CHAPTER XIV.
A SECOND MARRIAGE.
San Diego had a sensation when Colonel Falconer, the rich Southerner, married the beautiful young typewriter within a few days after his return from San Francisco.
He had pleaded for an early marriage, and she, after some hesitancy, had consented.
“There is no one whose consent I have to ask, I suppose?” he said; and, after a moment’s silence, she answered:
“No, there is no one. I have reason to think that my mother believes me dead. I have no wish to undeceive her.”
“But does not that seem cruel?” he asked, and tears started to her eyes as she answered bitterly:
“She has her new husband and other children to comfort her for my loss.”
He said no more on the subject, and preparations were made for a speedy marriage. He declared that that would be best, and Pansy could not gainsay the assertion. Her small stock of money had been exhausted during her illness, and she was still too weak to go back to work.
So when her lover declared that they would be married quietly this week, and go at once upon a wedding tour abroad, she did not make any objection to the plan. She was glad to have her way smoothed out before her by his kindly, generous hand.
“Oh, how good he is to me—how noble! I wish that I could love him more in return for all his goodness,” she thought, sadly contrasting her gentle, quiet affection for this good man with the passionate love she had felt for one less worthy.
“Perhaps even now he is the husband of haughty Juliette Ives,” she thought, and grew cold and pale at the fancy.
She believed that she hated Norman Wylde, and she trusted that she might never meet him on earth again. To Colonel Falconer she gave the utmost respect, and a placid, gentle affection utterly unlike that ardent passion which she had outlived and outworn, as she believed, in her heart.
She thought it a little strange that he never mentioned any of his relatives, and, the day before they were married, she said:
“Are you sure that none of your grand relatives will object to your marrying a poor little typewriter girl?”
To her surprise, he started and looked visibly embarrassed.
“Ah, I made a clever guess!” she exclaimed, with faint sarcasm, and then he recovered himself.
“No—yes,” he stammered, and then added: “I have no near relatives, Pansy, except a widowed sister. She has one child—a beautiful daughter, who has counted confidently on being my heiress. I think they both will feel disappointed at hearing of my marriage, but they have no right to do so. My sister has a neat little fortune of her own, and her daughter is soon to marry a rich man.”
“Then you have not written to ask their consent?” Pansy asked, with unconscious bitterness, feeling an unaccountable antagonism to those two unknown ones.
“Certainly not,” Colonel Falconer answered, with some surprise, and continued: “I’m ashamed to confess that I don’t pretend to keep up any correspondence with my sister. I have written her once since I came to San Diego. She has not answered yet, so I shall not take the trouble to announce my marriage to her until we are safe on the other side of the Atlantic. She will be glad for such bad news to be delayed,” laughing grimly.
Afterward it seemed strange to her that she had never thought of asking the names of these people, who would soon be related to her so closely by her marriage with Colonel Falconer. And it seemed equally strange that he did not tell her without the asking. There was a fate in it, she told herself, when she came to know, for if she had heard those two names she would never have married Colonel Falconer, and run the risk of again meeting Norman Wylde.
The next day they were married quietly at church, but there were quite a number of people present, for the affair had become known through the gossip of the delighted Mrs. Scruggs. Pansy remembered with a bitter thrill that ceremony in Washington, which had made her so blindly happy.
“Poor, deluded fool that I was!” she sighed, thinking how much sadder and wiser she had grown since then, for now she was past twenty, although she looked so fair and girlish no one would have thought she was more than sixteen.
They left San Diego directly, and went abroad. They spent a year in travel, and in that time Pansy learned much and improved much. The clouds passed from her beautiful face, and she was tranquilly happy with her husband, save when one blighting memory intervened. It was the thought of Norman Wylde and the dark episode in her life that she had concealed from Colonel Falconer.
“He believes me pure and good; he has the greatest confidence in my goodness; yet all the while I am hiding from him a dark secret which I dare not disclose. Heaven grant he may never find out the truth, for it would be so hard for me to convince him that I was innocent, although so foully wronged,” she thought often, when the unfailing kindness of her husband touched her with ardent admiration for his noble nature and awakened self-reproach within her sensitive mind.