That evening I was made a heroine of by Mrs. Packard and all the other
members of the household. Even Nixon thawed and showed me his genial
side. I had to repeat my story above stairs--and below, and relate just
what the old ladies had done and said, and how they bore their joy, and
whatever I thought they would do with their money now they had it. When
I at last reached my room, my first act was to pull aside my shade and
take a peep at the old attic window. Miss Charity’s face was there,
but so smiling and gay I hardly knew it. She kissed her hand to me as I
nodded my head, and then turned away with her light as if to show me she
had only been waiting to give me this joyous good night.
This was a much better picture to sleep on than the former one had been.
Next day I settled back into my old groove. Mrs. Packard busied herself
with her embroidery and I read to her or played on the piano. Happier
days seemed approaching, nay, had come. We enjoyed two days of it, then
trouble settled down on us once more.
It began on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Packard and I had been out making
some arrangements for the projected dinner-party and I had stopped for a
minute in the library before going up-stairs.
A pile of mail lay on the table. Running this over with a rapid hand,
she singled out several letters which she began to open. Their contents
seemed far from satisfactory. Exclamation after exclamation left her
lips, her agitation increasing with each one she read, and her haste,
too, till finally it seemed sufficient for her just to glance at the
unfolded sheet before letting it drop. When the last one had left her
hand, she turned and, encountering my anxious look, bitterly remarked:
“We need not have made those arrangements this morning. Seven regrets in
this mail and two in the early one. Nine regrets in all! and I sent out
only ten invitations. What is the meaning of it? I begin to feel myself
ostracized.”
I did not understand it any more than she did.
“Invite others,” I suggested, and was sorry for my presumption the next
minute.
Her poor lip trembled.
“I do not dare,” she whispered. “Oh, what will Mr. Packard say! Some one
or something is working against us. We have enemies--enemies, and Mr.
Packard will never get his election.”
Her trouble was natural and so was her expression of it. Feeling for
her, and all the more that the cause of this concerted action against
her was as much a mystery to me as it was to herself, I made some
attempt to comfort her, which was futile enough, God knows. She heard my
voice, no doubt, but she gave no evidence of noting what I said. When I
had finished--that is, when she no longer heard me speaking--she let her
head droop and presently I heard her murmur:
“It seems to me that if for any reason he fails to get his election I
shall wish to die.”
She was in this state of dejection, with the echo of this sad sentence
in both our ears, when a light tap at the door was followed by
the entrance of Letty, the nurse-maid. She wore an unusual look of
embarrassment and held something crushed in her hand. Mrs. Packard
advanced hurriedly to meet her.
“What is it?” she interrogated sharply, like one expectant of evil
tidings.
“Nothing! that is, not much,” stammered the frightened girl, attempting
to thrust her hand behind her back.
But Mrs. Packard was too quick for her.
“You have something there! What is it? Let me see.”
The girl’s hand moved forward reluctantly. “A paper which I found pinned
to the baby’s coat when I took her out of the carriage,” she faltered.
“I--I don’t know what it means.”
Mrs. Packard’s eyes opened wide with horror. She seized the paper and
staggered with it to one of the windows. While she looked at it, I cast
a glance at Letty. She was crying, from what looked like pure fear; but
it was the fear of ignorance rather than duplicity; she appeared as much
mystified as ourselves.
Meanwhile I felt, rather than saw, the old shadow settling fast upon
the head of her who an hour before had been so bright. She had chosen a
place where her form could not fail of being more or less concealed by
the curtain, and though I heard the paper rattle I could not see it
or the hand which held it. But the time she spent over it seemed
interminable before I heard her utter a sharp cry and saw the curtains
shake as she clutched them.
It seemed the proper moment to proffer help, but before either Letty or
I could start forward, her command rang out in smothered but peremptory
tones:
“Keep back! I want no one here!” and we stopped, each looking at the
other in very natural consternation. And when, after another seemingly
interminable interval, she finally stepped forth, I noted a haggard
change in her face, and that her coat had been torn open and even the
front of her dress wrenched apart as if she felt herself suffocating,
or as if--but this alternative only suggested itself to me later and I
shall refrain from mentioning it now.
Crossing the floor with a stumbling step, with the paper which had
roused all this indignation still in her hand, she paused before the now
seriously alarmed Letty, and demanded in great excitement:
“Who pinned that paper on my child? You know; you saw it done. Was it a
man or--”
“Oh no, ma’am, no, ma’am,” protested the girl. “No man came near her. It
was a woman--a nice-looking woman.”
“A woman!”
Mrs. Packard’s tone was incredulous. But the girl insisted.
“Yes, ma’am; there was no man there at all. I was on one of the park
benches resting, with the baby in my arms, and this woman passed by
and saw us. She smiled at the baby’s ways, and then stopped and took
to talking about her,--how pretty she was and how little afraid of
strangers. I saw no harm in the woman, ma’am, and let her sit down on
the same bench with me for a few minutes. She must have pinned the
paper on the baby’s coat then, for it was the only time anybody was near
enough to do it.”
Mrs. Packard, with an irrepressible gesture of anger or dismay, turned
and walked back to the window. The movement was a natural one. Certainly
she was excusable for wishing to hide from the girl the full extent of
the agitation into which this misadventure had thrown her.
“You may go.” The words came after a moment of silent suspense. “Give
the baby her supper--I know that you will never let any one else come so
near her again.”
Letty probably did not catch the secret anguish hidden in her tone, but
I did, and after the nurse-maid was gone, I waited anxiously for what
Mrs. Packard would say.
It came from the window and conveyed nothing. Would I do so and so? I
forget what her requests were, only that they necessitated my leaving
the room. There seemed no alternative but to obey, yet I felt loath to
leave her and was hesitating near the doorway when a new interruption
occurred. Nixon brought in a telegram, and, as Mrs. Packard advanced
to take it, she threw on the table the slip of paper which she had been
poring over behind the curtains.
As I stepped back at Nixon’s entrance I was near the table and the
single glance I gave this paper as it fell showed me that it was covered
with the same Hebrew-like characters of which I already possessed more
than one example. The surprise was acute, but the opportunity which came
with it was one I could not let slip. Meeting her eye as the door closed
on Nixon, I pointed at the scrawl she had thrown down, and wonderingly
asked her if that was what Letty had found pinned to the baby’s coat.
With a surprised start, she paused in her act of opening the telegram
and made a motion as if to repossess herself of this, but seeming to
think better of it she confined herself to giving me a sharp look.
“Yes,” was her curt assent.
I summoned up all my courage, possibly all my powers of acting.
“Why, what is there in unreadable characters like these to alarm you?”
She forgot her telegram, she forgot everything but that here was a
question she must answer in a way to disarm all suspicion.
“The fact,” she accentuated gravely, “that they are unreadable. What
menace may they not contain? I am afraid of them, as I am of all obscure
and mystifying things.”
In a flash, at the utterance of these words, I saw, my way to the
fulfillment of the wish which had actuated me from the instant my eyes
had fallen on this paper.
“Do you think it a cipher?” I asked.
“A cipher?”
“I have always been good at puzzles. I wish you would let me see what
I can make out of these rows of broken squares and topsy-turvy angles.
Perhaps I can prove to you that they contain nothing to alarm you.”
The gleam of something almost ferocious sprang into this gentle woman’s
eyes. Her lips moved and I expected an angry denial, but fear kept her
back. She did not dare to appear to understand this paper any better
than I did. Besides, she was doubtless conscious that its secret was not
one to yield to any mere puzzle-reader. She could safely trust it to my
curiosity. All this I detected in her changing expression, before she
made the slightest gesture which allowed me to secure what I felt to be
the most valuable acquisition in the present exigency.
Then she turned to her telegram. It was from her husband, and I was not
prepared for the cry of dismay which left her lips as she read it, nor
for the increased excitement into which she was thrown by its few and
seemingly simple words.
With apparent forgetfulness of what had just occurred--a forgetfulness
which insensibly carried her back to the moment when she had given me
some order which involved my departure from the room--she impetuously
called out over her shoulder which she had turned on opening her
telegram:
“Miss Saunders! Miss Saunders! are you there? Bring me the morning
papers; bring me the morning papers!”
Instantly I remembered that we had not read the papers. Contrary to our
usual habit we had gone about a pressing piece of work without a glance
at any of the three dailies laid to hand in their usual place on the
library table. “They are here on the table,” I replied, wondering as
much at the hectic flush which now enlivened her features as at the
extreme paleness that had marked them the moment before.
“Search them! There is something new in them about me. There must be.
Read Mr. Packard’s message.”
I took it from her hand; only eight words in all.
Here they are--the marks of separation being mine:
I am coming--libel I know--where is S.
Henry.
“Search the columns,” she repeated, as I laid the telegram down.
“Search! Search!”
I hastily obeyed. But it took me some time to find the paragraph I
sought. The certainty that others in the house had read these papers,
if we had not, disturbed me. I recalled certain glances which I had seen
pass between the servants behind Mrs. Packard’s back,--glances which
I had barely noted at the time, but which returned to my mind now with
forceful meaning; and if these busy girls had read, all the town had
read--what? Suddenly I found it. She saw my eyes stop in their hurried
scanning and my fingers clutch the sheet more firmly, and, drawing up
behind me, she attempted to follow with her eyes the words I reluctantly
read out. Here they are, just as they left my trembling lips that
day--words that only the most rabid of opponents could have instigated:
Apropos of the late disgraceful discoveries, by which a woman
of apparent means and unsullied honor has been precipitated from
her proud preeminence as a leader of fashion, how many women,
known and admired to-day, could stand the test of such an inquiry
as she was subjected to? We know one at least, high in position
and aiming at a higher, who, if the merciful veil were withdrawn
which protects the secrets of the heart, would show such a dark
spot in her life, that even the aegis of the greatest power in
the state would be powerless to shield her from the indignation
of those who now speak loudest in her praise.
“A lie!” burst in vehement protest from Mrs. Packard, as I finished. “A
lie like the rest! But oh, the shame of it! a shame that will kill me.”
Then suddenly and with a kind of cold horror: “It is this which
has destroyed my social prestige in town. I understand those nine
declinations now. Henry! my poor Henry!”
There was little comfort to offer, but I tried to divert her mind to the
practical aspect of the case by saying:
“What can Mr. Steele be doing? He does not seem to be very successful
in his attempts to carry out the mayor’s orders. See! your husband asks
where he is. He can mean no other by the words ‘Where is S--?’ He knew
that your mind would supply the name.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes had become fixed; her whole face betrayed a settled despair.
Quickly, violently, she rang the bell.
Nixon appeared.
She advanced hurriedly to meet him.
“Nixon, you have Mr. Steele’s address?”
“Yes, Mrs. Packard.”
“Then go to it at once. Find Mr. Steele if you can, but if that is not
possible, learn where he has gone and come right back and tell me. Mr.
Packard telegraphs to know where he is. He has not joined the mayor in
C---.”
“Yes, Mrs. Packard; the house is not far. I shall be back in fifteen
minutes.”
The words were respectful, but the sly glint in his blinking eyes as
he hastened out fixed my thoughts again on this man and the uncommon
attitude he maintained toward the mistress whose behests he nevertheless
flew to obey.