THE BREAKING OF THE STORM.
She looked at him and recoiled with a cry of dismay. He stood before
her so ghastly, so awful, that with a blind, unthinking motion of
intense terror she put out both hands as if to keep him off.
"You have reason to fear me!" he said, in a hoarse, unnatural voice.
"Wives have been murdered for less than this!"
Sybilla and Edwards heard the ominous words, and looked blankly in each
other's faces. They heard no more. The baronet caught his wife's
wrist in a grasp of iron, drew her into the dressing-room, and closed
the door. He stood with his back to it, gazing at her, his blue eyes
filled with lurid rage.
"Where have you been?"
He asked the question in a voice more terrible from its menacing calm
than any wild outburst of fury.
"In the Beech Walk," she answered, promptly.
"With whom?"
"With Mr. Parmalee."
Her glance never fell. She looked at him proudly, unquailingly, full
in the face. The look in his flaming eyes, the tone of his ominous
voice, were bitterly insulting, and with insult her imperious spirit
rose.
"And you dare stand before me--you dare look me in the face," he said,
"and tell me this?"
"I dare!" she said, proudly. "You have yet to learn what I dare do,
Sir Everard Kingsland!"
She drew herself up in her beauty and her pride, erect and defiant.
Her long hair fell loose and unbound, her face was colorless as marble;
but her dark eyes were flashing with anger and wounded pride, and at
her brightest she had never looked more beautiful than she did now.
"So beautiful and so lost!" he said, bitterly. "So utterly deceitful
and depraved! Surely what they tell of her mother must be true. The
taint of dishonor is in the blood!"
The change was instantaneous. The pallor of her face turned to a
burning red. She clasped her hands with a sudden spasm over her heart.
"My mother!" she gasped. "What do you say of her?"
"What they say of you--that she was a false and wicked wife. Deny it
if you can."
"No," she said, with an imperial gesture of scorn, "I deny nothing. If
my husband can believe such a vile slander of his wife of a month, let
it be. I scorn to deny what he credits so easily."
"I am afraid it would tax even your invention, my lady, to deny these
very plain facts. I leave you in your room, too ill to leave it, too
ill by far to ride with me to my mother's, but not too ill to get up
and meet your lover--shall I say it, madame?--clandestinely in the
Beech Walk as soon as I am gone! You should be a little more careful,
madame, and make sure before you hold those confidential
_tête-à-têtes_, that the servants are not listening and looking on.
Lady Kingsland and Mr. Parmalee are the talk of the county already.
To-night's meeting will be a last _bonne bouche_ added to the spicy
dish of scandal."
"Have you done?" she said, whiter than ashes. "Have you any more
insults to offer?"
"Insults!" the baronet repeated, hoarse with passion. "You do well,
madame, to talk of insults--lost, fallen creature that you are! You
have dishonored an honorable name; betrayed a husband who loved and
trusted you with all his heart; blighted and ruined his life; covered
him with disgrace! And you stand there and talk of insult! I have
loved you as man never loved woman before, but God help you, Harriet
Kingsland, if I had a pistol now!"
She fell down on her knees before him.
"Kill me!" she cried. "I am here at your feet--have mercy and stab me
to the heart, but do not drive me mad with your horrible reproaches!
May God forgive me if I have brought dishonor upon you, for I never
meant it! Never--never--so help me Heaven!"
"Rise, madame! Kneel to Him who will judge you for your baseness; it
is too late to kneel to me! Oh, great God! to think how I have loved
this woman, and how bitterly she has deceived me!"
The unutterable agony of his tone to her dying day Harriet Kingsland
might never forget.
"I loved her and I trusted her! I would have died to save her one hour
of pain, and this is my reward! Dishonored--disgraced--my life
blighted--my heart broken--deceived from first to last!"
"No, no, no!" she shrieked aloud. "I swear it to you, Everard! I am
guiltless! By all my hopes of heaven, I am your true, your faithful,
your loving wife!"
He turned and looked up at her in white amaze. Truth, that no living
being could doubt, was stamped in agony on that upturned, beautiful
face.
"Hear me, Everard!" she cried--"my own beloved husband! I met this man
to-night because he holds a secret I am sworn to keep, and that places
me in his power. But, by all that is high and holy, I have told you
the simple truth about him! I never saw him in all my life until I saw
him that day in the library. I have never set eyes on him since,
except for an hour to-night. Oh, believe me, Everard or I shall die
here at your feet!"
"And you never wrote to him?" he asked.
"Never--never!"
"Nor he to you?"
"Once--the scrawl you saw Sybilla Silver fetch me. I never wrote--I
never sent him even a message."
"No? How, then, came you two to meet to-night?"
"He wished to see me--to extort money from me for the keeping of this
secret--and he sent word by Sybilla Silver. My answer was, 'I will be
in the Beech Walk at eight tonight. If he wishes to see me let him
come to me there.'"
"Then you own to have deliberately deceived me? The pretended headache
was--a lie?"
"No; it was true. It aches still, until I am almost blind with the
pain. Oh, Everard, be merciful! Have a little pity for me, for I love
you, and I am the most wretched creature alive!"
"You show your love in a singular way, my Lady Kingsland. It is not by
keeping guilty secrets from your husband--by meeting other men by night
and by stealth in the grounds--that you are to convince me of your
love. Tell me what this mystery means. I command you, by your wifely
obedience, tell me this secret at once!"
"I can not!"
"You mean you will not."
"I can not."
"It is a secret of guilt and of shame? Tell me the truth?"
"It is; but the guilt is not mine. The shame--the bitter shame--and
the burning expiation, God help me, are!"
"And you refuse to tell me?"
"Everard, I have sworn!" she cried out, wildly. "Would you have me
break a death-bed oath?"
"I would have you break ten thousand such oaths," he exclaimed, "when
they stand between you and your husband! Harriet Hunsden, your dead
father was a villain!"
She sprung to her feet--she had been kneeling all this time--and
confronted him like a Saxon pythoness. Her great gray eyes actually
flashed fire.
"Go!" she cried. "Leave me this instant! Were you ten times my
husband, you should never insult the memory of the best, the noblest,
the most devoted of fathers! I will never forgive you the words you
have spoken until my dying day!"
"_You_ forgive!" he retorted, with sneering scorn, stung out of all
generosity. "Forgiveness is no word for such lips as yours, Lady
Kingsland! Keep your guilty secret, or your father's or your mother's,
whosoever it may be; but not as my wife! No, madame! when the world
begins to point the finger of scorn, through her own evil-doing, at the
woman I have married, then from that hour she is no longer my wife.
The law of divorce shall free you and your secrets together; but until
that freedom comes, I command you to meet this man no more! On your
peril you write to him, or speak to him, or meet him again. If you do,
by the living Lord, I will murder you both!"
He dashed out of the room like a man gone mad, leaving her standing
petrified in the middle of the floor.
One instant she stood, the room heaving, the walls rocking around her;
then, with a low, moaning cry, she tottered blindly forward and fell
like a stone to the floor.
The storm burst at midnight. A gale surged through the trees with a
noise like thunder; the rain fell in torrents. And while rain and wind
beat tempestuously over the earth and the roaring sea, the husband
paced up and down the library, with clinched teeth and locked hands and
death-like face--for the time utterly mad--and the wife lay alone in
her luxuriant room, deaf and blind to the tempest, in a deep swoon.