‘This is where she would keep anything she wanted to hide,’ thought Mr. Piper.
He was not mistaken. In one of the recesses he found some money lying loose. A bank note and half a dozen sovereigns. In another there was a morocco jewel-case, containing an opal cross set with diamonds, a trinket which Mr. Piper had never seen till that moment. A third recess was crammed with letters, this time unmistakably masculine.
Bella’s husband sat down before the desk, and read these letters one by one, carefully. His commercial instincts came to his aid and kept him wondrously cool. He arranged the letters according to their dates, and after reading one, folded and endorsed it neatly before he laid it aside, as if it had been a business document. Had he been a lawyer preparing a case for the divorce court he could hardly have been more deliberate.
The first ten or twelve letters were innocent enough. Courteous little notes about archery—French novels—a volume generally accompanying the letter that recommended it. Then the tone grew gradually more familiar—the notes became letters; then came sentiment—as morbidly sweet as the correspondence of Julie and her St. Preux, but happily without Julie’s tendency to sermonizing. Then they grew still warmer—the old, old story, abuse of the stern laws that set up the accident of wedlock as a barrier against the divinity of passion.
There was a great deal Mr. Piper could not understand, but the gist of all was very clear to him. He saw that to the bottom of her heart his wife had been false, and that if she had hesitated on the brink of criminal treason, it was because she loved Little Yafford Park and the wealth that went along with it, not because she had one spark of gratitude or affection for him, Ebenezer Piper.
There was no limit to her treachery. The husband saw himself ridiculed, travestied—in the lover’s letters. His ignorance, his vulgarity, were put forward as reasons why his wife should betray him. Such a man—to put the insolent plea in plain words—was unworthy of pity; he was beyond the pale of social law—the code of gentlemanly honour did not recognise his existence. He was a cipher, like those wretched husbands in the old feudal days, from whom the lord of the soil might take everything, bride, honour, the right of property in a newly wedded wife, as in the land they tilled and the harvest they reaped.
Mr. Piper made the letters up into a couple of neat bundles, and put them in his pocket. There was a letter for every day in the week. Captain Standish’s idleness had run into letter-writing. Then, pale to the lips, but cold and firm, Mr. Piper replaced the pigeon-holes, shut the escritoire, and went downstairs to see if his wife had yet come home.
‘Home,’ he repeated. ‘No, she shall never call my house by that name again.’
And then he remembered his first wife, with her humble dog-like fidelity, her narrow spirit, troubled about many things, but always true to him, reverencing him as the king of men, the epitome of wisdom. Poor Moggie, who had been pretty and buxom once, and who had kept his house so well in those happy days when he was beginning to grow rich. Ah, how different from this beautiful viper, this living lie, a creature that could smile at him and caress him while she kept those letters in her desk!
‘She shall never cross my threshold again,’ he said to himself. ‘There shall be no slander—no legal separation. I’ll give her a thousand a year, and she may go to the devil her own way.’