“Did I act my part well?” said Miss Fortescue, mournfully. “It was an easy enough part. I believe I succeeded in making myself utterly detestable. Captain Dudleigh was bitterly vexed at my manner. He wanted me to gain your confidence. That, however, I could not yet bring myself to do. His own intercourse with you was even worse. Your attempt to escape was a terrible blow to his hopes. Yet he dared not let you escape. That would have destroyed his plans utterly. You would have gone to your friends—to Miss Plympton—and you would have found out things about him which would have made his projects with reference to you out of the question.”
“Miss Plympton!” cried Edith. “How could I have gone to her? She is away.”
“That was one of my lies,” said Miss Fortescue. “Unfortunately, she is really ill, but she is still in the country, at her school. I myself went there to tell her about you only two days ago, but found that she had been ill for some time, and could not see any one.”
Edith sighed heavily. For an instant hope had come, and then it had died out.
“He made me go again to see you, but with what result you know. I was fairly driven away at last. This made him terribly enraged against you and against me, but I quieted him by reminding him that it was only his own fault. It brought about a change in his plans, however, and forced him to put me more prominently forward. Then it was that he devised that plan by which I was to go and win your confidence. I can not speak of it; you know it all. I wish merely to show you what the pressure was that he put on me.
“'Dear wife,' said he to me one day, in his most affectionate tone—'my own Lucy, you know all about my affairs, and you know that I am utterly ruined. If I can not do something to save myself, I see no other resource but to blow my brains out. I will do it, I swear I will, if I can not get out of these scrapes. My father will not help me. He has paid all my debts twice, and won't do it again. Now I have a proposal to make. It's my only hope. You can help me. If you love me, you will do so. Help me in this, and then you will bind your husband to you by a tie that will be stronger than life. If you will not do this simple thing, you will doom me to death, for I swear I will kill myself, or at least, if not that, I will leave you forever, and go to some place where I can escape my creditors.'
“This was the way that he forced his plan upon me. You know what it was. I was to see you, and do—what was done.
“'You are my wife,' said he, earnestly. 'I can not marry her—I don't want to—but I do want to get money. Let me have the control of the Dalton estates long enough to get out of my scrapes. You can't be jealous of her. She hates me. I hate her, and love you—yes, better than life. When she finds out that I am married to her she will hate me still more. The marriage is only a form, only a means of getting money, so that I may live with my own true wife, my darling Lucy, in peace, and free from this intolerable despair.'
“By such assurances as these—by dwelling incessantly upon the fact that I was his wife, and that this proposed marriage to you was an empty form—upon your hate for him, and the certainty of your still greater hate, he gradually worked upon me. He appealed to my love for him, my pity for his situation, and to every feeling that could move me in his favor. Then it was that he told me frankly the name of the clergyman who had married us, and the witness. The clergyman's name was Porter, and the witness was a Captain Reeves. So, in spite of my abhorrence of the act, I was led at last, out of my very love to him, and regard for his future, to acquiesce in his plan. Above all, I was moved by one thing upon which he laid great stress.
“'It will really be for her benefit,' he would say. 'She will not be married at all. I shall take some of her money, certainly; but she is so enormously rich that she will never feel it; besides, if I didn't get it, Wiggins would. Better for her cousin to have it. It will be all in the family. Above all, this will be the means, and the only means, of freeing her from that imprisonment in which Wiggins keeps her. That is her chief desire. She will gain it. After I pay my debts I will explain all to her; and what is more, when I succeed to my own inheritance, as I must do in time, I shall pay her every penny.'