Chapter LV

A look of bitter pain came over Mr. Delaney’s handsome face at those words from Mr. Rodney’s lips.

“Who could have been so cruel, so wicked?” repeated the lawyer.

And then Mr. Delaney answered:

“One to whom I owed a debt of gratitude, and who caused me to pay the heaviest price man ever paid for a like debt.”

“I do not understand you,” said Mr. Rodney.

“I did not suppose you would. My reference was too obscure. I will make my meaning more clear,” said Mr. Delaney. “When I first went on my travels abroad, I met in France a native of that agreeable country, by name Monsieur Sanson. Our first meeting was on an occasion, when he saved my life, in what manner I will not now relate, as my strength would not hold out for the recital. But we became friends from that hour, and in course of time fellow-travelers. I found my new friend one of the best-read and most agreeable men I had ever met. He was clever, cultivated, full of _bon camaraderie_--in short, a man of the world, full of wit and _bel esprit_. He was middle-aged and good-looking and appeared to have the means of living well, and even extravagantly, at his command. He told me that he had no family ties with the exception of one daughter, a young and lovely creature then being educated in the retirement of a convent school. Of this daughter, his ‘_chère_ Julie,’ as he lovingly called her, he never wearied of talking and expatiating on her manifold perfections. Once he showed me a small portrait of her. It represented the loveliest brunette I ever beheld. I fell in love with her and begged to be presented, but he laughingly refused, telling me that he did not intend to have his plans for _chère_ Julie spoiled in that way. After awhile he told me more seriously that in France the parents seldom permitted daughters to have any male acquaintances, fearing unfortunate love-affairs for them, as they were usually affianced by their parents to men of wealth and position.”

“I have heard that that is the way they manage affairs of marriage in France,” said Mr. Rodney at this point.

“I found it so to my cost,” groaned Oran Delaney, and then there was a short silence. He lay still with closed eyes, breathing heavily.

“You have unduly wearied yourself in talking so much. Defer the remainder of your story until you are better,” said Mr. Rodney.

“No, I will go on. I am anxious now that the secret I have kept so long in my morbid pride should be revealed. I am anxious to clear the name of Aline from the stain I suffered to rest upon it to save my own,” he answered.

“My poor Aline. Shall I ever find her?” sighed the wretched father.

“God grant you may. Oh, if I only were not chained down to this bed by my weakness, I would search the world over, but I would find her!” cried Oran Delaney with feverish impatience.

A vision came over his mind of the fair young face and the sweet supplicating eyes, he seemed to hear her voice again as she spoke the strange words that made the warm blood run tingling through his veins with rapture.

“I want to be your wife,” she had said, in her clear, frank voice, with her large eyes lifted childishly to his face, while in her exceeding innocence she had never dreamed of the passion of pain and despair in the man’s heart as he refused her request.

“Ah, Heaven, if only I might have taken her at her word,” he sighed to himself, “I would have taught that young heart to love, and that soft cheek to blush at my glance. I would have won her heart as well as her hand. Aline, my poor darling, where are you to-night?”

He put away the thought of her with a great effort of will and returned with a shudder to the subject of his story.

“I was young and impressible, Mr. Rodney. My heart was touched by the beauty of the picture I had seen, and Monsieur Sanson’s refusals to present me to the original only fanned my boyish passion into hotter flame. I importuned him often, but he only laughed at me, artfully leading me on by his apparent reluctance to yield to my desires. Ah, what a simple, gullible young fool I was in those days.”

He paused and drew his breath with a heavy tortured sigh.

Mr. Rodney held a reviving cordial to his lips. His heart was pierced with remorse as he looked at the pale face and heard the weak voice, and realized what a wreck he had made of the strong man.

“It would be much better if you waited until you are stronger before you finish,” he said, compassionately, though his anxiety to hear the rest was very strong.

“No, I cannot wait. Let me tell my story and clear Aline’s name, then if I die, what matter? I have long been weary of life,” sighed Oran Delaney.

There came to him across the mist of the long intervening months a memory of the words he had read to Aline when she lay wounded and impatient in the beautiful blue room--the words she had rejected in the blindness of her ignorant youth:

“How many days will it be, I wonder,
And how will their slow length pass
Till I shall find rest in silence under
The trees and the waving grass?”

“Not long now, perhaps,” he thought, wearily, for he felt strangely weak and faint, and his sufferings were most severe from his wound.

He cleared his throat and slowly proceeded:

“When I look back at that past time, Mr. Rodney, I am lost in wonder at the consummate young fool I was in those days. Would you believe me, sir, that in my infatuation for a girl I had never seen, but of whose perfections I had been told day by day for months, I proposed to marry Monsieur Sanson’s pretty little school-girl daughter?”

“Impossible!”

“I did, Mr. Rodney, and I was in the most serious earnest. Monsieur Sanson pretended to be shocked when I laid the matter before him, but promised that he would consider it, and assured me that he would have no objection to an American son-in-law, declaring that he admired Americans individually, and as a nation, to a most excessive degree. I was delighted at his blarney, which slipped from his tongue as easily as from a son of the Emerald Isle.”