The Ordeal of Elizabeth Part 26

She turned quickly towards him. "You don't think that they can be very bad?"

"I should be willing to take the risk of offering you absolution."

She bent down over her work so that her face was hidden. "Ah, you--you don't know"----she rather breathed than spoke. He only smiled incredulously, as one who knew her better than she did herself.

"Play for me, darling," he said, after awhile, and she went mechanically to the piano. But her playing was always a matter of mood, and to-night her fingers faltered, the keys did not respond as usual. She pa.s.sed restlessly from one thing to another--s.n.a.t.c.hes of Brahms, Chopin, Tschaikowski, with the same jarring note running through them all.

She broke off at last, with a wild clash of chords. "I can't play to-night," she said, and came back to the fire. "How calm you are!"

she said, standing beside Gerard and looking down at him with eyes almost of reproach. "This horrible evening doesn't get on your nerves at all."

"How can it?"--Gerard possessed himself of her hand and raised it to his lips.--"How can I waste any regrets on the Old Year," he said, "when the New Year is to bring me--so much happiness?"

She started and caught her breath, as if the words held a sting. "Ah, yes," she repeated, very low "it is to bring you--so much happiness!"

For a moment she left her hand in his and then withdrew it with a stifled sigh. She went back very still and pale, to her seat on the other side of the fire, and taking up her work, she fixed her eyes upon it intently.

"And so you think it is to bring you happiness?" she said, in a low voice, continuing the subject as it seemed in spite of herself. "You are quite sure of that, Julian, you have--no doubts?" She raised her eyes with a wistful questioning that puzzled him.

"Doubts, Elizabeth!" He stared back at her reproachfully, his brows drawn together frowning. "Why do you harp so much on that, my darling?

Why should I have doubts?"

"Why, some men might, you know."--Her eyes were bent again upon her work.--"You yourself--you had them, you know, when you first knew me."

He flushed. "Don't remind me of that," he said, hastily.

"Well, it may have been a true presentiment."--She gave him an odd, furtive look. "I've wondered--sometimes--if I were as nice naturally as other girls I know. I hadn't, to begin with, the sort of mother that--most girls have"----She hesitated, a painful crimson flooded her face, her eyes filled with tears. Gerard stared at her in amazement.

He had never heard her allude to her mother before, and had supposed her entirely ignorant of all painful facts in the family history.

"Darling," he broke out, indignantly, "who has told you--things like that?"

"Who? Oh! I don't know."--She put the question aside listlessly.--"One always hears unpleasant facts, somehow. I always knew that she wasn't the--the sort of person that the Neighborhood would call on"--a painful smile hovered about her lips. "It used to make me very unhappy--but lately--it hasn't seemed to matter. And yet--I think of it sometimes"----She broke off suddenly and looked at Gerard with a strange light in her eyes. "Doesn't it make a difference to you?

Doesn't it occur to you sometimes that I may be--my mother's daughter; that it would be wiser to--distrust me?" Her voice died away at the last words into a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

"Elizabeth!"--Gerard sprang to his feet. He went over to her and took both her hands in his strong grasp. "Elizabeth, never let me hear these morbid fancies again. Never suppose that anything your mother did or left undone, can make a difference in my faith in you!"

He stood looking down at her with eyes full of an imperious tenderness. She trembled and shrank away before them, as if frightened. "You trust me, then?" she repeated, and she drew a long sobbing breath. "You're quite _sure_ you trust me?"

"Absolutely."--Gerard's smile lit up his face.--"How often, you exacting woman," he asked, "do you want me to promise that I will never doubt you again."

There was silence for a moment. The noises in the street sounding suddenly with redoubled violence in the stillness, seemed to punctuate Gerard's words with an outburst of derision. To Elizabeth's fancy the whole atmosphere of the room was tense, vibrant, filled with jarring echoes of the noise without. Even the old Dutch clock, whose ticking was one of her earliest memories, seemed to beat with a new, discordant note of mockery, as if it too were uttering its ironical comment on the wisdom of a man's faith.

Elizabeth shuddered and thrust Gerard's hands away. "I wish--I wish I deserved your trust, Julian," she broke out, wildly. Then she laid her face on the arm of the chair and sobbed. He fell back and stared at her aghast. The tender smile was arrested, frozen on his lips. For him, too, as for her, the room was suddenly filled with discordant vibrations, a sense of unreasoning dread.

In a moment Elizabeth looked up; with a great effort she conquered her tears. She went to Gerard and put her hand on his arm. The face she raised to his was white, trembling in a pathetic appeal. The tears still glistened on her long lashes, there was a tremulous sweetness in her great dark eyes, in the quivering lines about her pale lips.

"Julian," she said, "if I'm not--not worthy of your trust--not worthy of your love, even"--she faltered--"if I had deceived you--_were_ deceiving you still"----she paused and looked him in the face with an agonized questioning.

"Yes?"--Gerard's hoa.r.s.e voice urged her on.--"If you were deceiving me? It isn't--it can't be true, but if you were?"----

"If I were," she went on, steadily, "if I had kept one thing from you--against my will--oh, G.o.d knows! sorely against my will"--her voice broke--"if it had been a weight on my mind day and night--if I had longed to tell you and had tried to do it and always--my courage failed me, and--and--if at last--at last, I told you--would you--think me so very much to blame, couldn't you--forgive?"--Her voice again faltered piteously, the last word was barely audible.

He broke away from her and took two or three turns up and down the room, breathing heavily, like a man who had been running. "Tell me what this secret is?" he broke out, fiercely, pausing suddenly in front of her. "How can I tell if----I could forgive, till I know what it is?"

Again the silence. Elizabeth's white lips tried, apparently in vain, to form an answer. The courage which a moment before had possessed her, seemed to shrivel up and die away, before that fierce light in his eyes.

"Tell me," he repeated, inexorably, "what it is."

She put out her hand suddenly with a pleading gesture. "Ah, let us first see the Old Year out together," she murmured, "as we planned. I should like to feel that you loved me till--the very end of it. You may not--afterwards. It won't be long. See--it's nearly time." She glanced up at the clock. It was ticking faster now, as it seemed, and steadily, the hour hand well towards midnight.

Elizabeth went to the window and flung it open. The current of cold air which flooded the room seemed to give her relief; she leaned out as far as she could, inhaling it in long, fevered gasps. Gerard followed and stood behind her, in an agony of impatience, distraught by a hundred incongruous, terrible suggestions. The prolonged suspense seemed, in his over-wrought state, a very refinement of cruelty, yet some instinct kept him silent, left to her the mastery of the situation.

In the street there was unwonted stir and bustle. A crowd a.s.sembled to greet the New Year. Small boys, whose horns made the night hideous, pranced about like uncouth imps of darkness; the street-lamps, as they flickered, cast a weird, uncertain light on the snow-covered ground.

But the moon, riding overhead, shone peacefully, and myriads of stars studded the wintry sky. Down towards the Battery one could hear, above all coa.r.s.er sounds, the chimes of Old Trinity ringing faint but true.

Elizabeth's eyes were riveted upon St. George's clock, which stood out, not many blocks away, above the roofs of intervening houses. Her lips moved, but no sound came; one hand grasped convulsively the curtain behind her. To Gerard as he watched her those fifteen minutes before the New Year were the longest of his life.

Suddenly all noises slackened; upon the listening crowd outside there fell a pause, a hush of expectation. St. George's clock boomed out the hour in twelve majestic strokes. The old Dutch clock within the room echoed it in quieter tones. And then, as the last stroke died away, the crowd stirred, there arose a hideous Babel of sound--cat-calling, shouting, blowing of horns and whistles; pandemonium set loose. It raged for several minutes, and stopped abruptly, exhausted by its own violence. There was again silence, and then a burst of laughter. Some one in the crowd cried loudly and heartily: "Happy New Year!"

Elizabeth shivered, as if with a sudden consciousness of the cold. She shut the window and faced Gerard. Against the vivid background of the crimson curtain, in her clinging white dress, her pale beauty, crowned by her red-gold hair, stood out with a strange, unearthly quality, like that of some pictured saint. There was a look on her face which was tragic in its despairing resolution, yet which had in it a certain exaltation, as if she had risen for the moment at least, above herself, to heights. .h.i.therto unknown.

"You shall know the worst of me, at last. You won't"--she gave an odd little laugh--"you won't grant me absolution, Julian, I'm afraid. But oh, I'm sick--G.o.d knows, I'm sick of lies!" She paused and caught her breath as if for one supreme effort. "This is the truth," she said. "I was married to Paul Halleck--before I knew you, more than a year ago."

He staggered back, as if she had struck him a blow. "You were--married--to Paul Halleck?"

"Yes," she repeated, in a dull monotone, "married to him--more than a year ago."

He was still staring at her as if stupefied. "Married!" he repeated, "married all this time!--when you professed to love me! When"--a pause--"you promised to marry me! Oh, it's impossible," he cried, with a sudden flash of incredulity, and he put out his hand and touched her involuntarily. "Say you're only playing with me," he begged her, "trying my faith--say it's not true." His voice shook, unconsciously his hand closed upon her wrist with a grasp that might have hurt her, had she been capable just then of feeling physical pain.

"It--it is true," she said, and stood motionless, white and rigid as a statue, her head bent.

He still stared incredulous for a moment, and then the reality of what she said seemed to sink into his soul. With a quick, involuntary gesture, which wounded more than words, he let her hand fall, and began to pace up and down the room.

"Good G.o.d!" she heard him mutter. "Married all these months!--and I, who loved you, trusted you!"----He broke off with a gesture of angry despair. Her lip quivered, her eyes followed him for a moment and then filled with tears. She went over to the mantel-piece, and resting her arms upon it, she hid her face.

It was a long time before he stopped beside her, but then his voice showed recovered self-control. "Will you tell me," he said, "exactly how and when this marriage took place?"

She turned with a little shuddering sigh and raised her white, exhausted face to his. "It was at Cranston," she said, quietly, "one day in July. I did it hastily. My aunts were opposed to it, and--I hated to make them unhappy. But I--I thought I loved him. It was a mistake. I went up to Cranston to meet him, and--we were married. It was in church--there were witnesses, we signed a register--it was all legal, or at least I suppose so. And then--when we came out"----she paused.

"Yes--when you came out?"--Gerard repeated the words hoa.r.s.ely, his brows drawn together, his eyes fixed upon her in an agonized questioning.--"What then, Elizabeth?"

She hesitated, staring straight before her, as if she were trying to recall the whole thing exactly as it happened. "When we came out of the church, I felt--I don't know why--I felt frightened. I seemed to realize--indeed, I think I _had_ realized all the time--what a mistake it was. He begged me to come away with him, and I--I refused. He had promised me that I should go home, and that he wouldn't claim me for six months, and--I held him to it. He gave in at last, and so--we parted"----

"Ah!"--Gerard drew a long breath.--"You--parted?"

"Yes. I left him and came home. I got there about four--my aunts suspected nothing. He went abroad. And--after a while he stopped writing, I thought he had forgotten me. It all began to seem like a dream. And then--Eleanor Van Antwerp asked me to come to town, and--the rest you know."

"No, not all." Gerard insisted. "When the fellow came home, why didn't he claim you? How have you kept him quiet, all this time?"

"Ah, that was easy."--She spoke listlessly.--"He didn't care anything about me; I used to give him money. I sold my pearls--all my jewelry, in fact. Yes"--as Gerard uttered a horrified exclamation--"it was a terrible bondage, but what could I do? He had me in his power. I used to wonder if the marriage were legal, but there was no one whom I dared ask. And then I thought sometimes that he might die--I had all sorts of wild ideas; but nothing happened, and meanwhile he threatened--to tell you everything. I bought him off twice, and then--this last time"--she paused--"this last time I promised him all my income if he would give me up forever, and never trouble me again.

Ah, you think it unpardonable, I see"--she put out her hand with a deprecating gesture--"but you don't know what it is to be tempted--desperate. I was determined I wouldn't ruin my life. And then--then"--her voice faltered--"this evening when you seemed so happy, so trustful--that was what hurt me, Julian--it was easier when you were jealous, suspicious, as you were at first--it came to me suddenly that I couldn't begin the New Year--I couldn't begin our life together with this--this terrible secret weighing on my soul. And so I--I told you"----