GUY KENMORE'S WIFE
AND
THE ROSE AND THE LILY
BY MRS. ALEX. McVEIGH MILLER
STREET & SMITH, publishers, NEW YORK
CHAPTER I.
It was a night of nights. Moonlight—the silvery, mystical, entrancing, love-breathing, moonlight of exquisite June—fairest daughter of the year—lay over all the land. The bay—our own beautiful Chesapeake—shone gloriously in the resplendent light, and rolled its foam-capped, phosphorescent waves proudly on to the grand Atlantic.
A wind from the sea—cool, and salty, and delicious—came up to Bay View House, and stole in with the moonlight to the lace-draped windows of the parlor where a crumpled little figure crouched in a forlorn white heap on the wide, old-fashioned window sill, sobbing desperately through the plump little hands, in which the girlish face was hidden.
The spacious parlor with its handsome, old-fashioned furniture, and open piano, was deserted, and the weeping of the girl echoed forlornly through the room, and blended strangely with the whispers of the wind, and the sounds of the sea.
Old Faith put her grotesque, white-capped head inside the parlor door.
"Miss Irene, darling, won't you come and take your tea now?" said she, persuasively. "There's strawberry short-cake, and the reddest strawberries, and yellowest cream," added she, artfully appealing to the young lady's well-known epicurean tastes.
A sharp little voice answered back from the window seat:
"I won't take a thing, Faith; I mean to starve myself to death!"
"Oh, fie, my dearie, don't, now," cried Faith. "Come up-stairs, and let me tuck you in your little white bed, there's a love!"
"I won't, so there! Go away and leave me alone, Faith," cried the girl, through her stifled, hysterical sobs.
Exit Faith.
The wind stirred the yellow curls on the drooping head, and the moonlight touched them with fingers of light, bringing out their glints of gold. The great magnolia tree outside the window shook a gust of strong, sweet perfume from the large white waxen flowers, and the scent of June roses and lilacs came up from the old-fashioned garden. But the sweetness and beauty of the night seemed lost on little Irene, for her grieved sobs only burst forth afresh when Faith had departed. The girlish bosom heaved, the tears rained through her fingers, her smothered wail disturbed the harmony of the beautiful night.
Another step came along the hall, a hand turned the door-knob and a handsome old man came into the room.
"Irene, my pet, my darling, where are you hiding? Come to papa," he called, glancing around the dimly-lighted room.
With a scream of joy the little figure sprang down from its high perch in the window, and ran precipitately into his arms.
"Oh, papa, dear papa, you are home again!" she exclaimed, laughing and crying together, and patting his grey whiskers with her loving white hands.
"Yes, but you aren't glad to see me one bit. You're crying because I've come home. Shall I go back to the city, eh?" he inquired, softly pinching her cheek, and looking at her with kind, blue eyes full of love.
Irene hid her lovely face on his broad breast and sobbed aloud.
"Why, what ails my little girl?" he exclaimed. "Who's been teasing my pet? Where are mamma and the girls?"
With a fresh rain of tears, Irene sobbed out:
"All g—gone to the b—ball, and would not let—let—me g—go, after you'd told them all I might, papa."
The old man's genial face clouded over instantly with some intangible annoyance.
"Why wouldn't they let you go?" he inquired.
"Bertha said if I went, she wouldn't," replied Irene, hushing her sobs, and answering in a high-pitched, indignant young voice; "she said children had no business at a ball! The idea of calling me a child! I was sixteen, yesterday! Oh, papa, have you brought me a birthday present from the city?" she inquired, eagerly, forgetting for a moment her grievance.
"Yes, dear. And so Bertha wouldn't let you go to the ball?" he said, taking a seat, and drawing her down upon his knee.
"It was mamma, too. She took Bertha's part, and said I shouldn't come out until the girls were married. Two Miss Brookes were quite enough in the market at one time she said. As if I wanted to marry any of their ridiculous beauxs, with their lisps, and their eye-glasses, and their black coats. I despise them!" cried Irene, indignantly.
"That's because, as Bertha said, you're nothing but a child," laughed Mr. Brooke. "When you grow older you'll quite adore[Pg 3] these black-coated dandies, I dare say;" then he added, in a graver tone: "Did Elaine forbid your going, too?"
"No, she didn't say one word for, or against it. She only pursed up her lips and looked out of the window. I never saw such a coward as Elaine," pursued the girl, angrily. "Bertha and mamma have everything their own way, and ride rough-shod over Elaine, and she daren't say her soul's her own!"
"Hush, Irene—you musn't talk so disrespectfully of your—sister," her father said, reprovingly.
"Well, but, papa, do you think it is right for Ellie to be ruled so by Bertha? She's older than Bert, you know," said the girl, laying her soft, round cheek against his, coaxingly.
A strange, sad look came into Mr. Brooke's face at her words.
"My dear, we won't discuss it," he said, uneasily. "Elaine is so gentle and quiet, she will not take her own part, perhaps. But about this ball, my pet. I'm sorry they wouldn't let you go. I brought you some pretty fal-lals to wear."
He handed her several parcels as he spoke, and turned up the lamps to a brighter blaze. Irene Brooke began unwrapping the parcels, with little feminine shrieks of delight.
"A baby-blue sash; oh, oh, you dear, old darling!" she cried, letting the rich lengths of wide, blue satin ribbon ripple splendidly over her white dress. "A fan! Ivory sticks, and blue and white feathers! Oh, thank you a hundred times, papa! And what is this tiny parcel? Oh, a bang-net! You ridiculous old papa, what do you think I want of a bang-net?" with a ripple of girlish laughter.
"The shop-woman recommended it. She said they were very fashionable," said Mr. Brooke, vaguely.
"I don't care! I'll never put my yellow curls under a bang-net," laughed Irene, whose tears were dried now as if they had never been. "Ellie may have it. And, oh, this little box! I had almost missed it."
She opened it with a little girlish shriek of joy and amaze.
"A gold chain and locket! Oh, papa, let me kiss you a hundred times!" she cried, running to him and half smothering him with energetic caresses.
"Your birthday present, my love. Look in the locket and see if you like the pictures," said Mr. Brooke as soon as he could get his breath.
She left off choking him a moment to obey.
"Your picture and Elaine's—the very ones I would have wished for! And how true, how perfect, how beautiful!" she cried, kissing the pictured faces. "Dear papa, how did you know that I would far rather have your picture and Ellie's than mamma's and Bert's?" she inquired, smiling fondly at him.
"I knew you liked us best because we spoil you the most," he replied.
"That is true of you, papa, but not to my elder sister," replied Irene, with a touch of seriousness softening for the moment her childish face. "Ellie is very kind to me, but she never spoils me. She reads me long lectures in private, and I believe she[Pg 4] loves me dearly, but she never takes my part against mamma and Bert, when they scold and fret me. She only looks tearful and miserable! Oh, why should she be afraid of them?"
"Hush, Irene, I will not listen to such ridiculous fancies," said Mr. Brooke, half sternly. "You must not imbibe such foolish notions! and, remember, I forbid you, on pain of my extreme displeasure, ever to mention these idle notions to your sister."
"Indeed I never will, papa, I would not hurt Ellie's feelings for the world," the girl said, earnestly. Then she went to his side and put her arm around his neck.
"Papa," she said, looking up at him, with arch, beautiful eyes that sparkled like purple-blue pansies under their shady, golden-brown lashes, "papa, it isn't an hour yet since they went to the ball."
"Well?" he said, half-comprehendingly, smiling down into the eager, charming face, and passing his hand caressingly over the wealth of golden curls that adorned the dainty head.
"Let us go to the ball—you and I, papa?" she said, audaciously.
"What? Why, that would be rank rebellion! What would mamma and the girls say when we sneaked into the ball-room? Wouldn't they march us home and put us in irons for disobeying orders?" inquired Mr. Brooke in pretended alarm, though Irene did not lose the humorous twinkle in his eye.
"No, sir, you know they won't say a word if you take my part! You know they never do. They're afraid of my dear old papa. Oh, how amazed and how angry they would be if you and I were to walk in presently, and have a dance together! And serve them right, too, for their selfishness! Oh, papa, dearest, do take me! I never, never saw a ball in my life, and I had so set my heart on this one!"
The tearful eyes and coaxing lips conquered the old man's heart as they always did, against his better judgment.
"Well, well, they didn't treat you right," he said, "and you shall have your revenge on them. Go along now, and tell old Faith to put your new white frock and blue sash on you in fifteen minutes while I am getting ready."
CHAPTER II.
Every lady knows that fifteen minutes is a totally inadequate time in which to make a ball toilet. It was at least half an hour before Irene, with the assistance of the old housekeeper, had adorned herself with all the finery at her command. Then she came flying down the steps in joyous haste, and burst into the parlor with the refrain of a happy song upon her girlish lips.
Old Faith followed more leisurely with a little white nubia and shawl thrown over her arm.
"Ah! dearie me, dearie me," she sighed, as she waddled uncomfortably down the wide stairs, "the child's too pretty and too willful, and Mr. Brooke spoils her too much! Harm will come of it, I fear me. Poor Miss Ellie, poor Irene!"
She laid the wrappings of her young mistress across the hat-rack in the hall ready for her, and went back to her own domain[Pg 5] and her own duties. Meanwhile Irene had danced blithely into the parlor.
"Papa," she said, to the dark, masculine figure that stood at the window with its back to her, "I'm ready now. Don't I look nice?"
The figure turned around from its contemplation of the moonlighted bay, and looked at her. It was not Mr. Brooke at all. It was a younger, handsomer man, whose brown eyes danced with irresistible mirth at her pardonable vanity.
"Nice enough to eat," he answered coolly, and Irene gave a little, startled shriek.
"Oh, dear, it isn't papa at all. Are you a bear, sir, that you talk of eating me?" she inquired, demurely.
The stranger came forward into the light, and stood before her.
"Do I look like one?" he inquired, with a smile that lit up his face indescribably.
Then, for a moment, they stared straight at each other, taking a mental inventory of each other's appearance.
Ladies first—so we will try to give you some faint idea of how Irene Brooke appeared in Guy Kenmore's eyes, though it is no easy task, for beauty like hers, varying from light to shadow with
defies all formal attempts at description.
She was a sixteen-year-old girl, with the graceful slenderness of that exquisite age, and the warm, blonde beauty of the south. Her eyes were deeply, darkly, beautifully blue, and appeared almost black beneath the long, thick fringes of the beautiful, golden-brown lashes, and the slender, arched brows of a darker hue. These arched brows, and the faint, very faint, retrousse inclination of the pretty little nose, gave an air of piquancy and spirit to the young face that was hightened by the proud curve of the short upper lip. The round, dimpled chin, and soft cheeks were tinted with the soft pink of the sea shell. The waving, rippling mass of glorious curls was of that warm, rich, golden hue the old masters loved to paint. Put on such a fair young girl a dress of soft white muslin and lace—just short enough to show the tiny, high-arched feet in white kid slippers—girdle the slim waist with a broad, blue ribbon, and fancy to yourself, reader mine, how sweet a vision she appeared in the eyes of the stranger.
For him, he was tall, large, and graceful, with a certain air of indolence and gracious ease, not to say laziness. He was decidedly handsome, with a well-shaped head of closely-clipped brown hair, good features, laughing brown eyes, and a drooping brown mustache. His summer suit of soft, light-gray cloth was infinitely becoming.
But in much less time than it took for these cursory descriptions, Irene has spoken:
"No, you do not look like a bear," she says, with charming frankness. "You look like—see how good I am at guessing—like Bertha's city beau! You are—aren't you?"
Something in this childish frankness touches him with faint annoyance. He chews the end of his long mustache after an old habit, and answers, rather stiffly:
"My name is——"
"'Norval, from the Grampian hills,'" she quotes, with audacious laughter.
"No,—it is plain Guy Kenmore," he answers, stifling his rising vexation, and laughing with her.
"There, didn't I say so? Pray sit down, Mr. Kenmore," sweeping him a mocking, ridiculous little courtesy. "I hope you will make yourself quite at home at Bay View. I have a great liking for you, Mr. Kenmore."
He takes a chair with readiness, while she paces, a little restlessly, up and down the floor.
"Thank you," he says, languidly. "May I inquire to what circumstances I owe the honor of your regard?"
"You may," shooting him a swift, arch glance. "You're going to take Bert off our hands, and I consider you in the light of my greatest benefactor."
He laughs and colors at the cool speech of this strange girl.
"Indeed?" he says, with a peculiar accent on the word. "Why?"
"Oh, because," she pauses in her restless walk, and looks gravely at him a moment with those dark blue eyes, "because Bert is so wretchedly selfish she won't let me go anywhere until she is married off. Now to-night there was a ball. Papa had said I might go, but when he was called unexpectedly away to the city what did Bert and mamma do but forbid my going! After my dress and gloves and slippers were all bought, too. Wasn't that too bad? And if you were me shouldn't you just love the man that would take Bertha away?"
"A spoiled child, who hasn't the least business out of the school-room yet," mentally decides the visitor. Aloud he says, curiously:
"Do you know you have the advantage of me? I haven't the least idea who you are."
The blue eyes grow very large and round indeed. "Haven't you, really? Did Bertha never tell you about me—her little sister, Irene?"
"Never. She must have forgotten your existence," he answered, with an amused twinkle in his eyes.
"It is like her selfishness!" flashed Irene. "Never mind, I'll pay her out for her crossness this evening. Only think, Mr. Kenmore, papa came home just after they had gone, and said he would take me to the ball. I wonder if he is ready yet. It's quite time we were starting," she adds, looking anxiously at the door.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Brooke. Your dazzling entree put everything out of my mind for a moment. Your father was in here about fifteen minutes ago. He left a message for you."
"Why didn't you tell me, ah, why didn't you?" she demands, stamping her little foot in impatient wrath.
"You talked so fast I quite forgot," he answers coolly.
"Well, are you going to tell me now?" she inquires, flashing her large eyes at him superbly.
"Yes, if you will keep still long enough," he answers, provokingly, and openly amused at the impatient anger, so like that of a sadly spoiled child.
Irene folds her bare white arms over her heaving breast, and shuts her red lips tightly over her busy little tongue; but her eyes look through him with a glance that says plainer than words:
"Go on, now, I'm waiting."
With a stifled laugh, he obeys:
"Mr. Brooke said that he had been most unexpectedly called away on a little matter of business, but that he would certainly return inside an hour and take you to the ball."
He expected some expression of disappointment, but he was scarcely prepared for the dire effect of his communication.
Irene ran precipitately to the darkest corner of the room, flung herself down on a sofa, and dissolved into tears.
Feminine tears are an abomination to most men. Our hero is no exception to the rule. He fidgets uneasily in his chair a moment, then rises and goes over to the window, and listening to the low, sad murmur of the sea tries to lose the sound of that disconsolate sobbing over there in the dark corner.
"I never saw such a great, spoiled baby in my life," he says, vexedly, to himself. "How childish, how silly! She's as pretty as a doll, and that's all there is to her!"
But he cannot shut out easily the sound of her childish weeping. It haunts and vexes him.
"Oh, I say, Miss Brooke," he says, going over to her at last, "I wouldn't cry if I were in your place. Your father will be back directly."
Irene, lifting her head, looks at him with tearful blue eyes shining under the tangle of golden love-locks that half obscures her round, white forehead.
"No, he will not," she answers, stifling her sobs. "When men go out on business they never come back for hours and hours—and hours!" dolefully. "It was too bad of papa to treat me so!"
"But he was called away—don't you understand that? He wouldn't have gone of himself," says Mr. Kenmore, doing valiant battle for his fellow-man.
"I don't care. He shouldn't have gone after he'd promised me, and I was all ready," Irene answers, obstinately and with a fresh sob.
"Little goosie!" the young man mutters between his teeth, and feeling a strong desire to shake the unreasonable child.
But suddenly she springs up, dashing the tears from her eyes.
"I won't wait for papa, so there!" she flashes out, determinedly. "All the best dances will be over if we go so late. You shall take me."
"I'm not invited, you know," he says, blankly.
"No matter. They'll make you welcome, for Bert's sake. Any friend of Miss Bertha's, you know, etc.," she says, with a little, malicious laugh. "Yes, you shall go with me. It is a splendid idea. I wonder you didn't suggest it yourself."
He smiles grimly.
"Indeed, Miss Brooke, I'm not at all in ball costume," he objects, glancing down at his neat, light suit.
"All the better. I despise their ugly black coats," she replies, warmly. "Do you know," with startling candor, "you are handsomer and nicer-looking than any of the black-coated dandies that dawdle around Ellie and Bert? Come, you will go, just to please me, won't you?" she implores, pathetically.
"No gentleman ever refuses a lady's request," he replies, with rather a sulky air.
Irene scarcely notices his sulky tone. Her heart is set on this daring escapade. Smarting under the sense of the injuries sustained at Bertha's hands, she longs to avenge herself, and show her selfish sister that she will go her way despite her objections. It is a child's spite, a child's willfulness, and all the more obstinate for that reason.
"Oh, thank you," she says, brightly. "We shall have a charming time, sha'n't we?"
"You may. I am not rapturous over the prospect," he replies, laconically.
The willful girl regards him with sincere amazement. "Why, you must be very stupid indeed, not to care for a ball," she observes, with all the candor and freshness of an enfant terrible.
"You are very candid," he replies, feeling a strong desire to seize his hat and leave the house.
"Now you are vexed with me. What have I done?" she inquires, fixing on him the innocent gaze of her large, soft eyes. "I hope you haven't a bad temper," she goes on, earnestly, almost confidingly, "for Bert isn't an angel, I can assure you; and if you're both cross, won't you have a lovely time when you marry."
Vexation at this aggravating little beauty almost gets the better of the young man's politeness.
"Miss Brooke, if you weren't such a pretty child, I should like to shake you soundly, and send you off to your little bed!" he exclaims.
She flushes crimson, flashes him an angry glance from her lovely eyes, and curls her red lips into a decided and deliberate moue at him. Then, holding her pretty head high, she walks from the room.
"Has she taken me at my word?" he asks himself, rather blankly.
But no; Irene has only gone to the housekeeper's room, to leave a message for her father that she has gone to the ball with Mr. Kenmore. It does not enter her girlish mind that she is doing an improper thing, or that her father would object to it.
Old Faith, wiser in this world's lore than her willful little mistress, raises vehement objections.
"You mustn't do no such thing, Miss Irene, darling," she says. "Miss Bertha will be downright outrageous about you coming there along of her beau."
The pansy-blue eyes flash, the red lips pout mutinously.
"All the better," she answers, wickedly. "I want to make her mad! That's why I'm going! I'm going to the ball with her beau; and I mean to keep him all to myself, and to flirt with him outrageously, just to see how Bert's black eyes will snap!"
CHAPTER III.
"Oh, Irene, my darling, why have you done this mad, disobedient thing? Mamma and Bertha are terribly angry! When Bertha first saw you, dancing with her lover, too, I thought she would have fainted. Her eyes flashed lightning. I believe she could have killed you! Child, child, you will break my heart by your willfulness! Oh, you cannot dream what this may bring upon you!"
The sweet voice broke in almost a wail of pain, and beautiful Elaine Brooke drew her sister further into the shaded alcove of the bay-window as she waited anxiously to hear her reply.
Pretty little Irene shrugged her dimpled white shoulders, and pouted her rosy lips.
"Now, Ellie, you needn't begin to scold," she said. "You know you all treated me unfairly, and so papa said when he came home!"
"Papa has come, then?" asked Miss Brooke, in a tone of relief.
"Yes, and he gave me leave to come, so you needn't lecture any more, Ellie," said the girl, with an arch, pleading glance.
But a long and bitter sigh drifted over the grave, sweet lips of Elaine Brooke.
"Then why, ah, why didn't papa bring you himself?" she said, wringing her slender white hands together. "He should have known that Bertha would be enraged at your coming with Mr. Kenmore."
"Don't scold any more, Ellie, please don't," said her little sister, impatiently; "papa was coming, but, while I was up-stairs dressing, he was called away for an hour. So when I came down to the parlor there was Mr. Kenmore, and I made him go with me. Please let me go now. I want to dance some more."
"Oh, Irene, indeed you must not dance again to-night! Promise me you will not!" exclaimed her sister, anxiously.
Irene shook the white hand off her shoulder, dismayed and rebellious.
"I'm engaged to Mr. Kenmore for ever so many dances," she exclaimed, "and I don't want to break my word! You're selfish, Ellie, and want to have all the pleasure to yourself!"
"Selfish," Elaine echoed, with almost a moan. "Oh, child, you don't understand!" then she added, almost piteously: "Irene, in the large parlor next to the dancing-room there are some young people like yourself who are not dancing at all, but playing games and having charades and tableaux. Darling, won't you join them, and keep out of Bert's and mamma's sight? Perhaps they won't be so angry, then."
"I'm not afraid of them——" Irene began, rebelliously, but stopped short as she saw a glittering tear splash down on her[Pg 10] sister's cheek. "Oh, Ellie, you great baby," she said, "must I give up all my pleasure just to please you?"
"Yes, for this once, love," answered Elaine, tremblingly. "I'll try to make it up to you, indeed I will, some other time, dear," and drawing Irene further into the shadow of the lace curtain, she bent down and kissed the fresh young lips.
"But here comes Mr. Kenmore, now. What shall I say to him about our dances?" asked the girl, with a sigh of disappointment.
"Oh, I'll make your excuses," Elaine answered, readily, as Mr. Kenmore came toward them, not looking very eager, certainly, over the dances he was fated to lose.
His handsome brown eyes lighted with admiration as they fell upon Elaine Brooke, and she was well worthy of it, for in her maturer style she was as lovely as the girlish Irene.
The family Bible registered the eldest Miss Brooke as thirty-two years old, and she had all the repose and dignity of the age, with all the charms of ripe loveliness. Men called her a "magnificent woman," envious girls sneeringly dubbed her an old maid. This latter was her own fault, certainly, for she had admirers by the score who went wild over her rare blonde beauty. But Miss Brooke, unknown to all, treasured a broken dream in her heart like her hapless namesake:
So the years went and came, and Elaine answered no to all her suitors, though her mother frowned and her father sighed, while deep down in her heart she echoed the "Lily Maid's" song:
But none of this pain was visible on Elaine's face as she looked up at Guy Kenmore with that calm, sweet smile, softly bright, like the moonlight that shone on the outer world.
"Mr. Kenmore, I know you will excuse Irene from her dances," she said sweetly. "She wants to go and play games with the other children in the parlor."
"The other children," Irene muttered ominously, and before Mr. Kenmore could murmur his ready assent, she exclaimed, in a tone of witching diablerie:
"Yes, but I'm not going to desert my partner! Come along, Mr. Kenmore, and you shall be my play-fellow with the children."
With a gay little laugh and a triumphant glance at her sister, Irene slipped her hand in his arm, and led her captive away, leaving Elaine gazing after them in silent dismay and despair. Irene had outwitted her after all, and her artful scheme for keeping her apart from Bertha's lover was an ignominious failure.
With a sinking heart and a face as pale as death, she turned away to convey the tidings of her failure to her mother.
Mrs. Brooke, a still handsome woman of the brunette type, received the news with an ominous flash of her large black eyes.
"Little minx! she shall pay for it, dearly," she muttered, between her teeth.
"Oh, mamma, it is only thoughtlessness I think. She doesn't really mean to be disobedient," faltered Elaine, tremulously.
Her mother gave her a swift, displeased glance that silenced the excusing words on her lips.
Bertha came up, flushed from the dance, a dark, haughty beauty, three years younger than Elaine, but never owning to more than twenty years.
"Where is Mr. Kenmore? I left him with you, mamma," she said.
"He left me to seek his partner for the next dance," Mrs. Brooke answered, in a tone of repressed fury.
Bertha turned her large, flashing dark eyes on her elder sister.
"I thought mamma sent you to get Irene out of the way," she said, imperiously.
"I did my best, Bertha," Elaine answered, gently. "I persuaded her to go and play games in the parlor. Unfortunately Mr. Kenmore came up as she was going, and she playfully carried him off with her. I am sure he will return to us directly. He regards Irene as the merest child."
"She is as old as you were when she was——" Bertha sneered in her sister's ear, making the last word so low it was inaudible.
Beautiful Elaine's cool, white cheeks crimsoned, then grew paler than before. She answered not a word.
"Hush, Bertha. Are you crazy, making such remarks in this crowded room?" whispered her mother, in angry haste.
"I shall not be answerable for what I say or do unless you get my lover away from that wretched girl," the dark-eyed beauty retorted furiously in her ear.
"Come, then, let us go and see their games," Mrs. Brooke answered, soothingly, to allay the young lady's violent rage. "He will leave Irene and come to you as soon as he sees you."
The three moved away to the crowded parlor where the girls from twelve to sixteen, and the lads from sixteen to twenty, were enjoying themselves, to the top of their bent. Having exhausted everything else, they had determined on having a wedding. Mr. Kenmore being the most grown-up of the gentlemen, was selected for the groom, and Irene Brooke for the bride.
CHAPTER IV.
Mr. Kenmore, having vainly protested at first against making a show of himself, has now resigned himself to his fate, and stands awaiting his martyrdom with a rather bored look on his handsome face. Irene, on the point of a vehement refusal to enact the bride's part, suddenly catches a glimpse of Bertha's face glowering on her from the door, and on the instant her mood changes.
Never so willing a bride as she.
After that one glance she does not seem to see Bertha. She stands with lowered eyelids waiting while the gay young girls fasten a square of tulle on her hair with a spray of real orange[Pg 12] blossoms from the pet orange tree that is the pride of the hostess. No one sees the mischief dancing under the demurely drooping lashes.
"Poor old Bert—how mad she is," the girl is saying to herself. "I think I've almost paid her out now for her meanness. As soon as the wedding is over she shall have her fine beau back. I believe I have almost teased her enough."
"Who will be the preacher?" she inquires, glancing around at the lads.
"Mr. Clavering, Mr. Clavering!" cried half a dozen voices. "He looks the parson to the life, with his black coat and little white tie. There he is on the balcony. Go and ask him, Mr. Kenmore."
Guy Kenmore steps lazily through the low window and addresses the little, clerical-looking figure standing meditatively in the moonlight.
"Excuse me," he says, in his bored tone. "We are going to have a marriage, by way of a diversion for the young people. Will you come in and perform the ceremony for us?"
Mr. Clavering turns a pale, dreamy, rather delicate face, toward the speaker.
"Isn't it rather sudden?" he inquires.
"Rather," Mr. Kenmore asserts, with a careless laugh, and without more words they step through the window into the parlor, where the babel of shrill young voices goes on without cessation.
The bride, and a giggling string of attendants, are already on the floor awaiting them. Guy Kenmore laughingly steps to his place. Somebody puts a prayer-book into Mr. Clavering's hand and merrily introduces him to the bride and groom. He bows, and, with quite an assumption of gravity, opens the book and begins to read the beautiful marriage service.
To Bertha Brooke, glaring with scarce repressed rage at the mock marriage, it all seems horribly real. Irene has put on a shy, frightened look, supposed to be natural to brides, and no one takes note of the suppressed merriment dancing in her blue eyes, as she pictures to herself Bertha's silent rage. Mr. Kenmore, impressed beyond his will by the solemn marriage words, looks a little graver than his wont. The babel of voices is momentarily still, while bright eyes gaze entranced on the beautiful scene. It seems to Bertha as if she can no longer bear it; as if she must scream out aloud as she hears Guy Kenmore's deep, full voice repeating after Mr. Clavering:
"I, Guy, take thee, Irene, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth."
"Mamma, for God's sake, stop it," Bertha utters, in a fierce whisper, clutching her mother's arm.
"Don't be a fool, Bertha! It is nothing but child's play," Mrs. Brooke replies, impatiently, and, in a minute more the ring is[Pg 13] slipped over Irene's finger, and the minister utters, in tones that sound too solemn for this pretty mockery:
Gay congratulations followed, and Irene, a little paler than her wont, slipped over to Elaine, who was white as death, with the dew of unshed tears glittering on her long, thick lashes.
"You dear old owl, how solemn you look," she said. "But I didn't like it myself. It sounded too horribly real. Once I had half a mind to break loose, and run away!"
Mrs. Brooke glared at her youngest pride in silent rage. The vials of her wrath were reserved till to-morrow.
Irene darted to Mr. Kenmore's side and looked at him with laughing eyes:
"You may go and stay with Bert now," she said, carelessly, "I believe I have teased her quite enough, and I mean to be good the remainder of the night."
He looked at the bright, arch face curiously a minute, then moved away to join Bertha.
She received him with a curling lip, and an irrepressible flash of her proud, dark eyes.
"I did not know you were so fond of juvenile society, Mr. Kenmore," she said, in a tone of pique.
"I am not; I was rather forced into this affair, Miss Bertha," he replied, languidly, and with a rather bored expression. "But come, let us promenade the balcony in the moonlight. Or would you prefer to dance?"
"The balcony by all means," answered Bertha, remembering what an opportunity it would afford for a sentimental tete-a-tete, and also that a pretty woman never looks more lovely than by moonlight.
"When did you leave Baltimore?" she inquired, as they stepped through the low French window, and walked arm-in-arm along the moonlighted balcony.
"Only to-day," he answered. "I remembered my promise to visit you at Bay View, and thought it a good time to keep my word, not dreaming that you would be absent. I half-feared you would have forgotten me, it has been so long since your visit to the city," he added, half-quizzically, for Irene's innocent prattle that evening had let in some light upon his mind. He understood that Bertha claimed him openly as her lover, and fully calculated on marrying him, while the truth was that though he had a lazy admiration for the beautiful brunette, he had never dreamed of aspiring for her hand. His intimate friends did not consider him "a marrying man."
"As if I could ever forget my visit to Baltimore," said Bertha, sentimentally, with an effective upward glance into his face from her dark, long-lashed eyes.
Mr. Kenmore returned the coquettish glance with interest. He was an adept at flirting himself when he could conquer his natural indolence enough to exercise the art.
"I hope it will not be long before you visit the city again," he said. "Your friend, Miss Leigh, sent you as much love as I[Pg 14] could conveniently transport, and an urgent message to come again."
"I shall be delighted," exclaimed Bertha, who was fast forgetting Irene's naughtiness, and recovering her spirits in the charm of her admirer's presence. Now that she had him all to herself, her horrible fears of her younger sister's rivalry grew less, and she resolved to make the very most of this glorious tete-a-tete under the beautiful moonlight with the soft notes of the entrancing dance-music blending with the murmuring of the melancholy sea.
She was succeeding almost beyond her expectations. Mr. Kenmore was lending himself to her efforts to charm with unqualified approval.
He had dropped his indolent air of being bored by everything, and his dark eyes sparkled with interest, when suddenly the scene was changed, and Bertha's sentimentalisms interrupted by a little flying white figure that came through the window with a rush, and clutched Mr. Kenmore's arm frantically, with two desperate young hands, and looked up at him with eyes that were wide and dark with horror.
"Mr. Kenmore, oh, Mr. Kenmore," panted the sharp, shrill, frightened young voice, "do you know what they are saying in yonder?—what Mr. Clavering is saying? That—that—he is a real minister, and that it was a real marriage! It isn't true! Oh, my God, it can't be! Go, and make them say it is all a wretched joke to frighten me!"
There was a moment's stunned silence broken only by a scream of dismay from Bertha. Irene was gazing with a blanched face, and wild, beseeching eyes, up into the handsome, startled face of the man. Suddenly he pushed the white hands from his arm, broke loose from Bertha's clasp, and strode hastily through the window.
Irene fell upon the floor, all her childishness stricken from her by this terrible blow, and grovelled in abject terror.
Haughty Bertha spurned the little white figure with her dainty slippered foot.
"Get up," she said, harshly. "Get up, Irene, and tell me the truth! Is it true what you were saying, or only one of your miserable jokes?"
Irene dragged herself up miserably from the floor, and clung to the balcony rail around which clambered a white rose vine. The snowy, scented roses were not whiter than her haggard young face.
"Oh, Bertha—Bertha, it is true," she said, despairingly. "That stupid Clavering didn't know we were joking. He is a minister—really a minister—but no one in the room knew it, because he is a stranger about here, you know, and staying at the hotel for his health. Oh, Bertha—Bertha, what shall I do? I don't like Mr. Kenmore! I don't want to be his wife!"
Bertha shook from head to foot with jealous rage.
"Listen to me, Irene Brooke," she said, in a hoarse, low voice of concentrated fury. "If this is true, if you really are Guy Kenmore's wife, I am your bitterest foe as long as you live! I'll[Pg 15] make you repent this night's work in dust and ashes to your dying day!"
As the cruel words left her writhing lips, Mr. Kenmore came out, followed by Mrs. Brooke and her eldest daughter.
Irene's wild eyes searched the man's face imploringly,
"Yes, it is true," he said to her abruptly, almost harshly. "The man is an ordained minister, licensed to marry. You are really my wife!"
A piercing shriek, full of the sharpest anguish, followed on the last cold word. Irene threw up her white arms wildly in the air and fell like one dead at the bridegroom's feet.
CHAPTER V.
When Irene Brooke recovered her senses she was lying on a sofa in the old familiar home-parlor which she had quitted such a little while ago a careless, happy, willful child. The soft locks that hung about her forehead were all wet and dabbled with eau de cologne, and Elaine bent over her with the face of a pitying angel, bathing her cheeks and temples with the refreshing perfume. The clock in the hall chimed the midnight hour, and lifting her head, that felt strangely dull and heavy, she gazed wonderingly around her.
In the subdued light that flooded the spacious parlor, Mr. Kenmore was walking slowly up and down with his hands behind his back. He came and knelt down by her side.
"You are better," he said, gently.
All her troubles rushed overwhelmingly over Irene, and she turned from him with a shudder.
"Ellie, where is papa? I want papa," she said, longing to lean in her trouble on the grand strength of the father who was dearer to her than all the world.
"He has never come home yet," Elaine answered in a troubled tone.
"Not yet, and he promised to return within the hour!" Irene exclaimed in vague alarm.
"He has been detained, doubtless," Mr. Kenmore said, soothingly. "You know you said to-night, Irene, that when men went out on business they never came back for hours and hours."
Irene looked at him in wonder, his tone was so kind and gentle. A great, deep pity shone in his speaking eyes. He laid his strong white hand lightly on hers. She could not understand why his touch thrilled her through and through, and pulled her hand quickly away.
"Irene, do not turn from me so coldly," he said, in the same gentle tone at which she had wondered so much, "I have something to say to you. Will you listen to me?"
She lifted her dark blue eyes to his face, inquiringly.
"Since we brought you home, and while you lay unconscious, my child, I have been talking to your sister," he said. "I think—we both think—that you and I will have to accept the situation."
Elaine rose delicately and went to the window. Irene answered[Pg 16] not a word. He went on, holding her gaze within his steady, grave, brown eyes:
"Through our carelessness and love of fun, we have fettered ourselves so effectually that we cannot break our bonds without exposing ourselves to a notoriety that would be galling alike to the pride of the Brookes and the Kenmores. Do you understand me, my child?" he inquired, pausing, and waiting for her reply.
"I understand—you mean——," she said, then paused, sensitively, while her cheeks grew very white, and her dry lips refused to go on.
"That it is doubtful if the law will free us from the marriage vows we so unthinkingly uttered," he said. "If it did, it would only be at the expense of a newspaper notoriety that would be galling to our pride and a death-blow to sensitiveness. I own that I am proud," a deep flush coloring his face for a moment. "I cannot bear the thought of making the subject of numberless inane witticisms and newspaper paragraphs. I had rather accept the consequences of my folly."
"You are taking all the blame upon yourself," she said, in a low, strange voice that sounded very womanly for Irene, "when you know that it was all my fault."
"Do you think so? No, I was too careless, I should not have been led into their child's play," he said. "Well, no matter, let us make the best of it. I will be your faithful husband if you will be my true little wife, Irene."
The tone was very kind, but it was not that of a lover. Irene, though she had never been wooed, instinctively felt the subtle difference.
"You do not care for me—that way," she said, "and I—do not like you!"
"I have heard it said that it is best to begin with a little aversion," he answered, in a tone of patient good-humor.
"You belong to Bertha," she said.
"I belong to you," he retorted.
Elaine came slowly back from the window, looking like some tall, fair goddess in her shimmering pearl-gray silk. The tears were shining in her azure eyes.
"Irene, Mr. Kenmore is very kind," she said. "Believe me, he has made the wisest decision, if only you will acquiesce in it."
"Ellie, I don't wish to be married," cried the child.
"You are married already," Elaine answered, with a sigh, quickly repressed.
The beautiful child, who, by her own willfulness, had brought this doom upon her head, struggled up to a sitting posture. The sweet blue eyes had a dazed look. Grief had strangely changed her already.
"Let me alone, Ellie, and you, Mr. Kenmore, for a little while," she said, pitifully. "Wait until papa comes. He shall tell me what is best. Oh, it cannot be right that two lives should be spoiled by such a little mistake! Three lives, I mean," she added, wildly, "for Bertha loves him, and he belongs to her."
"Yes, he belongs to me," said a low, menacing voice in the door-way. "He belongs to me, Irene Brooke. Do not dare to take him from me!"
CHAPTER VI.
It was Bertha's voice. She had been to her room, to indulge in a fit of mad passion and jealousy, but had returned and stood listening at the door for some moments—long enough indeed to hear all that had been spoken since Irene had recovered consciousness. Mad with passion she stood before them.
"He is mine," she said again, hoarsely. "Woe be to you, Irene Brooke, if you take him from me!"
She looked like some mad creature with the loosened coils of her shining hair falling down like long black serpents over the corsage of her ruby satin robe, and her black eyes flashing forth jealousy and defiance. The jeweled serpents that wreathed her white arms seemed to dart menace from their gleaming emerald eyes as she shook her hand.
Slowly Guy Kenmore turned and looked at her, honest amazement stamped on his handsome features.
"Miss Brooke, your assertion is a most strange one," he said. "I cannot understand why you should wish to complicate this unhappy affair still further by such a palpable injustice. On what grounds do you base your claim?"
Her flashing eyes fell a moment before the proud wonder in his. Then she asked, with a heaving breast and in deep agitation:
"Do you deny that you have made love to me? That you came to Bay View to woo me?"
A deep, warm color drifted over his face.
"Is it possible, Miss Bertha, that you have taken our idle flirtation in earnest?" he exclaimed, shame, surprise and self-reproach struggling together in his voice. "If you have, I beg your forgiveness a thousand times, for I thought you were simply amusing yourself, as I was. I admired you, certainly, but I never dreamed of love, I never thought of marriage."
If love changed to hatred could have slain, Guy Kenmore would have fallen dead before the vengeful lightnings of the brunette's eyes. Strong man though he was he shivered under their baleful glare. Her very voice was changed when she spoke again. It seemed to cut the air like a keen-bladed knife.
"So you were only amusing yourself," she said. "You made a plaything of a woman's heart! Did you ever hear of playing with edged tools? Ah, beware, Guy Kenmore, beware! My love would have been a thousand times better than my hate! And do you pretend to love that creature?" pointing a scornful finger at the drooping form of Irene.
Instinctively he moved a step nearer to his girl-bride, as if to shield her from some threatening danger.
"I make no idle pretences," he answered. "Irene is my wife. Love will come."
"Love," she sneered. "Love! Your cold, selfish heart is incapable of that divine passion! I understand why you would hold[Pg 18] that willful child to the fetters so unwittingly forged! It is the Kenmore pride, that is afraid of being dragged through the mire of the divorce court! You will never love her, never make her happy! You only take her to save your overweening pride."
"Oh, Bertha, hush! It is the best way out of our trouble," pleaded Elaine, gently.
"Best—ah, yes, you never dreamed of such a marriage for your fatherless child? A Kenmore—rich, honorable, high-born—to mate with the child of shame, the nameless creature whom we have shielded with our own honest name to save our family honor! Ha, ha, Guy Kenmore, are you not proud of your high-born bride—Elaine's base-born child, who never had a father?" screamed Bertha, wild with jealousy and anger, and flashing the lurid lightning of her great black eyes upon their blanched faces.
Like some beautiful enraged tigress, Irene sprang from the sofa, and ran to Bertha. She clutched her small white fingers in the brunette's round white arm, and their frantic clasp sunk deep into the flesh.
"You wicked, cruel woman, how dare you utter such a fiendish lie?" she panted, hoarsely. "How dare you malign the honor of my beautiful, pure-hearted Ellie? How dare you name us—Ellie and me—the honest daughters of old Ronald Brooke—in the same breath with dishonor!"
"I dare because it is true," hissed Bertha, breaking loose from the child's frantic grasp, and laughing like a beautiful demon. "Don't take my word for it! Ask that woman there whom my very words have crushed down to the earth! Ask her if she is not your mother! Ask her the name of your father! Ha, ha, Guy Kenmore, accept my congratulations on your brilliant marriage," she sneered, as she rushed from the room.
Elaine Brooke had indeed sunk wretchedly to the floor at her sister's terrible charge. She crouched there forlornly, her face hidden in her trembling hands, her golden hair falling loose, and streaming in sad beauty over her quivering, prostrate form. Guy Kenmore, with blanched face and starting eyes, recalled Arthur's words to his faithless Guinevere. They seemed to fit this crushed woman:
With a single bound Irene reached the prostrate form. Her small hand fell heavily on Elaine's white, quivering shoulder.
"Ellie, Ellie, look at me," she said; "I want to see your face! I want to see the truth in your eyes!"
With a groan Elaine obeyed the imperious mandate of the sharp, young voice. She raised her head and looked into Irene's clear, searching eyes with a woful, white, white, face, on which the very agonies of death could not have written such despair.
"Irene, my love, my darling, do not curse me," she moaned. "It is true! I am your wretched mother!"
The beautiful, kneeling figure reeled backward with one hand pressed on her heart as if it had been pierced by a sword-point.
"My mother—Elaine Brooke my mother," she groaned. "Oh, God, was ever sin and shame hidden beneath such true, sweet eyes and the face of an angel before? Do not ask me not to curse you! God may forgive you, but I never can! Now I know why they hate me, your mother and your sister. I have no right in the world, I have no name, no place, I am the living badge of my mother's dishonor! Great God, pity me! Strike me dead this moment at the feet of my guilty, shameless mother," she prayed, wildly lifting her wild, white face and anguished eyes to Heaven.
Guy Kenmore gazed like one paralyzed at the unhappy mother and daughter. He could not speak one word to either. The shocking disclosure of the maddened Bertha had almost stunned him. He was a proud man, as he had said. It was horrible to think of the stain on the girl he had wedded—the willful, naughty, yet beautiful girl whom with all her faults he had been proud to think was nobly born as the Kenmores.
CHAPTER VII.
Elaine dragged herself up from the floor, and held out her arms imploringly to the lovely, imperious young creature, who regarded her with angry, scornful eyes.
"Irene, hear me," she said, humbly.
But Irene pushed off the clinging hands, cruelly.
"Do not touch me," she said, bitterly. "I am bad enough myself. The brand of shame is on me, and I have no name and no right in the world; but it is no sin of mine. You—you are the guilty one! The touch of your hand would burn me! Oh, God! oh, God! how came she by that angel's face and devil's heart?"
She had forgotten Guy Kenmore's presence as she hurled her denunciations at the lovely, despairing, sinful woman before her. Elaine did indeed have the face of an angel. Even in this moment, when her long-hidden and shameful secret became revealed to her child, her exquisite face had on it no remorseful shame. The rather it was touched with the despairing resignation of some pure, high heart which has found itself cast down and destroyed in its struggle against the wicked world. She lifted her sweet, sad, violet eyes, and cast a look of pathetic reproach upon Irene.
"My child, do you indeed believe me so vile and wicked?" she asked, mournfully.
"I am forced to judge you by your confession," Irene answered, with passionate shame.
"I have made no confession yet, I wish to do so now, if you will listen to me, Irene," said the beautiful woman in a tone of sad patience. "I am not guilty as you think me, oh, no, no, no!" she cried, shudderingly.
"You are my mother, and you are ashamed to claim me! You are a wretched sinner, and instead of hiding your disgraced head in seclusion, and trying to win the pardon and mercy of offended[Pg 20] Heaven, you flaunt your beautiful face before the world, unforgiven and unrepentant!" cried out Irene, with all the hard severity of a young mentor.
Elaine wrung her beautiful, jeweled hands together, and tears fell one after another in a rapid stream down her cheeks upon the corsage of her dress, spotting and staining the rich silk.
"Irene, will you indeed be so hard and unforgiving?" she cried. "Will you judge and condemn me without hearing? Are you the sweet, loving child, whom I could always lead and persuade with a kind word?"
"I am no longer a child!" the girl cried out, bitterly. "I am a woman now. The events of to-night have laid years on my head and a burden on my heart! You might have led me by one thread of your golden hair while I believed you to be my pure, true-hearted sister who bore your mother's and sister's tyranny like an angel because you were too gentle to resent it. I understand it all now. You were afraid of them. Conscience made a coward of you, and they held your shameful secret like a whip-lash over your head and drove you hither and yon at the bent of their own wills! Oh, shame, shame!" cried Irene, withering her mother by her sharp scorn.
"Yes, I have been a slave, a coward," Elaine murmured, mournfully. "But, oh, Irene, my poor child, I bore it all for my father's sake. He, at least, was kind and forgiving!"
The words recalled to Irene's mind the fond, indulgent old man whom she adored with all the strength of her ardent young heart. Mrs. Brooke and Bertha had been too harsh and cold to command her love, Elaine had vexed her impetuous spirit by her shrinking cowardice. But her father—the loving old man who has ever taken her part bravely against them all—it rushed over her with a chill like that of death that he belonged to her no longer, by that dear filial tie that had been the one unalloyed joy of her willful life, and a cry of exceeding bitter pain fell from her white lips.
"Papa, oh, my dear, my darling, I must lose you with the rest," she cried out in a voice sharp and shrill with despair. "Nothing of all I thought mine belongs to me! I must lose you, too, whom I loved with all my soul—lose you through the sin of her who brought me into a world where I have no place, no name! Oh, God, I cannot bear it! I wish that I were dead!" wailed Irene, in the bitterness of her despair.
Elaine gazed at her daughter like one dazed. All the youth, the joy, the childishness seemed stricken from her forever by the terrible revelation of to-night. The slender young figure stood apart from her in desperate grief, seeking no friendly arm to lean on in its terrible isolation; the beautiful young face was cold and rigid with despair; the blue eyes, black now with her soul's emotion, flashed scorn through proud tears that would not fall. A woman's outraged soul, forlorn yet proud, shone through the tense young form.
Suddenly a firm touch fell on Irene's arm.
"Irene," said Guy Kenmore, low and sternly, "no more of[Pg 21] these wild reproaches to your mother! You shall hear her offered confession first."
CHAPTER VIII.
There was a moment's perfect silence in the room. The sound of the sea came to them soft and low, the wind stirred the flowers in the garden, and sent a gust of exquisite perfume through the windows. In the stillness Elaine moved a little nearer to her daughter, looking at the stern young face with unutterable love and longing in her eyes.
Irene turned coldly from that yearning glance and looked at Mr. Kenmore with a rebellious flash in her eyes.
He was very pale, the sparkle of mirth had died out from his dark eyes, his lips were compressed sternly.
"Hear your mother's story first," he repeated, gravely. "Do not condemn her before you know her whole sad secret. See how she suffers."
The calm, grave, masterful tone influenced Irene against her will. She glanced reluctantly at Elaine's face, and saw how terribly she suffered beneath the fiery lash of her daughter's scorn, but she spoke no word of comfort, only lowered her white-lidded eyes to shut out that harrowing sight.
"Why should I listen to her?" she said, almost sullenly. "What can she say to excuse her sin?"
"Hear me, and judge, Irene," said Elaine, creeping a little nearer, with a wistful gaze at the obstinate girl. "You, too, Mr. Kenmore. You have heard me taunted with my sin. Stay and hear my exculpation."
He bowed silently and placed a chair for her; then he drew Irene down to a seat upon the sofa beside himself. She yielded with strange passiveness, unconscious that while she sat there his arm lay lightly but firmly around her waist, gently detaining her. She was conscious of nothing but a sharp, tearing pain at her heart, and that she was waiting with a sort of numb indifference to hear Elaine's palliation of her sin.
Elaine sat silently a minute, with her white hands locked convulsively in her lap. When she spoke she seemed to be communing with herself.
"Dear God," she whispered, "I had hoped that the child need never know her mother's secret! Ah, I might have known how hard and cruel Bertha would be some day!"
She lifted her eyes and fixed them in a sort of unwilling fascination on Irene's beautiful, mutinous face.
"I have lived years and years of sorrow and despair," she said, "but when I look back it seems only yesterday that I was a pretty, willful, loving child, such as Irene was until to-night. Ah, so like, so like, that I have sometimes shuddered and wept, fearing her fate would be like mine."
Irene made a passionate gesture of loathing and dissent.
"Ah, my child, you do not know," Elaine said, sadly. "The greatest temptation of woman has never come to you. You have never loved."
The fresh, young lips curled in utter scorn of that master-passion whose fire had never breathed over her young heart.
"You have never loved," Elaine repeated, with a gesture of despair. "When that master passion first came to me I was a younger girl than you, Irene, and just as willful and headstrong and passionate. Bertha and I were away at boarding-school when I first met my fate."
She paused, trembling like a leaf in the wind, and resumed, mournfully:
"He was a cousin of one of the pupils, and came to a musical festival given by us at the first of the mid-winter term. I sang one or two solos, and it was then and there that this handsome scion of a proud and wealthy house fell in love with me."
"I have never loved as you say," interrupted Irene in her clear, bell-like voice, "but I should hesitate to call that feeling which only aims at the ruin of its object by the pure name of love."
Elaine bowed her golden head wearily.
"Let us say that he pretended to love me, then," she amended, sadly. "But, ah, Irene, if you had seen and heard him you would have believed his vows, too—you would have trusted in him as I did. No girl ever had a handsomer, more adoring lover."
"I was young, romantic, willful," she continued. "It seemed to be a case of true love at first sight. We met several times, and some foolish love-letters passed between us. There are more opportunities for such things than you would guess at the average boarding-school, Mr. Kenmore," she said, turning her blushing face upon him for a moment. "At this one, love-letters, stolen walks, secret meetings were carried on to an alarming extent, one third of the pupils at least being as foolish and romantic as I was."
"I can understand," Mr. Kenmore answered, gently.
"Mamma was a stern and proud woman," Elaine resumed, with a sigh. "She was exceedingly proud of my beauty and my fine voice. A brilliant future was mapped out for me. But first I was to become a perfect prodigy of learning and accomplishments. At sixteen, when I was to finish the course at the Institute where I then was, I was to be sent to the Vassar College for a few years. 'Ossa on Pelion piled,'" she quoted, with a mournful smile.
"I knew that a love affair on my part would not be tolerated for years," she resumed. "My lover, as regards his family, was placed in the same position comparatively. A marriage of convenience was arranged for him, and he was forbidden to think of another. Madly in love with each other, and rebelling against our fetters, we planned an elopement. In three months after I met him we ran away to another State and were married."
"Married?" Irene echoed, with a hopeful start.
"We were married—as I believed," said Elaine, with a shudder. "There was a ceremony, a ring, a certificate. I was a child, not sixteen yet, remember, Irene. All appeared satisfactory to me. We went to a luxurious boarding-house where six months passed in a dream of perfect happiness. My husband remained the same[Pg 23] fond, faithful lover he had been from the first day we met until the fateful hour when we parted—never to meet again," sobbed Elaine, yielding to a momentary burst of despairing grief that showed how well and faithfully she had loved the traitor who had ruined her life.
But feeling her daughter's cold, young eyes upon her, she soon stemmed the bitter tide of her hopeless grief.
"Our funds ran low," she continued, after a moment, "and he was compelled to leave me to go to his father and ask pardon and help. We were both young, and having been reared in the enervating atmosphere of luxury, knew not how to earn a penny. He went and—never came again."
"Villain!" Guy Kenmore uttered, indignantly.
"After waiting vainly a week I wrote to him," said Elaine, bowing her lovely head upon her hands. "His father came, full of pity and surprise. My God! I had been deceived by a mock marriage. He whom I loved so dearly, whom I believed my husband, had gone home, wedded the woman of his father's choice, and taken her abroad on a wedding trip. I had been ruthlessly forsaken.
"Then I remembered papa, whom I had loved truly and tenderly as you did, Irene. In my extremity and despair I wrote to him. He came, the dear father I had deserted and forgotten in the flush of my wifely happiness. He pitied and forgave me.
"Mamma and Bertha would not forgive, but they plotted to save the family honor. The affair had never been publicly known. We went abroad, and among strangers, where in a few months you were born, my poor wronged Irene. When we came home mamma claimed my child for her own, and by her stern command I took my place in society and played my part as calmly as if my heart were not broken. Now, Irene, you know the full extent of your mother's sin. I have been wronged as well as you, my darling. You are nameless, but not through sin of mine."
Her faltering voice died into silence. Irene made no answer. She had dropped her face in her small white hands. Guy Kenmore felt the slight form trembling against his arm.
"I was mistaken in my first estimate of her," he thought. "She has more depth, more character than I thought."
Then he turned to Elaine.
"You have indeed been wronged bitterly," he said. "The fault is not yours, save through your disobedience to your parents."
"Yes, I was willful and thoughtless, and I have been most terribly punished for my fault," she replied, sorrowfully.
"Is there no possibility that you have been deceived by your husband's father? Such things have been," said Mr. Kenmore, thoughtfully.
"There was no deception. He was armed with every proof, even the newspaper, with the marriage of his son to the wealthy heiress whom his family had chosen for him," answered Elaine, blushing crimson for her unmerited shame and disgrace.
"Then your lover was a villain unworthy the name of man. He deserved death," exclaimed Guy Kenmore.
Elaine's angelic face grew pale as death. She sighed heavily, but made no answer.
Suddenly Irene sprang to her feet, with blazing eyes.
"His name!" she cried, wildly, "his name!"
"My poor child, why would you know it?" faltered Elaine.
"That I may hunt him down!" Irene blazed out. "That I may punish him for your wrongs and mine!"
"Alas, my darling, vengeance belongs to Heaven," sighed the martyred Elaine.
"It belongs to you and to me," cried Irene. "His name, his name!"
"I cannot tell you, dear," wept the wronged woman.
"Then I will go to Bertha," flashed the maddened girl.
"Bertha is bound by an oath never to reveal that fatal name," Elaine answered.
The door opened, Mrs. Brooke entered, stern and pale. She glanced scornfully at Irene, then turned to her daughter:
"Elaine, I am sorry this has happened," she said. "I could not keep Bertha from betraying you. The poor girl was driven mad by her wrongs. If Irene had remained away from the ball to-night, as I bade her do, you would have been spared all this. Her disobedience has caused it all."
Old Faith put her head, with its flaring cap-ruffles, inside the door before Elaine could speak.
"Oh, Mrs. Brooke, Mrs. Brooke!" she cried, and wrung her plump old hands disconsolately.
"Well, what is it? Speak!" cried her mistress, sharply.
"Oh, ma'am, some men have come—with news—they found master down on the shore—oh, oh, they told me to break it to you gently," cried the old housekeeper, incoherently.
A flying white figure darted past old Faith and ran wildly down the broad, moon-lighted hall, to the old-fashioned porch, bathed in the glorious beams of the moonlight.
Mrs. Brooke went up to the woman and shook her roughly by the arm.
"What are you trying to tell me, Faith? What of your master?" she exclaimed. "Speak this instant!"
Elaine came up to her other side, and looked at her with wide, startled eyes.
"Oh, Faith, what is it?" she cried.
"They told me to break it gently," whimpered the fat old woman.
At this moment a shrill young voice, sharpened by keenest agony, wild with futile despair, came floating loudly back through the echoing halls:
"Papa, oh, darling papa! Oh, my God, dead, dead, dead!"
CHAPTER IX.
They bore him into the parlor and laid him down. He was dead—the handsome, genial, kind old father, who had been[Pg 25] Elaine's truest friend in her trouble and disgrace. It was strange and terrible to see the women, each of whom had loved the dead man in her own fashion, weeping around him.
Their gala robes looked strangely out of place in this scene of death. There was Bertha in her ruby satin and shining jewels, Elaine in her shimmering silk and blue forget-me-nots, Mrs. Brooke in crimson and black lace, lighted by the fire of priceless diamonds. Saddest of all, little Irene, crouched in a white heap on the floor at his feet, adorned in the modest bravery he had brought her for a birthday gift. Poor little Irene who has lost in this one fatal day all that her heart held dear.
A physician was called to satisfy the family. He only said what was plainly potent before. Mr. Brooke was dead—of heart disease, it appeared, for there were no marks of violence on his person. He was an old man, and death had found him out gently, laying its icy finger upon him as he walked along the shining sand of the bay, in the beautiful moonlight. His limbs were already growing rigid, and he must have been dead several hours.
"Dead! while we laughed and danced, and made merry over yonder in their gay saloons," Elaine wailed out, in impatient despair. "Oh, my God, how horrible to remember!"
Only Guy Kenmore saw that the right hand of the dead man was rigidly clenched.
"What treasure does he clasp in that grasp of death?" he asked himself, and when no one was looking he tried to unclasp the rigid fist. He only succeeded in opening it a little way—just enough to draw from the stiffened fingers a fragment of what had once been a letter—now only one line remained—a line and a name.
Guy Kenmore went to the light, spread the little scrap open on his hand and looked at it. The writing was in a man's hand and the few words were these:
"That the truth may be revealed and my death-bed repentance accepted of Heaven, I pray, humbly.
"Clarence Stuart, Senior."
Suddenly a cold little hand touched his own.
"I saw you," said Irene, in a low, strange voice. "What does it mean?"
"A great deal, or—— nothing," he answered, in a voice as strange as her own.
She read it slowly over. The fragmentary words and the proud name seemed to burn themselves in on her memory.
"Who is Clarence Stuart?" she asked, wonderingly.
"I intend to find out," he answered. "When I do, I shall tell you, little Irene."
In his heart there was a deadly suspicion of foul play. Who had torn from old Ronald Brooke's hand the letter whose fragmentary ending he grasped within that clenched and stiffened hand? Had there been murder most foul?
He went back and looked attentively at the corpse. It was true there was no sign of violence, but was that the face of one[Pg 26] who had died from one instant's terrible heart pang, who must have died before he had realized his pain? No, the face was drawn as if in deadly pain, the open eyes stared wide with horror.
"I shall say nothing yet," he said to himself, gravely. "Let them think that death came in the quiet course of nature. But if old Ronald Brooke was murdered I shall bring his murderer to justice."
And on the man's handsome face, usually so gay and debonair, was registered a grim, firm purpose.
Mrs. Brooke and Bertha had been led away to their rooms now. No one remained for the moment but Elaine. She came slowly to her daughter's side.
"Irene, you must come with me now, she said, pleadingly, but the girl broke from her clasp and ran to throw herself on the dead man's breast.
"I cannot leave him yet," she sobbed. "He was my all!"
Elaine shivered, as if some one had struck her a blow. She followed her daughter, and solemnly took the dead man's hand in her feverish, throbbing clasp.
"Irene, my daughter, this, my own father whom I deceived and deserted, whose loving heart I broke by my folly—he pitied and forgave me," she said, mournfully. "My sin against you was far less, for it was not premeditated. Here by papa's cold dead body I ask you, darling, to pity and forgive me. Will you refuse my prayer?"
Irene lifted her head from its chill resting-place and looked at her suppliant mother with a strange, grave gaze.
"We forgive every one when we are dying—do we not?" she asked, slowly.
"Yes, my darling, but you are young and strong. You have many years to live perhaps. I cannot wait till your dying hour for your love and pity. I need it now," sighed poor Elaine.
There was a moment's silence. Irene looked down at the dead man's face as if asking him to counsel her in this sad hour. As the wide, horror-haunted eyes met hers she recoiled in terror.
"He forgave you," she said, solemnly. "He cannot counsel me, but I will follow his example. Mother," she reached across that still form and touched Elaine's hand, "I forgive you, too. Always remember that I pitied and forgave you."
There was a strange, wild light in her eyes. It startled Elaine.
"My darling," she cried, half-fearfully.
"I must leave you now, poor mother," continued Irene, with that strange look. "I must go down to the shore where death waited for papa to-night. He is waiting there for me!"
She turned with the words and ran swiftly from the room. Frightened by her strange looks and words Elaine followed behind her, but her trembling limbs could scarcely carry her body.
Young, light, swift as a wild gazelle, Irene flew down the steps and across the garden. The moon was going down now, and only the flutter of her white dress guided the frantic mother in her wild pursuit. The garden gate unclosed, there was a patter of flying feet along the sands outside, there was a wild, smothered,[Pg 27] wailing cry of despair, then—then Elaine heard the horrible splash of the waves as they opened and closed again over her maddened, desperate child.
CHAPTER X.
The sound of Irene's pliant young body as it struck the cold waters of the bay, fell on the wretched mother's heart like a death-blow. The horrors of this fatal night culminated in this.
One long, terrible shriek as of some wounded, dying creature, startled the midnight hour with its despairing echoes, then she sprang wildly forward with the desperate intent to share her daughter's watery grave.
The weakness of her overwrought body saved her from the crime of self-destruction. Her head reeled, her limbs failed her. As she pushed the gate open with faltering hands she staggered dizzily and fell like a log on the hard ground. Merciful unconsciousness had stolen upon her.
That prolonged, despairing shriek reached Guy Kenmore's ears in the library, where he was gravely conferring with the men who had found Mr. Brooke dead upon the shore.
His first thought was of Irene. A dreadful foreboding filled his mind. He rushed from the room and followed the sound, the two men behind, all terrified alike by the anguish that rang in that mysterious shriek.
Outside the garden gate they found Elaine, lying like one dead on the hard earth. With tender compassion they lifted the beautiful, rigid form and bore it into the house.
That long, deep, deathly swoon was the beginning of a severe illness for Elaine Brooke. It culminated in an attack of brain fever.
On recovering from her long spell of unconsciousness, Elaine revealed the cause of her illness. Two hours, perhaps, had passed since Irene's maddened plunge into the water. It was too late to save her then. The cold waves kept their treasure, refusing to yield it up to the efforts of those who, headed by Mr. Kenmore, made an ineffectual trial to find even the cold, dead body of the desperate girl. Dawn broke with all the roseate beauty of summer, and the golden light glimmered far over land and sea, but neither the wide waste of waters nor the sandy reaches of shore gave back sign or token of her who had found life too hard to bear, and so had sought Nepenthe from its ills and pains.
Guy Kenmore remained to Mr. Brooke's funeral, then returned to Baltimore a softened, saddened man—a man with a purpose. Two things had confirmed him in his purpose to trace the writer of the fragment found in the dead man's hand.
On the night of Mr. Brooke's death no sign of violence had been discovered on his person. On the day following a purplish mark was discoverable on the old man's temple—a strange, discolored mark. Careless lookers believed it to be the effects of decomposition.
Guy Kenmore, studying it with suspicious eyes, believed that[Pg 28] it was caused by a blow—a blow that had caused Ronald Brooke's death.
Another thing was, that when Elaine Brooke went into a delirious fever, that terrible dawn that broke on the tragic night, he had stood by her side a few moments, gazing at her in pain and sorrow. While he stood there she had startled him by calling wildly on one name. It was "Clarence, Clarence, Clarence!"
He sought Bertha.
"Will you tell me," he asked, gravely, and without preamble, "the name of the villain who deceived your sister?"
Bertha colored and trembled in shame and agitation.
"I cannot," she answered. "I am under a sacred promise not to reveal it."
"Was it Clarence Stuart?" he asked, coolly, and Bertha gave a terrible start.
"She has revealed it in her delirium," she exclaimed.
"Yes," he answered, calmly, knowing that he had surprised the truth from her reluctant lips.
Walking slowly along the shore, listening to the murmur of the waves, in which his bride of an hour had sought oblivion from the ills of life, Guy Kenmore thought it all out to his own satisfaction. That fragmentary line of a letter had told the whole sad story.
Elaine Brooke had been truly a wife. Her husband's father had deceived her by a trumped up story, and divided her from her young husband. Dying, he had repented his sin, and written a letter of confession to her father.
And here he fitted the second link of the story.
Some person unknown had found it to be against his or her interests that the truth should be revealed. That person had followed the bearer of Clarence Stuart's letter, and had torn it from old Ronald Brooke's grasp, with a blow that meant death to the gentle, kindly old man.
Guy Kenmore honestly believed in the truth and accuracy of these deductions.
"If I can only find out where these Stuarts live, I will discover the guilty party," he said to himself. "I will not ask Mrs. Brooke nor Bertha. They would only believe me impertinent. I must depend on the gentle Elaine for information."
He concluded to return to his home in Baltimore, and await the issue of Elaine's illness.
CHAPTER XI.
The time came weeks after when Elaine, pale, wan, shadowy, the sad ghost of her former beautiful self, came down to the parlor again and joined her mother and sister in the broken family circle whose severed links could never be re-united again.
Mrs. Brooke and Bertha were subtly changed, too. Their black dresses made them look older and graver. Bertha's grief at the loss of a kind, indulgent father, and her chagrin at Guy Kenmore's defection, had combined to plant some fine lines on her hither unruffled brow, and a peevish expression curled her[Pg 29] red lips, while her large brilliant black eyes flashed with discontent and scorn. Over Irene's tragic death she had shed not a tear. She had always disliked the girl for her youth and winsome beauty and looked down on her for the stain upon her birth, always deploring that she had not died in infancy. The poor girl's willfulness the night of the ball had changed Bertha's dislike to hate. She was secretly glad Irene was dead. Better that than to have lived to be Guy Kenmore's wife.
Mrs. Brooke shared Bertha's feelings, only in a less exaggerated degree.
So Elaine found no sympathy in the loss of the beautiful daughter whom she had secretly worshiped, and over whose pretty defiant willfulness she had oftentimes shed bitter, burning tears of grief and dread.
The old gray hall which her sweet songs and musical laughter had once made gay and joyous was now hushed and silent as the tomb. The few servants glided about as if afraid of awaking the lonely echoes that slept in the wide, dark halls, and quiet chambers. No song nor laugh disturbed the silence. The mistress sat in the parlor pale and grave in her sweeping sables. Her daughters were no less grave and still, sitting in their chairs like dark, still shadows, with averted faces and silent lips, for Elaine had not forgotten Bertha's treacherous betrayal of her shameful secret; and Bertha, while she felt no remorse for her cruel work still felt shame enough to cause her to turn in confusion from the clear, sad light of her sister's eyes.
In the meantime that sad truth that oftentimes makes the pang of bereavement harder to bear, was coming home to them.
Mr. Brooke had died almost insolvent.
Once a man of almost unlimited wealth and position, the old tobacco planter had been almost ruined by the war which had freed his slaves, and left him only his broad-spreading, fertile acres, with no one to till them. His great income was almost gone, for with his losses through the war, he could not afford to replace with hired workmen the skilled labor he had lost.
In order to keep up the dignity of appearances which his proud wife considered necessary to herself and her beautiful young daughters, Mr. Brooke had been forced to sacrifice his land from time to time, until now, at the end, only a few acres remained of his once princely estate. The fine old gray-stone mansion, Bay View, remained as a shelter for their heads, indeed; but the sacrifice of the remaining land would barely support them a year or two. Mrs. Brooke and Bertha were aghast at the prospect. They had expected that the latter would have been married off to some wealthy personage before the dire catastrophe of poverty overtook them. They quailed and trembled now beneath the subdued mutterings of the storm of adversity.
When Elaine came down and mingled with them again, they broke the bad tidings to her rudely enough.
"No more playing fine lady for us," Mrs. Brooke said, bitterly. "We can live on the land a little while, then we must sell our jewels, then our home, and when all is done, we shall have to work for our living like common people."
The aristocratic southern lady, who had never soiled her white, jeweled fingers in useful toil, broke down and sobbed dismally at the grievous prospect.
"Oh, I have had more than enough of trouble and sorrow in my life," she complained. "First, there was Elaine's disobedience and disgrace; then, losing our negroes by the war; then my poor husband dying so suddenly, without a farewell word, and now this horrible nightmare, poverty! Oh! I have never deserved these visitations of Providence," asseverated the handsome, selfish widow, energetically.
Bertha joined in these lamentations loudly. She would not know how to work when it came to that, not she. They should have to starve.
Elaine regarded them with troubled eyes.
"Mamma, do not grieve so bitterly," she said. "We are not come to absolute want yet."
"You take it very coolly," Bertha sneered. "When the last few acres of land are sold, how long will the proceeds keep three helpless women, pray?"
Elaine did not answer Bertha—did not even look at her. She went up to her mother's side.
"Mamma, I have foreseen this trouble coming," she said. "We have been living beyond our means for years, and even if poor papa had lived this crash must have come some day; I am very sorry," she repeated, gently.
"Sorrows will not put money into our empty purses," Mrs. Brooke answered, spitefully.
"I know that," Elaine answered, patiently. "But I have a plan by which your money may be made to last a little longer. I am going to leave you, mamma."
"Leave me," Mrs. Brooke echoed, feebly.
"Rats always desert a sinking ship," flung in Bertha with coarse irony.
Again her elder sister had no answer for her.
"I am going away," she repeated. "Even if papa had left us a fortune it would be the same, I could not stay here after—all that has happened."
"You mean,"—said Mrs. Brooke, then paused.
"I mean since I have lost papa and Irene," her daughter answered, sadly. "You know, mamma, you and Bertha have never been kind to me since my great—trouble. You only tolerated me because my father wished it. I have long been in your way. It is all over now. To-morrow I shall leave you forever."
"Forever," Mrs. Brooke repeated, blandly, while Bertha exclaimed with a coarse, spiteful sneer:
"You will return to the life of shame from which papa rescued you perhaps."
"I am going to New York to earn my living by honest work," Elaine said, speaking pointedly to her mother. "You know I have a good voice, and talent for music. I shall give music lessons, probably."
"My daughter giving music lessons! Oh, what a disgrace to[Pg 31] the family!" cried the aristocratic lady. "Are you not ashamed to put yourself so low, Elaine?"
"Don't be silly, mamma," flashed Bertha, sharply. "It is a very good plan, I think. Besides, it is only right for Elaine to give up the remainder of her property to us. If we had not been burdened with the support of her daughter for sixteen years there would have been more money for me."
"It is quite settled, mamma, I shall go," said poor Elaine, and the selfish mother weakly acquiesced.
The next day she went, glad of her freedom, glad to fling off the slavery of sixteen years.
"I could not have stayed even if poor papa had left me a fortune," she said to herself. "The sound of the waves sighing over Irene's watery grave in the lonesome nights breaks my heart!"
CHAPTER XII.
We must return to Irene Brooke that fatal night, whose accumulating horrors induced a transient madness that drove the wretched girl to seek oblivion from her woes in self-destruction.
Life is sweet, even to the wretched. Irene's sudden, violent plunge into the cold waves cooled the fever of her heart and brain like magic. In that one awful, tragic moment in which the waters closed darkly over her golden head, a sharp remorse, a terrible regret woke to life within her heart.
Out of that swift repentance and awful despair, a cry for pity broke wildly from her almost strangling lips:
"Oh, Lord, pardon and save me!"
As she came back from the depths with a swift rebound to the surface of the water, the girl threw out her white arms gropingly, as if to seize upon some support, however slight and frail, on which to buoy her drenched and sinking frame.
Joy! as if God himself had answered her wild appeal for help and pardon, a strong, wide plank drifted to her reach. Irene grasped it tightly and threw herself upon it, while a cry of thankfulness broke from her lips. Alone in the dark and rushing waves, her heart filled with relief at the thought of this frail barrier between herself and that mysterious Eternity, to which a moment ago she had blindly hastened.
"If I can only hold on a little while, Elaine will bring me help and rescue," she said to herself, hopefully, and calling her mother by the old familiar sisterly name, for the name of mother was strange to her young lips yet.
Alas, for her springing hopes! Poor Elaine lay white and still in that long, long trance of unconsciousness that followed on her realization of her daughter's suicide. Her locked lips did not unclose to tell her anxious watchers the story of that white form floating on the dark waters, waiting, hoping, praying for rescue, while her strength ebbed, and her arms grew tired and weak, clinging so tightly to that slender plank that floated between her and the death from which she shrunk tremblingly[Pg 32] now with all the ardor of a young heart that has found life a goodly thing and fair.
No rescue came. The girl floated farther and farther out to sea in that thick darkness that comes before the dawn. Hours that were long as years seemed to pass over her head, and hope died in her breast as the cruel waves beat and buffeted her tender form.
"I am forgotten and deserted," she moaned. "My mother has raised no alarm. Is it possible she was glad to be rid of me, and held her peace?"
A jeering voice seemed to whisper in her ear:
"It is best for all that you die. Bertha and her mother hated you. You were a stumbling block in your mother's path. You had involved Guy Kenmore in a fatal entanglement. You had no right and no place in the world. Not one whom you have left but will be glad that you are dead."
A cry of despair came from the beautiful girlish lips in the darkness.
"Oh, God, and only yesterday life seemed so beautiful and fair! Now I must die, alone and unregretted! Oh, cruel world, farewell," she cried, for she felt her strength forsaking her, and knew that in a moment more her arms would relax their hold and that she would sink forever amid the engulfing waves.
But in that last perilous moment something occurred that seemed to her dazzled and bewildered senses nothing less than a miracle.
In her bodily pain and mental trouble, with eyes blinded by the salt sea waves that mixed with her bitter tears, Irene had not perceived the faint grey light of dawn dispelling the thick darkness of the night. But suddenly, all suddenly, the crest of the waves was illuminated marvellously by a gleam of brightness that shot far and wide across the water; the blank horizon glowed with light.
Startled by the swift and seemingly instant transition from darkness to light, Irene uttered a shrill, sharp cry and looked up. The beautiful, life-giving sun was just peeping across the level green waves, and touching their foamy crests with gold. Through half-dazzled eyes she saw riding, like a thing of beauty on the beautiful water, a stately, white-sailed yacht only a few rods away. Irene could see moving figures on her decks.
There was one awful moment when the girl's breath failed, her heart stood still, and she could scarcely see the moving yacht outlined against the rosy dawn, for the mist that filled her eyes. Then she shook off the trance that threatened to destroy her, and with one last, desperate effort sent her sharp young voice ringing clearly across the waves:
"Help! Help! In God's name, help!"
The cry was heard and answered by the moving figures on the vessel's deck.
CHAPTER XIII.
Was it hours or moments before the gallant figure that sprang over the side of the yacht reached Irene's side?
The girl never knew, for even as she watched his progress through the water, and admired his swift and graceful swimming, a dizziness stole over her; her arms relaxed their hold; the friendly plank slipped from beneath her, and she felt herself sinking down, down into the fathomless depths of green water.
It was well that her rescuer was a skillful diver, or our hapless heroine's history must have ended then and there.
But the dauntless swimmer who had gone to her assistance was brave, bold, daring. He redoubled his speed, made a desperate dive beneath the water and reappeared with the form of the exhausted and unconscious girl tightly clasped in one arm.
In the meantime a small boat had been lowered from the yacht, and was coming with rapid strokes to her assistance.
When Irene came to herself again she lay on a pile of blankets upon the deck of the yacht. An anxious group was collected around her, conspicuous among them being one wet and dripping figure whom she instinctively recognized as her gallant preserver.
Irene opened her beautiful eyes, blue as the cerulean vault above, and smiled languidly at the stranger.
The man, who was middle-aged and had the rich, dark, picturesque beauty of the southern climate, started and bent over her. He grew ashy pale beneath his olive skin.
"She recovers," he said, hoarsely. "She will live."
"Clarence, Clarence," cried a thin, peevish, authoritative voice at this moment, "I insist that you shall go and change your wet clothing this moment! You will catch your death of cold standing around here drenched and shivering."
Irene turned her languid eyes and saw a pale, faded, yet rather pretty little woman, clothed in an elegant blue yachting dress with gold buttons. She was looking at Irene's rescuer with a peevish look in her light hazel eyes.
The man scarcely seemed to heed her, so intent was his gaze at Irene. Some one handed him a glass of wine at that moment, and, kneeling down, he lifted the girl's head gently on his arm and held it to her lips.
"Drink," he said, in a voice so kind and musical it thrilled straight through the girl's tender heart. She drank a little of the beautiful, ruby-colored liquid, and it ran like fire through her veins, warming and reviving her chilled frame.
"Clarence," again reiterated the woman's peevish voice, "do oblige me by changing your wet clothing. You seem to think less of your own health than of this total stranger's."
His brow clouded over, but he forced a smile on his handsome face.
"Very well, Mrs. Stuart, I will do so to oblige you," he said; "but pray do not make me ridiculous among my friends by such unfounded apprehensions! I am not a baby to be killed by a bath in salt water!"
He went away, and several ladies came around Irene, gazing curiously at the pale, fair face. They whispered together over her wondrous beauty, which, despite the long hours of suffering endured in the water, shone resplendently as some fair white flower in the beams of the rising sun.
"Her clothing should be changed, too," said one, more thoughtful than the rest. "She shall have my bed and dry clothing from my wardrobe. She is about my size, I believe."
Irene smiled her languid gratitude to the kind-hearted lady, then her weary eyes closed again. An overpowering drowsiness and languor was stealing over her. When they had changed her drenched clothing for warm, dry, perfumed garments, and laid her in a soft, warm bed, she could no longer keep awake. She swallowed the warm, fragrant tea they brought her and fell into a long, deep, saving slumber.
The ladies were all burning with curiosity over the beautiful waif so strangely rescued from the cruel waves, but they refrained through delicacy from asking her questions when they saw how weary and exhausted she was. When she was asleep they examined her wet, cast-off linen for her name, but were disappointed, for they found none.
Then, with feminine curiosity, they peeped into the gold locket that hung by its slender chain around Irene's neck.
"What a handsome old man, and what a beautiful woman!" they cried. "Who can the girl be?"
Everyone was eager and interested except the faded, peevish Mrs. Stuart. She openly railed at her husband for risking his life for an utter stranger. She would not allow anyone to praise his bravery in her presence.
"I will not have him encouraged in such bravado and foolhardiness," she said, angrily.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Oh, Mrs. Leslie, isn't she just lovely? And she cannot be much older than I am!"
Irene had slept profoundly for a day and night, being physically and mentally exhausted by her terrible ordeal in the water. When she awoke after twenty-four hours of restful slumber those words of admiration rung in her ears, uttered by a soft, girlish voice, interrupted by an ominous hacking cough.
Irene opened her eyes and glanced languidly around her. Beside her bed she saw Mrs. Leslie, the little lady who had been so kind to her the day before. Next to the lady, in a low, cushioned rocker, sat a girl of thirteen or fourteen, richly and tastefully dressed, but with a thin face as white as alabaster, save for two burning spots of hectic on her hollow cheeks, and with large, brilliant black eyes burning with the feverish fire of consumption.
"So you are awake at last!" cried the girlish voice, joyously, "I thought you were going off into a regular Rip Van Winkle sleep, and I have been just dying of curiosity over you."
Irene felt the sudden crimson dying her cheeks at the vivacious exclamation of the delicate-looking girl.
"Lilia, my love, you startle her," said Mrs. Leslie, gently; then she bent over Irene, saying kindly: "You feel better, I hope, after your long rest. This is Miss Stuart, the daughter of the gentleman who saved your life. She has been very anxious over you."
Irene looked gratefully at the dark-eyed girl who rose impulsively and kissed her.
"You are so pretty, I love you already," she cried, and Mrs. Leslie laughed.
"Pretty is as pretty does," she said, gaily, and Irene crimsoned painfully, as if the words had been a poisoned shaft aimed at her breast.
"Are you going to be well enough to sit up to-day?" pursued Lilia Stuart, anxiously. "Because if you are, I want you to come into my little saloon with me. I will give you my softest lounge to lie on. Aren't you very hungry? Will you take your breakfast now?"
"Yes, to all of your questions," Irene answered, looking in wonder at this girl who was but two years younger than herself, yet who seemed so very light and childish. Alas, poor Irene, that fatal night had forced her into a premature womanhood.
When she had taken a light, appetizing breakfast, and been robed in a white morning-dress, Mrs. Leslie advised her to spend the day in Lilia Stuart's saloon.
"She is a spoiled child," she said, "but we humor her all we can, for hers is a sad fate. She is dying of consumption."
"Dying—— so young!" cried Irene with a shudder, remembering how horrible the thought of death had appeared to her while she was struggling in the cold, black waves.
"Yes, poor child, she is surely dying," sighed Mrs. Leslie. "Her father bought this beautiful yacht to take her to Italy by the advice of her physicians. They fancied a sea voyage might benefit her. But I do not believe she will survive the trip. Some days she is very ill. Poor little Lilia. It is very hard. She is Mr. Stuart's only child."
They went to Lilia's luxurious saloon which was fitted up with every comfort, and was exquisitely dainty and charming, though small. Mrs. Stuart was there with her daughter. She gave the stranger a little supercilious nod, and invited Mrs. Leslie to go on deck with her.
Lilia, who had just recovered from a violent spell of coughing, led her visitor to a softly cushioned satin lounge.
"You may rest here," she said. "I am well enough to-day to sit up in my easy-chair, but some days I lie down all day. You may call me Lilia. What shall I call you?"
"You may call me Irene," was the answer, while a burning flush mounted to the speaker's forehead.
"Irene—— what a soft, sweet name! I like that," said Lilia, and just then the door unclosed and her father came in softly. "Ah, here is papa! you see I have a visitor, papa," she cried.
Mr. Stuart was a handsome, stately-looking man, middle-aged, with abundant threads of silver streaking his dark hair. His mouth, in repose, looked both sad and stern.
Irene arose and held out her hands.
"I owe you my life," she said, gratefully.
A transient, melancholy smile lit the grave, dark face.
"You need not thank me," he said, almost bruskly. "Wait until years have come and gone, and you have fairly tested life. It will be a question then whether you will award me blame or praise for the turn I did you yesterday."
The large, dark, melancholy eyes held Irene's with a strange fascination.
"Ah! you think that youth is all sunshine and roses," she answered, almost against her will. "I have already learned the reverse of that, and yet I find life sweet."
"How came you to be in the water?" he asked, anxiously, sitting down and drawing Lilia to a seat upon his knee.
The deep color rushed over Irene's pale, lovely face. A deep shame overpowered her, and yet against her will something within her forced her to confess her sin.
"You will be shocked," she said; "but I must tell you the truth. I threw myself in."
"No," he exclaimed, in surprise.
"Yes," she answered, sadly.
"Oh, Irene, why did you do that?" exclaimed little Lilia.
"Why did you do it?" echoed the man.
"I had lost the only friend I had on earth, and I did not wish to live," she answered.
"Then I was right. You will not thank me for saving your life," exclaimed Mr. Stuart.
"Yes, for I repented my rashness as soon as my body struck the cold waves," she answered, shivering. "I am thankful my life was spared to me. Life is hard, but death is harder."
He looked at the beautiful, agitated girl with deep interest. He began to see that there had been some romance in her life. Her face had a tragedy written on it.
"You will wish to return to your home and your friends?" he said.
An exceedingly bitter expression crossed the lovely young face, and for a moment she was silent. To herself she said: "I have neither home, nor friends, nor name. Those whom I left will be glad to think that I am dead."
Her heart was hardened against them all. She believed that her mother had left her to perish without one effort at rescue.
"She was glad to be rid of her illegitimate child," she said to herself, with inexpressible bitterness.
Mr. Stuart, thinking she had not heard him, repeated his question.
"You will be glad to return to your home and friends?"
She raised her large, beautiful eyes to his face. They were dark with unutterable despair.
"I have neither home nor friends—nor name!" she said.
He started, and looked at her keenly.
"You must have borne some name in the world," he said, almost sternly.
"I did; but I had no right to it, and I have renounced it forever. I am called Irene. That is the only name I can rightfully claim," she answered, bitterly, and drooping her shamed eyes from his earnest gaze.
For a moment both were silent.
Mr. Stuart's dark, sad eyes were fixed on her with a look that was almost pain. This fair, mysterious waif from the sea, stirred his soul to its deepest depths. His presence held the same mysterious fascination for her.
Lilia, the most innocent child in the world, and who had been listening with deepest interest, broke the silence, wide-eyed.
"You have only one name," she said. "How strange! I thought everyone had two names. I have. Mine is Lilia Stuart. Mamma's is the same. Papa's name is Clarence Stuart."
She paused, for a stifled cry broke from Irene's lips. The dainty saloon, the faces of the father and child seemed to fade before her. She was back in the parlor of Bay View, that fatal night when they had brought old Ronald Brooke home dead. Again she saw, through the blinding mist of her tears, Guy Kenmore extricating the fragment of paper from the dead hand. Again she looked over his arm and read:
"That the truth may be revealed, and my death-bed repentance accepted of Heaven, I pray humbly.
"Clarence Stuart, Senior."
"My God! what does it mean?" she asked herself; and Guy Kenmore's ambiguous answer recurred to her mind:
"A great deal—or nothing!"
"Irene, are you ill?" asked Lilia, anxiously. "You almost screamed out, and your face is as white as chalk!"
"I am very nervous. You must not let me frighten you, Lilia," the girl answered, sadly.
Lilia came coaxingly to her side.
"I am going to tell you something," she said, with her pretty air of a spoiled child. "While you were asleep I was very naughty. I peeped at the beautiful lady in your locket!"
"Lilia!" her father exclaimed.
"All the ladies looked, papa," Lilia answered, self-excusingly. "And I am going to have one more peep! Irene will not care, I know!"
She flashed the lid open suddenly before his dazzled eyes. He could not choose but see that fair face, with its haunting eyes, and tremulous smile, and golden hair, Elaine's perfect image, even to the shadow of a tragedy that even a stranger could read on her beauty.
He gazed and gazed, and the breath fluttered sharply over his parted lips. Then, all in a moment, with a smothered cry of despair, he put out his hands and shut out the sight of the lovely face, even as his head fell back against the chair, his breath failed, and he lay all white and corpse-like before the two frightened girls.
CHAPTER XV.
Bertha had promised to keep Guy Kenmore informed of the progress of Elaine's illness, and she was glad to keep her word, as it afforded her a pretext for writing to the young man, and thus keeping her memory alive in his heart.
Since the supposed death of poor Irene, the artful Bertha was again laying plans for the capture of Mr. Kenmore. She hoped in time to allay the unfavorable impression she had created in his mind the night of the ball, and to establish an empire over his heart. Mr. Kenmore belonged to one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic families in Baltimore, and it was the hight of her ambition to become his wife.
Though the young man's interest in Elaine afforded her a pretext for corresponding with him, Bertha was vaguely displeased at his anxiety over her sister. It filled her with secret jealousy. Elaine was still young and beautiful enough to win the heart of the man who had married her daughter. Bertha was determined not to tolerate her as a rival.
"There is no accounting for men's tastes," she said, angrily, to her mother. "I supposed that his knowledge of Elaine's shameful secret would utterly disgust him with her. But he is almost as anxious over her as if he were her lover."
"Men regard these things somewhat differently from women," replied Mrs. Brooke. "It is possible he may regard Elaine with pity, rather than disgust. And pity is akin to love, you know."
In her heart Mrs. Brooke was rather elated at Guy's interest in Elaine. If she could not secure him for Bertha, she would be very pleased to have him for her elder daughter.
Bertha saw the bent of her mother's mind, and inwardly raged at it. Day and night her mind was filled with projects for diverting Guy's mind from the charms of her elder sister. On this particular state of her mind Elaine's announcement of leaving Bay View fell like healing balm.
Several days elapsed after her departure before Bertha communicated the fact to Mr. Kenmore in a brief, ambiguous note.
It was no part of her plan that he should become acquainted with their poverty, or with the reason of Elaine going.
So she wrote simply:
"Elaine convalesced more rapidly than was expected, and has left us in anger, declining to live with us longer, and making a mystery of her destination. Come down to Bay View and I will give you the particulars."
The note had the effect she anticipated of bringing Mr. Kenmore down to Bay View without delay.
Then Bertha told her story with well-acted grief and penitence.
"It was all my wretched fault," she sighed. "Elaine would not forgive me for giving way to my jealous passion that dreadful night, and betraying her shameful story. It was all in vain that I declared my penitence on my knees and implored her forgiveness. She would not hear me. She declared that she[Pg 39] should hate me so long as she lived, and that the same roof could not shelter us both. So she went away from mamma and me, declaring that it was forever."
The arch deceiver here shed some quiet, natural-looking tears into her perfumed, black-bordered handkerchief.
"It was very hard, losing papa and Elaine, and poor little Irene, all, as it were, at one fatal stroke," she declared, sobbingly.
Mr. Kenmore was gravely, sadly silent. He did not think of doubting Bertha's clever tale. It seemed very natural that poor Elaine should resent her sister's cruel betrayal of the long-guarded secret of Irene's birth. He scarcely wondered that she had gone away desperately wounded and unforgiving, in the smart of her bitter pain.
"Oh, if you could know how bitterly I have repented all that I said that dreadful night," sighed Bertha, giving him a sidewise glance under her long, black lashes. "I must have been mad, I think. You know the great poet says, 'There's madness in the moon,' and that night Irene had fairly driven me wild. Oh, if I could only think you had forgotten the unkind things I said to you in my foolish passion!" she pursued, remorsefully.
Her pretty shame and penitence touched him.
"I wish that you could forget it as freely as I forgive it, Miss Brooke," he answered, kindly.
"Oh, thank you, thank you," she cried. "I have repented my folly in bitterness and tears. I let my own heart deceive me. I know now that a woman should not give her heart unasked, still less betray its tender throbbings to the cold and careless."
She hid her face in her hands as if she could not bear his kindly gaze. Guy, touched by her tears and sorrow, did not know what to say or do. He was intensely sorry for her, forgetting how much he had disliked her that night when she had shown herself in her true colors.
"Let us forget it all, Miss Brooke," he said, uneasily, anxious to dry up her springing tears.
The beautiful brunette gave him a swift, shy look of gratitude.
"Oh, how gladly I will do so!" she exclaimed, putting out her delicate, white hand to him. "Shall we be friends as we were before—— that fatal night?"
"Yes," he replied, pressing her hand kindly, but lightly, for he had no mind to be drawn into the role of a lover again.
"And you will come down to Bay View sometimes? Mamma and I will be so lonely and sad now, after losing so many dear links from our family circle," said the dark-eyed beauty, following up her advantage.
"Sometimes—when I can find leisure," he replied ambiguously.
And with that Bertha was obliged to be content. She hoped great things from the concessions he had already made. Now that Irene was dead, and Elaine gone, she would have no rivals, and surely, surely her beauty, her fascination, her tenderness for him must win him even against his will.
She brought the whole battery of her charms and graces to[Pg 40] bear upon him, but was obliged to confess to herself that she had never seen him so sad, so grave, so pale and so distrait.
"It cannot be that he is sorry over that child's death. He ought to be glad," she thought to herself. "It must be that he assumes this gravity in deference to my affliction."
Yet she was troubled and chagrined when he left her so indifferently and went down to the shore. She watched him from her window, standing quietly, with folded arms, a tall, dark shape, outlined against the brightness of the summer eve.
"Of what is he thinking?" she asked her heart, uneasily.
It would have seemed strange to her if she had known. It even seemed strange to himself.
He was standing there gazing with dark, heavy eyes at the rolling waves, much as if he had been gazing on a grave.
He was recalling to mind the winsome, changeful, perfect beauty, the fire, the soul, the passion of the girl he had so strangely wedded, the girl who had recklessly flung herself into the deep, relentless waves, leaving him only the memory of the few, brief hours in which she had flashed before him in the extremes of joy and despair—— one moment a beautiful, spirited, happy child, the next a passionate, despairing, crushed and broken-hearted woman!
"Poor little Irene," he said to himself. "If she had lived, who knows"—then a sigh, deeper than he knew, finished the regretful words.
CHAPTER XVI.
He stood there a long, long time, listening to the beat of the waves, and thinking of Irene and her mother. Bertha grew tired of watching him and stole away to try the effect of a new mourning bonnet that had just been sent home from the milliner. Guy had forgotten her. He was wrapped in other thoughts. New feelings had come to him since that night, when, indolent, blase, careless, he had come face to face with his fate. He was haunted by a voice, a face. Some sad words came to his mind:
He turned away at last warned by the darkening twilight that fell like a pall over his lost bride's "vast and wandering grave."
"I must bid adieu to Mrs. Brooke and Bertha and return home to-night," was the thought in his mind.
Mrs. Brooke was in the parlor alone, Bertha being still absorbed in the new bonnet. A sudden impulse came to Guy Kenmore.
He sat down by the matron's side and gazed sympathetically into her still youthful-looking and handsome face.
"Miss Brooke left you no address when she went away, I presume?" he inquired in a tone of respectful anxiety.
Mrs. Brooke had received her cue from Bertha and answered accordingly:
"No. She has deserted us most heartlessly, and I fear, I fear"—— she broke down and buried her face in her handkerchief.
"You do not suppose that she can have made away with herself?" he cried in low, awe-struck tones.
"No, no; worse, far worse," groaned the apparently deeply agitated woman. "Oh, Mr. Kenmore, pity the grief and shame of a heart-broken mother—I fear that Elaine has returned to her wicked deceiver."
"Impossible!" he exclaimed, in stern and startled tones.
"Would that I could think so," sighed the unjust mother. "But my heart is torn by cruel suspicions. Elaine has never ceased to love that wicked wretch, and to whom else can she have gone?"
To herself she said, self-excusingly: "Poor Elaine, I would not blacken her name still more, only to help Bertha. If she marries him I shall manage to let him find out the real truth about Elaine directly afterward. She shall not lie under that base imposition any longer than is necessary for Bertha's welfare."
She was startled when she saw how reproachfully and sternly his brown eyes gleamed upon her.
"A mother is the last person to impute sin to her child," he said.
Mrs. Brooke only sobbed into her handkerchief by way of answer to this reproach.
"I have become deeply interested in your daughter's sad story, Mrs. Brooke," he went on. "Pray do not think me inquisitive if I ask you one question."
She looked it him in startled surprise.
"It is only this, Mrs. Brooke," he said. "Will you tell me in what city lived the man who so cruelly wronged beautiful Elaine?"
"It can do no good to rake up these old things," she said, half-fretfully.
"It was only a single question. It cannot hurt you to answer," he said, almost pleadingly.
She said to herself that it could not matter indeed, and she did not wish to offend the young man whom she hoped to capture for her son-in-law.
"It is very painful re-opening these old wounds," she sighed; "but since you insist upon it I will answer your question. The young villain lived at Richmond."
He bowed his thanks.
"I already know his name," he said, "and since you have no son to send upon this delicate mission, Mrs. Brooke, I will make it my business to inquire if your elder daughter has indeed deserted you for her base betrayer."
She was about to protest against his doing so on the first pretext[Pg 42] she could think of, when Bertha's entrance suddenly closed the conversation.
He made his adieux and departed, giving an evasive reply to the young lady's wishes for his swift return.
One week later Mrs. Brooke received a letter from him dated at Richmond.
"You wronged your daughter by your unkind suspicions," he wrote; "she is not with the man you thought. Clarence Stuart left Richmond on the very day of your husband's death, in his own yacht, with his wife and daughter, and a party of friends. They were on a pleasure-trip to Italy. You will no doubt be glad to hear that Elaine is not so wicked as you believed her."
Thus the letter closed abruptly. Mrs. Brooke, in a curt note, thanked Mr. Kenmore for his information. She did not dare give way to her indignation at his interference, dreading that it would injure the success of Bertha's husband-hunting.
CHAPTER XVII.
Lilia Stuart was very much frightened by her father's strange seizure. She was about to scream loudly for help when Irene, with a sensitive horror of scenes, laid her white hand gently but firmly over the parted lips.
"Do not be frightened, Lilia," she said. "Get some cold water. That is all that is necessary."
Lilia sprang to the ice-flagon and returned with a glass of cold water in her trembling grasp. Irene thrust her white hand into the cold fluid, and deluged Mr. Stuart's rigid white face with it.
It produced the desired effect. Mr. Stuart shivered, opened his eyes, and stared blankly around him for a moment.
"Oh, papa, you are better," cried Lilia, springing to throw her arms around his neck. "I am so frightened, dearest papa, shall I not call mamma?"
Something like dread or fear flashed for a moment into his open dark eyes.
"No, for Heaven's sake, don't!" he exclaimed, testily; "I detest scenes! There is nothing at all the matter with me! Say nothing to your mother, Lilia. You understand me?"
"Yes, papa," the girl replied, obediently. "But what made you faint?" she continued, curiously.
An expression of deep annoyance clouded Mr. Stuart's handsome face.
"Pooh, I did not faint," he said, sharply. "A mere dizziness overcame me. Don't let your fancies run away with your reason, Lilia."
He rose as he spoke, and without a glance at Irene or the open locket that still swung at her throat, hastily quitted the room. Lilia, forgetting her guest, followed after him.
Irene thus left alone, fell into a startled revery.
She had not been deceived like Lilia by Mr. Stuart's short assertion of dizziness. She knew that he had actually fainted, and she believed that the bare sight of her mother's face in the locket had been the cause of his agitation.
"He recognized the face, and it had power to stay the very pulses of his life for a moment," she said to herself.
A terrible suspicion darted into her young mind, chilling the blood in her veins, and driving it coldly back upon her heart.
"Can this man be my father, my mother's base betrayer?" she thought.
She did not like to think so. Her heart had gone out strangely to this man, the savior of her young life. She liked to think that he was noble, good and brave. For the villain who had betrayed her trusting young mother she had nothing in her heart but hatred, and a burning desire for revenge.
Suddenly the saloon door opened softly. Mr. Stuart had eluded Lilia and returned.
He came to her side and sat down again. His dark face was strangely pale still. There was a troubled look in his large, dark eyes.
"You must have thought my agitation strange just now, Irene," he said.
"Yes," she answered, gravely.
"And—you guessed the reason?" he inquired, slowly, fixing a keen glance on her face.
She raised her beautiful, troubled blue eyes steadily to his.
"You recognized the pictures in my locket," she replied, touching it with her trembling hand.
"My God, yes!" he answered hoarsely. "Irene, child, for the love of Heaven, tell me what this man and woman are to you."
She had no answer for him. In her own heart she was saying, dumbly:
"I cannot tell him. It is my mother's secret. She guarded it for sixteen years, and I must not betray her."
He looked at the white, agonized face of the girl, and repeated his question:
"Tell me what this man and woman are to you."
"I cannot tell you, Mr. Stuart," she replied, falteringly.
"You mean you will not," he said, studying her downcast face, with grave, attentive eyes.
"I cannot," she replied. "It is a secret that belongs to others. I cannot betray confidence."
A baffled look came into his troubled, marble-white face.
"Do you mean to preserve an utter incognito among us?" he asked.
"I must," she answered, while great, trembling tears started beneath her drooping lashes. "I can say no more than what I have told you already. I am homeless, friendless, nameless!"
"How old are you?" he inquired.
"I was sixteen years old but a few days ago," she answered.
He looked again keenly at her face, and bending forward, again looked at the beautiful, pictured face of Elaine Brooke.
A shudder shook his form.
"You are strangely like her—strangely like," he said. "Child, I would give much to hear you say what this beautiful woman is to you."
Irene looked gravely at him, her young bosom shaken by a storm of suspicion.
"Confidence invites confidence," she said, harshly. "I will tell you what this woman is to me if you tell me what she once was to you."
CHAPTER XVIII.
Irene's stern, abrupt question produced a startling effect upon Mr. Stuart. His face grew ashy pale, even to his lips, and he gazed suspiciously, almost angrily, at the girl's grave face. Seeing only an earnest wonder mirrored in her clear, sweet eyes, he sprang abruptly from his seat, and without replying to her question began to pace rapidly up and down the room.
Her grave, troubled eyes followed him slowly up and down, while a terrible pain tore her heart.
He seemed to have forgotten her presence, as with clenched hands and wildly staring eyes he paced up and down, muttering bitter phrases to himself.
Irene caught the echo of some passionate words quoted in a voice of raging scorn:
Suddenly he stopped in his wild march, and came back to her side.
"No, child, keep your secret," he said, hoarsely. "Keep your secret, and I will keep mine. God help you if yours be as hard to bear as mine."
She must have pitied the dreary despair of his face and voice if her heart had not been hardened against him by her terrible suspicions. A hard, scornful laugh broke over her lips.
"Remorse is always hard to bear," she said, bitterly, to herself.
He looked at her in wonder.
"We will keep our own sad secrets," he repeated, mournfully. "But you are friendless. I will be your friend. You are homeless. My home shall be yours. You are nameless. You shall be Lilia's sister, and share her name. It is a noble one, and has never been stained by disgrace."
She looked at him gravely, fixedly.
Did he speak the truth? Did not her mother's shame and hers lie at his door?
"Do you accept my proposition?" he inquired, anxiously.
For a moment she was tempted to give him an angry passionate denial, to say bitterly:
"No, I will not have these things on sufferance that should be mine by right. I will not have your favor or your pity, you demon, who blasted my mother's life and mine! I could rather curse you!"
But on a sudden she remembered that her suspicions were merely suspicions. She had no proof that this noble-looking man,[Pg 45] who seemed crushed by the weight of some inward sorrow, was her father. Perhaps she wronged him in her thoughts.
"I must give him the benefit of the doubt, since he saved my life," she thought, and put out a cold, little hand to him.
"I must perforce accept your kindness," she said, mournfully, "since I have not a friend to turn to in all the wide, wide world."
He crushed the slender fingers in his firm clasp.
"I will be your friend, always—remember that," he said.
Irene would have thanked him feebly, but the saloon door hastily unclosed, admitting Lilia and her faded, peevish-looking mother.
"You here, Clarence!" exclaimed the latter, in a tone of marked displeasure.
He gave her a quick, cold look. Her eyes fell before it. Cowed by her husband's superior will, she vented her spite on Irene.
"Lilia has been telling me that you threw yourself into the water," she said, flashing her eyes full of greenish rage on the pale young girl. "Oh, you wicked, wicked girl!"
"Madam!" exclaimed Irene, in a proud and haughty tone.
Mr. Stuart advanced, and drew his wife's arm through his own.
"Come with me, Mrs. Stuart, I want you," he said, leading her deliberately from the room.
Lilia stood looking at Irene's indignant face, with a strange expression. The child was like a cat, one moment all silky fur and purring fondness, the next ready to attack with teeth and claws.
She saw the resentment at her mother's coarse attack burning in Irene's dark blue eyes, and exclaimed, with peevish childishness:
"Mamma says you must have done something very bad, indeed, or you wouldn't have thrown yourself into the water! She says you are a bad, wicked girl, and that I musn't entertain you in my pretty saloon, so I guess you had better go back to Mrs. Leslie, and let me have my lounge!"
Irene gazed at the child, almost petrified by her startling change from sweetness and affection to spite and rancour. She saw the mother's spirit flashing from the eyes of the child, and rising with a proud step, left the room without a word.
"Is he really my father," she asked herself, "and is that coarse woman the one who was thought better to bear his name than my angel-hearted mother? And that sickly, petted child—does she shed greater lustre on the proud name of Stuart than I would have done?"
She hastened to Mrs. Leslie's tiny apartment, and finding herself alone, threw herself down upon the white bed and burst into a torrent of bitter tears.
Mrs. Leslie entering more than an hour later found her there, still sobbing and weeping in a very abandonment of despair. She stooped down impulsively and kissed the pure, white brow.
"Do not mind Mrs. Stuart, my dear," she said consolingly.[Pg 46] "She is a spiteful, jealous cat, and hates you for your fair, young face."
Irene looked up, startled. How had Mrs. Leslie learned so much?
"Oh, I have heard about her naughtiness to you just now," smiled the lady. "Do not grieve, Irene. I will be your friend. I am a wealthy widow, and have no one to please but myself. I have fallen in love with you, you mysterious little waif! You shall be my protege if you will."
Seeing that Irene could not speak for tears, she slipped a little note into her hand.
"Dry your eyes and read that," she said. "It is my recommendation to your favor."
Irene obeyed her in surprise. It was a pencil scrawl, hastily done.
"My poor, unfortunate child," it ran, "owing to the hardness of my wife I am unable to take you into the bosom of my family, as I wished to do; but I am none the less interested in your welfare. You will be Mrs. Leslie's protege. She is one of my oldest friends, and will be like a sister to you, while you may always command me as your best friend. It will be necessary, perhaps, that you should assume some name in order to avoid censure and suspicion. The world is very hard and cold, as you may have learned ere now, and it is best to put every defense possible between you and its sneers. Let Mrs. Leslie assist you in the selection of a suitable name."
The hurried note closed abruptly with the name of Clarence Stuart. Irene raised her eyes wonderingly to the lady's face.
"Why does he take such an interest in me?" she asked.
"He saved your life, my dear, and you seem in some sort to belong to him. Besides, he is naturally one of the noblest and best of men. His heart is full of pity for the weak and helpless," said the lady, enthusiastically.
There was a moment's silence; then Mrs. Leslie said, kindly:
"What do you say, my dear—will you be my little sister, and let me care for you?"
"Yes, until I can act for myself," Irene answered, softly, and pressing her girlish lips gratefully upon the lady's small white hand.
CHAPTER XIX.
Mrs. Leslie smoothed the girl's rippling golden curls tenderly.
"And the name?" she said. "Shall you not take Mr. Stuart's advice about that? It will be far—far better."
Irene was silent, warm blushes drifting over her fair, young face.
"Think," said the gentle lady, "there must surely be some name to which you have a legal right. Is there not, my dear?"
Deeper and warmer grew the blush on the fair, girlish face.
She had suddenly remembered Guy Kenmore, and the ceremony[Pg 47] which Mr. Clavering had declared to be binding upon them.
"My name is Mrs. Kenmore," she said to herself, with a strange feeling trembling at her heart as she recalled the handsome man to whom she was bound.
Then a flash of pride usurped the thrill of almost unconscious tenderness.
"He did not wish for me to be his wife," she said to herself. "I remember he regarded me simply as a spoiled child. I shall not claim his name, shall never trouble him more. He shall think me dead."
She looked up gravely at her kind friend.
"Mrs. Leslie," she said, "there is no name from out my past that I wish to claim. I have severed myself violently from all that once bound me. I have done no wrong, I have sinned no sin, but I have been terribly wronged and sinned against. It is true I have borne a name in the world where I used to move, but when I found it was not mine I flung it away. I will not be called by it, I will have nothing to remind me of the past. Now tell me what I shall do."
Mrs. Leslie was silent a few moments. She wondered who had been so cruel as to wrong this beautiful girl, whose words, whose looks, whose every action was so pure and high-toned.
After a moment's reflection she said:
"My maiden name was Berlin; will you bear that, Irene?"
"You would give your own name to me, an utter stranger?" Irene cried, in grateful surprise.
"Yes, because, as I said just now, I have fallen in love with you. Whatever may be the sad secret of your past I can look into your eyes and see that you are pure and good. The name of Berlin is an old and honorable one, but I do not believe you would disgrace it in the bearing," said the sweet lady, heartily.
"Then I accept the loan of it with sincerest gratitude," replied Irene, through springing tears.
"Then you shall be called Irene Berlin," said Mrs. Leslie. "It is a pretty name, and will suit you. And now we will discuss other affairs. I am going to Italy with the Stuarts. Shall you be willing to go with me?"
"Nothing could please me better than to leave my native land behind me," replied the girl.
"That is settled, then. And now do you feel well enough to go on deck with me? It is a lovely day. The sun is shining softly and brightly. The sea is almost as calm and blue as the sky. The fresh air will do you a world of good."
"I have nothing to wear," said Irene, flushing deeply.
"That is true," laughed Mrs. Leslie. "The party dress in which you came among us is not exactly a yacht costume. But I can remedy that defect, I think, from my own wardrobe. Fortunately we are about the same size."
She brought out from her trunk a dark blue velvet suit and a cap of the same with a jaunty bird's wing on one side. Nothing could have become Irene better. The suit fitted to a charm, and[Pg 48] when Mrs. Leslie set the jaunty cap on the streaming curls she exclaimed in wonder at the dazzling loveliness of her protege.
"It is no wonder Mrs. Stuart was jealous of you, you are the loveliest creature I ever saw," she exclaimed frankly.
"If I were not so unhappy you would make me vain, Mrs. Leslie," sighed the lovely girl.
"You are too young to be unhappy, my dear. I hope you will soon forget your sorrows. But come, let us go on deck and I will introduce you to your Compagnons du Voyage."
They went out and Irene's eyes were dazzled with the beauty of the day. The sky was deeply blue, with little white clouds sailing over it. The sun shone on the blue waves, and white-winged sea-gulls darted here and there. Several ladies and gentlemen were on deck, walking and chatting. They started in surprise—the women envious—the men admiring—at the new comer. She looked like a young princess. Her step was light and proud, her bearing calm and self-possessed. The sun shone on her golden curls, her fair face and her velvet blue eyes, making her look like a perfect picture. Several gentlemen came around Mrs. Leslie, waiting eagerly for an introduction.
CHAPTER XX.
Lilia Stuart had not failed to repeat Irene's confession of her namelessness to her mother. Mrs. Stuart, with the malice of a little mind, industriously disseminated the news among her guests. Curiosity and excitement were rife, regarding the mysterious waif from the sea.
So when Irene came upon deck, looking so wondrously lovely in the blue velvet dress and her rippling, waving, golden curls, they all came around her, full of wonder and surprise. They were amazed and disconcerted when Mrs. Leslie, with the cool self-possession that never deserted her under any circumstances, proceeded to introduce her protege by the name of Miss Berlin.
"Why, we thought she had no name—that she was a child of shame. Mrs. Stuart certainly said so," the ladies exclaimed to each other in whispers. "Depend upon it there is something wrong. We will be very shy of having anything to do with her."
If Irene had been homely and stupid, they might have pitied her, but her girlish beauty and grace at once enlisted the spite and envy of their little minds. Mrs. Leslie was the only lady on board who did not wish that she had perished in the cold waves. They regarded her as an interloper and unwelcome burden on them.
The gentlemen took a different view of the matter from their feminine friends. They were full of wonder and admiration over the beautiful stranger.
There were three gentlemen beside Mr. Stuart, on board the yacht, as there were three ladies. With two of these men our story has no interest. The third one, who was a distant relative of Mr. Stuart, and who at once fell desperately in love with our heroine, we will slightly describe.
He was tall and slight, with very dark eyes and hair, and a face that though weak and irresolute in expression, was rather handsome, having an effeminate mouth and chin that lent sweetness to his ever-ready smile. His dark eyes had a trick of falling beneath your glance, as if some inner consciousness made him shrink from meeting you with an open, steady gaze. In dress and manner he was rather a dandy, and was counted popular among the fair sex for his obliging disposition, and also a very fair tenor voice, with which he accompanied himself on the guitar. He answered to the name of Julius Revington.
On the heart of this handsome ladies'-man, the fair, blonde loveliness of Irene at once committed terrible havoc.
He gazed as if fascinated, on that arch, bright face to which the delicate color mounted in a roseate glow at his ardent gaze.
Mrs. Leslie smiled as she saw how deeply he was smitten with her protege's charms, and immediately introduced him.
He acknowledged the introduction with delight, and invited Miss Berlin to promenade the deck with his arm for support.
As Irene gently declined, pleading weariness for excuse, he brought her a comfortable chair and stood beside her ostensibly to shade her face from the too ardent kisses of the wind and sun, but really that he might feast his eyes on her fresh and pearl-fair beauty. Revington holding his umbrella over Irene provoked some mirth and more envy in the breasts of Brown and Jones. The ladies were unanimously disgusted. It was too bad that she should wile Revington from them. Miss Smith, a tall brunette who rather regarded him as her own prey, looked daggers. Mrs. Leslie was secretly amused and delighted. She knew that Mrs. Stuart had been forming a coalition against Irene, and it pleased her to see how hard they took Revington's desertion to the banner of the newcomer.
But rave as they would, Irene's conquest was potent to everyone but herself. She who had never had a lover in the course of her brief, secluded life, was innocent of coquetry and unversed in the arts of love. She accepted Revington's attentions kindly, and congratulated herself that she had won another friend.
But though she was patient and gentle the beau could not congratulate himself on any rapid progress in her favor. She was strangely sad and grave. The red lips had no smiles for him though they answered him gently when he spoke. The blue eyes did not look at him, though he tried all his arts to win them to meet his gaze. They wandered strainingly across the sea, as if seeking something lost to sight. The lids, with their heavy golden lashes, had a pathetic droop as if unshed tears weighed them down. The lips quivered now and then as if with mute sobs. A story was written on her face—a story of sorrow and pain that clouded somewhat its spring time loveliness as clouds overshade an April sky. Revington, who was poetical, thought of some applicable lines, and bending over her softly repeated them:
The sweet words touched her. She had not known before that the sorrow at her heart was reflected on her face. She looked at him then a little wistfully.
"Do I indeed look so sad?" she asked.
"Far too sad for one so young," he answered. "I wish I could teach you to smile."
She did smile then, but the smile was sadder than tears.
"Ah, you should have known me even a week ago," she said, impulsively. "I had never known a real sorrow then. But now, unless I could forget, I do not think I could ever again be glad."
She thought of the old gray head that she had so loved lying low in the dark grave; of Elaine, her mother, who had left her to perish in the dark waves after she had followed her almost to the brink, and a fountain of sorrow, of bitterness, and of shame welled up within her heart.
Revington looking keenly at her, wondered what the sorrow had been that had shadowed her brow and heart.
"I will find it out if I can," he said to himself, "and I will teach her to forget if I can."
He little dreamed how vain a task he had set himself. As the summer days glided softly past, and the white-sailed yacht flew over the blue ocean waves blithely as a bird, Irene began to understand the drift of his attentions.
"Revington is making love to you, my dear," Mrs. Leslie had said, laughing, and thus her young eyes were opened.
It amused her at first, and then she became disgusted. It angered her to see the artful little traps he had set to surprise her secret from her—the secret of her hidden past. From a desire for flirtation at first he had glided into ardent love, and his longing to know the story of her past grew greater daily in accordance with the strength of his passion.
But Irene, from mere friendliness at first had turned to ice. She repelled his attentions now, instead of languidly enduring them. In her heart she contrasted the weakly, handsome face and shrinking eyes with one that was engraved on her memory as possessing of all manly beauty the most.
Mrs. Stuart looked on at the little by-play with coldly disapproving eyes. She had begun with a jealous hatred of Irene, because her husband had saved her life. Her aversion never grew less. Indeed, the beauty, and grace, and romantic mystery that enfolded the girl, only added fuel to the flame of her wrath and jealousy. She knew, although she was chary of expressing it by[Pg 51] word or sign, that Mr. Stuart took a great and almost painful interest in the object of her antipathy.
It vexed her when she saw Julius Revington losing his heart to the girl, but she never expostulated with him but once, although they were intimate friends. Then he spoke a few words that effectually silenced her, and she learned for the first time how his dark eyes could flash beneath their drooping lids. She let him alone after that, and contented herself with spiteful looks and sneering words behind his back.
In the balmy breezes and salty breath of the summer ocean, Lilia Stuart's insidious disease took a new and flattering turn. She had fewer ill-turns. Her thin cheeks rounded out with something like healthy plumpness. Her large eyes did not look so large in her childish face. She would have returned to her first enthusiastic admiration and friendship for Irene, but her mother maliciously fostered ill-will and contempt in her mind, and Irene was the recipient of many bitter impertinences from the misguided child, which she received with cold and disdainful scorn. Mrs. Leslie was the only friend she had who dared speak openly and kindly for her. All the rest of the party, except Julius Revington, were weakly dominated by Mrs. Stuart.
They reached Italian shores at last, and Arno was secured for the Stuarts and their guests. There was a short and sharp debate between Mr. Stuart and his wife, who objected to receive Irene as her guest. But the lady knew how far she could transgress against her husband's will, and she found she had reached the limit, and was forced to yield ungraciously to his desires.
A cold and formal invitation was therefore accorded to Miss Berlin as Mrs. Leslie's friend. Irene, burning with resentment and wounded pride, would fain have declined and gone out into the cold, strange world to seek her bread among strangers, but Mrs. Leslie's gentle solicitation prevailed, and she accepted the grudging invitation as reluctantly as it had been given. We will leave her there, in "the land of the orange, the myrtle and vine," and return to Guy Kenmore.
CHAPTER XXI.
Mr. Kenmore, in his pursuit of knowledge, had no difficulty in tracing the Stuarts in Richmond.
At the elegant and fashionable West End of the city, a stylish residence was pointed out to him as the home of Clarence Stuart and his family.
He remained in the city a few days and stored his mind with all the available facts regarding this, to him, interesting family.
It was easy to do. The Stuarts, as wealthy, fashionable and aristocratic people, were well known. The city papers had duly announced their departure for Italy in their own yacht, the Sea-Bird. Their movements were considered generally interesting to the public, to judge by the paragraphs that appeared in the daily journals.
Mr. Kenmore heard, incidentally, that Clarence Stuart's wife[Pg 52] had been a wealthy heiress when he married her, some fifteen years before.
Casual inquiry elicited the fact that Clarence Stuart's father had been dead three weeks.
Guy Kenmore was startled by this information. It went far towards confirming his theory of the fragment of letter found in old Ronald Brooke's dead hand, and which he treasured carefully in his pocket-book.
"It was the senior Stuart's death-bed confession," he said to himself. "What could that dying man have to confess to old Ronald Brooke?"
What but the story of a crime that lay so heavy on his dying hours, that he was fain to seek the pardon of God and of man before he dared go out into the terrible unknown?
Who had dared to wrest that important confession from Mr. Brooke's hand, and strike him dead with the secret unrevealed?
Shuddering, Guy Kenmore asked himself this question to which the answer seemed only too clear.
The only persons who could have been vitally interested in old Clarence Stuart's death-bed confession were his son and his family.
Was Clarence Stuart, junior, a guilty man or a wronged man?
Did he or did he not know of his father's death-bed confession?
By whose hand had that confession been sent to old Ronald Brooke?
Who had followed behind the messenger and torn that document from the old man's hand with a death-blow?
These questions rung unceasingly through Guy Kenmore's head. They sickened him with their terrible suggestions of hidden guilt and crime. He believed more and more that Ronald Brooke had been murdered instead of dying a natural death as his physicians had asserted.
But how was he to find the murderer, and how bring his guilt home to him?
Mr. Kenmore, who was naturally indolent and ease-loving, and who had been nurtured in these habits by his life of luxury and indulgence, found himself staggered by these heavy responsibilities that appeared to have been thrust upon him. The blood of Ronald Brooke seemed to cry aloud to him from the earth for vengeance on his murderer.
"Why has Heaven selected me for the instrument of righting Elaine Brooke's wrongs?" he asked himself, in wonder.
He did not relish the duty, but when he would fain have given it up, a voice within him loudly urged him forward in the path of duty.
"What good can it do?" he answered back, impatiently, to that inward monitor. "Mr. Brooke is dead, Irene is dead, her mother has broken loose from all her old ties and associations, and hidden her life away in the great thronging world. Can vengeance bring the dead back, or give peace to the broken heart of that poor wronged woman?"
Yet in spite of his sophistries and protestations the voice within still loudly echoed: "Go on."
He wrote to Mrs. Brooke informing her of her erroneous supposition concerning Elaine's whereabouts, then he turned his whole attention to the Stuarts.
"If I could see Clarence Stuart I could form my opinion of him much better," he thought. "I have nothing else to do. Why not follow them to Italy?"
He went home to Baltimore and made his preparations for going abroad. There was no one to oppose his will. His parents were dead, his two sisters were married to wealthy men, and were too much absorbed in fashion and pleasure to miss him greatly. Somewhat reluctantly he went, not remembering that the path of duty is oftentimes the straight road to happiness.
No dream came to him as he walked the deck those beautiful moonlit nights of summer and mused on the repulsive task to which he was going, that fate was leading him straight to the presence of her who had become a sweet and softened memory to his heart; whose childish willfulness and flitting spites had so irked him once, but which now he remembered only as
Death had idealized his blue-eyed girl-bride, and he loved her now when it seemed too late.
CHAPTER XXII.
The words fell softly from the lips of Irene as she walked beneath the shade of the orange and olive and lemon trees in the villa garden. The balmy air was sweet with the breath of countless flowers, the birds sang sweetly in the boughs above her head, and the blue waves of the Arno ebbed and flowed at her feet with a pleasant murmur. Overhead the clear blue sky of Italy, which poets have painted in deathless verse and artists on immortal canvas, sparkled and glanced in all its radiant sapphire beauty.
She was musing on the beauty and the sorrow of this lovely hapless land, and the famous words of Byron came aptly to her lips. She repeated them softly and sadly, and someone who had stolen upon her unaware answered musingly:
"Do you believe with Byron that the gift of beauty is always fatal, Miss Berlin?"
She started and flushed with annoyance. It was Julius Revington. He had become her very shadow, seeming unable to exist out of her sight.
The beautiful girl in her white dress with the roses and myrtles in her small hand, turned her face away pettishly.
"How you startled me, Mr. Revington," she said, in a tone of displeasure. "I thought myself alone."
"You are very cruel to hide yourself out here in the orange ground," said the gentleman, sentimentally. "Do you know that I have been searching for you everywhere?"
"No, I did not know it. If I had, I should have hidden myself in a securer place than this," she replied, with all the frank cruelty of a young girl.
"Miss Berlin, you are very cruel," complained the lover. "Sometimes I really wonder whether you say such sharp things in earnest, or if you are only coquetting."
The blue eyes flashed.
"I know nothing of coquetry," said Irene, sharply. "I mean everything that I say."
He came nearer and looked under the brim of the shady hat at the lovely, irritated face and sparkling eyes.
"Oh, Miss Berlin, why will you treat me so coldly when you know that I love the very ground you walk upon?" he exclaimed, almost abjectly.
"I do not want your love," she answered, stamping her little foot impatiently on the turf, as if the love he confessed for her lay veritably beneath her feet.
His weakly, handsome face grew pale at her impetuous words.
"Wait, Irene, before you so cruelly reject me," he exclaimed. "You are young, but not too young to know that it is wrong to trifle with the human heart."
"I have not trifled with yours," she interrupted, flushing at the imputation.
"But all the same your beauty has wiled my heart from me," he said. "I have loved you from the first hour I saw your charming face. I lay my heart, my hand, my fortune at your feet, Irene. Will you not take pity on me and be my wife?"
The flowers fell from her hands down upon the sweet, green turf, and her face grew pale with emotion. It was the first time a lover had ever wooed her, yet she was a wife—a wife unwooed and unwon—yet bound, how plainly she recalled the solemn, fateful words, by ties that no man "should put asunder."
She looked at the dark, handsome face that showed at its best with that light of love lingering on it. Between her and it another face arose, languid, careless, indifferent, yet fascinating for the soul that looked out of the bright, yet soft brown eyes. She remembered that she had thought him handsome—handsomer than any of Bertha's and Elaine's beaux—a flush rose slowly to her face as she remembered that she had told him so.
"No wonder he despised me," she said to herself, and she turned back to Mr. Revington trying to forget Guy Kenmore, for she was now ashamed of the willfulness and spite she had displayed before him.
"Will you be my wife, Irene?" repeated her adoring lover.
"I cannot, Mr. Revington. I do not love you," she answered, in a gentler tone than she had used to him before.
He threw himself impetuously at her feet and grasped her hands.
"Let me teach you to love me," he cried, abjectly.
Her crimson lips curled in faint scorn.
"I could not learn the lesson," she replied. "You are not the kind of man whom I could love," and again the handsome face of Guy Kenmore rose before her mind's eye.
"Why do I think of him?" she asked herself.
"What sort of a man could you love, Miss Berlin?" he asked, almost despairingly, and again the proud, handsome, indifferent face of Guy Kenmore rose tormentingly before her.
"Why do I think of him?" she asked herself again, in wonder, and forgetting to answer the question of the kneeling man. She had drawn her hand away from his frenzied clasp, and now he gently plucked at her dress to draw her attention.
"Irene, my love, my darling, my beautiful queen, take pity on me, and do not reject me," he cried, pleadingly. "Tell me what manner of man you could love, and I will make myself over by your model. I could do anything, be anything, for your sweet sake!"
Again the blue eyes looked at him in faint scorn, and the red lips curled.
"Do get up from the ground, Mr. Revington," she said. "It is quite undignified; I dislike it very much."
He was too much carried away by his passion to observe the slight inflection of scorn in her tone.
"No, I will not rise," he answered. "I will kneel at your feet, like the veriest slave, until you retract your cruel refusal, and give me leave to hope."
"But I cannot do so," she answered, more gently. "Do be reasonable, and drop the subject, Mr. Revington. It is quite impossible, this that you ask. I do not love you, and I cannot be your wife."
"You might learn to love me," he persisted, almost sullenly.
"Never. You do not realize my ideal," the girl replied, with an unconscious blush.
"Tell me what your ideal is like, Irene," said her kneeling lover.
"I have read some lines that fit him," she replied, half dreamily, half to herself, and still with that soft blush on her beautiful face. "I will repeat them to you."
Yet she seemed to have forgotten him, as she fixed her eyes on the blue, rolling waves of the Arno, and the words fell like music from her beautiful lips:
Her ideal lover, so unlike himself, sent a blush of shame tingling to his cheeks. He sprang hastily to his feet and looked down at her from his tall hight sullenly.
"You are unlike all the women I have ever met before," he said, with repressed anger. "You would have a man play the master, not the slave."
And in his heart he longed to be her master then and compel her love in return for that which glowed in his heart.
She looked up at him with a slight smile.
"You misunderstand me," she replied. "I could not tolerate a master as you mean it—a tyrant. Still less could I love a slave. My ideal must have manly dignity and gracious pride. He must look like Jean Ingelow's Laurance:
"So I must change my looks as well as my nature before I can please my lady," he said with sudden bitterness.
"Yes," she answered, with a light and careless laugh, for, to do her justice, she did not dream how deep his love lay in his heart. She believed him weak and fickle, as his face indicated, and as he was. If he had won her, lovely and charming as she was, he must have wearied of her in time, as it was his nature to do; but being unattainable she at once became the one thing precious in his sight, without which he could never know happiness.
He went away and left her to her solitude under the orange tree with its glistening green leaves, its waxen-white flowers and golden globes of fruit. She looked a little sadly at the flowers which had fallen from her hands and which her kneeling lover had crushed into the turf.
"The great booby," she said indignantly to herself. "He has remorselessly crushed all my beautiful flowers."
Was it an omen?
CHAPTER XXIII.
Julius Revington went away from the presence of the girl he adored, cast down but not destroyed.
He had set his mind doggedly on winning her and he was by no means despondent of winning her yet.
His grosser, weaker nature could not comprehend the higher, loftier nature of Irene. Her gentle intimation of how he fell short of her ideal had not greatly impressed him except to fill him with a certain amount of sullen jealousy toward some unknown[Pg 57] person or other whom it was evident existed in her mind, and possibly in flesh and blood upon the earth.
"Perhaps she has already given her heart away," he thought to himself. "But, no, she is too young. That cannot be."
As he walked slowly along the path toward the villa something bright and shining on the ground attracted his attention. He stooped and picked it up.
A cry of eager surprise broke from his lips.
It was the pretty, blue-enamelled locket that Irene usually wore around her white throat.
It had become detached from the slender gold chain and fallen on the ground without her knowledge.
Julius Revington had endured many pangs of baffled curiosity over this locket, of whose contents he had heard much from the ladies but which he had never had the good fortune to behold.
Pausing now in the quiet, secluded path, he deliberately touched the spring of the pretty bauble.
The lid flew open, and there before him under the soft light of the Italian sky that sifted down through the glistening leaves of the orange trees, were revealed the handsome faces of old Ronald Brooke and his daughter.
A hoarse cry broke from Julius Revington's lips, his face whitened, a cold dew started out upon his brow.
"My God," he said, and sank down upon a bed of flowers as if totally overcome.
With starting eyes he looked at the kind, genial, manly face of the old man, and then at the fair, almost angelic face of Elaine. An uncontrollable shudder shook his form.
"Father and daughter!" he said, under his breath.
Sitting there in the balmy air with the soft murmur of the waves in his ears, he relapsed into thought. Minutes went silently by, bringing a subtle change into the man's face. His cheeks glowed, his downcast eyes sparkled.
"A master rather than a slave," he muttered at last with an evil triumph in his tone; "so be it."
Slowly rising, he retraced his steps to Irene.
He met her coming along the path toward him, her fair face anxious and troubled.
"Oh, Mr. Revington," she cried, "I have lost the locket off my chain! Have you seen it anywhere?"
He held it up to the light, and her sweet face glowed with joy.
"Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Revington," she cried, "I am so glad! I feared I had lost it forever!"
"I am very glad to have the good fortune to restore it to you," he said; "it lay directly in my path as I was returning to the villa."
"I am so glad," she repeated, kissing it as if it had been some sentient thing. "You see, Mr. Revington, it was a gift to me from one who is now dead—one whom I loved—dearly," she concluded, with a falter in her voice and a mist of tears in her eyes.
"Miss Berlin, will you pardon me if I ask you what may seem an impertinent question?" he asked.
She brushed the soft dew from her eyes with her lace handkerchief, and looked up at him with her soft, wondering glance.
"Well?" she said.
He did not look at her in return; his shifting eyes fell to the ground, as was their wonted habit.
"When I found the locket lying on the ground the lid was open. I saw the two faces it held," he said, in a strange, hesitating voice.
"Well?" she repeated, gravely, while a flush rose over her fair face.
"They—were not strange to me," he replied; "I was startled when I saw whose were the faces you wore always over your heart. Miss Berlin, will you tell me what that man and woman are to you?"
He saw her start and shiver—saw the warm crimson flash into her face, then recede again, leaving it deathly pale and cold. She clasped her hands over the locket, pressing it tightly to her beating heart, while she answered hoarsely and with downcast eyes:
"I cannot tell you, Mr. Revington; it is a secret, and that secret belongs to another. I have no right to reveal it."
CHAPTER XXIV.
Julius Revington stood looking in silence at the beautiful, agitated girl as she repeated, sadly:
"The secret belongs to another. I have no right to reveal it."
"Is it a secret of shame?" Julius Revington asked, slowly.
Irene started, and flashed a look of anger upon him through her tear-wet lashes.
"You are impertinent," she said, sharply; "you have no right to seek to penetrate the secret of my past!"
"I have the same right as the physician who probes the wound to heal it," he replied, coolly.
"You!—you can heal no wound of mine!" she flashed, almost disdainfully.
"You think so, but you are wrong," said Julius Revington. "Sit down, Miss Berlin, I have much to say to you. It is for your own good that you should listen to it."
The earnestness of his tone impressed Irene against her will. She sat down slowly on the soft, green grass, still with a mutinous pout on her lips, and her eyes turned coldly away from him.
Mr. Revington seated himself also, and glanced carefully around, to make sure that no one was in hearing distance of himself and his fair companion.
"I see that you have no faith in my power of making an interesting communication to you," he said, addressing himself to Irene.
"No, I cannot imagine your telling me anything I should like to hear," she retorted, coldly.
An angry light flared into the man's dark eyes a moment, but[Pg 59] he bit his lip to keep back a sharp rejoinder. Her willfulness, her pretty petulances, had an actual fascination for him.
"Such an answer from any one but you, Miss Berlin, would be actual rudeness," he said, lightly. "But whether frowning or smiling you are ever charming to me. You remind me of nothing so much as one of Tennyson's heroines, 'a rosebud set with little willful thorns.'"
She answered not a word. Her fair face was averted, and her blue eyes gazed at the silvery Arno softly gliding past.
"You have been a beautiful, enchanting mystery to me ever since I met you," he continued, slowly. "I have wondered whence you came and to whom you belonged, but with no hope of unsealing your beautiful lips or the secret they held so close. But chance—or shall I call it fate?—has solved the mystery for me."
She turned her head and looked at him suddenly, her blue eyes dark with fear and wonder.
"What can you mean?" she exclaimed.
"I mean that when I came upon your picture in your locket just now the mystery of your identity was solved for me," he replied, coolly, glad that he had roused her at last.
"I do not understand you," she said through her lips that had suddenly grown white and trembling.
A slight smile curved Julius Revington's mustached lips, as he saw how much he had startled her.
"Master rather than slave," he repeated to himself, vindictively, for that was the way he interpreted her eloquent description of her ideal.
"I told you the faces were not strange to me," he said. "Shall I tell you their names?"
"You cannot," she returned, miserably.
"Do not deceive yourself," he retorted. "The old man is Ronald Brooke, the beautiful woman is his daughter, Elaine."
A startled cry broke from her lips, she flashed her eyes upon him in a swift, horrified gaze, a terrible suspicion darting through her heart.
"You know her?" she cried out, hoarsely.
His answer dispelled the horrible dread that had clutched at her heart with icy fingers.
"No, I have never met her in my life, but I have seen her picture before," he said.
She gave a gasp of relief. It had been horrible to fancy for a moment that this man whom she despised in her heart could be her mother's betrayer.
"You have seen her picture before?" she repeated. "Where?"
"It depends on yourself whether I ever answer that question or not," he said.
"On me?" she asked, with some wonder.
"Yes," he replied; "for if I should answer that question it would involve a long story. Before I tell it to you I shall expect to receive a like confidence from you."
She shut her lips tightly over her little clenched teeth, and he saw the blue eyes flash mutinously.
"You refuse?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied, dauntlessly. "You have startled and surprised me and I know not how much you know of me and my past. But at least you will never learn more from me."
He could not forbear a glance of annoyance.
"Miss Berlin, you are certainly the most willful child I ever saw," he exclaimed. "What good can it do you to refuse to tell me what relationship you bear to Ronald Brooke and his daughter?"
CHAPTER XXV.
Irene raised her large blue eyes to Mr. Revington's face. They were full of anguish and despair.
"I have told you already that the secret is not mine to reveal," she said.
"Then I must answer my own question," he replied, with a swift glance around him to make sure that he was not overheard; "you are Elaine Brooke's illegitimate daughter!"
A low cry of bitterness and despair shrilled from her lips. It confirmed his hazardous guess.
"You cannot deny it!" he uttered, triumphantly.
"My God, are you man or devil, Julius Revington?" she exclaimed. "How came you by this knowledge?"
"In a perfectly natural manner," he answered, coolly. "The story of your mother's past is better known to me than to yourself, Irene."
She could not speak for a moment. A hand of ice seemed to grip her throat, her brain reeled, the sound of the river came to her faintly as in a dream. The hot color rushed to her face and her lashes fell. She could not look at this man who held the story of her mother's past—that secret so full of shame and sorrow.
"I know it far better than you do; better than she does," he repeated. "Do not hang your head so heart-brokenly, Irene. You have nothing to blush for."
"Nothing," she echoed, bitterly.
"No," he said, "I can tell you good news, little one. But first raise your head and look at me. I want to see the joylight flash into your eyes when you hear what I have to tell you."
She obeyed him, lifting her sweet eyes in wonder, with half-parted crimson lips that seemed to ask mutely what joy life could yet hold for her.
"You have nothing to blush for," he repeated. "Your mother was a lawfully wedded wife. You are not the child of shame as you have been taught to believe."
"Can I believe you?" she exclaimed, and he was dazzled by the flash of joy in her eyes.
"You may, for it is true, and I can produce proofs of what I say," he answered. "Your mother has been fearfully wronged, but it lies in my power to restore her to her rights again."
"God forever bless you, Mr. Revington, if you can lift the[Pg 61] cloud of sorrow from the hearts and lives of a wronged woman and her child," exclaimed the lovely girl, fervently.
"It rests with you, Irene, whether I do so or not," he replied, flashing a look of admiration on her beautiful, agitated face.
"With me!" she echoed, blankly.
"You are the daughter of a wealthy, high-born, noble gentleman, who would be delighted to claim you if he knew that you lived, and who would rejoice to clasp your mother to his devoted heart," said Mr. Revington, watching her closely as he uttered the words. Her eyes beamed, her face glowed with joy; then suddenly a shadow fell on its brightness.
"You are deceiving me?" she said.
"No, I swear that I am not," he asseverated. "I can prove what I say, and I am ready to do so—on one condition!"
"And that?" she asked, innocently.
His shifting gaze fell before that eager, hopeful, unconscious look, but he answered, boldly:
"That you be my wife, Irene."
"I have told you that was impossible," she answered, growing suddenly pale to the lips.
"Why?" he inquired, chagrined at the prompt reply.
"I do not love you," she replied, evasively.
"Granted that you do not," he said, selfishly, "is your hand too great a price to pay to secure to your mother ease, honor, end happiness?"
She had no answer for him only an irrepressible moan of pain that broke uncontrollably over her white lips. Her thoughts went back to poor, patient, badgered Elaine, and her hard life at Bay View—harder now than ever, she guessed, since her father was dead, and she was left to the tender mercies of her mother and sister.
"Dear mother, how gladly I would purchase this man's knowledge, even at the bitter price he asks, for your dear sake, if only it were possible," she thought to herself with a pang like death at her heart, as she recalled her fatal marriage.
Julius Revington, watching the mute anguish on her speaking face, saw that it was no time to press the question.
"Do not answer me now, Irene," he said, with ready gentleness. "Take time to think it over. Revolve it in your mind to-night in soberness and calmness. Ask yourself if you do not owe this duty to your poor, wronged mother. How sweet it would be for her child to restore to her all she has lost."
"You are cruel and calculating," she said, indignantly. "Why should you ask such a costly price for doing this kindness to my poor, martyred mother?"
"Because I love you, and in no other way can I win you," he answered, boldly.
Her beautiful eyes flashed scornfully upon him.
"Would you take a reluctant and unloving bride?" she asked.
"I would take you on any terms, Irene," he replied.
She looked up at him and asked the strangest question that could possibly fall from a daughter's lips:
"Mr. Revington, will you tell me the name of my father?"
The piteous sadness of the tone, and the pathos of the question must have touched the heart of a better man.
But Julius Revington was thoroughly hard and selfish.
"You have never heard his name, then?" he said.
"Never," she replied. "Will you tell it to me now?"
"Not yet," he replied, cruelly. "I will reserve that pleasant bit of information for our marriage day."
She flashed a sudden, piercing glance upon him.
"You are deceiving me," she said. "You are trying to win me by a pretended knowledge of facts that do not exist."
"On my honor, no," he replied. "I admit that I am selfish, and that I am using the knowledge I possess to gain my own ends, but on the morning that you give me your hand in marriage I swear that I will place in your hands the documents that will prove your mother a lawfully-wedded wife, and give you a legal right to your father's name and wealth. Moreover, I assure you that no one will be more surprised or rejoiced than your father himself on learning the truth."
"And what if I refuse to marry you? she asked, fearfully.
"If you refuse," he replied, cruelly, "the cloud of shame shall never be lifted from your mother's life and yours. Nay, more, I will go to the Stuarts and your good friend, Mrs. Leslie, and I will tell them why you choose to make a mystery of your past. Consent to marry me, and on our wedding-day I will prove you the legal inheritor of an honorable name and a great fortune. I will give you until to-morrow to decide the question."
He rose with the words and walked abruptly away.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Irene remained sitting like one stunned on the banks of the beautiful river.
Her white hands clasped each other convulsively in her lap, her head drooped on her breast, she stared blankly and dreamily before her, seeming lost to the beauty of the fair Italian scene, and deaf to the soft sounds that filled the air with a pleasant murmur.
Heart and brain were in a terrible tumult.
Her head ached and throbbed almost to bursting, her heart beat fast and hard in her breast.
The joy and triumph she would have experienced in the knowledge of her poor mother's innocence and honor were all damped by the thought of the costly price she was required to pay before she could have the happiness of bearing the glad tidings to the wronged, unhappy woman.
With deepest self-reproach the girl recalled her own frenzied reproaches to that beautiful, sorrow-stricken parent on the fatal night when she had been so maddened by the revelation of the angry Bertha. She looked back as though years had intervened upon the Irene of that summer night as a rude, impertinent, willful child.
"Is it any wonder my mother left me to the death I courted in my wild despair?" she thought. "How could I, who should have[Pg 63] soothed sorrow, turned upon her so cruelly? Poor, unhappy Ellie, as I used to call her, what sorrows may she not be enduring now? What insolence, what cruelty, at the hands of her overbearing mother and sister? Even I, her child, did not spare her my reproaches in her dark hour, and how should they who love her less than I did?"
In the flood-tide of remorseful affection that swept over her heart, she longed to go home to her mother, to take her in her arms, and say, lovingly: "Mother, darling, you and your husband were both cruelly wronged. Here are the papers that will prove your wifely honor. Take them and forgive me my wicked reproaches."
Alas, between her and that beautiful hour which fancy painted so glowingly, there yawned a dread, impassable gulf!
"Even if I could consent to pay Julius Revington's terrible price for those papers, I could not do so. I am already wedded," she said to herself; and her heart thrilled strangely at the thought.
The remembrance of his threat sent a shiver of dread thrilling through her frame. To-morrow he would tell Mrs. Leslie and the Stuarts that she was a child of shame; that her beautiful, pure-hearted mother was a sinful, erring woman. How should she bear it? she asked herself, with a moan.
The evening sun sunk lower and lower; the twittering birds flew home to their nests; the cool, soft dew began to fall on Irene's face and hands. She rose with a shiver, as though of mortal cold, and dragged herself back wearily to the villa.
Then she felt that she could not endure to meet the cold, curious faces of Mrs. Stuart and her friends just then. She stole quietly up to her own room, closed and locked the door, and threw herself wretchedly down upon the floor, with her face hidden on her arm.
She did not know how long she had lain there, wretched, forlorn, despairing, when she was roused by the tap of a servant outside, who desired her presence at dinner.
She replied, through the closed door, that she was ill, and did not wish any, and returned to her crouching posture on the floor, as if she found a grim pleasure in physical discomfort, as a set-off to her mental trouble.
She felt angry with herself for the fairness that had won Julius Revington's love.
"If I had been homely and ill-shapen, instead of fair and graceful, he would never have loved me, and he might then have given me those papers for pure pity's sake, with no such condition attached," she told herself, sadly.
Two hours later Mrs. Leslie came tapping softly at the door.
"You must let me in, Irene, for I shall keep 'tapping, tapping,' like the raven, until you do," she called out gaily.
With a smothered sigh Irene admitted her friend.
"What, all in darkness? I beg your pardon, I did not know you had retired," exclaimed the lady.
Irene struck a light and then Mrs. Leslie gazed in wonder at the pale, haggard face.
"My dear child, what is the matter with you?" she cried out in wonder.
"It is nothing—only a headache, I—I have been lying down," she faltered, miserably.
The lady glanced at the white, unrumpled bed, and then at Irene, curiously.
"Where—upon the floor?" she inquired, with a mixture of sarcasm and amazement.
"I—believe so; I felt so bad I did not think," answered Irene, trying to smile.
"Poor dear," said the lady, full of womanly compassion; "if I had known you were so ill I would have come up to you long ago. It was too bad your lying here all by yourself in the dark! In your tight dress, too; I am ashamed of myself! But now I am going to undress you and 'put you in your little bed.'"
Heedless of Irene's gentle expostulations, she proceeded to follow the kind promptings of her womanly heart, and directly she had the girl dressed in her snowy robe de nuit and nestled among the pillows of the snowy bed.
"Now you may shut your eyes, and I will bathe your head with eau de cologne until you fall asleep," she said.
"But indeed it does not ache now. Pray do not trouble yourself," Irene expostulated, now thoroughly ashamed of her innocent little fib.
The lady sat down and began passing her hand tenderly over the pillow.
"I am glad it does not ache any longer," she said, unsuspiciously. "You were sadly missed from among us this evening, my dear," she continued in a light, bantering tone. "Mr. Revington was exceedingly distrait; Miss Smith teased him for a song, but he gave her such a doleful one that he received no encores whatever."
Irene looked so plainly disgusted at the mention of her lover's name that Mrs. Leslie forebore to tease her. She delicately changed the subject.
"Mr. Stuart came back from his trip to Florence this evening, and brought us some sad news," she said.
Irene tried hard to look interested in this communication, but failed dismally. Her own troubles absorbed all her care.
"There has been the most terrible ocean disaster," continued Mrs. Leslie. "Two American steamers, one homeward bound, the other en route for Italy, collided in mid-ocean at midnight, with a horrible loss of human life. Is it not awful?"
Irene tried to look properly shocked, but heart and brain were so numbed by her own grief that she could scarcely comprehend the extent of the calamity her friend was bewailing.
"It is very dreadful," she murmured, feebly.
"Is it not?" said Mrs. Leslie, in awe-struck tones; "and, only think, Irene, I was personally acquainted with one of the passengers who perished in the wreck. I met him once while visiting my sister in Baltimore. He was very handsome and agreeable, besides being very wealthy. His name was Guy Kenmore."
She paused, and uttered a cry of alarm in the next breath.[Pg 65] Irene had gasped convulsively once or twice, then fainted dead away.
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.
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[Pg 66] 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[Pg 68] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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[Pg 72] 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.
"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[Pg 73] 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.
CHAPTER XXXI.
"Do you think so?" asked Mr. Stuart sadly. "Yes, she was very young, but that was a poor love that could thus lightly be turned away from its object."
And again he murmured hollowly from his favorite poet:
"You have had a sad experience," the lady said, gently.
"Have I not?" he said bitterly. "Ah, Mrs. Leslie, I cannot tell you what I suffered in learning my wife had cast me off. It seemed to me that I had gone mad in my grief and despair. I had a relapse of my illness and for long weeks struggled between life and death. I would sooner have died, but it was fated not to be. Slowly, wearily, I came back to life, and when I asked my father for tidings of her he told me that her parents had taken her abroad. Do I weary you, my friend, with the long recital of my sorrows?" he asked, pausing abruptly and gazing into her face with his beautiful, sad, black eyes.
"No, I am deeply interested," she replied. "I wish to hear all that there is to tell."
"There is little more to tell," he answered, sadly. "I was very proud, I loved my wife still, but I had no mind to force her obedience. I did not follow her to beg for her favor. I lent myself to my father's efforts to amuse and interest me, and tried to drown my sorrow in the mad whirl of dissipation and excess. In a few, a very few months, a formal letter came to my father from the Brookes abroad. Elaine, my willful child-wife, had died in giving birth to a little daughter. They wrote my father later on that the babe was dead, too."
He stifled the hollow groan that rose to his lips, and bowed his face on his arm. Mrs. Leslie regarded him in silent pity, but she could offer no acceptable words of sympathy to the sharp pathos of a grief like this.
"It grows late, I must hasten with my story," he exclaimed, glancing up at the sky from which all the sunset brightness was fading into "sober-suited grey." "You understand, Mrs. Leslie, that life was over and done for me then. I cared little what became of me, and my father urged me so persistently that a year later I married Lilia Lessington, the heiress he had chosen for me. I did not pretend to love her. I think she suspected something of my story, for she has always been bitterly jealous of me, and we have never been happy together."
"You should have told her your story. She could not have been jealous of the dead," Mrs. Leslie said, gently.
"The dead," he repeated in a strange voice. "Ah, my friend, is she dead? For sixteen years I never doubted it, but since that morning months ago, when I saved Irene's life, I have been haunted by terrible doubts and tears. The girl is the living, breathing image of my lost child-wife. She looks at me with Elaine's eyes, she speaks to me with Elaine's voice, she smiles at me with Elaine's face. And the face she wears around her neck is Elaine's face, only older, graver, sadder, with the brightness[Pg 75] and archness faded from it, and the look of a martyred angel in its place."
"What do you suspect?" she asked, in a low and startled tone.
"I suspect that Elaine lives—that your mysterious protege, is her child and mine—I suspect that I have been deeply, darkly, terribly wronged—but, oh, my God, by whom?" he added, fiercely, striking his clenched hand against his high brow all beaded with drops of dew.
Mrs. Leslie stared, aghast and speechless. Had Clarence Stuart, indeed, been thus foully wronged? If so, whose soul was black with the stain of this sin?
"I have told you my story," he said. "I know you will keep it inviolate, but, Mrs. Leslie, if there is aught in the boasted keenness and wit of woman, I pray you find out this girl's secret for me. Let me know if my heart has spoken truly, when day and night it claims her for its very own, its first-born child, dearer than aught on earth beside, because she bears her mother's face."
"If woman's wit can avail, I will find out the truth for you," Mrs. Leslie answered, from the depths of her warm, womanly heart.
Then they rose and walked back to the villa in the hush of the beautiful twilight, outwardly silent, but with full hearts.
CHAPTER XXXII.
As the footsteps of Mr. Stuart and his companion died away, there was a sudden rustling in the thick shrubbery that shaded the garden-seat. The branches parted and the face of Mrs. Stuart appeared. It was white with commingled fear and anger, the eyes flashed luridly, her white, jeweled hands were tightly clenched, the breath came gaspingly between her parted lips.
She sat down on the garden-seat, and gazed gloomily before her into the deepening dusk.
"He suspects all," she uttered, huskily. "My God, what if he should learn the truth? That girl—I have always instinctively hated her. Can she be his child, indeed? If so, she must be removed as soon as possible. Does Julius Revington suspect whom she is, and is he laying a plan for my dethronement? I must see him privately and learn the truth. I cannot, I will not, be ousted from my place. I have dared and risked too much to lose all now!"
She made her way rapidly back to the house by a roundabout path, and going to her room, arranged her disordered hair and dress. Then she descended to the drawing-room in search of Mr. Revington.
The lamps were lighted and most of her guests were in the room amusing themselves in various fashions. She missed Mr. Revington, but the tinkle of his inevitable guitar came to her from the balcony. She went out and found him pouring out a plaintive love-song into the unappreciative ears of Irene. At the appearance of her hostess the girl effected a precipitate escape[Pg 76] into the house, leaving her lover to finish his ditty to the desert air.
Mrs. Stuart went up to his side and laid her hand on his arm.
"Julius, I wish to speak to you," she said, in a low, strange voice.
The strings twanged discordantly under his hand. He looked up with something like a guilty start.
"Now?" he asked.
"Of course not," impatiently, "but as soon as possible. Can we manage a private meeting?"
"I can, of course," he answered, with an emphasis on the pronoun. "The risk is yours, not mine. What can you have to say to me?"
The impatient, almost insolent tone in which he addressed her, sent the hot blood to her face.
"You take a high tone," she breathed in suppressed anger.
"Pardon me," he replied, with a fine latent sarcasm in his tone that angered her yet more.
But she kept down her seething resentment with a powerful effort of will.
"Can you come out into the grounds to-night? I have something very important to speak about. I can slip out unnoticed about eleven o'clock," she whispered.
"I will come," he replied, laconically.
She named a place for meeting, then returned to her guests in the drawing-room. Her glance, full of envenomed hate and deadly malice, fell on Irene.
The girl was standing at an open window half-hidden by the falling drapery of the lace curtains, her beautiful, sad young face turned toward the sky. She was looking wondrously lovely in her simple, white mull dress with a great cluster of purple golden-hearted pansies nestled in the filmy lace at her throat, and the veil of her golden hair half hiding the slim, graceful form. Mrs. Stuart wondered at the air of deep sadness that marked the girlish face and caused that pathetic droop of the rosy lips.
How little she dreamed that the girl she hated so jealously was thinking of one dead in the cruel sea as she stood there watching the starry constellations of Heaven sparkling through the misty veil of night. She did not dream what mournful thoughts filled the young heart nor how sadly Irene murmured over to herself some plaintive words that seemed to fit her melancholy vein:
All unheeded and unnoted by its object, Mrs. Stuart's angry glance dwelt on Irene. The girl was so absorbed in her own sad thoughts that the ripple of talk and laughter in the room seemed to flow past her like a dream so faint and far-away it sounded. A feeling of utter loneliness and pain, of vague longing and sharp[Pg 77] regret possessed her. Only half conscious of outward things she leaned against the window mournfully musing.
Suddenly to her dulled senses penetrated the noise of a somewhat unusual bustle in the room, the rustle of a silken robe as its wearer hastily rose, and a sharp cry of wonder and surprise in the voice of Mrs. Leslie:
"Mr. ——!" Irene lost the name in her apathy. "Can this be you, or am I dreaming?"
"I heard at Florence that you were here, Mrs. Leslie, and I could not resist the temptation of calling," said a deep, sweet, musical voice.
That voice! Every drop of blood in Irene's heart seemed to answer it! It shocked her out of her apathetic sorrow. She would have cried out in the suddenness of her surprise, but her lips were parched and dry, her tongue failed her.
Instinctively she shrank further into the shadow and turned her head toward the sound.
Her heart had not deceived her. The world had never held but one voice that could stir the secret depths of her heart.
And this was he! She had thought him dead—
But there he stood—tall, large, handsome, with that easy, gracious, indolent air she recalled so well—a smile on his lips as he replied to Mrs. Leslie's eager questions and exclamations.
Then Irene, watching with startled eyes, saw and heard the hum of greetings and introductions. Even Mrs. Stuart unbent from her supercilious hauteur to do honor to the stranger. She had heard of him, and knew that he was well-born and wealthy.
"What shall I do? Will he know me?" Irene asked herself, with a great suffocating heart-beat.
She saw Mrs. Leslie coming to the window with her friend, and nerved herself for the ordeal. Her thoughts flew confusedly back over the past. How strangely they had parted, how strangely they were meeting.
Mrs. Leslie pushed back the rich lace curtain with her white, ringed hand, and showed the beautiful, silent, statue-like girl.
"Miss Berlin, allow me to present my friend, Mr. Kenmore, the dead-alive," she said, smilingly.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
There was one instant of breathless silence as Mrs. Leslie's kind introductory words thus fell on the ears of the husband and wife, who until that moment had believed the other dead. Then, with a great effort of will Irene raised her pale face and dark blue eyes to meet Guy Kenmore's gaze.
He was staring at her with parted lips, with dilated eyes, and a death-white face as if he had seen a ghost, and suddenly, without[Pg 78] words or bow, or slightest greeting, he turned away and walked to another window, leaning from it as if stifled for want of air.
Mrs. Leslie gazed after him, stupefied. She had never beheld such unparalleled rudeness.
"Irene might have been a ghost," she said to herself. "What does it mean?"
In the next instant Mr. Kenmore walked quickly back to them. He bowed his head humbly before Irene.
"Miss Berlin, I crave your pardon," he said. "Pray do not think me rude. Your face startled me as if I had seen a ghost. You are the image of one—who is dead."
He looked at her strangely as if expecting her to refute his words, but she only bowed her graceful head and drooped her deep blue eyes before his earnest gaze. Her heart was throbbing wildly with the wonder if he would claim her before all these curious, gazing eyes. It would not have surprised her if he had said:
"You are Irene Brooke, whom I married and whom I thought dead. I know not how you came back from your watery grave, but I cannot be deceived in your identity."
She stood speechless before him, expecting every moment to hear him utter those words. She wondered what she would say to him in reply. Should she own the truth—she, who had promised to give herself to Julius Revington to purchase honor and happiness for her wronged mother?
She could not answer her own question; a mist swam before her eyes, her heart beat in her ears, it seemed to her that her strength failed her, and in another moment she must fall upon the floor at his feet.
Through it all she heard his voice breaking clearly, musically upon her tumultuous thoughts.
"I am most happy to make your acquaintance, Miss Berlin," he said, in the courteous, kindly voice of a stranger, and extended his hand to her.
He had been startled out of himself, but only for a moment. Now he was the cool, polished man of the world again. He spoke to her and looked at her as a stranger.
Her heart gave a sudden throb of relief, then sank like ice in her breast. She gave him her hand, her small head crested with sudden pride, though a subtle thrill ran through her veins as his warm fingers clasped hers in a momentary pressure.
There is a subtle language in a hand-clasp. Guy Kenmore's pressure of Irene's hand said, as plain as words:
"I love you!"
Every drop of blood in Irene's heart acknowledged the confession, but her colder reason disdainfully rejected it.
"He will not acknowledge me. He is sorry to find that I am living," she said to herself, with a sudden, hot thrill of shame and anger. "Well, I shall not force myself upon him. I can be as cold and indifferent as he is."
Her strong will and her latent pride came to her aid. She knew that he regarded her as a spoiled child. A longing came over[Pg 79] her to show him that she was a woman—a fascinating woman, too.
When Julius Revington came to her side again he was astonished at the bright, charming wiles she put forth for his benefit.
He knew that her moods were changeful as an April day. He had found a certain charm in the fact, although more clouds than sunshine had been meted out to him. But suddenly he found everything inexplicably changed.
From a lovely, willful, capricious child, Irene was transformed into a beautiful, dignified, brilliant woman. She talked with charming ease and grace. Her laugh rang out like a chime of silver bells. No one had ever seen her so gay and sparkling before, nor one-half so beautiful.
Her eyes sparkled beneath their drooping lashes with interest and animation. Her cheeks were flushed like the heart of a rose, the delicious dimples played hide and seek around her lovely lips. Her words, her looks, her gestures, were all full of grace and beauty.
Julius Revington was enthralled by the newly developed charms of his betrothed. He believed that she had softened to him at last, and that her graciousness indicated a dawning love for himself.
He was thrilled with joy at the thought, and gave free rein to the emotions of his heart. His eager adoration showed in his every glance.
Meanwhile Guy Kenmore, seated across the room by the side of Mrs. Leslie, could not keep his eyes and his thoughts from the lovely girl who had so startled him out of his self-possession. Not a movement or word escaped his notice, although he was outwardly courteous and attentive to the lady he had called to see.
But the pretty, graceful widow was gifted with keen perceptions. She did not fail to note her caller's wandering glance. She was not envious of her beautiful protege, but she could not repress a slight feeling of pique as she saw with what an effort he maintained his apparent interest in herself.
At length she tapped him lightly on his shoulder and brought his wandering glances back to meet her own.
"Forewarned is forearmed," she whispered, gaily. "Do not lose your heart to my beautiful protege, Mr. Kenmore. She is already betrothed."
He started, and a dark-red flush mounted to his temples.
"Your protege!" he exclaimed, catching eagerly at the word.
"Yes," she replied. "She belongs to me, and her story is a most romantic one. Some time I will tell it you, and you shall tell me about that dead friend of yours whom Irene resembles."
"Is her name Irene?" he inquired, and she did not fail to notice the uncontrollable start he gave.
"Yes, it is Irene—Irene Berlin. Do you not think it a pretty name?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered, "I like it very much, and it gives me a new interest in the owner. The name of my lost friend was Irene."
"And if I am not mistaken my protege is the friend whom you believed lost. I have stumbled on a romance and a mystery," thought the lady, shrewdly, to herself; but aloud she only said, with apparent unsuspiciousness: "That is quite a coincidence."
Then she said no more, for to her utter surprise she saw Julius Revington leading Irene to the piano.
Irene had always declined to play and sing before to-night, so her friend was quite excusable for the almost open-mouthed surprise with which she regarded her movements.
The white figure settled itself on the piano stool, the white hands fluttered over the keys, a melancholy chord was softly struck, then——
Mrs. Leslie held her breath.
Irene was singing in a voice no one had suspected her of possessing—pure, clear, rarely tender and sweet—those sad, pathetic verses, "Remember and Forget."
A sudden silence fell on every one in the room. No one was less surprised than Mrs. Leslie. No one had dreamed how obstinately Irene had concealed her gift of a sweet, bird-like voice until now. As the clear, well-trained tones rose and fell, every one was dumb with astonishment and delight.
Mrs. Leslie felt a light touch on her shoulder. She looked up into the pale, agitated face of Mr. Stuart. He bent down and whispered:
"I can doubt no longer. She is too fatally like Elaine. She is, she must be, my own child. She has my lost wife's face and voice, and it is the same song she sang the night when her fatal beauty and sweetness wiled my heart from me. What must I do?"
She saw that he was deeply agitated, and fearing some impulsive action, whispered back, warningly:
"Do nothing—yet. Stranger coincidences have happened. Wait until you learn more."
With a sigh he acquiesced in her advice, and returned to his seat. But his agitation had not been unobserved by Mrs. Stuart. Her soul was on fire with anger and hatred toward the beautiful[Pg 81] singer. She would have given anything she possessed to have heard what her husband had confided to Mrs. Leslie.
Guy Kenmore sat silent, lost in a maze of troubled thought. He had not meant to listen to Mr. Stuart's words, but in his proximity to Mrs. Leslie, the sharp, agonized whisper had penetrated to his hearing. An uncontrollable eagerness came over him to hear Mrs. Leslie's promised story of her beautiful protege.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Irene was playing a waltz now—something as gay and joyous as her song had been sweet and pensive. Guy Kenmore touched Mrs. Leslie's arm.
"Let us go on the balcony. The moonlight is so beautiful," he said.
They went, and though Irene did not turn her head she knew that they had left the room, and her heart sank unaccountably. But she went on playing with tireless fingers, and the gay, sweet music floated deliciously out on the balcony where the young man was saying in a low voice to his companion:
"I must confess to an almost feminine curiosity regarding your promised story of your beautiful protege."
"You wish to hear it now?" said the lady, smilingly.
"Yes," he admitted, frankly.
"After all there is little to tell," she replied. "I know actually nothing of her except that she is a beautiful, fascinating mystery."
"A mystery—how?" he asked.
"I will tell you," she said, "for I do not suppose it is any betrayal of confidence. If I do not tell it you will hear it from others who love her less than I do."
"No one could appreciate your confidence more than I will do," he said, eagerly.
Mrs. Leslie's heart beat quickly. She believed that Mr. Kenmore held the key to the mystery she had promised to unravel for Clarence Stuart. She determined to tell him Irene's story, in the hope of eliciting a like confidence.
"It is nearly four months now since we left Richmond for Italy," she began. "We sailed in Mr. Stuart's own yacht."
"Yes. I saw that fact duly announced in the Richmond papers," he observed.
"But, pardon me for having interrupted your story. Please go on."
"It was the tenth of June when we left Richmond—I like to be particular as to dates," said Mrs. Leslie. "Well, it was lovely weather, and we all planned to get up early the next morning and see the sun rise over the sea. We did so, and as you may be aware, it was a glorious sight; but we only got one glimpse of it, for its first beams showed us a more tragic and interesting sight."
Mr. Kenmore caught his breath, and gazed eagerly at the speaker.
"It was a loud scream for help that first attracted our attention," said Mrs. Leslie. "The sound was not very far away, and we all turned instinctively toward it. To our horror we saw on the level, sun-lighted waves a floating plank, with a human figure clinging to its frail support. Literally, there remained but one plank between her and eternity."
"Ah!" exclaimed Guy Kenmore, with a shudder.
"Mr. Stuart is one of the bravest men in the world, I think. He immediately sprang over the side of the yacht into the sea, and swam toward the floating figure. Before he reached her she lost her hold of the plank, and sank under the water. Mr. Stuart instantly dived, and brought her up in his arms."
"He saved her life. How strange," exclaimed Mr. Kenmore, as if speaking to himself.
"Do you think so?" she asked, looking at him keenly. "Why strange, Mr. Kenmore?"
"I beg your pardon. I did not express myself properly," he said, biting his lips nervously. "Well, Mrs. Leslie, do you mean to tell me that the heroine of that romantic episode was the beautiful Miss Berlin?"
"Yes, it was she," replied Mrs. Leslie.
There was a minute's dead pause. Irene was singing again. In the stillness her full, sweet voice floated out to them softly:
Mrs. Leslie looked at the man's handsome face. It was grave and troubled in the moonlight.
"Is it not strange?" she said. "She would never sing for us until to-night. We did not suspect that she had such a soulful voice. But she was betrothed to Mr. Revington to-day. Perhaps the happiness of her soul finds natural vent in song."
She saw him wince as if she had touched a secret wound. He looked away from her at the lovely Italian landscape bathed in the pearly radiance of the moonlight. When he spoke again he did not look at her.
"Mrs. Leslie. I am curious to hear how your protege came to be in the water?"
"She threw herself in, Mr. Kenmore."
"No," he cried, with a shudder.
"It is true," she replied. "She says she had lost her only friend and did not wish to live."
"Who was that friend?" he asked.
"She declined to say. She declined to speak of her past. She had broken loose from all its ties, and never wished to unite them again. She shrouded herself in mystery, claiming nothing from the life she had left except the sweet, simple name of Irene."
"Yet you called her Berlin," he said.
"Yes, but it was my own maiden name which I gave her because she declared herself nameless," said Mrs. Leslie.
"You were very kind."
"Do you think so? I fell in love with the child, and adopted her as my protege. I am sure she has had a great sorrow in her life, but I am equally sure that she is pure and innocent as a little child."
He looked at her, gratefully.
"And the Stuarts?" he inquired, in a tone of veiled significance.
"Mr. Stuart was as much fascinated by Irene as I was. He wished to adopt her as Lilia's sister, but his jealous wife would not permit him to do so."
"And Revington is her lover?"
"Yes, she accepted him to-day."
"Is it a good match for her?" inquired Mr. Kenmore, dropping into a light, conventional, society tone.
"Not in a worldly way," she replied. "Mr. Revington's fortune is very small, barely sufficient for his own luxurious needs. He is of good family, however, being cousin to Clarence Stuart. I cannot say I have any admiration for the man, and I am disappointed at Irene's choice."
He made no comment on her words, but remained gazing thoughtfully at the beautiful starry arch of night. Mrs. Leslie thought that it was now her turn to receive confidence.
"Now, I have told you all I know of my interesting protege, you must tell me about your friend whom she resembled so much that she frightened you to-night," she said, blandly.
He started and looked at her, but before he could speak they were interrupted.
Mr. Revington and Irene came out upon the balcony and took seats near them. The girl looked at Mr. Kenmore with a bright, careless smile.
"We have been talking about you, Mr. Kenmore," she said. "We are exceedingly anxious to know how you escaped from the wreck in which you were reported as lost."
She spoke and looked as if he were an utter stranger. He answered with indifference equal to her own:
"I am gratified by your solicitude, Miss Berlin. I can very easily gratify your curiosity. I was rescued by one of the small boats that was lowered from the steamer that sunk us."
"Thank you for your concise explanation," she replied, gaily. "I see you are not disposed to weave any romance around it."
"It was too terribly real to be associated with the thought of romance," he replied, repressing a slight shudder.
"And yet our daily life is often more romantic than fiction," observed Mr. Revington, sentimentally.
No one dissented from the proposition. Mr. Kenmore rose and prepared to take leave.
But when he had bowed formally to Irene and her lover, and returned to the drawing-room, the hospitable host and hostess quite took him by storm.
"Return to Florence that night? They would not hear of such a thing! They could not think of losing such a pleasant addition to their party. Mr. Kenmore must promise to be their guest a week at least." The end of it all was that Mr. Kenmore gracefully[Pg 84] accepted their cordial invitation, and promised to send to Florence for his luggage on the morrow.
Very soon afterwards the party separated for the night. Mr. Kenmore went to his room, but he was in no mood for retiring. He threw himself down into a chair at the window and lighted a cigar.
"Decidedly I have made a fine beginning," he said to himself. "I have found out more than I expected to do when I came to Mr. Stuart's villa. Perhaps I had been wise to have remained in America. I am come too late."
He was restless and ill at ease. The four walls of his room, spacious and elegant as it was, seemed to confine and stifle him. A fancy seized him to go out into the night air. It would cool his throbbing brow perhaps and he could think more clearly.
A narrow balcony ran across the front of his window, and a flight of steps led from it to the garden below. He stepped safely through his open window and went down the stairs just as all the clocks in the house simultaneously chimed eleven.
CHAPTER XXXV.
"You have kept me waiting, Julius."
Mrs. Stuart spoke impatiently. She had been waiting some time at the end of the myrtle avenue among its deepest shadows and her temper was not sweetened by the delay.
"I beg your pardon," Mr. Revington replied, "I was smoking a cigar with your husband and could not come any sooner."
He paused a moment, and then added in a rather complaining tone:
"I could not imagine what you wanted of me, anyhow."
"Could you not?" she inquired, with a smothered sneer. "Well, sit down here on this quiet seat and I will tell you."
They seated themselves and began talking softly, unconscious that in the long grass just beyond the thick belt of shrubbery that inclosed the myrtle avenue, a man had flung himself down full length, so absorbed in his own painful thoughts as to be for the moment unaware of their presence.
Suddenly he became aware of the murmuring sound of voices. His first impulse was to rise and leave the spot, but in the next he decided that it would startle the speakers and draw down their ill-will perhaps upon himself.
"Some of the servants out sparking," he laughed to himself. "I will not disturb them. They will be none the worse for my presence."
So he laid his head down again upon his arm, and relapsed into his painful musing.
"I will tell you what I have to say to you, Julius," repeated Mrs. Stuart. "I wish to ask you who is this girl, Irene?"
Julius Revington gave a violent start in the darkness.
"My dear madame, how should I know?" he exclaimed.
"She has promised to be your wife, and it is very likely that she has confided the story of her past to you," replied Mrs. Stuart.
"You are mistaken in the supposition. She has steadily declined any such confidence. I have taken her upon her own merits, mystery and all," he replied.
There was a moment's pause. Their faces were in shadow, and Mrs. Stuart devoutly wished that she could pierce the veil of the darkness, and read upon his weak face whether or not he was deliberately trying to deceive her.
"Perhaps you have formed some opinion of your own," she said.
"I have had no clew upon which to base an opinion," he replied.
"Have you ever seen the pictures in her locket?" she inquired.
Taken by surprise, he stammered faintly: "Ye-es, once, by the merest accident."
"You recognized them?" she asked, coldly.
"How should I?" he asked, startled.
"Why should you not?" she mimicked. "Julius, do not try to beat about the bush with me. I am in desperate earnest. I will not be put off by lies and evasions! You have seen Elaine Brooke's portrait; therefore you must have recognized the face in Irene's locket as hers."
"And if I did?" he asked, sullenly.
"You must have guessed at the girl's name. You could not have helped it. It is written on her face. You know whom she is, but you are trying to deceive me. You know that you are," she said, passionately.
He saw that he had to deal with a passionate, jealous woman, and that his game was all up, so far as concealment of his plans was concerned.
"I shall be forced to admit what I cannot deny," he told himself, grimly.
Aloud, he asked, in a tone of forced suavity: "Whom do you say that the girl is, Mrs. Stuart?"
She bent toward him and answered in a hissing whisper of anger and hate:
"She is the daughter of Clarence Stuart and his first wife, Elaine Brooke."
A cry of dismay and surprise came from his lips.
"You dare not deny it," she hissed.
"I do not intend to. It is quite true," he replied, doggedly.
"I knew it! How I hate her!" exclaimed Mrs. Stuart, vindictively. "Would to God she had perished in the sea that day! From the very first I hated her even before I dreamed of her identity!"
And for a few moments the air was filled with the sharp ravings of her anger and bitter hatred.
"How have you learned so much?" inquired Julius Revington, curiously, for he had fancied that the mystery surrounding Irene was impenetrable to all but himself.
"No matter. I am not blind to anything around me. I carry too terrible a secret in my breast to run the risk of its detection. I must guard it at every point," she replied. "Can you guess what question I am about to ask you, Julius Revington? You[Pg 86] cannot? It is this, then, and mind that you answer me truly. Do you intend to turn traitor?"
CHAPTER XXXVI.
"Traitor? What do you mean?" stammered Julius Revington.
"You know well enough what I mean," flashed Mrs. Stuart angrily. "You are going to marry that girl, and of course her welfare will be yours. It will be to your interest to betray me. Do you intend to reveal the secret and drive me and Lilia out into the world nameless and disgraced—— through no fault of mine, remember, but through the sin of that old dotard who should have carried his miserable secret to the grave with him?"
A pause. It seemed to Guy Kenmore that they must hear his heart beating so near them in the stillness. He was thoroughly aroused now, but he could not believe that it was wrong to listen. On the contrary he blessed the fancy that had led him out into the cool night air.
Julius Revington made no reply to Mrs. Stuart's half-piteous appeal.
"Cannot you speak?" she cried out, sharply. "Are you too cowardly to own your vile intentions?"
"You use strong terms, Mrs. Stuart," he said, sullenly. "Is it a vile act to carry out the sacred commands of a dying man? To restore to Clarence Stuart the last love of his youth? To give honor and happiness to a wronged woman? To restore her unhappy child to her father's name and love?"
"Then you do intend to do so! Wretch!" cried the lady, bitterly; then she broke down, sobbing in an abandonment of despair: "Oh, Lilia, Lilia, my poor, fragile darling! This will kill you!"
Julius Revington sat sullenly silent, ashamed of being found out in his designs, yet by no means ready to forego them.
"And you promised to keep the secret for me. You took my bribes, and swore you would never tell the truth to Clarence! You are a perjured villain!" upbraided the lady, violently.
"And you are a——". He bent and whispered the last word in her ear in a tone of threatening. "Beware how you call names, my lady! I am not to be abused and bullied, remember that!"
A wail of pain broke from her lips.
"It was for Lilia's sake," she moaned. "My proud, beautiful child, how could she bear shame and disgrace? Oh, Julius Revington, I would go down on my knees to you, I would bless you forever, I would deem you the noblest man on earth, if you would spare me and my Lilia this shame and ignominy!"
"Irene has lived under the shadow of shame and ignominy all her life. It is her turn now," he retorted, sullenly.
"Does she suspect the truth?" she asked, anxiously.
"No," he replied, ashamed of the bribe he had held out as the means of winning his lovely betrothed.
"She need not ever know. Oh, Julius, why cannot you marry[Pg 87] her, and take her away, far away, and leave us in peace?" she cried, miserably.
"You forget that she is the legal heir to her father's fortune," he retorted, with coarse significance.
"Ah! that is the object," she cried. "You are poor, and you cannot forego your grip on the Stuart fortune. Oh, Julius, I bought your silence once; let me do so again."
"It would be at a costly price," he said, in a hard, snappish voice.
"At any price!" she cried, desperately. "Listen, Julius. My own private fortune is as large as Mr. Stuart's. I have complete control of it. I will portion you off handsomely, if you will keep the secret and take Irene away from here—far away—where she can never trouble my peace again. Oh, for pity's sake, Julius, grant my prayer!" She threw herself desperately on the ground and clasped his knees despairingly. "It can matter little to you. You will have the woman you love; and I swear that you shall receive from me as much money as Mr. Stuart would leave her. Will you do this, Julius, for Lilia's sake? If you refuse, it will be the death-warrant of my child!"
"Since you put it like that, I suppose I must yield the point. I do not want to kill the child," he muttered. "But it is hard on Irene, and if a large slice of your fortune isn't handed out, you needn't count on my silence!"
"As much as you wish," she cried, eagerly; "and, oh, Julius, you will marry her as quick as possible—to-morrow—next week—the earliest moment she will consent! And let your wedding tour be to the other end of the world!" she added, feverishly.
"I do not care how far it be so that I have beautiful Irene for my companion, and a large bank account to draw on," Julius Revington answered, with a coarse laugh.
"And this contemptible creature is the man Irene loves, the man she would wed," Guy Kenmore said to himself in bitter disgust.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
"What am I to do?" Irene asked herself that night when she was alone in the quiet and seclusion of her chamber.
She had laughed and sung and jested while Guy Kenmore's eyes were upon her, and feigned an indifference she was very far from feeling. But now she had to tear off the mask so proudly worn, and face her fate.
"What am I to do?" she asked herself, miserably, as she walked up and down the floor in her pretty blue dressing-gown, with her white hands twisted together in a childish fashion she had. "I do not believe the heroine of the most impossible novel was ever placed in a more harrowing situation. Here am I betrothed to the villain of the story, when my husband, whom I believed to be dead, unexpectedly pops upon the scene. And instead of his appearance simplifying matters, it tangles them into a Gordian knot, and I can only ask myself what I shall do!"
She laughed—a mocking, mirthless little laugh that startled a dozen eerie little echoes in the corners of the room.
"Heigh-ho! I know what I would do if he loved me," she said to herself, wistfully, "I would fly to my husband's arms, and defy Julius Revington to do his worst. I would say to him proudly, I have here an honest name, and a true love of which your machinations cannot deprive me!"
The quick tears started out beneath her golden-brown lashes.
"Alas, alas! he does not love me," she sighed. "Why should he do so? He never saw me but once before last night. It was my own willful folly that led him into that dreadful marriage. I doubt not he was glad when he thought that my reckless suicide had broken the fetters that had bound him. Last night he pretended not to know me, yet he could hardly have been ignorant of my identity. He could not have forgotten my face so soon. It is a fair one, they say—yet not fair enough to have won his heart."
That momentous question, "What am I to do?" echoed drearily in her heart. She could find no answer to it; she could think of no refuge from her sorrow. For the first time since that awful night in the cold, dark waves, she wished that the friendly plank had not drifted to her reach—that she had perished miserably then rather than have lived to find herself in this terrible strait.
"I cannot marry Mr. Revington now," she thought. "I must take back my promise of yesterday, with no reason save that of a woman's fickleness. He will be very angry; he will tell my miserable story to Mr. Stuart and Mrs. Leslie, to all of these people that sneer at the mystery that enshrouds my past. What shall I do?"
A passionate shame surged over her at the thought of the cold looks and sneering words that would be thrown at her when her discarded suitor should tell these strangers that her mother was a dishonored woman, and that she, her child, had no right to her father's name. She fancied that Mrs. Leslie and Mr. Stuart, the only two friends she had, would be turned against her, too. She would be utterly alone and wretched—friendless and forsaken.
"And yet I cannot be sorry that Guy Kenmore lives," she murmured. "Though he hate me and deny me; though he bring down shame and sorrow on my head, I must still be glad that he did not perish in the cold and dark waves. How strange it seems that only twenty-four hours ago I wept him dead, and now I weep him living. Alas! living or dead, he is lost to me the same. I must ever remain an unloved, unacknowledged bride."
Worn out by the weary vigils of the past two nights she threw herself down on the bed, dressed as she was, and fell into an exhausted slumber. She slept late and dreamlessly, and when she opened her bewildered blue eyes the next morning upon the beautiful sunny day no answer had come to the question that vexed her brain last night.
But in the golden light of the new day her woful strait did not look so grievous as it did last night. A feverish hope sprang[Pg 89] up in her heart that God would befriend her in her sorrow and helplessness and show her some way out of her trouble.
When she had made her simple, pretty toilet, and gone down-stairs, she found that everyone had breakfasted except Mr. Revington, who had sentimentally waited for her. She swallowed her breakfast with what appetite she could, and then he asked her to take a walk with him.
"All the ladies of the family are out in the garden," he said. "Mrs. Leslie and her admirer, Mr. Kenmore, have been out almost an hour. That will be a match, I think."
"I think you are mistaken," Irene answered, almost angrily.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Irene brought her shady sun-hat and went out into the beautiful garden with her lover. Mr. Revington carried his guitar, thinking that he would beguile the hours with music.
They went to Irene's favorite seat under the orange trees, where she could watch the river gliding past. She was very languid and quiescent this morning, the natural result of last night's emotion. She said to herself that she would make no struggle against her fate to-day; she would just drift quietly with the tide and see where it would bear her.
She little dreamed what subject was agitating Mr. Revington's mind.
He was full of the new idea Mrs. Stuart had suggested, and had brought his betrothed out expressly to ask her to name an early day for their marriage.
Some little remorse for the treachery he meditated toward her disturbed his mind, but it was not deep enough to cause him to repent of the promise Mrs. Stuart had exacted from him. Once he was safely married to beautiful Irene he intended to invent some plausible story of losing the documents he had promised her as proving her mother's honorable marriage. Oh, he would manage cleverly enough. Once bound to him Irene could not help herself, doggedly reasoned the dastard.
But somehow he did not find it easy to broach the subject uppermost in his thoughts. Irene was grave and distrait this morning, with a chilly reserve about her that did not court lover-like advances. All her bright spirits and coquettish wiles of last night had vanished. He was dismayed at her relapse into her old, ennuyed self. She would not encourage his advances. She was absolutely frigid.
So he was obliged to plunge into the subject with an inward shiver like one about taking a bath in ice-cold water.
"My darling, can you guess what I am going to ask you this morning?" he ventured.
She looked at him with a crimsoning face and flashing eyes.
"I wish you would not call me names, Mr. Revington," she said, with petulant dignity.
"Names!" he echoed, blankly.
"Yes," she replied, loftily. "Darling, and all such names as[Pg 90] belong to the jargon of love, I heartily despise, and I must beg you to spare me their infliction."
"But you have promised to marry me, Irene," he expostulated.
"I have not promised to love you, though," she retorted with spirit. "Please remember that, Mr. Revington, and spare me your love-sick phrases!"
He stared at her, angered and abashed. Her purple-blue eyes sparkled with scorn, her sweet, red lips were curled disdainfully. He kept down his bitter anger with an effort, remembering the boon he wished to crave.
"Do not forget that our compact was a mere matter of the bargain and sale of the secret you held," Irene continued, bitterly. "You drove me into it by your threats of disgracing me in the eyes of the world. Let us keep to the letter of our bargain. You will never have any terms of endearment from me, and I expect and desire none from you. On such terms they are simply revolting."
"As you will," he retorted, in sullen wrath. "But I cannot see what you expect to gain by your stand-off and let-alone policy. I shall be your husband all the same, and instead of having me for your devoted slave, you will make me a tyrannical master."
A queer little smile curled her lips. Her heart beat with a sudden exultant thought.
Fate had placed it out of her power to sacrifice herself for her mother's sake. She could not but be glad, although her heart bled for that mother's griefs and wrongs.
"Shall I tell him?" she asked herself, almost tempted to defy him then and there.
Her weak heart failed her at the thought of the story the wretch would pour into Mrs. Leslie's ears. How would she meet pity and contempt in those dear eyes that had looked at her so kindly.
"I will wait. I cannot tell him yet," she concluded, weakly.
But his next words fell like a thunder-clap on her startled hearing. "Irene, I wish you would name an early day for our marriage," he said.
"Early," she stammered, taken aback.
He smiled grimly.
"Yes, it's a mere bargain, you know, and, like all business compacts, should be ratified early."
She quivered all over with resentment at his tone, but she held her peace.
"Not yet," she answered to her beating heart that longed to defy him.
"It seems to me that in your peculiar situation, being a mere dependent on Mrs. Leslie's charity, that the sooner you have a home and a husband the better for you," he continued, coarsely. "I am most anxious to take you back to your mother with the good tidings we have to carry her. Do you remember, Irene, that the longer you delay our marriage the more you prolong your mother's pain?"
"I remember," she said, in a stifled voice.
"Then will you not consent to name this day week for our wedding-day?
"So soon? No, I will not," she flashed back, in indignant surprise.
"For your mother's sake," he pleaded artfully.
"Not for an angel's sake!" declared Irene angrily.
Her lover was dumfounded at this indignant denial.
"How soon, then, can I count upon your fulfilment of your promise?" he demanded, in a crestfallen tone.
The girl's red lips trembled with the defiant answer, "Never," but she bit them hard to keep back the passionate word. She knew his power, and though she felt that the threatening sword that hung over her head must fall at last, she dreaded to utter the word that must precipitate its downfall.
"I have not thought about that matter yet," she said, determined to temporize with the wretch, and gain a few days' respite. "I supposed it lay far away in the future. I hoped so at least."
"I hope you will give it your earliest attention, then," he replied, sullenly. "I have no mind to wait long, I can assure you."
"How long will be the limit of your patience?" she inquired sarcastically.
"I shall wait two weeks on your pleasure. If you are not ready then to keep your promise I shall throw prudence to the winds and reveal all," he answered, stung by her scorn and goaded to retaliation.
Her beautiful blue eyes flashed scorn and contempt upon him.
"Wretch," she cried, "how I hate you! Leave my presence instantly, and do not intrude upon me again to-day. I am free yet, and I will not tolerate you until I am compelled to do so. Go this instant!"
The flash of her eye assured him that prudence was the better part of valor. He rose angrily.
"Very well, since you choose to play the shrew!" he said, "enjoy your liberty while you may! I assure you it will not last long once you are legally mine!"
And with a muttered curse on his lips he stalked angrily away, his heart full of blended love and hate for his beautiful, disdainful betrothed.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
"Mrs. Leslie, I want to ask you one question," said Guy Kenmore.
They two were walking in the wide, beautiful villa-garden among the roses and lilies and beautiful crimson flowers drooping from grand white marble vases. The sun shone on the beautiful terraced walks, on the sparkling fountains, and the glistening green leaves and golden fruit of the orange and lemon trees, the air perfumed with the fragrance of countless flowers.
Mrs. Leslie was walking by her friend's side looking thoughtfully down at the drifts of pink myrtle blossoms that blew across[Pg 92] the path beneath her dainty feet. She looked up with a smile, and answered:
"As many as you please, Mr. Kenmore."
"Thank you," he replied, but for a moment he was silent over the momentous question that hovered on his lips. Looking at him curiously she saw that he was very pale and grave, with a fathomless sadness in the dark brown eyes usually so bright and laughing.
"It must be a very important question, you look so grave over it," she said.
"It is important," he replied, and then he went on, meditatively. "You told me, I believe, Mrs. Leslie, that Mr. Stuart's yacht left Richmond on the tenth of June?"
"Yes," she replied.
"The question I have to ask you is this: Did the yacht go steadily on that day and night, or did she stop at any landing on the Bay?"
Mrs. Leslie pursed up her pretty lips, and reflected.
"Let me see," she said. "Ah, yes, I remember. We did stop that night, about nine o'clock, at a landing in the Bay. It was at a place called Brooke's Wharf, and was noted for the fine fruit to be obtained there. I think it was at Mr. Revington's instance we stopped, and Mr. Stuart obtained a supply of the most luscious fruit."
Outwardly calm and composed, Guy Kenmore inwardly trembled with excitement. Was he about to find a clew to Ronald Brooke's slayer?
"Did anyone leave the yacht and go on shore?" he inquired.
"Oh, yes, we all did," said Mrs. Leslie, readily enough. "I mean all except the captain and crew. It was the most beautiful night I ever saw, I think. These Italian nights are not lovelier. We went on shore, and rambled about in the moonlight. I remember the night perfectly."
Ah! did he not, too, he groaned, silently, to himself. How vividly it all rushed over him. His careless visit to Bertha Brooke, from which so much had arisen. Memory recalled the lovely, willful girl, who had carried him off to the hall perforce that night, and he thought, with a softened tenderness, of the childish spite and self-will that had so vexed him then. Poor little Irene! she had suffered enough from Bertha's rage to atone for her willfulness. A feeling of pity and remorse mingled with the love he bore his hapless child-wife.
"Poor child! I was vexed and annoyed when I first found out the truth that we were legally married that night. It came upon me so suddenly, and I showed my feelings too plainly, and she—she was equally averse to having me for a husband. But, better, far better for her, if she had taken me at my word when I offered to make the best of my sad mistake than to have given her heart to that dandy jackanapes," he concluded, bitterly, for he had gauged the depth of Julius Revington at first sight, and the conspiracy he had overheard last night had filled him with horror and contempt for the traitor.
"To think that, she—my own beautiful and beloved wife—should[Pg 93] turn coldly from me to lavish her precious love on a thing like that," he thought, jealously.
Mr. Kenmore, in his indolent way, though unconsciously to himself, had possessed some little complacent conceit of himself. His mirror had told him he was noble-looking and handsome, and women's eyes had repeated it. His progress through society had been a complete ovation to his pride and his vanity. Men had honored him for his manliness as much as for his great wealth, and women had angled for him as a most unexceptionable parti. But the complacent conceit that the world had fostered in him for years, had received a terrible blow from Irene's indifference and her palpable preference for the weakly-handsome, guitar-playing and tenor-singing Julius Revington.
"A compound of the dandy and the villain—a man who can plan behind her back to rob her of the knowledge of her honorable name, who cares nothing for the grief and shame of her wronged mother! To think that she should love him! And most probably she hates me for having re-appeared when she believed me dead. I have a most disagreeable task before me, for I must prove to her the unworthiness of the villain on whom she has set her heart," he mused, gravely.
"Are you through with your questioning?" inquired Mrs. Leslie, noting his pre-occupied silence.
"Yes," he replied, adding, with a slight smile: "Perhaps you would like to ask me some questions now."
"Yes, I would," she smiled, with engaging frankness.
"I am ready to reply to you," he answered, cordially.
"Perhaps I shall startle you," she said; "I am going to ask you a leading question, as a lawyer would say. You must remember that I give you carte blanche not to answer it unless you wish."
"Thank you for the permission," he said. "Let me hear it."
She looked at him with an odd gleam in her bright, kindly eyes.
"It is this," she said. "I believe that you and Irene Berlin, my protege, have met before last night. Am I right?"
He looked at her with a curious, intent gaze.
"Mrs. Leslie," he said, "I can better answer that question if you will tell me whether I may count on your silence and friendship in the strange dilemma in which I find myself placed."
She put out her hand to him impulsively.
"No one can say that Laura Leslie ever failed them in the hour of trouble," she said, gravely. "You may count on my silence and my truest friendship if it can avail you."
He pressed her hand, gratefully. "It will be an incalculable benefit to me," he said. "Perhaps you can help me and advise me."
"I will do both if I can," replied the charming widow.
"Then I shall tell you my secret," he replied. "Mrs. Leslie, it was not mere chance as I pretended that brought me here last night. I have followed Clarence Stuart across the ocean on a self-appointed mission to right the wrongs of the innocent and bring the guilty to justice."
Looking at his grave, agitated face, she started and uttered a cry of comprehension.
"You come from Elaine Brooke—— she lives!" she cried.
He started in his turn.
"What do you know?" he cried.
"No matter—— I must hear your story first," she said. "And you have not answered my leading question yet."
"I will tell you my story, and then you may be able to answer it for yourself," he said.
They sought a beautiful, secluded spot where they were not likely to be interrupted or overheard, and Guy Kenmore confided to her sympathizing ears the story of that fatal tenth of June, when old Ronald Brooke had met his death and Irene Brooke had become his wife.
The lady listened with eager, breathless interest, with parted lips and shining eyes, and color that varied from white to red and red to white.
When he had finished he looked at her with something like a smile in his dark-brown eyes.
"Mrs. Leslie, I have given you my confidence now. Perhaps you can answer your own question."
She laughed, merrily.
"I can put two and two together as cleverly as any woman, I think," she replied. "And you have made this case quite clear. My pretty Irene is your wife."
"Yes," he replied. "And she is the daughter of Clarence Stuart."
"That is quite true," she answered. "I have suspected it before, now I am assured of the fact. No one will rejoice more over it than will Clarence Stuart, himself."
"I do not understand you," he replied, in a puzzled tone.
Mrs. Leslie found that she had a confidence to make too. She told him Mr. Stuart's sorrowful story, and he in turn related the conversation he had heard the night before. Many things were made clear to both by the confidence thus reposed in each other.
"It is as I supposed," Guy Kenmore said. "Clarence Stuart and his wife were foully deceived and separated by the machinations of old Mr. Stuart."
"And the whole secret of it lies in the possession of Julius Revington, and the proud usurper of Elaine Brooke's name and rights," added Mrs. Leslie.
"More than that," said he, with a shudder, "the death of old Ronald Brooke lies between those two."
She was silent a few moments, gravely reviewing the case. It was a baffling one, she confessed to herself, with a sigh.
"What shall we do?" she asked him, at last. "Shall we take Mr. Stuart and Irene into our confidence?"
"Not yet," he replied, thoughtfully. "Let us deal with Julius Revington first. We must study out a plan to bring that villain to confession."
CHAPTER XL.
Irene sat still where her angry lover had left her, lost in a trance-like maze of troubled thought. With her small, white hands folded in her lap, and her dreamy blue eyes fixed on vacancy, she remained there, statue-like and unheeding, and time, albeit its wings were clogged with sorrow, flew past unnoted, until the noon-day sun rode high in the heavens.
A step, a voice, startled her from her dreamy revery.
"Ah, Miss Berlin, you see I have discovered your charming retreat," said Guy Kenmore. "Will you permit me to share it?"
The swift color flew to her brow, as she looked up into the handsome face, with the slightly wistful smile about the firm lips.
"This spot is free to all Mr. Stuart's guests," she replied, coldly. "I have no right to forbid you to come here."
"Would you, if you had?" he asked, throwing himself down in the grass at her feet, and lifting to her face his slightly quizzical brown eyes.
"Why should I?" she retorted, gazing down into his face with an air of the most serene indifference.
"Why, indeed?" he asked himself, with sudden bitterness. "Serene, in her fancied incognito, she cares not whether I go or stay. I am no more to her than the earth beneath her feet," and aloud, he answered calmly as he could speak, and in a slight tone of banter:
"I fancied you might prefer to share this lovely solitude with some more favored friend—for instance, Mr. Revington."
The hot flush deepened on the beautiful face, and she answered with an impulse of passionate willfulness:
"That would be natural, would it not? I suppose you have heard that I am to marry, Mr. Kenmore?"
His brown eyes flashed beneath their shady lashes.
"She dares to twit me with her preference for that puppy," he said, angrily to himself. "Does she indeed believe that I am blinded by her borrowed name, and that I am unaware of her real identity? Will she attempt to carry the farce through to the end?"
An impulse came over him to claim her then and there as his own; to take the slight young figure in his arms and press it to his beating heart; to kiss the beautiful, proud face and the defiant eyes, and to say, jealously: "You are my own wife, Irene, and whether you love me or not, no one shall take you from me."
Ah, if only he had obeyed the prompting of his heart, how much sooner happiness would have come home to them to crown their lives with bliss; but their mutual pride stood like a wall between. He shook off the tempting impulse to claim his own, and believed that he was but obeying the command of chivalry and honor in keeping stern silence.
"What, claim an unwilling, reluctant bride?" he thought to himself, sadly. "No, no! never! I must wait until of her own[Pg 96] free will she owns her fealty to me. I must woo and win her before I claim her."
Perhaps the struggle in his heart betrayed itself on his face, for the resentment died out of her blue eyes and they were filled with a mute, pathetic longing.
"Ah, if he would only love me, if he would only claim me," she thought. "I would tell him how I hate and despise Julius Revington! He might help me to right my mother's wrongs!"
At that moment his downcast gaze fell on Julius Revington's guitar which that worthy had forgotten in his hurried and angry exit from Irene's presence. A jealous gleam lightened in his brown eyes.
"Ah, I see that Mr. Revington has already been with you this morning," he said frigidly.
"Yes," she replied, with coldness equal to his own.
"Are you fond of music?" he inquired, taking up the instrument, and striking a few chords, softly.
"Passionately," she replied.
Obeying a sudden impulse he played a soft, sweet symphony and began to sing in a mellow baritone. He had chosen the beautiful song, "My Queen," and the girl's heart vibrated painfully to the sweetness of the strain.
"Who will be his queen?" she asked herself, with a jealous pang at her heart. "He is so grand and handsome, he will only love some one gifted beyond her sex with beauty and genius. Ah, why did I come between him and his future?"
She looked at him wistfully when he had finished.
"I did not know you could sing like that," she said.
"Is it equal to Revington's performances?" he inquired, smiling at her implied compliment.
To his dismay she sprang up crimson with anger and resentment.
"Revington, Revington! It is always Revington with you," she cried, and flung away disdainfully from him.
CHAPTER XLI.
Irene preserved a dignified reserve toward Mr. Kenmore after that day when he had so angered her by his allusions to Julius Revington. She never spoke to him when she could avoid it, she never looked at him, she never seemed to know that he was in the room. She froze him by her coldness and indifference. He did not even dare speak to her unless courtesy strictly required it. Yet all the while her heart was aching with its doubt and pain, while as for him, his love for his beautiful, willful girl-bride grew stronger every hour, though in his pride and resentment at her coldness and scorn he would have died rather than avow it.
A few days after his arrival at the villa some of the gentlemen rode into Florence, and when they returned they brought tickets for a grand concert to be given that night. They reported that the music-loving Italians were in ecstasies over it.
It appeared that one of their countrymen, a musician, had gone[Pg 97] to America twenty years before, where he had remained until two months ago, when he had returned to Florence, bringing with him a beautiful young lady whose voice he designed to cultivate for the operatic stage. The curiosity of the volatile Italians had run high over this pupil of the great musician, and unable to resist the importunities of his countrymen, Professor Bozzaotra had promised a public concert in which the American singer would make her debut. Her name was down on the programme as Miss Brooke. Strange to say, not one of the villa inhabitants to whom that name was so sadly familiar, were struck by its similarity to Clarence Stuart's first wife's. It failed to suggest any probabilities to their minds. One and all were eager to attend the promised feast of music.
But at the very last moment Irene declined to accompany the merry, expectant party to the concert.
A headache was the alleged feminine excuse for her refusal.
In vain Mr. Revington pleaded and Mrs. Leslie added her protests. They could not persuade Irene that the ride in the fresh air would benefit her head, or that the music would cause her to forget indisposition.
"I do not wish to go," she reiterated, firmly, and Mrs. Leslie wondered a little at the tears in the girl's blue eyes, as she kissed her good-night, and the more than usual fervency of her embrace.
When they were all gone, and the villa was left to the occupancy of herself and the servants, Irene retired to her room. She sat down and wrote a hasty letter to Mrs. Leslie, which, after sealing and addressing, she placed in a conspicuous place on the toilet table.
"She will think me unkind and ungrateful," she sighed to herself; "but what can I do?"
She removed her pretty blue dinner dress, and substituted a plain, black cashmere. Then, with trembling fingers and nervous haste, she packed a change of clothing into a small hand-bag. Lastly she took out her little shell purse, and counted its contents. There was something more than a hundred dollars, the gift of her munificent friend, Mrs. Leslie.
"She little thought for what purpose I would use it," sighed poor Irene. "But I have no other refuge left me!"
She put the purse into her pocket, drew on a dark gray travelling ulster, and a little cap with a thick veil. Then taking the hand-bag in her little trembling hands, she stole silently as a ghost from the great house, and did not draw a free breath until she stood alone in the moonlighted garden.
Then she paused and lifted her white face and tear-wet eyes to the starry sky.
"If only he had loved me I need not have gone," she sighed. "Ah, my husband, my darling, farewell!"
Without another word she was gone, flitting away, a small, dark shadow, to mingle with the shadows of the night.
Meanwhile the party from the villa were seated in the great[Pg 98] concert hall awaiting the appearance of the lovely American debutante.
They occupied two boxes, and conspicuous in the foremost one was Mrs. Stuart, with her daughter and her husband.
Mrs. Stuart was elegantly dressed in rose-colored satin and point lace, with magnificent diamonds. With the aid of pearl powder and rouge she had been made up by her maid into quite a beauty for this occasion.
Lilia wore soft white mull and pearls. As she sat by the side of her handsome, dark-eyed father her likeness to him was marked and conspicuous. No one could have failed to see that they were father and child.
Impatience was at its hight. The orchestra had rendered its overture, and been vociferously applauded by the enthusiastic Italians. Professor Bozzaotra himself had executed a magnificent violin solo, and responded twice to encores that could not be suppressed. The curtain had fallen, to rise the next time on the lovely debutante whom Rumor credited with the beauty of an angel and the voice of a siren.
It rose at last, and the hundreds of curious eyes fell on her, standing there with modestly drooping head, yet quiet, calm, and self-possessed, and so lovely, withal, that before she opened her lips for a single note a thunder of applause shook the building. Silently and by the mere force of her peerless beauty she had carried all their hearts by storm.
For Clarence Stuart, sitting pale and silent by the side of his dying daughter and his faded wife, it seemed as if a ghost had sprung up before his eyes.
He knew her instantly—that fair, false wife who had forsworn him so long ago, and whom all these long, long years he had believed to be lying dead under foreign skies, with her baby on her breast. It was Elaine, the woman, lovelier in her splendid prime than she had been in her spring. As she stood there, "gowned in pure white that fitted to the shape," her only ornaments the clusters of pure white roses on her breast and in her golden hair, she looked queen-like, bride-like, and the man's heart swelled with a great despair as he gazed upon her, remembering how he had lost her forever. But he spoke not, he scarcely breathed, only sat and gazed with an eternity of despair shining out of his wide dark eyes.
There was one other, too, who gazed as if petrified upon that beautiful vision.
It was Guy Kenmore, who instantly recognized Elaine Brooke, but whose great wonder and surprise held him still and speechless, while her rich, clear voice rose and fell in waves of mellow sweetness on the tranced air. She sang a difficult, classic song, which the professor had chosen to display the great beauty and volume of her voice, and every note rung clear and true as liquid gold. When the first verse was ended, and she stood waiting for the tumultuous applause to die away, she suddenly lifted her eyes to the box above, as if drawn by some strange, magnetic power, and her glance met full those dark, burning, anguished eyes with which her husband gazed upon her.
A start, a shiver! Those who gazed closely at the beautiful singer saw her reel slightly; saw her white-gloved hand pressed convulsively upon her heart as if in pain. She stood thus, statue-like and immovable, for an instant, her eye held as if fascinated by that conspicuous group in the box; then suddenly, as the professor struck the opening notes of the next verse, she seemed to recall her wandering senses by a supreme effort of will. For weary years she had nerved herself for this chance meeting, which had come about so strangely at last. She would not let herself be conquered by it.
The beautiful voice rose clear, strong, delicious. There was just one falter in the first notes, just one tremor like a sob of agony. Then the woman's will conquered the woman's heart. She sang on to the end sweetly, bravely gathered up one or two of the fragrant floral tributes that rained at her feet, and with just the proper bow and smile retired.
Tumultuous applause, passionate encores followed her retreating footsteps. She did not respond to them. They thought her chary of her exquisite voice; they did not know that she had fallen down like one dead on the floor of the little dressing room, and that the lips that had sang to them so sweetly were now flecked with drops of blood forced out by the heart's great emotion. The flowers had fallen from her hands, and they were clenched so tightly that the white gloves were torn and spoiled.
"Oh, Clarence, Clarence, my traitor-love, we have met at last," she moaned. "Oh, God, how hard it is that I love him still! That perjured wretch who blighted my life and that of our innocent child! He has not forgotten me! It was remorse that looked out from his eyes at me to-night. Yet that was his wife and child who sat beside him! Oh, heavens, what humiliation for me who stood there beneath their cold, critic eyes to remember that I was once his wife, that I rested in his bosom, that my arms cradled his child! Oh, Irene, my lost one, my darling, I must crush down this weak love that blazed afresh in my heart when I met the eyes of the man I once held as the truest and noblest of men! I must remember that the knowledge of his sin drove you to death, my darling, and I must hate him for your wrongs and mine!"
So she raved on in her impotent despair, while the thunders of the orchestra filled the house, and people chanted her praises, prophesying for her a career equal to Patti or Nilsson. She, whose voice was sweeter than nightingale's notes or the sound of falling waters, lay there like a broken flower, crushed by her terrible despair.
When she had retreated from the stage, Mrs. Leslie touched Guy Kenmore's arm. Turning to look at her face, he saw that her eyes were wide and startled.
"Well!" he said.
She answered in a voice that was hoarse with emotion:
"It was the face that Irene wears in her locket. What does it mean?"
He whispered back softly, "It was Irene's mother! It was Elaine Brooke."
"Merciful heavens," exclaimed the lady, and turned to look at Mr. Stuart.
Then she saw Mrs. Stuart and Lilia hanging over him in an agony of despair, and gentlemen crowding into their box. Mr. Stuart was a brave and a strong man, but when that ghost from the past had risen to confront him, then faded quietly again, heart and strength had failed him, and sitting in his chair, he had silently swooned away.
They said that the heat had overcome him, and bore him out into the fresh air, where he revived a little. Some advised him not to return to the concert hall, but he waved them quietly aside, ashamed of his womanly weakness, and returned to Lilia, who was sobbing with grief and fear.
"It is nothing, my dear. I am quite well again," he said, gravely. "But shall I take you home now?"
"No, no, papa, I wish to hear the beautiful lady sing again," she replied, turning eagerly back to the stage.
Mrs. Stuart said nothing to her husband. She was whispering with Julius Revington, who had come into her box a little while before. The gleam of hate in the lady's eyes flashed almost brighter than her diamonds, her cheek glowed through its rouge with a deep natural red, and her jeweled hands clenched each other nervously in her lap.
Miss Brooke came again after a little interval, which was filled up by other performers. She had fought down her terrible emotion, but her lovely face was very pale and sad, and she never lifted her dark blue eyes while she sang. This time it was an Italian chanson, and the words flowed easily from her lips in that liquid southern tongue that is so sweet and soft. The Florentines were charmed, as the professor had intended they should be, at hearing one of their native songs warbled by the sweet lips of the stranger. She retired again under a storm of bouquets and applause, but, as before, she did not respond to their encores. It was too keen an agony to go back and sing to them again before those burning dark eyes, whose gaze she intuitively felt upon her, though she would not lift her own to meet their flashing light. It was all that she could bear to go on when her turn came.
But when she had sung her last song and the liquid Italian recall followed her again, Professor Bozzaotra went to her. He was radiant with joy.
"Let me beg you to humor them, my child," he said, radiantly. "You have carried their warm hearts by storm. Be kind to them. Sing them something, anything to satisfy their craving."
She went back and stood before them, with bowed head and an almost divine sadness on her face. She sang some words that were "as sad as earth, as sweet as Heaven."
Then the concert was over!
CHAPTER XLII.
The concert was over, and hastily excusing himself to his companion, Guy Kenmore made his way around to the private entrance; with some difficulty he elbowed his way through the eager throng that waited to see the lovely singer pass to her carriage, and was fortunate enough to meet her coming down the steps on the professor's arm. He touched her eagerly.
"Miss Brooke," he said, and she turned with a start and a cry. Her eyes dilated with wonder as she saw by whom she was addressed.
"Mr. Kenmore—you here!" she exclaimed, and put out her delicate hand graciously.
He pressed it warmly in both his own.
"I am delighted to meet you," he said, "I have news for you—good news. May I call on you at the earliest admissible hour to-morrow morning?"
She glanced at the carriage.
"You may come with us in the carriage now if you will," she replied. "The hour is not too late for good news from an old friend."
Then she introduced her friend to the professor. The gentlemen shook hands cordially, and Bozzaotra repeated Elaine's invitation to come with them in the carriage.
"Gratefully, if you can wait for one moment while I make my excuses to a friend," he said.
They promised to wait, and Mr. Kenmore hurried back to inform Mrs. Leslie that he would not return to the villa that night. He heard Julius Revington saying that he should remain at the hotel that night and walk out to the villa in the morning; but he paid small heed to the words, in the preoccupation of his mind. He was longing to tell Elaine that her daughter lived; and as soon as he had handed Mrs. Leslie to her carriage, he hurried back to her.
She received him with a pensive smile of pleasure, and made[Pg 102] room for him by her side, the professor being seated opposite. The carriage door was closed, and they were whirled away.
"It is a great surprise to see you here, Mr. Kenmore," Elaine began, in her musical voice. "Is your news from mamma and Bertha? I have so longed to hear from them; but, though I have written them several times, I have had no news of them since I left Bay View."
"Bang! Whirr!"
His answer is not on record.
A pistol had been fired close to the horses' heads, and they plunged and reared, almost upsetting the carriage. The shriek of the driver was heard as he tumbled from his seat upon the stony pavement; then the maddened steeds, without check or hindrance, dashed blindly forward in a mad, terrified pace, dragging after them the rocking carriage, with its precious, living freight.
Meantime, the man who had fired that reckless, murderous shot had been overtaken by Nemesis.
In his eager excitement he had gone too near the horses' heads, and, making his retreat, he had stumbled and fallen. In an instant they had trampled his fallen body with their plunging hoofs. Compassionate hands lifted him up from the stony street, a crushed and bleeding mass, in which the spark of life yet feebly lingered.
The carriage driver was picked up senseless in the street, where the maddened horses had hurled him in their swift rush to destruction. Luckily, he had escaped the contact of their iron hoofs, and his injuries, though serious, were not mortal.
But that poor sinner who, in the commission of a dastardly crime, had been overtaken by a swift and just Nemesis, how fared he?
They placed him on a litter and bore him into the nearest house. Men looked at that crushed and bleeding semblance of poor humanity, and, turning away, shuddered with horror. The physician came, and shook his head.
"My poor fellow, you can live but a few hours more," he said. "Tell us who your friends are that we may summon them."
"Are you sure, quite sure, that I must die?" moaned the sufferer, while the dews of terror beaded the weakly, handsome face which had escaped the vicious hoofs that had beaten the life from his body.
"You cannot possibly live but a few hours longer," repeated the physician as kindly as he could speak, and with a deep pity on his face that would not have been there could he have guessed that the wretch had wrought his own destruction.
Moans of terror and despair welled over the man's blanched lips when he realized that death was so near him. He begged that a priest might be sent for to pray the pardon of Heaven on his sinful soul.
"And your friends," they asked him, "shall we not bring them, too?"
With a moan of pain he answered:
"Send some one with a swift horse to overtake Clarence Stuart, who is returning to his villa in the suburbs. Tell him Julius Revington is dying, and—the lady—who was in the carriage—with the runaway horses—if she is living, bring her to me with all haste."
CHAPTER XLIII.
The willing hearts were not wanting to do the bidding of the dying man. Messengers went in three different directions, while the physician remained to assuage by all means that lay in his power the agonies that racked that tortured form. Anon the priest came, and with prayers and holy words strove to comfort the poor departing soul.
The swiftest horse in Florence went clattering over the road in pursuit of the carriage that held Clarence Stuart and his wife and daughter. It was soon overtaken, and the ominous message flashed like a thunder-clap upon their startled senses.
Mrs. Stuart and Lilia uttered shrieks of the wildest dismay.
But Clarence Stuart, after the first shock of surprise, regained his self-possession.
"I must go to him at once," he said. "Mrs. Stuart, I must transfer you and Lilia to one of the other carriages while I return to poor Julius."
To his surprise the lady answered, in sharp, hysterical tones:
"Lilia may go in the carriage with Mrs. Leslie, but I shall return with you to the death-bed of poor Julius."
"I object to your doing so. It may be an unpleasant ordeal for a lady of your delicate nerves," Mr. Stuart said, almost sternly.
"I insist upon going. All the arguments against my doing so will be quite wasted," she exclaimed, doggedly.
"Oh, mamma, do not leave me," cried her daughter, in almost hysterical distress.
But Mrs. Stuart shook off the clinging hands of the weeping girl almost rudely.
Mr. Stuart regarded his wife in silent amaze and displeasure. Nothing angered him more than for anyone to speak unkindly to his child, but he well knew how useless it would be to remonstrate with his wife, so without more ado Lilia was transferred to Mrs. Leslie's care, and the husband and wife returned to the city.
No more unpleasant sight could have greeted Julius Revington's eyes than the face of Mrs. Stuart as she entered the room where he lay attended by the priest and the physician, the only helpers left to him on earth. The eyes already dim with the film of death gazed at her with weak repugnance and horror.
Unheeding his gaping wounds and his blood-stained garments, she knelt down by his side and whispered frantically in his ear.
With all the strength that was left in his mangled arms he pushed her from him.
"Do not tempt me to die with all this load of sin on my soul!" he cried. "I must confess, confess! The priest is waiting to shrive me of my sins! Clarence, Clarence," he cried out wildly[Pg 104], "take her away, take her away! She has been my evil genius. I was weak, but never guilty until she whispered her evil suggestions in my ear and bribed me with her gold!"
"It is false, false! Let no one listen to him. These are but the ravings of delirium!" cried the woman angrily.
Her looks and actions were those of a desperate, maddened woman. The physician came up firmly to her side and attempted to draw her away.
"Let me entreat you, madam, not to shorten the brief span of my patient's life by your unjust charges," he cried. "I assure you he is not delirious, but in the full possession of his senses. Come away from him."
They were about to drag her forcibly away when the door opened suddenly and Guy Kenmore entered the room with Miss Brooke clinging to his arm.
CHAPTER XLIV.
It was a strange sight on which the flickering gaslight fell in that little room. The dying man, lying on the litter on which he had been borne into the room, and from which the physician declared it impossible to remove him, was a ghastly sight that sickened human sensibilities.
Mrs. Stuart, crouching on the floor beside him in her rose-tinted satin, her priceless lace and flashing diamonds, looked like a maniac. Her eyes flashed with hatred and desperation, her face was death-white, her breath fluttered over her lips in short gasps, and she defiantly resisted the efforts of Mr. Stuart and the physician to draw her away from the side of the dying man whose looks all too plainly expressed his abhorrence at her presence. At a little distance the old priest was devoutly crossing himself while he muttered an inaudible prayer. No wonder that Elaine Brooke reeled with horror as her gaze fell on that strange and dreadful scene.
"Be brave. Do not lose heart," Guy Kenmore whispered to her as he felt her weight grow heavier on his arm. "That dying man may have an important confession to make to you."
"I will be brave," she whispered back, but when she saw Clarence Stuart and the woman who had rivalled her in his heart—the woman who was his wife—it seemed to her that she could not breathe, that she must rush from the room, or surely she would fall down dead there at her traitor husband's feet.
They turned and saw them, the tall, gracious-looking man with his gentle, protecting air as he looked down upon Elaine—Elaine all in white, with her golden hair fallen down upon her shoulders in shining disorder, the snowy roses dying on her breast, and the pathos of a terrible despair written all over her lovely, pallid face—they saw her, and from Mrs. Stuart's lips shrilled a cry of rage and despair, from those of the dying man an exclamation of joy.
"You live!" he cried, "thank God, you live! Your death is not upon these dying hands!"
"Then it was you who fired that terrible shot!" cried Elaine, in horror.
"God forgive me, yes," he wailed. "Come nearer, Elaine Brooke. I have a story to tell you before I go hence. I have a legacy to leave you. Oh, horrors, will not some one take this mad woman away from me?"
Mrs. Stuart had sprung upon him in such insane fury that it seemed as though she meant to hurry his remorseful soul into the eternity to which it was hastening. Mr. Stuart hastened to draw her away, dreading the struggle that must ensue, when suddenly, with a choking gasp, she fell senseless into his arms. The tension on her nerves had given way, and she had instantly fainted.
"That is much better than having to remove the lady by violence," said the physician, relieved. "We will remove her to another room now where she cannot distress my patient."
"Clarence, you must return in a moment," moaned Julius Revington. "I have a confession to make to this lady—one that you must hear."
Mr. Stuart looked back a moment, and his glance met Elaine's large blue eyes, true as those of an angel, yet full of dumb agony. His glance fell and he turned away, with a strange thrill at his heart.
"She repents of her cruelty to me," he said in his heart. Meanwhile Guy Kenmore had spread a dark covering over Revington's mangled form, and Elaine knelt down beside him on a low cushion which Mr. Kenmore had arranged for her. She looked with compassionate gentleness at the sufferer who was passing away so fast from the reach of all earthly resentment.
"You are a stranger to me," she said, wonderingly. "Why did you try to harm me, and what can you have to confess to me?"
"You shall know presently," he answered. "Wait until Clarence Stuart comes back. You must hear my story together—you two who have been so foully wronged and parted."
CHAPTER XLV.
A startled look came over Elaine's face at those strange words from the lips of the dying man.
"Wronged and parted," she repeated, vaguely.
"Yes," he replied, and at that moment the door unclosed and Mr. Stuart came again into the room.
"Let all go out now except Mr. Stuart and this lady," said Julius Revington, feebly.
But Elaine interposed:
"I should like for my friend, Mr. Kenmore, to stay," she said. "He knows all the story of my life, and if I have been deceived beyond what I know I should like for him to hear it."
Julius Revington looked curiously at the man whom Elaine claimed as her friend.
The doctor and the priest had retired, and the four were alone in the room.
"What is he to you?" he asked, in his weak, painful tones.
Elaine looked up at Guy.
"Shall I tell him?" she asked.
He bowed his head in acquiescence, and she replied:
"He is my daughter's husband."
"Irene's husband!" exclaimed the dying man, feebly, and Clarence Stuart echoed the startled cry, "Irene's husband!"
"Yes, she is my wife, but she believed me dead when she promised to marry you," replied Guy Kenmore, looking at the dying man.
"My God," exclaimed Julius Revington, and for a few moments he lay silent contemplating this strange piece of news, then he looked curiously at the handsome, noble-looking man.
"You did not claim her when you came," he said.
"It was her secret. I was waiting until she gave me leave to divulge it," was the quiet reply.
Elaine had been listening with startled eyes. She sprang up and caught Mr. Kenmore's arm.
"I—do not—understand you," she panted. "You speak as if—as if my child were yet alive!"
He took her trembling hands and held them gently in his own.
"I meant to break it to you gently," he said. "But do not be shocked. That is the news I had for you. Irene is alive, and but a few miles away from you. You shall see her soon."
An ominous gasp from Julius Revington recalled them to his side.
"That news will wait," he said. "But I—I have but a little while to live. Listen to me first."
With a beating heart and a face radiant with sudden joy Elaine knelt down beside him. She could have touched Clarence Stuart as he sat by the litter, but she shrunk sensitively back, without looking at him. Guy Kenmore stood apart at a little distance, with his arms folded over his broad breast, his clear brown eyes fixed gravely on the little group.
"Clarence," said the dying man, turning his dim eyes on the face of his cousin, "you believed that this lady deserted you sixteen years ago of her own free will and desire. It was not true."
"Not true!" gasped Clarence Stuart.
"No, it was not true. She loved you and she was true to you. The wicked machinations of your father parted you from each other."
"My father! Oh, God, no!" exclaimed Mr. Stuart, in an agony of grief.
"It is horrible, but it is true," said Julius Revington. "He was bitterly enraged against you because of your marriage with Miss Brooke instead of the heiress he had selected for you. He laid his plans cleverly to circumvent you. Your severe illness that prevented you from returning to your wife was caused from drugs administered by him in the wine you drank that night."
"What authority have you for making these statements? Remember that you are dying, Julius, and do not try to falsify anything," exclaimed Mr. Stuart, almost sternly.
"I do not forget that I am dying," moaned the sufferer. "I[Pg 107] speak the truth as God hears me—the truth as I received it from the lips of your father upon his death-bed."
"He revealed the truth to you instead of to me—strange!" cried the tortured man, almost incredulously.
"Yes; can you guess why?"
"I cannot."
"He repented of his sin, but he was afraid to confess it to you. He dreaded your terrible anger and dreadful despair. He feared that you would curse him upon his dying bed."
"I am afraid I should have done so, indeed," muttered Clarence Stuart.
"So he selected me as the instrument to right the wrong," went on Revington. "He wrote out a full confession of his sin, detailing the means he had used to separate you, and he deputed me to carry it to Bay View, where your first wife had been living all the time while you believed her dead in a foreign land."
"And you failed in your promise to the dead," exclaimed Mr. Stuart, fixing a glance of deep reproach upon his cousin.
"No, I kept my promise. You remember the night we stopped at Brooke Wharf on our way to Italy, Clarence?"
"Yes, I remember."
"Well, that night while you lay in your stores of fruit, and the rest of our party rambled about, I fulfilled my mission. I went to Bay View Hall, and I persuaded old Mr. Brooke to come out on the shore with me. I told him of your father's death-bed repentance, and I confided to his care the written confession. He promised to deliver it to his daughter Elaine, and I came away and left him."
Elaine hid her face in her hands and low moans of pain came from her lips.
Julius Revington lay still a moment, breathing hard and painfully, then he resumed slowly:
"There was one who, by some means, had become cognizant of the secret confided me by the dying man. I will call no names. Your own heart may suggest who that person was, Clarence Stuart. She sought me and endeavored to buy my silence by costly bribes. I refused her importunities. I was bound by a solemn pledge to the dead, and I kept my vow. God knows how she learned my mission that night, but she followed me at a distance. She concealed herself, and when I had gone she felled the old man with a sharp blow on the temple from a thick stone she carried, and then she wrested the precious confession from his clenched hand and fled back to the yacht."
A piercing cry broke from Elaine's lips.
"Oh, God, papa, my own papa, you were most foully murdered," and throwing up her arms, she fell like one dead upon the floor.
Guy Kenmore placed a cushion beneath her head with gentle care, but he made no effort to restore her to consciousness.
"It is better thus," he said. "I have long known or believed, that Ronald Brooke met his death by violence, but I would have been glad to spare this poor soul that harrowing knowledge if I could."
"You knew it!" both Clarence Stuart and the dying man reiterated in surprise.
"I suspected it," said Mr. Kenmore, "but the physician said that he died of heart disease, and I had no right to go beyond his verdict. I alone observed the purplish mark of a blow upon his temple. I alone knew that some important paper had been wrested from his hand in that last dreadful struggle. I kept silence, but I have been on the track of his slayer ever since. But go on with your story, Mr. Revington. Do not wait for this broken-hearted woman to recover. She has heard enough."
"There is little more to tell," he answered, weakly. "When I went back to the yacht, I missed the lady who was so interested in old Mr. Stuart's dying confession. Suspecting and dreading I scarcely knew what, I hurried back along the path I had come, and met her flying like a mad thing toward me, with the precious confession clasped tightly in her hand. Wrenching it rudely enough from her, I ran forward to restore it to Mr. Brooke, and found the old man's dead body lying on the sands, with its convulsed face upturned to the moonlight."
"A murderess—the mother of my loved Lilia a murderess!" groaned Clarence Stuart, hoarsely.
"I went back and charged her with her sin," continued Julius Revington. "She was horrified. She declared that she had not meant to kill him, only to stun him that she might obtain the coveted paper. It was then that she bribed me to keep the secret. But it was not alone her gold that bought me, I was sorry for her. She had been my friend for years, and I was not acquainted with Miss Brooke, although I had seen her portrait, and knew that she was the loveliest of women. But I thought it best to leave matters as they were. I reflected that if the secret were revealed, it would only shift the disgrace from one innocent wife and child to another, for Mrs. Stuart believed her husband free when she married him. So I kept silence, and now I realize my sin. I have here your father's death-bed confession, but I fear it will prove valueless to you, for the signature is gone."
He drew it from his breast, all dabbled with his life-blood, and Clarence shuddered as he took it in his hand. Guy Kenmore came slowly forward with a narrow slip of paper.
"Here is the signature and the remainder of the confession which I found clinched in Mr. Brooke's hand after death," he said; "I restore it to you, Mr. Stuart, and I also have a brief confession to make."
"You?"—and Mr. Stuart looked up in wonder.
"Yes, and it is this: I believed that you were old Ronald Brooke's murderer. I followed you to Italy to ferret out your secret, if I could, for the sake of poor Elaine Brooke, for I believed that Irene, my little bride, was dead then. I will tell you my own strange story by-and-by. Now, I wish to ask your pardon for the wrong I did you in my thoughts. Instead of the guilty sinner I believed you, I find that you are a wronged and miserable man."
He held out his hand, and Mr. Stuart pressed it firmly in his[Pg 109] own, while his dark eyes wandered to the still white face of the woman whom he had never ceased to love, even while he thought her dead. Heavy sighs breathed over his lips.
"And Irene is your wife?" said Julius Revington's gasping voice.
"Irene is my wife," replied Guy Kenmore.
"And you love her?" said the dying man, wistfully.
"As my life," was the low, fervent reply.
"I loved her, too, but it was a selfish love," sighed the sufferer. "She despised me, but I bought her promise to be mine by a selfish barter. I had told her that her mother was legally married, and that I would give her her grandfather's confession on the day she became my wife. I was hard and cruel to her. Ask her to forgive me if she can, Mr. Kenmore."
"I will," answered Guy Kenmore, whose grave face had suddenly grown radiant.
A moment later Mr. Stuart asked, gravely:
"And did you really fire a pistol at Elaine's horses to-night, Julius?"
"Yes, and found my death in doing so," he groaned. "The same hand incited me to that desperate deed that did old Ronald Brooke to death. She was furious with rage and fear when she saw her rival on the stage, and she conceived that terrible plan for putting her out of the way. But I am thankful that my nefarious deed failed, although I can scarcely conceive how my victims escaped."
"I can tell you in a moment," answered Guy Kenmore. "In turning an abrupt corner of a street, the carriage parted from the horses, and left us safe, though sadly bruised and frightened in the battered vehicle."
"Thank God!" echoed Julius Revington, in his weak tones, and then he added, plaintively: "Call the priest in now, I wish to take my solemn oath to the confession I have made."
At that moment Elaine gasped and opened her eyes. They fell upon Clarence Stuart, who bent over her wistfully regarding her.
"Elaine, my poor, wronged darling, what can we say to each other?" he whispered, mournfully.
She regarded him with grave, reproachful eyes.
"Nothing," she answered, firmly. "You forged other ties when you thought me dead. Be true to them."
She could not repress that little outburst of jealous reproach, pure and angelic as she was, and with the words she took Guy Kenmore's arm and passed from the room.
With a heavy sigh, Clarence Stuart bent over the dying man. Death had blotted out all resentment.
"My poor fellow, what can I do for you?" he inquired.
"Nothing, only leave me with the priest," he answered, heavily. "I want him to pray for me. I have done with the things of this world."
And when he had sworn solemnly to the truth of his confession, he bade his cousin a long and last farewell, and sent him from the room.
On the threshold he met the physician coming in with a solemn face. Taking him by the arm, he said, gravely:
"My dear sir, prepare yourself for a great shock. The lady's swoon was more serious than we thought. She never revived from it. Her terrible excitement killed her."
Well, it was best so. How could he have ever looked in her face again, knowing that the death of old Ronald Brooke lay on her white, woman hands?
Just before daybreak they brought him word that Julius Revington was dead. He went and looked a moment at the still, white face, and the old priest told him that his cousin had died peacefully, trusting to the full in the mercy and pardon of Heaven.
Clarence Stuart shuddered and thought of that other one who had gone swiftly and unrepentantly before the bar of that God whose commands she had outraged.
All the morning he remained in Florence making arrangements for the double burial. Elaine had returned to her hotel, and Mr. Stuart sent her by Guy Kenmore the blood-stained confession to read at her leisure. Then he gave up his time to the burial of his dead. He sent a messenger out to the villa to break the tidings of death to all but Lilia, who was to be kept in ignorance of her mother's fate until he could tell her himself.
The messenger returned with tidings as sad as he had carried away. Lilia lay unconscious and dying, having suffered a relapse of her insidious disease that morning which had brought on fatal hemorrhage.
CHAPTER XLVI.
It was more than Elaine could bear to read the dying confession of the wicked old man who had blighted her life and branded her daughter's young life with shame.
It almost killed her to look at it and to feel that through it her kind, noble old father had lost his life.
"Better, far better, if old Clarence Stuart had died with the secret of his villainy untold!" she cried. "Better that I should have borne the brand of shame forever than you to have died by the assassin's hand, my father, oh, my father!"
Yet she knew, even while she bewailed him, that her father would have given his life twice over to purchase honor and happiness for her, his best-loved child.
"Irene must never know," she said to Mr. Kenmore. "She loved my father so dearly, and she is so passionate and impetuous that it would break her heart. We must spare mamma and Bertha, too. That wicked woman is dead now, and earthly vengeance cannot reach her, so for her husband's sake we will shield her memory."
He agreed with her that it was best so, and she gave him the confession to read for her, telling him frankly that she could not bear to hold it in her hand. Yet her heart burned and her cheek glowed as she heard the story of the deep-laid scheme by which she and her adoring young husband had been separated.
"Irene must read that—and mamma and Bertha," she said, wistfully, and Guy Kenmore understood then how bitterly the woman's pure heart had shrunk under the lash of scorn they had laid upon her shoulders.
"It is almost impossible to imagine anyone so heartless as that old man," he said. "With what devilish art he laid his plans. To you he told the story of the fraudulent marriage ceremony, and your husband's second marriage. To his son he presented your fraudulent letter of renunciation, and later on the false notice of your death abroad. No wonder the wings of his soul were clogged in dying by the weight of his terrible sins."
He told her the story of Irene's rescue from death, and how he had subsequently met her at Mr. Stuart's villa on the Arno.
"Does it not seem like some strange recompense of Providence that she should have been saved from death by her father?" he said, thoughtfully.
She agreed with him, and then he saw a wistful look stealing into her gentle eyes.
"You are longing for your child?" he asked.
"My heart aches to clasp her again," she answered.
"Be patient. In a few hours I will bring her to you," he answered.
"And you?" she asked, slowly. "Are you glad or sorry that the waves gave her back to us?"
"I love her," he answered, simply, and with that she was content.
He went away on his mission to restore the child to her mother's arms, and Elaine waited with eager impatience for his return.
"He has a brave, true heart," she said. "Irene will have a noble husband. After all, the mistake of that dreadful night may prove a providence to them both."
For it seemed to her that they could not help from loving each other. It seemed like a match made in Heaven. He was so handsome, so noble, so kind. Irene was so lovely, so tender, and her mother knew that beneath her pretty, wilful ways, that were but as the foam on the sea, she had a heart of gold.
So Elaine was well content with her son-in-law for her daughter's sake, though when she looked into her mirror it seemed almost ridiculous to reflect that she was a mother-in-law. Time had touched her very lightly in its flight, and she was as beautiful as her daughter. Indeed, Clarence Stuart pronounced her lovelier. Sorrow had brought such soul and expression into her face, even as "night brings out the stars."
When several hours had passed and she heard footsteps in the hall outside her door, the glad tears rose to her eyes and the rapturous beats of her heart were almost painful.
"Irene, my love, my darling," she murmured, longingly.
The door unclosed and Guy Kenmore entered—alone!
Elaine looked past him—her face paled, her eyes filled.
"Oh, do not tell me she would not come," she cried.
Then she saw the shadow of heavy trouble brooding over his face.
"Not dead!" she wailed.
He took her hands in his firm, strong clasp.
"Be brave," he said. "She is not dead. It is not so bad as that. But last night while we were away at the concert, Irene fled from the villa, and her absence was not discovered until late this morning. She left this note for Mrs. Leslie, and she has sent it to you."
He drew the dainty white envelope from his breast and laid it in her hand.
CHAPTER XLVII.
Elaine took the letter in her trembling hands, and, through a mist of bitter tears, saw the pretty girlish writing of the daughter she had mourned as dead. She wiped the dew from her eyes and read the sorrowful words that had flowed from the girl's burdened heart.
"Dear Mrs. Leslie, my true friend," Irene had written, "forgive me for going away in seeming ingratitude for all your kindness to me. Troubles encompass me, from which I have no refuge but in flight. I do not love Mr. Revington, and I am not free to marry him. But he has it in his power to work me ill, and I must fly far, far away, beyond the reach of his power. I have a sorrowful secret, but I cannot tell it to you; my heart is broken, but I cannot tell you by whose coldness and cruelty. Enough that I leave you reckless and despairing, not knowing if we may ever meet again. God forever bless you for your friendship and kindness to the mysterious stranger.
"Irene."
"You have read this?" said Elaine, lifting her tearful eyes to Mr. Kenmore's grave, sad face.
"Yes; by Mrs. Leslie's kind permission," he replied.
"Is it your coldness and cruelty to which she so sadly refers?" asked Elaine.
"Mine? by no means," he answered, startled. "I cannot at all understand what she means by those phrases."
"You are willfully blind," she answered. "I am quite sure she referred to you. Ah, Mr. Kenmore, my poor child had learned to love you. You should have claimed her before them all as your wife, if you really loved her."
He looked very grave and perplexed. A deep flush colored his face.
"God knows I would have done so, gladly enough, but I feared to offend her. I believed she would be angry if I attempted to claim her for my own. And you must remember that she bore an assumed name. I was waiting, with what patience I could, hoping she would relent toward me and acknowledge her identity."
"Waiting for the child to throw herself into your arms," said Elaine, with one of her sweet, pensive smiles. "Ah, Mr. Kenmore, you are very noble and chivalrous, but you know little of the subtle workings of a woman's heart. My little Irene is very[Pg 113] proud, and the circumstances of her marriage were not such as to make her feel confident of a welcome from you. I believe she would have died before she would have come to you and said: 'I am your wife, whom you believed to be dead!'"
"She was cold, proud, indifferent to the verge of rudeness," he answered, gravely. "She seemed bent on showing me that she loved Julius Revington."
"Yet you see now that she did not care for him. Ah, Mr. Kenmore, I can see plainly how pride and sensitiveness stood between you. While you waited for her to declare herself, she waited for you to claim her, and, despairing of your love at last, went away."
She extended her white arms to him, imploringly.
"Oh, Mr. Kenmore, you will find her for me, my little girl, my darling," she pleaded, piteously.
"Yes, I will find her for you, and for myself—I swear it," he said, passionately. "I will never give up the search until I find my proud and willful little wife."
He paused a moment, then went on, anxiously:
"But before I go I have somewhat to ask of you. Perhaps it may be too great a favor."
"Name it," she answered, gently, and he replied:
"Lilia Stuart—your husband's child, and who should have been yours, too—lies ill unto death at her father's villa with that fatal malady, consumption. Last night you carried the child's heart by storm. To-day, in her illness and pain, she sings over fragments of your songs—they think if—you would come—that it might make happier her dying hours."
"Let her father comfort her," she said, bitterly, jealous in her heart of that other woman's child.
He took her hand and gazed deep into her soft, pure eyes, tinctured with a certain womanly pride.
"Mrs. Stuart," he said, letting his voice linger firmly on the name, "this is not worthy of you. Your heart harbors resentment against your husband when he has never wronged you. He has not sinned, he has been sinned against. Just now he cannot come to the child. He must first bury his dead."
"How can I sing to her when my heart is so empty and full of pain?" she asked, drearily.
"Because God will bless your efforts to cheer the last hours of that motherless child," he said. "Clarence Stuart loves the child, and it might have been yours as well as his. You must love it for his sake. Think if it were your own loved Irene, dying in the spring of her life."
"I will go," she answered, tremulously.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
When Elaine went to the villa her strange, romantic history was known to all the inhabitants except Lilia. Mrs. Leslie, in her woman's wisdom, had judged it best to tell all the rest, but no one breathed it to the dying child. She alone never knew that the beautiful singer who had taken her young heart captive[Pg 114] was her father's real wife. When he came and found her singing like an angel by Lilia's dying bed, he made no sign save by the silent gratitude in his dark eyes, and Elaine was best pleased thus.
There were several days of fluctuating hope and fear before the fair bud faded on its drooping stem. Sometimes she would have every appearance of rallying, but it was only the deceptive flattery of her insidious disease, and she would immediately fall back into the most alarming symptoms.
The day came when Mr. Stuart could bear it no longer to hear the weak voice asking for her mother, and wondering why she came not.
He told his child the truth with such infinite pity and gentleness that it softened the blow to her young heart—— told her that her mother had gone before her to the unknown Land.
Lilia bore it more bravely than he had expected.
"She has only gone before me a little," she said, sadly.
And later on she asked Mrs. Leslie for Irene.
"I loved her at first until mamma bade me not to," she said, plaintively. "Then I was cruel and unkind. Is she angry still, that she does not come to me when I am so sick?"
They told her gently that Irene did not know of her illness, that she had gone away.
"Then I shall never see her again," said Lilia, sadly. "Tell her I was sorry for my cruelty, Mrs. Leslie, and ask her to forgive me. Tell her she should have been my sister only mamma was not willing. She was good and pretty and I loved her even when I tried to hate her."
Mrs. Leslie promised to deliver the message when she found Irene.
"I know she will forgive you, Lilia, for she loved you even when you were unkind to her," she said, marveling to herself how the tie of blood had asserted itself in the spontaneous love of the two girls whom the dead woman had so maliciously sundered.
"Poor little misguided Lilia. She will know in Heaven that they were really sisters, and it will be a comfort to her," she said to herself.
That evening in the glow of the golden Italian sunset Lilia closed her heavy-lidded eyes softly as flowers shut their petals at twilight, and forgot to open them again in the world in which she had tarried a little while. Elaine had held her hand and sung her to sleep in soft, sweet numbers that breathed of a Better Land.
It was over the child's grave where they lingered together one twilight eve, strewing lovely, pure, white flowers, that Clarence Stuart made his first appeal to the wife he had so fondly worshiped, and from whom he had been so cruelly sundered.
"Elaine, my house is left unto me desolate," he said. "Will you ever consent to return to me?"
The fair flower-face drooped, crimson with the warm tide of her heart's emotion, but for a moment she could not speak, and he continued, sadly:
"I have never ceased to love you, Elaine, even when I believed you false, even when they told me you were dead, even after another bore my name, and shared my home. I never loved her. She was my father's choice, not mine, and she could not make me happy. Elaine, my early choice, my own worshiped wife, will you not come home to my heart?"
He held out his arms to her eagerly, but she drew back, though not unkindly.
"Not yet," she answered, gently. "It is too soon. Let us give a few months to the dead who filled your life so long, then—— come for me."
"And this contemplated public career—— I am very selfish, love," he said. "Will you sacrifice your ambition for my sake? Will you give up that sweet voice to me to be heard only in the walls of my home? It is sacred to me since it sang my child into her last, long sleep."
"It shall be as you wish, Clarence," she answered, gently; and though Professor Bozzaotra was disappointed at the loss of that grand voice to the world, he acquiesced in her decision. He was glad that Elaine's romance had ended so happily.
"Although it is a sad disappointment to me," he sighed. "When she was but a girl at school I told her that her voice belonged to the world, and when she came to me at last to teach her again I was charmed that the public should have its due. Ah, well, I must not spoil her happiness with my vain regrets!"
CHAPTER XLIX.
The moonlight lay on Bay View House—not the tender moonlight of June as when we saw it first—but the cold, wintry whiteness of November. The ground was covered with a thin, light carpeting of snow, and a wind from the bay swept coldly across the land, almost freezing those who were so unfortunate as to be exposed to its piercing rigor. In the sky the stars were glittering coldly bright.
But no hint of the outdoor cold and discomfort penetrated to the luxurious parlor where we first met our pretty, willful Irene. A bright coal fire burned in the wide, steel bars of the grate, and diffused a lazy, luxurious warmth through the large apartment. Basking in its comfortable rays sat Mrs. Brooke and Bertha, the lamplight falling softly on their black silk dresses and the delicate lisse at throat and wrists. A white rose fastened in Bertha's silky, dark hair diffused the pleasant fragrance of summer amid their wintry surroundings.
A dark frown disfigured the handsome face of the brunette, evoked by her mother's words, uttered a moment ago.
"To-morrow, Bertha, we must go up to New York and sell my[Pg 116] diamonds," Mrs. Brooke had said. "There is no help for it. They will have to be sacrificed."
"A pretty appearance we shall make in society when we lay off our mourning—no jewels to wear!" snapped Bertha, discontentedly.
"You will have your pearls and rubies; I have not asked you to part with them," said Mrs. Brooke, soothingly.
"You needn't to, for I shall not do it—no, not if it came to starvation with us!" declared the brunette, passionately.
"You talk foolishly, Bertha," declared her mother. "Do you not suppose that it grieves me also to part with my jewels, the gift of your poor dead father? Yet I make no foolish lament over it. I consider the necessities of the case; but I also remember that if you had not forced me to make the tour of the summer resorts this season I should have been able to live through the winter without selling my beautiful diamonds!"
"Oh, yes, everything is my fault!" cried Bertha, angrily. "Could I help it if Guy Kenmore went gadding off to Europe instead of going to the summer resorts where I expected to find him? I am sure I should not have asked you to spend the money if I had not felt perfectly sure of finding him somewhere. And if I had found him I should have won him, I know, for I am very sure he was in love with me last year."
"I am afraid you were mistaken, my dear. I think it was Elaine he was smitten with. You had as well turn your attention to some one else with money, if you can find one, for it is very important that you should marry soon, and it is very evident that Guy Kenmore cares nothing for you," Mrs. Brooke said, tartly.
"Elaine—always Elaine!" cried Bertha, in a passion. "Do you suppose he could care about her after I betrayed her shameful story to him?"
Before Mrs. Brooke could reply there came a sharp peal at the door-bell that echoed weirdly through the great, silent house. Both ladies started violently.
"Who can this be?—at this hour?" exclaimed Bertha, glancing at the clock, whose hands pointed to nine.
"Some one who has come by the boat or the train," exclaimed Mrs. Brooke, nervously. "Perhaps Elaine!"
"You are always harping on Elaine—you forget that Professor Bozzaotra has taken her to Europe to make her a prima donna," Bertha exclaimed, sharply.
They heard old Faith, who was the only servant they retained now, waddling down the hall to the door, and waited a moment silently to learn whom their guest might be.
The heavy hall-door opened, light steps sounded on the threshold, then suddenly a shriek of terror resounded through the house, and staid old Faith rushed back to the parlor door, tore it wildly open, and fled to the side of her mistress as if for protection.
"Why, Faith, you old simpleton, what ails you? Have you seen a ghost?" exclaimed haughty Bertha.
"Yes, Miss Bertha, that's just what I saw! I opened the door[Pg 117] and there stood the ghost of Miss Irene, just risen from the sea," panted old Faith, overcome with terror and exhaustion, for she was very fat, and her flight had been sudden and rapid.
"Ridiculous," sneered Bertha, and just then light feet came pattering along the hall, a slight figure flashed over the threshold—Irene, with the dark hood of her cloak fallen back on her shoulders, and all her wavy golden hair flying like an aureole around her beautiful, pale face!
She ran up to the old housekeeper and shook her laughingly by the shoulders.
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself, old Faith?" she said. "I'm not a ghost—I am Irene, living and breathing! Pinch me if you don't think I'm telling the truth. I've come to see my mother," her eager glance roving around the room. "Oh, where is she, where is she?"
CHAPTER L.
For a moment Mrs. Brooke and Bertha were almost as much unnerved and startled as the old housekeeper had been. They stared in speechless amaze at the fair, young face, like, yet unlike, Irene Brooke's—like it in the bright, captivating beauty that had been the girl's glorious dower, yet changed because a woman's soul with all its love and sorrow had subtly transformed it, adding the one only grace it needed to make it simply peerless.
At last—
"You are not Irene," gasped Bertha, "she is dead!"
"I was not drowned," the girl answered, simply. "God did not let me perish in my wickedness that night. I was saved by a passing yacht after floating several hours on a plank in the water. Look at me, Bertha. Do you not see that I am Irene, alive and in the flesh?"
Bertha regarded her a moment with steady, contemptuous eyes and curling lips.
"No, you are not Irene! You are a miserable impostor!" she flashed out, in scathing anger and bitterness.
Irene stood regarding her, disconcerted and amazed for an instant. It had never occurred to her that they would deny her.
Her lips quivered and the tears sparkled into her sweet, blue eyes.
"How dare you utter such a falsehood, Bertha?" she cried, with something of her old, imperious anger. "You know who I am perfectly well. You are wicked and cruel to call me an impostor."
Then she turned from the scornfully silent girl and crossed the room to Mrs. Brooke, who still sat in her easy chair with old Faith crouching in dumb terror at her feet.
"Grandmamma, you will not deny me," she pleaded, "I am Elaine's child—she whose shame and sorrow you shielded so long beneath the honest name of Brooke. Will you not speak to me, little Irene that grandpapa used to love so dearly?"
The handsome old lady returned her gaze with a hard, cruel stare. She was not ready to acknowledge her granddaughter yet.[Pg 118] It flashed dimly over her bewildered mind that Irene had come back to claim her protection and support.
In her straightened circumstances she was not ready to accord her either, and the faint pity that was struggling in her heart was smothered by the warning flash of Bertha's black eyes.
Irene saw herself disowned and rejected again. She looked at them in hapless bewilderment. Nothing equal to this cavalier scorn had ever occurred to her. She had been girlishly amused at the housekeeper's terror, but this was worse. Her young bosom heaved with stormy indignation.
"Where is my mother?" she asked, bitterly. "Will she deny me, too? Will she be sorry that the sea has given up its dead?"
No one answered her except old Faith, who gave a low, whimpering moan that might mean everything or nothing.
Irene went up to her and shook her by the arm with gentle violence.
"Come, old Faith, you are not quite daft, I think," she said, bitterly. "Tell me where to find your Miss Elaine!"
The fat old housekeeper seemed to be somewhat reassured by the very realistic touch of the warm, white hand. She shook herself like a big, shaggy dog, and rose to a standing posture. Some of the abject terror died out of her face.
"Is my mother up-stairs in her room?" inquired Irene, impatiently.
"Miss Irene, where have you been all these long months?" inquired Faith, irrelevantly.
"I have been in Italy, Faith. I was rescued that night when I tried to drown myself, by a yacht bound for Italy. The people were very kind to me, and I went there with them. But I have come back to find mamma. Where is she, Faith? Go and bring her to me," exclaimed the young girl, impatiently.
"Oh, miss, she isn't here. She went away after you did, She's gone away off to that place where you said you were," stammered Faith.
"To—to Italy?" exclaimed Irene, blankly.
"Yes, Miss Irene—she went away with her old music teacher to learn to be a great singer. Oh, Mrs. Brooke," sighed the old woman, turning anxiously to her mistress, "you can tell her better than I can about the letter that Miss Elaine wrote you before she went away."
"How dare you tell our private matters to this impostor, Faith?" demanded Bertha, fire flashing from her brilliant eyes. "Have you no sense, no judgment?"
"Oh, ma'am, 'tis certainly our Irene. I was an old fool at first and took her for a ghost, but now I could swear 'tis Miss Elaine's own little daughter," pleaded Faith, with a loving glance at the shrinking young girl who stood anxiously awaiting her reply.
"Hush, not another word!" raged Bertha. "How dare you set yourself up against me? I tell you this girl is nothing to us and she shall leave this house! Go to your room, Faith, and remain there. You have no business in the parlor."
"Go," echoed Mrs. Brooke, bestowing a glance of stern displeasure upon the old housekeeper.
Faith slowly left the room, after bestowing a glance of love and pity upon the forlorn young creature who looked after her as if her last friend on earth were departing.
A rush of cold air met the old woman in the hall, and she went to close the heavy door which was banging loudly back and forth.
To her dismay she met a gentleman just crossing the threshold. Ashamed of her recent idiotic display of fear, the old woman held her ground bravely, and stopped to hold a parley with the intruder.
Irene remained standing in the center of the room looking blankly from one to the other of the two cruel women who so coldly denied her. A look of pain and grief shadowed her fair face.
"Is it true that your daughter has gone to Italy, madam?" she asked, timidly, looking at her grandmother whom she dreaded less than the wrathful Bertha.
"Yes, it is true," Mrs. Brooke replied, without raising her eyes from the contemplation of the shining rings on her plump fingers.
"When is she coming back?" inquired the girl.
"What is that to you?" demanded Bertha, pitilessly.
The beautiful girl flashed a look of deep reproach upon the cruel woman.
"It is everything to me," she said, mournfully. "She is my mother. I love her, and she is all I have to love me. I have crossed the sea to throw myself into her arms, and now that I am here she is gone—she is gone, oh, God, have pity on me," she wailed, despairingly, while the hot tears of disappointment and sorrow streamed down her cheeks.
"This is all very fine acting, but it does not impose upon mamma and me," sneered Bertha. "You are nothing to us, and you are nothing to my sister. You are a vile adventuress and impostor. You are trying to trade upon my sister's unfortunate secret which you have somehow discovered, but you will get nothing from us—nothing! Begone now, before I call the servants to put you out," she concluded, loftily.
Irene turned her pale, distressful face upon the merciless woman.
"Do you know that I have nowhere to go?" she asked, in a low, fearful voice. "I have spent the last penny in my purse coming here to find my mother. If you turn me out to-night I must perish in the cold."
"That is no concern of mine," Bertha answered, angrily. "Go, I tell you!"
"Do you sanction Bertha in her cruelty, madam?" said Irene, appealing to her grandmother. "Must I indeed go forth to my death?"
"Go where you please, so that you leave my room instantly," replied the hard-hearted woman, resolutely sustaining Bertha in her cruelty.
"You hear my mother's decision. Now go!" cried Bertha flinging wide the door, and pointing to it with her white, ringed hand.
But even as she was about to thrust Irene out of the room, her hand fell, and she uttered a shrill scream of dismay.
Her malevolent black eyes had encountered the gaze of a pair of flashing brown ones, whose scathing contempt and bitter anger seemed to wither her where she stood.
"May God forgive you both!" said the poor forsaken girl, as she turned to obey their wicked mandates; "for I am surely going out to meet my death!"
Blinded by her bitter tears, she crossed the threshold, seeing nothing, and so ran into the manly arms that were outstretched to clasp her.
"You are going no further than your husband's arms, my darling," said the low music of the voice she had learned to love beneath the blue Italian skies. "To your husband's arms, never to leave him again!"
And holding his little wife tightly clasped to his beating heart, Guy Kenmore turned to Bertha.
"God may forgive you for this wanton cruelty," he said, "but I never will. None but fiends in human form could have showed themselves so pitiless to this helpless child. I hope I may never see either of your faces again."
And with no more words, he led his little bride from those inhospitable doors out into the cold, bleak night again. But they were no longer conscious of the cold, sharp wind and the driving snow. There was a warmth and summer in their hearts that made the night more fair to them than that June-tide with all its moonlight and roses when they had first met.
"I followed you from Italy here, my darling," he said, "and I shall never lose sight of you again. I love you, Irene. I have loved you ever since the night that made you my unwilling bride. Will you promise to stay with me always now, my little wife?"
And in her tender, timid "yes," and the pressure of the small hand on his arm he read the sweet, wifely love he was too generous and too chivalrous to ask his shy little bride to avow.
CHAPTER LI.
There was a very good hotel in the vicinity of Bay View House, and Guy Kenmore and his little bride went there to await the coming of the midnight train by which they proposed returning to Baltimore.
He secured a comfortable private parlor, and sitting by the cheerful fire never hours of waiting passed more rapidly than these.
With her lover-husband's arm drawn close and fondly round her graceful form, Irene listened to the story of that momentous night when she had so unwisely fled. She learned that the man she had both feared and despised was dead, that Mr. Stuart was her father, and that Lilia and her mother were both dead.
"And it was my own precious mamma whom I refused to go[Pg 121] and hear that night," she said. "Oh, if I had only known! But I was driven wild by my fears. In my trouble it seemed to me that there was no refuge on earth for me but in my mother's arms, and so I came back to America as fast as wind and tide could bring me!"
"If you had known then that I loved you, Irene, would you have gone?" he asked her softly, while he gazed deep in the lovely sapphire blue eyes.
The warm color surged into her cheeks at his earnest gaze, and she hesitated.
"Tell me," he pleaded, and then she answered frankly:
"No, I should not have gone. If you had claimed me then I should have come straight to your arms and told you all my doubts and fears. I could not have left you."
"My proud little darling," he murmured, "we were both mistaken in holding aloof from each other; but, please God, we will make up the loss of those months of separation by long years of happiness spent together. Do you remember those sweet lines of Jean Ingelow, my darling?
In his deep, sweet tones and the fond glances of his eyes, Irene read that she was beloved even as she had longed to be in those days in Italy, when she had believed him cold, careless, indifferent, and determined not to acknowledge the tie between them. Tears of happiness sparkled in her eyes, and with a low sob she hid her face on his breast.
He held her close, and kissed her tears away, silently, thanking Heaven for the priceless gift of her innocent young heart.
He told her the gay yachting party had returned to Richmond, sobered and saddened by the loss of Mrs. Stuart and Lilia.
"The child—your half-sister, Irene—have you thought of that?—sent you some kind messages by Mrs. Leslie before she died," he said.
Irene was sorry to know that the spoiled, pretty Lilia was dead; but it pleased her to know that her mother had been kind to her—that she had soothed her dying hours with her soft, sweet songs.
"Dear, dear mamma—when shall I see her, Mr. Kenmore?" she asked, wistfully.
"I meant to surprise you," he said; "but I cannot keep you in suspense. You have already borne too much. You will see her to-morrow. She is the guest of my sister in Baltimore. When I found out in Florence that you had started to come back to America, I crossed in the next steamer, and your mother came with me. We landed in a few hours after you did, and I had no[Pg 122] difficulty in tracing you. I learned that you had started for Bay View by the water route, and followed you on a fast train, by which means I was enabled to reach your old home in time to learn the wickedness and heartlessness of Bertha."
"In time to save me from perishing in the cold, for I had exhausted my last cent in the purchase of that ticket to Bay View," she said, with a shudder.
"I am most happy that I came, but in any case, you would not have suffered," he replied; "for old Faith assured me that, had they turned you out of the house, she would have gone with you and taken care of you."
"Dear old Faith, she was always kind to me," said Irene. "But Bertha always hated me, and I am sure that she will never forgive me for taking you away from her."
"Do not say that," he answered, "for I never belonged to Bertha. I admired her stately beauty, but the thought of taking a wife had never occurred to me until that night when," laughing, "you married me, willy-nilly."
Irene blushed very much, but ended by laughing, too. In a minute she grew very serious again, and, slipping her soft little hand into his, said, gently:
"Do you know, dear Guy, that since—since we love each other—that marriage in play seems very light and flippant to me? Shall we not—shall we not"—— pausing, bashfully.
"Plight our marriage vows over again," he finished for her. "Yes, love, we will do so again, and this time our hearts shall go with our hands."
And the very next day they were married over again in the quiet little church in Baltimore, with their nearest relatives for witnesses, and although Irene wore the plainest pearl-gray silk, and the demurest little bonnet, Mr. Kenmore's handsome, fashionable sisters declared that she was the loveliest bride they had ever beheld.
They went away on a little southern tour to see Mrs. Leslie, who received her favorite with the gladdest of embraces and some incoherent reproaches, calling her a "naughty little runaway."
"I can never quite forgive you for not confiding your secret to me," she said. "I could have helped you so much, dear, if only you had let me."
Mr. Stuart came to see her and they sent her in alone to meet him. All felt that their meeting as father and child would be too sacred a scene for other eyes to gaze upon. She came from his presence weeping, but they were the placid tears of joy that her father was proven good and noble, and that his heart was full of love for her and her long-suffering mother.
"He is waiting in sorrowful patience for mamma to relent," she confided to her husband, when they were alone. "I hope she will go back to him soon. Only think! They have been cruelly separated for almost seventeen years!"
And looking into the beautiful, loving young face, Guy Kenmore realized something of Mr. Stuart's pain in the sudden pang with which he wondered how he could bear to be separated from his beautiful Irene for such an eternity of years.
He kissed the sorrowful young face into brightened smiles again.
"When we go home we will talk to mamma," he said. "We will tell her that life is too short to spend away from those we love and who love us. We will persuade her to shorten the span of his probation."
"He deserves it I know, for he tells me that he has suffered deeply," said Clarence Stuart's daughter. "Oh, Guy, I love him dearly already. He saved my life, you know, and I believe I have loved him ever since, although I could not understand the subtle nearness of the bond that drew me to him."
CHAPTER LII.
Mrs. Brooke and Bertha did not go to New York the next day as they had intended doing.
Both of them were overcome by the scene of last night. Bertha's malevolence and angry bitterness made her almost ill. Mrs. Brooke was chagrined and regretful. She had permitted Bertha to rule her affairs with a high hand, believing in the wisdom of her ruling, and now she found that she had over-reached herself.
If she had dreamed that Guy Kenmore would claim Irene for his own, she would never have allowed her granddaughter to be driven from her doors. She had too keen a sense of the advantage to be gained from such a wealthy connection.
But it was too late now to recall the heartless deed by which she had closed Guy Kenmore's doors against her. His stern face remained in her memory, and his parting words rung like the clash of steel in her hearing:
"I hope I may never see either of your faces again."
It was just. She acknowledged it to herself, but it galled her none the less bitterly. She upbraided Bertha for her share in the transaction, and Bertha replied insolently. They spent their time in bitter recriminations, these two women who had so cleverly over-reached themselves.
In a few days a letter came from Elaine. The gentle reproach of its preface touched a painful chord in the mother's heart, for she had sadly missed her eldest daughter, though she would not have dared to say so before the overbearing Bertha.
"I have written to you many times since I left home, mamma," wrote gentle Elaine, "but as you never answered any of my letters, I conclude that they were unwelcome, and that I am forgotten and uncared for in my old home. I am writing you once again, probably for the last time."
Then in a few closely written pages Elaine told them the whole story of her new-found happiness.
"My plan for becoming an opera-singer is abandoned by the desire of my husband," she wrote, simply. "He is very wealthy, and there is no longer any need for me to work. I shall live in Baltimore. Irene's home will be here, and I cannot consent to live apart from my child. Mr. Kenmore has a superb residence here, and my husband has promised to secure a similar one for[Pg 124] me on the same street, so that I may see my little Irene every day. Dear mamma, it seems to me that if you had loved your poor Elaine as warmly as I love my little girl, you could never have treated me so unkindly!"
It was the last drop of bitter in Bertha's cup of humiliation. Elaine, whom she had trampled upon for years, despising her for her sorrow, envying her for her beauty—Elaine to be loved, honored, crowned with wealth and happiness! It stung Bertha to the depths of her little soul. She would have sold her soul to the powers of evil for the power to drag Elaine and her daughter down from their high estate.
But there was no convenient demon about to gratify Bertha's malevolent desires, and her mother began to assert her own will, which she had long permitted Bertha to dominate. She forced her to accompany her to Baltimore to see Elaine, though she rebelled bitterly against this eating of "humble pie."
They found the long despised daughter and sister the guest of Mrs. Livingstone, one of the leaders of fashion in the monumental city. She was a sister of Guy Kenmore, and it almost maddened Bertha to sit quietly and listen to the enthusiastic praises she bestowed on her brother's beautiful bride. "I have never seen anyone so artlessly lovely and charming," she said. "She will be the rage in society. While they are taking their little tour, the Kenmore diamonds and pearls are being reset for her, and her bridal reception dress is ordered from Paris. It will be a marvel of beauty."
"All might have been mine but for that fatal night's work," Bertha told herself, full of maddening envy, and no words could have told her hatred for innocent, willful Irene.
Elaine had become like a young girl again in the sunshine of her great, new happiness. Her blue eyes beamed with love and hope, her cheeks were tinted softly like the lining of the murmurous sea-shell, she had the sweetest smile in the world. There was only one shadow on her joy:
"If only my father could have lived to see my honor vindicated and my happiness restored," she would sigh, and when she remembered the cruel blow that had struck him down to death, she would steal away to her room to weep unavailing tears for his untimely fate. But she bore her pain alone, and none of those who had been bound to old Ronald Brooke by the tie of kinship ever knew the sorrowful secret hidden in Elaine's breast. Bertha did not let her mother stay long, though Elaine was very kind and gentle, and did not reproach them for their heartless denial of her daughter. The cruel, unkind sister could not bear the sight of Elaine's happiness, and so dragged her mother away, but not before the old lady had secretly whispered in the ear of her elder daughter that "everything had all been Bertha's fault."
Elaine did not doubt it, for she well knew her sister's malice and ill-nature, but seeing how their unkindness had recoiled upon their own heads, she tried to forgive and forget.
When beautiful, happy Irene came home, she pleaded her father's cause so well that Elaine, whose own heart was pleading for him, too, relented, and suffered her daughter to write for[Pg 125] him. He came gladly, but the reunion of the long-parted husband and wife is too sacred a subject for us to dwell upon. It was the realization of the poet's dream:
One bit of gossip, reader. Mrs. Brooke never sold her diamonds. Ten thousand dollars settled on her very quietly by her wronged and despised elder daughter, enables her and Bertha to keep their heads above water and to hold their place in society. They flash in and out from one gay resort to another, for Bertha is very restless and never contented long in one place. Mrs. Brooke is very fond of talking about "my daughter, Mrs. Stuart, and my granddaughter, Mrs. Kenmore," but it is noticeable that she is not very intimate with either. Indeed, she and Bertha have never yet crossed the threshold of the palace where Irene reigns a queen.
Bertha is an old maid now, faded, sour, and given to saying sharp things to everyone, so that no one enjoys her company, and no one dreams of seeking her for a wife. Proud, envious, spiteful, she seems to hate all the world, but no one with such concealed malice and galling bitterness as Guy Kenmore's wife.
[THE END.]
