“Yes, I know myself,” he said; “I think I know her. I’ll hesitate no longer; some fool may ‘rush in.’ To-morrow shall settle it. The tough old Scotchman was right:
‘He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all!’”
That same afternoon, at two o’clock, Mr. Vanderbilt Morris’s stylish dog-cart, drawn by his high-spirited bays, drew up at Miss Rose Wood’s domicile. Holding the reins sat Mr. Andrew Browne, beaming as though Chambertin had never been pressed from the grape; seemingly as fresh as though headache had never slipped with the rest out of Pandora’s box.
But it may have been only seemingly; for, faultlessly attired from scarf-pin to glove tips, Andy was still a trifle more uneasy than the dancing of his restless team might warrant in so noted a whip as he. A queer expression swept over his handsome face from time to time; and, as he came to a halt, he glanced furtively over his shoulder, as though fearing something in pursuit.
“Ask Miss Rose if she will drive with me,” he said hurriedly to the servant. “Say I can’t get down to come in; the horses are too fresh.”
Then the off-horse danced a polka in space, responsive to deft tickling with the whip.
Miss Wood did not stand upon ceremony, nor upon the order of her going, but went at once to get her wraps.
“Better late than never,” she said to herself, as she dived into a drawer and upset her mouchoir case in search for a particular handkerchief. “I really couldn’t comprehend his absence and silence all day – but, poor boy! he’s so young!” And then Miss Rose, as she tied a becoming cardinal bow under her chin, hummed two bars of “The Wedding March” through the pins in her mouth.
Two minutes later saw her seated on the high box beside her future lord in posse; the bays plunging like mad and Andy swinging to the reins as if for life. For, before she could speak one word – and for no reason to her apparent – he had let the limber lash drop stingingly across their backs.
Very keen was the winter wind that swept by her tingling ears; and Miss Wood raised her seal-skin muff and hid her modest blushes from it. For that gentle virgin had ever a familiar demon at her elbow. His name was Experience; and now he whispered to her: “A red nose never reflects sentiment!”
“And he is so particular how one looks,” Miss Rose whispered back to the familiar; and her tip-tilted feature sought deeper protection in the furs.
At length, when well off the paved streets, the mad rush of the brutes cooled down to a swinging trot – ten miles an hour; Browne’s tense arms relaxed a trifle; and he drew a long, deep breath – whether of relief, or anxiety, no listener could have guessed. But he kept his eyes still rooted to that off-horse’s right ear as though destiny herself sat upon its tip.
Then, for the first time, he spoke; and he spoke with unpunctuated rapidity, in a hard, mechanical tone, as though he were a bad model of Edison’s latest triumph, and some tyro hand was grinding at the cylinder.
“Miss Rose,” he began, “we are old friends – never so old; but I can never sufficiently regret – last night!”
He felt, rather than saw, the muff come sharply down and the face turn full to him; regardless now of the biting wind.
“No! don’t interrupt me,” he went on, straight at the off-horse’s right ear. “I know your goodness of heart; know how it pained you; but you could have done nothing else but —refuse me!”
Miss Rose Wood’s mouth opened quickly; but a providential gutter jolted her nearly from the seat; and the wind drove her first word back into her throat like a sob.
The inexorable machine beside her ground on relentless.
“Yes, I understand what you would say: that you refused me firmly and finally because I —deserved it!” Had Andy Browne’s soul really been the tin-foil of the phonograph, it could not have shown more utter disregard of moral responsibility. “You knew I was under the influence of wine; that I would never have dared to address you had I been myself! I repeat, I deserve my —decisive rejection! It was proper and just in you to say ‘No!’”
Woman’s will conquered for one brief second. Spite of wind and spite of him, Miss Wood began:
“‘No?’ I – ”
“Yes, ‘no!’” broke in the relentless machinery. It ground on implacable, though great beads stood on Andy’s brow from sheer terror lest he run down before the end. “No! as firmly, as emphatically as you said it to me last night. Indeed, I honor you the more for flatly refusing the man who, in forgetting his self-respect, forgot his respect —for you! But, Miss Rose, while I pledge you my honor never, never to speak to you again of love, I may still be —your friend!”
The bays were bowling down the street again by this time; when another kismet, in small and ugly canine form, flew at their heads with yelp and snarl. Rearing with one impulse, the spirited pair lunged forward and flew past the now twinkling lamps in a wild gallop. Andy pulled them down at last; their swinging trot replacing the dangerous rush. The Wood mansion was almost in sight; but the Ancient Mariner was a tyro to Andy Browne in the way he fixed that off-horse’s right ear with stony stare.
He might have looked round in perfect safety. The lithe figure by him sat gracefully erect. The face a trifle pale; the lips set tight against each other, with the blood pressed out of them, were not unnatural in that cutting wind. The eyes, fixed straight ahead, as his own, gleamed gray and cold; only a half-closing of the lids, once or twice, hiding an ugly light reflecting through them from the busy brain behind. But Andy never turned once until he brought up the bays stock still and leaped down to offer his hand to the lady at her own door.
She took it, naturally; springing to the ground as lightly as any débutante of the season. Not one trace of annoyance, even, showed on that best educated face.
“Andy, we are old friends,” she said, offering her hand frankly.
He took it mechanically, with a dazed soft of feeling that he must be even a bigger fool than he felt himself.
“Real friends,” Miss Wood went on, pleasantly, “and I’ll prove it to you now. You have acted like a man of honor to me; I will betray one little confidence, and make two people happy!”
The man still stood dumb; and his eye furtively wandered to the pawing off-horse, as if to take his confidence as to what it meant. The woman’s next words came slowly, and she smiled; a strange smile the lips alone made, but in which the glinting gray eyes took no share.
“For Van Morris is your best friend, after all. He will remember that I told him, last night, ‘One cannot be too careful’!”
She rose on tiptoe, whispered three words, and was gone before he could frame one in reply.
Once more those ill-used bays got the whip fiercely; and they turned the corner so short that Mr. Trotter Upton looked over his shoulder with a grin, and remarked to the blaze-faced companion in his sulky shafts:
“Nine hundred dollars’ worth of horse risked with nine dollars’ worth of man! Van Morris better drive his own stock. G’long!”
It was two o’clock when Mr. Andrew Browne had ridden forth to recapture his plighted troth.
The