CHAPTER VII.
“Sick to the soul.”
On his return to Denver, Morning found no difficulty in speedily closing up his business and converting his mortgages into money. In about ten days he was ready to depart for San Francisco, where he intended purchasing the necessary machinery for five mills of forty stamps each. His sole remaining business in Denver was the execution and delivery to the purchaser of a conveyance of some city property which he had sold.
While breakfasting at the Windsor that morning, his appetite was not increased by reading from the Associated Press telegrams the following:—
“MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE.
“BOSTON, February 13, 1893.
“There was celebrated this morning at the residence of the bride’s father, Professor John Thornton, in Roxbury, the nuptials of one of Boston’s greatest heiresses and acknowledged belles, the beautiful and accomplished Miss Ellen Thornton, to the Baron Von Eulaw. The happy couple will sail on the Servia to-morrow, and will proceed directly to Berlin. It is intimated that our fair countrywoman may be restored to us after a season by the appointment of the Baron Von Eulaw as envoy at Washington from the German Empire.”
Forgotten? Ah, no! there are experiences in life that may never be forgotten. Time rolls by, and against the door of the mausoleum where we buried our dead out of sight the years have piled events and emotions and distractions, and the passion which we once thought immortal becomes now an episode, and by and by a dream, and at last a vague and shadowy remembrance, and one day some new and mighty fact stalks forward, and sweeps away all obstructions, and the doors of the tomb are reopened, and the dead of our heart come forth, bringing to us sometimes the joys of life’s morning, and sometimes the bitterness of a new death.
David Morning walked from the hotel to his office without noticing many of the friendly greetings bestowed upon him, for his thoughts were busy with the past, and there was a dull, dead pain tugging at his heart strings.
The notary who had taken Morning’s acknowledgment to the deed whose delivery would complete his business in Denver, brought the instrument to Morning’s office, and, not finding him in, slipped the paper in the top of a desk with a circular cover. This desk was one of Morning’s first possessions in the way of office furniture, and, finding it convenient and commodious, he had caused it to accompany every change of quarters which his increasing business had from time to time rendered necessary.
Entering his office, Morning hurriedly threw back the cover of the desk, not noticing the deed in the top of it until it was too late to prevent the paper from being carried by the revolving cover into the interior of the desk, where it could only be reached by removing a portion of the back. The services of a mechanic from a neighboring furniture store were procured, the back of the desk was removed, and Morning recovered the deed.
He also recovered another paper. It was an unopened letter addressed to himself, which had doubtless reached its resting-place in the old desk through the same process as that which carried the deed there. The envelope was covered with dust; it was postmarked “Boston, Mass., February, 1883”—ten years before—and the superscription was in the handwriting of Ellen Thornton, now the Baroness Von Eulaw.
Dispatching the recovered deed to its destination, Morning closed the door of his private office, and, with breath coming thick and fast, proceeded to open and peruse the missive. It read as follows:—
ROXBURY, Mass., Feb. 13, 1883.
MY DEAR MR. MORNING: This letter may bring you a moment of surprise; if it be not a surprise mixed with chagrin, I am less justly repaid than perhaps I deserve for that which may seem my instability of purpose. But I have heard you say that you scarcely knew which was the weaker, the man who changed his mind too often or who never changed it at all, and in this recollection I find refuge.
With men as intuitive as yourself, explanations are almost superfluous. Nevertheless, you will bear with me while I pass under review a few of the causes which have led to this action.
After the change in my father’s fortunes and our subsequent removal to Boston, life began to open up new possibilities, and what with the increased demands upon my time, and the many beguilements of flattering tongues, together with—let me confess it—an unresting desire to forget the act of folly which had shut out every ray of sunshine from my heart, as I found too late, I at length fixed my footing to the artificial conditions of the situation, and for a brief time flattered myself that you were forgotten.
My letter, if written at all, ought to stop here. But thus much I have learned—that passion tinctured with sorrow is the greatest of egotists, and that the feeling that brooks no measure of repression or discouragement inspires a degree of courage little short of defiance. Thus stimulated, I feel a growing joy in being able to surmount artificial restraint and to address you as I know you would wish an honest girl who loves you with her whole heart, should speak.
What will you think of me? Will you call me fickle and unworthy? unwomanly? In a word, will you misunderstand me? How could I know till my eyes were opened that there was but one sun? that the whole world to me was adjusted to your simple, noble qualities? How could I know that the music of the spheres meant the remembered tones of your voice, that your face should haunt alike every scene of splendor and every secret shadow, or that I would give my patrimony to be able to pass my fingers through your brown locks for ever so brief a moment?
What am I writing? I dare not read it. How confident I feel, how transported with the thought that you may in remembering me forget my much-repented dictum, or at least relegate it to the Quixotic realm to which it belongs.
As I near the close of my letter, I am possessed with a new fear. Shall I dare send it? What if you shall have discovered new powers in yourself, new persons out in the broad world, which shall make you glad of your escape? It is so long since I have heard of you, and life is so full of new things, I forget that you too have quite the right to change your mind. If this be your condition, do not, I beg of you, write me. I could not bear the humiliation as your great heart bore yours. Consign my letter, then, to the great silence, and only remember me as ever and always your sincere friend,
ELLEN.
What was his colossal fortune to David Morning now? Out of the past came this message of life and love; of a love gone forever, and a life which now seemed barren of purpose and hope.
What is time but a name? The intervening years shriveled into nothingness, and he was again bathing in the light which shone from the eyes of the woman he loved, the one woman on earth or in heaven for him, yesterday and to-day and forever. Again he walked with her under the whispering foliage along the brow of the hill which crowns the Queen City of the plains, and watched the burning sunsets illumine the lavender mountains and change the clouds into embers of glory. Again he sat beside her, reading some tender or beautiful or stirring passage from poet or essayist. Again, at the good-night going, he felt her dainty kiss, thrilling his soul to ecstasy.
And she was lost to him now, lost through his pride, lost through his vanity, lost through such dense and inexcusable stupidity as never before possessed or afflicted a man. He had taken her girlish doubts as final. He had thought to exhibit his manly pride—which was, after all, only conceit of self—as an offset to her presuming to question the possibility of her being possessed by a great love for him. Coward that he was to surrender this glorious creature without an effort. Dolt that he was to so mistake her maidenly hesitancy.
And she—dear heart—had loved him after all. She had condescended to summon him, and he had never received the message. What had she thought of his failure to respond? What must she have thought of him, save that he was a cruel, conceited creature unworthy of her love? What humiliation his unexplained silence must for a time have brought to her gentle spirit! What wreck and misery had not this miscarriage of her missive brought to his life!
If he could have identified the clerk or postman whose carelessness had misplaced her letter, he would have beaten him in his fury, and he wished for an ax that he might hew and batter to splinters the inanimate desk whose machinery had been instrumental in wrecking two lives.
Were they hopelessly wrecked? He caught his breath at the thought. He at least was free, and whatever else might come never would he be otherwise. Never should wile of woman enchant him, never should desire for home and love and perpetuation of race and name beguile him. He would walk lonely to the gates of the eternal morning, and wait for her beyond the portal, and carry her soul upon the pinions of his immortal love to the uttermost confines of ether, where no entrapments or environments of earth could follow or molest them, and in the glow of the astral light he would claim her as his own, and give himself to her forever and ever.
Ellen’s letter released the passion which had been locked for ten years in the silent chambers of David Morning’s soul, and it possessed the man, and mastered him with throes of bitter agony and throbs of ecstatic delight. His cheeks were wet with the tears of disappointment, and again to the very center of him he laughed with joy as he covered the letter with kisses.
“She loved me, my darling, my own, she loved me!” he cried. “Maybe she loves me yet!” and again his heart beat wildly. “For ten years she remained unmated. But yesterday she married this German nobleman, this Baron Von Eulaw. Surely love could not have moved her to the union. Surely with her nature she could not have forgotten her first love. She was outraged and humiliated and incensed at the silence and seeming indifference of the man she really loved, and so she married, for reasons common enough in society.”
Was this tie irrevocable? Could it not be severed? Might it not be possible that happiness should yet be in store on this earth for his darling and himself? He was now in possession of the lever that moves the world. Should he not use this power for her and for himself, as well as for the benefit of mankind?
Who was this German baron that he should stand against him? There were hundreds of barons, but only one owner of the Morning mine. He would use millions piled upon millions to bring his Ellen to his arms.
Napoleon divorced Josephine and married Maria Louisa. Cæsar put away one wife and married another. David placed Uriah in the front of the battle. Many kings had used their power to readjust to their liking their own domestic relations and those of their subjects.
He was a mightier king than Darius. He ruled greater armies than any ever commanded by Bonaparte. Not the Kaiser or the Romanoff upon their imperial thrones could exercise so great a power as David Morning.
He would bid his golden armies serve their master. Walpole had truthfully said that “every man has his price,” and the Baron Von Eulaw probably had his. How many millions would this titled Dutchman take for his wife? ten? fifty? a hundred? a thousand?—he should have them multiplied again and again.
Morning smiled grimly at the grotesque fancy. Von Eulaw aspired to the American embassy. Mayhap he was not covetous but ambitious. Very well, he would ask the Hohenzollern to name his figures for offices and ribbons and rank to be accorded to the baron in exchange for a surrender of his American wife. He would pay off the national debt of Germany if necessary. Or he would buy the baron a kingdom. There were always thrones for sale for cash or approved credit in the Danubian country. That of Servia was just now in the market, and even that of Spain or Portugal might be purchased.
Maybe the baron loved his wife. How could he help loving her? Curse him, what right had he to love her? What if Morning emulated the example of the Psalmist and caused the Baroness Von Eulaw to be made a widow? Money would accomplish this, and none be the wiser.
None? Ah, what of the God that rules worlds and directs the eternities, the God that was in and a part of David Morning, the God that punishes and pities, the God that smote David, that struck down Cæsar, that gave Napoleon to an exile’s death, and Henry Tudor to centuries of infamy?
If Morning gained his Ellen’s arms through wrong to another, through wrong to his own imperial and impartial conscience, there would be bitterness in her kisses, and misery in his soul; they would go maimed and chained to the gates of death, and in the other land they should meet not again.
And, inch by inch and minute by minute, Ohromades and Ahriman fought for the soul of David Morning. The ebon-plumed spirit of darkness and the silver-armored essence of light battled along the lines of heaven and hell, and the light triumphed, and darkness was hurled from the battlements, and peace and strength came to the aching soul.
He would wait. He would not even jeopardize her peace by righting himself in her esteem. He would offer no explanation. He would wait, wait for the decree of the Father, wait for the hour of meeting in honor. If it came on earth, well; if it came only through the help of death, still well, for “life is short but love immortal.” In the other land there would be readjustments, and each soul not mated truly here would find its true mate there, in a mating that should be prevented by no power, and limited by no death, but should endure so long as the planets circle in their orbits.
How did he know this? Not through any evidence presented to the material senses, nor through any logic of the schools. It is the spiritual sense of man that perceives his spiritual life. No priest can give him his intuitions, no scoffer can take them from him, and the querulous questionings of science are but as the babblings of infancy in the august presence of the soul.
And for full five minutes David Morning sat with his face between his hands, then rose and went forth a conqueror.