Chapter 16

"Of course, if you wanted to go, I should make no protest. But so long as you love me I shall hold you--should, if we ceased to meet. And whatever you do, don't marry some man suddenly in self-defence. No man ever loved a woman more than I love you, but you can trust me."

"Ah!" she said with her first moment of bitterness, "you _are_ strong. And you believe that if you held out your arms to me now, in the depths of this forest, I would spring to them. I might not stay. I believe, I hope I never should see you alone again; but-"

"You are deliberately missing the point," he said gravely. "I am not willing to pay the price of a moment's incomplete happiness. I have lived too long for that. And I should not have ventured even so far on dangerous ground," he added more lightly, "if it were not quite probable that five hundred people are ranging the forest this minute. We are later than we were yesterday, and they are not at their hymns. This evening when we return I shall discuss with you the possible age of the Adirondacks, or tell you one of Cooper's yarns." She leaned toward him, her breath coming so short for a moment that she could not speak. Finally, with what voice she could command she said,--

"Then, as we are safe here and you have broken down the reserve for a moment, let me ask you this: Do you know how much I love you? Do you guess? Or do you think it merely a girl's romantic fancy--"

"No!" he exclaimed. "No! No!" This time she did not cower before the passion in his face. She looked at him steadily, although her eyes were heavy. "Ah!" she said at last. "I am glad you know. It seemed to me a wicked waste of myself that you should not. And if you do--the rest does not matter so much. For the matter of that, life is always making sport of its ultimates. The most perfect dream is the dream that never comes true."

He did not answer for a moment, but when he did he had recovered himself completely.

"That is true enough," he said. "We who have lived and thought know that. But there never was a man so strong as to choose the dream when Reality cast off her shackles and beckoned. Imagination we regard as a compensation, not as the supreme gift. The wise never hate it, however, as the failures so often do. For what it gives let us be as thankful as the poet in his garret. If we awake in the morning to find rain when we vividly had anticipated sunshine, it is only the common mind who would regret the compensation of the dream."

XXI

Jack had almost finished his breakfast when Betty entered the dining-room. He looked beyond her with the surprised and sulky frown of the neglected husband.

"Where on earth is Harriet?" he asked. "Her natural inclination is to lie in bed all day. What induced her--"

"She wanted to go to the camp-meeting," said Betty, not without apprehension. "You know she always went with her adopted father, who was a Methodist clergyman--"

"Great heaven!" Her apprehension was justified. His face was convulsed with disgust. "My wife at a camp-meeting! And you let her go?"

"Harriet is not sixteen. And when a person has been brought up to a thing, you cannot expect her to change completely in a few months. Poor Harriet lived in a forsaken village where she had no sort of society; I suppose the camp-meeting was her only excitement. And you know how emotionally religious the--the Methodists are--You glare at me so I scalded my throat."

"I am sorry, and I am afraid I have been rude. But you must--you must know how distasteful it is for me to think of my wife at a camp-meeting. Great heaven!"

"It is even worse than my going over to politics, isn't it? Don't take it so tragically, my dear. The truth is, I suspect, Harriet worries about having deceived Molly and me, and the camp-meeting is probably to the Methodist what the confessional is to the Catholic. Both must ease one's mind a lot."

"Harriet will have to ease her mind in some other way in the future. And it will be some time before I can forget this." "Thank heaven I am not married. Are you going after her? Shall you march her home by the ear?"

"I certainly shall not go after her--that is, if she is in no danger. Where is this camp-meeting?"

"Oh, there are five hundred or so of them, and it is near a farmhouse." It was evident that he had forgotten the colour of the camp. "Seriously, I would let her alone for to-day. That form of hysteria has to wear itself out. I did not like the idea of her going, and told her so, but I saw what it meant to her, and took her. When you get her over to Europe, settle in some old town with a beautiful cathedral and a dozen churches, where the choir boys are ducky little things in scarlet habits and white lace capes, and there are mediaeval religious processions with gorgeous costumes and solemn chants, and the bells ring all day long, and there is a service every five minutes with music, and a blessed relic to kiss in every church. She will be a Catholic in less than no time, and look back upon the camp-meeting with a shudder of aristocratic disgust."

"I hope so. If you will excuse me I will go out and smoke a cigarette."

She said to Senator North as they approached the head of the lake that evening, "A tempest is brewing in our matrimonial teapot. He looked ready to divorce her when I told him where she had gone."

"I hope he won't divorce her when she gets home. Keep them apart if you can. She has developed more than one characteristic of the race to which she is as surely forged as if her fetters were visible. If she has all its religious fanaticism in her, she is quite likely to work up to that point of hysteria where she will proclaim the truth to the world."

"Ah!" cried Betty, sharply. "Why did I not think of that? What a poor guardian I am! If I had warned her, she never would have gone--but probably she won't, as we have thought of it. The expected so seldom happens."

"Don't count too much on that when great crises threaten," he said grimly. "The law of cause and effect does not hide in the realm of the unexpected when intelligent beings go looking for it. To tell you the truth, I have been apprehensive ever since I saw her face this morning. All the intelligence had gone out of it. With her race, religion means the periodical necessity to relapse into barbarism, to act like shouting savages after the year of civilized restraints. I will venture to guess that Harriet has forgotten to-day everything she has learned since she entered your family. Within that sad, calm, high-bred envelope is--I am afraid--a mind which has the taint of the blood that feeds it."

"I have thought that for a long while. Poor thing, why was she ever born?"

"Because sin has a habit of persisting, and is remorseless in its choice of vehicles. I do not see anything of her."

They waited almost an hour before she came hurrying down the path. She barely recognized them, but dropped on her seat in the bow and crouched there, sobbing and groaning.

It was a cheerless journey through the forest and down the lake, and the element of the grotesque did nothing to relieve it. Betty, distracted at first, soon realized that upon her lay the responsibility of averting a tragedy, and she ordered her brain to action. She leaned forward finally and whispered to Senator North:

"Row me to my boat-house and I will ask Jack to row you home. He is too courteous to suggest sending a servant if I make a point of his taking you."

He nodded. She saw the confidence in his eyes, and even in that hour of supreme anxiety her mind leapt forward to the winning of his approval as the ultimate of her struggle to save the happiness of two human beings who were almost at her mercy.

Jack was walking on the terrace. Betty called to him, and he consented with no marked grace to be boatman. He had taken the oars before he noticed that his wife, whom he was not yet ready to forgive, was being hurried off by his cousin.

"Mrs. Emory is very tired and her head aches," said Senator North. "Miss Madison is anxious to get her into bed. Can't you dine with me to-night? It would give me great pleasure, and men are superfluous, I have observed, when women have headaches."

And Jack, who was not sorry to punish his wife, accepted the invitation and did not return home till midnight.

XXII

Betty took Harriet to her own room and put her to bed. She had dinner for both sent upstairs, but Harriet would not eat; neither would she speak. She lay in the bed, half on her face, as limp as the newly dead. Occasionally she sighed or groaned. Betty tried several times to rouse her, but she would not respond. Finally she shook her.

"You shall listen," she said sternly. "As you seem to have left your common-sense up there with those negroes, you are not to leave this room until you have recovered it--until I give you permission. Do you understand?" She had calculated upon striking the slavish chord in the demoralized creature, and her intelligence had acted unerringly. Harriet bent her head humbly, and muttered that she would do what she was told.

When Betty heard Jack return, she went out to meet him, locking the door behind her.

"Harriet is with me for to-night," she said. "She needs constant care, for she is both excited and worn out; and as you still are angry with her--"

"Oh, I am sorry if she is really ill, and I will do anything I can--"

"Then leave her with me for to-night. You know nothing about taking care of women."

Jack, who was sleepy and still sulky, thanked her and went off to his room. She returned to Harriet, who finally appeared to sleep.

Betty took the key from the door and put it in her pocket, then lay down on the sofa to sleep while she could: she anticipated a long and difficult day with Harriet. She was awakened suddenly by the noise of a door violently slammed. Immediately, she heard the sound of running feet.

She looked at the bed. Harriet was not there. A draught of cold air struck her, and she saw a curtain flutter. She ran to the window. It was open. She stepped out upon the roof of the veranda, and went rapidly round the corner to Emory's room. One of the windows was open. Betty looked up at the dark forest behind the lonely house and caught her breath. What should she see? But she went on. A candle burned in the room. Harriet sat on a chair in her nightgown, her black hair hanging about her.

"I told him," she said, in a hollow but even voice. "I was drunk with religion, and I told him. I didn't come to my senses till I looked up--I was on the floor--and saw his face. He has gone away."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing. Not a word."

She drew a long sigh. "I'm so tired," she said. "I reckon I'll go to bed."

XXIII

For four days they had no word from Jack Emory. Harriet slept late on the first day. When she awoke she was an intelligent being again, and strove for the controlled demeanor which she always had seemed to feel was necessary to her self-respect. But more than once she let Betty see how nervous and terrified she was.

"I am sure he will come back," she said, with the emphasis of unadmitted doubt. "Sure! He adores me. Of course he would not have married me if he had known, but that is done and cannot be undone. When he realizes that, he will come back, for he loves me. We are bound together and he will return in time."

Betty, who scarcely left her, gave her what encouragement she could. Men were contradictory beings. Jack had the fanatical pride and prejudices of his race, but he was in love. It was possible that after a few months of loneliness in his old house he would give way to an uncontrollable longing and send for his wife. She had made inquiries at the railroad station, and ascertained that he had taken a ticket for New York. Undoubtedly he had gone on to Washington.

She reproached herself bitterly for having slept and allowed Harriet to escape; but Harriet, to whom she did not hesitate to express herself, shook her head.

"You could not have stayed awake for twenty-four hours, and I should have found a chance sooner or later. The idea came to me up there while I was shouting and nearly crazy with excitement and the excitement of all those half-mad negroes in that wild forest,--the idea came to me that I must tell him, and I believed that it came straight from the Lord. It seemed to me that He was there and told me that was my only hope,--to tell him myself before he found it out from your mother or Miss Trumbull. The idea never left me for a minute; it possessed me. I was so afraid you wouldn't have waited when I found out I was late,--that they would tell him before I got home. But I wanted to tell him alone. When you ordered me not to leave the room, I felt like I wanted to do anything you told me, but when I found you'd gone to sleep, I felt like I couldn't wait another minute. I crawled out of the window and went to him. And perhaps I did right. I can't think it wasn't an inspiration to confess and be forgiven before he found out for himself."

Betty was in the living-room with Senator North when a letter from Jack Emory was brought to her. With it, also bearing the Washington postmark, was another, directed in an unfamiliar and illiterate hand. Betty, cold with apprehension, tore open Emory's letter. It read:--

Dear Betty,--You know, of course, that my wife confessed to me the terrible fact that she has negro blood in her veins. My one impulse when she told me was to get back to my home like a beaten dog to its kennel. I did little thinking on the train; whether I talked to people or whether I was too stupefied to think, I cannot tell you. But here I have done thinking enough. At first I hated, I loathed, I abhorred her. I resolved merely never to see her again, to ask you to send her to Europe as quickly as possible, to threaten her with exposure and arrest if she ever returned. But, Betty, although I have not yet forgiven her, although the thought of her awful hidden birthmark still fills me with horror and disgust, I know the weakness of man. The marriage is void according to the laws of Virginia, and I know that if I returned to her she would insist upon remarriage in a Northern State--and I might succumb. And rather than do that, rather than dishonour my blood, rather than do that monstrous wrong, not only to my family but to the South that has my heart's allegiance--as passionate an allegiance as if I had fought and bled on her battlefields--I am going to kill myself.

Do not for a moment imagine, Betty, that I hold you to account. I can guess why you did not warn me in the beginning, why you did not tell me when it was too late. Would that I had gone on to the end faithful to my ideal of you! My lonely years in this old house were brightened and made endurable with the mere thought of you. But man was not made to live on shadows, and I loved again, so deeply that I dare not trust myself to live.

I send her only one message--she must drop my name. She has no legal title to it according to the laws of Virginia; the marriage would be declared void were it known that she had black blood in her. I would spare her shame and exposure, but she shall not bear my name, and it is my dying request that you use any means to make her drop it. Good-bye. JACK EMORY.

Betty thrust the letter into Senator North's hand. "Read it!" she said. "Read it! Oh, do you suppose he has--"

Her glance fell on the other letter and she opened it with heavy fingers. It read:--

Mis Betty,--Marse Jack done shot himself. He tole me not to telegraf. Yours truly, JIM.

Betty stood staring at Senator North as he read Jack's letter. When he had finished it, she handed him the other. He read it, then took her cold hands in his.

"You must tell her," he said. "It is a terrible trial for you, but you must do it."

"Ah!" she cried sharply. "I believe you are thinking of me only, not of that poor girl."

"My dear," he said, "that poor creature was doomed the moment she entered the world. No amount of sympathy, no amount of help that you or I could give her would alter her fate one jot. For all the women of that accursed cross of black and white there is absolutely no hope--so long as they live in this country, at all events. They almost invariably have intelligence. If they marry negroes, they are humiliated. If they pin their faith to the white man, they become outcasts among the respectable Blacks by their own act, as the act of others has made them outcasts among the Whites, Their one compensation is the inordinate conceit which most of them possess. Do not think I am heartless. I have thought long and deeply on the subject. But no legislation can reach them, and the American character will have to be born again before there is any change in the social law. It is one of those terrible facts of life that rise isolated above the so-called problems. If Harriet lives through this, she will fall upon other miseries incidental to her breed, as sure as there is life about us, for she has the seeds of many crops within her. So it is true that all my concern is for you. In a way I helped to bring this on you; but you did what was right, and I have no regrets. And you must think of me as always beside you, not only ready to help you, but thinking of you constantly."

She forgot Harriet for the moment. "Oh, I do," she said, "I do! I wonder what strength I would have had through this if you had not been behind me."

"You are capable of a great deal, but no woman is strong enough to stand alone long. Send for Harriet to come here. I don't wish you to be alone with her when she hears this news."

Betty rang the bell, and sent a servant for Harriet. She put Emory's letter in her pocket.

"I shall not give her that terrible message of his until she quite has got over the shock of his death," she said. "Let her be his widow for a little while. Then she can go to Europe and resume her own name. She soon will be forgotten here."

Harriet came in a few moments. She barely had sat down since she had risen after a restless night. But she had refused to talk even to Betty. As she entered the room and was greeted by one of those silences with which the mind tells its worst news, she fell back against the door, her hands clutching at her gown. Betty handed her the servant's letter.

She took it with twitching fingers, and read it as if it had been a letter of many pages. Then she extended her rigid arms until she looked like a cross.

"Oh!" she articulated. "Oh! Oh!"

But in a moment she laughed. "I don't feel surprised, somehow," she said sullenly. "I suppose I knew all along he'd do it. Every day that I live I'll curse your unjust and murderous race while other people are saying their prayers. May the black race overrun the world and taint every vein of blood upon it. For me, I accept my destiny. I'm a pariah, an outcast. I'll live to do evil, to square accounts with the race that has made me what I am. I'll go back to that camp, and leave it with whatever negro will have me, and when I'm so degraded I don't care for anything, I'll go out and ruin every white man I can. I'll keep the money you gave me, so that I'll be able to do more harm--"

"You can go," said Betty, "but not yet. You shall go with me first and bury your husband. If you attempt to escape until I give you permission, I shall have you locked up. I shall take two menservants with us. Now come upstairs with me and pack your portmanteau."

She slipped her hand into Senator North's. "Good-bye," she said hurriedly. "I shall return Friday night. Please come over Saturday morning."

Harriet preceded Betty upstairs, and obeyed her orders sullenly. Betty locked her in her room, and went to break the news to her mother. Mrs. Madison received it without excitement, remarking among her tears that it was one of the denouements she had imagined, and that on the whole it was the best thing he could have done. She consented to go with her maid to the hotel till Friday, and the party left for Washington that evening.

XXIV

They returned late on Friday night. As Betty had anticipated, Harriet's exhausted body had not harboured a violent spirit for long. When they arrived in New York, she bought herself a crape veil reaching to her toes, and when she entered the dilapidated old house where her husband lay dead, she began to weep heavily. Her tears scarcely ceased to flow until she had started on her way to the mountains again, and, hot as it was, she never raised her veil during the nine hours' train journey from New York to the lake, except to eat the food that Betty forced upon her.

Mrs. Madison had returned, and Betty, after telling her those details of the funeral which elderly people always wish to know, went to her room, for she was tired and longed for sleep. But Harriet entered almost immediately and sat down. She barely had spoken since Monday; but it was evident that she was ready to talk at last, and Betty stifled a yawn and sat upon the edge of her bed. Harriet was a delicate subject and must be treated with vigilant consideration, except at those times where an almost brutal firmness was necessary. She looked sad and haggard, but very beautiful, and Betty reflected that with her voice she might begin life over again, and in a public career forget her brief attempt at happiness. If she failed, it would be because there was so little grip in her; Nature had been lavish only with the more brilliant endowments.

"Betty," she began, "I want to tell you that I'm sorry I said those dreadful words when I learned he was dead. But suspense and the doubt that had begun to work had nearly driven me crazy. I don't mind saying, though, that I wish I had kept on meaning them, that I could do what I said I'd do, for I meant them then--I reckon I did! But I haven't any backbone, my will is a poor miserable weak thing that takes a spurt and then fizzles out. And I'd rather be good than bad. I reckon that has something to do with it. I'd have gone to the bad, I suppose, if you hadn't taken hold of me; I'd have just drifted that way, although I liked teaching Sunday-school, and I liked to feel I was good and respectable and could look down on people that were no better than they should be. And now that I've been living with such respectable and high-toned people as you all are, I don't think I could stand niggers and poor white trash again--"

"I am sure you will be good," interrupted Betty, encouragingly. "And you owe him respect. Don't forget that, and make allowances for him."

"Ah, yes!" Her face convulsed, but she calmed herself and went on. "You will never know how I loved him. I was proud enough of the name, but I worshipped him; and he killed himself to get rid of me! Oh, yes, I'll make allowances, for I killed him as surely as if I had pulled that trigger--" "Put the heavier blame on those that went before you," said Betty, with intent to soothe. "You did wrong in deceiving him, but helpless women should be forgiven much that they do, in their desperate battle with Circumstance. Think of it as a warning, but not as a crime." Don't let _anything_ make you morbid. Life is full of pleasure. Go and look for it, and put the past behind you."

Harriet shook her head. "I am not you," she said. "I am _I_. And I feel as if there was a heavy hand on my neck pressing me down. If I should live to be a toothless old woman, I should never feel that I had any right to be happy again. Heaven knows what I might be tempted to do, but I should laugh at myself for a fool, all the same."