Then all Christine"s hesitation vanished, and she answered frankly, "Neil is in a little town on the Hudson River, about a two hours"
journey from New York."
"What is he doing?"
"He is bookkeeper in a shop there."
"What is the name of the town? Tell me truly, Christine."
"I will let you read his last letter. It came two days ago."
"Thank you! It would be a great comfort to me."
There was a John Knox teapot on the chimney-piece, and Christine lifted it down, removed the lid, and took Neil"s letter out, and handed it to Roberta.
The woman"s invincible sense of whatever was ridiculous or inconsistent, with a person or event, was instantly roused by the appearance of John Knox. She laughed with girlish merriment. "To think of John Knox interfering in my matrimonial difficulties!" she cried, "it is too funny! The old scold! How grim and gruff he looks! If he could speak, how he would rave about the outrageous authority of women. It is refreshing to know that he had a wife that snubbed him, and didn"t believe in him, and did not honor and obey him, and----"
She had unfolded the letter as she was speaking, and now her eyes were so busy, that her tongue got no message to deliver, and this was what she read:--
MY DEAR SISTER CHRISTINE,
I am still here, waiting for the information I asked you to get me, namely the address of my dear wife. I am unhappy, I may say I am miserable; and I can never settle anywhere, till I see her. If she then refuses to hear and believe me, life will be over to me.
But she will believe me, for I will tell her the truth, and she will see that though I was foolish, I was not criminal. The law separating these two conditions is far from being clear enough. I want to know where my wife is! She will believe me! She will trust me! You do. Mother did. Roberta has been very near and dear to me.
She has been forced to abandon me. It is the injustice of my treatment that is killing me. If I could only clear myself in her sight, I could lift life again, and make the best of it. I am not half content in this place. I cannot believe the people here are representative Americans, and I dislike small towns. Traders and dwellers in small towns are generally covetous--they have a sinister arithmetic--they have no clear notions of right and wrong, and I think they are capable of every kind of malice known to man. I want to go to a big city, where big motives move men, and if you do not send me Roberta"s hiding place, I will put out for California, if I foot it every step of the way. I am stunned, but not broken.
Your loving brother,
NEIL.
When she had finished this letter, she was crying. "Give it to me!"
she sobbed, "it is all about me, Christine. Give it to me! Poor Neil!
He has been badly used! Oh Christine, what must I do?"
"You ought to go to his side, and help him to mak" a better life. What prevents ye?"
"Oh the shame of it! The atmosphere of the prison!"
"You promised G.o.d to tak" him for better or worse, richer or poorer.
You are breaking your promise every day, and every hour, that you stay away from him."
"You must not blame me ignorantly, Christine. My brother and I were left alone in the world, when he was ten years old, and I was eight.
He at once a.s.sumed a tender and careful charge of my lonely life. I cannot tell you how good and thoughtful he was. When I left school he traveled all over Europe with me, and he guarded my financial interests as carefully as if they were his own. And I gave him a great affection, and a very sincere obedience to all his wishes and advice.
At first he seemed to favor my liking for Neil, but he soon grew furiously jealous, and then all was very unpleasant. Neil complained to me. He said he did not want me to take my brother"s opinion without saying a few words in his own behalf, and so I soon began to take Neil"s side. Then day by day things grew worse and worse, and partly because I liked Neil, and partly because I was angry at Reginald, and weary of his exacting authority, I became Neil"s wife."
"That was an engagement for a" the days of your life. You hae broken it."
"The law excused and encouraged me to do so."
"Were you happy in that course?"
"About as unhappy as I could be. I was sure Neil had been hardly dealt with, that advantage had been taken of his terror and grief, when he found himself in prison. I am sure the lawyer he employed was really seeking Reginald"s favor, and practically gave Neil"s case away, but I was angry at Neil"s want of spirit and pluck, in his own defense.
Reginald told me that he cried in the dock, and I shed a few pa.s.sionate tears over his want of courage and manliness."
"Poor Neil! If you had stood by him, he would have stood by himself.
Remember, Roberta, that he was only just out of his college cla.s.ses, and had had neither time nor opportunity to make friends; that his mither was dying, and that we had no money to defend him; that his wife had deserted him, and that he is naturally a man of little courage, and you will judge him very leniently."
"Reginald told me he was saving money in order to run away from me, and----"
"If he was saving money to run awa" with, he intended to take you with him. If he was going awa" alone, a few pounds would hae been all he needed. And it seems to me you were the runaway from love and duty.
But it is little matter now, who was most to blame. Life is all repenting and beginning again, and that is everything that can be done in this case."
"I will start for New York tomorrow. Can you get Doctor Trenabie here for me?"
"Do you know him?"
"He is a distant relative both of the Raths and the Ballisters."
"He never said a word about his relationship, to me."
"It would have been most unlike him had he done so, but I can tell you, he wrote me before my marriage, and advised me to be very cautious with Mr. Neil Ruleson."
"I will send for him," said Christine, a little coldly, and then she drew the conversation towards the Raths and Ballisters. "Were they closely connected with Doctor Trenabie?" she asked.
"In a distant way," said Roberta, "but they are firm friends, for many generations."
"The Domine does not talk much about himsel"."
"No. He never did. He vowed himself early in life to chast.i.ty and poverty, for Christ"s sake, and he has faithfully kept his vow. Old Ballister gave him the kirk of Culraine at fifty pounds a year, and when the death of his father made him a comparatively rich man, he continued his humble life, and put out all the balance of his money in loans to poor men in a strait, or in permanent gifts, when such are necessary. Reginald used to consider him a saint, and many times he said that if I was married to a good man, he would try and live such a life as Magnus Trenabie."
"Once I knew Colonel and Angus Ballister."
"I heard Angus lately boasting about his acquaintance with you--that is since your book has set the whole newspaper world to praising you."
"He is married. I saw him with his bride."
"A proud, saucy, beautiful Canadian, educated in a tip-top New York boarding school, in all the p.r.o.nounced fads of the day. Now, I have seen New York girls of this progressive kind, and the polish being natural to them, they were not only dashing and impertinent, they were fascinating in all their dictatory moods. But this kind of polish is intolerable when laid over a hard, calculating, really puritanical Scotch nature. Such a girl has to kill some of her very best qualities, in order to take it on at all."
"She would be gey hard to live wi". I wouldn"t stay wi" her--not a day."
"Yet, I can tell you, both English and Scotch men are enslaved easily by this new kind of girl. She is only the girl of the period and the place, but they imagine her to be the very latest improvement in womanly styles. Now, I will astonish you. Reginald married the sister of Angus Ballister"s wife. She is equally beautiful, equally impertinent and selfish, and she holds Reginald in a leash. She makes fun of my dowdy dress and ways, and of my antiquated moralities, even to my brother, in my very presence, and Reggie looks at me critically, and then at Sabrina--that is the creature"s name--and says--"Roberta, you ought to get Brina to show you how to dress, and how to behave.
You should just see Brina tread our old fogyish social laws under her feet. She makes a sensation in every room she enters." And I answer pointedly--"I have no doubt of it." She understands my laugh, though Reggie is far from it. Of course she hates me, and she has quite changed Reggie. I have no longer any brother. I want to go and see if my husband cares for me."
"Of course he cares for you, more than for any ither thing. Go to him.
Mak" a man every way of him. Teach him to trust you, and you may trust him. Now go and sleep until the Domine comes, and he will tak" care of your further movements."
When the Domine came, he treated Roberta very like a daughter, but he would not hear her tale of woe over again. He said, "There are faults on both sides. You cannot strike fire, without both flint and steel."
"I have been so lonely and miserable, Doctor, since I saw you last.
Reggie has quite deserted me for her."