The Masked Bridal Part 43

"Ha! I thought so!" cried her companion, with a sudden shock. "When did you hear?--who told you?"

"I met your friend, Will Forsyth, only two years ago--just before my return to this country--and when I took him to task for the shameful part which he had played to a.s.sist you in carrying out your ignominious plot, telling him that you had owned to his being disguised as an aged minister to perform the sacrilegious ceremony, he confessed to me that, at the last moment, his heart had failed him, whereupon he went to an old clergyman, a friend of his father, revealed everything, and persuaded him to perform the marriage in a legal manner; and thus, Gerald G.o.ddard, I became your lawful wife instead of your victim, as you supposed."

"Yes, I know it. Forsyth afterward sent me the certificate and explained everything to me," the man admitted, with a guilty flush. "I received the paper about a year after the report of your death."

"Ah! that could not have been very gratifying to--your other--victim,"

remarked Mrs. Stewart, with quiet sarcasm.

"Isabel! you are merciless!" cried the man, writhing under her scorn.

"But since you have learned so much, I may as well tell you everything. Of course Anna was furious when she discovered that she was no wife, for I had sworn to her that there was no legal tie between you and me--"

"Ah! then she also learned the truth!" interposed his companion. "I almost wonder you did not try to keep the knowledge from her."

"I could not--she was present when the doc.u.ment arrived, and the shock to me was so great I betrayed it, and she insisted upon knowing what had caused it, when she raved like an insane person, for a time."

"But I suppose you packed her by being married over again, since you have lived with her for nearly twenty years," remarked Mrs. Stewart.

"No, I did not," returned her visitor, hotly. "To tell the truth, I had begun to tire of her even then--she was so furiously jealous, pa.s.sionate, and unreasonable upon the slightest pretext that at times she made life wretched for me. So I told myself that so long as I held that certificate as proof that she had no legal hold upon me, I should have it in my power to manage her and cow her into submission when she became ungovernable by other means. I represented to her that, to all intents and purposes, we were man and wife, and if we should have the ceremony repeated, after having lived together so long, it would create a scandal, for some one would be sure to find it out, sooner or later. For a time this appeared to pacify her; but one day, during my absence from home, she stole the certificate, although I thought I had concealed it where no one would think of looking for it. It has been in her possession ever since. I have tried many times to recover it; but she was more clever than I, and I never could find it, while she has always told me that she would never relinquish it, except upon one condition--"

"And that was--what?"

"Ever the same old demand--that I would make her legally my wife."

"But she never could have been that so long as I lived," objected Mrs.

Stewart.

"True; but she would have been satisfied with a repet.i.tion of the ceremony, as we did not know that you were living."

"If you have been so unhappy, why have you lived with her all these years?"

The man hesitated for a moment before replying to this question. At length he said, although he flushed scarlet over the confession:

"There have been several reasons. In spite of her variable moods and many faults, Anna is a handsome and accomplished woman. She entertains magnificently, and has made an elegant mistress for our establishment.

We have been over the world together several times, and are known in many cities both in this country and abroad, consequently it would have occasioned no end of scandal if there had been a separation.

Thus, though she has tried my patience sorely at times, we have perhaps, on the whole, got along as amicably as hundreds of other couples. Besides--ahem!--"

The man abruptly ceased, as if, unwittingly, he had been about to say something that had better be left unsaid.

"Well--besides what?" queried his listener.

"Doubtless you will think it rather a humiliating confession to make,"

said Gerald G.o.ddard, with a crestfallen air, "but during the last few years I have lost a great deal of money in unfortunate speculation, so--I have been somewhat dependent upon Anna in a financial way."

"Ah! I understand," remarked Mrs. Stewart, her delicate nostrils dilating scornfully at this evidence of a weak, ease-loving nature, that would be content to lean upon a rich wife, rather than be up and doing for himself, and making his own way in the world. "Are you not engaged with your profession?"

"No; Anna has not been willing, for a long time, that I should paint for money."

"And so your talents are deteriorating for want of use."

The scorn in her tones stung him keenly, and he flushed to his temples.

"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.