Volume Ii Part 15 (1/2)
CHAPTER x.x.xV.
MILLICENT.
Next morning, Joseph Naylor was disturbed in the act of shaving by the intelligence that a lady desired to see him, and that she was waiting his coming down-stairs in one of the parlours.
”A lady? Who is it? What does she want?” he inquired of the black boy who brought the message.
”Princ.i.p.al of the Female College at Montpelier, sah.”
”Never heard of the inst.i.tution. Some one drumming up for pupils, I suppose. My nieces are rather old to put to school. They would not go if I tried to put them. Why does she not apply to their mother? Susan never did allow me to interfere about the schools--or anything else, for that matter, when she could manage without me.”
He finished his dressing quickly, however, and hastened down-stairs.
In the parlour stood a tall, grey woman, clad in black, awaiting him.
He advanced with a low bow and a look of inquiry. The lady looked earnestly in his face, coming forward to meet him with extended hand.
”You do not know me, Joseph?”
Joseph stared in surprise at so intimate a form of address; yet there was a tone in the voice which seemed not unfamiliar, though he could not connect it in his memory with any particular time, place, or person.
”I am changed, of course,”--it was still the lady who spoke,--”but so are you. Try if you cannot recall. It is five-and-twenty years since we last met.”
”You have the advantage, ma'am.”
”My name is Millicent Rolph. You know me now?”
”You? Do you mean that you are Lina's sister?”
”I am, Joseph--your sister-in-law. You cannot have forgotten our last meeting at the old home in New Orleans?”
”I can never forget the last time I met Millicent Rolph; but I trace no resemblance between you and her. She was a woman of thirty, dark-haired, large, handsome; you--do not resemble her.”
”She was thirty twenty-five years ago, and you were twenty-two. The years have left their mark upon us both. I cannot but be changed. I have come through the troubles of a lifetime. There was the war, and mother's death, and the ruin of our affairs in New Orleans; and there have been trials and much hard work since then, to change me into the spare, elderly, white-haired woman you see now. You are changed too, though life has dealt less harshly, I should judge. Yet I recognised you at once, though I had prayed that I might not--that you might prove to be another man, bearing by accident the name of my brother-in-law.... We were such friends once, Joseph, in the long ago.
Sitting under the shade of the magnolias in the dear old garden, with Lina between us----”
”Have done, Millicent! I confess now that it is you. I recognise your voice. But do not stir up old memories. They haunted me like ghosts for more than twenty years. It is only recently that I have been able to lay them.... Let them lie. You weighed me down with misery enough when last we met. Do not refer to it. I had rather we had not met now.
It is like reopening a grave, even to hear you speak. It brings back all I would forget--all I have been cheating myself into believing that I had buried and got rid of at last.”
”I can understand the feeling.”
”What can I do to serve you? Tell me; but let us part at once. I will do anything, but I cannot stand here listening. Your voice is heavy with memories like forebodings; my heart sinks at the very sound.
Speak, and let me leave you. What do you want?”
”I want nothing, Joseph--nothing for myself. It is for your own sake I am come, and it tears my heart to say the things I have to tell you.”
”You said something like that when you acted so cruelly before, you and your mother; but you did not spare me.”