Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/45

5, 1862.] effort. “I swear to you, that when I married Violet—”

“Don’t lie to me, Wilford. Don’t make your sin greater by trying to make it seem less. I know the truth. I know that you have made my poor sister your victim by a most infamous treachery. But just as she was good and truthful herself, so she believed others to be the same. So she was caught and betrayed by your most wicked plot. Could nothing induce you to spare her, you heartless man? Did neither her beauty nor her purity move you to pity? Don’t lie to me, sir: you know that you have been guilty of a shameful wrong. Be assured that your guilt is now known, that your sin is now laid bare. You married Violet, knowing that your marriage was a fraud and falsehood. Still you hoped to escape detection; you changed your name; you lived here obscurely, unknown; you never returned to Grilling Abbots—to the Grange; you sought to sever every tie that united you to us—to our family, and to your own at Grilling Abbots. The plot was as adroit as it was wicked, cruel. It has succeeded; your blow has struck well home; and you have killed the poor confident, loving, tender woman who believed herself your wife. Surely you are satisfied. Stop now; let there be no more wrong-doing. Your lies are thrown away now—at least, they will not deceive us any more.”

Very slowly, by grasping a chair, and so half pulling himself up—for he seemed terribly crushed by his suffering—Wilford raised himself, his face quite livid, the perspiration in beads upon his forehead, wetting his matted hair. He stretched out a shaking hand.

“My sister—Madge, will you hear me?” he said, in tones so solemn and strange that, in spite of herself, she was awed and silenced. “You do me a grave injustice, but let that pass. Perhaps I may never hope for Violet’s pardon or pity. The wrong I have done—I am quite conscious how great and cruel that wrong is—may well hinder her from one further feeling of tenderness towards me. Still, Madge, it cannot but be some comfort to her in the future to know that her suffering, her anguish—well—her shame, if you will have it so, was brought about certainly by no human design, but by means of an awful and inscrutable accident—a wild, mad chance. If you will see in it the hand of an Almighty, chastening a prodigal and a wrong-doer, even at the sacrifice of one of the purest, and best, and noblest of His creatures, be it so; I may not gainsay you. But, my sister, I swear to you—”

But again she shrunk from him. He could not but perceive it, and he stopped. Presently he resumed, however, lowering his eyes, and in a low, agitated voice.

“I cannot marvel, I can still less complain that you should persist in a refusal to credit me. After what has happened it is perhaps but natural that you should distrust, despise, hate me—it is part of my punishment that this should be so. I can bear it. It is not for myself I speak. I am not coward enough for that. It is for her sake—for Violet’s—that I ask you to hear me. For one moment, Madge, try to think of me as I seemed to you before this awful revelation was made. You would have believed and trusted me then—no one sooner—and I am not changed; it is the same Wilford Hadfield who speaks to you, and implores you to hear and to credit. On my soul, then, I swear to you that when I married Violet, your sister—I swear it—I believed that the other was dead—believed that I held proof, certain proof, of her death years and years before.”

“Yet you never breathed word of this to Violet, never told her of your former love—of your former marriage!”

“No; because it was a shame and a sin, taken at the best. I could not speak on such a subject to her. I loved her. I had need of all her love, all her respect. I did not dare to risk the loss of these by drawing the curtain that hid the past. I could not sully my union with her by a thought of that former most shameful union. I sought to conceal from her the depths to which it had been possible for her husband to sink. Years had gone by; the secret of that first marriage was known to a very, very few; these I believed—and I had reason for believing so—dead, or gone away beyond all chances of discovery. I did not dare to breathe life into the secret that seemed so dead—to hold it before Violet, my wife, as a shameful and hideous ghost of what my early life had been. Married to her, I planned a new career, founded upon the buried corpse of the past. I was presumptuous enough to think that Heaven had forgiven and forgotten! I am punished. It is not the least cruel part of my chastisement to find that the blow which has fallen upon me has struck down Violet also. For my change of name, my life here—these, I do assure you, had no connection with that dreadful secret. My sister, I swear to you that I have spoken truly.”

Madge could not but be softened by his words; the tone in which they were uttered carried conviction with it.

“I believe, Wilford—at least I will try to believe that this is so. I am violent and passionate, I know; and, indeed, it is hard to be calm thinking of this subject. Perhaps I have said more than I ought. Certainly more than I had Violet’s sanction to say. If this be all as you have told me, Wilford—and why should it not be?—there is perhaps more need of sorrow and pity than anger, is there not? Forgive me, Wilford, if I have in speaking to you been too violent and headstrong—if I have said things I had better have left unsaid. I am only a girl; wilful, not very wise, perhaps, and my temper getting the better of me often; still you must know how much I love Vi—how I wouldn’t have her injured for all the world—how the thought of a wrong to her makes me half wild. For Violet—”

“Yes, Madge, tell me of her.”

“She is very still, very calm, there is hardly a tear in her eyes. Yet it is dreadful to see her. I think if she could only cry and storm and get very angry as I do, it would be better for her. Oh! so sad she looks, so wan, and hardly speaks, hardly looks from the ground; holding her baby so close to her heart, as though she feared to lose that also; and then she turns from one to the