"It is just possible that there may be a third sister, yet I think I have heard you say you had but one, and this reminiscence is anguish to my mind. Even more, the careless and unwarrantable allusions of Mr. Gregory to certain scars, evidently from burns that he had the insolence to observe on your neck and arms, and remark upon as mere foils to their beauty, in my first acquaintance with you and before I had a right to silence him, recurred to me as a partial confirmation of my fears. Without explaining to him my motives, I questioned him on this subject again soon after he handed me your note, a proceeding that I should have shrunk from as gross and unworthy of a gentleman under any other circumstances. I did not stop to think what impression my inquiries would leave upon his mind, ever prone to levity and suspicion; but he must have seen that I was deeply moved, and that no impertinent curiosity could sway me to such a course with regard to the woman I loved and had openly declared my plighted wife. You will understand all this and make allowance for me. Write to me immediately, and relieve, if possible, my intense solicitude. At all events, let me know the truth, and look it in the face as soon as may be. Any reality is better than suspense. Yet I must 'hope against hope,' or surrender wholly. I have not time to write another line. My business is imperative, or I should certainly retrace my steps.
"Yours eternally, Wentworth."
The man who wrote this letter was capable of condensing in a few calm words a world of passion, whether he spoke or wrote them; but he had governed his pen carefully in his agonizing uncertainty. It was yet to be determined when he penned these lines whether he should be considered a lover addressing his mistress, or an uncle writing to his niece, and in this bitter perplexity he commanded his inclinations to the side of principle.
I wept with tears of joy and thankfulness above this constrained epistle—I pressed it to my heart, my lips, a thousand times, in the quiet hours of night, in the moments of retirement my jailer granted me. The child Ernie alone saw and wondered at these manifestations of which I first saw the extravagance through his solemn imitations thereof, which yet made me catch him rapturously in my arms and kiss him a thousand times, until he put me aside, at last, with decorous dignity, as one transcending privilege.
By some vicarious process, best understood by lovers, I lavished on little Ernie a thousand terms of endearment, meant only for another, and by the light of my own happiness he seemed transfigured. He was identified with the lifting away of a burden more bitter than captivity itself. They could but kill my body now—my soul was filled with a new life that nothing could extinguish; and believing in Wentworth, I felt that I could die happy, let death come when and how it would. I knew now that in the course of time, whether I lived or died, Wentworth would know that I was not his niece, and claim Mabel as his own, remembering my estimate of those who held her in charge. Then would the tide of love and passion, so long repressed, roll back in its old channel, and he would leave no stone unturned, no path unexplored, whereby to trace my fate.
To this, as yet, he held no clew. The sea had seemed to swallow Miriam Harz, by which name I had been registered in the ship's books and known to the passengers; nor could it be surmised that the young "mad girl," since spoken of, as I had been told, in the papers, as having been restored to her friends by the accident of meeting the Latona, and Miriam Monfort, were one and the same person. But if the time should come when all should be explained, either by my own lips or the revelations of others, good cause might Basil Bainrothe and his confederate have to tremble!
Like all cold, patient, deeply-feeling men, there were untold reserves of power and passion in the nature of Wardour Wentworth which might, for aught I knew to the contrary, tend naturally to and culminate in revenge. The wish to retaliate was, I knew, a fundamental fault in my own character, one I had often occasion to struggle with even in childhood, when Evelyn, my despot, was also my dependant, and generosity had been called to the aid of forbearance. Vengeance was a fierce thirst in my Judaic heart which only Christian streams could ever allay or quench, and I judged the man I loved by self—not always a fitting standard of comparison.
And Gregory! I could imagine well the fiendish delight with which he had seen me day by day writhing uncomplainingly beneath the unexplained and as I had deemed unsuspected alienation of Wentworth, the cause of which his act had wrapped in mystery! Afraid to tamper with the note I gave him for the cool, discerning eye of Wentworth, curiosity had at first led him to break the seal of that intrusted to his care in return, and dark malevolence to retain it rather than destroy, for the eye of his confederate. That he had dispatched it at once for Paris was very evident from the pencilling on the back of the letter; and that the snare was set for me already, in which the accident of the encountered raft proved an assistant, I could not doubt.
I fell into the hands of Bainrothe on shipboard instead of into those of Gregory in New York; this was the only difference, for subterfuge could have done its work as well, if not as daringly, on land as on sea; and the league of iniquity was made before I sailed from Savannah.
How perfectly I could comprehend, for the first time since this revelation, what Wentworth must have suffered beneath his burden of unrelieved doubt and conjecture! I could see how, day by day, as no answer came to change the current of his thoughts, conviction slowly settled down like a cloud upon his heart, his reason; and what stern confirmation of all he dreaded most, my silence must have seemed to him!