The Substitute Prisoner Part 2

"There's a letter for madam--"

"Give it to me!"

Reluctantly the butler delivered the letter to him.

"You needn't mention my having received all the mail," Collins growled.

"If madam asks whether there was any mail for her tell her there wasn't any. And don't forget what I say!"

The butler stared after him as he climbed up the stairs and disappeared into his own room.

Seated on the edge of his bed, Collins glanced through his personal mail then tore open the letter to his wife. It was in a familiar handwriting and the contents brought no look of surprise to his face. But he read it through half a dozen times, as if to sear it into his memory.

Presently he dressed and went out for a stroll, drinking copious draughts of the bracing morning air. But the tormenting presence of the intercepted letter in his pocket drew him back to the house. He encountered his wife in the hallway.

"There was some mail for me--where is it?" she said, extending a hand confidently.

He produced the letter from his pocket, poising it tantalizingly between his fingers. She recognized the handwriting and a wave of red mounted to her forehead. Also, she observed the ragged slit at the top of the envelope and the painful realization that he had read the contents rushed on her.

"How dared you?" She tried to seize the letter, but he, antic.i.p.ating her move, withdrew his arm and thrust the missive into his pocket. "I didn't believe it possible you could sink so low," she murmured. "But this is the end," she added with sudden vehemence. "I shall leave this house to-day."

"Oh, no, you won't!" An angry scowl contorted his face. "You've flaunted your superior virtues in my face--accused me of cruelty and neglect and selfishness. Everybody, including your brother, believes you to be the long-suffering, patient little angel. You've been the woman with the n.o.ble soul--I've been the unworthy rascal. Now you stand there, your feelings outraged, because I had the foresight to intercept an incriminating letter. You calmly tell me it's the end. You're going to leave. It makes no difference how much scandal you bring on my name.

You--"

She checked him with a contemptuous toss of the head. All the suffering which she had endured through the years of their married life now resolved itself into a fury of resentment.

"Your name!" she exclaimed with cutting irony. "As if anything which I might do could add to the weight of dishonor that you have imposed upon it! I don't know the contents of that letter, but it's from Herbert Whitmore and he's as incapable of a dishonorable act as you are incapable of anything honorable. And you had the audacity to open and read that letter!"

She paused, fixing him with her eyes, her lips curled into a disdainful smile. But the fire of her scorn left him unseared. His calloused sensibilities had long ago lost their capability of appreciating a nature such as hers. For his wife to have a letter addressed to her such as he had intercepted, spelled guilt. The debasing environment into which he had plunged on inheriting the fortune which his father had acc.u.mulated, had undermined all his faith in womanhood. He could not see beyond the Tenderloin purview.

But pride and selfishness were screamingly alive within him. To these was added the inordinate conceit of the habitual libertine, a combination than which there is nothing more sensitive in the entire human composition.

But as Collins gazed on the graceful lines of her full figure and on the almost cla.s.sic beauty of her marmoreal features, he could not stifle a pang of anxiety at thought of losing her. The fact that he had discarded her in all but name, for the dubious pleasures of a life of dissipation, did not occur to him. He believed in the established moral code that excuses the offenses of the man and eternally condemns the woman. Yet, ready as he was to attribute culpability to her conduct, it was hard even for him to reconcile her smooth, artless brow, her frank, limpid eyes, her delicate, sensitive lips, with any act that savored of unworthiness or deceit.

"It's hard to look at you and believe you guilty of wrong," he said resentfully.

"It makes no difference to me what you believe," she snapped. "I'm through with you! I shall obtain a divorce."

The storm which had been gathering force within him all morning now broke in all its fury.

"You're going to get a divorce!" he cried ironically. "You still pretend to be the injured one. You and Whitmore have it all framed up--eh! But I tell you you've miscalculated this time! No man can wreck my home with impunity! No man can enter my house to steal my wife--and get away with it. I've been blind a long time, but my eyes are wide open now."

He walked to the telephone at the rear of the hall and lifted the receiver off the hook.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"Call up your brother. We'll see what he has to say about it."

Lester Ward, the brother of Mrs. Collins, also lived in Delmore Park. He had succeeded to his father's banking business and occupied the house which his parents had left. Fifteen minutes after Collins summoned him over the telephone, he was seated in his sister's library, prepared to mediate in what he guessed to be another quarrel between her and her husband.

"This letter will explain itself," Collins opened the conversation.

Lifting the note out of the envelope, he read:

"_My Dear Grace_:

"Since I communicated with you last, additional reasons have developed to justify your leaving him immediately. Your belief that with all his faults he has adhered to his marriage vows is but a delusion born of your own pure nature. I have the proof, if you care to hear it. Grace, you told me you loved me. My love for you is undiminished. Why sacrifice yourself longer--why sacrifice me? I cannot endure to be parted from you. Start for Reno at once--to-morrow is not too soon. Our love is too holy to be smitten and made to suffer by one entirely unworthy of your slightest consideration. Leave him, Grace, and come to me.

"Yours devotedly, HERBERT."

"Well, what do you think of that?" Collins asked, turning toward his brother-in-law. "My wife loves another man. And he's urging her to wreck her home!"

Ward's eyes alternated between his sister and her husband.

"Of course, she's not going to do it," he said as if expressing an inevitable conclusion.

"I'm going to leave here this very day," she declared firmly.

"And plunge into the scandal of a divorce proceeding?" Her brother bestowed a reproachful glance upon her. "Grace, you know how I feel toward your husband. Long ago I urged you to divorce him, but you refused. Now you must consider me. Think of the notoriety! My approaching marriage must not be overcast by the awful scandal that will follow your trip to Reno. Were we less prominent socially, it might be different. But the newspapers will be full of it. No, Grace, don't do anything hasty--not just now."

"You counsel me to continue living with him?" she inquired.

"I simply ask you to continue as you're doing."

She bent forward in her chair, her face set in an expression of unalterable determination.

"I love Herbert," she declared calmly, unmindful of the amazement which her avowal produced. "I have loved him a long while," she continued undismayed. "I crave him--I loathe the man to whom I am wedded."

"I sympathize with you," the brother hastened to a.s.sure her, "and, were it not for my marriage, I should urge you to leave him at once. He's a cad--"

"I'm not the sort of cad that permits another man to destroy his home,"

blurted Collins.

The others ignored his interruption.

"Lester," said the wife, "I shall leave this house to-day. Regardless of your marriage, I shall apply for a divorce and marry Herbert Whitmore."

The strained silence which followed was broken by Collins. He arose and walked to the door.

"You'll never marry Whitmore," he said. "There is a higher law that protects the home."

"Why--what do you mean?" the wife inquired in a tone of alarm. Something in her husband's face, something she had never seen there before, frightened her.

"I'm going to kill Whitmore," he said, leaving the room.

CHAPTER III