Part 55 (1/2)
Adah's laugh rang out a little harshly.
I hastened to the rescue of the embarra.s.sed girl, saying, ”I don't see why you should beg my pardon. We're all Friends here. At least I'm trying to be one as fast as a leopard can change his spots and the Ethiopian his skin. As for you, a tailor would say you were cut from the same cloth as Mrs. Yocomb.”
But for some reason she could not recover herself. She probably realized, in the tumult of her feeling, that she had revealed her heart too clearly, and she could not help seeing that Adah understood her.
She was too confused for further pretence, and too unnerved to attempt it. After a moment of pitiful hesitation she fled with a scarlet face to her room.
”Well,” said Adah, with a slight hysterical laugh, ”I understand Emily Warren now.”
”Pardon me, Miss Adah, I don't think you do,” I began.
”If thee doesn't, thee's blind indeed.”
”I am blind.”
”Be a.s.sured I'm not any longer,” and with a deep angry flush she, too, left us.
I turned to Mrs. Yocomb, and taking both of her hands I entreated, ”As you have the heart of a woman, never let Emily Warren marry that man.
Help me--help us both!”
”My poor boy,” she began, ”this is a serious matter--”
”It is indeed,” I said, pa.s.sionately; ”it's a question of life and death to us both.”
”Well,” she said, thoughtfully, ”I think time and truth will be on thy side in the end; but I would advise thee not to do or say anything rash or hasty. She is very resolute. Give her time.”
Would to G.o.d I had taken her advice!
CHAPTER XVII
MY WORST BLUNDER
I scarcely could foresee how we should get through the following day. I both longed for and dreaded it, feeling that though it might pa.s.s quietly enough, it would probably be decisive in its bearing on the problem of my life. Miss Warren would at last be compelled to face the truth squarely, that she had promised a man what she could not give, and that to permit him to go on blindly trusting would be impossible.
The moment she realized fully that she had never truly loved him, and now never could, she would give up the pretence. Then why should she not see that love, duty, and truth could go together? That she had struggled desperately to be loyal to Mr. Hearn was sadly proved by her thin face and wasted form; but with a nature like hers, when once her genuine love was evoked, the effort to repress it was as vain as seeking to curb a rising tide. I now saw, as I looked back over the past weeks, that her love had grown steadily and irresistibly till it had overwhelmed all save her will and conscience; that these stood, the two solitary landmarks of her former world. And I knew they would stand, and that my only hope was to stand with them. Her love had gone out to me as mine had to her, from a constraint that she could not resist, and this fact I hoped would reveal to her its sacred right to live. With every motive that would naturally bind her to a man who could give her so much, her heart claimed its mate in one who must daily toil long hours for subsistence. It would be like her to recognize that a love so unthrifty and unselfish must spring from the deepest truths and needs of her being rather than from any pa.s.sing causes. She would come to believe as I did, that G.o.d had created us for each other.
But it seemed as if the whole world had changed and gone awry when we sat down to breakfast the next morning. Adah was polite to me, but she was cool and distant. She no longer addressed me in the Friendly tongue. It was ”you” now. I had ceased to be one of them, in her estimation. Her father and mother looked grave and worried, but they were as kind and cordial to me as ever. Reuben and the little girls were evidently mystified by the great change in the social atmosphere, but were too inexperienced to understand it. I was pained by Adah's manner, but did not let it trouble me, feeling a.s.sured that as she thought the past over she would do me justice, and that our relations would become substantially those of a brother and sister.
But I was puzzled and alarmed beyond measure by Miss Warren's manner and appearance, and my feelings alternated between the deepest sympathy and the strongest fear. She looked as if she had grown old in the night, and was haggard from sleeplessness. Her deep eyes had sunken deeper than ever, and the lines under them were dark indeed, but her white face was full of a cold scorn, and she held herself aloof from us all.
She looked again as if capable of any blind, desperate self-sacrifice.
Simple, honest Mr. Yocomb was sorely perplexed, but his wife's face was grave and inscrutable. If I had only gone quietly away and left the whole problem to her, how much better it would have been!
I tried to speak to Miss Warren in a pleasant, natural way; her answers were brief and polite, but nothing more. Before the meal was over she excused herself and returned to her room. I felt almost indignant. What had I--most of all, what had her kind, true friends, Mr. and Mrs.
Yocomb--done to warrant that cold, half--scornful face? Her coming to breakfast was but a form, and she clearly wished to leave us at the earliest possible moment. Adah smiled satirically as she pa.s.sed out, and the expression did not become her fair face.
I strode out to the arbor in the garden and stared moodily at the floor, I know not how long, for I was greatly mystified and baffled, and my very soul was consumed with anxiety.
”She shall listen to reason,” I muttered again and again. ”This question must be settled in accordance with truth--the simple, natural truth--and nothing else. She's mine, and nothing shall separate us--not even her perverse will and conscience;” and so the heavy hours pa.s.sed in deep perturbation.