brought Cousin Emerson. As he alighted from the carriage, Sister Faithful thought him only an older edition of the intellectual-looking man she had met in London. He was evidently still ill, and looked as if he had burned too much midnight oil. Her practical mind immediately swept over the entire list of nourishing dishes that she might concoct for him. He, half-an-hour later, glanced over his well-appointed room, and thanked fortune that it had occurred to him to stay with his good cousins.

After dinner this occurred to him again as he stretched himself on the comfortable library lounge, and let the smoke of his cigar curl up in slow, bewitching rings about his head, while Cousin Faithful read aloud in that well-modulated voice of hers.

And so the days went on, bringing health and strength to Cousin Emerson, and great, unspeakable content to “Sister Faithful,” as he too called her.

“Somehow,” he said, after he had been at Edgecombe for several weeks, “it seems as if we were more than cousins. I shall reverse your name; you shall be my Faithful Sister, as you have been nurse and friend.”

At first he had accompanied her in her long afternoon walks, when she visited her cottage people, but after a while he persuaded her to take all sorts of short excursions on foot, or again they would drive over the hills about the estate.

The evenings were perhaps the sweetest of all to Sister Faithful, for then her interests in the outer world ceased, and, until her cousin came, she had often felt very lonely. Now, they read aloud, played a friendly game of cribbage, or strolled about the garden when the nights were fine. Autumn was drawing near. Cousin Emerson’s visit had lengthened to two months, and still he said nothing about going. He was quite strong again, and seemed to have lost the melancholy that at first overshadowed him. Faithful’s heart rejoiced as she looked at him, and she did not allow herself to think that it might end.

One morning, in early September, the post brought several letters. They were breakfasting. Faithful remembered every detail afterwards. The pungent odour of chrysanthemums always carried her back to that morning. Cousin Emerson had gathered for the breakfast-table the splendid bunch that adorned it.

Suddenly a look of intense happiness lighted up his face. “Faithful Sister,” he said, looking across at her, “I want you to be the first to congratulate me. At last the woman whom I adore, for love of whom I have been so miserable, has consented to marry me. I doubt whether, if I had not fallen into your dear hospitable hands, I could have struggled so well to recover.”

In his excitement, Cousin Emerson did not notice the pallor that swept over Faithful’s face. Her voice was steady as she said, “Why have you not let us sympathize with you all along?”

“Oh, it all seemed so hopeless,” he said, “and I could not bear to open the old wound; but I am to go up to London at once, and I shall bring my bride straight to Edgecombe, if I may.”

That night he left, after many cordial expressions of gratitude, and Sister Faithful, apparently unmoved, saw him go; but afterward she had no mind to wander about the garden, or read a favourite book. She went quietly to her room, and, for the first time, wept.

She knew she had been companionable to this man; that in her society he had found peace and content. And yet—in a moment—he had forgotten it all; he had gone to win some other woman, impelled by what he called love. Was it love she felt for him? Even then, in her loneliness, with a grey-skyed future before her, and no prospect of change, she felt only her own inconsistency. “He was my kinsman and guest; he never asked me to love him, and he never knew my feeling for him,” she argued, and so the night passed, a night of unselfish sorrow for the lonely woman, while the man was being whirled towards the one being who engrossed _his_ thoughts.

Afterward, when Cousin Emerson and his wife came to Edgecombe to visit, he remarked, in the privacy of their room, that Cousin Faithful had aged terribly; but to the poor people she seemed more saintly than ever, for after that one happy summer—the only time she had ever allowed herself any personal happiness—she had returned to her charities as if she wished to make up for some neglect. And when the villagers called her “Sister Faithful,” she felt it almost as a reproach that she had dared hope for any other name.

IV. Miss Cameron’s Art Sale.

Katherine Cameron was spending her third winter in Paris. The first year she had led a quiet, uneventful student’s life. The second season she launched out a little into society as represented by the English and American colonies, and now she was spoken of as that “clever and rich Miss Cameron,” whom the English-speaking residents remembered to have seen at various _musicales_ the year before.

On her return from America, with the reputation of added wealth, she found herself invited everywhere. Everyone wondered that she did not marry, for she was a young woman whom men admired apart from her money and accomplishments. But although she went out a great deal, and was usually surrounded by a little court of struggling tenors and impecunious titles, she seemed unmoved by all the attention she received, and apparently was not even greatly amused.

The truth was, Katherine Cameron, being a clever girl, had seen through the artificiality of it all, and still could not bear to give up the illusion she had cherished all her life, that she should find her _real_ sphere in the society she would meet in Paris; it might be among her own country people, but they would be broadened by travel and study until all desirable and agreeable qualities would be blended into a harmonious whole.