It had been no pleasure trip to her. She had seen the change in her husband, a change that struck deep into his very being and altered him in everything except in his love and tender care for her. “Oh, why is it? what is the matter?” she asked her self a thousand times a day. Could it be possible that he had discovered the secret which tortured her, the only secret she had ever had from him, the secret she had longed to confess to him a hundred times but had lacked courage to do it.
For she had sinned deeply against her husband, she knew. Her fear and her confusion had driven her deeper and deeper into the waters of deceit until it was impossible for her to find the words that would have brought help and comfort from the man whom she loved more than anything else in the world. In the very earliest stages of Winkler’s persecution she had lost her head completely and instead of confessing to her husband and asking for his aid and protection, she had pawned the rich jewels which had been his wedding present to get the money demanded by the blackmailer. In her ignorance she had thought that this one sum would satisfy him.
But he came again and again, demanding money which she saved from her pin money, from her household allowance, thus taking what she had intended to use to redeem her jewels. The pledge was lost, and her jewels gone forever. From now on, Mrs. Thorne lived in a terror which sapped her strength and drank her life blood drop by drop. Any hour might bring discovery, a discovery which she feared would shake her husband’s love for her. The poor weak little woman grew pale and ill. She wrote finally to her step-brother, but he could think of no way out; he wrote only that if the matter came to a scandal there would be nothing for him to do but to kill himself. This was one reason more for her silence, and Mrs. Thorne faded to a wan shadow of her former sunny self.
As she looked down from the balcony, she was like a woman suffering from a deathly illness. A new terror had come to her heart because her husband had gone away so early without telling her why or whither he had gone. When she saw him coming towards the door of the hotel, pale and drooping, and when she saw Mrs. Bernauer beside him, her heart seemed to stand still. She crept back from the window and stood in the middle of the room as Herbert Thorne and his former nurse entered.
“What has happened?” This was all she could say as she looked into the distraught face of the housekeeper, into her husband’s sad eyes.
He led her to a chair, then knelt beside her and told her all.
“Outside the door stands the man who will take me back to Vienna—and you, my dearest, you must go to your father.” He concluded his story with these words.
She bent down over him and kissed him. “‘No, I am going with you,” she said softly, strangely calm; “why should I leave you now? Is it not I who am the cause of this dreadful thing?”
And then she made her confession, much too late. And she went with him, back to the city of their home. It seemed to them both quite natural that she should do so.
When the Northern Express rolled out of Venice that afternoon, three people sat together in a compartment, the curtains of which were drawn close. They were the unhappy couple and their faithful servant. And outside in the corridor of the railway carriage, a small, slight man walked up and down—up and down. He had pressed a gold coin into the conductor’s hand, with the words: “The party in there do not wish to be disturbed; the lady is ill.”