第58章 A Wretched Secret that Must be Kept.(1)

The interview described in the previous chapter touched Van Berg deeply,but its close puzzled him.Under the influences of his aroused feelings had his face expressed more than mere sympathy?

Had her strong intuition,that was like a second sight,interpreted his heart more clearly than he had been able to understand it himself as yet?Reason and judgement,his privy council,had already begun to advise him to win if possible this unselfish maiden,who with a divine alchemy transmuted her shadows into sunshine for others,and often suggested the thought,if she can do this in sorrow,how inexpressibly happy she might make you and your aged father and mother if you could first find out in some way how to make her happy.

Indeed,so clear a case did these counsellors make out,that conscience added her authoritative voice also,and assured him that he would be false to himself and his future did he not,to the utmost,avail himself and his future did he not,to the utmost,avail himself of the opportunity of winning one whose society from the first had been an inspiration to better thoughts and better living.

Until this evening his heart had remained sluggish.Sweet and potent as her voice had been,it had not penetrated to the "holy of holies"within his soul.But had not her low sad tones echoed there to-night in the half involuntary confidence she had given him?

In his deep sympathy,in the answering feeling evoked by her strong but repressed emotion,he thought his heart had been stirred to its depths,and that henceforth its chief desire would be to banish the sorrowful memories typified to her mind by the black clouds above him.Had his face revealed this impulse of his heart before he had been fully conscious of it himself?Was it an unwelcome discovery,that she so hastily fled from it?Or had she been only startled--her maidenly reserve shrinking from the first fore-shadowing of the supreme request that she should unveil the mysteries of her life to one who but now had been a stranger?He did not know.He felt he scarcely understood her or himself;but he was conscious of a hope that both might meet their happy fate in each other.

He leaned thus for a time absorbed in thought against a pillar where she had left him,then sauntered with bowed head and preoccupied manner to the main entrance,down the steps and out into the darkness.

He did not even notice that he passed Ida Mayhew,where she stood among a group of gay chattering young people.Still less did he know that she had been furtively watching his interview with Miss Burton,and that when he passed her without a glance her face was as pale as had been that of the object of his thoughts.But he had not strolled very far down a gravelled path before she compelled him to distinguish her reckless laugh and tones above all the others.

With an impatient gesture he muttered,"God made them both,Isuppose;and so there's another mystery."As Van Berg's interest in Miss Burton had deepened,it had naturally flagged toward the one whose marvelously fair features had first caught his attention and now promised to be links in a chain of causes that might produce effects little anticipated.He had virtually abandoned the project of seeking to ennoble and harmonize these features that suggested new possibilities of beauty to almost every glance,for the reason that he not only believed there was no mind to be awakened,but also because he had been led to think the girl so depraved and selfish at heart that the very thought of a larger,purer life was repugnant to her.He believed she disliked and even detested him,not so much on personal grounds as because he represented to her mind a class of ideas and a self-restraint that were hateful.Circumstances had associated her in his mind with Sibley,who thus cast a baleful shadow athwart even her beauty and made it repulsive.Indeed the mocking perfection of her features irritated him,and he began to make a conscious and persistent effort not to look toward her.He now regarded his hope to illumine her face from within,by delicate touches of mind,thought,and motive,as vain as an attempt to carve the Venus of Milo out of mottled pumice-stone.Still he did not regret to-night the freak of fancy that had brought him to the Lake House,since it had led to his meeting a woman who was to him a new and beautiful revelation of the rarest excellence and grace.

But there was no such compensating outlook for poor Ida.To her,his coming promised daily to result in increasing wretchedness.