The Man Between, Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr [the snowy day read aloud txt] 📗

it might be typhoid. Nothing of the kind, however. I shall be all right in a day or two."

The truth was far from typhoid, and Fred knew it. He had left the wedding breakfast because he had reached the limit of his endurance. Words, stinging as whips, burned like hot coals in his mouth, and he felt that he could not restrain them much longer. Hastening to his hotel, he locked himself in his rooms, and passed the night in a frenzy of passion. The very remembrance of the bridegroom's confident transport put mur-der in his heart--murder which he could only practice by his wishes, impotent to compass their desires.

"I wish the fellow shot! I wish him hanged! I would kill him twenty times in twenty different ways! And Dora! Dora! Dora! What did she see in him? What could she see? Love her? He knows nothing of love--such love as tortures me." Backwards and forwards he paced the floor to such imprecations and ejaculations as welled up from the whirlpool of rage in his heart, hour following hour, till in the blackness of his misery he could no longer speak. His brain had become stupefied by the iteration of inevitable loss, and so refused any longer to voice a woe beyond remedy. Then he stood still and called will and reason to council him. "This way madness lies," he thought. "I must be quiet--I must sleep--I must forget."

But it was not until the third day that a dismal, sullen stillness succeeded the storm of rage and grief, and he awoke from a sleep of exhaustion feeling as if he were withered at his heart. He knew that life had to be taken up again, and that in all its farces he must play his part. At first the thought of Mostyn Hall presented itself as an asylum. It stood amid thick woods, and there were miles of wind-blown wolds and hills around it. He was lord and master there, no one could intrude upon his sorrow; he could nurse it in those lonely rooms to his heart's content. Every day, however, this gloomy resolution grew fainter, and one morning he awoke and laughed it to scorn.

"Frederick's himself again," he quoted, "and he must have been very far off himself when he thought of giving up or of running away. No, Fred Mostyn, you will stay here. 'Tis a country where the impossible does not exist, and the unlikely is sure to happen--a country where marriage is not for life or death, and where the roads to divorce are manifold and easy. There are a score of ways and means. I will stay and think them over; 'twill be odd if I cannot force Fate to change her mind."

A week after Dora's marriage he found himself able to walk up the avenue to the Rawdon house; but he arrived there weary and wan enough to instantly win the sympathy of Ruth and Ethel, and he was immensely strengthened by the sense of home and kindred, and of genuine kindness to which he felt a sort of right. He asked Ruth if he might eat dinner with them. He said he was hungry, and the hotel fare did not tempt him. And when Judge Rawdon returned he welcomed him in the same generous spirit, and the evening passed delightfully away. At its close, however, as Mostyn stood gloved and hatted, and the carriage waited for him, he said a few words to Judge Rawdon which changed the mental and social atmosphere. "I wish to have a little talk with you, sir, on a business matter of some importance. At what hour can I see you to-morrow?"

"I am engaged all day until three in the afternoon, Fred. Suppose I call on you about four or half-past?"

"Very well, sir."

But both Ethel and Ruth wondered if it was "very well." A shadow, fleeting as thought, had passed over Judge Rawdon's face when he heard the request for a business interview, and after the young man's departure he lost himself in a reverie which was evidently not a happy one. But he said nothing to the girls, and they were not accustomed to question him.

The next morning, instead of going direct to his office, he stopped at Madam, his moth-er's house in Gramercy Park. A visit at such an early hour was unusual, and the old lady looked at him in alarm.

"We are well, mother," he said as she rose. "I called to talk to you about a little business." Whereupon Madam sat down, and became suddenly about twenty years younger, for "business" was a word like a watch-cry; she called all her senses together when it was uttered in her presence.

"Business!" she ejaculated sharply. "Whose business?"

"I think I may say the business of the whole family."

"Nay, I am not in it. My business is just as I want it, and I am not going to talk about it--one way or the other."

"Is not Rawdon Court of some interest to you? It has been the home and seat of the family for many centuries. A good many. Mostyn women have been its mistress."

"I never heard of any Mostyn woman who would not have been far happier away from Rawdon Court. It was a Calvary to them all. There was little Nannie Mostyn, who died with her first baby because Squire Anthony struck her in a drunken passion; and the proud Alethia Mostyn, who suffered twenty years' martyrdom from Squire John; and Sara, who took thirty thousand pounds to Squire Hubert, to fling away at the green table; and Harriet, who was made by her husband, Squire Humphrey, to jump a fence when out hunting with him, and was brought home crippled and scarred for life--a lovely girl of twenty who went through agonies for eleven years without aught of love and help, and died alone while he was following a fox; and there was pretty Barbara Mostyn----"

"Come, come, mother. I did not call here this morning to hear the Rawdons abused, and you forget your own marriage. It was a happy one, I am sure. One Rawdon, at least, must be excepted; and I think I treated my wife as a good husband ought to treat a wife."

"Not you! You treated Mary very badly."

"Mother, not even from you----"

"I'll say it again. The little girl was dying for a year or more, and you were so busy making money you never saw it. If she said or looked a little complaint, you moved restless-like and told her 'she moped too much.' As the end came I spoke to you, and you pooh-poohed all I said. She went suddenly, I know, to most people, but she knew it was her last day, and she longed so to see you, that I sent a servant to hurry you home, but she died before you could make up your mind to leave your 'cases.' She and I were alone when she whispered her last message for you--a loving one, too."

"Mother! Mother! Why recall that bitter day? I did not think--I swear I did not think----"

"Never mind swearing. I was just reminding you that the Rawdons have not been the finest specimens of good husbands. They make landlords, and judges, and soldiers, and even loom-lords of a very respectable sort; but husbands! Lord help their poor wives! So you see, as a Mostyn woman, I have no special interest in Rawdon Court."

"You would not like it to go out of the family?"

"I should not worry myself if it did."

"I suppose you know Fred Mostyn has a mortgage on it that the present Squire is unable to lift."

"Aye, Fred told me he had eighty thousand pounds on the old place. I told him he was a fool to put his money on it."

"One of the finest manors and manor-houses in England, mother."

"I have seen it. I was born and brought up near enough to it, I think."

"Eighty thousand pounds is a bagatelle for the place; yet if Fred forces a sale, it may go for that, or even less. I can't bear to think of it."

"Why not buy it yourself?"

"I would lift the mortgage to-morrow if I had the means. I have not at present."

"Well, I am in the same box. You have just spoken as if the Mostyns and Rawdons had an equal interest in Rawdon Court. Very well, then, it cannot be far wrong for Fred Mostyn to have it. Many a Mostyn has gone there as wife and slave. I would dearly like to see one Mostyn go as master."

"I shall get no help from you, then, I understand that."

"I'm Mostyn by birth, I'm only Rawdon by, marriage. The birth-band ties me fast to my family."

"Good morning, mother. You have failed me for the first time in your life."

"If the money had been for you, Edward, or yours----"

"It is--good-by."

She called him back peremptorily, and he returned and stood at the open door.

"Why don't you ask Ethel?"

"I did not think I had the right, mother."

"More right to ask her than I. See what she says. She's Rawdon, every inch of her."

"Perhaps I may. Of course, I can sell securities, but it would be at a sacrifice a great sacrifice at present."

"Ethel has the cash; and, as I said, she is Rawdon--I'm not."

"I wish my father were alive."

"He wouldn't move me--you needn't think that. What I have said to you I would have said to him. Speak to Ethel. I'll be bound she'll listen if Rawdon calls her."

"I don't like to speak to Ethel."

"It isn't what you like to do, it's what you find you'll have to do, that carries the day; and a good thing, too, considering."

"Good morning, again. You are not quite yourself, I think."

"Well, I didn't sleep last night, so there's no wonder if I'm a bit cross this morning. But if I lose my temper, I keep my understanding."

She was really cross by this time. Her son had put her in a position she did not like to assume. No love for Rawdon Court was in her heart. She would rather have advanced the money to buy an American estate. She had been little pleased at Fred's mortgage on the old place, but to the American Rawdons she felt it would prove a white elephant; and the appeal to Ethel was advised because she thought it would amount to nothing. In the first place, the Judge had the strictest idea of the sacredness of the charge committed to him as guardian of his daughter's fortune. In the second, Ethel inherited from her Yorkshire ancestry an intense sense of the value and obligations of money. She was an ardent American, and not likely to spend it on an old English manor; and, furthermore, Madam's penetration had discovered a growing dislike in her granddaughter for Fred Mostyn.

"She'd never abide him for a lifelong neighbor," the old lady decided. "It is the Rawdon pride in her. The Rawdon men have condescended to go to Mostyn for wives many and many a time, but never once have the Mostyn men married a Rawdon girl--proud, set-up women, as far as I remember; and Ethel has a way with her just like them. Fred is good enough and nice enough for any girl, and I wonder what is the matter with him! It is a week and more since he was here,