Chapter XXXIV ALL THAT HAPPENED
Durgan felt that day to be a distinctly happy one. A youth makes many pictures of happiness for himself, and he must have but a poor outfit of hope and imagery whose pictures are realized. Yet happiness springs up beside the steps of the older wayfarer, a wild flower that he has not sown or tended. In places where his familiar burden lightens, or when gathering clouds disperse, it pushes up its bright flower-face with a positive beauty and fragrance, something much fairer and better than the mere negation of trouble, yet not so gay as mere imagined joys. Durgan, who had come to this mountain thinking to be alone, and had become so strenuously involved in the fate of his neighbors, to-day not only felt peace in the cessation of fear and gloomy forebodings which had enwrapped them all, but was lifted beyond this to participate in the joy of heavenly deliverance which transfigured Hermione Claxton. He could not think of her to-day without a strange, new, selfless pleasure which he did not analyze; and, added to this, his heart leaped up in gratitude on his own account, for surely now the wife he was bound to honor would be spared the public odium which to her vain nature would be peculiar agony. The fate of a long, living death for the man who had stifled every honorable impulse to avoid the legal punishment of death was robbed of its worst horror, because it gave him immunity from the passion of fear by which he was enslaved, and restored him to the arms of the only human love which could not be quenched by his misconduct and disgrace. Durgan knew enough to suppose that when his wife's first glamor of reverence for Claxton had passed, when, with the help of such a skilful prompter, she had succeeded on the stage of her ambition, his home with her had been no longer even peaceful. The letters 'Dolphus had stolen had convinced Durgan that she was prepared to get rid of her protégé if possible; and when he left her he was practically a homeless fugitive, the whole world his enemy. From such a fate self-destruction, or yielding to the last penalty of the law, were the only ways of escape, had not the angel of mercy intervened.
Later in the day Alden came from the room above the carriage house, the room in which Durgan had spent his first two curious nights on Deer Mountain. He only knew of the finding of the fugitive, for, on being assured of this, he had fallen asleep in sheer exhaustion.
The rain was shifting for the time, affording intervals of blithe air and mellow sunlight. Alden sat him down upon a settle in the verandah. The trailing vines and the passion-flower were glowing with the life-renewing moisture, but the gorgeous leaves and long tassels of the love-lies-bleeding had fallen, sodden with the rain.
Durgan was waiting for some instructions concerning certain invalid requisites. His cousins, the Durgan Blounts, were returning to Baltimore for the winter, and Durgan had undertaken that they should make the purchases. No sooner had Alden spoken than Miss Claxton left her writing desk, came swiftly, and sat down beside him.
"There is something that I am waiting to tell you," she said. Her voice was very gentle. "I have not made any explanation, either, to Mr. Durgan, for I wouldn't till I saw you; but he ought to know, for Mrs. Durgan's sake."
Durgan had moved, but, at her command, remained.
There was a little silence, and after she began he was quite sure she had forgotten his presence. She took Alden's passive hand in hers.
"Herbert! my father has come back to us. No, dear; do not start like that. He is still alive. That is my long secret, which I could not have kept from you for anyone's sake but his."
Alden said not a word. He sat erect, as if someone had struck him.
"Oh," she cried, with tears in her voice, "the fate that came to him that terrible morning was worse than death, and now he has been carried back to us paralyzed. Have patience with me, and I will tell you all that happened."
The little lawyer, as if suddenly moved by some electric force, was for bounding from his seat, every nerve quivering with the sting of his own mortification and the shock of surprise. It was the strength of her will that controlled him.
"I must tell you from the beginning—it is the only way. Upon the morning that that crime was committed in our house, a boy came with a note from Mr. Beardsley. It made my father very angry. He told me that Beardsley was coming on the heels of his messenger upon an impertinent errand. What he said was that Beardsley was bent upon dictating the terms of his friendship with Mrs. Durgan, whom he had only lately met.
"There was something the maids had to do that afternoon, and I sent them then in the morning, for I could not bear that anyone should see such a person in our house, or see my father so angry. My poor step-mother had not risen from bed. When Beardsley came he went upstairs to my father's sitting-room. The door was shut, but from what my father told me afterwards, I know pretty well what happened."
"Afterwards!" repeated Alden; "afterwards! Hermione?"
"Dear Herbert, do not be angry, but only listen, and you will understand how easily what seemed impossible could happen. This Mr. Beardsley had the idea that my poor father and Mrs. Durgan had fallen in love at his meetings. He was a simple, stupid man, and he thought it his duty to exhort my father and warn my step-mother. I think that, angry as he was, my father thought it best to receive his exhortation with the affection of playfulness. It was his way, you know. He had graceful, whimsical ways; he was not like other people. When he could not make this man see his own folly, or divert him from his purpose, he took down the little old pistol that was fastened on the wall as an ornament—the one that was found. I need not tell you that he did not know it was loaded; I did not know, and I dusted his things every day, for he could not bear to have a servant in the room. He tried to stop Beardsley by threatening to shoot himself in mock despair. Poor mamma, hearing loud voices, ran in.
"Up till then I am sure papa had not a serious thought, except that he was naturally angered by the folly of the man; but the pistol went off, and poor mamma was killed. Oh! can you not imagine my father's wild grief and anger against the fellow that, as he would think, had caused him to do it? But there was more than that. My father told me that Beardsley denounced him as a wilful murderer, and declared that it was only a feigned accident. Then, you see, he was the only witness, and could ruin my father's reputation. Oh, I think it was fear as much as anger, but I am sure it was frenzy, possessed my father. You know what happened. The Indian battle-ax was hanging beside the pistol, and as soon as Beardsley fell, I am sure my father lost all control of himself or any knowledge of what he was doing."
"Hermione," said Alden, "you cannot believe this story? Who has made you believe it?" He lifted her hand to his lips. "Have you believed this all these years?"
"It is true, Herbert; you will have to believe it. I will tell you my part of it. I do not think I did right, but you will see that I did not know what else to do. When I heard the noise I ran upstairs, but the door was locked. The boy that brought the note was waiting in the kitchen all this time for Beardsley to pay him. Then, in a minute, all was quiet, and I heard my father sobbing like a child. You cannot think how quickly it all happened. Then my father came to the door and whispered through, 'Hermione, are you alone? Are the servants out? Is Bertha there?' So I told him of Beardsley's messenger waiting below.
"Then he came out and called over the stairs to the boy. You know how very clever and quick he always was when he wanted to do anything. He looked the boy up and down, and then he said, 'Do you want to earn a hundred dollars?' The boy was cautious; he did not answer. My father said, 'Can you hold your tongue and help me, and I'll make a gentleman of you? It's your best chance, for a crime has been committed in this house, and if you don't do as I bid you, I'll give you up to the police and say you did it; they'll take my word for it.' And all the time, between speaking, he was sobbing. He shoved the boy into his dressing-room. Then he told me what had happened.
"He told me he would be hanged if I did not keep quite quiet. I could not believe that they were dead. I went into the room, but I couldn't stop an instant. The sight of that poor body, disfigured past all recognition, even the clothes stained beyond recognition, made me almost insensible. I saw that no doctor could be of any use.
"My father was very quick. He shaved himself, and colored his face with his paints, and put on the boy's clothes. He told me he would go to Mrs. Durgan, who would get him away. He told me to call the police at once, and tell them everything, except that I had seen him or knew anything about him. He locked the boy in a narrow cupboard that held hot-water pipes, and told me how to let him out at night. I did not think at the time it could be wrong to keep silence about my father. I did just what he told me to do.
"You know, Herbert, you said the other night that I had deceived you; but, indeed, the great deceit came of itself. I don't think even my father intended it. I could never have believed they could have mistaken that man lying there for my father. First, the police made the mistake; then, in a few hours, we heard the newsboys crying it all over the streets. Still I felt sure that when you came, and the coroner, the truth would be known. When you believed it, too, what word could I have said to you that would not have made it your duty to hunt him down? His daughter was the only person who could take the responsibility of silence. I don't say I was right to do it; I only know I could not do anything else. Even the boy, as I found afterwards, had never seen Beardsley. A servant had given him the note to bring. He naturally thought it was Beardsley who had bribed him, and escaped in his clothes. I only kept silent hour by hour.
"I thought again they would find out at the inquest; but when, at length, the poor body was buried, and those saturated, torn clothes burned, and I had found out from Mrs. Durgan that the poor wretch had no near relatives or friends to mourn him, I could do nothing but acquiesce. I had a message from father, through Mrs. Durgan, before they arrested me. She and he had decided that he must personate the dead man, and he even ventured to play the medium's part at the dark séance. He was always clever at disguises. I could not judge them. I hardly cared, then, whether I lived or died; the wickedness of it all was so dreadful. I shrank far more—and there was nothing heroic in that—from the thought of my father being arrested and punished than from danger for myself. Think what it would have been like if it had been your father!"
Seeing that Alden was profoundly distressed, she hastened to say, "If I had told you, Herbert, how painful would your position have been! And I never even told Bertha; it was father's parting request that she should not know. But I know that of late she has guessed something, for she has lived in fear up here alone. I was obliged when I was ill in Paris to tell her where she would find the truth; she guessed the rest, I fear, and it must have been father's return that she has dreaded. But now he has been brought back so helpless he can never hurt anyone again."
Alden's emotion was hardly restrained from breaking through the crust of his conventionality, and Hermione was fain to turn to a lighter aspect of the case in addressing Durgan.
"I gathered from my father's letters that Mrs. Durgan's motive in befriending him was partly kindness, and partly that he could be of use to her."
"I can understand that," said Durgan. He also felt it a relief to speak clearly on the only aspect of this sorrowful tale which did not awaken emotion. "It was the one thing in the whole world that my wife wanted—to be told how to manipulate the secret springs of a world of fashion in which she had so far moved as one in the dark. And having once taken your father in, she could not go back."
He rose as he said this and went away, wondering how much Alden would submit to the continued devotion of such a daughter to such a father, how much Hermione's appeal would reach him: "Think how you would feel if it were your father."