The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, Anna Katharine Green [mini ebook reader TXT] 📗

wall behind him. They seemed alive. Both of them seemed alive, and as he saw them thus in conjunction, the sweet, pure countenance of the child he had instinctively mourned, peering at him over his guilty shoulder—the sweat started on his forehead and he uttered a great cry. Then he stood still, swaying from side to side, the eyes starting from his head in a horror transcending all that had gone before.

"Take him away!" she cried. "Out of the room! Let him remain anywhere but here. I pray you; I entreat."

But he was not to be moved.

"Ermentrude," he whispered; "they say her name was Duclos. She gave her name as Willetts. What was her name? You know the truth and can tell me."

XXXIII AGAIN THE CUCKOO-CLOCK

Then to the wonder and admiration of all, this extraordinary woman showed her full strength and the inexhaustible power she possessed over her own emotions. With a smile piteous in its triumph over a suffering the depths of which they were just beginning to sound, she held his gaze in hers and quietly said:

"You have driven me to the wall, Carleton. If I answer, nothing remains to us of hope or honor; nothing upon which to stay our souls but a consciousness of truth. Shall we let all go and meet our fate as people should who stand on a desolate shore and see the whole world roll away from before them?"

"What was her name?"

At his look, at this repetition of his question, she straightened up, and addressed herself to Mr. Gryce.

"You were astonished and regarded me curiously when at the sound of that foolish little clock I entered this room. That little clock means everything to me, gentlemen." Here she surveyed them one after the other with her proud and candid eye. "It is the one witness I have—is it not, Carleton?" she asked, turning quickly upon him. "You have not failed me in this?"

He shook his head.

"A witness to what I am still ready to ignore, if such is your will, Carleton."

Terror! terror far beyond anything they had seen in him yet, paled his cheek and made his face almost unrecognizable; but he could still speak, and in the murmur he let fall she heard no word of protest.

"May I ask one of you to take down that clock?"

In a few minutes it lay on the table to which she had pointed. Mr. Gryce who had at that moment in his pocket a copy of the inscription pasted on its back, expected her to turn it over and show them the token of Mr. Roberts' and her united initials.

But it was not this she had in mind. Though she took up the clock, she did not turn it round, only looked at it steadily, her trembling lips and a tear—the first they had seen—testifying to the rush of old memories which this simple little object brought back to her long suffering heart. Then she laid it down again and seemed to hesitate.

"I want to get at the works inside," she appealed to them with a helpless accent. "Can you tear off the back? That would be the quickest way. But no, I know a quicker," and lifting the clock again she turned it upside down and shook it.

They heard—what did they hear? No one could say, but when she again reversed it, there fell out upon the table and rolled to the floor a small gold circlet. Lifting it, Mr. Gryce held it out to her. Taking it, she carried it over to the District Attorney and placed it in his hand.

"Read the inscription inside."

He did so, and looking quickly up, said:

"This is a wedding ring! Yours! You believe yourself to have been married to him."

"I was married to him in Switzerland. The marriage was legal; he knows it, he acknowledges it, or why should he keep this ring. I have endured seeing him put another woman in my place. I have kept silence for years; but when he asks the right name of the child shot down in the museum, and asks it in a way which compels answer, then I must make known my rightful claims. For that child was not only mine, but his; born after he left me, and reared without his knowledge, first in this country and then in France."

And breaking down now utterly, she fell on her knees sobbing out her soul at the feet of him from whose honor she had torn the last poor, pitiful shred.

As for him, he said nothing; even his lips refused the smallest cry. Only his hand which had hung at his side went to his heart; and thus he stood swaying—swaying, till he finally fell forward into the arms she suddenly threw out to receive him.

"Carleton! Carleton!" she wailed, searching for consciousness in his fast glazing eye. "It was to show you your child that I made the appointment at the museum. Not for myself. Oh, not for myself, but for your sake, that you might have——"

Useless; all useless.

He was dead.

Would she have had it otherwise? Would any of them? When they were quite sure of the fact, she placed the ring in his still warm hand; then she solemnly put it on her finger, and turning, faced them all.

"Do not blame me too much for this final blow I gave him. He had already seen the truth in that mirror over there. His face—look at it and then at this picture of her taken after death, and see the resemblance! It is showing plainer every minute. It was the something which had worried and eluded him. Nothing could have kept back the truth from him after that one glimpse he caught of himself and her in the mirror. I loved him. Mine is the grief; you will let me stay here with him to-night. To-morrow I will answer all questions."

XXXIV THE BUD—THEN THE DEADLY FLOWER

You who have read thus far will care little for the legalities which followed the events just related, but you may wish to know to a fuller extent some of the facts in Ermentrude Taylor's life which led to this tragic end of all her hopes.

Her story is twofold, the portion connecting her with Carleton Roberts being entirely dissociated from that which made her the debtor of Antoinette Duclos. Let me tell the latter first, as it preceded the other, and tell it in episodes.

Two girls stood at one end of a long walk of immemorial yews. At the other could be seen the advancing figure of a man, young, alert, English-clad but unmistakably foreign. They were school girls and bosom friends; he their instructor in French; the walk one attached to a well-known seminary. When they had entered this walk, it had been empty. Now it held for one of them—and possibly for the other, too—a world of joy and promise;—the world of seventeen. Innocent and unthinking, neither of them had known her own heart, much less that of her fellow. But when in face of that approach, eye met eye with an askance look of eager question, revelation came, crimsoning the cheeks of both, and marking an epoch in either life.

Noble of heart and tender each toward the other, they were yet human. Arm fell from arm, and with an equally spontaneous movement, they turned to search each the other's countenance, not for betrayal,—for that had already been made—but for those physical charms or marks of mental superiority which might attract the eye or win the heart of a man of the ideality of this one.

Alas! these gifts, for gifts they are, were much too unequally distributed between these two to render the balance at all even.

Ermentrude was handsome; Antoinette was not.

Ermentrude had besides, what even without beauty would have made her conspicuous to the eye, the figure of a goddess and the air of a queen. But Antoinette was small and had to feel secure and in a happy mood to show the excellence of her mind and the airy quality of her wit.

Then, Ermentrude had money and could dress, while Antoinette, who was dependent upon an English uncle for everything she possessed, wore clothes so plain that but for their exquisite neatness, one would never dream that she came from French ancestry, and that ancestry noble.

Yes, she had that advantage; rank was hers, but not the graces which should accompany it. More than that, she had nothing with which to support it. Better be of the yeoman class like Ermentrude, and smile like a duchess granting favors. Or so she thought, poor girl, as her meek regard passed from the friend whose attractions she had thus acknowledged to the man whose approbation would make a goddess of her too.

He was coming—not with his usual indifferent swing, but eagerly, joyously, as though this moment meant something to him too. She knew it did. Small memories rushing upon her, made no doubt of that. But why? Because of Ermentrude or because of herself? Alas! she could recall nothing which would answer that. They were much together; he had scarcely ever seen them separate. It might be either——Hardly alive from suspense, she watched him coming—coming. In a moment he would be upon them. On which would his eyes linger?

That would tell the tale.

In an anguish of ungovernable shyness, she slipped behind the ample figure of her friend till only her fluttering skirt betrayed her presence. Perhaps she was saved something by this move; perhaps not. She did not see the beam of joy sparkling in his eye as he greeted Ermentrude; but she could not but mark the heaviness of his step as he passed them by and wandered away into the shadows.

And that she understood. Ermentrude had not smiled upon him. To him, the moment had brought pain.

It was enough. Now she knew.

But why had not Ermentrude smiled?

A dormitory lighted only by the moon! Two beds close together; in one a form of noble proportions, and in the other the meagre figure of a girl almost buried from sight among pillows and huddled-up blankets. Both are quiet save for an occasional shudder which shakes the bed of the latter. Ermentrude lies like the dead, though the moonlight falls full upon her face blanching it to the aspect of marble. Even her lashes rest moveless on her cheek.

But she is not sleeping; she is listening—listening to the sobs, almost inaudible, which now and then escape from the beloved one at her side. As they grow fainter and fainter and gradually die away altogether till stillness reigns through the whole dormitory, she rouses and bending forward on her elbow, looks long and lovingly at the wet brow of her sleeping mate. She then sinks back again into rigidity, with a low moan, ending in the whispered words:

"He does not love,—not yet. A slight thing will turn him. Did I not see him glance back twice, and both times at her? The look with which she greeted him was so wonderful."

A village street in Britanny; a parish church in the distance; two women bidding each other farewell amid a group of wedding-guests, gay as the heavens are blue.

"Au revoir!" was the whisper breathed by the bride into the ear of the other. "Au revoir, my Ermentrude. May you have a happy year in Switzerland!"

"Au revoir! little Madame. You will be happy I know in those United States to which you are going."

And the tears stood in the eyes of both.

"You will write?"

"I will write."

But the bride did not seem quite satisfied. Glancing about and finding her young husband busy with his adieux, she drew her friend apart and softly murmured:

"There is something I must say,—something I must know, before the sea divides us. You remember the day we all left school and you went home and I came to Britanny? Ermentrude, Achille tells me that on that day he sought the whole house over for you till he came upon you in one of the classrooms; and that you whom I had sometimes seen so sad were very gay and told him between laughing and crying that you were bidding a solemn farewell to all the nooks and corners of the old seminary, because your fiancé awaited you at home, and there would be no coming back."

"I meant my music."

"He did not know that, Ermentrude," and here she laid her hands upon the other's shoulders, drawing back as she did so to look earnestly up into her face. "Was that done for me?"

They were too near for anything but the truth to pass from eye to eye. Ermentrude tried to laugh and utter a quick No, no! but the little bride was not deceived. Again upon her face