'That appears to me decisive as an assertion of Alice's innocence,' said Martin Gurwood, looking round as Humphrey finished reading.
'To most persons it would be so,' said Statham; 'but Mrs. Calverley, with whom we chiefly have to deal, is not of the ordinary stamp. It will be advisable, however, I think, that we should see her at once, taking this document with us. If Madame Du--if Mrs. Durham's suspicions of Mr. Wetter are well founded, he will not have uttered his bark without being prepared to bite, and it is probably to Mrs. Calverley that he will first address himself.'
'Do you wish me to accompany you?' asked Pauline.
'No,' said Statham, 'I think you had better return home.'
'I think so, too,' said Martin; 'your sister may be expecting you.'
Her sister! In her broken condition it was some small comfort to Pauline to hear the acknowledgement of that connection from Martin's lips.
[CHAPTER IX.]
HAGAR'S VISIT.
In the house in Great Walpole-street there was little change. Things went on in pretty much the same manner as when John Calverley was in the habit of creeping back to his dismal home with sorrow in his heart, or when Pauline sat watching and plotting in the solitude of her chamber. Since her second husband's death Mrs. Calverley seemed to have eschewed even the small amount of society which she had previously kept; the heavy dinner-parties were given up, and the only signs of so-called social intercourse were the fortnightly meetings of a Dorcas Club which was held under Mrs. Calverley's auspices, and at which several elderly ladies of the neighbourhood discussed tea and scandal under the pretence of administering to the necessities of the poor. At other times, the mistress of the house led a life which was eminently solitary and self-contained. She read occasionally, it is true; but when she called at the circulating library, she brought away with her, for her amusement or edification, no story in which, under the guise of fiction, the writer had endeavoured to portray any of the varieties of shifting human nature which had come beneath his ken; no poem glowing with passion and ardour, or sweetly musical with melodious numbers. Hard, strong books of travel through districts with immense unpronounceable names; tales of missionary enterprise set forth in the coldest, baldest, and least-educated style, relieved with frequent interpolations of theological phraseology; reviews which had once been potential, but whose feeble echoes Of former trumpet fanfarons now fell idly on inattentive ears; polemical discussions on religious questions, and priestly biographies--lives of small men, containing no proper precept, setting no worthy example--these were Mrs. Calverley's favourite reading. The butler declared that she read nothing at all; that though these books were brought from Mudie's on the back seat of the carriage, and were afterwards displayed on the drawing-room table, one at a time occupying the post of honour on his mistress's lap, she never so much as glanced at them, but sat staring with her steely blue eyes straight in front of her; a state of things which, rigorously persisted in, afflicted the butler, on his own statement, with a disease known to him as 'the creeps,' and which was considered generally so uncanny throughout the lower regions, that had not the wages been good and the table liberal, the whole household would have departed in a body.
About four o'clock on a dull afternoon in the very early spring, Mrs. Calverley was seated in her drawing-room in that semi-comatose state which inspired her domestics with so much terror. Some excuse, however, was to be made for her not attempting, on the present occasion, to read the book which lay idly in her lap, the time being 'between the lights,' as the phrase goes, when the gathering gloom of light, aided by the ever-present thickness of the London atmosphere, blots out the sun's departing rays before the time recorded in the almanac. It was very seldom, indeed, that Mrs. Calverley suffered her thoughts to dwell upon any incident of her immediately passed life. On what had happened during her girlhood, when she was the spoiled and petted heiress, on certain episodes in the career of jolly George Gurwood, her first husband, in which she had borne a conspicuous part, she was in the habit of bestowing occasional remembrances; but all that concerned her later life she wilfully and deliberately shut out from her mind. And this not from any sting of conscience, for Mrs. Calverley considered herself far too immaculate to be open to any such vulgar, consideration, but, as she said to herself, because everything of that kind was too near to allow her to form an impartial judgment upon it. It chanced, however, that upon this particular day, the deceased John Calverley had been frequently present to his widow's recollection. There was nothing extraordinary in this; it arose from the fact that that very morning, in looking through the contents of an old trunk which had long since been consigned to the lumber-room, Mrs. Calverley had come upon an old fly-blown water-colour drawing of a youth with a falling linen collar, a round jacket, and white-duck trousers, a drawing which bore some faint general resemblance to John even as she remembered him. Pondering over this work of art in a dreamy fashion, Mrs. Calverley found herself wondering whether her late husband's mental condition in youth had been as frank and ingenuous as that to be gathered from his physical portrait; and, secondly, whether she had not either faultily misapprehended or wilfully misconstrued that mental and moral condition even during the time that she had been acquainted with him. Two or three times later in the day her mind had wandered to the same topic, and now, as she sat in the dull drawing-room in the failing light, her thoughts were full on him. It was pleasant, she remembered, though she had not thought so at the time, to be looking forward in expectation of his return home at a certain hour; pleasant to know that he would probably be detained beyond the appointed time, thereby giving her opportunity for complaint; pleasant to have some one to vent her annoyance upon who would feel it so keenly, and reply to it so little. She had not hitherto looked at her loss from this point of view, and she was much struck by the novelty of it; though she had never had any opinion of Mr. Calverley, she was willing to admit that he was not absolutely bad-hearted; nay, there were times when--