Chapter 17

Alice did not rally in health or spirits after her marriage, as her family, friends and physician had anticipated. She remained nervous, ailing and despondent.

"Should maternity come to her, she would doubtless be very much improved in health afterward," the doctor said, and Mabel, remembering how true a similar prediction proved in her case, despite her rebellion against it, was not sorry when she knew that Alice was to become a mother, scarcely a year after her marriage.

But Alice grew more and more despondent as the months passed by; and after the birth of her son, the young mother developed dementia of the most hopeless kind. The best specialists in two worlds were employed to bring her out of the state of settled melancholy into which she had fallen, but all to no avail. At the end of two years, her case was pronounced hopeless. Fortunately the child died at the age of six weeks, so the seed of insanity which in the first Mrs Lawrence was simply a case of "nerves," growing into the plant hysteria in Mabel, and yielding the deadly fruit of insanity in Alice, was allowed by a kind providence to become extinct in the fourth generation.

This disaster to his only child caused a complete breaking down of spirit and health in Preston Cheney.

Like some great, strongly coupled car, which loses its grip and goes plunging down an incline to destruction, Preston Cheney's will-power lost its hold on life, and he went down to the valley of death with frightful speed.

During the months which preceded his death, Senator Cheney's only pleasure seemed to be in the companionship of his son-in-law. The strong attachment between the two men ripened with every day's association. One day the rector was sitting by the invalid's couch, reading aloud, when Preston Cheney laid his hand on the young man's arm and said: "Close your book and let me tell you a true story which is stranger than fiction. It is the story of an ambitious man and all the disasters which his realised ambition brought into the lives of others. It is a story whose details are known to but two beings on earth, if indeed the other being still exists on earth. I have long wanted to tell you this story--indeed, I wanted to tell it to you before you made Alice your wife, yet the fear that I would be wrecking the life and reason of my child kept me silent. No doubt if I had told you, and you had been influenced by my experience against a loveless marriage, I should to-day be blaming myself for her condition, which I see plainly now is but the culmination of three generations of hysterical women. But I want to tell you the story and urge you to use it as a warning in your position of counsellor and friend of ambitious young men.

"No matter what else a man may do for position, don't let him marry a woman he does not love, especially if he crucifies a vital passion for another, in order to do this." Then Preston Cheney told the story of his life to his son-in-law; and as the tale proceeded, a strange interest which increased until it became violent excitement, took possession of the rector's brain and heart. The story was so familiar--so very familiar; and at length, when the name of BERENE DUMONT escaped the speaker's lips, Arthur Stuart clutched his hands and clenched his teeth to keep silent until the end of the story came.

"From the hour Berene disappeared, to this very day, no word or message ever came from her," the invalid said. "I have never known whether she was dead or alive, married, or, terrible thought, perhaps driven into a reckless life by her one false step with me. This last fear has been a constant torture to me all these years.

"The world is cruel in its judgment of woman. And yet I know that it is woman herself who has shaped the opinions of the world regarding these matters. If men had had their way since the world began, there would be no virtuous women. Woman has realised this fact, and she has in consequence walled herself about with rules and conventions which have in a measure protected her from man. When any woman breaks through these conventions and errs, she suffers the scorn of others who have kept these self-protecting and society-protecting laws; and, conscious of their scorn, she believes all hope is lost for ever.

"The fear that Berene took this view of her one mistake, and plunged into a desperate life, has embittered my whole existence. Never before did a man suffer such a mental hell as I have endured for this one act of sin and weakness. Yet the world, looking at my life of success, would say if it knew the story, 'Behold how the man goes free.' Free! Great God! there is no bondage so terrible as that of the mind. I have loved Berene Dumont with a changeless passion for twenty-three years, and there has not been a day in all that time that I have not during some hours endured the agonies of the damned, thinking of all the disasters and misery that might have come into her life through me. Heaven knows I would have married her if she had remained. Strange and intricate as the net was which the devil wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and would have broken through it after that strange night--at once the heaven and the hell of my memory--if Berene had remained. As it was--I married Mabel, and you know what a farce, ending in a tragedy, our married life has been. God grant that no worse woes befell Berene; God grant that I may meet her in the spirit world and tell her how I loved her and longed for her companionship."

The young rector's eyes were streaming with tears, as he reached over and clasped the sick man's hands in his. "You will meet her," he said with a choked voice. "I heard this same story, but without names, from Berene Dumont's dying lips more than two years ago. And just as Berene disappeared from you--so her daughter disappeared from me; and, God help me, dear father--doubly now my father, I crushed out my great passion for the glorious natural child of your love, to marry the loveless, wretched and UNNATURAL child of your marriage."

The sick man started up on his couch, his eyes flaming, his cheeks glowing with sudden lustre.

"My child--the natural child of Berene's love and mine, you say; oh, my God, speak and tell me what you mean; speak before I die of joy so terrible it is like anguish."

So then it became the rector's turn to take the part of narrator. When the story was ended, Preston Cheney lay weeping like a woman on his couch; the first tears he had shed since his mother died and left him an orphan of ten.

"Berene living and dying almost within reach of my arms--almost within sound of my voice!" he cried. "Oh, why did I not find her before the grave closed between us?--and why did no voice speak from that grave to tell me when I held my daughter's hand in mine?--my beautiful child, no wonder my heart went out to her with such a gush of tenderness; no wonder I was fired with unaccountable anger and indignation when Mabel and Alice spoke unkindly of her. Do you remember how her music stirred me? It was her mother's heart speaking to mine through the genius of our child.

"Arthur, you must find her--you must find her for me! If it takes my whole fortune I must see my daughter, and clasp her in my arms before I die."

But this happiness was not to be granted to the dying man. Overcome by the excitement of this new emotion, he grew weaker and weaker as the next few days passed, and at the end of the fifth day his spirit took its flight, let us hope to join its true mate.

It had been one of his dying requests to have his body taken to Beryngford and placed beside that of Judge Lawrence.

The funeral services took place in the new and imposing church edifice which had been constructed recently in Beryngford. The quiet interior village had taken a leap forward during the last few years, and was now a thriving city, owing to the discovery of valuable stone quarries in its borders.

The Baroness and Mabel had never been in Beryngford since the death of Judge Lawrence many years before; and it was with sad and bitter hearts that both women recalled the past and realised anew the disasters which had wrecked their dearest hopes and ambitions.

The Baroness, broken in spirit and crushed by the insanity of her beloved Alice, now saw the form of the man whom she had hopelessly loved for so many years, laid away to crumble back to dust; and yet, the sorrows which should have softened her soul, and made her heart tender toward all suffering humanity, rendered her pitiless as the grave toward one lonely and desolate being before the shadows of night had fallen upon the grave of Preston Cheney.

When the funeral march pealed out from the grand new organ during the ceremonies in the church, both the Baroness and the rector, absorbed as they were in mournful sorrow, started with surprise. Both gazed at the organ loft; and there, before the great instrument, sat the graceful figure of Joy Irving. The rector's face grew pale as the corpse in the casket; the withered cheek of the Baroness turned a sickly yellow, and a spark of anger dried the moisture in her eyes.

Before the night had settled over the thriving city of Beryngford, the Baroness dropped a point of virus from the lancet of her tongue to poison the social atmosphere where Joy Irving had by the merest accident of fate made her new home, and where in the office of organist she had, without dreaming of her dramatic situation, played the requiem at the funeral of her own father.