He sat down in the velvet chair by the fire, took something from his waistcoat-pocket, and held it towards the light on his open palm. It was a plain gold ring, and a date was engraved inside it. It was that of the day then passing into evening, and he had had it done that morning.
"This is the true symbol," he murmured, "she will wear this willingly."
He sat for many minutes gazing at the ring upon his outstretched hand; then he put it back into his pocket, and started up.
A quarter to six.
Later than he had thought, than he had hoped. His thoughts were confused. Now they were hurrying him away again. This must not be. In this supreme hour of his life there must be no vagueness; he must rule his mind. But how? Her letter--he would read her letter--yes, that would reassure him, would restore his composure. A horrid feeling of unreality was creeping over him. This was not a dream, surely? Katharine his wife was really coming--this was her room. The fire and light were real; the doors of yonder wardrobe were lying open to receive her dresses, and the jewels upon the table there were hers--she had worn them. He was really standing in the midst of objects which assured him all was true. Then why had he felt for a moment a wide cold barren heath around him, and seen the sky and the stars? They were shut out, and there was no picture upon the wall opposite? Of course not. There was no picture there; he was only remembering the picture he had seen yesterday. He would read her letter, and he would read it on his knees, and remain kneeling until he should hear the sound of wheels--and then? How painful the slow heavy beating of his heart grew! It quite confused him. He would be much easier kneeling down. He crossed the room to the low white bed, touching the table with his hand for a moment, and knelt down on the side of the bed which faced the door. He took Katharine's letter from his breast, spread it open on the coverlet, stretching his arms out round it, like a frame. He was steadier now--that strange hurry had passed away. This was the letter:--
"I wrote to you three years ago, on the day after my father died; and I then believed, and intended what I said, that that should be the last communication I would ever hold with you. I left you, full of anger and revenge, full of self-contempt that I had permitted myself to be deceived, and with no thought beyond myself, my injuries, and my vengeance. From that day I never heard your name spoken, or was recalled by any outward circumstance to the recollection of the life I had forsaken, until a few days ago; and the letter I am now writing to you, Robert, is the result of what I then accidentally learned.
"The knowledge I have gained is the knowledge of your loss of fortune--ruin. The person who mentioned it called it in the strong phrase natural to those who love wealth best, and value it above all. I hope it is not so bad as this; but whatever it be, you are what the world I lived in once, but which has forgotten me, and which I have forgotten, calls a poor man. Thus the great barrier which did exist between you and me exists no longer, and I can address you as frankly and as freely as I will, with my whole heart. You may have ceased to love me, you may not care for my pardon now; but at least you cannot say I am tired of obscurity and poverty, and would return to my former position of wealth and luxury as your wife. Neither you nor the world, if it should ever know any thing of me again,--nor even my own proud self-doubting heart, which has so often tortured me with suggestions of deceitful motives,--can whisper that I have any purpose but the right to serve in this.
"I have suffered and learned since I left you, Robert. That suffering has been good for me, and that learning has changed me; so that I have often wished to do that which I am now doing, but have been held back by pride. For I am asking you to take me back; I am asking you to give me once more the place in your home and in your life which I wilfully, in my blind wrath, abandoned. The wrong you did me I have long ago forgiven; will you forgive me the wrong I have done you? I never understood it aright until I knew that your fortunes had fallen, until I knew that you, too, had lapsed out of your place in the world; and then, though you never cared for these things as I cared for them, I came to understand what I had done to you. You hid all your troubles from me; you kept a cheerful face to me when your heart was sad; and you allowed me to lavish money when it was melting out of your hands; you never found a fault with me, or denied a wish of mine its most ample gratification. Foolish, vain, worthless wishes they were, and I think of them with shame; but I remember your forbearance, your generosity, your constant kindness with gratitude, which is no new feeling, for I have been learning life's lessons for a long time in silence and loneliness; and if I could have conquered my pride, if I could have known above all what I know now, I should long ago have told you this. What am I, that I should be relentless to you? what am I, that I should not forgive? I never fulfilled a wife's duties; I never understood them; no one ever tried to teach me but one, and I set my headstrong will against her. I left you to sorrow and perplexity, to humiliation, and to ruin; I, who had enjoyed your wealth, and had married you without love. Your sin was not greater in reality than mine, Robert. I wonder can any sin be really greater than a marriage without love? But I was implacable to you, and you never complained of me. We lived together, the one a mystery for the other, each a lie to ourselves, and there was no confidence between us, and in me no forbearance. God help me, I was ignorant indeed; and it was not until I had become a lonely looker-on at life that I learned the lessons which earlier might have saved both you and me.
"I soon forgave you, Robert; but I have never been able to forgive myself. Perhaps when you have forgiven me, as I know you will, peace will come to me. External quiet I have had, but not peace, though it took me long to learn that I was seeking a vain shadow, under that name, and that in doing the right alone can any human being ever find it. In the day when self-delusion fell away from me, it left me as lonely as I had left you; and there was no possibility of substituting self-made duties for those which God's law and my own vow had laid upon me, and which I had forsaken. If you have been unhappy--and, little as I know you, in comparison with the comprehension which a wife's ought to be, I know you well enough to feel only too sure that you have been unhappy--my life has had no joy in it, no serenity. All that ever pleased me in the past has utterly lost its charm. God has had too much compassion on me to suffer me to say, 'Peace, peace, when there is no peace;' and now the end of the struggle has come. Careless words spoken by a stranger have been a revelation to me. You have sought for me in vain, Robert; then you desire to find me? Is it that you love me still, as you loved me in those evil days when I so ill requited your love? Or is it because you too would expiate the past for God's sake and the right? Whatever be your motive, there is but one course for me--the course I am taking. If you will receive me, I am ready to return to you whenever you shall summon me.
"Do you remember Dr. Hudson, who attended me at Martigny after our marriage? He has been a true and untiring friend to me. Nobly has he redeemed the unasked pledge of fidelity which he gave me when we parted there. I sought him out when I left you, and he has taken care of me ever since. Part of the time I lived in a convent, and was permitted to work among the poor and the sick; but of late I have been living with Dr. Hudson's mother in Brittany. This is a brief history of a long time. If you can forgive me, and bid me come home, I will tell you all the story of my outwardly quiet life, and you shall; tell me yours. We are husband and wife, Robert; and yet what strangers we are to each other! I wonder if you are as much changed as I am. Since I have known that you have had other heavy griefs besides those which I laid upon you, I dread to think how they may have altered you. Let me help you to bear them now--I, who never before touched your burdens with so much as a finger--let me be to you in adversity what in prosperity I did not care, did not know how to be. Let our dead past bury its dead. Life must always be sad and serious, I think, to those who are neither foolish nor wicked; and it will be always sad and serious to us. There are shadows cast from the time that is gone upon our paths, which no light can wholly dissipate, until we emerge into the perfect day; but the shades of anger and resentment are not among them: they have vanished, and can never come again. I do not know where your home is, Robert, and I must direct this letter to your mother's house; but wherever and whatever it may be, I entreat you let me share it. Let me come to you, late as it is, and keep my vow to you, so long and so wilfully broken, 'until death do us part.'