Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1885 — GOLDEN FETTERS. [ARTICLE]

GOLDEN FETTERS.

By EBEN E. REXFORD.

Catherine Warfield walked slowly down the orchard path, thinking. The wind from the valley came up the hill, bringing to her sweet scents of late blossoming clover from the meadow by the river. Now and then an apple dropped from the branches of the gnarled old trees about her, and fell into the crisp, brown grass, burned by the September heat until all its freshness had departed as if a frost had touched it, and a bluebird sang plaintively overhead, as if sorrowing for summer’s going. But it was not of these things she thought. “If I only knew what to do,” she said to herself, as she went slowly down the lane, “it is so hard to choose between the man I love, who is and the man I do not love, who is rich. But the choice must be made, and I must make it now. If I could only see into the future a little—if I could know which life would give me most happiness?” All her life she had been used to luxury. Her father supported his family in a style out of all proportion to his income, and nothing had been laid by. Therefore, when she married, the man of her choice must have wealth if she cared to go on in fashionab.e life. ••John Marsh is rich,” she said, thinking of the man her father wanted her to marry, but the thought did not bring a pleased look into her lace, it brought her a vision of an old, gray-headed man for whom she could have nothing but respect, and perhaps but little of that; so little, in fact, that it might not last long after she became the old man’s wife. “He is rich, and can give me all that wealth can buy. Robert Moore has nothing but his brain and his hands, and a great love forme. Who knows? That love might be more to me than wealth and position. Love! It tempts me—it makes me wavering and weak, if Robert Moore could only have John Marsh’s 11 onoy, how soon, how easily my c.ioieo could be made. Things are never as taey ought to be in this world.” The handsome lace took on a vexed look, bbe felt angry with Fate, Why couldn't she have the man she loved, and the money of the man she did not love? iShe heard a blithe whistle down the lane, and the sound of it brought a brighter glow to her face than the exercise of walking bad given it. It made her heart beat a trifle faster. “Why, oh, why, must I give up this great happiness?” she cried, thinking of what her life would lose when Robert Moore was shut out of it. That question, asked of herself, showed her the truth. She knew that she had deliberately made up her mind to turn her back on love tlnd sell herself forgold, though she had hardly admitted it as yet. Perhaps she had known all along what her final de cision would be; but, like most of us, she had liked to keep unpleasant truths as far in the background as possible. “Good-morning,” called out a pleasant voice, and a young man sprang over the orchard wall and joined her. She made room for the visitor in the broad path, but she was silent for some time. The sight of Robert Moore’s bright face made her weaker thau ever. It set her heart to clamoring for that which she had resolved to deny it, and it seemed to her that a word would have betrayed her. “Perhaps I am intruding,” he said presently. “1 wouldn’t have come If 1 thought I was disturbing you.” “I am glad you did come,” she said, at last. ■“I wanted to say something to you that might better be said now than by and by. Perhaps 1 ought to have said it long ago.” He looked at her questioningly. He saw that her face was grave. Her eyes had a pained look In them. The words had caused her a great effort. But she had decided to put an end to everything between them, at once ami forever. There was no use in dallying with the matter. The sooner she told him the truth the better it would be for both of them. “Sit down,” she said, when they came to a little knoll at the end of the lane. “We can have our talk out here without any one’s disturbing us." He sat down, looking up at her in a perplexed way. He had never seen her in this mood before. She broke a branch of golden-rod from the bush that leaned over the old wall, and tore the yellow blossoms slowly apart. She knew what she wanted to say, but hardly liow to say it. “I—l think I shall go back to the city in a day or two,” she said at last. She did not look at him once, but kept her eyes on the purple hills and thought, with a swift, keen pain, of what life might hold for her if this man could go through it at her side. Now that she had decided to speak the cruel words of doom, the happiness she was rejecting seemed dearer, sweeter—more worth having thau ever before. “I knew you would be going soon,” he said. "But”—and his face lighted up with pleasant anticipation—“l shall see you before long. I shall spend the winter in the city. I have often thought of taking this step, but since I have known you I have decided to go, for it will keep me near you, and there will be an incentive to work that I ■have never felt before. Do you think I would stay here contentedly after you are gone?” She did not answer; it seemed to her that she could not. He would be near her. She ■would see him often, perhaps. There was a dangerous pleasure in the thought. But it must not be. He must be made to understand that henceforth their ways lay apart. “There is something I have wanted to tell you in words that 1 think you understand plainly enough already,” he said. “1 may as well tell it now—there is no use in waiting. Do you guess what it is I have to say ?” His \ oice was low and full of an eager tenderness that thrilled her like music. She knew what he had to tell, and she was not womanly enough to prevent his telling it. though she knew what her answer would be. It would be pleasant to hear him say, “I love you.” She was cruel enough to let him say it. “I love ‘you. I ask you to be my wile by and by. Cur stations in life are different, aud the prejudices of society might lead some to say 1 was presuming, but to my mind no honest man presumes too much who loves a woman and asks her to share bis lot if she loves him. Love makes all equal. Birth or love have nothing to do with it. Since I love you, and, as I believe, you love me, I put all lalse delicacy, all deference to the opinions of others, entirely out of the question, and ask you to be my wife. Not now, not till I have prove Ito you that I mean to do something, for your sake, that shall give me a rank among men that shall be counted better than the possession of wealth. I can work hard when I feel the incentive of love urging me on. I can wait till you are willing to come to me, if -only you bid ma do so.” She listened with averted face. What a

i tumult his words made in her heart. They : made her weak again. After al', was wealth i and position worth as much as this man’s I love? If she gave it up for them, would she ■ never regret her choice? She could not deny that she hal encouraged him Ito believe that she loved him. She I did love him. She had known that long ago; ! had known, too, that it was her duty to put an end to the intimacy between them while ■ it was possible to do it, and save this man’s heart the crudest pain it had ever felt. But she ha-i found it pleasanter to drift with the tide and dream than to be a true womarn. Though she loved him she had thought more of her own selfish pleasure than of lhe pain the truth was sure to give him at last. “Here's a couple of letters lor ye,” sung out Joe, her landlady’s tow-headed son. “Got ’em down to the postoliis.” He threw them over the wall to her. gave a knowing wink at Robert Moore, and went on to the house chuckling over the interrupted “sparkin’" that he told his mother about, as he sat on the door-step munching bread and butter. Catherine Warfield took up the letters and read them through. One was from her father, telling- her that John Marsh had asked permission to propose marriage to her. “I have given my approval, and trust you understand the advantages of such a marriage too well to hesitate in giving a favorable answer to his proposal,” he wrote. The other was from John Marsh, asking her to be his wife. “Your father tells me you are coming home soon,” he wrote toward the end of his letter. “If you accept my proposal I will come out and stay a day or two with you, and accompany you home. It may be an old man's whim to want to have the woman he is to marry all to himself at first, but I know that could not be if I waited to see you here, and I think you will not refuse me the pleasure a gratification of this whim, if you choose to call it such, would give me.” Catherine Warfield’s lip curled a little with contempt as she read this. To marry an old man was bad enough; a sentimental old man was worse. “This letter is from the man I am to marry,” she said, suddenly, as one who stands on a precipice dreading a leap he knows he must make, and all at once gathers his courage and makes the fatal plunge. She did not look at him as she said it. Her face was pale, and her voice trembled, for the words hurt her cruelly, because it was a relentless putting away of the only real love her life had ever known. He heard her with such a look or his face as men wear when they see the woman they had reckoned above all other women in honor and truth and true womanliness stripped of all disguise and proved to be of common clay. The light that had been in his eyes as he tolc her of his love had faded out, and there was pain, and anger, and surprise there. "Why did you not tell nu of this before?” he asked, at [.■st. “If I had known ” She did not answer. Something in his face made her ashamed of herself. She felt her littleness, her unworthiness, her cruelty. For the pleasure it had given her, she had deceived this man and wrung his heart as nothing but the discovery of a woman’s faithlessness can wring it. It was no less deceit because she loved him. “I have been mistaken, he said at last, rising to his feet. She knew that he meant he had been mistaken in his estimate of her rather than in his feelings toward her. He had thought her too true to trifle with a man’s love. Knowing how she had trifled with his, what must be his opinion of her? Her face flushed hotly with shame at the thought. “If you had been frank and truthful with me two months ago it would have been better for both or us,” he said. “It would have saved me some pain and disappointment. However, 1 may get over that in time. But it will take a goo Ideal to make me forget how u terly unworthy you are of the love I have given you. I shall not lose my faith in women because of one woman’s faithlessness, for I believe—l know—there are true women, but it is I ard to thitik any woman could deceive u man as you have done.” He turned and walked away, his face very white and stern. She saw him going from her, and the love she felt for him rose up in arms against the decision she had made. She lelt a wild impulse to cry out, to call him back. But she did not give way to it. She felt that he would not come if she call till doomsday. Such men do not forget so grievous an injury in a moment. “I ought to have told him," she said, “but -*■l could not. It was so sweet to go on dreaming. But the dream is over at last, and we must wake up to the truth.” She turned away from the spot where they had passed so many pleasant hours together, ami wont back through the orchard to the old gray farm-house. "If John Marsh’s gold could only buy love like this I have rejected!” she cried,{as she paused for a moment on the crest of the hill to look down the road Robert Moore had taken. “If—if! Life is full of ifs, and they set everything wrong. 1 wonder if anything ever sets things right?” Yes; truth and honor right all wrongs, sooner or later, but if we Ignore them the skein of life gets into such a tangle that our hands can never straighten its many threads. Three days later John Marsh came to visit the woman whose hand had been purchased by his gold. Robert Moore saw him driving past with Miss Warfield, and smiled at the contrast between them, she in the prime of womanhood; he a bent, half-decrepit old man, trying to cheat himself into the belief that the possession of such a beautiful woman was like a renewal of youth. Miss Warfield saw the lover she had rejected, and turned her face away, with a flush, that was I half-annoyance, half-shame, on it. When they had passed him, and her gaze wandered back to the old man at her side, the look became one of pain. The thought of being his wife was repulsive, She felt that her life would be nothing but slavery. But the fetter she wore would be a golden one. In a few days they went back to the city, and Robert Moore told himself that this woman had passed out of his life forever. Their paths would never meet again. Though hisdisappointmenthad been great, he had no idea of giving up to it meekly. He would go to work in earnest and outgrow it. And he did go to work in earnest. He had intended to And somtAhing to do in the city where Miss Warfield lived, because that would bring him near her. But after he had found out the mistake he had made, he determined to go e sew here, and he set his face Westward. He read of the marriage of Miss Warfield to John Marsh, the millionaire, shortly alter he had settled down to his new work, and ho could not help feeling a thrill of pity for the woman who had sold hdrself for gold. Not long after that he read that John Marsh and his wife had gone to Europe. Then, for months, he heard nothing about them, and he was beginning to forget their existence, when he read that the o!d man had been stricken with paralysis, and physicians had forbidden his removal from the little Swiss village in which the atta k occurred. He must wait there for death, or recovery. He thought of wbat her life must be now. If she bad loved the old man, her watching and waiting by his sick-bed would have had an element or’ mournful pleasure in it. But when what we do is done from a sense of duty merely, or a fear of what the world will say if we neglect it, and love is lacking, such a life as ho knew hers must be is a dreary one. Ho could not help wondering what her choice would be now, if it were in her power to make it again. After that he road no more about them, but he heard from various sources that the life of waiting for some change to come to the old man went on the same from month to month. He lay between life and death, helpless peevish, exacting, and requiring of his wife tho obedience a slave is expected to

t give. He wondered more than once if the fetter pressed more lightly now because it was a golden one. i Five years went by. These years wrought i many changes in their passage. They opened suddenly, for 1 obert Moore, a career be bad ofiened dreamed of. The thriving Western ' city in which he had cast his lot wanted seme one to represent it at Washington, who had in him the ability to make the spirit of Western enterprise and ideas felt, t uch a man it Lelieved Robert Moore to be, and believ.ng that, it decided that he should be its repre1 sentative at the Capitol, and so it came about that before he had reached his thirti- ■ cth year he was Senator Moore. People ■ whose opinion was worth something spoke of I him as being a “promising man.” He bad i a "brilliant career” before him, they said. Catherine Maish, whom the slow-moving j-ears had freed from her bondage at last by bringing death to the man who bad bough t her, was visting friends in Washington when she found out that the Senator Moore whose name she heard repeated so frequently was the man she had loved in the years that seemed so long ago, as she looked back to them over tho dreary, cheerless memory of her life in the little Swiss village where freedom had come to her. He was near her then. They would meet, perhaps, and who could tell what the result of a renewal of the old friendship would be? If—and then she fell to dreaming of a happiness that she had rejected, that miuht, after all, be hers. The years that had parted them had not for one moment made her forget the love she had denied herself. She knew now that all the while she had been looking ahead to some possibility like the present one, when the diverging paths would meet. It was reception-night at the house of a prominent official. Everybody would be there—the everybody of political and fashionable society, at least —and she would go with the hope of meeting Robert Moore. She made her toilet with special regard to his taste in such matters, as she remembered it. He haa told her that no other flower became her so well as scarlet carnations. Therefore, she would wear no other flower to-night. She stood before the glass and wondered if ho would- find that the years had changed her much. The first flush of womanhood’s beauty had disappeared, but there was beauty there still of a cold, stately kind, which the thought of meeting her old lover again softened wonderfully. “I have not looked so well for a long time,” she said, as she shook out the rich folds of her dress, and adjusted the scarlet flowers in her hair and at her throat. John Marsh’s diamonds flashed on her hands, but their glitter did not have the fascination for her now that they had possessed five years ago. She stood among the throng in the parlors, waiting and watching, with a color in her cheeks that rivaled the carnations she wore. Her heart beat fast with a strangely pleasant excitement. She was fascinated by the thought that he was somewhere near her. She seemed to feel his presence. Time had strengthened her iove for him, she thought, with a smile at the brilliant woman the mirror reflected as she passed it. A little later she saw Robert Moore come in. There was a woman on bis arm, a sweetfaced, happy-eyed woman, with pure valley lilies nestling among their own green leaves bn her shining yellow hair and the lace jipon her breast. She looked as fair, as pure, as the flowers she v. ore. Catherine Marsh started, and the color died out of her lace. Could it be that lie had forgotten her and given his love to another? A feeling of hatred toward the woman on his arm took possession of her. What right had she—had any one—to come between them? Had he not loved her years ago? Did she not love him now? The wealth she had sold herself for she was ready to lay at his feet, and cry, "Take it! It parted us once, but now it shall be ours—yours and mine—and love shall be ours, too ! ” “I see that Senator Moore has arrived,” she said to a friend. “Who is that woman with him? His wile?" The last two words cost her a great effort. They seemed to stab her. “1 never heard of his having a wife,” was the reply. “ But, now that I come to think of it, 1 did hear some one say that his cousin and her mother were to live with him this winter. This is probably the cousin. Very sweet, isn't she? Quite like a Madonna, with that yellow hair and those blue eyes.” Catherine Marsh gave a sigh of relief. He had told her of a cousin who had always been like a sister to him. This was that cousin, without doubt. She watched him as he moved among the crowd. He had changed much in the live years that had passed since she last saw him. His face had a stronger look in it. It told of energy of purpose and high aims. His eyes hal a- grave thoughtfulness in them, which was relieved by a smile that was winning in its beauty—a smile that a woman might have envied, for it lighted up his face like sunshine. Watching nhn, the woman’s heart forgot the intervening years and took up tho old, sweet dream of love where it had been broken off by the choice she made. By and by they met. She held out her hand in eager welcome, saying: "You have not forgotten me, have you?” He could not mistake the look on her face for anything but pleasure. “No, 1 do not forget faces easily,” he said, as their hands met. But he said it.gravely. There was not the pleasure in his voice she had hoped to hear. "I am so glad to mectyou again,” she said. “Let me congratulate you on your brilliant success.” “Thank, you,” he answere.l. “I have worked hard, and not all in vain, and I think 1 have earned my success. 1 prefer to think that rather than that it was thrust upon me.” “How time has changed us since—since we met last,’’ she said, witti a little flush that was partly shame, partly embarrassment, rising to her cheek. Something in his grave, steady glanee disconcerted her. “Five years could not go by without making changes of some sort in us,” he answered, as they passed into the conservatory. “Your husband is dead, I think?” “Yes,” she answered, “bedied ayearago.” They sat down under an acacia, and talked of ordinary things, at first. He did not seem inclined to venture on the subject about which her thoughts were busy. “Perhaps,” she thought, “he is too proud to talk of the old days until 1 acknowledge that I was wronr.” “Robert,” she said, suddenly—“l may call you that, may I not, for the sake of our old friendship? I want to tell you that I made a great mistake when—when 1 married John Marsh. I was to blame lor all that both of us suffered in consequence of the choice I made. Will you forgive me?” “1 forgave you long ago,” he said, gravely. “Uh. that was so good, so kind of you,” she said. "I thought, or I tried to make myself think, that I was doing what was for the b -st. But I found out what a mistake I mad when it was too late. If it was all to do over again, Robert, I would make a d.ilerent choice.” Her face was full of a strongly appealing look. She was so much in earnest that .-he forgot she was speaking unwomanly words. It was her heart crying out for the happiness it had starved for so long. “Do not say anything more,” he said, rising; “you might say something you would regret. The woman I loved in the old days is dead. That woman died when I found out how you hud deceived me. Perhaps I shall always keep a little tender memory in my ■ heart for the woman 1 loved, who was true; but for tile woman who bore her name after she died I have only pity.” Catherine Marsh’s face grew white as it will be when she is dead. She tried to speak, but no words came. , “I am afraid that I came near doubting

the tru'h and sincerity of all women for awhile after I found out how one woman had deceived me,’ he said, “but I have found out that there are true women in the world, and this is one of them.” Catherine Marsh looked up. The sweetfaced woman was standing at his side with her band in his. “This is my wife,” he said, softly. “Alice, this is Mrs. Marsh, whom I knew years ago when she was Miss Warfield. I have told you about our friendship and its sudden death.” Then he bent and kissed the face of the woman at his side. That was the crudest stab of all for Catherine Marsh, though be did it without a thought of her. She shut her lips tightly together to keep back a cry of pain. Then she turned and walked awaj'. At the door she paused, as the first woman might when the gate of Eden was closing behind her, and gave one last look backward., His eyes were on the face of the sweet-faced woman who was smiling up at him in love and trust. Then she went out, and the door closed behind her on Paradise.