The fatal three, vol. I

by M. E. Braddon

Mildred’s needle moved slowly, as she sat in her low chair, with her hands in the lamp-light and her face in shadow, moved very slowly, and then stopped altogether, and the white hands lay idle in her lap, and the embroidery-frame, with its half-finished group of azaleas, slid from her knee to the ground. She was thinking—thinking of that one subject which had possessed her thoughts since yesterday afternoon; which had kept her awake through the brief darkness of the summer night and in the slow hours betwixt dawn and seven o’clock, when the entrance of the maid with the early cup of tea marked the beginning of the daily routine. In all those hours her thoughts had revolved round that one theme with an intolerable recurrence.

It was of her husband’s first marriage she thought, and of his motive for silence about that marriage: that he who, in the whole course of their wedded lives, had been the very spirit of single-minded candour, should yet have suppressed this all-important event in his past history, was a fact in itself so startling and mysterious that it might well be the focus of a wife’s troubled thoughts. He could not so have acted without some all-sufficient reason; and what manner of reason could that have been which had influenced him to conduct so entirely at variance with his own character?

What was there in the history of that marriage which had sealed his lips, which made it horrible to him to speak about it, even when fair dealing with the girl who was to be his wife should have constrained frankness?

Had he been cursed with a wicked wife; some beautiful creature, who had caught his heart in her toils, as a cat catches a bird, and had won him only to betray and to dishonour him? Had she blighted his life, branded him with the shame of a forsaken husband?

And then a hideous dread floated across her mind. What if that first wife were still living—divorced from him? Had she, Mildred Fausset, severely trained in the strictest principles of the Anglican Church—taught her creed by an ascetic who deemed divorce unchristian and an abomination, and who had always refused to marry those who had been divorced—had she, in whose life and mind religion and duty were as one feeling and one principle—had she been trapped into a union with a man whose wife yet lived, and in the sight of God was yet one with him—a wife who might crawl penitent to his feet some day, and claim him as her own again by the right of tears and prayers and a soul cleansed from sin? Such a sinner must have some hold, some claim even to the last, upon the man who once was her husband, who once swore to cherish her and cleave to her, of whom it had once been said, “And they two shall be one flesh.”

No; again and again, no. She could not believe George Greswold capable of such deep dishonour as to have concealed the existence of a divorced wife. No; the reason for that mysterious silence must be another reason than this.

She had sinned against him, it might be, and had died in her sin, under circumstances too sad to be told without infinite pain; and he, who had never in her experience shown himself wanting in moral courage, had in this one crisis of his life acted as the coward acts. He had kept silence where conscience should have constrained him to speak.

And then the wife’s vivid fancy conjured up the image of that other wife. Her jealous fears depicted that wife of past years as a being to be loved and remembered until death—beautiful, fascinating, gifted with all the qualities that charm mankind. “He can never care for me as he once cared for her,” Mildred told herself. “She was his first love.”

His first—the first revelation of what love means to the passionate heart of youth. What a world there is in that! Mildred remembered how a new life began for her with the awakening of her love for George Greswold. What a strange sweet enchantment, what an intoxicating gladness which glorified the whole face of nature! The river, and the reedy islets, and the pollard willows, and the autumn sunsets—things so simple and familiar—had all taken new colours in that magical dawn of her first love.

She—that unknown woman—had been George Greswold’s first love. Mildred envied her that brief life, whose sole distinction was to have been loved by him.