Chapter LXXXVI: That Letter Again

Weeks went by. Egbert Fletcher gained strength every hour. The perfect stillness of the island, the bright, pure atmosphere, and, above all, the presence of those devoted women, made his convalescence a tranquil dream of Heaven. Bertha, the brilliant, beautiful Bertha, would have made herself his slave, and gloried in the title, had he permitted it. Alice was her own generous self again, and even Lydia came back to snatches of the quaint humor and rollicking mischief that had forsaken her at the period of that mournful death at the farm-house; Clara alone remained gravely sad.

“She’ll marry him,” Lydia would assert to herself, jerking her thumb toward the window of Fletcher’s room, “and maybe never give that other rampageous scoundrel a thought. There’s some one up there that will see about him safe enough. He may marry rich girls, and flourish like—like a yellow pine tree on a hill; but, by-and-by, he’ll be struck with lightning, root and branch, you’ll see! As for her, I wish she didn’t know all that has nigh about killed me. It will always hang about her. I can see it now, when a girl ought to be happy as the day is long, pulling her down and covering her with blackness. She thinks I don’t see it, but I do, I do! While that Judas Iscariot is within a thousand miles of her, she’ll be breathing poison. Why didn’t he go down to Norfolk and catch the yellow fever or cholera like a man!”

These thoughts haunted Lydia, who was young, poor thing, to be burdened with the dark secret that had been laid upon her. She had no confidant, but sometimes told her troubles to the winds and waters, when her boat was far from shore, and she could give the fears that possessed her free words. It was well that she had this small relief; for her mind was getting fearfully warped and dark; fatal ideas of duty were gathering about the secret which occupied her entire mind. The scene which she had witnessed in that bridal chamber haunted her. Her young mistress must never be so tempted again. Had she not promised in the presence of the dead mother, to stand between her and all temptation? If there must be retribution, Bertha should not take it.

These were awful thoughts to trouble a young creature like that; but they fed upon her brain day and night.

Bertha, too, had a heavy burden of thought. She had accepted the love of a man so feeble that a word of the truth which oppressed her might have taken his life. She loved him now with a still, solemn, intense passion, so at variance with anything known to her before that her mind could scarcely comprehend it. Rather than have brought one shade of disgrace, or one hour of absolute sorrow on that man, she would have died. From him she would have no secret. That which her mother had felt bound to reveal to the bad man, at whose very name she shuddered, must be honestly told before she became the wife of Egbert Fletcher. Beyond this, her mother’s secret should be locked up sacredly forever.

One day when Fletcher had regained so much strength that he talked of trying the open air a little, Bertha—who had been watching the craving avidity with which he looked out upon the world, while she sat at his feet with a volume of poems lying open on her lap—took that sudden courage which seizes upon a brave heart when some duty is to be performed, and spoke out:

“Egbert, I have something sad to tell you. Will you hear it now?”

Fletcher turned from the green trees and soft grass that he had been longing for, and saw that the girl at his feet was white as the dress she wore, and that her hands were clasped firmly, like one who meditates jumping off a precipice.

“Yes, now, Bertha; but it must be sad, indeed, to make you tremble so. If there is anything in your heart that I ought to know—if you have one lingering regret—”

“Oh, it is not that! it is not that!”

“Then there can be nothing that I shall shrink from.”

Bertha took a letter from her bosom. The paper had been wet, the ink in some places had run together, but the writing had been pressed on the paper with a desperate force, which no water could wash out. She gave this letter to Fletcher, and leaning her head on one hand, waited in dead silence for him to read it.

The young man flushed and kindled with keen indignation as he read that mournful and most touching appeal to a man who had no mercy in has heart; but through it all arose a glow of infinite tenderness for the young creature at his feet, and such compassion for the mother who was dead, as strong, merciful men have for women who have died in struggling to redeem a great fault.

When the letter was finished, he folded it reverently, and lifting Bertha’s head from its drooping position, drew her up to the bosom pierced by the man who had so cruelly wounded her.

“My beloved! my darling! Did you think that I should love you less, or that I would not have sheltered this wronged lady? Look up, Bertha, my own, own wife!”

“And I could love that other man!”

This thought stung Bertha like the remembrance of a crime.

“One thing more, and you know all,” she said, avoiding his lips until the last dregs of her secret were told. “There was a time when I almost thirsted for that man’s life—when I meant to take it in order to avenge my poor mother, and save you; but I was not strong enough. Being a woman I could not do it; I tried, but failed; but still I sometimes pant to strike him down as he struck her!”

“My poor darling, forget these thoughts—they belong to men!”

“But there was no man to defend her.”

“At any rate there is one to defend you. Now, Bertha, that all your secrets are mine, will you refuse to kiss me?”

Bertha gave him her quivering lips to kiss, and went away to her room with a feeling of tender worship for that man, in a heart which had never fathomed its own depths of emotion before.

Fletcher was but mortal, with all his self-command, and that letter had stirred up the pride and honest rage that drives a man to avenge the honor of a beloved woman. He began to hate himself for the mercy which had spared that bad man from the peril of his most certain aim. Why had he refrained from shooting that magnificent villain on the spot? A single touch of his finger might have done it. That he magnanimously flung away this one chance of taking the man’s life was a subject of stern self-reproach now. He was no duellist, but in the heat of his indignation reasoned thus: Wrongs that deserve the deepest punishment are such as no law can reach. Half the crimes for which men are imprisoned and executed deserve less condemnation than those inflicted on helpless women, who hide them, like vultures, in the hearts they are consuming rather than cry aloud for the redress that never comes.

Russell Waldon had just as surely driven that gentle, helpless and long-suffering woman to her death as if he had stabbed her to the heart with his own hand. Yet where was the law that could reach him? In her whole life she had done him nothing but good. With gentle humility, she had asked a little mercy at his hands—a little forbearance for her innocent child, whose future he had rudely grasped. The return was insult, desertion—in the end, death! Was there a penalty for all this in the law?

Beyond all this, Waldon, after murdering the woman, and, as he thought, burying the guilty secret in his conscience, to save his own miserable vanity had cast insidious slanders on the person whom he had once craved as his wife, and proudly proclaimed as his betrothed.

In his horror of the cruel thing that had been exposed to him, Fletcher allowed thoughts like these to sway him into a state of burning rage against the man he had spared. If such thoughts were wrong, they sprang out of a generous nature, thrown into sudden tumult when his frame was weak, and his heart tender with the love of a woman.

A sharp pain in his chest reminded him at what cost this man had been spared to wrong other women, and carry his wicked powers more deeply into the social life such men poison.

“Oh, that I had known this!” cried Fletcher, walking the room in feverish excitement—for he could not forgive himself that a generous impulse had stayed his hand when Waldon was in his power. “His punishment would have been just, his doom well earned; but in my weakness I left two women unavenged, and thought myself acting right. Poor, poor Bertha! no wonder she was driven to attempt the life I was fool enough to spare! Oh, this pain! this pain!”

Fletcher flung himself on the bed, breathing hard, and feeling as if a girdle of iron were tightening around his chest.

As he lay, writhing in pain, a little hand was laid on his forehead, and a kindly voice inquired, with comforting lowness, if he would just lift up his head and take a drop or two of medicine.

It was Lydia, with a spoon in one hand, which she held steadily to his lips.

“There, now, take a good, long breath, and I’ll sit by you still as a mouse. Miss B. is on her bed, having a sweet, soft cry all to herself. Mrs. Forbes is off to the mainland, on some sort of an errand, and Uncle Sam is off fishing; so you and I have got the house to ourselves, and nothing but the flow of the river to disturb us; for Aunt Celia rests on her oars when Uncle Sam’s gone, taking in wood, and getting up steam for a new explosion. Now, Mr. Fletcher, being all alone, haven’t you anything to say to me?”

“What should I have to say, Lydia?” answered Egbert, smiling, in spite of his pain; “only to thank you for being so kind!”

“Oh, yes; that, of course. Every one thanks some one else for being kind; but that isn’t just what I mean.”

“Then, what _do_ you mean, Lydia?”

“Mr. Fletcher, my old mistress loved me and trusted me. I knew all that Miss Bertha has been telling you, long and long before you did.”

“How can you know what she has told me?”

“This way: she is up-stairs, crying softly, like a girl who is thankful to lie down. Ah, Mr. Fletcher, secrets like this are a load to carry. You are lying here, red in the face, bloodshot about the eyes, and throwing out your arms and feet like a deer with a bullet in him. She has given up her secret, and you’ve got it. I knew she would; but it weighs on you, don’t it? You would give the whole world to lift it off of your bosom, but it lies there like a great stone.”

“Lydia, you are a strange girl!” said Fletcher, losing all sense of his pain in astonishment.

“Yes,” answered Lydia; “things make people strange. But I have this to say: Don’t talk any more to Miss Bertha about this matter. Her great stone is rolled away. She has done her duty. The angel, in unlocking her heart, has let in ever so much sunshine. Don’t shut it out again with dark looks, as if her burden had settled too heavy on you. Keep that man’s name from her ears. Make her forget him—forget him yourself, if you can. She will never let you fight another duel. When it comes to that, she won’t break down a second time. Do you understand me, Mr. Fletcher?”

“Yes, Lydia; I think so.”

“Then just snuggle down in that pillow and go to sleep. You want it bad enough, gracious knows; and, when the worst comes, trust me.”

Fletcher obediently closed his eyes, for he wanted to think over what the strange girl had said.