Chapter XV: The Photograph

The days passed rapidly, and Connie and Kitty, as they called each other, seemed to have become one personality, so fast their friendship grew. Connie spent the most of her time at the villa, where the baby was the great attraction. For hours she would hold it, studying its features, and sometimes seeming almost to get a glimpse of something she had seen like them; then the likeness would fade into a mist, leaving her as puzzled as ever.

“She is like Harry,” Kitty said to her one day when she sat with the baby in her lap, “and he is the handsomest man you ever saw. Dr. Kenneth is grand and splendid, and makes you feel that there is a power there for great and noble things,—self-sacrifice, I mean, and all that. Harry is different. I love him dearly, but I don’t believe he would give up as much as Dr. Kenneth. He always gets his way, he is so persuasive, and his eyes and voice talk. He was very kind to me when he heard father had lost everything and could not send me the allowance I’d always had. ‘Served me right,’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant, unless he had married me for my money. When I asked him he kissed me and said I was all the world to him. He told me though, before we were married, that he had once loved a beautiful girl, and when I asked, ‘Why didn’t you marry her?’ he said, ‘Because I wanted you.’ Nice, wasn’t it? I have often wondered who that girl was, and wanted to ask him, but think perhaps I’d better not. Would you?”

“No,” Connie answered, mechanically, as she poked the baby’s chin trying to make it laugh.

“Strange you have never seen Harry,” Kitty continued, “but you will soon. I expect him to-morrow night or the next.”

She was going out to drive that morning, with the baby, and asked Connie to go with her; but Connie declined, saying she was not quite well, and would rather stay in the cool, quiet room if Kitty did not mind. The baby was soon ready, and as Kitty came down with her wraps on, she said to Connie: “I have just come across, in one of my trunks, a splendid photo of Harry, taken in Paris two years ago. It is on my table, if you care to see it.”

Connie thanked her, and after the carriage drove from the house, with Kitty kissing her hand to her and the baby’s little face looking out from its lace cap, she went upstairs and into Kitty’s room. On a table some books were lying, and near them a large photograph on an easel. This must be Kitty’s husband, and she went swiftly towards it, then stopped suddenly and put up her hand to wipe the mist she thought must be before her eyes, preventing her from seeing clearly. But there was no mist. She was not mistaken. Kitty’s husband was the man who had wrecked her life. She had a photograph like this one,—smaller, but like it, taken in Paris two years ago. She knew those soft, persuasive eyes, the smile around the mouth, the way the brown hair was parted on the forehead, the erect and rather haughty carriage,—all were his. She could not be mistaken, and for a moment everything around her turned black as she grasped a chair to keep from falling.

“Villain!” she said, when she could speak. “You have wronged Kitty more than you have me, and how dare you come back and face me? I believe I could strike you dead, if it were really you smiling upon me there, instead of your picture.”

Connie was terrible in her anger and resentment. All her love for the man had died out, and what she felt was indignation against him, with an intense pity for Kitty.

“What can I do to spare her? What ought I to do?” she asked herself, as she continued to look at the picture, which each moment grew more like the man who had sat with her on the Alpine bowlder and sworn eternal fidelity.

In a great emergency some minds work rapidly, and Connie’s was one of them. To stay and meet Harry was impossible without betraying herself. Betrayal meant ruin to Kitty, and something in the warm-hearted Southern girl had appealed to her strangely.

“I love her,” she whispered, “and there is the baby named for me, I know now, instead of the city where it was born. Kitty must never know what I do, and I must go away before he comes.”

But where, and how, and what excuse to give, were the problems she must work out alone. Kenneth had left that morning for Boston, where he was to meet some members of the medical faculty. He might be gone two days, and she could not consult him. She could consult no one, and must act for herself. Providentially, as it seemed to her, she found on her return to the farmhouse a letter from her aunt, saying she should sail in a few days for New York, and wished Connie would see that her house was put in order and be there to receive her. “God has surely opened a way, and I’ll go to-day,” Connie thought, as she read the letter, wondering at her calmness when her plans were finally made. Mrs. Stannard was surprised and sorry, and so was Kitty, when she returned from her drive and stopped for a moment at the farmhouse.

“Going before Harry comes? He’ll be here to-night on the late train. I’ve had a telegram,” she said, while Connie bit her lips until the blood nearly came through, the feeling within her was so strong to cry out, “He is a rascal, he is a villain, and that is why I go away.”

“You will come back in a few days,” Kitty said, and Connie replied: “Perhaps; I can’t tell. I will write, and now please leave me to rest a little; I am very tired.”

She wanted to be alone, and think whether to tell Kenneth or not. The hardest of all was leaving him, for life was very sweet with him, even if he could never be more to her than a friend, and when she was alone she broke down and cried like a little child.

“Oh, Kenneth! if it could be, but it never can. I had thought he might be dead, and that some time I should know, but he is alive; he is Kitty’s husband and baby’s father, and they must never know, and it can never be. But I will tell you.”

Drying her tears, she began a letter which would tell Kenneth why she was leaving.

“Dear Kenneth,” she began, “I have found out something and must go away before your cousin comes. Kitty showed me his photograph, and he is the man who stands between you and me. _He is my husband._”

Something like the sharp cut of a knife pierced her heart as she wrote the words and looked at them with a desire to tear them from the paper.

“I can’t tell you about it,” she went on. “It is too dreadful to recall. I will only say he bade me good-by the night we were married, and I have never seen him since. He called himself _Harold Meurice_, and that is why I have never identified him with your cousin. My aunt did not like him and must not know who he really is. No one but you must know, for Kitty’s sake and the baby’s. Oh, Kenneth! It cannot be wicked to tell you, as I say good-by forever, that I love you; but don’t try to see me; it can do no good. I must live my life alone. Don’t tell _him_ that you know. Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth! Good-by.

“CONNIE.”

A great tear fell on the word “Connie” and blotted it, but she could not rewrite the note, and, folding it, she directed it to Kenneth, and taking it to his room placed it where he would see it at once. There was not much time to lose if she would take the three o’clock train, and she accepted Kitty’s offer to help her pack, while Mrs. Stannard, half distraught with the suddenness of Connie’s going, kept wondering why she need take everything, if she were coming back. And Connie could not talk, for the swelling in her throat and the tears she was trying to keep down. She was very white, and there was a drawn look about her mouth and an expression in her eyes which troubled Kitty, and when everything was done and they were waiting for the carriage which was to take Connie to the station, she put her arm caressingly around her neck and said:

“Is it some trouble, Connie, and can I help you?”

“No; oh, no. You least of all,” was Connie’s answer, and putting her head on Kitty’s shoulder, she cried aloud for a moment, then lifting up her head, she said, with an attempt to smile: “Excuse me for the weakness. It is like leaving home, where I have been so happy. I must cry a little.”

Mrs. Stannard, Kitty and the baby went to the station with her in Kitty’s brougham, with the coachman in livery and the blooded horses. Could she have had her choice, she would have preferred going in a wheelbarrow to this fine turnout of the man who had so deceived her. But there was no alternative. Deacon Stannard was away, and she must go with Kitty, who clung to her as if she were her sister, and whose tears were hot on her cheek when she at last said good-bye.

“Too bad you can’t meet Harry; but you saw his picture, didn’t you?” Kitty said.

“Yes, I saw it,” Connie gasped, springing on the platform of the car so as to hear no more of Harry, whose baby, held high up in Kitty’s arms, was the last thing she saw clearly as the train took her away.