A Mad Marriage E-Book

May Agnes Fleming

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Mr. Gordon Carill marries Miss Rosamond Lovell, and then discovers that she is not the daughter of Colonel Lovell, but a girl with a low birth rate and a bad reputation, who was a concert singer. She is unusually beautiful, she is only eighteen years old, and the dark experiences of her past life, to put it mildly, had to hurry. In horror, she leaves her husband, who then pursues her.

Leseprobe

Contents

A MAD MARRIAGE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PART SECOND

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

PART THIRD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

A MAD MARRIAGE

CHAPTER I

Joan Kennedy’s Story–”The House that Wouldn’t Let”

It lay down in a sort of hollow, the hillside sloping up behind, crowned with dark pine woods, shut in by four grim wooden walls, two dark windows, like scowling eyes, to be seen from the path, and was known to all as “the house that wouldn’t let.”

It stood neither on street nor high road. You left the town behind you–the queer, fortified, Frenchified town of Quebec; you passed through St. John’s Gate, through St. John’s street-outside-the-gate, to the open country, and, a mile on, you came upon a narrow, winding path, that seemed straggling out of sight, and trying to hide itself among the dwarf cedars and spruces. Following this for a quarter of a mile, passing one or two small stone cabins, you came full upon Saltmarsh–this house that wouldn’t let.

It was an ugly place–a ramshackle place, the lonesomest place you could see, but still why it wouldn’t let was not so clear.

The rent was merely nominal. Mr. Barteaux, its owner, kept it in very good repair. There was a large vegetable garden attached, where, if you were of an agricultural turn, you might have made your rent twice over. There was game in the woods; trout in the ice-cold brooks; but noventurous sportsman took up his abode at Saltmarsh. It wasn’t even haunted; it looked rather like that sort of thing, but nobody ever went exactly so far as to affirm that it was. No ghastly corpse-lights ever glimmered from those dull upper windows, no piercing shrieks ever rent the midnight silence, no spectre lady, white and tall, ever flitted through the desolate rooms of Saltmarsh. No murder had ever been done there; no legend of any kind was connected with the place, its history was prosy and commonplace to a degree. Yet still, year in, year out, the inscription remained up over the dingy wooden gateway, this house to be let; and no tenant ever came.

“Tom Grimshaw must have been mad when he built the beastly old barn,” the present proprietor would growl; “what with taxes, and repairs, and insurance, there it stands, eating its own head off, and there it may stand, for what I see, to the crack of doom. One would think the very trees that surround it say, in their warning dreariness, as the sentinels of Helheim used in Northern mythology:

“‘Who passes here is damned.’”

If this strong language rouses your curiosity, and you asked the proprietor the history of the house, you got it terse and lucid, thus:

“Old Tom Grimshaw built it, sir. Old Tom Grimshaw was my maternal uncle, rest his soul; it is to be hoped he has more sense in the other world than he ever had in this. He was a misogynist, sir, of the rabidest sort, hating a petticoat as you and I hate the devil. Don’t know what infernal mischief the women had ever done him–plenty, no doubt; it is what they were created for. The fact remains–the sight of one had much the same effect upon him as a red scarf on a mad bull. He bought this marshy spot for a song, built that disgustingly ugly house, barricaded himself with that timber wall, and lived and died there, like Diogenes, or Robinson Crusoe, or any other old bloke you like. As heir-at-law, the old rattle-trap fell to me, and a precious legacy it has been, I can tell you. It won’t rent, and it has to be kept in repair, and I wish to Heaven old Tom Grimshaw had taken it with him, wherever he is!"

That was the history of Saltmarsh. For eight years it was to be let, and hadn’t let, and that is where the matter began and ended.

Gray, lonely, weather-beaten, so I had seen the forlorn house any time these twenty years; so this evening of which I am to write I saw it again, with the mysterious shadow of desolation brooding over it, those two upper windows frowning down–sullen eyes set in its sullen, silent face. From childhood it had had its fascination for me–it had been my Bluebeard’s castle, my dread, my delight. As I grew older, this fascinating horror grew with my growth, and at seven-and-twenty it held me with as powerful a spell as it had done at seven.

It was a cold and overcast February afternoon. An icy blast swept up from the great frozen gulf, over the heights of Quebec, over the bleak, treeless road, along which I hurried in the teeth of the wind. In the west a stormy and lurid sunset was fading out–fierce reds and brazen yellows paling into sullen gray. One long fiery lance of that wrathful sunset, slanting down the pines, struck those upper windows of Saltmarsh, and lit them into sheets of copper gold.

I was in a hurry–I was the bearer of ill news–and ill news travels apace. It was bitterly cold, as I have said, and snow was falling. I had still half a mile of lonesome high road to travel, and night was at hand; but the spell of Saltmarsh, that had never failed to hold me yet, held me again. I stood still and looked at it; at those two red cyclopean eyes, those black stacks of chimneys, its whole forbidding, scowling front.

“It is like a house under a curse,” I thought; “a dozen murders might be done inside those wooden walls, and no one be the wiser. Will any human being ever call Saltmarsh home again, I wonder?”

“This house is to let?”

I am not nervous as a rule, but as a soft voice spoke these words at my elbow, I jumped. I had heard no sound, yet now a woman stood at my side, on the snow-beaten path.

“I beg your pardon; I have startled you, I am afraid.I have been here for some time looking at this house. I see it is to let.”

I stepped back and looked at her, too much surprised for a moment to speak. To meet a stranger at Saltmarsh, in the twilight of a bitter February day, was a marvel indeed.

I stood and looked at her; and I thought then, as I think now, as I will think to the last day of my life, that I saw one of the most beautiful faces on which the sun ever shone.

I have said she was a woman–a girl would have been the fitter word; whatever her age might have been, she did not look a day over seventeen. She was not tall, and she was very slender; that may have given her that peculiarly childish look–I am a tall young woman, and she would not have reached my shoulder. A dress of black silk trailed the ground, a short jacket of finest seal wrapped her, a muff of seal held her hands. A hood of black velvet was on her head, and out of this rich hood her richer beauty shone upon me, a new revelation of how lovely it is possible for a woman to be. Years have come and gone since that evening, but the wonderful face that looked at me that February twilight, for the first time, is before me at this moment, as vividly as then. Two great, tawny eyes, with a certain wildness in their light, a skin of pearl, a red mouth like a child’s, a low forehead, a straight nose, a cleft chin, the gleam of small, white teeth, rise before me like a vision, and I understand how men, from the days of Samson the Strong, have lain down life and honor, and their soul’s salvation, for just such women as this. Surely a strange visitant to the house that wouldn’t let, and in the last hour of the day.

All this in a moment of time, while we stand and face each other. Then the soft voice speaks again, with a touch of impatient annoyance in its tone:

“I beg your pardon. You heard me? This house is to let?”

I point to the sign, to the legend and inscription affixed to the gate, and read it stoically aloud: “This house to be let.”

“Evidently my lady is not used to being kept waiting,” I think, “whoever she is."

“Yes, yes, I see that,” she says, still impatiently; “there is no one living in it at present, is there?”

“Madame,” I say, briefly, “no one has lived there for eight years.”

The wonderful tawny black eyes, almost orange in some lights, and whose like I have never seen but in one other face, dilate a little as they turn from me to the dead, silent house.

“Why?” she asks.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Need one ask that question, madame, after looking at the house? Who would care to live in so lonely, so lost a place as that?”

“I would. No one would ever think of coming here.”

She made the answer almost under her breath, more to herself than to me, her pale face turned toward the house.

Its pallor struck me now, not the pallor of ill health, or of natural complexion, but such fixed whiteness, as some extraordinary terror may once in a lifetime blanch a human face.

“No one would ever think of coming here,” I repeated, inwardly. “I should think not indeed. Are you in hiding then, my beautiful young lady, and afraid of being found out? You are lovelier than anything out of a frame. You are one of the rich and elect of the earth, or you would not be dressed like that, but who are you, and what are you doing here alone and at this hour?”

The last red light of the sunset had entirely faded away. Cold, gray, and overcast the wintry sky spread above us like a pall, and over Cape Diamond, with its citadel crown, swept the icy wind from the frozen St. Lawrence. One or two white flakes came sifting down from the fast drifting sky–night and storm were falling together, and it was still half a mile to my home.

“If you desire any information about this place, madame,” I said, “you had better apply to Mr. Barteaux, No.–St. Louis Street, Quebec; he is the present owner. It is to let, and he will be very glad of a tenant. Good-evening.”

She made no reply, she did not even seem to have heard. She stood, her hands in her muff, her eyes fixed with astrangely sombre intensity on the blank wooden wall, her profile gleaming cold and white in the steely twilight. I know little of passion or despair, but surely it was most passionate despair I read in those fixed, sightless eyes.

I turned and left her. I was interested of course, but it would not do, to stand mooning here and let night overtake me. Once, as I hurried along the deserted road, I looked back. The small lonely figure still stood as I had left it, motionless, a black speck against the chill darkness of the wintry sky.

“Something wrong there,” I thought; “I wonder who she is and what has brought her here. None of the officers’ wives or daughters–I have seen all of them at the major’s. One thing is certain, Mr. Barteaux will never rent Saltmarsh to a slip of a girl like that.”

And then the mysterious young lady and all connected with her slipped from my mind, for the red light from my mother’s cottage streamed far afield, and the ill tidings I was bringing home filled my whole thoughts.

In this strange record which it becomes my duty to write, a few words of myself must be said, and may as well be said here and done with. I was Joan Kennedy then, and am Joan Kennedy still. I was seven-and-twenty years of age, and the sole support of a feeble old mother and a sister of twelve. My mother who had been a governess in her youth, and in her native city of Glasgow, had educated me considerably above the station I filled, giving me a very thorough English education, and teaching me to speak French with a fine Scottish accent. At my father’s death, ten years before, I went out to service, and in service I had remained ever since. This night, as I hastened homeward through the snowy darkness, my errand was to tell my mother and sister that I had lost my place, and had no present prospect of being able to get another. That is Joan Kennedy’s whole past and present history, so far as you need know it.

The darkness was all white with whirling snow as I opened the cottage door and entered. All was bright and cosy here. A large red fire burned on the hearth, the tea table was spread, a little snub-nosed teapot wafted its incense alowand aloft, my mother sat knitting in the ingle nook, and my pretty sister Jessie sang, as she stitched away, at the table. At sight of their snow-powdered visitor both dropped their work in amaze.

“Joan!” Then Jessie’s arms were around my neck, and my mother’s poor old face lit up with delight; “Joan! in this storm, and at this time of night and alone! Are you alone, Joan?”

“Who is likely to be with me, little Jess? Yes, I am alone; and you are likely to have more of my delectable society than perhaps may prove pleasant or profitable. Mother dear, I have lost my place.”

“Joan!”

“I am not to blame, mother, believe that. Only (it is not a pleasant thing to tell) Mrs. Englehart has taken it into that supremely foolish head of hers to be jealous of me–of poor, plain Joan Kennedy! The major, a kind old soul, has spoken a friendly word or two in passing and–behold the result! Don’t let us talk about it. I’ll start out to-morrow morning and search all Quebec, and get a situation or perish in the attempt. And now, Mistress Jessie, I’ll take a cup of tea.”

I threw off my shawl and bonnet, laughing for fear I should break down and cry, and took my seat. As I did so, there came a loud knock at the door. So loud, that Jessie nearly dropped the snub-nosed teapot.

“Good gracious, Joan! who is this?”

I walked to the door and opened it–then fell back aghast. For firelight and candlelight streamed full across the face of the lady I had seen at the House to Let.

“May I come in?”

She did not wait for permission. She walked in past me, straight to the fire, and stood before it. Furs and silks were coated with the fast-falling snow. She drew her hands out of her muff, tossed it aside, drew off her gloves, and held to the blaze two small white hands, all twinkling with rings. Mother sat speechlessly gazing at this dazzling apparition. Jessie stood with eyes and mouth agape, and my own heart, I must confess, fluttered nervously as I looked. Who wasshe, and what did she want? For fully a minute she stood staring at the fire, then feeling that some one must say something, I took heart of grace, and said it.

“You have been caught in the snow-storm,” I ventured, drawing near. “I was afraid you would. Will you please to sit down?”

She took no notice of the proffered politeness. The tawny eyes turned from the fire to my face.

“Will you tell me your name?” was the strange young lady’s abrupt question.

“Joan Kennedy.”

“You are a single woman?”

“I am, madame.”

“You live here–in this house, with–” a pause and a stare at mother and Jessie.

“With my mother and sister–yes, at present. As a rule I live at service in Quebec.”

“In service?” Another pause and a stare at me. “Joan Kennedy, would you live with me?”

This was a leading question with a vengeance. “With you, madame?” I gasped.

“With me. I want a maid, a companion, what you will. Wages are no object–to a trustworthy person. I will give anything she asks. I am all alone–all alone–” her lips trembled, her voice died away; “all alone in the world. I have had great trouble and I want some quiet place to live–some quiet person to live with me, for awhile. I am going to take that house to let. I was overtaken by the storm, just now, and followed you here, instead of going back to the hotel. I like your face–you look as though you may have had trouble yourself, and so could feel for others. I wish you would come and live with me. I have told you I am in dreadful trouble–” she paused, a sort of anguish coming over her face: “I have lost my husband,” she said with a great gasp, and covering her face with both hands broke out into such a dreadful crying as I never heard or saw before.

“Oh, poor dear!” said my mother. For me, I stood still and looked at her. What could I say–what could I do? Great sobs shook her from head to foot. A widow! I glancedat her left hand. Yes, there among the diamonds gleamed that plain band of gold that has brought infinite bliss or misery to millions of women–a wedding ring. It lasted not two minutes. Almost fiercely she dashed away her tears and looked up.

“My name is Mrs. Gordon,” she said; “as I tell you, I am all alone. I came to Quebec yesterday, I saw that house advertised, and so came to see it. It suits me, and I will take it for the next six months at least. Some one must live with me there. I like your looks. Will you come?”

Would I come? would I live in the House to Let? I stood gasping–the proposal was like a cold douche–it took my breath away.

“I will pay any wages to a suitable person–any wages,” emphatically this; “and in advance. It is a lonely place, it suits me the better for that, and you don’t look like a young woman afraid of bogies. If you won’t come,” haughtily, “of course I shall find some one else.”

“I–I have not refused,” I gasped; “–it’s all so sudden. You must let me think it over. I will tell you to-morrow.”

Her mood changed–she lifted a face to mine that was like the helpless, appealing face of a child–she held up two clasped hands.

“Do come,” she said piteously; “I will pay you anything–anything! I only want to be quiet for awhile, and away from everybody. I am all alone in the world. I have lost my husband–lost him–lost him–”

“The lady is going to faint!” screamed Jessie.

Sure enough! whether the heat of the fire had overcome her, or the “dreadful trouble” of which she spoke had broken her down, she swayed unsteadily to and fro, the words dying on her lips, and I caught her as she fell.

So it was that the first tenant of the House to Let came into my home, and into my life, to change it utterly from that hour.

CHAPTER II

A WOMAN WITH A SECRET

Mrs. Gordon did not leave our cottage that night–did not leave it for two whole weeks, and then the house that wouldn’t let was let at last, and Saltmarsh had a tenant.

It would be of little use at this late day to detail all the arguments she used to win me for her attendant and companion–the most irresistible argument of all was wages, treble, fourfold what I had ever earned before, and paid in advance. Of her and her story I had very serious doubts, but beggars must not be choosers. I took her money and became her paid companion.

For hours that night, after mother and Jessie were in bed, I sat beside Mrs. Gordon, listening to the story she told of herself. Brief, vague, and unsatisfactory to a degree, that story was. She had been an orphan from childhood. She was not wealthy, but she had sufficient; great trouble had suddenly come upon her, and she had lost her husband after four months of wedded life. That was all.

“Lost your husband!” I repeated, curiously, looking at her. “Do you mean that your husband is dead?”

A simple and natural question, surely; but her face, pale before, turned of a dead whiteness from brow to chin.

“Dead of course,” she answered, huskily; “for pity’s sake, don’t ask me questions. It is only a week ago, and I cannot bear it. Only a week, and it seems like a century. And to think–to think of all the long, lonely, empty years that are to come! Never to hear his voice, never to see his face more!”

And then she broke down again and wept–oh, how she wept! My heart was full of compassion, and yet–onlydead one week, and running away like this, not in mourning, not a friend in the world, rich, young and beautiful. A queer story on the face of it–a very queer story indeed.

Who is to gauge the power of woman’s beauty? If she had been a plain young person, I believe ten pounds a week would not have tempted me to take up with her and bury myself alive at Saltmarsh. But her wonderful beauty fairly fascinated me, her lovely face won me, even against my better judgment.

“And if that face can make a fool of you, Joan, my dear,” I said to myself, as I went to bed, “what awful havoc it must make among mankind! How very unpleasant for poor Mr. Gordon to die and leave it, and how desperately fond she must have been of him, to be sure!”

“You will let me stay here until the house yonder is ready,” she said next morning, with the air of one not used to being refused. “I dislike hotels–people stare so. I will make you no trouble, and I want to be perfectly quiet, and quite alone.”

It was curious to see her with her lovely face, her elegant dress, her diamond rings, and her dark flowing hair, so strangely out of place in our small, bare, homely house. I hardly know whether she should have stayed or not, but our poverty pleaded for her, and I consented to all she proposed. To take the house for her, to see it furnished, to attend to everything, while she herself kept absolutely out of sight.

My new duties began at once. I went to Mr. Barteaux, and abruptly informed him I had a tenant for the House to Let.

“A widow lady, sir,” I said; “a Mrs. Gordon. Any reasonable rent she is willing to pay, and I am engaged to live with her.”

“Bless my soul!” said Mr. Barteaux. “You don’t say so! A tenant at last. A widow lady, eh? How many in family, Joan?”

I knew the vision before Mr. Barteaux’s mind’s eye. A florid matron of fifty, with half-a-dozen strapping boys and girls.

“No family, sir. Quite a young widow. You must close the bargain with me, Mr. Barteaux; her loss is recent, she is in trouble, and doesn’t feel like transacting business herself. There are no references; instead, she will pay in advance if you choose.”

We closed the bargain there and then; and that very day Saltmarsh was thrown open to the sunshine and free winds of Heaven. What an odd, awesome feeling it gave me to go with my mysterious new mistress through the gruesome apartments, silent and forsaken so long. Four, out of the ten rooms the house contained, were chosen to be furnished and fitted up, papered, painted, whitewashed, carpeted, curtained. All fell to me, and all was done in two brief weeks, and well done, though I say it, and Mrs. Gordon and Joan Kennedy, it was known to all Quebec, were domesticated at Saltmarsh.

I wonder now, as I sit here and look back at that strange time, that even poverty could have tempted me to endure the life I led all those dreary months. The listless, lonely days spent in reading or rambling through the empty, echoing rooms, the long awesome nights when the winds held high carnival without and the rats high jinks within. No one ever came to the house, except a stout Frenchwoman, who did our washing and general drudgery, coming every morning and going every night. For me, my position was a sinecure, nothing to do, and treble wages for doing it, but the hardest work for all, that I ever did in my life.

And my mistress! Well, the days, and the weeks, and the months went by, and she was as great a mystery as ever. Where she had come from, how long she meant to remain, whither she intended going, were all sealed secrets to me. She never wrote letters, she never received any. She could not have been much more dead to all the world outside our wooden walls if she had been in her shroud and coffin.

She spent the heavy, aimless days sitting mostly at her chamber window–a dark-draped, slender figure, a dreary, lovely face, two great, hopeless eyes, a total wreck of life. The story of her life, whatever it had been, no common one be sure, was ended for the time; the play was over, the lightsout, and nothing left but to sit and look at the curtain. A woman young as she was, of the wrong sort, of the silent, secret sort, a woman with something on her mind, a woman with a secret.

Two things I discovered–only two. One, that her husband was not dead, but deserted; that she had run away from him and was hiding here, in horrible dread of his ever finding her out. Secondly, that in spite of this running away and this constant terror, she still loved him, with a passionate and most despairing love.

I had gone into her room one night, and found her sitting holding a picture before her, and gazing on it as if entranced. It was her principal occupation. I had often found her so before, but the picture itself I had never seen. To-night, however, she called me to her in her abrupt way.

“Joan,” she said, “come here.”

She had been crying, I could see–silently and miserably. I went and looked over her shoulder at the picture.

Photography was in its infancy in those days–every family had not its picture gallery. This was a daguerreotype–the portrait of a young, dashing-looking and rather handsome man. A beardless and boyish face, yet a very manly one, looking up at you with frankly smiling eyes.

“It is all I have left,” she said, with tremulous lips. “I will never see him again. I loved him and I have spoiled his whole life. It would have been better for him he had died than ever looked in my face.”

“Indeed,” was my rather stupid answer. But I was used to her extravagant talk and not much affected by it. “He is a friend of yours, madame?”

She looked at her picture, and over her face there dawned a light that made her beauty radiant.

“He is my husband!” she answered.

I drew back and looked at her–aghast, I must confess.

“Your husband!” I repeated. “Oh–was your husband, you mean? You told me he was dead.”

“Dead to me. Oh, Joan! dead to me, but alive and well. Alive and well; and though I should live to be a hundred, I may never see his face again. Never again; andthere are times when I would lay down my very life only to look upon him once more.”

“You love him and–he has left you?” I ventured.

“I love him–and I left him. I love him with all my heart, and I have fled from him, and buried myself here for fear of him. I wonder I don’t go mad, or die. Once I thought I would without him; but somehow life drags on and on, and one is a coward, and afraid to end it one’s self. He loved me once, Joan–ah, dear Heaven, yes! he loved me and made me his wife; and now, and now, Joan, if ever he finds me, I believe he will take my life.”

I looked back at the frank, fair, boyish face.

“He take your life!” I said; “that bright-faced boy! No, Mrs. Gordon, murderers don’t look like that.”

“He is the truest, the noblest, the bravest of men, a loyal friend and a gallant gentleman.”

“And yet his wife runs away from him, and says if ever they meet he will take her life.”

She scarcely seemed to heed me. She laid her head on her folded arms as though she never cared to lift it again.

“Ah! let me alone,” she said. “You know nothing about it. If I could but die and make an end of it all! Only this, Joan,” she looked up suddenly, swift, dark terror in her eyes; “I dreamed last night he was searching for me–that he was here. He came and stood before me, stern and terrible, holding my death-warrant in his hand! Don’t let him come! don’t let anyone come! If ever we meet, I believe in my soul he will kill me.”

Was Mrs. Gordon going mad? that was the very serious question uppermost in my thoughts when I went to bed that night, and for many nights after. It was a very queer and uncomfortable affair altogether, and the sooner I got out of it the better; and just as I was beginning to think of tendering my resignation, behold the climax all at once came of itself.

March, April and May had passed–it was the close of June. I had gone into the city one afternoon for our weekly store of groceries, finished my purchases, and, basket on arm, was going home. My way led up St. Louis Street; andpassing the office of Mr. Barteaux, I saw him in his own doorway, deep in conversation with a stranger. A look at that stranger, and with one great jump my heart was in my mouth. For it was the original of the picture–it was Mrs. Gordon’s husband. “The hour and the man were come!”

Neither saw me. I paused a second and looked again. The same, beyond doubt; the same, with a difference–worn and haggard, set and stern–the same, yet that was the face of a frank, happy boy, this of a reckless, desperate man. A straw hat was pulled over his eyes, a gray summer overcoat was buttoned up–a soldier and a gentleman, that was evident at a glance.

I turned up a side street and hastened breathlessly on. My first duty was to my mistress. I must tell her that what she dreaded had come–that the husband from whom she had fled, was here. I walked at my utmost speed, and in half an hour was at Saltmarsh.

“She said he would kill her!” I thought, turning hot and cold; “and who knows that he will not? He would not be the first husband that has killed a runaway wife.”

I ran through the rooms, all flurried and breathless, calling out her name.

She was not in any of them. Of late, since June had come, the fine weather at times had tempted her out. This, most unfortunately, was one of the times. I knew pretty well where to find her–on the river bank below there was a strip of yellow sand, where she was fond of walking up and down in the sunshine. She was sure to be there now.

I rushed out, looking wildly around. Yes, there was the tall, soldierly figure in the straw hat and summery overcoat, coming rapidly toward me at a swinging pace.

I declare I almost screamed, so nervous and overwrought had I become.

If he was before me–if he came upon her suddenly, the shock alone might kill her, for she was far from strong of late. I turned and fled headlong down the steep hillside path, still calling her name. Yes, there, quite alone, pacing slowly up and down the sandy riverside path, looking at the fast-flowing water, Mrs. Gordon walked.

She paused in her slow walk, and turned to me in wonder at my break-neck descent.

How beautiful she was! even in that supreme moment, I remember that was my first thought.

“For pity’s sake, fly!” I cried out; “fly at once. He is here!”

She laid both her hands suddenly over her heart. Across her face there flashed the electric light of a great and sudden joy.

“Who?” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Your husband, the man whose picture you showed me. Fly at once if you are afraid of him. I saw him, I tell you he is coming. Oh, Heaven!–he is here!”

I fell back in consternation. Yes, he had followed me; he was coming down the path, he was here.

I turned to my mistress. Would she faint? would she fly? Neither.

Who is to understand men’s wives! Terror was there, in that wild, white face, it is true, but over and above it all, such rapture as I never before saw in the face of man or woman. She loved him and she saw him again–all was said in that.

He walked down the path. She came a step forward, with that transfigured face, and held out to him both arms with an eloquent cry:

“Gordon! Gordon!”

CHAPTER III

THE DECREE OF DIVORCE

It had come. I could do no more. Nothing remained for me but to retreat into the background, and wait with bated breath and beating heart for this play of “powerful domestic interest” to play itself out.

He had descended the steep, hillside path and stood on the strip of yellow sand, face to face with the wife who had deserted him. The full light of the June afternoon fell upon his face as he stood there before her, a face more hollow-eyed and haggard, more worn, than it had even looked to me first. A face set and stern, with little of mercy or pity in it.

He waved her back. Only the slightest motion of his hand, but she shrank and shivered like a child who has got a blow.

“No nearer,” he said in a voice as cold and steady as the chill gray eyes that looked upon her. “Unless your sense of hearing has become dulled since the night of Lovell’s death, when you played eavesdropper so well, you will be able to hear all I have to say, where you stand. I will not detain you long, and you need not wear that frightened face. I am not going to kill you–the time for all that is passed. But let me tell you this: If you had not played eavesdropper that memorable night five months ago, if you had not fled as you did, if I had found you before me when I returned, you would never have lived to see the morning. The greatest fool that ever walked the earth I had been–if you and I had met that night I would have been a murderer as well.”

All this he said in a slow, self-repressed sort of tone, but the deep gray eyes that watched her were full of such hatred as no words of mine can tell.

“Spare me, Gordon,” she answered, with a sobbing cry.

“Spare you?” he repeated, with cold scorn; “have I not said so? I would not lift a finger to harm a hair of your head, or to save your life if I saw you drowning in the river yonder. You are as dead to me as though I had gone home and strangled you that eventful night. The madness of love and rage, alike, are past forever. I have cut you off utterly and absolutely from my life. You have been in hiding here, they tell me, in daily dread of your life no doubt. Let us end all that. You are free to come and go where and how you will. After to-day I will never look upon your face again of my own free will, alive or dead.”

She gave a shrill cry, like a culprit under the lash, her hands still held out to him in dumb agony.

“I have not even come to Quebec now in search of you,” the cold, pitiless voice went on; “don’t think it. I came to visit General Forrester, stationed yonder at the Citadel, before leaving this accursed Canada forever–accursed since in it I met you.”

Her outstretched hands went up, with a dull moaning sound, and covered her face.

“Would you care to know how I found you out, and why I came?” he slowly went on. “Listen: Last night at mess the fellows were speaking of a widow lady, a most mysterious widow lady, young and beautiful, so rumor said, who had taken a desolate old house in a marsh, and there shut herself up, hidden from mortal man and light of day. Her name was Mrs. Gordon. Where she came from, who she was, why she had come, no man could tell. Before the name was uttered I knew it was you. Knew that when you fled from Toronto you fled here; knew that the lost woman who had been my wife was found.”

Her hands dropped. For the first time she stood upright before him and looked him full in the face, stung, it would seem, into turning at bay by these last words.

“Who had been your wife!” she cried, passionately; “who is your wife, Gordon Caryll! Nothing,” a sort of exultation lit her face as she said it, “nothing but death can ever alter that!"

For fully a minute he stood silently looking at her, a smile on his lips, a pitiless triumph in his eyes.

“Nothing can change that?” he repeated; “nothing but death? Well, I will answer that before we part. Let me go on. I knew it was you, this woman they talked of, and I said to myself: ‘I will find her to-morrow; I will look upon her face once more, for the last time, and I will see what there was, if I can, in its wax-doll beauty, its yellow-black eyes, its straight nose and silken hair, to turn men into blind, besotted fools.’ Take down your hands, Rosamond, and let me look at you.”

She had shrank from him, from his smile, in some nameless, dreadful fear, that made her cover her white face once more. She dropped her hands now, at his bidding, looking up with dilated eyes.

“Gordon, have mercy on me. I love you!”

Again she stretched forth her hands to him with that piteous cry. Again he motioned her imperiously back, his lips set, his eyes pitiless, his face like stone.

“Stand still!” he ordered.

She obeyed.

For fully two minutes this strange tableau was before me, and all unseen, in my obscure nook, I stood gazing with an interest that held me rapt and spellbound. He, drawn up to his full height, his face like white stone, so hard, so cold, that chill, half smile still on his lips. She, half cowering before him, her lovely, colorless face uplifted, her eyes full of dreadful terror, her loose, feathery hair blowing in the wind,–young, fair, innocent to see, at least. So they stood–stern young judge, quivering little criminal, until it grew almost too much even for my nerves to endure.

“You are a beautiful little woman, Rosamond,” he said, at length; “one of those exceptional women, who, like Ninon de L’Enclos, will be beautiful at eighty. And that fair face of yours will do its devil’s work, I don’t doubt, to the end of the chapter. To possess that face for four short months I have lost all that man holds dear–name, honor, home, friends, fortune–all. For the name that you have borne and disgraced, I will bear no longer. I have sold out–do you know it? my father has disinherited me–I am the laughingstock of all who ever knew me. I look back and wonder at my own infatuation. I loved you–I trusted you. Oh, God!” he cried out, a spasm of anguish distorting his face; “I married you–you! You played your game well, you and Lovell. It was your trade; and with such a fool as I, it was an easy game enough. But you had cause to fear, and you knew it–I say again you did well to fly. I went out from Lovell’s death-bed a madman–if I had found you on my return, by the light above us, I would have murdered you!”

She shrank back from him, trembling with pure physical terror now, from head to foot.

“No need to tremble–no need to fear now,” he went on, his voice losing its sudden fury, and sinking to its former cold monotone; “I have told you all that is past and done with. But before we part, I should like to hear once from your own lips, just once (not that I doubt) that Major Lovell’s story was true.”

Her only answer was to cower still farther away, and with a great, heart-wrung sob, to bury her face once again in her hands.

“Ah, hide it,” he said bitterly; “hide it forever from the sight of man–the fairest, falsest face ever made. But speak–if such lips as yours can speak truth, and tell me that Lovell’s story was true.”

“Gordon! have mercy.”

“Was it true?”

“I loved you, Gordon! As there is a heaven above us, I loved you with all my heart.”

He half laughed–even in that moment.

“Your heart–yours! What witty things are said by accident! Never mind your heart or your love. I know what both are worth. Answer my question. Was Lovell’s story true. One word–yes or no.”

“Gordon, I was faithful. Oh! what shall I say to him to–”

“Was it true? Yes or no?”

“Gordon, I swear–”

“Was it true?” he cried, his eyes flashing fire; “no more words! Yes or no.”

“Yes, but–”

“That will do. We won’t waste words about it. You would swear black was white, I daresay, but keep your histrionic talents for the New York stage again–you may need them before long. Let us get back to what you said a moment ago. ‘You are my wife–nothing but death can change that.’ Do me the favor to look at this.”

He drew a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to her. Something in his face as he did so frightened her as nothing had frightened yet. Her hands shook–she strove to open the paper and failed. She looked at him with piteous eyes and trembling lips.

“I can’t,” she faltered; “Gordon, what is it?”

“It is a decree of divorce,” he answered, in his cold, sombre voice. “One week after Lovell’s death and your flight, I instituted a suit for divorce, and obtained it. You can read the details in that paper, at your leisure–it may help while away an hour. This is what has kept me in Canada so long. In two days I leave it forever. Chance has brought us together this once, for the last time.”

He paused, half turned away, then suddenly stopped. She had made some kind of gesture, but it was not for that; she had said “wait!” in a hoarse whisper; but it was not that. It was the ghastly change that had come over her face as he struck his last merciless blow. For a moment, I think, it startled even him.

“This is true–this that you tell me–this–divorce?”

She spoke the words in a husky, breathless sort of voice, her face all distorted, clutching the paper hard.

“It is perfectly true,” his chill voice answered. “Read and see.”

“I am no longer your wife?”

“You are no longer my wife–thank Heaven and the merciful law of the land.”

“After this day, you never mean to see or know me again?”

“I never mean to see you again if it be in my power, alive or dead."

“Then hear me!” She drew herself upright, her small figure seeming to dilate and grow tall. “Lovell’s story was true–true I tell you in every particular except this: that I married you for your rank, and your name, and your wealth. I married you for these, it is true; but beyond these, because I loved you with all my heart. Oh, yes, Gordon Caryll! even such women as I am can love; and in deed, and thought, from the hour you placed this ring on my finger, I was your true and loyal wife. I would have gone with you to beggary–I would have died, if need were, for your sake. Now I am divorced and cast off forever, you say. Well, then we shall meet again one day, so surely as we both live. This cold-blooded divorce I will never forgive. Go, Gordon Caryll! but remember this, one day or other, so surely as we both stand here, I will make you suffer for this!”

He laughed as he listened–a low, contemptuous laugh, that would have goaded any infuriated woman to madness.

“You do it very well, Rosamond,” he said; “but so many years’ hard practice on the stage of the Bowery Theatre could hardly fail to tell. For the rest, it is rather wasted on an unappreciative audience at present. If I should be so unfortunate as ever to meet you again, I trust, even then, to be able to take care of myself.”

He turned without another word and left her, striding up the steep path, and never once looking back.

She stood where he left her, watching him out of sight, the color fading from her face, the life from her eyes. So, standing motionless there, she saw him pass from view, heard the last echo of his footsteps die away. Then I came forward, for the look on her face frightened me. She turned to me slowly, the fatal paper held in her hand.

“I dreamed he came with my death-warrant,” she said; “here it is.”

And then without word or cry to warn me, she went down in a dead faint on the sands.

How I brought her to, how I got her home, I can never tell. I did it somehow, and laid her on her bed as the June moon rose and the stars came out. OldBettine, the French charwoman, was still pottering about the kitchen. In her charge I left my mistress, and fled into town for a doctor. For she was very ill–so ill that it seemed doubtful whether she would ever live to see day dawn.

The clocks of Quebec, high up in steeples, silvered by the quiet summer moonlight, were chiming eleven as our first visitor entered Saltmarsh–the doctor.

And when the lovely June morning dawned, and the swallows twittered in the eaves, Gordon Caryll’s child lay in my arms, and Gordon Caryll’s divorced wife lay white and still, with Life and Death fighting their sharp battle above her pillow.

CHAPTER IV

A STRANGE ENDING

Life won. Days passed, two weeks went by, and the struggle was at an end. Pale and shadowy that marvellously fair face lay among the pillows, but all doubt was at an end. Mrs. Gordon would live.

Saltmarsh was a deserted house no longer. A ponderous nurse had come from Quebec, the doctor was a daily visitor, and old Bettine spent her nights as well as her days with us. There was nothing to fear any more; the man she had longed for and feared had come and gone, to come no more forever. The baby fell almost entirely to me–a charge as pleasant as novel, for I must own, spinster that I am, to a tender weakness for babies. It lay in my arms all day; it slept in its crib by my bedside at night.

“The smallest mite of a baby I ever see,” observed Mrs. Watters, the fat nurse; “and I’ve seen a regiment of ‘em, little and big, in my day. I should say now it wouldn’t weigh five pounds.”

It was small. A tiny, black-haired, black-eyed speck, its pink dot of a face looking weird, lit by those black, blinking eyes.

One thing was strange–was unnatural. From its birth its mother had never seen it, never asked to see it. One evening, when Bettine had called nurse down to supper, and I sat watching in her room, she spoke of it for the first time.

It was a lovely July night, under the brilliant summer moon, the St. Lawrence ran between its green slopes like a belt of silver light. The white, misty moonlight filled the chamber, the lamp had not yet been lit, and the pale glory illumined the face, whiter than the lace and linen against which it lay. She sat partly up in bed, propped by pillows,gazing with dark, sombre eyes out at that radiance in Heaven and on earth–that glory from the skies upon river and shore. For more than an hour she had been sitting motionless, her dark, brooding eyes never leaving the fairy scene, as though she saw her own future life over there beyond that shining river. In the dim distance, baby lay in its crib fast asleep; deepest silence reigned within and without. That silence was suddenly and sharply broken by the shrilly, feeble wail of the child as it awoke. As I rose and crossed the room to take it, she spoke: “Joan, bring it here.”

“H’m! high time for you to say it,” I thought, but in silence I obeyed. There had been something revolting to me in her utter want of mother-love; in her unnatural indifference; I carried it to the bedside and stooped to place it beside her.

“No, no,” she said with a quick, petulant gesture of repulsion; “not there; I don’t want it. I always hated babies. I only want to look at it.”

“Shall I bring in the lamp?” I asked.

“No; the moonlight will do. What a dot of a baby! Joan, who is it like?”

“It has your eyes,” I answered; “beyond that it is impossible to tell. Mrs. Watters says, though, it is your very ‘moral.’ It is certainly the tiniest baby that ever was born.”

“My very moral,” she repeated, with a feeble laugh. “I hope so! I hope it may be like me. I hope it may never resemble him, in any way. I hope it may live to help avenge its mother yet!”

I was silent–shocked and scandalized beyond power of replying. Here was a Christian woman and mother, just saved from death, talking like some heathen, of revenge!

“Is it a girl or a boy?” she inquired next, after a pause.

“Girl,” I answered, shortly. “It is time you asked.”

She glanced at me in surprise, but in no displeasure.

“Why should I ask? It didn’t matter much. A girl! If it had only been a boy; and yet, who can tell, if she is like me, and is pretty, she may do great things yet. She may help me. That will do, Joan. Take it away.”

She turned her face from the light, and lay for a longtime still, brooding over her own thoughts–dark and wicked thoughts I well knew. Whoever or whatever this Mrs. Gordon might be, she was not a proper or virtuous woman, that seemed pretty clear–a wife whose husband had been forced to put her away–a mother who only looked forward to the future of her child as an instrument of vengeance on its father. There are some services that no wages can repay–to my mind this was one. The moment Mrs. Gordon was well enough to be left, that moment I would leave her.

“And what will become of you with such a mother, Providence only knows,” I apostrophized the little one on my lap. “You poor, little, spectral, black-eyed mite! I wish you belonged to me altogether.”

From that evening Mrs. Gordon rallied, and asserted her power once more as mistress of the house. Her first act of sovereignty was to dismiss the nurse.

“All danger is over, the doctor tells me,” she said to Mrs. Watters a few days after. “Joan Kennedy can take care of me now. I shall not require you any more. Joan, pay Mrs. Watters her due. She leaves to-night.”

Mrs. Watters left. Next morning Mrs. Gordon asserted herself still further–she insisted upon being dressed and allowed to sit up. She had her way, of course, and I wish I could tell you how fair and youthful and lovely she looked. Youthful! I declare, whatever her age really was, she did not look a day over sixteen. But there was that in her quick, black eyes, in her colorless face, in those latter days, not pleasant to see–something I could not define, and that confirmed me in my resolution to leave her very soon. Of her child, from the evening of which I have spoken, she took not the slightest notice. I truly believe she never once looked at it again; when it cried she had it impatiently removed out of hearing. She sat thinking–thinking steadfastly, with bent brows and compressed lips, of what–who could tell?

“I’ll give her warning to-morrow,” I said resolutely to myself; “my month is up in a week. I’ll never live another with you, my pretty, mysterious little mistress."

Her eyes lifted suddenly, and fixed themselves on my face as I thought it. Did she divine my very thoughts? The faint smile that was on her lips almost made me think so.

“Joan,” she said, in her pretty, imperious way, “come here, child; I want to talk to you. You have been a good and faithful companion in all these dreary, miserable months, to a most miserable and lonely woman. Let me thank you now while I think of it, and before we say good-by.”

“Good-by!” I repeated, completely taken aback. “Then you are going away?”

“Going away, Joan; high time, is it not? All is over now–there is nothing to fear or hope any more. One chapter of my life is read and done with forever. The day after to-morrow I go out into the world once more, to begin all over again. Up to the present my life has been a most miserable failure–all but four short months.” She paused suddenly; the dreary, lovely face lit up with a sort of rapture. “All but four short months–oh, let me always except that–when he made me his wife, and I was happy, happy, happy! Joan, if I had died three weeks ago when that was born, you might have had engraven on my tombstone the epitaph that was once inscribed over another lost woman; ‘I have been most happy–and most miserable.’”

I listened silently, touched, in spite of myself, by the unspeakable pathos of her look and tone.

“All that is over and done with,” she said, after a little. “I am not to die, it seems. I am going to begin my life, as I say, all over again. Nothing that befalls me in the future can be any worse than what lies behind. It does not fall to the lot of all women to be divorced wives at the age of eighteen.”

She laughed drearily. She sat by the window in her favorite easy-chair, looking out while she talked, with the rosy after-glow of the sunset fading away beyond the feathery tamarac trees and the low Canadian hills.

“I feel something as a felon must,” she dreamily went on, half to herself, half to me, “who has served out his sentence and whose order of release has come, almost afraid to face the world I have left so long. I did not come to thishouse a very good woman, Joan–that, I suppose, you know; but I quit it a thousand times worse. I came here with a human heart, at least, a heart that could love and feel remorse; but love and remorse are at an end. I told him I loved him and had been faithful to him, and he laughed in my face. Women can forgive a great deal, but they do not forgive that. If he had only left me–if he had not got that divorce, I would never have troubled him–never, I swear. I would have gone away and loved him, and been faithful to him to the end. Now–now–” she paused, her hands clenched, her yellow eyes gleaming catlike in the dusk. “Now, I will pay him back, sooner or later, if I lose my life for it. I will be revenged–that I swear.”

I shrank away from her, from the sight of her wicked face, from the hearing of her wicked words,–the horror I felt, showing, I suppose, in my face.

“It all sounds very horrible, very shocking, does it not?” she asked, bitterly. “You are one of the pious and proper sort, my good Joan, who walk stiffly along the smooth-beaten path of propriety, from your cradle to your grave. Well, I won’t shock you much longer, let that be your comfort. The day after to-morrow I go, and as a souvenir I mean to leave that behind me.”

She pointed coolly to the crib in the corner.

“You–you mean to leave the baby?” I gasped.

“I–I mean to leave the baby,” she answered, with a half laugh, parodying my tone of consternation; “you didn’t suppose I meant to take it with me, did you? I start in two days to begin a new life, as a perfectly proper young lady–young lady, you understand, Joan? and you may be very sure I shall carry no such land-mark with me as that of the old one. Yes, Joan, I shall leave the baby with you, if you will keep it, with Mrs. Watters if you will not.”

“Oh, I will keep the baby and welcome,” I said; “poor little soul!” and as it lay in its sleep, so small and helpless, so worse than orphaned at its very birth, I stooped and kissed it, with tears in my eyes.

“You are a good woman, Joan,” she said, more softly; “I wish–yes, with all my soul, I wish I were like you. But it is late in the day for wishing–what is done is done. You will keep the child?”

“I will keep the child.”

“I am glad of that. It will be well with you. One day or other I will come and claim it. Don’t let it die, Joan; it has its work to do in the world, and must do it. I will pay you, of course, and well. The money I had with me when I came here is almost gone, but out yonder, beyond your Canadian woods and river, there is always more for busy brains and hands. The furniture of these rooms I leave with you to sell or keep, as you see fit. Wherever I may be, I will give you an address, whence letters will reach me.”

“And you will never return–never come to see your child?” I asked.

“Never, Joan,–until I come to claim it for good. Why should I? I don’t care for it–not a straw–in the way you mean. One day, if we both live, I will claim it; one day its father shall learn, to his cost and his sorrow, that he has a child.”