Prudence Palfrey

V.

THE ROMANCE OF HORSESHOE LANE.

JOHN DENT did not return to Willowbrook to dinner. The meal was passed in unwonted silence. Mr. Dent was preoccupied, and Prudence was conscious of something in the atmosphere inimical to conversation. Once or twice her guardian looked up from his plate as if to address her, and then seemed to change his mind.

“ Where is Cousin John ? ” at length asked Prudence, setting the almonds and raisins nearer to Mr. Dent.

“ Oh, by the way, I forgot to say he was not coming to dinner. He — he dines in town.”

“ At the Blydenburghs' ? ”

There was a certain Miss Veronica Blydenburgh, and a very pretty girl, let me tell you.

“ I don’t know. How should I know ? ” replied Mr. Dent, crisply.

“ Will he return to tea? ” ventured Prudence, after a pause.

“ I don’t think he will,” Mr. Dent said, pushing back his chair. “ In fact, I do not think he will return here at all; he has some matters in town requiring his attention for a few days, and then he is off. He sent good-by to you,” added Mr. Dent, committing a little amiable perjury in the attempt to rob his nephew’s sudden departure of its brusqueness.

Then Mr. Dent walked out of the dining-room.

“Not coming back at all, and sent good-by to me?” said Prudence to herself. “ Assuredly, Cousin John has not strained many points to be polite, after being our guest for six weeks.”

Then she recalled the walk which Cousin John had taken with his uncle in the morning; she put this and that together, and became pensive.

As Prudence and her guardian were sitting on the piazza an hour or two later, Clem Hoyt, the local Mercury and expressman, drove up to the gate with an order for Mr. J. Dent’s trunk, and an unsealed note for Miss Palfrey which Mr. Dent handed to her with an indescribable grimace.

The writer expressed his regret on not being able to say his adieux to her in person; he had been called away unexpectedly ; he would never forget her kindness to him during the past six weeks, but would always be her very faithful cousin John Dent. That was all.

Prue turned the paper over and over, and upside down, to see if a postscript had not escaped her; but that was the whole of it. It was almost as telegrammatic as the royal epistle to the queen in “ Ruy Blas,” — Madam, the wind is high, and I have killed six wolves.

“ Uncle Ralph,” said Prue, folding up the note and slipping it back into the envelope, “ I know that something unpleasant has happened.”

“ What does he say? ”

“ He ? — nothing. But something has happened.”

Mr. Dent tilted back his chair and made no rejoinder.

“What is it? Have you quarreled with him ? ”

“ We did have a misunderstanding.”

“ What about, uncle ? ”

“ About money matters chiefly.”

“If it was all about money,” said Prudence, “ 1 have no business to ask questions.”

“The boy made a fool of himself generally,” returned Mr. Dent, incautiously.

“Then it was not money chiefly?” said Prudence, walking up to him and looking into his eyes. “ Uncle Ralph, was it anything connected with me ? ”

“ Prue, my dear, I would rather not discuss the subject.”

“ But, uncle, if it was about me, I ought to know it. It would make me very unhappy to be the cause of dissension between you and your nephew, and not know what I have done. I might keep on doing it all the time, you know.”

“ You haven’t done anything, child; it is Jack’s doing.”

“ What is Jack’s doing? ”

“ Since you will have it, I suppose I must tell you.”

But Mr. Dent was at a loss how to tell her, and hesitated. Should he treat the affair lightly or seriously ? The idea of Prue having a lover was both comical and alarming to him.

“ Well, what did Cousin John do? ”

“ He did me the honor, this morning, to say that he was in love with you, — did you ever hear anything so absurd ? ”

Prudence opened her eyes wide.

“Well? ”

“Well? Well, I thought it rather absurd myself.”

“ That anybody should love me ? ” said Prue, slyly.

“ Not at all; but that Jack should allow himself to be interested in any one under the circumstances. I pointed out to him the mistake of his even dreaming of marriage in his present position. What folly! Setting you entirely aside, what could Jack do with a wife? She would be a millstone tied to his neck. Of course I refused to sanction his insanity, and offered to establish him in business if he would behave himself sensibly.”

“That is, if he wouldn’t love anybody ? ’ ’

“ Precisely.”

“ And then what did he say? ” aslced Prudence, leaning on her guardian’s arm persuasively, and smiling up in his face.

Mr. Dent was pleased to see that his ward took the matter with so much composure, and felt that the subject was one which could be treated best from a facetious point of view,

“ He said he’d see me — no, he did not say that exactly; but he meant it. He declared he would go off somewhere and make his fortune in a few weeks, or hours, I forget which, and then come back and marry you. Upon my word, Prue, I think there is something wrong with his brain. He refused my advice and assistance point-blank.”

“ Then you quarreled ? ’ ’

“Yes, I suppose we quarreled. He was as unreasonable as a lunatic. He cut off my head,” said Mr. Dent, grimly.

“ Cut off —your head? ”

“ Substantially. He snipped off the top of a thistle with his walking-stick, and looked me straight in the eye, as much as to say, ‘ Consider your head off! ’ ”

“Oh!” cried Prue, faintly. “But how did it end ? ’ ’

“It ended by my forbidding him to come to the house.”

Prue’s hand slipped from her guardian’s shoulder with a movement like lightning.

“ You turned him out of doors! ”

“ Well, perhaps that is stating it rather strongly.”

“It was generous in him not to speak of his love to me, and brave of him to go to you, — and you have turned him out of doors!” and Prue’s eyes flashed curiously.

Now it was not, perhaps, a frightful thing in itself, Prue’s eyes flashing; but since she was a baby, when her eyes could not flash, she had never given Mr. Dent such a look, and it all but withered him. It was so sudden and unlike her!

“Why, Prue!” he managed to cry, “ you don’t mean to say you love the fellow! ”

“I do love him!” cried Prudence, with red cheeks. “ I did n’t love him, but you have made me love him! I have beggared him, and made him wretched besides, and I’d marry him to-morrow if he’d ask me! ”

44 Gracious heaven, Prue! what else could I do ? ”

“ You ought to have sent him to me ! ”

Struck by this reply into “amazement and admiration,” Mr. Dent found no words at his command as the girl glided by him and into the house.

“ And Prue loves him,” he said, in a subdued voice, leaning against the balustrade heavily, like a wounded man, “ my Prue! ”

Between his nephew and his ward Mr. Ralph Dent had had a hard day of it.

If John Dent could have caught only an echo of Prudence Palfrey’s words as she swept by her guardian that afternoon, he would not have been the forlorn creature he was, over there in Rivermouth, trying to read musty books on knotty doctrinal points, borrowed from Parson Hawkins’s library, but forever leaving them to wander down to points on the river, where was afforded what the poet Gray would have called “ a distant prospect ” of Willowbrook chimneys.

A week had passed since the rupture with his uncle, and Dent’s plans were matured. He had fallen in with a brother knight-errant, a Rivermouth boy and quondam school-mate of his, and the two had agreed to set forth together in search of fortune. Their plan was to go to San Francisco overland, and, failing of adventures there, to push on to the mining districts. It was a mad idea, and John Dent’s own. The day had long gone by when great nuggets were unearthed by private enterprise in California; but he had drawn the notion into his brain that his fortune was to be made at the mines. How or when the fancy first took possession of him, I cannot say. Perhaps the accounts of the Australian gold-fields, then a comparatively recent discovery, had something to do with it; perhaps it was born solely of his necessity. He wanted money, he wanted a large quantity, and he wanted it immediately. A gold-mine seemed to simplify the matter. To bring it down to a fine point, it was a gold-mine he wanted. He brooded over the subject until it became a fixed fact in his mind that there was a huge yellow nugget waiting for him somewhere, hidden in the emerald side of a mountain or lying in the bed of some pebbly stream among the gulches. Æons and æons ago Nature had secreted it in her bounteous bosom to lavish it lovingly on some man adventurous and faithful above the rest. The Golden Fleece at Colchis was not more real to Jason and his crew. John Dent was a poet in those days. Every man is a poet at some period of his life, if only for half an hoar.

In Parson Hawkins’s library was a work on metallography, together with a certain history of the gold-fever in the early days of California: young Dent had pored over these volumes as Cervantes’s hero pored over the books on chivalry, until his brain was a little touched; and also like the simple gentleman of La Mancha, John Dent had not been long in finding a simpler soul to inoculate with his madness,—to wit, Deacon Twombly’s son Joe.

Their preparations for the journey were completed, and Joseph Twombly, set on fire by his comrade’s enthusiasm, was burning to be gone; but John Dent lingered irresolutely day after day in the old town by the river. An unconquerable longing had grown up in his heart to say good-by to Prudence Palfrey.

In the mean while the days -were passing tranquilly but not happily at Willowbrook.

Mr. Dent was gloomy and distrait, and Prudence had lost her high spirits. She had also lost a rose or two from her cheek, but they came back impetuously whenever she thought of the confession she had made to her guardian. It had been almost as much a surprise to herself as to him. John Dent’s name had not been breathed by either since that afternoon. Whether he was still at Rivermonth or not, neither knew. Both had cast, a hasty glance over the congregation, on entering the church the succeeding Sunday, one half dreading and the other half hoping he might be there; but John Dent, seated in the gallery behind the choir, had eluded them. He sat with his eyes riveted on the back of Prue’s best bonnet, and it had not done the young man any appreciable good.

As matters stood Prudence could not, and Mr. Dent did not, go to Rivermonth. Having declared to him that she loved a man who had not asked her for her love, she had cut herself off from the town while young Dent remained there. This involved a serious deprivation to Prue, for she longed to carry her trouble to the good old parson in Horseshoe Lane, who had been her counselor and comforter in all her tribulations as far back as she could remember.

Towards the end of the second week Prudence became restless. No doubt Jobn Dent had quitted the place long ago. And suppose he had not? suppose he had decided to live there? Was she to shut herself up forever like a nun ? There were calls owing in town, at the Blydenburghs’ and elsewhere. The whole routine and pleasure of life was not to be interrupted because her uncle had quarreled with his nephew.

At the breakfast table she said, “I am going to town this morning, uncle.”

“ Will you have the phaeton? ” asked Mr Dent, but not with effusion, as the French say.

“ I think I shall walk, for the sake of the exercise.”

“ But Prue ” —

“ If you infer that I am going to town to hunt up a young man who ran away from me,” Prudence broke out with a singular dash of impatience, “ I will stay at home.”

“I do not infer anything of the kind,” Mr. Dent answered. “ I was simply going to say you had better ride; it is dusty walking.”

Prudence bit her lip.

“ I want you to be your own sensible self, Prue. You are very strange recently. Many a time you must have felt the lack of a gentler hand than mine to guide you. You never needed guidance more than now. I wish I knew what wise words Mercy would speak to her child, if she were alive.”

Prudence rose from her chair and went over to his side.

“ If fay mother were here, I think she would tell me to ask your forgiveness for all the annoyance I have been to you from the time I was a baby until now. I am very sorry for the way I spoke the other day. I Could not help I-liking John Dent, but I need n’t have been a fierce wolf about it, need I? ”

Mr. Dent smiled at the fierce wolf, but he could not help recognizing the appositeness of simile. It was the first time he had smiled in two weeks, and it was to Prue like a gleam of pure sunshine after dog-days. So the cloud between them broke, floated off a little way, and halted; for life to these two was never to be just what it had been.

“ If yon don’t wish me to go ” — said Prue, humbly.

“ But I do,” Mr. Dent answered. Then be made a forlorn efibrt to be merry, and bade her hurry off to town and get married, and come back again as soon as possible.

And Prue said she would. She resolved, however, that if by any chance John Dent was still in Bivermouth, and if by any greater chance she encountered him, — and nothing was more remote from her design, — she would behave with faultless discretion. She would not marry him to-morrow, now, if he asked her; she loved him, but her love should never be a millstone about his neck. That phrase of her guardian’s had sunk into her mind.

As she drew near the town, and saw the roof-tops and spires taking sharper outlines against the delicate lilac sky, her pulse quickened. YVhat if she were to meet him on the bridge, or run against him suddenly at a street corner ? Would his conceit lead him to suppose she was searching for him, or even wished to meet him ?

The thought sent the blood blooming up to her temples, and she was half-inclined to turn back. Then, with a little imperious toss of the head, like a spirited pony taking the bit between its teeth, she went on.

Prudence avoided the main thoroughfares, and, by a circuitous route through Pickering’s Court, reached the gate of the parsonage without accident. She closed the gate behind her carefully, with a dim apprehension that if she let it swing to with a hang, John Dent, walking in a street a mile or two away, might hear the click of the latch and be down on her. An urchin passing the house at that instant gave a shrill whistle through his fingers, in facile imitation of a steam-engine, and the strength went quite out of Prue’s knees. Smiling at her own nervousness she ran up the graveled walk.

At the farther end of the piazza, completely screened by vines from the street, sat John Dent, with corrugated brow, reading Adam Smith on “ The Wealth of Nations.”

As Prudence stretched out her hand towards the knocker, the young man looked up wearily from the book and saw her, and then her eyes fell upon him.

“I — I thought you had gone!” stammered Prudence, grasping at the flat-nosed brass cherub for support.

“No, I haven’t gone yet,” replied John Dent, with beaming countenance.

“ So I see,” said Prue, recovering herself.

“ I hated to go without saying goodby to you, and of course I could not come to the house.”

“ Of course not,” said Prue.

“ And so I waited.”

“ Waited for me to come to you! ” cried Prue, flushing. “ You might have waited a long time if I had suspected it.”

“ And you would n’t have come? ”

“No.”

A No kept on ice for a twelvemonth could not have been colder than that.

“ Are you angry with me, too? ”

“I am very angry with you. You were entirely in the wrong to quarrel with your uncle, John Dent; he was your only friend.”

“ He left me no choice, you see. I went to him in great trouble and uncertainty, wanting kindly advice, and he treated me harshly, as I think. Unless he has told you why we fell out, I shall say nothing about it. Did he tell you, Prue ? ’ ’

“Yes, he told me,” said Prudence slowly.

“ What could I do but go to him? ”

“ I was very sorry it happened.”

“ What if I had come to you instead ? ”

“ I should have heen still more sorry.”

“ Then after all,” said John Dent, “ it seems that I chose the lesser evil. There is some small merit in that. But the mischief is done, — the cat has eaten the canary, — and the only atonement I can make is to take myself off as soon as may be. I cannot tell you what a comfort it is to see you once more. I have spent two or three hours here every day, hoping some lucky chance would bring you. Parson Wibird, you know, was my father’s most intimate friend when our family lived in the town, and I didn’t seem to have any one nearer to me; so I ’ve given him a good deal of my unpleasant society.' I have been reading the parson’s theological works,” he went on with a dreary air, “ and some books on mining, and I ’m pretty well up on the future state and geology.”

It, was all Prudence could do not to laugh.

“ But the minutes hung on my hands, I can tell you. About the wretchedest hours of my life I have passed on that little pine seat yonder.”

Many a time afterwards Prudence recalled these words, sitting disconsolately herself on that same green bench under the vines.

“ All that is past, now you are here; but I don’t believe I could have stood it another week, even with the hope of seeing you at the end of it. Cousin Prue, there are several things I want to say to you; I hardly know how to say them. May I try?”

“ That depends on what they are,” returned Prudence. “ There are some things which you should not say to me.” “ I may tell you I love you? ”

“ No, you must not tell me that.”

“ I need not, you mean. Uncle Ralph has saved me the confusion of confession. If he had trusted me fully I believe I should have gone away with the word unspoken. I don’t see the harm of speaking it now. I am very proud of loving you. I know I have laid up a store of unhappiness, may be one that will last me my days; but I shall never regret it. I stand higher in my own estimation that I could n’t live in the same house with you week after week and not love you.”

“ But I— I never gave you ” —

“ Now you are on dangerous ground,” said John Dent. “ If you hate me, don’t tell me; if you love me, don’t tell me, for I could not bear that either. I pledge you my honor I don’t know, I only hope, and would not know for the world. ”

Here was a lover — one man out of ten thousand — who was ready to bind himself hand and foot for his sweetheart, and would have no vows from her, even if she were willing to make them. He said nothing less than the truth when he declared his ignorance of the nature of Prue’s feelings. She liked him, of course, — that went without saying; but farther than that he did not know. He was content to go away with so much hope as lies in uncertainty, and perhaps he was wise.

“You speak of love and hate,” said Prue, smiling, “ as if there was nothing between. What prevents me from being your friend? Your plans and welfare interest me very deeply, and I am glad of the chance to talk with you about them. Where are you going when you leave Rivermouth? ”

“ To California. ”

“ So far! ”

“ I am going to the mines — the only short cut to fortune open to me. I ’m sadly in lack of that kind of nerve which enables a man to plod on year in and year out for a mere subsistence. I am not afraid of hard work; I am ready to crowd the labor of half a life-time into a few months for the sake of having the result in a lump. But I must have it in a lump. 1 won’t accept fortune in driblets. I don’t think I would stoop to pick up less than an ounce of gold at a time. I’ve a conviction, Prue, I shall light on some fat nuggets ; they can’t all have been found.”

“ I hope not,” responded Prudence, smiling.

John Dent did not smile. As he spoke, his face flushed, and a lambent glow came into his eyes, as if he saw rich masses of the yellow ore cropping out among Parson Hawkins’s marigoldbeds.

“ I have a theory,” he said, “ that a man never wants a thing as I want this, and is willing to pay the price for it, without getting it. I mean to come back independent, or not at all. I have discovered that a man without money in Ids pocket, or the knack to get it, had better be in his family tomb — if he has a family tomb. That is about the only place where he will not be in the way. Moralists, surrounded by every luxury, frown down on what they call the lust of riches. It is one of the noblest of human instincts. The very pen and paper, and the small amount of culture which enables these ungrateful fellows to write their lopsided essays, would have been impossible without it. Some one has said this before, — but not so well,” added John Dent, complacently, suddenly conscious that he was hammering away at one of Mr. Arthur Helps’s ideas. “ There was more sound sense in Iago’s advice than he gets credit for. I mean to put money in my purse, Prue, and then come back to Rivermouth, and ask you to be my wife. There, I have said it. Are you angry? ”

“N-o, not very,” said Prudence. “But suppose I have married ‘auld Robin Gray’ in the mean time?” she added slyly.

“ You are free to do it.”

“ And you ’ll not scowl at him, and make a scene of it when you come back?”

“ I shall hate him,” cried John Dent, as a venerable figure of a possible “auld Robin Gray ” limped for an instant before his mind’s eye. “No, Prue; I shall have no right to hate him. I shall only envy him. Perhaps I ’ll be magnanimous if he ’s a poor man, — though he was n’t poor in the ballad, — and turn over my wealth to him; it would be of no use to me without you. Then I ’d go hack to the wilds again.”

He said this with a bleak laugh, and Prudence smiled, and her heart was as heavy as lead. It required an effort not to tell him that she would not marry though he stayed away a thousand years. If John Dent had asked Prudence that moment if she loved him, she would have thrown her cautious resolves to the winds; if he had asked her to go to the gold-fields with him, she would have tightened her bonnet-strings under her chin, and placed her hand in his. But the moment went by.

Prudence had moved away from the front door, and seated herself on the small bench at the end of the piazza, much to the chagrin of the Widow Mugridge, who had been feverishly watching the interview, and speculating on its probable nature, from a rear attic window across the street.

“ I must go now,” said Prudence, rising hastily. “ I promised Uncle Ralph not to be long. I’m afraid I have been long. He will wonder what has kept me, and I have not seen the parson yet. ”

“I suppose I may write to you?” said John Dent. “I shall want to write only two letters,” he added, quickly; “ one on my arrival at the mines, and one some months afterwards, to tell you the result of the expedition. As I shall send these letters under cover to Uncle Dent, there will be no offense. I do not not ask you to answer them.”

“ He cannot object to that,” said Prudence. “In spite of what has passed, I am sure he will be glad to hear of your movements, and anxious for your success.”

“ I am not so positive on that head.”

“You do him injustice, then,” returned Prudence, warmly. “ You don’t know how good he is.”

“ I know how good he is n’t.”

“ You mistake him entirely. He was willing to look upon you as his own son. ”

“But not as his son-in-law,” suggested John Dent.

“ He has not told me the particulars of the conversation,” said Prudence, “ but I am convinced he said nothing to you that was not wise and kind and candid.”

“ It was certainly candid.”

“ I see we shall not agree on this subject; let us speak of something pleasanter. When are you going away? ”

“ My going away is a pleasanter subject, then? ”

“ Yes, because it is something we cannot easily quarrel over.”

“ I shall leave Rivermouth to-morrow. Now that I have seen you, there is nothing to detain us.”

“ Us? you don’t go alone, then? ”

“No; Joe Twombly is going with me; you know him, the deacon’s son. A very good fellow, Joe. His family made a great row at first. He had to talk over the two old folks, six grown sisters, the twins, and the baby. He ’s been bidding them good-by ever since the week before last. I quite envy him the wide-spread misery he is causing. I have only you and Parson Hawkins in the whole world to say good-by to, and you can’t begin to be as sorry as six sisters.”

“ But I can be as sorry as one,” said Prue, giving him her ungloved hand, and not withdrawing it. It was as white and cold as a snow-flake.

“I’d like to know what that Palfrey gal’s a-doin’ with Squire Dent’s nevy on the parson’s front piazza,” muttered the Widow Mugridge, as she stretched her pelican-like neck out of the attic window.

“What, Prue!—you’re not crying ? ’ ’

“ Yes, I am,” said Prudence, looking up through two tears which had been troubling her some time. “ Cannot a sister cry if she wants to ? ”

“If you are my sister ” —and John Dent hesitated.

Prudence gave a little sob.

“ If you are my sister, you will let me kiss you good-by.”

“ Yes,” said Prudence.

Then John Dent stooped down and kissed her.

“Hoity-toity! what’s this?” cried Parson Hawkins, appearing suddenly in the door-way with one finger shut in a vast folio, and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, giving him the aspect of some benevolent four-eyed monster.

“There’s the parson now,” soliloquized the Widow Mugridge. “ Mebbe he didn’t come ’fore he’s wanted. Seek goin’s on! ”

As Prue drew back, she pressed into John Dent’s hand a little bunch of fuchsias which she had worn at her throat; he thanked her with a look, and was gone.

So the two parted, — Prudence Palfrey to resume the quiet, colorless life of Willowbrook, and John Dent to go in search of his dragons.

VI.

CONCERNING A SKELETON IN A CLOSET.

PRUE, on returning home, said nothing to her guardian touching the interview with John Dent at the parsonage.

She did not intend to hide the matter, but it was all too new and distracting for her to speak about just then. She was flurried, and wanted time to think it over. She lay awake half the night thinking of it, and began reproaching herself for her coldness and coquetry. How generous John Dent had been with her, and how calculating and worldly wise she had been on her part. He was going away to face hardship and danger, perhaps death itself, for her sake, — she understood clearly it was for her sake, — and she had let him go without speaking the word that would have made this comparatively easy for him. It was true, he had begged her not to speak the word; hut she might have spoken it like an honest girl. She had given him a marble cheek to salute, when she ought to have thrown her arms around his neek. What was there to prevent her loving him and telling him so?

The generosity had been wholly on the side of her lover, and no woman is content with that; so Prue’s heart warmed to him all the more because she had not been allowed to sacrifice herself in the least, and she fell asleep with the vow upon her lips that if she did not marry John Dent she would never marry.

At the breakfast-room door the next morning, Prudence met her guardian returning from a walk. He had been marketing at Rivermouth bright and early, and had had the unlooked-for satisfaction of beholding at a distance his nephew and Joseph Twombly standing in the midst of their luggage on the platform of the railway station. But it chanced that on the way home Mr. Dent had picked up a piece of intelligence which turned the edge of his satisfaction.

Gossip never sleeps in Rivermouth, but stalks about night and day seeking whom it may devour. There are entire families in the town whose sole purpose and pursuit in life seems to be to pry into the affairs of their neighbor. If this is not their raison-d’être, then there is no other obvious explanation of their existence.

“Laws ’a mercy, if that ain’t Mr. Ralph Dent! ” cried a shrill, querulous voice at his elbow, as that gentleman turned into Penhallow Place. It was the Widow Mugridge sweeping the flag-stones in front of her domicile. “ Who’d ’a thought you’d ketch me tidyin’ up a bit this airly in the mornin’! It’s the airly bird that gits the worm, Mr. Dent. Ben to see your nevy off to Califerny, I s’pose! I see him an’ Miss Prudence a-chirpin’ thicker ’n blackbirds over there on the parson’s piazzer yisterday forenoon, an’ thought likely ’s not he was goin’ away at last. An’ Joe, too — dear me! They do say Deacon Twombly’a folks is dreffully cut up ” —

Buz, buz, buz! Mr. Dent did not wait to hear more, but lifting his hat to the old lady, hurried down the street.

“I’d wager a cookey, now,” said the good soul, leaning on the broomhandle meditatively, and following Mr. Dent’s vanishing figure with a lack-lustre blue eye, “ I’d wager a cookey, now, young Dent has ben settin’ up to that Palfrey gal, an’ there’s ben trouble. Thought so all ’long. Clem Hoyt fetched away young Dent’s trunk more ’n two weeks ago, and he has n’t set in the family pew sence. Guess things muster ben purty lively up to Willowbrook house. Well, now, it’s cur’ous, how folks will fall to sixes an’ sevins, ’specially relations, right in the face of them Creator! ”

Mr. Dent gave Prudence a frigid good morning. He had no heart to arraign her for her seeming duplicity; he had no heart for anything. Prue loved his nephew, and the two had met, — met in secret. One had defied him and the other had deceived him.

I scarcely know how to describe the emotions and perplexities that beset Mr. Dent at this period, without shearing him of some of those practical attributes which I have claimed for him.

When his nephew, that day on the road to Rivermouth, declared his intentions regarding Prue, Mr. Dent was startled and alarmed. That True would marry some time or other, had occurred to him faintly as a possibility, — a possibility so far in the future as not to be considered; hut John Dent had taught him that the time was come when his hold on Prue would be slight, were the right man to demand her. John Dent was clearly not the right man, and Mr. Dent had opposed the arrangement, chiefly, as he imagined, because his nephew was not in a position to marry; but under it all was a strangely-born and indefinable jealousy. Prue’s declaration on the piazza that afternoon fell upon Mr. Dent like lightning from a cloudless sky; by the flash of her love he saw the depth of his own affection. It sometimes happens, outside the covers of romances, that a man rears an adopted girl from the cradle, and falls in love with her when she gets into long dresses, — that the love creeps into existence unsuspected, and asserts itself suddenly, full-grown. It was something very like this that had happened to Mr. Dent.

There is said to be a skeleton in every house. Until then there had never been a skeleton at Willowbrook, at least since Mr. Dent owned the property; but there was one now, and Mr. Dent’s task henceforth was to see that the ghastly thing did not peep out of its closet. Prudence should never dream of its existence; he would stand a grim sentinel over the secret until the earth covered him and it. He thought it hard, after the disappointment of his youth, that such a burden should be laid upon his later years; but he would bear it as he had borne the other.

He saw his duty plainly enough, but there were almost insuperable difficulties in the performance of it. It was next to impossible for him to meet Prue on the same familiar footing as formerly; the unrestrained intimacy that had held between them was full of peril for his secret. He must he always on his guard lest she should catch a glimpse into the Bluebeard chamber where he had hidden his stilled love: an unconsidered word or look might be a key to it. Now it so fell out, in his perplexity as to which was the least dangerous method to pursue, that this amiable and honest gentleman began treating the girl with a coldness and constraint which gradually merged into a degree of harshness he was far from suspecting.

Acknowledging to herself that she had given her guardian some grounds for displeasure, Prudence was ready to make any advances towards a reconciliation; but Mr. Dent gave her no encouragement; he was ice to her. At this stage business called him to Boston, where he remained a fortnight.

“ He will forgive me before he comes home,” Prudence said to herself; but he came home as he went away, gelid.

As she leaned over his chair at bedtime that night to offer him her forehead to kiss, a pretty fashion which had outlived her childhood, he all but repulsed her. Prue shrank back, and never attempted to repeat the caress.

“ He is still angry,” she thought, “ because he fancies there is some engagement between me and John Dent.”

But she was too proud now, as she had been too timid before, to tell him what had passed at Parson Hawkins’s. He evidently knew they had met there; she had forfeited his confidence and respect, and that was hard to bear, harder than John Dent’s absence, a great deal. She would have borne that cheerfully if her guardian had let her; but he made even that heavier.

The old parson was Prue’s only resource at this time. Whenever household duties gave her leave, she went straight to the parsonage, and sat for hours on the little green bench under the vines, nearly leafless now, where John Dent had waited for her. She called it her stool of penitence. Here she actually read through Adam Smith on “The Wealth of Nations,” a feat which I venture to assert has been accomplished by few young women in New England or elsewhere. It was like a novel to her.

Sometimes the parson would bring his arm-chair out on the piazza into the sunshine, and the two would hold long discourses on California and John Dent; for the parson had a fondness for the young fellow; he had taught Jack Latin when he was a kid; besides, the boy’s father had been dear to him. How far the young man had taken Parson Hawkins into his confidence, I do not know; but it is presumable that Prudence told her old friend all there was to tell. Often the parson was absent from home, visiting parishioners, and Prue sat there alone, thinking of John Dent. She had fallen into so pitiable a state that this became her sole pleasure, — to walk a mile and a quarter to a place where she could be thoroughly miserable.

These frequent pilgrimages to Horseshoe Lane filled Mr. Dent with lively jealousy. He grew to hate the simple old gentleman, whose society was openly preferred to his own, though he did not make his own too agreeable.

He blamed the parson for coming between him and Prudence; most of all he blamed him for allowing John Dent to meet her clandestinely under his roof. He made no doubt but the intriguing old woman, —for what was he but an old woman ? — had connived at the meeting, very likely brought it about. Perhaps he saw a pitiful marriage-fee at the end of his plots and his traps, the wretched old miser!

If Prue was rendered unhappy by her guardian’s harsh humor, he was touched to the heart by her apparent indifference. They saw each other rarely now, only at meals and sometimes in the sitting-room after dinner. Mr. Dent spent his time mostly in the library, and Prudence kept out of the way. She no longer played chess with him or read to him of an evening. The autumn evenings were dull and interminable at Willowbrook. If it hail been Mr. Dent’s purpose to make Prudence miss his nephew every hour of the day, Machiavelli himself could not have improved on the course he was pursuing.

One afternoon, after nearly three months of this, Mr. Dent received an envelope from his nephew inclosing a letter for Prudence. Mr. Dent’s first impulse was to throw the missive into the grate; but be followed his second impulse, and carried it to her, though it burnt his fingers like a hot coal.

Prudence started and colored when her eyes fell upon the superscription, but she made no motion to take the letter; she let it lie on the table where he had placed it.

“ She wishes to read it alone,” said Mr. Dent to himself, bitterly. He was marching off to the door as stiff as a grenadier when Prudence intercepted him.

“ Are we never going to be friends again?” she said, touching him lightly on the arm. “ Are you never going to like me any more ? I begin to feel that I am a stranger in the house; it is no longer my home as it was. Do you know what I shall do when I am convinced you have entirely ceased to care for me? I shall go away from you.”

He gave a quick glance at Prue’s face, and saw that she meant it.

“ Go away from me? ” he exclaimed. “ What in God’s world could I do without you! ”

“ I cannot go on living here if you don’t love me. I have done nothing to deserve your unkindness. I saw John Dent only by chance, I did not go to meet him, there is no engagement between us; but I love him, and shall love him always. I regret every day of my life that I did not tell him so, like an honest girl. That is really my only fault. For all this I ask your forgiveness so far as you consider yourself disobeyed. You have been unjustly severe with me. In a little while your severity will lose the power of wounding, and I shall think only of your injustice.”

Then Prue walked away aud sat down by the work-table.

Every word of this was a dagger to Mr. Dent. Had be been cruel to her? It was plain he had. He was struck now by the change that had taken place in Prudence within three months. He had not noticed until then how pale she was; there were dark circles under her eyes that seemed to darken her whole face, and the eyes themselves were grown large and lustrous, like a consumptive’s. As her hands lay in her lap, he observed how white and thin they were; and his conscience smote him. It was not enough he should keep the skeleton securely locked in its closet; his duty went farther; the girl’s health and happiness were to looked after a little, and he had neglected that-

“ Prue,” he said, with sudden remorse, “ I have been very blind and unreasonable. Only be a happy girl again, and I will ask you to do nothing else except to forgive me for not finding it easy to yield you up to the first young fellow that came along and asked for you. You have been my own girl for so many years, that the thought of losing you distracted me. But we won’t speak about that. Write to Jack, and tell him to come home; he shall be welcome to Willowbrook. I ’ll bury a bushel of gold eagles in the lawn for him to dig up, if he is still mad on the subject. All I have is yours and his. What do I care for beyond your happiness?” and Mr. Dent put his arm around Prudence and kissed her much the same as he might have done before John Dent ever came to Rivermouth.

The wisest way to treat a skeleton is to ignore it. There is nothing a skeleton likes more than coddling: nothing it likes less than neglect. Neglect causes it to pine away—if a skeleton, even in a metaphor, can be said to pine away—and crumble into dust.

“ And now,” cried Mr. Dent, “ let us see what the young man has to say for himself. ’ ’

He never did things by halves, this honest gentleman. When he made beer he made the best beer Rivermouth ever tasted; though he was no longer proud of it.

He picked up the letter and handed it to Prudence, who could not speak for surprise and joy over this sudden transformation. She sat motionless for a minute, with her eyes bright with tears, and then broke the seal.

“ I ’ll read it aloud,” said Prue primly, as one with authority.

The letter was not from California, as they had expected, but was dated at an obscure little post-village with a savage name somewhere on the frontiers of Montana.

Bewildering rumors of gold discoveries in the Indian Territory had caused a change in the plans of the adventurers at the last moment.¹ Instead of proceeding to San Francisco, they had struck for the other side of the Rocky Mountains. They were now on their way to the new gold regions. At Salt Lake City, where they had halted to purchase mining implements, tents, provisions, etc., John Dent had been too busy to write; he did not know when he would be able to write again; probably not for several months. They were going into the wilds where postal arrangements were of the most primitive order. The country was said to be infested by bushwhackers, on the lookout for unprotected baggage trains bound for the diggings, and for lucky miners returning with their spoils. Besides, scouting parties of the Bannock tribe had an ugly fashion of waylaying the mail and decorating their persons with canceled postage-stamps. Under these circumstances communication with the States would be difficult and might be impossible. Dent and Twombly were traveling with a body of forty or fifty men, among whom certain claims already secured were to be divided on their arrival at the point of destination in Red Rock Cañon. Their special mess consisted of Twombly, Dent, and a young man named Nevins, whom they had picked up at Salt Lake City. This Nevins, it appeared, had made a fortune in California in ’56, and lost it in some crazy silver-mining speculation two years before. He had come over with a crowd from Nevada, and found himself in Salt Lake City with one suit of clothes and a large surplus of unemployed pluck. He was thoroughly up in gold-digging, a very superior fellow in every way, and would be of immense service to the tyros. The three were to work on shares, Nevins putting his knowledge and experience against their capital and ignorance. John Dent was in high spirits.

If there was-any gold in Montana, he and Twombly and Nevins had sworn to have it. There was no doubt of the gold; and three bold hearts and three pairs of strong hands were going to seek it all they knew. “ I thank my stars,” he wrote, “ that Uncle Ralph opposed me as he did in a certain matter; if he had not, I should probably at this moment be lying around New York on a beggarly salary, instead of marching aloug with a score or so of brave fellows to pick up a princely fortune in Red Rock Cañon.”

“Well, I hope he will pick up the princely fortune, with all my heart,” remarked Mr. Dent, when they came to the end of the disjointed and incoherent four pages.

There was not a word of love in them, and no allusion to the past, except the passage quoted, and the reading had been without awkwardness.

Prue was relieved, for she had broken the seal with some doubt as to the effect of a love-letter on her guardian even in his present blissful mood; and Mr. Dent himself was well satisfied with the absence of sentiment, though the spirit underlying the letter was evident enough.

“ If I were aman,” Prudence said, “I would not be a clerk in a shop, or sit all day like a manikin on a stool with a pen stuck behind my ear, while new worlds full of riches and adventures lay wide open for gallant souls. Cousin John was right to go, and I would not have him return until he has done his best like a man. It will be a great thing for him, uncle, it will teach him self-assurance and ” —

“ But, Prue, dear, I don’t think that was a quality he lacked,” put in Mr. Dent, with a twinkle in his eye.

“ Well, it will do him good, anyhow,” said Prue didactically; then, sinking her voice to a minor key and sweeping her guardian from head to foot with her silken lashes, she added, “ and I do not mind so much his being away, now you are kind to me. What trouble could be unbearable while I can turn to you who have been father, mother, lover, and all the world to me! ”

She was rewarding him for his concessions. The words dropped like honey from the girl’s lips. An hour before they would have been full of bitterness to him; but he was a new man within these sixty minutes; he had trampled his folly under foot, and was ready to accept as very precious the only kind of affection she had to give him. The color must be lured back into those cheeks and the troubled face taught to wear its happy look again. What a cruel egotist he had been, nursing his own preposterous fancies and breaking down the health of the girl!

“ A perfect dog in the manger,” he said to himself, as he marched up and down the garden walks, in the afternoon sunshine, with a lighter heart than he had carried for many a week. “ And what a sentimental old dog! I shall be writing verses next, and printing them in the poet’s corner in the Rivermouth Barnacle. I declare I am alarmed about myself. A man ought n't to be in his dotage at fifty-six. If Jack knew of this he would be justified in placing me in the State Lunatic Asylum.”

So Mr. Dent derided himself pleasantly that afternoon, and said severer things of his conduct than I am disposed to set down here, though it is certainly a great piece of folly for a young lad of fifty-six to fall in love with an old lady of eighteen,—particularly when she is his ward, and especially when she loves his nephew.

The four or five months that succeeded the receipt of John Dent’s letter sped swiftly and happily over the Willowbrook people. Mr. Dent was, if anything, kinder to Prudence than he had ever been. His self-conquest was so complete that on several occasions he led himself in chains, so to speak, to the parsonage, and took a morbid pleasure in playing backgammon with the old clergyman.

No farther tidings had come to them from John Dent; but Prudence had been prepared for a long silence, and did not permit this to disturb her. She was her old self again, filling the house with sunshine.

Air. Dent said to her one day: “ Prue,

I really believe that you love Jack.” Prudence beamed upon him.

“ What made you ? ’ ’ asked her guardian, thoughtfully.

“He did.”

“ I suppose so; but I don’t see how he did it.”

“ Well, then, you did.”

“ I ? ”

“ Yes, — by opposing us! ”

“ Oh, if I had shut my eyes and allowed Jack to make love to you, then you would n’t have loved him? ”

“ Possibly not.”

“ I wish I had let him! ”

“I wish you had,” said Prue, demurely.

“ It was obstinacy, then? ”

“Just sheer obstinacy,” said Prue, turning a hem and smoothing it on her knee with the rosy nail of her forefinger. Then she leaned one elbow on the work, and, resting her chin on her palm, looked up into her guardian’s face after the manner of that little left-hand cherub in the foreground of Raphael’s Madonna di San Sisto.

Mr. Dent went on with his newspaper, leaving Prue in a brown study.

The period preceding John Dent’s visit seemed to Prudence like some faroff historical epoch with which she could not imagine herself contemporary. Her existence had been so colorless before, made up of unimportant happy nothings. It was so full now of complicated possibilities. A new future had opened upon her, all unlike that eventless one she had been in the habit of contemplating, in which she was to glide from merry girlhood with its round hats, into fullblown spinstership with its sedate bonnets, and tlience into serene old age with its prim caps and silver-bowed spectacles, — mistress of Willowbrook in these various stages, placidly pouring out tea for her guardian and executing chefs-d’œuvre in worsted to be sold for the benefit of the heathen.

This tranquil picture — with that vague background of cemetery which will come into pictures of the future — had not been without its charm for Prudence. To grow old leisurely in that pleasant old mansion among the willows, and to fall asleep in the summer or winter twilight after an untroubled, secluded-violet sort of life, had not appeared so hard a fate to her. But now it seemed to Prudence that that would be a very hard fate indeed.

In the mean while the days wore on, not unhappily, as I have said. Nearly a year went by, and then Prudence began to share the anxiety of the Twombly family, who had heard nothing from Joseph since the inclosure sent in John Dent’s letter.

“ You remember what be wrote about the uncertainty of the mails,” said Mr. Dent, cheeringly. “ More than likely the Bannock braves are at this moment seated around the council-fire, with all their war-paint on, perusing Jack’s last epistle, and wondering what the deuce he is driving at.”

Prue laughed, but her anxiety was not dispelled by the suggestion. She had a presentiment which she could not throw off that all was not well with the adventurers. What might not happen to them, among the desperate white men and lawless savages, out there in the territory? Mr. Dent called her his little pocket Cassandra, and tried to laugh down her fancies; but in the midst of his pleasantries and her forebodings a letter came, — a letter which Prue read with blanched lip and cheek, and then laid away, to grow yellow with time, in a disused drawer of the old brassmounted writing-desk that stood in her bedroom. It was a letter with treachery and shipwreck and despair in it. A great calamity had befallen John Dent, He had made his pile — and lost it. But how he made it and how he lost it must be told by itself.

T. B. Aldrich.