The Unseen Bridgegroom, May Agnes Fleming [ebook reader for surface pro .TXT] 📗

of the room.

"Do you regret your broken marriage with Sir Roger Trajenna, Mollie?"

"No--yes--no. I don't know--I don't think I do. It isn't that. I didn't care for Sir Roger. I was mean enough and shabby enough to consent to marry him for his wealth and title. But I was such a little fool! Sir Roger was a thousand times too good for me, and he and I are both well out of that matter. But that is no excuse for such a villainous deed."

"True. Nothing can excuse it. But you must be merciful. The man loved you passionately."

"Mr. Ingelow," opening her eyes wild and wide, "are you pleading Doctor Oleander's case?"

"No, Mollie--the case of the man who loved you so madly, so recklessly, that the thought of your being another's--another's whom you did not love--drove him to insanity, and to the commission of an insane deed."

"And that man was Doctor Oleander."

"It was not!"

"Mr. Ingelow!"

"No, Mollie; never Guy Oleander. He hadn't the pluck. He never cared for you enough."

"But he did it twice."

"Once only--this last time--stung, goaded into it by the lash of Mrs. Walraven's waspish tongue. But he is not the man who married you, whoever that man may be. At least," cooling down suddenly, as he saw the full blue eyes fixed upon him with piercing intentness, "I don't believe it."

"What do you believe, then, Mr. Ingelow?" Mollie said, slowly and suspiciously.

"That when you made Miriam the confidante of your story, on a certain night in your bedroom, Mrs. Carl Walraven overheard you."

"Impossible!"

"Perhaps so; but you'll find that's the way of it. She listened and heard, and patched it up with Mr. Rashleigh's dinner-table tale, and confabulated with her cousin, and put him up to this last dodge. She saw your advertisement in the paper, and understood it as well as you did, and Doctor Oleander was there in waiting. You committed one unaccountable blunder. You appointed ten for the nocturnal interview, and were at the place of the tryst at half past nine. How do you explain that little circumstance?"

"It seems to me, Mr. Ingelow," said Mollie, "that you must be a sorcerer. How do you know all this?"

"Partly from Miriam, partly from my own inborn ingenuity, as a Yankee, in guessing. Please answer my question."

"I didn't know I was before time. It was later than half past nine by my watch when I quitted the house. I remember listening for the clocks to strike ten as I reached Fourteenth Street."

"You didn't hear them?"

"No."

"Of course not. Your watch was tampered with, and that confirms my suspicion of Mrs. Walraven. Believe me, Mollie, a trap was laid for you, and you were caught in it. You never met 'Black Mask' that night."

"If I thought so!" Mollie cried, clasping her hands.

"You will find it so," Hugh Ingelow said, very quietly. "Let that be Doctor Oleander's punishment. Make him confess his fraud--make him confess Mrs. Walraven aided and abetted him--to-night."

"How can I?"

"Simply enough. Accuse him and her before us all. There will be no one present you can not trust. Your guardian, Sir Roger, and myself know already. Sardonyx is Mr. Walraven's lawyer, and silence is a lawyer's forte."

"Well?" breathlessly.

"Accuse him--threaten him. Tell him you know his whole fraud from first to last. Accuse her! Tell him if he does not prove to your satisfaction he is the man who carried you off and married you, or if he refuses to own he is not the man, that he will go straight from the house to prison. He knows you can fulfill the threat. I think it will succeed."

"And if he confesses he is not the man who married me--if he acknowledges the fraud--what then?"

"Ah! what then? Doctor Oleander will not be your husband."

"And I will be as much in the dark as ever."

"A moment ago you were in despair because you thought he, of all men, was the man," said Hugh Ingelow. "It seems to me you are hard to satisfy."

"No," said Mollie; "if it be as you suspect, I shall be unspeakably thankful. No fate earth can have in store for me can be half so horrible as to know myself the wife of Guy Oleander."

"And if I thought you were his wife, Mollie, rest assured I should never have taken you from him," said Mr. Ingelow, decidedly. "You are no more Guy Oleander's wife than I am."

"Heaven be praised for that!" Mollie cried. "But then, I am entirely in the dark. Whose wife am I?"

Mr. Ingelow smiled.

"That question has an extraordinary sound. One doesn't hear it often in a life-time. If I were a sorcerer, as you accuse me of being, I might perhaps answer it. As it is, I leave it to your own woman's wit to discover."

"My woman's wit is completely at a loss," said Mollie, despairingly. "If ever I do find out, and I think it likely I shall, the divorce law will set me free. I must tell guardy all, and get him to help me."

"Is there no one you suspect?"

"Not one--now," Mollie replied, turning away from him.

How could Mollie Dane tell him she had ever suspected, ever hoped, it might be himself? It was evidently a matter of very little moment to him.

"And you can not forgive the love that resorts to such extreme measures, Mollie?" he asked, after a pause.

"No more than I can forgive Doctor Oleander for carrying me off and holding me captive in his dreary farmhouse," answered Mollie, steadily. "No, Mr. Ingelow, I will never forgive the man who married me against my will."

"Not even if you cared a little for him, Mollie?"

He asked the question hesitatingly, as if he had something at stake in the answer. And Mollie's eyes flashed and her cheeks flushed angry red as she heard it.

"I care for no one in that way, Mr. Ingelow," she said, in a ringing voice. "You ought to know that. If I did, I should hate him for his dastardly deed."

Dead silence fell. Mollie stood looking down at the bustle of Broadway at one window, Mr. Ingelow at the other. He was pale--she flushed indignant red. She was grieved, and hurt, and cruelly mortified. She had found out how dearly she loved him, only to find out with it he was absolutely indifferent to her; he was ready to plead another man's cause, yield her up to her bolder lover.

She could have cried with disappointment and mortification, and crying was not at all in Mollie's line. Never until now had she given up the hope that he still loved her.

"It serves me right, I dare say," she thought, bitterly. "I have been a flirt and a triller, and I refused him cruelly, heartlessly, for that old man. Oh! if the past could be but undone, what a happy, happy creature I should be!"

The oppressive silence lasted until Mrs. Sharpe re-entered with some needle-work. Then Mr. Ingelow rose and looked at his watch.

"I believe I'll take a stroll down Broadway," he said, a little coldly. "Your friend Miriam will probably be here before I return. If not, there are books yonder with which to beguile the time."

Mollie bowed, proudly silent, and Mr. Ingelow left the room for his morning constitutional. Miss Dane walked over, took a book, opened it, and held it before her face a full hour without turning a leaf. The face it screened looked darkly bitter and overcast. She was free from prison, only to find herself in a worse captivity--fettered by a love that could meet with no return.

The bright morning wore on; noon came. Two o'clock brought dinner and Mr. Ingelow, breezy from his walk.

"What!" he exclaimed, looking round, "no Miriam?"

"No Miriam," said Mollie, laying down her book. "Mrs. Sharpe and I have been quite alone--she sewing, I reading."

Mrs. Sharpe smiled to herself. She had been watching the young lady, and surmised how much she had read.

"Why, that's odd, too," Mr. Ingelow said. "She promised to be here this morning, and Miriam keeps her promises, I think. However, the afternoon may bring her. And now for dinner, mesdames."

But the afternoon did not bring her. The hours wore on--Mr. Ingelow at his easel, Mollie with her book, Susan Sharpe with her needle, conversation desultory and lagging.

Since the morning a restraint had fallen between the knight-errant and the rescued lady--a restraint Mollie saw clearly enough, but could not properly understand.

Evening came. Twilight, hazy and blue, fell like a silvery veil over the city, and the street-lamps twinkled through it like stars.

Mr. Ingelow in an inner room had made his toilet, and stood before Mollie, hat in hand, ready to depart for the Walraven mansion.

"Remain here another half hour," he was saying; "then follow and strike the conspirators dumb. It will be better than a melodrama. I saw Oleander to-day, and I know information of your escape has not yet reached him. You had better enter the house by the most private entrance, so that, all unknown, you can appear before us and scare us out of a year's growth."

"I know how to get in," said Mollie. "Trust me to play my part."

Mr. Ingelow departed, full of delightful anticipations of the fun to come. He found all the guests assembled before him. It was quite a select little family party, and Mr. Walraven and Sir Roger Trajenna were in a state of despondent gloom that had become chronic of late.

Mollie, the apple of their eye, their treasure, their darling, was not present, and the whole universe held nothing to compensate them for her loss.

Mrs. Walraven, superbly attired, and looking more like Queen Cleopatra than ever, with, a circlet of red gold in her blue-black hair, and her polished shoulders and arms gleaming like ivory against bronze in her golden-brown silk, presided like an empress. She was quite radiant to-night, and so was Dr. Guy. All their plans had succeeded admirably. Mollie was absolutely in their power. This time to-morrow scores of broad sea miles would roll between her and New York.

The conversation turned upon her ere they had been a quarter of an hour at table. Mr. Walraven never could leave the subject uppermost in his thoughts for long.

"It is altogether extraordinary," Sir Roger Trajenna said, slowly. "The first absence was unaccountable enough, but this second is more unaccountable still. Some enemy is at the bottom."

"Surely Miss Dane could have no enemies," said Hugh Ingelow. "We all know how amiable and lovable she was."

"Lovable, certainly. We know that," remarked Sardonyx, with a grim smile.

"And I adhere to my former opinion," said Dr. Oleander, with consummate coolness--"that Miss Mollie is playing tricks on her friends, to try their affection. We know what a tricksy sprite she is. Believe me, both absences were practical jokes. She has disappeared of her own free will. It was very well in the Dark Ages--this abducting young ladies and carrying them off to castle-keeps--but it won't do in New York, in the present year of grace."

"My opinion precisely, Guy," chimed in his fair cousin. "Mollie likes to create sensations. Her first absence set the avenue on the _qui vive_ and made her a heroine, so she is resolved to try it