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When he was finally well buried under six feet of earth, Berene found herself twenty years of age, alone in the world with just one thousand dollars in money, the price brought by her father's effects.
The lonely girl, whose strangely solitary life with her old father had excluded her from all social relations outside, grasped at this offer from the handsome lady whom she had long admired from a distance, and went to make her home at the Palace. Berene had been several months in her new home when Preston Cheney came to lodge at the Palace.
"I heard this same story, but without names, from Berene Dumont's dying lips more than two years ago. And just as Berene disappeared from you so her daughter disappeared from me; and, God help me, dear father doubly now my father, I crushed out my great passion for the glorious natural child of your love, to marry the loveless, wretched and UNNATURAL child of your marriage."
She read her mother's manuscript over, and tried to argue herself into the philosophy which had sustained the author of her being through all these years. But her mind was shaped far more after the conventional pattern of her paternal ancestors, who had been New England Puritans, and she could not view the subject as Berene had viewed it.
In answer to a mechanical "Come," the Baroness appeared. The rustle of her silken morning gown caused Berene to turn suddenly and face her; and as she met the eyes of her visitor the young woman's pallor gave place to a wave of deep crimson, which dyed her face and neck like the shadow of a red flag falling on a camellia blossom.
He would have hesitated, considered, and reconsidered, and without doubt his better nature and his good taste would have prevailed. But when fate threw Berene Dumont in his way, and circumstances brought about his close associations with her for many months, there seemed but one way of escape from the Scylla of his desires, and that was to the Charybdis of a marriage with Miss Lawrence.
Certainly none of these love marriages were examples for him to follow. And in the midst of these reveries and reflections, Preston Cheney came to Beryngford, and met Sylvester Lawrence and his daughter Mabel. He met also Berene Dumont. Had he not met the latter woman he would not have succumbed so soon at least to the temptation held out by the former to advance his ambitious aims.
Miss Lawrence was not aware of the part Berene Dumont had played in her engagement, but she knew perfectly the part her father's influence and wealth had played; but she was quite content with affairs as they were, and it mattered little to her what had brought them about.
He was, too, a petty tyrant and a cruel husband and father when under the influence of absinthe, a state in which he was usually to be found. Berene was an only child, and her mother, whom she worshipped, said, when dying, "Take care of your poor father, Berene. Do everything you can to make him happy. Never desert him." Berene was fourteen at that time.
So imbued had Berene Dumont become with her belief in the legitimacy of her child, and in her own purity, that she felt but little surprise at the calm manner in which Mr Irving received her story, and now when the rector of St Blank's Church was her listener, she expected the same broad judgment to be given her.
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