"Under God, my dear Val," he wrote, "I owe the restoration of my good name to you. I know all you have done for me and mine—my poor mother has told me; but I cannot thank you. I am sure you do not want me to thank you; but it is all written deep in my heart, and will be buried with me. I am coming back to Speckport—ah! dear old Speckport! I never thought it could be so dear! I shall be with you in November, and perhaps I may say to you then what I cannot write now. I am coming back a man, Val; I went away a hot-headed, passionate, unreasoning boy. I have learned to be wise, I hope, and if the school has been a hard one, I shall only remember its lessons the longer. I am coming back rich; blessings as well as misfortunes do not come alone. I have been left a fortune—you will see an account of it in the paper I send you. Our colonel, a gallant fellow, and a rich Georgian planter, has remembered me in his will. I saved his life shortly after I came here, almost at the risk of my own, I believe. They promoted me for it at the time, and I thought I had got my reward; but I was mistaken. He died last week of a bayonet-thrust, and when his will was read, I found I was left thirty thousand dollars. He was a childless widower, with no near relatives; so no one is wronged. You see I shall not have to fall back upon Dr. Leach's hand on my return, and my mother need depend no more on Mrs. Wyndham's generosity. I am very grateful to that lady all the same."
"I believe I'll show this letter to Father Lennard," said Val to himself; "he asked me on Sunday if I had heard from Charley lately, and told me to let him know when I did. Charley was always a favorite of his, since the day when he was a little shaver and an acolyte on the altar."
Mr. Blake was not the man to let grass grow under his feet when he took a notion in his head; so he started off at once, at a swinging pace, for the cathedral. The October twilight was cold and gray. A dreary evening, in which men went by with pinched noses and were buttoned up in greatcoats, and women had vails over their faces, and shivered in the street—a melancholy evening, speaking of desolation, and decay, and death, and the end of all things earthly.
Mr. Blake, to whom it was only a rawish evening, strode along, and reached the cathedral in the bleak dusk. The principal entrances were all closed, but he went in through a side door, and looked into the side chapel for the priest. Not finding him, he entered the cathedral through one of the transepts, but neither was Father Lennard there. The gray twilight shone but dimly through the painted windows, and the long and lofty aisles were very dim and shadowy. There was but one light in the great church—a tiny lamp burning on the grand altar—a lamp that never went out by night or day. Two or three shadowy female figures knelt around the altar-rails in silent prayer, and Val thought one of them looked like Miss Rose. He knew she was in the habit of coming in the twilight here; but something else had caught his attention, and he turned away and went on tiptoe down the echoing nave, staring up at the choir. Some one was singing softly there—singing so softly that it seemed but the sighing of the autumn-wind, and seemed to belong to it. But Val had a quick ear, and the low melancholy cadences struck him with a nameless thrill. What was there that sounded so strangely familiar in that voice? It was a woman's voice—a sweet, full soprano, that could rise to power at its owner's will. But what did it remind him of? A thought flashed through him—a sudden and startling thought—that brought the blood in a red gush to his face, and then left him cold and white. He softly ascended the stairs, the low, mournful voice breaking into a sweetly-plaintive vesper hymn as he went.
Val Blake trembled from head to foot, and a cold sweat broke out on his face. He paused a moment before he entered into the choir, his heart beating faster than it ever had beat before. A woman sat before the organ, not playing, but with her fingers wandering noiselessly over the keys, her face upraised in the ghostly light. She looked like the picture of St. Cecilia, with a cloud of tressed hazy golden hair falling about that pale, earnest, upraised face. Her mantle had fallen back—a white cashmere mantle, edged with ermine and lined with blue satin—and she sung, unconscious, as it seemed, of all the world. Val Blake stood like a man paralyzed—struck dumb and motionless—and the sweet voice sang on:
"Ave Maria! Oh, hear when we call,
Mother of Heaven, who is Saviour of all;
Feeble and fearing, we trust in thy might;
In doubting and darkness thy love be our light.
Let us sleep on thy breast while the night-taper burns.
And wake in thine arms when the morning returns!
Ave Maria! Ave Maria! Ave Maria! audi nos!"
The singing ceased, the fingers were motionless, and the pale face drooped and sunk down on the pale hands. And still Val Blake stood mute, motionless, utterly confounded. For there before him, with only the moonlight shadow of her former loveliness left, sat and sang, not the dead, but the living, Nathalie Marsh!