“Yes, was,” he said, with a trembling lip. “She died only a week ago, and I feel that it is due to you, for your kindness to me, that I should tell you this. She believed, and has believed all these long years, that she was most cruelly wronged. She was driven from her beautiful home on account of it, and has suffered in silence ever since. I knew nothing of her sad history, believing my father had died before my birth, until a very short time before her own death. It was true that she had the certificate of which the rector speaks, but that man told her, and she believed, it was a sham and a forgery. Whether he was ever told or discovered that his accomplice was foiled and driven from the field, and a bona fide marriage performed, is a mystery; but I am rather inclined to think he did not, since, if he ever discovered my mother’s position in life, he would undoubtedly have been anxious to claim her as his wife. She was a lady, and occupied a station in every way honorable before this sad trouble overtook her; and I to-day, with this to prove it, can claim a name as proud as any in England. She was the daughter of the Marquis of Wycliffe, of whom you have doubtless heard.”
“Is it possible?” Miss Grafton exclaimed, greatly surprised; “and you are therefore the heir of Wycliffe.”
“Yes; but before I present my claim I have a work to do. I must find him who wronged and ruined my mother’s life,” he returned, with firmly compressed lips and lowering brow.
“Thank you for telling me this,” Miss Grafton said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I have often thought of the young girl, of whom my father used frequently to speak, and wonder if all was well with her. I congratulate you. I am glad that the wrong-doer was outwitted, and that the innocent will be righted at last.”
“My poor, innocent mother can never be righted; those years of suffering and humiliation can never be atoned for,” the young man said, in trembling tones.
“My friend,” Miss Isabel Grafton said, meeting his eyes with a sweet gravity that was all her own, “can you not trust that where she has gone all sorrow has ceased, all tears are wiped, and that pain is remembered no more? She can see now, if you cannot, why all this was permitted.”
“Miss Grafton, you remind me of my mother, only you are younger—she used to talk that way to me, and she said almost the same thing to me just before she died,” he said, with a touch of reverence in his tones.
Miss Grafton sighed, yet at the same time her lips parted in a little tremulous smile.
The sigh bespoke the memory of some bitter struggle of the past—the smile of the trust and hope of which she had just spoken.
She set before him a pen, ink, and paper, and then quietly left the room while he copied those blessed words from the rector’s diary, which in one hour had changed all his life.