Chapter VIII The Telegram
Mrs. Page promised herself to keep a sharp lookout in behalf of the young girl of whom she had assumed temporary charge. At the very first of those exclusive walks and sails which she foresaw, she meant to reason with her brother, and indirectly to warn Mildred of his idiosyncrasy. Her guest seemed wonderfully well-poised and self-possessed for a girl of her age. Doubtless she had already become accustomed to admiration; but Gorham’s attentions would be of an unusual sort. Mrs. Page meant to keep an eye on him.
She was disappointed, however. The very day following, he mentioned his intention of returning to the city.
“You must have known that I only came down to call on you,” he replied to Hilda’s expressions of surprise and dismay. “After such a prolonged holiday as I have had, you surely didn’t suppose I was going to idle away more time here.”
“I think it is very shabby of you,” pouted Mrs. Page, with no thought of her own inconsistency. “Miss Bryant and I need you to entertain us while Robert is away. Don’t we, Miss Bryant?”
Mildred assented. “It is hard to be deprived of both Blitzen and Mr. Page,” she said feelingly, and her hostess wished she had not appealed to her.
Page regarded his sister thoughtfully. “Shall I send you some books?” he asked. “Miss Bryant said last night that she had not brought any books with her.”
“You needn’t trouble yourself,” returned Hilda quickly. “His first symptom of interest,” she noted mentally. “I know you,” she added aloud. “The lightest entertainment we could hope for would be Buckle’s ‘History of Civilization.’ No. Leave us if you must; but don’t send us any literature!”
So he departed, and Mrs. Page was left to sound his praises instead of his defects, to her friend. After Mildred’s saucy speech, she was determined that the girl should appreciate how far above the common run of men this rara avis of a brother was; and she rang the changes upon his high principle, his conscientiousness, his unselfishness, until the faint light of ironical amusement in her guest’s eyes arrested her.
“I wouldn’t have you think Gorham a prig,” she added hastily. “He is the furthest from it.”
Mildred’s week at the beach slipped quickly and pleasantly away, and then she was recalled to Pearfield by her sister, who wrote that Mr. Van Tassel felt so much stronger that he wished to return home at once.
Mrs. Page received one letter from the girl, after they reached Chicago, descriptive of the journey, and the parting from Pearfield. Blitzen, she said, they were obliged to leave behind, as on the day of departure he was nowhere to be found. Humiliating as it was to confess it, they all believed he had heard the plans for his removal, and had gone into hiding.
September passed and October was nearly gone, when one morning as he opened his mail in his office, Gorham Page found a letter from his cousin Jack.
It began by responding to some theories and warnings, which Page had recently written him, relative to the unwholesomeness of beer-drinking.
DEAR GORHAM,—Your interesting and instructive letter just received. It has been an unusual length of time on the road, and it was an ill fate that delayed your temperance lecture, and deprived me of that aid to sobriety any longer than was necessary, in view of the rapidity with which I am traveling the downward road. It arrived, however, at a critical period. A friend in the pension, whose besotted fancy could not rise from the miry slough in which intemperance has sunk her, has just made me a philopena present. Instead of bestowing upon me some airy and diverting German philosophy, or fascinating English tract, or an elevating necktie,—instead of finding something which, in the guise of a trifling gift, should have brought to a debauched young man blessed suggestions of a reformed life and renewed respectability, she presented me a beer mug with a painting of Lohengrin, Swan and Co. on the outside, and a line or two of German words around the rim, having some reference to Parsifal and the Holy Grail!
That of course drives the last nail into my coffin! That puts me beyond the pale of—water! In vain do you exclaim, “Be a man! Have some backbone about you! Be content to look at your new beer mug, without making other use of it. Keep it as bric-a-brac, dry, and always perpendicular! Let its rigid uprightness be also that of your moral character. Resist the dreadful power of this unrighteous alliance of a refined taste for æsthetic pottery with a depraved taste for strong drink!”
Alas, I cannot. How appalling and yet how interesting it is to observe how Fate inclines to kick a fellow when he’s down. Everything conspires against the reform of one who has fallen.
As to my own case, even if I could overcome my craving for liquor, I should still be obliged to go right on drinking my pint of beer at dinner every day, for it seems that the German words around the rim of my mug are not “fast colors;” they come off gradually as I drink; and after long-drawn-out attempts by the other process, I conclude that this is the only way in which I can ever get any German into me, so I must go on to the bitter end. Bitte sehr!
I have decided to come home before the New Year. I dread it, as you know, but the plunge into the new family circle must be taken some time, and I want to see my father. I am sure he wants to see me, too, though he doesn’t say much about it. In a recent letter, he admitted that he had not been very well during the summer. Bless him! I suppose her griefs have shaken him very much. Of course I’m sorry for her, but I can’t be resigned to father’s having had to shoulder the Bryants’ affairs. I tell you I am glad to know he is himself again. His letter made me feel an intolerable distance away. Yes, I shall see him by the New Year, whatever happens.
Page was folding this letter into its envelope, when a telegraph boy entered the office.
“Want an answer?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
So while his clerk signed, the lawyer tore open the message. He started as he read it, and a slow color rose over his face.
Taking a blank he scribbled an address, then added:—
Will be with you to-morrow evening.
GORHAM PAGE.
Making hasty preparations at the office and at home, he barely succeeded in catching the limited train for Chicago. When he was seated in his section, he drew forth from his pocket the telegram that had startled him, and read it again.
Mr. Van Tassel died suddenly at nine last night. Can you come to us?
MILDRED BRYANT.
“Poor Jack!” thought Page; and the wheels seemed to repeat the words like a refrain. He disliked his own task, but it did not seem strange to him that he had been summoned. Mr. Van Tassel had no near relatives in Chicago. Page had had charge of his legal affairs in Boston. Doubtless his address had been among the dead man’s papers, and Mrs. Van Tassel’s advisers had suggested that he be sent for.
Page shrank repugnantly from encountering this woman, whom disaster followed so relentlessly. He tried not to think of her. Perhaps it would not be necessary that they should meet at all; yet try as he might, he could not prevent his imagination from picturing the siren, who had succeeded in capturing the honest, cordial, fine-natured man, whose death it was difficult to realize. How would Jack bear it? How would his highly strung affectionate nature stand the strain? This woman who had brazenly told him that she did not love his father had been the one to stand near the latter’s deathbed; while the loving heart of the son had been kept at a distance by her machinations.
For Page was now fully convinced that Jack had been deliberately deceived as to his father’s condition, and he blamed himself hotly for obeying his sister and refraining from intermeddling.
He said to himself that he ought to have talked with Miss Bryant about the matter at R——. The thought of Mildred gave him no pleasure. She was sister to the woman who had robbed Jack, and broken his heart. He felt a sudden conviction of Mrs. Van Tassel’s appearance. She was an Amazon; tall, commanding, bold-faced, loud-voiced, with a coarser repetition of her sister’s beauty; and involuntarily he shuddered with anticipatory disgust, and wished the next few days well over.
But this was being extraordinarily imaginative for Page, and he realized it all at once, and opened the paper which he had bought, with the newsboy shuffling along beside him as he hastened through the depot in Boston. But his thoughts would not concentrate upon the printed page; rather they flew to Jack’s brilliant face,—the face which always said that life was good,—and saw it suddenly stamped with white despair, alone in a strange land.
The next day, arrived in Chicago, Page left the train at Hyde Park and went to a hotel. Half an hour afterward, he emerged and walked toward the lake. It was a dreary day, such as seldom comes in Chicago’s October. The lake was gray from recent rain, and an east wind was whipping dead leaves from the elms, across the green lawn around the Van Tassel house.
Page looked at the drawn curtains, walked up the steps to the crape-hung door, and an unexpected lump rose in his throat, for he thought of Jack. In that moment, there came to him a new loyal satisfaction in the fact that he had come; that some one beside aliens would stand near Uncle Richard. It was with a strange mixture of grief and resentment that he met the servant, and asked for Miss Bryant.
He looked around the well-remembered parlor, where the maid left him, and noted that it was newly and fashionably furnished; but scarcely five minutes had passed before Mildred entered the room, and walked straight up to him with outstretched hand.
He returned the greeting with cold formality, and even in the shaded room he could see that the girl’s eyes were swelled from weeping.
“I am so glad you could come,” she said tremulously. “Was it very inconvenient? We thought you would probably wish to attend the funeral any way. Mr. Van Tassel had so few”—she could go no further, but broke down and wept into her handkerchief.
“Crocodile tears!” thought Page. “It is more than likely that they have everything between them.—Certainly, I should have wished to come,” he said aloud.
“Then—then,” began Mildred, making an effort, “my sister wanted your advice—she thought you would know best—Mr. Van Tassel trusted you—Forgive me, but we have had such a shock”—she tried vainly to go on, once, twice, then with a gesture turned and left the room.
The visitor moved to a window, and looked out through a crack of the blind.
“I’m sorry they think it necessary to go through this sort of thing,” he thought cynically. “Now I suppose she will send the other one; and if that was a preface!” A sound behind him caused him to set his teeth, and turn about with the coldest, blankest expression he could assume. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light now, and he saw a straight slight girl in black, standing and regarding him with the saddest, loveliest countenance he had ever looked upon. Her large eyes had shed all their tears, and her delicate lips had never smiled. Her rippled brown hair framed a colorless face, and her effect was less pathetic than awe-inspiring in its pure unconscious dignity.
“This is Mr. Page?” she said, advancing and offering a hand which the young man took mechanically. “It was kind of you to come promptly. I felt that I must see you and you only, about—about Mr. Van Tassel’s son.”
She spoke in an even, emotionless voice, but Page noted a faint trembling of her lips at the mention of Jack.
“You are the nearest relative, and you can best decide what should be done.”
Page was in all the confusion incident upon intense revulsion of feeling. He felt that he had not yet full command of his ideas; but the spontaneous desire to help this exquisite young creature, to let neither himself nor any one else wound her further, constituted his ruling passion for the moment.
“You have sent no word to Jack as yet?”
“No. As soon as your telegram came I decided to wait for you.”
She had been waiting for him and he had filled the moments of his coming with brutal contempt and criticism of her.
The tearless sadness of her voice went on: “It is better for the word to go from you than from me.” Her eyelids fell. “It will hurt Jack less. I would”—she lifted her eyes again and gave Page a look that his heart received as a pang. “I would gladly give my life if it could procure Jack one hour with his father, alive.”
“I believe it sincerely,” he answered.
The respect and sympathy of Page’s tone seemed to impel her to further explanation. “It was terribly sudden and unexpected,” she said. “No one—the doctor himself did not believe in the possibility of such a catastrophe. He was feeling so well for him. He was in the act of speaking of it when he sank back. His last word was ‘happy.’”
She stood a moment, her eyelids dropped, in statuesque silence. Page watched her steady her tottering self-control.
“I had thought,” she went on finally, “of a succession of cablegrams. Could it be broken to your cousin a little more gently, so?”
“Yes, that will be best.”
“And may I ask you to send them, without regard to cost?”
“Certainly. What else can I do? I beg you to let me be useful to you in all ways that I can for Uncle Richard’s sake.”
“Thank you. I will give you the address of a neighbor, an old and dear friend of Mr. Van Tassel, who has been most kind. Perhaps he would be glad to consult with you.”
Page soon took his leave, and until the day after the funeral did not again have opportunity to speak with the young widow. Then she sent for him and he went upstairs to the gay and delicate boudoir which Richard Van Tassel had furnished for his young wife, whose black gown to-day made the one dark spot amid its luxury.
She looked precisely the same as on the occasion of their first meeting except that now, by daylight, Page could see more distinctly her patient, marble beauty.
“I could not let you go East without thanking you,” she said, greeting him gravely. “You have been very kind, and a great help to us.”
The young man bowed, and murmured a polite platitude. He could think of nothing to say to her.
“Do you—I suppose you do expect your cousin to return home immediately.”
“Yes. I think he will come.”
“One thing which I wanted to say to you this morning is that my sister and I are going immediately to California to spend the winter. You will meet your cousin, very likely, upon his arrival?”
Page bowed.
“Will you kindly tell him that the house here is ready for him, that we shall not return to it”—Mrs. Van Tassel’s even, formal utterance broke, and she suddenly averted her head. “Poor Jack!” she exclaimed. “It will make him suffer afresh to come back here, and who can comfort him? It is the best I can do, though,” she added suddenly, turning again toward Page. “You know there is not one person save Mildred to whom I can speak of all this, and it is wrong to dwell upon sad and humiliating subjects with a bright young girl.”
She looked scarcely older than Mildred herself, Page thought, but he eagerly offered himself as a confidant.
“I am glad Jack has you,” she continued. “I wish, oh, so deeply, that I might do or say anything to alleviate his sorrow; but you see,” appealingly, “the only thing I can do is to keep away. Jack and I were good friends once, but that is all over.”
As Page a little later came downstairs to leave the house, Mildred Bryant rose from a seat near the fireplace in the hall. Her face looked a little paler than was its wont, and faint shadows about her eyes told of grief; but she was once more the self-possessed girl he had first seen on the train.
“You are returning at once to Boston?” she asked.
“Yes. I leave to-night.”
“I saw by your face as you came downstairs that you think my sister looks badly; but of course you do. Well, I believe there is nothing more, there are no more shocks that she can suffer—unless she should lose me, and I fancy I am long for this world;” a shade of the girl’s pretty ironical smile flitted over her lips; “but I could lose her,” the hazel eyes suddenly became bright with unshed tears; “and,” with vehemence, “I will not. I am going, we are going away to search for Clover’s girlhood. It must come back. She has been cheated out of it too soon.”
“Mrs. Van Tassel told me that you intend going West. Southern California will surely do her good.”
“I hope so. I am glad you have been here these last days. It has been a comfort to my sister.”
“Do you really think so?” eagerly.
“Without doubt. I observed that she seemed less anxious about—everything, from the moment of your coming.”
“The matter of telling Jack had preyed upon her,” said Page sympathetically.
He saw an indefinable change come over Mildred’s face. “I suppose Jack must bear his troubles like the rest of the world,” she answered with a tinge of hardness. “We thank you very much for everything, Mr. Page,” she added, holding out her hand, and the other clasped it warmly.
“I would not have failed to be here for any consideration, Miss Bryant. I hope,” looking into the girl’s eyes earnestly, “that the time may not be far distant when I shall meet you and Mrs. Van Tassel again.”
“Thank you,” returned Mildred courteously, and the young man left the house with a distinct sensation of disappointment because she had not echoed his wish. He could not avoid the suspicion that these young women would now expect and wish to walk in a separate way from that of all connections of his dear lost uncle. He himself would henceforth be classed with Jack, and, strange new disloyalty, the prospect was unsatisfactory.
He turned his steps toward the office where he was going to await a cablegram, and on his way undertook to analyze his own unreasonable feelings. “They are nothing to me, those girls,” he thought, while memory presented in fresh hues that averted head leaning upon a white hand in Clover’s spasm of impotent pity for Jack, and all of a sudden, instead of theorizing, Page found himself dwelling with eager pride, as if it were the climax of achievement in his life, on the fact that he had been of assistance, of use, of comfort, to that fair, pale creature, set in a sacred niche apart from all the other women in the world.
He recalled himself with cold surprise from this Scylla, only to fall into the Charybdis of a reverie in which Miss Bryant’s face and bearing were regal, as she declared that Jack must bear his trials like the rest of the world.
Page threw back his head in self-impatience. “She is a fine, bright girl, and I should like to know her better,” he thought; “but there is this comfort—in a couple of months I shall have forgotten all about her. I couldn’t remember her if I tried.”
Before evening he received the expected message from his cousin. Jack sailed from Bremen at once.