Man on the Box by Harold MacGrath (free reads .TXT) 📕

the whirlpool and swallowed up. Then would come the haggling with managers, long and tiresome journeys, gloomy hotels and indifferent fare, curious people who desired to see the one-time fashionable belle; her portraits would be lithographed and hung in shop-windows, in questionable resorts, and the privacy so loved by gentlewomen gone; and perhaps there would be insults. And she was only on the threshold of the twenties, the radiant, blooming twenties!

[Illustration: "Go home, Colonel-and stay home!"-ACT III.]

During the long ride (for they covered something like seven miles) not a word was spoken. The girl was biding her time; the man had nothing to voice. They were going through the woods, when they came upon a clearing through which a narrow brook loitered or sallied down the incline. She reined in and raised her crop. He was puzzled. So far as he could see, he and the girl were alone. The third person, for whom, he reasoned, he had brought the second plate, was nowhere in sight.

A flat boulder lay at the side of the stream, and she nodded toward it. Warburton emptied the hamper and spread the cloth on the stone. Then he laid out the salad, the sandwiches, the olives, the almonds, and two silver telescope-cups. All this time not a single word from either; Warburton, busied with his task, did not lift his eyes to her.

The girl had laid her face against Jane's nose, and two lonely tears trailed slowly down her velvety cheeks. Presently he was compelled to look at her and speak.

"Everything is ready, Miss." He spoke huskily. The sight of her tears gave him an indescribable agony.

She dropped the bridle-reins, brushed her eyes, and the sunshine of a smile broke through the troubled clouds.

"Mr. Warburton," she said gently, "let us not play any more. I am too sad. Let us hang up the masks, for the comedy is done."


XXVI

THE CASTLE OF ROMANCE


How silent the forest was! The brook no longer murmured, the rustle of the leaves was without sound. A spar of sunshine, filtering through the ragged limbs of the trees, fell aslant her, and she stood in an aureola. As for my hero, a species of paralysis had stricken him motionless and dumb. It was all so unexpected, all so sudden, that he had the sensation of being whirled away from reality and bundled unceremoniously into the unreal.... She knew, and had known! A leaf brushed his face, but he was senseless to the touch of it. All he had the power to do was to stare at her. . . . She knew, and had known!

Dick stepped into the brook and began to paw the water, and the intermission of speech and action came to an end.

"You-and you knew?" What a strange sound his voice had in his own ears!

"Yes. From the very beginning-I knew you to be a gentleman in masquerade; that is to say, when I saw you in the police-court. The absence of the beard confused me at first, but presently I recognized the gentleman whom I had noticed on board the ship."

So she had noticed him!

"That night you believed me to be your sister Nancy. But I did not know this till lately. And the night I visited her she exhibited some photographs. Among these was a portrait of you without a beard."

Warburton started. And the thought that this might be the case had never trickled through his thick skull! How she must have laughed at him secretly!

She continued: "Even then I was not sure. But when Colonel Raleigh declared that you resembled a former lieutenant of his, then I knew." She ceased. She turned to her horse as if to gather the courage to go on; but Jane had her nose hidden in the stream, and was oblivious of her mistress' need.

He waited dully for her to resume, for he supposed that she had not yet done.

"I have humiliated you in a hundred ways, and for this I want you to forgive me. I sent the butler away for the very purpose of making you serve in his stead. But you were so good about it all, with never a murmur of rebellion, that I grew ashamed of my part in the comedy. But now-" Her eyes closed and her body swayed; but she clenched her hands, and the faintness passed away. "But for you, my poor father would have been dishonored, and I should have been forced into the arms of a man whom I despise. Whenever I have humiliated you, you have returned the gift of a kind deed. You will forgive me?"

"Forgive you? There is nothing for me to forgive on my side, much on yours. It is you who should forgive me. What you have done I have deserved." His tongue was thick and dry. How much did she know?

"No, not wholly deserved it." She fumbled with the buttons of her waist; her eyes were so full that she could not see. She produced an oblong slip of paper.

When he saw it, a breath as of ice enveloped him. The thing she held out toward him was the canceled note. For a while he did me the honor to believe that I had betrayed him.

"I understand the kind and generous impulse which prompted this deed. Oh, I admire it, and I say to you, God bless you! But don't you see how impossible it is? It can not be; no, no! My father and I are proud. What we owe we shall pay. Poverty, to be accepted without plaint, must be without debts of gratitude. But it was noble and great of you; and I knew that you intended to run away without ever letting any one know."

"Who told you?"

"No one. I guessed it."

And he might have denied all knowledge of it!

"Won't you-won't you let it be as it is? I have never done anything worth while before, and this has made me happy. Won't you let me do this? Only you need know. I am going away on Monday, and it will be years before I see Washington again. No one need ever know."

"It is impossible!"

"Why?"

She looked away. In her mind's eye she could see this man leading a troop through a snow-storm. How the wind roared! How the snow whirled and eddied about them, or suddenly blotted them from sight! But, on and on, resolutely, courageously, hopefully, he led them on to safety.... He was speaking, and the picture dissolved.

"Won't you let it remain just as it is?" he pleaded.

Her head moved negatively, and once more she extended the note. He took it and slowly tore it into shreds. With it he was tearing up the dream and tossing it down the winds.

"The money will be placed to your credit at the bank on Monday. We can not accept such a gift from any one. You would not, I know. But always shall I treasure the impulse. It will give me courage in the future-when I am fighting alone."

"What are you going to do?"

"I? I am going to appear before the public,"-with assumed lightness; "I and my violin."

He struck his hands together. "The stage?"-horrified.

"I must live,"-calmly.

"But a servant to public caprice? It ought not to be! I realize that I can not force you to accept my gift, but this I shall do: I shall buy in the horses and give them back to you."

"You mustn't. I shall have no place to put them. Oh!"-with a gesture full of despair and unshed tears, "why have you done all this? Why this mean masquerade, this submitting to the humiliations I have contrived for you, this act of generosity? Why?"

Perhaps she knew the answers to her own questions, but, womanlike, wanted to be told.

And at that moment, though I am not sure, I believe Warburton's guarding angel gave him some secret advice.

"You ask me why I have played the fool in the motley?"-finding the strength of his voice. "Why I have submitted in silence to your just humiliations? Why I have acted what you term generously? Do you mean to tell me that you have not guessed the riddle?"

She turned her delicate head aside and switched the grasses with her riding-crop.

"Well,"-flinging aside his cap, which he had been holding in his hand, "I will tell you. I wanted to be near you. I wanted to be, what you made me, your servant. It is the one great happiness that I have known. I have done all these things because-because, God help me, I love you! Yes, I love you, with every beat of my heart!"-lifting his head proudly. Upon his face love had put the hallowed seal. "Do not turn your head away, for my love is honest. I ask nothing, nothing; I expect nothing. I know that it is hopeless. What woman could love a man who has made himself ridiculous in her eyes, as I have made myself in yours?"-bitterly.

"No, not ridiculous; never that!" she interrupted, her face still averted.

He strode toward her hastily, and for a moment her heart almost ceased to beat. But all he did was to kneel at her feet and kiss the hem of her riding-skirt. He rose hurriedly.

"God bless you, and good-by!" He knew that if he remained he would lose all control, crush her madly in his arms, and hurt her lips with his despairing kisses. He had not gone a dozen paces, when he heard her call pathetically. He stopped.

"Mr. Warburton, surely you are not going to leave me here alone with the horses?"

"Pardon me, I did not think! I am confused!" he blundered.

"You are modest, too." Why is it that, at the moment a man succumbs to his embarrassment, a woman rises above hers? "Come nearer,"-a command which he obeyed with some hesitation. "You have been a groom, a butler, all for the purpose of telling me that you love me. Listen. Love is like a pillar based upon a dream: one by one we lay the stones of beauty, of courage, of faith, of honor, of steadfastness. We wake, and how the beautiful pillar tumbles about our ears! What right have you to build up your pillar upon a dream of me? What do you know of the real woman-for I have all the faults and vanities of the sex; what do you know of me? How do you know that I am not selfish? that I am constant? that I am worthy a man's loving?"

"Love is not like Justice, with a pair of scales to weigh this or that. I do not ask why I love you; the knowledge is all I need. And you are not selfish, inconstant, and God knows that you are worth loving. As I said, I ask for nothing."

"On the other hand," she continued, as if she had not heard his interpolation, "I know you thoroughly. I have had evidence of your courage, your steadfastness, your unselfishness. Do not misunderstand me. I am proud that you love me. This love of yours, which asks for no reward, only the right to confess, ought to make any good woman happy, whether she loved or not. And you would have gone away without telling me, even!"

"Yes." He dug into the earth with his riding-boot. If only she knew how she was crucifying him!

"Why were