“Proved past doubt.” Oh, heavens! is it not hard to think that what is evidence sufficient for love is not evidence sufficient for law? Till that instant Phemie had never for a moment doubted the accuracy of the tidings which had reached England, but now, with a bound, hope sprung to life again.
It had been so easy to remain true to her husband with Basil dead; but Basil living! Over and over and over she conned the lines suggesting this probability, while the other letter—the enclosure, the message from the newly-made grave—lay unheeded beside her.
To do Phemie justice, she did not couple together the sentences—Basil is living, and I am free. She had never thought of marrying him, and she did not now; but she had loved him, and, as I have said, the old love never dies; it is the one thing in this mutable world which is immutable; it is the one temporal possession of our mortality which is immortal. She could not kill it, she could not bury it; the winter’s frosts and the winter’s snows had lain upon it, yet here it was, springing up fresh and green and fair and beautiful as ever.
If he were but alive! and then all at once her eyes fell on her black dress, and she remembered with a shock the man who was but too surely dead. There lay his letter, with this written on the outside—“To be given to my wife one month after my death in case she survives me; to be burnt in the event of her dying before me.”
It always seems a solemn and a strange thing when the idea of his or her own death is presented as a precautionary possibility to the mind of a person in health.
Insurance forms, for instance, appear to put a matter about which most people, I suppose, think sometimes after a fashion, in a new light before the senses of an intending insurer.
There is a regular debit and credit statement. You may die—you may not die; you are such an age, and inasmuch as you are such an age, the chances are against the length of the years to come; on the other hand, you are healthy, active, temperate. It is not a sermon, it is not a warning, it is not a mere possibility; it is a rule-of-three sum worked out, not very accurately it may be, but still calmly and dispassionately. You may die, you may not die, and you are rated accordingly; you may live, you may not live, and the law and common sense take precautions in consequence.
When that letter was written the future lay shrouded from view, that future was the present now, and he had died; but she might as well have died, and then—why that letter would have been burnt, and she never a bit the wiser.
Life’s firmest ground is insecure, its strongest fortresses powerless against the touch of the great destroyer. Vaguely this idea took root in Phemie’s mind as she read the lines I have copied, ere breaking the outer seals and taking out the letter folded inside.
“Mrs. Stondon” was the direction on the cover, but on the actual envelope were traced the words—“To my dear wife,” and the paper that envelope contained began—“My dearest Phemie.” His! The hand that penned the sentence, that had been warm when the letter was folded, sealed, and directed, was cold enough now.