EVERARD AND ROSSIE.
The voice which said “Come in” did not sound like Rossie’s at all, nor
did the little girl sitting in the chair look much like the Rossie he
had last seen, flushed with health and happiness, and the light of a
great joy shining in the eyes which now turned so eagerly toward him as
he came in. On the stairs outside there was the rustling of skirts, and
he heard it, and involuntarily slid the bolt of the door, and then
swiftly crossed to where Rossie’s face was upturned to his with a smile
of welcome, and Rossie’s hands were both outstretched to him as she
said:
“Oh, Mr. Everard, I am glad you have come; we have wanted you so much.”
He had thought she would meet him with coldness and scorn for his
weakness and duplicity, and he was prepared for that, but not for this;
and forgetting himself utterly for the moment, he took the offered hands
and held them tightly in his own, until she released them from him and
motioned him to a seat opposite her, where he could look into her face,
which, now that he saw it more closely, had on it such a grieved,
disappointed expression that he cried out:
“Kill me, Rossie, if you will! but don’t look at me that way, for I
cannot bear it. I know what I’ve done and what I am, better than you
do.”
Here he paused, and Rossie said:
“I am sorry, Everard, that you did not tell me long ago, when it first
happened. Four years and more, she says. I’ve been thinking it over, and
it must have been that time you came home when your mother died and you
were so sick afterward. You were married then.”
How quietly and naturally she spoke the words “married then,” as if it
was nothing to her that he was married _then_ or _now_, but the hot
blood flamed up for a moment in her face and then left it whiter than
before, as Everard replied:
“Yes, if that can be called a marriage which was a mere farce, and has
brought nothing but bitter humiliation to me, and been the cause of my
ruin. I wish that day had been blotted from my existence.”
“Hush, Everard,” Rossie said. “You must not talk that way, and your wife
here in the house waiting for you. I have not seen her yet, but they
tell me she is very beautiful.”
“Yes, with that cursed beauty which lures men, or rather fools, to their
destruction; and I was a fool!” Everard answered, bitterly,—“an idiot,
who thought myself in love. Don’t call her my wife, Rossie. She has
never been that; never will be. But I did not come here to abuse her. I
came to tell you the whole truth at last, as I ought to have told it
years ago, when my mother was on her death-bed. I tried to tell her, but
I could not. I made a beginning by showing her Josephine’s picture,
which she did not like. The face was pretty, she said, but not the face
of a true, refined woman, but rather of one who wore dollar jewelry,”
and here Everard laughed sarcastically as he went on; “then I showed the
picture to Bee, who said she looked as if she might wear cotton lace.
But you, Rossie, said the hardest thing of all, and decided me finally
not to tell, for I had almost made up my mind to make you my
confidante.”
“I, Everard? I decided you? You must be mistaken. When was it, Everard?”
Rossie exclaimed, her eyes growing very large and bright in her
excitement.
“Do you remember I once showed you a picture of a young girl?” Everard
said. “You were watering flowers in the garden; and you said she was
very beautiful, but suggested that the jewelry, of which there was a
superfluity on her neck and arms, might be a sham, and said she looked
like a _sham_, too. How could I tell you after that, that she was my
wife? I couldn’t, and I kept it to myself; and mother died, and I went
crazy, and you cut off your hair and sold it to pay what you believed to
be a gambling debt, and you wrote to Joe Fleming, and I did not open my
lips to undeceive you.
“I will have my say out,” he continued, fiercely, as Rossie put up her
hands to stop him; “I deserve a good cudgeling, and I’ll give it to
myself, for no one knows as well as I do just what a sneaking coward I
have been all these years, when you have been believing in me and
keeping me from going to the——. No, I won’t swear; at least before you,
who have been my good angel ever since you knew enough to chide me for
my faults. Oh, Rossie! what would I give to be put back to those old
days when I was comparatively innocent, and you, in your cape sun-bonnet
and long-sleeved aprons, were the dearest, sweetest little girl in all
the world, just as you are now. I will say it, though I am killing you,
I know, and I am almost wicked enough not to care, for I would rather
there were no Rossie in this world than to know she lived to hate and
despise me.”
“No, Everard, never that, never!” and Rossie again stretched toward him
her pale little hands, which he seized and held while he told her
rapidly the whole story of his marriage, beginning at the time he first
saw Josey Fleming and went to board with her mother.
One item, however, he withheld. He did not tell her that it was her
half-brother who had married him, nor did he give the name of the
clergyman. He would spare her all pain in that direction, if possible,
and let her think as well as she could of the brother she could scarcely
remember, and who, she believed, must be dead, or he would ere this have
manifested some interest in her.
Of Josephine he spoke very plainly, and though he did not exaggerate her
faults, he showed conclusively, in what he said, that his love for her
had long since died out, and he went on from one fact to another so
rapidly that Rossie felt stunned and bewildered and begged him to stop.
But he would not. She must hear him through, he said, and at the close
of his story she looked so white and tired that he bent over her in
alarm, chafing her cold hands and asking what he could do for her.
“Nothing but to leave me now,” she said. “I have heard so much and borne
so much that none of it seems real. There’s a buzzing in my head, and I
believe I’m going to faint again, or die. How could you do all this, and
I trusted you so?—and, oh, Everard, where are you? It grows so dark and
black, and I’m so sick and faint,” and with a sobbing, hysterical cry,
Rossie involuntarily let her tired, aching head fall upon the arm which
held it so gladly, and which fain would have kept it there forever.
Rossie did not faint quite away, as she had done when the news of
Everard’s marriage reached her, but she lay still and helpless in
Everard’s arms until she felt his hot kisses upon her forehead, and that
roused her at once. He had no right to kiss her, she no right to suffer
it, and she drew herself away from him to the safe shelter of her
pillows, as she said, with her old childish manner:
“Everard, you must not kiss me like that. It is too late. Such things
are over between us now.”
She seemed to accept the fact that he loved her, and though the love was
hopeless, and, turn which way she would, there was no brightness in the
future, the knowledge of what might have been was in one sense very
sweet to her, and the face which Everard took between his hands and
looked earnestly into, while his lips quivered and his eyes were full of
tears, seemed to him like the face of an angel.
“Heaven pity me, Rossie,” he said. “Heaven pity us both for this which
lies between us.” There was a knock outside the door and a voice Rossie
had never heard before, said:
“Miss Hastings, if my husband is with you, tell him his wife will be
glad to see him when he can tear himself away. I have waited an hour,
and surely I may claim my own now.”
There was an unmistakable coarseness of meaning in the words which
brought the hot blood to Rossie’s cheeks, but Everard was pale as death,
as, with a muttered execration, he stepped back from Rossie, who said:
“Yes, go, Everard. She is right. Her claim is first. Say I am sorry I
kept you. Go, and when I have thought it all out I’ll send for you, but
don’t come till I do.”
She motioned him to leave her, and with the look of one going to the
rack, he obeyed, and unbolting the door, went out, shutting it quickly
behind him, and thus giving the woman outside no chance for more than a
glance at the white-faced little girl, of whose personal appearance no
impression could be formed.