A Mad Marriage by May Agnes Fleming (mini ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Was Lovell’s story true. One word—yes or no.”

“Gordon, I was faithful. Oh! what shall I say to him to—”

“Was it true? Yes or no?”

“Gordon, I swear—”

“Was it true?” he cried, his eyes flashing fire; “no more words! Yes or

no.”

“Yes, but—”

“That will do. We won’t waste words about it. You would swear black was

white, I daresay, but keep your histrionic talents for the New York

stage again—you may need them before long. Let us get back to what you

said a moment ago. ‘You are my wife—nothing but death can change that.’

Do me the favor to look at this.”

He drew a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to her. Something in

his face as he did so frightened her as nothing had frightened yet. Her

hands shook—she strove to open the paper and failed. She looked at him

with piteous eyes and trembling lips.

“I can’t,” she faltered; “Gordon, what is it?”

“It is a decree of divorce,” he answered, in his cold, sombre voice.

“One week after Lovell’s death and your flight, I instituted a suit for

divorce, and obtained it. You can read the details in that paper, at

your leisure—it may help while away an hour. This is what has kept me

in Canada so long. In two days I leave it forever. Chance has brought us

together this once, for the last time.”

He paused, half turned away, then suddenly stopped. She had made some

kind of gesture, but it was not for that; she had said “wait!” in a

hoarse whisper; but it was not that. It was the ghastly change that had

come over her face as he struck his last merciless blow. For a moment, I

think, it startled even him.

“This is true—this that you tell me—this—divorce?”

She spoke the words in a husky, breathless sort of voice, her face all

distorted, clutching the paper hard.

“It is perfectly true,” his chill voice answered. “Read and see.”

“I am no longer your wife?”

“You are no longer my wife—thank Heaven and the merciful law of the

land.”

“After this day, you never mean to see or know me again?”

“I never mean to see you again if it be in my power, alive or dead.”

“Then hear me!” She drew herself upright, her small figure seeming to

dilate and grow tall. “Lovell’s story was true—true I tell you in every

particular except this: that I married you for your rank, and your name,

and your wealth. I married you for these, it is true; but beyond these,

because I loved you with all my heart. Oh, yes, Gordon Caryll! even such

women as I am can love; and in deed, and thought, from the hour you

placed this ring on my finger, I was your true and loyal wife. I would

have gone with you to beggary—I would have died, if need were, for your

sake. Now I am divorced and cast off forever, you say. Well, then we

shall meet again one day, so surely as we both live. This cold-blooded

divorce I will never forgive. Go, Gordon Caryll! but remember this, one

day or other, so surely as we both stand here, I will make you suffer

for this!”

He laughed as he listened—a low, contemptuous laugh, that would have

goaded any infuriated woman to madness.

“You do it very well, Rosamond,” he said; “but so many years’ hard

practice on the stage of the Bowery Theatre could hardly fail to tell.

For the rest, it is rather wasted on an unappreciative audience at

present. If I should be so unfortunate as ever to meet you again, I

trust, even then, to be able to take care of myself.”

He turned without another word and left her, striding up the steep path,

and never once looking back.

She stood where he left her, watching him out of sight, the color fading

from her face, the life from her eyes. So, standing motionless there,

she saw him pass from view, heard the last echo of his footsteps die

away. Then I came forward, for the look on her face frightened me. She

turned to me slowly, the fatal paper held in her hand.

“I dreamed he came with my death-warrant,” she said; “here it is.”

And then without word or cry to warn me, she went down in a dead faint

on the sands.

How I brought her to, how I got her home, I can never tell. I did it

somehow, and laid her on her bed as the June moon rose and the stars

came out. Old Bettine, the French charwoman, was still pottering about

the kitchen. In her charge I left my mistress, and fled into town for a

doctor. For she was very ill—so ill that it seemed doubtful whether she

would ever live to see day dawn.

The clocks of Quebec, high up in steeples, silvered by the quiet summer

moonlight, were chiming eleven as our first visitor entered

Saltmarsh—the doctor.

And when the lovely June morning dawned, and the swallows twittered in

the eaves, Gordon Caryll’s child lay in my arms, and Gordon Caryll’s

divorced wife lay white and still, with Life and Death fighting their

sharp battle above her pillow.

CHAPTER IV.

A STRANGE ENDING.

Life won. Days passed, two weeks went by, and the struggle was at an

end. Pale and shadowy that marvellously fair face lay among the pillows,

but all doubt was at an end. Mrs. Gordon would live.

Saltmarsh was a deserted house no longer. A ponderous nurse had come

from Quebec, the doctor was a daily visitor, and old Bettine spent her

nights as well as her days with us. There was nothing to fear any more;

the man she had longed for and feared had come and gone, to come no more

forever. The baby fell almost entirely to me—a charge as pleasant as

novel, for I must own, spinster that I am, to a tender weakness for

babies. It lay in my arms all day; it slept in its crib by my bedside at

night.

“The smallest mite of a baby I ever see,” observed Mrs. Watters, the

fat nurse; “and I’ve seen a regiment of ‘em, little and big, in my day.

I should say now it wouldn’t weigh five pounds.”

It was small. A tiny, black-haired, black-eyed speck, its pink dot of

a face looking weird, lit by those black, blinking eyes.

One thing was strange—was unnatural. From its birth its mother had

never seen it, never asked to see it. One evening, when Bettine had

called nurse down to supper, and I sat watching in her room, she spoke

of it for the first time.

It was a lovely July night, under the brilliant summer moon, the St.

Lawrence ran between its green slopes like a belt of silver light. The

white, misty moonlight filled the chamber, the lamp had not yet been

lit, and the pale glory illumined the face, whiter than the lace and

linen against which it lay. She sat partly up in bed, propped by

pillows, gazing with dark, sombre eyes out at that radiance in Heaven

and on earth—that glory from the skies upon river and shore. For more

than an hour she had been sitting motionless, her dark, brooding eyes

never leaving the fairy scene, as though she saw her own future life

over there beyond that shining river. In the dim distance, baby lay in

its crib fast asleep; deepest silence reigned within and without. That

silence was suddenly and sharply broken by the shrilly, feeble wail of

the child as it awoke. As I rose and crossed the room to take it, she

spoke: “Joan, bring it here.”

“H’m! high time for you to say it,” I thought, but in silence I obeyed.

There had been something revolting to me in her utter want of

mother-love; in her unnatural indifference; I carried it to the bedside

and stooped to place it beside her.

“No, no,” she said with a quick, petulant gesture of repulsion; “not

there; I don’t want it. I always hated babies. I only want to look at

it.”

“Shall I bring in the lamp?” I asked.

“No; the moonlight will do. What a dot of a baby! Joan, who is it like?”

“It has your eyes,” I answered; “beyond that it is impossible to tell.

Mrs. Watters says, though, it is your very ‘moral.’ It is certainly the

tiniest baby that ever was born.”

“My very moral,” she repeated, with a feeble laugh. “I hope so! I hope

it may be like me. I hope it may never resemble him, in any way. I

hope it may live to help avenge its mother yet!”

I was silent—shocked and scandalized beyond power of replying. Here was

a Christian woman and mother, just saved from death, talking like some

heathen, of revenge!

“Is it a girl or a boy?” she inquired next, after a pause.

“Girl,” I answered, shortly. “It is time you asked.”

She glanced at me in surprise, but in no displeasure.

“Why should I ask? It didn’t matter much. A girl! If it had only been a

boy; and yet, who can tell, if she is like me, and is pretty, she may do

great things yet. She may help me. That will do, Joan. Take it away.”

She turned her face from the light, and lay for a long time still,

brooding over her own thoughts—dark and wicked thoughts I well knew.

Whoever or whatever this Mrs. Gordon might be, she was not a proper or

virtuous woman, that seemed pretty clear—a wife whose husband had been

forced to put her away—a mother who only looked forward to the future

of her child as an instrument of vengeance on its father. There are some

services that no wages can repay—to my mind this was one. The moment

Mrs. Gordon was well enough to be left, that moment I would leave her.

“And what will become of you with such a mother, Providence only knows,”

I apostrophized the little one on my lap. “You poor, little, spectral,

black-eyed mite! I wish you belonged to me altogether.”

From that evening Mrs. Gordon rallied, and asserted her power once more

as mistress of the house. Her first act of sovereignty was to dismiss

the nurse.

“All danger is over, the doctor tells me,” she said to Mrs. Watters a

few days after. “Joan Kennedy can take care of me now. I shall not

require you any more. Joan, pay Mrs. Watters her due. She leaves

to-night.”

Mrs. Watters left. Next morning Mrs. Gordon asserted herself still

further—she insisted upon being dressed and allowed to sit up. She had

her way, of course, and I wish I could tell you how fair and youthful

and lovely she looked. Youthful! I declare, whatever her age really was,

she did not look a day over sixteen. But there was that in her quick,

black eyes, in her colorless face, in those latter days, not pleasant to

see—something I could not define, and that confirmed me in my

resolution to leave her very soon. Of her child, from the evening of

which I have spoken, she took not the slightest notice. I truly believe

she never once looked at it again; when it cried she had it impatiently

removed out of hearing. She sat thinking—thinking steadfastly, with

bent brows and compressed lips, of what—who could tell?

“I’ll give her warning to-morrow,” I said resolutely to