CHAPTER LIV
St. Leon Le Roy threw himself down on the green turf at Mrs. Lynn's feet, and resting his arm on his wife's grave, leaned his head in his hand. So resting he could look up and note every expression of the beautiful face above him—the face, deathly pale with emotion now, for all she tried so bravely to appear politely calm and interested like the stranger she pretended to be.
"Do you care to hear this story I am about to tell you?" he asked, abruptly.
"I am sure I shall be interested," she replied, gently, and thus encouraged he began.
"It is more than nine years ago now that my mother received a letter from a lady friend in New York—Mrs. Gordon, the wife of the well-known publisher—perhaps you know him, Mrs. Lynn," he said.
"Mr. Gordon is my publisher," she replied.
"He had an only child—a beautiful daughter," said Mr. Le Roy. "She had betrothed herself to a poor young man of whom her parents disapproved. They proposed to break off the match by strategy, if possible. They sent their daughter to Eden to remain a few months, proposing to send her lover abroad during her absence, and so separate them as to end the affair in the quietest manner possible."
He paused, but she made no comment on his words, only inclined her golden head attentively.
"I was five-and-thirty years old when Beatrix Gordon came to Eden, she a beautiful child of sixteen," went on St. Leon, slowly, as if looking back into the past. "Perhaps you will think I was too old for her, Mrs. Lynn, but my heart was carried by storm, as it were, by the lovely girl. I think almost from the first hour of our meeting I recognized my fate in her. She was like no other woman I ever met. If I talked to you all day, Mrs. Lynn," said St. Leon, looking deep into her eyes with his dark, mesmeric orbs, "I could never portray in words her beauty and sweetness. There was a charm of novelty about them. She was rarely original. She was afraid of me at first. That piqued me, although it was my own fault. Very soon I found that my pique was the offspring of unconscious love. I, St. Leon Le Roy, who despised women, who had been angry at first at the girl's coming, had lost my heart to the slip of a girl who belonged to another. The bitter consciousness of that latter fact aroused my jealousy and added fuel to the fire of my passion. I was angry with myself, ashamed of myself, yet I could no more have checked the course of my strong, passionate love than I could have stemmed the tide of a rushing river. Can you understand me, Mrs. Lynn?"
She answered quietly, "Yes," but to her own heart she said: "Ah if he only knew."
"Then you may guess something of what I suffered," said St. Leon, and for a moment he was silent, and his gaze turned from her face, as he seemed lost in retrospection. She looked at the dark, haughtily handsome face, and her heart thrilled within her. It had all its old, luring, magnetic charm for her. She had repented her fault long ago; she was sorry for her sin, bitterly sorry, but looking at her husband's face now, she did not wonder that she had sinned for his sake. In spite of time, in spite of pride, the old love was strong within her. She might have exclaimed, with Byron:
"I deemed that time, I deemed that pride,
Had quenched at length my early flame;
Nor knew till seated by thy side,
My heart in all save hope the same."
It was well for her that when he resumed his story he did not look up. Too much of her heart was written on her lovely, mobile face.
"From the despair of my jealous love and misery, I wakened to passionate bliss," he continued. "I know not when the child's first shyness and dread of me changed to a tenderer feeling, but it came upon me suddenly, and with heavenly sweetness, that she loved me. She had forgotten her lover in New York. Mrs. Lynn, I swear I believed she loved me even as I loved her, with singleness and depth of devotion such as few hearts are capable of feeling. God forgive me that I doubted her once! No one was ever more cruelly punished for unbelief and hardness than I have been!"
With his eyes downcast upon that low, green grave, he did not see how bitterly her lip curled as it always did when that night of her betrayal rushed bleakly over her.
"She gave me her tender, trusting heart, and her beautiful self," he went on. "We were married. Her parents were absent, and it was a very quiet ceremony in a quiet church that gave me the desire of my heart. We went abroad for our honeymoon, and remained more than a year."
A sigh, heavy with his heart's despair, drifted over his lips.
"Such a year, Mrs. Lynn!—a golden year, into whose short space was crowded all the real happiness and bliss of my life. She made me the happiest, most blessed of men in that brief time. I am forty-four years old, Mrs. Lynn, but, it seems to me I have only really lived one year—one year that shines on me from the past like a radiant star in the darkness of night."
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