Ellen told her that she could not go herself, but she would be very glad to have some of the children go; and then she stood for some moments, leaning on the carriage-door and talking most animatedly. I looked from one woman to the other. Ellen at that moment was more beautiful than Mrs.

Long. The strong, serene, upright look which was her most distinguishing and characteristic expression, actually shone on her face. I wished that John Gray had stopped to see the two faces side by side. Emma Long might be the woman to stir and thrill and entrance the soul; to give stimulus to the intellectual nature; to rouse pa.s.sionate emotion; but Ellen was the woman on whose steadfastness he could rest,--in the light of whose sweet integrity and transparent truthfulness he was a far safer, and would be a far stronger man than with any other woman in the world.

As the carriage drove away with all three of the little girls laughing and shouting and clinging around Mrs. Long, a strange pang seized me. I looked at Ellen. She stood watching them with a smile which had something heavenly in it. Turning suddenly to me, she said: "Sally, if I were dying, it would make me very happy to know that Emma Long would be the mother of my children."

I was about to reply with a pa.s.sionate e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, but she interrupted me.

"Hush, dear, hush. I am not going to die,--I have no fear of any such thing. Come to my room now, and I will tell you all."

She locked the door, stood for a moment looking at me very earnestly, then folded me in her arms and kissed me many times; then she made me sit in a large arm-chair, and drawing up a low foot-stool, sat down at my feet, rested both arms on my lap, and began to speak. I shall try to tell in her own words what she said.

"Sally, I want to tell you in the beginning how I thank you for your silence. All winter I have known that you were seeing all I saw, feeling all I felt, and keeping silent for my sake. I never can tell you how much I thank you; it was the one thing which supported me. It was an unspeakable comfort to know that you sympathized with me at every point; but to have had the sympathy expressed even by a look would have made it impossible for me to bear up. As long as I live, darling, I shall be grateful to you. And, moreover, it makes it possible for me to trust you unreservedly now. I had always done you injustice, Sally. I did not think you had so much self-control."

Here she hesitated an instant. It was not easy for her to mention John's name; but it was only for a second that she hesitated. With an impetuous eagerness unlike herself, she went on.

"Sally, you must not blame John. He has struggled as constantly and n.o.bly as a man ever struggled. Neither must you blame Emma. They have neither of them done wrong. I have watched them both hour by hour. I know my husband's nature so thoroughly that I know his very thoughts almost as soon as he knows them himself. I know his emotions before he knows them himself. I saw the first moment in which his eyes rested on Emma's face as they used to rest on mine. From that day to this I have known every phase, every step, every change of his feeling towards her; and I tell you, Sally, that I pity John from the bottom of my heart. I understand it all far better than you can, far better than he does. He loves her at once far more and far less than you believe, and he loves me far more than you believe! You will say, in the absolute idealization of your inexperienced heart, that this is impossible. I know that it is not, and I wish I could make you believe it, for without believing it you cannot be just to John.

He loves me to-day, in spite of all this, with a sort of clinging tenderness born of this very struggle. He would far rather love me with all his nature if he could, but just now he cannot. I see very clearly where Emma gives him what he needs, and has never had in me. I have learned many things from Emma Long this winter. I can never be like her.

But I need not have been so unlike her as I was. She has armed me with weapons when she least suspected it. But she is not after all, on the whole, so nearly what John needs as I am. If I really believed that he would be a better man, or even a happier one with her as his wife, I should have but one desire, and that would be to die. But I think that it is not so. I believe that it is in my power to do for him, and to be to him, what she never could. I do not wonder that you look pityingly and incredulously. You will see. But in order to do this, I must leave him."

I sprang to my feet. "Leave him! Are you mad?"

"No, dear, not at all; very sane and very determined. I have been for six months coming to this resolve. I began to think of it in a very few hours after I first saw him look at Emma as if he loved her. I have thought of it day and night since, and I know I am right. If I stay, I shall lose his love. If I go, I shall keep it, regain it, compel it." She spoke here more hurriedly. "I have borne now all I can bear without betraying my pain to him. I am jealous of Emma. It almost kills me to see him look at her, speak to her."

"My poor, poor darling!" I exclaimed; "and I have been thinking you did not feel it!"

She smiled sadly, and tossed back the sleeve of her wrapper so as to show her arm to the shoulder. I started. It was almost emaciated. I had again and again in the course of the winter asked her why she did not wear her usual style of evening dress, and she had replied that it was on account of her cough.

"It is well that my face does not show loss of flesh as quickly as the rest of my body does," she said quietly. "I have lost thirty-five pounds of flesh in four months, and n.o.body observed it! Yes, dear," she went on, "I have felt it. More than that, I have felt it increasingly every hour, and I can bear no more. Up to this time I have never by look or tone shown to John that I knew it. He wonders every hour what it means that I do not.

I have never by so much as the slightest act watched him. I have seen notes in Emma's handwriting lying on his desk, and I have left the house lest I might be tempted to read them! I know that he has as yet done no clandestine thing, but at any moment I should have led them both into it by showing one symptom of jealousy. And I should have roused in his heart a feeling of irritation and impatience with me, which would have done in one hour more to intensify his love for her, and to change its nature from a pure, involuntary sentiment into an acknowledged and guilty one, than years and years of free intercourse could do. But I have reached the limit of my physical endurance. My nerves are giving away. I am really very ill, but nothing is out of order in my body aside from the effects of this anguish. A month more of this would make me a hopelessly broken-down woman. A month's absence from the sight of it will almost make me well."

I could not refrain from interrupting her.

"Ellen, you are mad! you are mad! You mean to go away and leave him to see her constantly alone, unrestrained by your presence? It has almost killed you to see it. How can you bear imagining it, knowing it?"

"Better than I can bear seeing it, far better. Because I have still undiminished confidence in the real lastingness of the bond between John and me. Emma Long would have been no doubt a good, a very good wife for him. But I am the mother of his children, and just so surely as right is right, and wrong is wrong, he will return to me and to them. All wrong things are like diseases, self-limited. It is wrong for a man to love any woman better than he loves his wife; I don't deny that, dear," she said, half smiling through her tears at my indignant face; "but a man may seem to do it when he is really very far from it. He may really do it for days, for months--for years, perhaps; but if he be a true man, and his wife a true wife, he will return. John is a true husband and a still truer father: that I am the mother of his five children, he can never forget. If I had had no children, it would be different. If I had ever been for one moment an unloving wife, it would be different; but I am his; I believe that he is mine; and that I shall live to remind you of all these things, Sally, after time has proved them true."

I was almost dumb with surprise. I was astounded. To me it seemed that her plan was simply suicidal. I told her in the strongest words I could use of the scene of the night before.

"I could tell you of still more trying scenes than that, Sally. I know far more than you. But if I knew ten times as much, I should still believe that my plan is the only one. Of course I may fail. It is all in G.o.d's hands. We none of us know how much discipline we need. But I know one thing: if I do not regain John in this way, I cannot in any. If I stay I shall annoy, vex, disturb, torture him! Once the barriers of my silence and concealment are broken down, I shall do just what all other jealous women have done since the world began. There are no torments on earth like those which a jealous woman inflicts, except those which she bears! I will die sooner than inflict them on John. Even if the result proves me mistaken, I shall never regret my course, for I know that the worst is certain if I remain. But I have absolute faith,"--and her face was transfigured with it as she spoke,--"John is mine. If I could stay by his side through it all and preserve the same relation with him which I have all winter, all would sooner or later be well. I wish I were strong enough. My heart is, but my body is not, and I must go."

When she told me the details of her plan, I was more astounded than ever.

She had taken Dr. Willis into her full confidence. (He had been to us father and physician both ever since our father's death.) He entirely approved of her course. He was to say--which indeed he could do conscientiously--that her health imperatively required an entire change of climate, and that he had advised her to spend at least one year abroad. It had always been one of John's and Ellen's air-castles to take all the children to England and to Germany for some years of study. She proposed to take the youngest four, leaving the eldest girl, who was her father's especial pet and companion, to stay with him. A maiden aunt of ours was to come and keep the house, and I was to stay with the family. This was the hardest of all.

"Ellen, I cannot!" I exclaimed. "Do not--oh, do not trust me. I shall never have strength. I shall betray all some day and ruin all your hopes."

"You cannot, you dare not, Sally, when I tell you that my life's whole happiness lies in your silence. John is un.o.bservant and also unsuspicious.

He has never had an intimate relation with you. You will have no difficulty. But you must be here,--because, dear, there is another reason," and here her voice grew very unsteady, and tears ran down her cheeks.

"In spite of all my faith, I do not disguise from myself the possibility of the worst. I cannot believe my husband would ever do a dishonorable thing. I do not believe that Emma Long would. And yet, when I remember what ruin, has overtaken many men and women whom we believed upright, I dare not be wholly sure. And I must know that some one is here who would see and understand if a time were approaching at which it would be needful for me to make one last effort with and for my husband face to face with him. Unless that comes, I do not wish you to allude to the subject in your letters. I think I know just how all things will go. I believe that in one year, or less, all will be well. But if the worst is to come, you with your instincts will foresee it, and I must be told. I should return then at once. I should have power, even at the last moment, I believe, to save John from disgrace. But I should lose his love irrecoverably; it is to save that that I go."

I could say but few words. I was lifted up and borne out of myself, as it were, by my sister's exaltation. She seemed more like some angel-wife than like a mortal woman. Before I left her room at noon, I believed almost as fully as she did in the wisdom and the success of her plan.

There was no time to be lost. Every day between the announcement of her purpose and the carrying of it out, would be a fearful strain on Ellen's nerves. Dr. Willis had a long talk with John in his office while Ellen was talking with me. John came home to dinner looking like a man who had received a mortal blow. Dr. Willis had purposely given him to understand that Ellen's life was in great danger. So it was, but not from the cough!

At first John's vehement purpose was to go with them. But she was prepared for this. His business and official relations were such that it was next to impossible for him to do it, and it would at best involve a great pecuniary sacrifice. She overruled and remonstrated, and was so firm in her objections to every suggestion of his of accompanying or following her, that finally, in spite of all his anxiety, John seemed almost piqued at her preference for going alone. In every conversation on the subject I saw more and more clearly that Ellen was right. He did love her--love her warmly, devotedly.

Two weeks from the day of my conversation with her they sailed for Liverpool. The summer was to be spent in England, and the winter in Nice or Mentone.

Alice, the eldest daughter, a loving, sunshiny girl of twelve, was installed in her mother's room. This was Ellen's especial wish. She knew that in this way John would be drawn to the room constantly. All her own little belongings were given to Alice.

"Only think, Auntie," said she, "mamma has given me, all for my own, her lovely toilette set, and all the Bohemian gla.s.s on the bureau, and her ivory brushes! She says when she comes home she shall refurnish her room and papa's too!"

Oh, my wise Ellen. Could Emma Long have done more subtly!

Early on the first evening after John returned from New York, having seen them off, I missed him. I said bitterly to myself, "At Mrs. Long's, I suppose," and went up-stairs to find Alice. As I drew near her room I heard his voice, reading aloud. I went in. He and Alice were lying together on a broad chintz-covered lounge, as I had so often seen him and Ellen.

"Oh, Auntie, come here," said Alice, "hear mamma's letter to me! She gave it to papa in New York. She says it is like the sealed orders they give to captains sometimes, not to be opened till they are out at sea. It is all about how I am to fill her place to papa. And there are ever so many little notes inside, more orders, which even papa himself is not to see!

only I suppose he'll recognize the things when I do them!"

At that moment, as I watched John Gray's face, with Alice's nestled close, and his arms clasped tight around her, while they read Ellen's letter, a great load rolled off my heart. I went through many dark days afterward, but I never could quite despair when I remembered the fatherhood and the husbandhood which were in his eyes and his voice that night

The story of the next twelve months could be told in few words, so far as its external incidents are concerned. It could not be told in a thousand volumes, if I attempted to reproduce the subtle undercurrents of John Gray's life and mine. Each of us was living a double life; he more or less unconsciously; I with such sharpened senses, such overwrought emotions, that I only wonder that my health did not give way. I endured vicariously all the suspense and torment of the deepest jealousy, with a sense of more than vicarious responsibility added, which was almost more than human nature could bear. Ellen little knew how heavy would be the burden she laid upon me. Her most express and explicit direction was that the familiar intimacy between our family and Mrs. Long's was to be preserved unaltered. This it would have been impossible for me to do if Mrs. Long had not herself recognized the necessity of it, for her own full enjoyment of John's society. But it was a hard thing; my aunt, the ostensible head of our house, was a quiet woman who had nothing whatever to do with society, and who felt in the outset a great shrinking from the brilliant Mrs. Long. I had never been on intimate terms with her, so that John and Alice were really the only members of the household who could keep up precisely the old relation. And so it gradually came about that to most of our meetings under each other's roofs, strangers were asked to fill up the vacant places, and in spite of all Emma Long's efforts and mine, there was a change in the atmosphere of our intercourse. But there was intimacy enough to produce the effect for which Ellen was most anxious, i.e., to extend the shelter of our recognition to the friendship between John and Emma, and to remove from them both all temptation to anything clandestine or secret. They still saw each other almost daily; they still shared most of each other's interests and pleasures; they still showed most undisguised delight in each other's presence. Again and again I went with them to the opera, to the theatre, and sat through the long hours, watching, with a pain which seemed to me hardly less than Ellen's would have been, their constant sympathy with each other in every point of enjoyment, their constant forgetfulness of every one else.

But there was, all this time, another side to John Gray's life, which I saw, and Emma Long did not see. By every steamer came packages of the most marvelous letters from Ellen: letters to us all; but for John, a diary of every hour of her life. Each night she spent two hours in writing out the record of the day. I have never seen letters which so reproduced the atmosphere of the day, the scene, the heart. They were brilliant and effective to a degree that utterly astonished me; but they were also ineffably tender and loving, and so natural in their every word, that it was like seeing Ellen face to face to read them. At first John did not show them even to me; but soon he began to say, "These are too rare to be kept to myself; I must just read you this account;" or, "Here is a page I must read," until it at last became his habit to read them aloud in the evenings to the family, and even to more intimate friends who chanced to be with us. He grew proud beyond expression of Ellen's talent for writing; and well he might. No one who listened to them but exclaimed, "There never were such letters before!" I think there never were. And I alone knew the secret of them.

But these long, brilliant letters were not all. In every mail came also packages for Alice--secret, mysterious things which n.o.body could see, but which proved to be sometimes small notes, to be given to papa at unexpected times and places; sometimes little fancy articles, as a pen-wiper, or a cigar-case, half worked by Ellen, to be finished by Alice, and given to papa on some especial day, the significance of which "only mamma knows;" sometimes a pressed flower, which was to be put by papa's plate at breakfast, or put in papa's b.u.t.ton-hole as he went out in the morning. I was more and more lost in astonishment at the subtle and boundless art of love which could so contrive to reach across an ocean, and surround a man's daily life with its expression. There were also in every package, letters to John from all the children: even the baby's little hand was guided to write by every mail, "Dear papa, I love you just as much as all the rest do!" or, "Dear papa, I want you to toss me up!" More than once I saw tears roll down John's face in spite of him, as he slowly deciphered these illegible little scrawls. The older children's notes were vivid and loving like their mother's. It was evident that they were having a season of royal delight in their journey, but also evident that their thoughts and their longings were constantly reverting to papa.

How much Ellen really indited of these apparently spontaneous letters I do not know; but no doubt their tone was in part created by her. They showed, even more than did her own letters, that papa was still the centre of the family life. No sight was seen without the wish--"Oh, if papa were here!"

and even little Mary, aged five, was making a collection of pressed leaves for papa, from all the places they visited. Louise had already great talent for drawing, and in almost every letter came two or three childish but spirited little pictures, all labelled "Drawn for papa!" "The true picture of our courier in a rage, for papa to see." "The washerwoman's dog, for papa," etc., etc. Again and again I sat by, almost trembling with delight, and saw John spend an entire evening in looking over these little missives and reading Ellen's letters. Then again I sat alone and anxious through an entire evening, when I knew he was with Emma Long. But even after such an evening, he never failed to sit down and write pages in his journal-letter to Ellen--a practice which he began of his own accord, after receiving the first journal-letter from her.

"Ha! little Alice," he said, "we'll keep a journal too, for mamma, won't we! She shall not out-do us that way." And so, between Alice's letters and his, the whole record of our family life went every week to Ellen; and I do not believe, so utterly unaware was John Gray of any pain in his wife's heart about Emma Long, I do not believe that he ever in a single instance omitted to mention when he had been with her, where, and how long.

Emma Long wrote too, and Ellen wrote to her occasional affectionate notes; but referring her always to John's diary-letters for the details of interest. I used to study Mrs. Long's face while these letters were read to her. John's animated delight, his enthusiastic pride, must, it seemed to me, have been bitter to her. But I never saw even a shade of such a feeling in her face. There was nothing base or petty in Emma Long's nature, and, strange as it may seem, she did love Ellen. Only once did I ever see a trace of pique or resentment in her manner to John, and then I could not wonder at it. A large package had come from Ellen, just after tea one night, and we were all gathered in the library, reading our letters and looking at the photographs--(she always sent unmounted photographs of the place from which she wrote, and, if possible, of the house in which they were living, and the children often wrote above the windows, "_Papa's_ and mamma's room," etc, etc.)--hour after hour pa.s.sed.

The hall clock had just struck ten, when the door-bell rang violently.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed John, springing up, "that must be Mrs. Long; I totally forgot that I had promised to go with her to Mrs. Willis's party.

I said I would be there at nine; tell her I am up-stairs dressing," and he was gone before the servant had had time to open the door. Mrs. Long came in, with a flushed face and anxious look. "Is Mr. Gray ill?" she said. "He promised to call for me at nine, to go to Mrs. Willis's, and I have been afraid he might be ill."

Before I could reply, the unconscious Alice exclaimed,--

"Oh, no; papa isn't ill; he is so sorry, but he forgot all about the party till he heard you ring the bell. We were so busy over mamma's letters."

"John will be down in a moment," added I. "He ran up-stairs to dress as soon as you rang."

For one second Emma Long's face was sad to see. Such astonishment, such pain, were in it, my heart ached for her. Then a look of angry resentment succeeded the pain, and merely saying, "I am very sorry; but I really cannot wait for him. It is now almost too late to go," she had left the room and closed the outer door before I could think of any words to say.

I ran up to John's room, and told him through the closed door. He made no reply for a moment, and then said,--

"No wonder she is vexed. It was unpardonable rudeness. Tell Robert to run at once for a carriage for me."

In a very few moments he came down dressed for the party, but with no shadow of disturbance on his face. He was still thinking of the letters.

He took up his own, and putting it into an inside breast-pocket, said, as he kissed Alice, "Papa will take mamma's letter to the party, if he can't take mamma!"