"Wooed and married and a'." How swiftly it all had followed upon Laurel
Vane's coming to Eden!
In June she had come to the Le Roys, a trembling, frightened, innocent
little impostor, lending herself to a fraud for Beatrix Gordon's
sake. From a most unwelcome intruder, whom they had received with
secret disfavor, she had come to be the light of their eyes and their
hearts. To-day--a fair, ripe day in October, with the "flying gold of
the ruined woodlands driving through the air"--she clung to St. Leon
Le Roy's arm, his worshiped bride, happy, with a strange, delirious
happiness, in spite of the sword that ever hung suspended by a hair
above her head--the sword that must surely fall some day, and cause her
destruction.
She was dizzy with the whirl of events that had brought about this
dazzling consummation.
In the first place, Mr. Le Roy had written to Mr. Gordon, announcing
his engagement to his daughter, and pleading for an early marriage.
The publisher had replied, on the part of himself and wife, delightedly
sanctioning their darling's betrothal to Mr. Le Roy, and permitting
Beatrix to consult her own wishes in naming the day. They wished only
to make their darling happy, they said; and she should, therefore,
choose the earliest day that pleased her. Mrs. Gordon wrote that she
would soon come home to superintend the preparation of the bridal
_trousseau_.
Laurel was filled with dismay at the latter information. St. Leon,
noting every change of the fair young face with a lover's eye, was
quick to see the shadow.
"What is it, my darling?" he asked.
"We must postpone the wedding a long, long time," she said. "Mamma
must not curtail her Southern trip and lose the benefit she is deriving
from it. We must wait."
She felt like a hypocrite as she said it, but she was rendered
desperate by her fears. She knew that, with Mrs. Gordon's coming,
all was at an end, and she longed desperately to ward off the evil
hour. She was so wildly, deliriously happy now, she would stave off
the hour of reckoning as long as she could. Just to remain at Eden
as long as she could was all that she asked. It always seemed to her
quite impossible that she should ever become St. Leon Le Roy's wife.
The blow would fall before then. She felt that she was only taking her
pleasure like a butterfly in the sun, and that the nipping blasts of
winter would soon lop off her gilded wings and leave her, crushed and
trampled, beneath the scorner's heel.
Those joys that we hold by a frail, slight tenure we always prize the
most. This love that she was fated one day to lose had become a part
of Laurel Vane's life. She said to herself that, when she lost it she
would die.
It was a mad love that she gave her noble, princely looking lover. She
would have made any sacrifice for him except to tell him that she had
deceived him. She would have died for him if need be, but death would
have been easier than confessing her strange sin to him.
St. Leon chafed sorely at the idea of waiting so long to claim his
bonny bride. They had talked of a bridal tour to Europe, and Laurel had
betrayed the most eager delight at the idea. The tour of Europe had not
the attraction of novelty to him. He had made it several times, but he
longed to gratify the girl's wish; he was so sure that he would make
her happy he could not bear to wait. And yet he was not selfish enough
to wish to hasten Mrs. Gordon's return at the hazard of her health.
His mother agreed with him that it was unfortunate his having to wait.
She was very anxious to see him married to Beatrix Gordon, and she
thought the autumn a pleasant time for crossing the ocean.
If they could only be married in October, how pleasant it would be, but
then the _trousseau_--it would take an endless time for that.
St. Leon displayed all a man's impatience under the circumstances.
"A fig for the _trousseau_! What could be prettier than Beatrix's white
dresses that she wore every day? But if she had to have no end of new
things, why couldn't they get them when they went to Paris? Worth was
the only man who could make them, anyhow. Given a traveling-dress to
cross the 'herring pond' in, and she might have a hundred new dresses
if she liked, once they landed in France. Must a man wait months and
months for his happiness on account of some paltry dresses?"
Mrs. Le Roy, in her anxiety for the marriage, quite agreed with him in
his tersely expressed views. If Mrs. Gordon came home she would order
her daughter's dresses from Paris. How much easier for Beatrix to get
them herself while abroad!
She wrote to Mrs. Gordon and suggested the idea. Moreover, she hinted
broadly her fears that Beatrix, if let alone so long, might change
her mind--might return to the old love--no one could say when Cyril
Wentworth would return to America, nor what effect his return might
have on his sweetheart. Mrs. Le Roy thought the wisest plan, under
the peculiar circumstances of the case, would be for the Gordons to
continue their Southern tour, and let St. Leon marry Beatrix quietly,
without any fuss or ceremony, and take her abroad.
That clever hint about Cyril Wentworth had the intended effect on the
nervous invalid. All her old fears of Cyril Wentworth were reawakened.
A longing desire took possession of her to have her daughter married
off safely out of the fortune-hunter's reach. In her sudden anxiety she
would have had St. Leon and Beatrix married that moment by telegraph
if possible. She infected her husband with all her own fears, and both
concurred in the opinion of Mrs. Le Roy that delays were dangerous.
So a letter went hastily back to Eden full of good tidings to the
dwellers there.
The Gordons approved and even advocated Mrs. Le Roy's plan. They wrote
to their daughter, and recommended her to shorten the term of her
lover's probation, regretting that the state of her mother's health
made it desirable for her to remain where she was yet awhile longer.
The letter was filled with such warm, parental love and advice that
Laurel involuntarily wept over it. A generous check for her Parisian
_trousseau_ was inclosed. This the young girl put carefully away.
"I shall never use it," she said. "Gold could not tempt me to sin. It
is love that has made me bad and wicked, but I cannot draw back now. I
shall marry St. Leon Le Roy. It is fate."
So, following that fate, she went recklessly on in her strange career.
Three weeks later she was no longer Laurel Vane, she was Laurel Le
Roy, almost forgetting in her wild happiness her enemy's threat, "_Who
breaks--pays!_"