A Mad Marriage, May Agnes Fleming [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

myself; “my

month is up in a week. I’ll never live another with you, my pretty,

mysterious little mistress.”

 

Her eyes lifted suddenly, and fixed themselves on my face as I thought

it. Did she divine my very thoughts? The faint smile that was on her

lips almost made me think so.

 

“Joan,” she said, in her pretty, imperious way, “come here, child; I

want to talk to you. You have been a good and faithful companion in all

these dreary, miserable months, to a most miserable and lonely woman.

Let me thank you now while I think of it, and before we say good-by.”

 

“Good-by!” I repeated, completely taken aback. “Then you are going

away?”

 

“Going away, Joan; high time, is it not? All is over now—there is

nothing to fear or hope any more. One chapter of my life is read and

done with forever. The day after to-morrow I go out into the world once

more, to begin all over again. Up to the present my life has been a most

miserable failure—all but four short months.” She paused suddenly; the

dreary, lovely face lit up with a sort of rapture. “All but four short

months—oh, let me always except that—when he made me his wife, and I

was happy, happy, happy! Joan, if I had died three weeks ago when that

was born, you might have had engraven on my tombstone the epitaph that

was once inscribed over another lost woman; ‘I have been most happy—and

most miserable.’”

 

I listened silently, touched, in spite of myself, by the unspeakable

pathos of her look and tone.

 

“All that is over and done with,” she said, after a little. “I am not to

die, it seems. I am going to begin my life, as I say, all over again.

Nothing that befalls me in the future can be any worse than what lies

behind. It does not fall to the lot of all women to be divorced wives at

the age of eighteen.”

 

She laughed drearily. She sat by the window in her favorite easy-chair,

looking out while she talked, with the rosy after-glow of the sunset

fading away beyond the feathery tamarac trees and the low Canadian

hills.

 

“I feel something as a felon must,” she dreamily went on, half to

herself, half to me, “who has served out his sentence and whose order of

release has come, almost afraid to face the world I have left so long. I

did not come to this house a very good woman, Joan—that, I suppose,

you know; but I quit it a thousand times worse. I came here with a human

heart, at least, a heart that could love and feel remorse; but love and

remorse are at an end. I told him I loved him and had been faithful to

him, and he laughed in my face. Women can forgive a great deal, but they

do not forgive that. If he had only left me—if he had not got that

divorce, I would never have troubled him—never, I swear. I would have

gone away and loved him, and been faithful to him to the end.

Now—now—” she paused, her hands clenched, her yellow eyes gleaming

catlike in the dusk. “Now, I will pay him back, sooner or later, if I

lose my life for it. I will be revenged—that I swear.”

 

I shrank away from her, from the sight of her wicked face, from the

hearing of her wicked words,—the horror I felt, showing, I suppose, in

my face.

 

“It all sounds very horrible, very shocking, does it not?” she asked,

bitterly. “You are one of the pious and proper sort, my good Joan, who

walk stiffly along the smooth-beaten path of propriety, from your cradle

to your grave. Well, I won’t shock you much longer, let that be your

comfort. The day after to-morrow I go, and as a souvenir I mean to leave

that behind me.”

 

She pointed coolly to the crib in the corner.

 

“You—you mean to leave the baby?” I gasped.

 

“I—I mean to leave the baby,” she answered, with a half laugh,

parodying my tone of consternation; “you didn’t suppose I meant to take

it with me, did you? I start in two days to begin a new life, as a

perfectly proper young lady—young lady, you understand, Joan? and you

may be very sure I shall carry no such landmark with me as that of the

old one. Yes, Joan, I shall leave the baby with you, if you will keep

it, with Mrs. Watters if you will not.”

 

“Oh, I will keep the baby and welcome,” I said; “poor little soul!” and

as it lay in its sleep, so small and helpless, so worse than orphaned at

its very birth, I stooped and kissed it, with tears in my eyes.

 

“You are a good woman, Joan,” she said, more softly; “I wish—yes, with

all my soul, I wish I were like you. But it is late in the day for

wishing—what is done is done. You will keep the child?”

 

“I will keep the child.”

 

“I am glad of that. It will be well with you. One day or other I will

come and claim it. Don’t let it die, Joan; it has its work to do in the

world, and must do it. I will pay you, of course, and well. The money I

had with me when I came here is almost gone, but out yonder, beyond your

Canadian woods and river, there is always more for busy brains and

hands. The furniture of these rooms I leave with you to sell or keep, as

you see fit. Wherever I may be, I will give you an address, whence

letters will reach me.”

 

“And you will never return—never come to see your child?” I asked.

 

“Never, Joan,—until I come to claim it for good. Why should I? I don’t

care for it—not a straw—in the way you mean. One day, if we both live,

I will claim it; one day its father shall learn, to his cost and his

sorrow, that he has a child.”

 

That evil light flashed up into her great eyes for an instant, then

slowly died out: but she spoke no more—her folded hands lay idly on her

lap, her moody gaze turned upon the rapidly darkening river and hills.

The rose light had all faded away—the gray, creeping, July twilight was

shrouding all things in a sombre haze. The baby awoke and cried; I had

its bottle ready—I lit the lamp and lifted it. As it lay in my lap,

placidly pulling at its feeding-bottle, its big black eyes fixed

vacantly upon the ceiling, its mother turned from the window and stared

at it silently.

 

With its little white face, and large black eyes, and profusion of long

black hair, it looked more like some elfish changeling in a fairy tale

than a healthy human child.

 

“It’s a hideous little object,” was Mrs. Gordon’s motherly remark, after

that prolonged stare; “but ugly babies they say sometimes grow up

pretty. I want it to be pretty—It must be pretty. Will it, do you

think, Joan? Will it really look like me?”

 

“I think so, madame—very like you. More’s the pity,” I added, under my

breath.

 

“Ah!” still thoughtfully staring at it, “is there any birthmark? The

proverbial strawberry on the arm, or mole on the neck, you know? that

sort of thing?”

 

“It has no mark of any kind, from head to foot.”

 

“What a pity; we must give it one, then. Art must supply the

deficiencies of nature. It shall be done to-morrow.”

 

“What must be done? Mrs. Gordon, you don’t surely mean—”

 

“I mean to mark that child so that I shall know it again, fifty years

from now, if need be. Don’t look so horrified Joan,—I won’t do anything

very dreadful. One marks one’s pocket-handkerchiefs—why not one’s

babies? You may die; she may grow up and run away—oh, yes, she may! If

she takes after her mother, you won’t find it a bed of roses bringing

her up. We may cross paths and never know each other. I want to guard

against that possibility. I want to know my daughter when we meet.”

 

“For pity’s sake, madame, what is it you intend to do?”

 

“You have seen tattooing, Joan, done in India ink? Yes. Well, that is

what I mean. I shall mark her initials on her arm to-morrow, exactly as

I mark them on my handkerchief, and you shall help me.”

 

“No, madame,” I cried out in horror, “I will not. Oh, you poor little

helpless babe! Madame! I beg of you—don’t do this cruel thing.”

 

“Cruel? Silly girl! I shall give it a sleeping cordial, and it will feel

nothing. So you will not help me?”

 

“Most assuredly I will not.”

 

“Very well—Bettine will. And lest your tender feelings should be

lacerated by being in the house, you may go and pay your mother and

sister a visit. By the by, you don’t ask me what its name is to be,

Joan.”

 

“As I am to keep it, though, supposing you don’t kill it to-morrow, I

shall be glad to know, Mrs. Gordon.”

 

“I don’t mean to kill it—never fear; I don’t want it to die. If it had

been a boy, I always meant—in the days that are gone, mind you—to have

called it for its father.”

 

She paused a moment, and turned her face far away. On this point, even

she could feel yet.

 

“It is a girl, unluckily,” she went on again, steadily, “but I will

still call it for him. Gordon Caryll—a pretty name, is it not, Joan? an

odd one too, for a girl. Until I claim it, however, and the proper time

comes, we will sink the Caryll, and call it Kennedy. Kennedy’s a good

old Scotch, respectable name—Gordon Kennedy will do. As I said,

to-morrow I will mark the initials ‘G. C.’ upon its arm; and whatever

happens, years and years from now, if my daughter and I ever meet, I

shall know her always, and in all places, by the mark on her arm.”

 

I could do nothing. My heart sickened and revolted against this cruelty,

but she was mother and mistress, and could do as she pleased. I would

not stay to see the torture; Bettine might help her or not, as she

pleased; I would go.

 

Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I quitted the house, and

spent the day at mother’s. In the gray of the summer evening I returned,

to find the deed done, the babe drugged and still asleep, lying in its

crib, the arm bound up, Bettine excited, Mrs. Gordon composed and cool.

 

“Did it cry?” I asked, kissing the pale little face.

 

“Ah, but yes, mademoiselle!” Bettine cried, in her shrill, high French

voice; “cried fit to break the heart, until madame double drugged it,

and it lay still. The arm—the poor infant—will be sore and inflamed

for many a day to come. It is a heart of stone. Mam’selle Jeanne—the

pretty little madame.”

 

That was our last evening in Saltmarsh—a long, quiet, lonesome evening

enough. I distrusted her—in some way I feared and disliked her; and yet

I felt a strange sort of compassion for the quiet little creature,

sitting there so utterly desolated in her youth and beauty—wrecked and

adrift on the world at eighteen.

 

She sat in her old place by the window so still—so still—the fair face

gleaming like marble in the dusk, the dark, mournful eyes fixed on the

creeping darkness shrouding the fair Canadian river and landscape. It

all ended to-night—the peace,