Gladly? ay, joyfully. Little doubt of that. So the Squire put on his hat, and she her bonnet, and away they started, and I with them.
We took the lonely path across the fields: her appearance might have raised a stir in the highway. Charlotte was but little altered, and would have been recognized at once. And I have no space to tell of the scene at Mrs. Tinkle’s, which was as good as a play, or of the way they rushed into one another’s arms.
“Johnny, there’s something on my mind,” said the Squire in a low tone as we were going back towards home: and he was looking grave and silent as a judge. “Do you remember those two foreign letters we chanced to see of Nash Caromel’s, with the odd handwriting, all quavers and tails?”
“Yes, I do, sir. They were ship letters.”
“Well, lad, a very ugly suspicion has come into my head, and I can’t drive it away. I believe those two letters were from Charlotte—the two she speaks of—I believe the handwriting which puzzled me was hers. Now, if so, Nash went to the altar with that other Charlotte, knowing this one was alive: for the first letter came the day before the marriage.”
I did not answer. But I remembered what I had overheard Nave the lawyer say to Nash Caromel: “You must marry her: where there’s a will there’s a way”—or words to that effect. Had Nave concocted the letters which pretended to tell of Mrs. Nash Caromel’s death, and got them posted to Nash from New York?
With the morning, the Squire was at Caromel’s Farm. The old-fashioned low house, the sun shining on its quaint windows, looked still and quiet as he walked up to the front-door across the grass-plat, in the middle of which grew a fine mulberry-tree. The news of Charlotte’s return, as he was soon to find, had travelled to it already; had spread to the village. For she had been recognized the night before on her arrival; and her boxes, left in charge of a porter, bore her full name, Mrs. Nash Caromel.
Nash stood in that little library of his in a state of agitation not to be described; he as good as confessed, when the Squire tackled him, that he had known his wife might have been alive, and that it was all Nave’s doings. At least he suspected that the letter, telling of her death, might be a forgery.
“Anyway, you had a letter from her the day before you married, so you must have known it by that,” cried the Squire; who had so much to do always with the Caromel family that he deemed it his duty to interfere. “What on earth could have possessed you?”
“I—was driven into a corner,” gasped Nash.