Part 8 (1/2)
”YOUR letter notifies me, in general terms, that the answers returned to your inquiries as to my antecedents and present reputation are the reverse of satisfactory. You feel constrained, you add, in view of the information thus obtained, to interdict my further intercourse with your sister or any other member of your family. Since I cannot battle with shadows, or refute insinuations the drift of which I do not in the least comprehend, may I trouble you to put the allegations to which you refer into a definite and tangible shape? Let me know who are my accusers, and what are the iniquities with which they charge me. The worst criminal against human and divine laws has the right to demand thus much before he is convicted and sentenced.
”As to your prohibition of my continued correspondence with Miss Aylett, I shall consider her my promised wife, and write to her regularly as such, until you have made good your indictment against me, or until I receive the a.s.surance under her own hand and seal that my conduct in thus addressing her is obnoxious to herself.
”I have the honor, sir, of signing myself
”Your obedient servant,
”FREDERIC S. CHILTON.”
The cool contempt of the reply to his imperative dismissal of whatever claims the presumptuous adventurer his aunt had encouraged believed he had upon Mabel's notice or affection, was likely to irk Winston Aylett as more intemperate language could not. It did more. It baffled him, for a time. He could, and he meant, to withhold the lover's letter from his sister's eyes. He could--and upon this also he was determined--command her, in the masterful manner that heretofore had never failed to work submission, never to meet, speak, or write again to the man he almost hated; will her to forget her childish fancy for his handsome face and glozing arts, and in the fulness of time, to bestow her in marriage upon a partner of his own providing. He had no misgivings as to his ability to accomplish all this, if the blackguard aforesaid could be kept out of her way until that remedial agent, Time, and lawful authority had a chance to do their work.
But he was openly defied to prevent communication between the betrothed pair, unless his injunction had Mabel's endors.e.m.e.nt; and, upon alighting from the stage at the village, on his return to Ridgeley, he had taken from the post-office, along with the impertinent missive addressed to himself, one for Mabel, superscribed by the same hand. From the first, he had no intention of transferring it to the keeping of the proper owner, It was forwarded in direct disobedience to his commands, and the writer should be made to understand the futility of opposition to these.
For several hours, his only purpose respecting it was to enclose it, unopened, in an envelope directed by himself, and send it back to the audacious author, by the next mail. He was balked in this project by no fastidious scruples as to his right thus to dispose of his ward's property. Nature, or what he a.s.sumed was natural affection, concurred with duty in urging him to hinder an alliance by which Mabel's happiness would be imperilled and her relatives scandalized. But when, in the solitude of his study, he vouchsafed a second reading to Frederic's letter, preparatory to the response he designed should annihilate his hopes and chastise his impudence, a doubt of the efficacy of his schemes attacked him for the first time. ”Under her own hand and seal,”
were terms the explicitness of which commended them to his grave consideration. His next thought was to oblige Mabel to indite a formal renunciation of her unworthy suitor. There were several objections to this measure.
Firstly, he disliked whatever smacked of scenic effect, and women were apt to get up scenes--hysterics, att.i.tudes, and the like--upon trivial provocation, He wanted to get the thing over quietly and soon.
Secondly, he was not very sure that he should find in Mabel the docile puppet she had appeared to him for so many years of tutelage. She had matured marvelously of late. Her very manner of meeting him that afternoon impressed him by its self-possession and freedom from the emotion that used to gush from eyes and lips, in happy tears, and broken, delighted greeting at his approach. For aught he knew to the contrary, she might have accepted his fiat as just, if not merciful, and not a dream of rebellion been fostered thereby. The grave tranquillity of her demeanor might arise from the chastening influences of the mortification she had sustained, and a consciousness of ill-desert that bred humility. He would fain have believed all this, but until he broached the subject to her, his incert.i.tude could not be removed, and in a step so momentous as that which he meditated, it behooved him to try well the solidity of the ground beneath him.
Lastly, our blood-prince of the kingdom of Ridgeley was, whether he confessed it or not, acting under orders.
”Be very tolerant with that poor little deceived sister of yours!” his fiancee had implored, her diamond eyes bedimmed by quick-springing damps of commiseration. ”Recollect that the consciousness of wasted love is always harder to bear than what is commonly known as bereavement. If you find her refractory, be patient and persuasive, instead of dictatorial.
Craft often effects what overt violence would attempt in vain.”
”Craft!” The word struck unpleasantly upon the Virginia lordling's ear, and he echoed it with a suspicion of a frown upon his brow. ”I am not an adept in chicanery!”
”But you are a born diplomatist!” seductively. ”And because I am of the same credulous s.e.x as our mistaken little darling, you will not proceed to open warfare with her, even should she be both to resign her lover?
It is the glory of the strong to show charity to the weak and erring.”
For her sake, then, our flattered diplomatist would try the effect of guile, instead of brutality, upon the helpless girl, the balance of whose fate was grasped by his shapely hand. For one base second, the idea of attempting an imitation of his sister's handwriting flashed through his mind. But he was a gentleman, and forgery is not a gentlemanly vice, any more than is counterfeiting bank-notes. Finally, the author of craft--the subtle, refined virtue bepraised by his bride-elect--the devil--came to his help.
Mabel, like most other girls, had a dainty and fantastic taste in the matter of letter-paper and envelopes. She used none but French stationery, stamped with her monogram--a curious device, wrought in two colors--and at the top of each sheet stood out in bas-relief the Aylett crest. With these harmless whimsies Frederic was, without doubt, familiar. If his letter were returned to him, wrapped in a blank page, taken from her papetiere and within one of her envelopes, it would not signify so much whose handwriting was upon the exterior. Papetiere and writing-desk were in Mabel's bed-room, but she was in the parlor, practising an instrumental duet with Rosa--a favorite with Miss Dorrance. Winston had brought it south with him, and asked his sister to learn it forthwith, in just the accent he used to employ when prescribing what studies she should pursue at school. There was nothing in his errand that he should be ashamed of, he reminded himself with impatient severity, as he traversed the upper hall on tip-toe to the western chamber. He had, on sundry previous occasions, sought, in the receptacles he was about to ransack, for sealing-wax, pencils, and the like trifles. Mabel was too wise a woman not to keep her secrets under lock and key, and if there were private doc.u.ments left in his way, he was too honorable to pry into them.
Shutting the door cautiously, that the snap and blaze might not betray him, he struck a wax match, warranted to burn a minute-and-a-half, and raised the lid of the desk. His unseen but wily coadjutor had guided him cunningly. In fingering a heap of envelopes in order to find one large enough for his purpose, he brought to light one addressed to ”Mr.
Frederic Chilton, Box 910, Philadelphia, Penn.”
Upon the reverse was a small blot that had condemned it in Mabel's sight, as unfit to be sent to her most valued correspondent, and which she had not observed before writing the direction. Selecting another, she had thrown this back carelessly into the desk, meaning to burn it when it should be convenient, and forgotten all about it.
The livid dints were deep and restless in Winston's nostrils, as seen by the light of the tiny taper he raised to extinguish, when his prize was secured. The devil supplied him with another crafty hint, as he was in the act of folding one edge of Frederic's letter that it might fit into the new cover. Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer's hands with contumely? Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish. Stratagem, to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was bungling, not diplomacy. His hand did not shake in divesting the closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof of pure old blood. He averted his eyes lest he should see a line the lover had penned to his mistress. The letter slipped smoothly into the quarters prepared for it--smoothly as Satan's mark usually goes on until his tool has made his d.a.m.nation sure.
”Well done?” said Diabolus.
”That was a clever hit!” chimed in his a.s.sistant, complacently, after he had put the sealed envelope into his portfolio for safe-keeping, and burned the torn one he had removed. ”n.o.body but an idiot or a madman would persist in following a girl up after such a quietus.”
He replied to Frederic's note to himself shortly and with disdain, using the third person throughout, and informing Mr. Chilton with unmistakable distinctness that Miss Aylett had offered no opposition whatever to her brother's will in this unfortunate affair. So far as he--Mr.
Aylett--could judge, her views coincided exactly with his own. Mr.
Chilton's letters and presents should be returned to him at an early day, and thus should be finished the closing chapter of a volume which ought never to have been begun.