"Git out of my house," he blurted out at Hayward as he stalked angrily into the midst of Lily's melodious love-making. "I tol' you once I didn' want any footman callin' on my daughter!"
"Oh, papa! What do you mean?" Lily cried, springing up from the piano.
"I mean git out when I say git out!"
"Wait a moment, Mr. Hayward," Lily called to the footman, who, chin in air, was leaving the room, truth to tell, no little relieved at this complete solution of what was fast becoming an embarrassing situation for him.
"No use to wait. Move on!" the father growled, placing himself across the door to prevent Lily's following her caller. Upon her attempt to push by him he caught her and shoved her into a chair. As the outer door closed with a very modest and well-mannered snap, he released his hold upon her arm. He was yet in a fury.
"So you've lied to me! Thought you could fool your ol' daddy! But I guess not!"
"I haven't lied to you."
"You have! You tol' me you were goin' to marry a military man, and here you are, dead gone on this footman—and no use to deny out of it!"
Lily didn't attempt to deny it.
"Umhuh, I knew it! Already promised him, ain't yuh?"
No denial of that either, to her father's consternation.
"What! And you a-tellin' me all the time you were goin' to marry a military man! You lyin' huzzy!"
"But he's a military man—he's the John H. Graham whose commission is before the Senate—now I hope you are satisfied!"
Henry Porter stopped his stamping about and looked at his daughter several seconds in silence.
"He's—he's who?" he asked in astonishment.
"He's the same John H. Graham you were reading about in the Post this morning—the man the President has appointed a lieutenant in the cavalry."
"But his name's not Graham."
"His name is Graham—John Hayward Graham—Lieutenant John Hayward Graham when the Senate confirms it."
Old Henry looked a little bit nonplussed. His daughter took courage. She jumped up and grabbed him.
"Come on right now and write him an apology, and send it so that it will get to his rooms by the time he does!"
Old Henry demurred. His dignity was a very real thing—as hard and substantial as his dollars.
"Oh, no, no. Wait awhile. Le's think about it. No use to be in a hurry. He'll come back agin. What did he go sneakin' roun' here without his name for if he wanted people to treat him right? A man's got no business monkeyin' with his name."
"But you must write him an apology, papa. You just must!"
"Oh, well, mebbe I will. But I'll wait till to-morrer. Better wait till the Senate confirms him though, and be certain about it."
"Oh, no! That would never do. It would be too plain,"—and Lily went into a long disquisition to fetch her hard-headed old daddy to her way of thinking. He showed some signs of relenting but could not be persuaded that night. When the morning came it took all her powers to push him to the point of sending a suitable note to Hayward: but she accomplished it. Hayward's stinging, sarcastic, withering reply was not written till late in the afternoon, and in the footman's agitation over other concerns was not mailed till his mother found it in his room on the day after that. By the time Mr. Henry Porter received it, other events had come to pass that gave it some emphasis....
When Hayward Graham returned to his room after his dismissal from Porter's house he found a letter addressed to him in his wife's writing. He tore it open hungrily.
"You say you would joyfully die to atone. That would be the very best thing you could do—the only fitting thing you could do.—H."
A grim smile lighted the man's face. At the moment the blood of some long-dead cavalier ancestor splashed through his heart, and he wrote the brief reply.
"Your wish is law, and shall be obeyed. Grant me one day to put my house in order."
* * * * *
Her maid handed the message to Helen before she was out of bed the next morning. The girl read it, caught its meaning, and shook with an ague of fear. Her love for her husband, outraged and stricken, may not have been dead—for who shall speak the last word for a woman's heart?—and her tender soul recoiled at the murder so calmly forespoken: and yet neither of these impulses was elemental in her agony of terror. Her impetuous letter of the day before, breaking a silence she had sworn to keep, was not intended as a reply to anything that Hayward had written. It was but a wild protest against the new-born realization that her situation was tragic, and could not be ignored nor long concealed. She had not meant to suggest or to counsel death, but to rail against life. The possibility of his taking-off had not occurred to her. His letter terrified her! Death!—her husband's death? It was the one thing that must not be! When she had read his words, her blood was ice. "No! No!" her teeth chattered as she dressed, "he must not, he must not!" In the nervousness, the weakness, the faintness, the sickness into which fevered meditations upon the day-old revelation had shaken her, she did not think to question the sincerity of Hayward's purpose at self-destruction. The calamity was imminent—and trebly calamitous. The chill of more than death was upon her. When she had dressed she dashed off a hurried scrawl.
"No, no, no. I did not mean that. It is not my wish that you destroy yourself. You must not. You must not! I need you—above everything I need you. If you die I am undone! Where is our marriage certificate? Or was there one? And who was that witness? Do not die, do not die. As you love me do not die!"
She carefully arranged every detail of her toilet, pinched her pale cheeks into something of pink, put on her morning smile, and, with a very conscious effort at lightness of manner, tripped out into the hall and down the stairs. She knew the very spot on which she would see her husband standing. With a round-about journey she approached it. He was not there. She laughed nervously, and with an aimless air, but a faster thumping heart, sought him at another haunt. Failure. And failure again. She went to breakfast, and displayed a lack of appetite and a tendency to hysterics. After breakfast she lingered down-stairs on every conceivable pretext, and journeyed from one end of the house to the other many times and again. At last when her nerves could not stand the strain a second longer she asked the coachman, who had driven the carriage to the door, where Hayward was. She felt that there was a full confession in the tones of her voice.
"Hayward asked for a day off this mornin', mum. He didn't come. Just telephoned."
Helen felt the tension of her nerves snap. She hurried to her room, suppressing fairly by force an impulse to scream, and locking the door, threw herself across the bed. There for three hours, pleading a headache and denying admittance to all who knocked, she cowered before the thoughts of her seething brain—and suffered torment.
Along about two o'clock she sprang up suddenly and turned out of her trunk all of her husband's letters and began feverishly to search for one she remembered written long ago which by chance contained the street number of his lodgings. She was nearly an hour finding it.
Again she went through the womanly process of making herself presentable, and sauntered freshly forth in quest of the post office and a special delivery stamp. With an added prayer that he relieve her suspense quickly, she dropped her agonized note into the box under the hurry postage. Having thus done all that was possible to save her husband's life—and her own—she went back to her bed in collapse, and waited for the night-fall as one, hoping for a reprieve, who must die at sunset.