Produced by John Hamm, and James Rusk
THE LAW AND THE LADY
by Wilkie Collins
NOTE:
ADDRESSED TO THE READER.
IN offering this book to you, I have no Preface to write. I have only
to request that you will bear in mind certain established truths, which
occasionally escape your memory when you are reading a work of fiction.
Be pleased, then, to remember (First): That the actions of human beings
are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason. (Secondly):
That we are by no means always in the habit of bestowing our love on
the objects which are the most deserving of it, in the opinions of
our friends. (Thirdly and Lastly): That Characters which may not have
appeared, and Events which may not have taken place, within the limits
of our own individual experience, may nevertheless be perfectly natural
Characters and perfectly probable Events, for all that. Having said
these few words, I have said all that seems to be necessary at the
present time, in presenting my new Story to your notice.
W. C.
LONDON, February 1, 1875.
THE LAW AND THE LADY.
PART I. PARADISE LOST.
CHAPTER I. THE BRIDE’S MISTAKE.
“FOR after this manner in the old time the holy women also who trusted
in God adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands;
even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are
as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement.”
Concluding the Marriage Service of the Church of England in those
well-known words, my uncle Starkweather shut up his book, and looked at
me across the altar rails with a hearty expression of interest on his
broad, red face. At the same time my aunt, Mrs. Starkweather, standing
by my side, tapped me smartly on the shoulder, and said,
“Valeria, you are married!”
Where were my thoughts? What had become of my attention? I was too
bewildered to know. I started and looked at my new husband. He seemed
to be almost as much bewildered as I was. The same thought had, as
I believe, occurred to us both at the same moment. Was it really
possible--in spite of his mother’s opposition to our marriage--that we
were Man and Wife? My aunt Starkweather settled the question by a second
tap on my shoulder.
“Take his arm!” she whispered, in the tone of a woman who had lost all
patience with me.
I took his arm.
“Follow your uncle.”
Holding fast by my husband’s arm, I followed my uncle and the curate who
had assisted him at the marriage.
The two clergymen led us into the vestry. The church was in one of the
dreary quarters of London, situated between the City and the West
End; the day was dull; the atmosphere was heavy and damp. We were a
melancholy little wedding party, worthy of the dreary neighborhood and
the dull day. No relatives or friends of my husband’s were present; his
family, as I have already hinted, disapproved of his marriage. Except
my uncle and my aunt, no other relations appeared on my side. I had lost
both my parents, and I had but few friends. My dear father’s faithful
old clerk, Benjamin, attended the wedding to “give me away,” as the
phrase is. He had known me from a child, and, in my forlorn position, he
was as good as a father to me.
The last ceremony left to be performed was, as usual, the signing of the
marriage register. In the confusion of the moment (and in the absence of
any information to guide me) I committed a mistake--ominous, in my aunt
Starkweather’s opinion, of evil to come. I signed my married instead of
my maiden name.
“What!” cried my uncle, in his loudest and cheeriest tones, “you have
forgotten your own name already? Well, well! let us hope you will never
repent parting with it so readily. Try again, Valeria--try again.”
With trembling fingers I struck the pen through my first effort, and
wrote my maiden name, very badly indeed, as follows:
Valeria Brinton
When it came to my husband’s turn I noticed, with surprise, that his
hand trembled too, and that he produced a very poor specimen of his
customary signature:
Eustace Woodville
My aunt, on being requested to sign, complied under protest. “A bad
beginning!” she said, pointing to my first unfortunate signature with
the feather end of her pen. “I hope, my dear, you may not live to regret
it.”
Even then, in the days of my ignorance and my innocence, that curious
outbreak of my aunt’s superstition produced a certain uneasy sensation
in my mind. It was a consolation to me to feel the reassuring pressure
of my husband’s hand. It was an indescribable relief to hear my uncle’s
hearty voice wishing me a happy life at parting. The good man had left
his north-country Vicarage (my home since the death of my parents)
expressly to read the service at my marriage; and he and my aunt had
arranged to return by the mid-day train. He folded me in his great
strong arms, and he gave me a kiss which must certainly have been heard
by the idlers waiting for the bride and bridegroom outside the church
door.
“I wish you health and happiness, my love, with all my heart. You are
old enough to choose for yourself, and--no offense, Mr. Woodville, you
and I are new friends--and I pray God, Valeria, it may turn out that
you have chosen well. Our house will be dreary enough without you; but
I don’t complain, my dear. On the contrary, if this change in your life
makes you happier, I rejoice. Come, come! don’t cry, or you will set
your aunt off--and it’s no joke at her time of life. Besides, crying
will spoil your beauty. Dry your eyes and look in the glass there, and
you will see that I am right. Good-by, child--and God bless you!”
He tucked my aunt under his arm, and hurried out. My heart sank a
little, dearly as I loved my husband, when I had seen the last of the
true friend and protector of my maiden days.
The parting with old Benjamin came next. “I wish you well, my dear;
don’t forget me,” was all he said. But the old days at home came back
on me at those few words. Benjamin always dined with us on Sundays in my
father’s time, and always brought some little present with him for his
master’s child. I was very near to “spoiling my beauty” (as my uncle had
put it) when I offered the old man my cheek to kiss, and heard him sigh
to himself, as if he too were not quite hopeful about my future life.
My husband’s voice roused me, and turned my mind to happier thoughts.
“Shall we go, Valeria?” he asked.
I stopped him on our way out to take advantage of my uncle’s advice; in
other words, to see how I looked in the glass over the vestry fireplace.
What does the glass show me?
The glass shows a tall and slender young woman of three-and-twenty years
of age. She is not at all the sort of person who attracts attention in
the street, seeing that she fails to exhibit the popular yellow hair and
the popular painted cheeks. Her hair is black; dressed, in these later
days (as it was dressed years since to please her father), in broad
ripples drawn back from the forehead, and gathered into a simple knot
behind (like the hair of the Venus de Medicis), so as to show the neck
beneath. Her complexion is pale: except in moments of violent agitation
there is no color to be seen in her face. Her eyes are of so dark a blue
that they are generally mistaken for black. Her eyebrows are well enough
in form, but they are too dark and too strongly marked. Her nose just
inclines toward the aquiline bend, and is considered a little too large
by persons difficult to please in the matter of noses. The mouth, her
best feature, is very delicately shaped, and is capable of presenting
great varieties of expression. As to the face in general, it is too
narrow and too long at the lower part, too broad and too low in the
higher regions of the eyes and the head. The whole picture, as reflected
in the glass, represents a woman of some elegance, rather too pale, and
rather too sedate and serious in her moments of silence and repose--in
short, a person who fails to strike the ordinary observer at first
sight, but who gains in general estimation on a second, and sometimes
on a third view. As for her dress, it studiously conceals, instead of
proclaiming, that she has been married that morning. She wears a gray
cashmere tunic trimmed with gray silk, and having a skirt of the
same material and color beneath it. On her head is a bonnet to match,
relieved by a quilling of white muslin with one deep red rose, as a
morsel of positive color, to complete the effect of the whole dress.
Have I succeeded or failed in describing the picture of myself which I
see in the glass? It is not for me to say. I have done my best to keep
clear of the two vanities--the vanity of depreciating and the vanity of
praising my own personal appearance. For the rest, well written or badly
written, thank Heaven it is done!
And whom do I see in the glass standing by my side?
I see a man who is not quite so tall as I am, and who has the misfortune
of looking older than his years. His forehead is prematurely bald.
His big chestnut-colored beard and his long overhanging mustache are
prematurely streaked with gray. He has the color in the face which my
face wants, and the firmness in his figure which my figure wants. He
looks at me with the tenderest and gentlest eyes (of a light brown) that
I ever saw in the countenance of a man. His smile is rare and sweet; his
manner, perfectly quiet and retiring, has yet a latent persuasiveness in
it which is (to women) irresistibly winning. He just halts a little in
his walk, from the effect of an injury received in past years, when he
was a soldier serving in India, and he carries a thick bamboo cane,
with a curious crutch handle (an old favorite), to help himself along
whenever he gets on his feet, in doors or out. With this one little
drawback (if it is a drawback), there is nothing infirm or old or
awkward about him; his slight limp when he walks has (perhaps to my
partial eyes) a certain quaint grace of its own, which is pleasanter to
see than the unrestrained activity of other men. And last and best
of all, I love him! I love him! I love him! And there is an end of my
portrait of my husband on our wedding-day.
The glass has told me all I want to know. We leave the vestry at last.
The sky, cloudy since the morning, has darkened while we have been
in the church, and the rain is beginning to fall heavily. The idlers
outside stare at us grimly under their umbrellas as we pass through
their ranks and hasten into our carriage. No cheering; no sunshine; no
flowers strewn in our path; no grand breakfast; no genial speeches; no
bridesmaids; no fathers or mother’s blessing. A dreary wedding--there
is no denying it--and (if Aunt Starkweather is right) a bad beginning as
well!
A _coup_ has been reserved for us at the railway station. The attentive
porter, on the look-out for his fee pulls down the blinds over the side
windows of the carriage, and shuts out all prying eyes in that way.
After what seems to be an interminable delay the train starts. My
husband winds his arm round me. “At last!” he whispers, with love in
his eyes that no words can utter, and presses me to him gently. My arm
steals round his neck; my eyes answer his eyes. Our lips meet in the
first long, lingering kiss of our married life.
Oh, what recollections of that journey rise in me as I write! Let me dry
my eyes, and shut up my paper for the day.
CHAPTER II. THE BRIDE’S THOUGHTS.
WE had been traveling for a little more than an hour when a change
passed insensibly over us both.
Still sitting close together, with my hand in his, with my head on
his shoulder, little by little we fell insensibly into silence. Had we
already exhausted the narrow yet eloquent vocabulary of love? Or had we
determined by unexpressed consent, after enjoying the luxury of passion
that speaks, to try the deeper and finer rapture of passion that thinks?
I can hardly determine; I only know that a time came when, under some
strange influence, our lips were closed toward each other. We traveled
along, each of us absorbed in our own reverie. Was he thinking
exclusively of me--as I was thinking exclusively of him? Before the
journey’s end I had my doubts; at a little later time I knew for certain
that his thoughts, wandering far away from his young wife, were all
turned inward on his own unhappy self.
For me the secret pleasure of filling my mind with him, while I felt him
by my side, was a luxury in itself.
I pictured in my thoughts our first meeting in the neighborhood of my
uncle’s house.
Our famous north-country trout stream wound its flashing and foaming way
through a ravine in the rocky moorland. It was a windy, shadowy evening.
A heavily clouded sunset lay low and red in the west. A solitary angler
stood casting his fly at a turn in the stream where the backwater lay
still and deep under an overhanging bank. A girl (myself) standing on
the bank, invisible to the fisherman beneath, waited eagerly to see the
trout rise.
The moment came; the fish took the fly.
Sometimes on the little level strip of sand at the foot of the bank,
sometimes (when the stream turned again) in the shallower water rushing
over its rocky bed, the angler followed the captured trout, now letting
the line run out and now winding it in again, in the difficult and
delicate process of “playing” the fish. Along the bank I followed to
watch the contest of skill and cunning between the man and the trout.
I had lived long enough with my uncle Starkweather to catch some of his
enthusiasm for field sports, and to learn something, especially, of the
angler’s art. Still following the stranger, with my eyes intently fixed
on every movement of his rod and line, and with not so much as a chance
fragment of my attention to spare for the rough path along which I was
walking, I stepped by chance on the loose overhanging earth at the edge
of the bank, and fell into the stream in an instant.
The distance was trifling, the water was shallow, the bed of the river
was (fortunately for me) of sand. Beyond the fright and the wetting I
had nothing to complain of. In a few moments I was out of the water and
up again, very much ashamed of myself, on the firm ground. Short as the
interval was, it proved long enough to favor the escape of the fish. The
angler had heard my first instinctive cry of alarm, had turned, and had
thrown aside his rod to help me. We confronted each other for the
first time, I on the bank and he in the shallow water below. Our eyes
encountered, and I verily believe our hearts encountered at the same
moment. This I know for certain, we forgot our breeding as lady and
gentleman: we looked at each other in barbarous silence.
I was the first to recover myself. What did I say to him?
I said something about my not being hurt, and then something more,
urging him to run back and try if he might not yet recover the fish.
He went back unwillingly. He returned to me--of course without the fish.
Knowing how bitterly disappointed my uncle would have been in his place,
I apologized very earnestly. In my eagerness to make atonement, I even
offered to show him a spot where he might try again, lower down the
stream.
He would not hear of it; he entreated me to go home and change my wet
dress. I cared nothing for the wetting, but I obeyed him without knowing
why.
He walked with me. My way back to the Vicarage was his way back to the
inn. He had come to our parts, he told me, for the quiet and retirement
as much as for the fishing. He had noticed me once or twice from the
window of his room at the inn. He asked if I were not the vicar’s
daughter.
I set him right. I told him that the vicar had married my mother’s
sister, and that the two had been father and mother to me since the
death of my parents. He asked if he might venture to call on Doctor
Starkweather the next day, mentioning the name of a friend of his, with
whom he believed the vicar to be acquainted. I invited him to visit us,
as if it had been my house; I was spell-bound under his eyes and under
his voice. I had fancied, honestly fancied, myself to have been in love
often and often before this time. Never in any other man’s company had
I felt as I now felt in the presence of _this_ man. Night seemed to fall
suddenly over the evening landscape when he left me. I leaned against
the Vicarage gate. I could not breathe, I could not think; my heart
fluttered as if it would fly out of my bosom--and all this for a
stranger! I burned with shame; but oh, in spite of it all, I was so
happy!
And now, when little more than a few weeks had passed since that first
meeting, I had him by my side; he was mine for life! I lifted my head
from his bosom to look at him. I was like a child with a new toy--I
wanted to make sure that he was really my own.
He never noticed the action; he never moved in his corner of the
carriage. Was he deep in his own thoughts? and were they thoughts of Me?
I laid down my head again softly, so as not to disturb him. My thoughts
wandered backward once more, and showed me another picture in the golden
gallery of the past.
The garden at the Vicarage formed the new scene. The time was night. We
had met together in secret. We were walking slowly to and fro, out of
sight of the house, now in the shadowy paths of the shrubbery, now in
the lovely moonlight on the open lawn.
We had long since owned our love and devoted our lives to each other.
Already our interests were one; already we shared the pleasures and the
pains of life. I had gone out to meet him that night with a heavy heart,
to seek comfort in his presence and to find encouragement in his voice.
He noticed that I sighed when he first took me in his arms, and he
gently turned my head toward the moonlight to read my trouble in my
face. How often he had read my happiness there in the earlier days of
our love!
“You bring bad news, my angel,” he said, lifting my hair tenderly from
my forehead as he spoke. “I see the lines here which tell me of anxiety
and distress. I almost wish I loved you less dearly, Valeria.”
“Why?”
“I might give you back your freedom. I have only to leave this place,
and your uncle would be satisfied, and you would be relieved from all
the cares that are pressing on you now.”
“Don’t speak of it, Eustace! If you want me to forget my cares, say you
love me more dearly than ever.”
He said it in a kiss. We had a moment of exquisite forgetfulness of the
hard ways of life--a moment of delicious absorption in each other. I
came back to realities fortified and composed, rewarded for all that
I had gone through, ready to go through it all over again for another
kiss. Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture,
suffer, and do.
“No, they have done with objecting. They have remembered at last that
I am of age, and that I can choose for myself. They have been pleading
with me, Eustace, to give you up. My aunt, whom I thought rather a hard
woman, has been crying--for the first time in my experience of her. My
uncle, always kind and good to me, has been kinder and better than ever.
He has told me that if I persist in becoming your wife, I shall not be
deserted on my wedding-day. Wherever we may marry, he will be there
to read the service, and my aunt will go to the church with me. But
he entreats me to consider seriously what I am doing--to consent to a
separation from you for a time--to consult other people on my position
toward you, if I am not satisfied with his opinion. Oh, my darling, they
are as anxious to part us as if you were the worst instead of the best
of men!”
“Has anything happened since yesterday to increase their distrust of
me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“You remember referring my uncle to a friend of yours and of his?”
“Yes. To Major Fitz-David.”
“My uncle has written to Major Fitz-David.”
“Why?”
He pronounced that one word in a tone so utterly unlike his natural tone
that his voice sounded quite strange to me.
“You won’t be angry, Eustace, if I tell you?” I said. “My uncle, as I
understood him, had several motives for writing to the major. One of
them was to inquire if he knew your mother’s address.”
Eustace suddenly stood still.
I paused at the same moment, feeling that I could venture no further
without the risk of offending him.
To speak the truth, his conduct, when he first mentioned our engagement
to my uncle, had been (so far as appearances went) a little flighty and
strange. The vicar had naturally questioned him about his family. He had
answered that his father was dead; and he had consented, though not very
readily, to announce his contemplated marriage to his mother. Informing
us that she too lived in the country, he had gone to see her, without
more particularly mentioning her address. In two days he had returned
to the Vicarage with a very startling message. His mother intended no
disrespect to me or my relatives, but she disapproved so absolutely
of her son’s marriage that she (and the members of her family, who all
agreed with her) would refuse to be present at the ceremony, if Mr.
Woodville persisted in keeping his engagement with Dr. Starkweather’s
niece. Being asked to explain this extraordinary communication, Eustace
had told us that his mother and his sisters were bent on his marrying
another lady, and that they were bitterly mortified and disappointed by
his choosing a stranger to the family. This explanation was enough for
me; it implied, so far as I was concerned, a compliment to my superior
influence over Eustace, which a woman always receives with pleasure. But
it failed to satisfy my uncle and my aunt. The vicar expressed to Mr.
Woodville a wish to write to his mother, or to see her, on the subject
of her strange message. Eustace obstinately declined to mention his
mother’s address, on the ground that the vicar’s interference would be
utterly useless. My uncle at once drew the conclusion that the mystery
about the address indicated something wrong. He refused to favor Mr.
Woodville’s renewed proposal for my hand, and he wrote the same day to
make inquiries of Mr. Woodville’s reference and of his own friend Major
Fitz-David.
Under such circumstances as these, to speak of my uncle’s motives was
to venture on very delicate ground. Eustace relieved me from further
embarrassment by asking a question to which I could easily reply.
“Has your uncle received any answer from Major Fitz-David?” he inquired.
“Yes.
“Were you allowed to read it?” His voice sank as he said those words;
his face betrayed a sudden anxiety which it pained me to see.
“I have got the answer with me to show you,” I said.
He almost snatched the letter out of my hand; he turned his back on me
to read it by the light of the moon. The letter was short enough to be
soon read. I could have repeated it at the time. I can repeat it now.
“DEAR VICAR--Mr. Eustace Woodville is quite correct in stating to you
that he is a gentleman by birth and position, and that he inherits
(under his deceased father’s will) an independent fortune of two
thousand a year.
“Always yours,
“LAWRENCE FITZ-DAVID.”
“Can anybody wish for a plainer answer than that?” Eustace asked,
handing the letter back to me.
“If _I_ had written for information about you,” I answered, “it would
have been plain enough for me.”
“Is it not plain enough for your uncle?”
“No.”
“What does he say?”
“Why need you care to know, my darling?”
“I want to know, Valeria. There must be no secret between us in this
matter. Did your uncle say anything when he showed you the major’s
letter?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“My uncle told me that his letter of inquiry filled three pages, and he
bade me observe that the major’s answer contained one sentence only. He
said, ‘I volunteered to go to Major Fitz-David and talk the matter over.
You see he takes no notice of my proposal. I asked him for the address
of Mr. Woodville’s mother. He passes over my request, as he has passed
over my proposal--he studiously confines himself to the shortest
possible statement of bare facts. Use your common-sense, Valeria. Isn’t
this rudeness rather remarkable on the part of a man who is a gentleman
by birth and breeding, and who is also a friend of mine?’”
Eustace stopped me there.
“Did you answer your uncle’s question?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “I only said that I did not understand the major’s
conduct.”
“And what did your uncle say next? If you love me, Valeria, tell me the
truth.”
“He used very strong language, Eustace. He is an old man; you must not
be offended with him.”
“I am not offended. What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Mark my words! There is something under the surface in
connection with Mr. Woodville, or with his family, to which Major
Fitz-David is not at liberty to allude. Properly interpreted, Valeria,
that letter is a warning. Show it to Mr. Woodville, and tell him (if you
like) what I have just told you--’”
Eustace stopped me again.
“You are sure your uncle said those words?” he asked, scanning my face
attentively in the moonlight.
“Quite sure. But I don’t say what my uncle says. Pray don’t think that!”
He suddenly pressed me to his bosom, and fixed his eyes on mine. His
look frightened me.
“Good-by, Valeria!” he said. “Try and think kindly of me, my darling,
when you are married to some happier man.”
He attempted to leave me. I clung to him in an agony of terror that
shook me from head to foot.
“What do you mean?” I asked, as soon as I could speak. “I am yours
and yours only. What have I said, what have I done, to deserve those
dreadful words?”
“We must part, my angel,” he answered, sadly. “The fault is none of
yours; the misfortune is all mine. My Valeria! how can you marry a man
who is an object of suspicion to your nearest and dearest friends?
I have led a dreary life. I have never found in any other woman the
sympathy with me, the sweet comfort and companionship, that I find
in you. Oh, it is hard to lose you! it is hard to go back again to my
unfriended life! I must make the sacrifice, love, for your sake. I
know no more why that letter is what it is than you do. Will your
uncle believe me? will your friends believe me? One last kiss, Valeria!
Forgive me for having loved you--passionately, devotedly loved you.
Forgive me--and let me go!”
I held him desperately, recklessly. His eyes, put me beside myself; his
words filled me with a frenzy of despair.
“Go where you may,” I said, “I go with you! Friends--reputation--I
care nothing who I lose, or what I lose! Oh, Eustace, I am only a
woman--don’t madden me! I can’t live without you. I must and will be
your wife!”
Those wild words were all I could say before the misery and madness in
me forced their way outward in a burst of sobs and tears.
He yielded. He soothed me with his charming voice; he brought me back to
myself with his tender caresses. He called the bright heaven above us
to witness that he devoted his whole life to me. He vowed--oh, in such
solemn, such eloquent words!--that his one thought, night and day,
should be to prove himself worthy of such love as mine. And had he not
nobly redeemed the pledge? Had not the betrothal of that memorable night
been followed by the betrothal at the altar, by the vows before God! Ah,
what a life was before me! What more than mortal happiness was mine!
Again I lifted my head from his bosom to taste the dear delight of
seeing him by my side--my life, my love, my husband, my own!
Hardly awakened yet from the absorbing memories of the past to the sweet
realities of the present, I let my cheek touch his cheek, I whispered to
him softly, “Oh, how I love you! how I love you!”
The next instant I started back from him. My heart stood still. I put
my hand up to my face. What did I feel on my cheek? (_I_ had not been
weeping--I was too happy.) What did I feel on my cheek? A tear!
His face was still averted from me. I turned it toward me, with my own
hands, by main force.
I looked at him--and saw my husband, on our wedding-day, with his eyes
full of tears.
CHAPTER III. RAMSGATE SANDS.
EUSTACE succeeded in quieting my alarm. But I can hardly say that he
succeeded in satisfying my mind as well.
He had been thinking, he told me, of the contrast between his past and
his present life. Bitter remembrance of the years that had gone had
risen in his memory, and had filled him with melancholy misgivings of
his capacity to make my life with him a happy one. He had asked himself
if he had not met me too late--if he were not already a man soured and
broken by the disappointments and disenchantments of the past? Doubts
such as these, weighing more and more heavily on his mind, had filled
his eyes with the tears which I had discovered--tears which he now
entreated me, by my love for him, to dismiss from my memory forever.
I forgave him, comforted him, revived him; but there were moments when
the remembrance of what I had seen troubled me in secret, and when I
asked myself if I really possessed my husband’s full confidence as he
possessed mine.
We left the train at Ramsgate.
The favorite watering-place was empty; the season was just over. Our
arrangements for the wedding tour included a cruise to the Mediterranean
in a yacht lent to Eustace by a friend. We were both fond of the sea,
and we were equally desirous, considering the circumstances under which
we had married, of escaping the notice of friends and acquaintances.
With this object in view, having celebrated our marriage privately in
London, we had decided on instructing the sailing-master of the yacht to
join us at Ramsgate. At this port (when the season for visitors was at
an end) we could embark far more privately than at the popular yachting
stations situated in the Isle of Wight.
Three days passed--days of delicious solitude, of exquisite happiness,
never to be forgotten, never to be lived over again, to the end of our
lives!
Early on the morning of the fourth day, just before sunrise, a trifling
incident happened, which was noticeable, nevertheless, as being strange
to me in my experience of myself.
I awoke, suddenly and unaccountably, from a deep and dreamless sleep
with an all-pervading sensation of nervous uneasiness which I had never
felt before. In the old days at the Vicarage my capacity as a sound
sleeper had been the subject of many a little harmless joke. From the
moment when my head was on the pillow I had never known what it was to
awake until the maid knocked at my door. At all seasons and times the
long and uninterrupted repose of a child was the repose that I enjoyed.
And now I had awakened, without any assignable cause, hours before my
usual time. I tried to compose myself to sleep again. The effort was
useless. Such a restlessness possessed me that I was not even able to
lie still in the bed. My husband was sleeping soundly by my side. In the
fear of disturbing him I rose, and put on my dressing-gown and slippers.
I went to the window. The sun was just rising over the calm gray sea.
For a while the majestic spectacle before me exercised a tranquilizing
influence on the irritable condition of my nerves. But ere long the old
restlessness returned upon me. I walked slowly to and fro in the room,
until I was weary of the monotony of the exercise. I took up a book, and
laid it aside again. My attention wandered; the author was powerless
to recall it. I got on my feet once more, and looked at Eustace, and
admired him and loved him in his tranquil sleep. I went back to the
window, and wearied of the beautiful morning. I sat down before the
glass and looked at myself. How haggard and worn I was already, through
awaking before my usual time! I rose again, not knowing what to do next.
The confinement to the four walls of the room began to be intolerable
to me. I opened the door that led into my husband’s dressing-room, and
entered it, to try if the change would relieve me.
The first object that I noticed was his dressing-case, open on the
toilet-table.
I took out the bottles and pots and brushes and combs, the knives and
scissors in one compartment, the writing materials in another. I smelled
the perfumes and pomatums; I busily cleaned and dusted the bottles
with my handkerchief as I took them out. Little by little I completely
emptied the dressing-case. It was lined with blue velvet. In one corner
I noticed a tiny slip of loose blue silk. Taking it between my finger
and thumb, and drawing it upward, I discovered that there was a false
bottom to the case, forming a secret compartment for letters and papers.
In my strange condition--capricious, idle, inquisitive--it was an
amusement to me to take out the papers, just as I had taken out
everything else.
I found some receipted bills, which failed to interest me; some letters,
which it is needless to say I laid aside after only looking at the
addresses; and, under all, a photograph, face downward, with writing on
the back of it. I looked at the writing, and saw these words:
“To my dear son, Eustace.”
His mother! the woman who had so obstinately and mercilessly opposed
herself to our marriage!
I eagerly turned the photograph, expecting to see a woman with a stern,
ill-tempered, forbidding countenance. To my surprise, the face showed
the remains of great beauty; the expression, though remarkably firm,
was yet winning, tender, and kind. The gray hair was arranged in rows
of little quaint old-fashioned curls on either side of the head, under a
plain lace cap. At one corner of the mouth there was a mark, apparently
a mole, which added to the characteristic peculiarity of the face.
I looked and looked, fixing the portrait thoroughly in my mind. This
woman, who had almost insulted me and my relatives, was, beyond all
doubt or dispute, so far as appearances went, a person possessing
unusual attractions--a person whom it would be a pleasure and a
privilege to know.
I fell into deep thought. The discovery of the photograph quieted me as
nothing had quieted me yet.
The striking of a clock downstairs in the hall warned me of the flight
of time. I carefully put back all the objects in the dressing-case
(beginning with the photograph) exactly as I had found them, and
returned to the bedroom. As I looked at my husband, still sleeping
peacefully, the question forced itself into my mind, What had made that
genial, gentle mother of his so sternly bent on parting us? so harshly
and pitilessly resolute in asserting her disapproval of our marriage?
Could I put my question openly to Eustace when he awoke? No; I was
afraid to venture that length. It had been tacitly understood between us
that we were not to speak of his mother--and, besides, he might be
angry if he knew that I had opened the private compartment of his
dressing-case.
After breakfast that morning we had news at last of the yacht. The
vessel was safely moored in the inner harbor, and the sailing-master was
waiting to receive my husband’s orders on board.
Eustace hesitated at asking me to accompany him to the yacht. It would
be necessary for him to examine the inventory of the vessel, and to
decide questions, not very interesting to a woman, relating to charts
and barometers, provisions and water. He asked me if I would wait for
his return. The day was enticingly beautiful, and the tide was on
the ebb. I pleaded for a walk on the sands; and the landlady at our
lodgings, who happened to be in the room at the time, volunteered to
accompany me and take care of me. It was agreed that we should walk
as far as we felt inclined in the direction of Broadstairs, and that
Eustace should follow and meet us on the sands, after having completed
his arrangements on board the yacht.
In half an hour more the landlady and I were out on the beach.
The scene on that fine autumn morning was nothing less than enchanting.
The brisk breeze, the brilliant sky, the flashing blue sea, the
sun-bright cliffs and the tawny sands at their feet, the gliding
procession of ships on the great marine highway of the English
Channel--it was all so exhilarating, it was all so delightful, that I
really believe if I had been by myself I could have danced for joy like
a child. The one drawback to my happiness was the landlady’s untiring
tongue. She was a forward, good-natured, empty-headed woman, who
persisted in talking, whether I listened or not, and who had a habit of
perpetually addressing me as “Mrs. Woodville,” which I thought a little
overfamiliar as an assertion of equality from a person in her position
to a person in mine.
We had been out, I should think, more than half an hour, when we
overtook a lady walking before us on the beach.
Just as we were about to pass the stranger she took her handkerchief
from her pocket, and accidentally drew out with it a letter, which fell
unnoticed by her, on the sand. I was nearest to the letter, and I picked
it up and offered it to the lady.
The instant she turned to thank me, I stood rooted to the spot. There
was the original of the photographic portrait in the dressing-case!
there was my husband’s mother, standing face to face with me! I
recognized the quaint little gray curls, the gentle, genial expression,
the mole at the corner of the mouth. No mistake was possible. His mother
herself!
The old lady, naturally enough, mistook my confusion for shyness. With
perfect tact and kindness she entered into conversation with me. In
another minute I was walking side by side with the woman who had sternly
repudiated me as a member of her family; feeling, I own, terribly
discomposed, and not knowing in the least whether I ought or ought not
to assume the responsibility, in my husband’s absence, of telling her
who I was.
In another minute my familiar landlady, walking on the other side of
my mother-in-law, decided the question for me. I happened to say that
I supposed we must by that time be near the end of our walk--the little
watering-place called Broadstairs. “Oh no, Mrs. Woodville!” cried the
irrepressible woman, calling me by my name, as usual; “nothing like so
near as you think!”
I looked with a beating heart at the old lady.
To my unutterable amazement, not the faintest gleam of recognition
appeared in her face. Old Mrs. Woodville went on talking to young Mrs.
Woodville just as composedly as if she had never heard her own name
before in her life!
My face and manner must have betrayed something of the agitation that I
was suffering. Happening to look at me at the end of her next sentence,
the old lady started, and said, in her kindly way,
“I am afraid you have overexerted yourself. You are very pale--you are
looking quite exhausted. Come and sit down here; let me lend you my
smelling-bottle.”
I followed her, quite helplessly, to the base of the cliff. Some fallen
fragments of chalk offered us a seat. I vaguely heard the voluble
landlady’s expressions of sympathy and regret; I mechanically took the
smelling-bottle which my husband’s mother offered to me, after hearing
my name, as an act of kindness to a stranger.
If I had only had myself to think of, I believe I should have provoked
an explanation on the spot. But I had Eustace to think of. I was
entirely ignorant of the relations, hostile or friendly, which existed
between his mother and himself. What could I do?
In the meantime the old lady was still speaking to me with the most
considerate sympathy. She too was fatigued, she said. She had passed a
weary night at the bedside of a near relative staying at Ramsgate. Only
the day before she had received a telegram announcing that one of her
sisters was seriously ill. She was herself thank God, still active and
strong, and she had thought it her duty to start at once for Ramsgate.
Toward the morning the state of the patient had improved. “The doctor
assures me ma’am, that there is no immediate danger; and I thought it
might revive me, after my long night at the bedside, if I took a little
walk on the beach.”
I heard the words--I understood what they meant--but I was still too
bewildered and too intimidated by my extraordinary position to be able
to continue the conversation. The landlady had a sensible suggestion to
make--the landlady was the next person who spoke.
“Here is a gentleman coming,” she said to me, pointing in the direction
of Ramsgate. “You can never walk back. Shall we ask him to send a chaise
from Broadstairs to the gap in the cliff?”
The gentleman advanced a little nearer.
The landlady and I recognized him at the same moment. It was Eustace
coming to meet us, as we had arranged. The irrepressible landlady gave
the freest expression to her feelings. “Oh, Mrs. Woodville, ain’t it
lucky? here is Mr. Woodville himself.”
Once more I looked at my mother-in-law. Once more the name failed to
produce the slightest effect on her. Her sight was not so keen as ours;
she had not recognized her son yet. He had young eyes like us, and
he recognized his mother. For a moment he stopped like a man
thunderstruck. Then he came on--his ruddy face white with suppressed
emotion, his eyes fixed on his mother.
“You here!” he said to her.
“How do you do, Eustace?” she quietly rejoined. “Have _you_ heard of
your aunt’s illness too? Did you know she was staying at Ramsgate?”
He made no answer. The landlady, drawing the inevitable inference from
the words that she had just heard, looked from me to my mother-in-law in
a state of amazement, which paralyzed even her tongue. I waited with
my eyes on my husband, to see what he would do. If he had delayed
acknowledging me another moment, the whole future course of my life
might have been altered--I should have despised him.
He did _not_ delay. He came to my side and took my hand.
“Do you know who this is?” he said to his mother.
She answered, looking at me with a courteous bend of her head:
“A lady I met on the beach, Eustace, who kindly restored to me a letter
that I dropped. I think I heard the name” (she turned to the landlady):
“Mrs. Woodville, was it not?”
My husband’s fingers unconsciously closed on my hand with a grasp that
hurt me. He set his mother right, it is only just to say, without one
cowardly moment of hesitation.
“Mother,” he said to her, very quietly, “this lady is my wife.”
She had hitherto kept her seat. She now rose slowly and faced her son in
silence. The first expression of surprise passed from her face. It was
succeeded by the most terrible look of mingled indignation and contempt
that I ever saw in a woman’s eyes.
“I pity your wife,” she said.
With those words and no more, lifting her hand she waved him back from
her, and went on her way again, as we had first found her, alone.
CHAPTER IV. ON THE WAY HOME.
LEFT by ourselves, there was a moment of silence among us. Eustace spoke
first.
“Are you able to walk back?” he said to me. “Or shall we go on to
Broadstairs, and return to Ramsgate by the railway?”
He put those questions as composedly, so far as his manner was
concerned, as if nothing remarkable had happened. But his eyes and his
lips betrayed him. They told me that he was suffering keenly in secret.
The extraordinary scene that had just passed, far from depriving me of
the last remains of my courage, had strung up my nerves and restored
my self-possession. I must have been more or less than woman if my
self-respect had not been wounded, if my curiosity had not been wrought
to the highest pitch, by the extraordinary conduct of my husband’s
mother when Eustace presented me to her. What was the secret of
her despising him, and pitying me? Where was the explanation of her
incomprehensible apathy when my name was twice pronounced in her
hearing? Why had she left us, as if the bare idea of remaining in our
company was abhorrent to her? The foremost interest of my life was now
the interest of penetrating these mysteries. Walk? I was in such a fever
of expectation that I felt as if I could have walked to the world’s end,
if I could only keep my husband by my side, and question him on the way.
“I am quite recovered,” I said. “Let us go back, as we came, on foot.”
Eustace glanced at the landlady. The landlady understood him.
“I won’t intrude my company on you, sir,” she said, sharply. “I have
some business to do at Broadstairs, and, now I am so near, I may as well
go on. Good-morning, Mrs. Woodville.”
She laid a marked emphasis on my name, and she added one significant
look at parting, which (in the preoccupied state of my mind at that
moment) I entirely failed to comprehend. There was neither time
nor opportunity to ask her what she meant. With a stiff little bow,
addressed to Eustace, she left us as his mother had left us taking the
way to Broadstairs, and walking rapidly.
At last we were alone.
I lost no time in beginning my inquiries; I wasted no words in prefatory
phrases. In the plainest terms I put the question to him:
“What does your mother’s conduct mean?”
Instead of answering, he burst into a fit of laughter--loud, coarse,
hard laughter, so utterly unlike any sound I had ever yet heard issue
from his lips, so strangely and shockingly foreign to his character
as _I_ understood it, that I stood still on the sands and openly
remonstrated with him.
“Eustace! you are not like yourself,” I said. “You almost frighten me.”
He took no notice. He seemed to be pursuing some pleasant train of
thought just started in his mind.
“So like my mother!” he exclaimed, with the air of a man who felt
irresistibly diverted by some humorous idea of his own. “Tell me all
about it, Valeria!”
“Tell _you_!” I repeated. “After what has happened, surely it is your
duty to enlighten _me_.”
“You don’t see the joke,” he said.
“I not only fail to see the joke,” I rejoined, “I see something in
your mother’s language and your mother’s behavior which justifies me in
asking you for a serious explanation.”
“My dear Valeria, if you understood my mother as well as I do, a serious
explanation of her conduct would be the last thing in the world that you
would expect from me. The idea of taking my mother seriously!” He burst
out laughing again. “My darling, you don’t know how you amuse me.”
It was all forced: it was all unnatural. He, the most delicate, the most
refined of men--a gentleman in the highest sense of the word--was coarse
and loud and vulgar! My heart sank under a sudden sense of misgiving
which, with all my love for him, it was impossible to resist. In
unutterable distress and alarm I asked myself, “Is my husband beginning
to deceive me? is he acting a part, and acting it badly, before we have
been married a week?” I set myself to win his confidence in a new way.
He was evidently determined to force his own point of view on me. I
determined, on my side, to accept his point of view.
“You tell me I don’t understand your mother,” I said, gently. “Will you
help me to understand her?”
“It is not easy to help you to understand a woman who doesn’t understand
herself,” he answered. “But I will try. The key to my poor dear mother’s
character is, in one word--Eccentricity.”
If he had picked out the most inappropriate word in the whole dictionary
to describe the lady whom I had met on the beach, “Eccentricity” would
have been that word. A child who had seen what I saw, who had heard what
I heard would have discovered that he was trifling--grossly, recklessly
trifling--with the truth.
“Bear in mind what I have said,” he proceeded; “and if you want to
understand my mother, do what I asked you to do a minute since--tell me
all about it. How came you to speak to her, to begin with?”
“Your mother told you, Eustace. I was walking just behind her, when she
dropped a letter by accident--”
“No accident,” he interposed. “The letter was dropped on purpose.”
“Impossible!” I exclaimed. “Why should your mother drop the letter on
purpose?”
“Use the key to her character, my dear. Eccentricity! My mother’s odd
way of making acquaintance with you.”
“Making acquaintance with me? I have just told you that I was walking
behind her. She could not have known of the existence of such a person
as myself until I spoke to her first.”
“So you suppose, Valeria.”
“I am certain of it.”
“Pardon me--you don’t know my mother as I do.”
I began to lose all patience with him.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that your mother was out on the sands
to-day for the express purpose of making acquaintance with Me?”
“I have not the slightest doubt of it,” he answered, coolly.
“Why, she didn’t even recognize my name!” I burst out. “Twice over the
landlady called me Mrs. Woodville in your mother’s hearing, and twice
over, I declare to you on my word of honor, it failed to produce the
slightest impression on her. She looked and acted as if she had never
heard her own name before in her life.”
“‘Acted’ is the right word,” he said, just as composedly as before.
“The women on the stage are not the only women who can act. My mother’s
object was to make herself thoroughly acquainted with you, and to throw
you off your guard by speaking in the character of a stranger. It is
exactly like her to take that roundabout way of satisfying her curiosity
about a daughter-in-law she disapproves of. If I had not joined you when
I did, you would have been examined and cross-examined about yourself
and about me, and you would innocently have answered under the
impression that you were speaking to a chance acquaintance. There is my
mother all over! She is your enemy, remember--not your friend. She is
not in search of your merits, but of your faults. And you wonder why
no impression was produced on her when she heard you addressed by your
name! Poor innocent! I can tell you this--you only discovered my
mother in her own character when I put an end to the mystification by
presenting you to each other. You saw how angry she was, and now you
know why.”
I let him go on without saying a word. I listened--oh! with such a heavy
heart, with such a crushing sense of disenchantment and despair! The
idol of my worship, the companion, guide, protector of my life--had he
fallen so low? could he stoop to such shameless prevarication as this?
Was there one word of truth in all that he had said to me? Yes! If I
had not discovered his mother’s portrait, it was certainly true that I
should not have known, not even have vaguely suspected, who she really
was. Apart from this, the rest was lying, clumsy lying, which said one
thing at least for him, that he was not accustomed to falsehood and
deceit. Good Heavens! if my husband was to be believed, his mother must
have tracked us to London, tracked us to the church, tracked us to the
railway station, tracked us to Ramsgate! To assert that she knew me by
sight as the wife of Eustace, and that she had waited on the sands and
dropped her letter for the express purpose of making acquaintance with
me, was also to assert every one of these monstrous probabilities to be
facts that had actually happened!
I could say no more. I walked by his side in silence, feeling the
miserable conviction that there was an abyss in the shape of a family
secret between my husband and me. In the spirit, if not in the body, we
were separated, after a married life of barely four days.
“Valeria,” he asked, “have you nothing to say to me?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you not satisfied with my explanation?”
I detected a slight tremor in his voice as he put that question. The
tone was, for the first time since we had spoken together, a tone that
my experience associated with him in certain moods of his which I had
already learned to know well. Among the hundred thousand mysterious
influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if
there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I
am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation:
it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little
natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can’t say why) to the
happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.
He suddenly stood still, and took me by the hand. He tried to look at
me.
I kept my head down and my eyes on the ground. I was ashamed of my
weakness and my want of spirit. I was determined not to look at him.
In the silence that followed he suddenly dropped on his knees at my
feet, with a cry of despair that cut through me like a knife.
“Valeria! I am vile--I am false--I am unworthy of you. Don’t believe
a word of what I have been saying--lies, lies, cowardly, contemptible
lies! You don’t know what I have gone through; you don’t know how I have
been tortured. Oh, my darling, try not to despise me! I must have been
beside myself when I spoke to you as I did. You looked hurt; you
looked offended; I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to spare you even a
moment’s pain--I wanted to hush it up, and have done with it. For
God’s sake don’t ask me to tell you any more! My love! my angel! it’s
something between my mother and me; it’s nothing that need disturb you;
it’s nothing to anybody now. I love you, I adore you; my whole heart and
soul are yours. Be satisfied with that. Forget what has happened. You
shall never see my mother again. We will leave this place to-morrow. We
will go away in the yacht. Does it matter where we live, so long as we
live for each other? Forgive and forget! Oh, Valeria, Valeria, forgive
and forget!”
Unutterable misery was in his face; unutterable misery was in his voice.
Remember this. And remember that I loved him.
“It is easy to forgive,” I said, sadly. “For your sake, Eustace, I will
try to forget.”
I raised him gently as I spoke. He kissed my hands with the air of a
man who was too humble to venture on any more familiar expression of his
gratitude than that. The sense of embarrassment between us as we slowly
walked on again was so unendurable that I actually cast about in my
mind for a subject of conversation, as if I had been in the company of a
stranger! In mercy to _him_, I asked him to tell me about the yacht.
He seized on the subject as a drowning man seizes on the hand that
rescues him.
On that one poor little topic of the yacht he talked, talked, talked,
as if his life depended upon his not being silent for an instant on
the rest of the way back. To me it was dreadful to hear him. I could
estimate what he was suffering by the violence which he--ordinarily a
silent and thoughtful man--was now doing to his true nature, and to
the prejudices and habits of his life. With the greatest difficulty I
preserved my self-control until we reached the door of our lodgings.
There I was obliged to plead fatigue, and ask him to let me rest for a
little while in the solitude of my own room.
“Shall we sail to-morrow?” he called after me suddenly, as I ascended
the stairs.
Sail with him to the Mediterranean the next day? Pass weeks and weeks
absolutely alone with him, in the narrow limits of a vessel, with his
horrible secret parting us in sympathy further and further from each
other day by day? I shuddered at the thought of it.
“To-morrow is rather a short notice,” I said. “Will you give me a little
longer time to prepare for the voyage?”
“Oh yes--take any time you like,” he answered, not (as I thought) very
willingly. “While you are resting--there are still one or two little
things to be settled--I think I will go back to the yacht. Is there
anything I can do for you, Valeria, before I go?”
“Nothing--thank you, Eustace.”
He hastened away to the harbor. Was he afraid of his own thoughts, if he
were left by himself in the house. Was the company of the sailing-master
and the steward better than no company at all?
It was useless to ask. What did I know about him or his thoughts? I
locked myself into my room.
CHAPTER V. THE LANDLADY’S DISCOVERY.
I SAT down, and tried to compose my spirits. Now or never was the time
to decide what it was my duty to my husband and my duty to myself to do
next.
The effort was beyond me. Worn out in mind and body alike, I was
perfectly incapable of pursuing any regular train of thought. I vaguely
felt--if I left things as they were--that I could never hope to remove
the shadow which now rested on the married life that had begun so
brightly. We might live together, so as to save appearances. But to
forget what had happened, or to feel satisfied with my position, was
beyond the power of my will. My tranquillity as a woman--perhaps my
dearest interests as a wife--depended absolutely on penetrating the
mystery of my mother-in-law’s conduct, and on discovering the true
meaning of the wild words of penitence and self-reproach which my
husband had addressed to me on our way home.
So far I could advance toward realizing my position--and no further.
When I asked myself what was to be done next, hopeless confusion,
maddening doubt, filled my mind, and transformed me into the most
listless and helpless of living women.
I gave up the struggle. In dull, stupid, obstinate despair, I threw
myself on my bed, and fell from sheer fatigue into a broken, uneasy
sleep.
I was awakened by a knock at the door of my room.
Was it my husband? I started to my feet as the idea occurred to me. Was
some new trial of my patience and my fortitude at hand? Half nervously,
half irritably, I asked who was there.
The landlady’s voice answered me.
“Can I speak to you for a moment, if you please?”
I opened the door. There is no disguising it--though I loved him so
dearly, though I had left home and friends for his sake--it was a relief
to me, at that miserable time, to know that Eustace had not returned to
the house.
The landlady came in, and took a seat, without waiting to be invited,
close by my side. She was no longer satisfied with merely asserting
herself as my equal. Ascending another step on the social ladder, she
took her stand on the platform of patronage, and charitably looked down
on me as an object of pity.
“I have just returned from Broadstairs,” she began. “I hope you will do
me the justice to believe that I sincerely regret what has happened.”
I bowed, and said nothing.
“As a gentlewoman myself,” proceeded the landlady--“reduced by family
misfortunes to let lodgings, but still a gentlewoman--I feel sincere
sympathy with you. I will even go further than that. I will take it on
myself to say that I don’t blame _you_. No, no. I noticed that you were
as much shocked and surprised at your mother-in-law’s conduct as I was;
and that is saying a great deal--a great deal indeed. However, I have
a duty to perform. It is disagreeable, but it is not the less a duty
on that account. I am a single woman; not from want of opportunities of
changing my condition--I beg you will understand that--but from choice.
Situated as I am, I receive only the most respectable persons into my
house. There must be no mystery about the positions of _my_ lodgers.
Mystery in the position of a lodger carries with it--what shall I say? I
don’t wish to offend you--I will say, a certain Taint. Very well. Now I
put it to your own common-sense. Can a person in my position be expected
to expose herself to--Taint? I make these remarks in a sisterly and
Christian spirit. As a lady yourself--I will even go the length of
saying a cruelly used lady--you will, I am sure, understand--”
I could endure it no longer. I stopped her there.
“I understand,” I said, “that you wish to give us notice to quit your
lodgings. When do you want us to go?”
The landlady held up a long, lean, red hand, in a sorrowful and sisterly
protest.
“No,” she said. “Not that tone; not those looks. It’s natural you should
be annoyed; it’s natural you should be angry. But do--now do please try
and control yourself. I put it to your own common-sense (we will say a
week for the notice to quit)--why not treat me like a friend? You don’t
know what a sacrifice, what a cruel sacrifice, I have made--entirely for
your sake.
“You?” I exclaimed. “What sacrifice?”
“What sacrifice?” repeated the landlady. “I have degraded myself as a
gentlewoman. I have forfeited my own self-respect.” She paused for a
moment, and suddenly seized my hand in a perfect frenzy of friendship.
“Oh, my poor dear!” cried this intolerable person. “I have discovered
everything. A villain has deceived you. You are no more married than I
am!”
I snatched my hand out of hers, and rose angrily from my chair.
“Are you mad?” I asked.
The landlady raised her eyes to the ceiling with the air of a person who
had deserved martyrdom, and who submitted to it cheerfully.
“Yes,” she said. “I begin to think I _am_ mad--mad to have devoted
myself to an ungrateful woman, to a person who doesn’t appreciate a
sisterly and Christian sacrifice of self. Well, I won’t do it again.
Heaven forgive me--I won’t do it again!”
“Do what again?” I asked.
“Follow your mother-in-law,” cried the landlady, suddenly dropping the
character of a martyr, and assuming the character of a vixen in its
place. “I blush when I think of it. I followed that most respectable
person every step of the way to her own door.”
Thus far my pride had held me up. It sustained me no longer. I dropped
back again into my chair, in undisguised dread of what was coming next.
“I gave you a look when I left you on the beach,” pursued the landlady,
growing louder and louder and redder and redder as she went on. “A
grateful woman would have understood that look. Never mind! I won’t
do it again I overtook your mother-in-law at the gap in the cliff. I
followed her--oh, how I feel the disgrace of it _now!_--I followed her
to the station at Broadstairs. She went back by train to Ramsgate. _I_
went back by train to Ramsgate. She walked to her lodgings. _I_ walked
to her lodgings. Behind her. Like a dog. Oh, the disgrace of it!
Providentially, as I then thought--I don’t know what to think of it
now--the landlord of the house happened to be a friend of mine, and
happened to be at home. We have no secrets from each other where
lodgers are concerned. I am in a position to tell you, madam, what your
mother-in-law’s name really is. She knows nothing about any such person
as Mrs. Woodville, for an excellent reason. Her name is _not_ Woodville.
Her name (and consequently her son’s name) is Macallan--Mrs. Macallan,
widow of the late General Macallan. Yes! your husband is _not_ your
husband. You are neither maid, wife, nor widow. You are worse than
nothing, madam, and you leave my house!”
I stopped her as she opened the door to go out. She had roused _my_
temper by this time. The doubt that she had cast on my marriage was more
than mortal resignation could endure.
“Give me Mrs. Macallan’s address,” I said.
The landlady’s anger receded into the background, and the landlady’s
astonishment appeared in its place.
“You don’t mean to tell me you are going to the old lady herself?” she
said.
“Nobody but the old lady can tell me what I want to know,” I answered.
“Your discovery (as you call it) may be enough for _you_; it is not
enough for _me_. How do we know that Mrs. Macallan may not have been
twice married? and that her first husband’s name may not have been
Woodville?”
The landlady’s astonishment subsided in its turn, and the landlady’s
curiosity succeeded as the ruling influence of the moment.
Substantially, as I have already said of her, she was a good-natured
woman. Her fits of temper (as is usual with good-natured people) were of
the hot and the short-lived sort, easily roused and easily appeased.
“I never thought of that,” she said. “Look here! if I give you the
address, will you promise to tell me all about it when you come back?”
I gave the required promise, and received the address in return.
“No malice,” said the landlady, suddenly resuming all her old
familiarity with me.
“No malice,” I answered, with all possible cordiality on my side.
In ten minutes more I was at my mother-in-law’s lodgings.
CHAPTER VI. MY OWN DISCOVERY.
FORTUNATELY for me, the landlord did not open the door when I rang. A
stupid maid-of-all-work, who never thought of asking me for my name, let
me in. Mrs. Macallan was at home, and had no visitors with her. Giving
me this information, the maid led the way upstairs, and showed me into
the drawing-room without a word of announcement.
My mother-in-law was sitting alone, near a work-table, knitting. The
moment I appeared in the doorway she laid aside her work, and, rising,
signed to me with a commanding gesture of her hand to let her speak
first.
“I know what you have come here for,” she said. “You have come here to
ask questions. Spare yourself, and spare me. I warn you beforehand that
I will not answer any questions relating to my son.”
It was firmly, but not harshly said. I spoke firmly in my turn.
“I have not come here, madam, to ask questions about your son,” I
answered. “I have come, if you will excuse me, to ask you a question
about yourself.”
She started, and looked at me keenly over her spectacles. I had
evidently taken her by surprise.
“What is the question?” she inquired.
“I now know for the first time, madam, that your name is Macallan,” I
said. “Your son has married me under the name of Woodville. The only
honorable explanation of this circumstance, so far as I know, is that my
husband is your son by a first marriage. The happiness of my life is at
stake. Will you kindly consider my position? Will you let me ask you if
you have been twice married, and if the name of your first husband was
Woodville?”
She considered a little before she replied.
“The question is a perfectly natural one in your position,” she said.
“But I think I had better not answer it.”
“May I as k why?”
“Certainly. If I answered you, I should only lead to other questions,
and I should be obliged to decline replying to them. I am sorry to
disappoint you. I repeat what I said on the beach--I have no other
feeling than a feeling of sympathy toward _you._ If you had consulted me
before your marriage, I should willingly have admitted you to my fullest
confidence. It is now too late. You are married. I recommend you to make
the best of your position, and to rest satisfied with things as they
are.”
“Pardon me, madam,” I remonstrated. “As things are, I don’t know that I
_am_ married. All I know, unless you enlighten me, is that your son has
married me under a name that is not his own. How can I be sure whether I
am or am not his lawful wife?”
“I believe there can be no doubt that you are lawfully my son’s wife,”
Mrs. Macallan answered. “At any rate it is easy to take a legal opinion
on the subject. If the opinion is that you are _not_ lawfully married,
my son (whatever his faults and failings may be) is a gentleman. He is
incapable of willfully deceiving a woman who loves and trusts him. He
will do you justice. On my side, I will do you justice, too. If the
legal opinion is adverse to your rightful claims, I will promise to
answer any questions which you may choose to put to me. As it is, I
believe you to be lawfully my son’s wife; and I say again, make the best
of your position. Be satisfied with your husband’s affectionate devotion
to you. If you value your peace of mind and the happiness of your life
to come, abstain from attempting to know more than you know now.”
She sat down again with the air of a woman who had said her last word.
Further remonstrance would be useless; I could see it in her face; I
could hear it in her voice. I turned round to open the drawing-room
door.
“You are hard on me, madam,” I said at parting. “I am at your mercy, and
I must submit.”
She suddenly looked up, and answered me with a flush on her kind and
handsome old face.
“As God is my witness, child, I pity you from the bottom of my heart!”
After that extraordinary outburst of feeling, she took up her work with
one hand, and signed to me with the other to leave her.
I bowed to her in silence, and went out.
I had entered the house far from feeling sure of the course I ought
to take in the future. I left the house positively resolved, come what
might of it, to discover the secret which the mother and son were hiding
from me. As to the question of the name, I saw it now in the light in
which I ought to have seen it from the first. If Mrs. Macallan _had_
been twice married (as I had rashly chosen to suppose), she would
certainly have shown some signs of recognition when she heard me
addressed by her first husband’s name. Where all else was mystery,
there was no mystery here. Whatever his reasons might be, Eustace had
assuredly married me under an assumed name.
Approaching the door of our lodgings, I saw my husband walking backward
and forward before it, evidently waiting for my return. If he asked me
the question, I decided to tell him frankly where I had been, and what
had passed between his mother and myself.
He hurried to meet me with signs of disturbance in his face and manner.
“I have a favor to ask of you, Valeria,” he said. “Do you mind returning
with me to London by the next train?”
I looked at him. In the popular phrase, I could hardly believe my own
ears.
“It’s a matter of business,” he went on, “of no interest to any one but
myself, and it requires my presence in London. You don’t wish to sail
just yet, as I understand? I can’t leave you here by yourself. Have you
any objection to going to London for a day or two?”
I made no objection. I too was eager to go back.
In London I could obtain the legal opinion which would tell me whether
I were lawfully married to Eustace or not. In London I should be within
reach of the help and advice of my father’s faithful old clerk. I could
confide in Benjamin as I could confide in no one else. Dearly as I
loved my uncle Starkweather, I shrank from communicating with him in my
present need. His wife had told me that I made a bad beginning when I
signed the wrong name in the marriage register. Shall I own it? My pride
shrank from acknowledging, before the honeymoon was over, that his wife
was right.
In two hours more we were on the railway again. Ah, what a contrast that
second journey presented to the first! On our way to Ramsgate everybody
could see that we were a newly wedded couple. On our way to London
nobody noticed us; nobody would have doubted that we had been married
for years.
We went to a private hotel in the neighborhood of Portland Place.
After breakfast the next morning Eustace announced that he must leave me
to attend to his business. I had previously mentioned to him that I had
some purchases to make in London. He was quite willing to let me go out
alone, on the condition that I should take a carriage provided by the
hotel.
My heart was heavy that morning: I felt the unacknowledged estrangement
that had grown up between us very keenly. My husband opened the door
to go out, and came back to kiss me before he left me by myself. That
little after-thought of tenderness touched me. Acting on the impulse of
the moment, I put my arm round his neck, and held him to me gently.
“My darling,” I said, “give me all your confidence. I know that you love
me. Show that you can trust me too.”
He sighed bitterly, and drew back from me--in sorrow, not in anger.
“I thought we had agreed, Valeria, not to return to that subject again,”
he said. “You only distress yourself and distress me.”
He left the room abruptly, as if he dare not trust himself to say more.
It is better not to dwell on what I felt after this last repulse. I
ordered the carriage at once. I was eager to find a refuge from my own
thoughts in movement and change.
I drove to the shops first, and made the purchases which I had mentioned
to Eustace by way of giving a reason for going out. Then I devoted
myself to the object which I really had at heart. I went to old
Benjamin’s little villa, in the by-ways of St. John’s Wood.
As soon as he had got over the first surprise of seeing me, he noticed
that I looked pale and care-worn. I confessed at once that I was in
trouble. We sat down together by the bright fireside in his little
library (Benjamin, as far as his means would allow, was a great
collector of books), and there I told my old friend, frankly and truly,
all that I have told here.
He was too distressed to say much. He fervently pressed my hand; he
fervently thanked God that my father had not lived to hear what he
had heard. Then, after a pause, he repeated my mother-in-law’s name to
himself in a doubting, questioning tone. “Macallan?” he said. “Macallan?
Where have I heard that name? Why does it sound as if it wasn’t strange
to me?”
He gave up pursuing the lost recollection, and asked, very earnestly,
what he could do for me. I answered that he could help me, in the first
place, to put an end to the doubt--an unendurable doubt to _me_--whether
I were lawfully married or not. His energy of the old days when he had
conducted my father’s business showed itself again the moment I said
those words.
“Your carriage is at the door, my dear,” he answered. “Come with me to
my own lawyer, without wasting another moment.”
We drove to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
At my request Benjamin put my case to the lawyer as the case of a friend
in whom I was interested. The answer was given without hesitation. I had
married, honestly believing my husband’s name to be the name under which
I had known him. The witnesses to my marriage--my uncle, my aunt, and
Benjamin--had acted, as I had acted, in perfect good faith. Under those
circumstances, there was no doubt about the law. I was legally married.
Macallan or Woodville, I was his wife.
This decisive answer relieved me of a heavy anxiety. I accepted my old
friend’s invitation to return with him to St. John’s Wood, and to make
my luncheon at his early dinner.
On our way back I reverted to the one other subject which was now
uppermost in my mind. I reiterated my resolution to discover why Eustace
had not married me under the name that was really his own.
My companion shook his head, and entreated me to consider well
beforehand what I proposed doing. His advice to me--so strangely do
extremes meet!--was my mother-in-law’s advice, repeated almost word for
word. “Leave things as they are, my dear. In the interest of your own
peace of mind be satisfied with your husband’s affection. You know
that you are his wife, and you know that he loves you. Surely that is
enough?”
I had but one answer to this. Life, on such conditions as my good friend
had just stated, would be simply unendurable to me. Nothing could alter
my resolution--for this plain reason, that nothing could reconcile me to
living with my husband on the terms on which we were living now. It only
rested with Benjamin to say whether he would give a helping hand to his
master’s daughter or not.
The old man’s answer was thoroughly characteristic of him.
“Mention what you want of me, my dear,” was all he said.
We were then passing a street in the neighborhood of Portman Square. I
was on the point of speaking again, when the words were suspended on my
lips. I saw my husband.
He was just descending the steps of a house--as if leaving it after a
visit. His eyes were on the ground: he did not look up when the-carriage
passed. As the servant closed the door behind him, I noticed that the
number of the house was Sixteen. At the next corner I saw the name of
the street. It was Vivian Place.
“Do you happen to know who lives at Number Sixteen Vivian Place?” I
inquired of my companion.
Benjamin started. My question was certainly a strange one, after what he
had just said to me.
“No,” he replied. “Why do you ask?”
“I have just seen Eustace leaving that house.”
“Well, my dear, and what of that?”
“My mind is in a bad way, Benjamin. Everything my husband does that I
don’t understand rouses my suspicion now.”
Benjamin lifted his withered old hands, and let them drop on his knees
again in mute lamentation over me.
“I tell you again,” I went on, “my life is unendurable to me. I won’t
answer for what I may do if I am left much longer to live in doubt of
the one man on earth whom I love. You have had experience of the world.
Suppose you were shut out from Eustace’s confidence, as I am? Suppose
you were as fond of him as I am, and felt your position as bitterly as I
feel it--what would you do?”
The question was plain. Benjamin met it with a plain answer.
“I think I should find my way, my dear, to some intimate friend of your
husband’s,” he said, “and make a few discreet inquiries in that quarter
first.”
Some intimate friend of my husband’s? I considered with myself. There
was but one friend of his whom I knew of--my uncle’s correspondent,
Major Fitz-David. My heart beat fast as the name recurred to my memory.
Suppose I followed Benjamin’s advice? Suppose I applied to Major
Fitz-David? Even if he, too, refused to answer my questions, my position
would not be more helpless than it was now. I determined to make the
attempt. The only difficulty in the way, so far, was to discover the
Major’s address. I had given back his letter to Doctor Starkweather,
at my uncle’s own request. I remembered that the address from which the
Major wrote was somewhere in London--and I remembered no more.
“Thank you, old friend; you have given me an idea already,” I said to
Benjamin. “Have you got a Directory in your house?”
“No, my dear,” he rejoined, looking very much puzzled. “But I can easily
send out and borrow one.”
We returned to the villa. The servant was sent at once to the nearest
stationer’s to borrow a Directory. She returned with the book just as we
sat down to dinner. Searching for the Major’s name under the letter F, I
was startled by a new discovery.
“Benjamin!” I said. “This is a strange coincidence. Look here!”
He looked where I pointed. Major Fitz-David’s address was Number Sixteen
Vivian Place--the very house which I had seen my husband leaving as we
passed in the carriage!
CHAPTER VII. ON THE WAY TO THE MAJOR.
“YES,” said Benjamin. “It _is_ a coincidence certainly. Still--”
He stopped and looked at me. He seemed a little doubtful how I might
receive what he had it in his mind to say to me next.
“Go on,” I said.
“Still, my dear, I see nothing suspicious in what has happened,” he
resumed. “To my mind it is quite natural that your husband, being in
London, should pay a visit to one of his friends. And it’s equally
natural that we should pass through Vivian Place on our way back here.
This seems to be the reasonable view. What do _you_ say?”
“I have told you already that my mind is in a bad way about Eustace,”
I answered. “_I_ say there is some motive at the bottom of his visit to
Major Fitz-David. It is not an ordinary call. I am firmly convinced it
is not an ordinary call!”
“Suppose we get on with our dinner?” said Benjamin, resignedly. “Here is
a loin of mutton, my dear--an ordinary loin of mutton. Is there anything
suspicious in _that?_ Very well, then. Show me you have confidence in
the mutton; please eat. There’s the wine, again. No mystery, Valeria,
in that claret--I’ll take my oath it’s nothing but innocent juice of the
grape. If we can’t believe in anything else, let’s believe in juice of
the grape. Your good health, my dear.”
I adapted myself to the old man’s genial humor as readily as I could.
We ate and we drank, and we talked of by-gone days. For a little while I
was almost happy in the company of my fatherly old friend. Why was I not
old too? Why had I not done with love, with its certain miseries, its
transient delights, its cruel losses, its bitterly doubtful gains? The
last autumn flowers in the window basked brightly in the last of the
autumn sunlight. Benjamin’s little dog digested his dinner in perfect
comfort on the hearth. The parrot in the next house screeched his vocal
accomplishments cheerfully. I don’t doubt that it is a great privilege
to be a human being. But may it not be the happier destiny to be an
animal or a plant?
The brief respite was soon over; all my anxieties came back. I was once
more a doubting, discontented, depressed creature when I rose to say
good-by.
“Promise, my dear, you will do nothing rash,” said Benjamin, as he
opened the door for me.
“Is it rash to go to Major Fitz-David?” I asked.
“Yes--if you go by yourself. You don’t know what sort of man he is; you
don’t know how he may receive you. Let me try first, and pave the way,
as the saying is. Trust my experience, my dear. In matters of this sort
there is nothing like paving the way.”
I considered a moment. It was due to my good friend to consider before I
said No.
Reflection decided me on taking the responsibility, whatever it might
be, upon my own shoulders. Good or bad, compassionate or cruel, the
Major was a man. A woman’s influence was the safest influence to trust
with him, where the end to be gained was such an end as I had in view.
It was not easy to say this to Benjamin without the danger of mortifying
him. I made an appointment with the old man to call on me the next
morning at the hotel, and talk the matter over again. Is it very
disgraceful to me to add that I privately determined (if the thing could
be accomplished) to see Major Fitz-David in the interval?
“Do nothing rash, my dear. In your own interests, do nothing rash!”
Those were Benjamin’s last words when we parted for the day.
I found Eustace waiting for me in our sitting-room at the hotel. His
spirits seemed to have revived since I had seen him last. He advanced to
meet me cheerfully, with an open sheet of paper in his hand.
“My business is settled, Valeria, sooner than I had expected,” he began,
gayly. “Are your purchases all completed, fair lady? Are _you_ free
too?”
I had learned already (God help me!) to distrust his fits of gayety. I
asked, cautiously,
“Do you mean free for to-day?”
“Free for to-day, and to-morrow, and next week, and next month--and next
year too, for all I know to the contrary,” he answered, putting his arm
boisterously round my waist. “Look here!”
He lifted the open sheet of paper which I had noticed in his hand, and
held it for me to read. It was a telegram to the sailing-master of the
yacht, informing him that we had arranged to return to Ramsgate that
evening, and that we should be ready to sail for the Mediterranean with
the next tide.
“I only waited for your return,” said Eustace, “to send the telegram to
the office.”
He crossed the room as he spoke to ring the bell. I stopped him.
“I am afraid I can’t go to Ramsgate to-day,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked, suddenly changing his tone, and speaking sharply.
I dare say it will seem ridiculous to some people, but it is really true
that he shook my resolution to go to Major Fitz-David when he put his
arm round me. Even a mere passing caress from _him_ stole away my heart,
and softly tempted me to yield. But the ominous alteration in his tone
made another woman of me. I felt once more, and felt more strongly than
ever, that in my critical position it was useless to stand still, and
worse than useless to draw back.
“I am sorry to disappoint you,” I answered. “It is impossible for me (as
I told you at Ramsgate) to be ready to sail at a moment’s notice. I want
time.”
“What for?”
Not only his tone, but his look, when he put that second question,
jarred on every nerve in me. He roused in my mind--I can’t tell how or
why--an angry sense of the indignity that he had put upon his wife in
marrying her under a false name. Fearing that I should answer rashly,
that I should say something which my better sense might regret, if I
spoke at that moment, I said nothing. Women alone can estimate what it
cost me to be silent. And men alone can understand how irritating my
silence must have been to my husband.
“You want time?” he repeated. “I ask you again--what for?”
My self-control, pushed to its extremest limits, failed me. The rash
reply flew out of my lips, like a bird set free from a cage.
“I want time,” I said, “to accustom myself to my right name.”
He suddenly stepped up to me with a dark look.
“What do you mean by your ‘right name?’”
“Surely you know,” I answered. “I once thought I was Mrs. Woodville. I
have now discovered that I am Mrs. Macallan.”
He started back at the sound of his own name as if I had struck him--he
started back, and turned so deadly pale that I feared he was going to
drop at my feet in a swoon. Oh, my tongue! my tongue! Why had I not
controlled my miserable, mischievous woman’s tongue!
“I didn’t mean to alarm you, Eustace,” I said. “I spoke at random. Pray
forgive me.”
He waved his hand impatiently, as if my penitent words were tangible
things--ruffling, worrying things, like flies in summer--which he was
putting away from him.
“What else have you discovered?” he asked, in low, stern tones.
“Nothing, Eustace.”
“Nothing?” He paused as he repeated the word, and passed his hand over
his forehead in a weary way. “Nothing, of course,” he resumed, speaking
to himself, “or she would not be here.” He paused once more, and looked
at me searchingly. “Don’t say again what you said just now,” he went on.
“For your own sake, Valeria, as well as for mine.” He dropped into the
nearest chair, and said no more.
I certainly heard the warning; but the only words which really produced
an impression on my mind were the words preceding it, which he had
spoken to himself. He had said: “Nothing, of course, _or she could not
be here.”_ If I had found out some other truth besides the truth about
the name, would it have prevented me from ever returning to my husband?
Was that what he meant? Did the sort of discovery that he contemplated
mean something so dreadful that it would have parted us at once and
forever? I stood by his chair in silence, and tried to find the answer
to those terrible questions in his face. It used to speak to me so
eloquently when it spoke of his love. It told me nothing now.
He sat for some time without looking at me, lost in his own thoughts.
Then he rose on a sudden and took his hat.
“The friend who lent me the yacht is in town,” he said. “I suppose I had
better see him, and say our plans are changed.” He tore up the telegram
with an air of sullen resignation as he spoke. “You are evidently
determined not to go to sea with me,” he resumed. “We had better give it
up. I don’t see what else is to be done. Do you?”
His tone was almost a tone of contempt. I was too depressed about
myself, too alarmed about _him,_ to resent it.
“Decide as you think best, Eustace,” I said, sadly. “Every way, the
prospect seems a hopeless one. As long as I am shut out from your
confidence, it matters little whether we live on land or at sea--we
cannot live happily.”
“If you could control your curiosity.” he answered, sternly, “we might
live happily enough. I thought I had married a woman who was superior to
the vulgar failings of her sex. A good wife should know better than to
pry into affairs of her husband’s with which she had no concern.”
Surely it was hard to bear this? However, I bore it.
“Is it no concern of mine?” I asked, gently, “when I find that my
husband has not married me under his family name? Is it no concern of
mine when I hear your mother say, in so many words, that she pities your
wife? It is hard, Eustace, to accuse me of curiosity because I cannot
accept the unendurable position in which you have placed me. Your cruel
silence is a blight on my happiness and a threat to my future. Your
cruel silence is estranging us from each other at the beginning of our
married life. And you blame me for feeling this? You tell me I am prying
into affairs which are yours only? They are _not_ yours only: I have my
interest in them too. Oh, my darling, why do you trifle with our love
and our confidence in each other? Why do you keep me in the dark?”
He answered with a stern and pitiless brevity,
“For your own good.”
I turned away from him in silence. He was treating me like a child.
He followed me. Putting one hand heavily on my shoulder, he forced me to
face him once more.
“Listen to this,” he said. “What I am now going to say to you I say for
the first and last time. Valeria! if you ever discover what I am
now keeping from your knowledge--from that moment you live a life of
torture; your tranquillity is gone. Your days will be days of terror;
your nights will be full of horrid dreams--through no fault of mine,
mind! through no fault of mine! Every day of your life you will feel
some new distrust, some growing fear of me, and you will be doing me the
vilest injustice all the time. On my faith as a Christian, on my honor
as a man, if you stir a step further in this matter, there is an end to
your happiness for the rest of your life! Think seriously of what I have
said to you; you will have time to reflect. I am going to tell my friend
that our plans for the Mediterranean are given up. I shall not be
back before the evening.” He sighed, and looked at me with unutterable
sadness. “I love you, Valeria,” he said. “In spite of all that has
passed, as God is my witness, I love you more dearly than ever.”
So he spoke. So he left me.
I must write the truth about myself, however strange it may appear. I
don’t pretend to be able to analyze my own motives; I don’t pretend even
to guess how other women might have acted in my place. It is true of me,
that my husband’s terrible warning--all the more terrible in its mystery
and its vagueness--produced no deterrent effect on my mind: it only
stimulated my resolution to discover what he was hiding from me. He
had not been gone two minutes before I rang the bell and ordered the
carriage, to take me to Major Fitz-David’s house in Vivian Place.
Walking to and fro while I was waiting--I was in such a fever of
excitement that it was impossible for me to sit still--I accidentally
caught sight of myself in the glass.
My own face startled me, it looked so haggard and so wild. Could I
present myself to a stranger, could I hope to produce the necessary
impression in my favor, looking as I looked at that moment? For all I
knew to the contrary, my whole future might depend upon the effect which
I produced on Major Fitz-David at first sight. I rang the bell again,
and sent a message to one of the chambermaids to follow me to my room.
I had no maid of my own with me: the stewardess of the yacht would
have acted as my attendant if we had held to our first arrangement. It
mattered little, so long as I had a woman to help me. The chambermaid
appeared. I can give no better idea of the disordered and desperate
condition of my mind at that time than by owning that I actually
consulted this perfect stranger on the question of my personal
appearance. She was a middle-aged woman, with a large experience of the
world and its wickedness written legibly on her manner and on her face.
I put money into the woman’s hand, enough of it to surprise her.
She thanked me with a cynical smile, evidently placing her own evil
interpretation on my motive for bribing her.
“What can I do for you, ma’am?” she asked, in a confidential whisper.
“Don’t speak loud! there is somebody in the next room.”
“I want to look my best,” I said, “and I have sent for you to help me.”
“I understand, ma’am.”
“What do you understand?”
She nodded her head significantly, and whispered to me again. “Lord
bless you, I’m used to this!” she said. “There is a gentleman in the
case. Don’t mind me, ma’am. It’s a way I have. I mean no harm.” She
stopped, and looked at me critically. “I wouldn’t change my dress if I
were you,” she went on. “The color becomes you.”
It was too late to resent the woman’s impertinence. There was no help
for it but to make use of her. Besides, she was right about the dress.
It was of a delicate maize-color, prettily trimmed with lace. I could
wear nothing which suited me better. My hair, however, stood in need of
some skilled attention. The chambermaid rearranged it with a ready hand
which showed that she was no beginner in the art of dressing hair. She
laid down the combs and brushes, and looked at me; then looked at the
toilet-table, searching for something which she apparently failed to
find.
“Where do you keep it?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at your complexion, ma’am. You will frighten him if he sees you
like that. A touch of color you _must_ have. Where do you keep it? What!
you haven’t got it? you never use it? Dear, dear, dear me!”
For a moment surprise fairly deprived her of her self-possession.
Recovering herself, she begged permission to leave me for a minute. I
let her go, knowing what her errand was. She came back with a box of
paint and powders; and I said nothing to check her. I saw, in the glass,
my skin take a false fairness, my cheeks a false color, my eyes a false
brightness--and I never shrank from it. No! I let the odious conceit go
on; I even admired the extraordinary delicacy and dexterity with which
it was all done. “Anything” (I thought to myself, in the madness of that
miserable time) “so long as it helps me to win the Major’s confidence!
Anything, so long as I discover what those last words of my husband’s
really mean!”
The transformation of my face was accomplished. The chambermaid pointed
with her wicked forefinger in the direction of the glass.
“Bear in mind, ma’am, what you looked like when you sent for me,” she
said. “And just see for yourself how you look now. You’re the prettiest
woman (of your style) in London. Ah what a thing pearl-powder is, when
one knows how to use it!”
CHAPTER VIII. THE FRIEND OF THE WOMEN.
I FIND it impossible to describe my sensations while the carriage was
taking me to Major Fitz-David’s house. I doubt, indeed, if I really felt
or thought at all, in the true sense of those words.
From the moment when I had resigned myself into the hands of the
chambermaid I seemed in some strange way to have lost my ordinary
identity--to have stepped out of my own character. At other times my
temperament was of the nervous and anxious sort, and my tendency was to
exaggerate any difficulties that might place themselves in my way. At
other times, having before me the prospect of a critical interview with
a stranger, I should have considered with myself what it might be wise
to pass over, and what it might be wise to say. Now I never gave
my coming interview with the Major a thought; I felt an unreasoning
confidence in myself, and a blind faith in _him_. Now neither the past
nor the future troubled me; I lived unreflectingly in the present. I
looked at the shops as we drove by them, and at the other carriages as
they passed mine. I noticed--yes, and enjoyed--the glances of admiration
which chance foot-passengers on the pavement cast on me. I said to
myself, “This looks well for my prospect of making a friend of
the Major!” When we drew up at the door in Vivian Place, it is no
exaggeration to say that I had but one anxiety--anxiety to find the
Major at home.
The door was opened by a servant out of livery, an old man who looked as
if he might have been a soldier in his earlier days. He eyed me with
a grave attention, which relaxed little by little into sly approval. I
asked for Major Fitz-David. The answer was not altogether encouraging:
the man was not sure whether his master were at home or not.
I gave him my card. My cards, being part of my wedding outfit,
necessarily had the false name printed on them--_Mrs. Eustace
Woodville_. The servant showed me into a front room on the ground-floor,
and disappeared with my card in his hand.
Looking about me, I noticed a door in the wall opposite the window,
communicating with some inner room. The door was not of the ordinary
kind. It fitted into the thickness of the partition wall, and worked in
grooves. Looking a little nearer, I saw that it had not been pulled out
so as completely to close the doorway. Only the merest chink was left;
but it was enough to convey to my ears all that passed in the next room.
“What did you say, Oliver, when she asked for me?” inquired a man’s
voice, pitched cautiously in a low key.
“I said I was not sure you were at home, sir,” answered the voice of the
servant who had let me in.
There was a pause. The first speaker was evidently Major Fitz-David
himself. I waited to hear more.
“I think I had better not see her, Oliver,” the Major’s voice resumed.
“Very good, sir.”
“Say I have gone out, and you don’t know when I shall be back again. Beg
the lady to write, if she has any business with me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop, Oliver!”
Oliver stopped. There was another and longer pause. Then the master
resumed the examination of the man.
“Is she young, Oliver?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And--pretty?”
“Better than pretty, sir, to my thinking.”
“Aye? aye? What you call a fine woman--eh, Oliver?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Tall?”
“Nearly as tall as I am, Major.”
“Aye? aye? aye? A good figure?”
“As slim as a sapling, sir, and as upright as a dart.”
“On second thoughts, I am at home, Oliver. Show her in! show her in!”
So far, one thing at least seemed to be clear. I had done well in
sending for the chambermaid. What would Oliver’s report of me have
been if I had presented myself to him with my colorless cheeks and my
ill-dressed hair?
The servant reappeared, and conducted me to the inner room. Major
Fitz-David advanced to welcome me. What was the Major like?
Well, he was like a well-preserved old gentleman of, say, sixty years
old, little and lean, and chiefly remarkable by the extraordinary length
of his nose. After this feature, I noticed next his beautiful brown wig;
his sparkling little gray eyes; his rosy complexion; his short military
whisker, dyed to match his wig; his white teeth and his winning smile;
his smart blue frock-coat, with a camellia in the button-hole; and his
splendid ring, a ruby, flashing on his little finger as he courteously
signed to me to take a chair.
“Dear Mrs. Woodville, how very kind of you this is! I have been longing
to have the happiness of knowing you. Eustace is an old friend of
mine. I congratulated him when I heard of his marriage. May I make a
confession?--I envy him now I have seen his wife.”
The future of my life was perhaps in this man’s hands. I studied him
attentively: I tried to read his character in his face.
The Major’s sparkling little gray eyes softened as they looked at me;
the Major’s strong and sturdy voice dropped to its lowest and tenderest
tones when he spoke to me; the Major’s manner expressed, from the moment
when I entered the room, a happy mixture of admiration and respect. He
drew his chair close to mine, as if it were a privilege to be near me.
He took my hand and lifted my glove to his lips, as if that glove
were the most delicious luxury the world could produce. “Dear Mrs.
Woodville,” he said, as he softly laid my hand back on my lap, “bear
with an old fellow who worships your enchanting sex. You really brighten
this dull house. It is _such_ a pleasure to see you!”
There was no need for the old gentleman to make his little confession.
Women, children, and dogs proverbially know by instinct who the people
are who really like them. The women had a warm friend--perhaps at one
time a dangerously warm friend--in Major Fitz-David. I knew as much of
him as that before I had settled myself in my chair and opened my lips
to answer him.
“Thank you, Major, for your kind reception and your pretty compliment,”
I said, matching my host’s easy tone as closely as the necessary
restraints on my side would permit. “You have made your confession. May
I make mine?”
Major Fitz-David lifted my hand again from my lap and drew his chair as
close as possible to mine. I looked at him gravely and tried to release
my hand. Major Fitz-David declined to let go of it, and proceeded to
tell me why.
“I have just heard you speak for the first time,” he said. “I am under
the charm of your voice. Dear Mrs. Woodville, bear with an old fellow
who is under the charm! Don’t grudge me my innocent little pleasures.
Lend me--I wish I could say _give_ me--this pretty hand. I am such an
admirer of pretty hands! I can listen so much better with a pretty hand
in mine. The ladies indulge my weakness. Please indulge me too. Yes? And
what were you going to say?”
“I was going to say, Major, that I felt particularly sensible of your
kind welcome because, as it happens, I have a favor to ask of you.”
I was conscious, while I spoke, that I was approaching the object of my
visit a little too abruptly. But Major Fitz-David’s admiration rose
from one climax to another with such alarming rapidity that I felt the
importance of administering a practical check to it. I trusted to those
ominous words, “a favor to ask of you,” to administer the check, and I
did not trust in vain. My aged admirer gently dropped my hand, and, with
all possible politeness, changed the subject.
“The favor is granted, of course!” he said. “And now, tell me, how is
our dear Eustace?”
“Anxious and out of spirits.” I answered.
“Anxious and out of spirits!” repeated the Major. “The enviable man who
is married to You anxious and out of spirits? Monstrous! Eustace fairly
disgusts me. I shall take him off the list of my friends.”
“In that case, take me off the list with him, Major. I am in wretched
spirits too. You are my husband’s old friend. I may acknowledge to _you_
that our married life is just now not quite a happy one.”
Major Fitz-David lifted his eyebrows (dyed to match his whiskers) in
polite surprise.
“Already!” he exclaimed. “What can Eustace be made of? Has he no
appreciation of beauty and grace? Is he the most insensible of living
beings?”
“He is the best and dearest of men,” I answered. “But there is some
dreadful mystery in his past life--”
I could get no further; Major Fitz-David deliberately stopped me. He did
it with the smoothest politeness, on the surface. But I saw a look in
his bright little eyes which said, plainly, “If you _will_ venture on
delicate ground, madam, don’t ask me to accompany you.”
“My charming friend!” he exclaimed. “May I call you my charming friend?
You have--among a thousand other delightful qualities which I can see
already--a vivid imagination. Don’t let it get the upper hand. Take an
old fellow’s advice; don’t let it get the upper hand! What can I offer
you, dear Mrs. Woodville? A cup of tea?”
“Call me by my right name, sir,” I answered, boldly. “I have made a
discovery. I know as well as you do that my name is Macallan.”
The Major started, and looked at me very attentively. His manner became
grave, his tone changed completely, when he spoke next.
“May I ask,” he said, “if you have communicated to your husband the
discovery which you have just mentioned to me?”
“Certainly!” I answered. “I consider that my husband owes me an
explanation. I have asked him to tell me what his extraordinary conduct
means--and he has refused, in language that frightens me. I have
appealed to his mother--and _she_ has refused to explain, in language
that humiliates me. Dear Major Fitz-David, I have no friends to take
my part: I have nobody to come to but you! Do me the greatest of all
favors--tell me why your friend Eustace has married me under a false
name!”
“Do _me_ the greatest of all favors;” answered the Major. “Don’t ask me
to say a word about it.”
He looked, in spite of his unsatisfactory reply, as if he really felt
for me. I determined to try my utmost powers of persuasion; I resolved
not to be beaten at the first repulse.
“I _must_ ask you,” I said. “Think of my position. How can I live,
knowing what I know--and knowing no more? I would rather hear the
most horrible thing you can tell me than be condemned (as I am now) to
perpetual misgiving and perpetual suspense. I love my husband with all
my heart; but I cannot live with him on these terms: the misery of it
would drive me mad. I am only a woman, Major. I can only throw myself on
your kindness. Don’t--pray, pray don’t keep me in the dark!”
I could say no more. In the reckless impulse of the moment I snatched up
his hand and raised it to my lips. The gallant old gentleman started as
if I had given him an electric shock.
“My dear, dear lady!” he exclaimed, “I can’t tell you how I feel for
you! You charm me, you overwhelm me, you touch me to the heart. What can
I say? What can I do? I can only imitate your admirable frankness, your
fearless candor. You have told me what your position is. Let me tell
you, in my turn, how I am placed. Compose yourself--pray compose
yourself! I have a smelling-bottle here at the service of the ladies.
Permit me to offer it.”
He brought me the smelling-bottle; he put a little stool under my feet;
he entreated me to take time enough to compose myself. “Infernal fool!”
I heard him say to himself, as he considerately turned away from me for
a few moments. “If _I_ had been her husband, come what might of it, I
would have told her the truth!”
Was he referring to Eustace? And was he going to do what he would have
done in my husband’s place?--was he really going to tell me the truth?
The idea had barely crossed my mind when I was startled by a loud and
peremptory knocking at the street door. The Major stopped and listened
attentively. In a few moments the door was opened, and the rustling of a
woman’s dress was plainly audible in the hall. The Major hurried to the
door of the room with the activity of a young man. He was too late. The
door was violently opened from the outer side, just as he got to it. The
lady of the rustling dress burst into the room.
CHAPTER IX. THE DEFEAT OF THE MAJOR.
MAJOR FITZ-DAVID’S visitor proved to be a plump, round-eyed overdressed
girl, with a florid complexion and straw colored hair. After first
fixing on me a broad stare of astonishment, she pointedly addressed her
apologies for intruding on us to the Major alone. The creature evidently
believed me to be the last new object of the old gentleman’s idolatry;
and she took no pains to disguise her jealous resentment on discovering
us together. Major Fitz-David set matters right in his own irresistible
way. He kissed the hand of the overdressed girl as devotedly as he had
kissed mine; he told her she was looking charmingly. Then he led her,
with his happy mixture of admiration and respect, back to the door by
which she had entered--a second door communicating directly with the
hall.
“No apology is necessary, my dear,” he said. “This lady is with me on
a matter of business. You will find your singing-master waiting for you
upstairs. Begin your lesson; and I will join you in a few minutes. _Au
revoir_, my charming pupil--_au revoir._”
The young lady answered this polite little speech in a whisper--with her
round eyes fixed distrustfully on me while she spoke. The door closed on
her. Major Fitz-David was a t liberty to set matters right with me, in
my turn.
“I call that young person one of my happy discoveries;” said the old
gentleman, complacently. “She possesses, I don’t hesitate to say, the
finest soprano voice in Europe. Would you believe it, I met with her at
the railway station. She was behind the counter in a refreshment-room,
poor innocent, rinsing wine-glasses, and singing over her work. Good
Heavens, such singing! Her upper notes electrified me. I said to myself;
‘Here is a born prima donna--I will bring her out!’ She is the third
I have brought out in my time. I shall take her to Italy when her
education is sufficiently advanced, and perfect her at Milan. In that
unsophisticated girl, my dear lady, you see one of the future Queens of
Song. Listen! She is beginning her scales. What a voice! Brava! Brava!
Bravissima!”
The high soprano notes of the future Queen of Song rang through the
house as he spoke. Of the loudness of the young lady’s voice there could
be no sort of doubt. The sweetness and the purity of it admitted, in my
opinion, of considerable dispute.
Having said the polite words which the occasion rendered necessary, I
ventured to recall Major Fitz-David to the subject in discussion between
us when his visitor had entered the room. The Major was very unwilling
to return to the perilous topic on which we had just touched when the
interruption occurred. He beat time with his forefinger to the singing
upstairs; he asked me about _my_ voice, and whether I sang; he remarked
that life would be intolerable to him without Love and Art. A man in my
place would have lost all patience, and would have given up the struggle
in disgust. Being a woman, and having my end in view, my resolution was
invincible. I fairly wore out the Major’s resistance, and compelled him
to surrender at discretion. It is only justice to add that, when he did
make up his mind to speak to me again of Eustace, he spoke frankly, and
spoke to the point.
“I have known your husband,” he began, “since the time when he was a
boy. At a certain period of his past life a terrible misfortune fell
upon him. The secret of that misfortune is known to his friends, and
is religiously kept by his friends. It is the secret that he is keeping
from You. He will never tell it to you as long as he lives. And he has
bound _me_ not to tell it, under a promise given on my word of honor.
You wished, dear Mrs. Woodville, to be made acquainted with my position
toward Eustace. There it is!”
“You persist in calling me Mrs. Woodville,” I said.
“Your husband wishes me to persist,” the Major answered. “He assumed the
name of Woodville, fearing to give his own name, when he first called
at your uncle’s house. He will now acknowledge no other. Remonstrance
is useless. You must do what we do--you must give way to an unreasonable
man. The best fellow in the world in other respects: in this one matter
as obstinate and self-willed as he can be. If you ask me my opinion, I
tell you honestly that I think he was wrong in courting and marrying
you under his false name. He trusted his honor and his happiness to your
keeping in making you his--wife. Why should he not trust the story of
his troubles to you as well? His mother quite shares my opinion in
this matter. You must not blame her for refusing to admit you into
her confidence after your marriage: it was then too late. Before your
marriage she did all she could do--without betraying secrets which, as
a good mother, she was bound to respect--to induce her son to act justly
toward you. I commit no indiscretion when I tell you that she refused
to sanction your marriage mainly for the reason that Eustace refused to
follow her advice, and to tell you what his position really was. On my
part I did all I could to support Mrs. Macallan in the course that she
took. When Eustace wrote to tell me that he had engaged himself to marry
a niece of my good friend Doctor Starkweather, and that he had mentioned
me as his reference, I wrote back to warn him that I would have nothing
to do with the affair unless he revealed the whole truth about himself
to his future wife. He refused to listen to me, as he had refused to
listen to his mother; and he held me at the same time to my promise to
keep his secret. When Starkweather wrote to me, I had no choice but to
involve myself in a deception of which I thoroughly disapproved, or to
answer in a tone so guarded and so brief as to stop the correspondence
at the outset. I chose the last alternative; and I fear I have offended
my good old friend. You now see the painful position in which I am
placed. To add to the difficulties of that situation, Eustace came here
this very day to warn me to be on my guard, in case of your addressing
to me the very request which you have just made! He told me that you had
met with his mother, by an unlucky accident, and that you had discovered
the family name. He declared that he had traveled to London for the
express purpose of speaking to me personally on this serious subject.
‘I know your weakness,’ he said, ‘where women are concerned. Valeria is
aware that you are my old friend. She will certainly write to you; she
may even be bold enough to make her way into your house. Renew your
promise to keep the great calamity of my life a secret, on your honor
and on your oath. ‘Those were his words, as nearly as I can remember
them. I tried to treat the thing lightly; I ridiculed the absurdly
theatrical notion of ‘renewing my promise,’ and all the rest of it.
Quite useless! He refused to leave me; he reminded me of his unmerited
sufferings, poor fellow, in the past time. It ended in his bursting into
tears. You love him, and so do I. Can you wonder that I let him have his
way? The result is that I am doubly bound to tell you nothing, by the
most sacred promise that a man can give. My dear lady, I cordially side
with you in this matter; I long to relieve your anxieties. But what can
I do?”
He stopped, and waited--gravely waited--to hear my reply.
I had listened from beginning to end without interrupting him. The
extraordinary change in his manner, and in his way of expressing
himself, while he was speaking of Eustace, alarmed me as nothing had
alarmed me yet. How terrible (I thought to myself) must this untold
story be, if the mere act of referring to it makes light-hearted Major
Fitz-David speak seriously and sadly, never smiling, never paying me a
compliment, never even noticing the singing upstairs! My heart sank in
me as I drew that startling conclusion. For the first time since I had
entered the house I was at the end of my resources; I knew neither what
to say nor what to do next.
And yet I kept my seat. Never had the resolution to discover what my
husband was hiding from me been more firmly rooted in my mind than it
was at that moment! I cannot account for the extraordinary inconsistency
in my character which this confession implies. I can only describe the
facts as they really were.
The singing went on upstairs. Major Fitz-David still waited impenetrably
to hear what I had to say--to know what I resolved on doing next.
Before I had decided what to say or what to do, another domestic
incident happened. In plain words, another knocking announced a new
visitor at the house door. On this occasion there was no rustling of a
woman’s dress in the hall. On this occasion only the old servant
entered the room, carrying a magnificent nosegay in his hand. “With Lady
Clarinda’s kind regards. To remind Major Fitz-David of his appointment.”
Another lady! This time a lady with a title. A great lady who sent
her flowers and her messages without condescending to concealment. The
Major--first apologizing to me--wrote a few lines of acknowledgment,
and sent them out to the messenger. When the door was closed again he
carefully selected one of the choicest flowers in the nosegay. “May I
ask,” he said, presenting the flower to me with his best grace, “whether
you now understand the delicate position in which I am placed between
your husband and yourself?”
The little interruption caused by the appearance of the nosegay had
given a new impulse to my thoughts, and had thus helped, in some degree,
to restore me to myself. I was able at last to satisfy Major Fitz-David
that his considerate and courteous explanation had not been thrown away
upon me.
“I thank you, most sincerely, Major,” I said “You have convinced me that
I must not ask you to forget, on my account, the promise which you have
given to my husband. It is a sacred promise, which I too am bound to
respect--I quite understand that.”
The Major drew a long breath of relief, and patted me on the shoulder in
high approval of what I had said to him.
“Admirably expressed!” he rejoined, recovering his light-hearted looks
and his lover-like ways all in a moment. “My dear lady, you have the
gift of sympathy; you see exactly how I am situated. Do you know, you
remind me of my charming Lady Clarinda. _She_ has the gift of sympathy,
and sees exactly how I am situated. I should so enjoy introducing you
to each other,” said the Major, plunging his long nose ecstatically into
Lady Clarinda’s flowers.
I had my end still to gain; and, being (as you will have discovered by
this time) the most obstinate of living women, I still kept that end in
view.
“I shall be delighted to meet Lady Clarinda,” I replied. “In the
meantime--”
“I will get up a little dinner,” proceeded the Major, with a burst of
enthusiasm. “You and I and Lady Clarinda. Our young prima donna shall
come in the evening, and sing to us. Suppose we draw out the _menu?_ My
sweet friend, what is your favorite autumn soup?”
“In the meantime,” I persisted, “to return to what we were speaking of
just now--”
The Major’s smile vanished; the Major’s hand dropped the pen destined to
immortalize the name of my favorite autumn soup.
“_Must_ we return to that?” he asked, piteously.
“Only for a moment,” I said.
“You remind me,” pursued Major Fitz-David, shaking his head sadly, “of
another charming friend of mine--a French friend--Madame Mirliflore. You
are a person of prodigious tenacity of purpose. Madame Mirliflore is a
person of prodigious tenacity of purpose. She happens to be in London.
Shall we have her at our little dinner?” The Major brightened at the
idea, and took up the pen again. “Do tell me,” he said, “what _is_ your
favorite autumn soup?”
“Pardon me,” I began, “we were speaking just now--”
“Oh, dear me!” cried Major Fitz-David. “Is this the other subject?”
“Yes--this is the other subject.”
The Major put down his pen for the second time, and regretfully
dismissed from his mind Madame Mirliflore and the autumn soup.
“Yes?” he said, with a patient bow and a submissive smile. “You were
going to say--”
“I was going to say,” I rejoined, “that your promise only pledges you
not to tell the secret which my husband is keeping from me. You have
given no promise not to answer me if I venture to ask you one or two
questions.”
Major Fitz-David held up his hand warningly, and cast a sly look at me
out of his bright little gray eyes.
“Stop!” he said. “My sweet friend, stop there! I know where your
questions will lead me, and what the result will be if I once begin
to answer them. When your husband was here to-day he took occasion to
remind me that I was as weak as water in the hands of a pretty woman.
He is quite right. I _am_ as weak as water; I can refuse nothing to a
pretty woman. Dear and admirable lady, don’t abuse your influence! don’t
make an old soldier false to his word of honor!”
I tried to say something here in defense of my motives. The Major
clasped his hands entreatingly, and looked at me with a pleading
simplicity wonderful to see.
“Why press it?” he asked. “I offer no resistance. I am a lamb--why
sacrifice me? I acknowledge your power; I throw myself on your mercy.
All the misfortunes of my youth and my manhood have come to me through
women. I am not a bit better in my age--I am just as fond of the women
and just as ready to be misled by them as ever, with one foot in the
grave. Shocking, isn’t it? But how true! Look at this mark!” He lifted
a curl of his beautiful brown wig, and showed me a terrible scar at the
side of his head. “That wound (supposed to be mortal at the time) was
made by a pistol bullet,” he proceeded. “Not received in the service of
my country--oh dear, no! Received in the service of a much-injured lady,
at the hands of her scoundrel of a husband, in a duel abroad. Well, she
was worth it.” He kissed his hand affectionately to the memory of the
dead or absent lady, and pointed to a water-color drawing of a pretty
country-house hanging on the opposite wall. “That fine estate,” he
proceeded, “once belonged to me. It was sold years and years since. And
who had the money? The women--God bless them all!--the women. I don’t
regret it. If I had another estate, I have no doubt it would go the same
way. Your adorable sex has made its pretty playthings of my life, my
time, and my money--and welcome! The one thing I have kept to myself
is my honor. And now _that_ is in danger. Yes, if you put your clever
little questions, with those lovely eyes and with that gentle voice, I
know what will happen. You will deprive me of the last and best of all
my possessions. Have I deserved to be treated in that way, and by you,
my charming friend?--by you, of all people in the world? Oh, fie! fie!”
He paused and looked at me as before--the picture of artless entreaty,
with his head a little on one side. I made another attempt to speak
of the matter in dispute between us, from my own point of view. Major
Fitz-David instantly threw himself prostrate on my mercy more innocently
than ever.
“Ask of me anything else in the wide world,” he said; “but don’t ask me
to be false to my friend. Spare me _that_--and there is nothing I will
not do to satisfy you. I mean what I say, mind!” he went on, bending
closer to me, and speaking more seriously than he had spoken yet “I
think you are very hardly used. It is monstrous to expect that a woman,
placed in your situation, will consent to be left for the rest of her
life in the dark. No! no! if I saw you, at this moment, on the point
of finding out for yourself what Eustace persists in hiding from you, I
should remember that my promise, like all other promises, has its
limits and reserves. I should consider myself bound in honor not to help
you--but I would not lift a finger to prevent you from discovering the
truth for yourself.”
At last he was speaking in good earnest: he laid a strong emphasis on
his closing words. I laid a stronger emphasis on them still by suddenly
leaving my chair. The impulse to spring to my feet was irresistible.
Major Fitz-David had started a new idea in my mind.
“Now we understand each other!” I said. “I will accept your own terms,
Major. I will ask nothing of you but what you have just offered to me of
your own accord.”
“What have I offered?” he inquired, looking a little alarmed.
“Nothing that you need repent of,” I answered; “nothing which is not
easy for you to grant. May I ask a bold question? Suppose this house was
mine instead of yours?”
“Consider it yours,” cried the gallant old gentleman. “From the garret
to the kitchen, consider it yours!”
“A thousand thanks, Major; I will consider it mine for the moment.
You know--everybody knows--that one of a woman’s many weaknesses is
curiosity. Suppose my curiosity led me to examine everything in my new
house?”
“Yes?”
“Suppose I went from room to room, and searched everything, and peeped
in everywhere? Do you think there would be any chance--”
The quick-witted Major anticipated the nature of my question. He
followed my example; he too started to his feet, with a new idea in his
mind.
“Would there be any chance,” I went on, “of my finding my own way to
my husband’s secret in this house? One word of reply, Major Fitz-David!
Only one word--Yes or No?”
“Don’t excite yourself!” cried the Major.
“Yes or No?” I repeated, more vehemently than ever.
“Yes,” said the Major, after a moment’s consideration.
It was the reply I had asked for; but it was not explicit enough, now
I had got it, to satisfy me. I felt the necessity of leading him (if
possible) into details.
“Does ‘Yes’ mean that there is some sort of clew to the mystery?” I
asked. “Something, for instance, which my eyes might see and my hands
might touch if I could only find it?”
He considered again. I saw that I had succeeded in interesting him in
some way unknown to myself; and I waited patiently until he was prepared
to answer me.
“The thing you mention,” he said, “the clew (as you call it), might be
seen and might be touched--supposing you could find it.”
“In this house?” I asked.
The Major advanced a step nearer to me, and answered--
“In this room.”
My head began to swim; my heart throbbed violently. I tried to speak;
it was in vain; the effort almost choked me. In the silence I could
hear the music-lesson still going on in the room above. The future prima
donna had done practicing her scales, and was trying her voice now in
selections from Italian operas. At the moment when I first heard her
she was singing the beautiful air from the _Somnambula,_ “Come per me
sereno.” I never hear that delicious melody, to this day, without being
instantly transported in imagination to the fatal back-room in Vivian
Place.
The Major--strongly affected himself by this time--was the first to
break the silence.
“Sit down again,” he said; “and pray take the easy-chair. You are very
much agitated; you want rest.”
He was right. I could stand no longer; I dropped into the chair. Major
Fitz-David rang the bell, and spoke a few words to the servant at the
door.
“I have been here a long time,” I said, faintly. “Tell me if I am in the
way.”
“In the way?” he repeated, with his irresistible smile. “You forget that
you are in your own house!”
The servant returned to us, bringing with him a tiny bottle of champagne
and a plateful of delicate little sugared biscuits.
“I have had this wine bottled expressly for the ladies,” said the Major.
“The biscuits came to me direct from Paris. As a favor to _me,_ you
must take some refreshment. And then--” He stopped and looked at me very
attentively. “And then,” he resumed, “shall I go to my young prima donna
upstairs and leave you here alone?”
It was impossible to hint more delicately at the one request which I
now had it in my mind to make to him. I took his hand and pressed it
gratefully.
“The tranquillity of my whole life to come is at stake,” I said. “When I
am left here by myself, does your generous sympathy permit me to examine
everything in the room?”
He signed to me to drink the champagne and eat a biscuit before he gave
his answer.
“This is serious,” he said. “I wish you to be in perfect possession of
yourself. Restore your strength--and then I will speak to you.”
I did as he bade me. In a minute from the time when I drank it the
delicious sparkling wine had begun to revive me.
“Is it your express wish,” he resumed, “that I should leave you here by
yourself to search the room?”
“It is my express wish,” I answered.
“I take a heavy responsibility on myself in granting your request. But I
grant it for all that, because I sincerely believe--as you believe--that
the tranquillity of your life to come depends on your discovering the
truth.” Saying those words, he took two keys from his pocket. “You will
naturally feel a suspicion,” he went on, “of any locked doors that you
may find here. The only locked places in the room are the doors of the
cupboards under the long book-case, and the door of the Italian cabinet
in that corner. The small key opens the book-case cupboards; the long
key opens the cabinet door.”
With that explanation, he laid the keys before me on the table.
“Thus far,” he said, “I have rigidly respected the promise which I made
to your husband. I shall continue to be faithful to my promise, whatever
may be the result of your examination of the room. I am bound in honor
not to assist you by word or deed. I am not even at liberty to offer you
the slightest hint. Is that understood?”
“Certainly!”
“Very good. I have now a last word of warning to give you--and then I
have done. If you do by any chance succeed in laying your hand on the
clew, remember this--_the discovery which follows will be a terrible
one._ If you have any doubt about your capacity to sustain a shock which
will strike you to the soul, for God’s sake give up the idea of finding
out your husband’s secret at once and forever!”
“I thank you for your warning, Major. I must face the consequences of
making the discovery, whatever they may be.”
“You are positively resolved?”
“Positively.”
“Very well. Take any time you please. The house, and every person in it,
are at your disposal. Ring the bell once if you want the man-servant.
Ring twice if you wish the housemaid to wait on you. From time to time I
shall just look in myself to see how you are going on. I am responsible
for your comfort and security, you know, while you honor me by remaining
under my roof.”
He lifted my hand to his lips, and fixed a last attentive look on me.
“I hope I am not running too great a risk,” he said--more to himself
than to me. “The women have led me into many a rash action in my time.
Have _you_ led me, I wonder, into the rashest action of all?”
With those ominous last words he bowed gravely and left me alone in the
room.
CHAPTER X. THE SEARCH.
THE fire burning in the grate was not a very large one; and the outer
air (as I had noticed on my way to the house) had something of a wintry
sharpness in it that day.
Still, my first feeling, when Major Fitz-David left me, was a feeling of
heat and oppression, with its natural result, a difficulty in breathing
freely. The nervous agitation of the time was, I suppose, answerable for
these sensations. I took off my bonnet and mantle and gloves, and opened
the window for a little while. Nothing was to be seen outside but a
paved courtyard, with a skylight in the middle, closed at the further
end by the wall of the Major’s stables. A few minutes at the window
cooled and refreshed me. I shut it down again, and took my first step
on the way of discovery. In other words, I began my first examination of
the four walls around me, and of all that they inclosed.
I was amazed at my own calmness. My interview with Major Fitz-David had,
perhaps, exhausted my capacity for feeling any strong emotion, for the
time at least. It was a relief to me to be alone; it was a relief to me
to begin the search. Those were my only sensations so far.
The shape of the room was oblong. Of the two shorter walls, one
contained the door in grooves which I have already mentioned as
communicating with the front room; the other was almost entirely
occupied by the broad window which looked out on the courtyard.
Taking the doorway wall first, what was there, in the shape of
furniture, on either side of it? There was a card-table on either side.
Above each card-table stood a magnificent china bowl placed on a gilt
and carved bracket fixed to the wall.
I opened the card-tables. The drawers beneath contained nothing but
cards, and the usual counters and markers. With the exception of one
pack, the cards in both tables were still wrapped in their paper covers
exactly as they had come from the shop. I examined the loose pack, card
by card. No writing, no mark of any kind, was visible on any one of
them. Assisted by a library ladder which stood against the book-case,
I looked next into the two china bowls. Both were perfectly empty. Was
there anything more to examine on that side of the room? In the two
corners there were two little chairs of inlaid wood, with red silk
cushions. I turned them up and looked under the cushions, and still I
made no discoveries. When I had put the chairs back in their places my
search on one side of the room was complete. So far I had found nothing.
I crossed to the opposite wall, the wall which contained the window.
The window (occupying, as I have said, almost the entire length and
height of the wall) was divided into three compartments, and was adorned
at their extremity by handsome curtains of dark red velvet. The ample
heavy folds of the velvet left just room at the two corners of the wall
for two little upright cabinets in buhl, containing rows of drawers, and
supporting two fine bronze productions (reduced in size) of the Venus
Milo and the Venus Callipyge. I had Major Fitz-David’s permission to
do just what I pleased. I opened the si x drawers in each cabinet, and
examined their contents without hesitation.
Beginning with the cabinet in the right-hand corner, my investigations
were soon completed. All the six drawers were alike occupied by a
collection of fossils, which (judging by the curious paper inscriptions
fixed on some of them) were associated with a past period of the Major’s
life when he had speculated, not very successfully in mines. After
satisfying myself that the drawers contained nothing but the fossils
and their inscriptions, I turned to the cabinet in the left-hand corner
next.
Here a variety of objects was revealed to view, and the examination
accordingly occupied a much longer time.
The top drawer contained a complete collection of carpenter’s tools in
miniature, relics probably of the far-distant time when the Major was a
boy, and when parents or friends had made him a present of a set of toy
tools. The second drawer was filled with toys of another sort--presents
made to Major Fitz-David by his fair friends. Embroidered braces, smart
smoking-caps, quaint pincushions, gorgeous slippers, glittering purses,
all bore witness to the popularity of the friend of the women. The
contents of the third drawer were of a less interesting sort: the entire
space was filled with old account-books, ranging over a period of
many years. After looking into each book, and opening and shaking it
uselessly, in search of any loose papers which might be hidden between
the leaves, I came to the fourth drawer, and found more relics of past
pecuniary transactions in the shape of receipted bills, neatly tied
together, and each inscribed at the back. Among the bills I found nearly
a dozen loose papers, all equally unimportant. The fifth drawer was in
sad confusion. I took out first a loose bundle of ornamental cards, each
containing the list of dishes at past banquets given or attended by the
Major in London or Paris; next, a box full of delicately tinted quill
pens (evidently a lady’s gift); next, a quantity of old invitation
cards; next, some dog’s-eared French plays and books of the opera; next,
a pocket-corkscrew, a bundle of cigarettes, and a bunch of rusty keys;
lastly, a passport, a set of luggage labels, a broken silver snuff-box,
two cigar-cases, and a torn map of Rome. “Nothing anywhere to interest
me,” I thought, as I closed the fifth, and opened the sixth and last
drawer.
The sixth drawer was at once a surprise and a disappointment. It
literally contained nothing but the fragments of a broken vase.
I was sitting, at the time, opposite to the cabinet, in a low chair. In
the momentary irritation caused by my discovery of the emptiness of the
last drawer, I had just lifted my foot to push it back into its place,
when the door communicating with the hall opened, and Major Fitz-David
stood before me.
His eyes, after first meeting mine, traveled downward to my foot. The
instant he noticed the open drawer I saw a change in his face. It was
only for a moment; but in that moment he looked at me with a sudden
suspicion and surprise--looked as if he had caught me with my hand on
the clew.
“Pray don’t let me disturb you,” said Major Fitz-David. “I have only
come here to ask you a question.”
“What is it, Major?”
“Have you met with any letters of mine in the course of your
investigations?”
“I have found none yet,” I answered. “If I do discover any letters, I
shall, of course, not take the liberty of examining them.”
“I wanted to speak to you about that,” he rejoined. “It only struck me
a moment since, upstairs, that my letters might embarrass you. In your
place I should feel some distrust of anything which I was not at liberty
to examine. I think I can set this matter right, however, with very
little trouble to either of us. It is no violation of any promises or
pledges on my part if I simply tell you that my letters will not assist
the discovery which you are trying to make. You can safely pass them
over as objects that are not worth examining from your point of view.
You understand me, I am sure?”
“I am much obliged to you, Major--I quite understand.”
“Are you feeling any fatigue?”
“None whatever, thank you.”
“And you still hope to succeed? You are not beginning to be discouraged
already?”
“I am not in the least discouraged. With your kind leave, I mean to
persevere for some time yet.”
I had not closed the drawer of the cabinet while we were talking, and
I glanced carelessly, as I answered him, at the fragments of the broken
vase. By this time he had got his feelings under perfect command. He,
too, glanced at the fragments of the vase with an appearance of perfect
indifference. I remembered the look of suspicion and surprise that
had escaped him on entering the room, and I thought his indifference a
little overacted.
“_That_ doesn’t look very encouraging,” he said, with a smile, pointing
to the shattered pieces of china in the drawer.
“Appearances are not always to be trusted,” I replied. “The wisest thing
I can do in my present situation is to suspect everything, even down to
a broken vase.”
I looked hard at him as I spoke. He changed the subject.
“Does the music upstairs annoy you?” he asked.
“Not in the least, Major.”
“It will soon be over now. The singing-master is going, and the Italian
master has just arrived. I am sparing no pains to make my young prima
donna a most accomplished person. In learning to sing she must also
learn the language which is especially the language of music. I shall
perfect her in the accent when I take her to Italy. It is the height
of my ambition to have her mistaken for an Italian when she sings in
public. Is there anything I can do before I leave you again? May I send
you some more champagne? Please say yes!”
“A thousand thanks, Major. No more champagne for the present.”
He turned at the door to kiss his hand to me at parting. At the same
moment I saw his eyes wander slyly toward the book-case. It was only for
an instant. I had barely detected him before he was out of the room.
Left by myself again, I looked at the book-case--looked at it
attentively for the first time.
It was a handsome piece of furniture in ancient carved oak, and it
stood against the wall which ran parallel with the hall of the house.
Excepting the space occupied in the upper corner of the room by the
second door, which opened into the hall, the book-case filled the whole
length of the wall down to the window. The top was ornamented by vases,
candelabra, and statuettes, in pairs, placed in a row. Looking along
the row, I noticed a vacant space on the top of the bookcase at the
extremity of it which was nearest to the window. The opposite extremity,
nearest to the door, was occupied by a handsome painted vase of a very
peculiar pattern. Where was the corresponding vase, which ought to have
been placed at the corresponding extremity of the book-case? I returned
to the open sixth drawer of the cabinet, and looked in again. There was
no mistaking the pattern on the fragments when I examined them now. The
vase which had been broken was the vase which had stood in the place now
vacant on the top of the book-case at the end nearest to the window.
Making this discovery, I took out the fragments, down to the smallest
morsel of the shattered china, and examined them carefully one after
another.
I was too ignorant of the subject to be able to estimate the value of
the vase or the antiquity of the vase, or even to know whether it were
of British or of foreign manufacture. The ground was of a delicate
cream-color. The ornaments traced on this were wreaths of flowers and
Cupids surrounding a medallion on either side of the vase. Upon the
space within one of the medallions was painted with exquisite delicacy
a woman’s head, representing a nymph or a goddess, or perhaps a portrait
of some celebrated person--I was not learned enough to say which.
The other medallion inclosed the head of a man, also treated in the
classical style. Reclining shepherds and shepherdesses in Watteau
costume, with their dogs and their sheep, formed the adornments of the
pedestal. Such had the vase been in the days of its prosperity, when
it stood on the top of the book-case. By what accident had it become
broken? And why had Major Fitz-David’s face changed when he found that
I had discovered the remains of his shattered work of art in the cabinet
drawer?
The remains left those serious questions unanswered--the remains told me
absolutely nothing. And yet, if my own observation of the Major were to
be trusted, the way to the clew of which I was in search lay, directly
or indirectly, through the broken vase.
It was useless to pursue the question, knowing no more than I knew now.
I returned to the book-case.
Thus far I had assumed (without any sufficient reason) that the clew of
which I was in search must necessarily reveal itself through a written
paper of some sort. It now occurred to me--after the movement which
I had detected on the part of the Major--that the clew might quite as
probably present itself in the form of a book.
I looked along the lower rows of shelves, standing just near enough to
them to read the titles on the backs of the volumes. I saw Voltaire in
red morocco, Shakespeare in blue, Walter Scott in green, the “History of
England” in brown, the “Annual Register” in yellow calf. There I paused,
wearied and discouraged already by the long rows of volumes. How (I
thought to myself) am I to examine all these books? And what am I to
look for, even if I do examine them all?
Major Fitz-David had spoken of a terrible misfortune which had darkened
my husband’s past life. In what possible way could any trace of that
misfortune, or any suggestive hint of something resembling it, exist in
the archives of the “Annual Register” or in the pages of Voltaire?
The bare idea of such a thing seemed absurd The mere attempt to make a
serious examination in this direction was surely a wanton waste of time.
And yet the Major had certainly stolen a look at the book-case. And
again, the broken vase had once stood on the book-case. Did these
circumstances justify me in connecting the vase and the book-case as
twin landmarks on the way that led to discovery? The question was not an
easy one to decide on the spur of the moment.
I looked up at the higher shelves.
Here the collection of books exhibited a greater variety. The volumes
were smaller, and were not so carefully arranged as on the lower
shelves. Some were bound in cloth, some were only protected by paper
covers; one or two had fallen, and lay flat on the shelves. Here and
there I saw empty spaces from which books had been removed and not
replaced. In short, there was no discouraging uniformity in these higher
regions of the book-case. The untidy top shelves looked suggestive of
some lucky accident which might unexpectedly lead the way to success. I
decided, if I did examine the book-case at all, to begin at the top.
Where was the library ladder?
I had left it against the partition wall which divided the back room
from the room in front. Looking that way, I necessarily looked also
toward the door that ran in grooves--the imperfectly closed door through
which I heard Major Fitz-David question his servant on the subject of
my personal appearance when I first entered the house. No one had moved
this door during the time of my visit. Everybody entering or leaving the
room had used the other door, which led into the hall.
At the moment when I looked round something stirred in the front room.
The movement let the light in suddenly through the small open space left
by the partially closed door. Had somebody been watching me through the
chink? I stepped softly to the door, and pushed it back until it was
wide open. There was the Major, discovered in the front room! I saw it
in his face--he had been watching me at the book-case!
His hat was in his hand. He was evidently going out; and he dexterously
took advantage of that circumstance to give a plausible reason for being
so near the door.
“I hope I didn’t frighten you,” he said.
“You startled me a little, Major.”
“I am so sorry, and so ashamed! I was just going to open the door, and
tell you that I am obliged to go out. I have received a pressing message
from a lady. A charming person--I should so like you to know her. She
is in sad trouble, poor thing. Little bills, you know, and nasty
tradespeople who want their money, and a husband--oh, dear me, a husband
who is quite unworthy of her! A most interesting creature. You remind
me of her a little; you both have the same carriage of the head. I shall
not be more than half an hour gone. Can I do anything for you? You are
looking fatigued. Pray let me send for some more champagne. No? Promise
to ring when you want it. That’s right! _Au revoir_, my charming
friend--_au revoir!_”
I pulled the door to again the moment his back was turned, and sat down
for a while to compose myself.
He had been watching me at the book-case! The man who was in my
husband’s confidence, the man who knew where the clew was to be found,
had been watching me at the book-case! There was no doubt of it now.
Major Fitz-David had shown me the hiding-place of the secret in spite of
himself!
I looked with indifference at the other pieces of furniture, ranged
against the fourth wall, which I had not examined yet. I surveyed,
without the slightest feeling of curiosity, all the little elegant
trifles scattered on the tables and on the chimney-piece, each one
of which might have been an object of suspicion to me under other
circumstances. Even the water-color drawings failed to interest me in my
present frame of mind. I observed languidly that they were most of
them portraits of ladies--fair idols, no doubt, of the Major’s facile
adoration--and I cared to notice no more. _My_ business in that room (I
was certain of it now!) began and ended with the book-case. I left
my seat to fetch the library ladder, determining to begin the work of
investigation on the top shelves.
On my way to the ladder I passed one of the tables, and saw the keys
lying on it which Major Fitz-David had left at my disposal.
The smaller of the two keys instantly reminded me of the cupboards under
the bookcase. I had strangely overlooked these. A vague distrust of the
locked doors a vague doubt of what they might be hiding from me, stole
into my mind. I left the ladder in its place against the wall, and set
myself to examine the contents of the cupboards first.
The cupboards were three in number. As I opened the first of them
the singing upstairs ceased. For a moment there was something almost
oppressive in the sudden change from noise to silence. I suppose my
nerves must have been overwrought. The next sound in the house--nothing
more remarkable than the creaking of a man’s boots descending
the stairs--made me shudder all over. The man was no doubt the
singing-master, going away after giving his lesson. I heard the house
door close on him, and started at the familiar sound as if it were
something terrible which I had never heard before. Then there was
silence again. I roused myself as well as I could, and began my
examination of the first cupboard.
It was divided into two compartments.
The top compartment contained nothing but boxes of cigars, ranged in
rows, one on another. The under compartment was devoted to a collection
of shells. They were all huddled together anyhow, the Major evidently
setting a far higher value on his cigars than on his shells. I searched
this lower compartment carefully for any object interesting to me which
might be hidden in it. Nothing was to be found in any part of it besides
the shells.
As I opened the second cupboard it struck me that the light was
beginning to fail.
I looked at the window: it was hardly evening yet. The darkening of the
light was produced by gathering clouds. Rain-drops pattered against
the glass; the autumn wind whistled mournfully in the corners of the
courtyard. I mended the fire before I renewed my search. My nerves were
in fault again, I suppose. I shivered when I went back to the book-case.
My hands trembled: I wondered what was the matter with me.
The second cupboard revealed (in the upper division of it) some really
beautiful cameos--not mounted, but laid on cotton-wool in neat cardboard
trays. In one corner, half hidden under one of the trays, there peeped
out the white leaves of a little manuscript. I pounced on it eagerly,
only to meet with a new disappointment: the manuscript proved to be a
descriptive catalogue of the cameos--nothing more!
Turning to the lower division of the cupboard, I found more costly
curiosities in the shape of ivory carvings from Japan and specimens of
rare silk from China. I began to feel weary of disinterring the Major’s
treasures. The longer I searched, the farther I seemed to remove myself
from the one object that I had it at heart to attain. After closing the
door of the second cupboard, I almost doubted whether it would be worth
my while to proceed farther and open the third and last door.
A little reflection convinced me that it would be as well, now that I
had begun my examination of the lower regions of the book-case, to go on
with it to the end. I opened the last cupboard.
On the upper shelf there appeared, in solitary grandeur, one object
only--a gorgeously bound book.
It was of a larger size than usual, judging of it by comparison with
the dimensions of modern volumes. The binding was of blue velvet, with
clasps of silver worked in beautiful arabesque patterns, and with a lock
of the same precious metal to protect the book from prying eyes. When I
took it up, I found that the lock was not closed.
Had I any right to take advantage of this accident, and open the book?
I have put the question since to some of my friends of both sexes. The
women all agree that I was perfectly justified, considering the serious
interests that I had at stake, in taking any advantage of any book in
the Major’s house. The men differ from this view, and declare that I
ought to have put back the volume in blue velvet unopened, carefully
guarding myself from any after-temptation to look at it again by locking
the cupboard door. I dare say the men are right.
Being a woman, however, I opened the book without a moment’s hesitation.
The leaves were of the finest vellum, with tastefully designed
illuminations all round them. And what did these highly ornamental pages
contain? To my unutterable amazement and disgust, they contained locks
of hair, let neatly into the center of each page, with inscriptions
beneath, which proved them to be love-tokens from various ladies who had
touched the Major’s susceptible heart at different periods of his life.
The inscriptions were written in other languages besides English, but
they appeared to be all equally devoted to the same curious purpose,
namely, to reminding the Major of the dates at which his various
attachments had come to an untimely end. Thus the first page exhibited
a lock of the lightest flaxen hair, with these lines beneath: “My adored
Madeline. Eternal constancy. Alas, July 22, 1839!” The next page was
adorned by a darker shade of hair, with a French inscription under it:
“Clemence. Idole de mon âme. Toujours fidele. Helas, 2me Avril, 1840.” A
lock of red hair followed, with a lamentation in Latin under it, a note
being attached to the date of dissolution of partnership in this case,
stating that the lady was descended from the ancient Romans, and was
therefore mourned appropriately in Latin by her devoted Fitz-David.
More shades of hair and more inscriptions followed, until I was weary of
looking at them. I put down the book, disgusted with the creatures
who had assisted in filling it, and then took it up again, by an
afterthought. Thus far I had thoroughly searched everything that had
presented itself to my notice. Agreeable or not agreeable, it was
plainly of serious importance to my own interests to go on as I had
begun, and thoroughly to search the book.
I turned over the pages until I came to the first blank leaf. Seeing
that they were all blank leaves from this place to the end, I lifted the
volume by the back, and, as a last measure of precaution, shook it so as
to dislodge any loose papers or cards which might have escaped my notice
between the leaves.
This time my patience was rewarded by a discovery which indescribably
irritated and distressed me.
A small photograph, mounted on a card, fell out of the book. A first
glance showed me that it represented the portraits of two persons.
One of the persons I recognized as my husband.
The other person was a woman.
Her face was entirely unknown to me. She was not young. The picture
represented her seated on a chair, with my husband standing behind, and
bending over her, holding one of her hands in his. The woman’s face was
hard-featured and ugly, with the marking lines of strong passions and
resolute self-will plainly written on it. Still, ugly as she was, I felt
a pang of jealousy as I noticed the familiarly affectionate action by
which the artist (with the permission of his sitters, of course) had
connected the two figures in a group. Eustace had briefly told me, in
the days of our courtship, that he had more than once fancied himself
to be in love before he met with me. Could this very unattractive woman
have been one of the early objects of his admiration? Had she been near
enough and dear enough to him to be photographed with her hand in his? I
looked and looked at the portraits until I could endure them no longer.
Women are strange creatures--mysteries even to themselves. I threw the
photograph from me into a corner of the cupboard. I was savagely angry
with my husband; I hated--yes, hated with all my heart and soul!--the
woman who had got his hand in hers--the unknown woman with the
self-willed, hard-featured face.
All this time the lower shelf of the cupboard was still waiting to be
looked over.
I knelt down to examine it, eager to clear my mind, if I could, of the
degrading jealousy that had got possession of me.
Unfortunately, the lower shelf contained nothing but relics of the
Major’s military life, comprising his sword and pistols, his epaulets,
his sash, and other minor accouterments. None of these objects excited
the slightest interest in me. My eyes wandered back to the upper
shelf; and, like the fool I was (there is no milder word that can
fitly describe me at that moment), I took the photograph out again, and
enraged myself uselessly by another look at it. This time I observed,
what I had not noticed before, that there were some lines of writing (in
a woman’s hand) at the back of the portraits. The lines ran thus:
“To Major Fitz-David, with two vases. From his friends, S. and E. M.”
Was one of those two vases the vase that had been broken? And was the
change that I had noticed in Major Fitz-David’s face produced by some
past association in connection with it, which in some way affected
me? It might or might not be so. I was little disposed to indulge in
speculation on this topic while the far more serious question of the
initials confronted me on the back of the photograph.
“S. and E. M.?” Those last two letters might stand for the initials of
my husband’s name--his true name--Eustace Macallan. In this case the
first letter (“S.”) in all probability indicated _her_ name. What right
had she to associate herself with him in that manner? I considered a
little--my memory exerted itself--I suddenly called to mind that Eustace
had sisters. He had spoken of them more than once in the time before our
marriage. Had I been mad enough to torture myself with jealousy of my
husband’s sister? It might well be so; “S.” might stand for his sister’s
Christian name. I felt heartily ashamed of myself as this new view of
the matter dawned on me. What a wrong I had done to them both in my
thoughts! I turned the photograph, sadly and penitently, to examine the
portraits again with a kinder and truer appreciation of them.
I naturally looked now for a family likeness between the two faces.
There was no family likeness; on the contrary, they were as unlike each
other in form and expression as faces could be. _Was_ she his sister,
after all? I looked at her hands, as represented in the portrait. Her
right hand was clasped by Eustace; her left hand lay on her lap. On the
third finger, distinctly visible, there was a wedding-ring. Were any of
my husband’s sisters married? I had myself asked him the question when
he mentioned them to me, and I perfectly remembered that he had replied
in the negative.
Was it possible that my first jealous instinct had led me to the right
conclusion after all? If it had, what did the association of the three
initial letters mean? What did the wedding-ring mean? Good Heavens! was
I looking at the portrait of a rival in my husband’s affections--and was
that rival his Wife?
I threw the photograph from me with a cry of horror. For one terrible
moment I felt as if my reason was giving way. I don’t know what would
have happened, or what I should have done next, if my love for Eustace
had not taken the uppermost place among the contending emotions that
tortured me. That faithful love steadied my brain. That faithful love
roused the reviving influences of my better and nobler sense. Was the
man whom I had enshrined in my heart of hearts capable of such base
wickedness as the bare idea of his marriage to another woman implied?
No! Mine was the baseness, mine the wickedness, in having even for a
moment thought it of him!
I picked up the detestable photograph from the floor, and put it back
in the book. I hastily closed the cupboard door, fetched the library
ladder, and set it against the book-case. My one idea now was the idea
of taking refuge in employment of any sort from my own thoughts. I felt
the hateful suspicion that had degraded me coming back again in spite of
my efforts to repel it. The books! the books! my only hope was to absorb
myself, body and soul, in the books.
I had one foot on the ladder, when I heard the door of the room
open--the door which communicated with the hall.
I looked around, expecting to see the Major. I saw instead the Major’s
future prima donna standing just inside the door, with her round eyes
steadily fixed on me.
“I can stand a good deal,” the girl began, coolly, “but I can’t stand
_this_ any longer?”
“What is it that you can’t stand any longer?” I asked.
“If you have been here a minute, you have been here two good hours,”
she went on. “All by yourself in the Major’s study. I am of a jealous
disposition--I am. And I want to know what it means.” She advanced a few
steps nearer to me, with a heightening color and a threatening look. “Is
he going to bring _you_ out on the stage?” she asked, sharply.
“Certainly not.”
“He ain’t in love with you, is he?”
Under other circumstances I might have told her to leave the room. In my
position at that critical moment the mere presence of a human creature
was a positive relief to me. Even this girl, with her coarse questions
and her uncultivated manners, was a welcome intruder on my solitude: she
offered me a refuge from myself.
“Your question is not very civilly put,” I said. “However, I excuse you.
You are probably not aware that I am a married woman.”
“What has that got to do with it?” she retorted. “Married or single,
it’s all one to the Major. That brazen-faced hussy who calls herself
Lady Clarinda is married, and she sends him nosegays three times a
week! Not that I care, mind you, about the old fool. But I’ve lost my
situation at the railway, and I’ve got my own interests to look after,
and I don’t know what may happen if I let other women come between him
and me. That’s where the shoe pinches, don’t you see? I’m not easy in my
mind when I see him leaving you mistress here to do just what you like.
No offense! I speak out--I do. I want to know what you are about all by
yourself in this room? How did you pick up with the Major? I never heard
him speak of you before to-day.”
Under all the surface selfishness and coarseness of this strange girl
there was a certain frankness and freedom which pleaded in her favor--to
my mind, at any rate. I answered frankly and freely on my side.
“Major Fitz-David is an old friend of my husband’s,” I said, “and he is
kind to me for my husband’s sake. He has given me permission to look in
this room--”
I stopped, at a loss how to describe my employment in terms which should
tell her nothing, and which should at the same time successfully set her
distrust of me at rest.
“To look about in this room--for what?” she asked. Her eye fell on the
library ladder, beside which I was still standing. “For a book?” she
resumed.
“Yes,” I said, taking the hint. “For a book.”
“Haven’t you found it yet?”
“No.”
She looked hard at me, undisguisedly considering with herself whether I
were or were not speaking the truth.
“You seem to be a good sort,” she said, making up her mind at last.
“There’s nothing stuck-up about you. I’ll help you if I can. I have
rummaged among the books here over and over again, and I know more about
them than you do. What book do you want?”
As she put that awkward question she noticed for the first time Lady
Clarinda’s nosegay lying on the side-table where the Major had left it.
Instantly forgetting me and my book, this curious girl pounced like a
fury on the flowers, and actually trampled them under her feet!
“There!” she cried. “If I had Lady Clarinda here I’d serve her in the
same way.”
“What will the Major say?” I asked.
“What do I care? Do you suppose I’m afraid of _him?_ Only last week I
broke one of his fine gimcracks up there, and all through Lady Clarinda
and her flowers!”
She pointed to the top of the book-case--to the empty space on it
close by the window. My heart gave a sudden bound as my eyes took the
direction indicated by her finger. _She_ had broken the vase! Was the
way to discovery about to reveal itself to me through this girl? Not a
word would pass my lips; I could only look at her.
“Yes!” she said. “The thing stood there. He knows how I hate her
flowers, and he put her nosegay in the vase out of my way. There was
a woman’s face painted on the china, and he told me it was the living
image of _her_ face. It was no more like her than I am. I was in such a
rage that I up with the book I was reading at the time and shied it at
the painted face. Over the vase went, bless your heart, crash to the
floor. Stop a bit! I wonder whether _that’s_ the book you have been
looking after? Are you like me? Do you like reading Trials?”
Trials? Had I heard her aright? Yes: she had said Trials.
I answered by an affirmative motion of my head. I was still speechless.
The girl sauntered in her cool way to the fire-place, and, taking up the
tongs, returned with them to the book-case.
“Here’s where the book fell,” she said--“in the space between the
book-case and the wall. I’ll have it out in no time.”
I waited without moving a muscle, without uttering a word.
She approached me with the tongs in one hand and with a plainly bound
volume in the other.
“Is that the book?” she said. “Open it, and see.”
I took the book from her.
“It is tremendously interesting,” she went on. “I’ve read it twice
over--I have. Mind you, _I_ believe he did it, after all.”
Did it? Did what? What was she talking about? I tried to put the
question to her. I struggled--quite vainly--to say only these words:
“What are you talking about?”
She seemed to lose all patience with me. She snatched the book out of
my hand, and opened it before me on the table by which we were standing
side by side.
“I declare, you’re as helpless as a baby!” she said, contemptuously.
“There! _Is_ that the book?”
I read the first lines on the title-page--
A COMPLETE REPORT OF THE TRIAL OF EUSTACE MACALLAN.
I stopped and looked up at her. She started back from me with a scream
of terror. I looked down again at the title-page, and read the next
lines--
FOR THE ALLEGED POISONING OF HIS WIFE.
There, God’s mercy remembered me. There the black blank of a swoon
swallowed me up.
CHAPTER XI. THE RETURN TO LIFE.
My first remembrance when I began to recover my senses was the
remembrance of Pain--agonizing pain, as if every nerve in my body were
being twisted and torn out of me. My whole being writhed and quivered
under the dumb and dreadful protest of Nature against the effort to
recall me to life. I would have given worlds to be able to cry out--to
entreat the unseen creatures about me to give me back to death. How long
that speechless agony held me I never knew. In a longer or shorter time
there stole over me slowly a sleepy sense of relief. I heard my own
labored breathing. I felt my hands moving feebly and mechanically, like
the hands of a baby. I faintly opened my eyes and looked round me--as if
I had passed through the ordeal of death, and had awakened to new senses
in a new world.
The first person I saw was a man--a stranger. He moved quietly out of my
sight; beckoning, as he disappeared, to some other person in the room.
Slowly and unwillingly the other person advanced to the sofa on which I
lay. A faint cry of joy escaped me; I tried to hold out my feeble hands.
The other person who was approaching me was my husband!
I looked at him eagerly. He never looked at me in return. With his eyes
on the ground, with a strange appearance of confusion and distress in
his face, he too moved away out of my sight. The unknown man whom I had
first noticed followed him out of the room. I called after him faintly,
“Eustace!” He never answered; he never returned. With an effort I moved
my head on the pillow, so as to look round on the other side of the
sofa. Another familiar face appeared before me as if in a dream. My good
old Benjamin was sitting watching me, with the tears in his eyes.
He rose and took my hand silently, in his simple, kindly way.
“Where is Eustace?” I asked. “Why has he gone away and left me?”
I was still miserably weak. My eyes wandered mechanically round the room
as I put the question. I saw Major Fitz-David, I saw the table on which
the singing girl had opened the book to show it to me. I saw the girl
herself, sitting alone in a corner, with her handkerchief to her eyes
as if she were crying. In one mysterious moment my memory recovered its
powers. The recollection of that fatal title-page came back to me in all
its horror. The one feeling that it roused in me now was a longing to
see my husband--to throw myself into his arms, and tell him how firmly I
believed in his innocence, how truly and dearly I loved him. I seized on
Benjamin with feeble, trembling hands. “Bring him back to me!” I cried,
wildly. “Where is he? Help me to get up!”
A strange voice answered, firmly and kindly: “Compose yourself, madam.
Mr. Woodville is waiting until you have recovered, in a room close by.”
I looked at him, and recognized the stranger who had followed my husband
out of the room. Why had he returned alone? Why was Eustace not with me,
like the rest of them? I tried to raise myself, and get on my feet.
The stranger gently pressed me back again on the pillow. I attempted to
resist him--quite uselessly, of course. His firm hand held me as gently
as ever in my place.
“You must rest a little,” he said. “You must take some wine. If you
exert yourself now you will faint again.”
Old Benjamin stooped over me, and whispered a word of explanation.
“It’s the doctor, my dear. You must do as he tells you.”
The doctor! They had called the doctor in to help them! I began dimly
to understand that my fainting fit must have presented symptoms far more
serious than the fainting fits of women in general. I appealed to the
doctor, in a helpless, querulous way, to account to me for my husband’s
extraordinary absence.
“Why did you let him leave the room?” I asked. “If I can’t go to him,
why don’t you bring him here to me?”
The doctor appeared to be at a loss how to reply to me. He looked at
Benjamin, and said, “Will you speak to Mrs. Woodville?”
Benjamin, in his turn, looked at Major Fitz-David, and said, “Will
_you?_” The Major signed to them both to leave us. They rose together,
and went into the front room, pulling the door to after them in its
grooves. As they left us, the girl who had so strangely revealed my
husband’s secret to me rose in her corner and approached the sofa.
“I suppose I had better go too?” she said, addressing Major Fitz-David.
“If you please,” the Major answered.
He spoke (as I thought) rather coldly. She tossed her head, and turned
her back on him in high indignation. “I must say a word for myself!”
cried this strange creature, with a hysterical outbreak of energy. “I
must say a word, or I shall burst!”
With that extraordinary preface, she suddenly turned my way and poured
out a perfect torrent of words on me.
“You hear how the Major speaks to me?” she began. “He blames me--poor
Me--for everything that has happened. I am as innocent as the new-born
babe. I acted for the best. I thought you wanted the book. I don’t know
now what made you faint dead away when I opened it. And the Major blames
Me! As if it was my fault! I am not one of the fainting sort myself; but
I feel it, I can tell you. Yes! I feel it, though I don’t faint about
it. I come of respectable parents--I do. My name is Hoighty--Miss
Hoighty. I have my own self-respect; and it’s wounded. I say my
self-respect is wounded, when I find myself blamed without deserving it.
You deserve it, if anybody does. Didn’t you tell me you were looking
for a book? And didn’t I present it to you promiscuously, with the
best intentions? I think you might say so yourself, now the doctor has
brought you to again. I think you might speak up for a poor girl who is
worked to death with singing and languages and what not--a poor girl who
has nobody else to speak for her. I am as respectable as you are, if
you come to that. My name is Hoighty. My parents are in business, and my
mamma has seen better days, and mixed in the best of company.”
There Miss Hoighty lifted her handkerchief again to her face, and burst
modestly into tears behind it.
It was certainly hard to hold her responsible for what had happened.
I answered as kindly as I could, and I attempted to speak to Major
Fitz-David in her defense. He knew what terrible anxieties were
oppressing me at that moment; and, considerately refusing to hear a
word, he took the task of consoling his young prima donna entirely on
himself. What he said to her I neither heard nor cared to hear: he spoke
in a whisper. It ended in his pacifying Miss Hoighty, by kissing her
hand, and leading her (as he might have led a duchess) out of the room.
“I hope that foolish girl has not annoyed you--at such a time as this,”
he said, very earnestly, when he returned to the sofa. “I can’t tell you
how grieved I am at what has happened. I was careful to warn you, as you
may remember. Still, if I could only have foreseen--”
I let him proceed no further. No human forethought could have provided
against what had happened. Besides, dreadful as the discovery had been,
I would rather have made it, and suffered under it, as I was suffering
now, than have been kept in the dark. I told him this. And then I turned
to the one subject that was now of any interest to me--the subject of my
unhappy husband.
“How did he come to this house?” I asked.
“He came here with Mr. Benjamin shortly after I returned,” the Major
replied.
“Long after I was taken ill?”
“No. I had just sent for the doctor--feeling seriously alarmed about
you.”
“What brought him here? Did he return to the hotel and miss me?”
“Yes. He returned earlier than he had anticipated, and he felt uneasy at
not finding you at the hotel.”
“Did he suspect me of being with you? Did he come here from the hotel?”
“No. He appears to have gone first to Mr. Benjamin to inquire about you.
What he heard from your old friend I cannot say. I only know that Mr.
Benjamin accompanied him when he came here.”
This brief explanation was quite enough for me--I understood what had
happened. Eustace would easily frighten simple old Benjamin about my
absence from the hotel; and, once alarmed, Benjamin would be persuaded
without difficulty to repeat the few words which had passed between us
on the subject of Major Fitz-David. My husband’s presence in the Major’s
house was perfectly explained. But his extraordinary conduct in leaving
the room at the very time when I was just recovering my senses still
remained to be accounted for. Major Fitz-David looked seriously
embarrassed when I put the question to him.
“I hardly know how to explain it to you,” he said. “Eustace has
surprised and disappointed me.”
He spoke very gravely. His looks told me more than his words: his looks
alarmed me.
“Eustace has not quarreled with you?” I said.
“Oh no!”
“He understands that you have not broken your promise to him?”
“Certainly. My young vocalist (Miss Hoighty) told the doctor exactly
what had happened; and the doctor in her presence repeated the statement
to your husband.”
“Did the doctor see the Trial?”
“Neither the doctor nor Mr. Benjamin has seen the Trial. I have locked
it up; and I have carefully kept the terrible story of your connection
with the prisoner a secret from all of them. Mr. Benjamin evidently
has his suspicions. But the doctor has no idea, and Miss Hoighty has no
idea, of the true cause of your fainting fit. They both believe that you
are subject to serious nervous attacks, and that your husband’s name is
really Woodville. All that the truest friend could do to spare Eustace
I have done. He persists, nevertheless, in blaming me for letting you
enter my house. And worse, far worse than this, he persists in declaring
the event of to-day has fatally estranged you from him. ‘There is an end
of our married life,’ he said to me, ‘now she knows that I am the man
who was tried at Edinburgh for poisoning my wife!”’
I rose from the sofa in horror.
“Good God!” I cried, “does Eustace suppose that I doubt his innocence?”
“He denies that it is possible for you or for anybody to believe in his
innocence,” the Major replied.
“Help me to the door,” I said. “Where is he? I must and will see him!”
I dropped back exhausted on the sofa as I said the words. Major
Fitz-David poured out a glass of wine from the bottle on the table, and
insisted on my drinking it.
“You shall see him,” said the Major. “I promise you that. The doctor has
forbidden him to leave the house until you have seen him. Only wait a
little! My poor, dear lady, wait, if it is only for a few minutes, until
you are stronger.”
I had no choice but to obey him. Oh, those miserable, helpless
minutes on the sofa! I cannot write of them without shuddering at the
recollection--even at this distance of time.
“Bring him here!” I said. “Pray, pray bring him here!”
“Who is to persuade him to come back?” asked the Major, sadly. “How can
I, how can anybody, prevail with a man--a madman I had almost said!--who
could leave you at the moment when you first opened your eyes on him? I
saw Eustace alone in the next room while the doctor was in attendance
on you. I tried to shake his obstinate distrust of your belief in his
innocence and of my belief in his innocence by every argument and every
appeal that an old friend could address to him. He had but one answer to
give me. Reason as I might, and plead as I might, he still persisted in
referring me to the Scotch Verdict.”
“The Scotch Verdict?” I repeated. “What is that?”
The Major looked surprised at the question.
“Have you really never heard of the Trial?” he said.
“Never.”
“I thought it strange,” he went on, “when you told me you had found out
your husband’s true name, that the discovery appeared to have suggested
no painful association to your mind. It is not more than three years
since all England was talking of your husband. One can hardly wonder at
his taking refuge, poor fellow, in an assumed name. Where could you have
been at the time?”
“Did you say it was three years ago?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I think I can explain my strange ignorance of what was so well known to
every one else. Three years since my father was alive. I was living with
him in a country-house in Italy--up in the mountains, near Sienna. We
never saw an English newspaper or met with an English traveler for weeks
and weeks together. It is just possible that there might have been some
reference made to the Trial in my father’s letters from England. If
there were, he never told me of it. Or, if he did mention the case, I
felt no interest in it, and forgot it again directly. Tell me--what has
the Verdict to do with my husband’s horrible doubt of us? Eustace is a
free man. The Verdict was Not Guilty, of course?”
Major Fitz-David shook his head sadly.
“Eustace was tried in Scotland,” he said. “There is a verdict allowed by
the Scotch law, which (so far as I know) is not permitted by the laws of
any other civilized country on the face of the earth. When the jury are
in doubt whether to condemn or acquit the prisoner brought before them,
they are permitted, in Scotland, to express that doubt by a form of
compromise. If there is not evidence enough, on the one hand, to justify
them in finding a prisoner guilty, and not evidence enough, on the other
hand, to thoroughly convince them that a prisoner is innocent, they
extricate themselves from the difficulty by finding a verdict of Not
Proven.”
“Was that the Verdict when Eustace was tried?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“The jury were not quite satisfied that my husband was guilty? and not
quite satisfied that my husband was innocent? Is that what the Scotch
Verdict means?”
“That is what the Scotch Verdict means. For three years that doubt about
him in the minds of the jury who tried him has stood on public record.”
Oh, my poor darling! my innocent martyr! I understood it at last. The
false name in which he had married me; the terrible words he had spoken
when he had warned me to respect his secret; the still more terrible
doubt that he felt of me at that moment--it was all intelligible to my
sympathies, it was all clear to my understanding, now. I got up again
from the sofa, strong in a daring resolution which the Scotch Verdict
had suddenly kindled in me--a resolution at once too sacred and too
desperate to be confided, in the first instance, to any other than my
husband’s ear.
“Take me to Eustace!” I cried. “I am strong enough to bear anything
now.”
After one searching look at me, the Major silently offered me his arm,
and led me out of the room.
CHAPTER XII. THE SCOTCH VERDICT.
We walked to the far end of the hall. Major Fitz-David opened the
door of a long, narrow room built out at the back of the house as a
smoking-room, and extending along one side of the courtyard as far as
the stable wall.
My husband was alone in the room, seated at the further end of it, near
the fire-place. He started to his feet and faced me in silence as I
entered. The Major softly closed the door on us and retired. Eustace
never stirred a step to meet me. I ran to him, and threw my arms round
his neck and kissed him. The embrace was not returned; the kiss was not
returned. He passively submitted--nothing more.
“Eustace!” I said, “I never loved you more dearly than I love you at
this moment! I never felt for you as I feel for you now!”
He released himself deliberately from my arms. He signed to me with the
mechanical courtesy of a stranger to take a chair.
“Thank you, Valeria,” he answered, in cold, measured tones. “You could
say no less to me, after what has happened; and you could say no more.
Thank you.”
We were standing before the fire-place. He left me, and walked away
slowly with his head down, apparently intending to leave the room.
I followed him--I got before him--I placed myself between him and the
door.
“Why do you leave me?” I said. “Why do you speak to me in this cruel
way? Are you angry, Eustace? My darling, if you _are_ angry, I ask you
to forgive me.”
“It is I who ought to ask _your_ pardon,” he replied. “I beg you to
forgive me, Valeria, for having made you my wife.”
He pronounced those words with a hopeless, heart-broken humility
dreadful to see. I laid my hand on his bosom. I said, “Eustace, look at
me.”
He slowly lifted his eyes to my face--eyes cold and clear and
tearless--looking at me in steady resignation, in immovable despair. In
the utter wretchedness of that moment, I was like him; I was as quiet
and as cold as my husband. He chilled, he froze me.
“Is it possible,” I said, “that you doubt my belief in your innocence?”
He left the question unanswered. He sighed bitterly to himself. “Poor
woman!” he said, as a stranger might have said, pitying me. “Poor
woman!”
My heart swelled in me as if it would burst. I lifted my hand from his
bosom, and laid it on his shoulder to support myself.
“I don’t ask you to pity me, Eustace; I ask you to do me justice. You
are not doing me justice. If you had trusted me with the truth in the
days when we first knew that we loved each other--if you had told me
all, and more than all that I know now--as God is my witness I would
still have married you! _Now_ do you doubt that I believe you are an
innocent man!”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “All your impulses are generous, Valeria.
You are speaking generously and feeling generously. Don’t blame me,
my poor child, if I look on further than you do: if I see what is to
come--too surely to come--in the cruel future.”
“The cruel future!” I repeated. “What do you mean?”
“You believe in my innocence, Valeria. The jury who tried me doubted
it--and have left that doubt on record. What reason have _you_ for
believing, in the face of the Verdict, that I am an innocent man?”
“I want no reason! I believe in spite of the jury--in spite of the
Verdict.”
“Will your friends agree with you? When your uncle and aunt know what
has happened--and sooner or later they must know it--what will they say?
They will say, ‘He began badly; he concealed from our niece that he had
been wedded to a first wife; he married our niece under a false name.
He may say he is innocent; but we have only his word for it. When he was
put on his Trial, the Verdict was Not Proven. Not Proven won’t do for
us. If the jury have done him an injustice--if he _is_ innocent--let him
prove it.’ That is what the world thinks and says of me. That is what
your friends will think and say of me. The time is coming, Valeria, when
you--even You--will feel that your friends have reason to appeal to on
their side, and that you have no reason on yours.”
“That time will never come!” I answered, warmly. “You wrong me, you
insult me, in thinking it possible!”
He put down my hand from him, and drew back a step, with a bitter smile.
“We have only been married a few days, Valeria. Your love for me is new
and young. Time, which wears away all things, will wear away the first
fervor of that love.”
“Never! never!”
He drew back from me a little further still.
“Look at the world around you,” he said. “The happiest husbands and
wives have their occasional misunderstandings and disagreements; the
brightest married life has its passing clouds. When those days come for
_us,_ the doubts and fears that you don’t feel now will find their way
to you then. When the clouds rise in _our_ married life--when I say my
first harsh word, when you make your first hasty reply--then, in the
solitude of your own room, in the stillness of the wakeful night, you
will think of my first wife’s miserable death. You will remember that I
was held responsible for it, and that my innocence was never proved. You
will say to yourself, ‘Did it begin, in _her_ time, with a harsh word
from him and with a hasty reply from her? Will it one day end with me
as the jury half feared that it ended with her?’ Hideous questions for
a wife to ask herself! You will stifle them; you will recoil from them,
like a good woman, with horror. But when we meet the next morning you
will be on your guard, and I shall see it, and know in my heart of
hearts what it means. Imbittered by that knowledge, my next harsh word
may be harsher still. Your next thoughts of me may remind you more
vividly and more boldly that your husband was once tried as a poisoner,
and that the question of his first wife’s death was never properly
cleared up. Do you see what materials for a domestic hell are mingling
for us here? Was it for nothing that I warned you, solemnly warned you,
to draw back, when I found you bent on discovering the truth? Can I ever
be at your bedside now, when you are ill, and not remind you, in the
most innocent things I do, of what happened at that other bedside, in
the time of that other woman whom I married first? If I pour out your
medicine, I commit a suspicious action--they say I poisoned _her_ in
her medicine. If I bring you a cup of tea, I revive the remembrance of a
horrid doubt--they said I put the arsenic in _her_ cup of tea. If I kiss
you when I leave the room, I remind you that the prosecution accused
me of kissing _her,_ to save appearances and produce an effect on the
nurse. Can we live together on such terms as these? No mortal creatures
could support the misery of it. This very day I said to you, ‘If you
stir a step further in this matter, there is an end of your happiness
for the rest of your life.’ You have taken that step and the end has
come to your happiness and to mine. The blight that cankers and kills is
on you and on me for the rest of our lives!”
So far I had forced myself to listen to him. At those last words the
picture of the future that he was placing before me became too hideous
to be endured. I refused to hear more.
“You are talking horribly,” I said. “At your age and at mine, have we
done with love and done with hope? It is blasphemy to Love and Hope to
say it!”
“Wait till you have read the Trial,” he answered. “You mean to read it,
I suppose?”
“Every word of it! With a motive, Eustace, which you have yet to know.”
“No motive of yours, Valeria, no love and hope of yours, can alter the
inexorable facts. My first wife died poisoned; and the verdict of the
jury has not absolutely acquitted me of the guilt of causing her death.
As long as you were ignorant of that the possibilities of happiness were
always within our reach. Now you know it, I say again--our married life
is at an end.”
“No,” I said. “Now I know it, our married life has begun--begun with a
new object for your wife’s devotion, with a new reason for your wife’s
love!”
“What do you mean?”
I went near to him again, and took his hand.
“What did you tell me the world has said of you?” I asked. “What did you
tell me my friends would say of you? ‘Not Proven won’t do for us. If the
jury have done him an injustice--if he _is_ innocent--let him prove it.’
Those were the words you put into the mouths of my friends. I adopt them
for mine! I say Not Proven won’t do for _me._ Prove your right, Eustace,
to a verdict of Not Guilty. Why have you let three years pass without
doing it? Shall I guess why? You have waited for your wife to help you.
Here she is, my darling, ready to help you with all her heart and soul.
Here she is, with one object in life--to show the world and to show the
Scotch Jury that her husband is an innocent man!”
I had roused myself; my pulses were throbbing, my voice rang through the
room. Had I roused _him_? What was his answer?
“Read the Trial.” That was his answer.
I seized him by the arm. In my indignation and my despair I shook him
with all my strength. God forgive me, I could almost have struck him for
the tone in which he had spoken and the look that he had cast on me!
“I have told you that I mean to read the Trial,” I said. “I mean to
read it, line by line, with you. Some inexcusable mistake has been made.
Evidence in your favor that might have been found has not been found.
Suspicious circumstances have not been investigated. Crafty people have
not been watched. Eustace! the conviction of some dreadful oversight,
committed by you or by the persons who helped you, is firmly settled
in my mind. The resolution to set that vile Verdict right was the first
resolution that came to me when I first heard of it in the next room. We
_will_ set it right! We _must_ set it right--for your sake, for my sake,
for the sake of our children if we are blessed with children. Oh, my own
love, don’t look at me with those cold eyes! Don’t answer me in those
hard tones! Don’t treat me as if I were talking ignorantly and madly of
something that can never be!”
Still I never roused him. His next words were spoken compassionately
rather than coldly--that was all.
“My defense was undertaken by the greatest lawyers in the land,” he
said. “After such men have done their utmost, and have failed--my poor
Valeria, what can you, what can I, do? We can only submit.”
“Never!” I cried. “The greatest lawyers are mortal men; the greatest
lawyers have made mistakes before now. You can’t deny that.”
“Read the Trial.” For the third time he said those cruel words, and said
no more.
In utter despair of moving him---feeling keenly, bitterly (if I must
own it), his merciless superiority to all that I had said to him in the
honest fervor of my devotion and my love--I thought of Major Fitz-David
as a last resort. In the dis ordered state of my mind at that moment, it
made no difference to me that the Major had already tried to reason with
him, and had failed. In the face of the facts I had a blind belief
in the influence of his old friend, if his old friend could only be
prevailed upon to support my view.
“Wait for me one moment,” I said. “I want you to hear another opinion
besides mine.”
I left him, and returned to the study. Major Fitz-David was not there. I
knocked at the door of communication with the front room. It was opened
instantly by the Major himself. The doctor had gone away. Benjamin still
remained in the room.
“Will you come and speak to Eustace?” I began. “If you will only say
what I want you to say--”
Before I could add a word more I heard the house door opened and closed.
Major Fitz-David and Benjamin heard it too. They looked at each other in
silence.
I ran back, before the Major could stop me, to the room in which I had
seen Eustace. It was empty. My husband had left the house.
CHAPTER XIII. THE MAN’S DECISION.
MY first impulse was the reckless impulse to follow Eustace--openly
through the streets.
The Major and Benjamin both opposed this hasty resolution on my part.
They appealed to my own sense of self-respect, without (so far as I
remember it) producing the slightest effect on my mind. They were more
successful when they entreated me next to be patient for my husband’s
sake. In mercy to Eustace, they begged me to wait half an hour. If he
failed to return in that time, they pledged themselves to accompany me
in search of him to the hotel.
In mercy to Eustace I consented to wait. What I suffered under the
forced necessity for remaining passive at that crisis in my life no
words of mine can tell. It will be better if I go on with my narrative.
Benjamin was the first to ask me what had passed between my husband and
myself.
“You may speak freely, my dear,” he said. “I know what has happened
since you have been in Major Fitz-David’s house. No one has told me
about it; I found it out for myself. If you remember, I was struck by
the name of ‘Macallan,’ when you first mentioned it to me at my cottage.
I couldn’t guess why at the time. I know why now.”
Hearing this, I told them both unreservedly what I had said to Eustace,
and how he had received it. To my unspeakable disappointment, they both
sided with my husband, treating my view of his position as a mere dream.
They said it, as he had said it, “You have not read the Trial.”
I was really enraged with them. “The facts are enough for _me,_” I said.
“We know he is innocent. Why is his innocence not proved? It ought to
be, it must be, it shall be! If the Trial tell me it can’t be done, I
refuse to believe the Trial. Where is the book, Major? Let me see for
myself if his lawyers have left nothing for his wife to do. Did they
love him as I love him? Give me the book!”
Major Fitz-David looked at Benjamin.
“It will only additionally shock and distress her if I give her the
book,” he said. “Don’t you agree with me?”
I interposed before Benjamin could answer.
“If you refuse my request,” I said, “you will oblige me, Major, to go
to the nearest bookseller and tell him to buy the Trial for me. I am
determined to read it.”
This time Benjamin sided with me.
“Nothing can make matters worse than they are, sir,” he said. “If I may
be permitted to advise, let her have her own way.”
The Major rose and took the book out of the Italian cabinet, to which he
had consigned it for safe-keeping.
“My young friend tells me that she informed you of her regrettable
outbreak of temper a few days since,” he said as he handed me the
volume. “I was not aware at the time what book she had in her hand when
she so far forgot herself as to destroy the vase. When I left you in the
study, I supposed the Report of the Trial to be in its customary place
on the top shelf of the book-case, and I own I felt some curiosity
to know whether you would think of examining that shelf. The broken
vase--it is needless to conceal it from you now--was one of a pair
presented to me by your husband and his first wife only a week before
the poor woman’s terrible death. I felt my first presentiment that
you were on the brink of discovery when I found you looking at the
fragments, and I fancy I betrayed to you that something of the sort was
disturbing me. You looked as if you noticed it.”
“I did notice it, Major. And I too had a vague idea that I was on the
way to discovery. Will you look at your watch? Have we waited half an
hour yet?”
My impatience had misled me. The ordeal of the half-hour was not yet at
an end.
Slowly and more slowly the heavy minutes followed each other, and still
there were no signs of my husband’s return. We tried to continue
our conversation, and failed. Nothing was audible; no sounds but the
ordinary sounds of the street disturbed the dreadful silence. Try as I
might to repel it, there was one foreboding thought that pressed closer
and closer on my mind as the interval of waiting wore its weary way on.
I shuddered as I asked myself if our married life had come to an end--if
Eustace had really left me.
The Major saw what Benjamin’s slower perception had not yet
discovered--that my fortitude was beginning to sink under the unrelieved
oppression of suspense.
“Come!” he said. “Let us go to the hotel.”
It then wanted nearly five minutes to the half-hour. I _looked_ my
gratitude to Major Fitz-David for sparing me those last minutes: I could
not speak to him or to Benjamin. In silence we three got into a cab and
drove to the hotel.
The landlady met us in the hall. Nothing had been seen or heard of
Eustace. There was a letter waiting for me upstairs on the table in our
sitting-room. It had been left at the hotel by a messenger only a few
minutes since.
Trembling and breathless, I ran up the stairs, the two gentlemen
following me. The address of the letter was in my husband’s handwriting.
My heart sank in me as I looked at the lines; there could be but one
reason for his writing to me. That closed envelope held his farewell
words. I sat with the letter on my lap, stupefied, incapable of opening
it.
Kind-hearted Benjamin attempted to comfort and encourage me. The Major,
with his larger experience of women, warned the old man to be silent.
“Wait!” I heard him whisper. “Speaking to her will do no good now. Give
her time.”
Acting on a sudden impulse, I held out the letter to him as he spoke.
Even moments might be of importance, if Eustace had indeed left me. To
give me time might be to lose the opportunity of recalling him.
“You are his old friend,” I said. “Open his letter, Major, and read it
for me.”
Major Fitz-David opened the letter and read it through to himself. When
he had done he threw it on the table with a gesture which was almost a
gesture of contempt.
“There is but one excuse for him,” he said. “The man is mad.”
Those words told me all. I knew the worst; and, knowing it, I could read
the letter. It ran thus:
“MY BELOVED VALERIA--When you read these lines you read my farewell
words. I return to my solitary unfriended life--my life before I knew
you.
“My darling, you have been cruelly treated. You have been entrapped
into marrying a man who has been publicly accused of poisoning his first
wife--and who has not been honorably and completely acquitted of the
charge. And you know it!
“Can you live on terms of mutual confidence and mutual esteem with me
when I have committed this fraud, and when I stand toward you in this
position? It was possible for you to live with me happily while you were
in ignorance of the truth. It is _not_ possible, now you know all.
“No! the one atonement I can make is--to leave you. Your one chance of
future happiness is to be disassociated, at once and forever, from my
dishonored life. I love you, Valeria--truly, devotedly, passionately.
But the specter of the poisoned woman rises between us. It makes no
difference that I am innocent even of the thought of harming my first
wife. My innocence has not been proved. In this world my innocence can
never be proved. You are young and loving, and generous and hopeful.
Bless others, Valeria, with your rare attractions and your delightful
gifts. They are of no avail with _me._ The poisoned woman stands between
us. If you live with me now, you will see her as I see her. _That_
torture shall never be yours. I love you. I leave you.
“Do you think me hard and cruel? Wait a little, and time will change
that way of thinking. As the years go on you will say to yourself,
‘Basely as he deceived me, there was some generosity in him. He was man
enough to release me of his own free will.’
“Yes, Valeria, I fully, freely release you. If it be possible to annul
our marriage, let it be done. Recover your liberty by any means that
you may be advised to employ; and be assured beforehand of my entire and
implicit submission. My lawyers have the necessary instructions on this
subject. Your uncle has only to communicate with them, and I think he
will be satisfied of my resolution to do you justice. The one interest
that I have now left in life is my interest in your welfare and your
happiness in the time to come. Your welfare and your happiness are no
longer to be found in your union with Me.
“I can write no more. This letter will wait for you at the hotel. It
will be useless to attempt to trace me. I know my own weakness. My heart
is all yours: I might yield to you if I let you see me again.
“Show these lines to your uncle, and to any friends whose opinions you
may value. I have only to sign my dishonored name, and every one
will understand and applaud my motive for writing as I do. The name
justifies--amply justifies--the letter. Forgive and forget me. Farewell.
“EUSTACE MACALLAN.”
In those words he took his leave of me. We had then been married--six
days.
CHAPTER XIV. THE WOMAN’S ANSWER.
THUS far I have written of myself with perfect frankness, and, I think I
may fairly add, with some courage as well. My frankness fails me and my
courage fails me when I look back to my husband’s farewell letter, and
try to recall the storm of contending passions that it roused in my
mind. No! I cannot tell the truth about myself--I dare not tell the
truth about myself--at that terrible time. Men! consult your observation
of women, and imagine what I felt; women! look into your own hearts, and
see what I felt, for yourselves.
What I _did,_ when my mind was quiet again, is an easier matter to deal
with. I answered my husband’s letter. My reply to him shall appear in
these pages. It will show, in some degree, what effect (of the lasting
sort) his desertion of me produced on my mind. It will also reveal the
motives that sustained me, the hopes that animated me, in the new and
strange life which my next chapters must describe.
I was removed from the hotel in the care of my fatherly old friend,
Benjamin. A bedroom was prepared for me in his little villa. There I
passed the first night of my separation from my husband. Toward the
morning my weary brain got some rest--I slept.
At breakfast-time Major Fitz-David called to inquire about me. He had
kindly volunteered to go and speak for me to my husband’s lawyers on the
preceding day. They had admitted that they knew where Eustace had gone,
but they declared at the same time that they were positively forbidden
to communicate his address to any one. In other respects their
“instructions” in relation to the wife of their client were (as they
were pleased to express it) “generous to a fault.” I had only to write
to them, and they would furnish me with a copy by return of post.
This was the Major’s news. He refrained, with the tact that
distinguished him, from putting any questions to me beyond questions
relating to the state of my health. These answered, he took his leave of
me for that day. He and Benjamin had a long talk together afterward in
the garden of the villa.
I retired to my room and wrote to my uncle Starkweather, telling him
exactly what had happened, and inclosing him a copy of my husband’s
letter. This done, I went out for a little while to breathe the fresh
air and to think. I was soon weary, and went back again to my room to
rest. My kind old Benjamin left me at perfect liberty to be alone as
long as I pleased. Toward the afternoon I began to feel a little more
like my old self again. I mean by this that I could think of Eustace
without bursting out crying, and could speak to Benjamin without
distressing and frightening the dear old man.
That night I had a little more sleep. The next morning I was strong
enough to confront the first and foremost duty that I now owed to
myself--the duty of answering my husband’s letter.
I wrote to him in these words:
“I am still too weak and weary, Eustace, to write to you at any length.
But my mind is clear. I have formed my own opinion of you and your
letter; and I know what I mean to do now you have left me. Some women,
in my situation, might think that you had forfeited all right to their
confidence. I don’t think that. So I write and tell you what is in my
mind in the plainest and fewest words that I can use.
“You say you love me--and you leave me. I don’t understand loving a
woman and leaving her. For my part, in spite of the hard things you have
said and written to me, and in spite of the cruel manner in which you
have left me, I love you--and I won’t give you up. No! As long as I live
I mean to live your wife.
“Does this surprise you? It surprises _me._ If another woman wrote
in this manner to a man who had behaved to her as you have behaved, I
should be quite at a loss to account for her conduct. I am quite at a
loss to account for my own conduct. I ought to hate you, and yet I can’t
help loving you. I am ashamed of myself; but so it is.
“You need feel no fear of my attempting to find out where you are, and
of my trying to persuade you to return to me. I am not quite foolish
enough to do that. You are not in a fit state of mind to return to
me. You are all wrong, all over, from head to foot. When you get right
again, I am vain enough to think that you will return to me of your
own accord. And shall I be weak enough to forgive you? Yes! I shall
certainly be weak enough to forgive you.
“But how are you to get right again?
“I have puzzled my brains over this question by night and by day, and my
opinion is that you will never get right again unless I help you.
“How am I to help you?
“That question is easily answered. What the Law has failed to do for
you, your Wife must do for you. Do you remember what I said when we were
together in the back room at Major Fitz-David’s house? I told you that
the first thought that came to me, when I heard what the Scotch jury had
done, was the thought of setting their vile Verdict right. Well! Your
letter has fixed this idea more firmly in my mind than ever. The only
chance that I can see of winning you back to me, in the character of a
penitent and loving husband, is to change that underhand Scotch Verdict
of Not Proven into an honest English Verdict of Not Guilty.
“Are you surprised at the knowledge of the law which this way of writing
betrays in an ignorant woman? I have been learning, my dear: the Law and
the Lady have begun by understanding one another. In plain English, I
have looked into Ogilvie’s ‘Imperial Dictionary,’ and Ogilvie tells
me, ‘A verdict of Not Proven only indicates that, in the opinion of the
jury, there is a deficiency in the evidence to convict the prisoner. A
verdict of Not Guilty imports the jury’s opinion that the prisoner is
innocent.’ Eustace, that shall be the opinion of the world in general,
and of the Scotch jury in particular, in your case. To that one object I
dedicate my life to come, if God spare me!
“Who will help me, when I need help, is more than I yet know. There was
a time when I had hoped that we should go hand in hand together in doing
this good work. That hope is at an end. I no longer expect you, or
ask you, to help me. A man who thinks as you think can give no help to
anybody--it is his miserable condition to have no hope. So be it! I will
hope for two, and will work for two; and I shall find some one to help
me--never fear--if I deserve it.
“I will say nothing about my plans--I have not read the Trial yet. It
is quite enough for me that I know you are innocent. When a man is
innocent, there _must_ be a way of proving it: the one thing needful is
to find the way. Sooner or later, with or without assistance, I shall
find it. Yes! before I know any single particular of the Case, I tell
you positively--I shall find it!
“You may laugh over this blind confidence on my part, or you may cry
over it. I don’t pretend to know whether I am an object for ridicule or
an object for pity. Of one thing only I am certain: I mean to win
you back, a man vindicated before the world, without a stain on his
character or his name--thanks to his wife.
“Write to me, sometimes, Eustace; and believe me, through all the
bitterness of this bitter business, your faithful and loving
“VALERIA.”
There was my reply! Poor enough as a composition (I could write a much
better letter now), it had, if I may presume to say so, one merit. It
was the honest expression of what I really meant and felt.
I read it to Benjamin. He held up his hands with his customary gesture
when he was thoroughly bewildered and dismayed. “It seems the rashest
letter that ever was written,” said the dear old man. “I never heard,
Valeria, of a woman doing what you propose to do. Lord help us! the new
generation is beyond my fathoming. I wish your uncle Starkweather was
here: I wonder what he would say? Oh, dear me, what a letter from a wife
to a husband! Do you really mean to send it to him?”
I added immeasurably to my old friend’s surprise by not even employing
the post-office. I wished to see the “instructions” which my husband had
left behind him. So I took the letter to his lawyers myself.
The firm consisted of two partners. They both received me together. One
was a soft, lean man, with a sour smile. The other was a hard, fat man,
with ill-tempered eyebrows. I took a great dislike to both of them. On
their side, they appeared to feel a strong distrust of me. We began
by disagreeing. They showed me my husband’s “instructions,” providing,
among other things, for the payment of one clear half of his income as
long as he lived to his wife. I positively refused to touch a farthing
of his money.
The lawyers were unaffectedly shocked and astonished at this decision.
Nothing of the sort had ever happened before in the whole course of
their experience. They argued and remonstrated with me. The partner
with the ill-tempered eyebrows wanted to know what my reasons were. The
partner with the sour smile reminded his colleague satirically that I
was a lady, and had therefore no reasons to give. I only answered, “Be
so good as to forward my letter, gentlemen,” and left them.
I have no wish to claim any credit to myself in these pages which I do
not honestly deserve. The truth is that my pride forbade me to accept
help from Eustace, now that he had left me. My own little fortune (eight
hundred a year) had been settled on myself when I married. It had been
more than I wanted as a single woman, and I was resolved that it should
be enough for me now. Benjamin had insisted on my considering his
cottage as my home. Under these circumstances, the expenses in which my
determination to clear my husband’s character might involve me were
the only expenses for which I had to provide. I could afford to be
independent, and independent I resolved that I would be.
While I am occupied in confessing my weakness and my errors, it is
only right to add that, dearly as I still loved my unhappy, misguided
husband, there was one little fault of his which I found it not easy to
forgive.
Pardoning other things, I could not quite pardon his concealing from me
that he had been married to a first wife. Why I should have felt this
so bitterly as I did, at certain times and seasons, I am not able to
explain. Jealousy was at the bottom of it, I suppose. And yet I was
not conscious of being jealous--especially when I thought of the poor
creature’s miserable death. Still, Eustace ought not to have kept _that_
secret from me, I used to think to myself, at odd times when I was
discouraged and out of temper. What would _he_ have said if I had been a
widow, and had never told him of it?
It was getting on toward evening when I returned to the cottage.
Benjamin appeared to have been on the lookout for me. Before I could
ring at the bell he opened the garden gate.
“Prepare yourself for a surprise, my dear,” he said. “Your uncle, the
Reverend Doctor Starkweather, has arrived from the North, and is waiting
to see you. He received your letter this morning, and he took the first
train to London as soon as he had read it.”
In another minute my uncle’s strong arms were round me. In my forlorn
position, I felt the good vicar’s kindness, in traveling all the way
to London to see me, very gratefully. It brought the tears into my
eyes--tears, without bitterness, that did me good.
“I have come, my dear child, to take you back to your old home,” he
said. “No words can tell how fervently I wish you had never left your
aunt and me. Well! well! we won’t talk about it. The mischief is done,
and the next thing is to mend it as well as we can. If I could only get
within arm’s-length of that husband of yours, Valeria--There! there! God
forgive me, I am forgetting that I am a clergyman. What shall I forget
next, I wonder? By-the-by, your aunt sends you her dearest love. She is
more superstitious than ever. This miserable business doesn’t surprise
her a bit. She says it all began with your making that mistake about
your name in signing the church register. You remember? Was there ever
such stuff? Ah, she’s a foolish woman, that wife of mine! But she means
well--a good soul at bottom. She would have traveled all the way here
along with me if I would have let her. I said, ‘No; you stop at home,
and look after the house and the parish, and I’ll bring the child back.’
You shall have your old bedroom, Valeria, with the white curtains, you
know, looped up with blue! We will return to the Vicarage (if you can
get up in time) by the nine-forty train to-morrow morning.”
Return to the Vicarage! How could I do that? How could I hope to gain
what was now the one object of my existence if I buried myself in
a remote north-country village? It was simply impossible for me to
accompany Doctor Starkweather on his return to his own house.
“I thank you, uncle, with all my heart,” I said. “But I am afraid I
can’t leave London for the present.”
“You can’t leave London for the present?” he repeated. “What does the
girl mean, Mr. Benjamin?” Benjamin evaded a direct reply.
“She is kindly welcome here, Doctor Starkweather,” he said, “as long as
she chooses to stay with me.”
“That’s no answer,” retorted my uncle, in his rough-and-ready way. He
turned to me. “What is there to keep you in London?” he asked. “You used
to hate London. I suppose there is some reason?”
It was only due to my good guardian and friend that I should take him
into my confidence sooner or later. There was no help for it but to
rouse my courage, and tell him frankly what I had it in my mind to do.
The vicar listened in breathless dismay. He turned to Benjamin, with
distress as well as surprise in his face, when I had done.
“God help her!” cried the worthy man. “The poor thing’s troubles have
turned her brain!”
“I thought you would disapprove of it, sir,” said Benjamin, in his mild
and moderate way. “I confess I disapprove of it myself.”
“‘Disapprove of it’ isn’t the word,” retorted the vicar. “Don’t put it
in that feeble way, if you please. An act of madness--that’s what it is,
if she really mean what she says.” He turned my way, and looked as
he used to look at the afternoon service when he was catechising an
obstinate child. “You don’t mean it,” he said, “do you?”
“I am sorry to forfeit your good opinion, uncle,” I replied. “But I must
own that I do certainly mean it.”
“In plain English,” retorted the vicar, “you are conceited enough to
think that you can succeed where the greatest lawyers in Scotland
have failed. _They_ couldn’t prove this man’s innocence, all working
together. And _you_ are going to prove it single-handed? Upon my word,
you are a wonderful woman,” cried my uncle, suddenly descending from
indignation to irony. “May a plain country parson, who isn’t used to
lawyers in petticoats, be permitted to ask how you mean to do it?”
“I mean to begin by reading the Trial, uncle.”
“Nice reading for a young woman! You will be wanting a batch of nasty
French novels next. Well, and when you have read the Trial--what then?
Have you thought of that?”
“Yes, uncle; I have thought of that. I shall first try to form some
conclusion (after reading the Trial) as to the guilty person who really
committed the crime. Then I shall make out a list of the witnesses who
spoke in my husband’s defense. I shall go to those witnesses, and tell
them who I am and what I want. I shall ask all sorts of questions which
grave lawyers might think it beneath their dignity to put. I shall be
guided, in what I do next, by the answers I receive. And I shall not be
discouraged, no matter what difficulties are thrown in my way. Those are
my plans, uncle, so far as I know them now.”
The vicar and Benjamin looked at each other as if they doubted the
evidence of their own senses. The vicar spoke.
“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that you are going roaming about
the country to throw yourself on the mercy of strangers, and to risk
whatever rough reception you may get in the course of your travels? You!
A young woman! Deserted by your husband! With nobody to protect you! Mr.
Benjamin, do you hear her? And can you believe your ears? I declare to
Heaven _I_ don’t know whether I am awake or dreaming. Look at her--just
look at her! There she sits as cool and easy as if she had said nothing
at all extraordinary, and was going to do nothing out of the common way!
What am I to do with her?--that’s the serious question--what on earth am
I to do with her?”
“Let me try my experiment, uncle, rash as it may look to you,” I said.
“Nothing else will comfort and support me; and God knows I want comfort
and support. Don’t think me obstinate. I am ready to admit that there
are serious difficulties in my way.”
The vicar resumed his ironical tone.
“Oh!” he said. “You admit that, do you? Well, there is something gained,
at any rate.”
“Many another woman before me,” I went on, “has faced serious
difficulties, and has conquered them--for the sake of the man she
loved.”
Doctor Starkweather rose slowly to his feet, with the air of a person
whose capacity of toleration had reached its last limits.
“Am I to understand that you are still in love with Mr. Eustace
Macallan?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“The hero of the great Poison Trial?” pursued my uncle. “The man who has
deceived and deserted you? You love him?”
“I love him more dearly than ever.”
“Mr. Benjamin,” said the vicar, “if she recover her senses between
this and nine o’clock to-morrow morning, send her with her luggage to
Loxley’s Hotel, where I am now staying. Good-night, Valeria. I shall
consult with your aunt as to what is to be done next. I have no more to
say.”
“Give me a kiss, uncle, at parting.”
“Oh yes, I’ll give you a kiss. Anything you like, Valeria. I shall be
sixty-five next birthday; and I thought I knew something of women, at
my time of life. It seems I know nothing. Loxley’s Hotel is the address,
Mr. Benjamin. Good-night.”
Benjamin looked very grave when he returned to me after accompanying
Doctor Starkweather to the garden gate.
“Pray be advised, my dear,” he said. “I don’t ask you to consider _my_
view of this matter, as good for much. But your uncle’s opinion is
surely worth considering?”
I did not reply. It was useless to say any more. I made up my mind to be
misunderstood and discouraged, and to bear it. “Good-night, my dear old
friend,” was all I said to Benjamin. Then I turned away--I confess with
the tears in my eyes--and took refuge in my bedroom.
The window-blind was up, and the autumn moonlight shone brilliantly into
the little room.
As I stood by the window, looking out, the memory came to me of another
moonlight night, when Eustace and I were walking together in the
Vicarage garden before our marriage. It was the night of which I have
written, many pages back, when there were obstacles to our union, and
when Eustace had offered to release me from my engagement to him. I saw
the dear face again looking at me in the moonlight; I heard once
more his words and mine. “Forgive me,” he had said, “for having loved
you--passionately, devotedly loved you. Forgive me, and let me go.”
And I had answered, “Oh, Eustace, I am only a woman--don’t madden me!
I can’t live without you. I must and will be your wife!” And now, after
marriage had united us, we were parted! Parted, still loving each as
passionately as ever. And why? Because he had been accused of a crime
that he had never committed, and because a Scotch jury had failed to see
that he was an innocent man.
I looked at the lovely moonlight, pursuing these remembrances and these
thoughts. A new ardor burned in me. “No!” I said to myself. “Neither
relations nor friends shall prevail on me to falter and fail in my
husband’s cause. The assertion of his innocence is the work of my life;
I will begin it to-night.”
I drew down the blind and lighted the candles. In the quiet night, alone
and unaided, I took my first step on the toilsome and terrible journey
that lay before me. From the title-page to the end, without stopping to
rest and without missing a word, I read the Trial of my husband for the
murder of his wife.
*****
PART II. PARADISE REGAINED.