Double Trouble | Page 5

his clothes?
I must denounce myself!"
The porter came, and, by way of denouncing himself, Mr. Amidon
clapped his waistcoat shut and buttoned it, snapped the catches of the
bags, and pretended to busy himself with the letters in his pockets; and
in doing so, he found in an inside vest-pocket a long thin pocket-book
filled with hundred-dollar bills, and a dainty-looking letter. It was
addressed to Mr. Eugene Brassfield, was unstamped, and marked, "To
be Read En Route."
There was invitation, there was allurement, in the very superscription.
Clearly, it seemed, he ought to open and examine these letters. They
might serve to clear up this mystery. He would begin with this.
"My darling!" it began, without any other form of address--and was not
this enough, beloved?--

"My own darling! I write this so that you may have something of me,
which you can see and touch and kiss as you are borne farther and
farther from me. Distance unbridged is such a terrible thing--any long
distance; and more than our hands may reach and clasp across is
interstellar space to me. You said last night that all beauty, all
sweetness, all things delectable and enticing and fair, all things which
allure and enrapture, are so bound up in little me, that surely the very
giants of steam and steel would be drawn back to me, instead of
bearing you away. Ah, my Eugene! You wondered why I put my hands
behind me, and would not see your out-stretched arms! Now that you
are gone, and will not return for so long--until so near the day when I
may be all that I am capable of becoming to you, let me tell you--I was
afraid!
"Not of you, dearest, not of you--for with all your ardor of wooing (and
no girl ever had a more perfect lover--I shall always thank God for that
mixture of Lancelot and Sir Galahad in you which makes every
moment in your presence a delight), I always knew that you could leave
me like a sensible boy, and, while longing for me, stay away. But
I--whom you have sometimes complained of a little for my
coldness--had I not looked above your eyes, and put my hands behind
me, I should have clung to you, dear, I was afraid, and never have
allowed you to go as you are now going, and made you feel that I am
not the perfect woman that you describe to me, as me. Even now, I fear
that this letter will do me harm in your heart; but all the lover in
me--and girls inherit from their fathers as well as from their
mothers--cries out in me to woo you; and you must forget this, only at
such times of tenderness as you will sometimes have while you are
gone, when one embrace would be worth a world. Then read or
remember this, as my return-clasp for such thoughts.
"Besides, may I not, now that you are away from me, give you a
glimpse of that side of my soul which a girl is taught to hide? This was
the 'swan's nest among the reeds' which Little Ellie meant to show to
that lover who, maybe, never came. Ah, Mrs. Browning was a woman,
and knew! (Mind, dear, it's Mrs. Browning I speak of!)

"Sometimes, when the Knight has come, and the wife wishes to show
the glories of her soul, 'the wild swan has deserted, and a rat has
gnawed the reed.' Let the wild and flowery little pool of womanhood
which is yours--yours, dearest--grow somewhat less strange to you than
it would have been--last evening--so that when you see me again you
will see it as a part of me, and, without a word or look from me, know
me, even more than you now do,
"Yours,
"Elizabeth."
Florian read it again and again. Sometimes he blushed--not with shame,
but with the embarrassment of a girl--at the fervid eloquence. And then
he would feel a twinge of envy for this Eugene Brassfield who could be
to such a girl "a perfect lover."
"From one soon to be a bride," said he to himself, "to the man she loves:
it's the sweetest letter ever written. I wonder how long ago she wrote it!
Here's the date: 7th January, 1901. Odd, that she should mistake the
year! But it was the 7th, no doubt. By the way, I don't know the day of
the week or month, or what month it is! Here, boy! Is that the morning
paper?"
He seized the paper feverishly, held it crushed in his hand until the boy
left him, and then spread it out, looking for the date. It was January the
8th, 1901! The letter had been written the preceding evening. Whatever
had happened