The Mayor's Wife (Ladies' Home Journal serial)/Part 4
“'Mercy?' He Vociferated. 'Why Does My Wife Appeal for Mercy to You—a Stranger—and in Your Own Cipher?'”
Chapter X
DETERMINED to know the cause of Mrs. Packard's anguish, if not of Nixon's unprovoked anger against myself, I stopped the latter as he was passing me and peremptorily demanded:
“What message did you carry to Mrs. Packard to throw her into such a state as this? Answer! I am in this house to protect her against all such disturbances. What did you tell her?”
“Nothing.”
There was sullenness itself in the tone.
“Nothing? And you were sent on a message? Didn't you fulfill it?”
“Yes.”
“And didn't tell her what you learned?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“She didn't give me the chance.”
“Oh!”
“I know it sounds queer, miss, but it's true. She didn't give me a chance to talk.”
He muttered the final sentence. Indeed, all that we had said up till now had been in a subdued tone, but now my voice unconsciously rose.
“You found Mr. Steele?”
“No, miss; he was not at home.”
“But they told you where to look for him?”
“No. His landlady thinks he is dead. He has queer spells, and some one had sent her word about a man, handsome like him, who was found dead at Hudson Three Corners last night. Mr. Steele told her he was going over to Hudson Three Corners. She has sent to see if the dead man is he.”
“The dead man!”
Who spoke? Not Mrs. Packard! Surely that voice was another's. Yet we both looked up to see. The sight which met our eyes was astonishing, appalling. She had let her baby slip to the floor and had advanced to the stairs, where she stood clutching at the rail, looking down upon us, with a joy in her face matching the unholy elation we could still hear ringing in that word dead.
Such a look might have leaped to life in the eyes of the Medusa when she turned her gaze upon her foredoomed victims.
“Dead!” came again in ringing repetition from Mrs. Packard's lips, every fibre in her tense form quivering and the gleam of hope shining brighter and brighter in her countenance, “No! not dead!” Then, while Nixon trembled and succumbed inwardly to this spectacle of a gentle-hearted woman transported, by some secret and overwhelming emotion, into an image of vindictive delight, her hands left the stair-rail and flew straight up over her head in the transcendent gesture which only the greatest crises in life call forth, and she exclaimed with awe-inspiring emphasis: “God could not have been so merciful!”
It is not often, perhaps it is only once in a lifetime, that it is given us to look straight into the innermost recesses of the human soul. Never before had such an opportunity come to me, and possibly never would it come again, yet my first conscious impulse was one of fright at the appalling self-revelation she had made, not only in my hearing but in that of nearly her whole household. I could see, over her shoulders, Betty's eyes staring wide in ingenuous dismay, while from the hall below rose the sound of hurrying feet as the two girls came running in from the kitchen. Something must be done, and immediately, to recall her to herself, and, if possible, to reinstate her in the eyes of her servants.
Bounding upward to where she still stood forgetful and self-absorbed, I laid my hands softly but firmly on hers which had fallen back upon the rail, and quietly said:
“You have some strong reason, I see, for looking upon Mr. Steele as your husband's enemy rather than friend.”
The appeal was timely. With a start she woke to the realization of her position and of the suggestive words she had just uttered in the hearing of us all, and with a glance behind her at Betty and another at Nixon and the two girls, who by this time had pushed their way to the foot of the stairs, she gathered herself up with a determination born of the necessity of the moment and emphatically replied:
“No; I do not know Mr. Steele well enough for that My emotion at these unexpected tidings of his possible death springs from another cause.” Here the help, the explanation for which she had been searching, came. “Girls,” she went on, addressing those below and those above with an emphasis which drew all eyes, “I am ashamed to tell you what has so deeply disturbed me these last few days. I should blame any one of you for being affected as I was. The great love I bear my husband and child is my excuse—a poor one, I know, but one you will understand. A week ago something happened to me in the library which frightened me very much. I saw—or thought I saw—what some would call an apparition, but what you would call a ghost. Don't shriek!” (The two girls behind me had begun to squeal and make as if to run away.) “It was all imaginary, of course—there cannot really be any such thing. But I was dreadfully nervous that night, and could not help feeling that the mere fact of my thinking of anything so dreadful meant misfortune to some one in this house. Wait!” Her voice was imperious, and the shivering, terrified girls, superstitious to the backbone, stopped in spite of themselves. “You must hear it all, and you, too, Miss Saunders, who have only heard half. I was awfully frightened then, especially as the ghost, spirit, man, or whatever it was, wore a look, in the one short moment I stood face to face with it, full of threat and warning. Next day Mr. Packard introduced his new secretary. Girls, he had the face of the something I had seen, without the threatening look which had so alarmed me.”
“Bad cess to him!” said the cook
“It's trouble he'll bring us all,” echoed Betty
That was what I feared,” assented the now thoroughly composed mistress. “So when Nixon said just now that Mr. Steele was dead—had fallen in a fit at Hudson Three Corners, or something like that—I felt such wicked relief at finding that my experience had not meant danger to ourselves but to him—wicked, because it was so selfish—that I forgot myself and cried out in the way you all heard. Now, girls, don't frighten yourselves by talking about it. It's all right. If Mr. Steele is indeed dead we have enough to trouble us without that.”
And with a last glance at myself, which ended in a wavering, half-deprecatory smile, she stepped back and vanished into her own room.
The mood in which I proceeded to mine was as thoughtful a one as I had ever experienced.
Hitherto I had mainly admired Mrs. Packard's person and the extreme charm of manner which never deserted her, no matter how she felt. Now I found myself forced to admire the force and quality of her mind, her readiness to meet emergencies and the tact with which she had availed herself of the superstition latent in the Irish temperament. For I had no more faith in the explanation she had seen fit to give these ignorant girls than I had in the apparition itself. Emotion such as she had shown called for a more matter-of-fact basis than the one she had ascribed to it. No unreal and purely superstitious reason would account for the extreme joy and self-abandonment with which she had hailed the possibility of Mr. Steele's death. The “No” she had given me when I asked if she considered this man her husband's enemy had been a lying no. To her, for some cause as yet unexplained, the secretary was a dangerous ally to the man she loved: an ally so near and so dangerous that the mere rumor of his death was capable of lifting her from the depths of despondency into a state of abnormal exhilaration and hope. Now why? What reason had she for this belief, and how was it in my power to solve this mystery, which I felt to be at the bottom of all the rest?
But one means suggested itself. I was now assured that Mrs. Packard would never take me into her actual confidence, any more than she had taken her husband. What I learned must be in spite of her precautions. The cipher of which I had several specimens might, if properly read, give me the clew I sought. I had a free hour before me. Why not employ it in an endeavor to pick out the meaning of those odd Hebraic characters? I had in a way received her sanction to do so if I could; and if I should succeed what shadows might it not clear from the path of the good man whose interests it was my chief duty to consult?
Ciphers have always possessed a sort of fascination for me. This one, from the variety of its symbols, offered a study of unusual interest. Collecting the stray specimens which I had picked up, I sat down in my cozy little room and laid them all out before me with the following result:
There they were, yes! But what now? Where begin? Finally, I thought I struck what seemed to be a clew to their unraveling, and I began, but only at the end to find myself running against a dead wall of defeat. Once more I tried, yes, five times did I strike what seemed a new solution, but each time it was only to run into absolute failure. I thought of the cipher in Poe's story of “The Gold-Bug,” and tried that, but only to run up against a snag. Yet in these blind characters I felt lay the door to the secret I was trying to probe. What was the law that governed these characters? Was a key necessary? I began to think so. Moreover, Mrs. Packard had made use of some such help the day I watched her puzzling in the window over these symbols. I recalled her movements, the length of time which elapsed before that cry of miserable understanding escaped her lips, the fact that her dress was wrenched apart at the throat when she came out, and decided that she had not only drawn some paper from her bosom helpful to the elucidation of these symbols, but that this paper was the one which had been the object of her frantic search the night I watched her shadow on the wall.
So convinced was I of this fact that I ceased from any further attempt to solve the cryptogram at this time.
The mystery was, therefore, as much a mystery to me as ever.
Chapter XI
THAT evening the Mayor returned unexpectedly. As I met him he instantly asked:
“Where is Mrs. Packard, Miss Saunders?”
“Sleeping, sir, after a day of exhausting emotion.”
“She didn't wire me?”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps she wasn't able?”
“She was not, Mayor Packard.”
“I must see her. I came as soon as I could. Left Warner to fill my place on the platform, and it is the night of nights, too. Why, what's the matter?”
He had caught me staring over his shoulder at a form drawn up in the doorway.
“Nothing; I thought you had come alone.”
“No, Mr. Steele is with me. He joined me at noon just after I had telegraphed home. He has come back to finish the work I assigned him. He has at last discovered—or thinks he has—the real author of these libels. You have nothing special to say to me?” he whispered as I followed him upstairs.
“No; only I think, if I were you, that I should say nothing to Mrs. Packard about Mr. Steele's having returned.”
And I rapidly detailed the occurrences of the afternoon, ending up with Mrs. Packard's bizarre explanation to her servants.
The Mayor showed impatience.
“Oh, I cannot bother with such nonsense as that,” he declared; “the situation is too serious.”
I thought so, too, when in another moment his wife's door opened and she stepped out upon the landing to meet him. Her eyes fell on Mr. Steele standing at the foot of the stairs before they encountered her husband; and though she uttered no cry, and hardly paused in her approach toward the latter, I saw the heart within her die as quickly and surely as a flame from which the air has been suddenly excluded.
“You!” There was hysteria in the cry. “How good of you to give up making your great speech to-night just to see how I have borne this last outrage. You do see, don't you?” Here she drew her form to its full height. “My husband believes in me, and it gives me courage to face the whole world. Ah! is that Mr. Steele I see below there? Pardon me, Mr. Steele, if I show surprise. We heard a false report of your illness this afternoon. Henry, hadn't Mr. Steele better come upstairs? I presume you are here to talk over this last dreadful paragraph with me.”
“It is not necessary for Mr. Steele to join us if you do not wish him to,” I heard the Mayor whisper in his wife's ear.
“Oh, I do not mind,” she returned with an indifference whose reality I probably gauged more accurately than he did.
“That is good.” And he called Mr. Steele up. “You see, she is reasonable enough,” he muttered in my ear as he motioned me to follow them into the upstairs sitting-room to which she had led the way. “The more heads the better in a discussion of this kind,” was the excuse he gave his wife and Mr. Steele as he ushered me in.
As neither answered I considered my presence accepted and sat down in as remote a corner as offered. Verily the fates were active in my behalf.
Mayor Packard was about to close the door when Mrs. Packard suddenly leaped by him with the cry:
“There's Laura! She must have heard your voice.” And rushing into the hall she came back with the child, whom she immediately placed in its father's arms. Then she slowly seated herself. Not till she had done so did she turn toward Mr. Steele.
“Sit,” said she, with a look and gesture her husband would have marveled at had he not been momentarily occupied with the prattling child.
The secretary bowed and complied. Surely men of such great personal attractions are few. Instantly the light, shaded though it seemingly was in all directions, settled on his face, making him, to my astonished gaze, the leading personality in the group. Was this on account of the distinction inherent in extreme beauty, or because of a new and dominating expression which had insensibly crept into his features?
The Mayor, and the Mayor only, seemed oblivious of the fact. Glancing up from the child he opened the conference by saying:
“Tell Mrs. Packard, Steele, what you have just told me.”
With a quiet shifting of his figure which brought him into better line with the woman he was asked to address, the secretary opened his lips to reply, when she, starting, reached out one hand and drew toward herself the little innocent figure of her child, which she at once placed between herself and him—which seeing, I recalled the scraps of cipher which I had left in my room above, and wished I had succeeded in determining their meaning, if only to understand the present enigmatical situation.
Meanwhile Mr. Steele was saying, in the mellow tone of a man accustomed to tune his voice to suit all occasions, “Mrs. Packard will excuse me if I seem abrupt. In obedience to commands laid upon me by his Honor, I spent both Tuesday and Wednesday in inquiries as to the origin of the offensive paragraph which appeared in Monday's issue of the 'Leader.' I was given names, but too many of them. It took me two days to sift these down to one, and when I had succeeded in doing this it was only to find that the man I sought was ninety miles away. So I journeyed there only to learn that in the interim he had returned to this city. While I was covering those miles for the second time today's paragraph appeared. I hastened to accuse its author of libel, but the result was hardly what I expected. Perhaps you know what he said?”
“No,” she harshly returned, “I do not.” And with the instinctive gesture of one awaiting attack she raised her now sleepy and nodding child in front of her laboring breast, with a look into the secretary's eyes which I see yet.
“He said—pardon me, your Honor; pardon me, madam—that I was at liberty to point out what was false in it.”
With a leap she was on her feet, towering above us all in her indignation and overpowering revolt against the man who was the conscious instrument of this insult. The child, loosed so suddenly from her arms, tottered and would have fallen had not Mr. Steele leaned forward and drawn the little one across to himself, where she appeared perfectly contented to remain. Mr. Packard, who, we must remember, had been more or less prepared for what his secretary had to say, cast a glance at his wife, teeming with varied emotions.
“And what did you reply to that?” were the words she hurled at the unabashed secretary, who had won even her child from her.
“Nothing,” was his grave reply. “I did not know myself what was false in it.”
With sudden faltering Mrs. Packard reseated herself, while the Mayor, outraged by what was evidently a very unexpected answer, leaned forward in great anger:
“That was not the account you gave me of this wretched interview, Steele. Explain yourself. Don't you see that your silence at such a moment, to say nothing of the attitude you at present assume, is an insult to Mrs. Packard?”
The smile he met in reply was deprecatory enough; so were the words his outburst had called forth:
“I did not mean, and do not mean, to insult Mrs. Packard. I am merely showing you how hampered a man is, whatever his feelings, when it comes to a question of facts known only to a lady with whom he has not exchanged fifty words since he came into her house. If Mrs. Packard will be good enough to inform me just how much or how little is true in the paragraph we are considering, I will see this rascally reporter again and give him a better answer.”
Mayor Packard looked unappeased. This was not the way to soothe a woman whom he believed greatly maligned. With an exclamation indicative of his feelings, he was about to address some hasty word to the composed, almost smiling man who confronted him, when Mrs. Packard herself spoke, and with unexpected self-control if not disdain:
“You are a very honest man, Mr. Steele. I commend the nicety of your scruples and am quite ready to trust myself to them. I own to no blot in my past or present life calling for public arraignment. If my statement of the fact is not enough I here swear on the head of my child”
“No, no,” he quickly interpolated, “don't frighten the baby. Swearing is not necessary; I am bound to believe your word, Mrs. Packard.” And lifting a sheet of paper from a pile lying on the table before him he took out a pencil from his pocket and began making lines to amuse the child dancing on his knee.
Mrs. Packard's eyes opened in wonder mingled with some emotion deeper than distaste, but she said nothing, only watched in a fascinated way his moving fingers.
The Mayor, mollified possibly by his secretary's last words, sank back again into his chair with the remark:
“You have heard Mrs. Packard's distinct denial. You are consequently armed for battle. See that you fight well. It is all a part of the scheme to break me up. One more paragraph of that kind and I myself will be a wreck, even if my campaign is not.”
“There will not be any more.”
“You can assure me of that?”
“Positively.”
“What are you playing there?”
It was Mrs. Packard who spoke. She was pointing to the scribble he was making on the paper.
“Tit-tat-to,” he smiled, “to amuse the baby.”
Did she hate to see him so occupied, or was her own restlessness of a nature demanding a like outlet?
Tearing her eyes away from him and the child she looked about her in a wild way till she came upon a box of matches standing on the large centre-table around which they were all grouped, and, pouring some into her hand, commenced to lay them out on the table before her, possibly in an attempt to attract the baby's attention to herself. Puerile business, but it struck me forcibly, possibly from the effect it appeared to have upon the Mayor. Looking from one to the other in an astonishment which was not without its hint of some new and overmastering feeling on his own part, he remarked:
“Isn't it time for the baby to go to bed? Surely our talk is too serious to be interrupted by games to please a child.”
Without a word Mr. Steele rose and put the protesting child in the mother's arms. She, rising, carried it to the door, and, coming slowly back, reseated herself before the table and began to push the matches about again with fingers that trembled beyond her control. The Mayor proceeded as if no time had elapsed since that last “Positively.”
“You had some words, then, with this Brainard—I think you called him Brainard—exacted some promise from him?”
“Yes, your Honor,” was his only reply.
Did not Mrs. Packard speak, too? We all seemed to think so, for we all turned toward her; but she gave no evidence of having said anything, unless we except the increased nervousness visible in her fingers as she pushed and pushed the matches about.
“I thought I was warranted in doing so much,” continued Mr. Steele. “I could not buy the man with money, so I used threats.”
“Right! anything to squelch him,” exclaimed the Mayor, but not with the vigor I expected from him. Some doubt—some dread—caught perhaps from his wife's attitude or expression, seemed to have interposed between his indignation and the object of it. “You are our good friend, Steele, notwithstanding the shock which you gave us a moment ago.”
As no answer was made to this beyond a smile too subtle and too fine to be understood by his open-hearted chief, the Mayor proceeded to declare:
“Then that matter is at an end. I pray that it may have done us no real harm. I do not think it has. People resent attacks on women, especially on one whose reputation has never known a shadow as girl, wife or mother.”
“Yes,” came in slow assent from the lips which had just smiled, and he glanced at Mrs. Packard, whose own lips seemed to have gone suddenly dry, for I saw her try to moisten them as her right hand groped about for something on the table-top and finally settled on a small paper-weight which she set down among her matches. Was it then, or afterward, that I began to have my first real doubt as to whether some shadow had not fallen across her apparently unsullied record?
“Yes, you are right,” repeated Mr. Steele more energetically. “People resent such insinuations against a woman, though I remember one case where the opposite effect was produced. It was when Collins ran for Supervisor in Cleveland. He was a good fellow himself, and he had a wife who was all that was beautiful and charming, but who had once risked her reputation in an act which did call for public arraignment. Unfortunately, there was a man who knew of this act, and he published it right and left, and”
“Barbara!” Mayor Packard was on his feet with riveted eyes pointing in sudden fury and suspicion at the table where the matches lay about in odd and, as I now saw, seemingly set figures. “You are doing something besides playing with those matches. I know Mr. Steele's famous cipher very well; he showed it to me a week ago; and so evidently do you, notwithstanding the fact that you have had hardly fifty words to say to him since he came into the house. Let me read Here,” turning to his secretary, “give over that piece of paper you have there, Steele.”
And while his wife drooped before his eyes and a cynical smile crept about the secretary's fine mouth, he caught up the sheet on which Steele had been playing tit-tat-to with the child, and glanced from the table to it, and back again to the table on which the matches lay in the following device, the paper-weight answering for the dot.
“M,” suddenly left the Mayor's writhing lips; then slowly, letter by letter, “E-R-C-Y. Mercy?” he vociferated. “Why does my wife appeal for mercy to you—a stranger—and in your own cipher? What secret's here? Either”
“Some one's at the door!” interposed the secretary.
Mr. Packard turned quickly, and, smoothing his face rapidly, as such men must, started for the door. Mrs. Packard, flinging her whole soul into a look, met the secretary's eyes for a moment and then let her head sink forward on her hands above these telltale matches from whose arrangement she had reaped despair in place of hope.
Mr. Steele smiled again his fine, false smile, but after her head had fallen: not before. Indeed, he had vouchsafed no reply to her eloquent look. It was as if it had met marble till her eyes were hidden; then
But Nixon was in the open doorway, and Nixon was speaking:
“A telegram, your Honor.”
The old man spoke briskly, even a little crisply—perhaps he always did when he addressed the Mayor. But his eyes roamed eagerly and changed to a burning, red color when they fell upon the dejected figure of his mistress. Had he dared he would have leaped into the room and taken his own part—and who could rightly gauge what that was—in the scene he may have comprehended more than I did, for one. But, apparently, he did not dare.
CONTINUED IN THE OCTOBER JOURNAL