The smile he met in reply was deprecatory enough; so were the words his outburst had called forth.
“I did not mean, and do not mean to insult Mrs. Packard. I am merely showing you how hampered a man is, whatever his feelings, when it comes to a question of facts known only to a lady with whom he has not exchanged fifty words since he came into her house. If Mrs. Packard will be good enough to inform me just how much and how little is true in the paragraph we are considering, I shall see this rascally reporter again and give him a better answer.”
Mayor Packard looked unappeased. This was not the way to soothe a woman whom he believed to be greatly maligned. With an exclamation indicative of his feelings, he was about to address some hasty words to the composed, almost smiling, man who confronted him, when Mrs. Packard herself spoke with unexpected self-control, if not disdain.
“You are a very honest man, Mr. Steele. I commend the nicety of your scruples and am quite ready to trust myself to them. I own to no blot, in my past or present life, calling for public arraignment. If my statement of the fact is not enough, I here swear on the head of my child—”
“No, no,” he quickly interpolated, “don’t frighten the baby. Swearing is not necessary; I am bound to believe your word, Mrs. Packard.” And lifting a sheet of paper from a pile lying on the table before him, he took a pencil from his pocket and began making lines to amuse the child dancing on his knee.
Mrs. Packard’s eyes opened in wonder mingled with some emotion deeper than distaste, but she said nothing, only watched in a fascinated way his moving fingers. The mayor, mollified possibly by his secretary’s last words, sank back again in his chair with the remark:
“You have heard Mrs. Packard’s distinct denial. You are consequently armed for battle. See that you fight well. It is all a part of the scheme to break me up. One more paragraph of that kind and I shall be a wreck, even if my campaign is not.”
“There will not be any more.”
“Ah! you can assure me of that?”
“Positively.”
“What are you playing there?” It was Mrs. Packard who spoke. She was pointing at the scribble he was making on the paper.
“Tit-tat-to,” he smiled, “to amuse the baby.”
Did she hate to see him so occupied, or was her own restlessness of a nature demanding a like outlet? Tearing her eyes away from him and the child, she looked about her in a wild way, till she came upon a box of matches standing on the large center-table around which they were all grouped. Taking some in her hand, she commenced to lay them out on the table before her, possibly in an attempt to attract the baby’s attention to herself. Puerile business, but it struck me forcibly, possibly from the effect it appeared to have upon the mayor. Looking from one to the other in an astonishment which was not without its hint of some new and overmastering feeling on his own part, he remarked:
“Isn’t it time for the baby to go to bed? Surely, our talk is too serious to be interrupted by games to please a child.”
Without a word Mr. Steele rose and put the protesting child in the mother’s arms. She, rising, carried it to the door, and, coming slowly back, reseated herself before the table and began to push the matches about again with fingers that trembled beyond her control. The mayor proceeded as if no time had elapsed since his last words.
“You had some words then with this Brainard—I think you called him Brainard—exacted some promise from him?”
“Yes, your Honor,” was the only reply.
Did not Mrs. Packard speak, too? We all seemed to think so, for we turned toward her; but she gave no evidence of having said anything, though an increased nervousness was visible in her fingers as she pushed the matches about.
“I thought I was warranted in doing so much,” continued Mr. Steele. “I could not buy the man with money, so I used threats.”
“Right! anything to squelch him,” exclaimed the mayor, but not with the vigor I expected from him. Some doubt, some dread—caught perhaps from his wife’s attitude or expression—seemed to interpose between his indignation and the object of it. “You are our good friend, Steele, in spite of the shock you gave us a moment ago.”
As no answer was made to this beyond a smile too subtle and too fine to be understood by his openhearted chief, the mayor proceeded to declare:
“Then that matter is at an end. I pray that it may have done us no real harm. I do not think it has. People resent attacks on women, especially, on one whose reputation has never known a shadow, as girl, wife, or mother.”
“Yes,” came in slow assent from the lips which had just smiled, and he glanced at Mrs. Packard whose own lips seemed suddenly to become dry, for I saw her try to moisten them as her right hand groped about for something on the tabletop and finally settled on a small paper-weight which she set down amongst her matches. Was it then or afterward that I began to have my first real doubt whether some shadow had not fallen across her apparently unsullied life?
“Yes, you are right,” repeated Mr. Steele more energetically. “People do resent such insinuations against a woman, though I remember one case where the opposite effect was produced. It was when Collins ran for supervisor in Cleveland. He was a good fellow himself, and he had a wife who was all that was beautiful and charming, but who had once risked her reputation in an act which did call for public arraignment. Unfortunately, there was a man who knew of this act and he published it right and left and—”
“Olympia!” Mayor Packard was on his feet, pointing in sudden fury and suspicion at the table where the matches lay about in odd and, as I now saw, seemingly set figures. “You are doing something besides playing with those matches. I know Mr. Steele’s famous cipher; he showed it to me a week ago; and so, evidently, do you, in spite of the fact that you have had barely fifty words with him since he came to the house. Let me read—ah!—give over that piece of paper you have there, Steele, if you would not have me think you as great a dastard as we know that Brainard to be!”
And while his wife drooped before his eyes and a cynical smile crept about the secretary’s fine mouth, he caught up the sheet on which Steele had been playing tit-tat-to with the child, and glanced from the table to it and back again to the table on which the matches lay in the following device, the paper-weight answering for the dot:
7; L;.]7; [-]; ^V. “M,” suddenly left the mayor’s writhing lips; then slowly, letter by letter, “E-R-C-Y. Mercy!” he vociferated. “Why does my wife appeal for mercy to you—a stranger—and in your own cipher! Miserable woman! What secret’s here? Either you are—”
“Hush! some one’s at the door!” admonished the secretary.
Mr. Packard turned quickly, and, smoothing his face rapidly, as such men must, started for the door. Mrs. Packard, flinging her whole soul into a look, met the secretary’s eyes for a moment and then let her head sink forward on her hands above those telltale matches, from whose arrangement she had reaped despair in place of hope.
Mr. Steele smiled again, his fine, false smile, but after her head had fallen; not before. Indeed, he had vouchsafed no reply to her eloquent look. It was as if it had met marble till her eyes were bidden; then—
But Nixon was in the open doorway and Nixon was speaking:
“A telegram, your Honor.”
The old man spoke briskly, even a little crisply—perhaps he always did when he addressed the mayor. But his eyes roamed eagerly and changed to a burning, red color when they fell upon the dejected figure of his mistress. I fancied that, had he dared, he would have leaped into the room and taken his own part—and who could rightly gage what that was?—in the scene which may have been far more comprehensive to him than to me. But he did not dare, and my eyes passed from him to the mayor.
“From Haines,” that gentleman announced, forgetting the suggestive discovery he had just made in the great and absorbing interest of his campaign. “‘Speech good—great applause becoming thunderous at flash of your picture. All right so far if—‘” he read out, ceasing abruptly at the “if” which, as I afterward understood, really ended the message. “No answer,” he explained to Nixon as he hurriedly, dismissed him. “That ‘if’ concerns you,” he now declared, coming back to his wife and to his troubles at the same instant. “Explain the mystery which seems likely to undo me. Why do you sit there bowed under my accusations? Why should Henry Packard’s wife cry for mercy, to any man? Because those damnable accusations are true? Because you have a secret in your past and this man knows it?”