The Mayor's Wife (Ladies' Home Journal serial)/Part 6
DRAWN BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS
“'God Has Finished What These Old Arms Had Only Strength Enough to Begin. He is Dead This Time, and it's a Mercy!'”
Chapter XIV
IT WAS characteristic of these two forcible men, as well as of the extreme nature of the conflict as they faced each other to battle for the woman before them, that both were quiet in manner and speech. Perhaps the Mayor was even more quiet than the other, as he began the struggle by saying:
“Is what Mrs. Packard says of your playing with her fears during these two weeks true, Steele?”
Without a droop of his eye or a tremor in his voice, the answer came short, sharp and emphatic:
“Yes.”
“Then you are a villain! and I shall not show you any consideration beyond what justice demands. Have you any plea to urge beyond the natural one of her seemingly unprovoked desertion of you? Has not my wife” (the nobility with which he emphasized those two words made my heart swell) “spoken the truth?”
“True, yes, it is true. But what does that truth involve for me? Not two weeks, but seven years, of torture—five of them devoted to grief for her loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against her whole sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised victim of her deception.”
“She wronged you—she acknowledges that—but it was the wrong of an unthinking child, not of a realizing woman. Would you, a realizing man, tear her now from home, from her child, from her place in the community and my heart—make her despicable as well as unhappy just to feed your revenge?”
“Yes, I would do that.”
“Jeopardize interests you have so often professed to be far above personal considerations—the success of your party, the triumph of political principles?”
“My political principles!” Oh, the irony in his voice, the triumph in his laugh. “And what do you know of them? What I have said? Mayor Packard, your education as a politician has yet to be completed before you will be fit for the Governorship of a State. I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man, that it suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you pause before you trusted me with the furtherance of a campaign which may outlast those exigencies. I have not always been of your party; I am not so now at heart.”
The Mayor, outraged in every sentiment of honor as well as in the most cherished feelings of his heart, towered upon his unmoved secretary with a wrath which would have borne down any other man before it.
“Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor's work? That the glorification you speak of is false? That you may talk in my favor, but that when you come to the issue you will vote according to your heart—that is, for Stanton?”
“Yes, you understand me perfectly.”
The Mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.
“Then,” he cried, “I take back the word by which I qualified you a moment ago. You are not a villain, you are a dastard.”
Mr. Steele bowed in a way which turned the opprobrium into a seeming compliment.
“I have suffered so many wrongs at your hands that I cannot wonder at suffering this one more.” Then slowly, and with a short look at her, “The woman who has queened it so long in C society cannot wish to undergo the charge of bigamy.”
“You will bring such a charge?”
“Certainly, if she does not voluntarily quit her false position, and, accepting the protection of the man whose name is really hers, go from this house at once.”
At this alternative, uttered with an icy deliberation which left little ground for hope, Mrs. Packard recoiled with a sharp cry, but the Mayor, preserving his self-possession, confined himself to the sarcastic query: “Which name—Steele or Brainard?”
“My real name is Brainard; therefore, it is also hers. But I will be content if she will take my present one of Steele. More than that, I will be content if she will honestly accept from my hands a place of refuge where I swear she shall remain unmolested by me till this matter can be legally settled. I do not wish to make myself hateful to her, for I anticipate the day when she will be my wife in heart as she is now in law.”
“Never!” The word rang out in true womanly revolt. “I will die before that day ever comes to separate me from the man I love and the child who calls me mother. You may force me from this house, you may plunge me into poverty, into contumely, but you shall never make me look upon myself as other than the wife of this good man whom I have wronged but will never disgrace.”
“Madam,” declared the secretary with a derisive appreciation which bowed her once proud head upon her breast, “you are all I thought you when I took you from Crabbe's back-pantry in Boone to make you the honor and glory of a life which I knew then, as well as I do now, would not run long in obscure channels.”
It was a sarcasm calculated to madden the proud man who only a few minutes before had designated the object of it by the sacred name of wife. But beyond a hasty glance at the woman it had bowed almost to the ground, the Mayor gave no evidence of feeling either its force or assumption. Other thoughts were in his mind than those roused by jealous anger.
“How old were you then?” he demanded with alarming incongruity.
The secretary started; the doubtful nature of the attack was one he could not but feel. He answered, however, calmly enough: “I? Seven years ago I was twenty-five. I am thirty-two now.”
“So I have heard you say. A man of twenty-five is old enough to have made a record, Mr. Steele.” All the Mayor's natural geniality fled with the word. His tone changed, so did his manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the courts before he took up politics and became the city's Mayor. “Mr. Steele, I do not mean you to disturb my house or to rob me of my wife. What was your life before you met Barbara Brewster?”
A pause, the slightest in the world, but the keen eye of the astute lawyer noted it, and his tone grew in severity and assurance.
“You have known for two years that this woman whom you call yours was within your reach, if not under your very eye, and you forbore to claim her. Has this delay had anything to do with the record of those years to which I have just alluded?”
Had the random shot told? The secretary's eye did not falter, nor his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look and attitude were not the same: the fire had gone out of them; a blight had struck his soul; the flush of his triumph was gone.
Mayor Packard was merciless.
“Only two considerations could hold back a man like you from urging a claim he regarded as a sacred right: the fact of a former marriage, or the remembrance of a forfeited citizenship (pardon me, we cannot mince matters in a strait like this) which would delegalize whatever contract you may have entered into.”
Still the secretary's eye did not swerve, though he involuntarily stretched forth his hand toward the table as if afraid of betraying a tremor in his rigid figure.
“Was there the impediment of a former marriage?”
No answer from the sternly-set lips.
“Or was it that you once served a term—a very short term, cut short by a successful effort at escape—in a Minnesota prison?”
“Insults,” broke from those set lips, and nothing more.
“Mr. Steele, I have practiced law in that same State for a period of three years. All the records of the office and of the prison register are open to me. Over which of them should I waste my time?”
Then the tiger broke loose in the man who from the aggressor had become the attacked, and he cried:
“I shall never answer; the devil has whispered his own suggestions in your ear.”
But the Mayor, satisfied that he made his point, smiled calmly, saying:
“No, not the devil, but yourself. You—even the you of seven years back—live in any country town, if necessity, or, let us say, safety, did not demand it! With your looks and your ambitions to marry at twenty-five a girl from the kitchen—any girl, even it she had the makings of a Barbara Packard—if you did not know that it was in your power to shake her off when you got ready to assert yourself, or better prospects offered! The cipher and the possible need you expressed of a means of communication unreadable save by you two! All this was enough to start the suspicion; your own manner has done the rest. Mr. Steele, you are a villain and a dastard both, and have no right in law to this woman. Contradict me if you dare.”
“I dare, but will not,” was the violent reply. “I will not give you even that satisfaction. This woman, who has gone through the ceremony of marriage with both of us, shall never know of which of us she is the wife. Perhaps it is as good a revenge as the other. It certainly will interfere as much with her peace.”
“Oh, oh, not that, I cannot bear that,” leaped in anguish from her lips. “I am a pure woman—let no such torture be inflicted upon me. Speak! tell the truth as you are the son of a woman you would have me believe honest.”
A smile, thin, cold, but all alive with gloating triumph, altered the straight line of his lips for an instant as he advanced toward the door. “A woman over the possession of whom it is an honor to quarrel,” was the final finish he gave his words as he passed the Mayor with a bow.
I looked to see the Mayor spring and grasp him by the throat, but that was left for another hand. As the secretary bent to touch the door it suddenly flew violently open, and Nixon, quivering in every limb and with his face afire, sprang in and seized upon the other with a violence of passion which would have been deadly had there been any strength behind it.
It was nothing for so strong a man as Steele to shake off so futile a grasp, and he did so easily. But next moment he was tottering, blanched and helpless, and while struggling to right himself and escape, yielded more and more to the weakness sapping his life vigor, till he lay prone and apparently lifeless on the lounge toward which with a final effort he had thrown himself.
“Good! Good,” rang thrilling through the room, as the old man reeled back from the wall against which he had been cast. “God has finished what these old arms had only strength enough to begin. He is dead this time, and it's a mercy! Thank God, Miss Barbara; thank God, as I do now on my knees!” But here, catching the Mayor's eye, he faltered to his feet again, saying humbly as he crept away:
“I could not help it, your Honor. I shouldn't have been listening at the door; but I have loved Miss Barbara, as we used to call her, more than anything in the world ever since she came to make my old master's house a place of sunshine, and all I'm sorry for is that God had to do the finishing which twenty years ago I could have done myself.”
But Nixon was wrong. Mr. Steele did not die—not this time. Cared for by the physician who had been hastily summoned, he slowly but surely revived and by midnight was able to leave the house. As he passed the Mayor on his way out I heard the latter say:
“I shall leave the house myself in a few minutes. I do not mean that your disaffection shall ruin my campaign any more than I mean to leave a stone unturned to substantiate my accusation that you had no right to marry, and possess no legal claims over the woman whose happiness you have endeavored to wreck. If you are wise you will put no further hindrance in my way. You have roused a man, Steele—one who can rend and tear but who can also be merciful. Permit him to be merciful.”
I heard no answer, and the closing of the door upon the former secretary had a final sound which affected me like a prophecy of better days to come.
I was not a witness to the parting interview between Mayor Packard and his wife; I had stolen into the nursery for a look at the little one. I found her sleeping sweetly with one chubby hand under her rounded cheek. Thus had she lain and thus had she slept during all those dreadful minutes when her future fate hung trembling in the balance.
I remained with Mrs. Packard during the ensuing weeks. One of the tasks with which I whiled away the many hours in which I found myself alone was the proper mastery of the cipher which had played such a part in the evolution of the life drama enacted before my eyes. It was very simple. With the following diagram as a key, and a single hint as to its management, you will at once comprehend its apparent intricacies:
(Whenever a dot appeared indicated that the second letter in the division was the one used. Thus _| stood for A, and *_| for B.)
The hint to which I allude is this: with every word the paper is turned in the hands toward the left. This alters the shape and direction of the angle or part of square symbolizing the several letters, and creates the confusion which interfered with my solution of its mysteries the night I subjected it, with such unsatisfactory results, to the tests which had elucidated the cryptogram in “The Gold-Bug.”
We all know the results of the election by which Governor Packard holds his seat, but few persons outside of those mentioned in this history know why the event of his homecoming from a trip he made to Minnesota brought a brighter and more lasting light into his wife's eye than the news of his astonishing political triumph.
He had substantiated facts by which Mr. Steele's claims were entirely disannulled. But what those facts were, or which, if either, of the two accusations he had made against him was the true one, I never heard, nor do I think it was ever divulged to any one outside of the Mayor's own family circle.