THE ROSE AND THE LILY;
OR,
LOVE WINS LOVE.
By MRS. ALEX. MCVEIGH MILLER.
CHAPTER I.
A dusky, piquante face, arch, sparkling, bright, as only brunette faces can be, dark, waving hair, and pansy-dark eyes with golden lights in their soft depth, delicious lips, tinted with the velvety crimson of the rose, a slight girlish figure, unformed as yet, but with a willowy grace all its own—Reine Langton.
She comes singing along the graveled path between the trim borders of bright verbenas, velvety pansies and fragrant pinks, swinging her large straw hat by its scarlet ribbons. The golden light of the summer day falls on the uncovered head, and on the fair, low forehead with its silky rings of clustering hair, and its slender, straight, black brows. She sings shrilly, but sweetly
The handsome, blonde face of a young man lifts itself from the reclining depths of a hammock-chair, swung under a wide-spreading tree; as she draws nearer, he breaks out with careless raillery:
"Pray forbear, Miss Langton! your shrill soprano has frightened me from a charming dream. I do not[Pg 2] believe your match could be found for keeping one's nerves continually on edge."
"Men have no business with nerves," she retorts, coolly. "For shame, Mr. Vane Charteris. Get out of that hammock and stir yourself. I can't abide a lazy man."
He looks at her with sleepy, half-shut eyes that mirror the deep, beautiful blue of the sky overhead.
"Fortunately you do not have to abide me," he says, bruskly. "After to-morrow I shall forever be out of reach of your shrill voice and scolding tongue!"
A strange look comes into her dark eyes a moment. Some of the golden light dies out of them, they grow darker and vaguely sad, but she laughs.
"A pity for you, too. My influence and example might rouse you otherwise from your stupid inertia. Tennyson must have had a lazy man in his mind's eye when he wrote the Lotos-Eaters."
He smiles, and quotes with careless good-nature:
"Is not that an idyllic life, Reine?"
"No," she says, promptly. "I have no patience with the dolce far niente of some people. It is a pity you are to marry Maud Langton!"
He colors, and asks:
"Why?"
"Because she is as lazy as you are. When you marry her and come into Uncle Langton's money, you'll both be too lazy to breathe, just that! You will die for lack of energy to live."
She has stopped beside the hammock-chair, and leaning against the tree looks down into the handsome, debonair face with a gleam of audacious levity in the dusky eyes. He starts up to a sitting posture, thoroughly aggravated.
"Thank you," he remarks, with immense dignity. "I understand," with cutting irony, "the reason of your spite. You wanted Mr. Langton's money yourself."
"Not a bit of it," decidedly. "Thank goodness, I know how to earn my own living. Not but that Uncle Langton has treated me unfairly, though. I am as near kin to him as Maud. My father was his own brother.[Pg 3] Why should he make her his heiress, and marry her to the son of his old sweetheart, cutting me off with a beggarly invitation to spend three weeks, and be her bride's-maid?"
"Why don't you tell him that?" he queries, watching the rich color deepen on the delicate cheek.
"I don't care to," with careless indifference. "I don't want his money."
"No—do you mean to say you do not care for all this?" He glances around him at the spacious white villa, set in the midst of a green, flower-gemmed lawn, shaded by stately trees. "Only think, my lady disdain: A summer home in these grand old mountains, a winter palace in Washington, a cottage by the sea, and a fabulous bank account; does it all count for nothing in your eyes?"
"Yes," pertly, "if, like poor Maud, I had to take you as an incumbrance with it all!"
He flushes with wounded vanity and anger.
"The feeling is mutual," he retorts, under the spur of pride. "If I had to take you with Mr. Langton's money, it might go to found an idiot asylum."
"Vane Charteris, I hate you!" she exclaims, with a flash of childish passion.
"I take it as a compliment," he replies, with a profound bow.
"Quarreling as usual," says a clear, sweetly modulated voice, and both turn with a start.
A tall, imperially stately woman has come sauntering down the path from the house. You think of Tennyson's description:
Vane Charteris' face lights with languid pleasure. It is Maud Langton, his betrothed. This very night she is to be his bride.
"Ah, Maud," he says, "I am glad you are come. Perhaps you will deliver me from this little vixen!"
There is a grave, far-away look in the light blue eyes of the bride-elect. She looks at Reine, not at her lover, as she answers lightly:
"It is very undignified to call names, Vane, and how often have I told you, Reine, that you must bridle that sharp tongue of yours?"
"He began it," mutters Reine, with a childish petulance.
"You should have known better than to tease the child, Vane," says Miss Langton. "If you are in fault, you must apologize, of course."
"I'll be shot if I do," he begins, stoutly, then stops at her look of dignified amaze, and says, with a gleam of tender relenting: "Very well, Maud. Of course I can refuse you nothing on this day of all days. See here, Reine, I beg your pardon for what I said. Will you forgive me?"
"No, I won't—so there!" she flashes, with some wrathful tears splashing down her cheeks.
"Reine!" Miss Langton cries, horrified.
"Reine!" mimics the girl, provokingly.
"Ah, me!" with a pretty sigh of resignation, "I see it is no use trying to train you," but Reine Langton is already out of hearing. They catch the distant gleam of her white dress among the trees.
Vane Charteris rises from his indolent pose in the hammock-chair and installs his blonde angel in his place. Tall, graceful, with the fair beauty of a Greek god, he might hold any woman's heart, but as he stands by her side, lightly swaying the chair, Miss Langton's large, blue eyes wander from him to the line of the distant hills that stand around about her beautiful home in a glorious green wooded circle.
"Ah, Maud, my beautiful, gentle darling," he says, "how hard it is to believe that Reine Langton is your cousin. You are so utterly unlike. You are so calm and sweet and gracious, she is so rude, so pettish, so like a chestnut burr!"
"Poor Reine," she says, not disputing him, yet a little apologetically, "she has had no training. Her mother died in Reine's infancy, and her father brought her up after his own fashion, dying two years ago, and leaving her to get her own living. You cannot expect an underpaid teacher to have the manners of a lady."
"She is rather young to teach others, isn't she?" he says.
"Rather," she replies. "Sixteen or seventeen at the most, I should say. But now, Vane, I really must go in; I have fifty things to attend to. All my bride's-maids will be coming presently."
"My sweetest, how shy you are," he laughs; "you will barely look at me, yet in a few hours more you will be my own. Mine to love and caress as much as I please. Do you realize it, my dignified darling?"
A slight, a very slight shiver passes over the imperially-molded form. She looks at him, then, half-fearfully, half-questioningly—
"Vane, tell me the truth," she says. "Is it me you love or is it my uncle's money?"
A dark-red flush stains his handsome face.
"Maud, that question is unworthy of you. I have loved you from the first hour I saw you. I have told you how irritated I was at first when my mother's old friend wrote to me offering me a wife and a fortune. Poor as I am I was determined not to marry you unless I loved you. But your peerless beauty conquered me as soon as I saw you."
Something very like a sigh ripples over the delicate rose-leaf lips. She does not smile nor blush as if she felt flattered.
"I will tell you something else, now, my Maud, if you'll promise not to laugh," he goes on; "I was jealous at first of that handsome, black-eyed Clyde that came so frequently to call on you. I was very glad when you sent him away. You never cared for him, did you, dear?"
"Of course not, you foolish boy," she laughs, and with that she slips away from him.
He watches the flutter of her pale blue robe out of sight, then, dropping his eyes, sees a folded slip of paper lying on the ground at his feet. In a careless, mechanical way he picks it up and reads the few lines hastily scribbled in a man's strong hand.
"My darling," it says, "you have relented at the last and made me the happiest of men. God forever bless you. Do not fail to be at the appointed place. If you do not marry me I swear I'll shoot myself through the heart, but if you keep your promise I promise to make you the happiest woman on earth."
The note was signed with a blurred, undistinguishable initial. Vane Charteris tucked it into his vest-pocket in happy unconsciousness of the fatal truth.
"Reine Langton must have dropped this," he thinks[Pg 6] to himself. "I'll restore it to her the first opportunity. I wonder who her suicidal correspondent may be?"
CHAPTER II.
Inside the elegant, ornate white villa all is confusion and excitement. The house is crowded with guests, and the preparations for the wedding are going blithely on.
In the dining-hall the long table glitters with plate of silver and gold, and all the luxuries of home and foreign countries are temptingly spread thereon. Flowers are lavishly arranged everywhere. Trained domestics hurry to and fro, bent on perfecting every arrangement, for the wedding of Mr. Langton's beautiful niece is a very grand occasion indeed, and every honor must be paid to the heiress, and the husband of her uncle's providing.
Mr. Langton himself was an old man, old and peculiar to the verge of whimsicality, as was proved by the fact of his adopting one orphan niece as the heiress to all his possessions, and leaving the other, a frail, weak girl, to fight her battle with the cold world alone.
Latterly Mr. Langton had become displeased with his favorite, Maud, because she had countenanced a suitor of whom he did not approve—a rascally fortune-hunter, he irascibly declared. The upshot of the whole matter was that he wrote to a clever young lawyer, the son of an old sweetheart long dead, and bade him come and marry Maud, to which the young man replied that he would marry her if she was pretty, and he fell in love with her, but not otherwise.
We have heard the result announced in the words of Vane Charteris to his betrothed. He was conquered at once by her peerless beauty. Mr. Langton privately confided to the young lady that she must marry the husband he had selected for her, or he would cut her off with a shilling. Maud acquiesced meekly, prudently banished her obnoxious lover, and Mr. Langton announced to his friends the near consummation of what he happily termed a love-match.
That it was a love-match on one side, the words of Vane Charteris have assured us. Whether it was the same on Maud's part remains to be seen.
"Can we assist you in any way?" asked the gay bevy of bride's-maids, coming into Maud's room en masse as the dressing hour drew near.
The beautiful bride-elect sat in the midst of the bridal finery, loosely wrapped in a dainty dressing-gown, her beautiful golden hair unbound, and flowing over her shoulders. She was very pale, and her blue eyes glittered with excitement.
"Thanks, no," she answered, in her languid, well-trained voice. "My maid can do everything, and you will need all your time to beautify yourselves."
They laughed and protested, but lingered in the room, admiring the elegant white satin dress, with its frosting of seed-pearls, the beautiful Brussels veil, and the costly set of pearls, Mr. Langton's bridal gift to his well-beloved niece. Maud did not talk to them much, and Reine Langton's quick eyes saw that she was growing nervous and impatient.
"Come, girls, let us go," she said. "It is time to dress, and Maud wants a little time to herself. Remember that this is her last hour of 'maiden meditation, fancy free.'"
The gay, pretty troop ran away, nothing loth, to don their bridal finery. Reine went to her own airy chamber thoughtfully.
"How calmly and coolly my cousin takes it all," she thought, "while I—I would give my two ears, I know, to be in her place. Oh, Vane, Vane! how cruel you are to me, and how much you despise me. What a fool I am to love you so!"
And full of indignant self-scorn, she threw herself into a chair, and wept until her eyes were red, a calamity which necessitated a copious mopping with cologne water.
"My looks are spoiled for the evening, that's clear," she says to herself, ruefully. "I shall look a fright; no one will give me a second glance. But who will care for poor Reine Langton, anyway?"
But when the pretty bride's-maid dress, Mr. Langton's gift, is on, and the dark, curling tresses are looped back with pale rose-buds and some long, trailing sprays of feathery white, she is well worth looking at.
The mellow brune tint of her skin is brightened by the[Pg 8] vivid, yet changeful rose-flush on the round, dimpled cheeks; the dark eyes are none the less dazzling for the new touch of dreaminess that has come into their subtle depths beneath the drooping lashes, "like to rays of darkness."
Dressing has taken but a little time. It is a process over which Reine never lingers. She adjusts the last flower with one careless glance into the mirror, and goes to the window. The dim, mysterious twilight has fallen over everything. The silver sickle of a young moon hangs in the amethystine sky, the summer air is heavy with perfume and dew. Reine props her dimpled chin in the hollow of one small hand, and falls to musing.
To-morrow she goes back to the old dull life of care and labor, to the made-over dresses, the shabby boarding-house, the stupid, stubborn pupils of her village school.
These three weeks she has "fed on the roses, and lain in the lilies of life." Servants have waited on her, she has had her time at her own disposal, she has thoroughly enjoyed every hour of it in her eager, active fashion. This brief visit has been like a green oasis in a desert land. To-morrow she will step across its green borders, and journey on through the sandy reaches of a dreary, uncongenial life again.
"The same old, tiresome life," she says, yet even as she speaks she knows it will not be the same.
Something has come into her life these brief, bright summer days that she knew not of in the old days—even love.
"After to-morrow I shall never see him again," she says to herself with patient gravity, and there comes to her a shamed remembrance of his words that morning: "After to-morrow I shall be forever out of reach of your shrill voice and scolding tongue."
"Forever!" The word, never dwelt upon before, acquires a strange, terrible meaning in her thoughts. She realizes, with a gasp of terror, what Maud's lover really is to her. Though she has gibed him, teased him, pitilessly derided him, she has given him her whole, foolish, girlish heart. She flushes hotly with a passionate shame.
"I love him—when he will be Maud's husband in less than an hour!" she cries to herself. "For shame, Reine[Pg 9] Langton. Shake off this disgraceful weakness, and be your own brave self again."
There is a tap at the door, unheeded and unheard in her preoccupation.
It opens, and the house-maid enters, flurried and excited.
Reine starts up in a panic and looks at the clock.
"Oh, dear, it is past the time," she cries. "How could I be so careless? Are they all waiting for me, Mary?"
"No, Miss Langton—leastways I don't think they need you."
"Not need me? What do you mean? Isn't the bride dressed yet?"
"No, miss—yes, miss—that is, I don't quite know. She's run away," the girl stammers, blankly.
"Who has run away?" Reine demands, sharply.
"The bride—Miss Maud," is the startling reply.
"Where has she gone? What for?" Reine demands, inelegantly, in the shock of her great surprise.
"To marry her old lover, Mr. Clyde, that she loved, and she couldn't love Mr. Charteris, miss," said the house-maid, succinctly.
There is a moment's silence. Reine drops back into a chair, dazed with the suddenness of the news.
"You see she left a little note to her uncle, miss, to let him know where she'd gone, and the old gentleman's that mad, miss, he up and swore bad enough to lift the roof off!"
There is a quick, startling rap at the door. Mary runs to open it in a hurry, and Reine glances up with dark, anxious eyes.
The next instant she starts to her feet with a smothered cry.
On the threshold stands Vane Charteris, pale as death itself, but superbly handsome in the customary suit of solemn black that makes gentlemen appear like mourners on all festive occasions.
CHAPTER III.
Fifteen minutes before, while Reine Langton dreamed at the window, there had been great excitement in[Pg 10] the villa. The house-maid's tale was a true one. The bride-elect has eloped with another man.
They have the terrible story down in uncompromising "black and white"—in her own hand-writing. She has gone away to marry Mr. Clyde.
"Because I loved him all the while, uncle," she writes, pleadingly, "and at last I found it would break my heart to give him up. I could not love Mr. Charteris, though I tried hard, because you wished it. And indeed, Uncle Langton, you are deceived in Vane Charteris. It was your money he wanted, not me; but poor Clyde loves me for myself alone. I know you will forgive me when I come back to you, for you cannot long be angry with your own loving Maud."
All this to the uncle she had disobeyed, but not one word to the lover she had betrayed and deserted. He stands silent, biting his lips to keep back the words that rush to them, a lurid flame of angry scorn burning in his dark blue eyes.
"I could bear all else but that most cruel thrust," he says to his old friend, hoarsely, when the dismayed bride's-maids have left them together, amid the splendid paraphernalia of the bridal chamber. "When she knew how I loved her, to cast that wretched money into my face! Great God! the falsity of women! Henceforth I live only for revenge!"
The old man, so old and feeble that people said of him already that he had "one foot in the grave and the other on the brink," whirled around, and paused in his terrible revilings of Maud and her chosen lover, and looked strangely at his favorite.
"So you want revenge, my boy," he said, chuckling wickedly. "You are right to live for it. Very well, you shall have it ready made to your hand."
"How?" Vane Charteris asked, eagerly.
"That false, deceitful jade shall never receive a penny from my hoarded wealth!" declared Mr. Langton. "You shall have all."
But Vane Charteris shakes his head, decisively.
"No," he says, firmly, "I will not have my revenge that way. It would be defrauding another. You have another niece."
"I have not forgotten her claims," Mr. Langton says, grimly. "I was going on to speak of her when you interrupted[Pg 11] me. What I was about to say was this: Reine Langton shall be my heiress, and you shall be her husband."
Vane Charteris starts and recoils.
"No, no!" he exclaims.
"What! you refuse my niece's hand when I offer it to you?" he storms.
"Yes; I cannot marry her, for I do not love her," Vane answers, firmly.
"You handsome idiot! Who said anything about love? I thought we were discussing revenge," cries the old man, testily.
"So we were, but I cannot take my revenge like that! I would sooner die than have an unloved wife tied around my neck like a mill-stone," Vane Charteris answers, gravely.
"An unloved wife," the old man repeats; "and pray, couldn't you love my niece, Reine? She's a bright little beauty to my thinking."
"Love that little hoiden, that incorrigible vixen!" the young man cries, regarding his mother's old friend as if he thought he had taken leave of his senses.
Mr. Langton frowns darkly.
"Take care," he says, "you are speaking of my heiress, remember. I see how it is. Maud disliked Reine—jealous of her bright prettiness, perhaps—she has set you against her."
"She has not," declares Vane. "Reine has done it, herself. You cannot deny her brusk manners, and her sharp, ungoverned tongue, Mr. Langton."
"Pooh! mere girlish fun," retorts Mr. Langton. "I have never disliked her sprightly ways, myself; I like the vim and spirit of Reine. She makes me think of Lelia, a 'rosebud set with little willful thorns,' much more charming than Maud's 'passionless, pale-cold calm.'"
"'The king is dead, long live the king,'" Vane Charteris quotes with grim sarcasm.
"Yes, Maud is dethroned, and Reine shall reign in her stead," Mr. Langton replies; "and if you are wise, Vane Charteris, you will reign with her."
There is a moment's silence, and then Mr. Langton goes on:
"You talk of revenge. Marry Reine and you have[Pg 12] it in full measure. Maud believes that she can marry Clyde, and come back and wheedle me into taking them both into my good graces. How glorious for Reine to take her place in my favor and in your heart!"
"She could not do that," Vane answers. "I was proud of Maud's beauty, and grace, and refinement. I loved her gentleness."
"The silky, purring deceitfulness of a treacherous cat," interpolates Maud's outraged uncle.
Vane flushes deeply.
"Still I should never love Reine," he said. "She continually jars upon me. She keeps my nerves upon edge. You are right to make her your heiress, but forgive me for saying that I can never make her my bride."
"She shall not be one without the other," declares the old man stubbornly.
"You mean—" Vane says, aghast.
"That if you refuse to marry Reine, she shall go back to her life of toil to-morrow, and I'll leave my money to found an asylum for idiots and fools," storms the old man, violently.
"You would never be so unjust, Mr. Langton," Vane exclaims, incredulously. "Let me reason with you. Though I do not admire Reine, I pity her. She has a hard life. Let me plead for the poor orphan girl. Take her in the place of Maud, and give her your love and your wealth."
"No, I have announced my ultimatum. To-morrow she leaves here, and to-morrow you leave here. She to her life of slavery, you as a mark for the finger of scorn to point at, a jilted man! How false-hearted Maud and her successful husband will laugh at the misery of the man they fooled so shamelessly; how the minister, waiting down-stairs, and the wedding guests will laugh in their sleeves at the deserted bridegoom. Go, now, sir, and remember that your cursed obstinacy has beggared you, and cheated Reine Langton of fortune."
He glares with bleared, furious eyes at the uncompromising young fellow. Vane looks troubled, reckless all at once.
"I do not want to cause Reine such a misfortune," he says, sadly. "Give me five minutes to decide in, Mr. Langton."
"Take them," the host says, shortly. Vane walks to the window and stares silently out at the dewy, odorous, tranquil summer night. Many thoughts crowd into his mind.
He has loved Maud Langton dearly, and he is cut to the heart by the bitter humiliation she has put upon him. He is a jilted man. How shall he face the sneering world again? that world that but a little while ago fawned upon him because he was going to marry Mr. Langton's heiress.
Mr. Langton waits impatiently, watch in hand, for the stipulated five minutes to pass. He is very anxious to have his way and spite Maud for her falsehood and disobedience. Inwardly he curses Vane's Quixotic foolishness in refusing a fortune, no matter how burdened.
"The time is up," he says, impatiently. "Yes or no. Marry Reine to-night and I will make my will to-morrow, and leave everything to you and your wife. For the present, until my death, which can't be far off," with sardonic humor, "I'll settle twenty-five thousand a year upon you; refuse, and you both go."
Vane Charteris turns upon him a white, desperate face.
"For myself I despise your threat," he says. "I am a man. I can carve my own way to fortune, yet I should hate for Reine to blame me with her loss of fortune. Mr. Langton, I will marry her if she will have me."
"Of course she will; no girl in her senses would refuse a handsome man like you, let alone the fortune," Mr. Langton cries, with returning good humor.
"On one condition," Vane continues, haughtily.
Mr. Langton lifts his eyebrows interrogatively.
"This: that I may go abroad to-morrow to be absent a year—you may offer any evasive excuse to the bride—and that while I am gone you will train Reine to be a graceful, dignified woman, whom I can respect and honor."
"Like Maud, for instance," Mr. Langton says.
"Maud's manners were perfect," Vane answers, flushing. "I could not wish more grace and refinement for my own wife so that her heart is kept truer."
"You are quite decided to go away?" Mr. Langton inquires, disappointed.
"Yes," decidedly. "I can marry Reine, but I cannot live with her just yet."
"Very well, you shall have your way. Now go and ask her if she will have you."
"Where shall I find her?"
"In her own room, I think. I have not seen her in all the bustle. I will wait here. If she says yes, bring her to me."
And Vane turns away with a white, set face, to obey him.
CHAPTER IV.
Vane Charteris enters the room and motions the maid to withdraw, closes the door, and stands face to face with Reine Langton. It strikes him suddenly on what a ridiculous errand he has come. This morning he offended her, and she refused to pardon him. Tonight he has come to ask her to be his wife.
But Reine—passionate, impulsive Reine—has quite forgotten all that now. After that one startled moment of indecision and surprise, she goes forward to him, she puts her small hand on his coat sleeve, she looks up into his white, haggard face with dark, pitying eyes.
"You are come to tell me," she says, forgetting in her eager excitement how strange it would be for him to seek her sympathy. "But I have heard. Believe me, I am very sorry for your disappointment. It was mean and cruel," indignantly, "in Maud. I would not have done it, bad as you think me."
How soft the dark, uplifted eyes; how gentle the pitying voice, how kind the words! Can this be Reine—sharp-tongued, restless, gibing Reine? He stares in great surprise.
"I should not care if I were you," she goes on. "I should be too proud to grieve for one so false and unkind. She never loved you; I saw that as soon as I came here, but I did not know she could be so mean. I will never speak to her again."
"You take my part," he says, unconsciously pleased.
"Yes, because you have been treated unfairly," she[Pg 15] says, warmly. "You have been jilted at the very altar—you so handsome, so noble——" she stops, biting her lips, vexed at herself for these outspoken words.
But Vane Charteris smiles.
"Thank you for those words," he says. "They give me courage to ask what I came for—Reine, will you be my wife?"
The white hand falls from his arm, she steps backward a pace, and stares at him mutely, with great, wondering, dark eyes.
He repeats the words:
"Reine, will you be my wife? Will you go down-stairs and marry me, a jilted man? Will you take the man your beautiful cousin deemed worthless?"
A passionate sarcasm quivers in his tone. She looks at him, the deep, rich color flushing into her cheeks.
"You do not mean it; you are jesting!" she cries, in a vaguely troubled tone.
"I do," he answers. "The guests are here; the feast is provided; the minister waits. Nothing is lacking but the bride, who has fled to the arms of another. Will you throw yourself into the breach, Reine, and make everybody happy?"
"If I thought I could," she begins, with a questioning glance, and a delicious thrill at her heart. Something whispers to her that he would wed her to spite Maud, yet her instinct prompts her to take him at his word. In time her tender love must win a return from him.
"You must not stop to think," the strange wooer says, impatiently. "Everyone is waiting, and your uncle is most impatient. I have his permission to win you if I can."
"Uncle Langton wishes it?" she asks, wondering.
"Yes. What is your answer, Reine?"
"It is yes," she answers, simply, frankly, and happily.
"Thank you," he says; "come, then, Mr. Langton is waiting for us."
Then, softened by her gentle mood and the sparkling beauty he cannot help but acknowledge, he says, with a dash of mischief:
"You are changed from this morning Reine. So you do not hate me after all?"
A spark of the morning's diablerie flashes into the bright eyes again.
"Yes, I do," she retorts, "and I am only taking you that I may torment you to death."
He checks the impatient sigh, and leads her to Mr. Langton.
"Sensible girl," he chuckles, beaming upon her. "Knew better than to refuse uncle's fortune, didn't you, Reine?"
She stares at him, her rosy cheeks grow pale.
"I don't understand," she falters.
"Didn't you tell her?" Mr. Langton demands of Vane.
"No, I forgot. After all, it wasn't necessary," he answers.
"Cunning dog," the old man laughs. "So she took you for yourself alone? Well, I told you so. She has a true heart in spite of her wild ways."
But Reine stares from one to the other, vaguely troubled.
Mr. Langton bends and kisses the fair, low brow.
"Reine, you are my heiress now," he says. "I shall cut Maud off with a shilling. You and Vane will have all my money when I am dead."
"Oh, if you please, Uncle Langton, I'd rather not," she cries, breathlessly, then she looks at Vane. "Is he taking me for the money?" she says, with a flash of disdain in her great, black eyes.
Vane flushes an angry crimson, but his old friend interferes.
"No, you little goose," he replies, severely, "He's taking you because you're a deuced pretty girl, and worth a dozen disobedient Mauds. Now will you put on that wedding-veil there, and go down-stairs with him and show those gaping, gossiping simpletons that there's a bride after all, and the wedding-feast will not be spoiled by the groom's sorrow?"
He rings the bell with the words. A trim maid appears with a quickness that would argue that she had been listening outside the door.
"Put that wedding-veil on Miss Langton," commands her master. "She will be the bride, and also my heiress."
"Miss Reine, let me congratulate you," the girl exclaims,[Pg 17] with a heartiness that shows how Reine has won her way since she came to Langton Villa.
In five minutes the veil is on, with the trailing sprays of orange flowers meant for Maud. The rich, white silk, with its lace flounces, makes no inappropriate bridal dress. But Reine stands still, a lovely bride, grown suddenly strangely pale and grave-looking.
"Now, Mary, hunt up the bride's-maids while I go down and notify the minister," adjures Mr. Langton.
They go, and the bride and groom remain alone together. She stands shyly in the center of the room, with drooping eyes, dark, slender, lovely, but strangely unlike the fair and stately Juno Vane Charteris has pictured these many days as his bride.
They speak no word to each other, and the laughing "men and maidens" come in and surround them.
"It is just like a novel," one says; and another: "It serves Maud right," and all agree that it is "just too romantic for anything," and are glad there will be a wedding after all.
But the two principals say nothing in all the babble of idle tongues. Arm in arm they go forward to the marriage altar, side by side they breathe those solemn vows that bind together their antagonistic lives. It is all like a dream to Reine: the wedding march, the wedding flowers, the curious faces, the solemn words, the circle of gold upon her finger. But as she turns to meet the congratulations of the guests, one precious thought is blooming like a full and perfect rose in her passionate heart:
"He is all my own now. I shall not be parted from him to-morrow."
After the hum of congratulations is over there ensues a momentary pause. The bride is led to a seat, and Vane Charteris drifts away from her side. The good wishes, the pretty sentiments of the guests fall meaningless on his ears.
"What happiness can I promise myself as the husband of that little vixen?" he says to himself, darkly.
So he stands apart in moody silence, and the curious glances of a hundred eyes note the handsome, troubled white face, and turn again pityingly on the girlish young bride.
"She will never be happy with him," they say, decidedly. "He has only married her to spite Maud."
Suddenly, in that momentary lull and stillness, the door is flung violently open, a tall, queenly figure, clad in a gray traveling-dress, wavers a moment on the threshold, then rushes across the room to Mr. Langton. She falls on her knees before him.
"Oh, for God's sake, tell me I am not too late," she cries. "Uncle Langton, I have repented my folly before it was too late. Forgive me, uncle. I have come back to marry Mr. Charteris."
CHAPTER V.
Dead silence falls. Every eye turns on that graceful, kneeling figure, and fair, uplifted face, with the gold braids crowning the graceful head so royally.
Mr. Langton stares stupidly a moment.
Maud puts her hand on his arm and shakes him.
"Uncle, don't you understand?" she says. "I have come back to marry Vane. I repented as soon as I saw Mr. Clyde. I knew in a moment that I did not care for him enough to sacrifice everything for him. I told him so, and he was very angry, but I came away in spite of his terrible threats. I—I like Mr. Charteris best."
Vane Charteris starts forward like one awakening from a nightmare.
"Hush; do not perjure your soul, Maud," he breaks out, sternly. "Say what you mean. You do not care for Vane Charteris, but you love Mr. Langton's money too well to give it up for love in a cottage with Mr. Clyde."
She starts to her feet, half extending her arms.
"This from you, Vane!" she cries, dramatically. "Surely you have not turned against me after all your professions of love. Do not be so hard, Vane. You see I have come back to you. Forgive me, I pray you. I do care for you, I want to be your wife!"
"You can never be my wife. By the folly of an hour you have barred yourself out of my life forever," he answers her with a strange, icy sternness.
She stares at him mutely a moment, then turns to Mr. Langton.
"You see," she says, triumphantly, "it is Mr. Charteris[Pg 19] who refuses me—I do not refuse him. I am willing to keep to my contract—he declines my hand. Surely you will forgive me now, dear uncle, and take me back. I have not forfeited your love nor your fortune."
And Mr. Langton, finding voice at last, answers her, angrily:
"You have forfeited both by your cursed madness. Henceforth you have no part in my heart nor my home. Yonder sits my heiress, and Vane Charteris' wife!"
With a gasp like one dying, Maud follows the direction of his pointed finger.
She sees a slight, girlish figure that has suddenly come forward to the side of Vane Charteris as if mutely claiming him for hers. Her own costly wedding veil drapes the dainty, lissome figure.
"Reine Langton," she cries, furiously, "have you dared to rob me of my fortune and husband?"
Reine lifts her flashing, dark eyes.
"Remember, Maud, you flung them both away," she answers, indignantly.
"Fool that I was," Maud wails, despairingly. "I have lost all, all, by my brief madness! Oh! Uncle Langton, surely you will forgive me, and take me back now when I am so bitterly repentant. Let her have Mr. Charteris—I can do without him—but do not send me away!"
He looks coldly at the pleading blue eyes, and the eager, upraised hands. If possible he is more bitterly angry with her now than he was when he received her note an hour ago.
"It is useless to plead with me," he says, coldly. "You should have thought of all this before. It is too late now. I have flung you out of my heart forever. Reine will be my heiress—you can go."
"I have nowhere to go," she says, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes and parted lips.
"It matters not to me," he answers, cruelly. "Go back to the fine, gay lover that lured you from your duty and your plighted word. See if he will take you, now that you have lost all chances of the Langton fortune."
Reine comes bravely forward to the side of the discarded girl.
"Oh! uncle, let her stay," she says, imploringly; "I do not want your fortune, I have Vane. That is enough for me. Let Maud come home and have the money—or at least share it."
"No," he thunders, stormily; "I have said my say—I will abide by it. She is nothing to me henceforth. Let her go."
Maud looks around at the bride.
"It is all your fault," she says, bitterly. "If you had not married Vane before I came, my uncle would have forgiven me. Vane does not love you, he has only taken you for my uncle's money. Beware that you do not rue this night in dust and ashes."
"If I had only known that you would come back, Maud, like this," Reine begins, wringing her hands in a passionate kind of self-pity.
Maud crosses to the door before them all, with that proud, imperial step that had become Mr. Langton's heiress so well, but is mockingly out of place now. The bride follows her.
"Maud," she whispers, anxiously, "send me your address to-morrow, and I will come to you. Indeed, indeed I am anxious to befriend you."
Maud puts her aside without a word, and steps over the threshold. She walks with her light, proud step down the hall, and disappears in the outer darkness, looking regretfully back, as Eve might have looked when she was driven from paradise.
"My friends," Mr. Langton says, rising, "do not let this unpleasant episode damp the wedding festivities. You came to do honor to my heiress, and Vane Charteris' bride. She is here, and the banquet waits."
"The queen is dead, long live the queen!" that is what he means. They understand that Maud is dethroned, and Reine reigns in her stead. They obey his implied wish. No one speaks the name of Maud either in praise or blame. The festivities go on. The luxurious banquet duly discussed, the joyous music invites the young and gay to "trip the light fantastic toe." This is a country wedding where all is freedom and simple enjoyment. The guests "don't go home until morning."
In the pale dawn-light some of the young men, who left with gay words and light hearts, came hurrying back with blanched faces and startled eyes. In the[Pg 21] woods near-by, they have found the blood-stained body of a dead man—Maud's lover, Mr. Clyde.
CHAPTER VI.
Wearied with the long festivities of the night, Reine goes to her room, in the pale light of the new day, and lays aside the bridal veil and dress, donning a cool white wrapper instead. She bathes her face in some fresh water, brushes out her silky, dark tresses, and loosely tying them back with a scarlet ribbon, slips quietly down the stairs again.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Langton and Vane Charteris coming into the deserted parlor, find her standing with one of the maids before the long table, on which the numerous and costly bridal presents have been displayed. Friends have vied with each other in the elegance and beauty of their gifts to Mr. Langton's heiress. Silver and gold, and precious stones flash back the expiring light of the flickering lamps. The house-maid has brought in a large box, and she and Reine are deftly restoring the wrappers to the various articles, and packing them carefully into its capacious recesses.
Mr. Langton stares.
"Child, what upon earth are you doing?" he exclaims.
Reine looks around, brightly.
"Only packing these things away for Maud," she explains.
"For Maud?" Mr. Langton gasps.
"Yes, sir. I shall forward them to her as soon as I find out where she is staying," she replies, pausing to admire a richly-chased bracelet, set with rubies, before she closes the satin-lined case.
"The deuce you will," Mr. Langton growls. "Upon my word I never saw such cool impertinence in my life. Who authorized you to do such a thing?"
"I took the liberty myself," Reine responds, flashing a laughing glance upon his indignant face.
"Very well. Let me inform you, Mrs. Charteris, that these things belong to you, not to Maud. They were given to my heiress, and Vane's bride, therefore they are your own."
The beautiful color flows into her face, but she shakes her small head resolutely.
"You must pardon me, uncle," she says, "but, indeed, I think your ideas of meum et tuum are rather confused. All these pretty things belong to my cousin by every right in the world, and I am determined she shall have them."
"I say she shall not," he cries, violently.
"And I say she shall," Reine reiterates, laughing, but in earnest, the golden lights fairly dancing in her eyes.
"Why, you audacious little spitfire," the old man begins to splutter, but Vane Charteris interrupts him gravely.
"I think Reine's idea is the true one," he says. "The gifts really belong to Maud, and she ought to have them."
The bride flashes him a dazzling look of gratitude from her brilliant eyes.
"There, now, Uncle Langton," she cries, with pretty triumph. "You see my husband sides with me."
"Sides with Maud, you mean," Mr. Langton mutters, between his teeth.
"He will always be on the side of justice, I hope," Reine says, with a smile at her husband, that he does not see, consequently does not return.
But Mr. Langton frowns at the pert little lady.
"See here, Reine," he says. "I won't be set at naught by a child like you, if you were fifty times my niece. Have your way this time, but don't begin your rule too soon. Remember, I haven't made my will yet."
"That does not frighten me one bit," she laughs; then she rises on tiptoe to put her rosy lips to his ear. "You cannot take my husband from me," she whispers, archly. "I do not care for the rest."
He looks at her half-pityingly, and turns away without a word.
But something born of that pitying thought makes him say to Vane Charteris, as they pass from the room:
"There is no reason you should regret Maud. Reine is quite as charming and beautiful, though in a different way from her cousin."
And Vane answers, readily enough:
"She is beautiful, certainly no one can deny that.[Pg 23] She has the brilliant beauty of the rose. But one must beware the thorns. She is a perfect contrast to Maud, who always reminded me of a tall, white, stately lily."
"The rose is the sweeter, to my thinking," Mr. Langton replies. "Besides, the rose is the true emblem of love."
They pass through the hall, and out into the soft light of the early day. The cool, dewy breath of the morning, freighted with the scent of countless flowers, blows in their faces, the matin songs of myriad birds make music in their ears. Roses, honeysuckles, jessamines and lilies, open their perfumed chalices to greet the rising sun that begins to color the eastern sky with tints of purple and rose and gold.
And up the graveled path came a trio of young men who had left the house but a little while ago, laughing and jesting in the light-heartedness of youth. They come silently now, with blanched and solemn faces, and heavily-beating hearts.
"Something dreadful has happened," they tell Mr. Langton. "We have found a dead man in the woods. It is Mr. Clyde. He is cold and stiff—has certainly been dead several hours. And, worst of all, he has most probably been murdered. There is a bullet-hole through his heart."
Found murdered! With what an icy chill the words strike upon the senses in that beautiful, peaceful summer dawn.
Having finished the packing of the box, Reine comes out, attracted by the hum of voices.
The rich color pales in her cheeks at the dreadful news.
"Oh, how terrible," she cries. "It was Maud's lover, and she loved him, poor girl!"
She sees Vane Charteris wince, and feels as if she could bite her tongue off for the thoughtless words. Her heart sinks heavily.
"He has given me his hand, but not his heart," she says to herself. "I must be very patient. Perhaps I may win his love yet. I must do so, for I cannot live without it."
As she thinks all this, he comes to her side. The[Pg 24] heart of the unloved bride beats quick and fast as the blue eyes fall upon her.
But he has only come to say, coldly and carelessly:
"Reine, you had better go in. This is too terrible a thing for a young girl's ears."
CHAPTER VII.
Yesterday, Reine would have defied Vane, and taken her own way, recklessly. To-day, filled with the yearning wish to win her husband's heart, she obeys with gentle dignity, and retires into the house.
"I have read somewhere that love wins love," she says to herself. "If that be true, surely my patience, my gentleness, my devoted love will sometime win a return from him."
They hold an inquest over Mr. Clyde's body that day. No facts are elicited that throw any light on the manner of his death.
He was a stranger in the neighborhood, boarding at a quiet farm-house for his health, he said. He had few friends and fewer enemies. The people who lodged him deposed that they had not seen him since their early seven o'clock supper, the evening previous. He had been in very gay and brilliant spirits then; had dressed himself elegantly and gone out before dark. No one had seen him until he was found dead in the woods this morning, shot through the heart. The physicians examine the corpse, and decide that he has been dead since nine o'clock last night, and suddenly a baleful whisper runs from lip to lip.
There are a hundred people, guests of the grand wedding at Langton villa last night, who remember Maud Langton's abrupt entrance a little after nine o'clock, and her frank confession that she had gone away to marry Mr. Clyde, but had repented, and left him in spite of his threats.
These facts are communicated to the coroner. He looks exceedingly grave.
"It will be quite necessary to examine Miss Langton on the subject," he declares.
Someone is found who remembers to have heard[Pg 25] that Miss Langton is at the hotel in the village, near by.
An officer is dispatched to bring her in to the inquest.
So they wait in the odorous sweetness of the green wood, the officers of justice, the silent corpse, the curious crowd; the wild birds sing on as gayly as if no dead man lay there on the sweet, green grass, with his handsome white face upturned to Heaven as if pleading for vengeance on his slayer.
He has not been murdered for purposes of robbery. His gold watch, his diamond ring, his purse, containing a hundred dollars in bills, are all secure upon his person. It is not known that he had an enemy in the world. A strange mystery centers around his death.
A few notice that old Mr. Langton goes away quietly before the officer's return with Maud. And Vane Charteris stays. Standing apart beneath the shade of a towering maple, he waits, with a strange, incensed look in his dark blue eyes, and on his handsome face that is almost as white as that of the dead. Many eyes regard him curiously; but the cold, white, inscrutable face tells nothing to their wondering gaze.
At last, after what seems a long and wearisome interval of waiting, the rumble of the carriage wheels is heard. They pause in the road near by, they catch the impatient neigh of horses, and the officer appears leading a lady through the trees and grass toward them.
She comes toward them, trembling so that, but for the support of the officer's arm, she must certainly fall to the ground. At the coroner's request she lifts her veil and looks at him with frightened, blue eyes, and a wild, white face—whiter than the lilies to which Vane Charteris likened her that morning.
She is duly sworn, and they re-cover the dead, white face, with its staring eyes they cannot close, and mute, cold lips.
"Do you recognize this man?" they ask her, and after one shuddering, quickly-withdrawn glance, she averts her face, and answers with white, pain-drawn lips:
"It is Mr. Clyde."
She is asked next:
"When and where did you see him last?"
A quiver passes over the pale, beautiful face.
"Last night, at or near nine o'clock, near this spot," she falters, yet standing suddenly erect, with stately, lily-like grace, and a proudly-poised head.
"Was he living or dead?"
"Living, of course," haughtily.
"Mr. Clyde was your lover?" the coroner interrogated.
"I have not said so," she says, flashing him a haughty look.
"The fact is well known," he answers. "You went away to marry him last night?"
The deep color flows into her cheeks, then recedes again, leaving her pale as marble.
"I cannot deny it," she murmurs, in a crushed voice.
"Then you changed your mind, as it is a lady's privilege to do, and left him. He was very angry, and used threats toward you," the coroner pursues, politely.
"Yes," Miss Langton answers, in the same low, sad voice.
"Of what nature were those threats?" they ask her.
"He threatened to destroy himself if I did not become his wife, but, oh, I did not believe it, really—I thought he was only trying to frighten me into compliance with his wish," she cries, while a look of regret and sorrow transforms this fair, beautiful face. A hum of surprise goes through the eager throng of listeners.
"Do you believe that he really killed himself?"
"Yes; how else should he have met his death?" she inquired, fixing a look of grave wonder upon him.
A slight whisper goes through the crowd again—some shrug their shoulders.
The coroner pursues without answering her question:
"Was Mr. Clyde in the habit of making such suicidal threats?"
"He had done so on several occasions."
"In the presence of witnesses?" the question is asked with strange gravity.
Maud looks at him with a grave wonder on her fair, proud face.
"No, of course not," she answers, a little annoyance in her clear tone.
"Then you cannot prove that the deceased made those threats against his own life?" the coroner asked in a troubled tone. It is very plain to him that she[Pg 27] cannot see the cloud of distress and suspicion gathering around her.
"Cannot prove it!" she says, indignantly. "You have my word under oath."
"Other evidence would make it all the stronger," he replies, evasively.
The officer who has brought her goes forward and whispers something in the coroner's ear. He starts and looks at the girl fixedly a moment from head to foot, then proceeds with the examination.
"When you left your uncle's house last night, did you return to your trysting-place with your discarded lover?"
She stares at him with strangely dilated eyes, and parted lips.
"Why should I?" she says. "I had dismissed him, and parted from him. I supposed he had gone away."
"Please answer, yes or no, to the question," he urges.
"What question?" a little shortly.
"The one I asked you just now. Did you return to your discarded lover at this place when you left Langton Villa the second time? Yes, or no."
"No, then," with a slight touch of defiance.
A minute of dead silence. The coroner resumes, almost irrelevantly, it would seem:
"Is the dress you wear now the same one you had on last night, Miss Langton?"
"Yes, the same. I have not slept all night, she replies, wearily.
"Please observe that on the front breadth of your dress there are some dark, reddish-looking splashes and stains that resemble blood. Can you account for them?"
A cry of mingled horror and fear comes from her lips. All eyes turn on the stylish, dark-gray silk that clings so gracefully to the tall, finely molded figure. True enough, there are some dark red stains on the middle breadth between the lower frills and the upper drapery.
"Can you account for them?" the coroner repeats.
But after one swift glance at the tell-tale marks, Maud crimsons, and the tears start into her eyes.
"You must pardon me; I spoke falsely to you just now," she says, with desperate calmness. "I can tell[Pg 28] you how those stains came there. They are Vernon Clyde's blood."
Again an ominous whisper runs through the circle of listeners. Maud glances around her fearfully. She meets strange, averted glances from faces that have been wont to smile upon her before. A strange light comes into her eyes.
"Oh, what do they mean?" she cries. "They do not think, do they, that I killed Mr. Clyde? I tell you he killed himself. He told me he would do so if I refused to marry him."
"Tell us how those blood-stains came upon your dress," the coroner answers, briefly and gravely.
She clasps her hands and shivers through all her imperially perfect form.
"I did come back here last night," she says, in a fearful whisper. "My uncle had discarded me. Mr. Charteris had married another, and I had no one to turn to but the lover I had discarded a little while before. So I hurried back, thinking I would be Clyde's wife after all, but when I came, he," with a gasp, "he lay dead before me. I had thought it but a mere idle threat to frighten me, but he had kept his word faithfully. He had shot himself through the heart. I knelt down beside him, and laid my hand on his breast, but it was cold and still. Oh, you must not think I killed him! I loved him, and I would have gone away with him, but I was afraid of losing my uncle's money," she ends, with a choking sob.
"Why did you not raise an alarm when you found him dead?"
"I was afraid they would charge me with his murder, so I hurried away, not knowing of those tell-tale stains on my dress where I had been down on my knees beside him. I did not kill him, no, no, but my fatal weakness drove him to take his own life."
There is a moment's perfect silence, then the voice of the coroner is heard, with a troubled cadence in its sternness:
"I regret my painful duty, Miss Langton, more than I can say. The high position you have always held in this county would forbid the thought of your criminality, but the evidence against you is of such a nature[Pg 29] that we shall be compelled to commit you to prison until further developments."
Her cry of terror and indignation echoes to the blue sky above her golden head. The sweet song-birds fly affrighted from its shrill, eerie sound.
"You believe me guilty," she exclaimed. "Yet I have told you again and again that Vernon Clyde died by his own hand."
"If you could prove it to us," he says, "if you could even prove by a competent witness his threat of self murder, you should go free this hour."
She looks at him dumbly and strangely. Suddenly a light of dazzling joy breaks over her face. She slips her gloved hand into the folds of her dress, withdrawing it with a gasp of disappointment.
"Let me tell you," she says, hurriedly and eagerly. "Yesterday Mr. Clyde sent me a note relative to my promise to meet him last night. In it he says, distinctly and clearly: 'If you do not marry me, I swear I will shoot myself through the heart.' I remember that the note is in the pocket of the blue dress I wore yesterday. Tell me, for Heaven's sake, would that be proof sufficient?"
"If the writing could be proved as Mr. Clyde's, it would entirely clear you from suspicion."
"Then let them take me to Langton Villa," she cries, anxiously. "I can lay my hand upon the note in one moment."
All eyes are turned upon her glad, triumphant face. No one remembers Vane Charteris where he stands in the shade of the tall maples. Yet a strange look has come upon the fair, handsome face. The lips curl nervously beneath the golden-brown mustache, the blue eyes gleam with a strange, mocking triumph.
CHAPTER VIII.
Mr. Langton is nowhere to be seen when Maud re-enters the home, so late her own. Reine comes to meet her, pale, troubled, sympathetic. They have not been very fond of each other in the past—Maud has been too proud to encourage the friendship of her poor cousin—but now the heart of the younger girl goes out to the other in a gush of sympathy and sorrow.
"Maud, I am so sorry," she says, putting her hand gently on the girl's arm; "but never fear, dear. All will come right. Of course you would not have harmed a single hair of Mr. Clyde's head. Everybody must know that."
"Come with me to my room, Reine," Maud answers.
Inside that quiet room she had quitted only yesterday eve in such high hope Maud's proud self-possession breaks down. Throwing herself on a luxurious sofa, she gives way to hysterical weeping.
"I am so sorry, Maud," Reine can only repeat, in gentlest sympathy.
Maud gives her an angry glance through her tears.
"Sorry," she says. "Sorry! Why should you be? Your fortune is built on the wreck of mine."
"Oh, Maud, do not say so," the girl cries, deeply pained. "Indeed, indeed, I do not want the money. I will ask Uncle Langton to give it all to you. I have Vane, I care for nothing else."
"You love him?" Maud says, with lifted brows, slightly incredulous.
"Yes," with a deep, beautiful blush.
"You cannot suppose that he cares for you," Maud says, with subdued contempt.
"Not yet—not as he cared for you, of course, Maud. But I hope to win him after awhile. You know," hopefully, "he must have thought he could learn to care for me, else he would not have married me."
"What a little simpleton you are," Maud says, disdainfully. "Ring the bell for my maid, please."
The maid comes, her eyes red with weeping. She has been mourning over the troubles of her late mistress, and now, with dejected brow, stands waiting.
"Nellie, you remember the note you brought me from Mr. Clyde yesterday?"
"Yes, miss, an' if I'd known what trouble it would bring, I'd never have carried the first note back and forth," says Nellie, with vain lamentation.
"It's too late for regrets now," Maud answers her impatiently. "I want that note, Nellie. It is in the pocket of the blue dress I wore yesterday. Get it for me."
Barely a minute—and a cry of dismay from Nellie's lips.
"Oh, Miss Maud, 'tisn't there."
Maud's face grows suddenly white and scared.
"Look again," she says, with a gasp.
"'Tisn't there," the maid reiterates, after a second flurried search.
"Then it's somewhere else," confidently. "I know it is in this room. Look until you find it, Nellie."
Then she turns to Reine.
"Can you guess why I came back last night?"
"You told us the reason when you came, didn't you?" Reine says, blankly.
"Not exactly. I will tell you now while Nellie is searching for the note. Of course you knew when I went away I didn't expect to lose my uncle's fortune?"
"I thought you did. Hadn't he said——" begins simple Reine.
"That I should marry Charteris, or lose the money—yes, I know, but I give you my word I never believed it. I honestly thought I could marry Mr. Clyde and return here. I thought it would be an easy matter to wheedle my doting uncle into taking us both back. I never dreamed that you would throw yourself into the breach and help them to their revenge against me."
"I never thought of such a thing myself, until—until Vane asked me!" Reine murmurs, blushingly.
"Do you know why he asked you?" sneers the beautiful girl before her.
"To spite you for having jilted him so publicly, Maud, and, perhaps, because he liked me a little after all," she says, a little wistfully.
"I gave you credit for just a little more sense, Reine," Maud answers, bitterly. "Vane Charteris disliked you exceedingly. He thought you a vixen, neither more nor less. He made you his wife because Mr. Langton literally forced him to it."
"It is not true. Why do you say such things? You are cruel, Maud," the bride cries out, starting indignantly to her feet.
"It is the truth. Nellie, have you found the note yet?"
"No, miss, nor I don't think I can. Was it so very important?" returns the girl.
"Important! My very life hangs on its production," Maud says, wildly. "You have looked carelessly. I could swear that it is in this room. It must be found."
"I'll look again. Perhaps I've overlooked it, being in a hurry," the maid returns, patiently, and Maud turns again to her cousin.
"Nellie has always been very faithful to me," she says. "She was in my confidence. She knew the trysting-place in the woods where I was to meet Mr. Clyde. As soon as she learned that it was likely you would marry Vane Charteris and cheat me out of Uncle Langton's fortune, she hastened after me, and urged me to return and prevent such a catastrophe. I decided at once to return. I had no notion of doing the love-in-a-cottage business with my poor, but handsome lover."
"You were heartless, Maud," Reine says, with a flash of her superb, dark eyes.
"So Mr. Clyde said," carelessly. "Anyway, I told him I should come back. He was very angry. He drove Nell back, and swore I should stay and go with him to the preacher that was even then waiting to marry us. I would not yield an inch, and as soon as I could I got away."
"Why do you tell me all this, Maud?" Reine says, with something like royal scorn. "You make me think very little of you."
"You will perhaps think very little of yourself presently," beautiful Maud answers, maliciously. "Come here, Nellie, and tell Mrs. Charteris all the hard things her husband said about her when Mr. Langton almost went down on his knees to him to marry her."
"How can she know?" Reine says, puzzled.
"I was hid in a closet, listening, if you'll please to excuse me, ma'am," the maid says, timorously, to the new mistress of Langton Villa. Then she looks at Maud. "Oh, I'd rather not," she exclaims. "It would only hurt Mrs. Charteris' feelings."
"Do as I bid you," Maud answers, with her imperious tone of command. "When Mr. Langton asked Vane Charteris to marry Reine, what words did he use in reply?"
Nellie looks at the bride with scared eyes.
"Mrs. Charteris, you mustn't get mad at me. I[Pg 33] wouldn't tell it, no, not to save my life, only that Miss Maud will be angry if I don't," she says, deprecatingly.
No words come from Reine's pale lips. She stares with great, troubled dark eyes alternately at the beautiful, cruel mistress and the shrinking little maid.
"Tell her," Maud repeats, imperiously.
"Well, then, he said," the maid begins, nervously, "he said, Mrs. Charteris, a flat no that he wouldn't marry you, that he couldn't love a vixen and a hoiden like you, an' he'd sooner die than have you hanged like a mill-stone around his neck."
"Why, then, did he consent to marry me?" the bride gasps, after a shiver and moan of unspeakable humiliation.
"For your own sake, ma'am, 'cause Mr. Langton said he'd make you his heiress if the gentleman would marry you, and if he wouldn't, why he would leave his money to some asylum for fools. An' so Mr. Vane he said he would marry you, 'cause he wouldn't want you to lose the fortune on his account."
"On one condition," Maud says, in her clear, high-pitched voice, gazing with pitiless eyes at the beautiful, scarlet face before her.
But Reine lifts her small hand with a sudden imperious gesture of command.
"I will not hear another word," she says, in a tone of mingled sorrow and pride. "You must obey me now, Nellie; I am your mistress, not Maud. And I command you never to open your lips on this subject again."
Nellie shrinks abashed. Her whilom mistress laughs low and mockingly.
"You have heard enough, eh? Well, I don't blame you. Well, Nellie, the note?"
"Oh, miss, I haven't found it yet, and indeed—indeed, I've looked in every spot in this room where it could possibly be. Sure, you've tucked it away somewhere and forgot, Miss Maud. Try to remember where you had it last," the girl says, soothingly.
Startled and half afraid, Maud springs to her feet putting her white hand to her brow.
"Let me think," she says, confusedly; "ah, now I remember; yesterday, when I went down the path to Mr. Charteris and Reine under the tree I had the note in my hand. I slipped it into my pocket."
"It must have fallen on the ground," Nellie says, quickly. "Shall I go and see?"
"Yes," Maud answers, anxiously.
Reine, grown suddenly, strangely pale, looks at the beautiful, harassed face of her cousin.
"That note, Maud," she says, in a voice of repressed excitement. "Is it so very important?"
"Important?" Maud says, peevishly. "Did I not tell you my very life hangs on it? They believe that I killed Mr. Clyde. I must go to prison unless I can find that note, which would establish my innocence."
"Then it must be found," Reine says with sudden nervousness. "I will go and help Nellie find it."
"No—no, Reine; where is my uncle?"
"Shut up in the library, I think, Maud."
"Is he so very—very angry with me," she asks, lifting her large blue eyes to Reine's troubled face.
"I—I'm afraid so," Reine stammers, with marked hesitation.
"Would he see me, do you think?" Maud inquires.
"I do not know," Reine answers, with an unconscious sigh.
"Go and ask him, Reine. Oh, I must make friends with him! What shall I do without a friend in this perilous time?"
"I will be your friend," Reine ventures, wistfully.
Maud measures the slight figure with scornful eyes.
"You! what good could you do me?" she asks, disdainfully.
"I do not know. I am small, but I am willing," Reine answers to that look. "Remember, Maud, a little mouse once saved a lion."
"Go and ask my uncle if he will let me come in and speak to him," Maud answers, ignoring her offer with proud indifference.
The slight, girlish figure turns away without a word. In the hall she meets Nellie returning.
"You have not found the note?" she says.
"No, ma'am, and whatever will my poor Miss Maud do? Oh, Mrs. Charteris, will they hang her for Mr. Clyde's murder? Oh, I daren't go in and tell her I cannot find it," whimpers poor Nellie.
"Nellie," abruptly, "tell me where to find Mr. Charteris."
"Oh, ma'am, at the inquest, most probably," returns Nellie, surprised; then, with an imploring look, "oh, Mrs. Charteris, please'm don't tell him what I told you. I know Mr. Langton would discharge me for listening. I shouldn't have told you, never, but for Miss Maud."
Reine looks at her sadly. A far-away look in her "dark—dark eyes."
"You needn't be afraid, Nell. I shall never tell him," she says, slowly, and passes on.
She opens the library door softly, and goes in. Mr. Langton is sitting dejectedly in his arm-chair.
"Uncle, dear," she says, in a strange, low voice, "tell me where to find Mr. Charteris."
He starts, guiltily, it seems to her. His fingers close over a slip of paper in his hand.
"You want Vane—oh, ah, yes, of course," he says, confusedly. "What can you want of Vane?"
She smiles sadly to herself. Her own husband, yet "what can she want of him."
"A matter of business, sir," she replies, with cold brevity.
"Business!" He glances up and sees how white and strange her face is. "Is it important? It will wait, won't it?"
"No; it's a matter of life and death," she says, with trembling lips.
"Life and death? You are jesting, child, surely. I am very sorry, dear, but Vane has just sent me a line. He has gone—I mean he has been called away suddenly. He may be compelled to remain some time. You will have to be satisfied with my poor society. Vane sent you his love, and regrets that he could not bid you farewell."
A slight, cold smile touches the scarlet lips that curl in faint scorn.
"Do not fib to me, Uncle Langton. You know very well he sent me no such message. Let me see that note."
She draws it deliberately out of his fingers, and reads the curt message:
"Mr. Langton, I am about going away as we agreed upon. I will write you from abroad. Invent some excuse to satisfy the curiosity of Reine."
"So that is the love he sent me," she says, looking at[Pg 36] him with reproachful, dark eyes. "How charmingly affectionate he is! Aren't you afraid that you'll never get to Heaven, Uncle Langton, after that tremendous fib?"
"Don't tease, child, I have vexation enough. I did not think it of Charteris, really. I wish now I hadn't——" he stops and gnaws his gray mustache, fiercely.
"I wish so, too," she says, with subdued bitterness. "It was a sad mistake all round. It cannot be helped now. But, uncle, I must see him. Tell me where to find him."
"You may find him in New York to-morrow. He left on the ten o'clock train to-day."
"This is dreadful—poor Maud," she says, incoherently. "Oh, uncle, Maud is up-stairs. She prays you to see her. Uncle, you must. She has no one to turn to but you. The shadow of a terrible crime is hanging over her head. She must go to prison unless something happens to help her."
"She has made her bed, so let her lie," he says, petulantly.
"Oh, uncle, you must forgive her and befriend her; say that you will."
"I won't," he says, with bitter brevity.
"Let her come to you for five minutes; she can plead her own cause better than I can."
"I decline to see her. Tell her so. Tell her I will never have anything more to do with her," he replies, sternly, leading her to the door, and shutting her out into the hall.
She goes back to her cousin, stumbling over Nellie, who is crouched outside the door, dreading to enter with the story of her non-success.
"He will see me?" Maud says, hopefully, as she enters.
"I am very sorry, dear, but he utterly declines," Reine says, sorrowfully.
"Of course! I doubt if you ever asked him," Maud cries, irritably. "But, Reine, what is the matter? You look white and scared? What has happened?"
"Vane—Mr. Charteris has gone away," Reine falters, miserably.
"Gone away—of course. That was the condition on which he married you. He said he could marry you, but he could not live with you."
"Maud, why do you tell me these horrible things?" falters the wretched young bride.
"To make you as wretched as I am," Maud breaks out, with vindictive passion in her voice and face. "But it is all true, every word. He said he would stay away a year, and Mr. Langton must train you to be such a woman as he could respect and honor; a woman," triumphantly, "like me."
"God forbid!" Reine says, with a stifled gasp, turning her white face away that Maud may not see the hopeless pain that shadows the brightness.
The door opens and Nellie creeps forlornly in.
"Oh, Miss Maud," she says, tearfully, "I can't find it, I can't find it! I've searched high and low but it's nowhere to be found!"
CHAPTER IX.
How strange are the turns of fortune. Yesterday the beautiful queen of the county, the heiress of a millionaire, the betrothed of a handsome, adoring lover; to-day the inmate of a prison, the shadow of a crime hanging over her head, looked upon with horror and suspicion by those who, twenty-four hours ago, were ready to fall down and worship her. So Maud Langton muses drearily.
Out of all the throng of defaulting friends only one remains to her—the girl she hates with cordial good-will, the rival who has spoiled all her hopes, who has married her lover, and who reigns at Langton Villa in her stead. What bitterness to acknowledge that slight, dark-eyed girl she has always despised, as the only human being who clings to her, and is kind to her in this, her dark hour.
But it is true. It is Reine who takes her by the hand when others fail her; it is Reine who stands up bravely by her side and declares her belief in the existence of the mislaid note; it is Reine who almost pledges herself to find it if only they will give her time—hours, or days, or weeks, as the case may be.
And when she has thus declared her purpose, she goes back to Langton Villa to "beard the lion in his den."
"Uncle Langton, I am going to New York after Mr. Charteris," she says to him, coolly.
"Eh? what—after Vane?" he growls, in his curt fashion. "What's up?"
"I have important business with him. I must see him, if only for five minutes."
The old millionaire looks keenly at the dusky, beautiful face. Some of the brightness has gone out of it since yesterday. The large, dark eyes have a strange, intent, far-off look, the lips droop like a grieved child's, the white rose instead of the red, blooms on her cheek.
"Child, you look tired and pale. All this excitement has been too much for you. What is this business with Vane, eh? To scold him for running away?"
"Nothing of the sort," with impatient wrath; "a mere matter of business, as I said to you just now."
He does not believe her, and in his proud old heart there is a secret indignation at Vane for his cavalier flitting. Reine shall not run after him.
"You mustn't go," he says, bluntly. "I won't have you run after him. He'll come to of himself, only give him time and let him have his fling undisturbed. You will only disgust him, going after him. You shall hold your own, and be as stiff as he is."
She stares at him, her white hands locked before her, her sweet lips apart.
"But, uncle——" she begins.
"I know," he interrupts, "but believe me, child, I know men better than you do. You must not seem to care. Remember that you are a bride, unwooed, as yet, married for spite, not for love. In fact, Vane has gone away for a time just to accustom himself to the idea of his strange marriage, and to give you time to—to train yourself for your new position."
"To make myself over into a woman like Maud," she breathes, low and bitterly.
He starts, evidently disconcerted.
"Eh? what? Who told you that, Reine?"
"A little bird in the air whispered it," she retorts, with grim pleasantry.
"No such thing. I wish I knew who had been telling tales to you. I'd wring their necks!" testily. "But you understand, don't you," anxiously, "how premature it would be to follow him? Give him a little time. He'll[Pg 39] come to his senses fast enough, and thank fortune for his pretty little wife!"
"Uncle Langton," indignantly, "do give me leave to speak. Do you think I'm a love-sick fool to go running after a man that despises me?"
"I thought you had more sense," he says, beaming upon her; "you give it up, then?"
"No, I am determined to go. Try to understand, sir, that it is on no personal business I wish to see him. It is for—for another. He will understand."
"Write to him, then, Reine."
"It would not do. He is very obstinate, I fancy. I may have to urge him very persistently."
Mr. Langton peers at her curiously beneath his shaggy brows.
"What is this mysterious mission on which you are going, Reine? Explain."
The dark lashes fall, veiling her troubled eyes from his keen scrutiny.
"I cannot tell you; it may turn out a mere chimera; say that I am going on a 'wild-goose chase,' and you will hit the truth."
"Of course you know there is not another train until to-morrow," he observes. "Vane will have had twenty-four hours the start of you."
"I know that. Still I must follow him," she says, persistently.
"Then I must tell you. I didn't mean you should know just yet; it is not likely you will find him in New York when you go. He's off for the other side of the 'herring-pond.'"
"Gone abroad!" She starts, and her tortured face whitens. Into her eyes comes a look of despair.
"You know he was booked for Europe—he and Maud were, I mean. Their passage was taken on the steamer which leaves New York to-morrow. Vane has obstinately chosen to go alone. Never mind, lovey. The young simpleton will be suing your pardon some day."
"Never mind me, uncle, I am not thinking of myself," she says, through white, quivering lips. "Oh, tell me what to do! I must see him for five minutes only—I must, I must, I must! if I have to follow him to Europe!"
"Is the case so desperate as that?" he asks; "I will[Pg 40] help you, then. Shall I telegraph him to stay in New York until——"
"Not until I come," nervously. "That might make him very angry."
"Until I come, then. For I shall go with you, of course. What could you do all alone by yourself in big New York?"
"You will go—oh, you dear, kind uncle, how thankful I am!" she cries, kissing his withered old cheek in the fervor of her gratitude. "Now, I shall be brave as a lion. Oh, pray telegraph him this hour, if possible!"
CHAPTER X.
"Now, Reine, I know the hotel where Vane stays when he comes to New York. If he received my telegram he will be waiting there for me. I will go and bring him to you."
They are in a small, private parlor of a hotel in New York. Reine, very dusty and anxious-looking, is walking up and down the floor, never having even removed her hat.
"I will bring him to you," Mr. Langton repeats. "Now, dear, go to your room and bathe your face and hands, and brush your hair. Do not let your husband find you so dusty and travel-stained."
"As if he cared," she says, with infinite mournfulness, yet obeying his hint all the same.
She looks with dim, pathetic eyes at the pale, grave face in the mirror.
"How these few days have changed me," she sighs. "No wonder! Yet I did not know it was in my nature to suffer such pain. If Vane cared for me he must be startled at the change. But he does not love me, and never will, alas!"
She waits, perhaps the longest half an hour she ever knew in her gay, careless life. Mr. Langton comes at last—alone!
"Whew! how confoundedly hot and dusty is New York at this season," he splutters, mopping his face with his handkerchief. "The thermometer up in the nineties, and the dust in clouds that choke and blind one. An hour of life at Langton Villa is worth a[Pg 41] year in this noisy, abominable place. Reine, let us go home."
She stares at him with wide, dismayed dark eyes.
"Uncle, he—he is gone?" she falters.
"Gone, yes, the impertinent young puppy," he growls. "Gone without a word, utterly ignored me and my telegram. I wish to Heaven——" he pauses with a dark frown.
"What, Uncle Langton?" with pathetic wistfulness.
"That—that I'd never married you to him, the scamp!" he blurts out in a fury. "He has treated us both with the most distinct contempt. We will go home, dearie, and Vane Charteris may go to the devil!"
This from the irate old man, but Reine looks at him bravely.
"Uncle Langton, I object to your calling names," she says, distinctly. "Mr. Charteris is my husband. I insist that you shall respect that fact."
"A pretty husband," he mutters.
"No one shall blame him in my hearing," she goes on with shy, pretty dignity. "After all, it was unfair to hang an unloved wife like a millstone around his neck."
"You know all," Mr. Langton mutters, darkly, "but where the deuce you found out is beyond my ken. If I knew, I'd shoot the fellow that told you. Well, are you ready to go back to the mountains to-morrow?
"No, oh, no," she clasps her small hands in anguish. "Oh, uncle, you promised to leave me your fortune. Give me only just enough money to follow Vane across the ocean, and I'll resign all the rest!"
"What, you obstinate little vixen! You are quite determined to follow him?"
"I must, uncle. Oh, you do not know how much depends on my seeing him!"
"And you would cross the great 'herring-pond' alone? I should think you would be frightened at the thought, you, a green little country girl. Who knows where Vane may cast his lines? Perhaps among the frog-eating Frenchmen, or the garlicky Italians. Can you speak French?"
"Like a native," she responds, with an arch little moue.
"Italian?"
"Perfectly, and Spanish, too. You know I get my living by my learning," she laughs, trying hard to be her own bright, careless self.
He is plainly delighted.
"Very well, you shall go," he replies. "A steamer sails to-morrow. We will go in her."
"You," she cries, with incredulous joy. "It will be too wearisome for you. You are so old."
"Not a bit," contemptuously. "Do you think I will let you go alone?"
CHAPTER XI.
The Sea Gull wings her flight blithely and rapidly across the "dark blue waves," as if she were not freighted with the heaviest heart that ever beat in breast of mortal man.
For Vane Charteris, although his passionately longed-for revenge has come to him in such strange and subtle fashion, is a most unhappy man.
Mingled with his almost fierce joy at the speedy retribution that has been dealt out to Maud, his false love, is a stinging, unconquerable remorse that pursues him like an evil spirit, although he cannot bring himself to repentance for what he has done. A shuddering horror takes possession of his soul when he thinks of the cloud of shame and disgrace, and impending peril lowering darkly over that golden head he has loved so dearly, but his passionate anger and resentment are stronger than the languid, admiring affection he had cherished for his fair, queenly-looking betrothed.
In the madness of his insulted pride it seems to Vane impossible that he should lift a finger to save the treacherous one from her terrible fate.
Arriving in the great, smoky city of London, that is hot and smoky and altogether unbearable, Vane throws himself into whatever excitement is going with an abandon and recklessness altogether unlike himself.
He is bent on losing himself and his tormenting thoughts in the deepest oblivion he can find, but in less than a week he succumbs to fatigue and mental agony, and decides that he is "fagged out." Either he must recuperate or he must die.
Life is sweet to us all; even to Vane, with his dearest hope gone from him.
He decides to run down to the sea-shore a little way, and brace his constitution with the life-giving sea-breezes.
He hears of a quiet place, frequented by invalids, authors, and poets, and such quiet people, "packs his traps" and goes down by the first train. Behold, it is a coast such as Tennyson portrays:
"I shall die of memory and stagnation here in less than a week," he tells himself grimly, as he paces along the yellow sands up to his balconied hotel, where a few dispirited invalids and long-haired poets eye the handsome young American with a dreamy, listless curiosity. "I shall find health and quiet here with a vengeance. I shall go mad with this eternal sea!"
And after one night with the long, low moan of the "sad sea waves" in his ears, and the ghosts of the past stalking drearily in the haunted darkness, he stoutly prepares to "fold up his tent like the Arabs, and silently steal away" to "fresh fields and pastures new." The spirit of unrest is upon him; strange mood for one who all his life-long had been indolent, languid, not to say, in Reine's plain English, lazy.
But while he chews the end of his morning segar, and restlessly meditates on the where to go next, a boy comes to him with a pretty little three-cornered note. In stupid astonishment he takes it and holds it unopened in his hand.
"I was to take back an answer, sir," the lad ventures, as a gentle reminder.
Then Vane turns it over and looks at the superscription. It is addressed to himself in a pretty, graceful hand, with a good deal of character in it.
Unfolding it, he reads, with staring eyes:
"Mr. Charteris:—Arriving at the hotel an hour ago, I learned, on inquiry, that you were at the 'Haven of Rest.' Will you come to me for ten minutes? Hastily,
"Reine Langton."
The earth seems to yawn beneath Mr. Charteris' feet. He mutters, on the uncontrollable spur of the moment, a profane expletive:
"The devil!"
"Eh, what, sir?" the lad mutters, uncomprehendingly.
The words recall Mr. Charteris to his senses, he having been momentarily shocked out of them.
"Who gave you this note, boy!" he demands, sternly.
Really, it seems to him there must be some mistake. Reine, his unloved wife, here on Albion's wave-washed shore—impossible.
But the lad replies, distinctly:
"A young lady at the Sea View Hotel, a very pretty lady, with big black eyes."
This description is too suggestive of Reine to admit of further doubt.
With a suppressed groan, Vane tears a leaf from his memorandum book, and scribbles, hastily:
"Reine:—I will be with you in fifteen minutes.
"Vane."
Totally forgetting, in his flurry, to put her name upon it, he doubles the sheet and puts it into the lad's hand with a generous silver piece.
"Now, fly back to the lady, you young scamp," he apostrophizes.
As if the reward had lent wings to his feet, the urchin runs lightly along the sandy shore, and disappears in the distance.
Vane takes a turn up and down the balcony to steady his nerves. He has had what some people are wont to call a "turn."
The authors and invalids eye him with blended curiosity and admiration. It is not often that a handsome, comely young fellow like this anchors his bark in this "Haven of Rest."
"She has followed me here," Vane is saying to himself, through his compressed lips. "Now, I call that downright bold and unwomanly. It proves to me more and more how unwise a choice was forced upon me by Mr. Langton's perverse will. Why did he let her come? And how the deuce am I to get rid of her? For I swear I won't live with her, at least not yet."
So saying, he flings on his hat and starts off at a swinging pace along the sands toward the hotel.
"I must see what she wants," he says, under his breath, and gnawing the ends of his golden-brown mustache[Pg 45] savagely, while the habitues of the place watch him carelessly, little thinking that the handsome American is going unwillingly to the bonniest bride all England holds.
He had called her "bold and unwomanly," yet in his heart he is forced to retract the words when he finds himself in her presence, and the spell of her dark, bright beauty throws its glamor over him, against his will.
For Reine, with the pardonable vanity of "lovely woman," has hastened to make herself fair for her husband's coming.
In London, while they rested and searched for Vane, Mr. Langton has bought her a box of what he calls "fine things." Among them is a sheer, white India muslin morning robe, trimmed with a profusion of fine, rich lace. Nothing could be lovelier than Reine in this dainty robe, with deep-hearted crimson roses in her hair and at her belt.
The slight, graceful figure advances to the center of the pretty morning parlor, then pauses suddenly, while the curling, black lashes flutter and fall till they waver against the burning crimson cheeks.
"You sent for me?" he says, abruptly, noting her sudden shame and confusion with ungenerous malice.
"Yes, I—I——" she pauses, and throws up her girlish white hands as if to ward off a blow. "Oh, do not look at me so," she says, imploringly. "I know what you are thinking and saying to yourself. It is that—that I am bold, forward, unlady-like, to have followed you here, when you," a choking sob, quickly suppressed, "when you despise me so!"
It is his turn to blush now under the dazzling light of the "dark, dark eyes" she opens wide upon his face, while she makes her frantic plaint.
"It is no such thing, pray do not say so," he retorts, fibbing unblushingly, in that he feels himself, to use his own graphic inward phrase, "cornered." "Of course you had a perfect right," dejectedly, "to come after me."
"Not at all," she says, decidedly. "No right that I would presume upon thus far. Oh, Mr. Charteris," with a sudden transition from shame and self-pity to irrepressible[Pg 46] mirth, "pray, pray, do not look so dejected and forlorn. I have not come after you, indeed; that is, not as you think. I hope to leave here for America to-morrow."
"Leading me as a captive in your train?" he inquires, not feeling half so bad at the prospect as he could have imagined ten minutes ago.
"Certainly not," she replies, in her frank, decisive way; then, a little frigidly, "pray be seated, sir, and I will unfold to you the business upon which I have followed you to England."
He bows silently, turning a little pale beneath his healthy, florid tinge.
What an ominous sound that dull, prosaic word, "business," has from her lovely, heart-shaped, crimson lips. Besides, he feels, to use his own inward thought again, "wilted." She does not want him, as he has vainly imagined, and ridiculously resented in secret. She is come on a mere matter of business. She makes him understand that thoroughly by her pretty, dignified manner that has stiffened into ice.
"I should not have come—nothing could have induced me to," she goes on, with sensitive deprecation and lowered eyelids, "only for the sake of Maud."
"Of Maud!" he starts, and his pallor grows death-like. "What has she to do with you and me, Reine?"
She looks up silently, and their glances meet and hold each other a moment; the velvety black orbs, swimming in golden light, hold a mute and stern reproach before which the proud, defiant blue ones waver and shrink, pained and ashamed.
"I do not understand," he says, sullenly, answering her look against his will.
"Oh, yes, you do, you know," she returns with airy frankness. "You remember poor Mr. Clyde wrote Maud a note, swearing he would kill himself if she didn't marry him. And Maud lost the note that day she was in the hammock-chair under the tree. You, Mr. Charteris, found it, and tucked it into your vest pocket, thinking it of no consequence. But in that you were mistaken, as you learned the day of[Pg 47] the inquest. Oh, Mr. Charteris, will you give up that note, and pray God to pardon your wicked revenge?"
CHAPTER XII.
There is a moment's perfect silence. From deathly white Vane Charteris has turned to a burning crimson, then marble-pale again. No sound is heard save the low, hoarse swell of the waves as they break on the rocky shore.
"Oh, you did not realize, surely," the girl goes on, with pained eyes, and clasped hands, "what a terrible thing you were doing when you went away silently with that note in your possession, that is worth the wealth of the world to poor Maud Langton. You were blinded by your wounded pride and insulted love, or you could not have stooped to take such an ignoble revenge for your wrongs."
He stares at her still, like one dreaming. Is the girl a witch? How does she know?
"Oh, speak!" she breaks out, impatiently. "Have you nothing to say?"
"You have taken my breath away," he answers. "Why do you bring this absurd charge against me? Who says," with a sneer, "I have that wonderful note?"
"I am your accuser," she answers, fixing upon him the full fire of her magnetic dark eyes. "I saw you, I was not very far away when Maud left you that day, I saw you pick up a note from the ground and read it, then you slipped it into your vest pocket. I am quite sure it was Maud's note. I do not believe you will deny it."
"Since you know so much, I will not," he answers, with blended amaze and defiance. "What then?"
The beautiful dusky face lights up with the lovely earnestness of hope.
"You will give it to me," she says. "I have followed you across the wide ocean to ask you for it."
"Why should I give it to you?" he asks, with distinct coldness.
She gives him a glance of blended pride and patience.
"Not for any grace you owe me, certainly," she says, with gentle calmness, "but for Maud's sake."
"Do I owe her any kindness?" he asks, sardonically.
"You owe her forgiveness, which is divine," she answers, anxiously.
"I prefer revenge. Do you remember these lines?
She rises and faces him, something of proud scorn in her free and girlish bearing.
"Yes, I remember them, but such sentiments are unworthy of you, Mr. Charteris. What! are you not the brave, noble gentleman I deemed you? Am I to blush for my—husband?"
A subtle thrill, he cannot tell whether it be of pain or pleasure, it is so intense, shoots through him as the low word falls from her lips. A passionate shame, evoked by her proud scorn, tingles through all his frame, yet he says, mockingly:
"So you own the tie that binds us? I thought not, as when I came just now and inquired for Mrs. Charteris I was told there was no such person staying in the hotel. I had to ask for Miss Langton."
"I am traveling as Miss Langton," she explains, simply, yet coloring crimson under his keen, cool gaze.
"May I ask why?" with an unconscious touch of pique in his tone.
"No, you may not ask," with a great deal of dignity in her tone; then, suddenly: "Yet I think you should know I am too sensitive to claim the name you will not accord me of your own free will."
She opens the scrawl he has sent her awhile ago, holding it open before his eyes. There is neither name nor address upon it.
"I, upon my word, I beg your pardon. It was entirely—I give you my word of honor—unintentional; a mere omission. I was so flurried, you see, and somehow I forgot. Can you forgive me?" he stammers.
"With pleasure," she returns, coolly, looking away from his shamed countenance. "But we have digressed from our subject. We were talking of Maud and the note you hold. How can you withhold it from her when you know that her very life hangs upon it?"
"Reine, do you know that I hate that woman?" he cries, with subdued fierceness.
"Then you never loved her," she replied, decisively.
"I did; but her falsity turned my love to hate," he answers, moodily.
"No," she answers.
An utter silence which she breaks again, anxiously: "You will not refuse my prayer? Give me the note and let me go to Maud."
He turns from her sullenly and looks out of the window at the blue, sun-gilded waves breaking in snowy foam against the shell-strewn shore.
"You could not let her suffer for a crime of which she is innocent," the pleading voice goes on.
"I suffered innocently," he says, shortly enough, without turning around. "Why did she make me a mark for the finger of scorn?"
"You can live that down," she answers. "But she, her very life is at stake. Do not forget that if she suffers the full penalty of the law, for this crime of which she is not guilty, her blood will be on your hands. You will, in the sight of God, and to my knowledge, be Maud's Langton's murderer."
Though he will not turn around, she sees the strong shudder that shakes his frame.
"You will be a haunted man," she goes on, relentlessly. "By day and by night you will dream of the girl you have slain. You will remember always that the golden head you hoped to pillow on your breast is laid low in a dishonored grave."
"For God's sake, Reine, why do you torment me so?" he cries, turning fiercely round upon her.
"For Maud's sake, and your own sake, and for humanity's sake, and my own sake," she retorts, bravely. "That Maud's innocence may be vindicated, that you may be saved from the evil consequences of your wicked revenge, that the world may see how divine a thing is repentance and forgiveness, and that I," her brave voice falls to a low, pathetic cadence, "that I may not have to die of shame because I have given my heart to one so lost to honor, truth and mercy."
Vane Charteris stands like one stunned a moment.
"What a little vixen it is," he says to himself, darkly. "There is no end to her tongue."
"I know what you are saying to yourself," the girl breaks in, vivaciously; "you are wishing I would go away and leave you alone——"
"You are mistaken," he replies, thinking of a way to put her to confusion, and silence her tongue that is but a little louder than his own accusing conscience. "I was thinking of what you said just now. Is it really true that you have given me your heart?"
The warm, red color creeps up to her temples under the blue fire of his steady, curious eyes. She rallies herself with a brave little effort of will.
"Yes," she answers, with a little touch of pathos in her low voice. "It is quite true. Does it amuse you? It is only a girl's heart. You will break it and throw it from you of course. I have often heard that women's hearts were men's playthings."
He regards her in curious silence. Few women would be brave enough to make that frank admission to a cold, careless, unloving husband. Yet Reine is as proud as the most, she lacks none of the modesty of her sex.
There is a curious, restrained pride in her every look and movement now. And, strange to say, he does not feel disgusted at her pathetic admission of her love for him.
"She loves me," he repeats over and over to his heart, looking at the lissome, daintily rounded figure, and the brilliant face, bright and rich like a tropical flower, with the softness of emotion lying on it like dew. "She loves me," and there is a certain masculine vanity in the thought that he, Vane Charteris, is the lode-star of her girlish dreams.
But before he can think of anything to say, she goes back, pertinacious, to the old theme:
"But we have digressed from the original subject. Once more, Mr. Charteris, will you give me the note?"
And he answers, bluntly, almost angrily:
"No, I will not."
And for the first time since their interview, Reine shows a sign of weakness. She reels unsteadily, and throws up her white hands in the air.
"I have failed, I have failed," she cries, despairingly. "Oh, you are merciless; you are a veritable Shylock. Nothing will sate your thirst for vengeance but a pound of flesh!"
He catches the falling figure in his arms. For one moment the white, anguished face rests against his breast, then she opens her eyes and struggles from his clasp.
"Do not touch me," she says, with indignant scorn. "You are a monster!"
And his own conscience, knocking loudly at the door of his heart, echoes the words.
"Reine, Reine," he falters, hurriedly, "do not be hasty. Give me a little time. I will answer you to-morrow."
"You take back your refusal?" brightening so swiftly that you think of the sun coming out from under a cloud.
"Until to-morrow—yes," he says, feeling a sort of relief at his own words. "You can wait until then?"
"Yes, for I cannot go until to-morrow. Did I forget to tell you that Uncle Langton is with me?"
"Is he, really?"
"Yes, and I fear the trip has been too much for him, poor old dear," with loving compassion. "He feels worn and tired. He is lying down this morning. Will you go to him?"
"I shall be very glad. Does he—does he know why you came?"
"No," quietly; then, flushing: "You will not mind if he is a little cross, and—and fault finding? He is so old, you know, and then he is tired and half sick."
"I shall not mind," he answers, a little grimly, as he follows her through a small suite of rooms to Mr. Langton's own especial one.
"Mr. Charteris is here, uncle," she says, quietly ushering the visitor in, and sensitively withdrawing.
CHAPTER XIII.
Vane Charteris, entering the cool, breezy white room, with its wide windows opening upon the sea, encounters the half-indignant gaze of his old friend, who is lying on a low couch in a silken dressing-gown and[Pg 52] tasseled cap, his wrinkled old hands grasping the knob of his gold-headed cane, which he proceeds to thump viciously on the floor at the young man's entrance, thereby expressing the war-like state of his mind.
"I hope I see you well, Mr. Langton," airily observes the handsome young "reprobate," as Mr. Langton mentally dubs him.
"Then you'll be disappointed," snaps the old millionaire, irefully. "Never was so mortally used up before in my life. Soul and body will scarcely hold together. And all on your account, you disobedient young rascal."
"Disobedient?" Mr. Charteris queries, in a mild tone, slightly arching his eyebrows.
"Disobedient, yes;" with an emphatic thump of the cane. "Didn't you receive my telegram ordering you to remain in New York until I came?"
"Ye-es, I did," admits the culprit, with no great show of repentance, "but being, according to the old law, free, white, and twenty-one, I didn't seem to see that I was under any man's orders."
"Nor any woman's either?" testily.
"Nor any woman's either," Vane repeats, undauntedly.
"At least I expected a show of courtesy from a young fellow whom I had tried hard to benefit," Mr. Langton retorts, with his stiffest air.
Whereat Mr. Charteris, after a little ambiguous cough, puts on a show of meekness.
"Ah, there I see my naughtiness," he says. "I acted like a churl. There can be no two opinions as to that. But, sir, if you could only know the madness of the passion that drove me on, I think you might find some excuse for me in your heart."
Mr. Langton, differing from him on this latter point, says nothing in reply, but discreetly changes the conversation.
"You talked with Reine?" he inquires.
"Oh, yes; or, I may say, she talked with me," this ruefully.
Mr. Langton at this chuckled heartlessly.
"She has a sharp tongue of her own, I warrant you," he says.
"Inherited honestly enough," replies Mr. Charteris, with a pointed bow at the old gentleman.
"Yes—yes; chip of the old block," Mr. Langton retorts, in nowise disconcerted at the hint of his niece's resemblance to himself. "Well, Vane, this mission on which she has followed you abroad—has she broached it?"
His yet keen eyes detect the flush that steals up to the young man's temples as he replies in the affirmative.
"I hope it was concluded to her satisfaction."
"It has not been decided yet," Vane replies, with no little embarrassment.
"I may not venture to inquire into its nature?" Mr. Langton asks, curiously.
"No, I think not—at least, not just yet. Later on you shall hear, perhaps," Vane responds, ambiguously, and with very palpable confusion.
They have some desultory conversation, then Mr. Langton asks, casually:
"Well, and have you enjoyed your 'outing?'"
"Recklessly," responds he.
"I don't think I quite enter into your meaning," the old millionaire retorts; and Vane, laughing carelessly, replies:
"I mean I have enjoyed it down to the ground, as the fellows say here."
"Humph! looks as if you had been dissipating straight through," Mr. Langton comments, glaring keenly at him under his shaggy brows. "You don't ask me anything about that wretched girl," he says, startlingly.
"Reine has told me," Vane replies, pale to the lips.
"Serves her right. I can't, for my life, feel sorry for the treacherous little cat! To think that she should have treated me so!" said the vindictive old man.
"This affair is likely to go hard with her," says Vane, with admirably-acted indifference.
"Pooh! nothing of the sort," Mr. Langton returns, trying to salve his uneasy conscience. "No danger of such a pretty girl as Maud coming to grief. That cold, white beauty that reminds you," maliciously, "of a lily, would win over any jury in the world."
They discussed the subject a little while, carelessly,[Pg 54] almost unfeelingly, it would seem, since Maud Langton has been so much to them both a little while ago; then the old millionaire turns carelessly, to all intent, to another subject.
"Do you know it seemed to me superlatively ridiculous to be dragging my old, sapless bones so far as this, dancing attendance on another man's wife?"
Vane colors, then turns aside the implied reproach.
"It must have weighed upon you, certainly," he responds. "I am rather surprised at such thoughtlessness, even on the part of Reine. Why did you let her persuade you?"
"Nothing of the kind. I simply came in spite of her. Did you think I would have suffered your wife to come alone, Vane?"
"Will you smoke?" Mr. Charteris inquires, proffering a choice Havana, and lighting one himself.
Mr. Langton, taking one gingerly between his fingers, resumes:
"There is a good deal more to Reine than we thought for. I am downright pleased over the exchange of heiresses I made. I wish now, seeing how all fell out, that I had taken her without encumbrance."
"Meaning me?" Vane asks, with an uncomfortable flush.
"Meaning you," Mr. Langton replies, beginning to puff away furiously at his Havana, as if he were a smoke-stack. "You see I am mistaken in you, Vane. After all you said I didn't believe it was in you to treat your bride in such a cavalier style. If I had thought you would really run away from Reine the next day, and set all the country talking and sneering, you might have gone to the devil before I'd have given you my pretty little niece!"
"The regret is mutual, sir," Vane replies, with some heat; and then, glancing up, warned by some strange instinct, he sees his unloved wife standing just within the door.
She has entered just in time to catch Mr. Langton's closing speech and the angry answer.
Vane sprang to his feet, very red and confused.
"I—I beg your pardon," he says, in the utmost confusion.
She bows, speechlessly. Her face has gone quite[Pg 55] white; her eyes shun his in a kind of fearful shame. She says at last, in a strange voice, but with desperate calmness:
"I feared Uncle Langton would be rude to you. You must pardon him, and pardon me."
"For what?" he gains courage to ask, a little blankly.
"For our share in making you unhappy," she answers, very low.
Something in the proud humility of her attitude strikes a remorseful pang through his heart.
She stands alone in the center of the room, slender and graceful as a young palm tree, her head drooped slightly forward, the dew of unfallen tears shining like pearls in her long, dark lashes. She is like, yet unlike, the giddy Reine of a month ago.
"There is nothing to pardon," he says, in a flurried tone, "Mr. Langton was right. I have acted very badly—like a brute, in fact. You must wish you had never seen me."
"Yes," she says, low, but steadily. "It would have been so much better for you."
"I did not mean that," says he, disconcerted.
"You are good enough to say so," she replies, with delicate disbelief, and then she goes up to her uncle.
"The physician you sent for is here," she says. "Shall I send him in?"
"Are you so bad as that?" Vane asks, with a slight start.
"Yes; I can scarce hold myself together," Mr. Langton replies, and his trembling old hands attest the truth of his words. "I must have something for my nerves or I shall not be able to stir from this to-morrow."
Vane rises, glad to get away under any terms.
"Au revoir," he says. "I will call again to-morrow."
He goes back to the Haven of Rest with the poets, æsthetes and such people, lounging on the balconies. That name is a misnomer. It appears to him a haven of unrest. He wanders away to the shell-strewn beach, and smokes like a chimney while he reviews the situation.
Meanwhile, the physician attending Mr. Langton has thrown a bomb-shell into that camp.
"You are quite broken down and exhausted," is his dictum. "Rest and recuperation are what you need. I will leave you a tonic, and in about ten days you may be well enough to be taken for a short drive, and in two days more you may be strong enough to walk down to the sea-shore, and——"
"Distraction, man!" thunders the irascible invalid. "Do you think I have come to this place to stay a year? No, sir. I am going to start back to America to-morrow."
"But, my friend, you know that is quite impossible," laughs the stout, good-natured physician. "At your time of life, recuperation goes on but slowly, and——"
"I tell you I'm as young as I ever was," this from Mr. Langton, in tones of mulish obstinacy.
"And I tell you you're breaking down of old age, and you'll not stir from this for two weeks; if you do you'll risk your life. You understand me, young lady?" turning to Reine.
"Yes, sir, and your directions shall be implicitly carried out."
"But, Reine," he objects when the doctor has gone, "you know you said it would be impossible we should stay beyond to-morrow."
"We must manage some way—you must not be hurt by our haste. We will go as soon as we can, that is all," she answers, patting his cheek, then turning gently from him to the window.
The dark, blue waves go splashing softly past under the gaze of her dark, sad eyes. A thought comes into her mind:
CHAPTER XIV.
"Another day. Never was mortal so glad to behold daylight," ejaculated Vane Charteris, yawning with all the weariness of one who has seen the long hours of a sleepless night glide past.
This is somewhat an unusual experience for our hero, but for once mind has so far triumphed over matter as to keep the drowsy god Somnus far away. A day and a night have been passed in vexing thought. Now[Pg 57] when the first golden beams of sunshine gild the sea, he rises weary and unrefreshed, and goes for a stroll on the shore, this early outing being also a novel experience for him.
Early as it appears to him, others are astir before him. He meets several people returning from an early morning dip in the briny element.
Down on the sands he comes face to face with a vision fresh and fair as the summer morn itself—Reine, in a graceful boating dress, stepping lightly into a little boat that rides at anchor on the tide.
As she takes up the oars with consummate skill, his voice falls on her hearing, giving her a shock of surprise:
"Good morning; will you carry a passenger?"
She lifts to him her lovely face, flushed with a Hebe-like bloom, the light of the new day sunning itself goldenly in her pansy-dark eyes.
Somehow in this out-of-doors chance encounter there is none of the embarrassment that would attend a formal meeting in the house. There is even some of the old time badinage and sauciness in her tones as she replies:
"Can I believe my ears or my eyes? Mr. Charteris out at this unheard-of hour? I thought you 'never, never——'"
"'Well, hardly ever,'" he returns, with a spice of malice. "How came you to do it yourself?"
"Because I always do, you know," she returns, smilingly. "I have been out some time; I have had a glorious bath in the sea this morning, have you?"
He laughs no, and again renews his petition to be taken in, to which she assents, carelessly.
"I did not know you could manage a boat," he observes, as with a skillful sweep of the oars she turns the little craft forward, dancing lightly on the crest of the waves.
"Did you not? Well, that is not strange, seeing how little you know of me anyway. I am a good swimmer, too. You would not have guessed that?" she says, lightly.
"No, and yet it is a knowledge all women should possess," he returns. "Where have you learned these things?"
"My father taught me. He wanted me to be thorough in such things as well as in more lady-like accomplishments."
"He must have been a sensible man," Mr. Charteris comments to himself, and then there is a silence broken only by the soft, steady splash of the oars in the water. An embarrassing consciousness has fallen over both. Vane is thinking to himself that after all there may be some excuse for the brusquerie and wildness of the little savage, as he sometimes unkindly termed her in his thoughts. He remembers what Maud had told him of her tuition under her father. Masculine training would be apt to give her that touch of wildness.
She in her turn studies him shyly, but intently. She sees the haggard impress of the sleepless night on the pale, handsome face, and about the dark-blue eyes, with their slight heaviness and the faint blue circles around them. Impulsively she speaks:
"You have thought the matter well over. You will forego your revenge and save Maud?"
"Why should you think so? What sign have I given of yielding?" he asks, curiously.
"Your face, even your voice betrays you. If you had decided to refuse my prayer, you would look and speak differently. You would despise yourself, and your very looks would reveal it."
"I did not know you were such a close observer," he replies, "but it is true. You have saved me from myself, Reine."
As he speaks he leans forward, tossing a folded paper into her lap. The oars lie idle a moment, as they drift at the mercy of the wind and tide, while she reads the precious note.
Then she lifts her eyes, full of eloquent thankfulness, to his face.
"I expected no less of you," she says. "I knew you could not be so cruel to Maud."
The handsome blonde face darkens.
"It was not solely for Maud's sake," he replies. "Pray remember that I would not have yielded to you, Reine, only—only you showed me so plainly what a monster I was, and how truly I would be that false girl's murderer if I persevered. And then—then, I could not bear to have my wife ashamed of me."
He looks away consciously as he speaks. A thousand tingling little arrows of rapture shoot through her frame as the low words, "my wife," fall from his lips; spoken not harshly nor sneeringly, but kindly, almost tenderly. Is it possible, she asks herself, in thrilling silence, that he may one day forgive her, and be kind to her—nay, even give her love for love?
"I remembered," he goes on, even more kindly, "that this was the first request my wife had made of me, and I could not choose but grant it."
He can be dangerously winning when he pleases. It pleased him to be so then—perhaps to try his power over her. The result is quite satisfactory. The rich color leaps to her cheeks, the light of joy flashes into her deep, dark eyes, the low-breathed answer is freighted with emotion.
"I thank you more than I can express for your kindness," she answers, earnestly. "You make me very happy."
"Then, while you are in that pleasant mood, there is something I must ask you," he ventures.
"Yes?" She flashes him a bright, swift look of inquiry.
He is silent for a moment. He has an air of confusion that does not sit ill upon him.
"Reine," he says, "it was all a mistake, your traveling under your maiden name. It—it places you in a false position."
"No one knows aught of us here—it cannot matter," she replies, with a blush, and quickly-drawn breath.
He studies the beautiful face attentively. How fair, how young, how lovely it is. How sweet the heart-shaped, crimson lips, how long and dark the lashes that droop against her cheeks. How luxuriant and long the silken tresses that float like a banner on the fresh morning breeze. And she loves him; some strange, sweet thrill strikes through him whenever he recalls the truth she had owned with such pathetic frankness.
"I have acted badly—no one realizes that fact more than I do," he continues, gravely; "but, Reine that is past. I am your husband; you are my wife, shall we let bygones be bygones and begin again?"
"You mean——" she says, giving him a little wondering look.
"I mean," he replies, "that I will go back to America to-day with you, and I will try to do my duty by you in future if only you will forgive me for shirking it in the first instance, and running away in such a dastardly fashion."
Two crimson spots rise into her cheeks, her lashes fall lower.
"But—but we are not going back to-day," she explains, in an agitated voice, telling him what her uncle's physician had said.
"Not get away for two weeks?" he says. "Very well, Reine, then I shall leave the Haven of Rest and come to stay at Sea View Hotel, and it must be publicly made known that you are mine."
"Indeed you will not, then," she breaks out with sudden self-assertion. "I am not willing."
"Not willing?" he cries, and Reine's quick ear fancies it detects a tone of relief in his voice. "You refuse to be my wife, Reine—woman-like, taking revenge for a transient wrong."
"It is not that," she says, falteringly; "I am not angry with you, Vane, but it is best to—to wait."
"Until when?" he asks, bending his curious eyes on the bright, arch face.
And looking frankly at him, she replies, gently:
"Until love comes."
"Until love comes?" he repeats, blankly. "But I thought you owned——"
"Yes, I know," she says, checking him with uplifted finger, "but I mean mutual love."
With a light dip of the oars she whirls the boat around on its homeward way. The graceful head is poised in a free, half-haughty fashion. He cannot understand the strange look on the dusky, lovely face. It is neither pride nor humility, yet a strange blending of both.
After a moment she says in her clear, sweet voice, toned to a softer cadence than usual:
"Do not think me stubborn that I refuse to own your claim just now, Vane—I am proud in my own way. I cannot come to you until you wish it from your heart."
He is silent, gazing at her in sheer perplexity. She goes on gently:
"You see I was deceived at first, Vane—not willfully—I[Pg 61] do not accuse you of that, but I fancied there must be in your heart some little spark of tenderness for love to grow upon. When I found out my mistake—how my uncle had forced the match upon you, and how but for my too eager consent Maud might have been yours, I—well, it was hard to bear! So I would rather wait, Vane—until the year you wished is over. Perhaps by then, the soreness of your regret for—another—will be past, and your heart may be open to me."
Has the moisture of the sea got into his eyes that they look so dim? He draws his handkerchief across them, and can find no words to answer. So she resumes, after a minute's weary waiting:
"I am not perverse, Vane. I am not fighting against my fate—only trying to make the best of it. You will give me a fair chance to win your heart before I wear your name? Will you not?"
"Yes," he answers, wondering at her strangeness.
"Thank you. Now we will return to my uncle. I will take the liberty to invite you to breakfast with him. Will you come?"
"Yes, thank you," he replies, and the little boat touching the shore, they spring out and go up the walk together, both very silent and thoughtful. He begins to think that Mr. Langton's quaint phrase of yesterday is true. "There is more in Reine than we suspected."
CHAPTER XV.
A sociable breakfast for three being laid in Mr. Langton's room, the small party proceed to enjoy it, Vane and Reine with appetites sharpened by the early morning air, and the sharp sea-breeze.
The old millionaire regards the young people curiously beneath his shaggy brows. Something in their expressions makes him say, confidently:
"You have come to an understanding regarding that secret mission, you two, I see."
"Yes," Reine answers, giving him a radiant glance from under her drooping, black-fringed lashes.
"And you are ready to return to America?"
"As soon as you are strong enough," Reine makes answer, trying not to let him see her inward anxiety to be gone.
"It is too bad that this old hulk of mine should be the means of detaining you," he grumbles. "What shall you do now?"
She lifts her dark, inquiring eyes to the face of Mr. Charteris. He nods, affirmatively.
"I will tell you, uncle," she replies. "I shall write to Maud's counsel, and tell him I have found the missing note, and that I shall soon return, bringing it with me. He must obtain a stay of proceedings until my return."
"And this was your mission abroad?" Mr. Langton queries, surprised.
She smiles and nods, and Mr. Charteris comes in for his share of the old man's scrutiny.
"Then you had the note, Vane!" he says.
"Yes, sir," he responds, rather shame-facedly.
Mr. Langton looks from one to the other of the expressive faces, and comes to a very fair comprehension of the truth.
After a moment passed in silent thought, he breaks out with irrepressible enthusiasm:
"Reine, you are a trump!" whereat both the young people laugh with contagious merriment.
"Where are you staying, Vane?" Mr. Langton queries.
"At the Haven of Rest. I wished to change my quarters to the Sea View Hotel, but this imperious little lady here forbids me," he replies.
The keen little old eyes turn curiously on the crimsoning face of the girl.
"Why should you do that?" he asks, and stammering some incoherent excuse Reine flies from the room.
Then Vane rather ruefully explains the reason. To tell the truth he begins to feel ashamed of himself, the more so that Mr. Langton applauds Reine's determination.
"I am proud of her," he declared. "I was vexed at first. I thought she meant to follow you and plead her own case. Now I cannot help but glory in her nobility and her reasonable pride. She has the head of a Solomon on her young shoulders. If you were not blind, Vane, you could not fail to see what an adorable girl you have married."
"She is different from what I thought, certainly," Vane admits, gravely.
"She can hold her own—I am glad of that," Mr. Langton grunts, amicably. "You see you could not have her for the asking. Serves you right. There is hardly any excuse for the way you acted."
"It was outrageous, certainly," Vane answers, with admirable penitence, "but I wish she would have made it up and let me come here. The Haven of Rest is a dry place certainly—given up to invalids and poky people."
"I hear that Sea View is rather gay," Mr. Langton replies. "Some new people arrived this morning. There is talk of a ball to-night."
"A ball! Will Reine go down?" Mr. Charteris inquires.
"Scarcely, I think. You see I shall not be able to escort her."
"Perhaps she will allow me that honor," Mr. Charteris observes, promptly.
"Perhaps so," Mr. Langton responds, with a dry smile.
The ball comes off. Vane constitutes himself the attendant cavalier of Reine. In a white lace dress with Marechal Neil roses on her breast and in her hair, she has never looked more brilliant and beautiful. There is a softened grace about her, a new light in her eyes that is wondrously winning. She is withal a perfect dancer, embodying the very poetry of motion.
Some very pretty girls are present, some very nice men, but Reine is the belle of the ball. Mr. Charteris looks on in surprise. Reine had not been appreciated at Langton Villa.
"You have not given me a single dance," he says to her late in the evening.
"You have not asked me," she replies, in just the slightest tone of reproach, "and now I cannot; my card is full."
She floats away with a partner who has just claimed her. Vane, leaning carelessly against a chair in the corner, watches her languidly. She seems to enjoy herself. Smiles hover on the crimson lips, the dark eyes flash beneath their curling lashes.
Suddenly someone comes up to him—an acquaintance[Pg 64] he has formed in London, and who has, somehow, found his way to this secluded spot.
"Ah, Charteris, how-de-do," the new-comer says, unceremoniously. "Who is the dark-eyed beauty? I've been watching her this half hour."
"Which one, Sir George?" with affected nonchalance.
"By Jove! there is but one, you know, the divinity in white lace and yellow roses. I saw you speaking to her just now," returns Sir George Wilde, with a look of interest in his handsome brown eyes.
"That!" says Mr. Charteris, "oh, that is—Miss Langton," with a curious hesitation over the name.
"Friend of yours?" inquires the dashing young baronet.
"Slight acquaintance," Charteris answers, warily.
"A compatriot, I take it," pursues Sir George.
Vane nods affirmatively.
"You'll introduce me, then?"
"With her permission," Vane responds, a trifle stiffly.
"That, of course," laughs Sir George.
A little later Vane goes to her to proffer his request. She stands for the moment alone in the embrasure of a window, her dark eyes turned from the giddy dancers out upon the mystic, lonely sea, with the moon and stars asleep upon its breast. He tells her, watching the bright face narrowly, that an English baronet has been so attracted by her beauty that he desires an introduction. Will she accord it?
The laughing, dark eyes, a spice of mischief in their starry depths, glance up into his own.
"A baronet!" she says, making a little round O of her rosy mouth. "Do you think, Mr. Charteris, I could really bear the burden of such an honor without being crushed by it?"
"You can but try," he retorts, lightly. "England expects every man and every woman to do their duty."
"Then I am ready for the sacrifice," she laughs, as lightly.
He looks at her a moment in thoughtful silence.
"Well?" she asks, interpreting a question in his look.
"It is this, then, Reine: I am placed in an awkward position. How shall I introduce you—as Miss Langton, or as—as Mrs. Charteris?"
He flushes uncomfortably as the words leave his lips. His bride's face reflects the crimson glow. After a minute she replies, with outward indifference:
"Better, perhaps, as—Miss Langton, according to our agreement this morning."
Some slight feeling of pique rises in his heart. He will not own to himself that when he condescended to ask her the question he had thought to give her pleasure, and had felt, too, that he should not be ashamed to see this peerlessly-lovely girl wearing his name.
"Perhaps she does not really care for me as she pretended," he thinks to himself, and the first spark of jealousy is lighted in his heart when he sees her long lashes fall before Sir George's admiring gaze, and sees with what calm and graceful self-possession she acknowledges the introduction to the handsome, titled nobleman. "Who would have thought, when she first came to Langton Villa, that the wild little 'school ma'am' had so much dignity?" he thinks. "Is it, after all, a new phase of her character, or was I simply blinded then by my admiration for Maud? It seems that Sir George is irresistibly attracted by her graces. What can he see in the girl that I was blind to?"
And full of this wonder, he sets himself to watch the young baronet, who hovers around Reine with the palpable desire of the "moth for the star."
The whole room sees his admiration, and smiles at the fair American's conquest.
Vane is a good deal amused, and unknowingly piqued.
"What barefaced admiration," he says, within himself. "The young dandy is falling in love with my wife, confound him!"
CHAPTER XVI.
At a rather early hour the next morning, Mr. Charteris is astir, and out upon the sands.
Not so early as some others, though, he finds, for in a merry group of young people on the sands, he meets Sir George Wilde in close proximity to Reine. Vane, giving them a careless good-morning, passes on to some little distance, where he pauses with folded arms, and a slightly sulky aspect, to look out over the wide waste[Pg 66] of heaving sea, his shapely back turned resolutely on the merry-makers.
"Confound the fellow's impudence," he remarks to himself, with needless savagery. "How he follows her around. Of course she would rather be with me. She loves me, or pretends to."
Why he should feel vexed at Sir George's monopoly of his, Vane's, unloved bride he could not explain to himself. Yet the feeling is there.
Glancing furtively over his shoulder, and seeing the undeniably handsome and well-matched pair strolling on side by side, creates a feeling of decided ill-humor within him.
"It is quite a flirtation," he tells himself. "Reine should know better, being a married woman. But perhaps she has taken a fancy to the fellow. Perhaps she was mistaken in the notion that she cared for me. She had seen no one else then. But now, meeting this handsome, spoony young baronet, she may regret this nasty marriage as much as I do."
While these thoughts flash through his mind, the gay hum of voices die away. The party have gone out of sight, and a sudden resolution comes into Vane's mind.
"I'll go and breakfast with the old gentleman again," he thinks. "After all it's only the proper thing to call and inquire for his health. Of course Reine will not have come in from her walk yet."
In this he deceives himself. Reine is there by the side of the old man's couch, with a lapful of rosy-tinted shells which she is displaying with a good deal of childish pleasure in their acquisition.
"Sir George found this one; isn't it a beauty?" she is saying, vivaciously, as the door opens, and Mr. Charteris is ushered in.
A start, a blush, a dimpling smile. She rises, gathering her treasures, child-like, in her apron overskirt.
Mr. Charteris, vouchsafing her a careless nod, passes on to Mr. Langton.
"I hope I find you better this morning, and rested?" he observes, taking the chair Reine places, without seeming to see her.
"A trifle easier, yes," Mr. Langton responds, with more than ordinary graciousness, and then Vane steals a furtive glance at Reine.
Some of the brightness that came into her face at his entrance has faded from it. She has quietly seated herself again, her long lashes droop to the shells in her lap, which she fingers rather at random.
"So the baronet helped you gather shells," he remarks, condescendingly.
She looks up, with returning smiles.
"Yes," she returns, spreading the pretty collection out to view. "Will you look at them? Some are quite pretty."
"Reine has been telling me about your friend," put in Mr. Langton. "He was very kind."
"Not my friend, a mere acquaintance," Vane replies with acerbity. "I saw him a few times in London; he is wild, rather."
"Indeed! and I thought him so nice," Reine says, with dismay.
"So he is nice; wildness, a little, you know, doesn't count," Vane hastens to say, ashamed of the spirit in which he has spoken a moment before. "Sir George is unexceptionable, rich, titled, and all that. He is what the ladies term a most desirable parti. A pity you are a-a-already married, Reine."
"Were I free he could be nothing to me," Reine retorts, a crimson flame coming to her cheeks.
Mr. Langton, struck by something in Vane's tone, looks from one to the other of the flushed faces, and says, laughingly:
"O-ho, my fine young lad, jealous, are you?"
Mr. Charteris is positively indignant.
"Don't tease, if you please, Mr. Langton," he retorts, with immense dignity. "Jealousy only exists with love, you know. And I haven't pretended to fall in love with my wife yet!"
With this most ungenerous stab, he flies out of the room in a passion.
The rosy-lipped shells fall unheeded from Reine's lap to the floor as she rises and stands before her uncle, the bitter tears of shame crowding into her eyes.
"Oh, Uncle Langton, how could you—how could you?" she cries, in bitter distress. "It—it is too—too absurd. He never could, you know——"
"There—there, don't cry, dear," he soothes, gently. "I am an old bungler, I know, and I shouldn't have[Pg 68] said it so plain, but the fact remains. Vane Charteris, whether he knows it or not, is falling in love with you, my dear, and is correspondingly jealous of the baronet's attentions to you."
The beautiful dark eyes looked at him incredulously. She shakes her head.
"You are mistaken," she answers, decidedly. "Your hopes mislead you. Confess now," smiling pensively through her tears, "that 'the wish was father to the thought.'"
"Perhaps so," he answers, willing to drop the subject and sorry he had agitated it.
Vane goes home rather ruefully, without breakfasting with Mr. Langton, as he had promised himself.
"What possessed me to be so rude, I wonder?" he soliloquizes. "Though I did not love her, it was awkward and ill-considered to cast it in her teeth. I begin to believe that it is I who am brusk and unmannerly, not she."
The day goes, long and wearily it seems to Vane, who is conscious of some new feeling he cannot realize, perhaps does not try to.
He smokes and reads, turning an unsociable cold shoulder on the rather dry habitues of the hotel. In the evening, drawn by "a spirit in his feet," and thoroughly ennuyed with his own society, he saunters over to the Sea View Hotel.
On his way he meditates rather slowly.
"It is doubtful whether she will receive me," his musings run. "I was rude this morning. Of course the little spitfire will resent it. She has too much spirit to tamely brook such shameless impudence. I certainly forgot myself in my vexation at that stupid old man."
The wide balcony of the Sea View presents a pleasant sight. A dozen or two of "young men and maidens" are assembled on it, some sitting, some walking, but one and all flirting with the greatest interest and delight.
Vane's quick eye singles out one solitary figure sitting apart from the rest, a slight, girlish one in white, the dark head bent over a book.
To this figure Vane goes forward, not without a lurking dread of meeting a petulant repulse.
He stops behind her chair, and Reine, startled, looks around.
Vane is relieved to find that there is no resentment in her face, only a new, sweet gravity a little strange to see on the piquant, girlish face.
"Ah, it is you, Mr. Charteris!" she says, carelessly. "You left us so unceremoniously this morning, I fear—thought you would not return."
Vane slips into the chair beside her, his heart unconsciously lightened of the burden that has weighed it down all day.
"To tell the truth I was half-afraid to come," he answers; "I was very rude to you this morning, and I knew you had reason to resent it, and expected you would. You remember you were wont to give me a piece of your mind very often in the days 'when we were first acquainted.'"
"Yes, but things are changed, you know," she returns, gently.
Reine is changed too. The thought flashes over him suddenly as he looks at her keenly, taking advantage of her momentary obliviousness of his presence.
She has folded her very small and slender white hands across the book in her lap, and is gazing a little dreamily out to sea.
The dark eyes are not so free and glad as they were of old.
They have grown larger and vaguely sad, the peachy cheek, rounded daintily like a child's, is pale to-day, the crimson lips have a slight, pathetic droop. Something in the softened loveliness of the brilliant face goes to his heart like a wordless reproach.
For a moment he regrets the arch, daring, sparkling face that used to flash defiance at him and his opinions.
"You are changed, too, Reine," he says, unconsciously putting his thought into words. "You used to scold me when I was naughty. I hope you are not afraid of me now because you are my wife?"
A great wave of color surges into her cheek at his words. She turns on him the half-shy gaze of the frank, dark eyes.
"Afraid of you—oh, no, it is not that," she says. "But you disliked my wild ways so much that I have tried to be more what you wished me, more dignified, more gentle."
He looks at her with a half question in his blue eyes, a flush on his handsome face.
"Like Maud," she explains, further.
"Like Maud—why, really," he begins, with supreme anger and sarcasm, but she interrupts him, somewhat incoherently:
"I thought—I was told, I mean that—that I was to stay with Uncle Langton a year, and be formed over into a woman like Maud."
His blue eyes darken with shame and anger.
"So you have heard that!" he says, with self-contempt. "I was a fool, a dolt. Give over the attempt, Reine. You can never be like Maud any more than—than a rose is like a lily!"
"So I thought," she answers, visibly abashed. "Maud is so grand, and white, and queenly, and I am so little, and dark, and ugly."
"That is not true," he answers, hastily. "You are beautiful, Reine. I am sure you know that. You are like a beautiful 'queen-rose,' all sweetness, color and dew, 'set round with little willful thorns.' Maud is like a grand white calla lily, beautiful, but devoid of sweetness and perfume."
"The lily is the most beautiful of all flowers," the girl answers, sighing.
"But the rose is the emblem of love," he replies, smiling as the swift color floods her cheeks.
She has no answer ready, and he goes on with some embarrassment:
"Do not try to be like Maud, Reine. Though so beautiful and stately, she was mercenary and treacherous. Perhaps a less perfect manner is preferable with a heart free from guile. Do you not think so?"
Before she can reply, Sir George Wilde comes up to them. His eyes rest admiringly on the beautiful, graceful, dark-eyed girl by the side of Vane Charteris.
"Sentimentalizing and reading poetry?" says the intruder, looking at Reine's book. "Upon my word it is simply shocking, the number of flirtations going on[Pg 71] this evening. Miss Langton, let me see your verses," coolly taking the open volume from her hand.
Vane, looking off to sea, unreasonably vexed, and out of humor, hears him reading in a clear, full voice, the lines on which Reine's hands have been closely folded since he sat down by her.
"Lugubrious reading, certainly," comments the lively young baronet. "Does Charteris enjoy that style of poetry for a summer evening by the sea?"
"I—I was not reading to Mr. Charteris," the girl stammers, vaguely confused. "I was reading when he came, and then I laid the book down."
Both men regard her a little gravely.
The touch of sadness in face and voice is strange, yet sweet, in the young and lovely girl.
Sir George tells himself that there is some depth to this lovely American girl, and wonders why Charteris doesn't fall in love with her.
For himself, he is very far gone indeed, and Vane, irritated by his society, abruptly announces that he will go up and see Mr. Langton.
"He will be very pleased, I know," Reine answers, brightening suddenly, and Vane turns away with a sudden angry conviction that she is glad to have him gone.
Sir George is glad at least, there can be no two opinions as to that. He settles himself delightedly in Vane's vacated chair.
CHAPTER XVII.
"I have a proposition to make to you," Vane says, after he has conversed with Mr. Langton awhile on indifferent subjects.
Mr. Langton, lying on his couch, looking dull and weary, glances up with some interest.
"Well?" he says, abruptly.
"I saw your physician to-day," Vane observes, slightly embarrassed. "He thinks it would be at the risk of your health if you left this place under a month."
"The rascal! He's keeping me here to swell his fee for attendance, that's all," groans the millionaire; "well, and what has that to do with your proposition, eh?"
"A great deal. You know your delay in returning to America is attended with serious risk to Maud Langton, languishing in prison, and waiting for a release that cannot come until she regains possession of that note that is to prove her innocence."
"I have urged Reine to return alone, but she is unwilling to leave me," Mr. Langton answers, hastily.
"There would be no risk in doing so," Vane replies, "with a competent nurse left in charge of you. It is of that I wished to speak to you. Persuade Reine to go back without you. I will myself accompany her."
"You!" Mr. Langton exclaims, in such thorough surprise, that Vane flushes a deep red.
"Yes," he answers, a little testily, "I will go with her. Why not? She is my wife."
"Certainly, and it will be a very good plan," Mr. Langton replies, secretly delighted at Vane's repentance, but pretending to be very calm and non-committal.
"You see," Vane continues, with a sigh of relief, "after the business that took us home was concluded, I should bring Reine back. By that time you would be well and strong again, and we would travel some, the three of us, and remain abroad some time. Do you like my plan?"
"Very much. I am pleased with the idea. Have you spoken with Reine on the subject?"
"No, not yet. To tell the truth I have relied on you to persuade her. I might fail, you know. Will you undertake to plead my case for me?" inquires Vane, blushing like a girl.
"I thought you were lawyer enough to plead your own case," laughs the old millionaire.
"You see, this is different," answers Vane. "I—I do[Pg 73] not quite understand Reine. I do not know how she would receive such a proposal. Perhaps she would laugh at me. I should have to plead as a lover, not as a lawyer. Only imagine the spirited little lady laughing in my face."
"I do not believe it is likely," Mr. Langton replies. "But since you are so afraid of your wife, I will speak to her about the matter. But, pray tell me, is your anxiety solely over Maud, or are you reconciled to your strange marriage?"
A step at the door, a hand at the latch, and Reine comes in, interrupting the answer hovering on his lips. Vane rises abruptly.
"I will go down and smoke my segar on the balcony," he says, then, looking at his wife: "Reine, will you walk on the sand with me afterward? It will be moonlight, and the nights are very pleasant."
A smile of surprise and pleasure lights the changeful face into splendor.
"Thank you, I shall like it very much," she answers, with some inward wonder at his kindness.
"I will wait for you, then, on the balcony," he replies, and when he's gone, Mr. Langton hastens to tell her of Vane's proposal.
Her color comes and goes, her bosom heaves as she listens.
"But you know I could not leave you here alone with only a hired nurse," she remonstrates.
"You could, and you must," he replies, seriously.
"Listen, Reine, your husband has held out the olive-branch of peace, and you must not decline to accept it if you care for him. I shall do very well here with the doctor and the nurse. After all, I am not sick, only weak and fatigued. Remember Maud's peril before you refuse."
"I have written to Maud's lawyer. He will know that I have the note, and they will wait until I come," she replies.
"Delays are dangerous," he answers, "and the mails are not sure. Suppose your letter should not reach them. Letters have been lost before now," he says, artfully.
The girlish face grows white and troubled.
"If I thought that mine would be lost——" she begins.
"You would go," he finishes for her. "Very well, Reine, take my advice and go. I will remain here until you return. Go down now to your husband and tell him you will be ready to accompany him to-morrow."
"If anything should happen to you, I should never forgive myself," she says, with lingering hesitation.
"Nothing will happen," he answered. "You will find me here, when you come back, safe and well. Go, now, to Vane, and tell him you will go."
She lingers a moment, warned by some strange presentiment of evil; then, conquered by his renewed persuasions, and her own anxiety over Maud's fate, she goes from the room with a strangely beating heart to seek her husband.
He throws away his segar with a smile at sight of her, and comes out from a little knot of men who have clustered around him.
"You are ready?" he says, with a new tone of tenderness in his voice that makes the girlish heart beat all the faster, and drawing her hand through his arm they bend their steps to the shore.
It is twilight, that most seductive hour of all the twenty-four. The moon is rising softly, a few stars shine in the purple vault above, and mirror themselves in the laughing waves below.
The murmurous sound of the great deep is all that breaks the silence.
"Mr. Langton has told you, Reine," he says, looking down into the brilliant face that is "luminous, star-like, gem-like," in the soft, twilight haze.
"Yes," she answers, in a low voice, as if she scarcely cared to break the charmed silence brooding around them.
They walk slowly arm-in-arm along the sandy shore. Vane has drawn her hand very closely through his arm, and the tips of her velvet-soft fingers lie against his wrist, sending thrills of sweetness along every nerve. To him also "silence seemed best," so they stroll on quietly awhile. Reine lost to everything but the magic charm that lies in the presence of the man she loves, and Vane held in thrall also by some new feeling, whose power he is scarcely prepared to acknowledge.
He looks down at the young face that is strangely fair and tender in the mystic light, and wonders at his[Pg 75] own blindness that he has never quite realized the charm of her beauty before. She has thrown some soft trifle of filmy lace over her waving dark hair, with soft ends knotted beneath the round, dimpled chin. Nothing could be more becoming. It frames the glowing face so delicately and so exquisitely, making her fairer than she knows. A strange, delicious thrill goes through Vane's heart as he remembers that this girl belongs to him—she is his wife.
"And she loves me," he says to himself, with the same wonder he had felt when that truth first flashed upon him. It flatters his manly vanity, cruelly hurt by Maud's treachery, to know that one true heart clings to him and loves him, though the woman he had loved had deceived him.
Suddenly her lips part with an anxious question:
"And you think it wise and prudent that I should go back to Maud leaving Uncle Langton here?"
"Yes," he answers, and there is a silence which she does not break.
"What do you think of the plan?" he asks.
"I hardly know," the girl answers, with some embarrassment.
"But you will do as I wish you—you will go back—in my care, Reine?"
"If you think it for the best," she answers very low.
"I do think so, otherwise I should not urge it. You need not be afraid to go with me, Reine. I will care for you with every tenderness—you are my wife, you know."
And, stooping over her, he lays his lips full and softly upon her own.
The shock of a great, new happiness tingles through the girl's sensitive frame. It is the first caress her unloving husband has ever offered her. With that impulsive kiss hope, which has almost died in her wounded heart, is born anew.
"You are my wife," he repeats, gently. "I shall not lose sight of that fact again. I shall remember my duty better."
She sighs a little. That word "duty" sounds so cold.
"I will try to make you happier," he continues; "I fear you have not been so light-hearted as you used to be since that night. Do you know those verses you[Pg 76] were reading this evening sounded like a reproach to me?"
She glances up, inquiringly.
"The verses you shut your hands over when I came up to you," he explains. "The sad words ring in my head:
"Did you think, my child, that they applied to your own case?"
"I was tempted to think so—can you blame me?" she says, with a gentle reproach in her voice.
"Do not fall into such despondent thoughts again," he answers, evasively. "You are too young for sorrow, Reine. Look on the bright side of the picture. I foresee that this play will end with my falling desperately in love with my own wife."
"I hope so," she answers, with sudden, piteous earnestness, and a quiver of passionate sorrow in her voice.
"So do I," he says, filled with sudden penitence. "I am sure it cannot be hard to learn to love so fair and noble a wife. You have saved me from my own sinful passions, Reine. I can never forget that."
"And now I must go back," she says, with a bitter sigh of regret. "Uncle Langton will be lonely, and if—if I go to-morrow I have a great deal of packing to do first."
They walk slowly back to the hotel through the murmurous silence of the summer night by the sea, with the strong, sweet smell of the brine in their faces. It is the first time they have been together without cold words from one or the other, the first time her husband has caressed her.
And when he leaves her at the balcony steps he presses his lips to her white hand, and whispers, kindly:
"After to-night, little wife, we are never to be parted any more, remember."
CHAPTER XVIII.
No one can recall without a shudder of horror the midnight burning of the steamer Hesperus in mid-ocean in 188-, and the terrible loss of life consequent upon that marine disaster.
She had been five days out, with fair skies and smooth seas, and every prospect of a prosperous and speedy voyage, when that disastrous fire stole upon her like a thief in the night, and wrapped her noble and majestic form in a winding sheet of flame.
Fifty souls perished miserably, including the captain and a part of crew.
In that terrible holocaust of fire and water, Reine Charteris was lost.
Her husband was saved—saved through such a tragedy of horror as sowed silvery threads in his fair, clustering locks, and almost broke his heart with remorse and pain.
We will hear him tell the story in his own words, as he told it that day when seated in the gloomy prison-cell, where Maud Langton was expiating her folly in bitterness of soul, he placed in her hands a small metallic case, locked with a tiny key, and said, solemnly and slowly:
"This means freedom and release to you, Maud. It is a legacy to you from the dead."
The beautiful, queenly-looking girl, wasted and worn from long confinement, and sickening dread and terror, looks up at the man's pale, haggard face, at the deep crape band on his hat, and shudders.
"You mean——" she says, then pauses, struck dumb by the white agony of his face.
"I mean I have lost my wife; Reine is dead."
"Dead!" the beautiful prisoner cries in wonder—not sorrow.
That is so plain to his senses, sharpened by grief, that he cries out bitterly:
"Yes, dead! But look at your legacy, Maud. That is all your selfish soul will care for!"
She gives him one look of cold surprise, and then turns eagerly to her treasure.
The small key grates in the lock, the lid of the box flies open.
Within lies a package wrapped in oil silk. Undoing this with eager fingers, Maud comes upon the precious note that means so much to her in this terrible plight, the note poor Reine had crossed the seas to win from the vengeful grasp of Vane Charteris.
All of Maud's cold, superb dignity breaks down at[Pg 78] sight of that little slip of paper. She weeps and laughs together.
"This means hope, freedom, happiness to me," she cries, tearfully. "And you had it all the time, Vane. And Reine knew. It was for that she crossed the seas?"
"Yes," he answers, "and it was for that she died."
"No, no!" Maud says, and shakes her head; "how could that be? Oh, how I thank you for bringing me this! You did not know when you went away how much it was worth to me, did you? That my very life would depend upon it?"
He looks at her with steady, somber eyes.
"Yes, I knew," he answers. "I knew, but I did not care. My love for you was turned to hate by the crushing indignity you had put upon me. At that time I would have sold myself to the evil one for the chance of revenge upon you. Guess how I felt when, at the inquest over the dead body of the lover you had preferred to me, I found what terrible power fate had put into my eager hands. I rejoiced wickedly. I went away that the great ocean rolling between us might keep from me the tidings of your too probable fate, for I shuddered at the horror of my revenge, although I could not forego it. Yes, Maud, I, who had loved you dearly once, would not have lifted my finger to save you from the horror of a shameful death upon the scaffold; do you realize, now, the intensity of my hate?"
She puts her delicate hand to her grand, white throat and sobs hysterically. By day and by night she has dreamed of that horrible, impending death. She knows that all believed her guilty of her lover's death, and that no jury would have cleared her without that note in Clyde's own writing, swearing that he would shoot himself if she failed to marry him.
"You were cruel, cruel," she moans.
"Say rather that I was insane," he answers; "my heart and my brain were on fire, and my soul was numb within me until Reine came to me and showed me what a wretch I was, and how I should be your murderer if I persisted in my wicked silence. Then I yielded to that white-souled child who was far too pure[Pg 79] to be my wife, and I prayed God to forgive my sin, as I now pray you, Maud."
She looks at him with her large, clear blue eyes, with the glad tears of joy still pendant on the golden lashes and holds out her hands.
"I cannot refuse to forgive you since you have relented and brought me this invaluable paper," she answers, "and more especially since I know that I did you a cruel wrong. Can you forgive me, Vane?"
"Once I thought I could not, but it is easy enough now," he answers, gravely, just touching for a moment the soft, white, extended hands. "I have no longer any room in my heart for anger or resentment. I think only of my grief."
"For Reine!" she asks, with an almost imperceptible lifting of the golden eyebrows indicating surprise.
"For Reine," he answers, with a tortured sigh.
"Did she die abroad?" Maud asks in an awed and softened voice.
"She was drowned at midnight in the Atlantic Ocean, amid all the horrors of fire and flood," he groans.
"On the ill-fated Hesperus," she exclaims. "Oh, I read the news in the papers, but there were no particulars, and I did not dream of such a tragedy. You were with her, were you not? Why was it that you could not save her?"
His gloomy eyes fell with a look of loathing on the paper in her hand.
"She died, Maud, to save you from the consequences of your folly. She might have been saved but for that paper you hold in your hand," he answers, sternly.
"I do not understand you, Vane. Surely you know not what you say," Miss Langton utters in perplexity.
"Listen, and you shall be the judge," he answers, with a heavy sigh. "I sailed with my wife on the Hesperus——"
"And Uncle Langton?" she interrupts him to ask.
"We left Mr. Langton resting at a quiet summer resort. He was too much indisposed to return with us so soon. We were to have gone back for him as soon as your freedom had been secured," he explains.
She bows, silently, and he goes on, the pale, beautiful girl listening attentively.
"Reine came to me the day that we had been five[Pg 80] days out, with that little metallic case in her hand. She had been very bright and happy since we started, but just then she was pale and grave. 'Vane,' she said to me, 'I have put Maud's precious paper in this little case for greater safety. But I have a strange dread of losing it. Put it in your breast pocket and keep it for me!' I—oh, Heaven! I obeyed her," he exclaims, struggling with a bitter remorse.
The beautiful prisoner regards him with silent sympathy.
"I obeyed her," he repeats, with a passionate remorse, "and that night when we sprang into the water together, fleeing from the devouring flames, it was still on my person. All hope seemed gone, and we clung to each other in the desperation of despair, determined at least to die together. Suddenly a crowded life-boat came in sight. A man shouted there was room for one more and that they would take the woman in. At these words she cried out frantically that I had Maud's precious paper, and that I was the one to be saved, and with that she loosed her hold, and with an awful suddenness pushed me from her, and sank down, down in the terrible water. With the awful shock of her loss I became unconscious. They drew me into the boat in the place of my poor girl, and the boat swept on over her awful burial-place. It was for you, Maud. She gave her beautiful, innocent life freely for you rather than risk the loss of the legacy I have brought you!"
CHAPTER XIX.
Even Maud Langton's cold and shallow nature, utterly incapable of such an act of dauntless heroism as Reine's, is touched by the man's overmastering grief and the story of the woman's devotion.
"Poor little Reine! I did not deserve such a sacrifice from her," she exclaims, with a guilty consciousness of her cruel and contemptuous treatment of her generous rival.
Vane Charteris makes her no reply. He has dropped his pale, handsome face into his hands, his strong frame quivers with silent sobs. Maud watches him in amazement.
"You take it hard," she says; "yet I thought you did not love her, that you would not care."
"Not care!" lifting his somber blue eyes a moment to her pale, wondering face. "I care so much that by night or by day, sleeping or waking, her image is never absent from my thoughts. I would give the whole world to have her back, my poor lost darling!"
"Then you learned to love her?" Miss Langton exclaims, recalling his fastidious dislike of Reine's wild ways and sharp little speeches.
"Yes; now, when it is all too late," he answers, in a wild burst of remorse and sorrow.
Then there is a brief silence. How often those sad words, "too late," come home to stricken hearts with a pathos that words are all too powerless to express. Could Reine but have known—in that fair land to which her soul had flown—her husband's poignant repentance, she might well have answered with the poet:
"Believe me, Vane, I am very, very sorry," Maud says to him in her gentlest tones. "Perhaps you think I was not worthy little Reine's generous self-sacrifice."
He has no answer ready for her. She begins to realize that he is strangely changed. The fair and handsome face that used to be so gay and debonair has grown wan and haggard. Some silver threads shine in the fair, clustering locks on his temples. His step is slow and heavy as he turns to go.
"How long will it be before I shall be free?" she asks him, wistfully, as he turns to go.
He starts, and turns back, remembering suddenly what the petted beauty must have endured in these weary weeks of confinement, with the shadow of an awful fate hanging over her.
Looking closer into the white face with its finely-chiseled features, sharpened and refined by the agony[Pg 82] she has endured, his heart swells with momentary pity for the cold beauty who has wronged him so deeply.
"But a little while, I think," he answers, kindly. "I have seen your lawyer. He told me that the trial which he has been staving off from time to time, will take place to-morrow. He is quite sure that your innocence will be indisputably proven by the paper you hold, together with other facts in his possession. I congratulate you, Maud, upon your narrow escape from the terrible web that circumstantial evidence had woven around you."
She shudders, and grows deathly pale at the thought of it, and Vane hurries from the room and from the presence of her who had been, for a brief while, the sun of his existence.
Hurrying back to his hotel, he finds there a letter which has followed him across the sea from the quiet watering-place where he had left Mr. Langton. It is from the genial, kindly physician, and the news is startling.
The old millionaire, the sharp-tongued, irascible, yet kindly-hearted old gentleman, is dead—has died suddenly and strangely of disease of the heart in two days after Reine and Vane had left him in the confident hope of soon rejoining him. They have buried him there in the quiet churchyard by the sea, far away from his native land, and the friends he loved. All unknowing of Reine's fate, he has gone to rejoin her in the unknown land.
CHAPTER XX.
Mr. Langton's favorite axiom: "Delays are dangerous," which he had quoted so effectively to Reine, would seem to have made less impression on his own mind. The new will, which was to have disinherited Maud Langton and made Vane Charteris and his wife his sole heirs, had been carelessly and fatally postponed. Beautiful Maud, but yesterday penniless, imprisoned, suspected, goes back to-day, free, joyous, triumphant, to her old home, the undisputed mistress of Langton Hall and her uncle's great wealth. Vane Charteris, in nowise disconcerted, and scarcely disappointed, returns to the musty little law office in Washington, from whence[Pg 83] his old friend's letter had summoned him a few months before to marry his heiress.
It is a dull, prosaic life enough. Vane is young yet, and has not made his mark. Very few clients come to seek his assistance out of their difficulties. Some dreary days go by, and life does not look quite the same through his office windows as it did in the golden spring before he went to Langton Hall. It is autumn now. The leaves are turning red, and brown, and yellow, the petals are falling from the flowers. Not that Vane takes note of this. One flower that faded in the summer gone, is worth all the world to him. For a time ambition, energy, hope, seem to forsake him. Always before his eyes floats a vision of a fair, dead face with waving tresses, tangled with seaweed; always against his breast he feels the pressure of small hands pressing against him, pushing him from her in the mad resolve to die in his stead. For in his heart Vane feels that it was not alone for Maud's sake she died. She had meant to save him, whom she loved far more than life.
So the autumn days go by. By-and-by the gay, brilliant, beautiful city of Washington begins to fill up with its usual winter throng. Congress assembles, and the brilliant crowds that follow in its train. And one day there comes a delicate, perfumed note to Vane from one of the most fashionable avenues of the fashionable city.
"Dear Vane," it says, "I have come to Washington for the winter, but shall be very quiet, of course, being in deep mourning for my dear uncle. I have invited the Widow Baird and her daughter—unexceptionable people, you know—to stay with me. But I am very lonely, very repentant, and very sad. Will you let by-gones be by-gones, and come and see me?
"Maud Langton."
A delicate, dainty, seductive note. With a start, Vane remembers the elegant house on —— avenue, which had been Mr. Langton's property. Here it is that his heiress had pitched her tent, figuratively speaking, and opened the campaign, for she is determined not to lose the delights of the winter wholly, although in ostensible mourning.
Vane is roused to indignation at first. Why should[Pg 84] she ask him to call? Does she take him for a simpleton? He has forgiven her for Reine's sake. That is enough.
He stays away, and in three days an elegant private carriage sets Maud down in front of his office. She rustles across the threshold in a costly costume, designed to represent slight second mourning—a black silk with jetted trimmings, white crepe lisse at throat and wrists, a jetted bonnet with white lisse strings, a dress that is marvelously becoming to the pearl-fair beauty, framed in soft waves of golden hair.
"Perhaps you think I have come to scold you," she says, with infinite tact, as he comes forward, visibly embarrassed; "but I have not. Of course you had a right to decline my invitation, if it did not please you to come. I shall not trouble you long now. I am here on a matter of business."
Mr. Charteris bows and hands her a chair. She seats herself, making moonlight, not "sunlight," "in a shady place," with her cold, white beauty.
Then her large, light-blue eyes turn scrutinizingly on his worn, handsome face.
"You are not looking well," she pronounces. "Business, perhaps, is driving you too hard?"
Vane smiles rather grimly.
"I cannot make any complaint of that nature," he responds.
The blue eyes light, unmistakably, with pleasure.
"Then you are not busy," she says; "I am rather glad to hear it. Perhaps you will have time to manage my property for me?"
He looks inquiringly at the beautiful, smiling face.
"I have quarreled with my lawyer," she explains. "I intended to take the management of my affairs out of his hands. Will you take his place, Vane?"
A dark, red flush creeps up to his temples at her air of condescending patronage.
"Excuse me, I must decline," he answers.
"You decline—surely not!" says the proud beauty, with incredulous surprise.
"Why should I not decline?" Vane Charteris asks, with a certain haughtiness, before which Maud lowers her proud tone of patronage visibly.
"I thought you could not afford to decline," she falters. "Are you not—not poor?"
"Granted," he answers, with a slight, cold smile. "I am not yet poor enough to barter my self-respect. For the rest, you know, Miss Langton—
Maud, who has come bustling with pretty patronage and self-importance, is visibly disconcerted. She takes a new tone.
"You are harsh and cruel to me, Vane," she says, petulantly. "I came with the best intentions. I only meant kindness."
"Thank you," stiffly.
"I thought you had forgiven my—my folly," she goes on further, with a killing glance from the long-lashed, seraphic-blue eyes.
"I hope I have," he replies, still coldly.
"Then why—why will you refuse my request?" she asks.
Something like scorn flashes on her from the man's sapphire-blue eyes.
"Miss Langton, I have forgiven the indignity you put upon me last summer," he answers, shortly, "but do you think I could stoop to serve you—you?"
The heiress colors under his glance of haughty scorn.
"You will never forget that," she sighs. "You will not believe how eager I am to make atonement for my sin against you. I see you are determined to be hard and cold with me. You will not make friends."
Vane turns round upon her a little fiercely.
"What are you driving at, Maud?" he asks, with positive rudeness. "Do you wish to make a fool of me again? To win my heart from me again and trample it under your feet?"
And then a sudden impulsive shame seizes upon him as she shrinks before his quick wrath with something very like fear in her face.
"I beg your pardon—I was talking foolishly to you," he says. "You do not at all understand me, I think, Miss Langton, or you would never have——"
"Never have come here, you mean," she says, as he pauses. "Aren't you just a little rude, Mr. Charteris?[Pg 86] But I am determined not to be angry with you. Forgive me for trespassing on your time. I am going now."
Swish! goes the rich silk against her chair with a waft of delicious perfume.
The tips of her gloved fingers settle lightly against his coat-sleeve, the great, blue eyes look straight into his own, persuasively.
"Vane, think better of your refusal, pray do," she says. "I did not come here to insult you, neither to wheedle you back to your old allegiance. I thought you would help me about this great, troublesome property. I am so ignorant and helpless."
"Any lawyer in the city would be glad to manage your business for you," he returns, with cool courtesy.
"I shall not ask any of them till I hear from you again. Perhaps you may change your mind, and let me know that you will take this trouble off my hands," she answers, good humoredly, moving toward the door.
Vane attends her to her carriage, and with a formal bow returns to his lonely office. How lonely he never quite realized till now, looking at the empty chair where the brilliant heiress had sat just now, queenly and graceful like the tall, white lily to which he had once likened her.
CHAPTER XXI.
We will return to Reine Charteris on that terrible night of fire and flood, when, with all the deathless devotion of a true woman's heart she sacrificed herself to save her husband and her friend.
In the minute before the life-boat came into sight Reine's mind had been comparatively calm and contented.
Though she believed that certain death stared her in the face, it had no special terrors for her. Her life had been good and pure, and she had no dread of the hereafter.
The thought of dying with the husband she loved had a strange, romantic sweetness for her heart.
In the bright and awful glare of light thrown upon the waters by the burning ship, her pale and lovely[Pg 87] face had upon it an expression of rapt and Heavenly sweetness and content, untouched by dread or fear.
Vane's arm was drawn around her, and they were slowly swimming about and looking for some drifting desperate hope of rescue.
A few minutes ago the black waves, weirdly illumined by the red glare of the flames, had been filled with a writhing, despairing, shrieking mass of anguished humanity, but now they had all disappeared. Some had floated off to a distance, some had sunk beneath the waves and found a watery grave—
Vane and Reine were quite alone for a moment—alone, and drawn seemingly nearer together than they had ever been in life by the deadly peril that menaced them. They had made up their minds to death. Both were good swimmers, but they were too far from land for their strength and skill to avail. They clung together, each feeling instinctively that death would be less hard if shared together.
At that moment one of the life-boats that had been seized upon in the first moments of peril by a fortunate few, came in sight of them. It was crowded, already, but one manly heart saw and pitied the terrible case of the two victims. He shouted that they would make room for one more—they would take the woman in.
"Come, Reine, they will save you, my darling," Vane Charteris cried out, tenderly and joyfully, yet with the solemnity of a last farewell in his eyes, as he drew his young wife forward.
But with a sudden cry of anguish, the girl resisted him.
The bare thought of forsaking her husband and leaving him to die alone, was more bitter than death. With that thought came the remembrance of the precious paper she had crossed the sea to win from Vane's vengeful keeping.
"Let me save you—remember you have Maud's precious paper," she cried out, hoarsely, and pushing him frantically from her with both extended hands, she sank down—down into the depths of the sea. They waited a moment, but she did not rise again, and seeing that Vane had lost consciousness, they drew him into the life-boat,[Pg 88] and in the efforts to revive him, they soon drifted out of sight of the spot where the devoted girl had disappeared beneath the fire-illumined waves.
In the meantime Reine, who was really a strong and expert swimmer, had only dived beneath the waves, and had come up again in a few seconds later at a different spot where, herself unseen, she could behold the life-boat with its living freight drifting swiftly out of her yearning sight. She had freely given her one chance of life to her husband, but with the thought that he would live there was born in her own young heart an agonizing desire for life. She loved Vane so dearly that she could not bear to leave him in the bright, gay world, and go down to death alone. Though not regretting that she had saved her husband by so great a sacrifice, she breathed a silent, fervent, yet seemingly hopeless prayer, that she might also be rescued and restored to him.
Yet who can tell how often God is near, listening to the wild appeals of those who, despairing of human help, cry out to Heaven. Alone in the wide waste of the ocean, with the midnight stars shining down upon her like the pitying eyes of angels, a friendly plank drifted to her reach. She clutched it eagerly with her hands, threw herself upon, and embraced it with her bruised and weary arms. Now she felt, with a thrill of hope, that there was at least one plank between her and eternity.
The night wore on. Wind and tide bore her far away from the terrible burning ship that towered aloft like a ghastly funeral pyre, throwing its awful glare far and wide upon the sea.
Tossed hither and yon, bruised and buffeted by the heavy waves, the slender form of the fair young girl still held in its breast the faint spark of life, though looking forward to death as inevitable, and drawing nearer and nearer.
The blushing rose of dawn opened its petals at last. The morning light glimmered palely in the east. It shone upon a deathly-white face with pale lips, half apart, and eye-lids closed in unconsciousness, with the[Pg 89] long, thick lashes lying on the cheek like to "rays of darkness."
At that moment a small sailing-vessel hove in sight. The floating plank with its precious burden was sighted by the pilot, and in a few minutes more the unfortunate girl was safe on deck.
The crew gathered around her, filled with wonder and curiosity at the sight of the beautiful ocean-waif.
"She is dead," said the mate, with a sorrowful shake of the head.
"I do not think so," said the captain, decidedly. "Look at her right temple. You see it still bleeding from a slight wound that must have been received from something that has struck her in the water. She has been stunned by it, perhaps, and will revive presently. Call Doctor Franks."
Doctor Franks came and agreed with the captain. The girl was not dead, but there was no telling how soon she would be, from the bad effects of her exposure in the water, and the jagged wound on her head.
"A bed must be prepared for her at once, and I will see what I can do towards resuscitating her," said the kind-hearted Doctor Franks.
CHAPTER XXII.
"Go and tell the stewardess to prepare a bed quickly for this young lady," said the captain, turning to the cabin-boy.
The boy disappeared in the lower regions of the vessel, returning presently with a plump, good-natured-looking woman, who had a "full blown comeliness, white and red."
"An' indade, Cap'en Dill, sorra a bit spare bed is there, saving the little cuddy-hole where Mrs. Odell's maid slept afore she died."
"Prepare that, then, Mrs. McQueen. Don't you see what a deuce of a hurry we are in?" returned Captain Dill.
"Faix, and it'll be by Mrs. Odell's leave, then," says Mrs. McQueen. "Shall I ask her? It's a bit cross and ailing she is the day."
"Ask her then, and be in a hurry," he answers. "If[Pg 90] she refuses, the poor girl shall have my bed, and I'll bunk on deck with a blanket."
He is saved the necessity of the sacrifice, however, for Mrs. Odell, whoever she may be, yields an ungracious consent to the appropriation of the defunct maid's bed, and the still unconscious girl is removed thereto.
Long days afterward she opens her eyes consciously for the first time upon this world, after a long battle has been fought with fever, and delirium, and greedy death; opens her eyes with a passionate heart-cry on her poor, fever-parched lips:
"Vane, dear Vane!"
There is a soft swish of silk as of a lady rising from her chair, and Reine's large, hollow, dark eyes follow the sound.
She lies on a small, white bed in a "cuddy-hole" indeed, herself, but a small door is propped open, showing just beyond a very tiny, but elegant saloon, furnished royally enough for a princess, with hangings of purple velvet and gold, and softest couches and chairs, a carpet of velvet pile, picturesque rugs strewn about the floor, small paintings, each perfect gems of art, adorning the walls. Moving slowly through this luxurious saloon comes a lady, on whom Reine's feeble gaze is instantly riveted.
A form of medium hight, with narrow, stooping shoulders, and a middle-aged face with a strange beauty all its own—the beauty of brilliant eyes, waxen pallor, and hectic-flushed cheeks, that the deadly disease, consumption, bestows upon its victims. Clothed with almost barbaric splendor, with rustling silks and velvets, and sparkling jewels that seemed to flash fire in the dim saloon, she was yet one upon whom the heart ached to gaze, for by her terrible emaciation, and hollow, fever-flushed cheeks, and pain-drawn lips, she was one that cruel death had plainly marked for his own.
In wondering silence Reine's dark eyes lift to the strange woman's face as she comes to her side, diffusing a delicate odor of attar du rose as she moves. She speaks in a low, pleasantly-modulated voice, interrupted by a slight, hacking cough:
"You spoke, did you not? Is there anything you wish?"
"Yes, I want Vane," Reine answers, in a weak, childish voice, forgetful, or momentarily unconscious, of all that has passed since she was sundered from her husband's side.
An expression of pity comes into the emaciated face regarding her.
"I hope you will see Vane after a while," she replies, evasively. "Do you feel better, my dear?"
"Better?" the girl echoes, startled. "Have I been ill?"
"Yes, with fever. But you are convalescing now. Do you remember nothing of your illness?"
"Nothing," Reine answers, dreamily. "And—and your face is strange to me. Have I ever seen you before?"
"Not to your knowledge, I think," Mrs. Odell replies, with a slight smile.
A puzzled look comes into the pale, thin face lying on the pillow, with its great, hollow, black eyes. Reine is slowly gathering up the links of memory.
"Are—are we not on the Atlantic Ocean?" she inquires, after a dreamy pause.
Mrs. Odell, drawing her handkerchief across her lips after a slight spell of coughing, answers: "Yes."
Another dreamy pause. The dark eyes that have half-closed, open slowly again.
"Is this steamer the—the Hesperus?" she queries, half-doubtfully.
Mrs. Odell draws back with a slight expression of alarm on her face.
"I—I fear you are talking too much for an invalid," she says. "I will call the doctor."
Retiring into the saloon, and touching a silver call-bell, the fat stewardess appears.
"Send Doctor Franks in," Mrs. Odell commands. "His patient begins to recover consciousness."
Doctor Franks comes, eager, and on the alert, smiling a little as Reine's curious eyes seek his face.
"Another stranger," she complains, with almost childish petulance.
"Well, and what would you have?" he answers, cheerfully, as he touches her pulse. "Though strangers, we are all friends."
"I want Vane," the girl answers, with a hungry yearning in her weak voice.
"After awhile—after awhile," he answers, evasively, as the lady had done. "Are you feeling better to-day?"
"Yes, if I have been ill—have I?" Reine inquires, with some of her old sharpness of tone, for in her weak state she is easily irritated.
"Have you? Well, I should say so," he responds, smilingly. "At present you are nothing but a pair of big black eyes and a lot of hair that I should have cut off only that you were so pretty with it that I hadn't the heart."
"Do not believe him," Mrs. Odell puts in, good-naturedly. "If I had not scolded and begged, and almost gone down on my knees to him, he would have shaved your pretty head bare."
"I should not have liked that," Reine says, putting her small fingers to the thick, glossy plaits. "Vane liked my hair. He thought it pretty; he said so that very night when——" But, with the effort of recalling the long-past time, a great wave of memory suddenly breaks over Reine's heart. Her wan face grows paler, her eyes dilate wildly and fill with swift, passionate tears.
"I remember," she gasps, in a voice of pain, "oh, Heaven! I remember."
There is a moment of silence and they watch her closely. All along Dr. Franks had dreaded this moment of re-awakened memory in the girl's heart. But her agitation is not so great as he had anticipated, for though she is sobbing softly behind her hands, it is not with the bitterness of an utter despair.
"What is it you remember, Miss Langton?" he asks, touching her arm gently.
She starts and looks at him with her great, tear-filled eyes.
"Who told you my name?" she asks, curiously.
"It was marked upon your clothing," Mrs. Odell gently explains, and again Dr. Franks says, curiously:
"You were saying that you remembered——"
"The burning of the Hesperus and the loss of life, and our deadly peril, yes—yes," Reine answers, weakly. "But Vane was saved; oh, thank God for that. And[Pg 93] now my life, too, is spared," she exclaims, with the glad tears of joy falling through her white fingers.
They regard her in sympathetic silence awhile, then Dr. Franks says, kindly:
"I am very glad your friend was saved, Miss Langton, and very happy to think that we had the pleasure of seeing you. Were you bound for America?"
"Yes—returning home from a trip to England," she answers.
"I knew you were American instantly," says Mrs. Odell. "We are also of that nationality."
"I am very glad," Reine answers, giving her a pensive smile. "Are you also bound for your native shore?"
"Not just now," the consumptive returns, with a smothered sigh. "I am in delicate health, and Doctor Franks here has recommended the climate of Italy for my health, with the additional advantage of a leisurely sea-trip in a sailing vessel. We are now making our way to Mentone, Italy."
CHAPTER XXIII.
"You are bound for Mentone, Italy!" Reine repeats, with a quiver of disappointment in her low voice. "Then I am going farther away from home every hour!"
"Yes," replies Doctor Franks. "Lucky thing for you, too, in your weak and debilitated condition. Mentone is a charming climate for invalids. Will set you up in less than no time. Then, when your roses are blooming again, we'll send you home to America."
"How long since you picked me up out of the water?" she asks.
"Three weeks," he replies.
Three weeks!—she shuts her eyes ever so tightly, but the traitor tears creep through beneath the black fringe of her lashes.
Three weeks since she parted from Vane amid the horrors of that awful night. Three weeks he has believed her dead. Has he mourned her much? she wonders. Perhaps time has already dulled the sharp edge of grief.
Then graver thoughts chase these self-regrets from her mind.
A terrible doubt chills the life-blood around her heart.
After all, was Vane really saved?
She remembers that crowded little life-boat, already so full that it seemed rash and perilous to take in even one more passenger.
Has the little bark survived the dangers of the sea, or gone down with its precious freight of souls to swell the treasures of the "vasty deep?"
Truly has the poet written that: "Love is sorrow with half-grown wings."
Reine lies silent, with quivering lips and closed eyelids, thinking with grief unutterable of the beloved one's unknown fate. From first to last this passionate love of hers has brought her nothing but bitter pain and sharp humiliation.
Doctor Frank's genial voice rouses her from her bitter absorption.
"Come, come, mademoiselle, this will never do. No fretting and grieving if you please. It will only retard your recovery and return to America. Hold up your head now, and swallow this bit of refreshment our good stewardess has brought you. Then you must go to sleep."
"Do, that's a dearie," admonishes Mrs. McQueen, rather vaguely, proceeding to feed the patient with a spoon from the bowl of gruel that she has brought in, but after a sip or two Reine declares that she cannot swallow, and begs to be let alone.
To this the physician blandly consents after administering an infinitesimal dose of a dark liquid. As a result Reine goes away on a journey to the land of Nod in precisely fifteen minutes. Talking and emotion have thoroughly wearied her exhausted frame.
She sleeps soundly and dreamlessly till the light of another day shines broadly over the world.
Waking silently, and in her senses this time, the girl lies still with wide dark eyes gazing around her. The door into the tiny saloon is open as before.
She sees Mrs. Odell lying on a satin couch, wrapped in a crimson dressing-gown, and covered with a costly India shawl. Her eyes are closed, her face is ghastly in its deep pallor and emaciation.
Suddenly she starts broad awake, seized by a terrible fit of coughing that convulses her slight frame.[Pg 95] When she withdraws the snowy handkerchief she has been holding to her lips, Reine sees that it is streaked with blood.
"Oh, dear!" she exclaims, terrified, and Mrs. Odell looks around.
"So you are awake—what a sleep you have had. What made you cry out so?" she inquires in a weak, exhausted voice.
"It was the sight of the blood," Reine stammers. "I was frightened. You are very ill, are you not?"
Mrs. Odell, who has sunk wearily into a chair by her bedside, looks down at her with a ghastly smile on her blood-stained lips.
"Oh, no," she answers, with the hopeful confidence peculiar to that flattering disease, consumption, "my lungs are a little weak, that is all my trouble. The sea air and the Italian climate will quite restore my health, I think. The American climate is too harsh for me. I shall be better at Mentone."
"You will make your home there?" Reine asks, and Mrs. Odell answers readily:
"Yes, until my health is restored. Then I shall return to my native land. There is no place like America to me. Besides, all my property is there."
"Your friends and relatives, too?" Reine asks, and Mrs. Odell answers, sighing:
"Relatives I have none. My husband and children have all gone before to the better land. My friends are few. A woman as rich as I am does not know how to trust in friendship. Only think, child, my husband has left me two millions of dollars, and I have neither kith nor kin of my own to leave it to. I am utterly alone in the world."
"As I was until I met—Vane," Reine murmurs silently to herself, while a look of sympathy flashes from her beautiful eyes upon the lonely rich woman.
"The friend I cared most for on earth," Mrs. Odell continues, sadly, "was my maid, who died just a few days before you were rescued. She was a girl of culture and refinement, rather above her position, and a friend, rather than a servant. I have missed her sadly, as much for her company as her services."
"Did she die suddenly?" Reine asks, with a sigh for[Pg 96] the poor girl who had found a watery grave far from her native land.
"Yes, very suddenly, from an unsuspected heart disease."
After a minute's silence Mrs. Odell resumes, pensively:
"Do you know what I have been wishing, Miss Langton?"
"I cannot even guess," Reine replies, wonderingly.
"I have been wishing that you could take that poor girl's place with me. Not as my maid, of course, but as my friend and companion. I have grown to like you so much since you have been lying here ill and suffering. I have taken care of you as far as my own feeble state would allow. Do you think you could be my friend, child?"
"I am sure I could; that is, if you would not suspect me of designs on your property. I am an heiress, myself," Reine returns, with such naive, innocent pride that Mrs. Odell's pain-drawn lips part in an amused smile:
"You simple child. No one could suspect you of anything. There is no guile in that charming face," she answers kindly.
"Thank you. I shall be very glad of your friendship, and hope I may be of some account to you," Reine murmurs.
"It is settled then," Mrs. Odell says, with evident satisfaction. "You are to be my friend and my guest, the same as a daughter to me, until you leave me to return to America, which time, I hope, may be far off yet, for I shall not like to lose my little friend."
"Do not say that," Reine cries out quickly. "I should hate to grieve you, but I have two dear ones who would grieve to think that I was dead. I must let them know the truth as soon as I can."
CHAPTER XXIV.
Poverty is a great persuader. Numberless times it has forced people to put their pride in their pocket.
Vane Charteris, moping along in his law-office, finds such a dearth of clients that it would seem the world is for once at peace.
Nothing happens to break up the dull monotony of his life, or put a fee into his lank pockets. True, invitations pour in upon the "handsome rising young lawyer," but these he declines on the score of his mourning.
The city wakes up to the gayety of its winter season, but the ripple of joyous life flows past him unheeded. The lethargy of a hopeless grief is upon him. At last, with something of a shock, the vulgar and prosaic question of: "What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?" forces itself upon his consideration.
For Vane, handsome, careless, ease-loving Vane, has suddenly and thoughtlessly come to the end of his resources.
Bills, formidable, some of them, begin to pour in. Our hero, anxiously debating the question of "ways and means of raising the wind," begins to realize that business is strangely dull, and himself placed in a dilemma.
You understand that Vane Charteris is no perfect hero, my friends, you have seen that from the first. Self has in almost every instance ruled his thoughts; he has yielded to temptation, he has shown himself daily one of those petulant, faulty, yet daring types of men whom, after all, women cannot help loving.
So in this instance, instead of loftily adhering to his stubborn rejection of Maud Langton's offer, Vane Charteris suddenly remembers, with a sensation of relief, that all this while, a long month, indeed, the offer has lain in abeyance, waiting on his pleasure. Maud, like a skillful general, having made one artful move, is now waiting to see what the enemy will do.
Vane, like the thoughtless and innocent fly that he is, walks straight into the trap she has set. He decides to call. After all he may be forced to accept the management of her property. At this critical period of his fate, he cannot afford to be proud.
Yet it is with strange reluctance he climbs the marble steps and rings the bell. A memory of the dead seems to hold him back. The perfume of a white rose he has purchased and placed in his coat in passing a little flower shop, rises strong and sweet, thrilling him with the thought of her who has been like a rose herself.
"A rosebud set with little, willful thorns."
"I am foolish," he says to himself, disobeying the impulse to turn and descend the steps. "I must go through with it, I have to live."
He rings the bell again, and when the door is opened, sends in cards for Miss Langton, and Mrs. and Miss Baird, with whom he has some slight acquaintance.
The two latter are out. Miss Langton receives him in the elegant library where she is alone among the books, basking in the ruddy glow of firelight and gaslight. As his eyes light upon her, he recalls the English laureate's Maud:
She is like a rare picture in her black velvet dress, with its picturesque trimmings of cream-white lace, and the pearls that clasp her throat and wrists. She rises with that slow and languid grace that Vane was wont to admire so much.
"At last," she says, in her well-trained, softly-toned voice. "Welcome, Vane!"
He touches the white, extended hand very lightly, and takes the chair she places.
"I was passing, and I thought I would look in upon you a few moments," he observes, with unblushing nonchalance.
"I am thankful for even that small grace," Maud answers, with her most winning smile. "I know I have been a very bad girl to you, Vane, but I think if you knew how sincere my repentance is you would not mind coming now and then to cheer my lonely hours."
Then she drops her eyes and sighs. Vane looks at the fair, calm, languid beauty in wondering silence. A little while ago this had been his idea of perfect beauty. Since then he has learned to love the slumberous fire that glows in dark eyes and the soul that dwells on scarlet lips and dusky, brunette complexions. The sweetness of the rose has won his heart, but the beauty of the lily unconsciously charms his eyes even now when he knows how false she is at heart, and only fair in outward seeming.
"I—I have no time for calling," he responds, with cool politeness. "I am always busy."
"Always?" she arches her golden brows slightly. "That is unfortunate. I suppose, then, that I may[Pg 99] abandon the hope that I have been secretly cherishing, that you would relent and take the management of my property."
Vane regards her in apparent surprise.
"Is it possible you have found no one else?" he inquires, carelessly.
"I told you I should not try until I heard from you," she answers.
"True, I had forgotten that," he answers. "And so you have been waiting all this time. I wish you would tell me why you wish me to do this for you when there are others equally capable, and far more willing."
Of this pointed reminder Maud wisely takes no heed save a gentle, quickly suppressed sigh.
"Perhaps you would be angry if I told you my reason," she says, gently, removing her eyes a moment from the contemplation of her folded, milk-white hands to glance into his fair, grave, handsome face.
"Oh, no, I am quite curious to hear," he replies.
"I think you know that Mr. Langton allowed his lawyer a very liberal salary," she begins. "You know there is a great deal of work, really, a number of tenements here, several farms in the country——"
"I know all that," he interrupts, with a slight air of brusqueness.
"I should like," she answers, with a very becoming blush, "that you should have that salary, Vane. It would only be fair, seeing that the whole property would have been yours but for my foolish, deeply repented error.
"Thank you, you are very kind," Vane replies, with grim brevity.
"Do you think so?" she asks, simply, then with an anxious look into his unmoved face, she continues: "Will you be kinder still, Vane, and permit me to offer this salve to my accusing conscience?"
"If only I were not so busy," Vane says, with artful reluctance.
"Cannot you make the time? I should feel so much better over this unfortunate thing," she says, lifting her blue, pleading eyes to his face.
Vane pretends to meditate within himself.
"Well, yes, since you make a point of it, I will try to take the trouble off your hands," he says, after that[Pg 100] pause. "But as for losing Mr. Langton's money, pray don't think that I consider it hard lines, your inheriting it. I think you know that it wasn't for the sake of that I was—" he cuts his speech off short there, finding himself getting unwittingly on sentimental ground.
"I know," she says, quickly; "you mean you were going to marry me because you loved me. How foolish I was to doubt it then! Oh, Vane, if only we had it all to go over again, how different all would be!"
Vane turns on the beautiful, sighing coquette a look of steady contempt.
"If you had it all to do over again you would do precisely as you did then," he replies, with quiet scorn. "Don't play the coquette with me, Maud. I am in no mood for trifling."
"Nor I," she answers. "I am in earnest, Vane. It would be different; but I will not dwell on it since it annoys you. I fully understand that I am at liberty only to regard you as my man of business, not my friend."
There is just the right touch of sad and patient humility in the musical voice, and a dewy moisture gathers on the golden lashes. Vane is inwardly mollified by her repentance, but is careful not to show it.
"My friendship can be of no value to you," he says, coldly. "You are rich, and can number your friends by the score. I will serve you faithfully in my legal capacity. That is all I can promise."
"That is all I can ask, then," she answers, resignedly, and with such sweet patience that Vane takes his leave with a vague feeling that he has been unnecessarily cruel to the fair woman who had jilted him.
"Has she really repented? Does she indeed care for me now, as her words would imply, or is she the most consummate actress upon earth?" he asks himself.
And this is the beginning of the end.
Maud, left alone in the silent, stately library, throws off the mask of meekness and patience that had set so becomingly on her beautiful face.
She walks up and down the floor impatiently, with blended triumph and vexation in her soft, blue eyes.
"I have gained one point at least," she murmured to[Pg 101] herself. "And I will gain the rest, I swear it," clenching her jeweled hands tightly. "I love him. How strange that I should grow to care for him when once I fled from him in the hour that would have made me his own. I was mad and blind. I was deluded by my romantic fancy for Clyde. Ugh! how the remembrance of that man's face troubles and haunts me. I see it always as I did that night, upturned in the moonbeams, dead and white. If I had loved him really, the shock must have killed me. But I did not love him—at least not half so well as I love Vane Charteris now. How proud and independent he is. But I love him all the better for that. If he had not come back and brought me that paper I might have been hung, or at least imprisoned for life. I hate to think that I owe it to Reine Langton, whom I never liked. How fortunate for me that she and Uncle Langton died. I have the fortune now, and I am determined that I will yet be the adored wife of Vane Charteris."
CHAPTER XXV.
"Is the English mail in yet, Mrs. Odell? I do so want my English letter!"
Mrs. Odell turns a compassionate look on the pale, wistful face of the girl, into whose white cheeks all the life-giving breezes of Mentone have failed to restore the vanished rose.
Reine has been in Italy three weeks now. Thrice she has written to England to her Uncle Langton relating the story of her escape, and begging for news of himself and Vane.
No answer has come to these eager appeals, and she is half wild with anxiety.
"There is no letter yet, my dear," Mrs. Odell answers, sorrowfully, for she knows of Reine's strange story now. "I will tell you what to do now, Reine. Write to the postmaster there, and ask him for news of your uncle. Perhaps Mr. Langton has gone to another place."
"It is not probable," Reine answers, sighing, but she takes her friend's advice, and writes the letter of inquiry.
This time the answer comes all too soon. Her own[Pg 102] three letters are returned unopened, with the information that Mr. Langton is long since dead! The physician encloses a certificate of death.
"He is dead, my dear, kind uncle is dead, Mrs. Odell!" Reine cries, lifting her dark eyes, heavy with grief, to the pale face of her friend.
"My poor darling, I feared as much," the lady answers, compassionately. "Now, darling, you belong wholly to me."
"You forget my husband," Reine answers, through her tears.
And Mrs. Odell, clasping tighter the paper she holds in her hand, speaks no word at first. How can she stab that tender heart yet deeper, already bleeding with the sad news of her uncle's death?
"You will be your uncle's heiress, dear," she says to her presently, thinking to check the flowing tide of grief.
The girl starts and looks up, bewildered.
"I said, you will be your uncle's heiress," Mrs. Odell repeats.
And Reine, growing a trifle paler, shakes her head
"Not if he has died so suddenly," she answers. "He intended to alter his will, but he had not done so when I left him. The old will left everything to my cousin, Maud Langton. It is more than probable that I am penniless."
"It does not seem to distress you, losing the fortune, I mean," the pale invalid remarks, with some surprise.
"It does not," the girl answers, calmly; "I never cared to have my uncle's money; I know that Vane will take care of me," she adds, with tender confidence.
And again Mrs. Odell's sad, white face grows sadder.
"Dear, you forget that you have no assurance that your husband is living," she exclaims abruptly.
Reine presses the small white hand that loosely wears the wedding-ring upon her poor aching heart, and lifts her dark, solemn eyes to the lady's face.
"My own heart tells me he is living," she says, with passionate energy. "He cannot be dead, my darling, just as I had almost won his heart. He lives to bless me yet with his love. Ah, if I only knew where to find him," she breathes, with despairing earnestness.
"My poor, poor child," Mrs. Odell says, with impulsive[Pg 103] tenderness. "You must not be too sure. We can be sure of nothing in this world."
"You have heard—something!" Reine says, with vague terror, looking fixedly at the lady.
"Yes, dear. I have here some papers that I have been trying for sometime to get, the English and American papers with the accounts of the burning of the Hesperus and the list of those lost."
"And—my husband?" Reine says, looking at the lady with burning eyes.
"Is reported among the lost," Mrs. Odell replies, the papers trembling in her trembling hands.
A moment's silence, then Reine, trembling all over with emotion, rallies bravely from the shock.
"Am not I, too, reported among the lost?" she inquires.
"Yes, here it is, dear," and Mrs. Odell reads, under the heading of "Lost:" "'Vane Charteris and wife.'"
"So you see that does not really signify anything," Reine says, momentarily radiant. "Here I am safe and sound on terra firma. And Vane had so much better a chance than I had that he cannot be dead. Did I not see him safe on board the life-boat myself?"
"But, listen, dear," Mrs. Odell answers, sorrowfully.
She folds down the paper and reads, in a weak voice, a short paragraph:
"The Sea-Gull rescued one life-boat after it had drifted two days at the mercy of the wind and waves. It was filled with thirsty, famishing women and children. They reported that the boat had been on the point of sinking from too great a load, when the four men who were in it had leaped into the water, heroically resigning their only chance of life in favor of the weaker sex. There is no ground for hoping that either of these noble, manly hearts survived their self-sacrificing act, as none have been heard from since."
"Well?" Reine says, in a hushed voice, with a strange, prescient dread on her white face.
"Oh, my poor, bereaved girl, how can I tell you?" exclaims the frail invalid, the dew of womanly sympathy starting into her eyes.
And Reine, with a horrible weight pressing on her heart, gasps faintly:
"My husband——"
"His name appears in the list of the four who leaped into the water," Mrs. Odell replies in an awe-struck voice.
One cry, whose terrible despair pierces to the blue heavens, then blank silence. Reine has fallen forward, face downward, on the floor. For a brief space, time, love, sorrow, all the things of life, are blotted from her mind in a merciful semi-death.
The days go by—"time does not stop for tears"—and one day there comes out of the room where Reine, the girl, was carried in senseless, a beautiful, sad-eyed woman in sables. Sorrow has touched her with its transfiguring finger. The beautiful dark eyes droop always beneath the black-fringed lashes, the lips forget to smile, the white cheeks have lost their dimples and roses. For the passionate, loving heart, life is over and done—yet she lives on.
After a time there comes to the crushed heart a thought crowded out at first by the intensity of woe—the remembrance of Maud. Maud, whose hopes, like her own, have hung trembling on the life of Vane Charteris.
"I must go home," she says, sadly, to her friend. "Maud will need me. God only knows what has happened to her in these long months."
And Mrs. Odell, who has daily grown weaker and frailer, looking up from the couch where she rests almost all day now, cries out, sorrowfully:
"Oh, Reine, you will not let this Maud come between us? She cannot love you as well as I do."
The girl answers her a little sadly.
"I do not think she loves me at all."
"Then, why go to her?" Mrs. Odell exclaims.
"Because it seems my duty," Reine answers calmly.
"Write to her," suggests the invalid eagerly.
"There is no surety in the mail. It is safer to go," Reine objects.
But that evening, faithful Dr. Franks, who has come[Pg 105] across the ocean to watch over the invalid's health, requests a private interview with Mrs. Charteris.
"I hear that you wish to return to America?" he says, fixing his kind, smiling gray eyes on her quiet face, with its grave, sweet lips and drooping eyes.
"Yes," she answers.
"Is it imperative?" asks Dr. Franks.
"I think so," Reine replies, with some little wonder at his curiosity.
"You are the best judge," he answers, gravely. "Were it otherwise I would beg you not to go."
"Why?" Reine asks, surprised.
"For that poor lady's sake in yonder. Do you know that your going will shorten her days upon earth?"
"Dr. Franks, how can you speak so? You know I would not harm one hair of her dear, kind head," Reine says, with subdued indignation.
"I know," he says, gently for him, usually so brusque and careless. "But she will grieve for you so. She has grown to love you as a daughter. She has no one else to cling to—she is sensitive and loving, who has buried all she loves, and is so ill and lonely."
"What would you have me do?" Reine asks, irresolute and pained.
"Stay with her till the last, if that were possible," he answers. "It cannot be for long. Do you know that her days are numbered?"
She starts, and trembles.
"No, I thought that this genial climate was to restore her health," she exclaims.
"We hoped it, but all has failed," he answers, sadly. "She fails daily and rapidly. There is no power in medicine, no magic in these balmy airs to lengthen her life. She is surely fading from us."
The dark eyes brim over with sorrow.
"How long?" she asks, faintly.
"I cannot tell," he answers, sadly. "Her disease is too insidious for one to say with any certainty. It may be hours, days, weeks, months, for who can prognosticate surely the coming of that dread enemy that flatters only to destroy."
"Then I must not leave her," she answers, warmly, "and yet, I know that I ought to go back to America."
"Can you not write?" he inquires.
"I must do so," she answers, "and trust to God that my letter may go safely across the ocean. Mrs. Odell has been too kind and tender to me for me to desert her now. Believe me, I did not know that the end was so near. I thought, I hoped, she would get well, but now I will not leave her while she lives."
"God bless you!" Doctor Franks exclaims, with strong but repressed emotion. "Will you go in and tell her that? I left her in the bitterest distress over the thought of your going."
"Yes," Reine answers, but when he has left her she lingers a little to regain her composure before returning to the presence of the hapless lady whom death had marked for his own.
The sun is shining on the soft, blue water, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing.
Surely, this clime is fair and balmy enough to woo expiring life back to its tenement of clay. And yet, she, too, her last loved friend, thinks Reine, must go from her out into the darkness and dreariness of death.
Crushing back one hopeless sigh, Reine goes back to the shaded, quiet chamber, where the sick woman lies on her silken couch, with tearful eyes veiled by the thin, emaciated fingers on which the shining wealth of rings hang loosely.
She kneels down and presses her soft, loving lips on the thin, fever-flushed cheek.
"You are crying for me," she says, with an earnest penitence and regret. "I was cruel and ungrateful to talk of leaving you. Can you forgive me?"
"You are sorry; you will stay!" the sick woman murmurs, with piteous eagerness.
"Yes, as long as you live, I will never leave you nor forsake you," Reine murmurs, with all the solemnity of a vow, thinking sadly to herself that this is the only heart left on earth to which she is near and dear.
"God bless you, you shall be like my own child, Reine. And it may not be for long," Mrs. Odell sighs. "I am afraid—afraid, dear, that I shall never see my native land again."
"We will hope for the best," the girl answers, gently, "and if—if it should be as you fear, you will not forget that Heaven is as near to Italy as to our native land."
Heaven! to these two who have lost the treasure of life, that word is sweet and potent.
Drawn nearer together by the waves of sorrow that have gone over their heads, they cling together in the falling twilight, and talk softly of
The soft Italian winter comes and goes. To Reine's young and inexperienced eyes, as she ministers lovingly to her dying friend, it seems as if a change for the better is taking place. But Doctor Franks shakes his head.
"Impossible," he tells her, sadly. "It is a marvel she has lasted so long. It almost seems as if your love and tenderness have held her fluttering spirit back from the other world. The end is not far now."
But the spring days pass with such gentle touches on the wasting frame that the spirit lingers still.
At last, in the golden sunset of a golden June, Mrs. Odell's summons comes, gently, as if angels had borne it down the golden stairway of the sky, closing her tired eyelids on the fair land of Italy, with her thin hand nestled in Reine's warm clasp, she opens them again on the "stiller, fairer world of the dead."
CHAPTER XXVI.
Standing alone and sadly by the marble cross that marks Mrs. Odell's quiet grave, Reine's thoughts turn homeward. The longing for native land inherent in humanity begins to stir in her heart.
The slim, dark figure standing quietly with the pale face turned seaward, has a pathetic grace and beauty all its own.
So thinks one who approaches so quietly along the grass-grown paths of "the city of the dead," that she starts with a frightened little cry when he stands before her.
"Oh! Dr. Franks, how you startled me," she says, with one slim, white hand pressed against her heart to still its rapid beating.
"Did I? Pardon me," he answers, with an irrepressible glance of admiration. "I forgot you might be nervous in this quiet, lonely spot. Do I intrude upon you?"
"The place is free to all," she answers, somewhat confusedly.
"That would be no excuse for me if you did not desire my company," he answers, quickly and humbly, then in a lower tone: "Oh! Mrs. Charteris, you must pardon me that I have followed you here! I had something to say to you. Can you not guess?"
"Do not say it, please. I would rather not hear," she answers, with weary indifference in face and voice.
His handsome, eager face grows blank and dismayed.
"You will not listen?" he says. "Oh! Reine, think a minute. Is it best to refuse such love as mine—so ardent, strong, and devoted? You are so young and lovely, yet so lonely and unprotected. Let me throw the strong shield of my love around you—let me make you my wife!"
Reine waves him away with a quiver of pain on the beautiful face, that is even more lovely in its pallor and gravity than it used to be in its blushes and dimples.
"I shall never love—never marry—again," she answers, in a choking voice.
"Then you can give me no hope?" Doctor Franks asks sadly, and she shakes her head.
"You do not know how long I have loved you," he says, pleadingly. "Ever since I first saw you you have been the delight of my eyes and heart. But I have tried to be patient. I have respected your widowhood and your sorrow. But now, Reine, seeing you so utterly alone in the world, the time seemed come for me to speak. Are you sure—quite sure, dear, that you can never love me?"
The sound of the sea comes to them soft and sad; the wind sighs through the long grass above the quiet sleepers, whom the things of this world trouble no more. Tears rise into the dark eyes of the girl as she looks[Pg 109] into the man's troubled face. It is no slight thing to a true woman to hold the great, throbbing pulse of a man's heart in the hollow of the hand.
She lifts to his the great, dewy, pain-filled eyes.
"I am so sorry," she falters; "but you must have seen how little I cared for you, for anyone, and that my heart was broken."
Before that grave and pathetic confession the man's passion is mute.
"And I have wounded you," he says, in self-condemnation. "Forgive me, Mrs. Charteris, I have heard of women who were faithful unto death. I did not know there were those who carried love beyond it."
She sighs wearily and rests her cheek against the cold marble cross.
"My heart is broken," she repeats sadly. "I shall never have any more room in my life for love and lovers."
"Nor friends?" he asks, pleadingly, and Reine impulsively holds out her hand.
"Yes, if you care to claim me," she answers, gently.
"Rather your friendship than any other woman's love," says the rejected lover, loyally.
"You must not feel like that, it is so very hopeless," the girl answers. "I am going home soon. You may never see me again. I hope that you may love and marry some happier woman."
And when he has gone away and left her to the loneliness of her own thought, she sinks down in the long, sweet grass, weeping long and bitterly.
Until now she has never quite realized the truth of her widowhood. It comes to her with a great pang of agony that Vane Charteris has no longer any place among men.
His place in her poor life is vacant forever.
"And I loved him so dearly," she sighs, lifting her desolate, tear-wet eyes to the fair, blue heavens. "I loved him, and if he had lived he would have loved me. My patient love must have won him in the end."
And again her thoughts turn homeward as if drawn by some irresistible power.
"I will return to my native land," she resolves. "I will seek out Maud, if indeed she has escaped from the[Pg 110] terrible web that encompassed her. I am so lonely and sad perhaps she will be kinder to me than of old."
CHAPTER XXVII.
A year has passed since the ill-fated Hesperus was burned in mid-ocean with such terrible loss of human life.
In the sultry heat of August, Vane Charteris has forsaken the breathless, dusty city for the coolness and verdure of that terrestrial paradise among the hills, Langton Villa.
He is the guest of Miss Langton, who queens it right royally here over the grand domain she had nearly lost by her folly of one year ago.
They walk up and down beneath the trees, Maud and her handsome lawyer, in the glow of the evening sunset, with the lovely sights and sounds of summer all around them.
The heiress, in a robe of palest blue, with creamy lace, looks her fairest. Mr. Charteris, always handsome, is none the less so for the shadow brooding darkly in the deep blue eyes, lending its touch of earnestness to the grave, pale face.
"How dull and distrait you are," she says at length, impatiently. "Let us sit down here beneath this tree, and I will try to charm this dull mood away."
But for once she finds her fascinations fail. Vane, always inclined to be taciturn, is more than usually so to-night, even to the verge of embarrassment.
She wonders why his eyes evade her own, why he makes no reply to some tender epithets that falls cooingly from the beautiful lips.
"I thought you loved me, Vane," she breaks out at last, with some indignation.
"Yes, I thought so too, for a little while, under the glamour of your beauty and my own loneliness, but when you were gone, I found that I was mistaken. I am here to tell you this. Can you forgive me, Maud?" he blunders out, with all the shame of a man who feels himself placed in an uncomfortable position.
"Mistaken!" she cries, transfixing him with the angry[Pg 111] gleam of her blue eyes. "Why, only the last time we met you said that you loved me."
Vane, rather red and ashamed, still holds his ground bravely.
"I was mistaken, as I told you just now," he says. "I do not, I cannot love you."
"Cannot!" she repeats, a little blankly.
"I cannot," he answers. "I find in the light of my later experiences that I never really loved you, not even when I was about to make you my wife. I was under the spell of your beauty. I know now that my heart was untouched."
"What do you mean by later experience?" the beautiful woman asks, sneeringly.
"I mean that the love I feel now, when too late, for my lost wife, Reine, is the only love my heart can ever know," he answers, speaking low and reverentially, as if in the presence of the dead.
The cold blue eyes of the beautiful heiress kindle with pride and resentment.
"You expect me to believe this?" she cries, hotly. "Do I not know how you despised Reine Langton! How you called her vixen, spit-fire, scold! How you longed to be out of her presence and rid of her?"
"For all of which I would beg her pardon on my knees if she were living," he answers, still low and reverentially; "I did not understand her then. I was a simpleton, an indolent, fastidious fool. I know now that those bright, wild ways were but the ripple and effervescence on the water that ran deep, and calm, and sweet beneath. She was like a lovely rose that hid its sweetness behind 'little wilful thorns.' At heart she was true, and sweet, and womanly. Too late I learned that I loved her, and in honor to her memory I will make no other woman my wife."
The angry color rises into Miss Langton's fair cheek.
"You forget that you are pledged to me," she says, in a low, fierce whisper. "You forget that our marriage day is already set."
"I forget nothing," he returns, sadly. "Nothing except that I was blinded for a moment by your subtle charm, and offered you what was not mine to give, what belongs irrevocably to the dead—my whole heart. I came to ask you for my freedom, Maud."
"What if I refuse?" she asks, with a subtle flash in the blue eyes.
"Then God help me and forgive you," he answers, solemnly, "for we can never be happy together. There are two ghosts between us, Maud. The man who murdered himself because of your falsity, and the fair, sweet girl who gave her life to save yours. They would haunt us and reproach us with their slighted and forgotten love. They would come between us ever."
Her cheeks and lips are paling, her eyes stare before her, wild and frightened; she shivers, and puts up her white hand as if to ward off some threatening danger.
"I—am haunted already," she says, in a low and trembling voice. "Do you think I do not see him in my dreams, with menace in his staring eyes and reproaches on his lips? He was my dreaded companion in the lonely prison-cell. He stalks before me grimly in the grand saloons of wealth and pride, always with a look of terrible reproach and despair on his dead, white face. I am a haunted woman. It is for this I have sought to win back your heart. I would fain put your warm, living love and tenderness between me and the pursuing ghost of the man whom I betrayed to his death. I am afraid of the dark, the loneliness, the terror of my own thoughts. Do not put me away from you, Vane. My only hope is in you."
They gaze at each other silently a moment. The soft wind, odorous with the breath of honeysuckles, pinks and roses, sighing through the garden, whispers to them of a slight form bowed behind the tree, a white face convulsed with passionate emotion. But they neither hear nor heed its admonition. Maud speaks again, pleadingly:
"I cannot release you, Vane. I love you. Surely you can give me some little tenderness and love when once I am your wife? I will make you happy—I swear it."
"The only woman who could make me happy rests in her ocean grave," Vane answers, with deep solemnity and truth.
Miss Langton regards him in wonder.
"Yet once you scorned her," she says slowly. "How did she win you at last, Vane?"
He is silent a moment, as if the question has struck[Pg 113] home to his own heart, awakening thought and memory to life. His lips grow strangely tender in their saddened curve.
"How can I tell?" he says slowly. "Perhaps it was the softened sweetness that hung about her after that night when our lives became one. Perhaps it was her proud, sweet patience under my unkindness. Perhaps, yes, after all! I believe it was the charm of her love that won me. Can you realize such a thing as this, Maud, that love should win love?"
"Yes," she answers, hopefully. "Did I not tell you just now that my love would win you and make you happy?"
He shakes his head impatiently
"That could never be, Maud. You and I are better apart. I can never forget Reine, my slighted girl-bride. She is ever in my thoughts. I think of her as of one living, not dead. I recall her rose-leaf lips, her dark, laughing eyes, the nameless charm that clung about her, and my very heart aches with the intensity of its yearning to find my loved and lost one again."
"Thank God!" exclaimed a low, rapturous, thrilling voice almost at his very side.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
At that heart-thrilling cry of rapture, Vane Charteris and his companion turn around simultaneously.
Within a few feet of them they behold Reine, the long-lost bride, Reine, in the long, trailing sables of widowhood, yet with a face fairly transfigured by happiness, love and triumph.
The effect of her sudden appearance upon Maud is most startling.
The beautiful blonde, after one terrified glance at her strangely-restored cousin, shrieks out:
"A ghost, a ghost!" and flies in the wildest dismay toward the house.
Vane Charteris, half-bewildered, yet full of gladness, flies to clasp the beautiful phantom to his heart.
As his arms close around the palpitating figure, and he realizes that she is truly a creature of flesh and blood, a cry of thanksgiving escapes his lips, the tears[Pg 114] of not unmanly emotion burst from the eyes and rain down on the dark head, nestled closely and lovingly against his breast.
He holds her close and tight, raining passionate kisses on the sweet, scarlet mouth, the blushing cheeks, the dark eye, tearful with this sudden happiness.
"You love me, Vane," she murmurs, softly and half-incredulously, "and yet I thought, I feared——"
"You feared what?" he asks, breaking in upon her shy pause.
"That you loved Maud best," she answers. "When I came up the path and saw you two together, I crept behind the tree and listened. If I had learned then that she was the desire of your heart, I should have crept away quietly to die of my sorrow, I should not have come between you and your love. You never should have known."
"But since you found me faithful to your memory, Reine, you will forgive all the past, will you not, my darling?" he pleads.
"Freely," she answers, with a smile that is all the brighter because it breaks through tears.
"And now," he says, drawing her down to a seat beside him on the bench beneath the tree, "now, dear, you will tell me all your story. Where have you been through all the long months in which I mourned you as dead?"
Resting in his arms she tells him the story of those long months of sorrow while she believed him dead, sobbing even now in the deep, sweet gladness that has come to her so suddenly, over the remembrance of her despair.
"I knew no better until I reached the village yonder, seeking Maud," she concludes. "There I learned the whole truth, that you lived, and were again the betrothed of my cousin. I came here to have one secret, farewell look at you, my husband, to go away and leave you to your love and your happiness. But I heard all you said, and I could not give you up to Maud's selfish claim after that."
"I thank God that I have found you again, my precious wife. We shall never be parted any more," he answers, earnestly.
"You have not told me how you were saved that[Pg 115] night after you sprang from the life-boat in which I last saw you," the young wife says after a little, lifting to his her shy, yet radiant eyes.
"I floated on a plank a few hours, and was picked up by another life-boat, that is the whole story, simply told," he replies.
"And you did not forget me when you thought me dead—you loved me after I was gone from you?" she says, with a note of gladness in her deep, sweet voice.
"I loved you before I had lost you, darling. Did you not guess the truth, Reine?" he inquired, earnestly.
"No," she answers, with blended wonder and delight in her beautiful, glowing face.
"It is true, dear," he answers. "I loved you before I became aware of it myself. I was abominably jealous of the young lord who admired you in England. Yet at the time I was scarcely conscious of the meaning of my annoyance. My proposal to accompany you to America was an outgrowth of the longing to have you all to myself. And Reine, my darling wife, you remember that last night when the terrible trial of fire came to us, that night I had resolved that our strange alienation should exist no longer. I had determined to ask you, to pray you to come to your true resting-place upon my heart. But, my bride, my wife, there will be no more separation between us. You will share my home and my heart henceforth."
"You used not to like me," she says, filled with a glad surprise. "Why did you love me at last?"
The lover-husband looks down with a half-mischievous smile into the dark, questioning eyes.
"Why did I love you," he says, lightly, yet tenderly. "Shall I tell you, little one? Well, then, I believe it was because you loved me."
The sweet face, covered with blushes, droops from his gaze. He bends to kiss it, then continues, less teasingly:
"You remember how you used to gibe and tease and ridicule me, Reine, and how I retaliated in likewise? Well, when it came to me suddenly that you really loved me, it filled me with a certain, indefinable triumph and pride which grew and grew upon me until when you came to England the feeling blossomed into passion. Every time I looked at you I said to myself: 'She[Pg 116] loves me, that beautiful, spirited girl loves me,' and there was such strange, thrilling sweetness in the thought that it seemed to compel my love in return. Now, Reine, my own adored one, I feel and know that my love for you is the one great passion of my life. That which I felt for Maud was a mere empty fancy, born of her lily-like beauty, and fading when I saw that her soul was not fair and angelic like her face. Henceforth, my wife, you will embody all the beauty of earth to me. You are 'queen, lily and rose' in one."
She has no answer for him, her tears are falling so fast—the tender tears of happiness, soft and cooling, like the rain of summer that falls like a blessing. Vane kisses them away with tender solicitude. They are the last that dim her eyes for many years. The sunshine of her future happiness shines too bright on her life for clouds and tears to dim its glory.
After awhile, Miss Langton, who has been silently reconnoitering from an upper window, comes out to them.
"You see I was not a ghost after all," Reine exclaims, advancing to meet her. "Will you not bid me welcome, Cousin Maud?"
"You are an imposter!" Miss Langton answers, angrily, recoiling from the white, extended hand. "I will never acknowledge you as a cousin of mine!"
"For shame, Maud!" Vane Charteris cries out, warmly, drawing his young wife to his side. "This is my wife, and you know it!"
"I have your own assurance that your wife was drowned before your eyes on the night of the burning of the Hesperus," Maud answers, icily.
"That was a mistake, Maud. I only dived beneath the water and came up again out of his range of vision," Reine explains, eagerly.
But Vane checks her gently.
"Do not trouble yourself to explain to her, my darling," he says. "It matters very little to us whether she recognizes you or not. We can be happy without her favor."
"Happy! oh, I dare say," Maud laughs, hysterically. "No doubt you, Mr. Charteris, will be exceedingly[Pg 117] happy in a squalid cottage, with a sharp-tongued little vixen for your companion. Permit me to remind you of the o'er-true adage that 'When poverty comes in the door, love flies out of the window.'"
Something in the blue fire of the eyes he bends upon her makes her quail momentarily. He answers with chill brevity:
"Fortunately I may take my wife to a palace, not a cottage, so we need run no such risks as you apprehend, Miss Langton. To convince you, will you look at this?"
He draws a folded paper from his breast and holds it open before her startled eyes.
"You see," he says, icily, "it is the will with which Mr. Langton threatened you the night you jilted me. I am a lawyer, you remember. I drew this up for him at his own request. It is signed by competent and available witnesses. It is perfectly legal, and I can prove it so in any court in the land. It bequeathes Mr. Langton's whole fortune equally between my wife and myself, cutting you off without a shilling."
Maud stares at the terrible legal-looking document with frightened eyes and a corpse-like pallor.
"You—you are deceiving me," she says, faintly. "If it is really true, why have you kept the will so long and allowed me to usurp the property?"
"Through pity and kindness for you," he answers, with cold contempt. "As long as Reine was supposed dead, no one suffered from the fraud but myself, and I was content to be poor that you might have the wealth your soul coveted. But now my wife's claims must be considered above all others."
"I would sooner die than be poor!" Maud weeps, wildly.
And Reine, taking the legal document between her white fingers, turns her shining eyes on her husband.
"Could you be happy with me, Vane, if we had really to live in a cottage and work hard for each other?" she asks, earnestly.
"Yes, Reine, I am quite sure I could," he answers, as earnestly.
"Then may I do as I like with this paper?" she inquires.
"You must not defraud yourself, dear," he says, startled.
She laughs—her old, ringing, joyous laugh, with a new tone of tenderness in its musical cadence.
"I do not intend to," she answers. "You are everything to me, Vane; Maud may have all the rest."
With the words, the white paper flutters in her whiter fingers, there is a sound of tearing paper, and the old millionaire's will flutters in a heap of snowy fragments on the soft, green grass.
Then Reine laughs in pretty, childish exultation.
"You are the heiress still, Maud," she says, gayly. "I have only Vane. From first to last, he is all I have cared for or wanted."
There is a moment's stunned silence, then the ice around Maud's selfish, worldly heart melts in the sunshine of this warm and loving nature. She is conquered by this heavenly forgiveness and love.
"Reine, Reine," she cries, in hoarse, half-choking accents, "forgive me for my cruel and wicked denial of you. I know you now. No other woman but Reine Charteris could be so forgiving, so generous, so self-sacrificing."
"You have beggared yourself," Vane says to his wife, a little vexed.
"I have you," she answers, with a glance so radiant and loving that he cannot but forgive her folly.
So there is peace between the three—a peace that is never more broken, for Maud's heart has gone out to her cousin in a love never to be recalled. She even offers to divide the fortune so generously bestowed on her, but Vane and Reine decline the compromise. They have each other, and as each laughingly declares, "that is the world and all." They try "love in a cottage" for a year, and declare it a perfect success.
One of the world's great bards has written: "The secret of genius is dogged persistence." Vane Charteris, toiling early and late in his dusty office for his little wife, finds it true. The laurels he would never have won in ease and indolence, begin to circle his brow with a chaplet that is the pride of his young wife's heart.
Yet he goes home one evening with a sigh instead of a smile for the dark-eyed wife who meets him in the[Pg 119] homely little parlor, made beautiful only by her beautiful presence.
"Reine, how lovely you are," he murmurs, bending to kiss the upturned lips. "Ah!" with a discontented sigh, "if I only had jewels and laces, satins and velvets to adorn that glorious beauty."
"What is it, dear?" she asks, trying to smooth the frown from his brow with her dainty forefinger.
"It is only this, dear: Invitations are pouring in upon us which we cannot accept because we are too poor to enter into that circle where we rightfully belong by reason of my talent and your beauty. Darling, how I hate to seclude you from the gaze of men because I am too poor to adorn you like the rest. What shall we do?"
"Do? Why, we must go into the world and shine with the rest," she answers, promptly and gayly.
"We are too poor," he replies, gloomily.
"We are worth a million of dollars," Mrs. Charteris answers, calmly, with her dainty head perched sidewise like a bird's.
"Reine!"
"Vane!"
"Whatever do you mean?" he inquires.
"I mean," contritely, "that Mrs. Odell divided her fortune between Dr. Franks and me, and I have kept the secret, like a naughty girl, just for the pleasure of having you work for me. You see, Vane, you were careless, indolent, ease-loving. You never would have made a name if you had not an object to work for. Now, dear, will you forgive me for keeping the secret a whole year?"
"I forgive you and thank you, too," he answers, earnestly. "You have made a man of me, little wife."
"Yes, indeed," she says, with a pretty, happy triumph "And now, Vane, we will share the fortune and all the pleasures it can give together. My dear friend left me all her jewels, too. Only think," gayly, "how I shall shine in them."
In society they meet Maud, and—actually—Doctor Franks, who has also returned to America. Putting aside his own regret, he rejoices heartily in Reine's happiness. Maud's blue eyes heal the wound that Reine's dark eyes made, and a year later the pair are happily[Pg 120] married, the selfish woman having developed into a nobler creature under Reine's lovely example.
The current of Reine's life glides on smoothly and brightly under the blue and sunny sky of love. At times the old, gay, teasing nature bubbles up to the surface; at times Mr. Charteris calls her "vixen and scold," but never in spite or vexation, only in the gay and careless badinage in which it pleases them sometimes to indulge, as when under the green trees of Langton Villa, where the separate streams of their lives first met and mingled into one.
[THE END.]
