Books: The Mayor\'s Wife
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Anna Katherine Green >> The Mayor\'s Wife
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Mrs. Packard's eyes opened in wonder mingled with some emotion
deeper than distaste, but she said nothing, only watched in a
fascinated way his moving fingers. The mayor, mollified possibly by
his secretary's last words, sank back again in his chair with the
remark:
"You have heard Mrs. Packard's distinct denial. You are
consequently armed for battle. See that you fight well. It is all
a part of the scheme to break me up. One more paragraph of that
kind and I shall be a wreck, even if my campaign is not."
"There will not be any more."
"Ah! you can assure me of that?"
"Positively."
"What are you playing there?" It was Mrs. Packard who spoke. She
was pointing at the scribble he was making on the paper.
"Tit-tat-to," he smiled, "to amuse the baby."
Did she hate to see him so occupied, or was her own restlessness of
a nature demanding a like outlet? Tearing her eyes away from him
and the child, she looked about her in a wild way, till she came
upon a box of matches standing on the large center-table around
which they were all grouped. Taking some in her hand, she
commenced to lay them out on the table before her, possibly in an
attempt to attract the baby's attention to herself. Puerile
business, but it struck me forcibly, possibly from the effect it
appeared to have upon the mayor. Looking from one to the other in
an astonishment which was not without its hint of some new and
overmastering feeling on his own part, he remarked:
"Isn't it time for the baby to go to bed? Surely, our talk is too
serious to be interrupted by games to please a child."
Without a word Mr. Steele rose and put the protesting child in the
mother's arms. She, rising, carried it to the door, and, coming
slowly back, reseated herself before the table and began to push
the matches about again with fingers that trembled beyond her
control. The mayor proceeded as if no time had elapsed since his
last words.
"You had some words then with this Brainard--I think you called him
Brainard--exacted some promise from him?"
"Yes, your Honor," was the only reply.
Did not Mrs. Packard speak, too? We all seemed to think so, for we
turned toward her; but she gave no evidence of having said
anything, though an increased nervousness was visible in her
fingers as she pushed the matches about.
"I thought I was warranted in doing so much," continued Mr. Steele.
"I could not buy the man with money, so I used threats."
"Right! anything to squelch him," exclaimed the mayor, but not with
the vigor I expected from him. Some doubt, some dread--caught
perhaps from his wife's attitude or expression--seemed to interpose
between his indignation and the object of it. "You are our good
friend, Steele, in spite of the shock you gave us a moment ago."
As no answer was made to this beyond a smile too subtle and too
fine to be understood by his openhearted chief, the mayor proceeded
to declare:
"Then that matter is at an end. I pray that it may have done us no
real harm. I do not think it has. People resent attacks on women,
especially, on one whose reputation has never known a shadow, as
girl, wife, or mother."
"Yes," came in slow assent from the lips which had just smiled, and
he glanced at Mrs. Packard whose own lips seemed suddenly to become
dry, for I saw her try to moisten them as her right hand groped
about for something on the tabletop and finally settled on a small
paper-weight which she set down amongst her matches. Was it then
or afterward that I began to have my first real doubt whether some
shadow had not fallen across her apparently unsullied life?
"Yes, you are right," repeated Mr. Steele more energetically.
"People do resent such insinuations against a woman, though I
remember one case where the opposite effect was produced. It was
when Collins ran for supervisor in Cleveland. He was a good fellow
himself, and he had a wife who was all that was beautiful and
charming, but who had once risked her reputation in an act which
did call for public arraignment. Unfortunately, there was a man
who knew of this act and he published it right and left and--"
"Olympia!" Mayor Packard was on his feet, pointing in sudden fury
and suspicion at the table where the matches lay about in odd and,
as I now saw, seemingly set figures. "You are doing something
besides playing with those matches. I know Mr. Steele's famous
cipher; he showed it to me a week ago; and so, evidently, do you,
in spite of the fact that you have had barely fifty words with him
since he came to the house. Let me read--ah!--give over that piece
of paper you have there, Steele, if you would not have me think you
as great a dastard as we know that Brainard to be!"
And while his wife drooped before his eyes and a cynical smile
crept about the secretary's fine mouth, he caught up the sheet on
which Steele had been playing tit-tat-to with the child, and
glanced from the table to it and back again to the table on which
the matches lay in the following device, the paper-weight answering
for the dot:
7; L; .)7; [-]; ^V
"M," suddenly left the mayor's writhing lips; then slowly, letter
by letter, "E-R-C-Y. Mercy!" he vociferated. "Why does my wife
appeal for mercy to you--a stranger--and in your own cipher!
Miserable woman! What secret's here? Either you are--"
"Hush! some one's at the door!" admonished the secretary.
Mr. Packard turned quickly, and, smoothing his face rapidly, as
such men must, started for the door. Mrs. Packard, flinging her
whole soul into a look, met the secretary's eyes for a moment and
then let her head sink forward on her hands above those telltale
matches, from whose arrangement she had reaped despair in place of
hope.
Mr. Steele smiled again, his fine, false smile, but after her head
had fallen; not before. Indeed, he had vouchsafed no reply to her
eloquent look. It was as if it had met marble till her eyes were
bidden; then--
But Nixon was in the open doorway and Nixon was speaking:
"A telegram, your Honor."
The old man spoke briskly, even a little crisply--perhaps he always
did when he addressed the mayor. But his eyes roamed eagerly and
changed to a burning, red color when they fell upon the dejected
figure of his mistress. I fancied that, had he dared, he would
have leaped into the room and taken his own part--and who could
rightly gage what that was?--in the scene which may have been far
more comprehensive to him than to me. But he did not dare, and my
eyes passed from him to the mayor.
"From Haines," that gentleman announced, forgetting the suggestive
discovery he had just made in the great and absorbing interest of
his campaign. "'Speech good--great applause becoming thunderous at
flash of your picture. All right so far if--'" he read out,
ceasing abruptly at the "if" which, as I afterward understood,
really ended the message. "No answer," he explained to Nixon as he
hurriedly, dismissed him. "That 'if' concerns you," he now
declared, coming back to his wife and to his troubles at the same
instant. "Explain the mystery which seems likely to undo me. Why
do you sit there bowed under my accusations? Why should Henry
Packard's wife cry for mercy, to any man? Because those damnable
accusations are true? Because you have a secret in your past and
this man knows it?"
Slowly she rose, slowly she met his eyes, and even he started back
at her pallor and the drawn misery in her face. But she did not
speak. Instead of that she simply reached out and laid her hand on
Mr. Steele's arm, drooping almost to the ground as she did so.
"Mercy!" she suddenly wailed, but this time to the man who had so
relentlessly accused her. The effect was appalling. The mayor
reeled, then sprang forward with his hand outstretched for his
secretary's throat. But his words were for his wife. "What does
this mean? Why do you take your stand by the side of another man
than myself? What have I done or what have you done that I should
live to face such an abomination as this?"
It was Steele who answered, with a lift of his head as full of
assertion as it was of triumph.
"You? nothing; she? everything. You do not know this woman,
Mayor Packard; for instance, you do not know her name."
"Not know her name? My wife's?"
"Not in the least. This lady's name is Brainard. So is mine.
Though she has lived with you several years in ignorance of my
continued existence, no doubt, she is my wife and not yours. We
were married in Boone, Minnesota, six years ago."
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WIFE'S TALE
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.
IRA T. HOUGHTALING.'
"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.
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