"I can not!"
"You mean you will not."
"I can not."
"It is a secret of guilt and of shame? Tell me the truth?"
"It is; but the guilt is not mine. The shame--the bitter shame--and the burning expiation, G.o.d help me, are!"
"And you refuse to tell me?"
"Everard, I have sworn!" she cried out, wildly. "Would you have me break a death-bed oath?"
"I would have you break ten thousand such oaths," he exclaimed, "when they stand between you and your husband! Harriet Hunsden, your dead father was a villain!"
She sprung to her feet--she had been kneeling all this time--and confronted him like a Saxon pythoness. Her great gray eyes actually flashed fire.
"Go!" she cried. "Leave me this instant! Were you ten times my husband, you should never insult the memory of the best, the n.o.blest, the most devoted of fathers! I will never forgive you the words you have spoken until my dying day!"
"_You_ forgive!" he retorted, with sneering scorn, stung out of all generosity. "Forgiveness is no word for such lips as yours, Lady Kingsland! Keep your guilty secret, or your father"s or your mother"s, whosoever it may be; but not as my wife! No, madame! when the world begins to point the finger of scorn, through her own evil-doing, at the woman I have married, then from that hour she is no longer my wife.
The law of divorce shall free you and your secrets together; but until that freedom comes, I command you to meet this man no more! On your peril you write to him, or speak to him, or meet him again. If you do, by the living Lord, I will murder you both!"
He dashed out of the room like a man gone mad, leaving her standing petrified in the middle of the floor.
One instant she stood, the room heaving, the walls rocking around her; then, with a low, moaning cry, she tottered blindly forward and fell like a stone to the floor.
The storm burst at midnight. A gale surged through the trees with a noise like thunder; the rain fell in torrents. And while rain and wind beat tempestuously over the earth and the roaring sea, the husband paced up and down the library, with clinched teeth and locked hands and death-like face--for the time utterly mad--and the wife lay alone in her luxuriant room, deaf and blind to the tempest, in a deep swoon.
CHAPTER XXVI.
"THE PERSON IN LONDON."
The February day was closing in London in a thick, clammy, yellow fog.
No keen frost, no sparkling stars brightened the chill spring twilight; the sky, where it could be seen, was of a uniform leaden tint, the damp mist wet you to the bone, and a long, lamentable blast whistled around the corners and pierced chillingly through the thickest wraps, and pa.s.sengers strode through the greasy black mud with surly faces and great-coats and the inevitable London umbrella.
At the window of a dull and dirty little lodging a woman sat, in this dark gloaming, gazing out at the pa.s.sers-by. The house had a perpetual odor of onions and cabbage and dinner, as it is in the nature of such houses to have, and the room, "first floor front," was in the last stage of lodging-house shabbiness and discomfort.
The woman was quite alone--a still, dark figure sitting motionless by the grimy window. She might have been carved in stone, so still she sat--so still she had sat for more than two hours.
Her dress was black, of the poorest sort, frayed and worn, and she shivered under a threadbare shawl drawn close around her shoulders.
Yet, in spite of poverty and sickness, and despair and middle age, the woman was beautiful still, with a dark and haggard and wild sort of beauty that would have haunted one to one"s dying day.
In her youth, and her first freshness and innocence, she must have been lovely as a dream; but that loveliness was all gone now.
The listless hands lay still, the great, glittering dark eyes stared blankly at the dingy houses opposite, at the straggling pedestrians, at the thickening gloom. The short February day was almost night now, the street-lamps flared yellow and dull athwart the clammy fog.
"Another day," the woman murmured, "another endless day of sick despair gone. Alone and dying--the most miserable creature on the wide earth.
Oh, great G.o.d, who didst forgive Magdalene, have a little pity on me!"
A spasm of fierce anguish crossed her face for an instant, fading away, and leaving the hopeless despair more hopeless than before.
"I am mad, worse than mad, to hope as I do. She will never look upon my guilty face--she so pure, so stainless, so sweet--how dare I ask it?
Oh, what happy women there are in the world! Wives who love and are beloved, and are faithful to the end! And I--think how I drag on living with all that makes life worth having gone forever, while those happy ones, whose lives are one blissful dream, are torn by death from all who love them. To think that I once had a husband, a child, a home; to think what I am now--to think of it, and not to go mad!"
She laid her face against the cold gla.s.s with a miserable groan. "Have pity on me, oh, Lord! and let me die!"
There was a rush of carriage-wheels without, a hansom cab whirled up to the door, and a tall young man leaped out. Two minutes more and the tall young man burst impetuously into the dark room.
"All alone, Mrs. Denover," called a cheery voice, "and all in the dark?
Darkness isn"t wholesome--too conducive to low spirits and the blue devils. Halloo! Jane Anne, idol of my young affections, bring up the gas."
He leaned over the greasy bal.u.s.ter, shouting into the invisible regions below, and was answered promptly enough by a grimy maid-servant with a flickering dip-candle.
""Tain"t my fault, nor yet missis"s," said this grimy maid. "Mrs.
Denover will sit in the dark, which I"ve----"
"That will do, Jane Anne," taking the dip and unceremoniously cutting her short. "Vamoose! evaporate! When I want you I"ll sing out."
He re-entered the room and placed the candle on the table. The woman had risen, and stood with both hands clasped over her heart, a wild, gleaming, eager light in her black eyes. But she strove to restrain herself.
"I am glad to see you back, Mr. Parmalee," she said. "I have been expecting you for the last two days."
"And wearing yourself to skin and bone, as I knew you would, with your fidgets. What"s the good of taking on so? I told you I"d come back as quick as I could, and I"ve done so. It ain"t my fault that the time"s been so long--it"s Lady Kingsland"s."
"You have seen her?"
"That I have. And very well worth seeing she is, I tell you. She"s as handsome as a picture, though not so handsome as you must have been at her age, either, Mrs. Denover. And she says she"ll see you."
"Oh, thank G.o.d!"
The woman tottered hack and sunk into a chair.
"That"s right," said Mr. Parmalee; "take a seat, and let us talk it all over at our ease."
He took one himself, not in the ordinary fashion, but with his face to the back, his arms crossed over it, and his long legs twisted scientifically round the bottom.
"I"ve seen him, and I"ve seen her," said the photographer, "and a finer-looking couple ain"t from here to anywhere. And as the Lord made "em, He matched "em for an all-fired prouder pair you couldn"t meet in a summer-day"s walk."
"She comes of a proud race," the woman murmured, feebly. "The Hunsdens are of the best and oldest stock in England."
"And she"s a thorough-bred, if ever there was a thorough-bred one yet, and blood will show in a woman as well as a horse. Yes, she"s proud, she"s handsome and dreadful cut up, I can tell you, at the news I brought her."
The woman covered her face with her hands with a low moan. Mr.
Parmalee composedly went on: