“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs Eyrecourt, now for the first time taking alarm. “You don’t mean to say she has run away—run away with some one? How frightful! What a scandal! Oh, Beauchamp, how terribly you have been deceived!”
“Take care what you say, Gertrude,” said Captain Chancellor, sternly. “Run away with any one—my wife—Eugenia! What are you thinking of? Read that!”
He thrust into her hand the letter he had found on his mantelpiece, and while watching her read it, he almost laughed, not with standing his distress, at the utter incompatibility of his sister’s coarsely commonplace supposition with the perfect guilelessness, the transparency and innocence, he had often been half inclined to look upon as but a part of his wife’s childishness and inexperience.
Eugenia’s note to her husband was as follows:—
“I am going away because I am too hopeless and miserable to bear my life longer. Hitherto I have clung to hope and to you through all my suffering, believing that at least you had loved me. Now I know the whole bitter truth. I am going to my own friends. I will agree to any arrangements you like to make, but I do not want any money, except what I have of my own. I cannot think that you will in any way miss me, but I trust you will be happier without me than you have been with me.
“Eugenia.”
Mrs Eyrecourt did not speak when she had finished reading this. Beauchamp, observing her closely, fancied she looked pale and frightened.
“Can you explain any of this to me?” he asked, impatiently. “Has anything happened in my absence, to explain it? Or must I think she has gone out of her mind?”
Gertrude hesitated a little. “There was—we had a rather disagreeable conversation the day you left,” she began. “I don’t know who in the world could have put it in her head—truly I don’t, Beauchamp—but all of a sudden Eugenia challenged me with having been the cause of your not marrying Roma, and by some peculiar reasoning of her own, from that she went on to argue that I was the cause of your hasty proposal to her, which she seems to look upon as the misfortune of her life.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“What could I tell her but the truth? She seemed to have a very fair notion of it to begin with. I could not have deceived her. Certainly she is the most hot-headed exaggerated person I ever knew. She talked of having been deceived and all sorts of things. She must have been infatuated to think that you, with your prospects—and altogether—could have deliberately chosen her, or that your friends could have approved of your doing so, though of course both you and they were too honourable to try to draw back once the thing was actually done.”