“Have you asked where his club is, my dear?”
“He says it’s in Pall Mall. There are dozens of clubs in that street—and he has never told me the name of his club. I am completely shut out of his confidence. Would you believe it, father? he has not introduced one of his friends to me since we came home. I doubt if they know where he lives, since he took this house.”
What could I say?
I said nothing, and looked round the room. It was fitted up with perfectly palatial magnificence. I am an ignorant man in matters of this sort, and partly to satisfy my curiosity, partly to change the subject, I asked to see the house. Mercy preserve us, the same grandeur everywhere! I wondered if even such an income as eight hundred a year could suffice for it all. In a moment when I was considering this, a truly frightful suspicion crossed my mind. Did these mysterious absences, taken in connection with the unbridled luxury that surrounded us, mean that my son-in-law was a gamester? a shameless shuffler of cards, or a debauched bettor on horses? While I was still completely overcome by my own previsions of evil, my daughter put her arm in mine to take me to the top of the house.
For the first time I observed a bracelet of dazzling gems on her wrist. “Not diamonds?” I said. She answered, with as much composure as if she had been the wife of a nobleman, “Yes, diamonds—a present from Marmaduke.” This was too much for me; my previsions, so to speak, forced their way into words. “Oh, my poor child!” I burst out, “I’m in mortal fear that your husband’s a gamester!”
She showed none of the horror I had anticipated; she only shook her head and began to cry.
“Worse than that, I’m afraid,” she said.
I was petrified; my tongue refused its office, when I would fain have asked her what she meant. Her besetting sin, poor soul, is a proud spirit. She dried her eyes on a sudden, and spoke out freely, in these words: “I am not going to cry about it. The other day, father, we were out walking in the park. A horrid, bold, yellow-haired woman passed us in an open carriage. She kissed her hand to Marmaduke, and called out to him, ‘How are you, Marmy?’ I was so indignant that I pushed him away from me, and told him to go and take a drive with his lady. He burst out laughing. ‘Nonsense!’ he said; ‘she has known me for years—you don’t understand our easy London manners.’ We have made it up since then; but I have my own opinion of the creature in the open carriage.”
Morally speaking, this was worse than all. But, logically viewed, it completely failed as a means of accounting for the diamond bracelet and the splendor of the furniture.
We went on to the uppermost story. It was cut off from the rest of the house by a stout partition of wood, and a door covered with green baize.