Chapter XI: The Old Love and the New

'Poor Dalton! you have indeed suffered deeply--paid dear for your boyish folly,' said Goring, as the former concluded the little story of his early life in a voice tremulous with emotion. 'Now the apparent inconsistency of your attention to Mrs. Trelawney is quite accounted for.'

'Until I knew myself free to ask her to be my wife I had sworn in my inner heart that I would not do so--indeed, I dared not do so; yet, for the life of me, attracted as I was, I could not help hovering about her; but now I am going to Ashanti, and there is an end of it! Such was the end of the fatal passion of a foolish lad. Since those days I have never entered a theatre, and shudder at the mere idea of a dramatic situation.'

'You are in one now,' said a sweet and tremulous voice, as Mrs. Trelawney, who, unseen and unheard by them in their preoccupation, had softly entered the room, stood before them.

How much or how little she had overheard they did not precisely know, but with a smile of mingled sadness and sweetness, pride and triumph, she threw up her veil, and the full light of the gasalier overhead fell upon her rich, shining hair, her beautiful and animated countenance.

'Mrs. Trelawney!' exclaimed the friends together, as they started from their chairs.

'You here--in Southampton!' added Dalton, in a voice tremulous with bewilderment.

'Yes. Can it be that you have yet to learn that I am that Laura Dorillion to whom you gave this opal and diamond ring, with whom you spent so many a sweet hour, by Fairlight Glen, the East Cliffs that overhang the sea, by the Dripping Well, and amid the old castle walls at Hastings--the Laura whom you married, and from whom you so coldly fled?'

Dalton tried to speak, but his voice was gone; he could but stretch his hand towards her, without advancing, while regarding her with growing bewilderment; so she spoke again, with tears in her voice.

'You ought to have forgiven me the humility of my origin, for that I could not help--ay, forgiven me long ago, Anthony. Remember that "he who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself," for "every man hath need of forgiveness," we are told.'

'My wife--you?' exclaimed Dalton.

'Laura--your own wife, whom you married in St. Clement's Church on the tenth of August. You remember the day?'

The words were simple, but spoken with great pathos, and all her sparkling manner seemed to have left her as she seated herself, and he hung over her.

'Do you forgive me, Laura, and pardon me--pardon me, and love me?'

'You know that I love you.'

He was about to put an arm round her, when he paused, and said,

'But whence this name of Trelawney?'

'I assumed it from an aunt, who left me a small fortune, but for which I--I might have been compelled to struggle in penury on the stage to support your daughter.'

'My daughter!' exclaimed Dalton, a great love for the beautiful little girl lie knew suddenly gushing up in his heart. 'My daughter--mine?'

'Our child,' said Laura, softly.

'Born--when?'

'Six months after you left me at Hastings.'

'But her name--of Antoinette?'

'Is but the feminine of your own--Anthony.'

'Oh, what a blind fool I have been--Laura--Laura!'

Goring, who had been studying a picture on the wall, now thought he might as well withdraw softly, and smoke his cigar outside.

Taller in stature, fuller in figure, more fully developed in every way, and with a bearing, manner, and grace cultivated by those among whom she had moved, it required a certain effort to recognise in her the girlish Laura Dorillion of the past time. Though her whole style was different--finer and more statuesque--and the mode of her toilette and of dressing her hair was different, her voice and the inflections of it, her expression of eye, the droop of the lid and flicker of the long lash, and the sweet smile of her lip were, he now saw, all unchanged, and he pressed her to his breast in the rapture of the moment, forgetting that the transport which was soon to bear him away was at that supreme moment of joy having her fires banked up preparatory to putting to sea.

'And you love me, Laura?' he never was tired of repeating, and hearing the sweet admission that she did so. 'Oh, why have you concealed till this--why have you concealed yourself thus, and from me?'

'I wished to try you--to test you--to compel you to love me, and I have done so, have I not?' she asked, taking his face between her hands and gazing tenderly into his eyes.

'You know now what fettered my tongue,' said he, with a sigh.

'I knew you were in bondage--but it was in bondage to _me_. Your love for me was an insult to myself; your compliments and intentions in the present time, were an implied insult to my past. You dared to love me, knowing that you had a wife somewhere--where, you knew not; but you little thought that Mrs. Trelawney, the supposed widow of a mythical Trelawney, and Laura Dorillion were one and the same person. Now, is the situation dramatic? Do you remember that you told me that you loved me against your own will and conscience, and that my very _name_ of Laura repressed that love at times? Heavens, could you but know what I felt--how my heart was wrung--my woman's pride alternately roused and crushed by admissions such as these! I have suffered greatly, darling, but all is over now,' she added, laying her cheek on his breast, while his lips were pressed to her forehead.

After a time, she spoke again.

'I knew not that you were in the Army, or were in life. I knew not of your existence till I met you suddenly at Aldershot, after I had lived years of seclusion in the Channel Isles. I thanked God for the discovery; I vowed to win you again, if I could, before I would reveal myself--and I have done so.'

She whose love he had so longed and prayed for, and yet striven to root out of his heart, was now his own--his own after all; and all the pent-up love of lonely years had found reward at last.

'Often before I met you again--discovered you, and vowed to make you mine again, I had pondered that, but for Netty's sake, whether, taking it all in all, the good with the bad, life was worth living,' said she, her eyes full of tears now.

'And till now, Laura, my life has seemed a gloomy and empty one. I was often appalled by the aimlessness and isolation of it.'

'How strange it is that you never discovered me!' said Laura; 'yet I have seen your eyes wander more than once to this engagement ring.'

'And stranger still that when I heard you sing the old, old song that was once so familiar, making my heart thrill with troubled memories, no light came to me. Oh, Laura, you acted well your part to this joyous ending.'

'I told you that I had found the verses in an old album, where a friend wrote them years ago; that friend was yourself. You remember so lately telling me that I had ruined your life?'

'Yes, Laura, and your cruel smile.'

'God knows how at that moment I longed to cast myself on your breast, Anthony, as I do now, and barter all my past wrongs for a single kiss!'

His Christian name again on her lips, as in the days of their boy and girl love, ere the black change came, and how strange, yet familiar--how sweet, how dear it sounded!

'How did you learn I was here with Goring?' he asked, tenderly.

'I learned it at the transport.'

'My darling--my darling, why have you kept all this secret so long--the secret that you were my own?'

'As I told you, I would never be more to you _than I am now_, were I to live a hundred years, and was I not right?'

'But to keep the secret so long--I might never have learned it, for to-morrow will see us separated. Hastings was the first volume of our romance.'

'Southampton was the second.'

'The third is Ashanti. How it will end, God alone knows, darling,' he added, straining her in his embrace, while her tears fell fast now; 'if spared to return to you, Laura--to you and little Netty--you will never regret your love and trust in me at last--your confidence in my affection.'

Poor Dalton--'if spared;' he was right to say that, with the fate and fortune of a barbarous war before him.

The old love had become the new one, and the new love was the old; and yet it seemed that to-night both had entered on a new relationship.

And, as we have said, the two last appeals of Jerry Wilmot and Dalton ended differently. Practically they came to the same conclusion--a separation from those they loved.

Laura now deplored deeply her pride and folly, as she deemed it, in playing the game she had done so long; but the separation had to be faced and endured; yet she watched the transport, as it steamed down Southampton water, till it melted into the haze; and it was not until then that she fully realised that her husband, so lately restored to her, was gone again, and perhaps for ever.

But that her appearance on board would have excited speculation in the battalion, she would have gone down the Channel with the steamer and come ashore in the pilot's boat at Deal.

On the long, though rapid voyage, Dalton had ample food for reflection, for thinking of the strangeness of his fate, that for months past he had been associating with, meeting and seeing at intervals, and loving deeply, a woman who was his own wife, and yet he knew it not!

Why had she played this perilous game so long?

Why, but for the temptation to win him again, and for the gratification of a kind of affectionate vengeance. And now they were separated, each with but a memory to the other again.

A few photos and two locks of hair--the light blond hair of his wife, a golden curl of his little daughter--were all that poor Dalton took with him to the burning coast of Ashanti, to remind him of the happiness he had so lately and so briefly tasted, and might never taste more.