Lady Elizabeth, too, was greatly grieved for a time. But as her sympathies are widely scattered, and her interest in human nature is keen, she finds sufficient employment for mind and body to keep both in a healthy state of activity. If there is one thing that she is more sorry about than another, it is the fact that she could ever have harbored unworthy suspicions against two people whom she now firmly believes to be entitled to be numbered among the innocents. Thank God that she is spared the knowledge which I possess! It would kill her.
Jerry is now at Cambridge, and bids fair to reward all the hopes centered upon him.
As for myself, there is a perpetual problem facing me, and that is—What have I done to deserve all the love and happiness which are showered upon me? Yes, there is one other—How shall I repay Sergius for the transformation he has wrought in my life? I am constantly trying to do it, but never manage it quite to my own satisfaction, though I believe my Russian friends, all of whom now live within a short distance of our house, entertain very exaggerated views concerning my capabilities of making a good wife.
There is one other subject upon which the future reader of these memoirs may possibly desire a little enlightenment. He shall have it.
Cyril, earl of Greatlands, who is said to have accidentally poisoned himself by swallowing a large dose of chloral in mistake for a milder drug, sleeps by the side of his ancestors in the Greatlands mausoleum, and only Dennis Marvel, who is now the young earl’s valet, and myself ever dream that despair and remorse drove an apparently happy man to sever the life-chords which had become a torture to him.
So soon as I had an opportunity to do so unobserved, I read the letter which had been the last thing upon which Belle had gazed with the light of reason.
“My darling wife,” it ran, “I thought to have overcome the horror which has been resting upon me ever since I became an accursed parricide. My God! how could I do it! And how could you urge me to it! You, whom it would not have been difficult to worship as the outward embodiment of all that is pure and holy! I have often asked myself if I were mad. For I could not otherwise understand how it was possible for me to continue loving the temptress whose ambition has wrought my father’s doom and mine. For I am doomed and accursed! My days are filled with loathing of myself, and my nights are one long dream of horror. For me there is no salvation. I see my father’s frowning face, and hear his curses even amid the gay talk of the happy folk around us, and it is more than I can bear. Therefore I have put an end to it. When you pick this up from your dressing-table, the man who murdered his own father to gratify your ambition and his own greed will be numbered among the dead. But for you, who could coolly plan a murder, and yet not be haunted by remorse, life still holds many possibilities. You are now the Countess of Greatlands. I have enabled you to gratify your ambition. In return, you can make expiation for your own guilt by devoting your gifts to the interests and benefit of others. This I pray you to do, repentant sinner that I am! This I implore you to do, madly-loving husband that I am! This I command you to do, wretched—but but my strength fails me. I must bid you an eternal farewell. God bless you, my darling, and may His mercy be given to us both.
“Cyril.”
I read this letter through, but though it moved me terribly, it told me nothing I did not know already. How would it be with others, though? Would it not enlighten them more than was desirable about secrets that were better kept? I thought so, and I carefully burned the letter, anxiously watching it shrivel beneath the action of the flames, and guarding against the possibility of the smallest fragment escaping to betray the dark mysteries of the past.
Does the reader blame me?