Chapter VI The Make-Believe
After Aunt Lucretia had gone there was a faint tap at my window, which I knew of old. When I raised the sash Eloise stood outside, smiling at me. On the veranda she slipped her arm through mine, and led the way to our old seat under the hickories.
“Jack,” she began, and her serious tone seemed to bode no good, “I just couldn’t go to sleep until I had talked with you. Aunt Lucretia thinks I’m in bed; just as she used to think we both were when we weren’t, Little Brother.” She smiled half tenderly. “I think I ought to speak to you. This thing is getting serious, don’t you think?”
“It’s been that way with me all the time,” I said earnestly, “if I could only get you to look at it seriously—”
For reply she thumped my cheek with her thumb and forefinger. It was a trick Aunt Lucretia had used when I had been naughty as a boy, and Eloise knew that nothing made me madder.
“Now, Jack—no nonsense—listen. We must do something—about—”
“Our marriage this fall?” I interrupted.
Eloise laughed. “Isn’t it nonsense?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “She has always said so, and we have always done as she said. I have always found it was the best thing for me,” I added.
Eloise pretended indignation. “Well, now, let me tell you, Jack, this is my funeral as well as yours, and for once this isn’t the right idea!”
“Oh,” said I, “maybe you’ve grown big enough since I saw you to defy Aunt Lucretia. Well, I haven’t; and dear, dear Little Sister,” I went on, taking her slim hand in mine with more warmth than she seemed to like, “I have learned to hold my own among men, but Aunt Lucretia is a very different thing! I am not going to defy her, or go contrary to her wishes—I’ve tried it and know better! And you?”
“Of course I am,” she said, moving a little away from me; “the idea! Why, Jack, it is absurd! Jack—” and instantly she stopped. Her voice dropped with a sad little wilt, and she laid her head upon my shoulder.
I knew that she was brave and never cried, or else I would have believed she was in tears.
“Dear Little Sister,” I said consolingly, “why, what is it? What has happened since I left? This has been Aunt Lucretia’s dream all her life, and mine too,” I said, tenderly kissing her cheek.
Eloise sighed; then after a while she answered. “Of course, Jack, she has said that always, ever since we were children, and being children, why we couldn’t say anything, for our very home and living depended on it. But Jack, I see it all now. I’m ashamed of it—though I couldn’t help it—this—this awful buy-and-sell way, this bartering me because I am poor and an orphan, this closing the chance of the great dream of my life for me—that one dream which every woman loves more than life, Jack. It’s—why, I’ve treated you so badly. I wonder that you care for me at all. But—oh, Jack, I had such ideas of love, and now to be mated off like her cattle!”
“I know it,” I said, “only you were never as mean as you say. Young as we were I felt it, too, and that is why I didn’t blame you. But it never made any difference with me, Eloise—I have loved you always, and I’m as proud of you now as anyone can be.”
“Oh, you dear boy,” said she. She laid her head upon my shoulder, then reached up and kissed me on the cheek. She was silent and I was never so happy, with her head lying there, and the perfume of her hair in my face.
At last she laughed. “Jack, you neglected me shamefully while you were away, studying.”
“I wrote you a love letter every week!” I exclaimed.
“But people in love write to each other every day,” she said. “You don’t really love me, Jack!”
“Eloise, I couldn’t write every day, but I thought of you the last thing every night before I went to sleep, and I slept with your picture under my pillow, and I used to play that we were married, and that my dressing gown in the chair was you.”
“O, Jack,” and she clasped my hand in hers, “you dear boy! And I must say I never dreamed you’d be so big and handsome!”
I seized her hands, holding them in mine: “And let me tell you, Eloise, you almost took my breath when I saw you for the first time this morning!”
There was a long silence before Eloise spoke. “Jack, what are we going to do about—about—Aunt Lucretia?”
“Why, I tell you there is nothing to do but to do as she says—marry—you know how she has planned this all her life. It would break her heart; and mine,” I added softly.
“Listen now,” said Eloise earnestly. “Jack, that is nonsense. I don’t love you that way nor you me. I don’t care what she says. Love is made from higher, nobler motives, and true marriages should be made in heaven as they say. I,” she went on with a sigh, “Jack, I have given up; I was not made for love like that—as you want to love me. I am too selfish, I care too much for the fine world around me, for my own self, for pleasure. I love to will, to conquer, Jack. I don’t want to love, to give myself up to any man and his whims unless—”
“Unless what?” I asked eagerly.
“Well, two things,” she said. “First; unless I loved him—oh, if I only could! How I would love him! And if not that—well, for—for—it would have to be compensation of another kind, such as great wealth, and all that, to have a great name like that of the Countess of Carfax.”
“The Countess of Carfax?” I asked.
She was looking at me very earnestly. I felt her eyes on my face. Something unpleasant began to dawn upon me.
“Jack, I cannot deceive you. I do not, I cannot love anyone that way—that one sweet way. It is not in me. I might have loved you that way, Jack, it is the truth, but Aunt Lucretia has thwarted the chance you had with me, with her blooded stock idea of it. That is why I’ve treated you so all my life; it was not I, it was Love resenting this profanity of itself.”
I could not speak. Eloise, I saw, had much to tell that I did not know.
“Four years is a long time to be away, and after you left I was so lonely, I had no comrade, no Little Brother in my summer vacations. And you were far away, and Colonel Goff—you know how queerly he has always persisted in wanting to marry me some day—not quite as bad as Aunt Lucretia’s way, but almost as bad—because, well, I think for no other reason than because I ride well—” she was speaking brokenly. “Aunt Lucretia wants me to marry you because I’ve got a good pedigree, and Colonel Goff wants me to marry him because I ride well, but I want to marry someone because I love him. You know how grandfather is about Colonel Goff, Jack? Oh, I can’t tell it all, but he has made it so unpleasant for me since you left, worrying me about—that I should marry Colonel Goff—that I had nothing, and how great a man Colonel Goff was—and—oh, he has seemed to become childish of late, so irritable and strange, and so he has almost driven me away from home or into marrying Colonel Goff; and you were far away, Jack. And so when Colonel Goff—well, he was as persistent as grandfather, and so kind always and good to me—Jack, you see how I was placed between them—”
“Well?” I said bitterly, “go on.”
“And so when Colonel Goff asked me, I—”
The great trees above me seemed to reel, and my heart to stop, and then thump fiercely in my throat.
“Eloise, please don’t,” I begged. “Do you—you don’t love that man!”
“Of course not,” she answered coolly, and very quietly, “but—and this is my secret, Jack. Promise me—it isn’t known yet, but it will be before long. You know since he came home from the war with grandfather and lived here he has been at outs with his people in England. You know how he had to leave them. Well, it seems that all of his brothers over there have died but one, and that Colonel Goff is next heir, and that he has received a letter from the physician asking him to come and see his brother before he dies, that he wants to arrange about the estates, for they are large, and the brother is the Earl of Carfax.”
I had dropped her hand, and my head was bent. I knew what was coming.
“But you don’t love him, Eloise, surely—” I arose, the stars whirling above my head, the great trees soughing as in sorrow. She came up in the starlight and put her arms around my neck. She tried to laugh and pull me back to our seat.
“Jack,” she said, “I want you to help me—will you not do something—the last something I shall ever ask you for?”
“I love you enough to give you my life,” I said.
“You were always so good to me. It is this, Jack—our secret: Colonel Goff and I will be married as soon as he can arrange to go back to England, in a month or two. I don’t want any scene with Aunt Lucretia, and so, and so, Jack, we’ll just make-believe—let her believe it is all right—that we are carrying out her plans up to the very day.”
“I’ll say nothing,” I answered; “you and Aunt Lucretia can arrange it.”
“You’ll have to act as if you loved me, Jack.”
“I cannot act any other way,” I said.
She laughed, her voice floating up triumphantly. “And you will have to send me that diamond ring, you know—”
“Eloise,” I said again, after a moment, “this is desecration! You know you don’t love that old man!”
“I like him enough to be the Countess of Carfax. If I’ve got to be sold to anyone, Jack,” she said with bitterness, “got to be traded off like a Jersey, why I’d rather be traded off as the Countess of Carfax than any other way!”
I flushed hot.
“But Jack, think of grandfather. It is that or be turned out.”
“Eloise,” I cried, “you know I wouldn’t stand for that!”
“No,” she whispered softly, “not if you could help. But Jack, I forgot to tell you, you are already out.”
I could only look my astonishment.
“I wanted to write you,” she went on, “but I was afraid. I learned it all from Braxton Bragg.”
“What did he have to do with it?”
“You know he has had a silly idea that he was going to marry me himself some day, though you know how I have always despised him. Well, Jack, you’ll never know what he has done; because you don’t know the conditions on The Home Stretch. I, myself, didn’t, till Braxton Bragg showed me the papers the very month you left. You know how grandfather has always kept that secret drawer in his safe locked? But you remember how we children learned all about it?”
“I remember Braxton showed it to me,” I said. “I never knew how he found it out.”
“Nor I, nor how he stole the parchment from it, the one that grandfather kept from all eyes, even Aunt Lucretia’s, for she knows nothing of it yet. But he did, and he showed it to me, thinking—well, you’ll guess why. Jack, we’re outcasts, you and I, we have nothing.”
She hesitated a moment, then went on. “It seems that the first John Rutherford, the Old Indian fighter, who was killed at New Orleans, left a secret paper with his will, in which he begged the heir who inherited from him, your great-grandfather, John Rutherford, second, who fought in the Mexican war, you know, to bequeath the estate to that son of his who should be a soldier, and that it should be passed on in that way secretly to each generation. Now John Rutherford the second, had only one son, your grandfather, and his son, Braxton’s father, was killed in the war.
“Oh, I see now,” I said amazed, “and that was why he wanted me to go to West Point.”
“And why Braxton Bragg, who is a coward,” she cried indignantly, “did go to West Point, after he stole that parchment and read it. And as proof of it, when grandfather was trying to persuade me to listen to Colonel Goff, he told me he was going to leave The Home Stretch so that it would go to Braxton Bragg after Aunt Lucretia’s death.”
In an instant I saw it all. I understood things that I had given no serious thought to before.
“Yes, I am out,” I agreed.
“Jack, Little Brother, I hope I haven’t made you unhappy on your first night at home.”
I did not speak; she sighed.
“And so I am going to marry Colonel Goff, Jack, and be the Countess of Carfax, and you’ll do as I say—you’ll make-believe with me. I’d so hate to have Aunt Lucretia know now.”
“I’ll go on as if it were I,” I said bitterly. “I’d do anything for you, Eloise—and—and I do hope you’ll be happy yet.”
She shook her head: “Jack, you do not know me—that kind of happiness that I have craved all my life is not for me, and it is so hard that it should be, for I have always had such beautiful dreams of that kind of happiness—I, who could love so if I only might—I who wish it so, to be widowed of it all my life.”
“I could make you if you’d only wait—give me a chance to prove mine—to make you love me, Eloise.”
“It is too late. O, Jack, you deserve better of me than this; you do not deserve so poor return as this make-believe—a make-belief—only this—a little sisterly kiss,” and she held up her face in the starlight to mine.
But I sat silent. My heart—it would not take such a make-believe tribute.
I rose from our seat. “Good night, Eloise, I wish now that I had stayed in Germany,” I said as I walked in.
“Jack, come back, don’t be angry with me. I’ve done the best I could.”
I saw her turn defiantly, like one who, receiving a hurt, fights back. I left her sitting under the trees.