 | CHAPTER XXVIII.
IN THE DEPTHS. The Wetherel affair |  |
28. CHAPTER XXVIII.
IN THE DEPTHS.
Miss Imogen Eleonore Jones hurried back joyfully and vaingloriously to
Nestoria with the proceeds of her traffic.
“Behold the dawn of fortune!” she exclaimed, holding the bank-bills exultingly
aloft, and otherwise making an impressive tableau of herself, such as
one heroine should present in addressing another, especially when the first
heroine is the protector of the second.
Nestoria counted the money in amazement, and was thankful and for a
moment happy over it, seeing in her earnings a promise of other prosperities,
and, above all, of escape. “Oh, I will work night and day, night and day,”
she murmured, meanwhile trying to compute in her excited brain how long it
would be before she would have enough to take her to her distant home.
“How well you have done my errand!” was her next thought. “I am so
deeply obliged to you!”
“Not so,” protested Miss Jones, striving, though in vain, to bear her mercantile
honors meekly. “It was the beauty of your fans which gave me success.
A young lady who was in the shop pronounced them exquisite, and
purchased one immediately. I think the name of your first patron is worthy
of being entered upon the tablets of your memory. It was a Miss Dinneford,
and her first name is Alice, for I heard a gentleman call her so who was with
her, and I think he was an admirer.”
A haunting ghost, the terror of discovery, suddenly slid close up to Nestoria,
train. She heard the feet of pursners, and saw herself haled into halls of justice,
and there either denounced as a bloodstained criminal, or forced to bear deadly
evidence against Edward Wetherel.
“Did you tell her anything about me?” she asked in a faint, eager voice.
“You do not yet know me,” replied Miss Jones, almost offended. “Never
for one instant have I forgotten my vow to hide your solemn secret. Some
day you will do me justice.”
“I hope I have not pained you,” pleaded Nestoria fearful of losing her
only friend. “I am too much occupied with myself. And yet, if you knew—”
She stopped. Her calamity was of such a nature that she could not ask for
sympathy under it. She must hide her face from all human beings but one,
and from that one she must hide her soul. Oppressed with a sense of utter
isolation and abandonment, it seemed to her as if she were an ordained and
sealed outcast, a second Cain. An actual assassin could hardly have felt
keener terror and remorse than did this innocent girl who had never even
wished harm to one of her fellow creatures. Of all the ugly features of sin,
perhaps the ugliest is this, that it often causes the guiltless to suffer with the
guilty, and sometimes in place of the guilty. Every evil act has its possible
rebounds which may strike down those who least deserve punishment.
For a few moments it seemed to Nestoria that she could not endure this unshared
torment; and she was nearly driven to making a confidante of her
chance intimate, and telling the whole story of the Wetherel tragedy. But
the thought of exposing Edward, the thought of bringing the man whom she
had loved to a shameful death, the thought of being obliged to look upon him
while she should utter her damning testimony—these frightful possibilities
struck her dumb. In no manner, neither through confession nor complaint,
must she relieve herself ever so little of the burden which had been laid upon
her by one who owed her all the happiness in his gift. Under this burden she
had tottered a little; but in a minute or so she was steady again; she turned
quietly and silently to her painting. It was a prodigious exhibition of tenacity,
of magnanimity, and, perhaps we may venture to add, of heroism. A few
days earlier in her life she would not have believed herself possessed of such
endurance. Her character was one of those which are capable of almost indefinite
development under adversity, suffering, and combat.
It is a proof of her practical ability, as well perhaps as of her ignorance of
the great, perplexing world in which she had lost herself, that she had one
simple plan of action and never swerved from it. To keep concealed until
she could earn money enough to take her back to her father, had been her
first purpose, and she conceived no other. She had the singleness of intent
which marks a child, or a dog, or a cat, who, having got into trouble abroad,
thinks only of making homeward. There were no wild hopes that some wandering
fairy of a chance would favor her; there were no dreamings that she
would some day find an unexpected friend able and willing to rescue. She
had her single, fixed scheme of escape, to be carried out by herself; and she
clung to it as firmly as in her shipwreck she had clung to the tossing boat.
As soon as she had sold a second batch of fans she took a room by herself.
Money was indescribably precious, but the chance of thickening her concealment
was more so, and she had recovered from her first terror of solitude.
Indeed, one cogent reason why she wished to live alone was her need of se
clusion for meditation and devotion. She had a conflict to maintain, not only
less, scrupulous, and hostile conscience. An unappeasable and menacing
voice continually charged her with guiltiness for hiding the guilty from justice.
She had not obeyed her sense of duty, but had hearkened to the pleadings
of her natural heart, a counsellor which she knew to be deceitful and
desperately wicked. In this matter she had done evilly from the beginning;
and, what was far more dreadful, she persisted in her unrighteousness. That
imperious inward voice, a monitor which was the more dreadful because hitherto
she had always striven to obey it, called upon her to repent of her iniquity
of silence, and to turn from it or perish. But such a turning, to be honest and
thorough and salvatory, signified nothing less than the denouncing of Edward
Wetherel.
This was a cross of such exceptional weight, and sharp with such a promise
of lifelong wretchedness, that she could not take it up. Scourged by her
conscience, she approached it again and again, only to reject it passionately or
to seek some way of evading it. Then a new proclamation of guilt resounded,
and she heard herself judged as one of the hardened impenitent. All the
sources in which she had hitherto found comfortable guidance and hope were
now turned into springs of condemnation and threatening. One of her first
purchases after reaching her asylum had been a Bible; and hour by hour she
turned over its leaves in search of some word which would justify her in her
resolution of secrecy;
but she found no text to which she could cling for more
than a minute at a time. Shining promises came toward her in garments of
peace, but once close at hand changed into accusing angels. She was like a
person who attempts to cross a river on an ice-float, and who must continually
leap from one sinking, shivering fragment to another. At one time she sought
to uphold herself by persistently repeating that broadest of forgiving utterances—that
pardon which demands not even repentance for the past, but only
reformation for the future: “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.”
But this refuge, like all the others, grew thin, crackled under her feet, and
vanished, leaving her in deep waters.
The past—that brief, happy past of loving—became as dreadful as the present,
and only less dreadful than the future. It seemed to be shown to her
that her calamity was a retribution for giving her heart to a man who had not
given his heart to righteousness. She had been taught to believe in a special
providence; to believe that the Creator watches over every act of every one
of his creatures; to believe that he incessantly chastens the good and punishes
the wicked. It was clear enough to her that her ways had been followed up
by Omniscience, and that she was suffering a castigation either of mercy or
of judgment. Which? How could it be mercy while she continued in her
sin? She must altogether give up that unholy affection, and she must repent of
having ever indulged in it. Here, as it seemed to her, she found duty somewhat
easier, at least for a time. She affirmed that she did not love Edward Wetherel
now; that she could not possibly love a man who was a murderer; that the
mere thought of such a love filled her with horror. As to the past, too, she professed
repentance, prostrating herself in humiliation because of it, and confessing
that her chastisement had been merited. For a day or two she had a
comforting sense that on this point she had cleared her conscience. But then,
like a spectre rising out of a grave, appeared this horrible accusation: “Because
you hide this man's guilt and shield him from justice, therefore it must
be that you still love him; in some secret and evil recess of your heart there
is still an unholy remnant of affection.”
“No, no, no!” she protested in agony; and thereupon a pitiless voice answered:
“Expose him; surrender him to the gallows.” Nothing would answer
except that she should come out before the world and denounce Edward
Wetherel as a murderer. Her conscience demanded it; her innate sense of
the claims of human justice demanded it; every near or distant sound of the
great city around her seemed to require it; the ghost of Judge Wetherel arose
before her mind and added its grisly urgency.
There were times when every passer-by who glanced at the house had in
her eyes the air of saying to himself “Here is a place where blood is hidden.”
There were other times when she saw before her the awful bar of the Final
Judgment, and heard an unearthly voice inquire: “When thou art come
hither, wilt thou still be silent?” There was no end to this beating of remorseless
behests; it was a fiery tempest which never ceased and seldom lulled.
She was almost continually blown up and down gloomy abysses, like the unresting
spirits whom Dante saw in the second circle of the Inferno, among
whom was that Francesca who gave all for love. If any passage of those
Scriptures, to which she vainly looked for comfort, came to her oftener than
any other, it was the declaration. “There is no peace for the wicked.”
At times it appeared to her that she could not possibly bear her burden
longer unassisted; that, since it would not come off at the foot of the cross,
she must absolutely appeal to human help. She wrote to her father, not
knowing that he was dead, not knowing that this last refuge had been closed
to her. She wrote out the whole story of that tragedy which had murdered her
venerable friend and her own girlish peace. She filled pages on pages with the
hideous narrative, and then read them to herself as well as she could for weeping.
No other eye ever beheld the letter; she could not bring herself to mail
it. Nor did she dare keep it long, for the thought came to her that justice
might discover it, and she burnt it to the last shred.
Then she wrote another letter saying nothing of her gloomy situation,
nothing of her whereabouts. What a struggle it was to chat of commonplaces
when her whole mind was full of calamity and horror! She merely intimated
that she did not find America agreeable, and that she might yet be led to ask
leave to return home. She added that she was with a friend; and with that
vague statement she closed. This wretched epistle she sent, praying to be
forgiven for its prevarications, or rather its suppressions of the truth, but finding
no justification for them even in necessity, so scrupulous was her sore conscience.
Meantime she labored without ceasing, for her trouble of mind made her
all the more eager to earn money enough to fly with, and furthermore her
work was enough of a distraction to be somewhat of a consolation. In the
artistic anxiety of touching a rose with its healthfullest flush or a lily with its
saintliest purity, she could forget by moments that her soul was sick with sorrow
and stained with sin. Oh, the comfort that innumerable hosts of fearing
and mourning ones have found in enforced industry! If the fallen inhabitant
of Eden had not been condemned to live by the sweat of his brow, his chastisement
would not have been diminished, but exaggerated.
It was also a blessing to Nestoria, a blessing in the guise of a cruelty, that
she was forced to hide her griefs. There is less good in confession, and more
good in silent self-control, than is generally supposed. The first is often a
weakening habit, and the second an invigorating effort. The girl's heart
almost burst in her struggle to appear tranquil under the eyes of her fellow
the solid moral fibre which constitutes character.
She had been rather more than a fortnight in her seclusion, her hands busy
with their graceful industry and her soul with its terrible combats, when an
incident occurred which was of far more moment than she could then suspect.
Closely veiled, she was returning from a walk in search of painting materials,
when she met in the passage which led to her room a stranger of peculiar appearance,
a man of little more than dwarfish stature, with a remarkably large
head and plain features. Fearful of every one, her first impulse was to avoid
him and take refuge in her own apartment.
But in this homely face and even in the carriage of this insignificant figure
there was an influence which would not let her turn her back curtly. The
stranger's expression was one of touching humility and resignation, and also
of that benevolence which noble natures evolve out of suffering. The smile
which lighted up the coarse mouth had such a sweetness as one might attribute
to the smile of a pitying seraph. With the quick insight of a sensibility
which has pondered over calamities, Nestoria divined the man of sorrows who
has learned to pity the griefs of others. Eager for sympathy and help, she
felt an instantaneous impulse to trust this man, and to wish that she knew
him. Thus when he took off his hat and approached her, she did not seek to
avoid him.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” he said in a voice as tender and appealing as
his smile. “But may I presume to inquire of you as to an old acquaintance
of mine? Does Miss Imogen Jones still live here?”
“She does,” replied Nestoria. “But she will not be in for some hours. Can
I deliver a message to her for you?”
“I thank you,” bowed the visitor. “Be pleased to say that Mr. Walter
Lehming called on her, and that he proposes to take his old rooms in the
building. I regret that I have no card, and must trouble you to remember
the name. If you should forget it, you can describe my appearance to her,
and she will know who came.”
This allusion to the oddity, and in plain terms the deformity of his figure
was so simple and humble and uncomplaining that it completely captivated
Nestoria's sympathy.
“I shall not forget the name,” she said in a tone of respect; and here we
must call distinctly to mind the fact that she had never heard it before: for
Alice Dinneford had only mentioned Lehming as “Cousin Walter.”
He bowed his thanks and departed, moving away in an unobtrusive and
and noiseless fashion, such as one may remark in the deformed who are
meekly conscious of their deformity.
| CHAPTER XXVIII.
IN THE DEPTHS. The Wetherel affair | |