The Mayor's Wife Part 26

"Ah! you can a.s.sure me of that?"

"Positively."

"What are you playing there?" It was Mrs. Packard who spoke. She was pointing at the scribble he was making on the paper.

"t.i.t-tat-to," he smiled, "to amuse the baby."

Did she hate to see him so occupied, or was her own restlessness of a nature demanding a like outlet? Tearing her eyes away from him and the child, she looked about her in a wild way, till she came upon a box of matches standing on the large center-table around which they were all grouped. Taking some in her hand, she commenced to lay them out on the table before her, possibly in an attempt to attract the baby's attention to herself. Puerile business, but it struck me forcibly, possibly from the effect it appeared to have upon the mayor. Looking from one to the other in an astonishment which was not without its hint of some new and overmastering feeling on his own part, he remarked:

"Isn't it time for the baby to go to bed? Surely, our talk is too serious to be interrupted by games to please a child."

Without a word Mr. Steele rose and put the protesting child in the mother's arms. She, rising, carried it to the door, and, coming slowly back, reseated herself before the table and began to push the matches about again with fingers that trembled beyond her control. The mayor proceeded as if no time had elapsed since his last words.

"You had some words then with this Brainard--I think you called him Brainard--exacted some promise from him?"

"Yes, your Honor," was the only reply.

Did not Mrs. Packard speak, too? We all seemed to think so, for we turned toward her; but she gave no evidence of having said anything, though an increased nervousness was visible in her fingers as she pushed the matches about.

"I thought I was warranted in doing so much," continued Mr. Steele. "I could not buy the man with money, so I used threats."

"Right! anything to squelch him," exclaimed the mayor, but not with the vigor I expected from him. Some doubt, some dread--caught perhaps from his wife's att.i.tude or expression--seemed to interpose between his indignation and the object of it. "You are our good friend, Steele, in spite of the shock you gave us a moment ago."

As no answer was made to this beyond a smile too subtle and too fine to be understood by his openhearted chief, the mayor proceeded to declare:

"Then that matter is at an end. I pray that it may have done us no real harm. I do not think it has. People resent attacks on women, especially, on one whose reputation has never known a shadow, as girl, wife, or mother."

"Yes," came in slow a.s.sent from the lips which had just smiled, and he glanced at Mrs. Packard whose own lips seemed suddenly to become dry, for I saw her try to moisten them as her right hand groped about for something on the tabletop and finally settled on a small paper-weight which she set down amongst her matches. Was it then or afterward that I began to have my first real doubt whether some shadow had not fallen across her apparently unsullied life?

"Yes, you are right," repeated Mr. Steele more energetically. "People do resent such insinuations against a woman, though I remember one case where the opposite effect was produced. It was when Collins ran for supervisor in Cleveland. He was a good fellow himself, and he had a wife who was all that was beautiful and charming, but who had once risked her reputation in an act which did call for public arraignment.

Unfortunately, there was a man who knew of this act and he published it right and left and--"

"Olympia!" Mayor Packard was on his feet, pointing in sudden fury and suspicion at the table where the matches lay about in odd and, as I now saw, seemingly set figures. "You are doing something besides playing with those matches. I know Mr. Steele's famous cipher; he showed it to me a week ago; and so, evidently, do you, in spite of the fact that you have had barely fifty words with him since he came to the house. Let me read--ah!--give over that piece of paper you have there, Steele, if you would not have me think you as great a dastard as we know that Brainard to be!"

And while his wife drooped before his eyes and a cynical smile crept about the secretary's fine mouth, he caught up the sheet on which Steele had been playing t.i.t-tat-to with the child, and glanced from the table to it and back again to the table on which the matches lay in the following device, the paper-weight answering for the dot:

7; L;.)7; [-]; ^V. "M," suddenly left the mayor's writhing lips; then slowly, letter by letter, "E-R-C-Y. Mercy!" he vociferated. "Why does my wife appeal for mercy to you--a stranger--and in your own cipher!

Miserable woman! What secret's here? Either you are--"

"Hus.h.!.+ some one's at the door!" admonished the secretary.

Mr. Packard turned quickly, and, smoothing his face rapidly, as such men must, started for the door. Mrs. Packard, flinging her whole soul into a look, met the secretary's eyes for a moment and then let her head sink forward on her hands above those telltale matches, from whose arrangement she had reaped despair in place of hope.

Mr. Steele smiled again, his fine, false smile, but after her head had fallen; not before. Indeed, he had vouchsafed no reply to her eloquent look. It was as if it had met marble till her eyes were bidden; then--

But Nixon was in the open doorway and Nixon was speaking:

"A telegram, your Honor."

The old man spoke briskly, even a little crisply--perhaps he always did when he addressed the mayor. But his eyes roamed eagerly and changed to a burning, red color when they fell upon the dejected figure of his mistress. I fancied that, had he dared, he would have leaped into the room and taken his own part--and who could rightly gage what that was?--in the scene which may have been far more comprehensive to him than to me. But he did not dare, and my eyes pa.s.sed from him to the mayor.

"From Haines," that gentleman announced, forgetting the suggestive discovery he had just made in the great and absorbing interest of his campaign. "'Speech good--great applause becoming thunderous at flash of your picture. All right so far if--'" he read out, ceasing abruptly at the "if" which, as I afterward understood, really ended the message.

"No answer," he explained to Nixon as he hurriedly, dismissed him. "That 'if' concerns you," he now declared, coming back to his wife and to his troubles at the same instant. "Explain the mystery which seems likely to undo me. Why do you sit there bowed under my accusations? Why should Henry Packard's wife cry for mercy, to any man? Because those d.a.m.nable accusations are true? Because you have a secret in your past and this man knows it?"

Slowly she rose, slowly she met his eyes, and even he started back at her pallor and the drawn misery in her face. But she did not speak.

Instead of that she simply reached out and laid her hand on Mr. Steele's arm, drooping almost to the ground as she did so. "Mercy!" she suddenly wailed, but this time to the man who had so relentlessly accused her.

The effect was appalling. The mayor reeled, then sprang forward with his hand outstretched for his secretary's throat. But his words were for his wife. "What does this mean? Why do you take your stand by the side of another man than myself? What have I done or what have you done that I should live to face such an abomination as this?"

It was Steele who answered, with a lift of his head as full of a.s.sertion as it was of triumph.

"You? nothing; she? everything. You do not know this woman, Mayor Packard; for instance, you do not know her name."

"Not know her name? My wife's?"

"Not in the least. This lady's name is Brainard. So is mine. Though she has lived with you several years in ignorance of my continued existence, no doubt, she is my wife and not yours. We were married in Boone, Minnesota, six years ago."

CHAPTER XXIII. THE WIFE'S TALE

Ten minutes later this woman was pleading her cause. She had left the side of the man who had just a.s.sumed the greatest of all rights over her and was standing in a frenzy of appeal before him she loved so deeply and yet had apparently wronged.

Mayor Packard was sitting with his head in his hands in the chair into which he had dropped when the blow fell which laid waste his home, his life, the future of his child and possibly the career which was as much, perhaps more, to him than all these. He had not uttered a word since that dreadful moment. To all appearance her moans of contrition fell upon deaf ears, and she had reached the crisis of her misery without knowing the extent of the condemnation hidden in his persistent silence.

Collapse seemed inevitable, but I did not know the woman or the really wonderful grip she held on herself. Seeing that he was moved by nothing she had said, she suddenly paused, and presently I heard her observe in quite a different tone:

"There is one thing you must know--which I thought you would know without my telling you. I have never lived with this man, and I believed him dead when I gave my hand to you."

The mayor's fingers twitched. She had touched him at last. "Speak! tell me," he murmured hoa.r.s.ely. "I do not want to do you any injustice."

"I shall have to begin far, far back; tell about my early life and all its temptations," she faltered, "or you will never understand."

"Speak."

Sensible at this point of the extreme impropriety of my presence, I rose, with an apology, to leave. But she shook her head quickly, determinedly, saying that as I had heard so much I must hear more. Then she went on with her story.

"I have committed a great fault," said she, "but one not so deep or inexcusable as now appears, whatever that man may say," she added with a slow turn toward the silent secretary.

Did she expect to provoke a reply from the man who, after the first triumphant a.s.sertion of his claim, had held himself as removed from her and as unresponsive to her anguish as had he whom she directly addressed? If so, she must have found her disappointment bitter, for he did not respond with so much as a look. He may have smiled, but if so, it was not a helpful smile; for she turned away with a shudder and henceforth faced and addressed the mayor only.

"My mother married against the wishes of all her family and they never forgave her. My father died early--he had never got on in the world--and before I was fifteen I became the sole support of my invalid mother as well as of myself. We lived in Boone, Minnesota.

"You can imagine what sort of support it was, as I had no special talent, no training and only the opportunity given by a crude western town of two or three hundred inhabitants. I washed dishes in the hotel kitchen--I who had a millionaire uncle in Detroit and had been fed on tales of wealth and culture by a mother who remembered her own youth and was too ignorant of my real nature to see the harm she was doing.

I washed dishes and ate my own heart out in shame and longing--bitter shame and frenzied longing, which you must rate at their full force if you would know my story and how I became linked to this man.

"I was sixteen when we first met. He was not then what he is now, but he was handsome enough to create an excitement in town and to lift the girl he singled out into an enviable prominence. Unfortunately, I was that girl. I say unfortunately, because his good looks failed to arouse in me more than a pa.s.sing admiration; and in accepting his attentions, I consulted my necessities and pride rather than the instincts of my better nature. When he asked me to marry him I recoiled. I did not know why then, nor did I know why later; but know why now. However, I let this premonition pa.s.s and engaged myself to him, and the one happy moment I knew was when I told my mother what I had done, and saw her joy and heard the hope with which she impulsively cried: 'It is something I can write your uncle. Who knows? Perhaps he may forgive me my marriage when he hears that my child is going to do so well!' Poor mother! she had felt the glamour of my lover's good looks and cleverness much more than I had. She saw from indications to which I was blind that I was going to marry a man of mark, and was much more interested in the possible reply she might receive to the letter with which she had broken the silence of years between herself and her family than in the marriage itself.