Read Ebook: Addie's Husband; or Through clouds to sunshine by Gordon Smythies Mrs

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Ebook has 1711 lines and 79076 words, and 35 pages

"A moment more, if you please; then I shall have done. On your own admission, therefore, I may conclude that your future prospects, both personally and collectively, are not, to put it mildly, in a flourishing condition, and that at present you see no glimmer of improvement, no chance of reprieve from a life of servile drudgery, for which you feel yourself totally unfitted, first of all from a strong distaste to teaching, and secondly from the unconventional nature of your early life and education."

She is too amazed to resent even by a gesture this extraordinary speech. After a slight pause, he resumes, in the same low mechanical voice, with a faint tinge of color in his swarthy cheek:

"Therefore, I presume to ask you, Miss Lefroy, if in these circumstances you would deem it any improvement to your condition to--to--marry me and live out your life at Nutsgrove?"

She looks at him with eyes wide open, staring stupidly, and blank white face.

"To--to marry you? I--I don't understand. Are you joking, Mr. Armstrong?"

"No, Miss Lefroy, I am not joking; on the contrary, I am very much in earnest. Men mostly are, I believe, when they ask a woman to be their wife."

"You ask me to--to be your wife?"

"Yes, I most assuredly do. If you consent, I will settle this place on you unreservedly, so that, whatever happens to me, nobody will be able to oust you from it again. Nutsgrove will belong to you, you alone, as virtually as it belonged to your grandfather sixty years ago, before an acre was mortgaged. Will you marry me, Miss Lefroy? Is the bribe sufficient?" he asks sharply.

But poor Addie has no power to answer; she sits gazing into the frowning, flushed face of her suitor with the same blank expression, without a tinge of shyness, hesitation, or embarrassment in her attitude, or flicker of color in her cheek. Armstrong feels as if he would like to shake her.

"She looks at me as if I were not human, as if I were some strange animal escaped from a menagerie. She's a woman, I'm a man; why should I not ask her to marry me?" he thinks. "Well," he says aloud, with an irritation he strives in vain to repress, "have you understood my question, Miss Lefroy? Must I repeat it? No? Then will you kindly put me out of pain--that is the correct term, I believe--as soon as you can?"

"Oh!" pants Addie, waving her hands nervously, as if pushing him from her. "Can't you give me a moment to breathe--to feel--to understand?"

"Certainly, if you wish it."

He walks to the window, steps out, and paces up and down the terrace, smoking furiously.

Addie, left to herself, heaves a great sigh of relief, then glances languidly round the room, and tries to realize her situation, to understand that she can be mistress of the old place again, that she need never yawn the dreary hours away in the Moggeridge school-room, need never darn alien socks, help to tub peevish babies, never bow her haughty young head to the yoke of uncongenial servitude, but spend her days by the familiar fireside, rambling through the leafy grove and mellow orchards, her own, her very own forever. A flood of sunshine bathes the park in flickering glory; every leaf trembling with the pulse of coming summer, every bird singing in the budding grove, every gurgling ripple of the stream that feeds the marshy pond behind the park, seems to whisper to the girl's troubled heart words of welcome and entreaty, seems to sing in gladsome chorus, "Come back, Addie, come back, come back; we miss you sorely!" At that moment a shadow falls across her path, the song of the birds dies into a wordless twitter, the glory of the evening fades, as the burly, massive form of the vitriol-manufacturer stands between her and the sunset.

"To live with him alone here!" she thinks, with a shudder, while the hot blood dyes her face and neck. "Oh, I couldn't--I couldn't! He would spoil everything; he would take the beauty, the poetry out of everything I love. I couldn't--I couldn't! Nobody would expect it of me. The bribe is big, but not sufficient--not sufficient, unless--unless--Oh, I wish I knew what to do--what to say to him! If he would let me be his gover--I mean his housekeeper, his dairy-maid--anything--anything but his--his--wife! Oh, dear, dear, what put it into his head? What made him think of such a thing? He never even looked at me when he came to the farm; and now he wants to marry me. He is a strange man; when he turns to me with that stern straight look in his eyes, I feel--I feel as if I didn't belong to myself, as if I had no power over my life. Ellen Higgins says that he always gets everything he wants, that every one gives in to him sooner or later in Kelvick--nice prospect for me! And the flowers told me last autumn that I was to marry a gentleman--a gentleman they told me over and over again--a gentleman!"

A quarter of an hour later Mr. Armstrong re-enters the room, and stands with still impenetrable face before his guest.

"You--you have given me good measure," she says, rather hysterically. "I have been trying to think, to understand it all thoroughly."

"Yes?"

"It is very kind, very thoughtful of you to make such a suggestion, to--to offer to give me back what I--I value so dearly and believed forever out of my reach; and, you--you understand, I would not have spoken as freely as I did--"

"I understand perfectly. Do you accept or reject my offer then?"

"Oh, dear, dear, how point-blank you are!" she answers flutteringly. "I--I do neither yet. Of course it is a great bribe, a great temptation; but--but--"

"But what? Do not be afraid of me, Miss Lefroy. Please tell me unreservedly what is on your mind. I am not a very sensitive plant, I assure you."

"I will then. I dare say it would be better always to come to the point as you do," she says, with a weak laugh. "But women never can, you know; they must flutter round corners and by-ways a little at first--'tis their nature to, Bob says. What I mean is that, dearly as I love the old place for itself, it--it was more the surroundings, it was being all together--we five--that--that made it what it was to me. I know, I feel sure it would--would never be the same, never be the old home to me, if I were living in it all alone and they outside struggling in the world. I'm afraid," continues Addie, her fingers nervously crimping the ragged flounces of her cotton dress, "that I don't express myself very--very clearly; but I think you--you will understand what I mean."

He looks stealthily at the origin of his troublous irresolution, at the shabby gray-eyed girl whom half an hour before he had no more idea of marrying than he had of marrying his cook, whose presence he has barely noticed during the few times he has found himself in her company. "Is the game worth the candle?" he asks himself for the twentieth time in impatient iteration. She is no beauty, this Addie Lefroy. Her features are not the least bit regular; her skin, though pure and fresh, is thickly freckled; her figure, willowy and rounded enough, is not the type of figure Madame Armine of Kelvick would love to adorn. Then she has no accomplishments, scarcely any education, no money, no connection, save her nightmare of a family; and--most damning fact of all--she does not like him personally. He, Tom Armstrong of Kelvick, is repugnant to her--that he can see clearly enough. Therefore is he not making an ass of himself--an unmitigated ass? A man of his years and experience to introduce on the impulse of a moment an element into his hitherto self-sufficing contented life that may bring with it infinite discord, life-long annoyance! Is there sense or meaning in his vague intangible longing to possess that callous undisciplined child who almost shrinks from his touch, just because she has sat in his drawing-room as if she were at home there, and has handed him a cup of tea gracefully? What is her fascination, her attraction? Not her beauty, certainly, for she is not half as good-looking as other girls he knows--as Miss Ethel Challice, for instance--no, certainly not!

He turns aside and unsuccessfully tries to recall to his mind's eye the vision of that young lady as he sat by her side on the night before in her father's elegant drawing-room. How handsome, how graceful she looked in her shimmering silk, roses clustering in her golden hair! How sweetly and kindly she smiled on him when he went to help her at the tea-table! Why did he not fall in love with her, or have the sense to invite her to come up to Nutsgrove and pour him out a cup of tea from that magical exasperating pot? It might have done the business for him just as well; and how infinitely more suitable and sensible it would have been in every way! She--Miss Challice--would have been just the wife for him, eligible all round--a handsome accomplished young woman, six years nearer his age than the other, with eighteen thousand pounds dowry and no incumbrance--a young woman who would have sat at the head of his table, ruled his house, and reared his children, with comfort and pleasant smooth-working skill.

"I think she might have said 'Yes' had I asked her," he muses ruefully. "Now that I come to think of it, she always seemed pleased to see me; and her parents are continually asking me up to their place. But I never even thought of it, never noticed--If I had--well, well, if I had, she wouldn't have stared at me as if I had just escaped from a lunatic asylum or the Zo?logical Gardens. No, I think not; her pretty eyes would have drooped a little, her cheeks have flushed ever so faintly, no matter which way her answer would have gone. And she has such lovely hair, too--though I remember a brute at the club said it was dyed, one night. I don't believe it a bit, not a bit! How stupid, how exasperating of me never to have noticed how handsome and attractive--yes, really attractive, by Jove!--Challice's daughter is--his only daughter too! And now--now--"

He turns from the window to take another covert look.

Miss Lefroy has left her couch and is kneeling on the carpet, a gaunt, green-eyed, grimy-coated cat clasped to her breast, over which she is cooing with the rapturous joy of a mother over a downy-pated infant whom she has lost and unexpectedly recovered.

"It's the Widow, Mr. Armstrong," she explains, with dewy upturned eyes. "My own dear, darling, long-lost Widow, whom I thought never to see again! She must have heard my voice through the open window; she came flying in straight to my arms five minutes ago. Oh, you don't know what a cat she is! We've had her nine years, and she's had about eighty-seven kittens. Hal kept an account; and the rats and the mice she has killed--no one could keep an account of them--could they, my darling, could they?"

"She seems glad to see you again--hungrily glad," says Armstrong, stroking her dusty fur; "and she is giving you a demonstrative welcome, and no mistake! I wonder if anything or any one in the world would be as glad to see me after a few months' absence?"

"Why, of course, Mr. Armstrong, your brothers and sisters--and other relatives would!"

"I have no brothers and sisters, or other relatives--at least, no near ones," he answers a little wistfully.

"Dear, how lonely you must feel!"--looking at him with compassionate eyes.

"Miss Lefroy," he says quickly, swallowing a lump in his throat, "With regard to the difficulty we were discussing a few minutes ago, I wish you to understand that, in case you--you--should decide on accepting my offer, I--should quite sympathize with your family feeling in the matter, and sincerely hope you would be able to induce your sisters to come and live with you here--in fact, to look on Nutsgrove as their home as long as they liked."

"Oh!"

"As regards your brothers, the case is different. You see, my chi--I mean, Miss Lefroy, I am much older than you or they, and I am satisfied I should only be doing them an irreparable injustice if I asked them to continue to live the life they have hitherto led here. Men must go out into the world, fight their way, and learn the value of independence and success--must earn the birthright of self-respect to transmit to those who come after them. I know it will be a harder struggle for them than for others brought up differently; but I should be always by to give them an encouraging hand and help them with my advice and experience; and then, when their occupation allowed it, they could always come here for a holiday--in fact, continue to look upon the old place as their head-quarters until they built up separate homes and shaped interests for themselves, as most men do sooner or later."

"You are very kind--you are very kind," she answers breathlessly.

"You have said that before."

"I know; but what else can I say?"

"Say that you will marry me."

"Oh, I think I will soon--not just yet--not just yet! Will you give me a few hours more--until to-morrow--to think and talk it over with the others?"

"I will give you until to-morrow morning."

"Thank you--you are very kind. There is a brougham at the door--for me, isn't it? I must be going now"--with a great sigh of relief.

"But can you walk?"

"Oh, yes, with a little help, quite easily."

"Here is my stick--not a Rotten Row crutch, you see--lean on it well on one side, and on my arm on the other--so."

At the threshold of the door she pauses to rest a moment and take one backward glance at the beloved flower-scented room, at the dainty table all awry, at the Widow Malone, her raptures exhausted, sipping a saucer of cream on the spotless carpet.

"Oh, what a mess I have made of your beautiful tidy room!" she cries in childish dismay. "It is easily seen a Lefroy has been in possession. It's quite disgraceful--the cushions all upside down, the antimacassars crumpled, saucers on the floor, and an old bow from my polonaise, with two crooked hairpins, stuck in the arm of the sofa. I must get them, let me go."

"No," he says, laughing; "leave the room exactly as it is, and consider your property confiscated, Miss Lefroy."

With an impulse that she can not control, she looks up into his face and says quickly, with a puzzled frown--

"What made you do it? What put it into your head?"

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