Kitabı oku: «Laurel Vane; or, The Girls' Conspiracy», sayfa 7

CHAPTER XXIII

Deep emotion overpowered Laurel's speech for a moment. Her lips parted as if to speak, but closed again without a sound. Her fair head drooped like a beautiful flower too heavily laden with dew. It had come upon her like a great shock that St. Leon Le Roy loved her—loved her, the false Beatrix Gordon, the perjured girl living a deliberate lie beneath his roof. She called it by its worst name to herself, even though she flinched from it, for she had, as Clarice Wells said of her, a habit of calling things by their right names. To her a "spade" was a "spade." She had the moral courage to recognize her sin, but this love had made her a coward. She could not confess the truth. For the sake of this man she had risked all. She could not put his love from her now. Yet his next words stabbed her with keenest pain.

"For the first time, Beatrix, I feel like thanking God for Maud's falsity, since it has left me free to win you, my true, angel-hearted girl!"

"True! angel-hearted—oh, my God!" she shuddered to herself, and a longing came over her to be all that he thought her, honest, innocent, true. Should she confess all, and trust to his great love to pity and pardon her?

She lifted her dark, wistful eyes to his glowing, eager face.

"If you had not loved me perhaps you would have forgiven the wrong Mrs. Merivale did you," she said, anxiously.

The stern lines she dreaded came around his lips again.

"I forgave her long ago—as long ago as my fancy for her died!" he said. "But I can never respect her, nor even like her again. She deceived me. I can never forget that! Women should be little lower than the angels, Beatrix.

 
"'A perfect creature, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel's light.'"
 

Wordsworth's ideal is mine, Beatrix. I could never again love a woman who had deceived me. Once fallen from her lofty pedestal, the broken idol could never be restored again!"

He was unconsciously warning her, but he only frightened her. She said to herself that he would never forgive her if she told him at this late day how she had deceived him. And she could not do it. She would not risk it. She loved him too dearly. She would have his love while she could, whether it lasted for a year or a day.

"Why did you deceive her this evening?" she asked, gaining courage as she made her wild resolve. "You were so devoted and attentive she thought she had won you back."

His scornful laugh was not good to hear.

"That was my revenge," he said. "I fooled her to the top of her bent, while I laughed in my sleeve at her credulity. She should have known me better, yet she came down here with the deliberate intention of winning me back. She did not find St. Leon the boy who was blinded by her beauty, she found Le Roy, the man who saw through her shallow arts and despised her." She had no answer ready and he went on more slowly after a moment: "Shall I confess that I had another motive too, Beatrix? I longed to pique you if possible. Since you came to Eden you have been cold, shy, frightened of me always. I confess that I gave you room at first, but I soon became interested in you and would have repaired my error if you had let me. But you did not. You treated me with a distant, respectful civility, as if I had been as old as my mother. When Mrs. Merivale came I determined to show you that I was not too antiquated to admire fair women and to be admired by them. But you held your own so bravely, you flirted so charmingly with Count Fitz John that I was completely blinded and half maddened by your indifference. Ah, my darling," he bent toward her with a flash of triumphant love in his splendid eyes, "if you had not come in here to night, I should never have dreamed, never have known—"

"You heard—you saw?" she broke in, hot and red with bitter shame. "Oh, I could sooner have died!" hiding her burning face in her small hands.

"Hush, Beatrix." He drew the trembling hands away, put his arms around her tenderly, and pillowed the flushed face on his breast. "It was a happy chance, my love. Do not regret it for my sake. Do not think I spied upon your actions, darling. I did not mean to disturb you, only I could not forbear peeping through the curtains and feasting my eyes on your sweetness. So it came to pass that I heard and saw—that which made me the happiest of men!"

"You take it for granted that I—that you—" she began to remonstrate, incoherently, with a mutinous, trembling pout upon her sweet red lips.

"That you belong to me—that I may ask you for your love—since you have broken with Wentworth—yes," he answered, full of happy faith. "Is it not true, Beatrix, my beautiful, dark-eyed love? Will you not be my cherished little wife?"

And paler than the marble statue that glimmered coldly white in the shadowy corner yonder, she murmured:

"I will."

Full of boundless trust and passion he bent down and pressed a lingering, passionate kiss on the lips of the beautiful impostor.

"God bless you, my little love," he said, huskily, and with deep empressement, "you shall never regret that sweet promise."

He meant to keep his word, but we mortals are so blind. The day came when she felt that all her life was one long regret!

 
"Oh, that word regret!
There have been nights and morns when we have sighed
'Let us alone, Regret! We are content
To throw thee all our past, so thou wilt sleep
For aye.' But it is patient, and it wakes!
It hath not learned to cry itself to sleep,
But plaineth on the bed that it is hard."
 

Dizzy with passionate love and happiness, she rested in his arms a moment, then drew herself shyly away.

"It grows late. Indeed, I must leave you now," she whispered.

"It is late and you are weary," he said, tenderly. "I must send you to your rest, my precious one, but for me I shall sit here all night rejoicing over my sweet, new happiness."

They had heard no step in the hall, but at that moment the door swung open and Mrs. Merivale appeared on the threshold in an exquisite dressing-gown, her loosened golden hair flying over her shoulders. She gazed in dismay for an instant, then started backward with a quick smile of scorn.

"Pardon! I could not sleep, and came for a book. I did not dream of interrupting such an interesting midnight tête-à-tête," she said, sneeringly.

St. Leon drew his arm gently around the slight form of his betrothed, an ominous gleam in his eyes.

"Congratulate us, Mrs. Merivale," he said, "Miss Gordon has promised to be my wife."

The snaky fire of hate flashed in greenish sparkles from the eyes of the disappointed woman.

"With all my heart. May you be as happy as you deserve," she answered, scornfully.

Then, turning to go, she bent swiftly toward Laurel Vane and whispered in her ear with the hissing tone of hate:

"You have triumphed over me—you have come between us, but do not forget that 'Who breaks—pays!'"

"An omen," Laurel sighed to herself.

He was loath to let her go when the jealous, angry woman had disappeared. The pale, frightened face touched his heart. He made her tell him what Maud Merivale had hissed in her ear.

"A mere idle threat," he said. "She can do you no harm, Beatrix. You are too secure in your high position as Mr. Gordon's daughter and my promised wife for her hate to touch you. As the mistress of Eden you will be socially her superior, for old Midas Merivale made his millions in trade, and the Le Roys have inherited their wealth from several generations of blue-blooded ancestors. Indeed, we trace our origin from the French nobility."

Everything he told her only frightened her worse. She trembled at her presumption in entering this family which prided itself less on its great wealth than on its noble pedigree. She silently recalled some verses she had read that evening:

 
"I knew that every victory,
But lifted you away from me;
That every step of high emprise
But left me lowlier in your eyes;
I watched the distance as it grew,
And loved you better than you knew!"
 

"He counts his ancestors back to the French nobility, while I do not know what my grandfather's name was," said Louis Vane's daughter to herself.

"Before you go, my darling," said St. Leon, suddenly, "there is one thing I should like to hear you say."

"Tell me what it is," she answered.

He took both her trembling hands in his and looked deep into her eyes with a piercing gaze that seemed to read her soul.

"Lift up your head, Beatrix, look straight into my eyes, and say, 'St. Leon, I love you.'"

Blushing "celestial, rosy red," she obeyed his fond command, and there was a depth of pathos and passion in her voice of which she was herself unconscious.

"St. Leon, I love you," she repeated from the depths of her adoring heart.

"My darling!" he caught her in his arms and strained her eagerly to his breast. "Forgive me for calling out your blushes so, but they are more lovely than your roses. Now good-night, my little love, but do not speak another word. Let those last sweet words live in my memory to-night."

He kissed her and put her gently from him, then stood at the door to watch the little white figure going lightly along the hall and up the wide polished stairway.

"Mine, mine, my little love!" he murmured, gladly. "How pleased and happy my mother will be!"

He went back into the room, threw himself down into a chair, and, true to his word, spent the remaining hours of the night in a happy vigil, dreaming over the sweet, new happiness which had come to him so strangely when his heart had been weighed down by despair.

And Laurel Vane! She kept a wakeful vigil, too. Her eyes were not so bright as they should have been next morning, her cheeks and lips were not so rosy, but her beauty was as marked as ever, and Count Fitz John was very loath to follow the angry, disappointed widow back to New York that day.

"I not only found an Eden but an Eve!" he said to Maud, rather disconsolately.

"You need not vex your heart over her, for she has found her Adam in St. Leon Le Roy," she answered, bitterly.

When they were gone, St. Leon sought his mother.

"Congratulate me," he said. "The desire of your heart will be granted. I am about to marry."

Her handsome, proud old face did not look as bright as he had expected.

"You have chosen Maud Merivale again?" she said, and then he understood the shadow on her face and the tone of regret in her voice.

"You are still prejudiced against Maud!" he said, quietly.

"I have never forgiven her for the slight she put upon my son!" she answered, gravely.

Laurel's slim young figure went flitting past the open door at that moment. He called to her, drew the small hand through his arm, and led her up to his mother.

"Mother, here is your daughter," he said, with the brightest smile she had ever seen on his darkly handsome face.

"And Cyril Wentworth?" she asked, blissful, but bewildered.

"I have never loved him. It was only fancy. I have broken with him forever!" answered the girl.

"Thank God!" she cried, drawing her new daughter into her arms and kissing her fondly; while she added to St. Leon, gladly: "I am so glad it is our sweet little Beatrix, and not that odious Maud Merivale!"

And that day she wrote a letter to Mrs. Gordon, telling her how cleverly their plot had succeeded, and that St. Leon had taken Cyril Wentworth's place in her daughter's heart.

CHAPTER XXIV

"Wooed and married and a'." How swiftly it all had followed upon Laurel Vane's coming to Eden!

In June she had come to the Le Roys, a trembling, frightened, innocent little impostor, lending herself to a fraud for Beatrix Gordon's sake. From a most unwelcome intruder, whom they had received with secret disfavor, she had come to be the light of their eyes and their hearts. To-day—a fair, ripe day in October, with the "flying gold of the ruined woodlands driving through the air"—she clung to St. Leon Le Roy's arm, his worshiped bride, happy, with a strange, delirious happiness, in spite of the sword that ever hung suspended by a hair above her head—the sword that must surely fall some day, and cause her destruction.

She was dizzy with the whirl of events that had brought about this dazzling consummation.

In the first place, Mr. Le Roy had written to Mr. Gordon, announcing his engagement to his daughter, and pleading for an early marriage.

The publisher had replied, on the part of himself and wife, delightedly sanctioning their darling's betrothal to Mr. Le Roy, and permitting Beatrix to consult her own wishes in naming the day. They wished only to make their darling happy, they said; and she should, therefore, choose the earliest day that pleased her. Mrs. Gordon wrote that she would soon come home to superintend the preparation of the bridal trousseau.

Laurel was filled with dismay at the latter information. St. Leon, noting every change of the fair young face with a lover's eye, was quick to see the shadow.

"What is it, my darling?" he asked.

"We must postpone the wedding a long, long time," she said. "Mamma must not curtail her Southern trip and lose the benefit she is deriving from it. We must wait."

She felt like a hypocrite as she said it, but she was rendered desperate by her fears. She knew that, with Mrs. Gordon's coming, all was at an end, and she longed desperately to ward off the evil hour. She was so wildly, deliriously happy now, she would stave off the hour of reckoning as long as she could. Just to remain at Eden as long as she could was all that she asked. It always seemed to her quite impossible that she should ever become St. Leon Le Roy's wife. The blow would fall before then. She felt that she was only taking her pleasure like a butterfly in the sun, and that the nipping blasts of winter would soon lop off her gilded wings and leave her, crushed and trampled, beneath the scorner's heel.

Those joys that we hold by a frail, slight tenure we always prize the most. This love that she was fated one day to lose had become a part of Laurel Vane's life. She said to herself that, when she lost it she would die.

It was a mad love that she gave her noble, princely looking lover. She would have made any sacrifice for him except to tell him that she had deceived him. She would have died for him if need be, but death would have been easier than confessing her strange sin to him.

St. Leon chafed sorely at the idea of waiting so long to claim his bonny bride. They had talked of a bridal tour to Europe, and Laurel had betrayed the most eager delight at the idea. The tour of Europe had not the attraction of novelty to him. He had made it several times, but he longed to gratify the girl's wish; he was so sure that he would make her happy he could not bear to wait. And yet he was not selfish enough to wish to hasten Mrs. Gordon's return at the hazard of her health.

His mother agreed with him that it was unfortunate his having to wait. She was very anxious to see him married to Beatrix Gordon, and she thought the autumn a pleasant time for crossing the ocean.

If they could only be married in October, how pleasant it would be, but then the trousseau—it would take an endless time for that.

St. Leon displayed all a man's impatience under the circumstances.

"A fig for the trousseau! What could be prettier than Beatrix's white dresses that she wore every day? But if she had to have no end of new things, why couldn't they get them when they went to Paris? Worth was the only man who could make them, anyhow. Given a traveling-dress to cross the 'herring pond' in, and she might have a hundred new dresses if she liked, once they landed in France. Must a man wait months and months for his happiness on account of some paltry dresses?"

Mrs. Le Roy, in her anxiety for the marriage, quite agreed with him in his tersely expressed views. If Mrs. Gordon came home she would order her daughter's dresses from Paris. How much easier for Beatrix to get them herself while abroad!

She wrote to Mrs. Gordon and suggested the idea. Moreover, she hinted broadly her fears that Beatrix, if let alone so long, might change her mind—might return to the old love—no one could say when Cyril Wentworth would return to America, nor what effect his return might have on his sweetheart. Mrs. Le Roy thought the wisest plan, under the peculiar circumstances of the case, would be for the Gordons to continue their Southern tour, and let St. Leon marry Beatrix quietly, without any fuss or ceremony, and take her abroad.

That clever hint about Cyril Wentworth had the intended effect on the nervous invalid. All her old fears of Cyril Wentworth were reawakened. A longing desire took possession of her to have her daughter married off safely out of the fortune-hunter's reach. In her sudden anxiety she would have had St. Leon and Beatrix married that moment by telegraph if possible. She infected her husband with all her own fears, and both concurred in the opinion of Mrs. Le Roy that delays were dangerous.

So a letter went hastily back to Eden full of good tidings to the dwellers there.

The Gordons approved and even advocated Mrs. Le Roy's plan. They wrote to their daughter, and recommended her to shorten the term of her lover's probation, regretting that the state of her mother's health made it desirable for her to remain where she was yet awhile longer. The letter was filled with such warm, parental love and advice that Laurel involuntarily wept over it. A generous check for her Parisian trousseau was inclosed. This the young girl put carefully away.

"I shall never use it," she said. "Gold could not tempt me to sin. It is love that has made me bad and wicked, but I cannot draw back now. I shall marry St. Leon Le Roy. It is fate."

So, following that fate, she went recklessly on in her strange career. Three weeks later she was no longer Laurel Vane, she was Laurel Le Roy, almost forgetting in her wild happiness her enemy's threat, "Who breaks—pays!"

CHAPTER XXV

Days came in which Laurel almost forgot the long, dark, threatening shadow that lay always just ahead of her.

They were crossing the wide Atlantic Ocean, and every one said that there never had been finer weather or a pleasanter trip. They had no rough winds the whole voyage. The calm, sunny blue sky hung over an ocean as beautifully blue and almost as calm. The foamy white caps of the waves were almost as fleecy and pure as the snowy little clouds that sailed through the sky. The beautiful shining-winged sea-birds were a source of beauty and delight to every one. Every day was warm and sunny, every night was moonlighted and balmy. No one had expected such perfect weather in October.

Forever after those two weeks remained in Laurel's memory like a beautiful dream, fadeless and ineffaceable.

For that little time she was perfectly secure. She knew no one on the steamer, no one knew her. Her husband was perfectly devoted to her as she was to him. They spent long, happy days together on deck, never weary of each other's society. They talked to each other by moonlight, their talk often drifting into poetry, which is the most natural language of love. They made some acquaintances, but they did not seek other society. They were all in all to each other. The girl-wife could not find it in her heart to repent of what she had done. It appeared to her that she had been made for him, and he for her, judging by their mutual love.

Certainly a change for the better had been effected in St. Leon Le Roy. His dark eyes were no longer cold and cynical, but beamed with love and happiness. The mocking smile no longer curled his lips. They were sweet and gentle. His voice rang with tenderness instead of sarcasm. His hatred and distrust for all women because Maud Merivale had deceived him was gradually dying out. He believed that his bride was an angel. When the awakening came, it was all the more bitter because he had believed in her so truly.

Laurel was as lovely as a dream in those honeymoon days. Her face glowed with happiness, her dark eyes lost their somber, brooding shadow, and sparkled like stars.

The passengers said that Mr. Le Roy's young bride was a perfect beauty. When she walked on deck in her soft, fine, white cashmere dresses, with a crimson scarf about her shoulders, diamonds blazing in her small, shell-like ears, and her splendid burnished golden hair flying like a banner of light on the gentle breeze, no one could keep from looking at her, no one could keep from envying St. Leon Le Roy the possession of so much beauty, and sweetness, and love.

Laurel had never known that she was beautiful until St. Leon told her so. It was a new delight to her. Some faint hope came to her that by that beauty she might hold his heart, even when he found her out—even when he knew her at her worst—an impostor who had masqueraded under a false name, and so won him. She had read that "beauty is lord of love," and she prayed that it might prove so to her in her dark hour—that hour always just a little ahead of her, when she should moan:

 
"So tired, so tired, my heart and I!
Though now none takes me on his arm
To fold me close and kiss me warm
Till each quick breath end in a sigh
Of happy languor. Now alone,
We lean upon some graveyard stone,
Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I."
 

She would not think of that nearing future much. She gave herself up to the delights of the present. She was the most fondly worshiped wife in the world. When they went to Paris, he loaded her with costly gifts, splendid dresses, priceless jewels.

"I do not know how I shall ever be able to wear all of these splendid things; they are too fine for me," she said to him, almost afraid of herself in the midst of this splendid paraphernalia.

"Nothing is too costly or too fine for you, my little love," he answered, taking her in his arms and kissing the beautiful face over and over. "You will need all these things when you go into society. When we go home, we will spend our winters in New York, and the women in society there dress like queens. I shall want you to be the finest of them all, as you are decidedly the most beautiful."

He wondered why the fair face grew so pale, why his young wife shivered in his arms, and drooped her eyes from his.

"I hope it will be a long time before we return to New York," she said, almost petulantly. "I like Europe better than America."

"You are a most disloyal subject of the United States," he laughed: "but you shall stay as long as you wish, my darling."