CHAPTER XVII
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THE SEALED LETTER.
“She was not my wife,” Gordon said at last, for there was no reason he should not clear himself, if he dared not answer her plain question. “I never had a wife and never will have. The woman Hester Murray meant was nothing to me, though it was true she was in trouble and I helped her, till I found out she was a worthless liar. If Mrs. Murray dared,” he hesitated, “to tell you that, some one must have made it very much worth her while.”
“Adrian,” said Ravenel, her eyes straight on his, “you mean that? Because we’re just as if we were dead, you and I. We’ve got to tell the truth.”
“You know it’s true,” he answered heavily. “That woman lied to you. Only I can’t see how it was her business,” with the vile conviction on him that only at Levallion’s own bidding would Hester Murray have helped him to take a wife, and with pressure even then. He roused himself sharply.
“Never mind that, it doesn’t matter.” Since it was too dangerous to touch on! “You say I didn’t go to the duchess’. Well, I wrote to you that I couldn’t go; that it was my only day to marry you.” She could hardly hear him, saw him as in a mist through scalding tears of relief that was yet worse anguish. “I waited all day. I came back that night and threw gravel at your window, tried every door in the house, and couldn’t wake you or Tommy. Jacobs came out to bark, and found it was a friend--but no one else. And at dawn I had to go. Surely you must have heard, or Tommy must! I made all the noise I dared.”
“I never heard,” she answered, with a tearless sob, “and Tommy could not have heard any one in the garden, for he slept on the other side of the house.” She would not tell him how she had cried herself to sleep on the floor that night, and never waked till dawn. She went on sharply: “If I had heard Jacobs bark I should never have thought of you, because your letter said the next day was--was when you were coming for me.” Not the pains of hell could have made her say “our wedding-day.” “I was only wretched because I’d lost your ring and had such a dreadful disappointment at the party. I never dreamed you had come for me while I was out.”
“But, of course, I came! I wrote I should.” He stared at her with a puzzled frown. “And you said you got my letter?”
“Oh, I got it,” slowly. “But you must have made a mistake in it. It said you would come for me on the 14th, and be at the duchess’ on the 13th. Look!” with an uncontrollable impulse she did what she had meant not to do, and threw on the table that lying letter she had kept because she was not brave enough to burn it. “Read for yourself.”
Tear-stained, rubbed out with long poring over, it lay in his hand, but he was looking at the envelope instead of the enclosure.
“You see it was sealed!” she cried. “No one could have opened it.”
“That is just it,” said Gordon quietly. “I never sealed a letter in my life. I never owned a seal with ‘A’ on it. That was some one else’s work, Nel, not mine.” He shook the letter out painfully with one hand and let the light slant across it. “Look,” he said, “the dates have been rubbed out and altered. Just five minutes’ work and a bit of sealing-wax, but they’ve ruined you and me. See, I wrote, ‘I can’t go to the duchess’!’ And one flick of a rubber made it, ‘I can go!’ But who could have done it? Who could care?”
“Lady Annesley.” There were no tears in her eyes, just as there lurked no doubt in her heart. “The letters all went to her first. I thought it had escaped her notice, because of the London postmark, and the seal--like a fool!--for in an Annesley house there must have been plenty of seals with ‘A’ on them. And Tommy warned me that very morning that he thought she had her eyes on you and me. I might have known it--when her ladyship was kind!” bitterly. “She couldn’t have dared do it. She had no reason.”
Lady Levallion laughed, and it was ugly laughter.
“She’s allowed a thousand a year now, and a house,” she said, in a voice like her laugh. “She has been able to shake the dust of dulness and Annesley Chase and mortgages off her feet. Oh! she had reason enough. Tommy said she meant Levallion to marry me, but the funny part of it is that in the end she had nothing to do with it.”
“What do you mean?” with a dull horror at the look on her face. “And what did you mean just now about Lady Annesley’s ring, when I said you sent mine back?”
“I meant just that,” she answered bitterly. “I thought I lost your ring, but I never did, since it’s here in my hand. Who could have sent it to you but Sylvia? And I know now how she got it. She cut the ribbon off my neck when she tried on that wicked dress she gave me. She pretended to arrange the train just to pick the ring off the floor. I thought even then I must have dropped it in her room, but I was afraid to ask. And then when I was going to stay with the duchess she gave me a ring of hers--and it was the note I sent that ring back to her in that you know by heart. She simply enclosed my ring in it to you. Oh”--she was getting out each jerky sentence breathlessly--“I see it all now! Just like A, B, C, one thing after another. Except,” listlessly, “how she found out about it in the first place; but she was always suspicious. It all began with my trying on that dreadful dress--that I only took for you to see.”
“And Levallion saw you instead,” quietly.
“You’re wrong!” she cried. “It was all Sylvia. Levallion had nothing to do with it. It was I! I, who, after you went, got wicked. Married him with my eyes open, to hurt you.” She covered her face.
But all he said was almost to himself.
“Nel, my Nel all the time!”
“Not now,” fiercely, “nor ever! Adrian, can’t you see it? We’re done for, just as though we were dead.”
“I’ll see Lady Annesley first,” grimly.
“You can’t!” she whispered. “Not now. She lied to me, but I--I married Levallion of my own accord. And he was good to me. I can see now that if I’d had the sense to tell him he might have--but what had I to tell?” breaking off with a sick sob. “Only that you had thrown me over. I couldn’t expect him to write and ask you to take me back again. And I thought you were married and had lied to me.”
“You couldn’t do anything,” feeling sick as he saw himself as he had been all this time in her eyes. “I wouldn’t wonder at anything you did. Tell me, is Tommy also thinking me a scoundrel?”
A penciled letter seemed such a little thing to be able to drag a man’s honor in the dust, and take away from him all that life held. There were both dismay and anger in his eyes as he waited for her to answer.
“Tommy only knows I was engaged to you, that I lost my ring and you left me without writing. You needn’t think I told any one the rest,” simply. “Adrian, what are we going to do? Levallion--he’s been good.” She faltered, stopped. Yet he knew her white lips were not for Levallion.
“We can’t do anything. I must go away,” and he touched the lace at her wrist as if the very hem of her garments were sacred to him; his eyes swept with the old look from her bronze hair to her little shoes. But from the sight of her wet eyes, her trembling lips, he turned away, cursing himself that in blind madness he had believed even her own handwriting against her; wincing at the remembrance that “Levallion had been kind.” Levallion, whose kind acts, to his knowledge, had been two, and one of them might very well bear another significance. He could not forget that it was Levallion who had sent him to India.
“Go? You can’t go! You’re not fit!” She was frantic as she looked at his changed and ravaged face. How worn he was--how like, with quick horror--to Levallion! “Where can you go?”
“Town,” laconically. “Rooms, till I’m better.”
Like a flash she saw him sitting alone in those rooms, with a broken ring, a lying letter, in pain, old in his youth.
“You can’t go. It would kill me!” she said quietly. But she drew away from him so that her lace was out of his reach. If he touched the flesh of her wrist she knew that not Tommy, nor honor, nor Levallion, could keep her from following him to the end of the world.
“I must. I can’t stay here!”
“I could nurse you, take care of you!” wildly, her face bloodless over her lace tie, her collar of Levallion’s pearls.
“Any one on God’s earth but you!” said Gordon, with a quick shudder. He leaned back in his chair as if he were faint. He had known the light of his life was gone out, but he had not known alien fingers had extinguished it against Ravenel Annesley’s will.
The hard words, the exhaustion in his face, steadied her, as pain always did.
“You’re worn out. I had no right to tell you,” she said miserably. “I’ve only hurt you.”
“You’ve shown me heaven,” he answered, and bravely, for all his pain of body and mind. “Just that, after being through hell and out again. Go now, Nel. They’ll wonder--you’ve been so long! Give me the ring. I can keep that, can’t I? It’s all I have, you know.”
“But I’ll see you again?”
“Not alone,” gravely. “It isn’t likely. So this is good-by.”
Good-by! After to-day, then, she would see his face no more. Would never hear his voice, that could move her as no voice on earth would ever do; would be alone till she died, the ungrateful, unloving girl Levallion had been good to. And he would be alone, too, but out in the world where he could forget her, as men forget and women never.
Ashy pale, she put that unlucky ring in his hand; silent, broken-hearted, turned away from him; and had never loved him so much as now, when he bade her go.
“Nel!” he said, and she turned at the door. But not to go back to him, not to touch his hand nor to kiss him but once before she went, for she read his face aright and knew he would have died a thousand deaths first. Only to stand and look at him as he at her, the truth for the first and last time spoken between them. After this it would be Levallion’s wife who met him, never Nel Annesley who had loved him neither wisely nor well, but madly and in the bitterness of her soul.
“Good-by, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Be good. Don’t forget me,” and shut his eyes that he might not see her go.
And neither of them heard the quiet breathing of Sister Elizabeth, where she stood goggle-eyed in Adrian’s bedroom.
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