Kitabı oku: «Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily», sayfa 9

CHAPTER XXVII

Mrs. Leslie was filled with dismay and terror at the result of her thoughtless communication to her protege.

"What a silly tattler I am to tell such shocking things to that poor sick child," she said to herself, with lively compunction.

Then she flew to the dressing-table, and securing a bottle of eau de cologne, proceeded to drench Irene's face vigorously.

The result of her treatment was that Irene speedily gasped, shivered and opened her eyes.

"Oh, you are alive yet, are you, my dear?" exclaimed her friend. "I was afraid I had killed you with my foolish tales."

"Then it wasn't true—you were jesting with me?" exclaimed the girl, unconsciously clasping her small hands around her friend's arm, and lifting her dark, anxious eyes to her face.

"Eh? what, my dear?" Mrs. Leslie asked, rather vaguely.

"The wreck, you know—the people who were drowned," Irene answered, with a shudder. "Is it true?"

"Oh, yes, child, every word of it, I am sorry to say, but I oughtn't to have told you about it while you were feeling so badly. It shocked you very much, poor dear."

"Yes, it shocked me very much," Irene replied, in a strange voice. "You were saying—were you not?—that one of your friends was—was—drowned," she concluded, with a faint quiver in the last word.

"Yes—poor Guy Kenmore of Baltimore—one of the most splendid men I ever met," sighed Mrs. Leslie. "But do not let us talk about it any more to-night, dear. It makes you nervous, I think."

"Yes, and I am very tired. I should like to go to sleep. Good-night, dear Mrs. Leslie," said Irene, thus gently dismissing her friend.

"Very well, since you want to go to sleep, good-night, dear," said the lady, good-humoredly; "I hope you will let me know if you are worse in the night, though."

Irene promised, and received Mrs. Leslie's good-night kiss. Then the lady went away and left her alone.

Why did she weep so bitterly upon her lonely pillow that it was drenched with her bitter tears?

Now that her husband of an hour was dead, Irene knew that she loved him.

 
"Loved him with a bitter yearning
That could never pass away,
Loved him with an anguished passion
That could never know decay."
 

As she lay there weeping sorely on her pillow, she recalled that sweet June night, but a few short months ago, when her own willful folly had led her into that deplorable entanglement. She recalled the handsome face of Bertha's lover, as she then deemed him—handsomer then and now to her fancy than any other man she had met. He had given her no word of blame or reproach for her folly that had led him into that mad marriage. Nay, how kindly, how gently he had tried to make the best of it—he had offered to keep faithfully those marriage vows he had taken, even when he knew that she was a nameless child, and her mother a disgraced woman. How kindly he had spoken to poor Elaine, even when her own child madly reproached her. She seemed to feel again the warm, gentle clasp of his arm around her waist while poor Elaine told her sorrowful story.

"I love him. It is not wrong, for he belonged to me, and he is dead," she said to herself, plaintively and sadly, through her falling tears.

She forgot Julius Revington for a while in the shock of this new grief. One hour was given to her sorrow and her tears.

"He is dead, yet I cannot realize it," the girl-widow said to herself, trying to fancy those laughing brown eyes drowned in the salty waves of old ocean—those languid, musical tones hushed in its everlasting roar. It was in vain the effort. It was in life, rather than death that he dwelt in her thoughts.

"He is dead, but no more dead to me than he was in life," she repeated over and over to herself, "for I should never have seen him again."

And suddenly, like an Arctic wave coldly sweeping over her, came the remembrance of Julius Revington.

"I am free now," she repeated to herself, with a shiver of horror. "Nothing lies between my mother and happiness but my own unconquerable repugnance to the man who holds the secret of my mother's wrongs."

Remorseful memory pictured that beautiful mother sad, lonely, bereaved, wasting her heart in unavailing sighs and tears.

"Oh, mother, I was hard, cold, cruel to you that night in my madness," she cried. "I, who shadowed your life with an ever-present memory of shame for sixteen years, now owe you reparation and atonement even to the sacrifice of my poor life."

And in the solemn, mystical midnight hours the great battle was fought between self-pity and mother-love.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was late when Irene came down to breakfast the next morning.

The breakfast bell had clanged noisily twice, and all the other inmates of the villa were in their places at the table, when Miss Berlin glided in, pale, mute, grave, and took her wonted seat by Mrs. Leslie's side.

Every eye turned curiously on the fair young face. The change was too marked to escape observation. The white cheeks, the dark shadows beneath the eyes, the pathetic droop of the red lips, all had a story of their own. The simple white morning-dress, with the black velvet ribbon at throat and waist was sad and suggestive too. All missed the bright bunch of flowers she was wont to wear on her breast, but none guessed that the simple black and white were mute tokens of bereavement.

"I was sorry to hear of your illness last night. I trust you are better this morning," said Mr. Stuart from his place as host.

His voice was grave and kind, but his eyes were kinder. They often lingered on her as if fascinated, until, with a sharp sigh of pain he would turn away.

"Thank you, I am better," she replied, briefly, and dropped the long lashes over her eyes because Julius Revington was trying to meet them across the table.

He was vexed with her for looking so pale, so wan, so unhappy.

"Am I an ogre that she should look so pale, so ill, so wretched, at the bare idea of having me for a husband?" he said to himself, in a passionate ebullition of wounded vanity.

When breakfast was over he managed to intercept her as she was going out.

"It is a beautiful morning, Miss Berlin. Will you walk out with me?" he asked, pleadingly.

She brought her broad-brimmed sun-hat from the rack in the hall and silently accompanied him.

It was a beautiful morning, as he had said. The sun shone brilliantly, the blue sky mirrored itself in the blue river, birds sang, flowers bloomed, and the air was sweet with the breath of roses. But for once Irene was indifferent to the sweet influences of nature. She walked along silently by his side, her blue eyes downcast, her face pale, her steps slow and languid.

They paused at last to rest on a pretty garden seat beside the murmuring river. Irene flung herself down wearily.

She, who seldom knew what weakness meant, could barely drag her weary limbs along.

"I am sorry to see you looking so ill to-day," murmured the lover.

She glanced up quickly in his face for some sign of relenting.

Alas, his passionate look of admiration dispelled the sudden, springing hope. Her heart sank heavily again.

"I am ill," she cried. "God only knows what I suffered last night. Are you still relentless in your cruel purpose?"

"You use hard words," he said, flinching under her scorn. "Is it cruel to love you, and wish you for my own?"

"It is cruel to try to force me into compliance with your wishes," she answered, with a passing flash of indignation.

"You mistake. I have not tried to force you. I merely gave you a choice of terms," he replied.

"Scylla and Charybdis," murmured the girl, disdainfully.

"As you will," he replied; but in his heart he said, cruelly: "You find it hard, fair lady, to tolerate a master in practice, however fine it may appear in theory."

She sat still, looking dreamily into the rushing river, a look of despair frozen on her white face.

"You may have guessed why I brought you here," he said.

She made him no answer. The cold despair deepened in the lovely, downcast eyes.

"I am impatient for my answer," he went on. "Are you going to be kind to your mother, Irene; kind to yourself, and merciful to me?"

She turned and looked at him, with the fire of scorn flashing all over her beautiful face.

"If you mean am I going to sacrifice myself for my mother's sake, I answer yes," she said. "Here is my hand. Take it. But it is empty—there is no heart in it. There never will be. I shall never love you, were I twenty times your wife. I shall always hate you for driving me to the wall, for making me untrue to myself."

Unheeding her wild words he took the hand and kissed it, but she tore it madly away. It rushed over her drearily how strange it was for Guy Kenmore's widowed bride to be thus plighting her hand to another almost in the first hour of her bereavement.

CHAPTER XXIX

Mr. Revington duly announced his betrothal to the inhabitants of the villa. Congratulations followed of course, but he could not flatter himself that there was any heart in them.

Mr. Stuart was openly surprised and inwardly disgusted.

"To think that a girl of such beauty and soul as Irene should stoop to mate with that weak, guitar-playing dandy," he said to himself.

Brown and Jones were envious of Revington's good luck. The ladies, with the exception of Mrs. Leslie, thought it quite too good a match for the mysterious Miss Berlin.

"My dear," said Mrs. Leslie, the first time she could draw Irene aside, "I do not know how to congratulate you. You have surprised me too much. I never dreamed that you were in love with Julius Revington."

They were alone on the wide balcony, and the opaline hues of sunset sparkled on the blue horizon. Irene looked very pale and grave in the brilliant light. She gazed sadly at her friend.

"Does it follow that I am in love with him because I have promised to be his wife?" she asked, almost bitterly.

Mrs. Leslie started and gazed keenly at the fair young face.

"It should follow," she said. "No girl should marry a man with whom she is not in love. It is positively sinful to do so. And, my dear child, if you are marrying him for money you are sadly mis–" she paused, for a flood of crimson had drifted into Irene's face.

"Mrs. Leslie, I am quite aware that Mr. Revington's income is extremely small," she said, with girlish dignity.

"Oh, then, it is for love, after all," said the lady, relieved. "Well, that is the best, if you are going to marry him. But I must say it is a great surprise to me. You seemed to belong to me so utterly I never thought of a lover carrying you off."

Her sigh of genuine regret pierced Irene's tender heart.

She longed to throw her arms around the sweet lady's neck and tell her all her sad story—to disclaim all interest and love in the wretch who exacted so costly a price for her mother's happiness; but a feeling of pride held her back.

"Not now, while the shadow of the old disgrace hangs over me," she said to herself. "I could not bear for her to pity me. Only in the hour of my triumph will I tell her my strange story and ask her to rejoice with me."

Lilia came out on the balcony and Mrs. Leslie said no more. The child was exquisitely dressed, as usual, in a rich white robe, with a rose-colored sash. She looked quite pretty with her dark, shining hair falling over her shoulders, her large black eyes beaming with the fires of disease, and a deceptive glow of color on her cheeks.

She came and stood by Irene's side, and with one of her rare impulses of kindness laid her light, fragile hand on her shoulder.

"They tell me you are going to marry my cousin Julius," she said, abruptly.

"Yes," Irene answered, with a smothered sigh.

Mrs. Leslie looked at the two young girls, admiring their different types of beauty. Irene's blonde loveliness was matchless; the darker type of Lilia challenged admiration. Each set off the other, like night and morning.

But as Mrs. Leslie gazed she suddenly smothered a cry upon her lips—a cry of amazement!

Something had flashed over her suddenly and without warning as she watched the two beautiful faces side by side.

It was a subtle, startling, vivid resemblance between the two—the blue-eyed blonde, the dark-eyed brunette.

As she gazed, the wonderful, startling resemblance grew and grew upon her consciousness. Though one was fair and the other dark there was a subtle, haunting likeness in their features strong enough to have existed between sisters.

"What does it mean?" the lady asked herself, wonderingly. "Is it a mere chance likeness?"

While she gazed as if fascinated, Mr. Stuart stepped out upon the balcony. His dark face lighted with pleasure as he noted Lilia's affectionate attitude toward Irene. He stepped softly to his daughter's side and gazed at the two fair girls with a gratified smile upon his lips.

And again Mrs. Leslie suppressed a little cry of wonder.

The subtle likeness between Irene and Lilia was not stronger than that which existed between Irene and Mr. Stuart. They might have passed for father and daughter.

He looked up and arrested her gaze fixed upon his face in wonder and perplexity. He smiled.

"On what weighty subject are you musing so deeply, Mrs. Leslie?" he inquired.

"If you will come and walk with me, I will tell you," she replied, lightly.

"Nothing would give me more pleasure," he answered gallantly.

CHAPTER XXX

They went down the wide balcony steps together, leaving the two girls alone. Mrs. Leslie chose a favorite walk along the river bank, and by chance they sat down on the same pretty garden seat where Irene had rested that morning while she gave her promise to be Julius Revington's wife.

Mr. Stuart looked at his friend with a smile on his dark, handsome face.

"Now will you give me the benefit of your thoughts?" he said.

"If you will promise not to laugh—not to call me fanciful," she answered.

"On my honor," he replied, placing his hand on his heart, and bowing with mock gravity.

She was silent a moment, feeling a momentary embarrassment over her promise. He would think her fanciful certainly, perhaps be displeased.

"I am growing very curious," he observed.

"You need not be– it is nothing of any consequence," she said. "It is only that before you came out on the balcony I was startled by observing the vivid likeness that exists between Lilia and Irene. They are like enough to be sisters. And when you came upon the scene my wonder only grew. Irene is enough like you to be your daughter."

She need not have been afraid that he would laugh at her—that he would think her fanciful. He started and gazed at her with wide, dark eyes and ashen, parted lips.

"Like Lilia! like me!" he repeated, strangely.

"Yes," she answered. "Enough like Lilia to be her sister, enough like you to be your child."

"Before God, I believe that she is!" he answered, startlingly.

She gazed at him in wonder.

"I do not understand you," she said, wondering if her old friend had gone mad.

But he reiterated in tones of suppressed passion:

"I believe that she is my own child. I have loved her since the first hour I looked on her beautiful face, so like that of the fair, cold woman who broke my heart! I have yearned to hold her in my arms, to kiss her fair face, and claim her for my own daughter, the pledge of a love that for a little while was as pure, as true, as beautiful as Heaven! It was the voice of nature speaking in my heart, claiming its own in tones that would not be stilled. Oh, Elaine, Elaine, fairest, dearest, cruelest of women!"

He bowed his head on his hands, and his strong form shook with great, smothered sobs.

Mrs. Leslie gazed at him in wonder and sympathy. What hidden mystery, what aching sorrow had her chance words evoked from the buried past? It was terrible to witness the shuddering emotion of this brave, strong man.

Looking up suddenly, with dark, anguished eyes, he caught her wondering, troubled look.

"Mrs. Leslie, you think me mad," he said, mournfully.

"No, no," she answered, reassuringly. "I must beg your pardon for my ill-advised words," she continued, regretfully. "I fear that I have touched the spring of some secret sorrow."

"You have," he answered, sadly. "But do not reproach yourself. You could not have known. You probed an aching wound by chance."

"I am so sorry. I did not dream," she said, incoherently, full of sorrow for her unconscious fault.

"And she looks like me, you think?" he said, thoughtfully.

"Marvellously," she exclaimed.

"Have you ever seen the woman's face in the locket she wears about her throat?" he asked.

"I am ashamed to confess that my womanly curiosity has made me guilty of peeping into it on one or two occasions," she replied. "It is the loveliest face I ever beheld."

"Fairest and falsest," he replied. "Mrs. Leslie, what will you think when I tell you that that woman was once bound to me by the dearest tie upon earth? She was my wife."

"I do not know what to think," she replied, and in truth she was half dazed by his words. She could not understand him.

"You look incredulous," he said, sadly. "But, Mrs. Leslie, you have known me for long years. Let your mind go back to the years before I married Miss Lessington. Did no faint rumor ever reach you of a boyish entanglement, hushed up by my father for fear it should reach the ears of the heiress selected for me?"

"Yes," she answered, with a start, "I recall it now—the merest whisper of a boyish fancy that your father would not tolerate. It was true, then?"

"It was true," he answered, sadly. "Mrs. Leslie, may I tell you my story? They say that a woman's wit is very keen. Perhaps you can help me to solve the problem of Irene's identity."

"You may tell me, and I will gladly help you if I can," she replied, with gentle, womanly sympathy.

In her heart she had always been sorry for Clarence Stuart. She believed him to be one of nature's noblemen, and she knew that he was mated with a cold, hard, jealous woman who was proud of her wealth, her birth, her station, and whose hard heart held neither pity nor sympathy for those whom she proudly held as inferiors. She intuitively felt that he had never loved the haughty heiress his proud father had selected for him.

"I must go back more than seventeen years to the romance of my life," he said. "I was barely twenty-one, then, an eager, impetuous, romantic boy, chafing at the rein my father tried to hold over me, and disgusted with the idea of the mariage de convenance he had arranged for me."

He sighed, and resumed:

"Nellie Ford, my cousin, who was away at a fashionable boarding-school, sent me an invitation to a musical soiree. I went, carelessly enough, and at that entertainment I met my fate—a blue-eyed girl looking much as Irene does now.

"She was not only beautiful, she was gifted with the sweetest voice I ever heard," he continued. "She sang, and I was enraptured. I sought and obtained an introduction to my divinity. Before we parted that evening my heart was irrevocably lost to sweet Elaine Brooke."

Heavy sighs rippled over his lips as he paused and seemed to contemplate in fancy the fair, flower-face, so long ago lost out of his life.

"That was not the last time we met," he continued. "Both loved, although it seemed indeed a mad, hopeless passion. I was destined to Lilia Lessington, and Elaine's ambitious mother intended to make a pedant of her daughter. She was destined to several years at Vassar College. Young blood flows hastily, you know, Mrs. Leslie," with a sad smile. "The hopelessness of my love maddened me. I persuaded my darling to elope with me to a distant city, where we were married."

"All for love, and the world well-lost," Mrs. Leslie quoted.

"Well-lost, indeed, if only she had been true," Clarence Stuart answered, with one of those long, labored sighs, that seem to cleave a strong man's heart in twain.

He was silent a few moments then, watching with gloomy eyes the softly lapsing river, on which the haze of twilight began to fall—

"So life runs away," he said, sadly. "Wave by wave, in sunshine or shadow. Ah! my old friend, the stream of my life has flowed for more than sixteen years in the shadow of a great sorrow. Only a few months of happiness were granted me with my beautiful bride."

"She was false, you said?" murmured Mrs. Leslie, sympathetically.

"False," he echoed.

 
"'Falser than all fancy fathoms,
Falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat,
And servile to a shrewish tongue.'
 

"I have said that a few months only of happiness were granted me," he continued, after a moment's pause. "In a distant city, our whereabouts and our fate a mystery to all our relatives, we spent a few months of blind, delirious happiness, forgetting all save each other. Never was bride more wildly worshiped than I worshiped my beautiful Elaine; never was husband more adored than she seemed to adore me. We lived but for each other.

"To this sweet idyl, this beautiful romance, came a most prosaic ending.

"The considerable sum of money with which I had left home was quite exhausted by our idle, happy, luxurious life. I was forced to leave my wife for a short time, and go home, like the prodigal, to my father's house, confess my marriage, and entreat his forgiveness and assistance.

"There were hard words and a stormy scene at first. I had expected as much; for I was well aware of his ambitious plans for me. But at last, as I was about leaving his roof in anger, he relented. He gave me his paternal forgiveness, and promised to receive my wife as a daughter. It was arranged that I should leave early the next morning to bring Elaine home. Perhaps you can fancy my happiness, Mrs. Leslie."

"Yes," she replied, sympathetically, her kind blue eyes shining through a suspicious mist.

"I sat up quite late that night, talking to my father, expatiating with boyish enthusiasm on the beauty and sweetness of my young bride. My father heard me indulgently, and suffered me to run on unchecked. At length we drank some wine together, and I retired to rest in buoyant spirits, to dream of my darling, who was so soon to be welcomed as a beloved daughter to my father's splendid home.

"Instead of awaking early the next morning to start on my return to Elaine, as I had proposed doing, I slumbered on deeply and dreamlessly until noon. I awoke, burning with fever, parched with thirst, and seriously ill almost to the verge of delirium. Physicians were summoned, who declared that a severe and probably long attack of illness lay before me. I entreated my father to write to my wife to come to me, and was assured that he had already done so. He received no reply. Elaine neither wrote nor came to my sick bed. At my wild and urgent solicitations he wrote again and again, receiving not a line in reply. To allay my terrible anxiety, as soon as my illness took a turn for the better, my father went himself to bring my wife to me."

He paused, and fixed his dark, sad eyes on Mrs. Leslie's face. Their intense, anguished gaze seemed to burn through her.

After a moment, he said, hollowly:

"My friend, he returned alone."

"She was not worthy your love," Mrs. Leslie began, indignantly.

"Listen, and you shall judge," he replied. "After I left Elaine, her parents by some means obtained a clew to her whereabouts. They went to her, and, by dint of threats and persuasions, induced her to renounce me forever—me, her husband, who lay languishing upon his sick bed, almost dying for a sight of her worshiped face."

His voice broke slightly here. After the lapse of sixteen years memory was still potent to shake the iron self-possession he had tried to build up against his sorrow. He collected himself with an effort and resumed:

"Cold, hard man as my father was, the tears of pity for his outraged son stood thickly in his eyes when he told me this story. Elaine had gone home with her father and mother, but she sent me a cold, hard letter, upbraiding me with having beguiled her from her duty to her parents, and declaring that she would never live with me again, and never even wished to see again the man who had persuaded her into an entanglement which now she bitterly regretted and deplored."

"She was young and her parents unduly influenced her," said Mrs. Leslie, instinctively excusing the beautiful child-wife.