Double Trouble | Page 5

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 to this man Brassfield, had occurred within the past sixteen hours. And, great God! where had Florian Amidon been since June, 1896? All was dark; and, in sympathy with it, blackness came over his eyes, and he rode into New York in a dead faint.

III
ANY PORT IN A STORM
Cosimo: Join us, Ludovico! Our plans are ripe, Our enterprise as fairly lamped with promise As yon steep headland, based, 'tis true, with cliff, But crowned with waving palms, and holding high Its beaconing light, as holds its jewel up, Your lady's tolling finger! Come, the stage Is set, your cue is spoke.
Ludovico: And