There were a lot of people at the station. They had been to a family
gathering of some sort from their remarks, and they talked loudly and
much, so that the two stood apart--for the seats were all occupied--and
had no opportunity for conversation, save a quiet smiling comment now
and then upon the chatter about them, or the odd remarks they heard.
There had come a constraint upon them, a withdrawing of each into his
shell, each conscious of something that separated. Gordon struggled to
prevent it, but he seemed helpless. Celia would smile in answer to his
quiet remarks, but it was a smile of distance, such as she had worn
early in the morning. She had quite found her former standing ground,
with its fence of prejudice, and she was repairing the breaks through
which she had gone over to the enemy during the day. She was bracing
herself with dire reminders, and snatches from those terrible letters
which were written in characters of fire in her heart. Never, never,
could she care for a man who had done what this man had done. She had
forgotten for a little while those terrible things he had said of her
dear dead father. How could she have forgotten for an instant! How
could she have let her hand lie close to the hand that had defiled
itself by writing such things!
By the time they were seated in the train, she was freezing in her
attitude, and poor Gordon sat miserably beside her and tried to think
what he had done to offend her. It was not his fault that her hand
had lain near his on the rail. She had put it there herself. Perhaps
she expected him to put his over it, to show her that he cared as a
bridegroom should care--as he did care, in reality, if he only had the
right. And perhaps she was hurt that he had stood coolly and said or
done nothing. But he could not help it.
Much to Gordon’s relief, the train carried a parlor-car, and it
happened on this particular day to be almost deserted save for a deaf
old man with a florid complexion and a gold knobbed cane who slumbered
audibly at the further end from the two chairs Gordon selected. He
established his companion comfortably, disposed of the baggage, and
sat down, but the girl paid no heed to him. With a sad, set face,
she stared out of the window, her eyes seeming to see nothing. For
two hours she sat so, he making remarks occasionally, to which she
made little or no reply, until he lapsed into silence, looking at her
with troubled eyes. Finally, just as they neared the outskirts of
Pittsburgh, he leaned softly forward and touched her coat-sleeve, to
attract her attention.
“Have I offended--hurt--you in any way?” he asked gently. She turned
toward him, and her eyes were brimming full of tears.
“No,” she said, and her lips were trembling. “No, you have
been--most--kind--but--but I cannot forget _those letters_!” She ended
with a sob and put up her handkerchief quickly to stifle it.
“Letters?” he asked helplessly. “What letters?”
“The letters you wrote me. All the letters of the last five months. I
cannot forget them. I can _never_ forget them! How could you _think_ I
could?”
He looked at her anxiously, not knowing what to say, and yet he must
say something. The time had come when some kind of an understanding,
some clearing up of facts, must take place. He must go cautiously, but
he must find out what was the matter. He could not see her suffer so.
There must be some way to let her know that so far as he was concerned
she need suffer nothing further and that he would do all in his power
to set her right with her world.
But letters! He had written no letters. His face lighted up with the
swift certainty of one thing about which he had not dared to be sure.
She still thought him the man she had intended to marry. She was not
therefore troubled about that phase of the question. It was strange,
almost unbelievable, but it was true that he personally was not
responsible for the trouble in her eyes. What trouble she might feel
when she knew all, he had yet to find out, but it was a great relief to
be sure of so much. Still, something must be said.
“Letters!” he repeated again stupidly, and then added with perplexed
tone: “Would you mind telling me just what it was in the letters that
hurt you?”
She turned eyes of astonishment on him.
“How can you ask?” she said almost bitterly. “You surely must know how
terrible they were to me! You could not be the man you have seemed to
be to-day if you did not know what you were doing to me in making all
those terrible threats. You must know how cruel they were.”
“I am afraid I don’t understand,” he said earnestly, the trouble
still most apparent in his eyes, “Would you mind being a little more
explicit? Would you mind telling me exactly what you think I wrote you
that sounded like a threat?”
He asked the question half hesitatingly, because he was not quite sure
whether he was justified in thus obtaining private information under
false pretenses, and yet he felt that he must know just what troubled
her or he could never help her; and he was sure that if she knew he was
an utter stranger, even a kindly one, those gentle lips would never
open to inform him upon her torturer. As it was she could tell him her
trouble with a perfectly clear conscience, thinking she was telling it
to the man who knew all about it. But his hesitation about prying into
an utter stranger’s private affairs even with a good motive, gave him
an air of troubled dignity, and real anxiety to know his fault that
puzzled the girl more than all that had gone before.
“I cannot understand how you can ask such a question, since it has been
the constant subject of discussion in all our letters!” she replied,
sitting up with asperity and drying her tears. She was on the verge of
growing angry with him for his petty, wilful misunderstanding of words
whose meaning she felt he must know well.
“I do ask it,” he said quietly, “and, believe me, I have a good motive
in doing so.”
She looked at him in surprise. It was impossible to be angry with those
kindly eyes, even though he did persist in a wilful stupidity.
“Well, then, since you wish it stated once more I will tell you,” she
declared, the tears welling again into her eyes. “You first demanded
that I marry you--demanded--without any pretense whatever of caring
for me--with a hidden threat in your demand that if I did not, you
would bring some dire calamity upon me by means that were already in
your power. You took me for the same foolish little girl whom you had
delighted to tease for years before you went abroad to live. And when
I refused you, you told me that you could not only take away from my
mother all the property which she had inherited from her brother, by
means of a will made just before my uncle’s death, and unknown except
to his lawyer and you; but that you could and would blacken my dear
dead father’s name and honor, and show that every cent that belonged to
Mother and Jefferson and myself was stolen property. When I challenged
you to prove any such thing against my honored father, you went still
further and threatened to bring out a terrible story and prove it with
witnesses who would swear to anything you said. You knew my father’s
white life, you as much as owned your charges were false, and yet you
dared to send me a letter from a vile creature who pretended that she
was his first wife, and who said she could prove that he had spent much
of his time in her company. You knew the whole thing was a falsehood,
but you dared to threaten to make this known through the newspapers
if I did not marry you. You realized that I knew that, even though few
people and no friends would believe such a thing of my father, such a
report in the papers--false though it was--would crush my mother to
death. You knew that I would give my life to save her, and so you had
me in your power, as you have me now. You have always wanted me in your
power, just because you love to torture, and now you have me. But you
cannot make me forget what you have done. I have given my life but I
cannot give any more. If it is not sufficient you will have to do your
worst.”
She dropped her face into the little wet handkerchief, and Gordon
sat with white, drawn countenance and clenched hands. He was fairly
trembling with indignation toward the villain who had thus dared impose
upon this delicate flower of womanhood. He longed to search the world
over for the false bridegroom; and, finding, give him his just dues.
And what should he do or say? Dared he tell her at once who he was and
trust to her kind heart to forgive his terrible blunder and keep his
secret till the message was safely delivered? Dared he? Had he any
right? No, the secret was not his to divulge either for his own benefit
or for any other’s. He must keep that to himself. But he must help her
in some way.
At last he began to speak, scarcely knowing what he was about to say:
“It is terrible, _terrible_, what you have told me. To have written
such things to one like you--in fact, to anyone on earth--seems to me
unforgivable. It is the most inhuman cruelty I have ever heard of. You
are fully justified in hating and despising the man who wrote such
words to you.”
“Then, why did you write them?” she burst forth. “And how can you sit
there calmly and talk that way about it, as if you had nothing to do
with the matter?”
“Because I never wrote those letters,” he said, looking her steadily,
earnestly, in the eyes.
“You never wrote them!” she exclaimed excitedly. “You dare to deny it?”
“I dare to deny it.” His voice was quiet, earnest, convincing.
She looked at him, dazed, bewildered, indignant, sorrowful. “But you
cannot deny it,” she said, her fragile frame trembling with excitement.
“I have the letters all in my suit-case. You cannot deny your own
handwriting. I have the last awful one--the one in which you threatened
Father’s good name--here in my hand-bag. I dared not put it with the
rest, and I had no opportunity to destroy it before leaving home. I
felt as if I must always keep it with me, lest otherwise its awful
secret would somehow get out. There it is. Read it and see your own
name signed to the words you say you did not write!”
While she talked, her trembling fingers had taken a folded, crumpled
letter from her little hand-bag, and this she reached over and laid
upon the arm of his chair.
“Read it,” she said. “Read it and see that you cannot deny it.”
“I should rather not read it,” he said. “I do not need to read it to
deny that I ever wrote such things to you.”
“But I insist that you read it,” said the girl.
“If you insist I will read it,” he said, taking the letter reluctantly
and opening it.
She sat watching him furtively through the tears while he read, saw
the angry flush steal into his cheeks as the villainy of a fellow man
was revealed to him through the brief, coarse, cruel epistle, and she
mistook the flush for one of shame.
Then his true brown eyes looked up and met her tearful gaze steadily, a
fine anger burning in them.
“And you think I wrote that!” he said, a something in his voice she
could not understand.
“What else could I think? It bears your signature,” she answered coldly.
“The letter is vile,” he said, “and the man who wrote it is a
blackguard, and deserves the utmost that the law allows for such
offences. With your permission, I shall make it my business to see that
he gets it.”
“What do you mean?” she said, wide-eyed. “How could you punish
yourself? You cannot still deny that you wrote the letter.”
“I still deny that I wrote it, or ever saw it until you handed it to me
just now.”
The girl looked at him, nonplussed, more than half convinced, in spite
of reason.
“But isn’t that your handwriting?”
“It is not. Look!”
He took out his fountain pen, and, holding the letter on the arm of her
chair, he wrote rapidly in his natural hand her own name and address
beneath the address on the envelope, then held it up to her.
“Do they look alike?”
The two writings were as utterly unlike as possible, the letter being
addressed in an almost unreadable scrawl, and the fresh writing
standing fine and clear, in a script that spoke of character and
business ability. Even a child could see at a glance that the two were
not written by the same hand--and yet of course, it might have been
practised for the purpose of deception. This thought flashed through
the minds of both even as he held it out for her to look.
She looked from the envelope to his eyes and back to the letter,
startled, not knowing what to think.
But before either of them had time for another word the conductor, the
porter, and several people from the car behind came hurriedly through,
and they realized that while they talked the train had come to a halt,
amid the blazing electric lights of a great city station.
“Why,” said Gordon, startled, “we must have reached Pittsburgh. Is this
Pittsburgh?” he called out to the vanishing porter.
“Yas sah!” yelled the porter, putting his head around the curve of the
passageway. “You bettah hurry sah, foh dis train goes on to Cincinnati
pretty quick. We’s late gittin’ in you see.”
Neither of them had noticed a man in rough clothes with slouch hat and
hands in his pockets who had boarded the train a few miles back and
walked through the car several times eyeing them keenly. He stuck his
head in at the door now furtively and drew back quickly again out of
sight.
Gordon hurriedly gathered up the baggage, and they went out of the car,
the porter rushing back as they reached the door, to assist them and
get a last tip. There was no opportunity to say anything more, as they
mingled with the crowd, until the porter landed their baggage in the
great station and hurried back to his train. The man with the slouch
hat followed and stood unobtrusively behind them.
Gordon looked down at the white, drawn face of the girl, and his heart
was touched with compassion for her trouble. He must make her some
satisfactory explanation at once that would set her heart at rest, but
he could not do it here, for every seat about them was filled with
noisy chattering folk. He stooped and whispered low and tenderly:
“Don’t worry, little girl! Just try to trust me, and I will explain it
all.”
“Can you explain it?” she asked anxiously, as if catching at a rope
thrown out to save her life.
“Perfectly,” he said, “if you will be patient and trust me. But we
cannot talk here. Just wait in this seat until I see if I can get the
stateroom on the sleeper.”
He left her with his courteous bow, and she sat watching his tall, fine
figure as he threaded his way among the crowds to the Pullman window,
her heart filled with mingling emotions. In spite of her reason, a tiny
bit of hope for the future was springing up in her heart and without
her own will she found herself inclined to trust him. At least it was
all she could do at present.