"Dreadful, indeed! I don't know what I should do with such a wife."
"Would not you forgive her if you loved her very much?" asked Lady Lucy, and she spoke in the singularly calm tone of suppressed emotion.
"Once, perhaps, once; and if her fault were the fault of youthful inexperience,—but so much falseness, mean deception, and mental deterioration must have accompanied such transactions, that—in short, I thank Heaven that I have never been put to the trial."
As he spoke, the eyes of Mr. Farrars were fixed on the leading article of the Times, not on his wife. Presently Lady Lucy glided from the room, without her absence being at the moment observed. Once in her dressing-room she turned the key, and sinking into a low chair, gave vent to her grief in some of the bitterest tears she had ever shed. She, too, was in debt; "frightfully," her husband had used the right word; "hopelessly," so far as satisfying her creditors even out of the large allowance Mr. Farrars made her; and still she had not the courage voluntarily to tell the truth, which yet she knew must burst upon him ere long. From what small beginnings had this Upas shadow come upon her! And what "falseness, mean deception, and mental deterioration" had truly been hers!
Even the fancied relief of weeping was a luxury denied to her, for she feared to show the evidence of tears; thus after a little while she strove to drive them back, and by bathing her face before the glass, and drawing the braids of her soft hair a little nearer her eyes, she was tolerably successful in hiding their trace. Never, when dressing for court or gala, had she consulted her mirror so closely; and now, though the tears were dried; she was shocked at the lines of anguish—those delvers of the wrinkles of age—which marked her countenance. She sat before her looking-glass, one hand supporting her head, the other clutching the hidden letters which she had not yet the courage to open. There was a light tap at the door.
"Who is there?" inquired Lady Lucy.
"It is I, my lady," replied Harris, her faithful maid. "Madame Dalmas is here."
Lady Lucy unlocked her door and gave orders that the visitor should be shown up. With the name had come a flush of hope that some trifling temporary help would be hers. Madame Dalmas called herself a French-woman, and signed herself "Antoinette," but she was really an English Jewess of low extraction, whose true name was Sarah Solomons. Her "profession" was to purchase—and sell—the cast-off apparel of ladies of fashion; and few of the sisterhood have carried the art of double cheating to so great a proficiency. With always a roll of bank notes in her old leathern pocket-book, and always a dirty canvas bag full of bright sovereigns in her pocket, she had ever the subtle temptation for her victims ready.
Madame Dalmas—for she must be called according to the name engraved on her card—was a little meanly-dressed woman of about forty, with bright eyes and a hooked nose, a restless shuffling manner, and an ill-pitched voice. Her jargon was a mixture of bad French and worse English.
"Bon jour, miladi Lucy," she exclaimed, as she entered Lady Lucy's sanctum, "need not inquire of health, you look si charmante. Oh, si belle!—that make you wear old clothes so longer dan oder ladies, and have so leetel for me to buy. Milady Lucy Ferrars know she look well in anything, but yet she should not wear old clothes: no right—for example—for de trade, and de hoosband always like de wife well dressed—ha—ha!"