The Mayor's Wife (Ladies' Home Journal serial)/Part 5
Chapter XII
DRAWN BY F. R. GRUGER
MAYOR Packard opened the telegram that had been handed to him by Nixon, the butler.
“From Haines,” he announced, forgetting the suggestive discovery he had just made, in the great and absorbing interest of his campaign. “Speech good—great applause, becoming thunderous at flash of your picture. All right so far if” he read out, ceasing abruptly at the if which, as I afterward understood, really ended the message. “No answer,” he explained to Nixon as he hurriedly dismissed him.
“That if concerns you,” he now declared, coming back to his wife and to his troubles in the same instant. “Now explain this mystery which seems likely to undo me. Why do you sit there bowed? Why should my wife cry for mercy to any man?”
Slowly she rose—slowly she met his eyes, and even he started back at her pallor and the drawn misery in her face. But she did not speak. Instead of that she simply reached out and laid her hand on Mr. Steele's arm, drooping almost to the ground as she did so.
“Mercy!” she suddenly cried, but this time to the man who had so relentlessly accused her.
The effect was appalling. The Mayor reeled, then sprang forward with his hand outstretched for his secretary's throat. But his words were for his wife.
“What does this mean? Why do you take your stand by the side of another man than myself? What have I done, or what have you done, that I should live to face such a scene as this?”
It was Steele who answered, and with a lift of his head as full of assertion as it was of triumph. “You? nothing; she? everything. You do not know this woman, Mayor Packard; for instance, you do not know her name.”
“Not know her name? My wife's?” gasped the Mayor.
“Not in the least,” replied Steele. “This lady's name is Brainard. So is mine. Though she has lived with you for several years—in ignorance of my continued existence, no doubt—she is my wife, and not yours. We were married in Boone, Minnesota, six years ago.”
Ten minutes later this woman was pleading her cause. She had left the side of the man who had just assumed the greatest of all rights over her and was standing in a frenzy of appeal before him she loved so deeply and yet had so grievously wronged.
Mayor Packard was sitting with his head in his hands in the chair into which he had dropped when the blow fell which laid waste his home, his life, the future of his child, and possibly the career which meant so much to him, possibly more than all the rest. He had not uttered a word since that dreadful moment. To all appearance her moans of contrition fell upon deaf ears. Collapse seemed inevitable, but I did not know the woman or the really wonderful grip she held on herself. Seeing that he was moved by nothing she had said, she suddenly paused, and presently I heard her observe in quite a different tone:
“There is one thing you must know—which I thought you would know without my telling you. I have never lived with this man, and I believed him dead when I gave my hand to you.”
The Mayor's fingers twitched. She had touched him at last. “Speak! tell me,” he murmured hoarsely. “I do not want to do you any injustice.”
“I shall have to begin far, far back—tell about my early life and all its temptations,” she faltered, “or you will never understand.”
“Speak!”
Sensible at this point of the extreme impropriety of my presence, I rose, with an apology, to leave. But she shook her head quickly, determinedly, saying that as I had heard so much I must hear more. Then she went on with her story.
“I have committed a fault,” she said, “but not so deep or inexcusable a one as now appears—whatever that man may say,” she added with a slow turn toward the silent secretary, but she quickly turned away with a shudder, and henceforth faced and addressed the Mayor only.
“My mother married against the wishes of all her family, and they never forgave her. My father died early, and before I was fifteen I became the sole support of my invalided mother as well as of myself.
“You can imagine what sort of support it was, as I had no special talent, no training and only the opportunity given by a crude Western town of two or three hundred inhabitants. I washed dishes in the hotel kitchen—I, who had a millionaire uncle in Detroit, and had been fed on tales of wealth and culture by a mother who remembered her own youth and was too ignorant of my real nature to see the harm she was doing. I washed dishes and ate my own heart out in shame and longing.
“I was sixteen when I first met this man. He was not then what he is now, but he was handsome enough (excuse the personality) to create an excitement in town, and to lift the girl he singled out into an enviable prominence. Unfortunately I was that girl. I say unfortunately because his good looks failed to arouse in me more than a passing admiration; and in accepting his attentions I consulted my necessities and pride rather than the instincts of my better nature. When he asked me to marry him I recoiled. I did not know why then, nor did I know why later, but I know why now. However, I let this premonition pass and engaged myself to him, and the one happy moment I knew was when I told my mother what I had done, and saw her joy and heard the hope with which she impulsively cried: 'It is something I can write your uncle. Who knows? Perhaps he may forgive me my marriage when he hears that my child is going to do so well!' Poor mother! she had felt the glamour of my lover's good looks and cleverness much more than I did. She saw from indications to which I was blind that I was going to marry a man of mark, and was much more interested in the possible reply she might receive to the letter with which she had broken the silence of years between herself and her family than in the marriage itself.
“But days passed, a week, and no answer came. My uncle—the only relative remaining in whom we could hope to awaken any interest, or rather, the only one whose interest it would be worth awakening, he being a millionaire and unmarried—declined, it appeared, any communication with one so entirely removed from his sympathies, and the disappointment of it broke my mother's heart, and before my wedding day came she was lying in the bare cemetery I had passed so often with a cold dread in my young and bounding heart.
“With her loss the one true and unselfish bond which held me to my lover was severed, and, unknown to him (perhaps he hears it now for the first time), I had many hours of secret hesitation which might have ended in a positive refusal to marry him if I had not been afraid of his anger and the consequences of an open break. With all his protestations of affection and the very ardent love he made me, he had not succeeded in arousing my affections, but he had my fears. I knew that to tell him to his face that I would not marry him would mean death to him and possibly to myself.
“So my wedding day came and we were united in the very hotel where I had so long served in a menial capacity. The social distinctions in such a place being small, and my birth and breeding really placing me on a par with my employer and his family, I was given the parlor for this celebration, and never, never shall I forget its mean and bare look, or how lonely those far hills seemed, through the small-paned window I faced, or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not in them: 'Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.'
“The ceremony over, I went upstairs to make my final preparations for departure. No bridesmaids had lent joy to the occasion, and no real friends; and when I closed that parlor door upon my bridegroom and the two or three neighbors and boon companions with whom he was making merry, I found myself alone with my dead heart and a most unwelcome future. I remember, as the latch clicked, and the rude hall, ruder even than the wretched, half-furnished room I had just left, opened before me, a sensation of terror at leaving even this homely refuge, and a half-formed wish that I was going back to my dish-washing in the kitchen. It was, therefore, with a shock, which makes my brain reel yet, that I saw, lying on a little table which I had to pass, a letter directed to myself, bearing the postmark, Detroit. What might there not be in it? What? What?
DRAWN BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS
“Striding to a Cupboard He Took Down Something I Could Not See and Did Not Guess at Till the Sharp Sound of a Pistol-Shot Cleft My Ear”
“Gasping as much with fear as delight, I caught up the letter, and, rushing with it to my room, locked myself in and tore open the envelope. A single sheet fell out. It was signed with the name I had heard whispered in my ear from early childhood and always in connection with riches and splendor and pleasures it was rapture to dream of. This was an agitation in itself; but the words! the words! I have never told them to mortal being, but I must tell them now; I remember them as distinctly as I remember the look of my child's face when she was first put in my arms; the child”
She had underrated her strength. She broke into a storm of weeping which shook to the very soul one of the two men who listened to her, though he made no move to comfort her or allay it. The alienation thus expressed produced its effect, and stricken deeper than the fount of tears, she suddenly choked back every sob and took up the thread of her narrative with the calmness born of despair.
“These were the words, these and no others:
“'If my niece will break all ties, and come to me completely unhampered, she may hope to find a permanent home in my house and a close hold upon my affections.
“'Ira T. Houghtaling.'
“Unhampered! with the marriage vow scarcely cold on my lips! Without tie! and a husband waiting below to take me to his home on the hillside—a hillside so bare and bleak that the sight of it had sent a shudder to my heart as the wedding ring touched my finger. The irony of the situation was more than I could endure, and alone, with my eyes fixed on the comfortless heavens, showing gray and cold through the narrow panes of my window, I sank to the floor insensible.
“When I came to myself I was still alone and the twilight a little more pronounced than when my misery had turned it to blackest midnight. Rising, I read that letter again, and plainly as the acknowledgment betrays the selfishness lying at the basis of my character, the temptation which thereupon seized me had never an instant of relenting, or one conscientious scruple to combat it. 1 simply, at that stage in my life and experience, could not do otherwise than I did. Saying to myself that vows as empty of heart as mine were void before God and man, I sat down and wrote a few words to the man whose step on the stair I dreaded above everything else in the world, and, leaving them open on the table, unlocked my door and looked out. The hall connecting with my room was empty, but not so the lower one. There I could hear voices and laughter—Mr. Brainard's loud above all the rest—a fatal sound to me, cutting off all escape in that direction. But another way offered, and that one near at hand. Communicating with the very hall in which I stood was an outside staircase running down to the road—a means of entering and leaving a house which I never see now, wherever I may encounter it, without a gush of inward shame and terror, so instinctive and so sharp that I have never been able to hide it from any one whose eye might chance to be upon me at the moment. But that night I was conscious of no shame, barely of any terror, but only of the necessity for haste. The train on which I was determined to make my flight was due in little less than an hour at a station two miles down the road.
“That I should be followed farther than the turbulent stream which the road crossed only a quarter of a mile from the hotel I did not fear. For in the hurried note I had left behind me I had bidden them look for me there, saying that I had been precipitate in marrying one I did not really love, and that, overcome by a sense of my mistake, I was resolved on death. A lie! But what was a lie to me then, who saw in my life with this man an amelioration of my present state, but an amelioration only, while in the prospects held out to me by my uncle I foresaw not only release from a hated union, but each and every delight for which my soul had craved passionately since my mother could talk to me of wealth and splendor.
“Behold me, then, stealing down the side of the house in a darkness which during the last few minutes had become impenetrable. A shadow where all was shadowy, I made for the woods and succeeded in reaching their shelter just as there rose in the distance behind me that most terrible of all sounds to a woman's ear: a man's loud cry of anguish and rage.”
She was not looking at that man now, yet I was. As these words left her lips Mr. Steele's hand crept up and closed over his heart, though his face might have been that of a marble image.
She went gaspingly on:
“Reckless of the dangers of the road, fearing nothing but what pressed upon me from behind, I flew straight for the stream, on whose verge I meant them to stop, and, having by some marvel of good luck or providence reached it without a mishap, I tore the cloak from my shoulders, and, affixing one end to the broken edge of the bridge, flung the other into the water. Then with one loud, ear-piercing shriek thrown back on the wind—see! I tell all, I leave out nothing—I fled away in the direction of the station.
“For some reason I had great confidence in the success of this feint and soon was conscious of but one fear, and that was of being recognized by the station-master, who knew my figure even if he did not know my new city-made dress. So when I had made sure by the clock visible from the end window that I was in ample time for the expected train, I decided to remain in the dark at the end of the platform till the cars were about starting, and then to jump on and buy my ticket from the conductor.
“But I never expected such an interminable wait. Minute after minute went by without a hint of preparation for the advancing train. The hour for leaving arrived, passed, and not a man had shown himself on the platform. Had a change been made in the time-table? If so, what a prospect lay before me. However, I did not fully realize my position till another passenger arrived late and panting, and I heard some one shout out to him from the open door that an accident had occurred below and that it would be five hours at least before the train could come through. Five hours! and no shelter in sight save the impossible one of the station itself. How could I pass away that time? How endure the cold and fatigue? By pacing to and from the road? I tried it, resolutely tried it, for an hour, then new terror, a new suspense, gripped me and I discovered that I could never live through this wait, never, in fact, take the train when it came, without knowing what had happened in Boone, and whether the feint on which I relied had achieved its purpose. There was time to steal back, time to see and hear what would satisfy me of my own safety; and then to have some purpose in my movement! How much better than this miserable pacing back and forth just to start the stagnating blood and make the lagging moments endurable.
“So I turned again toward Boone. I was not in the mood to fear darkness or any encounter save one, and experienced hesitation only when I found myself reapproaching the bridge. Shadows which had protected me up till now failed me here, and it was with caution that I finally advanced and emerged upon the open spot where the road crossed the river. But even this was not needed. In the wide stretch before me, cut by the inky stream, I saw no signs of life, and it was not till I was on the bridge itself that I discerned in the black hollows below the glint of a lantern lighting up the bending forms of some two or three men, who were dragging at something which heaved under their hands.
“A sight which has never left me, but one which gave wings to my feet that night, sent me flying on till a fork in the road brought me to a standstill. To the left lay the hotel. I could see its windows glimmering with faint lights, while hard away to the right there broke upon me from the hillside a solitary sparkle; but this sparkle came from the house where, but for the letter hidden in my heart, I should be sitting at this moment before my own fireside.
“What moved me? God knows. It may have been duty; it may have been curiosity; it may have been only dread to know the worst and know it at once; but seeing that single gleam I began to move toward it, and before I was aware I had reached the house, edged up to its unshaded window, and taken a frightened look within.
“I was prepared and yet unprepared for what I saw. A room, astonishingly attractive in contrast to the rude, unpainted exterior, which was all I had hitherto seen; with light, warmth and color everywhere, far beyond what I had thought to be in his means and heart to provide, and in the midst himself, standing alone, with garments dripping, gazing in frenzy at a slip of paper which clung wet about his hand. My words to him! I could see it in his eye and in his desperate look.
“Any softening which the appearance of the room had effected in me disappeared before that look, but I still watched him as he flung that letter off from his fingers as he would a biting snake, and, striding to a cupboard high up on the wall, took down something I could not see and did not guess at till the sharp sound of a pistol-shot cleft my ear, and I beheld him fall face downward on the carpet of fresh autumn leaves with which he had hidden the bare floor in expectation of his bride.
“The shriek which involuntarily went up from my lips must have rung far and wide, but only the groaning of the night wind answered me. Driven by my fears to do something, I tried the door, but it was locked; so was the window. Yet I might have battered my way in if at that moment I had not heard two men coming down the road, one of whom was shouting to another: 'I did not like his face. I sha'n't sleep till I've seen him again.'
“Relieved, but vaguely sensible of my own unfortunate position, I drew back from the road, but did not quit the spot till those men, seeing through the window what had happened, worked their way in and lifted him up in their arms. The look with which they let him fall back again was eloquent, and convinced me that it was death I saw. I started again upon my shuddering flight from Boone, secure in the belief that while my future might hold remorse for me, it would never more burden me with a hindrance in the shape of an unloved husband.”
Chapter XIII
THE suspense which had held us tense and speechless was for the moment relieved, and Mr. Steele allowed himself the following explanation:
“My hand trembled and the bullet penetrated an inch too high.” Then he relapsed again into silence.
Mrs. Packard shuddered and went on:
“It may seem incredible to you, it seems incredible now to myself, but I completed my journey, entered my uncle's house, was made welcome there, and started upon my new life without letting my eyes fall for one instant on the columns of a newspaper. Perhaps I did not dare to see what the papers contained; perhaps I thought my conclusions needed no confirmation; perhaps I was merely negligent. When I did bring myself to read them once more they held nothing to change my mind on the one subject personal to myself. That short but bitter episode of my sixteenth year was a nightmare of horror, to be buried with my old name and all that could interfere with the delights of the cultured existence which my uncle's means and affection opened before me. Two years, and I hardly remembered; three years, and it came to me only in dreams; four, and even dreams failed to suggest it; the present, the glorious present, was all. I had met you, Henry; we had loved and married.
“Did any doubts come to disturb my joy? Very few. I had never received a word from Minnesota. I was as dead to every one there as they each and all were to me. I believed myself free and that the only wrong I did was in not taking you into my confidence. But this the very nature of my secret forbade. How could I tell you what would inevitably alienate your affections? That act of my early girlhood by which I had gained an undeserved freedom had been too base; sooner than let you know this blot on my life I was content to risk the possibility—the inconceivable possibility—that Mr. Brainard had survived the attack he had made upon his own life. Can you understand such temerity? I cannot, now that I see its results before me.
“So the die was cast and I became a wife instead of the mere shadow of one. You were prosperous, and not a shadow came to disturb my sense of complete security till that day of two weeks ago, when, looking up in my own library, I saw, gleaming between me and the evening lamp, a face which, different as it was in many respects, tore my dead past out of the grave and sent my thoughts reeling back to a lonely road on a black hillside with a lighted window in view, and behind that window the outstretched form of a man with his head among leaves not redder than his blood.
“I have said to you, I have said to others, that a spectre rose upon me that day in the library. It was such to me: an apparition and nothing else. Perhaps he meant to impress himself as such, for I had heard no footfall and only looked up because of the constraining force of the look which awaited me. I knew afterward that it was a man whom I had seen, a man whom you ourself had introduced into the house; but at the instant I thought it a phantom of my forgotten past sent to shock and destroy me; and, struck speechless with the horror of it, I lost that opportunity of mutual explanation which might have saved me an unnecessary and cruel experience. For believe it who can, this man who recognized me more surely than I did him, who perhaps knew who I was before he ever entered my house, has sported for these two weeks with my fears and hopes as a tiger with his prey. Maintaining his attitude of stranger (you have been witness to his manner in my presence) he led me slowly but surely to believe myself deceived by an extraordinary resemblance: a resemblance, moreover, which did not hold at all times, and which frequently vanished altogether, as I recalled the straight-featured but often uncouth aspect of the man who had awakened the admiration of Boone. Memory had been awakened and my sleep filled with dreams, but the unendurable had been spared me and I was thanking God with my whole heart when suddenly one night, after an evening spent with friends in the old way had made me feel safe, my love safe, my husband and my child safe, there came to my ears from below the sound of a laugh, loud, coarse and deriding, such a laugh as could spring from no member of my own household, such a laugh as I had heard but once before, and that in the bygone years, when some one asked Mr. Brainard if he meant to live always in Boone. The shock was terrible, and when I learned that the secretary, and the secretary only, was below, I knew who that secretary was, and I yielded to the blow.
“Yet hope dies hard with the happy. I knew, but it was not enough to know: I must be sure. There was a way—it came to me with my first fluttering breath as I recovered from my faint. In those old days, when I was thrown much with this man, he had shown me a curious cipher and taught me how to use it. It was original with himself, he said, and some day we might be glad of a method of communication which would render our correspondence inviolable. I could not see why he considered this likely to be ever desirable, but I took the description of it which he gave me and promised that I would never let it leave my person. I even allowed him to solder about my neck the chain which held the locket in which he had placed it. Consequently I had it with me when I fled from Boone, and for the first few weeks after arriving at my uncle's house in Detroit. Then the mockery of carrying about this reminder of days I was so anxious to forget caused me to break the chain, destroy the locket, and hide away from every one's sight the now useless and despised cipher. Now that cipher must prove my salvation. If I could find it again I was sure that the shock of receiving from my hand certain words written in the symbols he had himself taught me would call from him an involuntary revelation. I should know what I had to fear. But so many changes had taken place and so long a time elapsed since I hid this slip of paper away that I was not even sure I still retained it; but after spending a good share of the night in searching for it I finally came across it in one of my old trunks.
“The next morning I made my test. Perhaps, Henry, you remember my handing Mr. Steele an empty envelope to mail which he returned with an air of surprise so natural and seemingly unfeigned that he again forced me to believe that he was the stranger he appeared. Though he must have recognized at a glance (for he was an adept in this cipher once) the seven simple symbols in which I had expressed the great cry of my soul—'Is it you?'—he acted the innocent secretary so perfectly that all my old hopes returned and I experienced one hour of perfect joy. Then came another reaction. Betty brought in the baby with a paper pinned to her coat. She declared to us that a woman had been the instrument of this outrage, but the marks inside suggesting the cipher, but with characteristic variations bespeaking malice, could only have been made by one hand.
“How I managed to maintain sufficient hold upon my mind to drag the key from my breast, and by its means to pick out the meaning of the first three words—words which once read suggested all the rest—I cannot now imagine. Death was in my heart, and the outrage of it all was more than human strength could bear; yet I compared paper with paper carefully, intelligently, till these words from the prayer-book, with all their threatening meaning to me and mine, started into life before me: 'Visiting the sins'—Henry, you know the words—'Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.' Upon the children! Upon our child! Henry, Henry, I had awakened revenge in a fiend.
“Yet, such is the reaching out of the drowning for straws, I did not utterly despair till Nixon brought me, from this man's lodging-house, where I had sent him, a specimen of his handwriting.
“Nixon is the only confidant I have had. Nixon knew me as a girl, has always had the most unbounded, I may say jealous, affection for me. To him I had dared impart that I did not trust your new secretary; that he looked like a man I once knew who was a determined opponent of the party now trying to elect you; that a specimen of his writing would make me quite sure, and begged him to get it. I thought he might pick up such in the little office below, but he was never able to do so—Mr. Steele has taken care not to leave any of his handwriting in this house—but he did find a few lines signed with Mr. Steele's name in his room at the boarding-house, and these he showed me before he told me of the result of his errand. They settled all doubts, and my conduct since needs no explanation.
“What is to be my fate? Surely this man has no real claim on me after all these years when I thought myself your true and honest wife. He may ruin your campaign, defeat your hopes, overwhelm me with calumny and a loss of repute, but surely, surely he cannot separate us. The law will not uphold him in that, will it, Henry? Say that it will not, say—oh, say that—it—will not—do—that, or we will live to curse the day, not when we were born, but when our little innocent child was.”
For a few moments—it seemed an hour—perfect silence reigned in the room.
Then, moved by his wife's appeal, the Mayor rose and faced his secretary, and the spectacle was afforded me of seeing two strong men drawn up in conflict for the most cherished treasure of their lives. In my heart, of course, I wanted the Mayor to win. But how could he? how could he overcome the fact that his wife was previously married to this man before him?
One thing was certain: as the Mayor stepped over to his secretary there was a look in his eye that plainly indicated that he was battling for his wife, his child and his reputation.
CONCLUDED IN THE NOVEMBER JOURNAL