Ah, why? Why is half the mischief that is done in the world done by the instrumentality of letters, which ought to have been read and destroyed, being treasured up instead by foolish women, or read and left about by men whom experience has not availed to teach? If Robert Streightley had quite understood Mr. Guyon's character, he would have known, in the first place, that that gentleman had never been in the habit of contemplating the contingency of his own death, or of making any preparation, temporal or spiritual, for that event; in the second, that his vanity was of so ominous a kind that he liked to indulge in the recollection of successful enterprises, no matter what their nature, and treasured up the trophies of his fortunate coups, as other people might keep love-tokens or relics of departed friends,--a ghastly perversion, it is true, but a characteristic trait of Mr. Guyon, as Robert came to learn, when he had to examine all the dead man's papers and personal effects.
After all, it did not matter very much that this mistake had been made. Any one of the papers concerning this transaction, so endorsed, would have equally convicted her husband in Katharine's eyes. For a moment, when Robert perceived the error and recognised how it had occurred, a faint hope had sprung up in his heart that all might be explained, in explaining that he had never seen the draft of Mr. Guyon's letter to Gordon Frere; but it lasted only for a moment, and then left Robert more shame-stricken, more despairing than before.
The bitter remembrance of his resolutions of the day before came to torment him now. How futile they were! made all too late, and useless; how ridiculous they seemed, too! Would he ever have had the courage to tell the woman he had wronged the truth concerning himself and her? Cowering as he was now under the blast of her scorn and anger, he could not believe that he would; he heaped upon himself all the reprobation which the sternest judge could have measured out to him. His sin had found him out indeed, and nothing could save him now from the fullest retribution. It had come in its worst form, complicated with the death of his accomplice, as a double horror. Robert Streightley was not a man who could coldly contemplate such an event as Mr. Guyon's death. He had indeed retained but little personal regard for him; but that fact, the growing knowledge of the man which rendered such regard impossible, invested his death with additional horror to Robert. That such should have been the manner of the detection and the punishment, impressed him with awe. Standing, as he had done that day, by the dead man's bed, he had bowed his head submissively to the tremendous lesson which the scene conveyed. Where was their fine scheme now? Where was the wealth for which the father had sold the daughter? Gone--almost all gone; and if it had remained a million times told, what could it avail to the form of clay which lay there waiting for the coffin and the grave? Where was the beautiful wife whom the father's accomplice had purchased at the price of his honour? Who was to tell that to the wretched husband, who knew nothing but that she had detected them both, and fled from them both,--from the living and the dead?
As he thought these thoughts, and a thousand others which could find no utterance in words, no expression by the pen, the long hours of the night were wearing by. Up and down the room, long after the fire had died out, unnoticed, Robert Streightley walked, buried in his tormenting thoughts, full of horror, remorse, shame, the sense of righteous retribution and torturing grief. She was gone,--his darling, the one treasure of his life, the beautiful idol of his worship: the desolation of that knowledge had not come to him yet; he had had no time to think of the meaning of life without her; the fear, the excitement, the strangeness of the fact were all that he had as yet realised. The awful sorrow, the hopeless bereavement were for the future. The strokes of the rod were beginning to fall upon him; strokes which were to continue, ceaseless and stinging, until the end. Any one who has ever battled, quite alone, with a tremendous sorrow in its first hours of strife, knows how vain is the effort to collect his thoughts at the time, and to recall their order afterwards; knows how the merest trifles will intrude themselves on the attention at times, and at others how the faculties will seem to be suspended, and a kind of dull vacuity will succeed the access of raging pain. The story of Robert's suffering in no way differed from that of any other supreme agony. It had all the caprices, all the fantasies of pain; it had the dreadful vitality, and the intervals of numbness and wandering. Many times in the course of that night Robert sat down in a chair and fell asleep, to wake again--with a start, and an impression that some voice had uttered his name--to the renewed consciousness of his misery.
It was very long before he began to think about the circumstances of Katharine's flight from her home, before he began to speculate upon how she had gone, and whither. From the moment he had read her assurance that in this world he should never see her face again, he had been seized with a horrible conviction that this was literally true: he would seek her, of course; he would find out where she had gone to,--he did not even stop to think whether there would be much, or any difficulty about that--but he should see her face no more. No such wild notion as that Katharine would relent and forgive him ever crossed Robert's mind. He knew how cold and proud she was--how cold and proud when she was ignorant of his sin against her, and when he had lived only in the hope of winning her love some happy day before he died;--he knew how insensate any hope would now be, and he never cherished such a delusion for a moment. She was dead to him, and all the gorgeous fabric of the life he had built up for himself had crumbled away.
The new day was dawning, when Robert Streightley went wearily upstairs, and stopped at the door of his wife's dressing-room. He had hardly courage to enter the deserted chamber,--it was as though she lay dead inside. There had been so strong a likeness to her face in that of the dead man he had stood beside that day, that it had had a double awe for him. When at length he opened the door and went in, the cold dim dawn was there before him, and the orderly emptiness of the splendid chamber struck him to the heart.
No picturesque disarray was there, but the trimness of a swept and garnished apartment. He had not entered this room on the preceding night--he had not thought of looking for any explanation of Katharine's absence there. But now that she had furnished the explanation herself, he remembered the servants had told him she had been some time in her dressing-room after her return from Queen Anne Street. He drew back the curtains and admitted the misty light; he sat down on a sofa and leaned his head wearily upon his hands. Gradually fatigue overcame him, and he fell into a deep sleep, which gave him merciful forgetfulness until late in the morning.
Robert was roused from his slumber by Katharine's maid, who told him that Lady Henmarsh had arrived and was waiting to see him. "There's another lady with her, sir," said the maid,--"Mrs. Frere."
Robert started perceptibly. "I cannot see any one yet," he said. "Say I am not dressed, but will call on Lady Henmarsh as soon as possible."
The woman hesitated. "Lady Henmarsh wants to know what day is fixed for the funeral, sir; and she has been asking about my mistress."