CHAPTER LIII.COLONEL SCHUYLER AND THE SECRET.

He knew it now in part, and the knowledge of it had aged him as ten years of ordinary life could not have done, making him feel old and worn and bewildered, and uncertain whether it really were himself upon whom this blow had fallen. And it had come to him thus: Mrs. Barrett had brought her grandson a fanciful whistle, of which he was very fond, and which, since Edith’s illness, could not be found.

“I wants my fissle danmusser brought me,” Arthur said to his father, who was amusing him in the nursery one day, the fourth after Edith had banished him from her room and bidden him stay away until she sent for him.

“I wants myfissle,” the child kept saying, and then the search for it commenced again, and Mary, the nurse, suddenly remembered having seen it last on the day when her mistress was taken sick. “She had Arthur in her lap, and might have put it in her pocket. She sometimes did so,” she said.

“What dress did she have on?” the colonel asked, and on being told went himself to the closet where the cashmere wrapper was hanging. The missing toy was there, and also the letter, which he drew out with the whistle and held a moment in his hand, wondering what it contained, and why it had never reached him.

“Col. Howard Schuyler, Oakwood,” was the direction in Edith’s handwriting, and by that he knew that it was written years ago when he was in England, and his wonder increased as to the cause of its having been so long withheld and not destroyed.

Had Edith written it, intending to send it to him, and then changed her mind, and if so, why? he asked himself as he stood turning it over in his hand, and then there flashed upon him a remembrance of the time when she said he did not knowallabout that early love affair of hers, and he felt convinced thattheallwas contained in that soiled, yellow letter. And if so, should he read it? Ought he to read it? he questioned, as, having given the toy to Arthur, he went to his own private room to be alone and think. Never since Edith came to Hampstead had there been the slightest allusion to thataffaire du cœurto which she had seemed to attach so much importance, and he had not the least ideawhothe young man was or where he had lived and died. Possibly it was all here in the letter, which he laid down and took up again three times before deciding to read it. And when at last he did open it and glanced at the heading, “Caledonia St., June 20th, 18—. Col. Howard Schuyler: Dear Sir,” he would not for a moment let his eye go any further, but held it fast on the “Dear Sir,” while he pondered again his right to read the letter. Then his eye wandered a little and caught a word here and there, and lighted at last on the names “Abelard Lyle” and “Rev. Mr. Calvert,” andthenhe began at the beginning and read every word twice, to be sure there was no mistake, while his heart seemed to stop beating, and he tore off both cravat and collar in order to breathe more freely. There was a humming in his ears, and he could not hear the December storm beating against the windows, and there was a mist before his eyes, so that he could not see the paper he held in his trembling hand. Nor was vision longer needful to him. He had read and re-read, and the lines had burned themselves into his brain word for word, and even with his eyes shut he could see the sentence, “Abelard Lyle, your hired workman, was my husband, and I wasHeloise Fordham, who lived in the cottage by the bridge at Hampstead.”

“Abelard Lyle her husband!,” he tried to say, but his lips only gave a sound which made him shiver and wonder if he was dying, it was so unnatural, so like the cry of an animal wounded and in mortal agony.

And he was wounded, sorely, and every nerve quivered with pain, and he could feel the hot blood surging through his veins as he had felt it once when under the influence of ether. Then he had fought and struck at the dentist operating on him, and acted like a madman. But he did not do sonow. He neither fought nor struck, but sat motionless, thinking of the words, “Abelard Lyle was my husband, and I was Heloise Fordham.”

He remembered that young girl, remembered the face framed in the green leaves, and the clear voice telling him Abelard’s name and place of birth. He remembered, too, that people had said the young man was her lover, and how suddenly she disappeared with her mother. And Edith, his Edith, the woman he loved so much, wasthat girl!—was Abelard’s wife, and the mother of his child, and had married him without telling him a word of the real truth as written in this letter! There had been a show of sincerity, and that was all. She had at first meant to tell him, but had changed her mind and given him no hint of the actual state of things. She had really come to him stained with falsehood and treachery and deceit, a lie on her lips, a lie in her heart, and a lie in every act of hers, since her beautiful head was first pillowed on his bosom.

Oh, what bitter things he thought against her in the first moments of surprise and anguish I How black the record was, and how he shrank from ever looking in her face again, as he thought of the imposition practised upon him.

“Oh, Edith! Edith! I loved you so much, and thought you so innocent and pure. I can never trust you again, or take you for my wife,” he said, when his lips could frame his thoughts into words, and his heart was hardening like adamant against the woman who had so deceived him, when the door was pushed cautiously open, and little Arthur came in, blowing his whistle vigorously at first, and then staring wonderingly at his father’s white, haggard face.

“What is it, papa?” he said. “Is you sick, too, like mamma?” and themotherlooked through her boy’s eyes straight at the suffering husband, who recognized the look, and clasping his child and Edith’s in his arms, sobbed and wept over him just as he would have done had Edith really been dead and Arthur motherless. “Is you tyin’ for mamma? Don’t; she’ll det well. Dirtie and the doctor will ture her. Is you tyin’ for her?” Arthursaid; and with sobs which rent his very heart, Colonel Schuyler answered:

“Yes, Arthur, I’m crying for her,—for her,—your mother. Oh, Edith! my lost Edith!”

His tears poured in torrents now, and did him good, for the pressure around his heart gave way, the blood flowed more slowly through his veins, and the humming ceased in his ears, as he strained Arthur to his bosom and covered him with the kisses he meant as a farewell to the mother. He could never touch her false lips again, but he could kiss her child, and he fondled and wept over him, and then bidding him go away, and locking the door upon him, went back to the battle he was fighting between justice and inclination.

What should he do? What ought he to do? Should he show the letter to Edith, and, upbraiding her with her duplicity, live henceforth apart from her, as one he never could trust again? or should he keep his knowledge to himself, and try to act as if nothing had happened, hoping that some time she would herself tell him the truth, and why it had so long been withheld?

He could not decide then; he was in no condition to think clearly of anything, except that his Edith, whom he had taken for a pure, innocent young maiden, had been a wife and mother, and never let him know it. What her motives had been he could readily guess. She wanted his money and name, and the position he could give her, and if she told him all she feared the result. This was the reason, he said, and yet when he remembered many things in the past, he could not reconcile the two, or reason clearly about anything.

“I must go away by myself and think it out alone,” he thought, and glancing at his watch, and seeing there was yet time for the down train to New York, he rose, and going to the door of Edith’s room, knocked softly, and asked Gertie to come out a moment to him.

“I am going away for a day or two, or three at the most,” he said. “Mrs. Schuyler is out of danger, and as in her present state she is more quiet without me, I shall not be needed for alittle time, and leave her in your care. I know I can trust you in everything. You have been faithful to us, Gertie!”

He wrung her hand as he said this, feeling for the moment as if of all his family Gertie alone had not forsaken him. Emily was dead, Emma was over the sea, Godfrey was estranged, Julia was seeking her own pleasure with a party of friends in Florida, and Edith, oh, how far she had drifted away from him within the last two hours,—so far that he feared she could never come back again, just as she was before. And yet he loved her so much, and when he caught through the open door a glimpse of her white face upon the pillow, he experienced a keen throb of pain, and felt an almost irresistible desire to go to her and beg her to tell him that what he had just read was false, that she was nought to Abelard Lyle, nought to that woman in Alnwick, the very thought of whom made him shudder with disgust. But there could be no doubt. He had it in her handwriting, and with a stifled moan he walked through the hall, and down the stairs out into the yard, where he ordered his man to take him to the train.

There were none of his acquaintances going down at that time of the day, and choosing a seat near the door behind his fellow-passengers, he sat with his coat-collar turned up, and his hat over his eyes, apparently asleep, though never was sleep further from one’s eyes than from his, as he mentally went over with the story fold in Edith’s letter and tried to realize it. Arrived in New York he went to the St. Nicholas, feeling that he should be more secure there, as Godfrey and his friends frequented the hotels farther up town. He wanted as private a room as possible, he said, with his meals served in it, and no one to intrude; so they gave him one far up on the fourth floor, and there for three days he stayed, never once leaving the hotel, or taking other exercise than to walk up and down his room, and this he did for hours at a time, with his hands behind him, and his head bent forward, while he tried “to think it out.” He did not sleep, and the chamber-maid found his bed unruffled morning after morning, when she came to arrange his room, and his food was taken away untouched unless it werea bit of toast and a cup of coffee, which he compelled himself to swallow on the morning of the third day, when he felt his strength giving way, and knew he must take something. He had thought it all over and over again, and gone through with every incident of Edith’s life as narrated in her letter, and was as far from any decision as ever.

“If she had told me,—if I had known,” he kept repeating to himself, without finishing the sentence, for he did not know what the result might have been if he had known that the woman he thought to make his wife was the widow of his hired workman, the sister-in-law of Jenny Nesbit, among the Alnwick Hills. “If I had loved her then as I do now, it would have made no difference,” he said to himself at last, “and in any event I should have respected her for a truthful, conscientious woman, which I cannot do now. Oh, Edith, Edith, how you have fallen, and I thought you so true!”

This was the third day when he sat exhausted by the table where the letter lay. He kept it there constantly in his sight, though he had not read it since he came, but he took it up now and turning to the first page began to read it again, when, on the margin in the lower corner his eve caught, for the first time, a few faint pencil marks, almost erased, but which could still be made out with care. It was not Edith’s handwriting, and in looking closely he recognized the peculiar style of Mrs. Barrett, whose writing he had seen on the back of Edith’s letters received from her. What had she written there,—she who, at her daughter’s instigation, had lied so foully to him on the day when she came with that smooth story of anearly loveand nothing more! He asked himself this question, and as he asked it, there flashed over him a light of revelation even before he made out the pencil lines.

London,October10th, 18—.

“This letter Edith bade me carry to Col. Schuyler, but I kept it back and told him what I liked, and she never knew of the deception until just after she was married, when I accidentally let it out, and she fainted away.

“M. Barrett.”

The words were finely written, but the colonel made them out, while the sudden revulsion from despair to joy was almost too much for him, and he sat for a moment half fainting in his chair. Then he roused himself, and his first words were:

“Thank God! I have my Edith back again!”

It must have been in some moment of contrition that Mrs. Barrett had penned the words with which from her grave she now spoke for her injured daughter. Something, sure, had prompted her to keep the letter and write the explanation which brought such joy to Col. Schuyler. The losing faith in Edith’s integrity, the belief that she was artful, intriguing, and deceitful, had hurt him a thousandfold more than the humiliation of having married the widow of Abelard Lyle. He had hardly given that a serious thought, so great was his disappointment at having found Edith false as he believed; and when she was proved otherwise his joy was as acute as his grief had been intense. Every circumstance which bore at all upon the matter came back to him, and he remembered so distinctly the many times since their marriage when Edith had tried to tell him. At the inn where they stopped on their bridal night she had stolen to his side, with the confession on her lips, and he had not listened to her, but had bidden her never allude to the past again, as he was satisfied. Dear Edith, he said, aloud, and felt again the pressure of her hand on his shoulder where she had lain it, and heard the falter in her voice as she first called him Howard. How she must have suffered then and afterward when he insisted upon taking her with him to the Lyles. He knew now the secret of her silence, which he had called pride. The iron fingers were on her throat, and she could not talk in Abelard’s home with that dreadful Jenny sitting there. Andshewas Edith’s sister-in-law! The colonel shivered from head to foot when he remembered that, and a flush of shame and mortification spread over his pale face. He had yet to fight these feelings down, and he did it manfully, and said to himself again and again:

“I love her just as wall, now that I know she did not mean to deceive me, just as well as if she had never seen those Lyles,who seem thrust upon me at every point, first through Emma and then through Edith, my wife.”

He liked to say “my wife,” and kept repeating the name as if it would make her dearer to him, and wipe out every feeling of regret for the incidents of her early life. How she has suffered, he thought, as he remembered all she must have passed through after her arrival at Hampstead, and he could understand now the meaning of her strange words when their first baby was born, and when it died. She was thinking of the little girl whose grave she never saw, and in the transports of his joy and generosity the poor man thought how he would, if she wished it, help her find that grave, and place a headstone there to the memory of little Heloise Lyle! Nobody would ever connect that name with him or his, and he was glad of that, and was not sorry that the little girl was dead, and could not by any chance come up as a witness against his Edith. Alas, he never dreamed that only half the strange story had been told, that his love and generosity, and principle of right and wrong were to be more severely tested than they yet had been. He was human, and naturally it was a comfort to him to think that Edith’s story need be known only to her and to himself. It should be their secret, and die with them when they died, and the world never be the wiser for it.

That the secret had something to do with Edith’s recent dangerous illness, he was certain, when he recalled expressions and ravings which had puzzled him so much; and he knew, too, or thought he did, why she shrank from him as she always did when delirious, telling him she was unworthy to let him touch her. But this should be so no longer; he would go home to her at once, and as soon as she could bear it, tell her that he knew the whole, and loved her the same as ever.

He did not stop long after that, but calling for his bill, hurried to the station and was soon on his way to Schuyler Hill.

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