So dreadful as an injured friend?—Rokeby.
"Strange," thought Vinal, "that I hear nothing from him."
It was three days since he had written to Speyer; and his chief anxiety was, lest his note should have miscarried. Pain and long confinement had wrought heavily upon him. Every emotion, every care, thrilled with a morbid keenness upon his brain and nerves; but hitherto he had ruled his sensitive organism with an iron self-control, and calmed its perturbations with a fortitude which in a better man would have been heroic.
His wife was in the room, and, as his eye rested on her, it kindled with a kind of troubled delight, for he loved her strongly, after his fashion. He had remarked of late a singular assiduity and tenderness in her devotion to him. Her position, in fact, was not unlike that of one who, broken and overborne by some irreparable sorrow, had renounced the world and its happiness, to embrace a new life, and build up for herself a new hope in the calm sanctuary of a convent. In the same spirit, Edith Leslie, bidding farewell to her girlish dream of life, its morning rose tint, and cloud draperies of gold and purple, gave herself to the practical duties before her, and sought, in their devoted fulfilment, to strengthen herself against the flood which for a time had overwhelmed her.
Vinal, who, acute as he was, could not understand the state of mind from which her peculiar kindness of manner towards him rose, pleased himself with the idea that his rival's return was not so great a shock to her as he had at first feared, and that, after all, she was more fond of him than of Morton. This notion consoled his disturbed thoughts not a little. Still he was abundantly anxious and harassed.
"If Morton should suspect! He has not come to see me; but that is natural enough, under the circumstances. And if he does suspect, he can have no proof. No one here suspects me. They say it was strange that my European correspondent should have made such a mistake; but that is all. No one dreams that I had a hand in it; and why should they? No one knew of Edith's engagement to him, except herself, her father, and her confidantes. I suppose she has confidantes—all girls have them. I wish their epitaphs were written, whoever they are. Well,
'Come what come may,
Time and the hour run through the roughest day.'
But this is a dangerous business—a cursed business. Why does not Speyer write?"
As his thoughts ran in this strain, he looked up, and his eye caught that of his wife. She was struck with his troubled expression.
"You look anxious and care-worn. Are you ill?"
"Come to me, Edith," said Vinal, with a faint smile.
She came to the side of his chair, and he took her hand.
"Edith, I am not well to-day. My head swims. This long confinement is eating away my life by inches."
"In a week more, I trust, you will be able to move again. The country air will give you new life. But why do you look so troubled?"
"Dreams, Edith,—bad dreams, like Hamlet's, I suppose. It is very strange,—I cannot imagine why it is,—but to-day I have felt oppressed, weighed down, shadowed as if a cloud hung over me. I am not myself. A man is a mere slave to his nervous system, and when that is overthrown, his whole soul is shaken with it. The country is my hope, Edith. We will go there together, soon, and begin life anew."
A knock at the door interrupted him.
"Come in," cried Vinal, in his usual quick, decisive tone.
A servant entered.
"Well, what is it?"
"A gentleman wishes to see you, sir."
"Did he give his name?"
"Mr. Edwards, sir."
"Ask him to come up."
"A man whom I expected this morning on business," he said, in explanation to his wife, as the servant closed the door. "I wish he were any where but here. And so you are going away."—She was dressed to go out.—"He will be here only a moment; do not be gone long."
"No, I will be with you again in an hour."
"Do not forget," said Vinal, pressing her hand, "for when you leave the room, Edith, it is as if a sunbeam were shut out."
As Vinal, sick in body and mind, thus leaned in his distress on the victim of his villany, he cast into her face a look that was almost piteous. She, seeing nothing but his love for her, warmed towards him with compassion; the more so since, till that moment, she had known him as a calm, firm man, a model, to her eyes, of masculine self-government. A mind tortured with suspense, acting upon a weak and morbidly sensitive body, had betrayed him into this unwonted imbecility.
The step of the visitor sounded in the passage; and returning the pressure of his hand, his wife went out at the door of a small adjoining room, opening upon the side passage by which she commonly entered and left the hotel.
After a few minutes' interview, Edwards took his leave, and Vinal, left alone, fell into his former train of thought. In a moment, he was again interrupted by a knock at the door, quite unlike the hasty rap of the hotel servant.
"Come in," cried Vinal.
The door opened, and Vassall Morton entered. He had learned from the retiring visitor that Vinal was alone.
"My dear fellow!" exclaimed Vinal, his face beaming with a transport of welcome. "My dear fellow!"
But Morton stood without taking his proffered hand. The smile remained frozen on Vinal's face, and cold drops of doubt and fear began to gather on his forehead.
"There is another friend of yours in the passage," said Morton.—"Come in, Speyer."
Speyer entered, bowing with his usual composure. Vinal sank back in his chair, collapsing like a man withered with a palsy stroke.
"Vinal," said Morton, after a silence of some moments, "you have a cool way of receiving your acquaintances."
He made no answer, but still sat, or rather crouched, in the depths of his easy chair, where the thick bounding of his heart almost choked him. Morton stood for some time longer, looking at him. He had not reached such a point of Christian forgiveness as not to find pleasure in his enemy's tortures, and he saw that his silence tortured him more than words.
"Vinal," he said at length, "I used to know you in college for a liar and a coward; and since then you have grown well in both ways. You have hatched into a full-fledged villain; and now that I have found you out, you crouch like a whipped cur."
No answer was returned, and Morton's anger began to yield to a different feeling. If he could have seen the condition of Vinal's mind and body, he might, between pity and contempt, have spared him.
"I came to upbraid you with your knaveries; but I find you hardly worth the trouble. Do you see this letter? It is the same that you wrote to this man at Marseilles, instructing him to forge a story that I was dead, and that he had seen my gravestone, with my mother's family device upon it. Will you dare deny that you wrote it? You will not! I thought as much. I have unravelled you from first to last. Five years ago, you bribed Speyer, here, to compromise me with the Austrian police. Pretending to be my friend, you gave me letters which betrayed me into a prison, where you hoped that I would end my days; and, next, you contrived this trickery to prove me dead. Is there any name in the English tongue too vile to mark you?"
Vinal sat as if stricken dumb.
"I know your reputation," pursued Morton. "You are in high feather here. You pass for a man of virtue, integrity, and honor. You make speeches at public meetings; Fourth of July orations; Phi Beta orations; charity harangues—any thing that smacks of philanthropy and goodness; any thing that will varnish you in the public eye. Why am I not bound to lay bare this whitewashed lie? What withholds me from grinding you like a scorpion under my boot-heel, or flinging you on the pavement to be stared at like a scotched viper? A word from me, and you are ruined. You need not fear it. Stay, and enjoy your honors as you can; but my foot shall be on your neck. This letter of yours is the spell by which I will rule you, body and soul."
Here he paused again; but Vinal's tongue was powerless.
"I tell you again, for I would not have you desperate, that I do not mean to ruin you. Bear yourself wisely, and you are safe, at least from me. Have you lost your speech? Are you turned dumb?"
Vinal muttered inarticulately.
"There is another danger which I have done my best to ward off from you. This man, who had you at his mercy, has sworn to leave the country, and never to return; on which score you will please to pay him the money you offered him for the purchase of your letters."
Vinal seemed confused and stupefied, and Morton was forced to be more explicit in his demands. At length, the former signed a note for the amount, though not without stammering objections to his name appearing on it in connection with Speyer's. Morton, however, turned a deaf ear to these remonstrances.
"Here is your pay," he said to Speyer. "Any bank will discount this for you. Now, to what place do you mean to go?"
"To Venezuela. I have a friend there in the army. He will get a commission for me."
"Very well. See that you stay there; or, at all events, do not come back to the United States. If you do, you will perjure yourself. Now, go; I have done with you. Vinal, I will leave you to your reflections; and when you can sleep in peace, free from Speyer's persecutions, remember to whom you owe it."
Vinal sat like a withered plant, his head sinking between his shoulders, while his hand, still unconsciously holding the pen, rested on the arm of his chair. There was something in his appearance at once so abject and so piteous, that a changed feeling came over Morton as he looked on him. By a sudden impulse, akin to pity, he stepped towards him, and took his wrist. The pen dropped from his pale fingers, which quivered like an aspen bough; and as Morton stood gazing on him, Vinal's upturned eyes met his, as if riveted there by a helpless fascination.
"You unhappy wretch! You are burning already with the pains of the damned. Flint and iron could not see you without softening. I have saved you,—not out of mercy, nor forgiveness,—not for your sake;—but I have saved you. I have pushed away the sword that hung over you by a hair. You are free now to be happy."
But as he spoke this last word, so fierce a pang shot into his heart, remembering what he had lost, and what Vinal had won, that his pity was scattered like mist before a thunder squall. He flung back the passive hand against the breast of its terrified owner, turned abruptly, and left the room.
No sooner had the door closed behind him, than the door of the anteroom opposite was flung open, and Edith Leslie, rushing in, stood before Vinal with the wild look of one who gasps for breath. She attempted to speak, but broken words and inarticulate sounds were all her lips would utter. Strength failed her in the effort, and pressing her hands to her forehead, she sank fainting to the floor.