Part 40 (2/2)
”Why did I send for you? Why should I not send for you? Think you a mother would have no desire to see her own son after long years of cruel separation from him?”
”There is no need to call up the past,” he said, more coldly; ”the separation to which you refer was, under existing circ.u.mstances, the best for all concerned. It undoubtedly caused suffering, but you were not the sufferer; there could be no great depth of maternal love where there was neither love nor loyalty as a wife.”
Her dark eyes grew tender and luminous as she fixed them upon his face, while she beckoned him to a seat and seated herself near and facing him.
”You forget,” she replied, in the low, rich tones he had so often heard at Fair Oaks; ”you forget that a mother's love is instinctive, born within her with the birth of her child, while a wife's love must be won. I must recall the past to you, and you must listen; 'twas for this I sent for you, that you, knowing the past, might know that, however deeply I may have sinned, I have been far more deeply sinned against.”
”Not as regards my father,” he interposed, quickly, as she paused to note the effect of her words; ”he sacrificed fortune, home, friends, everything for you, and you rewarded his love and devotion only with the basest infidelity.”
”That your father loved me, I admit,” she continued, in the same low, musical tones, scarcely heeding his words; ”but, as I said a moment ago, a wife's love must be won, and he failed to win my love.”
”Was his treacherous brother so much more successful then in that direction than he?” Harold questioned, sternly. ”Within six months after your marriage to my father, you admitted that you married him only that you might have Hugh Mainwaring for your lover.”
She neither flushed nor quailed under the burning indignation of his gaze, but her eyes were fastened upon him intently as the eyes of the charmer upon his victim.
”Half truths are ever harder to refute than falsehood,” she replied, softly. ”I said that once under great provocation, but if I sought to make Hugh Mainwaring my lover, it was not that I loved him, but through revenge for his having trifled with me only to deceive and desert me. Before I married your father, both he and his brother were among my most ardent admirers. The younger brother seemed to me far more congenial, and had he possessed one-half the chivalry and devotion which the elder brother afterwards manifested, he would have completely won my love. The rivalry between the two brothers led to bitter estrangement, which soon became known to their father, who lost no time in ascertaining its cause. His anger on learning the facts in the case was extreme; he wrote me an insulting letter, and threatened to disown either or both of his sons unless they discontinued their attentions to a 'disreputable adventuress,' as he chose to style me. Hugh Mainwaring at once deserted me, without even a word of explanation or of farewell, and, as if that were not enough, on more than one occasion he openly insulted me in the presence of his father, on the streets of London.
I realized then for the first time that I cared for him, coward that he was, though I did not love him as he thought,--had I loved him, I would have killed him, then and there. Mad with chagrin and rage, I married your father, partly for the position he could give me--for I did not believe that he, the elder son and his father's favorite, would be disowned--and partly to show his brother and their father that I still held, as I supposed, the winning hand.
On my wedding-day I vowed that I would yet bring Hugh Mainwaring to my feet as my lover, and when, shortly afterwards, your father was disinherited in his favor, my desire for revenge was only intensified. I redoubled my efforts to win him, and I found it no difficult task; he was even more willing to play the lover to his brother's wife than to the penniless girl whom he had known, with no possessions but her beauty and wit. At first, our meetings were clandestine; but we soon grew reckless, and in one or two instances I openly boasted of my conquest, hoping thereby to arouse his father's displeasure against him also. But in that I reckoned wrong. He disinherited and disowned his son for having honorably married a woman whom he considered below him in station, but for an open affaire d'amour with that son's wife, he had not even a word of censure.
”Your father discovered the situation and decided upon a life in Australia. If he had then shown me some consideration, the future might have been vastly different; but he grew morose and taciturn, and I, accustomed to gay society and the admiration of crowds, was left to mope alone in a strange country, with no companions.h.i.+p whatever. What wonder that I hungered for the old life, or that a casual admiring glance, or a few words even of flattery, were like cold water to one peris.h.i.+ng with thirst! Then new hope came into my lonely life, and I spent months in dreamy, happy antic.i.p.ations of the future love and companions.h.i.+p of my child. But even that boon was denied me. It was hard enough, believing, as I did, that my child had died, but to find that I was robbed of that which would have been not only my joy and happiness, but my salvation from the life which followed!” She paused, apparently unable to proceed, and buried her eyes in a dainty handkerchief, while Harold Mainwaring watched her, the hard lines deepening about his mouth.
”After that,” she resumed, in trembling tones, ”all hope was gone.
Your father deserted me soon afterwards, leaving me nearly penniless, and a flew years later I returned to England.”
”To find Hugh Mainwaring?” he queried.
”Not at the first,” she answered, but her eyes fell before the cynicism of his glance. ”I had no thought of him then, but I learned through Richard Hobson, whom I met in London at that time, of the will which had been made in my husband's favor, but which he told me had been destroyed by Hugh Mainwaring. He said nothing of the clause forbidding that any of the property should pa.s.s to me, and I immediately sailed for America in search of Hugh Mainwaring, believing that, with my knowledge of the will, I, as his brother's widow, could get some hold upon him by which I could compel him either to share the property with me or to marry me.”
”Then you were not married to Hugh Mainwaring in England, as you testified at the inquest?”
”No,” she replied, pa.s.sionately; ”I was never married to him. I have made many men my dupes and slaves, but he was the one man who made a dupe of me, and I hating him all the time!”
”And Walter!” he exclaimed, ”you stated that he was the son of Hugh Mainwaring.”
”He is Hugh Mainwaring's son and mine,” she answered, with bitter emphasis; ”that was another of my schemes which failed. I found I had little hold upon Hugh Mainwaring, while he had the same power over me as in the days before I had learned to despise him. When Walter was born, I hoped he would then fulfil his promises of marriage; but instead, he would have turned me adrift had I not threatened that I would then disclose everything which I knew concerning the will. He sneered at me, but offered me a place as servant in his home, and support and education for his child on condition that the relations.h.i.+p should never be known, and that I would remain silent regarding the will. I could do nothing then but accept his conditions, but they were galling,--too galling at last to be longer endured!”
”How is it that you and Walter bear the name of LaGrange?” he asked.
She hesitated a moment, then replied: ”I married a man by that name soon after leaving Australia.”
”Before or after the tidings of my father's death?” he questioned, sternly.
”We heard the news of his death soon after our marriage, but he had deserted me years before, so it made little difference. I met Captain LaGrange in Sydney, and we sailed together for Paris and were married there, but we soon grew tired of each other. I left him in about two years and went to Vienna, and from there returned to England. In some way, Hugh Mainwaring learned of the marriage, and when I came to Fair Oaks, he insisted on my taking that name for myself and child.”
She spoke wearily and with an air of dejection, for it was plainly evident that Harold Mainwaring was not to be deceived by misstatements, however plausible, nor were his sympathies to be aroused by simulated grief. A few moments of silence followed, while she watched him intently, her face again falling into the pinched and haggard outlines which he had observed on entering the room.
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