CHAPTER XXVIII.
Annie passed the night at Kirby Park; and, when she and Harry were sitting at breakfast the next morning, he told her he should come and see her act that night.
“Then will you come up to town with me?” she asked eagerly.
Her husband hesitated.
“I don’t know whether I can, Annie. I have some things to see to down here before I start, and something to do in town when I get up there, so that I cannot be at your rooms till about four.”
Her face clouded.
“Something to do in town!” she echoed, watching him narrowly, and noting the expression into which his face had set during the last few minutes. “Is it—to see some one, Harry?” she asked timidly.
“Yes, a business appointment.”
“Oh, Harry, it is to see Stephen, I know! What are you going to do? What are you going to say? You look as if you would kill him!”
“Don’t be afraid. How could I condescend to touch the little misshapen wretch, who has not as much strength in his whole body as I have in one finger? But I am going to see him, and to-day.”
She saw that it was impossible to alter her husband’s resolutions, so she desisted from her persuasions; but there was a terrible fear at her heart which she could not shake off. She knew the violence of her husband’s temper, and feared it all the more under this new aspect of repression. She made up her mind to go to Stephen and warn him of Harry’s coming, and to beg him not to exasperate her husband further by any attempt at concealment and false excuses, but to make a frank confession, such as would, she felt sure, be more likely than anything else to avert Harry’s anger. Once resolved on this course, she let the conversation turn to indifferent subjects, and it was not until breakfast was nearly over that she pretended to remember an appointment with her dressmaker which would make it necessary for her to go up to town before luncheon. She did it too naturally to excite in her husband any suspicions of her good faith, and he went to the station with her, and parted with her very reluctantly, although he expected to be with her again in a few hours.
Annie herself felt something more than reluctance; she was seized with a foreboding of evil.
“Ah, Harry,” she said, laying a trembling hand upon his arm, “I wish I were not married to you!”
“Why?” asked he, startled.
“Because then perhaps you might do what you did long ago, fling all considerations of business and duty to the winds and jump into the train with me.”
“Do you think my love was better worth having then than now?” he asked softly.
“N-o, perhaps not. Still I wish the wife had as much influence as the girl had.”
If the train had been in the station, she in it, and he at the door, these words would have carried him off. As it was, standing on the platform beside her, Harry was seized with a great trembling, and, walking away from her a few steps, he came back and said to her, low and reproachfully:
“That is the first time you have ever tempted me to what was not right, Annie. If the train had been here, your words would have made me jump in, and, for the first time since I have had work to do, I should have neglected it—and through you. I have a lot to see to at the stables this morning, and an appointment to keep with Captain King before I go up to town. But I can’t resist you; so, if you love me, Annie, and if you care for what people think of me and say of me, don’t ask me again, my darling, for I can’t say ‘No’ to you.”
The young wife, self-possessed and independent as she usually was, hung her head. These words of his, inspiring in her a strong feeling of respect, did much to restore her confidence in his self-command when dealing with his treacherous cousin. As she took the rebuke silently, Harry began to be alarmed at the effect he had produced.
“You are not angry with me, are you, darling? You look as if I had been scolding you, as if we had changed places.”
“Changed places, Harry!” cried she, looking up in astonishment.
She had already forgotten the long period during which she had looked upon her husband as a tiresome, unreasonable child.
“Yes, when I was getting well at the Grange you didn’t always treat me with proper respect, I fancy,” said he, flushing, but looking down into her eyes rather mischievously.
“Oh, ah—then you were ill!” she said, blushing too.
The last words she said to her husband as the train went off were:
“Remember you are not to be with me later than four. Promise.”
“All right; I promise.”
And, trying to look as if her mind was at ease, Annie gave him a last smiling “Good-bye,” as the train started.
On arriving in town, she drove straight to the house where Stephen lodged, and, finding that he was out, she sat down in the sitting-room to wait for him. Long ere this an explanation of the cripple’s cruel and deceitful conduct had occurred to her, and it seemed more and more probable to her, as she sat in the shabby sitting-room, with its low, weather-stained ceiling and ill-papered walls. Evidently the money which he had kept back from her he had not spent upon himself; it must have gone where her jewelry had gone, and Harry’s flowers—to Muriel West. Annie knew well to what depths of meanness he would descend in his devotion to a woman, for she remembered with what dogged and disinterested fidelity he had fulfilled every command, every wish of his cousin Lilian in the old days at the Grange, before her marriage with Mr. Falconer. In spite of her contempt for a man who could stoop to such acts, Annie was touched by the cripple’s hapless attachment, and a great pity filled her heart as she heard the slow thud, thud of his crutch upon the staircase. Her compassion deepened when the door opened and Stephen stood before her, wild-eyed and pale with a pallor which was like that of death. She sat quite still for an instant, unable to speak, unable to express what she felt at the dreadful change in his appearance.
But when she rose very softly and held out a hand to him, she discovered, to her horror, that he still stared blankly in front of him, making no sign. He did not see her.
“Stephen,” said she, in a low voice.
He started, and for the first time knew that he was not alone.
“Annie!” he said apathetically. “It is you, is it?”
With mechanical courtesy, he moved forward feebly and offered her a chair; but she took his hand and led him very gently to the hard little sofa, and made him sit down beside her there. She thought the feeling which had evidently overmastered him must be remorse for his conduct toward her and her husband, and she tried to think of the sweetest words she could to soothe his distress.
“It makes me very unhappy to see how deeply you are suffering,” said she. “If I had known you would feel it so much, I would have come before.”
He played idly with his crutch, not in the least moved by her words.
“It would have made no difference,” said he, in a dull, cold tone.
“Oh, but I think it would! I would not have let you think so much about it!”
“How could you help that?” said he, turning upon her his lusterless eyes. “I tell you I was not rich enough, and she would have thrown me over just the same!”
Annie started. He was thinking no more of the wrong he had done her than if it had been a deed of a hundred years back. But she was not angry. Her pity rose higher than ever for this unhappy man, who had sacrificed all, even to his honesty, for the sake of a woman who did not care a straw for him now that she had got from him all he had to give.
“Stephen, I am so very, very sorry for you,” said she, in a quivering voice.
“Are you?” said he, waking for an instant into something more like life. “And yet—you have no reason to be.”
A feeling of shame seemed for the first time to come over him as he realized whose sympathy it was that was offered him; and he drew his hand away from hers.
“Every one has reason to be sorry for any one else who is unhappy,” said she. “And when you see that even I can feel sympathy with you, you will see that you have friends who are worth living for yet.”
“Not I, not I,” murmured he, in a broken voice. “There is nothing left for me. She had promised to marry me—she is not a lady by birth, you know, and I could have made her one by position. I would have worked for her—I have worked for her—I have done more. But I used up all I had too fast—she saw I had no more; she said, if she married me, we should starve. And she looked at me quite coldly with her beautiful eyes, and said she was not well-educated enough to marry a gentleman—a gentleman! I, a poor cripple! It was that—it is always that! There is no happiness, no love for me; nothing but pity—wretched, miserable, scornful pity, that stings me more than taunts, more than hatred. She pitied me, I dare say, and laughed at me, and let me go;” and he broke down into incoherent words and sobbing.
Annie tried bright words of encouragement, asked him if he thought nothing of her friendship, of that of the rest of his family; but she spoke to deaf ears. When at length she rose to go, he gave her his hand and said, but still coldly:
“Thank you. I shall be glad presently that you came. It was good of you to come—generous—and I thank you. If I had a long life before me, I would try to do you some service; but I am played out now, and there is not much of my life left to run. Good-bye, Annie.”
She could not stay. His last words were almost a command to go. She had not mentioned her husband’s name. She thought that, in the state of mind in which she was leaving the cripple, the dread of an angry visitor might make him desperate; and she knew very well that, when Harry saw the miserable condition to which his sensitive cousin was reduced, he was no more likely to be unmerciful than she had been.
But she could not shake off a foreboding that the meeting between the cousins would be productive of evil, and she reached home anxious and thoughtful.
Her misgivings were not without foundation.
Within an hour of her departure from Stephen’s lodging, Harry drove up in a hansom and was directed, as his wife had been, to the little room on the top floor. He entered with a very stern face and firm tread; but the sight of the cripple, lying half on the sofa, half on a chair, in a state of utter prostration of body and mind, made him pause. The other looked up at him without fear, without feeling of any kind.
“Do you know me?” asked Harry, abruptly.
“Yes; what do you want here?”
“I want an explanation. If you do not feel fit to give it to me now, I will come again. But I must have it, and the less delay the better.”
“Ask your wife, then. She has a better head than you, and understands without so much talking. Go to her for your explanations, and leave me in peace.”
“Not yet. I want some reason for your stopping my letters to her and her letters to me, for taking the presents we intrusted to your care to be given to each other, and for giving her money, my flowers, and even her jewelry to a greedy, extravagant, worthless woman whom you couldn’t satisfy if you had gold mines to give her. That is what I want you to answer.”
The cripple had raised himself, his eyes glittering with fury, and he sat frowning maliciously at his cousin until the latter had finished his speech.
“Then I won’t answer you, except to say this; you are very good now, and look upon extravagance and waste as very wicked things. But you haven’t been a saint so very long that you can have forgotten that you yourself were as greedy and worthless as any one I knew once, and that you forged your father’s name to supply your own extravagance, which, it seems to me, is worse than to stoop to meanness for the sake of a woman you love and for whom you would die.”
The last words he spoke in a low voice, looking straight in front of him with his glittering, feverish eyes; and his hand moved restlessly toward his coat-pocket as he finished speaking.
“Look here!” said Harry, in a softer voice. “I don’t want to be hard on you. I know I’ve done as bad things myself, if not worse; and, if I’m a saint now, it’s the first I’ve heard of it. But, if you’re so fond of this woman as you say, I wonder how you could have the heart to play such confoundedly nasty tricks with the love of another man, and to such an angel as Annie, who had always been kind to you too?”
“Your love? Your love was nothing to mine!” Stephen burst out, contemptuously. “A woman may have a place in your heart; but your dogs and your horses fill the rest of it. You are handsome, straight; if one woman will not smile on you, another will; while I, who love sweet eyes and fair faces with a passion you cannot dream of, can only buy kindness from a woman by the ceaseless labor of ministering to all her wants, all her caprices; and then, when at last the time comes when I can give no more, I am cast aside and forgotten for—for one of your sort, with a pair of blue eyes that say nothing, and a head that can’t put two ideas together.”
The passionate bitterness of this speech moved Harry.
“It—it is rough on a fellow,” he murmured, in a low, gruff voice.
But the pity in his tone woke the wretched man before him to frenzy.
“You can spare me your pity,” said he, fiercely. “All our lives through you have got easily what I might work myself to death for, and never get, after all. You always got enjoyment, admiration, love; and, now you have sobered down, you get respect, success, money. If you had been in my place, Muriel would never have thrown you over. She had seen you only once, at a supper-party, months ago, at Beckham. Yet, when I met her in London, she remembered your stupid, red face, and sent you messages which I took care not to give you. But I will be even with you at last; the remedy I prepared for my own wrongs will do as well for yours.”
And Stephen drew out from his breast, where his hand had been hidden for some minutes, a revolver, and, aiming before the other had time to realize his intention, fired it at his cousin.
Four o’clock came, and still Annie waited for her husband. He had promised so seriously, so many times, not to be later than that hour that her impatience grew quickly into anxiety as the time passed and still he did not appear. At half-past four, just as she was deciding that she could wait no longer, that she must go to Stephen’s lodging and find out what had detained him, she heard a knock at the door, which, however, she recognized, to her bitter disappointment, not as Harry’s but George’s. He had brought William to see her, that young soldier having just arrived in town, and being mad to have a glimpse of his old play-fellow, and tell her how well he was getting on in his profession.
Poor Annie could give but a mechanical show of interest to the young fellow’s eager outpourings, and at last she broke down.
“William, I cannot listen now,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “You know it is not for lack of interest; but——George,” she cried suddenly, turning to her elder brother-in-law, “Harry has gone to see Stephen, angrier than I ever saw him before. I can’t tell you why now. But Harry and I are reconciled. It seems you knew all about his being at Kirby Park. You might have told me! And he promised to be with me at four o’clock,” she went on, growing more and more excited and incoherent. “You see it is a quarter to five, and he is not here! He was very angry; and I am afraid something has happened. I must go and see!”
There was no restraining her. In ten minutes they were all three on the way to Stephen’s lodging. As they approached the house, George caught sight of something from the cab-window which made him turn suddenly to his sister-in-law and advise her to return while he went in and spoke to Harry.
She saw the alarm in his eyes, and, steadying herself to speak calmly, she refused. So the cab stopped; and then Annie saw that there was a rough crowd outside the house and a policeman keeping the people away from the door. George sprung out; but she followed so closely behind him that she caught the policeman’s answer to his low-voiced question:
“What is the matter?”
“Man shot, I believe, sir.”
Annie kept quite still, quite calm, while George induced the policeman to let them pass in; and, as soon as the door was opened, she slipped past her brother-in-law, who had not known she was so close, and flew first up the stairs, swiftly and silently as a bird.
“He has broken his word to me,” she thought in agony. “He has scattered all our happiness; and now——Oh, where is he? I dare not go in! Perhaps already they have led him away to—prison. Oh, Harry, Harry!”
She was standing outside the door of the sitting-room, which was shut. She seemed to hear a noise of low voices: but she was not sure that it was not the singing in her own ears. At last, with cold, weak fingers, she turned the handle and went in.
The only figure in the room was that of the cripple, lying motionless on the sofa.
Brought thus abruptly into what she believed to be the presence of a dead man, Annie tottered to the table for support, her face white and damp with horror; but Stephen turned, raised his head and confronted her; and she gave a low cry of relief when she saw that he was alive.
“Then Harry has not hurt you?” she whispered falteringly.
“No,” said the cripple, “it was not he. You will never forgive me, Annie; you will hate me. I shot him!”
Annie did not cry this time, did not even start; she stood tapping with her fingers upon the table, struck suddenly into utter numbness. She did not feel his trembling hands clinging to her mantle as he fell at her feet and implored her to speak to him, to scold him, and not to stand before him as if his words had killed her. She did not hear the door of the bedroom open or feel the touch of a stranger’s hand. But the new-comer was a doctor; and, when she woke presently from the sort of stupor which had seized her, he said, quietly:
“Now, Mrs. Braithwaite, if you will remain calm, you shall see your husband.”
“I am calm,” she said, simply.
She could not have cried, or moaned, or lamented her fate, if her life had depended upon her showing some emotion.
So he led her into the next room; and there, not dead, but sitting in a faded chintz arm-chair, with his left arm bound up, was Harry. It was then that her calmness gave way. She was not very demonstrative indeed over the passion of joy which lit up and transfigured her whole face; but she fell upon her knees by the side of his chair, shaking from head to feet.
“I thought—you were—killed!” whispered she.
“Why, my poor darling, who told you so?” he asked, tenderly.
“I shall never forgive Stephen!” she hissed, clinching her teeth.
“Yes, you will, Annie. He is to be pitied, not I—only we musn’t tell him that. He hasn’t even hurt me much—the arm is not broken; the only danger possible to me through it was loss of blood; and, if I keep quiet, I shall be all right again in no time. Is that George’s voice I hear in the next room?”
“Yes; he came with me and William.”
“I must get William to come down with me to Kirby Park for a day or two till I can ride again. He’ll be very glad to come and I to have him. If I had to stay indoors alone, I think I should throw myself off the roof.”
“Oh, Harry, won’t you have me?” Annie asked, in pitiful entreaty.
“Why, how can I, my darling? I know you won’t break your engagement at the theater.”
“No; but I’ll go down to Kirby Park every night after the performance, and come back each evening in time to dress for the theater.”
“But won’t that tire you too much, Annie? It is more than an hour’s journey by train,” he said; but his eyes flashed at the proposal.
“Why,” said Annie, shyly, laughing a little, “I wanted to do so all the time. I thought of it yesterday; but then I decided to wait until you asked me; and, after all,” she added, with mock petulance, “I’ve had to ask myself.”
So that night, after the performance, Annie, escorted by George, who had made what excuses he could for not having revealed to her that he had heard of Harry’s residence at Kirby Park, drove to Waterloo, where she found William and her husband. The three went down to Kirby Park together by the last train, very tired, especially Annie, but very happy.
The next day she and William had a walk together, while Harry was holding a business interview in the library; but William found that it was not quite like the old time at the Grange.
“Hasn’t it improved Harry to have something to do?” said the young wife proudly.
“Oh, he’s well enough!” said William, without enthusiasm. “But there’s a sad falling off in you, Annie. You’re quite spoiled for a sister-in-law. Why, now, when anything amuses you, you look first at Harry!”