The Breton Mills — Chapter XXI, XXII, XXIII

The Breton Mills

By Charles J. Bellamy

Copyrighted by the Author, and published by arrangement with him.

CHAPTER XXI.
OUT, DAMNED SPOT.

Philip dipped his pen in the inkstand. He was sitting in his study at home, later in the afternoon than usual. Nothing unimportant could have detained him so long from his factory, and, besides, there was a look of unusual solemnity on his face. Philip Breton had just written his will. It was a very elaborate instrument, prepared from memoranda of the ablest lawyer in the state. A moment ago he had signed it, and the names of the witnesses were not dry yet. He had been uneasy for a long time that the destiny of the thousand creatures who worked in his mill, and of their successors forever, should hang on so feeble a thread as a human life, which might snap before he could give spontaneous energy to the plans that now only lived in his brain. He wrote in large, plain letter across the back of the paper, "The Last Will and Testament of Philip Breton." Then he read the whole instrument over again - the magna carta of Bretonville. How glad the village would be when his will came to be known - when it was found that the mill owner had not been satisfied with what he could do in his lifetime, but had placed his benevolence on a perpetual footing, had reached back his hand from his grave to shower blessings on the laboring poor God had committed to his charge. Some men had wives and children to work for, to defend, to hope for. If he had been happy, and blessed with love and kisses, he might have been like the rest, never listening to the groans of his poor under burdens too heavy for them to bear. His heart should, perhaps, have been full of the little wants and trivial discomforts of his own circle, his mind busy with plans for the future of his sons, while a thousand dreary hopeless lives wore themselves out in the struggle for their scant bread, with never one pitiful thought from him.

Philip Breton was relieved now that he had made his will. He folded it carefully and put it in his inner breast pocket. Perhaps, he thought sadly enough, if he should die this moment it would be better for Bretonville, for his will might waver while he lived. He might not be able to sustain his high tone, but once dead, nothing could be changed. The words that an idle stroke of his pen could make null and void when once his hand became rigid in death, would leap forth from the written page into potent everlasting life. Suddenly he remembered another occasion when, as he had sat at this very table, he had been interrupted by the servant bringing him a letter - no, it was a note from Bertha. And he had been very happy, fancying the shadow had gone from his life. He just had opened this very table drawer when the maid had tapped at the door. He had been searching for something at the time. Oh! it was one of Bertha's pictures, and it must be here still. In a moment more be was unclasping a morocco case, then gazing with such tenderness as one has for the dead on the delicately tinted oval of Bertha's beautiful face in porcelain. The great blue eyes seemed to look surprise and reproach at him. It had been long ago, before so much as a dream of sin had tainted the holy innocence of her girlhood.

Philip closed his lips very tightly; he longed unutterably for her lost innocence; he hungered so desperately for the maidenly purity that looked out of these startled eyes. If she had died then, he might at least have cherished her memory. What had he done that he should be punished so terribly? Then the memories of the day when the picture was taken came rushing back upon him.

They two had been sitting in her garden on the afternoon of a summer day. It was two, three, almost four years ago, but he could see the blooming roses and hear the drowsy hum of the bees as if it had been yesterday. He had been reading a love poem to her; that was as near as he dared come to love making; sometimes letting his voice soften and tremble a little over the tenderer passages. He was but a timid lover, and Bertha so royally cold. Suddenly glancing at her, he saw she was overcome with the heat, and had fallen asleep leaning her shapely head back against the rough bark of the tree. Her fingers loosely clasped in her sloping lap suggested perfect repose; the girlish bosom rose and fell with her still breathing, and there was an exquisite pout on her lips, as if vaguely mutinous against the hardness of her pillow. His heart was beating violently as he laid aside his book and seated himself on the bench by her side. But he dared not profane the vestal purity of such sleep as hers; he devoured her face with his eyes, but did not steal one kiss from the red lips, though there was such a sweet, mute invitation on them. But he put his arm about her and drew her toward him as gently as if she were a sleeping infant, and made her head rest on his shoulder. Then he looked down the red tinged cheeks, like the woods in autumn's tenderest mood, swept by her long, golden eyelashes, and tried to fancy she was awake, though her eyes were closed, and that she was willing her head should rest on his breast and her hair like the threads of twisted Roman gold kiss his burning face.

But she moved in her slumber, and then her star like eyes opened and looked mute astonishment into his eager face. For one startled moment she did not move, and in sudden boldness from the liberty he had already taken he poured his passionate declarations into her ears, covering her hair and her forehead and then her cool white hands with kisses.

"You frighten me, Philip." Her quick, startled tones as she rose to her feet yet rang in his ears. She looked at him as half of a mind to run away. "I don't understand you," she said, reproachfully. The porcelain picture is just as she was then.

"Why, Bertha!" He had risen, too; but she drew back from him. "I love you. I want you for my wife."

How coldly she had looked at his flushed, excited face. He thought it was the supreme moment in his life; but it seemed to be nothing to her.

"Is that all? Why, I thought you were mad."

Ah, and the same madness burned in his soul this moment. Time could not wear it out. Shame, outrage, desolation could not kill it. He rose to his feet and pushed the tinted porcelain away from him.

Mrs. Silas Ellingsworth was all smiles and grace as Philip entered her parlor, and she shook hands with him, lingered as cordially over the greeting as if she had quite forgotten her pretty fingers had ever been on his throat. She made him take a seat and began to make conversation with him, as if she supposed he had called to see her. But suddenly she affected to be struck with an idea.

"Oh, I know why you are not more talkative, you didn't come to see me at all." She stepped to the door. "Susan, call Miss Ellingsworth."

"Miss!" Then there was no longer any room for doubt. Philip shrank at the blow she gave him. He had thought all uncertainty was gone long ago, but he found that up to this very instant he had cherished a spark of hope that Bertha had a right to the name of the man she fled with. And she was "Miss" still. His hostess way saying something, but he did not hear it, there was such a deathly faintness about his heart.

Then there came a step in the hall, and his familiar thrill of tenderness at her coming. She lingered an instant on the threshold, an old habit of hers that gave him time to step forward and meet her.

Mrs. Ellingsworth had risen, too, and was waiting to speak. It was only tenderness in Philip Breton's eyes as he took both Bertha's hands so gently, but she said:

"Am I very much changed, then?" and a pained look flitted across her face. Philip did not answer her for a moment, he was so distressed at her interpretation of the love that made his sight misty as he gazed at her.

"Well. I suppose I am in the way," remarked the mistress of the house, with inbred vulgarity. She was smiling sweetly, but women's smiles do not always signify amiability. "I suppose," she added, letting her skirts touch her two guests as she passed out, "you want to talk over old times with Miss Ellingsworth."

Now came the last terrible assurance; Philip winced at the heartless blow, but not so much as a flush passed over Bertha's cold face. She accepted the name without even a shade of silent denial on her calm features, though it was the badge of shame for her.

"Oh, no," but he dared not look her in the face for fear she should see his anxious pity for her. "You have been ill, perhaps, but I always thought you the loveliest woman in the world."

She smiled as she let him lead her to a seat. "You always said that." Then she glanced sadly into the mirror. "But it is more pleasant to hear now, for I know I am not pretty any longer."

Could she understand that the change that had come over her radiant beauty only changed his love to make it deeper? Could she not see the new intensity of yearning in his eyes as he raised them to her face again? He longed to draw her into his arms and kiss her tired face into eternal smiles. His love had been refined into a new divineness; a love capable of all sacrifices for her; that asked no price, but would pour itself in an eternal flood against her dull indifference, if it must be; a love more pain than joy, of unutterable yearnings for what he believed she could never have for him; that would seem to grow on her unresponsiveness; that welled up the mightier for her coldness, content if hereafter it might throw a little brightness on the path her snowy feet should tread; content if she would but let him warm her cold heart with his tenderness.

"Are you glad to be at home?" he asked, gently.

"Do you call this home, with my servant its mistress?" For a moment it was Bertha, as she used to be, her anger curling her red lips and flashing new fire into her tired eyes.

"Does she insult you?"

"It is insult enough that she is my father's wife. She can not go beyond that."

"Shall you stay here alway?" asked Philip stupidly enough.

"I suppose so; where else is there?"

A wild impulse touched him; he loved her and she needed love, had he not waited long enough? But a sudden fear came into his mind and chilled his hope like a frozen fountain. She might have a child - how strange he had never thought of it before. Ah, it would be a strong love which could endure that, a baby to hang on her bosom and take her kisses, a baby with Curran's face. No, he could never bear that, anything better than that. Her sin he could forgive. Though it must linger forever in his memory, he would bury it beneath more blessed experiences. His love should hallow her, he would kiss away Curran's caresses from her lips. But if there were a child -

Philip started violently and looked at the door; he fancied he heard a sound like the pattering of infant feet. In a moment Bertha would catch to her arms her child and Curran's, and half smother it with a mother's kisses.

"Isn't that a child's voice?" he cried, rising to his feet and his eyes rested on her in a new pitiful reproach. He thought she started strangely, as if a mother's instincts stirred in her bosom.

"Oh, no; it is only Jane - I mean Mrs. Ellingsworth. What an innocent little laugh she has."

A child, with sweet winning ways, is a strange thing to hate, a lovely little rosebud to blossom no one knows how faultlessly by and by. But Philip thought he would hate her child - Bertha's child, perhaps with his darling's star like eyes; ah, was it not Curran's, too, the symbol of her shame? As he walked home in the twilight he saw in each toddling baby in the doorways and windows, an image of his own materialized fear and horror. Philip looked back from the hill on which stood his home to the village his father had built up. Those massive mills with their thousands of looms were his; those long rows of white houses, each one of which held a family rich in possibilities of virtue and hope, they all were his, and the new element of brightness and thrift, that had made the whole village a nursery of comfort and happiness was his work. Behind him was the great stone mansion with its arched gothic windows green with clustering woodbine, it was his too. How powerless he thought all that wealth and material power can do to solve one of the terrible problems a heart makes for itself.

Moodily he walked to his stables, in a kind of vague longing for companionship, and threw open the doors. Four horses stood in their stalls within, noble looking creatures all of them. They turned their stately heads toward the sound of their master's feet; they returned his love with love. One of them whinnied welcome and laid back his ears as his master came into the stall beside him.

"Poor fellow, good boy;" Philip patted his white neck affectionately. "You would do what you could for me, wouldn't you, Joe? I know you would, old fellow." He laid his cheek against the animal's velvet nose. "But you couldn't go fast enough to get me out of this trouble, not if you died to do it.

 

CHAPTER XXII.
NO BARRIER.

Sensitiveness is a very unfortunate quality in life since no object is molded in accordance with the strict rules of art, since there is no character but has a repulsive spot in it, no history but with its dark page. The happy man is neither too enthusiastic over the virtues of his acquaintance, which may be accidental or merely a pretty optical delusion, or too stern and unrelenting toward sins, which he fancies might have been virtues under different conditions. But Philip Breton had fallen out with life. The great world seemed to jar him as it rolled. Each hour had revealed unguessed means of suffering, and even the beams of genial sunlight bad daggers for him.

Yet it is hard for a man to understand that his fate may be pure, unalloyed pain. He is ever smiling through his tears and trying to awake from his despair, as if it were but a dream of disordered fancy. So as the next morning came, and Philip Breton threw open his door to go out into the sweet scented September air, he felt happier than for many weeks; the peace that came over him seemed to leave no place for cruel distrust and unrelenting pride. He even reproached himself for his ungenerousness of yesterday. The world of nature left no unsightly wounds and breaks in its whole dominion. Gaping graves are soon covered with green grass and wild flowers; life springs quickly out of death, and apparent ruin is soon forgotten in renewed magnificence. Why should he, then, let two lives be wrecked for one wrong act in the past - forever past?

He swung down his walk in a new buoyancy. He believed he had passed through the cloud and come out into the clear light of reason.

But at his gate a carriage rolled slowly by him. It contained a bridal couple, and he stopped to smile at them. The girl's face had no culture in it, but was sweet, and had the innocence of childhood. That ungainly fellow, who now wore his first broadcloth suit, at whom she looked so fondly, was the only lover she had over known. She had no secrets from him, no past his jealous eyes might not scan without a pang. Her soul was open to him. No whisper to her shame could ever reach his insulted ears. Her life was commonplace, but no blot was on it, no guilty thought had ever left its trail across her heart. The rough lad, who was bold enough to put his arm about her waist in broad daylight could pour his foolish love making into her eager ears without stint. There was no theme he must avoid with her, no page in her life he must not cut.

He loved the soiled lily, loved it more than all the fresh roses. All other women might as well never have been born for him; this woman he would have died for. Could he not protect her from evil tongues? If she were trampled, could he not lift her into his bosom? If she were insulted, could he not put his man's heart and strength between her and shame? He would hurry to his darling, throw himself at her feet, her past should be buried, her life should begin with his happiness to-night.

"You want to marry Bertha? I supposed you were acquainted with her past."

It was in Mr. Ellingsworth's room, where he sat in dressing gown and slippers, well back in his easy chair. He was looking at Philip Breton very curiously. He had really fancied he understood human nature before.

"I suppose I am," answered Philip simply.

"Well, I know more of it than I wish I did. She ran away with a beggar, and she has come back. I dislike unpleasant memories, so I avoid unpleasant information. You know her - her - her relations with Curran? Yes, well," and the gentleman shrugged his slight shoulders, "no doubt you know what you are doing, you run your own risks."

"Risks?"

"Understand me, I asked but two questions - have you left Curran forever? do you want to come home? I had heard she had never been married. Jane has heard it. I feared it. Do you wonder I did not ask, not caring for a disagreeable certainty. Well, do your own questioning. I suppose the fact of her keeping her maiden name shows something."

What if he should find she was indeed married after all, when he had at last decided he could not live without her; when he had at last made up his mind that he must have her if he took a burden of life long shame into his soul with her? That would be a wretched freak for fortune to play with him; but how foolish he was, did not her name prove that she was unmarried?

"But I hate so to harrow up her memories," said Philip, in an unsteady voice; "to make her confess her shame before me. I should think that would be a father's duty."

"Can it be, my dear Philip," remarked Mr. Ellingsworth, with his own brilliant smile, "that you know me so little as to expect me to perform an unpleasant duty? There are people that love them - that never seem so much in their element as when engaged in some act of self sacrifice. You must really excuse me."

When Philip went down into the parlor Bertha was sitting there alone, and his fate seemed thrust upon him. Before he had time to dread breaking the subject to her he stood at the back of her chair, looking down on her thin, white fingers moving over her embroidery work. He laid his hand very gently on her shoulder. Ah, it was less round than it used to be. She was good enough to keep her eyes fixed on her work. There was no shade of heightened color on her cheeks, nor did she quicken her breathing.

"Bertha," he began, in a low, sweet voice, "I am going to ask you something." Still she did not look up.

"If, at some time before you died, a man whom you liked came and asked you to marry him," he spoke very slowly, "is there any reason why you must say no?''

Not one flush or nervous tremor. She threaded her needie again with the red worsted. "What do you mean by reason?"

"I mean," he said, in forced calm, "is there any barrier which the laws make to prevent you from marrying him?" Since he had begun to dream of marriage, he had thought only of the barrier of her shame; he had not thought that there might be a barrier more impregnable. But it came over him all the more terribly now. That would explain her lack of shame, her unbroken pride, that would be more consistent with his lifelong idea of her, if she had preserved her honor, and, alas, was already married and cut forever away from him. That would save her purity which he had thought sullied. No fingers of scorn could ever be pointed at her. No; but she would be lost to him forever. God forgive him, then, if he would rather have her dishonored, insulted, degraded, than lose her. Would she never answer? She laid down her needle and turned her face up toward him. He trembled like a child as he watched her lips part; in a moment his fate would be decided. It was terrible that his happiness could come only through her shame, and her honor meant a life of despair and loneliness for him, but so it seemed to him now.

"There is no barrier," she replied.

"Thank God," he whispered. The strain was removed. She had established her own disgrace with her own lips, without a drooping of her eyes, without a quiver of her lips. Ah, but he suffered in his very hope. It wounded him that he must rejoice in her shame, it was almost as if he had caused it. He bent low over her shoulder, in another moment he would have told her of the unchanging passion - of his love. All the bounds of his nature were broken down now. His whole soul seemed dissolving in ineffable tenderness for this cold woman, into whose calm, beautiful eyes he looked so hungrily.

"Like embroidery, don't you, Mr. Breton?"

Mrs. Ellingsworth flashed her small black eyes in delight. Philip started back in ill concealed dismay, but Bertha's face changed not one shade of expression as she rose magnificently to her feet and swept from the room.

The lady of the house looked unpleasantly after her.

"Isn't it funny, she don't seem to like me? Do you suppose it is that Curran scrape that has put her so much above me?"

Philip glanced savagely at her; he could almost have struck her, without thinking of her womanhood, there was such a snake like look in the glistening black eyes. One might as well reproach a wild creature of the forest for following out its instincts; but after a moment he said:

"Mrs. Ellingsworth forgets she is a lady?"

But she was beautiful, if not a lady, her hot blood lighting up her round olive cheeks as if it were liquid fire and her curled lips glowing like a perfect rose just bursting into bloom. No man could look at her now and not feel a mad soulless fascination for her, a fascination the greater because mixed with revulsion. She was a perfect type of the womanhood that can madden a man with passion, without tenderness, that can wreck his life, banish every noble hope or ideal from his soul and feed him nothing but dead sea fruit.

"It's strange what makes a lady," she answered him in growing excitement. "Your Bertha is one no matter what vileness she sinks to, but I can't whisper one rude word."

She come close to him and put her burning fingers on his hand. "Your horse loves you better than that woman. She will torture you to death, let her alone." Then she sprang away from him, and walked backward and forward clasping and unclasping her clinging fingers in her old habit. "Oh, I hate her, I hate her; but what good is it? I would dash myself to pieces to break her, but I could not. She steals my lover and then leaves him. She comes back disgraced in the eyes of her own father; but she does not feel it. And now comes her lover with his riches, and offers everything to her. She deserves nothing, but gets everything." She would have raved on, but Philip Breton walked slowly out of the room. Nothing could ever move him now; he preferred the woman she maligned to all the other hopes or possessions in the world.

 

CHAPTER XXIII.
NO APPRECIATION OF EMBROIDERY.

It was the next afternoon, as Philip Breton was unhitching Joe from the post, that he had occasion to doff his hat to Mrs. Ellingsworth, driving by with her husband. They made a very pretty picture of marital bliss; perhaps they were all the happier because neither of them had souls. Philip had been intending to go to his factory, there was some business he ought to attend to, but the sudden assurance that Bertha was alone made his heart give a great bound. What better time than now to tell her of his unaltered love, to win her promise to let him make her happy? So his business was postponed, and he rang the bell at Mr. Ellingsworth's instead.

"Not in?" he repeated after the servant in dismay. Would his luck never change? Had she been frightened at his manner the night before, and gone away to avoid his unpleasant suit?

"But she isn't far away," and the girl smiled at the disappointment that had come over his face. "I guess, now, you will find her in the garden; or I will call her if you say."

"No, don't call her," and Philip hurried out to the garden. What more fitting place for what he had to say if he could find his voice for the great lump in his throat. He must be very eloquent to persuade her, to answer all her objections, to assure her that it was not pity that moved him, for she would resent that, but love - a love that craved her above all the world.

She looked up from her embroidery at the sound of his footsteps and smiled. Her beauty might all go, as its first bloom and freshness had gone, and her cheeks fade like the autumn leaves whose glowing tints they had once worn; her golden hair might whiten with age, he knew it would make no difference in his love. She wore the same dress she had worn in that other garden scene. She had grown thin and gone back to the dresses of her girlhood. It was a light blue silk, open low in the neck, filled in with nestling folds of lace. The sunbeams made their way through the low hanging trees, and with them came the breath of the roses, and the humming of the bees, just as on that other day.

Philip seated himself on the bench beside her, and tried to make his voice calm as he said:

"Do you remember when you last wore this dress?"

Would she be frightened at the intensity of gentleness in his voice?

But she smiled as frankly at him as if he were her brother. "Oh, yes."

He put his hand on her arm, cool as if love and passion were forever outside her experience. "Bertha, I love you more now than then. I will not frighten you with my vehemence; I have learned to conquer myself. I will cherish you as a child, but, oh, Bertha, I want to be near you."

The woman did not draw away from him. She was looking with a changed expression at his eager face - the face of the lover whom no coldness could chill; who returned again after her desertion of him; whom no shame could alter. He had stirred something like admiration in her at last. A tinge of delicate color rose from her neck among the folds of lace, and mounted to the roots of her golden hair. It was the first time he had ever moved her.

"And you love me as much now as that day I fell asleep on your shoulder - ages ago, it must have been?" Then her great blue eyes drooped under the intensity of love that looked from his face - a love beyond her power to understand.

He gathered her hands in his. "As much and more - a deeper, purer, gentler love that will protect you against its own very vehemence - that would rather make sacrifices for you than joys for itself."

"Take me, then," and she let him draw her head on his breast, where she felt the throbbing growing mightier and mightier, though he only pressed his lips upon her cool forehead. Then she drew back. She did not look in his face, which had a great light in it, perhaps she was ashamed that she had nothing to give him, ashamed that her heart was so cold under the rapture that looked out of his eyes.

"But Philip, you must not hurry me too much. I am slow, and this is so sudden, I would as soon have thought of an earthquake.'" Then she glanced wonderingly at him as if to make sure. "Ah, Philip, you deserve a better love than mine." But he caught her hand to his lips, and held it there while he covered it with kisses, "I would rather the flower you wear in your bosom than any woman in the world besides you. I learned to love with you, Bertha."

But she took her hand away uneasily. "But you won't hurry me, will you, Philip?" How could she ask him to wait much longer? "For if you do"-

"Oh, no- I will give you a whole week." He laughed, and then grew suddenly very sober. "Haven't I given you long enough?"

"I must take a little journey first," and her eyes appeared to avoid his. A sudden tide of jealousy swept over him. Had she deserved his trust?

"I will go with you. It shall be our wedding journey."

She flushed nervously- "Oh, no, not yet."

Where could she be going? To one last interview with Curran, perhaps, and he felt that he could not bear one thought of him should ever cross her soul again. How short a time it took to spoil his happiness. The glow had left his heart, the light had gone out of his eye, all in a moment. Is misery then the only thing that can last?

"Only this once," she said. "You shall go with me always then."

His mood melted and in a moment he was kneeling before her. "Oh, Bertha, be fair with me- for you hold me in the hollow of your hand. Do not fail me now when you have seemed so near me."

She put her hand on his bowed head, perhaps some sweet word trembled on her lips. He hungered for it, and when she did not speak, he looked up into the face of his bride. She had seemed so far from him, a world could not have parted them more, but he was at her feet, and she had promised to be his wife.

"My dear Philip, excuse me, but you are crushing my embroidery." So he was. He was kneeling on it in his fond idolatry, as if a piece of worsted work was of no account. He found his feet and cast a pathetic glance at the square of canvas before he stooped to pick it up. It was strange, indeed, that he should have been so carried away in his passionate ardor as not to notice what he was kneeling on.

"I hope I have not ruined your work," he said, simply. No, he had only rumpled it a little, and he would have been willing to purchase all the canvas and worsted in two cities, rather than have missed the tender word he thought was on her lips.

 

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

 

IT ENDED IN A DRAW.