A COMEDY OF ELOPEMENT

BY

CHRISTIAN REID

AUTHOR OF MISS CHURCHILL, BONNY KATE, A SUMMER IDYL, MORTON HOUSE, VALERIE AYLMER, NINA’S ATONEMENT, HEART OF STEEL, ETC.

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1893

Copyright, 1892, By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Electrotyped and Printed at the Appleton Press, U. S. A.

A COMEDY OF ELOPEMENT.

PART I.

I.

The short December day was drawing to its close; but, though the month was December, the temperature was not that which is usually associated with the season. Instead of gray skies, leaden waters, and brown or snowy earth, there was a sky of glowing beauty, a glittering sea, and a land covered with the evergreen foliage of the South—for it was December in Florida. At noon the sun had shone with uncomfortable power on the broad plaza and old Spanish houses of St. Augustine; but now that his last rays were gilding the ancient fort and the Moorish belfry of the cathedral, the air was full of that delicious softness—a caressing warmth without heat—which[Pg 2] in such latitudes makes the mere fact of existence a delight.

On the gray sea wall there were several loiterers; but, as the sun finally sank, and the purple veil of twilight fell over land and sea, most of these departed, leaving only two girls, who still paced the narrow promenade, talking earnestly.

At least one was talking earnestly—the other only listened. But the mere fact of listening can be eloquent sometimes, and this girl’s face seemed made to express all things eloquently. It was a delicately molded face, with a pale complexion and the most gentle and lustrous eyes possible to imagine. As yet she was altogether immature in appearance and manner, being not more than fifteen years of age, but her slender figure gave indications of more than ordinary grace when time should have transformed its angles into curves, just as her face promised to prove even more than beautiful when a woman’s soul should shine out of those eyes, now soft as a fawn’s and innocent as a child’s.

Her companion was more ordinary in appearance,[3] yet nine people out of ten would have admired her most. She was an exceedingly pretty girl, and, being four or five years the senior of the two, possessed all the advantage of presence and of manner which such a difference in age at this period of life bestows. Her face had none of the delicate regularity of the face beside her, but her features were charmingly piquant, her complexion brilliantly fair, and her sunny, hazel eyes were full of mirth. At least they were usually full of mirth, but this evening there was a shade in them that looked like anxiety. It was she who had been talking for half an hour, while the girl who clung to her arm listened with rapt attention. As they still paced up and down in the twilight she went on:

“You understand now, Aimée, how it is, and how I am almost at my wit’s end to know what to do. I declare it is almost enough to make one wish one were ugly, to be tormented as I am!”

“I would not wish that,” said Aimée. “It is like a novel—only better—to be as pretty as you are, and to know that two men love you[4] to distraction; that you are almost engaged to one, but that you love the other and are going to elope with him—”

“Hush!” cried the other, with a pressure of the arm she held almost as sharp as the tone of her voice. “Think, if somebody were to hear you! I am not going to elope with him! That is just the point. I have promised—but I can not, I can not! I like him—of course, I like him—but I don’t like him well enough to ruin all my life for him, to give up everything and break mamma’s heart. Aimée, I can’t do it.”

“What are you going to do, then?” asked Aimée, while her eyes seemed to grow momently larger and darker and more full of interest.

To an impressionable girl of fifteen, with her head full of romances, all this was thrilling beyond expression. A beautiful girl, a worldly mother, two ardent suitors, and an elopement planned—what could any romance furnish better? Yet it was here in her own every-day world, and she was promoted to the dignity of receiving the confidences of the heroine.[5] What could life hold more exciting, save the joy, of which she as yet hardly dreamed, of being a heroine herself?

“What are you going to do?” she repeated in a voice as sweet and as full of dramatic expression as her eyes. “If you have promised to go to-night, how can you break your promise?”

“Breaking my promise does not matter at all,” said Fanny Berrien, impatiently; “but getting rid of Lennox Kyrle without trouble does matter. And how it is to be done I do not know, unless you will help me.”

“I will do anything—anything in the world!” said Aimée, fervently. “But how can you make up your mind to give him up?”

“It does not exactly mean giving him up,” said Fanny, “though I suppose it will come to that at last,” she added with a sigh. “But just now I only want him to understand that it is quite impossible for me to go with him. He is so impetuous and rash, he will not understand at all how I am placed; and if I do not meet him at the time when he expects me,[6] he will be quite capable of coming for me—as he has threatened to do—and then there would be a fearful state of affairs!”

“He must be like young Lochinvar,” said Aimée. “I should think you would adore such a lover as that.”

“He has given me more trouble than any other man in the world, so I suppose I ought to adore—or else hate him,” said Miss Berrien. “Of course, you don’t understand about these things, Aimée, and I ought not to be talking of them to a child like you, only I have nobody else to talk to; but Lennox Kyrle is one of the men to whom one can’t say no. He has more power over me than any one else in the world, and yet I am not at all sure that I want to marry him.”

“Why not?” asked Aimée, who was drinking in these new ideas as a plant absorbs water.

“Oh, for a great many reasons,” replied the other. “For one thing, I am not sure that I want to be domineered over for the rest of my life; and then he has nothing in the way of fortune—at least nothing to speak of. Now,[7] Aimée, you know it is not at all pleasant to want money and not have any.”

“No,” said Aimée decidedly—she evidently understood this—“it is not at all pleasant.”

“And Mr. Meredith is rich, and will be richer; and he is devoted to me, and mamma is anxious that I shall marry him, and I like him very well—when I don’t see Lennox! So I have nearly made up my mind not to see him any more.”

There was a pause. Aimée felt that this was a very unheroine-like decision, a lame and impotent conclusion for a romance; but she did not know what to say, being somewhat confused by the multiplicity of new ideas presented to her consideration.

“At all events, I can not go to-night, though I was mad enough to promise him that I would,” pursued the young lady desperately. “And I can not see him; if I did, I should go. I am ashamed to think how little will of my own I have when I am with him—in fact, I have none at all. He simply makes me do whatever he likes. So I dare not go to meet him, and this brings me to the point[8] I have been trying to reach all this time—will you go for me?”

If she had asked Aimée to spring from the wall into the waves washing softly against it, the girl could hardly have been more surprised. Her face showed this plainly, but after an instant’s hesitation she said:

“I will do anything that I can for you—where do you want me to go?”

“It will not be pleasant at all, and I feel as if it was very selfish to ask it of you,” said Miss Berrien. “But then you are only a child, and it can not compromise you as it would compromise me; and you are as brave as a lion, so you won’t be afraid to come here after dark, will you?”

“Here?” said Aimée, glancing around.

“Yes, here,” answered her companion. “A boat, with Lennox in it, will be here at midnight. You must tell him that I can not come, that I—But never mind, I will give the message at the time. Will you do it for me?”

If Aimée’s courage failed at such a prospect, she felt that it would never do to betray as much. She had pledged herself to do “anything,”[9] and she must not fail when something was demanded.

“Yes, I will do it,” she said, “if there is no other way; but why can you not write and let him know?”

“Write!” repeated the other. “Why, you foolish child, have I not told you where he is?”

“I don’t think you have,” said Aimée—conscious, however, that in the multiplicity of statements which had been made to her, the particular statement relative to Mr. Kyrle’s whereabouts might not have received due attention.

“He is there,” said Fanny with a comprehensive wave of her hand toward the Atlantic Ocean. “Did I not tell you that he is in a yacht?”

“Oh! has he a yacht?” cried Aimée; “and can you refuse to go with him?”

“I might not refuse if it was his own yacht—for a man must be very rich to afford a yacht—but it is not his own. It is borrowed from a friend ‘for this occasion only,’” said Fanny, with a slight laugh. “His plan is certainly[10] very well arranged. He borrows the yacht, as I have said, runs down here, lies off the inlet and brings a boat up to St. Augustine for me—I step into it, we return to the yacht, run to Key West or Pensacola and are married, then cruise for a month among the West Indies. How would you like such a programme as that, Aimée?”

“How would I like it?” repeated Aimée. Words were evidently too weak to express her sentiments; but she clasped her hands and her eyes shone like stars. “It would be glorious!” she cried, with a thrill in her voice. “I never read of anything more beautiful. I don’t believe, I can’t believe, but that you mean to go.”

“You may believe it, then,” said Miss Berrien, shortly. “It is very well to be romantic when you don’t have to pay a price for romance; but when you do, and it is such a heavy one as a life of poverty—sailing and love-making can’t last forever, and what is to come after? I asked myself that question, and the answer made me stop.”

“I wonder if it was not Mr. Meredith who[11] made you stop?” said Aimée. “I saw the diamonds he brought you; but, though diamonds are very pretty, they are not as good as a lover like young Lochinvar.”

“You will change your mind when you are a little older, my dear. Lovers are plenty, but diamonds—However, it is not certain that I will take them. It is only certain that I can not throw away everything by going with Lennox to-night. He must wait.”

“But perhaps he won’t wait,” said Aimée. “If he is so impetuous, perhaps he will say that it must be this night or never.”

“There is no danger that he will say anything of the kind,” replied Fanny, with a comfortable assurance of her own power. “He will never give me up until I am married to somebody else. He makes love like an angel,” she added, with a stifled sigh. “I have had a great many lovers, of course, but nobody that I ever liked half as well as Lennox. But I must not think of him; and as for seeing him—well, if I did that, I should be on board the Ariel before day. I will give my chance of a cruise over to you, Aimée.”

[12]

“I only wish I could take it,” said Aimée, with the most evident sincerity.

“Now we must go home,” said the other, glancing out at the darkening water. “But first come and let me show you exactly where the boat will be to-night.”

II.

Twilight had given way to night, and the sky was thickset with golden stars, when the two girls reached the door of their boarding house. A stream of light from the dining room, and a clatter of knives and forks and voices announced that supper was in progress, so they turned at once into that apartment.

A party of about a dozen people—chiefly feminine—were gathered round the table. One of these, a handsome middle-aged lady, looked up when the two entered.

“Why are you so late, Fanny?” she asked. “You know that I do not like you to be out after dark without an escort.”

“But it is so hard to get in before dark,[13] mamma,” said Miss Berrien, taking her place at the table. “It is lovely on the sea wall at twilight, and the air—oh, what a feeling it gives one! Do you suppose it can be ozone?—ozone in the air, I mean? Well”—as nobody appeared able to answer this question—“whatever it is, it is wonderful in its effect. My appetite is a most serious fact, and I am quite ready to do justice to your good things, Mrs. Shreve.”

Mrs. Shreve—an elderly faded widow, who presided at the head of the table—smiled faintly. The faintness of the smile was not owing to any disapproval of her young boarder’s appetite, but was due to the fact that, like a good many other estimable people, she lived persistently in the shadow rather than in the sunshine of life.

“I like to see people with good appetites, Miss Fanny,” she said in a tone which seemed to imply that appetites were perhaps a slight mitigation of the sadness of existence. “Try the cup cakes; they are nice to-night.—Why, Miss Aimée, you are not eating anything!”

“I am not hungry, Mrs. Shreve,” replied[14] Aimée, who could not say that she was incapacitated by excitement from eating, and who looked with amazement at Fanny’s gastronomic performances. How a girl on the eve of a promised elopement, with a lover on his way to meet her, could exhibit such a keen appreciation of cup cakes and other delicacies was quite beyond Aimée’s comprehension.

Her attention thus directed to the latter, Mrs. Berrien glanced at her.

“What is the matter with you, Aimée?” she asked. “Your eyes are shining as if you had been listening to a ghost story.”

“She has been listening to a moral lecture,” said Miss Fanny, giving Aimée an admonitory touch under the table, “and she is reflecting upon it.”

“Nothing is the matter with me, Aunt Alice,” said Aimée. “I have no appetite—that is all.”

“Want of appetite is very far from being the trifling thing that most people consider it,” said an elderly gentleman on the other side of the table, who certainly himself had no ground for complaint on that score. “There[15] is no effect without a cause, and no physical derangement which may not be attended with the most serious results. If people would only be warned in time—”

“I suppose nobody would ever die,” interposed Fanny, a little flippantly; and then, feeling that to talk of dying to a company chiefly composed of invalids was not the extreme of tact, she went on hastily: “O mamma! who do you suppose I met at the hotel to-day? Your old friend Mr. Denham, who is here for his throat—that same throat of which he has been talking ever since I can remember. I also saw the English gentlemen who are going soon on that hunting expedition which Mr. Meredith thinks of joining, and which I should like to join, too.”

“I have no doubt the party would be glad to receive you as a recruit, Miss Berrien,” said one of the ladies with a smile. “At least it is easy to answer for one member of it.”

“Yes, I think I might count on his vote,” returned Miss Berrien, composedly.

After tea this young lady retired for some additions to her toilet, while Aimée—who felt[16] as if she lived, moved, and had her being in a dream—went into the parlor and sat down ostensibly to read. She was usually a great bookworm, having been a devourer of all kinds of literature from her earliest childhood, and to-night she had a novel which at another time would have absorbed all her attention. But for once the letters danced before her eyes and conveyed no meaning to her mind. The romance of reality in which she was so soon to play a part engrossed all her thoughts. How would she acquit herself? What would she be called upon to do? How could Fanny possibly be so composed when her fate was hanging in the balance? These questions formed the burden of Aimée’s reflections, while her head was bent and her dark eyes rested on the open page of the book which she held.

Suddenly, however, she roused with a start, for some one said, “How are you, this evening, Mr. Meredith?” and looking up she saw Miss Berrien’s lover number two crossing the room.

A man with whom the world went well and easily was Mr. Meredith, evidently.[17] Rather short, rather stout, rather rubicund, but not ill-looking, and apparently not cast by Nature for that villainous part which is assigned in melodramas to the obnoxious suitor, Aimée’s gaze followed him with a species of fascination. This man, commonplace as he appeared, was, unconsciously to himself, one of the dramatis personæ in the romance now proceeding. “If he could know!” thought the girl, with a thrill.

Exemplifying the proverb that ignorance is sometimes bliss, Mr. Meredith sank easily into a seat and began talking to one or two people, without observing the solemn young eyes regarding him from a shady corner. “If he could know!” Aimée thought again when Fanny entered, bright, sparkling, coquettish, and gave him her hand as he came eagerly forward to meet her. If there was a single weight on Miss Berrien’s mind, a single cloud on her spirit, no one could possibly have suspected it; and Aimée began to wonder somewhat if the whole thing was not a jest, when, in the midst of the lively banter which with Fanny generally did duty for conversation, she[18] sent a sudden, swift glance across the room, which made the wondering girl understand that it was reality after all.

The glance conveyed a warning, and fearing lest she might unguardedly betray to Mrs. Berrien’s quick observation that something unusual was in the atmosphere, Aimée rose and with her book in her hand went quietly from the room. As her slender young figure passed, two ladies near the door looked up and nodded a kindly good-night.

“What a sweet girl that is!” said one of them. “She seems the embodiment of gentleness.”

“She is so pretty, too,” said the other. “At least, she promises to be pretty—and there is so much mind and soul in her face!”

“Poor child! I fancy it is doubtful what will become of her,” said the first speaker. “Her father is dead, and her mother has married again—married a certain Major Joscelyn, who is very much gone to pieces in all respects. I know the family well, and Mrs. Berrien was talking to me about the Joscelyns—whom she dislikes exceedingly—the other day.[19] Aimée, you see, is her brother’s child, and for that reason she has her with her at present. ‘I found that the Joscelyns were simply making her a drudge,’ she said, ‘and her health was breaking down under it, so I decided to take her for a time at least. Perhaps, when Fanny is married, I may adopt her altogether.’”

“She can well afford to do so if Miss Fanny establishes herself in life as well as that,” responded the other, glancing significantly across the room.