Then the concert was over!
The concert was over, and hastily excusing himself to his companion, Guy Kenmore made his way around to the private entrance; with some difficulty he elbowed his way through the eager throng that waited to see the lovely singer pass to her carriage, and was fortunate enough to meet her coming down the steps on the professor's arm. He touched her eagerly.
"Miss Brooke," he said, and she turned with a start and a cry. Her eyes dilated with wonder as she saw by whom she was addressed.
"Mr. Kenmore—you here!" she exclaimed, and put out her delicate hand graciously.
He pressed it warmly in both his own.
"I am delighted to meet you," he said, "I have news for you—good news. May I call on you at the earliest admissible hour to-morrow morning?"
She glanced at the carriage.
"You may come with us in the carriage now if you will," she replied. "The hour is not too late for good news from an old friend."
Then she introduced her friend to the professor. The gentlemen shook hands cordially, and Bozzaotra repeated Elaine's invitation to come with them in the carriage.
"Gratefully, if you can wait for one moment while I make my excuses to a friend," he said.
They promised to wait, and Mr. Kenmore hurried back to inform Mrs. Leslie that he would not return to the villa that night. He heard Julius Revington saying that he should remain at the hotel that night and walk out to the villa in the morning; but he paid small heed to the words, in the preoccupation of his mind. He was longing to tell Elaine that her daughter lived; and as soon as he had handed Mrs. Leslie to her carriage, he hurried back to her.
She received him with a pensive smile of pleasure, and made room for him by her side, the professor being seated opposite. The carriage door was closed, and they were whirled away.
"It is a great surprise to see you here, Mr. Kenmore," Elaine began, in her musical voice. "Is your news from mamma and Bertha? I have so longed to hear from them; but, though I have written them several times, I have had no news of them since I left Bay View."
"Bang! Whirr!"
His answer is not on record.
A pistol had been fired close to the horses' heads, and they plunged and reared, almost upsetting the carriage. The shriek of the driver was heard as he tumbled from his seat upon the stony pavement; then the maddened steeds, without check or hindrance, dashed blindly forward in a mad, terrified pace, dragging after them the rocking carriage, with its precious, living freight.
Meantime, the man who had fired that reckless, murderous shot had been overtaken by Nemesis.
In his eager excitement he had gone too near the horses' heads, and, making his retreat, he had stumbled and fallen. In an instant they had trampled his fallen body with their plunging hoofs. Compassionate hands lifted him up from the stony street, a crushed and bleeding mass, in which the spark of life yet feebly lingered.
The carriage driver was picked up senseless in the street, where the maddened horses had hurled him in their swift rush to destruction. Luckily, he had escaped the contact of their iron hoofs, and his injuries, though serious, were not mortal.
But that poor sinner who, in the commission of a dastardly crime, had been overtaken by a swift and just Nemesis, how fared he?
They placed him on a litter and bore him into the nearest house. Men looked at that crushed and bleeding semblance of poor humanity, and, turning away, shuddered with horror. The physician came, and shook his head.
"My poor fellow, you can live but a few hours more," he said. "Tell us who your friends are that we may summon them."
"Are you sure, quite sure, that I must die?" moaned the sufferer, while the dews of terror beaded the weakly, handsome face which had escaped the vicious hoofs that had beaten the life from his body.
"You cannot possibly live but a few hours longer," repeated the physician as kindly as he could speak, and with a deep pity on his face that would not have been there could he have guessed that the wretch had wrought his own destruction.
Moans of terror and despair welled over the man's blanched lips when he realized that death was so near him. He begged that a priest might be sent for to pray the pardon of Heaven on his sinful soul.
"And your friends," they asked him, "shall we not bring them, too?"
With a moan of pain he answered:
"Send some one with a swift horse to overtake Clarence Stuart, who is returning to his villa in the suburbs. Tell him Julius Revington is dying, and—the lady—who was in the carriage—with the runaway horses—if she is living, bring her to me with all haste."
The willing hearts were not wanting to do the bidding of the dying man. Messengers went in three different directions, while the physician remained to assuage by all means that lay in his power the agonies that racked that tortured form. Anon the priest came, and with prayers and holy words strove to comfort the poor departing soul.
The swiftest horse in Florence went clattering over the road in pursuit of the carriage that held Clarence Stuart and his wife and daughter. It was soon overtaken, and the ominous message flashed like a thunder-clap upon their startled senses.
Mrs. Stuart and Lilia uttered shrieks of the wildest dismay.
But Clarence Stuart, after the first shock of surprise, regained his self-possession.
"I must go to him at once," he said. "Mrs. Stuart, I must transfer you and Lilia to one of the other carriages while I return to poor Julius."
To his surprise the lady answered, in sharp, hysterical tones:
"Lilia may go in the carriage with Mrs. Leslie, but I shall return with you to the death-bed of poor Julius."
"I object to your doing so. It may be an unpleasant ordeal for a lady of your delicate nerves," Mr. Stuart said, almost sternly.
"I insist upon going. All the arguments against my doing so will be quite wasted," she exclaimed, doggedly.
"Oh, mamma, do not leave me," cried her daughter, in almost hysterical distress.
But Mrs. Stuart shook off the clinging hands of the weeping girl almost rudely.
Mr. Stuart regarded his wife in silent amaze and displeasure. Nothing angered him more than for anyone to speak unkindly to his child, but he well knew how useless it would be to remonstrate with his wife, so without more ado Lilia was transferred to Mrs. Leslie's care, and the husband and wife returned to the city.
No more unpleasant sight could have greeted Julius Revington's eyes than the face of Mrs. Stuart as she entered the room where he lay attended by the priest and the physician, the only helpers left to him on earth. The eyes already dim with the film of death gazed at her with weak repugnance and horror.
Unheeding his gaping wounds and his blood-stained garments, she knelt down by his side and whispered frantically in his ear.
With all the strength that was left in his mangled arms he pushed her from him.
"Do not tempt me to die with all this load of sin on my soul!" he cried. "I must confess, confess! The priest is waiting to shrive me of my sins! Clarence, Clarence," he cried out wildly, "take her away, take her away! She has been my evil genius. I was weak, but never guilty until she whispered her evil suggestions in my ear and bribed me with her gold!"
"It is false, false! Let no one listen to him. These are but the ravings of delirium!" cried the woman angrily.
Her looks and actions were those of a desperate, maddened woman. The physician came up firmly to her side and attempted to draw her away.
"Let me entreat you, madam, not to shorten the brief span of my patient's life by your unjust charges," he cried. "I assure you he is not delirious, but in the full possession of his senses. Come away from him."
They were about to drag her forcibly away when the door opened suddenly and Guy Kenmore entered the room with Miss Brooke clinging to his arm.
It was a strange sight on which the flickering gaslight fell in that little room. The dying man, lying on the litter on which he had been borne into the room, and from which the physician declared it impossible to remove him, was a ghastly sight that sickened human sensibilities.
Mrs. Stuart, crouching on the floor beside him in her rose-tinted satin, her priceless lace and flashing diamonds, looked like a maniac. Her eyes flashed with hatred and desperation, her face was death-white, her breath fluttered over her lips in short gasps, and she defiantly resisted the efforts of Mr. Stuart and the physician to draw her away from the side of the dying man whose looks all too plainly expressed his abhorrence at her presence. At a little distance the old priest was devoutly crossing himself while he muttered an inaudible prayer. No wonder that Elaine Brooke reeled with horror as her gaze fell on that strange and dreadful scene.
"Be brave. Do not lose heart," Guy Kenmore whispered to her as he felt her weight grow heavier on his arm. "That dying man may have an important confession to make to you."
"I will be brave," she whispered back, but when she saw Clarence Stuart and the woman who had rivalled her in his heart—the woman who was his wife—it seemed to her that she could not breathe, that she must rush from the room, or surely she would fall down dead there at her traitor husband's feet.
They turned and saw them, the tall, gracious-looking man with his gentle, protecting air as he looked down upon Elaine—Elaine all in white, with her golden hair fallen down upon her shoulders in shining disorder, the snowy roses dying on her breast, and the pathos of a terrible despair written all over her lovely, pallid face—they saw her, and from Mrs. Stuart's lips shrilled a cry of rage and despair, from those of the dying man an exclamation of joy.
"You live!" he cried, "thank God, you live! Your death is not upon these dying hands!"
"Then it was you who fired that terrible shot!" cried Elaine, in horror.
"God forgive me, yes," he wailed. "Come nearer, Elaine Brooke. I have a story to tell you before I go hence. I have a legacy to leave you. Oh, horrors, will not some one take this mad woman away from me?"
Mrs. Stuart had sprung upon him in such insane fury that it seemed as though she meant to hurry his remorseful soul into the eternity to which it was hastening. Mr. Stuart hastened to draw her away, dreading the struggle that must ensue, when suddenly, with a choking gasp, she fell senseless into his arms. The tension on her nerves had given way, and she had instantly fainted.
"That is much better than having to remove the lady by violence," said the physician, relieved. "We will remove her to another room now where she cannot distress my patient."
"Clarence, you must return in a moment," moaned Julius Revington. "I have a confession to make to this lady—one that you must hear."
Mr. Stuart looked back a moment, and his glance met Elaine's large blue eyes, true as those of an angel, yet full of dumb agony. His glance fell and he turned away, with a strange thrill at his heart.
"She repents of her cruelty to me," he said in his heart. Meanwhile Guy Kenmore had spread a dark covering over Revington's mangled form, and Elaine knelt down beside him on a low cushion which Mr. Kenmore had arranged for her. She looked with compassionate gentleness at the sufferer who was passing away so fast from the reach of all earthly resentment.
"You are a stranger to me," she said, wonderingly. "Why did you try to harm me, and what can you have to confess to me?"
"You shall know presently," he answered. "Wait until Clarence Stuart comes back. You must hear my story together—you two who have been so foully wronged and parted."
A startled look came over Elaine's face at those strange words from the lips of the dying man.
"Wronged and parted," she repeated, vaguely.
"Yes," he replied, and at that moment the door unclosed and Mr. Stuart came again into the room.
"Let all go out now except Mr. Stuart and this lady," said Julius Revington, feebly.
But Elaine interposed:
"I should like for my friend, Mr. Kenmore, to stay," she said. "He knows all the story of my life, and if I have been deceived beyond what I know I should like for him to hear it."
Julius Revington looked curiously at the man whom Elaine claimed as her friend.
The doctor and the priest had retired, and the four were alone in the room.
"What is he to you?" he asked, in his weak, painful tones.
Elaine looked up at Guy.
"Shall I tell him?" she asked.
He bowed his head in acquiescence, and she replied:
"He is my daughter's husband."
"Irene's husband!" exclaimed the dying man, feebly, and Clarence Stuart echoed the startled cry, "Irene's husband!"
"Yes, she is my wife, but she believed me dead when she promised to marry you," replied Guy Kenmore, looking at the dying man.
"My God," exclaimed Julius Revington, and for a few moments he lay silent contemplating this strange piece of news, then he looked curiously at the handsome, noble-looking man.
"You did not claim her when you came," he said.
"It was her secret. I was waiting until she gave me leave to divulge it," was the quiet reply.
Elaine had been listening with startled eyes. She sprang up and caught Mr. Kenmore's arm.
"I—do not—understand you," she panted. "You speak as if—as if my child were yet alive!"
He took her trembling hands and held them gently in his own.
"I meant to break it to you gently," he said. "But do not be shocked. That is the news I had for you. Irene is alive, and but a few miles away from you. You shall see her soon."
An ominous gasp from Julius Revington recalled them to his side.
"That news will wait," he said. "But I—I have but a little while to live. Listen to me first."
With a beating heart and a face radiant with sudden joy Elaine knelt down beside him. She could have touched Clarence Stuart as he sat by the litter, but she shrunk sensitively back, without looking at him. Guy Kenmore stood apart at a little distance, with his arms folded over his broad breast, his clear brown eyes fixed gravely on the little group.
"Clarence," said the dying man, turning his dim eyes on the face of his cousin, "you believed that this lady deserted you sixteen years ago of her own free will and desire. It was not true."
"Not true!" gasped Clarence Stuart.
"No, it was not true. She loved you and she was true to you. The wicked machinations of your father parted you from each other."
"My father! Oh, God, no!" exclaimed Mr. Stuart, in an agony of grief.
"It is horrible, but it is true," said Julius Revington. "He was bitterly enraged against you because of your marriage with Miss Brooke instead of the heiress he had selected for you. He laid his plans cleverly to circumvent you. Your severe illness that prevented you from returning to your wife was caused from drugs administered by him in the wine you drank that night."
"What authority have you for making these statements? Remember that you are dying, Julius, and do not try to falsify anything," exclaimed Mr. Stuart, almost sternly.
"I do not forget that I am dying," moaned the sufferer. "I speak the truth as God hears me—the truth as I received it from the lips of your father upon his death-bed."
"He revealed the truth to you instead of to me—strange!" cried the tortured man, almost incredulously.
"Yes; can you guess why?"
"I cannot."
"He repented of his sin, but he was afraid to confess it to you. He dreaded your terrible anger and dreadful despair. He feared that you would curse him upon his dying bed."
"I am afraid I should have done so, indeed," muttered Clarence Stuart.
"So he selected me as the instrument to right the wrong," went on Revington. "He wrote out a full confession of his sin, detailing the means he had used to separate you, and he deputed me to carry it to Bay View, where your first wife had been living all the time while you believed her dead in a foreign land."
"And you failed in your promise to the dead," exclaimed Mr. Stuart, fixing a glance of deep reproach upon his cousin.
"No, I kept my promise. You remember the night we stopped at Brooke Wharf on our way to Italy, Clarence?"
"Yes, I remember."
"Well, that night while you lay in your stores of fruit, and the rest of our party rambled about, I fulfilled my mission. I went to Bay View Hall, and I persuaded old Mr. Brooke to come out on the shore with me. I told him of your father's death-bed repentance, and I confided to his care the written confession. He promised to deliver it to his daughter Elaine, and I came away and left him."
Elaine hid her face in her hands and low moans of pain came from her lips.
Julius Revington lay still a moment, breathing hard and painfully, then he resumed slowly:
"There was one who, by some means, had become cognizant of the secret confided me by the dying man. I will call no names. Your own heart may suggest who that person was, Clarence Stuart. She sought me and endeavored to buy my silence by costly bribes. I refused her importunities. I was bound by a solemn pledge to the dead, and I kept my vow. God knows how she learned my mission that night, but she followed me at a distance. She concealed herself, and when I had gone she felled the old man with a sharp blow on the temple from a thick stone she carried, and then she wrested the precious confession from his clenched hand and fled back to the yacht."
A piercing cry broke from Elaine's lips.
"Oh, God, papa, my own papa, you were most foully murdered," and throwing up her arms, she fell like one dead upon the floor.
Guy Kenmore placed a cushion beneath her head with gentle care, but he made no effort to restore her to consciousness.
"It is better thus," he said. "I have long known or believed, that Ronald Brooke met his death by violence, but I would have been glad to spare this poor soul that harrowing knowledge if I could."
"You knew it!" both Clarence Stuart and the dying man reiterated in surprise.
"I suspected it," said Mr. Kenmore, "but the physician said that he died of heart disease, and I had no right to go beyond his verdict. I alone observed the purplish mark of a blow upon his temple. I alone knew that some important paper had been wrested from his hand in that last dreadful struggle. I kept silence, but I have been on the track of his slayer ever since. But go on with your story, Mr. Revington. Do not wait for this broken-hearted woman to recover. She has heard enough."
"There is little more to tell," he answered, weakly. "When I went back to the yacht, I missed the lady who was so interested in old Mr. Stuart's dying confession. Suspecting and dreading I scarcely knew what, I hurried back along the path I had come, and met her flying like a mad thing toward me, with the precious confession clasped tightly in her hand. Wrenching it rudely enough from her, I ran forward to restore it to Mr. Brooke, and found the old man's dead body lying on the sands, with its convulsed face upturned to the moonlight."
"A murderess—the mother of my loved Lilia a murderess!" groaned Clarence Stuart, hoarsely.
"I went back and charged her with her sin," continued Julius Revington. "She was horrified. She declared that she had not meant to kill him, only to stun him that she might obtain the coveted paper. It was then that she bribed me to keep the secret. But it was not alone her gold that bought me, I was sorry for her. She had been my friend for years, and I was not acquainted with Miss Brooke, although I had seen her portrait, and knew that she was the loveliest of women. But I thought it best to leave matters as they were. I reflected that if the secret were revealed, it would only shift the disgrace from one innocent wife and child to another, for Mrs. Stuart believed her husband free when she married him. So I kept silence, and now I realize my sin. I have here your father's death-bed confession, but I fear it will prove valueless to you, for the signature is gone."
He drew it from his breast, all dabbled with his life-blood, and Clarence shuddered as he took it in his hand. Guy Kenmore came slowly forward with a narrow slip of paper.
"Here is the signature and the remainder of the confession which I found clinched in Mr. Brooke's hand after death," he said; "I restore it to you, Mr. Stuart, and I also have a brief confession to make."
"You?"—and Mr. Stuart looked up in wonder.
"Yes, and it is this: I believed that you were old Ronald Brooke's murderer. I followed you to Italy to ferret out your secret, if I could, for the sake of poor Elaine Brooke, for I believed that Irene, my little bride, was dead then. I will tell you my own strange story by-and-by. Now, I wish to ask your pardon for the wrong I did you in my thoughts. Instead of the guilty sinner I believed you, I find that you are a wronged and miserable man."
He held out his hand, and Mr. Stuart pressed it firmly in his own, while his dark eyes wandered to the still white face of the woman whom he had never ceased to love, even while he thought her dead. Heavy sighs breathed over his lips.
"And Irene is your wife?" said Julius Revington's gasping voice.
"Irene is my wife," replied Guy Kenmore.
"And you love her?" said the dying man, wistfully.
"As my life," was the low, fervent reply.
"I loved her, too, but it was a selfish love," sighed the sufferer. "She despised me, but I bought her promise to be mine by a selfish barter. I had told her that her mother was legally married, and that I would give her her grandfather's confession on the day she became my wife. I was hard and cruel to her. Ask her to forgive me if she can, Mr. Kenmore."
"I will," answered Guy Kenmore, whose grave face had suddenly grown radiant.
A moment later Mr. Stuart asked, gravely:
"And did you really fire a pistol at Elaine's horses to-night, Julius?"
"Yes, and found my death in doing so," he groaned. "The same hand incited me to that desperate deed that did old Ronald Brooke to death. She was furious with rage and fear when she saw her rival on the stage, and she conceived that terrible plan for putting her out of the way. But I am thankful that my nefarious deed failed, although I can scarcely conceive how my victims escaped."
"I can tell you in a moment," answered Guy Kenmore. "In turning an abrupt corner of a street, the carriage parted from the horses, and left us safe, though sadly bruised and frightened in the battered vehicle."
"Thank God!" echoed Julius Revington, in his weak tones, and then he added, plaintively: "Call the priest in now, I wish to take my solemn oath to the confession I have made."
At that moment Elaine gasped and opened her eyes. They fell upon Clarence Stuart, who bent over her wistfully regarding her.
"Elaine, my poor, wronged darling, what can we say to each other?" he whispered, mournfully.
She regarded him with grave, reproachful eyes.
"Nothing," she answered, firmly. "You forged other ties when you thought me dead. Be true to them."
She could not repress that little outburst of jealous reproach, pure and angelic as she was, and with the words she took Guy Kenmore's arm and passed from the room.
With a heavy sigh, Clarence Stuart bent over the dying man. Death had blotted out all resentment.
"My poor fellow, what can I do for you?" he inquired.
"Nothing, only leave me with the priest," he answered, heavily. "I want him to pray for me. I have done with the things of this world."
And when he had sworn solemnly to the truth of his confession, he bade his cousin a long and last farewell, and sent him from the room.
On the threshold he met the physician coming in with a solemn face. Taking him by the arm, he said, gravely:
"My dear sir, prepare yourself for a great shock. The lady's swoon was more serious than we thought. She never revived from it. Her terrible excitement killed her."
Well, it was best so. How could he have ever looked in her face again, knowing that the death of old Ronald Brooke lay on her white, woman hands?
Just before daybreak they brought him word that Julius Revington was dead. He went and looked a moment at the still, white face, and the old priest told him that his cousin had died peacefully, trusting to the full in the mercy and pardon of Heaven.
Clarence Stuart shuddered and thought of that other one who had gone swiftly and unrepentantly before the bar of that God whose commands she had outraged.
All the morning he remained in Florence making arrangements for the double burial. Elaine had returned to her hotel, and Mr. Stuart sent her by Guy Kenmore the blood-stained confession to read at her leisure. Then he gave up his time to the burial of his dead. He sent a messenger out to the villa to break the tidings of death to all but Lilia, who was to be kept in ignorance of her mother's fate until he could tell her himself.
The messenger returned with tidings as sad as he had carried away. Lilia lay unconscious and dying, having suffered a relapse of her insidious disease that morning which had brought on fatal hemorrhage.
It was more than Elaine could bear to read the dying confession of the wicked old man who had blighted her life and branded her daughter's young life with shame.
It almost killed her to look at it and to feel that through it her kind, noble old father had lost his life.
"Better, far better, if old Clarence Stuart had died with the secret of his villainy untold!" she cried. "Better that I should have borne the brand of shame forever than you to have died by the assassin's hand, my father, oh, my father!"
Yet she knew, even while she bewailed him, that her father would have given his life twice over to purchase honor and happiness for her, his best-loved child.
"Irene must never know," she said to Mr. Kenmore. "She loved my father so dearly, and she is so passionate and impetuous that it would break her heart. We must spare mamma and Bertha, too. That wicked woman is dead now, and earthly vengeance cannot reach her, so for her husband's sake we will shield her memory."
He agreed with her that it was best so, and she gave him the confession to read for her, telling him frankly that she could not bear to hold it in her hand. Yet her heart burned and her cheek glowed as she heard the story of the deep-laid scheme by which she and her adoring young husband had been separated.
"Irene must read that—and mamma and Bertha," she said, wistfully, and Guy Kenmore understood then how bitterly the woman's pure heart had shrunk under the lash of scorn they had laid upon her shoulders.
"It is almost impossible to imagine anyone so heartless as that old man," he said. "With what devilish art he laid his plans. To you he told the story of the fraudulent marriage ceremony, and your husband's second marriage. To his son he presented your fraudulent letter of renunciation, and later on the false notice of your death abroad. No wonder the wings of his soul were clogged in dying by the weight of his terrible sins."
He told her the story of Irene's rescue from death, and how he had subsequently met her at Mr. Stuart's villa on the Arno.
"Does it not seem like some strange recompense of Providence that she should have been saved from death by her father?" he said, thoughtfully.
She agreed with him, and then he saw a wistful look stealing into her gentle eyes.
"You are longing for your child?" he asked.
"My heart aches to clasp her again," she answered.
"Be patient. In a few hours I will bring her to you," he answered.
"And you?" she asked, slowly. "Are you glad or sorry that the waves gave her back to us?"
"I love her," he answered, simply, and with that she was content.
He went away on his mission to restore the child to her mother's arms, and Elaine waited with eager impatience for his return.
"He has a brave, true heart," she said. "Irene will have a noble husband. After all, the mistake of that dreadful night may prove a providence to them both."
For it seemed to her that they could not help from loving each other. It seemed like a match made in Heaven. He was so handsome, so noble, so kind. Irene was so lovely, so tender, and her mother knew that beneath her pretty, wilful ways, that were but as the foam on the sea, she had a heart of gold.
So Elaine was well content with her son-in-law for her daughter's sake, though when she looked into her mirror it seemed almost ridiculous to reflect that she was a mother-in-law. Time had touched her very lightly in its flight, and she was as beautiful as her daughter. Indeed, Clarence Stuart pronounced her lovelier. Sorrow had brought such soul and expression into her face, even as "night brings out the stars."
When several hours had passed and she heard footsteps in the hall outside her door, the glad tears rose to her eyes and the rapturous beats of her heart were almost painful.
"Irene, my love, my darling," she murmured, longingly.
The door unclosed and Guy Kenmore entered—alone!
Elaine looked past him—her face paled, her eyes filled.
"Oh, do not tell me she would not come," she cried.
Then she saw the shadow of heavy trouble brooding over his face.
"Not dead!" she wailed.
He took her hands in his firm, strong clasp.
"Be brave," he said. "She is not dead. It is not so bad as that. But last night while we were away at the concert, Irene fled from the villa, and her absence was not discovered until late this morning. She left this note for Mrs. Leslie, and she has sent it to you."
He drew the dainty white envelope from his breast and laid it in her hand.
Elaine took the letter in her trembling hands, and, through a mist of bitter tears, saw the pretty girlish writing of the daughter she had mourned as dead. She wiped the dew from her eyes and read the sorrowful words that had flowed from the girl's burdened heart.
"Dear Mrs. Leslie, my true friend," Irene had written, "forgive me for going away in seeming ingratitude for all your kindness to me. Troubles encompass me, from which I have no refuge but in flight. I do not love Mr. Revington, and I am not free to marry him. But he has it in his power to work me ill, and I must fly far, far away, beyond the reach of his power. I have a sorrowful secret, but I cannot tell it to you; my heart is broken, but I cannot tell you by whose coldness and cruelty. Enough that I leave you reckless and despairing, not knowing if we may ever meet again. God forever bless you for your friendship and kindness to the mysterious stranger.
"Irene."
"You have read this?" said Elaine, lifting her tearful eyes to Mr. Kenmore's grave, sad face.
"Yes; by Mrs. Leslie's kind permission," he replied.
"Is it your coldness and cruelty to which she so sadly refers?" asked Elaine.
"Mine? by no means," he answered, startled. "I cannot at all understand what she means by those phrases."
"You are willfully blind," she answered. "I am quite sure she referred to you. Ah, Mr. Kenmore, my poor child had learned to love you. You should have claimed her before them all as your wife, if you really loved her."
He looked very grave and perplexed. A deep flush colored his face.
"God knows I would have done so, gladly enough, but I feared to offend her. I believed she would be angry if I attempted to claim her for my own. And you must remember that she bore an assumed name. I was waiting, with what patience I could, hoping she would relent toward me and acknowledge her identity."
"Waiting for the child to throw herself into your arms," said Elaine, with one of her sweet, pensive smiles. "Ah, Mr. Kenmore, you are very noble and chivalrous, but you know little of the subtle workings of a woman's heart. My little Irene is very proud, and the circumstances of her marriage were not such as to make her feel confident of a welcome from you. I believe she would have died before she would have come to you and said: 'I am your wife, whom you believed to be dead!'"
"She was cold, proud, indifferent to the verge of rudeness," he answered, gravely. "She seemed bent on showing me that she loved Julius Revington."
"Yet you see now that she did not care for him. Ah, Mr. Kenmore, I can see plainly how pride and sensitiveness stood between you. While you waited for her to declare herself, she waited for you to claim her, and, despairing of your love at last, went away."
She extended her white arms to him, imploringly.
"Oh, Mr. Kenmore, you will find her for me, my little girl, my darling," she pleaded, piteously.
"Yes, I will find her for you, and for myself—I swear it," he said, passionately. "I will never give up the search until I find my proud and willful little wife."
He paused a moment, then went on, anxiously:
"But before I go I have somewhat to ask of you. Perhaps it may be too great a favor."
"Name it," she answered, gently, and he replied:
"Lilia Stuart—your husband's child, and who should have been yours, too—lies ill unto death at her father's villa with that fatal malady, consumption. Last night you carried the child's heart by storm. To-day, in her illness and pain, she sings over fragments of your songs—they think if—you would come—that it might make happier her dying hours."
"Let her father comfort her," she said, bitterly, jealous in her heart of that other woman's child.
He took her hand and gazed deep into her soft, pure eyes, tinctured with a certain womanly pride.
"Mrs. Stuart," he said, letting his voice linger firmly on the name, "this is not worthy of you. Your heart harbors resentment against your husband when he has never wronged you. He has not sinned, he has been sinned against. Just now he cannot come to the child. He must first bury his dead."
"How can I sing to her when my heart is so empty and full of pain?" she asked, drearily.
"Because God will bless your efforts to cheer the last hours of that motherless child," he said. "Clarence Stuart loves the child, and it might have been yours as well as his. You must love it for his sake. Think if it were your own loved Irene, dying in the spring of her life."
"I will go," she answered, tremulously.
When Elaine went to the villa her strange, romantic history was known to all the inhabitants except Lilia. Mrs. Leslie, in her woman's wisdom, had judged it best to tell all the rest, but no one breathed it to the dying child. She alone never knew that the beautiful singer who had taken her young heart captive was her father's real wife. When he came and found her singing like an angel by Lilia's dying bed, he made no sign save by the silent gratitude in his dark eyes, and Elaine was best pleased thus.
There were several days of fluctuating hope and fear before the fair bud faded on its drooping stem. Sometimes she would have every appearance of rallying, but it was only the deceptive flattery of her insidious disease, and she would immediately fall back into the most alarming symptoms.
The day came when Mr. Stuart could bear it no longer to hear the weak voice asking for her mother, and wondering why she came not.
He told his child the truth with such infinite pity and gentleness that it softened the blow to her young heart—— told her that her mother had gone before her to the unknown Land.
Lilia bore it more bravely than he had expected.
"She has only gone before me a little," she said, sadly.
And later on she asked Mrs. Leslie for Irene.
"I loved her at first until mamma bade me not to," she said, plaintively. "Then I was cruel and unkind. Is she angry still, that she does not come to me when I am so sick?"
They told her gently that Irene did not know of her illness, that she had gone away.
"Then I shall never see her again," said Lilia, sadly. "Tell her I was sorry for my cruelty, Mrs. Leslie, and ask her to forgive me. Tell her she should have been my sister only mamma was not willing. She was good and pretty and I loved her even when I tried to hate her."
Mrs. Leslie promised to deliver the message when she found Irene.
"I know she will forgive you, Lilia, for she loved you even when you were unkind to her," she said, marveling to herself how the tie of blood had asserted itself in the spontaneous love of the two girls whom the dead woman had so maliciously sundered.
"Poor little misguided Lilia. She will know in Heaven that they were really sisters, and it will be a comfort to her," she said to herself.
That evening in the glow of the golden Italian sunset Lilia closed her heavy-lidded eyes softly as flowers shut their petals at twilight, and forgot to open them again in the world in which she had tarried a little while. Elaine had held her hand and sung her to sleep in soft, sweet numbers that breathed of a Better Land.
It was over the child's grave where they lingered together one twilight eve, strewing lovely, pure, white flowers, that Clarence Stuart made his first appeal to the wife he had so fondly worshiped, and from whom he had been so cruelly sundered.
"Elaine, my house is left unto me desolate," he said. "Will you ever consent to return to me?"
The fair flower-face drooped, crimson with the warm tide of her heart's emotion, but for a moment she could not speak, and he continued, sadly:
"I have never ceased to love you, Elaine, even when I believed you false, even when they told me you were dead, even after another bore my name, and shared my home. I never loved her. She was my father's choice, not mine, and she could not make me happy. Elaine, my early choice, my own worshiped wife, will you not come home to my heart?"
He held out his arms to her eagerly, but she drew back, though not unkindly.
"Not yet," she answered, gently. "It is too soon. Let us give a few months to the dead who filled your life so long, then—— come for me."
"And this contemplated public career—— I am very selfish, love," he said. "Will you sacrifice your ambition for my sake? Will you give up that sweet voice to me to be heard only in the walls of my home? It is sacred to me since it sang my child into her last, long sleep."
"It shall be as you wish, Clarence," she answered, gently; and though Professor Bozzaotra was disappointed at the loss of that grand voice to the world, he acquiesced in her decision. He was glad that Elaine's romance had ended so happily.
"Although it is a sad disappointment to me," he sighed. "When she was but a girl at school I told her that her voice belonged to the world, and when she came to me at last to teach her again I was charmed that the public should have its due. Ah, well, I must not spoil her happiness with my vain regrets!"
The moonlight lay on Bay View House—not the tender moonlight of June as when we saw it first—but the cold, wintry whiteness of November. The ground was covered with a thin, light carpeting of snow, and a wind from the bay swept coldly across the land, almost freezing those who were so unfortunate as to be exposed to its piercing rigor. In the sky the stars were glittering coldly bright.
But no hint of the outdoor cold and discomfort penetrated to the luxurious parlor where we first met our pretty, willful Irene. A bright coal fire burned in the wide, steel bars of the grate, and diffused a lazy, luxurious warmth through the large apartment. Basking in its comfortable rays sat Mrs. Brooke and Bertha, the lamplight falling softly on their black silk dresses and the delicate lisse at throat and wrists. A white rose fastened in Bertha's silky, dark hair diffused the pleasant fragrance of summer amid their wintry surroundings.
A dark frown disfigured the handsome face of the brunette, evoked by her mother's words, uttered a moment ago.
"To-morrow, Bertha, we must go up to New York and sell my diamonds," Mrs. Brooke had said. "There is no help for it. They will have to be sacrificed."
"A pretty appearance we shall make in society when we lay off our mourning—no jewels to wear!" snapped Bertha, discontentedly.
"You will have your pearls and rubies; I have not asked you to part with them," said Mrs. Brooke, soothingly.
"You needn't to, for I shall not do it—no, not if it came to starvation with us!" declared the brunette, passionately.
"You talk foolishly, Bertha," declared her mother. "Do you not suppose that it grieves me also to part with my jewels, the gift of your poor dead father? Yet I make no foolish lament over it. I consider the necessities of the case; but I also remember that if you had not forced me to make the tour of the summer resorts this season I should have been able to live through the winter without selling my beautiful diamonds!"
"Oh, yes, everything is my fault!" cried Bertha, angrily. "Could I help it if Guy Kenmore went gadding off to Europe instead of going to the summer resorts where I expected to find him? I am sure I should not have asked you to spend the money if I had not felt perfectly sure of finding him somewhere. And if I had found him I should have won him, I know, for I am very sure he was in love with me last year."
"I am afraid you were mistaken, my dear. I think it was Elaine he was smitten with. You had as well turn your attention to some one else with money, if you can find one, for it is very important that you should marry soon, and it is very evident that Guy Kenmore cares nothing for you," Mrs. Brooke said, tartly.
"Elaine—always Elaine!" cried Bertha, in a passion. "Do you suppose he could care about her after I betrayed her shameful story to him?"
Before Mrs. Brooke could reply there came a sharp peal at the door-bell that echoed weirdly through the great, silent house. Both ladies started violently.
"Who can this be?—at this hour?" exclaimed Bertha, glancing at the clock, whose hands pointed to nine.
"Some one who has come by the boat or the train," exclaimed Mrs. Brooke, nervously. "Perhaps Elaine!"
"You are always harping on Elaine—you forget that Professor Bozzaotra has taken her to Europe to make her a prima donna," Bertha exclaimed, sharply.
They heard old Faith, who was the only servant they retained now, waddling down the hall to the door, and waited a moment silently to learn whom their guest might be.
The heavy hall-door opened, light steps sounded on the threshold, then suddenly a shriek of terror resounded through the house, and staid old Faith rushed back to the parlor door, tore it wildly open, and fled to the side of her mistress as if for protection.
"Why, Faith, you old simpleton, what ails you? Have you seen a ghost?" exclaimed haughty Bertha.
"Yes, Miss Bertha, that's just what I saw! I opened the door and there stood the ghost of Miss Irene, just risen from the sea," panted old Faith, overcome with terror and exhaustion, for she was very fat, and her flight had been sudden and rapid.
"Ridiculous," sneered Bertha, and just then light feet came pattering along the hall, a slight figure flashed over the threshold—Irene, with the dark hood of her cloak fallen back on her shoulders, and all her wavy golden hair flying like an aureole around her beautiful, pale face!
She ran up to the old housekeeper and shook her laughingly by the shoulders.
"Aren't you ashamed of yourself, old Faith?" she said. "I'm not a ghost—I am Irene, living and breathing! Pinch me if you don't think I'm telling the truth. I've come to see my mother," her eager glance roving around the room. "Oh, where is she, where is she?"
For a moment Mrs. Brooke and Bertha were almost as much unnerved and startled as the old housekeeper had been. They stared in speechless amaze at the fair, young face, like, yet unlike, Irene Brooke's—like it in the bright, captivating beauty that had been the girl's glorious dower, yet changed because a woman's soul with all its love and sorrow had subtly transformed it, adding the one only grace it needed to make it simply peerless.
At last—
"You are not Irene," gasped Bertha, "she is dead!"
"I was not drowned," the girl answered, simply. "God did not let me perish in my wickedness that night. I was saved by a passing yacht after floating several hours on a plank in the water. Look at me, Bertha. Do you not see that I am Irene, alive and in the flesh?"
Bertha regarded her a moment with steady, contemptuous eyes and curling lips.
"No, you are not Irene! You are a miserable impostor!" she flashed out, in scathing anger and bitterness.
Irene stood regarding her, disconcerted and amazed for an instant. It had never occurred to her that they would deny her.
Her lips quivered and the tears sparkled into her sweet, blue eyes.
"How dare you utter such a falsehood, Bertha?" she cried, with something of her old, imperious anger. "You know who I am perfectly well. You are wicked and cruel to call me an impostor."
Then she turned from the scornfully silent girl and crossed the room to Mrs. Brooke, who still sat in her easy chair with old Faith crouching in dumb terror at her feet.
"Grandmamma, you will not deny me," she pleaded, "I am Elaine's child—she whose shame and sorrow you shielded so long beneath the honest name of Brooke. Will you not speak to me, little Irene that grandpapa used to love so dearly?"
The handsome old lady returned her gaze with a hard, cruel stare. She was not ready to acknowledge her granddaughter yet. It flashed dimly over her bewildered mind that Irene had come back to claim her protection and support.
In her straightened circumstances she was not ready to accord her either, and the faint pity that was struggling in her heart was smothered by the warning flash of Bertha's black eyes.
Irene saw herself disowned and rejected again. She looked at them in hapless bewilderment. Nothing equal to this cavalier scorn had ever occurred to her. She had been girlishly amused at the housekeeper's terror, but this was worse. Her young bosom heaved with stormy indignation.
"Where is my mother?" she asked, bitterly. "Will she deny me, too? Will she be sorry that the sea has given up its dead?"
No one answered her except old Faith, who gave a low, whimpering moan that might mean everything or nothing.
Irene went up to her and shook her by the arm with gentle violence.
"Come, old Faith, you are not quite daft, I think," she said, bitterly. "Tell me where to find your Miss Elaine!"
The fat old housekeeper seemed to be somewhat reassured by the very realistic touch of the warm, white hand. She shook herself like a big, shaggy dog, and rose to a standing posture. Some of the abject terror died out of her face.
"Is my mother up-stairs in her room?" inquired Irene, impatiently.
"Miss Irene, where have you been all these long months?" inquired Faith, irrelevantly.
"I have been in Italy, Faith. I was rescued that night when I tried to drown myself, by a yacht bound for Italy. The people were very kind to me, and I went there with them. But I have come back to find mamma. Where is she, Faith? Go and bring her to me," exclaimed the young girl, impatiently.
"Oh, miss, she isn't here. She went away after you did, She's gone away off to that place where you said you were," stammered Faith.
"To—to Italy?" exclaimed Irene, blankly.
"Yes, Miss Irene—she went away with her old music teacher to learn to be a great singer. Oh, Mrs. Brooke," sighed the old woman, turning anxiously to her mistress, "you can tell her better than I can about the letter that Miss Elaine wrote you before she went away."
"How dare you tell our private matters to this impostor, Faith?" demanded Bertha, fire flashing from her brilliant eyes. "Have you no sense, no judgment?"
"Oh, ma'am, 'tis certainly our Irene. I was an old fool at first and took her for a ghost, but now I could swear 'tis Miss Elaine's own little daughter," pleaded Faith, with a loving glance at the shrinking young girl who stood anxiously awaiting her reply.
"Hush, not another word!" raged Bertha. "How dare you set yourself up against me? I tell you this girl is nothing to us and she shall leave this house! Go to your room, Faith, and remain there. You have no business in the parlor."
"Go," echoed Mrs. Brooke, bestowing a glance of stern displeasure upon the old housekeeper.
Faith slowly left the room, after bestowing a glance of love and pity upon the forlorn young creature who looked after her as if her last friend on earth were departing.
A rush of cold air met the old woman in the hall, and she went to close the heavy door which was banging loudly back and forth.
To her dismay she met a gentleman just crossing the threshold. Ashamed of her recent idiotic display of fear, the old woman held her ground bravely, and stopped to hold a parley with the intruder.
Irene remained standing in the center of the room looking blankly from one to the other of the two cruel women who so coldly denied her. A look of pain and grief shadowed her fair face.
"Is it true that your daughter has gone to Italy, madam?" she asked, timidly, looking at her grandmother whom she dreaded less than the wrathful Bertha.
"Yes, it is true," Mrs. Brooke replied, without raising her eyes from the contemplation of the shining rings on her plump fingers.
"When is she coming back?" inquired the girl.
"What is that to you?" demanded Bertha, pitilessly.
The beautiful girl flashed a look of deep reproach upon the cruel woman.
"It is everything to me," she said, mournfully. "She is my mother. I love her, and she is all I have to love me. I have crossed the sea to throw myself into her arms, and now that I am here she is gone—she is gone, oh, God, have pity on me," she wailed, despairingly, while the hot tears of disappointment and sorrow streamed down her cheeks.
"This is all very fine acting, but it does not impose upon mamma and me," sneered Bertha. "You are nothing to us, and you are nothing to my sister. You are a vile adventuress and impostor. You are trying to trade upon my sister's unfortunate secret which you have somehow discovered, but you will get nothing from us—nothing! Begone now, before I call the servants to put you out," she concluded, loftily.
Irene turned her pale, distressful face upon the merciless woman.
"Do you know that I have nowhere to go?" she asked, in a low, fearful voice. "I have spent the last penny in my purse coming here to find my mother. If you turn me out to-night I must perish in the cold."
"That is no concern of mine," Bertha answered, angrily. "Go, I tell you!"
"Do you sanction Bertha in her cruelty, madam?" said Irene, appealing to her grandmother. "Must I indeed go forth to my death?"
"Go where you please, so that you leave my room instantly," replied the hard-hearted woman, resolutely sustaining Bertha in her cruelty.
"You hear my mother's decision. Now go!" cried Bertha flinging wide the door, and pointing to it with her white, ringed hand.
But even as she was about to thrust Irene out of the room, her hand fell, and she uttered a shrill scream of dismay.
Her malevolent black eyes had encountered the gaze of a pair of flashing brown ones, whose scathing contempt and bitter anger seemed to wither her where she stood.
"May God forgive you both!" said the poor forsaken girl, as she turned to obey their wicked mandates; "for I am surely going out to meet my death!"
Blinded by her bitter tears, she crossed the threshold, seeing nothing, and so ran into the manly arms that were outstretched to clasp her.
"You are going no further than your husband's arms, my darling," said the low music of the voice she had learned to love beneath the blue Italian skies. "To your husband's arms, never to leave him again!"
And holding his little wife tightly clasped to his beating heart, Guy Kenmore turned to Bertha.
"God may forgive you for this wanton cruelty," he said, "but I never will. None but fiends in human form could have showed themselves so pitiless to this helpless child. I hope I may never see either of your faces again."
And with no more words, he led his little bride from those inhospitable doors out into the cold, bleak night again. But they were no longer conscious of the cold, sharp wind and the driving snow. There was a warmth and summer in their hearts that made the night more fair to them than that June-tide with all its moonlight and roses when they had first met.
"I followed you from Italy here, my darling," he said, "and I shall never lose sight of you again. I love you, Irene. I have loved you ever since the night that made you my unwilling bride. Will you promise to stay with me always now, my little wife?"
And in her tender, timid "yes," and the pressure of the small hand on his arm he read the sweet, wifely love he was too generous and too chivalrous to ask his shy little bride to avow.