The Blue Wall Part 14

"Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and ever-loving wife as G.o.d will let me be," she said softly; "and may He forgive me for what I do, because I love you."

She held out her arms to me, begging to be taken into mine, and when I had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss I had ever given her.

CHAPTER VI

THE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN

Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you--cold and bare and sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish, concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as myself.

Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again a.s.sured herself in my presence that she knew her own heart and that for her part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.

Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject the disagreeable superst.i.tious affectations concerning death and that overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity, I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the night of the Judge's death, was whispering to her again. True, however, to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety and affection which were more charming than I can describe.

She would romp, mind and body, in all the freshness of youth, with the most entrancing grace of movement and with her natural brilliant play of thought.

"I belong to you!" she would exclaim, retreating before my advance.

"Come--take me!"

Then, after I had captured her and she had looked up at me, wrinkling her nose playfully, she would suddenly grow serious, and from her smiling eyes tears of happiness would start, and then, for an hour afterward, she would go singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of song through the house. So that more than once I saw Margaret Murchie stop her household task to listen, shut her old eyes and say, "Thank G.o.d for his care of her."

It need not surprise you that I tell you of her, for, as you may understand when I have told you all, I am now facing circ.u.mstances which, for some reason, have caused me to fall in love with her with a strange, new, and even deeper desire, and which raise the necessity for me to save her from some unrevealed menace and win her a second time.

The extraordinary fact in the light of this new situation is that our married life has been, until a year ago, as peaceful as could be.

Whatever I might have suffered at first from the fact that I had been forbidden to know or ask of the past, these stings soon lost their power to disturb me. I was glad to forget them because I so hated all things which might tend to disturb the well-ordered life with which well-bred families retain their respectable position.

We found our tastes adapted to a common enjoyment of outdoor and intellectual pleasures, and we spent many hours each week, when alone, in reading the books which pleased us and in playing duets, in which I, being an indifferent player of the piano, contrasted my cold technique with the warmth and expression of her performances upon the 'cello.

Indeed, we showed ourselves in these duets as in our companionship, for though I loved her, I believe I may have fallen short in those attentions, those little demonstrations and caresses, upon which some women seem to be nourished. As for her, she remained unchanged by marriage or time. By her humor, her tender sympathy, her refreshing, unaffected ways, she won a large and devoted circle of acquaintance, composed of both women and men. If any of the former, however, desired intimacy, they always found a gentle resistance; if the latter, they were made to see that a fortress had been erected on the borderland.

Until a year ago we were very happy, I think. To be sure, as time pa.s.sed without the coming of any child, Julianna suffered that peculiar grief which, whatever may be its severity, is like no other. The desire for children was not only in her heart and mind: it was also a keen, instinctive yearning. Quietly, and without inflicting upon me any of her distress over unfulfilled hopes of the past, she persisted in the belief that the gift she most desired would not be withheld from her forever.

Other than this no cloud seemed to be creeping up our sky, and, indeed, it was only little by little that I realized that some peculiar change had taken place.

I may say to you, I think, that this strange influence came even more than a year ago. I have tried in my own mind to establish a connection between its beginning and an accident which happened at that time.

We had gone for a week-end visit to the Tencorts' farm in the Sweetbriar Hills, and much against my wishes, expressed, however, sleepily, Julianna had gone out at sunrise, chosen a rangy mare, saddled the creature herself, for the grooms were not up, and had ridden off across the wet fields, alone. Breakfast had already been announced when we heard the hoofs of the animal and caught glimpses of the horse's yellow neck and Julianna's plaid jacket, bobbing toward us under the arching trees.

"Your lady is hardly what one might call a gentle rider," said Jack Tencort. "As for me, I'm glad to see the mare in a foam for once, but I would not be pleased to have my own wife--h.e.l.lo, she is using her right hand."

I, too, could see that Julianna's left arm was hanging by her side, and as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her lips were white.

"I'm sorry to have forced your animal," she said, "but I was in a hurry to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off."

"What's the matter?" cried our host behind me.

"To tell the truth," she said. "I have had my arm broken."

"Thrown?" cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her costume.

Julianna smiled gamely.

"That is a matter wholly between myself and the mare," she answered.

You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow, which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and sinew there.

When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then left the rest to time.

Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle, and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had followed the reading of the _post-mortem_ message from the Judge returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was, seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful face a look of guilt, of fear--the look of a soul in a panic. She became suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away from me.

For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile, it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her accident.

"I have promised the horse never to tell," she would say, putting her finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own, or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.

In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us.

I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I found that she was evading my questions.

At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees, caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and forehead.

"Whatever happens, you will love me?" she cried out desperately. "Say you will! Say you will!"

"You know that," I said.

Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her the greatest pain.

"I wish you had not said so," she exclaimed, with a wild look in her eyes. "It is your goodness that hurts. Don't you see what comfort it must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her--beat her--abuse her!"

I drew back from my wife, astounded.

"Stop!" I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made since I had known her. "It's time for you who dare to speak like that--to tell--"

"No! No!" she cried. "For G.o.d's sake, don't forget your promise. If you do we are lost--I am lost."

She sprang up and away from me, and with her bare arms crossed over her face and her hands over her ears to shut out all sounds, she ran from the room.

This, sir, was seven weeks ago, and for many days following she would sit and look at me constantly, until, feeling her eyes, I would raise my own to find her face drawn as by a weary period of sleeplessness. At these moments it seemed to me that she was trying to make me understand, just as a faithful dog tries at times to communicate his thoughts by the expectancy, the love, or the pleading shining from his eyes. How much would I now give had I been able to do it!

Within the s.p.a.ce of a week she brought to me the suggestion and the plan, which I, being driven to desperation by the impending wreck of our happiness, was mad enough to accept without foreseeing the punishment I would have to suffer through giving for the second time a solemn word of honor.

I think on that morning Julianna was more like her old self than she had been for weeks. Her apartments, though separate from my own, are entered from mine by a narrow door. I had prepared for breakfast,--which we do not have served in our rooms according to the degenerate modern custom,--and then had gone to find her, with the thought in my mind that, whatever she suffered or feared, it was my duty to help her as best I might. I had promised myself to be cheerful, yielding, and as entertaining as possible.

She was sitting on the side of her bed when I came in. The whiteness of the linen and the pale blue of her morning gown served to bring out the delicate color of her skin. I was so delighted with this indication of renewed health that I opened my mouth to express my admiration.

She was quicker than I.

"You find me attractive this morning," she said with a sad little smile.

"I am glad. I wish that I might be attractive to you forever and ever.--I mean my shoulders, my arms, my hands--free from wrinkles or fat or dryness."