The Adventures of an Ugly Girl

Never had such a brilliant company been assembled within the walls of Moorbye Church. It was Belle’s wedding-day, and the sun shone kindly upon the face of nature. Only a few family friends had been invited down, but the little church was filled to overflowing by the gentlefolks of the neighborhood, who did not think it infra dig. to undergo a lot of crowding and elbowing for the privilege of witnessing an earl’s wedding.

Belle looked superb in her pearl-embroidered satin gown as she walked up the aisle with my father, and her bearing must have struck the onlookers as unusually calm and dignified. I fancied that I could detect a sign of anxiety in the hurried glance she cast around in search of Cyril, and that her face paled on discovering that he had not yet arrived. Possibly she thought of that other bridal morning, when the bridegroom did not put in an appearance. As yet, however, there was no need for uneasiness. The train by which the Earl of Greatlands was to come from town was only just due, and it might possibly be a little late.

“I feel very anxious,” said Lady Elizabeth to me, in a voice low enough only to be heard by myself. “Cyril ought to have contrived to be here first. He has behaved very strangely altogether of late, and I cannot help thinking that something must be wrong with him. I hope he is not ill.”

Alas! I knew what was wrong with him, and by this time my fears exceeded Lady Elizabeth’s own. When I say that I feared, I speak advisedly. For it had seemed to me that an interruption to this marriage was a thing to be dreaded, for everybody’s sake. True, real happiness was not to be expected for either Belle or her husband. But it was more fitting that these two, who had sinned together, should spend the rest of their conscience-haunted days together, than that either of them should be left at liberty to cast a shadow upon the life of any one else. Perhaps it was very presumptuous of me to constitute myself judge in such a case as this; for to encourage criminals in the achievement of that for which they have schemed and planned hardly seems a justifiable way of making the punishment fit the crime. Certainly the demands of justice would appear to point to a very different ending to our family troubles. But what woman in my place would not have tried to pit silence and oblivion against naked justice?

It was a relief to us all when the Earl of Greatlands, accompanied by Mr. Alwyn Gardener, his best man, hurriedly entered the church and walked toward the altar. But Mr. Gardener appeared flushed and troubled, and the bridegroom seemed to me to be looking like one demented. For at one moment he bit his lip and clinched his hand with all the air of one who is doing a thing that is distasteful to him. The next he was smiling at Belle, and gazing at her with the exultant admiration of a proud and happy bridegroom.

Presently Mr. Garth and his two chosen assistants began the marriage service, and the interest of the onlookers was quickened in an endeavor to hear the responses. Even yet I felt apprehensive of interruption. But, so far, my fears were unfounded, for the ceremony was concluded, and soon all was smiles and congratulation. The bride was kissed by relatives and bridemaids, and I hoped that, among all the fuss and excitement, the fact that I neither kissed my sister nor shook hands with my brother-in-law would pass unnoticed.

There was to be a reception after the wedding, and then the newly-married pair were to go to Scotland for their honeymoon. We were quite a merry party at the Grange, and even I, who was so much behind the scenes, felt as if I almost dared hope that the family troubles were now over.

Jerry was in high glee, for everybody liked him, and the tips he got were enough to have turned any ordinarily lucky schoolboy green with envy. His holidays were almost over, and no doubt some of the school-chums of whom he spoke to me would soon show him how to get rid of his pocket-money.

The Earl of Greatlands excused himself somewhat earlier than had been expected, on the plea of feeling the need of half an hour’s quiet, as he was considerably out of sorts. “It will be time enough for you to get into your traveling dress in three-quarters of an hour, dear,” he said to Belle, whom he kissed again with all the ardor of a lover. Then he went up to his room, while Belle supported her honors a while longer in a manner that won admiring encomiums from certain individuals of the toadying order, who never lose an opportunity of flattering their superiors in station. When at last the bride went upstairs, she had little time to spare for dressing, but declined to take her two bridemaids with her to facilitate the process.

A minute later Marvel, who had accompanied his master to Moorbye, rushed into the room in which the rest of us were toying with time, and, throwing his hands up with a despairing gesture, screamed rather than shouted his dreadful tidings—

“My master is dead!”

That was what he had to tell us, and a moment later all was confusion and excitement, which was augmented by the sound of despairing shrieks from above.

In common with others, my first impulse was to rush upstairs to Belle’s room. I arrived first, and found her standing in the middle of the floor, alternately screaming and laughing, both screams and laughter being such as can but proceed from the tortured bosom of insanity. Beside her, on the floor, lay an open letter. I instinctively picked it up and hid it in my pocket before any one else saw it. I knew, without being told, that whatever awful tragedy had taken place in the next room was explained in that letter, and that it was the reading of it which had driven my sister mad.

There were plenty of affectionate hands ready to help the stricken bride, and plenty of loving hearts that would fain have lightened her woe. But the blow had been too awful in its suddenness, and had struck when she was least prepared for it, just when she was at the zenith of her triumph and satisfaction. It had extinguished forever the light of reason from that beautiful face, and had transformed the erstwhile smiling bride into a hopeless maniac.

Strangely enough, she seems to have forgotten the present, and all memory of aught connected with the family of Greatlands has been wiped off her darkened mind. She will never betray the part she bore in that other tragedy, and the world speaks very pityingly of the beautiful girl whose mental and social life ended on the very day which had witnessed the climax of her ambition.

The new Earl of Greatlands, being tender and pitiful, would have established his father’s bride of an hour in the dower-house, surrounded by such comforts as she is capable of enjoying. But to this plan neither my father nor Lady Elizabeth were willing to consent, and she still lives at Courtney Grange, one of the saddest wrecks of humanity it is possible to meet with. Interest in her surroundings she takes none, but will sit and babble by the hour of the time when she was a little one, and had no greater trouble than to please an indulgent governess.

My father has aged very much of late, and always bears about him the impress of one who has been cruelly stricken by fate. He had almost worshiped his eldest daughter, in whom he saw nothing but physical, mental and moral perfection. To gaze upon her as she is, and to contrast her present condition with what might have been, is a daily torture to him, which robs his life of much of its former animation and spirit. Seeing how he takes the changed order of things to heart, I often feel thankful that he is quite unsuspicious of the fact that, but for herself, Belle might now have been happy in the love of husband and children, even as I am.

Lady Elizabeth, too, was greatly grieved for a time. But as her sympathies are widely scattered, and her interest in human nature is keen, she finds sufficient employment for mind and body to keep both in a healthy state of activity. If there is one thing that she is more sorry about than another, it is the fact that she could ever have harbored unworthy suspicions against two people whom she now firmly believes to be entitled to be numbered among the innocents. Thank God that she is spared the knowledge which I possess! It would kill her.

Jerry is now at Cambridge, and bids fair to reward all the hopes centered upon him.

As for myself, there is a perpetual problem facing me, and that is—What have I done to deserve all the love and happiness which are showered upon me? Yes, there is one other—How shall I repay Sergius for the transformation he has wrought in my life? I am constantly trying to do it, but never manage it quite to my own satisfaction, though I believe my Russian friends, all of whom now live within a short distance of our house, entertain very exaggerated views concerning my capabilities of making a good wife.

There is one other subject upon which the future reader of these memoirs may possibly desire a little enlightenment. He shall have it.

Cyril, earl of Greatlands, who is said to have accidentally poisoned himself by swallowing a large dose of chloral in mistake for a milder drug, sleeps by the side of his ancestors in the Greatlands mausoleum, and only Dennis Marvel, who is now the young earl’s valet, and myself ever dream that despair and remorse drove an apparently happy man to sever the life-chords which had become a torture to him.

So soon as I had an opportunity to do so unobserved, I read the letter which had been the last thing upon which Belle had gazed with the light of reason.

“My darling wife,” it ran, “I thought to have overcome the horror which has been resting upon me ever since I became an accursed parricide. My God! how could I do it! And how could you urge me to it! You, whom it would not have been difficult to worship as the outward embodiment of all that is pure and holy! I have often asked myself if I were mad. For I could not otherwise understand how it was possible for me to continue loving the temptress whose ambition has wrought my father’s doom and mine. For I am doomed and accursed! My days are filled with loathing of myself, and my nights are one long dream of horror. For me there is no salvation. I see my father’s frowning face, and hear his curses even amid the gay talk of the happy folk around us, and it is more than I can bear. Therefore I have put an end to it. When you pick this up from your dressing-table, the man who murdered his own father to gratify your ambition and his own greed will be numbered among the dead. But for you, who could coolly plan a murder, and yet not be haunted by remorse, life still holds many possibilities. You are now the Countess of Greatlands. I have enabled you to gratify your ambition. In return, you can make expiation for your own guilt by devoting your gifts to the interests and benefit of others. This I pray you to do, repentant sinner that I am! This I implore you to do, madly-loving husband that I am! This I command you to do, wretched—but but my strength fails me. I must bid you an eternal farewell. God bless you, my darling, and may His mercy be given to us both.

I read this letter through, but though it moved me terribly, it told me nothing I did not know already. How would it be with others, though? Would it not enlighten them more than was desirable about secrets that were better kept? I thought so, and I carefully burned the letter, anxiously watching it shrivel beneath the action of the flames, and guarding against the possibility of the smallest fragment escaping to betray the dark mysteries of the past.

Does the reader blame me?

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