A TERRIBLE SELF-SACRIFICE.
He looked at her for a moment, then turned away slightly, as if he
could not meet the direct gaze of her lovely eyes, which said so
plainly: “Let others think what they may, I know you are innocent!”
He did not offer to draw forward the only chair, but stood in silence
while one could count twenty. By this time he had recovered his usual
self-possession, and could speak to her without a quiver in his voice.
“You have been ill,” he said, gently. “You are ill and weak still, too
unwell to--to come here. Why did you come?”
She sank into the chair, and looked up at him, leaning her arms on the
table and clasping her hands. There was entreaty, and yet a touch of
firmness and resolution in her attitude and her face.
“Yes, I have been ill,” she said. “I think I have been very near death.
I tell you this that you may know why I have not sent a message to you,
why I have not come.”
He fought hard against the thrill of joy which ran through him, and,
keeping his eyes closely guarded, as it were, responded:
“Why should you send to me? I--I have no claim upon you.”
“Have you not?” she said at once, her eyes fixed on his with the light
of a woman’s truth and devotion shining in their depths. “Are you not
in trouble?”
“Yes,” he assented, “in great trouble, God knows!”
“And did you not offer me your friendship, did you not insist upon my
accepting it--for Bertie’s sake?”
“For Bertie’s sake, yes,” he said in a low voice. “It was a promise
I made him, and I would have kept it; but I am no longer capable
of keeping it. No one’s friendship could be more valueless--or
dangerous--than mine.”
“Because you are in trouble,” she said, and her eyes glowed upon him
with tender indignation. “Because you cannot help me, you think that I
do not care for your friendship. It was to be all one-sided. Is that
it? I was to use you when I wanted you, to come to you for help and
advice as to a true and firm friend; and then--when you were in trouble
I was to desert and turn my back on you!”
He hung his head, and sighed.
“Mr. Faradeane, your experience of women must have been unfortunate!”
He looked up, as if her words had cut deeper than she had intended.
“You are right, Miss Vanley,” he said, so gravely and sadly that she
uttered a little cry of dismay and remorse.
“Ah, what have I said?” she murmured.
“Nothing, nothing!” he replied, quickly, soothingly. “Nothing you
could say would wound me. But--forgive me!--I know the kindness of
heart which prompted you to pay me this visit; but was it wise? Your
father----”
“He does not know that I have come. But I should not care if he did.”
She spoke calmly and resolutely. “I am not ashamed of standing by a
friend when all the world is against him.”
He shook his head as he looked down at her tenderly, reverentially.
“It is like you; yes, I might have known!” he said, almost to himself.
“But you have not counted the cost. Already the story of Miss Vanley’s
visit to Harold Faradeane, the mur----”--he stopped in time, warned
by her sudden pallor--“the prisoner, is on its round. Why should you
make yourself a victim to scandalous tongues? Tell me why you came,
and--forgive me once more--but you must not stay here another minute.
Why have you come?”
“I have come because I want you to tell me who did this thing!”
He turned away from her, and looked through the barred window again, a
wistful, anxious expression in his eyes.
“I cannot do that,” he said. “You--you ask too much. You have heard the
evidence----”
She uttered an exclamation of impatience.
“Yes; oh, yes! But what is all that to me who knows that you are
innocent?”
He sighed, and glanced at her sadly.
“You cannot know that,” he said, gravely.
“But I do know it!” she said. “Do you think if I had doubted your
innocence----”
“That you would have come to see me,” he finished.
Her face flushed, and her eyes glowed.
“No, that was not what I was going to say,” she retorted at once. “If I
had thought you were guilty I should still have come; yes, if they had
had to carry me here!”
He uttered a low cry, and held out his arms to her, then restrained
himself and sank upon the pallet.
“Ah, yes!” he murmured. “I might have known! I might have known!”
“Yes,” she assented. “You might have known. You should have judged me
by yourself. Would you not have come to me if I had been accused of a
crime--yes, even if you had thought me guilty?”
He looked at her; it was sufficient answer.
The look seemed to sink into her heart, and for the first time her eyes
faltered in their steady gaze.
“And now you will tell me who did this, will you not?”
He remained silent, shading his face with his thin and already wasted
hand.
“You will tell me,” she persisted, and her voice floated across to him
like the sweetest, softest music. She saw his hand tremble. “You will
tell me, me alone, if you like. Have I not proved that I can be stanch?
I can be secret. Tell me, and I will promise that I will never repeat
it until you give me permission!”
By leaning forward she could almost touch him, and he felt rather than
saw her white hand near him.
He dropped his hand from his eyes with a cry that was like a smothered
groan.
“I cannot!” he said, simply.
She fell back a little. She was still weak, and the excitement was
telling upon her.
“Ah, how hard you are with me! How distrustful!” and she gave a piteous
little sigh. “I thought that I had only to come to you, only to ask
you, and that you would have told me--me!”
He leaned his head upon his hands, and sat like one tried almost beyond
endurance.
“If,” she went on in a low, soft voice, every note of which rang in
his heart--“if I had been in your place, and you had come to me and
asked me to confide in you, as I now ask you, do you think I would have
refused? No! I could not have done so! See,” she pleaded, touching
him timidly, tenderly, “see how little it is I ask! I do not want
you to tell me why you have refused any explanation to the world at
large; no, I don’t do that! I only ask you to tell me the name of the
man for whom you are enduring all this, whose burden of crime you are
bearing--will you not do that? Can you refuse me?” She glided nearer to
him imperceptibly. Before he knew it she was on her knees at his side,
her hand, soft and quivering as a bird, upon his arm. “Ah, tell me!
Tell me!” she murmured.
He took her hand and held it in both his, his white face working like
a man’s in a mortal agony, his eyes gazing into hers with intense
entreaty.
“Oh, don’t ask me! don’t, don’t!” he said, hoarsely. “I cannot tell
you! It is impossible! Will you believe that? If you knew what it costs
me to refuse you! If you knew how I dread that you should come to think
me guilty----”
He stopped and compressed his lips as her face flushed and her hand
closed on his arm.
“Go on!” she breathed, “go on!”
He turned his head aside.
“No, I can say no more! Not one word. There is danger----” He stopped.
“Miss Vanley----” He started, and put his hand to his brow with a
sudden gesture of despair and sorrow. “Ah, I forgot! Forgive me. Does
he--your husband--know?”
Her face paled, and her lips twitched.
“No, he does not know. I--I have not seen him since the wedding.”
He was silent a moment; and she, glancing up at him, saw a strange look
of trouble and anxiety in his face, and she knew that he was thinking
of her.
“I--I have a message for him,” he said, slowly, as if he were guarding
every word. “It--it is a matter of business, which I had intended
telling him before they arrested me. Will you ask him if he will be so
good as to come and see me? No! do not!” he said, suddenly; “I will
write. If--if it be possible, do not let him know that you have been
here. Tell me who knows it already.”
“There is Bessie--she came with me; and the coachman and the colonel,”
she replied, listlessly and indifferently.
“Good, faithful Bessie,” he said, thoughtfully. “You--you will keep her
near you. She loves you with all her heart and soul.”
“Yes, I will keep her; you sent her.”
He looked at her gratefully.
“And those are all who know? It may be kept from the scandal-mongers,
even now. You must go.” He rose quickly, and she stood looking at
him. “They need not know that you have seen me--that you have come in
contact with the contamination of a prison cell. You may have come to
see Colonel Summerford!”
She shook her head.
“I care nothing for all this,” she said; “all the world may know.”
“No,” he said, “but I care. To know that your name was being lightly
dealt with, would increase my unhappiness tenfold. Go now. I have not
thanked you for coming. If I were to try and tell you, I could not. My
heart is too full of the sense of your goodness and sweetness----” He
stopped. “Let happen what may, the remembrance of your presence in
this cell, your gentle, pitying voice will be with me--yes, even to
the end. Oh, hush! Forgive me!” for she had uttered a little cry, and
wavered as if he had struck her. “No, I cannot tell you; but some day,
perhaps----” He stopped, his voice breaking. “Go now,” and he took her
hand and gently drew her to the door.
“And you?” she said, faintly; “are you going to keep silent? Are you
going to let them do what they will with you? You spoke of the--end!
What is that? Do you mean to let them--kill you?”
Her voice died away into a sob, and she gazed up into his face with
dry, anguished eyes.
“God knows!” he said, reverently. “We are all in His hands. If you knew
all--and you will never know, thank God!--you would understand; yes,
and you would say that if you had been in my place you would have done
the same.”
“You say that?” she asked, with an inscrutable expression in her
eyes--“that I should do as you are doing; that I should take another
person’s crime upon my shoulders and suffer for him?”
“Yes,” he said, and he met her gaze steadily, “I do say that; and you
know that I would not speak untruthfully, even to persuade you to do
what I want you to do.”
“What is it?” she said, with a little pant.
“I want you to forget that such a person as Harold Faradeane ever
existed; to erase from your life all memory of him, and--his
misfortunes. Don’t let me have to reproach myself with the thought that
I have cast a shadow over the life of the only woman I ever----”
He stopped.
Her lips quivered, and her gaze fell for a moment, then she raised her
eyes again.
“You ask me to do this?” she said.
“I do, with all my heart and soul,” he responded.
“Then I tell you that if I were capable of such baseness, I should be
as vile--as vile as the man who committed the murder--the man you are
screening! No! You ask too much. The rest of the world may take your
silence for guilt, but I will not accept it! I will not rest until I
have discovered the truth you are concealing.”
He uttered a cry of alarm, of dread.
“Olivia!”
“Yes!” she repeated, her eyes flashing, her lips trembling. “I am only
a woman, but I will do what you would have done in my place--save my
friend even in spite of himself!”
He grasped her arm, his face white and set, his eyes full of a terrible
fear.
“If any words of mine, if any entreaty can stop you in this
course----Believe me--believe me--it would be useless. The evidence is
conclusive. No jury in England could fail to find me guilty. No one can
stretch out a hand to save me----”
“Excepting yourself!” she said.
He turned away, and laid his hand upon the door.
“And you will not?”
“And I--cannot!” he responded. “Go now--every moment----”
He put out his hand to her, and she took it in hers and held it for a
moment, her tearless eyes fixed on his, as if she hoped even against
hope, at that last moment, to see some signs of yielding; but his
eyes met hers with the sad firmness and resignation they had worn all
through.
“Good-by--God bless you--the best and sweetest and truest----” His
voice broke; the warder opened the door, and Faradeane, seeing Bessie
standing in the corridor, beckoned to her. “Bessie!” and he held
out his hand with a faint smile. “Take care of her! She looks so
ill--and weak. Take care of her--and never let her come here again!
Good-by--don’t cry, Bessie.”
“Now, ladies, please!” said the warder, respectfully, but firmly.
As the door closed with a heavy clang, Olivia started and turned with a
little cry of agony and despair toward the cell.
Then Bessie drew her aside. The colonel put them in the brougham, and
Olivia sank back, white and exhausted; but there were no tears in her
eyes, though Bessie cried bitterly.
When they got home Olivia made her way upstairs, and, throwing herself
down on her knees beside the bed, hid her face in her hands, one
thought taking possession of her to the exclusion of all else. She
forgot that she was married to Bartley Bradstone, forgot that in the
bosom of her wedding-dress was the sum for which she had sold herself,
forgot even her father and his great need. All she remembered was that
Harold Faradeane lay in prison charged with the awful crime of murder;
and that, unless some hand was stretched forth to save him, his days
were numbered.