Chapter XXII THE EARTHLY PURGATORY
Waking or sleeping, one figure stood forth in Durgan's imagination that night, and was the center of all his mental activity—it was Hermione Claxton.
He had been accustomed to regard her as the very incarnation of the commonplace, in so far as good sense and good feeling can be common.
Now he knew her as the chief actor in a story wherein the heights and depths of human passion had been so displayed that it might seem impossible for one mind to habitually hold so wide a gamut of experience in its conscious memory. This quiet little gray-haired housewife, who lived beside him, baking, sweeping, and sewing her placid days away, had stood in the criminal dock almost convicted of the most inhuman of crimes. Having passed through the awful white flame of public execration, she had accepted her blackened reputation with quiet dignity; for years she had lived a hidden life of perfect self-sacrifice, devoting herself to the purest service of sister-love. With character still uncleared, she had been urged to take her place as the wife of one of New York's best-known philanthropists, with whom, it seemed, she had long suffered the sorrows of mutual love and disappointment. Of more than this Durgan felt assured. As he reviewed all that had been told him that day, he was the more convinced that she had been no involuntary victim of false accusation, that she knew the secret that had puzzled the world, and had chosen to shield the criminal, to bear the odium, and also inflict it on the objects of her love. She had done all this for the sake of—what? What motive could have been strong enough to induce a wise and good woman to make such a sacrifice and endure the intolerable keeping of such a secret?
Durgan very naturally sought again the bundle of criminal reports which had fallen into his hands after the fire. Packed in the pile which fed the miners' stove, they had not, as yet, been burned. He reconsidered them, supposing now that they had been collected by Miss Claxton herself. A motley band of prisoners was thus evoked. They passed in procession before Durgan, beginning with Hermione Claxton, and ending with that curious figure of the dilettante priest who had beaten a sister to death in fear that she was an apparition. The well-born woman who, without temptation, had stolen jewels; the French peasant who had killed a loved wife to save her from the sufferings of a painful disease, and all the other members of this strange procession, represented the eccentricities of the respectable, rather than the characteristics of the degraded class. From a fresh scrutiny of each Durgan gained no information, only a strong suspicion that the criminal for whom Miss Claxton had so bravely stood scapegoat belonged to the same respectable class. He assumed that while her lawyers had been hunting for some inconsequent housebreaker who had taken a maniacal delight in dealing death, she had covered the guilt of someone whose reputation defied suspicion. Love, blind love, could have been the only motive strong enough to initiate and sustain such a course of action. The only way to discover the villain to whom she had sacrificed herself was to discover the man to whom she had given her heart. No doubt, since the crime and cowardice had betrayed his true value, such a woman would turn with some affection to a man like Alden. But Durgan's surmise required that before the crime she should have had another lover. Such a lover, if at enmity with the father and in need of money, would have had all the motive that the prosecution had attributed to Miss Claxton. She was supposed to have sent all witnesses out of the house before the crime; if her lover was demanding a private interview with her father, and her engagement was as yet private, such action on her part—— But Durgan paused, vexed at the nimbleness of his fancy. He derided himself for assuming that so obvious a suspicion had not long ago been probed to the bottom by acuter minds than his.
When he came to question more soberly what clues he held by which he might himself seek for any truth in his new suspicion, more unquiet suggestions came thick and fast.
More than once lately he had had the unpleasant sensation of hearing his wife's name very unexpectedly. Bertha had more than once referred to her; and what was it the raving mulatto had said? It took him some time to recollect words that had fallen on his astonished ears only to convince him of their nonsense. The mulatto had implied that his wife had concealed something for years which put her in some rivalry or enmity with Miss Claxton. His advice that Durgan should look into his wife's conduct and take Miss Claxton's part could, if it meant anything, only point to some mutual interest both women had with the spiritualist, Charlton Beardsley.
Durgan was amazed at such an idea. He remained for some time, as he said to himself, "convinced" that the mulatto was raving; and yet he went as far as to reflect that there had never been any visible reason for his wife's devotion to this man; furthermore, that Bertha had said that Mr. Claxton, an hour before his sad death, had received a message from Charlton Beardsley, that the mulatto had come from Beardsley, and was it not likely that he had sought shelter with his employer? The mulatto evidently knew Hermione to be innocent; in that case Beardsley would know it, and perhaps Durgan's own wife knew it. They had come forward with no evidence. What possible motive could they have had for concealment?
Durgan broke from his camp bed and from his hut, hot and stifled by the disagreeable rush of indignant and puzzled thoughts. He stood in the free air and dark starlight, trying to shake off his growing suspicions. Details gathered from different sources were darting into his mind, and it seemed to him that fancy, not reason, was rapidly constructing a dark story of which he could conceive no explanation, but which involved even himself—through tolerance of his wife's conduct—in the guilt of Miss Claxton's unmerited sufferings.