"With this assurance, I remain, sir,
Your obedient servant,
VALENTINE HAWKEHURST.
Carlyle Terrace, Edgware Road."
Enclosed with this there was a second letter—from his wife.
He read it with a countenance that expressed mingled anger and contempt.
"Fool!" he muttered; "this is about the only service she could do me."
The letter was long and incoherent; blotted with tears—in places completely illegible. Mr. Sheldon cared only to master the main facts contained in it, which were these:—His wife had left him for ever. Dr. Jedd and Valentine Hawkehurst had told her of something—something that affected the safety of her darling and only child—and the knowledge of which must separate her for ever from him. Of the money which she had brought to him she claimed nothing. Even her jewels, which were in his keeping, in the iron safe where he kept his papers, she did not attempt to obtain from him. Valentine would not allow her to starve. The humblest shelter, the poorest food, would suffice her in the future; but no home of his providing could she ever inhabit again.
"What I have suffered in this last few days is only known to myself and to heaven," she wrote. "O Philip, how could you—how could you even shape the thought of such a deed as this, which you have been doing, day after day, for the last two months? I could not have believed what they have told me, if I had not seen my child fade hour by hour under your care, slowly, surely—and recover as surely directly you were excluded from any part in our care of her. If it were possible not to believe these people, I would disbelieve them, and would cling to you faithfully still; but the voices against you are too many, the proofs against you are too strong.
"Do not seek to see me. I am with my poor child, who was but just able to bear the removal from your house, and to go through the ceremony that was performed this morning. Little did I ever think my daughter would have such a wedding. What a mockery all my plans seem now!—and I had chosen the six bridesmaids, and arranged all the dresses in my own mind. To see my dear girl dressed anyhow, in her oldest bonnet, standing before the altar huddled up in a shawl, and given away by a strange doctor, who kept looking at his watch in a most disrespectful manner during the ceremony, was very bitter to me."
Mr. Sheldon flung aside the letter with an oath. He had no time to waste upon such twaddle as this. He tore open Nancy Woolper's letter. It was a poor honest scrawl, telling him how faithfully she had served him, how truly she had loved him in the past, and how she could henceforth serve him no more. It exhorted him, in humble ill-spelt phrases, to repentance. It might not yet be too late even for such a sinner as he had been.
He tore these two epistles into infinitesimal fragments, and flung them into the fireplace. Valentine Hawkehurst's letter he kept. It was a document of some legal importance.
For a moment there had flashed across his brain the thought that he might punish these people for their interference with his affairs. He might bring an action against Dr. Jedd for slander, and compel the physician to prove the charges insinuated against him, or pay the penalty attendant upon an unjustifiable accusation. He was well assured that Dr. Jedd could prove very little; and a jury, if properly worked, might award him exemplary damages.