CHAPTER XXV.MAGDALEN AND ROGER.
Magdalen had waited for Frank until she grew so nervous and restless that she crept back to her couch, and, wrapping her shawl about her, lay down among the pillows, still listening for Frank’s footsteps and wondering that he did not come. She had made up her mind at last. After days and nights of throbbing headache and fierce heart-pangs and bitter tears, she had come to a decision. She would die so willingly for Roger, if that would save Millbank for him. She would endure any pain or toil or privation for him, but she could notsinfor him. She could not swear to love and honor one, when her whole being was bound up in another. She could not marry Frank, but she hoped she might persuade him to let Roger keep Millbank, while he took the mill and the shoe-shop, and the bonds and mortgages. He would surely listen to that proposition, and she had sent for him to hear her decision, and then she meant next day to take the will from its hiding place, and carry it to Roger, with the letter she guarded so carefully. This was her decision, and she waited for Frank until two hours were gone and the spring twilight began to creep into the room, and still no one came near her. She heard the dinner bell, and knew it was not answered, and then, as the minutes went by, she became conscious of some unusual stir in the house among the servants, and grasping the bell rope at last, she rang for Celine, and asked where Mrs. Irving was.
“In the library with Mr. Irving and Mr. Frank and Hester. They are talking very loud, and don’t pay any attention to the dinner bell,” was Celine’s reply, and Magdalen felt as if she was going to faint with the terrible apprehension of evil which swept over her.
“That will do. You may go,” she said to Celine; and then,the moment the girl was gone, she rose from the couch, and knotting the heavy cord around her dressing-gown, and adjusting her shawl, went stealthily out into the hall, and stealing softly down the stairs, soon stood near the door of the library.
It was closed, but Hester’s loud tones reached her as she talked of the will, and with a shudder she turned away, whispering to herself:
“Too late! He’ll never believe me now.”
Then a thought of Aleck crossed her mind. She did not think he was in the library; possibly he was in Hester’s room; at all events she would go there, and wait for Hester’s return. An outside door stood open as she passed through the rear hall which led to Hester’s room, and she felt the chill night air blow on her, and shivered with the cold. But she did not think of danger to herself from the exposure. She only thought of Roger and what was transpiring in the library, and she entered Hester’s room hurriedly, and uttered a cry of joy when she saw Aleck there. He was not smoking now. He was sitting bowed over the hearth, evidently wrapped in thought, and he gave a violent start when Magdalen seized his arm, and asked him what had happened.
He heard her, though she spoke in a whisper, and turning his eyes slowly toward her, replied:
“Somebody has found the will, and Roger is a beggar.”
“Oh, Aleck, I wish I was dead,” Magdalen exclaimed, and then sank down upon the floor at the old man’s feet, sobbing in a piteous kind of way, and trying to explain how she had found it first, and how she would give her life if she never had done so.
In the midst of her story Hester came in, and Magdalen sprang up and started toward her, but something in the expression of the old woman’s face stopped her suddenly, and grasping the back of a chair, she stood speechless, while Hester gave vent to a tirade of abuse, accusing her of ruining Roger, taunting her with vile ingratitude, and bidding her take herself andher lover back to where she came from, if that spot could be found.
Perfectly wild with excitement Magdalen made no effort to explain, but darted past Hester out into the hall, where the first person she encountered was Frank, who chanced to be passing that way. She did not try to avoid him; she was too faint and dizzy for that, and when asked what was the matter, and where she was going, she answered:
“To my room. Oh, help me, please, or I shall never reach it.”
He wound his arm around her, and leaning heavily upon him she went slowly down the hall, followed by Hester Floyd, who was watching her movements. Not a word was spoken of the will until her chamber was reached; then, as Frank parted from her, he said:
“I think you know that Roger has the will; but I did not give it to him. I would have kept it from him, if possible, and it shall make no difference, if I can help it.”
He held her hand a moment; then suddenly stooped and kissed her forehead before she could prevent the act, and walked rapidly away, leaving her flushed and indignant and half fainting, as she crept back to the couch. No one came near her to light her lamp. No one remembered to bring her food or drink. Everybody appeared to have forgotten and forsaken her, but she preferred to be alone, and lay there in the darkness until Celine came in to ask what she would have.
“Nothing, only light the lamp, please,” was her reply.
Then, after a moment, she asked:
“Are the family at dinner?”
“Yes; that is, Mrs. Irving and Mr. Frank. Mr. Irving is in the library alone,” Celine said.
And then Magdalen sat up and asked the girl to gather up her hair decently, and give it a brush or two, and bring her a clean collar, and her other shawl.
Magdalen was going to the library to see Roger, who sat just where Frank had left him, with his head bowed upon thefatal paper which had done him so much harm. The blow had fallen so suddenly, and in so aggravating a form, that it had stunned him in part, and he could not realize the full extent of his calamity. One fact, however, stood out distinctly before his mind, “Magdalen was lost forever!” Frank had said openly that she was to be his wife! She had come to a decision. She would be the mistress of Millbank, without a doubt. But he who had once hoped to make her that himself, would be far away,—a poor, unknown man,—earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. Roger did not care for that contingency. He was willing to work; but he felt how much easier toil would be if it was for Magdalen’s sake that he grew tired and worn. He was thinking of all this when Magdalen came to his door, knocking so softly that he did not hear at first; then, when the knock was repeated, he made no answer to it, for he would rather be left alone. Ordinarily, Magdalen would have turned back without venturing to enter; but she was desperate now. Shemustsee Roger that night, and she resolutely turned the door-knob and went into his presence.
Roger lifted up his head as she came in, and then sprang to his feet, startled by her white face and the change in her appearance since he saw her last. Then she had stood before him in the hall, winding the scarf around his neck, her face glowing with health and happiness and girlish beauty, and her eyes shining upon him like stars. They were very bright now, unnaturally so he thought, and there was a glitter in them which reminded him of the woman in the cars who had left her baby with him.
“Magdalen,” he said, as he went forward to meet her. “I did not think you had been so sick as your looks indicate. Let me lead you to the sofa.”
He laid his hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off and sank into a chair close beside the one he had vacated.
“Don’t touch me yet, Roger, oh Roger,” she began, and Roger’s heart gave a great leap, for never before had she called him thus to his face. “Excuse me for coming here to-night.I know it is not maidenly, perhaps, but I must see you, and tell you it was all a horrible mistake. I did not know what I was doing. Hester talked so much about that loose board in the garret and something hidden under it, that once, a week ago or more, it seems a year to me, I went up to shut a window; my curiosity led me to look under the floor, and I found it, Roger, and read it through, and Frank came and surprised me, and then the secret was no longer mine, and I—oh, Mr. Irving, I wanted to keep it from you, till—till—I cannot explain the whole, and I don’t know at all how it came into your hands. Can you forgive me, Roger? I could have burned it at once or had it burned, but I dared not. Would you have liked me better if I had destroyed it?”
She stopped speaking now, and held her hands toward Roger, who took them in his own and pressed them with a fervor which brought the blood back to her cheeks and made her very beautiful as she sat there before him.
“No, Magda,” he said, “I am glad you did not destroy it. I would rather meet with poverty in its direct form than know that you had done that thing; for it would have come to light some time, and I should have felt that in more ways than one I had lost my little girl.”
He was speaking to her now as he had done when she was a child, and one of his hands was smoothing her soft hair; but he was thinking of Frank, and there was nothing of the lover in his caress, though it made Magdalen’s blood throb and tingle to her finger tips, for she knew he did not hate her as she had feared he might.
“The will should never have been hidden,” he said. “Hester did very wrong. Do you know the particulars?”
“I know nothing except that I found it and you have it,” Magdalen replied, and briefly as possible Roger told her the substance of Hester’s story, smoothing over as much as possible Mrs. Irving’s guilt, because she was to be Magdalen’s mother-in-law.
Before he spoke of the letter left by his father, Magdalenhad taken it from her pocket and held it in her hand. He knew it was the missing letter, but did not offer to take it until his recital was ended, when Magdalen held it to him and said, “This is the letter; it was in the box, and I kept it to give to you myself in case you should ever know of the will. I have not read it. You donotbelieve I would read it,” she added in some alarm, as she saw a questioning look in his face.
Whatever he might have suspected, he knew better now, and he made her lie down upon the sofa, and arranged the cushions for her head, and then, standing with his back to her, opened the letter, and read that message from the dead. And as he read, he grew hard and bitter toward the man who could be so easily swayed by a lying, deceitful woman. He knew Magdalen was watching him, and probably wondering what was in the letter, and knew, too, that she could not fully believe in his mother’s innocence without more proof than his mere assertion. Of all the people living he would rather Magdalen should think well of his mother, and after a moment’s hesitancy he turned to her, and said:
“I want you to see this, Magda. I want you to know why I was disinherited, and then you must hear my poor mother’s letter, and judge yourself if she was guilty.”
He turned the key in the door, so as not to be interrupted, and then came back to Magdalen, who had risen to a sitting posture, and who took the letter from his hand while he adjusted the shade so that the glare of the lamp would not shine directly in her eyes as she read it.