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

nothing—they stand together and look, and the yellow sunshine gilds

all. The books in their cases, the handsomely framed proof engravings of

dogs and horses, the pipes of all nations, the sidearms of all

countries—dirks, cimetars, swords, bowie knives, the gaudy robe de

chambre, now faded and dim, thrown over a chair back—all as Gordon

Caryll had left them.

They quit this room presently and enter the next. It was Mrs. Caryll’s

sitting-room, in those long gone days, the room in which, as the

twilight of another August day fell, she stood and banished her only son

from her side forever.

The bright yellow sunshine floods all things here too; the chair in

which she used to sit, the work-table and work-box upon it, her piano in

the corner, the velvet draperied oratory beyond; and over the chimney,

one picture with its face turned to the wall. “It is a portrait of

Gordon Caryll,” France says, almost in a whisper, for something in her

companion’s face startles her strangely; “she placed it so on that last

cruel evening when she drove him from her. So it has hung since.”

“Turn it,” Locksley commands briefly, and she obeys. She stands upon a

chair and turns the pictured face to the light. It is covered with dust.

Spiders have woven their webs across it. She glances around for a cloth,

finds one, wipes dust and cobwebs together off, and the boyish face of

the last Squire of Caryllynne smiles back upon her in the sunshine.

“Was he not handsome?” she asks, regretfully. “Poor Gordon! brave and

generous and beloved of all—to think he should pay for one mistake by

life-long exile and loneliness.”

She looks down at her lover. She pauses suddenly; a wild expression

comes over her face. She springs from her perch and glances from the

pictured face of the boy to the living face of the man gazing gravely

up.

She sees at last—neither years, nor bronze, nor beard can deceive her

longer. She gives a little cry, and stands breathless, her hands

clasped, her color coming and going.

He sees he is known, and turns to her with the very smile the pictured

face wears.

“My France,” he says, “you know at last that I am Gordon Caryll.”

CHAPTER XVII.

THROUGH THE SUNSET.

So! The truth is out at last—the desire of her life is gained. Gordon

Caryll stands there before her—her lover!

She hardly knows whether she is glad or sorry, she hardly knows even

whether she is surprised. She has turned quite white, and stands looking

at him in a silence she is unable to break.

Gordon Caryll laughs—the most genially amused laugh she has heard yet.

“If I had said, ‘I am his Satanic Majesty, horns, hoofs and all,’ you

could hardly look more petrified, more wildly incredulous. My dear

child, do come out of that trance of horror and say something.”

He takes both her hands, and looks smilingly down into her pale,

startled face.

“Look at me, France—look at that picture. Don’t you see the

resemblance? Surely you don’t doubt what I have said?”

“Doubt you! Oh, Gordon! what a surprise this is. And yet—I don’t

know—I don’t really know—‘As in a glass, darkly,’ I believe I must

have seen it from the first.”

“And you are sorry or glad—which? You told me that the desire of your

heart was Gordon Caryll’s return. Gordon Caryll stands before you—your

heart’s desire is gained, and you look at me with the blankest face I

ever saw you wear. Are you sorry, then, after all?”

“Sorry! Ah, you know better than that. Why,” with a laugh, “the romance

of my life was that Gordon Caryll would return, and that I should be the

one to console him for the bitter past—that I should one day be his

wife. And to think—that my dream should come true. Yet still—”

“Well—yet still.”

“Yet still—more or less it is a disappointment. I had hoped to be the

good genius of your life in all things—that my fortune would be your

stepping stone to fame. Now I can do nothing; I am not going to marry a

struggling artist and help him win his laurel crown. The heir of

Caryllynne need owe nothing to his wife. My romance of love in a

cottage, while you won a name among the immortals, is at an end.”

“Not so. After all it will be due to you the same—I take Caryllynne

from you. And I would never have taken off my mask, and shown myself to

the world as I am, but for you.”

“Not even for your mother’s sake?”

“Not even for my mother’s sake. How, but for you would I ever have known

that my mother desired it, that I was forgiven, that she longed to take

me back? It makes me happier than I can say now that I know it; but of

myself I never would have discovered it. What was done, was done; I

meant to have walked on the way I had chosen to the end. But you

appeared, and lo! all things changed.”

“It is like a fairy tale,” she said; “I cannot realize it. Oh! what

will Lady Dynely, what will Eric, what will your mother, what will all

the world say?”

“I don’t think it will surprise Lady Dynely very greatly,” Caryll

answered coolly. “She recognized me the first day—I saw it in her

face—only she took pains to convince herself it was an impossibility. I

had been gone so long it was impossible I could ever come back; that was

how she reasoned. For Eric, well it would be dead against every rule of

his creed to be surprised at anything. He will open those sleepy blue

eyes of his for a second or two, and lift his blonde eyebrows to the

roots of his hair.”

“Very likely,” says France; “he has not far to lift them.”

“I wonder you did not marry him, France. He’s a handsome fellow, and a

gallant. As unlike a battered old soldier such as I am as—as the Apollo

is unlike the Farnese Hercules.”

“And yet there are many people, of undoubted taste too, who prefer the

Hercules as the true type of manliness to the Apollo. Eric is very

handsome—absurdly handsome for a man; the wife of a demi-god must have

rather a trying time of it. I don’t care, besides, to share a heart that

some scores of women, dark and light, have shared before me. ‘All or

none,’ is the motto of the Forresters. Are you sure, sir, I may claim

all in the present case?”

“All—every infinitesimal atom. I offer you a heart that for the past

seventeen years has had no lodger. Before that,” he drew a deep breath

and looked at her. “You know that story.”

“Yes, I know it—Lady Dynely told me. She is dead?”

“Would I ever have spoken to you else? Yes, she is dead.”

He dropped her hands suddenly and walked over to the window. Beyond the

green hill tops the sun was dropping into the sea—the whole western sky

was aflush. The sparkling drops, glittering like diamonds on roses and

verbenas, were all that remained of the past storm.

She stood where he had left her, looking after him wistfully, with

something that was almost a contraction of the heart.

“Nineteen years have passed,” she thought, “since they parted. Does the

very memory of that time still affect him like this?”

She remembered the story Lady Dynely had told her—of how passionately

he had loved that most worthless wife. Could any man love like that

twice in a lifetime. The wine of life had been given to that dead

actress—the lees were left for her.

“France!”

She was by his side in an instant—ashamed of that unworthy spasm of

jealousy of the dead.

“Am I to take this day as emblematic of my life? Have the rain and the

darkness passed forever, and will the end be in brightness such as this?

It has been a hard life sometimes, a bitter life often, a lonely life

always, but the darkest record you know. The story of the woman I

married and who was my ruin.”

She glanced up with that new-born shyness of hers into his overcast face

in silence.

“Let me tell you all to-day, and make an end of it,” he said. “It is

something I hate to speak of—hate with all my soul to think of. You

know the story—Lady Dynely has told you, you say. You know then how I

was divorced, how our united names rang the changes through England and

Canada; how the name of Caryll, never dishonored before, was dragged

through the mire of a divorce court. You know how I came to England and

saw my mother and Lucia. Saw Lady Dynely, told her all, and bade her

good-by upon that other August night nineteen years ago—the very night

her husband died. All that you know?”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Go on.”

“I had left my old regiment and exchanged into one ordered to India, and

in India the next twelve years were spent. It was hot and exciting work

at first; little time to think, little time to regret. The horrible

mutiny, of which you have heard, with whose bloody and sickening details

all England was ringing then, when women and children were butchered in

cold blood, was at its height. Who could stop and think of private woes

when the whole British heart was wrung with agony. It was the best

discipline that could possibly have befallen me—for my life I was

reckless, the sooner a Sepoy bullet ended a dishonored existence the

better. But the flying Sepoy bullet laid low better men and passed me. I

carried a sort of charmed life—I passed through skirmish after

skirmish, hot work too with the fierce black devils, and never received

a scratch. At last our slaughtered countrymen were avenged and the

mutiny was over.

“Of the life that followed in India I have little to say. It was the

usual dull routine of drill and parade; of Calcutta and Bombay—of hill

parties, of up-country excursions, of jackal shooting, and pig sticking.

Of a sudden I grew tired of it all. India became insupportable, a sort

of homesickness took possession of me. I must see England. I must see my

mother once more. I sold out and came home, and came here, and heard

all about my people. My mother had quitted Caryllynne forever, and taken

up her abode at Rome. She had adopted General Forrester’s only child as

her daughter and heiress, Miss Forrester being then at a Parisian

convent. Lady Dynely was a widow—she too was abroad—she too had

adopted an orphan lad, who was now with her son and heir at Eton. That

was what I learned from the village gossips, and then once more I left

England.

“This time I went to America. There I remained, rambling aimlessly about

the country, trying to decide what to do with my future life. Suddenly

it occurred to me to ascertain for certain what had become of the woman

who had been my wife. Was she living or dead? I never thought of her at

all when I could avoid it, but that thought had often obtruded. Now was

the time to know for certain.

“I went to Canada—Quebec, to the place where I had seen her last. The

lonely house on the Heights, which she had chosen as her home, stood

silent and gray, desolate and uninhabited. I returned to the town,

hunted up