JUST as Mrs Irving had written her story for her daughter to read, she
told it, in the main, to the rector a few days before her death.
Only once before had the tale passed her lips; then her listener was
Horace Irving; and his only comment was to take her in his arms and place
the kiss of betrothal on her lips. Never again was the painful subject
referred to between them. So imbued had Berene Dumont become with her
belief in the legitimacy of her child, and in her own purity, that she
felt but little surprise at the calm manner in which Mr Irving received
her story, and now when the rector of St Blank’s Church was her listener,
she expected the same broad judgment to be given her. But it was the
calmness of a great and all-forgiving love which actuated Mr Irving, and
overcame all other feelings.
Wholly unconventional in nature, caring nothing and knowing little of the
extreme ideas of orthodox society on these subjects, the girl Berene and
the woman Mrs Irving had lived a life so wholly secluded from the world
at large, so absolutely devoid of intimate friendships, so absorbed in
her own ideals, that she was incapable of understanding the conventional
opinion regarding a woman with a history like hers.
In all those years she had never once felt a sensation of shame. Mr
Irving had requested her to rear Joy in the belief that she was his
child. As the matter could in no way concern anyone else, Mrs Irving’s
lips had remained sealed on the subject; but not with any idea of
concealing a disgrace. She could not associate disgrace with her love
for Preston Cheney. She believed herself to be his spiritual widow, as
it were. His mortal clay and legal name only belonged to his wife.
Mr Irving had met Berene on a railroad train, and had conceived one of
those sudden and intense passions with which a woman with a past often
inspires an innocent and unworldly young man. He was sincerely and truly
religious by nature, and as spotless as a maiden in mind and body.
When he had dreamed of a wife, it was always of some shy, innocent girl
whom he should woo almost from her mother’s arms; some gentle, pious
maid, carefully reared, who would help him to establish the Christian
household of his imagination. He had thought that love would first come
to him as admiring respect, then tender friendship, then love for some
such maiden; instead it had swooped down upon him in the form of an
intense passion for an absolute stranger—a woman travelling with a
theatrical company. He was like a sleeper who awakens suddenly and finds
a scorching midday sun beating upon his eyes. A wrecked freight train
upon the track detained for several hours the car in which they
travelled. The passengers waived ceremony and conversed to pass the
time, and Mr Irving learnt Berene’s name, occupation and destination. He
followed her for a week, and at the end of that time asked her hand in
marriage.
Even after he had heard the story of her life, he was not deterred from
his resolve to make her his wife. All the Christian charity of his
nature, all its chivalry was aroused, and he believed he was plucking a
brand from the burning. He never repented his act. He lived wholly for
his wife and child, and for the good he could do with them as his
faithful allies. He drew more and more away from all the allurements of
the world, and strove to rear Joy in what he believed to be a purely
Christian life, and to make his wife forget, if possible, that she had
ever known a sorrow. All of sincere gratitude, tenderness, and gentle
affection possible for her to feel, Berene bestowed upon her husband
during his life, and gave to his memory after he was gone.
Joy had been excessively fond of Mr Irving, and it was the dread of
causing her a deep sorrow in the knowledge that she was not his child,
and the fear that Preston Cheney would in any way interfere with her
possession of Joy, which had distressed the mother during the visit of
the Baroness, rather than unwillingness to have her sin revealed to her
daughter. Added to this, the intrusion of the Baroness into this long
hidden and sacred experience seemed a sacrilege from which she shrank
with horror. But she now told the tale to Arthur Stuart frankly and
fearlessly.
He had asked her to confide to him whatever secret existed regarding
Joy’s birth.
“There is a rumour afloat,” he said, “that Joy is not Mr Irving’s child.
I love your daughter, Mrs Irving, and I feel it is my right to know all
the circumstances of her life. I believe the story which was told my
mother to be the invention of some enemy who is jealous of Joy’s beauty
and talents, and I would like to be in a position to silence these
slanders.”
So Mrs Irving told the story to the end; and having told it, she felt
relieved and happy in the thought that it was imparted to the only two
people whom it could concern in the future.
No disturbing fear came to her that the rector would hesitate to make Joy
his wife. To Berene Dumont, love was the law. If love existed between
two souls she could not understand why any convention of society should
stand in the way of its fulfilment.
Arthur Stuart in his rôle of spiritual confessor and consoler had never
before encountered such a phase of human nature. He had listened to many
a tale of sin and folly from women’s lips, but always had the sinner
bemoaned her sin, and bitterly repented her weakness. Here instead was
what the world would consider a fallen woman, who on her deathbed
regarded her weakness as her strength, her shame as her glory, and who
seemed to expect him to take the same view of the matter. When he
attempted to urge her to repent, the words stuck in his throat. He left
the deathbed of the unfortunate sinner without having expressed one of
the conflicting emotions which filled his heart. But he left it with
such a weight on his soul, such distress on his mind that death seemed to
him the only way of escape from a life of torment.
His love for Joy Irving was not killed by the story he had heard. But it
had received a terrible shock, and the thought of making her his wife
with the probability that the Baroness would spread the scandal
broadcast, and that his marriage would break his mother’s heart, tortured
him. Added to this were his theories on heredity, and the fear that
there might, nay, must be, some dangerous tendency hidden in the daughter
of a mother who had so erred, and who in dying showed no comprehension of
the enormity of her sin. Had Mrs Irving bewailed her fall, and
represented herself as the victim of a wily villain, the rector would not
have felt so great a fear of the daughter’s inheritance. A frail,
repentant woman he could pity and forgive, but it seemed to him that Mrs
Irving was utterly lacking in moral nature. She was spiritually blind.
The thought tortured him. To leave Joy at this time without calling to
see her seemed base and cowardly; yet he dared not trust himself in her
presence. So he sent her the strangely worded letter, and went away
hoping to be shown the path of duty before he returned.
At the end of three months he came home stronger in body and mind. He
had resolved to compromise with fate; to continue his calls upon Joy
Irving; to be her friend and rector only, until by the passage of time,
and the changes which occur so rapidly in every society, the scandal in
regard to her birth had been forgotten. And until by patience and
tenderness, he won his mother’s consent to the union. He felt that all
this must come about as he desired, if he did not aggravate his mother’s
feeling or defy public opinion by too precipitate methods.
He could not wholly give up all thoughts of Joy Irving. She had grown to
be a part of his hopes and dreams of the future, as she was a part of the
reality of his present. But she was very young; he could afford to wait,
and while he waited to study the girl’s character, and if he saw any
budding shoot which bespoke the maternal tree, to prune and train it to
his own liking. For the sake of his unborn children he felt it his duty
to carefully study any woman he thought to make his wife.
But when he reached home, the surprising intelligence awaited him that
Miss Irving had left the metropolis. A brief note to the church
authorities, resigning her position, and saying that she was about to
leave the city, was all that anyone knew of her.
The rector instituted a quiet search, but only succeeded in learning that
she had conducted her preparations for departure with the greatest
secrecy, and that to no one had she imparted her plans.
Whenever a young woman shrouds her actions in the garments of secrecy,
she invites suspicion. The people who love to suspect their
fellow-beings of wrong-doing were not absent on this occasion.
The rector was hurt and wounded by all this, and while he resented the
intimation from another that Miss Irving’s conduct had been peculiar and
mysterious, he felt it to be so in his own heart.
“Is it her mother’s tendency to adventure developing in her?” he asked
himself.
Yet he wrote her a letter, directing it to her at the old number,
thinking she would at least leave her address with the post-office for
the forwarding of mail. The letter was returned to him from that
cemetery of many a dear hope, the dead-letter office. A personal in a
leading paper failed to elicit a reply. And then one day six months
after the disappearance of Joy Irving, the young rector was called to the
Cheney household to offer spiritual consolation to Miss Alice, who
believed herself to be dying. She had been in a decline ever since the
rector went away for his health.
Since his return she had seen him but seldom, rarely save in the pulpit,
and for the last six weeks she had been too ill to attend divine service.
It was Preston Cheney himself, at home upon one of his periodical visits,
who sent for the rector, and gravely met him at the door when he arrived,
and escorted him into his study.
“I am very anxious about my daughter,” he said. “She has been a nervous
child always, and over-sensitive. I returned yesterday after an absence
of some three months in California, to find Alice in bed, wasted to a
shadow, and constantly weeping. I cannot win her confidence—she has
never confided to me. Perhaps it is my fault; perhaps I have not been at
home enough to make her realise that the relationship of father and
daughter is a sacred one. This morning when I was urging her to tell me
what grieved her, she remarked that there was but one person to whom she
could communicate this sorrow—her rector. So, my dear Dr Stuart, I have
sent for you. I will conduct you to my child, and I leave her in your
hands. Whatever comfort and consolation you can offer, I know will be
given. I hope she will not bind you to secrecy; I hope you may be able
to tell me what troubles her, and advise me how to help her.”
It was more than an hour before the rector returned to the library where
Preston Cheney awaited him. When the senator heard his approaching step,
he looked up, and was startled to see the pallor on the young man’s face.
“You have something sad, something terrible to tell me!” he cried. “What
is it?”
The rector walked across the room several times, breathing deeply, and
with anguish written on his countenance. Then he took Senator Cheney’s
hand and wrung it. “I have an embarrassing announcement to make to you,”
he said. “It is something so surprising, so unexpected, that I am
completely unnerved.”
“You alarm me, more and more,” the senator answered. “What can be the
secret which my frail child has imparted to you that should so distress
you? Speak; it is my right to know.”
The rector took another turn about the room, and then came and stood
facing Senator Cheney.
“Your daughter has conceived a strange passion for me,” he said in a low
voice. “It is this which has caused her illness, and which she says will
cause her death, if I cannot return it.”
“And you?” asked his listener after a moment’s silence.
“I? Why, I have never thought of your daughter in any such manner,” the
young man replied. “I have never dreamed of loving her, or winning her
love.”
“Then do not marry her,” Preston Cheney said quietly. “Marriage without
love is unholy. Even to save life it is unpardonable.”
The rector was silent, and walked the room with nervous steps. “I must
go home and think it all out,” he said after a time. “Perhaps Miss
Cheney will find her grief less, now that she has imparted it to me. I
am alarmed at her condition, and I shall hope for an early report from
you regarding her.”
The report was made twelve hours later. Miss Cheney was delirious, and
calling constantly for the rector. Her physician feared the worst.
The rector came, and his presence at once soothed the girl’s delirium.
“History repeats itself,” said Preston Cheney meditatively to himself.
“Alice is drawing this man into the net by her alarming physical
condition, as Mabel riveted the chains about me when her mother died.
“But Alice really loves the rector, I think, and she is capable of a much
stronger passion than her mother ever felt; and the rector loves no other
woman at least, and so this marriage, if it takes place, will not be so
wholly wicked and unholy as mine was.”
The marriage did take place three months later. Alice Cheney was not the
wife whom Mrs Stuart would have chosen for her son, yet she urged him to
this step, glad to place a barrier for all time between him and Joy
Irving, whose possible return at any day she constantly feared, and whose
power over her son’s heart she knew was undiminished.
Alice Cheney’s family was of the best on both sides; there were wealth,
station, and honour; and a step-grandmamma who could be referred to on
occasions as “The Baroness.” And there was no skeleton to be hidden or
excused.
And Arthur Stuart, believing that Alice Cheney’s life and reason depended
upon his making her his wife, resolved to end the bitter struggle with
his own heart and with fate, and do what seemed to be his duty, toward
the girl and toward his mother. When the wedding took place, the saddest
face at the ceremony, save that of the groom, was the face of the bride’s
father. But the bride was radiant, and Mabel and the Baroness walked in
clouds.