Chapter Twelve.
In which a Strange Thing Happens.
“If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller,” I said, looking into her tearful eyes. “You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me—and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I did. I was hers—body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman’s hands—to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me—you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory.”
“Yes,” she answered, with a slight sigh, “I quite understand how you must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have been Ella’s lover—the man who she declared to me was the only one she would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to lie to you under compulsion.”
“But why—why did she consent to do this?” I asked.
“She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father, owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds on the day that he married Ella.”
“Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!” I cried.
“Without a doubt. And what a sacrifice! She loved you, Mr Leaf, and yet she dismissed you in order to save her father from ruin.”
“Blumenthal was a brute to have ever suggested such a condition,” I declared savagely. “I never saw him. What kind of man was he? Did you meet him?”