Studies in Wives

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

There was a pause, and then again the older man broke the silence with something entirely irrelevant to the subject which was filling the minds of his son and himself.

"You haven't looked at the Post this morning? There's nothing in it. Dearth of real news is, I suppose, responsible for this?" and he pointed, frowning as he spoke, to a column on the middle page headed "The Jarvice Mystery. New Developments."

Again a shrewd, good-humoured smile quivered on his son's firm mouth.

"In these days newspapers have to follow, not lead, the public taste. Very few people are honestly as indifferent as you are, father, to that sort of story. Now even I, who never met poor old Jarvice, cannot help wondering how he came by his death; and yet you, who knew the man——"

"I knew him," said the other with a touch of impatience, "as I know, and as you know, dozens of our fellow-townsmen."

"Never mind; you, at any rate, can put a face to the man's name; and yet the question as to whether he was or was not poisoned by his wife, is one of indifference to you! Now I submit that in this indifference you are really a little——" he hesitated for a word, but found that none so well expressed his thought as that which had first arisen to his lips—"peculiar, father."

"Am I?" said Thomas Carden slowly; "am I so, Theodore? Nay, nay, I deny that I am indifferent! Lane"—Major Lane was at that time Head Constable of Birmingham, and a lifelong friend of the speaker—"Lane was quite full of it last night. He insisted on telling me all the details of the affair, and what shocked me, my boy, was not so much the question which, of course, occupied Lane—that is, as to whether that unhappy young woman poisoned her husband or not—but the whole state of things which he disclosed about them. Lane told me certain facts concerning Jarvice, whom, as you truly say, I have known, in a sense, for years, which I should not have thought possible of any man—vile things, which should have prevented his thinking of marriage, especially of marriage with a young wife."

Theodore Carden remained silent; he never discussed unsavoury subjects with his father. Moreover, he had no liking for Major Lane, though he regarded him with considerable respect, and even with a feeling of gratitude. Some years before, the Head Constable had helped the young man out of a serious scrape, the one real scrape—so Carden was complacently able to assure himself—engendered by his systematic and habitual pursuit of women.

Even now he could not recall, without wincing, the interview he had had on that occasion with his father's friend. During that interview Carden had felt himself thoroughly condemned, and even despised, by the older man, and he had been made to feel that it was only for the sake of his father—his high-minded, unsuspicious father—that he was being saved from the public exposure of a peculiarly sordid divorce suit.

But it was in all sincerity that the young man now felt indignant with Major Lane for having distressed such a delicately spiritual soul as was Thomas Carden with the hidden details of the Jarvice story. After all, what interested the public was not the question of Jarvice's moral character, but whether a gently nurtured and attractive woman had carried through a sinister and ingenious crime, which, but for a mere accident, would have utterly defied detection.