“Do you think she does not know?” I said. “It was not for nothing that your brother took such dreadful means of escape. You may be sure she suspects the worst, even if she does not know.”
“If I could think that!” he said. It gave him a little composure. The mere idea that there was someone to whom he could speak freely was a support. Even to talk it over with me was something. We had been to the house of death to see that all was ready for next day’s melancholy business, and the sight of Mrs. Colin done up in new crape, with the white streamers of a coquettish widow’s cap setting off her commonplace comeliness, had been almost more than either of us could bear. For my part, everything seemed more mysterious to me in the light of this wife. Had Colin squandered the family substance in luxurious chambers, at the feet of one of those beautiful harpies who are never satisfied with luxury, it would have been more comprehensible. But the lodgings in Bloomsbury and the landlady’s daughter seemed to throw an air of burlesque upon the tragedy. The accessories ought to have been bad and vicious, not respectable and commonplace. But it seems there are many ways of courting ruin; and there must have been other unknown chapters in his life before he came to this. Perhaps, indeed, the hasty marriage, the retirement into this shabby retreat, were of themselves efforts to get back into a better way. I walked along with Charley to the house of the doctor, in which his father and sister still were, meaning to leave him there; but he clutched at my arm. “You’ve been through it all,” he said, in a broken voice. Charlotte came down to us in the dining-room of the doctor’s house, the one corresponding to that in which the first chapter of our tragedy had been enacted. She was very pale, yet greeted us with a smile. Her father was always the same--quite comfortable, suspecting nothing, now and then asking if Colin had gone home. “‘The best place for him, Chatty, the best place for him,’ he says to me,” she said, the tears springing to her eyes, “and we must let him think so, the doctor says. He says, ‘You must do the London business, Charley. We must keep it up as long as we can.’”
“If there is any business to do--or if anybody will ever trust us more,” Charley said.