The Oldest Flame

The Oldest Flame: A Mrs. Meade Mystery

By Elisabeth Grace Foley

Cover design by Historical Editorial

Silhouette artwork by Casey Koester

Photo credits

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Copyright © 2014 Elisabeth Grace Foley

Table of Contents

The Oldest Flame

More Mrs. Meade

About the Author

A man would incur any danger for a woman…would

even die for her! But if this were done simply

with the object of winning her, where was that real
love of

which sacrifice of self on behalf of another is the
truest proof?

~ Anthony Trollope

Mrs. Meade gazed with much pleasure and
contentment over the view from the garden bench where she sat.
Below the well-kept gardens of the other houses strung out down the
slope of the hill, a silvery glimpse of the river in the valley
twinkled bright in the afternoon sun, with a lovely vista of wooded
hills rising beyond it. Here in the garden, the air of the summer
afternoon was soft and peaceful, with bees humming among the
flowers and now and then the sweet piercing song of a bird from the
trees high overhead.

Mrs. Meade looked around the garden again,
her admiration mixed with something like marveling. The latter
expression was accompanied by a touch of motherly fondness as she
turned to look at her companion, who was leaning against the tree
which cast its shade over the bench.

“How you have grown, Mark!” she said. “The
last time I saw you, you were just a rambunctious schoolboy. And
now look at the fine young college man you’ve grown into.”

Mark Lansbury grinned with just a touch of
self-consciousness. He was a dark, good-looking boy of nineteen,
tall and athletic, with a pair of arresting, expressive brown eyes.
With Mrs. Meade, whom he had always regarded in the light of a
favorite aunt, he was always at his ease, and did not find it
necessary to observe the dignity that had become rather more
important to him since attaining the aforementioned collegiate
status.

“Everything seems to have moved very quickly
for your family these past few years,” said Mrs. Meade. “Your
father’s promotion—this beautiful new house—and then you off to
college. I’ve missed seeing all of you, these years you’ve been so
busy. I was so very happy when I received your mother’s invitation
last month, to find she had remembered me.”

“She could never forget you!” said Mark
warmly. “None of us could. Mother was always thinking about you,
even when things were busiest. I’ve heard her speak of you a
hundred times.”

“Well, as things have turned out, I’m glad
she chose this summer to invite me, since the Greys are here. It’s
been so good to see them again too.”

Mark did not answer this. He picked at the
smooth bark of the tree, looking down at the grass at Mrs. Meade’s
feet, the animation of a moment before gone from his face. Mrs.
Meade observed him quietly for a moment, and then, in a voice and
manner so light and natural it could never have aroused any
suspicion of ulterior motives, entered on an entirely new
subject.

“How do you like college?” she said. “Your
father told me you were doing very well, but you’ve hardly said a
word about it since I’ve been here. Was your first year a good
one?”

“Oh, yes, it was fine,” said Mark, shying a
broken bit of bark at the ground. “But to tell you the truth, I
haven’t been thinking much about college lately.”

“There’s something else on your mind, then?”
said Mrs. Meade, who had already divined as much.

“Some
one
else, anyway,” Mark mumbled,
looking down again with a little color in his face.

“My dear boy, don’t tell me you’ve tumbled
into a love-affair already!”

“Oh, I didn’t tumble,” said Mark, looking
over at her with an uneasy smile, as if he already half regretted
sharing his secret. “It’s been coming on steadily enough.” He
paused. “It’s Rose, of course. Could you even think it was anyone
else?”

There was something different in his voice as
he spoke these last words, a subtle ring of feeling that made Mrs.
Meade look up at him with closer attention. His restless eyes met
hers for an instant. Yes, he had grown up a good deal, she thought.
Sensitive, earnest, impatient, ardent—all those qualities of youth
were there in abundance, but somewhere along the way a door had
opened to the capacity for a deeper feeling, one likely to throw
all those very qualities into turmoil.

“Rose,” she said thoughtfully. Mark nodded,
watching her as if hoping to gain some sort of encouragement from
her response.

“I knew you were always good friends when you
were children, but I didn’t know you felt that way about her.”

“Well, I do now,” said Mark. “I’m in love
with her—miserably in love with her, Mrs. Meade, but she doesn’t
care whether I’m alive or dead.”

Mrs. Meade forbid herself to smile. She had
long since learned to balance her sense of humor with her
expression of sympathy, and Mark Lansbury was intensely in
earnest.

“That seems rather unlikely,” she said. “Does
Rose know yet how you feel?”

“She knows I’m in love with her. I’ve told
her so. But she doesn’t take me seriously. She thinks it’s just an
infatuation and I’ll get over it.” He swung round so his back was
against the trunk of the tree. “I used to think, at first, that
maybe…”

A wistful look came over his face for a few
seconds, but then it vanished and his mouth set bitterly. He thrust
his hands deep in his pockets. “But she’s never been the same since
she met that Steven Emery. She’d believe anything he told her,
whether it was the truth or not.”

Mrs. Meade had been introduced to Steven
Emery for the first time the evening before, and she understood the
complication to Mark’s problem.

“Who is Mr. Emery exactly? I thought at first
that he was a friend of your father’s.”

“No. The Greys met him somehow in Denver last
winter, and he’s been hanging around them ever since. Mr. Grey
introduced him to Dad when Dad was in the city on business. That’s
why he got included in the invitation when Mother asked the Greys
down here, I think. Dad’s trying to get him to invest in the new
railroad project he wants to put through, because Emery’s supposed
to have money. But I don’t think he’s biting. He’s too busy
entertaining Rose.”

“Is that why he came down here, do you
think?” said Mrs. Meade.

Mark gave a disheartened shrug. “I don’t know
whether he has any serious intentions, or if he’s just amusing
himself. He’s a lot older than her, you know. But I
am
serious. How can I make Rose see that?”

“Have you tried poetry?” suggested the
practical Mrs. Meade.

“I wrote a lot,” said Mark, “and then tore it
up. Rose would only laugh at it. But if it was Steven Emery or
someone else like him writing her sonnets, she’d think it grand.
It’s all a matter of perception—the way she sees me,” he added, as
if he felt it necessary to explain for Mrs. Meade’s benefit.

Mrs. Meade did not entirely succeed in hiding
her smile this time, since she had spent a good portion of this
conversation trying to adjust her own perception of the parties in
question. The image that still came most vividly to her mind was
one she had seen from her window some years before, of an
eight-year-old Rose and eleven-year-old Mark constructing a river
and dam in the mud of a ditch below the railway embankment. But
that was before prosperity, in the form of railroads, had descended
upon both families—and girlhood upon Rose.

“Nothing I can say will make any difference
to Rose,” Mark was saying. “My trouble is that there’s nothing I
can
do
. I’ve got no way of showing her what I’m made
of.”

“No, there are few dragons to slay in our
everyday life,” said Mrs. Meade thoughtfully. “But do you know,
I’ve always thought the girls who would take a man on his
dragon-slaying merits rather short-sighted. There are plenty of men
who can rise to the occasion when something extraordinary happens,
but what about the little things—the common things? Those are what
will matter most in the rest of their life together.”

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “I’ve always
thought the crisis shows the essence of a man’s character—the trial
by fire, so to speak. How he answers to that gives you the clue to
everything else about him.”

“How do you think you would be in a crisis?”
inquired Mrs. Meade, gravely, but with a genial twinkle in her
eye.

Mark reddened a little, but he answered, “I’d
like
to think I’d come out well…but I don’t see how I’ll
ever have the opportunity.”

“Don’t give up, Mark,” said Mrs. Meade,
putting her hand out to him with a warm, affectionate manner that
acted upon him so far as to bring a somewhat forlorn smile to his
face. “Rose is young yet—she may not know just what it is she
wants. But don’t waste all your time waiting for your grand chance.
Just be ‘faithful in that which is least’—and perhaps one day
you’ll find your chance is come.”

“Do you really think I could make my own
chance…that way?” said Mark, sounding a little doubtful, but with a
somewhat vacant look in his eyes, as if he was turning over an idea
in his mind.

“Perhaps you could. Who knows?” said Mrs.
Meade, smiling again.

“Yes,” said Mark, “who knows.”

* * *

When Mrs. Meade came through the open French
window into the sunny lower hall, a woman was just coming down the
staircase opposite. She was dressed for the evening, in white with
a pale peach-colored sash, a very simply cut dress that suited her
tall, spare style of beauty in such a way that Mrs. Meade
inadvertently paused to admire the effect. She had been introduced
to Eloisa Parrish on the preceding evening and had been similarly
struck by her appearance, but had had little or no success in
forming an acquaintance with her. Miss Parrish was a handsome young
woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with a certain austerity
about her finely molded features and an almost haughty lift to her
narrow chin. She had remained silent and aloof through most of the
evening in the drawing-room, seemingly unmoved by any kind of
pleasantry or any topic of conversation.

She paused for half an instant on the lowest
stair as her eyes fell on Mrs. Meade, as if she had not expected to
encounter anyone here or did not particularly want to. Mrs. Meade,
however, did not see this movement, or perhaps chose not to see
it.

“Oh, good afternoon, Miss Parrish,” she said
pleasantly. “I was just on my way up to dress for dinner. It has
been so fine out that I’ve spent most of the day outdoors. Have you
seen much of the garden?”

“No,” said Miss Parrish with the barest of
polite smiles, a slight curve of the lips that did not mean much.
“No, I have hardly been out of my room today.”

“I hope you are not feeling ill?” said Mrs.
Meade. Her direct, yet considerate eyes took stock of the younger
woman’s face. “You look a little pale, if I may say so.”

A door opened somewhere in the direction of
the drawing-room and voices drifted out, and over them rose the
sound of a young girl’s happy laugh. Neither woman’s eyes wavered,
but an almost contemptuous expression passed across Miss Parrish’s
face.

She lifted her chin slightly, though not,
Mrs. Meade thought, so much with defiance as with the air of one
who would conceal some emotion. “I must have had a headache, I
suppose,” said Miss Parrish in a cool, ironical voice. “At least
that is what I must say if I’m asked. That is what we all say,
isn’t it, to hide a more embarrassing ailment—the desire for
solitude.”

Without another word she moved past Mrs.
Meade and went out through the French window onto the terrace. Mrs.
Meade looked after her with a slightly perplexed expression, but at
nearly the same moment she heard footsteps behind her and turned
back as Mrs. Lansbury came into the hall.

Mrs. Lansbury had entered in time to see Miss
Parrish disappear through the window, and to observe the expression
on Mrs. Meade’s face, and there was understanding in the smile
which she exchanged with her friend.