“I will not be so foolish, though,” she said, and opening the library door she walked boldly in; but the same Marian who entered there never came out again!
CHAPTER VI.
READING THE LETTER.
Oh, how still it was in that room, and the click of the key as it turned the slender bolt echoed through the silent apartment, causing Marian to start as if a living presence had been near. The drawer was opened, and she held the letter in her hand, while unseen voices seemed whispering to her, “Oh, Marian, Marian—leave the letter still untouched. Do not seek to know the secret it contains, but go back to the man who is your husband, and by those gentle acts which seldom fail in their effect, win his love. It will be far more precious to you than all the wealth of which you are the unsuspecting heiress.”
But Marian did not understand—nor know why it was she trembled so. She only knew she had the letter in her hand—her letter—the one left by her guardian. It bore no superscription, but it was for her, of course, and fixing herself in a comfortable position, she broke the seal and read:
“My Dear Child:”
There was nothing in those three words suggestive of a mistake—and Marian read on till, with a quick, nervous start, she glanced forward, then backward—and then read on and on, until at last not even the fear of death itself could have stopped her from that reading. That letter was never intended for her eye—she knew that now, but had the cold hand of her guardian been interposed to wrest it from her, she would have held it fast until she learned the whole. Like coals of living fire, the words burned into her soul, scorching, blistering as they burned—and when the letter was finished she fell upon her face with a cry so full of agony and horror that Frederic in the parlor heard the wail of human anguish, and started to his feet, wondering whence it came.
With the setting of the sun the November wind had risen, and as the young man listened it swept moaning past the window, seeming not unlike the sound he had first heard. “It was the wind,” he said, and he resumed his seat, while, in that little room, not very far away, poor Marian came back to consciousness, and crouching on the floor, prayed that she might die. She understood it now—how she had been deceived, betrayed, and cruelly wronged. She knew, too, that she was the heiress of untold wealth, and for a single moment her heart beat with a gratified pride, but the surprise was too great to be realized at once, and the feeling was soon absorbed in the reason why Frederic Raymond had made her his wife. It was not herself he had married, but her fortune—her money—Redstone Hall. She was merely a necessary incumbrance, which he would rather should have been omitted in the bargain. The thought was maddening, and, stretching out her arms, she asked again that she might die.
“Oh, why didn’t he come to me?” she cried, “and tell me? I would gladly have given him half my fortune—yes, all—all—rather than be the wretched thing I am, and he would have been free to love and marry this—”
She could not at first speak the name of her rival—but she said it at last, and the sound of it wrung her heart with a new and torturing pain. She had never heard of Isabel Huntington before, and as she thought how beautiful and grand she was, she whispered to herself, “Why didn’t he go back to her, and leave me, the red-headed fright, alone? Yes, that was what he wrote to his father. Let me look at it again,” and the tone of her voice was bitter and the expression of her face hard and stony, as taking up the letter she read for the second time that “she was uncouth, uneducated and ugly,” and if his father did not give up that foolish fancy, Frederic would positively “hate the red-headed fright.” Her guardian had not given up the foolish fancy, consequently there was but one inference to be drawn.
In her excitement she did not consider that Frederic had probably written of her harsher things than he really meant. She only thought, “He loathes me—he despises me—he wishes I was dead—and I dared to kiss him too,” she added. “How he hated me for that, but ’twas the first, and it shall be the last, for I will go away forever and leave him Redstone Hall, the bride he married a few hours ago,” and laying her face upon the chair Marian thought long and earnestly of the future. She had come into that room a happy, simple-hearted, confiding child, but she had lived years since, and she sat there now a crushed but self-reliant woman, ready to go out and contend with the world alone. Gradually her thoughts and purposes took a definite form. She was ignorant of the knotty points of law, and she did not know but Frederic could get her a divorce, but from this publicity she shrank. She could not be pointed at as a discarded wife. She would rather go away where Frederic would never see nor hear of her again, and she fancied that by so doing he would after a time at least be free to marry Isabel. She had not wept before, for her tears seemed scorched with pain, but at the thought of another coming there to take the place she had hoped to fill, they rained in torrents over her white face, and clasping her little hands convulsively together, she cried—“How can I give him up when I love him so much—so much?”