THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW.
'Poor Dalton! you have indeed suffered deeply--paid dear for your
boyish folly,' said Goring, as the former concluded the little story
of his early life in a voice tremulous with emotion. 'Now the
apparent inconsistency of your attention to Mrs. Trelawney is quite
accounted for.'
'Until I knew myself free to ask her to be my wife I had sworn in my
inner heart that I would not do so--indeed, I dared not do so; yet,
for the life of me, attracted as I was, I could not help hovering
about her; but now I am going to Ashanti, and there is an end of it!
Such was the end of the fatal passion of a foolish lad. Since those
days I have never entered a theatre, and shudder at the mere idea of
a dramatic situation.'
'You are in one now,' said a sweet and tremulous voice, as Mrs.
Trelawney, who, unseen and unheard by them in their preoccupation,
had softly entered the room, stood before them.
How much or how little she had overheard they did not precisely know,
but with a smile of mingled sadness and sweetness, pride and triumph,
she threw up her veil, and the full light of the gasalier overhead
fell upon her rich, shining hair, her beautiful and animated
countenance.
'Mrs. Trelawney!' exclaimed the friends together, as they started
from their chairs.
'You here--in Southampton!' added Dalton, in a voice tremulous with
bewilderment.
'Yes. Can it be that you have yet to learn that I am that Laura
Dorillion to whom you gave this opal and diamond ring, with whom you
spent so many a sweet hour, by Fairlight Glen, the East Cliffs that
overhang the sea, by the Dripping Well, and amid the old castle walls
at Hastings--the Laura whom you married, and from whom you so coldly
fled?'
Dalton tried to speak, but his voice was gone; he could but stretch
his hand towards her, without advancing, while regarding her with
growing bewilderment; so she spoke again, with tears in her voice.
'You ought to have forgiven me the humility of my origin, for that I
could not help--ay, forgiven me long ago, Anthony. Remember that "he
who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he must pass
himself," for "every man hath need of forgiveness," we are told.'
'My wife--you?' exclaimed Dalton.
'Laura--your own wife, whom you married in St. Clement's Church on
the tenth of August. You remember the day?'
The words were simple, but spoken with great pathos, and all her
sparkling manner seemed to have left her as she seated herself, and
he hung over her.
'Do you forgive me, Laura, and pardon me--pardon me, and love me?'
'You know that I love you.'
He was about to put an arm round her, when he paused, and said,
'But whence this name of Trelawney?'
'I assumed it from an aunt, who left me a small fortune, but for
which I--I might have been compelled to struggle in penury on the
stage to support your daughter.'
'My daughter!' exclaimed Dalton, a great love for the beautiful
little girl lie knew suddenly gushing up in his heart. 'My
daughter--mine?'
'Our child,' said Laura, softly.
'Born--when?'
'Six months after you left me at Hastings.'
'But her name--of Antoinette?'
'Is but the feminine of your own--Anthony.'
'Oh, what a blind fool I have been--Laura--Laura!'
Goring, who had been studying a picture on the wall, now thought he
might as well withdraw softly, and smoke his cigar outside.
Taller in stature, fuller in figure, more fully developed in every
way, and with a bearing, manner, and grace cultivated by those among
whom she had moved, it required a certain effort to recognise in her
the girlish Laura Dorillion of the past time. Though her whole style
was different--finer and more statuesque--and the mode of her
toilette and of dressing her hair was different, her voice and the
inflections of it, her expression of eye, the droop of the lid and
flicker of the long lash, and the sweet smile of her lip were, he now
saw, all unchanged, and he pressed her to his breast in the rapture
of the moment, forgetting that the transport which was soon to bear
him away was at that supreme moment of joy having her fires banked up
preparatory to putting to sea.
'And you love me, Laura?' he never was tired of repeating, and
hearing the sweet admission that she did so. 'Oh, why have you
concealed till this--why have you concealed yourself thus, and from
me?'
'I wished to try you--to test you--to compel you to love me, and I
have done so, have I not?' she asked, taking his face between her
hands and gazing tenderly into his eyes.
'You know now what fettered my tongue,' said he, with a sigh.
'I knew you were in bondage--but it was in bondage to _me_. Your
love for me was an insult to myself; your compliments and intentions
in the present time, were an implied insult to my past. You dared to
love me, knowing that you had a wife somewhere--where, you knew not;
but you little thought that Mrs. Trelawney, the supposed widow of a
mythical Trelawney, and Laura Dorillion were one and the same person.
Now, is the situation dramatic? Do you remember that you told me
that you loved me against your own will and conscience, and that my
very _name_ of Laura repressed that love at times? Heavens, could
you but know what I felt--how my heart was wrung--my woman's pride
alternately roused and crushed by admissions such as these! I have
suffered greatly, darling, but all is over now,' she added, laying
her cheek on his breast, while his lips were pressed to her forehead.
After a time, she spoke again.
'I knew not that you were in the Army, or were in life. I knew not
of your existence till I met you suddenly at Aldershot, after I had
lived years of seclusion in the Channel Isles. I thanked God for the
discovery; I vowed to win you again, if I could, before I would
reveal myself--and I have done so.'
She whose love he had so longed and prayed for, and yet striven to
root out of his heart, was now his own--his own after all; and all
the pent-up love of lonely years had found reward at last.
'Often before I met you again--discovered you, and vowed to make you
mine again, I had pondered that, but for Netty's sake, whether,
taking it all in all, the good with the bad, life was worth living,'
said she, her eyes full of tears now.
'And till now, Laura, my life has seemed a gloomy and empty one. I
was often appalled by the aimlessness and isolation of it.'
'How strange it is that you never discovered me!' said Laura; 'yet I
have seen your eyes wander more than once to this engagement ring.'
'And stranger still that when I heard you sing the old, old song that
was once so familiar, making my heart thrill with troubled memories,
no light came to me. Oh, Laura, you acted well your part to this
joyous ending.'
'I told you that I had found the verses in an old album, where a
friend wrote them years ago; that friend was yourself. You remember
so lately telling me that I had ruined your life?'
'Yes, Laura, and your cruel smile.'
'God knows how at that moment I longed to cast myself on your breast,
Anthony, as I do now, and barter all my past wrongs for a single
kiss!'
His Christian name again on her lips, as in the days of their boy and
girl love, ere the black change came, and how strange, yet
familiar--how sweet, how dear it sounded!
'How did you learn I was here with Goring?' he asked, tenderly.
'I learned it at the transport.'
'My darling--my darling, why have you kept all this secret so
long--the secret that you were my own?'
'As I told you, I would never be more to you _than I am now_, were I
to live a hundred years, and was I not right?'
'But to keep the secret so long--I might never have learned it, for
to-morrow will see us separated. Hastings was the first volume of
our romance.'
'Southampton was the second.'
'The third is Ashanti. How it will end, God alone knows, darling,'
he added, straining her in his embrace, while her tears fell fast
now; 'if spared to return to you, Laura--to you and little Netty--you
will never regret your love and trust in me at last--your confidence
in my affection.'
Poor Dalton--'if spared;' he was right to say that, with the fate and
fortune of a barbarous war before him.
The old love had become the new one, and the new love was the old;
and yet it seemed that to-night both had entered on a new
relationship.
And, as we have said, the two last appeals of Jerry Wilmot and Dalton
ended differently. Practically they came to the same conclusion--a
separation from those they loved.
Laura now deplored deeply her pride and folly, as she deemed it, in
playing the game she had done so long; but the separation had to be
faced and endured; yet she watched the transport, as it steamed down
Southampton water, till it melted into the haze; and it was not until
then that she fully realised that her husband, so lately restored to
her, was gone again, and perhaps for ever.
But that her appearance on board would have excited speculation in
the battalion, she would have gone down the Channel with the steamer
and come ashore in the pilot's boat at Deal.
On the long, though rapid voyage, Dalton had ample food for
reflection, for thinking of the strangeness of his fate, that for
months past he had been associating with, meeting and seeing at
intervals, and loving deeply, a woman who was his own wife, and yet
he knew it not!
Why had she played this perilous game so long?
Why, but for the temptation to win him again, and for the
gratification of a kind of affectionate vengeance. And now they were
separated, each with but a memory to the other again.
A few photos and two locks of hair--the light blond hair of his wife,
a golden curl of his little daughter--were all that poor Dalton took
with him to the burning coast of Ashanti, to remind him of the
happiness he had so lately and so briefly tasted, and might never
taste more.