Chapter XXXI: “long Hopes Wear Out Joy.”

Lieutenant Barrington would never forget while life lasted the suspense and unrest of those wretched weeks while he waited in illness and jealous pain for his wife to come from Paris.

Nor would he ever forget the evening of her return; and her startled cry:

“For Heaven’s sake, what is the matter? You look like a ghost!”

He had answered in passionate wrath:

“Very likely you would not care if I were a ghost!”

“Oh, Del, how can you be so unkind and untruthful?” and she clasped him in her warm white arms and kissed him eagerly with her soft, rosy lips.

Alas, he had pined for her kisses so long in vain that now in passionate resentment he pushed her away.

“It is all deceit! If you had really loved me, you could not have stayed away; you would have come long ago,” he answered bitterly.

She moved back from him in a gust of responsive anger, stamping her tiny foot, and answering curtly:

“If I had known you would be so hateful, I would have stayed longer! There is no pleasure hanging around a sick man’s bed, and I was having a grand time in Paris when Aunt Constance wrote me that long letter, begging me to come to you--that you would die of grief without me!”

He sank back heavily on his sofa, his face went dead-white, his sombre eyes flashed luridly.

“She wrote that to you--you only came in answer to her appeal--not from love of me!”

“No!” Josephine muttered vindictively, thinking to herself how changed he was--how pale and thin and ill-natured--so different from handsome, vivacious Burton Kingwood, who had borne her company down from Paris, and whom, thank Heaven, she would walk and talk with to-morrow. If anybody thought she was going to tie herself down to Delmar, they would find themselves mistaken. She had married him for a good time--not to be a sick-nurse.

And she was so angry at being summoned to his side that, being a cat by nature, she showed her claws on the least provocation.

What was the use, she said to herself impatiently, of playing goody-goody all the time? She was his wife, fast and tight enough. Nothing could alter that, and as it did not seem that he could live long, she would soon be mistress of all his money.

Her fickle fancy for him had grown so weak since illness had faded his personal charms that she could contemplate his death without a single pang of feeling.

Of course, she would have to pretend a fondness for him still--she was prepared to do that, if he behaved right. But his first exhibition of irritability elicited quick resentment and angry retort.

And, as we have seen, his temper was as quick as her own, and he was goaded by a sense of neglect and injury--wounded love and pride--into jealous revolt.

So, as the saying goes, one word brought on another.

They quarreled bitterly, and presently he said fiercely:

“Your pretended love was nothing but a sham. I believe you found out some way or other that I was coming into Maisie’s money, and that was why you suddenly became so sweet on me, and hurried up the marriage, before I was strong enough to travel, so that you could have a good time at my expense!”

The shaft struck home, and she fairly glared at him in her rage, as she comprehended that he had seen clear through her too carelessly worn mask.

Those long weeks of desertion and jealous pain had opened his eyes to the cruel truth, and he saw his idol in her true colors at last.

Unheeding her angry gaze, her husband added bitterly:

“Dear little Maisie, would to God that she had lived to save me from being married for money--the cruelest fate that can befall any one! She was worth a hundred vain coquettes like you!”

Josephine marched indignantly from the room.

“Why did you drag me here?” she cried angrily, to dismayed Aunt Constance. “Delmar was not glad to see me at all. He repulsed me when I kissed him, and heaped a tirade of abuse upon me. I shall return to my friends in Paris to-morrow!”

“It will be the death of him if you do, Josephine, for your absence has nearly broken his heart already! He has brooded over your neglect so long that he could not keep from reproaching you a little, I suppose; but that will all blow over by to-morrow, and he will begin to realize the joy of your coming. Besides, one must not pay any attention to the little tempers of a sick man!” soothed the old woman.

The angry young wife only answered scornfully:

“I will not tolerate abuse from any man! I am going back to Paris to-morrow, and you may tell him so! Now, good night; I’m going to bed in another room.”

And, feeling sure that Delmar would be humbled into the dust by the lofty stand she had taken, Josephine retired in high dudgeon, and, gazing from her window for some moments, concluded that Florence was, after all, a beautiful place, and if she did consent to stay after Delmar had begged her humbly enough to-morrow, she could have no end of fun flirting with Burton Kingwood.

Aunt Constance went in tearfully to her nephew, who was lying back on his sofa, his somber eyes still full of smoldering rage that blazed up again at her entrance.

“So you wrote for her to come, did you, you meddlesome old woman, after I had sternly forbidden you?” he raged.

“Oh, Del, I did it for the best. You were pining yourself to death, and I thought it was her duty to come. But I told her not to tell!” she quavered distressfully.

But he was miserable, and in the mood to make himself more so.

“You were meddlesome!” he reiterated stubbornly. “You always were a talking woman, telling everything you could hear for the pleasure of gossip! I shouldn’t wonder now if you didn’t betray to Josephine all about Maisie’s money coming to me before I was ready for her to know it! Didn’t you, now?”

Thus adjured, the poor woman burst into a flood of guilty tears that did not deter the half-maddened young man from continuing harshly:

“I’ve suspected this for some time, and you may as well own the truth of your tattling!”

“But what difference could that make?” she sobbed.

“The difference that I wanted to be married for myself alone--as my poor lost Maisie married me--not for my money!” he answered hoarsely, with despair in his eyes.

“But Josephine loved you all the time, Del--before your father died.”

“Loved the heir, yes--but how quickly she threw me over when I was disinherited!” he muttered.

If she had been a woman of good judgment, Mrs. French would have laid up a falsehood against herself in the great recording-book at once, and denied to the bitter end that she had ever betrayed the secret of Maisie’s money to Josephine. She ought to have seen that it would make matters far worse for Delmar to learn the truth now.

But she was only a weak, loving woman, never over-wise, but with an inherent love of truthfulness that would not let her stoop to a lie, even for the sake of the good to be gained for it--if good can ever ultimately be gained thus.

So she would not deny it. She simply tried to palliate the truth by asserting that Josephine had been fond of him, anyway.

But Delmar knew better, having learned it by bitter experience, and the truth that he had long suspected was like gall and wormwood to his heart.

He heaped the bitterest reproaches of a frenzied man on the weeping woman, forgetting all her kindness in the one great injury she had done him.

The result of his passion was to make him so ill that his brother had to be summoned first, and then the physician, who anxiously demanded the cause of the relapse.

They had to explain to him rather lamely that the coming of his wife had caused such a shock of joy, etc.

“Humph! A peculiar effect certainly. My patient has the symptoms of having worked himself up into spasms by a fit of anger,” he replied frankly.

They remained up with Delmar all night, and it almost seemed as if the wavering flame of life would go out before the day.

But in their trouble they never aroused Josephine from her placid slumbers. When Byrd suggested it, the doctor said grimly:

“No; she would not add to the comfort of her husband, I fancy.”

Towards daylight he left, saying that Delmar would probably be better when he aroused from the deep sleep, induced by the sedative he had taken.

Josephine arose late, breakfasted alone, without inquiring for her husband, and went out to walk, hoping to find Burton Kingwood on hand to flirt with, as usual.

But she was quickly followed by her brother-in-law, who interrupted her meeting with Kingwood, to say bruskly:

“You must drop this nonsense, Josephine, and come in at once to your husband, whom you nearly killed by your cruelty last night, and beg his pardon.”

Kingwood bowed and walked away, and presently Maisie, looking out of her window, saw Byrd and Josephine walking together, but though she was smiling up so coolly into his face, she was getting a very sharp lecture from her indignant brother-in-law.

“You are behaving shamefully. I shall never forgive your heartless treatment of my brother, flirting there in Paris with that nincompoop, while your husband lay ill and neglected! Why, if Aunt Constance and I had not come abroad to take care of him, he must have been dead ere now!” he exclaimed hotly.

Josephine was inwardly furious. She would have liked to strike him dead at her feet.

But she only pouted prettily, and muttered:

“Mr. Kingwood is not what you call him, but a perfect gentleman. And--and--you have no right to scold me! I am not accountable to you for my actions!”

“Then I shall take the liberty anyway, and I insist that for the sake of poor Delmar’s life, hanging in the balance, you shall come back to him at once, and use enough of the deceit you know so well as to make him believe you are sorry for your ill temper of last night.”

“I refuse,” she answered, so maliciously that he said quickly:

“I can read your thoughts, Josephine. You are thinking that he will die all the sooner, and leave you a wealthy widow, to pursue your course of heartless pleasure. Ah, my God, what a fiend you are! Why did I ever let you fool him into this unhappy marriage? If I had but opened my lips and told him the truth that he already half-guessed--how you had cared nothing for him really, but angled for me so boldly, you heartless little fortune-hunter--he would have turned from you in scorn, as you deserved! But for his sake, to make him happy, I sealed my lips, and did him this great wrong. Still, I erred in innocence! I did not really believe you were as bad as you showed yourself! I thought you still treasured a faint spark of love for him.”

She was writhing with humiliation under his pitiless scoring, but the devil of pride in her made her obdurate.

“You may scold all day, but I will never humble myself to him!” she cried stubbornly, feeling sure of her ground, never dreaming he could cut it away from under her feet with a word.

And that word came quickly.

“You do not care for losing his money!”

“You cannot cut me out of that!” she answered triumphantly.

“Not out of a legal third, perhaps; but he can dispose of all the rest by will.”

“Impossible!”

“It is quite true. He already contemplates it. While you have left him fretting here, his mind has been busy over many things. Shall I tell you some things he has said to me?”

“Oh, if you choose,” carelessly.

“His mind has been dwelling on his dead wife. He said to me: ‘Byrd, I can never feel as if I had a right to all Maisie’s money. I treated her shamefully, poor girl, and do you know, it almost seems to me as if she must be restless in her grave at the thought of Josephine squandering her inheritance--Josephine, whose cruel, cutting words drove her into exile and death. And so, Byrd, I am thinking of making a will, for I’m afraid I shall not live long. This wound and Josephine’s devilish cruelty will be the death of me together.’”

Josephine started and paled, gazing up at him in sudden anxiety, while she gasped:

“You are just trying to frighten me, to drive me to do your bidding!”

“You do not think so. You know I am telling you the simple truth, and you are anxious to know what Delmar intends to do with all of his money he can legally leave away from you.”

“Yes, I am anxious, I own it,” she answered sullenly.

“Then it is briefly told. He talks of leaving it to found an orphan asylum in memory of Maisie.”

“He shall not!” she exclaimed, in a violent rage, and he answered coolly:

“There is but one way to prevent it.”

“How?” she cried eagerly.

“By trying to coax him back to life by a wife’s devotion.”

Josephine made a wry face behind her hand. She did not care to coax him back to life, if he would die and leave her his money.

But that absurd project! Faugh, it must be forestalled at any risk, even the bitter pill of Byrd’s advice.

A moment’s rapid thought, and she quickly capitulated, and said, with apparent humbleness:

“You do me injustice, Byrd. I did love Del when we were married, although I do not deny I would not have married an entirely penniless man, even for love. I admit also now that I have been thoughtless in my love of pleasure: but Delmar, in his rôle of an invalid, disgusted me, and I sought gayer company as a natural result. Perhaps if my husband should recover, and regain his handsome looks, I might be fond of him as of old, so I will take your advice and make up with him.”

“Come, then,” he replied, with an irrepressible sneer, and led her in, while Burton Kingwood watched them from a distance with an angry frown.

Disappointed in his love for Maisie, he had thrown himself with ardor into the flirtation with Josephine, finding consolation in her dazzling smiles for his wounded heart.

From simply seeking amusement at first, her heart had become interested in Kingwood, whose dark, handsome style was similar to that of Delmar Barrington before illness had altered him so much for the worse.

So the poor love she had at first given Delmar waned with the flight of time, until she secretly chafed at the bonds that held her, and meditated on the advantage of being a rich young widow, who, after enjoying her freedom for a time, might command a title by reason of her great wealth, or if she followed the bent of her fancy, might, who knows, bestow herself on her new flame, unless the present infatuation burnt itself out before.