unconscious took possession of him. He fell back into his chair again, a
chill running through all his veins. If it should be the man Christine
had married so hastily in a foreign country--the father of her child!
The horror of it overcame him so that for several moments he remained
transfixed. Then he reflected that the name might be a mere coincidence,
and took up the letter to finish it.
Every word he read strengthened the conviction that it was the Robert
Dallas that he knew. There was a minute description of him, which
corresponded perfectly, and the lawyer added that he had sent, by
express, a photograph and specimens of his handwriting. Noel looked
about him. An express parcel, which he had not noticed, lay on the
table. He hastily cut the twine and opened it. There were papers and
memoranda, and in an envelope a photograph. He tore it open and the
weak, handsome face of the father of Christine's child confronted him.
There was no longer a doubt of it; Christine, the innocent, the
guileless, the confiding, the pure and sweet and lovely, had been
betrayed, and by this creature, this miserable excuse for a man, whose
dull and feeble beauty looked to him hideous as leprosy. What would
become of her? How would she bear it? Who would take care of her when
the great shock fell?
A sudden strength came into him. A force that had lain as silent and
reserved as the force of steam in water surged forth at the fiery touch
of the thought that had first come to him. He got up hastily and put the
lawyer's letters and the parcel of papers into his iron safe and locked
it. The photograph only he left out, and this he thrust into the inner
pocket of his coat. As he was doing so it caught on something. It was
his cross. A thought thrilled him. He was her knight of the Legion of
Honor, and he felt that he had kept his trust!
He went out of the office, called a cab, and had himself driven to a
street and number in a remote suburb of the city. In a quiet, pretty
little house, overrun with vines, and facing a green and grassy public
square as fresh and lovely as it was unfashionable, he stayed a long
time, and when he emerged from it an elderly lady, dressed in black and
with a white widow's cap set above her smoothly-brushed hair, came to
the door with him and pressed his hand with a fervent "God bless you" as
he was leaving her.
It was evident that he had inspired her with some of the ardent spirit
that was animating him, for she looked eager and full of interest, and
as she turned back within the house, when he had driven off, she had
the manner of a person who had work to do that called forth her best
energies and sympathies. Noel had the same air as he caused himself to
be driven from place to place, in pursuance of some purpose which kept
him occupied until far into the night.
XI.
Next morning when the hour for Christine's sitting came Noel was walking
up and down in his studio with a face intensely pale from past
sleeplessness and present excitement. He looked at his watch frequently,
as if impatient, and yet the least sound made him start as if nervous
and apprehensive. At last the sound he longed for and yet dreaded was
heard, and he went to the door and threw it open for Christine to enter.
She came in without speaking, and throwing back her veil revealed her
pale, sad face, with its look of passionless woe.
Noel took her hand as he closed the door behind her and inquired for her
health. It was steadier than his, that little black-gloved hand. He felt
reluctant to let it go as she withdrew it and began to take off her
bonnet and gloves. When she had laid these on the table she ran her
fingers with a pretty motion that he had often noticed through the
loose masses of her dark hair, where it curved behind her ears. It was
quite mechanical and showed an unconsciousness of self that Noel
wondered whether he should ever see in her again.
She poured out a glass of water and drank half of it, and then said she
was ready to begin. She looked tired, but she said she was not, and
would like to begin if he were ready.
"Sit down, Christine," he said gently, "I am not ready to begin yet. I
want to talk to you."
She looked surprised, but sank upon the lounge and he seated himself by
her side. The utter lassitude of her expression made his task seem
desperately hard to begin.
"I have something to tell you, dear Christine," he said, "but I want you
to make me a promise first. If the few poor little services I have been
able to render you, and the interest and sympathy I have tried to
express to you have done anything at all, I think they must have
convinced you that I am your true, devoted friend and that you can
trust me. Tell me this, Christine; you do trust me--don't you?"
"More than any one on earth--but that is too little," she said
hastily--"as much as I could ever have trusted any one--as much as I
trusted those who have been unworthy--and with a feeling that the
knowledge of their unworthiness could never affect a thing so high as my
faith in you."
"Thank God that it is so. And now, Christine, I call the God we both
adore and fear to witness that I will be true to your faith in me, to
the last recess of my mind, no less than to the last drop of my blood.
See, Christine, I swear it on my cross," and he drew it out, touching
the picture as he did so. "Give me your hand," he said, "and we will
hold this sacred cross between my hand and yours, and I will tell you
this thing, and you must try to feel that I am not only your knight but
also your dear brother, in whom all the confidence you have expressed
to me is strengthened by the added bond of relationship. Christine, my
sister, I want you to realize that there is an ordeal before you which
it will take all the strength that you can summon to bear with
fortitude. At first you will think it intolerable--impossible to be
borne, and I do not pretend to tell you that the blow will not be awful,
beyond words. I only want to say to you now, when you are calm enough
to listen, that it is not so hopeless and terrible as it will look at
first--that there is light beyond, though at first you may not be able
to see it. Try to keep that in your mind if you can."
She had given him her hand and they clasped the cross between them. All
the time that he was speaking she looked at him with a calm and
unbelieving wonder in her large eyes. As he paused she shook her head
with grave incredulousness and said quietly:
"You do not know me, Mr. Noel. I thought you understood a little, but
you are wrong if you think there is anything you could tell me for which
I should care so much. I do not suppose I could make you understand it,
but my heart is dead and buried in my baby's grave, and nothing could
make me feel as you expect me to feel. The two or three people that
I--know" (Noel knew by the pause she made that she had wanted to say
love, but couldn't, in honesty, use the word) "are all well. I have just
come from them--even Dr. Belford I have seen to-day--but if you were
going to tell me they were all dead I could not care a great deal--at
least not in the way you expect me to care--for what you have to tell
me. It may be wicked to have so hard a heart, but I cannot help it.
There is absolutely nothing in all the world that could make me feel in
the way you think I ought to feel at what you have to tell me."
"I did not say ought," said Noel, "there is no ought about it. It is a
thing inevitable. Oh, Christine, there is no way to lead up to it. I
must just tell you and beg you, for my sake at least, to try to bear
it."
"You had better tell me," she said. "You will see how I can bear it."
The calm security of her tones, the passionless wonder of her quiet
face were almost maddening. They made him fear the more the effect of
the shock when it should come.
"Christine," he said quietly, though his heart was leaping, "it is
something about your--about the man you married."
A faint flush came up in her face, and she averted her eyes an instant.
Then she looked at him and said calmly:
"I thought you knew that long ago that became one of the subjects upon
which I had ceased to feel deeply. If you think it is wrong of me to say
this I cannot help it. He hated his little child. He never thought it
anything but a trouble and a burden, and he was not sorry when it died.
He is glad the trouble of it is over. He had long ceased to feel any
love for me--if he ever had it--but if he had cared a little for the
poor little baby I could have forgotten that; but he was cruel toward
it in thought and feeling, and if I had not watched the treasure of my
heart and guarded it unceasingly he would have been cruel to it in deed,
too. I know it and Eliza knows it. Oh, why did you make me speak of it?
I ought not to say such things. It is wrong."
"Why wrong, Christine? Why do you feel it to be wrong? Tell me."
"Because he is my husband," she said sternly, "and I took solemn vows to
love, to serve and to obey him. I said 'for better or for worse.' I said
'till death us do part.' The God who will judge me knows whether I have
kept them. The love one cannot control; but one can force one's self to
serve and obey, and that I have tried to do."
"And you have done it. I have felt that I could kneel and worship you
for it--but, Christine, the truth is too evident to be avoided. He is
unworthy of you. Suppose you could be free from him?"
"Divorce?" she said with a sort of horror. "Never! I scarcely know what
it is--but marriage seems to me a thing indissoluble and inviolate. I
cannot forget that he is the father of my child. I could never wish, on
that account, to be free from him."
"Christine, there is another way. Oh, my poor, poor child, you have
never even thought of it, and it breaks my heart to tell you. But there
is a way you might be free from him without divorce--a sad and dreadful
way, my poor little sister, but remember, I implore you, that there is
light beyond the darkness. Oh, cannot you think what I mean?"
She shook her head.
"I know he is not dead," she said; "there is no other way that I know."
"Suppose--my poor girl, try to be brave now, for you will have to know
it--suppose your marriage to him was not legal--was no marriage at all?"
Her face got scarlet.
"That is not possible," she said, "and if it were, it would make no
difference. If he did it without knowing--"
"Christine, Christine, he did not! He knew it, my child. Prepare
yourself for the very worst. He deceived you wilfully. Oh, Christine,
when he was married to you there was an impossible barrier between you.
It was such a thing as you could not dream of. Give me your hands and
try to feel that your brother bears this sorrow with you." He caught her
other hand also and pressed them both between his own.
"Christine, he was married already. When he married you, he had already
a wife and child."
She wrenched her hands away and sprang to her feet. A low cry broke from
her. Noel felt that it was he who had applied the torture, and he saw
her racked with agony and utterly heedless of the comfort he had
offered, and had fondly hoped to give her.
"Have you proof for what you say?" she cried, her wild look of confusion
and terror making her so unlike her usual self that he seemed not to
know her. "I will never believe it without the strongest proof. It is
too horrible, too awful, too deadly, deadly shameful to be true. Be
quick about it. If there is proof, let me have it."
"Christine, there is proof. I have it here on the spot, but spare
yourself, my poor, poor girl. Wait a little--"
"Don't talk to me of waiting. Let me see what you have got. Oh, can't
you see that I can bear anything better than not to know? Show me what
you have and if what you say is true--"
But she turned away as if his eyes upon her hurt her, and raised her arm
before her face. In an instant she lowered it and said entreatingly:
"Oh, show me what you have. Have pity on me."
Noel took the envelope containing the picture from his pocket.
"This has been sent me by a lawyer," he said. "The woman is his client.
She says he gave her this picture soon after they were married. Oh,
Christine, don't look at it--"
But she walked toward him steadily and took the envelope from his hand.
He could not bear to see her when her eyes rested on it, so he turned
away and walked off a few paces, standing with his back toward her.
There was a moment's silence. He heard her slip the picture from the
envelope, and he knew that she was looking at it. He heard his watch
tick in the stillness, and her absolute silence frightened him. It
lasted, perhaps, a moment more and then he turned and looked at her. She
was standing erect with the picture in her hand. He saw that she had
turned it over and that it was upon the reverse side that her eyes were
fixed. There was some writing on it which he had not seen.
She held the photograph out to him, with an intense calm in her manner,
but he saw that her nostrils quivered and her breath came short. Her
hands were trembling, too, but her voice was steady as she said:
"I am convinced."
He glanced down at the picture and saw written on the back in a weak,
uncertain hand which Christine had evidently recognized, "To my darling
little wife, from Robert."
He felt her humiliation so intensely that he could not look at her, but
he took a step toward her and was about to speak when she turned away
and, with a tottering step, went toward the sofa and fell heavily upon
it, her face buried in her hands. A long breath that was almost a groan
broke from her, and then she lay very still, except that now and then
a violent shiver would run all along her frame. Poor Noel! He felt the
bitterness of the false position he had tried to occupy. If he had been
indeed her brother, this awful grief might have spent itself, to some
extent, in his arms. He felt that he was nothing to her, but his heart
was none the less soft toward her for that.
Thrusting the picture back into his pocket, he drew a chair near to her,
and sat down by her side. He wanted her to feel that he was there, in
case she should find it in her heart to turn to him for a help he did
not venture to intrude. It seemed a long while that they remained so,
but at last Christine sat up, turning upon him a face so strange and
terrible that he trembled at the look of it. Sorrow had seared it like a
blight. She had been lying upon a seam in the lounge and it had left a
red mark across her face. He thought it looked like the wound upon her
heart made visible.
"I can never see him again," she said. "I cannot go home. Oh God, I have
no home! It never was a home to me, except when my baby was in it. Oh,
my baby boy!--my baby boy!--my little child that loved and clung to me!
Oh, God was merciful to take you. My God, I see it now! I thank Thee, I
thank Thee, I thank Thee!"
She fell on her knees on the floor, and then she threw herself forward
on the couch, and hiding her face again shook from head to foot with
great, tearless sobs.
"Oh, I am so glad he is dead! It is so sweet to me to think it! I would
have had to look into his big, clear eyes that used to seem to read my
very heart, and think of this! Oh, if only I could go and lie beside my
baby, in the deep, still ground where the cruel eyes of men and women
could not see us, I would want no other home. I have been lonely and
miserable, lying in my bed at night, without him, and I have felt that
he missed and needed me, as I did him. Oh, if only God would let me go
to him, I would be willing to be put into his grave alive and wait for
death to come! It would be easier than life with this thing branded on
me."
"Branded on you! Oh, Christine, you must not say it. You will not be
branded; you will be, as you have always been, best and purest and
truest among women--to me at least. What have you ever been but an angel
of nobleness and heroism and devotion to duty? Oh, Christine, I could
worship you."
She rose to her feet and stood before him.
"I believe God will reward you in Heaven for those words," she said.
"You are a man who can see as He sees, in truth and clearness, and you
know, as He does, I have tried to do right. But what you do not know,
what He alone can know, is how I have suffered--how every sacred feeling
of my woman's heart has been torn and desecrated, and dragged to the
earth, and how I endured it all, because I thought it was my duty--and
all the time it was--Oh, I feel as if I don't know what may happen to me
next to drag me deeper down in misery and sorrow. I thought the worst
had come when my baby died, and now a thing so terrible has come as to
make that the comfort that I hug to my soul."
She sank to a seat on the couch again, and Noel came and took the place
at her side.
"Give me your hand," she said tremblingly. "Oh, I feel so frightened.
Now that this has come I feel that the air is full of awful horrors that
are waiting to fall upon me."
Noel took her hands in both his own, and she clung to them with a
pitiful intensity.
"The worst is over," he said gently. "You have only to let me manage and
think for you now--"
"Tell me," she said, "tell me all there is to know--how you found this
thing out, and what will be done about it. You must tell it every word
to me. I can bear it better now than ever to speak of it again."
And Noel told her, as mercifully and gently as he could, all that he had
learned from the lawyer's statements. He wanted to show her how
convincing and certain the proof was, that she might be justified in
acting on it. She held his hands in a hard grasp and looked at him with
excited, distended eyes as she listened to it all. The mixture of
wildness and calm in her manner and looks positively terrified him. He
feared her reason might be temporarily disturbed, and would have given
worlds to see her cry and complain, but she heard him through with the
same excited stillness.
"I have a safe and pleasant refuge for you for the present, Christine,"
he said. "I have arranged everything. A lady--a dear friend of mine,
whose son was my friend and a man I loved devotedly--this lady will take
you and care for you as a daughter. I have told her everything and she
is waiting for you now, longing to love and comfort you. Her son is dead
and she has often told me that I, as his friend, came next in her
affections, and that she would do anything on earth to serve me. I was
able to help him once and she never forgot it. So I went and told her
all the truth. She has a mind as clean and simple as your own,
Christine, and she is longing to love and comfort and take care of you.
You will let me take you to her--will you not?"
"Oh, yes," she said. "God bless you for it. I could never go back there
again," she added with a shudder, "but I must write a letter."
She rose hastily and Noel, wondering, brought her writing materials.
She wrote a hasty note, and sealing it, asked him to have it sent at
once. To his surprise he found it was addressed to Dallas.
"I will give it to the janitor as we go down," he said. "Do you feel
able to go now, Christine? A carriage will be waiting for us and I will
take you to that dear woman who will make you feel as if your mother's
arms were around you."
Christine was trembling in every limb, but she reached for her bonnet
and tried to tie it on. Her hands shook so that she let it fall. Noel
picked it up and held it a moment, saying soothingly:
"Don't hurry. We can wait a little while, if you wish. Try not to be too
despairing. When you drive away from here to-day you leave the past
behind you, and enter into a new and different life. Your new friend,
Mrs. Murray, will know you only as you are now, and you may meet no one
unless you wish to. She has very few friends herself, and she will tell
them what she chooses of you. You will see she is not a woman that
people will dare to ask questions of."
He stopped. A look so dreary, strange and full of anguish had come into
Christine's face that he was alarmed and said quickly:
"What is it?"
She struck her hands together and uttered a low cry.
"What is my name?" she said, in a tone so wild and vacant he thought
her mind was wandering. "It used to be," she said, passing one hand
across her forehead, as if in an effort of memory--"it used to be
Verrone--Christine Verrone, but I am not that happy-hearted girl the
nuns used to call by that name. This is not Christine Verrone. The very
flesh and blood and bones of this body are different--and surely in this
mind and heart and soul there is no tinge nor remnant of that old
Christine. How, then, can I be she? Oh! I have no home, no country, no
dwelling-place on earth; I have not even a name to be called by!"
Noel could bear no more. Taking her hands in his, he held them firmly,
and looking in her eyes, said fervently:
"Then take my name, Christine. Let me give you a home and friends, and
call you by the name I bear. God knows I would feel honored in bestowing
it upon you. If you will commit your precious life into my keeping--if
you will marry me--"
The look of her eyes checked him. The meaning of his words had dawned
upon her slowly, and to his infinite distress he saw that they filled
her with pain.
"You are speaking out of pity for me. You think I would die beneath it,
unless you sacrificed yourself and gave me the protection of your name,"
she said, speaking almost eagerly. "Tell me this is so. But you do not
know how I feel. I can bear it somehow, or else I can die. I could never
accept such a sacrifice from you, and, oh, I could never think of
marriage again, even to the best and noblest creature on God's earth,
without a shrinking that is pain intolerable."
Noel saw he had made a mistake. He saw, too, that the only way out of it
was to let her put this interpretation on it. So he merely soothed and
comforted her, and told her things should be as she chose, and then he
tied her bonnet under her chin as if she had been a little girl, gave
her her gloves, lowered the veil before her face and asked her if she
were ready.
"You will take your sweet girl-name," he said, "and be known as Mrs.
Verrone. Only Mrs. Murray and I will know anything of your past, and we
will now turn that page, Christine, and go forth into a new world--and a
brighter one, please God."
XII.
Christine was ill for many weeks, with Dr. Belford in daily attendance,
and her faithful old Eliza to help Mrs. Murray with the nursing. All
during the long fever, the gentle, little old lady, to whom Noel had
confided her, watched and tended her with a mother's devotion and love.
The patient was far too ill to protest, and very soon she learned to
lean upon and love Mrs. Murray as though she had indeed been her mother.
Again poor Noel felt himself banished, ignored and excluded, as he alone
was kept away from her, but his care for her was so supremely above his
care for himself that he never made a complaint.
He had learned from Eliza--whose mouth was shut so tight to the other
servants that she went among them almost like a dumb woman--that on the
day of his making the announcement concerning her husband to Christine,
a messenger had brought Dallas a note, after reading which he had
hurriedly put a few things into a valise and left the house. Since then
he had not been heard from. Evidently Christine had warned him in her
note and he had run away to escape the suit for bigamy. Noel had not
suspected the poor girl's motive in writing, but, on the whole, he was
glad. It was the simplest and surest way of getting rid of him.
At last Dr. Belford had pronounced the patient convalescent, and she was
sitting up and even moving about the up-stairs rooms.
One afternoon Noel came to the house, as usual, to make inquiries. As he
mounted the steps he saw that by some accident the door had been left
ajar. He bethought him to go in softly, in the hope of finding Mrs.
Murray in one of the lower rooms and taking her by surprise. He had
bought a big bunch of crimson roses on the way. He crossed the hall
softly and made his way to the cozy little sitting-room, attracted by
the flickering light of a wood fire, which looked cheery and
comfortable on a day like this. It was burning rather low, but the room
was still partly lighted from without, and as he was about to cross the
threshold he saw a picture which made him pause.