"And Wildair allowed her to do this?" said Randall, indignantly.
"Well, I don't know how it was, but he was blind to all; but I think the truth of the matter is they deceived him, and only did it when he was absent. There was a cousin there, a little female fiend, whom I should admire to be putting in the pillory, who tried every means in her power to make him jealous, and succeeded; and you don't need to be told a jealous man will stop at nothing."
"Poor girl! poor Wildair! What an infernal shame."
"Wasn't it! You see, he had invited a party to his country-seat—Richmond Hall they called it—and I was there among the rest. Poor Mrs. Wildair had a wretched life of it, with them all set against her. If she had been one of your meek, spiritless little creatures, she would have drooped, and sunk under it, and died perhaps of a broken heart, and all that sort of thing; or if she had been a dull, spiritless young woman, she would have snapped her fingers in their faces, and kept on, never minding. Unfortunately, she was neither, but a sensitive, high-spirited girl, whom every slight wounds to the quick, and you would hardly believe me if I were to tell you the change one short week made in her—you would hardly have known her for the same person. What with her mother-in-law's insults, her cousin-in-law's sneers, her husband's jealousy and angry reproaches, and the neglects and slights of most of the company, a daily stretch on the rack would have been a bed of roses to it."
"Shameful! atrocious!" exclaimed Randall, impetuously. "How could Wildair have the heart to treat her so? He couldn't have cared much about her."
"Didn't he, indeed! That's all you know about it. If ever there was a man loved his own wife, that man was Rich Wildair; but when a man is jealous, you know, he becomes partially insane, and allowances must be made for him. One night, this little vixen of a cousin I mentioned somewhere before, began taunting Mrs. Wildair about her mother, telling her she was no better than she ought to be, and calling herself all sorts of scandalous names—one of the servants accidentally heard her—until she maddened the poor girl so that, in a fit of passion, she caught her and hurled her from her, with a shriek I will never forget to my dying day. Of course, there was the old—what's his name—to pay, immediately; but Freddy's injuries did not prove half so severe as she deserved, and a piece of court-plaster did her business beautifully for her. But you never saw any one in such a rage as Wildair was about it, knowing it would be all over town directly. Three or four of the mean crowd he had invited went off, declaring his wife was a lunatic, and that they were afraid to stay in the same house with her. Wasn't that pretty treatment, after his hospitality?"
"It's the way of the world, mon ami."
"And a very mean way it is. Well, Wildair went to his wife and said all sorts of cutting things to her, was as sharp as a bottle of cayenne pepper, in fact, and wound up by telling her he was going to apply for a divorce, which he had no more notion of doing than I have of proposing to one of the Misses Leonard to-morrow. She believed him, though, and, driven to despair by the whole of them, made a moonlight flitting of it, and from that day to this Richmond Wildair has never seen or heard of his wife."
"Poor thing! it was a hard fate. What do you suppose has become of her?"
"Heaven knows! She left a note saying she had gone and would never disgrace him more—these were her words—and bidding him an eternal farewell. Wildair nearly went crazy; he was mad, I firmly believe, for awhile, and it was as much as any one's life was worth to go near him. He searched everywhere, offered enormous rewards for the least trace of her, did everything man could do, in a word, to find her again; but it was of no use, no one had seen or knew anything of her."