"And she was never seen again?"
"Never by me."
"And––you––you think she went out of this house with the intention of––of––destroying herself?"
The words died away in a hoarse whisper, and it was by the motion of his white lips that Barbara Simmons perceived what the young man meant.
"I do, sir."
"Have you any––particular reason for thinking so?"
"No reason beyond what I have told you, sir."
Edward Arundel bent his head, and walked away to hide his blanched face. He tried instinctively to conceal this mental suffering, as he had sometimes hidden physical torture in an Indian hospital, prompted by the involuntary impulse of a brave man. But though the woman's words had come upon him like a thunderbolt, he had no belief in the opinion they expressed. No; his young spirit wrestled against and rejected the awful conclusion. Other people might think what they chose; but he knew better than they. His wife was not dead. His life had been so smooth, so happy, so prosperous, so unclouded and successful, that it was scarcely strange he should be sceptical of calamity,––that his mind should be incapable of grasping the idea of a catastrophe so terrible as Mary's suicide.
"She was intrusted to me by her father," he thought. "She gave her faith to me before God's altar. She cannot have perished body and soul; she cannot have gone down to destruction for want of my arm outstretched to save her. God is too good to permit such misery."
The young soldier's piety was of the simplest and most unquestioning order, and involved an implicit belief that a right cause must always be ultimately victorious. With the same blind faith in which he had often muttered a hurried prayer before plunging in amidst the mad havoc of an Indian battle–field, confident that the justice of Heaven would never permit heathenish Affghans to triumph over Christian British gentlemen, he now believed that, in the darkest hour of Mary Marchmont's life, God's arm had held her back from the dread horror––the unatonable offence––of self–destruction.