A Terrible Secret Part 62

"Edith!" she said--and at the sound of her name the girl recoiled--"you don't know me, but I think you will know my name. I am Inez Catheron."

She recoiled a step farther, her dark face paling and growing set--her large eyes seeming to darken and dilate--her lips setting themselves in a tense line. "_Well_?" was all she said.

Inez stretched out her hands with an imploring gesture, drawing near as the other retreated.

"Oh, Edith, you know why I have come! you know who has sent me. You know _what_ I have come for."

The dark, deep eyes met hers, full, cold, hard, and bright as diamonds.

"I don't in the least know what you have come for. I haven't an idea who can have sent you. I know who you are. You are Sir Victor Catheron's cousin."

Without falter or flinch she spoke his name--with a face of stone she waited for the answer. If any hope had lingered in the breast of Inez it died out as she looked at her now.

"Yes," she said sadly; "I am Victor Catheron's cousin, and there could be but one to send me here--Victor Catheron himself."

"And why has Sir Victor Catheron given you that trouble?"

"Oh, Edith!" again that imploring gesture, "let me call you so--need you ask? All these months he has been searching for you, losing health and rest in the fruitless quest--wearing himself to a very shadow looking for you. He has been to New York, he has hunted London--it has brought him almost to the verge of death, this long, vain, miserable search."

Her perfect lips curled scornfully, her eyes shot forth gleams of contempt, but her voice was very quiet.

"And again I ask why--why has Sir Victor Catheron given himself all this unnecessary trouble?"

"Unnecessary! You call it that! A husband's search for a lost wife."

"Stop, Miss Catheron!" she lifted her hand, and her eyes flashed. "You make a mistake. Sir Victor Catheron's wife I am not--never will be.

The ceremony we went through, ten months ago, down in Ches.h.i.+re, means nothing, since a bridegroom who deserts his bride on her wedding-day, resigns all right to the name and authority of husband. Mind, I don't regret it now; I would not have it otherwise if I could. And this is not bravado, Miss Catheron; I mean it. In the hour I married your cousin he was no more to me than one of his own footmen--I say it to my own shame and lasting dishonor; and I thank Heaven most sincerely now, that whether he were mad or sane, that he deserted me as he did.

At last I am free--not bound for life to a man that by this time I might have grown to loathe. For I think my indifference then would have grown to hate. Now I simply scorn him in a degree less than I scorn myself. I never wish to hear his name--but I also would not go an inch out of my way to avoid him. He is simply nothing to me--nothing. If I were dead and in my grave, I could not be one whit more lost to him than I am. Why he has presumed to search for me is beyond my comprehension. How he has had the audacity to hunt me down, and send you here, surpa.s.ses belief. I wonder you came, Miss Catheron!

As you have come, let me give you this word of advice: make your first visit your last. Don't come again to see me--don't let Sir Victor Catheron dog my steps or in any way interfere with me. I never was a very good or patient sort of person--I have not become more so of late. I am only a girl, alone and poor, but," her eyes flashed fire--literally fire--and her hands clenched, "I warn him--it will not be safe!"

Inez drew back. What she had expected she hardly knew--certainly not this.

"As I said before," Edith went on, "my time is limited. Madame does not allow her working-girls to receive visitors in working hours. Miss Catheron, I have the honor to wish you good-morning."

"Stay!" Inez cried, "for the love of Heaven. Oh, what shall I say, how shall I soften her? Edith, you don't understand. I wish--I wish I dared tell you the secret that took Victor from your side that day! He loves you--no, that is too poor a word to express what he feels; his life is paying the penalty of his loss. He is dying, Edith, dying of heart disease, brought on by what he has suffered in losing you. In his dying hour he will tell you all; and his one prayer is for death, that he may tell you, that you may cease to wrong and hate him as you do. O Edith, listen to me--pity me--pity him who is dying for you!

Don't be so hard. See, I kneel to you!--as you hope for mercy in your own dying hour, Edith Catheron, have mercy on him!"

She flung herself on her knees, tears pouring over her face, and held up her clasped hands.

"For pity's sake, Edith--for your own sake. Don't harden your heart; try and believe, though you may not understand. I tell you he loves you--that he is a dying man. We are all sinners; as you hope for pity and mercy, have pity and mercy on him now." With her hand on the door, with Inez Catheron clinging to her dress, she paused, moved, distressed, softened in spite of herself.

"Get up, Miss Catheron," she said, "you must not kneel to me. What is it you want? what is it you ask me to do?"

"I ask you to give up this life of toil--to come home with me. Lady Helena awaits you. Make your home with her and with me--take the name and wealth that are yours, and wait--try to wait patiently to the end.

For Victor--poor, heart-broken boy!--you will not have long to wait."

Her voice broke--her sobs filled the room. The distressed look was still on Edith's face, but it was as resolute as ever.

"What you ask is impossible," she said; "utterly and absolutely impossible. What you say about your cousin may be true. I don't understand--I never could read riddles--but it does not alter my determination in the least. What! live on the bounty of a man who deserts me on my wedding-day--who makes me an outcast--an object of scorn and disgrace! I would die first! I would face starvation and death in this great city. I know what I am saying. I would sweep a crossing like that beggar in rags yonder; I would lie down and die in a ditch sooner. Let me go, Miss Catheron, I beg of you; you only distress me unnecessarily. If you pleaded forever it could not avail.

Give my love to Lady Helena; but I will never go back--I will never accept a farthing from Sir Victor Catheron. Don't come here more--don't let _him_ come." Again her eyes gleamed. "There is neither sorrow nor pity for him in my heart. It is like a stone where he is concerned, and always will be--always, though he lay dying before me.

Now, farewell."

Then the door opened and closed, and she was gone.

CHAPTER III.

HOW THEY MET.

Miss Stuart went back to the workroom, and to the dozen or more young women there a.s.sembled. If she was a shade paler than her wont they were not likely to notice it--if she was more silent even than usual, why silence was always Miss Stuart's forte. Only the young person to whom Miss Catheron had given the sovereign looked at her curiously, and said point blank:

"I say, Miss Stuart, who was that? what did she want?" And the dark, haughty eyes of Miss Stuart had lifted from the peach satin on which she worked, and fixed themselves icily upon her interrogator:

"It was a lady I never saw before," she answered frigidly. "What she wanted is certainly no business of yours, Miss Hatton."

Miss Hatton flounced off with a muttered reply; but there was that about Edith that saved her from open insult--a dignity and distance they none of them could overreach. Besides, she was a favorite with madame and the forewoman. So silently industrious, so tastefully neat, so perfectly trustworthy in her work. Her companions disliked and distrusted her; she held herself aloof from them all; she had something on her mind--there was an air of mystery about her; they doubted her being an English girl at all. She would have none of their companions.h.i.+p; if she had a secret she kept it well; in their noisy, busy midst she was as much alone as though she were on Robinson Crusoe's desert island. Outwardly those ten months had changed her little--her brilliant, dusk beauty was scarcely dimmed--inwardly it had changed her greatly, and hardly for the better.

There had been a long and bitter struggle before she found herself in this safe haven. For months she had drifted about without rudder, or compa.s.s, or pilot, on the dark, turbid sea of London. She had come to the great city friendless and alone, with very little money, and very little knowledge of city life. She had found lodgings easily enough, cheap and clean, and had at once set about searching for work. On the way up she had decided what she must do--she would become a nursery governess or companion to some elderly lady, or she would teach music.

But it was one thing to resolve, another to do. There were dozens of nursery governesses and companions to old ladies wanting in the columns of the _Times_, but they were not for her. "Where are your references?" was the terrible question that met her at every turn.

She had no references, and the doors of the genteel second and third-rate houses shut quietly in her face.

Young and pretty, without references, money or friends, how was she ever to succeed? If she had been thirty and pock-marked she might have triumphed even over the reference business: as it was, her case seemed hopeless. It was long, however, before her indomitable spirit would yield. Her money ran low, she p.a.w.ned several articles of jewelry and dress to pay for food and lodging. She grew wan and hollow-eyed in this terrible time--all her life long she could never recall it without a shudder.

Five months pa.s.sed; despair, black and awful, filled her soul at last.

The choice seemed to lie between going out as an ordinary servant and starving. Even as a housemaid she would want this not-to-be-got-over reference. In this darkest-hour before the dawn she saw Madame Mirebeau's advertis.e.m.e.nt for sewing girls, and in sheer despair applied. Tall, handsome girls of good address, were just what madame required, and somehow--it was the mercy of the good G.o.d no doubt--she was taken. For weeks after she was kept under close surveillance, she was so very unlike the young women who filled such situations--then the conviction became certainty that Miss Stuart had no sinister designs on the ruby velvets, the snowy satins, and priceless laces of her aristocratic customers--that she really wanted work and was thoroughly capable of doing it. Nature had made Edith an artist in dressmaking; her taste was excellent; madame became convinced she had found a treasure. Only one thing Miss Stuart steadfastly refused to do--that was to wait in the shop. "I have reasons of my own for keeping perfectly quiet," she said, looking madame unflinchingly in the eyes. "If I stay in the shop I may--though it is not likely--be recognized; and then I should be under the necessity of leaving you immediately."

Madame had no wish to lose her very best seamstress, so Miss Stuart had her way. The sentimental Frenchwoman's own idea was that Miss Stuart was a young person of rank and position, who owing to some ill-starred love affair had been obliged to run away and hide herself from her friends. However as her hopeless pa.s.sion in no way interfered with her dressmaking ability, madame kept her suspicions to herself and retained her in the workroom.

And so after weary months of pain, and shame, and despair, Edith had come safely to land at last. For the past five months her life had flowed along smoothly, dully, uneventfully--going to her work in the morning, returning to her lodgings at night--sometimes indulging in a short walk in the summer twilight after her tea; at other times too wearied out in body and mind to do other than lie down on the little hard bed, and sleep the spent sleep of exhaustion. That was her outer life; of her inner life what shall I say? She could hardly have told in the after-days herself. Somehow strength is given us to bear all things and live on. Of the man she had married she could not, dare not think--her heart and soul filled with such dark and deadly hatred. She abhorred him,--it is not too much to say that. The packet of treasured letters written in New York so long--oh, so long ago! it seemed--became the one spot of suns.h.i.+ne in her sunless life. She read them until the words lost all meaning--until she knew every one by heart. She looked at the picture until the half-smiling eyes and lips seemed to mock her as she gazed. The little turquoise broach with the likeness, she wore in her bosom night and day--the first thing to be kissed in the morning, the last at night. Wrong, wrong, wrong, you say; but the girl was desperate and reckless--she did not care. Right and wrong were all confounded in her warped mind; only this was clear--she loved Charley as she had never loved him before she became Sir Victor Catheron's bride. He scorned and despised her; she would never look upon his face again--it did not matter; she would go to her grave loving him, his pictured face over her heart, his name the last upon her lips.

Sometimes, sitting alone in the dingy London twilight, there rose before her a vision of what might have been: Charley, poor as he was now, and she Charley's wife, he working for her, somewhere and somehow, as she knew he gladly would, she keeping their two or three tiny rooms in order, and waiting, with her best dress on, as evening came, to hear his step at the door. She would think until thought became torture, until thought became actual physical pain. His words, spoken to her that last night she had ever spent at Sandypoint, came back to her full of bitter meaning now: "Whatever the future brings, don't blame _me_." The future had brought loneliness, and poverty, and despair--all her own fault--her own fault. That was the bitterest sting of all--it was her own work from first to last. She had dreaded poverty, she had bartered her heart, her life, and him in her dread of it, and lo! such poverty as she had never dreamed of had come upon her. If she had only been true to herself and her own heart, what a happy creature she might have been to-day.

But these times of torture were mercifully rare. Her heart seemed numb--she worked too hard to think much--at night she was too dead tired to spend the hours in fruitless anguish and tears. Her life went on in a sort of treadmill existence; and until the coming of Inez Catheron nothing had occurred to disturb it.

Her heart was full of bitter tumult and revolt as she went back to her work. The dastard! how dared he! He was dying, Inez Catheron had said, and for love of her. Bah! she could have laughed in her bitter scorn,--what a mockery it was! If it were true, why let him die! The sooner the better--then indeed she would be free. Perhaps Edith had lost something--heart, conscience--in the pain and shame of the past.

All that was soft and forgiving in her nature seemed wholly to have died out. He had wronged her beyond all reparation--the only reparation he could make was to die and leave her free.

Madame's young women were detained half an hour later than usual that evening. A great Belgravian ball came off next night, and there was a glut of work. They got away at last, half f.a.gged to death, only to find a dull drizzling rain falling, and the murky darkness of early night settling down over the gas-lit highways of London. Miss Stuart bade her companions a brief good-night, raised her umbrella, and hurried on her way. She did not observe the waiting figure, m.u.f.fled from the rain and hidden by an umbrella, that had been watching for her, and who instantly followed her steps. She hurried on rapidly and came at last to a part of the street where it was necessary she should cross. She paused an instant on the curbstone irresolute. Cabs, omnibuses and hansoms were tearing by in numbers innumerable. It was a perilous pa.s.sage. She waited two or three minutes, but there was no lull in the rush. Then growing quite desperate in her impatience she started to cross. The crossing was slippery and wet.

"I say! look out there, will you!" half a dozen shrill cabbies called, before and behind.

She grew bewildered--her presence of mind deserted her--she dropped her umbrella and held up her hands instinctively to keep them off. As she did so, two arms grasped her, she felt herself absolutely lifted off her feet, and carried over. But just as the curbstone was reached, something--a carriage pole it appeared--struck her rescuer on the head, and felled him to the ground. As he fell, Edith sprang lightly out of his arms, and stood on the pavement, unhurt.

The man had fallen. It was all the driver of the hansom could do to keep his horse from going over him. There was shouting and yelling and an uproar directly. A crowd surrounded the prostrate man. X 2001 came up with his baton and authority. For Edith, she stood stunned and bewildered still. She saw the man lifted and carried into a chemist's near by. Instinctively she followed--it was in saving _her_ he had come to grief. She saw him placed in a chair, the mire and blood washed off his face, and then--was she stunned and stupefied still--or was it, _was_ it the face of Sir Victor Catheron?