The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green [chrysanthemum read aloud TXT] 📗

before I could reply to her, before Mr. Clavering himself could murmur a word, the guilty wretch before her had started to his feet.

“Don’t you know? then I will tell you. It is because these gentlemen, chivalrous and honorable as they consider themselves, think that you, the beauty and the Sybarite, committed with your own white hand the deed of blood which has brought you freedom and fortune. Yes, yes, this man”—turning and pointing at me—“friend as he has made himself out to be, kindly and honorable as you have doubtless believed him, but who in every look he has bestowed upon you, every word he has uttered in your hearing during all these four horrible weeks, has been weaving a cord for your neck—thinks you the assassin of your uncle, unknowing that a man stood at your side ready to sweep half the world from your path if that same white hand rose in bidding. That I——”

“You?” Ah! now she could see him: now she could hear him!

“Yes,” clutching her robe again as she hastily recoiled; “didn’t you know it? When in that dreadful hour of your rejection by your uncle, you cried aloud for some one to help you, didn’t you know——”

“Don’t!” she shrieked, bursting from him with a look of unspeakable horror. “Don’t say that! Oh!” she gasped, “is the mad cry of a stricken woman for aid and sympathy the call for a murderer?” And turning away in horror, she moaned: “Who that ever looks at me now will forget that a man—such a man!—dared to think that, because I was in mortal perplexity, I would accept the murder of my best friend as a relief from it!” Her horror was unbounded. “Oh, what a chastisement for folly!” she murmured. “What a punishment for the love of money which has always been my curse!”

Henry Clavering could no longer restrain himself, leaping to her side, he bent over her. “Was it nothing but folly, Mary? Are you guiltless of any deeper wrong? Is there no link of complicity between you two? Have you nothing on your soul but an inordinate desire to preserve your place in your uncle’s will, even at the risk of breaking my heart and wronging your noble cousin? Are you innocent in this matter? Tell me!” placing his hand on her head, he pressed it slowly back and gazed into her eyes; then, without a word, took her to his breast and looked calmly around him.

“She is innocent!” said he.

It was the uplifting of a stifling pall. No one in the room, unless it was the wretched criminal shivering before us, but felt a sudden influx of hope. Even Mary’s own countenance caught a glow. “Oh!” she whispered, withdrawing from his arms to look better into his face, “and is this the man I have trifled with, injured, and tortured, till the very name of Mary Leavenworth might well make him shudder? Is this he whom I married in a fit of caprice, only to forsake and deny? Henry, do you declare me innocent in face of all you have seen and heard; in face of that moaning, chattering wretch before us, and my own quaking flesh and evident terror; with the remembrance on your heart and in your mind of the letter I wrote you the morning after the murder, in which I prayed you to keep away from me, as I was in such deadly danger the least hint given to the world that I had a secret to conceal would destroy me? Do you, can you, will you, declare me innocent before God and the world?”

“I do,” said he.

A light such as had never visited her face before passed slowly over it. “Then God forgive me the wrong I have done this noble heart, for I can never forgive myself! Wait!” said she, as he opened his lips. “Before I accept any further tokens of your generous confidence, let me show you what I am. You shall know the worst of the woman you have taken to your heart. Mr. Raymond,” she cried, turning towards me for the first time, “in those days when, with such an earnest desire for my welfare (you see I do not believe this man’s insinuations), you sought to induce me to speak out and tell all I knew concerning this dreadful deed, I did not do it because of my selfish fears. I knew the case looked dark against me. Eleanore had told me so. Eleanore herself—and it was the keenest pang I had to endure—believed me guilty. She had her reasons. She knew first, from the directed envelope she had found lying underneath my uncle’s dead body on the library table, that he had been engaged at the moment of death in summoning his lawyer to make that change in his will which would transfer my claims to her; secondly, that notwithstanding my denial of the same, I had been down to his room the night before, for she had heard my door open and my dress rustle as I passed out. But that was not all; the key that every one felt to be a positive proof of guilt wherever found, had been picked up by her from the floor of my room; the letter written by Mr. Clavering to my uncle was found in my fire; and the handkerchief which she had seen me take from the basket of clean clothes, was produced at the inquest stained with pistol grease. I could not account for these things. A web seemed tangled about my feet. I could not stir without encountering some new toil. I knew I was innocent; but if I failed to satisfy my cousin of this, how could I hope to convince the general public, if once called upon to do so. Worse still, if Eleanore, with every apparent motive for desiring long life to our uncle, was held in such suspicion because of a few circumstantial evidences against her, what would I not have to fear if these evidences were turned against me, the heiress! The tone and manner of the juryman at the inquest that asked who would be most benefited by my uncle’s will showed but too plainly. When, therefore, Eleanore, true to her heart’s generous instincts, closed her lips and refused to speak when speech would have been my ruin, I let her do it, justifying myself with the thought that she had deemed me capable of crime, and so must bear the consequences. Nor, when I saw how dreadful these were likely to prove, did I relent. Fear of the ignominy, suspense, and danger which confession would entail sealed my lips. Only once did I hesitate. That was when, in the last conversation we had, I saw that, notwithstanding appearances, you believed in Eleanore’s innocence, and the thought crossed me you might be induced to believe in mine if I threw myself upon your mercy. But just then Mr. Clavering came; and as in a flash I seemed to realize what my future life would be, stained by suspicion, and, instead of yielding to my impulse, went so far in the other direction as to threaten Mr. Clavering with a denial of our marriage if he approached me again till all danger was over.

“Yes, he will tell you that was my welcome to him when, with heart and brain racked by long suspense, he came to my door for one word of assurance that the peril I was in was not of my own making. That was the greeting I gave him after a year of silence every moment of which was torture to him. But he forgives me; I see it in his eyes; I hear it in his accents; and you—oh, if in the long years to come you can forget what I have made Eleanore suffer by my selfish fears; if with the shadow of her wrong before you, you can by the grace of some sweet hope think a little less hardly of me, do. As for this man—torture could not be worse to me than this standing with him in the same room—let him come forward and declare if I by look or word have given him reason to