After a time she went to the pendant of this picture, still oppressed by the strange dread which had followed her ever since she first entered the room. A sweep of her hand carried away the gauze from this portrait also, and that which was behind seemed to chill her into marble. She did not breathe, the color left her lips, and she retreated slowly backward, mute and astonished.
It was the portrait of her husband, the man who had abandoned her and her child to disgrace and starvation. Her own husband, for say what they would, deny it as he might, the man yonder, smiling upon her from the crimson of the wall, with his clear gray eyes and chestnut hair, was her husband. All the perjury on earth could not change the truth.
It was a terrible shock, this sudden appearance of the man who had wronged her. How frankly those eyes looked down into hers; that smile hovering around the fine mouth! her heart swelled to meet it with a great throb of joy. Those curls—chestnut with a gleam of gold in them—how often had she swept them together in masses with her own hand, and laughed at the air of playful impatience with which he had shaken them back to their place on his white temples.
Oh, these memories were too sweet and too painful. The joy of the past was upon it in a bright, rosy cloud, but underneath lay the black thought that he had wronged and left her; even as she looked on the picture, it was there, darting like a flash of lightning through her heart.
In this struggle of joy and anguish she sat down, gazing up wistfully at the portrait, and though she knew that it was inanimate, beseeching it to speak one word, and tell her that he was blameless,—that the miserly old woman, his mother, had maligned him, and she would believe his first breath, believe even a look against the whole world, against facts, against truth itself.
Thus, half madly, the poor girl, the wife who had no husband, who had been a mother and was childless, pleaded with the dumb, smiling picture.
At last the sound of her own voice fell back upon her like a mockery. She hushed her weeping and grew still, but the yearning affections, which are the perfume of womanhood, struggled out of passion into thought. She pondered over her whole life, not yet a long one, not really eventful, for the most terrible suffering more frequently springs from commonplace circumstances than from startling romance. It was a life of feeling, of endurance and doubt, rather than action—so far destiny had been wrought out for her. She had neither chosen nor rejected it, gloomy as it had always been. Save the few months in which love had filled her dreary lot with sunshine, so glorious that her heart ached to think of it, existence to her had been a dreary thing. But the very absence of earthly friends had unconsciously lifted her thoughts to a higher and holier power, and there she had learned to look trustingly. She was young, too, and healthy; thus life was not altogether a desert, though some of it had been spent in an insane asylum, and the rest marked by orphanage and desertion.
Desertion, ah! there was the doubt, which had never yet been entirely put to rest. Now, with that bright, honest face looking down upon her from the wall, her whole nature rose up against the conviction. He had died suddenly, or something would yet arise to clear him from the evil suspicions that she—wretch that she was—had dared to harbor against him.
These thoughts became a conviction. Her face, still wet with tears, was bathed with smiles. A holy faith in him she had loved so truly filled her soul, and the happiness therefrom rose and sparkled like starlight all around her. Her hands were softly clasped; her lips murmured a prayer for the forgiveness she would not grant to herself. She began to love the old library and everything in it, for was it not the scene of this sweet revelation? She had found her husband again.