Part 5

"Ah, you can't tell," said Paul. "Women are fickle beings. I don't trust you, Elizabeth. I have a feeling that, if you don't marry me now, you never will. And why should you hesitate?" he went on eagerly. "It isn't so much that I ask. I don't even say--come abroad with me now; only give me the certainty that when I come back, I shall be able to claim you."

"You would have that certainty now," she still insisted. "I promise that I will marry you when you come back."

"Then why not marry me now," he asked, triumphantly.

Elizabeth could give no good reason to the contrary. The idea was vaguely alarming, yet it held for her a certain fascination. She sat listening in troubled uncertainty, while Paul discoursed with enthusiasm over the many advantages of his plan. He was exceedingly anxious, as he had said, to make sure of this beautiful girl, who was, he vaguely felt, a little above him--of a grade superior to that of the other girls whom he had known and made love to, for the space of a fortnight perhaps. He had been true to Elizabeth, now, for more than double that time. He really believed that he should be true to her always. There were other things that attracted him besides her beauty. The thought that Elizabeth was Miss Van Vorst of the Homestead was not unpleasant to him; the old house, the family silver, the family traditions, appealed to his artistic sense of fitness. And then though he was no fortune-hunter, and certainly would have made love to no girl whom he did not for the moment at least sincerely admire, he admitted to himself, frankly, that it was by no means inconvenient that Elizabeth should have a little money of her own and the prospect of more in the future. The Van Vorst property, while it was insignificant enough when measured by the standard of the Van Antwerps and other rich people in the Neighborhood, seemed by no means contemptible to Paul, who measured it by the standard of poverty-stricken Bohemia.

Elizabeth's feelings were more complex, less frankly selfish, much more anxious and uncertain. The money question did not enter into them to any great extent, though she had an instinctive dread of poverty, and she was convinced that, if once married to Paul, she would not be able to have the pretty gowns, and other luxurious trifles, which had hitherto seemed a necessity of life. But she was young and romantic, and this thought did not weigh with her very much. What most distressed her, and made her feel in some way vaguely in the wrong, was the trouble this, her first love affair, seemed to bring to others; to her aunts, to Amanda. She loved her aunts, and hated to run counter to their wishes; she did not love Amanda, and yet the thought of having injured her, though unconsciously, brought with it an uncomfortable sense of guilt.

She had not seen her since that terrible interview, which she still could not recall without a feeling of humiliation; but she had seen her aunt, who told her that Amanda was ill with some low fever--typhoid malaria, probably; there was always a good deal of that at The Mills. It was not considered wise that Elizabeth should see her; and besides, Amanda was delirious, and did not recognize any one. Elizabeth was more relieved than sorry to hear it. No doubt, she told herself, Amanda was already out of her head when she uttered that extraordinary outburst, and it was foolish to attach any importance to what she said in her feverish excitement. Still, Elizabeth did not like to think of it, much less of the promise she herself had given, voluntarily, in such forcible words. She had been so absolutely sincere in making it; she had broken it so completely within the hour. The whole affair was unpleasant, and weighed upon her more than those more serious charges against Paul, which had fallen vaguely upon her ear, not seeming to make any deep impression. His conduct to Amanda was at its worst a mere trifle in comparison.

Still she could not give him up. That broken promise to Amanda only proved this the more strongly. She could not face the prospect of life without him. And yet she could not face without terrible misgivings the prospect of further tears and remonstrances from her aunts. The two claims struggled for the mastery; on the one hand, the claims of the women who had brought her up, whose every thought for twenty years had centred in her; on the other, the claims of the man who had loved her in his light way some five weeks. Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that the claims of the man should predominate. And yet Elizabeth longed to satisfy them both.

Paul's plan seemed to suggest a compromise. And Elizabeth had not yet learned that compromise is never satisfactory to either side.

"Listen," she said, looking at him intently, with eyes that seemed to hold, even in the moment of yielding, a certain defiance of his power, "If I do as you wish, if I--I marry you to-morrow, I am free to--to come home at once, to go on with my life as if nothing were changed--not to tell my aunts, not to tell any one, till you come back? Do you promise this, on your word of honor?"

For a moment Paul hesitated. He had hardly expected her to yield so easily; perhaps if he pressed the matter she might be persuaded even to go abroad with him at once. But there were financial reasons which made that inexpedient just then. On the whole, Paul decided not to test his power too far.

"Upon my word of honor," he said, looking her steadily in the face "I promise that you shall be free as air, to go on with your life as you please, till I come back to claim you."

And so the thing was settled. Paul was to go to Cranston early the next morning to make all necessary arrangements; Elizabeth was to follow him a little later. They were to be married at once. Then Paul was to take an afternoon train for New York, Elizabeth was to return home, the whole affair should remain a secret.

Then Paul, radiantly triumphant, clasped Elizabeth in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers.

"To-morrow," he whispered, "to-morrow, my darling, at this time--though the world won't know it--still you will be my wife."

A strange feeling thrilled Elizabeth. She could not have told if it were pleasure, or some involuntary presentiment. But aloud she repeated mechanically: "Yes, I shall be your wife."

"You won't fail me, dearest," he said, scanning her face eagerly. "You won't break your word? You have promised--you won't fail me?"

"No," Elizabeth answered, "I have promised--I won't fail you."

And yet the thought crossed her mind irrelevantly, that she had broken a promise once already.

She left him and went home through the stillness and the fast gathering shadows of the evening. The days were already growing shorter. She noted the fact mechanically; noted too that the deep glowing crimson of the sunset foretold a hot day for the morrow. She entered the house and looked in at the dining-room; the table was set out for tea with all the wonted care. Her aunts sat each at one end; they were neither of them eating and both had red eyes. In the centre of the table stood Elizabeth's favorite cake--the kind with the raisins in it, which she used to beg for as a child, and which was reserved either as a reward for virtue, or for consolation in some childish trouble. Now in this trouble that was so far from childish, poor Miss Joanna had bethought herself of the old attention, and brought out the favorite cake as the only means of comfort within her power. Elizabeth could not see it without a lump in her throat.

She smoothed her ruffled hair before the glass and came in quietly to her usual place at the table. They looked up nervously at her entrance, but neither spoke; they did not reproach her with being late or ask where she had been. Miss Joanna pressed upon her the various dainties, reminding her that she had eaten no dinner; otherwise the meal was a silent one. It was not till near the end of it that Elizabeth spoke in a strained harsh voice unlike her own.

"Paul is going away." That was what she said. "He--has an engagement to go abroad. He goes to New York to-morrow. I--I hope you are satisfied."

And then she stopped, for the look of tremulous relief on both their faces was almost more than she could bear. The raisins in her favorite cake seemed suddenly to choke her. She began to doubt, after all, whether she would go to Cranston the next day.

_Chapter X_

This was Elizabeth's last thought that night; it was her first in the morning. She dressed herself carefully, putting on white, according to the custom which had aroused Aunt Rebecca's criticism; and all the while she asked of the reflection that stared back at her with perplexed eyes out of the mirror: "Shall I go, or shall I not?" She put the question to a rose when she got down-stairs, repeating as she ruthlessly destroyed each petal. "Yes, no, yes, no?" But the flower answered with a "no," and she threw away the last petal in disgust.

"I think I shall drive over to The Mills this morning," she announced quietly at the breakfast-table. "There is some ribbon I want to match." Her aunts looked up startled. They wondered simultaneously at what hour Halleck was to leave for New York. Yet what if after all the child wished for one last meeting?

"You don't think it's--it's too hot to go over there to-day, my dear?" Miss Cornelia ventured at last uncertainly.

"No, I don't mind the heat," Elizabeth answered indifferently, as she sat playing with her knife and fork. She was very pale and had no appetite. This seemed to them only natural. They hoped that when the young man were once out of the way, their darling would be herself again.

"We must take her to the sea-shore for a little while," Miss Cornelia observed when Elizabeth had left the room. "She needs change of air." Miss Joanna cheerfully assented. The idea and the sacrifice which it involved (since to go away from home, even for a few weeks, seemed a terrible undertaking) consoled them both greatly.

And meanwhile Elizabeth went her own way. It was not till she was seated in the carriage about to start on her drive, that she observed as if by an afterthought: "Oh, by the way, if I can't match the ribbon at The Mills, I may go to Cranston for it by the trolley, so don't be worried if I don't come back till late, and don't wait dinner." Her aunts looked at one another questioningly; but she drove off at once, before they could offer any objections.

And so Elizabeth drove towards Bassett Mills. The day was dry and hot, as were most days that summer. The sun beat down out of a brazen sky, the roads were white with dust, the grass in the fields was sere and brown. The locusts all along the way kept up a loud, exultant song, the burden of which was heat.

To Elizabeth, as she drove on, there began to be something ominous in it all; in the heat and the dust and the dazzling sunshine and the locusts with their eternal noise. They seemed all part, and she with them of some horrible nightmare; she was under some spell which benumbed her, deprived her of the capacity for thought, of all but the power to keep doggedly on the way to Bassett Mills. What she should do when she got there she did not know; her brain was torpid, there was a strange ringing in her ears. It was the sun, no doubt, that was affecting her head; it would be wise to turn back, or she might be ill. But still she kept on.

It was not far from noon when she reached Bassett Mills. There was little life about the place this hot morning; the mill-stream even seemed to dash less tumultuously, and showed signs of running dry. A group of men stood outside the drug-store, which was a great meeting-place, and discussed the drought. It was decided that if it continued the crops would be ruined; but hopes were founded on the fact that prayers for rain were to be offered in all the churches on Sunday.

"But there's not much use praying for rain," said one skeptic, "when the wind's due west."

Elizabeth heard the words as she drove up, and, alighting tied the white pony to a post and bribed a small boy to "keep an eye" on him. Then she joined the group in front of the shop, who were some waiting for the trolley, others merely passing the time of day. She did not go into the dry-goods shop to try to match her ribbon; she knew that such ribbon as she wanted was not to be had at Bassett Mills. She stood idly listening to the men's conversation, and wondering if it were indeed true, as the skeptic had declared, that it was useless to pray for an event already determined by natural causes. She had been brought up to believe implicitly in the efficacy of prayer, and had added to her usual formula that morning a petition of unwonted fervor that she might be enabled in this perplexing situation to decide for the best. But perhaps there was no use in praying; perhaps one was not a free agent. Fate, she thought, had evidently determined that she should go to Cranston that morning to be married, since it was a thing that might so easily have been prevented--by an objection from her aunts, an offer of company on the expedition, even by the white pony going lame; she would have yielded, or so she thought, to the merest trifle, glad to have the decision taken out of her hands. But everything had been made easy; it evidently was to be. And an implicit believer in heredity might have observed that the matter had been decided for her, by events and influences which had moulded her character even before she was born. It was in just such clandestine fashion as this that her parents had once gone up to Cranston to be married; and it might be that some mysterious hereditary instinct, some force over which she had no control, was now constraining their daughter, under the same circumstances, to act in the same way.

Elizabeth, fortunately or otherwise, did not think of this. She only knew that she was standing outside the drug-store with the other loiterers, straining her eyes along the dusty white road for a sight of the trolley; and that, even while she doubted the wisdom of waiting, some fascination held her rooted to the spot. When the trolley came she took her seat at once. After all a trip to Cranston meant nothing; she might simply buy her ribbon and come back.

The trolley started off fast and jerkily, creating a teasing wind, that seemed to blow from some fiery furnace. Elizabeth clutched her hat with one hand, while with the other she tried to shield her eyes from the flying dust and glare. Soon they were past the cemetery and the straggling outskirts of Bassett Mills, out into the open country, with rolling meadow and upland on either side, all withered, scorching under the sun's fierce rays. An occasional wagon met them, wrapped in a cloud of dust; the trolley was hailed now and then from some solitary farm-house, and came to a sudden stop. The ride seemed endless, but that they were approaching Cranston was at last made evident by unmistakable signs; by the advertisements staring at them from trunks of trees and the expanse of stone walls; by the asphalt pavement that succeeded the rough country road, the increasing quantity of bicycles, carriages and dust; and finally by the neat rows of Queen Anne villas, with their gabled fronts and terraced gardens sloping to the road. Then the car, with a last triumphant jerk, turned a corner and landed its passengers squarely in the High Street of Cranston.

Elizabeth alighted rather limply, and stood looking about her in a dazed sort of way. A country woman laden with parcels addressed her timidly. "Excuse me miss," she said, "but would you tell me the best place to go for stockings?"

Elizabeth started and stared at her, as if the simple question had been put in Hebrew. Then in a moment she recovered herself and directed the woman very civilly. She watched her bustle off upon her round of errands, then turned and slowly walked into the confectioner's shop. It was there that she had promised to meet Paul.

There was no one, as it happened, in the front part of the shop, where candy and cake were sold; no one in the little restaurant at the back. Elizabeth sat down at one of the small marble-topped tables; her head was aching, her eyes blood-shot, she was conscious of nothing but a feeling of pleasure in the coolness and darkness, of relief from the outside glare. Mechanically, she glanced at the small mirror, that hung at an unbecoming angle opposite on the wall, and felt a slight shock at the sight of herself--pale, worn, with blood-shot eyes, her white gown dusty and bedraggled. No, she did not look well--she had never looked worse in her life. Her lips curled in an unmirthful smile, as she thought irrelevantly of Aunt Rebecca, and of how she might have held forth on the folly of wearing white for such a dusty ride. And thereupon with a sudden pang, came the thought of Amanda--Amanda, tossing no doubt just then in the delirium of fever. The unpleasant idea struck Elizabeth of a resemblance between her own white face in the mirror, and her cousin's face as she had last seen it, with those staring, red-rimmed eyes. Certainly, there was a latent family likeness; but it took unbecoming conditions such as these to bring it out. She wondered languidly if any one else had ever noticed it.

Poor Amanda! Was she still, in her delirium, fretting over Paul? Or was she, perhaps, secure in Elizabeth's promise, and the pleasure of having separated them? What would she think if she knew that Elizabeth was even now waiting for him here in Cranston--waiting to be married to him? But with this thought the spell of indifference which had rested upon Elizabeth seemed suddenly to fall away, and there swept over her a sudden sense of revolt, of shame and repulsion. She started impulsively to her feet. No, she could not be married--not in that way; it was clandestine, disgraceful. There was still time to escape. If only she could reach home, without seeing Paul! She made one quick, blinded rush for the door, and then, a tall figure stood in her way, and her hands were seized in a man's eager grasp. His handsome, exultant face looked into hers.

"My brave girl," he said. "So you have not failed me."

_Chapter XI_

Elizabeth with a great effort wrenched her hands away from Paul's grasp, and fell against one of the marble-topped tables. Her face was white, her dull eyes looked up at him with a sort of terror.

"I--I have failed you," she said, speaking slowly and thickly, with parched lips. "I have come, but I--cannot stay. I was going when you came in."

"Elizabeth!" The look of exultant joy faded slowly and reluctantly from Paul's face. "Elizabeth, what do you mean? Why did you come if you don't mean to stay?"

"Because I--was crazy." She was trembling now, and she clung to the table for support; but still she was firm. "I--I didn't think what I did. Now I--I know. It would be wrong to marry like this--so secretly. I must go home. Let me pass." She spoke the last words quickly, imperiously, and made a motion as if to brush past him; but he stood motionless in the door and blocked her way.

He was very angry; she had never seen him so before. The emotion lent a curious brute strength to his fair, sensuous beauty. His face was as white as hers, his full red lips were set in a curve of unwonted determination.

"Listen to me, Elizabeth." He had never spoken to her in such a tone before. "I won't be trifled with like this. I have made all the arrangements. I won't have you--jilt me now. You must come with me, or I--I'll know the reason why."

She met his gaze defiantly. "You can't compel me to come you know," she said. And again she would have passed him, and again he stopped her. She did not try a third time, but sank into a chair and put up her hands to her face. A sudden faintness came over her; it might have been the heat, or the sharp, conflicting play of emotion. He followed her and gently took her hands from her face and looked into her eyes.

"Don't be foolish, darling," he said, persuasively. "You know that you love me, that you are only playing with me. You wouldn't really throw me over now."

She looked up reluctantly, fascinated as she had often been before, by the mere physical attraction of his beauty. "I--I don't know," she began slowly, and then stopped frightened at the sound of voices in the shop. A dread flashed over her all at once of a scene in a place like this. The trifling, frivolous consideration turned the scale in Paul's favor. She rose, shook off his grasp, and gave a hasty glance in the glass.

"No, I won't throw you over," she said. "It's all wrong but--as you say, it's too late now. Take care--some one is coming." She gave a warning look at the door, as Paul pressed her hand.

So the threatened scene was averted and Elizabeth's fate was sealed. The people who, after buying candy in the shop, came into the little back room for some ice cream, saw a young woman arranging her hair before the glass, and a young man waiting for her--a not unusual sight.

What followed seemed in after life a dream to Elizabeth. There were times when she tried to think that it had never happened; that the whole thing was a mere figment of the imagination. But on that day she was quite conscious that it was she herself, in very flesh and blood, Elizabeth Van Vorst, who walked by Paul Halleck's side through the glaring, sunny streets of Cranston, went with him into a dimly-lighted church, let him place a ring upon her finger, spoke her share in the marriage service, and wrote her maiden name for what should have been the last time, in the parish register. The clergyman was very old and mumbled over the service; the witnesses, two servants of his, were old and feeble, also, and took but small interest. The church was damp like a tomb after the heat without; Elizabeth found herself shivering as from a chill. It was a relief to come out again into the heat which had been so oppressive before. But on the church steps Elizabeth gave a little cry. A funeral was slowly filing past, its black trappings standing out in incongruous gloom against the noon-day brilliance.

Elizabeth looked at Paul. He had turned very white, and he too was shivering. "It is a bad omen," he said, in a low voice, as if to himself. He said no more, but led the way carefully in the opposite direction from that which the funeral had taken.

They found themselves in a part of Cranston unknown to Elizabeth. The road was bordered on either side by flowering hedges and led apparently into the open country. There were no houses in sight; for the moment, even no people. Halleck suddenly turned and clasped Elizabeth almost roughly in his arms, while he pressed passionate kisses upon her brow, her lips, her hair.

"My darling," he cried "I can't--I can't give you up. I was mad to promise it. Let everything go and come with me to New York."

"No, no, I can't," she murmured faintly. "I can't." His vehemence stunned, bewildered her; but instinctively she struggled against it. "You promised," she cried out indignantly, "you promised that I should be free--till you came back. I've kept my word, you must keep yours."

He let her go and for a moment they eyed each other steadily. This time the victory remained with her. "Did I really make that promise?" he said at last with a sigh. "Well, if I did, I must keep it, I suppose. But, Elizabeth, you must be made of ice--you can't love me, or you wouldn't hold me to it."

Elizabeth was chiefly conscious of an overpowering sense of relief.