The Best Man (16 page)

She turned eyes of astonishment on him.

“How can you ask?” she said almost bitterly. “You surely must know how terrible they were to me! You should not be the man you have seemed to be to-day if you did not know what you were doing to me in making all those terrible threats. You must know how cruel they were.”

“I am afraid I don’t understand,” he said earnestly, the trouble still most apparent in his eyes, “Would you mind being a little more explicit? Would you mind telling me exactly what you think I wrote you that sounded like a threat?”

He asked the question half hesitatingly, because he was not quite sure whether he was justified in thus obtaining private information under false pretenses, and yet he felt that he must know just what troubled her or he could never help her, and he was sure that if she knew he was an utter stranger, even a kindly one, those gentle lips would never open to inform him upon her torturer. As it was she could tell him her trouble with a perfectly clear conscience, thinking she was telling it to the man who knew all about it. But his hesitation about prying into an utter stranger’s private affairs, even with a good motive, gave him an air of troubled dignity, and real anxiety to know his fault that puzzled the girl more than all that had gone before.

“I cannot understand how you can ask such a question, since it had been the constant subject of discussion in all our letters!” she replied, sitting up with asperity and drying her tears. She was on the verge of growing angry with him for his petty, willful misunderstanding of words whose meaning she felt he must know well.

“I do ask it,” he said quietly, “and, believe me, I have a good motive in doing so.”

She looked at him in surprise. It was impossible to be angry with those kindly eyes, even though he did persist in a wilful stupidity.

“Well, then, since you wish it stated once more I will tell you,” she declared, the tears welling again into her eyes. “You first demanded that I marry you – demanded – without any pretense whatever of caring for me – with a hidden threat in your demand that if I did not, you would bring some dire calamity upon me by means that were already in your power. You took me for the same foolish little girl whom you had delighted to tease for years before you went abroad to live. And when I refused you, you told me that you could not only take away from my mother all the property which she had inherited from her brother, by means of a will made just before my uncle’s death, and unknown except to his lawyer and you; but that you could and would blacken my dear dead father’s name and honor, and show that every cent that belonged to Mother and Jefferson and myself was stolen property. When I challenged you to prove any such thing against my honored father, you went still further and threatened to bring out a terrible story and prove it with witnesses who would swear to anything you said. You knew my father’s white life, you as much as owned your charges were false, and yet you dared to send me a letter from a vile creature who pretended that she was his first wife, and who said she could prove that he had spent much of his time in her company. You knew the whole thing was a falsehood, but you dared to threaten to make this known throughout the newspapers if I did not marry you. You realized that I knew that, even though few people and no friends would believe such a thing of my father, such a report in the papers – false though it was – would crush my mother to death. You knew that I would give my life to save her, and so you had me in your power, as you have me now. You have always wanted me in your power, just because you love to torture, and now you have me. But you cannot make me forget what you have done. I had given my life but I cannot give any more. If it is not sufficient you will have to do your worst.”

She dropped her face into the little wet handkerchief, and Gordon sat with white, drawn countenance and clenched hands. He was fairly trembling with indignation toward the villain who had thus dared impose upon this delicate flower of womanhood. He longed to search the world over for the false bridegroom; and finding, give him his just dues.

And what should he do or say? Dared he tell her at once who he was and trust to her kind heart to forgive his terrible blunder and keep his secret till the message was safely delivered? Dared he? Had he any right? No, the secret was not his to divulge either for his own benefit or for any other’s. He must keep that to himself. But he must help her in some way.

At last he began to speak, scarcely knowing what he was about to say:

“It is terrible, terrible, what you have told me. To have written such things to one like you – in fact, to any one on earth – seems to me unforgivable. It is the most inhuman cruelty I have ever heard of.  You are fully justified in hating and despising the man who wrote such words to you.”

“Then, why did you write them?” she burst forth. “And how can you sit there calmly and talk that way about it, as if you had nothing to do with the matter?”

“Because I never wrote those letters,” he said, looking her steadily, earnestly, in the eyes.

“You never wrote them!” she exclaimed excitedly. “You dare to deny it?”

“I dare to deny it.” His voice was quiet, earnest, convincing.

She looked at him, dazed, bewildered, indignant, sorrowful. “But you cannot deny it,” she said, her fragile frame trembling with excitement. “I have the letters all in my suit-case. You cannot deny your own handwriting. I have the last awful one – the one in which you threatened Father’s good name – here in my hand-bag. I dared not put it with the rest, I felt as if I must always keep it with me, lest otherwise its awful secret would somehow get out. There it is. Read it and see your own name signed to the words you say you did not write!”

While she talked, her trembling fingers had taken a folded, crumpled letter from her little handbag, and this she reached over and laid upon the arm of his chair.

“Read it,” she said. “Read it and see that you cannot deny it.”

“I should rather not read it,” he said. “I do not need to read it to deny that I ever wrote such things to you.”

“But I insist that you read it,” said the girl.

“If you insist I will read it,” he said, taking the letter reluctantly and opening it.

She sat watching him furtively through the tears while he read, saw the angry flush steal into his cheeks as the villainy of a fellow man was revealed to him through the brief, coarse, cruel epistle, and she mistook the flush for one of shame.

Then his true brown eyes looked up and met her tearful gaze steadily, a fine anger burning in them.

“And you think I wrote that?” he said, a something in his voice she could not understand.

“What else could I think? It bears your signature,” she answered coldly.

“The letter is vile,” he said, “and the man who wrote is a blackguard, and deserves the utmost that the law allows for such offenses. With your permission, I shall make it my business to see that he gets it.”

“What do you mean?” she said, wide-eyed. “How could you punish yourself? You cannot still deny that you wrote the letter.”

“I still deny that I wrote it, or ever saw it until you handed it to me just now.”

The girl looked at him, nonplussed, more than half convinced, in spite of reason.

“But isn’t that your handwriting?”

“It is not. Look!”

He took out his fountain pen, and holding the letter on the arm of her chair, he wrote rapidly in his natural hand her own name and address beneath the address on the envelope, then held it up to her.

“Do they look alike?”

The two writings were as utterly unlike as possible, the letter being addressed in an almost unreadable scrawl, and the fresh writing standing fine and clear, in a script that spoke of character and business ability. Even a child could see at a glance that the two were not written by the same hand – and yet of course, it might have been practiced for the purpose of deception. This thought flashed through the minds of both even as he held it out for her to look.

She looked from the envelope to his eyes and back to the letter, startled, not knowing what to think

But before either of them had time for another word the conductor, the porter, and several people from the car behind came hurriedly through, and they realized that while they talked the train had come to a halt, amid the blazing electric lights of a great city station.

“Why,” said Gordon startled, “we must have reached Pittsburgh. Is this Pittsburgh?” he called out to the vanishing porter.

“Yas sah!” yelled the porter, putting his head around the curve of the passageway. “You bettah hurry sah, foh dis train goes on to Cincinnati pretty quick. We’s late gittin’ in you see.”

Neither of them had noticed a man in rough clothes with slouch hat and hands in his pockets who had boarded the train a few miles back and walked through the car several times eyeing them keenly. He stuck his head in at the door now furtively and drew back quickly again out of sight.

Gordon hurriedly gathered up the baggage, and they went out of the car, the porter rushing back as they reached the door, to assist them and get a last tip. There was no opportunity to say anything more, as they mingled with the crowd, until the porter landed their baggage in the great station and hurried back to his train. The man with the slouch hat followed and stood unobtrusively behind them.

Gordon looked down at the white, drawn face of the girl and his heart was touched with compassion for her trouble. He must make her some satisfactory explanation at once that would set her heart at rest, but he could not do it here, for every seat about them was filled with noisy chattering folk. He stooped and whispered low and tenderly:

“Don’t worry, little girl! Just try to trust me, and I will explain it all.”

“Can you explain it?” she asked anxiously, as if catching at a rope thrown out to save her life.

“Perfectly,” he said, “if you will be patient and trust me. But we cannot talk here. Just wait in this seat until I see if I can get the stateroom on the sleeper.”

He left her with his courteous bow, and she sat watching his tall, fine figure as he threaded his way among the crowds to the Pullman window, her heart filled with mingling emotions. In spite of her reason, a tiny bit of hope for the future was springing up in her heart and without her own will she found herself inclined to trust him. At least it was all she could do at present.

Back at Milton an hour before, when the shades of dusk were falling and a slender moon hung timidly on the edge of the horizon, a horse drawing a spring wagon ambled deliberately into town and came to a reluctant halt beside the railroad station, having made a wide detour through the larger part of the country on the way to that metropolis.

The sun had been hot, the road much of it rough, and the jolts over stones and bumps had not added to the comfort of the thick-set man, already bruised and weary from his travels. Joe’s conversation had not ceased. He had given his guest a wide range of topics, discoursing learnedly on the buck wheat crop and the blight that might be expected to assail the cherry trees. He pointed out certain portions of land infested with rattlesnakes, and told blood-curdling stories of experiences with stray bears and wild cats in a maple grove through which they passed till the passenger looked furtively behind him and urged the driver to hurry a little faster.

Joe, seeing his gullibility, only made his stories of country life the bigger, for the thick-set man, though bold as a lion in his own city haunts, was a coward in the unknown world of the country.

When the traveller looking at his watch urged Joe to make haste and asked how many miles further Milton was, Joe managed it that the horse should stumble on a particularly stony bit of road. Then getting down gravely from the wagon he examined the horse’s feet each in turn, shaking his head sadly over the left fore foot.

“Jes’ ’z I ’sposed,” he meditated dreamily. “Stone bruise! Lame horse! Don’t believe I ought to go on. Sorry, but it’ll be ruination of the horse. You ain’t in a hurry I hope.”

The passenger in great excitement promised to double the fare if the young man would get another horse and hurry him forward, and after great professions of doubt Joe gave in and said he would try the horse, but it wouldn’t do to work him hard. They would have to let him take his time. He couldn’t on any account leave the horse behind anywhere and get a fresh one because it belonged to his best friend and he promised to bring it back safe and sound. They would just take their time and go slow and see if the horse could stand it. He wouldn’t think of trying it if it weren’t for the extra money which he needed.

So the impatient traveller was dragged fuming along weary hour after weary hour through the monotonous glory of a spring afternoon of which he saw nothing but the dust of the road as he tried to count the endless miles. Every mile or two Joe would descend from the wagon seat and fuss around with the horse’s leg, the horse nothing loth at such unprecedented attention dozing cozily by the roadside during the process. And so was the traveller brought to his destination ten minutes after the last train that stopped at Milton that night had passed the station.

The telegraph office was not closed however, and without waiting to haggle, the passenger paid his thirty dollars for the longest journey he ever took, and disappeared into the station, while Joe, whipping up his petted animal, and whistling cherrily:

“Where did you get that girl –”

went rattling down the short cut from Milton home at a surprising pace for a lame horse. He was eating his supper at home in a little more than an hour, and the horse seemed to have miraculously recovered from his stone bruise. Joe was wondering how his girl would look in a hat with purple plumes, and thinking of his thirty dollars with a chuckle.

It was surprising how much that thick-set man, weary and desperate though he was, could accomplish, when once he reached the telegraph station and sent his messages flying on their way. In less than three minutes after his arrival he had extracted from the station agent the fact that two people, man and woman, answering the description he gave, had bought tickets for Pittsburgh and taken the afternoon train for that city. The agent had noticed them on account of their looking as if they came from the city. He especially noticed the purple plumes, the like of which he had never seen before. He had taken every minute he could get off from selling tickets and sending telegrams to watch the lady through his little cobwebby window. They didn’t wear hats like that in Milton.