"No, nor to let you, if I can prevent you. Arthur, you have allowed a base jealousy to persuade you, in the face of every contrary evidence, that your fair young wife has lost her loyalty--and your nearest friend the commonest honesty--in a clandestine love. Under the goadings of that pa.s.sion you have foully guessed, have heartlessly accused, have brazenly lied. Isabel has confessed nothing to you, and I know by your lies to me how pusillanimously you must have been lying to her. Had your guess been right, I should not have known you were only guessing, and your successful iniquity would have remained hidden from everybody but yourself--I still do you the honor to believe you would have realized it. Now the vital question is, do you realize it, and will you undo it?"
Arthur was deadly pale; his pointing finger trembled. "Leave"--he choked--"leave this house."
Leonard turned scarlet, but his tone sank low. "Arthur, I don"t believe your soul is rotten. If I did, I should not be such a knave or such a fool as to make any treaty with you that would leave you in your pulpit one Sabbath Day."
"What do you--what do you mean by that?"
"I mean that such a treaty would be foul faith to everybody."
"So, then, you do propose one common shipwreck for us all."
"Quite the contrary. To trust the fortunes of our loved ones to any treaty with a rotten soul would indeed be to launch them upon a stormy sea in a rotten boat. But I do not believe your soul is so. I believe it is sound,--still sound, though on fire; and so, to help you quench its burning, I give you my pledge to be from this day a stranger to your sweet wife. And now will you do something for me, to prove that your soul is sound and is going to stay sound? It shall be the least I can ask in good faith to the world we live in."
"What is it?" asked Arthur. There was no capitulation in his face or his voice.
"I want you to make to Isabel a full retraction and explanation of every falsehood you have uttered to her or to me in this matter." Leonard was pale again; Arthur burned red a moment, and then turned paler than Leonard.
"You fiend!" gasped the husband. "I am to exalt you, and abase myself, to her?"
"No. No, Arthur. Women are strange; every chance is that in her eyes I shall be abased." The speaker went whiter than ever.
"But be that as it may, you shall have lifted your soul out of the mire.
You must do it, Arthur; don"t you see you must?"
Arthur sank into the chair at his side. He seemed to have guessed what Leonard was keeping unsaid. A moisture of anguish stood on his brow.
Yet--
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Arthur Winslow, I give you five minutes."]
"I will die before I will do it," he said.
Leonard drew forth the letter, and then his watch. "Arthur Winslow, I give you five minutes. If you don"t make me that promise in that time, I shall this day show this letter to your bishop."
The rector sat clenching his fingers and spreading them again, and staring at the table.
A bead of sweat, then a second, and then a third started down his forehead.
Presently he clutched the board, drew himself to his feet, and turned to leave the chair, but fell across its arms, slid heavily from them, and with one rude thump and then another lay unconscious on the floor.
Leonard sprang round the table, but when he would have lifted the fallen head it was in the arms of Isabel, and her dilated eyes were on him in a look of pa.s.sionate aversion.
"Ring!" she cried. "Ring for Sarah--and go!
"No! stop! don"t ring! he"s coming to! Only go! go quickly and forever!
Say not a word,--oh, not a word! I heard it all! Despise me too, for I listened at the door!
"Oh, my husband! Arthur, look at me, Arthur. Look, Arthur; it"s your Isabel. Oh, Arthur, my husband, my husband!"
IX
THE YOUNG YEAR SMILES
Martin Kelly, pious Irishman and out-door factotum of the Byington place, paused from the last snow-shovelling of the season to reply to a wandering salesman of fruit trees.
"Mr. Airthur Winslow or Mr. Linnard Boyington,--naw, sor! ye can see nayther the wan nor th" other, whatsomiver! How can ye see thim, moy graciouz! whin "tis two weeks since the two o" thim was tuck the same noight wid the pneumonias, boy gorra! and the both of thim has thim on the loongs!"
The nursery agent asked how it had happened so.
"Hawh! ask yer grandmother! All ye can say is they was roipe to catch the maladee, whatsomiver! Ye cannot always tell how "tis catched, and whin ye cannot tell, moy graciouz! ye have got the wurrst koind!"
The two sick men recovered very nearly at the same time.
One day when Leonard had read all his acc.u.mulated mail and had seen three or four men officially in his bedchamber, he told Ruth that a certain criminal case, the trial of which had been waiting for his recovery, would take him to the county-seat, and would keep him there many days, probably weeks, except for brief visits to his office and yet briefer moments at home.
Ruth gave him a look of tender approval, laid a hand in his, and bent into the evening fire her far-off smile. Thus, and only thus, he knew she had divined what had befallen.
A day or two afterward Mrs. Morris brought him a note from Arthur. He wrote an answer while she stayed, and while Ruth listened elatedly to her sprightly account of how well Isabel still bore the burden of nursing a most loving but most nervous husband.
The missive from Arthur was a short but complete and propitiative acknowledgment of his error and fraility. It offered no change in the agreement as to Isabel, but it professed a high yet humble resolve to fall no more, and it ended with a manly offer to resign his pulpit, and even to lay aside his sacred calling, if Leonard retained any belief in the moral necessity of his so doing.
Leonard"s reply was a very brief exhortation to his friend to put away all thought of resigning, and to take up his work again with the zeal with which he had first entered upon it.
Mrs. Morris went away refreshed, and left the Byingtons equally so. Her buoyancy had been as prettily restrained, her sympathies as sweet, her dimple as unconscious, her belief in everybody"s wit and wisdom except her own as genuine, and her timid dissimulations as kindly meant and as transparent, as ever. Yet there was an unspoken compa.s.sion for her when she was gone, for in the parting words with which she playfully vaunted her ignorance of the correspondence she was bearing, it was clear, even to the General, that behind that small ignorance she had a larger knowledge,--a fact that made her dainty cheerfulness seem very brave.
The freshets swept down the valleys, the myriad yellow twigs of the brookside willows turned green, a cheery piping rose from the ponds, the last gleam of snow pa.s.sed from the farthest hills, the bluebird sang, the harrow followed the plough, Ruth"s crocuses shone above the greening sod, and down by the old mill-pool and on the steep hillside beyond it she and Isabel gathered arbutus, anemones, and the yellow violet. Spring had come.
Then through the thickening greenery the dogwood shone like belated drifts, the flashing warblers pa.s.sed on into the north, the bobolink had arrived, the robin was already overeating, the whole chorus of birds that had come to nest and stay broke forth, and it was summer.
Leonard was back in his own town, enriched with new esteem from the public and from the men of his profession. The noted case was won, a victory for the peace and dignity of the state, due wholly, it was said, to the energy and sagacity of the young district attorney. A murder had been so cunningly done that suspicion could fasten nowhere, until Byington laid his finger upon a man of so unspotted a name that no one else had had the mental courage to point to him. Through a long and masterly untangling of contradictions the state"s counsel had so overwhelmingly proved him guilty that he had confessed without waiting for the jury"s verdict.
"Yes," said many, "it was a great stroke, Leonard"s management of that thing." And not a few added that it had made him an older man--"that or something." Those who were of his politics, and even some who were not, stopped him in Main Street and State Street to "shake" and to say, without too much care for logical sequence, how soon, in their opinion, he would be the commonwealth"s "favorite son."
"My dear Mrs. Morris," said the General, "every town has at least one."
But even Mrs. Morris could see the father"s faith and pride through the old soldier"s satire.
X
THE STORM REGATHERS