"YOUR letter notifies me, in general terms, that the answers returned to your inquiries as to my antecedents and present reputation are the reverse of satisfactory. You feel constrained, you add, in view of the information thus obtained, to interdict my further intercourse with your sister or any other member of your family. Since I cannot battle with shadows, or refute insinuations the drift of which I do not in the least comprehend, may I trouble you to put the allegations to which you refer into a definite and tangible shape? Let me know who are my accusers, and what are the iniquities with which they charge me. The worst criminal against human and divine laws has the right to demand thus much before he is convicted and sentenced.

"As to your prohibition of my continued correspondence with Miss Aylett, I shall consider her my promised wife, and write to her regularly as such, until you have made good your indictment against me, or until I receive the a.s.surance under her own hand and seal that my conduct in thus addressing her is obnoxious to herself.

"I have the honor, sir, of signing myself

"Your obedient servant,

"FREDERIC S. CHILTON."

The cool contempt of the reply to his imperative dismissal of whatever claims the presumptuous adventurer his aunt had encouraged believed he had upon Mabel's notice or affection, was likely to irk Winston Aylett as more intemperate language could not. It did more. It baffled him, for a time. He could, and he meant, to withhold the lover's letter from his sister's eyes. He could--and upon this also he was determined--command her, in the masterful manner that heretofore had never failed to work submission, never to meet, speak, or write again to the man he almost hated; will her to forget her childish fancy for his handsome face and glozing arts, and in the fulness of time, to bestow her in marriage upon a partner of his own providing. He had no misgivings as to his ability to accomplish all this, if the blackguard aforesaid could be kept out of her way until that remedial agent, Time, and lawful authority had a chance to do their work.

But he was openly defied to prevent communication between the betrothed pair, unless his injunction had Mabel's endors.e.m.e.nt; and, upon alighting from the stage at the village, on his return to Ridgeley, he had taken from the post-office, along with the impertinent missive addressed to himself, one for Mabel, superscribed by the same hand. From the first, he had no intention of transferring it to the keeping of the proper owner, It was forwarded in direct disobedience to his commands, and the writer should be made to understand the futility of opposition to these.

For several hours, his only purpose respecting it was to enclose it, unopened, in an envelope directed by himself, and send it back to the audacious author, by the next mail. He was balked in this project by no fastidious scruples as to his right thus to dispose of his ward's property. Nature, or what he a.s.sumed was natural affection, concurred with duty in urging him to hinder an alliance by which Mabel's happiness would be imperilled and her relatives scandalized. But when, in the solitude of his study, he vouchsafed a second reading to Frederic's letter, preparatory to the response he designed should annihilate his hopes and chastise his impudence, a doubt of the efficacy of his schemes attacked him for the first time. "Under her own hand and seal,"

were terms the explicitness of which commended them to his grave consideration. His next thought was to oblige Mabel to indite a formal renunciation of her unworthy suitor. There were several objections to this measure.

Firstly, he disliked whatever smacked of scenic effect, and women were apt to get up scenes--hysterics, att.i.tudes, and the like--upon trivial provocation, He wanted to get the thing over quietly and soon.

Secondly, he was not very sure that he should find in Mabel the docile puppet she had appeared to him for so many years of tutelage. She had matured marvelously of late. Her very manner of meeting him that afternoon impressed him by its self-possession and freedom from the emotion that used to gush from eyes and lips, in happy tears, and broken, delighted greeting at his approach. For aught he knew to the contrary, she might have accepted his fiat as just, if not merciful, and not a dream of rebellion been fostered thereby. The grave tranquillity of her demeanor might arise from the chastening influences of the mortification she had sustained, and a consciousness of ill-desert that bred humility. He would fain have believed all this, but until he broached the subject to her, his incert.i.tude could not be removed, and in a step so momentous as that which he meditated, it behooved him to try well the solidity of the ground beneath him.

Lastly, our blood-prince of the kingdom of Ridgeley was, whether he confessed it or not, acting under orders.

"Be very tolerant with that poor little deceived sister of yours!" his fiancee had implored, her diamond eyes bedimmed by quick-springing damps of commiseration. "Recollect that the consciousness of wasted love is always harder to bear than what is commonly known as bereavement. If you find her refractory, be patient and persuasive, instead of dictatorial.

Craft often effects what overt violence would attempt in vain."

"Craft!" The word struck unpleasantly upon the Virginia lordling's ear, and he echoed it with a suspicion of a frown upon his brow. "I am not an adept in chicanery!"

"But you are a born diplomatist!" seductively. "And because I am of the same credulous s.e.x as our mistaken little darling, you will not proceed to open warfare with her, even should she be both to resign her lover?

It is the glory of the strong to show charity to the weak and erring."

For her sake, then, our flattered diplomatist would try the effect of guile, instead of brutality, upon the helpless girl, the balance of whose fate was grasped by his shapely hand. For one base second, the idea of attempting an imitation of his sister's handwriting flashed through his mind. But he was a gentleman, and forgery is not a gentlemanly vice, any more than is counterfeiting bank-notes. Finally, the author of craft--the subtle, refined virtue bepraised by his bride-elect--the devil--came to his help.

Mabel, like most other girls, had a dainty and fantastic taste in the matter of letter-paper and envelopes. She used none but French stationery, stamped with her monogram--a curious device, wrought in two colors--and at the top of each sheet stood out in bas-relief the Aylett crest. With these harmless whimsies Frederic was, without doubt, familiar. If his letter were returned to him, wrapped in a blank page, taken from her papetiere and within one of her envelopes, it would not signify so much whose handwriting was upon the exterior. Papetiere and writing-desk were in Mabel's bed-room, but she was in the parlor, practising an instrumental duet with Rosa--a favorite with Miss Dorrance. Winston had brought it south with him, and asked his sister to learn it forthwith, in just the accent he used to employ when prescribing what studies she should pursue at school. There was nothing in his errand that he should be ashamed of, he reminded himself with impatient severity, as he traversed the upper hall on tip-toe to the western chamber. He had, on sundry previous occasions, sought, in the receptacles he was about to ransack, for sealing-wax, pencils, and the like trifles. Mabel was too wise a woman not to keep her secrets under lock and key, and if there were private doc.u.ments left in his way, he was too honorable to pry into them.

Shutting the door cautiously, that the snap and blaze might not betray him, he struck a wax match, warranted to burn a minute-and-a-half, and raised the lid of the desk. His unseen but wily coadjutor had guided him cunningly. In fingering a heap of envelopes in order to find one large enough for his purpose, he brought to light one addressed to "Mr.

Frederic Chilton, Box 910, Philadelphia, Penn."

Upon the reverse was a small blot that had condemned it in Mabel's sight, as unfit to be sent to her most valued correspondent, and which she had not observed before writing the direction. Selecting another, she had thrown this back carelessly into the desk, meaning to burn it when it should be convenient, and forgotten all about it.

The livid dints were deep and restless in Winston's nostrils, as seen by the light of the tiny taper he raised to extinguish, when his prize was secured. The devil supplied him with another crafty hint, as he was in the act of folding one edge of Frederic's letter that it might fit into the new cover. Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer's hands with contumely? Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish. Stratagem, to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was bungling, not diplomacy. His hand did not shake in divesting the closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof of pure old blood. He averted his eyes lest he should see a line the lover had penned to his mistress. The letter slipped smoothly into the quarters prepared for it--smoothly as Satan's mark usually goes on until his tool has made his d.a.m.nation sure.

"Well done?" said Diabolus.

"That was a clever hit!" chimed in his a.s.sistant, complacently, after he had put the sealed envelope into his portfolio for safe-keeping, and burned the torn one he had removed. "n.o.body but an idiot or a madman would persist in following a girl up after such a quietus."

He replied to Frederic's note to himself shortly and with disdain, using the third person throughout, and informing Mr. Chilton with unmistakable distinctness that Miss Aylett had offered no opposition whatever to her brother's will in this unfortunate affair. So far as he--Mr.

Aylett--could judge, her views coincided exactly with his own. Mr.

Chilton's letters and presents should be returned to him at an early day, and thus should be finished the closing chapter of a volume which ought never to have been begun.

All this done to his mind, he set the door of his room ajar, and watched for Mabel's pa.s.sage to hers.

He had not to wait long. The young ladies had fallen into habits of early retiring of late--a marked change from their olden fashion of singing and talking out the midnight hour. Himself unseen, Mr. Aylett scrutinized the two mounting the stairs side by side--Rosa's dark, mobile face, arch with smiles, while she chattered over a bit of country gossip she had heard that afternoon from a visitor, and the weary calm of Mabel's visage, the drooping eyelids, and, when appealed to directly by her volatile comrade, the measured, not melancholy cadence of her answer, The girl had had a sore fight, and won a Pyrrhian victory. She was not vanquished, but she was worsted. Some men, upon appreciating what this meant, and how her grief had been wrought, would have had direful visitings of conscience, surrendered themselves to the mastery of doubts as to the righteousness and humanity of stringent action such as he had just consummated. He was not unmoved. He really loved his only sister, as proud, selfish men love those of their own lineage who have never disputed their supremacy, and derogated from their importance. He said something under his breath before he called her, but the curse was not upon himself.

"The low-bred hound!" he muttered. "This is his doing!"

Mabel halted at the stair-head, the blood suddenly and utterly forsaking her cheeks when he spoke her name, although his address was purposely kind, and, he thought, inviting.

"Can you spare me a moment?" he continued, smilingly, to win her advance. "I will not detain you long. I know you are agonizing to have your talk out, Miss Rosa."

Rosa laughed, with a saucy retort, and turned into her chamber.

Mabel entered her brother's, and without speaking, took the seat he offered. She was to be sentenced, and she must reserve her forces to sustain the pain without a groan.

"You saw Jenkyns--did you not?" began Mr. Aylett, with the manner of one at peace with himself, and those of his fellow-men whose existence he chose to acknowledge.

"I did. He made memoranda of your orders, and said all should be done as you wished."

"I ordered the masons, this evening, to begin the hall-chimney to-morrow. While the work is going on, you had better occupy some other bed-room. I shall hurry it forward, day and night, or it will not be done in season for us when we return from our bridal-tour. The carpets must be down, and the paper dry by the fifteenth at farthest. Clara bought your dresses, and offers to have them made, if you will send her an accurate measurement. You are about her height, although not so well-proportioned. Your figure is angular, where hers is round. She is your senior by several years, yet one might easily mistake her for a girl of twenty, her complexion is so fresh. Her twenty-five years show themselves in nothing except her ease of manner, maturity of thought, and elegance of diction."

He would have sneered at this strain in another as hyperbolical and fatuous. The absurdity of it in his mouth consisted mainly in the cool arrogance of the a.s.sumption that whatever belonged to him was above adverse criticism, and would be maligned if it were referred to without appending an encomium. Much of fervor might and did mingle in his thoughts of her he was to wed, but none warmed his enumeration of her perfections. He did nothing con amore, unless it were exalting the dignity and glory of the Aylett name, and maintaining his right to support their ancient honors.

Mabel did not respond to his gratuitous praise of the fair and benevolent Clara. While he was talking, he seemed to recede a great way from her; his tones to ring hollowly upon her hearing, his form to grow indistinct. Was he playing with her suspense, or could it be that he--a being with heart and nerves like hers, had no conception of the rack on which she was stretched--no suspicion that every one of his deliberate sentences was a turn of the screw that redoubled her torture? The Ayletts were a strong-willed race, and she repressed all sign of suffering save intense pallor; made this less palpable by screening her eyes from the lamp-light with a paper she took from the table, and thereby throwing her features into deep shadow.

"But it is not my intention to trouble you with matters that concern me alone," he pursued, without varying his intonations. "As I antic.i.p.ated, Mr. Chilton declines explaining the ugly story relative to his earlier career of dissipation and deceit, which I forwarded to you. He indulges, instead, in a tirade of personal abuse touching my right to control you, declaring his purpose to pursue you with letters and attentions until he shall be discarded by yourself. We will not stay to discuss the gentlemanliness and delicacy of his behavior in this regard. I merely declare, that, having had a fair opportunity of honest confession or denial of statements detrimental to his principles and pursuits, and having shirked both, he has placed himself outside the pale of respectful consideration. Has he written to you since his receipt of my letter?"

"No!"

Mabel was staring at a figure in the carpet, on a line with her feet.

Had she regarded her brother never so attentively, she would have detected no change in his countenance. He did not prepare questions without also studying how to deliver them.

"I am glad he has the moral decency to forbear carrying out his threat of persecution."

He could say it with the greater hardihood in the remembrance that the "persecution" had been attempted.

"I wish he had written!" rejoined Mabel, abruptly, but without pa.s.sion.

"He was right to protest against accepting his dismissal from any other than myself."

She had not removed her eyes from the spot on the carpet, or lowered the paper screen. She looked like a statue and spoke like an automaton.

Mr. Aylett's nostrils quivered ominously.

"Is it your wish to recommence the correspondence I have ended?"

"You know that I would strike off my right hand sooner than do it. But if he had written to me, I should have answered his letter, if it had been only to bid him farewell. Since he has not chosen to do this, I cannot take the initiative."

If Winston had never entertained a favorable opinion of his own sagacity prior to hearing this avowal, it would have forced itself upon him now.

How timely was the thought, how felicitous the accident, that had aided him to ward off the disaster of renewed intercourse!

Involuntarily his fingers crept nearer to the closed portfolio.