Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

O source of the holiest joys we inherit!
O Sorrow, thou solemn, invisible spirit!
Ill fares it with man when through life's desert sand,
Grown impatient too soon for the long-promised land,
He turns from the worship of thee.

It will long ago have been suspected that Margaret was wrong in her suspicion about her husband. Maurice Grey was not the person who had taken forcible possession of her child. Jane, in her new capacity of friend and protector (for the landlady had never done anything by halves; hers was one of the world's strong natures—great in good as in evil), had opened out, with much shame and contrition, everything that concerned the transactions of that fatal day.

Her story was this: In the course of the afternoon a gentleman had come up the garden-path, and proceeding to the back instead of to the front door, had requested to have a few words with her. He had begun by asking some trivial questions about her mistress, and Jane said that as he asked them he looked at her in a searching kind of way. Apparently it did not take him many minutes to discover a certain amount of animus in her state of mind, and with the more readiness he revealed to her the object of his visit, persuading her that the service she was desired to render was very small. He was careful enough of her conscience not to tell her in so many words what he intended to do. All he asked her was to keep the fact of his having been there at all a secret as long as possible, and if she should be questioned to give a certain description of his personal appearance.

L'Estrange's revenge was perfect in its kind. In his angry bitterness he had determined to punish, and not only to punish but to humiliate, the woman who had kept him at arm's length, who offended him by her dignity, who openly showed her contempt and loathing for his character; and he had succeeded.

It was a bold scheme. Had it been deliberately planned, it might have been said to be diabolical in its clever wickedness; but the fact, though strange, was true: it was not deliberately planned.

When L'Estrange found Margaret's address and followed her to Middlethorpe, he had not the vaguest idea of being in any way inimical to her. He had a passionate admiration for her beauty, and he believed her to be weak. Even the persistent way in which she had hidden herself from him had nurtured this idea in his mind. He thought she was afraid of him, and his aim was to conquer this fear, to persuade her by his specious reasoning that it was foolish and vain.

He was a man who believed he understood women perfectly, and as, unhappily for himself, his experience had been rather with the weak and erring than with the strong and pure, he had a rooted contempt for the female character. The height and purity of such a soul as Margaret's it was impossible for him to understand.

It must not be supposed that L'Estrange was any monster of wickedness—he possessed, on the contrary, many good and noble traits—but his foreign training, the wandering life he had led and the strange notions he had picked up from modern sectaries had sorely impaired his moral sense. Truth was a mere name to him. To cling to it at an inconvenient season he would have considered the supreme of folly. And yet he had a kind of honor of his own. To help the weak and defend the oppressed were articles in his strange creed. If Margaret had given herself up to him and followed him in his wanderings, he would have been faithful to her even unto death.

In fact it was only tenderness for her, an instinctive feeling of unfitness, that had prevented him from marrying the warm-hearted, impulsive English girl who had given him her love so unreservedly.

Fortune had come to L'Estrange late in life, and unexpectedly; with it came the desire for the renewal of old ties. He did not look upon marriage as the insuperable barrier which it is happily considered here. He believed Margaret's marriage to have been one of convenience, not inclination, and that she would be rather thankful to him than the reverse for interfering with its smooth tranquillity. Hence the scene at Ramsgate, which, in reliance on Maurice's impulsive character and his English repugnance to anything approaching a scandal, he had deliberately planned.