 | CHAPTER XIX.
THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE. Millbank, or, Roger Irving's ward |  |
19. CHAPTER XIX.
THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE.
HESTER was better. Her long sleep had done her
good, and when she awoke it was evident that her
fever was broken and the crisis of her disease passed.
She was perfectly rational, and evidently retained no recollection
of what she had said of the garret and Mrs. Walter Scott.
Indeed, she was very civil to that lady, who, on her way to
breakfast, came in to see her, looking very bright and fresh in
her black wrapper, trimmed with scarlet, and her pretty little
breakfast cap set on the back of her head. Good fare, which
she did not have to pay for, — pure country air, and freedom
from all care, had had a rejuvenating effect on Mrs. Walter
Scott, and for a woman of forty-seven or thereabouts, she was
remarkably handsome and well preserved. This morning she
complained of feeling a little languid. She could not have
slept as well as usual, she said, and she dreamed that some one
came into her room, or tried to come in, and when she woke
she was sure she heard footsteps at the extremity of the hall.
“It was Roger, most likely,” Hester rejoined. “Like the
good boy he is, he got up about twelve, or thereabouts, and
stayed up the rest of the night with me and Magdalen.”
“Oh-h,” Mrs. Irving replied, and her eyes had in them a
puzzled look as she left Hester's room and repaired to the
breakfast-table.
“Hester tells me that you spent the night with her, or with
Magdalen, — which was it?” she said to Roger playfully, as
she leisurely sipped her cup of coffee.
There was no reason why Magdalen should have colored
scarlet as she did, or why Roger should stammer and seem so
confused as he replied, “Yes, Hester was very restless, and
Magdalen very tired, and so I stayed with them.”
“And proved a very efficient watcher, it seems; for Hester
is better and Magdalen as blooming as a rose,” was Mrs.
Irving's next remark, as she shot a quick, curious glance at
Magdalen, whose burning cheeks confirmed her in the suspicion
which until that morning had never entered her mind.
Magdalen cared for Roger, and Roger cared for Magdalen,
and at last she had the key to Magdalen's refusal of her son.
Mrs. Irving had heard from Frank of his ill success, and
while expressing some surprise, had told him not to despair,
and had promised to do what she could for the furtherance of
his cause. It was no part of her plan to speak to Magdalen
then upon the subject, but she was more than usually kind and
affectionate in her manner towards the girl, hoping that by this
means the mother might succeed where the son had failed.
Now, however, an unlooked-for obstacle had arisen, and for once
Mrs. Walter Scott was uncertain what to do. She had never
dreamed that Roger might fancy Magdalen, he was so much
older and seemed to care so little for women; but she was
sure now that he did, and the hundred thousand dollars she
had looked upon as eventually sure seemed to be fading from
her grasp. There were wrinkles in her forehead when she left
the breakfast table, and her face wore a kind of abstracted
look, as if she were intently studying some new device or plan.
It came to her at last, and when next she was alone with
Frank, she said, “I have been thinking that it might be well
for you to get Roger's consent for you to address Magdalen.”
“Roger's consent!” Frank repeated, in some surprise. “I
should say Magdalen's consent was of more consequence than
Roger's.”
“Yes, I know,” and the lady smiled meaningly. “You said
to me once that you loved Magdalen well enough to take her
on any terms, and wait for the affection she withholds from you
now.”
“Yes, I said so; but what of it?” Frank asked; and his
mother replied, “I think I know Magdalen better than you
do. She has implicit confidence in Roger's judgment, and an
intense desire to please him. Let her once believe he wishes
her to marry you, and the thing is done. At least, it is worth
the trial, and I would speak to Roger without delay and get his
consent. Or stay,” she added, as she reflected that Frank
would probably make a bungle and let out that Magdalen had
refused him once, “I will do it for you. A woman knows so
much better what to say than a man.”
Frank had but little faith in his mother's scheme, and he was
about to tell her so, when Magdalen herself came in. She had
just returned from accompanying Roger as far as the end of
the avenue on his way to his office. He told her that a
walk in the bracing air would do her good, and had taken her
with him to the gate which was the entrance to the Millbank
grounds. There they had lingered a little, and Roger had
seemed more lover-like than ever before, and Magdalen's eyes
had shone on him like stars and kept him at her side long after
he knew he ought to be at his office, where some of his men
were waiting for him. At last, warned by the striking of the
village clock of the lateness of the hour, he said a final good-by,
and Magdalen returned to the house, flushed with excitement
and radiant with happiness, which showed itself in her
eyes and face, and in her unusual graciousness towards Frank.
Now that she began herself to know what it was to love, and
how terrible it would be to lose the object of her love, she pitied
Frank so much, and never since that night in the library had
she seemed to him so much like the Magdalen of old as she
did, when, with her large straw hat upon her arm, she stood
talking with him a few moments, mingling much of her old
coquetry of manner with what she said, and leaving him at last
would further his cause with Magdalen.
That night, when dinner was over and Magdalen was with
Hester, who was recovering rapidly, Mrs. Walter Scott took her
balls of worsted and her crocheting, and knocking softly at the
door of the library, where she knew Roger was, asked if she
might come in. He thought it was Magdalen's knock, and
looked a little disappointed when he found who his visitor was.
But he bade her come in, and bringing a chair for her near to
the light, asked what he could do for her.
“I want to talk with you about Frank and Magdalen;” Mrs.
Irving said. “You must of course have seen the growing
affection between the young people?”
Mrs. Walter Scott pretended to be very busy counting her
stitches, but she managed to steal a side glance at her companion,
who fairly gasped at what he had heard, and whose fingers
fluttered nervously among the papers on the table, on one of
which he kept writing, in an absent kind of way and in every
variety of hand, the name of Magdalen. He had not noticed
the growing affection between the young people; that is, he
had seen nothing on Magdalen's part to warrant such a conclusion.
Once, just after his return from Europe, he had thought
his nephew's attentions very marked, and a thought had crossed
his mind as to what might possibly be the result. But all this
was past, as he believed, and his sister's intelligence came
upon him like a thunderbolt, stunning him for an instant, and
making him powerless to speak. Those were fierce heart-pangs
which Roger was enduring, and they showed themselves upon
his face, which was very pale, and the corners of his mouth
twitched painfully, but his voice was steady and natural as he
said at last, —
“And Magdalen, — does she — have you reason to believe
she would return a favorable answer to Frank's suit?”
Mrs. Irving was sure now that what she had suspected was
true, and that nothing but a belief in Magdalen's preference for
another would avail with him, so she replied unhesitatingly, —.
“Certainly I do. I have suspected for years that she was
strongly attached to Frank, and her manner towards him fully
warrants me in that belief. She is the soul of honor, and never
professes what she does not feel.”
“Ye-es,” Roger said, with something between a sigh and a
long-drawn breath, assenting thus to what his sister said, and
trying to reconcile with it Magdalen's demeanor toward himself
of late.
If she was attached to Frank, and had been for years, why
that sudden kindling of her eyes, and that lighting up of her
whole face whenever he was with her, and why that sweet
graciousness of manner towards him which she had of late
evinced? Was Magdalen a coquette, or was that the way of
girls? Roger did not know, — he had never made them a study,
never been interested in any girl or woman except Magdalen;
and now, when he must lose her, he began to feel that he had
loved her always from the moment when he took her as his
child and first held her baby hands in his, and laid her soft
cheek against his own. She was his, — he had a better right to
her than Frank, and he wrote her name all over the sheet of
paper on the table, and thought of all the castles he had built
within the last few weeks, — castles of the time when Magdalen
would be really his and he could lavish upon her the love and
tender caresses he would be coy of giving any one who was not
his wife. Roger was naturally very reserved, — and in his intercourse
with Magdalen he had only shown her glimpses of the
deep, warm love he felt for her. He held peculiar notions
about such things, and he was sorry now that he did, — sorry that
he had not improved his opportunities and won her for his own
before Frank appealed to him, as he had done through his
mother, and thus sealed his lips forever. He was thinking of
all this, and was so absorbed in it that he forgot his sister was
there watching him narrowly, but veiling her watchfulness with
her apparent interest in her worsted work, which became
strangely tangled and mixed, and required her whole attention
to unravel and set right. But she could not sit still all the
she must recall him to the point at issue, and so she said
at last, —
“Frank will do nothing without your sanction, and what he
wants is your permission, as Magdalen's guardian, for him to
address her. Can he have it?”
Then Roger looked up a moment, and the pencil which had
been so busy began to trace a long black line through every
name as if he thus would blot out the sweetest dream of his
life.
“Have my permission to address Magdalen? Yes — certainly,
if he wants it. I had thought — yes, I had hoped — I
had supposed — ”
Here Roger came to a full stop, and then, as the only thing
he could do, he added, —
“I thought I had heard something about a Miss Grey of
New York, and that probably has misled me. Was there nothing
in that report?”
“Nothing,” Mrs. Irving replied. “Frank knew her in New
Haven and met her abroad, and so it was only natural he should
call upon her in New York. There is nothing in that rumor;
absolutely nothing. Frank's mind was too full of Magdalen for
him to care for a hundred Miss Greys. Poor foolish boy, it
brings my own youth back to me to see him so infatuated. I
must go to him now, for I know how anxiously he is waiting
for me. Thank you for the favorable answer I can give him.”
She hurried from the room and out into the hall, never stopping
to heed the voice which called after her, —
“Helen, oh, Helen!”
Roger did not know what he wanted to say to her. His call
was a kind of protest against her considering the matter settled
as wholly as she seemed to think it was. He could not give
Magdalen up so easily, — he must make one effort for himself,
— and so he had tried to call his sister back, but she did not
hear him, and went on her way, leaving him alone with his
great sorrow.
Frank was in his own room, lazily reclining in his easy chair,
and about finishing the second cigar in which he had indulged
since dinner. He took his third when his mother came in, for
he saw that she had something to tell him, and he could listen
so much better when he was smoking. With a faint protest
against the atmosphere of the room, which was thick with the
fumes of tobacco, Mrs. Walter Scott began her story, telling him
that he had Roger's consent to speak to Magdalen as soon as
he liked, but not telling him of her suspicions that Roger, too,
would in time have spoken for himself, if his nephew had not
first taken the field. It was strange that such a possibility had
never occurred to Frank. He, too, had a fancy that Roger was
too old for Magdalen, — that he was really more her father than
her lover, and he never dreamed of him as a rival.
“I wish you could arrange it with Magdalen as easily as you
have with Roger,” he said; and his mother replied, “She will
think better of it another time. Girls frequently say no at
first.”
“But not the way Magdalen said it,” Frank rejoined. “She
was in earnest. She meant it, I am sure.”
“Try her with Roger's consent. Tell her he wishes it; not
that he is willing, but that he wishes it. You will find that
argument all-powerful,” Mrs. Irving said.
Being a woman herself she knew how to work upon another
woman's feelings, and she talked to and encouraged her son
until he caught something of her hopefulness; and saw himself
the fortunate possessor of all the glorious beauty and sprightliness
embodied in Magdalen, who little dreamed of what lay
before her, and who next morning, at the breakfast table, wondered
at Frank's exhilaration of spirits and Roger's evident
depression. He was very pale, and bore the look of one who
had not slept; but he tried to be cheerful, and smiled a faint,
sickly kind of smile at Magdalen's lively badinage with Frank,
whom she teased and coquetted with something after her olden
fashion, not because she enjoyed it, but because she saw there
was a cloud somewhere, and would fain dispel it. She never
when she met him in the hall, where he was drawing on his
gloves preparatory to going out, she asked him what was the
matter, and if he had one of his bad headaches coming on.
“His throat was a little sore,” he said; “he did not sleep
much last night, but the walk to the village would do him good.”
Magdalen had taken a long scarf from the hall-stand, and
holding it toward him, said, “It's cold this morning, and my
teeth fairly chattered when I went out on the piazza for my
run with old Rover. Please wear this round your throat, Mr.
Irving. Let me put it on for you.”
There was a soft light in her eyes and a look of tender interest
in her face, and Roger bent his head before her and let
her wind the warm scarf round his neck and throw the fringed
ends over his shoulder. Roger was tall, and Magdalen stood
on tiptoe, with her arms almost meeting round his neck as she
adjusted the scarf behind, and her face came so near to his
that he could feel her breath stir his hair just as her presence
stirred the inmost depths of his heart, tempting him to take her
in his arms and beg of her not to heed Frank's suit, but listen
first to him, who had the better right to her. But Roger was a
prudent man; the hall was not the place for love-making, so
he restrained himself, and only took one of Magdalen's hands
in his and held it while he thanked her for her thoughtfulness.
“You are better than a physician, Magda. I don't know
what I should do without you. I hope you will never leave
Millbank.”
So much he did say, and his eyes had an earnest, pleading
look in them, which haunted Magdalen all the morning, and
made her very happy as she flitted about the house, or dashed
off one brilliant piece after another upon her piano, which
seemed almost to talk beneath her spirited touch.
Meanwhile, Roger and Frank were alone in the office. The
brisk wind which was blowing in the morning had brought on
an April shower of sleet and rain, and there was not much
prospect of visitors or clients. Roger sat by his desk, pretending
had done the previous night, viz., writing Magdalen's name on
slips of paper, and adding to it once the name of Irving, just to
see how it would look; and Roger, who got up for a book
which was over Frank's head, saw it, and smiled sadly as he
remembered that he, too, had written “Magdalen Irving,” just
as Frank was doing. There was a little mirror over the table,
where Frank had placed it for his own use; for he was vain of
his personal appearance, and his hair and collar and necktie
needed frequent fixing. Into this mirror Roger glanced and
then looked down upon his nephew, who at that moment
seemed a boy compared with him. Frank's light hair and skin,
and whitish, silky mustache, gave him a very youthful appearance
and made him look younger than he was, while Roger
had grown old within the night. There were no gray hairs, it
is true, among his luxuriant brown locks; but he was haggard
and pale, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes, and he
felt tired and worn and old, — too old to mate with Magdalen's
bright beauty. Frank was better suited to her in point of age,
and Frank should have her if she preferred him. Roger
reached this conclusion hastily, and then, by way of strengthening
it, pointed playfully to the name on the paper, and asked,
“Have you spoken to her yet?”
Frank was glad Roger had broached the subject, and he
began at once to tell what he meant to do and be, if Magdalen
would but listen favorably to him. He would study so hard,
and overcome his laziness and his expensive habits, and be a
man, such as he knew he had not been, but such as he felt he
was capable of being with Magdalen as his leading star. He
had not spoken to her yet, he said, but he should do so that
night, and he was glad to have Roger's approval, as that would
surely bias Magdalen's decision. Frank grew very enthusiastic,
and drove his penknife repeatedly into the table, and ran his
fingers through his hair, and pulled up his collar and looked in
the glass; but never glanced at Roger, to whom every word he
as he listened and felt that his heart was breaking.
“I'd better go away for a day or two, until the matter is
settled, for if I stay I might say that to Magdalen which would
hardly be fair to say, after Frank's confiding in me as he has,”
Roger thought; and, after the mail came in, and he had some
pretext for doing so, he announced his intention of going to
New York in the afternoon train. “I shall not go to the
house,” he said, “as I have some writing to do; so please tell
your mother where I have gone, and that I may not return
until day after to-morrow.”
With all his efforts to seem natural, there was something
hurried and excited in his manner, which Frank observed and
wondered at, but he attributed it to some perplexity in business
matters, and never suspected that it had anything to do with
him and his prospective affairs.
Roger talked but little that morning, but busied himself at
his own desk, until time for the train, when, with some directions
to Frank as to what to do in case certain persons called,
he left his office and went on his way to New York.
After Roger's departure, Frank grew tired of staying alone.
The day had continued wet and uncomfortable, and few had
dropped in at the office, and these for only a moment. So,
after a little, he started for Millbank, resolving, if a good opportunity
occurred, to speak to Magdalen again on the subject
uppermost in his mind. He did not see his mother as he entered
the house, but he met a servant in the hall and asked for
Magdalen.
“Miss Lennox was in Mrs. Floyd's room,” the servant said,
and Frank went there to find her.
“I sent her up garret to shet a winder and hain't seen her
sense,” Hester said in answer to his question. “She's somewheres
round, most likely. Did you want anything particular?”
“No, nothing very particular,” was Frank's reply, as he left
the room and continued his search for Magdalen, first in the
hall, which had been fitted up for a fernery.
Not finding her there and remembering what Hester had
said about the garret, he started at last in that direction, though
he had but little idea that she was there. If she had come
down, as he supposed, she had left the door open behind her,
and he was about to shut it, when a sound met his ear, which
made him stop and listen until it was repeated. It came again
ere long, — a sound half way between a moan and a low, gasping
sob, and Frank ran swiftly up the stairs, for it was Magdalen's
voice, and he knew now that Magdalen was in the garret.
| CHAPTER XIX.
THE BEGINNING OF TROUBLE. Millbank, or, Roger Irving's ward | |