The Sherrods

by George Barr McCutcheon

CHAPTER XXVIII.

HEARTS.

Sherrod's body lay stretched across the rug in front of the grate in his studio. His coat and vest had been hastily thrown aside and his white shirt, covering the deep chest, was saturated with blood. The carved hilt of a Malay dagger stood defiantly above the cleft heart. The steel was deep in his body.

He had dealt one blow, but he had sent the blade of the kris straight home; so true was its course that death must have been instantaneous. He lay flat on his broad back, his neck twisted as if checked in the supreme moment of agony; death had left its stamp of pain on his ghastly face.

On the floor near the body a piece of white paper was found, across which was scrawled:

"Forgive me."

The hand that penciled these words was the same that drove home the blade, but it had trembled only in the writing, not in the blow. The hasty scrawl revealed his eagerness to have over with life while there was yet a chance to escape facing the ruined women below. The last plea of the suicide was not directed to either of the loved ones; it was left for each to take it to her heart and in secrecy hold it as hers alone—cherishing it, if she could.

His had been a crime that the law could not sufficiently punish. He had indicted the penalty himself and he had asked forgiveness of those he had wronged in his weakness. They had loved him to the hour of his death; they had trusted him. Neither had known him in his baseness or his cowardice—they knew him only as loving, devoted and true. Death came just as the joys of being his were shattered; the pains he had given them in life were known only after he had gone from them. They were asked to forgive a dead man who had been everything to them in life, and whom they had loved until his last breath was drawn; he did not wait to receive their reproaches; he had gone away as they had known him and they had not looked upon the face of guilt.

*****

Celeste was the calmer of the two and yet she was the more deeply wronged. After the first grief she arose, bleeding and broken from the wreck of every joy, and she was strong. Justine, stunned by grief and horror, lay for hours in the bed to which she had been carried by the maids after the terrible scene in the studio. With the slow return of composure, Celeste saw dimly the situation as it existed for her. She was not a widow. The widow was the other woman who had crouched on the opposite side of the corpse, pleading with him to come back to her and the boy. While she could not as yet grasp the full reality of her position, she felt that Justine's claim was best.

It was she who had Justine taken to a room by the maids. There was no rage in her heart; she took that other one into her grief and shared it with her. There was no other way; they had suffered together. There still lingered a faint hope—cruel though it was—that she might be the real wife, and Justine the false one. Hours after the calamity, far in the night, while her mother bathed her head and sought to soothe her, Celeste planned and planned.

She knew that if Justine's claim were true, Jud had deliberately made a wanton of her, even though he loved her. The world would soon know that she was not a wife, and the newspapers would be nauseous with the sensation. She was confident, however, that she was the only one in the house who knew Justine's story, and as she lay waiting for the dawn there grew in her mind a steady purpose. The world must never know!

Justine, pale and dead-eyed, stood looking from the window of the bed-chamber when the knock came at her door the next morning. She did not respond, she did not even turn her head, for her thoughts were of the night before, and the life before that. Celeste softly opened the door and came to her side.

"Justine," she said gently, almost inaudibly. Dark, heavy, despairing eyes were turned upon her and she feared for the success of her plan.

"Am I to go to him now?" came the lifeless voice of the other.

"Justine," said Celeste, taking a cold hand in her own, "we must understand each other, we must know the truth. I don't think anything that can happen now will hurt us; we are dead to all pain. We must talk about—about ourselves."

"I don't understand what it all means," moaned Justine. "Why can't I go to Jud? He is mine—he is mine, and—and——"

"But, Justine, dear, it is of this that we must talk. I—I thought he was mine. Oh God, don't you see? I have lived as his wife for months and—and I never knew until you came that I—that I—oh, don't you understand?"

Justine's unwillingness to believe evil of Jud, despite all that had happened to prove the existence of a double life, was a barrier hard to break down, and it was not without long entreaties and explanations that Celeste made her see that her claim had some justification. At last these two women brought themselves down to the point from which the situation could be seen plainly in all its unhappy colorings. Together in the darkness that he had cast about them they groped their way toward the light of understanding; as they went, the heart of each was bared to the other, and both saw and sought to ease the pain the rents disclosed.

There was no denying Justine's right to call Jud husband. Celeste saw her every hope slipping away as she listened to the story of the courtship and marriage in the little country lane. She knew now that she had never been a wife, and she knew that she had to live all the rest of her life beneath an ugly shadow. Whatever were her thoughts of the man who had so basely wronged her, she kept them to herself. Not one word of reproach did she utter in the presence of the wife and mother. The consequences of his crime were hers to bear, and her only object in life now was to prevent others from sharing them with her, to prevent the world from knowing of their existence. If she loathed the memory of the man who had despoiled her honor, she held that loathing secret. To the world, he was her husband, and the world should see her mourn for him.

Her proposition to Justine was at first indignantly rejected, but so skillfully did she paint the picture of her position in life as Jud had left it for her, that the tender, honest girl from the country fell completely under the influence of her pleading. Justine was made to see Jud's fault in all its blackness, and was urged to share in the effort to protect his memory. No one was to know of the double life he had led; no one was to know of his crime; no one was to curse his memory; two women alone were to—forget, if they could.

Between them it was agreed that in Chicago Justine was to appear as a cousin of the dead man, and the funeral obsequies were to be conducted with the real wife in the background, the other as the deepest mourner. The body was to be taken afterwards to Clay township for burial, and there Justine was to claim her dead, with Celeste posing as the good friend in the hour of direst trouble. That was the general plan, the minor but intricate details being intrusted to Celeste.

"Here he was my husband, and the world may never be the wiser," said she, taking the other to her grateful heart. "Down there he is yours, and no one there must know how he has served you. You can save me, Justine, and I can shield him from the curses of your people. He will lie in the grave you dig for him away down there, and your friends may always look upon his headstone and say: 'He was a good man. We all loved him.' It is fair, Justine, and I will love you to my dying day for doing all this for me."

"I love you," said Justine, and they went forth to play their unhappy parts.

It was Celeste, keen and bold in her desperation, who wrote the letter to 'Gene Crawley, signing a fictitious name, Justine looking over her shoulder with streaming eyes. It briefly told of a sudden death and ended with the statement that a telegram would follow announcing the time of leaving Chicago with the body. The newspapers in the city told the story of the suicide, giving the cause as ill-health, and pictured the grief of the young widow. Celeste saw the reporters herself. Purposely, deliberately she misinformed them in many of the details regarding his birthplace and his earlier life. This act of shrewdness on her part was calculated to mislead the people of Clay township, and it succeeded. No one could connect the identity of the suicide with that of the youth who had gone out from that Indiana community long ago.

How the two women lived through the funeral service in S—— Place was past all understanding.

The real wife heard the sobs of the other and choked with the grief she was compelled to suppress. The other wept, but who knows whether the tears were tribute of love for the man over whom the clergyman said such gentle, hopeful words? A dead man and two women knew the story that would have shocked the world. One could not speak, the others would not. And so he was eulogized.

That night the two women and their dead left Chicago for Glenville. Their only companion was Dudley Sherrod, the second.