"If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely
sympathise with each other, Miss Miller," I said, looking into her
tearful eyes. "You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella
really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me
amazes me. I believed that she was false to me--and yet you tell me
that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that
any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I
did. I was hers--body and soul. My love for her was that deep,
all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman's
hands--to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all
count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The
hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music,
her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses
the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes,
you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant
to me--you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing
Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in
the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant
memory."
"Yes," she answered, with a slight sigh, "I quite understand how you
must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have
been Ella's lover--the man who she declared to me was the only one she
would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with
you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to
lie to you under compulsion."
"But why--why did she consent to do this?" I asked.
"She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that
it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father,
owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the
hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who
had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds
on the day that he married Ella."
"Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!" I cried.
"Without a doubt. And what a sacrifice! She loved you, Mr Leaf, and
yet she dismissed you in order to save her father from ruin."
"Blumenthal was a brute to have ever suggested such a condition," I
declared savagely. "I never saw him. What kind of man was he? Did you
meet him?"
"Yes. He was at Porchester Terrace on the afternoon when I called," she
replied. "A short, stout, black-whiskered man, of a decidedly Hebrew
cast. He was dressed loudly and wore a white waistcoat with heavy gold
albert--a typical City man such as one sees in Cornhill or Lothbury."
"She showed no sign of affection towards him?"
"None whatever. He was introduced to me by Mr Murray as Ella's
affianced husband, and I was, of course, amazed that she should
entertain a spark of affection for him. But half an hour later, when we
were alone, she confessed in tears everything to me, just as I have
related it to you."
"Well, you utterly astound me," was all I could exclaim.
What she had revealed to me placed my little Ella in an entirely new
light. I never dreamed of her self-martyrdom. I sighed heavily, and a
big lump arose in my throat as I reflected that, perhaps, after all
death was preferable to life with a man whom she could not love.
The calm twilight was deepening into night, and the silence was broken
only by the low murmuring of the water, the swift swish of some rat or
water-hen in the rushes startled at our presence, and the dismal cry of
a night-bird in the willows on the opposite bank.
"Did you hear nothing more of Ella after that day at Porchester
Terrace--that 12th of November that was, alas! fatal to my happiness?"
"She wrote to me twice. One letter I received in Rome a month
afterwards, and the second followed me about some weeks, and at last
found me at Lindau, on the Lake of Constance. Both letters were full of
her own unhappiness. In the first she reproached herself bitterly for
having lied to the man she really loved--though she never mentioned your
name--and said that she was back at Wichenford, but for her the world
was dead. The man whom she had dismissed had left her in disgust and
despair and had gone abroad, whither she knew not. A friend of yours
had, it seemed, told her that you had gone to Algeria, and her letter
concluded with the words: `I am alone to blame for this, yet how could
I, in the circumstances, have acted otherwise?'"
"And the second letter?" I asked eagerly.
"It was written a month later, from Blumenthal's shooting-box near Blair
Athol. She and her father were guests there at the great house-party
consisting mostly of wealthy City men and their wives. She described it
and said how she hated it all. She had, she told me, tried to escape.
She had even thought of writing to you to tell you the truth and ask
your counsel, yet what use was it when she knew that she must save her
father from the ruin that threatened. Wichenford Place had been the
home of the Murrays ever since the days of James the First, when the
King himself, granted it to his faithful partisan, Donald Murray of
Parton, in Dumfriesshire. No Murray had ever before mortgaged it,
therefore it was clearly her duty to her family to redeem it from the
hands of usurers and vandals, even at cost of her own happiness."
"A noble sacrifice!" I sighed.
"Yes, Mr Leaf. She was a noble girl," declared my handsome companion.
"I, who knew her through ten years or so, knew her, perhaps, better than
even you yourself did. The Little Madonna was never accused of an
unkind or unjust action."
"And after that letter?"
"A few months later she came to visit us at Enghien. She and her father
were in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau. But she made no
mention of Blumenthal. Afterwards we were continually moving from place
to place, and if she wrote, her letter never reached me. I heard no
more."
A long deep silence fell between us. We were still standing there in
the grey twilight at a small gate that led into the next field, our path
still continuing beside the stream.
"Strange that it should be I who should tell you the truth," she
remarked, almost as though speaking to herself. "You, a perfect
stranger, offered to do me a service--indeed you have done me a very
great service by restoring that letter to me--and in return, I have been
able to tell you the truth regarding your lost love," and she looked
into my face with her sad, serious eyes.
"Yes, it is indeed curious," I said. "Our circumstances are, in a
measure, identical. We have both been the victims of dire misfortunes,
both broken by the tragedy of an unhappy love. But you have told me
hardly anything concerning yourself," I added.
The laces of her muslin blouse rose slowly and fell again. In that dim
light I detected a hardness at the corners of her mouth, a hardness
that, to me, was all-sufficient proof of the bitterness wearing out her
young heart.
"Myself!" she echoed sadly. "What need I say about myself? It is of
the past, and the memory of it all is a very bitter one. Like you, I
believed that happiness was to be mine, the more so, because my father
entirely approved of our union. He made confidential inquiries
concerning him, and found that he was all that he represented himself to
be. But love and happiness were not for me. I, alas! am one of those
who are debarred the sweetness of life," she added hoarsely, her small
white hands clenching themselves, as thoughts of the past crowded upon
her.
For some time we were again silent. I was anxious to know the truth of
the love romance of my sweet-faced little friend--the girl whom Sammy
had denounced as an adventuress. Yet surely there was nothing of the
adventuress about her as she stood there in her plain white frock amid
that purely English scene. I glanced at her countenance and saw that it
was pale and agitated, and that her nervous lips were trembling. Her
chin had sunk upon her breast and she stood deep in thought as though
unconscious of my presence.
"Where did it occur? Here?"
"No, abroad," she answered, in a thin, mechanical voice. "I met him
when we were living at Enghien, and from the first moment of our meeting
we discovered that by some strange magnetism we were drawn irresistibly
together. He was a foreigner, it is true, but his mother had been
English, and his father was a Chilian."
"Chilian!" I cried, in a voice of surprise. But she never guessed the
reason of my amazement.
"Yes. My father discovered that we met in secret, and then invited him
to dine with us. From that evening he came daily out from Paris, and we
used to spend each afternoon boating on the lake or playing tennis on
the island. Before long we had pledged our love, and then commenced
days of bliss such as I had never before experienced. I knew at last
what was meant by perfect happiness, for we adored each other. I loved
him just as dearly as Ella loved you. I would have died for him. Yet
in all too short a time the blow fell upon me--the blow that has crushed
all life from me, that has already made me a world-weary woman before my
time."
"And what was the end?" I asked with deep sympathy, yet, alas! knowing
too well the story of the tragedy.
"The end--ah?" she sighed. "How can I tell you? On the very night when
we had secretly fixed the date of our marriage--a night when my father
invited several friends to dine--he returned to Paris, and--" but she
broke off short and burst into a wild passion of tears.
For some time I waited, my hand placed tenderly upon her shoulder,
striving to comfort her, and urging her to bear up against her heavy
burden of trouble. Then at last when she grew calm again, she said in a
hard tone:--
"On his return to Paris he found that during his absence thieves had
obtained access to his room at the hotel, and securities for a very
large amount, for the safe custody of which he was personally
responsible, had been stolen. He saw that his own honour was at stake,
that he alone was to blame for not leaving them in the bank, and in a
fit of despondency--a mad paroxysm of temporary insanity--he took out
his revolver and ended his life. I only knew of it four days after,
when I chanced to read of it in the _Independance Belge_, for early on
the morning following the dinner, my father had received a telegram and
been compelled to go to Brussels, and I accompanied him. Before I knew
the awful truth, poor Manuel was already dead and buried! Since that
day," she added bitterly, "all hope of happiness has been crushed within
me. I know now that the love of an honest man is not for me."
I made no response. I was too absorbed in my own thoughts. Every word
of hers bore out Sammy's story, yet I saw that she herself was innocent
of the foul plot which had, as a sequel, the suicide of the poor girl's
lover.
Miller knew the truth; he was, indeed, in all probability the instigator
of the ingenious theft that had had such a tragic sequel.
In silence I held the small gate open for her, and together we passed on
along the path beside the winding stream. Both our hearts were too full
for words after that unusual exchange of confidences.
Of a sudden before us, advancing in our direction, there appeared the
figure of some one in the shadow beneath the trees.
Lucie detected it at the same instant as myself, and halting drew back
in quick alarm.
"We must not be seen here together," she gasped. "People would talk,
and it would quickly get to my father's ears."
"And what harm if it did?" I asked, but ere she could reply a strange
thing happened--an incident more startling and more amazing than any I
could have ever imagined in my wildest dreams.