Ten minutes later this woman was pleading her cause. She had left the side of the man who had just assumed the greatest of all rights over her and was standing in a frenzy of appeal before him she loved so deeply and yet had apparently wronged.
Mayor Packard was sitting with his head in his hands in the chair into which he had dropped when the blow fell which laid waste his home, his life, the future of his child and possibly the career which was as much, perhaps more, to him than all these. He had not uttered a word since that dreadful moment. To all appearance her moans of contrition fell upon deaf ears, and she had reached the crisis of her misery without knowing the extent of the condemnation hidden in his persistent silence. Collapse seemed inevitable, but I did not know the woman or the really wonderful grip she held on herself. Seeing that he was moved by nothing she had said, she suddenly paused, and presently I heard her observe in quite a different tone:
“There is one thing you must know—which I thought you would know without my telling you. I have never lived with this man, and I believed him dead when I gave my hand to you.”
The mayor’s fingers twitched. She had touched him at last. “Speak! tell me,” he murmured hoarsely. “I do not want to do you any injustice.”
“I shall have to begin far, far back; tell about my early life and all its temptations,” she faltered, “or you will never understand.”
“Speak.”
Sensible at this point of the extreme impropriety of my presence, I rose, with an apology, to leave. But she shook her head quickly, determinedly, saying that as I had heard so much I must hear more. Then she went on with her story.
“I have committed a great fault,” said she, “but one not so deep or inexcusable as now appears, whatever that man may say,” she added with a slow turn toward the silent secretary.
Did she expect to provoke a reply from the man who, after the first triumphant assertion of his claim, had held himself as removed from her and as unresponsive to her anguish as had he whom she directly addressed? If so, she must have found her disappointment bitter, for he did not respond with so much as a look. He may have smiled, but if so, it was not a helpful smile; for she turned away with a shudder and henceforth faced and addressed the mayor only.
“My mother married against the wishes of all her family and they never forgave her. My father died early—he had never got on in the world—and before I was fifteen I became the sole support of my invalid mother as well as of myself. We lived in Boone, Minnesota.
“You can imagine what sort of support it was, as I had no special talent, no training and only the opportunity given by a crude western town of two or three hundred inhabitants. I washed dishes in the hotel kitchen—I who had a millionaire uncle in Detroit and had been fed on tales of wealth and culture by a mother who remembered her own youth and was too ignorant of my real nature to see the harm she was doing. I washed dishes and ate my own heart out in shame and longing—bitter shame and frenzied longing, which you must rate at their full force if you would know my story and how I became linked to this man.
“I was sixteen when we first met. He was not then what he is now, but he was handsome enough to create an excitement in town and to lift the girl he singled out into an enviable prominence. Unfortunately, I was that girl. I say unfortunately, because his good looks failed to arouse in me more than a passing admiration; and in accepting his attentions, I consulted my necessities and pride rather than the instincts of my better nature. When he asked me to marry him I recoiled. I did not know why then, nor did I know why later; but know why now. However, I let this premonition pass and engaged myself to him, and the one happy moment I knew was when I told my mother what I had done, and saw her joy and heard the hope with which she impulsively cried: ‘It is something I can write your uncle. Who knows? Perhaps he may forgive me my marriage when he hears that my child is going to do so well!’ Poor mother! she had felt the glamour of my lover’s good looks and cleverness much more than I had. She saw from indications to which I was blind that I was going to marry a man of mark, and was much more interested in the possible reply she might receive to the letter with which she had broken the silence of years between herself and her family than in the marriage itself.
“But days passed, a week, and no answer came. My uncle—the only relative remaining in which we could hope to awaken any interest, or rather, the only one whose interest would be worth awakening, he being a millionaire and unmarried—declined, it appeared, any communication with one so entirely removed from his sympathies; and the disappointment of it broke my mother’s heart. Before my wedding-day came she was lying in the bare cemetery I had passed so often with a cold dread in my young and bounding heart.
“With her loss the one true and unselfish bond which held me to my lover was severed, and, unknown to him—[perhaps he hears it now for the first time]—I had many hours of secret hesitation which might have ended in a positive refusal to marry him if I had not been afraid of his anger and the consequences of an open break. With all his protestations of affection and the very ardent love he made me, he had not succeeded in rousing my affections, but he had my fears. I knew that to tell him to his face I would not marry him would mean death to him and possibly to myself. Such intuition, young as I was, did I have of his character, though I comprehended so little the real range of his mind and the unswerving trend of his ambitious nature.
“So my, wedding-day came and we were united in the very hotel where I had so long served in a menial capacity. The social distinctions in such a place being small and my birth and breeding really placing me on a par with my employer and his family, I was given the parlor for this celebration and never, never, shall I forget its mean and bare look, even to my untutored eyes; or how lonely those far hills looked, through the small-paned window I faced; or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not in them: What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. Death and not life awaited me on that bleak hillside, or so I thought, though the bridegroom at my side was the handsomest man I had ever seen and had rather exceeded than failed in his devotion to me as a lover.
“The ceremony over, I went up-stairs to make my final preparations for departure. No bridesmaids or real friends had lent joy to the occasion; and when I closed that parlor door upon my bridegroom and the two or three neighbors and boon companions with whom he was making merry, I found myself alone with my dead heart and a most unwelcome future. I remember, as the lock clicked and the rude hall, ruder even than the wretched half-furnished room I had just left, opened before me, a sensation of terror at leaving even this homely refuge and a half-formed wish that I was going back to my dish-washing in the kitchen. It was therefore with a shock, which makes my brain reel yet, that I saw, lying on a little table which I had to pass, a letter directed to myself, bearing the postmark, Detroit. What might there not be in it? What? What?
“Gasping as much with fear as delight, I caught up the letter, and, rushing with it to my room, locked myself in and tore open the envelope. A single sheet fell out; it was signed with the name I had heard whispered in my ear from early childhood, and always in connection with riches and splendor and pleasures,—it was rapture to dream of. This was an agitation in itself, but the words—the words! I have never told them to mortal being, but I must tell them now; I remember them as I remember the look of my child’s face when she was first put in my arms, the child—”
She had underrated her strength. She broke into a storm of weeping which shook to the very soul one of the two men who listened to her, though he made no move to comfort her or allay it. The alienation thus expressed produced its effect, and, stricken deeper than the fount of tears, she suddenly choked back every sob and took up the thread of her narrative with the calmness born of despair,
“These were the words, these and no others:
“‘If my niece will break all ties and come to me completely unhampered, she may hope to find a permanent home in my house and a close hold upon my affections.
“Unhampered! with the marriage-vow scarcely cold on my lips! Without tie! and a husband waiting below to take me to his home on the hillside—a hillside so bare and bleak that the sight of it had sent a shudder to my heart as the wedding ring touched my finger. The irony of the situation was more than I could endure, and alone, with my eyes fixed on the comfortless heavens, showing gray and cold through the narrow panes of my windows, I sank to the floor insensible.
“When I came to myself I was still alone, and the twilight a little more pronounced than when my misery had turned it to blackest midnight. Rising, I read that letter again, and, plainly as the acknowledgment betrays the selfishness lying at the basis of my character, the temptation which thereupon seized me had never an instant of relenting or one conscientious scruple to combat it. I simply, at that stage in my life and experience, could not do otherwise than I did. Saying to myself that vows, as empty of heart as mine, were void before God and man, I sat down and wrote a few words to the man whose step on the stair I dreaded above everything else in the world; and, leaving the note on the table, unlocked my door and looked out. The hall connecting with my room was empty, but not so the lower one. There I could hear voices and laughter, Mr. Brainard’s loud above all the rest,—a fatal sound to me, cutting off all escape in that direction. But another way offered and that one near at hand. Communicating with the very hall in which I stood was an outside staircase running down to the road—a means of entering and leaving a house which I never see now wherever I may encounter it, without a gush of inward shame and terror, so instinctive and so sharp that I have never been able to hide it from any one whose eye might chance to be upon me at the moment. But that night I was conscious of no shame, barely of any terror, only of the necessity for haste. The train on which I was determined to fly was due in a little less than an hour at a station two miles down the road.
“That I should be followed farther than the turbulent stream which crossed the road only a quarter of a mile from the hotel, I did not fear. For in the hurried note I had left behind me, I had bidden them to look for me there, saying that I had been precipitate in marrying one I did not really love, and, overcome by a sense of my mistake, I was resolved on death.
“A lie! but what was a lie to me then, who saw in my life with this man an amelioration of my present state, but an amelioration only, while in the prospects held out to me by my uncle I foresaw not only release from a hated union, but every delight which my soul had craved since my mother could talk to me of wealth and splendor.
“Behold me, then, stealing down the side of the house in a darkness which during the last few minutes had become impenetrable. A shadow, where all was shadowy, I made for the woods and succeeded in reaching their shelter just as there rose in the distance behind me that most terrible of all sounds to a woman’s ear, a man’s loud cry of anguish and rage.”
She was not looking at that man now, but I was. As these words left her lips, Mr. Steele’s hand crept up and closed over his heart, though his face was like that of a marble image set in immovable lines. I feared him, I admired him, and found myself still looking at him as she went gaspingly on:
“Reckless of the dangers of the road, fearing nothing but what pressed upon me from behind, I flew straight for the stream, on whose verge I meant then to stop, and, having by some marvel of good luck or Providence reached it without a mishap, I tore the cloak from my shoulders, and, affixing one end to the broken edge of the bridge, flung the other into the water. Then with one loud ear-piercing shriek thrown back on the wind—see! I tell all—I leave out nothing—I fled away in the direction of the station.
“For some reason I had great confidence in the success of this feint and soon was conscious of but one fear, and that was being recognized by the station-master, who knew my face and figure even if he did not know my new city-made dress. So when I had made sure by the clock visible from the end window that I was in ample time for the expected train, I decided to remain in the dark at the end of the platform till the cars were about starting, and then to jump on and buy my ticket from the conductor.
“But I never expected such an interminable wait. Minute after minute went by without a hint of preparation for the advancing train. The hour for leaving arrived, passed, and not a man had shown himself on the platform. Had a change been made in the time-table? If so, what a prospect lay before me! Autumn nights are chill in Minnesota, and, my cloak having been sacrificed, I found poor protection in my neat but far from warm serge dress. However, I did not fully realize my position till another passenger arrived late and panting, and I heard some one shout out to him from the open door that an accident had occurred below and that it would be five hours at least before the train would come through.
“Five hours! and no shelter in sight save the impossible one of the station itself. How could I pass away that time! How endure the cold and fatigue? By pacing to and fro in the road? I tried it, resolutely tried it, for an hour, then a new terror, a new suspense, gripped me, and I discovered that I could never live through the hours; never, in fact, take the train when it came without knowing what had happened in Boone and whether the feint on which I relied had achieved its purpose. There was time to steal back, time to see and hear what would satisfy me of my own safety; and then to have some purpose in my movement! How much better than this miserable pacing back and forth just to start the stagnating blood and make the lagging moments endurable!
“So I turned again toward Boone. I was not in the mood to fear darkness or any encounter save one, and experienced hesitation only when I found myself reapproaching the bridge. Shadows which had protected me until now failed me there, and it was with caution I finally advanced and emerged upon the open spot where the road crossed the river. But even this was not needed. In the wide stretch before me cut by the inky stream, I saw no signs of life, and it was not till I was on the bridge itself that I discerned in the black hollows below the glint of a lantern, lighting up the bending forms of two or three men who were dragging at something which heaved under their hands with the pull of the stream.
“It was a sight which has never left me, but one which gave wings to my feet that night and sent me flying on till a fork in the road brought me to a standstill. To the left lay the hotel. I could see its windows glimmering with faint lights, while, away to the right, there broke upon me from the hillside a solitary sparkle; but this sparkle came from the house where, but for the letter hidden in my heart, I should be sitting at this moment before my own fireside.
“What moved me? God knows. It may have been duty; it may have been curiosity; it may have been only dread to know the worst and know it at once; but seeing that single gleam I began to move toward it, and, before I was aware, I had reached the house, edged up to its unshaded window and taken a frightened look within.
“I was prepared and yet unprepared for what I saw. Within, standing alone, with garments dripping, gazing in frenzy at a slip of paper which clung wet about his hand, stood my husband. My words to him! I could see it in his eyes and the desperation which lit up all his features.
“Drawing back in terror from the road, I watched him fling that letter of from his fingers as he would a biting snake, and, striding to a cupboard high up on the wall, take down something I could not see and did not guess at till the sharp sound of a pistol-shot cleft my ear, and I beheld him fall face downward on the carpet of fresh autumn leaves with which he had hidden the bare floor in expectation of his bride.
“The shriek which involuntarily went up from my lips must have rung far and wide, but only the groaning of the night-wind answered me. Driven by my fears to do something to save him if he was not yet dead, I tried the door, but it was locked; so was the window. Yet I might have battered my way in at that moment had I not heard two men coming down the road, one of whom was shouting to the other: ‘I did not like his face. I shan’t sleep till I’ve seen him again.’
“Somewhat relieved, I drew back from the road, but did not quit the spot till those men, seeing through the window what had happened, worked their way in and lifted him up in their arms. The look with which they let him fall back again was eloquent, and convinced me that it was death I saw. I started again upon my shuddering flight from Boone, secure in the belief that while my future would surely hold remorse for me, it would nevermore burden me with a hindrance in the shape of an unloved husband.”
The suspense which had held us tense and speechless was for the moment relieved and Mr. Steele allowed himself the following explanation:
“My hand trembled and the bullet penetrated an inch too high.”
Then he relapsed again into silence.
Mrs. Packard shuddered and went on:
“It may seem incredible to you, it seems incredible now to myself, but I completed my journey, entered my uncle’s house, was made welcome there and started upon my new life without letting my eyes fall for one instant on the columns of a newspaper. I did not dare to see what they contained. That short but bitter episode of my sixteenth year was a nightmare of horror, to be buried with my old name and all that could interfere with the delights of the cultured existence which my uncle’s means and affection opened before me. Two years and I hardly remembered; three years and it came to me only in dreams; four and even dreams failed to suggest it; the present, the glorious present was all. I had met you, Henry, and we had loved and married.
“Did any doubts come to disturb my joy? Very few. I had never received a word from Minnesota. I was as dead to every one there as they all were to me. I believed myself free and that the only wrong I did was in not taking you into my confidence. But this, the very nature of my secret forbade. How could I tell you what would inevitably alienate your affections? That act of my early girlhood by which I had gained an undeserved freedom had been too base; sooner than let you know this blot on my life, I was content to risk the possibility—the inconceivable possibility—of Mr. Brainard’s having survived the attack he had made upon his own life. Can you understand such temerity? I can not, now that I see its results before me.
“So the die was cast and I became a wife instead of the mere shadow of one. You were prosperous, and not a sorrow came to disturb my sense of complete security till that day two weeks ago, when, looking up in my own library, I saw, gleaming between me and the evening lamp, a face, which, different as it was in many respects, tore my dead past out of the grave and sent my thoughts reeling back to a lonely road on a black hillside with a lighted window in view, and behind that window the outstretched form of a man with his head among leaves not redder than his blood.
“I have said to you, I have said to others, that a specter rose upon me that day in the library. It was such to me,—an apparition and nothing else. Perhaps he meant to impress himself as such, for I had heard no footfall and only looked up because of the constraining force of the look which awaited me. I knew afterward that it was a man whom I had seen, a man whom you yourself had introduced into the house; but at the instant I thought it a phantom of my forgotten past sent to shock and destroy me; and, struck speechless with the horror of it, I lost that opportunity of mutual explanation which might have saved me an unnecessary and cruel experience. For this man, who recognized me more surely than I did him, who perhaps knew who I was before he ever entered my house, has sported for two weeks with my fears and hopes as a tiger with his prey. Maintaining his attitude of stranger—you have been witness to his manner in my presence—he led me slowly but surely to believe myself deceived by an extraordinary resemblance; a resemblance, moreover, which did not hold at all times, and which frequently vanished altogether, as I recalled the straight-featured but often uncouth aspect of the man who had awakened the admiration of Boone. Memory had been awakened and my sleep filled with dreams, but the unendurable had been spared me and I was thanking God with my whole heart, when suddenly one night, when an evening spent with friends in the old way had made me feel safe, my love safe, my husband and my child safe, there came to my ears from below the sound of a laugh, loud, coarse and deriding,—such a laugh as could spring from no member of my own household, such a laugh as I heard but once before and that in the by-gone years when some one asked Mr. Brainard if he meant to live always in Boone. The shock was terrible, and when I learned that the secretary, and the secretary only, was below, I knew who that secretary was and yielded to the blow.
“Yet hope dies hard with the happy. I knew, but it was not enough to know,—I must be sure. There was a way—it came to me with my first fluttering breath as I recovered from my faint. In those old days when I was thrown much with this man, he had shown me a curious cipher and taught me how to use it. It was original with himself, he said, and some day we might be glad of a method of communication which would render our correspondence inviolable. I could not see why he considered this likely ever to be desirable, but I took the description of it which he gave me and promised that I would never let it leave my person. I even allowed him to solder about my neck the chain which held the locket in which he had placed it. Consequently I had it with me when I fled from Boone, and for the first few weeks after arriving at my uncle’s house in Detroit. Then, wishing to banish every reminder of days I was so anxious to forget, I broke that chain, destroyed the locket and hid away from every one’s sight the now useless and despised cipher. Why I retained the cipher I can not explain. Now, that cipher must prove my salvation. If I could find it again I was sure that the shock of receiving from my hand certain words written in the symbols he had himself taught me would call from him an involuntary revelation. I should know what I had to fear. But so many changes had taken place and so long a time elapsed since I hid this slip of paper away that I was not even sure I still retained it; but after spending a good share of the night in searching for it, I finally came across it in one of my old trunks.
“The next morning I made my test. Perhaps, Henry, you remember my handing Mr. Steele an empty envelope to mail which he returned with an air of surprise so natural and seemingly unfeigned that he again forced me to believe that he was the stranger he appeared. Though he must have recognized at a glance—for he was an adept in this cipher once—the seven simple symbols in which I had expressed the great cry of my soul ‘Is it you?’ he acted the innocent secretary so perfectly that all my old hopes returned and I experienced one hour of perfect joy. Then came another reaction. Letty brought in the baby with a paper pinned to her coat. She declared to us that a woman had been the instrument of this outrage, though the marks inside, suggesting the cipher but with characteristic variations bespeaking malice, could only have been made by one hand.
“How I managed to maintain sufficient hold upon my mind to drag the key from my breast and by its means to pick out the meaning of the first three words—words which once read suggested all the rest—I can not now imagine. Death was in my heart and the misery of it all more than human strength could bear; yet I compared paper with paper carefully, intelligently, till these words from the prayer-book with all their threatening meaning to me and mine started into life before me: ‘Visiting the sins—’ Henry, you know the words ‘Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’ Upon the children! Henry, he meant Laura! our little Laura! I had wakened vengeance in a fiend. The man who had calmly smiled in my face as he handed me back that empty envelope inscribed with the wild appeal, ‘Is it you?’ was the man I had once driven to the verge of the grave and who had come back now to destroy us all.
“Yet, such is the reaching out of the drowning for straws, I did not utterly despair till Nixon brought me from this man’s lodging-house, where I had sent him, a specimen of his handwriting.
“Nixon is the only confidant I have had. Nixon knew me as a girl when he worked in my uncle’s home, and has always had the most unbounded, I may say jealous, affection for me. To him I had dared impart that I did not trust your new secretary; that he looked like a man I once knew who was a determined opponent of the party now trying to elect you; that a specimen of his writing would make me quite sure, and begged him to get it. I thought he might pick up such in the little office below, but he was never able to do so—Mr. Steele has taken care not to leave a line written in this house—but he did find a few lines signed with his name in his own room at the boarding-house, and these he showed me before he told me the result of his errand. They settled all doubts. What is to be my fate? Surely this man has no real claim on me, after all these years, when I thought myself your true and honest wife. He may ruin your campaign, defeat your hopes, overwhelm me with calumny and a loss of repute, but surely, surely he can not separate us. The law will not uphold him in that; will it, Henry? Say that it will not, say—oh, say that—it—will not—do—that, or we shall live to curse the day, not when we were born; but when our little innocent child came to us!”
At this appeal the mayor rose and faced his secretary and the spectacle was afforded me of seeing two strong men drawn up in conflict over a woman both had cherished above all else. And it was characteristic of the forceful men, as well as the extreme nature of the conflict, that both were quiet in manner and speech—perhaps the mayor the more so, as he began the struggle by saying:
“Is what Mrs. Packard says of your playing with her fears during these two weeks true, Mr. Steele?”
Without a droop of his eye, or a tremor in his voice, the answer came short, sharp and emphatic:
“Yes.”
“Then, you are a villain! and I shall not feel myself called upon to show you any consideration beyond what justice demands. Have you any plea to urge beyond the natural one of her seemingly unprovoked desertion of you? Has not my wife—” the nobility with which he emphasized those two words made my heart swell—“spoken the truth?”
Ah! then the mask of disdainful serenity with which the other had hitherto veiled the burning anguish of his soul fell in one burst of irresistible passion.
“True! yes, it is true. But what does that truth involve for me? Not two weeks, but seven years of torture, five of them devoted to grief for her, loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against her whole sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised victim of her deception.”
“She wronged you—she acknowledges that—but it was the wrong of an unthinking child—not of a realizing woman. Would you, a realizing man, tear her now from home, from her child, from her place in the community and my heart—make her despicable as well as unhappy, just to feed your revenge?”
“Yes, I would do that.”
“Jeopardize interests you have so often professed in my hearing to be far above personal consideration—the success of your party, the triumph of your political principles?”
“My political principles!” Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph in his laugh! “And what do you know of them? What I have said. Mayor Packard, your education as a politician has yet to be completed before you will be fit for the governorship of a state. I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man that it suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you pause before you trusted me with the furtherance and final success of a campaign which may outlast those exigencies. I have not always been of your party; I am not so now at heart.”
The mayor, outraged in every sentiment of honor as well as in the most cherished feelings of his heart, lowered upon his unmoved secretary with a wrath which would have borne down any other man before it.
“Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor’s work? That the glorification you speak of is false? That you may talk in my favor, but that when you come to the issue, you will vote according to your heart; that is, for Stanton?”
“I have succeeded in making myself intelligible.”
The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.
“Then,” he cried, “I take back the word by which I qualified you a moment ago. You are not a villain, you are a dastard.”
Mr. Steele bowed in a way which turned the opprobrium into a seeming compliment.
“I have suffered so many wrongs at your hands that I can not wonder at suffering this one more.”
Then slowly and with a short look at her: “The woman who has queened it so long in C—— society can not wish to undergo the charge of bigamy?”
“You will bring such a charge?”
“Certainly, if she does not voluntarily quit her false position, and, accepting the protection of the man whose name is really hers, go from this house at once.”
At this alternative, uttered with icy deliberation, Mrs. Packard recoiled with a sharp cry; but the mayor thrust a sudden sarcastic query at his opponent:
“Which name? Steele or Brainard? You acknowledged both.”
“My real name is Brainard; therefore, it is also hers. But I shall be content if she will take my present one of Steele. More than that, I shall be content if she will honestly accept from my hands a place of refuge where I swear she shall remain unmolested by me till this matter can be legally settled. I do not wish to make myself hateful to her, for I anticipate the day when she will be my wife in heart as she is now in law.”
“Never!”
The word rang out in true womanly revolt. “I will die before that day ever comes to separate me from the man I love and the child who calls me mother. You may force me from this house, you may plunge me into poverty, into contumely, but you shall never make me look upon myself as other than the wife of this good man, whom I have wronged but will never disgrace.”
“Madam,” declared the inflexible secretary with a derisive appreciation which bowed her once proud head upon her shamed breast, “you are all I thought you when I took you from Crabbe’s back-pantry in Boone to make you the honor and glory of a life which I knew then, as well as I do now, would not long run in obscure channels.”
It was a sarcasm calculated to madden the proud man who, only a few minutes before, had designated the object of it by the sacred name of wife. But beyond a hasty glance at the woman it had bowed almost to the ground, the mayor gave no evidence of feeling either its force or assumption. Other thoughts were in his mind than those roused by jealous anger. “How old were you then?” he demanded with alarming incongruity. The secretary started. He answered, however, calmly enough:
“I? Seven years ago I was twenty-five. I am thirty-two now.”
“So I have heard you say. A man of twenty-five is old enough to have made a record, Mr. Steele—” The mayor’s tone hardened, so did his manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the courts before he took up politics and an office. “Mr. Steele, I do not mean you to disturb my house or to rob me of my wife. What was your life before you met Olympia Brewster?”
A pause, the slightest in the world,—but the keen eye of the astute lawyer noted it, and his tone grew in severity and assurance. “You have known for two years that this woman whom you called yours was within your reach, if not under your very eye, and you forbore to claim her. Has this delay had anything to do with the record of those years to which I have just alluded?”
Had the random shot told? The secretary’s eye did not falter, nor his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of them; a blight had struck his soul—the flush of his triumph was gone.
Mayor Packard was merciless.
“Only two considerations could hold back a man like you from urging a claim he regarded as a sacred right; the fact of a former marriage or the remembrance of a forfeited citizenship—pardon me, we can not mince matters in a strait like this—which would delegalize whatever contract you may have entered into.”
Still the secretary’s eye did not swerve, though he involuntarily stretched forth his hand toward the table as if afraid of betraying a tremor in his rigidly drawn-up figure.
“Was there the impediment of a former marriage?”
No answer from the sternly set lips.
“Or was it that you once served a term—a very short term, cut short by a successful attempt at escape in a Minnesota prison?”
“Insults!” broke from those set lips and nothing more.
“Mr. Steele, I practised law in that state for a period of three years. All the records of the office and of the prison register are open to me. Over which of them should I waste my time?”
Then the tiger broke loose in the man who from the aggressor had become the attacked, and he cried:
“I shall never answer; the devil has whispered his own suggestions in your ear; the devil and nothing else.”
But the mayor, satisfied that he made his point, smiled calmly, saying:
“No, not the devil, but yourself. You, even the you of seven years back, would not have lived in any country town if necessity, or let us say, safety, had not demanded it. You, with your looks and your ambitions,—to marry at twenty-five a girl from the kitchen! any girl, even if she had the making of an Olympia Packard, if you did not know that it was in your power to shake her off when you got ready to assert yourself, or better prospects offered? The cipher and the desirability you expressed of a means of communication unreadable save by you two,—all this was enough to start the suspicion; your own manner has done the rest. Mr. Steele, you are both a villain and a bastard, and have no right in law to this woman. Contradict me if you dare.”
“I dare, but will not,” was the violent reply. “I shall not give you even that satisfaction. This woman who has gone through the ceremony of marriage with both of us shall never know to which of us she is the legal wife. Perhaps it is as good a revenge as the other. It certainly will interfere as much with her peace.”
“Oh, oh, not that! I can not bear that!” leaped in anguish from her lips. “I am a pure woman, let no such torture be inflicted upon me. Speak! tell the truth as you are the son of a woman you would have us believe honest.”
A smile then, cold but alive with gloating triumph, altered the straight line of his lips for an instant as he advanced toward the door. “A woman over the possession of whom it is an honor to quarrel!” were his words as he passed the mayor with a bow.
I looked to see the mayor spring and grasp him by the throat, but that was left for another hand. As the secretary bent to touch the door it suddenly flew violently open and Nixon, quivering in every limb and with his face afire, sprang in and seized upon the other with a violence of passion which would have been deadly had there been any strength behind it.
It was but child’s play for so strong a man as Mr. Steele to shake off so futile a grasp, and he did so with a rasping laugh. But the next moment he was tottering, blanched and helpless, and while struggling to right himself and escape, yielded more and more to a sudden weakness sapping his life-vigor, till he fell prone and apparently lifeless on the lounge toward which, with a final effort, he had thrown himself.
“Good! Good!” rang thrilling through the room, as the old man reeled back from the wall against which he had been cast. “God has finished what these old arms had only strength enough to begin. He is dead this time, and it’s a mercy! Thank God, Miss Olympia! thank God as I do now on my knees!” But here catching the mayor’s eye, he faltered to his feet again, saying humbly as he crept away:
“I couldn’t help it, your Honor. I shouldn’t have been listening at the door; but I have loved Miss Olympia, as we used to call her, more than anything in the world ever since she came to make my old master’s house a place of sunshine, and all I’m sorry for is that God had to do the finishing which twenty years ago I could have done myself.”
But Nixon was wrong. Mr. Steele did not die—not this time. Cared for by the physician who had been hastily summoned, he slowly but surely revived and by midnight was able to leave the house. As he passed the mayor on his way out, I heard Mr. Packard say:
“I shall leave the house myself in a few minutes. I do not mean that your disaffection shall ruin my campaign any more than I mean to leave a stone unturned to substantiate my accusation that you had no right to marry and possess legal claims over the woman whose happiness you have endeavored to wreck. If you are wise you will put no further hindrance in my way.”
I heard no answer, for at that instant a figure appeared in the open door which distracted all our attention. Miss Thankful, never an early sleeper and much given, as we know, to looking out of her window, had evidently caught the note of disaster from the coming and going of the doctor. She had run in from next door and now stood panting in the open doorway face to face with Mr. Steele, with her two hands held out, in one of which, remarkable as it seems to relate, I saw the package of bonds which I had been fortunate enough to find for her.
The meeting seemed to paralyze both; her face which had been full of tremulous feeling blanched and hardened, while he, stopped in some speech or final effort he was about to make, yielded to the natural brutality which underlay his polished exterior, and, in an access of rage which almost laid him prostrate again, lifted his arm and struck her out of his path. As she reeled to one side the bonds flew from her hand and lay at his feet; but he saw nothing; he was already half-way down the walk and in another moment the bang of his carriage door announced his departure.
The old lady, muttering words I could not hear, stared mute and stricken at the bonds which the mayor had hastened to lift and place in her hands.
Pitying her and anxious to relieve him from the embarrassment of her presence when his own mind and heart were full of misery, I rushed down to her side and endeavored to lead her away. She yielded patiently enough to my efforts, but, as she turned away, she cast one look at the mayor and with the tears rolling down her long and hollow cheeks murmured in horror and amaze:
“He struck me!”
The flash in Mayor Packard’s eye showed sympathy, but the demands of the moment were too great for him to give to those pathetic words the full significance which I suddenly suspected them to hold. As I led her tottering figure down the step and turned toward her door I said gently:
“Who was the man? Who was it that struck you?”
She answered quickly and with broken-hearted emphasis “My nephew! my sister’s son, and I had come to give him all our money. We have waited three days for him to come to us. We thought he would when he knew the bonds had been found, but he never came near, never gave us a chance to enrich him; and when I heard he was ill and saw the carriage which had come to take him away, we could not stand it another minute and so I ran out and—and he struck me! looked in my face and struck me!”
I folded her in my arms, there and then at the foot of her own doorstep, and when I felt her heart beating on mine, I whispered:
“Bless God for it! He has a hard and cruel heart, and would make no good use of this money. Live to spend it as your brother desired, to make over the old house and reinstate the old name. He would not have wished it wasted on one who must have done you cruel wrong, since he has lived so many days beside you without showing his interest in you or even acknowledging your relationship.”
“There were reasons,” she protested, gently withdrawing herself, but holding me for a minute to her side. “He has had great fortune—is a man of importance now—we did not wish to interfere with his career. It was only after the money was found that we felt he should come. We should not have asked him to take back his old name, we should simply have given him what he thought best to take and been so happy and proud to see him. He is so handsome and fortunate that we should not have begrudged it, if he had taken it all. But he struck me! he struck me! He will never get a dollar now.”
Relieved, for the natural good sense of the woman was reasserting itself, I gave her hands a squeeze and quickly ran back to where the mayor was holding the door for me.
“She is all right now,” I remarked, as I slid by him upstairs; and that was all I said. The rest must wait a more auspicious moment—the moment when he really would have time to take up the gage which Mr. Steele had thrown down to him in his final words.
I was not a witness to the parting interview between Mayor Packard and his wife; I had stolen into the nursery, for a look at the little one. I found her sleeping sweetly, with one chubby hand under her rounded cheek. Thus had she lain and thus had she slept during all those dreadful minutes, when her future hung, trembling in the balance.