CHAPTER XLI.
Cecil Laurens turned sternly upon the deceitful maid.
“You say that you expected, feared this. Why did you not warn me?” He exclaimed in a voice whose stern impatience did not hide its key-note of agony.
“Ma foi, monsieur, I thought you did not care,” Florine replied insolently.
“What do you mean?” he stormed; and she answered with pretending humility:
“Monsieur neglected his wife and she was wretched. She cried out often that there was one in her own land who loved her, and that she repented now that she had left him for Monsieur Laurens! If only she could find him again—”
“Stop!” Cecil thundered angrily.
She paused obediently.
“Who has tutored you to this falsehood?” he exclaimed.
Florine muttered cringingly:
“I am sorry monsieur is angry, but it is the truth I speak. Madame was lonely and dissatisfied. What more natural than that she should fly from a cold husband to a devoted lover in her own land?”
An impulse came over him to strike down the impudent woman at his feet for those maddening words. He restrained himself with difficulty.
“She is foolish and ignorant,” he said to himself, and flung the letter toward her.
“Read that and see how you have misjudged your mistress!” he exclaimed.
He watched her closely, and he saw the plainest incredulity upon her face.
“What do you think now?” he asked.
“Monsieur does not wish my real opinion?” reluctantly.
“Yes.”
“Very well. I should believe this letter only that Madame Laurens made me bring her the daily paper today and read aloud the shipping news. There was one steamer that sailed tonight just before midnight.”
“That proves nothing,” he said curtly.
“No, nothing,” agreed Florine. Then with a deep-drawn sigh: “Only madame wept so bitterly, and exclaimed, ‘No one could blame me if I left my unloving husband and went back to my friend!’”
He looked at her sternly, as if trying to pierce the secrets of her false breast, but she continued unfalteringly:
“Ah, I have lived with so many fine ladies, I know their ways. It might be only a coincidence, but why did she send me away tonight? Why was she so anxious I should go to the theater?”
“Hush! No more!” he said, hoarsely, and Florine bowed mockingly.
“You believe, then, Florine, that her note was a blind, and that she sailed tonight for America?”
“Undoubtedly, monsieur.”
“Great heavens! I wish you had warned me!” he exclaimed.
“I thought you would be glad to be rid of an unloved wife,” low and tauntingly.
“Go!” he said, threateningly; then as suddenly recalled her. “This scandal must be kept a secret,” he said. “The servants even must not know. The price of your silence?” sternly.
“I am incapable of telling; but if fifty pounds—” she began.
“My check shall be yours tomorrow, so that you may be sure to hold your tongue,” he said, taking Molly’s note, and turning away to seek counsel with his parents.
They had just come in from some fashionable revel, and recoiled in alarm at his haggard, agitated looks.
When he had told them all, they declared that Florine was doubtless in the right. The letter had been a blind to keep him in London while Molly fled to America to join John Keith.
“She has loved him all the time, and she has found out that your wealth will not console her for his loss,” Mrs. Laurens said, bitterly.
“As to her having English relations, that is all bosh, of course,” said Cecil’s father. “If she had had them, we should have heard of them before.”
No one had ever thought of Sir Edward Trueheart in connection with poor Molly. No one had ever credited her with having respectable relations.
“I shall follow her by the next steamer, and let John Keith beware if I find him in company with my faithless wife!” Cecil Laurens exclaimed, furiously.
He kept his word; but, as no steamer sailed for a week, he was detained in London six days longer. So that, when he went, at last, his parents and sisters went with him, as had already been arranged. Doctor Laurens alone of the family remained behind.
A bitter note from Cecil and a letter from his mother had duly informed him of Molly’s flight.
The noble, honest young physician was amazed, dumfounded.
“How could she do it? I thought she loved him,” he said, but then remembering all Molly’s treachery in the past he was fain to believe what they said of her now.
“I was deceived in her. Her beauty and her apparent guilelessness led my judgment astray,” he decided, and a great indignation took possession of his mind against the girl whose part he had taken so nobly.
He wrote to his brother that she had not been worthy of his love, and that the only thing he could do now was to cast her from his heart.
Louise Barry said the same thing when they confided to her the secret of Molly’s flight.
“It is what I have expected all the time,” she said. “Molly never cared for Mr. Laurens. It was his money that tempted her, and she has found out now that John Keith’s love was more to her than gold. Mr. Laurens ought to cast her from his heart forever.”
“I have told him I should be glad if he would divorce her, but he will not agree to do so,” said Cecil’s mother.
“I wish he would,” said Louise, and the aspiration came from her heart.
She was secretly enraged and frightened at the failure of the scheme she had intrusted to Florine Dabol.
“As long as Molly Trueheart lives the sword of Damocles will be suspended by a single hair over my head,” she thought, angrily, and in her disappointment she had at first refused to pay the promised bribe to the Frenchwoman.
But Florine was insolent.
“Very well,” she said, “break your promise if you will, and I know where to find Madame Laurens at any moment. And upon my soul I believe I should feel happier in reconciling that deceived husband and wife than in taking the gold you promised me for keeping them apart.”
That threat frightened Louise and she paid Florine, after binding her solemnly to keep Molly still apart from her husband.
“That will be easy to do if you will only make your arrangements to return to America with the Laurens family. It will lend color to the stories I have told her of her husband’s love for you,” said the maid.
“But if she should follow us, if she should relent and come back to her husband?”
“She will not do it. She is too proud. But even if she should attempt such a thing I will prevent it,” declared Florine.
So Louise and her Aunt Thalia returned to America on the same steamer with the Laurens family. Mrs. Barry had been longing for Ferndale for weeks, and so Louise found it easy to throw the blame of her return upon the old lady.
“I have not the heart to keep her away from home any longer, however reluctant I may be to leave London before the gay season is over,” she said, with an affectation of dutifulness that did not deceive the keen-sighted old lady, who knew already that her niece was selfish and cold-hearted, and cared for nothing but money.
But she was glad to go home again on any terms, so she did not even suffer herself to look sarcastic at Louise’s hypocrisy.
She knew she had to make the best of the heiress for whom poor Molly had been discarded.
They went home, and Cecil set out to trace Molly and her lover, vowing to himself a dark revenge upon the man for whom his wife had deserted and disgraced him.
The Barry and Laurens families became more intimate than ever. There was an unspoken desire on each side that Cecil would procure a divorce from his faithless wife and marry the real Louise Barry.
There seemed small prospect of their hopes being gratified, for the angry husband did not give up the quest for John Keith for two years, and during those two years he never once came home.
Letters came from him but seldom. He was always on the wing—always following some new clue, spending money like water in the effort to trace the fugitives. Mrs. Laurens complained that he was spending all his income in that wild and foolish pursuit, but to her entreaties that he would come home he paid not the slightest heed. She had not given him much sympathy in his sorrow and his heart had grown cold to her. He felt vaguely that herhauteurhad helped to drive his wife to despair and flight.
“If we had not neglected her so much, if we had pitied and forgiven her a little sooner, her heart would not have turned against me,” he thought often; and remembering how his mother had tried to keep up the feud, he found it hard to forgive her interference.
But the sudden death of his father nearly three years after his wife’s flight brought the wanderer home again.
Nina had married a year ago, and gone to a home in Richmond, of which she was the light and life. Onlythe mother and Dot remained at Maple Shade, where the family of six had once made everything bright and cheerful.
“You must never leave us again, Cecil,” they said, piteously, and he stayed with them in their loneliness and sorrow until another year had rolled by.
Then Doctor Charley Laurens came home, and brought a lovely English bride, for whom the family threw off its somber mourning and made merry.
Nina and her husband came from Richmond, Louise Barry from Ferndale, other guests from Lewisburg, until the large house was full of friends who came to join in the festivities over the marriage and return of the favorite son.
Then the bride was lovely, rich, and of gentle birth. She was a cousin of Lord Westerley.
“He knows you all, both he and his wife,” she said.
“We knew Lord Westerley, but he was not married,” Mrs. Laurens answered.
“He must have married soon after you left, for Madelon Trueheart has been his wife four years,” answered the vivacious bride.
“Then he married Madelon Trueheart?” Cecil exclaimed, rousing from his usual apathetic manner. He remembered that beautiful Madelon Trueheart had been his wife’s friend. Molly had told him that Madelon would not leave her parents to marry her lover.
He said carelessly that he had heard this, without adding that his lost wife told him.
Pretty, young Mrs. Laurens answered, eagerly:
“How noble that was in beautiful Madelon, or Lady Westerley as she is now. Happily a missing relative turned up and took her place in the heart of Sir Edward and his wife, and left Madelon free to marry.”
“A missing relative?” Cecil repeated, with a start; then, eagerly: “But I thought she was the last of the race.”
“Then you have never heard of Sir Edward’s disinherited son? He made a low marriage, and his people would not forgive him. But he died soon after, and they repented and sent for his wife and child, who came and stayed with them, and made happiness possible for Madelon and Lord Westerley.”
“Ah!” said Cecil, his momentary flash of interest dying out.
A moment’s eager suspicion had awakened in him, then died out again. He had no interest in the widow and child of Sir Edward’s son, as the bride, who was a little awry in her facts, called them.
“Poor Sir Edward! They say he tried to make up in kindness to them for his cruelty to his son,” continued the pretty English girl. “He died last year; and after what came by law of entail to his wife and grandson, he gave all the rest of his money to the beautiful Mrs. Trueheart.”
“Was she beautiful?” asked Dot, who adored beauty.
“As a dream!” replied her sister-in-law, enthusiastically. “I have heard her called the most beautiful lady in England, and no one speaks of her low birth now, since Sir Edward took her up and left her so much money. Lord and Lady Westerley adore her and her child.”
“They ought to do so, since she brought them their happiness,” said some one; and then the conversation languished, as no one took any interest in Sir Edward Trueheart’s relative except Mrs. Doctor Charley.
Charley himself, who had never met any of theTruehearts for years, had no suspicion of the truth that the Mrs. Trueheart of his wife’s story was his brother’s missing wife and Sir Edward Trueheart’s granddaughter—not his daughter-in-law, as the bungling story ran. He did not even connect the name with Molly Trueheart, whose mother had been an actress and her father, no doubt, an actor.