"You have been dreaming, darling Joris."

"Yes; I am sorry I have been dreaming. I thought my father was here--my good father, that loves us so much."

Then, with a happy face, Katherine rose and gave the child cool water, and turned his hot pillow, and with kisses sent him smiling into dreamland again. In those few tender moments all her fears slipped away from her heart. "I will not believe what a bad man says against my husband--against my dear one who is not here to defend himself. Lies, lies! I will make the denial for him."

And she kept within the comfort of this spirit, even though Hyde's usual letter was three days behind its usual time. Certainly they were hard days. She kept busy; but she could not swallow a mouthful of food, and the sickness and despair that crouched at the threshold of her life made her lightest duties so heavy that it required a constant effort and a constant watchfulness to fulfil them. And yet she kept saying to herself, "All is right. I shall hear in a day or two. There is some change in the service. There is no change in Richard--none."

On the fourth day her trust had its reward. She found then that the delay had been caused by the necessary charge and care of ceremonies which Lady Capel's death forced upon her husband. She had almost a sentiment of grat.i.tude to her, although she was yet ignorant of her bequest of eight thousand pounds. For Hyde had resolved to wait until the reading of the will made it certain, and then to resign his commission, and carry the double good news to Katherine himself.

Henceforward, they were to be together. He would buy more land, and improve his estate, and live happily, away from the turmoil of the town, and the disagreeable duties of active service in a detestable quarrel.

So this purpose, though unexpressed, gave a joyous ring to his letter; it was lover-like in its fondness and hopefulness, and Katherine thought of Lady Suffolk and her emissary with a contemptuous indifference.

"My dear one she intended that I should make miserable with reproaches, and from his own home drive him to her home for some consolations;" and Katherine smiled as she reflected how hopeless such a plan of separation would be.

Never, perhaps, are we so happy as when we have just escaped some feared calamity. That letter lifted the last fear from Katherine's heart, and it gave her also the expectation of an early visit. "I am very impatient to see you, my Kate," he wrote; "and as early as possible after the funeral, you may expect me." The words rang like music in her heart. She read them aloud to little Joris, and then the whole household warmed to the intelligence. For there was always much pleasant preparation for Hyde's visits,--clean rooms to make still cleaner, silver to polish, dainties to cook; every weed to take from the garden, every unnecessary straw from the yards. For the master's eye, everything must be beautiful. To the master's comfort, every hand was delighted to minister.

So these last days of May were wonderfully happy ones to Katherine. The house was in its summer draperies--all its windows open to the garden, which had now not only the freshness of spring, but the richer promise of summer. Katherine was always dressed with extraordinary care and taste. Little Joris was always lingering about the gates which commanded the longest stretch of observation. A joyful "looking forward" was upon every face.

Alas, these are the unguarded hours which sorrow surprises! But no thought of trouble, and no fear of it, had Katherine, as she stood before her mirror one afternoon. She was watching Lettice arrange the double folds of her gray taffeta gown, so as to display a trifle the high scarlet heels of her morocco slippers, with their scarlet rosettes and small diamond buckles.

"Too cold a colour is gray for me, Lettice: give me those scarlet ribbons for a breast knot;" and as Lettice stood with her head a little on one side, watching her mistress arrange the bright bows at her stomacher, there came a knock at the chamber door.

"Here be a strange gentleman, madam, to see you; from London, he do say."

A startled look came into Katherine's face; she dropped the ribbon from her hand, and turned to the servant, who stood twisting a corner of her ap.r.o.n at the front-door.

"Well, then, Jane, like what is the stranger?"

"He be in soldier's dress, madam"--

"What?"

She asked no further question, but went downstairs; and, as the tapping of her heels was heard upon them, Jane lifted her ap.r.o.n to her eyes and whimpered, "I think there be trouble; I do that, Letty."

"About the master?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jane lifted her ap.r.o.n to her eyes]

"It be like it. And the man rides a gray horse too. Drat the man, to come with news on a gray horse! It be that unlucky, as no one in their seven senses would do it."

"For sure it be! When I was a young wench at school"--and then, as she folded up the loose ribbons, Letty told a gruesome story of a farmer robbed and murdered; but as she came to the part the gray horse played in the tale, Katherine slowly walked into the room, with a letter in her hand. She was white, even to her lips; and with a mournful shake of her head, she motioned to the girls to leave her alone. She put the paper out of her hand, and stood regarding it. Fully ten minutes elapsed ere she gathered strength sufficient to break its well-known seal, and take in the full meaning of words so full of agony to her.

"It is midnight, beloved Katherine, and in six hours I may be dead. Lord Paget spoke of my cousin to me in such terms as leaves but one way out of the affront. I pray you, if you can, to pardon me. The world will condemn me, my own actions will condemn me; and yet I vow that you, and you only, have ever had my love. You I shall adore with my last breath.

Kate, my Kate, forgive me. If this comes to you by strange hands, I shall be dead or dying. My will and papers of importance are in the drawer marked "B" in my escritoire. Kiss my son for me, and take my last hope and thought."

These words she read, then wrung her hands, and moaned like a creature that had been wounded to death. Oh, the shame! Oh, the wrong and sorrow!

How could she bear it? What should she do? Captain Lennox, who had brought the letter, was waiting for her decision. If she would go to her husband, then he could rest and return to London at his leisure. If not, Hyde wanted his will, to add a codicil regarding the eight thousand pounds left him by Lady Capel. For he had been wounded in his side; and a dangerous inflammation having set in, he had been warned of a possible fatal result.

Katherine was not a rapid thinker. She had little, either, of that instinct which serves some women instead of all other prudences. Her actions generally arose from motives clear to her own mind, and of whose wisdom or kindness she had a conviction. But in this hour so many things appealed to her that she felt helpless and uncertain. The one thought that dominated all others was that her husband had fought and fallen for Lady Suffolk. He had risked her happiness and welfare, he had forgotten her and his child, for this woman. It was the sequel to the impertinence of the pedler's visit. She believed at that moment that the man had told her the truth. All these years she had been a slighted and deceived woman.

This idea once admitted, jealousy of the crudest and most unreasonable kind a.s.sailed her. Incidents, words, looks, long forgotten rushed back upon her memory, and fed the flame. Very likely, if she left her child and went to London, she might find Lady Suffolk in attendance on her husband, or at least be compelled for his life's sake to submit to her visits. She pondered this supposition until it brought forth one still more shameful. Perhaps the whole story was a scheme to get her up to London. Perhaps she might disappear there. What, then, would be done to her child? If Richard Hyde was so infatuated with Lady Suffolk, what might he not do to win her and her large fortune? Even the news of Lady Capel's death was now food for her suspicions. Was she dead, or was the a.s.sertion only a part of the conspiracy? If she had been dead, Sir Thomas Swaffham would have heard of the death; yet she had seen him that morning, and he had made no mention of the circ.u.mstance.

"To London I will not go," she decided. "There is some wicked plan for me. The will and the papers are wanted, that they may be altered to suit it. I will stay here with my child. Even sorrow great as mine is best borne in one's own home."

She went to the escritoire to get the papers. When she opened the senseless chamber of wood, she found herself in the presence of many a torturing, tender memory. In one compartment there were a number of trout-flies. She remembered the day her husband had made them--a long, rainy, happy day during his last visit. Every time she pa.s.sed him, he drew her face down to kiss it. And she could hear little Joris talking about the work, and his father's gay laughter at the child's remarks. In an open slide, there was a rude picture of a horse. It was the boy's first attempt to draw Mephisto, and it had been carefully put away. The place was full of such appeals. Katherine rarely wept; but, standing before these mementos, her eyes filled, and with a sob she clasped her hands across them, as if the sight of such tokens from a happy past was intolerable.

Drawer B was a large compartment full of papers and of Hyde's personal treasures. Among them was a ring that his father had given him, his mother's last letter, a lock of his son's hair, her own first letter--the shy, anxious note that she wrote to Mrs. Gordon. She looked sadly at these things, and thought how valueless all had become to him at that hour. Then she began to arrange the papers according to their size, and a small sealed parcel slipped from among them. She lifted it, and saw a rhyme in her husband's writing on the outside,--

"Oh, my love, my love! This thy gift I hold More than fame or treasure, more than life or gold."

It had evidently been sealed within a few months, for it was in a kind of bluish-tinted paper which Hyde bought in Lynn one day during the past winter. She turned it over and over in her hand, and the temptation to see the love-token inside became greater every moment. This was a thing her husband had never designed any human eye but his own to see.

Whatever revelation there was in it, much or little, would be true.

Tortured by doubt and despair, she felt that impulse to rely on chance for a decision which all have experienced in matters of grave moment, apparently beyond natural elucidation.

"If in this parcel there is some love-pledge from Lady Suffolk, then I go not; nothing shall make me go. If in it there is no word of her, no message to her or from her; if her name is not there, nor the letters of her name,--then I will go to my own. A new love, one not a year old, I can put aside. I will forgive every one but my Lady Suffolk."

So Katherine decided as she broke the seal with firmness and rapidity.

The first paper within the cover made her tremble. It was a half sheet which she had taken one day from Bram's hand, and it had Bram's name across it. On it she had written the first few lines which she had had the right to sign "Katherine Hyde." It was, indeed, her first "wife"

letter; and within it was the precious love-token, her own love-token,--_the bow of orange ribbon_.

She gave a sharp cry as it fell upon the desk; and then she lifted and kissed it, and held it to her breast, as she rocked herself to and fro in a pa.s.sionate transport of triumphant love. Again and again she fed her eyes upon it. She recalled the night she wore it first, and the touch of her mother's fingers as she fastened it at her throat. She recalled her father's happy smile of proud admiration for her; the afternoon, next, when she had stood with Joanna at the foot of the garden and seen her lover wearing it on his breast. She remembered what she had heard about the challenge, and the desperate fight, and the intention of Semple's servant to remove the token from her senseless lover's breast, and her father's n.o.ble interference. The bit of fateful ribbon had had a strange history, yet she had forgotten it. It was her husband who had carefully sealed it away among the things most precious to his heart and house. It still kept much of its original splendid colour, but it was stained down all its length with blood. Nothing that Hyde could have done, no words that he could have said, would have been so potent to move her.

"I will give it to him again. With my own hands I will give it to him once more. O Richard, my lover, my husband! Now I will hasten to see thee."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "O Richard, my lover, my husband!"]

With relays at every post-house, she reached London the next night, and, weary and terrified, drove at once to the small hostelry where Hyde lay.

There was a soldier sitting outside his chamber-door, but the wounded man was quite alone when Katherine entered. She took in at a glance the bare, comfortless room, scarcely lit by the sputtering rush-candle, and the rude bed, and the burning cheeks of the fevered man upon it.

"Katherine!" he cried; and his voice was as weak and as tearful as that of a troubled child.

"Here come I, my dear one."

"I do not deserve it. I have been so wicked, and you my pure good wife."

"See, then, I have had no temptations, but thou hast lived in the midst of great ones. Then, how natural and how easy was it for thee to do wrong!"

"Oh, how you love me, Katherine!"

"G.o.d knows."

"And for this wrong you will not forsake me?"

She took from her bosom the St. Nicholas ribbon. "I give it to thee again. At the first time I loved thee; now, my husband, ten thousand times more I love thee. As I went through the papers, I found it. So much it said to me of thy true love! So sweetly for thee it pleaded! All that it asks for thee, I give. All that thou hast done wrong to me, it forgives."

And between their clasped hands it lay,--the bit of orange ribbon that had handselled all their happiness.

"It is the promise of everything I can give thee, my loved one,"

whispered Katherine.