CHAPTER XXI.
THE COMING IN THE NIGHT.
Soon after their return to Chicago, Celeste began to observe changes in her husband's manner. He gave up newspaper illustrating and went in for water colors and began to take lessons in oil painting. The cleverness of Jud Sherrod, the boy, was not wanting in the man. In a short time the born artist in him was mastering the difficulties of color and he was painting in a manner that surprised not only his critical friends but himself. He toiled hard and faithfully; his little studio on the top floor of their home was always a place of activity.
Feverishly he began these first attempts at coloring, Celeste his only critic. With loving yet honest eyes she saw the faults, the virtues and the improvement. He worked day and night, despite her expostulations. The bright eyes he turned to her when he took them from the canvas were not the gray, hungry ones that dulled into reverie when he was alone with his pigments. His eyes saw two dancing faces in the colors as he spread them: one dark, distressed, and weary, the other fair, bright, and happy.
There came to him a powerful desire to see Justine, but with it the fear that he could not leave her if he again felt her presence touching his. For an hour at a time, day after day, he would hold Celeste in his arms, uttering no word, stroking her hair, caressing her face, gloomily repentant. The enormity of his mistake—he would not call it crime—had come full upon him. It was not that he had broken the laws of the land, but that he had deceived—deceived.
Men about town remarked the change and wondered. Douglass Converse, in anxiety, sought to ascertain the cause, fearing to find Celeste unhappy. She was, beyond doubt, blissfully happy, and he fell back upon the old solution: Sherrod was not well. The latter, in response to blunt questioning, told him he was not sick, not tired, not worried, but his heart quaked with the discovery that the eyes of his friends were upon him and always questioning.
"Dudley, dear, let us go to Florida next month," said Celeste one night as they drove home from the theatre. He had drooped moodily through the play and had been silent as they whirled along in the carriage. In casting about for the cause of his apparent weariness, she ascribed it to overwork.
"Do you really want to go, Celeste?" he asked, tenderly. "Will the stay down there do you good?"
"I want to get away from Chicago for awhile. I want to be where it is bright and warm. Why should we stay here through all this wretched winter when it is so easy to go to such a delightful place? You must finish your picture in time to start next month. You don't know how happy it will make me."
If he could only take Justine with them! That longing swelled his heart almost to the bursting. "If Justine could only enjoy it all with me," he groaned to himself. "If she could go! If she could go where it is warm and bright! If I could have them both with me there could be no more darkness, no more chill, no more unhappiness."
As the days dragged along, nearer and nearer the date set for the departure for Florida, he grew moodier, more dejected. But one thought filled his mind, the abandonment of Justine; not regret for the wrong he was doing Celeste, but remorse for the wrong he was doing Justine. Sleepless nights found him seeing her slaving, half-frozen, on that wretched farm, far from the bright world he had enjoyed and she would have enjoyed.
At last, a week before the day set for their departure for Florida he reached a sudden determination. He would see Justine, he would go to her in the night and kiss her and take her up in his arms and bear her to Chicago with him, there to—but no! He could not do that! He could only kiss her and take her in his arms and then steal back to the other one, a dastard. There could be but one and it was for him to choose between them.
He wondered if he could go back to the farm and live, if he could give up all he had won, if he could confess his error to Justine, if he could desert Celeste, if he could live without both of them. Selfishness told him to relinquish Justine, honor told him to strip the shackles from Celeste, even though the action broke her heart.
Then there came to his heart the design of the coward, and he could not get away from its horrible influence. It battled down manly resistance, it overthrew every courageous impulse, it made of him a weak, forceless, unresisting slave. With the fever of this malignant impulse in his blood, he stealthily began the laying of plans that were to end his troubles. But one person would be left to suffer and to wonder and she might never know the truth.
One dark night there descended from the railway coach at Glenville, a roughly clad man whose appearance was that of a stranger but whose actions were those of one familiar with the dark surroundings. There had been few changes in Glenville since the day on which Jud Sherrod left the place for the big city on the lake, but there had been a wondrous change in the man who was returning, under cover of night, to the quaint, old-fashioned home of his boyhood. He had gone away an eager, buoyant youth, strong and ambitious; he was coming back a heartsick, miserable old man, skulking and crafty.
Through unused lanes, across dark, almost forgotten fields, frozen and bleak, he sped, his straining eyes bent upon the blackness ahead, fearfully searching for the first faint flicker in a certain window. He did not know how long it took him to cover the miles that lay between the village and the forlorn cottage in the winter-swept lane. He had carefully concealed his face from the station men and there were so few people abroad in that freezing night that no one knew of the return of Justine's long-absent husband. His journey across the fields was accomplished almost before he knew it had begun, so full was his mind of the purpose that brought him there. Every sound startled and unnerved him, yet he hurried on unswervingly. He was going to the end of it all.
At last he came to the fence that separated Justine's little farm from the broad acres of David Strong. Scarce half a mile away stood the cottage, hidden in the night. He knew it was there, and he knew that a light shone from a window on the side of the house farthest from him. It was there that she loved to sit, and, as it was not yet ten o'clock, she could not have gone to bed. He swerved to the south, and by a wide detour came to the garden fence that he had built in the days gone by. As he slunk past the corner of the barn his gaze fell upon the lighted window.
He clung to the fence and gazed intently at the square blotch of yellow in the blackness. She was there! In that room! His Justine! For a moment his resolution wavered. Then he doggedly turned his back upon the kindly glimmer in her window, and looked into the shadow. He did not dare look again upon the loving light that stretched its warmth out to him as he shuddered and cringed on the threshold of his own home, almost within the clasp of those adoring arms.
But, with his back to her, his face to the darkness, he waited, waited, waited. It seemed to him that hours passed before he dared again to face the house, fearing that another glimpse of her light would break his resolution. His mind was a blank save for one tense thought—the one great thought that had drawn him from one woman to the other. He thought only of the moment when the light in the window should disappear, when stillness should be in Justine's bed-chamber, when no accusing eye could look upon what was to follow. His numb fingers felt for the knife that lay sheathed in his overcoat pocket, and he shuddered as they touched it.
His eyes again turned apprehensively toward the house. The window was dark; he could see nothing except the dense outlines of the square little building against the black sky. There was a dead chill in the air. The silence weighed upon him. He made a stealthy way to the weather boards of the house. The touch of his numb fingers against the frosty wood was uncanny, and he drew his hand sharply away. For a moment he paused, and his crouching form straightened with a sudden consciousness of its position. The deepest revulsion swept over him, the most inordinate shame and horror. Why was he coming to her in the dead of night, like an assassin, sneaking, cringing, shivering? With a groan he recklessly strode forward to the dark window frame. His fingers touched the glass of two or three panes, then the rags that kept the wind out of others. In there she was lying asleep, alone, breathing softly, dreaming of him perhaps. He was within ten feet of that dear, unconscious body and she was sweetly alive—a tender breathing thing that loved him better than life. Alive, and he had come to take life away from her!
He had come to steal the only thing that was left to her—her life.
With wild eyes he sought to penetrate the darkness beyond the glass. As plainly as if it were broad daylight his imagination revealed to him the interior of the bare room. There were his drawings on the walls; the worn ingrain carpet of green and red; the old rocking-chair and the two cane-bottom chairs; the walnut stand with its simple cover of white muslin, the prayer-book and the kerosene lamp; Justine's little work-basket with its yarn, its knitting, its thread, thimble, patch-pieces and the scissors. Across the back of a chair hung her pitifully unfashionable dress of calico, her white underskirt, her thick petticoat; beside the bed stood the heavy, well-worn shoes with her black stockings lying limp and lifeless across them. The white coverlet, rumpled and ridged by the lithe figure that snuggled underneath; the brown hair, the sweet, tired face with its closed eyes, sunk in the broad pillow; the gentle breathing, the regular movement of the covers that stretched across the warm, slumbering body; the brown, strong hand that wore his ring resting beside the cheek of the sleeper. A sudden eagerness to clasp the hand, to hold it firm, to protect it from something, came to him. He wondered for a moment why she should need protection—before he remembered.
How could he live without her? The folly of trying to do so! Better, far better, that he should die and take her with him, leaving the other to wonder and at last find her young way back to happiness through forgetfulness. Foresworn to end his own misery and to destroy every possible chance that might convey his faithlessness to the trusting Justine, he had slunk away from the city, bidding farewell to the world that had weakened him, and was now clinging to her window sill with love and murder in his heart. He had come to kill her and to kill himself. He must have it over. There was no other way. His legs trembled as he sped on to the kitchen door. The door was bolted and he sought the narrow window. It moved under his effort, creaking treacherously, but he did not pause. A half-dead fire smoldered in the kitchen stove—their kitchen stove—and he sank beside it, craving its friendly warmth. He crouched there for many minutes, steeling himself for what was to come. Indecision and weakness assailed him again and again, but he overcame them; the fear of death made him cast glances over his shoulder, but he set his teeth; the terror of crime shook him, but he fought it away. There was but one way to end the tragedy, there was but one way to save Justine. It would be over in a moment; there was relief in that.
How he crept through the kitchen and the dark sitting-room he did not know, but at last he found himself, breathless and pulseless, at her door. Then came the stunning thought: was she alone in the room? Was old Mrs. Crane with her or was she in the little half-story room at the head of the stairs? He shrank back to the kitchen noiselessly. Groping his way to the table he ran his hand over its surface until it touched the candlestick that he knew was there as well as if he had seen it. He lighted the candle from the flickering blue flame in the stove, and, shading it with his hand, glided swiftly to her door.
After what seemed an hour of irresolution, he softly pressed the latch. The almost imperceptible noise sounded like a crash of thunder in his sensitive ears, but the door swung slowly open and he stood in his wife's room. Yes! There was the bed and there was the mass of brown hair and the white, blurred face and——
But, what was that noise? His heart stopped beating—his wide eyes saw Justine's hand slowly stretch out and, as if its owner were acting in her sleep, apparently tuck in the covers on the side of the bed nearest the wall. A faint, smothered wail came to his ears. There was no mistaking the sound.
A baby!
As he stood there in the doorway, frozen to the spot, the candle in one hand, the knife in the other, Justine moved suddenly and in a moment was staring at him with wide, terrified eyes.