Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/46

38 other of us, half frightened, half imploring that we will say no word against you. She will not listen to an accusation against you. ‘He is not guilty of this sin,’ she murmurs always; ‘he has been the victim of some scandalous fraud. He never would have done this wrong—never, never!’ over and over again, like one crazed. Oh, Wilford! you have never been so loved as Violet loved you.”

“My own Violet!” he sobbed.

“Oh! she has been dreadfully tried, and yet remains good and saintly as ever. The things that foreign woman said to her! She was like a tigress let loose; she was furious in her jealousy and her hatred; smooth and calm and cunning at first, then lashing herself into a whirl of rage, and saying such things! I wish she had said them to me instead of to Violet! How could you, Wilford, have ever loved such a woman? I hate her for her shamelessness, her cruelty, her Let me not talk of her, or I lose patience altogether. The whole thing is so wretched and sad, that I feel quite faint and sick with it. Yet I am glad I have seen you. The charge against you is dreadful enough, but it is less vague and horrible than it seemed at first. Yet all is hopeless! If I dreamt to find some flaw in the woman’s story, if I ever hoped that yet a chance remained which could give you back to Violet—all that is over now; from your own lips I have had confirmation. The very first tears that Violet shed started to her eyes at my proposal that I should come up here by the early train from Mowle to see you. Poor Violet! she yet clung to the hope that the story might be false, though she was shown proof in your own writing—letters, and a certificate of the marriage—though she could not really doubt. Yet I go back something less sad, less angry. Violet is not your wife, but she has been wronged by accident, not villainy.”

“Did she send no word?—no message?” he asked.

‘We can never, never meet again,’ she said; ‘it must be henceforth as though death had parted us. Yet let him know that if he has need of my forgiveness, it is his. I have given him my whole heart: I cannot take it back again if I would. He will be as dead to me; but, as I have loved him living, so I will love his memory, as though he had died in my arms—my husband! I will teach my child to pray for him, and to love him. May God ever bless him! and now especially in this hour of sore trouble. Say this to Wilford, and implore him,’ she went on, ‘if he ever loved me, that he will forbear all attempt to see me again; there are some things it is not possible to bear. I am only a woman, and I have loved him. I dare not see him again.’ So she said, the hot tears streaming from her eyes, in quite an agony of grief. And now, Wilford, I must leave you: I must go back home again.”

“Why did I not die in her arms before this frightful secret was revealed? She would not then have known the wrong she had suffered, or, at least, would have seen in my death expiation sufficient. No, Madge, you must not go! At least not alone. Do not start. I must see Violet! I must! It will indeed be for the last time. Madge, I implore you, let this be so! Think what it is that I am asked to do. To go, and never see her more! To be exiled for ever from her presence! Can I bear this? I who have loved her! God help me! who love her still. No! I tell you I must see her again, though it be but for a moment. I must look once again into her eyes. I must press our child again to my heart. For it is our child—Violet’s and mine! Then I will go away,—anywhere! I will drag out the remainder of my life, obscure and unknown, praying to Heaven that the end may soon come. Madge, have mercy, let this be so! Let me see her once again! Let me learn from her own lips that she pardons me! You will grant me this? You cannot refuse me this? Think that this would be her own wish, Madge, if she knew all! Have mercy, my sister, and let me return with you!”

And he flung himself at her feet.

Soon after they passed together out of the house in Freer Street.

“The poor master!” cried Sally, holding up her hands. “White as wax, and trembling like a haspin!”

“Shocking!” murmured Mr. Phillimore. “Yet very like an Old Master—a study by Carravaggio, say; but next to a Guido! No wonder he looks poor in colour and weak in tone.”

And the picture-dealer shook his head in vigorous deprecation of such an injudicious arrangement of works of art.

is a pleasant story told by some old writer, of a fine lady and a curate viewing the moon through a telescope.

“I perceive,” said the lady, “two shadows inclining towards each other; doubtless they are two happy lovers.”

“Not at all:” replied the curate: “they are two steeples of a cathedral.”

It is an illustration of the influence that propensity exercises over opinion and belief. Sympathy and propensity are closely related. In youth our sympathies, rarely penetrating beneath the surface, are easily ensnared by outward appearances: and it is thus, said to me one evening, a hale, vigorous, and portly gentleman of some seventy-five years, that I philosophise over a very egregious mistake I made in the estimate of two men, notorious in the annals of crime, whom chance threw across my path in early life. I was then a clerk in the counting-house of a merchant in the city of London; and, unlike my brother employés, who either lived in the house, or in the immediate neighbourhood, anticipated the habits of the present generation, inasmuch as I affected the—at that time—pretty rural suburb of Islington. One consequence of this taste for the rus in urbe was, that I was compelled to dine at an eating-house; and usually eat my solitary chop in an old tavern in New Court, Lombard Street. Upstairs there was a billiard-room in which was usually spent the remainder of my hour’s mid-day