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CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:
BELFORD, CLARKE AND COMPANY,
PUBLISHERS
(1883?)
Having placed the poor girl in Priscilla's motherly hands, I fetched the best doctor I could think of, and efforts were at once made to restore consciousness. It was long before any sign of returning animation showed itself, but, at last, she awoke. Need I say what a supreme moment that was to me.
I need not give details of that return to life. After all, it was but a half return, and brought fresh terrors in its train. When morning dawned it found Pauline raving with what I prayed was but the delirium of fever.
The doctor told me her state was a most critical one. There was hope for her life, but no certainty of saving it. It was during those days of anxiety that I learned how much I loved my unhappy girl. How grateful I should be if she were given back to me, even as I had always known her.
Her wild fevered words cut me to the heart. Sometimes in English, sometimes in soft Italian, she called on some one; spoke words of deep love and sorrow; gave vent to expressions of fond endearment. These were succeeded by cries of grief, and it seemed as if shudders of fear passed over her.
For me there was no word; no look of recognition. I, who would have given worlds to hear my name spoken once, during her delirium, with an expression of love, was but a stranger at her bedside.
Whom was it she called for and lamented? Who was the man that she and I had seen slain? I soon learned —— and if my informant spoke the truth, he had, in so doing, dealt me a blow from which I should never rally.
It was Macari who struck it. He called on me the day alter Pauline and I had visited that house. I would not see him then. My plans were not formed. For the time I could think of nothing save my wife's danger. But two days afterward, when he again called, I gave orders for him to be admitted.
I shuddered as I took the hand I dared not yet refuse him, although in my own mind I was certain that a murderer's fingers were clasped round my own. Perhaps the very fingers which had once closed on my throat. Yet, with all I knew, I doubted whether I could bring him to justice.
Unless Pauline recovered, the evidence I could bring would be of no weight. Even the victim's name was unknown to me. Before the accusation would lie his remains must be found and identified. It was hopeless to think of punishing the murderer, now that more than three years had elapsed since the crime.
Besides —— was he Pauline's brother?
Brother or not, I would unmask him. I would show him that the crime was no longer a secret; that an outsider knew every detail. I would tell him this in the hope that his future would be haunted with the dread of a just vengeance overtaking him.
I knew the name of the street to which Pauline had led me. I had noticed it as we drove from it a few nights ago, and the reason of my drunken guide's mistake was apparent. It was Horace Street. My conductor had jumbled up Walpole and Horace in his drink-muddled brain.
On what a slight thread the whole course of a life hangs!
Macari had heard of Pauline's illness and delirium. He was as tenderly solicitous in his inquiries as a brother should be. My replies were cold and brief.
Brother or not, he was answerable for everything.
Presently he changed the subject. "I scarcely like to trouble you at such a time, but I should be glad to know if you are willing to join me, as I suggested, in a memorial to Victor Emmanuel?"
"I am not. There are several things I must have explained first."
He bowed politely; but I saw his lips close tightly for a moment.
"I am quite at your service," he said.
"Very well. Before all I must be satisfied that you are my wife's brother."
He raised his thick, dark eyebrows and tried to smile.
"That is easily done. Had poor Ceneri been with us, he would have vouched for it."
"But he told me very differently."
"Ah, he had his reasons. No matter, I can bring plenty of other persons."
"Then, again," I said, looking him full in the face and speaking very slowly, "I must know why you murdered a man three years ago in a house in Horace Street."
Whichever the fellow felt —— fear or rage —— the expression of his face was that of blank astonishment. Not, I knew, the surprise of innocence, but of wonder that the crime should be known. For a moment his jaw dropped and he gaped at me in silence.
Then he recovered. "Are you mad, Mr. Vaughan?" he cried.
"On the 20th of August, 186—— , at No. —— Horace Street, you stabbed here, to the heart, a young man who was sitting at the table. Dr. Ceneri was in the room at the time, also another man with a scar on his face."
He attempted no evasion. He sprang to his feet with features convulsed with rage. He seized my arm. For a moment I thought he meant to attack me, but found he only wanted to scan my face attentively. I did not shrink from his inspection. I hardly thought he would recognize me, so great a change does blindness make in a face.
But he knew me. He dropped my arm and stamped his foot in fury.
"Fools! Idiots! " he hissed. "Why did they not let me do the work thoroughly?"
He walked once or twice up and down the room, and then with regained composure stood in front of me.
"You are a great actor, Mr. Vaughan," he said, with a coolness and cynicism which appalled me. "You deceived even me, and I am very suspicious."
"You do not even deny the crime, you villain?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Why should I, to an eye-witness? To others I will deny it fast enough. Besides, as you are interested in the matter, there is no occasion to do so."
"I am interested!"
"Certainly; as you married my sister. Now, my fine fellow! my gay bridegroom! my dear brother-in-law! I will tell you why I killed that man and what I meant by my words to you at Geneva."
His air of bitter, callous mockery, as he spoke these words, made me dread what was to come. My hands were tingling to throw him from the room.
"That man —— I shall not for obvious reasons tell you his name —— was Pauline's lover. Translate 'lover' into Italian —— into what the word drudo signifies in that language —— then you will understand my meaning. We, on our mother's side have noble blood in our veins —— blood which brooks no insult. He was Pauline's, your wife's, lover, I say again. He had no wish to marry her, and so Ceneri and I killed him —— killed him in London —— even in her presence. As I told you once before, Mr. Vaughan, it is well to marry a woman who cannot recall the past."
I made no reply. So hideous a statement called for no comment. I simply rose and walked toward him
He saw my purpose written in my face. "Not here," he said hastily, and moving away from me: "what good can it do here —— a vulgar scuffle between two gentlemen? No; on the Continent —— anywhere, meet me, and I will show you how I hate you."
He spoke well, the self-possessed villain! What good could it do? An unseemly struggle, in which I could scarcely hope to kill him; and Pauline the while perhaps upon the point of death!
"Go," I cried, "murderer and coward! Every word you have ever spoken to me has been a lie, and because you hate me, you have to-day told me the greatest lie of all. Go; save yourself from the gallows by flight."
He gave me a look of malicious triumph and left me. The air in the room seemed purer now that he no longer breathed it.
Then I went to Pauline's room, and sitting by her bed heard her parched lips ever and ever calling in English or Italian on some one she loved. Heard them beseeching and warning, and knew that her wild words were addressed to the man whom Macari averred he had slain because he was the lover of his sister —— my wife!
The villain lied! I knew he lied. Over and over again I told myself it was a black, slanderous lie —— that Pauline was as pure as an angel. But, as I strove to comfort myself with these assertions, I knew that, lie as it was, until I could prove it such, it would rankle in my heart; would be ever with me; would grow until I mistook it for truth; would give me not a moment's rest or peace, until it made me curse the day when Kenyon led me inside that old church to see "the fairest" sight of all."
How could I prove the untruth? There were but two other persons in the world who knew Pauline's history —— Ceneri and old Teresa. Teresa had disappeared and Ceneri was in the Siberian mines or some other living grave. Even as I thought of the old Italian woman, Macari's slander began to throw forth its first poisonous shoots. Her mysterious words, "not for love or marriage," might bear another meaning, a dishonorable meaning. And other circumstances would come to me. Ceneri's haste to get his niece married —— his wish to get rid of her. Thoughts of this sort would steal into my mind until they half-maddened me.
I could bear to sit with Pauline no longer. I went out into the open air and wandered about aimlessly, until two ideas occurred to me. One was that I would go to the greatest authority on brain diseases, and consult him as to Pauline's hope of recovery —— the other that I would go to Horace Street and examine, by daylight, the house from top to bottom. I went first to the doctor's.
To him I told everything, saving, of course, Macari's black lie. I could see no other way to explain the case without confiding fully. I most certainly succeeded in arousing his interest. He had already seen Pauline and knew exactly the state in which she had been. I think he believed, as many others will, all I told him except that one strange occurrence. Even this he did not scoff at, accustomed as he was to wild fancies and freaks of imagination. He attributed it to this cause which was but natural —— And now what comfort or hope could he give me?
"As I told you before, Mr. Vaughan," he said, "such a thing as losing the recollection of the past for a long while and then picking up the end of the thread where it fell is not altogether unprecedented. I will come and see your wife; but as the case now stands it seems to me it is an attack of brain fever, and as yet no specialist is needed. When that fever leaves her I should like to know, that I may see her. It will, I expect, leave her sane, but she will begin life again from the hour that her mind was first unhinged. You, her husband, may even be as a stranger to her. The case, I say again, is not unprecedented, but the circumstances which surround it are."
I left the doctor and walked to the agents in whose hands the house in Horace Street was placed. I obtained the keys and made some inquiries. I found that at the time of the murder the house had been let furnished for a few weeks to an Italian gentleman whose name was forgotten. He had paid the rent in advance, so no inquiries had been made about him. The house had been vacant for a long time. There was nothing against it except that the owner would only let it at a certain rent, which most people appeared to consider too high.
I gave my name and address aud took the keys. I spent the remainder of the afternoon in searching every nook and cranny in the house, but no discovery rewarded my labor. There was, I believed, no place in which the body of a victim could have been hid —— there was no garden in which it might have been buried. I took back the keys and said the house did not suit me. Then I returned home, and brooded on my grief, whilst Macari's lie ate and ate its way to my heart.
And day by day it went on working and gnawing, corroding and warping, until I was told that the crisis was over; that Pauline was out of danger; that she was herself again.
Which self? The self I had only known, or the self before that fatal night? With a beating heart I drew near to her bedside. Weak, exhausted, without strength to move or speak she opened her eyes and looked at me. It was a look of wonder, of non-recognition, but it was the look of restored reason. She knew me not. It was as the doctor had predicted. I might have been a total stranger to those beautiful eyes as they opened, gazed at me, and then reclosed themselves wearily. I went from the room with tears running down my cheeks, and at my heart a feeling of mingled joy and sorrow, hope and fear, which words will not express.
Then Macari's black lie came out from its lurking place and seized me as it were by the throat —— clung to me, wrestled with me —— cried, "I am true! Push me away, I am still true. The lips of a villain spoke to me, but for once he spoke the truth. If not for this, why the crime? Men do not lightly commit murder." Even then when the moment I had prayed and longed for had come —— when sense, full sense, was given back to my poor love —— I was invaded, conquered, and crushed to the ground by the foul lie which might be truth.
"We are strangers —— she knows me not," I cried. "Let me prove that this lie is a lie or let us be strangers forever!"
How could I prove it? How could I ask Pauline? Or asking her, how could I expect her to answer? Even if she did, would her word satisfy me? oh that I could see Ceneri! Villain he might be, but I felt he was not such a double-dyed villain as Macari.
Thinking thus, I formed a desperate resolve. Men are urged to do strange and desperate things when life is at stake —— with me it was more than life. It was the honor, the happiness —— everything of two people.
Yes, I would do it! Mad as the scheme seemed, I would go to Siberia, and if money, perseverance, favor, or craft could bring me face to face with Ceneri, I would wring the truth, the whole truth from his lips!
(End of chapter nine)
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