CHAPTER XXXVIII.
HER SIDE OF THE STORY.
Everard Dawn’s haggard eyes marked the entrance of the doctor and the Varians, and he said feebly:
“Are you all here, Cinthia, Arthur, his mother, my sister, and my kind friend, Madame Ray?”
“They are all here,” Doctor Deane replied; and Everard Dawn continued:
“I should like Mr. Foster to be present, too—and Mrs. Varian’s maid. She may need her ministrations in a trying scene. You, too, doctor, I would like to have stay if you can bear the disclosure of family secrets.”
The old doctor answered, genially:
“I have no wish to pry into family secrets, but it is best that I should stay, that I may render assistance should you overtax your feeble powers.”
They brought Frederick Foster and Janetta, and there were eight of them forming a curious, anxious group about the bed.
Across the hall, gasping for breath, and tossing restlessly from side to side in the pain of internal injuries, was a woman who would have taken as great an interest as any in the novel scene transpiring so close to her; but no one gave her a single thought, no one supposed that the humble servant, Rachel Dane, could have taken any interest in the event, much less have thrown a light on the dark mystery that had saddened several hopeful lives. Everything had been so closely guarded that little of it had come to her knowledge. Janetta had told her that Mr. Dawn’s daughter and her friends had come, that was all.
The suffering woman had a lively interest to see Cinthia, whom she had nursed as a little child, and of whom her aunt had talked so much, but she knew that her curiosity must bide the proper time.
A house-maid had come in just now, and said:
“Janetta, you are wanted in Mr. Dawn’s room. I will stay here until you come back.”
Janetta went as bidden, and stationed herself at the back of the arm-chair where her mistress was sitting, close to the bed.
Then Everard Dawn exclaimed, clearly:
“Paulina!”
Mrs. Varian gave a convulsive start and looked fearfully at the speaker.
His blue eyes met hers full with a commanding expression, as he continued:
“Paulina, in meeting my daughter here on my dying bed she has demanded to know the details of the feud as she believes it, that shadowed so darkly the last three years of her young life. Once I would have died to shield her from such sorrow, but now she declares that certainty of sorrow is better than the pangs of suspense. She demands the truth. It is our bitter duty to yield to her desires.”
A hushed murmur of surprise went around the group, and Cinthia buried her face on Madame Ray’s bosom.
She had indeed pleaded with her father for the truth, and he had promised to gratify her wish, though she wondered why he added:
“There was indeed a terrible reason why you could not marry Arthur, my dear child, and it would have killed you at first to know it, but now that you love another man, and are engaged to marry him, you will not mind so much.”
They had startled her strangely, those words, and she hung tremblingly on every sentence that fell now from her father’s lips, and before she hid her pallid face she had seen Arthur draw his chair close to his mother’s side—the mother he loved so dearly still, though she had parted him so cruelly from his beautiful betrothed.
Again Everard Dawn breathed through pallid, pain-drawn lips:
“All I ask of you, Paulina, is that you shall tell your side of our marriage and divorce. I will follow with my version of the story.”
The listeners could scarcely express outcries of surprise.
Everard Dawn had revealed to them all in one brief sentence a totally unsuspected fact.
Mrs. Varian, the wealthy, beautiful, haughty woman, was his divorced wife.
Cinthia trembled with surprise, and clung closer to her loving friend, who thought quickly.
“My suspicions and forebodings are about to be verified. Alas, poor Cinthia!”
Arthur Varian drew his arm about his mother, whispering to her of courage in this trying hour, begging her to gratify the sick man’s request.
Everard Dawn waited a moment, then added:
“You may make the story as short as you please, only let it come from your own lips.”
Mrs. Varian lifted her head with something of her old haughty pride, and looked at Cinthia where she drooped against her friend’s breast, but her voice was slightly tremulous as she began:
“When I first met your father, Cinthia, he was a rising young lawyer employed by my father to attend to some complicated business matters. Our acquaintance ripened into love, and he became a suitor for my hand against my father’s wishes. But as my lover’s only fault was poverty and we were rich, I soon persuaded papa to withdraw his objections. So we were married.”
She paused and sighed, and every one heard Everard Dawn re-echo that sigh heavily.
“Go on, dear,” whispered Arthur, encouragingly, with an anxious look at Cinthia.
“We were very happy, for my husband seemed a model of manly perfection,” continued Mrs. Varian. “We lived in Florida with my dear father, who made Everard the manager of all his investments, thus insuring him independence of my fortune, for he was very proud and impatient of being thought a fortune-hunter. Arthur was born when I had been married one year, and until he was four years old I was the happiest woman on earth.”
Everard Dawn gave her a sudden bright look that she did not perceive, as if grateful for those words.
Again sighing, she continued:
“Then a dark shadow fell over Love’s Retreat—the shadow of a beautiful young girl, the daughter of a former client of my husband. She arrived suddenly at our home one day, bearing a letter from her father who had recently died. In it he commended the girl—Gladys Lowe—to the guardianship of my husband, begging that he would keep her at his home till she married. To be brief, her father’s property dwindled to nothing when it came to be settled up, leaving her penniless on our hands—a charge I would most generously have undertaken but for the predilection Miss Lowe immediately manifested for my husband, driving me wild with her kittenish coquetries, for she was very charming, with abundant tawny locks and effective hazel eyes, that were always fixed on Everard with a passion she could not disguise. The Varians are charged with being jealous people, and I do not deny it; I feared she would win my husband with her blandishments, and I imperiously demanded of him that he send Miss Lowe away.”