“But you would not marry him, Laura, if you knew him to be a bad man?”
“I would never believe that he is a bad man!”
“But, my darling, you will listen to me. I must tell you the truth. I have kept it from you too long. I have been very guilty in keeping it from you. I ought to have told you when I first came back to Tolldale.”
“What ought you to have told me?”
“The story of my life, Laura. But I thought you would come between me and the victory I wanted to achieve.”
“What victory?”
“A victory over the man who caused my father’s death.”
Then, little by little, interrupted by a hundred exclamations and protestations from the sobbing girl whose head lay on her shoulder, and whose waist was encircled by her arm, Eleanor Monckton told the story of her return to Paris, the meeting on the Boulevard, and George Vane’s suicide. Little by little she contrived to explain to the wretched girl who clung about her, and who declared again and again that she would not believe anything against Launcelot, that she could not think him cruel or treacherous,—how the artist and his vile associate, Victor Bourdon, had cheated the old man out of the money which represented his own honour and the future welfare of his child.
“You think me hard and merciless, Laura,” she cried, “and I sometimes wonder at my own feelings; but remember, only remember what my father suffered. He was cheated out of the money that had been entrusted to him. He was afraid to face his own child. Oh, my poor dear, how could you wrong me so cruelly,” she murmured, in a low voice, as if addressing her dead father, “how could you think that I should have spoken one word of reproach, or loved you any the less, if you had lost a dozen fortunes of mine? No, Laura, I cannot forget what my father suffered; I cannot be merciful to this man.”
Eleanor’s task was a very hard one. Laura would not believe; that is to say, she would not acknowledge that she believed; but she had none of the calm assurance which a perfect and entire faith in her lover should have given her. It was useless to reason with her. All Eleanor’s logic was powerless against the passionate force of this girl’s perpetual cry, the gist of which was, “I will believe no harm of him! I love him, and I will not cease to love him!”