The maid Louisa arrived at Queen Anne’s Gate a little before luncheon on the following day. She brought a considerable portion of Mrs. Greswold’s belongings in two large basket-trunks, a portmanteau, and a dressing-bag. These were at once sent on to Victoria in the cab that had brought the young person and the luggage from Waterloo, while the young person herself was accommodated with dinner, table-beer, and gossip in the housekeeper’s room. She also brought a letter for her mistress, a letter written by George Greswold late on the night before.
Mildred could hardly tear open the envelope for the trembling of her hands. How would he write to her? Would he plead against her decision? would he try to make her waver? Would he set love against law, in such irresistible words as love alone can use? She knew her own weakness and his strength, and she opened his letter full of fear for her own resolution: but there was no passionate pleading.
The letter was measured almost to coldness:
“I need not say that your departure, together with your explanation of that departure, has come upon me as a crushing blow. Your reasons in your own mind are doubtless unanswerable. I cannot even endeavour to gainsay them. I could only seem to you as a special pleader, making the worse appear the better reason, for my own selfish ends. You know my opinion upon this hard-fought question of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; and you know how widely it differs from Mr. Cancellor’s view and yours—which, to my mind, is the view of the bigot, and not the Christian. There is no word in Christ’s teaching to forbid such marriages. Your friend and master, Clement Cancellor, is of the school which sets the law-making of a mediæval Church above the wisdom of Christ. Am I to lose my wife because Mr. Cancellor is a better Christian than his Master?
“But granted that you are fixed in this way of thinking, that you deem it your duty to break your husband’s heart, and make his home desolate, rather than tolerate the idea of union with one who was once married to your half-sister, let me ask you at least to consider whether you have sufficient ground for believing that my first wife was verily your father’s daughter. In the first place, your only evidence of the identity between my wife and the girl you call Fay consists of a photograph which bears a striking likeness to the girl you knew, a likeness which I am bound to say Bell saw as instantly as you yourself had seen it. Remember, that the strongest resemblances have been found between those who were of no kin to each other; and that more than one judicial murder has been committed on the strength of just such a likeness.
“The main point at issue, however, is not so much the question of identity as the question whether the girl Fay was actually your father’s daughter; and from my interrogation of Bell, it appears to me that the evidence against your father in this matter is one of impressions only, and, even as circumstantial evidence, too feeble to establish any case against the accused. Is it impossible for a man to be interested in an orphan girl, and to be anxious to establish her in his own home, as a companion for his only child, unless that so-called orphan were his own daughter, the offspring of a hidden intrigue? There may be stronger evidence as to Fay’s parentage than the suspicions of servants or your mother’s jealousy; but as yet I have arrived at none. You possibly may know much more than Bell knows, more than your letter implies. If it is not so, if you are acting on casual suspicions only, I can but say that you are prompt to strike a man whose heart has been sorely tried of late, and who had a special claim upon your tenderness by reason of that recent loss.
“I can write no more, Mildred. My heart is too heavy for many words. I do not reproach you. I only ask you to consider what you are doing before you make our parting irrevocable. You have entreated me not to follow you, and I will obey you, so far as to give you time for reflection before I force myself upon your presence; but I must see you before you leave England. I ask no answer to this letter until we meet.—Your unhappy husband
“George Greswold.”
The letter chilled her by its calm logic—its absence of passion. There seemed very little of the lover left in a husband who could so write. His contempt for a law which to her was sacred shocked her almost as if it had been an open declaration of infidelity. His sneer at Clement Cancellor wounded her to the quick.