That Affair at Elizabeth by Burton Egbert Stevenson (top 5 ebook reader TXT) 📖

unrest. Miss Lawrence had chosen her words well when she had said that the marriage was "quite, quite impossible." Yet who could have guessed a reason so dark, so terrifying, so unanswerable! Small wonder that she had fled, that her first thought had been to put the ocean between herself and her lover. How could she meet him, how look him in the eyes, with that secret weighing upon her? How would she face him when she found him awaiting her at Liverpool? I shuddered at thought of that meeting. We should have held Curtiss back; we should have known that it was no idle whim, no empty fear which had driven her over-sea.

Resolutely I tried to put such thoughts behind me, and to apply myself to the mass of work which had accumulated during my three days' absence. Was it only three days? It seemed weeks, months, since that moment when I opened the telegram from Mr. Royce which summoned me to Elizabeth.

But they would not be frowned down, for there were many questions still unanswered. What had been Lucy Kingdon's connection with the mystery? Above all, why had Mrs. Lawrence permitted the courtship to go on? Perhaps she had not known—only at the last moment, after her daughter's disappearance, had she suspected. No doubt, it was that sudden revelation, confirmed, perhaps, by Lucy Kingdon, coming to her after she had left us in the library, which had struck her white and tremulous, which had urged her to tell me that the search must cease. Yet, even then, she had spoken as though the marriage might be arranged, as though it were not impossible! She had said that Curtiss himself should choose! What had she meant by that? Was there some depth which we had not yet touched, some turn to the tragedy which we did not suspect? Had we really found the solution, after all?

My mind flew back to the Kingdon women, with a sort of fascination. What had Harriet Kingdon meant by that wild outburst of hers?

"There are others," she had said, "who have waived their rights and torn their hearts and withered in silence——"

What had she meant by that? What secret was it had torn her heart? Were the words merely a meaningless outburst, an incoherent cry, the result of a mind disordered? I could not bring myself to think so, but cudgel my brain as I might, I could read no meaning into them. Yet it was for her that Mrs. Lawrence had sent at that supreme moment when I revealed to her the secret of the letter; it was of her she had spoken when she cried, "I thought it was that woman!" Harriet Kingdon had known the secret, then, and had kept silence.

Then, suddenly, it burst upon me what a hideous thing it was that she had done by keeping silent. It was the letter, arriving at that last desperate moment, which had snatched Marcia Lawrence and Burr Curtiss from the horrible pit which yawned before them. The writing of that letter was not an act of enmity, but of mercy. Harriet Kingdon had stood by and uttered no word of warning—I shuddered at the utter fiendishness of it! But who had written the letter? Then, in a flash, I knew!

"What is it, Lester?" demanded Mr. Royce, wheeling suddenly around. I suppose some exclamation must have burst from me, though I was not conscious of uttering any sound. "What is it? I can guess what you're thinking of—I can't think of anything else."

"I believe," I answered, "that I know who it was wrote that letter to Miss Lawrence."

"You do!" he cried. "Who was it?"

"Wait!" I said, and closed my eyes and pressed my hands tight against my temples in the effort at recollection. "It was Mrs. Lawrence's aunt—her father's sister. It was to her house she came when she ran away. It was there, no doubt, that the child was born."

"And who is she?" asked our junior. "Where does she live?"

I made another desperate effort of memory. At last I had it.

"Her name is Heminway," I said. "I don't know her address, except that it's somewhere in New York. She was married to a banker."

"Oh, I knew him—Martin Heminway," and Mr. Royce jerked down a directory and ran feverishly through its pages. "Here it is—East Fifty-fourth Street."

He closed the book with a bang and took down his hat.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm going to see her," he said. "You're coming, too. We'll get to the bottom of this, for Curtiss's sake. Either we'll prove it a mistake, or we'll prove beyond doubt that it's true."

Neither of us spoke during that long drive uptown. We were too depressed, too anxious. Nor did we speak as we mounted the steps of the old-fashioned brownstone and rang the bell. We were admitted. We were shown into a room on the second floor, after some delay, where, in a great padded chair, an old, old woman sat, thin and wrinkled, but with eyes preternaturally bright.

"Mrs. Heminway," Mr. Royce began directly, "we're representing Mr. Burr Curtiss. We feel that some explanation is due him of the sudden flight, three days ago, of Marcia Lawrence, whom he was to marry; and we believe that you're the one best fitted to tell us the whole story."

She did not answer for a moment, but sat peering up at us, plucking at the arms of her chair with nervous, skinny hands.

"Of course he has a right to know!" she cried, in a high, thin voice, like the note of a flute. "I thought the girl would tell him."

"But since she hasn't," said our junior, "I hope you will. I know it won't be a pleasant task——"

She stopped him with a quick, claw-like gesture.

"I have never shrunk from any duty," she said, "however unpleasant. Sit down, gentlemen. I will tell you the story."

I am sure there was no evil in either of them—Boyd Endicott or Mary Jarvis. They were rather another Mildred and Mertoun, caught in the grip of circumstance and whirled asunder, by one of those ironical tricks which fate sometimes loves to play. For, on the night of the elopement, while Boyd Endicott, leaving Princeton on the eve of his Christmas vacation, was waiting for his bride at Trenton, with every preparation made to whirl her away to a new home in the West, she was speeding away from him toward New York. She had taken the train at Fanwood and was to change at Elizabeth. There, half dazed by the noise, bewildered by the storm which was raging, tremulous with fright, confused in the tangle of tracks, she had taken the wrong train.

Boyd Endicott waited through the night, with what agony of doubt one can guess; then, when morning dawned, believing Mary Jarvis faithless—believing she loved her father more than him—hot-blooded and impetuous, he had boarded a train and journeyed alone into the West, where they had planned to build up a new home together. He was never to know the true story of that night, for there in the West, two days later, his life had been crushed out.

Meanwhile, almost paralysed with fear, the girl arrived at New York. She was ill, benumbed, chilled with the cold; darkness was coming on; she knew not where to turn, and finally, in an agony of desperation, she sought the home of Mrs. Heminway. The cause of her illness could not be long concealed; she asserted that she was married, that she had been Boyd Endicott's wife for nearly a year; but her father did not believe her. For she had no marriage lines, she did not even know the name of the minister before whom their vows had been uttered—she could tell only of a long drive through the dashing rain one night when her father had been detained in town; of a hasty ceremony; of the drive home again. It was an incoherent story, at the best, and she told it in a half-delirium which made it more incoherent still. Her father was nearly mad with rage; in his first white wrath, he was for sending her forth into the streets. But his sister reasoned with him—there was no need of a public disgrace; she would take the child, the sight of it should never offend him, nor should his daughter know aught concerning it. Doubtless they would have made some effort to verify her story, but the news of Boyd Endicott's death rendered that unnecessary. For their plan was laid.

So the child was born—a boy—and the mother lay for days and weeks hovering between life and death. When she came again to consciousness, they told her that the child was dead—had never lived, indeed. They told her, too—no doubt with a kind of fierce exulting—how Boyd Endicott had met his end—a fit punishment from the hand of God! The past was buried with him. It must be as though it had never been.

Mary Jarvis acquiesced. Life, it seemed, held nothing more for her. The future, no less than the past, was to her a dark and lifeless thing. She would have welcomed death, but it did not come. She grew slowly better, and at last she was able to go with her father to Scotland, for a long visit among his people there, while he hastened home for his revenge—his pound of flesh. Whatever fault she had been guilty of, she expiated by taking, without love—for she knew that love would never come into her life again—the husband of her father's choosing. And seemingly she had never suspected that her child was living; certainly she never dreamed that her instinctive tenderness for her daughter's lover was that of a mother for her son.

So the years passed, and cast a veil about this sorrow; not concealing it, but rendering it less sharp, less poignant. To her daughter no whisper of this secret ever came until that terrible moment when she opened the letter marked "Important—read at once." The blow, of course, must have fallen—it was right that it should fall—but oh! how it might have been tempered. Here is what she read, in that half-darkened library whither she had fled for refuge:

"Marcia Lawrence:—I suppose that you have never heard of me, yet I am your mother's only living relative, her father's sister. There are painful memories, perhaps, which have caused her to wish to forget me, and it is not to claim relationship or ask for love or sympathy that I write this letter, but to fulfil a sacred duty. A Merciful Providence turned my eyes, this morning, to an article in the Tribune, describing your approaching marriage, of which I have hitherto been kept in ignorance. From the name, age, and circumstances given concerning the bridegroom's life, I am certain he is your brother, your mother's son, born in sin in this house thirty-one years ago. So are the iniquities of the parents visited upon the children. Ex. 34:7; 20:5. See also Le. 20:10; I. Cor. 6:13; Ro. 6:23. I thank God that He has enabled me to prevent this last iniquity. If any doubt remains to you, ask your mother for the story, or come to me and I will tell it you.

"Margaret Heminway."

One can guess how this horrible letter palsied her; how this first face-to-face encounter with the world's sin and misery tortured and sickened her. But she shook the weakness off—they would be seeking her in a moment; she must flee, must hide herself, until she had time to think, to adjust herself to this new, corroding fact which had come into her life. So she sought the Kingdon cottage, the nearest, most convenient refuge, and there had written that hasty, despairing note and entrusted it to Lucy Kingdon, who had brought her a gown to replace that mockery of satin. She had remained there, hidden, during the long afternoon, secure in the knowledge that these women, whose devotion to her had a peculiar intensity which she had not quite understood, would not betray her.

Then, as soon as darkness fell, she had come to New York and sought Mrs. Heminway. She must be quite certain; she must know the whole truth. And that old, old woman, with all the grimness of her creed, told her the story bluntly and cruelly, as she told it to us. The child had not died, but had been placed with the family of the manager of her husband's estate on Long Island, who himself did not know its history; who had, in the end, adopted it and given it his name. There could be no mistaking.

I have called her merciless, for she seemed to glory in another's anguish, counting it fit retribution and a punishment from the Lord. Yet I trembled to think how more merciless she might have been had she withheld the truth!

And when she had