Mr. Claghorn's Daughter Part 38

"Which was right. I am glad you waited."

Plainly she was uneasy and so, feeling rather foolish, he explained that in order to fulfil the duty of breakfasting at Stormpoint he must be going. Her suggestion that he remain and breakfast with her was made rather faintly. "Good-bye, Natalie," he said. "Remember me to Leonard.

Next time I shall call in proper form."

And so he rode away, watched a little while by her, who then went to her own now belated breakfast. She sat at the table, eating hardly at all, seemingly lost in thought. Then she went slowly upstairs to her own room.

She sat down upon the bed, suddenly catching her breath, as one stifling a sob. Then she twitched her body with an impatient shake, like a naughty child. Then she rose quickly and began to rectify or complete various small duties, neglected by the maid, who had arranged the chamber while she had been out. Ornaments were to be lifted and dusted, pillows more carefully smoothed, chairs to be moved an inch forward then replaced. Mirrors to be wiped clear of invisible dust, but not, for some inscrutable reason, to be looked into; in short, pretended duty must be indulged in--a poor pretense, which died away as she sank into a chair and, with listless hands lying in her lap, permitted thought to have its way.

Had she known him or not? Of course she had not known him. Not even when (here she blushed and her lips parted slightly)----She was angry at her impetuosity, honestly angry. It was silly, but she had no other reproach to make to herself. It had not been her fault, coming from the sunny street, that she had not recognized the man who had advanced so eagerly to meet her,--the last person she could have expected to see in her own house. It would be absurd to feel more than pa.s.sing annoyance at such a contretemps. Only a morbid conscience could find reproach for an episode in which there was no fault, which naturally she regretted----

No! She did _not_ regret. Had her heart not fluttered with joy every moment since it had happened? Was it true or was it not--she did not know, but, alas, she wished it true--that for one brief instant, ere he had released her, she had known him and had been happy? Happy! What a barren word was "happy."

Her thoughts wandered far--farther than ever before. The secret casket in her heart, wherein heretofore they had been hidden, was opened, and they rushed forth, to roam in regions forbidden, yet so fair that her feeble protests were unheeded; and she smiled upon them, these bright children of fancy, wandering with them in the paradise where Love has made his home. She closed her eyes and strove to realize again the brief ecstasy of an hour ago. She knew--she must have known--in whose arms she had been enfolded. She wished it so; it must be so. Again she felt his beating heart against her own, his arms once more about her, his breast pressed close to hers. "Mark," she whispered, stretching forth her arms and pouting lips as one prepares for meeting other lips----

The morning grew old, and she still sat thinking of many things. She knew that she loved the man that had left her, with a love that must be his, and his only, shared by no other. She had known it as she had that morning stood upon the strand, seeing in the fleeting rainbows of the spray pictures of a life that might have been, but which could never be.

She had turned her back upon the vision, well knowing why she turned away. She had seen it again in the cemetery and had denied it, bidding it begone forever; and she had met it on the threshold of her home, no longer a vision, but a fact so rapturous and so mighty that she dared no longer deny the truth. She loved him; she had always loved him.

She sat long, dreaming her pleasant dreams, which only slowly merged with the facts with which she was environed. Very gradually the full import of her thoughts came home to her, but it came surely, disclosing an abyss so evil and so deep that she was appalled, and sinking upon her knees she cried aloud that she was a guilty creature, and prayed fervently and long for aid to be that which she had only that morning resolved to be, a faithful wife in thought as in deed.

At last she went downstairs. Entering the library, she discovered her husband.

He still slept, the deep sleep of exhaustion. She watched him, noting the careworn face, the disheveled dress. To her he looked like a man who had pa.s.sed through a crisis of illness, he was so changed.

And now the regret and penitence for all the wrong she had done him pressed upon her as a heavy weight. She was his wife, yet had driven him from her side. She was his wife, yet had, within an hour, dreamed her dreams of love and happiness in which he had no share.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

A GOLDEN BRIDGE ACROSS AN ABYSS OF SHAME.

When Leonard awoke to find her bending over him, the anxiety in her eyes looked to him like fear. He had no perception of the fact that hours had pa.s.sed since in the meeting in the hall he had seen the same eyes dancing with the light of joy, and had heard from the drawing-room the fond murmurs of forbidden love. In his first awakening the scene he had witnessed and the murmurs he had heard swayed before his eyes and sounded still in his ears. Fresh from dalliance with her lover, she might well tremble to find her husband here! With this thought uppermost, he staggered to his feet.

She started back. He glared upon her with a gaze so furious that she was in truth afraid.

For the burden of her guilty dream weighed heavily upon her, justifying the hatred in his eyes, a hatred born of the ascription of all his woes to her, and while she saw abhorrence, the suffering he had endured was no less plainly written in his haggard face, accusing her even as she accused herself. Her sins against this man, her husband, the father of her dead child, crushed her with the burden of the humiliation born of them.

"My husband!" In her self-abas.e.m.e.nt she sank upon her knees. The action was instinctive in her of Gallic training; to Leonard, bred to less dramatic display of emotion, it was proof of guilt far deeper than he had until now suspected.

"Get up," he said harshly, and taking her by the arm he led her to the doorway, pus.h.i.+ng her from the room and, with unconscious violence, almost throwing her against the opposite wall. He returned to the room and rang the bell. His rudeness had given him a sense of mastery in his own house, and had dissipated his dread of meeting the servants. He asked the maid if breakfast would soon be ready, and was surprised to learn that it was long past noon.

Ordering a meal to be prepared he went upstairs, boldly and with something not unlike a swagger in the perception that there were sinners as bad as he, and having bathed, being clothed in fresh garments, and having eaten almost ravenously, he felt, he said to himself, like a new man.

Which indeed he was, if new thoughts make a new man. That dreadful load of regret for his own misdeeds had been lifted from his shoulders. His violence toward his wife had somewhat shocked himself, and while attending to his physical needs, he had had time to regret his hasty outbreak; and this fact led him to resolve to consider the situation calmly and judicially.

To know all is, if the French adage be true, to pardon all, which is perhaps the reason why we find it easier to forgive our own sins than those of others. We presumably know what motives actuated us in evil-doing, and being aware of the strength of the force that drove us, we are conscious of the fact that had the incentive to sin been less powerful than our rect.i.tude we would not have been guilty. In other words, we sin because we can't help sinning, a logical and soothing conclusion, converting our wickedness into misfortune and rendering us objects of self-commiseration rather than of self-condemnation.

But in that contemplation of the iniquity of others, to which circ.u.mstances sometimes impel us, and which is always so painful, the strength of temptation which we have not personally experienced is less obvious, while at the same time the sense of our own rect.i.tude is naturally in the ascendant. And as, in such contemplation, our judgment is inevitably swayed by our morality in its sternest mood, especially if the crimes under consideration have wronged ourselves, our indignation is naturally fervent. It is also true that our vision is clarified, our memory sharpened, and we recall incidents, now corroborative of guilt, though heretofore unremarked, or regarded as innocent.

Leonard recalled so many of such incidents that at last nearly every remembered act of his wife a.s.sumed a semblance of guilt. There were those visits to churches mentioned by Berthe, the woman who truly loved him, and who, doubtless, had minimized the truth to spare him, and the same habit had been indulged in after marriage. It was not to pray that she went to the churches; he remembered that she had herself said so.

No; it was to dream of the old unhallowed meetings in the hallowed precincts. To dream! Why not to meet her lover? During much of their sojourn in Paris, Mark had been supposed to be in London--what was a pa.s.sage between London and Paris to Mark? He remembered now that in Natalie's bearing toward himself there had always been a vague and undescribable something which he could not define, but which he had felt. It was easy now to fix the date of the commencement of this aloofness (he had found this word for it); it had been during the visit in Paris. He recalled a thousand instances with which to torture his mind and prove his suspicions true. The aloofness had increased; after the birth of the child it had even been noticed by others--and then as a blow came the conviction that the inferences she had drawn from his belief in h.e.l.l and her consequent resolve to live a celibate life were all pretense, a ghastly role played in obedience to her lover's command.

As this hideous thought took possession of him all semblance of judicial summing up was put aside. He laid his head between his hands and wept aloud in his great misery. He had loved her; she had been the light of his life. He remembered her now (and the vision he recalled was strangely clear and vivid) as she had stood at the entrance to the cave where dwelt the echo of Forellenbach; she laughing a little at the strange American boy who thought wine-drinking an evil; he standing within the cave, half shy, half proud, and longing to wake the echoes with the pretty name, on that day first heard by him. Yes; he had loved her then and always, while she,--and he groaned and his hot tears fell fast as he remembered that Berthe had said--Berthe who knew--that his wife had never loved him!

The thoughts that racked him were base and unworthy, but he believed them. It may be that at the bottom of his heart he wished to believe, even while the belief rent him with actual anguish. He needed justification for his own sins, and true to his human nature, found it where he could. Again, perhaps dim as yet, but only dim because he closed his eyes, was the desire to be driven to a step which he had hardly dared contemplate, which he had refused to contemplate when it had been suggested to him, but toward which now he was making his way as certainly as he who, lost in the gloom of some dark forest, makes his way toward a rift of light.

He took Mrs. Joe's cheque from his pocket and looked at it. He recalled a suggestion of Berthe that they cash it and go to France together. The suggestion had startled, yet had fascinated him. He had put it aside.

Now its fascination returned with tenfold power--to put the ocean between him and the past; to be a denizen of that land where man can be free; to be one of those who, being d.a.m.ned, refuse to accept misery in this life as well--he had recognized it then as a picture painted by the devil; it now a.s.sumed a worthier aspect. There would be boldness in such a step, a certain picturesqueness as well, and a dramatic ending to the play in which he had enacted the role of dupe. The curtain would be rung down upon a scene not contemplated by the authors of the drama--a scene in which he alone would retain some dignity, to the discomfiture of those whose puppet he had been.

No thought of financial dishonesty was in his mind. The peculiar fascination in the cheque was the facility it afforded for complete and sudden rupture of every tie. He could secure the maker of the cheque against loss; that could be done at his leisure; meanwhile, there it lay, a golden bridge for pa.s.sage across an abyss of shame, beyond which lay a region of beauty and content.

Yet even while he mused, finding a balm for wounded pride and love betrayed in visions, of which the central figure was the woman who had parted from him in despair, and whose pleading eyes even now besought him, while his own lonely heart called out to her--even now, when despair on the one hand, and pa.s.sion on the other, strove for mastery, even now he turned from the devil's beckoning finger, resolving to be just.

Yes; the accused should have a hearing. He would confront his wife and demand an explanation of that meeting in the hall. She was probably aware that he had witnessed it, for she had crouched in fear before him when she had unexpectedly found him in the library. If she had not known of his presence he would inform her and warily watch her, and carefully weigh whatever she had to offer in explanation. He would not be deceived, but she should meet the accusation face to face, himself accuser, judge and witness.

He looked at his watch. It was after nine o'clock. Natalie could hardly be in bed. He would see her now in her own room, away from the chance of eavesdropping servants.

He prepared to put his intention into effect and was already in the hall, when a maid handed him a sealed note.

He read the letter. It commenced abruptly, without address:

"Your violence has so agitated me that it has only been after a long struggle that I have brought myself to write you. But I persuade myself, as indeed I must, that you were unconscious of your harshness. I will not, therefore, offer you my forgiveness for an offense which was unintentional. But I think it better that we do not meet immediately. I am the more urgent in this because I wish your spirit to be soothed and your anger against me to be mitigated, so that you shall hear me calmly. For, I have much to say to you--a sad confession to make which may be even harder for you to bear than the sorrow you have already borne. But I have hope that if you will hear it calmly you will recognize that if I did not love you I could not open my heart to you, as I shall do. My husband, I have not been that which I so long to be in future, a true wife to you. But I know, for I know your goodness of heart, that when you have heard all you will pardon all, and that our future shall be cloudless; that your love shall help me to be that which I have failed in being--your faithful wife."

No need now, having read this confession, to consider his future course.

It was fixed. He looked at his watch. The train left at midnight. He would write the necessary answer to the letter at once.

He wrote swiftly and without pause. His brain had never been clearer, his heart never lighter.

A few minutes before midnight he quietly left the house. When he had crossed the street to the Square he looked back at the only home he had ever known. For good or for evil he was about to leave it, never to return the husband of the woman who watched in the dimly lighted chamber. A sob shook him as he turned from the light toward the darkness.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

THE RUINS OF HER AIR-CASTLE LAY AROUND HER.

Father Cameril laid down the "Life of St. Dunstan" and sighed. "He was strong, he was faithful," muttered the good Father. "Alas!" and he sighed again.

He took a photograph from his pocket and gazed long upon the pictured features. "Dr. Hicks did it," he murmured. Then he replaced the photograph and went forth, going toward the sea, until at last, by many a devious way, he came into the grounds of Stormpoint, and there, by Eliphalet's Tomb, he saw a woman. "'Tis fate," he muttered. The woman turned; Father Cameril started. He was face to face with Natalie.

He stammered awkwardly, being wholly taken by surprise, that he had thought she was Miss Lynford; then, after some conventional references to the weather, he escaped. Natalie watched him as he walked away, then fell into bitter musings, in which he had no part.

Two years had pa.s.sed since Leonard's flight. With the fall of her hero, the light of the life of Miss Claghorn had been extinguished, and though, with grim courage, she had striven to bear the heavy hand of the Lord, laid thus upon the House of Claghorn, the knowledge that another of the race, the brightest and the best, was doomed, was too heavy a burden. Other Claghorns would be born and would live their little day, but for whom could hope be cherished after such a fall as this? She pa.s.sed from life sure of her own salvation, but with the knowledge that the elect race was no more to be reckoned as of the favored minority.

She refused to leave any message for Leonard; since the Lord had closed the gates of glory upon him, it was for her to close her heart. She charged her estate with a liberal annuity for Tabitha Cone, leaving her fortune, otherwise uninc.u.mbered, to Natalie, who, with Tabitha, continued to reside at the White House.