After Dr. Kane had reached the Arctic seas, I find this passage at the end of a long letter, full of solicitude and noble counsel about the education of his future wife: “One final wish—the only thing like restraint that your true friend can find it in his heart to utter: See little of Leah, and never sleep within her house.”
For a short time, on his return from his second Arctic voyage, Dr. Kane allowed himself to be swayed by interest and the vehement efforts of his relatives, so far as to require from Margaret a written declaration that they had never been engaged, and that she had no claim whatever upon his hand in matrimony. There was a quick reaction, however, and the old relations were renewed. One who wrote of these facts said: “Amid all his sorrow, one fear seemed to harass him perpetually—that Miss Fox might be induced to return to the professional life she had abandoned years ago for his sake. She was surrounded by spiritualists.” * * *
In his letters to her, Dr. Kane still harped upon the one anxiety that continually possessed him. He says: “Do avoid ‘spirits.’ I cannot bear to think of you as engaged in a course of wickedness and deception. * * * Pardon my saying so; but is it not deceit even to listen when others are deceived? * * * In childhood it was a mere indiscretion; but what will it be when hard age wears its wrinkles into you, and like Leah you grow old! Dear Maggie, I could cry to think of it. * * * A time will come when you will see the real ghost of memory—an awful specter!”
And again he wrote: “Maggie, I have but one thought, how to make you happier; how to withdraw you from deception; from a course of sin and future punishment, the dark shadow of which hung over you like the wing of a vampire.”
Then, as he claimed her more and more openly as his own, “he would not permit her,” says the writer already quoted, “even to witness any spiritual manifestations, nor to remain in the room when the subject was discussed. * * * ‘You never shall be brought in contact with such things again,’ he would say.”
The ending of this very sad tale of love, which throws a peculiar light athwart the colder theme of this volume, was bitterly tragic. A secret marriage under the common law was entered into, and Dr. Kane, whose health was shattered never to be mended, went first to Europe and then to Cuba to die. Margaret and her mother were to join him at Havana, but ere their departure from New York he was already a corpse.
And so, a noble and generous, if sometimes faltering heart, ceased to beat, and a gentle creature, who at last had learned to love as much as she had honored him, was on the shores of that deep sea of infamy against which, had he only lived, he would surely have shielded her.