The Unseen Bridegroom; Or, Wedded For a WeekFleming, May Agnes
General
The Unseen Bridegroom; Or, Wedded For a Week
Fleming, May Agnes
Fiction
"Simply enough. Accuse him and her before us all. There will be no one
present you can not trust. Your guardian, Sir Roger, and myself know
already. Sardonyx is Mr. Walraven's lawyer, and silence is a lawyer's
forte."
"Well?" breathlessly.
"Accuse him--threaten him. Tell him you know his whole fraud from first
to last. Accuse her! Tell him if he does not prove to your satisfaction
he is the man who carried you off and married you, or if he refuses to
own he is not the man, that he will go straight from the house to
prison. He knows you can fulfill the threat. I think it will succeed."
"And if he confesses he is not the man who married me--if he
acknowledges the fraud--what then?"
"Ah! what then? Doctor Oleander will not be your husband."
"And I will be as much in the dark as ever."
"A moment ago you were in despair because you thought he, of all men, was
the man," said Hugh Ingelow. "It seems to me you are hard to satisfy."
"No," said Mollie; "if it be as you suspect, I shall be unspeakably
thankful. No fate earth can have in store for me can be half so
horrible as to know myself the wife of Guy Oleander."
"And if I thought you were his wife, Mollie, rest assured I should never
have taken you from him," said Mr. Ingelow, decidedly. "You are no more
Guy Oleander's wife than I am."
"Heaven be praised for that!" Mollie cried. "But then, I am entirely in
the dark. Whose wife am I?"
Mr. Ingelow smiled.
"That question has an extraordinary sound. One doesn't hear it often in
a life-time. If I were a sorcerer, as you accuse me of being, I might
perhaps answer it. As it is, I leave it to your own woman's wit to
discover."
"My woman's wit is completely at a loss," said Mollie, despairingly. "If
ever I do find out, and I think it likely I shall, the divorce law will
set me free. I must tell guardy all, and get him to help me."
"Is there no one you suspect?"
"Not one--now," Mollie replied, turning away from him.
How could Mollie Dane tell him she had ever suspected, ever hoped, it
might be himself? It was evidently a matter of very little moment to him.
"And you can not forgive the love that resorts to such extreme measures,
Mollie?" he asked, after a pause.
"No more than I can forgive Doctor Oleander for carrying me off and
holding me captive in his dreary farmhouse," answered Mollie, steadily.
"No, Mr. Ingelow, I will never forgive the man who married me against my
will."
"Not even if you cared a little for him, Mollie?"
He asked the question hesitatingly, as if he had something at stake in
the answer. And Mollie's eyes flashed and her cheeks flushed angry red
as she heard it.
"I care for no one in that way, Mr. Ingelow," she said, in a ringing
voice. "You ought to know that. If I did, I should hate him for his
dastardly deed."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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