Chapter XXII THE EARTHLY PURGATORY
Waking or sleeping, one figure stood forth in Durgan's imagination that night, and was the center of all his mental activity—it was Hermione Claxton.
He had been accustomed to regard her as the very incarnation of the commonplace, in so far as good sense and good feeling can be common.
Now he knew her as the chief actor in a story wherein the heights and depths of human passion had been so displayed that it might seem impossible for one mind to habitually hold so wide a gamut of experience in its conscious memory. This quiet little gray-haired housewife, who lived beside him, baking, sweeping, and sewing her placid days away, had stood in the criminal dock almost convicted of the most inhuman of crimes. Having passed through the awful white flame of public execration, she had accepted her blackened reputation with quiet dignity; for years she had lived a hidden life of perfect self-sacrifice, devoting herself to the purest service of sister-love. With character still uncleared, she had been urged to take her place as the wife of one of New York's best-known philanthropists, with whom, it seemed, she had long suffered the sorrows of mutual love and disappointment. Of more than this Durgan felt assured. As he reviewed all that had been told him that day, he was the more convinced that she had been no involuntary victim of false accusation, that she knew the secret that had puzzled the world, and had chosen to shield the criminal, to bear the odium, and also inflict it on the objects of her love. She had done all this for the sake of—what? What motive could have been strong enough to induce a wise and good woman to make such a sacrifice and endure the intolerable keeping of such a secret?
Durgan very naturally sought again the bundle of criminal reports which had fallen into his hands after the fire. Packed in the pile which fed the miners' stove, they had not, as yet, been burned. He reconsidered them, supposing now that they had been collected by Miss Claxton herself. A motley band of prisoners was thus evoked. They passed in procession before Durgan, beginning with Hermione Claxton, and ending with that curious figure of the dilettante priest who had beaten a sister to death in fear that she was an apparition. The well-born woman who, without temptation, had stolen jewels; the French peasant who had killed a loved wife to save her from the sufferings of a painful disease, and all the other members of this strange procession, represented the eccentricities of the respectable, rather than the characteristics of the degraded class. From a fresh scrutiny of each Durgan gained no information, only a strong suspicion that the criminal for whom Miss Claxton had so bravely stood scapegoat belonged to the same respectable class. He assumed that while her lawyers had been hunting for some inconsequent housebreaker who had taken a maniacal delight in dealing death, she had covered the guilt of someone whose reputation defied suspicion. Love, blind love, could have been the only motive strong enough to initiate and sustain such a course of action. The only way to discover the villain to whom she had sacrificed herself was to discover the man to whom she had given her heart. No doubt, since the crime and cowardice had betrayed his true value, such a woman would turn with some affection to a man like Alden. But Durgan's surmise required that before the crime she should have had another lover. Such a lover, if at enmity with the father and in need of money, would have had all the motive that the prosecution had attributed to Miss Claxton. She was supposed to have sent all witnesses out of the house before the crime; if her lover was demanding a private interview with her father, and her engagement was as yet private, such action on her part—— But Durgan paused, vexed at the nimbleness of his fancy. He derided himself for assuming that so obvious a suspicion had not long ago been probed to the bottom by acuter minds than his.
When he came to question more soberly what clues he held by which he might himself seek for any truth in his new suspicion, more unquiet suggestions came thick and fast.
More than once lately he had had the unpleasant sensation of hearing his wife's name very unexpectedly. Bertha had more than once referred to her; and what was it the raving mulatto had said? It took him some time to recollect words that had fallen on his astonished ears only to convince him of their nonsense. The mulatto had implied that his wife had concealed something for years which put her in some rivalry or enmity with Miss Claxton. His advice that Durgan should look into his wife's conduct and take Miss Claxton's part could, if it meant anything, only point to some mutual interest both women had with the spiritualist, Charlton Beardsley.
Durgan was amazed at such an idea. He remained for some time, as he said to himself, "convinced" that the mulatto was raving; and yet he went as far as to reflect that there had never been any visible reason for his wife's devotion to this man; furthermore, that Bertha had said that Mr. Claxton, an hour before his sad death, had received a message from Charlton Beardsley, that the mulatto had come from Beardsley, and was it not likely that he had sought shelter with his employer? The mulatto evidently knew Hermione to be innocent; in that case Beardsley would know it, and perhaps Durgan's own wife knew it. They had come forward with no evidence. What possible motive could they have had for concealment?
Durgan broke from his camp bed and from his hut, hot and stifled by the disagreeable rush of indignant and puzzled thoughts. He stood in the free air and dark starlight, trying to shake off his growing suspicions. Details gathered from different sources were darting into his mind, and it seemed to him that fancy, not reason, was rapidly constructing a dark story of which he could conceive no explanation, but which involved even himself—through tolerance of his wife's conduct—in the guilt of Miss Claxton's unmerited sufferings.
Alarmed at the trend of these memories and hasty inferences, he controlled himself, to reflect only on the more instant question of Eve's death, and the evidence he must give at the trial. It would appear that until 'Dolphus was condemned, even the Claxtons did not fear his tongue. To give evidence against him, and at the same time to seal his tongue, appeared to be Durgan's immediate duty, but the performance seemed difficult. What bribe, what threat could move a condemned man who was but a waif in the world, and need care for none but himself?
Yet if rational meaning was to be granted at all to his raving on the night of Eve's death, it would appear that even this creature had a reverence for Miss Claxton, and a desire to be the object of her prayers. Was this motive strong enough to be worked upon? It would be better, no doubt, to gain an interview with the prisoner and try to discover if he had any tenacity of purpose, but to this Durgan felt strong repugnance.
In avoiding this issue, his mind began to torment him regarding the evidence against Miss Claxton, which he alone knew, and which he might not have a right to conceal. His ardent belief in her goodness, his firm belief that he had heard Eve die, rested only on intuitive insight, common in men of solitary habit and unscholarly minds; he knew that this was no basis on which to found legal evidence.
With these uneasy and unfinished thoughts he at last fell asleep in the faint light of the dawn, and waked again soon with a vivid and bad dream.
He dreamed that he was again on the lonely mountain on the night of Eve's death, groping under the stunted thicket of old oak. Again he saw Miss Claxton come to the forked tree. She climbed as before, and reached up one thin arm to deposit something in the highest cleft of the trunk. The moon rose as before; Durgan saw in his dream that the thing she hid there was a knife, and the blade was red. Rousing himself from a sleep that brought so odious a vision, he woke to find the rays of a red sunrise in his face.
One of his laborers brought up the borrowed horse which he had arranged to ride to Hilyard. Before he started he went up the trail to the summit house, hoping that Alden might be about. He had nothing definite to ask, and yet he would have been glad to have some parting advice from him. No one was up. The very house was drowsy under the folded petals of its climbing flowers. Durgan went down through the stunted oak wood, and looked up as he passed the forked tree. It was the first time he had been close to it in daylight. In one branch of the fork, close to the notch, there was a round hole, such as squirrels choose for their nests. Better hiding-place for a small object could not be. To act the spy so far as to look into the hole without Miss Claxton's permission would have been what Durgan called "a nigger's trick." Like all the better class of slave-owners, he habitually sought to justify his own assumption of superiority by holding himself high above all mean actions or superstitious ideas. As he went down the hill he was vexed with himself for having been so far influenced by a dream as to have even looked for the hole in the tree.
Yet as he rode out into the glorious morning, he found himself arguing that if money for the mulatto had been put in the tree, it was odd that the mulatto had made no effort to get it before his arrest or to send for it after. The thing which had really been put there, if not meant for 'Dolphus, was probably intended to be long hidden. But a dream, of course, meant nothing, and his could easily be accounted for by the tenor of his waking thoughts and the color of the sunrise.
When he reached the saw-mill he turned by the long, wooden mill-race and set his horse at a gentle gallop for Hilyard. Even at that speed he began to wonder whether if, by such evidence as had convinced Bertha, he were induced to hold the erroneous opinion of Miss Claxton's guilt, he would be also forced into Bertha's conclusion, that fits of mania were the only explanation. Since last night he had called Bertha a fool; now, while most unwelcome suspicions followed him like tormenting demons, he was driven into greater sympathy with the younger sister.
He galloped gently down the slope of the valley, tree and shrub and flower rushing past him in the freshness of the morning. Suddenly he checked his horse to look up. He was beneath his own precipice. The mine was on a ledge about three hundred feet above him. The rock rose sheer some hundred and fifty feet above that. He could trace the opening of the trail, but even the smoke of the hidden dwelling-house could not be seen here. As Durgan listened for the faint chink of his workmen's tools, and sought from this unfamiliar point of view to trace each well-known spot, he began, for the first time, to realize fully the dreadfulness of the story which only yesterday had revealed.
Involuntarily he drew rein. The memory that had transfixed him was the description of the Claxton murder. While the step-mother had been killed by only one well-aimed shot, the father had been beaten with such brutal rage that no likeness of the living man appeared in the horrid shape of the dead.
He spoke aloud in the sunny solitude, and his words were of Bertha and her sister. "My God! She has lived alone with her there for two years believing this."
He had very often of late thought slightingly of Bertha's excitability. Last night he had thought scorn of her conclusions. Now, when he perceived how the terrible form of death which had befallen her loved father must have wrought upon her nerves, and how much more reason she had to believe her sister guilty than the most bigoted member of the public who had tried to condemn her, he felt only reverence for the courage and devotion of such a life. No doubt her womanly proneness to nervous fears, and the undisciplined activity of her imagination, had sometimes pictured scenes of impossible distress, and resulted in words and looks inconsistent with her resolution of secrecy; but, also, how much did this timorous and excitable disposition heighten the heroism of the office she had so perseveringly filled.
Yet while he remained in deep admiration of this heroism, he thought that he himself could never forgive Bertha's suspicion of her sister. How much less could Alden forgive? And if it ever reached the trustful mind of that loving sister that the child of her delight had thought her prone to madness, the word "forgiveness" would have no meaning between them. A wound would be made that no earthly love could ever heal.
Bertha's beauty came vividly before him—her kind, honest, impulsive girlhood. "God help her," he said slowly. "She has cheerfully borne worse than hell for love's sake, and such is the extreme tragedy of love, that if she is mistaken, all this loyalty and suffering can never atone for her mistake."