For whose sake? A sequel to "Why did he wed her?"

Two travelers on board the ocean steamer Scorpio, bound from New York to Liverpool, were Gentleman Geff and his queenly bride.

He was in blissful ignorance that his forsaken wife and her infant were on the same ship.

The wife whom he believed to be in her pauper grave in potter’s field, and the child of whose birth he had never heard!

Gentleman Geff was riding on the topmost wave of success and popularity. He had paid a high price for his fortune, but he told himself continually that the fortune was worth all he had given for it.

Certainly there were two awful pictures that would present themselves to his mental vision with terrible distinctness and persistent regularity.

The first was of a deep wood, in the dead of night, and a young man’s ghastly face turned up to the starlight.

The other was of a silent city street, in the dark hours before day, and a girl’s form prone upon the pavement, with a dark stream creeping from a wound in her side.

There were moments when the murderer would have given all that he had gained by his crimes to wake up and find that they had all been “the phantasmagoria of a midnight dream”; that he was not the counterfeit Randolph Hay, Esquire, of Haymore, with a rent roll of twenty thousand pounds sterling a year, and an income from invested funds of twice as much, and with two atrocious murders on his soul, but simply the poor devil of an adventurer who lived by his wits, and was known to the miners as Gentleman Geff.

At such times he would drink deeply of brandy, and under its influence find all his views change. He would philosophize about life, fortune, destiny, necessity, and try to persuade himself that he had been more sinned against than sinning. He then felt sure that, if he had been born to wealth, he would have been a philanthropist of the highest order, a benefactor to the whole human race; would have founded churches, and sent out missionaries; would have established hospitals and asylums, and erected model tenement houses for the poor.

Ah! how good and great a man he would have proved himself if he had only been born to vast wealth! But he had been born to genteel poverty. Fate had been unkind. It was all the fault of fate, he argued.

In this exaltation he would go into the gentlemen’s saloon, sit down at one of the gaming tables, and stake, and win or lose, large sums of money; and so, in the feverish mental and physical excitement of drinking and gambling, he would seek to drive away remorse.

Often he would drink himself into a state of maudlin sentimentality, and in that state reel into the stateroom occupied by himself and his bride. He was really more “in love” with Lamia Leegh than he had ever been with any woman in his long career of “lady-killing.” He had married her for love, although it was the Turk’s love.

But Lamia did not love him in the least. She had married him for rank, money and position. She had begun by liking him, then enduring him, and now she ended by detesting him.

“Some poor girls marry old men for money; some marry ugly men or withered men for the same cause; but to marry a drunkard for that, or for any cause; to be obliged to live with the beast; to be unable to escape from him; to see him day and night; to smell his nauseous breath—it is horrible, abhorrent, abominable!” she said to herself.

Yet she never dared to let her disgust and abhorrence appear to its object. She was too politic to offend him, for—he held the purse strings. There had been no settlements—nothing of the sort—notwithstanding all the talk about them with Will Walling. For every dollar she would receive she must depend on her husband.

The Cashmere shawls and sable furs and solitaire diamonds that she longed for, if she should get them at all, must be got from him, and she knew she would get them, and everything else she might want, so long as he should possess his fortune and she retain his favor. So she veiled her dislike under a show of affection, and she even made for herself a rule and set for herself a task, so that he might never find out her real feelings toward him.

The more disgusted she might really be, the more enamored she would pretend to be.

This was surely a very hard way of earning diamonds and the rest, but, like Gentleman Geff, she told herself that they were worth it; and she thought so.

Their fellow passengers all knew them to be a newly married pair; for there happened to be a few New York “society” people on the ship, who had heard all about the grand wedding at Peter Vansitart’s, and they had spread the news in the first cabin.

Their fellow voyagers also believed them to be a very happy couple; though ladies sometimes whispered together that he certainly did look rather dissipated; and gentlemen remarked to each other that it was a pity he drank so hard and played so high. It was a bad beginning at his age, and if it should continue Haymore fortunes could scarcely “stand the racket.”

But notwithstanding these drawbacks, Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Hay were very popular among their fellow voyagers.

The weather continued good for the first week.

The bride and groom were daily to be seen on deck—well wrapped up, for the fine October days were cold on midocean.

Yet though they were every day on deck, they had never yet encountered Jennie.

How was that? And where was Jennie?

Jennie Montgomery was in her stateroom, so prostrated by seasickness that she was scarcely able to take care of her child. She had never once left her room even to go into the ladies’ saloon, but passed her time between her lower berth and her broad sofa.

Stewardess Hopkins became interested in poor little Jennie and her baby—“one as much of a baby as t’other,” she had said to one of the stateroom stewards—and so she showed them kindness from a heartfelt sympathy, such as no fee could have purchased.

On the eighth day out, Mrs. Hopkins was in the room with the young mother and child, when Jennie, looking gratefully at the stewardess, said, with tears in her eyes:

“Oh, Mrs. Hopkins, I do thank you with all my heart, but feel so deeply that that is not enough. I shall never, never be able to repay you for all your goodness to me.”

“Don’t talk in that way, my dear,” replied the stewardess, in self-depreciation.

“If it were not for you, I believe that I and baby should both die on the sea.”

“Oh, no, dear. ‘The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ and if I hadn’t been here He would have provided some one else for you. But now, dear, I do really think you ought to try and exert yourself to go up on deck. Here we are a week at sea, and you have had no enjoyment of the voyage at all. Don’t you think, now that the baby has gone to sleep, and is safe to be quiet for two or three hours, you could let me wrap you up warm and help you up on deck?”

“I should like to do so, but I am not able; indeed I am not. I am as weak as a rat.”

“Rats are remarkably strong for their size, my dear, for they’re all muscle. And as for you being weak, it is only a nervous fancy, caused by your seasickness. But you’re over that now. And if you will only let me help you up on deck, why, every step you take and every breath you breathe will give you new life and strength,” persisted the stewardess.

“Well, I will go.”

Jennie stood up, holding by the edge of the upper berth for support, while the stewardess prepared her to go up on deck.

And when last of all Jennie was well wrapped up in her fur-lined cloak, Mrs. Hopkins led and supported her to the stairs, and took her carefully up to the deck, and found her a sheltered seat on the lee side.

“Sit here,” she said, “and every breath of this fresh air you breathe will give you new life.”

And having tucked a rug well around the feet of her charge, the stewardess left Jennie to herself.

Jennie looked around her. There were very few people within the range of her vision, only the man at the wheel and two or three deck hands.