HEARTS.
Sherrod's body lay stretched across the rug in front of the grate in
his studio. His coat and vest had been hastily thrown aside and his
white shirt, covering the deep chest, was saturated with blood. The
carved hilt of a Malay dagger stood defiantly above the cleft heart.
The steel was deep in his body.
He had dealt one blow, but he had sent the blade of the kris straight
home; so true was its course that death must have been instantaneous.
He lay flat on his broad back, his neck twisted as if checked in the
supreme moment of agony; death had left its stamp of pain on his
ghastly face.
On the floor near the body a piece of white paper was found, across
which was scrawled:
"Forgive me."
The hand that penciled these words was the same that drove home the
blade, but it had trembled only in the writing, not in the blow. The
hasty scrawl revealed his eagerness to have over with life while there
was yet a chance to escape facing the ruined women below. The last
plea of the suicide was not directed to either of the loved ones; it
was left for each to take it to her heart and in secrecy hold it as
hers alone--cherishing it, if she could.
His had been a crime that the law could not sufficiently punish. He
had indicted the penalty himself and he had asked forgiveness of those
he had wronged in his weakness. They had loved him to the hour of his
death; they had trusted him. Neither had known him in his baseness or
his cowardice--they knew him only as loving, devoted and true. Death
came just as the joys of being his were shattered; the pains he had
given them in life were known only after he had gone from them. They
were asked to forgive a dead man who had been everything to them in
life, and whom they had loved until his last breath was drawn; he did
not wait to receive their reproaches; he had gone away as they had
known him and they had not looked upon the face of guilt.
* * * * *
Celeste was the calmer of the two and yet she was the more deeply
wronged. After the first grief she arose, bleeding and broken from the
wreck of every joy, and she was strong. Justine, stunned by grief and
horror, lay for hours in the bed to which she had been carried by the
maids after the terrible scene in the studio. With the slow return of
composure, Celeste saw dimly the situation as it existed for her. She
was not a widow. The widow was the other woman who had crouched on the
opposite side of the corpse, pleading with him to come back to her and
the boy. While she could not as yet grasp the full reality of her
position, she felt that Justine's claim was best.
It was she who had Justine taken to a room by the maids. There was no
rage in her heart; she took that other one into her grief and shared it
with her. There was no other way; they had suffered together. There
still lingered a faint hope--cruel though it was--that she might be the
real wife, and Justine the false one. Hours after the calamity, far in
the night, while her mother bathed her head and sought to soothe her,
Celeste planned and planned.
She knew that if Justine's claim were true, Jud had deliberately made a
wanton of her, even though he loved her. The world would soon know
that she was not a wife, and the newspapers would be nauseous with the
sensation. She was confident, however, that she was the only one in
the house who knew Justine's story, and as she lay waiting for the dawn
there grew in her mind a steady purpose. The world must never know!
Justine, pale and dead-eyed, stood looking from the window of the
bed-chamber when the knock came at her door the next morning. She did
not respond, she did not even turn her head, for her thoughts were of
the night before, and the life before that. Celeste softly opened the
door and came to her side.
"Justine," she said gently, almost inaudibly. Dark, heavy, despairing
eyes were turned upon her and she feared for the success of her plan.
"Am I to go to him now?" came the lifeless voice of the other.
"Justine," said Celeste, taking a cold hand in her own, "we must
understand each other, we must know the truth. I don't think anything
that can happen now will hurt us; we are dead to all pain. We must
talk about--about ourselves."
"I don't understand what it all means," moaned Justine. "Why can't I
go to Jud? He is mine--he is mine, and--and----"
"But, Justine, dear, it is of this that we must talk. I--I thought he
was mine. Oh God, don't you see? I have lived as his wife for months
and--and I never knew until you came that I--that I--oh, don't you
understand?"
Justine's unwillingness to believe evil of Jud, despite all that had
happened to prove the existence of a double life, was a barrier hard to
break down, and it was not without long entreaties and explanations
that Celeste made her see that her claim had some justification. At
last these two women brought themselves down to the point from which
the situation could be seen plainly in all its unhappy colorings.
Together in the darkness that he had cast about them they groped their
way toward the light of understanding; as they went, the heart of each
was bared to the other, and both saw and sought to ease the pain the
rents disclosed.
There was no denying Justine's right to call Jud husband. Celeste saw
her every hope slipping away as she listened to the story of the
courtship and marriage in the little country lane. She knew now that
she had never been a wife, and she knew that she had to live all the
rest of her life beneath an ugly shadow. Whatever were her thoughts of
the man who had so basely wronged her, she kept them to herself. Not
one word of reproach did she utter in the presence of the wife and
mother. The consequences of his crime were hers to bear, and her only
object in life now was to prevent others from sharing them with her, to
prevent the world from knowing of their existence. If she loathed the
memory of the man who had despoiled her honor, she held that loathing
secret. To the world, he was her husband, and the world should see her
mourn for him.
Her proposition to Justine was at first indignantly rejected, but so
skillfully did she paint the picture of her position in life as Jud had
left it for her, that the tender, honest girl from the country fell
completely under the influence of her pleading. Justine was made to
see Jud's fault in all its blackness, and was urged to share in the
effort to protect his memory. No one was to know of the double life he
had led; no one was to know of his crime; no one was to curse his
memory; two women alone were to--forget, if they could.
Between them it was agreed that in Chicago Justine was to appear as a
cousin of the dead man, and the funeral obsequies were to be conducted
with the real wife in the background, the other as the deepest mourner.
The body was to be taken afterwards to Clay township for burial, and
there Justine was to claim her dead, with Celeste posing as the good
friend in the hour of direst trouble. That was the general plan, the
minor but intricate details being intrusted to Celeste.
"Here he was my husband, and the world may never be the wiser," said
she, taking the other to her grateful heart. "Down there he is yours,
and no one there must know how he has served you. You can save me,
Justine, and I can shield him from the curses of your people. He will
lie in the grave you dig for him away down there, and your friends may
always look upon his headstone and say: 'He was a good man. We all
loved him.' It is fair, Justine, and I will love you to my dying day
for doing all this for me."
"I love you," said Justine, and they went forth to play their unhappy
parts.
It was Celeste, keen and bold in her desperation, who wrote the letter
to 'Gene Crawley, signing a fictitious name, Justine looking over her
shoulder with streaming eyes. It briefly told of a sudden death and
ended with the statement that a telegram would follow announcing the
time of leaving Chicago with the body. The newspapers in the city told
the story of the suicide, giving the cause as ill-health, and pictured
the grief of the young widow. Celeste saw the reporters herself.
Purposely, deliberately she misinformed them in many of the details
regarding his birthplace and his earlier life. This act of shrewdness
on her part was calculated to mislead the people of Clay township, and
it succeeded. No one could connect the identity of the suicide with
that of the youth who had gone out from that Indiana community long ago.
How the two women lived through the funeral service in S---- Place was
past all understanding.
The real wife heard the sobs of the other and choked with the grief she
was compelled to suppress. The other wept, but who knows whether the
tears were tribute of love for the man over whom the clergyman said
such gentle, hopeful words? A dead man and two women knew the story
that would have shocked the world. One could not speak, the others
would not. And so he was eulogized.
That night the two women and their dead left Chicago for Glenville.
Their only companion was Dudley Sherrod, the second.