Olivia

When they came out of the schoolroom into the open air, the moonlight was streaming over the pastoral scene, lighting up the crowd of people still talking of the wonderful “Dream of Eugene Aram,” as they made their way through the string of carriages.

Faradeane paused to say good-night; but Aunt Amelia would not offer her hand.

“My dear Mr. Faradeane!” she exclaimed, “surely you would not leave us! Bertie, the squire quite expects you back to smoke a cigar with him; do, do persuade him to come with you. Really, I feel that I cannot lose you, Mr. Faradeane.”

Faradeane hesitated; but Bertie, eager to snatch a few more minutes of his idol’s society, pressed his arm.

“Come on,” he said. “The squire will be pleased, I know.”

Olivia stood silent, her eyes fixed dreamily on the moonlit scene.

“Must we go back in those stuffy carriages,” she said, in a low voice. “Can we not walk, aunt?”

“Certainly you may,” replied Miss Amelia. “But I think I will ride; these night dews are rather treacherous, I’m sure,” and she dropped her head on her shoulder, and simpered, “Mr. Bradstone will be kind enough to take care of me.”

Bartley Bradstone’s face would have supplied a fine study for a painter of character, but he was helpless; and with a stifled oath, gave her his arm.

The two Penstone girls, of course, drew back, and declined, with distinct emphasis, the mere idea of riding.

“All right, then,” said Bertie. “Come on!” and the young people set out.

Annie and Mary, in their eagerness to vent their amazement and pent-up enthusiasm, caught him timidly, but effectually, by either arm, and began at once:

“Oh, Lord Granville, did you—now, did you ever hear anything like it? Wasn’t it simply wonderful?” etc., and poor Bertie, closely arrested, saw his goddess walk on with Faradeane.

He did not offer his arm, and they went on in silence for some minutes.

Any attempt to describe the varied emotions which swept through Olivia’s sensitive heart would be impossible.

The spell of his voice was on her still; the fascination of his dark, handsome face still held her in thrall.

Women admire men for many qualities; their strength, their good looks, their courage, their art, sometimes—but not often, alas!—their wisdom. And to-night, under the moonlight, Olivia was full of admiration for this man whom the gods had dowered with so many gifts. He had proved his courage in risking his life for Bessie, his face was handsome enough to haunt the dreams of a sculptor, and to-night he had exercised a power of imagination and voice and influence that had moved a crowded audience.

Think of it! An impressionable girl, full of poetry, and ready as wax to receive an impression, and wonder not that as she walked beside him she felt magnetized, attracted, fascinated.

She was pale still, still slightly tremulous, and her breath came slowly and heavily. Lines of the exquisite poem into which he had breathed life and reality still rang in her ears. She could find nothing to say that would not have sounded to her ears hideously commonplace.

And it was he who first spoke.

“Miss Vanley,” he said, “I have an uncomfortable feeling of guilt.”

She looked up at him instantly, with that look which a woman turns upon the man on whom her mind is fixed.

“Guilt!” she echoed.

He smiled at the almost tragic tones of her voice.

“Yes, I have an uneasy feeling that I have made you uncomfortable with my uncanny performance.”

“No,” she said, slowly, “not uncomfortable.”

“It was a stupid thing to do,” he went on. “Stupid and unsuitable to the bulk of the audience; but my excuse—well, my only excuse is that I knew no other piece, and was too—well, too lazy to learn any other. I will never recite it again.”

“No?” she breathed. “Don’t say that. It would be a waste. It was beautiful—beautiful—and yet so sad. I——” She paused. “I have read the poem—everybody has; but I did not know it was so dreadful until to-night.”

“Because I give it with all the usual tricks,” he said, half-contemptuously. “That is why. But it is a great piece of verse—and dreadful.”

“My sympathies are all with Eugene Aram,” she said, dreamily. “It is wrong, I know.”

He looked at her for a moment in silence.

“Yes, it is wrong,” he said. “One should not sympathize with the man who commits a crime; but I understand. His sufferings were almost an expiation.”

She shuddered slightly.

“Yes, and he was sorely tempted. But do you think that it is—natural? That an educated man should commit such a crime——”

“Education!” he said, slowly; and in the aftertime which cast such an awful shadow over her life, she recalled his words: “Has that anything to do with it? Education teaches us to conceal our passions; it does not, cannot destroy them! No, under the thin veneer which civilization plasters over us, lie the old savage instincts, and if you scratch your man of refinement deep enough, you will find the passions of the barbarian still existing. Given a temptation fiery enough, and your man of rank, position, education will fall.”

“That is terrible,” she breathed; “and you think that any one—any one—could be tempted to commit—murder?”

His dark eyes rested on her.

“It depends on the temptation,” he said, as if rather communing with himself than answering her. “Some men could not be induced to commit even an indiscretion for the sake of all the mines in Peru, but for another motive—the one motive—lust of power, ambition, revenge, love——” he paused, and the word rang in her brain—“he would descend to any crime—aye, even murder.”

The faint shudder ran through her again, and he seemed to know it, for he said, in a lighter tone:

“But this kind of morbid talk is shamed by such a night. What a lovely moon! It reminds me of those lines of Heine:

and he repeated in a low, musical voice, that seemed to sing the words, the whole of the short poem; surely one of the sweetest in the German tongue.

Olivia unconsciously drew nearer to him, and the words, the voice, dispelled the faint terror that had throbbed through her.

“I don’t know it,” she said, almost piteously. “I seem to know nothing. All my life has been spent half asleep——”

“Ah, don’t regret it!” he said, gravely, with a touch of sadness in his voice. “Your life has been a beautiful dream! May the awakening never come! Don’t speak of it remorsefully! To me it seems so precious——” He paused. “It is a perfect life for one like yourself. Do you see that star?” He stopped, and pointed upward. “Would you drag it from its place and its calm serenity to flicker in an oily lamp? Keep your pure and beautiful life as long as you can! Some day——”

He stopped.

“Some day?” she murmured, gently.

“Some day,” he continued, “the temptation will come to you, the star of my thoughts, to descend and become a part of the hard and cruel world. Stay in the heaven of your present serenity, Miss Vanley!”

It was strange talk in this prosaic, practical nineteenth century; but it did not seem strange or forced to Olivia. She drank in every word, and, if she did not at once feel its meaning, mentally stretched out her hands and sought for it.

Just to keep him talking, to hear the deep, musical voice again, she said:

“Is the world so wicked, then?”

“Wicked and foolish,” he said; “and its folly is worse than its wickedness. I have made one discovery as I passed through it. Do you know what it is?”

“No,” she murmured, drawing nearer to him.

He laughed softly, and pushed his hat from his brow with a half weary gesture. “It is this: That though wickedness may go unpunished, folly never does. A man may commit a crime—many—and pass through the world undetected and unpunished, but if he commit a folly, Nemesis follows and closes upon him at once. And the moral of this is——”

He stopped.

“That it is wiser to be wicked than foolish,” she said.

“Exactly!” he assented, with a strange smile.

Bertie and the two Penstones had passed them, and reached the turning to The Dell, and here Olivia and Faradeane overtook them.

“I don’t think I ought to go any farther,” he said, half-stopping; “your father has had enough of us to-night.”

“No?” she said. “Why?” She paused, half timidly. “Why should you go; it must be lonely at home.”

“It is lonely,” he said, with a smile half sad. “No one but I can tell how lonely.”

“Why do you——” she began, and then stopped again.

“Why do I live like a hermit and a recluse?” he said, gently. “We have some of us ceased to be masters of our own actions, Miss Vanley; I am so unlucky as to be one of those unfortunates.”

She looked up at him with the timid, shrinking glance of a woman whose heart aches with sympathy, and yet who has not power to give it.

“If I—if my father—could do anything,” she murmured.

He held out his hand and took hers, and he held it, not pressing it, but enfolding it in his strong, shapely one.

“You have done much already,” he said, in a low voice, “more than you can guess; yes, much more. Good-night, Miss Vanley.”

Obeying an impulse, one of those impulses which were rare with her, she raised her beautiful eyes to his.

“That is my aunt’s title,” she said, with a faint, flickering smile. “My name is Olivia.”

He looked at her for a moment gravely, and yet with a sort of troubled wistfulness; then he said, in as low tone as hers:

“Olivia! Good-night, Miss Olivia!”

Then he called to Bertie, waving his hand toward Olivia, and turning aside, strode into the dark lane that led to The Dell.

“Oh! isn’t he coming to the Grange?” exclaimed Annie Penstone, as Bertie brought Olivia to them. “Isn’t he really coming? It’s too bad! I wanted to talk to him, to ask him all sorts of things! And you have had him all the way to yourself! Now that isn’t fair, is it, Mary? What did he talk about, Olivia?”

“I don’t know,” said Olivia, dreamily.

They found Aunt Amelia and Bartley Bradstone waiting for them in the hall, the former still simmering with excitement over the success of her concert, and the latter glaring sullenly, with suppressed rage and jealousy.

All through the meal, which was a kind of “scratch” supper, while Annie and Mary and Bertie, all speaking very fast and at the same time, were giving the squire an account of the sensation Mr. Faradeane had created, Bartley Bradstone and Olivia sat in silence. Now and again he glanced at her thoughtful, dreamy face in a half watchful, half suspicious manner, but she seemed to be quite unconscious of his presence, and presently got up and went to the piano in the adjoining room and began to play softly.

“That’s a sign that we can take ourselves off to the smoking-room; come and have a cigar,” said the squire, and as he passed Olivia, he gently patted her cheek. She put up her hand and took his and laid her face against it, but said nothing, and the two men left the room.

“I shan’t smoke,” said Bertie, as he reached the door. “I shall stay and talk to these children,” nodding at Annie and Mary, but he glanced at Olivia as he spoke.

Bartley Bradstone dropped into the chair the squire motioned him to, but he seemed uneasy and restless, and after a moment or two, he got up, and, clearing his throat, nervously, said:

“I am glad we are alone, squire, for I wanted to speak to you on a—a private matter.”

The squire glanced at him with a return of the apprehensive, hunted look in his eyes.

“Yes! What is it? Wait a moment, till I have lit my cigar. Now,” and he seemed to pull himself together like a man prepared to receive bad news, or an unwelcome shock.

Bartley Bradstone grew pale; he was evidently as ill at ease as the squire.

“I—I want to speak to you about Miss Vanley—Miss Olivia,” he said.

A tremor passed over the squire’s face, and he lowered his eyes.

“About Olivia?” and his voice sounded dry and husky.

“Yes,” said Bartley Bradstone. “I don’t suppose you have been blind to the—the fact that I sincerely admire, and—and, indeed, that I—well”—he stammered—“I love her, and I want you to give her to me for my—wife.”

As he spoke the last word, his voice suddenly dropped and grew hoarse and indistinct. So much so that the squire, who had not expected such deep emotion, started and looked up at him. Bartley Bradstone’s face was perfectly white, and his eyes were fixed on the ground.

“I have been devoted to—to Miss Olivia for months past,” he continued. “I’m not good at this kind of thing, and I don’t express myself very well; but what I’ve said is true. I do love her, and I’ll do all in my power to make her happy.”

He cleared his throat, and took up a match to relight his cigar, which had gone out.

The squire stared at the carpet with grave, troubled eyes for a moment. He had expected this; in his heart of hearts he had desired it, and yet—yet now it had come, it seemed to chill him with an indefinable repugnance.

“Have you spoken to Olivia, Bradstone?” he asked, and his voice was rather that of a man speaking of a funeral than a contemplated marriage.

Bartley Bradstone colored.

“No,” he replied. “I have said nothing to Miss Olivia. I thought it my duty to come to you, her father, first; it’s the proper thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” assented the squire. “Yes—usually, thank you—yes, of course it is the proper thing. But——” He paused. “But I ought to tell you at once that in this matter my daughter will be quite uninfluenced by me—I mean that she will be left to decide for herself completely.”

“Then, if she says ‘Yes,’ I’m to understand that you will not object?” said Bartley Bradstone.

The squire looked up at him with a half sad, half reluctant expression in his eyes.

“Why should I object?” he said, as if to himself. “We have known you for some time, you are a near neighbor, and—I speak frankly, Bradstone—you possess the wealth without which, alas! few marriages can be happy.”

“Yes,” said Bartley Bradstone, and for the first time he drew himself up. “I think I can satisfy you on that point. I think I may say that Olivia will, as my wife, be able to live as comfortably as she has done as your daughter.”

The squire winced at the vulgarity and familiarity of the speech, as he nodded assentingly.

“It is a consideration that has weight with me,” he said. “But I ought to tell you, though you do not need telling, I am sure, that it will not have a feather’s weight with Olivia.”

“Most women like money,” said Bartley Bradstone.

The squire winced.

“Yes, most. But not Olivia. She cares nothing for it. She would be as contented in one of the keeper’s cots as here at the Grange or at The Maples—that is, so far as money is concerned. But all this is premature and useless talk. You have not spoken to her yet, you say. It will be time to—to talk of the financial part of the subject after——”

He paused and suppressed a sigh.

“No, I don’t agree with you, sir,” said Bartley Bradstone, with an air of great respect, but eyeing the grave, sad-faced old man out of the corner of his restless, suspicious eyes. “I like everything to be fair and aboveboard——”

“Fair and aboveboard!” echoed the squire, almost angrily.

“I—I mean straightforward and plain,” stammered Bartley Bradstone. “I must tell you what I intend to do if Olivia accepts me and becomes my wife——”

The squire rose and leaned his elbow on the mantelshelf and his head on his hand, and seemed engaged in some mental struggle for a moment; then he raised his head, and looking every inch the true-hearted English gentleman, he said:

“Wait a moment, if you please, Bradstone. Before you say any more, I think—I am sure—it is my duty to be as plain and straightforward—aye, to use your own words, as ‘fair and aboveboard’ as you are. I have to tell you this: You may suppose, and very naturally, that as the daughter of the lord of the manor, of a man with a large estate and occupying a prominent place in the county, Olivia will have a dowry suitable to her position.”

Bartley Bradstone opened his mouth; but the squire, with a gesture of gentle dignity, motioned him to silence.

“Hear me out. I find it difficult to tell you what I have to tell you. I say that it is only reasonable that you should suppose my daughter would come to you with a marriage portion suited to her rank in life. I am sorry, bitterly sorry, to tell you that Olivia will go to the man she marries with empty hands!”

If the squire had expected his auditor to express astonishment or chagrin, he was agreeably relieved, for Bartley Bradstone merely nodded his head.

“It is a matter of perfect indifference to me, sir,” he said, with a shrug of the shoulders. “It is Olivia I want, not money; thank Heaven I have enough—too much, perhaps—of that already. If you give me your consent——”

“One moment more,” said the squire, interrupting him in a low voice. “It is my duty to tell you something more, Bradstone. If you are utterly indifferent to the fact that she will have no dowry, you may consider that, as my only child, she will and should inherit this,” and he waved his hand. “What if I tell you that she will not even do that?”

Again Bartley Bradstone expressed neither surprise nor disappointment.

“No?” he said. “Well, that is of no consequence to me, sir. As I said, it is Olivia I want, not money nor the Grange; though, mind you, I think it a pity that a fine old property that has been in the family so long——”

“Should depart from it forever,” said the squire, in a low, sorrow-stricken voice. “A pity! Yes! But so it must be! Bradstone, having told you this much, I may—indeed, it is my duty to—tell you all. You see before you a man who is a living lie”—his voice broke—“a sham and a counterfeit, the Squire of Hawkwood who cannot give his daughter a poor thousand pounds as a wedding present, the lord of the manor every acre of which he is in hourly danger of losing. Bradstone, I am weighed down, sunk to my neck in debt, and the Grange may at any moment be in the bailiff’s hands.”

He did not drop into a chair or burst into tears, did not even utter a groan, but stood with pale, set face and steady, unflinching eyes—the aristocrat even in this moment of his deepest humiliation, the humiliation of having to confess his ruin to this parvenu, would-be son-in-law.

Bartley Bradstone looked at him with the grudging admiration of a vulgar mind for that higher type which it can never hope even to imitate; how he would have sighed and groaned and groveled if he had had to make such a confession!

“There is my case,” said the squire, after a moment’s pause. “And I shall not deem you selfish or unreasonable if, after having heard it, you withdraw your proposal, Bradstone.”

“But I do not do anything of the sort,” said Bartley Bradstone. “I repeat it. It makes no difference to me, sir—not a bit. As to the estate going, I’m not so sure that that can’t be prevented.”

The squire shook his head sadly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Bartley Bradstone, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “I’m not so sure of that. And now, sir, let me imitate your candor. You’ve told me how you stand; I’ll tell you my position. I believe—it’s difficult to calculate exactly—that I’m worth three-quarters of a million, more or less, and I should think——”

The squire raised his brows.

“Yes, that’s about the figure. Now, if Olivia says ‘Yes,’ if she accepts me, I’m prepared to settle fifty thousand pounds upon her for her life, for her own, you know, and I’ll give her The Maples, too. If that isn’t enough, if you think that it ought to be more——”

The squire’s pale face went crimson, and he made a gesture of repudiation.

“No, no! It is most liberal, most generous,” he said, and for the first time his voice quivered. “It is too large a settlement for a portionless girl——”

“Not for my wife,” said Bartley Bradstone, with a charming self consequence which made the poor old squire shudder inwardly. “A man who is worth three-quarters of a million doesn’t miss fifty thou. In fact, I expect that your lawyer fellows will want a great deal more than that——”

The squire reddened.

“My lawyers will express my sentiments, Bradstone,” he said, quietly.

Bartley Bradstone bit his lip.

“I mean they’ll consider that it ought to be more, and if they do, I’ll make it just what they want. In fact, I’ll do anything to get—to—prove my love for Olivia; and I’ll undertake to make her happy, if a man could do it.”

The squire did not hold out his hand, as a father usually does under such circumstances, as he would have done, for instance, if Bertie or some one like him had made the speech, but he bowed his head in acknowledgement.

“It is a liberal, generous proposal,” he said. “You have my consent, Bradstone, and—and my best wishes. But remember that Olivia will be left perfectly free; by no word or look would I endeavor to influence her. If she accepts you, it will be of her own accord, and if she should refuse——”

Bartley Bradstone bit his lip again.

“You will understand that the—the matter is at an end.”

“I understand, sir,” he said. “And now we have settled, perhaps I’d better speak to Olivia,” and he flung his cigar in the fireplace.

The squire gave a slight start.

“To-night?” he said. “Well—yes—I suppose a lover’s impatience——”

“Oh, I don’t like it,” said Bartley Bradstone, with a faint laugh. “But it’s been my motto all through life that if a disagreeable—I mean a hard job has got to be done, it’s better to set about it at once and get it over. I shall speak to Olivia to-night—the sooner the better. If I waited”—he hesitated, then blurted it out—“if I waited, I might wait too long; some other fellow might step in. I’ll go now, I think, sir.”

“You will find her in the drawing-room, and alone, I think,” said the squire, with a faint sigh. “I heard the Penstone carriage go a quarter of an hour since.”

“So did I,” said Bartley Bradstone, with a knowing look. “I was only waiting for their departure,” and he went out.

He had not told the squire that he held all his bonds in his hands, and that at any moment he could crush him, ruin him, turn him out of the Grange. Bartley Bradstone was clever enough to know that if he had done so, and had also intimated that his price for sparing her father was the daughter’s hand, the squire would have turned him out of the house, and probably kicked him into the bargain. No, Bartley Bradstone, though a vulgar parvenu, was too clever to make such a false move. He reserved it. That was all.