Part 20

Her maid handed the message to Helen before she was out of bed the next morning. The girl read it, caught its meaning, and shook with an ague of fear. Her love for her husband, outraged and stricken, may not have been dead--for who shall speak the last word for a woman's heart?--and her tender soul recoiled at the murder so calmly forespoken: and yet neither of these impulses was elemental in her agony of terror. Her impetuous letter of the day before, breaking a silence she had sworn to keep, was not intended as a reply to anything that Hayward had written. It was but a wild protest against the new-born realization that her situation was tragic, and could not be ignored nor long concealed. She had not meant to suggest or to counsel death, but to rail against life. The possibility of his taking-off had not occurred to her. His letter terrified her! Death!--her husband's death? It was the one thing that must _not_ be! When she had read his words, her blood was ice. "No! No!" her teeth chattered as she dressed, "he must not, he must not!" In the nervousness, the weakness, the faintness, the sickness into which fevered meditations upon the day-old revelation had shaken her, she did not think to question the sincerity of Hayward's purpose at self-destruction. The calamity was imminent--and trebly calamitous. The chill of more than death was upon her. When she had dressed she dashed off a hurried scrawl.

"No, no, no. I did not mean that. It is not my wish that you destroy yourself. You must not. _You must not_! I need you--above everything I _need you_. If you die I am undone! Where is our marriage certificate? Or was there one? And who was that witness? Do not die, do not die. As you love me _do not die_!"

She carefully arranged every detail of her toilet, pinched her pale cheeks into something of pink, put on her morning smile, and, with a very conscious effort at lightness of manner, tripped out into the hall and down the stairs. She knew the very spot on which she would see her husband standing. With a round-about journey she approached it. He was not there. She laughed nervously, and with an aimless air, but a faster thumping heart, sought him at another haunt. Failure. And failure again. She went to breakfast, and displayed a lack of appetite and a tendency to hysterics. After breakfast she lingered down-stairs on every conceivable pretext, and journeyed from one end of the house to the other many times and again. At last when her nerves could not stand the strain a second longer she asked the coachman, who had driven the carriage to the door, where Hayward was. She felt that there was a full confession in the tones of her voice.

"Hayward asked for a day off this mornin', mum. He didn't come. Just telephoned."

Helen felt the tension of her nerves snap. She hurried to her room, suppressing fairly by force an impulse to scream, and locking the door, threw herself across the bed. There for three hours, pleading a headache and denying admittance to all who knocked, she cowered before the thoughts of her seething brain--and suffered torment.

Along about two o'clock she sprang up suddenly and turned out of her trunk all of her husband's letters and began feverishly to search for one she remembered written long ago which by chance contained the street number of his lodgings. She was nearly an hour finding it.

Again she went through the womanly process of making herself presentable, and sauntered freshly forth in quest of the post office and a special delivery stamp. With an added prayer that he relieve her suspense quickly, she dropped her agonized note into the box under the hurry postage. Having thus done all that was possible to save her husband's life--and her own--she went back to her bed in collapse, and waited for the night-fall as one, hoping for a reprieve, who must die at sunset.

*CHAPTER XXXI*

Helen waited in vain for a word from her husband. Her letter did not come to his hand. She tossed in agonized suspense through the long hours--through the snail-paced minutes--through the dragging, tortured moments.

Elise came in to see her. Helen gave the first explanation of her indisposition that came to mind, and declined all ministrations. Her mother came, and she would have dismissed her as briefly had not Mrs. Phillips asserted authority and ordered her into bed and suggested calling the family physician. At this intimation Helen demurred. She felt that she would suffocate if she were to be tucked up and made to lie quiet, with the doctor fingering her pulse and talking of sleeping potions while her soul was throbbing in such a frenzy of horror.

To escape from them and from herself, she suddenly sat up and announced her intention of attending the dancing party which Elise was giving for the evening. There was a vigorous opposition to this procedure by both her mother and Elise, and by her father also, who had come in to have a look at her: but she outwilled them all.

* * * * *

Elise's dancing party was an affair to be remembered--an affair that is remembered. It deserved to be an unusual occasion, for in arranging it Elise was conscious of being in an unusual frame of mind. She was in some way disposed to be so perfectly even-handed in her dispensations. She directed the three invitations to Mr. Evans Rutledge, Captain George St. Lawrence Howard and Senator Joseph Richland with her own hand and with almost one continuous stroke of the pen. She took this batch of three invitations as a separate handful and placed them together in the basket for the mail. She assigned to each of these gentlemen one dance with herself, and one only, in the programme of the formal first half of the evening. She appointed as attendants for the eleven o'clock collation Mr. Rutledge to Mrs. Hazard, Captain Howard to Helen, and Senator Richland to Alice Mackenzie--the fiancee of Donald MacLane. In everything she was judicially impartial. She played no favourites.

Her plans carried through charmingly, and after dancing through the card a delighted lot of guests sat down to the light luncheon, though three men in the party, despite all their gallant attentions to the women beside them, were using half of their brains at least in planning for the catch-as-catch-can hour and a half that was to follow. Elise had smiled upon them equally and tormentingly, and not a man of them but felt that the briefest little five minutes _tete-a-tete_ might do magical things.

"Well," said Lola, after she and Rutledge had effervesced in a few minutes of commonplaces and conventionalities, "is your money still on the Englishman?"

"No," said Rutledge, "I've quit gambling."

"Lost your sporting nerve?"

"No, not that; but a man who bets against himself deserves to lose, and I can't afford to lose."

"But your self-respect?" laughed Lola.

"Now Miss--ah--Mrs. Hazard, don't jump on a fellow when he's down. Self-respect is nothing less than an abomination when it comes between a man and a girl like--that,--and besides, she didn't mean it that way."

"Oh, didn't she?"

"No, she didn't, and she's just the finest, dearest woman in the whole wide--unmarried state!"

"Thank you," said Lola, "but you needn't have minded. And so I'm to congratulate you? I've been so anxious to hear, but our mail has never caught up with us since the day we left New York."

"Oh, bless your heart, there are no congratulations--only good wishes, I hope. Take note of the exact mathematical equality in the distances by which Richland and Sir Monocle and I are removed from the chair of the Lady Beautiful. Could anything be more beautifully impartial?"

"And who is the ancient gentleman with Elise?" Lola asked.

"Some old party from York State. Bachelor uncle or cousin or some such chap--quite a character too, it seems--danced with Dolly Madison or Martha Washington or the Queen of Sheba or somebody like that in his youth. Miss Phillips was telling me of him awhile ago."

"That was a very safe subject of discussion," said Lola.

"Yes," Rutledge replied grimly, "and do you know I tried my very hardest to lose him out of the conversation and he just wouldn't drop. Miss Phillips must be greatly interested in him."

"Anything will do in a pinch, Mr. Rutledge. What were you trying to talk about?"

"Oh, that's it, you think? Well I wish I had ten good minutes with her. I'd make the talk--for half the time--or know the reason why."

"I think I remember that Elise told me once that you could be very abrupt."

"Yes, and I'm going to do a few stunts in abruptness that will surprise her the next time I have a chance. I've tried the easy and graceful approach for the last six weeks, and it's getting on my nerves."

"I tell you what, Mr. Rutledge," Lola laughed, "Elise is to be with me to-morrow evening. You come around after dinner, and I promise you shall have a square deal and ten minutes at least for your very own. Come early and avoid the rush."

"Good. I'll do it. You are a trump!"

"And you may run along now if you wish," she said as they came out of the dining-room, "and take her away from the old party before the others get a chance at her."

"You'll go to heaven when you die," Rutledge whispered as he left her....

Evans met some difficulty in cutting Elise out of the herd. It took time and determination and some strategy to carry the smiling young hostess off down the hall alone; but he brought it to pass, and drew a breath of exultation when he had shaken himself free. However, turn where he would, every nook and corner seemed to be occupied. He was not openly on the hunt for a retired spot, but he was wishing for one with a prayerful heart and wide-open eyes.

Now a man can make love to a girl right out in the open--in full view of the multitude--in fact there is a sort of fascination in it--in telling her what a dear she is with the careless air and gesture which, to the onlookers, suggests a remark anent the blizzard in the west or the hot times in South Carolina; but when it comes to putting the cap-sheaf on the courting and running the game to earth, in pushing the inquiry to ultimate conclusions and demanding the supreme reply,--a man who dares to hope to win and whose blood has not been thinned by promiscuous flirtations ever wants the girl to be in a situation grab-able.

When Evans became convinced that the fates were against him on that evening, he set definite plans in order for the next.

"Mrs. Hazard tells me that you are to be with her to-morrow evening," he said to Elise, with something of that abruptness. "May I not call upon you there? There is something I wish very much to tell you, and the crowd here is always too great."

Elise looked up at him quickly. The something he wished to tell her was to be read in his face, but she could not presume to assume it had been said. The man waited quietly for his answer.

"Why, certainly, yes, I will be very glad to see you," she said in a tone of conventional politeness; but assuredly, Rutledge thought, the light in her gray eyes was not discouraging.

"But I must be going now, if you will take me back," she said; and they turned to go up the hall. A lumbering crash and a stifled little cry changed their purpose.

Three minutes before, they had seen Helen and Harry Lodge turn a corner in the hall and pass round behind some of the overflowing greenery which almost shut off a side entrance. Lodge was as intent upon the pursuit of Helen as Rutledge of Elise, and was making more of his opportunities. Helen was welcoming any excitement that carried her out of herself. With Lodge's pushfulness and her indifference to consequences, it did not take long to bring the issue to a point. From her manner Harry did not gather the faintest idea of losing. She listened to his speeches with a smile which was not in the least false but none the less deceiving. She did not offer the slightest objection to his wooing nor put the smallest obstruction in the way of it. In his enthusiasm he developed an eloquence, and, taking her unresisting hand, he rushed along to the climax of a rapturous declaration.

"--And will you be my wife?" he asked, with his arm already half about her.

"No," Helen answered dispassionately, drawing herself back from him as if his meaning were but just now made clear to her: but that "no" came too late.

A pair of eyes in which the lightnings had gathered and gone wild had looked upon the whole of this tender scene except the last moments of it. Hayward Graham felt the devils in the blood of all his ancestors white and black cry to be uncaged as he looked upon Lodge in his ecstasy of love-making, and when Lodge took Helen's hand and it was not withdrawn, the devils broke the bars.

"So," cried Hayward in his soul, "it's for you--to resign her to your arms--that I am asked to die! No! If I may not possess her, not you, you hound!"

A door was wrenched open and Lodge had only time to straighten himself before he was knocked senseless by the infuriated husband.

Hayward drew himself up, terrible, before his wife, and Helen in the moment of recognition threw herself into his arms with a glad cry.

"Oh, you have come at last!" she moaned. "You got my letter at last and have come to me!"

"No. What letter?" asked Hayward--but as he asked it Helen was pushing herself from him as savagely as she freely had thrown herself to him. Her ear had caught the sound of people approaching. Hayward was too confused to notice that. He was in consternation at the lightning change from love to aversion, and clung to her desperately.

A second later he was lying prone upon the floor with Evans Rutledge standing above him, murder in his eyes. He made a wild attempt to rise, when another terrific blow from Rutledge's arm sent him again to the floor. The hall was in an uproar, and a couple of palms were knocked aside as President Phillips burst into the midst of the melee in time to restrain another smash from Rutledge's clenched fist.

"In the name of God, what's the row?" he asked.

"This nigger has assaulted Miss Helen," said Rutledge, gasping and choking with fury.

Mr. Phillips trembled with a fearful passion, but, seeing Helen apparently unhurt, pulled himself down to a terrible quiet.

"Get up," he growled to Hayward. "Now"--when the footman was on his feet--"what have you to say for yourself?"

Hayward looked for the hundredth part of a second in Helen's eyes.

"I have no excuse," he answered simply.

Only silence could greet such an admission. For five seconds the silence and the stillness were torturing.

As Mr. Phillips moved to speak, Helen took two quick steps to the negro's side. His renunciation, his silent, unhesitating committal of the issue--of his life--to her decision, had touched her heart.

"I am his wife," she said, as she took his hand and turned to face the circle of her friends.

*CHAPTER XXXII*

Helen's announcement was made quietly, without any melodramatic display.

In the circle immediately surrounding her and her husband were her father and mother, Elise and Evans Rutledge, and Hal Lodge but just now coming to his senses and his feet. Behind these were Mrs. Hazard, Captain Howard, Senator Richland, and a gathering of other excited guests. For a space after Helen's speech the scene was steady and fixed as for a flashlight picture, and was photographed on Elise's brain: the incredulity on her father's face--the horror on that of Evans Rutledge--the perfectly restrained features of Howard--the quickly suppressed smile of Richland as he glanced at Evans in lightning comprehension of all the situation meant--the ghastly pallor of Mrs. Phillips as she sank voiceless in a dead faint--

"No--o!"

The harshly aspirated protest of Mr. Phillips was propelled from his lungs with a burst of indignant anger, but drawn out at the end into a pathetic quaver--and the scene dissolved.

Rutledge caught and lifted Mrs. Phillips whose collapse was unnoticed by her husband in his transfixed stare at Helen, and pushing back through the crowd was about to place her upon a settle in the hall; but at Elise's bidding he carried her up the broad stairs and left her in the care of her daughter and Lola Hazard. There could be no good-bye said--no time for it; but at the glance of dismissal Elise gave him from her mother's bedside--at the look of suffering in her eyes--his heart was like to burst.

Down-stairs the confusion was painful. The guests were hesitating between being accounted so ill-bred as to stare at a family scene, and running away from it as from a scourge.

To her father's unsteady denial Helen repeated her simple statement: "I am his wife."

"Since when?" Mr. Phillips demanded.

"A year ago last October."

The father looked about him as for help.

"Come along with me," he said. "Both of you. Good night, ladies and gentlemen," he added to the hesitating guests--and there was a breath of relief and a scattering for home.

* * * * *

With his hand upon Helen's arm, and Hayward following, President Phillips led the way to his offices.

"I am not to be disturbed," he told a servant after he had stopped at the door and waved Helen and Hayward into the room. "Ask Mrs. Phillips if she will please come here."

Entering, he motioned Hayward to a chair, and, taking Helen with him, went into the inner office and closed the door behind him.

"Now, my child," he said, with a break in his voice despite every effort to keep it steady, "tell me all about this, and we--we'll find a way out."

He patted her hand reassuringly.

"There's no way out, papa. I loved Hayward, and I married him."

"No, no, child, not love. You were infatuated--he was a footman and you are--"

"He was a gentleman," interrupted Helen.

"In a way, perhaps, but uncultured and common--how could--"

"He is a Harvard man," Helen cut in again, "a man of intelligence and education. He is--"

"But a weakling--no genuine Harvard man could be a menial--a flunkey--"

"He's not a weakling, papa. He stooped to the service for love of me. He loved me long before we came here--when he was a student at Harvard. It was so romantic, papa--he saw me first at a football game and he has loved me from that day. He was the hero of the game and he has yet the Harvard pennant I gave him--and, oh, he's a greater hero than that, papa--he was a soldier and he was the trooper that--wait a moment." Helen ran to the door.

"Here, Hayward, give me the knife," she called; and she came running back, holding it out to her father.

"The knife that the trooper stole!" she said, with a pitiful little attempt at gayety in her voice and face.

"What's that?" her father asked harshly.

"Why, papa, you surely don't forget the knife I gave you on your birthday? The one that was taken by the trooper who rescued you at Valencia?"

The light of understanding came to her father's eyes.

"Well, Hayward was the man, papa! He it was who saved your life to us--oh, how I have loved him for that! Just think, daddy dear, how often you have told me what a heroic thing it was--and for such a long time I have known it was Hayward and wanted so to tell you, but I couldn't."

"Why couldn't you?" demanded her father.

"Well, I found it out by accident when he caught me off my falling horse--there it is again, papa--he saved my life as well as yours--it was just the grandest thing the way he did it!--no wonder I have loved and married him--he's the sort that can take care of a woman--enough different from Bobby Scott, who couldn't stay in his own saddle!"

"But Mr. Scott is of an excellent family--distinguished for generations--while Hayward is a nobody--a--a nothing--no family and no recognized personal distinction or merit of his own--the commonest circus clown can ride a horse, my child."

"But he is personally distinguished, papa; and you have approved his merit by making him a lieutenant of cavalry."

"When? How?" the father asked.

"He is John H. Graham, papa--John Hayward Graham; and there can be no denying his fitness or ability, for you have certified to both."

Mr. Phillips saw he was estopped on that line; but it only made him angry and stirred his fighting blood.

"That's the reason," Helen continued, "that Hayward wouldn't let me tell you who he was or thing about his service to you. He wanted to obtain his commission absolutely on his merit and without appealing to your gratitude--wasn't it noble of him?"

A grunt was all the answer Helen got to her question.

"But his people, who are they? What sort of a family have you married into? Do you know?" Mr. Phillips demanded sharply.

"He lives with his mother--his father is dead--oh, I wish you could hear him tell about his father and mother, and his grandfather--it's just beautiful. I don't know whether he has any other relatives,--but that doesn't make any difference. I am not married to them, papa, and he's not responsible for his people but must be judged by his own personal character and excellence!"

In this last speech of Helen, Mr. Phillips thought he caught an echo of something he had heard himself say, and he winced a little: but it only added a spark more to his anger.

"But he's so far below you socially, Helen. You cannot be happy with him! You must remember that you are the President's daughter and--"

"And my husband," interrupted Helen, "is of the one order of American nobility--_a man_! I've thought about all that--the man's the thing, you said, papa--and besides, an army officer has no social superiors."

There was no mere echo in Helen's defence now. It was plain fighting her father with his own words: and it irritated him beyond endurance. His wrath burst through and threw off the shell of theories and sentiment which he had built up around himself and the man's real self spoke.

"But he's a negro, Helen! _A negro_! How could you!"

"A _negro_, papa?" Helen questioned in unmixed surprise. "What has that to do with it? He's the finest looking man in Washington if he is--and didn't you tell Elise that that was nothing more than a colour of skin?--that the man was the thing?--that a--that a--negro must stand or fall upon his own merit and not upon his colour or caste?--and did you not say to Mr. Mackenzie that colour has nothing to do with a man's acceptability in your house?--and that--"

"Oh, my God! yes, my child, but I did not mea--you are too young, too young to be married, my child,--too young and too--yes, too young, and we must annul this marriage--yes, we must annul it, we must annul it--we can annul it without trouble, don't worry about it, child, don't worry--we can annul it, and--for you are too young, my little girl, my little girl, my little girl!"

At sight of her father's tears, and the trembling that shook him as he sank down in a chair, Helen's combative attitude began to melt and her eyes to fill.

"Yes, little girl, don't worry," he said, drawing her tenderly down within his arms, "don't worry, and we will have it annulled in short order."

"It's too late, papa," she spoke against his shoulder.

"No, no, precious heart, it's not too late--we can have it annulled--don't cry, and don't worry, we can have it annulled."

"But, papa," she said again as she pushed herself back so that he looked her full in the face, "it's too late, I tell you! It's--too--late!"--and with outburst of weeping she curled herself up against him.

With a dry sob of comprehension her father gathered her close to his heart.

* * * * *