When these tidings were told to the widow she had already given way to many fears.Lopez had gone, purporting, as he said,--to be back to dinner.He had not come then, nor on the following morning, nor had he written.Then she remembered all that he had done and said;--how he had kissed her, and left a parting malediction for her father.She did not at first imagine that he had destroyed himself, but that he had gone away, intending to vanish as other men before now had vanished.As she thought of this something almost like love came back upon her heart.Of course he was bad.Even in her sorrow, even when alarmed as to his fate, she could not deny that.But her oath to him had not been to love him only while he was good.She had made herself a part of him, and was she not bound to be true to him, whether good or bad? She implored her father and she implored her brother to be ceaseless in their endeavours to trace him,--sometimes seeming almost to fear that in this respect she could not fully trust them.Then she discerned from their manner a doubt as to her husband's fate.'Oh, papa, if you think anything, tell me what you think,' she said late on the evening of the second day.He was then nearly sure that the man who had been killed at Tenway was Ferdinand Lopez;--but he was not quite sure, and he would not tell her.But on the following morning, somewhat before noon, having himself gone out early to Euston Square, he came back to his own house,--and then he told her all.For the first hour she did not shed a tear or lose her consciousness of the horror of the thing;--but sat still and silent, gazing at nothing, casting back her mind over the history of her life, and the misery which she had brought to all who belonged to her.Then at last she gave way, fell into tears, hysteric sobbings, convulsions so violent as for a time to take the appearance of epileptic fits, and was at last exhausted and, happily for herself, unconscious.
After that she was ill for many weeks,--so ill that at times both her father and her brother thought that she would die.When the first month or six weeks had passed by she would often speak of her husband, especially to her father, and always speaking of him as though she had brought him to his untimely fate.Nor could she endure at this time that her father should say a word against him, even when she obliged the old man to speak of one whose conduct had been so infamous.It had all been her doing!
Had she not married him there would have been no misfortune! She did not say that he had been noble, true, or honest,--but she asserted that all the evils which had come upon him had been produced by herself.'My dear,' her father said to her one evening, 'it is a matter which we cannot forget, but on which it is well that we should be silent.'
'I shall always know what that silence means,' she replied.
'It will never mean condemnation of you by me,' said he.
'But I have destroyed your life,--and his, I know.I ought not to have married him, because you bade me not.And I know that Ishould have been gentler with him, and more obedient when I was his wife.I sometimes wish that I were a Catholic, and that Icould go into a convent, and bury it all amidst sackcloths and ashes.'
'That would not bury it,' said her father.
'But I should at least be buried.If I were out of sight, you might forget it all.'
She once stirred Everett up to speak more plainly than her father ever dared to do, and then also she herself used language that was very plain.'My darling,' said her brother once, when she had been trying to make out that her husband had been more sinned against than sinning,--'he was a bad man.It is better that the truth should be said.'
'And who is a good man?' she said, raising herself in her bed and looking at him full in the face with her deep-sunken eyes.'If there be any truth in our religion, are we not all bad? Who is to tell the shades of difference of badness? He was not a drunkard, or a gambler.Through it all he was true to his wife.'
She, poor creature, was ignorant of the little scene in the little street near Mayfair, in which Lopez had offered to carry Lizzie Eustace away with him to Guatemala.'He was industrious.
His ideas about money were not the same as yours or papa's.How was he worse than others? It happened that his faults were distasteful to you--and so, perhaps, his virtues.'
'His faults, such as they were, brought all these miseries.'
'He would have been successful now if he had never seen me.But why should we talk of it? We shall never agree.And you, Everett, can never understand all that has passed through my mind during the last two years.'
There were two or three persons who attempted to see her at this period, but she avoided them all.First came Mrs Roby, who as her nearest neighbour, as her aunt, and as an aunt who had been so nearly allied to her, had almost a right to demand admittance.
But she would not see Mrs Roby.She sent down word to say that she was too ill.And when Mrs Roby wrote to her, she got her father to answer the note.'You had better let it drop,' the old man said at last to his sister-in-law.'Of course she remembers that it was you who brought them together.'
'But I didn't bring them together, Mr Wharton.How often am I to tell you so? It was Everett brought Mr Lopez here.'
'The marriage was made up in your house, and it has destroyed me and my child.I will not quarrel with my wife's sister if I can help it, but at present you had better keep apart.' Then he had left her abruptly, and Mrs Roby had not dared either to write or call again.
At this time Arthur Fletcher saw both Everett and Mr Wharton frequently, but he did not go to the Square, contenting himself with asking whether he might be allowed to do so.'Not yet, Arthur,' said the old man.'I am sure she thinks you one of her best friends, but she could not see you yet.'
'She would have nothing to fear,' said Arthur.'We knew each other when we were children, and I should be now only as I was then.'
'Not yet, Arthur, not yet,' said the barrister.
