CHAPTER III.

Notwithstanding the day’s outward sense of joyousness and rest, in the brilliant sun, softened breeze, and lovely landscape, there was trouble brewing for the peaceful New England home, and one, at least, of its inmates seemed conscious of the fact.

“I wonder,” exclaimed Alice, as she stood before the cheval glass in her dressing-room, attending to those delicate personal adornments with which youthful brides are wont to prepare to receive their lords and masters, “I wonder whether grandma would have told me that terrible story about her wedding-ring if she had known that I had really lost mine?”

This momentous question was asked of her _vis-à-vis_, her own brilliant reflection in the swinging mirror before her. As the young bride turned with a look of inquiry to her image in the glass, we may be permitted a passing glance at the reflection which met her gaze.

A tall and lissom figure, with all the graceful lines of the stately Grecian form, combined with the warmer and more womanly outlines of the Norman maiden, the youthful matron stood a vision of loveliness which Praxiteles himself might have despaired to reproduce.

As she tossed the burden of brown tresses from her forehead, her pure Grecian profile stood out clear and delicate as a cameo against the curtain of dark hair which fell, a rippling sombre cascade, almost to her feet. The dark eyes smiled back a sympathetic glance from the mirror, and then a weary sigh of anxiety clouded the beautiful eyes with trouble. Why?

The conversation about the removed ring had been resumed in the morning, and in compliance with the husband’s request, the young bride had again taken off her wedding-ring, in order that he might himself replace it on her fair finger; this unfortunately happened on the upper piazza, and in the usual loving conflict with which youthful couples adjust all matters between themselves, the ring had fallen into the garden and mysteriously disappeared.

Search had been made high and low, but unavailingly, and with a feeling of alarm which each concealed from the other, but which, nevertheless, almost bordered on despair, the subject was dropped with mutual consent.

“It is just as well,” said the husband, with simulated cheerfulness; “I will bring you a fresh ring to-night, and I will put that on your finger myself--_once for all_.”

“Ah, pet, but it won’t be _our_ ring,” the bride had exclaimed with a tremor in her voice, and although the husband had ridiculed the idea that it made any difference, he was painfully conscious of the look of gentle reproach in the outraged eyes of his young wife and of the justice of it.

* * * * *

Punctually at five o’clock the coachman brought around the carriage in which his young mistress was accustomed to drive to the station to meet her husband. The train arrived punctually, but it brought no husband to the waiting wife. It was her first disappointment, trivial in character though it might be, and to the youthful bride it was painful almost beyond expression. As the coachman drove home it required a brave effort to still the quivering lip and to press back the too ready tear.

“Oh, I hope,” she murmured fearfully, “that this is not the beginning of any trouble through the loss of my wedding-ring.” For a moment the thought appalled her, and then a smile of wonderful relief flashed across her face.

“Oh! how silly I am,” she exclaimed, chiding herself, “of course George is late because he has to buy me a new ring.”

This explanation was entirely sufficient, and the once more radiant bride ascended to her room humming a dainty little operatic air, as happy as the mocking-bird which flooded the sunny stairway with melody.

But the shadow returned to the young wife’s face with ever-deepening gloom when the six o’clock and seven o’clock trains arrived and brought no husband with them.

“He is detained on business, dear,” explained her grandma.

“Why couldn’t he telegraph then?”

“There is no office within five miles, love, and no doubt he thought he would get here before his message.”

But another trouble weighed--and heavily--upon the young bride’s mind. The last train was due at eight o’clock, the hour so urgently appointed by her brother for their interview. How _could_ she possibly meet both her husband and her brother at the same time?

This brother was a sad scapegrace, and it had been the one mistake of the bride’s married life not to mention his existence to her husband.

“Why don’t you tell your husband about Tom?” had urged the old lady.

“O, I can’t bear George to know that I have anybody disgraceful so nearly related to me; if ever he misunderstood any of my actions, or if I was not at hand to explain them, he would be certain to think that I was going wrong, like poor Tom, and it would break my heart. Don’t you remember, dear, that night when we were talking about the Wollanders, how scornfully he said: ‘Oh, they couldn’t run straight to save their lives--it is in the blood--the strain is bad.’ That sentence of George’s determined me not to tell him anything.”

“Believe me, dearest,” replied the other, “it was a mistake, and one which grows more serious the longer it is kept up.”

“O, I _could not_ tell him,” returned Alice with a little air of determination; “but, grannie, dear, don’t-ee scare me like that.”

And so the matter had ended for that time, and fair Alice’s opportunity was lost forevermore.

* * * * *

When Mr. Montgomery arrived by the eight o’clock train and found no one to meet him, a dull feeling of apprehension crept into his heart. His first thought was, “Can my darling be sick? She is in very delicate health.”

With hasty steps he sped on his homeward way, denouncing the special business which on that particular day had detained him.

“I’m glad I thought to buy the ring during the day and did not leave it till after business, or I should either have lost the last train or had to come home without the ring.”

Entering the house unseen, by the side door, he glanced through the empty reception rooms, noted the vacant dining-room, and then hastened upstairs to his wife’s apartments, only, however, to find these silent and deserted.

A feeling of uneasiness and oppression took possession of him. “Where can everybody be?” he muttered. “Ah! there are grandpa and grandma coming across the fields, but where is Alice?”

Hastily glancing across the grounds from the window of his wife’s boudoir, he caught a glimpse in the gathering dusk of feminine apparel at the end of the long peach walk. The light was too uncertain, the distance too great, and the foliage too thick for accurate observation, but it appeared to him that some member of the household, probably one of the maids, was keeping a somewhat late appointment out of doors, for, with the aid of a pair of opera-glasses taken from the adjoining table, he could discern the dark outline of a man’s dress in close proximity to the other and more flowing garment.

Presently the two figures parted, and in the person of the female now hurrying down the peach walk toward the house, the astonished husband recognized his wife.

For a moment he stood gazing, stolidly it seemed, out of the window. Only the dull leaden look creeping over his face, and, presently, the panting breath gave indication of the shock he had received.

That his wife, whom he had considered as pure as the angels in Heaven, should take advantage of his first absence to meet another man clandestinely--another man! Bah! an old lover, for did she not kiss him at parting? Yes, that much the glasses had enabled him to see. The thought was agony, a thousand times worse than death.

“Oh, Alice! Alice! my love, my wife! How _could_ you!” he cried to the unhearing walls, as he put his hand to his head with a gesture of infinite pain.

That, however, was the last wail of love’s weakness; then the frenzy of jealousy and revenge seized him and possessed him like a demon, and the look on his face, as he took a revolver from a secret panel in the bureau, boded ill for his future happiness.

“Fooled, the very first month of my marriage too!” he muttered; and the words seemed ground out between his clenched teeth.

“----But I will clear this thing up or put an end to it once for all, even if in doing so I have to put an end----”

His voice sank as he passed from a side door and stole rapidly through the garden to intercept the man who had just left his wife.

The narrow path through the woods brought him out, as he had anticipated, in advance of the person whom he had come to meet.

He saw him coming along a hundred yards or so away, and he felt, mixed up with his murderous feelings, a craving to see the face of the man for whom his wife had forgotten him even in their honeymoon.

The stranger bade him good-evening with an easy, nonchalant air, and was passing on his way to the station.

“Stay!” commanded the other, in a hoarse and unnatural tone.

The face that turned towards him with an air of easy surprise was wonderfully handsome, and now that it recognized an enemy in the man before it, as insolent as handsome.

“Who are you?” inquired Montgomery, in a calmer tone, of which the other possibly failed to note the full significance.

The stranger’s answer was to flick the ash from his cigar in the other’s face, and then to turn easily and coolly on his heel.

In an instant, Montgomery’s hand was on his shoulder, and the two men faced each other at bay.

“You met a lady just now, and you kissed her on leaving?” burst from between Montgomery’s white lips.

“I certainly did.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“Quite well.”

“And you dare to tell me that to my face?”

“Yes, and also to tell you that I hope to meet and kiss the lady a great many more times.”

“Never, at least, in this world again,” grimly broke in the other, lashed to madness by the insolent smile of his antagonist, and stepping back a pace, he levelled the revolver full at the stranger’s face.

As the other saw the gleam of the barrel he shouted “Stay!” and threw back his head, but the action was too late, the bullet struck him in the temple, and he fell to the ground, his face bathed in blood.

For a moment the other stood motionless with the smoking weapon in his hand. Then he stooped and looked in the face of the dead man.

All the amazing fury had died out of his heart; he looked towards the home where his wife was awaiting him, and he murmured, “God forgive you, Alice, you have made me a murderer.” Then there came to him, as to all similarly circumstanced, the brute instinct of self-preservation. “No one saw me arrive,” he muttered to himself, “no one will suspect me; still, I would like _her_ to know that I had found out her crime and punished it.”

As he said this, a strange, ghastly smile, weird in the extreme, crept over his face, and he laid on the dead man’s breast gently--not in tribute to the man, but in reverence of death--the wedding-ring which he had bought that day to replace the missing one.

“She will understand by this just how it happened,” he murmured, as he turned to go.

Once he looked back and saw the dark form lying on the lonely road, and, so strange a composite is humanity, he felt a thrill of revengeful joy, to think how refined a method of punishment he had discovered for his wife.

Poor, short-sighted, misguided man; how little he dreamt of the widespread harm which that small, innocent-looking gold hoop was destined to work.