Joy had been excessively fond of Mr Irving, and it was the dread of causing her a deep sorrow in the knowledge that she was not his child, and the fear that Preston Cheney would in any way interfere with her possession of Joy, which had distressed the mother during the visit of the Baroness, rather than unwillingness to have her sin revealed to her daughter. Added to this, the intrusion of the Baroness into this long hidden and sacred experience seemed a sacrilege from which she shrank with horror. But she now told the tale to Arthur Stuart frankly and fearlessly.
He had asked her to confide to him whatever secret existed regarding Joy"s birth.
"There is a rumour afloat," he said, "that Joy is not Mr Irving"s child. I love your daughter, Mrs Irving, and I feel it is my right to know all the circ.u.mstances of her life. I believe the story which was told my mother to be the invention of some enemy who is jealous of Joy"s beauty and talents, and I would like to be in a position to silence these slanders."
So Mrs Irving told the story to the end; and having told it, she felt relieved and happy in the thought that it was imparted to the only two people whom it could concern in the future.
No disturbing fear came to her that the rector would hesitate to make Joy his wife. To Berene Dumont, love was the law. If love existed between two souls she could not understand why any convention of society should stand in the way of its fulfilment.
Arthur Stuart in his role of spiritual confessor and consoler had never before encountered such a phase of human nature. He had listened to many a tale of sin and folly from women"s lips, but always had the sinner bemoaned her sin, and bitterly repented her weakness. Here instead was what the world would consider a fallen woman, who on her deathbed regarded her weakness as her strength, her shame as her glory, and who seemed to expect him to take the same view of the matter. When he attempted to urge her to repent, the words stuck in his throat. He left the deathbed of the unfortunate sinner without having expressed one of the conflicting emotions which filled his heart. But he left it with such a weight on his soul, such distress on his mind that death seemed to him the only way of escape from a life of torment.
His love for Joy Irving was not killed by the story he had heard.
But it had received a terrible shock, and the thought of making her his wife with the probability that the Baroness would spread the scandal broadcast, and that his marriage would break his mother"s heart, tortured him. Added to this were his theories on heredity, and the fear that there might, nay, must be, some dangerous tendency hidden in the daughter of a mother who had so erred, and who in dying showed no comprehension of the enormity of her sin. Had Mrs Irving bewailed her fall, and represented herself as the victim of a wily villain, the rector would not have felt so great a fear of the daughter"s inheritance. A frail, repentant woman he could pity and forgive, but it seemed to him that Mrs Irving was utterly lacking in moral nature. She was spiritually blind. The thought tortured him.
To leave Joy at this time without calling to see her seemed base and cowardly; yet he dared not trust himself in her presence. So he sent her the strangely worded letter, and went away hoping to be shown the path of duty before he returned.
At the end of three months he came home stronger in body and mind.
He had resolved to compromise with fate; to continue his calls upon Joy Irving; to be her friend and rector only, until by the pa.s.sage of time, and the changes which occur so rapidly in every society, the scandal in regard to her birth had been forgotten. And until by patience and tenderness, he won his mother"s consent to the union.
He felt that all this must come about as he desired, if he did not aggravate his mother"s feeling or defy public opinion by too precipitate methods.
He could not wholly give up all thoughts of Joy Irving. She had grown to be a part of his hopes and dreams of the future, as she was a part of the reality of his present. But she was very young; he could afford to wait, and while he waited to study the girl"s character, and if he saw any budding shoot which bespoke the maternal tree, to prune and train it to his own liking. For the sake of his unborn children he felt it his duty to carefully study any woman he thought to make his wife.
But when he reached home, the surprising intelligence awaited him that Miss Irving had left the metropolis. A brief note to the church authorities, resigning her position, and saying that she was about to leave the city, was all that anyone knew of her.
The rector inst.i.tuted a quiet search, but only succeeded in learning that she had conducted her preparations for departure with the greatest secrecy, and that to no one had she imparted her plans.
Whenever a young woman shrouds her actions in the garments of secrecy, she invites suspicion. The people who love to suspect their fellow-beings of wrong-doing were not absent on this occasion.
The rector was hurt and wounded by all this, and while he resented the intimation from another that Miss Irving"s conduct had been peculiar and mysterious, he felt it to be so in his own heart.
"Is it her mother"s tendency to adventure developing in her?" he asked himself.
Yet he wrote her a letter, directing it to her at the old number, thinking she would at least leave her address with the post-office for the forwarding of mail. The letter was returned to him from that cemetery of many a dear hope, the dead-letter office. A personal in a leading paper failed to elicit a reply. And then one day six months after the disappearance of Joy Irving, the young rector was called to the Cheney household to offer spiritual consolation to Miss Alice, who believed herself to be dying. She had been in a decline ever since the rector went away for his health.
Since his return she had seen him but seldom, rarely save in the pulpit, and for the last six weeks she had been too ill to attend divine service.
It was Preston Cheney himself, at home upon one of his periodical visits, who sent for the rector, and gravely met him at the door when he arrived, and escorted him into his study.
"I am very anxious about my daughter," he said. "She has been a nervous child always, and over-sensitive. I returned yesterday after an absence of some three months in California, to find Alice in bed, wasted to a shadow, and constantly weeping. I cannot win her confidence--she has never confided to me. Perhaps it is my fault; perhaps I have not been at home enough to make her realise that the relationship of father and daughter is a sacred one. This morning when I was urging her to tell me what grieved her, she remarked that there was but one person to whom she could communicate this sorrow-- her rector. So, my dear Dr Stuart, I have sent for you. I will conduct you to my child, and I leave her in your hands. Whatever comfort and consolation you can offer, I know will be given. I hope she will not bind you to secrecy; I hope you may be able to tell me what troubles her, and advise me how to help her."
It was more than an hour before the rector returned to the library where Preston Cheney awaited him. When the senator heard his approaching step, he looked up, and was startled to see the pallor on the young man"s face. "You have something sad, something terrible to tell me!" he cried. "What is it?"
The rector walked across the room several times, breathing deeply, and with anguish written on his countenance. Then he took Senator Cheney"s hand and wrung it. "I have an embarra.s.sing announcement to make to you," he said. "It is something so surprising, so unexpected, that I am completely unnerved."
"You alarm me, more and more," the senator answered. "What can be the secret which my frail child has imparted to you that should so distress you? Speak; it is my right to know."
The rector took another turn about the room, and then came and stood facing Senator Cheney.
"Your daughter has conceived a strange pa.s.sion for me," he said in a low voice. "It is this which has caused her illness, and which she says will cause her death, if I cannot return it."
"And you?" asked his listener after a moment"s silence.
"I? Why, I have never thought of your daughter in any such manner,"
the young man replied. "I have never dreamed of loving her, or winning her love."
"Then do not marry her," Preston Cheney said quietly. "Marriage without love is unholy. Even to save life it is unpardonable."
The rector was silent, and walked the room with nervous steps. "I must go home and think it all out," he said after a time. "Perhaps Miss Cheney will find her grief less, now that she has imparted it to me. I am alarmed at her condition, and I shall hope for an early report from you regarding her."
The report was made twelve hours later. Miss Cheney was delirious, and calling constantly for the rector. Her physician feared the worst.
The rector came, and his presence at once soothed the girl"s delirium.
"History repeats itself," said Preston Cheney meditatively to himself. "Alice is drawing this man into the net by her alarming physical condition, as Mabel riveted the chains about me when her mother died.
"But Alice really loves the rector, I think, and she is capable of a much stronger pa.s.sion than her mother ever felt; and the rector loves no other woman at least, and so this marriage, if it takes place, will not be so wholly wicked and unholy as mine was."
The marriage did take place three months later. Alice Cheney was not the wife whom Mrs Stuart would have chosen for her son, yet she urged him to this step, glad to place a barrier for all time between him and Joy Irving, whose possible return at any day she constantly feared, and whose power over her son"s heart she knew was undiminished.
Alice Cheney"s family was of the best on both sides; there were wealth, station, and honour; and a step-grandmamma who could be referred to on occasions as "The Baroness." And there was no skeleton to be hidden or excused.
And Arthur Stuart, believing that Alice Cheney"s life and reason depended upon his making her his wife, resolved to end the bitter struggle with his own heart and with fate, and do what seemed to be his duty, toward the girl and toward his mother. When the wedding took place, the saddest face at the ceremony, save that of the groom, was the face of the bride"s father. But the bride was radiant, and Mabel and the Baroness walked in clouds.
CHAPTER XVII
Alice did not rally in health or spirits after her marriage, as her family, friends and physician had antic.i.p.ated. She remained nervous, ailing and despondent.
"Should maternity come to her, she would doubtless be very much improved in health afterward," the doctor said, and Mabel, remembering how true a similar prediction proved in her case, despite her rebellion against it, was not sorry when she knew that Alice was to become a mother, scarcely a year after her marriage.
But Alice grew more and more despondent as the months pa.s.sed by; and after the birth of her son, the young mother developed dementia of the most hopeless kind. The best specialists in two worlds were employed to bring her out of the state of settled melancholy into which she had fallen, but all to no avail. At the end of two years, her case was p.r.o.nounced hopeless. Fortunately the child died at the age of six weeks, so the seed of insanity which in the first Mrs Lawrence was simply a case of "nerves," growing into the plant hysteria in Mabel, and yielding the deadly fruit of insanity in Alice, was allowed by a kind providence to become extinct in the fourth generation.
This disaster to his only child caused a complete breaking down of spirit and health in Preston Cheney.
Like some great, strongly coupled car, which loses its grip and goes plunging down an incline to destruction, Preston Cheney"s will-power lost its hold on life, and he went down to the valley of death with frightful speed.
During the months which preceded his death, Senator Cheney"s only pleasure seemed to be in the companionship of his son-in-law. The strong attachment between the two men ripened with every day"s a.s.sociation. One day the rector was sitting by the invalid"s couch, reading aloud, when Preston Cheney laid his hand on the young man"s arm and said: "Close your book and let me tell you a true story which is stranger than fiction. It is the story of an ambitious man and all the disasters which his realised ambition brought into the lives of others. It is a story whose details are known to but two beings on earth, if indeed the other being still exists on earth. I have long wanted to tell you this story--indeed, I wanted to tell it to you before you made Alice your wife, yet the fear that I would be wrecking the life and reason of my child kept me silent. No doubt if I had told you, and you had been influenced by my experience against a loveless marriage, I should to-day be blaming myself for her condition, which I see plainly now is but the culmination of three generations of hysterical women. But I want to tell you the story and urge you to use it as a warning in your position of counsellor and friend of ambitious young men.
"No matter what else a man may do for position, don"t let him marry a woman he does not love, especially if he crucifies a vital pa.s.sion for another, in order to do this." Then Preston Cheney told the story of his life to his son-in-law; and as the tale proceeded, a strange interest which increased until it became violent excitement, took possession of the rector"s brain and heart. The story was so familiar--so very familiar; and at length, when the name of BERENE DUMONT escaped the speaker"s lips, Arthur Stuart clutched his hands and clenched his teeth to keep silent until the end of the story came.
"From the hour Berene disappeared, to this very day, no word or message ever came from her," the invalid said. "I have never known whether she was dead or alive, married, or, terrible thought, perhaps driven into a reckless life by her one false step with me. This last fear has been a constant torture to me all these years.
"The world is cruel in its judgment of woman. And yet I know that it is woman herself who has shaped the opinions of the world regarding these matters. If men had had their way since the world began, there would be no virtuous women. Woman has realised this fact, and she has in consequence walled herself about with rules and conventions which have in a measure protected her from man. When any woman breaks through these conventions and errs, she suffers the scorn of others who have kept these self-protecting and society-protecting laws; and, conscious of their scorn, she believes all hope is lost for ever.
"The fear that Berene took this view of her one mistake, and plunged into a desperate life, has embittered my whole existence. Never before did a man suffer such a mental h.e.l.l as I have endured for this one act of sin and weakness. Yet the world, looking at my life of success, would say if it knew the story, "Behold how the man goes free." Free! Great G.o.d! there is no bondage so terrible as that of the mind. I have loved Berene Dumont with a changeless pa.s.sion for twenty-three years, and there has not been a day in all that time that I have not during some hours endured the agonies of the d.a.m.ned, thinking of all the disasters and misery that might have come into her life through me. Heaven knows I would have married her if she had remained. Strange and intricate as the net was which the devil wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and would have broken through it after that strange night--at once the heaven and the h.e.l.l of my memory--if Berene had remained. As it was--I married Mabel, and you know what a farce, ending in a tragedy, our married life has been. G.o.d grant that no worse woes befell Berene; G.o.d grant that I may meet her in the spirit world and tell her how I loved her and longed for her companionship."
The young rector"s eyes were streaming with tears, as he reached over and clasped the sick man"s hands in his. "You will meet her," he said with a choked voice. "I heard this same story, but without names, from Berene Dumont"s dying lips more than two years ago. And just as Berene disappeared from you--so her daughter disappeared from me; and, G.o.d help me, dear father--doubly now my father, I crushed out my great pa.s.sion for the glorious natural child of your love, to marry the loveless, wretched and UNNATURAL child of your marriage."