"Oh, it is true!" she cried, holding him off. "It is true! Go away and leave me, Bernard Mendoza; for I—I, not Janet—I am the widow of Napoleon Garlic!"
What spoke? Her brain? Her heart? No: her soul! Sometimes the soul will not be hindered. Before Death comes, will it force its way to the Judgment-Seat, and call out its crimes, and cry for sentence.
Yet who could judge her now? Not Bernard! The woman he held in his arms, sobbing, weeping, irrational, was his wife. He loved her better than name, family, life. All he desired was to forgive her. To judge her, was his hardest punishment, and in his heart she found her best advocate. It pleaded for her. It cried out that if he condemned her he condemned himself to misery unspeakable, intolerable; that if he could not persuade her to be happy, what was left to him but torture? He soothed her as a mother might; he taught her that there is a love strong enough to cast out fear and all reproach; and when, at last, he understood her story, broken, incoherent, mixed with stifled cries and caresses, and when he knew that she had had so great a fear of him, and had dared so much rather than lose his love, he asked her if he was indeed so hard, so brutal, and he was down on his knees begging her pardon and saying he was the sinner,—that he had not been gentle, and that a man ought not to be trusted with a woman's tender heart. And she, not, being able to endure this from him, fell on her knees beside him, and so the two together asked for strength and for pardon from the One to whom both belong.
And Bernard, being a generous man, and not one to reconsider or rejudge, loved Juliet better and better, and all his life was more tender to her.
When daylight came they hastened to telegraph to Duncan, and so from under the waters of the ocean that then divided us came flashing this message:
"Tell Janet that Bernard and Juliet send her their dearest love, and they humbly beg her to forgive them both."
The fortune? As things go in this contrary world, neither one of us needs, or desires, a great fortune. Bernard has his property in England, and Duncan earns a good income: so neither Juliet nor I have reasonable wishes unfulfilled. And the money is not pleasant to us. Yet we use it. There is in a bank a very large sum kept in deposit, to which we all have access, and we do not account to each other for our use of it, but Bernard sees that the account is kept up. This money we give away. We find—especially Juliet and I—many people who are the better for it. But Duncan and I are quite certain that as the little Mendozas grow older, and the family expenses and demands increase, neither Bernard nor Juliet will hesitate to use for themselves an inheritance that is so justly their own.
THE END.
