An Oregon Girl Part 15

"Sam!" she affrightedly exclaimed. "What are you saying?"

"This," continued he, with dauntless determination, "and I'll tell you the truth. You are the talk of the town, and they say you--you--you've secured the child from your husband."

Her face became ashy white as the meaning of John's absence from home dawned on her mind. She staggered, then sank into a chair. Presently she looked up with a sort of dazed, wandering expression and tried to smile through watery eyes. "My cup of woe is very full, Sam! Please don't jest with me!"

He wiped the perspiration from his brow, for he felt his resolution to accomplish what he had set out to do was fast crumbling.

He rushed on, "I am not jesting. No, I guess not! I know I am paining you, but I have a duty to do which I shall do, as I have always done through my life. And as this affair occurred at my uncle's place, they say he knows more about it than he cares to tell, which he doesn't.

And I have come to see if you really don't know something of the whereabouts of Dorothy, as that would relieve my uncle and aunt of much embarra.s.sment--at least--I guess so!"

Her lips trembled with the pathos of her reply: "Did I know of the fate of my child, heaven could not bless me with a more joyful desire--to let you know, to let your aunt know, that Dorothy is--is safe. As it is, I would to heaven that I were dead and with my darling." And her head fell forward on the table as a burst of heart-rending agony shook her frame.

It was evident Sam was uneasy and much affected by her distress. He coughed and tried to clear his throat again and again. "Ahem!--you must excuse me, Mrs. Thorpe--ahem! But--but, Lord--Lord! I can't bear to hear you take on that way. Ahem! Ahem! I'm rough and thoughtless in my way, and it seems harsh and brutal to speak to you as I have done--I guess so!--and if any man in my hearing says you have hidden your child--why, by Heavens, I'll knock the lie back through his teeth."

Sam had forgotten his resolution to resist the influence of a woman's tears; moreover, he felt convinced he was standing in the presence of a true, atrociously wronged and much slandered woman, and in his eagerness to undo the wrong he had done her by practically charging her with the wrecking of her husband's happiness and connivance at the child's disappearance, had lost control of that gentleness he felt due to the weaker s.e.x, especially this bereaved woman. He stammered an apology in a soft regretful tone of voice.

"I--I--beg your pardon. I--I could not help it. These expressions will slip out now and again, won't they? I guess so. I am satisfied you are deeply grieved about Dorothy, and I'm interested in her, too. The fact is, I was so anxious on my aunt's account that I have behaved like a brute. Now please understand me, you are not friendless, for I shall do my best for you, and if Dorothy is out of water I'm going to find her. I'm off now, so good-bye!"

And he was gone--glad to get away from the distress that raised a lump in his throat which all his labored coughing could not dislodge.

Sam had entered her presence a scoffer. He had made up his mind that her grief was as deceitful as her reputed double life. He departed, her firm friend and almost choked with disgust at his own readiness to believe the foul reports, magnified by gossiping busybodies.

Gradually Constances' emotion subsided. She sat upright in the chair.

A significant dryness had come into her eyes as she stared at the wall with profound abstraction. Out of the haze John Thorpe's picture gradually emerged.

Suddenly she exclaimed in strangely low tones, almost a whisper--tones in which a woman's life was projected on the horoscope of faithfulness, immutable as the "Rock of Ages":

"John! John! You are breaking my heart!"

Then her mind began to settle upon one object--to see her husband, John Thorpe.

"It must be some mistake!" she muttered. "It cannot be so. John would never treat me thus. I will have Smith seek him and deliver a message at once."

She went to her desk and wrote a hasty note, requesting John to come home to her immediately. With the sealed note in her hand, she hurried out to find Smith. She found him fast asleep on an old couch just inside the coach-house door, and remembering his tired look, softly said: "Poor man! How fatigued he must be! After all, what matters it for a few hours?" And then, instead of arousing him, she took his coat off the rack and gently covered him, murmuring in a broken voice that betrayed the pathos of her trouble: "Asleep, with the peace of G.o.d resting on his face. Heaven bless and reward your faithful heart.

Sleep on."

Returning to the house, she sat down at the table to think of a possible something she had done to cause John's unkind behavior.

A shadow darkened the doorway. She turned mechanically. A tall, grave and elderly gentleman, with stooping shoulders and bared head, stood in the entrance.

Constance arose. He approached her and said softly: "I beg to apologize for the intrusion. The door being open, and seeing you within, I entered unannounced."

"Oh, Mr. Williams! Have you any tidings of Dorothy?"

"I regret not being able to bring any tidings of your child. The river has been carefully dragged for a considerable distance in front of 'Rosemont.' I fear she is drowned and the body carried down to the Columbia."

"My poor darling!"

"There is yet hope, however, that your child lives. An old cripple--a disreputable looking vagabond--was seen lurking about the grounds the night she was lost. He has not been seen since. Detectives are baffled in tracing him. He may have abducted your child. It's the only hope that she is alive, though I admit, a frail one."

"Heaven give me strength to hope it is so. But who could be so cruel as to steal away my little darling? No, no, she is drowned!"

"I have to announce a disagreeable errand," and he paused, not quite satisfied of the propriety of the moment for so serious a declaration as he was about to make; but he at length continued hesitatingly:

"As--as your--legal adviser--." Again he paused.

Constance looked at him timidly. A cold, creepy fear of something dreadful about to happen chilled her. Her blanched face and beseeching eyes warned him of very grave consequences.

"What is it, Judge?" she whispered with parched lips, "speak out; tell me what you have come for."

"Are you strong enough?--I think--perhaps--I had better defer--"

"Oh, yes, my strength is not great--but--the suspense--I cannot bear. Let me hear--what it is." He hesitated no longer.

"As your attorney, I have been served with a notice of an application for a divorce, by John Thorpe, from his wife, Constance."

With bowed head he laid the doc.u.ment on the table.

She clasped her hand to her head, clutched the back of a chair for support, for the suddenness and weight of the blow staggered her. She, however, managed to bear herself bravely up.

"And--could--he really believe this of me?" she said distractedly.

"He has, at the same time, placed at your disposal in the National Bank a sum of money for your immediate wants." He paused. A solemn quietness pervaded the room.

At length he continued in a low, grave tone: "I am prepared to receive instructions. Shall I give notice of your intention to resist his application for divorce?"

Still leaning on the chair for support, and without lifting her bowed head, or raising her downcast eyes, she said in a voice barely articulate with the huskiness and tremor of threatened physical collapse, "Please leave me for awhile. Providence has seen fit to afflict me so sorely that I must beg a little time to try to think.

But, stay!" And her voice gathered a little strength in an effort to keep from breaking down altogether:

"I desire to receive nothing from John. I shall not reply to his complaint, and you will return the money he has placed to my credit in the bank. Now, please leave me; I desire to be alone."

During his professional experience, the "Judge" had been a witness to many painful scenes, and familiarity had calloused somewhat his sense of sympathy. But as he gazed upon the white, spiritually chaste face of this frail woman, a conviction that a great wrong was being done to her forced and crowded itself upon his brain.

"Someone must answer for it before a higher than human court," he thought, and then with bent head he left her, feeling that he would value beyond price the power to effect a little gleam of sunshine to heal her broken heart.

"Dorothy! Dorothy!" he muttered, and he pa.s.sed out from her presence with words of Tennyson on his lips:

"Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, The sound of a voice that is still!"

After he had gone, Constance remained motionless. She was strangely quiet, yet wrapt in thoughts of bitterest shame and grief, the world had little left for her to care for.

A sense of gloom enveloped her. Its shadow bore heavily upon her oppressed spirits, smothering by its weight the stifled cry of her heart's anguish.

It was therefore with a wondrously calm voice, pregnant with tragic pathos, that she at length broke the stillness: "I am sure of the cause of John's absence now, and the very worst has come to me. What now can compensate me for the humiliation of being thought by him so shameless and debased? Oh, how wretched I am!" and with a moan, she placed her hand on the top of her head.

"Oh, heaven spare my reason--yet--what is reason to me now? Or--life? My darling is drowned. John has left me, and with them hope and happiness are gone forever."

It was then a strange, uncanny, desperate flash leapt into her eyes.

Suddenly she withdrew her hand from the top of her head, but instantly pressed it to her brow.