The suspense which had held us tense and speechless was for the moment
relieved and Mr. Steele allowed himself the following explanation:
“My hand trembled and the bullet penetrated an inch too high.”
Then he relapsed again into silence.
Mrs. Packard shuddered and went on:
“It may seem incredible to you, it seems incredible now to myself, but
I completed my journey, entered my uncle’s house, was made welcome
there and started upon my new life without letting my eyes fall for one
instant on the columns of a newspaper. I did not dare to see what they
contained. That short but bitter episode of my sixteenth year was a
nightmare of horror, to be buried with my old name and all that could
interfere with the delights of the cultured existence which my uncle’s
means and affection opened before me. Two years and I hardly remembered;
three years and it came to me only in dreams; four and even dreams
failed to suggest it; the present, the glorious present was all. I had
met you, Henry, and we had loved and married.
“Did any doubts come to disturb my joy? Very few. I had never received
a word from Minnesota. I was as dead to every one there as they all were
to me. I believed myself free and that the only wrong I did was in not
taking you into my confidence. But this, the very nature of my secret
forbade. How could I tell you what would inevitably alienate your
affections? That act of my early girlhood by which I had gained an
undeserved freedom had been too base; sooner than let you know this blot
on my life, I was content to risk the possibility--the inconceivable
possibility--of Mr. Brainard’s having survived the attack he had made
upon his own life. Can you understand such temerity? I can not, now that
I see its results before me.
“So the die was cast and I became a wife instead of the mere shadow of
one. You were prosperous, and not a sorrow came to disturb my sense of
complete security till that day two weeks ago, when, looking up in my
own library, I saw, gleaming between me and the evening lamp, a face,
which, different as it was in many respects, tore my dead past out of
the grave and sent my thoughts reeling back to a lonely road on a black
hillside with a lighted window in view, and behind that window the
outstretched form of a man with his head among leaves not redder than
his blood.
“I have said to you, I have said to others, that a specter rose upon me
that day in the library. It was such to me,--an apparition and nothing
else. Perhaps he meant to impress himself as such, for I had heard no
footfall and only looked up because of the constraining force of the
look which awaited me. I knew afterward that it was a man whom I had
seen, a man whom you yourself had introduced into the house; but at the
instant I thought it a phantom of my forgotten past sent to shock and
destroy me; and, struck speechless with the horror of it, I lost
that opportunity of mutual explanation which might have saved me an
unnecessary and cruel experience. For this man, who recognized me more
surely than I did him, who perhaps knew who I was before he ever entered
my house, has sported for two weeks with my fears and hopes as a tiger
with his prey. Maintaining his attitude of stranger--you have been
witness to his manner in my presence--he led me slowly but surely to
believe myself deceived by an extraordinary resemblance; a resemblance,
moreover, which did not hold at all times, and which frequently vanished
altogether, as I recalled the straight-featured but often uncouth aspect
of the man who had awakened the admiration of Boone. Memory had been
awakened and my sleep filled with dreams, but the unendurable had been
spared me and I was thanking God with my whole heart, when suddenly one
night, when an evening spent with friends in the old way had made me
feel safe, my love safe, my husband and my child safe, there came to my
ears from below the sound of a laugh, loud, coarse and deriding,--such
a laugh as could spring from no member of my own household, such a laugh
as I heard but once before and that in the by-gone years when some one
asked Mr. Brainard if he meant to live always in Boone. The shock was
terrible, and when I learned that the secretary, and the secretary only,
was below, I knew who that secretary was and yielded to the blow.
“Yet hope dies hard with the happy. I knew, but it was not enough to
know,--I must be sure. There was a way--it came to me with my first
fluttering breath as I recovered from my faint. In those old days when
I was thrown much with this man, he had shown me a curious cipher and
taught me how to use it. It was original with himself, he said, and some
day we might be glad of a method of communication which would render our
correspondence inviolable. I could not see why he considered this likely
ever to be desirable, but I took the description of it which he gave me
and promised that I would never let it leave my person. I even allowed
him to solder about my neck the chain which held the locket in which he
had placed it. Consequently I had it with me when I fled from Boone, and
for the first few weeks after arriving at my uncle’s house in Detroit.
Then, wishing to banish every reminder of days I was so anxious to
forget, I broke that chain, destroyed the locket and hid away from every
one’s sight the now useless and despised cipher. Why I retained the
cipher I can not explain. Now, that cipher must prove my salvation. If I
could find it again I was sure that the shock of receiving from my hand
certain words written in the symbols he had himself taught me would call
from him an involuntary revelation. I should know what I had to fear.
But so many changes had taken place and so long a time elapsed since I
hid this slip of paper away that I was not even sure I still retained
it; but after spending a good share of the night in searching for it, I
finally came across it in one of my old trunks.
“The next morning I made my test. Perhaps, Henry, you remember my
handing Mr. Steele an empty envelope to mail which he returned with an
air of surprise so natural and seemingly unfeigned that he again forced
me to believe that he was the stranger he appeared. Though he must have
recognized at a glance--for he was an adept in this cipher once--the
seven simple symbols in which I had expressed the great cry of my soul
‘Is it you?’ he acted the innocent secretary so perfectly that all my
old hopes returned and I experienced one hour of perfect joy. Then came
another reaction. Letty brought in the baby with a paper pinned to her
coat. She declared to us that a woman had been the instrument of
this outrage, though the marks inside, suggesting the cipher but with
characteristic variations bespeaking malice, could only have been made
by one hand.
“How I managed to maintain sufficient hold upon my mind to drag the key
from my breast and by its means to pick out the meaning of the first
three words--words which once read suggested all the rest--I can not now
imagine. Death was in my heart and the misery of it all more than
human strength could bear; yet I compared paper with paper carefully,
intelligently, till these words from the prayer-book with all their
threatening meaning to me and mine started into life before me:
‘Visiting the sins--’ Henry, you know the words ‘Visiting the sins of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’
Upon the children! Henry, he meant Laura! our little Laura! I had
wakened vengeance in a fiend. The man who had calmly smiled in my face
as he handed me back that empty envelope inscribed with the wild appeal,
‘Is it you?’ was the man I had once driven to the verge of the grave and
who had come back now to destroy us all.
“Yet, such is the reaching out of the drowning for straws, I did not
utterly despair till Nixon brought me from this man’s lodging-house,
where I had sent him, a specimen of his handwriting.
“Nixon is the only confidant I have had. Nixon knew me as a girl when he
worked in my uncle’s home, and has always had the most unbounded, I may
say jealous, affection for me. To him I had dared impart that I did not
trust your new secretary; that he looked like a man I once knew who
was a determined opponent of the party now trying to elect you; that a
specimen of his writing would make me quite sure, and begged him to get
it. I thought he might pick up such in the little office below, but he
was never able to do so--Mr. Steele has taken care not to leave a line
written in this house--but he did find a few lines signed with his name
in his own room at the boarding-house, and these he showed me before he
told me the result of his errand. They settled all doubts. What is to be
my fate? Surely this man has no real claim on me, after all these
years, when I thought myself your true and honest wife. He may ruin your
campaign, defeat your hopes, overwhelm me with calumny and a loss of
repute, but surely, surely he can not separate us. The law will not
uphold him in that; will it, Henry? Say that it will not, say--oh, say
that--it--will not--do--that, or we shall live to curse the day, not
when we were born; but when our little innocent child came to us!”