After the speaking was finished, Rutledge went back to his hotel, and, taking from the clerk a bundle of mail that had been forwarded to him, climbed up to his room to look it over.
The third letter he opened was in a plain business envelope with typewritten address. He read:
"Unspeakably false? No, no, Evans, I am not false. I have not been false: for I love you. Such a long time I have loved you. Sometimes I have believed you loved me, and sometimes I have doubted; but I do not doubt since you told me to-night I was unspeakably false. Shame on you to swear at your sweetheart so!—and bless you for saying it, for now I know. O why did you not say it earlier so that I might not have misread you? I thought you felt yourself committed, and must go on: that your love was dead, but honour held you. You looked so distressed, dear heart, that I was misled. Forgive me. And do not think I do not know your distress. I, too—but no, I must not. I love you, I cannot do more. In your rage were you conscious that your kiss fell upon my lips, dearest? Blind you were when you said I was unspeakably false—"
CHAPTER XL
Elise Phillips had not stirred from Virginia Springs since coming there with her mother and two little sisters early in April. Her father had visited them regularly each week-end except when imperative official duties forbade, and had suggested at his almost every coming that Elise take some little outing from her mother's bedside. Elise would not go. She was as constant in ministering to her mother as was the nurse in charge.
Not even when her father died did she go to look upon him in farewell, for she was momentarily fearful lest her mother go away also for ever. It was a forced choice between the claims of the living and the dead. Her heart was torn with a distressing sense of her father's loneliness in death—going to his grave in state, thousands following his catafalque—and yet not a single member of his family beside him: her mother and Helen prostrated, Katherine and May too very young, and she herself drawn on the rack of a divided duty.
Her daily life had been secluded and monotonous, except in the moments when her cumulating sorrows were so poignant that they drove out monotony. With religious regularity and with tenderest love—as for a wayward unfortunate child—she had written to Helen at Hill-Top, and at the private hospital in which she was now detained, until the physician in charge had requested that she discontinue her letters except at such times as he should advise.
Only in the last fortnight, since her mother was beginning slowly to recover strength, had Elise given the slightest heed to her physician's orders that she herself take some appreciable outdoor exercise and care of her health. Few of the summer visitors stopping at the one hotel of the quiet resort ever had a glimpse of her, for the reason that the cottage taken by Mrs. Phillips was quite removed and secluded. The few friends who did see her remarked upon her loss of flesh and added beauty.
Elise was never beautiful after an assertive, flamboyant fashion, but was of that sublimated type of loveliness that, stealing slowly and softly in upon the senses, at last holds them rapt before the Rare Vision: Woman in Excelsis. Now, however, vigils and griefs had touched her face and form with a spirituelle quality not ordinarily possessed by them, and this ethereal effect caught the eye more quickly, and revealed at once the fine and exquisite modelling of her beauty.
She had seen and heard very little of Rutledge for half a year. During the remainder of the Washington season after Helen's marriage was announced she had bravely kept up appearances by missing none of the functions and gayeties that had claim upon her time and interest, and on one or two occasions had been face to face with him and exchanged brief but formal salutations. Since she had been at Virginia Springs an occasional brief press notice of the South Carolina senatorial campaign was all the word she had of him except a couple of lines in a letter from Lola Hazard in May.