[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]

Under these circumstances, the time could not but pass heavily, and Neria
had several times sought a private interview with her watch, hoping to find the
proper hour for retiring arrived, when the sound of a carriage driving rapidly up
the avenue was heard, and the next moment it passed the front of the terrace,
where the cousins were seated.

“Whom have we here, I wonder?” inquired Fergus, rather superciliously,
as a common covered wagon stopped at the foot of the steps, and a man in fisherman's
costume leaped out.

“Some one on business, probably,” said Neria. “Will you see him, Fergus,
and, if I am right, send him round to the housekeeper?”

“I shall suggest, also, that this house has a less conspicuous entrance than
the front door,” muttered Fergus, slowly walking down the terrace. But he had
not yet reached the steps when the visitor ran lightly up them, and with a civil,
but not deferential bow, inquired:

“Can you tell me where to find Miss Vaughn, if ye please, sir?”

“Miss Vaughn? Do you wish to speak with her personally?” inquired Fergus,
in surprise.

“Yes. I've got something for her.”

“Oh, a parcel. You may leave it at the top of the steps, and I will see to it.”

“No; that won't do,” returned the man, in a voice less rude than determined.
“I have a word to give along with the parcel, and I must see Miss Vaughn herself.
Is that her down there?”

Fergus looked rather indignantly at the speaker, but found something in his
bronzed face and manly bearing which so modified his first impression, that he
only said, quietly:

“You are very decided in your tone, my man; but I will ask Miss Vaughn
if she will see you.”

“That's right,” replied the intruder, briefly; and, running down the steps,
he rolled up the back curtain of his wagon, and began to handle a heavy mass
of something lying in the bottom of it.

Fergus watched him for a moment, and then went to summon Francia, who,
accompanied by Neria and himself, approached the steps just as the man, ascending
them with some difficulty on account of the bulky nature of his burden,
arrived at the top, and deposited it at their feet.

“Mr. Lewis!” exclaimed Neria, as she recognized the young fisherman, and
saw the nature of his burden.

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

“What is this? who is this man?”

She stooped as she spoke, and examined, by the light of the failing moon,
the features of the body which, pinioned, helpless, but convulsed with rage and
shame, lay writhing at her feet.

“Which is Miss Vaughn?” asked Lewis, recovering his breath by a painful
effort, and, looking from one lady to the other.

Francia stepped a little forward. The young man bowed and removed his
hat.

“This fellow, I believe, ma'am,” said he, putting one foot lightly upon the
parcel lying between them, “is a friend of yours, or, perhaps, you only think he
is. I've brought him here to-night to tell you what he is, and leave it for you to
say what shall be done with him.” Francia made no reply, and he continued:
“I come home unexpected last night, partly because I'd had such luck with my
fishing I thought I might as well be married before I got another v'y'ge, and
partly because I was sort of anxious—just why I couldn't tell. I hadn't been in
town ten minutes when I went to see the girl I've been a year expecting to marry.
Her mother looked scared when I asked for the gal, and said she didn't
know where she was. I told her if she didn't she'd ought to, and I was going
to look for her. I asked round a little at the neighbors, and, finally, one fellow
told me, with a sarcy grin, that he reckoned I'd find her somewhere up the beach,
along with this fellow.”

The fisherman's foot emphasized the last word by a slight motion, beneath
which the “fellow” writhed like a wounded snake.

“I knocked down the man that said it, of course,” continued Zeb, quietly.
“But I went up the beach, and just as I was going to turn back I heard Trypheny's
voice talking to some one. They were sitting under the lee of a big
rock, and I walked up to the other side and hearkened a bit to what they were
saying. Just what it was I ain't going to tell you, for it wasn't talk fit for you, or
any woman who thinks much of herself, to listen to; but among the rest I found
he was planning to take her off to the city when he went, and she was in a hurry
to go. That was enough; and I stepped round the rock, picked up the mean
rascal who wasn't even man enough to hit back when I struck him, and gave him
as much of a thrashing as it was in me to give to such a white-livered sneak; and
then I tied him up this fashion, put a cobble-stone in his mouth to keep him
quiet, and left him propped up against the rock while I took Trypheny home to
her mother. I didn't say much, nor I didn't feel mad as she thought I did. If
it had been something that could have been got over, I might have tried to put
it into words, and, after a while, be done with it. But nothing that any human
being could say will ever undo the ten minutes I spent listening behind that rock,
nor can ever put the girl I had thought so much of in the place she's fell from.
So I said nothing to her and to her mother, no more than that if she didn't know
where her daughter had been, I did now, and that I bid her good-by, once for all.
Then I went and got a horse and wagon, drove up the beach to where my young
man was waiting very patient for me, loaded him in, and brought him here. Now,
ma'am, it's for you to say what I shall do with him next.”

“It is not for Miss Vaughn, it is for me to decide that question,” said Fergus,
in a voice of suppressed rage. “Untie him, Lewis, if you please.”

“Wait. It is for me to say, I think,” interposed Neria, with quiet dignity.
“That no violence shall be committed in my presence, or within my grounds.
Fergus, you will not touch this man in any manner.”

[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]

Fergus turned impatiently toward her; but when he had met her steady look
and fixedly returned it, he bowed his head—that head so seldom bowed in deference
or submission to any one—and murmured,

“Pardonnez moi. Votre volonté est ma loi.”

Neria slightly bent her head, still more slightly smiled her thanks, but before
she could again speak, Francia laid a hand upon her arm.

“No one has my right to act in this matter,” said she, in a voice whose suppressed
emotion tingled through its every tone, and made her low accents as
thrilling as the trumpet pealing the onward charge of an army. All paused and
turned to look at the slender girl who stood beneath the moon, transformed in
an instant, as it were, to a stern Dian pronouncing judgment on Actæon, a
Boadicea rehearsing wrongs which no blood could ever drown. The pride of
her father's house, the brooding sense of injury, the life-deep passion of her
mother's race shone together in her eyes, throned themselves upon her lips, as
presently she spoke, looking at Lewis.

“The insult this man has offered me, the bitter wrong he has done to you,
are not to be in the lightest measure undone or satisfied by any insult, any penalty
that could be inflicted upon him. What you said with regard to that unhappy
girl, holds good for him. Any words that could be framed by mortal lips
would but insult the feelings they could never express. Any attempt at retribution
would, while it gave us only an angry disappointment, comfort him with
the idea that his crimes were expiated. What I will have you do is simply this.
Remove his bonds and leave him to slink away into the night, alone and unnoticed,
like a faithless hound whom one scorns to beat, but turns from the doors,
as no longer worthy of so much as a hound's place in the regard of man or
woman.

“Untie him, Lewis, and let us see that he departs. One would be sure such
a thing did not lurk about the house.”

No one offered reply or opposition to the haughty words and gesture. The
fisherman silently cast off the lashings, and removed the gag which had held his
captive quiet, but ostentatiously refrained from any roughness or insult. When
he had done he stood aside, and beneath the scornful eyes, the more scornful
silence of those whom he had so foully wronged that he could never do them
right again, Rafe Chilton, the exquisite, the debonair, the curled darling of
many a boudoir, the successful rival of Fergus Murray, the chosen husband of
Francia Vaughn, slowly rose from the dust where he had grovelled, and stood
before them shaking with rage and agitation. He turned to Francia.

“You've had your say, my beauty,” began he, in a voice thick with passion,
“now hear me!”

Fergus uttered an angry exclamation, and would have interfered; but Francia
with a hand upon his arm, while her eyes never wandered from the face of
the speaker, silently asserted her right to control the moment.

“It is all very natural that you should feel a little mortified at being jilted
for a common fisherman's daughter, and that between the disappointment and
the cursed pride which is a part of you, that you should be somewhat bitter in
your remarks, but for all that I know you love me still, and would at a word follow
me over the world—”

“Francia! you shall not restrain me!” exclaimed Fergus, shaking off her
hand indignantly, but still with her eyes upon the face of the man whose words
could no longer be held of so much value as to be an insult, she again grasped
her cousin's arm and said below her breath

[figure description] Page 131.[end figure description]

“Hush! let him speak!”

“Yes, Francia Vaughn,” continued Chilton, in a tone of concentrated bitterness,
“you love me now as you loved me when you let me steal you from that
proud fool of a cousin who dared not then, and dares not now resent either my
deeds or my words, and I want no better revenge for this night's work than the
chance of telling you that I never cared for you so much as for your father's
money, and that just by your own outrages and your own insolence you have
driven me to a determination that with all your pride and all your pretended anger
you will not hear unmoved. I will marry the girl whom I love better than
ever I loved you—a girl whose pride and whose honor and whose very existence
begin and end in my love; and when I give her to the world as my wife, if that
world says that pretty Francia Vaughn wears the willow wreath that Trypheny
Markham may wear the bridal roses, who shall contradict it?”

He finished and stood staring malignantly into her face, hoping to find there
some trace of the anger or chagrin he had hoped to arouse. But no marble was
ever colder or more changeless in its scorn and pity than the face of Frederic
Vaughn's daughter, as she looked and listened until his own eyes wavered and
he half turned away. Then Francia, still with her hand upon her cousin's arm,
led him toward the house, saying softly to herself in a tone of bitterest self-contempt,

“And I fancied that I loved him!”

Fergus made no reply, but as Neria entered the door after Francia, he quietly
drew back, and would have returned to the spot where Chilton still stood, had
not Neria lingered beside him, saying quietly,

“Remember, Fergus, that you are under the roof of my husband and Francia's
father, and must respect our wishes.”

“But it is too much—too much that you require,” muttered Fergus hoarsely,
as he half threw off her grasp.

“If it is much, so much the deeper the gratitude your forbearance merits.
Fergus, for Francia's sake!”

“For Neria's sake!” whispered Fergus, as he suffered her to lead him into
the house.

Lewis slowly mounting his cart was already driving away, and as the heavy
hall door closed upon him, and he felt himself alone, an outcast and a social
outlaw where he had been an honored guest, the bitterness of defeat writhed
serpentlike about the heart of the libertine, and stung to its black centre.