She is like a rare picture in her black velvet dress, with its picturesque trimmings of cream-white lace, and the pearls that clasp her throat and wrists. She rises with that slow and languid grace that Vane was wont to admire so much.
"At last," she says, in her well-trained, softly-toned voice. "Welcome, Vane!"
He touches the white, extended hand very lightly, and takes the chair she places.
"I was passing, and I thought I would look in upon you a few moments," he observes, with unblushing nonchalance.
"I am thankful for even that small grace," Maud answers, with her most winning smile. "I know I have been a very bad girl to you, Vane, but I think if you knew how sincere my repentance is you would not mind coming now and then to cheer my lonely hours."
Then she drops her eyes and sighs. Vane looks at the fair, calm, languid beauty in wondering silence. A little while ago this had been his idea of perfect beauty. Since then he has learned to love the slumberous fire that glows in dark eyes and the soul that dwells on scarlet lips and dusky, brunette complexions. The sweetness of the rose has won his heart, but the beauty of the lily unconsciously charms his eyes even now when he knows how false she is at heart, and only fair in outward seeming.
"I—I have no time for calling," he responds, with cool politeness. "I am always busy."
"Always?" she arches her golden brows slightly. "That is unfortunate. I suppose, then, that I may abandon the hope that I have been secretly cherishing, that you would relent and take the management of my property."
Vane regards her in apparent surprise.
"Is it possible you have found no one else?" he inquires, carelessly.
"I told you I should not try until I heard from you," she answers.
"True, I had forgotten that," he answers. "And so you have been waiting all this time. I wish you would tell me why you wish me to do this for you when there are others equally capable, and far more willing."
Of this pointed reminder Maud wisely takes no heed save a gentle, quickly suppressed sigh.
"Perhaps you would be angry if I told you my reason," she says, gently, removing her eyes a moment from the contemplation of her folded, milk-white hands to glance into his fair, grave, handsome face.
"Oh, no, I am quite curious to hear," he replies.
"I think you know that Mr. Langton allowed his lawyer a very liberal salary," she begins. "You know there is a great deal of work, really, a number of tenements here, several farms in the country——"
"I know all that," he interrupts, with a slight air of brusqueness.
"I should like," she answers, with a very becoming blush, "that you should have that salary, Vane. It would only be fair, seeing that the whole property would have been yours but for my foolish, deeply repented error.
"Thank you, you are very kind," Vane replies, with grim brevity.
"Do you think so?" she asks, simply, then with an anxious look into his unmoved face, she continues: "Will you be kinder still, Vane, and permit me to offer this salve to my accusing conscience?"
"If only I were not so busy," Vane says, with artful reluctance.
"Cannot you make the time? I should feel so much better over this unfortunate thing," she says, lifting her blue, pleading eyes to his face.
Vane pretends to meditate within himself.
"Well, yes, since you make a point of it, I will try to take the trouble off your hands," he says, after that pause. "But as for losing Mr. Langton's money, pray don't think that I consider it hard lines, your inheriting it. I think you know that it wasn't for the sake of that I was—" he cuts his speech off short there, finding himself getting unwittingly on sentimental ground.
"I know," she says, quickly; "you mean you were going to marry me because you loved me. How foolish I was to doubt it then! Oh, Vane, if only we had it all to go over again, how different all would be!"
Vane turns on the beautiful, sighing coquette a look of steady contempt.
"If you had it all to do over again you would do precisely as you did then," he replies, with quiet scorn. "Don't play the coquette with me, Maud. I am in no mood for trifling."
"Nor I," she answers. "I am in earnest, Vane. It would be different; but I will not dwell on it since it annoys you. I fully understand that I am at liberty only to regard you as my man of business, not my friend."
There is just the right touch of sad and patient humility in the musical voice, and a dewy moisture gathers on the golden lashes. Vane is inwardly mollified by her repentance, but is careful not to show it.
"My friendship can be of no value to you," he says, coldly. "You are rich, and can number your friends by the score. I will serve you faithfully in my legal capacity. That is all I can promise."
"That is all I can ask, then," she answers, resignedly, and with such sweet patience that Vane takes his leave with a vague feeling that he has been unnecessarily cruel to the fair woman who had jilted him.
"Has she really repented? Does she indeed care for me now, as her words would imply, or is she the most consummate actress upon earth?" he asks himself.
And this is the beginning of the end.
Maud, left alone in the silent, stately library, throws off the mask of meekness and patience that had set so becomingly on her beautiful face.
She walks up and down the floor impatiently, with blended triumph and vexation in her soft, blue eyes.
"I have gained one point at least," she murmured to herself. "And I will gain the rest, I swear it," clenching her jeweled hands tightly. "I love him. How strange that I should grow to care for him when once I fled from him in the hour that would have made me his own. I was mad and blind. I was deluded by my romantic fancy for Clyde. Ugh! how the remembrance of that man's face troubles and haunts me. I see it always as I did that night, upturned in the moonbeams, dead and white. If I had loved him really, the shock must have killed me. But I did not love him—at least not half so well as I love Vane Charteris now. How proud and independent he is. But I love him all the better for that. If he had not come back and brought me that paper I might have been hung, or at least imprisoned for life. I hate to think that I owe it to Reine Langton, whom I never liked. How fortunate for me that she and Uncle Langton died. I have the fortune now, and I am determined that I will yet be the adored wife of Vane Charteris."
"Is the English mail in yet, Mrs. Odell? I do so want my English letter!"
Mrs. Odell turns a compassionate look on the pale, wistful face of the girl, into whose white cheeks all the life-giving breezes of Mentone have failed to restore the vanished rose.
Reine has been in Italy three weeks now. Thrice she has written to England to her Uncle Langton relating the story of her escape, and begging for news of himself and Vane.
No answer has come to these eager appeals, and she is half wild with anxiety.
"There is no letter yet, my dear," Mrs. Odell answers, sorrowfully, for she knows of Reine's strange story now. "I will tell you what to do now, Reine. Write to the postmaster there, and ask him for news of your uncle. Perhaps Mr. Langton has gone to another place."
"It is not probable," Reine answers, sighing, but she takes her friend's advice, and writes the letter of inquiry.
This time the answer comes all too soon. Her own three letters are returned unopened, with the information that Mr. Langton is long since dead! The physician encloses a certificate of death.
"He is dead, my dear, kind uncle is dead, Mrs. Odell!" Reine cries, lifting her dark eyes, heavy with grief, to the pale face of her friend.
"My poor darling, I feared as much," the lady answers, compassionately. "Now, darling, you belong wholly to me."
"You forget my husband," Reine answers, through her tears.
And Mrs. Odell, clasping tighter the paper she holds in her hand, speaks no word at first. How can she stab that tender heart yet deeper, already bleeding with the sad news of her uncle's death?
"You will be your uncle's heiress, dear," she says to her presently, thinking to check the flowing tide of grief.
The girl starts and looks up, bewildered.
"I said, you will be your uncle's heiress," Mrs. Odell repeats.
And Reine, growing a trifle paler, shakes her head
"Not if he has died so suddenly," she answers. "He intended to alter his will, but he had not done so when I left him. The old will left everything to my cousin, Maud Langton. It is more than probable that I am penniless."
"It does not seem to distress you, losing the fortune, I mean," the pale invalid remarks, with some surprise.
"It does not," the girl answers, calmly; "I never cared to have my uncle's money; I know that Vane will take care of me," she adds, with tender confidence.
And again Mrs. Odell's sad, white face grows sadder.
"Dear, you forget that you have no assurance that your husband is living," she exclaims abruptly.
Reine presses the small white hand that loosely wears the wedding-ring upon her poor aching heart, and lifts her dark, solemn eyes to the lady's face.
"My own heart tells me he is living," she says, with passionate energy. "He cannot be dead, my darling, just as I had almost won his heart. He lives to bless me yet with his love. Ah, if I only knew where to find him," she breathes, with despairing earnestness.
"My poor, poor child," Mrs. Odell says, with impulsive tenderness. "You must not be too sure. We can be sure of nothing in this world."
"You have heard—something!" Reine says, with vague terror, looking fixedly at the lady.
"Yes, dear. I have here some papers that I have been trying for sometime to get, the English and American papers with the accounts of the burning of the Hesperus and the list of those lost."
"And—my husband?" Reine says, looking at the lady with burning eyes.
"Is reported among the lost," Mrs. Odell replies, the papers trembling in her trembling hands.
A moment's silence, then Reine, trembling all over with emotion, rallies bravely from the shock.
"Am not I, too, reported among the lost?" she inquires.
"Yes, here it is, dear," and Mrs. Odell reads, under the heading of "Lost:" "'Vane Charteris and wife.'"
"So you see that does not really signify anything," Reine says, momentarily radiant. "Here I am safe and sound on terra firma. And Vane had so much better a chance than I had that he cannot be dead. Did I not see him safe on board the life-boat myself?"
"But, listen, dear," Mrs. Odell answers, sorrowfully.
She folds down the paper and reads, in a weak voice, a short paragraph:
"The Sea-Gull rescued one life-boat after it had drifted two days at the mercy of the wind and waves. It was filled with thirsty, famishing women and children. They reported that the boat had been on the point of sinking from too great a load, when the four men who were in it had leaped into the water, heroically resigning their only chance of life in favor of the weaker sex. There is no ground for hoping that either of these noble, manly hearts survived their self-sacrificing act, as none have been heard from since."
"Well?" Reine says, in a hushed voice, with a strange, prescient dread on her white face.
"Oh, my poor, bereaved girl, how can I tell you?" exclaims the frail invalid, the dew of womanly sympathy starting into her eyes.
And Reine, with a horrible weight pressing on her heart, gasps faintly:
"My husband——"
"His name appears in the list of the four who leaped into the water," Mrs. Odell replies in an awe-struck voice.
One cry, whose terrible despair pierces to the blue heavens, then blank silence. Reine has fallen forward, face downward, on the floor. For a brief space, time, love, sorrow, all the things of life, are blotted from her mind in a merciful semi-death.
The days go by—"time does not stop for tears"—and one day there comes out of the room where Reine, the girl, was carried in senseless, a beautiful, sad-eyed woman in sables. Sorrow has touched her with its transfiguring finger. The beautiful dark eyes droop always beneath the black-fringed lashes, the lips forget to smile, the white cheeks have lost their dimples and roses. For the passionate, loving heart, life is over and done—yet she lives on.
After a time there comes to the crushed heart a thought crowded out at first by the intensity of woe—the remembrance of Maud. Maud, whose hopes, like her own, have hung trembling on the life of Vane Charteris.
"I must go home," she says, sadly, to her friend. "Maud will need me. God only knows what has happened to her in these long months."
And Mrs. Odell, who has daily grown weaker and frailer, looking up from the couch where she rests almost all day now, cries out, sorrowfully:
"Oh, Reine, you will not let this Maud come between us? She cannot love you as well as I do."
The girl answers her a little sadly.
"I do not think she loves me at all."
"Then, why go to her?" Mrs. Odell exclaims.
"Because it seems my duty," Reine answers calmly.
"Write to her," suggests the invalid eagerly.
"There is no surety in the mail. It is safer to go," Reine objects.
But that evening, faithful Dr. Franks, who has come across the ocean to watch over the invalid's health, requests a private interview with Mrs. Charteris.
"I hear that you wish to return to America?" he says, fixing his kind, smiling gray eyes on her quiet face, with its grave, sweet lips and drooping eyes.
"Yes," she answers.
"Is it imperative?" asks Dr. Franks.
"I think so," Reine replies, with some little wonder at his curiosity.
"You are the best judge," he answers, gravely. "Were it otherwise I would beg you not to go."
"Why?" Reine asks, surprised.
"For that poor lady's sake in yonder. Do you know that your going will shorten her days upon earth?"
"Dr. Franks, how can you speak so? You know I would not harm one hair of her dear, kind head," Reine says, with subdued indignation.
"I know," he says, gently for him, usually so brusque and careless. "But she will grieve for you so. She has grown to love you as a daughter. She has no one else to cling to—she is sensitive and loving, who has buried all she loves, and is so ill and lonely."
"What would you have me do?" Reine asks, irresolute and pained.
"Stay with her till the last, if that were possible," he answers. "It cannot be for long. Do you know that her days are numbered?"
She starts, and trembles.
"No, I thought that this genial climate was to restore her health," she exclaims.
"We hoped it, but all has failed," he answers, sadly. "She fails daily and rapidly. There is no power in medicine, no magic in these balmy airs to lengthen her life. She is surely fading from us."
The dark eyes brim over with sorrow.
"How long?" she asks, faintly.
"I cannot tell," he answers, sadly. "Her disease is too insidious for one to say with any certainty. It may be hours, days, weeks, months, for who can prognosticate surely the coming of that dread enemy that flatters only to destroy."
"Then I must not leave her," she answers, warmly, "and yet, I know that I ought to go back to America."
"Can you not write?" he inquires.
"I must do so," she answers, "and trust to God that my letter may go safely across the ocean. Mrs. Odell has been too kind and tender to me for me to desert her now. Believe me, I did not know that the end was so near. I thought, I hoped, she would get well, but now I will not leave her while she lives."
"God bless you!" Doctor Franks exclaims, with strong but repressed emotion. "Will you go in and tell her that? I left her in the bitterest distress over the thought of your going."
"Yes," Reine answers, but when he has left her she lingers a little to regain her composure before returning to the presence of the hapless lady whom death had marked for his own.
The sun is shining on the soft, blue water, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing.
Surely, this clime is fair and balmy enough to woo expiring life back to its tenement of clay. And yet, she, too, her last loved friend, thinks Reine, must go from her out into the darkness and dreariness of death.
Crushing back one hopeless sigh, Reine goes back to the shaded, quiet chamber, where the sick woman lies on her silken couch, with tearful eyes veiled by the thin, emaciated fingers on which the shining wealth of rings hang loosely.
She kneels down and presses her soft, loving lips on the thin, fever-flushed cheek.
"You are crying for me," she says, with an earnest penitence and regret. "I was cruel and ungrateful to talk of leaving you. Can you forgive me?"
"You are sorry; you will stay!" the sick woman murmurs, with piteous eagerness.
"Yes, as long as you live, I will never leave you nor forsake you," Reine murmurs, with all the solemnity of a vow, thinking sadly to herself that this is the only heart left on earth to which she is near and dear.
"God bless you, you shall be like my own child, Reine. And it may not be for long," Mrs. Odell sighs. "I am afraid—afraid, dear, that I shall never see my native land again."
"We will hope for the best," the girl answers, gently, "and if—if it should be as you fear, you will not forget that Heaven is as near to Italy as to our native land."
Heaven! to these two who have lost the treasure of life, that word is sweet and potent.
Drawn nearer together by the waves of sorrow that have gone over their heads, they cling together in the falling twilight, and talk softly of
The soft Italian winter comes and goes. To Reine's young and inexperienced eyes, as she ministers lovingly to her dying friend, it seems as if a change for the better is taking place. But Doctor Franks shakes his head.
"Impossible," he tells her, sadly. "It is a marvel she has lasted so long. It almost seems as if your love and tenderness have held her fluttering spirit back from the other world. The end is not far now."
But the spring days pass with such gentle touches on the wasting frame that the spirit lingers still.
At last, in the golden sunset of a golden June, Mrs. Odell's summons comes, gently, as if angels had borne it down the golden stairway of the sky, closing her tired eyelids on the fair land of Italy, with her thin hand nestled in Reine's warm clasp, she opens them again on the "stiller, fairer world of the dead."
Standing alone and sadly by the marble cross that marks Mrs. Odell's quiet grave, Reine's thoughts turn homeward. The longing for native land inherent in humanity begins to stir in her heart.
The slim, dark figure standing quietly with the pale face turned seaward, has a pathetic grace and beauty all its own.
So thinks one who approaches so quietly along the grass-grown paths of "the city of the dead," that she starts with a frightened little cry when he stands before her.
"Oh! Dr. Franks, how you startled me," she says, with one slim, white hand pressed against her heart to still its rapid beating.
"Did I? Pardon me," he answers, with an irrepressible glance of admiration. "I forgot you might be nervous in this quiet, lonely spot. Do I intrude upon you?"
"The place is free to all," she answers, somewhat confusedly.
"That would be no excuse for me if you did not desire my company," he answers, quickly and humbly, then in a lower tone: "Oh! Mrs. Charteris, you must pardon me that I have followed you here! I had something to say to you. Can you not guess?"
"Do not say it, please. I would rather not hear," she answers, with weary indifference in face and voice.
His handsome, eager face grows blank and dismayed.
"You will not listen?" he says. "Oh! Reine, think a minute. Is it best to refuse such love as mine—so ardent, strong, and devoted? You are so young and lovely, yet so lonely and unprotected. Let me throw the strong shield of my love around you—let me make you my wife!"
Reine waves him away with a quiver of pain on the beautiful face, that is even more lovely in its pallor and gravity than it used to be in its blushes and dimples.
"I shall never love—never marry—again," she answers, in a choking voice.
"Then you can give me no hope?" Doctor Franks asks sadly, and she shakes her head.
"You do not know how long I have loved you," he says, pleadingly. "Ever since I first saw you you have been the delight of my eyes and heart. But I have tried to be patient. I have respected your widowhood and your sorrow. But now, Reine, seeing you so utterly alone in the world, the time seemed come for me to speak. Are you sure—quite sure, dear, that you can never love me?"
The sound of the sea comes to them soft and sad; the wind sighs through the long grass above the quiet sleepers, whom the things of this world trouble no more. Tears rise into the dark eyes of the girl as she looks into the man's troubled face. It is no slight thing to a true woman to hold the great, throbbing pulse of a man's heart in the hollow of the hand.
She lifts to his the great, dewy, pain-filled eyes.
"I am so sorry," she falters; "but you must have seen how little I cared for you, for anyone, and that my heart was broken."
Before that grave and pathetic confession the man's passion is mute.
"And I have wounded you," he says, in self-condemnation. "Forgive me, Mrs. Charteris, I have heard of women who were faithful unto death. I did not know there were those who carried love beyond it."
She sighs wearily and rests her cheek against the cold marble cross.
"My heart is broken," she repeats sadly. "I shall never have any more room in my life for love and lovers."
"Nor friends?" he asks, pleadingly, and Reine impulsively holds out her hand.
"Yes, if you care to claim me," she answers, gently.
"Rather your friendship than any other woman's love," says the rejected lover, loyally.
"You must not feel like that, it is so very hopeless," the girl answers. "I am going home soon. You may never see me again. I hope that you may love and marry some happier woman."
And when he has gone away and left her to the loneliness of her own thought, she sinks down in the long, sweet grass, weeping long and bitterly.
Until now she has never quite realized the truth of her widowhood. It comes to her with a great pang of agony that Vane Charteris has no longer any place among men.
His place in her poor life is vacant forever.
"And I loved him so dearly," she sighs, lifting her desolate, tear-wet eyes to the fair, blue heavens. "I loved him, and if he had lived he would have loved me. My patient love must have won him in the end."
And again her thoughts turn homeward as if drawn by some irresistible power.
"I will return to my native land," she resolves. "I will seek out Maud, if indeed she has escaped from the terrible web that encompassed her. I am so lonely and sad perhaps she will be kinder to me than of old."
A year has passed since the ill-fated Hesperus was burned in mid-ocean with such terrible loss of human life.
In the sultry heat of August, Vane Charteris has forsaken the breathless, dusty city for the coolness and verdure of that terrestrial paradise among the hills, Langton Villa.
He is the guest of Miss Langton, who queens it right royally here over the grand domain she had nearly lost by her folly of one year ago.
They walk up and down beneath the trees, Maud and her handsome lawyer, in the glow of the evening sunset, with the lovely sights and sounds of summer all around them.
The heiress, in a robe of palest blue, with creamy lace, looks her fairest. Mr. Charteris, always handsome, is none the less so for the shadow brooding darkly in the deep blue eyes, lending its touch of earnestness to the grave, pale face.
"How dull and distrait you are," she says at length, impatiently. "Let us sit down here beneath this tree, and I will try to charm this dull mood away."
But for once she finds her fascinations fail. Vane, always inclined to be taciturn, is more than usually so to-night, even to the verge of embarrassment.
She wonders why his eyes evade her own, why he makes no reply to some tender epithets that falls cooingly from the beautiful lips.
"I thought you loved me, Vane," she breaks out at last, with some indignation.
"Yes, I thought so too, for a little while, under the glamour of your beauty and my own loneliness, but when you were gone, I found that I was mistaken. I am here to tell you this. Can you forgive me, Maud?" he blunders out, with all the shame of a man who feels himself placed in an uncomfortable position.
"Mistaken!" she cries, transfixing him with the angry gleam of her blue eyes. "Why, only the last time we met you said that you loved me."
Vane, rather red and ashamed, still holds his ground bravely.
"I was mistaken, as I told you just now," he says. "I do not, I cannot love you."
"Cannot!" she repeats, a little blankly.
"I cannot," he answers. "I find in the light of my later experiences that I never really loved you, not even when I was about to make you my wife. I was under the spell of your beauty. I know now that my heart was untouched."
"What do you mean by later experience?" the beautiful woman asks, sneeringly.
"I mean that the love I feel now, when too late, for my lost wife, Reine, is the only love my heart can ever know," he answers, speaking low and reverentially, as if in the presence of the dead.
The cold blue eyes of the beautiful heiress kindle with pride and resentment.
"You expect me to believe this?" she cries, hotly. "Do I not know how you despised Reine Langton! How you called her vixen, spit-fire, scold! How you longed to be out of her presence and rid of her?"
"For all of which I would beg her pardon on my knees if she were living," he answers, still low and reverentially; "I did not understand her then. I was a simpleton, an indolent, fastidious fool. I know now that those bright, wild ways were but the ripple and effervescence on the water that ran deep, and calm, and sweet beneath. She was like a lovely rose that hid its sweetness behind 'little wilful thorns.' At heart she was true, and sweet, and womanly. Too late I learned that I loved her, and in honor to her memory I will make no other woman my wife."
The angry color rises into Miss Langton's fair cheek.
"You forget that you are pledged to me," she says, in a low, fierce whisper. "You forget that our marriage day is already set."
"I forget nothing," he returns, sadly. "Nothing except that I was blinded for a moment by your subtle charm, and offered you what was not mine to give, what belongs irrevocably to the dead—my whole heart. I came to ask you for my freedom, Maud."
"What if I refuse?" she asks, with a subtle flash in the blue eyes.
"Then God help me and forgive you," he answers, solemnly, "for we can never be happy together. There are two ghosts between us, Maud. The man who murdered himself because of your falsity, and the fair, sweet girl who gave her life to save yours. They would haunt us and reproach us with their slighted and forgotten love. They would come between us ever."
Her cheeks and lips are paling, her eyes stare before her, wild and frightened; she shivers, and puts up her white hand as if to ward off some threatening danger.
"I—am haunted already," she says, in a low and trembling voice. "Do you think I do not see him in my dreams, with menace in his staring eyes and reproaches on his lips? He was my dreaded companion in the lonely prison-cell. He stalks before me grimly in the grand saloons of wealth and pride, always with a look of terrible reproach and despair on his dead, white face. I am a haunted woman. It is for this I have sought to win back your heart. I would fain put your warm, living love and tenderness between me and the pursuing ghost of the man whom I betrayed to his death. I am afraid of the dark, the loneliness, the terror of my own thoughts. Do not put me away from you, Vane. My only hope is in you."
They gaze at each other silently a moment. The soft wind, odorous with the breath of honeysuckles, pinks and roses, sighing through the garden, whispers to them of a slight form bowed behind the tree, a white face convulsed with passionate emotion. But they neither hear nor heed its admonition. Maud speaks again, pleadingly:
"I cannot release you, Vane. I love you. Surely you can give me some little tenderness and love when once I am your wife? I will make you happy—I swear it."
"The only woman who could make me happy rests in her ocean grave," Vane answers, with deep solemnity and truth.
Miss Langton regards him in wonder.
"Yet once you scorned her," she says slowly. "How did she win you at last, Vane?"
He is silent a moment, as if the question has struck home to his own heart, awakening thought and memory to life. His lips grow strangely tender in their saddened curve.
"How can I tell?" he says slowly. "Perhaps it was the softened sweetness that hung about her after that night when our lives became one. Perhaps it was her proud, sweet patience under my unkindness. Perhaps, yes, after all! I believe it was the charm of her love that won me. Can you realize such a thing as this, Maud, that love should win love?"
"Yes," she answers, hopefully. "Did I not tell you just now that my love would win you and make you happy?"
He shakes his head impatiently
"That could never be, Maud. You and I are better apart. I can never forget Reine, my slighted girl-bride. She is ever in my thoughts. I think of her as of one living, not dead. I recall her rose-leaf lips, her dark, laughing eyes, the nameless charm that clung about her, and my very heart aches with the intensity of its yearning to find my loved and lost one again."
"Thank God!" exclaimed a low, rapturous, thrilling voice almost at his very side.
At that heart-thrilling cry of rapture, Vane Charteris and his companion turn around simultaneously.
Within a few feet of them they behold Reine, the long-lost bride, Reine, in the long, trailing sables of widowhood, yet with a face fairly transfigured by happiness, love and triumph.
The effect of her sudden appearance upon Maud is most startling.
The beautiful blonde, after one terrified glance at her strangely-restored cousin, shrieks out:
"A ghost, a ghost!" and flies in the wildest dismay toward the house.
Vane Charteris, half-bewildered, yet full of gladness, flies to clasp the beautiful phantom to his heart.
As his arms close around the palpitating figure, and he realizes that she is truly a creature of flesh and blood, a cry of thanksgiving escapes his lips, the tears of not unmanly emotion burst from the eyes and rain down on the dark head, nestled closely and lovingly against his breast.
He holds her close and tight, raining passionate kisses on the sweet, scarlet mouth, the blushing cheeks, the dark eye, tearful with this sudden happiness.
"You love me, Vane," she murmurs, softly and half-incredulously, "and yet I thought, I feared——"
"You feared what?" he asks, breaking in upon her shy pause.
"That you loved Maud best," she answers. "When I came up the path and saw you two together, I crept behind the tree and listened. If I had learned then that she was the desire of your heart, I should have crept away quietly to die of my sorrow, I should not have come between you and your love. You never should have known."
"But since you found me faithful to your memory, Reine, you will forgive all the past, will you not, my darling?" he pleads.
"Freely," she answers, with a smile that is all the brighter because it breaks through tears.
"And now," he says, drawing her down to a seat beside him on the bench beneath the tree, "now, dear, you will tell me all your story. Where have you been through all the long months in which I mourned you as dead?"
Resting in his arms she tells him the story of those long months of sorrow while she believed him dead, sobbing even now in the deep, sweet gladness that has come to her so suddenly, over the remembrance of her despair.
"I knew no better until I reached the village yonder, seeking Maud," she concludes. "There I learned the whole truth, that you lived, and were again the betrothed of my cousin. I came here to have one secret, farewell look at you, my husband, to go away and leave you to your love and your happiness. But I heard all you said, and I could not give you up to Maud's selfish claim after that."
"I thank God that I have found you again, my precious wife. We shall never be parted any more," he answers, earnestly.
"You have not told me how you were saved that night after you sprang from the life-boat in which I last saw you," the young wife says after a little, lifting to his her shy, yet radiant eyes.
"I floated on a plank a few hours, and was picked up by another life-boat, that is the whole story, simply told," he replies.
"And you did not forget me when you thought me dead—you loved me after I was gone from you?" she says, with a note of gladness in her deep, sweet voice.
"I loved you before I had lost you, darling. Did you not guess the truth, Reine?" he inquired, earnestly.
"No," she answers, with blended wonder and delight in her beautiful, glowing face.
"It is true, dear," he answers. "I loved you before I became aware of it myself. I was abominably jealous of the young lord who admired you in England. Yet at the time I was scarcely conscious of the meaning of my annoyance. My proposal to accompany you to America was an outgrowth of the longing to have you all to myself. And Reine, my darling wife, you remember that last night when the terrible trial of fire came to us, that night I had resolved that our strange alienation should exist no longer. I had determined to ask you, to pray you to come to your true resting-place upon my heart. But, my bride, my wife, there will be no more separation between us. You will share my home and my heart henceforth."
"You used not to like me," she says, filled with a glad surprise. "Why did you love me at last?"
The lover-husband looks down with a half-mischievous smile into the dark, questioning eyes.
"Why did I love you," he says, lightly, yet tenderly. "Shall I tell you, little one? Well, then, I believe it was because you loved me."
The sweet face, covered with blushes, droops from his gaze. He bends to kiss it, then continues, less teasingly:
"You remember how you used to gibe and tease and ridicule me, Reine, and how I retaliated in likewise? Well, when it came to me suddenly that you really loved me, it filled me with a certain, indefinable triumph and pride which grew and grew upon me until when you came to England the feeling blossomed into passion. Every time I looked at you I said to myself: 'She loves me, that beautiful, spirited girl loves me,' and there was such strange, thrilling sweetness in the thought that it seemed to compel my love in return. Now, Reine, my own adored one, I feel and know that my love for you is the one great passion of my life. That which I felt for Maud was a mere empty fancy, born of her lily-like beauty, and fading when I saw that her soul was not fair and angelic like her face. Henceforth, my wife, you will embody all the beauty of earth to me. You are 'queen, lily and rose' in one."
She has no answer for him, her tears are falling so fast—the tender tears of happiness, soft and cooling, like the rain of summer that falls like a blessing. Vane kisses them away with tender solicitude. They are the last that dim her eyes for many years. The sunshine of her future happiness shines too bright on her life for clouds and tears to dim its glory.
After awhile, Miss Langton, who has been silently reconnoitering from an upper window, comes out to them.
"You see I was not a ghost after all," Reine exclaims, advancing to meet her. "Will you not bid me welcome, Cousin Maud?"
"You are an imposter!" Miss Langton answers, angrily, recoiling from the white, extended hand. "I will never acknowledge you as a cousin of mine!"
"For shame, Maud!" Vane Charteris cries out, warmly, drawing his young wife to his side. "This is my wife, and you know it!"
"I have your own assurance that your wife was drowned before your eyes on the night of the burning of the Hesperus," Maud answers, icily.
"That was a mistake, Maud. I only dived beneath the water and came up again out of his range of vision," Reine explains, eagerly.
But Vane checks her gently.
"Do not trouble yourself to explain to her, my darling," he says. "It matters very little to us whether she recognizes you or not. We can be happy without her favor."
"Happy! oh, I dare say," Maud laughs, hysterically. "No doubt you, Mr. Charteris, will be exceedingly happy in a squalid cottage, with a sharp-tongued little vixen for your companion. Permit me to remind you of the o'er-true adage that 'When poverty comes in the door, love flies out of the window.'"
Something in the blue fire of the eyes he bends upon her makes her quail momentarily. He answers with chill brevity:
"Fortunately I may take my wife to a palace, not a cottage, so we need run no such risks as you apprehend, Miss Langton. To convince you, will you look at this?"
He draws a folded paper from his breast and holds it open before her startled eyes.
"You see," he says, icily, "it is the will with which Mr. Langton threatened you the night you jilted me. I am a lawyer, you remember. I drew this up for him at his own request. It is signed by competent and available witnesses. It is perfectly legal, and I can prove it so in any court in the land. It bequeathes Mr. Langton's whole fortune equally between my wife and myself, cutting you off without a shilling."
Maud stares at the terrible legal-looking document with frightened eyes and a corpse-like pallor.
"You—you are deceiving me," she says, faintly. "If it is really true, why have you kept the will so long and allowed me to usurp the property?"
"Through pity and kindness for you," he answers, with cold contempt. "As long as Reine was supposed dead, no one suffered from the fraud but myself, and I was content to be poor that you might have the wealth your soul coveted. But now my wife's claims must be considered above all others."
"I would sooner die than be poor!" Maud weeps, wildly.
And Reine, taking the legal document between her white fingers, turns her shining eyes on her husband.
"Could you be happy with me, Vane, if we had really to live in a cottage and work hard for each other?" she asks, earnestly.
"Yes, Reine, I am quite sure I could," he answers, as earnestly.
"Then may I do as I like with this paper?" she inquires.
"You must not defraud yourself, dear," he says, startled.
She laughs—her old, ringing, joyous laugh, with a new tone of tenderness in its musical cadence.
"I do not intend to," she answers. "You are everything to me, Vane; Maud may have all the rest."
With the words, the white paper flutters in her whiter fingers, there is a sound of tearing paper, and the old millionaire's will flutters in a heap of snowy fragments on the soft, green grass.
Then Reine laughs in pretty, childish exultation.
"You are the heiress still, Maud," she says, gayly. "I have only Vane. From first to last, he is all I have cared for or wanted."
There is a moment's stunned silence, then the ice around Maud's selfish, worldly heart melts in the sunshine of this warm and loving nature. She is conquered by this heavenly forgiveness and love.
"Reine, Reine," she cries, in hoarse, half-choking accents, "forgive me for my cruel and wicked denial of you. I know you now. No other woman but Reine Charteris could be so forgiving, so generous, so self-sacrificing."
"You have beggared yourself," Vane says to his wife, a little vexed.
"I have you," she answers, with a glance so radiant and loving that he cannot but forgive her folly.
So there is peace between the three—a peace that is never more broken, for Maud's heart has gone out to her cousin in a love never to be recalled. She even offers to divide the fortune so generously bestowed on her, but Vane and Reine decline the compromise. They have each other, and as each laughingly declares, "that is the world and all." They try "love in a cottage" for a year, and declare it a perfect success.
One of the world's great bards has written: "The secret of genius is dogged persistence." Vane Charteris, toiling early and late in his dusty office for his little wife, finds it true. The laurels he would never have won in ease and indolence, begin to circle his brow with a chaplet that is the pride of his young wife's heart.
Yet he goes home one evening with a sigh instead of a smile for the dark-eyed wife who meets him in the homely little parlor, made beautiful only by her beautiful presence.
"Reine, how lovely you are," he murmurs, bending to kiss the upturned lips. "Ah!" with a discontented sigh, "if I only had jewels and laces, satins and velvets to adorn that glorious beauty."
"What is it, dear?" she asks, trying to smooth the frown from his brow with her dainty forefinger.
"It is only this, dear: Invitations are pouring in upon us which we cannot accept because we are too poor to enter into that circle where we rightfully belong by reason of my talent and your beauty. Darling, how I hate to seclude you from the gaze of men because I am too poor to adorn you like the rest. What shall we do?"
"Do? Why, we must go into the world and shine with the rest," she answers, promptly and gayly.
"We are too poor," he replies, gloomily.
"We are worth a million of dollars," Mrs. Charteris answers, calmly, with her dainty head perched sidewise like a bird's.
"Reine!"
"Vane!"
"Whatever do you mean?" he inquires.
"I mean," contritely, "that Mrs. Odell divided her fortune between Dr. Franks and me, and I have kept the secret, like a naughty girl, just for the pleasure of having you work for me. You see, Vane, you were careless, indolent, ease-loving. You never would have made a name if you had not an object to work for. Now, dear, will you forgive me for keeping the secret a whole year?"
"I forgive you and thank you, too," he answers, earnestly. "You have made a man of me, little wife."
"Yes, indeed," she says, with a pretty, happy triumph "And now, Vane, we will share the fortune and all the pleasures it can give together. My dear friend left me all her jewels, too. Only think," gayly, "how I shall shine in them."
In society they meet Maud, and—actually—Doctor Franks, who has also returned to America. Putting aside his own regret, he rejoices heartily in Reine's happiness. Maud's blue eyes heal the wound that Reine's dark eyes made, and a year later the pair are happily married, the selfish woman having developed into a nobler creature under Reine's lovely example.
The current of Reine's life glides on smoothly and brightly under the blue and sunny sky of love. At times the old, gay, teasing nature bubbles up to the surface; at times Mr. Charteris calls her "vixen and scold," but never in spite or vexation, only in the gay and careless badinage in which it pleases them sometimes to indulge, as when under the green trees of Langton Villa, where the separate streams of their lives first met and mingled into one.
[THE END.]