"As if—even had I been the person insulted by his pity—I would believe one syllable he said of a woman as far above him in virtue and intellect, in everything good and lovable, as the heavens are above the earth! I would despise myself as much as I do him if I could lend my ear for an instant to so degrading a whisper! I wish I had faced him and demanded the whole tale; yet no! that would have been rash and absurd. Better as it is! By to-morrow I shall laugh at my ridiculous fancies!"
"Scratch! scratch! scratch!" The house was so still in the approaching midnight that the slight noise caused him a shock and quiver in the excited state of his nerves. The interruption was something between a scrape and a rap, three times repeated, and proceeding, apparently, from the bookcase at his right. What could it be? He had never seen or heard of a mouse on the premises, nor did the sound much resemble the nibbling of that animal. Ashamed of the momentary thrill he had experienced, he remained still and collected, awaiting its repetition.
"Scratch! scratch! rap!" It was in the bookcase—in the lower part where were drawers shut in by solid doors. These he had never explored, but knew that his wife kept pamphlets and papers in them. He opened the outer doors cautiously, and listened again, until assured by the scratching that his search was in the right direction. There were three drawers—two deep, the third and upper shallow. This he drew out and examined. It contained writing-paper and envelopes, all in good order. Nor was there any sign of the intruder amongst the loose music and periodicals in the second. The lower one was locked—no doubt accidentally, for he had never seen Sarah lock up anything except jewels and money. Their servants were honest, and she had no cause to fear investigation on his part.
Feeling, rather than arguing thus, he removed the drawer above, leaving exposed the locked one, and thrust his hand down into it. It encountered the polished surface of a small box or case, which he was in the act of drawing through the aperture left by the second drawer, when something dark and swift ran over his hand and up his sleeve. With a violent start, he dashed the casket to the floor, and another energetic fling of his arm dislodged the mouse. His first care was to pursue and kill it; his next to examine into the damage it had indirectly produced. The box—ebony, lined with sandal-wood—had fallen with such force as to loosen the spring, and lay on its side wide open; its treasures strewed over the carpet. They were neither numerous, nor in themselves valuable. A bouquet of dried flowers, enveloped in silver paper, lay nearest Lewis' hand, as he knelt to pick up the scattered articles. The paper was tied about the stalks of the flowers with black ribbon, and to this was attached a card: "Will Miss Sarah accept this trifling token of regard from one who is her stanch friend, and hopes, in time, to have a nearer claim upon her esteem?"
The hand was familiar to the reader as Philip Benson's. Why should Sarah preserve this, while the many floral tokens of his love which she had received were flung away when withered like worthless weeds? The pang of jealousy was new—sharp as the death-wrench to the heart-strings, cruel as the grave! The card was without date, or he would have read, with a different apprehension of its meaning, the harmless clause—"And hopes in time to have a nearer claim upon her esteem." There was a time, then, when, as Lucy had taunted her husband, he might have married her sister! when Sarah loved him, and had reason to think herself beloved in return! What was this sable badge but the insignia of a bereaved heart, that mourned still in secret the faithlessness of her early love, or the adverse fate that had sundered him from her, and given him to another?
Crushing the frail, dead stems in his hand, he threw them back into the box, and took up a bit of dark gray wood, rough on one side—smoothed on the other into a rude tablet. "Philip Benson, Deal Beach, July 27th, 1856. Pensez a moi!" But ten days before he met her at the wharf in New York to take her to her sick father! but three months before she plighted her troth to him, promised to wed him, while in spirit she was still weeping tears of blood over the inconstant! for he did not forget that Philip's engagement to Lucy preceded his own to Sarah by eight or nine weeks. There were other relics in the box; a half-worn glove, retaining the shape of the manly hand it had inclosed—which, he learned afterwards, Philip had left in his chamber at the farm-house when he departed to seek gayer scenes; a white shell, upon whose rosy lining were scratched with the point of a knife the ominous initials, "P. B." and beneath them "S. B. H.," a faded rosebud, and several printed slips, cut from the columns of newspapers. He unfolded but two of these.
One was an extract from Tennyson's "Maud"—the invitation to the garden. Breathlessly, by reason of the terrible stricture tightening around his heart, Lewis ran his eyes over the charming whimsical morceau. They rested upon and reviewed the last verse:
"She is coming—my own, my sweet!
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat;
Were it earth in an earthy bed,
"My dust would hear her and beat;
Had I laid for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red."
He did not discriminate now between printed and written verses. These were love stanzas sent by another man to his wife, received and cherished by her, hidden away with a care that, in itself, bordered on criminality, for was not its object the deception of the injured husband? The most passionate autograph love-letter could hardly have stabbed him more keenly.