A STARTLING DISCOVERY
Marion Vance, after leaving the man whom, during that one hour’s
interview, she had learned to loathe and despise as intensely as before
she had loved him, returned directly to Wycliffe, where in the silence
of her own room, she waited in dumb despair for the return of the
marquis.
Then, with a stern, set face, she sought everything—how she had refused
while away on her visit to be introduced as his daughter, and thus
brought upon herself this misery—and that when she found that the one
upon whom she had lavished her affection cared only for position and
wealth, she had kept silence, resolving rather to suffer her shame than
to gratify his ambition when he proved to be so heartless and base. The
only thing she reserved was the name of the man for whom she had
sacrificed her birthright; and no amount of persuasions or threats could
compel her to reveal it.
The marquis sat stern and rigid while listening to this confession from
his only child.
He uttered no reproaches, he gave way to no violent passion or grief,
only when she had concluded, he pointed with shaking finger to the door,
saying, with perfectly hueless lips:
“Do you know, Marion Vance, what you have done? You have cut off the
inheritance forever from my heirs—you have sold your birthright for a
mess of pottage, and it will go to Arthur Tressalia’s son, your cousin
Paul. Do you hear? You have ruined both yourself and me. You have made
me worse than childless. Go, and never let me look upon your face again
while you live.”
“Papa, do not—oh! do not send me away alone—alone into the cold, cruel
world. I am your only child. I have no one but you. I love you, papa.
Oh, have mercy! Let me stay here in my home. I will be very quiet and
humble. I will never trouble you, only let me be where I can see and
hear you sometimes,” Marion cried, in her despair, as she cast herself
upon her knees before the stern man.
He turned away from her with a face of stone, yet with a heart bursting
with disappointment and agony equal to her own.
“Go, I say. You shall not suffer; you shall have three hundred pounds a
year, and more if that is not enough; but never let me see you again. I
could not bear it and live,” was all he said in reply to her agonized
entreaties.
Marion tottered from the room, praying that the earth would open and
swallow her and her misery, and bury her in oblivion.
That day she left Wycliffe forever.
She fled to a small town in the southwest of England, assumed a name,
and lived there in quiet seclusion until her son was seventeen years of
age.
Her heart was broken, her life was ruined, but she never told her boy
the story of her shame and the disgrace she had entailed upon him until
she lay upon her dying bed.
He had got the idea, and always believed, that his father had died
before he was born, and seeing that it pained his mother to talk of the
past, he never mentioned it.
Marion determined, since she had been the means of robbing him of his
proud title and position, that she would devote her life to him, and
rear him with a character stamped with grandeur with which no worldly
title could ever endow him.
She taught him to hate everything mean or low—to love and cling to the
truth, no matter what opposed—to be a _manly man_, never despising or
exalting any one on account of position alone; but to admire and emulate
true worth wherever he might find it, and regard every one whom he could
respect as an equal.
She gave him the very best education that her means would allow; and,
being naturally bright and talented, he was at seventeen far in advance
of other youths of his age. Marion’s health now began to fail, and it
soon became evident to her that all that remained to her of life would
be a very brief span.
As she grew weaker day by day, she became greatly depressed in her mind
regarding the past and its connection with her son’s future, and at last
she called him to her and told him all the sad story of her life; and
all his outraged manhood, all his deep and tender love for her, arose in
arms as he listened.
“Mother!” he cried, his head thrown back, his eyes flashing fire, his
nostrils dilating, his lips quivering with indignation, shame, and
wounded pride, “I will find the man—no, I cannot call him a _man_—the
brute who dared to do so vile a thing, and I will brand him the traitor
and the coward that he is.”
“My son, never forget that vengeance belongs to a mightier arm than your
own—never forget that _you_ belong to a noble race; and even though you
may never claim your kindred, let your life testify to the respect you
bear for the blood which flowed in your mother’s veins,” was all the
reply which Marion vouchsafed to his boyish outburst of anger.
“Ah! my dear, gentle little mother,” he said, kissing her wasted hands,
“you always teach me to do right; but I bear my kindred no love; they
have cruelly wronged you. I think I cannot even respect that man whom
you say is my grandfather, even though he be the Marquis of Wycliffe.
How could he have driven you forth from your home in such bitterness?”
“You do not realize the cruel disappointment it was to him to have his
hopes thus ruined. If I had not been so blind and foolish in my love,
_you_ would now be the heir of all his proud possessions. I have wronged
you also, my noble boy,” she sighed, in bitter pain.
“Do not think of it, dear mother. It was not your fault; you were
cheated and ruined by a designing villain. Oh, that I may meet him some
day!” he cried, all the blood of his noble ancestors running riot in his
veins.
He was very handsome, and his mother told him that he looked like his
grandfather, the Marquis of Wycliffe, which to him, in his bitterness
against his treatment of her, sounded like very tame praise.
“Mother,” he burst out one day afterward, “have you one particle of
affection remaining for—that man?”
“No, my dear. That was crushed; all my wild love was burned to ashes
that night when, in my misery, he turned from me, and I went out alone
to battle with my shame.”
“That is well. But, mother, please do not call it _shame_. _You_ were
guiltless of any wrong. The _shame_, if there be any, is his,” he urged,
with troubled brow.
Marion sighed and let the matter drop. If the shame was not to be
imputed to her, she had suffered as though it were.
From that day her son was changed.
A new dignity of purpose seemed to crown him. His boyishness dropped
from him all at once, and he suddenly developed, mentally, into the full
stature of a man. He became grave and thoughtful, but a new and deeper
tenderness pervaded all his care of his mother thereafter, making him
gentle as a woman in his sympathy and attention to her wants.
She died blessing him, and telling him what a comfort he had been to her
all his life, and bidding him not forget the lessons she had taught him
of truth and right.
With an almost breaking heart, he buried her under a noble, sweeping
elm, in a quiet spot of the village cemetery, and felt as if he had not
a friend upon the face of the earth.
He sent a notice of her death to the Marquis of Wycliffe, declining all
further aid from him upon his own behalf, and then went forth into the
world to battle for himself.
One thing he resolved to do before settling down to the real business of
life, and that was to visit the place where his mother had been made the
victim of such baseness and treachery.
He went down to South Sussex County, visited Rye, and all the places she
had described to him, and thought of her there, as a fair and innocent
girl, filled to the brim with joy and gayety.
He saw the house, the Surrey mansion, where she had spent those eight
short, happy weeks and longed to enter, that he might see the rooms
where her gay laughter had rang out and her light and nimble feet had
danced to tuneful measure.
But he did not even enter the grounds, passing them with a heavy sigh
for the happiness that had been sacrificed there; and then he took his
way to the little village where St. John’s chapel stood, and where that
sacrilegious fraud had been perpetrated.
And there he made a startling discovery!
It was nearly sunset when he reached the chapel, and as he lifted his
hat on entering the sacred place, still thinking of his mother, who
believed herself a happy bride when her feet had crossed its threshold,
the last notes of a sweet hymn died away on the organ within.
He crossed the vestibule, and was about opening the inner door, when a
lady came down from the organ loft and met him face to face.
She was about twenty-five or six years of age, with a very sweet and
lovely though sad face, and she bowed kindly and graciously to the
stranger.
He returned the salutation, and then asked if she would tell him where
he could find the sexton.
She pointed out to him a little cottage near by, and as he started to go
toward it, she turned and walked with him, remarking the beauty of the
day and the glorious sunset, which they could see through the
overarching trees that grew about the chapel.
More than once he found himself searching her sweet face, and there was
something in her manner and in the tones of her voice which made him
wonder it at some time in her life she, too, had not suffered deeply.
“Perhaps,” he thought, “there is another tale of wrong, and misery, and
disappointment connected with _her_ life.”
They walked together as far as the sexton’s house, she passing in to
speak to the wife, while he sought the man who was working in the
garden.
He questioned him regarding the incidents already related, about the
secret marriage that had occurred nearly eighteen years previous; and
when the young man told him who he was—the son of that fair young
bride—he was surprised to see him betray deep emotion.
“Yes, mister,” he said, eyeing him keenly, “I remember clearly the young
gentleman and pretty lady that came here to be married, and he, the
groom, paid me a handsome sum to leave the chapel unlocked, so that they
could go there for the ceremony. He would bring his own clergyman, he
said, and as the marriage would have to be kept secret for awhile, he
wanted it done as late as possible, and no lights.”
The sexton here stopped and leaned reflectively upon the handle of his
spade, while he contemplated the neat little chapel visible through the
trees.
“I tell you, sir,” he at length resumed, “the sight of the gentleman’s
money won me at first, but when I came to think it all over, I seemed to
think that somehow it did not have a right look—their not wanting any
lights and coming so late in the evening, to say nothing about their
bribing me to let them into the chapel. I thought if it was honest and
square, even if the marriage was to be a secret, they might have come
quietly but openly, and at a proper time, for the ceremony; and, sir—I
beg your pardon if I did wrong, but my conscience was heavy—the gold
seemed like the price of innocent blood to me, and I went and confessed
the whole thing to the old rector himself, and gave him the money to put
in the poor-box.”
Marion’s son started violently at these last words, and he grew white
and trembling.
“_When_ did you make this confession—_before_ or _after_ marriage?” he
asked, with intense eagerness.
“The afternoon before, sir. I felt that if there was anything wrong
about the affair, the good old rector would see that it was made right.
He reprimanded me severely for the betrayal of my trust, as he called
it, but he relieved my mind by saying that no wrong should be done. Sir,
you are faint,” he said, noticing his visitor’s ghastly face, which was
absolutely startling in its pallor.
“No; go on! go on!” he breathed, in a voice that sounded strange even to
himself.
“Well, sir, you had better sit down upon the bench, for you don’t look
able to stand;” and he indicated a rustic bench near by, and the young
man sank weakly upon it, motioning his companion to proceed. “I don’t
know, sir, how the old rector managed that business, but I _do_ know
that after that young couple had entered the chapel I crept softly up
and looked in through an open window, and—_I heard his reverence marry
them good and strong as ever a couple was married in the world_.”
“Are you _sure_?” demanded his listener, actually gasping for breath at
this startling and unexpected announcement, while he wiped away the
great drops of sweat that had gathered upon his brow.
“As sure, sir, as that I am talking to you at this moment,” returned the
old man, confidently. “I could not _see_ the rector, it is true, for the
chapel was dark, but I knew the good old man’s voice well, and I _know_
that, instead of the young man’s clergyman—if a clergyman he had with
him at all—marrying them, the rector of St. John’s chapel said the
ceremony over them himself.”
“Oh, if you could prove this to me!” Marion’s son said, an agony of
longing in his concentrated tones.
The sexton shook his head with an air of perplexity.
“I cannot prove it, sir, except by my word, and I’ve never told any one
before; but you, sir, being the son of the pretty young lady—I had seen
her before, strolling with the gentleman—you being her child, have a
right to know it.”
“The rector! the rector! where is he? If this is true, he can prove it,”
his companion cried, starting up with excitement.
“Ah, sir, he has been dead these ten years, and there is a young man in
his place who could not know anything about this,” the sexton replied,
with a look of pity at the handsome young stranger who was so painfully
agitated.
“And there were no other witnesses—you were the only one who saw and
heard this?”
“Yes, sir, I was the only one as far as I know; but,” with sudden
thought, “I’ve heard that the old rector never went to bed at night
without first writing down everything that had happened during the day,
and perhaps Miss Isabel—that’s the rector’s daughter, sir, as came with
you hither, bless her kind heart!—perhaps she could tell you something
more about it.”
“Thank you. What you have told me to-night is of the most vital
importance, as you have doubtless judged by my unavoidable excitement.
If what you say can be proved, it will repair one of the greatest wrongs
ever committed upon this earth,” Marion’s son replied, very gravely.
“I feared it—I feared it at the time—may God forgive me for ever
betraying my trust,” murmured the old man, brokenly.
“But you atoned for it—you were tempted as all are liable to be tempted,
and I hope and trust that your repentance may have been the means of
saving a proud name from dishonor.”
“Miss Isabel can tell you if any one can,” answered the sexton.
“I will wait, then, until she comes from the cottage, and seek an
interview with her,” returned the youth; and, though his stock of money
was none too large, he generously dropped a golden guinea into the old
man’s hand, and then, too deeply moved to remain quiet, he paced back
and forth beneath the trees, while waiting for the rector’s daughter to
appear.