He said, with a long-drawn sigh:
“Life is sad to many, my dear little girl, and perhaps I have had as
sad an experience as any.”
She looked at him with questioning eyes, and, although he was usually
very quiet and reserved, after the English nature, the lovely face drew
him so strangely to her that he continued:
“Suppose we compare notes. I will tell you what a great sorrow I have
had in my life, and then you may tell me your story.”
Floy did not reply, and he saw her rosy under lip quiver as if she
repressed a sob with difficulty.
She was thinking with pride and pain:
“I can never tell this kind and noble gentleman the story of my
blighted love-dream. I do not believe that he could understand a nature
so ignoble, so fickle as that of the handsome lover I trusted so
fondly, and who failed me so cruelly in the end. His name shall never
pass my lips either in praise or blame, although I never can forget
him.”
Her new friend continued in a clear, low voice, just audible above the
rumble of their carriage-wheels on the stony street:
“But I have not told you who I am yet, so perhaps I had better
introduce myself. My name is Miller. I am an Englishman, and but a few
months ago inherited a title and large estate from my father, who was a
peer of the realm.”
“You are great and rich!” exclaimed Floy; and he caught a note of
disappointment in her voice, and wondered at it.
He continued his story by saying:
“Wealth and position do not always bring happiness. They stood in the
way of mine.”
“And of mine,” thought Floy, in silent sympathy, while he went on:
“Eighteen years ago--ah, me! how long it seems!--I was the heir
apparent to my father, a powerful noble, and a member of parliament. I
was his only son, and all his hopes centered in me. My mother was dead,
and I used to spend much of my time with a favorite aunt in London,
who had two charming children. I met there a beautiful American girl
recently orphaned, who was employed as a governess. We loved at first
sight.”
“It is a great pity for the rich and poor to fall in love with each
other. It can not end happy!” cried Floy, out of the bitterness of her
own experience.
“How cynically you speak! Has the world already made you so wise?”
exclaimed Lord Miller, in surprise; but Floy blushed without replying,
unwilling to betray herself further.
And again he took up the thread of his story:
“I see that you understand what a _mésalliance_ it would be considered
for the heir to a title to marry a poor governess, though she was pure
as an angel and beautiful as a princess. I knew it all too well, but
love would not listen to reason. I won her promise to be mine, and
then, hopeless of gaining my father’s consent to be married, persuaded
my darling to elope with me. Her consent was hardly won, but she became
my bride at a little English church, and we went to live in a pretty
cottage home pending my forgiveness by my father. Alas! it was never to
be won. My father cursed me, and drove me from his presence, swearing
that I should never have a penny from him, and that I should live on
the beggarly two hundred a year that I inherited as a legacy from my
mother. My aunt was also obdurate, and would have nothing to do with
us. In fact, we got the cold shoulder from all our former friends.”
“The rich are as cruel as death!” murmured Floy.
“Not all of them, dear child, as I shall convince you by and by,”
returned Lord Miller, wondering what cruel experience had made her so
harsh and bitter, and resolving that she should be his adopted child if
she would consent.
She looked up at him with admiring blue eyes, and added:
“I am glad that you were brave enough to marry your love, in spite of
the opposition of your rich relations. Not many a young man would be so
brave and true.”
He said to himself, shrewdly:
“This lovely child has had a romance in her life already. The pain of
an aching heart throbs through her bitter little speeches. Her pride
has been wounded by some vulgar rich person, no doubt.”
And he looked tenderly at the little beauty, while he said:
“There are plenty of young men who would marry the girl they love in
spite of the whole world. I am glad I was one of them, and I had two
years of almost perfect happiness with my darling--two years in which a
lovely little daughter came to us--a girl who would be about as old as
you, my child, if she had lived. Alas! she is dead--she and her mother!”
His voice trembled, his face grew pale, she read keen despair in his
dark-blue eyes.
“I must hasten with my story,” he cried, mournfully. “I have told you
I was happy with her only two years. Well, at the end of that time my
father sent for me to come down to one of his estates in the country--a
dreary place in Cornwall that we seldom visited, and that was half a
ruin. We thought--my wife and I--that he meant to forgive us at last,
and I went joyfully, for I did not know he had a heart of stone.
“I met him at that grim old pile of ruins, and he tried to bribe
me to divorce my darling wife and desert my child. When I refused
indignantly, he--can you imagine anything so horrible?--made his
minions thrust me into a dungeon of the old castle, and swore to me I
should die there unless I consented to his plan.
“I steadily refused, and I remained his prisoner almost fifteen years,
while he gave it out to the world that I had wearied of my American
wife and gone to travel in far countries.
“Is it not a wonder that my heart did not break in those cruel years?
At last Heaven took pity on my tears and prayers, and stretched my
inhuman parent on a bed of death. Then he had me brought to his
bedside, and implored my pardon for what he had done, after confessing
that my poor wife, believing his diabolical tale that I had deserted
her, had eked out a toilsome existence for herself and babe in London
for a few years, then returned to her native land, and he knew not what
had been her fate thereafter.
“How could I forgive him his cruel work? I fell in a swoon by his
bedside, and before I revived he died, and went to meet the judgment
of the wicked. Then I set about finding my darlings. I wrote to her
old home in Mount Vernon, New York, and received no reply. I searched
London over for months, and with no success, so I determined to come to
America. I went to my wife’s ancestral home, Nellest Farm, and found it
was deserted. I made inquiries, and learned that my wife, Mrs. Fane,
as she called herself, had died the terrible death of the suicide ten
years before--that my daughter Florence was taken care of by some
kindly neighbor who only lately met death by a terrible accident!”
“No--no; I am your daughter Florence, dearest father!” cried Floy, in
joyous excitement.