A Book o' Nine Tales.

As far as Mr. Tom was concerned, Mr. Dysart might as well not have existed. They did once meet in the passage before the study door when the invalid in his first days of walking was one rainy morning wandering restlessly about the halls; but the owner of the house hurried furtively past, as if he were the interloper and the other lord of the manor; and even when the convalescent was well enough to join the family at table, Mr. Dysart was very seldom there, so that the meals were for the most part taken tête-à-tête by Columbine and her patient.

The result of such a situation is evident from the beginning. Exceptional natures might be imagined, perhaps, that would not have grown dangerously interested in each other under such circumstances; but at least these two drew every day closer together. Neither had any tie belonging to the past; or, more exactly, Columbine had none, and he, for the time being, at least, had no past. His helplessness and the mystery enshrouding him would have appealed to the heart of any woman, and Columbine had no distractions to fill her life and crowd out this ever-deepening interest. Of Mr. Tom, her beauty and freshness, her simplicity, which was so far removed from insipidity, her innocence, which never suggested ignorance, won the respect and admiration long before he was conscious that love, too, was growing in his heart.

There came a day, however, when he could no longer be ignorant of the nature of his feelings.

The two had gone past the arbor and down to the shore. Columbine was seated upon a rock, while Tom lay at her feet, idly tossing pebbles into a pool left among the sea-weed by the ebbing tide. The maiden wore that day a dress of gray flannel, almost the color of the stone upon which she sat, trimmed with a velvet of orange which no complexion less brilliant than hers could have endured. She twisted in her fingers a spray of goldenrod, yellow-coated harbinger of autumn.

“The summer is gone,” Columbine remarked, pensively. “It is getting late even for goldenrod.”

“Yes,” he echoed, “the summer is gone. I lost so much of it I hardly realize – ”

He broke off suddenly, a new thought seizing him.

“Why!” he exclaimed, “how long I have been here! I ought to have taken myself off your hands long ago. How you must think I abuse your hospitality!”

“Nonsense!” she returned, brightly; “you of course cannot go until you are well. It is necessary that you at least conjure from the past the rest of your name before you start out into the world again. Make yourself as comfortable as you can, Mr. Tom; you won’t be let loose for a long time to come yet.”

Despite the lightness of her manner her companion fancied he detected a shade of some hitherto unnoted feeling in her words; but whether dread of his departure or desire to be rid of him he could not divine. The latter thought struck him with a sudden chill. The love which had been fostered in his mind by this close and intimate companionship was not unmixed at this moment with a fear of being thrown upon his own resources while ignorant alike of his place and his name. He clung strongly to Columbine as to one who understood and sympathized with his strange mental weakness. The color flamed into his pale cheeks with a sudden throb of intense emotion; then faded, to leave him whiter than ever.

“Besides,” Columbine continued, after a moment’s pause, her glance still downcast, “why shouldn’t you stay? Your being here makes no difference to papa; he smokes and grubs after the roots of his ancestral tree the same as ever; and as for me,” lifting her eyes with a sudden smile that showed all her dimples, “you know how much you amuse me. You are as good as a continued story, and are alive, too, the last being a good deal in this desert.”

He returned her smile with effort. His moment of intense feeling had so overpowered him that he felt weak and faint.

“How white you are!” she exclaimed, noting the wanness of his face; “you should have had your bouillon long ago. A pretty condition you are in to go roaming off by yourself!”

She tripped lightly off towards the house for the forgotten nourishment, and Mr. Tom was left to his reflections. He raised himself, as her graceful figure vanished, then sank back upon his rug with something like a groan. All in an instant the knowledge had come to him that he loved her. He had gone on from day to day conscious only of thinking of his own history, which, bit by bit, he was disinterring from the past, as men bring to light some buried city, and insensibly Columbine had become dear to him before he was aware.

He buried his face in his hands in a despair which was in part the result of his strange mental confusion; in part arose from his physical weakness. He did not reflect then that his case was not necessarily hopeless; that nothing in his life which remembrance had recovered need raise a barrier between himself and Columbine. Afterward this thought came to him and brought comfort; now he was overwhelmed by a sense of impotent misery. Helpless in the hand of fate, it seemed to him that this love, of which he was newly aware, was but a fresh device of malignant destiny. He did not even consider whether his affection might be returned; he only felt the impossibility of offering his broken life to Columbine, – of binding her to a past that was uncertain and a future that was insecure.

Tears of weakness, and scorn of that weakness, came into his eyes. Their traces were still visible when Columbine returned.

“Come,” she said, ignoring the signs of his agitation, “you have told me nothing on the story to-day. Just down there,” indicating by a pretty sweep of the hand a little pebbly cove lying just below them, “is where Sarah and I found you.”

“And I would to God,” cried poor Tom with sudden fierceness, “that you had left me there.”

Columbine made, for the moment, no reply to this outburst. She insisted upon his drinking his bouillon, despite his protests of disinclination, and then brought him back to the tale of his life.

“There is an air of improbability about my story,” he said, after a little musing. “Indeed, so much so that I myself begin to doubt the truth of it. In the first place it seems particularly arranged to baffle inquiry. Whenever I recall a person to whom I might send for verification or information, I straightway remember that he is dead, or that my wanderings have carried me beyond his knowledge. I am apparently as far as ever from knowing who I am or what I am. And, besides, suppose your beautiful theory, that my memory acts as it does because the impressions of youth are strongest, is not true? You put me in the same category with those whose memory is weakened by age; but this may be all moonshine. Perhaps this history, to which I am painfully adding every day, is something I have read, and only a fiction after all.”

“But why suppose so many tormenting things?” returned Columbine, brightly. “The fault of the age, they say, – we know very little of it here, but cousin Tom sends me a paper occasionally, – is unrest; and whoever you are, a little tranquillity will scarcely be likely to harm you. Go on with the life and adventures, and never mind now whether they are true or not. At least they are interesting. You broke off yesterday in a most exciting account of a tiger hunt.”

“Ah, yes; I got the rest of it together this morning. Where did I leave off? Had we reached the second jungle?”

The salt meadows were on fire. The pungent odor of burning peat and saline grasses floated over the Dysart place and about the arbor one October morning when Tom sat there meditating. He was thinking of Columbine, and of his passion for her. His health now seemed firmly re-establishing itself, and his memory had gone on over the old track of his life in its singular method of progression until he felt confident that he should ultimately be in possession of all his past. He reviewed what he remembered, as he sat this morning inhaling the aromatic scent of the burning lowlands, and the result was not unsatisfactory. He had recovered from oblivion his life up to the time, three years before, when he took passage home from India, and his financial affairs at that period were in an eminently satisfactory position. He recalled that he had been regarded on shipboard as a person of more consequence than the British officer who, with his daughter, occupied the cabin of the Indiaman with him; and he trusted that no untoward circumstances of the interval had placed him in a condition less desirable.

He had reconciled himself to remaining at the Dysart mansion by turning over to old Sarah a goodly portion of the money contained in his travelling-belt, and blessed himself that his wandering life had led him to form the habit of always going thus provided. He sat now waiting for Columbine to appear, and fondly picturing to himself the delight of telling his love when the time came that he dare speak. Each day increased his attachment, and he believed, as every lover will, that his love was returned. A smile of brooding contentment, so deep that even the impatience of his passion could not disturb it, dwelt upon his face as he inhaled the fragrant odors from the burning marshes, and listened for the step of the maiden he loved.

She came at last, moving along the garden paths between the faded shrubs, a gracious and winning figure. She was dressed that morning in a gown of russet wool, with a bunch of gold and crimson leaves at her throat, and never, in Tom’s eyes, had she looked so lovely.

“I shouldn’t have been so late in getting here,” she said, as she took her accustomed seat, “but Sarah is greatly concerned about the fire in the salt marshes. She says it is thirty years since they burnt over, and she presages all sorts of dire calamities from that fact.”

“That they haven’t burnt over for thirty years?”

“Well,” Columbine returned with a pout, “she is not at all clear what she does mean, so it isn’t to be expected that I shall be. We will go on with the life and adventures, if you please.”

“But suppose I haven’t remembered anything more?”

“Nonsense,” retorted pretty Columbine; “you never really remember. I am convinced that you make it all up as you go along; but you tell it so seriously that it might as well be true. And in any case it does credit to your powers of imagination.”

His story now was of his voyage from Calcutta. He told of moonlight nights in the Indian ocean, of long days of sunny idling on deck, and all the pleasant details of a prosperous voyage over Southern seas.

“Miss Grant wasn’t very pretty,” he observed, lying lazily back and looking up into the blue October sky, “at least not as I remember her; but she was very good company, only a little given to sentimentalizing. She had a guitar, and I will confess I did hate to see that guitar come out.”

“She would be pleased if she could hear you,” laughed Columbine. “What was there so frightful about her guitar?”

“Oh, when she had that she always sang moony songs, and after that – ”

“Well?” demanded Miss Dysart, mischievously.

“Oh, after that,” he returned, with an impatient shake of his shoulders, “she was sure to talk sentiment.”

His companion laughed merrily. The faint, almost unconscious feeling of jealousy which had risen at the mention of this engaging young lady had vanished entirely in the indifference with which Mr. Tom spoke of her. She moved her head with a happy little motion not unlike that with which a bird plumes itself. Her soft, low laugh did not really end, but lost itself among the dimples of her cheeks.

Tom regarded her with shining eyes.

“Not that I should mind some people’s talking sentiment,” he said with a smile.

She raised her laughing gaze to his, and, as their eyes met, the meaning of the look in his was too plain to be mistaken. She flushed and paled, dropping her gaze from his.

“And did nothing especial happen on the voyage?” she asked, with a strong effort to regain her careless manner.

“Not that I recall,” he answered, putting his hand beside hers upon the rustic table so that their fingers almost touched.

A moment of silence followed, broken only by the chirping of a few belated crickets, that, despite the advancement of the season, had not yet discontinued their autumnal concerts. The two, so quiet outwardly, sat with beating hearts, when suddenly a wandering breeze brought into the summer-house a puff of smoke from the burning salt meadows. It was laden with the fetid odor of consuming animal matter, and so powerful was it that both involuntarily turned away their heads.

“Bah!” Columbine cried. “How horrible! There must be a dead animal of some sort there that the fire has reached.”

She stopped speaking and gazed with surprise at Tom, who had buried his face in his hands with a groan.

“What is it? Has it made you ill? It is gone now.”

He lifted a face white with emotion.

“No,” he said, “it has not made me ill, – physically, that is; but it has done worse, it has made me remember.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “What is it? is it so terrible?”

She leaned toward him, and to poor Tom she looked the incarnation of enticing loveliness. Sympathy and interest – not unmixed, she being a woman, with curiosity – sparkled in her eyes, yet he nerved himself to tell her all that had come back to him.

“That smell of burning hide,” he began, “brought it all up in a flash. The ship got on fire; Miss Grant clung to me; there was just such an odor leaking out around the hatches from the hold where the flames were at the cargo; she – I – when everything else was right, when the fire was out, I was all wrong.”

“I do not understand,” Columbine said.

She drew away from him, her cheeks pale, her very lips wan. She did not meet his gaze, but sat with downcast eyes.

“I was engaged to Miss Grant. I did not pretend to love her, but I thought we were all bound for the bottom, and” —

He stopped helplessly; her eyes flashed upon him.

“And if a lie would soothe her last moments,” she said, bitterly, “you – No, no; I beg your pardon.”

“I remember more,” he went on, wrenching each word out as if by a strong effort of will. “The shock, and, perhaps, previous seeds of disease, were too much for her father; he died the day before we landed. She was alone in the world, she had no protector, and I – I married her at once, to protect her.”

A sparrow flew up into the lattice outside the arbor without noticing the pair within, so dead was the stillness which now fell upon them. At length Columbine rose and stood an instant by the table which had been between them. She wavered an instant, then stooped and kissed him upon the forehead. Then without a word she turned from the arbor and fled swiftly to the house.

Left alone in the summer-house Tom’s first feeling was a great throb of joy; but it gave place almost instantly to an aching pang of misery. To be assured of Columbine’s love would have been intense happiness an hour before; now it could only add to his pain. He raged against the toils in which fate had entangled him, yet defiance to helplessness and every paroxysm of rage at destiny ended in a new and humiliating consciousness of his own impotence. He felt like one who walked blindfolded, with light granted him, not to avoid missteps, but merely to see them after they were taken.

One thing at least was clear to Tom, – that he must leave the Dysart mansion. To go on seeing Columbine day after day, with the knowledge at once of their love and of the barrier that stood between them, was a position too painful and too anomalous to be endured. Both for his own sake and for Miss Dysart’s it was necessary that he delay no longer. Where he was going he was not at all clear; that he left to circumstances to decide. He quitted the arbor and walked toward the house, so intent upon his painful thoughts that at a turning of the path he ran plump against old Sarah, who was hurrying along with a face full of anxiety.

“Oh, mercy gracious, Mr. Thomas!” the faithful creature cried; “I’m sure I beg your pardon! But you look as if you’d seen a ghost!”

“So I have,” he answered. “Where are you going with that spade?”

“To the salt meadows,” she answered. “The fire’s sure to come into the lower garden if we don’t ditch it, and if it does, there’ll be no stopping it from the house.”

“What!” exclaimed Tom. “Where are the men?”

“There ain’t no men,” old Sarah returned, philosophically. “Why should there be?”

“But you are not going down to ditch alone?”

“’D I be likely to stop in-doors and let the house where I’ve lived fifty years burn over my head?” demanded she, grimly.

“Give me the spade,” was his reply. “A little work will do me good.”

Old Sarah remonstrated, but it ended in the strangely matched pair going together to the meadows below.

The dry sphagnum was readily cut through with the spade, and it was not a difficult, although a slow task, to dig a wide, shallow trench between the stretch of burning moss and the gardens. Once the ditch was complete, it would be easy to fight the fire on the home side, since there was nothing swift or fierce about the conflagration, it being rather a sullen, relentless smouldering of the moss and grass-roots, dry from the long drought.

Zealously as the two labored, the fire gained upon them, and as they worked, they could not but cast despairing glances at the long stretch of garden which lay still unprotected.

Meanwhile Columbine from her window had seen the laborers, and, in a moment realizing the danger, she flew to the library.

“Father,” she cried, “the salt marshes have been burning all day, and the fire is almost up to the garden.”

“Good heavens, Columbine, how impetuous you are! You have quite driven out of my head what became of the second son of – ”

“But, father,” she interrupted, impatiently, “do you realize that if you sit here pothering about second sons the house may be burned over our heads?”

“Burned!” exclaimed the genealogist, in dismay; “and all my papers scattered about! Oh, help me, Columbine, to pack up my notes; but don’t take up anything without asking me where it goes. Do you think that iron-bound trunk will hold them all?”

Fearing to trust herself to reply, Columbine darted from the library, leaving her father to the half-frenzied collection of his papers, and betook herself to the salt meadows, where, grimed with smoke, Tom and the old serving woman were sturdily laboring. The pungent smoke eddied about them, and already old Sarah’s gown showed marks of having been on fire in a dozen places. Columbine stood upon the descending path a moment and regarded them; then, with a step which bespoke determination, she went on and joined them.

“Go back!” shouted Tom, hoarsely, as she approached; “don’t you see how the sparks are flying about? You’ll be a-fire before you know it.”

And, indeed, the fire was becoming more active as it crept nearer to the edges of the meadows, where the grass was taller. The word of warning had hardly left Tom’s lips before she found her dress burning, and while, being of wool, it was easily extinguished, Tom found in it an excuse for taking her in his arms to smother the flame.

“Go back to the house,” he said, in a voice which was full of feeling, yet which it would have been impossible to disobey. “We shall save the place; but I cannot work while you are in danger.”

“And you?” she demanded, clasping her hands upon his arm.

“Nonsense! there is no danger for me,” he returned, smiling tenderly. “Don’t think of me.”

It was not until late in the night that the contest against the fire was concluded. Tom worked with an energy in which desperation had a large place, while old Sarah, with the pathetic fidelity of an animal, labored by his side, indefatigable and unmurmuring. Faint streaks of light had begun to show in the east when Tom flung down the spade, upon which he had been leaning, for a last close scrutiny.

“It is all right now,” he said; “there can’t possibly be any fire left on this side of the marshes. It was lucky for us that the tide rose into the lower part of the trench.”

Undemonstratively, as she had worked, old Sarah gathered herself together, grimy, stooping, quivering with weariness and hunger, and crept back to the house they had saved; while Tom, with tired step, climbed the path and took his way past the summer-house toward the other side of the mansion. As he passed the arbor something stirred within.

“Columbine!” he said, in surprise, recognizing by some instinct that it was she. “Why, Columbine, what are you here for? You will be chilled to death.”

“You sent me away,” returned the girl, with a trace of dogged protest in her voice. “You wouldn’t let me help.”

“I should hope not,” laughed Tom, nervously, taking off his hat and passing his hand through his hair, from which odors of smoke flowed as he stirred it. “You were hardly made to fight fire.”

“No,” she answered, with sudden and significant vehemence, “I was not made to fight fire.”

He moved uneasily where he stood in the darkness; then he took a stride forward and sat down beside her. They were silent a moment, his eyes fixed upon the first far sign of dawn, while hers searched the gloom for his features.

“Columbine,” he began, at length, in a voice of strange softness, “it would have been better for us both if I had never come here.”

“No, no,” was her eager reply; “I cannot have you say that. You have put savor into my life that was so vapid before.”

“But a bitter savor,” he said.

“Bitter, yes,” Columbine returned in a voice which, though low and restrained, betrayed the fierceness of her excitement. “Bitter as death; but sweet too, sweet as – ”

She left the sentence unfinished. Below on the shore the full tide was lapping the stones with monotonous melody. Save for their iterance, the stillness was almost as deep as the marvellous silence of a winter night which no sound of living thing breaks.

“Whatever comes,” Columbine murmured a moment later, her voice changed and softened so that he had to bend to catch her words, “I am glad of all that has happened; glad of you; glad, always glad.”

He caught her passionately in his arms and covered her downcast head with kisses, while she yielded unresistingly to his embrace, although she sobbed as if her heart would break. In the east the promise of the dawn shone steadily, increasing slowly but surely. It became at last so strong that Columbine, opening her swollen lids, was able to distinguish objects a little. At that moment she became conscious that the arms of her lover had loosened their hold upon her. She looked into his face with sudden alarm. Mr. Tom had fallen into a dead faint.

The afternoon sun was shining into Tom’s chamber windows when he awoke. Ten hours of heavy sleep had had a wonderfully revigorating effect upon him, and despite some stiffness he awoke with a sense of renewed power. His repose had, too, a far more remarkable effect than this. Before his eyes were open he said aloud, as if he were solemnly summoning some culprit before the bar of an awful tribunal: —

“Thomas Wainwright!”

The sound of his own words acted upon him like an electric shock. He started up in bed, wide awake, his eyes shining, his whole manner alert, joyous, and confident. He was nameless no longer. Treacherous memory had yielded up its tenaciously kept secret, and at last he emerged from the shadowy company of the nameless to be again a man among men.

He sprang from his couch and made his toilet with impatient eagerness. As he dressed he remembered everything in an instant. That baffling mystery of his family name seemed the key to all the secrets of his past, and, having yielded up this prime fact, his memory made no further resistance. His whole life lay before him, no longer laboriously traced out, bit by bit, but unrolled as a map, visible at a single coup d’œil.

Little that he recalled was of a nature to change the conclusions he had formed of his circumstances, except the single fact that his wife had not outlived her honeymoon. The shock of her father’s death, and, perhaps, some seeds of malaria contracted in India, had proved too much for her delicate constitution, and Tom, eagerly reviewing his newly recovered past, felt a pang of unselfish sorrow for the unloved bride who had for so short a time borne his name, that name which he now kept saying over to himself, as if he feared he might again forget it.