"Oh, what a fool I have been," she groaned, when he had disappeared, "to credit that small, chill heart with noble qualities! To invest that suspicious soul with high impulses, and then to fall down and worship him for a fallen god! Does not his quailing eye speak of a vile history, of which he is such a coward as to fear the exposure? He, the gallant soldier and invincible hero! Oh, blind world, to wear such a bandage of credulity! He is incapable of bravery. I protest that a man with such a downward eye could not look peril in the face. He fears me—me, Margaret Walsingham, who trembled at his voice. How can this paradox be explained? Is it possible that I have been so insanely mistaken in the man as this?"
Colonel Brand forthwith began to visit Margaret Walsingham, with a view to winning her for his wife, and at every interview her aversion increased.
She soon came to shudder if she but heard his voice, and in her heart violently contradicted every word he uttered, as if she saw the lie on his face, when she detected his petty subterfuges to trap her interest, and wily schemes to catch her love as regularly as he had recourse to them. And she knew in her soul that the man was false in all except his intention to win back his fortune.
"Where is that St. Udo Brand I mourned for?" wailed she, one evening, after a stormy interview, when he had unwittingly disclosed the foul distortion of his soul to her abhorring eyes. "Where has that great spirit fled which cried for help to save itself from ruin at the hands of Juliana Ducie? Must I accept the detestable truth that the gold which I thought I had discovered behind the vail of sin was but tinsel all the time, and tarnished with many an indelible stain of crime? Oh, St. Udo, come back to me as you used to come in my grief, and reveal your sad, heroic history once more, that I may believe in human nature again! But for that secret, wily nature, I loathe it—oh, I loathe that man!" she hissed, passionately. "Something rises up in my heart against him every hour I see him, and whispers: 'Crush that serpent!'"
"How could he have concealed his real nature from everybody so successfully? This wretch is not clever enough to conceal his nature from me, and I am not particularly penetrating. Can this be St. Udo Brand? Good Heaven! What an idea!"
Margaret suddenly relapsed into utter silence; the half-whispered thoughts died on her lips, and she grew fearfully pale. The idea had shot through her brain like a blinding flash of light; it dazzled, it distracted her. She struggled against the fast-growing conviction as the unconscious wretch from his half-fatal bath in the ocean struggles against returning life, preferring the stupor to the throes of the new life.
But it grew to her; she could not shake it off. She wondered, aghast at herself for wondering, why she had not known it in the first stunned, incredulous gaze, when all her joy at his return froze into cold repulsion, and she recognized a worm instead of St. Udo, the hero.
Then she fell into a dreadful state of excitement; she paced her room for hours, clasping her hands frantically, as if she felt her need of a tight hold on some human being, and had no friend but herself; and every dread possibility sailed slowly and with ruthless pertinacity before her shrinking eye. She never had passed such a forlorn night yet.
When her strength gave out she lay on her bed, with her sleepless gaze fastened upon the wintry sky, and thought out the ugly problem, with the winking stars for counselors.
"That man has come here, determined to marry me for the sake of the fortune I hold; and he has every hope that I will consent. He has traded upon his extraordinary resemblance to St. Udo Brand, and, trusting to our slight knowledge of St. Udo Brand, expects to pass without difficulty for him.