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

"Oh, no," I laughed. "I can easily guess how they've been harassing you. I'm acting for Mr. Curtiss," I added, resolving quickly that the best thing I could do was to tell him the whole story so far as I knew it, which I did, as briefly as possible. He heard me to the end with intent, interested face. "I think you'll agree with me, Dr. Schuyler," I concluded, "that my client is quite right in deciding to demand an explanation."

"Yes," he answered, after a moment's thought, "I suppose he is—I'm sure he is. It's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of—and the most deplorable. Until this moment, I had hoped that they had gone away to be married elsewhere."

"Hoped?" I asked.

"Yes, hoped. I've seen them together, Mr. Lester, and it seemed to me an ideal attachment. I can conceive of nothing which could keep them apart. Has any explanation of it occurred to you?"

"Only one," I said, "that Miss Lawrence has been married before, but thought her husband dead, and discovered that he was still alive only at the last moment."

But the clergyman shook his head.

"You don't know Miss Lawrence?" he asked.

"No," I answered.

"You would see the absurdity of such a theory if you did."

"I fancied it might have happened when she was very young," I explained; "when she was abroad, perhaps. I've even pictured the man to myself as an adventurer, French or Italian, a man of the world, polished, without heart, perhaps even base at bottom—a man who would not hesitate to take advantage of her girlish innocence."

My companion smiled faintly.

"I see you have a lively imagination, Mr. Lester," he said. "Don't let it run away with you."

"She would not be the first to succumb to such a one," I retorted.

"No, nor the last, I fear. Have you worked out the rest of the story?"

"Granting the premises, the rest is easy enough. She soon found him out and took refuge with her mother. The scoundrel was bought off and disappeared. She supposed him dead; but at the last moment, he appeared again."

Dr. Schuyler had listened with half-closed eyes. Now he opened them and looked at me amusedly.

"It sounds like some of the yellow-backs I used to read in my unregenerate youth," he commented. "I fancy you must have read them too, Mr. Lester. Now I want you to dismiss that theory," he went on, more earnestly. "I tell you, once for all, it's ridiculous and untrue. Rest assured that whatever the secret is, it does not in any way reflect upon her."

"Then that leaves us all at sea," I pointed out. "There can be no question of her love for Curtiss."

"None whatever. As I said, I've seen them together, and I'm sure she loved him devotedly. Of his feeling for her you have, of course, been able to judge for yourself. I've looked forward to the wedding with much pleasure, for it seemed to me the least worldly one that I had ever been asked to consecrate. It is a singular coincidence, though——" He stopped suddenly and glanced about the room. "Of course, this conversation is between ourselves, Mr. Lester?"

"Certainly," I assented. "I would wish to have it so."

"With that understanding, I shall be glad to help you, if I can. I was about to say that it is a very singular coincidence that something of the same sort happened many years ago to Mrs. Lawrence."

"To Mrs. Lawrence?" I repeated. Here was a coincidence, indeed! Could it be, I asked myself again, that this thing had been deliberately arranged? But I dismissed the thought as ridiculous.

"I will tell you the story so far I know it," said the clergyman. "It is no breach of trust to do so, for it was public property at the time, though long since forgotten. I should not recall it now but for the fact that it may shed some light upon to-day's occurrence."

"Perhaps it will," I agreed.

"Mrs. Lawrence," began my companion, "was born at Scotch Plains about fifty years ago. Her father's name was Hiram Jarvis. He had made a comfortable fortune in the dry-goods business in New York, and had built himself a country-house at Scotch Plains, going in to New York every morning and returning every evening. Scotch Plains is a very small place—a mere village—but has a number of handsome country homes. It is not on the railroad, but lies about a mile back of Fanwood, which is its station. It has a little Presbyterian church, and when I graduated in '65 from Princeton seminary, I received a call to it, which I accepted. Mr. Jarvis and his daughter were members of my congregation—the former, indeed, being the president of the board of trustees."

I nodded my interest. Plainly I had done well in coming to Dr. Schuyler.

"Jarvis was a tall, straight, austere Scotchman of the old school," continued the clergyman, "with a belief in predestination and eternal punishment, which was—well—rather fanatical, even for those days. His daughter was a beautiful girl of seventeen or eighteen. Her mother had died some years before and she was left solely in her father's care, without brothers or sisters. There was an aunt in New York City, a younger sister of her father, and married to a banker named Heminway, but she seemingly took little interest in the girl. Her character—or so I judged the few times I saw her—was much like her brother's, tempered, perhaps, with a little more worldliness. I think she's still living; at least, I've never heard of her death. She has been a widow for many years.

"So the girl grew up in the lonely house, with only her father to care for. I sometimes thought his treatment of her a little severe—he would rarely permit her to take part in even the most innocent merry-making—and I often found myself pitying her. But I concluded it was none of my business—a conclusion which was cowardly, perhaps; but that was my first charge, and Jarvis was quite a terrifying man."

I could well believe it, and said so.

"There was another member of my congregation," went on Dr. Schuyler, "concerning whom I had doubts of quite an opposite character—that was young Boyd Endicott. The Endicott place lay just beyond the Jarvis house, which it quite overshadowed, for the Endicotts were very wealthy. The father did not belong to my church—nor, indeed, to any church—and I seldom met him. He had been associated with Jim Fisk in some operations which seemed to me of questionable honesty—though Fisk's reputation may have prejudiced me unduly. But his wife was a lovely Christian woman, and devoted to her children."

"Her children?" I repeated. The story interested me so intensely that I wanted every detail.

"There were two, a girl of seventeen or eighteen, named Ruth; and Boyd, who was about nineteen, and a junior at Princeton. I had heard something of his college escapades while I was at the seminary, but the first time I saw him was when he came home for the holidays. He was a handsome boy, dark, with a face that showed his breeding; but he was the wildest, most untamable I ever knew. When he came walking into church with his mother, it used to amuse me to see how Mr. Jarvis would glare at him; he considered him a firebrand of hell, and didn't scruple to say so. And young Endicott would stare back—at Jarvis, as I thought, but I saw my mistake afterwards.

"There was more or less trouble of a personal kind between the two. Endicott's dog killed some of the Jarvis chickens, and Jarvis shot the dog. Endicott rode over the Jarvis land, and Jarvis swore out a warrant against him for trespass—mere persecution, the villagers thought it,—and there were other differences of a similar nature, which were ended only when the boy went back to school.

"Of course, Mr. Lester, I don't know all the steps in the affair; but on Christmas Eve, just a year later, there came a great knocking at my door, and when I opened it, there on the step stood Jarvis, with such a face as I had never seen on a man before. He stamped in and flung a sheet of paper down on the table.

"'Read that!' he said, in a stifled voice. 'Read that, man! Oh, that I should have bred a harlot!'

"I was too astonished to reply, but I picked up the paper and read it. It was a note from his daughter—I forget the exact words—but she told him that she had secretly married Boyd Endicott, knowing that she could never win his consent, and prayed for his forgiveness. They were going far away, she said; she would not see him again for a long time, and hoped he would think kindly of her. It was a touching note, Mr. Lester."

The good man's voice choked and he paused to regain control of it. As for me, I thought of that other note I had read a few hours since.

"He was like a man crazed," continued Dr. Schuyler, at last. "He wouldn't listen to reason; he demanded only that I accompany him, while he sought his daughter out and made sure that she and young Endicott were really married. He swore that he would follow them to the ends of the earth that he might see them wedded with his own eyes. A heavy storm was raging, but I could not deny him; he had his buggy at the door, and we drove away to the Fanwood station. There the agent told us that Miss Jarvis had taken the afternoon train for New York. There was no other train for an hour, so we waited. Jarvis tramped up and down the station like a wild thing. And then, just before the train was due, there came a telegram for him. It was from his sister and stated that Mary had reached her home unattended and was very ill.

"That settled the matter, so far as I was concerned. I drove back home again and Jarvis went on to New York. Unfortunately, in the first rage of his discovery of his daughter's flight, he had given the servants some hint of the affair, and it leaked out, but was gradually forgotten. Mary Jarvis, after a long illness, went with her father for a visit to Scotland, and did not return to her home at Scotch Plains for nearly three years. She was greatly changed—older and with an air of sadness which never quite left her.

"Her father was changed, too. He had left his daughter at his old home in Scotland and hurried back—why I didn't guess till afterwards. He became more crabbed and irritable than ever; he seemed to be withering away, and his face grew to haunt me, it was so harried and anxious. I suspected that he had become involved in business troubles of some sort, for the country was on the verge of a panic, and once I tried to approach the subject to offer him any help I could, but he stopped me with such ferocity that I never tried again. Then, suddenly, came the news that Endicott had been caught with Fisk in the ruin of Black Friday; but while Fisk saved himself by repudiating his obligations, Endicott had been bound in such a way that he could not repudiate—and the man who had bound him was Hiram Jarvis."

The speaker paused and leaned back for a moment in his chair, his face very stern.

"That was his revenge," he added. "But I doubt if he foresaw how bitter it was to be. For Endicott shot himself; the place was sold, and the widow and her daughter came to live here in Elizabeth, where they had relatives."

"But the boy," I asked; "where was he?"

"He was killed two days after that Christmas Eve in a railroad wreck somewhere in the West—I have forgotten exactly where. His body was brought home to Scotch Plains and buried there."

"In the West?" I repeated. "What was he doing in the West?"

"I don't know," answered Dr. Schuyler. "I've never been able to understand it."

"Were he and Miss Jarvis already married? Or did they expect to be married afterwards?"

"Well," said Dr. Schuyler slowly, "I inferred from the note that they were already married. But I may have been mistaken in thinking so. I know that her father did not believe it."

"And you say that you've never been able to understand why, after all, they did not go away together—why Miss Jarvis went to New York and Endicott to the West?"

Dr. Schuyler hesitated.

"Of course," he said, after a moment, "the most obvious explanation is that Endicott deserted her; and yet that would have been so unlike him, for he was not a vicious or selfish fellow, Mr. Lester, but generous, honourable, warm-hearted, despite