“Go and seek it where it has gone,” said Richard, brutally, almost beside himself with suppressed rage;—“it is dead!”
“It is a lie—a lie!” cried the woman, excitedly, her pale face flushing with anger. “That man told me the same; but he is in your pay, and you have hidden it from me.”
She clung to him now fiercely, clutching the ostentatiously-displayed smoothly-plaited shirt-front, and turning it into a crumpled rag.
“Hush! hush! For God’s sake, be still!” he exclaimed. “They will hear you in the outer office. I have not got the child; it died months ago.”
“It is a lie!” exclaimed the woman, more angrily. “You drove me mad once with your ill-treatment, but you shall not do it again.” Then, raising her voice—“I will have my child!”
As Richard Pellet’s face turned of a ghastly muddy hue, he glanced again and again at the door, his hands trembling with the cowardly rage that, under different circumstances, might have made the life of the woman before him—his wife—not worth a moment’s purchase. The coarse, heavy, insolent smile was gone; for he was attacked in his weakest point, and already in imagination he could see the side looks and laughter of his clerks, and hear the sneering innuendoes of fellow-men of his own stamp when there was a public exposé, and Richard Pellet, the wealthy banker, who for the sake of money had kept his weak insane wife in obscurity for years, that he might commit bigamy for the fortune of the Widow Clayton, was arraigned for his offence against his country’s laws, and the story of his wife’s wrongs came forth.
What was he to do? He must get her away quietly—by subterfuge—he could lead her in one way he knew, and she would not believe the truth.
The scandal, after so many years lying hidden, would now most certainly be bruited abroad. Some men would have laughed it to scorn, and faced it with brazen effrontery; but Richard Pellet was a religious man—a patron of philanthropic societies—even now upon his table lay half-a-dozen annual reports with his name thereon as steward or committee-man, for all men to read. Why, his very sober beneficent look carried weight, and he was always placed in the front rank upon the platform at Exeter Hall meetings. In fact, in May, during the meetings, he adopted white cravats and frills. And now, in spite of money, care, secrecy, this matter would be spread abroad. He could hear it already; and to hide this example of his cruel love of greed, had he dared, and could have hidden the crime, he would have struck down the patient sufferer whom he had treated with such a mingling of cruelty and neglect, dead at his feet, with as little compunction as he had already shown in sending her staggering to the wall.
But the wife of long ago, whose reason had gone astray years before, the soft eyes, the pale face, and trembling lips were here no more; and Richard Pellet, as he shrank from her, felt himself to be almost helpless in the hands of one whose strength was augmented by her position, for he dared not raise his voice. He knew, too, that now the time had gone when he could command, and he must try subterfuge, and get her away abroad, where she would be safely kept. He blamed himself now that he had not placed her in an asylum, but he recalled his reason—it would have been too public a proceeding; and in these fleeting moments the question came, were the gold and position he had won worth the price that he had paid?
As he stood there in her grasp, his mind was made up, and he said quietly, “Sit down.”