This was the third day when he sat exhausted by the table where the letter lay. He kept it there constantly in his sight, though he had not read it since he came, but he took it up now and turning to the first page began to read it again, when, on the margin in the lower corner his eve caught, for the first time, a few faint pencil marks, almost erased, but which could still be made out with care. It was not Edith’s handwriting, and in looking closely he recognized the peculiar style of Mrs. Barrett, whose writing he had seen on the back of Edith’s letters received from her. What had she written there,—she who, at her daughter’s instigation, had lied so foully to him on the day when she came with that smooth story of an early love and nothing more! He asked himself this question, and as he asked it, there flashed over him a light of revelation even before he made out the pencil lines.
London, October 10th, 18—.
“This letter Edith bade me carry to Col. Schuyler, but I kept it back and told him what I liked, and she never knew of the deception until just after she was married, when I accidentally let it out, and she fainted away.
“M. Barrett.”
The words were finely written, but the colonel made them out, while the sudden revulsion from despair to joy was almost too much for him, and he sat for a moment half fainting in his chair. Then he roused himself, and his first words were:
“Thank God! I have my Edith back again!”
It must have been in some moment of contrition that Mrs. Barrett had penned the words with which from her grave she now spoke for her injured daughter. Something, sure, had prompted her to keep the letter and write the explanation which brought such joy to Col. Schuyler. The losing faith in Edith’s integrity, the belief that she was artful, intriguing, and deceitful, had hurt him a thousandfold more than the humiliation of having married the widow of Abelard Lyle. He had hardly given that a serious thought, so great was his disappointment at having found Edith false as he believed; and when she was proved otherwise his joy was as acute as his grief had been intense. Every circumstance which bore at all upon the matter came back to him, and he remembered so distinctly the many times since their marriage when Edith had tried to tell him. At the inn where they stopped on their bridal night she had stolen to his side, with the confession on her lips, and he had not listened to her, but had bidden her never allude to the past again, as he was satisfied. Dear Edith, he said, aloud, and felt again the pressure of her hand on his shoulder where she had lain it, and heard the falter in her voice as she first called him Howard. How she must have suffered then and afterward when he insisted upon taking her with him to the Lyles. He knew now the secret of her silence, which he had called pride. The iron fingers were on her throat, and she could not talk in Abelard’s home with that dreadful Jenny sitting there. And she was Edith’s sister-in-law! The colonel shivered from head to foot when he remembered that, and a flush of shame and mortification spread over his pale face. He had yet to fight these feelings down, and he did it manfully, and said to himself again and again:
“I love her just as wall, now that I know she did not mean to deceive me, just as well as if she had never seen those Lyles, who seem thrust upon me at every point, first through Emma and then through Edith, my wife.”
He liked to say “my wife,” and kept repeating the name as if it would make her dearer to him, and wipe out every feeling of regret for the incidents of her early life. How she has suffered, he thought, as he remembered all she must have passed through after her arrival at Hampstead, and he could understand now the meaning of her strange words when their first baby was born, and when it died. She was thinking of the little girl whose grave she never saw, and in the transports of his joy and generosity the poor man thought how he would, if she wished it, help her find that grave, and place a headstone there to the memory of little Heloise Lyle! Nobody would ever connect that name with him or his, and he was glad of that, and was not sorry that the little girl was dead, and could not by any chance come up as a witness against his Edith. Alas, he never dreamed that only half the strange story had been told, that his love and generosity, and principle of right and wrong were to be more severely tested than they yet had been. He was human, and naturally it was a comfort to him to think that Edith’s story need be known only to her and to himself. It should be their secret, and die with them when they died, and the world never be the wiser for it.
That the secret had something to do with Edith’s recent dangerous illness, he was certain, when he recalled expressions and ravings which had puzzled him so much; and he knew, too, or thought he did, why she shrank from him as she always did when delirious, telling him she was unworthy to let him touch her. But this should be so no longer; he would go home to her at once, and as soon as she could bear it, tell her that he knew the whole, and loved her the same as ever.