Читать книгу The Span o' Life: A Tale of Louisbourg & Quebec - William McLennan - Страница 8

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“THE DEAD AND THE ABSENT ARE ALWAYS WRONG”

I myself was not greatly disturbed over the turn things had taken, for I had begun to be suspicious of my thrifty Scot in Greek Street, and, as I had left behind me neither papers nor effects which could compromise myself or others when he laid his dirty claws upon them, I turned my back on him without regret.

The hour was late to enter upon a search for new lodgings without arousing suspicion, and this determined me to try the sempstress indicated by Lady Jane.

I found the street without difficulty, and, what was better, without questioning, and soon discovered the little shop with a welcome gleam of light shewing through the closed shutters. The street was empty, so I advanced, and, after knocking discreetly, tried the door, which, to my surprise, I found open, and so entered.

In a low chair behind the counter sate a solitary woman, sewing by the indifferent light of a shaded candle. She looked at me keenly and long, but without alarm.

“Madam,” said I, closing the door behind me and slipping in the bolt, “have no fear. My name is Captain Geraldine.”

“That is a lie,” she said, calmly, raising her face so the full light of the candle should fall upon it.

Great heavens! It was that of my wife!

I sank down on a settle near the wall and stared at her, absolutely speechless with surprise and horror, while she continued her sewing without a second look, though I could mark her hands were trembling so she could hardly direct her needle.

“Good God! Lucy! Is it really you?” I cried, scarce believing the evidence of my senses.

“I am she whom you name.”

“And you know me?”

“I know that you are Hugh Maxwell,” she answered, in the same steady voice.

“And you know that I am your husband.”

“I have no husband. My husband is dead.”

“Lucy, do not break my heart! I am not a scoundrel! Do you think for a moment I could abandon the girl who trusted and married me? I had the most positive intelligence of your death. Lucy, Lucy, for God's sake speak, and do not torture me beyond endurance. Tell me what has happened.”

But the trembling hands went on with their task, though she neither raised her head nor spake. My brain was in a whirl, and I did not know what to think or how to act, so I preserved at least an outward quiet for a time, trying to imagine her position.

I was but eighteen when I had married her, a tradesman's daughter, but my uncertain allowance, as well as the certain wrath of my family, prevented me acknowledging her as my wife, and no one except her mother knew of our union.

As I sate trying to find some light, I heard the cry of a lusty child: “Mother! Mother!” At this her face contracted as with sudden pain, and saying only, “Wait where you are,” she left the shop.

I noticed she had still the same quick, light way of moving, “like a bird,” I used to tell her in the old days: it was but the dull, ungenerous colour and shape of her stuff gown that hid the dainty figure I had known, and only some different manner of dressing her hair that prevented the old trick of the little curls that would come out about her ears and forehead.

While she was away I thought it all out, and my heart melted with pity for the poor soul, forced to these years of loneliness, to this daily struggle for the support of herself and her child—our child—and, more than all else, to the torturing thought that the love which had been the sum of her existence was false. What should I do? Could I be in doubt for a moment? I would make up to her, by the devotion of a heart rich in feeling, all the sorrows of the past.

Here she entered again, but now collected and herself as at first. I rose and advanced to meet her, but she waved me off, and took up her sewing again in her former position.

“Lucy,” I said, standing over her, “does not the voice of our child—for I cannot doubt it is our child—plead for me? Listen a moment. When I returned from that ill-starred Russian voyage, I flew at once to join you. You had been in my heart during all my absence, and my return home was to be crowned with your love. But, to my consternation, I found strangers occupying the old rooms, and the woman told me with every circumstance of harrowing detail the story of your death by typhus, and that your mother followed you to the grave scarce a day later. Heartbroken as I was, I never sought for further confirmation than the nameless graves she pointed out to me by your parish church. She told me, too, your effects were burned by order of the overseers, and I took it for granted she had stolen anything of value that might have been left. When I found at my banker's that a lieutenancy in Berwick's was awaiting my application, I only too eagerly seized the opportunity of escaping from a country where I should be constantly reminded of my ruined past, and since that day I have never set foot in London till the present. Oh, Lucy! Lucy! I see it all now. The birth of our child was approaching. You, poor soul, were an unacknowledged wife; I was wandering, a shipwrecked stranger beyond all means of communication, and you fled from the finger of shame that cruel hands would hare pointed at you. Why that hag should have gone to such lengths to deceive me I cannot even guess. But now, my dear love, my dearest wife, it is at an end! I have a position—at least I am a captain, with fair chance of promotion—I no longer have a family to consider, and once I get out of this present trap I will acknowledge you before the whole world, and we will wipe out the cruel past as if it had never existed.”

“I have no past,” she said, quietly.

“Then, Lucy darling, as truly as I am your husband I will make you a future.”

“I have no husband,” she answered, in the same quiet tone: “my husband died the day my boy was born.”

“But, Lucy, my wife, you have love?”

“Not such love as you mean. My love, such as it is here, is for my boy. All else is for something beyond.”

“But, Lucy, have you nothing left for me? Surely you do not doubt my word?”

“No,” she answered, slowly. “You have never deceived me that I know of. Until to-night I believed you had left me, but I know now, it is I who have left you. There never can be anything between us.”

“Why, Lucy? Tell me why! Do not sit there holding yourself as if you were apart from me and mine.”

“You have just said the very words which explain it all,” she answered. “I am indeed 'apart from you and yours.' Your explanation now makes clear why you did not seek me out on your return, and I accept it fully. But think you for a moment that this wipes out all I have suffered through these years? Can you explain away, by any other statement, save that I was 'apart from you and yours.' the cruel wrong you did when you left me, a helpless girl without experience, in a position where I was utterly defenceless against evil tongues in the hour of my trial; so that what should have been my glory was turned into a load of disgrace which crushed me and killed my mother? To say you intended to return is no answer, no defence. You knew all about a world of which I was ignorant, and you should have shielded me by your knowledge.

“Do not think I am unhuman, I am simply unfeeling on the side to which you would appeal. I have lived too long alone, I have suffered too much alone, to look to any human creature for such help or such comfort as you would bring. I know you were honest, I know you were loving and tender, but that has all passed for me. You do not come into my life at any point; I can look on you without a throb of my heart either in love or in hate—”

“But, Lucy, I am not changed. I am the same Hugh Maxwell you knew.”

“You are Hugh Maxwell—but there is no question of likeness, of being the same, for there is no Lucy. She is as really dead to you to-day as you thought when you mourned her six years ago. The 'Mistress Routh' who speaks now is a widow, by God's grace a member of the Society of Methodists, and you need never seek through her to find any trace of the girl you knew. She is dead, dead, dead, and may the Lord have mercy on her soul!”

It was like standing before a closed grave.

Against this all my prayers, my tears, my entreaties, availed nothing, until at last I ceased in very despair at the firmness of this unmovable woman, whom I had left a pretty, wilful, changeable girl a few years before.

The candle had long since burned itself out, and the gray of the morning was beginning to struggle in at every opening when I gave up the contest.

“Mistress Routh,” said I, smiling at the odd address, “I have been overlong in coming to my business. I am a proscribed rebel with a price set on my head, and I seek a new lodging, my old one being unsafe. I was directed here almost by chance. Can you give me such room as you can spare? There is but little or no danger in harbouring me, for I am reported to be in Scotland with the Prince, 'the Young Pretender,' if you like it so. I will be as circumspect in my movements as possible. Above all, I will never shew by word or sign that I knew you before, even when we are alone, nor will I betray your secret to our boy. You are free to refuse me, and should you do so, I will seek shelter elsewhere; but whether I go or stay, I give you my word of honour as a gentleman that your secret rests where it lies in my heart until such time as you see fit to proclaim it yourself. Will you, then, consent to let me have a room under your roof until such time as I can get over to France?”

After a little she said: “Yes; I can take your word. But remember, from this night you are a stranger to me. You will pay as a stranger, and come and go as a stranger.”

And so this unnatural treaty was ratified. My hostess made such preparation for my comfort as I would allow, and when alone I sate on my couch trying to put my thoughts in order.

It was only then that Margaret came back to me. During my long struggle with my poor wife no thought of another had entered my mind, my whole endeavour being directed towards making such amends for the cruelties of an undeserved fate as were possible; but now, when alone, the realisation of what it meant in my relation towards Margaret overwhelmed me. All unwittingly I had been playing the part of a low scoundrel towards the fairest, purest soul in the whole world; I had been living in a Fool's Paradise, drinking the sweetest draught that ever intoxicated a human soul, and now, without an instant's warning, the cup was dashed from my lips.

Poor Margaret! Poor Lucy! Poor Hugh! My heart was aching for them all.