"Martelli?" I exclaimed, stopping short.
"Why, Sir, so Sarah says," (Sarah was the housemaid). "She was that way yesterday, and says she saw him sitting on the beach."
"I can hardly believe it. What should Martelli do here?—unless, indeed, he has taken a situation at a school—but you have no schools here, have you?"
"No, Sir. But it is quite likely Sarah was mistaken. She was in a hurry, and the gentleman she saw might well happen to be a stranger. Yet she declares the person she saw was Mr. Martelli."
"Perhaps he has returned to Cliffegate wishing to return to me: but it is out of the question that I could receive him now."
I retreated to the library and wrote a letter to an old medical gentleman who was long my mother's adviser and mine. I set my position before him with the bluntness I knew he relished, and asked him if he could oblige me with the name of any medical man who he thought would have leisure and skill enough to carry out my stratagem. He sent me a long reply, saying he had spoken to a friend who had made the treatment of insanity his study, who would be happy to carry out my wishes. To obviate all chance of exciting my wife's suspicions he advised me to come to London and settle the programme; "for," he continued, "madness is often subtle enough to mislead the most practised observer, and it would therefore be absolutely necessary that Dr. F——'s visit to your house should be so contrived as to seem perfectly consistent with the excuse for his visit which you will contrive."
I saw the wisdom of this and determined to go to London.
As some pretence for my absence was needful, I pretended that I had received a letter on a business matter of great urgency. A large sum, I said, was at stake, and my presence in town was imperative. Geraldine was very reluctant to let me go. Her large eyes filled, and her beauty became mournful, as though some great sorrow had entered her heart.
"I shall be counting the hours, day and night, until you return," she said. "But how blank the time will be without you! I shall not care to eat or drink, or go into the garden. Is it not you who make all those flowers beautiful, and this home dear and sweet to me as heaven?"
"But I will not be long gone, Geraldine. And do you not know that little separations like these sweeten love, as the clouds in the sky make the sunshine more brilliant when their shadows pass?"