I returned to the papers and studied them, far into the night. There was
the evidence of the fifty thousand dollars received; and there, too, was
the evidence of the prior marriage—the first wife living at the time of
the taking of the second. It was a sad tale, the story of that first
wife; a tale of neglect, of desertion, of want and wo; a tale told in
letters written from a far distant land, and blotted with many tears. I
steeled my heart against it. How else could we of “The Profession” live?
As the surgeon, compassionless, cuts with steady nerve through flesh,
and bone, and marrow, and saves the life which pity would have lost; so
we soon learn to close the heart to sorrow; to hear nothing, to see
nothing but the interest of the client; to hope for nothing but his
success—God protect us! Ever dealing with the passions and the vices of
men; their unholy race after mammon; strifes by the way-side; plots and
counter-plots; faith broken; trusts betrayed; snares for the unwary; the
innocent duped; the unfortunate trampled upon; the hoary sinner
honored—God protect us! Great wonder is it, that we do not loathe the
very name of man! Poor woman! If she who assumed your name and state,
and defiled the marriage bed, which with you alone was pure, was guilty,
although ignorant, of a careless haste, the punishment has come, equal
to the fault; and you, too, are avenged—even in time.
I often saw my client, during the period of one year, which elapsed
between my retainer and the trial of the suit which she had engaged me
to defend. She was young—she could not have been more than
twenty—without children, and her beauty grew upon me every day. With a
fine figure—not too light, but rather a little heavy, with the
_embonpoint_ of the widow—with features, which were the handsomer for
being irregular, and eyes which spoke the sex with all its glory and its
weakness. She interested something more than professional pride, or
manly compassion in her favor. Her intellect, too, was brilliant and
cultivated; and her manners most refined: certainly it would have been
pardonable in a bachelor to have made her cause wholly his own. But
there was a mystery woven into the history of her life, which she either
could not, or was not pleased to remove. In one only, of the many papers
and few family letters which she from time to time put into my hands,
did I find any allusion made to her father. She never herself
voluntarily spoke of him; and whenever I questioned her upon the
subject, she was evidently much troubled by my inquiries, and professed
to be utterly ignorant of that side of her house. She had known her
mother only under her maiden name, and had lived with her, in one of our
northern cities in great seclusion, until she met with Mr. Andrews,
married him, and removed to New Orleans. Shortly after her marriage her
mother had died, bequeathing her fifty thousand dollars, the result of
economy and business habits. What folly, what shame, what crime had
given her birth, or had removed as beneath a cloud her father from her
sight, she knew not; but her mother had often told her that she was born
in honest wedlock, and that some day she should claim her own. She knew
not the place of her birth, nor her mother’s relatives, and stood as one
without relationship in the world. How her heart yearned to find in
other veins the blood which flowed in her own! At such times, when my
questions had stirred the fountain of her tears, and the grief of
desolation ran over, she would wring her hands in a passion of sorrow,
and call upon heaven to give her knowledge—to give her father to her
arms.
“Pardon,” she would murmur, “these exhibitions of my weakness; it is
terrible not to know the father that begat you; terrible to hear want,
even to destitution, knocking at your door.”