Black is White 52

Black is White 52

“And yet you married me,” he muttered thickly.

 

“Not because I loved you; oh, no! She loved you to the day of her death,

after all the misery and suffering you had heaped upon her. No woman

ever endured the anguish that she suffered throughout those hungry

years. You kept her child from her. You denied him to her, even though

you denied him to yourself. Why did you keep him from her? She was his

mother. She had borne him; he was all hers. But no! It was your revenge

to deprive her of the child she had brought into the world. You worked

deliberately in this plan to crush what little there was left in life

for her.

 

“You kept him with you, though you branded him with a name I cannot

utter; you guarded him as if he were your most precious possession, and

not a curse to your pride; you did this because you knew that you could

drive the barb more deeply into her tortured heart. You allowed her to

die, after years of pleading, after years of vain endeavour, without

one glimpse of her boy, without ever having heard the word mother on

his lips. That is what you did to my sister. For twelve long years you

gloated over her misery. Man, man, how I hated you when I married you!”

She paused, breathless.

 

“You are creating an excuse for your devilish conduct!” he exclaimed

harshly. “You are like Matilde, false to the core. You married me for

the luxury I could provide, notwithstanding the curse I had put upon

your sister. I don’t believe a word of what you are saying to------”

 

“Don’t you believe that I am her sister?”

 

“You, yes; I must believe that. Why have I been so blind? You are the

little Thérèse, and you hated me in those other days. I remember well

the------”

 

“A child’s despairing hatred because you were taking away the being she

loved best of all. Will you believe me when I say that my hatred did not

endure for long? When her happy, joyous letters came back to us filled

with accounts of your goodness, your devotion, I allowed my hatred to

die. I forgot that you had robbed me. I came to look upon you as the

fairy prince, after all. It was not until she came all the way across

the ocean and began to die before our eyes--she was years in dying

it was not until then that I began to hate you with a real, undying

hatred.”

 

“And yet you gave yourself to me!” he cried. “You put yourself in her

place! In Heaven’s name, what was to be gained by such an act as that?”

 

“I wanted to take Matilde’s boy away from you,” she hurried on, and for

the first time her eyes began to waver. “The idea suggested itself to

me the night I met you at the comtesse’s dinner. It was a wonderful,

a tremendous thought that entered my brain. At first my real self

revolted, but as time went on the idea became an obsession. I married

you, James Brood, for the sole purpose of hurting you in the worst

possible way: by having Matilde’s son strike you where the pain would be

the greatest. Ah, you are thinking that I would have permitted myself

to have become his mistress, but you are mistaken. I am not that bad. I

would not have damned his soul in that way. I would not have betrayed my

sister in that way. Far more subtle was my design. I confess that it was

my plan to make him fall in love with me and in the end to run away with

him, leaving you to think that the very worst had happened. But it would

not have been as you think. He would have been protected, my friend,

amply protected. He------”

 

“But you would have wrecked him; don’t you see that you would have

wrecked the life you sought to protect? How blind and unfeeling you

were. You say that he was my son and Matilde’s, honestly born. What

was your object, may I inquire, in striking me at such cost to him? You

would have made a scoundrel of him for the sake of a personal vengeance.

Are you forgetting that he regarded himself as my son?”

 

“No; I do not forget, James. There was but one way in which I could hope

to steal him away from you, and I went about it deliberately, with my

eyes open. I came here to induce him to run away with me. I would have

taken him back to his mother’s home, to her grave, and there I would

have told him what you did to her. If, after hearing my story, he

elected to return to the man who had destroyed his mother, I should have

stepped aside and offered no protest.

 

“But I would have taken him away from you in the manner that would have

hurt you the worst. My sister was true to you. I would have been just as

true, and after you had suffered the torments of hell, it was my plan to

reveal everything to you. But you would have had your punishment by that

time. When you were at the very end of your strength, when you trembled

on the edge of oblivion, then I would have hunted you out and laughed

at you and told you the truth. But you would have had years of

anguish--years, I say.”

 

“I have already had years of agony, pray do not overlook that fact,”

said he. “I suffered for twenty years. I was at the edge of oblivion more

than once, if it is a pleasure for you to hear me say it, Thérèse.”

 

“It does not offset the pain that her suffering brought to me. It does

not counterbalance the unhappiness you gave to her boy, nor the stigma

you put upon him. I am glad that you suffered. It proves to me that you

secretly considered yourself to be in the wrong. You doubted yourself.

You were never sure, and yet you crushed the life out of her innocent,

bleeding heart. You let her die without a word to show that you------”

 

“I was lost to the world for years,” he said. “There were many years

when I was not in touch with------”

 

“But her letters must have reached you. She wrote a thousand of--------”

 

“They never reached me,” he said significantly.

 

“You ordered them to be destroyed?” she cried in sudden comprehension.

 

“I must decline to answer that question.”

 

She gave him a curious, incredulous smile and then abruptly returned to

her charge.

 

“When my sister came home, degraded, I was nine years of age, but I was

not so young that I did not know that a dreadful thing had happened to

her. She was blighted beyond all hope of recovery. It was to me, little

me, that she told her story over and over again, and it was I to whom

she read all of the pitiful letters she wrote to you. My father wanted

to come to America to kill you. He did come later on to plead with you

and to kill you if you would not listen to him. But you had gone--to

Africa, they said. I could not understand why you would not give to her

that little baby boy. He was hers, and------”

 

She stopped short in her recital and covered her eyes with her hands.

He waited for her to go on, sitting as rigid as the image that faced him

from beyond the table’s end.

 

“Afterward my father and my uncles made every effort to get the child

away from you, but he was hidden; you know how carefully he was hidden

so that she might never find him. For ten years they searched for him,

and you. For ten years she wrote to you, begging you to let her have

him, if only for a little while at a time. She promised to restore him

to you. You never replied. You scorned her. We were rich, very rich.

But our money was of no help to us in the search for her boy. You had

secreted him too well. At last, one day, she told me what it was

that you accused her of doing. She told me about Guido Feverelli, her

music--master. I knew him, James. He had known her from childhood. He

was one of the finest men I have ever seen.”

 

“He was in love with her,” grated Brood.

 

“Perhaps. Who knows? But if so, he never uttered so much as one word of

love to her. He challenged you. Why did you refuse to fight him?”

 

“Because she begged me not to kill him. Did she tell you that?”

 

“Yes. But that was not the real reason. It was because you were not sure

of your ground.”

 

“I deny that!”

 

“Never mind! It is enough that poor Feverelli passed out of her life.

She did not see him again until just before she died. He was a noble

gentleman. He wrote but one letter to her after that wretched day in

this house. I have it here in this packet.”

 

She drew a package of letters, tied with a white ribbon, from her bosom

and laid it upon the table before him.

 

“But one letter from him,” she went on. “I have brought it here for you

to read. But not now. There are other letters and documents here for

you to consider. They are from the grave. Ah, I do not wonder that you

shrink and draw back from them. They convict you, James.”

 

“Now I can see why you have taken up this fight against me. You--you

knew she was innocent,” he said in a low, unsteady voice.

 

“And why I have hated you, _aïe?_ But what you do not understand is how

I could have brought myself to the point of loving you.”

 

“Loving me! Good Heaven, woman, what do you------”

 

“Loving you in spite of myself,” she cried, beating upon the table with

her hands. “I have tried to convince myself that it was not I, but the

spirit of Matilde that had come to lodge in my treacherous body. I hated

you for myself and I loved you for Matilde. She loved you to the end.

She never hated you. That was it. The pure, deathless love of Matilde

was constantly fighting against the hatred I bore for you. I believe as

firmly as I believe that I am alive that she has been near me all the

time, battling against my insane desire for vengeance. You have only

to recall to yourself the moments when you were so vividly reminded of

Matilde Valeska. At those times I am sure that something of Matilde was

in me. I was not myself. You have looked into my eyes a thousand times

with a question in your own. Your soul was striving to reach the soul

of Matilde. Ah, all these months I have known that you love Matilde, not

me. You loved Matilde that was in me. You------”

 

“I have thought of her, always of her, when you were in my arms.”

 

“I know how well you loved her,” she declared slowly. “I know that you

went to her tomb long after her death was revealed to you. Ï know that

years ago you made an effort to find Feverelli. You found his grave,

too, and you could not ask him, man to man, if you had wronged her. But

in spite of all that you brought up her boy to be sacrificed as------”

 

“I--I--am I to believe you? If he should be my son!” he cried, starting

up, cold with dread.

 

“He is your son. He could be no other man’s son. I have her dying word

for it. She declared it in the presence of her God. Wait! Where are you

going?”

 

“I am going down to him!”

 

“Not yet, James. I have still more to say to you, more to confess. Here!

Take this package of letters. Read them as you sit beside his bed--not

his death--bed, for I shall restore him to health, never fear. If he

were to die I should curse myself to the end of time, for I and I alone

would have been the cause. Here are her letters, and the one Feverelli

wrote to her. This is her death--bed letter to you. And this is a letter

to her son and yours. You may some day read it to him. And here--this is

a document requiring me to share my fortune with her son. It is a pledge

that I took before my father died a few years ago. If the boy ever

appeared he was to have his mother’s share of the estate, and it is not

an inconsiderable amount, James. He is independent of you. He need ask

nothing of you. I was taking him home to his own.”