Kitabı oku: «Little Golden's Daughter; or, The Dream of a Life Time», sayfa 14

CHAPTER XLIII

When Elinor had gone, Frederick Glenalvan turned curiously to Chesleigh.

"So you were really the husband of Golden Leith, and not her betrayer, as everybody believed?" he said.

"Yes, she was my lawful wife; but why do you call her Golden Leith?" Bertram Chesleigh inquired, curiously.

"Did you not know," said Fred, carelessly, "that she had found her father? He is a New York lawyer, and his name is Richard Leith. It seems that her mother was really married to him after all."

"Thank God! Then there is really not a shadow of disgrace upon my poor, wronged wife," cried Bertram Chesleigh, gladly. "Oh, God! if only she had lived."

He was silent a moment, then asked, suddenly:

"Where is Richard Leith now?"

"He is lying ill in the western wing of Glenalvan Hall," Frederick replied, with some embarrassment at the inward consciousness of who caused that illness.

"Is is possible? I must go to him at once," cried Bertram, starting up. "I am an old friend of Richard Leith. Will you accompany me, Fred?"

Frederick walked with him across the grassy slope of the lawn, but left him in the wide corridor that separated the divided dwellings of the strangely sundered family.

"I can accompany you no further," he said, confusedly. "The truth is, Mr. Leith and father have had a little difficulty, and we are not on the best of terms."

He turned away, and Bertram knocked nervously on the door before him, and was admitted by Dinah, who scowled blackly when she saw whom the visitor was.

"I wish to see Mr. Leith," he said, and the old woman silently motioned him to follow her into the sick man's room.

White as the pillows on which he lay, was Richard Leith, but there was a smile of peace on his face, for Gertrude was sitting in a chair by his bedside, and she had been telling him of the strange scene at Golden's burial that evening; how Bertram Chesleigh had claimed her as his wife, and the child for his own.

"Thank God! she was innocent and pure. Oh, how could I ever have doubted the child of my precious Golden," cried the bereaved father, in a passion of remorse and grief.

"You know the whole truth, now. Can you ever forgive me?" inquired Bertram, advancing.

"You here, Bertram Chesleigh? Oh, how could you have been so cruel?" exclaimed Mr. Leith, excitedly, as he rose on his elbow, and looked at the pale face and gleaming eyes of the intruder.

"I will tell you all the truth, and perhaps you will understand me better," began Bertram Chesleigh, eagerly, but before the words were ended, a terrible change came over his face. It was distorted by contortions of pain, and with a shrill cry of agony he fell to the floor in strong convulsions.

Gertrude sprang from her chair with a frightened shriek that brought Dinah rushing into the room with her old master close at her heels, followed by the hired nurse who had the care of Mr. Leith.

"This man is dying—bring a doctor at once!" cried Gertrude, shrilly.

"The doctor is here, madam," said the pleasant voice of the physician himself, who had just entered the door on his usual daily visit to Mr. Leith. "Why, what have we here?"

He bent down over the tall, superb form that lay upon the floor writhing in a violent fit.

There were a few moments of busy silence while he worked over the patient, then he looked up with a dark frown on his broad brow.

"Who is this man, and how came he here?" he inquired.

"He is my son-in-law, doctor, and he had barely entered the room when he fell in a fit," said Richard Leith. "What ails him?"

Another dire contortion of the prostrate form, and the busy physician answered, sternly:

"He has all the symptoms of arsenical poisoning."

The hovering night fell rainy, dark, and cheerless. The skillful physician worked steadily, anxiously, and patiently, trying to save from the grasp of the fell destroyer the writhing victim of Elinor Glenalvan's deadly hate and wicked revenge.

Everyone was filled with grief and sorrow. All warring passions, all human resentments were forgotten in the anxiety with which they watched the wavering balance in which Bertram Chesleigh lay fluctuating between life and death.

Arsenic had been administered to him in a draught of wine, declared the physician, and the wonder arose who had given it to him.

Someone started the theory that he had taken it himself, with intent to commit suicide.

Then they searched him, but not a grain of the deadly drug was discovered on his person. It was all a baffling mystery.

They had left him mourning despairingly over little Golden's grave, and they had seen him no more until he had come to them in this awful condition.

"If I had not come in at the moment I did, no earthly power could have saved him," declared the physician; "As it is, I hope—mind, I only say hope—that I may save his life."

At midnight Gertrude stole to the outer door for a breath of fresh air. She felt faint, weary and dispirited.

The death of Golden, whom she had learned to love very deeply, had deeply grieved her saddened heart.

"Poor child," she moaned, sitting down on the marble steps and gazing sadly at the silver crescent of the young moon as it struggled through a bank of clouds; "she has had a fate as tragic and sad as her poor young mother's."

The sound of muffled footsteps on the grass caused Gertrude to start up with a sudden cry.

A youth was coming toward her, and his low, entreating "stay, madam," arrested her contemplated flight.

He came close to her side, and as his rough garments brushed the stone ballustrade, the cool, moist smell of newly thrown up earth came distinctly to her senses.

She shivered and thought of that new-made grave lying in the silence and calm of the dewy night.

"Will you tell me if Mr. Chesleigh is here, ma'am?" he inquired, respectfully.

"Yes, he is here. What can you want of Mr. Chesleigh at this unseemly hour of the night?" she inquired, in wonder.

"I have important business with him," said the youth, and Gertrude thought she detected a trembling, as of fear, in his voice. "Can I see him a moment, if you please?"

"No, you cannot, for he is ill and unconscious, and we fear that he is dying," she replied.

A smothered exclamation escaped from the youth's lips.

"Oh, this is dreadful!" he said, as if unconscious of having a listener. "What shall we do now?"

"Can I help you?" asked Gertrude, gently.

He bent toward her eagerly.

"Oh, madam, you are a friend of the poor lady that was buried this afternoon?" he said, almost fearfully.

"Yes," she answered, with a quickened heart-beat.

"Then come with me, for God's sake. There is not a minute to lose. Don't be afraid. No harm shall come to you."

So impressed was Gertrude by the youth's strange eagerness that she followed him without a word across the green lawn, through the wide gate, and along the winding road.

"Not here!" she said, aghast, as he paused at the white gate of the Glenalvan burying ground.

"Yes, even here," he answered, solemnly; and the gate-latch clicked softly beneath his hand. "Follow me, lady. No harm shall happen you."

CHAPTER XLIV

When Bertram Chesleigh came to full consciousness again he found himself lying on a couch in Mr. Leith's bedroom.

The curtains were drawn at the windows, but the light of the full day glimmered through, and he saw the grave-faced physician sitting beside him, while Richard Leith, from the bed opposite, regarded him with an intent expression. He struggled up feebly and pressed his hand to his brow.

"I have had a shock," he said, with an air of strange perplexity, as he looked into their anxious faces. "What was it? What has happened to me?"

"You have been near to death's door," replied the physician, gravely, "but you will recover now."

"I wish that I had died!" the young man burst out, with such passionate realization of his misery, that the doctor exclaimed, incautiously:

"So, then, you did try to commit suicide?"

The brilliant, dark eyes looked at him in amazement.

"Suicide! suicide!" he repeated, blankly. "Who dares to say that of me?"

The doctor regarded him thoughtfully.

"My dear sir," he said, quietly, "I happened in here very opportunely last evening and found you suffering all the terrible symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Your friends feared that your grief had unhinged your mind, and that under temporary aberration you had attempted the destruction of your own life."

"They were wrong. I could never have been such a coward," Bertram answered, in such a tone of convincing truthfulness that no one could doubt him. "Indeed, doctor, you must have been mistaken. I have taken no drug recently."

"I am not mistaken," the physician asserted, confidently. "You had most certainly had arsenic administered to you in a draught of wine."

A startled gleam came into Mr. Chesleigh's eyes, his face whitened, a cry of horror came from his lips.

"Doctor, are you quite, quite sure?" he exclaimed.

"I would swear to the drug," was the instant reply. "Do you admit the wine?"

"Yes," came the grave reply; "I drank a glass of wine before coming in here yesterday evening, but I did not dream it was drugged," and an expression of almost incredulous horror swept over the handsome face.

"Who gave you the wine?" inquired the doctor and Richard Leith almost simultaneously.

But Bertram Chesleigh shook his head.

"Do not ask me," he said. "It is terrible, yet I will not betray my would-be destroyer."

"It was one of the Glenalvans," asserted Richard Leith, seeing the truth as by a flash of light.

"Do not ask me," the young man replied again. "I must not tell you. It is too terrible. I can scarce believe the dread reality myself."

But though he refused to reveal the secret, Richard Leith felt morally certain that it was to some of the family of John Glenalvan the young man owed the attempted destruction of his life. He had heard that Elinor had "set her cap" at him.

This, then, was the dreadful revenge she had taken for her disappointment.

The physician went away and left them together. Then the lawyer told his son-in-law his whole sad story. Bertram's indignation knew no bounds.

"May the curse of an offended God rest upon John Glenalvan's head!" he exclaimed. "It is to him and his family that my poor Golden owes the bitter sorrows of her brief life. My sister's maid, Celine, confessed that it was Elinor Glenalvan who discovered Golden's identity, and bribed her to send her away under a ban of disgrace. Oh, God, Leith, could I only have known that the girl little Ruby loved so dearly, and who shunned me so persistently, was my deserted wife, how joyously would I have taken her to my heart and claimed her for my own."

"Yes, if you had only known," Richard Leith replied, with mournful emphasis. "My poor young daughter, hers indeed was a hard lot. Scorned by her kindred, deserted by her husband, despised and disowned by her miserable father! How glad she must have been to creep into the kindly shelter of the grave! Ah, Heaven, Chesleigh, I never can forget my own wretched share in breaking that tender heart."

His head sank back on his pillow, and almost womanly tears coursed over his pale cheeks.

"But she forgave me before she died," he continued, pathetically, after a little. "She was an angel, Chesleigh. I can never forget how sweet and patient she was. The day before she died they carried me into her room. I lay on a couch by the side of her bed. They showed me the beautiful little waxen image—the babe that had never drawn a single breath of life in this world, and I could not keep from crying when they said her terrible fall had killed the child. The minister came, and told her that she must die in a few hours, too. But was it not strange, Chesleigh? She smiled sadly and shook her head."

"'No, you are all mistaken,' she said. 'I should not be sorry to die, but my time has not come yet. I cannot die until I know whether I shall meet my mother in Heaven, or whether she is still on earth.'

"But that night she passed away peacefully in her sleep. It was so calm and gradual we did not know when the end had come. It was like those sweet lines of Hood:

 
"'We watched her breathing through the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Went heaving to and fro.
Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.'"
 

He ceased, and there was a heavy silence in the room. Bertram Chesleigh broke it in a hushed, low voice.

"Poor, martyred child! Was she, then, so anxious to find her mother?"

"She declared that it was the one dream of her life-time," Richard Leith replied.

"And there is no clew save that which John Glenalvan holds?" inquired Bertram, thoughtfully.

"None, and the villain has fled. I do not believe his own wife and children know aught of his whereabouts."

A look of grave determination swept over Bertram's handsome, pallid face.

"Then I will take up the quest where it dropped from Golden's little hand in dying. I will track the villain, if it is to the end of the world. It shall be my task to vindicate her mother's memory," he said, gravely and earnestly.

"It is my task rather," said Richard Leith.

"We will join hands in the effort," his son-in-law answered.

Old Dinah came in with a note for Mr. Leith. It was from Gertrude.

"I have gone away," she wrote. "I can leave you no address, but I shall be cognizant of all that transpires at Glenalvan Hall, and I may see you again ere long. You will soon be well enough to go about again, and that you may be enabled to solve the distressing mystery of your lost wife's fate, is the earnest prayer of

"Gertrude."

"Surely no man was ever placed in such a terrible position," said Richard Leith. "For aught I know, I may have two wives living."

"It is through no fault of yours," replied Mr. Chesleigh; "but it is most distressing. Your second wife appears to be a very beautiful and winning woman."

"She is both, but I never discovered her worth until it was too late to love her," Mr. Leith replied, sadly. "Her noble conduct to my helpless daughter first opened my eyes to her lovable character."

"God bless her!" Bertram Chesleigh uttered, fervently.

They had some further conversation, and then Mr. Chesleigh announced his intention of going away.

"I will not trespass further on Mr. Glenalvan's hospitality," he said decidedly. "I do not forget how much reason he has to hate the sight of me."

CHAPTER XLV

The twilight hour found Bertram Chesleigh wending his way to the green graveyard where his hapless wife lay buried. As he had hoped, he found the old grave-digger waiting for him.

He had been sodding the mound with velvety green turf, and planting lilies and immortelles upon it.

"Why have you done this?" he said. "Did you not know I would come to-night? I was at death's door last night, or I would have come as I said. Did you do what you promised?"

"Yes, sir, and waited a long time for you," said the man, doffing his cap respectfully. "I even sent my son to look for you. He learned of your bad condition, and then we were compelled to put the coffin back in the ground again."

There was a strange, repressed excitement in the man's manner, but Mr. Chesleigh, absorbed in the bitterness of his own despair, did not observe it.

He counted over a hundred dollars into the man's hand, and then said, with a tremor of hope in his voice:

"I will double the amount if you will do your work over to-night. I must see her. I am mad for one last look at my darling's face!"

The grave-digger shuddered.

"Oh, sir, it is too late," he said. "Have you forgotten how soon death's touch blasts everything human? And the little babe—that was dead long before she was. I know you could not bear to see them now."

"Hush, hush!" the mourner cried, in a voice of agony. "I will hear no more. Go, now, and leave me!"

"Cheer up, sir," said the man, with a strange gleam in his eyes, as he turned to go. "The Lord may have some blessing in store for you yet, sir."

His only answer was a hollow groan from the wretched man. He threw himself face downward on the green grave, crushing all the sweet lilies and immortelles beneath his shuddering frame, and cried out to Heaven to kill him because he had blighted Golden's innocent life.

He lay there an hour or two, musing sorrowfully over the hapless fate of his beautiful girl-bride.

He recalled their brief, happy love-dream from which they had been so rudely awakened.

Over and over again he cursed himself for that first impulse of pride and selfishness that had made him false to his bride in the hour when he should have protected and shielded her.

A passionate, despairing longing to see her again filled his soul.

"I will go back and wander by the lake again," he resolved, in the madness of his despair. "It was there that we spent our sweetest, most blissful hours. In the calm and silence of the night I will dream them over again."

He went to the lake, but the very spirit of unrest was upon him.

The stars came forth and shone weirdly in the sky, the perfume of spring flowers sweetened the air. He grew restless and fanciful.

Such a brief while ago she had stolen nightly from the haunted rooms to meet him here beside the silvery lake.

It almost seemed that she would come to him presently, gliding like a fairy across the green lawn to the glad shelter of his arms.

Some impulse prompted him to seek the haunted rooms, to spend an hour of solitary musing in their quiet shade.

He knew of a retired stairway by which he could make his way unperceived, and following the blind fate that led him, he went up to the hall and up the narrow, secluded stairs which little Golden had shown him, and by which she had obtained egress to her lover.

He went along the dark corridor with a strangely beating heart, and paused before the closed door of the haunted room.

He placed his hand on the knob, but to his surprise it refused to yield to his touch.

Disappointed, he was about turning away, when a heavy step crossed the floor inside, the key clicked in the lock, and the door was cautiously opened.

A flood of light streamed out into the corridor, and showed Bertram Chesleigh the tall form, and dark, saturnine face of John Glenalvan.

There was a moment of complete astonishment on the part of each of the two men.

Both recoiled from each other in the first suddenness of the shock, and then an angry oath burst from John Glenalvan's lips.

"I thought it was Elinor!"

"Luckily you were mistaken," returned Mr. Chesleigh, quickly recovering his wits. "This rencontre is most opportune for me, sir. I have wished to see you."

He stepped into the room as he spoke, and boldly confronted the villain, who glared at him with a mixture of defiance and dismay.

"You wished to see me. I feel flattered," he said, with an attempt at cutting sarcasm. "May I ask why?"

There was a moment's silence while Bertram Chesleigh rapidly reviewed the situation in his mind. Then he spoke:

"You may ask, and I may answer," he said. "Mr. Glenalvan, I might heap the bitterest reproach upon your head, if by so doing the cruel work of your life might be undone. But the past is past. My wife is dead, and no reproaches and no lamentations can bring her back to me. But there is one issue between you and me. I have taken up my dead wife's quest where she left it. I demand that you shall tell me where to find my little Golden's deeply-wronged mother."

The dark face before him whitened to the awful pallor of death, the man's eyes blazed luridly, his hands were clenched as they hung at his sides.

"What if I refuse to answer your question?" he inquired, in a low, tense voice.

"I will find means to force you to confession," Bertram Chesleigh replied, unhesitatingly.

"I defy you to do so," John Glenalvan replied, with an imprecation. "I am not afraid of you."

"You have caused my wife's death, and nearly murdered her father. I will have you arrested for it," exclaimed Mr. Chesleigh.

"Do so, and I will prove that I only acted in self-defense," was the instant reply.

"I will charge you with the murder or abduction of Golden Leith, your own sister," pursued Mr. Chesleigh.

"And I will swear before any court in the land that she is the inmate of a nameless house in New York," was the taunting answer of the villain.

They gazed at each other a moment, then Bertram Chesleigh exclaimed, in wonder:

"What a black and unnatural heart you must have, John Glenalvan. How can you thus malign the fair fame of your own sister?"

"Do not call her my sister. I hated her, the blue-eyed, doll-faced creature. She stole the love of my parents from me. It was all lavished on her, there was none left for me. But I have had a most glorious revenge," he laughed, wickedly.

"Yes, you have had a most terrible revenge," said Bertram Chesleigh, with a shudder. "You have blighted her life and that of her child. Four lives—perhaps five—have been ruined by your sin. Is it not time that vengeance should cease?"

"No!" thundered John Glenalvan, harshly. "For sixteen years the taste of revenge has been sweet on my lips. It is sweet still."

"And you will not speak?" asked Bertram Chesleigh.

"Never!" with triumphant malice.

"I have one card yet to play," began the other, slowly.

A light step suddenly crossed the threshold, and Elinor Glenalvan appeared in the room, bearing a waiter with a substantial supper arranged upon it.

"Papa, were you growing impatient?" she asked; then her startled eyes fell on Bertram Chesleigh, meeting a glance of fiery scorn.

"You here!" she gasped.

The waiter fell from her nerveless hands, and its contents crashed upon the floor.