Two years more go by. The Lefroys, though enjoying both health and
prosperity, are no longer banded together in family union as in days of
yore. Lady Saunderson, whose social engagements are increasing day by
day, is spending the winter and early spring in Rome; Robert is with
his regiment at Sheffield, Hal on board a training-ship at Portsmouth,
and Lottie finishing her education in an advanced collegiate academy in
South Kensington. They are all doing well in the world, and growing out
of the passionate attachment they once had for their old home, which
still remains desolate and untenanted.
One night, Armstrong takes Lottie and a school-friend to the theater.
"You have enjoyed yourself, my dear?" he asks, when he is taking them
home.
"Oh, I don't think I ever enjoyed anything so much in my life before!
Feel my handkerchief, Mr. Armstrong. Wouldn't you think I had soaked
it in a tub of water? And I'm sure Susie Arthur's sobs were quite
heartrending. Oh, we've enjoyed ourselves tremendously."
"It was quite too awfully touching. Thank you so much, Mr. Armstrong,
for bringing us," chimes in the sensitive Miss Arthur.
"I'm so glad we decided on 'Jo,' instead of 'Hamlet.' Shakespeare is
such a grind sometimes; isn't he, Susie? And now, if we knew some kind
friend who would take us to see the Kendals, I think we should die
happy, shouldn't we Susie?"
And Lottie lifts her round bonny face, framed in a white hood,
appealingly to Armstrong, who smiles negatively and turns away his
head. The brougham stops, and with a sigh the two blooming school-girls
descend, and Armstrong drives back to his hotel in Piccadilly, where,
after knocking about a few billiard-balls, he lights a cigar and
strolls out again. This time he unconsciously wends his way eastward,
his mind absorbed in a semi-political, semi-commercial speculation
in which he is much interested, having invested a large sum of money
and allowed his name to appear at the head of the list of directors.
Heedless of time or distance, he walks on, with knitted brow and
absorbed senses, until he is vigorously recalled to reality by a grimy
hand making a snatch at his watch-chain, which, however, he is expert
enough to rescue; but the would-be thief wriggles himself out of his
grasp. On looking round he finds that he has strayed into the back
slums of Shoreditch, into a regular labyrinth of reeking streets, dark
lanes, and courts, from which egress seems almost impossible. He seeks
in vain for a policeman to direct him, makes inquiries right and left,
but receives only slangy, insulting, and sometimes almost threatening
answers. At last he turns to a weather-beaten motherly-looking old lady
presiding over a sugar-stick stall at a corner of a lane, who responds
by throwing her arms protectingly around him, and murmuring words
soothing but tipsy toned.
"Losh yer way, did shye, me love? Mile-En' Road, to b'shure; bring
ye there insh jiffy. Come 'long, come 'long, me lamb! Mile-En'
Road--insh jiffy"--leading him at the same moment to the open door of a
public-house opposite.
He tries laughingly to shake her off; but she clings to him with a
grasp of iron. Being unwilling to use her roughly, he is about to put
his hand into his pocket to purchase freedom, when a sudden drunken
sortie from the house in question hurls them both off the footpath
and effects his purpose. The row soon looks rather alarming, people
crowding from all parts, and the night becomes hideous with shrieks
and imprecations. Armstrong stands by, watching a scene to which he
was well accustomed in his earlier days, until he notices that two
policemen, pluckily trying to restore order, are getting rather badly
handled; then he begins pushing his way to give them help, when an
unexpected backward movement of the crowd obliges him to retreat, and
a woman, who has been feebly struggling to get away, is thrown heavily
against his shoulder, where she lies without movement. He throws his
strong arm around her and plows his way to an open hall door a few
yards further down, where he leans panting for a moment against the
wall.
"Are you hurt?" he asks gently; but, as she makes no answer, he raises
the hanging head, and the dismal yellow light of a gas-jet in the
street outside falls on the face of Adelaide Armstrong--a face livid,
worn, ghastly, from which the bloom and life of youth have fled.
Armstrong does not recognize her in the least; nevertheless he remains
gazing with a startled fascination into the unconscious face until she
opens her heavy eyes and looks straight into his.
"Thomas Armstrong!" she says dreamily.
"Great Heaven," he cries, "is it you?"
He starts back, shaking her from him; she sways, tries to save herself,
and is on the point of falling when he puts out his hand, and she
grasps it feverishly.
"I--I think I must have been crushed a little in the crowd; I feel
faint," she says gaspingly. "Will you--help me up to my room? It is in
the next house to this." Then, seeing that he hesitates, she adds,
with a hard laugh, "You can take a bath--wash off my touch--afterward,
you know."
Gravely he puts out his arm, and they toil slowly and silently up the
rotting evil-smelling stairway to a garret furnished with one chair, a
table, and a litter in one corner, dimly suggesting a bed. She sinks
upon the chair exhausted.
"There is a bit of candle on the table. If you have a match, will you
strike it?"
He obeys her mechanically. When the dismal tallow light reveals the
bare hideousness of the room she leans her arms on the table and looks
full into his stern face with unabashed, and, to him, crime-hardened
glance.
"How well you wear, Thomas Armstrong! How strong and big and full of
life you are! It gives me breath to look at you."
"You are ill?" he says abruptly.
"Ill! Well, I am not exactly in what you call robust health; I haven't
been for many a day. I wish I could get into the consumptive hospital.
A woman on the landing below me, a French-polisher, said she'd try to
get me in when she came back from a job in the country; she has been a
long time away."
"You are alone?"
"Yes; he left me three weeks ago to attend some Newmarket meeting,
and he has not returned since. I suspect he doesn't mean to do so
either, though he has left an old portmanteau in my charge. I--I am not
what you call a cheerful or fascinating companion for any man--am I?
You--you would not like to escort me down Regent Street, would you, Mr.
Armstrong?"
He answers not a word.
"Do you know, I passed my brother Robert Lefroy in the Strand a week
ago. When I uttered his name he sprung off the footpath to avoid my
touch, and jumped into a passing hansom, as if to get out of the very
air I was breathing; he looked almost ill when he saw me. You bore the
shock better; but then you are made of stronger stuff than he, and,
besides, you sprung from the depths into which I have sunk. You are
acclimatized. Won't you sit down? I haven't a second chair; but the
corner of the table near the door will bear your weight."
"Have you no one to help you? Are you destitute?" he asks, bringing out
his words with a jerk.
"He left me seven-and-sixpence when he went away, saying he would be
back in a few days. I have had nothing since; and yet he knew I was
dying and friendless. I wrote to my sister Lady Saunderson when I first
landed, and asked her, for the love of Heaven, for the sake of the same
mother who bore us, to give me help, to let me die somewhere out of
this hole of pestilence and crime; but she never answered my letter."
She stops, then says, with a peevish querulous gesture, "Thomas
Armstrong, why don't you say something to me, instead of staring as if
I were a ghost, a ghoul?"
"What can I say, woman?" he answers roughly. "What words are needed to
emphasize the retribution of your sin to me? If you want money I will
give it to you as freely as I would to any needy sufferer, as freely as
I will give you pity and pardon; but why should I seek to moralize on
your pitiful fate, to reproach you when Heaven has so terribly avenged
my wrongs?"
"Heaven?" she interrupted, with a touch of the old fire in her thin
wailing voice. "Where is Heaven? Heaven exists only when one is young
and happy and healthy, free from care and sorrow when the sun is
shining and the blood warm with hope and youth and love; with a body
worn with disease, gnawed with want, and a soul sick with the sight
of pain and misery and sin that never can be relieved, who can feel
that there is a heaven? Ah, who can believe in heaven then, I ask?
Come to my bedside every day Thomas Armstrong, with Bible, bell, and
candle, whisper words of hope, of promise in my dying ears, and yet,
if you speak with the tongue of an angel, and not of a man, you will
not be able to lift the shroud from my soul, nor kindle one spark of
heaven-born fire in my breaking heart. I defy you--I defy you!"
"Yet I will try."
"Too late, too late--you come too late!" she murmurs, her voice dying
away in a dry choking sob.
He tries to utter some hackneyed refutation, but the commonplace words
die on his lips, and a heavy silence follows as his eyes, in which all
wrath and repugnance have now made way for pain and pity infinite, rest
on the cowering wreck of womanhood whom he has loved with a love that
comes to men of his metal only once in a life.
An angry curse, followed by a woman's coarse laugh, breaks the
stillness. There is the sound of stumbling footsteps on the stairs, and
the next moment the door is burst open, and a tall, gaunt-looking man,
past the prime life, with dark gleaming eyes, and a thin chiseled face
scarred with the ravages of fast living and squalid dissipation, stands
on the threshold.
"Adelaide"--he speaks in a sweet thrilling voice that sounds so
incongruous coming from the hard sensual mouth--"are you here? Quick,
my girl--give me those deeds I left behind. I'm off to Antwerp in half
an hour. Infernal run of luck throughout! I'll write for you when--Eh,
whom have you here? Who is this?"--starting back with lowering brow
when he catches sight of Armstrong's flaming face.
"I'll introduce you," says Addie rising quickly and turning to her
husband. "This is, I believe, the only member of our estimable
family whose acquaintance you have not yet made. My father, Colonel
Lefroy--Mr. Armstrong of Kelvick."
But, before the words have left her mouth, Colonel Lefroy, with an
angry oath, has disappeared, and is stumbling frantically down the
stairs.
For fully two minutes Armstrong, with dazed face, remains staring at
the spot where he stood; then he turns slowly to Addie.
"Is that--that man your father?" he asks.
She nods bitterly.
"You have been living with him lately?"
"I have lived with him ever since I left you--four years ago."
"Since you left me--since you left me!" he repeats stupidly. "And--and
your lover--where is he? What did you do with him?
"My lover?"--a faint flush stealing into her own cheek. "What do you
mean, Thomas Armstrong? Something insulting, I--I suppose. Well, I do
not care; I have not much feeling left now--not enough blood in my
veins to resent a sting, a blow from you as I once did. My lover!"
"Yes, I repeat, your lover--the man you loved before you knew me, with
whom you sailed to Melbourne in the 'Chimborazo' four years ago--your
cousin, Teddy Lefroy."
To this statement she makes no reply whatever; her head sinks forward
on her outstretched arm. After waiting a moment, his blood on fire, his
every nerve quivering, he leans over her, thinking she has fainted; but
he sees that her eyes are wide open and tearless, and that there is a
strange smile on her pinched mouth.
"Go away, go away!" she cries querulously. "Can't you let me die in
peace? I am so tired--so tired of you all--of husbands, lovers, father,
brothers, sisters. Oh, go away--go away, all of you! I want peace."
"Adelaide," he says sharply, using her name for the first time, "you
must answer me--you must speak. Did you sail to Melbourne with your
cousin as his wife?"
"How--how dare you ask me such a question?"
"I have dared, and I will dare again and again, until you answer me."
"No," she says fiercely, "I did not! How could I do such a thing when
I was your wife? I have not seen my Cousin Teddy Lefroy since I was a
girl of sixteen. I heard he married, four years ago, a barmaid of some
theater-restaurant, and went to Australia with her--that is all I know
about him. And now--now will you go? You have done your worst, have
offered me the grossest insult a husband could offer a wife. Will you
follow my father?"
Armstrong draws a mighty breath, and passes his hand over his brow with
a scared helpless gesture. He walks to the window, which he pulls open,
thrusts his hot head out into the night, and then comes back to the
table, and, leaning over the sick girl, asks, in a choking whisper:
"Why did you do it--why did you do it, Adelaide, my wife? Why did
you make me, your brothers and sisters, believe that you--you were
worthless--oh, why--in Heaven's name, why?"
"I don't know--I can't remember; it was so long ago! What does it
matter now?" she answers wearily, her eyes closing. "I feel so ill, so
tired. I can't talk any more."
He drops upon his knees by her side, and brings his head on a level
with hers.
"Adelaide, Adelaide, by the love I once bore you, by all the pain, the
trouble you brought into my life, I implore you to answer me!"
The quivering earnestness of the appeal rouses her. She rubs her eyes
and struggles into an upright position.
"Let me think--let me think--it is so long ago. I did not let them
believe anything but the truth. I wrote almost at once--before I went
to America--and told them whom I was with and why I was going. I wrote
many times to Robert and to Pauline, with letters inclosed for Aunt Jo
and the others; but they never answered me."
"They burned them unread. Oh, Heaven forgive them, Heaven forgive them,
for I can not!" he mutters hoarsely.
But Addie betrays no indignation, no surprise, no regret.
"Did they?" she murmurs indifferently. "That would explain."
"Addie, Addie, why did you leave me--my love, my love?"
A flush spreads over her face and a sparkle comes to her eye which
almost brings back her youth again.
"Why did I leave you? Because you had learned to hate, to despise me,
because I--we were all making your life unbearable, and I saw no other
means by which I could free your home, give you back peace; and I left
you because I loved you--loved you, oh, a thousand times better than
you ever loved me!"
"Oh, child, child!"
"I saw you had learned to hate, to loathe me--I saw it in your eyes
when--when--I asked you for that wretched money."
"The money--the money," he says eagerly, "you wanted for your father?"
"Yes; he had forged a check for that amount, hoping to be able to
refund the money before his crime should be discovered; but, finding
he could not, and seeing ruin staring him in the face, he came to me,
having heard that I had married a rich man, and asked me to get it
from you. I promised, and for a whole week I tried--tried to ask you;
but I found I couldn't; and when at the end of the week I told him
so, he held a loaded revolver to his temple and was about to blow his
brains out on the spot. But I wrenched the weapon from his hand, ran
straight into the house, and got the money from you. I got the money;
but--but it cost me home--home, happiness, youth and life. I knew that
we two could carry on the farce no longer, that the same roof could not
shelter us again. I told my father that you had discarded me forever
and that he must keep me with him. We sailed for America, and lived
a hand-to-mouth existence there in the lowest haunts of Bohemianism
among gamblers, sharpers, reprobates of all nations and classes until
two months ago when we came home. What a life--what a life! I--I tried
to get away many times, to support myself free from him; but my health
was against me from the start, so I had to stay with him or starve,
though he tried to shake me off often enough. I--I could have taken
a--a husband before my looks went; but I didn't--I didn't because I
thought the husband I had left would come to rescue me. I lived on this
hope for two years; every morning when I woke I said, 'He will come
to-day; he must come to-day!' I longed for you, Tom, I hungered for
you, and I hoped--always hoped--for every night you used to whisper
to me in my sleep that you were coming to take me home again. But you
never came--ah, you never came! And then the great longing for you died
in me; disease was wasting me. I became torpid, callous, and I thought
no more of you or--Tom, Tom, what is the matter? Why, you are crying!
How funny to see a man cry! You are sorry for me? Don't, please,
don't--I--I don't like it."
He is kneeling on the ground before her, sobbing wildly, kissing her
feet, the hem of her dress, moaning forth inarticulate cries of love,
remorse, pain, and pity infinite.
She leans forward, and looks at him for a few moments with cold
sparkling eyes; then her better nature reasserts itself, and, after
making several unsuccessful efforts to rouse him, she lays her hot thin
fingers on his swelling neck and whispers in his ear--
"Tom, listen! I--I am hungry, dear. I have not eaten anything to-day."
He rises to his feet, stares at her with filmy eyes, then seizes her
in his arms, with her pale face strained to his breast, and carries
her down the rotting stairway, away from darkness, pain, and want, to
warmth, peace, care, and love unsleeping, that are to be her lot while
her days are yet of earth.
* * * * *
Armstrong wants at first to carry off his wife to Madeira, Nice,
Algiers; but the doctors are of unanimous opinion that her strength is
not sufficient to bear the fatigue of such a journey, but that later on
in the season, after a few months' rest and care, she may be moved to a
warmer climate.
"Then tell me--tell me," he asks feverishly, "what I am to do for her
in the meantime. I--I want to cure her quickly; what am I to do?"
"Take her where she wishes to go, within moderate distance; give her
whatever she fancies, keep up her spirits, keep her mind undisturbed,
and do not leave her much alone."
"But medicine--what medicine is she to get? Surely you will give her
something to strengthen her?" pleads Armstrong, an icy chill creeping
over him at the vagueness of the prescription.
"Certainly, certainly," says Dr. Gibson, one of the greatest
authorities on lung disease in the United Kingdom, seizing a sheet of
paper and writing hurriedly; "but remember, Mr. Armstrong, that good
nutriment, complete rest of mind and body, and cheerful companionship
will do more to restore your wife's health than all the medicine in an
apothecary's shop."
With despair in his heart and a smile on his lips Armstrong kneels by
his wife's chair, tells her that he has medical leave to take her away
from the close crowded city, and asks whither she would like to go--to
Brighton, Bournemouth, Cheltenham, the Isle of Wight?
Addie shakes her listless head--she has no wish, no fancy in the
matter--wherever Tom wishes; she does not mind--it is all the same to
her. He sighs noiselessly; everything is the same to her now, all the
life, the vivacity, the eager pretty willfulness that charmed him, are
gone. She lies all day with half-closed eyes, silent, torpid, enjoying
the good things he heaps upon her with a dumb animal appreciation,
taking no interest in any earthly matter, asking no questions or
explanations, unmoved by--seemingly unaware of--the yearning anguished
eyes that never leave her face, the hot and restless hands that always
hover round her, anticipating her lightest want, holding to her lips
food and medicine, from which she turns aside with childish distaste.
"But you used to like the sea, don't you remember, Addie?" he pleads
wistfully. "Bournemouth is, I believe, a lovely place. I think we'll
decide on it."
"Yes," she answers indifferently. "But I hope it is not too far away;
I feel so tired still. Are there not primroses in the room? Hold them
to my face, Tom. How sweet they are--primroses! Why, it must be spring
again, and the grove all yellow with them! And the white lilac too must
be coming into bloom outside the school-room window."
"Addie," he says quickly, "would you like me to take you home, my
darling?"
"Yes," she answers slowly, drawing a long breath; "I think I should
like to spend another spring at home. Yes, take me home."
Home! Is she going home only to die? is the question ever present to
the penitent and remorseful husband.