Kitabı oku: «Laurel Vane; or, The Girls' Conspiracy», sayfa 16

CHAPTER LVI

There was a moment of the most utter silence while St. Leon Le Roy's wild, appealing words died upon the stillness of the solemn place.

Mrs. Lynn was struck dumb for an instant by the suddenness and passion of her husband's accusation. She grew ghastly pale—she trembled like a wind-blown leaf, the denial she would have uttered died gaspingly upon her quivering lips.

"You are my wife," he repeated. "There was never but one face, one voice in this world like yours, and they belonged to Laurel Vane. My darling, you will not deny the truth! You did not throw yourself into the dark, cruel river that summer night. You went away and hid yourself from me in the wide world. It was some unknown waif whom we buried in this shaft for you, my own sweet one! That marble cross speaks falsely. Thank God you live, Laurel, to hear the story of my sorrow and repentance! You cannot, you will not, refuse to forgive me!"

She sprung from her seat as he advanced, and slowly retreated before him, her eyes wide and dark with terror; she put out her white hands before her as if to ward off a blow.

"You are mad!" she cried, hoarsely. "You are simply mad, Mr. Le Roy! Your great sorrow has unhinged your brain. Come away from this gloomy place of graves into the world again, and I will try to forget your momentary madness!"

"Do you mean to deny the truth?" he cried, gazing reproachfully at the beautiful, defiant face. "Is it right to scorn me, Laurel, when I have so bitterly repented the wrong I did you? Is it right to defraud me of my child's love—right to defraud the child of his father's love? Do you think I do not know that your beautiful little Laurence is my own child? Shall I tell you why my mother fainted in your rose garden that day? She lifted the boy's dark, clustering locks from his temples and saw the familiar Le Roy birth-mark—the crimson heart that you, my wife, have so often kissed on my temple. I saw her, although I made no sign. Laurel, you will give me my son? You will come home to Eden yourself, forgetting and forgiving all the past, will you not, my injured wife? I will atone for my momentary hardness by the devotion of a lifetime!"

He held out his arms yearningly to the beautiful, startled woman standing dumbly before him with a smile of scorn on her perfect lips. She was terribly frightened when she found that he had recognized her, but she had no thought of confessing the truth. All the hard, bitter pride that had grown up in her heart these eight years was at war with her husband's claim. She held her hands out before her as if to ward him off as he came nearer to her side.

"I can only say, as I did just now, that you are mad," she said. "I can excuse you because I know that your brain must be turned by your sorrow. But this must go no further. I will not endure it. There are limits that even my patience will not suffer to be passed. I am nothing to you, St. Leon Le Roy—nothing! As for the child, you have deceived yourself. It is the scar of a wound on the child's temple, not a birth-mark as you think."

He stared at her like one dazed, his arms dropping weakly at his sides. That she would refuse to forgive him he had expected and dreaded, but that she would deny her identity when taxed with it, had not occurred to him. It put quite a new phase upon the matter. She had not staggered his convictions in the least, but she had shown him what ground both stood upon. He was powerless, helpless. There was nothing for him but to bow to her will.

"You deny my charges?" he said. "You cut the ground from under my feet and leave me without a hope—with nothing but this grave?"

"Yes," she answered, pale as death, beautiful, proud, defiant. "I forgive you for your brief madness. We will never recur to it again. Now, will you take me home?"

"In a moment," he answered. He was busy plucking some flowers from the grave. He held them out to her.

"Mrs. Lynn, will you take these flowers?" he said. "Take them and keep them. They may remind you sometimes of all that is buried in this grave for me—love, hope, happiness."

She took them silently, and they went away from that place of tombs into the busy, beautiful world again. They spoke but little driving home, and then only on indifferent subjects—never on the theme lying deep in their hearts—the love, the remorse, the unsatisfied longing, the fruitless pain of their lives.

But Laurel, when she had reached her own private room, threw herself down upon the floor with a great, tearless sob of utter agony.

"Oh, how cruel I am," she cried. "For the sake of my miserable pride, I have murdered my own last chance of happiness!"

CHAPTER LVII

It was a long while before Laurel recovered her calmness. She had been severely shaken by her interview with Mr. Le Roy. She did not feel half so triumphant and victorious as she might have done. She had repulsed her husband, she had made him suffer all that she had suffered that night when he had renounced her. But there was none of the sweetness of victory in her triumph. She was at war with herself. Her own heart was a traitor. It only ached over the conquest of love by ruthless pride. The triumph was bitterer than defeat.

When she dragged herself up from the floor at last, with all her misery written on her face, she saw a letter lying on her toilet-table. It had been brought in by her maid during her absence. She took it up, and found that it was addressed to herself, in the delicate, refined hand of Mrs. Le Roy.

An expression of dismay and dread came over the beautiful face.

"Why has she written to me?" she asked herself. "Does she, too, mean to claim me and Laurie?"

She grew very pale at the thought. A dread came over her that they would take her child from her to punish her for her willfulness and pride.

"They shall not have him," she said to herself, setting her little white teeth firmly together. "I will take my little son and fly to the uttermost ends of the earth with him. I was foolish and weak even to have come here. I forgot many things I ought to have remembered. I forgot utterly that tell-tale birth mark on my child's temple—the birth-mark of all the Le Roys. I never dreamed that they would suspect me. I thought that grave with my name upon it was an all sufficient shield for me."

She opened the letter and read it. It was a beautiful, pathetic appeal that brought tears to Laurel's proud, dark eyes. Mrs. Le Roy had recognized her, too. She prayed her to forgive St. Leon for his hardness of heart, and to return to him.

"I do not know whether my son has recognized you or not, Laurel," wrote the anxious mother. "You may remember that he is very proud and reserved. He is silent. He makes no sign. And yet I think that he could not have failed to know you. Forgive him, Laurel. He has suffered bitterly and repented sorely. Let me tell him that you are living, and that your beautiful little son is his own child. Let me tell him that you both will come home to us. Ah, Laurel, my dear daughter, I cannot tell you how tenderly my heart goes out to you, both for your own sake and for that of the child. How I love the beautiful, manly little lad! He is the heir to Eden, the last descendant of the Le Roys, my son's son, my only grandchild. All these years you have kept him from us; you have had all his sweetness to yourself. I have no word of blame for you, my dear daughter. I know you were greatly wronged—almost driven, as it were, into the course you adopted. But you will give him to us now, will you not, dear? You will come back to the home you never should have left, you will be the light of our hearts and our eyes, as you were before that fatal night. To-morrow I shall come to you for your answer. I have not told St. Leon of my discovery. I shall not speak to him until after I see you. But I cannot help but hope, that your answer will be a favorable one. You would not have come here among us if you had not meant to be kind to us. I remember your gentle, loving heart, my dear, and, although you have the world at your feet now, I think you will be the same tender, loving little girl that you were of old. You will come home to us soon—you and my darling little Laurence."

"Laurence, Laurence, it is only of the child they think—only of their heir to Eden," she said to herself, bitterly. "I see through it all. They would endure the mother for the child's sake! I understand! But it shall not be. I will take my boy away. I have cared for him all these years, and I will do so still. They who were so cruel to the mother shall have none of the child's love!"

And when Mrs. Le Roy called the next day she was astounded to find that Carlyle Ford and Mrs. Lynn and her son had left Belle Vue the previous evening. None of the servants were aware of their destination. One of them gave the lady a note that Mrs. Lynn had left behind for her. It was brief and cruelly cold.

"I regret that I cannot have the honor of receiving you, as we are leaving suddenly and for an indefinite time," wrote Mrs. Lynn. "I must say that your letter was all Greek to me. You seem laboring under some strange hallucination of the brain. I fear you are threatened with a brain fever. I would advise you to consult a physician. Delays are dangerous in such cases."

Mrs. Le Roy went home like one dazed. She had not counted on such a terrible disappointment. She had staked everything on Laurel's sweet, forgiving disposition. She had made no allowance for a woman's pride.

She went to the library, where St. Leon sat among his books—dreaming, not reading—dreaming of a fair, cold, scornful face that shone on him from the walls of memory—

 
"Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound;
Woman-like, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong."
 

He glanced up absently at his mother's entrance, too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice her irrepressible agitation.

"Oh, St. Leon," she cried out, distressfully. "Mrs. Lynn has gone away!"

She saw the handsome face whiten under its healthy brown. He did not speak for a moment, only put out his hand and drew her gently to him. Then he said, in a hoarse, strained voice:

"Well, mother?"

The tone told her more than words. She broke out, vehemently:

"My son, did you know, did you understand? It was Laurel, your wife, it was your own child. Can you realize it, my son?"

He answered, wearily:

"Yes, I know, dear."

"You knew, and you let her go without a word—oh, St. Leon," she exclaimed, reproachfully.

The dark mustached lips parted in a slight sad smile.

"You wrong me, mother," he said: "I spoke to her. I claimed her and the child. She denied her identity, she laughed me to scorn. There was nothing more for me to say or do."

"You give her up like this—her and the heir to Eden?" she exclaimed, in dismay.

"There is nothing else to do—she denies my claim, and that ends all. I make no war upon women," he answered, sadly, but firmly.

Tears of bitter disappointment crowded to her eyes. She had so counted upon this reconciliation, so longed to have Laurel back—Laurel and the little child who was heir to Eden.

"And the child—will you give him up without a word?" she asked, in bitter disappointment. "You have every legal right to him."

"Granted—but do you think I could take him from Laurel? No, no, mother, she shall keep the little one. We will not disturb her. It may be some little atonement for that night, if we leave her in peace;" then, with a weary sigh, "Let us drop the subject, mother."

Sorely disappointed, she acquiesced in his decision, knowing that there was no appeal from his firm will.

CHAPTER LVIII

Laurel had left Belle Vue in a sudden panic of fear and dread. She was afraid that her bold denial of her identity would irritate the Le Roys into an attempt to prove their charges and claim her child. She determined to put a wide distance between herself and her husband, regretting in her new-born terror that she had ever exposed herself to the danger of being recognized by him.

She did not confide to her uncle the fact that she had been charged with her identity by her husband and his mother. She knew that Mr. Ford sympathized with the Le Roys in their repentance and sorrow, and she knew what his advice would be. She had not confided to him the reason of her sudden flitting. She knew that he was the loving slave of her imperious will, and that she need but express a wish to have it gratified. So the grand home on the Hudson was deserted, and they sought "fresh fields and pastures new," according to Laurel's capricious fancy. If Mr. Ford wondered at her fickleness, he kept it to himself. Perhaps he was not altogether sorry that Laurel was not to leave him yet. His heartstrings were very closely entwined around her and her beautiful child. He would have been lonely indeed without them.

They went to a noted summer resort by the seashore, and Laurel declared that she meant to labor diligently here on a new book she had commenced to write that summer. But the new novel did not grow very fast. The brilliant author was restless and ill at ease. Some days she would devote to her task with a feverish energy and persistence, often writing far into the night. Again there would be days and days when the manuscript remained locked in her desk neglected and untouched, while Laurel threw herself into the whirl of social pleasure with a zest born of the desire to forget. But neither in work nor pleasure did she find that lethean draught for which her lips thirsted. She was haunted by a voice, a face. She could not choose but remember.

Even if it had been possible for her to forget, little Laurence would not have allowed her to do so. Strange to say, the child had taken a wondrous fancy to the Le Roys, both mother and son. He prattled of them often in his pretty childish fashion, regretting that he could not see them again, and every word was like a dagger in the mother's heart. She knew that it was nature and instinct clamoring for its own in the boy's heart. Sometimes she was almost melted, sometimes she felt keenly the wrong she had done the child in depriving him of his father's love. But her hard, bitter pride was always stronger than her pity and her love.

Little Laurence found a congenial playmate at last, and his regrets for Belle Vue and Eden grew daily less and less. It was a little golden-haired girl of six years old, called Trixy by her nurse, who brought her to play on the sands daily with her little toy spade and bucket. In Laurie's shell-gathering expeditions with his own nurse, the two children became acquainted and were soon inseparable companions and friends. Laurence did not rest until he had made his mother acquainted with the little beauty.

"I cannot understand my feelings when I look at little Trixy," Mrs. Lynn said to her uncle, with a pretty, puzzled air. "The child's face haunts me. In some inexplicable manner she recalls the past. And yet I cannot remember whom she is like."

She was not fated to remain long in ignorance of the resemblance that haunted her so strangely.

She was standing on the shore one day looking dreamily out at the swelling, foam-capped waves, as they rolled in and broke in crystal spray at her feet, when she was startled by little Trixy's voice, crying vivaciously:

"Oh, Laurie, here comes mamma! Now she can see your mamma, Laurie!"

Mrs. Lynn turned toward the children, and saw a fair, blue eyed woman coming up to them. She gazed in silence a moment, then gave a great strangling gasp of surprise and recognition. It was Beatrix Wentworth!

The past rushed bleakly over Laurel's memory; the past, with all its love and sorrow and shame. The sight of this fair woman brought it all back freshly and with terrible realism. She stood like one turned to stone, as Mrs. Wentworth came up to her, a look of startled wonder on her lovely blonde face.

"Laurel Vane!" she cried, and put out both her hands.

Laurel drew back coldly, all her self-possession returning.

"You have made a mistake," she said; "I am Mrs. Lynn!"

Mrs. Wentworth colored deeply.

"I beg your pardon—you are right," she said. "I was so startled by your likeness to my friend that I forgot for the moment that she by whose name I called you is long since numbered with the dead!"

"I regret to have awakened unpleasant emotions in your mind," said Laurel, gently, as she offered her card to Mrs. Wentworth.

"You are little Trixy's mother," she went on, smiling. "I am very glad to know you for her sake. She and my little son are great friends."

"You have a son?" said Mrs. Wentworth, as she exchanged cards with Laurel. She sighed heavily, and then Laurel noticed that she wore a black dress. "Ah, I had a son, too, Mrs. Lynn, a beautiful boy that would be as old now as yours had he lived, but he lies buried in an English graveyard."

"You are English?" asked Laurel, gently, her heart melting in sympathy with the tear that sparkled down Beatrix's cheek.

"No, I am American, but I have lived in England ever since my marriage, nine years ago. Little Trixy was born in London, as also my little Cyril, dead three years ago. We have come home now to live."

"We?" said Mrs. Lynn, with a slight, interrogative accent on the pronoun.

"I should have said Mr. Wentworth and myself, and Trixy. There are only three of us," explained Beatrix, pensively, and smothering a sigh.

Laurel wondered to herself whether the Gordons had ever forgiven their daughter; she wondered what had become of smart, pretty Clarice Wells. But she could not ask any of these questions that filled her thoughts, because she had decided that she, in her own proper identity, would remain as dead to Mrs. Wentworth as she was to the rest of the world. They stood there side by side, the two fair women who had so greatly influenced each other's lives, and gazed pensively at the sun-gilded waves, trying to put away the thoughts of the past that each recalled to the other, and to recall themselves to the present.

"I have read your books, Mrs. Lynn," said Beatrix. "I think they are among the most beautiful in the language. I am proud of you as an American author."

"You praise my poor efforts too highly," Laurel said, with her slow, half-sad smile.

"I do not think so. The critics agree with me at least," said Beatrix. "Do you not find it very pleasant to be laurel crowned, Mrs. Lynn—to win the applause of the world and own a name that will live beyond the grave?"

"To be

 
"'Conscious that a world's regret
Would seek us where we lie!'"
 

quoted Mrs. Lynn, with a slight, sad smile. "Ah, Mrs. Wentworth, will you believe that I have scarcely ever regarded the subject from that point of view? When I first took up literary work it was to win bread for my little child. Since success has crowned my efforts, since hard necessity drives me no longer, I labor on because I have need to fill an empty void in my life. From first to last I have had no thought of fame."

The soft sigh of the waves blending with her voice made it sound very sad. Mrs. Wentworth looked at the beautiful, proud face curiously. Some kind of a history was written on it. There was a lingering shadow in the somber, dark eyes, a sorrowful gravity about the lovely crimson lips. She wondered what that empty void might be. And then she remembered that she had heard that Mrs. Lynn was a widow.

"It is grief for her husband," said Beatrix to herself.

"I suppose we all have something in our lives that we are glad to forget in the oblivion of hard work, or even in the pursuit of pleasure," she said. "My little Cyril's death left an aching void in my own heart, and I have another sorrow too. I have been a disobedient child to my parents. I never fully appreciated the enormity of my unpardonable fault until I had a little daughter of my own."

Beatrix spoke in a tone of dreamy sadness. She did not seem to be speaking to a stranger, but rather to a friend. The subtle likeness between Mrs. Lynn and Laurel Vane affected her strangely.

Laurel caught at her words quickly.

"Your unpardoned fault," she echoed. "Do you mean to say that your parents never forgave your disobedience, Mrs. Wentworth?"

"Never," Beatrix answered, with a sigh that showed how deep her pain lay.

Then they were silent for a time. The idle loiterers on the beach, the casual passers by turned twice to look at the two fair women, so beautiful, so unlike in their beauty—Beatrix so lily-fair with her large blue eyes and pale-gold tresses; Laurel with her rare, unusual type of beauty, her dark eyes, her blonde skin, her burnished hair; the one in her dress of deep, lusterless black silk, the other in something white and soft and clinging, marvelously becoming to her graceful style.

"Shall you be long at the seaside?" Laurel inquired, presently.

"A few weeks—that is all," Beatrix replied. "Mr. Wentworth is in New York—business, you know, Mrs. Lynn—Trixy and I cannot stay long away from him."

"You are fond of him?" said Laurel, turning her large, wistful eyes on the other's tender face.

The tenderness deepened in Mrs. Wentworth's sweet blue eyes, and around her gentle lips.

"You would think so if you knew the story of our marriage," she said. "Ours was a real love-match, Mrs. Lynn. It was most romantic. Some day, when I know you better I will tell it to you. It would furnish you a plot for a novel."

Laurel turned her head aside and set her lips in a tense, hard line. She remembered how the story had been told her a few weeks ago in that green city of the dead beside the grave where the unknown waif lay under the name of Laurel Le Roy.

"God forbid that I should have to hear the story told again," she murmured to herself.

She looked back at Mrs. Wentworth and said, calmly, and even smilingly:

"It is very pleasant to hear of a real love-match in real life. I suppose you are very happy, Mrs. Wentworth?"

"Yes, I am very happy with my noble husband," Beatrix said, thoughtfully. "But my happiness was purchased at a bitter cost to another. I know what it is to feel the sharp sting of remorse, Mrs. Lynn."

Little Trixy came up with a beautiful shell and claimed her mother's attention. They went away together presently, and left Laurel to her own reflections. They were very sweet and noble ones. She was thinking of the Gordons—longing to reconcile them to their daughter and her husband.

"I am glad that she is happy with her husband," mused Laurel. "Oh, how differently our girlish conspiracy resulted for her and for me. And yet—would I change places with her? No, hers be the pleasure, mine the pain."

She walked slowly back to the hotel, leaving Laurie at play with his nurse on the shell-strewn beach. In the hotel corridor she encountered some new arrivals, ladies and gentlemen, going to their rooms. Quite oblivious of their interested, admiring stare, she passed on, and took no note of the pretty, painted blonde face that whitened beneath all her rouge as she stared aghast, and murmured, huskily:

"Is it Laurel Vane or her ghost? I never saw such a terrible likeness!"