Chapter XVI: Orville and Lionne

’Tis an old tale and often told:
But let my fate and will agree,—
Ne’er hath been read in story old
Of maiden true, forsook for gold,
That loved, or was revenged like me!—_Scott._

Orville entered the sitting-room, expecting to find Adelaide.

He saw a slight female figure, wearing such a riding-dress and hat as _she_ often wore, and sitting beside the table, with her back toward him, and her head bowed forward upon her hand.

Never doubting for an instant that this was the one of whom he came in search, he hastened forward with outstretched arms, eagerly exclaiming—

“My dearest, dearest girl! my most injured love! thank God, I find you safe at last! Only hear my exculpation, and you will forgive me!”

With a sudden, piercing cry of joy, Lionne sprang up and cast herself into his outstretched arms!

In that wild, impulsive act, so natural to her vehement, impassioned nature, all her wrongs and all her rage was forgotten! His presence, his looks, his words, she had most naturally taken as intended for herself, and she had received them and forgiven him at once! Hear his exculpation! of course she would! In that moment of extreme bliss, she was ready to believe “all the world a liar,” and only Orville Deville true! In that sudden revulsion of feeling from despair to delight, she must have swooned but that she was so strong.

Now lifting from his bosom a face at once beaming with smiles and glittering with tears, she exclaimed, in tones vibrating with intense joy—

“Oh, Orville, are you here? are you indeed here at last? and you love me still? you have loved me ever? oh, joy! joy! joy! let me die now! Ah, Orville, within the last few days I have suffered so, and I have _sinned_ against you so, my faithful love! I have sinned against you in my thoughts so cruelly!”

“Lionne! oh, heaven, Lionne!” exclaimed Orville Deville, never returning her warm caress, but gazing at her in a sort of panic.

“Yes! is it not strange that I could have had such wicked thoughts of you, my constant love? But you must forgive them,” she said, entirely mistaking the cause of his emotion.

“Lionne! Lionne!” he repeated mechanically, gazing upon her face.

“Why, what is the matter? Why do you look upon me so strangely, so compassionately? Oh, I see! I know now! It is because I am so changed! Oh, yes, indeed, I know I am frightfully changed, Orville! The storm that has raged in this poor, wild bosom for a week past, must have metamorphosed me! But never mind; you are here now, and in a few hours I shall be myself again! every trace of suffering will have left my face! But come! sit down! sit down! you too look weary.” And smiling brightly, she took his hand to draw him towards the settee.

He shrank from her touch as though her fingers had been fire, and hurrying forward threw himself upon the indicated seat, and covered his face with his hands.

Still utterly self-deceived, she followed him, took the place by his side and laid her hand affectionately on his shoulder, saying:

“Do not take this so hard, dear Orville! Indeed, I am not ill, though I look so! And though it is true that I have suffered frightfully, and my countenance betrays it, yet do not dread to look upon my face! with all its pallor it is not disfigured! Look upon me, or at least take down your hands and let me see you!”

Orville dropped his hands and raised his eyes desperately to meet her unsuspicious gaze—showing her a countenance in which deep sorrow now so far predominated over every other expression, as to confirm her in her most natural mistake of him.

He saw this confidence on her part, and his distress and embarrassment increased.

How should he enlighten her? In what terms could he bring himself to inform her that she had been deceived and forsaken?

“Lionne,” he began, in a tone that he vainly endeavored to render calm—“Lionne, I have an explanation to make to you!”

“Why, so you said when you first came in, dear Orville! And I am waiting to hear it from you! indeed I _have_ heard it from another, who did not tell your story harshly; though only _you_ can do yourself full justice!” she said, turning towards him an attentive face, bright with confiding love, in the full anticipation of hearing his perfect vindication.

How could she yet feel otherwise? At his first appearance in the room and his first words—so likely to deceive her—all her sense of injury, all her anger, and all her doubts had vanished. She saw before her the man who for months had been ever at her side, her sworn and trusted friend and companion; who had pledged to her in marriage an eternal fidelity. Here was the arm that had sustained her: the face that had always smiled upon her; the eyes that had ever followed her with glances of unutterable love; the lips that had sealed the marriage kiss upon her own; the voice that had ever dropped soft and musical, as the notes of the dove, in addressing her. His first looks and first words on coming in had expressed unfailing and unmeasured love, and upon seeing the traces of suffering upon her face, he had exhibited almost unreasonable grief—so Lionne thought, and looking upon him now, she could not doubt, she could only love. So with her countenance still beaming with happiness, she awaited his words.

“Lionne,” he commenced, “when I led you before the clergyman at Winchester, I firmly believed myself free to become your husband!”

“I am sure that you did, and that you were really so. That comedy performed by the bedside of your uncle in your childhood could not and should not have bound you,” said Lionne, confidently.

“Poor girl! undeceive yourself,” sighed Orville, gravely and sadly.

“Why, what do you mean?” inquired his companion, with perplexity, but without suspicion.

“Lionne, I was _not_ free!”

“Oh, _legally_, perhaps not, but _morally_, certainly so! The dainty little lady at River-view admitted that!”

“Lionne, at the time I ignorantly married you I was fast bound by the laws of Scotland to another!”

“By the unjustifiable act of worldly-minded parents when you were a child! It was a marriage only in name. Even the little lady admitted that.”

“Lionne, she admitted that in generosity, and also, perhaps, in total ignorance of the nature of her claims upon me.”

“Not so, I assure you, Orville. She fully comprehended her possession of _legal_ rights and her lack of _moral_ ones.”

“Lionne!” exclaimed Orville, desperately, “look at me and undeceive yourself!”

“AH MY HEART!” exclaimed Lionne, with a sharp and sudden cry, and a strained and piercing gaze into his firm, set face. “What—what do you mean?”

“I mean, poor girl, that you are looking upon the husband of Lady Adelaide Deville, who possesses _every_ right—legal, moral, and social—to be called his wife!”

“AND—WHAT—THEN—AM—I?”

As the wronged girl asked this terrible, this unanswerable question, her eyes, fixed upon his face seemed to burn into and blast his very soul.

“And what, then, am I?” she repeated.

His brow crimsoned at the question; but meeting her gaze with eyes at once blazing with defiance and melting with compassion—for he both pitied and dreaded this wronged and reckless girl, he said—

“You at least are innocent, Lionne. The guilt—if guilt there was—is mine, solely mine, as I would also the consequences could be! I am ready to meet them, whatever they are!”

“And you think that I can be answered so! Good,” she said calmly. And her calmness was more threatening than her agitation had been.

“How _would_ you be answered? Lionne, speak; you have only to command! I cannot, indeed, give you my name; but all that I can give, my fortune, my services, are at your orders.”

She raised her hand to stop him, and then slowly inquired—

“Do you love the little lady at River-view?”

“Lionne, at the time that my heart and eyes were ensnared by your fatal beauty, I had never loved woman, except my mother!”

“I have been told so by you before this; that, however, is not the question. Do you love Adelaide _now_?”

“Lionne, when I believed that I had made you my wife, I loved only you; let that suffice you!”

“It does not, it cannot, it shall not,” she said calmly and firmly; “and I adjure you, on your honor, on your soul, answer my question—Do you now love Adelaide Lorne?”

“I know no such person as Adelaide Lorne!” exclaimed Orville, with the asperity of desperation; “but I love my honorable wife, Lady Adelaide Deville, with my whole heart!”

“It is enough,” said Lionne, very quietly.

“I recognize her perfect, her exclusive and indisputable right to my hand, fortune and heart, and in doing so, I must, of course, repudiate the claims of any other.”

“I make none,” replied the forsaken girl, as quietly as before.

Orville Deville, when driven to “define his position,” had deemed it proper to be perfectly, if even most painfully explicit. Now, however, deceived by the non-resistance of Lionne’s words and manner, he relented and looked towards her.

Her face was paler and stiller than before; her lips were compressed; her eyes were fixed upon the floor; her countenance was perfectly impassible.

“Lionne,” he said, in softened accents, “no one can regret more bitterly than myself, the power of that fatal passion that led _me_ into error and _you_ into misfortune. Pray let me repeat to you that when first attracted by your beauty, I had loved only you, and believed myself at liberty to offer you my hand. When, however, I returned to River-view, and met my child-bride after a separation from her of so many years, and found her grown up into the loveliest woman that the sun ever shone upon—when I found that her pure heart, through all the years of absence and of change, from childhood to sweet womanhood, had been single in its love and duty to me—when I found that she was, in fact, my own legal wife, bound to me as fast as Church and State could bind her; that for years she had dutifully looked upon me as her husband, and patiently waited for me to claim her as my wife, I did what any other in my position must inevitably have done! I learned to love, to adore, to worship her! Lionne, it was my fate!”

“Your love was a matter of time and place, and circumstance and policy. Good,” she said, very quietly.

Beginning to be seriously disturbed now by what he considered the unnatural calmness of her words and the perfect impassibility of her countenance, he said:

“Lionne, in all that has passed, you at least have nothing whatever to accuse yourself with. You believed yourself, as I also then believed you, an honest wife! I only have sinned—grievously, though unconsciously, sinned against you. And, Lionne, I repent from the bottom of my heart! And I shall repent to the last day of my life!”

“Peace. I do not reproach you,” she said, very smoothly.

“I know you do not, most wronged and most forbearing girl!”

Her lip almost imperceptibly curled; that was the only sign that she had heard his last words.

“Lionne,” he said, earnestly, “go farther in generosity; say that you forgive me.”

“I have nothing to forgive,” she quietly replied.

“Noblest, most magnanimous girl——!”

He stopped as if he had been struck by lightning.

With her face white and still, her lips compressed and bloodless, her eyes fixed and glittering, and hand lifted high towards heaven, she arose and stood before him.

“I have nothing to forgive,” she said, in a low, deep, steady tone, terrible even in its smoothness: “I have _nothing to forgive_, but EVERY THING TO AVENGE! Our hospitality outraged! our friendship deceived! our confidence betrayed! our home desecrated! my gray-haired father brought to dishonor, and his daughter to shame!—in one fell phrase, the preservation of your worthless life by us, repaid with the ruin of ours by you! And now and here, before high heaven! here, by the majesty of my awful wrongs and sorrows, suffered at your treacherous hands!—here, for your stupendous sin, I do solemnly devote you and yours to earthly and eternal destruction! And if ever I revoke this sentence, may the doom fall a thunderbolt of destruction upon my own head, and the heads of all I love! may then my words of pardon to you become the sentence of my own temporal and eternal death!”

And with this terrible imprecation upon her lips, her arm raised high towards heaven, and her eyes blazing with malediction, the heart-scathed girl receded from the room, and was seen no more at Bush Creek.

Orville Deville remained standing where she had left him, spell-bound, panic-stricken, appalled by this prophetic vision of Retribution.

He was aroused by the entrance of Kate Kyte, who, without speaking, took up a seine that she was engaged in netting; and seated herself at one of the windows to work upon it.

Orville, with a pang and a start, suddenly recollected the errand that had brought him to the house, and, turning towards the young girl, he said:

“Kate, I came hither in anxious search of my wife.”

“Which of them?” inquired Kate, very dryly.

“Do not mock me, little school-mate,” said Orville, as a rush of color crimsoned his forehead, “but tell me if you have seen Lady Adelaide Deville since yesterday?”

“If I tell you that I saw her last night, it is for _her_ sake and not for _yours_ that I speak,” said Kate, coldly.

“Last night! how? where? at what hour, _good_ Kate?” eagerly inquired Orville.

“At midnight, in the snow-storm, alone, outside that window,” said Kate, cruelly condensing the facts.

“Great heaven above, what is it you tell me?” cried Orville, starting up with horror, grief, and dismay in every lineament of his face. “Where is she now?”

“The Lord knows—I don’t!” said Kate, severely.

“Explain! for the love of heaven, explain!” exclaimed Orville, rushing forward, and seizing the arm of the girl, and gazing with an agony of inquiry into her face.

Kate indignantly shook off his arm, giving him a glance which, could a look have killed, must have laid him dead at her feet.

“I have nothing to explain,” she said, “except the reason why I do not now know where Lady Adelaide is to be found. Her _body_, I think, may sometime or other be discovered among the snow-drifts; her _soul_ is probably in heaven!”

“Kate, this is torture—this is agony! For the love of heaven, be more explicit! You saw her——”

“I told you all that I saw. If you wish me to be more circumstantial, I can be so. I can tell you the relation will not be less painful. Last night, a little after midnight, while I sat at that very fire, listening to the history of _your other wife_, which included also the story of a hero, who repaid the preservation of his own worthless life with the ruin of his preserver, we heard amid the snow-storm a slight noise at the window, as if some poor little storm-beaten bird had pecked against the glass for admission. I looked up and screamed on seeing, at that hour, in that storm, a pale, still, sad face at the pane, and which I did not at first recognize as that of Lady Adelaide.”

“Well! well!” exclaimed Orville, breathlessly.

“This phantom raised the window, and slipped under it a little note, which was eagerly seized, and read, and carefully burned by—your other wife.”

“Kate, your words are full of well-merited bitterness. _I_ do not quarrel with them. But Adelaide—tell me of Adelaide!”

“I have really nothing more to tell. As soon as she had slipped in the note, her face vanished from the window. And as soon as I had recovered from my panic, I jerked open the door and ran out into the night and storm to call her in. I ran up and down among the deep drifts, and amid the fast falling snow, calling and shouting, in vain! It was as dark as pitch; I could see nothing—not even my own hand, not even the snow! and I could hear nothing but the sound of my own voice!”

“Go on! go on!”

“What more would you have me say? I floundered out among the snow-drifts, in black darkness, freezing cold, and stifling sleet, until, tough as I am, I was near perishing at my own door. Then in despair of finding her, I gave up the search and came in. That is absolutely all that I know of her fate!”

“Kate! for heaven’s sake tell me, have you no clue, no suspicion, no vague idea, of whither she went?” asked Orville, in anguish.

“None whatever. After I came in, it occurred to me that she might possibly have had a carriage and servants in attendance, and that while I was floundering in the snow, she might have been comfortably driving homewards; but since that is not so, I fear, indeed, that she must have perished in the storm!”

“The Lord in his mercy forbid! Kate, are your brothers at home?”

“None have yet returned but Hubert.”

“I am very sorry for that. But Hubert knows every foot of the forest—I must get him to assist me ’n my search.”

“Very well, Mr. Deville. Hubert will be glad to do any thing in the service of Lady Adelaide. But he must pursue his search alone, if you please, and report his luck to your mother.”

“What do you mean by that, Kate?”

“That I do not wish my brother to become intimate with you, sir.”

“Kate, are you determined to affront me, whether I will or no?”

“I am determined to speak a few plain words to you, Mr. Deville.”

“Say on—you are a woman, and privileged.”

“The Lord knows, I wish I were not! I wish I were a man for your sake! But this is what I have to say to you, Mr. Deville. In the first place, that but for the sake of Lady Adelaide, I should not have permitted you to hold me in conversation so long. I told you that I had heard your story from Lionne. Now, had a _woman_ committed the sin that _you_ have committed, you know that she would have forever, and justly, forfeited her place in society. God never made one set of commandments for man and another for woman! He will hold both equally responsible for similar sins. In the same circumstances, _I_ do not judge a man _less_ guilty than a woman, but rather more so! And therefore, Mr. Deville, I judge that you have lost your title as a man of honor, and consequently forfeited all right to cross the threshold of an honorable woman! I hope you will consider this a hint to shorten your visit, and—never to repeat it!”

And before Orville Deville could recover his astonishment, Kate Kyte flounced from the room, leaving him to depart and pursue his quest of Adelaide.

“My eyes!” said Hubert, who from the kitchen had heard and understood ‘a fury in the words, but not the words,’ what a “thundering blowing-up Mr. Deville _did_ get from both them women! Wonder what it was all about. Don’t any of the three look so very happy.”