THE HUSBAND RELENTS.
Grantley Mellen turned back to the miserable grandeur of his home. The
proud heart ached in his bosom. What if, from fear or weakness,
Elizabeth did not return to the house? What if she remained there among
the cold graves, or wandered off in terror of his wrath?
The graveyard was full half a mile from the spot where this thought
struck him. He turned at once and went back, feeling how unmanly it was
to leave the miserable creature stricken with such anguish, alone with
that man. He remembered how her uncovered head had drooped under his
denunciations in the moonlight, that the cold wind had lifted the waves
of her hair and revealed the dead marble of a face in which all hope was
quenched. Notwithstanding his wrongs, notwithstanding the ache at his
heart, he would go back and take her home for that one night--only for
that one night.
He walked rapidly towards the graveyard, more eager now to find
Elizabeth than he had been to separate from her only a brief time
before. He looked to the right and left in search of her, but the moon
was obscured now by thin gray clouds, and a fog drifting up from the
ocean was fast obliterating the crowd of golden stars that had been so
brilliant when he went forth.
Mellen walked on, growing more and more anxious, till he came in sight
of the graveyard, then he paused under a clump of cedars; for he saw his
unhappy wife forcing her way, in desperate haste, through the broken
pickets of the fence, with her face turned homewards. The gray woollen
shawl was floating loosely around her, giving a weird ghostliness to her
appearance.
Mellen turned and went back, sheltering himself under the cedar trees.
When he saw that she was safe, a revulsion came upon his feelings; a
sense of the wrong she had done him returned with bitter force, and when
she passed along the outskirts of the cedars, making her way down the
hill, he retreated deeper into the shadows, recoiling from contact with
her.
"She will go home," he said, gloomily, "no one is more familiar with the
paths through the woods. Thank heaven she does not know that I am weak
enough to care for her safety! Let her reach the house first, we shall
be less likely to meet."
With these thoughts in his mind he lingered in the cedars till Elizabeth
was out of sight. The wind was dying away in low sobs now, smothered
down by the fog, through which he could hear the moaning of the ocean
afar off.
Mellen left the woods, and made the best of his way home, believing that
his wife had already found a shelter there.
The house was dark and still as the grave when he entered it again.
Instinctively he trod with caution along the halls and crept stealthily
upstairs, for in the depths of his heart he was anxious to conceal
Elizabeth's movements that night from the servants, and, above all, from
Elsie. He paused and listened a moment in the square passage that led to
her rooms, hoping to hear some movement by which he could be certain
that she had reached home in safety. But there was no sound, and he
turned away sighing, for compassion and the tender pity which every
generous man feels for a fallen woman whom he has once loved, was
turning the bitterness of his rage into intense pain.
Hearing nothing, and with vague uncertainty at his heart, the unhappy
man entered his own dark chamber, threw off his clothes and flung
himself into bed, wretched beyond any power of my pen to describe.
But he could not sleep, could not even rest, the very effort at repose
drove him wild. He got up again, dressed himself and sat down by the
open window, looking out into the darkness. All at once he started and
leaned far out of the window. Was it fancy, or had some wailing voice
pronounced his name? Something gray and weird seemed floating from his
sight through the gathering fog. At first it had the form of a human
being, then it seemed as if a pair of wings unfurled and swallowed it
up. Was it his wife? Could that winglike envelopment be her gray woollen
shawl, tossed by the wind? Had her voice been engulfed in the far-off
moan of the ocean? In this dreary state the unhappy and most wronged man
remained all the rest of that gloomy night.