“Now put all these coincidences together. Don't you see that she had a lover, and that he was about her in London and other places? Stop! _Fact 10._--Those two were married for years, and had no child but this equivocal one; and now four years and a half have passed, during all which time they have had none, and the young parson has been abroad during that period.”
Wheeler was staggered and perplexed by this artful array of coincidences.
“It is not so easy. Of course if Sir Charles was to die, you could claim the estate, and give them a great deal of pain and annoyance; but the burden of proof would always rest on you. My advice is not to breathe a syllable of this; but get a good detective, and push your inquiries a little further among house agents, and the women they put into houses; find that charwoman, and see if you can pick up anything more.”
“Do you know such a thing as an able detective?”
“I know one that will work if I instruct him.”
LADY BASSETT, as her time of trial drew near, became despondent.
She spoke of the future, and tried to pierce it; and in all these little loving speculations and anxieties there was no longer any mention of herself.
This meant that she feared her husband was about to lose her. I put the fear in the very form it took in that gentle breast.
Possessed with this dread, so natural to her situation, she set her house in order, and left her little legacies of clothes and jewels, without the help of a lawyer; for Sir Charles, she knew, would respect her lightest wish.
To him she left her all, except these trifles, and, above all--a manuscript book. It was the history of her wedded life. Not the bare outward history; but such a record of a sensitive woman's heart as no male writer's pen can approach.
It was the nature of her face and her tongue to conceal; but here, on this paper, she laid bare her heart; here her very subtlety operated, not to hide, but to dissect herself and her motives.
But oh, what it cost her to pen this faithful record of her love, her trials, her doubts, her perplexities, her agonies, her temptations, and her crime! Often she laid down the pen, and hid her face in her hands. Often the scalding tears ran down that scarlet face. Often she writhed at her desk, and wrote on, sighing and moaning. Yet she persevered to the end. It was the grave that gave her the power. “When he reads this,” she said, “I shall be in my tomb. Men make excuses for the dead. My Charles will forgive me when I am gone. He will know I loved him to desperation.”