Three millions! or, The way of the world
“Barbarous? We haven’t got the facts yet, but if this girl has run away
with a dissolute person, you are a lucky fellow to escape from further
contact with her.”
“You don’t know her, Dick.”
“I don’t want to know her if she is what she appears to be.”
“I will not believe _she_ meditates anything wrong, Dick. Mary Kingman
was an angel!”
“All girls are, under certain circumstances.”
“No, no, Dick; you will not understand me.”
“Hungerford, I know you feel bad, and I am sorry for you; but I must
speak my mind, if I speak at all, whether you like it or not. It
appears now that the girl has run away with a man whose character is
not above par.”
“Don’t, Dick!”
“Don’t what? I only state the fact.”
“You state it as offensively as possible.”
“I state it just as it is. Now, to take the mildest view of it: Miss
Kingman did not love you, or she would not have run away with another
man. Is that good logic?”
“I always thought she loved me.”
“You were mistaken.”
“I can’t think I was.”
“Confound it, Hungerford, what do you mean?” said Dick, impatiently.
“Don’t you see the thing has proved itself? If you thought chalk was
cheese, wouldn’t the taste convince you? The girl has gone off with
another man, either to be his wife, or----.”
“No, Dick!” shouted Eugene, springing to his feet. “Don’t say that, or
you will make me your enemy.”
“Hungerford, I don’t buy my friends, any more than you buy your wife. I
deem it my duty, as your friend, to open your eyes. I don’t wonder that
you feel bad, if you loved the girl.”
“If I loved her!” gasped Eugene.
“Well, I had my doubts whether or not you did. I must say you were the
coolest, most unimpassioned lover I ever saw in my life.”
“Do you think so?”
“I do. Why, man, you hardly looked at her! You were alone with her for
half an hour, the other day, and I’ll bet you talked politics with her,
or discussed the height of the mountains in the moon.”
“You are amusing yourself at my expense, Dick.”
“I was never more serious in my life, Hungerford. In my opinion you
have done the very thing I was afraid you would do, and warned you not
to do.”
Dick prided himself on being a prophet.
“What was that?”
“I was afraid you would permit your fear of buying the lady to make you
seem cold, indifferent, reserved, and distant. When you came out of the
house the day we went there, I studied her expression very carefully.
You had been alone with her for half an hour; I expected to find a
little glow upon her face, to find some indication of pleasure in her
eye, which would assuredly have been visible, if you had given her
reason even to suspect that you loved her. Hungerford, she looked sad,
disappointed, hopeless.”
“Do you mean to say that you could tell by her looks what her feelings
were?”
“No; but a lady of her age, and of her sensitive nature, could not
conceal the exultation of her first love, any more than she could
conceal any other joy that warmed her heart. I was looking for such a
manifestation. I could not find it. On the contrary, she looked sad and
depressed.”
“Poor girl! she had enough, as you saw, that day, to make her sad and
depressed. It was just before her drunken father made his appearance.”
“It was not that. You did not take her by the hand, when we left; you
did not smile upon her. Your adieu to her was not different from that
to her mother. I watched her as you walked away. Her eye followed you,
and it seemed to me I could hear her reason speaking to her heart, and
saying that you did not love her, and that her heart must cease to
beat for you. I think now that she gave you up then. Very likely she
thought that, as you were now a _millionnaire_, she had no right to
cherish the affection she had fostered when you were both poor.”
“Perhaps she did,” said Eugene, musing; “but I did love her, and I
intended to assure her that I regarded her with deep interest.”
“Pray, what did you say to her?” demanded Dick, bluntly.
Eugene recalled the embarrassment under which he had labored on that
occasion; the difficulty he had experienced in attempting to say enough
without saying too much; and the fear which had haunted him lest he
should make her the wife of the three millions instead of himself.
He had firmly resolved not to permit himself to be influenced by the
contingent fortune, and this resolution had warped his judgment over
to the opposite extreme. He began to realize it now, under the sharp
tuition of his common-sense friend.
“I told her that we should always be friends,” he replied, in answer to
Dick’s blunt question.
“Did you, indeed?” And something like a sneer accompanied the words.
“I meant so.”
“It is quite possible you did. Are you sure you didn’t tell her you
could never be anything more than friends?”
“Of course, I did not. I didn’t mean that.”
“Miss Kingman would have been smarter than any lady I know of, if she
hadn’t believed that was what you meant. Did you tell her you were
going abroad?”
“I did.”
“Did you promise to write to her, or ask her to write you?”
“Not in so many words?”
“What did you say about it?”
“Well, I told her--I told her I should think of all my friends at home.”
“Excellent!”
“Of course I meant her.”
“And she, being gifted with the power to read your soul, even while
you were studiously attempting to hide it from her, readily understood
that all your friends at home meant herself! No, Hungerford, there was
no hole in that millstone. You cheated yourself, which is of no great
consequence; you cheated her, which, as the result shows, is a matter
of very great consequence both to you and to her.”
“Let us go to the island, and find out the facts,” said Eugene,
uneasily; for, as thousands of others have done when it was too late,
he regretted his excessive distrust, his overstrained prudence.
They went to the island; they saw Mrs. Kingman: her husband was still
sleeping off the effects of his midnight debauch. She told Eugene
that Mary had gone--where she knew not. The “strange story” that was
circulating at the Port had not yet reached the island. With tearful
eyes she narrated to him the events which had transpired in the house
when Captain Kingman came home in the middle of the night; that Mary
had been driven from her home by the fear of her father’s violence;
that even her life was in peril if she remained longer in the house.
Eugene was filled with anguish by the story of wrong and violence; and
it was some time before he could muster the courage to repeat to her
the rumor which was passing through the village. Mrs. Kingman listened
patiently to his slow and struggling utterance of the truth so terrible
to him.
“I shouldn’t wonder, a mite,” said the woman.
“Then you think it is true that she has gone off with this man?” asked
Eugene.
“I shouldn’t be the least surprised. Mr. Buckstone was down here e’en
a’most all the time arter that day you were all here.”
“Was he?”
“That’s what made her father so desp’ate mad with her. He found ’em
down on the beach two or three times; and arter that it seemed to me
the man was possessed with the sperit of the evil one, and he pestered
the poor gal all the time.”
“What did you think of Mr. Buckstone yourself?” said Eugene, pierced to
the soul by every word the woman spoke.
“Well, he was a perlite body. He always looked like a nice sort o’ man
to me; but there’s no tellin what a body is by the looks. Cap’n Kingman
stuck to’t the man was a raskil; he told me that he had hearn some one
said so that knew him in New York.”
“Poor Mary!” sighed Eugene.
He had already passed from the selfish view of his own loss to an
unselfish consideration of the poor girl’s fate. The story was all
told. What he had been too blind to see, others had known for a
week--that Mary had encouraged the attentions of the artist. With a
heart sadder than he had ever known before, he walked down to the boat,
where his friend had remained while he went up to the house to make the
inquiries. He repeated to Dick all that he had learned.
“Poor girl! I pity her, if the fellow is the villain he is represented
to me,” said Dick, who, though sometimes sharp in his words and quick
in his conclusions, had a heart as warm and tender as that of a woman.
Eugene buried his face with his hands, and groaned in bitterness of
spirit. To his own grief at the loss of her who seemed to be more
to him now than ever before, was added the revolting fact that Mary
Kingman had unwittingly thrown herself into the arms of a reckless
villain. To have known that she had become the bride of an honest man,
would have been tolerable; to feel that she had thrown herself away
upon an unprincipled wretch, was insupportable.
“What shall I do, Dick?” he exclaimed, unable longer to conceal the
tears that flowed down his haggard face.
“You can do nothing but bear it. I pity you, Hungerford, as I pity her.”
“Can’t we follow her, and bring her back?”
“She would not come, if what you say be true. She loves this Buckstone.”
“Can you believe it?”
“We have no right to think she does not. When we saw them last on
the beach, I could not help thinking that she was favorably inclined
towards him. He is a splendid looking fellow. He is an artist, and
probably as romantic as a knight errant.”
“But Mary was not romantic,” protested Eugene.
“Perhaps not. Poor girl! I have ceased to blame her for what she has
done.”
“Wasn’t it wrong for her to go off so suddenly with this man!”
“Undoubtedly he has promised to make her his wife at once. Here she
was, driven from her home in the dead of the night, with the fear of
death by the hand of her father if she returned; and, with too much
pride to burden her friends, whither could she turn?”
“Where, indeed!” groaned the disconsolate lover.
“Then this Buckstone, who has been pouring the tale of his love into
her ears all the time for a week, steps into her presence. He knows
something about her family relations, and she tells him what has
happened. What more natural than that she should listen to him? What
more natural than his offer to be her best and truest friend? Doubtless
he proposed to make her his wife without delay, and she, poor girl,
not having a resting-place or a near friend on earth, after weakly
resisting the appeal for a time, yields the point.”
“Will he make her his wife?” whispered Eugene.
“Let us hope that he will. They may be man and wife before this time.”
“But they say he’s a villain.”
“They say so; but he may be an honest man, after all, though I confess
that I have my doubts.”
“He may deceive her.”
“He may.”
“Dick, I cannot endure this agony!” cried Eugene, springing to his
feet, as he had often done in his excitement. “I must do something to
save her; at least I must try to do something.”
“Nothing can be done.”
“Dick, I feel guilty. If I had spoken what was in my heart, this could
not have been.”
“We don’t know.”
“I know! If I had told her how I loved her; if I had whispered only a
tithe of what I felt then, and feel now, this could not have been.”
“It might.”
“No, Dick.”
“Don’t distress yourself. You meant right.”
“If Mary comes to harm, it will be my fault. If she is lost, I have
destroyed her,” cried Eugene, in his agony.
“Nothing of the kind, Hungerford.”
“If I had told her what I felt, she would not have countenanced this
Buckstone. When we found them in the boat, I saw that his presence was
distasteful, if not disagreeable, to her. I think she had begun to love
me. As you said before, Dick, my coldness robbed her of all hope, and
she has thrown herself away upon this wretch.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Hungerford. You did what you believed was right.”
“I am guilty, Dick! I must at least try to save her.”
“It is too late.”