A Strange Disappearance Part 9

"My wife?" murmured he.

"She is well," was the a.s.surance given by Mr. Gryce, "and in a room not far from this. I will send for her if you say so."

"No, not yet," came in a sort of gasp; "let me look at these wretches first, and understand if I can what my wife has to suffer from her connection with them."

"Your wife," broke in the father, "what's that to do with it; the question is how do you like it and what will you do to get us clear of this thing."

"I will do nothing," returned Mr. Blake. "You amply merit your doom and you shall suffer it to the end for all time."

"It will read well in the papers," exclaimed the son.

"The papers are to know nothing about it," I broke in. "All knowledge of your connection with Mr. or Mrs. Blake is to be buried in this spot before we or you leave it. Not a word of her or him is to cross the lips of either of you from this hour. I have set that down as a condition and it has got to be kept."

"You have, have you," thundered in chorus from father and son. "And who are you to make conditions, and what do you think we are that you expect us to keep them? Can you do anymore than put us back from where we came from?"

For reply I took from my pocket the ring I had fished out of the ashes of their kitchen stove on that memorable visit to their house, and holding it up before their faces, looked them steadily in the eye.

A sudden wild glare followed by a bluish palor that robbed their countenances of their usual semblance of daring ferocity, answered me beyond my fondest hopes.

"I got that out of the stove where you had burned your prison clothing," said I. "It is a cheap affair, but it will send you to the gallows if I choose to use it against you. The pedlar-"

"Hush," exclaimed the father in a low choked tone greatly in contrast to any he had yet used in all our dealings with him. "Throw that ring out of the window and I promise to hold my tongue about any matter you don't want spoke of. I'm not a fool-"

"Nor I," was my quick reply, as I restored the ring to my pocket. "While that remains in my possession together with certain facts concerning your habits in that old house of yours which have lately been made known to me, your life hangs by a thread I can any minute snip in two. Mr. Blake here, has spent some portion of a night in your house and knows how near it lies to a certain precipice, at foot of which-"

"Mein Gott, father, why don't you say something!" leaped in cowed accents from the son's white lips. "If they want us to keep quiet, let them say so and not go talking about things that-"

"Now look here," interposed Mr. Gryce stepping before them with a look that closed their mouths at once. "I will just tell you what we propose to do. You are to go back to prison and serve your time out, there is no help for that, but as long as you behave yourselves and continue absolutely silent regarding your relationship to the wife of this gentleman, you shall have paid into a certain bank that he will name, a monthly sum that upon your dismissal from jail shall be paid you with whatever interest it may have acc.u.mulated. You are ready to promise that, are you not?" he inquired turning to Mr. Blake.

That gentleman bowed and named the sum, which was liberal enough, and the bank.

"But," continued the detective, ignoring the sudden flash of eye that pa.s.sed between the father and son, "let me or any of us hear of a word having been uttered by you, which in the remotest way shall suggest that you have in the world such a connection as Mrs. Blake, and the money not only stops going into the bank, but old scores shall be raked up against you with a zeal which if it does not stop your mouth in one way, will in another, and that with a suddenness you will not altogether relish."

The men with a dogged air from which the bravado had however fled, turned and looked from one to the other of us in a fearful, inquiring way that duly confessed to the force of the impression made by these words upon their slow but not unimaginative minds.

"Do you three promise to keep our secret if we keep yours?" muttered the father with an uneasy glance at my pocket.

"We certainly do," was our solemn return.

"Very well; call in the girl and let me just look at her, then, before we go. We won't say nothing," continued he, seeing Mr. Blake shrink, "only she is my daughter and if I cannot bid her good-bye-"

"Let him see his child," cried Mr. Blake turning with a shudder to the window. "I-I wish it," added he.

Straightway with hasty foot I left the room. Going to the little closet where I had ordered his wife to remain concealed, I knocked and entered. She was crouched in an att.i.tude of prayer on the floor, her face buried in her hands, and her whole person breathing that agony of suspense that is a torture to the sensitive soul.

"Mrs. Blake," said I, dismissing the landlady who stood in helpless distress beside her, "the arrest has been satisfactorily made and your father calls for you to say good-bye before going away with us. Will you come?"

"But my-my-Mr. Blake?" exclaimed she leaping to her feet. "I am sure I heard his footstep in the hall?"

"He is with your father and brother. It was at his command I came for you."

A gleam hard to interpret flashed for an instant over her face. With her eye on the door she towered in her womanly dignity, while thoughts innumerable seemed to rush in wild succession through her mind.

"Will you not come?" I urged.

"I-," she paused. "I will go see my father," she murmured, "but-"

Suddenly she trembled and drew back; a step was in the hall, on the threshold, at her side; Mr. Blake had come to reclaim his bride.

"Mr. Blake!"

The word came from her in a low tone shaken with the concentrated anguish of many a month of longing and despair, but there was no invitation in its sound, and he who had held out his arms, stopped and surveying her with a certain deprecatory glance in his proud eye, said, "You are right; I have first my acknowledgments to make and your forgiveness to ask before I can hope-"

"No, no," she broke in, "your coming here is enough, I request no more. If you felt unkindly toward me-"

"Unkindly?" A world of love thrilled in that word. "Luttra, I am your husband and rejoice that I am so; it is to lay the devotion of my heart and life at your feet that I seek your presence this hour. The year has taught me-ah, what has not the year taught me of the worth of her I so recklessly threw from me on my wedding day. Luttra,"-he held out his hand-"will you crown all your other acts of devotion with a pardon that will restore me to my manhood and that place in your esteem which I covet above every other earthly good?"

Her face which had been raised to his with that earnest look we knew so well, softened with an ineffable smile, but still she did not lay her hand in his.

"And you say this to me in the very hour of my father's and brother's arrest! With the remembrance in your mind of their bound and abject forms lying before you guarded by police; knowing too, that they deserve their ignominy and the long imprisonment that awaits them?"

"No, I say it on the day of the discovery and the restoration of that wife for whom I have long searched, and to whom when found I have no word to give but welcome, welcome, welcome."

With the same deep smile she bowed her head, "Now let come what will, I can never again be unhappy," were the words I caught, uttered in the lowest of undertones. But in another moment her head had regained its steady poise and a great change had pa.s.sed over her manner.

"Mr. Blake," said she, "you are good; how good, I alone can know and duly appreciate who have lived in your house this last year and seen with eyes that missed nothing, just what your surroundings are and have been from the earliest years of your proud life. But goodness must not lead you into the committal of an act you must and will repent to your dying day; or if it does, I who have learned my duty in the school of adversity, must show the courage of two and forbid what every secret instinct of my soul declares to be only provocative of shame and sorrow. You would take me to your heart as your wife; do you realize what that means?"

"I think I do," was his earnest reply. "Relief from heart-ache, Luttra."

Her smooth brow wrinkled with a sudden spasm of pain but her firm lips did not quiver.

"It means," said she, drawing nearer but not with that approach which indicates yielding, "it means, shame to the proudest family that lives in the land. It means silence as regards a past blotted by suggestions of crime; and apprehension concerning a future across which the shadow of prison walls must for so many years lie. It means, the hushing of certain words upon beloved lips; the turning of cherished eyes from visions where fathers and daughters ay, brothers and sisters are seen joined together in tender companionship or loving embrace. It means,-G.o.d help me to speak out-a home without the sanct.i.ty of memories; a husband without the honors he has been accustomed to enjoy; a wife with a fear gnawing like a serpent into her breast; and children, yes, perhaps children from whose innocent lips the sacred word of grandfather can never fall without wakening a blush on the cheeks of their parents, which all their lovesome prattle will be helpless to chase away."

"Luttra, your father and your brother have given their consent to go their dark way alone and trouble you no more. The shadow you speak of may lie on your heart, dear wife, for these men are of your own blood, but it need never invade the hearthstone beside which I ask you to sit. The world will never know, whether you come with me or not, that Luttra Blake was ever Luttra Schoenmaker. Will you not then give me the happiness of striving to make such amends for the past, that you too, will forget you ever bore any other name than the one you now honor so truly?"

"O do not," she began but paused with a sudden control of her emotion that lifted her into an atmosphere almost holy in its significance. "Mr. Blake," said she, "I am a woman and therefore weak to the voice of love pleading in my ear. But in one thing I am strong, and that is in my sense of what is due to the man I have sworn to honor. Eleven months ago I left you because your pleasure and my own dignity demanded it; to-day I put by all the joy and exaltation you offer, because your position as a gentleman, and your happiness as a man equally requires it."

"My happiness as a man!" he broke in. "Ah, Luttra if you love me as I do you-"

"I might perhaps yield," she allowed with a faint smile. "But I love you as a girl brought up amid surroundings from which her whole being recoiled, must love the one who first brought light into her darkness and opened up to her longing feet the way to a life of culture, purity and honor. I were the basest of women could I consent to repay such a boundless favor-"

"But Luttra," he again broke in, "you married me knowing what your father and brother were capable of committing."

"Yes, yes; I was blinded by pa.s.sion, a girl's pa.s.sion, Mr. Blake, born of glamour and grat.i.tude; not the self-forgetting devotion of a woman who has tasted the bitterness of life and so learned its lesson of sacrifice. I may not have thought, certainly I did not realize, what I was doing. Besides, my father and brother were not convicted criminals at that time, however weak they had proved themselves under temptation. And then I believed I had left them behind me on the road of life; that we were sundered, irrevocably cut loose from all possible connection. But such ties are not to be snapped so easily. They found me, you see, and they will find me again-"

"Never!" exclaimed her husband. "They are as dead to you as if the grave had swallowed them. I have taken care of that."

"But the shame! you have not taken care of that. That exists and must, and while it does I remain where I can meet it alone. I love you; G.o.d's sun is not dearer to my eyes; but I will never cross your threshold as your wife till the opprobrium can be cut loose from my skirts, and the shadow uplifted from my brow. A queen with high thoughts in her eyes and brave hopes in her heart were not too good to enter that door with you. Shall a girl who has lived three weeks in an atmosphere of such crime and despair, that these rooms have often seemed to me the gateway to h.e.l.l, carry there, even in secrecy, the effects of that atmosphere? I will cherish your goodness in my heart but do not ask me to bury that heart in any more exalted spot, than some humble country home, where my life may be spent in good deeds and my love in prayers for the man I hold dear, and because I hold dear, leave to his own high path among the straight and unshadowed courses of the world."

And with a gesture that inexorably shut him off while it expressed the most touching appeal, she glided by him and took her way to the room where her father and brother awaited her presence.

CHAPTER XIX. EXPLANATIONS

"I cannot endure this," came in one burst of feeling from the lips of Mr. Blake. "She don't know, she don't realize-Sir," cried he, suddenly becoming conscious of my presence in the room, "will you be good enough to see that this note," he hastily scribbled one, "is carried across the way to my house and given to Mrs. Daniels."

I bowed a.s.sent, routed up one of the men in the next room and despatched it at once.

"Perhaps she will listen to the voice of one of her own s.e.x if not to me," said he; and began pacing the floor of the narrow room in which we were, with a wildness of impatience that showed to what depths had sunk the hope of gaining this lovely woman for his own.

Feeling myself no longer necessary in that spot, I followed where my wishes led and entered the room where Luttra was bidding good-bye to her father.

"I shall never forget," I heard her say as I crossed the floor to where Mr. Gryce stood looking out of the window, "that your blood runs in my veins together with that of my gentle-hearted, never-to-be-forgotten mother. Whatever my fate may be or wherever I may hide the head you have bowed to the dust, be sure I shall always lift up my hands in prayer for your repentance and return to an honest life. G.o.d grant that my prayers may be heard and that I may yet receive at your hands, a father's kindly blessing."

The only answer to this was a heavily muttered growl that gave but little promise of any such peaceful termination to a deeply vicious life. Hearing it, Mr. Gryce hastened to procure his men and remove the hardened wretches from the spot. All through the preparations for their departure, she stood and watched their sullen faces with a wild yearning in her eye that could scarcely be denied, but when the door finally closed upon them, and she was left standing there with no one in the room but myself she steadied herself up as one who is conscious that all the storms of heaven are about to break upon her; and turning slowly to the door waited with arms crossed and a still determination upon her brow, the coming of the feet of him whose resolve she felt must have, as yet been only strengthened by her resistance.

She had not long to wait. Almost with the closing of the street door upon the detectives and their prisoners, Mr. Blake followed by Mrs. Daniels and another lady whose thick veil and long cloak but illy concealed the patrician features and stately form of the Countess De Mirac, entered the room.

The surprise had its effect; Luttra was evidently for the moment thrown off her guard.

"Mrs. Daniels!" she breathed, holding out her hands with a longing gesture.

"My dear mistress!" returned that good woman, taking those hands in hers but in a respectful way that proved the constraint imposed upon her by Mr. Blake's presence. "Do I see you again and safe?"

"You must have thought I cared little for the anxiety you would be sure to feel," said that fair young mistress, gazing with earnestness into the glad but tearful eyes of the housekeeper. "But indeed, I have been in no position to communicate with you, nor could I do so without risking that to protect which I so outraged my feelings as to leave the house at all. I mean the life and welfare of its master, Mrs. Daniels."

"Ha, what is that?" quoth Mr. Blake. "It was to save me, you consented to follow them?"

"Yes; what else would have led me to such an action? They might have killed me, I would not have cared, but when they began to utter threats against you-"

"Mrs. Blake," exclaimed Mrs. Daniels, catching hold of her mistress's uplifted hand, and pointing to a scar that slightly disfigured her white arm a little above the wrist, "Mrs. Blake, what's that?"

A pink flush, the first I had seen on her usually pale countenance, rose for an instant to her cheeks, and she seemed to hesitate.

"It was not there when I last saw you, Mrs. Blake."

"No," was the slow reply, "I found myself forced that night to inflict upon myself a little wound. It is nothing, let it go."

"No, Luttra I cannot let it go," said her husband, advancing towards her with something like gentle command. "I must hear not only about this but all the other occurrences of that night. How came they to find you in the refuge you had attained?"

"I think," said she in a low tone the underlying suffering of which it would be hard to describe, "that it was not to seek me they first invaded your house. They had heard you were a rich man, and the sight of that ladder running up the side of the new extension was too much for them. Indeed I know that it was for purposes of robbery they came, for they had hired this room opposite you some days previous to making the attempt. You see they were almost dest.i.tute of money and though they had some buried in the cellar of the old house in Vermont, they dared not leave the city to procure it. My brother was obliged to do so later, however. It was a surprise to them seeing me in your house. They had reached the roof of the extension and were just lifting up the corner of the shade I had dropped across the open window-I always open my window a few minutes before preparing to retire-when I rose from the chair in which I had been brooding, and turned up the gas. I was combing my hair at the time and so of course they recognized me. Instantly they gave a secret signal I, alas, remembered only too well, and crouching back, bade me put out the light that they might enter with safety. I was at first too much startled to realize the consequences of my action, and with some vague idea that they had discovered my retreat and come for purposes of advice or a.s.sistance, I did what they bid. Immediately they threw back the shade and came in, their huge figures looming frightfully in the faint light made by a distant gas lamp in the street below. 'What do you want?' were my first words uttered in a voice I scarcely recognized for my own; 'why do you steal on me like this in the night and through an open window fifty feet from the ground? Aren't you afraid you will be discovered and sent back to the prison from which you have escaped?' Their reply sent a chill through my blood and awoke me to a realization of what I had done in thus allowing two escaped convicts to enter a house not my own. 'We want money and we're not afraid of anything now you are here.' And without heeding my exclamation of horror, they coolly told me that they would wait where they were till the household was asleep, when they would expect me to show them the way to the silver closet or what was better, the safe or wherever it was Mr. Blake kept his money. I saw they took me for a servant, as indeed I was, and for some minutes I managed to preserve that position in their eyes. But when in a sudden burst of rage at my refusal to help them, they pushed me aside and hurried to the door with the manifest intention of going below, I forgot prudence in my fears and uttered some wild appeal to them not to do injury to any one in the house for it was my husband's. Of course that disclosure had its natural effect.

"They stopped, but only to beset me with questions till the whole truth came out. I could not have committed a worse folly than thus taking them into my confidence. Instantly the advantages to be gained by using my secret connection with so wealthy a man for the purpose of cowering me and blackmailing him, seemed to strike both their minds at once, slow as they usually are to receive impressions. The silver-closet and money-safe sank to a comparatively insignificant position in their eyes, and to get me out of the house, and with my happiness at stake, treat with the honorable man who notwithstanding his non-approval of me as a woman, still regarded me as his lawfully wedded wife, became in their eyes a thing of such wonderful promise they were willing to run any and every risk to test its value. But here to their great astonishment I rebelled; astonishment because they could not realize my desiring anything above money and the position to which they declared I was by law ent.i.tled. In vain I pleaded my love; in vain I threatened exposure of their plans if not whereabouts. The mine of gold which they fondly believed they had stumbled upon unawares, promised too richly to be easily abandoned. 'You must go with us,' said they, 'if not peaceably then by force,' and they actually advanced upon me, upsetting a chair and tearing down one of the curtains to which I clung. It was then I committed that little act concerning which you questioned me. I wanted to show them I was not to be moved by threats of that character; that I did not even fear the shedding of my blood; and that they would only be wasting their time in trying to sway me by hints of personal violence. And they were a little impressed, sufficiently so at least to turn their threats in another direction, awakening fears at last which I could not conceal, much as I felt it would be policy to do so. Gathering up a few articles I most prized, my wedding ring, Mr. Blake, and a photograph of yourself that Mrs. Daniels had been kind enough to give me, I put on my bonnet and cloak and said I would go with them, since they persisted in requiring it. The fact is I no longer possessed motive or strength to resist. Even your unexpected appearance at the door, Mrs. Daniels, offered no prospect of hope. Arouse the house? what would that do? only reveal my cherished secret and perhaps jeopardize the life of my husband. Besides, they were my own near kin, remember, and so had some little claim upon my consideration, at least to the point of my not personally betraying them unless they menaced immediate and actual harm. The escape by the window which would have been a difficult task for most women to perform, was easy enough for me. I was brought up to wild ways you know, and the descent of a ladder forty feet long was a comparatively trivial thing for me to accomplish. It was the tearing away from a life of silent peace, the reentrance of my soul into an atmosphere of sin and deadly plotting, that was the hard thing, the difficult dreadful thing which hung weights to my feet, and made me well nigh mad. And it was this which at the sight of a policeman in the street led me to make an effort to escape. But it was not successful. Though I was fortunate enough to free myself from the grasp of my father and brother, I reached the gate on --- street only to encounter the eyes of him whose displeasure I most feared, looking sternly upon me from the other side. The shock was too much for me in my then weak and unnerved condition. Without considering anything but the fact that he never had known and never must, that I had been in the same house with him for so long, I rushed back to the corner and into the arms of the men who awaited me. How you came to be there, Mr. Blake, or why you did not open the gate and follow, I cannot say."

"The gate was locked," returned that gentleman. "You remember it closes with a spring, and can only be opened by means of a key which I did not have."

"My father had it," she murmured; "he spent a whole week in the endeavor to get hold of it, and finally succeeded on the evening of the very day he used it. It was left in the lock I believe."

"So much for servants," I whispered to myself.

"The next morning," continued she, "they put the case very plainly before me. I was at liberty to return at once to my home if I would promise to work in their interest by making certain demands upon you as your wife. All they wanted, said they, was a snug little sum and a lift out of the country. If I would secure them these, they would trouble me no more. But I could not concede to anything of that nature, of course, and the consequence was these long weeks of imprisonment and suspense; weeks that I do not now begrudge, seeing they have brought me the a.s.surance of your esteem and the knowledge, that wherever I go, your thoughts will follow me with compa.s.sion if not with love."

And having told her story and thus answered his demands, she a.s.sumed once more the position of lofty reserve that seemed to shut him back from advance like a wall of invincible crystal.

CHAPTER XX. THE BOND THAT UNITES

But he was not to be discouraged. "And after all this, after all you have suffered for my sake and your own, do you think you have a right to deny me the one desire of my heart? How can you reconcile it with your ideas of devotion, Luttra?"

"My ideas of devotion look beyond the present, Mr. Blake. It is to save you from years of wearing anxiety that I consent to the infliction upon you of a pa.s.sing pang."

He took a bold step forward. "Luttra, you do not know a man's heart. To lose you now would not merely inflict a pa.s.sing pang, but sow the seeds of a grief that would go with me to the grave."

"Do you then"-she began, but paused blushing. Mrs. Daniels took the opportunity to approach her on the other side.

"My dear mistress," said she, "you are wrong to hold out in this matter." And her manner betrayed something of the peculiar agitation that had belonged to it in the former times of her secret embara.s.sment. "I, who have honored the family which I have so long served, above every other in the land, tell you that you can do it no greater good than to join it now, or inflict upon it any greater harm than to wilfully withdraw yourself from the position in which G.o.d has placed you."

"And I," said another voice, that of the Countess de Mirac, who up to this time had held herself in the background, but who now came forward and took her place with the rest, "I, who have borne the name of Blake, and who am still the proudest of them all at heart, I, the Countess de Mirac, cousin to your husband there, repeat what this good woman has said, and in holding out my hand to you, ask you to make my cousin happy and his family contented by a.s.suming that position in his household which the law as well as his love accords you."

The girl looked at the daintily gloved hand held out to her, colored faintly, and put her own within it.

"I thank you for your goodness," said she, surveying with half-sad, half-admiring glances, the somewhat pale face of the beautiful brunette.

"And you will yield to our united requests?" She cast her eye down at the spot where her father and brother had cowered in their shackles, and shook her head. "I dare not," said she.

Immediately Mrs. Daniels, whose emotion had been increasing every moment since she last spoke, plunged her hand into her bosom and drew out a folded paper.

"Mrs. Blake," said she, "if you could be convinced that what I have told you was true, and that you would be irretrievably injuring your husband and his interests, by persisting in that desertion of him which you purpose, would you not consent to reconsider your determination, settled as it appears to be?"

"If I could be made to see that, most certainly," returned she in a low voice whose broken accents betrayed at what cost she remained true to her resolve. "But I cannot."