"CRUEL AS THE GRAVE."
"I do not know what he is doing," Harriet had repeated to herself in
sore distress; "I do not know what he is doing. I am in the dark, and
the tide is rising."
The jealous agony she had suffered at Homburg was harder to bear than
the uncertainty which had been her lot since her return. The intense
passion of jealousy sprung up within her was a revelation to this
woman of the violence of her nature, over which a stern restraint had
been kept so long that quiet and calm had grown habitual to her while
nothing troubled or disputed her love; but they deserted her at the
first rude touch laid upon the sole treasure, the joy, the punishment,
the occupation, mainspring, and meaning of her life. Under all the
quiet of her manner, under all the smoothness of her speech, Harriet
Routh knew well there was a savage element in the desperation of her
love for Routh, since he had committed the crime which sets a man
apart from his fellows, marked with the brand of blood. She had loved
him in spite of the principles of her education, in defiance of the
stings of her conscience, dead now, but which had died hard; but now
she loved him in spite of the promptings of her instincts, in spite of
the revulsion of her womanly feelings, in defiance of the revolt of
her senses and her nerves. The more utterly lost he was the more she
clung to him, not indeed in appearance, for her manner had lost its
old softness, and her voice the tone which had been a caress; but in
her torn and tortured heart. With desperate and mad obstinacy she
loved him, defied fate, and hated the world which had been hard to
him, for his sake.
With the first pang of jealousy awoke the fierceness of this love,
awoke the proud and defiant assertion of her love and her ownership in
her breast. Never would Harriet have pleaded her true, if perverted,
love, her unwavering, if wicked, fidelity, to the man who was drifting
away from her; the woman's lost soul was too generous for that; but he
was hers, her own;--purchased;--God, in whom she did not believe, and
the devil, whom she did not fear, alone knew at what price;--and he
should not be taken from her by another, by one who had done nothing
for him, suffered nothing for him, lost nothing for him. Her
combativeness and her craft had been called into instant action by the
first discovery of the unexpected peril in which her sole treasure was
placed. She understood her position perfectly. No woman could have
known more distinctly than Harriet how complete is the helplessness of
a wife when her husband's love is straying from her, beckoned towards
another--helplessness which every point of contrast between her and
her rival increases. She was quite incapable of the futile strife, the
vulgar railing, which are the ordinary weapons of ordinary women in
the unequal combat; she would have disdained their employment; but
fate had furnished her with weapons of other form and far different
effectiveness, and these she would use. Routh had strong common-sense,
intense selfishness, and shrewd judgment. An appeal to these, she
thought, could not fail. Nevertheless, they _had_ failed, and Harriet
was bewildered by their failure. When she made her first appeal to
Routh, she was wholly unprepared for his refusal. The danger was so
tremendous, the unforeseen discovery of the murdered man's identity
had introduced into their position a complication so momentous, so
insurmountable, that she had never dreamed for a moment of Routh's
being insensible to its weight and emergency. But he rejected her
appeal--rudely, brutally, almost, and her astonishment was hardly
inferior to her anguish. He must indeed be infatuated by this
strange and beautiful woman (Harriet fully admitted the American's
beauty--there was an element of candour and judgment in her which made
the littleness of depreciating a rival impossible) when he could
overlook or under-estimate the importance, the danger, of this
newly-arisen complication.
This was a new phase in her husband's character; this was an aspect
under which she had never seen him, and she was bewildered by it, for
a little. It had occurred to her once, on the day when she last saw
George Dallas--parting with him at the gate of his mother's house--to
think whether, had she had any other resource but her husband, had the
whole world outside of him not been a dead blank to her, she could
have let him go. She had heard of such things; she knew they happened;
she knew that many women in "the world" took their husbands'
infidelity quietly, if not kindly, and let them go, turning them to
the resources of wealth and pleasure. She had no such resources, nor
could these have appeased her for a moment if she had had. She cared
nothing for liberty, she who had worn the chain of the most abject
slavery, that of engrossing passionate love for an unworthy object,
willingly, had hugged it to her bosom, had allowed it, without an
effort to alleviate the pain, to eat into her flesh, and' fill it with
corruption. But, more than this, she could not let him go, for his own
sake; she was true to the law of her life, that "honour rooted in
dishonour" knew no tarnishing from her; she must save him, for his own
sake--from himself, she must save him, though not to bring him back to
her--must save him, in spite of himself, though she longed, in the
cruel pangs of her woman's anguish, to have done with it--to have
found that nothingness in which she had come to believe as the "end
all," and had learned to look to as her sovereign good.
She had reached such a conclusion, in her meditations, on the night of
the great storm at Homburg; she had determined on a course to be
adopted for Routh's sake. She would discard fear, and show him that he
must relinquish the desperate game he was playing. She would prove to
him that fate had been too strong for him; that in Mrs. Ireton P.
Bembridge the fatality which was destined to destroy him existed; that
her acquaintance with Arthur Felton, and her knowledge of Arthur
Felton's affairs, into whose extent Routh had no possible pretext for
inquiry, must necessarily establish the missing link. She would hide
from him her own sufferings; she would keep down her jealousy and her
love; she would appeal to him for himself; she would plead with him
only his own danger, only the tremendous risk he was involving himself
in. Then she must succeed; then the double agony of jealousy of him
and fear for him in which she now lived must subside, the burning
torment must be stilled. The time might perhaps come in which she
should so far conquer self as to be thankful that such suffering had
brought about his safety, for there could be no real security for them
in London, the terrible fact of Deane's identity with Arthur Felton
once known. After that discovery, no arguments could avail with
George; the strength of all those which she had used would become
potent against her, their weight would be against her--that weight
which she had so skilfully adjusted in the balance. After all, she
thought that night, as she sat in the darkness and idly watched the
lightning, hearing the raging wind unmoved, what would a little more
misery matter to her? Little, indeed, if it brought him safety; and it
should, it must!
From this condition of mind she had been roused by Routh's startling
announcement of their departure on the morrow. The effect produced
upon Harriet was strange. She did not believe that Routh had been only
to the gaming-rooms that night: she felt an immutable conviction that
he had seen Mrs. Bembridge, and she instantly concluded that he had
received a rebuff from the beautiful American. Inexpressibly
relieved--though not blind enough to be in the least insensible to the
infamy of her husband's faithlessness, and quite aware that she had
more, rather than less, to complain of than she had previously
believed;--for she rightly judged, this woman is too finished a
coquette to throw up her game a moment before her own interest and
safety absolutely obliged her to do so--she acquiesced immediately.
Had Stewart Routh had the least suspicion of the extent of his wife's
knowledge of his life at Homburg, he could not have been lulled into
the false security in which he indulged on his return to London. He
perceived, indeed, that Harriet closely noted the state of his
spirits, and silently observed his actions. But he was used to
that. Harriet had no one to think of but him, had nothing to care
about but him; and she had always watched him. Pleasantly, gaily,
before;--coldly, grimly, now: but it was all the same thing. He was
quite right in believing she had not the least suspicion that Mrs.
Ireton P. Bembridge was in London, but that was the sole point on
which he was correct. Had he known how much his wife knew, he would
have affected a dejection of spirits he was far from feeling, and
would have disarmed her by greater attention to her during the few
hours of each day which he passed at home.
Harriet was at a loss to account for his cheerfulness; but strong of
mind and heart as she was, she was not altogether free from the
weakness of catching at that interpretation of a mystery in which
there was some relief for her own pain. So she concluded that he had
been only passingly, and not deeply, hurt by the coquetry of the woman
who had attracted him, and that he had recovered from the superficial
wound, as soon as he became again immersed in the schemes which had
awaited him in London.
He had told her little concerning these schemes, but she considered
this reticence due to her own withdrawal from her former active
participation in the business of his life, and it was an additional
inducement to her to hope that Routh was taking the resolution which
she desired. "When we get back to London I will think about it," he
had said, and she clung to the hope, to the half-promise in the words.
He was surely settling affairs so as to enable him to avoid the
bursting of the storm. The tacit estrangement between them would
account for his doing this silently; his vile temper, which Harriet
thoroughly understood, and never failed to recognize in action, would
account for his denying her the relief of knowing his intentions. Many
small things in his daily life, which did not escape the quickened
perception of his wife, betokened a state of preparation for some
decided course of action. The time of explanation must necessarily
come; meanwhile she watched, and waited, and suffered.
How she suffered in every hour of her life! Yet there was a kind of
dulness over Harriet too. She recurred little to the past in point of
feeling; she thought over it, indeed, in aid of the action of her
reason and her will, but she did not recall it with the keenness
either of acute grief for its vanished happiness, such as it had been,
or of remorse and terror for its deep and desperate guilt. The burden
of the day was enough now for this woman, whose strength had lasted so
long, endured so much, and given way so suddenly.
But time was marching on, the inevitable end drawing near, and Harriet
had been utterly unprepared for the second shock, the second
unexpected event which had befallen. She had opened George Dallas's
letter with the Paris postmark almost without an apprehension. The
time for the thing she feared had not yet come; and here was a thing
she had never feared, a possibility which had never presented itself
to her imagination, brought at once fully before her. She had done
this thing. One moment's want of caution, in the midst of a scene in
which her nerves had been strung to their highest tension, and this
had been the result. Had no other clue existed, these few lines of
writing would furnish one leading unerringly to discovery. Supposing
no other clue to exist, and Routh to pretend to inability to identify
the writing, there were several common acquaintances of Dallas and
Deane who _could_ identify it, and render a refusal the most dangerous
step which Routh could take.
She sat for several minutes perfectly still, her face colourless as
marble, and her blue eyes, fixed with a painful expression of terror,
under the shock of this new discovery. She had had no worse
apprehension than that the letter would announce the day of George's
intended return, and for that she was prepared; but this! It was too
much for her, and the first words she uttered showed that her mind had
lost its strict faculty of reasoning; they broke from her with a
groan:
"I--I it is who have destroyed him!"
But, even now, weakness and exaggeration had no long duration in
Harriet Routh's mind. By degrees she saw this in its true light, an
alarming, a terrible coincidence indeed, an addition to the danger of
their position, but not necessarily a fatal catastrophe. Then she saw
new light, she caught at a new idea, a fresh, bright hope. This would
avail with Routh; this would drive away his irresolution; this would
really inspire him with the true conviction of their danger; this,
which would throw the whole burden of identification upon him; this,
which would establish a strong and intimate link between him and the
dead man; for the "articles to be purchased," named in the memorandum
of which George had sent her a copy, were simply shares in companies
with every one of which Stewart Routh was connected. Only George's
ignorance of such matters had prevented his recognizing the meaning of
the memorandum.
And now Harriet rose; and as she paced the room, the colour came back
to her cheek, the light came back to her eyes. A new life and fresh
energy seemed to spring up within her, and she grasped George's letter
in her hand, and struck it against her bosom with an action of the
hand and a responsive movement of the breast which was almost
triumphant. This thing which she had done, which had looked like ruin,
would be her way of escape.
Routh's refusal to return home immediately annoyed, puzzled, and
disheartened her. Why was he so hard to move, so difficult to
convince, so insensible to danger? His plea was business; if this
business was what she hoped and believed it to be, that of
preparation, he should have come home to learn the new and urgent need
for its expedition. Why was he so hard to her? Why had he no thought
for her wishes, no compassion on her suspense? Harriet could not but
ask herself that, though she strove against the deadly suffering the
answer brought her.
Thus the time wore on drearily, until Harriet carelessly took from the
table the slip of paper which contained a whole revelation for her.
Of the hours which succeeded she could not have given an account
herself. How the fury of jealousy, of love betrayed, of faith
violated, was reawakened within her, and inflamed to the wildest and
most desperate pitch; how she writhed under the shame and the scorn
which her husband's baseness forced her to feel. She had had
profoundest pity, readiest help for the criminal; but for this
pitiful, cowardly, cruel liar nothing but contempt--nothing! Ah, yes,
something more, and that made it all the harder--contempt and love.
The woman was here, then--here, in London, on the spot to ruin him,
lured hither by him. His false heart planned; his guilty hands dug the
pit into which he was to fall; and now his feet were close upon the
brink. This rendered him deaf and blind; for this he had basely
deceived her, his best, his only friend; for this he had come to
regard and treat her as his enemy; and now Harriet had to make a
desperate effort indeed to rally all her strength and courage. She had
to put the suffering aside, to let all her hopes go, to face a new and
almost desperate condition of affairs, and to think how he was to be
saved. It must be in spite of himself. This time, it must be in
defiance of himself.
She had passed through a long period of suffering--if time is to be
measured by pain--before Routh came home. She had not nearly thought
it out; she had only reached a resolution to be patient and peaceful,
and to conceal her knowledge of his treachery, if any effort could
give her the strength to do so, when she heard his key in the lock,
and the next moment his hand on the door-handle.
There was confusion in the expression of Eolith's shifty black eyes,
some embarrassment in the tone of his voice. They were slight; but she
saw and understood them. Her heart gave one angry bound under the
paper which lay securely in her bosom, but her steady face took no
change from the pulsation.
"Sorry I couldn't get back. I got away as soon as I could," said
Routh, as he threw aside his coat and put his hat down. Harriet pushed
a chair towards him, and he sat down before she answered:
"I am sorry, too, Stewart. I can hardly think any business can have
equalled in importance such an occurrence as this."
She put George Dallas's letter into his hand, and eagerly watched him,
while with a face convulsed by anger, hatred, and all unholy passions,
he read it.
If she could have seen his heart! If she could have read the devilish
project that filled it! If she could have seen that in the discovery
of the new and urgent danger he had seen, not blind to that danger
indeed, but catching at the chance included in it, a means of
realizing his atrocious plot against her! If she could have
distinguished, amid the surging, passionate thoughts and impulses
which raged within him, this one, which each second made more clear:
"This is my opportunity. All is settled, all is right; she and I are
safe. I have triumphed, and this cursed letter gives me a better
chance than any I could have formed or made. This infernal idiot is
always my curse and my dupe; however, he has done me a good turn this
time."
If Harriet, watching the changes in her husband's countenance, could
have read these thoughts, she might have interpreted aright the
ferocity which blazed in his wicked eyes, while a cynical sneer curled
his lip, as he flung the letter violently on the floor, starting up
from his chair.
Harriet had seen Routh in a passion more than once, though only once
had that passion been directed against herself, and she was not a
woman, even when its victim, to be frightened by a man's temper. But
she was frightened now, really and truly frightened, not, however, by
the violence of his rage, but because she did not believe in it. She
did not understand his game; she saw he was playing one; why he
feigned this fury she could not comprehend, but she knew it was
feigned, and she was frightened. Against complicated deception of this
kind she was powerless.. She could not oppose successful art to the
ingenious skill with which he was courting his own ruin, to save him.
She could not disentangle this thought from the confusion in her
brain; she felt only its first thrill of conviction, she only shrank
from it with swift, sharp, physical pain, when Routh turned upon her
with a torrent of angry and fierce reproaches.
"This is your doing," he said, the violence of his simulated anger
hurrying his words, and rendering them almost unintelligible. "I owe
it to you that this cursed fool has me in his power, if the idiot only
finds it out, and knows how to use it, more securely than I ever had
him in mine. This is your skill and your wisdom; your caution and your
management, is it? Like a fool, I trusted a woman--you were always so
sure of yourself, you know, and here's the result. You keep this
pretty piece of conviction in your desk, and produce it just in the
nick of time. I don't wonder you wanted me home; I don't wonder you
were in such a hurry to give me such a proof of your boasted
cleverness."
Her clear blue eyes were upon him; his restless black eyes shifted
under her gaze, but could not escape it. She did not release him for
an instant from that piercing look, which became, with each word he
spoke, more and more alight with scorn and power. The steady look
maddened him, the feigned passion changed to real rage, the man's evil
face paled.
She slightly raised her hand, and pointed to the chair he had left; he
kicked it savagely away. She spoke, her hands still extended.
"Stewart, I do not understand you, but I am not taken in by you. What
are you aiming at? Why are you pretending to this violent and
unreasonable anger?"
"Pretending!" he exclaimed, with an oath; "it is no pretence, as you
shall find. Pretending! Woman, you have ruined me, and I say--"
"And _I_ say," she interposed, as she slowly rose, and stood upright
before him, her head raised, her steady eyes still mercilessly set on
his, "this is a vain and ridiculous pretence. You cannot long conceal
its motive from me: whatever game you are playing, I will find it
out."
"Will yon, by--?" he said, fiercely.
"I will, for your own sake," she answered calmly. And, standing before
him, she touched him lightly on the breast with her small white hand.
"Stop! don't speak. I say, for your own sake. You and I, Stewart, who
were once one, are two now; but that makes no change in me. I don't
reproach you."
"Oh, don't you?" he said. "I know better. There's been nothing but
whining and reproaches lately."
"Now you are acting again, and again I tell you I will find out why.
The day of reproach can never--shall never--come; the day of ruin is
near, awfully near--"
"You've taken care of that."
"Again! You ought to know me better, Stewart; you can't lie to me
undetected. In time I shall know the truth, now I discern the lie. But
all this is vain. Read once more." She took up the letter, smoothed it
out, and held it towards him. He struck it out of her hand, and cursed
her.
She looked at him in blank amazement for a moment, and then said:
"You are not drunk again, Stewart? You are not mad? If you are not,
listen to me, for your fate is rushing upon you. The time may be
counted by hours. Never mind my share in this new event, never mind
what you really think, or what you pretend to think about it. It makes
my appeal to you strong, irresistible. This is no fit of woman's
terror; this is no whim, no wish to induce you to desert your
harvest-field, to turn your back upon the promise of the only kind of
life you care to live. Here is a link in the evidence against you, if
suspicion lights upon you (and it must), which is of incontestable
strength. Here, in Arthur Felton's writing, is the memoranda of the
shares which you bought and paid for with Arthur Felton's money.
Stewart, Stewart, are you blind and mad, indeed, that you stay here,
that you let the precious time escape you, that you dally with your
fate? Let us begone, I say; let us escape while we may. George Dallas
is not our only foe, not our only danger--formidable, indeed; but
remember, Stewart, Mr. Felton comes to seek for his son; remember that
we have to dread the man's father!"
The pleading in her voice was agonizing in its intensity, the lustrous
excitement in her blue eyes was painful, the pallor of her face was
frightful. She had clasped her hands round his arm, and the fingers
held him like steel fetters. He tried to shake off her hold, but she
did not seem aware of the movement.
"I tell you," she continued, "no dream was ever wilder than your hope
of escape, if those two men come to London and find you here; no such
possibility exists. Let us go; let us get out of the reach of their
power."
"By--, I'll put myself out of Dallas's reach by a very simple
method, if you don't hold your cursed tongue," said Routh, with such
ferocity that Harriet let go her hold of him, and shrank as if he had
struck her. "If you don't want me to tell Mr. Felton what has become
of his son, and put him on to George's trail myself, you'll drop this
kind of thing at once. In fact," he said, with a savage sneer, "I
hardly think a better way out of our infernal blunder could be found."
"Stewart, Stewart!" She said no more.
"Now listen to me, Harriet," he went on, in furious anger, but in a
suppressed tone. "If you are anything like the wise woman you used to
be, you won't provoke a desperate man. Let me alone, I tell you--let
me get out of this as I best can. The worst part of it is what you
have brought upon me. I don't want George Dallas to come to any
serious grief, if I can help it; but if he threatens danger to me, he
must clear the way, that's all. I dare say you are very sorry, and all
that. You rather took to Master George lately, believed in his
prudence, and his mother, and all that kind of thing; but I can't help
that. I never had a turn for sentiment myself; but this you may
be sure of--only gross blundering can bring anything of the kind
about--if any one is to swing for Dean, it shall be Dallas, and not
I."
A strong shudder shook Harriet's frame as she heard her husband's
words. But she repressed it, and spoke:
"You refuse to listen to me, then, Stewart. You will not keep your
promise--your promise which, however vague, I have built upon and
lived upon since we left Homburg? You will not 'think of' what I said
to you there? Not though it is a thousand times more important now?
You will not leave this life, and come away to peace and safety?"
"No, no; a thousand times no!" said Routh, in the wildest fury. "I
will not--I will not! A life of peace and safety; yes, and a life of
poverty, and you--" he added, in a tone of bitterest scorn and hatred.
A wonderful look came into the woman's face as she heard his cruel and
dastardly words. As the pink had faded into the white upon her cheeks,
so now the white deadened into gray--into an ashen ghostly gray, and
her dry lips parted slowly, emitting a heavy sigh.
He made a step or two towards the door, she retreating before him. And
when he had almost reached it, she fell suddenly upon her knees, and
flung her arms round him with desperate energy.
"Stewart," she said, in a whisper indeed, yet in a voice to be heard
amid a whirlwind, "my husband, my love, my life, my darling, don't
mind me! Leave me here; it will be safer, better, less suspicious. Go
away, and leave me. I don't care, indeed. I don't want to go with you.
Go alone, and make sure of your safety! Stewart, say you'll go--say
you'll go!"
While she was speaking, he was striving to loosen her hold upon him,
but in vain. A short brief warfare was waged in that moment in his
soul. If he softened to her now, if he yielded to her now, all was
undone. And yet what love was this--what strange, and wondrous, and
potent kind of love was this? Not the kind of love which had looked at
him, an hour or two ago, out of the rich black eyes of the American
widow, that had trembled in the tones of her voice. But a vision of
the beauty he coveted, of the wealth he needed, of the freedom he
panted for, rose before Routh's bewildered brain, and the strife
ended. Evil had its own way unchecked henceforth to the end.
He raised his right arm and struck her heavily upon the face; the
clasp of her hands gave way, and she sank upon the floor. Then he
stepped over her, as she lay prostrate in the doorway, and left the
room. When she raised herself, she pushed back her hair, and looked
round with a dreary amazement upon her troubled face, and she heard
the key turned in his dressing-room door.
The day had dawned when Harriet Routh went gently upstairs to her
bed-room. She was perfectly calm. She opened the window-shutters and
let the light in before she lay down on her bed. Also, she unlocked a
box, which she took from her wardrobe, and looked carefully into it,
then put it away satisfied. As she closed her eyes, she said, half
aloud, "I can do no more; but she can save him, and she shall."
At one o'clock on the following day, Harriet Routh, attired, as usual,
in simple but ladylike dress, and presenting an appearance on which
the most impertinent of pages would not have dared to cast an
imputation, presented herself at No. 4 Hollington-square, Brompton.
Mrs. Bembridge lived there, but Mrs. Bembridge was not at home, and
would not be at home until late in the evening. Would the lady leave
her name? 'No; but she desired Mrs. Bembridge might be informed that a
lady had called, and would call again at the same hour on the morrow,
who had found an article of dress lost at Homburg by Mrs. Bembridge,
and which she would restore to Mrs. Bembridge in person, but not
otherwise.
As Harriet was returning home, she walked down Piccadilly, and saw Mr.
Felton and George Dallas alighting from a cab at the door of the house
in which their lodgings had been engaged.
"Very fair, too," said Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge, when she received
Harriet's message from her maid, "and very natural she should expect a
reward. Ladies often take advantage of that kind of thing to give
money to the poor. I shan't grudge her any thing she may ask in
reason, I shall be so glad to get back my golden egg."