“Thank you! It would be a great comfort to me.”
There was a John Knox teapot on the chimney-piece, and Christine lifted it down, removed the lid, and took Neil’s letter out, and handed it to Roberta.
The woman’s invincible sense of whatever was ridiculous or inconsistent, with a person or event, was instantly roused by the appearance of John Knox. She laughed with girlish merriment. “To think of John Knox interfering in my matrimonial difficulties!” she cried, “it is too funny! The old scold! How grim and gruff he looks! If he could speak, how he would rave about the outrageous authority of women. It is refreshing to know that he had a wife that snubbed him, and didn’t believe in him, and did not honor and obey him, and——”
She had unfolded the letter as she was speaking, and now her eyes were so busy, that her tongue got no message to deliver, and this was what she read:—
My dear sister Christine,
I am still here, waiting for the information I asked you to get me, namely the address of my dear wife. I am unhappy, I may say I am miserable; and I can never settle anywhere, till I see her. If she then refuses to hear and 342 believe me, life will be over to me. But she will believe me, for I will tell her the truth, and she will see that though I was foolish, I was not criminal. The law separating these two conditions is far from being clear enough. I want to know where my wife is! She will believe me! She will trust me! You do. Mother did. Roberta has been very near and dear to me. She has been forced to abandon me. It is the injustice of my treatment that is killing me. If I could only clear myself in her sight, I could lift life again, and make the best of it. I am not half content in this place. I cannot believe the people here are representative Americans, and I dislike small towns. Traders and dwellers in small towns are generally covetous—they have a sinister arithmetic—they have no clear notions of right and wrong, and I think they are capable of every kind of malice known to man. I want to go to a big city, where big motives move men, and if you do not send me Roberta’s hiding place, I will put out for California, if I foot it every step of the way. I am stunned, but not broken.
Your loving brother,
Neil.
When she had finished this letter, she was crying. “Give it to me!” she sobbed, “it is all about me, Christine. Give it to me! Poor Neil! He has been badly used! Oh Christine, what must I do?”
“You ought to go to his side, and help him to mak’ a better life. What prevents ye?”
“Oh the shame of it! The atmosphere of the prison!”
“You promised God to tak’ him for better or 343 worse, richer or poorer. You are breaking your promise every day, and every hour, that you stay away from him.”
“You must not blame me ignorantly, Christine. My brother and I were left alone in the world, when he was ten years old, and I was eight. He at once assumed a tender and careful charge of my lonely life. I cannot tell you how good and thoughtful he was. When I left school he traveled all over Europe with me, and he guarded my financial interests as carefully as if they were his own. And I gave him a great affection, and a very sincere obedience to all his wishes and advice. At first he seemed to favor my liking for Neil, but he soon grew furiously jealous, and then all was very unpleasant. Neil complained to me. He said he did not want me to take my brother’s opinion without saying a few words in his own behalf, and so I soon began to take Neil’s side. Then day by day things grew worse and worse, and partly because I liked Neil, and partly because I was angry at Reginald, and weary of his exacting authority, I became Neil’s wife.”