 | III. The thief in the night |  |
3. III.
With his victim. Gaston had been fond of
fancying himself the victim of Beaudesfords.
How could it be that fate had so suddenly turned
the tables?
They two were boys together at the same school,
mates in the same barrack: if they had had no
sorrows to share, they had been one in every
pleasure. Gaston was a poor man with his way to
clear; but had Beaudesfords — millionnaire from
his cradle — been born of Danäe's golden shower
itself, he could not have lavished wealth around
him more loosely. So prodigal that every one
partook of his bounty, his friend could scarcely
avoid basking in the same sunshine that he did.
But Gaston was a proud man, as well as a poor
one: he liked to accept nothing without rendering
its equivalent; and it was partly for that reason
that Beaudesfords, while squandering his income
when by himself, had reduced his personal expenditures
Gaston. Gaston had been the first of his class:
Beaudesfords, the second, looked up at him with
unmixed admiration. Beaudesfords had resigned
his commission: Gaston had retained his, and in
the frontier service had won a scar that Beaudesfords,
with joyous envy, considered a superior
decoration to the cross of the Legion of Honor.
Gaston, with a somewhat gloomy tinge of temperament,
almost a stranger to success, hitherto
chained to his profession, and devoured by stifled
and unsatisfied ambitions, was regarded by
Beaudesfords — young, rich, handsome, followed
by troops of friends — as the one person in the
world with whom he would be willing to exchange
identities and circumstances. In return
Gaston loved him truly: he could do no less.
The two were on a fishing excursion round the
coast at the time they together met Catherine
Stanhope. The wind had fallen, and they were
rowing their heavy boat round a long ledge of
rocks before making its night-harbor, when they
saw this woman standing on the extreme point of
the ledge looking out to sea. Her gown and a
loosened tress of fair hair fluttered on a little
eddy of faint air; but she herself stood in the
and tinted by whatever foreign light was shed
upon it, — as if her beauty were a beacon to warn
all sailors from so dangerous a coast. So beautiful
was she, indeed, that the two friends raised
their oars by one accord while they gazed, turned
away, and looked back again to make sure that it
was no deceit of weary eyes. At her knees another
figure sat, a younger girl, only less lovely,
but in utter contrast to the cool command of her
who stood: this small and clear dark face was
flushed, its eyes were fired, its short rings of
raven hair were wet with the dew of terror; for,
coming to gather samphire, Rose and her sister
had been cut off from shore by the rising tide.
Rose cowered there half unobserved; but it is safe
to say that of the two friends one not sooner than
the other was wild with love of Catherine Stanhope.
“Beautiful, by God!” exclaimed Gaston.
“By all the gods!” cried Beaudesfords, turning
on his seat.
“When was such a group seen before, — two
such women” —
“Ah! I saw but one,” said Beaudesfords.
“And yet the picture would be incomplete
without that carnation on the darker cheek.”
Beaudesfords laughed while he lowered his oar,
as if there had been disclosed a flash of his good
fortune in the future that eclipsed all the past
had given, since his friend had had time to see
the darker cheek, and preferred to linger on the
sight. The veil which Arnold Gaston's reserve
for ever wrapped about his emotion served him
in ill stead that night: a frank word, perhaps,
and the end had been otherwise. With the
sound of that laugh, Catherine's eyes fell from
their steady gaze where her soul had stayed prepared
for all the ventures of eternity; and she
beheld the two, — the back of one as he bent
over his oar, the dark, eager face of the other.
This life again with all its warmth and bliss
rushed before her: all past joys, all future possibilities,
rose in a splendid hope and gleamed
for her out of Arnold Gaston's eyes, as he gazed
in her face, while the other oar dipped and glanced,
rowing steadily towards her. A cry would have
risen to her lips, but it died there: she only held
out her arms with an imploring gesture, and
awaited him. It was his arms that lifted to receive
her as the boatside grated; but as instantly
he had dropped them, had sprung out on the
weed-imbedded rock, had passed Rose across to
grasp had been profanation of the other, had held
her steady by her strong white hands — he saw
how strong and white they were, each lineament
and curve was printed on his perception in as
brief an instant as that in which the sun sets
down every line and shadow — as she stepped
across, had followed her, and pushed off again
with a laboring oar out of the way of the strong
current that rippled round the rock. But if
Beaudesfords ever thought about that swift scene
in its relation to any other than himself and
Catherine, he only remembered that it was Rose
whom Gaston had saved the first.
Rose began to cry. The statelier and serener
woman calmed her with a soothing touch.
“Mr. Beaudesfords” — said she.
He turned in astonished silence, taking off the
cap and throwing back his tumbling yellow hair.
“You have forgotten me — Catherine Stanhope.”
“Never!” he cried.
“But it is!” averred the little one, looking up,
her face a-glitter with tears and blushes. “And
I am Rose.”
“That you are!” said Beaudesfords, gallantly.
you suppose I could have forgotten you if I had
ever seen you? When I knew Catherine Stanhope
she was fifteen and farouche.”
What lovely woman ever forgave a slight to
her beauty, past or present? What unconscious
one ever favored such bold addresses? Beaudesfords
learned that fact by an intuition. “And
now you are affronted,” said he; “and I have no
claim upon your good-nature, since it was Gaston
and not I that brought you into the boat.”
Gaston was running up the sail to meet the
rising breeze: the presence of these two women,
each so bewilderingly beautiful, was, to all appearance,
a matter to him of not half the moment
of the capful of wind which he essayed to catch.
“You used to speak of Gaston when you
stayed with us,” said Rose, under her breath.
“He is Major Gaston now,” replied Beaudesfords.
Just then the sail swung lazily round, and left
Gaston standing dark and clear against the setting
sun, while he bowed in answer to this introduction.
Catherine turned, and again their gaze
met. Beaudesfords used to speak of his friend as
of a being impassible as the hills: he would have
of the fires that seethed within. But who would
have guessed them as Gaston raised his hand to
try the wind, saying, “Another tack, and we just
make it!”
For the rest of the quiet sail no one wasted
many words, — Rose quivering with excitement,
Catherine too grateful for her escape, too deeply
touched. Beaudesfords had mercy on them, and
spent his impatience on the boat as it wound in
and out a serpentine channel to the shore. But
perhaps none of them ever forgot that tranquil
motion on the still, broad stream, in which the
sunset colors burned and drowned, and over
which the evening star stole out large-rayed and
calm: evening bells came floating off from the
distant town, the light-house lamps began to
sparkle, a warm land-breeze caught them up and
baffled them with flower-scents for a time; then
a salt smell of the sea was upon them in the
land-locked river-mouth, and a light and rushing
east wind bore them up the sand, just as the night,
with all its flitting fire-flies up, had settled into
duskiest, warmest depth.
It was Beaudesfords who helped them out.
Then Catherine turned again and held her hand
“because there are no words for such a service.”
If Major Gaston tingled to his fingers' ends as he
resigned that hand, none there would have known it.
“But you must come up with us,” cried the little
Rose. “Mamma will never forgive us if we let
you go. She will want to kiss the hands that
helped us. Oh! you saved our lives, you know!”
“We never thought of any thing less,” responded
Beaudesfords, taking no notice of her
grateful phrases, for the extremity had not been
serious, and doubtless other boats, in a port
where they were always darting about the water,
would have come to the rescue in season: it only
happened to be Beaudesfords' that came the first.
“We never thought of any thing less when we set
out,” said he; and so, ringing the changes on old
times with question and answer, they had gone
up the steep bank to the Stanhope cottage and
entered, and, in view of the alarm their protracted
stay had caused, had received a greeting from the
mother and her other daughter of welcome and
reproaches, kisses and tears. Gaston viewed the
scene from the doorway, — Beaudesfords mingling
in it, and with assumed simplicity coming in for
his share of all; and perhaps the glow of the
the Stanhopes in his regard than a year's endeavor
might have done, though he had once been
almost a child of the house himself.
Mrs. Stanhope was rather a stately woman:
her white skin Catherine had, her dark eyes Rose.
She was still a pretty woman, and had sufficient
spirit to cause the household to cluster round herself
for a centre. Her three children obeyed her
now as they did in their infancy; that is to say,
Catherine implicitly, Caroline petulantly, Rose
not at all. She was an ambitious woman, desiring
wealth; and, since it was unlikely that Caroline
would ever leave her, she intended that the
marriages of the others should be brilliant enough
to cover her deficiency. Her husband had been
one of Beaudesfords' guardians until his death.
A widow now, and with a small support, she knew
the value of money, particularly of Beaudesfords',
— the accumulation of a long minority:
she knew the value of beauty, too, as a merchantable
article, though doubtless she would
have rebuked such a suggestion with scorn.
Nevertheless she had sighed that in her seclusion
the beauty of her daughters should go for nothing;
had more than once wondered if Beaudesfords,
never remember his home of a single year sufficiently
to seek it again; and was not at last a
whit surprised when one morning, after he had
been a week in the place, Beaudesfords — who
had come in and was scratching off some letters
on her writing-table — looked up and said to her,
“Mamma Stanhope, I am going to marry Catherine.”
“With all my heart,” said she.
“Do you think Catherine will marry me?”
said Beaudesfords then, a little shyly and slyly.
“Oh! that,” said Mamma Stanhope, to make
the prize more precious, — “that is quite another
thing. Catherine is whimsical: I cannot say.
You surely are the one to know.”
“I surely do not know. This morning she is
kind to me, this evening she is haughty, to-morrow
she forgets I exist. You see, Mamma Stanhope,
if I had — if I were like Gaston” —
“Gaston, indeed!” cried madame. “I will
bring her here this moment!”
“No, no, no! That would never do. But you
can judge, at least, if she would favor such a
suit. I have so little to offer in myself.”
“Is that Rose calling me?” asked the wily
than Catherine ever did in her whole life. Wait
here, and finish your letters. I will be back
directly.”
Catherine and her sisters were alone in the
little sewing-room: they were plotting a gown
that should answer at once for the street, the
evening, and dinner. The mother entered, and
stood a moment watching them before she despatched
the other two on some opportune errand.
“You will not need to turn a breadth three
times before saying which side is the less shabby
any more,” said she then. “Beaudesfords wishes
you for his wife, Catherine.” She would not
have played her cards so poorly had she felt a
trifle less exultation over her prospects, or dislike
of their employment.
“Me?” exclaimed Catherine, lifting her head
from where she stooped, while the blood blossomed
out in two red roses on her cheeks.
“Beaudesfords!” She sprang to her feet.
“When he has not known me a week!” she
cried. “Does he think, because his purse is full,
he comes into this house as if it were a market
of Circassian girls and orders his slave home?”
Beaudesfords had not finished his letters,
there stripping his quill in pieces, when suddenly
the doorway darkened, and Catherine stood there
as blazing and brilliant as if a meteor had opened
and let her out, — a baleful meteor.
Beaudesfords rose pale to confront her. He
was her mate for beauty as he stood, that was
clear: his stature nobler than hers, his profile
like that on those coins where the conquering
Alexander had his own likeness struck in the
name of Apollo, his gray eyes with no more
quailing in them than an eagle's, the clustering
brightness of his hair, — she saw it all as she
stood there, her lips apart to speak, but the words
rising to them so bitter that they were not fit to
say. Beaudesfords, too, had a sharp arrow on the
string; but in a moment he had conquered his
indignant feeling, and he went forward, and
taking her hand, while she was too much surprised
to refuse it, led her to a seat.
“You are angry with me, Catherine,” said he
then, “because I have wished to share my life
with you, whatever there is in it either of sorry
or glad; because you had enchanted a week so
that I would have the same enchantment spread
over years; because in this week I had found
ever!” But her lids fell, and her face grew dull,
for she cared little for compliment, — nothing
for it from Beaudesfords, whom she remembered
as a careless, cheerful lad, while her sequestered
life had fostered every romantic tendency towards
the unknown and heroic. “Very well,” continued
Beaudesfords: “it is possible you can
pardon me, and I will keep the rest to myself.
Of course it was presumptuous. I acknowledge
my transgression, and my sin is ever before me!”
Then Beaudesfords laughed. He was a merry fellow,
and had never known what failure was: he
hoped still. “To keep it from being before me,”
said he, “I must go away. But not till I feel
forgiven. Don't let me tire you with complaint.
Do I look like a disappointed lover?”
“No, Mr. Beaudesfords,” exclaimed Catherine,
her chance having come, “but like a disappointed
purchaser!”
“Before God!” cried Beaudesfords, “I never
thought of my money! I will give it all to Gaston,
if that will make me a lighter weight in the
contest!”
What a flame leaped into Catherine's eyes!
“If Major Gaston had the half of it, he would” —
“Would what?” said Beaudesfords, in that
debonair way of his that seemed to her insufferable
familiarity.
“Would never woo his wife in such a fashion!”
Beaudesfords bent and touched her hand with
his lips. “Good-by,” said he. “It is the kiss
of peace. Since the lips are forbidden me” —
he hesitated half an instant, as if his own words
were a temptation to him; then lest, before he
knew what he was about, he should stoop and
hold and make that mouth his own, — that fragrant
and delicious mouth, — he turned upon his
heel and went out.
He came again though in the afternoon, and
Gaston with him. They had picked up a little
girl with her basket of wild strawberries to sell,
and had brought her up to empty it on Mamma
Stanhope's table.
“We have sold such a boat-load of fish, and
lobsters, and crabs,” said Beaudesfords, “that
we can afford to buy some berries. What a
work-a-day world it is where Gaston is!” he
said, throwing himself back in the great chair
he had chosen, and his hands clasped behind his
head. “Such idle hours as those officers have in
their forts and frontiers — Gaston could never
earn his living. I suppose I ought to go away,”
continued Beaudesfords, glancing half mischievously
at Catherine, for he was well enough aware
that all the family knew of his morning's mishap,
and he had taken care that Gaston did.
“But look at my net profits of to-day,” and he
threw two gold pieces on the table; “and Gaston
has as much more, — at least he had, before
he bought the berries, — honest earnings. Do
you think we shall leave such a placer?” And
he began to troll out, “Who 'll buy my caller
herrin'?” in as heart-whole a manner as ever a
costermonger cried his wares.
“Do you mean that you have actually sold your
fish?” questioned Rose, with her usual license.
“Why not?”
“In an age of bargain and sale,” added Gaston,
with something strange in his tone. Catherine
raised her eyes once more, and they met
those of Gaston, in a long-suspended glance.
She seemed mutely to answer a mute question:
the whole world might be at vendue, but she,
at least, was neither to be bought nor sold. A
moment after and she was wondering at herself:
wondering how it was that in a single week this
one into discovering his thoughts; this plain
man, whose scar caused you always to look into
his eyes that you might not see it; this lonely
man, without a relative, and with no nearer
friend than Beaudesfords on earth, — had already
become, as it were, a part of her own being.
That day had not been the happiest one, on
the whole, of Catherine's life. Her mother
had met her outbreak with a stern sense of
injury and unbending disapproval. Caroline had
awarded it no more favor: only little Rose —
she would always be little, though she were a
woman grown — had woven a chain of pansies,
and hung them on Catherine's hair, like the
benoitons of after-days, whispering a host of
naughty consolations; and Catherine — somewhat
martyrized, picturing to herself that unvarying
success in life which had so spoiled
Beaudesfords that he had never dreamed of a
woman's withstanding him, and had dared his
whole hope on a single risk — had made a noble
relief to her picture out of Gaston, proud, sad,
and majestic.
But when Gaston met her gaze just now, his
heart beating at first so exultantly, what made it
was an honest man, deeply in debt, and with a
sufficient burden on his shoulders to meet his
obligations? Was it with a conviction that his
great schemes and the work he had projected for
himself would not endure the rivalries of domestic
life? It could never have been with a
sense that he was a selfish man shrinking from
deprivations and responsibilities!
“Yes, we sold them,” continued Beaudesfords.
“Every fish had a piece of money in its mouth.”
“Just as much as if it had been caught in the
brooks of the miracles,” said Gaston.
“So you see we are inevitable as long as a
sturgeon leaps in the river, — at least I am:
Gaston has some ridiculous idea of departure.”
“Why, I thought Major Gaston had a furlough,”
said Rose, who had brought her little
macaw to the table, and was teasing her with
strawberries, thereby diverting the attention of
Mamma Stanhope, who coupled the claws and
beak with rents in her damask.
“A long furlough,” said Gaston: “I have left
the army for a situation in the civil-engineer service,
that I may pay my debts and draw a free
breath before I die.”
“Mamma says good people do not get into
debt,” said the more than half-spoiled Rose.
“That is the reason I have such a bill at the
milliner's. Good people are so stupid!”
“You relish a suspicion of wickedness?” asked
Gaston. “It does heighten the lights.”
“Since Rose is not one of them,” said Beaudesfords,
“we will admit that good people are
stupid.”
“And so are successful ones,” said the little
witch. “They stand like Beaudesfords,” deprecating
offence with her pretty smile, “in such a
glare of sunshine as to be commonplace; like a
picture without perspective. Give me Hassan of
the Desert, — somebody with a battle to fight
inside or outside; for my ideal is” —
“Grand, gloomy, and peculiar,” laughed Beaudesfords.
“But you, Major Gaston” —
“I am no darling of good-fortune certainly.”
“Ah! you are envious of Beaudesfords, I see.
Peste! I had much rather be a hero!” and she
sent the macaw fluttering and screaming to his
perch, having covered Catherine sufficiently with
her chatter.
Beaudesfords laughed his assent again.
“What are you talking of, Rose?” cried
Mamma Stanhope.
“She has been reading French novels,” said
Caroline. “And you are obliged to go at once,
Major Gaston?”
“Not necessarily, but I have some preparations”
—
“And two months to make them in,” said
Beaudesfords. “He is to explore one of the
great Central-American routes; and the expedition
— himself and a couple of Caribs — does not
start until August. Do you remember when my
guardian took me on his pilgrimage down among
the thunderbolted hills and arrowy rivers of the
isthmus? How wild Catherine was to go!”
“Green and salad days,” said Catherine, opening
her lips for the first time since his entrance.
“We told her women were in the way: they
could never stand, like Cortez and his men,
`silent upon a peak in Darien.'”
“That was the time you found your coppers?”
asked Gaston.
“Your what?” said Caroline, in her thirst for
useful knowledge.
“Didn't my guardian ever tell you? In one
of the old Spanish towns they were coppering a
a half-dozen of the rarest paintings on copper,
stripped from some cathedral. I bought them
for a song; and one — a St. Veronica, I fancy —
is such a likeness of Catherine, as she sits there,
that I swear the Inquisition couldn't get it away
from me!”
Gaston's brow darkened. “Don't you see it?”
asked Beaudesfords.
“It is plain enough!” returned the other,
making his excuse for gazing till it lightened all
his gloom.
“Oh!” cried Rose, “to tell a lady that her
face is plain enough!”
“Suppose you come and see,” said Beaudesfords,
impetuously. “Mamma Stanhope, it is not
a day's sail up the river. Take the demoiselles
and go up to Beaudesfords to-morrow with us:
with a fair wind, and the tide serving at daybreak,
we shall be there in time to dine, and come
down on the midnight ebb. I want you to see
how I have carried out my guardian's plans in
the improvements. You have never been there
since he and you came together to bring the forlorn
little wretch that you found crying and kicking
on the floor down to the shelter of this roof.
What say?”
Mamma Stanhope would have gone to the moon
if Beaudesfords had led the way. Catherine's
objections were hushed; and before the eastern
stars had melted into the flames of sunrise the
boat had stretched its wings, and, laden with such
a crew as it never bore before, went flying zigzag
up the river that crept from gray to gold with
morning breaking on the banks, reaching its destination
by noon, when, by Beaudesfords' ukase,
the party scattered for a nap before they should
be summoned to a dinner for which a telegram
posted from the village had already prepared his
housekeeper.
Mamma Stanhope sunk among her pillows,
deep and downy as clouds, enjoying into the core
of her heart the sumptuousness about her, already
mistress of it in prospective, and sleeping the
sleep of the just. Caroline, of altogether too
common clay to keep awake when a luxurious
cushion offered its repose, followed her example;
while Rose, like a tired child, had been dozing in
the boat itself. Only Catherine, with a grieved
and outraged sense of the indelicacy of bringing
her here to spread her price before her, — the last
thing, assuredly, that Beaudesfords would have
thought of, — was stung wide awake; and, feeling
threw her scarf over her head, and, wandering
down the garden, had strolled beyond, pausing
where a growth of lofty oaks spread a perpetual
canopy of glancing gold and emerald, while the
trunks made mighty colonnades down the long
and open woodland.
She paused, because Gaston stood there: unwilling
to join him, and thinking he had not seen
her, she was about to retrace her way, when all
at once a distant voice, calling and commanding,
arrested her; and then a great, open-mouthed
bay, a war-cry, resounded in rough music, and an
enormous mastiff, but one remove from the gray
wolf of northern forests, flashed past her, and
flew at Gaston's throat. She stood rooted for
that moment, while the man, bent backward in
the dreadful contest, seized the jaws of the monster,
wrenched them open from the heavy frieze
they had caught, and, with a blow of his fist that
resounded like a sledge-hammer, had felled the
brute to the ground.
He came up to Catherine, almost directly afterward,
as if nothing had happened. “Which?”
said Mrs. Stanhope, when she one day told her
about it, — “which brute?”
“Which brute?” said Catherine, coolly.
“Why, Gaston, of course.”
“Were you much frightened?” Gaston asked.
“The fellow has a grudge against me. I had no
idea the wolf had such a memory though. Beaudesfords
should not have let him loose with you
upon the grounds. He is one of the pets of the
place.”
“You must come in and have your wound
dressed,” she said quickly. “Some day you will
be going mad!”
“Thank you, there is no wound to dress. He
has only torn my jacket and grazed the skin.”
Beaudesfords came running up, white and
breathless. “My God, Gaston!” he cried: “I
thought you were done for! I saw the struggle.”
“Oh, it was magnificent!” said Catherine.
“Heyday! you should have been a Roman girl
to applaud at the great circuses, where you could
have seen men eaten up alive any day. Hurry
up to the house, Gaston. Mrs. Gray will make
all right. Is the flesh torn?”
“The merest trifle. I hope I have not injured
the beast,” looking back where the mastiff had
struggled up on his fore-feet. “But so warm a
welcome” —
“I will settle his case. There is only one
penalty. If you will go up with Catherine.”
“Does Mr. Beaudesfords value such a creature?”
asked Catherine, as they moved away.
“Yes: I am sorry to say as much as any thing
at Beaudesfords. He has belonged to him for
years, and at one time, when lost in the snow
between these hills, rescued him from death.
He has some human traits, however, — jealous
of his master's friends and hating me.”
“Is it so much a human trait to hate you?”
“I will not be so melodramatic as to say so,”
said Gaston, in a bitter voice that answered for
him.
They were walking rapidly, but stopped just
then at what seemed to Catherine the most
beautiful sight of all her life: it was a flight of
birds that darkened the air, that made a thousand
lightnings in the sunshine, wings and wings
thicker than autumn leaves, scattering, uniting,
rising into heaven, rushing over them and winnowing
the air like grain till they became lost
and swallowed in the blue.
“Ah, how lovely!” cried Catherine.
“They fly as if Epaminondas manœuvred
them,” said Gaston. “Strange that the resistance
very wedge to cleave it. Yes: every thing is
lovely at Beaudesfords. Every sound makes
music — listen!”
It was only the echo of a pistol-shot, repeated
and repeated till it died in a silvery sough.
They turned, ere the echo expired: there was
a little puff of smoke dissipating under the oaks,
the mastiff had bounded and fallen over dead,
and Beaudesfords was hastening away. Catherine
shivered as she went in, finding herself
standing as it were between two such volcanic
foci; and nothing being said about the mastiff
and his end, when Beaudesfords, gay and smiling,
reappeared to take Mamma Stanhope in to dinner,
she also, for many a day thereafter, said
nothing.
What a dinner it was! These young women,
bred upon simple fare and in simple ways, could
hardly taste the wonderful viands in view of the
wonderful service, china, brilliant and brittle as
bubbles, the epergne a piece of jewelry, glasses
like rock-crystal, the frosted silver and beaten
gold; and to think that it was all within Catherine's
reach! Even Rose went over to the
enemy. Perhaps the exquisite Moselle, in whose
warmed Mrs. Stanhope's blood more generously
than was its wont; for she fairly bubbled with
pleasure when her glance followed Catherine by
and by as she moved down the hall among the
pictures and bronzes and enamelled armors, remembering
how Catherine loved splendor and
queendom, the rustle of silk, the whiteness of
ermine. Beaudesfords' eyes followed her with a
different thought. How sweet her presence and
her grace seemed in these great rooms where so
seldom of late years had there been any thing to
be seen better than wreaths of tobacco smoke!
how sweet her voice in the halls that, in the intervals
of long silence and disuse, had so seldom
rung with any thing but the hilarity of late carousals!
Gaston, meanwhile, busied himself in
cutting little devils and dragons out of butternuts:
he had no eyes for any thing but his
handiwork.
So at last the St. Veronica had been seen and
pronounced to be Catherine herself, so much so
that it vexed our young lady a little to leave it
in Beaudesfords' possession; then the grounds
had been travelled over and the improvements
lauded by Mrs. Stanhope; the housekeeper had
evening twilight they dropped down the river.
The gentle current bore them along slowly
at first, underneath a shaking sail, — it was the
movement of a dream: then the tide ran down
more strongly, the breeze came in pursuit, and
they heard the river hissing behind them as it
closed over the gash their keel made. The stars
came out, and sparkled as though the wind fanned
their fires. Beaudesfords, alive with gayety,
seemed to sparkle back at them. Gaston, also
unbending, became genial again after his fashion:
soon he began to sing, — sweet and sonorous
tones. Presently Catherine was singing too: his
breath came fast as he heard her, the voice was
so delicious, — his own trembled, he grasped the
tiller more closely, as if he could control himself
by controlling another thing, and poured out a
volume of melody on which hers seemed to rise
and float like some white-winged sea-bird on a
sustaining flood. Beaudesfords leaned back, his
face in the starlight shining with enjoyment. A
school of shad followed in their wake, leaping
and flashing out of the dark stream. “See,”
said Beaudesfords, in the succeeding silence, “all
the lurleys and creatures of the deep have risen
will be aboard and sink us! It makes me shiver!
Oh for a lanthorn and a spear, and such a breakfast
of planked mermaid as you should have to-morrow,
Mamma Stanhope!”
“No more shad for us,” replied Mamma, “unless
you want to make us phosphorescent.”
“We are sparkling enough now, you think?”
“There is a bittern booming,” said Gaston.
“We are almost home.”
“What a run it has been!” said Catherine.
“How sorry I am! What is there more intoxicating
than this swift motion by starlight?”
“One thing only,” said Gaston, between his
teeth and unheard.
“There is the cottage,” said Mamma. “See
the dew on the hedges. Come, you sleepy children!”
for Rose and Caroline had, this last
hour, been little more than ballast.
“How the wind freshens down there among
the breakers!” said Gaston, pointing at the white
line that fringed the river's mouth.
“It is like a dance of death by beautiful ghosts,”
answered Catherine.
“Will you go on, Beaudesfords?”
“Not I. Enough of this for one day. I have
me.”
“I never shared them,” replied Gaston.
The boat touched the landing under the lee of
the steep hill which you climbed to the Stanhope
cottage. Beaudesfords sprung ashore, helped out
Mrs. Stanhope, and passed Rose and Caroline
along.
“But you,” said Gaston to Catherine, “would
like to tempt that distance?”
The rudder turned, the sail flapped and filled,
the painter slipped from Beaudesfords' grasp and
plashed in the water; and before Mrs. Stanhope's
warning voice could be lifted, Gaston and Catherine
were flying out to sea.
Catherine stood forward by the mast, Gaston
sat in the stern; but what a strange freedom
rioted through their hearts alike as they went
coursing over the channel, rising on the broad
tide-waves, plunging up and down in the chop
upon the bar, then soaring and sinking with a
large wild motion on the great sea-swells, while
silver thunders filled their ears, and tall foam-phantoms
rose and fell in misty whiteness everywhere
about them. Catherine was where she
had never been, — in a narrow strait that wound
rock, so that she found herself with tumultuous
waters before her and behind her, on this side
and on that, surrounded by stormy sea and starlit
darkness in the midst of the breakers.
Since Gaston knew his way in, he surely knew
it out, — it never occurred to her to doubt him, —
all was well if the wind held, if the mast held.
The moment was too splendid for fear; and fear
or not, they could not have heard each other
speak. On one side now the waves shot up
across the gloom in spires of silver; on the other
boiled the whirlpool, a black pit of fire and
spume; just beyond was the still and open water.
Suddenly a snap that Catherine never heard:
the tiller had broken, and sent Gaston reeling
from his seat, with the fragment in his hand;
the boat staggered as if it had been struck by
death, then drifted broad on the breaker that in
another moment would have swamped her. But
before that moment came, Gaston had thrown
himself upon the floor, had thrust his long arm
through the tiller-hole to the shoulder, and with a
hand of iron had seized and held the rudder as
the tiller did. The boat hung and trembled like
a creature about to take some dreaded leap; in
and rose on his arm, and sent a pain grinding
through his body that he had reason to remember
for months; then the chasing wave came on, bent
to its fall, broke in a line of whiteness, rolled up
and caught them on its back and tossed the boat
over into safe water. Gaston twisted his arm
free, trimmed his sail, and, steering with an oar,
took the outer way through open sea, and so up
the winding channel and home again.
When it was all over, Catherine realized the
peril they had passed through; but Gaston stood
with the oar in his left hand half behind him, and
looking forward so unconcernedly that she scorned
to do less. So she wrung the spray out of her
hair in silence, — perhaps there would have been
a trifle too much flutter in the voice above all that
palpitation.
The boat went about, and they made the shore.
Gaston dropped the sail, threw over the anchor,
and handed her out, saying some trivial thing.
Then he went up the steep, dark-thicketed bank
beside her, where wafts of sweetness floated down
from the garden, and left her within the little
gate. She held her hand across: he took it for
a moment, still standing on the other side, towering
blossom just opened on the night; the shadows
of the tree-branches waved round them, only the
glint of a star broke through, the murmuring
river shone in a mystical glimmer below; all the
world slept, the distant shrilling of the cricket
seemed but the silence singing to itself. It was
a spell of hush and midnight and dew, not broken
even when two faces bent together and the lips in
one long thrill and touch of passion drew the soul
from each other.
Sleep was slow in descending on Catherine's
eyes that night: he never made his pillow on
such flushed and burning roses as her cheeks.
The hours passed in a wild and happy forgetfulness,
the deep dream of love and innocence that
the heart dreams with waking eyes. The face of
Gaston was the thing she saw, as it bent slowly
toward her; his figure, as he stalked away into
the darkness. Let her have her night's pleasure
in remembering it, in her heart's beating up one
great throb of bliss, in feeling still that kiss upon
her lips: the next time that she saw Gaston she
had been for more than two years the wife of
Beaudesfords.
| III. The thief in the night | |