Chapter X: Mrs. Meredith’s Conscience

She had one years before, but since the summer day when she sent from her the white-faced man, whose heart she knew she had broken, it had been hardening,—searing over with a stiff crust which nothing, it seemed, could penetrate. And yet there were times when she was softened and wished that much which she had done might be blotted out from the great book in which even she believed. There was many a misdeed recorded there against her, she knew, and occasionally there stole over her a strange disquietude as to how she should confront them when they all came up before her. Usually she could cast such thoughts aside by a drive down gay Broadway, or at most by a call at Stewart’s, but the sight of Anna’s white face and the knowing what made it so white were a constant reproach, and conscience gradually wakened from its torpor, enough to whisper of the only restitution in her power, that of confession to Arthur. But from this she shrank nervously. She could not humble herself thus to any one, and she would not either, she said. Then came the fear lest by another than herself her guilt should come to light. What if Thornton Hastings should find her out? She was half afraid he suspected her now, and that gave her the heaviest pang of all, for she respected Thornton highly, and it would cost her much to lose his good opinion. She had lost him for her niece, but she could not spare him from herself, and so in sad perplexity, which wore upon her visibly, the autumn days went on until at last she sat one morning in her dressing-room and read in a foreign paper:

“Died at Strasburg, Aug. 31st, Edward Coleman, Esq. aged 46.”

That was all, but the paper dropped from the trembling hands, and the proud woman of the world bowed her head upon the cold marble of the table and wept aloud. She was not Mrs. Meredith now, she was Julia Ruthven again, and she stood with Edward Coleman out in the grassy orchard where the apple-blossoms were dropping from the trees, and the air was full of the insects’ hum and the song of mating birds. Many years had passed since then. She was the wealthy Mrs. Meredith now, and he was dead in Strasburg. He had been true to her to the last, for he had never married, and those who had met him abroad had brought back the same report of a “white-haired man, old before his time, and with a tired, sad look on his face.” That look she had written there, and she wept on as she recalled the past and murmured softly: “Poor Edward, I loved you all the while, but I sold myself for gold, and it turned your brown locks snowy white,—poor darling,—” and her hands moved up and down the folds of her cashmere robe as if it were the brown locks they were smoothing just as they used to do. Then came a thought of Anna, whose face wore much the look which Edward’s did when he went slowly from the orchard and left her there alone with the apple-blossoms dropping on her head, and the hum of the bees in her ear.

“I can at least do right in that respect,” she said. “I can undo the past to some extent and lessen the load of sin upon my shoulders. I will write to Arthur Leighton; I surely need tell no one else,—not yet, at least, lest he has outlived his love for Anna. I can trust to his discretion and to his honor too; he will not betray me, unless it is necessary, and then only to Anna. Edward would bid me do it if he could speak; he was some like Arthur Leighton.”

And so with the dead man in Strasburg before her eyes, Mrs. Meredith nerved herself to write to Arthur Leighton, confessing the fraud imposed upon him, imploring his forgiveness, and begging him to spare her as much as possible.

“I know from Anna’s own lips how much she has always loved you,” she wrote in conclusion, “but she does not know of the stolen letter, and I leave you to make such use of the knowledge as you shall think proper.”

She did not put in a single plea for poor little Lucy dancing so gayly over the mine just ready to explode. She was purely selfish still with all her qualms of conscience, and only thought of Anna, whom she would make happy at another’s sacrifice. So she never hinted that it was possible for Arthur to keep his word pledged to Lucy Harcourt, and as she finished her own letter and placed it in an envelope with the one which Arthur had sent to Anna, her thoughts leaped forward to the wedding she would give her niece,—a wedding not quite like that she had designed for Mrs. Thornton Hastings, but a quiet, elegant affair, just suited to a clergyman who was marrying a Ruthven.