Democratic Sentinel, Volume 21, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1897 — LIVING IT DOWN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LIVING IT DOWN

By "Rita"

CHAPTER XXVI. It might have been a long or short time before Sir Ralph obeyed that message. I drew the curtain aside and looked at his face; but even as I looked a sense of something wanting in it —t>f horror at some awful, subtle change in its every line, in its rigid calm, in its sternly averted gaze, came over me and stilled the words on my lips—the cry of my aching heart. “You sent for me?” he said, tn a voice as unlike his own as was that altered face. “Yes,” I said faintly. “Won’t you—<von’t you come a little nearer?” He drew a few steps nearer to the bed; but he did not touch my hand, nor say he was sorry for my illness or my pain. “I sent for you,” I said, “because they have all been deceiving me. Something dreadful has happened. I —l want to know what it is.” “You want to know?” he said, and there was so strange a meaning in his voice that it seemed to freeze me with a new and terrible fear. “I think it is you who ought to supply the information.” “Is be dead?” 1 gasped. “Yes,” he said, stonily. “How?” I whispered, shivering a little as I turned my eyes away from the iron sternness of his face. “They say he shot himself.” “He did not!’ I almost screamed. “I am sure he did not!” He was perfectly silent. “Can't you speak to me?” I cried at last. “Can’t you say how it was? Where was he found?” “By the old summer house in the plantation.” “And by whom?” I gasped faintly. “By me,” he answered. Then I looked up and met his eyes. Heaven knows what ho saw in mine of horror and affright; but the fiery, bloodshot glance that answered them seemed to say, he, at least, frit no regret for this tragic end to that young life. My eyes fell on his hand as it lay on the white coverlet. It seemed to me that the stain of blood must surely be there. I shuddered, and grew sick with fear. “Why don’t you go on?” I said. “W’hy don't you tell me the whole thing? Why do you make me drag it from you piecemeal?”

“What more do you wish to hear?” he asked icily. “Do you wish me to lie to you as you have lied to yourself? To tell a pretty fable about accidents? The sound of your voice sickens me. It is false as—as its utterances. Do you think,” with rising passion leaping into face and voice, “that I don’t know he was your lover? —that I am ignorant of how you left the house that night to mefet him? Do you think to trick me still with a shallow pretense of fidelity—the fidelity of a wife whose heart is another’s? It Is too late for these things. I was blind a long, long time; but a trust once broken is hard to mend, and mine has gone forever.” “You are unjust,” I said weakly. “If you knew all, you would not condemn — you would pity me.” “Perhaps I do pity you,” he said with a heavy sigh. “But your folly has wrecked two lives, and cost one. I—l can’t even find pity now. From first to last I have been tricked and deceived. No woman who was innocent would have received such a letter as—as this,” taking that fatal missive from his breast, “and answered it in person. Facts are facts —you can’t deny them. I forbade Yorke Ferrers to cross the threshold of my house. In defiance of your knowledge of that fact —you meet him slyly—treacherously—as only a shameless woman would meet an equally shameless man. If justice has overtaken him, he has but suffered what he deserves. I have told myself a thousand times that I would rather have his end than the misery and shame that are my portion henceforward.” His voice ceased.

I turned away and buried my face in the pillows. I think I only longed to shut out sight, hearing, consciousness of life. “I am a failure!” I kept repeating to myself over and over again; “a dismal, hopeless failure!” Mechanically I drew one hand away, end held it up and looked at it; The sleeve fell back. The slender wrist looked almost transparent. The small, fine bones showed ' themselves only too plainly now. I let the hand drop again. I was startled when, in hoarse and shaken tones, I heard Sir Ralph say: “Why do you do that?” I half turned my head then. “I was only wondering,” I said, “how much more I can bear, and live. Not very much, I think.” “Is it so hard for you?” he cried passionately. “Then think what it must be for me. You have made my life loathsome as a sin! You have tricked me to a crime which I can’t regret, however deep the sting of its remorse!” “Crime!” I gasped faintly. My eyes met his; the look in them appalled me. So may a man look who has given and lost his all! “You are too weak to talk,” he said abruptly; “and—and it can do no good now!” Then his voice softened. “You must try and get some rest,” he said. ‘‘The inquest is to be to-morrow. I—l am afraid they’ll want your deposition.” “Mine?” I cried, almost springing up In bed. “Why mine? I can tell them nothing. I—l know nothing. I was at home when I heard that shot!’ His face blanched. He walked to the door, then suddenly recrosßed the room, and came back to my side. “What shall I do with this?” he said hoarsely, and held towards me the torn fragments of that fatal letter. Then, for the first time, the full horror of the situation flashed across me. The scandal, the opprobrium, the disgrace! I clasped my hands imploringly. “Burn it!” I said in a whisper. He looked at me —at the letter—hesitated, then walked over to the fire and threw it in. The flames caught it; for a moment it writhed and quivered like a sentient thing, then turned into dull gray ashes. Once more he came towards me. “It was for your sake," he said, low, and stern, and cold again. “It may spare sou one pang more. But its destruction bakes no difference in my belief.” He moved away again. This time I Stode no effort to atay him. My eyes

followed him mechanically. He opened the door, closed it; the room was empty once more. “He is very tall,” I said to myself in a strange sort of whisper. It was such a foolish remark—such an altogether inappropriate remark after such a scene, that I was less startled by it than by the weak little laugh that left my lips. “You must not laugh,” I said again. “No one laughs when—when death is in the house. Death! Death! Whose death?” Then a shriek burst from me that seemed to curdle the blood in my own veins as I heard it; but it was so madly exhilarating, so full of wild, thrilling, inexplicable relief, that I found myself repeating it agait and again, and yet again. Then suddenly something in my brain seemed to snap, and all the space around grew peopled with strange forms, and all the air seemed full of voices that shrieked and wailed in fiendish echo of my own; and, fighting wildly, desperately with the forms, and deafened by the voices, I lost myself in the chaos of a wild and awful dream, from which I tried in vain to escape.

CHAPTER XXVII. [Extracts from a journal of Sir Ralph Ferrers, kept for two years succeeding the mysterious death of his nephew, Yorke Ferrers.] It is all over at last, that hateful business of the inquest Heaven forgive me if I have kept anything back that would have thrown light upon this tragedy! And now let me go back to that night, and put down, for my own satisfaction, what I have not breathed, and think I never shall dare to breathe, to a living soul. On arriving at Monk’s Hall that fatal evening, I, as before stated, went to Joan’s boudoir. I had left her ill. I had parted from her coldly, and I wished to know how she was. The child was there alone, but left to seek her Bister. I went over to tho fire, and to the chair in which she had been seated. Close beside it lay a paper, as if dropped in haste. I took it up. I knew the writing only too well. It was that of Yorke. The letter was in two halves. I thought she must have intended to throw it into the fire, and failed to notice that it had fallen short of the mark. I read it—every word. Of what did I think as I took my way blindly in the direction of the ruined summer house? Of what does a man think when the hand he loves beet stabs him relentlessly to the heart? Who would not prefer the death of the creature he loves to her lasting, eternal dishonor—who, at least, that has loved? Tho blinding mist came down upon me; the darkness set itself like a foe between me and the path I sought. In the stifling atmosphere I grew confused; the suffering which enveloped me drove reason into chaos, and left but one thought whirling and repeating itself in my brain: “If I find them together, I will kill him! I will kill him!” Suddenly I heard a shot. It seemed so close that for a second I almost fancied it had been aimed at myself. I stood as if turned to stone, listening—listening with every faculty concentrated in the act —for any sound or cry. There was a faint rustle of the close-growing underwood—so faint, so far off, that It might have been made by the wind, or the passage of some sacred bird, frightened from its nest. That was all. I collected my startled energies. I rushed on. I reached the open space where the old summer house stood rotting in solitude and decay. The mist was less heavy here; 1 went forward a few paces, listening at intervals. There was absolute silence. The newspaper has stated most of these facts, and the further course action I pursued. I need not repeat them at length. But the newspapers know nothing of the one thing I discovered that night. Only a trifling thing, yet a thing that has been immortalized by the greatest tragedy of the world’s greatest genius —a woman’s handkerchief; a little gossamer, filmy thing, and in one corner embroidered with the letter “J.” He was dead—quite dead. He lay there alone in that awful misty solitude; he lay •there as I had turned him, face upwards to the silent sky, whose faint moonbeams strove to pierce the clouds; dumb, sightless, now and forever; helpless as my own accusation, powerless as my promised revenge.

She had been here. That I knew. Perhaps all had been arranged for their flight; perhaps they had parted, thinking to meet ere many hours had passed, and then part never again on this side of heaven. Perhaps—but why pursue conjecture further? He was beyond the reach of my vengeance—of her love. As I thought of her, I knew she must be near. Had she heard the shot? Would she return? I left him there and hurried back. My feet seemed winged. I reached the terrace, and was rushing -round to the door, when I stumbled against something—a woman’s prostrate figure. The shudder of dread that shook me told me who it was even before the faint light reached her face. I bore her in. She was mine—guilty or guiltless, shameful or pore, she was mine; the bearer of my name, the holder of my honor, the creature I had loved, and reverenced, and worshiped, and who had fooled me with such tricks as drive a man mad. She was mine, and I must try and shield her from the consequences of her folly and her weakness. It is all over now. No suspicions have been awakened, no question raised; accident 'has received the blame, and to accident must this tragedy be attributed. He finds his place in the resting place of the Ferrerses, and I follow in the hideous mockery of woe, and hear the dust fall dull and heavy on the coffin lid, and go homewards again with my secret in my breast, knowing that, neither for honor, nor for shame, nor for pity, will I unveil that secret or whisper it to living soul. They tell me she is mad. The shock of recent events following her brief and terrible illness, has been too much for her brain. Doctors come, the cleverest, the greatest, but they give me little hope. I listen to them, one and all. I listen and say to myself, “At least she will be spared the suffering that is my portion.” The dreary days come and go. The place grows more hateful with each. Once Nettie Croft comes over to see Joan, but the ordeal is too terrible to be repeated. I deny myself to her. I cannot see her, knowing what I know, and I am not sure whether the sight of her grief might not waken in me a similar weakness. The child comes and sits with me sometimes. We do not often speak, but she understands me, I think, and her silent sympathy is the only thing that soothes my restlessness, or calms the fever of my torturing thoughts. I know only one thing will give me relief —absence—and I at last make up my mind to go abroad again—not in any beaten track, not to haunts of men and fashion. No; to the wildest solitudes, to the roughest and most perilous of wanderings. There is nothing to keep me. Yorke’s debts are

paid, his effects have been sent to me—boxes of papers and letters, which I lack courage to examine, fearing to find there added confirmation of .my dishonor and hers. I call my lawyer in. I make all possible arrangements for my absence, or my death. I say to him that a man of my years must provide for all accidents. Yorke’s papers I inclose in a large packet, and seal, with instructions that they are to be burned unread in case of anything happening to me. These, with my will, and all the necessary authority for acting in my absence, I give into the lawyer’s charge. Darby will remain here under the care of a governess I have engaged for her. Joan has two attendants besides her faith- ' ful maid. Mrs. Birket, old and feeble as she is, promises to do her best to look after the household, for nothing will induce me to engage another strange housekeeper. And so, feeling I have done all I can do, I make up my mind to leave tie place for a year—perhaps more. One ordeal remains. To see my wife, to take farewell of that poor wreck, which is all that remains of my once bright, sweetfaced Joan. She was lying on the couch in her dressing room —that and the adjoining bedchamber are the only rooms she uses. Beside the couch was a little chair— Darby’s little chair. I saw her hand go out to it as if searching for something—a look of pain came over her white face. “Do you know me?” I asked her gently. She put her hand to her forehead. Her large sad eyes looked at me in curious wonder. “He was very cruel!” she said. “And it was too hard for me. I said it was too hard for me!” “She always says that,” said Darby plaintively. “I don’t know what ehe means. You were never hard to her, were you?” “I—l hope not,” I said brokenly. “Heaven knows I never meant to be.” “For she you,” the child went on, “very—very much. She has told me that so often. Sometimes I think you did not know, and,” mournfully, “she was sometimes so very sad. I think she was afraid of you a little.” I looked back at the couch once more. I saw the weak arms close around the little figure. I heard the murmured words, “My little one,” and saw the eyes, dull no longer, gaze with one long, yearning look. I thought I had grown hard, I thought nothing could touch me now, but that sight touched me,* and wrung my very soul. I could have thrown myself down and wept as weakly As a woman. I turned abruptly from them, and groped my way with dim eyes back to my own room, and in my heart thrilled one exceed* ing bitter cry: “My wife—oh, my wife!” (To be continued.)-