Finally came the real inspiration of the letter. The further linking of their names would be injudicious in the extreme. Maltravers would sacrifice himself. In fact, he had already left the neighborhood, having timed his flight so that the epistle should reach Ophelia after he had gone. This was “to insure the inevitable ending of a relationship that could only bring misery and misrepresentation upon both.”
Such in outline was the document with which this English gentleman relieved himself of a responsibility that he had so passionately assumed. There was much vapid and offensive sentiment, much pathetic posing crowded therein. Yet the letter reeked of hypocrisy—hypocrisy of the basest sort, even because it was pitched in a spiritually tragic key. Its scented sentiments stung far more deeply than the rough truth would have done, for there was an insult in the very cleverness of the thing, an insult exaggerated by the florid profession of feelings that the writer had never felt.
A woman is rarely deceived by a man whom she has loved, and Ophelia had gleaned the truth little by little those many weeks, the truth that the man’s passion had cooled, and that her love was no more to him the magic wine of life. Possibly she had fought against the conviction, even as a woman will fight against that which she knows in her heart of hearts to be true. The blow in itself was no sudden one to Ophelia, but the method of its administration appealed to her as brutal in the extreme.
She pictured the whole drama to herself as she sat at the window, brooding and brooding over the letter in her lap. She could see Maltravers confronted by John Strong, the leopard and the bull, guile and gold. She could imagine the disloyal promptings of his heart, his selfish scheming, his desire to escape from a predicament that had lost its passionate charm. Her woman’s instinct served her wonderfully in this. She could read the truth in every studied phrase of Maltravers’ letter.
The nature of her position dawned upon her relentlessly as the evening sunlight streamed in upon her sensual face and haughty eyes. The shame of it! the shame of it! This it was that smote her vanity to the core. Her overstrained imagination portrayed the future to her with a mordant realism that made her quail. She was only a woman, if a very imperfect one, and the motive towards audacity had vanished, leaving her unshielded and alone.
She reasoned thus as the day declined. John Strong would speak, for he was not the man to remain long silent. The whole country-side would take up the cry. The women, those women who loved her little, would point at her mockingly and clamor, “Clear yourself before us and the world, or be known as an adulteress and a liar.” They would shriek at her, these smug-mouthed women. And whence could come the refutation? Society would throw the gauntlet down, and who should stoop to take the challenge up?
Maltravers? Ay, he was the man, and thence rose the bitterest mockery of all. His very cowardice would condemn her, for like a false god he would not hear her cry, and fanaticism would rend her for his silence. For him she had risked all; for her he would venture nothing. Ignominy! ignominy! What was life worth to her that she should face such shame?
That night there was much hurrying to and fro in the galleries of the castle. Bells rang. White-faced servants stood gaping in the passageways, whispering together, awed and frightened. A lamp flashed to and fro in the stable-yard, where two grooms were saddling and bridling a horse, Ophelia’s horse, as good a beast as ever rode to hounds. Soon there came the sparking of hoofs on the cobbles, a scattering of pebbles along the drive.
A woman’s voice cried from the porch.