Hearts Afire - By J. D. Rawden Page 0,41
on Friday—leave your house as if you were going for a walk, and take a carriage to the garden. I shan’t be in the garden—that might arouse suspicions; but I shall be in the street across from the garden, awaiting your arrival. Find me there—come as swiftly as you can. We will meet there, and then we will leave for the big city, and sail for the East from there. I have some money. My entire savings for the past two years. Afterward— when this money is spent—well, we will work for our living.
“Remember, remember: Friday, at noon, leave your house. At half past one come to me at the garden. Don’t forget, for mercy’s sake. If you shouldn’t arrive at the right time, what would become of me, alone, at the garden, in anguish, devoured by anxiety?
“My sweetest love, this is the last letter you will receive from me. Why, as I write these words, does a feeling of sorrow come upon me, making me bow my head? The word last is always sad, whenever it is spoken. Will you always love me, even though far from your country, even though poor, even though unhappy? You won’t accuse me of having wronged you? You will protect me and sustain me with your love? You will be kind, honest, loyal. You will be all that I care for in the world.
“This is my last letter, it is true, but soon now our wondrous future will begin—our life together. Remember, remember where I shall wait for you.
“Charlotte,”
THE BETRAYAL.
Alone in his little house, Harleigh Daly read Charlotte’s letter twice through, slowly, slowly. Then his head fell upon his breast. He felt that he was lost, ruined; that Charlotte was lost and ruined.
At that late morning hour the “Universal Store” of Lady Denham, white with stucco, rich with gold ornamentation, with softly carved marbles and old pictures, was almost empty. A few pious old women moved vaguely here and there, wrapped in black shawls; a few strained their eyes toward the latest fashions. Charlotte and her mother, were standing in the middle of the store, with their eyes bent on the latest hats from Paris. Lysbet Morgan had a worn, sunken face that must have once been delicately pretty, with that sort of prettiness which fades before fifty. Charlotte wore a dark serge frock, with a jacket in the English fashion; and her brown hair was held in place by a comb of yellow tortoise-shell. The warm pallor of her face was broken by no trace of color. Every now and then she bit her lips nervously.
Presently the young girl rose.
“I am going to outside for a moment,” Charlotte said, walking toward the door.
Lysbet Morgan did not seek to detain her. With a light step she crossed the store and made it to front door without incident.
Charlotte stole swiftly out of the store into the street, where she hailed a carriage, and bade the good-man drive to Kalchhook Hill garden. She drew down the blinds of the carriage windows, and there in the darkness she could scarcely suppress a cry of mingled joy and pain to find herself at last alone and free.
The carriage rolled on and on; it was like the movement of a dream. The only thing she could think of was this beautiful and terrible idea, that she, Charlotte, had abandoned forever her home and her family, carrying away only so much of her savings as the purse in her pocket could hold, to throw herself into the arms of Harleigh Daly. No feeling of fear held her back. Her entire past life was ended, she could never take it up again; it was over, it was over.
In that sort of somnambulism which accompanies a decisive action, she was as exact and rigid in everything she had to do as an automaton. At the street by the garden she paid her driver, and mechanically bid him a good day.
She descended from the carriage when the driver tipped his hat, and followed the street toward the meeting place.
She went on, looking neither to right nor left, up the narrow, dusty lane that leads from the street to the garden’s gate. Neither hide nor hair noticed her; the solitary young woman, with the warm, pale face, and the great brown-black eyes that gazed straight forward, without interest in what they saw, the eyes of a soul consumed by an emotion. When she arrived at the meeting place, she ensconced herself on a