"I only knew it this morning," he thought; "I only knew this morning that my young wife still lives, and that I have a son."
He was sitting by the open window in Hester Jobson's best bedroom. He was sitting in an old–fashioned easy–chair, placed between the head of the bed and the open window,––a pure cottage window, with diamond panes of thin greenish glass, and a broad painted ledge, with a great jug of homely garden–flowers standing on it. The young man was sitting by the side of the bed upon which his newly–found wife and son lay asleep; the child's head nestled on his mother's breast, one flushed cheek peeping out of a tangled confusion of hazel–brown and babyish flaxen hair.
The white dimity curtains overshadowed the loving sleepers. The pretty fluffy knotted fringe––neat Hester's handiwork––made fantastical tracery upon the sunlit counterpane. Mary slept with one arm folded round her child, and with her face turned to her husband. She had fallen asleep with her hand clasped in his, after a succession of fainting–fits that had left her terribly prostrate.
Edward Arundel watched that tender picture with a smile of ineffable affection.
"I can understand now why Roman Catholics worship the Virgin Mary," he thought. "I can comprehend the inspiration that guided Raphael's hand when he painted the Madonna de la Chaise. In all the world there is no picture so beautiful. From all the universe he could have chosen no subject more sublime. O my darling wife, given back to me out of the grave, restored to me,––and not alone restored! My little son! my baby–son! whose feeble voice I heard that dark October night. To think that I was so wretched a dupe! to think that my dull ears could hear that sound, and no instinct rise up in my heart to reveal the presence of my child! I was so near them, not once, but several times,––so near, and I never knew––I never guessed!"
He clenched his fists involuntarily at the remembrance of those purposeless visits to the lonely boat–house. His young wife was restored to him. But nothing could wipe away the long interval of agony in which he and she had been the dupe of a villanous trickster and a jealous woman. Nothing could give back the first year of that baby's life,––that year which should have been one long holiday of love and rejoicing. Upon what a dreary world those innocent eyes had opened, when they should have looked only upon sunshine and flowers, and the tender light of a loving father's smile!
"O my darling, my darling!" the young husband thought, as he looked at his wife's wan face, upon which the evidence of all that past agony was only too painfully visible,––"how bitterly we two have suffered! But how much more terrible must have been your suffering than mine, my poor gentle darling, my broken lily!"
In his rapture at finding the wife he had mourned as dead, the young man had for a time almost forgotten the villanous plotter who had kept her hidden from him. But now, as he sat quietly by the bed upon which Mary and her baby lay, he had leisure to think of Paul Marchmont.
What was he to do with that man? What vengeance could he wreak upon the head of that wretch who, for nearly two years, had condemned an innocent girl to cruel suffering and shame? To shame; for Edward knew now that one of the most bitter tortures which Paul Marchmont had inflicted upon his cousin had been his pretended disbelief in her marriage.
"What can I do to him?" the young man asked himself. "What can I do to him? There is no personal chastisement worse than that which he has endured already at my hands. The scoundrel! the heartless villain! the false, cold–blooded cur! What can I do to him? I can only repeat that shameful degradation, and I will repeat it. This time he shall howl under the lash like some beaten hound. This time I will drag him through the village–street, and let every idle gossip in Kemberling see how a scoundrel writhes under an honest man's whip. I will––"