The moist, salt-laden breeze fanned their hot faces gratefully. The musical tap-tap of the waves against the side of the ship came to them as from a great distance, and even the voices and laughter of the passengers seemed, somehow, strangely remote.
The stranger brought his gaze back to them with an effort, as he said, wearily, “Monsieur, I am tired—you cannot know how much. But I had not meant to bore you with my so selfish perplexities——”
“Sometimes to tell our troubles is half the cure,” Mrs. Payton suggested, gently.
“You are very—good,” murmured the stranger, gratefully. “If you are sure it will not tire——”
Then at their vigorous denials, he proceeded, in his low, even voice: “Sometimes I have felt the great necessity of telling all to some one—some one who would understand. If I did not, I felt I should go mad.” He passed his hand over his eyes with an infinitely weary gesture.
“You see, my father and I, we had long been estranged. Not even in my earliest childhood have I the memory of a gentle word, a fatherly pressure of the hand. So I grew to young manhood with no knowledge of a mother’s or father’s love—for my mother,” here his voice lowered, reverently, “died when I was born. My childhood was of the utmost loneliness, for my father thought the children with whom I wished to associate were too far beneath me in social station. My sole companion was the old dame who took care of the house—the one person in the world of whom my father seemed to have fear. So the miserable years dragged by. When I had just begun to make some 87 plans by which I might escape from this dungeon they so falsely called my home—just at the time I was most despairing—like a joyful, radiant rift of sunlight in a clouded sky, came—my Jeanette. Oh, if you could but see her!”
Under cover of the dark the girls’ hands sought and clasped convulsively, but no one spoke.
“I cannot attempt to describe one so gay, so beautiful, so lovely. She seemed like a spirit from another world—a far dearer, happier world than I had ever thought to exist. Ah, how I loved her, and she—ah, she loved me, and for a while we were, oh, Monsieur, so divinely, so unthinkably happy——” His voice broke and again his gaze wandered dreamily out into the night.
“And who was the girl?” Lucile prompted, eagerly.
“Ah, Mademoiselle, that was the rock upon which all our dreams were wrecked. My father would but reply sourly to any question I might venture that my fair Jeanette was the ward of a friend who, on his death-bed, had bequeathed her to his clemency—the fool!”