Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1882 — A FOOLISH MISTAKE. [ARTICLE]

A FOOLISH MISTAKE.

CHAPTER I. “ Lucy, which of us are you going to give up, Mark Beauclere or me? It must be one of us, dear, and the sooner vou decide the better.” The Bpeaker—a tall, lithe, brownhaired, brown-skinned young fellow of tbree-aud-twenty, with an honest face and a pair of earnest blue eyes—placed himself very deliberately in Lucy Armstrong’s way, as she was strolling under the trees in the shady old garden, with lier liat pulled over her eyes, and a pooket volume of some poet in her hands. It was a scorching July afternoon, and Lucy had quietly slipped away from the half-dozen ladies who were sitting round her Aunt Hester’s tea-table, discussing all the latest news of the parish. Mark Beauclere, an {esthetic young geutieman of 30, with a very fine voice, rather weak sight and a large income, was there too, but, as he generally was to be found at Miss Hester Armstrong’s tea-table,, he counted almost as one of the ladies ; and Lucy was a little tired of them all, and wanted to be alone. She looked as if she were having some very pleasant thoughts, as she sauntered under the trees, and seemed in no way prepared for the sudden interruption. “ Why, George, you quite startled me,” she said, standing still, for George Leslie had placed himself in her way. “ Why didn’t you go in and have some tea?’’ “ Because I wanted to talk to you, Lucy. I’ve been trying to get an opportunity of talking to you for the last week, and I couldn’t. I want to know which of us you are going to give up, Mark or me ?” “ Seeing that I never possessed either of you, it would be rather premature of me to say,” and she glanced up at him from under the shelter of her hat. “Why, George, what’s tho matter?” she asked, laying her hand lightly upon his aim “Are you ill—or—angry? ’ “No, only heart-sick and sorry and disappointed,” and the young fellow looked quite haggard. “I suppose I ought to congratulate you, and then efface myself as speedily as possible; but when a fellow lias cared about somebody all his life, as I have cared about you, it’s not so easy, Lucy. ” “ What’s not easy, George ? I really have not the slightest idea of what you’re talking about,’’Lucy cried, growing very red and confused. “Do tell me exactly what you mean, like a good boy. ” George winced, and turned aside with rather a savage expression. To be called “a good boy” by Lucy under certain circumstauces would be all very well, but in that tolerant, almost patronizing tone, it was too much. “Am I not to congratulate you on your engagement to Mr. Beauclere ?” he said grimly. ’ “Certainly not,” was the very grave reply. “ Then you’ve refused him, Lucy?” with humiliating eagerness. “ I guessed you would.” “ Mr. Beauclere has not done me the honor of asking me.” ‘ * All 1” and George’s face fell perceptibly. “ But you will refuse him, Loo, won’t you?” he continued. “He told me he was going to propose this very day,” in a savage whisper. “ Then perhaps he will inform you es my reply in due course,” and she looked np with a droll twinkle in her bright hazel eyes. “ Now, George, if you’re not coming in to have some tea, let me pass, please.” “But you don’t care about him, Loo, do you?” he whispered, with a very penitent glance. “ Pardon me, Hike Mr. Beauclere very much, indeed. Why shouldn’t I? and I thought, George, you and he were friends. ”

George turned away with an exclamation that sounded like “Confound him,” and Lucy returned to the houee, Berenely smiling under her broadbrimmed hat. The drawing-room was empty, but in a little snuggery beyond, which her aunt called her boudoir, there was a muffled hum of voices, and Lucy smiled more comically than ever as she went upstairs to change her dress for dinner. Both George Leslie and Mr. Mark Beanclere were to dine at “The Nest,” and Lucy, brimful of mischief, resolved to tease George thoroughly before she put him out of his misery. So she donned a fresh jnuslin gown, and fastened a crimson rose in her hair, and then went down and took her seat near the drawing-room window, which commanded the entrance to the front garden, and with a very demure smile awaited the course of events. Presently she was joined by her aunt, looking gravely important, and bristling all over with a secret. Miss Hester was a tail, slender, keen-eyed, thin-lipped lady of as near 40 as possible, with smooth dark hair, regular features, and a stately, hot to say commanding, presence; she had very beautiful white

hands, and she used them a good deal in a majestic way. When dinner was announced it was by a wave of them she signified to her niece that she meant to proceed at once to the dining-room. Lucy followed her with suppressed amusement beaming from every feature of her face. She guessed pretty accurately what her aunt’s secret was, though, till Miss Hester opened the subject, she would not breathe even a hint of it. As the dinner progressed in impressive silence, she found herself wondering why George did not come. Later on, as she sat at the piano in the twilight, and played over her favorite songs, of them, wandering aimlessly from “ Auld Lang Svne ” to the “ Lass of Richmond lull, and then to “Home, Sweet Home,” she little thought who was listening to her on the other side of the lilao tree shaded the drawing-room window. There, in safe obscurity, George Leslie listened, till he heard the piano closed with just the suspicion of a bang, and saw Lucy’s slight white-robed figure cross the room and approach the open window, then he stole away noiselessly with something between a sob and a sigh. There was even a suspicious and humiliating moisture in the poor fellow’s eyes as h© hurried across the fields in the direction of the railway station. “She’s treated me very badly—but, for all that, I hope she may be happy. Heaven bless her!” he said, as he caught a glimpse of “Tho Nest” as the train shrieked past. Then he shrank back into his comer and gave himself up to the bitterest reflection. He found it difficult to realize that he was rejected; yet Beauclere had told him distinctly that he had proposed to Miss Armstrong that afternoon, and had been accepted. There was no further reason for his staying at Westwater; and he was going to ask his uncle, of the firm of Leslie & Longhampton, to send him on a confidential mission to the extreme end of the earth, where they were supposed to do business. George could not be philosophical enough to look at happiness “through another man’s eyes,” so he determined to get completely out of the way of Mark Beauclere; and lie could not even summon up courage to congratulate Lucy or say good-by; but he wrote her a nice little letter, in which a good deal of real feeling was hidden under some stiff, formal phrases, and through it all peeped a very sore, bruised, affronted, but still faithful, love. Lucy laughed at it first, and then cried over it, then wiped her eyes, and WTote an explanatory and affectionate reply; but, alas! George was gone on the confidential mission. His letter said that he was on the eve of starting for China, and bore the Southampton postmark. He said lie might be absent for years, or forever. To poor Lucy, in the first dismay of her discovery that George was really gone, it seemed the same thing.

CHAPTER 11. “My dear Leslie, this is a surprise and a pleasure 1 How are you ? When did you get back ?” and George Leslie found his baud grasped by a portly, comfortable-looking gentleman in goldrimmed glasses and a wideawake hat. “I—l beg your pardon, I don’t—l can’t quite recall you, though I seem to remember your voice,” George stammered. The portly gentleman laughed. ‘‘Well, you’re more changed than I am, i dare say, and yet I knew you in a moment. Is it possible that you have forgotten—” “ Beauclere ? Whv, of course ; liow stupid of me 1” and George’s face grew a very curious brick color as he wrung his old friend’s hand. ‘ ‘ I’ve been away five years, Mark, and it tells on all of us.” ‘‘ I wish it told such a flattering tale od me as it does on you,” Mark said, with a smile. “ Come and dine with me, old fellow—no excuses—it won’t put us out in the least. Mrs. Beauclere is at Brighton with Miss Armstrong, so I’m en garcon. We live at Putney. Jump in—” as a ’bus came up—“ and tell me all about your adventures, aud when you returned.” “ I only landed three days ago, aud I haven’t had any adventures except of the most commonplace kind. The business I went out to manage turned out very well, I made some money, and I’ve come to England to settle down—that’s all. How is Mrs. Beauclere?” “ Quite well, thanks. Have you put on the halter yet, George ?” “No. The Celestial Empire is certainly not the place of all others to tempt a man to matrimony.” “ Lucky fellow ! I wish I had gone there with you.” George was silent—it seemed like treason to echo the wish. It was just like the monster Mark, ever to express it. Of course he made poor Lucy miserable, that was only to be expected. How he ever could have become so supremely dull and commonplace George I couldn’t imagine. When he entered the drawingroom he couldn’t help noticing little evidences of Lucy about; her old-fashioned work-table—a black cat, which he seemed dimly to remember—books, and a drawing or two. His heart beat a little quickly ; and on the whole he was glad that he had not to meet her on the first evening. “Does Miss Armstrong always live with you ? ” he asked presently. “Yes, of course; where else could she live? Indeed, I don’t know iu the least how tho house would get on without her. You see, my wife and I go in for politics and literature, and that sort of thing; and if we hadn’t some one to keep us in order and see to our creature comforts, I’m afraid we’d starve. If eVer you do marry, George, don’t select a clever woman with a taste for logic and metaphysics,” Mark whispered, looking round cautiously. “ It’s simply awful ! ” ‘ ‘ I never fancied Mrs. Beauclere would develop a taste for those snbjects, ” George replied ; and then he smiled a little sadly as he thought of Lucy as a blue-stock-ing, and Aunt Hester, who had always been his special horror, whisking about the house, upsetting the domestic comfort of every one, and waving her hands, in command or disapproval, unceasingly. “ I never could stand it, 1 know,” he said to himself, as Mark went on giving him some details of the establishment, with a sort of rueful good humor. “ A clever wife and an energetic aunt-in-law would be too much for me. ” * And it had evidently proved too much for poor Mark Beauclere. He was no longer slender, sentimental and esthetic ; indeed, his chief idea in life seemed to be thorough enjoyment of such pleasures as remained to him. He enjoyed his dinner, for instance, thoroughly, and grew quite confidential over his coffee after.

“It was very sudden, your going away, George,” he remarked, after a long chat over the old times at Westwater, and the pleasant evenings they used to have at “The Nest.” “Do you know, I thought once that you had rather a fancy for Lucy?” George grew brick-red again, and bent his eyes resolutely on the table. “It would have been a capital thing for you; and I believed she liked you, for she seemed altogether out of sorts when she got your letter. In fact, George, you might have done much worse than to have married Lucy Armstrong.” Still silence and steady contemplation of his glass, on the part of George. “ And, for that matter, you might do worse than marry her still.” George looked up with a sudden angry flash, then he grew quite white. Mark was not chaffing in the least, he felt that; still he could not take it all in at once.

“I believe it’s entirely pn your account she has remained single,” Mark continued, with good-natured garrulity, “in spite of all her aunt's efforts to get her well married.” “Did you say Mrs. Beauclere was staying at Brighton V George presently asked, in a very meek voice; “because! thought of winning down there few afew days. Will you come, Mark?*’ “ No, thank yon,” with a droll shrug. “My wife and Lucy are staying at the Royal; give them my love, and tell them they need not hurry back, as I’m all right. r ’ * * * * * * * “Lucy, dearest, can yon forgive me ? It was all a dreadful mistake from first to last! I thought it was yon Mark wanted to marry; and. when he told me that evening that he had proposed and been accepted, I was frantic. Aunt Hester never once entered my head.” Lucy’s reply was a little unintelligible, but alter a time they managed to understand each other. Mjss Armstrong could not long resist a lover who had been faithful to her for five years, even when he believed her lost to him forever ; and George resolved to marry her out of hand, so that there should be no more misunderstandings. Sometimes Mark Beauclere chaffs them both a little about George’s mistake; but he always boldly asserts that the great mistake was Mark’s after all.