CHAPTER XXII.
A TARDY EXPLANATION.
While Florence Heriton, her lips quivering, her eyes glittering with excitement, was thus earnestly addressing her lover, Mr. Aylwinne had continued to stand before her, an agitated but attentive listener.
But when she ceased speaking, a spasm of pain contracted his features, and, dropping heavily into his chair, he covered his face with his hand.
“Why do you speak of this?” he asked, in low, uncertain tones. “Let it suffice that I have long known all; and pray do not recur again to a topic so fraught with misery to both of us.”
“You speak in riddles!” she retorted, her excitement and determination to be enlightened increasing with his evident reluctance to satisfy her. “You speak in riddles! I have never had anything to conceal, as you would seem to imply. Tell me your meaning frankly; for that man has aroused within me doubts and fears which nothing but your explanation can allay.”
He rose, and, coming toward her, would have taken her in his arms.
She stepped back and prevented this; but, without noticing the repulse, he said affectionately:
“My Florence, if in the first paroxysm of my natural grief and distress I permitted myself to think harshly of you, a more intimate knowledge of my darling’s character has made me repent this. I am satisfied that you were deceived—misled—that you never really knew what you were doing. And now let us say no more, for I lose all self-command when I think of your wrongs.”
Again Florence put back the hands that were extended to clasp her.
“Not yet. I must and will know what all this means! Tell me, Frank, I conjure you, what you have heard from this man!”
“Do you still persist? Why should you, when you see how painful it is to me? Have you never imagined that that fellow was deep in all his master’s secrets?”
Florence stamped her foot in an agony of impatience.
“I never thought about it. What was it to me? Why torture me with this hesitation? What was the whispered word that filled you with such strange thoughts of me?”
With evident reluctance and unwillingness, Mr. Aylwinne at last replied:
“He told me the nature of your errand at the Albany.”
“Well? Was there aught in it for which you could condemn me?”
“Certainly not, if”—then there was another tormenting pause—“if you still believed yourself a wife.”
Florence recoiled in dismay.
“I a wife! Whose? Lieutenant Mason’s? Nay, he dared not tell you this!”
Mr. Aylwinne smiled bitterly.
“Do you think that such a man would hesitate to prove false to any trust, or that compassion for deceived innocence is to be found in one so crafty and designing?”
“There was none reposed in him,” she answered. “It is you—you who have been deceived. I never spoke to Lieutenant Mason nor saw him after we quitted the priory.”
Mr. Aylwinne now looked utterly bewildered. He longed to believe her, yet what she told him was so completely at variance with all he had hitherto fancied to be true, that his mind was thoroughly confused.
In agitation far greater than her own, he exclaimed:
“For Heaven’s sake, Florence, do not palter with me! If a natural womanly shame at the unmerited disgrace that fell upon you has hitherto sealed your lips, to me you may surely speak openly! Or if I ask what gives you pain, bid me be silent, and I will faithfully obey.”
“Yet answer me this,” she cried: “Have you actually believed me united to Lieutenant Mason—believed that I came to your house a deserted wife, hiding her shame beneath a name she had no longer a right to bear?”
Mr. Aylwinne did not reply. All his deeply rooted convictions shaken by her indignant earnestness, he stood gazing at her in troubled silence.
With rising anger, Florence passionately exclaimed:
“If I have ever felt disgraced in my own sight it is now that I find you have thought me capable of such infamous concealments! What! you have been regarding me all these months as the discarded victim of a villain, and imagined that under such circumstances I could permit you to woo me?”
He drew his hand across his brow.
“Mason is dead, and you are free. Did I not carefully guard against a look or word that should fright you hence, while another had the shadow of a claim upon you? I can scarcely command my thoughts at this moment; yet surely I have not been mistaken in supposing that you acknowledged a barrier between us, and acceded to my wish that the wrongs you received at Mason’s hands should be never adverted to by either of us?”
“No, no!” cried Florence vehemently. “I never comprehended your half-sorrowful, half-angry allusions to the past. I thought it was of papa and his unfortunate speculations you spoke so angrily. Truth to tell, I have always supposed that some entanglement you did not care to confess to me occasioned your varying manner and your declaration that it was too late for us to love each other.”
“And you have never been another’s, my Florence—my darling!” Mr. Aylwinne murmured, as he joyfully caught her to his breast. “How cruelly I have been deceived! How cold—how unkind I must have appeared to you! And yet,” he added, releasing her and again looking doubtful and unsatisfied, “and yet there is something here I do not understand: I saw you at the Albany—I heard you crave an interview with the profligate lieutenant, and—oh, Florence!—I was the maddened witness of your tears and disappointment when you learned that he had quitted England.”
“And listened,” Florence added, with bitterness, “to the whispers of a man who is, by your own showing, as vile as his master. I insist that you tell me all he said!”
“For what purpose?” he asked. “Surely you must be well aware that your own candid statement will outweigh anything he may have told me.”
But Florence, whose pride had been aroused by his suspicions, persisted, and by degrees drew from him the whole story.
He had partially recognized in the veiled lady waiting to see Lieutenant Mason the form and features of the fair girl he loved devotedly, despite the rejection his suit had received. Shocked to behold her at such a place, he had questioned the servant, obtained equivocal answers, and bribed him to confess more.
His avarice awakened by the sight of Mr. Aylwinne’s gold, this fellow, who really had nothing to tell concerning Florence, poured into the ears of his credulous listener the history of his master’s connection with Julia Denham. Careful to mention no names, he told it more by hints and half sentences than an open relation of facts; and Mr. Aylwinne left him at last, sadly convinced that the beautiful young creature at West Street, Brompton, who had gone through the form of a marriage with Lieutenant Mason was Florence Heriton—the gentle, trusting girl whom for years it had been his cherished dream to win.
This, then, explained all that had so long perplexed Florence in his behavior. It was because he believed her morally if not legally bound to another that he had avoided her. It was in pure compassion that he had, after the first start of surprise, rejoiced that she had found an asylum beneath his roof. Now it became easy enough to find a meaning for all he had said that had hitherto sounded mysterious, as, for instance, his allusions to the recollections of her wrongs as being too painful to bear retrospection.
And then the flush faded from her cheek and left her deathly pale, for she remembered that she had nothing but her own simple assurance to oppose to Mr. Aylwinne’s deeply rooted conviction that she was the unhappy girl Lieutenant Mason had wedded and deserted.
Then in her distress, anger at his credulity began to make itself felt, and, drawing herself up, she proudly said:
“I scorn myself when I think how low an estimate of my character you must have formed to believe this tale. Could I, the Florence whose early years were spent in listening to the teachings of my good, prudent mother, have stooped to the secret addresses of a profligate, and a clandestine marriage?”
Mr. Aylwinne seized her hand.
“You are right; and I was mad, blind to be so easily duped. Only give me your own explanation of your visits to the Albany, and I promise to be satisfied.”
“That is quickly given. I went as the bearer on each occasion of a note from my poor father, whom Lieutenant Mason, by the most specious pretenses, tricked of the only sum of money remaining to us. It was the knowledge that he had ruined us that occasioned my dismay. But do you think that I can be satisfied until my innocence of all connection with this man is fully proved? No, Frank—no! By the memory of my mother I vow that I will never be your wife till that has been done!”
“Florence,” he cried wildly, “unsay those rash words! Mason is no more, and you know full well that there is no one else who can attest the falsity of his servant’s story.”
But Florence would stay to hear no more. Repeating: “I will never become your wife till the slur upon my name has been removed,” she would have fled the room. Mr. Aylwinne saw her intention, and put his back against the door.
“You shall not leave me in anger. I have been over-credulous, I know; yet make some excuses for me. Remember how I saw you: veiled deeply, and evidently in much agitation, earnestly seeking an interview with a young and handsome man, notorious for his gallantry. Can you wonder that, seeing you thus, I was only too ready to believe what I was told?”
Florence flung herself upon his breast with a bitter cry.
“No—no; I do not wonder that you thought the worst of me! Neither do you blame me that I keep to my vow even though our separation rends my heart. Your wife, my Frank, must be above suspicion. I could not be happy if I were yours. The slightest cloud on your brow, the slightest change in your voice, would fill me with dread that your suspicions were returning. Ah, Frank, I cannot—dare not give you my hand until no shadow of so fearful an estrangement can come between us.”
For a moment her lips were pressed to his; and then, resisting all further efforts to detain her, Florence tore herself from his embrace.