CHAPTER XLIV.
THE NIGHTINGALE’S STORY.
Laurie held up the beautiful diamond in the moonlight, and she half-shuddered, remembering the doom it had brought on her that summer night nearly two years ago now.
“You will not wish to wear it again; it frightens you,” he said questioningly.
She faltered:
“Might she not be angry?”
“Nonsense! She does not care any more now!” reassuringly.
Which showed how little he understood a woman’s heart.
Far away in America, at that very moment, Lelia was saying to her mother:
“I wish now I had thrown the diamond in the well! It maddens me to think of another girl wearing it.”
“Forget it all,” Mrs. Ritchie answered tenderly.
So when Laurie reassured her, Rosalind held out her white hand for the ring.
He kissed the little hand with eager lips, then slipped the ring back again.
“For ever and aye,” he said solemnly, and for a moment both were very still, listening to a nightingale that came to sing to the moonflowers in the dew.
The dark, soft eyes looked up at him shyly, and he murmured:
“What is it, dear?”
“The wish?”
“Oh, yes, I remember. But, Rosalind, perhaps it will frighten you to hear it spoken aloud--the wish I had in my heart that evening.”
“It will not frighten me, and I am so curious. You cannot guess how I have wondered over it and wept, fearing I should never know.”
“Ah, little Mother Eve, you will be angry.”
“No, no!”
“Then hear me, sweet! I had the same wish then that I have now. I had in my mind the same story that nightingale is warbling to the flowers; the old, old story of love. I wished that some day you would be my wife.”
Her face drooped to her breast with a little sob of exquisite joy, and he slipped his arm about the yielding form.
“Rosalind, my darling, it seems to me now that I have always loved you--yes, from the very beginning, only Lelia held us jealously apart. When I put the ring on your hand I meant to come back and marry you soon. I wrote you of my love when I was gone, but Lelia intercepted the letter. I found it with the ring; I will show it to you some day. But now--now all the pain and parting are over. Will you be my wife? Shall I have my wish?”
The nightingale sang so loud he drowned her answer, but the moon and the stars and the bird and the flowers saw the upturned face and the lover’s kiss that brought down heaven to earth.
* * * * *
Lady Warrington said she was not the least surprised when they told her all about it. She had read it in their faces.
Lord Warrington said he would try not envy his cousin’s luck. He had always guessed there was a man somewhere in the case, but he had never suspected Willoughby.
One thing my lady said she was determined on--the wedding should be from her own house, and as grand as if Rosalind had been her own daughter.
But the happy pair demurred. They preferred a quiet wedding.
Laurie begged for an early day. He was homesick for America. They would go home for a bridal-tour.
Then began endless shopping and fitting, and all the pleasures and trials of trousseau getting, but in two months all was ready, and the pretty wedding came off at The Larches.
* * * * *
“If I had dreamed he would marry her, I would never have released him; I would have stood between them forever!” Lelia said bitterly, when she learned of the wedding and the homecoming.
“I told you so,” returned Mrs. Ritchie uneasily.
“But I did not believe you. I am always too head-strong, and bring my troubles on myself,” Lelia said repentantly.
“Forget it all,” advised her mother.
“Forget!”
As if it were possible to a heart like Lelia’s, so passionate, so proud, so jealous.
With all her faults and all her sins, she possessed the one virtue of constancy.
She would never love any one but Laurie, whom she had lost through her terrible sin.
But she no longer raved of revenge; she had learned at bitter cost that vengeance belongs to Heaven.
She had no longer any faith in her mother’s religious notions; she had told her she would not be punished for her sins until after death, but she had lied. She had found her hell on earth.
She went on the stage, as Laurie had predicted, to impersonate her own heroines; she wrote with a pen dipped into her burning heart, so that the scenes glowed with feeling and the world bowed down in praise of her beauty and her genius. They said it was well she had divorced her husband. She was too gifted for a commonplace marriage.
But when Lelia paused in her meteorlike career to think of Laurie and Rosalind at The Crags, with bonny children laughing around their knees, all that the world had given her in lavish measure tasted like dead-sea fruit on her lips.
THE END.
No. 1031 of the NEW EAGLE SERIES, entitled “The Man and His Millions,” by Ida Reade Allen, tells of the happiness and the disappointment caused by an immense fortune, and will keep the reader’s interest alive throughout.
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Table of contents has been added and placed into the public domain by the transcriber.
This novel was previously serialized under the title, _Gipsy, the Waif; or, The Girl He Married_.
The edition used as the basis for this electronic text (Street & Smith’s New Eagle Series, no. 1030) contained sixteen pages of advertisements for Street & Smith publications in the back. Because the source copy was incomplete and damaged, only the text of the novel is reproduced here.