CHAPTER XIII.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XX, Issue 17, 12 February 1892, Page 25

CHAPTER XIII.

There was the letter from my original home to read when they fcad all left. I threw myself fnto the arm-crair and devoured it. Here gt is. Evidently it's a letter from my father to my mother : " Deweberry Park, Craddock, Suffolk, April 7 th, 1869. " Dear Sara, — I don't dispute the fact that I married yon, nor the fact that Angela is my daughter, nor that the present Lady Dewsberry is not my lawful wife. Bat what will you gain by claiming your position when you oannot hold that position ? M The graces of a cultivated mind and of the peculiar tact neces■ary to manage (witbont anybody dreaming that you are managing) large house-parties, and political talons, and so on, can never be yours. The grace of spontaneous beauty was always yours. I don't dispute your beauty— who could ?— but I dispute your pedigree. It takes centuries of ancestry, reared in the atmosphere of a peer's home, to give that peculiar something which, as a youth, I didn't comprehend, but which the years developed, as they develop everything hereditary— that pecular • something ' which is talismanic among classes. On this ground I married the present Lady Dewsberry. 11 She is a witty, charming, most perfectly well-bred woman. I don't love her ; I loved you. Love, like disease ia caught. She merer caught my passion, but she caught my mind. Besides, love is •o tiresome. You became bo tiresome ; the more I loved you the more tiresome I found it. "Love is bo elusive and evasive. I thought at last I had you, and lo I you bad gone. I can't explain it. Who can explain the intricacies of Nature, the sublimity of passion, the tiresomeness of love, the fatigue of everything that attacks the senses only ? When 1 discovered the loss of my love, your efforts to win it back would, I thought, at last kill me. When you smiled my lips refused to smile back, then your tears came, then I swore. O ! I have often beat my breast like an actor in the agony of discovering that not one in a million can love for evermore. Hence the ill-assorted pairs that are making the stern old sentence in the old, old Book go forth again and again : • Give her a writing of divorcement.' I didn't divorce you ; you gave no cause. You couldn't divorce me. But I paid you a fortune to dry your tears in that safe cure silence, and 1 ask you to accept the inevitable. 11 You have it in your power to break up this establishment, and power ia misplaced always in the hands of a woman. They are not constituted for it. Very often they don't make such a mess of power as men, but power is their worst enemy. You will gain nothing if you elect this course, fDr you will not regain me. " I have gone. "The world ia nothing to you, for you doa't belong to it, and its poignant remarks and its graceful sarcasms must always be to you like an unknown tongue. " Now what will you do ? Take my advice— accept the inevitable.—Yours, Dewsbkeby." I read and re-real that letter ; I paced the loom till the gray light of early morniDg fell softly on the faded old carpet, and crept wanly about the corneea of the rooms. Bach sentence of that strange, cold, clever, cynical letter fell into my very soul, and awoke, like seed sown, a new ideal force— determination. Sara my mother ! The tiresome Sara, who loved and lost, still tha true wife ; while the lady all grace and wit, with her political salons and her house-parties, was what 1 Fierce rage devoured m?. The years had crept by— sixteen years since my father wrote that letter ; to her I had no clue— to him abundant. I would go ; I would tell Lady Dewsberry who 1 was ; I would claim my rank and ins : ston my title. A few minutes ago I had repudiated it, but now I would hold by it. I made myself a cup of t«*», and drank it with that peculiar form of haste all action strung on a rope of stings means. The bells for Matins began to chime Boftly out. I flew to the glass, made a rapid but careful toilette, and with the letter thrust into my Prayer-Book (for what more sacred 1) I fled out by the garden, hurried by the glistening streams, which might be mermaids' glafwee flung away in haste on a stolen passage from sea to land, and entered the Abbey with a few worshippers who managed to steal an hour from sleep to lay by for eternity. (Concluded in onr next,)