Mrs. Glenarm’s congratulations were expressed in these terms:
“MY ADORED GEOFFREY,—I have heard all. My beloved one! my own! you are sacrificed to the vilest wretch that walks the earth, and I have lost you! How is it that I live after hearing it? How is it that I can think, and write, with my brain on fire, and my heart broken! Oh, my angel, there is a purpose that supports me—pure, beautiful, worthy of us both. I live, Geoffrey—I live to dedicate myself to the adored idea of You. My hero! my first, last, love! I will marry no other man. I will live and die—I vow it solemnly on my bended knees—I will live and die true to You. I am your Spiritual Wife. My beloved Geoffrey! she can’t come between us, there—she can never rob you of my heart’s unalterable fidelity, of my soul’s unearthly devotion. I am your Spiritual Wife! Oh, the blameless luxury of writing those words! Write back to me, beloved one, and say you feel it too. Vow it, idol of my heart, as I have vowed it. Unalterable fidelity! unearthly devotion! Never, never will I be the wife of any other man! Never, never will I forgive the woman who has come between us! Yours ever and only; yours with the stainless passion that burns on the altar of the heart; yours, yours, yours—E. G.”
This outbreak of hysterical nonsense—in itself simply ridiculous—assumed a serious importance in its effect on Geoffrey. It associated the direct attainment of his own interests with the gratification of his vengeance on Anne. Ten thousand a year self-dedicated to him—and nothing to prevent his putting out his hand and taking it but the woman who had caught him in her trap, the woman up stairs who had fastened herself on him for life!
He put the letter into his pocket. “Wait till I hear from the lawyer,” he said to himself. “The easiest way out of it is that way. And it’s the law.”
He looked impatiently at his watch. As he put it back again in his pocket there was a ring at the bell. Was it the lad bringing the luggage? Yes. And, with it, the lawyer’s report? No. Better than that—the lawyer himself.
“Come in!” cried Geoffrey, meeting his visitor at the door.
The lawyer entered the dining-room. The candle-light revealed to view a corpulent, full-lipped, bright-eyed man—with a strain of negro blood in his yellow face, and with unmistakable traces in his look and manner of walking habitually in the dirtiest professional by-ways of the law.
“I’ve got a little place of my own in your neighborhood,” he said. “And I thought I would look in myself, Mr. Delamayn, on my way home.”
“Have you seen the witnesses?”
“I have examined them both, Sir. First, Mrs. Inchbare and Mr. Bishopriggs together. Next, Mrs. Inchbare and Mr. Bishopriggs separately.”