“Do you remember Claire’s saying at the table that night of the farewell dinner that some dark-eyed mademoiselle was waiting for me? She did not know how truly she spoke, though I fancy she saw how I flushed when she said it: for I was already in love—madly so.
“I need not describe her. I need say nothing about her, for I know that nothing I say can ever persuade you to forgive her for taking me from you. This has gone on since I first came here, and I dared not tell you, for I saw whither your eyes had turned. I loved this girl, and she both inspired and hindered my work. Perhaps I would have been successful had I not met her, perhaps not.
“I love her too well to marry her and make of our devotion a stale, prosy thing of duty and compulsion. When a man does not marry a woman, he must keep her better than he would a wife. It costs. All that you gave me went to make her happy.
“Then, when I was about leaving you, the catastrophe came. I wanted much to carry back to her. I gambled to make more. I would surprise her. Luck was against me. Night after night I lost. Then, just before the dinner, I woke from my frenzy to find all that I had was gone. I would have asked you for more, and you would have given it; but that strange, ridiculous something which we misname Southern honour, that honour which strains at a gnat and swallows a camel, withheld me, and I preferred to do worse. So I lied to you. The money from my cabinet was not stolen save by myself. I am a liar and a thief, but your eyes shall never tell me so.
“Tell the truth and have Berry released. I can stand it. Write me but one letter to tell me of this. Do not plead with me, do not forgive me, do not seek to find me, for from this time I shall be as one who has perished from the earth; I shall be no more.
By the time the servants came they found Mrs. Oakley as white as her lord. But with firm hands and compressed lips she ministered to his needs pending the doctor’s arrival. She bathed his face and temples, chafed his hands, and forced the brandy between his lips. Finally he stirred and his hands gripped.
“The letter!” he gasped.
“Yes, dear, I have it; I have it.”
“Give it to me,” he cried. She handed it to him. He seized it and thrust it into his breast.
“Did—did—you read it?”
“Yes, I did not know—”
“Oh, my God, I did not intend that you should see it. I wanted the secret for my own. I wanted to carry it to my grave with me. Oh, Frank, Frank, Frank!”
“Never mind, Maurice. It is as if you alone knew it.”
“It is not, I say, it is not!”
He turned upon his face and began to weep passionately, not like a man, but like a child whose last toy has been broken.
“Oh, my God,” he moaned, “my brother, my brother!”
“ ’Sh, dearie, think—it’s—it’s—Frank.”
“That’s it, that’s it—that’s what I can’t forget. It’s Frank—Frank, my brother.”
Suddenly he sat up and his eyes stared straight into hers.
“Leslie, no one must ever know what is in this letter,” he said calmly.
“No one shall, Maurice; come, let us burn it.”
“Burn it? No, no,” he cried, clutching at his breast. “It must not be burned. What! burn my brother’s secret? No, no, I must carry it with me—carry it with me to the grave.”
“But, Maurice—”
“I must carry it with me.”
She saw that he was overwrought, and so did not argue with him.
When the doctor came, he found Maurice Oakley in bed, but better. The medical man diagnosed the case and decided that he had received some severe shock. He feared too for his heart, for the patient constantly held his hands pressed against his bosom. In vain the doctor pleaded; he would not take them down, and when the wife added her word, the physician gave up, and after prescribing, left, much puzzled in mind.
“It’s a strange case,” he said; “there’s something more than the nervous shock that makes him clutch his chest like that, and yet I have never noticed signs of heart trouble in Oakley. Oh, well, business worry will produce anything in anybody.”
It was soon common talk about the town about Maurice Oakley’s attack. In the seclusion of his chamber he was saying to his wife:
“Ah, Leslie, you and I will keep the secret. No one shall ever know.”
“Yes, dear, but—but—what of Berry?”
“What of Berry?” he cried, starting up excitedly. “What is Berry to Frank? What is that nigger to my brother? What are his sufferings to the honour of my family and name?”
“Never mind, Maurice, never mind, you are right.”
“It must never be known, I say, if Berry has to rot in jail.”
So they wrote a lie to Frank, and buried the secret in their breasts, and Oakley wore its visible form upon his heart.
XIV
Frankenstein
Five years is but a short time in the life of a man, and yet many things may happen therein. For instance, the whole way of a family’s life may be changed. Good natures may be made into bad ones and out of a soul of faith grow a spirit of unbelief. The independence of respectability may harden into the insolence of defiance, and the sensitive cheek of modesty into the brazen face of shamelessness. It may be true that the habits of years are hard to change, but this is not true of the first sixteen or seventeen years of a young person’s life, else Kitty Hamilton and Joe could not so easily have become what they were. It had taken barely five years to accomplish an
