Rutledge Part 50

"Why would it be madness?" he urged. "Oh, Josephine! Why cannot you give up the ambition that separates us? Depend upon it, it has stood in the way of your happiness all your life."

It had been impossible to avoid hearing this conversation; my companion, starting up, looked after the retreating figures amazed and stern. In his haste, he had pulled down an American flag that had been draped over the sofa we occupied. I started up, and involuntarily raised my hand to replace it. The loose sleeve fell back from my arm, and in the strong light of the lamp overhead, the scar on my wrist caught his eye. With a quick, imperious movement, he seized my hand before I could withdraw it, and held it firmly in one of his, while with the other he raised my mask.

"You have deceived me," he said, between his teeth.

"You have deceived yourself, you are the victim of your own prejudices.

You cannot say I did more than humor your decision!" I returned, quickly.

"You only acted a womanly and natural part, lied sweetly in every glance of your bright eyes, in every turn of your graceful figure, in every word on your red lips! I don't blame you; you are a woman."

"You are too cruel! you will repent this some day; it will be the bitterest thing you have to remember; the recollection of it will make you suffer as you have made me suffer."

"Never fear but I shall have enough to suffer, if the present is any earnest of the future for me! Your kindest wishes will be more than realized. For a proud man," he said, with a low, bitter laugh, flinging from him the hand he held, "for a proud man, I have had some humiliations that you would hardly believe if I told you! You could hardly understand them in your simplicity; your soft, woman's heart would bleed, perhaps, but it would heal itself too soon to allay in any great degree my wretchedness. Your morning-glory tenderness would droop before the fierceness of my pain, it would die in my hot grasp!--I will not ask your pity, but spare me your detestation. Save the aversion that your eyes showed then, for those who have deserved it better at your hands."

There was a sound of voices from within, a window near us was thrown open, and a group of people, laughing and talking, stepped out on the piazza. Hastily restoring my mask to its place, I turned away and entered the house through the window they had opened.

"You may have deceived one who is indifferent to you; you cannot deceive one who loves you," said a low voice in my ear, and the black figure I instinctively dreaded stood beside me. "For the sake of heaven, come with me, one moment!"

"Who are you?" I murmured, shrinking back.

He bent down and whispered a name in my ear, at which the color left my cheek, the light my eye, almost the life my pulses.

"Will you come?"

I bent my head without a word, and followed him out of the hall, down the terrace, through the winding paths of the shrubbery, across the garden; hurrying on to suit his fierce pace, but chilled to the heart with a terror that was no longer nameless.

CHAPTER x.x.xII.

"O man! while in thy early years, How prodigal of time!

Misspending all thy precious hours, Thy glorious, youthful prime!

Alternate follies take the sway; Licentious pa.s.sions burn; Which tenfold force give Nature's law, That man was made to mourn."

BURNS.

The spot to which my companion led me was a ruined summerhouse, not a stone's throw from the outer garden hedge. It was a lonely place in a sort of hollow, a low, dense orchard stretched dark on one side, while a little knoll, crowned with copse, rose between it and all view of the house and grounds on the other, and a little stream fell murmuring down from rock to rock through the ravine. Why it was so deserted and dilapidated, I had never exactly known; but from something Stephen had said, when I had questioned him about it, I had conjectured that it was a.s.sociated with the shame and fall of her whose memory was even yet so painful, and that ruin and decay were welcome to hide the place from all eyes.

The night wind was moaning wildly down the little hollow; the ghastly moonlight flickered fitfully through the broken roof and moldering arches; the moss-grown, slimy stones rocked beneath my tread; steadying myself by one of the posts of the ruined doorway, I stood still and waited for my companion to speak. He had sunk down on a seat, but in a moment, raising his head, he loosed the hood of his domino, and, as it fell back, rose and turned his face toward me. With a faint cry, I put out my hands and started back. In the haggard, bloodless face, the wild and troubled eye of the man before me, I could hardly recognize a feature of Victor Viennet's handsome face.

"No need to start away and put out your white hands to keep me off," he said, with a laugh that made my blood run cold. "No need to press your pale lips together to keep back that cry of horror! I have risked my life--aye--sold it, rather--for this interview, and yet I would not lay my guilty grasp upon the hand you have promised to me, I would not touch the distantest fold of your white dress! There is no need to droop, and flutter, and clasp your hands, and pray me to be calm--don't turn your eyes on me with such a look as that! You try to say you love me yet; wait till I tell you, wait till you know all, before you say you love me!"

"You need not tell me, Victor," I faltered, "I guessed it from the first."

"You guessed it from the first, and yet dared come here--alone--at midnight--with me! No, you have not guessed it. Your girl's heart never framed the outline of such a sin, you will swoon but to hear its name!"

The night wind howling through the shivering trees, the restless brook moaning down the hollow, if ever their wild lament had ceased, would have heard, brokenly and incoherently, such a story as this:

In a quaint, secluded village, in some remote province of France, Victor Viennet's early childhood had been pa.s.sed. It was a childhood so companionless that, but that he was happy and needed nothing save his sad mother's love and his wild freedom, one would have pitied him even then, before he knew the shame he had to bear and the sufferings it would bring. For months together no stranger's foot would cross the threshold of the lonely cottage; the neighbors looked askance at the two pale women and the pretty boy, who had come so strangely and so stealthily into their midst, and rumor had been busy even there. The village children were forbid to play with "le pet.i.t Anglais;" they taunted and mocked him, and he, in his turn, spurned and hated them, and clung more entirely to his mother, who strove to interfere between him and every insult, every harshness, and vexation. And but too well she succeeded in guarding him; when death came to unloose her arms from around him, he was left too sensitive and shrinking a plant to bear the first breath of the scorching simoon of scorn and ignominy that had been gathering up its strength so long. The fatal secret of his birth, that explained all, burst suddenly upon him while his childish heart was yet bleeding with his first grief. He learned that he must thank his dead mother for the brand of shame that he must bear through life; that for her, whom he had worshipped as an angel, there was on every lip a name of scorn. He learned that every man's hand was against him, as an outcast and a b.a.s.t.a.r.d; and all the strength of his nature became a strength of hatred; his southern blood turned to gall in his young veins. The home that had been his sanctuary, his city of refuge, was a desecrated and hateful place. The same fever that had struck down his mother, had laid her nurse and companion low. Tenderness and compa.s.sion had been blasted in the boy's heart; they had both deceived and wronged him; he owed nothing to the memory of the one, nor to the misery of the other; and without a look, he left her in her unconsciousness, and turned his back forever on his home, with the curse in his heart for which he had not yet learned the words.

Who needs be told the career on which the boy entered? Who but would sicken and turn away from the record of his houseless wanderings, his desperate shifts, his recklessness and wickedness. Who that could read with anything but sorrow of the scenes of squalid want, of cunning vice, of mad profligacy, through which he pa.s.sed before his youth was yet begun. There could be but one result; all that was weak in him was bent to the service of sin, all that was n.o.ble was turned to bitterness; the refinement of his nature made him rise, but it was to no heights of truth and virtue; ambition had taken the place of all n.o.ble aspirations, and sustained him through ignominy, and reproach, and poverty, helped him to trample on difficulties that would have daunted a less desperate man, and scruples that would have shaken a better one, aided him to free himself from the pollutions that his wild boyhood had contracted, and to shake off the trammels of the past, and crown himself with the success that he had made his G.o.d. But through it all, there lived a fear lest the forgotten stain of his birth should be revived, the foundation stone be pulled from his fair fabric of good fortune; and this morbid dread so haunted him, that he came to hate the very sunshine and soft air of France, to fear the very children in the streets, the strangers whose curious eyes he met in the thoroughfares of business. And with all the fearful and enslaved of the earth, he turned his eyes toward the fair land that promises absolution and new life to the sinful and miserable of other lands, and denies its rich benison of hope and freedom neither to the criminal who flies from justice, nor the miserable who flies from memory. With three thousand miles of ocean between him and France, perhaps he could shake off the slavish dread that gnawed forever at his peace, and rise to a position where he need not fear its sting. The untainted air of that new land had never heard the whisper of his shame, should never hear it; even in his own bosom, it should die forgotten and unfeared.

But than his strong will, there had been a stronger. Within the first week of his arrival in America, he was seized with a malignant fever, and from delirium and raving, sunk to stupor and an almost death-like torpor, and for weeks lay so. When at last he rallied and shook off the lethargy that had so long dulled intelligence and feeling, it was to find, that in the first hours of his delirium, he had betrayed his secret and undone himself; and betrayed it to a man whom neither honor nor pity could bind, but whose cunning malice gloated over the power his discovery had invested him with, and who would use it maliciously and unscrupulously. It did no good to rave and curse his fate; all the power of his strong will must go to the repairing of the error, and to the hushing and pacifying this low man who held him at such advantage. It seemed an easy enough thing at first; the man was ready to promise silence and a.s.sure him of his good will, and seemed to require nothing in return but good fellowship and confidence. Anything would have been easier for Victor to have given; his proud spirit revolted at such companionship and bondage, but at the first sign of contempt or impatience, the glistening serpent showed his sting, and chafed and despairing, the victim felt the toils tighten around him. There was no escape from his familiarity; he haunted and exasperated him, dogged his steps, followed him into the company of men who could not but wonder at the intimacy and draw their own conclusions from his endurance of such a man.

With the exception of this cruel drawback, the new land indeed proved an Eldorado to Victor. Friends thickened, fortune smiled; he rose with hasty steps to success, social and commercial. Only the sly gleam of Dr.

Hugh's treacherous eye sent an occasional fear through the pride of his heart, and kept it in a sort of check. But it did not humble him, it only galled and goaded him, and quickened his determination to prove himself a man for a' that; it strengthened his haughtiness and self-reliance. In the course of a year or two, however, circ.u.mstances somewhat changed; Dr. Hugh left the city, and Victor breathed freer.

Occasional letters still reached him, keeping him in mind, but they ceased after awhile, and the young adventurer began to feel secure; he was on the road to fortune, the only barrier to success was gone, and the happiness he had never dared enjoy before, seemed just within his grasp. And just then, just when the new hopes of love, and the nearly crowned ambition, most demanded the hiding of the hated secret, chance threw him upon the only man who held it. No wonder that his cheek had blanched the evening that he came to Rutledge, when he found the doctor there before him. The doctor had not forgotten, the doctor had not lost sight of him, though he had lost sight of the doctor, and soon his stealthy hand was on the festering wound again, and his old cunning at work to exasperate his victim, and with a new zest.

That Victor had been a successful man of business he had not minded; it only made his power over him the more desirable, and the remuneration for his silence greater; but that Victor should be the successful lover of one whom he had reason to regard with resentment and aversion, was too severe a trial for his love of malice to endure. Here was an opportunity for humbling the girl who had treated him with scorn and ridicule, and the proud man who endured him with but half concealed impatience. Victor Viennet should give up the woman he loved, and only buy a promise of continued silence at a heavy price. The girl should lose her lover; in any case he promised himself that. If Victor refused to give her up, a whisper in his ear of what he knew of _her_ secret, would damp his ardor and bring pride to weigh down the balance as he wished. And her pride, if even Victor's infatuation led him to prefer exposure and disgrace to separation, would never suffer her to marry a man, who, from the first she had never loved, now stripped of his name and honor. In any event that was secure to him. But he had overreached his aim when he drove Victor to resolve on such a sudden departure. Once in Europe, he might lose track of him; his vigilance at such a distance might be eluded, and all but his revenge would be lost; and chance had thrown into his hand the threads of a mystery that only time could unravel, that promised power over more than him; but Victor's absence would ruin all.

Late on the night before his intended departure from Rutledge, a note was handed to him from Dr. Hugh, demanding another interview before he sailed. Victor dared not neglect or refuse the demand. It was too late now to change his plans, and of all things he desired to conceal the fact of his having any private business with Dr. Hugh, from his host and the guests at Rutledge. Gnashing his teeth at the humiliation of feeling himself at the beck and call of this low villain, and cursing the fate that forced him to stoop to such stratagems, he hastily returned a few lines to the doctor, appointing to meet him the following day at noon, at Brandon, the next station to Rutledge, distant about twelve miles, intending to send his baggage on in the train in which he should start, and remaining an hour at Brandon with the doctor, should go on himself in the next train. By this, he would avoid suspicion and meet the persecutor on neutral ground. He found no difficulty in leaving the cars un.o.bserved, and repairing to the inn he had appointed for rendezvous.

The bar-room was crowded with pa.s.sengers for the cars going west, so, an unnoticed guest, he awaited with growing impatience the keeping of his appointment. Half suspecting that the man's object was to keep him back, and make him lose the train, his impatience and vexation knew no bounds, as the hour slowly waned and no one appeared. The train came rushing through the town, paused a moment, and rushed on, and his last chance for that day had pa.s.sed. For one moment he had resolved to defy his persecutor, and escape him once and forever; but he knew that before another sunset his secret would be published, and what was this vexation to that ruin? As the crowd hurried from the tavern to the ears, a horseman had alighted at the door, and Victor shrunk back with a guilty feeling of humiliation and fear as he recognized Mr. Rutledge. What a degrading bondage was this for a man of honor--what a d.a.m.nable humiliation! To be skulking away from the man whom, a few hours ago, he had met as his host and his equal. To be waiting submissively the pleasure of a low villain, whose greedy cunning and mean rascality marked him below the revenge of a gentleman.

"It shall end," muttered Victor, between his teeth, as he screened himself from the sight of the new comer, who had entered the bar-room.

He was engaged for several minutes in conversation with the bar-keeper, left a message for a neighboring workman, paid a bill for the cartage of some timber, and was about leaving the room, when his eye fell upon a note that was lying on a table near the door; and Victor's dark cheek mantled with shame and vexation, as, taking it up, Mr. Rutledge read, in a tone of surprise:

"Mr. Victor Viennet. To be left at the Brandon Shades."

"When was this brought here?" he inquired of the man behind the bar.

"This morning, sir, I think," he returned. "A man from your village came with it--a dark, thick-set fellow, if I'm not mistaken; one of the hands from the factory."

"And no one has called for it--no one answering to that name has been here?"

"Not to my knowledge, sir."

Mr. Rutledge knit his brow, and paced the floor uneasily. The haughty curl of his lip, as he glanced again at the note, made the blood boil in Victor's veins. It was almost impossible to keep back the defiant words that rushed to his lips; but detection would be fatal now, and he remained motionless, while Mr. Rutledge, crossing over to the barkeeper, said, in a lower tone:

"You will oblige me by noticing who comes for that note, and by what way he returns. I will stop here on my return from Renwick, before night."

The man promised obsequiously, and Mr. Rutledge left the room. Victor only waited to hear his horse's hoofs die away down the street, and to see the bar-keeper's attention fully engaged with a group of jovial mechanics just entering for their noon-day drink, to leave his place of concealment, and possessing himself hastily of the note, opened it carefully, and abstracting the contents, subst.i.tuted a business circular which he had in his pocket, sealed up the envelope again, threw it on the table, and left the room by a side-door.

He had walked some distance down the street before he ventured to read the letter, which proved, of course, to be from Dr. Hugh, apologizing for the delay, but saying that it would be impossible for him to be at Brandon before four o'clock. At that hour he should hope to find Mr.

Viennet at the Shades, as first named, etc.

"The Shades" was the last place where he desired to see him now, so he determined to walk forward on the road to Rutledge, and meet him on the way. It was a hot and dusty road, upon which the afternoon sun shone down unmercifully, but the heat and the dust were unheeded and indifferent to the over-wrought and exasperated traveller. The exercise and the fatigue of walking were in some measure a relief to his strained nerves, and without stopping to reflect, he hurried fiercely on, till eight miles of the twelve had been accomplished. Something familiar in the road had drawn his attention to his locality, and warned him of his nearness to Rutledge. It had been so lonely and monotonous a road before that, his attention had not been attracted to it; he had pa.s.sed the last farmhouse three or four miles back, and only paused now, struck by the familiarity of the Hemlock Hollow road, leading off at the left. It was now only four miles to the village, and he stopped, resolved to await Dr. Hugh here.

It was no balm to his vexed and angry mood, to remember how near he was to what was at once dearest and most unattainable to him. It was no soother to his wounded pride, to feel that he was skulking like a thief around the place where for weeks he had been entertained as a guest; and as hour after hour dragged on, and no one approached down the lonely road, his impatience grew into a kind of frenzy, and before the glaring sun had sunk behind the woods, and the thick, dull twilight had crept slowly over the gloomy hollow, from an angry and exasperated, he had become a revengeful and desperate man.

It was in this mood that his persecutor met him. It was when all the venomous rancor that a long subjection had bred in his haughty nature, was roused to its utmost, that the interview for which Dr. Hugh had schemed, and planned, and lied, took place. Cold and cunning, plausible and imperturbable, he met a man with whose keenest feelings he had been playing for years, and who was even then lacerated to madness by insults and indignities that would have roused a tamer nature. Some fiend was blinding his eyes surely, and lulling him into security, that he did not feel a warning throb of fear as he rode into the lonely hollow, and through the dusky twilight discerned the waiting form of him he had wronged so deeply. Some luring devil put into his mouth the cold and sneering words with which he greeted him--the fool-hardy and contemptuous bravado with which he taunted him. Beyond any length he had ever gone before, he now dared, claiming his power over him, defying him to disdain it, and threatening him with instant exposure if he dared leave America.

And when Victor, driven to desperation, and quivering with pa.s.sion, turned fiercely upon him and defied him to do it--from this hour he cared not whether it was known or not, the cunning fiend in the wretch's bosom prompted him to ask if he had grown tired of his pretty mistress so soon, that he gave her up so easily? Or did he flatter himself that the haughty girl, at whose feet he had been so long, would continue her hardly-won smiles when she knew him for a nameless, low-born adventurer, hiding the stain of his birth at the cost of his honor?

"You may tell it! You may proclaim it the length and breadth of the land! Who will believe you, low villain and known knave as you are, against the word and credit of a gentleman? Who will believe your paltry version of the delirium of a fever, that none but you heard--none but you interpreted? They will ask you for proofs--what then?"