Not Pretty, but Precious; And Other Short Stories Part 23

No discovery. Her husband was too indifferent toward her to watch her closely, or even to suspect her. As early in June as might be she obtained permission to go to the seaside, and with an eagerness which would have found the hurricane slow she flew to Northport.

Leighton received her with a joy which at first blinded him to her enfeebled health.

"Oh, how could you stay so long away from me?" were his first words. "Oh, my love, my darling wife! thank you for coming back to me."

But after a few moments, when the first flush and, sparkle of excitement had died out of her cheeks and eyes, he asked eagerly, "What is the matter with you? Have you been sick?"

"I am all well again, now that I see you," she answered, putting out her arms to him with that little start of love and joy which had so often charmed him.

It absolutely seemed that in the presence of the object of her affection this erring woman became innocent. Her smile was as simple and pure as that of childhood: her violet eyes reminded one of a heaven without a cloud. It must have been that, away from punishment and from terror, she did not feel herself to be guilty.

But the day of reckoning was approaching. She had scarcely begun to regain an appearance of health under the stimulus of country air and renewed happiness, when a disquieting letter arrived from Duvernois. In a tone which was more than usually authoritative, he directed her to meet him at Portland, to go to Nahant and Newport. Did he suspect something?

She would have given years of life to be able to show the letter to Leighton and ask his counsel. But here her punishment began to double upon her: the being whom she most loved was precisely the one to whom she must not expose this trouble--the one from whom she was most anxious to conceal it.

In secret, and with unconfided tears, she wrote a reply, alleging (what was true) that her feeble health demanded quiet, and praying that she might be spared the proposed journey. For three days she feverishly expected an answer, knowing the while that she ought to go to Portland to meet Duvernois, should he chance to come, yet unable to tear herself away from Leighton, even for twenty-four hours.

In the afternoon of the third day she made one of her frequent visits of charity. At the house of a poor and bed-ridden widow she met, as she had hoped to meet, her husband. When they left the place he took her into his gig and carried her home.

It was a delicious day of mid June: the sun was setting in clouds of crimson and gold; the earth was in its freshest summer glory. In the beauty of the scene, and in the companions.h.i.+p of the heart which was all hers, she forgot, or seemed to forget, her troubles. One hand rested on Leighton's arm; her face was lifted steadily to his, like a flower to the light; her violet eyes were dewy and sparkling with happiness. There were little clutches of her fingers on his wrist whenever he turned to look at her. There were spasms of joy in her slender and somewhat wasted frame as she leaned from time to time against his shoulder.

Arrived at the house, she was loth to have him leave her for even the time required to take his horse to the stable.

"Come soon," she said--"come as quick as you can. I shall be at the window. Look up when you reach the gate. Look at the window all the way from the gate to the door."

In an instant, not even taking off her bonnet, she was sitting by the window waiting for him to appear.

A man approached, walking behind the hedge of lilacs which bordered the yard, and halted at the gate with an air of hesitation. She turned ghastly white: retribution was upon her. It was Duvernois.

With that swift instinct of escape which sensitive and timorous creatures possess, she glided out of the room, through the upper hall, down a back stairway, into the garden behind the house, and so on to an orchard already obscure in the twilight. Here she paused in her breathless flight, and burst into one of her frequent coughs, which she vainly attempted to smother.

"I was already dying," she groaned. "Ah, why could he not have given me time to finish?"

From the orchard she could faintly see the road, and she now discovered Leighton returning briskly toward the house. Her first thought was, "He will look up at the window, and he will not see me!" Her next was, "They will meet, and all will be known!"

Under the sting of this last reflection she again ran onward until her breath failed. She had no idea where she should go: her only purpose was to fly from immediate exposure and scorn--to fly both from the man she detested and the man she loved. Her speed was quickened to the extent of her strength by the consideration that she was already missed, and would soon be pursued.

"Oh, don't let them come!--don't let them find me!" she prayed to some invisible power, she could not have said what.

Mainly intent as she was upon mere present escape from reproachful eyes, she at times thought of lurking in the woods or in some neighboring village until Duvernois should disappear and leave her free to return to Leighton. But always the reflection came up, "Now he knows that I have deceived him; now he will despise me and hate me, and refuse to see me; now I can never go back."

In such stresses of extreme panic and anguish an adult is simply a child, with the same overweight of emotions and the same imperfections of reason.

During the moments when she was certain that Leighton would not forgive her, Alice made wild clutches at the hope that Duvernois might. There were glimpses of the earlier days of her married life; cheering phantoms of the days when she believed that she loved and that she was beloved--phantoms which swore by altars and bridal veils to secure her pardon.

She imagined Duvernois overtaking her with the words, "Alice, I forgive your madness: do you also forgive the coldness which drove you to it?"

She imagined herself springing to him, reaching out her hands for reconciliation, putting up her mouth for a kiss, and sobbing, "Ah, why were you not always so?"

Then of a sudden she scorned this fancy, trampled it under her weary, aching feet, and abhorred herself for being faithless to Leighton.

At last she reached a sandy, lonely coast-road, a mile from the village, with a leaden, pulseless, corpselike sea on the left, and on the right a long stretch of black, funereal marshes. Seating herself on a ruinous little bridge of unpainted and wormeaten timbers, she looked down into a narrow, sluggish rivulet, of the color of ink, which oozed noiselessly from the mora.s.s into the ocean. Her strength was gone: for the present farther flight was impossible, unless she fled from earth--fled into the unknown.

This thought had indeed followed her from the house: at first it had been vague, almost unnoticed, like the whisper of some one far behind; then it had become clearer, as if the persuading fiend went faster than she through the darkness, and were overtaking her. Now it was urgent, and would not be hushed, and demanded consideration.

"If you should die," it muttered, "then you will escape: moreover, those who now abhor you and scorn you, will pity you; and pity for the dead is almost respect, almost love."

"Oh, how can a ruined woman defend herself but by dying?" She wept as she gazed with a shudder into the black rivulet.

Then she thought that the water seemed foul; that her body would become tangled in slimy reeds and floating things; that when they found her she would be horrible to look upon. But even in this there was penance, a meriting of forgiveness, a claim for pity.

Slowly, inch by inch, like one who proposes a step which cannot be retraced, she crept under the railing of the bridge, seated herself on the edge of the shaky planking and continued to gaze into the inky waters.

A quarter of an hour later, when the clergyman of Northport pa.s.sed by that spot, returning from a visit to a dying saint of his flock, no one was there.

We must revert to the two husbands. Duvernois had long wondered what could keep his wife in a sequestered hamlet, and immediately on her refusal to join him in a summer tour he had resolved to look into her manner of life.

At the village hotel he had learned that a lady named Duvernois had arrived in the place during the previous summer, and that she had been publicly married to a Doctor Leighton. He did not divulge his name--he did not so much as divulge his emotions: he listened to this story calmly, his eyes fixed on vacancy.

At the door of the boarding-house he asked for Mrs. Duvernois, and then corrected himself, saying, "I mean Mrs. Leighton."

He must have had singular emotions at the moment, yet the servant-girl noticed nothing singular in his demeanor.

Mrs. Leighton could not be found. None of the family had seen her enter or go out: it was not known that she had been in the house for an hour.

"But there comes Doctor Leighton," remarked the girl as the visitor turned to leave.

Even in this frightful conjuncture the characteristic coolness of Duvernois did not forsake him: after a moment's hesitation and a quick glance at his rival, he said, "I do not know him: I will call again."

On the graveled walk which led from the yard gate to the doorstep the two men met and pa.s.sed without a word--the face of the one as inexpressive of the strangeness and horror of the encounter as the mind of the other was unconscious of them.

Leighton immediately missed Alice. In a quarter of an hour he became anxious: in an hour he was in furious search of her.

Somewhat later, when Duvernois came once more to the house, accompanied by a fas.h.i.+onably-dressed youth, who, as it subsequently appeared, was his younger brother, he found the family and the neighborhood in wild alarm over the disappearance of Mrs. Leighton. The two at once returned to the hotel, procured saddle-horses and joined in the general chase.

It was ten o'clock at night, and the moon was s.h.i.+ning with a vaporous, spectral light, when the maddest of chances brought the two husbands together over a body which the tide, with its mult.i.tudinous cold fingers, had gently laid upon the beach.

Leighton leaped from his horse, lifted the corpse with a loud cry, and covered the white wet face with kisses.

Duvernois leaned forward in his saddle, and gazed at both without a word or a movement.

"Oh, what could have led her to this?" groaned the physician, already too sure that life had departed.

"Insanity," was the monotoned response of the statue on horseback.

The funeral took place two days later: the coffin-plate bore the inscription, "Alice Leighton, aged 23." Duvernois read it, and said not a word.

"If you don't claim her as your wife," whispered the brother, "you may find it difficult to marry again."

"Do you think I shall want to marry again?" responded the widower with an icy stare.