“Was your first marriage perfectly legal? Have you got the marriage certificate?”
She rose, dragged out the bundle she had brought with her, and from it drew a long dirty envelope which she handed to him.
He opened it and found the certificate. It was accurate in every detail. His eye ran over the ages and names of the contracting parties—Lucy Fraser, fifteen, to Jacob Shackleton, twenty-four, at St. Louis.
Twisting the paper in his hands he sat moodily eying the fire. The second marriage was the only way he could think of by which he could lend a semblance of right to the impossible position in which his generous action had placed him. Divorce, in that remote locality and at that early day of laws, half administered and chaotic, was impossible, and even had it been easily obtained he shrank from dragging into publicity the piteous story of how the woman he loved had been sold to him.
That a marriage with Jake Shackleton’s wife was a legal offense he knew, but with one of those strange whimsies of character which mark mankind, he felt that the reading of the marriage service over Lucy and himself would in some way sanctify what could never be a lawful tie.
In a spasm of rage and disgust he held out the paper to the flames, when Lucy, with a smothered cry sprang forward and seized it. It was the first violent action into which he had ever seen her betrayed. He looked in surprise into her flushed and alarmed face.
“Why not? Why not destroy everything that could connect you with such a past?” he said, almost angrily.
She hesitated, smoothing out the paper with trembling hands. Then she said falteringly:
“I don’t know—but—but—he was her father,” indicating the sleeping baby. “I was married to him all right.”
He understood the instinct that made her wish to keep the paper as a record of her child’s legitimacy, and made no further comment.