Lord Arleigh"s face flushed hotly.
"That," he replied, "is the Dower House, where my wife lives."
The earl looked with great interest at Lady Arleigh"s dwelling-place.
"It is very pretty," he said--"pretty and quiet; but it must be dull for a young girl. You said she was young, did you not?"
"Yes, she is years younger than I am," replied Lord Arleigh.
"Poor girl!" said the earl, pityingly; "it must be rather a sad fate--so young and beautiful, yet condemned all her life to live alone. Tell me, Arleigh, did you take advice before you separated yourself so abruptly from her?"
"No," replied Lord Arleigh, "I did not ever seek it; the matter appeared plain enough to me."
"I should not like you to think me curious," pursued the earl. "We are true friends now, and we can trust each other. You have every confidence in me, and I have complete faith in you. I would intrust to you the dearest secret of my heart. Arleigh, tell me what I know you have told to no human being--the reason of your separation from the wife you love."
Lord Arleigh hesitated for one half minute.
"What good can it possibly do?" he said.
"I am a great believer in the good old proverb that two heads are better than one," replied the earl. "I think it is just possible that I might have some idea that has not occurred to you; I might see some way out of the difficulty, that has not yet presented itself to you. Please yourself about it; either trust me or not, as you will; but if you do trust me, rely upon it I shall find some way of helping you."
"It is a hopeless case," observed Lord Arleigh, sadly. "I am quite sure that even if you knew all about it, you would not see any comfort for me. For my wife"s sake I hesitate to tell you, not for my own."
"Your wife"s secret will be as safe with me as with yourself," said the earl.
"I never thought that it would pa.s.s my lips, but I do trust you,"
declared Lord Arleigh; "and if you can see any way to help me, I shall thank Heaven for the first day I met you. You must hold my wife blameless, Lord Mountdean," he went on. "She never spoke untruthfully, she never deceived me; but on our wedding-day I discovered that her father was a convict--a man of the lowest criminal type."
Lord Mountdean looked as he felt, shocked.
"But how," he asked, eagerly, "could you be so deceived?"
"That I can never tell you; it was an act of fiendish revenge--cruel, ruthless, treacherous. I cannot reveal the perpetrator. My wife did not deceive me, did not even know that I had been deceived; she thought, poor child, that I was acquainted with the whole of her father"s story, but I was not. And now, Lord Mountdean, tell me, do you think I did wrong?"
He raised his care-worn, haggard face as he asked the question and the earl was disturbed at sight of the terrible pain in it.
Chapter x.x.xVII.
The reason of his separation from his wife revealed, Lord Arleigh again put the question:
"Do you think, Lord Mountdean, that I have done wrong?"
The earl looked at him.
"No," he replied, "I cannot say that you have."
"I loved her," continued Lord Arleigh, "but I could not make the daughter of a convict the mistress of my house, the mother of my children. I could not let my children point to a felon"s cell as the cradle of their origin. I could not sully my name, outrage a long line of n.o.ble ancestors, by making my poor wife mistress of Beechgrove. Say, if the same thing had happened to you, would you not have acted in like manner?"
"I believe that I should," answered the earl, gravely.
"However dearly you might love a woman, you could not place your coronet on the brow of a convict"s daughter," said Lord Arleigh. "I love my wife a thousand times better than my life, yet I could not make her mistress of Beechgrove."
"It was a cruel deception," observed the earl--"one that it is impossible to understand. She herself--the lady you have made your wife--must be quite as unhappy as yourself."
"If it be possible she is more so," returned Lord Arleigh; "but tell me, if I had appealed to you in the dilemma--if I had asked your advice--what would you have said to me?"
"I should have no resource but to tell you to act as you have done,"
replied the earl; "no matter what pain and sorrow it entailed you could not have done otherwise."
"I thought you would agree with me. And now, Mountdean, tell me, do you see any escape from my difficulty?"
"I do not, indeed," replied the earl.
"I had one hope," resumed Lord Arleigh; "and that was that the father had perhaps been unjustly sentenced, or that he might after all prove to be innocent. I went to see him--he is one of the convicts working at Chatham."
"You went to see him!" echoed the earl, in surprise.
"Yes; and I gave up all hope from the moment I saw him. He is simply a handsome reprobate. I asked him if it was true that he had committed the crime, and he answered me quite frank, "Yes." I asked him if there were any extenuating circ.u.mstances; he replied "want of money." When I had seen and spoken to him, I felt convinced that the step I had taken with regard to my wife was a wise one, however cruel it may have been. No man in his senses would voluntarily admit a criminal"s daughter into his family."
"No; it is even a harder case than I thought it," said the earl. "The only thing I can recommend is resignation."
Lord Mountdean thought that he would like to see the hapless young wife, and learn if she suffered as her husband did. He wondered too what she could be like, this convict"s daughter who had been gifted with a regal dower of grace and beauty--this lowly-born child of the people who had been fair enough to charm the fastidious Lord Arleigh.
Meanwhile Madaline was all unconscious of the strides that destiny was making in her favor. She had thought her husband"s letter all that was most kind; and, though she felt that there was no real grounds for it, she impressed upon her mother the need of the utmost reticence. Margaret Dornham understood from the first.
"Never have a moment"s uneasiness, Madaline," she said. "From the hour I cross your threshold until I leave, your father"s name shall never pa.s.s my lips."
It was a little less dreary for Madaline when her mother was with her.
Though they did not talk much, and had but few tastes alike, Margaret was all devotion, all attention to her child.
She was sadly at a loss to understand matters. She had quite expected to find Madaline living at Beechgrove--she could not imagine why she was alone in Winiston House. The arrangement had seemed reasonable enough while Lord Arleigh was abroad, but now that he had returned to England, why did he not come to his wife, or why did not she go to him? She could not understand it; and as Madaline volunteered no explanation, her mother asked for none.
But, when day after day she saw her daughter fading away--when she saw the fair face lose its color, the eyes their light--when she saw the girl shrink from the sunshine and the flowers, from all that was bright and beautiful, from all that was cheerful and exhilarating--she knew that her soul was sick unto death. She would look with longing eyes at the calm, resigned face, wishing with all her heart that she might speak, yet not daring to do so.
What seemed to her even more surprising[8] was that no one appeared to think such a state of things strange; and when she had been at Winiston some few weeks, she discovered that, as far as the occupants of the house were concerned, the condition of matters was not viewed as extraordinary. She offered no remark to the servants, and they offered none to her, but from casual observations she gathered that her daughter had never been to Beechgrove, but had lived at Winiston all her married life, and that Lord Arleigh had never been to visit her.
How was this? What did the terrible pain in her daughter"s face mean?
Why was her bright young life so slowly but surely fading away? She noted it for some time in silence, and then she decided to speak.
One morning when Madaline had turned with a sigh from the old-fashioned garden with its wilderness of flowers, Margaret said, gently:
"Madaline, I never hear you speak of the d.u.c.h.ess of Hazlewood who was so very kind to you. Does she never come to see you?"
She saw the vivid crimson mount to the white brow, to be speedily replaced by a pallor terrible to behold.