The Law and the Lady

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"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.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SCOTCH VERDICT.

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--a s 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 dis ordered 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.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE MAN'S DECISION.

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 a nd 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.

"EUSTACE MACALLAN."

In those words he took his leave of me. We had then been
married--six days.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE WOMAN'S ANSWER.

THUS far I have written of myself with perfect frankness, and, I
think I may fairly add, with some courage as well. My frankness
fails me and my courage fails me when I look back to my husband's
farewell letter, and try to recall the storm of contending
passions that it roused in my mind. No! I cannot tell the truth
about myself--I dare not tell the truth about myself--at that
terrible time. Men! consult your observation of women, and
imagine what I felt; women! look into your own hearts, and see
what I felt, for yourselves.

What I _did,_ when my mind was quiet again, is an easier matter
to deal with. I answered my husband's letter. My reply to him
shall appear in these pages. It will show, in some degree, what
effect (of the lasting sort) his desertion of me produced on my
mind. It will also reveal the motives that sustained me, the
hopes that animated me, in the new and strange life which my next
chapters must describe.

I was removed from the hotel in the care of my fatherly old
friend, Benjamin. A bedroom was prepared for me in his little
villa. There I passed the first night of my separation from my
husband. Toward the morning my weary brain got some rest--I
slept.

At breakfast-time Major Fitz-David called to inquire about me. He
had kindly volunteered to go and speak for me to my husband's
lawyers on the preceding day. They had admitted that they knew
where Eustace had gone, but they declared at the same time that
they were positively forbidden to communicate his address to any
one. In other respects their "instructions" in relation to the
wife of their client were (as they were pleased to express it)
"generous to a fault." I had only to write to them, and they
would furnish me with a copy by return of post.

This was the Major's news. He refrained, with the tact that
distinguished him, from putting any questions to me beyond
questions relating to the state of my health. These answered, he
took his leave of me for that day. He and Benjamin had a long
talk together afterward in the garden of the villa.

I retired to my room and wrote to my uncle Starkweather, telling
him exactly what had happened, and inclosing him a copy of my
husband's letter. This done, I went out for a little while to
breathe the fresh air and to think. I was soon weary, and went
back again to my room to rest. My kind old Benjamin left me at
perfect liberty to be alone as long as I pleased. Toward the
afternoon I began to feel a little more like my old self again. I
mean by this that I could think of Eustace without bursting out
crying, and could speak to Benjamin without distressing and
frightening the dear old man.

That night I had a little more sleep. The next morning I was
strong enough to confront the first and foremost duty that I now
owed to myself--the duty of answering my husband's letter.

I wrote to him in these words:

"I am still too weak and weary, Eustace, to write to you at any
length. But my mind is clear. I have formed my own opinion of you
and your letter; and I know what I mean to do now you have left
me. Some women, in my situation, might think that you had
forfeited all right to their confidence. I don't think that. So I
write and tell you what is in my mind in the plainest and fewest
words that I can use.

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