True Love's Reward Part 40

Ray laid out what he thought would serve to make Mr. Cutler's loss good, selected what stones he thought belonged to his own firm, and then it was decided that the real crescents should be given to Mrs. Vanderheck if she wished them, or they should be sold and the money given to her.

Mrs. Montague was then informed that she must at once surrender all deeds, bonds, bank stock, etc., which she had received from the Dinsmore estate, and would be expected to leave the city before noon of the next day.

She curtly replied that she would require only three hours, and that she would leave the house before sunset. The house, having been purchased with Mr. Dinsmore's money, would henceforth belong to Mona, therefore she and Ray decided to remain where they were until her departure and see that everything was properly secured afterward.

Having decided that these matters should not be made public, nothing could be done with Louis Hamblin, and Mr. Rider, much against his inclination, was obliged to forego making the arrest on the Fall River boat.

Mrs. Montague hastened her preparations and left her elegant home on West Forty-ninth street in season to meet her nephew a little after the hour appointed in the morning. Mr. Corbin previous to this handed her the first payment of her annuity, and obtained an address to which it was to be sent in the future, and thus the two accomplished sharpers disappeared from New York society, which knew them no more.

The next evening Ray and Mona were talking over their plans for the future, in the cozy library in Mr. Graves' house, when the young girl remarked:

"Ray, would you not like to read the story that my father concealed in the royal mirror?"

"Yes, dear, if you wish me," her lover replied.

Mona excused herself and went to get it. When she returned she brought the ancient keepsake with her.

She explained how the secret drawer operated, showed him the two rings and the letters, then putting Mr. Dinsmore's confession into his hands, bade him read it; and this is what his eager eyes perused:

"MY DEAR MONA:--You who have been the darling of my heart, the pride of my life; you have just left me, to go to your caller, after having probed my heart to its very core. I can never make you know the bitterness of spirit that I experience, as I write these lines, for the questions you have just asked me have completely unmanned me--have made a veritable coward of me when I should have boldly told you the truth, let the consequence be what it would; whether it would have touched your heart with pity and fresh love for a sorrowing and repentant man, or driven you away from me in hate and scorn such as I experience for myself. You have just told me that I have made your life a very happy one; that you love me dearly. Oh, my darling, you will never know, until I am gone, how I hug these sweet words to my soul, and exult over them with secret joy, and you will never know, either, until then, how I long and hunger to hear you call me just once by the sacred name 'father,'

"Yes, Mona, I am your father; you are my child, and yet I had not the courage to tell you so, with all the rest of the sad story, this morning, for fear I should see all the love die out of your face, and you would turn coldly from me as you learned the great wrong I once did your mother.

"I told you that your father is dead. So he is, to you, and has been for many long years; for when I brought you from England, when you were only two years old, I vowed that you should never know that I was the man who, by my cowardice and neglect, ruined your mother's life; so I adopted you as my niece, and you have always believed yourself to be the child of my only and idolized sister. But, to begin at the beginning, I first met Mona Forester one day while attending my aunt to a millinery store, where she had her bonnets and caps made. She waited upon her, and I sat and watched the beautiful girl, entranced by her loveliness and winning manner. She was a cultured lady, in spite of the fact that she was obliged to earn her living in so humble a way.

"Her parents had both died two years previously, leaving her homeless and dest.i.tute, after having been reared in the lap of luxury. I saw her often after that, we soon learned to love each other, and it was not long before she was my promised wife.

"But my first sin was in not giving her my full name. I was afraid she might be shy of me, if she knew that I was the heir of the wealthy Miss Dinsmore, and so I told her my name was Richmond Montague. About that time, my studies being completed, my aunt wanted me to go abroad for a couple of years.

"She also wished me to marry the child of an intimate friend, and take her with me. She had been planning this marriage for years and had threatened, if I disappointed her, to leave all her money to some one else.

"Now comes my second sin against your mother. If I had been loyal and true, I should have frankly told my aunt of my love for Mona Forester, and that I could never marry another woman, fortune or no fortune. But I shirked the duty--I thought something might happen before my return to give me the fortune, and then I should be free to choose for myself; so I led Miss Dinsmore to believe that on my return I would marry Miss Barton. I wanted the fortune--I loved money and the pleasure it brought, but I did not want Miss Barton for a wife. She was proud and haughty--a girl bound up in the world and fashion, and I did love sweet and amiable Mona Forester.

"Now my third sin: I was selfish. I could not bear the thought of leaving my love behind, and so I persuaded her to a secret marriage, and to go to Europe with me. I never should have done this; a man is a coward and knave who will not boldly acknowledge his wife before the world. I hated myself for my weakness, yet had not strength of purpose to do what was right. We sailed under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Montague, and Mona did not know that I had any other; but I took care that the marriage certificate was made out with my full name, so that the ceremony should be perfectly legal.

"We were very happy, for I idolized my young wife, and our life for six months was one of earth's sweetest poems. We traveled a great deal during the summer, and then settled in Paris for the winter. We had rooms in a pleasant house in a first-cla.s.s locality; our meals were served in our own dining-room, and everything seemed almost as homelike as if we had been in America.

"One day I took a sudden freak that I wanted to go hunting. Mona begged me not to go; she was afraid of fire-arms, and feared some accident. But I laughed at her fears, told her that I was an expert with a gun, and went away in spite of her pleadings, little thinking I should never see my darling again. I did meet with an accident--I fell and sprained my ankle very badly, and lay for several hours in a dense forest unable to move.

"Finally some peasants found me, and took me to their cottage, but it was too late to send news of my injury to Paris that night. But the next morning early I sent the man of the house--who was going through the city on his way to visit some friends for a week, with a letter to Mona, telling her to take a carriage and come to me. She did not come, and I heard nothing from her. I could not send to her again, for there was no one in the cottage to go, and no neighbor within a mile. I was terribly anxious, and imagined a hundred things, and at the end of a week, unable to endure the suspense any longer, I insisted upon being taken back to Paris in spite of the serious condition of my foot and ankle.

"But, oh, my child, the tidings that met me there were such as to drive the strongest mind distracted. The landlord told me that my wife had fled with the butler of the house. At first I laughed in his face at anything so absurd, but when he flew into a towering pa.s.sion and accused me of having brought disgrace upon his house by living there unlawfully with a woman who was not my wife, I began to think there must be some truth in his statements. In vain I denied the charge; he would not listen to me, and drove me also from his dwelling.

"I was too lame and helpless to attempt to follow Mona, but I set a detective at work to find my wife, for I still had faith in her, and thought she might be the victim of the landlord's suspicions. The detective traced her to London, and brought me word that a couple answering the description of my wife and the butler had crossed the channel on a certain date, and had since been living under the same roof in London.

"Then I cursed my wife, and said I would never trust a human being again.

I was a long time getting over my lameness, but I still kept my detective on the watch, and one day he came to me with the intelligence that the butler had deserted his victim, and the lady was ill, and almost dest.i.tute.

"That Mona should want or suffer, under any circ.u.mstances, was the last thing I could wish, even though I then firmly believed that she had deserted me; while the thought that my child might even lack the necessities of life, was sufficient incentive to make me hasten at once to her relief. But I have told you, Mona, that she was dead, and I found only a weak and helpless baby to need my care. The nurse told me that the lady had wanted to go to America several weeks previously, but her physician had forbidden her to attempt to cross the ocean. She told me that a gentleman had taken the room for her and had been very kind to her, but the lady had been very unhappy and ill most of the time, since coming to the house. I questioned her closely, but evidently Mona had made a confidante of no one, and she had lived very quietly, seldom going out, and seeing no one. I could not reconcile this with the fact of her having eloped with the butler, and I realized all too late that I should have come to her the moment I learned where she was, demanded an explanation, and at least given her a chance to defend herself. My darling might have lived, if I had done so, and my child would not have been motherless.

"I was frantic with grief, and tried to drown my sorrow by constant change of scene. I traveled for two years, and then was summoned home to my aunt, who was dying. She insisted that my marriage with Miss Barton should be immediately consummated, and I, too wretched to contest the point, let them have their way. Miss Dinsmore died soon afterward, but without suspecting my previous marriage. Then I confessed the truth to my wife, and told her of the existence of my child. I saw at once that she was deeply wounded upon learning of this secret of my life, but I never suspected how exceedingly jealous and bitter she was, or that she had any previous knowledge of the fact, until a little more than a year after our marriage, when I accidentally overheard a conversation between her and the man who had been her accomplice in ruining your mother's happiness and mine. That elopement, so called, had always seemed utterly inexplicable to me until then.

"I learned that day that Margaret Barton had known of my marriage with Mona Forester almost from the first, that she had followed us abroad, and came disguised into the very house where we were living; that she had intercepted my letter, telling Mona of my accident, and made the poor child believe that I had deserted her, and that I had not really married her, but simply brought her abroad with me to be the plaything of my season of travel, after which I was pledged to marry her, Margaret Barton. She repeated this cunning tale to the landlord, and then, when he drove my darling forth into the street, she hired the butler to follow her, and thus give her departure the appearance of an elopement. It was a plot fit to emanate only from the heart and brain of a fiend, and I wormed it out of her little by little, after the departure of her tool, who had traced her to this country, hoping to get more money for keeping her secret.

"I cannot, neither do I wish to describe the scene that followed this discovery. I was like a madman for a season, when I learned how I had been duped, how my darling had been wronged and betrayed, and driven to her untimely death, and I closed my heart and my doors forever against Margaret Barton. I settled an annuity of twenty-five hundred dollars upon her, then taking you, I left San Francisco. I came to settle in New York.

"You know all the rest, my Mona, but you cannot know how I have longed to own you, my child, and dared not, fearing to alienate your love by confessing the truth. I am going to conceal this avowal in the secret drawer of the mirror, that I have given you to-day, and some time you will read this story and perhaps pity and forgive your father for the culpable cowardice and wrong-doing of his early life. That woman stole the certificate of my first marriage and all the trinkets I had given your mother; but I swear to you that Mona Forester was my lawful wife--that you are our child, and in a few days I shall make my will, so stating, and bequeath to you the bulk of my fortune. I will also in that doc.u.ment explain the secret of this mirror so that you will have no difficulty in finding this confession, your mother's rings, and some letters which may be a comfort to you.

"Now, my darling, this is all; but I hope you will not love me less when you learn your mother's sad story and my weakness and sin in not boldly acknowledging her as my wife before the world. Oh, if I could hear but once, your dear lips call me 'father' I could ask no greater comfort in life--it would be the sweetest music I have ever heard since I lost my other Mona; yet it cannot be. But that G.o.d may bless you, and give you a happy life, is the earnest prayer of your loving father,

"WALTER RICHMOND MONTAGUE DINSMORE."

Ray was deeply moved as he finished reading this sad tale.

"It is the saddest story I ever heard," he said, as he folded the closely written sheets and returned them to Mona, "and Mr. Dinsmore must have suffered very keenly since the discovery of the great wrong done his wife, for his whole confession betrays how sensitive and remorseful he was."

"My poor father! if he had only told me! I could not have loved him less, and it would have been such a comfort to have known of this relationship, and to have talked with him about my mother," said Mona, with tears in her beautiful eyes.

"Well, dear, we will begin our life with no concealments," said Ray, with a tender smile, "And now, when may I tell Mr. Graves that you will come to me?"

"When you will, Ray," Mona answered, flushing, but with a look of love and trust that made his heart leap with gladness.

"Then one month from to-day, dear," he said, as he bent his lips to hers.

And so, when the roses began to bloom and all the world was in its brightest dress, there was a quiet wedding one morning in Mr. Graves'

s.p.a.cious drawing-room and Mona Dinsmore gave herself to the man she loved.

There were only a few tried and true friends present to witness the ceremony, but everybody was happy, and all agreed that the bride was very lovely in her simple but elegant traveling dress.

"I cannot have a large wedding or any parade with gay people about me, for my heart is still too sore over the loss of my dear father," Mona had said, with quivering lips, when they had asked her wishes regarding the wedding, and so everything had been done very simply.

It is doubtful if so young a bride was ever made the recipient of so many diamonds as fell to Mona's lot that day.

Mr. Palmer, true to his promise, had all the recovered stones reset for her, and made her a handsome gift besides. Mr. and Miss Cutler presented to her a pair of beautiful stars for the hair, and Ray put a blazing solitaire above her wedding-ring, for a guard.

After a sumptuous wedding-breakfast, the happy couple started for a trip to the Golden Gate city, while during their absence, Mr. Palmer, senior, had his residence partially remodeled and refurnished for the fair daughter to whom already his heart had gone out in tender affection.

A notice of the marriage appeared in the papers, together with a statement that "the handsome fortune left by the late Walter Dinsmore had been restored to the young lady formerly known as Miss Mona Montague, now Mrs. Raymond Palmer, who had been fraudulently deprived of it, through the craftiness of a woman calling herself Mrs. Dinsmore."

Mona did not wish anything of her father's sad story to be made public, and so, it was arranged that this was all that should be given to the reporters, to show that she was Mr. Dinsmore's heiress, and would resume her former position in the world upon her return from her bridal trip.