“No. I have left him—perhaps for ever.”
“On account of that past story?”
“No, for another reason, which is my sad secret, and his—a family secret. It involves no blame to him or me. It is a dismal fatality which parts us. You cannot suppose, Lady Lochinvar, that I could think my husband a murderer?”
“A murderer? No! I do not believe any one ever thought him guilty of deliberate murder—but that he lost his temper with that unhappy girl, spurned her from him, flung her over the edge of the cliff—”
“O, no, no, no! it is not possible! I know him too well. He is not capable of a brutal act even under the utmost exasperation. No irritation, no sense of injury, could bring about such a change in his nature. Think, Lady Lochinvar. I have been his wife for fourteen years. I must know what his character is like.”
“You know what he is in happy circumstances, with an attached and confiding wife. You cannot imagine him goaded to madness by an unreasonable, hot-headed woman. You remember he was mad for half a year after his wife’s death. There must have been some sufficient reason for his madness.”
“His wife’s wretched death, and the fact that he was accused of having murdered her, were enough to make him mad.”
And then Mildred remembered how she had tortured her husband by her persistent questions about that terrible past; how, in her jealousy of an unknown rival, she, too, had goaded him almost as that first wife had goaded him. She recalled the look of pain, the mute protest against her cruelty, and she hated herself for the selfishness of her love.
Lady Lochinvar was kind and sympathetic. She was not angry at the trap that had been set for her.
“I can understand,” she said. “You wanted to know the worst, and you felt that I should be reticent if I knew you were Mr. Ransome’s wife. Well, I have said all the evil I can say about him. Remember I know nothing except what other people thought and suspected. There was an inquiry about the poor thing’s death before the Juge d’Instruction at Villefranche, and Mr. Ransome was kept in prison between the first and second inquiry, and then it was discovered that the poor fellow had gone off his head, and he was taken to the asylum. He had no relations in the neighbourhood, nobody interested in looking after him. His acquaintances in Nice knew very little about him or his wife, even when they were living at an hotel on the Promenade des Anglais and going into society. After they left Nice they lived in seclusion at St. Jean, and avoided all their acquaintance. Mrs. Ransome’s health was a reason for retirement; but it may not have been the only reason. There was no one, therefore, to look after the poor man in his misfortunes. He was just hustled away to the madhouse—the inquiry fell through for want of evidence—and for six months George Ransome was buried alive. I was in Paris at the time, and only heard the story when I came back to Nice in the following November. Nobody could tell me what had become of Mr. Ransome, and it was only by accident that I heard of his confinement in the asylum some time after he had been released as a sane man.”