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At Last

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AT LAST.

A Novel.

BY

MARION HARLAND,

NEW YORK: 1870





CONTENTS.




CHAPTER I. DEWLESS ROSES

CHAPTER II. AN EXCHANGE OF CONFIDENCES

CHAPTER III. UNWHOLESOME VAPORS

CHAPTER IV. "FOUNDED UPON A ROCK"

CHAPTER V. CLEAN HANDS

CHAPTER VI. CRAFT--OR DIPLOMACY?

CHAPTER VII. WASSIL

CHAPTER VIII. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

CHAPTER IX. HE DEPARTETH IN DARKNESS

CHAPTER X. ROSA

CHAPTER XI. ON THE REBOUND

CHAPTER XII. AUNT RACHEL WAXES UNCHARITABLE

CHAPTER XIII. JULIUS LENNOX

CHAPTER XIV. "BORN DEAD"

CHAPTER XV. THE GOOD SAMARITAN

CHAPTER XVI. THE HONEST HOUR

CHAPTER XVII. AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS

CHAPTER XVIII. THUNDER IN THE AIR

CHAPTER XIX. NEMESIS

CHAPTER XX. INDIAN SUMMER






AT LAST.

CHAPTER I.

DEWLESS ROSES.





Mrs. Rachel Sutton was a born match maker, and she had cultivated
the gift by diligent practice. As the sight of a tendrilled vine
suggests the need and fitness of a trellis, and a stray glove
invariably brings to mind the thought of its absent fellow, so every
disengaged spinster of marriageable age was an appeal--pathetic and
sure--to the dear woman's helpful sympathy, and her whole soul went
out in compassion over such "nice" and an appropriated bachelors as
crossed her orbit, like blind and dizzy comets.

Her propensity, and her conscientious indulgence of the same, were
proverbial among her acquaintances, but no one--not even prudish and
fearsome maidens of altogether uncertain age, and prudent mammas,
equally alive to expediency and decorum--had ever labelled her
"Dangerous," while with young people she was a universal favorite.
Although, with an eye single to her hobby, she regarded a man as an
uninteresting molecule of animated nature, unless circumstances
warranted her in recognizing in him the possible lover of some
waiting fair one, and it was notorious that she reprobated as worse
than useless--positively demoralizing, in fact--such friendships
between young persons of opposite sexes as held out no earnest of
prospective betrothal, she was confidante-general to half the girls
in the county, and a standing advisory committee of one upon all
points relative to their associations with the beaux of the region.
The latter, on their side, paid their court to the worthy and
influential widow as punctiliously, if not so heartily, as did their
gentle friends. Not that the task was disagreeable. At fifty years
of age, Mrs. Button was plump and comely; her fair curls unfaded,
and still full and glossy; her blue eyes capable of languishing into
moist appreciation of a woful heart-history, or sparkling
rapturously at the news of a triumphant wooing; her little fat hands
were swift and graceful, and her complexion so infantine in its
clear white and pink as to lead many to believe and some--I need
not say of which gender--to practise clandestinely upon the story
that she had bathed her face in warm milk, night and morning, for
forty years. The more sagacious averred, however, that the secret of
her continued youth lay in her kindly, unwithered heart, in her
loving thoughtfulness for others' weal, and her avoidance, upon
philosophical and religions grounds, of whatever approximated the
discontented retrospection winch goes with the multitude by the name
of self-examination.

Our bonnie widow had her foibles and vanities, but the first were
amiable, the latter superficial and harmless, usually rather
pleasant than objectionable. She was very proud, for instance, of
her success in the profession she had taken up, and which she
pursued con amore; very jealous for the reputation for connubial
felicity of those she had aided to couple in the leash matrimonial,
and more uncharitable toward malicious meddlers or thoughtless
triflers with the course of true love; more implacable to
match-breakers than to the most atrocious phases of schism, heresy,
and sedition in church or state, against which she had, from her
childhood, been taught to pray. The remotest allusion to a divorce
case threw her into a cold perspiration, and apologies for such
legal severance of the hallowed bond were commented upon as rank and
noxious blasphemy, to which no Christian or virtuous woman should
lend her ear for an instant. If she had ever entertained "opinions"
hinting at the allegorical nature of the Mosaic account of the Fall,
her theory would unquestionably have been that Satan's insidious
whisper to the First Mother prated of the beauties of feminine
individuality, and enlarged upon the feasibility of an elopement
from Adam and a separate maintenance upon the knowledge-giving,
forbidden fruit. Upon second marriages--supposing the otherwise
indissoluble tie to have been cut by Death--she was a trifle less
severe, but it was generally understood that she had grave doubts as
to their propriety--unless in exceptional cases.

"When there is a family of motherless children, and the father is
himself young, it seems hard to require him to live alone for the
rest of his life," she would allow candidly. "Not that I pretend to
say that a connection formed through prudential motives is a real
marriage in the sight of Heaven. Only that there is no human law
against it. And the odds are as eight to ten that an efficient hired
housekeeper would render his home more comfortable, and his children
happier than would a stepmother. As for a woman marrying twice"--her
gentle tone and eyes growing sternly decisive--"it is difficult for
one to tolerate the idea. That is, if she really loved her first
husband. If not, she may plead this as some excuse for making the
venture--poor thing! But whether, even then, she has the moral
right to lessen some good girl's chances of getting a husband by
taking two for herself, has ever been and must remain a mooted
question in my mind."

Her conduct in this respect was thoroughly consistent with her
avowed principles. She was but thirty when her husdand died, after
living happily with her for ten years. Her only child had preceded
him to the grave four years before, and the attractive relict of
Frederic Sutton, comfortably jointured and without incumbrance of
near relatives, would have become a toast with gay bachelors and
enterprising widowers, but for the quiet propriety of her demeanor,
and the steadiness with which she insisted--for the most part,
tacitly--upon her right to be considered a married woman still.

"Once Frederic's wife--always his!" was the sole burden of her
answer to a proposal of marriage received when she was forty-five,
and the discomfited suitor filed it in his memory alongside of
Caesar's hackneyed war dispatch.

She had laid off crape and bombazine at the close of the first
lustrum of her widowhood as inconvenient and unwholesome wear, but
never assumed colored apparel. On the morning on which our story
opens, she took her seat at the breakfast-table in her nephew's
house--of which she was matron and supervisor-in-chief--clad in a
white cambric wrapper, belted with black; her collar fastened with a
mourning-pin of Frederic's hair, and a lace cap, trimmed with black
ribbon, set above her luxuriant tresses. She looked fresh and bright
as the early September day, with her sunny face and in her
daintily-neat attire, as she arranged cups and saucers for seven
people upon the waiter before her, instructing the butler, at the
same time, to ring the bell again for those she was to serve. She
was very busy and happy at that date. The neighborhood was gay,
after the open-hearted, open-handed style of hospitality that
distinguished the brave old days of Virginia plantation-life. A
merry troup of maidens and cavaliers visited by invitation one
homestead after another, crowding bedrooms beyond the capacity of
any chambers of equal size to be found in the land, excepting in a
country house in the Old Dominion; surrounding bountiful tables with
smiling visages and restless tongues; dancing, walking, driving, and
singing away the long, warm days, that seemed all too short to the
soberest and plainest of the company; which sped by like dream-hours
to most of the number.

Winston Aylett, owner and tenant of the ancient mansion of
Ridgeley--the great house of a neighborhood where small houses and
men of narrow means were infrequent--had gone North about the first
of June, upon a tour of indefinite length, but which was certainly
to include Newport, the lakes, and Niagara, and was still absent.
His aunt, Mrs. Sutton, and his only sister, Mabel, did the honors of
his home in his stead, and, if the truth must be admittbd, more
acceptably to their guests than he had ever succeeded in doing. For
a week past, the house had been tolerably well filled--ditto Mrs.
Sutton's hands; ditto her great, heart. Had she not three love
affairs, in different but encouraging stages of progression, under
her roof and her patronage! And were not all three, to her
apprehension, matches worthy of Heaven's making, and her
co-operation? A devout Episcopalian, she was yet an unquestioning
believer in predestination and "special Providences"--and what but
Providence had brought together the dear creatures now basking in
the benignant beam of her smile, sailing smoothly toward the haven
of Wedlock before the prospering breezes of Circumstance (of her
manufacture)?

While putting sugar and cream into the cups intended for the happy
pairs, she reviewed the situation rapidly in her mind, and sketched
the day's manoeuvres.

First, there was the case of Tom Barksdale and Imogene Tabb--highly
satisfactory and creditable to all the parties concerned in it, but
not romantic. Tom, a sturdy young planter, who had studied law while
at the University, but never practised it, being already provided
for by his opulent father, had visited his relatives, the Tabbs, in
August, and straightway fallen in love with the one single daughter
of his second cousin--a pretty, amiable girl, who would inherit a
neat fortune at her parent's death, and whose pedigree became
identical with that of the Barksdales a couple of generations back,
and was therefore unimpeachable. The friends on both sides were
enchanted; the lovers fully persuaded that they were made for one
another, an opinion cordially endorsed by Mrs. Sutton, and they
could confer with no higher authority.

Next came Alfred Branch and Rosa Tazewell--incipient, but promising
at this juncture, inasmuch as Rosa had lately smiled more
encouragingly upon her timid wooer than she had deigned to do before
they were domesticated at Ridgeley. Mrs. Sutton did not approve of
unmaidenly forwardness. The woman who would unsought be won, would
have fared ill in her esteem. Her lectures upon the beauties and
advantages of a modest, yet alluring reserve, were cut up into
familiar and much-prized quotations among her disciples, and were
acted upon the more willingly for the prestige that surrounded her
exploits as high priestess of Hymen. But Rosa had been too coy to
Alfred's evident devotion--almost repellent at seasons. Had these
rebuffs not alternated with attacks of remorse, during which the
exceeding gentleness of her demeanor gradually pried the crushed
hopes of her adorer out of the slough, and cleansed their drooping
plumes of mud, the courtship would have fallen through, ere Mrs.
Sutton could bring her skill to bear upon it. Guided, and yet
soothed by her velvet rein, Rosa really seemed to become more
steady. She was assuredly more thoughtful, and there was no better
sign of Cupid's advance upon the outworks of a girl's heart than
reverie. If her fits of musing were a shade too pensive, the
experienced eye of the observer descried no cause for discouragement
in this feature. Rosa was a spoiled, wayward child, freakish and
mischievous, to whom liberty was too dear to be resigned without a
sigh. By and by, she would wear her shackles as ornaments, like all
other sensible and loving women.

Thus preaching to Alfred, when he confided to her the fluctuations
of rapture and despair that were his lot in his intercourse with the
sometimes radiant and inviting, sometimes forbidding sprite, whose
wings he would fain bind with his embrace, and thus reassuring
herself, when perplexed by a flash of Rosa's native perverseness,
Mrs. Sutton was sanguine that all would come right in the end. What
was to be would be, and despite the rapids in their wooing, Alfred
would find in Rosa a faithful, affectionate little wife, while she
could never hope to secure a better, more indulgent, and, in most
respects, more eligible, partner than the Ayletts' well-to-do,
well-looking neighbor.

But the couple who occupied the central foreground of our
match-maker's thoughts were her niece, Mabel Aylott, and her own
departed husband's namesake, Frederic Chilton. She dilated to
herself and to Mabel with especial gusto upon the "wonderful
leading," the inward whisper that had prompted her to propose a trip
to the Rockbridge Alum Springs early in July. Neither she nor Mabel
was ailing in the slightest degree, but she imagined they would be
the brighter for a glimpse of the mountains and the livelier scenes
of that pleasant Spa--and whom should they meet there but the son of
"dear Frederic's" old friend, Mr. Chilton, and of course they saw a
great deal of him--and the rest followed as Providence meant it
should.

"The rest" expressed laconically the essence of numberless walks by
moonlight and starlight; innumerable dances in the great ball-room,
and the sweeter, more interesting confabulations that made the young
people better acquainted in four weeks than would six years of
conventional calls and small-talk. They stayed the month out,
although "Aunt Rachel" had, upon their arrival, named a fortnight as
the extreme limit of their sojourn. Frederic Chilton was their
escort to Eastern Virginia, and remained a week at Ridgeley--perhaps
to recover from the fatigue of the journey. So soon as he returned
to Philadelphia, in which place he had lately opened a law-office,
he wrote to Mabel, declaring his affection for her, and suing for
reciprocation. She granted him a gracious reply, and sanctioned by
fond, sympathetic Aunt Rachel, in the absence of Mabel's brother and
guardian, the correspondence was kept up briskly until Frederic's
second visit in September. Ungenerous gossips, envious of her
talents and influence, had occasionally sneered at Mrs. Sutton's
appropriation of the credit of other alliances--but this one was her
handiwork beyond dispute--hers and Providence's. She never forgot
the partnership. She had carried her head more erect, and there was
a brighter sparkle in her blue orbs since the evening Mabel had come
blushingly to her room, Fred's proposal in her hand--to ask counsel
and congratulations. Everybody saw through the discreet veil with
which she flattered herself she concealed her exultation when others
than the affianced twain were by--and while nobody was so unkind as
to expose the thinness of the pretence, she was given to understand
in many and gratifying ways that her masterpiece was considered, in
the Aylett circle, a suitable crown to the achievements that had
preceded it. Mabel was popular and beloved, and her betrothed, in
appearance and manner, in breeding and intelligence, justified Mrs.
Sutton's pride in her niece's choice.

The old lady colored up, with the quick, vivid rose-tint of sudden
and real pleasure that rarely outlives early girlhood, when the
first respondent to the breakfast-bell proved to be her Frederic's
god-son.

"You are always punctual! I wish you would teach the good habit to
some other people," she said, after answering his cordial
"good-morning."

"None of us deserve to be praised on that score, to-day," rejoined
he, looking at his watch. "I did not awake until the dressing-bell
rang. Our riding-party was out late last night. The extreme beauty
of the evening beguiled us into going further than we intended, when
we set out."

"Yes! you young folks are falling into shockingly irregular
habits--take unprecedented liberties with me and with Time!" shaking
her head. "If Winston do not return soon, you will set my mild rule
entirely at defiance."

Chilton laughed--but was serious the next instant.

"I expected confidently to meet him at this visit," he said,
glancing at the door to guard against being overheard. "Should he
not return to-day, ought I not, before leaving this to-morrow, to
write to him, since he is legally his sister's guardian? It is, you
and she tell me, a mere form, but one that should not be dispensed
with any longer."

"That may be so. Winston is rigorous in requiring what is due to his
position--is, in some respects, a fearful formalist. But he will
hardly oppose your wishes and Mabel's. He has her real happiness at
heart, I believe, although he is, at times, an over-strict and
exacting guardian--perhaps to counterbalance my indulgent policy. He
is unlike any other young man I know."

"His sister is very much attached to him."

"She loves him--I was about to say, preposterously. Her implicit
belief in and obedience to him have increased his self-confidence
into a dogmatic assertion of infallibility. But"--fearing she might
create an unfortunate impression upon the listener's mind--"Winston
has grounds for his good opinion of himself. His character is
unblemished--his principles and aims are excellent. Only"--relapsing
hopelessly into the confidential strain in which most of the
conference had been carried--"between ourselves, my dear Frederic, I
am never quite easy with these patterns to the rest of human-kind. I
should even prefer a tiny vein of depravity to such very rectangular
virtue."

"You are seldom ill at ease, if human perfection is all that renders
you uncomfortable," responded Frederic. "There are not many in whose
composition one cannot trace, not a tiny, but a broad vein of Adamic
nature. What a delicious morning!" he added, sauntering to the
window.

"And how sorry I am for those who did not get up in time to enjoy
the freshness of its beauty!" cried a gay voice from the portico,
and Mabel entered by the glass door behind him--her hands loaded
with roses, herself so beaming that her lover refrained with
difficulty from kissing the saucy mouth then and there.

He did take both her hands, under pretext of relieving her of the
flowers, and Aunt Rachel judiciously turned her back upon them, and
began a diligent search in the beaufet for a vase.

"Do you expect us to believe that you have been more industrious
than we? As if we did not know that you bribed the gardener to have
a bouquet cut and laid ready for you at the back-door," Frederic
charged upon the matutinal Flora. "Else, where are other evidences
of your stroll, in dew-sprinkled draperies and wet feet? Confess
that you ran down stairs just two minutes ago! Now that I come to
think of it, I am positive that I heard you, while Mrs. Sutton was
lamenting your drowsy proclivities after sunrise."

"I have been sitting in the summer-house for an hour--reading!"
protested Mabel, wondrously resigned to the detention, after a
single, and not violent attempt at release. "If you had opened your
shutters you must have seen me. But I knew I was secure from
observation on that side of the house, at least until eight o'clock,
about which time the glories of the new day usually penetrate very
tightly-closed lids. As to dew--there isn't a drop upon grass or
blossom. And, by the same token, we shall have a storm within
twenty-four hours."

"Is that true? That is a meteorological presage I never heard of
until now."

"There is a moral in it, which I leave you to study out for
yourself, while I arrange the roses I--and not the
gardener--gathered."

In a whisper, she subjoined--"Let me go! Some one is coming!" and in
a second more was at the sideboard, hurrying the flowers into the
antique china bowl, destined to grace the centre of the breakfast
table.

"Good-morning, Miss Rosa. You are just in season to enjoy the
society of your sister," Frederic said, lightly, pointing to the
billows of mingled white and red, tossing under Mabel's fingers.

The new-comer approached the sideboard, leaned languidly upon her
elbow, and picked up a half-blown bud at random from the pile.

"They are scentless!" she complained.

"Because dewless!" replied Mabel, with profound gravity. "It is the
tearful heart that gives out the sweetest fragrance."

"I have more faith in sunshine," interrupted Rosa, a tinge of
contempt in her smile and accent. "Or--to drop metaphors, at which
I always bungle--it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to
be good. All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms,
throwing their fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven
sandal-tree, and the blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous
balderdash, according to my doctrine. A buried thing is but one
degree better than a dead one. What it is the fashion of poets and
sentimentalists to call perfume, is the odor of incipient decay."

"You are illustrating your position by means of my poor oriental
pearl," remonstrated Mabel, playfully, wresting the hand that was
beating the life and whiteness out of the floweret upon the marble
top of the beaufet. "Take this hardy geant de batailles, instead. My
bouquet must have a cluster of pearls for a heart."

"What a fierce crimson!" Frederic remarked upon the widely-opened
rose Miss Tazewell received in place of the delicate bud. "That must
be the 'hue angry, yet brave,' which, Mr. George Herbert asserts,
'bids the rash gazer wipe his eye.'"

"More poetical nonsense!" said Rosa, deliberately tearing the bold
"geant" to pieces down to the bare stem, "unless he meant to be
comic, and intimate that the gazer was so rash as to come too near
the bush, and ran a thorn into the pupil."

No one answered, except by the indulgent smile that usually greeted
her sallies, howeve? absurd, among those accustomed to the spoiled
child's vagaries.

Mabel was making some leisurely additions to her bouquet in the
shape of ribbon grass and pendent ivy sprays, coaxing these with
persuasive touches to trail over the edge and entwine the pedestal
of the salver on which her bowl was elevated; her head set slightly
on one side, her lips apart in a smile of enjoyment in her work and
in herself. It was a picture the lover studied fondly--one that hung
forever thereafter in his gallery of mental portraits. Beyond a pair
of fine gray eyes, the pliant grace of her figure and the buoyant
carriage of youth, health, and a glad heart, Mabel's pretensions to
beauty were comparatively few, said the world. Frederic Chilton had,
nevertheless, fallen in love with her at sight, and considered her,
now, the handsomest woman of his acquaintance. Her dress was a
simple lawn--a sheer white fabric, with bunches of purple grass
bound up with yellow wheat, scattered over it; her hair was lustrous
and abundant, and her face, besides being happy, was frank and
intelligent, with wonderful mobility of expression. In temperament
and sentiment; in capacity for, and in demonstration of affection,
she suited Frederic to the finest fibre of his mind and heart. He,
for one, did not carp at Aunt Rachel's declaration that they were
intended to spend time and eternity together.

Still, Mabel Aylett was not a belle, and Rosa Tazewell was. Callow
collegians and enterprising young merchants from the city;
sunbrowned owners of spreading acres and hosts of laborers; students
and practitioners of law and medicine, and an occasional theologue,
had broken their hearts for perhaps a month at a time, for love of
her, since she was a school-girl in short dresses. Yet there had
been a date very far back in the acquaintanceship of each of these
with the charmer, when he had marvelled at the infatuation which had
blinded her previous adorers. She was "a neat little thing," with
her round waist, her tiny hands and feet and roguish eye--but there
was nothing else remarkable about her features, and in coloring, the
picture was too dark for his taste. Why, she might be mistaken for a
creole! And each critic held fast to his expressed opinion until the
roguish eyes met his directly and with meaning, and he found himself
diving into the bright, shimmering wells, and drowning--still
ecstatically--before he reached the bottom whence streamed the light
of passionate feeling, striking upward through the surface. What her
glances did not effect was done by her dazzling smile and musical
voice.

As one of her victims swore, "It was a dearer delight to be rejected
by her than to be accepted by a dozen other girls--she did the thing
up so handsomely! And yet, do you know, sir, I could have shot
myself for a barbarous brute when I saw the pitying tears standing
upon her lashes, and heard the tremor in her sweet tones, as she
begged me to forgive her for not loving me!"

Those she had once captivated never quite rid themselves of the
glamour of her arts; remained her trusty squires, ready to serve, or
to defend her always afterward.

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