CHAPTER XLI.
FATE’S DEVIOUS WAYS.
AT Boston it was not a matter of many months before Henry Wainsworth and piety Tootbaker, having been made aware that Garde was no longer provisionally betrothed to Randolph, resumed their former hopes and attentions, as to attending Meeting and paying sundry little visits to the Soams, when Garde could be expected to be seen.
Garde had become a subdued little person, wishing only that she might not be seen by any one as she came and went on her simple rounds of daily life. Her grandfather had recovered so that once more he pothered about in his garden and read in his Bible and busied himself with prattle, more childish than wise.
The old man saw little of his compatriots. He lived as one only partially awake from a recent dread. He never discussed the colony’s politics, for his friends, when they came to see him, spared him the ordeal which invariably resulted from a mention of the word charter. On this topic he was quite mad. Almost galvanically, the word produced in his brain a mania, half fear, half fury, in which he seemed to conceive that Garde was the author of woes to which nothing could ever give expression. In such a mood, he was savagery itself, toward the patient girl.
Gradually, so gradually that she could not have said when the impression commenced to grow upon her, Garde discovered that Henry Wainsworth was exceedingly kind, thoughtful and soothing, in her joyless existence. There was something kindred in his own isolation, and in his very bashfulness, or timidity, for it kept him so often silent, when he was with her alone. She had always respected Henry. His patient devotion could not but touch her at length. It was not so much a flattery as it was a faithfulness, through all the discouragements she had given him always.
This line of thought having been awakened in her breast, she noted more of the little, insignificant signs which go to make up the sum of a man’s real regard—the regard on which a woman can safely rely as one to endure and to grow.
In the soreness of her heart, it was almost sweet to think of Henry’s quiet attentions. It was calming. It lent a little spot of warmth and color to her otherwise cheerless life. She could never love him, as she had loved Adam—nay, as she loved him still,—but the dreariness of her present days might find relief in a new sort of life. Out of the duties, which as a housewife she would experience daily, surely a trust, an esteem for Henry, great enough almost to be called a love, would come, with the years.
She yearned to bury her sorrow. It was not a healthy, wholesome thing for any young woman to foster. She had enjoyed her day of love, yes—her years of love. She had felt like a widowed bride. To her, Adam’s kisses had been like the first sacred emblems of their marriage. She had not been able to conceive of permitting such caresses until she should feel that their souls were mated and their hearts already wedded. But it could never be the duty of a woman to mourn such a loss till she died. And then—this newly contemplated union would make her forget.
But, if she could encourage Henry toward this possibility of a union such as she thought upon, it would be her duty to be more cheerful, more living in the every-day hours that were, instead of dreaming sadly and morbidly upon her heart-break of the past.
It was not with a sense of gratifying her own longing for happiness that she finally thought a marriage with Henry possible; there was a sense of combating her own selfishness in it. It was a selfishness, it was pampering the morbid in her nature, she felt, to continue indefinitely in a “widowhood” of Adam’s love. It must also be admitted that Garde was human, wherefore the element of pique was not absolutely lacking in her being. No woman would ever wish a man she had rejected to believe that she could not, or would not, marry elsewhere. She would wish to show that other opportunities were not lacking, as well as she would desire to have him know that her heart was not broken beyond repair.
Having spent at least a month upon these introspective and other meditations, Garde appeared to Wainsworth so much more bright and beautiful that there was no containing his emotions. The poor fellow nearly broke his neck, metaphorically speaking, in a vain attempt to ask her to become his wife, on the first occasion afforded, after he made his discovery of her alteration in moods and appearance.
It was of no use to screw up his courage. It would not stick. He determined to write what he could not utter, and then, when a moment should be propitious, to deliver his written declaration into her hand, to be read when he had fled the scene. To this end he composed an elegant and eloquent epistle.
To avoid any possibility of making mistakes, Henry carefully deposited his letter in the pocket of the coat he always wore to Meeting. This pocket had been heretofore employed as a receptacle for things precious over which he desired to exercise particular care.
Having without difficulty obtained permission from Garde to walk at her side to church and back, poor Wainsworth lost appetite and sleep, while waiting for the fateful day. When it came, he was in a nervous plight which revealed to Garde the whole state of his mind. She felt her sympathy for him expand in her bosom till she hoped it would burgeon into love. Had he gone with her into her aunt Gertrude’s home, after the service, Garde would doubtless have helped to simplify what she was well aware he wished to say, but, alas for the timid lover, he dared not, on this occasion, so jeopardize his courage.
He knew that if ever he got inside the house and faced her, alone, he would not be able even to deliver his letter. But out of doors his nerve was steadier. Therefore, at the gate having fortified himself against the moment, he nervously drew from his pocket a good-sized packet of paper and put it shakingly into her hand.
“I wish—I wish you would read—this letter,” he stammered. “Good-by. I—I hope you will read it quite through.”
Garde looked at him compassionately. He was only made the more confused. He bowed himself away with a nervousness painful to see.
“Poor Henry!” said Garde, with a little smile to herself. She knew what to expect in the document and vaguely she wondered if she would not feel more at peace when she had consented to become his wife. Her memory of words and looks, behind which the figure of Adam, the sad boy-captive, the love-irradiated champion of her cat, and then the melancholy violinist in the woods—this had all, of late, been more than usually strong upon her.
Garde’s cat had died within the week just passed. This event had served to open up old tombs, containing her dead dreams. She had almost caught herself wishing she had taken less to heart the story of Adam’s perfidy, or at least that she might never have heard the story at all. But when she had shaken off the spell which this past would persist in weaving about her, she was resolved to accept Henry Wainsworth, so that her duty might compel her to forget.
With a half melancholy sense of sealing her own sentence of banishment from her land of bitter-sweet memories, she delayed the moment of unfolding Henry’s letter. When she found herself alone, she laid it down before her, on the table, and looked at it with lackluster eyes. But presently, then, having tossed off the reverie which was stealing upon her, she sighed once, heavily, and took up the papers with a resolute hand.
She opened the stiff sheets and bent them straight. She read “Dear friend,” and thought Henry’s writing had altered. Her eyes then sped along a number of lines and she started with a new, tense interest in the document.
The letter she held in her hands was the one which Adam Rust had penned to Wainsworth, concerning his brother.
“Why!” she presently said, aloud, “why—he couldn’t have meant—” yet Henry, she recalled, had asked her particularly to read all the pages through.
She had only made a start into Adam’s narrative, yet her heart had begun to leap till she could barely endure its commotion. She spread the sheets out before her on the table, with nervous fingers. She read swiftly, greedily. Her bosom heaved with the tumult of suddenly stirred emotions. She made a glad little noise, as she read, for the undercurrent of her thought was of a wild exultation to find that Adam was innocent, that she was justified in loving him now, as she had been justified always—that her instinct had guided her rightly when she had helped him to break from the prison.
Her eyes were widely dilated. Her pent-up emotions swayed her till she suddenly clutched up the sheets and crumpled them in joy against her bounding heart.
“Adam!” she said, half aloud. “Oh, Adam! My Adam!”
She bent above the letter again, crooning involuntarily, in the revelation of Adam made again his noble self by the lines he had written so simply and innocently here upon the paper. She was reading, but having, almost in the first few lines, discovered so much that her intuition had far out-raced her eyes, she was hardly comprehending the sentences that ran so swiftly beneath her gaze, so abandoned were her senses to the sudden hope and the overwhelming joy which the revelation compelled. She kissed the papers. She laid her cheek upon them, she surrounded them warmly with her arms.
She felt so glad that she had loved him in spite of that horrible story! Her soul leaped with exultation. She would not be obliged to marry Wainsworth, to forget. She would never forget! She would wait for Adam now—if need be till Judgment Day itself!
She kissed Adam’s writing again. She fondled it lovingly. It restored him. It gave her back her right to love him. It was too much to think upon or to try to express.
She had only half read it; the sense of the story had escaped her grasp. It had been enough that Adam was guiltless. Her breath came fast; the color had flamed to her cheeks. Her eyes were glowing with the love which she had welcomed home to her throbbing heart.
She had risen, unable to control herself, so abruptly and unexpectedly had the discovery come upon her. Now she sat down again at the table and read the letter more carefully. It was such a sad little story.
“Unfortunately I sprained my ankle, and this delayed me,” she read, where Adam had written. She pictured him now, limping through the forest, with the little brown child, and her heart yearned over his suffering, his patience and his self-sacrifice in coming back to the cruel fate in store for him, there in Boston.
She thought of him then in the prison. She blessed the instinct of love which had made her go to his aid. He was not an outlaw. He was not a renegade. He was her own Adam.
Then she thought of the moment in which she had sent him away. After all the heart-breaking trials he had already endured, she had added the final cruelty. She remembered how he had limped, when she saw him starting off, just before she had fainted at the window, that terrible night. Longing to call him back, now, and to cry out her love,—that had never died,—her trust, which should now endure for ever, and her plea to be forgiven, she fancied she heard him again saying: “Garde! Garde!—not forever?” and she felt a great sob rising in her throat.
“Oh, Adam!” she said, as if from the depths of her heart.
The hot tears, of joy and sadness blended, suddenly gave vent to the pent-up emotions within her. They rolled swiftly down across her face and splashed in great blots on the writing.