"Husband!" I cried—"Husband!" And I leaned on a chair for support.
"Richard," she said, placing the letter on the table, "I brought this that I might leave it for my father when he came in. You will see that he has it, will you?—or if you go before his return, let him find it when he comes."
Married! The room swam round; and as I stood there, dumb and sick, they seemed to swim with it out at the door.
When I came to myself the place was still as death, save for the ticking of the clock and the click of the failing fire. But there lay the letter. Another moment, as it seemed to me, and her father had let himself in and I had placed it in his hand. He read it half through before he quite understood what had been inclosed in it—a narrow printed slip of paper. Suddenly he unfolded that and carried it nearer the light.
"Married!" he said. "Well, thank God for that! But—but—married, and to him!"—and he fell forward on the table.
He didn't die. People don't mostly die of these shocks. The months went on; the years went on; and though he'd never seen his daughter, nor rightly knew where she was, he heard that her husband had an allowance made him by his father after his gambling debts had been paid; but the alderman had taken his head clerk into partnership, and there was an end of the captain's going into the business.
My dear old father died and left me this house and his small savings. I seldom went to the Hall, though I should have been welcome there. Four times a year I lent a hand with the accounts for the sake of old routine, and stayed to eat a little supper and drink a glass of the famous claret, or to smoke a pipe with the old gentleman, who was failing greatly. His daughter was never mentioned between us, and I supposed he had lost sight of her altogether, when, one night, he said quite suddenly: "Dick, I wish you'd take a letter and a message to Mary for me."
He hadn't called me Dick for years, and I thought he was drivelling, but he held an open letter into which he was folding some banknotes.
"You may read it, Dick. They are in London, but she has not been to see me, and she writes for help to tide over some difficulties, she says, till her husband can see his father. She evidently doesn't know that the alderman's in the bankruptcy court. Poor dear, poor dear, she's reaping the fruits of her disobedience, and yet she will not come to see me. To her own hand, Dick, to her own hand only, must this letter go. It tells her how, in the last resort, she may seek my cousin, if she will not come to me before I die. My poor savings—they are but little, Dick—will be in trust for her with my cousin, but she sha'n't know that from me. Could you take this to-morrow morning, Dick?"
I could do no less than promise to convey it to her, and the next morning set off to find the house, in a rather mean neighbourhood, where I found that she and her husband had taken furnished lodgings. A servant girl took up my name, and I was asked to walk upstairs. There, upon the landing, stood the woman I had not seen since the night she left her father's home, but changed, as years should not have changed her, and with a pleading anxious look in her scared eyes that was grievous to see.