It was not the footman who had answered the door, as usual, but Mrs.Carling's maid.She had taken the letters from the postman, and she was going away with them upstairs.
He stopped her, and asked her why she did not put the letters on the hall table as usual.The maid, looking very much confused, said that her mistress had desired that whatever the postman had brought that morning should be carried up to her room.He took the letters abruptly from the girl, without asking any more questions, and went back into his study.
Up to this time no shadow of a suspicion had fallen on his mind.
Hitherto there had been a simple obvious explanation for every unusual event that had occurred during the last three or four days; but this last circumstance in connection with the letters was not to be accounted for.Nevertheless, even now, it was not distrust of his wife that was busy at his mind--he was too fond of her and too proud of her to feel it--the sensation was more like uneasy surprise.He longed to go and question her, and get a satisfactory answer, and have done with it.But there was a voice speaking within him that had never made itself heard before--a voice with a persistent warning in it, that said, Wait; and look at your letters first.
He spread them out on the table with hands that trembled he knew not why.Among them was the back number of the _Times_ for which he had written to London, with a letter from the publisher explaining the means by which the copy had been procured.
He opened the newspaper with a vague feeling of alarm at finding that those letters to the editor which he had been so eager to read, and that perfecting of the mutilated volume which he had been so anxious to accomplish, had become objects of secondary importance in his mind.An inexplicable curiosity about the general contents of the paper was now the one moving influence which asserted itself within him, he spread open the broad sheet on the table.
The first page on which his eye fell was the page on the right-hand side.It contained those very letters--three in number--which he had once been so anxious to see.He tried to read them, but no effort could fix his wandering attention.He looked aside to the opposite page, on the left hand.It was the page that contained the leading articles.
They were three in number.The first was on foreign politics; the second was a sarcastic commentary on a recent division in the House of Lords; the third was one of those articles on social subjects which have greatly and honorably helped to raise the reputation of the _Times_ above all contest and all rivalry.
The lines of this third article which first caught his eye comprised the opening sentence of the second paragraph, and contained these words:
It appears, from the narrative which will be found in another part of our columns, that this unfortunate woman married, in the spring of the year 18--, one Mr.Fergus Duncan, of Glendarn, in the Highlands of Scotland...
The letters swam and mingled together under his eyes before he could go on to the next sentence.His wife exhibited as an object for public compassion in the _Times_ newspaper! On the brink of the dreadful discovery that was advancing on him, his mind reeled back, and a deadly faintness came over him.There was water on a side-table--he drank a deep draught of it--roused himself--seized on the newspaper with both hands, as if it had been a living thing that could feel the desperate resolution of his grasp, and read the article through, sentence by sentence, word by word.
The subject was the Law of Divorce, and the example quoted was the example of his wife.
At that time England stood disgracefully alone as the one civilized country in the world having a divorce law for the husband which was not also a divorce law for the wife.The writer in the _Times_ boldly and eloquently exposed this discreditable anomaly in the administration of justice; hinted delicately at the unutterable wrongs suffered by Mrs.Duncan; and plainly showed that she was indebted to the accident of having been married in Scotland, and to her consequent right of appeal to the Scotch tribunals, for a full and final release from the tie that bound her to the vilest of husbands, which the English law of that day would have mercilessly refused.
He read that.Other men might have gone on to the narrative extracted from the Scotch newspaper.But at the last word of the article _he_ stopped.
The newspaper, and the unread details which it contained, lost all hold on his attention in an instant, and in their stead, living and burning on his mind, like the Letters of Doom on the walls of Belshazzar, there rose up in judgment against him the last words of a verse in the Gospel of Saint Luke--_"Whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband, commiteth adultery."_He had preached from these words, he had warned his hearers, with the whole strength of the fanatical sincerity that was in him, to beware of prevaricating with the prohibition which that verse contained, and to accept it as literally, unreservedly, finally forbidding the marriage of a divorced woman.He had insisted on that plain interpretation of plain words in terms which had made his congregation tremble.And now he stood alone in the secrecy of his own chamber self-convicted of the deadly sin which he had denounced--he stood, as he had told the wicked among his hearers that they would stand at the Last Day, before the Judgment Seat.
He was unconscious of the lapse of time; he never knew whether it was many minutes or few before the door of his room was suddenly and softly opened.It did open, and his wife came in.
In her white dress, with a white shawl thrown over her shoulders;her dark hair, so neat and glossy at other times, hanging tangled about her colorless cheeks, and heightening the glassy brightness of terror in her eyes--so he saw her; the woman put away from her husband--the woman whose love had made his life happy and had stained his soul with a deadly sin.