XII
THE LANTERN QUENCHED
"I will answer you nothing!" murmured Isabel, still facing her husband as she moved round into the garden driveway. "Arthur Winslow, it is you who are on trial, not I!"
"I on trial! God, listen to that!"
He sprang after her, gripped her shoulders, and hung over her, snarling, "You two-faced runaway! what have I done but suffer?"
She kept the lantern hid. "What have you done? Oh, my husband, will you hear if I tell you? You have hung the fates of all of us, living or yet to live, on one thread,—please, dear, don't bear so heavily on me,—on one poor thread which the jar of another misstep will surely break. Oh, let us not make it! Come, Arthur,—my husband,—into the house; maybe we can yet save ourselves and our dear ones! Arthur, you're hurting me dreadfully. If you press me down that way, you'll force me to my knees."
Still she spoke in undertone, and still she muffled the light, while steadily the weight of his arms increased. Suddenly he crowded her to the earth. "Arthur," she murmured, "Arthur, what are you going to do? Don't kill me here and now, Arthur; wait till to-morrow. I have that to pass through to-night which may end my life peaceably in bed; and if it should, then there will be no infamy on any of us,—on you or our child, living, or on me, dead; and Godfrey, and Ruth, and mother, and all can be"—
"Give me that lantern!" He held her with one hand, snatched the light from cover, and thrust it into her face. "So this is what you signal him with, is it?"
"Oh no, no! Arthur, dear, no! Before God's throne, no!"
He lifted it as high as his arm would go, and with all his force swung it down, crashing and quenched, upon her head.
She gave a gentle sigh and rolled at his feet. Groaning with horror and fright, he lifted her in his arms and bore her to her room and bed.
There she presently opened her eyes to find him laving her face and head, moaning, covering them with kisses, and imploring her forgiveness in a thousand hysterical repetitions.
"Hush, dear," she whispered. "I see how it all happened. Does anybody know? Oh, God be thanked! don't let any one find out! It was all a misunderstanding. So many things crowded together to mislead you!"
"Oh yes, so many, many things at once, my treasure! Oh yes, yes!"
"Call Sarah, will you, dear?"
"Oh, beloved, why should I? You don't need Sarah for anything."
"Yes, I need her. I must send her for mother—and Ruth—I promised Ruth; and you must send Giles for the doctor; my hour is come."
In the Byington house Ruth and her brother met at the foot of the stairs.
"Leonard," she whispered, "what is it? Is father ill? Leonard! Oh, what have you seen?"
"Let me pass! quick!" He would have pressed her aside, but she laid hands on him.
"What has Arthur done?" she asked. "What is he doing?"
"Ruth! Ruth! he is putting her out of his own gate!" The brother extended both hands to turn the sister from his path, but she twined her arms on his.
"Leonard! Leonard! for the love of heaven, let him do it! She has only to go to her mother; let her go! It's the last hope. But she'd better be dead, and she'd a hundred times rather be dead, than that Leonard Byington should be her rescuer! Come in here a minute."
Slipping both hands into his she drew him into the lighted room, adding as they went, "In a few minutes I can make some errand to her and find how matters stand"—
They stumbled over a disordered rug. She fell into a chair; he sank to his knees, and with his face in her hands he moaned, "Oh, Ruth! Oh, Ruth! it's my fault after all! I should have gone away at the beginning!"
Ruth and Arthur met face to face in the Winslow garden. "I was just coming for you," he said, excitedly.
"For Isabel?"
"Yes, her mother is with her, and"—a sound of wheels—"here's Giles, now, off for the doctor."
The servant passed. "Yes, I got here by the sunset express. I couldn't stay away—with this impending."
"I didn't see you come."
"No, of course you didn't see me, for I didn't go to the station, and so I didn't pass anywhere near your house. I got off at the tank and came up the hill path."
"You must have got drenched; you are drenched."
"Oh no! I got in before the rain began. Let myself in without seeing any one, and found Isabel was over at her mother's. So I waited here."
"Didn't let her know you were home?" asked Ruth, with a penetrating gaze.
"No, I haven't been off the place since I came, but I stepped out so many times into the garden to see if she was coming that I'm soaking wet."
They entered the lighted house, and he turned upon her a glance heavy and wavering with falsehood. His tongue ran like a terrified horse. "Oh—eh—before you go upstairs—Ruth—there's one thing I'm distressed about. I've told Mrs. Morris, and she's promised to see that the doctor understands it perfectly,—though I shall explain it to him myself the moment he comes. And still I wish you'd see that he understands, will you?"
"What is it?"
"Why, at last, as I was waiting for Isabel, and saw her coming, I went to meet her. Unfortunately she took me for a stranger, turned to run, and tripped and fell headlong! She somehow got her lantern between the base of a tree and the crown of her head, smashed the lantern, and cut and bruised her head pitifully!"
To hide her start of distress Ruth moved up the stair; but after a step or two she turned. "Arthur, why say anything about it, if nothing is asked?"
The husband stared at her and turned deadly pale.
"Th—that's tr—true!" he said, with an eager gesture. "I'll not mention it. And—Ruth!"—she was leaving him—"you might s—say the same to Mrs. Morris!"
She nodded, but would not trust her eyes to meet his. He was right; she had divined his deed.
He went loiteringly into the library and gently closed the door. Then he turned the light low, paced once up and down the room, and all at once slammed himself full length upon a lounge, and lay face up, face down, by turns, writhing and tearing his hair.
Soon again he was pacing the floor, and presently was prone once more, and then once more up.
Giles, his English man, brought the doctor, and Arthur heard him discoursing as the vehicle drew up.
"Yes, sir, quite so; quite so, sir. And yet I believe, sir, if h-all money and lands was 'eld in common, the 'ole 'uman ryce would be as 'appy as the gentlemen and lydies on Bylow 'Ill!"
The young husband met the physician cheerily, sent him up, and went back to his solitude.
An hour passed, and then Sarah Stebbens knocked and leaned in. "Mr. Arthur!"
"What, Sarah?"
"Oh! I didn't see you. All's well, and it's a daughter."
XIII
BABY
It was most pleasant, being asked by everyone, even by General Byington, how it felt to be a grandmother. "Oh! ho, ho!" Mrs. Morris's unutilized dimple kept itself busy to the point of positive fatigue.
Even more delightful was it, when the time came round for the totality of her sex—the only sex worth considering—to call and see the babe and mother, to hear them all proclaim it the prettiest infant ever seen, and covertly pronounce Isabel more beautiful than on her wedding day.
In a way she was; and particularly when they fondly rallied her upon her new accession of motherly practical manner, and she laughed with them, and ended with that merry, mellow sigh which still gave Ruth new pride in her and new hope. But another source of Ruth's new hope was that Arthur, who had written to the bishop and resigned his calling the day after Mrs. Morris's little namesake was born, had at length withdrawn his letter.
"It is to your brother we owe its withdrawal," said the bishop, privately, to Ruth.
She beamed gratefully, but did not tell him that, after the long, secret conference between her brother and the rector, Leonard had come to her and wept for Arthur the only tears he had ever shed in her presence. Now Leonard had found occasion to go West for a time, though he still held his office; and Arthur was filling the rectorate almost in the old first way. On some small parish matter the rustic vestryman with the spectacled daughter came to Arthur's library in better spirits than he had shown for months, and by and by asked conjecturally, "I—eh—guess you don't keep any babies here you're ashamed to show, do ye?" and held his mouth very wide open.
The infinitesimal was brought.
"Well, I vum! Why, Miz. Winslow, I don't believe th' ever was a pretty baby so puny, nor a puny baby so pretty! Now, if it's a fair question, I hope y' ain't tryin' to push in between this baby and the keaow, be ye?"
"No," laughed Isabel. "I'm not that conceited. I should only be in the way."
"Well," he said as they parted, shaking Arthur's hand to the end of his speech, "I like to see a baby resemble its father, and that's what this 'n 's a-tryin' to do, jest 's hard 's she can."
So went matters for a time, and then, while the babe began to fill out and lengthen out, Isabel showed herself daily more and more overspent. The physician reappeared, and spoke plainly:—
"And if your cousin down South is so determined to have you at her wedding, why, go! Leave your baby with your mother; she's older in the business than you are."
But the cousin's wedding was weeks away yet, and Isabel clung to her wee treasure, and temporized with the aunts and cousins in the South and with her mother and Ruth at home, until the doctor spoke again.
"Let's see," he said to Arthur. "This is November, baby's five months old. Send your wife away. Put her out! Something's killing her by inches, and I believe it's just care o' the nest. We must drive her off it, as I drove Leonard Byington off,—which, you remember, you, quietly, were the first to suggest to me to do.... Coming back, you say,—Byington? Yes, but only for a day or two,—election time."
It did not occur to the doctor that Arthur was secretly keeping his wife from going anywhere.
The night Leonard came home the old pond, for the first time in the season, froze over, and through Giles's activities it was arranged next day that Martin Kelly, Sarah Stebbens, Minnie, and he should go down there after supper and skate by the light of fagot fires made out on the ice. Giles piled the fagots; but at a late moment, to the disgust of Giles and Minnie, the older pair pitilessly changed their minds, and decided they were too old to make such nincompoops of themselves. Minnie would not go without Sarah, for Minnie was up to her pretty eyebrows in love with Giles, as well as immensely correct; and so there, as it seemed, was the end of that.
At tea Arthur told Isabel he was going for a long walk down through the town and across the meadows, and would not be home before bedtime. Isabel approved heartily, and said Sarah would stay near the sleeping babe, and she would spend the evening with her mother. She and Arthur went together as far as the cross-paths in the arbor, and there, in parting, he clasped and kissed her with a sudden frenzy that only added one more distressful misgiving to the many that now haunted her days.
She found her mother alone. They sat down, hand in hand, before an open fire, and had talked in sweet quietness but a short while, when a chance word and the knowledge that this time they would not be interrupted made it easy for Isabel to say things she had for weeks been trying to say.
XIV
THE TALKATIVE LEONARD
Across the street the father of Leonard and Ruth, already abed, lay thinking of their tribulation and casting about in his mind for some new move that might help to end it happily. Godfrey had not come. He had not looked for him to appear with a hop, skip, and a jump, "a man under authority" as he was; but here were five months gone.
"I can't clamor for him," thought he, and feared Ruth had written him that the emergency was past. And so she had, in those days of new hope and new suspense which had followed for a while Arthur's withdrawal of his resignation.
At the fireside below sat Leonard and Ruth, not hand in hand, like Isabel and her mother, yet conversing on the same theme as they.
Leonard had spent the day at the polls; his party had won an easy victory; and, though not on the ticket, he was now awaiting a telegraphic summons to the state capital. His fortunes were growing. Yet that was not a thing to be wordy about, and now, when the murmur of his voice continued so long and steadily that it found even the dulled ear of the aged father in the upper room, that father knew what the topic must be. On all other matters the son and brother had become more silent than ever,—was being nicknamed far and near, flatteringly and otherwise, for his reticence; but let Ruth sit down with him alone and barely draw near this theme,—this wound,—and his speech bled from him and would not be stanched.
"I can admit I have made the mistake of my life," he said, "but I cannot and will not, even now, give up and say there is nothing to be saved out of it. It's a mistake that has bound me to her, to you, to Godfrey, to him, to all, and demands of me, pinioned and blindfolded as I am, every effort I can make, every device I can contrive, to compel him to free her and you and all of us from this torture.
"He shall not go on eating out our lives. I have dawdled with him weakly, pitifully, but I did it in my hope to save him. I tried to save him for his own sake, Ruth, truly,—as truly as for her sake and ours; and I wanted to save his work with him,—his church, his and hers; so much of it is hers. Oh, Ruth, I love that little bird-box, spite of all its spunky beliefs and twittering complacencies. I wanted to save it and him; and over and over there has seemed such good ground of hope in him. It's been always so unbelievable that he should utterly fail us. Ruth, if you could have seen his contrition the night I tore up that shameful, servile resignation! I don't need to see Isabel to know he is wearing the soul out of her. You needn't have answered one of my questions,—which I honor you for answering so unwillingly; Mrs. Morris gave me their answer in five minutes, though we talked only of investments. And Mrs. Morris needn't have given it; to see Arthur himself is enough. All the genuineness has gone out of the man,—out of his words, out of his face, out of his voice. I wonder it hasn't gone from all of us, driven out by this smirking masquerade into which he has trapped us."
"Have you determined what to do?" asked the sister, gazing into the fire.
"Not yet. But I sha'n't go back West. Flight doesn't avail. And, Ruth"—
"Yes, brother; you've cabled?"
"I have. He'll come at once, this time." A step on the porch drew the speaker to the door.
The telegram from the capital had come. But until its bearer had gone again and was out of hearing down the street the young man lingered in the porch. His mind was wholly on that evening when Isabel had passed with the lantern. Would she pass now? From the idle query he turned to go in, when Ruth came out, and they stayed another moment together. Presently their ear caught a stir at the side of the Morris cottage.
"Hmm," murmured Ruth half consciously, and, with a playful shudder at the cold, whispered, "Come in, come in!"
But then quickly, lest this should carry a hint of distrust, she tripped in alone, closed the door, and glided to the bright hearth. There a moment of waiting changed her mind. She ran again to the door, and began to say as she threw it open, "My brother! you'll catch your"—
But no brother was there.
XV
THE THIN ICE BREAKS
Isabel, who had never confessed her trouble to her mother until now, had this evening told all there was to tell.
"No, no, my dear," she said as she moved to go, "I have no dread of his blows. I don't suppose he will ever strike me again. Ah, there's the worst of it; he's got away, away beyond blows. I wish sometimes he'd brain me, if only that would stop his secretly watching me.
"If he'd never gone beyond blows, I would have died before I would have told; not for meekness, dearie, nor even for love,—of you, or my child, or any one,—but just for pride and shame. But to know, every day and hour, that I'm watched, and that every path I tread is full of traps,—there's what's killing me. And I could let it kill me and never tell, if being killed were all. But I tell you because—Oh, my poor little mother dearie, do I wear you out, saying the same things over and over?
"This is all I ask you to remember: that my reason for telling you is to save the honor of my husband himself, and of you, dear heart, and of—of my child, you know. For, mother, every innocent thing I do is being woven into a net of criminating evidence. Sooner or later it's certain to catch me fast and give me over, you and me and—and baby, to public shame."
As they went toward the arbor door Isabel warily hushed, but her mother said: "There's no one to overhear, honey-blossom; Minnie's at your house with Sarah."
But neither was there more to be said. The daughter shut herself out, and stood alone on the doorstep pondering what she had done. For she had acted as well as spoken, and, without knowledge of Leonard's move, was calling Godfrey home herself. Her mother was to send the dispatch in the morning.
So standing and distressfully musing, she heard the click of the Byingtons' door as Ruth left Leonard on the porch. But her thought went after Arthur. Where was he? That he had honestly gone where he had said he was going she painfully doubted. She stirred to move on, but had not taken a step when a feminine cry of terror set her blood leaping and sent her flying down the arbor, and where the two paths crossed she and Leonard met at such a speed that only by seizing her with both his hands did he avoid trampling her down. The scream was repeated again and again.
"It's Minnie!" cried Isabel as they sprang down the path to the mill pond; and Leonard, outrunning her, called back,—
"We'll get her out! She's not gone under!"
The next moment he, and then she, were on the scene. Minnie stood on the firmer ice away from the bank, moaning in continued agitation, but already rescued. It was Arthur Winslow who had saved her.
Now he gained the bank with the dripping girl, where he yielded her to his wife, and without a word from him, from Isabel, or from Leonard to any one but the incessantly talking maid, the four hurried up the path. When they reached the arbor Ruth had joined them, and there the three women turned to the cottage. Leonard passed on toward his home. Arthur went into his own house.
In the cottage, while being hurried into dry clothes, Minnie more coherently explained her mishap. Wishing to play a joke on Giles, she had slipped away from the fireside company of him and Sarah to put a match to his fagots on the pond, run back with word that they were burning, and laugh with Sarah while Giles should plunge out to find the incendiaries. But she had forgotten how frail good ice may be against a warm bank, and leaping down, had promptly broken through. She had had the fortune to hold on by the ice's outer edge until Arthur, whom she felt sure only Providence could have sent there, drew her out. She was tearfully ashamed, yet not so broken in spirit but she fiercely vowed she would get even with Giles for this yet.
Leonard went to his room, Arthur to his, and each in his way shut himself in to darkness, silence, and the fury of his own heart.
One of the things most harrowing to Leonard was that, at every turn, the active part fell to Arthur, while him fate held mercilessly to the passive; and his soul writhed in unworded prayer for any conceivable turn of events that would give him leave to act, to do!
But all he could do was done. Godfrey was sent for: everything must await his coming. Heaven hold Arthur's hand till Godfrey could come!
Ruth returned home and began to lock up the house. When, presently, she tapped at her brother's door and looked in, he had lighted the room and was reading his telegram.
"All right over the way," she said, and to hurry on over the grim untruth repeated briefly Minnie's story. "Good-night. You go—to-morrow? Well, you'll make haste back."
She left him, but later returned.
"Leonard." At the slightly opened door she thrust in her Bible, with a finger on the line, "My soul, wait thou only upon God."
"Thank you," said the brother. "Good-night. I'm afraid we've kept Him waiting on us."
XVI
MUST GIVE YOU UP
Over on the Winslow side of the way, Isabel, having tarried in the cottage to explain to her frightened mother how perfectly natural it was that Arthur, after his tramp across the meadows, should have made a circuit to the upper side of the old mill pool, went pensively home. Presently, holding a lamp, she stood in the door between her room and Arthur's, lifted the light above her head, and, shading her brows, called his name. Hidden in the gloom, silent and motionless, he stared for a moment on the beautiful apparition, and then moved without a sound into the beams of the lamp, a picture of misery and desperation.
"Why in the dark?" amiably inquired the wife.
With widening eyes and spectral motions he drew near.
"In the dark?" he asked. "Why in the dark? The darkness is in me, and all the lamps that light the world's ships into harbor could not dispel it."
All at once he went to his knees. "Oh, my wife, my wife! save me, save me! Hell is in my soul!"
She drew back, and with low vehemence urged him to his feet. "Up! up! My husband shall not kneel to me!"
Laying her hand reverently upon his shoulder she pressed him into his room, set the lamp aside, and let him clasp her wildly in his arms.
"Save me, Isabel," he moaned again. "Save me."
"From what, dear heart,—from what can I save you?" She drew him to a seat and knelt beside him.
"From the green-eyed demon that has gnawed, gnawed, gnawed at my heart till it is rent to shreds, and at my brain—my brain!—till it is almost gone." His brow drooped to hers. "Almost gone, beloved; my brain is almost gone."
"No, Arthur, dearest, no, no, no; your heart is torn, but your mind, thank God, is whole. This is only a mood. Come, it will pass with one night's sleep."
Still he held her brow beneath his. "Save me, Isabel; my soul is almost gone. Oh, save me from the fiends that come before me and behind me, by night and by day, eyes shut or eyes open."
"My husband! my love! how can I save you? How can I help you? Tell me how."
"Hear me! hear me confess! That will save me, oh, so sweetly, so sweetly! That will save me from the faces—the white, white faces that float on that black pool down yonder, and move their accusing lips at me: his face—and mine—and thine. Oh, Isabel, until you stood before me in the golden light of your lamp, transfigured into a messenger from heaven, it was in my lost soul to do the deed this night."
The wife laid her palms upon her husband's temples, and putting forth her strength lifted them and looked tenderly into his eyes.
"Dear heart, you do not frighten me. You know how unaccountably fear deserts me in fearful moments. But I know there's nothing for either of us to fear now. This is all in your tortured imagination, and there, though you had not seen me, it would have stayed; you never would have come to the act. Arthur, your soul is not lost. You who have pointed the way of escape and deliverance so clearly and savingly to so many, you need not miss it now yourself."
"Idle words, Isabel,—idle, idle words. The very words of Christ are idle to me until I give you up."
"Give me up, my husband? Dear love, you cannot! You shall not! I will not be given up. You haven't the cause, and I haven't the cause."
"Oh, Isabel, I stole you! And the curse of God has gone with the theft, and with every step of the thief, from the first day till now. From the first day until now God has lifted that other man up and brought me down. And yet, before God who said, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, he loves you this moment—now!—with the love of a man for a woman."
"Arthur, no! If he did"—
"Isabel, if he did not—if he did not love you yet as before he lost you—oh! if he did not love you infinitely more now than then—he would not be Leonard Byington. That is all my evidence, all my argument, all the ground of my hate; and I hate him with a hatred that has finished—finished!—with my heart, and is devouring my brain."
"Oh, my poor husband, listen to"—
"Listen to me!" he broke in. "Listen before I lose the blessed impulse to say there is but one cure. I must give you up to Leonard Byington. Oh, let me speak! I took you from him by law; by law I will give you back."
"Do you mean divorce, Arthur?"
"I do."
"On what ground?"
"On the ground of ill treatment. You shall bring suit; I will plead guilty."
She rose, with his temples still in her hands. "Ah! whose words are idle now?"
She bent over him with eyes of passionate kindness. "You did not take me from him. You asked me to take you, and for better for worse, till death us do part, I took you, Arthur, knowing as much of any other man's love for me as I know at this hour. You could not steal me; the shame would be mine, to have let you. You are no thief! I am no stolen thing! You shall be happy with me; you shall not give me up!"
He leaped to his feet and snatched her into his arms. The babe cried sleepily from its mother's room. She tenderly disengaged herself, left him in the door, moved on to the child's crib, and in the dim light of the bedside taper, facing him from beyond it, soothed the little one by her silent touch.
To Arthur, wan and frail though she was, the sight was heavenly fair, a vision of ineffable peace to which it seemed a sacrilege to draw nearer; but she beckoned, and he stole to the spot. With the quieted babe in its crib between them, the pair knit arms about each other's neck and kissed.
"My own! my own at last!" murmured the husband. "I never had you until now!"
"The cure has worked, dear heart," breathed the wife,—"worked without surgery, has it not?"
"The cure has worked," he replied,—"worked without the sacrifice. Oh, the sudden sweet ease of it!"
Whispering a fervent good-night in response to hers, he covered her head and brows with caresses; then stole away with eyes still fastened on her, and at the dividing threshold waved a last parting and closed the door.
XVII
SLEEP, OF A SORT
Isabel went to her couch in great heaviness and agitation. Her sad confidings to her mother, Minnie's adventure, Arthur's pitiful if not alarming condition, she strove to reconsider duly and in their order; but perpetually there interfered, with its every smallest detail thrillingly clear and strong, that moment which had thrown her once more into the company, tossed her into the very clutch, of Leonard Byington. She turned her face into her pillow and prayed God for other thoughts and visions, and at length, while charging herself to see her mother in time to postpone the sending of her dispatch to Godfrey, she slept.
Sleep, of a sort, came also to Arthur, though not before many an evil imagination had come back to tease and sting his galled mind.
What chafed oftenest was the fact that Isabel, had he allowed it, would have sought to argue down his belief that Leonard loved her. Great heaven! what must be her feeling toward him, that she should offer to argue such a question? She might truly deny all knowledge of his passion, but oh, where were her quick outcries of womanly abhorrence? Where was the word that Leonard Byington was no more to her than any other man,—that word which would have been the first to flash from her if conscience had not stopped it? Twice he sprang up in his bed, whispering: "They love! They love! Each knows it of the other! They love!"
The second time, as he stared, suddenly he saw them! They stood just beyond the foot of his couch, wrapped in each other's arms. Choking with wrath, freezing with horror, he slid to the floor; but at his first step they floated apart. Isabel glided toward her own door, fading as she went, and dissolved in a broad moonbeam. Leonard, as he receded, grew every instant more real, until, at his pursuer's second step, he melted through a window and was gone. Arthur sprang to the spot and stared out and down; but all he saw was the moon, the frosty night, and the silent, motionless garden.
With a whisper of fierce purpose he turned and noiselessly threw on his clothes, then clutched his head in his hands in a wild effort to recall what the purpose was, and by and by lay quietly down again on his bed. He could not recollect; but the inner tumult quieted more and more, and after a time, without putting off any part of his dress, he drew the bedcovers over himself, and in a few moments was partially asleep. So for an hour or more he lay in half-waking dreams, ghastly with phantoms and breathless with dismay of his own ferocious strivings. Then he rose once more, and, with the noiselessness which habit had perfected, left his room, moved down the upper hall and the stair, and let himself out into the garden. Wadded in his arms he bore one or two of the coverings from his bed. He took his way to the pond.
He was walking in his sleep.
At an earlier day Isabel would have been awakened by her husband's softest movement; but now, used to his stirrings, weary in body and mind, and in some degree reassured, she slept on unstartled until Arthur's return.
He came as silently as he had gone, and was empty-handed. He had tied a great stone in the two bed-coverings, and through the thin new ice of the hole where Minnie had broken in had sunk them in the black depth under the shelving rock. He was still asleep.
The door between the two chambers gave a faint sound as he opened it, yet neither mother nor child moved. A moment passed, and he had reached the bed. Another went by, and Isabel was awake, wildly but vainly trying to scream, to rise. A knee was on her bosom, two hands grappled her throat, and two out-starting eyes were close to hers. Her husband was strangling her.
Then he too awoke. With a horrified cry he recoiled, and she, for the first time in her life in a transport of terror, hurled him, in the strength of her frenzy, to the farther side of the bed, and writhing out on the opposite side, crept under it and lay still. In a torture of bewilderment and remorse Arthur buried his face in the bedside. Then, helpless to distinguish what he had done from what he had dreamed, he sprang back to the place where Isabel had lain sleeping, and lo, it was empty.
"Oh, was it thou, was it thou?" he wailed, in a stifled voice. "Was it not he?"
Whispering and moaning her name, hearkening and groping, he sought her from corner to corner, first of her room and then of his own, and then went to the hall and to other rooms in the same harrowing quest.
Isabel crept forth and darted to her babe. Yet as she leaned to take it in her arms her better judgment told her the child was safe. The husband too, and every one beside, were safer from his jealous wrath while the babe remained. With one anguished knitting of her hands over it she left it, and fled in her night-dress. Arthur's course was made plain by his moanings, and easily avoiding him, she glided down a back stair, out into the arbor, and across to her mother's cottage and bed-chamber. As she did so he returned hurriedly to his room, with low cries of less wretched conviction, and looked eagerly under his bed and then under hers. Thereupon the last hope died, and he dropped to his face on the floor in abject agony.
XVIII
MISSING
After a time a new conjecture brought him to his feet. To solve it he would go to the pond. If he had truly been there and done this appalling thing, he would know it by the empty imprint of the boulder he had taken from its resting place of years. If he had not, then Isabel had fled to her mother and would be found with her in the morning, and the blot of her murder, though it blackened his soul, was yet not on his hands.
He went to the water, and soon he came again with the step and face of one called out of his grave. Slowly he counted the disordered coverings of his wife's couch, stood a moment in desolate perplexity, and then went quickly and counted those of his own. A sheet and a blanket were gone. He turned to a closet and supplied the lack, and then paced the floor until dawn.
Before the servants were fairly astir he laid away the clothing Isabel had put off, and contrived to leave the house and pass through the arbor unseen until he reached its farther end; but there Mrs. Morris, in a dressing gown, opened to him before he could knock. She forced her usual laugh, but he saw the white preparedness of her face.
"She knows my crime," he thought, and was in agony to guess how she had got the knowledge and what she would do with it.
"Why, Arthur," she sweetly began, "what brings you"—But her throat closed.
"Mother," he interrupted emotionally as they shut themselves in, "is Isabel here?"
"Isabel?—No-o! Why—why, Arthur, she went home last night before ten o'clock!" The little lady knew her acting was not good, but it was better than she had hoped to make it. "Arthur Winslow! don't tell me my child is not at home! Oh, my heavens!"
"Wait, mother; listen. I beseech you. Do you absolutely know she's not here?"
"I know it! Oh, Arthur, are you only trying to break bad news to me by littles? Has Isabel destroyed herself? Has she fled?" The inquirer played well now; her pallor, that had seemed to accuse him, was gone, and her question offered a cue which he greedily took.
"Fled? Isabel! Destroyed herself,—that spotless soul? Oh no, no, no! But Oh merciful God! I am afraid she has been stolen!" He sank into a seat and dropped his face into his hands.
The maid's steps sounded overhead, and he started up. Mrs. Morris laid a hand on his arm. She was pale again, but her words were reassuring.
"It's Minnie," she murmured: "let me go and see her. She'll not be surprised; I'm always the first one up." She went, and was soon back again.
"There is no time to lose"—Arthur began.
"No, you must go. Go search for every clue that will tell us a word of her; but, whatever you do, let no one, not even Sarah, know she is missing, until we know enough ourselves to protect her from every shadow of reproach!"
"True! true! right! right!" said Arthur, while with secret terror he cried to himself: "This woman knows! She knows, she knows, and all this is make-believe, put on to gain time!"
But he saw no safer course than to help on the sham. "Right," he said again; "only, mother, dear, how shall we hide her absence?"
"We needn't hide it. You know she got another telegram last night, begging her to come at once to the wedding. We can say she went on this morning's train, before day; it makes such good Southern connections. And now go! make your search with all your might! and after a while I'll come over and pack a trunk full of her things, and express it South, just as if she were there, and had gone so hurriedly that—Don't you see?"
Arthur said he saw it all, but he did not; he saw much that was not, and much that was he saw not. He did not see that the dust of the old street, and of the new town as well, was on Mrs. Morris's shoes; and that Isabel, in a gown which she had left at the cottage when she went to be mistress of his home, was really on the train, bound South.
Dropping all pretence of having any search to make, he hurried back to his own room, and by and by told the pleasantly astonished Sarah and Giles the simple truth as Mrs. Morris had put it into his mouth, but told it in the firm belief that he was covering a hideous crime with an all but transparent lie.
After a false show of breakfasting he went into his study,—"to work on his sermon," he said; but did nothing there but pace the floor, hold his head, and whisper, "It will not last an hour after he has heard it," and, "O God, have mercy! Oh, my wife, my wife! Oh, my brain, my brain!"
XIX
A DOUBLE STILL HUNT
Mrs. Morris's task was too large for her. She had always taken such care of her innocence that her cultivation of the virtues had been only incidental. Hence, morally, she had more fat than fibre; and hence again, though to her mind guilt was horrible, publicity was so much worse that her first and ruling impulse toward any evil doing not her own was to conceal it. That was her form of worldliness, the only fault she felt certain she was free from. And here she was, without a helping hand or a word of counsel, laboring to hide from the servants and from the dear Byingtons, from the church and from a scoffing world, the hideous fact that Isabel was a fugitive from the murderous wrath of a jealous husband, and that the rector of All Angels had crumbled into moral ruin.
"And oh," she cried, "is it the worst of it, or is it the best of it, that in this awful extremity he keeps so sane, so marvellously sane?" She said this the oftener because every few hours some new sign to the contrary forced itself upon her notice. Oblivion was her cure-all.
For a while after his conference with Mrs. Morris Arthur made some feeble show—for her eye alone—of looking after clews, and then, as much to her joy as to her amazement, told her it was a part of his detective strategy to return into his study, and seemingly to his ordinary work, until time would allow certain unfoldings for which he looked with confidence.
"Have you found out anything?" she asked, with a glaringly false eagerness that gave him a new panic of suspicion and whetted his cunning.
He said he had, but must beg her not to ask yet what it was. Then he inquired if any neighbor had left town that morning for Boston, and her heart rose into her throat as she marked the subtlety he could not keep out of his dark face.
"Why, ye—yes—n—no, no one that I know of ex—except Leonard Byington," she replied, and thought, "If he should accuse Leonard, we are undone!"
To avoid that risk she would have told him, then and there, all she knew, had she not feared she might draw his rage upon herself for aiding the wife's flight. She must, must, must keep on good terms with him till she and Isabel could somehow get the child. So passed the awful hours, mother and husband each marvelling in agony over the ghastly puzzle of the other's apathy.
Later in the day she knocked timorously at his study door. She had come with a silly little proposition that he let her take the infant and go South as if to join Isabel. Thus the trunk would not lie in the express office down there, unclaimed and breeding awkward inquiries, and she from that point, with him at this, could keep up the illusion they had invented until Isabel herself should—eh—return!
But when he let her in, he stood before her a silent embodiment of such remorse and foreboding that she could have burst into sobs and cries.
Yet she broached her plan, trembling visibly, while he heard her through with melancholy deference.
In reply he commended it, but called to her notice how much better it would be for her to go alone. Then the babe, left behind, would be an unspoken yet most eloquent guarantee that its mother would soon reappear.
"Very true," responded the emboldened lady; "yet on the other hand"—
He put out an interrupting touch. "The child is as safe with me as if it were in its mother's bosom."
"Oh, it isn't so much a question of safety as"—
The father interrupted again, with a gleam in his eyes like the outflashing of a knife. "I hold the child against all comers, and would if I had to slay its mother to do it."
Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not let her.
"Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless. Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting idly here for her; I am waiting busily—for her slayer. He has fled; but when he sees he is not pursued he will come back to the spot,—to the black, black hole. He cannot help it. I know that. Oh, how well I know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,—caught in the web of proofs I am weaving!"
He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of him, tried with all her shaken wits to sham an impassioned accord.
"And you will wait?" she exclaimed approvingly. "You will not stir till the thing is sure?"
He would not stir till the thing was sure.