That oft-quoted French saying, a mauvais-quart-d’heure, is a pregnant one, and may apply to small as well as to great worries of life: most of us know it to our cost. But, rely upon it, one of the very worst is that when a bride or bridegroom has to make a disagreeable confession to the other, which ought to have been made before going to church.
Philip Hamlyn was finding it so. Standing over the fire, in their sitting-room at the Old Ship Hotel at Brighton, his elbow on the mantelpiece, his hand shading his eyes, he looked down at his wife sitting opposite him, and disclosed his tale: that when he married her fifteen days ago he had not been a bachelor, but a widower. There was no especial reason for his not having told her, save that he hated and abhorred that earlier period of his life and instinctively shunned its remembrance.
Sent to India by his friends in the West Indies to make his way in the world, he entered one of the most important mercantile houses in Calcutta, purchasing a lucrative post in it. Mixing in the best society, for his introductions were undeniable, he in course of time met with a young lady named Pratt, who had come out from England to stay with her elderly cousins, Captain Pratt and his sister. Philip Hamlyn was caught by her pretty doll’s face, and married her. They called her Dolly: and a doll she was, by nature as well as by name.
“Marry in haste and repent at leisure,” is as true a saying as the French one. Philip Hamlyn found it so. Of all vain, frivolous, heartless women, Mrs. Dolly Hamlyn turned out to be about the worst. Just a year or two of uncomfortable bickering, of vain endeavours on his part, now coaxing, now reproaching, to make her what she was not and never would be—a reasonable woman, a sensible wife—and Dolly Hamlyn fled. She decamped with a hair-brained lieutenant, the two taking sailing-ship for England, and she carrying with her her little one-year-old boy.
I’ll leave you to guess what Philip Hamlyn’s sensations were. A calamity such as that does not often fall upon man. While he was taking steps to put his wife legally away for ever and to get back his child, and Captain Pratt was aiding and abetting (and swearing frightfully at the delinquent over the process), news reached them that Heaven’s vengeance had been more speedy than theirs. The ship, driven out of her way by contrary winds and other disasters, went down off the coast of Spain, and all the passengers on board perished. This was what Philip Hamlyn had to confess now: and it was more than silly of him not to have done it before.
He touched but lightly upon it now. His tones were low, his words when he began somewhat confused: nevertheless his wife, gazing up at him with her large dark eyes, gathered an inkling of his meaning.
“Don’t tell it me!” she passionately interrupted. “Do not tell me that I am only your second wife.”
He went over to her, praying her to be calm, speaking of the bitter feeling of shame which had ever since clung to him.
“Did you divorce her?”
“No, no; you do not understand me, Eliza. She died before anything could be done; the ship was wrecked.”