"Do you think so?" asked Mr. Stuart sadly. "Yes, she was very young, but
that was a poor love that could thus lightly be turned away from its
object."
And again he murmured hollowly from his favorite poet:
"Well--'tis well that I should bluster!
Hadst thou less unworthy proved:
Would to God--for I had loved thee
More than ever wife was loved.
"Am I mad that I should cherish
That which bears but bitter fruit?
I will pluck it from my bosom
Though my heart be at the root."
"You have had a sad experience," the lady said, gently.
"Have I not?" he said bitterly. "Ah, Mrs. Leslie, I cannot tell you what
I suffered in learning my wife had cast me off. It seemed to me that I
had gone mad in my grief and despair. I had a relapse of my illness and
for long weeks struggled between life and death. I would sooner have
died, but it was fated not to be. Slowly, wearily, I came back to life,
and when I asked my father for tidings of her he told me that her
parents had taken her abroad. Do I weary you, my friend, with the long
recital of my sorrows?" he asked, pausing abruptly and gazing into her
face with his beautiful, sad, black eyes.
"No, I am deeply interested," she replied. "I wish to hear all that
there is to tell."
"There is little more to tell," he answered, sadly. "I was very proud, I
loved my wife still, but I had no mind to force her obedience. I did not
follow her to beg for her favor. I lent myself to my father's efforts to
amuse and interest me, and tried to drown my sorrow in the mad whirl of
dissipation and excess. In a few, a very few months, a formal letter
came to my father from the Brookes abroad. Elaine, my willful
child-wife, had died in giving birth to a little daughter. They wrote my
father later on that the babe was dead, too."
He stifled the hollow groan that rose to his lips, and bowed his face on
his arm. Mrs. Leslie regarded him in silent pity, but she could offer no
acceptable words of sympathy to the sharp pathos of a grief like this.
"It grows late, I must hasten with my story," he exclaimed, glancing up
at the sky from which all the sunset brightness was fading into
"sober-suited grey." "You understand, Mrs. Leslie, that life was over
and done for me then. I cared little what became of me, and my father
urged me so persistently that a year later I married Lilia Lessington,
the heiress he had chosen for me. I did not pretend to love her. I think
she suspected something of my story, for she has always been bitterly
jealous of me, and we have never been happy together."
"You should have told her your story. She could not have been jealous of
the dead," Mrs. Leslie said, gently.
"The dead," he repeated in a strange voice. "Ah, my friend, is she dead?
For sixteen years I never doubted it, but since that morning months ago,
when I saved Irene's life, I have been haunted by terrible doubts and
tears. The girl is the living, breathing image of my lost child-wife.
She looks at me with Elaine's eyes, she speaks to me with Elaine's
voice, she smiles at me with Elaine's face. And the face she wears
around her neck is Elaine's face, only older, graver, sadder, with the
brightness and archness faded from it, and the look of a martyred angel
in its place."
"What do you suspect?" she asked, in a low and startled tone.
"I suspect that Elaine lives--that your mysterious _protege_, is her
child and mine--I suspect that I have been deeply, darkly, terribly
wronged--but, oh, my God, by whom?" he added, fiercely, striking his
clenched hand against his high brow all beaded with drops of dew.
Mrs. Leslie stared, aghast and speechless. Had Clarence Stuart, indeed,
been thus foully wronged? If so, whose soul was black with the stain of
this sin?
"I have told you my story," he said. "I know you will keep it inviolate,
but, Mrs. Leslie, if there is aught in the boasted keenness and wit of
woman, I pray you find out this girl's secret for me. Let me know if my
heart has spoken truly, when day and night it claims her for its very
own, its first-born child, dearer than aught on earth beside, because
she bears her mother's face."
"If woman's wit can avail, I will find out the truth for you," Mrs.
Leslie answered, from the depths of her warm, womanly heart.
Then they rose and walked back to the villa in the hush of the beautiful
twilight, outwardly silent, but with full hearts.