An Ambitious Woman Part 43

"Whoever has sent this," he soon said, "is your enemy, and wishes you great harm. But thank G.o.d I have it!" He crushed the paper in his hand, immediately afterward, and thrust it within his pocket. Claire rose from the sofa. Her hands hung at either side, in a helpless way. Her eyes were still fastened upon his face.

"Are you acting a part?" she asked, with a sort of weary desperation. "I realize that I have done a horrible thing. But tell me at once what course you mean to take. If I am to leave your house, and never to be noticed by you again, order me to go, and I will go. The letter shows you that I care nothing for that man. I don't make excuses; I have none to make. But I am not an adulteress even in thought. Remember what I say. My sin, dark as it is, has not that one hideous element. I wanted to desert you--to go abroad--you read the whole story in the letter. You have only to speak the word, and you shall have looked on me for the last time.... It is your silence that tortures me.... Why are you silent? Here I stand before you, without a shadow of right to defend myself, and yet you force from me a certain kind of miserable defense, because you will not either rebuke or denounce me."

He had been looking at her very steadily. He now caught one of her hands in both his own.

"Claire," he said, "I have only one wish--one thought: to save you."

"Save me?" she repeated.

He went on speaking with great speed. His eyes were fixed on her own, and they were filled with a light that was rich and sweet. She had never known him to be like this before; he was just as tender as of old, but beneath his tenderness there was a strength, a decision, a virile a.s.sertion, that gave him a new, startling personality.

"Yes," he said, "to save you. There is no great mischief done, as it is.

I think some woman sent me your letter. It is just what some envious or spiteful woman would do. But I have it, and can destroy it. You ask me what course I mean to take. You ask me whether I shall bid you to leave my house. My only answer, Claire, is this: if you have no love for me, then I have a very great love for you. I think you knew this long ago. I am your friend, poor child--not only your husband, but your friend. You shan't go wrong while I have the brain and the nerve to stand between you and folly. Other men might take another course. I don't care. You are pure, still; I am certain of it, and you shall remain pure. You are my wife; I will protect you; it's my duty to protect you. You have never loved me; you married me without a spark of love. But I gave you as large a love as man ever gave to woman. It's in my heart still. It can never die. If it were not so large and so true it would not seek to guard and shield you now. But it does--it must.... Claire, Claire, you have been terribly foolish! A little more, and I could have done nothing to save you. A little more, and I must have cast you off. But as it is, I can and will plant myself between you and disgrace!"

He had been holding her hand all through the utterance of these words.

But now he released it, and slightly withdrew from her.

She advanced toward him. There was a look of absolute awe on her face.

She recognized how much her own blindness had been hiding from her. His very stature seemed to have risen. His tolerance appealed to her with sublimity. It flashed through her mind: 'What other man would have acted as he has done?'

In a few brief moments she knew him as the n.o.ble and high being he really was. The tears besieged her eyes. The enormity of the wrong she had done him horrified her. She stood quivering in his presence. The impulse a.s.sailed her literally to kneel before him. She grasped his arm; her dry, tearless eyes searched his pale face with a madness of contrition in their look.

"Herbert," she faltered.... "Herbert, I--I never knew till now that you could be so grand and strong! What kept me from loving you was your own love for _me_. It seemed to make you weak; it seemed to put you below me. You were always yielding to me--always paying me reverence. But _I_ should have bowed before _you_. You were worthy of it, and I did not see ... I never saw till now!... Herbert, _I love you_!... Oh, these are not idle words! They spring straight from my soul! If you want the repentance of my future life, it is yours! Why did you not show me your real self till so late? What shall I do to prove my love? You must not pardon me so easily--no, I cannot endure that! It makes me sick with shame to be treated so! Such a mercy would be cruelty. You must punish me, somehow--I must undergo some penance, the harder the better. You have no right to trust me again until I have pa.s.sed through some sort of cleansing fire--suffered, been mortified, humiliated, taught a stern and fearful lesson! You gave me everything; there was nothing in the world I did not owe to you; you lifted me from dependence into the most brilliant prosperity. And I--Good Heavens! I was a viper of ingrat.i.tude!

I might call it madness; I might say that the l.u.s.t for riches and power made me conceive this treacherous and contemptible idea of deserting you--made me decide that we could not live together when the wealth had gone. But it was no madness--there was too clear a method in it for that. It was merely base and mean--it can have no palliative....

Herbert, don't look at me with any love, any pity in your face. I can't bear it--I--I want to creep away somewhere and die. I am not fit to have you touch me--No, no! you _must_ not!" ...

She had receded from him; she meant to quit the room, though her limbs felt weak and her head giddy, and she was not sure whether she could reach the doorway without falling. But on a sudden his arms clasped her.

How strong they seemed! She had never till now had so keen a sense of even his bodily strength. When his lips touched her own she burst into tears. She was still struggling to free herself, but he held her too firmly; she could not escape.

"Claire," she heard him say, with a tenderness of tone more exquisite than any he had yet used, "I couldn't help forgiving you, dear, no matter how hard I might try. Oh, darling, let us begin all over again!

You say that you do love me at last! Well, I believe you! _I want to believe you, and I will!_ How could I ever punish you? You haven't been so greatly to blame--don't torment yourself by thinking you have. People were flattering and courting you; they made you a perfect queen; they turned your head. Now all that is over. I think there is a great happiness in store for us both, my love--a happiness that the money never brought us while it lasted. Perhaps, after all, it is better that I should find you weak. It makes you more human in my sight. I shan't bow down before you any more, as you say that I did; I shall only love you ... love you forever--love you till death, and beyond it, too, I hope!"

He was kissing her cheek as he uttered these final words; but it had already seemed to take a certain chill, and in another moment he was forced to bear up her form, for it had no power whatever of self-support. She had fainted in his arms....

She found him close beside her when she regained consciousness. She lay upon the lounge in her own dressing-room upstairs. He was bathing her forehead with cologne, and holding to her nostrils a handkerchief drenched with it. He had begun to be alarmed at her continued swoon.

The first thing that her eyes reopened upon was his smile of glad relief.

The light of that smile stayed with Claire through years. It bathed her life in perpetual sunshine.

Everything altered in a few more weeks. They left the great house and went to live in the smaller one, which Claire personally owned, and which Hollister would not let her give back to him, though she pleaded with him more than once on this subject.

"No," he would always say. "It is yours, and that means it is mine as well. I meant, when the crash first came, that you should keep it, and I was glad that the law made it yours. If I let you give it back to me, this would look as if I had lost faith in you. And I have lost no faith; I have gained a new faith--that is all."

'To think that I should ever have known this man and not have loved him!' she would say to herself again and again.

Every successive day brought with it a dear surprise. She felt toward her husband as though his nature were a region through which she had journeyed heedlessly but was now revisiting with sharpened vision, vitalized intelligence. Traits and qualities that she could not but remember him to have possessed, now a.s.sumed a beauty, a harmony, a proportion, an allurement that she had never before dreamed of recognizing. A fresh light, so to speak, flooded the beloved landscape of his character. Vale, grove, wayside, were all preciously different from of old. Over them sang awakened birds, and still higher leaned a shining sky, fond, fathomless, prophetic.

Very few of their former fashionable acquaintances showed the slightest sign of deserting them. Hollister had been one of the many victims of the dire panic, but it soon became generally understood that he was going to make honorable settlement with his creditors--that he was on the list of the seriously wounded, so to speak, and not on that of the killed. In many instances there was even an increase of civility. Cards were left at the door of the small house, just as they had been left at the door of the more s.p.a.cious one. Society made it a matter of _amour propre_ not to drop them. It had taken them up; it could not afford to discountenance them for the single fault of a reduced income. The thorough-paced plutocrat is always very slow to admit his claims founded on anything so vulgar as a purely mercenary basis; and the aristocrat, on the other hand, will very often pay you a kind of proud loyalty when he has once openly ranked you as his equal. Moreover, both Claire and her husband had an ample personal popularity to fall back upon. They had been graceful and charming young figures, felicitously harmonizing with their festal background. Their absence left a sensible void.

But it was an absence, and as such it continued. Claire's love for the superficial glitter and pomp of what she had always inwardly felt to be sham and falsity was no longer even a dumb sensation. It had become the merest memory, and by no means a pleasant one. She had changed for the last time in her life. The change was securely permanent, now. If she looked into the future and asked herself what unfulfilled desire lay there, it was always to thrill with the hope that Herbert might one day be rid of all financial worriment, and that their home, already lit and warmed by a precious mutual love, might receive the blessing of a happy tranquillity as well.

For a long time this hope looked very far from being realized. She was untiringly devoted to his interests, and would hold long talks with him regarding the complicated and distracting nature of his affairs. Her apt mind, her ready and shrewd counsel, no longer surprised him; but he recognized with an untold joy the different motives that now spurred and animated her. In the end light began to break from darkness. Hollister still kept steady the extraordinary nerve which had before enabled him to set aflame and continue such astonishing pyrotechnics of speculation.

It slowly and surely became evident to him that he would soon have steered clear of all disastrous reefs, and bring forth from the final dying rage of the big tempest a ship not so wholly shattered that careful repairs and cautious sailing hereafter might not keep it very seaworthy for many years.

Claire had meanwhile exulted in her economies, and conducted them with that same easy tact and skill which had marked her past supervision of a large and splendid establishment. She still preserved a certain residuum of friends. There was no ascetic renunciation of all worldly pleasures, either on her own or Hollister's part. It amused her to observe just whom she retained as her intimates and allies. The survival of the fittest, in this respect, was something to note and value. It showed her that the gay throng in which she had shone was not all made of worthlessly flippant members. But those, both men and women, whom she now liked to have about her had each stood some pleasant test, had each presented to her some solid or sterling trait of mind or character, which gave them a pa.s.sport into the gentler, healthier, and wiser conditions of her new life.

Beverley Thurston paid only rare visits to her home. She understood why he did not come oftener; she never pressed him to come. She had thanked him for his great service, with moist eyes and breaking voice. But she had not told him of the sweet ascendancy that her husband had gained.

She had tried to let him see this change. Such revelation had been less difficult than spoken words; for all words on a subject that had now become so holy appeared to her impious.

During many days after imparting to her husband the knowledge that he must henceforward receive her mother into his household, she had dreaded the clash of their widely opposite natures, and foreseen trouble that would only lend weight and severity to that which fate had already inflicted. But by degrees she found herself laughing with Herbert at the shadows of her own fears. He treated Mrs. Twining as a kind of grim joke. With her invigorated health, she was prepared to hold him strictly accountable for his altered circ.u.mstances. Her sarcasms were more pitiless than Claire had ever remembered them. She took the att.i.tude of a person who has been shut out from a banquet until the viands are all demolished, and then admitted to feed upon the unsatisfactory debris.

She had no intention whatever of forgiving Hollister his misfortunes. In all her career of repulsive deportment she had never achieved a more obnoxious triumph. And yet, by the sheer force of good-humored, gallant, conciliatory kindness, Hollister at length succeeded in conquering her. She found it simply impossible to annoy him. He insisted upon not taking her seriously. His amiability was so impenetrable that she finally receded before it, and began to profess toward him a sort of gloomy, reluctant liking.

"I see," Claire said to him one day. "She is my punishment. But why should you share it?"

"Nonsense," he answered. "I think she is immense fun." It seemed to Claire that he was quite in earnest as he thus spoke.

"She really does like you," Claire said. "In all my life, Herbert, I have never known her to like--actually _like_--any one till now."

"That makes it all the funnier," he returned, with a slight, blithe laugh. She knew he was in earnest, then, and felt a deep sense of comfort.

Once Claire had spoken to him of Goldwin.... It already seemed far back in the past, now, although it was scarcely a year ago. Her words had been very few; her cheeks had burned while she uttered them.

"Herbert," she had said, "I feel that I must ask you whether you have--have met"--And here she paused. Then, while he saw the pain and shame on her face, she went stammeringly on: "Oh, you know whom I mean--I don't want even to speak his name again--but it is best that I knew on ... on what terms you are, and all that."

He grew pale while he looked at her. His voice was very grave, but perfectly kind.

"I see him nearly every day, Claire. That is inevitable, you know. I have spoken to him only once since--that time. I didn't quite know whether I was strong enough to keep my temper. But I did keep it. I told him that I had learned everything. And then I told him, very quietly, that if he ever dared to address me again I would find an excuse for cowhiding him."

Claire sprang up from her seat. "Oh, Herbert! did you say that? And did he ... stand it?"

"Yes, he stood it. I didn't think he would, for a moment or two. It was imprudent of me, perhaps--on your account, I mean. But he walked away, without a word.... And now, Claire, promise me that you will never, as long as we both live, refer to this matter again."

She threw her arms about his neck. "Never!" she cried. "I didn't want to speak of it, as it was. I promise you, with all my heart!"

They had been married several years when a child, a boy, was born to them. Claire made the most adoring of mothers. Mrs. Diggs, who was forever dropping in upon her friend, with even more than her former intimacy, said, once, while she watched the baby laugh on its mother's lap, after the bath that Claire had lovingly given it with her own hands:--

"Upon my word, it does seem so odd, don't you know? I can't just quite realize it, even yet, Claire, dear."

"Realize what?" said Claire, looking up from the rosy little treasure on her lap with a smile and two touches of color, for which the joy of her own motherhood was solely responsible.

"Why, that you are the same being I used to know. It's a perfectly lovely change. You remember how I used to dote on you then. But I dote on you even more, now. Still, where _have_ all your grand ambitions flown to?"

Claire looked serious, for a moment. Then she gave a light, sweet laugh.

"Oh, I'm a very ambitious woman yet," she said.

THE END.