"Captain Dugald! I have heard of him!" exclaimed Ishmael.
"No doubt, most people have. He is rather a notorious character. Well, my infatuated sister took a fancy to the fellow; misled him into the belief that she was the mistress of a large fortune; and played her cards so skillfully that—well, in a word, the handsome scamp ran off with her, or rather she ran off with him; for she seems all through to have taken the initiative in her own ruin."
"But I do not understand why she should have run off? She was of ripe age and her own mistress. Who was there to run from?"
"Her mother, her mother; who could not endure the sight of Captain
Dugald, and who had forbidden him her house."
"Ah!"
"Well, they were married at Liverpool. He took her to the United States. At my mother's request I followed them there to reclaim my sister, for report said that the captain had already another wife when he married Eleanor. This report, however, I have ascertained to be without foundation. I could not find them in the United States, and soon gave up the search. Captain Dugald had no love for my sister. He appears to have treated her brutally from the first hour that he got her into his power. And when he learned that she had deceived him,—deceived him in every way, in regard to her fortune, in regard to her age, in regard to her very beauty, which was but the effect of skillful dress,—he conceived a disgust for her, abused her shamefully, and finally abandoned her in poverty, in sickness, and in debt."
"Poor, unhappy lady; what else could she have expected? She must have been mad," said Ishmael.
"Mad—madness don't begin to explain it. She must have been possessed of a devil. When thus left, she sold a few miserable trinkets of jewelry his cupidity had spared her, and took a steerage passage in one of our steamers and followed him back to England; but here lost sight of him, for it seems that he is somewhere on the Continent. She came to my mother's house in London in the condition of a beggar, knowing that she was a pauper, and fearing that she was not a wife. In this state of affairs my mother wrote, summoning me to her assistance. I came over as you know. I have ascertained that my sister's marriage is a perfectly legal one; but I have not succeeded in finding her scoundrel of a husband and bringing him to book. He is still on the Continent somewhere; hiding from his creditors, it is said."
"And his unhappy wife?"
"Is on her voyage to America. I have sent them all home, Ishmael.
They must live quietly at Brudenell Hall."