Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily
by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller · English · Gutenberg #43037 · 614,859 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily
Author: Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller
Release date: June 26, 2013 [eBook #43037]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GUY KENMORE'S WIFE, AND THE ROSE AND THE LILY ***
CONTENTS
Guy Kenmore's Wife; or, Her Mother's Secret
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
Chapter XVIII.
Chapter XIX.
Chapter XX.
Chapter XXI.
Chapter XXII.
Chapter XXIII.
Chapter XXIV.
Chapter XXV.
Chapter XXVI.
Chapter XXVII.
Chapter XXVIII.
Chapter XXIX.
Chapter XXX.
Chapter XXXI.
Chapter XXXII.
Chapter XXXIII.
Chapter XXXIV.
Chapter XXXV.
Chapter XXXVI.
Chapter XXXVII.
Chapter XXXVIII.
Chapter XXXIX.
Chapter XL.
Chapter XLI.
Chapter XLII.
Chapter XLIII.
Chapter XLIV.
Chapter XLV.
Chapter XLVI.
Chapter XLVII.
Chapter XLVIII.
Chapter XLIX.
Chapter L.
Chapter LI.
Chapter LII.
The Rose and the Lily; or, Love Wins Love
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
Chapter XVIII.
Chapter XIX.
Chapter XX.
Chapter XXI.
Chapter XXII.
Chapter XXIII.
Chapter XXIV.
Chapter XXV.
Chapter XXVI.
Chapter XXVII.
Chapter XXVIII.
No. 198 (EAGLE SERIES) 10 Cents
GUY KENMORE'S WIFE
AND
THE ROSE AND THE LILY
[Illustration]
BY MRS. ALEX. McVEIGH MILLER
STREET & SMITH, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
THE EAGLE SERIES
STREET & SMITH, Publishers
_The Pioneer Line of Ten-Cent Novels, and the Leader_
RETAIL PRICE, 10 Cents
This famous line was the original series of ten-cent books. Its
success was instantaneous. Millions of copies have been sold, and
an increasing demand for the entire series continues. The following
titles are in print, and can be supplied by all newsdealers.
..=199--Geoffrey's Victory. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon=
..=198--Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily. By
Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller=
..197--A Woman Scorned. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..196--A Sailor's Sweetheart. By St. George Rathborne.
..195--Her Faithful Knight. By Gertrude Warden.
..194--A Sinless Crime. By Geraldine Fleming.
..193--A Vagabond's Honor. By Ernest De Lancey Pierson.
..192--An Old Man's Darling, and Jaquelina. By Mrs. Alex.
McVeigh Miller.
..191--A Harvest of Thorns. By Mrs. H. C. Hoffman.
..190--A Captain of the Kaiser. By St. George Rathborne.
..189--Berris. By Katharine S. Macquoid.
..188--Dorothy Arnold's Escape. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..187--The Black Ball. By Ernest De Lancey Pierson.
..186--Beneath a Spell. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..185--The Adventures of Miss Volney. By Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
..184--Sunlight and Gloom. By Geraldine Fleming.
..183--Quo Vadis. By Henryk Sienkiewicz.
..182--A Legal Wreck. By William Gillette.
..181--The Baronet's Bride. By May Agnes Fleming.
..180--A Lazy Man's Work. By Frances Campbell Sparhawk.
..179--One Man's Evil. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..178--A Slave of Circumstances. By Ernest De Lancey Pierson.
..177--A True Aristocrat. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..176--Jack Gordon, Knight Errant. By William C. Hudson
(Barclay North)
..175--For Honor's Sake. By Laura C. Ford.
..174--Wild Margaret. By Geraldine Fleming.
..173--A Bar Sinister. By the Author of Dr. Jack.
..172--A King and a Coward. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..171--That Dakota Girl. By Stella Gilman.
..170--A Little Radical. By Mrs. J. H. Walworth.
..169--The Trials of an Actress. By Wenona Gilman.
..168--Thrice Lost, Thrice Won. By May Agnes Fleming.
..167--The Manhattaners. By Edward S. Van Zile.
..166--The Masked Bridal. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..165--The Road of the Rough. By Maurice M. Minton.
..164--Couldn't Say No. By the author of Helen's Babies.
..163--A Splendid Egotist. By Mrs. J. H. Walworth.
..162--A Man of the Name of John. By Florence King.
..161--Miss Fairfax of Virginia. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..160--His Way and Her Will. By Frances Aymar Mathews.
..159--A Fair Maid of Marblehead. By Kate Tannatt Woods.
..158--Stella, the Star. By Wenona Gilman.
..157--Who Wins? By May Agnes Fleming.
..156--A Soldier Lover. By Edward S. Brooks.
..155--Nameless Dell. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..154--Husband and Foe. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..153--Her Son's Wife. By Hazel Wood.
..152--A Mute Confessor. By Will N. Harben.
..151--The Heiress of Glen Gower. By May Agnes Fleming.
..150--Sunset Pass. By General Charles King.
..149--The Man She Loved. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..148--Will She Win. By Emma Garrison Jones.
..147--Under Egyptian Skies. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..146--Magdalen's Vow. By May Agnes Fleming.
..145--Country Lanes and City Pavements. By Maurice M.
Minton.
..144--Dorothy's Jewels. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..143--A Charity Girl. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..142--Her Rescue from the Turks. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..141--Lady Evelyn. By May Agnes Fleming.
..140--That Girl of Johnsons'. By Jean Kate Ludlum.
..139--Little Lady Charles. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..138--A Fatal Wooing. By Laura Jean Libbey.
..137--A Wedded Widow. By T. W. Hanshew.
..136--The Unseen Bridegroom. By May Agnes Fleming.
..135--Cast Up by the Tide. By the author of Half a Truth.
..134--Squire John. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..133--Max. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..132--Whose Was the Crime? By Gertrude Warden.
..131--Nerme's Second Choice. By Adelaide Stirling.
..130--A Bitter Bondage. By Bertha M. Clay.
..129--In Sight of St. Paul's. By Sutton Vane.
..128--The Scent of the Roses. By the author of Half a Truth.
..127--Nobody's Daughter. By Clara Augusta.
..126--The Girl from Hong Kong. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..125--Devil's Island. By A. D. Hall.
..124--Prettiest of All. By Julia Edwards.
..123--Northern Lights. By A. D. Hall.
..122--Grazia's Mistake. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..121--Cecile's Marriage. By Lucy Randall Comfort.
..120--The White Squadron. By T. C. Harbaugh.
..119--An Ideal Love. By Bertha M. Clay.
..118--Saved From the Sea. By Richard Duffy.
..117--She Loved Him. By Charles Garvice.
..116--The Daughter of the Regiment. By Mary A. Denison.
..115--A Fair Revolutionist. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..114--Half a Truth. By a popular author.
..113--A Crushed Lily. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
..112--The Cattle King. By A. D. Hall.
..111--Faithful Shirley. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
..110--Whose Wife Is She? By Annie Lisle.
..109--A Heart's Bitterness. By Bertha M. Clay.
..108--A Son of Mars. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..107--Carla; or, Married at Sight. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
..106--Lilian, My Lilian. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
..105--When London Sleeps. By Chas. Darrell.
..104--A Proud Dishonor. By Genie Holzmeyer.
..103--The Span of Life. By Sutton Vane.
..102--Fair But Faithless. By Bertha M. Clay.
..101--A Goddess of Africa. By the author of Dr. Jack.
..100--Alice Blake. By Francis S. Smith.
...99--Audrey's Recompense. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...97--The War Reporter. By Warren Edwards.
...96--The Little Minister. By J. M. Barrie.
...95--'Twixt Love and Hate. By Bertha M. Clay.
...94--Darkest Russia. By H. Grattan Donnelly.
...93--A Queen of Treachery. By T. W. Hanshew.
...92--Humanity. By Sutton Vane.
...91--Sweet Violet. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
...90--For Fair Virginia. By Russ Whytal.
...89--A Gentleman From Gascony. By Bicknell Dudley.
...88--Virgie's Inheritance. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...87--Shenandoah. By J. Perkins Tracy.
...85--Lorrie; or Hollow Gold. By Charles Garvice.
...84--Between Two Hearts. By Bertha M. Clay.
...83--The Locksmith of Lyons. By Prof. Wm. Henry Peck.
...82--Captain Impudence. By Edwin Milton Royle.
...81--Wedded For an Hour. By Emma Garrison Jones.
...80--The Fair Maid of Fez. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...79--Marjorie Deane. By Bertha M. Clay.
...78--The Yankee Champion. By Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.
...77--Tina. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...76--Mavourneen. From the celebrated play.
...75--Under Fire. By T. P. James.
...74--The Cotton King. By Sutton Vane.
...70--In Love's Crucible. By Bertha M. Clay.
...69--His Perfect Trust. By a popular author.
...68--The Little Cuban Rebel. By Edna Winfield.
...66--Witch Hazel. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...65--Won By the Sword. By J. Perkins Tracy.
...64--Dora Tenney. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
...63--Lawyer Bell from Boston. By Robert Lee Tyler.
...61--La Tosca. By Victorien Sardou.
...60--The County Fair. By Neil Burgess.
...59--Gladys Greye. By Bertha M. Clay.
...57--Rosamond. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
...56--The Dispatch Bearer. By Warren Edwards.
...55--Thrice Wedded. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...54--Cleopatra. By Victorien Sardou.
...53--The Old Homestead. By Denman Thompson.
...52--Woman Against Woman. By Effie Adelaide Rowlands.
...51--The Price He Paid. By E. Werner.
...50--Her Ransom. By Charles Garvice.
...49--None But the Brave. By Robert Lee Tyler.
...48--Another Man's Wife. By Bertha M. Clay.
...47--The Colonel By Brevet. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...46--Off With the Old Love. By Mrs. M. V. Victor.
...44--That Dowdy. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...41--Her Heart's Desire. By Charles Garvice.
...38--The Nabob of Singapore. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...37--The Heart of Virginia. By J. Perkins Tracy.
...36--Fedora. By Victorien Sardou.
...35--The Great Mogul. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...34--Pretty Geraldine. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
...33--Mrs. Bob. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...32--The Blockade Runner. By J. Perkins Tracy.
...31--A Siren's Love. By Robert Lee Tyler.
...30--Baron Sam. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...28--Miss Caprice. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...27--Estelle's Millionaire Lover. By Julia Edwards.
...26--Captain Tom. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...25--Little Southern Beauty. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
...24--A Wasted Love. By Charles Garvice.
...23--Miss Pauline of New York. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...22--Elaine. By Charles Garvice.
...21--A Heart's Idol. By Bertha M. Clay.
...20--The Senator's Bride. By Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
...19--Mr. Lake of Chicago. By Harry DuBois Milman.
...18--Dr. Jack's Wife. By the author of Dr. Jack.
...17--Leslie's Loyalty. By Charles Garvice.
...16--The Fatal Card. By Haddon Chambers and B. C.
Stephenson.
...15--Dr. Jack. By St. George Rathborne.
...14--Violet Lisle. By Bertha M. Clay.
...13--The Little Widow. By Julia Edwards.
...12--Edrie's Legacy. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
...11--The Gypsy's Daughter. By Bertha M. Clay.
....9--The Virginia Heiress. By May Agnes Fleming.
....8--Beautiful but Poor. By Julia Edwards.
....7--Two Keys. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
....5--The Senator's Favorite. Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.
....4--For a Woman's Honor. By Bertha M. Clay.
....3--He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not. By Julia Edwards.
....2--Ruby's Reward. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
....1--Queen Bess. By Mrs. Georgie Sheldon.
Guy Kenmore's Wife
OR
HER MOTHER'S SECRET
BY
MRS. ALEX. MCVEIGH MILLER
AUTHOR OF
"Jaquelina," "An Old Man's Darling," "A Little Southern Beauty,"
"The Senator's Bride," etc.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
STREET & SMITH, PUBLISHERS
238 WILLIAM STREET
Copyright, 1883,
By NORMAN L. MUNRO
Copyright, 1901,
By STREET & SMITH
GUY KENMORE'S WIFE;
OR,
HER MOTHER'S SECRET.
By MRS. ALEX. McVEIGH MILLER.
CHAPTER I.
"The moonlight lay on the garden wall,
And bathed each path in a silver glow;
And over the towers of the grey hall
Its pearly banner was trailing low."
It was a night of nights. Moonlight--the silvery, mystical, entrancing,
love-breathing, moonlight of exquisite June--fairest daughter of the
year--lay over all the land. The bay--our own beautiful
Chesapeake--shone gloriously in the resplendent light, and rolled its
foam-capped, phosphorescent waves proudly on to the grand Atlantic.
"Ten thousand stars were in the sky,
Ten thousand in the sea.
"For every wave with dimpled crest
That leaped upon the air,
Had caught a star in its embrace,
And held it trembling there!"
A wind from the sea--cool, and salty, and delicious--came up to Bay View
House, and stole in with the moonlight to the lace-draped windows of the
parlor where a crumpled little figure crouched in a forlorn white heap
on the wide, old-fashioned window sill, sobbing desperately through the
plump little hands, in which the girlish face was hidden.
The spacious parlor with its handsome, old-fashioned furniture, and open
piano, was deserted, and the weeping of the girl echoed forlornly
through the room, and blended strangely with the whispers of the wind,
and the sounds of the sea.
Old Faith put her grotesque, white-capped head inside the parlor door.
"Miss Irene, darling, won't you come and take your tea now?" said she,
persuasively. "There's strawberry short-cake, and the reddest
strawberries, and yellowest cream," added she, artfully appealing to the
young lady's well-known epicurean tastes.
A sharp little voice answered back from the window seat:
"I won't take a thing, Faith; I mean to starve myself to death!"
"Oh, fie, my dearie, don't, now," cried Faith. "Come up-stairs, and let
me tuck you in your little white bed, there's a love!"
"I won't, so there! Go away and leave me alone, Faith," cried the girl,
through her stifled, hysterical sobs.
Exit Faith.
The wind stirred the yellow curls on the drooping head, and the
moonlight touched them with fingers of light, bringing out their glints
of gold. The great magnolia tree outside the window shook a gust of
strong, sweet perfume from the large white waxen flowers, and the scent
of June roses and lilacs came up from the old-fashioned garden. But the
sweetness and beauty of the night seemed lost on little Irene, for her
grieved sobs only burst forth afresh when Faith had departed. The
girlish bosom heaved, the tears rained through her fingers, her
smothered wail disturbed the harmony of the beautiful night.
Another step came along the hall, a hand turned the door-knob and a
handsome old man came into the room.
"Irene, my pet, my darling, where are you hiding? Come to papa," he
called, glancing around the dimly-lighted room.
With a scream of joy the little figure sprang down from its high perch
in the window, and ran precipitately into his arms.
"Oh, papa, dear papa, you are home again!" she exclaimed, laughing and
crying together, and patting his grey whiskers with her loving white
hands.
"Yes, but you aren't glad to see me one bit. You're crying because I've
come home. Shall I go back to the city, eh?" he inquired, softly
pinching her cheek, and looking at her with kind, blue eyes full of
love.
Irene hid her lovely face on his broad breast and sobbed aloud.
"Why, what ails my little girl?" he exclaimed. "Who's been teasing my
pet? Where are mamma and the girls?"
With a fresh rain of tears, Irene sobbed out:
"All g--gone to the b--ball, and would not let--let--me g--go, after
you'd told them all I might, papa."
The old man's genial face clouded over instantly with some intangible
annoyance.
"Why wouldn't they let you go?" he inquired.
"Bertha said if I went, _she_ wouldn't," replied Irene, hushing her
sobs, and answering in a high-pitched, indignant young voice; "she said
children had no business at a ball! The idea of calling _me_ a child! I
was _sixteen_, yesterday! Oh, papa, have you brought me a birthday
present from the city?" she inquired, eagerly, forgetting for a moment
her grievance.
"Yes, dear. And so Bertha wouldn't let you go to the ball?" he said,
taking a seat, and drawing her down upon his knee.
"It was mamma, too. _She_ took Bertha's part, and said I shouldn't come
out until the girls were married. Two Miss Brookes were quite enough in
the market at one time she said. As if I wanted to marry any of their
ridiculous beauxs, with their lisps, and their eye-glasses, and their
black coats. I despise them!" cried Irene, indignantly.
"That's because, as Bertha said, you're nothing but a child," laughed
Mr. Brooke. "When you grow older you'll quite adore these black-coated
dandies, I dare say;" then he added, in a graver tone: "Did Elaine
forbid your going, too?"
"No, she didn't say one word for, or against it. She only pursed up her
lips and looked out of the window. I never saw such a coward as Elaine,"
pursued the girl, angrily. "Bertha and mamma have everything their own
way, and ride rough-shod over Elaine, and she daren't say her soul's her
own!"
"Hush, Irene--you musn't talk so disrespectfully of your--sister," her
father said, reprovingly.
"Well, but, papa, do you think it is right for Ellie to be ruled so by
Bertha? She's older than Bert, you know," said the girl, laying her
soft, round cheek against his, coaxingly.
A strange, sad look came into Mr. Brooke's face at her words.
"My dear, we won't discuss it," he said, uneasily. "Elaine is so gentle
and quiet, she will not take her own part, perhaps. But about this ball,
my pet. I'm sorry they wouldn't let you go. I brought you some pretty
fal-lals to wear."
He handed her several parcels as he spoke, and turned up the lamps to a
brighter blaze. Irene Brooke began unwrapping the parcels, with little
feminine shrieks of delight.
"A baby-blue sash; oh, oh, you dear, old darling!" she cried, letting
the rich lengths of wide, blue satin ribbon ripple splendidly over her
white dress. "A fan! Ivory sticks, and blue and white feathers! Oh,
thank you a hundred times, papa! And what is this tiny parcel? Oh, a
bang-net! You ridiculous old papa, what do you think I want of a
bang-net?" with a ripple of girlish laughter.
"The shop-woman recommended it. She said they were very fashionable,"
said Mr. Brooke, vaguely.
"I don't care! I'll never put _my_ yellow curls under a bang-net,"
laughed Irene, whose tears were dried now as if they had never been.
"Ellie may have it. And, oh, this little box! I had almost missed it."
She opened it with a little girlish shriek of joy and amaze.
"A gold chain and locket! Oh, papa, let me kiss you a hundred times!"
she cried, running to him and half smothering him with energetic
caresses.
"Your birthday present, my love. Look in the locket and see if you like
the pictures," said Mr. Brooke as soon as he could get his breath.
She left off choking him a moment to obey.
"Your picture and Elaine's--the very ones I would have wished for! And
how true, how perfect, how beautiful!" she cried, kissing the pictured
faces. "Dear papa, how did you know that I would far rather have your
picture and Ellie's than mamma's and Bert's?" she inquired, smiling
fondly at him.
"I knew you liked us best because we spoil you the most," he replied.
"That is true of you, papa, but not to my elder sister," replied Irene,
with a touch of seriousness softening for the moment her childish face.
"Ellie is very kind to me, but she never spoils me. She reads me long
lectures in private, and I believe she loves me dearly, but she never
takes my part against mamma and Bert, when they scold and fret me. She
only looks tearful and miserable! Oh, why should she be afraid of them?"
"Hush, Irene, I will not listen to such ridiculous fancies," said Mr.
Brooke, half sternly. "You must not imbibe such foolish notions! and,
remember, I forbid you, on pain of my extreme displeasure, ever to
mention these idle notions to your sister."
"Indeed I never will, papa, I would not hurt Ellie's feelings for the
world," the girl said, earnestly. Then she went to his side and put her
arm around his neck.
"Papa," she said, looking up at him, with arch, beautiful eyes that
sparkled like purple-blue pansies under their shady, golden-brown
lashes, "papa, it isn't an hour yet since they went to the ball."
"Well?" he said, half-comprehendingly, smiling down into the eager,
charming face, and passing his hand caressingly over the wealth of
golden curls that adorned the dainty head.
"Let us go to the ball--you and I, papa?" she said, audaciously.
"What? Why, that would be rank rebellion! What would mamma and the girls
say when we sneaked into the ball-room? Wouldn't they march us home and
put us in irons for disobeying orders?" inquired Mr. Brooke in pretended
alarm, though Irene did not lose the humorous twinkle in his eye.
"No, sir, you know they won't say a word if you take my part! You know
they never do. They're afraid of my dear old papa. Oh, how amazed and
how angry they would be if you and I were to walk in presently, and have
a dance together! And serve them right, too, for their selfishness! Oh,
papa, dearest, _do_ take me! I never, never saw a ball in my life, and I
had so set my heart on this one!"
The tearful eyes and coaxing lips conquered the old man's heart as they
always did, against his better judgment.
"Well, well, they didn't treat you right," he said, "and you shall have
your revenge on them. Go along now, and tell old Faith to put your new
white frock and blue sash on you in fifteen minutes while I am getting
ready."
CHAPTER II.
Every lady knows that fifteen minutes is a totally inadequate time in
which to make a ball toilet. It was at least half an hour before Irene,
with the assistance of the old housekeeper, had adorned herself with all
the finery at her command. Then she came flying down the steps in joyous
haste, and burst into the parlor with the refrain of a happy song upon
her girlish lips.
Old Faith followed more leisurely with a little white nubia and shawl
thrown over her arm.
"Ah! dearie me, dearie me," she sighed, as she waddled uncomfortably
down the wide stairs, "the child's too pretty and too willful, and Mr.
Brooke spoils her too much! Harm will come of it, I fear me. Poor Miss
Ellie, poor Irene!"
She laid the wrappings of her young mistress across the hat-rack in the
hall ready for her, and went back to her own domain and her own duties.
Meanwhile Irene had danced blithely into the parlor.
"Papa," she said, to the dark, masculine figure that stood at the window
with its back to her, "I'm ready now. Don't I look nice?"
The figure turned around from its contemplation of the moonlighted bay,
and looked at her. It was not Mr. Brooke at all. It was a younger,
handsomer man, whose brown eyes danced with irresistible mirth at her
pardonable vanity.
"Nice enough to eat," he answered coolly, and Irene gave a little,
startled shriek.
"Oh, dear, it isn't papa at all. Are you a bear, sir, that you talk of
eating me?" she inquired, demurely.
The stranger came forward into the light, and stood before her.
"Do I look like one?" he inquired, with a smile that lit up his face
indescribably.
Then, for a moment, they stared straight at each other, taking a mental
inventory of each other's appearance.
Ladies first--so we will try to give you some faint idea of how Irene
Brooke appeared in Guy Kenmore's eyes, though it is no easy task, for
beauty like hers, varying from light to shadow with
"Sudden glances, sweet and strange,
Delicious spites and darling angers,
And airy forms of flitting change,"
defies all formal attempts at description.
She was a sixteen-year-old girl, with the graceful slenderness of that
exquisite age, and the warm, blonde beauty of the south. Her eyes were
deeply, darkly, beautifully blue, and appeared almost black beneath the
long, thick fringes of the beautiful, golden-brown lashes, and the
slender, arched brows of a darker hue. These arched brows, and the
faint, very faint, _retrousse_ inclination of the pretty little nose,
gave an air of piquancy and spirit to the young face that was hightened
by the proud curve of the short upper lip. The round, dimpled chin, and
soft cheeks were tinted with the soft pink of the sea shell. The waving,
rippling mass of glorious curls was of that warm, rich, golden hue the
old masters loved to paint. Put on such a fair young girl a dress of
soft white muslin and lace--just short enough to show the tiny,
high-arched feet in white kid slippers--girdle the slim waist with a
broad, blue ribbon, and fancy to yourself, reader mine, how sweet a
vision she appeared in the eyes of the stranger.
For him, he was tall, large, and graceful, with a certain air of
indolence and gracious ease, not to say laziness. He was decidedly
handsome, with a well-shaped head of closely-clipped brown hair, good
features, laughing brown eyes, and a drooping brown mustache. His summer
suit of soft, light-gray cloth was infinitely becoming.
But in much less time than it took for these cursory descriptions, Irene
has spoken:
"No, you do not look like a bear," she says, with charming frankness.
"You look like--see how good I am at guessing--like Bertha's city beau!
You are--_aren't_ you?"
Something in this childish frankness touches him with faint annoyance.
He chews the end of his long mustache after an old habit, and answers,
rather stiffly:
"My name is----"
"'Norval, from the Grampian hills,'" she quotes, with audacious
laughter.
"No,--it is plain Guy Kenmore," he answers, stifling his rising
vexation, and laughing with her.
"There, didn't I say so? Pray sit down, Mr. Kenmore," sweeping him a
mocking, ridiculous little courtesy. "I hope you will make yourself
quite at home at Bay View. I have a great liking for you, Mr. Kenmore."
He takes a chair with readiness, while she paces, a little restlessly,
up and down the floor.
"Thank you," he says, languidly. "May I inquire to what circumstances I
owe the honor of your regard?"
"You may," shooting him a swift, arch glance. "You're going to take Bert
off our hands, and I consider you in the light of my greatest
benefactor."
He laughs and colors at the cool speech of this strange girl.
"Indeed?" he says, with a peculiar accent on the word. "Why?"
"Oh, because," she pauses in her restless walk, and looks gravely at him
a moment with those dark blue eyes, "because Bert is so wretchedly
selfish she won't let me go anywhere until _she_ is married off. Now
to-night there was a ball. Papa had said I might go, but when he was
called unexpectedly away to the city what did Bert and mamma do but
forbid my going! After my dress and gloves and slippers were all bought,
too. Wasn't that too bad? And if you were me shouldn't you just love the
man that would take Bertha away?"
"A spoiled child, who hasn't the least business out of the school-room
yet," mentally decides the visitor. Aloud he says, curiously:
"Do you know you have the advantage of me? I haven't the least idea who
you are."
The blue eyes grow very large and round indeed. "Haven't you, really?
Did Bertha never tell you about me--her little sister, Irene?"
"Never. She must have forgotten your existence," he answered, with an
amused twinkle in his eyes.
"It is like her selfishness!" flashed Irene. "Never mind, I'll pay her
out for her crossness this evening. Only think, Mr. Kenmore, papa came
home just after they had gone, and said _he_ would take me to the ball.
I wonder if he is ready yet. It's quite time we were starting," she
adds, looking anxiously at the door.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Brooke. Your dazzling _entree_ put everything
out of my mind for a moment. Your father was in here about fifteen
minutes ago. He left a message for you."
"Why didn't you tell me, ah, why didn't you?" she demands, stamping her
little foot in impatient wrath.
"You talked so fast I quite forgot," he answers coolly.
"Well, are you going to tell me now?" she inquires, flashing her large
eyes at him superbly.
"Yes, if you will keep still long enough," he answers, provokingly, and
openly amused at the impatient anger, so like that of a sadly spoiled
child.
Irene folds her bare white arms over her heaving breast, and shuts her
red lips tightly over her busy little tongue; but her eyes look through
him with a glance that says plainer than words:
"Go on, now, I'm waiting."
With a stifled laugh, he obeys:
"Mr. Brooke said that he had been most unexpectedly called away on a
little matter of business, but that he would certainly return inside an
hour and take you to the ball."
He expected some expression of disappointment, but he was scarcely
prepared for the dire effect of his communication.
Irene ran precipitately to the darkest corner of the room, flung herself
down on a sofa, and dissolved into tears.
Feminine tears are an abomination to most men. Our hero is no exception
to the rule. He fidgets uneasily in his chair a moment, then rises and
goes over to the window, and listening to the low, sad murmur of the sea
tries to lose the sound of that disconsolate sobbing over there in the
dark corner.
"I never saw such a great, spoiled baby in my life," he says, vexedly,
to himself. "How childish, how silly! She's as pretty as a doll, and
that's all there is to her!"
But he cannot shut out easily the sound of her childish weeping. It
haunts and vexes him.
"Oh, I say, Miss Brooke," he says, going over to her at last, "I
wouldn't cry if I were in your place. Your father will be back
directly."
Irene, lifting her head, looks at him with tearful blue eyes shining
under the tangle of golden love-locks that half obscures her round,
white forehead.
"No, he will not," she answers, stifling her sobs. "When men go out on
business they never come back for hours and hours--_and hours_!"
dolefully. "It was too bad of papa to treat me so!"
"But he was _called_ away--don't you understand that? He wouldn't have
gone of himself," says Mr. Kenmore, doing valiant battle for his
fellow-man.
"I don't care. He shouldn't have gone after he'd promised me, and I was
all ready," Irene answers, obstinately and with a fresh sob.
"Little goosie!" the young man mutters between his teeth, and feeling a
strong desire to shake the unreasonable child.
But suddenly she springs up, dashing the tears from her eyes.
"I won't _wait_ for papa, so there!" she flashes out, determinedly. "All
the best dances will be over if we go so late. _You_ shall take me."
"_I'm_ not invited, you know," he says, blankly.
"No matter. They'll make you welcome, for Bert's sake. Any friend of
Miss Bertha's, you know, etc.," she says, with a little, malicious
laugh. "Yes, you shall go with me. It is a splendid idea. I wonder you
didn't suggest it yourself."
He smiles grimly.
"Indeed, Miss Brooke, I'm not at all in ball costume," he objects,
glancing down at his neat, light suit.
"All the better. I despise their ugly black coats," she replies, warmly.
"Do you know," with startling candor, "you are handsomer and
nicer-looking than any of the black-coated dandies that dawdle around
Ellie and Bert? Come, you _will_ go, just to please me, won't you?" she
implores, pathetically.
"No gentleman ever refuses a lady's request," he replies, with rather a
sulky air.
Irene scarcely notices his sulky tone. Her heart is set on this daring
escapade. Smarting under the sense of the injuries sustained at Bertha's
hands, she longs to avenge herself, and show her selfish sister that she
will go her way despite her objections. It is a child's spite, a child's
willfulness, and all the more obstinate for that reason.
"Oh, thank you," she says, brightly. "We shall have a charming time,
sha'n't we?"
"You may. I am not rapturous over the prospect," he replies,
laconically.
The willful girl regards him with sincere amazement. "Why, you must be
very stupid indeed, not to care for a ball," she observes, with all the
candor and freshness of an _enfant terrible_.
"You are very candid," he replies, feeling a strong desire to seize his
hat and leave the house.
"Now you are vexed with me. What have I done?" she inquires, fixing on
him the innocent gaze of her large, soft eyes. "I hope you haven't a bad
temper," she goes on, earnestly, almost confidingly, "for Bert isn't an
angel, I can assure you; and if you're both cross, won't you have a
lovely time when you marry."
Vexation at this aggravating little beauty almost gets the better of the
young man's politeness.
"Miss Brooke, if you weren't such a pretty child, I should like to shake
you soundly, and send you off to your little bed!" he exclaims.
She flushes crimson, flashes him an angry glance from her lovely eyes,
and curls her red lips into a decided and deliberate _moue_ at him.
Then, holding her pretty head high, she walks from the room.
"Has she taken me at my word?" he asks himself, rather blankly.
But no; Irene has only gone to the housekeeper's room, to leave a
message for her father that she has gone to the ball with Mr. Kenmore.
It does not enter her girlish mind that she is doing an improper thing,
or that her father would object to it.
Old Faith, wiser in this world's lore than her willful little mistress,
raises vehement objections.
"You mustn't do no such thing, Miss Irene, darling," she says. "Miss
Bertha will be downright outrageous about you coming there along of her
beau."
The pansy-blue eyes flash, the red lips pout mutinously.
"All the better," she answers, wickedly. "I want to make her mad! That's
why I'm going! I'm going to the ball with her beau; and I mean to keep
him all to myself, and to flirt with him outrageously, just to see how
Bert's black eyes will snap!"
CHAPTER III.
"Oh, Irene, my darling, why have you done this mad, disobedient thing?
Mamma and Bertha are terribly angry! When Bertha first saw you, dancing
with her lover, too, I thought she would have fainted. Her eyes flashed
lightning. I believe she could have killed you! Child, child, you will
break my heart by your willfulness! Oh, you cannot dream what this may
bring upon you!"
The sweet voice broke in almost a wail of pain, and beautiful Elaine
Brooke drew her sister further into the shaded alcove of the bay-window
as she waited anxiously to hear her reply.
Pretty little Irene shrugged her dimpled white shoulders, and pouted her
rosy lips.
"Now, Ellie, you needn't begin to scold," she said. "You know you all
treated me unfairly, and so papa said when he came home!"
"Papa _has_ come, then?" asked Miss Brooke, in a tone of relief.
"Yes, and he gave me leave to come, so you needn't lecture any more,
Ellie," said the girl, with an arch, pleading glance.
But a long and bitter sigh drifted over the grave, sweet lips of Elaine
Brooke.
"Then why, ah, why _didn't_ papa bring you himself?" she said, wringing
her slender white hands together. "He should have known that Bertha
would be enraged at your coming with Mr. Kenmore."
"Don't scold any more, Ellie, _please_ don't," said her little sister,
impatiently; "papa _was_ coming, but, while I was up-stairs dressing, he
was called away for an hour. So when I came down to the parlor there was
Mr. Kenmore, and I made him go with me. Please let me go now. I want to
dance some more."
"Oh, Irene, indeed you must not dance again to-night! Promise me you
will not!" exclaimed her sister, anxiously.
Irene shook the white hand off her shoulder, dismayed and rebellious.
"I'm engaged to Mr. Kenmore for ever so many dances," she exclaimed,
"and I don't want to break my word! You're selfish, Ellie, and want to
have all the pleasure to yourself!"
"Selfish," Elaine echoed, with almost a moan. "Oh, child, you don't
understand!" then she added, almost piteously: "Irene, in the large
parlor next to the dancing-room there are some young people like
yourself who are not dancing at all, but playing games and having
charades and tableaux. Darling, won't you join them, and keep out of
Bert's and mamma's sight? Perhaps they won't be so angry, then."
"I'm not afraid of them----" Irene began, rebelliously, but stopped
short as she saw a glittering tear splash down on her sister's cheek.
"Oh, Ellie, you great baby," she said, "must I give up all my pleasure
just to please you?"
"Yes, for this once, love," answered Elaine, tremblingly. "I'll try to
make it up to you, indeed I will, some other time, dear," and drawing
Irene further into the shadow of the lace curtain, she bent down and
kissed the fresh young lips.
"But here comes Mr. Kenmore, now. What shall I say to him about our
dances?" asked the girl, with a sigh of disappointment.
"Oh, I'll make your excuses," Elaine answered, readily, as Mr. Kenmore
came toward them, not looking very eager, certainly, over the dances he
was fated to lose.
His handsome brown eyes lighted with admiration as they fell upon Elaine
Brooke, and she was well worthy of it, for in her maturer style she was
as lovely as the girlish Irene.
The family Bible registered the eldest Miss Brooke as thirty-two years
old, and she had all the repose and dignity of the age, with all the
charms of ripe loveliness. Men called her a "magnificent woman," envious
girls sneeringly dubbed her an old maid. This latter was her own fault,
certainly, for she had admirers by the score who went wild over her rare
blonde beauty. But Miss Brooke, unknown to all, treasured a broken dream
in her heart like her hapless namesake:
"Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable;
Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat."
So the years went and came, and Elaine answered no to all her suitors,
though her mother frowned and her father sighed, while deep down in her
heart she echoed the "Lily Maid's" song:
"Sweet is true love, though given in vain, in vain,
And sweet is death who puts an end to pain."
But none of this pain was visible on Elaine's face as she looked up at
Guy Kenmore with that calm, sweet smile, softly bright, like the
moonlight that shone on the outer world.
"Mr. Kenmore, I know you will excuse Irene from her dances," she said
sweetly. "She wants to go and play games with the other children in the
parlor."
"_The other children_," Irene muttered ominously, and before Mr. Kenmore
could murmur his ready assent, she exclaimed, in a tone of witching
_diablerie_:
"Yes, but I'm not going to desert my partner! Come along, Mr. Kenmore,
and you shall be my play-fellow with the children."
With a gay little laugh and a triumphant glance at her sister, Irene
slipped her hand in his arm, and led her captive away, leaving Elaine
gazing after them in silent dismay and despair. Irene had outwitted her
after all, and her artful scheme for keeping her apart from Bertha's
lover was an ignominious failure.
With a sinking heart and a face as pale as death, she turned away to
convey the tidings of her failure to her mother.
Mrs. Brooke, a still handsome woman of the brunette type, received the
news with an ominous flash of her large black eyes.
"Little minx! she shall pay for it, dearly," she muttered, between her
teeth.
"Oh, mamma, it is only thoughtlessness I think. She doesn't really mean
to be disobedient," faltered Elaine, tremulously.
Her mother gave her a swift, displeased glance that silenced the
excusing words on her lips.
Bertha came up, flushed from the dance, a dark, haughty beauty, three
years younger than Elaine, but never owning to more than twenty years.
"Where is Mr. Kenmore? I left him with you, mamma," she said.
"He left me to seek his partner for the next dance," Mrs. Brooke
answered, in a tone of repressed fury.
Bertha turned her large, flashing dark eyes on her elder sister.
"I thought mamma sent you to get Irene out of the way," she said,
imperiously.
"I did my best, Bertha," Elaine answered, gently. "I persuaded her to go
and play games in the parlor. Unfortunately Mr. Kenmore came up as she
was going, and she playfully carried him off with her. I am sure he will
return to us directly. He regards Irene as the merest child."
"She is as old as you were when she was----" Bertha sneered in her
sister's ear, making the last word so low it was inaudible.
Beautiful Elaine's cool, white cheeks crimsoned, then grew paler than
before. She answered not a word.
"Hush, Bertha. Are you crazy, making such remarks in this crowded room?"
whispered her mother, in angry haste.
"I shall not be answerable for what I say or do unless you get my lover
away from that wretched girl," the dark-eyed beauty retorted furiously
in her ear.
"Come, then, let us go and see their games," Mrs. Brooke answered,
soothingly, to allay the young lady's violent rage. "He will leave Irene
and come to you as soon as he sees you."
The three moved away to the crowded parlor where the girls from twelve
to sixteen, and the lads from sixteen to twenty, were enjoying
themselves, to the top of their bent. Having exhausted everything else,
they had determined on having a wedding. Mr. Kenmore being the most
grown-up of the gentlemen, was selected for the groom, and Irene Brooke
for the bride.
CHAPTER IV.
Mr. Kenmore, having vainly protested at first against making a show of
himself, has now resigned himself to his fate, and stands awaiting his
martyrdom with a rather bored look on his handsome face. Irene, on the
point of a vehement refusal to enact the bride's part, suddenly catches
a glimpse of Bertha's face glowering on her from the door, and on the
instant her mood changes.
Never so willing a bride as she.
After that one glance she does not seem to see Bertha. She stands with
lowered eyelids waiting while the gay young girls fasten a square of
tulle on her hair with a spray of real orange blossoms from the pet
orange tree that is the pride of the hostess. No one sees the mischief
dancing under the demurely drooping lashes.
"Poor old Bert--how mad she is," the girl is saying to herself. "I think
I've almost paid her out now for her meanness. As soon as the wedding is
over she shall have her fine beau back. I believe I have almost teased
her enough."
"Who will be the preacher?" she inquires, glancing around at the lads.
"Mr. Clavering, Mr. Clavering!" cried half a dozen voices. "He looks the
parson to the life, with his black coat and little white tie. There he
is on the balcony. Go and ask him, Mr. Kenmore."
Guy Kenmore steps lazily through the low window and addresses the
little, clerical-looking figure standing meditatively in the moonlight.
"Excuse me," he says, in his bored tone. "We are going to have a
marriage, by way of a diversion for the young people. Will you come in
and perform the ceremony for us?"
Mr. Clavering turns a pale, dreamy, rather delicate face, toward the
speaker.
"Isn't it rather sudden?" he inquires.
"Rather," Mr. Kenmore asserts, with a careless laugh, and without more
words they step through the window into the parlor, where the babel of
shrill young voices goes on without cessation.
The bride, and a giggling string of attendants, are already on the floor
awaiting them. Guy Kenmore laughingly steps to his place. Somebody puts
a prayer-book into Mr. Clavering's hand and merrily introduces him to
the bride and groom. He bows, and, with quite an assumption of gravity,
opens the book and begins to read the beautiful marriage service.
To Bertha Brooke, glaring with scarce repressed rage at the mock
marriage, it all seems horribly real. Irene has put on a shy, frightened
look, supposed to be natural to brides, and no one takes note of the
suppressed merriment dancing in her blue eyes, as she pictures to
herself Bertha's silent rage. Mr. Kenmore, impressed beyond his will by
the solemn marriage words, looks a little graver than his wont. The
babel of voices is momentarily still, while bright eyes gaze entranced
on the beautiful scene. It seems to Bertha as if she can no longer bear
it; as if she must scream out aloud as she hears Guy Kenmore's deep,
full voice repeating after Mr. Clavering:
"I, Guy, take thee, Irene, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold
from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth."
"Mamma, for God's sake, stop it," Bertha utters, in a fierce whisper,
clutching her mother's arm.
"Don't be a fool, Bertha! It is nothing but child's play," Mrs. Brooke
replies, impatiently, and, in a minute more the ring is slipped over
Irene's finger, and the minister utters, in tones that sound too solemn
for this pretty mockery:
"Whom God had joined together, let no man put asunder."
Gay congratulations followed, and Irene, a little paler than her wont,
slipped over to Elaine, who was white as death, with the dew of unshed
tears glittering on her long, thick lashes.
"You dear old owl, how solemn you look," she said. "But I didn't like it
myself. It sounded too horribly real. Once I had half a mind to break
loose, and run away!"
Mrs. Brooke glared at her youngest pride in silent rage. The vials of
her wrath were reserved till to-morrow.
Irene darted to Mr. Kenmore's side and looked at him with laughing eyes:
"You may go and stay with Bert now," she said, carelessly, "I believe I
have teased her quite enough, and I mean to be good the remainder of the
night."
He looked at the bright, arch face curiously a minute, then moved away
to join Bertha.
She received him with a curling lip, and an irrepressible flash of her
proud, dark eyes.
"I did not know you were so fond of juvenile society, Mr. Kenmore," she
said, in a tone of pique.
"I am not; I was rather forced into this affair, Miss Bertha," he
replied, languidly, and with a rather bored expression. "But come, let
us promenade the balcony in the moonlight. Or would you prefer to
dance?"
"The balcony by all means," answered Bertha, remembering what an
opportunity it would afford for a sentimental _tete-a-tete_, and also
that a pretty woman never looks more lovely than by moonlight.
"When did you leave Baltimore?" she inquired, as they stepped through
the low French window, and walked arm-in-arm along the moonlighted
balcony.
"Only to-day," he answered. "I remembered my promise to visit you at Bay
View, and thought it a good time to keep my word, not dreaming that you
would be absent. I half-feared you would have forgotten me, it has been
so long since your visit to the city," he added, half-quizzically, for
Irene's innocent prattle that evening had let in some light upon his
mind. He understood that Bertha claimed him openly as her lover, and
fully calculated on marrying him, while the truth was that though he had
a lazy admiration for the beautiful brunette, he had never dreamed of
aspiring for her hand. His intimate friends did not consider him "a
marrying man."
"As if I could ever forget my visit to Baltimore," said Bertha,
sentimentally, with an effective upward glance into his face from her
dark, long-lashed eyes.
Mr. Kenmore returned the coquettish glance with interest. He was an
adept at flirting himself when he could conquer his natural indolence
enough to exercise the art.
"I hope it will not be long before you visit the city again," he said.
"Your friend, Miss Leigh, sent you as much love as I could conveniently
transport, and an urgent message to come again."
"I shall be delighted," exclaimed Bertha, who was fast forgetting
Irene's naughtiness, and recovering her spirits in the charm of her
admirer's presence. Now that she had him all to herself, her horrible
fears of her younger sister's rivalry grew less, and she resolved to
make the very most of this glorious _tete-a-tete_ under the beautiful
moonlight with the soft notes of the entrancing dance-music blending
with the murmuring of the melancholy sea.
She was succeeding almost beyond her expectations. Mr. Kenmore was
lending himself to her efforts to charm with unqualified approval.
He had dropped his indolent air of being bored by everything, and his
dark eyes sparkled with interest, when suddenly the scene was changed,
and Bertha's sentimentalisms interrupted by a little flying white figure
that came through the window with a rush, and clutched Mr. Kenmore's arm
frantically, with two desperate young hands, and looked up at him with
eyes that were wide and dark with horror.
"Mr. Kenmore, oh, Mr. Kenmore," panted the sharp, shrill, frightened
young voice, "do you know what they are saying in yonder?--what Mr.
Clavering is saying? That--that--he is a _real minister_, and that it
was a _real marriage_! It isn't true! Oh, my God, it can't be! Go, and
make them say it is all a wretched joke to frighten me!"
There was a moment's stunned silence broken only by a scream of dismay
from Bertha. Irene was gazing with a blanched face, and wild, beseeching
eyes, up into the handsome, startled face of the man. Suddenly he pushed
the white hands from his arm, broke loose from Bertha's clasp, and
strode hastily through the window.
Irene fell upon the floor, all her childishness stricken from her by
this terrible blow, and grovelled in abject terror.
Haughty Bertha spurned the little white figure with her dainty slippered
foot.
"Get up," she said, harshly. "Get up, Irene, and tell me the truth! Is
it true what you were saying, or only one of your miserable jokes?"
Irene dragged herself up miserably from the floor, and clung to the
balcony rail around which clambered a white rose vine. The snowy,
scented roses were not whiter than her haggard young face.
"Oh, Bertha--Bertha, it is true," she said, despairingly. "That stupid
Clavering didn't know we were joking. He is a minister--really a
minister--but no one in the room knew it, because he is a stranger about
here, you know, and staying at the hotel for his health. Oh,
Bertha--Bertha, what shall I do? I don't like Mr. Kenmore! I don't want
to be his wife!"
Bertha shook from head to foot with jealous rage.
"Listen to me, Irene Brooke," she said, in a hoarse, low voice of
concentrated fury. "If this is true, if you really are Guy Kenmore's
wife, I am your bitterest foe as long as you live! I'll make you repent
this night's work in dust and ashes to your dying day!"
As the cruel words left her writhing lips, Mr. Kenmore came out,
followed by Mrs. Brooke and her eldest daughter.
Irene's wild eyes searched the man's face imploringly,
"Yes, it is true," he said to her abruptly, almost harshly. "The man is
an ordained minister, licensed to marry. You are really my wife!"
A piercing shriek, full of the sharpest anguish, followed on the last
cold word. Irene threw up her white arms wildly in the air and fell like
one dead at the bridegroom's feet.
CHAPTER V.
When Irene Brooke recovered her senses she was lying on a sofa in the
old familiar home-parlor which she had quitted such a little while ago a
careless, happy, willful child. The soft locks that hung about her
forehead were all wet and dabbled with _eau de cologne_, and Elaine bent
over her with the face of a pitying angel, bathing her cheeks and
temples with the refreshing perfume. The clock in the hall chimed the
midnight hour, and lifting her head, that felt strangely dull and heavy,
she gazed wonderingly around her.
In the subdued light that flooded the spacious parlor, Mr. Kenmore was
walking slowly up and down with his hands behind his back. He came and
knelt down by her side.
"You are better," he said, gently.
All her troubles rushed overwhelmingly over Irene, and she turned from
him with a shudder.
"Ellie, where is papa? I want papa," she said, longing to lean in her
trouble on the grand strength of the father who was dearer to her than
all the world.
"He has never come home yet," Elaine answered in a troubled tone.
"Not yet, and he promised to return within the hour!" Irene exclaimed in
vague alarm.
"He has been detained, doubtless," Mr. Kenmore said, soothingly. "You
know you said to-night, Irene, that when men went out on business they
never came back for hours and hours."
Irene looked at him in wonder, his tone was so kind and gentle. A great,
deep pity shone in his speaking eyes. He laid his strong white hand
lightly on hers. She could not understand why his touch thrilled her
through and through, and pulled her hand quickly away.
"Irene, do not turn from me so coldly," he said, in the same gentle tone
at which she had wondered so much, "I have something to say to you. Will
you listen to me?"
She lifted her dark blue eyes to his face, inquiringly.
"Since we brought you home, and while you lay unconscious, my child, I
have been talking to your sister," he said. "I think--we both
think--that you and I will have to accept the situation."
Elaine rose delicately and went to the window. Irene answered not a
word. He went on, holding her gaze within his steady, grave, brown eyes:
"Through our carelessness and love of fun, we have fettered ourselves so
effectually that we cannot break our bonds without exposing ourselves to
a notoriety that would be galling alike to the pride of the Brookes and
the Kenmores. Do you understand me, my child?" he inquired, pausing, and
waiting for her reply.
"I understand--you mean----," she said, then paused, sensitively, while
her cheeks grew very white, and her dry lips refused to go on.
"That it is doubtful if the law will free us from the marriage vows we
so unthinkingly uttered," he said. "If it did, it would only be at the
expense of a newspaper notoriety that would be galling to our pride and
a death-blow to sensitiveness. I own that I am proud," a deep flush
coloring his face for a moment. "I cannot bear the thought of making the
subject of numberless inane witticisms and newspaper paragraphs. I had
rather accept the consequences of my folly."
"You are taking all the blame upon yourself," she said, in a low,
strange voice that sounded very womanly for Irene, "when you know that
it was all my fault."
"Do you think so? No, I was too careless, I should not have been led
into their child's play," he said. "Well, no matter, let us make the
best of it. I will be your faithful husband if you will be my true
little wife, Irene."
The tone was very kind, but it was not that of a lover. Irene, though
she had never been wooed, instinctively felt the subtle difference.
"You do not care for me--that way," she said, "and I--do not like you!"
"I have heard it said that it is best to begin with a little aversion,"
he answered, in a tone of patient good-humor.
"You belong to Bertha," she said.
"I belong to you," he retorted.
Elaine came slowly back from the window, looking like some tall, fair
goddess in her shimmering pearl-gray silk. The tears were shining in her
azure eyes.
"Irene, Mr. Kenmore is very kind," she said. "Believe me, he has made
the wisest decision, if only you will acquiesce in it."
"Ellie, I don't wish to be married," cried the child.
"You are married already," Elaine answered, with a sigh, quickly
repressed.
The beautiful child, who, by her own willfulness, had brought this doom
upon her head, struggled up to a sitting posture. The sweet blue eyes
had a dazed look. Grief had strangely changed her already.
"Let me alone, Ellie, and you, Mr. Kenmore, for a little while," she
said, pitifully. "Wait until papa comes. He shall tell me what is best.
Oh, it cannot be right that two lives should be spoiled by such a little
mistake! Three lives, I mean," she added, wildly, "for Bertha loves him,
and he belongs to her."
"Yes, he belongs to me," said a low, menacing voice in the door-way. "He
belongs to me, Irene Brooke. Do not dare to take him from me!"
CHAPTER VI.
It was Bertha's voice. She had been to her room, to indulge in a fit of
mad passion and jealousy, but had returned and stood listening at the
door for some moments--long enough indeed to hear all that had been
spoken since Irene had recovered consciousness. Mad with passion she
stood before them.
"He is mine," she said again, hoarsely. "Woe be to you, Irene Brooke, if
you take him from me!"
She looked like some mad creature with the loosened coils of her shining
hair falling down like long black serpents over the corsage of her ruby
satin robe, and her black eyes flashing forth jealousy and defiance. The
jeweled serpents that wreathed her white arms seemed to dart menace from
their gleaming emerald eyes as she shook her hand.
Slowly Guy Kenmore turned and looked at her, honest amazement stamped on
his handsome features.
"Miss Brooke, your assertion is a most strange one," he said. "I cannot
understand why you should wish to complicate this unhappy affair still
further by such a palpable injustice. On what grounds do you base your
claim?"
Her flashing eyes fell a moment before the proud wonder in his. Then she
asked, with a heaving breast and in deep agitation:
"Do you deny that you have made love to me? That you came to Bay View to
woo me?"
A deep, warm color drifted over his face.
"Is it possible, Miss Bertha, that you have taken our idle flirtation in
earnest?" he exclaimed, shame, surprise and self-reproach struggling
together in his voice. "If you have, I beg your forgiveness a thousand
times, for I thought you were simply amusing yourself, as I was. I
admired you, certainly, but I never dreamed of love, I never thought of
marriage."
If love changed to hatred could have slain, Guy Kenmore would have
fallen dead before the vengeful lightnings of the brunette's eyes.
Strong man though he was he shivered under their baleful glare. Her very
voice was changed when she spoke again. It seemed to cut the air like a
keen-bladed knife.
"So you were only amusing yourself," she said. "You made a plaything of
a woman's heart! Did you ever hear of playing with edged tools? Ah,
beware, Guy Kenmore, beware! My love would have been a thousand times
better than my hate! And do you pretend to love _that_ creature?"
pointing a scornful finger at the drooping form of Irene.
Instinctively he moved a step nearer to his girl-bride, as if to shield
her from some threatening danger.
"I make no idle pretences," he answered. "Irene is my wife. Love will
come."
"Love," she sneered. "Love! Your cold, selfish heart is incapable of
that divine passion! I understand why you would hold that willful child
to the fetters so unwittingly forged! It is the Kenmore pride, that is
afraid of being dragged through the mire of the divorce court! You will
never love her, never make her happy! You only take her to save your
overweening pride."
"Oh, Bertha, hush! It is the best way out of our trouble," pleaded
Elaine, gently.
"Best--ah, yes, you never dreamed of such a marriage for your
_fatherless child_? A Kenmore--rich, honorable, high-born--to mate with
the child of shame, the _nameless creature_ whom we have shielded with
our own honest name to save our family honor! Ha, ha, Guy Kenmore, are
you not proud of your high-born bride--Elaine's base-born child, who
never had a father?" screamed Bertha, wild with jealousy and anger, and
flashing the lurid lightning of her great black eyes upon their blanched
faces.
Like some beautiful enraged tigress, Irene sprang from the sofa, and ran
to Bertha. She clutched her small white fingers in the brunette's round
white arm, and their frantic clasp sunk deep into the flesh.
"You wicked, cruel woman, how dare you utter such a fiendish lie?" she
panted, hoarsely. "How dare you malign the honor of my beautiful,
pure-hearted Ellie? How dare you name us--Ellie and me--the honest
daughters of old Ronald Brooke--in the same breath with dishonor!"
"I dare because it is true," hissed Bertha, breaking loose from the
child's frantic grasp, and laughing like a beautiful demon. "Don't take
my word for it! Ask that woman there whom my very words have crushed
down to the earth! Ask her if she is not your mother! Ask her the name
of your father! Ha, ha, Guy Kenmore, accept my congratulations on your
brilliant marriage," she sneered, as she rushed from the room.
Elaine Brooke had indeed sunk wretchedly to the floor at her sister's
terrible charge. She crouched there forlornly, her face hidden in her
trembling hands, her golden hair falling loose, and streaming in sad
beauty over her quivering, prostrate form. Guy Kenmore, with blanched
face and starting eyes, recalled Arthur's words to his faithless
Guinevere. They seemed to fit this crushed woman:
"Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes;
I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere,
I, whose vast pity almost makes me die
To see thee, laying there thy golden head,
My pride in happier summers, at my feet."
With a single bound Irene reached the prostrate form. Her small hand
fell heavily on Elaine's white, quivering shoulder.
"Ellie, Ellie, look at me," she said; "I want to see your face! I want
to see the truth in your eyes!"
With a groan Elaine obeyed the imperious mandate of the sharp, young
voice. She raised her head and looked into Irene's clear, searching eyes
with a woful, white, white, face, on which the very agonies of death
could not have written such despair.
"Irene, my love, my darling, do not curse me," she moaned. "It is true!
I am your wretched mother!"
The beautiful, kneeling figure reeled backward with one hand pressed on
her heart as if it had been pierced by a sword-point.
"My mother--Elaine Brooke my mother," she groaned. "Oh, God, was ever
sin and shame hidden beneath such true, sweet eyes and the face of an
angel before? Do not ask me not to curse you! God may forgive you, but I
never can! Now I know why they hate me, your mother and your sister. I
have no right in the world, I have no name, no place, I am the living
badge of my mother's dishonor! Great God, pity me! Strike me dead this
moment at the feet of my guilty, shameless mother," she prayed, wildly
lifting her wild, white face and anguished eyes to Heaven.
Guy Kenmore gazed like one paralyzed at the unhappy mother and daughter.
He could not speak one word to either. The shocking disclosure of the
maddened Bertha had almost stunned him. He was a proud man, as he had
said. It was horrible to think of the stain on the girl he had
wedded--the willful, naughty, yet beautiful girl whom with all her
faults he had been proud to think was nobly born as the Kenmores.
CHAPTER VII.
Elaine dragged herself up from the floor, and held out her arms
imploringly to the lovely, imperious young creature, who regarded her
with angry, scornful eyes.
"Irene, hear me," she said, humbly.
But Irene pushed off the clinging hands, cruelly.
"Do not touch me," she said, bitterly. "I am bad enough myself. The
brand of shame is on me, and I have no name and no right in the world;
but it is no sin of mine. _You_--_you_ are the guilty one! The touch of
your hand would burn me! Oh, God! oh, God! how came she by that angel's
face and devil's heart?"
She had forgotten Guy Kenmore's presence as she hurled her denunciations
at the lovely, despairing, sinful woman before her. Elaine did indeed
have the face of an angel. Even in this moment, when her long-hidden and
shameful secret became revealed to her child, her exquisite face had on
it no remorseful shame. The rather it was touched with the despairing
resignation of some pure, high heart which has found itself cast down
and destroyed in its struggle against the wicked world. She lifted her
sweet, sad, violet eyes, and cast a look of pathetic reproach upon
Irene.
"My child, do you indeed believe me so vile and wicked?" she asked,
mournfully.
"I am forced to judge you by your confession," Irene answered, with
passionate shame.
"I have made no confession yet, I wish to do so now, if you will listen
to me, Irene," said the beautiful woman in a tone of sad patience. "I am
not guilty as you think me, oh, no, no, no!" she cried, shudderingly.
"You are my mother, and you are ashamed to claim me! You are a wretched
sinner, and instead of hiding your disgraced head in seclusion, and
trying to win the pardon and mercy of offended Heaven, you flaunt your
beautiful face before the world, unforgiven and unrepentant!" cried out
Irene, with all the hard severity of a young mentor.
Elaine wrung her beautiful, jeweled hands together, and tears fell one
after another in a rapid stream down her cheeks upon the corsage of her
dress, spotting and staining the rich silk.
"Irene, will you indeed be so hard and unforgiving?" she cried. "Will
you judge and condemn me without hearing? Are you the sweet, loving
child, whom I could always lead and persuade with a kind word?"
"I am no longer a child!" the girl cried out, bitterly. "I am a woman
now. The events of to-night have laid years on my head and a burden on
my heart! You might have led me by one thread of your golden hair while
I believed you to be my pure, true-hearted sister who bore your mother's
and sister's tyranny like an angel because you were too gentle to resent
it. I understand it all now. You were afraid of them. Conscience made a
coward of you, and they held your shameful secret like a whip-lash over
your head and drove you hither and yon at the bent of their own wills!
Oh, shame, shame!" cried Irene, withering her mother by her sharp scorn.
"Yes, I have been a slave, a coward," Elaine murmured, mournfully. "But,
oh, Irene, my poor child, I bore it all for my father's sake. He, at
least, was kind and forgiving!"
The words recalled to Irene's mind the fond, indulgent old man whom she
adored with all the strength of her ardent young heart. Mrs. Brooke and
Bertha had been too harsh and cold to command her love, Elaine had vexed
her impetuous spirit by her shrinking cowardice. But her father--the
loving old man who has ever taken her part bravely against them all--it
rushed over her with a chill like that of death that he belonged to her
no longer, by that dear filial tie that had been the one unalloyed joy
of her willful life, and a cry of exceeding bitter pain fell from her
white lips.
"Papa, oh, my dear, my darling, I must lose you with the rest," she
cried out in a voice sharp and shrill with despair. "Nothing of all I
thought mine belongs to me! I must lose you, too, whom I loved with all
my soul--lose you through the sin of her who brought me into a world
where I have no place, no name! Oh, God, I cannot bear it! I wish that I
were dead!" wailed Irene, in the bitterness of her despair.
Elaine gazed at her daughter like one dazed. All the youth, the joy, the
childishness seemed stricken from her forever by the terrible revelation
of to-night. The slender young figure stood apart from her in desperate
grief, seeking no friendly arm to lean on in its terrible isolation; the
beautiful young face was cold and rigid with despair; the blue eyes,
black now with her soul's emotion, flashed scorn through proud tears
that would not fall. A woman's outraged soul, forlorn yet proud, shone
through the tense young form.
Suddenly a firm touch fell on Irene's arm.
"Irene," said Guy Kenmore, low and sternly, "no more of these wild
reproaches to your mother! You shall hear her offered confession first."
CHAPTER VIII.
There was a moment's perfect silence in the room. The sound of the sea
came to them soft and low, the wind stirred the flowers in the garden,
and sent a gust of exquisite perfume through the windows. In the
stillness Elaine moved a little nearer to her daughter, looking at the
stern young face with unutterable love and longing in her eyes.
Irene turned coldly from that yearning glance and looked at Mr. Kenmore
with a rebellious flash in her eyes.
He was very pale, the sparkle of mirth had died out from his dark eyes,
his lips were compressed sternly.
"Hear your mother's story first," he repeated, gravely. "Do not condemn
her before you know her whole sad secret. See how she suffers."
The calm, grave, masterful tone influenced Irene against her will. She
glanced reluctantly at Elaine's face, and saw how terribly she suffered
beneath the fiery lash of her daughter's scorn, but she spoke no word of
comfort, only lowered her white-lidded eyes to shut out that harrowing
sight.
"Why should I listen to her?" she said, almost sullenly. "What can she
say to excuse her sin?"
"Hear me, and judge, Irene," said Elaine, creeping a little nearer, with
a wistful gaze at the obstinate girl. "You, too, Mr. Kenmore. You have
heard me taunted with my sin. Stay and hear my exculpation."
He bowed silently and placed a chair for her; then he drew Irene down to
a seat upon the sofa beside himself. She yielded with strange
passiveness, unconscious that while she sat there his arm lay lightly
but firmly around her waist, gently detaining her. She was conscious of
nothing but a sharp, tearing pain at her heart, and that she was waiting
with a sort of numb indifference to hear Elaine's palliation of her sin.
Elaine sat silently a minute, with her white hands locked convulsively
in her lap. When she spoke she seemed to be communing with herself.
"Dear God," she whispered, "I had hoped that the child need never know
her mother's secret! Ah, I might have known how hard and cruel Bertha
would be some day!"
She lifted her eyes and fixed them in a sort of unwilling fascination on
Irene's beautiful, mutinous face.
"I have lived years and years of sorrow and despair," she said, "but
when I look back it seems only yesterday that I was a pretty, willful,
loving child, such as Irene was until to-night. Ah, so like, so like,
that I have sometimes shuddered and wept, fearing her fate would be like
mine."
Irene made a passionate gesture of loathing and dissent.
"Ah, my child, you do not know," Elaine said, sadly. "The greatest
temptation of woman has never come to you. You have never loved."
The fresh, young lips curled in utter scorn of that master-passion whose
fire had never breathed over her young heart.
"You have never loved," Elaine repeated, with a gesture of despair.
"When that master passion first came to me I was a younger girl than
you, Irene, and just as willful and headstrong and passionate. Bertha
and I were away at boarding-school when I first met my fate."
She paused, trembling like a leaf in the wind, and resumed, mournfully:
"He was a cousin of one of the pupils, and came to a musical festival
given by us at the first of the mid-winter term. I sang one or two
solos, and it was then and there that this handsome scion of a proud and
wealthy house fell in love with me."
"I have never loved as you say," interrupted Irene in her clear,
bell-like voice, "but I should hesitate to call that feeling which only
aims at the ruin of its object by the pure name of love."
Elaine bowed her golden head wearily.
"Let us say that he pretended to love me, then," she amended, sadly.
"But, ah, Irene, if you had seen and heard him you would have believed
his vows, too--you would have trusted in him as I did. No girl ever had
a handsomer, more adoring lover."
"I was young, romantic, willful," she continued. "It seemed to be a case
of true love at first sight. We met several times, and some foolish
love-letters passed between us. There are more opportunities for such
things than you would guess at the average boarding-school, Mr.
Kenmore," she said, turning her blushing face upon him for a moment. "At
this one, love-letters, stolen walks, secret meetings were carried on to
an alarming extent, one third of the pupils at least being as foolish
and romantic as I was."
"I can understand," Mr. Kenmore answered, gently.
"Mamma was a stern and proud woman," Elaine resumed, with a sigh. "She
was exceedingly proud of my beauty and my fine voice. A brilliant future
was mapped out for me. But first I was to become a perfect prodigy of
learning and accomplishments. At sixteen, when I was to finish the
course at the Institute where I then was, I was to be sent to the Vassar
College for a few years. 'Ossa on Pelion piled,'" she quoted, with a
mournful smile.
"I knew that a love affair on my part would not be tolerated for years,"
she resumed. "My lover, as regards his family, was placed in the same
position comparatively. A marriage of convenience was arranged for him,
and he was forbidden to think of another. Madly in love with each other,
and rebelling against our fetters, we planned an elopement. In three
months after I met him we ran away to another State and were married."
"Married?" Irene echoed, with a hopeful start.
"We were married--_as I believed_," said Elaine, with a shudder. "There
was a ceremony, a ring, a certificate. I was a child, not sixteen yet,
remember, Irene. All appeared satisfactory to me. We went to a luxurious
boarding-house where six months passed in a dream of perfect happiness.
My husband remained the same fond, faithful lover he had been from the
first day we met until the fateful hour when we parted--never to meet
again," sobbed Elaine, yielding to a momentary burst of despairing grief
that showed how well and faithfully she had loved the traitor who had
ruined her life.
But feeling her daughter's cold, young eyes upon her, she soon stemmed
the bitter tide of her hopeless grief.
"Our funds ran low," she continued, after a moment, "and he was
compelled to leave me to go to his father and ask pardon and help. We
were both young, and having been reared in the enervating atmosphere of
luxury, knew not how to earn a penny. He went and--never came again."
"Villain!" Guy Kenmore uttered, indignantly.
"After waiting vainly a week I wrote to him," said Elaine, bowing her
lovely head upon her hands. "His father came, full of pity and surprise.
My God! I had been deceived by a mock marriage. He whom I loved so
dearly, whom I believed my husband, had gone home, wedded the woman of
his father's choice, and taken her abroad on a wedding trip. I had been
ruthlessly forsaken.
"Then I remembered papa, whom I had loved truly and tenderly as you did,
Irene. In my extremity and despair I wrote to him. He came, the dear
father I had deserted and forgotten in the flush of my wifely happiness.
He pitied and forgave me.
"Mamma and Bertha would not forgive, but they plotted to save the family
honor. The affair had never been publicly known. We went abroad, and
among strangers, where in a few months you were born, my poor wronged
Irene. When we came home mamma claimed my child for her own, and by her
stern command I took my place in society and played my part as calmly as
if my heart were not broken. Now, Irene, you know the full extent of
your mother's sin. I have been wronged as well as you, my darling. You
are nameless, but not through sin of mine."
Her faltering voice died into silence. Irene made no answer. She had
dropped her face in her small white hands. Guy Kenmore felt the slight
form trembling against his arm.
"I was mistaken in my first estimate of her," he thought. "She has more
depth, more character than I thought."
Then he turned to Elaine.
"You have indeed been wronged bitterly," he said. "The fault is not
yours, save through your disobedience to your parents."
"Yes, I was willful and thoughtless, and I have been most terribly
punished for my fault," she replied, sorrowfully.
"Is there no possibility that you have been deceived by your husband's
father? Such things have been," said Mr. Kenmore, thoughtfully.
"There was no deception. He was armed with every proof, even the
newspaper, with the marriage of his son to the wealthy heiress whom his
family had chosen for him," answered Elaine, blushing crimson for her
unmerited shame and disgrace.
"Then your lover was a villain unworthy the name of man. He deserved
death," exclaimed Guy Kenmore.
Elaine's angelic face grew pale as death. She sighed heavily, but made
no answer.
Suddenly Irene sprang to her feet, with blazing eyes.
"His name!" she cried, wildly, "his name!"
"My poor child, why would you know it?" faltered Elaine.
"That I may hunt him down!" Irene blazed out. "That I may punish him for
your wrongs and mine!"
"Alas, my darling, vengeance belongs to Heaven," sighed the martyred
Elaine.
"It belongs to you and to me," cried Irene. "His name, his name!"
"I cannot tell you, dear," wept the wronged woman.
"Then I will go to Bertha," flashed the maddened girl.
"Bertha is bound by an oath never to reveal that fatal name," Elaine
answered.
The door opened, Mrs. Brooke entered, stern and pale. She glanced
scornfully at Irene, then turned to her daughter:
"Elaine, I am sorry this has happened," she said. "I could not keep
Bertha from betraying you. The poor girl was driven mad by her wrongs.
If Irene had remained away from the ball to-night, as I bade her do, you
would have been spared all this. Her disobedience has caused it all."
Old Faith put her head, with its flaring cap-ruffles, inside the door
before Elaine could speak.
"Oh, Mrs. Brooke, Mrs. Brooke!" she cried, and wrung her plump old hands
disconsolately.
"Well, what is it? Speak!" cried her mistress, sharply.
"Oh, ma'am, some men have come--with news--they found master down on the
shore--oh, oh, they told me to break it to you gently," cried the old
housekeeper, incoherently.
A flying white figure darted past old Faith and ran wildly down the
broad, moon-lighted hall, to the old-fashioned porch, bathed in the
glorious beams of the moonlight.
Mrs. Brooke went up to the woman and shook her roughly by the arm.
"What are you trying to tell me, Faith? What of your master?" she
exclaimed. "Speak this instant!"
Elaine came up to her other side, and looked at her with wide, startled
eyes.
"Oh, Faith, what is it?" she cried.
"They told me to break it gently," whimpered the fat old woman.
At this moment a shrill young voice, sharpened by keenest agony, wild
with futile despair, came floating loudly back through the echoing
halls:
"_Papa, oh, darling papa! Oh, my God, dead, dead, dead!_"
CHAPTER IX.
They bore him into the parlor and laid him down. He was dead--the
handsome, genial, kind old father, who had been Elaine's truest friend
in her trouble and disgrace. It was strange and terrible to see the
women, each of whom had loved the dead man in her own fashion, weeping
around him.
Their gala robes looked strangely out of place in this scene of death.
There was Bertha in her ruby satin and shining jewels, Elaine in her
shimmering silk and blue forget-me-nots, Mrs. Brooke in crimson and
black lace, lighted by the fire of priceless diamonds. Saddest of all,
little Irene, crouched in a white heap on the floor at his feet, adorned
in the modest bravery he had brought her for a birthday gift. Poor
little Irene who has lost in this one fatal day all that her heart held
dear.
A physician was called to satisfy the family. He only said what was
plainly potent before. Mr. Brooke was dead--of heart disease, it
appeared, for there were no marks of violence on his person. He was an
old man, and death had found him out gently, laying its icy finger upon
him as he walked along the shining sand of the bay, in the beautiful
moonlight. His limbs were already growing rigid, and he must have been
dead several hours.
"Dead! while we laughed and danced, and made merry over yonder in their
gay saloons," Elaine wailed out, in impatient despair. "Oh, my God, how
horrible to remember!"
Only Guy Kenmore saw that the right hand of the dead man was rigidly
clenched.
"What treasure does he clasp in that grasp of death?" he asked himself,
and when no one was looking he tried to unclasp the rigid fist. He only
succeeded in opening it a little way--just enough to draw from the
stiffened fingers a fragment of what had once been a letter--now only
one line remained--a line and a name.
Guy Kenmore went to the light, spread the little scrap open on his hand
and looked at it. The writing was in a man's hand and the few words were
these:
"_That the truth may be revealed and my death-bed repentance
accepted of Heaven, I pray, humbly._
"_Clarence Stuart, Senior._"
Suddenly a cold little hand touched his own.
"I saw you," said Irene, in a low, strange voice. "What does it mean?"
"A great deal, or---- nothing," he answered, in a voice as strange as
her own.
She read it slowly over. The fragmentary words and the proud name seemed
to burn themselves in on her memory.
"Who is Clarence Stuart?" she asked, wonderingly.
"I intend to find out," he answered. "When I do, I shall tell you,
little Irene."
In his heart there was a deadly suspicion of foul play. Who had torn
from old Ronald Brooke's hand the letter whose fragmentary ending he
grasped within that clenched and stiffened hand? Had there been murder
most foul?
He went back and looked attentively at the corpse. It was true there was
no sign of violence, but was that the face of one who had died from one
instant's terrible heart pang, who must have died before he had realized
his pain? No, the face was drawn as if in deadly pain, the open eyes
stared wide with horror.
"I shall say nothing yet," he said to himself, gravely. "Let them think
that death came in the quiet course of nature. But if old Ronald Brooke
was murdered I shall bring his murderer to justice."
And on the man's handsome face, usually so gay and debonair, was
registered a grim, firm purpose.
Mrs. Brooke and Bertha had been led away to their rooms now. No one
remained for the moment but Elaine. She came slowly to her daughter's
side.
"Irene, you must come with me now, she said, pleadingly, but the girl
broke from her clasp and ran to throw herself on the dead man's breast.
"I cannot leave him yet," she sobbed. "He was my all!"
Elaine shivered, as if some one had struck her a blow. She followed her
daughter, and solemnly took the dead man's hand in her feverish,
throbbing clasp.
"Irene, my daughter, this, my own father whom I deceived and deserted,
whose loving heart I broke by my folly--he pitied and forgave me," she
said, mournfully. "My sin against you was far less, for it was not
premeditated. Here by papa's cold dead body I ask you, darling, to pity
and forgive me. Will you refuse my prayer?"
Irene lifted her head from its chill resting-place and looked at her
suppliant mother with a strange, grave gaze.
"We forgive every one when we are dying--do we not?" she asked, slowly.
"Yes, my darling, but you are young and strong. You have many years to
live perhaps. I cannot wait till your dying hour for your love and pity.
I need it now," sighed poor Elaine.
There was a moment's silence. Irene looked down at the dead man's face
as if asking him to counsel her in this sad hour. As the wide,
horror-haunted eyes met hers she recoiled in terror.
"_He_ forgave you," she said, solemnly. "He cannot counsel me, but I
will follow his example. Mother," she reached across that still form and
touched Elaine's hand, "I forgive you, too. Always remember that I
pitied and forgave you."
There was a strange, wild light in her eyes. It startled Elaine.
"My darling," she cried, half-fearfully.
"I must leave you now, poor mother," continued Irene, with that strange
look. "I must go down to the shore where death waited for papa to-night.
He is waiting there for me!"
She turned with the words and ran swiftly from the room. Frightened by
her strange looks and words Elaine followed behind her, but her
trembling limbs could scarcely carry her body.
Young, light, swift as a wild gazelle, Irene flew down the steps and
across the garden. The moon was going down now, and only the flutter of
her white dress guided the frantic mother in her wild pursuit. The
garden gate unclosed, there was a patter of flying feet along the sands
outside, there was a wild, smothered, wailing cry of despair,
then--then Elaine heard the horrible splash of the waves as they opened
and closed again over her maddened, desperate child.
CHAPTER X.
The sound of Irene's pliant young body as it struck the cold waters of
the bay, fell on the wretched mother's heart like a death-blow. The
horrors of this fatal night culminated in this.
One long, terrible shriek as of some wounded, dying creature, startled
the midnight hour with its despairing echoes, then she sprang wildly
forward with the desperate intent to share her daughter's watery grave.
The weakness of her overwrought body saved her from the crime of
self-destruction. Her head reeled, her limbs failed her. As she pushed
the gate open with faltering hands she staggered dizzily and fell like a
log on the hard ground. Merciful unconsciousness had stolen upon her.
That prolonged, despairing shriek reached Guy Kenmore's ears in the
library, where he was gravely conferring with the men who had found Mr.
Brooke dead upon the shore.
His first thought was of Irene. A dreadful foreboding filled his mind.
He rushed from the room and followed the sound, the two men behind, all
terrified alike by the anguish that rang in that mysterious shriek.
Outside the garden gate they found Elaine, lying like one dead on the
hard earth. With tender compassion they lifted the beautiful, rigid form
and bore it into the house.
That long, deep, deathly swoon was the beginning of a severe illness for
Elaine Brooke. It culminated in an attack of brain fever.
On recovering from her long spell of unconsciousness, Elaine revealed
the cause of her illness. Two hours, perhaps, had passed since Irene's
maddened plunge into the water. It was too late to save her then. The
cold waves kept their treasure, refusing to yield it up to the efforts
of those who, headed by Mr. Kenmore, made an ineffectual trial to find
even the cold, dead body of the desperate girl. Dawn broke with all the
roseate beauty of summer, and the golden light glimmered far over land
and sea, but neither the wide waste of waters nor the sandy reaches of
shore gave back sign or token of her who had found life too hard to
bear, and so had sought Nepenthe from its ills and pains.
Guy Kenmore remained to Mr. Brooke's funeral, then returned to Baltimore
a softened, saddened man--a man with a purpose. Two things had confirmed
him in his purpose to trace the writer of the fragment found in the dead
man's hand.
On the night of Mr. Brooke's death no sign of violence had been
discovered on his person. On the day following a purplish mark was
discoverable on the old man's temple--a strange, discolored mark.
Careless lookers believed it to be the effects of decomposition.
Guy Kenmore, studying it with suspicious eyes, believed that it was
caused by a blow--a blow that had caused Ronald Brooke's death.
Another thing was, that when Elaine Brooke went into a delirious fever,
that terrible dawn that broke on the tragic night, he had stood by her
side a few moments, gazing at her in pain and sorrow. While he stood
there she had startled him by calling wildly on one name. It was
"Clarence, Clarence, Clarence!"
He sought Bertha.
"Will you tell me," he asked, gravely, and without preamble, "the name
of the villain who deceived your sister?"
Bertha colored and trembled in shame and agitation.
"I cannot," she answered. "I am under a sacred promise not to reveal
it."
"Was it Clarence Stuart?" he asked, coolly, and Bertha gave a terrible
start.
"She has revealed it in her delirium," she exclaimed.
"Yes," he answered, calmly, knowing that he had surprised the truth from
her reluctant lips.
Walking slowly along the shore, listening to the murmur of the waves, in
which his bride of an hour had sought oblivion from the ills of life,
Guy Kenmore thought it all out to his own satisfaction. That fragmentary
line of a letter had told the whole sad story.
Elaine Brooke had been truly a wife. Her husband's father had deceived
her by a trumped up story, and divided her from her young husband.
Dying, he had repented his sin, and written a letter of confession to
her father.
And here he fitted the second link of the story.
Some person unknown had found it to be against his or her interests that
the truth should be revealed. That person had followed the bearer of
Clarence Stuart's letter, and had torn it from old Ronald Brooke's
grasp, with a blow that meant death to the gentle, kindly old man.
Guy Kenmore honestly believed in the truth and accuracy of these
deductions.
"If I can only find out where these Stuarts live, I will discover the
guilty party," he said to himself. "I will not ask Mrs. Brooke nor
Bertha. They would only believe me impertinent. I must depend on the
gentle Elaine for information."
He concluded to return to his home in Baltimore, and await the issue of
Elaine's illness.
CHAPTER XI.
The time came weeks after when Elaine, pale, wan, shadowy, the sad ghost
of her former beautiful self, came down to the parlor again and joined
her mother and sister in the broken family circle whose severed links
could never be re-united again.
Mrs. Brooke and Bertha were subtly changed, too. Their black dresses
made them look older and graver. Bertha's grief at the loss of a kind,
indulgent father, and her chagrin at Guy Kenmore's defection, had
combined to plant some fine lines on her hither unruffled brow, and a
peevish expression curled her red lips, while her large brilliant black
eyes flashed with discontent and scorn. Over Irene's tragic death she
had shed not a tear. She had always disliked the girl for her youth and
winsome beauty and looked down on her for the stain upon her birth,
always deploring that she had not died in infancy. The poor girl's
willfulness the night of the ball had changed Bertha's dislike to hate.
She was secretly glad Irene was dead. Better that than to have lived to
be Guy Kenmore's wife.
Mrs. Brooke shared Bertha's feelings, only in a less exaggerated degree.
So Elaine found no sympathy in the loss of the beautiful daughter whom
she had secretly worshiped, and over whose pretty defiant willfulness
she had oftentimes shed bitter, burning tears of grief and dread.
The old gray hall which her sweet songs and musical laughter had once
made gay and joyous was now hushed and silent as the tomb. The few
servants glided about as if afraid of awaking the lonely echoes that
slept in the wide, dark halls, and quiet chambers. No song nor laugh
disturbed the silence. The mistress sat in the parlor pale and grave in
her sweeping sables. Her daughters were no less grave and still, sitting
in their chairs like dark, still shadows, with averted faces and silent
lips, for Elaine had not forgotten Bertha's treacherous betrayal of her
shameful secret; and Bertha, while she felt no remorse for her cruel
work still felt shame enough to cause her to turn in confusion from the
clear, sad light of her sister's eyes.
In the meantime that sad truth that oftentimes makes the pang of
bereavement harder to bear, was coming home to them.
Mr. Brooke had died almost insolvent.
Once a man of almost unlimited wealth and position, the old tobacco
planter had been almost ruined by the war which had freed his slaves,
and left him only his broad-spreading, fertile acres, with no one to
till them. His great income was almost gone, for with his losses through
the war, he could not afford to replace with hired workmen the skilled
labor he had lost.
In order to keep up the dignity of appearances which his proud wife
considered necessary to herself and her beautiful young daughters, Mr.
Brooke had been forced to sacrifice his land from time to time, until
now, at the end, only a few acres remained of his once princely estate.
The fine old gray-stone mansion, Bay View, remained as a shelter for
their heads, indeed; but the sacrifice of the remaining land would
barely support them a year or two. Mrs. Brooke and Bertha were aghast at
the prospect. They had expected that the latter would have been married
off to some wealthy personage before the dire catastrophe of poverty
overtook them. They quailed and trembled now beneath the subdued
mutterings of the storm of adversity.
When Elaine came down and mingled with them again, they broke the bad
tidings to her rudely enough.
"No more playing fine lady for us," Mrs. Brooke said, bitterly. "We can
live on the land a little while, then we must sell our jewels, then our
home, and when all is done, we shall have to work for our living like
common people."
The aristocratic southern lady, who had never soiled her white, jeweled
fingers in useful toil, broke down and sobbed dismally at the grievous
prospect.
"Oh, I have had more than enough of trouble and sorrow in my life," she
complained. "First, there was Elaine's disobedience and disgrace; then,
losing our negroes by the war; then my poor husband dying so suddenly,
without a farewell word, and now this horrible nightmare, poverty! Oh! I
have never deserved these visitations of Providence," asseverated the
handsome, selfish widow, energetically.
Bertha joined in these lamentations loudly. She would not know how to
work when it came to that, not she. They should have to starve.
Elaine regarded them with troubled eyes.
"Mamma, do not grieve so bitterly," she said. "We are not come to
absolute want yet."
"You take it very coolly," Bertha sneered. "When the last few acres of
land are sold, how long will the proceeds keep three helpless women,
pray?"
Elaine did not answer Bertha--did not even look at her. She went up to
her mother's side.
"Mamma, I have foreseen this trouble coming," she said. "We have been
living beyond our means for years, and even if poor papa had lived this
crash must have come some day; I am very sorry," she repeated, gently.
"Sorrows will not put money into our empty purses," Mrs. Brooke
answered, spitefully.
"I know that," Elaine answered, patiently. "But I have a plan by which
your money may be made to last a little longer. I am going to leave you,
mamma."
"Leave me," Mrs. Brooke echoed, feebly.
"Rats always desert a sinking ship," flung in Bertha with coarse irony.
Again her elder sister had no answer for her.
"I am going away," she repeated. "Even if papa had left us a fortune it
would be the same, I could not stay here after--all that has happened."
"You mean,"--said Mrs. Brooke, then paused.
"I mean since I have lost papa and Irene," her daughter answered, sadly.
"You know, mamma, you and Bertha have never been kind to me since my
great--trouble. You only tolerated me because my father wished it. I
have long been in your way. It is all over now. To-morrow I shall leave
you forever."
"Forever," Mrs. Brooke repeated, blandly, while Bertha exclaimed with a
coarse, spiteful sneer:
"You will return to the life of shame from which papa rescued you
perhaps."
"I am going to New York to earn my living by honest work," Elaine said,
speaking pointedly to her mother. "You know I have a good voice, and
talent for music. I shall give music lessons, probably."
"My daughter giving music lessons! Oh, what a disgrace to the family!"
cried the aristocratic lady. "Are you not ashamed to put yourself so
low, Elaine?"
"Don't be silly, mamma," flashed Bertha, sharply. "It is a very good
plan, I think. Besides, it is only right for Elaine to give up the
remainder of her property to us. If we had not been burdened with the
support of her daughter for sixteen years there would have been more
money for me."
"It is quite settled, mamma, I shall go," said poor Elaine, and the
selfish mother weakly acquiesced.
The next day she went, glad of her freedom, glad to fling off the
slavery of sixteen years.
"I could not have stayed even if poor papa had left me a fortune," she
said to herself. "The sound of the waves sighing over Irene's watery
grave in the lonesome nights breaks my heart!"
CHAPTER XII.
We must return to Irene Brooke that fatal night, whose accumulating
horrors induced a transient madness that drove the wretched girl to seek
oblivion from her woes in self-destruction.
Life is sweet, even to the wretched. Irene's sudden, violent plunge into
the cold waves cooled the fever of her heart and brain like magic. In
that one awful, tragic moment in which the waters closed darkly over her
golden head, a sharp remorse, a terrible regret woke to life within her
heart.
Out of that swift repentance and awful despair, a cry for pity broke
wildly from her almost strangling lips:
"Oh, Lord, pardon and save me!"
As she came back from the depths with a swift rebound to the surface of
the water, the girl threw out her white arms gropingly, as if to seize
upon some support, however slight and frail, on which to buoy her
drenched and sinking frame.
Joy! as if God himself had answered her wild appeal for help and pardon,
a strong, wide plank drifted to her reach. Irene grasped it tightly and
threw herself upon it, while a cry of thankfulness broke from her lips.
Alone in the dark and rushing waves, her heart filled with relief at the
thought of this frail barrier between herself and that mysterious
Eternity, to which a moment ago she had blindly hastened.
"If I can only hold on a little while, Elaine will bring me help and
rescue," she said to herself, hopefully, and calling her mother by the
old familiar sisterly name, for the name of mother was strange to her
young lips yet.
Alas, for her springing hopes! Poor Elaine lay white and still in that
long, long trance of unconsciousness that followed on her realization of
her daughter's suicide. Her locked lips did not unclose to tell her
anxious watchers the story of that white form floating on the dark
waters, waiting, hoping, praying for rescue, while her strength ebbed,
and her arms grew tired and weak, clinging so tightly to that slender
plank that floated between her and the death from which she shrunk
tremblingly now with all the ardor of a young heart that has found life
a goodly thing and fair.
No rescue came. The girl floated farther and farther out to sea in that
thick darkness that comes before the dawn. Hours that were long as years
seemed to pass over her head, and hope died in her breast as the cruel
waves beat and buffeted her tender form.
"I am forgotten and deserted," she moaned. "My mother has raised no
alarm. Is it possible she was glad to be rid of me, and held her peace?"
A jeering voice seemed to whisper in her ear:
"It is best for all that you die. Bertha and her mother hated you. You
were a stumbling block in your mother's path. You had involved Guy
Kenmore in a fatal entanglement. You had no right and no place in the
world. Not one whom you have left but will be glad that you are dead."
A cry of despair came from the beautiful girlish lips in the darkness.
"Oh, God, and only yesterday life seemed so beautiful and fair! Now I
must die, alone and unregretted! Oh, cruel world, farewell," she cried,
for she felt her strength forsaking her, and knew that in a moment more
her arms would relax their hold and that she would sink forever amid the
engulfing waves.
But in that last perilous moment something occurred that seemed to her
dazzled and bewildered senses nothing less than a miracle.
In her bodily pain and mental trouble, with eyes blinded by the salt sea
waves that mixed with her bitter tears, Irene had not perceived the
faint grey light of dawn dispelling the thick darkness of the night. But
suddenly, all suddenly, the crest of the waves was illuminated
marvellously by a gleam of brightness that shot far and wide across the
water; the blank horizon glowed with light.
"And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn."
Startled by the swift and seemingly instant transition from darkness to
light, Irene uttered a shrill, sharp cry and looked up. The beautiful,
life-giving sun was just peeping across the level green waves, and
touching their foamy crests with gold. Through half-dazzled eyes she saw
riding, like a thing of beauty on the beautiful water, a stately,
white-sailed yacht only a few rods away. Irene could see moving figures
on her decks.
There was one awful moment when the girl's breath failed, her heart
stood still, and she could scarcely see the moving yacht outlined
against the rosy dawn, for the mist that filled her eyes. Then she shook
off the trance that threatened to destroy her, and with one last,
desperate effort sent her sharp young voice ringing clearly across the
waves:
"Help! Help! In God's name, help!"
The cry was heard and answered by the moving figures on the vessel's
deck.
CHAPTER XIII.
Was it hours or moments before the gallant figure that sprang over the
side of the yacht reached Irene's side?
The girl never knew, for even as she watched his progress through the
water, and admired his swift and graceful swimming, a dizziness stole
over her; her arms relaxed their hold; the friendly plank slipped from
beneath her, and she felt herself sinking down, down into the fathomless
depths of green water.
It was well that her rescuer was a skillful diver, or our hapless
heroine's history must have ended then and there.
But the dauntless swimmer who had gone to her assistance was brave,
bold, daring. He redoubled his speed, made a desperate dive beneath the
water and reappeared with the form of the exhausted and unconscious girl
tightly clasped in one arm.
In the meantime a small boat had been lowered from the yacht, and was
coming with rapid strokes to her assistance.
When Irene came to herself again she lay on a pile of blankets upon the
deck of the yacht. An anxious group was collected around her,
conspicuous among them being one wet and dripping figure whom she
instinctively recognized as her gallant preserver.
Irene opened her beautiful eyes, blue as the cerulean vault above, and
smiled languidly at the stranger.
The man, who was middle-aged and had the rich, dark, picturesque beauty
of the southern climate, started and bent over her. He grew ashy pale
beneath his olive skin.
"She recovers," he said, hoarsely. "She will live."
"Clarence, Clarence," cried a thin, peevish, authoritative voice at this
moment, "I insist that you shall go and change your wet clothing this
moment! You will catch your death of cold standing around here drenched
and shivering."
Irene turned her languid eyes and saw a pale, faded, yet rather pretty
little woman, clothed in an elegant blue yachting dress with gold
buttons. She was looking at Irene's rescuer with a peevish look in her
light hazel eyes.
The man scarcely seemed to heed her, so intent was his gaze at Irene.
Some one handed him a glass of wine at that moment, and, kneeling down,
he lifted the girl's head gently on his arm and held it to her lips.
"Drink," he said, in a voice so kind and musical it thrilled straight
through the girl's tender heart. She drank a little of the beautiful,
ruby-colored liquid, and it ran like fire through her veins, warming and
reviving her chilled frame.
"Clarence," again reiterated the woman's peevish voice, "do oblige me by
changing your wet clothing. You seem to think less of your own health
than of this total stranger's."
His brow clouded over, but he forced a smile on his handsome face.
"Very well, Mrs. Stuart, I will do so to oblige you," he said; "but pray
do not make me ridiculous among my friends by such unfounded
apprehensions! I am not a baby to be killed by a bath in salt water!"
He went away, and several ladies came around Irene, gazing curiously at
the pale, fair face. They whispered together over her wondrous beauty,
which, despite the long hours of suffering endured in the water, shone
resplendently as some fair white flower in the beams of the rising sun.
"Her clothing should be changed, too," said one, more thoughtful than
the rest. "She shall have my bed and dry clothing from my wardrobe. She
is about my size, I believe."
Irene smiled her languid gratitude to the kind-hearted lady, then her
weary eyes closed again. An overpowering drowsiness and languor was
stealing over her. When they had changed her drenched clothing for warm,
dry, perfumed garments, and laid her in a soft, warm bed, she could no
longer keep awake. She swallowed the warm, fragrant tea they brought her
and fell into a long, deep, saving slumber.
The ladies were all burning with curiosity over the beautiful waif so
strangely rescued from the cruel waves, but they refrained through
delicacy from asking her questions when they saw how weary and exhausted
she was. When she was asleep they examined her wet, cast-off linen for
her name, but were disappointed, for they found none.
Then, with feminine curiosity, they peeped into the gold locket that
hung by its slender chain around Irene's neck.
"What a handsome old man, and what a beautiful woman!" they cried. "Who
can the girl be?"
Everyone was eager and interested except the faded, peevish Mrs. Stuart.
She openly railed at her husband for risking his life for an utter
stranger. She would not allow anyone to praise his bravery in her
presence.
"I will not have him encouraged in such bravado and foolhardiness," she
said, angrily.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Oh, Mrs. Leslie, isn't she just lovely? And she cannot be much older
than I am!"
Irene had slept profoundly for a day and night, being physically and
mentally exhausted by her terrible ordeal in the water. When she awoke
after twenty-four hours of restful slumber those words of admiration
rung in her ears, uttered by a soft, girlish voice, interrupted by an
ominous hacking cough.
Irene opened her eyes and glanced languidly around her. Beside her bed
she saw Mrs. Leslie, the little lady who had been so kind to her the day
before. Next to the lady, in a low, cushioned rocker, sat a girl of
thirteen or fourteen, richly and tastefully dressed, but with a thin
face as white as alabaster, save for two burning spots of hectic on her
hollow cheeks, and with large, brilliant black eyes burning with the
feverish fire of consumption.
"So you are awake at last!" cried the girlish voice, joyously, "I
thought you were going off into a regular Rip Van Winkle sleep, and I
have been just dying of curiosity over you."
Irene felt the sudden crimson dying her cheeks at the vivacious
exclamation of the delicate-looking girl.
"Lilia, my love, you startle her," said Mrs. Leslie, gently; then she
bent over Irene, saying kindly: "You feel better, I hope, after your
long rest. This is Miss Stuart, the daughter of the gentleman who saved
your life. She has been very anxious over you."
Irene looked gratefully at the dark-eyed girl who rose impulsively and
kissed her.
"You are so pretty, I love you already," she cried, and Mrs. Leslie
laughed.
"Pretty is as pretty does," she said, gaily, and Irene crimsoned
painfully, as if the words had been a poisoned shaft aimed at her
breast.
"Are you going to be well enough to sit up to-day?" pursued Lilia
Stuart, anxiously. "Because if you are, I want you to come into my
little saloon with me. I will give you my softest lounge to lie on.
Aren't you very hungry? Will you take your breakfast now?"
"Yes, to all of your questions," Irene answered, looking in wonder at
this girl who was but two years younger than herself, yet who seemed so
very light and childish. Alas, poor Irene, that fatal night had forced
her into a premature womanhood.
When she had taken a light, appetizing breakfast, and been robed in a
white morning-dress, Mrs. Leslie advised her to spend the day in Lilia
Stuart's saloon.
"She is a spoiled child," she said, "but we humor her all we can, for
hers is a sad fate. She is dying of consumption."
"Dying---- so young!" cried Irene with a shudder, remembering how
horrible the thought of death had appeared to her while she was
struggling in the cold, black waves.
"Yes, poor child, she is surely dying," sighed Mrs. Leslie. "Her father
bought this beautiful yacht to take her to Italy by the advice of her
physicians. They fancied a sea voyage might benefit her. But I do not
believe she will survive the trip. Some days she is very ill. Poor
little Lilia. It is very hard. She is Mr. Stuart's only child."
They went to Lilia's luxurious saloon which was fitted up with every
comfort, and was exquisitely dainty and charming, though small. Mrs.
Stuart was there with her daughter. She gave the stranger a little
supercilious nod, and invited Mrs. Leslie to go on deck with her.
Lilia, who had just recovered from a violent spell of coughing, led her
visitor to a softly cushioned satin lounge.
"You may rest here," she said. "I am well enough to-day to sit up in my
easy-chair, but some days I lie down all day. You may call _me_ Lilia.
What shall I call you?"
"You may call me Irene," was the answer, while a burning flush mounted
to the speaker's forehead.
"Irene---- what a soft, sweet name! I like that," said Lilia, and just
then the door unclosed and her father came in softly. "Ah, here is papa!
you see I have a visitor, papa," she cried.
Mr. Stuart was a handsome, stately-looking man, middle-aged, with
abundant threads of silver streaking his dark hair. His mouth, in
repose, looked both sad and stern.
Irene arose and held out her hands.
"I owe you my life," she said, gratefully.
A transient, melancholy smile lit the grave, dark face.
"You need not thank me," he said, almost bruskly. "Wait until years have
come and gone, and you have fairly tested life. It will be a question
then whether you will award me blame or praise for the turn I did you
yesterday."
The large, dark, melancholy eyes held Irene's with a strange
fascination.
"Ah! you think that youth is all sunshine and roses," she answered,
almost against her will. "I have already learned the reverse of that,
and yet I find life sweet."
"How came you to be in the water?" he asked, anxiously, sitting down and
drawing Lilia to a seat upon his knee.
The deep color rushed over Irene's pale, lovely face. A deep shame
overpowered her, and yet against her will something within her forced
her to confess her sin.
"You will be shocked," she said; "but I must tell you the truth. I threw
myself in."
"No," he exclaimed, in surprise.
"Yes," she answered, sadly.
"Oh, Irene, why did you do that?" exclaimed little Lilia.
"Why did you do it?" echoed the man.
"I had lost the only friend I had on earth, and I did not wish to live,"
she answered.
"Then I was right. You will not thank me for saving your life,"
exclaimed Mr. Stuart.
"Yes, for I repented my rashness as soon as my body struck the cold
waves," she answered, shivering. "I am thankful my life was spared to
me. Life is hard, but death is harder."
He looked at the beautiful, agitated girl with deep interest. He began
to see that there had been some romance in her life. Her face had a
tragedy written on it.
"You will wish to return to your home and your friends?" he said.
An exceedingly bitter expression crossed the lovely young face, and for
a moment she was silent. To herself she said: "I have neither home, nor
friends, nor name. Those whom I left will be glad to think that I am
dead."
Her heart was hardened against them all. She believed that her mother
had left her to perish without one effort at rescue.
"She was glad to be rid of her illegitimate child," she said to herself,
with inexpressible bitterness.
Mr. Stuart, thinking she had not heard him, repeated his question.
"You will be glad to return to your home and friends?"
She raised her large, beautiful eyes to his face. They were dark with
unutterable despair.
"I have neither home nor friends--nor name!" she said.
He started, and looked at her keenly.
"You must have borne some name in the world," he said, almost sternly.
"I did; but I had no right to it, and I have renounced it forever. I am
called Irene. That is the only name I can rightfully claim," she
answered, bitterly, and drooping her shamed eyes from his earnest gaze.
For a moment both were silent.
Mr. Stuart's dark, sad eyes were fixed on her with a look that was
almost pain. This fair, mysterious waif from the sea, stirred his soul
to its deepest depths. His presence held the same mysterious fascination
for her.
Lilia, the most innocent child in the world, and who had been listening
with deepest interest, broke the silence, wide-eyed.
"You have only one name," she said. "How strange! I thought everyone had
two names. I have. Mine is Lilia Stuart. Mamma's is the same. Papa's
name is Clarence Stuart."
She paused, for a stifled cry broke from Irene's lips. The dainty
saloon, the faces of the father and child seemed to fade before her. She
was back in the parlor of Bay View, that fatal night when they had
brought old Ronald Brooke home dead. Again she saw, through the blinding
mist of her tears, Guy Kenmore extricating the fragment of paper from
the dead hand. Again she looked over his arm and read:
"That the truth may be revealed, and my death-bed repentance
accepted of Heaven, I pray humbly.
"CLARENCE STUART, Senior."
"My God! what does it mean?" she asked herself; and Guy Kenmore's
ambiguous answer recurred to her mind:
"A great deal--or nothing!"
"Irene, are you ill?" asked Lilia, anxiously. "You almost screamed out,
and your face is as white as chalk!"
"I am very nervous. You must not let me frighten you, Lilia," the girl
answered, sadly.
Lilia came coaxingly to her side.
"I am going to tell you something," she said, with her pretty air of a
spoiled child. "While you were asleep I was very naughty. I peeped at
the beautiful lady in your locket!"
"Lilia!" her father exclaimed.
"All the ladies looked, papa," Lilia answered, self-excusingly. "And I
am going to have one more peep! Irene will not care, I know!"
She flashed the lid open suddenly before his dazzled eyes. He could not
choose but see that fair face, with its haunting eyes, and tremulous
smile, and golden hair, Elaine's perfect image, even to the shadow of a
tragedy that even a stranger could read on her beauty.
He gazed and gazed, and the breath fluttered sharply over his parted
lips. Then, all in a moment, with a smothered cry of despair, he put out
his hands and shut out the sight of the lovely face, even as his head
fell back against the chair, his breath failed, and he lay all white and
corpse-like before the two frightened girls.
CHAPTER XV.
Bertha had promised to keep Guy Kenmore informed of the progress of
Elaine's illness, and she was glad to keep her word, as it afforded her
a pretext for writing to the young man, and thus keeping her memory
alive in his heart.
Since the supposed death of poor Irene, the artful Bertha was again
laying plans for the capture of Mr. Kenmore. She hoped in time to allay
the unfavorable impression she had created in his mind the night of the
ball, and to establish an empire over his heart. Mr. Kenmore belonged to
one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic families in Baltimore, and
it was the hight of her ambition to become his wife.
Though the young man's interest in Elaine afforded her a pretext for
corresponding with him, Bertha was vaguely displeased at his anxiety
over her sister. It filled her with secret jealousy. Elaine was still
young and beautiful enough to win the heart of the man who had married
her daughter. Bertha was determined not to tolerate her as a rival.
"There is no accounting for men's tastes," she said, angrily, to her
mother. "I supposed that his knowledge of Elaine's shameful secret would
utterly disgust him with her. But he is almost as anxious over her as if
he were her lover."
"Men regard these things somewhat differently from women," replied Mrs.
Brooke. "It is possible he may regard Elaine with pity, rather than
disgust. And pity is akin to love, you know."
In her heart Mrs. Brooke was rather elated at Guy's interest in Elaine.
If she could not secure him for Bertha, she would be very pleased to
have him for her elder daughter.
Bertha saw the bent of her mother's mind, and inwardly raged at it. Day
and night her mind was filled with projects for diverting Guy's mind
from the charms of her elder sister. On this particular state of her
mind Elaine's announcement of leaving Bay View fell like healing balm.
Several days elapsed after her departure before Bertha communicated the
fact to Mr. Kenmore in a brief, ambiguous note.
It was no part of her plan that he should become acquainted with their
poverty, or with the reason of Elaine going.
So she wrote simply:
"Elaine convalesced more rapidly than was expected, and has left us in
anger, declining to live with us longer, and making a mystery of her
destination. Come down to Bay View and I will give you the particulars."
The note had the effect she anticipated of bringing Mr. Kenmore down to
Bay View without delay.
Then Bertha told her story with well-acted grief and penitence.
"It was all my wretched fault," she sighed. "Elaine would not forgive me
for giving way to my jealous passion that dreadful night, and betraying
her shameful story. It was all in vain that I declared my penitence on
my knees and implored her forgiveness. She would not hear me. She
declared that she should hate me so long as she lived, and that the
same roof could not shelter us both. So she went away from mamma and me,
declaring that it was forever."
The arch deceiver here shed some quiet, natural-looking tears into her
perfumed, black-bordered handkerchief.
"It was very hard, losing papa and Elaine, and poor little Irene, all,
as it were, at one fatal stroke," she declared, sobbingly.
Mr. Kenmore was gravely, sadly silent. He did not think of doubting
Bertha's clever tale. It seemed very natural that poor Elaine should
resent her sister's cruel betrayal of the long-guarded secret of Irene's
birth. He scarcely wondered that she had gone away desperately wounded
and unforgiving, in the smart of her bitter pain.
"Oh, if you could know how bitterly I have repented all that I said that
dreadful night," sighed Bertha, giving him a sidewise glance under her
long, black lashes. "I must have been mad, I think. You know the great
poet says, 'There's madness in the moon,' and that night Irene had
fairly driven me wild. Oh, if I could only think you had forgotten the
unkind things I said to you in my foolish passion!" she pursued,
remorsefully.
Her pretty shame and penitence touched him.
"I wish that you could forget it as freely as I forgive it, Miss
Brooke," he answered, kindly.
"Oh, thank you, thank you," she cried. "I have repented my folly in
bitterness and tears. I let my own heart deceive me. I know now that a
woman should not give her heart unasked, still less betray its tender
throbbings to the cold and careless."
She hid her face in her hands as if she could not bear his kindly gaze.
Guy, touched by her tears and sorrow, did not know what to say or do. He
was intensely sorry for her, forgetting how much he had disliked her
that night when she had shown herself in her true colors.
"Let us forget it all, Miss Brooke," he said, uneasily, anxious to dry
up her springing tears.
The beautiful brunette gave him a swift, shy look of gratitude.
"Oh, how gladly I will do so!" she exclaimed, putting out her delicate,
white hand to him. "Shall we be friends as we were before---- that fatal
night?"
"Yes," he replied, pressing her hand kindly, but lightly, for he had no
mind to be drawn into the _role_ of a lover again.
"And you will come down to Bay View sometimes? Mamma and I will be so
lonely and sad now, after losing so many dear links from our family
circle," said the dark-eyed beauty, following up her advantage.
"Sometimes--when I can find leisure," he replied ambiguously.
And with that Bertha was obliged to be content. She hoped great things
from the concessions he had already made. Now that Irene was dead, and
Elaine gone, she would have no rivals, and surely, surely her beauty,
her fascination, her tenderness for him must win him even against his
will.
She brought the whole battery of her charms and graces to bear upon
him, but was obliged to confess to herself that she had never seen him
so sad, so grave, so pale and so _distrait_.
"It cannot be that he is sorry over that child's death. He ought to be
glad," she thought to herself. "It must be that he assumes this gravity
in deference to my affliction."
Yet she was troubled and chagrined when he left her so indifferently and
went down to the shore. She watched him from her window, standing
quietly, with folded arms, a tall, dark shape, outlined against the
brightness of the summer eve.
"Of what is he thinking?" she asked her heart, uneasily.
It would have seemed strange to her if she had known. It even seemed
strange to himself.
He was standing there gazing with dark, heavy eyes at the rolling waves,
much as if he had been gazing on a grave.
He was recalling to mind the winsome, changeful, perfect beauty, the
fire, the soul, the passion of the girl he had so strangely wedded, the
girl who had recklessly flung herself into the deep, relentless waves,
leaving him only the memory of the few, brief hours in which she had
flashed before him in the extremes of joy and despair---- one moment a
beautiful, spirited, happy child, the next a passionate, despairing,
crushed and broken-hearted woman!
"Poor little Irene," he said to himself. "If she had lived, who
knows"--then a sigh, deeper than he knew, finished the regretful words.
CHAPTER XVI.
He stood there a long, long time, listening to the beat of the waves,
and thinking of Irene and her mother. Bertha grew tired of watching him
and stole away to try the effect of a new mourning bonnet that had just
been sent home from the milliner. Guy had forgotten her. He was wrapped
in other thoughts. New feelings had come to him since that night, when,
indolent, _blase_, careless, he had come face to face with his fate. He
was haunted by a voice, a face. Some sad words came to his mind:
"How could I tell I should love thee to-day,
Whom that day I held not dear?
How could I know I should love thee away
When I loved thee not anear?"
"Oh, that word Regret!
There have been nights and morns when we have sighed:
'Let us alone, Regret!'"
He turned away at last warned by the darkening twilight that fell like a
pall over his lost bride's "vast and wandering grave."
"I must bid adieu to Mrs. Brooke and Bertha and return home to-night,"
was the thought in his mind.
Mrs. Brooke was in the parlor alone, Bertha being still absorbed in the
new bonnet. A sudden impulse came to Guy Kenmore.
He sat down by the matron's side and gazed sympathetically into her
still youthful-looking and handsome face.
"Miss Brooke left you no address when she went away, I presume?" he
inquired in a tone of respectful anxiety.
Mrs. Brooke had received her cue from Bertha and answered accordingly:
"No. She has deserted us most heartlessly, and I fear, I fear"---- she
broke down and buried her face in her handkerchief.
"You do not suppose that she can have made away with herself?" he cried
in low, awe-struck tones.
"No, no; worse, far worse," groaned the apparently deeply agitated
woman. "Oh, Mr. Kenmore, pity the grief and shame of a heart-broken
mother--I fear that Elaine has returned to her wicked deceiver."
"Impossible!" he exclaimed, in stern and startled tones.
"Would that I could think so," sighed the unjust mother. "But my heart
is torn by cruel suspicions. Elaine has never ceased to love that wicked
wretch, and to whom else can she have gone?"
To herself she said, self-excusingly: "Poor Elaine, I would not blacken
her name still more, only to help Bertha. If she marries him I shall
manage to let him find out the real truth about Elaine directly
afterward. She shall not lie under that base imposition any longer than
is necessary for Bertha's welfare."
She was startled when she saw how reproachfully and sternly his brown
eyes gleamed upon her.
"A mother is the last person to impute sin to her child," he said.
Mrs. Brooke only sobbed into her handkerchief by way of answer to this
reproach.
"I have become deeply interested in your daughter's sad story, Mrs.
Brooke," he went on. "Pray do not think me inquisitive if I ask you one
question."
She looked it him in startled surprise.
"It is only this, Mrs. Brooke," he said. "Will you tell me in what city
lived the man who so cruelly wronged beautiful Elaine?"
"It can do no good to rake up these old things," she said,
half-fretfully.
"It was only a single question. It cannot hurt you to answer," he said,
almost pleadingly.
She said to herself that it could not matter indeed, and she did not
wish to offend the young man whom she hoped to capture for her
son-in-law.
"It is very painful re-opening these old wounds," she sighed; "but since
you insist upon it I will answer your question. The young villain lived
at Richmond."
He bowed his thanks.
"I already know his name," he said, "and since you have no son to send
upon this delicate mission, Mrs. Brooke, I will make it my business to
inquire if your elder daughter has indeed deserted you for her base
betrayer."
She was about to protest against his doing so on the first pretext she
could think of, when Bertha's entrance suddenly closed the conversation.
He made his adieux and departed, giving an evasive reply to the young
lady's wishes for his swift return.
One week later Mrs. Brooke received a letter from him dated at Richmond.
"You wronged your daughter by your unkind suspicions," he wrote; "she is
not with the man you thought. Clarence Stuart left Richmond on the very
day of your husband's death, in his own yacht, with his wife and
daughter, and a party of friends. They were on a pleasure-trip to Italy.
You will no doubt be glad to hear that Elaine is not so wicked as you
believed her."
Thus the letter closed abruptly. Mrs. Brooke, in a curt note, thanked
Mr. Kenmore for his information. She did not dare give way to her
indignation at his interference, dreading that it would injure the
success of Bertha's husband-hunting.
CHAPTER XVII.
Lilia Stuart was very much frightened by her father's strange seizure.
She was about to scream loudly for help when Irene, with a sensitive
horror of scenes, laid her white hand gently but firmly over the parted
lips.
"Do not be frightened, Lilia," she said. "Get some cold water. That is
all that is necessary."
Lilia sprang to the ice-flagon and returned with a glass of cold water
in her trembling grasp. Irene thrust her white hand into the cold fluid,
and deluged Mr. Stuart's rigid white face with it.
It produced the desired effect. Mr. Stuart shivered, opened his eyes,
and stared blankly around him for a moment.
"Oh, papa, you are better," cried Lilia, springing to throw her arms
around his neck. "I am so frightened, dearest papa, shall I not call
mamma?"
Something like dread or fear flashed for a moment into his open dark
eyes.
"No, for Heaven's sake, don't!" he exclaimed, testily; "I detest scenes!
There is nothing at all the matter with me! Say nothing to your mother,
Lilia. You understand me?"
"Yes, papa," the girl replied, obediently. "But what made you faint?"
she continued, curiously.
An expression of deep annoyance clouded Mr. Stuart's handsome face.
"Pooh, I did not faint," he said, sharply. "A mere dizziness overcame
me. Don't let your fancies run away with your reason, Lilia."
He rose as he spoke, and without a glance at Irene or the open locket
that still swung at her throat, hastily quitted the room. Lilia,
forgetting her guest, followed after him.
Irene thus left alone, fell into a startled revery.
She had not been deceived like Lilia by Mr. Stuart's short assertion of
dizziness. She knew that he had actually fainted, and she believed that
the bare sight of her mother's face in the locket had been the cause of
his agitation.
"He recognized the face, and it had power to stay the very pulses of his
life for a moment," she said to herself.
A terrible suspicion darted into her young mind, chilling the blood in
her veins, and driving it coldly back upon her heart.
"Can this man be my father, my mother's base betrayer?" she thought.
She did not like to think so. Her heart had gone out strangely to this
man, the savior of her young life. She liked to think that he was noble,
good and brave. For the villain who had betrayed her trusting young
mother she had nothing in her heart but hatred, and a burning desire for
revenge.
Suddenly the saloon door opened softly. Mr. Stuart had eluded Lilia and
returned.
He came to her side and sat down again. His dark face was strangely pale
still. There was a troubled look in his large, dark eyes.
"You must have thought my agitation strange just now, Irene," he said.
"Yes," she answered, gravely.
"And--you guessed the reason?" he inquired, slowly, fixing a keen glance
on her face.
She raised her beautiful, troubled blue eyes steadily to his.
"You recognized the pictures in my locket," she replied, touching it
with her trembling hand.
"My God, yes!" he answered hoarsely. "Irene, child, for the love of
Heaven, tell me what this man and woman are to you."
She had no answer for him. In her own heart she was saying, dumbly:
"I cannot tell him. It is my mother's secret. She guarded it for sixteen
years, and I must not betray her."
He looked at the white, agonized face of the girl, and repeated his
question:
"Tell me what this man and woman are to you."
"I cannot tell you, Mr. Stuart," she replied, falteringly.
"You mean you will not," he said, studying her downcast face, with
grave, attentive eyes.
"I _cannot_," she replied. "It is a secret that belongs to others. I
cannot betray confidence."
A baffled look came into his troubled, marble-white face.
"Do you mean to preserve an utter _incognito_ among us?" he asked.
"I must," she answered, while great, trembling tears started beneath her
drooping lashes. "I can say no more than what I have told you already. I
am homeless, friendless, nameless!"
"How old are you?" he inquired.
"I was sixteen years old but a few days ago," she answered.
He looked again keenly at her face, and bending forward, again looked at
the beautiful, pictured face of Elaine Brooke.
A shudder shook his form.
"You are strangely like her--strangely like," he said. "Child, I would
give much to hear you say what this beautiful woman is to you."
Irene looked gravely at him, her young bosom shaken by a storm of
suspicion.
"Confidence invites confidence," she said, harshly. "I will tell you
what this woman is to me if you tell me what she once was to you."
CHAPTER XVIII.
Irene's stern, abrupt question produced a startling effect upon Mr.
Stuart. His face grew ashy pale, even to his lips, and he gazed
suspiciously, almost angrily, at the girl's grave face. Seeing only an
earnest wonder mirrored in her clear, sweet eyes, he sprang abruptly
from his seat, and without replying to her question began to pace
rapidly up and down the room.
Her grave, troubled eyes followed him slowly up and down, while a
terrible pain tore her heart.
He seemed to have forgotten her presence, as with clenched hands and
wildly staring eyes he paced up and down, muttering bitter phrases to
himself.
Irene caught the echo of some passionate words quoted in a voice of
raging scorn:
"Falser than all fancy fathoms,
Falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat,
And servile to a shrewish tongue."
Suddenly he stopped in his wild march, and came back to her side.
"No, child, keep your secret," he said, hoarsely. "Keep your secret, and
I will keep mine. God help you if yours be as hard to bear as mine."
She must have pitied the dreary despair of his face and voice if her
heart had not been hardened against him by her terrible suspicions. A
hard, scornful laugh broke over her lips.
"Remorse is always hard to bear," she said, bitterly, to herself.
He looked at her in wonder.
"We will keep our own sad secrets," he repeated, mournfully. "But you
are friendless. I will be your friend. You are homeless. My home shall
be yours. You are nameless. You shall be Lilia's sister, and share her
name. It is a noble one, and has never been stained by disgrace."
She looked at him gravely, fixedly.
Did he speak the truth? Did not her mother's shame and hers lie at his
door?
"Do you accept my proposition?" he inquired, anxiously.
For a moment she was tempted to give him an angry passionate denial, to
say bitterly:
"No, I will not have these things on sufferance that should be mine by
right. I will not have your favor or your pity, you demon, who blasted
my mother's life and mine! I could rather curse you!"
But on a sudden she remembered that her suspicions were merely
suspicions. She had no proof that this noble-looking man, who seemed
crushed by the weight of some inward sorrow, was her father. Perhaps she
wronged him in her thoughts.
"I must give him the benefit of the doubt, since he saved my life," she
thought, and put out a cold, little hand to him.
"I must perforce accept your kindness," she said, mournfully, "since I
have not a friend to turn to in all the wide, wide world."
He crushed the slender fingers in his firm clasp.
"I will be your friend, always--remember that," he said.
Irene would have thanked him feebly, but the saloon door hastily
unclosed, admitting Lilia and her faded, peevish-looking mother.
"You here, Clarence!" exclaimed the latter, in a tone of marked
displeasure.
He gave her a quick, cold look. Her eyes fell before it. Cowed by her
husband's superior will, she vented her spite on Irene.
"Lilia has been telling me that you threw yourself into the water," she
said, flashing her eyes full of greenish rage on the pale young girl.
"Oh, you wicked, wicked girl!"
"Madam!" exclaimed Irene, in a proud and haughty tone.
Mr. Stuart advanced, and drew his wife's arm through his own.
"Come with me, Mrs. Stuart, I want you," he said, leading her
deliberately from the room.
Lilia stood looking at Irene's indignant face, with a strange
expression. The child was like a cat, one moment all silky fur and
purring fondness, the next ready to attack with teeth and claws.
She saw the resentment at her mother's coarse attack burning in Irene's
dark blue eyes, and exclaimed, with peevish childishness:
"Mamma says you must have done something very bad, indeed, or you
wouldn't have thrown yourself into the water! She says you are a bad,
wicked girl, and that I musn't entertain you in my pretty saloon, so I
guess you had better go back to Mrs. Leslie, and let me have my lounge!"
Irene gazed at the child, almost petrified by her startling change from
sweetness and affection to spite and rancour. She saw the mother's
spirit flashing from the eyes of the child, and rising with a proud
step, left the room without a word.
"Is he really my father," she asked herself, "and is that coarse woman
the one who was thought better to bear his name than my angel-hearted
mother? And that sickly, petted child--does she shed greater lustre on
the proud name of Stuart than I would have done?"
She hastened to Mrs. Leslie's tiny apartment, and finding herself alone,
threw herself down upon the white bed and burst into a torrent of bitter
tears.
Mrs. Leslie entering more than an hour later found her there, still
sobbing and weeping in a very abandonment of despair. She stooped down
impulsively and kissed the pure, white brow.
"Do not mind Mrs. Stuart, my dear," she said consolingly. "She is a
spiteful, jealous cat, and hates you for your fair, young face."
Irene looked up, startled. How had Mrs. Leslie learned so much?
"Oh, I have heard about her naughtiness to you just now," smiled the
lady. "Do not grieve, Irene. I will be your friend. I am a wealthy
widow, and have no one to please but myself. I have fallen in love with
you, you mysterious little waif! You shall be my _protege_ if you will."
Seeing that Irene could not speak for tears, she slipped a little note
into her hand.
"Dry your eyes and read that," she said. "It is my recommendation to
your favor."
Irene obeyed her in surprise. It was a pencil scrawl, hastily done.
"My poor, unfortunate child," it ran, "owing to the hardness of my wife
I am unable to take you into the bosom of my family, as I wished to do;
but I am none the less interested in your welfare. You will be Mrs.
Leslie's _protege_. She is one of my oldest friends, and will be like a
sister to you, while you may always command me as your best friend. It
will be necessary, perhaps, that you should assume some name in order to
avoid censure and suspicion. The world is very hard and cold, as you may
have learned ere now, and it is best to put every defense possible
between you and its sneers. Let Mrs. Leslie assist you in the selection
of a suitable name."
The hurried note closed abruptly with the name of Clarence Stuart. Irene
raised her eyes wonderingly to the lady's face.
"Why does he take such an interest in me?" she asked.
"He saved your life, my dear, and you seem in some sort to belong to
him. Besides, he is naturally one of the noblest and best of men. His
heart is full of pity for the weak and helpless," said the lady,
enthusiastically.
There was a moment's silence; then Mrs. Leslie said, kindly:
"What do you say, my dear--will you be my little sister, and let me care
for you?"
"Yes, until I can act for myself," Irene answered, softly, and pressing
her girlish lips gratefully upon the lady's small white hand.
CHAPTER XIX.
Mrs. Leslie smoothed the girl's rippling golden curls tenderly.
"And the name?" she said. "Shall you not take Mr. Stuart's advice about
that? It will be far--far better."
Irene was silent, warm blushes drifting over her fair, young face.
"Think," said the gentle lady, "there must surely be some name to which
you have a legal right. Is there not, my dear?"
Deeper and warmer grew the blush on the fair, girlish face.
She had suddenly remembered Guy Kenmore, and the ceremony which Mr.
Clavering had declared to be binding upon them.
"My name is Mrs. Kenmore," she said to herself, with a strange feeling
trembling at her heart as she recalled the handsome man to whom she was
bound.
Then a flash of pride usurped the thrill of almost unconscious
tenderness.
"He did not wish for me to be his wife," she said to herself. "I
remember he regarded me simply as a spoiled child. I shall not claim his
name, shall never trouble him more. He shall think me dead."
She looked up gravely at her kind friend.
"Mrs. Leslie," she said, "there is no name from out my past that I wish
to claim. I have severed myself violently from all that once bound me. I
have done no wrong, I have sinned no sin, but I have been terribly
wronged and sinned against. It is true I have borne a name in the world
where I used to move, but when I found it was not mine I flung it away.
I will not be called by it, I will have nothing to remind me of the
past. Now tell me what I shall do."
Mrs. Leslie was silent a few moments. She wondered who had been so cruel
as to wrong this beautiful girl, whose words, whose looks, whose every
action was so pure and high-toned.
After a moment's reflection she said:
"My maiden name was Berlin; will you bear that, Irene?"
"You would give your own name to me, an utter stranger?" Irene cried, in
grateful surprise.
"Yes, because, as I said just now, I have fallen in love with you.
Whatever may be the sad secret of your past I can look into your eyes
and see that you are pure and good. The name of Berlin is an old and
honorable one, but I do not believe you would disgrace it in the
bearing," said the sweet lady, heartily.
"Then I accept the loan of it with sincerest gratitude," replied Irene,
through springing tears.
"Then you shall be called Irene Berlin," said Mrs. Leslie. "It is a
pretty name, and will suit you. And now we will discuss other affairs. I
am going to Italy with the Stuarts. Shall you be willing to go with me?"
"Nothing could please me better than to leave my native land behind me,"
replied the girl.
"That is settled, then. And now do you feel well enough to go on deck
with me? It is a lovely day. The sun is shining softly and brightly. The
sea is almost as calm and blue as the sky. The fresh air will do you a
world of good."
"I have nothing to wear," said Irene, flushing deeply.
"That is true," laughed Mrs. Leslie. "The party dress in which you came
among us is not exactly a yacht costume. But I can remedy that defect, I
think, from my own wardrobe. Fortunately we are about the same size."
She brought out from her trunk a dark blue velvet suit and a cap of the
same with a jaunty bird's wing on one side. Nothing could have become
Irene better. The suit fitted to a charm, and when Mrs. Leslie set the
jaunty cap on the streaming curls she exclaimed in wonder at the
dazzling loveliness of her _protege_.
"It is no wonder Mrs. Stuart was jealous of you, you are the loveliest
creature I ever saw," she exclaimed frankly.
"If I were not so unhappy you would make me vain, Mrs. Leslie," sighed
the lovely girl.
"You are too young to be unhappy, my dear. I hope you will soon forget
your sorrows. But come, let us go on deck and I will introduce you to
your _Compagnons du Voyage_."
They went out and Irene's eyes were dazzled with the beauty of the day.
The sky was deeply blue, with little white clouds sailing over it. The
sun shone on the blue waves, and white-winged sea-gulls darted here and
there. Several ladies and gentlemen were on deck, walking and chatting.
They started in surprise--the women envious--the men admiring--at the
new comer. She looked like a young princess. Her step was light and
proud, her bearing calm and self-possessed. The sun shone on her golden
curls, her fair face and her velvet blue eyes, making her look like a
perfect picture. Several gentlemen came around Mrs. Leslie, waiting
eagerly for an introduction.
CHAPTER XX.
Lilia Stuart had not failed to repeat Irene's confession of her
namelessness to her mother. Mrs. Stuart, with the malice of a little
mind, industriously disseminated the news among her guests. Curiosity
and excitement were rife, regarding the mysterious waif from the sea.
So when Irene came upon deck, looking so wondrously lovely in the blue
velvet dress and her rippling, waving, golden curls, they all came
around her, full of wonder and surprise. They were amazed and
disconcerted when Mrs. Leslie, with the cool self-possession that never
deserted her under any circumstances, proceeded to introduce her
_protege_ by the name of Miss Berlin.
"Why, we thought she had no name--that she was a child of shame. Mrs.
Stuart certainly said so," the ladies exclaimed to each other in
whispers. "Depend upon it there is something wrong. We will be very shy
of having anything to do with her."
If Irene had been homely and stupid, they might have pitied her, but her
girlish beauty and grace at once enlisted the spite and envy of their
little minds. Mrs. Leslie was the only lady on board who did not wish
that she had perished in the cold waves. They regarded her as an
interloper and unwelcome burden on them.
The gentlemen took a different view of the matter from their feminine
friends. They were full of wonder and admiration over the beautiful
stranger.
There were three gentlemen beside Mr. Stuart, on board the yacht, as
there were three ladies. With two of these men our story has no
interest. The third one, who was a distant relative of Mr. Stuart, and
who at once fell desperately in love with our heroine, we will slightly
describe.
He was tall and slight, with very dark eyes and hair, and a face that
though weak and irresolute in expression, was rather handsome, having an
effeminate mouth and chin that lent sweetness to his ever-ready smile.
His dark eyes had a trick of falling beneath your glance, as if some
inner consciousness made him shrink from meeting you with an open,
steady gaze. In dress and manner he was rather a dandy, and was counted
popular among the fair sex for his obliging disposition, and also a very
fair tenor voice, with which he accompanied himself on the guitar. He
answered to the name of Julius Revington.
On the heart of this handsome ladies'-man, the fair, blonde loveliness
of Irene at once committed terrible havoc.
He gazed as if fascinated, on that arch, bright face to which the
delicate color mounted in a roseate glow at his ardent gaze.
Mrs. Leslie smiled as she saw how deeply he was smitten with her
_protege's_ charms, and immediately introduced him.
He acknowledged the introduction with delight, and invited Miss Berlin
to promenade the deck with his arm for support.
As Irene gently declined, pleading weariness for excuse, he brought her
a comfortable chair and stood beside her ostensibly to shade her face
from the too ardent kisses of the wind and sun, but really that he might
feast his eyes on her fresh and pearl-fair beauty. Revington holding his
umbrella over Irene provoked some mirth and more envy in the breasts of
Brown and Jones. The ladies were unanimously disgusted. It was too bad
that she should wile Revington from them. Miss Smith, a tall brunette
who rather regarded him as her own prey, looked daggers. Mrs. Leslie was
secretly amused and delighted. She knew that Mrs. Stuart had been
forming a coalition against Irene, and it pleased her to see how hard
they took Revington's desertion to the banner of the newcomer.
But rave as they would, Irene's conquest was potent to everyone but
herself. She who had never had a lover in the course of her brief,
secluded life, was innocent of coquetry and unversed in the arts of
love. She accepted Revington's attentions kindly, and congratulated
herself that she had won another friend.
But though she was patient and gentle the beau could not congratulate
himself on any rapid progress in her favor. She was strangely sad and
grave. The red lips had no smiles for him though they answered him
gently when he spoke. The blue eyes did not look at him, though he tried
all his arts to win them to meet his gaze. They wandered strainingly
across the sea, as if seeking something lost to sight. The lids, with
their heavy golden lashes, had a pathetic droop as if unshed tears
weighed them down. The lips quivered now and then as if with mute sobs.
A story was written on her face--a story of sorrow and pain that clouded
somewhat its spring time loveliness as clouds overshade an April sky.
Revington, who was poetical, thought of some applicable lines, and
bending over her softly repeated them:
"It is raining, little flower;
Be glad of rain----
Too much sun would wither thee----
'Twill shine again.
The clouds are very black, 'tis true,
But just behind them shines the blue.
"Art thou weary, tender heart?
Be glad of pain----
In sorrow sweetest things will grow,
As flowers in rain.
God watches and thou wilt have sun
When clouds their perfect work have done."
The sweet words touched her. She had not known before that the sorrow at
her heart was reflected on her face. She looked at him then a little
wistfully.
"Do I indeed look so sad?" she asked.
"Far too sad for one so young," he answered. "I wish I could teach you
to smile."
She did smile then, but the smile was sadder than tears.
"Ah, you should have known me even a week ago," she said, impulsively.
"I had never known a real sorrow then. But now, unless I could forget, I
do not think I could ever again be glad."
She thought of the old gray head that she had so loved lying low in the
dark grave; of Elaine, her mother, who had left her to perish in the
dark waves after she had followed her almost to the brink, and a
fountain of sorrow, of bitterness, and of shame welled up within her
heart.
Revington looking keenly at her, wondered what the sorrow had been that
had shadowed her brow and heart.
"I will find it out if I can," he said to himself, "and I will teach her
to forget if I can."
He little dreamed how vain a task he had set himself. As the summer days
glided softly past, and the white-sailed yacht flew over the blue ocean
waves blithely as a bird, Irene began to understand the drift of his
attentions.
"Revington is making love to you, my dear," Mrs. Leslie had said,
laughing, and thus her young eyes were opened.
It amused her at first, and then she became disgusted. It angered her to
see the artful little traps he had set to surprise her secret from
her--the secret of her hidden past. From a desire for flirtation at
first he had glided into ardent love, and his longing to know the story
of her past grew greater daily in accordance with the strength of his
passion.
But Irene, from mere friendliness at first had turned to ice. She
repelled his attentions now, instead of languidly enduring them. In her
heart she contrasted the weakly, handsome face and shrinking eyes with
one that was engraved on her memory as possessing of all manly beauty
the most.
Mrs. Stuart looked on at the little by-play with coldly disapproving
eyes. She had begun with a jealous hatred of Irene, because her husband
had saved her life. Her aversion never grew less. Indeed, the beauty,
and grace, and romantic mystery that enfolded the girl, only added fuel
to the flame of her wrath and jealousy. She knew, although she was chary
of expressing it by word or sign, that Mr. Stuart took a great and
almost painful interest in the object of her antipathy.
It vexed her when she saw Julius Revington losing his heart to the girl,
but she never expostulated with him but once, although they were
intimate friends. Then he spoke a few words that effectually silenced
her, and she learned for the first time how his dark eyes could flash
beneath their drooping lids. She let him alone after that, and contented
herself with spiteful looks and sneering words behind his back.
In the balmy breezes and salty breath of the summer ocean, Lilia
Stuart's insidious disease took a new and flattering turn. She had fewer
ill-turns. Her thin cheeks rounded out with something like healthy
plumpness. Her large eyes did not look so large in her childish face.
She would have returned to her first enthusiastic admiration and
friendship for Irene, but her mother maliciously fostered ill-will and
contempt in her mind, and Irene was the recipient of many bitter
impertinences from the misguided child, which she received with cold and
disdainful scorn. Mrs. Leslie was the only friend she had who dared
speak openly and kindly for her. All the rest of the party, except
Julius Revington, were weakly dominated by Mrs. Stuart.
They reached Italian shores at last, and Arno was secured for the
Stuarts and their guests. There was a short and sharp debate between Mr.
Stuart and his wife, who objected to receive Irene as her guest. But the
lady knew how far she could transgress against her husband's will, and
she found she had reached the limit, and was forced to yield
ungraciously to his desires.
A cold and formal invitation was therefore accorded to Miss Berlin as
Mrs. Leslie's friend. Irene, burning with resentment and wounded pride,
would fain have declined and gone out into the cold, strange world to
seek her bread among strangers, but Mrs. Leslie's gentle solicitation
prevailed, and she accepted the grudging invitation as reluctantly as it
had been given. We will leave her there, in "the land of the orange, the
myrtle and vine," and return to Guy Kenmore.
CHAPTER XXI.
Mr. Kenmore, in his pursuit of knowledge, had no difficulty in tracing
the Stuarts in Richmond.
At the elegant and fashionable West End of the city, a stylish residence
was pointed out to him as the home of Clarence Stuart and his family.
He remained in the city a few days and stored his mind with all the
available facts regarding this, to him, interesting family.
It was easy to do. The Stuarts, as wealthy, fashionable and aristocratic
people, were well known. The city papers had duly announced their
departure for Italy in their own yacht, the _Sea-Bird_. Their movements
were considered generally interesting to the public, to judge by the
paragraphs that appeared in the daily journals.
Mr. Kenmore heard, incidentally, that Clarence Stuart's wife had been a
wealthy heiress when he married her, some fifteen years before.
Casual inquiry elicited the fact that Clarence Stuart's father had been
dead three weeks.
Guy Kenmore was startled by this information. It went far towards
confirming his theory of the fragment of letter found in old Ronald
Brooke's dead hand, and which he treasured carefully in his pocket-book.
"It was the senior Stuart's death-bed confession," he said to himself.
"What could that dying man have to confess to old Ronald Brooke?"
What but the story of a crime that lay so heavy on his dying hours, that
he was fain to seek the pardon of God and of man before he dared go out
into the terrible unknown?
_Who_ had dared to wrest that important confession from Mr. Brooke's
hand, and strike him dead with the secret unrevealed?
Shuddering, Guy Kenmore asked himself this question to which the answer
seemed only too clear.
The only persons who could have been vitally interested in old Clarence
Stuart's death-bed confession were his son and his family.
Was Clarence Stuart, junior, a guilty man or a wronged man?
Did he or did he not know of his father's death-bed confession?
By whose hand had that confession been sent to old Ronald Brooke?
Who had followed behind the messenger and torn that document from the
old man's hand with a death-blow?
These questions rung unceasingly through Guy Kenmore's head. They
sickened him with their terrible suggestions of hidden guilt and crime.
He believed more and more that Ronald Brooke had been murdered instead
of dying a natural death as his physicians had asserted.
But how was he to find the murderer, and how bring his guilt home to
him?
Mr. Kenmore, who was naturally indolent and ease-loving, and who had
been nurtured in these habits by his life of luxury and indulgence,
found himself staggered by these heavy responsibilities that appeared to
have been thrust upon him. The blood of Ronald Brooke seemed to cry
aloud to him from the earth for vengeance on his murderer.
"Why has Heaven selected me for the instrument of righting Elaine
Brooke's wrongs?" he asked himself, in wonder.
He did not relish the duty, but when he would fain have given it up, a
voice within him loudly urged him forward in the path of duty.
"What good can it do?" he answered back, impatiently, to that inward
monitor. "Mr. Brooke is dead, Irene is dead, her mother has broken loose
from all her old ties and associations, and hidden her life away in the
great thronging world. Can vengeance bring the dead back, or give peace
to the broken heart of that poor wronged woman?"
Yet in spite of his sophistries and protestations the voice within still
loudly echoed: "_Go on._"
He wrote to Mrs. Brooke informing her of her erroneous supposition
concerning Elaine's whereabouts, then he turned his whole attention to
the Stuarts.
"If I could see Clarence Stuart I could form my opinion of him much
better," he thought. "I have nothing else to do. Why not follow them to
Italy?"
He went home to Baltimore and made his preparations for going abroad.
There was no one to oppose his will. His parents were dead, his two
sisters were married to wealthy men, and were too much absorbed in
fashion and pleasure to miss him greatly. Somewhat reluctantly he went,
not remembering that the path of duty is oftentimes the straight road to
happiness.
No dream came to him as he walked the deck those beautiful moonlit
nights of summer and mused on the repulsive task to which he was going,
that fate was leading him straight to the presence of her who had become
a sweet and softened memory to his heart; whose childish willfulness and
flitting spites had so irked him once, but which now he remembered only
as
"Delicious spites and darling angers,
And airy forms of flitting change."
Death had idealized his blue-eyed girl-bride, and he loved her now when
it seemed too late.
CHAPTER XXII.
"Italia, oh, Italia, thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past."
The words fell softly from the lips of Irene as she walked beneath the
shade of the orange and olive and lemon trees in the villa garden. The
balmy air was sweet with the breath of countless flowers, the birds sang
sweetly in the boughs above her head, and the blue waves of the Arno
ebbed and flowed at her feet with a pleasant murmur. Overhead the clear
blue sky of Italy, which poets have painted in deathless verse and
artists on immortal canvas, sparkled and glanced in all its radiant
sapphire beauty.
She was musing on the beauty and the sorrow of this lovely hapless land,
and the famous words of Byron came aptly to her lips. She repeated them
softly and sadly, and someone who had stolen upon her unaware answered
musingly:
"Do you believe with Byron that the gift of beauty is always fatal, Miss
Berlin?"
She started and flushed with annoyance. It was Julius Revington. He had
become her very shadow, seeming unable to exist out of her sight.
The beautiful girl in her white dress with the roses and myrtles in her
small hand, turned her face away pettishly.
"How you startled me, Mr. Revington," she said, in a tone of
displeasure. "I thought myself alone."
"You are very cruel to hide yourself out here in the orange ground,"
said the gentleman, sentimentally. "Do you know that I have been
searching for you everywhere?"
"No, I did not know it. If I had, I should have hidden myself in a
securer place than this," she replied, with all the frank cruelty of a
young girl.
"Miss Berlin, you are very cruel," complained the lover. "Sometimes I
really wonder whether you say such sharp things in earnest, or if you
are only coquetting."
The blue eyes flashed.
"I know nothing of coquetry," said Irene, sharply. "I mean everything
that I say."
He came nearer and looked under the brim of the shady hat at the lovely,
irritated face and sparkling eyes.
"Oh, Miss Berlin, why will you treat me so coldly when you know that I
love the very ground you walk upon?" he exclaimed, almost abjectly.
"I do not want your love," she answered, stamping her little foot
impatiently on the turf, as if the love he confessed for her lay
veritably beneath her feet.
His weakly, handsome face grew pale at her impetuous words.
"Wait, Irene, before you so cruelly reject me," he exclaimed. "You are
young, but not too young to know that it is wrong to trifle with the
human heart."
"I have not trifled with yours," she interrupted, flushing at the
imputation.
"But all the same your beauty has wiled my heart from me," he said. "I
have loved you from the first hour I saw your charming face. I lay my
heart, my hand, my fortune at your feet, Irene. Will you not take pity
on me and be my wife?"
The flowers fell from her hands down upon the sweet, green turf, and her
face grew pale with emotion. It was the first time a lover had ever
wooed her, yet she was a wife--a wife unwooed and unwon--yet bound, how
plainly she recalled the solemn, fateful words, by ties that no man
"should put asunder."
She looked at the dark, handsome face that showed at its best with that
light of love lingering on it. Between her and it another face arose,
languid, careless, indifferent, yet fascinating for the soul that looked
out of the bright, yet soft brown eyes. She remembered that she had
thought him handsome--handsomer than any of Bertha's and Elaine's
beaux--a flush rose slowly to her face as she remembered that she had
told him so.
"No wonder he despised me," she said to herself, and she turned back to
Mr. Revington trying to forget Guy Kenmore, for she was now ashamed of
the willfulness and spite she had displayed before him.
"Will you be my wife, Irene?" repeated her adoring lover.
"I cannot, Mr. Revington. I do not love you," she answered, in a gentler
tone than she had used to him before.
He threw himself impetuously at her feet and grasped her hands.
"Let me teach you to love me," he cried, abjectly.
Her crimson lips curled in faint scorn.
"I could not learn the lesson," she replied. "You are not the kind of
man whom I could love," and again the handsome face of Guy Kenmore rose
before her mind's eye.
"Why do I think of _him_?" she asked herself.
"What sort of a man _could_ you love, Miss Berlin?" he asked, almost
despairingly, and again the proud, handsome, indifferent face of Guy
Kenmore rose tormentingly before her.
"Why do I think of _him_?" she asked herself again, in wonder, and
forgetting to answer the question of the kneeling man. She had drawn her
hand away from his frenzied clasp, and now he gently plucked at her
dress to draw her attention.
"Irene, my love, my darling, my beautiful queen, take pity on me, and do
not reject me," he cried, pleadingly. "Tell me what manner of man you
could love, and I will make myself over by your model. I could do
anything, be anything, for your sweet sake!"
Again the blue eyes looked at him in faint scorn, and the red lips
curled.
"Do get up from the ground, Mr. Revington," she said. "It is quite
undignified; I dislike it very much."
He was too much carried away by his passion to observe the slight
inflection of scorn in her tone.
"No, I will not rise," he answered. "I will kneel at your feet, like the
veriest slave, until you retract your cruel refusal, and give me leave
to hope."
"But I cannot do so," she answered, more gently. "Do be reasonable, and
drop the subject, Mr. Revington. It is quite impossible, this that you
ask. I do not love you, and I cannot be your wife."
"You might learn to love me," he persisted, almost sullenly.
"Never. You do not realize my ideal," the girl replied, with an
unconscious blush.
"Tell me what your ideal is like, Irene," said her kneeling lover.
"I have read some lines that fit him," she replied, half dreamily, half
to herself, and still with that soft blush on her beautiful face. "I
will repeat them to you."
Yet she seemed to have forgotten him, as she fixed her eyes on the blue,
rolling waves of the Arno, and the words fell like music from her
beautiful lips:
"He to whom I give affection
Must have princely mein and guise.
If devotion lay below me,
I would stoop not for the prize
Bend down to me very lowly,
But bend always from above;
I would scorn where I could pity,
I must honor where I love.
"Did he come as other lovers
With his praises low and sweet,
Did he woo in the old phrases,
Kneeling humbly at my feet--
How my heart would be unfettered,
And my thoughts soar free and high,
As a bird that beats at morning
'Gainst the gateway of the sky.
"He must hold his perfect manhood,
He must keep his place of pride;
Bring me fond words as a lover,
And true words as friend and guide.
So in him my fate would meet me,
Life's surrender all complete,
Fearlessly I'd take my future,
And I'd lay it at his feet!"
Her ideal lover, so unlike himself, sent a blush of shame tingling to
his cheeks. He sprang hastily to his feet and looked down at her from
his tall hight sullenly.
"You are unlike all the women I have ever met before," he said, with
repressed anger. "You would have a man play the master, not the slave."
And in his heart he longed to be her master then and compel her love in
return for that which glowed in his heart.
She looked up at him with a slight smile.
"You misunderstand me," she replied. "I could not tolerate a master as
you mean it--a tyrant. Still less could I love a slave. My ideal must
have manly dignity and gracious pride. He must look like Jean Ingelow's
Laurance:
"'A mouth for mastery and manful work,
A certain brooding sweetness in the eyes,
A brow the harbor of grave thought, and hair
Saxon of hue.'"
"So I must change my looks as well as my nature before I can please my
lady," he said with sudden bitterness.
"Yes," she answered, with a light and careless laugh, for, to do her
justice, she did not dream how deep his love lay in his heart. She
believed him weak and fickle, as his face indicated, and as he was. If
he had won her, lovely and charming as she was, he must have wearied of
her in time, as it was his nature to do; but being unattainable she at
once became the one thing precious in his sight, without which he could
never know happiness.
He went away and left her to her solitude under the orange tree with its
glistening green leaves, its waxen-white flowers and golden globes of
fruit. She looked a little sadly at the flowers which had fallen from
her hands and which her kneeling lover had crushed into the turf.
"The great booby," she said indignantly to herself. "He has
remorselessly crushed all my beautiful flowers."
Was it an omen?
CHAPTER XXIII.
Julius Revington went away from the presence of the girl he adored, cast
down but not destroyed.
He had set his mind doggedly on winning her and he was by no means
despondent of winning her yet.
His grosser, weaker nature could not comprehend the higher, loftier
nature of Irene. Her gentle intimation of how he fell short of her ideal
had not greatly impressed him except to fill him with a certain amount
of sullen jealousy toward some unknown person or other whom it was
evident existed in her mind, and possibly in flesh and blood upon the
earth.
"Perhaps she has already given her heart away," he thought to himself.
"But, no, she is too young. That cannot be."
As he walked slowly along the path toward the villa something bright and
shining on the ground attracted his attention. He stooped and picked it
up.
A cry of eager surprise broke from his lips.
It was the pretty, blue-enamelled locket that Irene usually wore around
her white throat.
It had become detached from the slender gold chain and fallen on the
ground without her knowledge.
Julius Revington had endured many pangs of baffled curiosity over this
locket, of whose contents he had heard much from the ladies but which he
had never had the good fortune to behold.
Pausing now in the quiet, secluded path, he deliberately touched the
spring of the pretty bauble.
The lid flew open, and there before him under the soft light of the
Italian sky that sifted down through the glistening leaves of the orange
trees, were revealed the handsome faces of old Ronald Brooke and his
daughter.
A hoarse cry broke from Julius Revington's lips, his face whitened, a
cold dew started out upon his brow.
"My God," he said, and sank down upon a bed of flowers as if totally
overcome.
With starting eyes he looked at the kind, genial, manly face of the old
man, and then at the fair, almost angelic face of Elaine. An
uncontrollable shudder shook his form.
"Father and daughter!" he said, under his breath.
Sitting there in the balmy air with the soft murmur of the waves in his
ears, he relapsed into thought. Minutes went silently by, bringing a
subtle change into the man's face. His cheeks glowed, his downcast eyes
sparkled.
"A master rather than a slave," he muttered at last with an evil triumph
in his tone; "so be it."
Slowly rising, he retraced his steps to Irene.
He met her coming along the path toward him, her fair face anxious and
troubled.
"Oh, Mr. Revington," she cried, "I have lost the locket off my chain!
Have you seen it anywhere?"
He held it up to the light, and her sweet face glowed with joy.
"Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Revington," she cried, "I am so glad! I
feared I had lost it forever!"
"I am very glad to have the good fortune to restore it to you," he said;
"it lay directly in my path as I was returning to the villa."
"I am so glad," she repeated, kissing it as if it had been some sentient
thing. "You see, Mr. Revington, it was a gift to me from one who is now
dead--one whom I loved--dearly," she concluded, with a falter in her
voice and a mist of tears in her eyes.
"Miss Berlin, will you pardon me if I ask you what may seem an
impertinent question?" he asked.
She brushed the soft dew from her eyes with her lace handkerchief, and
looked up at him with her soft, wondering glance.
"Well?" she said.
He did not look at her in return; his shifting eyes fell to the ground,
as was their wonted habit.
"When I found the locket lying on the ground the lid was open. I saw the
two faces it held," he said, in a strange, hesitating voice.
"Well?" she repeated, gravely, while a flush rose over her fair face.
"They--were not strange to me," he replied; "I was startled when I saw
whose were the faces you wore always over your heart. Miss Berlin, will
you tell me what that man and woman are to you?"
He saw her start and shiver--saw the warm crimson flash into her face,
then recede again, leaving it deathly pale and cold. She clasped her
hands over the locket, pressing it tightly to her beating heart, while
she answered hoarsely and with downcast eyes:
"I cannot tell you, Mr. Revington; it is a secret, and that secret
belongs to another. I have no right to reveal it."
CHAPTER XXIV.
Julius Revington stood looking in silence at the beautiful, agitated
girl as she repeated, sadly:
"The secret belongs to another. I have no right to reveal it."
"Is it a secret of shame?" Julius Revington asked, slowly.
Irene started, and flashed a look of anger upon him through her tear-wet
lashes.
"You are impertinent," she said, sharply; "you have no right to seek to
penetrate the secret of my past!"
"I have the same right as the physician who probes the wound to heal
it," he replied, coolly.
"You!--you can heal no wound of mine!" she flashed, almost disdainfully.
"You think so, but you are wrong," said Julius Revington. "Sit down,
Miss Berlin, I have much to say to you. It is for your own good that you
should listen to it."
The earnestness of his tone impressed Irene against her will. She sat
down slowly on the soft, green grass, still with a mutinous pout on her
lips, and her eyes turned coldly away from him.
Mr. Revington seated himself also, and glanced carefully around, to make
sure that no one was in hearing distance of himself and his fair
companion.
"I see that you have no faith in my power of making an interesting
communication to you," he said, addressing himself to Irene.
"No, I cannot imagine your telling me anything I should like to hear,"
she retorted, coldly.
An angry light flared into the man's dark eyes a moment, but he bit his
lip to keep back a sharp rejoinder. Her willfulness, her pretty
petulances, had an actual fascination for him.
"Such an answer from any one but you, Miss Berlin, would be actual
rudeness," he said, lightly. "But whether frowning or smiling you are
ever charming to me. You remind me of nothing so much as one of
Tennyson's heroines, 'a rosebud set with little willful thorns.'"
She answered not a word. Her fair face was averted, and her blue eyes
gazed at the silvery Arno softly gliding past.
"You have been a beautiful, enchanting mystery to me ever since I met
you," he continued, slowly. "I have wondered whence you came and to whom
you belonged, but with no hope of unsealing your beautiful lips or the
secret they held so close. But chance--or shall I call it fate?--has
solved the mystery for me."
She turned her head and looked at him suddenly, her blue eyes dark with
fear and wonder.
"What can you mean?" she exclaimed.
"I mean that when I came upon your picture in your locket just now the
mystery of your identity was solved for me," he replied, coolly, glad
that he had roused her at last.
"I do not understand you," she said through her lips that had suddenly
grown white and trembling.
A slight smile curved Julius Revington's mustached lips, as he saw how
much he had startled her.
"Master rather than slave," he repeated to himself, vindictively, for
that was the way he interpreted her eloquent description of her ideal.
"I told you the faces were not strange to me," he said. "Shall I tell
you their names?"
"You cannot," she returned, miserably.
"Do not deceive yourself," he retorted. "The old man is Ronald Brooke,
the beautiful woman is his daughter, Elaine."
A startled cry broke from her lips, she flashed her eyes upon him in a
swift, horrified gaze, a terrible suspicion darting through her heart.
"You know her?" she cried out, hoarsely.
His answer dispelled the horrible dread that had clutched at her heart
with icy fingers.
"No, I have never met her in my life, but I have seen her picture
before," he said.
She gave a gasp of relief. It had been horrible to fancy for a moment
that this man whom she despised in her heart could be her mother's
betrayer.
"You have seen her picture before?" she repeated. "Where?"
"It depends on yourself whether I ever answer that question or not," he
said.
"On me?" she asked, with some wonder.
"Yes," he replied; "for if I should answer that question it would
involve a long story. Before I tell it to you I shall expect to receive
a like confidence from you."
She shut her lips tightly over her little clenched teeth, and he saw the
blue eyes flash mutinously.
"You refuse?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied, dauntlessly. "You have startled and surprised me and
I know not how much you know of me and my past. But at least you will
never learn more from me."
He could not forbear a glance of annoyance.
"Miss Berlin, you are certainly the most willful child I ever saw," he
exclaimed. "What good can it do you to refuse to tell me what
relationship you bear to Ronald Brooke and his daughter?"
CHAPTER XXV.
Irene raised her large blue eyes to Mr. Revington's face. They were full
of anguish and despair.
"I have told you already that the secret is not mine to reveal," she
said.
"Then I must answer my own question," he replied, with a swift glance
around him to make sure that he was not overheard; "you are Elaine
Brooke's _illegitimate daughter_!"
A low cry of bitterness and despair shrilled from her lips. It confirmed
his hazardous guess.
"You cannot deny it!" he uttered, triumphantly.
"My God, are you man or devil, Julius Revington?" she exclaimed. "How
came you by this knowledge?"
"In a perfectly natural manner," he answered, coolly. "The story of your
mother's past is better known to me than to yourself, Irene."
She could not speak for a moment. A hand of ice seemed to grip her
throat, her brain reeled, the sound of the river came to her faintly as
in a dream. The hot color rushed to her face and her lashes fell. She
could not look at this man who held the story of her mother's past--that
secret so full of shame and sorrow.
"I know it far better than you do; better than she does," he repeated.
"Do not hang your head so heart-brokenly, Irene. You have nothing to
blush for."
"Nothing," she echoed, bitterly.
"No," he said, "I can tell you good news, little one. But first raise
your head and look at me. I want to see the joylight flash into your
eyes when you hear what I have to tell you."
She obeyed him, lifting her sweet eyes in wonder, with half-parted
crimson lips that seemed to ask mutely what joy life could yet hold for
her.
"You have nothing to blush for," he repeated. "Your mother was a
lawfully wedded wife. You are not the child of shame as you have been
taught to believe."
"Can I believe you?" she exclaimed, and he was dazzled by the flash of
joy in her eyes.
"You may, for it is true, and I can produce proofs of what I say," he
answered. "Your mother has been fearfully wronged, but it lies in my
power to restore her to her rights again."
"God forever bless you, Mr. Revington, if you can lift the cloud of
sorrow from the hearts and lives of a wronged woman and her child,"
exclaimed the lovely girl, fervently.
"It rests with you, Irene, whether I do so or not," he replied, flashing
a look of admiration on her beautiful, agitated face.
"With me!" she echoed, blankly.
"You are the daughter of a wealthy, high-born, noble gentleman, who
would be delighted to claim you if he knew that you lived, and who would
rejoice to clasp your mother to his devoted heart," said Mr. Revington,
watching her closely as he uttered the words. Her eyes beamed, her face
glowed with joy; then suddenly a shadow fell on its brightness.
"You are deceiving me?" she said.
"No, I swear that I am not," he asseverated. "I can prove what I say,
and I am ready to do so--on one condition!"
"And that?" she asked, innocently.
His shifting gaze fell before that eager, hopeful, unconscious look, but
he answered, boldly:
"That you be my wife, Irene."
"I have told you that was impossible," she answered, growing suddenly
pale to the lips.
"Why?" he inquired, chagrined at the prompt reply.
"I do not love you," she replied, evasively.
"Granted that you do not," he said, selfishly, "is your hand too great a
price to pay to secure to your mother ease, honor, end happiness?"
She had no answer for him only an irrepressible moan of pain that broke
uncontrollably over her white lips. Her thoughts went back to poor,
patient, badgered Elaine, and her hard life at Bay View--harder now than
ever, she guessed, since her father was dead, and she was left to the
tender mercies of her mother and sister.
"Dear mother, how gladly I would purchase this man's knowledge, even at
the bitter price he asks, for your dear sake, if only it were possible,"
she thought to herself with a pang like death at her heart, as she
recalled her fatal marriage.
Julius Revington, watching the mute anguish on her speaking face, saw
that it was no time to press the question.
"Do not answer me now, Irene," he said, with ready gentleness. "Take
time to think it over. Revolve it in your mind to-night in soberness and
calmness. Ask yourself if you do not owe this duty to your poor, wronged
mother. How sweet it would be for her child to restore to her all she
has lost."
"You are cruel and calculating," she said, indignantly. "Why should you
ask such a costly price for doing this kindness to my poor, martyred
mother?"
"Because I love you, and in no other way can I win you," he answered,
boldly.
Her beautiful eyes flashed scornfully upon him.
"Would you take a reluctant and unloving bride?" she asked.
"I would take you on any terms, Irene," he replied.
She looked up at him and asked the strangest question that could
possibly fall from a daughter's lips:
"Mr. Revington, will you tell me the name of my father?"
The piteous sadness of the tone, and the pathos of the question must
have touched the heart of a better man.
But Julius Revington was thoroughly hard and selfish.
"You have never heard his name, then?" he said.
"Never," she replied. "Will you tell it to me now?"
"Not yet," he replied, cruelly. "I will reserve that pleasant bit of
information for our marriage day."
She flashed a sudden, piercing glance upon him.
"You are deceiving me," she said. "You are trying to win me by a
pretended knowledge of facts that do not exist."
"On my honor, no," he replied. "I admit that I am selfish, and that I am
using the knowledge I possess to gain my own ends, but on the morning
that you give me your hand in marriage I swear that I will place in your
hands the documents that will prove your mother a lawfully-wedded wife,
and give you a legal right to your father's name and wealth. Moreover, I
assure you that no one will be more surprised or rejoiced than your
father himself on learning the truth."
"And what if I refuse to marry you? she asked, fearfully.
"If you refuse," he replied, cruelly, "the cloud of shame shall never be
lifted from your mother's life and yours. Nay, more, I will go to the
Stuarts and your good friend, Mrs. Leslie, and I will tell them why you
choose to make a mystery of your past. Consent to marry me, and on our
wedding-day I will prove you the legal inheritor of an honorable name
and a great fortune. I will give you until to-morrow to decide the
question."
He rose with the words and walked abruptly away.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Irene remained sitting like one stunned on the banks of the beautiful
river.
Her white hands clasped each other convulsively in her lap, her head
drooped on her breast, she stared blankly and dreamily before her,
seeming lost to the beauty of the fair Italian scene, and deaf to the
soft sounds that filled the air with a pleasant murmur.
Heart and brain were in a terrible tumult.
Her head ached and throbbed almost to bursting, her heart beat fast and
hard in her breast.
The joy and triumph she would have experienced in the knowledge of her
poor mother's innocence and honor were all damped by the thought of the
costly price she was required to pay before she could have the happiness
of bearing the glad tidings to the wronged, unhappy woman.
With deepest self-reproach the girl recalled her own frenzied reproaches
to that beautiful, sorrow-stricken parent on the fatal night when she
had been so maddened by the revelation of the angry Bertha. She looked
back as though years had intervened upon the Irene of that summer night
as a rude, impertinent, willful child.
"Is it any wonder my mother left me to the death I courted in my wild
despair?" she thought. "How could I, who should have soothed sorrow,
turned upon her so cruelly? Poor, unhappy Ellie, as I used to call her,
what sorrows may she not be enduring now? What insolence, what cruelty,
at the hands of her overbearing mother and sister? Even I, her child,
did not spare her my reproaches in her dark hour, and how should they
who love her less than I did?"
In the flood-tide of remorseful affection that swept over her heart, she
longed to go home to her mother, to take her in her arms, and say,
lovingly: "Mother, darling, you and your husband were both cruelly
wronged. Here are the papers that will prove your wifely honor. Take
them and forgive me my wicked reproaches."
Alas, between her and that beautiful hour which fancy painted so
glowingly, there yawned a dread, impassable gulf!
"Even if I could consent to pay Julius Revington's terrible price for
those papers, I could not do so. I am already wedded," she said to
herself; and her heart thrilled strangely at the thought.
The remembrance of his threat sent a shiver of dread thrilling through
her frame. To-morrow he would tell Mrs. Leslie and the Stuarts that she
was a child of shame; that her beautiful, pure-hearted mother was a
sinful, erring woman. How should she bear it? she asked herself, with a
moan.
The evening sun sunk lower and lower; the twittering birds flew home to
their nests; the cool, soft dew began to fall on Irene's face and hands.
She rose with a shiver, as though of mortal cold, and dragged herself
back wearily to the villa.
Then she felt that she could not endure to meet the cold, curious faces
of Mrs. Stuart and her friends just then. She stole quietly up to her
own room, closed and locked the door, and threw herself wretchedly down
upon the floor, with her face hidden on her arm.
She did not know how long she had lain there, wretched, forlorn,
despairing, when she was roused by the tap of a servant outside, who
desired her presence at dinner.
She replied, through the closed door, that she was ill, and did not wish
any, and returned to her crouching posture on the floor, as if she found
a grim pleasure in physical discomfort, as a set-off to her mental
trouble.
She felt angry with herself for the fairness that had won Julius
Revington's love.
"If I had been homely and ill-shapen, instead of fair and graceful, he
would never have loved me, and he might then have given me those papers
for pure pity's sake, with no such condition attached," she told
herself, sadly.
Two hours later Mrs. Leslie came tapping softly at the door.
"You must let me in, Irene, for I shall keep 'tapping, tapping,' like
the raven, until you do," she called out gaily.
With a smothered sigh Irene admitted her friend.
"What, all in darkness? I beg your pardon, I did not know you had
retired," exclaimed the lady.
Irene struck a light and then Mrs. Leslie gazed in wonder at the pale,
haggard face.
"My dear child, what is the matter with you?" she cried out in wonder.
"It is nothing--only a headache, I--I have been lying down," she
faltered, miserably.
The lady glanced at the white, unrumpled bed, and then at Irene,
curiously.
"Where--upon the floor?" she inquired, with a mixture of sarcasm and
amazement.
"I--believe so; I felt so bad I did not think," answered Irene, trying
to smile.
"Poor dear," said the lady, full of womanly compassion; "if I had known
you were so ill I would have come up to you long ago. It was too bad
your lying here all by yourself in the dark! In your tight dress, too; I
am ashamed of myself! But now I am going to undress you and 'put you in
your little bed.'"
Heedless of Irene's gentle expostulations, she proceeded to follow the
kind promptings of her womanly heart, and directly she had the girl
dressed in her snowy _robe de nuit_ and nestled among the pillows of the
snowy bed.
"Now you may shut your eyes, and I will bathe your head with _eau de
cologne_ until you fall asleep," she said.
"But indeed it does not ache now. Pray do not trouble yourself," Irene
expostulated, now thoroughly ashamed of her innocent little fib.
The lady sat down and began passing her hand tenderly over the pillow.
"I am glad it does not ache any longer," she said, unsuspiciously. "You
were sadly missed from among us this evening, my dear," she continued in
a light, bantering tone. "Mr. Revington was exceedingly distrait; Miss
Smith teased him for a song, but he gave her such a doleful one that he
received no encores whatever."
Irene looked so plainly disgusted at the mention of her lover's name
that Mrs. Leslie forebore to tease her. She delicately changed the
subject.
"Mr. Stuart came back from his trip to Florence this evening, and
brought us some sad news," she said.
Irene tried hard to look interested in this communication, but failed
dismally. Her own troubles absorbed all her care.
"There has been the most terrible ocean disaster," continued Mrs.
Leslie. "Two American steamers, one homeward bound, the other en route
for Italy, collided in mid-ocean at midnight, with a horrible loss of
human life. Is it not awful?"
Irene tried to look properly shocked, but heart and brain were so numbed
by her own grief that she could scarcely comprehend the extent of the
calamity her friend was bewailing.
"It is very dreadful," she murmured, feebly.
"Is it not?" said Mrs. Leslie, in awe-struck tones; "and, only think,
Irene, I was personally acquainted with one of the passengers who
perished in the wreck. I met him once while visiting my sister in
Baltimore. He was very handsome and agreeable, besides being very
wealthy. His name was Guy Kenmore."
She paused, and uttered a cry of alarm in the next breath. Irene had
gasped convulsively once or twice, then fainted dead away.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Mrs. Leslie was filled with dismay and terror at the result of her
thoughtless communication to her _protege_.
"What a silly tattler I am to tell such shocking things to that poor
sick child," she said to herself, with lively compunction.
Then she flew to the dressing-table, and securing a bottle of _eau de
cologne_, proceeded to drench Irene's face vigorously.
The result of her treatment was that Irene speedily gasped, shivered and
opened her eyes.
"Oh, you are alive yet, are you, my dear?" exclaimed her friend. "I was
afraid I had killed you with my foolish tales."
"Then it wasn't true--you were jesting with me?" exclaimed the girl,
unconsciously clasping her small hands around her friend's arm, and
lifting her dark, anxious eyes to her face.
"Eh? what, my dear?" Mrs. Leslie asked, rather vaguely.
"The wreck, you know--the people who were drowned," Irene answered, with
a shudder. "Is it true?"
"Oh, yes, child, every word of it, I am sorry to say, but I oughtn't to
have told you about it while you were feeling so badly. It shocked you
very much, poor dear."
"Yes, it shocked me very much," Irene replied, in a strange voice. "You
were saying--were you not?--that one of your friends was--was--drowned,"
she concluded, with a faint quiver in the last word.
"Yes--poor Guy Kenmore of Baltimore--one of the most splendid men I ever
met," sighed Mrs. Leslie. "But do not let us talk about it any more
to-night, dear. It makes you nervous, I think."
"Yes, and I am very tired. I should like to go to sleep. Good-night,
dear Mrs. Leslie," said Irene, thus gently dismissing her friend.
"Very well, since you want to go to sleep, good-night, dear," said the
lady, good-humoredly; "I hope you will let me know if you are worse in
the night, though."
Irene promised, and received Mrs. Leslie's good-night kiss. Then the
lady went away and left her alone.
Why did she weep so bitterly upon her lonely pillow that it was drenched
with her bitter tears?
Now that her husband of an hour was dead, Irene knew that she loved him.
"Loved him with a bitter yearning
That could never pass away,
Loved him with an anguished passion
That could never know decay."
As she lay there weeping sorely on her pillow, she recalled that sweet
June night, but a few short months ago, when her own willful folly had
led her into that deplorable entanglement. She recalled the handsome
face of Bertha's lover, as she then deemed him--handsomer then and now
to her fancy than any other man she had met. He had given her no word
of blame or reproach for her folly that had led him into that mad
marriage. Nay, how kindly, how gently he had tried to make the best of
it--he had offered to keep faithfully those marriage vows he had taken,
even when he knew that she was a nameless child, and her mother a
disgraced woman. How kindly he had spoken to poor Elaine, even when her
own child madly reproached her. She seemed to feel again the warm,
gentle clasp of his arm around her waist while poor Elaine told her
sorrowful story.
"I love him. It is not wrong, for he belonged to me, and he is dead,"
she said to herself, plaintively and sadly, through her falling tears.
She forgot Julius Revington for a while in the shock of this new grief.
One hour was given to her sorrow and her tears.
"He is dead, yet I cannot realize it," the girl-widow said to herself,
trying to fancy those laughing brown eyes drowned in the salty waves of
old ocean--those languid, musical tones hushed in its everlasting roar.
It was in vain the effort. It was in life, rather than death that he
dwelt in her thoughts.
"He is dead, but no more dead to me than he was in life," she repeated
over and over to herself, "for I should never have seen him again."
And suddenly, like an Arctic wave coldly sweeping over her, came the
remembrance of Julius Revington.
"I am free now," she repeated to herself, with a shiver of horror.
"Nothing lies between my mother and happiness but my own unconquerable
repugnance to the man who holds the secret of my mother's wrongs."
Remorseful memory pictured that beautiful mother sad, lonely, bereaved,
wasting her heart in unavailing sighs and tears.
"Oh, mother, I was hard, cold, cruel to you that night in my madness,"
she cried. "I, who shadowed your life with an ever-present memory of
shame for sixteen years, now owe you reparation and atonement even to
the sacrifice of my poor life."
And in the solemn, mystical midnight hours the great battle was fought
between self-pity and mother-love.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
It was late when Irene came down to breakfast the next morning.
The breakfast bell had clanged noisily twice, and all the other inmates
of the villa were in their places at the table, when Miss Berlin glided
in, pale, mute, grave, and took her wonted seat by Mrs. Leslie's side.
Every eye turned curiously on the fair young face. The change was too
marked to escape observation. The white cheeks, the dark shadows beneath
the eyes, the pathetic droop of the red lips, all had a story of their
own. The simple white morning-dress, with the black velvet ribbon at
throat and waist was sad and suggestive too. All missed the bright bunch
of flowers she was wont to wear on her breast, but none guessed that the
simple black and white were mute tokens of bereavement.
"I was sorry to hear of your illness last night. I trust you are better
this morning," said Mr. Stuart from his place as host.
His voice was grave and kind, but his eyes were kinder. They often
lingered on her as if fascinated, until, with a sharp sigh of pain he
would turn away.
"Thank you, I am better," she replied, briefly, and dropped the long
lashes over her eyes because Julius Revington was trying to meet them
across the table.
He was vexed with her for looking so pale, so wan, so unhappy.
"Am I an ogre that she should look so pale, so ill, so wretched, at the
bare idea of having me for a husband?" he said to himself, in a
passionate ebullition of wounded vanity.
When breakfast was over he managed to intercept her as she was going
out.
"It is a beautiful morning, Miss Berlin. Will you walk out with me?" he
asked, pleadingly.
She brought her broad-brimmed sun-hat from the rack in the hall and
silently accompanied him.
It was a beautiful morning, as he had said. The sun shone brilliantly,
the blue sky mirrored itself in the blue river, birds sang, flowers
bloomed, and the air was sweet with the breath of roses. But for once
Irene was indifferent to the sweet influences of nature. She walked
along silently by his side, her blue eyes downcast, her face pale, her
steps slow and languid.
They paused at last to rest on a pretty garden seat beside the murmuring
river. Irene flung herself down wearily.
She, who seldom knew what weakness meant, could barely drag her weary
limbs along.
"I am sorry to see you looking so ill to-day," murmured the lover.
She glanced up quickly in his face for some sign of relenting.
Alas, his passionate look of admiration dispelled the sudden, springing
hope. Her heart sank heavily again.
"I _am_ ill," she cried. "God only knows what I suffered last night. Are
you still relentless in your cruel purpose?"
"You use hard words," he said, flinching under her scorn. "Is it cruel
to love you, and wish you for my own?"
"It is cruel to try to force me into compliance with your wishes," she
answered, with a passing flash of indignation.
"You mistake. I have not tried to force you. I merely gave you a choice
of terms," he replied.
"Scylla and Charybdis," murmured the girl, disdainfully.
"As you will," he replied; but in his heart he said, cruelly: "You find
it hard, fair lady, to tolerate a master in practice, however fine it
may appear in theory."
She sat still, looking dreamily into the rushing river, a look of
despair frozen on her white face.
"You may have guessed why I brought you here," he said.
She made him no answer. The cold despair deepened in the lovely,
downcast eyes.
"I am impatient for my answer," he went on. "Are you going to be kind
to your mother, Irene; kind to yourself, and merciful to me?"
She turned and looked at him, with the fire of scorn flashing all over
her beautiful face.
"If you mean am I going to sacrifice myself for my mother's sake, I
answer yes," she said. "Here is my hand. Take it. But it is empty--there
is no heart in it. There never will be. I shall never love you, were I
twenty times your wife. I shall always hate you for driving me to the
wall, for making me untrue to myself."
Unheeding her wild words he took the hand and kissed it, but she tore it
madly away. It rushed over her drearily how strange it was for Guy
Kenmore's widowed bride to be thus plighting her hand to another almost
in the first hour of her bereavement.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Mr. Revington duly announced his betrothal to the inhabitants of the
villa. Congratulations followed of course, but he could not flatter
himself that there was any heart in them.
Mr. Stuart was openly surprised and inwardly disgusted.
"To think that a girl of such beauty and soul as Irene should stoop to
mate with that weak, guitar-playing dandy," he said to himself.
Brown and Jones were envious of Revington's good luck. The ladies, with
the exception of Mrs. Leslie, thought it quite too good a match for the
mysterious Miss Berlin.
"My dear," said Mrs. Leslie, the first time she could draw Irene aside,
"I do not know how to congratulate you. You have surprised me too much.
I never dreamed that you were in love with Julius Revington."
They were alone on the wide balcony, and the opaline hues of sunset
sparkled on the blue horizon. Irene looked very pale and grave in the
brilliant light. She gazed sadly at her friend.
"Does it follow that I am in love with him because I have promised to be
his wife?" she asked, almost bitterly.
Mrs. Leslie started and gazed keenly at the fair young face.
"It _should_ follow," she said. "No girl should marry a man with whom
she is not in love. It is positively sinful to do so. And, my dear
child, if you are marrying him for money you are sadly mis----" she
paused, for a flood of crimson had drifted into Irene's face.
"Mrs. Leslie, I am quite aware that Mr. Revington's income is extremely
small," she said, with girlish dignity.
"Oh, then, it is for love, after all," said the lady, relieved. "Well,
that is the best, if you are going to marry him. But I must say it is a
great surprise to me. You seemed to belong to me so utterly I never
thought of a lover carrying you off."
Her sigh of genuine regret pierced Irene's tender heart.
She longed to throw her arms around the sweet lady's neck and tell her
all her sad story--to disclaim all interest and love in the wretch who
exacted so costly a price for her mother's happiness; but a feeling of
pride held her back.
"Not now, while the shadow of the old disgrace hangs over me," she said
to herself. "I could not bear for her to pity me. Only in the hour of my
triumph will I tell her my strange story and ask her to rejoice with
me."
Lilia came out on the balcony and Mrs. Leslie said no more. The child
was exquisitely dressed, as usual, in a rich white robe, with a
rose-colored sash. She looked quite pretty with her dark, shining hair
falling over her shoulders, her large black eyes beaming with the fires
of disease, and a deceptive glow of color on her cheeks.
She came and stood by Irene's side, and with one of her rare impulses of
kindness laid her light, fragile hand on her shoulder.
"They tell me you are going to marry my cousin Julius," she said,
abruptly.
"Yes," Irene answered, with a smothered sigh.
Mrs. Leslie looked at the two young girls, admiring their different
types of beauty. Irene's blonde loveliness was matchless; the darker
type of Lilia challenged admiration. Each set off the other, like night
and morning.
But as Mrs. Leslie gazed she suddenly smothered a cry upon her lips
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