“What is it, papa?” he said. “Is you sick, too, like mamma?” and the mother looked through her boy’s eyes straight at the suffering husband, who recognized the look, and clasping his child and Edith’s in his arms, sobbed and wept over him just as he would have done had Edith really been dead and Arthur motherless. “Is you tyin’ for mamma? Don’t; she’ll det well. Dirtie and the doctor will ture her. Is you tyin’ for her?” Arthur said; and with sobs which rent his very heart, Colonel Schuyler answered:
“Yes, Arthur, I’m crying for her,—for her,—your mother. Oh, Edith! my lost Edith!”
His tears poured in torrents now, and did him good, for the pressure around his heart gave way, the blood flowed more slowly through his veins, and the humming ceased in his ears, as he strained Arthur to his bosom and covered him with the kisses he meant as a farewell to the mother. He could never touch her false lips again, but he could kiss her child, and he fondled and wept over him, and then bidding him go away, and locking the door upon him, went back to the battle he was fighting between justice and inclination.
What should he do? What ought he to do? Should he show the letter to Edith, and, upbraiding her with her duplicity, live henceforth apart from her, as one he never could trust again? or should he keep his knowledge to himself, and try to act as if nothing had happened, hoping that some time she would herself tell him the truth, and why it had so long been withheld?
He could not decide then; he was in no condition to think clearly of anything, except that his Edith, whom he had taken for a pure, innocent young maiden, had been a wife and mother, and never let him know it. What her motives had been he could readily guess. She wanted his money and name, and the position he could give her, and if she told him all she feared the result. This was the reason, he said, and yet when he remembered many things in the past, he could not reconcile the two, or reason clearly about anything.
“I must go away by myself and think it out alone,” he thought, and glancing at his watch, and seeing there was yet time for the down train to New York, he rose, and going to the door of Edith’s room, knocked softly, and asked Gertie to come out a moment to him.
“I am going away for a day or two, or three at the most,” he said. “Mrs. Schuyler is out of danger, and as in her present state she is more quiet without me, I shall not be needed for a little time, and leave her in your care. I know I can trust you in everything. You have been faithful to us, Gertie!”
He wrung her hand as he said this, feeling for the moment as if of all his family Gertie alone had not forsaken him. Emily was dead, Emma was over the sea, Godfrey was estranged, Julia was seeking her own pleasure with a party of friends in Florida, and Edith, oh, how far she had drifted away from him within the last two hours,—so far that he feared she could never come back again, just as she was before. And yet he loved her so much, and when he caught through the open door a glimpse of her white face upon the pillow, he experienced a keen throb of pain, and felt an almost irresistible desire to go to her and beg her to tell him that what he had just read was false, that she was nought to Abelard Lyle, nought to that woman in Alnwick, the very thought of whom made him shudder with disgust. But there could be no doubt. He had it in her handwriting, and with a stifled moan he walked through the hall, and down the stairs out into the yard, where he ordered his man to take him to the train.
There were none of his acquaintances going down at that time of the day, and choosing a seat near the door behind his fellow-passengers, he sat with his coat-collar turned up, and his hat over his eyes, apparently asleep, though never was sleep further from one’s eyes than from his, as he mentally went over with the story fold in Edith’s letter and tried to realize it. Arrived in New York he went to the St. Nicholas, feeling that he should be more secure there, as Godfrey and his friends frequented the hotels farther up town. He wanted as private a room as possible, he said, with his meals served in it, and no one to intrude; so they gave him one far up on the fourth floor, and there for three days he stayed, never once leaving the hotel, or taking other exercise than to walk up and down his room, and this he did for hours at a time, with his hands behind him, and his head bent forward, while he tried “to think it out.” He did not sleep, and the chamber-maid found his bed unruffled morning after morning, when she came to arrange his room, and his food was taken away untouched unless it were a bit of toast and a cup of coffee, which he compelled himself to swallow on the morning of the third day, when he felt his strength giving way, and knew he must take something. He had thought it all over and over again, and gone through with every incident of Edith’s life as narrated in her letter, and was as far from any decision as ever.
“If she had told me,—if I had known,” he kept repeating to himself, without finishing the sentence, for he did not know what the result might have been if he had known that the woman he thought to make his wife was the widow of his hired workman, the sister-in-law of Jenny Nesbit, among the Alnwick Hills. “If I had loved her then as I do now, it would have made no difference,” he said to himself at last, “and in any event I should have respected her for a truthful, conscientious woman, which I cannot do now. Oh, Edith, Edith, how you have fallen, and I thought you so true!”