"I asked Luigi before he left for Hammersmith to take me away from this dirty house. But he shrugged his shoulders and said he was too poor to move. I told him that the bad smell of the cooking made me sick, and that the landlady entertained foreigners, who came tramping in at all hours of the day, jabbering and singing like savages, and poisoning the place with the rank fumes of tobacco. 'You should write to your grandmother to send you some money,' said he, 'and then we will seek better apartments.' I told him I would not write to grandmamma again after her last letter, no, not if I were dying. 'Then I am too poor to help you,' he said, stroking his moustache and humming a tune, with an air of such cruel indifference that my eyes filled with tears, though my breast heaved with a passion I could not keep down. 'We have been married a little more than six months,' I said, 'and you are already tired of me.' 'And you of me,' said he. 'It is false!' I cried, in a rage; 'but I suppose you want an excuse for your increasing indifference, and would tell a lie rather than not have one.' 'You did not bring me any money,' he replied, 'and yet you are always grumbling at our poverty. Don't I work like a slave for what I get? 'Tis a pity you are not more educated, for you might go out as a governess, and together we could earn a competence.' 'I did not marry to become a governess,' I said, 'and if you love me as you once professed, you could not name such a scheme.' He made a gesture of impatience, and uttered something in Italian. 'What do you say?' I exclaimed. He gave a shrug and left the room. And this is what my dream of love has come to! O how could I moralise if I were not the text! Patience? Yes, I could be patient if I had something solid to hold. But can I be patient holding sand, and watching the grains slipping through my fingers? Oh! my weariness of heart! and my head aches so I can hardly see this paper."
Here there was a leaf torn out. The next entry was dated exactly a year after. The records now became rhapsodical. Strange dreams were chronicled, and conversations which she had held in her sleep.
The first entry spoke of her delight with Elmore cottage. What followed was full of brief references to the past, especially to the events of the year she had omitted to record. Yet brief as they were I could gather the story.
Her husband had deserted her, possibly on the very date of the last entry I have transcribed. By her allusions to her feelings, the shock of his leaving her must have driven her almost mad. "I would thrust him deep, deep into the hell he has lighted in my heart against him; but he comes before me in the night when I am numbed by sleep and am powerless to thrust him off. O what a hate his face drives into me!"
"To-day I came across mamma's emerald ring. It reminded me of that day of hunger when I had to pledge it. I paid the odious German her rent, and went across to the little cook-shop at the corner and bought some cold meat. Do I not remember how delicious it tasted! How did I live through those days? I do not know. I sometimes look at my body and wonder how it could have held together under the pressure of so much utter, utter misery. It is bitter to have trusted nobly and to be betrayed remorselessly. It is bitter to feel hunger and poverty and the cruelties of the cold and selfish world. But when these bitternesses are combined, must not the heart be made of steel not to crack and burst?"
How long she remained in this state of destitution I could not gather. But in one entry she recorded her amazement on receiving a letter from her grandmother's solicitor, saying that the old lady had died suddenly, intestate, and that, as the next of kin, she inherited the property. In the same memorandum she referred to the number of names she went over before she hit on one to assume. It was her evident fear that her husband would claim her, should he hear of her whereabouts, now that she had come into property. Under the pseudonym of Mrs. Fraser, and hidden in the obscurity of Cliffegate, she believed herself perfectly secure against detection. This at least is my inference, from one or two passages in the diary; it is probably correct. Some entries before that which I am about to transcribe, the following notice, cut from a newspaper, was gummed:
"March 12, at Courtland Street, London, Luigi Forli, aged 35, of gastric fever."
And beneath it she had written:
"Sent me by Mr. Fells in the letter that enclosed my quarter's money."
Up to a certain point, from this sentence her diary was singularly rhapsodical. Then a more connected narrative began: