They went down the wide balcony steps together, leaving the two girls
alone. Mrs. Leslie chose a favorite walk along the river bank, and by
chance they sat down on the same pretty garden seat where Irene had
rested that morning while she gave her promise to be Julius Revington's
wife.
Mr. Stuart looked at his friend with a smile on his dark, handsome face.
"Now will you give me the benefit of your thoughts?" he said.
"If you will promise not to laugh--not to call me fanciful," she
answered.
"On my honor," he replied, placing his hand on his heart, and bowing
with mock gravity.
She was silent a moment, feeling a momentary embarrassment over her
promise. He would think her fanciful certainly, perhaps be displeased.
"I am growing very curious," he observed.
"You need not be---- it is nothing of any consequence," she said. "It is
only that before you came out on the balcony I was startled by observing
the vivid likeness that exists between Lilia and Irene. They are like
enough to be sisters. And when you came upon the scene my wonder only
grew. Irene is enough like you to be your daughter."
She need not have been afraid that he would laugh at her--that he would
think her fanciful. He started and gazed at her with wide, dark eyes and
ashen, parted lips.
"Like Lilia! like me!" he repeated, strangely.
"Yes," she answered. "Enough like Lilia to be her sister, enough like
you to be your child."
"Before God, I believe that she is!" he answered, startlingly.
She gazed at him in wonder.
"I do not understand you," she said, wondering if her old friend had
gone mad.
But he reiterated in tones of suppressed passion:
"I believe that she is my own child. I have loved her since the first
hour I looked on her beautiful face, so like that of the fair, cold
woman who broke my heart! I have yearned to hold her in my arms, to kiss
her fair face, and claim her for my own daughter, the pledge of a love
that for a little while was as pure, as true, as beautiful as Heaven! It
was the voice of nature speaking in my heart, claiming its own in tones
that would not be stilled. Oh, Elaine, Elaine, fairest, dearest,
cruelest of women!"
He bowed his head on his hands, and his strong form shook with great,
smothered sobs.
Mrs. Leslie gazed at him in wonder and sympathy. What hidden mystery,
what aching sorrow had her chance words evoked from the buried past? It
was terrible to witness the shuddering emotion of this brave, strong
man.
Looking up suddenly, with dark, anguished eyes, he caught her wondering,
troubled look.
"Mrs. Leslie, you think me mad," he said, mournfully.
"No, no," she answered, reassuringly. "I must beg your pardon for my
ill-advised words," she continued, regretfully. "I fear that I have
touched the spring of some secret sorrow."
"You have," he answered, sadly. "But do not reproach yourself. You
could not have known. You probed an aching wound by chance."
"I am so sorry. I did not dream," she said, incoherently, full of sorrow
for her unconscious fault.
"And she looks like me, you think?" he said, thoughtfully.
"Marvellously," she exclaimed.
"Have you ever seen the woman's face in the locket she wears about her
throat?" he asked.
"I am ashamed to confess that my womanly curiosity has made me guilty of
peeping into it on one or two occasions," she replied. "It is the
loveliest face I ever beheld."
"Fairest and falsest," he replied. "Mrs. Leslie, what will you think
when I tell you that that woman was once bound to me by the dearest tie
upon earth? She was my wife."
"I do not know what to think," she replied, and in truth she was half
dazed by his words. She could not understand him.
"You look incredulous," he said, sadly. "But, Mrs. Leslie, you have
known me for long years. Let your mind go back to the years before I
married Miss Lessington. Did no faint rumor ever reach you of a boyish
entanglement, hushed up by my father for fear it should reach the ears
of the heiress selected for me?"
"Yes," she answered, with a start, "I recall it now--the merest whisper
of a boyish fancy that your father would not tolerate. It was true,
then?"
"It was true," he answered, sadly. "Mrs. Leslie, may I tell you my
story? They say that a woman's wit is very keen. Perhaps you can help me
to solve the problem of Irene's identity."
"You may tell me, and I will gladly help you if I can," she replied,
with gentle, womanly sympathy.
In her heart she had always been sorry for Clarence Stuart. She believed
him to be one of nature's noblemen, and she knew that he was mated with
a cold, hard, jealous woman who was proud of her wealth, her birth, her
station, and whose hard heart held neither pity nor sympathy for those
whom she proudly held as inferiors. She intuitively felt that he had
never loved the haughty heiress his proud father had selected for him.
"I must go back more than seventeen years to the romance of my life," he
said. "I was barely twenty-one, then, an eager, impetuous, romantic boy,
chafing at the rein my father tried to hold over me, and disgusted with
the idea of the _mariage de convenance_ he had arranged for me."
He sighed, and resumed:
"Nellie Ford, my cousin, who was away at a fashionable boarding-school,
sent me an invitation to a musical _soiree_. I went, carelessly enough,
and at that entertainment I met my fate--a blue-eyed girl looking much
as Irene does now.
"She was not only beautiful, she was gifted with the sweetest voice I
ever heard," he continued. "She sang, and I was enraptured. I sought and
obtained an introduction to my divinity. Before we parted that evening
my heart was irrevocably lost to sweet Elaine Brooke."
Heavy sighs rippled over his lips as he paused and seemed to
contemplate in fancy the fair, flower-face, so long ago lost out of his
life.
"That was not the last time we met," he continued. "Both loved, although
it seemed indeed a mad, hopeless passion. I was destined to Lilia
Lessington, and Elaine's ambitious mother intended to make a pedant of
her daughter. She was destined to several years at Vassar College. Young
blood flows hastily, you know, Mrs. Leslie," with a sad smile. "The
hopelessness of my love maddened me. I persuaded my darling to elope
with me to a distant city, where we were married."
"All for love, and the world well-lost," Mrs. Leslie quoted.
"Well-lost, indeed, if only _she_ had been true," Clarence Stuart
answered, with one of those long, labored sighs, that seem to cleave a
strong man's heart in twain.
He was silent a few moments then, watching with gloomy eyes the softly
lapsing river, on which the haze of twilight began to fall--
"So life runs away," he said, sadly. "Wave by wave, in sunshine or
shadow. Ah! my old friend, the stream of my life has flowed for more
than sixteen years in the shadow of a great sorrow. Only a few months of
happiness were granted me with my beautiful bride."
"She was false, you said?" murmured Mrs. Leslie, sympathetically.
"False," he echoed.
"'Falser than all fancy fathoms,
Falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat,
And servile to a shrewish tongue.'
"I have said that a few months only of happiness were granted me," he
continued, after a moment's pause. "In a distant city, our whereabouts
and our fate a mystery to all our relatives, we spent a few months of
blind, delirious happiness, forgetting all save each other. Never was
bride more wildly worshiped than I worshiped my beautiful Elaine; never
was husband more adored than she seemed to adore me. We lived but for
each other.
"To this sweet idyl, this beautiful romance, came a most prosaic ending.
"The considerable sum of money with which I had left home was quite
exhausted by our idle, happy, luxurious life. I was forced to leave my
wife for a short time, and go home, like the prodigal, to my father's
house, confess my marriage, and entreat his forgiveness and assistance.
"There were hard words and a stormy scene at first. I had expected as
much; for I was well aware of his ambitious plans for me. But at last,
as I was about leaving his roof in anger, he relented. He gave me his
paternal forgiveness, and promised to receive my wife as a daughter. It
was arranged that I should leave early the next morning to bring Elaine
home. Perhaps you can fancy my happiness, Mrs. Leslie."
"Yes," she replied, sympathetically, her kind blue eyes shining through
a suspicious mist.
"I sat up quite late that night, talking to my father, expatiating with
boyish enthusiasm on the beauty and sweetness of my young bride. My
father heard me indulgently, and suffered me to run on unchecked. At
length we drank some wine together, and I retired to rest in buoyant
spirits, to dream of my darling, who was so soon to be welcomed as a
beloved daughter to my father's splendid home.
"Instead of awaking early the next morning to start on my return to
Elaine, as I had proposed doing, I slumbered on deeply and dreamlessly
until noon. I awoke, burning with fever, parched with thirst, and
seriously ill almost to the verge of delirium. Physicians were summoned,
who declared that a severe and probably long attack of illness lay
before me. I entreated my father to write to my wife to come to me, and
was assured that he had already done so. He received no reply. Elaine
neither wrote nor came to my sick bed. At my wild and urgent
solicitations he wrote again and again, receiving not a line in reply.
To allay my terrible anxiety, as soon as my illness took a turn for the
better, my father went himself to bring my wife to me."
He paused, and fixed his dark, sad eyes on Mrs. Leslie's face. Their
intense, anguished gaze seemed to burn through her.
After a moment, he said, hollowly:
"My friend, he returned alone."
"She was not worthy your love," Mrs. Leslie began, indignantly.
"Listen, and you shall judge," he replied. "After I left Elaine, her
parents by some means obtained a clew to her whereabouts. They went to
her, and, by dint of threats and persuasions, induced her to renounce me
forever--me, her husband, who lay languishing upon his sick bed, almost
dying for a sight of her worshiped face."
His voice broke slightly here. After the lapse of sixteen years memory
was still potent to shake the iron self-possession he had tried to build
up against his sorrow. He collected himself with an effort and resumed:
"Cold, hard man as my father was, the tears of pity for his outraged son
stood thickly in his eyes when he told me this story. Elaine had gone
home with her father and mother, but she sent me a cold, hard letter,
upbraiding me with having beguiled her from her duty to her parents, and
declaring that she would never live with me again, and never even wished
to see again the man who had persuaded her into an entanglement which
now she bitterly regretted and deplored."
"She was young and her parents unduly influenced her," said Mrs. Leslie,
instinctively excusing the beautiful child-wife.