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.
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.
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 disordered 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.
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.