Pansy had quite forgotten why she came to the Capitol Square. She could think of nothing but Norman Wylde and the sorrow on his handsome face. She lingered beside him until he consented to tell her the story of his unhappy love affair.
“I was engaged to Juliette Ives, but I was not very much in love with her. I met, in the country, a beautiful young girl named Pansy Laurens,” he said. “The young lady was not in our set. She was poor, and worked at Arnell & Grey’s tobacco factory; but she was the fairest, sweetest, most charming little creature I ever met. We fell in love at first sight, and I broke my engagement with Juliette for her sake. But, of course, you think, as every one else did, Mrs. Falconer, that I acted badly.”
He stopped and looked searchingly into her pale face. Oh, how like it was to his lost love’s, only with a proud smile on it that made it a little different from Pansy’s, that had been so sweet and gentle.
“I am very much interested; please go on,” she murmured. And, sighing heavily, Norman Wylde continued:
“Of course, everybody set themselves against us, Pansy’s relations as well as mine.”
Pansy trembled, for the deep, sweet, thrilling voice went to her heart, which began to beat heavily and painfully. How her thoughts went back to the past, when he had been her worshiped lover, and she had thought him true!
“We met in secret, my sweet little love and I,” continued Norman, “but we could not see each other very often, because she had to work in the factory all the week. But on Sundays I saw her at church, and in the afternoons she would come here, or to Libby Hill Park, always to a different place, that no one might suspect us. I would have married her at once, but we should have had nothing to live on, as I had no clients yet, and my father had threatened to disinherit me if I did not give her up. But I vowed in secret that I would not do that, and, at last, fate—as I thought—opened out a way for us to be happy. I found a client who wished me to go to Europe and manage an important case.”
“And you went?” she asked, for he paused so long that she feared his confidences were at an end.
“Yes, I went,” he answered slowly; then he looked at her gravely, and said: “You are a stranger, Mrs. Falconer, and there is something connected with my trip to London that I should not betray, perhaps, for the sake of my family.”
“Whatever you tell me will be held sacred,” she said, almost inaudibly, and the dark eyes looked at her in a sort of wonder.
“I ought not to betray this to any one but a dear friend,” he said hesitatingly. “Mrs. Falconer, I wonder if you could like me well enough to be my friend? It would be very pleasant to me. You look so much like her that I should find comfort in your friendship.”
Many and many a time Pansy Laurens had said to herself that Norman Wylde was the greatest enemy she had on earth. But now she held out her hand to him, in its soft silken glove, and he took it and pressed it eagerly.
“I will be your friend,” she said, wondering if he was going to confess to her now about the secret marriage that was no marriage, after all. She was so curious to hear how he would justify that that she did not hesitate to promise him her friendship.
But, to her wonder and indignation, he skipped quite over that important era in his love affair, and went on telling her about his trip to London:
“Mrs. Falconer, that tour on which I prided myself was a plot, a trap, laid by my parents to get me away from Richmond and from Pansy. My client was a paid tool of my father’s, and his craft followed me to London, where, for almost a year, I remained, vainly seeking links in a case that never had existed, save in the fertile brain of those who invented that pretext for the purpose of luring me away from home and love. My brain whirls yet when I recall how I was duped and deceived, my life and hers made pitiable wrecks for the sake of a despicable pride of birth and position.”
His agitation was terrible for the moment. His dark eyes blazed, great drops of perspiration started out on his pallid brow. As for her, she could not speak; she sat staring at him with parted lips and blue eyes full of misery.
“Oh, I ought not to have gone back to that time, for it stirs the smoldering ashes into fire again,” he cried bitterly. “Think, Mrs. Falconer, how I suffered all that time, never hearing a word from my darling, although I wrote to her every week, and she had promised to write to me. And, at last—oh, Heaven!—there came to me a Richmond paper, saying that she had drowned herself.”
“Oh!” sighed Pansy sympathetically, but he did not seem to hear her. His head drooped, and his eyes sought the ground. He seemed to be oblivious to all but his own pain.
For her, she was thinking bitterly:
“I am glad he is capable of some remorse for his sin. It makes me think a little more kindly of him.”
Then she shuddered at herself, for she knew that she was thinking of him more than kindly—fast falling under the old glamour—and she knew this must not be, that she ought to fly as from the tempting of a serpent. She made a motion to rise, but he looked up quickly.
“Do not go—yet,” he said pleadingly. “Somehow, it is a sad pleasure to me to see you sitting there, with that face so like poor dead Pansy’s that it brings back all the perished past.”
At those words she could not rise. She seemed to have no volition of her own. She sat still, comparing herself to a bird charmed by a serpent.
“Do you know,” he went on, “we sat here on the very bench one Sunday, just a week before I sailed for England. She wore a white dress and wide straw hat, something like you wear now. I told her of my good fortune, but, poor child, a presentiment seemed to come over her gentle spirit, and she wept most bitterly because I was going away.”
“He will tell me now of that most shameful marriage,” Pansy thought; but again she was mistaken.
“Poor little darling! No wonder she felt so gloomy, for our parting was the knell of her fate,” said Norman Wylde. “I feel quite sure that by some underhand means our letters to each other were suppressed, for not a line ever came to me, though I shall never doubt that she wrote often, and I feel quite certain that it was the agony of suspense and hope deferred that drove her to suicide.”
“You came home, then, did you not?” she asked.
“No; for I could not have borne to return and find her gone. What was there to come back to, Mrs. Falconer? Not even a grave, for her body was never recovered from the river.”
He raised his downcast eyes and looked into her face with such a searching expression that she trembled lest he was going to tax her with her identity.
But he did not do so. He only said:
“I was too miserable and distracted to come home then. Besides, I had not yet discovered the fraud that had been perpetrated on me. I stayed in London almost a year longer, vainly prosecuting my search for the missing links in my client’s case, and then, by accident, I found out how I had been deceived. I came home at once then, and taxed my parents with the truth. They acknowledged the deception, but claimed that it had been done for my good, and begged my pardon. I would not forgive them, yet, for the sake of family pride, I kept secret their perfidy, and you are the first one to whom it has been revealed.”
“Oh, what a sad, what a miserable ending for so sweet a love story! It seems a pity you did not marry the girl and take her away with you!” cried Pansy.
“I wish that I had done so, for then I might have been happy, instead of the most miserable and remorseful man in the whole world,” groaned Norman Wylde; and she wondered how much of this was acting and how much reality.
“Perhaps he loved me better than he knew, and repented when too late the miserable betrayal that wrecked my life,” she thought, softening more and more toward him whom she knew she ought to hate.
But before either one could utter another word, the prattling voice of a little child was heard, and Pansy looked up and saw Mrs. Meade and little Pet coming along the path toward where she sat.
Pet caught sight of the two sitting there together, and ran forward with a cry of delight.
“Pretty yady, pretty yady!” he cried joyously, and climbed into Pansy’s lap and kissed her.