Infelice Part 87

The audience dispersed, and Cuthbert and his father sat like those old Roman Senators, awaiting the breaking of the wave of savage vengeance that was rolling in upon them.

At length General Laurance struggled to his feet, and mechanically quitted the theatre, followed by his son. Reaching the carriage, they entered, and Cuthbert ordered the coachman to drive to Mrs. Orme's hotel.

"Not now! For G.o.d's sake, not to-night," groaned the old man.

"To-night, before another hour, this awful imposture must be confessed, and reparation offered. I sinned against Minnie, but not premeditatedly. You deceived me. You made me believe her the foul, guilty thing you wished her. You intercepted her letters, you never let me know that I had a child neglected and forsaken; and, father, G.o.d may forgive you, but I never can. My proud, lovely Minnie! My own wife!"

Cuthbert buried his face in his hands, and his strong frame shook as he pictured what might have been, contrasting it with the hideous reality of his loveless and miserable marriage with the banker's daughter, who threatened him with social disgrace.

During that drive General Laurance felt that he was approaching some offended and avenging Fury, that he was drifting down to ruin, powerless to lift his hand and stay even for an instant the fatal descent; that he was gradually petrifying, and things seemed vague and intangible.

When they reached the hotel, they were ushered into the salon already brilliantly lighted as if in expectation of their arrival. Cuthbert paced the floor; his father sank into a chair, resting his hands on the top of his cane.

After a little while, a silk curtain at the lower end of the room was lifted, and Mrs. Orme came slowly forward. How her l.u.s.trous eyes gleamed as she stood in the centre of the apartment, scorn, triumph, hate, all struggling for mastery in her lovely face.

"Gentlemen, you have read the handwriting on the wall. Do you come for defiance, or capitulation?"

General Laurance lifted his head, but instantly dropped it on his bosom; he seemed to have aged suddenly, prematurely. Cuthbert advanced, stood close beside the woman whose gaze intensified as he drew near her, and said brokenly:

"Minnie, I come merely to exonerate myself before G.o.d and man. Heaven is my witness, that I never knew I had a child in America until to-night, that until to-night I believed you were in California living as the wife of that base villain Peterson, who wrote announcing himself your accepted lover. From the day I kissed you good-bye at the cottage, I never received a line, a word, a message from you. When I doubted my father's and Peterson's statements concerning you, and wrote two letters, one to the President of the college, one to a resident professor, seeking some information of your whereabouts, in order at least to visit you once more, when I became twenty-one, both answered me that you had forfeited your fair name, had been forsaken by your grandmother, and had gone away from the village accompanied by Peterson, who was regarded as your favoured lover. I ceased to doubt, I believed you false. I knew no better until to-night. Father, my honour demands that the truth be spoken at last. Will you corroborate my statement?"

Pale and proud, he stood erect, and she saw that a consciousness of rect.i.tude at least in purpose, sustained him.

"Mrs. Orme----" began General Laurance.

"Away with such shams and masks! Mrs. Orme died on the theatrical boards to-night, and henceforth the world knows me as Minnie Laurance! Ah! by the grace of G.o.d! Minnie Laurance!"

She laughed derisively, and held up her fair slender hand, exhibiting the black agate with its grinning skull lighted by the glow of the large radiant diamonds.

"Minnie, I never dreamed you were his wife; oh, my G.o.d! how horrible it all is!"

He seemed bewildered, and his son exclaimed:

"Who is responsible for the separation from my wife? You, father, or I?"

"I did it, my son. I meant it for the best. I naturally believed you had been entrapped into a shameful alliance, and as any other father would have done, I was ready to credit the unfavourable estimate derived from the man Peterson. He told me that Minnie had belonged to him until she and her grandmother conceived the scheme of inveigling you into a secret marriage; and afterward he informed me of the birth of his child. I did not pay him to claim it, but when he p.r.o.nounced it his, I gave him money to pay the expenses of the two whom he claimed to California; and I supposed until to-night that both had accompanied him. I did not manufacture statements, I only gladly credited them; and believing all that man told me, I felt justified in intercepting letters addressed to you by the woman whom he claimed as mother of his child. Madame, do not blame Cuthbert. I did it all."

The abject wretchedness of his mien disconcerted her; robbed her of half her antic.i.p.ated triumph. How could she exult in trampling upon a bruised worm which made no attempt to crawl from beneath her heel? He sat, the image of hopeless dejection, his hands crossed on the gold head of his cane.

Mrs. Orme walked to the end of the room, lifted the curtain, and at a signal Regina joined her. Clasping the girl's fingers firmly she led her forward, and when to front of the old man, she exclaimed:

"Rene Laurance, blood triumphs over malice, perjury, and bribery; whose is this child? Is she Merle, Peterson, or Laurance?"

Standing before them, in a dress of some soft snowy shining fabric, neither silk nor c.r.a.pe, with white starry jasmines in her raven hair and upon her bosom, Regina seemed some angelic visitant sent to still the strife of human pa.s.sions, so lovely and pure was her colourless face; and as General Laurance looked up at her, he rose suddenly.

"Pauline Laurance, my sister; the exact, the wonderful image!

Laurance, all Laurance, from head to foot."

He dropped back into the chair, and smiled vacantly.

Cuthbert sprang forward, his face all aglow, his eyes radiant, and eloquent.

"Minnie, is this indeed _our child?_ Your daughter--and mine?"

He extended his arms, but she waved him back.

"Do not touch her! How dare you? This is my baby, my darling, my treasure. This is the helpless little one, whose wails echoed in a hospital ward; who came into the world cursed with the likeness of her father. This is the child you disowned, persecuted; this is the baby G.o.d gave to you and to me; but you forfeited your claim long years ago, and she has no father, only his name henceforth. She is wholly, entirely her mother's blue-eyed baby. You have your Maud."

As she spoke a wealth of proud tenderness shone in her eyes, which rested on the lily face of her child, and at that moment how she gloried in her perfect loveliness.

Her husband groaned, and clasped his hand over his face to conceal the agony that was intolerable, and in an instant, ere the mother could suspect or frustrate her design, the girl broke from her hand, sprang forward and threw herself on Cuthbert's bosom, clasping her arms around his neck, and sobbing:

"My father! Take me just once to your heart! Call me daughter; let me once in my life hear the blessed words from my own father's lips!"

He strained her to his bosom, and kissed the pure face, while tears trickled over his cheeks and dripped down on hers. Her mother made a step forward to s.n.a.t.c.h her back, but at sight of his tears, of the close embrace in which he held her, the wife turned away, unable to look upon the spectacle and preserve her composure.

A heavy fall startled all present, and a glance showed them General Laurance lying insensible on the carpet.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

In the clear, cold a.n.a.lytical light which the "_Juventui Mundi_"

pours upon the nebulous realm of h.e.l.lenic lore and Heroic legend, we learn that Homer knew "no destiny fighting with the G.o.ds, or unless in the shape of death, defying them,"--and that the "Nemesis often inaccurately rendered as revenge, was after all but self-judgment, or sense of moral law." Even in the dim Homeric dawn, Conscience found personification.

Aroused suddenly to a realization of the wrongs and wretchedness to which his inordinate pride and ambition had chiefly contributed, the Nemesis of self-judgment had opened its grim a.s.size in General Laurance's soul, and he cowered before the phantoms that stood forth to testify.

No father of ordinary prudence and affection could have failed to oppose the reckless folly of his son's ill-starred marriage, or hesitated to save him, if compatible with G.o.d's law and human statutes, from the misery and humiliation it threatened to entail.

But when he made a football of marriage vows, and became auxiliary to a second nuptial ceremony, striving by legal quibbles to cancel what only Death annuls, the hounds of Retribution leaped from their leash.

The deepest, strongest love of his life had bloomed in the sunset light, wearing the mellow glory of the aftermath; and his heart clung to the beautiful dream of his old age, with a fierce tenacity that destroyed it, when rudely torn away by the awful revelations of "Infelice." To lose at once not only his lovely idol, but that darling fetich--Laurance _prestige_; to behold the total eclipse of his proud reputation and family name; to witness the ploughshare of social degradation and financial ruin driven by avenging hands over all he held dearest, was a doom which the vanquished old man could not survive.

Perhaps the vital forces had already begun to yield to the disease that so suddenly prostrated him at Naples, dashing the cup of joy from his thirsty lips; and perchance the grim Kata-clothes had handed the worn tangled threads of existence to their faithful minister Paralysis, even before the severe shock that numbed him while sitting in the theatre _loge_.

When his eyes closed upon the spectacle of his son, folding in his arms his firstborn, they shut out for ever the things of time and sense, and consciousness that forsook him then never reoccupied its throne. He was carried from the brilliant salon of the popular actress to the home of his son; medical skill exhausted its ingenuity, and though forty-eight hours elapsed before the weary heart ceased its slow feeble pulsations, General Laurance's soul pa.s.sed to its final a.s.size, without even a shadowy farewell recognition of the son, for whom he had hoped, suffered, dared so much.

"Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment; and some men they follow after."

During the week that succeeded his temporary entombment in the sacred repose of _Pere La Chaise_, Mrs. Orme completed her brief engagement at the theatre where she had so dearly earned her freshest laurels; and though her tragic career closed in undimmed splendour, when she voluntarily abdicated the throne she had justly won, bidding adieu for ever to the scene of former triumphs, she heard above the plaudits of the mult.i.tude the stern whisper, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay."

The man whom she most intensely hated, and most ardently longed to humiliate and abase in public estimation, had escaped the punishment; housed from reproach by the stony walls of the tomb, mocking her efforts to requite the suffering he had inflicted; and the keenest antic.i.p.ations of her vindictive purpose were foiled, vanquished.

One morning, ten days after the presentation of "Infelice," Mrs. Orme sat listening to her daughter, who, observing her restless, dissatisfied manner, proposed to read aloud. Between the two had fallen an utter silence with reference to the past, and not an allusion had been made to Cuthbert Laurance since the night he had first held his daughter to his heart. Death had dropped like a sacred seal upon its memorable incidents, which all avoided; but mother and child seemed hourly to cling more closely to each other.

To-day sitting on a low ottoman, with her arm thrown across her mother's knee, while the white hand wearing the black agate wandered now and then over her drooping head, Regina read the "_Madonna Mia_."

She had not concluded the perusal, when a card was brought in, and a glance at her mother's countenance left her no room to doubt the name it bore.