CHAPTER XX.
A PLOT FOR A NOVEL.
Fair did, indeed, look shocked and pale as she pushed the slip of paper hurriedly in among the others and spread her hands over them, as if to shut out the horror of what she had read. The color had faded entirely out of her face and lips, and her large eyes were dilated as if with terror.
“I should not have given you those things to read. Forgive me,” said Bayard Lorraine, in a voice of deep and tender concern. He moved nearer to her, and laid one hand on her two clasped ones with a light pressure that sent the blood flying back into her cheeks. She drew a long, deep sigh, then seemed to rally from her deep dejection, and exclaimed, with a little shudder:
“Ugh! It was horrible, was it not?”
“Yes,” he answered, and the pressure of his hand tightened on hers as he saw that she did not resist it. It even seemed to him that with the sudden flush that came to her cheeks her eyes beamed on him with a gentle confidence, and the exquisitely molded form seemed to lean almost unconsciously nearer his shoulder. The lover could not resist this perceptible softening in one who had always until now been so shy, holding him at arm’s length, as it were, while yet leaving in his mind the impression that he was dear to her heart.
He gave one long look of love into the beautiful, blushing face upturned to his, then his arm slipped about the pliant waist and drew her close until the shining head rested against his shoulder. Looking deep into the glorious brown eyes, he whispered, in tones that trembled with emotion:
“Darling, you are mine, are you not?”
“Always,” she murmured back, and their lips met.
The roses and the newspaper clippings fell unheeded from her lap into the grass. Her hands were locked fast in his. She was listening to such words of love as thrilled her whole being with rapture.
“Now you know why I could not begin my book. I could think of nothing but you. I have adored you since first I saw your face.”
“And I you,” she owned, with such delicious frankness that he was more charmed than ever.
To know that she had loved him for the space of a month, it was bliss unalloyed to the man she had loved for more than two years with a passion she had believed to be the most foolish and the most hopeless the world ever knew.
But that was her secret—one that she would never confess to her lover. Let him think the love dated but one month back, for they would have all time and eternity for their mutual love now. She smiled gladly at the blissful thought.
Two hours went by while they sat there in the grand old garden of the Florentine villa, whispering to each other of their wonderful love—an endless theme, though the love was but one month old, when suddenly he asked:
“What will your mother say to this? Perhaps she would have preferred Augustus Frayne or Lord Leigh for your husband?”
She laughed, and answered confidently:
“Mother will be pleased with my choice, I am sure.”
And then he kissed her for the twentieth time at least, and Fair drew back, saying brightly:
“You shall not kiss me again to-day, sir, and I think you had better stop talking love, and think about your novel.”
“The plots for which you have scattered to the four winds of heaven,” he retorted, as he went down on his knees to gather the scattered clippings.
“No; do not put them away yet. There were several good things among them—no, I won’t get frightened again,” as he declined to let her have them. She drew them gently from him, and hurriedly took out one, which she put into his hand, saying falteringly:
“Would not this make a creditable novel?”
Bayard Lorraine took the clipping from Fair’s trembling little white hand, and sat down by her side to read it, and if his eyes had not been turned from her face he would have seen that her eyes had a troubled light, and that she had grown pale again, while her form trembled with agitation.
But he did not look at her. He began to read the paragraph, which had a sensational heading, running thus:
The Finale of a Romantic Story of Love, Pride, and Ambition among the Working Classes.
A slight frown contracted Bayard Lorraine’s straight brows, and he read on:
The deliberate suicide by drowning in the East River yesterday of Carl Bernicci, an Italian who kept a small fruit and confectionery stand near the wharf, forms the sequel to a romantic story which reached our reporter through the friends of the suicide. It appears that there worked in a garment factory a pretty little girl by the name of Fielding, a vain little creature, whose head was quite turned by the beauty of her own big, brown eyes and curly, red hair. The little beauty was clever and ambitious, and in the hope of making a grand match through her good looks, held aloof from her admirers in her own class of life, treating them with scorn and indifference.
But through her vaulting ambition came her terrible downfall. A young man, Carl Bernicci by name, saw the factory girl, and fell in love with her. He begged one of her associates in the factory to introduce him, but was assured that the pretty Miss Fielding would not look at a poor man. Then, just for a joke, he proposed that he should represent himself as a very wealthy man. Miss Fielding was caught by the glittering bait, and accepted him when he proposed marriage. In a few weeks they were solemnly united in wedlock, the young lover thinking that she would forgive his deception when she found it out, for the sake of their mutual love. How much he deceived himself may be understood by the fact that his girl bride left him forever within an hour after their marriage, vowing vengeance on him for the trick by which he had won her hand. For several weeks he haunted her humble home, where she lived with her mother, but both refused to have anything to do with him, for the mother was as ambitious and unforgiving as the daughter. But very suddenly the parent died of heart disease, and soon afterward the girl disappeared and her whereabouts became a mystery to every one. Carl Bernicci, the despised yet devoted husband, was in despair, fearing that she had gone to the bad to avenge herself upon him. His fears, unhappily, had good ground, for it was soon discovered that she had fallen into evil ways. She was seen lately riding in an open carriage with a notorious woman, and Carl Bernicci, driven to desperation, flung himself yesterday into the East River and was drowned. The body was not recovered.
This was what Fair had read. This was what had driven the color from her face and lips, this horror of Carl Bernicci’s tragic death. But little by little the blushes came back, and the thought that now she was free to love Bayard Lorraine made her glad that the man she feared and hated was dead.
“But what a tissue of lies the whole thing was!” she thought indignantly. “How dared any one assert that I had gone to the bad? I was never out in a carriage but once, and then I went with Mrs. Howard’s maid to a department store to leave an order for my traveling outfit. I was most falsely accused, and I believe that Belva Platt was the enemy that started the slander,” she said to herself bitterly.
Then she looked at her lover, and saw that his handsome blond face had on it a thoughtful frown. She thought to herself that she would like to kiss the line away, but she did not dare—she was too much afraid of her grand lover.
So she only asked timidly:
“Will it make a good novel?”
She had asked the question to draw him out. She had a curiosity to hear him discuss her story, distorted though it was in the newspaper’s telling. Would he, she wondered, say a kind word of the girl who had been so bitterly deceived and wronged?
He turned his grave eyes on her face, and answered:
“The characters of both Carl Bernicci and his bride are so repulsive to me, my darling, that I do not think I should care to put them in a novel. There seemed to be nothing good in either, unless it was in the man’s desperate love, that drove him at last to suicide. There is always an element of greatness in a strong love, I think.”
“Yes, it seems so to me,” she answered, the while her heart made a silent, pathetic moan.
“He has a kind word for that wretch whom remorse over my mother’s death, no doubt, drove to suicide; but he has not a single gentle thought of me. But, alas! he does not know the story aright. If he knew all, he could not help but pity me.”
Bayard Lorraine continued thoughtfully:
“If I could have any sympathy for either of those two, it would be for the man. He, poor fellow, seems to have done nothing bad except his one great fault of deceiving her in order to win her hand. He permitted her to leave him and defy him, when he might have enforced her obedience. No doubt he hoped to win her heart by his gentle endurance of her shrewish scorn. At least, he paid for his fault with his life; but she, how hard and unforgiving she must have been! One finds it hard to think of a simple, pretty little working girl having such ambitious thoughts in her curly head. Why, I knew one once who was as fair as a flower, and, I believe, as innocent and true as a little child; indeed, I fancy she was as sweet and good in her humble way as even you could be, my little darling.”
Fair looked up with a quick gleam of interest.
“Tell me about her, Bayard,” she exclaimed curiously.
Something like a shade of embarrassment came across his broad white brow.
“You wouldn’t be jealous, Fair?” he asked uneasily; and she retorted:
“You don’t mean to tell me you were in love with her—a poor working girl?”
“My darling, I do not quite like your tone,” he answered gravely, and a slight flush rose to his brow as he continued: “The girl I spoke of, although only a working girl, was, I am sure, as well worthy my love as one of the daughters of the rich. She was gentle, good, and industrious, and also very beautiful. Indeed, Fair, the girl actually resembled you so much that when I first met you I was startled by the wonderful likeness.”
A roguish smile began to dawn in the wide brown eyes, and she exclaimed, with a pretty pout:
“I thought I was your first love, but this does not look like it, sir.”
Seeing that no shadow of jealousy came into the clear eyes, he continued, more seriously:
“Darling, you never had but one rival. She was the little working girl of whom I spoke. I first saw her on the eve of my departure for Europe, more than two years ago, and as time wore on the strange interest she had awakened in me by her beauty and sweetness kept growing so that in a few months I returned to New York to search for her, with some half-defined intentions of putting aside my pride of class, and educating and marrying her if she proved worthy. But the affair went no further; I did not find her. She had married a man by the name of Loring—by the way, I never knew her name—and gone away.”