“MY DEAR FRIEND,--I hope you do not think that all these months, when
you have been suffering so terribly, I have been thinking of other
things! But I am sure you know the truth. You know that I could not send
you word or come to see you, or I would have done it. When I first heard
of what you had done, I saw it all as it happened,--that dreadful scene,
I mean, in the saloon. I am sure I have imagined everything just as it
was. I begged papa to help you, but he was very angry. You see, papa was
so peculiar. He thought more of the appearances of things, perhaps, than
of facts. It infuriated him to think of me as being concerned about you
or with you. I did not know he could be so angry, and his anger did not
die, but for days it cast such a shadow over me that I used to wish I
was dead. Only I would not disobey him, and now I am glad of that. We
were in France three months, and then, coming home, papa died. It was
on the voyage. I wish he had asked me to forgive him, for then I think
I could have remembered him with more tenderness. But he did nothing of
the kind. He did not seem to think he had done wrong in any way, though
I feel that some way we might have saved you. I am back here in Chicago
in the old home. But I shall not stay in this house. It is so large
and lonesome, and I always see you and father facing each other angrily
there in the parlor when I enter it. So I am going to get me some cosey
rooms in another part of the city, and take my aunt, who is a sweet old
lady, to live with me; and I am going to devote my time--all of it--and
all of my brains to getting you out of that terrible place. What is the
use of telling me that you are a murderer? Do I not know you could not
be brought to hurt anything? I suppose you must have killed that poor
man, but then it was not you, it was that dreadful drink--it was Me!
That is what continually haunts me. If I had been a braver girl, and
spoken the words that were in my heart, you would not have gone into
that place. You would be innocent to-day. It was I who was responsible
for it all. I let father kill your heart right there before me, and
never said a word. Yet I knew how it was with you, and--this is what
I ought to have said then, and what I must say now--and all the time I
felt just as you did. I thought I should die when I saw you go away, and
knew you would never come back again. Only I was so selfish, I was so
wicked, I would say nothing.
“I have no right to be comfortable and hopeful, and to have friends,
with you shut up from liberty and happiness. I will not have those
comfortable rooms, after all. I will live as you do. I will live alone
in a bare room. For it is I who am guilty! And then I will feel that I
also am being punished.
“Do you hate me? Perhaps my telling you now all these things, and that I
felt toward you just as you did toward me, will not make you happy. For
it may be that you despise me.
“Anyway, I have told you the truth now. I will go as soon as I hear from
you to a lawyer, and try to find out how you may be liberated. I am sure
it can be done when the facts are known.
“Poor boy! How I do hope you have known in your heart that I was not
forgetting you. Indeed, day or night, I have thought of nothing else.
Now I am free to help you. And be sure, whatever happens, that I am
working for you.
“ZOE LE BARON.”
That was all. Just a girlish, constrained letter, hardly hinting at the
hot tears that had been shed for many weary nights, coyly telling of the
impatient young love and all the maidenly shame.
David permitted himself to read it only once. Then a sudden resolution
was born-a heroic one. Before he got the letter he was a crushed
and unsophisticated boy; when he had read it, and absorbed its full
significance, he became suddenly a man, capable of a great sacrifice.
“I return your letter,” he wrote, without superscription, “and thank you
for your anxiety about me. But the truth is, I had forgotten all about
you in my trouble. You were not in the least to blame for what happened.
I might have known I would come to such an end. You thought I was good,
of course; but it is not easy to find out the life of a young man. It is
rather mortifying to have a private letter sent here, because the warden
reads them all. I hope you will enjoy yourself this winter, and hasten
to forget one who had certainly forgotten you till reminded by your
letter, which I return.
“Respectfully,
“DAVID CULROSS.”
That night some deep lines came into his face which never left it, and
which made him look like a man of middle age.
He never doubted that his plan would succeed; that, piqued and indignant
at his ingratitude, she would hate him, and in a little time forget
he ever lived, or remember him only to blush with shame at her past
association with him. He saw her happy, loved, living the usual life of
women, with all those things that make life rich.
For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him.
He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must
be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what
the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition
for success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at
night before him, tricked out in palpable forms.
A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe
felt for him. How often he said that! With her sensitiveness she would
be sure to hate a man who had mortified her.
So he fell to dreaming of her again as moving among happy and luxurious
scenes, exquisitely clothed, with flowers on her bosom and jewels on
her neck; and he saw men loving her, and was glad, and saw her at last
loving the best of them, and told himself in the silence of the night
that it was as he wished.
Yet always, always, from weary week to weary week, he rehearsed the
scenes. They were his theatre, his opera, his library, his lecture hall.
He rehearsed them again there on the cars. He never wearied of them. To
be sure, other thoughts had come to him at night. Much that to most men
seems complex and puzzling had grown to appear simple to him. In a way
his brain had quickened and deepened through the years of solitude. He
had thought out a great many things. He had read a few good books and
digested them, and the visions in his heart had kept him from being
bitter.
Yet, suddenly confronted with liberty, turned loose like a pastured
colt, without master or rein, he felt only confusion and dismay. He
might be expected to feel exultation. He experienced only fright. It is
precisely the same with the liberated colt.
The train pulled into a bustling station, in which the multitudinous
noises were thrown back again from the arched iron roof. The relentless
haste of all the people was inexpressibly cruel to the man who looked
from the window wondering whither he would go, and if, among all the
thousands that made up that vast and throbbing city, he would ever find
a friend.
For a moment David longed even for that unmaternal mother who had
forgotten him in the hour of his distress; but she had been dead for
many years.
The train stopped. Every one got out. David forced himself to his feet
and followed. He had been driven back into the world. It would have
seemed less terrible to have been driven into a desert. He walked
toward the great iron gates, seeing the people and hearing the noises
confusedly.
As he entered the space beyond the grating some one caught him by the
arm. It was a little middle-aged woman in plain clothes, and with sad
gray eyes.
“Is this David?” said she.
He did not speak, but his face answered her.
“I knew you were coming to-day. I've waited all these years, David. You
didn't think I believed what you said in that letter did you? This way,
David,--this is the way home.”