Colonel Egbert Crawford tore open the note, walking towards the upper or eastern end of the piazza as he did so. His back was towards the two on the other end, and perhaps it was well that he should have been so positioned at that moment. Naturally, he glanced first at the bottom, and saw a name which he immediately recognized as that of one who had been in the way sometimes at the Crawfords. He had never liked her, or held any more intercourse with her than was unavoidable with a very frequent guest at the same house with himself. He had considered her a little loud in voice, rather rapid, and a fool. He had been satisfied that she told all that she knew, and he would not have been surprised to find that sometimes she told considerably more. He had considered her utterly incapable of keen research, and the very last person in the world to keep a secret, supposing that such a thing could come into her possession. What did he find here, and from her?
He read that note three times over, standing on the extreme east end of the piazza, leaning against the corner-board of the house, and with his face so averted from those at the other end that even if Mary Crawford once or twice threw a quick glance around, she could see nothing. Then he turned, shoving the letter into his vest-pocket as he did so, and walked slowly down the piazza to the hall-door, his face calm, to all distant appearance, and whistling "Strida la Vampa."
If Mary Crawford had not before been able to see his movements, she arose from her knees as he came down the piazza, and saw him then. She saw him as he passed in at the hall-door, heard him whistle without an apparent tremor in a note, and heard his slippered steps as he slowly lounged up the stair towards the room on the second floor which had been for some months kept as his. The young girl was disappointed—astonished—astounded! She had seen no agitation—had heard and seen the indications of the opposite! The blow had not been effectual—it had either been feebly struck or delivered from a false aim! He was not guilty, or he was beyond fear and knew himself to be beyond the reach of public exposure! She had hoped too soon—the bond she dreaded was not broken or even deferred; and God help her, after all!
Such were the impressions of the young girl, as the man within a few hours to be her husband disappeared into the hall. Were they well founded? Ah, young eyes!—you may be schooled to do your part, very early, but you cannot at once be schooled to read the eyes of others aright. Perhaps you never learn to read aright, until you lose the brightness of your own truth and beauty. Seventeen cannot well realize, to-night at Mrs. Pearl Dowlas's hop, when Mr. Pearl Dowlas, the eminent merchant, supposed to be worth a million, caresses his handsome side-whiskers with his faultless hand and interchanges pleasant nothings with the fashionable women who all admire him and all hate his wife,—that Mr. Pearl Dowlas is suffering, all the while, the intense agonies of ruin, and that he has the revolver already loaded and capped with which he intends to blow out his brains after the last carriage has rolled away. And Seventeen will be quite as slow to discover, unless Seventeen has lived too fast for her own self-respect and eventual happiness, that Lady Flora, patting her white-gloved hands to-night at the Opera, with the blonde Emperor by her side, apparently the happiest and the most truly envied woman in all that brilliant house, has such pangs of rage and jealousy tugging at her heart-strings, when she looks over at a much plainer woman in the opposite row of boxes, that could the terror of the law be removed, she would sacrifice self-respect, dignity, hope, everything, and bury a knife in the heart of that plainer woman as they brush by each other in the lobby. Seventeen will be slow to discover these things. Twenty-five may have a nearer appreciation of them, though yet dim as compared with the reality alas!—it needs Forty-five or Fifty, or a younger age made so old by sad experience—Forty-five or Fifty, with the bloom gone, the gray hair here and the wrinkles coming, to look beneath the surface and see the agony writhing at the bottom. Thank God that some agonies never can be discovered at all, until they break forth in uncontrollable madness: the world might be sadder if we could look in through transparent flesh into our neighbors' hearts, as we do through glass windows into their houses!
"Strida la Vampa" had been bravely whistled. Not braver the conduct of the poor cartman at the hospital a few months ago, when he looked calmly on without a groan or a wince, while the surgeon sawed off the ends of the bone of his fractured arm, drilled holes through them and screwed them together with a fastening of gold wire! That was physical bravery, or perhaps stolid exemption from pain: this was that moral bravery, in a bad cause, but none the less real, which could see wholesale and undeniable ruin fall without betraying one sign of agony to the observer most interested. Though he had read that letter three times to fix the words in his mind, he had understood it at the first reading. It told him all that needed to be known. Mary's changed look and her averted face were now accounted for—accounted for at once and forever. No word of explanation was necessary and none would be given or demanded. Some men might have hesitated, and questioned whether the blow could not be softened or averted. This was not Egbert Crawford. He had played, boldly, wickedly and recklessly, though apparently with all care. At the very moment when he seemed to have won all, he had lost all. At the bar he had always been known as contesting a case unscrupulously and to the bitter end, but as giving up gracefully and bearing a defeat without complaint, when defeated. A suspicion once aroused, and backed as was this suspicion, the wearer of the eyes he had just seen could never again be deceived. Had he been less of a resolute man he might have dared the other threats of the young girl, perhaps impotent. But the one great stake lost, in the hand and fortune of Mary Crawford, there was nothing left to play for, worth even hazarding exposure.
We will not say that in his own chamber, and while changing his slippers for boots and his linen-wrapper to a coat more fit for the street, he did not more than once gnash his teeth, utter an oath below his breath, and curse the whole race of meddling women. But if he did so, he said nothing aloud; and if his dark brows were darker than usual, no human eye saw them. He had writing materials upon the table in that room—that room, the best in the house, and into which, on the night to follow, he had expected to be accompanied by his bride. He sat down at the table but a moment, but in that moment he dashed off, with a hand wonderfully steady under the circumstances, the following note:
Sunday, 1 P.M.
Miss Harris:—
You have meddled successfully, and whether you are right or wrong in what you allege, I shall not be here to contest the question. If your husband, if you ever get one, keeps half as close a watch over you, he will probably see quite enough to satisfy him. Perhaps you will be kind enough to communicate this to Miss Mary Crawford, and thus finish the obligations under which I rest.
Yours, humbly,