John Milton had rowed back without lifting his eyes to Mrs. Ashwood's receding figure. He believed that he was right in declining her invitation, although he had a miserable feeling that it entailed seeing her for the last time. With all that he believed was his previous experience of the affections, he was still so untutored as to be confused as to his reasons for declining, or his right to have been shocked and disappointed at her manner. It seemed to him sufficiently plain that he had offended the most perfect woman he had ever known without knowing more. The feeling he had for her was none the less powerful because, in his great simplicity, it was vague and unformulated. And it was a part of this strange simplicity that in his miserable loneliness his thoughts turned unconsciously to his dead wife for sympathy and consolation. Loo would have understood him!
Mr. Fletcher, who had received him on his arrival with singular effusiveness and cordiality, had put off their final arrangements until after dinner, on account of pressing business. It was therefore with some surprise that an hour before the time he was summoned to Fletcher's room. He was still more surprised to find him sitting at his desk, from which a number of business papers and letters had been hurriedly thrust aside to make way for a manuscript. A single glance at it was enough to show the unhappy John Milton that it was the one he had sent to Mrs. Ashwood. The color flashed to his cheek and he felt a mist before his eyes. His employer's face, on the contrary, was quite pale, and his eyes were fixed on Harcourt with a singular intensity. His voice too, although under great control, was hard and strange.
“Read that,” he said, handing the young man a letter.
The color again streamed into John Milton's face as he recognized the hand of Mrs. Ashwood, and remained there while he read it. When he put it down, however, he raised his frank eyes to Fletcher's, and said with a certain dignity and manliness: “What she says is the truth, sir. But it is I alone who am at fault. This manuscript is merely MY stupid idea of a very simple story she was once kind enough to tell me when we were talking of strange occurrences in real life, which she thought I might some time make use of in my work. I tried to embellish it, and failed. That's all. I will take it back,—it was written only for her.”
There was such an irresistible truthfulness and sincerity in his voice and manner, that any idea of complicity with the sender was dismissed from Fletcher's mind. As Harcourt, however, extended his hand for the manuscript Fletcher interfered.
“You forget that you gave it to her, and she has sent it to me. If I don't keep it, it can be returned to her only. Now may I ask who is this lady who takes such an interest in your literary career? Have you known her long? Is she a friend of your family?”
The slight sneer that accompanied his question restored the natural color to the young man's face, but kindled his eye ominously.
“No,” he said briefly. “I met her accidentally about two months ago and as accidentally found out that she had taken an interest in one of the first things I ever wrote for your paper. She neither knew you nor me. It was then that she told me this story; she did not even then know who I was, though she had met some of my family. She was very good and has generously tried to help me.”
Fletcher's eyes remained fixed upon him.
“But this tells me only WHAT she is, not WHO she is.”
“I am afraid you must inquire of her brother, Mr. Shipley,” said Harcourt curtly.
“Shipley?”
“Yes; he is traveling with her for his health, and they are going south when the rains come. They are wealthy Philadelphians, I believe, and—and she is a widow.”
Fletcher picked up her note and glanced again at the signature, “Constance Ashwood.” There was a moment of silence, when he resumed in quite a different voice: “It's odd I never met them nor they me.”
As he seemed to be waiting for a response, John Milton said simply: “I suppose it's because they have not been here long, and are somewhat reserved.”
Mr. Fletcher laid aside the manuscript and letter, and took up his apparently suspended work.
“When you see this Mrs.—Mrs. Ashwood again, you might say”—
“I shall not see her again,” interrupted John Milton hastily.
Mr. Fletcher shrugged his shoulders. “Very well,” he said with a peculiar smile, “I will write to her. Now, Mr. Harcourt,” he continued with a sudden business brevity, “if you please, we'll drop this affair and attend to the matter for which I just summoned you. Since yesterday an important contract for which I have been waiting is concluded, and its performance will take me East at once. I have made arrangements that you will be left in the literary charge of the 'Clarion.' It is only a fitting recompense that the paper owes to you and your father,—to whom I hope to see you presently reconciled. But we won't discuss that now! As my affairs take me back to Los Gatos within half an hour, I am sorry I cannot dispense my hospitality in person,—but you will dine and sleep here to-night. Good-by. As you go out will you please send up Mr. Jackson to me.” He nodded briefly, seemed to plunge instantly into his papers again, and John Milton was glad to withdraw.
The shock he had felt at Mrs. Ashwood's frigid disposition of his wishes and his manuscript had benumbed him to any enjoyment or appreciation of the change in his fortune. He wandered out of the house and descended to the beach in a dazed, bewildered way, seeing only the words of her letter to Fletcher before him, and striving to grasp some other meaning from them than their coldly practical purport. Perhaps this was her cruel revenge for his telling her not to write to him. Could she not have divined it was only his fear of what she might say! And now it was all over! She had washed her hands of him with the sending of that manuscript and letter, and he would pass out of her memory as a foolish, conceited ingrate,—perhaps a figure as wearily irritating and stupid to her as the cousin she had known. He mechanically lifted his eyes to the distant hotel; the glow was still in the western sky, but the blue lamp was already shining in the window. His cheek flushed quickly, and he turned away as if she could have seen his face. Yes—she despised him, and THAT was his answer!
When he returned, Mr. Fletcher had gone. He dragged through a dinner with Mr. Jackson, Fletcher's secretary, and tried to realize his good fortune in listening to the subordinate's congratulations. “But I thought,” said Jackson, “you had slipped up on your luck to-day, when the old man sent for you. He was quite white, and ready to rip out about something that had just come in. I suppose it was one of those anonymous things against your father,—the old man's dead set against 'em now.” But John Milton heard him vaguely, and presently excused himself for a row on the moonlit bay.
The active exertion, with intervals of placid drifting along the land-locked shore, somewhat soothed him. The heaving Pacific beyond was partly hidden in a low creeping fog, but the curving bay was softly radiant. The rocks whereon she sat that morning, the hotel where she was now quietly reading, were outlined in black and silver. In this dangerous contiguity it seemed to him that her presence returned,—not the woman who had met him so coldly; who had penned those lines; the woman from whom he was now parting forever, but the blameless ideal he had worshiped from the first, and which he now felt could never pass out of his life again! He recalled their long talks, their rarer rides and walks in the city; her quick appreciation and ready sympathy; her pretty curiosity and half-maternal consideration of his foolish youthful past; even the playful way that she sometimes seemed to make herself younger as if to better understand him. Lingering at times in the shadow of the headland, he fancied he saw the delicate nervous outlines of her face near his own again; the faint shading of her brown lashes, the soft intelligence of her gray eyes. Drifting idly in the placid moonlight, pulling feverishly across the swell of the channel, or lying on his oars in the shallows of the rocks, but always following the curves of the bay, like a bird circling around a lighthouse, it was far in the night before he at last dragged his boat upon the sand. Then he turned to look once more at her distant window. He would be away in the morning and he should never see it again! It was very late, but the blue light seemed to be still burning unalterably and inflexibly.
But even as he gazed, a change came over it. A shadow seemed to pass before the blind; the blue shade was lifted; for an instant he could see the colorless star-like point of the light itself show clearly. It was over now; she was putting out the lamp. Suddenly he held his breath! A roseate glow gradually suffused the window like a burning blush; the curtain was drawn aside, and the red lamp-shade gleamed out surely and steadily into the darkness.
Transfigured and breathless in the moonlight, John Milton gazed on it. It seemed to him the dawn of Love!
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