A Mad Marriage by May Agnes Fleming (mini ebook reader .TXT) 📕

marriage certificate, the record of his baptism, his father’s brief,

terse confession of his own marriage to the Galway girl, under the name

of Dennison. He read them all gravely and tied them up again.

“Poor soul,” he thought, “it was hard lines on her. No, my Lord

Dynely, you did harm enough in your lifetime; we won’t let you do any

more in your grave.”

He rose up, went to the open window and smoked away meditatively. What

was Crystal doing? Ah, asleep no doubt, little darling, his ring on her

finger and thoughts of him in her heart. He would go down to-morrow, and

tell her what had been in his heart so long. He could see the dear

little face, dimpling and smiling, and blushing, hear the dear little

voice faltering forth its tender confession, and Terry’s whole soul was

in one glow of love and gratitude and rapture. How happy he would make

her life, how devotedly he would cherish his little stainless lily, how

sweet it would be to care for her, and devote his whole existence to

her. Yes, to-morrow he would go down, and before Christmas they would be

married, and then—well, Terry was not imaginative—and then they would

live happy forever after.

Mr. Dennison was not an early riser. The early bird that catches the

worm was no kin of his. All the clocks and watches of Dynely were

sharply marking the hour of one, when, in freshest morning toilet,

shaven and shorn, he presented himself before Lady Dynely.

“My dear Lady Dynely,” he began, and there stopped.

Good Heaven! what a ghastly, terrified face he saw. White with a pallor

like death, lips blue and parched, eyes haggard and hopeless. She had

slept not at all—she had spent the whole night in fevered pacing to and

fro, half maddened at the thought of what she had done, of what might

be. The world would know. Eric would know—there lay the bitterness of

death. Terry was generous, but to her the generosity that would hide

this from the world looked more than mortal.

She stood up and confronted him, one hand holding by her chair, her

haggard eyes fixed upon his face. So might look a terrified woman

waiting for sentence of death. She tried to speak—her dry lips

trembled, only a husky sound came.

He was by her side in a moment, holding both hands fast in his, full of

pity and remorse. How she had suffered. Why had he kept her in suspense

even for a single night? How little she knew him, when she could fear

him like this. It gave him a pang of absolute pain.

“Lady Dynely—my dearest mother—you did not think I could ever use the

secret you told me last night? If you did, then you have certainly

wronged me. I loved you too well, Eric too well, ever to dream of such

shameful, selfish ingratitude. Look here!”

He drew out the packet, took a match, struck it, and touched it to a

corner of the paper, then threw it in the grate.

She uttered a gasping cry—a cry he never forgot—then stood spellbound.

With fascinated eyes both watched the paper shrivel, then blaze up, then

a cloud of black drift floated up the chimney, and the record of the

Irish marriage was at an end.

“With that ends our secret,” Terry said. “Living or dying, a word of

what you told me will never pass my lips.”

She fell heavily forward, her arms around his neck, her face on his

shoulder, shaking from head to foot with dry, hysterical sobbing. He

held her close; neither spoke a word, and there were tears big and

bright in Terry’s round blue eyes. Then very gently he put her back in

her chair and knelt down before her.

“Don’t,” he said, pleadingly; “it hurts me to hear you. How could you

think I would do what you feared? What a wretch you must have thought

me.”

“A wretch! Oh, my Terry, my Terry! You are more an angel than a man!”

Terry laughed. It was all very solemn, but the idea of Terry Dennison in

the r�le of angel, tickled the dragoon’s lively sense of the ludicrous,

and that merry school-boy laugh of his pealed forth.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Dynely,” Terry said, struggling manfully with

that explosion; “that’s a little too good. You are the first, I give you

my word, who ever accused me of angelic qualities. And I don’t deserve

it—oh, I assure you I don’t—it isn’t any sacrifice to me. I am not an

ambitious sort of fellow, nor a clever fellow, nor a brilliant fellow,

like Eric. As a dragoon, with five hundred a year and the dearest little

girl in England for my wife, I am a round peg, fitting neat and trim in

a round hole. As a nobleman, with title and estates, and the _noblesse

oblige_ business to do, I would be an object of pity to gods and men.

Eric was born a darling of fortune; I was born—plain Terry Dennison.”

She looked at him with sad, yearning, wondering eyes. Her arms still

loosely clasped his neck as he knelt before her.

“Plain Terry Dennison!” she repeated; “Terry, you are the stuff heroes

are made of. Eric is not like you—ah, if he only were! Where did you

get this generous heart, this great, grateful son of yours? You have

your father’s face—ay, you are like him to the very color of his hair.

You have his face—Eric, I fear—I fear his heart.”

“Oh, Eric isn’t half a bad fellow,” responded Terry, uneasily. He was

uncommonly fond of Lady Dynely, but he was only a man, and the heroics

were becoming a little too much for him. “Don’t let’s talk about it any

more. Let all be as though you had never told, as though I were in

reality what I have all along considered myself—a distant connection of

a very grand family. If—,” Terry’s head drooped a little and his color

rose—“if it makes you ever so little fonder of me, Lady Dynely, then,

as the goody sort of novels say, ‘I shall not have labored in vain.’”

She bent forward and kissed him, for the first time in her life, as

fondly as she might have kissed Eric.

“Who could help being fond of you, Terry? That girl in Lincolnshire is

a happy and fortunate girl, indeed I know you are dying to go back to

her, but just at present I feel as though I could not let you out of my

sight. My wonderful good fortune, your wonderful generosity, seem

altogether unreal. If I lose you I shall doubt and fear, and grow

wretched again. My nerves are all unstrung. Stay with me yet a few days,

Terry—the happiness of your life is all before you—until I have

learned to realize how blessed I am.”

It was a far greater sacrifice, had she but known it, than the sacrifice

he made in resigning all claim to title and fortune. But he made it

promptly and gratefully.

“I will remain a week,” he said; “as I have waited so long, a few more

days will not signify.”

He wrote down to Lincolnshire. A week would pass before he could be with

them, but he was surely coming, and meantime he was “Hers devotedly,

Terry.”

The order of release came at last. Armed with his ring, a half-hoop of

diamonds to fit the dearest little engagement finger on earth, Mr.

Dennison started, one bright August morning, on his way. The birds were

singing, the sun was shining, the grass was as green as though it had

been painted and varnished, the sky was without a cloud. So was his sky,

Terry thought; and in faultless summer costume, looking happy and almost

handsome, his long limbs stretched across on the opposite cushions of

the railway carriage, he was whirled away to Starling vicarage.

“A frog he would a wooing go

Whether his mother would let him or no,”

hummed Terry, unfolding that morning’s Daily Telegraph. “I wonder what

my precious little girl is about just now! And, by the bye, I should

like to know why Eric doesn’t come home. Egad! I should think France

wouldn’t like it—home for an evening and off again, and stopping away

over two weeks. Is he at Carruthers’ still, and what’s the dear boy’s

little game now, I wonder?”

What, indeed?

CHAPTER XI.

AT THE PICNIC.

With that brilliant light of the August afternoon pouring down over

everything like amber rain, Mr. Dennison opened the little wicket gate

and made his way into the vicarage. It was all ablaze with double roses,

and honeysuckle, and verbena, and geranium, and fuchsia, and the summer

air was sweet with drifts of perfume. All the windows and doors of the

vicarage stood open, but a Sabbath silence reigned. As his lofty six

feet darkened the parlor doorway, the only occupant of that apartment

looked up from her sewing with a little surprised scream. It was the

eldest and scraggiest of the three elder Misses Higgins.

“Lor!” cried Miss Higgins, “what a turn you gave me. Is it you, Terry?

Who’d have thought it? Come in. You see I wasn’t expecting anybody

to-day, and all the rest are off but Belinda and me, and—”

“Off!” cried Terry, blankly; “off where, Arabella?”

“Off to the picnic. Oh, I forgot, you don’t know. Sir Philip Carruthers,

Lord Dynely, and some of the gentlemen stopping at the Court, have

organized a picnic, and all the rest have gone. I and Belinda were

invited, but some one must stay home and do the work, while the others

gad. Belinda’s in the kitchen, making jam—I’m sewing for Crystal. It’s

always the way,” said the elder Miss Higgins, bitterly; “‘this little

pig goes to market, and this little pig stays at home.’ I’ve been the

one to stay at home all my life.”

“Where’s the picnic, Bella?” asked Terry, briskly.

For a moment—a moment only—he had felt inclined to be disappointed at

this contretemps; now it was all right again.

“At Carruthers Court, of course,” Bella answered. “They have had no end

of water parties, and garden parties, and croquet parties, and

junketings since you went away. Crystal’s growing a regular gadabout,

and so I tell mamma. A chit of a child like that ought to be in the

nursery for the next two years, instead of flirting and carrying on with

gentlemen in the way she does. I never did such a thing when I was

a—oh, he’s off. Another of little missy’s victims, I suppose. What

fools men are.”

The eldest Miss Higgins, aged thirty-five, was not vicious, as a rule,

but the blind neglect of mankind during the last fifteen years had

rather soured the milk of human kindness in her vestal bosom. She went

back to her sewing, and Terry went to the picnic.

The walk was a long one, the afternoon, as I have before remarked, hot.

The summer fields lay steeped in sunshine, the scarlet poppies nodding

in the faint breeze. Terry’s complexion was the hue of the poppies by

the time he reached the festal ground. Tents and marquees everywhere

dotted the sward; the military brass band discoursed sweet music beneath

the umbrageous foliage; archery, croquet, dancing and other sports, in

which the youthful and frivolous mind delights, were going on. Girls in

white, girls in blue, girls in pink, girls in lilac and green, dotted

the velvet sward like gorgeous posies, but the girl of his heart Mr.

Dennison could nowhere behold.