The Law and the Lady

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"I hear you have brought something for me?" I said. "Won't you
sit down?"

She handed me a letter--without answering and without taking a
chair. I opened the envelope. The letter inside was written by
Miserrimus Dexter. It contained these lines:

"Try to pity me, if you have any pity left for a miserable man;
I have bitterly expiated the madness of a moment. If you could
see me--even you would own that my punishment has been heavy
enough. For God's sake, don't abandon me! I was beside myself
when I let the feeling that you have awakened in me get the
better of my control. It shall never show itself again; it shall
be a secret that dies with me. Can I expect you to believe this?
No. I won't ask you to believe me; I won't ask you to trust me in
the future. If you ever consent to see me again, let it be in the
presence of any third person whom you may appoint to protect you.
I deserve that--I will submit to it; I will wait till time has
composed your angry feeling against me. All I ask now is leav e
to hope. Say to Ariel, 'I forgive him; and one day I will let him
see me again.' She will remember it, for love of me. If you send
her back without a message, you send me to the mad-house. Ask
her, if you don't believe me.

"MISERRIMUS DEXTER."

I finished the strange letter, and looked at Ariel.

She stood with her eyes on the floor, and held out to me the
thick walking-stick which she carried in her hand.

"Take the stick" were the first words she said to me.

"Why am I to take it?" I asked.

She struggled a little with her sluggishly working mind, and
slowly put her thoughts into words.

"You're angry with the Master," she said. "Take it out on Me.
Here's the stick. Beat me."

"Beat you!" I exclaimed.

"My back's broad," said the poor creature. "I won't make a row.
I'll bear it. Drat you, take the stick! Don't vex _him._ Whack it
out on my back. Beat _me._"

She roughly forced the stick into my hand; she turned her poor
shapeless shoulders to me; waiting for the blow. It was at once
dreadful and touching to see her. The tears rose in my eyes. I
tried, gently and patiently, to reason with her. Quite useless!
The idea of taking the Master's punishment on herself was the one
idea in her mind. "Don't vex _him,_" she repeated. "Beat _me._"

"What do you mean by 'vexing him'?" I asked.

She tried to explain, and failed to find the words. She showed me
by imitation, as a savage might have shown me, what she meant.
Striding to the fire-place, she crouched on the rug, and looked
into the fire with a horrible vacant stare. Then she clasped her
hands over her forehead, and rocked slowly to and fro, still
staring into the fire. "There's how he sits!" she said, with a
sudden burst of speech. "Hours on hours, there's how he sits!
Notices nobody. Cries about _you._"

The picture she presented recalled to my memory the Report of
Dexter's health, and the doctor's plain warning of peril waiting
for him in the future.

Even if I could have resisted Ariel, I must have yielded to the
vague dread of consequences which now shook me in secret.

"Don't do that!" I cried. She was still rocking herself in
imitation of the "Master," and still staring into the fire with
her hands to her head. "Get up, pray! I am not angry with him
now. I forgive him."

She rose on her hands and knees, and waited, looking up intently
into my face. In that attitude--more like a dog than a human
being--she repeated her customary petition when she wanted to fix
words that interested her in her mind.

"Say it again!"

I did as she bade me. She was not satisfied.

"Say it as it is in the letter," she went on. "Say it as the
Master said it to Me."

I looked back at the letter, and repeated the form of message
contained in the latter part of it, word for word:

"I forgive him; and one day I will let him see me again."

She sprang to her feet at a bound. For the first time since she
had entered the room her dull face began to break slowly into
light and life.

"That's it!" she cried. "Hear if I can say it, too; hear if I've
got it by heart."

Teaching her exactly as I should have taught a child, I slowly
fastened the message, word by word, on her mind.

"Now rest yourself," I said; "and let me give you something to
eat and drink after your long walk."

I might as well have spoken to one of the chairs. She snatched up
her stick from the floor, and burst out with a hoarse shout of
joy. "I've got it by heart!" she cried. "This will cool the
Master's head! Hooray!" She dashed out into the passage like a
wild animal escaping from its cage. I was just in time to see her
tear open the garden gate, and set forth on her walk back at a
pace which made it hopeless to attempt to follow and stop her.

I returned to the sitting-room, pondering on a question which has
perplexed wiser heads than mine. Could a man who was hopelessly
and entirely wicked have inspired such devoted attachment to him
as Dexter had inspired in the faithful woman who had just left
me? in the rough gardener who had carried him out so gently on
the previous night? Who can decide? The greatest scoundrel living
always has a friend--in a woman or a dog.

I sat down again at my desk, and made another attempt to write to
Mr. Playmore.

Recalling, for the purpose of my letter, all that Miserrimus
Dexter had said to me, my memory dwelt with special interest on
the strange outbreak of feeling which had led him to betray the
secret of his infatuation for Eustace's first wife. I saw again
the ghastly scene in the death-chamber--the deformed creature
crying over the corpse in the stillness of the first dark hours
of the new day. The horrible picture took a strange hold on my
mind. I arose, and walked up and down, and tried to turn my
thoughts some other way. It was not to be done: the scene was too
familiar to me to be easily dismissed. I had myself visited the
room and looked at the bed. I had myself walked in the corridor
which Dexter had crossed on his way to take his last leave of
her.

The corridor? I stopped. My thoughts suddenly took a new
direction, uninfluenced by any effort of my will.

What other association besides the association with Dexter did I
connect with the corridor? Was it something I had seen during my
visit to Gleninch? No. Was it something I had read? I snatched up
the Report of the Trial to see. It opened at a page which
contained the nurse's evidence. I read the evidence through
again, without recovering the lost remembrance until I came to
these lines close at the end:

"Before bed-time I went upstairs to prepare the remains of the
deceased lady for the coffin. The room in which she lay was
locked; the door leading into Mr. Macallan's room being secured,
as well as the door leading into the corridor. The keys had been
taken away by Mr. Gale. Two of the men-servants were posted
outside the bedroom to keep watch. They were to be relieved at
four in the morning--that was all they could tell me."

There was my lost association with the corridor! There was what
I ought to have remembered when Miserrimus Dexter was telling me
of his visit to the dead!

How had he got into the bedroom--the doors being locked, and the
keys being taken away by Mr. Gale? There was but one of the
locked doors of which Mr. Gale had not got the key--the door of
communication between the study and the bedroom. The key was
missing from this. Had it been stolen? And was Dexter the thief?
He might have passed by the men on the watch while they were
asleep, or he might have crossed the corridor in an unguarded
interval while the men were being relieved. But how could he have
got into the bedchamber except by way of the locked study door?
He _must_ have had the key! And he _must_ have secreted it weeks
before Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death! When the nurse first
arrived at Gleninch, on the seventh of the month, her evidence
declared the key of the door of communication to be then missing.

To what conclusion did these considerations and discoveries
point? Had Miserrimus Dexter, in a moment of ungovernable
agitation, unconsciously placed the clew in my hands? Was the
pivot on which turned the whole mystery of the poisoning at
Gleninch the missing key?

I went back for the third time to my desk. The one person who
might be trusted to find the answer to those questions was Mr.
Playmore. I wrote him a full and careful account of all that had
happened; I begged him to forgive and forget my ungracious
reception of the advice which he had so kindly offered to me; and
I promised beforehand to do nothing without first consulting his
opinion in the new emergency which now confronted me.

The day was fine for the time of year; and by way of getting a
little wholesome exercise after the surprises and occupations of
the morning, I took my letter to Mr. Playmore to the post.

Returning to the villa, I was informed that another visitor was
waiting to see me: a civilized visitor this time, who had given
her name. My mother-in-law--Mrs. Macallan.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

AT THE BEDSIDE.

BEFORE she had uttered a word, I saw in my mother-in-law's face
that she brought bad news.

"Eustace?" I said.

She answered me by a look.

"Let me he ar it at once!" I cried. "I can bear anything but
suspense."

Mrs. Macallan lifted her hand, and showed me a telegraphic
dispatch which she had hitherto kept concealed in the folds of
her dress.

"I can trust your courage," she said. "There is no need, my
child, to prevaricate with you. Read that."

I read the telegram. It was sent by the chief surgeon of a
field-hospital; and it was dated from a village in the north of
Spain.

"Mr. Eustace severely wounded in a skirmish by a stray shot. Not
in danger, so far. Every care taken of him. Wait for another
telegram."

I turned away my face, and bore as best I might the pang that
wrung me when I read those words. I thought I knew how dearly I
loved him: I had never known it till that moment.

My mother-in-law put her arm round me, and held me to her
tenderly. She knew me well enough not to speak to me at that
moment.

I rallied my courage, and pointed to the last sentence in the
telegram.

"Do you mean to wait?" I asked.

"Not a day!" she answered. "I am going to the Foreign Office
about my passport--I have some interest there: they can give me
letters; they can advise and assist me. I leave to-night by the
mail train to Calais."

"_You_ leave?" I said. "Do you suppose I will let you go without
me? Get my passport when you get yours. At seven this evening I
will be at your house."

She attempted to remonstrate; she spoke of the perils of the
journey. At the first words I stopped her. "Don't you know yet,
mother, how obstinate I am? They may keep you waiting at the
Foreign Office. Why do you waste the precious hours here?"

She yielded with a gentleness that was not in her everyday
character. "Will my poor Eustace ever know what a wife he has
got?" That was all she said. She kissed me, and went away in her
carriage.

My remembrances of our journey are strangely vague and
imperfect.

As I try to recall them, the memory of those more recent and more
interesting events which occurred after my return to England gets
between me and my adventures in Spain, and seems to force these
last into a shadowy background, until they look like adventures
that happened many years since. I confusedly recollect delays and
alarms that tried our patience and our courage. I remember our
finding friends (thanks to our letters of recommendation) in a
Secretary to the Embassy and in a Queen's Messenger, who assisted
and protected us at a critical point in the journey. I recall to
mind a long succession of men in our employment as travelers, all
equally remarkable for their dirty cloaks and their clean linen,
for their highly civilized courtesy to women and their utterly
barbarous cruelty to horses. Last, and most important of all, I
see again, more clearly than I can see anything else, the one
wretched bedroom of a squalid village inn in which we found our
poor darling, prostrate between life and death, insensible to
everything that passed in the narrow little world that lay around
his bedside.

There was nothing romantic or interesting in the accident which
had put my husband's life in peril.

He had ventured too near the scene of the conflict (a miserable
affair) to rescue a poor lad who lay wounded on the
field--mortally wounded, as the event proved. A rifle-bullet had
struck him in the body. His brethren of the field-hospital had
carried him back to their quarters at the risk of their lives. He
was a great favorite with all of them; patient and gentle and
brave; only wanting a little more judgment to be the most
valuable recruit who had joined the brotherhood.

In telling me this, the surgeon kindly and delicately added a
word of warning as well.

The fever caused by the wound had brought with it delirium, as
usual. My poor husband's mind, in so far as his wandering words
might interpret it, was filled by the one image of his wife. The
medical attendant had heard enough in the course of his
ministrations at the bedside, to satisfy him that any sudden
recognition of me by Eustace (if he recovered) might be attended
by the most lamentable results. As things were at that sad time,
I might take my turn at nursing him, without the slightest chance
of his discovering me, perhaps for weeks and weeks to come. But
on the day when he was declared out of danger--if that happy day
ever arrived--I must resign my place at his bedside, and must
wait to show myself until the surgeon gave me leave.

My mother-in-law and I relieved each other regularly, day and
night, in the sick-room.

In the hours of his delirium--hours that recurred with a pitiless
regularity--my name was always on my poor darling's fevered lips.
The ruling idea in him was the fine dreadful idea which I had
vainly combated at our last interview. In the face of the verdict
pronounced at the Trial, it was impossible even for his wife to
be really and truly persuaded that he was an innocent man. All
the wild pictures which his distempered imagination drew were
equally inspired by that one obstinate conviction. He fancied
himself to be still living with me under those dreaded
conditions. Do what he might, I was always recalling to him the
terrible ordeal through which he had passed. He acted his part,
and he acted mine. He gave me a cup of tea; and I said to him,
"We quarreled yesterday, Eustace. Is it poisoned?" He kissed me,
in token of our reconciliation; and I laughed, and said, "It's
morning now, my dear. Shall I die by nine o'clock to-night?" I
was ill in bed, and he gave me my medicine. I looked at him with
a doubting eye. I said to him, "You are in love with another
woman. Is there anything in the medicine that the doctor doesn't
know of?" Such was the horrible drama which now perpetually acted
itself in his mind. Hundreds and hundreds of times I heard him
repeat it, almost always in the same words. On other occasions
his thoughts wandered away to my desperate project of proving him
to be an innocent man. Sometimes he laughed at it. Sometimes he
mourned over it. Sometimes he devised cunning schemes for placing
unsuspected obstacles in my way. He was especially hard on me
when he was inventing his preventive stratagems--he cheerfully
instructed the visionary people who assisted him not to hesitate
at offending or distressing me. "Never mind if you make her
angry; never mind if you make her cry. It's all for her good;
it's all to save the poor fool from dangers she doesn't dream of.
You mustn't pity her when she says she does it for my sake. See!
she is going to be insulted; she is going to be deceived; she is
going to disgrace herself without knowing it. Stop her! stop
her!" It was weak of me, I know; I ought to have kept the plain
fact that he was out of his senses always present to my mind:
still it is true that my hours passed at my husband's pillow were
many of them hours of mortification and misery of which he, poor
dear, was the innocent and only cause.

The weeks passed; and he still hovered between life and death.

I kept no record of the time, and I cannot now recall the exact
date on which the first favorable change took place. I only
remember that it was toward sunrise on a fine winter morning when
we were relieved at last of our heavy burden of suspense. The
surgeon happened to be by the bedside when his patient awoke. The
first thing he did, after looking at Eustace, was to caution me
by a sign to be silent and to keep out of sight. My mother-in-law
and I both knew what this meant. With full hearts we thanked God
together for giving us back the husband and the son.

The same evening, being alone, we ventured to speak of the
future--for the first time since we had left home.

"The surgeon tells me," said Mrs. Macallan, "that Eustace is too
weak to be capable of bearing anything in the nature of a
surprise for some days to come. We have time to consider whether
he is or is not to be told that he owes his life as much to your
care as to mine. Can you find it in your heart to leave him,
Valeria, now that God's mercy has restored him to you and to me?"

"If I only consulted my own heart," I answered, "I should never
leave him again."

Mrs. Macallan looked at me in grave surprise.

"What else have you to consult?" she asked.

"If we both live," I repli ed, "I have to think of the happiness
of his life and the happiness of mine in the years that are to
come. I can bear a great deal, mother, but I cannot endure the
misery of his leaving me for the second time."

"You wrong him, Valeria--I firmly believe you wrong him--in
thinking it possible that he can leave you again."

"Dear Mrs. Macallan, have you forgotten already what we have both
heard him say of me while we have been sitting by his bedside?"

"We have heard the ravings of a man in delirium. It is surely
hard to hold Eustace responsible for what he said when he was out
of his senses."

"It is harder still," I said, "to resist his mother when she is
pleading for him. Dearest and best of friends! I don't hold
Eustace responsible for what he said in the fever--but I _do_
take warning by it. The wildest words that fell from him were,
one and all, the faithful echo of what he said to me in the best
days of his health and his strength. What hope have I that he
will recover with an altered mind toward me? Absence has not
changed it; suffering has not changed it. In the delirium of
fever, and in the full possession of his reason, he has the same
dreadful doubt of me. I see but one way of winning him back: I
must destroy at its root his motive for leaving me. It is
hopeless to persuade him that I believe in his innocence: I must
show him that belief is no longer necessary; I must prove to him
that his position toward me has become the position of an
innocent man!"

"Valeria! Valeria! you are wasting time and words. You have tried
the experiment; and you know as well as I do that the thing is
not to be done."

I had no answer to that. I could say no more than I had said
already.

"Suppose you go back to Dexter, out of sheer compassion for a mad
and miserable wretch who has already insulted you," proceeded my
mother-in-law. "You can only go back accompanied by me, or by
some other trustworthy person. You can only stay long enough to
humor the creature's wayward fancy, and to keep his crazy brain
quiet for a time. That done, all is done--you leave him. Even
supposing Dexter to be still capable of helping you, how can you
make use of him but by admitting him to terms of confidence and
familiarity--by treating him, in short, on the footing of an
intimate friend? Answer me honestly: can you bring yourself to do
that, after what happened at Mr. Benjamin's house?"

I had told her of my last interview with Miserrimus Dexter, in
the natural confidence that she inspired in me as relative and
fellow-traveler; and this was the use to which she turned her
information! I suppose I had no right to blame her; I suppose the
motive sanctioned everything. At any rate, I had no choice but to
give offense or to give an answer. I gave it. I acknowledged that
I could never again permit Miserrimus Dexter to treat me on terms
of familiarity as a trusted and intimate friend.

Mrs. Macallan pitilessly pressed the advantage that she had won.

"Very well," she said, "that resource being no longer open to
you, what hope is left? Which way are you to turn next?"

There was no meeting those questions, in my present situation, by
any adequate reply. I felt strangely unlike myself--I submitted
in silence. Mrs. Macallan struck the last blow that completed her
victory.

"My poor Eustace is weak and wayward," she said; "but he is not
an ungrateful man. My child, you have returned him good for
evil--you have proved how faithfully and how devotedly you love
him, by suffering all hardships and risking all dangers for his
sake. Trust me, and trust him! He cannot resist you. Let him see
the dear face that he has been dreaming of looking at him again
with all the old love in it, and he is yours once more, my
daughter--yours for life." She rose and touched my forehead with
her lips; her voice sank to tones of tenderness which I had never
heard from her yet. "Say yes, Valeria," she whispered; "and be
dearer to me and dearer to him than ever!"

My heart sided with her. My energies were worn out. No letter had
arrived from Mr. Playmore to guide and to encourage me. I had
resisted so long and so vainly; I had tried and suffered so much;
I had met with such cruel disasters and such reiterated
disappointments--and he was in the room beneath me, feebly
finding his way back to consciousness and to life--how could I
resist? It was all over. In saying Yes (if Eustace confirmed his
mother's confidence in him), I was saying adieu to the one
cherished ambition, the one dear and noble hope of my life. I
knew it--and I said Yes.

And so good-by to the grand struggle! And so welcome to the new
resignation which owned that I had failed.

My mother-in-law and I slept together under the only shelter
that the inn could offer to us--a sort of loft at the top of the
house. The night that followed our conversation was bitterly
cold. We felt the chilly temperature, in spite of the protection
of our dressing-gowns and our traveling-wrappers. My
mother-in-law slept, but no rest came to me. I was too anxious
and too wretched, thinking over my changed position, and doubting
how my husband would receive me, to be able to sleep.

Some hours, as I suppose, must have passed, and I was still
absorbed in my own melancholy thoughts, when I suddenly became
conscious of a new and strange sensation which astonished and
alarmed me. I started up in the bed, breathless and bewildered.
The movement awakened Mrs. Macallan. "Are you ill?" she asked.
"What is the matter with you?" I tried to tell her, as well as I
could. She seemed to understand me before I had done; she took me
tenderly in her arms, and pressed me to her bosom. "My poor
innocent child," she said, "is it possible you don't know? Must I
really tell you?" She whispered her next words. Shall I ever
forget the tumult of feelings which the whisper aroused in
me--the strange medley of joy and fear, and wonder and relief,
and pride and humility, which filled my whole being, and made a
new woman of me from that moment? Now, for the first time, I knew
it! If God spared me for a few months more, the most enduring and
the most sacred of all human joys might be mine--the joy of being
a mother.

I don't know how the rest of the night passed. I only find my
memory again when the morning came, and when I went out by myself
to breathe the crisp wintry air on the open moor behind the inn.

I have said that I felt like a new woman. The morning found me
with a new resolution and a new courage. When I thought of the
future, I had not only my husband to consider now. His good name
was no longer his own and mine--it might soon become the most
precious inheritance that he could leave to his child. What had I
done while I was in ignorance of this? I had resigned the hope of
cleansing his name from the stain that rested on it--a stain
still, no matter how little it might look in the eye of the Law.
Our child might live to hear malicious tongues say, "Your father
was tried for the vilest of all murders, and was never absolutely
acquitted of the charge." Could I face the glorious perils of
childbirth with that possibility present to my mind? No! not
until I had made one more effort to lay the conscience of
Miserrimus Dexter bare to my view! not until I had once again
renewed the struggle, and brought the truth that vindicated the
husband and the father to the light of day!

I went back to the house, with my new courage to sustain me. I
opened my heart to my friend and mother, and told her frankly of
the change that had come over me since we had last spoken of
Eustace.

She was more than disappointed--she was almost offended with me.
The one thing needful had happened, she said. The happiness that
might soon come to us would form a new tie between my husband and
me. Every other consideration but this she treated as purely
fanciful. If I left Eustace now, I did a heartless thing and a
foolish thing. I should regret, to the end of my days, having
thrown away the one golden opportunity of my married life.

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