Part 60 (1/2)

Her tears began to fall. And she let them fall--in silence. The earl resumed.

”But for that extraordinary letter, I should have supposed you had been actuated by a mad infatuation for the cur, Levison; its tenor gave the matter a different aspect. To what did you allude when you a.s.serted that your husband had driven you to it?”

”He knew,” she answered, scarcely above her breath.

”He did not know,” sternly replied the earl. ”A more truthful, honorable man than Carlyle does not exist on the face of the earth. When he told me then, in his agony of grief, that he was unable to form even a suspicion of your meaning, I could have staked my earldom on his veracity. I would stake it still.”

”I believed,” she began, in a low, nervous voice, for she knew that there was no evading the questions of Lord Mount Severn, when he was resolute in their being answered, and, indeed she was too weak, both in body and spirit, to resist--”I believed that his love was no longer mine; that he had deserted me, for another.”

The earl stared at her. ”What can you mean by 'deserted!' He was with you.”

”There is a desertion of the heart,” was her murmured answer.

”Desertion of a fiddlestick!” retorted his lords.h.i.+p. ”The interpretation we gave to the note, I and Carlyle, was, that you had been actuated by motives of jealousy; had penned it in a jealous mood. I put the question to Carlyle--as between man and man--do you listen, Isabel!--whether he had given you cause; and he answered me, as with G.o.d over us, he had never given you cause; he had been faithful to you in thought, word and deed; he had never, so far as he could call to mind, even looked upon another woman with covetous feelings, since the hour that he made you his wife; his whole thoughts had been of you, and of you alone. It is more than many a husband can say,” significantly coughed Lord Mount Severn.

Her pulses were beating wildly. A powerful conviction that the words were true; that her own blind jealousy had been utterly mistaken and unfounded, was forcing its way to her brain.

”After that I could only set your letter down as a subterfuge,” resumed the earl--”a false, barefaced plea, put forth to conceal your real motives, and I told Carlyle so. I inquired how it was he had never detected any secret understanding between you and that--that beast, located, as the fellow was, in the house. He replied that no such suspicion had ever occurred to him. He placed the most implicit confidence in you, and would have trusted you with the creature around the world, aye, with any one else.”

She entwined her hands one within the other, pressing them to pain. It would not deaden the pain at her heart.

”Carlyle told me he had been unusually occupied during the stay of that man. Besides his customary office work, his time was taken up with some private business for a family in the neighborhood, and he had repeatedly to see them, more particularly the daughter, after office hours. Very old acquaintances of his, he said, relatives of the Carlyle family; and he was as anxious about the secret--a painful one--as they were. This, I observed to him, may have rendered him un.o.bservant to what was pa.s.sing at home. He told me, I remember, that on the very evening of the--the catastrophe, he ought to have gone with you to a dinner party, but most important circ.u.mstances arose, in connection with the affair, which obliged him to meet two gentlemen at his office, and to receive them in secret, unknown to his clerks.”

”Did he mention the name of the family?” inquired Lady Isabel, with white lips.

”Yes, he did. I forgot it, though. Rabbit! Rabit!--some such name as that.”

”Was it Hare?”

”That was it--Hare. He said you appeared vexed that he did not accompany you to the dinner; and seeing that he intended to go in afterward, but was prevented. When the interview was over in his office, he was again detained at Mrs. Hare's house, and by business as impossible to avoid as the other.”

”Important business!” she echoed, giving way for a moment to the bitterness of former feelings. ”He was promenading in their garden by moonlight with Barbara--Miss Hare. I saw them as my carriage pa.s.sed.”

”And you were jealous that he should be there!” exclaimed Lord Mount Severn, with mocking reproach, as he detected her mood. ”Listen!” he whispered, bending his head toward her. ”While you may have thought, as your present tone would seem to intimate, that they were pacing there to enjoy each other's society, know that they--Carlyle, at any rate--was pacing the walk to keep guard. One was within that house--for a short half hour's interview with his poor mother--one who lives in danger of the scaffold, to which his own father would be the first to deliver him up. They were keeping the path against that father--Carlyle and the young lady. Of all the nights in the previous seven years, that one only saw the unhappy son at home for a half hour's meeting with his mother and sister. Carlyle, in the grief and excitement caused by your conduct, confided so much to me, when mentioning what kept him from the dinner party.”

Her face had become crimson--crimson at her past lamentable folly. And there was no redemption!

”But he was always with Barbara Hare,” she murmured, by way of some faint excuse.

”I have mentioned so. She had to see him upon this affair, her mother could not, for it was obliged to be kept from the father. And so, you construed business interviews into a.s.signations!” continued Lord Mount Severn with cutting derision. ”I had given you credit for better sense.

But was this enough to hurl you on the step you took? Surely not. You must have yielded in the persuasions of that wicked man.”

”It is all over now,” she wailed.

”Carlyle was true and faithful to you, and to you alone. Few women have the chance of happiness, in their married life, in the degree that you had. He is an upright and good man; one of nature's gentlemen; one that England may be proud of as having grown upon her soil. The more I see of him, the greater becomes my admiration of him, and of his thorough honor. Do you know what he did in the matter of the damages?”

She shook her head.

”He did not wish to proceed for damages, or only for the trifling sum demanded by law; but the jury, feeling for his wrongs, gave unprecedently heavy ones. Since the fellow came into his baronetcy they have been paid. Carlyle immediately handed them over to the county hospital. He holds the apparently obsolete opinion that money cannot wipe out a wife's dishonor.”

”Let us close those topics” implored the poor invalid. ”I acted wickedly and madly, and have the consequences to bear forever. More I cannot say.”