"Mark, let us be sensible. You should marry and have children. What else is open to you, the rich man? You have no faith in the world, none in friendship, none in love. Consider what your life must be if, at this age, all purer sources of feeling are dried up! In marriage you will find them all reopened. Your family will be your world. You need children. I need them. We are rich; yes, horribly rich. What is all this worth to us? You are the last of a race, honorable since the tenant of yonder grave first set foot upon this soil; honorable before that time. Shall that race die in you? My son, that old-world notion of Family is estimable. This country needs that it be cherished. The wealth will not be so new in the next generation. Your sons will not be strangers in the land of their fathers. You shall so train them that in them you shall reap the distinction denied to you. You say I am yet young. I am not old, and may still live to see my grandsons honored by their fellow men. By your own confession nothing remains to you but marriage. Love is offered you daily, by one most sweet and most lovable. Paula——"
He stopped her by a gesture. Her unwonted energy had impressed him. She had spoken well. "You have uttered many truths," he said, "but what you say of Paula is not kind, nor do you know——"
"Mark! on my honor as a woman, I believe that Paula loves you." Then she left him.
He remained long musing. Why should he not make his mother happy? It was true, waiting for a man to die was a pitiful occupation. And even should the man die there would be no hope for him. It was a year since Natalie had hidden herself with her burden and Tabitha Cone. Hidden herself, as he well knew, from him. She had written both him and his mother. She had not feared to again acknowledge her love; but she had prayed him to forget her. And she had told him that Paula loved him; she had shown him that his duty required him to love Paula in return; finally, she had, almost sternly, bade him cease to hope.
Perhaps his mother was right. Perhaps Paula loved him—as much as she could love. He loved her in the same cool fashion. He was used to her. She was very beautiful, completely amiable, kind and gentle. Not very brilliant, yet if simple-minded, not a fool. Marriage would bring out all there was of Paula, and that might be much more than was generally suspected. And whatever it was it would be lovable. He knew he was living the life of a fool. Why live that life consciously? Why not make his mother completely happy; Paula and himself happier; as happy as they could be?
He turned to his desk and opened a hidden drawer therein. From this he took a small packet of papers. "A man about to die or marry should set his house in order," he muttered, as he spread the papers open. There was the first letter Natalie had ever written him; a reply to his letter of condolence concerning her father's death. He glanced over it and slowly tore it into fragments. He did the same with the few others written by her, all except the last he had received. This was in answer to a letter into which he had thrown all the strength of his soul, lowering, if not completely breaking down, the last barriers of reserve behind which those who feel deeply hide their hearts.
He could not complain that in her answer she had not been equally frank. "From the innermost depths of my soul I love you, and if more can be, I honor you still more—and because I so love and honor you I must not see you again. I have loved you since the day I first saw you in the Odenwald. I loved you when I became the betrothed of another. I hoped then you would find a way to free me from the promise I had given. I aver before Heaven that I tried with all my strength to be a faithful wife. I loved my husband; alas! not as I know now, with a wife's love, but I believed it. Yet—let me confess it—at the very bottom of my heart slept my love for you, not dead as I had thought it. I have sinned against you, against him who was my husband, against myself. We must all suffer for my sin. You are strong. I must gather all the strength I can for the duty that my guilt has laid upon me—to bear my fate and to make a ruined life as endurable as unremitting care can make it. My sin was great. Consider my expiation! I must always see before my eyes my handiwork.
"You love me. Do you think that ever a doubt of your love crosses my mind? You will always love me. I know it. But, if you see me no more that love will, in time, become a tender reminiscence—not worth a tear, rather a smile—of pity let it be, for the lives that are wrecked. But from this day forth let your own life present a fair ideal to be realized. One has grown up beside you whose fate is in your hands. The fashioning of her destiny lies with you. To be a happy wife and mother, the lot for which nature intended her, or to live the barren life of a religious devotee; and knowing her as I do, I know that for you, embittered and distrustful by reason of your burden of inordinate wealth, she is supremely fitted to make your life serene and cheerful in return for the felicity you will bring to her.
"Adieu, for the last time. I shall not forget you, but shall love you as long as I live, and as warmly as I love you now. But deliberately, and with unalterable resolve, I have chosen my lot. Nothing, not even the hand of death, can render me fit to be more to you than the memory of one who has lived her life."
He slowly tore the letter into fragments as he had torn the others. Perhaps his mouth twitched as he did so. He looked upon the little heap of paper on his desk. "The Romance of a Rich Young Man," he muttered, and smiled at the conceit. Then he gathered the fragments in his hand and strewed them upon some tinder in the chimney and applied a match. "Gone up in Smoke," he said aloud.