CHAPTER VI.

When the young bride, Alice Montgomery, pale and wan, the mere spectre of her former self, left the sick room for the first time, a month had elapsed from the date of the events narrated in the last chapter. The interval had brought no tidings of her missing husband, beyond the intelligence conveyed by his partner that he had visited the office on the night of his departure, and arranged for her maintenance during a prolonged absence. This uncertainty as to his fate had greatly retarded her recovery, and the triumph which her youth had thus gained in dragging her back to life was, as yet, too uncertain to mitigate the anxiety felt by her aged relatives. Her brother had recovered from his wound, and had, in a measure, regained his health, but the mental disorder predicted by the medical adviser was now only too apparent. Of the occurrences of that dreadful night he had evidently no recollection, and he never spoke of them. His mind seemed perpetually occupied with monetary troubles, and no assurance on the part of his grandfather that these had all been adjusted served to allay his apprehension. From a youthful irrational creature of erratic habits he seemed suddenly to have passed into careworn middle life, burdened with a thousand gloomy anxieties.

Altogether the house of Arlington lay in a sombre shadow during those bright summer days, and many silvery hairs were added to its aged heads in the long weeks of trouble and grief through which they had to pass.

“Grandma, have you got my purse?” suddenly asked the young bride, while seated on the veranda one afternoon in the early days of her convalescence.

“Yes, dear,” replied the other, a delicate flush mantling her cheeks as she thought of its contents--the cartridge and the wedding-ring; “shall I fetch it?”

“Please, dear; has anyone else seen it, grannie?”

“No, love; I have kept it locked up since the night of the--the accident.”

No more passed between these two on the subject, but each understood the other, and if the gloom did not lighten with the mutual understanding, their hearts grew stronger to endure its burden.

“Why do you not wear your wedding-ring?” her grandmother inquired one day.

“I lost it the morning George left.”

A look of perplexity crossed the other’s face, but the trouble in her grand-daughter’s eyes checked further inquiry.

* * * * *

When the “City of Seville” sailed into the port of Cadiz the captain of the vessel handed a sealed envelope to his passenger, Angus Forman, with the assurance, somewhat stiffly delivered, that his secret, whatever it might be, was safe with him.

The other received the envelope in silence, and when he broke the seal and found the letter from his wife’s grandmother, which had been the means of revealing his victim’s identity, he read it again without apparent emotion.

During the long weeks of delirium and slow recovery to health in which he had passed the interval of the sailing vessel’s slow passage, he had discounted all human misery it seemed to him, and as he stood on the deck, the mere skeleton of his former self, he felt alike indifferent to the approach of weal or woe.

Far down in his breast there ached the dull ceaseless pain of a love forever lost, which drowned every other feeling and made him indifferent to it.

When the custom-house officers came aboard he was surprised--after a languid fashion, and as one thinking of some casual acquaintance rather than himself--that no detectives accompanied them, and that he was not arrested for murder, but when he found that no inquiry was made for him, and he was at liberty to go and come as he pleased, there was no corresponding relief or elation visible in his manner.

On bidding the captain adieu he thanked him for his great kindness. “I owe you my life,” he remarked, “and when I am certain that I am grateful to you for preserving it, I will thank you more warmly,” with which enigmatical sentence he passed ashore.

As health returned his tortured mind sought relief in excitement and he left Cadiz for Madrid, where he strove to allay the grief which gnawed at his heart by plunging into the wild excitement of that hot-headed and hot-blooded capital. After a time the ferocious excitement of the weekly bull fight ceased to deaden the agony which preyed at his heart, and he allied himself with a revolutionary movement, which had the advantage of promising equal excitement with some risk to the life which had long been a burden to him.

The Carlist rising seemed like the first glimpse of Heaven’s good will to him, and as such he embraced the opportunity it afforded. The contagious excitement aroused by the Pretender, thrilled through his being, and, at length, he opened his soul to his fellow-men. It were more correct, perhaps, to say fellow-man, since his sole companion and confidant was a much-travelled Spanish soldier of fortune, whose desperate circumstances, as narrated by himself, had first melted the icy reserve which begirt the heart-sore wanderer.

As the two travelled together to the front, the stranger, by insidious inquiries gathered piecemeal George Montgomery’s history. More particularly, however, he seemed interested in the bulky telegraphic code which the other carried with him, and he was puzzled, he said, with his eternal smile, to understand how a book of the kind could be of any practical value; he appeared to be unlettered in business ways, and the other, to while away the long evenings, explained to him the working of the code, as he would have elucidated any ordinary puzzle.

“It seems plain to you, doesn’t it?” said his friend, one night, laughingly, as he clasped his head in his palms at the end of a long explanation, “yet I swear the whole thing is Greek to me. I suppose my brain must be unusually dense.”

That night a false alarm was given, and, in the confusion, George Montgomery was parted from his friend. When order was at length restored, and the former endeavored to collect his baggage, he found that his telegraphic cipher was missing. A hasty march was made from the dangerous locality, and in the darkness he was parted from his friend, whom he did not see again. “It is the fortune of war,” he remarked, somewhat bitterly to himself, for he had grown to like his new-found friend, and in the daily exigencies of an exciting life he soon forgot his passing acquaintance.

The date of this alarm was the 5th of August. On the 10th the firm of Alford & Montgomery, in New York, received a cable message in cipher, of which the translation was:

“Please remit by cable to the Bank of Madrid, five thousand dollars, payable to my order without identification.

“GEORGE MONTGOMERY.”

On receipt of this despatch the firm telegraphed to Mrs. Montgomery, and received in reply a request to assure her husband that all was well, and to beg him to return to his wife without delay.

On the evening of the 10th, the Atlantic cable carried the following message in cipher:

“We have remitted five thousand dollars, by cable, as requested. Your wife entreats you to return, and says, ‘All is well.’

“ALFORD & MONTGOMERY.”

When this message was delivered and translated, the receiver smiled strangely as he lit a fresh cigar, adding, after he had established its fire, “Seeing how easy it has been, I’m only sorry, friend Montgomery, that I did not cable for twenty thousand dollars instead of five thousand dollars. It was a bright idea to steal that very useful code of yours.”

At that moment the clank of a heavy sabre on the marble floor of the hotel smote on his ear, and the weight of a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.

“I arrest you, señor, at the instance of the Bank of Madrid.”

“The charge?” fiercely ejaculated the other, finding his struggles useless.

“Forgery,” was the grim and laconic reply.

“Ah, well, that is an old hallucination of the bank’s and easily answered; let me light a cigarette any way,” urged the other, with simulated indifference, as he turned the folded dispatch towards the light. The officer made no objection and presently his prisoner ground the ashes of the telegraphic message beneath his heel.

* * * * *

At Arlington, Alice Montgomery waited with agonizing anxiety for a cabled reply to the loving message which she had sent across the ocean to her unhappy husband. As the days passed without bringing her any answering message she persuaded her husband’s partner to telegraph again to Madrid. Still no response, and still another message sped on its way beneath the ocean, only, however, to result in the same stony silence.

At length, in reply to a letter sent to the Bank of Madrid, there came the intelligence that the $5,000 remitted had never been applied for, and that the Cable Company had only been able to deliver the first message, all the others being still at the hotel where the husband had received the first one.

Perhaps the information that her husband had received the loving message which she had sent him, and had closed his ears and his heart to her piteous appeal, was the bitterest drop in the cup of Mrs. Montgomery’s affliction; and for a while it seemed as if in grinding out the ashes of the cablegram beneath his heel in the hotel at Madrid, the villain who had stolen George Montgomery’s cipher, had likewise ground out the life of his now thoroughly heartbroken wife. But no thought of compunction crossed the mind of the felon, now languishing in a Spanish cell and torturing his mind how best he could manage to get hold of that money in the bank, so that with a portion of it he might bribe his jailers and regain his freedom.

“I wonder how my American friend enjoys fighting the Spanish troops?” he smilingly queried of himself one day as he sat under the great white-washed wall of the prison court rolling a fresh cigarette.

At that moment, George Montgomery, sorely wounded, was bleeding his life out on the sunny slopes of the Sierra Morena mountains, and murmuring brokenly, now faintly, now passionately, as his fever ebbed and flowed, the name of his dearly loved wife, whom fate had at last, to all appearances, forever separated from him.