We went to Devonshire--I had had a small legacy a few months earlier, and I did not permit money cares to trouble my new and beautiful happiness. My only fear was that she would be saddened by thoughts of her father; but I am thankful to remember that in those first days she, too, was happy--so happy that there seemed to be hardly room in her mind for any thought but of me. And every hour of every day I said to my soul--
"But for that portent, whatever it boded, she might have been not my wife but his."
The first four or five days of our marriage are flowers that memory keeps always fresh. Kate"s face had recovered its wild-rose bloom, and she laughed and sang and jested and enjoyed all our little daily adventures with the fullest, freest-hearted gaiety. Then I committed the supreme imbecility of my life--one of those acts of folly on which one looks back all one"s life with a half stamp of the foot, and the unanswerable question, "How on earth could I have been such a fool?"
We were sitting in a little sitting-room, hideous in intention, but redeemed by blazing fire and the fact that two were there, sitting hand-in-hand, gazing into the fire and talking of their future and of their love. There was nothing to trouble us; no one had discovered our whereabouts, and my wife"s fear of Benoliel"s revenge seemed to have dissolved before the flame of our happiness.
And as we sat there, peaceful and untroubled, the Imp of the Perverse jogged my elbow, as, alas! he does so often, and I was moved to tell my wife that I, too, had heard that unearthly midnight music--that her hearing of it was not, as she had grown to think, a mere nightmare--a strange dream--but something more strange, more significant. I told her how I had heard the ma.s.s for the dead, and all the tale of that night.
She listened silently, and I thought her strangely indifferent. When I had finished, she took her hand from mine and covered her face.
"I believe it was a warning to us to flee temptation. We ought never to have married. Oh, my poor father!"
Her tone was one that I had never heard before. Its hopeless misery appalled me. And justly. For no arguments, no entreaties, no caresses, could win my wife back to the mood of an hour before.
She tried to be cheerful, but her gaiety was forced, and her laughter stung my heart.
She spoke no more about the music, and when I tried to reason with her about it she smiled a gloomy little smile, and said--
"I cannot be happy. I will not be happy. It is wrong. I have been very selfish and wicked. You think me very idiotic, I know, but I believe there is a curse on us. We shall never be happy again."
"Don"t you love me any more?" I asked like a fool.
"Love you?" She only repeated my words, but I was satisfied on that score. But those were miserable days. We loved each other pa.s.sionately, yet our hours were spent like those of lovers on the eve of parting.
Long, long silences took the place of foolish little jokes and childish talk which happy lovers know. And more than once, waking in the night, I heard my wife sobbing, and feigned sleep, with the bitter knowledge that I had no power to comfort her. I knew that the thought of her father was with her always, and that her anxiety about him grew, day by day. I wore myself out in trying to think of some way to divert her thoughts from him. I could not, indeed, pay his debts, but I could have him to live with us, a much greater sacrifice; and having a good connection, both as a musician and composer, I did not doubt that I could support her and him in comfort.
But Kate had made up her mind that the disgrace of bankruptcy would break her father"s heart; and my Kate is not easy to convince or persuade.
At Torquay it occurred to me that perhaps it would be well for her to see a priest. True, Father Fabian had counselled her to marry Benoliel, but I could hardly believe that most priests would advise a girl to marry a bad man, whom she did not love, for the sake of any worldly gain whatsoever.
She received the suggestion with favour, but without enthusiasm, and we sought out a Catholic church to make inquiries. As we opened the outer door of the church we heard music, and as we stood in the entrance and I laid my hand on the heavy inner door, my other hand was caught by Kate.
"Jasper," she whispered, "it is the same!"
Some person opening the door behind us compelled us to move forward. In another moment we stood in the dusky church--stood hand-in-hand in dim daylight, listening to the same music that each had heard in the lonely night on the eve of our wedding.
I put my arm round my wife and drew her back.
"Come away, my darling," I whispered; "it is a funeral service."
She turned her eyes on me. "I _must_ understand, I must see who it is. I shall go mad if you take me away now. I cannot bear any more."
We walked up the aisle, and placed ourselves as near as possible to the spot where the coffin lay, covered with flowers and with tapers burning about it. And we heard that music again, every note of it the same that each had heard before. And when the service was over I whispered to the sacristan--
"Whose music was that?"
"Our organist"s," he answered; "it is the first time they"ve had it.
Fine, wasn"t it?"
"Who is the--who was--who is being buried?"
"A foreign gentleman, sir; they do say as his lady as was to be gave him the slip on his wedding day, and he"d given her father thousands they say, if the truth was known."
"But what was he doing here?"
"Well, that"s the curious part, sir. To show his independence, what does he do but go the same tour he"d planned for his wedding trip. And there was a railway accident, and him and every one in his carriage killed in a twinkling, so to speak. Lucky for the young lady she was off with somebody else."
The sacristan laughed softly to himself.
Kate"s fingers gripped my arm.
"What was his name?" she asked.
I would not have asked: I did not wish to hear it.
"Benoliel," said the sacristan. "Curious name and curious tale. Every one"s talking of it."
Every one had something else to talk of when it was found that Benoliel"s pride, which had permitted him to buy a wife, had shrunk from reclaiming the purchase money when the purchase was lost to him. And to the man who had been willing to sell his daughter, the retention of her price seemed perfectly natural.
From the moment when she heard Benoliel"s name on the sacristan"s lips, all Kate"s gaiety and happiness returned. She loved me, and she hated Benoliel. She was married to me, and he was dead; and his death was far more of a shock to me than to her. Women are curiously kind and curiously cruel. And she never could see why her father should not have kept the money. It is noteworthy that women, even the cleverest and the best of them, have no perception of what men mean by honour.
How do I account for the music? My good critic, my business is to tell my story--not to account for it.
And do I not pity Benoliel? Yes. I can afford, now, to pity most men, alive or dead.
THE END.