CHAPTER LV
Laurel felt a dreary kind of pleasure in hearing her husband ascribe to her the only real happiness of his life. It was some atonement for all that she had borne, all that she had suffered. Her heart beat quickly and fast beneath her white robe. He went on sadly:
"Never was there a stormier ending to a beautiful, sunny, summer day, never a sadder waking from a happy dream. And it was all so swift and sudden. It was like Burns' poem.
"'No pause the dire extremes between,
She made me blest and broke my heart.'"
Ah, yes, Laurel could remember how swift and sudden it had all been—how like a thunderbolt falling from a clear sky. She sat there pale and silent and listened to her own story told by her husband's lips, and felt a strange, dreary, aching pity for the girl who had loved and suffered so much quite as if it had been another woman than herself.
"We came home at last," he said. "My mother was very ill, and my wife nursed and tended her unweariedly, and with all a daughter's devotion until she became convalescent. Then the hour of my awakening came. It was so swift, so horribly sudden, I wonder sometimes that it did not kill me."
Ah, she had wondered so often that she, too, had not died beneath the stroke of that cruel fate. But she made no sign, she only sat still and looked at the bowed head before her, and listened to his words.
"The Gordons came down from New York one day quite unexpectedly, to visit their daughter. I was delighted, Mrs. Lynn because I thought it would add to my darling's happiness. I thought I would surprise her, so I concealed the fact of their arrival, and led her into their presence full of happiness myself in the prospect of witnessing her amazement and joy."
Mrs. Lynn held her costly fan before her face for a moment. She did not want him to see the spasms of agony that convulsed her face. Ah, how bitterly it all rushed over her, the pain, the shame, the horror of that supreme moment he was now portraying.
"You are smothering a yawn behind your fan," he said. "Does my story weary you, Mrs. Lynn? It has not developed into a plot for a novel yet, has it? You see I have been telling it in the plainest fashion. I have not embellished it like a story-writer. And, besides, up to the moment of which I have spoken it had not developed any phases of the tragic. It had only been the simplest, sweetest love idyl that was ever lived."
"That is perfectly true," she said to herself, with a burning face and a strangely throbbing heart.
"But at the moment when I led my beautiful wife into the drawing room at Eden to meet her parents the dénouement came," said St. Leon Le Roy. "The tragic element entered my story then. Can you guess what happened, Mrs. Lynn?"
"Your wife was properly surprised and glad to see her parents, I presume," said Mrs. Lynn, with an air of polite interest.
His dark lashes lifted, and he gazed at her sadly a moment, and then they fell again.
"No one could guess what did take place," said Mr. Le Roy. "It was like a romance. You have never written anything stranger in all your novels, Mrs. Lynn. But you must not expect me to describe it to you in the language of fiction. Your own imagination must invest it with all the eloquence it merits. I have been surprised at many things in my life, Mrs. Lynn, but I was never more surprised, never more shocked than I was in the moment when I led my Beatrix up to her mother. I had expected demonstrations of delighted affection, I beheld only utter dismay and confusion. Can you believe it, Mrs. Lynn? My young wife and the Gordons had never met before in their lives!"
A faint murmur came from her lips, meant to convey surprise. He accepted it as such, and went on slowly:
"Then it all came out. I had been deceived. I had been made the victim of a clever conspiracy. Two beautiful, clever girls had plotted together and the result was this: Beatrix Gordon had never come to Eden. She had gone away and married her lover, and she had sent Laurel Vane to us in her place. It was cleverly planned, as I have said just now, but I have often wondered how Laurel carried it out and escaped detection. She was innocent and transparent as a child. She was frightened always, I know, for when all came out I could recall many things that pointed to the truth if only I had not been so blind. But fate helped it on, and made me the husband, not of Beatrix Gordon, the daughter of the wealthy, well-born publisher, but of Laurel Vane, the penniless orphan child of an author who, with the genius of an Edgar Allan Poe, had shared all the weaknesses of the great poet and died as miserable."
He paused, Laurel wondered if he could hear her heart beating in the stillness of that place of graves. It sounded so loudly in her ears, that it almost drowned his voice.
It was only by the greatest effort of her pride and will that she preserved her outward calmness.
"It was a terrible discovery for me to make," he said. "I was wounded in my love, in my faith, in my pride. Can you imagine what I did, Mrs. Lynn?"
He had lifted his drooping head and was looking straight into her face. She looked back at him steadily, almost scornfully, as she replied:
"You loved her so dearly, and she made you so happy, perhaps I should not err if I said that you forgave the girl for her sin."
He crushed back something like a groan upon his lips.
"Do you think I should have done so, Mrs. Lynn?" he asked.
"I do not know how to answer you," she said, and her voice trembled. "From a woman's standpoint, I should answer yes. But men are unlike women, are they not?—harder, colder, prone to harsh judgments!"
"Yes, men are harder," he said and was silent until she broke the strange stillness with her strange voice.
"Do you love Tennyson, Mr. Le Roy? I do. I think one of the grandest, most beautiful passages in the book is King Arthur's forgiveness of Guinevere's terrible sin. Do you remember those words:
"'Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives'?"
"Her sin was not like Guinevere's," he said, hastily.
"And therefore the more easily to be forgiven," she said. "Do you not think that your wife suffered for her sin? And, after all, it was for love's sake. And women do and dare so much for love's sake, remember."
"You are speaking as if I did not forgive her," he said. "I had not told you that yet."
"But I fancied it must be so," she said, "because this is her grave."
The shot went home. He shivered, and a hollow groan escaped his lips.
"Would she have died for such a cause?" he asked, and she answered gravely, and with a touch of sadness.
"Women's hearts have broken for even lighter causes."
To herself, she said, mournfully: "I should have died myself if it had not been for little Laurie's coming. I could not have lived through these weary years if it had not been for the little child who loved me!"
"Her heart was broken then," he said, "for I refused to forgive her, Mrs. Lynn. I was hard and stern and angry. But I never dreamed what would happen."
"What did she do?" inquired the brilliant novelist, with interest.
"She went away that night, Mrs. Lynn and all search for her proved futile and vain. In a few days after a body washed up from the river—a young, golden-haired woman. They said it was Laurel, my missing wife. You know the rest. This is her grave."
Laurel looked at the grassy mound with a strange dreary wonder over the waif whom they had buried there. She wondered what her name and history had been. "Perhaps as sad as mine," she sighed to herself.
"This is her grave," he repeated. "Ah, Mrs. Lynn, you have a glowing, vivid imagination. Can you fancy what I have suffered? Can you comprehend how the demons of remorse and despair have pursued me unceasingly?"
"Then you repented when too late?" she said.
"Too late," he echoed, drearily. "Yes, I repented when too late. Ah, Mrs. Lynn, are there any sadder words than those two in the English language?"
"Yes, I think so," she replied. "You remember what the poet Whittier has written?
"'Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been."'"
"'It might have been,'" he repeated. "Ah, yes, I can testify to all the sadness of those words! Have I not felt it all? Since she died my life has been one dreary penance, one long regret. Ah, Mrs. Lynn, if only I had forgiven her—if only I had not driven her from me by my harshness and cruelty! I was a fool, and blind. She loved me and made me happy. She sinned through her love, first, for Beatrix Gordon, then for me. Her story is the saddest, the most pitiful I ever heard or read. I should have forgiven the child—she was nothing but a child, and she had not been well taught. But it was all so sudden, and I was half dazed by the shock. Ah, well, I have had ample time to repent my haste and madness. The years have been long and dreary enough without my darling. Every time I come here to this quiet grave I whisper to the silent dust beneath:
"'Oh, to call back the days that are not!
My eyes were blinded, your words were few,
Do you know the truth now up in heaven,
Laurel, Laurel, tender and true?'"
How the sweet passion and sorrow of the words moved her! He was sorry for his cruelty, he repented it all. She said to herself that if she had really been dead in that grave beneath him, she must have heard those words—they would have thrilled even her dust. Tennyson's beautiful words came into her mind:
"My dust would hear him and beat
Had it lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under his feet
And blossom in purple and red."
He looked up at her sitting there so fair and young, and so like the dead, and his heart went out to her in passionate adoration. He cried out, hoarsely, in his deep emotion:
"Mrs. Lynn, what do you think? Have I really sinned beyond forgiveness? If Laurel could come back from the world of shadows, do you think she would forgive me for that night?"
"Are you asking me to tell you what I should do in your wife's place, Mr. Le Roy?" she asked him in a low, strange voice.
"Yes, put yourself in her place," he replied. "Tell me, could you forgive me and love me again after the coldness with which I put my wife from me that night?"
"I do not believe I could ever forget or forgive such unkindness," she replied.
He looked at her keenly, with a brooding trouble in his eyes.
"Perhaps you do not look at the subject quite as my young wife would have done," he said, anxiously. "Laurel loved me, Mrs. Lynn. Do not forget that. Would she not forgive me for love's sweet sake?"
"No, I do not think she would. Her pride would be stronger than her love," answered the beautiful woman.
"Laurel was not proud," said St. Leon Le Roy.
"Not when you loved her, not when she was happy," said Mrs. Lynn. "But can you not fancy the sweetness of even such a nature as hers turned to gall by wrong and ruth? I repeat it, Mr. Le Roy, if I were in your Laurel's place if I could come back after all those years, I believe I should be as proud and cold as I was gentle once, I do not believe I could forgive you!"
He sprung up, he held out his arms to her yearningly, his face transfigured by the yearning passion of his heart.
"Laurel, Laurel, do not speak to me so cruelly, do not judge me so hardly!" he cried. "Do you think I do not know you, my darling?—that I have not known you since the moment we met again? That senseless marble lies when it says my wife is dead! You are she, you are Laurel Le Roy!"
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