"i do not know what he is doing," harriet had repeated to herself in sore distress; "i do not know what he is doing. i am in the dark, and the tide is rising."
the jealous agony she had suffered at homburg was harder to bear than the uncertainty which had been her lot since her return. the intense passion of jealousy sprung up within her was a revelation to this woman of the violence of her nature, over which a stern restraint had been kept so long that quiet and calm had grown habitual to her while nothing troubled or disputed her love; but they deserted her at the first rude touch laid upon the sole treasure, the joy, the punishment, the occupation, mainspring, and meaning of her life. under all the quiet of her manner, under all the smoothness of her speech, harriet routh knew well there was a savage element in the desperation of her love for routh, since he had committed the crime which sets a man apart from his fellows, marked with the brand of blood. she had loved him in spite of the principles of her education, in defiance of the stings of her conscience, dead now, but which had died hard; but now she loved him in spite of the promptings of her instincts, in spite of the revulsion of her womanly feelings, in defiance of the revolt of her senses and her nerves. the more utterly lost he was the more she clung to him, not indeed in appearance, for her manner had lost its old softness, and her voice the tone which had been a caress; but in her torn and tortured heart. with desperate and mad obstinacy she loved him, defied fate, and hated the world which had been hard to him, for his sake.
with the first pang of jealousy awoke the fierceness of this love, awoke the proud and defiant assertion of her love and her ownership in her breast. never would harriet have pleaded her true, if perverted, love, her unwavering, if wicked, fidelity, to the man who was drifting away from her; the woman's lost soul was too generous for that; but he was hers, her own;--purchased;--god, in whom she did not believe, and the devil, whom she did not fear, alone knew at what price;--and he should not be taken from her by another, by one who had done nothing for him, suffered nothing for him, lost nothing for him. her combativeness and her craft had been called into instant action by the first discovery of the unexpected peril in which her sole treasure was placed. she understood her position perfectly. no woman could have known more distinctly than harriet how complete is the helplessness of a wife when her husband's love is straying from her, beckoned towards another--helplessness which every point of contrast between her and her rival increases. she was quite incapable of the futile strife, the vulgar railing, which are the ordinary weapons of ordinary women in the unequal combat; she would have disdained their employment; but fate had furnished her with weapons of other form and far different effectiveness, and these she would use. routh had strong common-sense, intense selfishness, and shrewd judgment. an appeal to these, she thought, could not fail. nevertheless, they had failed, and harriet was bewildered by their failure. when she made her first appeal to routh, she was wholly unprepared for his refusal. the danger was so tremendous, the unforeseen discovery of the murdered man's identity had introduced into their position a complication so momentous, so insurmountable, that she had never dreamed for a moment of routh's being insensible to its weight and emergency. but he rejected her appeal--rudely, brutally, almost, and her astonishment was hardly inferior to her anguish. he must indeed be infatuated by this strange and beautiful woman (harriet fully admitted the american's beauty--there was an element of candour and judgment in her which made the littleness of depreciating a rival impossible) when he could overlook or under-estimate the importance, the danger, of this newly-arisen complication.
this was a new phase in her husband's character; this was an aspect under which she had never seen him, and she was bewildered by it, for a little. it had occurred to her once, on the day when she last saw george dallas--parting with him at the gate of his mother's house--to think whether, had she had any other resource but her husband, had the whole world outside of him not been a dead blank to her, she could have let him go. she had heard of such things; she knew they happened; she knew that many women in "the world" took their husbands' infidelity quietly, if not kindly, and let them go, turning them to the resources of wealth and pleasure. she had no such resources, nor could these have appeased her for a moment if she had had. she cared nothing for liberty, she who had worn the chain of the most abject slavery, that of engrossing passionate love for an unworthy object, willingly, had hugged it to her bosom, had allowed it, without an effort to alleviate the pain, to eat into her flesh, and' fill it with corruption. but, more than this, she could not let him go, for his own sake; she was true to the law of her life, that "honour rooted in dishonour" knew no tarnishing from her; she must save him, for his own sake--from himself, she must save him, though not to bring him back to her--must save him, in spite of himself, though she longed, in the cruel pangs of her woman's anguish, to have done with it--to have found that nothingness in which she had come to believe as the "end all," and had learned to look to as her sovereign good.
she had reached such a conclusion, in her meditations, on the night of the great storm at homburg; she had determined on a course to be adopted for routh's sake. she would discard fear, and show him that he must relinquish the desperate game he was playing. she would prove to him that fate had been too strong for him; that in mrs. ireton p. bembridge the fatality which was destined to destroy him existed; that her acquaintance with arthur felton, and her knowledge of arthur felton's affairs, into whose extent routh had no possible pretext for inquiry, must necessarily establish the missing link. she would hide from him her own sufferings; she would keep down her jealousy and her love; she would appeal to him for himself; she would plead with him only his own danger, only the tremendous risk he was involving himself in. then she must succeed; then the double agony of jealousy of him and fear for him in which she now lived must subside, the burning torment must be stilled. the time might perhaps come in which she should so far conquer self as to be thankful that such suffering had brought about his safety, for there could be no real security for them in london, the terrible fact of deane's identity with arthur felton once known. after that discovery, no arguments could avail with george; the strength of all those which she had used would become potent against her, their weight would be against her--that weight which she had so skilfully adjusted in the balance. after all, she thought that night, as she sat in the darkness and idly watched the lightning, hearing the raging wind unmoved, what would a little more misery matter to her? little, indeed, if it brought him safety; and it should, it must!
from this condition of mind she had been roused by routh's startling announcement of their departure on the morrow. the effect produced upon harriet was strange. she did not believe that routh had been only to the gaming-rooms that night: she felt an immutable conviction that he had seen mrs. bembridge, and she instantly concluded that he had received a rebuff from the beautiful american. inexpressibly relieved--though not blind enough to be in the least insensible to the infamy of her husband's faithlessness, and quite aware that she had more, rather than less, to complain of than she had previously believed;--for she rightly judged, this woman is too finished a coquette to throw up her game a moment before her own interest and safety absolutely obliged her to do so--she acquiesced immediately.
had stewart routh had the least suspicion of the extent of his wife's knowledge of his life at homburg, he could not have been lulled into the false security in which he indulged on his return to london. he perceived, indeed, that harriet closely noted the state of his spirits, and silently observed his actions. but he was used to that. harriet had no one to think of but him, had nothing to care about but him; and she had always watched him. pleasantly, gaily, before;--coldly, grimly, now: but it was all the same thing. he was quite right in believing she had not the least suspicion that mrs. ireton p. bembridge was in london, but that was the sole point on which he was correct. had he known how much his wife knew, he would have affected a dejection of spirits he was far from feeling, and would have disarmed her by greater attention to her during the few hours of each day which he passed at home.
harriet was at a loss to account for his cheerfulness; but strong of mind and heart as she was, she was not altogether free from the weakness of catching at that interpretation of a mystery in which there was some relief for her own pain. so she concluded that he had been only passingly, and not deeply, hurt by the coquetry of the woman who had attracted him, and that he had recovered from the superficial wound, as soon as he became again immersed in the schemes which had awaited him in london.
he had told her little concerning these schemes, but she considered this reticence due to her own withdrawal from her former active participation in the business of his life, and it was an additional inducement to her to hope that routh was taking the resolution which she desired. "when we get back to london i will think about it," he had said, and she clung to the hope, to the half-promise in the words. he was surely settling affairs so as to enable him to avoid the bursting of the storm. the tacit estrangement between them would account for his doing this silently; his vile temper, which harriet thoroughly understood, and never failed to recognize in action, would account for his denying her the relief of knowing his intentions. many small things in his daily life, which did not escape the quickened perception of his wife, betokened a state of preparation for some decided course of action. the time of explanation must necessarily come; meanwhile she watched, and waited, and suffered.
how she suffered in every hour of her life! yet there was a kind of dulness over harriet too. she recurred little to the past in point of feeling; she thought over it, indeed, in aid of the action of her reason and her will, but she did not recall it with the keenness either of acute grief for its vanished happiness, such as it had been, or of remorse and terror for its deep and desperate guilt. the burden of the day was enough now for this woman, whose strength had lasted so long, endured so much, and given way so suddenly.
but time was marching on, the inevitable end drawing near, and harriet had been utterly unprepared for the second shock, the second unexpected event which had befallen. she had opened george dallas's letter with the paris postmark almost without an apprehension. the time for the thing she feared had not yet come; and here was a thing she had never feared, a possibility which had never presented itself to her imagination, brought at once fully before her. she had done this thing. one moment's want of caution, in the midst of a scene in which her nerves had been strung to their highest tension, and this had been the result. had no other clue existed, these few lines of writing would furnish one leading unerringly to discovery. supposing no other clue to exist, and routh to pretend to inability to identify the writing, there were several common acquaintances of dallas and deane who could identify it, and render a refusal the most dangerous step which routh could take.
she sat for several minutes perfectly still, her face colourless as marble, and her blue eyes, fixed with a painful expression of terror, under the shock of this new discovery. she had had no worse apprehension than that the letter would announce the day of george's intended return, and for that she was prepared; but this! it was too much for her, and the first words she uttered showed that her mind had lost its strict faculty of reasoning; they broke from her with a groan:
"i--i it is who have destroyed him!"
but, even now, weakness and exaggeration had no long duration in harriet routh's mind. by degrees she saw this in its true light, an alarming, a terrible coincidence indeed, an addition to the danger of their position, but not necessarily a fatal catastrophe. then she saw new light, she caught at a new idea, a fresh, bright hope. this would avail with routh; this would drive away his irresolution; this would really inspire him with the true conviction of their danger; this, which would throw the whole burden of identification upon him; this, which would establish a strong and intimate link between him and the dead man; for the "articles to be purchased," named in the memorandum of which george had sent her a copy, were simply shares in companies with every one of which stewart routh was connected. only george's ignorance of such matters had prevented his recognizing the meaning of the memorandum.
and now harriet rose; and as she paced the room, the colour came back to her cheek, the light came back to her eyes. a new life and fresh energy seemed to spring up within her, and she grasped george's letter in her hand, and struck it against her bosom with an action of the hand and a responsive movement of the breast which was almost triumphant. this thing which she had done, which had looked like ruin, would be her way of escape.
routh's refusal to return home immediately annoyed, puzzled, and disheartened her. why was he so hard to move, so difficult to convince, so insensible to danger? his plea was business; if this business was what she hoped and believed it to be, that of preparation, he should have come home to learn the new and urgent need for its expedition. why was he so hard to her? why had he no thought for her wishes, no compassion on her suspense? harriet could not but ask herself that, though she strove against the deadly suffering the answer brought her.
thus the time wore on drearily, until harriet carelessly took from the table the slip of paper which contained a whole revelation for her.
of the hours which succeeded she could not have given an account herself. how the fury of jealousy, of love betrayed, of faith violated, was reawakened within her, and inflamed to the wildest and most desperate pitch; how she writhed under the shame and the scorn which her husband's baseness forced her to feel. she had had profoundest pity, readiest help for the criminal; but for this pitiful, cowardly, cruel liar nothing but contempt--nothing! ah, yes, something more, and that made it all the harder--contempt and love.
the woman was here, then--here, in london, on the spot to ruin him, lured hither by him. his false heart planned; his guilty hands dug the pit into which he was to fall; and now his feet were close upon the brink. this rendered him deaf and blind; for this he had basely deceived her, his best, his only friend; for this he had come to regard and treat her as his enemy; and now harriet had to make a desperate effort indeed to rally all her strength and courage. she had to put the suffering aside, to let all her hopes go, to face a new and almost desperate condition of affairs, and to think how he was to be saved. it must be in spite of himself. this time, it must be in defiance of himself.
she had passed through a long period of suffering--if time is to be measured by pain--before routh came home. she had not nearly thought it out; she had only reached a resolution to be patient and peaceful, and to conceal her knowledge of his treachery, if any effort could give her the strength to do so, when she heard his key in the lock, and the next moment his hand on the door-handle.
there was confusion in the expression of eolith's shifty black eyes, some embarrassment in the tone of his voice. they were slight; but she saw and understood them. her heart gave one angry bound under the paper which lay securely in her bosom, but her steady face took no change from the pulsation.
"sorry i couldn't get back. i got away as soon as i could," said routh, as he threw aside his coat and put his hat down. harriet pushed a chair towards him, and he sat down before she answered:
"i am sorry, too, stewart. i can hardly think any business can have equalled in importance such an occurrence as this."
she put george dallas's letter into his hand, and eagerly watched him, while with a face convulsed by anger, hatred, and all unholy passions, he read it.
if she could have seen his heart! if she could have read the devilish project that filled it! if she could have seen that in the discovery of the new and urgent danger he had seen, not blind to that danger indeed, but catching at the chance included in it, a means of realizing his atrocious plot against her! if she could have distinguished, amid the surging, passionate thoughts and impulses which raged within him, this one, which each second made more clear:
"this is my opportunity. all is settled, all is right; she and i are safe. i have triumphed, and this cursed letter gives me a better chance than any i could have formed or made. this infernal idiot is always my curse and my dupe; however, he has done me a good turn this time."
if harriet, watching the changes in her husband's countenance, could have read these thoughts, she might have interpreted aright the ferocity which blazed in his wicked eyes, while a cynical sneer curled his lip, as he flung the letter violently on the floor, starting up from his chair.
harriet had seen routh in a passion more than once, though only once had that passion been directed against herself, and she was not a woman, even when its victim, to be frightened by a man's temper. but she was frightened now, really and truly frightened, not, however, by the violence of his rage, but because she did not believe in it. she did not understand his game; she saw he was playing one; why he feigned this fury she could not comprehend, but she knew it was feigned, and she was frightened. against complicated deception of this kind she was powerless.. she could not oppose successful art to the ingenious skill with which he was courting his own ruin, to save him. she could not disentangle this thought from the confusion in her brain; she felt only its first thrill of conviction, she only shrank from it with swift, sharp, physical pain, when routh turned upon her with a torrent of angry and fierce reproaches.
"this is your doing," he said, the violence of his simulated anger hurrying his words, and rendering them almost unintelligible. "i owe it to you that this cursed fool has me in his power, if the idiot only finds it out, and knows how to use it, more securely than i ever had him in mine. this is your skill and your wisdom; your caution and your management, is it? like a fool, i trusted a woman--you were always so sure of yourself, you know, and here's the result. you keep this pretty piece of conviction in your desk, and produce it just in the nick of time. i don't wonder you wanted me home; i don't wonder you were in such a hurry to give me such a proof of your boasted cleverness."
her clear blue eyes were upon him; his restless black eyes shifted under her gaze, but could not escape it. she did not release him for an instant from that piercing look, which became, with each word he spoke, more and more alight with scorn and power. the steady look maddened him, the feigned passion changed to real rage, the man's evil face paled.
she slightly raised her hand, and pointed to the chair he had left; he kicked it savagely away. she spoke, her hands still extended. "stewart, i do not understand you, but i am not taken in by you. what are you aiming at? why are you pretending to this violent and unreasonable anger?"
"pretending!" he exclaimed, with an oath; "it is no pretence, as you shall find. pretending! woman, you have ruined me, and i say--"
"and i say," she interposed, as she slowly rose, and stood upright before him, her head raised, her steady eyes still mercilessly set on his, "this is a vain and ridiculous pretence. you cannot long conceal its motive from me: whatever game you are playing, i will find it out."
"will yon, by--?" he said, fiercely.
"i will, for your own sake," she answered calmly. and, standing before him, she touched him lightly on the breast with her small white hand. "stop! don't speak. i say, for your own sake. you and i, stewart, who were once one, are two now; but that makes no change in me. i don't reproach you."
"oh, don't you?" he said. "i know better. there's been nothing but whining and reproaches lately."
"now you are acting again, and again i tell you i will find out why. the day of reproach can never--shall never--come; the day of ruin is near, awfully near--"
"you've taken care of that."
"again! you ought to know me better, stewart; you can't lie to me undetected. in time i shall know the truth, now i discern the lie. but all this is vain. read once more." she took up the letter, smoothed it out, and held it towards him. he struck it out of her hand, and cursed her.
she looked at him in blank amazement for a moment, and then said:
"you are not drunk again, stewart? you are not mad? if you are not, listen to me, for your fate is rushing upon you. the time may be counted by hours. never mind my share in this new event, never mind what you really think, or what you pretend to think about it. it makes my appeal to you strong, irresistible. this is no fit of woman's terror; this is no whim, no wish to induce you to desert your harvest-field, to turn your back upon the promise of the only kind of life you care to live. here is a link in the evidence against you, if suspicion lights upon you (and it must), which is of incontestable strength. here, in arthur felton's writing, is the memoranda of the shares which you bought and paid for with arthur felton's money. stewart, stewart, are you blind and mad, indeed, that you stay here, that you let the precious time escape you, that you dally with your fate? let us begone, i say; let us escape while we may. george dallas is not our only foe, not our only danger--formidable, indeed; but remember, stewart, mr. felton comes to seek for his son; remember that we have to dread the man's father!"
the pleading in her voice was agonizing in its intensity, the lustrous excitement in her blue eyes was painful, the pallor of her face was frightful. she had clasped her hands round his arm, and the fingers held him like steel fetters. he tried to shake off her hold, but she did not seem aware of the movement.
"i tell you," she continued, "no dream was ever wilder than your hope of escape, if those two men come to london and find you here; no such possibility exists. let us go; let us get out of the reach of their power."
"by--, i'll put myself out of dallas's reach by a very simple method, if you don't hold your cursed tongue," said routh, with such ferocity that harriet let go her hold of him, and shrank as if he had struck her. "if you don't want me to tell mr. felton what has become of his son, and put him on to george's trail myself, you'll drop this kind of thing at once. in fact," he said, with a savage sneer, "i hardly think a better way out of our infernal blunder could be found."
"stewart, stewart!" she said no more.
"now listen to me, harriet," he went on, in furious anger, but in a suppressed tone. "if you are anything like the wise woman you used to be, you won't provoke a desperate man. let me alone, i tell you--let me get out of this as i best can. the worst part of it is what you have brought upon me. i don't want george dallas to come to any serious grief, if i can help it; but if he threatens danger to me, he must clear the way, that's all. i dare say you are very sorry, and all that. you rather took to master george lately, believed in his prudence, and his mother, and all that kind of thing; but i can't help that. i never had a turn for sentiment myself; but this you may be sure of--only gross blundering can bring anything of the kind about--if any one is to swing for dean, it shall be dallas, and not i."
a strong shudder shook harriet's frame as she heard her husband's words. but she repressed it, and spoke:
"you refuse to listen to me, then, stewart. you will not keep your promise--your promise which, however vague, i have built upon and lived upon since we left homburg? you will not 'think of' what i said to you there? not though it is a thousand times more important now? you will not leave this life, and come away to peace and safety?"
"no, no; a thousand times no!" said routh, in the wildest fury. "i will not--i will not! a life of peace and safety; yes, and a life of poverty, and you--" he added, in a tone of bitterest scorn and hatred.
a wonderful look came into the woman's face as she heard his cruel and dastardly words. as the pink had faded into the white upon her cheeks, so now the white deadened into gray--into an ashen ghostly gray, and her dry lips parted slowly, emitting a heavy sigh.
he made a step or two towards the door, she retreating before him. and when he had almost reached it, she fell suddenly upon her knees, and flung her arms round him with desperate energy.
"stewart," she said, in a whisper indeed, yet in a voice to be heard amid a whirlwind, "my husband, my love, my life, my darling, don't mind me! leave me here; it will be safer, better, less suspicious. go away, and leave me. i don't care, indeed. i don't want to go with you. go alone, and make sure of your safety! stewart, say you'll go--say you'll go!"
while she was speaking, he was striving to loosen her hold upon him, but in vain. a short brief warfare was waged in that moment in his soul. if he softened to her now, if he yielded to her now, all was undone. and yet what love was this--what strange, and wondrous, and potent kind of love was this? not the kind of love which had looked at him, an hour or two ago, out of the rich black eyes of the american widow, that had trembled in the tones of her voice. but a vision of the beauty he coveted, of the wealth he needed, of the freedom he panted for, rose before routh's bewildered brain, and the strife ended. evil had its own way unchecked henceforth to the end.
he raised his right arm and struck her heavily upon the face; the clasp of her hands gave way, and she sank upon the floor. then he stepped over her, as she lay prostrate in the doorway, and left the room. when she raised herself, she pushed back her hair, and looked round with a dreary amazement upon her troubled face, and she heard the key turned in his dressing-room door.
the day had dawned when harriet routh went gently upstairs to her bed-room. she was perfectly calm. she opened the window-shutters and let the light in before she lay down on her bed. also, she unlocked a box, which she took from her wardrobe, and looked carefully into it, then put it away satisfied. as she closed her eyes, she said, half aloud, "i can do no more; but she can save him, and she shall."
at one o'clock on the following day, harriet routh, attired, as usual, in simple but ladylike dress, and presenting an appearance on which the most impertinent of pages would not have dared to cast an imputation, presented herself at no. 4 hollington-square, brompton. mrs. bembridge lived there, but mrs. bembridge was not at home, and would not be at home until late in the evening. would the lady leave her name? 'no; but she desired mrs. bembridge might be informed that a lady had called, and would call again at the same hour on the morrow, who had found an article of dress lost at homburg by mrs. bembridge, and which she would restore to mrs. bembridge in person, but not otherwise.
as harriet was returning home, she walked down piccadilly, and saw mr. felton and george dallas alighting from a cab at the door of the house in which their lodgings had been engaged.
"very fair, too," said mrs. ireton p. bembridge, when she received harriet's message from her maid, "and very natural she should expect a reward. ladies often take advantage of that kind of thing to give money to the poor. i shan't grudge her any thing she may ask in reason, i shall be so glad to get back my golden egg."
