“From the hour Berene disappeared, to this very day, no word or message ever came from her,” the invalid said. “I have never known whether she was dead or alive, married, or, terrible thought, perhaps driven into a reckless life by her one false step with me. This last fear has been a constant torture to me all these years.
“The world is cruel in its judgment of woman. And yet I know that it is woman herself who has shaped the opinions of the world regarding these matters. If men had had their way since the world began, there would be no virtuous women. Woman has realised this fact, and she has in consequence walled herself about with rules and conventions which have in a measure protected her from man. When any woman breaks through these conventions and errs, she suffers the scorn of others who have kept these self-protecting and society-protecting laws; and, conscious of their scorn, she believes all hope is lost for ever.
“The fear that Berene took this view of her one mistake, and plunged into a desperate life, has embittered my whole existence. Never before did a man suffer such a mental hell as I have endured for this one act of sin and weakness. Yet the world, looking at my life of success, would say if it knew the story, ‘Behold how the man goes free.’ Free! Great God! there is no bondage so terrible as that of the mind. I have loved Berene Dumont with a changeless passion for twenty-three years, and there has not been a day in all that time that I have not during some hours endured the agonies of the damned, thinking of all the disasters and misery that might have come into her life through me. Heaven knows I would have married her if she had remained. Strange and intricate as the net was which the devil wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and would have broken through it after that strange night—at once the heaven and the hell of my memory—if Berene had remained. As it was—I married Mabel, and you know what a farce, ending in a tragedy, our married life has been. God grant that no worse woes befell Berene; God grant that I may meet her in the spirit world and tell her how I loved her and longed for her companionship.”
The young rector’s eyes were streaming with tears, as he reached over and clasped the sick man’s hands in his. “You will meet her,” he said with a choked voice. “I heard this same story, but without names, from Berene Dumont’s dying lips more than two years ago. And just as Berene disappeared from you—so her daughter disappeared from me; and, God help me, dear father—doubly now my father, I crushed out my great passion for the glorious natural child of your love, to marry the loveless, wretched and unnatural child of your marriage.”
The sick man started up on his couch, his eyes flaming, his cheeks glowing with sudden lustre.
“My child—the natural child of Berene’s love and mine, you say; oh, my God, speak and tell me what you mean; speak before I die of joy so terrible it is like anguish.”
So then it became the rector’s turn to take the part of narrator. When the story was ended, Preston Cheney lay weeping like a woman on his couch; the first tears he had shed since his mother died and left him an orphan of ten.
“Berene living and dying almost within reach of my arms—almost within sound of my voice!” he cried. “Oh, why did I not find her before the grave closed between us?—and why did no voice speak from that grave to tell me when I held my daughter’s hand in mine?—my beautiful child, no wonder my heart went out to her with such a gush of tenderness; no wonder I was fired with unaccountable anger and indignation when Mabel and Alice spoke unkindly of her. Do you remember how her music stirred me? It was her mother’s heart speaking to mine through the genius of our child.
“Arthur, you must find her—you must find her for me! If it takes my whole fortune I must see my daughter, and clasp her in my arms before I die.”
But this happiness was not to be granted to the dying man. Overcome by the excitement of this new emotion, he grew weaker and weaker as the next few days passed, and at the end of the fifth day his spirit took its flight, let us hope to join its true mate.