it was perhaps fortunate for robert streightley that the pressure of an immediate necessity for exertion was put upon him at the same time that he received his wife's letter. the blow was so frightful that it might have completely crushed him, had he not been forced to rouse himself from its first effect, to put the meaning of the terrible communication aside for a time, while he attended to the stern duties which were his, as the only representative of the dead man. the subdued bustle, the ceaseless coming and going, the people to be seen, the letters to be written, the innumerable demands upon his attention in reference to his deceased father-in-law, to say nothing of the exigencies of his own affairs, from which he had not an hour's respite, controlled him in spite of himself, and by suspending softened the intensity of the knowledge of the punishment that had overtaken him.
the suspense and perplexity into which katharine's unexplained absence from home had thrown the household on the preceding day had prepared them to expect that some important intelligence was contained in the letter which had reached their master that morning; and the unhappy man comprehended the necessity of making some communication on the subject. he briefly informed katharine's maid that she had left town for the present; and on being asked whether the woman was to join her mistress at middlemeads, he said mrs. streightley was not there; that she had better wait for orders, and in the mean time ask no more questions. an injudicious answer; but robert neither knew nor cared what would have been the judicious course to pursue. he knew only that his sin had found him out; that the chastisement had come; and that the woman whom he had so loved and so wronged had left him for ever--left him hating and despising him.
the hours of that dreadful day wore through somehow. robert had been engaged during many of them in making arrangements consequent upon mr. guyon's death; he had been at queen anne street, and at his office in the city, transacting business of different but invariably unpleasant kinds. he had seen several persons, but not any by whom the domestic calamity which had fallen upon him was suspected. he had written to his mother, informing her of mr. guyon's death, and requesting that ellen would not come to portland place for the present; but giving no explanation of this request. all the day he had carried about with him the dreadful knowledge of what had befallen him--had been oppressed by its weight, darkened by its shadow; but he had not examined his burden--he had gone his appointed way, and done his relentless task, and the day had been got through somehow. now he was going to look the truth in the face; he was going to force his mind to understand it, to take it in fully, and to suffer the torture at his leisure.
he shut himself up in his "study," and gave orders that no one was to be admitted. then, with the door locked and sure of solitude, he read katharine's letter again,--not that he needed to do so; every one of its few remorseless words seemed to have burned themselves into his brain,--and then he read the letter which hers had enclosed--the letter endorsed "shown to r. s." he had not looked at it in the morning; it had sufficed him to know that the letter which mr. guyon had shown him on the day which had witnessed their disgraceful compact--the letter which they had tacitly agreed to suppress, still existed, for his conviction, for his condemnation, and had reached the hands to which it had been addressed at last: he had put it away with a shudder. but now he read it--steadily, and with utter amazement. there it was; and on the blank side of the sheet, in mr. guyon's hand, were the words, "shown to r.s." but this letter was sill in mr. guyon's hand, and robert had never seen it--had never heard of it; this was not the letter from gordon frere to katharine which her father had shown to him; there was a dreadful mistake somewhere. as robert read the heartless words in which mr. guyon rejected gordon frere on his daughter's behalf, he understood for the first time how the conspiracy which had resulted in so sad a success had been carried out. this, then, was the method mr. guyon had adopted, and into which robert had never inquired. he saw it all--he understood it all now; and he honestly recoiled at the baseness by which his triumph had been secured. he even thought he would not have consented, had he known how the thing was to be done; but his conscience was not so deadened as to accept that sophistry, and another moment's thought taught him that he was as guilty as ever.
but how came the letter to be endorsed with words, intended by their writer only as a private memorandum, which were not true? this puzzled robert, until he guessed, what really was the case, that mr. guyon had put frere's letter and his reply away together, and had mistaken the one for the other. why had he kept them at all? thought robert; why had he put such dangerous and useless documents aside, thus running the risk of detection now realised? "he never could have intended to use them as a weapon against me," thought robert, who had arrived at a tolerably correct appreciation of the character of his deceased father-in-law. "they convict him directly; me, though conclusively to her, only indirectly to others. why on earth did he keep them?"
ah, why? why is half the mischief that is done in the world done by the instrumentality of letters, which ought to have been read and destroyed, being treasured up instead by foolish women, or read and left about by men whom experience has not availed to teach? if robert streightley had quite understood mr. guyon's character, he would have known, in the first place, that that gentleman had never been in the habit of contemplating the contingency of his own death, or of making any preparation, temporal or spiritual, for that event; in the second, that his vanity was of so ominous a kind that he liked to indulge in the recollection of successful enterprises, no matter what their nature, and treasured up the trophies of his fortunate coups, as other people might keep love-tokens or relics of departed friends,--a ghastly perversion, it is true, but a characteristic trait of mr. guyon, as robert came to learn, when he had to examine all the dead man's papers and personal effects.
after all, it did not matter very much that this mistake had been made. any one of the papers concerning this transaction, so endorsed, would have equally convicted her husband in katharine's eyes. for a moment, when robert perceived the error and recognised how it had occurred, a faint hope had sprung up in his heart that all might be explained, in explaining that he had never seen the draft of mr. guyon's letter to gordon frere; but it lasted only for a moment, and then left robert more shame-stricken, more despairing than before.
the bitter remembrance of his resolutions of the day before came to torment him now. how futile they were! made all too late, and useless; how ridiculous they seemed, too! would he ever have had the courage to tell the woman he had wronged the truth concerning himself and her? cowering as he was now under the blast of her scorn and anger, he could not believe that he would; he heaped upon himself all the reprobation which the sternest judge could have measured out to him. his sin had found him out indeed, and nothing could save him now from the fullest retribution. it had come in its worst form, complicated with the death of his accomplice, as a double horror. robert streightley was not a man who could coldly contemplate such an event as mr. guyon's death. he had indeed retained but little personal regard for him; but that fact, the growing knowledge of the man which rendered such regard impossible, invested his death with additional horror to robert. that such should have been the manner of the detection and the punishment, impressed him with awe. standing, as he had done that day, by the dead man's bed, he had bowed his head submissively to the tremendous lesson which the scene conveyed. where was their fine scheme now? where was the wealth for which the father had sold the daughter? gone--almost all gone; and if it had remained a million times told, what could it avail to the form of clay which lay there waiting for the coffin and the grave? where was the beautiful wife whom the father's accomplice had purchased at the price of his honour? who was to tell that to the wretched husband, who knew nothing but that she had detected them both, and fled from them both,--from the living and the dead?
as he thought these thoughts, and a thousand others which could find no utterance in words, no expression by the pen, the long hours of the night were wearing by. up and down the room, long after the fire had died out, unnoticed, robert streightley walked, buried in his tormenting thoughts, full of horror, remorse, shame, the sense of righteous retribution and torturing grief. she was gone,--his darling, the one treasure of his life, the beautiful idol of his worship: the desolation of that knowledge had not come to him yet; he had had no time to think of the meaning of life without her; the fear, the excitement, the strangeness of the fact were all that he had as yet realised. the awful sorrow, the hopeless bereavement were for the future. the strokes of the rod were beginning to fall upon him; strokes which were to continue, ceaseless and stinging, until the end. any one who has ever battled, quite alone, with a tremendous sorrow in its first hours of strife, knows how vain is the effort to collect his thoughts at the time, and to recall their order afterwards; knows how the merest trifles will intrude themselves on the attention at times, and at others how the faculties will seem to be suspended, and a kind of dull vacuity will succeed the access of raging pain. the story of robert's suffering in no way differed from that of any other supreme agony. it had all the caprices, all the fantasies of pain; it had the dreadful vitality, and the intervals of numbness and wandering. many times in the course of that night robert sat down in a chair and fell asleep, to wake again--with a start, and an impression that some voice had uttered his name--to the renewed consciousness of his misery.
it was very long before he began to think about the circumstances of katharine's flight from her home, before he began to speculate upon how she had gone, and whither. from the moment he had read her assurance that in this world he should never see her face again, he had been seized with a horrible conviction that this was literally true: he would seek her, of course; he would find out where she had gone to,--he did not even stop to think whether there would be much, or any difficulty about that--but he should see her face no more. no such wild notion as that katharine would relent and forgive him ever crossed robert's mind. he knew how cold and proud she was--how cold and proud when she was ignorant of his sin against her, and when he had lived only in the hope of winning her love some happy day before he died;--he knew how insensate any hope would now be, and he never cherished such a delusion for a moment. she was dead to him, and all the gorgeous fabric of the life he had built up for himself had crumbled away.
the new day was dawning, when robert streightley went wearily upstairs, and stopped at the door of his wife's dressing-room. he had hardly courage to enter the deserted chamber,--it was as though she lay dead inside. there had been so strong a likeness to her face in that of the dead man he had stood beside that day, that it had had a double awe for him. when at length he opened the door and went in, the cold dim dawn was there before him, and the orderly emptiness of the splendid chamber struck him to the heart.
no picturesque disarray was there, but the trimness of a swept and garnished apartment. he had not entered this room on the preceding night--he had not thought of looking for any explanation of katharine's absence there. but now that she had furnished the explanation herself, he remembered the servants had told him she had been some time in her dressing-room after her return from queen anne street. he drew back the curtains and admitted the misty light; he sat down on a sofa and leaned his head wearily upon his hands. gradually fatigue overcame him, and he fell into a deep sleep, which gave him merciful forgetfulness until late in the morning.
robert was roused from his slumber by katharine's maid, who told him that lady henmarsh had arrived and was waiting to see him. "there's another lady with her, sir," said the maid,--"mrs. frere."
robert started perceptibly. "i cannot see any one yet," he said. "say i am not dressed, but will call on lady henmarsh as soon as possible."
the woman hesitated. "lady henmarsh wants to know what day is fixed for the funeral, sir; and she has been asking about my mistress."
"just tell her what i have said," returned robert impatiently, "and say no more."
the maid left him, and robert went to his own room. his injunction was useless. lady henmarsh, who had felt more discomposure when the news of mr. guyon's death had reached her than any other intelligence respecting her fellow-creatures could have caused her to experience, had hurried up to town, had gone to queen anne street, and learned from the housekeeper the strange disappearance of katharine. while her message was being conveyed to robert, she was engaged in cross-examining the footman; and she had elicited all that any one, save robert himself, could tell her before she went away, obliged to be contented with the promise of a speedy visit from mr. streightley.
the news of mr. guyon's death had been received by mrs. streightley and her daughter as such news would naturally be received by such persons. they were shocked and sorry; shocked, because they knew mr. guyon to be a "worldly" man, and they could not but regard his unprepared death with awe; sorry, because he was katharine's father, and ellen at least loved katharine, and grieved for her grief. ellen would indeed have gone to her sister-in-law, and sought to soothe her in her simple fashion, had not robert's note forbade her doing so. this note had excited no fresh alarm; the ladies agreed that katharine was not able to see any one, not even ellen, just yet, and were quite content to wait for the subsidence of a feeling so natural. thus, when robert made his appearance a little before noon on the day following the receipt of his note, they were wholly unprepared for the intelligence he had to communicate, and they received it with mingled horror and incredulity.
"my wife had grave cause of complaint against me," robert had said, "and she has left me."
to this plain but not explanatory statement he limited his disclosure, and he left his mother and sister in much perplexity and distress. it did not occur to them that robert was ignorant of his wife's plans; they accepted the situation as a simple separation; and mrs. streightley's comment upon it to her daughter, made after robert had left them, was:
"i don't care what her cause of complaint may be, nothing can justify her leaving robert. don't let us speak of her, my dear; time will bring things right, and at all events will console him."
thus ellen had not any information to afford mrs. gordon frere, when she surprised her by a visit that same afternoon. it was hester who repeated to ellen the particulars which lady henmarsh had extracted from the footman that morning, and hester who suggested that robert might find it more difficult than he imagined to open any communication with his wife.
"lady henmarsh went to mr. guyon's solicitor," said hester; "and he evidently can tell nothing. mrs. streightley had a long interview with him after her father's death, but he declares she never gave him a hint of her intention, and was singularly quiet and composed. he wondered, indeed, at the composure with which she bore her father's death. i believe mr. streightley expects her to communicate with him, or you, or some one, by letter?"
"i suppose so. o, of course," said ellen; "but the whole thing bewilders me. what fault can she have to find with robert? surely no woman ever had a better husband."
mrs. frere assented to this proposition, and the two talked over the mysterious occurrence. with none the less go?t that no amount of talking could render it less mysterious. hester had a certain degree of knowledge, and a greater degree of suspicion; but she did not confide either to her guileless companion, who was distracted between her admiring affection for katharine and her absolute belief in robert's faultlessness.
the interview between robert and lady henmarsh was not more communicative on his part than that which had taken place at the brixton villa, in so far as the motive of katharine's flight was concerned. "cousin hetty" had so much to say about mr. guyon's death, and was so much agitated by it, that robert's kindness of heart would, under any circumstances, have prevented his telling her any thing derogatory to the memory of the dead man. he therefore confined himself to a general statement of the circumstances. lady henmarsh was genuinely astonished, and honestly concerned. she thought in her heart that katharine was the "greatest fool" in existence. "the other man is married," said she to herself, "and therefore out of her reach. she has not run off with any one else; and unless she was really too well off, and bored to death by having every thing she wished for, i cannot understand her conduct." her manner was perfect in its sympathy with mr. streightley, and in her condemnation of his wife, whose flight she, however, took care to represent as merely a caprice, a little bit of temper,--"she always had an ungovernable temper," said lady henmarsh, in a parenthesis,--but of the worst possible taste under the circumstances.
"did i understand you rightly, that katharine was with her poor dear father when he died?" she asked.
"yes, she was with him," said robert; "she was with him all night, and until near eleven o'clock next day."
"how very extraordinary and how very shocking!" exclaimed lady henmarsh. "well, mr. streightley, i am sure, no matter what you and she have quarrelled about, the fault is not yours; and her friend will speedily send her back to you."
"her friend?" said robert, interrogatively.
"yes; mrs. stanbourne i mean. of course she is gone to her. do not you think so? she does not say so, i suppose, just to keep you in suspense, and make a sensation; but no doubt she is gone to her: she did so in all her troubles formerly; poor ned and i were not good enough for her," and lady henmarsh sniffed spitefully. "my advice to you is to take no notice; she must come off her high horse when she wants money."
robert started. he had not thought of that; he had not thought of his wife being reduced to any material distress. the mere idea gave him acute pain; and yet what better chance for her communicating with him, and some faint hope arising out of such communication? the divided pain and relief of the thought struggled in his expressive face.
"i have no idea," he replied; "there is no clue, no indication in her letter--nothing but the terrible, bare truth; and i don't know whether she has money with her or not."
"she had a private banking account, i know, among the other luxuries of her vie de princesse," said lady henmarsh with a spiteful emphasis; "you had better see to its condition. i have no doubt she has gone to mrs. stanbourne. it is unfortunate; and she is foolish to have made such a scandal as, let us all keep the matter as close as we may, it must make, for it will not be easily lived down by her, or forgotten by the world. however, it cannot be helped; she must only come back, and propitiate society more than ever."
robert hardly heard her; his thoughts were far distant, in pursuit of the beloved fugitive. the trivial talk of the woman of the world passed him by unheeded. he roused himself to tell lady henmarsh what were the arrangements for the funeral of mr. guyon, and to utter a few sentences of kindness towards the dead man, and concern for her grief. then he was going away, when he remembered something he had to say, and turned again to speak to her.
"no papers can be removed until after the funeral," he said; "but i have looked over the greater part of poor mr. guyon's, and i have set aside a large packet which i consider you are the proper person to dispose of. i will send them to you carefully."
lady henmarsh thanked him; but her manner was confused to a degree which did her habitual sang froid a great wrong, and a genuine blush dyed her face from the chin to the forehead. "to think of his being such an idiot as to keep those letters," she said, when robert had left her. "who could have believed it? i should not be surprised if he had kept some letter, some memorandum, which has opened kate's eyes; and if so, knowing what a devil she is when she's roused, i'm not surprised at any thing."
robert found that katharine had not drawn on her private banking account for more than a fortnight. more than ever puzzled by this discovery, he questioned her maid, inquiring if she could tell what money her mistress had had in her possession. she had only a few sovereigns in her purse, the maid knew, when she went out that fatal day in the carriage. katharine had forgotten her purse, and sent her upstairs for it just as she reached the hall-door; so she had seen the purse, and taken particular notice of it, as it lay open on the dressing-table. robert went with the woman to examine the drawers and wardrobes in katharine's room. he was intensely anxious now to be assured that she had the equivalent of money with her; for he was far from really sharing lady henmarsh's confident anticipations, though he tried to persuade himself that he did so. all katharine's possessions were in perfect order--not a trinket, not a jewel was missing,--not one, at least, that robert had given her, or that she had bought since their marriage; nothing but the old-fashioned case containing her dead mother's diamonds, her sole dowry, was gone from its place. then robert despaired; then he seemed to understand the terrible and final meaning of this event.
he was standing before the open doors of a cabinet in which katharine's jewels were symmetrically arranged, and had just satisfied himself that only the case of jewels had been removed, when a servant came to seek him.
"what is it?" said robert. "i am busy: i cannot see any one."
"it is one of the clerks from the city, sir," returned the man; "and he wants to see you on important business."
robert went down to the study, and saw the clerk from the city. his business was important, and his news serious. new and heavy loss had fallen on streightley and son. troubles had indeed come to robert, "not by single spies, but in battalions."
