“No, of course not, marm; anyway it aint any business of mine.”
CHAPTER XCV.
MR. WILLIAM RAWTON’S CUNNING DEVICE—THE MISSING PAGE.
With all the gipsy’s faults—and it must be confessed he had a few—want of consideration for Mrs. Bourne was not one of them.
He saw pretty clearly that a concurrence of circumstances, as unlooked for as unpropitious, threatened to environ the doctor’s wife in a labyrinth of difficulties. It is true that, morally speaking, no blame could be attached to her for consenting to become the wife of a needy and heartless physician.
She had not the faintest notion that Rawton was in the land of the living. Indeed, she had quite forgotten in the vortex of fashionable life that such a person ever did exist; but facts are stubborn things, and there was no getting over the horrible one which so immediately concerned herself.
Nothing would please Dr. Bourne better than having it in his power to cast her adrift on the world, to be released from the tie that bound him, and to espouse the rich and fascinating widow whom he had been dangling after for so long a time.
He knew perfectly well that his present wife regarded him with the greatest possible aversion, and the chances were that she would offer no impediment to a divorce, provided he gave her only a portion of the dowry he had received from the nobleman who was her former protector, but Bourne’s cupidity was so great that he could not bear to part with money. His device was to obtain a release by other means.
He had learned from a gossiping mischief-making Frenchwoman, who, at one time had been lady’s maid to his wife when she was in India with Sir Digby McBride, that in her early youth her ladyship, as she was termed, had been espoused by a gipsy named Rawton. Indeed the lady’s maid in question aided further than this, she gave the doctor a small miniature, which she said was a correct likeness of the gipsy in question. This the doctor treasured, and it was from this same miniature that he traced some similarity in the features of Bill Rawton, when he met him on the eventful night of the attempted robbery.
Well might his wife say that he had the cunning of the fox. He had a motive, and a strong one too, in patronising the gipsy. His motive was to worm out of him all respecting his—the doctor’s—wife. He had already become possessed of facts which he deemed might be of infinite service to him in carrying out his nefarious and contemptible plans.