Part 43 (2/2)
”You do not appear to lack for the luxuries of life,” he retorted, glancing about the elegant apartment, with a sullen air, but ignoring her thrust.
”No, I have an abundance,” she quietly replied; but evidently she did not deem it necessary to explain how she happened to be so favored.
”Will you explain to me the mystery of your existence, Isabel?” Mr.
G.o.ddard inquired, after an awkward silence. ”I cannot understand it--I am sometimes tempted to believe that you are not Isabel, after all, but some one else who--”
”Pray disabuse yourself of all such doubts,” she quickly interposed, ”for I a.s.sure you that I am none other than that confiding but misguided girl whom you sought to lure to her destruction twenty years ago. If it were necessary, I could give you every detail of our life from the time I left my home until that fatal day when you deserted me for Anna Correlli.”
”But Anna claims that she saw you dead in your casket.”
A slight s.h.i.+ver shook the beautiful woman from head to foot at this reference to the ghastly subject.
”Yes, I know it--”
”You know it!” exclaimed the man, amazed.
”Exactly; but I will tell you the whole story, and then you will no longer have any doubt regarding my ident.i.ty,” Mrs. Stewart remarked.
”After you left Rome with Anna Correlli, and I realized that I had been abandoned, and my child left to the tender mercies of a world that would not hesitate to brand her with a terrible stigma, for which her father alone was to blame, I resolved that I would not live.
Grief, shame, and despair for the time rendered me insane, else I, who had been religiously reared, with a feeling of horror for the suicide's end, would never have dared to meditate taking the life that belonged to G.o.d. I was not so bereft of sense, however, but that my motherhood inspired me to make an effort to provide for my little one, and I wrote an earnest appeal to my old schoolmate and friend, Edith Allandale, who, I knew, would shortly be in Rome, asking her to take the child and rear her as her own--”
”What! Then you did not try to drown the child as well as yourself!”
gasped Gerald G.o.ddard, in an excited tone.
”No; had I done so, I should never have lived to tell you this story,”
said the woman, tremulously. ”But wait--you shall learn everything, as far as I know, just as it happened. Having written my appeal, which I felt sure would be heeded, I took my baby to the woman who had nursed me, told her that I had been suddenly called away, and asked her to care for her until my return. She readily promised, not once suspecting that a stranger would come for her in my place, and that it was my purpose never to see her again. From the moment of my leaving the woman's house--that last straw of surrendering my baby was more than my heart and brain could bear--everything, with one exception, was a blank to me until I awoke to consciousness, five weeks later, to find myself being tenderly cared for in the home of a young man, who was spending the winter in Rome for his health. His sister--a lovely girl, a few years his senior--was with him, acting both as his nurse and physician, she having taken her degree in a Philadelphia medical college, just out of love for the profession. And she it was who had cared for me during my long illness. She told me that her brother was in the habit of spending a great deal of his time upon the Tiber; that one evening, just at dusk, as he was upon the point of pa.s.sing under a bridge, a little way out of the city, he was startled to see some one leap from it into the water and immediately sink. He shot his boat to the spot, and when the figure arose to the surface, he was ready to grasp it. It was no easy matter to lift it into his boat, but he succeeded at last, when he rowed with all possible speed back to the city, where, instead of notifying the police and giving me into their hands to be taken either to a hospital or to the morgue, as the case might demand, he procured a carriage and took me directly to his home, where he felt that his sister could do more for me than any one else.”
”Who was this young man?” Gerald G.o.ddard here interposed, while he searched his companion's face curiously.
”Willard Livermore,” calmly replied Mrs. Stewart, as she steadily met his glance, although the color in her cheeks deepened visibly.
”Ha! the man who accompanied you to Wyoming night before last?”
”Yes.”
”I have heard that he has long wanted to marry you--that he is your lover,” said Mr. G.o.ddard, flas.h.i.+ng a jealous look at her.
”He is my friend, stanch and true; a man whom I honor above all men,”
was the composed reply; but the woman's voice was vibrant with an earnestness which betrayed how much the words meant to her.
”Then why have you not married him?”
”Because I was already bound.”
”But you have told me that you did not know you were legally bound until within the last two years.”
Isabel Stewart lifted a grave glance to her companion's face.
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