Читать книгу A Mad Marriage - May Agnes Fleming - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTHE DECREE OF DIVORCE.
t had come. I could do no more. Nothing remained for me but to retreat into the background, and wait with bated breath and beating heart for this play of "powerful domestic interest" to play itself out.
He had descended the steep, hillside path and stood on the strip of yellow sand, face to face with the wife who had deserted him. The full light of the June afternoon fell upon his face as he stood there before her, a face more hollow-eyed and haggard, more worn, than it had even looked to me first. A face set and stern, with little of mercy or pity in it.
He waved her back. Only the slightest motion of his hand, but she shrank and shivered like a child who has got a blow.
"No nearer," he said in a voice as cold and steady as the chill gray eyes that looked upon her. "Unless your sense of hearing has become dulled since the night of Lovell's death, when you played eavesdropper so well, you will be able to hear all I have to say, where you stand. I will not detain you long, and you need not wear that frightened face. I am not going to kill you—the time for all that is passed. But let me tell you this: If you had not played eavesdropper that memorable night five months ago, if you had not fled as you did, if I had found you before me when I returned, you would never have lived to see the morning. The greatest fool that ever walked the earth I had been—if you and I had met that night I would have been a murderer as well."
All this he said in a slow, self-repressed sort of tone, but the deep gray eyes that watched her were full of such hatred as no words of mine can tell.
"Spare me, Gordon," she answered, with a sobbing cry.
"Spare you?" he repeated, with cold scorn; "have I not said so? I would not lift a finger to harm a hair of your head, or to save your life if I saw you drowning in the river yonder. You are as dead to me as though I had gone home and strangled you that eventful night. The madness of love and rage, alike, are past forever. I have cut you off utterly and absolutely from my life. You have been in hiding here, they tell me, in daily dread of your life no doubt. Let us end all that. You are free to come and go where and how you will. After to-day I will never look upon your face again of my own free will, alive or dead."
She gave a shrill cry, like a culprit under the lash, her hands still held out to him in dumb agony.
"I have not even come to Quebec now in search of you," the cold, pitiless voice went on; "don't think it. I came to visit General Forrester, stationed yonder at the Citadel, before leaving this accursed Canada forever—accursed since in it I met you."
Her outstretched hands went up, with a dull moaning sound, and covered her face.
"Would you care to know how I found you out, and why I came?" he slowly went on. "Listen: Last night at mess the fellows were speaking of a widow lady, a most mysterious widow lady, young and beautiful, so rumor said, who had taken a desolate old house in a marsh, and there shut herself up, hidden from mortal man and light of day. Her name was Mrs. Gordon. Where she came from, who she was, why she had come, no man could tell. Before the name was uttered I knew it was you. Knew that when you fled from Toronto you fled here; knew that the lost woman who had been my wife was found."
Her hands dropped. For the first time she stood upright before him and looked him full in the face, stung, it would seem, into turning at bay by these last words.
"Who had been your wife!" she cried, passionately; "who is your wife, Gordon Caryll! Nothing," a sort of exultation lit her face as she said it, "nothing but death can ever alter that!"
For fully a minute he stood silently looking at her, a smile on his lips, a pitiless triumph in his eyes.
"Nothing can change that?" he repeated; "nothing but death? Well, I will answer that before we part. Let me go on. I knew it was you, this woman they talked of, and I said to myself: 'I will find her to-morrow; I will look upon her face once more, for the last time, and I will see what there was, if I can, in its wax-doll beauty, its yellow-black eyes, its straight nose and silken hair, to turn men into blind, besotted fools.' Take down your hands, Rosamond, and let me look at you."
She had shrank from him, from his smile, in some nameless, dreadful fear, that made her cover her white face once more. She dropped her hands now, at his bidding, looking up with dilated eyes.
"Gordon, have mercy on me. I love you!"
Again she stretched forth her hands to him with that piteous cry. Again he motioned her imperiously back, his lips set, his eyes pitiless, his face like stone.
"Stand still!" he ordered.
She obeyed.
For fully two minutes this strange tableau was before me, and all unseen, in my obscure nook, I stood gazing with an interest that held me rapt and spellbound. He, drawn up to his full height, his face like white stone, so hard, so cold, that chill, half smile still on his lips. She, half cowering before him, her lovely, colorless face uplifted, her eyes full of dreadful terror, her loose, feathery hair blowing in the wind,—young, fair, innocent to see, at least. So they stood—stern young judge, quivering little criminal, until it grew almost too much even for my nerves to endure.
"You are a beautiful little woman, Rosamond," he said, at length; "one of those exceptional women, who, like Ninon de L'Enclos, will be beautiful at eighty. And that fair face of yours will do its devil's work, I don't doubt, to the end of the chapter. To possess that face for four short months I have lost all that man holds dear—name, honor, home, friends, fortune—all. For the name that you have borne and disgraced, I will bear no longer. I have sold out—do you know it? my father has disinherited me—I am the laughingstock of all who ever knew me. I look back and wonder at my own infatuation. I loved you—I trusted you. Oh, God!" he cried out, a spasm of anguish distorting his face; "I married you—you! You played your game well, you and Lovell. It was your trade; and with such a fool as I, it was an easy game enough. But you had cause to fear, and you knew it—I say again you did well to fly. I went out from Lovell's death-bed a madman—if I had found you on my return, by the light above us, I would have murdered you!"
She shrank back from him, trembling with pure physical terror now, from head to foot.
"No need to tremble—no need to fear now," he went on, his voice losing its sudden fury, and sinking to its former cold monotone; "I have told you all that is past and done with. But before we part, I should like to hear once from your own lips, just once (not that I doubt) that Major Lovell's story was true."
Her only answer was to cower still farther away, and with a great, heart-wrung sob, to bury her face once again in her hands.
"Ah, hide it," he said bitterly; "hide it forever from the sight of man—the fairest, falsest face ever made. But speak—if such lips as yours can speak truth, and tell me that Lovell's story was true."
"Gordon! have mercy."
"Was it true?"
"I loved you, Gordon! As there is a heaven above us, I loved you with all my heart."
He half laughed—even in that moment.
"Your heart—yours! What witty things are said by accident! Never mind your heart or your love. I know what both are worth. Answer my question. Was Lovell's story true. One word—yes or no."
"Gordon, I was faithful. Oh! what shall I say to him to—"
"Was it true? Yes or no?"
"Gordon, I swear—"
"Was it true?" he cried, his eyes flashing fire; "no more words! Yes or no."
"Yes, but—"
"That will do. We won't waste words about it. You would swear black was white, I daresay, but keep your histrionic talents for the New York stage again—you may need them before long. Let us get back to what you said a moment ago. 'You are my wife—nothing but death can change that.' Do me the favor to look at this."
He drew a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to her. Something in his face as he did so frightened her as nothing had frightened yet. Her hands shook—she strove to open the paper and failed. She looked at him with piteous eyes and trembling lips.
"I can't," she faltered; "Gordon, what is it?"
"It is a decree of divorce," he answered, in his cold, sombre voice. "One week after Lovell's death and your flight, I instituted a suit for divorce, and obtained it. You can read the details in that paper, at your leisure—it may help while away an hour. This is what has kept me in Canada so long. In two days I leave it forever. Chance has brought us together this once, for the last time."
He paused, half turned away, then suddenly stopped. She had made some kind of gesture, but it was not for that; she had said "wait!" in a hoarse whisper; but it was not that. It was the ghastly change that had come over her face as he struck his last merciless blow. For a moment, I think, it startled even him.
"This is true—this that you tell me—this—divorce?"
She spoke the words in a husky, breathless sort of voice, her face all distorted, clutching the paper hard.
"It is perfectly true," his chill voice answered. "Read and see."
"I am no longer your wife?"
"You are no longer my wife—thank Heaven and the merciful law of the land."
"After this day, you never mean to see or know me again?"
"I never mean to see you again if it be in my power, alive or dead."
"Then hear me!" She drew herself upright, her small figure seeming to dilate and grow tall. "Lovell's story was true—true I tell you in every particular except this: that I married you for your rank, and your name, and your wealth. I married you for these, it is true; but beyond these, because I loved you with all my heart. Oh, yes, Gordon Caryll! even such women as I am can love; and in deed, and thought, from the hour you placed this ring on my finger, I was your true and loyal wife. I would have gone with you to beggary—I would have died, if need were, for your sake. Now I am divorced and cast off forever, you say. Well, then we shall meet again one day, so surely as we both live. This cold-blooded divorce I will never forgive. Go, Gordon Caryll! but remember this, one day or other, so surely as we both stand here, I will make you suffer for this!"
He laughed as he listened—a low, contemptuous laugh, that would have goaded any infuriated woman to madness.
"You do it very well, Rosamond," he said; "but so many years' hard practice on the stage of the Bowery Theatre could hardly fail to tell. For the rest, it is rather wasted on an unappreciative audience at present. If I should be so unfortunate as ever to meet you again, I trust, even then, to be able to take care of myself."
He turned without another word and left her, striding up the steep path, and never once looking back.
She stood where he left her, watching him out of sight, the color fading from her face, the life from her eyes. So, standing motionless there, she saw him pass from view, heard the last echo of his footsteps die away. Then I came forward, for the look on her face frightened me. She turned to me slowly, the fatal paper held in her hand.
"I dreamed he came with my death-warrant," she said; "here it is."
And then without word or cry to warn me, she went down in a dead faint on the sands.
How I brought her to, how I got her home, I can never tell. I did it somehow, and laid her on her bed as the June moon rose and the stars came out. Old Bettine, the French charwoman, was still pottering about the kitchen. In her charge I left my mistress, and fled into town for a doctor. For she was very ill—so ill that it seemed doubtful whether she would ever live to see day dawn.
The clocks of Quebec, high up in steeples, silvered by the quiet summer moonlight, were chiming eleven as our first visitor entered Saltmarsh—the doctor.
And when the lovely June morning dawned, and the swallows twittered in the eaves, Gordon Caryll's child lay in my arms, and Gordon Caryll's divorced wife lay white and still, with Life and Death fighting their sharp battle above her pillow.
