The fate of Fenella

by Unknown

Then he brought her here, here to this beautiful, lonely, wind-girt, sea-girt island, and left her to strain her eyes out into the sea, that said nothing to her. The sky was empty for her, the flowers, it seemed to her, faded as she looked. Poor beauty! poor coquettish, light-hearted Fenella!

Then she met Frank in the street, and light flashed back to her, and memory and understanding. In a rush of emotion she saw him as a lover, as husband, as Murderer. She knew what he had done. She knew, too, what she had done to save him. “Frank!” the words rushed to her lips, words of love, of forgiveness, of——and he repelled her. Ice-cold on her heart he lay, his dead love, his living contempt, and she who would have died for him, seemed as if she died by him. He killed her. Not physically; she still lived, moved, breathed, but her faith was dead, and her hope, and her youth. She staggered home to her old seat by the window. She felt sick, and giddy, and dazed as from an earthquake; all her world was in ruins. It was only now she realized the hope on which she had lived all this time. Only now she knew that Frank had been the bulwark on which she rested, the light toward which she had looked. That though she was past reason, and had not asked why he had delayed, she had felt he would come, and that in his eyes she would read his love for her that had never swerved, his faith in her that would answer for all things, his gratitude to her, gratitude that she would put away, and not let him linger over, but would banish and forget, and it should be forgotten. Nothing should be between them any more, but love. He would bring her back Ronny, he and she and Ronny would be together always.

And then they had met and he had repulsed her, rejected her, looked upon her coldly! She was hopeless. She looked out over the blue sea, the rocks, the sails, the harbor, but there was a film before her eyes, all things were darkened. Even the face of nature would never smile upon her again. Hope was dead.

Then he came back. He knelt at her feet, he called her by a thousand endearing names, he kissed her hands, the hem of her dress. She sat there dumb, stricken as a statue, the film darkening before her eyes, and her brain throb, throbbing, like the screw of a steam engine.

“Fenella, my wife, my darling! For Heaven’s sake, listen to me. Don’t look at me like that, my darling, hear me. I never knew. I swear, I never knew. I was ill, I heard nothing, knew nothing until an hour ago. My sweet, what you must have suffered! Fenella, speak—a word, a little word. Sweetheart, think of our childhood.”

And then a little moan came from her, a little sighing moan, and she fell half forward. He caught her in his arms. “Darling,” he said again passionately, “only hear me. Ah!”

It was too late! Was it too late? She lay in his arms white and cold and silent. Frank, kissing those pale, cold lips, chafing those dead hands, murmuring over her a thousand caressing names, distracted with despair, desperately put away the fear, and called for help in anguished tones.

Then the women came in and were busy about her, and there were moaning and lamentation, but still she heard not.

Fenella was not dead, but she was ill—terribly ill. The silver cord was not broken, but it was strained to its last fiber. Weeks went by, weeks when she lay in the little cottage at Guernsey, and Frank crept about with anguished eyes, and lived on the bulletins from the sick room. Weeks during which, with the gold locks short cropped, and the sweet face fever-flushed and unrecognizable, Fenella lay in bed, and shrieked in her delirium that Frank did not do it, that she did; that Frank hated her because she had done it, but she had not done it. There was blood on her hands, horrible blood, human blood. There was blood on his hands, but she would kiss them. She was swimming in blood, drowning in blood, but Frank would save her. Ronny was on the shore, waiting for her, bright-faced Ronny, waiting to kiss away the stains from them both. And then she would call out again that she was drowning, and call for Frank, always for Frank, in agonized, delirious shrieks.

“Doctor! doctor!” He held him with hands grown thin and wasted, spoke to him in a voice all broken with tears, looked at him with eyes dim with wild, convulsive crying: “Will she live? will she live?”