Floyd Grandon's Honor, Amanda Minnie Douglas [you can read anyone .TXT] 📗

beyond. But she has seen the fine gold of love offered upon the altar. John Latimer is no better, finer, or nobler man than Floyd Grandon, and yet he loves his wife with so tender a passion that Violet's life looks like prison and starvation beside it. If she dared go to Floyd Grandon and ask for a little love! Did he give it all to that regal woman long ago, and does the ghost of the strangled passion stand between?

She tosses wearily, and is not much refreshed when morning dawns. Fortunately it is a busy day. Mrs. Dayre, who is a rather youngish widow of ample means, and who spent her early days at Westbrook, a sort of elder contemporary of the Grandons and Miss Stanwood, is to come with her young and pretty daughter, and take her mother with them to the West. Eugene goes to the station, and finds Miss Bertie Dayre a very stylish young woman, with an abundance of blond hair, creamy skin, white teeth, and a dazzling smile. She has been a year in society, the kind that has made an old campaigner of her already. She is not exactly fast, but she dallies on the seductive verge and picks out the daintiest bits of slang. She is seventeen, but looks mature as twenty; her mother is thirty-six, and could discount the six years easily.

Violet has made friends with Mrs. Wilbur, who finds her old-fashioned simplicity charming. She helps to receive the new guests, not as much startled by Miss Dayre as she would have been six months ago. The world is so different outside of convent walls that it seems sometimes as if she were in a play, acting a part.

In the midst of this Floyd Grandon arrives. Cecil captures him in wildest delight. Violet is glad to meet him first before all these people; alas for love when it longs for no secrecy! She colors and a sweet light glows in her face, she cannot unlearn her lesson all at once. Then she is quiet, lady-like, composed. Floyd watches her with a curious sensation. It is a new air of being mistress, of having a responsibility.

There certainly is a very gay week at Grandon Park. Bertie Dayre stirs people into exciting life. She is vivacious, exuberant, has wonderful vitality, and is never still a moment. Eugene has no need to devote himself to Miss Brade, he cannot even attend to Miss Bertie's pressing needs, and Floyd is called in to fill empty spaces. All men seem created with a manifest purpose of adding to her steady enjoyment.

"I think you were very short-sighted to marry so young," says Miss Dayre, calmly, to Violet, as they are driving out one morning. "What kind of a life are you going to have? It seems almost as if your greatest duty was to be a sort of nursery governess to the child, who is a marvel of beauty. How extremely fond her father is of her! Now _I_ should be jealous."

She utters this with a calm assumption of authority bordering on experience. Indeed, Bertie Dayre impresses you with the certainty that she _does_ know a great deal, the outcome of her confident belief in her own shrewd, far-sighted eyes.

"But _I_ love Cecil very much," returns Violet, so earnestly that Bertie stares.

"There are some women to whom children are more than the husband," announces this wise young woman. "I should want to have the highest regard for my husband. In fact, I mean never to marry until I can find a soul the exact counterpart of mine. Marriages are too hurried,--too many minor considerations are taken into account, home, money, position, protection, and all that,--but I suppose every girl cannot order her own life. I shall be able to."

Violet smiles dreamily, yet there is infinite sadness in it. If she could have ordered her life, she would have married Floyd Grandon and made the same mistake fate has made for her. Even now she would rather be the object of his kindly, indifferent tenderness than the wife of any other. Eugene's brilliance and spirited devotion do not touch her in any depth of sentiment, and yet he is so kind, so thoughtful for her, she sees it in so many ways.

All this whirl of gayety has had its effect everywhere. Marcia has come down with unblenching audacity to welcome her mother and take the measure of the new situation. Floyd is very cordial,--then Violet has not gone to him with complaints. Marcia is one of those people on whom generosity and the higher types of virtue are completely thrown away. She is full of clever devices that she sets down as intuitions or the ready reading of character. Violet speaks quietly and resents nothing, therefore she is quite sure the young wife's conscience will not allow her to. Conscience is a great factor in the make-up of other people, but her own seems of a gossamer quality. Indeed, she feels rather aggrieved that her _coup de main_ has wrought so little disaster. "But it will make her more careful how she goes on with Eugene," she comments to herself. Only Eugene seems not to have the slightest desire to go on with her, and that is another cause of elation.

Floyd Grandon is somewhat puzzled about his wife. He has come to understand the shy deference of manner, the frank friendliness, too, has nothing perplexing in it, but this unsmiling gravity, this gracious repose, amuse at first, then amaze a little. It is as if she has been taking lessons of some society woman, and he could almost accuse madame. She is very gentle and sweet. What is it he misses?

After all, he has not studied women to any great extent, his days have been so filled up with other matters, only she has hitherto appeared so transparent. She has liked him, but she has not been passionately in love, and he has never felt entirely certain that he desired it. Why, then, is he not satisfied?

Oddly enough, he has heard about the waltzing from Eugene, who desires to put it in its true light. It occurs one evening when he and Miss Dayre have been spinning and floating and whirling through drawing-room and hall, while Violet plays with fingers that seem bewitched and shake out showers of delicious melody. They have paused to take breath.

"Do you not waltz?" asks Bertie of Floyd, with a dazzling lure in her eyes.

"Oh, yes!" answers Eugene for him. "He and Mrs. Grandon waltz divinely together, but take them apart and I warn you the charm will be gone. I tried it a few evenings ago at my sister's, with Mrs. Grandon, and it was a wretched, spiritless failure. I wish there was some one else to play, and you could see them."

Floyd bites his lips, and wonders if Eugene is paying back a mortification.

"Oh, mamma will play," exclaims Bertie, with alacrity. "She is wonderfully good at such music, though Mrs. Grandon plays in exquisite time. Mamma."

"Don't trouble her," entreats Floyd.

Bertie is resolute, Mrs. Dayre obliging, and comes in from her balcony seat.

"Violet," says Mr. Grandon, "will you waltz awhile? Mrs. Dayre has kindly offered to play."

"I am not tired," answers Violet, in that curious, breathless tone which is almost a refusal.

"But I want you to," declares Bertie. "Mr. Eugene has so roused my curiosity."

Floyd takes her hand with a certain sense of mastery, and she yields. It is not the glad, joyous alacrity she has heretofore evinced. Eugene's half-confession, made with a feeling of honor that rarely attacks the young man, has failed of its mission. Some sense of fine adjustment is wanting.

Mrs. Dayre strikes into a florid whirl that would answer for a peasant picnic under the trees.

"Not that," says Eugene. "Some of those lovely, undulating movements. Oh, there is that Beautiful Blue Danube----"

"Which they waltzed when they came out of the ark," laughs Bertie, "but it is lovely."

The strain touches Violet. The great animating hope for joy has dropped out of her life, but youth is left, and youth cannot help being moved. Mrs. Dayre plays with an enchanting softness, and they float up and down as in some tranced sea.

"She waltzes fairly," comments Miss Dayre, "only she should be taller. I should like to waltz with him myself."

"They are a sort of Darby and Joan couple," says Eugene, evasively, "and his dancing days are about over."

"What a--mistake!" and Bertie laughs brightly. "Why, he is magnificent. Do you know I had a rather queer fancy about him; you expect literary men to be--well, grave and severe. The idea of his marrying a child like that! Why did he do it?"

"Because he loved her," replies the young man, with unblushing mendacity.

"Literary men and the clergy always do perpetrate matrimony in a curious manner. Do they go out much?" inclining her head toward the two floating at the other end of the room.

"Oh, to dinners and that sort of thing!" indifferently. "She is very sweet and has lovely eyes, but she is not the kind of person that I should think would attract him."

"What is it--the 'impossible that always happens'?" quotes Eugene, and as they come nearer Miss Dayre has the grace to be silent.

Floyd Grandon feels that some enthusiasm is missing, the divine flavor has gone out of it. Violet is so gentle, so quiet and unstirred by what only a little while ago carried her captive into an enchanted realm.

"Are you tired?" he asks, presently.

"Oh, no!"

She makes no motion for a release, and they go on. Indeed, it has a kind of pungent bitter-sweet elusiveness for her, almost as if she might come up with the lost happiness. "It is all there is, and she must make herself content," she is saying over and over. She has dreamed a wild, impossible dream.

Bertie Dayre is fond of conquests in strange lands. Even Violet comes to be amused at the frank bids she makes for Floyd's favor, but he seems not to see, to take them with the grave courtesy that is a part of his usual demeanor. Yet the preference has this effect upon him, to make him wish that another would try some delicate allurements. He is in a mood to be won to love, and Violet is fatally blind not to see that her day has come and take advantage of it.

From this point the summer festivities go straight on. There are guests at Madame Lepelletier's and a series of charming entertainments. The Brades have a houseful, and Lucia is followed by a train of adorers; but what does it all avail, since Mordecai sits stubbornly at the gate? Violet comes to have a strange, secret sympathy with the girl who cannot be content and choose among what is offered.

Madame Lepelletier is no less a queen here than she was in the city; indeed, the glories may be greater, more intense, from being circumscribed. The Latimers and the Grandons are frequent guests and meet people whom it is a delight to know; and Lucia decides there is no such lawn tennis anywhere, no such enchanting little suppers and dances. Eugene is rather resentful at first, but no one can hold out long against madame, and she finds a new way to please him,--to offer a little delicate incense at Violet's shrine. To her there is something in the way these two young people avoid any pronounced attention. Is it indicative of a secret understanding between them?