When the young bride, Alice Montgomery, pale and wan, the mere spectre
of her former self, left the sick room for the first time, a month had
elapsed from the date of the events narrated in the last chapter. The
interval had brought no tidings of her missing husband, beyond the
intelligence conveyed by his partner that he had visited the office on
the night of his departure, and arranged for her maintenance during a
prolonged absence. This uncertainty as to his fate had greatly retarded
her recovery, and the triumph which her youth had thus gained in
dragging her back to life was, as yet, too uncertain to mitigate the
anxiety felt by her aged relatives. Her brother had recovered from his
wound, and had, in a measure, regained his health, but the mental
disorder predicted by the medical adviser was now only too apparent. Of
the occurrences of that dreadful night he had evidently no recollection,
and he never spoke of them. His mind seemed perpetually occupied with
monetary troubles, and no assurance on the part of his grandfather that
these had all been adjusted served to allay his apprehension. From a
youthful irrational creature of erratic habits he seemed suddenly to
have passed into careworn middle life, burdened with a thousand gloomy
anxieties.
Altogether the house of Arlington lay in a sombre shadow during those
bright summer days, and many silvery hairs were added to its aged heads
in the long weeks of trouble and grief through which they had to pass.
“Grandma, have you got my purse?” suddenly asked the young bride, while
seated on the veranda one afternoon in the early days of her
convalescence.
“Yes, dear,” replied the other, a delicate flush mantling her cheeks as
she thought of its contents--the cartridge and the wedding-ring; “shall
I fetch it?”
“Please, dear; has anyone else seen it, grannie?”
“No, love; I have kept it locked up since the night of the--the
accident.”
No more passed between these two on the subject, but each understood the
other, and if the gloom did not lighten with the mutual understanding,
their hearts grew stronger to endure its burden.
“Why do you not wear your wedding-ring?” her grandmother inquired one
day.
“I lost it the morning George left.”
A look of perplexity crossed the other’s face, but the trouble in her
grand-daughter’s eyes checked further inquiry.
* * * * *
When the “City of Seville” sailed into the port of Cadiz the captain of
the vessel handed a sealed envelope to his passenger, Angus Forman, with
the assurance, somewhat stiffly delivered, that his secret, whatever it
might be, was safe with him.
The other received the envelope in silence, and when he broke the seal
and found the letter from his wife’s grandmother, which had been the
means of revealing his victim’s identity, he read it again without
apparent emotion.
During the long weeks of delirium and slow recovery to health in which
he had passed the interval of the sailing vessel’s slow passage, he had
discounted all human misery it seemed to him, and as he stood on the
deck, the mere skeleton of his former self, he felt alike indifferent to
the approach of weal or woe.
Far down in his breast there ached the dull ceaseless pain of a love
forever lost, which drowned every other feeling and made him indifferent
to it.
When the custom-house officers came aboard he was surprised--after a
languid fashion, and as one thinking of some casual acquaintance rather
than himself--that no detectives accompanied them, and that he was not
arrested for murder, but when he found that no inquiry was made for him,
and he was at liberty to go and come as he pleased, there was no
corresponding relief or elation visible in his manner.
On bidding the captain adieu he thanked him for his great kindness. “I
owe you my life,” he remarked, “and when I am certain that I am grateful
to you for preserving it, I will thank you more warmly,” with which
enigmatical sentence he passed ashore.
As health returned his tortured mind sought relief in excitement and he
left Cadiz for Madrid, where he strove to allay the grief which gnawed
at his heart by plunging into the wild excitement of that hot-headed and
hot-blooded capital. After a time the ferocious excitement of the weekly
bull fight ceased to deaden the agony which preyed at his heart, and he
allied himself with a revolutionary movement, which had the advantage of
promising equal excitement with some risk to the life which had long
been a burden to him.
The Carlist rising seemed like the first glimpse of Heaven’s good will
to him, and as such he embraced the opportunity it afforded. The
contagious excitement aroused by the Pretender, thrilled through his
being, and, at length, he opened his soul to his fellow-men. It were
more correct, perhaps, to say fellow-man, since his sole companion and
confidant was a much-travelled Spanish soldier of fortune, whose
desperate circumstances, as narrated by himself, had first melted the
icy reserve which begirt the heart-sore wanderer.
As the two travelled together to the front, the stranger, by insidious
inquiries gathered piecemeal George Montgomery’s history. More
particularly, however, he seemed interested in the bulky telegraphic
code which the other carried with him, and he was puzzled, he said, with
his eternal smile, to understand how a book of the kind could be of any
practical value; he appeared to be unlettered in business ways, and the
other, to while away the long evenings, explained to him the working of
the code, as he would have elucidated any ordinary puzzle.
“It seems plain to you, doesn’t it?” said his friend, one night,
laughingly, as he clasped his head in his palms at the end of a long
explanation, “yet I swear the whole thing is Greek to me. I suppose my
brain must be unusually dense.”
That night a false alarm was given, and, in the confusion, George
Montgomery was parted from his friend. When order was at length
restored, and the former endeavored to collect his baggage, he found
that his telegraphic cipher was missing. A hasty march was made from the
dangerous locality, and in the darkness he was parted from his friend,
whom he did not see again. “It is the fortune of war,” he remarked,
somewhat bitterly to himself, for he had grown to like his new-found
friend, and in the daily exigencies of an exciting life he soon forgot
his passing acquaintance.
The date of this alarm was the 5th of August. On the 10th the firm of
Alford & Montgomery, in New York, received a cable message in cipher, of
which the translation was:
“Please remit by cable to the Bank of Madrid, five thousand
dollars, payable to my order without identification.
“GEORGE MONTGOMERY.”
On receipt of this despatch the firm telegraphed to Mrs. Montgomery, and
received in reply a request to assure her husband that all was well, and
to beg him to return to his wife without delay.
On the evening of the 10th, the Atlantic cable carried the following
message in cipher:
“We have remitted five thousand dollars, by cable, as requested.
Your wife entreats you to return, and says, ‘All is well.’
“ALFORD & MONTGOMERY.”
When this message was delivered and translated, the receiver smiled
strangely as he lit a fresh cigar, adding, after he had established its
fire, “Seeing how easy it has been, I’m only sorry, friend Montgomery,
that I did not cable for twenty thousand dollars instead of five
thousand dollars. It was a bright idea to steal that very useful code of
yours.”
At that moment the clank of a heavy sabre on the marble floor of the
hotel smote on his ear, and the weight of a heavy hand fell on his
shoulder.
“I arrest you, señor, at the instance of the Bank of Madrid.”
“The charge?” fiercely ejaculated the other, finding his struggles
useless.
“Forgery,” was the grim and laconic reply.
“Ah, well, that is an old hallucination of the bank’s and easily
answered; let me light a cigarette any way,” urged the other, with
simulated indifference, as he turned the folded dispatch towards the
light. The officer made no objection and presently his prisoner ground
the ashes of the telegraphic message beneath his heel.
* * * * *
At Arlington, Alice Montgomery waited with agonizing anxiety for a
cabled reply to the loving message which she had sent across the ocean
to her unhappy husband. As the days passed without bringing her any
answering message she persuaded her husband’s partner to telegraph again
to Madrid. Still no response, and still another message sped on its way
beneath the ocean, only, however, to result in the same stony silence.
At length, in reply to a letter sent to the Bank of Madrid, there came
the intelligence that the $5,000 remitted had never been applied for,
and that the Cable Company had only been able to deliver the first
message, all the others being still at the hotel where the husband had
received the first one.
Perhaps the information that her husband had received the loving message
which she had sent him, and had closed his ears and his heart to her
piteous appeal, was the bitterest drop in the cup of Mrs. Montgomery’s
affliction; and for a while it seemed as if in grinding out the ashes of
the cablegram beneath his heel in the hotel at Madrid, the villain who
had stolen George Montgomery’s cipher, had likewise ground out the life
of his now thoroughly heartbroken wife. But no thought of compunction
crossed the mind of the felon, now languishing in a Spanish cell and
torturing his mind how best he could manage to get hold of that money in
the bank, so that with a portion of it he might bribe his jailers and
regain his freedom.
“I wonder how my American friend enjoys fighting the Spanish troops?” he
smilingly queried of himself one day as he sat under the great
white-washed wall of the prison court rolling a fresh cigarette.
At that moment, George Montgomery, sorely wounded, was bleeding his life
out on the sunny slopes of the Sierra Morena mountains, and murmuring
brokenly, now faintly, now passionately, as his fever ebbed and flowed,
the name of his dearly loved wife, whom fate had at last, to all
appearances, forever separated from him.