Cruel as the grave

by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

Suddenly it occurred to him that it was in some way connected with the cards she had thrown into the fire. They were not all burned up. Some few had fallen scorched upon the hearth. These he gathered up and examined; and as he looked at one after another, his face expressed, in turn, surprise, dismay, and amusement. Then he burst out laughing. He really could not help doing so, serious as the subject was; for upon every single card, instead of Rosa Blondelle, he had written:

Mrs. Rosa Berners.

“Was there ever such a mischief of a mistake?” he exclaimed, as he ceased laughing and sat down by his table to consider what was to be done next.

“Poor Sybil! poor, dear, fiery-hearted child, it is no wonder! And yet, Heaven truly knows it was because I was thinking of you, and not of the owner of the cards, that I wrote that name upon them unconsciously,” he said to himself, as he sat with his fine head bowed upon his hand, gravely reviewing the history of the last few days.

His eyes were opened now—not only to his wife’s jealousy, but to his own thoughtless conduct in doing anything to arouse it.

In the innermost of his own soul he was so sure of the perfect integrity of his love for his wife, that it had never before occurred to him that she could doubt it—that any unconscious act or thoughtless gallantry on his part could cause her to doubt it.

Now, however, he remembered with remorse that, of late, since the rising of the court, all his mornings and evenings had been spent exclusively in the company of the beautiful blonde. Any wife under such circumstances might have been jealous; but few could have suffered such agonies of wounded love as wrung the bosom of Sybil Berners,—of Sybil Berners, the last of a race in whose nature more of the divine and more of the infernal met than in almost any other race that ever lived on earth.

Her husband thought of all this now. He remembered what lovers and what haters the men and women of her house had been.

He recalled how, in one generation, a certain Reginald Berners, who was engaged to be married to a very lovely young lady, on one occasion found his betrothed and an imaginary rival sitting side by side, amusing themselves with what they might have considered a very harmless flirtation, when, transported with jealous fury, he slew the man before the very eyes of the girl. For this crime Reginald was tried, but for some inexplicable reason, acquitted; and he lived to marry the girl for whose sake he had imbrued his hands in a fellow-man’s blood.

He recalled how, in another generation, one Agatha Berners, in a frenzy of jealousy, had stabbed her rival, and then thrown herself into the Black Lake. Fortunately neither of the attempted crimes had been consummated, for the wounded woman recovered, and the would-be suicide lived to wear out her days in a convent.