FOR MRS. HATHAWAY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXI, Issue VIII, 22 August 1903, Page 559

FOR MRS. HATHAWAY.

Disgusting! The minx!” said Mrs Hathaway. She hoisted her eye-glasses, geared to a pearl and gold stick, and surveyed the minx with a disapproving stare.

Old Mrs Pollard looked startled. Ottilie Carr saw, farther down the hotel piazza, a young lady talking with Mrs Hathaway’s brother, John Belding—nothing more.

“She shot out of the door and grabbed him,” Mrs Hathaway declared. “Even so, she is not so ridiculously bold —• scandalously, I may say—as that Blodgett girl. She persecutes him! And if they were all -” Mrs Hathaway picked up her magazine and rose, satirically smiling. “It’s amusing to watch them, that is all. I am not at all troubled about Joan. Ottilie,” said John’s sister, “do wear your yellow chiffon down to dinner.” An imposing figure, she rustled slowly down the piazza. Old Mrs Pollard sat up straight. “Really!” said she. “Does it always upset Mrs Hathaway like this to have a girl come within speaking distance of her brother?”

Ottilie answered nothing. But her perturbed silence answered yes. “For fear he will marry! Ridiculous —incredible! And he must be thirty five at least?”

“I think possibly,” Ottilie answered. And Mrs Pollard's thoughts concentrated upon her momentarily. “She can’t be thirty, but she isn’t far from it. She has a beautifully sweet face. She lets Mrs Hathaway nose her right around.” And a further notion originated somehow. “Can she,” she thought, “be in love v. Ith him herself 1” “Mrs Hathaway,” Ottilie said anxiously, “is my best friend. I teach singing, you know.” For Ottilie there was no attraction In the small pretences that are the dear delight of half the world. “And I have got most of my pupils through her, and she gives me a room in her lovely great house for a studio, and she had it altered to improve the acoustics. I owe her all my success. And she’s always thinking of me. lam here now as her guest.” “Bless me!” said Mrs Pollard, impressed and somewhat mollified. Ottilie sighed. She had vindicated Mrs Hathaway, but she felt strangely oppressed.

Yes, it was certain that Mrs Hathaway hated the possibility of her brother’s marrying—hated it rigorously. By no means was it the first sign of it Ottilie had seen. She recalled many. Why did she object? Ottilie wondered, and reproached herself for wondering. She ought to understand the mind of her truest friend—yes, and approve her judgments and sustain them. She ought fully to comprehend why John Belding, should he marry, would commit a fatuous and heinous deed.

John had separated from the minx and strolled out on the lawn, and stood there industriously smoking. He was strikingly good looking; Ottilie had always considered him so. He inclined to stoutness, but she disliked to hear Mrs Hathaway advise him to take ten mile walks and leave off starcny foods; Ottilie would not have had him weigh ope pound less. She sat there and looked at him, and her singular depression lightened no whit.

But at dinner she was gay. There was a vase of roses on their little round table, and John opened a bottle of champagne. Ottilie, radiant in her yellow chiffon, responded with spirit to the various mel-

lowing influences, John Belding’s genial face being chief among them. “Won’t you go for a turn on the lake by and by?” said John. “Ottilie will; I’m going to play whist. Do go,” Mrs Hathaway murmured in Ottilie’s ear. “Take him away from that Blodgett and all the rest of them!" There was no moon to sparkle on the lake, but the stars were a luminous host. John let the boat drift. His dinner table jollity dropped to a reflective quiet. He lighted a cigar, without apology; he knew Ottilie’s tastes and prejudices.

Ottilie watched its red end. ft occurred to her that John had not spoken for many minutes, and she felt his eyes fixed upon her. What was coming? What? She began to tremble.

“Ottilie ” said John. He clutched for spiritual support at a tail of ribbon fluttering from her gown. He, John Belding, self confident and highly successful man of affairs, stammered as he said, with boyish indexterity, that everybody must have seen it, how much he loved her and wanted her for his wife, and he always had from the first minute he saw her, and he had only been waiting for the chance to tell her, and lie could not wait any longer—and she was not surprised, was she—dear girl? A great wave of happiness engulfed Ottilie, and for a moment gloriously uplifted her. Then it receded, and left her cold and tremulous; and she heard herself saying:

“I never knew yon cared for me.” Was it her voice? No—ah, no! It was the voice of a woman who saw her plain duty like a rocky road before her, and who would follow it at any cost. This was Mrs Hathaway’s brother, and Mrs Hathaway did not want him to marry. She had made that exceedingly clear. And she was Ottilie’s friend, to whom all her success was due, to whom she owed everything! No mists of doubt obscured her, nor any abstract debating upon John Belding’s natural and reasonable rights. Hers was a single mind. “Can I be an ingrate and a traitor?” was her only thought. “You know now,” said John. “Will you, Ottilie?” “I can’t marry you,” she answered, rather wildly. “I would if Don’t ask me anything. I cannot,” she faltered, with wretched inadequacy. “Never?” said John pitiably. “Never.”

Fate adds to her tragedies the mocking misery of small circumstances. They coidd not sit there forever in stunned stillness. John pulled himself together; he got the boat to the shore, and assisted Ottilie out of it. “Don’t be troubled,” he said. "1 thought you might like me a little. Never mind.”

Like him? She loved him; she knew it now. She loved him for his large heart, his unfailing kindness, his ample commonsense; she loved his blue, smiling eyes, and his very walk, and the way he lifted his eyebrows when he laughed. Yes, she loved him. She pressed her cold hands together, and she fairly wrung them.

“John took a cup of coffee,” Mrs Hathaway told Ottilie, at breakfast next morning, “and went off for a tramp by himself. He said he was all right, but he didn’t look so. You don’t look well yourself, Ottilie. I wonder if it is malarial around that lake? Some say so. I shall give you four grains of quinine, anyhow.”

Quinine for a breaking heart, quinine for a life thwarted and spoiled! And he was suffering. Ottilie knew a great and a tender pity.

“I must write some letters,” she said to Mrs Hathaway, wanly smiling.

But in the solitude of her room she stood in front of her glass and spoke aloud to the pale image before her. “You have done right,” she said. "You did it for her, and you are glad.” She had reiterated that at intervals all night. “And he will get over it.” That thought, she knew, ought to support and comfort her, and she Hung herself down wretchedly, her head in her arms, and tried to make it.

She sat thus long, till there sounded Mrs Hathaway’s familiar tap. “She has brought the quinine,” Ottilie thought, bracing herself.

Mrs Hathaway -camo in and shut the door. She sank into the largest chair and grasped its arms. AH her dignity, all her placidity, had strangely fled, and she sat there limply.

“I was not,” she said, looking at Ottilie as she had never looked before, “prepared for this.” Ottilie gazed blankly. “Don’t think he complained to mo. I worried it out of him. I knew something had happened, and I made him tell me. He would lie wild if he knew I was saying one word to you, but—l —l— I have no right to reproach you. You know your mind. And I should never dream of your taking into consideration anything I have done for you. I have no claim on you —none! But ” Mrs Hathaway broke down. She lowered her face into her handkerchief, and struggled on sobbingly. “But I don’t know what you do want, Ottilie Carr. I do not care, I shall say it? You are talented and handsome, of course; I know you are, and poor John knows it; but you must be somewhere near twenty-seven—and you can’t teach music all your life. Don't you want a home of your own? And such a home as John could give you, Ottilie, and what a position—the best! If anything was wanting in that respect I could comprehend it. And if it’s John himself —the best, the dearest fellow in the whole world, and you’ve known him all this time and don’t know it! Well,” Mrs Hathaway sobbed, “you have broken mv heart as well as his.”

She saw Ottilie atandug before her with locked hands and lips apart. “But,” she gasped, with such voice as she could gather, “you don’t want him to get married. Everybody knows it! You don’t want him to speak to a gii I—you never do. You ” Mrs Hathaway’s expression bewildered her.

“Ottilie Carr,” Mrs Hathaway said, in a voice terrible with a weight of amazement, of sternness, and of the implication of abysmal lacks in Ottilie’s judgment and understanding, “did you think that applied to you?”

“It was for you,” Ottilie answered simply, “that I—refused him.” “And I have hoped,” said Mrs Hathaway, borne to her feet by her high tide of emotion, “from the first that you would come together. I have planned and schemed for it! That was why 1 didn’t want other girls pestering him, that was precisely why. And I never till this minute had a shadow of suspicion. Ottilie,” said Mrs Hathaway, embracing her with tender warmth, “that you were a simpleton.”

She was a woman of action. She glanced at her watch. “He is going bajj to the city on the eleven o’clock train,” she said. “He is packing his trunk. A’l my entreaties wouldn’t move him, but now . You do love him, don’t you? I knew it! It has been perfectly plain,” Mrs Hathaway remarked. “You must stop him. You must see him this instant. There won’t be a soul in the back parlour. I shall send him right down to you. I sha’n’t attempt now to explain your craziness to the poor boy; I shall tell him you’ve changed your mind—anything!” She pushed Ottilio out of the room. “Thera, go!” Yes, the back parlour was empty. (Jttilie stood there and trembled. Her heart pounded furiously in her ears and disturbed the silence and made it hard to distinguish anything else; but she heard a step—his step. He was fumbling hurriedly with the curtains, and he put them apart and came to her with outstretched hands; and in his face was the light of eagerness and joy that was in her own. EMMA A. OPPER.