A Woman of Yesterday

by Caroline Atwater Mason

Half an hour later, Gregory found himself in the office of Senator Ingraham, seated in a substantial office-chair by the well-appointed desk, while Mr. Ingraham, himself in evident and most unusual mental disturbance, walked up and down the room. Suddenly he wheeled, and confronted Gregory, as if with sudden, though difficult, resolution.

“Mr. Gregory,” he said, low, and with the stern, terse brevity of a man who finds himself forced to speak what he would rather leave unsaid, “for over thirty years I have carried certain facts in my personal history shut up in my own memory. Not one other being, to the best of my belief, has shared my knowledge. To-night, I cannot tell how, I do not know why, I feel that I must break silence, and before you—stranger as you are—unload my burden. A strange compulsion seems upon me to disclose the things I have hitherto lived to conceal. What there is in you or in what I have heard you say, to bring me to this point, I cannot understand; but I feel in you something which makes you alone, of all men I have ever met, the one to whom I can speaks—and must. Are you willing to hear me?”

John Gregory noted the set, hard lines in the lawyer’s face, the knotted cords in his hands, and the tone, half of defiance, half of self-abasement, with which he threw out this abrupt question. Accustomed to encounters with men in their innermost spiritual struggles, Gregory was in no way astonished or excited by this surprising beginning of their interview, and simply nodded gravely in token that Ingraham should proceed.

“I will not affront you by demanding secrecy on your part,” the latter began haughtily; “if it were possible for you to betray my confidence, it would have been impossible for me to give it to you. I understand men.”

He paused. Gregory made no remark in confirmation of this assertion, but the direct, unflinching look with which he met the appeal in the eyes of the speaker was full guarantee of good faith. There was promise of profound and sympathetic attention in Gregory’s look, there was also judicial calmness and reserve; in fine, the characteristics of the priest and the judge were singularly united in him, and it was to the perception of this fact that he owed the present interview.

“I do not know whether I am a respectable citizen or a murderer,” Ingraham now began, turning again to walk the floor, while an uncontrollable groan as of physical anguish accompanied this unexpected declaration. “Imagine, if you will, what thirty years have been inwardly with this uncertainty as food for thought, served to me by conscience, or some fiend, morning and night. If I could have forgotten for one blessed day, it has been ingeniously rendered impossible, for sin in bodily form is ever before me. You have seen my son.”

With this sentence, harsh and curt, Ingraham paused, glanced aside at Gregory, who assented, and then continued to walk and speak. His voice and manner alike showed that he was holding himself in control by the effort of all his will. Strange distorting lines appeared in his face, and there was heavy sweat on his forehead.

“I was twenty-five years old when I was married, and was alone in the world save for one brother,—Jim, we always called him,—two years younger than I. We had inherited a good name, strong physique, and some little property from our parents, and started in life shoulder to shoulder. In Burlington, where we first began business life together, we became intimately acquainted with a family in which there were two daughters. The elder, Cornelia, was very pretty and singularly attractive. Men always fell in love with her. I did, desperately. The younger sister was a commonplace, uninteresting girl, rather sentimental perhaps, not otherwise remarkable.

“I shall make this story as short as possible. I offered myself to Cornelia after long wooing, and was refused. I was bitterly wounded, angry, defiant. While I was in that state of mind, it became apparent to me that I was secretly an object of peculiar interest to the younger sister. Like many another fool, half in spite and half in heart-sickness, I sought her hand, and was at once accepted, and our marriage followed quickly. Within the year Cornelia and Jim became engaged. There was a hard, silent grudge against Jim in my heart from the day I first suspected that it was he who had stood between Cornelia and me, and their engagement increased the grudge to hate.

“We had, before this, put the whole of our inheritance into mining fields in what was then the far West, buying up a large tract of land, divided equally between us. The year after my marriage we moved West for a time, and I started out on a prospecting tour of our land; Jim to follow me when he had finished establishing a kind of business office in pioneer quarters, in a small town as near the base of our operations as was feasible. My wife remained in this town.