Agatha Webb, Anna Katharine Green [readnow TXT] 📗

seems to have disturbed you. I ought to have attended to it myself. I am quite sure I ought to have attended to it myself.’ ‘The man is dying,’ I muttered. ‘You escaped a sad sight. Be satisfied that you have got the money. Shall I post that letter for you?’ He put it jealously in his pocket, and again I saw him look at me, but he said nothing more except that he repeated that same phrase, ‘I ought to have attended to it myself. Agatha might better have waited.’ Then he went out; but I remained till Philemon came home. My brother and myself were no longer companions; a crime divided us,—a crime he could not suspect, yet which made itself felt in both our hearts and prepared him for the revelation made to him by Mr. Gilchrist some weeks after. That night he came to Sutherlandtown, where I was, and entered my bedroom—not in the fraternal way of the old days, but as an elder enters the presence of a younger. ‘John,’ he said, without any preamble or preparation, ‘where are the five thousand dollars you kept back from Mr. Gilchrist? The memorandum said seven and you delivered to me only two.’ There are death-knells sounded in every life; those words sounded mine, or would have if he had not immediately added: ‘There! I knew you had no stamina. I have taken your crime on myself, who am really to blame for it, since I delegated my duty to another, and you will only have to bear the disgrace of having James Zabel for a brother. In exchange, give me the money; it shall be returned to-morrow. You cannot have disposed of it already. After which, you, or rather I, will be in the eyes of the world only a thief in intent, not in fact.’ Had he only stopped there!—but he went on: ‘Agatha is lost to me, John. In return, be to me the brother I always thought you up to the unhappy day the sin of Achan came between us.’

“YOU were lost to him! It was all I heard. YOU were lost to him! Then, if I acknowledged the crime I should not only take up my own burden of disgrace, but see him restored to his rights over the only woman I had ever loved. The sacrifice was great and my virtue was not equal to it. I gave him back the money, but I did not offer to assume the responsibility of my own crime.”

“And since?”

In what a hard tone she spoke!

“I have had to see Philemon gradually assume the rights James once enjoyed.”

“John,” she asked,—she was under violent self-restraint,—“why do you come now?”

I cast my eyes at Philemon. He was standing, as before, with his eyes turned away. There was discouragement in his attitude, mingled with a certain grand patience. Seeing that he was better able to bear her loss than either you or myself, I said to her very low, “I thought you ought to know the truth before you gave your final word. I am late, but I would have been TOO LATE a week from now.”

Her hand fell from the door, but her eyes remained fixed on my face. Never have I sustained such a look; never will I encounter such another.

“It is too late NOW,” she murmured. “The clergyman has just gone who united me to Philemon.”

The next minute her back was towards me; she had faced her father and her new-made husband.

“Father, you knew this thing!” Keen, sharp, incisive, the words rang out. “I saw it in your face when he began to speak.”

Mr. Gilchrist drooped slightly; lie was a very sick man and the scene had been a trying one.

“If I did,” was his low response, “it was but lately. You were engaged then to Philemon. Why break up this second match?”

She eyed him as if she found it difficult to credit her ears. Such indifference to the claims of innocence was incredible to her. I saw her grand profile quiver, then the slow ebbing from her cheek of every drop of blood indignation had summoned there.

“And you, Philemon?” she suggested, with a somewhat softened aspect. “You committed this wrong ignorantly. Never having heard of this crime, you could not know on what false grounds I had been separated from James.”

I had started to escape, but stopped just beyond the threshold of the door as she uttered these words. Philemon was not as ignorant as she supposed. This was evident from his attitude and expression.

“Agatha,” he began, but at this first word, and before he could clasp the hands held helplessly out before her, she gave a great cry, and staggering back, eyed both her father and himself in a frenzy of indignation that was all the more uncontrollable from the superhuman effort which she had hitherto made to suppress it.

“You too!” she shrieked. “You too! and I have just sworn to love, honour, and obey you! Love YOU! Honour YOU! the unconscionable wretch who—”

But here Mr. Gilchrist rose. Weak, tottering, quivering with something more than anger, he approached his daughter and laid his finger on her lips.

“Be quiet!” he said. “Philemon is not to blame. A month ago he came to me and prayed that as a relief to his mind I would tell him why you had separated yourself from James. He had always thought the match, had fallen through on account of some foolish quarrel or incompatibility, but lately he had feared there was something more than he suspected in this break, something that he should know. So I told him why you had dismissed James; and whether he knew James better than we did, or whether he had seen something in his long acquaintance with these brothers which influenced his judgment, he said at once: ‘This cannot be true of James. It is not in his nature to defraud any man; but John—I might believe it of John. Isn’t there some complication here?’ I had never thought of John, and did not see how John could be mixed up with an affair I had supposed to be a secret between James and myself, but when we came to locate the day, Philemon remembered that on returning to his room that night, he had found John awaiting him. As his room was not five doors from that occupied by Mr. Orr, he was convinced that there was more to this matter than I had suspected. But when he laid the matter before James, he did not deny that John was guilty, but was peremptory in wishing you not to be told before your marriage. He knew that you were engaged to a good man, a man that your father approved, a man that could and would make you happy. He did not want to be the means of a second break, and besides, and this, I think, was at the bottom of the stand he took, for James Zabel was always the proudest man I ever knew,—he never could bear, he said, to give to one like Agatha a name which he knew and she knew was not entirely free from reproach. It would stand in the way of his happiness and ultimately of hers; his brother’s dishonour was his. So while he still loved you, his only prayer was that after you were safely married and Philemon was sure of your affection, he should tell you that the man you once regarded so favourably was not unworthy of that regard. To obey him, Philemon has kept silent, while I— Agatha, what are you doing? Are you mad, my child?”

She looked so for the moment. Tearing off the ring which she had worn but an hour, she flung it on the floor. Then she threw her arms high up over her head and burst out in an awful voice:

“Curses on the father, curses on the husband, who have combined to make me rue the day I was born! The father I cannot disown, but the husband—”

“Hush!”

It was Mr. Gilchrist who dared her fury. Philemon said nothing.

“Hush! he may be the father of your children. Don’t curse—”

But she only towered the higher and her beauty, from being simply majestic, became appalling.

“Children!” she cried. “If ever I bear children to this man, may the blight of Heaven strike them as it has struck me this day. May they die as my hopes have died, or, if they live, may they bruise his heart as mine is bruised, and curse their father as—”

Here I fled the house. I was shaking as if this awful denunciation had fallen on my own head. But before the door closed behind me, a different cry called me back. Mr. Gilchrist was lying lifeless on the floor, and Philemon, the patient, tender Philemon, had taken Agatha to his breast and was soothing her there as if the words she had showered upon him had been blessings instead of the most fearful curses which had ever left the lips of mortal woman.

The next letter was in Agatha’s handwriting. It was dated some months later and was stained and crumpled more than any other in the whole packet. Could Philemon once have told why? Were these blotted lines the result of his tears falling fast upon them, tears of forty years ago, when he and she were young and love had been, doubtful? Was the sheet so yellowed and so seamed because it had been worn on his breast and folded and unfolded so often? Philemon, thou art in thy grave, sleeping sweetly at last by thy deeply idolised one, but these marks of feeling still remain indissolubly connected with the words that gave them birth.

DEAR PHILEMON:

You are gone for a day and a night only, but it seems a lengthened absence to me, meriting a little letter. You have been so good to me, Philemon, ever since that dreadful hour following our marriage, that sometimes—I hardly dare yet to say always—I feel that I am beginning to love you and that God did not deal with me so harshly when He cast me into your arms. Yesterday I tried to tell you this when you almost kissed me at parting. But I was afraid it was a momentary sentimentality and so kept still. But to-day such a warm well-spring of joy rises in my heart when I think that to-morrow the house will be bright again, and that in place of the empty wall opposite me at table I shall see your kindly and forbearing face, I know that the heart I had thought impregnable has begun to yield, and that daily gentleness, and a boundless consideration from one who had excuse for bitter thoughts and recrimination, are doing what all of us thought impossible a few short months ago.

Oh, I am so happy, Philemon, so happy to love where it is now my duty to love; and if it were not for that dreadful memory of a father dying with harsh words in his ears, and the knowledge that you, my husband, yet not my husband, are bearing ever about with you echoes of words that in another nature would have turned tenderness into gall, I could be merry also and sing as I go about the house making it pleasant and comfortable against your speedy return. As it is I can but lay my hand softly on my heart as its beatings grow too impetuous and say, “God bless my absent Philemon and help him to forgive me! I forgive him and love him as I never thought I could.”

That you may see that these are not the weak outpourings of a lonely woman, I will here write that I heard to-day that John and James Zabel