to his breakfast. The sight of his daughter’s handwriting [pg 50] relieved and reassured him. Some crazy thing she had done of course, but then Kate had always done queer things, and probably would to the end of time. She was a hussy to frighten them so, and he meant to tell her so when she returned, if it was her wedding day. But then, Kate would be Kate, and his breakfast was getting cold. He had the horses to look after and orders to give to the hands before the early guests arrived.
But David did not answer, and the sight of him was alarming. He stood as one stricken dumb all in a moment. He raised his eyes to the Squire’s—pleading, pitiful. His face had grown strained and haggard.
“Speak out, man, doesn’t the letter tell?” said the Squire imperiously. “Where is the girl?”
And this time David managed to say brokenly: “She’s gone!” and then his head dropped forward on his cold hand that rested on the mantel. Great beads of perspiration stood out upon his white forehead, and the letter fluttered gayly, coquettishly to the floor, a reminder of the uncertain ways of its writer.
The Squire reached for it impatiently, and wiping his spectacles laboriously put them on and drew near to the window to read, his heavy brows lowering in a frown. But his wife did not need to read the letter, for she, like Marcia, had divined its purport, and already her able faculties were marshalled to face the predicament.
The Squire with deepening frown was studying his elder daughter’s letter, scarce able to believe the evidence of his senses that a girl of his could be so heartless.
“Dear David,” the letter ran—written as though in a hurry, done at the last moment—which indeed it was:—
“I want you to forgive me for what I am doing. I know you will feel bad about it, but really I never was the right one for you. I’m sure you thought me all too good, and I never could have stayed in a strait-jacket, it would have [pg 51] killed me. I shall always consider you the best man in the world, and I like you better than anyone else except Captain Leavenworth. I can’t help it, you know, that I care more for him than anyone else, though I’ve tried. So I am going away to-night and when you read this we shall have been married. You are so very good that I know you will forgive me, and be glad I am happy. Don’t think hardly of me for I always did care a great deal for you.
“Your loving
“Kate.”
It was characteristic of Kate that she demanded the love and loyalty of her betrayed lover to the bitter end, false and heartless though she had been. The coquette in her played with him even now in the midst of the bitter pain she must have known she was inflicting. No word of contrition spoke she, but took her deed as one of her prerogatives, just as she had always taken everything she chose. She did not even spare him the loving salutation that had been her custom in her letters to him, but wrote herself down as she would have done the day before when all was fair and dear between them. She did not hint at any better day for David, or give him permission to forget her, but held him for all time as her own, as she had known she would by those words of hers, “I like you better than anyone else except!—” Ah! That fatal “except!” Could any knife cut deeper and more ways? They sank into the young man’s heart as he stood there those first few minutes and faced his trouble, his head bowed upon the mantel-piece.
Meantime Madam Schuyler’s keen vision had spied another folded paper beside the pincushion. Smaller it was than the other, and evidently intended to be placed further out of sight. It was addressed to Kate’s father, and her stepmother opened it and read with hard pressure of her thin lips, slanted down at the corners, and a steely look in her eyes. Was it possible that the girl, even in the midst of her treachery, had enjoyed with a sort of malicious glee the thought of her stepmother [pg 52] reading that note and facing the horror of a wedding party with no bride? Knowing her stepmother’s vast resources did she not think that at last she had brought her to a situation to which she was unequal? There had always been this unseen, unspoken struggle for supremacy between them; though it had been a friendly one, a sort of testing on the girl’s part of the powers and expedients of the woman, with a kind of vast admiration, mingled with amusement, but no fear for the stepmother who had been uniformly kind and loving toward her, and for whom she cared, perhaps as much as she could have cared for her own mother. The other note read:
“Dear Father:—I am going away to-night to marry Captain Leavenworth. You wouldn’t let me have him in the right way, so I had to take this. I tried very hard to forget him and get interested in David, but it was no use. You couldn’t stop it. So now I hope you will see it the way we do and forgive us. We are going to Washington and you can write us there and say you forgive us, and then we will come home. I know you will forgive us, Daddy dear. You know you always loved your little Kate and you couldn’t really want me to be unhappy. Please send my trunks to Washington. I’ve tacked the card with the address on the ends.
“Your loving little girl,
“Kate.”
There was a terrible stillness in the room, broken only by the crackling of paper as the notes were turned in the hands of their readers. Marcia felt as if centuries were passing. David’s soul was pierced by one awful thought. He had no room for others. She was gone! Life was a blank for him! stretching out into interminable years. Of her treachery and false-heartedness in doing what she had done in the way she had done it, he had no time to take account. That would come later. Now he was trying to understand this one awful fact.
[pg 53]
Madam Schuyler handed the second note to her husband, and with set lips quickly skimmed through the other one. As she read, indignation rose within her, and a great desire to outwit everybody. If it had been possible to bring the erring girl back and make her face her disgraced wedding alone, Madam Schuyler would have been glad to do it. She knew that upon her would likely rest all the re-arrangements, and her ready brain was already taking account of her servants and the number of messages that would have to be sent out to stop the guests from arriving. She waited impatiently for her husband to finish reading that she might consult with him as to the best message to send, but she was scarcely prepared for the burst of anger that came with the finish of the letters. The old man crushed his daughter’s note in his hand and flung it from him. He had great respect and love for David, and the sight of him broken in grief, the deed of his daughter, roused in him a mighty indignation. His voice shook, but there was a deep note of command in it that made Madam Schuyler step aside and wait. The Squire had arisen to the situation, and she recognized her lord and master.
“She must be brought back at once at all costs!” he exclaimed. “That rascal shall not outwit us. Fool that I was to trust him in the house! Tell the men to saddle the horses. They cannot have gone far yet, and there are not so many roads to Washington. We may yet overtake them, and married or unmarried the hussy shall be here for her wedding!”
But David raised his head from the mantel-shelf and steadied his voice:
“No, no, you must not do that—father—” the appellative came from his lips almost tenderly, as if he had long considered the use of it with pleasure, and now he spoke it as a tender bond meant to comfort.
The older man started and his face softened. A flash of understanding and love passed between the two men.
[pg 54]
“Remember, she has said she loves some one else. She could never be mine now.”
There was terrible sadness in the words as David spoke them, and his voice broke. Madam Schuyler turned away and took out her handkerchief, an article of apparel for which she seldom had use except as it belonged to every well ordered toilet.
The
