“You have been the source of the greatest happiness I have ever enjoyed,” he wrote; “and I would give a dozen fortunes rather than not have known you, and enjoyed you for the few years I called you mine, my sister, my child, my Magda. Once I could have cursed the man who lured my mother to her ruin, and cursed his children, too; but I did not then dream that such a curse would cover the beautiful child of my adoption. Heaven bless you, Magda, in all your new relations! Heaven make you happy in them as you deserve to be! Once I hoped I might see you at Schodick, and I have thought how I would take you around the old farm, and to the places hallowed by my mother’s footsteps, and pictured to myself just what you would say, and just how you would look. But that dream is over now. I cannot ask you to come. You would not care to, nor your father care to have you. Remember me to him, if you like. Since I know he is your father, I feel no bitterness toward him. Good-by! And God bless you, and bring you, at last, to the Heaven where I hope to find my little girl again!”
This was Roger’s letter, over which Magdalen wept tears of pain, mingled with tears of joy,—joy, that he loved her still,—for only in that way could she construe some portions of his letter; and pain that he should write as if all intercourse between them was necessarily at an end; that he was probably never to see her; she never to go to Schodick, when she had within the last few days thought so much about it, and planned how she could, perhaps, get her father and Alice to go with her, and thus show Roger to them. That plan had failed, that castle fallen, and Magdalen wept its fall, wondering what had come over Roger, and what he meant by some portions of his letter. She did not know how, for a moment, Roger had writhed under the knowledge that she was the daughter of Arthur Grey; or how the fact had seemed at once to build an iron wall between him and the girl he loved better than his life. Then, just as he was recovering from the first great shock, and hope was beginning to make itself heard again, Guy had unwittingly put his oar into the troubled waters, and made them ten times worse. In his enthusiasm about Magdalen, whom he extolled as all that was lovely and desirable, he gave Roger the impression that between himself and Magdalen there already existed an intimacy which would ripen into relations of a closer nature than mere friends. And Roger listened to him with a face which told no tales, and a heart which throbbed with jealousy and pain; and then, feeling that he must know something definite, said to him, just as he was leaving:
“Excuse me, Mr. Seymour, if I seem impertinent. From what you have said, I gather that you hope, one day, to be more to Mr. Grey than his sister’s nephew.”
And Guy, thinking only of Alice at that moment, had replied:
“You are something of a Yankee, I guess. But you are right in your conjectures. I do hope to be more to Mr. Grey than his sister’s nephew; but there’s no telling. Girls are riddles, you know.”
And then good-natured, kind-hearted Guy had gone his way, leaving in Roger’s mind an impression which drifted his life farther and farther away from Magdalen, whose heart went out after him now with a stronger desire than it had ever known before.
CHAPTER XLVI.
THE CLOUDS BREAK OVER BEECHWOOD.
Acknowledged by every one as the daughter of the Greys, caressed and idolized by Alice, petted by Aunt Penelope, and treated by Mr. Grey with the utmost tenderness and deference, Magdalen would have been perfectly happy but for one unfulfilled desire which was the skeleton at her side. Between herself and Alice there was perfect confidence, while she was learning daily more and more to respect her father, who omitted nothing which could tend to win her love. To her mother she was the same gentle nurse who never grew weary, but who sat hour after hour by the bedside, repeating over and over again the story of the lost child, until Laura knew it by heart and would correct her at once if she deviated ever so little. There was a change gradually stealing over the invalid, a change both in body and mind. She was far more quiet, and did not rock the cradle as much as formerly, and once, when Magdalen had finished her story for the second time that day, she said to her, “I think I have heard it enough to know that baby is not in the crib, and never has been. Take it away,—where I can’t rock it again and make Arthur so nervous.”
They carried it out,—Alice and Magdalen together,—and put it away, each feeling, as they left it, as if turning from a little grave. Laura never spoke of it but once, and that was to her husband. Pointing to the place where it had stood so long, she said with a smile, “Do you see it is gone? It will never keep you awake again. Kiss me, Arthur, for I, too, shall be gone before long.”