The Mysterious Mr. Miller

Instantly I saw that I had quite unintentionally alarmed her and hastened to set her at her ease.

“I saw upon a table in your drawing-room the photograph of a very dear friend – Ella Murray. She was your friend, so your father told me. How curious that we should both have been acquainted with her!”

“Oh! Ella! Did you really know poor Ella?” she exclaimed quickly, reassured that my discovery was not of a compromising character.

“I knew her very well indeed,” was my slow response. “When were you acquainted with her?”

“Oh! years ago. We were together at the Sacré Coeur at Evreux, and both left the convent the same year. She was my most intimate friend, and once or twice came with me here, to Studland, when we had our holidays together.”

“She actually visited here!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“Several times. Mr Murray was my father’s friend. As you know, he lived at Wichenford, in Worcestershire. Then we went to reside entirely abroad, and for quite a long time, a year or more, I lost sight of her. She was very beautiful. From a child her wonderful face was everywhere admired. In the convent we girls nicknamed her ‘The Little Madonna,’ for she bore a striking likeness to the Van Dyck’s Madonna in the Pitti in Florence, a copy of which hung in the convent chapel.”

“Ah, of course!” I cried. Now that she recalled that picture, I recognised the extraordinary likeness. Perhaps you, who read this chronicle of strange facts, know that small canvas a foot square which hangs in a corner of one of the great gold-ceilinged salons, almost unnoticed save by the foreign art enthusiast. The expression of sweetness and adoration distinguishes it as a marvellous work. “What do you know further concerning her?” I asked. “Tell me all – for she was my friend.”

“About a year before we went to live at Enghien, near Paris, Mrs Murray died. Then her father let Wichenford Place to an American, and went to Australia for a sea-trip, leaving Ella in charge of an old aunt who lived in London. I saw her once, at her aunt’s house in Porchester Terrace. She was very unhappy, and when I asked her the reason she told me in bitter tears that she loved a man who adored her in return. She would not tell me the man’s name, but only said that her father and her aunt were compelling her to marry a wealthy elderly man who was odious, and whom she hated. Poor little Ella! I pitied her, and tried to comfort her, but it was quite useless, for that very evening her father, who was then back in London, compelled her to go out and meet her secret lover and give him his congé. Who he was or what became of him I do not know. I only know that she loved him as dearly as any woman has ever loved a man – poor little Ella!”

I stood before her motionless, listening to those words. Was this true? Had Fate any further shaft of bitterness to thrust into my already broken heart?

“Miss Miller!” I managed to exclaim, in a very low voice I fear, “what you tell me is utterly astounding. You know the man who loved Ella Murray. He was none other than myself – I who loved her, ay better than my own life – I who received that dismissal from the sweet lips that I so adored – the lips that I now know were compelled to lie to me.”

“You – Mr Leaf!” she cried. “Impossible. You were actually Ella’s secret lover!”

“Ah, yes! God alone knows how I have suffered all these years,” I said, half-choked. “You were her friend, Miss Miller, therefore you will forgive me if even to-day I wear my heart upon my sleeve. You will say, perhaps, that I am foolish, yet when a man loves a woman honestly, as I did, and he craves for affection and happiness, the catastrophe of parting is a very severe one – often more so to the man than to the woman. But,” I added quickly, “pardon me, I am talking to you as though you were as old as myself. You, at your age, have never experienced the bitterness of a blighted love.”

“Unfortunately I have,” she answered, in a low, trembling voice. “I, too, loved once – and only once. But, alas! after a few short weeks of affection, of a bliss that I thought would last always, the man I loved was cruelly snatched from me for ever.” And she sighed and tears welled in her fine eyes, as she looked aimlessly straight before her – her mind filled with painful recollections.

She told me no more, and left me wondering at the secret love romance that, to my great surprise, seemed to have already hardened her young heart.

Every girl, even in her school years, has her own little affair of the heart, generally becoming hopelessly infatuated with some man much her senior, who is in ignorance of the burning he is awakening within the girlish breast. But hers was, I distinguished, a real serious affection, one which, like my own, had ended in black grief and tragedy.

But she had told me one truth – a ghastly truth. I had misjudged my dear dead love! She had still loved me – she had still been mine – in heart my own!

Chapter Twelve

In which a Strange Thing Happens

“If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller,” I said, looking into her tearful eyes. “You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me – and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I did. I was hers – body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman’s hands – to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me – you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory.”

“Yes,” she answered, with a slight sigh, “I quite understand how you must have suffered. Yet how strange it is that you should actually have been Ella’s lover – the man who she declared to me was the only one she would ever love. I did not know you, of course, yet I sympathised with you when she told me that she was going that evening to meet you, and to lie to you under compulsion.”

“But why – why did she consent to do this?” I asked.

“She confessed to me the reason. She spoke in confidence, but now that it is all past, I may surely tell you. The fact was that her father, owing to the great depreciation in the value of land, had got into the hands of the Jews, and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Blumenthal, who had lent him a large sum upon mortgage, had offered to return the deeds on the day that he married Ella.”

“Then she actually sacrificed herself to save her father!” I cried.

“Without a doubt. And what a sacrifice! She loved you, Mr Leaf, and yet she dismissed you in order to save her father from ruin.”

“Blumenthal was a brute to have ever suggested such a condition,” I declared savagely. “I never saw him. What kind of man was he? Did you meet him?”

“Yes. He was at Porchester Terrace on the afternoon when I called,” she replied. “A short, stout, black-whiskered man, of a decidedly Hebrew cast. He was dressed loudly and wore a white waistcoat with heavy gold albert – a typical City man such as one sees in Cornhill or Lothbury.”

“She showed no sign of affection towards him?”

“None whatever. He was introduced to me by Mr Murray as Ella’s affianced husband, and I was, of course, amazed that she should entertain a spark of affection for him. But half an hour later, when we were alone, she confessed in tears everything to me, just as I have related it to you.”

“Well, you utterly astound me,” was all I could exclaim.

What she had revealed to me placed my little Ella in an entirely new light. I never dreamed of her self-martyrdom. I sighed heavily, and a big lump arose in my throat as I reflected that, perhaps, after all death was preferable to life with a man whom she could not love.

The calm twilight was deepening into night, and the silence was broken only by the low murmuring of the water, the swift swish of some rat or water-hen in the rushes startled at our presence, and the dismal cry of a night-bird in the willows on the opposite bank.

“Did you hear nothing more of Ella after that day at Porchester Terrace – that 12th of November that was, alas! fatal to my happiness?”

“She wrote to me twice. One letter I received in Rome a month afterwards, and the second followed me about some weeks, and at last found me at Lindau, on the Lake of Constance. Both letters were full of her own unhappiness. In the first she reproached herself bitterly for having lied to the man she really loved – though she never mentioned your name – and said that she was back at Wichenford, but for her the world was dead. The man whom she had dismissed had left her in disgust and despair and had gone abroad, whither she knew not. A friend of yours had, it seemed, told her that you had gone to Algeria, and her letter concluded with the words: ‘I am alone to blame for this, yet how could I, in the circumstances, have acted otherwise?’”

“And the second letter?” I asked eagerly.

“It was written a month later, from Blumenthal’s shooting-box near Blair Athol. She and her father were guests there at the great house-party consisting mostly of wealthy City men and their wives. She described it and said how she hated it all. She had, she told me, tried to escape. She had even thought of writing to you to tell you the truth and ask your counsel, yet what use was it when she knew that she must save her father from the ruin that threatened. Wichenford Place had been the home of the Murrays ever since the days of James the First, when the King himself, granted it to his faithful partisan, Donald Murray of Parton, in Dumfriesshire. No Murray had ever before mortgaged it, therefore it was clearly her duty to her family to redeem it from the hands of usurers and vandals, even at cost of her own happiness.”

“A noble sacrifice!” I sighed.

“Yes, Mr Leaf. She was a noble girl,” declared my handsome companion. “I, who knew her through ten years or so, knew her, perhaps, better than even you yourself did. The Little Madonna was never accused of an unkind or unjust action.”

“And after that letter?”

“A few months later she came to visit us at Enghien. She and her father were in Paris, where she was buying her trousseau. But she made no mention of Blumenthal. Afterwards we were continually moving from place to place, and if she wrote, her letter never reached me. I heard no more.”

A long deep silence fell between us. We were still standing there in the grey twilight at a small gate that led into the next field, our path still continuing beside the stream.

“Strange that it should be I who should tell you the truth,” she remarked, almost as though speaking to herself. “You, a perfect stranger, offered to do me a service – indeed you have done me a very great service by restoring that letter to me – and in return, I have been able to tell you the truth regarding your lost love,” and she looked into my face with her sad, serious eyes.

“Yes, it is indeed curious,” I said. “Our circumstances are, in a measure, identical. We have both been the victims of dire misfortunes, both broken by the tragedy of an unhappy love. But you have told me hardly anything concerning yourself,” I added.

The laces of her muslin blouse rose slowly and fell again. In that dim light I detected a hardness at the corners of her mouth, a hardness that, to me, was all-sufficient proof of the bitterness wearing out her young heart.

“Myself!” she echoed sadly. “What need I say about myself? It is of the past, and the memory of it all is a very bitter one. Like you, I believed that happiness was to be mine, the more so, because my father entirely approved of our union. He made confidential inquiries concerning him, and found that he was all that he represented himself to be. But love and happiness were not for me. I, alas! am one of those who are debarred the sweetness of life,” she added hoarsely, her small white hands clenching themselves, as thoughts of the past crowded upon her.

For some time we were again silent. I was anxious to know the truth of the love romance of my sweet-faced little friend – the girl whom Sammy had denounced as an adventuress. Yet surely there was nothing of the adventuress about her as she stood there in her plain white frock amid that purely English scene. I glanced at her countenance and saw that it was pale and agitated, and that her nervous lips were trembling. Her chin had sunk upon her breast and she stood deep in thought as though unconscious of my presence.

“Where did it occur? Here?”

“No, abroad,” she answered, in a thin, mechanical voice. “I met him when we were living at Enghien, and from the first moment of our meeting we discovered that by some strange magnetism we were drawn irresistibly together. He was a foreigner, it is true, but his mother had been English, and his father was a Chilian.”

“Chilian!” I cried, in a voice of surprise. But she never guessed the reason of my amazement.

“Yes. My father discovered that we met in secret, and then invited him to dine with us. From that evening he came daily out from Paris, and we used to spend each afternoon boating on the lake or playing tennis on the island. Before long we had pledged our love, and then commenced days of bliss such as I had never before experienced. I knew at last what was meant by perfect happiness, for we adored each other. I loved him just as dearly as Ella loved you. I would have died for him. Yet in all too short a time the blow fell upon me – the blow that has crushed all life from me, that has already made me a world-weary woman before my time.”