“The next morning I made my test. Perhaps, Henry, you remember my handing Mr. Steele an empty envelope to mail which he returned with an air of surprise so natural and seemingly unfeigned that he again forced me to believe that he was the stranger he appeared. Though he must have recognized at a glance—for he was an adept in this cipher once—the seven simple symbols in which I had expressed the great cry of my soul ‘Is it you?’ he acted the innocent secretary so perfectly that all my old hopes returned and I experienced one hour of perfect joy. Then came another reaction. Letty brought in the baby with a paper pinned to her coat. She declared to us that a woman had been the instrument of this outrage, though the marks inside, suggesting the cipher but with characteristic variations bespeaking malice, could only have been made by one hand.
“How I managed to maintain sufficient hold upon my mind to drag the key from my breast and by its means to pick out the meaning of the first three words—words which once read suggested all the rest—I can not now imagine. Death was in my heart and the misery of it all more than human strength could bear; yet I compared paper with paper carefully, intelligently, till these words from the prayer-book with all their threatening meaning to me and mine started into life before me: ‘Visiting the sins—’ Henry, you know the words ‘Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.’ Upon the children! Henry, he meant Laura! our little Laura! I had wakened vengeance in a fiend. The man who had calmly smiled in my face as he handed me back that empty envelope inscribed with the wild appeal, ‘Is it you?’ was the man I had once driven to the verge of the grave and who had come back now to destroy us all.
“Yet, such is the reaching out of the drowning for straws, I did not utterly despair till Nixon brought me from this man’s lodging-house, where I had sent him, a specimen of his handwriting.
“Nixon is the only confidant I have had. Nixon knew me as a girl when he worked in my uncle’s home, and has always had the most unbounded, I may say jealous, affection for me. To him I had dared impart that I did not trust your new secretary; that he looked like a man I once knew who was a determined opponent of the party now trying to elect you; that a specimen of his writing would make me quite sure, and begged him to get it. I thought he might pick up such in the little office below, but he was never able to do so—Mr. Steele has taken care not to leave a line written in this house—but he did find a few lines signed with his name in his own room at the boarding-house, and these he showed me before he told me the result of his errand. They settled all doubts. What is to be my fate? Surely this man has no real claim on me, after all these years, when I thought myself your true and honest wife. He may ruin your campaign, defeat your hopes, overwhelm me with calumny and a loss of repute, but surely, surely he can not separate us. The law will not uphold him in that; will it, Henry? Say that it will not, say—oh, say that—it—will not—do—that, or we shall live to curse the day, not when we were born; but when our little innocent child came to us!”
CHAPTER XXV. THE FINGER ON THE WALL
At this appeal the mayor rose and faced his secretary and the spectacle was afforded me of seeing two strong men drawn up in conflict over a woman both had cherished above all else. And it was characteristic of the forceful men, as well as the extreme nature of the conflict, that both were quiet in manner and speech—perhaps the mayor the more so, as he began the struggle by saying:
“Is what Mrs. Packard says of your playing with her fears during these two weeks true, Mr. Steele?”
Without a droop of his eye, or a tremor in his voice, the answer came short, sharp and emphatic:
“Yes.”
“Then, you are a villain! and I shall not feel myself called upon to show you any consideration beyond what justice demands. Have you any plea to urge beyond the natural one of her seemingly unprovoked desertion of you? Has not my wife—” the nobility with which he emphasized those two words made my heart swell—“spoken the truth?”
Ah! then the mask of disdainful serenity with which the other had hitherto veiled the burning anguish of his soul fell in one burst of irresistible passion.
“True! yes, it is true. But what does that truth involve for me? Not two weeks, but seven years of torture, five of them devoted to grief for her, loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against her whole sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised victim of her deception.”
“She wronged you—she acknowledges that—but it was the wrong of an unthinking child—not of a realizing woman. Would you, a realizing man, tear her now from home, from her child, from her place in the community and my heart—make her despicable as well as unhappy, just to feed your revenge?”
“Yes, I would do that.”
“Jeopardize interests you have so often professed in my hearing to be far above personal consideration—the success of your party, the triumph of your political principles?”
“My political principles!” Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph in his laugh! “And what do you know of them? What I have said. Mayor Packard, your education as a politician has yet to be completed before you will be fit for the governorship of a state. I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man that it suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you pause before you trusted me with the furtherance and final success of a campaign which may outlast those exigencies. I have not always been of your party; I am not so now at heart.”
The mayor, outraged in every sentiment of honor as well as in the most cherished feelings of his heart, lowered upon his unmoved secretary with a wrath which would have borne down any other man before it.
“Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor’s work? That the glorification you speak of is false? That you may talk in my favor, but that when you come to the issue, you will vote according to your heart; that is, for Stanton?”
“I have succeeded in making myself intelligible.”
The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.
“Then,” he cried, “I take back the word by which I qualified you a moment ago. You are not a villain, you are a dastard.”
Mr. Steele bowed in a way which turned the opprobrium into a seeming compliment.
“I have suffered so many wrongs at your hands that I can not wonder at suffering this one more.”
Then slowly and with a short look at her: “The woman who has queened it so long in C– society can not wish to undergo the charge of bigamy?”
“You will bring such a charge?”
“Certainly, if she does not voluntarily quit her false position, and, accepting the protection of the man whose name is really hers, go from this house at once.”
At this alternative, uttered with icy deliberation, Mrs. Packard recoiled with a sharp cry; but the mayor thrust a sudden sarcastic query at his opponent: