# Saxe Holm's Stories, Second Series/Susan Lawton's Escape

   Probably no two women ever had a "better time" in the world than did Mrs. Lawton and Susan Sweetser for the next three years. I pass by all details of these years spent abroad, because I am not telling the story of Susan's life, only of two days in her life—of an escape she had. This two days' story is worth telling, partly because each hour of the two days was dramatic, partly because there is in the story a lesson—a moral—which any two who love may sometime come to need.

### SUSAN LAWTON'S ESCAPE.

I never heard of a girl who had her own way so completely, so delightfully, and so respectably as Susan Sweetser did. She was an only child. Her mother died when she was a baby; her father, who had never married again, died when she was sixteen. He left a large fortune, the income of which was to be paid to Susan until she was twenty-one, and at that time the whole estate was to come into her hands as unreservedly as if she had been a man. Her guardian, whose function was simply a nominal one, was her uncle by marriage, Thomas Lawton, a man not more than a dozen years older than herself,—an easy going, indolent, rich fellow, who never gave himself any concern about Susan further than the depositing in the bank each quarter the thousands of dollars which she might spend as she liked. Mrs. Thomas Lawton was a girl only a few years older than Susan, and one after her own heart; and when, two years after the death of her father, Susan took up her abode in the Lawton ​household, nothing could be jollier than the life the two women led together. The death of her father was no personal loss to Susan; she had seen him only in her brief school vacations; he was a reserved and silent man, wholly absorbed in making a fortune. He had always had the theory that when the fortune was big enough, and Susan was old enough to leave school, he would take some leisure, enjoy himself, and become acquainted with his daughter. But Death had other plans for Mr. Sweetser. He cut him down one night, before that interval of leisure had arrived, and before Susan was old enough to leave school, but not before the fortune had grown large enough to satisfy the utmost wants of any reasonable being. More because of her own interest in study than from any exercise of authority or even influence on her guardian's part, Susan remained at school two years after her father's death. During these two years she held, by virtue of her independence and her riches, a position in the school which was hardly that of a scholar. A young lady who had a carriage and horses at her command, and thousands of dollars every quarter for the expenditure of which she was responsible to nobody but herself, was not likely to be held in much restraint by her teachers. Madame Delancy was only too glad to avail herself of Miss Sweetser's carriage on occasion; and Miss Sweetser's generosity, in countless ways, smoothed difficulties in the Delancy ​household, which was like all boarding-school households, straitened at times, and forced to keep up show at expense of comfort. If Susan had not been of a singularly sweet nature, this abnormal freedom and independence, at the age of sixteen, would have hurt her sadly. As it was, the chief fault developed in her by her situation was an imperiousness of will, or impatience, if obstacles of any sort hindered her in carrying out a project. But as her projects were usually of a magnanimous and generous kind, this impatience did not seem unlovely; and the imperious manner was often charming. Her schemes could not be said to be unselfish, because they usually were for pleasures or profits which she desired for herself; but on the other hand they could not be said to be selfish, because she made them so wide in their scope, including everybody she could easily reach. If she wanted to go to an entertainment of any sort, she took her whole class, sometimes the whole school; when she went to drive in her pretty, blue-lined carriage, somebody else always went too,—Madame Delancy herself, or some teacher, or some friend. When she wanted strawberries, she ordered them into the house by the dozen boxes, and had them given to everybody at breakfast. And she did not do this with the least air of patronage or condescension; she did not think about its being any favor to people, or that she laid them under an obligation; she simply liked to do it; it was her way; there was ​no special friendliness in it; no exalted notion either about conferring happiness; why she liked to do so, she never thought; and if she had thought and questioned, would have been puzzled to tell; she did it as little children gregariously by instinct do, when they exclaim, "Oh, let 's do" this, or that, or the other—"it will be so nice!" That this was a surface and sensuous view of life, cannot be denied; but then, we are not drawing an ideal character; we are merely telling the exact truth about Susan Sweetser. She was not a saint by any manner of means, nor the stuff of which saints are made. She got no end of preaching to from pastors and from self-elected advisers, who saw in the free-souled young heiress a great opportunity for that obnoxious practice known as "doing good." But against all their lectures and sermons Susan's light-heartedness was a more effectual barrier than the hardest-heartedness in the world could have been. When they came, asking her for money, she pulled out her purse and gave it to them; not always so much as they asked for, because on some such points Susan had her own ideas of proportion and disproportion; yet she always gave liberally. But when they came preaching to her that she herself should do this and that, should go here and there, should be this and that, Susan smiled pleasantly, said little, but went on her way undisturbed. The odd thing was that she kept this undisturbed placidity of being comfortable in her own fashion, in ​spite of the most dogged orthodoxy of religious belief.
Just before Susan was eighteen years old, and a few weeks before her graduation at Madame Delancy's, Mr. Thomas Lawton died. Mrs. Lawton was now left as free and independent, and nearly as rich, as Susan. Her love for her husband had been very sincere as far as it went, but it had not been of such a nature as to make his death a heart-breaking thing to her. Life looked very attractive to Mrs. Thomas Lawton as one morning, a few months after her husband had died, and six weeks after Susan had left school, she and Susan sat together in the handsome library, planning what they would do for themselves for the winter.
"Bell," said Susan, energetically, "it 's perfectly splendid that you can chaperon me everywhere! I 've always had a terror of the time when I 'd have to hire some lay figure of respectability to live with me and go about with me, and all that. I know I should have hated her. I expect I should have changed her as often as poor papa had to change cooks. But now it 's all right. You and I can go all over the world together. You can do what you like, because you 're a widow."
"Oh, don't Susan!" exclaimed Mrs. Lawton, deprecatingly. "How can you run on so?"
"Why, Bell, dear, I did n't mean to hurt your feelings," said Susan; but it 's true—a widow can go anywhere. If you had n't been married, you ​could n't chaperon me, don't you know? And your being my aunt makes it all the better. You 'd never do for my chaperon in the world if it wer' n't for that, you young-looking thing, you! I declare you don't look a day older than I do!"
Mrs. Bell Lawton did, indeed, look very young in her widow's cap, which lay in its graceful Marie Stuart triangle very lightly on her pretty blond hair, and made her look, as widow's caps always make young and pretty woman look, far less like a mourner than she would have looked without it.
"Now, Susan, don't talk nonsense," said Mrs. Lawton. "You know I 'm twenty-five next month, and I 'm sure that is antiquated. Oh, dear, if I were only eighteen, like you!"
"What then?" asked honest Susan. "Why is eighteen any better than twenty-five, Bell?"
"Oh, I don't know," replied Bell, confusedly. "I don't suppose it is any better?"
"I don't think it 's half so good," said Susan "or, at any rate, half so good as twenty-one. I 'm dying to be twenty-one. I want all my money!"
"Why, Susan Sweetser!" exclaimed Bell. "What on earth would you do with any more money? You can't spend all your income now."
"Can't I?" laughed Susan. "You just try me and see! I 'm overdrawn on this quarter already; and it 's so disagreeable to be told of it. Dear Uncle Tom never told me. He was a great deal nicer for a guardian than this old Mr. Clark is."
​Mr. Clark was the family lawyer, who was to act as Susan's guardian and business agent for the next three years, and who had already made himself tiresome to her, by trying to instill into her mind some ideas of system and economy in expenditure.
"Overdrawn!" cried Bell. "You extravagant girl! What have you been doing?"
"I don't really know," laughed Susan. "I never keep accounts. I let poor Madame Delancy have a thousand; that was one thing. She 'll pay me in the spring; and those riding parties were awfully dear. Mr. Clark says I must n't pay for my friends horses any more but I don't think it is any of his business. Lots of the girls I want to have go can't go any other way; their fathers can't afford it."
"You 're a dear generous soul," said Bell, admiringly.
"No I 'm not," said Susan. "There is n't any generosity in my sending Sally Sanford a horse, when I want her in my party, and know she can't come any other way. It 's to please myself I do it."
"Well, I think it 's generous for all that," said Bell, "and anybody in the world would say so."
"Anybody in the world will say anything," replied Susan, satirically; "there is one thing I made up my mind about long ago, and that is, never to mind what the world says, either for or against a thing or a person."
​"You can't afford to do that way, Sue," said Mrs. Bell, who was conservative by nature and training. "You 'll get talked about awfully, the first thing you know."
"Let them talk!" laughed Susan. "They 'll talk anyway. It might as well be about me."
"No, it might n't!" persisted Bell, who had her own reasons for laying stress on this point with Susan. "No, it might n't. I tell you, Sue, a woman can't afford to be talked about."
"Can't afford? What do you mean by that? How much does it cost?" said Susan, scornfully.
Mrs. Bell was not clever enough to answer Susan in her own phraseology, and say, "It costs loss of position, loss of the best regard of the best people, loss of absolute trust from men whose trust would be honor, and might be love;" she only said, meekly:—
"You know as well as I do, Sue, that nobody really thinks so well of a woman who is much talked about. I don't think a woman can be too careful, for my part; especially, Sue, women situated as you and I are; we have got to be very careful indeed."
This was an opportunity Mrs. Bell had been anxiously awaiting for a long time. She had felt that it was necessary to define their positions and have some such matters thoroughly understood in the outset of her life with Susan, but she had lacked moral courage to open the discussion.
"I 'm never going to be careful, as you call it, ​Bell," cried Susan. "Never! and you 'll have to make up your mind to that. I hate it, the sneaking, time-serving, calculating thing. It is next door to lying and stealing. I m going always to say what I think, do what I like, have what friends I please, without the slightest reference to what the world says; whether they call it strange or not, proper or not, right or not, it 's nothing to me. I don't care a straw for the whole world's opinion, so long as I am sure I am right."
"Then you 'll get into horrible scrapes; that 's all; I can tell you that," said Bell, hotly.
"Why, I 'm never going to do anything improper," retorted Susan; "and how shall I get into horrible scrapes?"
"Oh, millions of ways," replied Bell, despairingly. "When you 're as old as I am, you 'll know the world better. I tell you women can't do that way; and I don't think it 's womanly."
"What is n't womanly?" said Susan, in a pettish tone.
"Why, not caring," said Bell; "I think it 's a woman's place to care very much what people think of her, and to try not to offend anybody's prejudices, and above all things, not to go against custom."
Susan groaned.
"Oh, pshaw, Bell," she said, "what kind of a life would that be? I 'd as soon be a cartridge in cartridge case, numbered and packed. But don't let us quarrel over this. We shall never think alike about it."
​"No, I suppose not," replied Bell, gravely. "But if we 're going to live together all our lives, it 's a great pity we should not, especially if, as you say, I 'm going to be your chaperon."
"Oh, you motherly, grandmotherly old girl!" cried Susan, kissing her. "Don't you worry yourself; I won't do anything you don't want me to. I believe in caring what one's friends say."
"You sweet, dear Sue!" cried Bell, kissing her warmly in turn; "I know you won't."
From all which it is easy to see that Mrs. Thomas Lawton's chaperonage of Miss Susan Sweetser would not be a very rigid one.
Susan's phrase, "What friends I please," had not been a random one. For more than a year her intimacy with Professor Balloure had been such as to give rise to some ill-natured comment in the town, and to no little anxiety in the minds of her friends. Edward Balloure had been professor of belles-lettres in one of our large colleges in his youth, but marrying early a woman of fortune, he had at once relinquished his professorship, and had ever since led a life of indolent leisure, dabbling in literature in an idle fashion, now and then throwing off a creditable pamphlet or paper, but for the most part doing nothing except enjoy himself. He was a handsome man and a brilliant talker; everybody liked him; nobody loved him, not even his wife, who had soon found out that he had married her for her money and not from affection. This knowledge, ​instead of crushing her, as it would a woman of weaker nature, had turned her into a cold, hard, bitter, ill-natured woman, whom it, seemed, now, nobody could like or live with; yet those who knew both her and her husband when they were young said that Martha Balloure, at the time of her marriage, had been an impulsive, loving, lovable girl. Be that as it may, she was now an unlovely, cynical, sharp-tongued, heartless woman, without a friend in the community, and the verdict of the world was always, "Poor Professor Balloure! What a sad fate it was that tied him to such a woman!" Mrs. Balloure herself perpetually fed this expression by her unconcealed contempt for and dislike of her husband. She had a sad lack of dignity of character, and could never forego an opportunity of a fling at the man whose name she bore. When people praised him to her,—said, for instance, "How well Professor Balloure talks!" Mrs. Balloure would reply, with a sneer, "Yes, outside his own house." Professor Balloure, on the contrary, never spoke of his wife but with the utmost respect; always treated her with the utmost courtesy, in the presence of others. Some close observers noticed that his eye never rested on her face—never met hers if it could be avoided; and when Mrs. Balloure replied bitterly, as she had been more than once heard to, on his offering her some small attentions, "Oh, pray don't trouble yourself; you know you would n't do it if there were no one ​here!" these same close observers wondered whether, after all, the brilliant Professor Balloure might not be a hypocrite. But he talked so well on high themes, he was so full of noble sentiments, so sure to be on the right side of all questions,—theoretical or practical,—it was hard to believe the man hollow-hearted. And yet, hollow he was to the very core, always excepting his sentiment toward Susan Sweetser. This was the one true, genuine thing he bore about him. He had been irresistibly attracted toward her while she was a mere child. Her frankness, her courage, her generosity, all allured him by the very greatness of the contrast they bore to his own traits. Out of his own meagerness was born his appreciation of her nobility. He looked back at his own youth,—at the time when he sold himself for money,—and he wondered, with passionate admiration, at the fearlessness, generosity, independence of this girl. Susan had no beauty to thrill a man's senses; but she had the perpetually varying charm of overflowing life and activity, and fullness of thought. When Professor Balloure was inquired of by Madame Delancy if he would give a course of lectures, accompanied by recitations, to the young ladies of her senior class, he recollected instantly that Mrs. Lawton had told him that this would be Susan's last year at school, and he consented to give the lectures for the sole and simple purpose of thus bringing himself into relation with her ​"How kind of Professor Balloure!" everybody said. "Such a help to Madame Delancy! How kind of him!"
"Do you think so?" sneered Mrs. Balloure. She did not know what her husband's motive was, but that it was not kindness she was sure. She did not trouble herself to find out, for she did not care. She spoke of the lecture course as "one of Mr. Balloure's whims," and dismissed it from her mind.
She never went into society with him, and really knew nothing of his habitual manner of half-insidious, half-chivalrous gallantry toward young women. If she had she would not have cared; she despised him too thoroughly to be wounded by any thing he might do; and the one great flaw in her nature—her lack of personal dignity—would have prevented her suffering as most women would from mortification. If anybody had gone to her and confided to her proofs of her husband's having had even an intrigue, she would most probably have said in her usual bitter tone, "You are surprised, then!" and have dropped the subject, as one of entire indifference to her.
It is an odd thing how very much franker a manner some types of hypocrites wear than a really frank person ever has. Edward Balloure had an offhand, hilarious, half-confidential way with everybody. He seemed almost lacking in proper reticence and secretiveness, so familiarly did he talk with people ​whom he desired to please; and he had a large, clear, light-blue eye, which looked full in everybody's face, and never wavered. It is only after a long and more or less sad experience of the world, that we learn to recognize such eyes as the eyes of traitors. I know to-day two women who are base and treacherous as if the very blood of Judas Iscariot filled their veins, and they both have sunny, clear, unflinching, light-blue eyes; and I have known a man who could, on occasion, tell cowardly lies with as steady a gaze into your face as an honest man could give,—and he too had light-blue eyes,—sunny, clear, unflinching.
If anybody had said to Susan Sweetser, that Professor Balloure was not an upright, sincere man, she would have blazed with indignation. His beauty, his brilliancy, his seeming kindliness, impressed her in the outset; and when by degrees he singled her out from all her class, and made evident and especial efforts to interest and instruct her, her admiration took on an affectionate and grateful quality which made her very attractive, and gave Edward Balloure great pleasure. Nothing was further from his intention than to have any flirtation with Susan. He was too cold-blooded and conscious ever to compromise himself for any woman; and he really did care for Susan herself too truly and warmly to be willing to compromise her. But he did intend to enjoy himself; and he did find a greater pleasure in teaching Susan Sweetser, in ​watching her quick comprehension, her originality of thought, her eager impulsiveness, than he had found in anything for many a long year. The very best of him came out to, and for, and with, Susan. Gradually their intercourse dropped from the relation of pupil with teacher into that of friend with friend. The technical instruction continued, but its atmosphere was new; there was a partial renewal of the old bond. Edward Balloure could not help reverencing this girl, whose belief in him, he knew, had its foundation in her immovable belief in honor and truth; whose affection for him individually was, he knew, also, based on her belief that he was honorable and truthful. Probably Susan was the only human being to whom he would have found it difficult to lie. He said to himself sometimes when he looked in her face:—
"Now, such a woman as that I never could have had the heart to deceive."
It soothed his uneasy consciousness of his hypocritical past to assume that, if his wife had been a stronger person he might have been saved from his deceit. But he was mistaken. If it had suited his purposes, and the purposes had been strong enough, he would have deceived Susan Sweetser as readily to-day as he had deceived his wife fifteen years before. For a year and a half now the relation between Professor Balloure and Susan had gone steadily on, growing warmer and closer. When the lectures at Madame Delancy's ceased, and Susan had ​left school, nothing was more natural than that she should continue some of her studies under Professor Balloure's guidance. And this was the ostensible pretext under shelter of which there continued an amount of intimacy which would have been otherwise inadmissible. But that it was partly a pretext, and that the intimacy was for Susan an undesirable one, Mrs. Lawton had come to feel most decidedly; and there had been several earnest conversations between them on the subject. The most baffling thing to Mrs. Lawton in these conversations was the utter impossibility of making Susan comprehend what was objected to. She simply could not understand. Professor Balloure had been her teacher; he was her teacher still; he was forty and she was eighteen; and above all he was a married man, and to Susan's mind there was something absurd as well as indelicate in any suggestion that there could be harm either to her or to him in their friendship.
"Why, I should as soon think of your objecting to an intimacy between me and papa, if he were alive," said Susan, vehemently; "if I ever could have had an intimacy with papa," she added, sadly. "Papa was only forty when he died; he would only be as much older than Professor Balloure, now, as you are than I; there 's no real difference of age between you and me."
At such times as this, poor Mrs. Lawton always fell back hopelessly on the assertion that Susan ​did not know the world; to which Susan always retorted that she hoped she never should know it, and there matters rested, in no wise altered by the discussions, except that Susan was somewhat hurt by them, inasmuch as each one inevitably took away a little of her fresh innocence and inability to comprehend evil. Mrs. Lawton loved Susan better than she loved any one else in the world, and the purpose had been growing stronger and stronger for weeks to take Susan away from home and break up her intimacy with Edward Balloure. The purpose coincided also with her own wishes, for the great air-castle of her life had been to spend some years in Europe. The one short and hurried trip she had taken there with her husband, soon after their marriage, had been merely sufficient to make her long to go again. She had often spoken of this to Susan, so there seemed nothing abrupt or unreasonable when on the present morning, as they sat together in the library, discussing plans for the winter, she suddenly said:—
"Susan, we 'll go abroad."
Susan sprang to her feet, her face flushed with pleasure.
"You don't mean it, Bell?"
"But I do!" said Mrs. Lawton; "I 've been meaning it all along."
"You blessed creature!" cried Susan. "I 've been dying to go ever since I could recollect. I have had it on my tongue's end five hundred times ​in the last three months to propose it to you; but I did not like to. I was afraid you would not want to go and would think you must go for my sake."
"Why should n't I want to go?" exclaimed Mrs. Lawton, wonderingly.
"Oh, I was afraid you might not feel like it," was Susan's evasive reply. She did not like to betray to Mrs. Lawton that she had doubted whether she would be willing to leave her parents, now both very old; also whether her afflictions were not yet too fresh in her mind to permit her full enjoyment of travel. Neither of these considerations having entered into Mrs. Lawton's mind, she did not suspect any hidden meaning in Susan's words, and went eagerly on in the discussion of their plans.
Nothing is easier than for two women of large fortunes and assured incomes to set off on a delightful tour of foreign travel. All paths become easy, thus smoothed by money, and so Mrs. Lawton and Susan Sweetser found. Probably no two women ever had a "better time" in the world than did these two for the next three years. I pass by all details of these years spent abroad, because I am not telling the story of Susan's life, only of two days in her life—of an escape she had. This two days' story is worth telling, partly because each hour of the two days was dramatic, partly because there is in the story a lesson—a moral—which any two who love may sometime come to need.
There are several years now of Susan's life to be ​sketched in outline before we come to those days of danger and escape.
When she and Mrs. Lawton returned from Europe and settled themselves again in their old home, the event produced no small stir in all circles. The two richest women of the town,—each young, each enjoying absolute control of her property, each bright and individual, each gay and pleasure-loving, and keeping together a house of free and gracious hospitalities. What Susan Sweetser and Bell Lawton did, said, wore, afforded all the material that a whole town full of first-class gossips could need; and what Susan Sweetser and Bell Lawton offered and provided and arranged for in way of hospitable entertainment was enough to keep social life going from one year's end to the other. It is not necessary to say that they became the leaders of the town; that their house was its social centre. First and foremost among the men who sought the pleasure and the honor of familiar and friendly footing in the house was Professor Edward Balloure. He found his warm-hearted little pupil and friend changed into a brilliant woman of the world; no less warm-hearted, no less impulsive, than of old, but educated, trained, developed, into such a woman as nothing but years of European travel and culture could have produced. It was not necessary now for Bell to explain social convenances to Susan. It was not necessary for her to point out to her the dangers of intimacies with men who had ​wives. Many men had loved, or had seemed to love, Susan during these years. She had been somewhat moved two or three times by their passion and devotion; but she had never really loved. It began to look as if she were obdurate of nature, in spite of all her warm-heartedness. Sometimes a fear came into Bell's mind that her old relation with Edward Balloure still stood between Susan and all other men; and when she saw the professor at his post again, handsome, brilliant, fascinating, as ever, devoted as ever, plausible as ever, in his assumption of the rôle of a privileged mentor, Bell Lawton groaned and said within herself, "How is such a man as this ever to be circumvented?" A sort of hate grew up in her heart toward him. Edward Balloure recognized it; he had the keenest of instincts, and knew on the instant the woman who trusted and admired him from the woman who unconsciously shrank away when he approached her. But he only laughed cynically when he saw poor Bell's desperate efforts to be civil to him, and said in his cold-blooded heart:—
"She 's much mistaken, if she thinks she can come between Susan and me."
Bell had too much good sense to try. Beyond an occasional half laughing or satirical reference to Professor Balloure's devotion, she avoided the subject. She made no attempt to exclude him from the house. On the contrary, she endeavored to make it evident to the whole world that he was one of ​their established, intimate friends,—her own, as well as Susan's. And she absolutely compelled poor Mrs. Balloure's continual presence with her husband on all occasions of special festivity, until the poor woman relaxed a little from her rigid severity, and became, as Susan ungenerously remarked one day, "a little less like the death's head at the banquet."
Susan's own manner to the professor baffled Bell's utmost scrutiny; it was always open as day always affectionate; always reverential; but there was a look now in her eyes when they rested on his face which made Bell uneasy. It was a groping, questioning look, as if she were feeling her way in the dark; it was a great change from Susan's old child-like trust. Edward Balloure himself felt this, and was more disconcerted by it than he would have been by any form of direct and distrustful inquiry. It put him perpetually on his guard; led him to be always discreet, even in his closest and most intimate moments with Susan: much more discreet than he would otherwise have been; for day by day, Edward Balloure was learning to love Susan Sweetser more and more warmly. The vague remoteness in which she held herself; the strange charm of mingled reverence and doubt, affection and withdrawal in her manner toward him, held him under a spell which no other woman could have woven. She was an endlessly interesting study to him, and that is the strongest fascination which one human being can possess for another.
​Among all the men who visited at the house, and who were evident admirers of Susan, the only one whom Edward Balloure feared was Tom Lawton, a distant cousin of Bell's husband. If Professor Balloure had said to any one in the town that Tom Lawton was the one man he thought Susan Sweetser might possibly marry, the remark would have been greeted with exclamations of surprise, and possibly laughter.
Tom Lawton was a lawyer; a plodding, hard working lawyer, not a pleader; there was not a trace of the rhetorician about Tom; he could not have made a speech in court to have saved his life.
He made very few anywhere, for that matter. But for a good, sound, common-sense opinion; for slow, sure, accurate working-up of a case; for shrewd dealing with, and reading of, human nature, men went to Tom Lawton. When Susan and Bell returned from Europe, Tom, being the nearest relative Bell had at hand, drifted very naturally into the position of chief adviser in the affairs of the two women. He was a man of such habitual quiet of manner, that one grew almost immediately accustomed to his presence, and felt at home with him. All dogs and all children ran to him; and his dark, blue-grey eye, which had usually a half stern look, twinkled instantly whenever he stooped to them. He was not good-looking. His face had nothing striking about it, except its expression of absolute honesty, good-will, and a certain sort of ​indomitableness which came very near looking like obstinacy, and no doubt did often take on that shape. His figure was stout and ungraceful; and long years of solitary, hard work had given him the manners of a recluse, and not of a man of the world. Before Edward Balloure had seen Tom Lawton one hour in Susan Sweetser's presence, he knew that he loved her. Tom made no effort to join the circle of gay talkers of which she was the centre; he did not pay her one of the most ordinary attentions of society; but he watched her with a steady, contented gaze, which to Edward Balloure's sharpened instinct was unmistakable.
Professor Balloure had had occasion to know some of Tom Lawton's traits very thoroughly. They had encountered each other once, in some business matters where trusts were involved, and where the professor's interests and Tom's sense of honor had been at variance. The calm immovableness which Tom had opposed to every influence brought to bear on him; his entire superiority to all considerations save the one of absolute right; and his dogged indifference to any amount of antagonism and resentment, had altogether made up an aggregate of opposition such as the professor rarely encountered. He chose to call it Quixotic obstinacy; but in his heart he admired it, and respected Tom Lawton more than any man he knew.
"If he makes up his mind to marry Susan he 'll win her sooner or later," said the professor to ​himself. "They 're made of the same stuff; but she does n't care anything about him yet," and Edward Balloure groaned inwardly and cursed the fate which stood in shape of a poor helpless woman between him and this girl whom he so wilfully and sinfully loved.
It was quite true, as the professor had said, that Susan did not as yet care anything for Tom Lawton. In her girlhood she had been used to seeing him come and go in her uncle's house, quietly and familiarly; his silent presence had produced no impression on her fancy; in fact she hardly remembered him when she first met him after her return from Europe. But it was not many weeks before the quality in Tom's steady gaze, which had penetrated Edward Balloure's consciousness, penetrated Susan's also. She became afraid that Tom was beginning to love her too well.
"Dear Tom!" she thought to herself. "The dear fellow! What shall I do? Whatever put such a thought into his head? How shall I stop him? I don't want him to fall in love with me," and in the most right-minded way Susan set herself to work to prevent what had already happened. It had once been Susan's belief that any woman could save any man the pain of a direct refusal; but the fallacy of this belief in individual cases she had been taught by some trying experiences. However, she still clung to her theory, and endeavored to carry it out in practice as conscientiously as if ​she had never discovered it fallible; and many a man had in his heart reverently thanked Susan Sweetser for having graciously and kindly made it clear to him that he must not love her. But this Tom was not on a footing to be dealt with by the subtle processes which told on a less familiar friend. If he had been Bell's own brother, Bell could not have trusted him or loved him more, or have given him mere unqualifiedly the freedom of the house. That she never once thought of the possibility of his falling in love with Susan was owing partly to the quiet, middle-aged seriousness of his manner and ways, partly to her absorption in her anxiety about Professor Balloure's relation to Susan, and hers to him. And so the months went on, and the girls lived their gay and busy life, and every hour that could be spared from his business, Tom was with them, as unquestionedly and naturally as if he had been their legal protector. Indeed it was not in frequently supposed by strangers, that he was the head of the house.
Susan was uneasy. She was distressed. She had come to have so true an affection for Tom that the thought of having to inflict on him at some not very distant day so cruel a hurt as to refuse his love was terrible to her.
"If only he could know beforehand," she said, "he could leave off loving me just as well as not. He is one of those quiet, undemonstrative men that can make up their mind to love any woman that they think best to love."
​From which it is plainly to be seen that Susan did not yet know men analytically. She was yet too much under the influence of the presence of an idealist who could talk eloquently and mysteriously on the subject of unconquerable passions. Susan made several blundering attempts to make Tom see what she wanted him to see; but Tom was obtuse; he was basking in the sun of Susan's presence, and not acknowledging to himself distinctly that he wanted her for his wife. Susan was right in one respect: Tom was quite capable of leaving off loving her if he resolved to. But it would take more to make him resolve to than Susan supposed. At last, one day, in one of those sudden, unpremeditated, accidental moments which are always happening between men and women whose relations are not clear, there came a chance for Susan to say,—exactly what she never knew, and Tom never could tell her, but something which made Tom understand clearly that she wanted to save him from falling in love with her.
Tom looked at her for one second with a gaze which was stern in its intensity; then he said:—
"You 're a good, kind, true girl, Sue. Don't you worry about me. I 'm all right."
And poor Susan was seized with the most mortifying fear that she had spoken needlessly. "Oh, dear!" she thought, "if it were anybody but Tom, how I should feel! But he is so good, he 'd never misunderstand a woman nor laugh at her!"
​And everything went on the same as before. Tom's eyes told just as plainly as ever that he loved the very spot where Susan stood. Bell looked on unconscious. Edward Balloure looked on in sullen despair. The world began to say that Tom Lawton cared about Susan Sweetser, and how absurd it was! He might know that a brilliant girl like that was never going to marry a plodding, middle-aged fellow like him; and Susan, meanwhile,—poor, perplexed Susan!—was perpetually asking herself whether, after all, Tom had really loved her or not. Weeks, months, a year went by, and to outside observers no change had come to any member of the little group. But the years write their records on human hearts as they do on trees, in hidden inner circles of growth, which no eye can see. When the tree falls, men may gather around and count the rings about its centre, and know how many times its sap has chilled in winter and glowed in spring. We wrap ourselves in the merciful veils of speech and behavior, and nobody can tell what a year has done to us. Luckily, even if we die, there is no sure sign which betrays us. As I said, at the end of a year no change which an outside observer would detect had come to any member of the little group. But if at any moment the hearts of Susan Sweetser, Tom Lawton, and Edward Balloure had been uncovered to the gaze of the world, there would have been revelations startling to all.
​Tom loved Susan now with a calm, concentrated purpose of making her his wife. There was in his feeling for her none of the impatience of a fiery passion. He would not have rebelled had he been told that she would not be his for years, so that he had been sure of her at last. He had gradually taken his position with her as her constant attendant, protector, adviser. In a myriad of ways he had made himself part of her daily life, and this, too, without once coming on the ordinary lover's ground of gifts, attentions, compliments. He never even sent her flowers; he never even said a flattering thing to, or of, her. He simply sat by her side, looked at her, and took care of her. How Edward Balloure chafed at all this is easy to imagine. When he met Tom in Sues presence,—and he was seldom out of it except in business hours,—he eyed him sometimes fiercely, sometimes almost imploringly. Tom had for Edward Balloure but one look, but one tone,—that of concealed contempt; the barest civility was all he could wrench from himself for the man whom he knew to be base, but whom Susan reverenced and loved. And Susan! It must be a more skillful pen than mine which could analyze the conflicting emotions which filled Susan's heart now. Professor Balloure occupied her imagination to a greater degree than she knew. She idealized him, and then let her thoughts dwell on the ideal she had made. She was full of sentiment about him, she leaned on his intellect, sought his ​opinions, was stimulated by his society. She talked better to him, and before him, than under any other circumstances. She yielded to him in many matters, small and great, as she had yielded when he was her teacher. She knew, also, her great power over him. In the bottom of her heart she knew that he loved her, though never once had he said to her a word which could offend her delicate sense of right. But one day, in a sudden and irrepressible mood, he had poured out to Mrs. Lawton such passionate avowals of his long admiration and affection for Susan that Bell had been terrified, and had spoken to him with the utmost severity. He pleaded so persistently to be forgiven, and moreover argued so plausibly that she had totally misconceived the real meaning of all he had said, that he made Bell feel ashamed of having resented his words, and half guilty herself of having misinterpreted them. Wily Edward Balloure! He thought that Bell would tell Susan of their conversation, and he watched the next day for some trace of its influence upon her. No trace was there. Her manner was as cordial as ever,—no more, no less so; and the professor could never make up his mind whether she had been told or not.
One day when Tom had been taking unusual pains about some matters for Susan, she looked up at him and said with a sudden and shame-stricken sense of how much she was perpetually receiving at his hands:—
​"Oh, Tom! how good you are! It is n't fair for you to be with me all the time, so——"
"Is n't fair!" exclaimed Tom. "What do you mean?"
Susan colored, but did not speak. He understood.
"Do you dislike to have me with you all the time?" he asked, emphatically.
"Oh, no!" cried Susan; "no. You know it is n't that"
"Then I am content," replied he. "It is all right."
Susan made no reply. Her eyes were fixed on the ground. Something he saw in her face made Tom bolder than one moment before he would have dared to be.
"One of these years, Sue, you and I will be married," he said, quietly.
She started, turned red, then pale, and stammered:—
"Why, Tom, I told you long ago——"
"Oh, yes,"—he interrupted her in a placid tone, "that 's all right. I understand it. It will be just as you say; but one of these years you 'll think it right," and Tom began to talk about something else as naturally and calmly as if no exciting topic had been broached.
When Susan thought over this extraordinary conversation she laughed and she cried. At one moment she thought it the most audacious ​impertinence a man ever committed; the next instant she thought it the sweetest daring that love ever dared, and a strange surrender of herself to its prophecy began in that very hour. No wonder. The prediction had almost a preternatural sound, as Tom said it; and while he spoke his eyes rested on hers with an authoritative tenderness which was very compelling.
After this day, Susan never felt sure that Tom was not right. After this day, Tom never felt a doubt; and from this day, Edward Balloure perceived in Susan a change which he could not define, but which made him uncomfortable. The searching, probing, questioning look in her eyes was gone. The affection remained, but the eager, restless inquiry had ceased. Had she found out? Or had she left off caring to know?
One day, in an impatient and ill-natured tone, Professor Balloure said to Susan:—
"Does Mr. Lawton really live in this house? I confess it is something of a trial that none of your friends can ever see you without having his company inflicted on them. He is a very stupid man."
Susan fixed her brown eyes steadily on Professor Balloure's face.
"If any of our friends find Mr. Lawton's company an infliction, they know how to avoid it. We do not think him a stupid person, and I trust him more than any other man I know," and, with this sudden and most unexpected shot, Susan walked away and sat down at the piano.
​Edward Balloure was, for once, dumb. When Susan stopped playing, he bent over her and said in a low tone:—
"I hope you will forgive me. I never dreamed that you had so strong a regard for Mr. Lawton. I thought he was Mrs. Lawton's friend, and somehow I had often fancied that he bored you."
"You were never more mistaken in your life, Professor Balloure," answered Susan, composedly. "Mr. Lawton is a person who makes you contented by his simple presence,—he is so quiet, and yet so full of vitality."
"She has studied Mr. Lawton then, feels a charm in his presence, and has reflected upon it enough to analyze it." All this passed through the professor's mind, and gave a peculiar bitterness to the coldly civil tone in which he replied, "Ah! I should not have thought that possible. It is only another of the many illustrations of the difference between the feminine and the masculine standards of judging men."
Susan colored, and was about to speak indignantly, changed her mind, closed her lips and smiled, and when Edward Balloure saw the smile, his heart sank within him. By that smile he knew that his reign, so far as it had been a reign, was over, and Tom Lawton's had begun.
Two weeks from that day Professor and Mrs. Balloure sailed for Europe. The sudden announcement of their plans caused no astonishment; it had ​always been the professor's way to set off at a day's notice. He had been a restless and insatiable traveler. But when it was known that his house was offered for rent, furnished, for three years, then people did wonder what was taking him away for so long a time. Nobody but Edward Balfoure knew. Bell Lawton suspected, but said nothing, and Susan did not so much as dream. She was surprised at herself, and had a half-guilty feeling that she did not more keenly regret his going. When she bade him good-by, she said, lightly:—
"Who knows where we shall meet next? Bell and I may run over next summer. We have talked of it."
"If I could think that, I should be very glad, indeed," replied the professor, earnestly. "But you will not come."
"What did he mean by that, Bell?" said Susan's after he had gone. "How does he know what we will do?"
Mrs. Lawton laughed, and skipping up to Susan's tide, kissed her on the forehead, and sang:—
"How does anybody know what anybody will do?
"'Wooed and married and a,'
Kissed and carried awa',
Is na the lassie well aff
That 's wooed and married and a'?'"
This chorus of an old Scotch ballad had been much on Mrs. Bell Lawton's lips of late.
​"Bell!" exclaimed Susan; "are you going to be married?"
"Perhaps," said Bell. "And you, Miss Susan?"
"No," said Susan, stoutly. "No! And you sha n't be. I can't spare you."
At this moment Tom entered, and Bell ran out of the room, singing:—
"'Wooed and married and a',
Kissed and carried awa!"
"Who 's married now?" asked Tom.
"Nobody," replied Susan. "But I 'm afraid Bell will be."
"Why, Sue!" said Tom; "it is n't possible that you have not seen all along that Bell would surely marry Fred Ballister?"
Susan looked aghast.
"I never thought of such a thing," she exclaimed. "Why, what will become of me?"
Tom looked in her face without speaking. If he had been a less reticent, less obstinate man, he would have poured out a voluble torrent of words just then; but he did not open his lips. He knew that Susan knew what his look meant. Yet he might have made it less hard for her. What could she say? She flushed and lowered her eyes, and finally said:—
"Oh, Tom!"
There was a world of appeal in the exclamation, ​if Tom would only have understood it; but he would not,—would not or did not.
"All right, Sue! All right!" he said, cheerily. "I shall never urge you. One of these days you 'll think it right to marry me. You 'll know when the time comes. All must be clear."
Susan could have cried with vexation. Did he mean to punish her for having gratuitously refused him before he had ever offered himself to her in words? No, surely Tom was too noble for that. Did he expect her to say to him in so many words, "Dear Tom, I am ready to marry you now?" Did she really and heartily want to marry him after all? She was happier when he was with her than when he was away. If a day passed without her seeing him she was restless and ill at ease. She found herself in all her plans and projects leaning on him, including him as inevitably as if they belonged to each other. But was this love? Susan was not wholly sure. Altogether Susan was quite miserable, and none the less so, it must be acknowledged, because Tom seemed so light-hearted, so content, so thoroughly at rest and satisfied with the state of things. Wise fellow! he had reason to be.
"I don't believe he really cares very much for me," said Susan, pettishly, to Bell one day. "If I were to tell him positively to-morrow that I would never marry him, I don't believe that he would mind it much."
"Oh, Sue, how can you say so?" cried Bell ​"Look at these last two years. Has Tom been out of your presence one hour when he could be in it?"
"No," said Sue. "That 's one way he 's brought me into this uncomfortable state about him. I 'm so used to him, I never could do without him in the world."
"Of course you can't," said Bell; "and when I 'm married"—Bell's engagement to Mr. Ballister was now formally acknowledged "you can't go on living here alone; and as for your getting any 'lady companion' to live with you, that 's out of the question. You 'll never find another such saint as I 've been to put up with your ways. My! what I 've borne in these last five years! No, Miss, you 'd better take to yourself a husband, and of all the good, true, sterling men in this world, Tom 's the best, excepting Fred."
"I know it," said Sue, forlornly. "I told Professor Balloure not long ago that I trusted Tom more than I trusted any other man in the world."
"Did you?" cried Bell. "Did you say that to Edward Balloure? Oh, I 'm so glad. Oh, Sue, you 'll never know how I 've worried about that man's influence over you. I don't believe in him, and I never did, and if his wife had died any time, you 'd have married him as true as fate."
"I think not," said Susan, reflectively. "I am afraid I don't believe in him either, and yet it seems so horribly ungrateful after all he has done for me."
​"Well, he 's safe out of the way now, thank heaven," said Bell. "That 's one good thing. And you 've got to make up your mind about Tom."
"Well, why does n't he make me?" said Susan.
"Susan Lawton," said Bell, "you ought to know Tom better. He knows that you know that he is ready and longing to make you his wife at any hour, and he will never urge you,—not if you keep him waiting on and on till you are both gray."
"I wonder," said Susan——.
"No," replied Bell, "he never will. He 's as obstinate as a rock, and more than that, he does n't want you for his wife till you want him for your husband. Tom is proud as Lucifer in his heart."
"But, Bell," pleaded Susan, "I can't go to Tom and say, 'please take me.' He had a good chance a few days ago when he first told me you were going to marry Fred, and all he said was: 'All right, Sue, all right,'" and Susan laughed in spite of herself at the recollection.
Bell laughed too, but she was vexed and anxious to see two people at such cross-purposes. Her own wooing and winning had been so smooth, so entirely in accordance with the conventional usages and customs, that she sympathized freely in Susan's position.
"I should n't like it myself," thought Bell. "I should never stand it if Fred treated me that way. But I know Fred would n't really do any more for ​me than Tom would for Sue. I believe I 'll speak to him."
"Speaking to him" was not so easy. Several well-meant and carefully planned little speeches of Bell's died away on her lips when she found herself face to face with Tom. And time was slipping away. Her own wedding was to come off in a few months, and what could poor Sue do? Mrs. Bell Lawton was much perplexed. At last one day she took a desperate step. Tom had dined with them. After dinner they were all sitting together in the library. Bell rose, looked them both in the face for a moment with a half comic, half severe glance, and said:—
"Now, I tell you what it is; it is high time you two decided what you were going to do. Something has got to be done. Now, I 'm going to leave you, and if you don't straighten out things, I won't speak to either of you again," and she marched out of the room.
Tom looked at Susan, who said, nervously.
"Oh, how queer Bell is!"
"She is right," said Tom. And then he looked at Susan, and continued looking at her, and said nothing.
Moments passed.
Susan could not bear the silence another moment.
"Tom!" she cried, "tell me just once, would you really mind very much if I did n't marry you?"
​Tom thought for a second that this must mean that after all, his hopes had been unfounded; that Susan had at last decided that she ought not to marry him. He turned pale, and spoke very slowly.
"Yes, it would be a very great disappointment to me," he said. "But——" He would probably have finished his sentence with his characteristic phrase, "It 's all right, Sue, all right," if he had not just then looked up. Tears were in Sue's eyes, and her hands were stretched toward him.
"Oh, Tom!" she cried, "if you really have been so sure, why have n't you made me come to you before?"
"So there was never a day without a Mrs, Thomas Lawton in town, after all," wrote Bell, describing her own and Sue's wedding to a friend.
"We were married first,—Sue and Tom would have it so,—and as soon as the minister had made me into Mrs. Fred Ballister, he hurried on to make Sue into me. It is really very odd to hear her called Mrs. Lawton. I don't get used to it. But, my dear, if you want to see two happy people, you just ought to see Tom and Sue. I declare it is marvelous. You would n't think they were in the least suited to each other. You know, dear Tom is queer to the last degree. Much as I love him I never could live with him. I 've always said so But Sue manages him most beautifully, and no ​wonder, for she never even looks at him without such love in her eyes—I did n't think Sue had it in her. Fred is quite jealous. He says that the other Mrs. Tom Lawton is the woman he ought to have married. She is a woman that knows how to appreciate a husband."
And now, where other stories end, this story begins. For it was four years after Susan Lawton's marriage that she had the "escape" which it is the purpose of my story to tell, and all this which has gone before has been merely what it was necessary that one should know in order to understand the rest.
The relation between Tom and Susan had grown constantly closer and sweeter. It was a very peculiar one. People did not always understand it. There were those who were shallow enough to say that Tom Lawton did not appreciate his wife; but nobody would have laughed more heartily than Sue herself at such an accusation against Tom. He was still as reticent, undemonstrative, as he had been in the days of his strange loverhood; but he was as sensitive yet to Susan's voice, look, touch, as if he were still her lover, and not her husband. What woman does not know how much this means! How few women, alas, have had it given to them ro know the joy of it!
One day a letter came to Sue from Bell, who was traveling in Europe with her husband.
"Only think," Bell wrote, "poor Mrs. Balloure ​has died at last. We found her here, in this hotel. She had been ill for a day or two, but nobody thought anything of it. She had the Roman fever last winter and has never been well since. What makes it worse is that Professor Balloure is away. He has gone with a party of scientific men into Russia. They say he has not been with her half the time since they came abroad, and that the poor thing has been quite broken—has just sat still patiently wherever he left her till he saw fit to come back. Oh, I 've no patience with that man! Well, she died last night, and nobody knows where to telegraph to him. Her maid is a stupid thing, and does n't seem to know anything. We can't find the professor's address anywhere among her papers, and so Fred is seeing to everything, and we 've actually got to bury the poor soul to-morrow. Is n't it the strangest thing you ever heard of, that we should have come way out to this outlandish spot, to bury this townswoman of ours,—and, a woman we always hated so, too? Poor thing, what a life she has led of it. And oh, have n't you had an escape! I declare, the second thing I thought of was, how glad I am Sue 's married all safe. I never could have stood your marrying Edward Balloure."
The letter ended abruptly, giving no more details, and, to Susan's great relief, no more comment on Professor Balloure. To Sue's loyal, loving, wedded heart there was something inexpressibly shocking ​in Bell's light way of referring to him. And it was with a real sense of relief that she threw the letter into the fire after having read Tom all of it except the last paragraph.
"That 's the first time in my life," thought Susan "that I ever had anything I did n't want Tom to see."
The consciousness of it hurt her to the core, and still more, she felt the hurt of it the next morning. She had been talking with Tom about Mrs. Balloure's death, and saying that she hoped the professor would now marry a woman he could love.
"Well, he can't have you, Sue," said Tom, dryly.
Susan gazed at him in wonder.
"Why, Tom Lawton!" she said, "what do you mean?"
Tom looked at her with a grave face.
"I think you would have married him, Sue?"
"Never!" exclaimed Sue, "and it is horrid of you to say such a thing. I never trusted Professor Balloure, and besides"—Sue stopped, colored—"I think I always loved you, Tom."
This speech of Tom's rankled in Sue's mind all day. It troubled her by its reflected implication as to the past. During all those years had Tom really believed that she loved Professor Balloure? Was that the reason he had left her so free from the urging with which men usually seek women to marry them? Had he—had her frank, ​open-hearted Tom a secret capacity for jealousy? Ah! if he could only know how immeasurably higher she held him than she had ever held any other man; how absolutely his strong integrity and loyalty of nature had won her trust and her love!
Later in the day Sue sat down to answer Bell's letter. When the letter was half finished, she was called away. She left the letter lying open on her desk.
When Tom came home at night and did not find Sue, he had a vague sense of discomfort, as he always did when she was not in the house. Roaming about the library, idly, he sat down at Sue's desk, saw the open letter, turned the sheet over to find out to whom it was written, saw Bell's name, and proceeded to read what Sue had written. Bell's letters to Sue and Sue's to her were always common property; there was nothing in the least strange in Tom's reading that letter; but this, alas! was what he read. After some comments on Mrs. Balloure's death and references to what Bell had said in regard to the professor's character, Sue had gone on to repeat what Tom had that morning said:—
"What do you suppose, Bell," she wrote, "ever put such an idea into his head? Bless him! Dear old fellow! How much happier, safer a woman I am, in every way, with him than I ever could have been with any other man; Now, Bell, do be careful what you write about Professor Balloure, for I never have a secret thing in the world from Tom, ​and he might look over my shoulder any minute and read your letter."
This was the way the thing had lain in Sue's mind. Tom's speech in the morning had startled her very much by its revelation that at some time or other, if not now, he had felt a jealousy of Professor Balloure's regard for her. If he had that feeling, nothing could so strengthen it as this sort of light reference which Bell seemed to be inclined to make to her old notion that Sue would have married the professor.
"I can't have Tom hurt by such things being said," thought Sue. "Bell might know better than to write so: she always was thoughtless. Why, if he feels sensitive on the subject now, one such speech as that of Bell's might make him believe all his life that I had married him, loving some one else better," and so Sue wrote that fatal sentence: "Do be careful what you write."
Tom sat still a long time looking at the words.
"So there are secrets in connection with Edward Balloure," he thought, "which I am not to know."
The blow was a more terrible one to Tom, from the fact that one of Sue's greatest charms to him was the frankness, the bold truthfulness, of her character. Tom's long experience as a lawyer had made him distrustful of average women. In Sue, he had thought he had found one who was incapable of deceit; and here she was not only concealing ​something from him, but warning her accomplice to conceal it too.
"There was nothing which one of them knew that the other did not," thought Tom, as he sat glued to the chair, and gazing at the mute, terrible lines. Finally he sprang up and left the house.
Sue came home late, hoping to find Tom as usual in his big arm-chair, reading the evening newspaper. The library was dark; no one was there.
"Has not Mr. Lawton been in yet?"
"Yes, ma'am," replied the servant. "He has been in and gone out again."
"How very strange," thought Sue. "I wish he was here."
She sat down and finished her letter in few words; then went to the window and watched for Tom. It was long past the dinner hour when he came in. He seemed preoccupied and grave. After asking him tenderly if he were ill, and if anything troubled him, Susan became silent. She had learned, and it was one of the hardest lessons of her married life, that when Tom was tired or worried about business matters, it was better not to talk to him. After dinner, he sat down near Susan's table, and glanced over the columns of the newspaper. The letter to Bell lay on the table. Taking it up he said casually,
"May I read it, Sue?"
"Oh, I guess you don't care to read it, this time, ​dear," she replied laughingly, and took it out of his hand. He made no answer, but turned back to his newspaper. Presently he said he must go down town; he had an engagement. He kissed her good-by in an absent sort of way and was gone.
"Poor dear Tom!" thought Susan. "He certainly is worried about something. It is too bad," and she set herself to work to make the best of a lonely evening. The evenings which Tom spent away from home were so rare, that it always seemed to Susan a fresh and surprising deprivation when one occurred. The loneliness of the house to her when Tom was out of it, could not be expressed; the very furniture seemed to take on a totally different expression. The clock struck ten, eleven, Tom did not return. Finally, Susan went to bed, and fell asleep, wondering what had become of him. The next morning his face wore the same grave and unnatural look. He hardly spoke, and when he did speak, the words were constrained. Susan was now thoroughly uneasy.
"Dear Tom," she said, "do tell me what is the matter."
"Nothing," was the only reply she could extract from him.
"Tom, I know something is the matter," she exclaimed, vehemently. "Are you ill?"
"Not in the least."
"Then something has gone wrong in business something worries you."
​"Nothing has gone wrong: nothing worries me."
Cool, curt replies: no relaxation of his face; not a smile; not a tender look in his eye. Was this Tom? What did it mean? Susan was bewildered; she could do nothing but reiterate helplessly her piteous cry, "Tom, what is the matter?"
He left her immediately after breakfast, with the same strange formal kiss he had given her the night before.
After he had gone, the impression of his altered manner faded somewhat; it was all so new, so strange, that as soon as he was out of her sight, she thought she must have exaggerated it—imagined it.
"I dare say he really was ill without knowing it," she said. "It must be that. He is n't in the least himself. Perhaps he will be better by noon."
Noon came; Tom came. The same cool, reserved manner; the same cool, distant tone; the same terrible silence! Susan now grew seriously alarmed. As soon as the servant had left them alone, she exclaimed:—
"Tom, you shall not treat me in this manner any longer. What have I done?"
"How do I treat you?" he asked coldly.
Susan could not keep the tears back.
"Why, Tom," she said, "you treat me as if I had displeased you most seriously: as if you were mortally offended with me for something. What have I done? I do implore you to tell me."
"You have not done anything. I am not offended," he replied.
​Susan was clinging to him, and looking up in his face with streaming tears.
"Tom," said she, you are not telling me the truth. You are as changed as a human being can be, and yet keep the same body. Something has happened; and you shall tell me. I have certainly displeased you, and I cannot imagine how."
He loosened her arms from his neck, and put her away, not ungently, but very firmly.
"There is nothing to tell," he said. "I am not displeased. I must go now."
Susan's arms fell, her whole figure drooped. She stopped weeping, and looked piteously into her husband's face.
"Tom," she said; "you are very hard. I would not hurt you so for all the world," and she turned and left him.
All the long afternoon she sat like one in a dream of misery. It seemed to her as if the very sun had gone out. How helpless she was! How long could she live—she wondered over and over—if Tom continued like this!
When he came home at night, she studied his face timidly, and in silence. She tried to converse about indifferent subjects. There was no change in him; still the same frigid, distant civility; the glance, the tone of a stranger and not of a husband. By a great effort she kept back the tears. She was growing calmer now and more resolved. In a few minutes after tea was over, Tom said, with in attempt at ease:—
​"I am going to leave you now. I must go down town."
Susan sprang up, closed the door, and standing with her back firmly against it, said, in a low tone, breathlessly,—
"You shall not go till you tell me what has so changed you in this one twenty-four hours. Why, Tom! Do you know how you look at me? How you speak to me? Why, I should be dead in one week, if it kept on like this. What have I done? What has come to you?"
He looked at her curiously and observantly.
"How do I look at you? How do I speak to you?" he said.
Susan was crying hard, now. She could hardly speak.
"You look at me," she sobbed, "as if I were not your wife, and never had been. You speak to me as if you hated me; all that is in your tone. Oh, you 'd know it quickly enough, if I looked at you even once with such an expression! Tom, I shall go mad if you don't tell me! You can't deceive me. You need n't think you can. I know every slightest intonation of your voice, every shade of your eye. I 've seen you vexed about little things, or out of patience, or tired—but this is different; this is horrible. I know I must have offended you in some way, and it is cruel in you not to tell me,—cruel, cruel, cruel!"
He still stood looking at her with a cool ​observant expression, and made no reply for a moment; then he said, taking hold of the door:—
"I must go now, I don't want to talk any more. I will be back soon."
"You shall not go," said Susan, more slowly, and in a voice of anguish. "I will follow you; you shall not leave me! Oh, Tom, Tom, tell me what I have done!" Suddenly, by what preternatural intuition I know not,—possibly, because, in her great excitement, she was lifted into a state of clairvoyant perception—she stopped like one hearing a distant sound, leaned forward, and said in an altered tone, "Was it because I would not let you read my letter to Bell?"
As the words passed her lips, she saw his face change,—the first break which there had been in its fearful rigidity. She knew she had touched the truth at last.
"Tom, Tom!" she cried, "was that it? Was that it? I see it was. Why, how could you have minded that so much?" and she led him, half by main force, to a chair, and threw her arms around his neck.
"Ought I not to have minded it?" he asked, in a stern tone.
Susan was reflecting. How distinctly before her eyes at that moment, stood out the fatal sentence, "Be careful what you write."
"Tom," she said, "I will write this very night to Bell, and ask her to send back the letter, that you may read every word of it."
​"I have no wish to read it," he said coldly.
Susan was in despair.
"Tom, what else can I do?" she said. "Oh, let me send for it? I never dreamed that you would mind not seeing it. Why, you don't see half my letters to Bell."
He made no reply. Susan sat silent for a moment. She seemed no nearer her husband than before. The same intangible icy barrier which had filled her with such anguish all day was there still. Suddenly, with one of those lightning impulses, by which men in desperate need have often been saved as by a miracle, Susan exclaimed:—
"Tom, I can tell you all there was in the letter. I mean all there was which I did not want you to see." She paused. Her husband fixed his eyes on her with as piercing a gaze as if she had been a witness in a case of life and death. "This was it," continued Susan. "It was about Professor Balloure. You know what you said to me the other morning, that at any rate he could n't have me."
Tom nodded.
"Well, I can't tell you how that shocked me. I never dreamed of your having had any feeling like jealousy about him, or any thought about him in any way in connection with me. Oh, Tom, Tom! how could you ever help knowing that with all the love of my whole nature I have loved you! Well, you see, Bell had always talked to me about the professor's caring for me. She always thought he ​wished he could marry me, and in this letter telling about his wife's death she said several things that I did n't like; I did n't read them to you; and in my letter to her I told her how much safer and happier I was with you than I ever could have been with any other man in the world, and——"
Susan hesitated. How hard it was to quote that unfortunate sentence just as it stood! "and—there really was only one sentence in the letter I was unwilling you should see. I thought you would n't understand. I told Bell to be careful what she wrote to me about it, because I had n't any secrets from you, and you might look over my shoulder and read the letter."
While Susan was speaking these last words, Tom's eyes seemed to grow darker and darker, with the fixity of their gaze. As she finished, he put his arms around her, held her tight and kissed her. She felt that the ice was broken. Weeping, she kissed his cheek and nestled closer.
"Sue," said Tom,—it was his old voice,—"Sue, now I will tell you. I had read that letter."
Sue started, and exclaimed, "You! read that letter!"
"Yes," he said. "I came in and saw it lying here open, saw it was to Bell, and glanced down the pages till I came to that sentence which you have just repeated, and which, you will admit, I had cause to resent."
She was hardly listening to what he said. Her face was full of awe, almost of terror.
​"Oh, Tom, Tom!" she cried, "was n't it like an inspiration, the impulse which made me tell you that sentence? Supposing I had not told you, you would never have believed in me again—never!"
"No," said Tom.
"Don't you see, dear love," continued Susan, "just how I said that? simply to save you pain?—not in the least because there were any secrets in the past I was afraid of Bell's letting out, but because by your speech to me about the professor, I knew that you had had some feeling about him, and I thought, if Bell said any more of her light, jesting, thoughtless things in regard to him, they would only strengthen your feeling and give you annoyance. Do you see? Oh, do say that you see just how it was!"
"Yes, I do see," said Tom, kissing her. "I do see, and I thank God that you told me yourself of the sentence. That took the load off my heart."
Susan shuddered.
"Oh, suppose I had forgotten it!" she said. "I might have, though I don't believe I ever could, for the sentence hurt me when I wrote it."
Susan was weak from nervous exhaustion; the twenty-four hour's strain had been a severe one. She laid her head on her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes. Without a word, without a sound, without a motion, she knew that they were one again.
After a time she said softly:—
​"Tom, what do you suppose put it into my head that it could possibly have been the letter which had troubled you? I never once thought of it at the time. I did not dream of your caring to see it. Don't you think it must have been an angel which made me think of it?"
"I don't know, dear," said Tom, solemnly. "It would have been worth while for an angel."
"Tom," continued Sue, "should you have seemed all the rest of our life as you did this day?"
"I can't tell," replied Tom.
"But you could never have trusted me again?" she said.
"Never," he answered.
After another long, peaceful silence, Susan lifted her head again and said:—
"Tom, will you promise me now one thing? Promise me that, as long as we live, you will never bury anything in your heart as you did this. Only think by what a narrow chance we have escaped terrible misery. Promise me that if ever again any act of mine seems to you wrong, you will come instantly to me and tell me. Will you?"
"Yes, Sue, I will," said Tom fervently.
And this was Susan Lawton's escape.