Chapter Twelve
In which a Strange Thing Happens
“If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller,” I said, looking into her tearful eyes. “You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me – and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I did. I was hers – body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman’s hands – to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me – you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory.”
“Yes,” she answered, with a slight sigh, “I quite understand how you must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have been Ella’s lover – the man who she declared to me was the only one she would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to lie to you under compulsion.”
“But why – why did she consent to do this?” I asked.
“She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father, owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds on the day that he married Ella.”
“Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!” I cried.
“Without a doubt. And what a sacrifice! She loved you, Mr Leaf, and yet she dismissed you in order to save her father from ruin.”
“Blumenthal was a brute to have ever suggested such a condition,” I declared savagely. “I never saw him. What kind of man was he? Did you meet him?”
“Yes. He was at Porchester Terrace on the afternoon when I called,” she replied. “A short, stout, black-whiskered man, of a decidedly Hebrew cast. He was dressed loudly and wore a white waistcoat with heavy gold albert – a typical City man such as one sees in Cornhill or Lothbury.”
“She showed no sign of affection towards him?”
“None whatever. He was introduced to me by Mr Murray as Ella’s affianced husband, and I was, of course, amazed that she should entertain a spark of affection for him. But half an hour later, when we were alone, she confessed in tears everything to me, just as I have related it to you.”
“Well, you utterly astound me,” was all I could exclaim.
What she had revealed to me placed my little Ella in an entirely new light. I never dreamed of her self-martyrdom. I sighed heavily, and a big lump arose in my throat as I reflected that, perhaps, after all death was preferable to life with a man whom she could not love.
The calm twilight was deepening into night, and the silence was broken only by the low murmuring of the water, the swift swish of some rat or water-hen in the rushes startled at our presence, and the dismal cry of a night-bird in the willows on the opposite bank.
“Did you hear nothing more of Ella after that day at Porchester Terrace – that 12th of November that was, alas! fatal to my happiness?”
“She wrote to me twice. One letter I received in Rome a month afterwards, and the second followed me about some weeks, and at last found me at Lindau, on the Lake of Constance. Both letters were full of her own unhappiness. In the first she reproached herself bitterly for having lied to the man she really loved – though she never mentioned your name – and said that she was back at Wichenford, but for her the world was dead. The man whom she had dismissed had left her in disgust and despair and had gone abroad, whither she knew not. A friend of yours had, it seemed, told her that you had gone to Algeria, and her letter concluded with the words: ‘I am alone to blame for this, yet how could I, in the circumstances, have acted otherwise?’”
“And the second letter?” I asked eagerly.
“It was written a month later, from Blumenthal’s shooting-box near Blair Athol. She and her father were guests there at the great house-party consisting mostly of wealthy City men and their wives. She described it and said how she hated it all. She had, she told me, tried to escape. She had even thought of writing to you to tell you the truth and ask your counsel, yet what use was it when she knew that she must save her father from the ruin that threatened. Wichenford Place had been the home of the Murrays ever since the days of James the First, when the King himself, granted it to his faithful partisan, Donald Murray of Parton, in Dumfriesshire. No Murray had ever before mortgaged it, therefore it was clearly her duty to her family to redeem it from the hands of usurers and vandals, even at cost of her own happiness.”
“A noble sacrifice!” I sighed.
“Yes, Mr Leaf. She was a noble girl,” declared my handsome companion. “I, who knew her through ten years or so, knew her, perhaps, better than even you yourself did. The Little Madonna was never accused of an unkind or unjust action.”
“And after that letter?”
“A few months later she came to visit us at Enghien. She and her father were in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau. But she made no mention of Blumenthal. Afterwards we were continually moving from place to place, and if she wrote, her letter never reached me. I heard no more.”
A long deep silence fell between us. We were still standing there in the grey twilight at a small gate that led into the next field, our path still continuing beside the stream.
“Strange that it should be I who should tell you the truth,” she remarked, almost as though speaking to herself. “You, a perfect stranger, offered to do me a service – indeed you have done me a very great service by restoring that letter to me – and in return, I have been able to tell you the truth regarding your lost love,” and she looked into my face with her sad, serious eyes.
“Yes, it is indeed curious,” I said. “Our circumstances are, in a measure, identical. We have both been the victims of dire misfortunes, both broken by the tragedy of an unhappy love. But you have told me hardly anything concerning yourself,” I added.
The laces of her muslin blouse rose slowly and fell again. In that dim light I detected a hardness at the corners of her mouth, a hardness that, to me, was all-sufficient proof of the bitterness wearing out her young heart.
“Myself!” she echoed sadly. “What need I say about myself? It is of the past, and the memory of it all is a very bitter one. Like you, I believed that happiness was to be mine, the more so, because my father entirely approved of our union. He made confidential inquiries concerning him, and found that he was all that he represented himself to be. But love and happiness were not for me. I, alas! am one of those who are debarred the sweetness of life,” she added hoarsely, her small white hands clenching themselves, as thoughts of the past crowded upon her.
For some time we were again silent. I was anxious to know the truth of the love romance of my sweet-faced little friend – the girl whom Sammy had denounced as an adventuress. Yet surely there was nothing of the adventuress about her as she stood there in her plain white frock amid that purely English scene. I glanced at her countenance and saw that it was pale and agitated, and that her nervous lips were trembling. Her chin had sunk upon her breast and she stood deep in thought as though unconscious of my presence.
“Where did it occur? Here?”
“No, abroad,” she answered, in a thin, mechanical voice. “I met him when we were living at Enghien, and from the first moment of our meeting we discovered that by some strange magnetism we were drawn irresistibly together. He was a foreigner, it is true, but his mother had been English, and his father was a Chilian.”
“Chilian!” I cried, in a voice of surprise. But she never guessed the reason of my amazement.
“Yes. My father discovered that we met in secret, and then invited him to dine with us. From that evening he came daily out from Paris, and we used to spend each afternoon boating on the lake or playing tennis on the island. Before long we had pledged our love, and then commenced days of bliss such as I had never before experienced. I knew at last what was meant by perfect happiness, for we adored each other. I loved him just as dearly as Ella loved you. I would have died for him. Yet in all too short a time the blow fell upon me – the blow that has crushed all life from me, that has already made me a world-weary woman before my time.”
“And what was the end?” I asked with deep sympathy, yet, alas! knowing too well the story of the tragedy.
“The end – ah?” she sighed. “How can I tell you? On the very night when we had secretly fixed the date of our marriage – a night when my father invited several friends to dine – he returned to Paris, and – ” but she broke off short and burst into a wild passion of tears.
For some time I waited, my hand placed tenderly upon her shoulder, striving to comfort her, and urging her to bear up against her heavy burden of trouble. Then at last when she grew calm again, she said in a hard tone: —
“On his return to Paris he found that during his absence thieves had obtained access to his room at the hotel, and securities for a very large amount, for the safe custody of which he was personally responsible, had been stolen. He saw that his own honour was at stake, that he alone was to blame for not leaving them in the bank, and in a fit of despondency – a mad paroxysm of temporary insanity – he took out his revolver and ended his life. I only knew of it four days after, when I chanced to read of it in the Indépendance Belge, for early on the morning following the dinner, my father had received a telegram and been compelled to go to Brussels, and I accompanied him. Before I knew the awful truth, poor Manuel was already dead and buried! Since that day,” she added bitterly, “all hope of happiness has been crushed within me. I know now that the love of an honest man is not for me.”
I made no response. I was too absorbed in my own thoughts. Every word of hers bore out Sammy’s story, yet I saw that she herself was innocent of the foul plot which had, as a sequel, the suicide of the poor girl’s lover.
Miller knew the truth; he was, indeed, in all probability the instigator of the ingenious theft that had had such a tragic sequel.
In silence I held the small gate open for her, and together we passed on along the path beside the winding stream. Both our hearts were too full for words after that unusual exchange of confidences.
Of a sudden before us, advancing in our direction, there appeared the figure of some one in the shadow beneath the trees.
Lucie detected it at the same instant as myself, and halting drew back in quick alarm.
“We must not be seen here together,” she gasped. “People would talk, and it would quickly get to my father’s ears.”
“And what harm if it did?” I asked, but ere she could reply a strange thing happened – an incident more startling and more amazing than any I could have ever imagined in my wildest dreams.
I held my breath, and stood rooted to the spot.
Chapter Thirteen
Beneath the Love-Light
What followed was amazing, mystifying.
With a loud cry that startled me the grey figure had come swiftly towards us, and I then saw that it was a woman.
My companion and she flew into each other’s arms and exchanged wild joyful greetings, while I, catching sight of her face, stood there open-mouthed, breathless in sheer astonishment.
At that moment I doubted whether I were actually sane and in possession of all my senses. I doubted even my own eyes. And had you been there, in my place, I think you also would have been dumbfounded.
“Fancy you – of all persons in this whole world!” Lucie cried, then turning to me after kissing the newcomer with wild enthusiasm, she laughed, adding: —
“This gentleman is not altogether a stranger, I believe?”
The woman turned her flushed countenance to mine, and in the dim twilight our eyes met.
She started back with a loud cry, then, next instant, dashed forward to me, grasping both my hands.
“Ella!” I ejaculated. It was all I could say.
“Godfrey! – you?”
And she looked from me to Lucie inquiringly, for having met us walking at that hour by that lonely brook she doubtless believed us to be lovers.
“I am Godfrey Leaf,” I said, grasping both her hands. “Yes, I cannot realise that you are really Ella – my own Ella – from the grave?” And I still stood there stupefied.
“From the grave? What do you mean?” she asked, surprised.
“They told me that you were dead,” I cried quickly. “They said that you had caught typhoid, and that it ended fatally.”
“It is true that I had a bad attack of fever, and the doctors gave me up, yet somehow – I suppose by the perverseness of Fate, because I had no further desire to live – I recovered. But you were abroad constantly, and therefore heard nothing of me.”
“I was in Russia when I received news of your death, Ella,” I said in a low voice, for there, in the presence of my love, I had become a changed man. “I have mourned for you until to-day.”
“I had no idea of this!” she exclaimed. “I have been living in Ireland with my father. I have scarcely ever been in London since – since that night when we parted,” she faltered, lowering her eyes, as though fearing to meet my reproachful gaze.
“And how came you here?” Lucie asked, as amazed as I was at her appearance.
“We came over from Bournemouth to Swanage this afternoon, and it suddenly occurred to me to come and see if you were in England. I wanted to see the dear old Manor again – the house where you and I have spent so many very happy hours long ago. Minton did not recognise me at first, but when he did he told me that you had gone out to the village two hours ago. I then made inquiries as to the direction you had taken, and fortunately found you here.”
“Then your father is now at Swanage?”
“Yes. We are staying the night there. To-night a motor-car belonging to a friend of my father’s is coming from Winchester to take us for a trip through Devonshire and Cornwall.”
“Well, Ella, you certainly gave us both a turn, appearing so suddenly,” declared Lucie. “Only half an hour ago we were speaking of you, and, like every one else, believed that you were dead.”
“I wonder who started such a report?” she said. “Why did they say that I had died?”
“To trace the source of a false report is always difficult,” I said. “Somebody surmises something and tells some one else, and the second person, in recounting it, declares the surmise to be the truth. It is almost always so.”
“There certainly could be no motive in saying that Ella was dead, as far as I can see,” Lucie declared. “But,” she added, “why let us worry about the past? You have come back to us – back really from the grave.”
“Yes,” I said, still holding her hand. “I believed, Ella, that you were dead long ago. The memory of that last night when we walked through the wet streets of Bayswater has ever remained a bitter one.”
“No, no,” she cried. “Do not recall it. I, too, have suffered agonies of regret. Why is it that we meet again – like this?” and I noted that her splendid eyes were turned upon her friend in askance.
Yes. She suspected that Lucie and I were lovers, and such a conclusion was, after all, but natural.
“You are surprised, no doubt, to meet us together,” laughed Lucie. “But if you knew the truth regarding our acquaintance you would be even more surprised.”
“Then Godfrey is not – ”
“He is certainly not my lover,” she exclaimed. “I may as well make that quite clear to you at once, dear. We came here because he had something to explain to me, and we naturally had no desire that the villagers should gossip.”
My Ella turned again to me, and I saw that all anxiety had faded from her beautiful countenance. She was sweet and smiling – her old delightful self again.
What had happened in those years I knew not. My love might be married, for aught I knew. She wore gloves, therefore I could not tell if her hand bore a wedding ring. She made no mention of Blumenthal, and I could not well inquire of him. So we were both of us somewhat restrained, neither knowing of the exact position of the other.
I only knew that all the great passion I had entertained for her swelled within my heart, filling it to overflowing. The touch of her had thrilled me and I longed to kiss those sweet red lips once again – to repeat to her my love and to assure her that I was still unchanged.
But with Lucie present I could say nothing. I could ask no question, nor could I make any declaration. Yet in those few moments I had been lifted from the depths of despair and despondency to the pinnacle of happiness.
Ella, my well-beloved, still lived! And while she lived she was still mine in heart, even though, perish the thought, she might be wife of another.
Darkness was now falling, yet there was still sufficient light to reveal her wondrous beauty. As she stood before me in her pale grey dress and large black hat I recognised that she had grown even more beautiful than she had been in the days of our love romance. Her figure was perfect in its symmetry; her countenance so lovely that even the uncommon beauty of Lucie paled before her. Those blue eyes that I knew were so unfathomable were turned upon me, and even there I saw in them the love-light that was unmistakable, that expression mysterious and indescribable that no woman is ever able to feign – the look, often unconscious, that tells a man that he is the object of passionate affection.
My heart leapt within me with wild ecstasy, yet I could not speak.
I only grasped her hand more tightly. Then in order to cover the emotion that I saw was rising within her, I turned and made a casual remark to Lucie that it was almost time we returned.
“Of course,” she said quickly, recognising the situation. “You two have much to talk over alone. Let us go.”
And together we moved forward along the path by, which my lost love had returned to me.
How can I describe to you my feelings in those moments? Sometimes I found myself doubting whether it was not all some dream or some strange chimera of my unbalanced brain. But I held her hand, and found that it was real flesh and blood. My well-beloved still lived; she for whom I had mourned so long had returned, even more sweet and beautiful.
The village bells were pealing, the ringers practising probably.
“Hark!” I said, as I walked at her side, treading on air from sheer buoyancy of spirits. “They are joy bells, Ella. They ring because you have returned to me.” She laughed, turning those dear, wide-open eyes to mine, and said: —
“How often have I wondered where you were, and whether – ” and she paused without completing the sentence.
“Whether what?”
“Well – whether you had, after all, forgotten me,” she said. “I never dreamed that you believed me dead. I thought, of course, that if you really loved me, as you used to say, that you would surely write to me or endeavour to see me when you knew that, after all, I had not married that man.”
“Then you did not marry Blumenthal after all!” I cried quickly. “Was the engagement broken off?”
“Yes. Because of his ill-health. He released me when the doctors told him the truth – that he had only a few months to live. He died three months later.” And she grew silent again, and yet it seemed as if she wished to tell me something further. Indeed she was about to do so, but checked herself.
“Well!” I asked, in order to allow her an opportunity to speak.
“He was generous to me after all,” she went on. “The day before he died he sent for me, and I went and sat at his bedside. He knew his end was near, and after he had expressed deep regret that he had come between us – for he knew quite well that I loved you very dearly – he drew from beneath his pillow a large sealed envelope, making me promise to take it home, but not to open it until the day after his decease. Next day he died, and on the day following I broke the seals and discovered, to my amazement and joy, that he had presented me with the mortgage deeds of Wichenford. Some years before my father had mortgaged our old home to him, and those very deeds he had made my price as his wife.”
“Then for the great injustice he did you, Ella, the fellow endeavoured to atone,” I said. “The mortgage, therefore, does not now exist.”
“Of course not. I gave the deeds at once to my father, and they were that day destroyed, much to the chagrin of the heirs of the estate, who had long been scheming to become possessors of Wichenford.”
“A most generous action,” Lucie declared.
“Yes, whatever I may have said of him, and however much I have hated him in the past, I cannot help acknowledging that before his death he rendered me the greatest service.”
“Yet you were prepared to perform a noble self-sacrifice, Ella,” I said, in a low, serious voice. “You kept your secret, and before we parted told me what was untrue. But Lucie has revealed to me the astounding truth. Only to-night, for the first time, have I realised all that your self-martyrdom meant – only to-night have I discovered that, after all, you still loved me just as fondly and with a passion just as fierce as my own – that even though engaged to Blumenthal your dear heart was still my own.”