John McElroy - The Red Acorn

He found Rachel sitting on the piazza. Though dressed in the deepest and plainest black she had never looked so surpassingly beautiful. As is usually the case with young women of her type of beauty, grief had toned down the rich coloring that had at times seemed almost too exuberant into that delicate shell-like tint which is the perfection of nature’s painting. Her round white arms shone like Juno’s, as the outlines were revealed by the graceful motions which threw back the wide sleeves. Her wealth of silken black hair was drawn smoothly back from her white forehead, over her shapely head, and gathered into a simple knot behind. Save a black brooch at her throat, she wore no ornaments—not even a plain ring.

She rose as Harry came upon the piazza, and for a moment her face was rigid with intensity of feeling. This evidence of emotion went as quickly as it came, however, and she extended her hand with calm dignity, saying simply:

“You have returned, Mr. Glen.”

In his anxiety to so play the impassioned lover as to conceal the recreancy he had fostered in his own heart, Harry did not notice the coolness of this greeting. Then, too, his self-satisfaction had always done him the invaluable service of preventing a ready perception of the repellant attitudes of others.

He came forward eagerly to press a kiss upon her lips, but she checked him with uplifted hand.

“O, the family’s in there, are they?” said he, looking toward the open windows of the parlor. “Well, what matter? Isn’t it expected that a fellow will kiss his affianced wife on his return, and not care who knows it?”

He pointed to the old apple-tree where they had plighted their troth that happy night, with a gesture and a look that was a reminder of their former meeting and an invitation to go thither again. She comprehended, but refused with a shudder, and, turning, motioned him to the farther end of the piazza, to which she led the way, moving with a sweeping gracefulness of carriage that Harry thought had wonderfully ripened and perfected in the three months that had elapsed since their parting.

“‘Fore gad,” he said to himself. (This was a new addition to his expletory vocabulary, which had accrued from Ned Burnleigh’s companionship.) “I’d like to put her alongside of one of the girls that Ned’s always talking about. I don’t believe she’s got her equal anywhere.”

Arriving at the end of the piazza he impetuously renewed his attempt at an embrace, but her repulse was now unmistakable.

“Sit down,” she said, pointing to a chair; “I have something to say to you.”

Harry’s first thought was a rush of jealously. “Some rascal has supplanted me,” he said bitterly, but under his breath.

She took a chair near by, put away the arm he would have placed about her waist, drew from her pocket a dainty handkerchief bordered with black, and opened it deliberately. It shed a delicate odor of violets.

Harry waited anxiously for her to speak.

“This mourning which I wear,” she began gently, “I put on when I received the news of your downfall.”

“My downfall?” broke in Harry hotly. “Great heavens, you don’t say that you, too, have been carried away by this wretched village slander?”

“I put it on,” she continued, unmindful of the interruption, “because I suffered a loss which was greater than any merely physical death could have occasioned.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“My faith in you as a man superior to your fellows died then. This was a much more cruel blow than your bodily death would have been.”

“‘Fore gad, you take a pleasant view of my decease—a much cooler one, I must confess, than I am able to take of that interesting event in my history.”

Her great eyes blazed, and she seemed about to reply hotly, but she restrained herself and went on with measured calmness:

“The reason I selected you from among all other men, and loved you, and joyfully accepted as my lot in life to be your devoted wife and helpmate, was that I believed you superior in all manly things to other men. Without such a belief I could love no man.”

She paused for an instant, and Harry managed to stammer:

“But what have I done to deserve being thrown over in this unexpected way?”

“You have not done anything. That is the trouble. You have failed to do that which was rightfully expected of you. You have allowed others, who had no better opportunities, to surpass you in doing your manly duty. Whatever else my husband may not be he must not fail in this.”

“Rachel, you are hard and cruel.”

“No, I am only kind to you and to myself. I know myself too well to make a mistake in this respect. I have seen too many women who have been compelled to defend, apologize, or blush for their husband’s acts, and have felt too keenly the abject misery of their lives to take the least chance of adding myself to their sorrowful number. If I were married to you I could endure to be beaten by you and perhaps love you still, but the moment I was compelled to confess your inferiority to some other woman’s husband I should hate you, and in the end drag both of us down to miserable graves.”

“But let me explain this.”

“It would be a waste of time,” she answered coldly. “It is sufficient for me to know that you are convicted by general opinion of having failed where a number of commonplace fellows succeeded. You, yourself, admit the justice of this verdict by tame submission to it, making no effort to retrieve your reputation. I can not understand how this could be so if you had any of the qualities that I fondly imagined you possessed in a high degree. But this interview is being protracted to a painful extent. Let us say good night and part.”

“Forever?” he stammered.

“Yes.”

She held out her hand for farewell. Harry caught it and would have carried it to his lips, but she drew it away.

“No; all that must be ended now,” she said, with the first touch of gentleness that had shaded her sad, serious eyes.

“Will you give me no hope?” said Harry, pleadingly.

“When you can make people forget the past—if ever—” she said, “then I will change this dress and you can come back to me.”

She bowed and entered the house.

Rachel Bond’s will had carried her triumphantly through a terrible ordeal—how terrible no one could guess, unless he followed her to her room after the interview and saw her alone with her agony. She did not weep. Tears did not lie near the surface with her. The lachrymal glands had none of that ready sensitiveness which gives many superficial women the credit of deep feeling. But when she did weep it was not an April shower, but a midsummer tempest.

Now it was as if her intense grief were a powerful cautery which seared and sealed every duct of the fountain of tears and left her eyes hot and dry as her heart was ashes.

With pallid face and lips set until the blood was forced from them, and they made a thin purplish line in the pale flesh, she walked the floor back and forth, ever back and forth, until a half-stumble, as she was turning in a dreary round, revealed to her that she was almost dropping from exhaustion.

She had thought her love for Harry had received its death-blow when her pride in him had been so rudely shattered. But this meeting, in which she played the part set for herself with a brave perfection that she had hardly deemed possible, had resurrected every dear memory, and her passion sprung into life again to mock and jeer at her efforts to throttle it out of existence. With him toppling from the pedestal on which her husband must stand, she had told herself that there was naught left but to roll a great stone against the sepulcher in which her love must henceforth lie buried, hopeless of the coming of any bright angle to unseal the gloomy vault. Yet, despite the entire approval given this by her judgment, her woman’s heart cried bitterly for a return of the joys out of which the beauty had fled forever.