Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily

"Oh, Miss Berlin, why will you treat me so coldly when you know that I love the very ground you walk upon?" he exclaimed, almost abjectly.

"I do not want your love," she answered, stamping her little foot impatiently on the turf, as if the love he confessed for her lay veritably beneath her feet.

His weakly, handsome face grew pale at her impetuous words.

"Wait, Irene, before you so cruelly reject me," he exclaimed. "You are young, but not too young to know that it is wrong to trifle with the human heart."

"I have not trifled with yours," she interrupted, flushing at the imputation.

"But all the same your beauty has wiled my heart from me," he said. "I have loved you from the first hour I saw your charming face. I lay my heart, my hand, my fortune at your feet, Irene. Will you not take pity on me and be my wife?"

The flowers fell from her hands down upon the sweet, green turf, and her face grew pale with emotion. It was the first time a lover had ever wooed her, yet she was a wife—a wife unwooed and unwon—yet bound, how plainly she recalled the solemn, fateful words, by ties that no man "should put asunder."

She looked at the dark, handsome face that showed at its best with that light of love lingering on it. Between her and it another face arose, languid, careless, indifferent, yet fascinating for the soul that looked out of the bright, yet soft brown eyes. She remembered that she had thought him handsome—handsomer than any of Bertha's and Elaine's beaux—a flush rose slowly to her face as she remembered that she had told him so.

"No wonder he despised me," she said to herself, and she turned back to Mr. Revington trying to forget Guy Kenmore, for she was now ashamed of the willfulness and spite she had displayed before him.

"Will you be my wife, Irene?" repeated her adoring lover.

"I cannot, Mr. Revington. I do not love you," she answered, in a gentler tone than she had used to him before.

He threw himself impetuously at her feet and grasped her hands.

"Let me teach you to love me," he cried, abjectly.

Her crimson lips curled in faint scorn.

"I could not learn the lesson," she replied. "You are not the kind of man whom I could love," and again the handsome face of Guy Kenmore rose before her mind's eye.

"Why do I think of him?" she asked herself.

"What sort of a man could you love, Miss Berlin?" he asked, almost despairingly, and again the proud, handsome, indifferent face of Guy Kenmore rose tormentingly before her.

"Why do I think of him?" she asked herself again, in wonder, and forgetting to answer the question of the kneeling man. She had drawn her hand away from his frenzied clasp, and now he gently plucked at her dress to draw her attention.

"Irene, my love, my darling, my beautiful queen, take pity on me, and do not reject me," he cried, pleadingly. "Tell me what manner of man you could love, and I will make myself over by your model. I could do anything, be anything, for your sweet sake!"

Again the blue eyes looked at him in faint scorn, and the red lips curled.

"Do get up from the ground, Mr. Revington," she said. "It is quite undignified; I dislike it very much."

He was too much carried away by his passion to observe the slight inflection of scorn in her tone.

"No, I will not rise," he answered. "I will kneel at your feet, like the veriest slave, until you retract your cruel refusal, and give me leave to hope."

"But I cannot do so," she answered, more gently. "Do be reasonable, and drop the subject, Mr. Revington. It is quite impossible, this that you ask. I do not love you, and I cannot be your wife."

"You might learn to love me," he persisted, almost sullenly.

"Never. You do not realize my ideal," the girl replied, with an unconscious blush.

"Tell me what your ideal is like, Irene," said her kneeling lover.

"I have read some lines that fit him," she replied, half dreamily, half to herself, and still with that soft blush on her beautiful face. "I will repeat them to you."

Yet she seemed to have forgotten him, as she fixed her eyes on the blue, rolling waves of the Arno, and the words fell like music from her beautiful lips:

"He to whom I give affectionMust have princely mein and guise.If devotion lay below me,I would stoop not for the prizeBend down to me very lowly,But bend always from above;I would scorn where I could pity,I must honor where I love."Did he come as other loversWith his praises low and sweet,Did he woo in the old phrases,Kneeling humbly at my feet—How my heart would be unfettered,And my thoughts soar free and high,As a bird that beats at morning'Gainst the gateway of the sky."He must hold his perfect manhood,He must keep his place of pride;Bring me fond words as a lover,And true words as friend and guide.So in him my fate would meet me,Life's surrender all complete,Fearlessly I'd take my future,And I'd lay it at his feet!"

Her ideal lover, so unlike himself, sent a blush of shame tingling to his cheeks. He sprang hastily to his feet and looked down at her from his tall hight sullenly.

"You are unlike all the women I have ever met before," he said, with repressed anger. "You would have a man play the master, not the slave."

And in his heart he longed to be her master then and compel her love in return for that which glowed in his heart.

She looked up at him with a slight smile.

"You misunderstand me," she replied. "I could not tolerate a master as you mean it—a tyrant. Still less could I love a slave. My ideal must have manly dignity and gracious pride. He must look like Jean Ingelow's Laurance:

"'A mouth for mastery and manful work,A certain brooding sweetness in the eyes,A brow the harbor of grave thought, and hairSaxon of hue.'"

"So I must change my looks as well as my nature before I can please my lady," he said with sudden bitterness.

"Yes," she answered, with a light and careless laugh, for, to do her justice, she did not dream how deep his love lay in his heart. She believed him weak and fickle, as his face indicated, and as he was. If he had won her, lovely and charming as she was, he must have wearied of her in time, as it was his nature to do; but being unattainable she at once became the one thing precious in his sight, without which he could never know happiness.

He went away and left her to her solitude under the orange tree with its glistening green leaves, its waxen-white flowers and golden globes of fruit. She looked a little sadly at the flowers which had fallen from her hands and which her kneeling lover had crushed into the turf.

"The great booby," she said indignantly to herself. "He has remorselessly crushed all my beautiful flowers."

Was it an omen?

CHAPTER XXIII

Julius Revington went away from the presence of the girl he adored, cast down but not destroyed.

He had set his mind doggedly on winning her and he was by no means despondent of winning her yet.

His grosser, weaker nature could not comprehend the higher, loftier nature of Irene. Her gentle intimation of how he fell short of her ideal had not greatly impressed him except to fill him with a certain amount of sullen jealousy toward some unknown person or other whom it was evident existed in her mind, and possibly in flesh and blood upon the earth.

"Perhaps she has already given her heart away," he thought to himself. "But, no, she is too young. That cannot be."

As he walked slowly along the path toward the villa something bright and shining on the ground attracted his attention. He stooped and picked it up.

A cry of eager surprise broke from his lips.

It was the pretty, blue-enamelled locket that Irene usually wore around her white throat.

It had become detached from the slender gold chain and fallen on the ground without her knowledge.

Julius Revington had endured many pangs of baffled curiosity over this locket, of whose contents he had heard much from the ladies but which he had never had the good fortune to behold.

Pausing now in the quiet, secluded path, he deliberately touched the spring of the pretty bauble.

The lid flew open, and there before him under the soft light of the Italian sky that sifted down through the glistening leaves of the orange trees, were revealed the handsome faces of old Ronald Brooke and his daughter.

A hoarse cry broke from Julius Revington's lips, his face whitened, a cold dew started out upon his brow.

"My God," he said, and sank down upon a bed of flowers as if totally overcome.

With starting eyes he looked at the kind, genial, manly face of the old man, and then at the fair, almost angelic face of Elaine. An uncontrollable shudder shook his form.

"Father and daughter!" he said, under his breath.

Sitting there in the balmy air with the soft murmur of the waves in his ears, he relapsed into thought. Minutes went silently by, bringing a subtle change into the man's face. His cheeks glowed, his downcast eyes sparkled.

"A master rather than a slave," he muttered at last with an evil triumph in his tone; "so be it."

Slowly rising, he retraced his steps to Irene.

He met her coming along the path toward him, her fair face anxious and troubled.

"Oh, Mr. Revington," she cried, "I have lost the locket off my chain! Have you seen it anywhere?"

He held it up to the light, and her sweet face glowed with joy.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Revington," she cried, "I am so glad! I feared I had lost it forever!"

"I am very glad to have the good fortune to restore it to you," he said; "it lay directly in my path as I was returning to the villa."

"I am so glad," she repeated, kissing it as if it had been some sentient thing. "You see, Mr. Revington, it was a gift to me from one who is now dead—one whom I loved—dearly," she concluded, with a falter in her voice and a mist of tears in her eyes.

"Miss Berlin, will you pardon me if I ask you what may seem an impertinent question?" he asked.

She brushed the soft dew from her eyes with her lace handkerchief, and looked up at him with her soft, wondering glance.

"Well?" she said.

He did not look at her in return; his shifting eyes fell to the ground, as was their wonted habit.

"When I found the locket lying on the ground the lid was open. I saw the two faces it held," he said, in a strange, hesitating voice.

"Well?" she repeated, gravely, while a flush rose over her fair face.

"They—were not strange to me," he replied; "I was startled when I saw whose were the faces you wore always over your heart. Miss Berlin, will you tell me what that man and woman are to you?"

He saw her start and shiver—saw the warm crimson flash into her face, then recede again, leaving it deathly pale and cold. She clasped her hands over the locket, pressing it tightly to her beating heart, while she answered hoarsely and with downcast eyes:

"I cannot tell you, Mr. Revington; it is a secret, and that secret belongs to another. I have no right to reveal it."

CHAPTER XXIV

Julius Revington stood looking in silence at the beautiful, agitated girl as she repeated, sadly:

"The secret belongs to another. I have no right to reveal it."

"Is it a secret of shame?" Julius Revington asked, slowly.

Irene started, and flashed a look of anger upon him through her tear-wet lashes.

"You are impertinent," she said, sharply; "you have no right to seek to penetrate the secret of my past!"

"I have the same right as the physician who probes the wound to heal it," he replied, coolly.

"You!—you can heal no wound of mine!" she flashed, almost disdainfully.

"You think so, but you are wrong," said Julius Revington. "Sit down, Miss Berlin, I have much to say to you. It is for your own good that you should listen to it."

The earnestness of his tone impressed Irene against her will. She sat down slowly on the soft, green grass, still with a mutinous pout on her lips, and her eyes turned coldly away from him.

Mr. Revington seated himself also, and glanced carefully around, to make sure that no one was in hearing distance of himself and his fair companion.

"I see that you have no faith in my power of making an interesting communication to you," he said, addressing himself to Irene.

"No, I cannot imagine your telling me anything I should like to hear," she retorted, coldly.

An angry light flared into the man's dark eyes a moment, but he bit his lip to keep back a sharp rejoinder. Her willfulness, her pretty petulances, had an actual fascination for him.

"Such an answer from any one but you, Miss Berlin, would be actual rudeness," he said, lightly. "But whether frowning or smiling you are ever charming to me. You remind me of nothing so much as one of Tennyson's heroines, 'a rosebud set with little willful thorns.'"

She answered not a word. Her fair face was averted, and her blue eyes gazed at the silvery Arno softly gliding past.

"You have been a beautiful, enchanting mystery to me ever since I met you," he continued, slowly. "I have wondered whence you came and to whom you belonged, but with no hope of unsealing your beautiful lips or the secret they held so close. But chance—or shall I call it fate?—has solved the mystery for me."

She turned her head and looked at him suddenly, her blue eyes dark with fear and wonder.

"What can you mean?" she exclaimed.

"I mean that when I came upon your picture in your locket just now the mystery of your identity was solved for me," he replied, coolly, glad that he had roused her at last.

"I do not understand you," she said through her lips that had suddenly grown white and trembling.

A slight smile curved Julius Revington's mustached lips, as he saw how much he had startled her.

"Master rather than slave," he repeated to himself, vindictively, for that was the way he interpreted her eloquent description of her ideal.

"I told you the faces were not strange to me," he said. "Shall I tell you their names?"

"You cannot," she returned, miserably.

"Do not deceive yourself," he retorted. "The old man is Ronald Brooke, the beautiful woman is his daughter, Elaine."

A startled cry broke from her lips, she flashed her eyes upon him in a swift, horrified gaze, a terrible suspicion darting through her heart.

"You know her?" she cried out, hoarsely.

His answer dispelled the horrible dread that had clutched at her heart with icy fingers.

"No, I have never met her in my life, but I have seen her picture before," he said.

She gave a gasp of relief. It had been horrible to fancy for a moment that this man whom she despised in her heart could be her mother's betrayer.

"You have seen her picture before?" she repeated. "Where?"

"It depends on yourself whether I ever answer that question or not," he said.

"On me?" she asked, with some wonder.

"Yes," he replied; "for if I should answer that question it would involve a long story. Before I tell it to you I shall expect to receive a like confidence from you."

She shut her lips tightly over her little clenched teeth, and he saw the blue eyes flash mutinously.

"You refuse?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied, dauntlessly. "You have startled and surprised me and I know not how much you know of me and my past. But at least you will never learn more from me."

He could not forbear a glance of annoyance.

"Miss Berlin, you are certainly the most willful child I ever saw," he exclaimed. "What good can it do you to refuse to tell me what relationship you bear to Ronald Brooke and his daughter?"

CHAPTER XXV

Irene raised her large blue eyes to Mr. Revington's face. They were full of anguish and despair.

"I have told you already that the secret is not mine to reveal," she said.

"Then I must answer my own question," he replied, with a swift glance around him to make sure that he was not overheard; "you are Elaine Brooke's illegitimate daughter!"

A low cry of bitterness and despair shrilled from her lips. It confirmed his hazardous guess.

"You cannot deny it!" he uttered, triumphantly.

"My God, are you man or devil, Julius Revington?" she exclaimed. "How came you by this knowledge?"

"In a perfectly natural manner," he answered, coolly. "The story of your mother's past is better known to me than to yourself, Irene."

She could not speak for a moment. A hand of ice seemed to grip her throat, her brain reeled, the sound of the river came to her faintly as in a dream. The hot color rushed to her face and her lashes fell. She could not look at this man who held the story of her mother's past—that secret so full of shame and sorrow.

"I know it far better than you do; better than she does," he repeated. "Do not hang your head so heart-brokenly, Irene. You have nothing to blush for."

"Nothing," she echoed, bitterly.

"No," he said, "I can tell you good news, little one. But first raise your head and look at me. I want to see the joylight flash into your eyes when you hear what I have to tell you."

She obeyed him, lifting her sweet eyes in wonder, with half-parted crimson lips that seemed to ask mutely what joy life could yet hold for her.

"You have nothing to blush for," he repeated. "Your mother was a lawfully wedded wife. You are not the child of shame as you have been taught to believe."

"Can I believe you?" she exclaimed, and he was dazzled by the flash of joy in her eyes.

"You may, for it is true, and I can produce proofs of what I say," he answered. "Your mother has been fearfully wronged, but it lies in my power to restore her to her rights again."

"God forever bless you, Mr. Revington, if you can lift the cloud of sorrow from the hearts and lives of a wronged woman and her child," exclaimed the lovely girl, fervently.

"It rests with you, Irene, whether I do so or not," he replied, flashing a look of admiration on her beautiful, agitated face.

"With me!" she echoed, blankly.

"You are the daughter of a wealthy, high-born, noble gentleman, who would be delighted to claim you if he knew that you lived, and who would rejoice to clasp your mother to his devoted heart," said Mr. Revington, watching her closely as he uttered the words. Her eyes beamed, her face glowed with joy; then suddenly a shadow fell on its brightness.

"You are deceiving me?" she said.

"No, I swear that I am not," he asseverated. "I can prove what I say, and I am ready to do so—on one condition!"

"And that?" she asked, innocently.

His shifting gaze fell before that eager, hopeful, unconscious look, but he answered, boldly:

"That you be my wife, Irene."

"I have told you that was impossible," she answered, growing suddenly pale to the lips.

"Why?" he inquired, chagrined at the prompt reply.

"I do not love you," she replied, evasively.

"Granted that you do not," he said, selfishly, "is your hand too great a price to pay to secure to your mother ease, honor, end happiness?"

She had no answer for him only an irrepressible moan of pain that broke uncontrollably over her white lips. Her thoughts went back to poor, patient, badgered Elaine, and her hard life at Bay View—harder now than ever, she guessed, since her father was dead, and she was left to the tender mercies of her mother and sister.

"Dear mother, how gladly I would purchase this man's knowledge, even at the bitter price he asks, for your dear sake, if only it were possible," she thought to herself with a pang like death at her heart, as she recalled her fatal marriage.

Julius Revington, watching the mute anguish on her speaking face, saw that it was no time to press the question.

"Do not answer me now, Irene," he said, with ready gentleness. "Take time to think it over. Revolve it in your mind to-night in soberness and calmness. Ask yourself if you do not owe this duty to your poor, wronged mother. How sweet it would be for her child to restore to her all she has lost."

"You are cruel and calculating," she said, indignantly. "Why should you ask such a costly price for doing this kindness to my poor, martyred mother?"

"Because I love you, and in no other way can I win you," he answered, boldly.

Her beautiful eyes flashed scornfully upon him.

"Would you take a reluctant and unloving bride?" she asked.

"I would take you on any terms, Irene," he replied.

She looked up at him and asked the strangest question that could possibly fall from a daughter's lips:

"Mr. Revington, will you tell me the name of my father?"

The piteous sadness of the tone, and the pathos of the question must have touched the heart of a better man.

But Julius Revington was thoroughly hard and selfish.

"You have never heard his name, then?" he said.

"Never," she replied. "Will you tell it to me now?"

"Not yet," he replied, cruelly. "I will reserve that pleasant bit of information for our marriage day."

She flashed a sudden, piercing glance upon him.

"You are deceiving me," she said. "You are trying to win me by a pretended knowledge of facts that do not exist."

"On my honor, no," he replied. "I admit that I am selfish, and that I am using the knowledge I possess to gain my own ends, but on the morning that you give me your hand in marriage I swear that I will place in your hands the documents that will prove your mother a lawfully-wedded wife, and give you a legal right to your father's name and wealth. Moreover, I assure you that no one will be more surprised or rejoiced than your father himself on learning the truth."

"And what if I refuse to marry you? she asked, fearfully.

"If you refuse," he replied, cruelly, "the cloud of shame shall never be lifted from your mother's life and yours. Nay, more, I will go to the Stuarts and your good friend, Mrs. Leslie, and I will tell them why you choose to make a mystery of your past. Consent to marry me, and on our wedding-day I will prove you the legal inheritor of an honorable name and a great fortune. I will give you until to-morrow to decide the question."

He rose with the words and walked abruptly away.

CHAPTER XXVI

Irene remained sitting like one stunned on the banks of the beautiful river.

Her white hands clasped each other convulsively in her lap, her head drooped on her breast, she stared blankly and dreamily before her, seeming lost to the beauty of the fair Italian scene, and deaf to the soft sounds that filled the air with a pleasant murmur.

Heart and brain were in a terrible tumult.

Her head ached and throbbed almost to bursting, her heart beat fast and hard in her breast.

The joy and triumph she would have experienced in the knowledge of her poor mother's innocence and honor were all damped by the thought of the costly price she was required to pay before she could have the happiness of bearing the glad tidings to the wronged, unhappy woman.

With deepest self-reproach the girl recalled her own frenzied reproaches to that beautiful, sorrow-stricken parent on the fatal night when she had been so maddened by the revelation of the angry Bertha. She looked back as though years had intervened upon the Irene of that summer night as a rude, impertinent, willful child.

"Is it any wonder my mother left me to the death I courted in my wild despair?" she thought. "How could I, who should have soothed sorrow, turned upon her so cruelly? Poor, unhappy Ellie, as I used to call her, what sorrows may she not be enduring now? What insolence, what cruelty, at the hands of her overbearing mother and sister? Even I, her child, did not spare her my reproaches in her dark hour, and how should they who love her less than I did?"

In the flood-tide of remorseful affection that swept over her heart, she longed to go home to her mother, to take her in her arms, and say, lovingly: "Mother, darling, you and your husband were both cruelly wronged. Here are the papers that will prove your wifely honor. Take them and forgive me my wicked reproaches."

Alas, between her and that beautiful hour which fancy painted so glowingly, there yawned a dread, impassable gulf!

"Even if I could consent to pay Julius Revington's terrible price for those papers, I could not do so. I am already wedded," she said to herself; and her heart thrilled strangely at the thought.

The remembrance of his threat sent a shiver of dread thrilling through her frame. To-morrow he would tell Mrs. Leslie and the Stuarts that she was a child of shame; that her beautiful, pure-hearted mother was a sinful, erring woman. How should she bear it? she asked herself, with a moan.