ALICE did not rally in health or spirits after her marriage, as her
family, friends and physician had anticipated. She remained nervous,
ailing and despondent.
“Should maternity come to her, she would doubtless be very much improved
in health afterward,” the doctor said, and Mabel, remembering how true a
similar prediction proved in her case, despite her rebellion against it,
was not sorry when she knew that Alice was to become a mother, scarcely a
year after her marriage.
But Alice grew more and more despondent as the months passed by; and
after the birth of her son, the young mother developed dementia of the
most hopeless kind. The best specialists in two worlds were employed to
bring her out of the state of settled melancholy into which she had
fallen, but all to no avail. At the end of two years, her case was
pronounced hopeless. Fortunately the child died at the age of six weeks,
so the seed of insanity which in the first Mrs Lawrence was simply a case
of “nerves,” growing into the plant hysteria in Mabel, and yielding the
deadly fruit of insanity in Alice, was allowed by a kind providence to
become extinct in the fourth generation.
This disaster to his only child caused a complete breaking down of spirit
and health in Preston Cheney.
Like some great, strongly coupled car, which loses its grip and goes
plunging down an incline to destruction, Preston Cheney’s will-power lost
its hold on life, and he went down to the valley of death with frightful
speed.
During the months which preceded his death, Senator Cheney’s only
pleasure seemed to be in the companionship of his son-in-law. The strong
attachment between the two men ripened with every day’s association. One
day the rector was sitting by the invalid’s couch, reading aloud, when
Preston Cheney laid his hand on the young man’s arm and said: “Close your
book and let me tell you a true story which is stranger than fiction. It
is the story of an ambitious man and all the disasters which his realised
ambition brought into the lives of others. It is a story whose details
are known to but two beings on earth, if indeed the other being still
exists on earth. I have long wanted to tell you this story—indeed, I
wanted to tell it to you before you made Alice your wife, yet the fear
that I would be wrecking the life and reason of my child kept me silent.
No doubt if I had told you, and you had been influenced by my experience
against a loveless marriage, I should to-day be blaming myself for her
condition, which I see plainly now is but the culmination of three
generations of hysterical women. But I want to tell you the story and
urge you to use it as a warning in your position of counsellor and friend
of ambitious young men.
“No matter what else a man may do for position, don’t let him marry a
woman he does not love, especially if he crucifies a vital passion for
another, in order to do this.” Then Preston Cheney told the story of his
life to his son-in-law; and as the tale proceeded, a strange interest
which increased until it became violent excitement, took possession of
the rector’s brain and heart. The story was so familiar—so very
familiar; and at length, when the name of _Berene Dumont_ escaped the
speaker’s lips, Arthur Stuart clutched his hands and clenched his teeth
to keep silent until the end of the story came.
“From the hour Berene disappeared, to this very day, no word or message
ever came from her,” the invalid said. “I have never known whether she
was dead or alive, married, or, terrible thought, perhaps driven into a
reckless life by her one false step with me. This last fear has been a
constant torture to me all these years.
“The world is cruel in its judgment of woman. And yet I know that it is
woman herself who has shaped the opinions of the world regarding these
matters. If men had had their way since the world began, there would be
no virtuous women. Woman has realised this fact, and she has in
consequence walled herself about with rules and conventions which have in
a measure protected her from man. When any woman breaks through these
conventions and errs, she suffers the scorn of others who have kept these
self-protecting and society-protecting laws; and, conscious of their
scorn, she believes all hope is lost for ever.
“The fear that Berene took this view of her one mistake, and plunged into
a desperate life, has embittered my whole existence. Never before did a
man suffer such a mental hell as I have endured for this one act of sin
and weakness. Yet the world, looking at my life of success, would say if
it knew the story, ‘Behold how the man goes free.’ Free! Great God!
there is no bondage so terrible as that of the mind. I have loved Berene
Dumont with a changeless passion for twenty-three years, and there has
not been a day in all that time that I have not during some hours endured
the agonies of the damned, thinking of all the disasters and misery that
might have come into her life through me. Heaven knows I would have
married her if she had remained. Strange and intricate as the net was
which the devil wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and
would have broken through it after that strange night—at once the heaven
and the hell of my memory—if Berene had remained. As it was—I married
Mabel, and you know what a farce, ending in a tragedy, our married life
has been. God grant that no worse woes befell Berene; God grant that I
may meet her in the spirit world and tell her how I loved her and longed
for her companionship.”
The young rector’s eyes were streaming with tears, as he reached over and
clasped the sick man’s hands in his. “You will meet her,” he said with a
choked voice. “I heard this same story, but without names, from Berene
Dumont’s dying lips more than two years ago. And just as Berene
disappeared from you—so her daughter disappeared from me; and, God help
me, dear father—doubly now my father, I crushed out my great passion for
the glorious natural child of your love, to marry the loveless, wretched
and _unnatural_ child of your marriage.”
The sick man started up on his couch, his eyes flaming, his cheeks
glowing with sudden lustre.
“My child—the natural child of Berene’s love and mine, you say; oh, my
God, speak and tell me what you mean; speak before I die of joy so
terrible it is like anguish.”
So then it became the rector’s turn to take the part of narrator. When
the story was ended, Preston Cheney lay weeping like a woman on his
couch; the first tears he had shed since his mother died and left him an
orphan of ten.
“Berene living and dying almost within reach of my arms—almost within
sound of my voice!” he cried. “Oh, why did I not find her before the
grave closed between us?—and why did no voice speak from that grave to
tell me when I held my daughter’s hand in mine?—my beautiful child, no
wonder my heart went out to her with such a gush of tenderness; no wonder
I was fired with unaccountable anger and indignation when Mabel and Alice
spoke unkindly of her. Do you remember how her music stirred me? It was
her mother’s heart speaking to mine through the genius of our child.
“Arthur, you must find her—you must find her for me! If it takes my
whole fortune I must see my daughter, and clasp her in my arms before I
die.”
But this happiness was not to be granted to the dying man. Overcome by
the excitement of this new emotion, he grew weaker and weaker as the next
few days passed, and at the end of the fifth day his spirit took its
flight, let us hope to join its true mate.
It had been one of his dying requests to have his body taken to
Beryngford and placed beside that of Judge Lawrence.
The funeral services took place in the new and imposing church edifice
which had been constructed recently in Beryngford. The quiet interior
village had taken a leap forward during the last few years, and was now a
thriving city, owing to the discovery of valuable stone quarries in its
borders.
The Baroness and Mabel had never been in Beryngford since the death of
Judge Lawrence many years before; and it was with sad and bitter hearts
that both women recalled the past and realised anew the disasters which
had wrecked their dearest hopes and ambitions.
The Baroness, broken in spirit and crushed by the insanity of her beloved
Alice, now saw the form of the man whom she had hopelessly loved for so
many years, laid away to crumble back to dust; and yet, the sorrows which
should have softened her soul, and made her heart tender toward all
suffering humanity, rendered her pitiless as the grave toward one lonely
and desolate being before the shadows of night had fallen upon the grave
of Preston Cheney.
When the funeral march pealed out from the grand new organ during the
ceremonies in the church, both the Baroness and the rector, absorbed as
they were in mournful sorrow, started with surprise. Both gazed at the
organ loft; and there, before the great instrument, sat the graceful
figure of Joy Irving. The rector’s face grew pale as the corpse in the
casket; the withered cheek of the Baroness turned a sickly yellow, and a
spark of anger dried the moisture in her eyes.
Before the night had settled over the thriving city of Beryngford, the
Baroness dropped a point of virus from the lancet of her tongue to poison
the social atmosphere where Joy Irving had by the merest accident of fate
made her new home, and where in the office of organist she had, without
dreaming of her dramatic situation, played the requiem at the funeral of
her own father.