GRAPES AND THORNS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF YORKE."
CHAPTER VIII.
SUMMER FRIENDS.
F. Chevreuse did not allow himself a long indulgence in his own sorrows. Before half an hour had elapsed, he was stepping through the portal of the city jail, all private grief set aside and lost sight of in the errand that had brought him.
Sensitive as he was, the gloom and dampness inseparable from a prison would have chilled him, but that pity for him who was suffering from them so unjustly, as he believed, startled his heart into intenser action, and sent an antagonistic glow through his frame, as though by force of love alone he would have warmed the stones and chased away those depressing shadows.
A few swift steps along the stone corridor brought him to the cell assigned to Mr. Schöninger. Looking with eagerness, yet shrinkingly too, through the grating, while the jailer unlocked the door, he saw the prisoner standing there with folded arms and head erect, regarding him coldly and without the faintest sign of recognition. The place was not so dim but he must have seen perfectly who his visitor was; yet a man of stone could not have stood more unmoved.
The jailer was not long unlocking the door, yet, brief as the time was, it sufficed to work a change in the priest. It was with him as with the fountain which tosses its warm waters into a chilly atmosphere: the spray retains its form, but not its temperature. "I am shocked at this, Mr. Schöninger!" he exclaimed, hastening into the cell. "I will do anything to relieve you! Only tell me what to do."
The words, the gesture, the emphasis, all were as he had meant; but a something in the whole manner, which tells when the heart outleaps the word and the gesture, was lost. It was possible to think the cordiality of his address affected.
Mr. Schöninger bowed lowly, without unfolding his arms or softening the expression of his face. "I thank you for your offers of service," he said; "but they are unnecessary. I have employed counsel, and what the law can do for me will be done. Meantime, it is not for you and me to clasp hands."
His look conveyed not only pride, but disdain. He seemed less the accused than the accuser.
"Whose hand, then, will you clasp?" the priest exclaimed, impatient at what seemed to him an unreasonable scruple. "You are a stranger here, and can be sure of no one. I am the very person whose good-will will be most valuable to you."
It was only the embarrassment resulting from an unexpected rebuff which could have made F. Chevreuse appeal to the motive of self-interest. To tell a proud and bitter, perhaps a guilty, man that he stands in his own light, is only to make him blacken yet more his immovable shadow. But as a man sometimes relaxes the severity of his manner at the same time that he increases the firmness of his resolution, Mr. Schöninger unbent so far as to offer his visitor a seat.
"Please excuse the roughness," he said, indicating a rude bench. "The furniture is not of my choosing." And seated himself on the bed, there being no other place.
F. Chevreuse remained standing. The mocking courtesy was more chilling than coldness.
"I followed an impulse of kindness in coming to you," he said, looking down to hide how much he was hurt. "I did not stop to ask myself what was conventional, or wise, or politic. My heart prompted me to fly to the rescue, and I took no other counsel."
There was no reply. Mr. Schöninger's eyes were fixed with an intent and searching gaze on the priest, and a faint color began to creep up over his cold face. As F. Chevreuse raised his eyes and met that gaze, the faint color deepened to a sudden red; for the priest's glance was dimmed by tears of wounded feeling he had striven to hide.
"You distrust me!" he said reproachfully; "and I do not deserve it. I would serve you, if I could. I would be your friend, if you would let me."
It was Mr. Schöninger's turn to drop his eyes. To look in that face unmoved was impossible. The reproach, the pain, the tenderness of it had shot like an arrow through his heart, steeled as it was. But his habit of self-control was proof against surprise. After the blush had left his face, there was no sign visible of the struggle that was going on within. He seemed to be merely considering a question. After a moment, he looked up.
"You seem to think me innocent of this charge?" he remarked calmly.
F. Chevreuse was silent with astonishment.
"You probably do think so," Mr. Schöninger went on, in the same tone. "But whatever your opinion may be, you do not know. Crimes are committed from various motives and under various circumstances. Some are almost accidental. Neither is crime committed by the low and rude alone, nor by the bad alone. There is nothing in the character or circumstances of any man which would render it impossible that he should ever be guilty of a crime. I repeat, then, that you cannot be sure of my innocence; and, till it is proved, there can be no intercourse between us. I am willing to give you credit for a charitable impulse; but I do not want charity. I want justice!" His eyes flashed out, and his face began to redden again. Mr. Schöninger had not become cool by spending a night in jail.
F. Chevreuse did not stir, though he was in fact dismissed. Mr. Schöninger, seeing that his visitor did not sit, rose, and stood waiting to bow him out.
"I cannot go away and leave you so, in such a place!" the priest exclaimed after a moment, during which he seemed to have made an inner effort to go. "It is monstrous! Cannot you see that it is so? Why, last night we were like friends; and I insist that there is no reason why we should not be friends to-day."
"What! Even if I should be guilty?" asked the prisoner in a low voice.
F. Chevreuse made a gesture of impatience, and was about to utter a still more impatient protest, when he met a look so cold, yet so thrilling with a significance he could not interpret, that he drew back involuntarily.
The Jew's face darkened. "Your convictions are, apparently, not so deep as you had supposed, sir," he said freezingly. "I am afraid you would find yourself disappointed as to the extent of confidence you would be able to repose in me. The sober second thought is best. Our paths are separate."
For the first time something like anger showed momentarily in the priest's face, and gave a certain sternness to the first words he spoke; but it was over in an instant. "You are quite right, sir!" he said. "It is impossible for me to go with you, unless I am met with entire frankness and confidence. If you choose that our paths shall be separate, I will not force myself on you; but we need not be antagonistic. Farewell!"
He turned and groped in the door-way for the passage-step, his own shadow being added to those which already wrapped the place in an obscurity almost like night. He saw the jailer in the long corridor before him, waiting to lock the door, and he had just found where to set his foot, when he felt a warm touch on his hand that still held by the stone door-way inside the cell. The touch was slight, but it was a caress, either a kiss or the quick pressure of a soft palm. He had hardly time to be fully aware of it before he stood in the corridor, and the jailer was locking the door behind him.
He stopped, and looked through the grating, but could not see the prisoner. Only a narrow line of black, like the sleeve of a coat, seemed to show that Mr. Schöninger had thrown himself on to his bed. The priest put his face close to the bars, and whispered, "God bless you!"
The line of black moved quickly with a start, but there was no reply.
Pale and dispirited, F. Chevreuse left the prison, and took his way slowly to Mrs. Gerald's. He would rather not have gone then, but he had promised. He wondered a little within himself, indeed, why he felt such reluctance to see persons who had always been faithful and sympathizing friends to him, and why he would rather, were the choice left to him, have gone to Mrs. Ferrier, or, still better, to Annette.
As soon as the true reason occurred to him, he put it aside, and refused to think on the subject.
Mrs. Gerald was evidently on the watch for him; for as soon as he approached the house, she came to the door to meet him. The color was wavering in her face, her blue eyes were suffused with tears, and looked the sympathy her lips did not speak. But the sympathy was all for him—for the terrible wound torn open again, for the new wound added, perhaps, of a misplaced confidence. No look seemed to glance past him and inquire for the one he had left behind.
Honora sat by a fire in the sitting-room, leaning close to the blaze, with a shawl drawn about her shoulders, and seemed to shiver even then. There was a frosty paleness in her face as she rose to meet their visitor, as though the blood had all flowed back to her heart, and stopped there, and the hand she gave him was cold. But an eager, questioning glance slipped from her eyes, swift and shrinking, that went beyond him and asked for news of the prisoner.
"Well," said F. Chevreuse, glancing from one to the other, "there is nothing to tell."
Honora sank into her chair again, and waited mutely, looking into the fire.
"Nothing of any consequence, that is," he continued, folding his hands together on the back of a chair, and looking down at them. "I went to the jail; but Mr. Schöninger has so quixotic a sense of propriety that he will not allow me to do anything for him. It was in vain for me to urge the matter; he absolutely sent me away."
"He was quite right in that," Mrs. Gerald remarked coldly.
Honora's eyes were again eagerly searching the priest's face, but Mrs. Gerald was in turn looking away from him.
"And why was he right, madam?" demanded F. Chevreuse.
She did not look up to answer, and her expression was of that stubborn reserve which some good people assume when they cannot say anything friendly, and are determined not to be uncharitable. "I may be wrong," she said, carefully choosing her words, "but it does not seem to me that you are the person of whom he should take advice now. Pardon me, F. Chevreuse! I do not mean to criticise you nor dictate to you, of course. But I am glad that you are to have nothing to do with this. You should be spared the pain."
He was too sore-hearted to argue the point; and he knew, moreover, that argument would be thrown away. He was well aware that the most of his friends thought his generosity sometimes exaggerated, and were more likely to check than to encourage him. When he went out of the beaten track, he had never found sympathy anywhere but with the one whose loss he felt more and more every day, unless it might be with Annette Ferrier and her mother.
"It seems that I am not to have anything to do with it," he said; "though I fail to see why I should not. Let that pass, however. I pity the poor fellow from my heart, though his detention will be a short one, since the trial, they tell me, is to come on immediately. It is a miserable condition, being shut up in that place, and loaded with such an outrageous accusation. I do not wonder it made him bitter and distrustful of me."
Mrs. Gerald lifted her eyes quickly, and gave F. Chevreuse a glance that recalled to his mind that look from which he had shrunk in the prison. He could not understand it, but it made him shiver. Not that it expressed any suspicion or accusation; it seemed only to ask searchingly if there were no suspicion in his own mind.
"Well, good-by!" he said hastily. "Let us all beware of uncharitableness in thought, word, and deed."
When he had reached the street-door he heard Miss Pembroke's step following him.
"You have really nothing to tell me?" she asked, trembling as she held her shawl about her. "Recollect that I and this man have spoken together as friends. Am I still to believe in him?"
"Oh! fie, Honora Pembroke!" the priest exclaimed sorrowfully. "Is that the kind of friendship you give, that you doubt a person at the first wild charge made against him?"
"It is not so much that I doubt, father," she said faintly. "But nothing so terrible has ever come near me before, and it is confounding. I want to be reassured."
"Cast all doubt out of your mind, then," he said emphatically. "And if you should send some little message to Mr. Schöninger by a proper messenger, saying that you hope he will soon be delivered from his trouble, it would be a kind and Christian act."
She drew back a little, and made no reply.
"You are not willing to do it?" he asked.
"I would rather not, father," she answered deprecatingly. "I really hope and pray that he may soon be delivered, and I am willing he should know it—he must be sure of it, if he gives the subject a thought—but I would not like to send him a message. There will be men to go and speak kindly to him; he has many friends. If Lawrence were here, he would go. I would not like to take any step in the matter."
F. Chevreuse sighed. "You must be guided by your own feeling and sense of right in this," he said. "I did not mean to advise, but only to suggest."
He knew, as he went away, that she lingered in the door, looking after him in painful uncertainty, and he almost expected to hear himself called back and begged to be her messenger. But no call came; and he went away from his second visit, as from the first, chilled and disappointed.
For one moment the thought which he had thrust aside on coming started out again, and made itself felt. It seemed to him, in that brief glance at it, that there is nothing on earth which can be more cruel than a strict and scrupulous respectability. Then instantly he began to make excuses, and to find reasons why people, women especially, should be less demonstrative than he might have wished.
"What! you will not recognize me?" said a voice at his elbow.
It was a voice to arrest attention—deep, musical, and penetrating; and the speaker was not one to be passed with only a glance. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered, and had an exceedingly handsome face, with brilliant blue eyes, and wavy, dark hair just beginning to be threaded with white. This was F. O'Donovan, whose parish, a small one, lay two miles, or more, from that of F. Chevreuse. Besides these two, there was no other priest resident within a radius of forty miles.
"Brother!" exclaimed F. Chevreuse, and grasped the hand the other extended to him, and for a moment seemed to be on the point of yielding to an emotion natural to one who, having long borne without human help his own burdens and the burdens of others, sees at length a friend on whom he can lean in turn, and to whom he can venture to confess his human weakness. "I thought you were at home, swathed in flannels," he added, recovering himself.
F. O'Donovan shrugged his shoulders. He had been a good deal in France, and had, moreover, as all graceful and vivacious persons have, a natural inclination to use a good deal of gesture. "Rheumatism, my friend, is not invincible. Yesterday I was helpless; this morning at seven o'clock I was helpless. At ten minutes past seven I heard news which made me wish to see you; and here I am—sound, too. It was only to say, Get thee behind me, Satan! and I could walk as well as you. From which I conclude that my rheumatism, if it had existence outside my own imagination, was Satan in disguise."
F. Chevreuse pressed the arm he had taken, and they walked on together a little way in silence. The news his brother priest had heard need not be spoken of. His silent sympathy and companionship were enough.
"Has it ever occurred to you that the saints must have been considered in their day rather disreputable people?" the elder priest asked presently. "Leaving violent persecution out of the question, what a raising of eyebrows, and shrugging of shoulders, and how many indulgent smiles, and looks of mild surprise, and cold surprise, and gentle dismay, and polite disapprobation, and all that they must have occasioned!"
"By which I understand," remarked the other, "that somebody has refused to fly in the face of society at your request."
"Taken with the usual allowance required by your interpretations of me, that is true," F. Chevreuse admitted.
His friend smiled. There was always this little pretence of feud between them, and each admired the other heartily, though the Frenchman was unconventional to a fault, and the Irishman scrupulously polished. A fastidious taste and a cautious self-control, learned in a large and varied experience of life, stood in constant ward over F. O'Donovan's warm heart and high spirit. F. Chevreuse, in his trustful ardor, was constantly bruising himself on the rocks; his friend looked out for and steered clear of them, yet not with a selfish nor ungenerous caution.
"Brother Chevreuse," he said in a voice to which he could impart an almost irresistible persuasiveness, "you are older and wiser than I am, and I only remind you of what you know when I say that conventionality is not to be reprobated. It is on the side of law and order. It is the friend of propriety and decency. It is the rule, to which, indeed, exceptions are allowed, but not too readily. You speak of the saints as though they were all persons who have lived before the world peculiar and exceptional lives. Of course, even while I speak, you remember that the church does not pretend to have canonized all her holy children, and that she has appointed a day to commemorate those who have won the heavenly crown without drawing upon themselves the attention of mankind. I do not believe that any breath of slander or of injurious criticism ever touched Our Blessed Lady. She used every care to preserve herself from them. Why should not women be as careful now, even at the risk of seeming to be selfishly cautious? Is the high reputation which they have labored to acquire to be lightly perilled, even for an apparently good end? Besides, in performing that one good act, they may, by drawing criticism on themselves, have lost the power to perform another effectually. You defend an accused person, never having done so before, and you may save him. Do it a second time, and people will say, 'Oh! he is always defending criminals'; and your power is gone."
"It is hard to see a person wrongly accused, and not protest against the wrong," F. Chevreuse said gravely.
"It is more than hard, it is wicked," the other replied with earnestness. "But first be sure that the person is innocent; and then, having ascertained that, try to recollect, my dear friend, that you alone are not to right all the wrongs of earth. Some must be endured, some must be rectified by others than you. And, after all, I am inclined to believe that, as a rule, no innocent person falls into serious difficulty without having been faulty in some way, as regards prudence, at least. Now, how is such a person to learn wisdom by experience, if there is always somebody at his elbow to save him from the consequences of his own act. It is not pleasant to be obliged to check a generous impulse in ourselves or in others; and it is not pleasant, when we are in trouble, to be left to fight our way out of it alone. But if we are always performing works of supererogation, we may unfit ourselves for performing duties. And as to finding our track, unassisted, through difficult ways, and learning by sharp experience how to avoid them, it develops our inward resources, and is good for us, though bitter."
The last words were delivered with an incisive emphasis so delicate as to be observable only in one who seldom spoke with emphasis, and it touched the listener deeply. F. O'Donovan never complained, and he had never made any special revelations to his friend; but one who knew his life could not doubt that he had learned to take his very sleep in armor. He had risen from poverty and obscurity, as the sparks rise; had borne the jealousy of those whom he left behind, and of those he had eclipsed in his higher estate; had been obliged to control in himself a haughty spirit and a tender heart; yet had never made a misstep of any consequence, nor given his most jealous detractor an angry word to remember.
His place was in a metropolitan church; but, at his own request, he had been sent for a time to a quiet country parish, that he might have leisure to complete a literary work for which city life and the demands of a host of admirers were too distracting.
He had followed F. Chevreuse from his own house to the prison, and from the prison to Mrs. Gerald's, and he understood perfectly what he would wish to do and where he had been disappointed. Honora had, indeed, told him, half weeping, of the request she had refused, and had proposed to make him the bearer of her retraction.
"To think I should have set up my sense of right against his!" she exclaimed. "To think that I should have refused him anything!"
And yet, though she was sincere in her regret, she was greatly relieved when F. O'Donovan declined to carry her message, assuring her that F. Chevreuse would doubtless, on second thought, approve of her refusal. To have sent a direct message to a man who stood before the world charged with a horrible crime, and, perhaps, to have received a message in return from him—to have placed herself thus in communication with one of the most darkly accused inmates of that jail which she had passed frequently during her whole life without ever dreaming of crossing the threshold, even for a work of mercy—the very possibility plunged Miss Pembroke into confusion and distress. The regions of crime were as far removed from her experience as the regions that lie outside of human life; and, of herself, she would as soon have thought of following any one to purgatory as to prison.
That scrupulous correctness and propriety which we admire in these fair women, whose whole lives are passed in the delicately screened cloisters of the world, shows sometimes a reverse not so admirable. They are seldom the friends in need; and when a fearless heroism is wanted, they do not come forward. They draw back instinctively those garments they have been at pains to preserve so white from contact with the blood-stained, dusty One who goes staggering by with the thorns on his head and the cross on his shoulders. A look of pity and horror may follow him from the safe place where they stand; but it is not they who pierce their way through the rabble, with Veronica, to take the imprint of his misery on to their stainlessness, nor they who weep around his tomb through dews and darkness, careless of the world in their unspeakable sorrow, and floating above the world in the unspeakable ecstasy to which that sorrow gives place. No, the charity of the human angel is limited. Only the angels of God, and those generous souls whose anguish of pity for the suffering is a constantly purifying fire, can go down into the darker paths of life and receive no stain.
"I am glad F. O'Donovan came," Mrs. Gerald remarked when their second visitor left them. "I feel better for being reassured by him. Of course, we all know that we cannot throw ourselves away for everybody, as dear F. Chevreuse's impulse is; yet he is so good, so much better than any one else, one feels almost guilty in not following him every step he wishes. His utter unselfishness and generosity are very disturbing to one sometimes; for we must think of ourselves."
"It is well for the world that there are those who see no such necessity," Miss Pembroke replied briefly.
Her companion said nothing more for a moment. She had been conscious that Honora was not satisfied, but had preferred to take no notice of it, and to quiet her without seeming aware that she needed quieting.
"Poor Mr. Schöninger!" she said presently. "I pity him with all my heart. It is, of course, impossible to believe that this arrest is anything but a mistake which will soon be corrected. Still, the affair must be very painful to him. How indignant Lawrence will be! I wish he might hear nothing of it till he comes home, for I really think he would come sooner if he knew what has happened. He thought a good deal of Mr. Schöninger."
"Yes, it must soon be corrected," repeated Honora, passing over the rest. "I cannot imagine on what grounds the arrest was made; but some are ready to believe of a stranger what they would never listen to if said of one they knew. One might parody that proverb about the absent, and say that the foreigner is always wrong. Only imagine what it must be, Mrs. Gerald"—Honora's brown eyes dilated with a sort of terror,—"imagine what it must be to find one's self in trouble and disgrace alone in a foreign land. No person has any special interest in the stranger; no one knows him well enough to defend him; his reputation is a bubble that the first breath may break; and if he is wrong, no one understands what excuses may be made for him. Fancy Lawrence alone in some European country, and arrested for a great crime."
Mrs. Gerald had listened at first with sympathy; but at the name of Lawrence her face changed.
"My dear Honora," she said with decision, "I cannot possibly imagine my son, no matter how far away, nor how friendless he might be—I cannot imagine him being arrested on a charge of robbery and murder! It is too great a flight of fancy, and too unjust. But that does not prevent my pitying Mr. Schöninger."
Mrs. Gerald would not have shown such asperity, probably, had her son never given people anything to forgive in him. Tremblingly alive to his faults, she gladly seized on any charge which it was possible to cast indignantly aside.
Honora perceived too well her feelings and the mistake that she herself had made to be in the least annoyed at the reply. It may be that she understood better than ever before what might be the pain of one whose affections are engaged by an object which has not her entire approval. Not that she loved Mr. Schöninger, or for a moment fancied that she did; it was only that he had come near enough to excite her imagination on the subject of love.
"Fortunately," she said, after a thoughtful pause, "the people of Crichton are liberal."
It was such an opinion as might have been expected from her character and experience. Life had shown her but little of those deeper causes which underlie so much of the apparent inconsistency of mankind. She had not learned to distinguish between that firm liberality which is founded on principle, and is but another name for justice, and its unstable namesake, which floats on the surface of a soul that has no convictions. The former can be relied on; the latter may at any time give place to a violent bigotry. It has an immense vanity beneath, and fiercely resents on others its own mistakes.
The gradations of the change might have been precisely calculated beforehand. At first, an astonishment which was unanimous; followed, after the natural pause, by individual voices in various tones, the loud ones harmless, the whispering ones poisonous. Crichton was a city where there could be but one sensation at a time. Whatever of moment happened there, everybody knew it and everybody talked about it. The loud voices grew lower, the whispers increased. We have heard orchestra music like that, where, after the first crash and pause, the instruments start their several ways, and one scarcely hears the whisper of violins that runs through the heavy brass, till presently that whisper becomes an audible hiss, then a sharp cry, and finally its shrieks overtop trumpet and organ.
People could not imagine on what grounds Mr. Schöninger had been accused, but considered it a matter of course that there must have been some proof against him; and they immediately set themselves to recollecting everything they had observed in him, to magnifying every peculiarity and perverting every circumstance connected with his life. Some had always said that strangers whom nobody knew anything about were received altogether too readily in Crichton. It was only necessary that a man should be good-looking, or clever, or have a romantic appearance, or be enveloped in a mystery, for him to be made the hero of the hour. And here the men bethought themselves, like true sons of Adam, to lay the blame on the women. Another class, made up of both Catholics and Protestants, reminded the public that they had from the first protested against Christians mingling in friendly intercourse with Jews. It was a treason against their Lord to do so, these Christians said, and he had shown his displeasure by allowing this wolf, whom they had admitted into the fold, to destroy one of the chosen ones. Others there were, microscopic critics, who had always found something peculiarly sinister in certain expressions of the Jew's face, and who recollected perfectly having shivered with fear when they had encountered these peculiar glances.
The sound grew up and gathered, and at the end of a fortnight public opinion in Crichton had half condemned the man without having heard a word of testimony against him.
Doubtless his own scornful silence had not predisposed any one in his favor; and, besides, he was reported to have spoken slightingly of an institution which it is not safe to attack. Rumor accused him of having said that a jury hinder more than they help the cause of justice; and that if public sentiment is not high enough to educate and elect a proper judge, it is folly to call in from the street to his aid twelve men who are probably still more incompetent, and certainly less responsible.
The judges may have been not ill-pleased at this; but few others heard the story without indignation.
The newspapers also soon became either cold or unfriendly; for though they had all expressed the most courteous surprise and regret at his arrest, he had not allowed one of their reporters so much as a glimpse of him.
One after another the friendly voices grew faint or fell into silence, till only three or four were left. F. Chevreuse had written Mr. Schöninger a line, "Whenever you want me, I shall be ready to come," and had refrained from all other approach. But he did not cease to insist on his belief in the prisoner's innocence. Mrs. Ferrier, also, was loud and warm in her championship. She visited Mr. Schöninger in prison, and stood at the grate, the jailer by her side, with tears running down her cheeks, while she poured forth her incoherent but most sincere indignation and grief; and she scraped the skin from her fat hand pushing it through the bars to take that of the prisoner.
She also made arrangements for a larger and lighter cell to be given him, and had begun to furnish it most luxuriously, when he found out what she was doing, and absolutely refused to move.
"My dear Mrs. Ferrier," he said, "it is not the bare stones and the hard bench that makes the place intolerable; and I will not consent to any change. I should be no more at ease locked up in a palace. Let me remain as I am while I stay here."
"But look at that bed!" she cried; and the diamond glittering on the indignant finger she pointed through the bars was outshone by the tear that welled up and hung on her eyelashes. "The idea of a man like you sleeping on that sack of straw with a gray blanket over it! It's a sin and a shame!"
"But, my friend, it is good enough for a criminal," he answered, with something like a faint smile on his face.
"A criminal!" And we hope the reader will pardon the next two words uttered by this dear, good soul in the heat of her generous trust and pity. She said, "Shut up!"
"I know what nonsense you talked to F. Chevreuse," she went on; "but I won't listen to it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for driving that man away. You can't serve me so. I shall come here, and I shall take up for you; and—now, Mr. Schöninger, don't be silly, but let me fix up that other room for you. The sun shines into it all the afternoon; and I've got a nice carpet on the floor, and two arm-chairs, and some wax candles, and a red curtain to draw over the grating, and I'll make it as comfortable as if my own son was going to be in it. Do give your consent, now!"
Still he was inflexible, though he softened his refusal with every expression of gratitude. "There are reasons why it would be very painful and embarrassing for me to consent," he said; "and since your wish is to give me pleasure, I am sure you will not urge this when I tell you that I should be more uncomfortable there than here. Your kindness does me good; but I cannot receive your bounty."
Mrs. Ferrier was not to be so thwarted, however. She had to relinquish her project of furnishing a room for him, but she made amends to herself by supplying his table extravagantly. It was in vain for him to protest. The waiter gravely assured him that the dishes were sent in from the prison kitchen; the jailer as gravely added that his wife overlooked that part of the establishment, and he knew nothing about it; and Mrs. Ferrier, when the prisoner questioned her, declared, with an air of the utmost innocence, that she did not send in his food, and did not know what he had. The truth was that she had ordered the keeper of a restaurant near by to send Mr. Schöninger the best that he could supply; and she flattered herself that the waiter could with truth obey her order to say that the dishes came from the jail kitchen. "You're not obliged to tell him that they come in at one door of the kitchen and out at another," she said.
Flowers lined the cell, fruit arrived there in profusion, and illustrated papers and books, the text of which betrayed the simple taste that had selected them, piled the one table and filled the window-ledges—all sent anonymously. Mr. Schöninger found himself obliged to capitulate to this persistent and most transparent incognita.
In a few weeks another friend, quite as decided, though less demonstrative, was added. Lawrence Gerald, returning with his wife to Crichton, went immediately to see Mr. Schöninger and offer any service in his power to render him.
"It is folly to waste breath in abusing the detectives or whoever has made this miserable blunder," he said calmly. "Of course, nobody is safe from suspicion. I'm rather surprised they hadn't hit upon me, for I was hard up at that time. The point is, however, can I do anything for you? You will be out of this soon, of course; but, in the meantime, I should be very glad if I can serve you in any way."
Mr. Schöninger assured his visitor that he needed no services; but his manner of declining the assistance offered him was far more natural and cheerful than it had been when F. Chevreuse or Mrs. Ferrier came. Lawrence Gerald's friendship was, indeed, of more value to him in this matter than theirs could have been; for as Lawrence was a man of the world, and not too likely to have much faith in any one, men of the world would respect his opinion, white they might laugh at the championship of a woman and look upon the ideal charity of a priest as a feeling which they could not be expected to sympathize with nor be influenced by.
This friendly act of Lawrence's greatly pleased his mother-in-law; and, since Annette looked quite contented and happy, she was still more disposed to be complacent toward the young man.
"I wouldn't have believed he thought so much of Annette," she said confidentially to F. Chevreuse. "But he follows her about like her shadow. It's all the time, 'Ask Annette,' or, 'What does Annette say?' or, 'How will Annette like it?' and he will hardly go down-town unless she goes with him. I only hope it may last," sighed the mother, fearful of being too sanguine.
It was quite true that Lawrence Gerald showed far more affection for his wife after than he ever had before their marriage, and Mrs. Ferrier scarcely exaggerated in saying that he followed her about like her shadow. He perceived more and more every day how strong and reliable she was, and how full of resources for every emergency. Besides, he had a cause for gratitude toward her of which her mother was not aware. During that time when they had been alone, undisturbed by discordant interruptions, undisturbed also by any excessive happiness in each other's society, she had perceived that something more than indifference to herself preyed upon his spirits, and had at length succeeded in drawing from him a confession of his difficulties. He owned that the story her mother had heard of his debts was true, and that he had been able to silence his persecutors only for a short time. On the very day of his marriage one of them had demanded payment, and a second letter had followed him to their bridal retreat.
"My dear Lawrence, why did you not tell me at once?" his wife interrupted as soon as she caught the purport of his stammering explanation. "It was not treating me with confidence; and surely I deserve your confidence."
"It isn't pleasant for a man to own that he has been a fool, and a liar besides," he replied bitterly. "You know I denied it to your mother. I couldn't very well tell her that it was none of her business, though I wanted to."
"It isn't pleasant for any one to own that he has failed to live quite up to his own idea of what is right," she said quickly. "I often blush at the recollection of some mistake or folly in my life. But where one understands you, Lawrence, and is bound to you for life, for better or for worse, you should not be too reserved. All that I have is yours. My first wish is to spare you pain, and I could have no greater pleasure than to have you confide in me. Do not be afraid of hearing any lectures or of seeing me assume the right to criticise you. I only ask to help you when I can."
This had been said with a haste that gave him no time to interpose or reply; and before the last words were well spoken she had left his side, and was opening a little writing-desk in another part of the room. Her husband leaned on the window-ledge and looked out, appearing to regard intently the mist that hung over the unseen cataract before him, and to listen to the soft thunder of its fall; but the color of his face, burning with a mortification inseparable from such an avowal as he had made, and the faint lines of a frown that seemed to be graven between his brows, showed that his mind was far from being occupied with the beauties of nature. The only thought Niagara suggested to him at that moment escaped his lips in a whisper as he leaned out into the air: "If my foot had but slipped a little further to-day!"
Annette came back and leaned out beside him. "How soft and sunny the air is for September!" she said. "It is more like June."
He felt her small hand slip under his arm, and push a roll of paper into his breast-pocket while she spoke.
"Do you not think, husband," she went on, "that we might like to go to Montreal instead of South? It would be pleasanter to go to Washington during the season."
And that was all that was said about the matter, except that, the day after their return to Crichton, Lawrence told his wife that the debt was paid.
"Oh! yes," she said lightly, as if such a debt were quite a matter of course. "I'm glad that is off your mind." And would have changed the subject.
But he, looking at her very gravely, knew well that the lightness was assumed to spare him, and that the affair was only less painful to her than to himself.
They were in their own sitting-room, and Annette was filling a vase with late flowers that she had just brought in from the garden, while he sat near the table by which she stood. He stretched his hand and drew her to him, holding her slender fingers that held a cluster of heart's-ease she had just taken from the basket.
"Let me speak of it once more, Ninon," he said. "You did not exact any promise from me, dear; but I have one to make you. If my word or my will are good for anything, I will never again play a game for pleasure even, still less for money. I have no temptation to now; and if I had, the recollection of what play has cost me would be enough to save me from yielding."
His face and voice said more than the words, and the regret, the shame, and the gratitude they expressed were almost more than she could bear. It hurt her cruelly to see him whom she had exalted as an idol so humbled and sorrowful before her. He looked weary; she had thought that for some time; and though the outlines of his beautiful face were too delicate to show readily a loss of flesh, she could see that he had grown perceptibly thinner.
"I was sure of you, without needing any promise," she said, and tried to smile on him, but with tremulous lips. "And now, do not let it trouble your mind any longer. I'm going to give you a charm." She smiled brightly this time, for he had kissed her hand. "With this magical flower I bar all unrest from you, and assure you peace for the future."
She fastened the cluster of heart's-ease in his button-hole, then returned to her flowers.
Her husband could not but remember the time when a tender word or act of his would bring the blush to her face and set her in a tremor of delight. He would sometimes have been a little more demonstrative and affectionate, if the effect had not been so annoyingly great on her. But now, without the slightest appearance of coldness or anger, in simple unconsciousness, it seemed, of having changed her manner, she was altogether changed. She received him kindly, there was no sign of an estranged heart, but she only received; she did not invite, nor follow, nor linger about him. Quite naturally and calmly she attended to whatever employment she might have in hand when he was present; and though she undeniably liked to have him near her, it was possible for her to forget his presence for a moment. Looking at her now, as she began quietly arranging her flowers again, the thought glimmered dimly in his mind that Honora Pembroke herself could not have behaved with a sweeter or more dignified tranquillity. But the moment of this consciousness was brief. Honora's image had too long been enthroned by him as queen in all things womanly to be disturbed by this slight figure with her glow-worm lamp.
Still, the development of his wife's character made its impression on him; and, half needing her, and half curious about her, he felt himself constantly attracted to her society.
They passed a good deal of time alone together, sometimes walking or driving in the pleasant autumn days, sometimes shut up in their own room, where Annette read, sang to, and otherwise amused her husband. He was going into business; but the two or three months of necessary preparation and delay were to him very much leisure time, and hung rather heavily on his hands.
"I shall be glad to get to work," he said to her. "Idleness is tolerable only in a pleasant atmosphere; and the atmosphere of Crichton is anything but pleasant now. Sometimes I've half a mind to run away till this ridiculous trial is over and people can talk of something else."
"The same thought has occurred to me," his wife replied. "I am growing nervous and low-spirited with these horrible images constantly before my mind. I have begged mamma not to mention the subject again at the table, nor anywhere else without necessity. Some people—I don't mean mamma, of course—but some people seem to enjoy tragedies, and to be quite angry if one doesn't put the most terrible construction on every circumstance. I have no patience with them."
She looked, indeed, quite pale and irritated. Like all persons of a lively imagination, she was nearly as much affected by the description of a scene as she would have been on witnessing it; and the frequent repetitions and amplifications with which others of duller natures had found it necessary to revive their own impressions had been both painful and annoying to her. Besides, she had a source of disquiet which she confided to no one, not even to F. Chevreuse, since she never alluded to his mother's death when in conversation with him. While wondering, in spite of herself, what proof sufficient to justify an indictment could have been found against Mr. Schöninger, she had recollected the shawl he left in her garden the night Mother Chevreuse was killed. It did not seem an important circumstance; yet it constantly recurred to her in connection with other points not so trivial. She did not for a moment believe him guilty; but her imagination, seizing on this one fact, held it up suggestively, so that it cast on her mind various and troublesome shadows that were out of all proportion to itself. Why had he appeared startled when she mentioned the shawl to him? And could it be possible he was sincere in saying that he came for it in the morning, when she had plainly seen some one remove it at night? She combated these disagreeable thoughts with all her strength, and sought to atone to Mr. Schöninger for the wrong she believed they did him by entering heartily into all her mother's plans for his comfort; but she could not banish them so entirely but they tormented her into wishing to fly to some place where she might at least hope to forget the whole subject.
"If every one were like Mrs. Gerald and Honora," she said to her mother, "how much smoother and deeper life would be! I am sure they think of dear Mother Chevreuse very often, and always with bleeding hearts; yet they never speak of her, except, in a pleasant way, to recall some saying or some kind act of hers; and one would not know, from what they say, that she had not been assumed bodily into heaven, or, at least, died tranquilly and beautifully of old age. I have no sympathy, mamma, with these noisy people who come here wringing their hands and uttering maledictions on Mr. Schöninger."
Mrs. Ferrier felt a little touched at that part of the speech which referred to the wringing of hands, for that was her most frequent manner of expressing distress of mind, and she was not sure that her daughter did not mean to give her an indirect reproof or warning. Her reply, therefore, was a dissenting one; and the comparison she used, though not elegant, was somewhat strong.
"It's all the same difference as there is between a wild horse and a horse that's broke," she said. "And you can't deny that the creature loses half its spirit before it bears the bit and the rein. And so I believe that your fine, quiet people kill some of the life out of their grief when they teach it to be so polite, and that they forget the friend they have lost while they are thinking how they shall behave themselves and cry in a genteel manner. When I die, Annette, may the Lord give me just such mourners as Mother Chevreuse has in those poor people!"
"Oh! don't, mamma!" the daughter said coaxingly; for Mrs. Ferrier had ended by bursting into tears. "I didn't mean to vex you, only I am nervous and distressed by all this excitement. There! don't cry any more, and I will own that you are at least half right."
"Not but that they do provoke me when they talk about Mr. Schöninger," Mrs. Ferrier admitted, wiping her eyes. "But then, the poor things! it's a relief to their sorrow to be mad with somebody about it."
It was undeniable that whatever relief could be found in lamentation for their dear lost friend, and in invoking retribution on her destroyer, very few hesitated to avail themselves of. Besides what the law could do, it needed all the influence that F. Chevreuse had, both with his own flock and with non-Catholics, to prevent the people who were constantly gathering outside the jail from throwing missiles into Mr. Schöninger's cell.
"How strong is accusation!" he exclaimed. "People appear to think that man condemned already, though he is sure to be triumphantly acquitted. It is astonishing how entirely a grave charge, no matter how unproved, removes those we have loved and respected beyond the pale of our sympathy. It is as though we had never heard of innocence being accused, and believed it impossible that we could ever be calumniated ourselves."
He was speaking to Mr. Sales, the editor of The Aurora, who received his remarks rather uneasily. The Aurora had of late been interesting itself very much in the history of the Jews, both ancient and modern, the items it scattered through its columns with apparent carelessness not being always calculated to inspire the reader with an increased affection for that ancient race; and "Fleur de Lis" had every week, from her corner on the first page, bewailed in facile and dolorous lines the sorrows and sufferings of that Mother and Son to whom, in the prose of everyday life, she was far from conspicuous for devotion.
"I have observed, sir," Mr. Sales said, feeling obliged to say something, "that people who have the reputation of being the most correct and irreproachable are often the most unmerciful toward wrong-doers. It gives one an unpleasant impression of religion."
"Not justly," the priest replied. "What you say of some good people is quite true—they are moral skeletons since, after all, good principles are only the vertebræ of a character. But there are many charitable Christians in the world. I find fault with their imaginations chiefly; they cannot fancy themselves accused without being guilty."
And thus, in the midst of an increasing excitement, Mr. Schöninger's trial came on.