Bylow Hill Part 12

Laying her hand reverently upon his shoulder she pressed him into his room, set the lamp aside, and let him clasp her wildly in his arms.

"Save me, Isabel," he moaned again. "Save me."

"From what, dear heart,--from what can I save you?" She drew him to a seat and knelt beside him.

"From the green-eyed demon that has gnawed, gnawed, gnawed at my heart till it is rent to shreds, and at my brain--my brain!--till it is almost gone." His brow drooped to hers. "Almost gone, beloved; my brain is almost gone."

"No, Arthur, dearest, no, no, no; your heart is torn, but your mind, thank G.o.d, is whole. This is only a mood. Come, it will pa.s.s with one night's sleep."

Still he held her brow beneath his. "Save me, Isabel; my soul is almost gone. Oh, save me from the fiends that come before me and behind me, by night and by day, eyes shut or eyes open."

"My husband! my love! how can I save you? How can I help you? Tell me how."

"Hear me! hear me confess! That will save me, oh, so sweetly, so sweetly! That will save me from the faces--the white, white faces that float on that black pool down yonder, and move their accusing lips at me: _his_ face--and mine--and thine. Oh, Isabel, until you stood before me in the golden light of your lamp, transfigured into a messenger from heaven, it was in my lost soul to do the deed this night."

The wife laid her palms upon her husband's temples, and putting forth her strength lifted them and looked tenderly into his eyes.

"Dear heart, you do not frighten me. You know how unaccountably fear deserts me in fearful moments. But I know there's nothing for either of us to fear now. This is all in your tortured imagination, and there, though you had not seen me, it would have stayed; you never would have come to the act. Arthur, your soul is not lost. You who have pointed the way of escape and deliverance so clearly and savingly to so many, you need not miss it now yourself."

"Idle words, Isabel,--idle, idle words. The very words of Christ are idle to me until I give you up."

"Give me up, my husband? Dear love, you cannot! You shall not! I will not be given up. You haven't the cause, and I haven't the cause."

"Oh, Isabel, I stole you! And the curse of G.o.d has gone with the theft, and with every step of the thief, from the first day till now. From the first day until now G.o.d has lifted that other man up and brought me down. And yet, before G.o.d who said, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, he loves you this moment--now!--with the love of a man for a woman."

"Arthur, no! If he did"--

"Isabel, if he did not--if he did not love you yet as before he lost you--oh! if he did not love you infinitely more now than then--he would not be Leonard Byington. That is all my evidence, all my argument, all the ground of my hate; and I hate him with a hatred that has finished--finished!--with my heart, and is devouring my brain."

"Oh, my poor husband, listen to"--

"Listen to me!" he broke in. "Listen before I lose the blessed impulse to say there is but one cure. I must give you up to Leonard Byington.

Oh, let me speak! I took you from him by law; by law I will give you back."

"Do you mean divorce, Arthur?"

"I do."

"On what ground?"

"On the ground of ill treatment. You shall bring suit; I will plead guilty."

She rose, with his temples still in her hands. "Ah! whose words are idle now?"

She bent over him with eyes of pa.s.sionate kindness. "You did not take me from him. You asked me to take you, and for better for worse, till death us do part, I took you, Arthur, knowing as much of any other man's love for me as I know at this hour. You could not steal me; the shame would be mine, to have let you. You are no thief! I am no stolen thing! You shall be happy with me; you shall not give me up!"

He leaped to his feet and s.n.a.t.c.hed her into his arms. The babe cried sleepily from its mother's room. She tenderly disengaged herself, left him in the door, moved on to the child's crib, and in the dim light of the bedside taper, facing him from beyond it, soothed the little one by her silent touch.

To Arthur, wan and frail though she was, the sight was heavenly fair, a vision of ineffable peace to which it seemed a sacrilege to draw nearer; but she beckoned, and he stole to the spot. With the quieted babe in its crib between them, the pair knit arms about each other's neck and kissed.

"My own! my own at last!" murmured the husband. "I never had you until now!"

"The cure has worked, dear heart," breathed the wife,--"worked without surgery, has it not?"

"The cure has worked," he replied,--"worked without the sacrifice. Oh, the sudden sweet ease of it!"

Whispering a fervent good-night in response to hers, he covered her head and brows with caresses; then stole away with eyes still fastened on her, and at the dividing threshold waved a last parting and closed the door.

XVII

SLEEP, OF A SORT

Isabel went to her couch in great heaviness and agitation. Her sad confidings to her mother, Minnie's adventure, Arthur's pitiful if not alarming condition, she strove to reconsider duly and in their order; but perpetually there interfered, with its every smallest detail thrillingly clear and strong, that moment which had thrown her once more into the company, tossed her into the very clutch, of Leonard Byington.

She turned her face into her pillow and prayed G.o.d for other thoughts and visions, and at length, while charging herself to see her mother in time to postpone the sending of her dispatch to G.o.dfrey, she slept.

Sleep, of a sort, came also to Arthur, though not before many an evil imagination had come back to tease and sting his galled mind.

What chafed oftenest was the fact that Isabel, had he allowed it, would have sought to argue down his belief that Leonard loved her. Great heaven! what must be her feeling toward him, that she should offer to argue such a question? She might truly deny all knowledge of his pa.s.sion, but oh, where were her quick outcries of womanly abhorrence?

Where was the word that Leonard Byington was no more to her than any other man,--that word which would have been the first to flash from her if conscience had not stopped it? Twice he sprang up in his bed, whispering: "They love! They love! Each knows it of the other! They love!"

The second time, as he stared, suddenly he saw them! They stood just beyond the foot of his couch, wrapped in each other's arms. Choking with wrath, freezing with horror, he slid to the floor; but at his first step they floated apart. Isabel glided toward her own door, fading as she went, and dissolved in a broad moonbeam. Leonard, as he receded, grew every instant more real, until, at his pursuer's second step, he melted through a window and was gone. Arthur sprang to the spot and stared out and down; but all he saw was the moon, the frosty night, and the silent, motionless garden.

With a whisper of fierce purpose he turned and noiselessly threw on his clothes, then clutched his head in his hands in a wild effort to recall what the purpose was, and by and by lay quietly down again on his bed.

He could not recollect; but the inner tumult quieted more and more, and after a time, without putting off any part of his dress, he drew the bedcovers over himself, and in a few moments was partially asleep. So for an hour or more he lay in half-waking dreams, ghastly with phantoms and breathless with dismay of his own ferocious strivings. Then he rose once more, and, with the noiselessness which habit had perfected, left his room, moved down the upper hall and the stair, and let himself out into the garden. Wadded in his arms he bore one or two of the coverings from his bed. He took his way to the pond.

He was walking in his sleep.

At an earlier day Isabel would have been awakened by her husband's softest movement; but now, used to his stirrings, weary in body and mind, and in some degree rea.s.sured, she slept on unstartled until Arthur's return.

He came as silently as he had gone, and was empty-handed. He had tied a great stone in the two bed-coverings, and through the thin new ice of the hole where Minnie had broken in had sunk them in the black depth under the shelving rock. He was still asleep.

The door between the two chambers gave a faint sound as he opened it, yet neither mother nor child moved. A moment pa.s.sed, and he had reached the bed. Another went by, and Isabel was awake, wildly but vainly trying to scream, to rise. A knee was on her bosom, two hands grappled her throat, and two out-starting eyes were close to hers. Her husband was strangling her.

Then he too awoke. With a horrified cry he recoiled, and she, for the first time in her life in a transport of terror, hurled him, in the strength of her frenzy, to the farther side of the bed, and writhing out on the opposite side, crept under it and lay still. In a torture of bewilderment and remorse Arthur buried his face in the bedside. Then, helpless to distinguish what he had done from what he had dreamed, he sprang back to the place where Isabel had lain sleeping, and lo, it was empty.

"Oh, was it thou, was it thou?" he wailed, in a stifled voice. "Was it not he?"

Whispering and moaning her name, hearkening and groping, he sought her from corner to corner, first of her room and then of his own, and then went to the hall and to other rooms in the same harrowing quest.

Isabel crept forth and darted to her babe. Yet as she leaned to take it in her arms her better judgment told her the child was safe. The husband too, and every one beside, were safer from his jealous wrath while the babe remained. With one anguished knitting of her hands over it she left it, and fled in her night-dress. Arthur's course was made plain by his moanings, and easily avoiding him, she glided down a back stair, out into the arbor, and across to her mother's cottage and bed-chamber. As she did so he returned hurriedly to his room, with low cries of less wretched conviction, and looked eagerly under his bed and then under hers. Thereupon the last hope died, and he dropped to his face on the floor in abject agony.

XVIII