Books: The Mayor\'s Wife
A >>
Anna Katherine Green >> The Mayor\'s Wife
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15
"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."
CHAPTER XXIV
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
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!"
CHAPTER XXV
THE FINGER ON THE WALL
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."
CHAPTER XXVI
"BITTER AS THE GRAVE"
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."
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15