“But we will talk of it, if you please. You believed in that letter, I suppose—you mourned over my shortcomings—you sympathised with a man who was tied to so wicked a wife—you dreamed perhaps of a divorce, and thought it within the bounds of probability that Basil Stondon and Euphemia Stondon might one day stand before the altar. Did you? I hope you did, for the letter was a sham! Ay, you may look at me,” she went on with a hysterical laugh. “I wrote it every word myself, and I left it in his way on purpose to see if I could rouse any feeling in him.”
“What an idiot you must be, Georgina,” exclaimed Phemie, indignantly; “what a senseless, wicked, foolish, childish trick it was. If he dies, his death will be at your door. How could you do it?—how came such a plan ever to enter your mind?”
“One cannot live near ice and not desire to thaw it,” was the reply; “may I see him?” she added, more humbly; “would it do him any harm if I spoke to him for a moment?”
“He will not know who you are,” the elder woman answered; and she led the way to where Basil lay, his wife following.
Then for the first time Phemie understood that Georgina loved her husband with all her heart, and soul, and strength; that all through their married life the attachment had been on her side, that she would have done anything to secure his affection, had she known how; that it would, as she declared, kill her if his illness proved fatal.
“I did more to win his heart than ever you could have done,” she said, when at last Phemie had dragged her from the sick-chamber. “I would have gone through fire and water for him, but he never loved me—never!”
“He must have loved you, or he would not have married you,” Phemie answered.
“I made him marry me,” was the reply. “He married me because I loved him; do you understand that, Mrs. Stondon—you, who were so cold, and so prudent, and so selfish? If I had been in your place, if I had been married fifty times, I would have left my husband for his sake. If he had loved me as he loved you, I would have quitted Marshlands had he held up his finger for me to come. I nursed him,”—she continued, speaking hurriedly and excitedly,—“I nursed him all through that illness he had in India. I brought him back from death. He could not have lived but for my care. It is no light thing, let me tell you, tending a man through a long sickness out in that climate, and when he got better I was like a ghost; but he knew I loved him,—knew no woman could have done what I did had she not loved him, and he married me, and I thought I had won the battle at last.”
“And afterwards,” Phemie suggested, as the speaker paused.
“Afterwards!” repeated Mrs. Basil Stondon. “You want me to go on and tell you how you beat me at every move—how it was your men on the board prevented my winning the game. So be it. The game has not been all profit to you either, so I must rest satisfied.”