An Ambitious Woman Part 41

"You believe all that Kate Diggs has told you!" she exclaimed. "You think I wanted a public scene. It is not true. I wanted her to be humiliated by her own conscience at a time when she thought herself most enviable, most lofty. I had no other motive. It was not revenge. It never was anything like revenge."

Goldwin's face had sobered, but he made a little shrug of the shoulders, which was like him at his brisk, mercurial best. He had plainly seen her falsehood. "Why on earth do you use the word?" he asked.

She recoiled once more. "Use the word?" she half stammered, as if thrown off her guard by this unexpected thrust. A moment afterward she went on, with renewed vehemence, all her native drawl flurriedly quickened by excitement. "I used it because Kate Diggs used it--because she presumed to say that I brought that poor, suffering, deserted, outraged mother face to face with her daughter for this reason. I don't doubt that Kate has invented the same nonsense for you that she tried to foist upon me.

She is very loyal to her friend. She has most probably told you that Mrs. Twining was always a monster to her daughter, and that she insisted on having her dead husband buried by charity, in spite of prayers, supplications, adjurations from the bereaved offspring. For my own part, I choose utterly to discredit this trumped-up tale. I never heard anything that resembled it from the feeble lips of the wretched woman who had lain for weeks in the hospital. I only heard"--

Goldwin here broke in with a voice more hard and stern than any which Mrs. Lee had known to leave his lips.

"If you will pardon me for saying so, I do not wish to continue as your listener. If you think my interruption outrageously rude, then let me admit with frankness that I can not--yes, literally _can_ not--endure what you now choose to state."

She gave her small, dark head a pa.s.sionate toss. "You can't endure it,"

she cried, "because you think that woman perfection! You can hear nothing that is not in her praise. You used to tell me that you thought Kate Diggs ridiculous; you used to laugh at her as a wild, eccentric creature. And now you are willing to credit her fictions."

"They are not fictions," said Goldwin. "All she told me to-day was pure truth. Don't try any longer to shake my credence of it. Your efforts will not avail, I a.s.sure you."

Mrs. Lee s.h.i.+vered. She put both hands up to her face, pressing them there for a moment, and then suddenly removed them. She set her dark eyes on Goldwin's face; they were glittering moistly.

"You think I edged that woman on, to serve purposes of revenge," she faltered. "Well, Stuart, if I did so, what was my real reason?"

Goldwin was drawing something from an inner side-pocket of his evening-coat. "Truly," he said, in dry, tepid tones, "I have no idea."

He fidgeted with the required something while he thus spoke. The next moment he had produced it. It was a slim packet of letters.

"I want to give you these," he said, with a brief, formal bow.

He handed her the packet. She examined it for several minutes.

"My letters," she murmured.

"Your letters," he answered, with a slight repet.i.tion of his recent bow.

She thrust the packet into her bosom. "You ... you have _kept_ all these?" she questioned, after hiding them.

"Yes," he said.

"And you give them back to me now," she pursued, "with a meaning? Well, with what meaning?"

Goldwin walked quietly toward the doorway that led into the adjacent hall. "Oh, if you want the meaning put brutally," he said, using a tone and demeanor of much suavity, "I ... I--well, I am tired."

"Tired?" she repeated. Her next sentence was a sort of gasp. "You--you hate me for what I have done!"

"I did not say that." His foot was almost on the threshold of the door while he spoke.

"Stuart!" she exclaimed, hurrying toward him. The lithe symmetry of her shape was very beautiful now; her worst detractor could not have said otherwise. She felt that the man whom she loved was leaving her forever.

She put a hand on either of his shoulders. She tried to look into his eyes while he averted his own.

"Will you leave me like this?" she went on. "You knew me long before you knew _her_! Don't let us quarrel. I--I confess everything. I--I have been very foolish. But you won't be too harsh with me--you will forgive, will you not?"

He did not answer her. He removed her hands. Then he receded from her.

"Stuart!" she still appealed.

"I have given you back your letters," he responded, standing quite near the threshold.

"Tell me one thing--do you love her? Is it because you love her that you want to part from me? I--I have scarcely seen you for weeks. You once said that a day wasn't a day unless you had seen me. Do you remember?

I've been stupid. But you won't mind so much when you've let me explain more. Don't go quite yet. Stay a moment, and" ...

He had pa.s.sed quietly from her sight. She waited until she heard the clang of the outer hall door. Then she understood what a knell it meant.

The alienation must now be life-long. She had made him despise her, and she could never win him back. Seated before the fire, that snapped and flashed as if in jeering glee at her own misery, she wept tears that had a real pathos in them--the pathos of a repulsed love. She had never believed herself at fault in her conduct toward Claire. Jealousy had speedily blackened the filial act of her rival, but in any case the story, as Mrs. Twining told it, would have roused her conviction that this desertion had been a most unnatural and cruel one. So esteeming it, she had played the part of castigator. She was not sure that she would have done very differently if Claire had not been at all an object of her hatred. She had not found the least difficulty in persuading herself that it was wholly a moral deed to use with vengeful intent knowledge which she would have been justified in using with an intent merely punitory.

But now she had wrecked all her own future by seeking to destroy Claire's. Mrs. Twining had broken faith and betrayed her. The pa.s.sion which she felt for Goldwin was an irrecoverable one. Her detestation of the woman who had caused their ceaseless parting grew as she wept over the ruin of her hopes, and mingled its ferocious heat with the more human tenderness of her tears. She pa.s.sed a lurid hour, there in her little picturesque parlor; she was in spiritual sympathy, so to speak, with its Oriental equipments. She could have understood some of those clandestine a.s.sa.s.sinations which the poisoned draught, the stealthy bow-string, and the ambushed scimitar have bequeathed to history and legend. Her past pietistic fervors had left her with no memento of consolation. A stormy turbulence had taken hold of her mental being, and shaken it as a blast will shake a bough. In her sorrow she was still a woman; in her hate she was something grossly below it.

She at length remembered the letters that he had returned to her, and drew them forth from her bosom. For a moment the anguish of loss gained mastery in her soul, and she held the packet clasped between both hands, her eyes blinded to any sight of them, and her frame convulsed with racking, internal sobs. She knew that she must read them all over again, and thus replunge into coverts of memory whose very charm and fragrance would deepen her despair. To re-peruse each letter would be like prying open the slab of a grave.

A sudden impulse a.s.sailed her as the violence of her grief subsided. She rose, and raised the letters in one hand, meaning to hurl them into the opposite blaze, and thus spare herself, while the destructive mood lasted, fresh future pangs. But at this moment her glance lighted on the packet itself. It was of moderate thickness, and tied together by a strip of ordinary cord. Inside the cincture so made, and held there insecurely by one sharp corner, a folded paper had caught, which seemed foreign to the remaining contents. Mrs. Lee disengaged this paper, opened it, and cast her tear-blurred eyes, carelessly enough at first, over some written lines which she had immediate certainty were not her own.

But presently a little cry left her lips. She turned the page with a rapid jerk, searching for a signature. She did not find any, but found merely two initials instead. She dropped into her seat again, and with a fire in her dark eyes that seemed to have quickly dried their last trace of moisture, she read, pausing over nearly every word, and pondering every sentence, a letter which ran thus:--

_Friday._

DEAR MR. GOLDWIN,--I think that I meant all the harsh treatment I gave you last evening. When I recall what my feelings then were, I am certain that my indignation was quite sincere. But very much has happened since then to change me, and to change my surroundings as well. I suppose I am in a most reckless mood while I write these lines: my head is hot, and my hands are cold, and tremble so that the words I am shaping have a strange, unfamiliar look, as though I myself were not writing them at all. Well, for that matter, the same woman whom you lately parted from is not writing them. Another woman has taken her place. She is a wayward, desperate sort of creature; she is a coward, an ingrate, a worthless and feeble egotist.

But this new ident.i.ty of mine will last. I have made up my mind to take a bold step, and nothing can now deter me. I shall not be explicit; at some other time I will send for you and tell you everything. You shall hear my reasons for acting as I propose to act. I don't claim that they are strong or good reasons, and yet I feel that they contain a certain propulsion--they push me on. My marriage has been an irreparable mistake; I can't go back and live the last year over again; I can't repossess my yesterdays. Hence, I have become willful and headstrong about my to-morrows. If I had ever really loved Herbert, all would now be so different!

But I have never loved anybody who is now living. There you have a frigid confession. You never roused in me anything but a decided liking; that other woman--the woman who called herself by my name a few hours ago--used to disapprove a good deal that there is about you. But my new self will doubtless pa.s.s over these faults very indulgently; she will have enough of her own to account for. Still, she can never do more than think you good company. I fancy that when I was a very young child nature locked up a certain cell of my heart, and then threw away the key where no one can ever find it.

I mean to go abroad, very secretly, after the sale of certain property and chattels shall have put me in possession of the needed funds. It will be a flight--and a flight from more than you are yet aware of. If we meet abroad--say in Paris--I may even stoop to discuss with you that question of a divorce. It is horrible for me to write these words. It is sin, and I feel the stab of it. But surely Herbert deserves to be rid of me, and perhaps he will come in time to value his freedom. I should want him to have the right of marrying again. Would not that be a possible arrangement? I know almost nothing of the law on these points.

It does not now seem conceivable that I should ever become your wife after I had ceased to be his. I have had enough of marriage without love. But if you should prevail with me, it would be only because of your great wealth, and the ease and distinction that are now slipping away from me. You see I am hideously candid; I don't mince matters ... where would be the use?

Do not answer this, but destroy it immediately. In regard to the last request, I count with perfect confidence upon your honor. Were it not that I did so, I should never send you this imprudent, daring, perilous scrawl.

Do not come to me until I send for you. I cannot tell how long that will be.

C. H.

Before Mrs. Lee refolded the letter which contained these words, she had read them through certainly five successive times.

Not until then had she made up her mind just what to do. She would put the letter in an envelope, and direct this, very legibly, to Herbert Hollister. Her determination was as fixed as fate....

When her guests had all departed, on the afternoon of this same day, Claire slowly walked the s.p.a.cious drawing-rooms for at least twenty minutes, with her eyes bent upon the floor.

She felt literally hunted down. The end had come; the clock had struck twelve, and her fineries were rags, her coach-and-four was a pumpkin and mice. She had carried it off well until the very last; she was sure of this, and the surety gave her, even now, a bitter pleasure. She had no doubt that the coming of her mother, with imperative demands of support and countenance, would mean a return of all the old taunts and gibes. If Claire's wealthful life of to-day had been destined to continue, this prospect would have opened a less dreary vista; as it was, she foresaw only a dropping back into the former ruts and sloughs of maternal acrimony and intolerance. The history of her past would in a manner repeat itself. There would be poverty again, or something closely akin to it; there would be the mother's unpardoning disapprobation of her child's ill-favored lot. For one marked difference, Herbert would be present, as a fresh, a.s.sertive force. And what a miserably adverse force it must prove! To exist with him would be hard enough, now, under any circ.u.mstances. But if he felt perpetually the shadow and weight of this second gloomy and heavy personality, what new hostile traits might not his depression, his impatience, his revolt develop?

Claire tried to take a very calm survey of the whole potential consequence. In so doing she regarded the advent of her mother as one factor that consorted with other untoward agencies; the central knot of the tangle would be wrought of several tough and stubborn threads. There could be no unraveling it. 'But the knot could be cut,' she thought, silently continuing her metaphor, as she paced the stately rooms.

It sent a thrill of actual terror to her when she reflected _how_ the knot could be cut. To the feet that have set their tread on slippery ways, evil can do much downward work by a gentle push. Claire felt herself lapsing, now....

What if she wrote to Stuart Goldwin a letter very different from the one she had already written him, and which was then hid under the fleecy laces that clad her bosom? What if she told him that she must fly from it all?--the love that she had outraged by cold hypocrisy, the keen if mute reproaches that would be punishment and torture alike, the thrusts and innuendoes from a tongue whose venom had poisoned her childhood, the tarnish in place of splendor, the dullness in place of brilliance, the obscurity in place of prominence, the service in place of mastery--perhaps even the toil in place of ease?

She tried, in a pitiable way, to rebuff temptation by taking the sole means at hand of ending these desperate reflections. In reality she took the most cogent means of rendering temptation more potent. She tightened its black clutch on her soul; she went upstairs and talked with her mother.