He looked at her earnestly. The slight, involuntary changes of expression in Lady Lucy, as he was speaking, made him say to himself: "She is not indifferent to the social stigma--she deceives herself!" But he made no sign of his perception; he held her to her word.
She paused, in evident hesitation, saying at last, with some coldness:
"If you wish it, Sir James, of course I am quite ready to listen. I desire to do nothing harshly."
"I will not keep you long."
Bending forward, his hands on his knees, his eyes upon the ground, he thought a moment. When he began to speak, it was in a quiet and perfectly colorless tone.
"I knew Juliet Wentworth first--when she was seventeen. I was on the Midland Circuit, and went down to the Milchester Assizes. Her father was High Sheriff, and asked me, with other barristers of the Circuit, not only to his official dinner in the county town, but to luncheon at his house, a mile or two away. There I saw Miss Wentworth. She made a deep impression on me. After the Assizes were over, I stayed at her father's house and in the neighborhood. Within a month I proposed to her. She refused me. I merely mention these circumstances for the sake of reporting my first impressions of her character. She was very young, and of an extraordinarily nervous and sensitive organization. She used to remind me of Horace's image of the young fawn trembling and starting in the mountain paths at the rustling of a leaf or the movement of a lizard. I felt then that her life might very well be a tragedy, and I passionately desired to be able to protect and help her. However, she would have nothing to do with me, and after a little while I lost sight of her. I did happen to hear that her father, having lost his first wife, had married again, that the girl was not happy at home, and had gone off on a long visit to some friends in the United States. Then for years I heard nothing. One evening, about ten years after my first meeting with her, I read in the evening papers the accounts of a 'Supposed Murder at Brighton.' Next morning Riley & Bonner retained me for the defence. Mr. Riley came to see me, with Mr. Sparling, the husband of the incriminated lady, and it was in the course of my consultation with them that I learned who Mrs. Sparling was. I had to consider whether to take up the case or not; I saw at once it would be a fight for her life, and I accepted it."
"What a terrible--terrible--position!" murmured Lady Lucy, who was shading her eyes with her hand.
Sir James took no notice. His trained mind and sense were now wholly concerned with the presentation of his story.
"The main facts, as I see them, were these. Juliet Wentworth had married--four years before this date--a scholar and archæologist whom she had met at Harvard during her American stay. Mr. Sparling was an Englishman, and a man of some means who was devoting himself to exploration in Asia Minor. The marriage was not really happy, though they were in love with each other. In both there was a temperament touched with melancholy, and a curious incapacity to accept the common facts of life. Both hated routine, and were always restless for new experience. Mrs. Sparling was brilliant in society. She was wonderfully handsome, in a small slight way; her face was not unlike Miss Curran's picture of Shelley--the same wildness and splendor in the eyes, the same delicacy of feature, the same slight excess of breadth across the cheek-bones, and curly mass of hair. She was odd, wayward, eccentric--yet always lovable and full of charm. He was a fine creature in many ways, but utterly unfit for practical life. His mind was always dreaming of buried treasure--the treasure of the archæologist: tombs, vases, gold ornaments, papyri; he had the passion of the excavator and explorer.
"They came back to England from America shortly after their marriage, and their child was born. The little girl was three years old when Sparling went off to dig in a remote part of Asia Minor. His wife resented his going; but there is no doubt that she was still deeply in love with him. She herself took a little house at Brighton for the child's sake. Her small startling beauty soon made her remarked, and her acquaintances rapidly increased. She was too independent and unconventional to ask many questions about the people that amused her; she took them as they came--"