A Mad Marriage, May Agnes Fleming [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

you; meantime your life should be as easy and pleasant as

money could make it. When we are wronged, not knowing we are wronged,

our loss is nothing. Eric should never give up his title and estates to

you, the son of an Irish peasant girl—his life should never be blighted

at the dying command of a cruel, and selfish, and sensual father. I

would not tell the truth.

 

“I have said that ten thousand times, Terry, and the years have gone on,

and you are both men. His majority comes in a few days; France is to be

his wife, the girl in Lincolnshire yours. I vowed I would not tell, and

I am telling. I have prayed passionate, rebellious prayers, wearied

Heaven with them, to know the right, and be given strength to do it.

That strength has been given to me at last—my duty is done. You know

the truth—how shamefully all your life long you have been wronged and

cheated. Here are the papers Lord Dynely left; I am prepared to repeat

the story in any court in England. All that seems easy, but—when I

think of Eric, it breaks my heart.”

 

Her voice died away in a choking sob. She knew so well Eric’s passionate

anger, his fierce rage and protest; how he would do battle to the death

with his interloper; how he would, in his stormy, selfish wrath, curse

the father and hate the mother. Hate her! Ay, his life long; your weak

and selfish men are good haters always. Why had she not held her

tongue?—how dared she speak?—what were the cowardly dying fears of ten

thousand fathers to his birthright? Was this her pretended love for him?

Let it end how it might he would never forgive her, never see her face

again. She knew what would follow as well as she knew that she sat here.

 

She placed a packet in Terry’s hand. He loosened his clasp of hers and

took it in dead silence. Even he, she thought in her bitter despair, was

turning against her already. And this is what it was to do one’s duty.

 

“There is no more to tell,” she said, in a stifled voice. “Go away,

Terry, and leave me alone.”

 

He arose, but lingeringly, and stood looking at her. In the deep

darkness that now filled the room he could see but the outline of her

figure and the white, rigid gleam of her face.

 

“I don’t know what to say yet,” he began, in a constrained voice, that

did not sound like Terry’s. “I feel stunned and stupefied. My head is in

a muddle. It is all so strange. You will give me to-night to think it

over—will you not?”

 

“What have I to do with it?” she answered, huskily. “All is in your own

hands now. You are master. You are Lord Dynely.”

 

“You are not angry with me?” he asked, wistfully, still hesitating.

 

It was a question he had asked her many times in his life, when her look

of half-concealed dislike had repelled and chilled him, and he had

wondered timidly what he had done to vex her. Its wistful, boyish pathos

and simplicity went to her heart now.

 

“Angry with you!” she said, with a sob. “Oh my Terry! you never gave me

cause for anger in all your life.”

 

“I am glad of that,” he said, simply; “I hope I never will. And, Lady

Dynely,” hesitating again, “my opinion cannot matter to you, of course;

but I hope you feel, I want you to feel, that I don’t blame you in all

this. I understand how you must have felt—it was too much to ask of any

mother—you would have been more than mortal to have acted as he

commanded you.”

 

She only looked up at him in the darkness with sad, hopeless eyes.

“You would have done it, Terry,” she said.

 

“No—I don’t know. I am not very heroic, and it requires heroism to do

these things. I am an awkward, blundering sort of fellow, not much like

Eric, but I think I could more easily die than deliberately wrong any

one I cared for to gratify myself. You know what I mean, Lady Dynely.

Don’t grieve too much over this; I can’t bear to see you in trouble. All

will go well yet. Eric—Eric does not know, of course?”

 

“Not yet! oh, not yet! That will be the hardest to bear of all.”

 

He knelt on one knee, and for the first time in all his life touched his

lips to her cheek.

 

“Mother,” he said, and love made Terry’s voice like an angel’s,

“mother, the best friend, the truest, man ever had, don’t grieve. All

will go well. To-night I will think it over—to-morrow we will make an

end of it forever.”

 

Then he arose softly and left her.

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

THINKING IT OUT.

 

That night, for the first time in the four-and-twenty years of his life,

Terry Dennison sat up until the “wee sma’ hours ayont the twal,” and

thought. Thought!—of all novel experiences, this surely was the most

novel in this supremely thoughtless young man’s life. The good or the

evil of Terry’s life, and there had been much of both, had alike been

unpremeditated; in all things he had acted naturally and involuntarily,

and without thinking of it beforehand. Now in a moment he was called

upon to settle the destinies of four lives—his own, Eric’s, Lady

Dynely’s and little Crystal’s. A sort of smile came over his face as he

thought of it—he the arbitrator of brilliant Eric’s whole future

life—he, Terry.

 

But the smile quickly faded as he entered the room and laid the little

packet her ladyship had given him down upon the table, and looked at the

yellow paper, the faded writing. The father who had wronged him so

greatly, who had so irreparably wronged his mother, and written

this—had striven to do him justice when that justice could no longer

annoy himself. He had served Satan all his life, and would make his

peace with Heaven at the last, at any sacrifice to those left behind. He

had lived a life of sin and sensualism, and would offer the dregs of

that bad life to his Creator. There was more a feeling of disgust in

Terry’s breast than any other as he looked at the faded writing and

thought of him who had written it, dust and ashes years ago.

 

“And his works do follow him!”

 

He sat down and looked blankly before him. He was Lord Dynely’s elder

son; no longer plain, impecunious Terry Dennison, a dependant on a

great lady’s bounty, but Viscount Dynely, with estates and mansions in

half a dozen counties, a villa at Ryde, a rent-roll as long as his

lineage. And he could make Crystal, Lady Dynely. His face flushed for a

moment at that. All that might be spread before him, a glittering vista.

He was one of the least mercenary of men, but he had lived too long in

the world not to know the great and utter change it would make in his

life. One of the oldest titles in the United Kingdom, one of the noblest

incomes—that is what he was called upon to claim or resign to-night.

For a moment, as he thought of it, his heart beat quick. He was very

human after all, and this was no child’s toy he must lay down or take

up. Men called Terry Dennison a good fellow—rather a simple soul,

perhaps, but a good fellow all the same. He had few enemies and many

friends, but in their liking for him there was more or less blended a

slight shade of contempt. He was one of them, but not of them. His

manners and habits were primitive to a degree. He wasn’t a “plunger,” as

they were to a man; didn’t drink, to speak of; didn’t gamble at all;

hunted down no woman, married or single, to her own destruction. He was

behind his age in all these things, in a most remarkable degree. Still

men liked him, and laughed with Terry, and at Terry, and never carried

their laughter too far. He was the soul of good-nature, but there was

that in his six feet of stature, his trained muscles, and scientific

British way of “hitting out straight from the shoulder,” on occasions,

that commanded respect. In the annual battles between “Town and Gown,”

at Oxford, Dennison had ever been a host in himself. In all athletic and

field sports he stood his own with the best of them. He was a “mighty

hunter before the lord,” down in the shires; but in the ball-room and

the boudoir, at court and at courting, Terry was decidedly a failure. He

never lost his heart for barronne or ballerina, duchess or actress; he

ran away with no man’s wife, wasn’t a fascinating sinner of any sort. He

had his failings, they were many—he had his virtues, they were many

too, and generosity stood chief among them. To give pain to a woman, to

any woman—to a woman he loved and venerated, as he did Lady Dynely,

would have been impossible to him; and in asserting this claim before

the world he would simply break Lady Dynely’s heart.

 

Wrong had been done. Yes; but, to Terry’s mind, hardly by her. She loved

her handsome son, as few sons ever deserve to be loved, and Eric

Hamilton certainly did not. How, then, loving him, could she

deliberately, and at the command of a selfish and cowardly husband, hand

over his birthright to a stranger, and blight his whole life? Lord

Dynely had asked too much; it was not in frail human nature to do it. He

had been wronged, but not by her. Why, she might have left him all his

life in that Irish cabin by the wild Galway coast, to drag out the

wretched, unlettered life of a peasant. Who then would have been the

wiser? But she had come for him, and in all things done by him as her

own son. And now, at last, she had told him all, and, at all cost to

herself, was ready to prove the truth of her words. Then his thoughts

drifted to Eric. He saw Eric’s rage and fury as plainly as he saw the

paper on the table, the blue eyes lurid with rage, the fair, womanish

face crimson with anger and rebellion. Eric would do battle to the

death, would contest every inch of the ground. The sympathy would be

with Eric; possession, the “nine points of the law,” would be with Eric;

the glory and the power were Eric’s;—what chance would he stand? There

would be an endless chancery suit, the kingdom would ring with the

scandal, the informal Irish marriage would be contested; perhaps in the

eye of the law, proven no marriage at all. And, meantime, Lady Dynely

would have broken her heart at the shame and publicity, and ended her

part of the tragedy. No, had he been ever so inclined, as selfishly bent

on his own interests as Eric himself, the thing was impossible on the

face of it. But he was not. It was really very little of a sacrifice to

him. He had no ambition whatever—he was, I have said, a most

commonplace young man. Life as he held it contented him. With his

commission, his five hundred a year, and Crystal for his wife, the world

might wag; he asked no more of fate.

 

With a long-drawn breath he broke from his reverie; with a motion of his

hand he seemed to dismiss the whole thing at once and forever.

 

He lit a cigar, opened the little packet