CHAPTER VIII.

MORE DISCOVERIES.

Though looks and words By the strong mastery of his practiced will Are overruled, the mounting blood betrays An impulse in its secret spring, too deep For his control. SOUTHEY.

Joy? That word does not express it. No guiltless martyr of circumstantial evidence, unjustly convicted and condemned to death, ever felt such deep rapture on being at once vindicated and released as did Valdimir Desparde on being delivered from the imputed dishonor, worse to him than any other fate.

Yet through this deep rapture, suddenly sped a shaft of pain. This was the thought of his lost love. The discovery had come too late to effect a reconciliation and reunion with her! He would go back to England, and vindicate himself to the satisfaction of every one, but—he could not recover his lost bride! He had forsaken her on her wedding morning, and without giving any explanation of his act! And she had naturally and properly resented his conduct by casting him forth from her thoughts and accepting the attentions of a worthier man, approved by her grandparents. Thus she was lost to him forever!

As he thought of this, how much he deplored his fatal reticence with his friends as to the cause of his flight!

But it was too late now for such regrets!

He had kept the secret from them for _their_ sakes! He had even allowed his betrothed bride to think evil of him, that she might the sooner forget him and recover her peace of mind.

This he had supposed to be the generous and noble course of conduct. And in this course he had been encouraged by his only confidant, Brandon Coyle!

Brandon Coyle?

At the recollection of that name a new difficulty occurred to the mind of Desparde. Had Brandon Coyle—had that cherished and trusted friend of many years consciously deceived and betrayed him? Or—had Coyle, being in ignorance of his own and his sister’s early history, been also misled by the strong circumstantial evidence that seemed to fix the shame on Desparde and which had even convinced the last-mentioned unhappy man of the fact?

He could not tell.

That Brandon and Aspirita Coyle were the children of that debasing marriage between the quadroon and the English girl was now reduced to a certainty; but how much Brandon knew or suspected of the fact was an uncertainty. If he, Brandon, knew the secret of his own origin, and—favored by the strong circumstantial evidence—had sought to shift the shame upon the shoulders of his stainless friend, to deprive the latter of home, country, friends, bride, honor, everything that man holds dear—then was Brandon Coyle a villain of the basest order, worthy of his degraded parentage.

But if he was _not_? If he had been kept in the same ignorance of his early life as Valdimir Desparde had been kept in concerning his own? If he had been really deceived by the strong circumstantial evidence into believing the apparent facts, as he had represented them to Desparde?

Then indeed was Coyle to be deeply compassionated.

And then and there the magnanimous man, the true gentleman, resolved upon one course—that in vindicating himself, he would guard, if possible, the secret of Brandon Coyle, at least until he should have proof that Coyle knew the truth, yet consciously and intentionally deceived him.

That same night when his patient was asleep, Desparde wrote the first letter to England under his real name since his flight. It was addressed to Lord Beaudevere and announced the young man’s intended return by an early steamer, to vindicate his own course and to re-establish himself in the esteem of his friends.

Two days after this he left his now recovered patient in the care of the landlady, drew his balance out of bank and left for New York, _en route_ for London.

He was leaving the breakfast-room of his hotel, on the morning after his arrival, and was approaching the hat-stand in the hall to recover his hat, gloves, and so forth, before walking out, when he perceived at the news-stand beside it, a gentleman whose form and air seemed familiar to him. The gentleman had his back turned, however, and was bending down turning over the leaves of a newspaper.

Valdimir Desparde stopped suddenly and gazed at the stranger, who presently lifted up his head and looked around.

There was an instantaneous mutual recognition, and the two men sprang eagerly towards each other with outstretched hands and delighted eyes, like friends meeting on a foreign shore, as they simultaneously exclaimed:

“Fleming!”

“Desparde!”

“_You_ over here!”

“Deuced glad to see you, old fellow!”

“When did you leave the old country, Fleming?”

“Oh, dear, ages ago! or it seems ages to me! I left England about the middle of last August! This is the middle of November! Only three months since after all! Yet it seems to me three years! I have ‘done’ the great Western world in this time, don’t you know? Seen the Rocky Mountains, the vast prairies, the Father of Waters, the great lakes, Niagara Falls, the St. Lawrence, the Thousand Islands, Tammany Hall, the State House in Philadelphia, the Capitol in Washington, and—there, I think that completes the list; but, then, one has to go over so much ground to see so little in this new country.”

“The middle of August! Then it is some time since you left home; but you have heard, in the interval?” inquired Desparde.

“Oh, yes, I hear every week. They are all well, I think—at least all except the two in whom I feel a particular interest.”

“And who are they?” inquired Desparde. “But stop!” he exclaimed. “We are in rather a public place for a conversation. Have you had breakfast?”

“Yes, just left the table.”

“Are you disengaged?”

“Quite at your service, or at that of anybody else who has more business with me than I have with all the world.”

“Then perhaps you will come with me to my room, where we can talk freely.”

“Certainly! Lead the way!” said Fleming.

The two young men left the hall and ascended to the bachelor’s den on the fourth floor, where the clerk of the house had thrust the future peer of “England’s realm.”

“Well, Desparde,” began Adrian Fleming, as soon as they were seated, “how is it with yourself? You have been in this country nearly six months! How is it with you and with the wife and bairns?”

“Wife and bairns!” echoed Desparde, elevating his eyebrows.

“Yes, certainly! You are married, are you not?” demanded Adrian,

“Married? No, no more than _yourself_!” promptly replied Valdimir.

Adrian Fleming laughed harshly at the comparison Desparde had ignorantly made.

“If you are married no more than _myself_—well, no matter. But come now, old fellow, between friends, what have you done with the bonny Scotch lassie and bairnie who accompanied you in your flight?” inquired Fleming in a chaffing tone.

“Scotch lassie? Bairnie?” repeated Desparde, in perplexity. “Upon my honor, Fleming, I do not know to what you refer?”

“Oh! then,” replied Adrian, in a more serious tone, “I refer, of course, to the rumor of your marriage to a young woman of humble parentage as the true cause of your leaving England so suddenly.”

“WHAT!” exclaimed the young exile. “Was such a rumor as THAT current in England?”

“Most certainly it was circulated and accepted there as the truth. But I infer from your tone and manner that it was false?”

“As false as anything ever invented by the father of lies! _Who_ set this report in circulation, may I ask?” demanded Desparde.

“I—_think_ it was your friend, Mr. Brandon Coyle,” replied Fleming after some hesitation.

“Brandon Coyle!” exclaimed Valdimir Desparde. “Impossible! He was in my confidence. He knew the true reason of my flight. He knew it from the first. He knew it was _not_ the reason that you say rumor has assigned.”

“_Indeed!_ Then I must have been mistaken in supposing it to have been Coyle,” answered Fleming, slowly and thoughtfully.

“But,” gravely inquired Desparde, “what could have suggested to you the idea that Brandon Coyle started this false report?”

“Now that is just what I am trying to remember. But it was three months ago, you see. Ah! now I have it! I had heard the rumor without having heard its origin, until I reached London on my way to Southampton to take the steamer. I stopped a few days in London, and while there called on the Coyles, who were then in town. I also invited Miss Coyle to ride with me in the Park. And in the course of that ride the subject of your absence came up, and Miss Coyle told me that her brother had received a letter from you, confessing your marriage to a lassie of low degree, and giving _that_ as a reason for your sudden self-expatriation.”

“Aspirita Coyle told you _that_?” fiercely demanded Valdimir.

“She did indeed. Moreover, she added that she had coaxed the letter from her brother’s possession and inclosed it in one from herself to Lady Arielle Montjoie, who was then at Skol. She said that she had done this from a sense of duty.”

Valdimir Desparde uttered a fierce, half suppressed oath, and made a gesture of desperation.

“I must infer, then, that you never wrote such a letter?”

“Never! If such a letter as you describe was inclosed to Lady Arielle, it was a base forgery!”

“Who could have been the forger?” mused Fleming.

“_Ah, who?_” bitterly inquired Desparde, as the conviction of his false friend’s duplicity settled on his mind. “I tell you, Fleming, that I have been not only the victim of overwhelming circumstantial evidence, but of villainous machinations by those who have attempted to turn that evidence to their own profit by my ruin.”

“‘Circumstantial evidence?’ _What_ circumstantial evidence, for Heaven’s sake?” demanded Fleming, slowly, and with great perplexity.

“If you have time to listen I will tell you. My story will explain my sudden and seemingly inexcusable departure from England on the very eve of my marriage; but I warn you that it is not a short one. Have you time for it?”

“‘Time for it!’” echoed Fleming. “Certainly I have. If I had not I would make time. Go on.”

As briefly as was practicable, however, Valdimir Desparde told the story of the cruel deception that had been practiced upon him, with all the circumstantial evidence that had supported the imposition, and that had driven him a fugitive from his native land.

“By Jove, Desparde! What I wonder at the most, in all this wonderful story, is just _yourself_!” exclaimed Adrian Fleming, staring at his companion.

“But why at me?” inquired the latter, in perplexity.

“Ah, Desparde! You have been the victim of your own easy credulity, no less than of circumstantial evidence manipulated by designing villainy.”

“Yet there _is_ something mysterious, and therefore suspicious, in the guarded secrecy that surrounds the early life of my sister and myself,” said Valdimir, sadly.

“Well! but old Beaudevere, who is the very soul of honor and chivalry—a very Don Quixote of England in the nineteenth century—told you himself that no reproach to any of you lurked in this secrecy—and therefore, of course, there cannot be.”

“No, I trust and believe that there cannot be any reproach, since he declares that there is not.”

“But for all that I should insist upon having that secret out of the old gentleman before effecting a reconciliation with Lady Arielle,” added Fleming.

“‘A reconciliation with Lady Arielle?’” mournfully echoed Valdimir. “Have I not told you that she is lost to me forever?”

“Stuff and nonsense! I don’t believe it!” roughly replied Fleming.

“But—but she is on the very brink of marriage with a gentleman—”

“‘Every way worthy of her ladyship and highly approved by her grandparents!’ Is not that the formula?”

“Yes, or something like it,” sighed Valdimir.

“What is your authority for that story?” abruptly demanded Fleming.

Desparde started. Brandon Coyle was his authority for that story, and after a short hesitation he said so.

“Stuff and nonsense. Arielle will forgive you as soon as she hears your explanation, if she has not forgiven you already, which is the more likely! Why, man! when I left England three months ago she was reported to be in a decline—”

Here Valdimir started and changed color.

“Do not be alarmed! _You_ are the fortunate physician destined to restore her to health! She was actually pining away and dying for love, like an old-fashioned maiden in an old-fashioned ballad! You can soon cure her of that malady,” laughed young Fleming.

“Is that true? Oh, Heaven, can that be true?” muttered Valdimir, in low, earnest tones.

“_I_ tell you that it is true, and I hope I am better authority than Mr. Brandon Coyle! Desparde, when do you sail for England?”

“To-morrow, by the _Colorado_. And you, Fleming?”

“To England? Ah, Heaven knows! I sail by the first Southern Pacific steamer for Rio Janeiro. I shall not probably see the ‘cliffs of Albion’ for many years to come,” answered Adrian.

“But the fair Antoinette? How will she like this long absence?” inquired Desparde, who, at the time of his own flight from England, believed as many others did, that Adrian was the accepted suitor of Miss Deloraine, of Deloraine Park.

The face of young Fleming suddenly clouded over.

“Ah! do not mention her!” he said, with a deep sigh.

“How, is the engagement broken off?” Valdimir impulsively inquired, and then he immediately regretted his hasty question.

“The engagement never existed, except in the imagination of gossips. It is worse than that, Desparde! Antoinette Deloraine, the young and beautiful heiress of an estate worth fifty thousand pounds a year, with everything to make this life delightful and attractive, is dying—”

“Dying! Gracious Heaven, Fleming, how you shock me! Dying!”

“Yes; slowly, but _surely_!”

“Of what malady, for mercy’s sake?”

“Of that hereditary decline that carried off her mother and her father! How could she escape? It is a painful subject, Desparde! But you may remember that when you asked me if all our friends in England were in good health when I last heard from home, I told you that all were well except two in whom I felt the greatest interest, meaning Lady Arielle Montjoie and Miss Deloraine. But you can be consoled in knowing that Lady Arielle’s malady is not of the fatal type of her friend’s illness.”

After this the friends walked out together and spent the forenoon in visiting various public places of interest about the metropolis.

The next morning Valdimir embarked on board the steamship _Colorado_, bound for Liverpool.

Adrian Fleming went with his friend to see him off, and secured a promise from him that at an early day after his arrival in England he would go down to Fleming Chase and call upon Sir Adrian and Lady Fleming.

“For you know, dear old boy, that no amount of letters from their good-for-nothing son will give them half so much satisfaction, as a visit from a friend who has lately interviewed him,” added the young man.

Valdimir Desparde gave the required promise, and the friends parted five minutes before the ship sailed.

[Illustration: [Fleuron]]