'No! did Polly do that? A golden girl I knew she was; but that's sublime! Yet I might have known she had held her tongue, since Felix and Cherry are alive and well! Good old girl. I say, Travis, you must have her after all. She deserves it!'
His relief was intense, when he thought of his son, in finding no brand affixed to the name he had never dared own again, except at the two most unhappy events of his life, his duel and his wedding.
'Ourselves, our souls, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice,' he said. 'Those were little Lance's words—the chief reason he assigned for burying himself at Bexley. A fanatic craze of course, but I never got the words out of my head, and I'm sure I've been the sacrifice, soul and body, though not what you'd call a holy or a reasonable one! Well, whatever hindered him, it was well for him!'
He explained that Allen had been a feeble speculator, but plausible, of personal good faith, and perniciously sanguine. His schemes had chiefly devoured Thomas Underwood's legacy, while as to the other debts, Edgar treated them lightly, and though he was much moved at Geraldine's exertions to pay them, he called it an infatuation in Felix to have allowed it.
After his flight to Ostend, Edgar had joined Allen's company at Strasburg. Failure had disgusted him with painting, and the free wandering life had long fascinated him, while with the Zoraya he had a standing game at coquetry. Though her name was Hungarian, she was almost stage-born, and her nationality was harder to analyze than Ferdinand's. She had sung ever since she could speak, and been bred to the boards, but as, in spite of her splendid beauty, she lacked dramatic talent, and her voice had been too early strained, she was never more than a third-rate prima-donna, with airs and graces that were Edgar's sport and titillation, while to her he was the handsomest and most gentlemanly man in the company, with wit and breeding of which she was half afraid.
When Edgar found that the unhappy occurrence at Pau was known, he asked eagerly after Alice, blessing the kindness that had brought her home; but he lived where life was held too cheap to make him greatly heed blood-guiltiness; nor had he deemed the wound more than the just penalty of forcing the duel on him, viewing the fatal result chiefly as an accident. But Zoraya had seen Alice shriek and faint, and Edgar falter and blush, and knew that this pretty English doll had been the cause of his killing his man. Thenceforth passion and jealousy awoke in her, and made her whole being centre in the determination to turn his trifling into earnest. Her beauty became more striking, her songs more effective in the absorption of her soul, and her eager pursuit became as often oppressive as amusing. When he had remained in Egypt with the apparently dying Major Harewood, nothing could persuade her that the Englishman was not connected with Alice; and when he joined the troop again, she hailed him like a truant slave returned to his bondage.
Why had he not broken from it? Had the telegram announced Felix, he could not have helped lingering for a sight of his face in spite of everything; but Wilmet, in her cold severity, and her grief too, he could not encounter, especially as Zoraya had threatened to descend upon him and 'imagine the meeting.'
So he drifted back to the 'company,' which had by force of custom become a sort of home, and was his sole resource. 'Rattle-snake and frog,' he said; 'of course the frog succumbs at last.'
But that had not been till the retirement of the Allens had left him to the mercy of the Prebels, and when the absence of Mrs. Allen's unimpeachable respectability left the company at the mercy of scandal; and a little exaggeration of evil report, with a few tears and heroics, brought him passively to surrender his hand to his pursuer, and they were married in New Zealand before proceeding to America to 'star it' in the Southern States.
Even then his affectionate nature would have opened to family love; but with the attainment of her object, Zoraya's passion ceased, and she viewed him as a master to be resisted. His ideal of a wife had been formed on very different women, and incensed her imperious temper; and when her violence was met by cool sarcasm, she was lashed to frenzy. Her repugnance to motherhood completed his disgust. He deliberately told Fernan that first and last he had never seen a spark of even animal yearning towards the infant, only angry impatience of the discomfort and inconvenience, and contempt of the pleasure it gave him. She was enough among the advocates of advanced women's rights to learn to admire her own scorn of maternity, and but for an old negress, whom he had hired on the poor little thing's unwelcome entrance into the world, its chances of life would have been few.