"I do not know what he is doing," Harriet had repeated to herself in sore distress; "I do not know what he is doing. I am in the dark, and the tide is rising."
The jealous agony she had suffered at Homburg was harder to bear than the uncertainty which had been her lot since her return. The intense passion of jealousy sprung up within her was a revelation to this woman of the violence of her nature, over which a stern restraint had been kept so long that quiet and calm had grown habitual to her while nothing troubled or disputed her love; but they deserted her at the first rude touch laid upon the sole treasure, the joy, the punishment, the occupation, mainspring, and meaning of her life. Under all the quiet of her manner, under all the smoothness of her speech, Harriet Routh knew well there was a savage element in the desperation of her love for Routh, since he had committed the crime which sets a man apart from his fellows, marked with the brand of blood. She had loved him in spite of the principles of her education, in defiance of the stings of her conscience, dead now, but which had died hard; but now she loved him in spite of the promptings of her instincts, in spite of the revulsion of her womanly feelings, in defiance of the revolt of her senses and her nerves. The more utterly lost he was the more she clung to him, not indeed in appearance, for her manner had lost its old softness, and her voice the tone which had been a caress; but in her torn and tortured heart. With desperate and mad obstinacy she loved him, defied fate, and hated the world which had been hard to him, for his sake.
With the first pang of jealousy awoke the fierceness of this love, awoke the proud and defiant assertion of her love and her ownership in her breast. Never would Harriet have pleaded her true, if perverted, love, her unwavering, if wicked, fidelity, to the man who was drifting away from her; the woman's lost soul was too generous for that; but he was hers, her own;--purchased;--God, in whom she did not believe, and the devil, whom she did not fear, alone knew at what price;--and he should not be taken from her by another, by one who had done nothing for him, suffered nothing for him, lost nothing for him. Her combativeness and her craft had been called into instant action by the first discovery of the unexpected peril in which her sole treasure was placed. She understood her position perfectly. No woman could have known more distinctly than Harriet how complete is the helplessness of a wife when her husband's love is straying from her, beckoned towards another--helplessness which every point of contrast between her and her rival increases. She was quite incapable of the futile strife, the vulgar railing, which are the ordinary weapons of ordinary women in the unequal combat; she would have disdained their employment; but fate had furnished her with weapons of other form and far different effectiveness, and these she would use. Routh had strong common-sense, intense selfishness, and shrewd judgment. An appeal to these, she thought, could not fail. Nevertheless, they had failed, and Harriet was bewildered by their failure. When she made her first appeal to Routh, she was wholly unprepared for his refusal. The danger was so tremendous, the unforeseen discovery of the murdered man's identity had introduced into their position a complication so momentous, so insurmountable, that she had never dreamed for a moment of Routh's being insensible to its weight and emergency. But he rejected her appeal--rudely, brutally, almost, and her astonishment was hardly inferior to her anguish. He must indeed be infatuated by this strange and beautiful woman (Harriet fully admitted the American's beauty--there was an element of candour and judgment in her which made the littleness of depreciating a rival impossible) when he could overlook or under-estimate the importance, the danger, of this newly-arisen complication.
This was a new phase in her husband's character; this was an aspect under which she had never seen him, and she was bewildered by it, for a little. It had occurred to her once, on the day when she last saw George Dallas--parting with him at the gate of his mother's house--to think whether, had she had any other resource but her husband, had the whole world outside of him not been a dead blank to her, she could have let him go. She had heard of such things; she knew they happened; she knew that many women in "the world" took their husbands' infidelity quietly, if not kindly, and let them go, turning them to the resources of wealth and pleasure. She had no such resources, nor could these have appeased her for a moment if she had had. She cared nothing for liberty, she who had worn the chain of the most abject slavery, that of engrossing passionate love for an unworthy object, willingly, had hugged it to her bosom, had allowed it, without an effort to alleviate the pain, to eat into her flesh, and' fill it with corruption. But, more than this, she could not let him go, for his own sake; she was true to the law of her life, that "honour rooted in dishonour" knew no tarnishing from her; she must save him, for his own sake--from himself, she must save him, though not to bring him back to her--must save him, in spite of himself, though she longed, in the cruel pangs of her woman's anguish, to have done with it--to have found that nothingness in which she had come to believe as the "end all," and had learned to look to as her sovereign good.
She had reached such a conclusion, in her meditations, on the night of the great storm at Homburg; she had determined on a course to be adopted for Routh's sake. She would discard fear, and show him that he must relinquish the desperate game he was playing. She would prove to him that fate had been too strong for him; that in Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge the fatality which was destined to destroy him existed; that her acquaintance with Arthur Felton, and her knowledge of Arthur Felton's affairs, into whose extent Routh had no possible pretext for inquiry, must necessarily establish the missing link. She would hide from him her own sufferings; she would keep down her jealousy and her love; she would appeal to him for himself; she would plead with him only his own danger, only the tremendous risk he was involving himself in. Then she must succeed; then the double agony of jealousy of him and fear for him in which she now lived must subside, the burning torment must be stilled. The time might perhaps come in which she should so far conquer self as to be thankful that such suffering had brought about his safety, for there could be no real security for them in London, the terrible fact of Deane's identity with Arthur Felton once known. After that discovery, no arguments could avail with George; the strength of all those which she had used would become potent against her, their weight would be against her--that weight which she had so skilfully adjusted in the balance. After all, she thought that night, as she sat in the darkness and idly watched the lightning, hearing the raging wind unmoved, what would a little more misery matter to her? Little, indeed, if it brought him safety; and it should, it must!
From this condition of mind she had been roused by Routh's startling announcement of their departure on the morrow. The effect produced upon Harriet was strange. She did not believe that Routh had been only to the gaming-rooms that night: she felt an immutable conviction that he had seen Mrs. Bembridge, and she instantly concluded that he had received a rebuff from the beautiful American. Inexpressibly relieved--though not blind enough to be in the least insensible to the infamy of her husband's faithlessness, and quite aware that she had more, rather than less, to complain of than she had previously believed;--for she rightly judged, this woman is too finished a coquette to throw up her game a moment before her own interest and safety absolutely obliged her to do so--she acquiesced immediately.
Had Stewart Routh had the least suspicion of the extent of his wife's knowledge of his life at Homburg, he could not have been lulled into the false security in which he indulged on his return to London. He perceived, indeed, that Harriet closely noted the state of his spirits, and silently observed his actions. But he was used to that. Harriet had no one to think of but him, had nothing to care about but him; and she had always watched him. Pleasantly, gaily, before;--coldly, grimly, now: but it was all the same thing. He was quite right in believing she had not the least suspicion that Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge was in London, but that was the sole point on which he was correct. Had he known how much his wife knew, he would have affected a dejection of spirits he was far from feeling, and would have disarmed her by greater attention to her during the few hours of each day which he passed at home.
Harriet was at a loss to account for his cheerfulness; but strong of mind and heart as she was, she was not altogether free from the weakness of catching at that interpretation of a mystery in which there was some relief for her own pain. So she concluded that he had been only passingly, and not deeply, hurt by the coquetry of the woman who had attracted him, and that he had recovered from the superficial wound, as soon as he became again immersed in the schemes which had awaited him in London.
He had told her little concerning these schemes, but she considered this reticence due to her own withdrawal from her former active participation in the business of his life, and it was an additional inducement to her to hope that Routh was taking the resolution which she desired. "When we get back to London I will think about it," he had said, and she clung to the hope, to the half-promise in the words. He was surely settling affairs so as to enable him to avoid the bursting of the storm. The tacit estrangement between them would account for his doing this silently; his vile temper, which Harriet thoroughly understood, and never failed to recognize in action, would account for his denying her the relief of knowing his intentions. Many small things in his daily life, which did not escape the quickened perception of his wife, betokened a state of preparation for some decided course of action. The time of explanation must necessarily come; meanwhile she watched, and waited, and suffered.
How she suffered in every hour of her life! Yet there was a kind of dulness over Harriet too. She recurred little to the past in point of feeling; she thought over it, indeed, in aid of the action of her reason and her will, but she did not recall it with the keenness either of acute grief for its vanished happiness, such as it had been, or of remorse and terror for its deep and desperate guilt. The burden of the day was enough now for this woman, whose strength had lasted so long, endured so much, and given way so suddenly.
But time was marching on, the inevitable end drawing near, and Harriet had been utterly unprepared for the second shock, the second unexpected event which had befallen. She had opened George Dallas's letter with the Paris postmark almost without an apprehension. The time for the thing she feared had not yet come; and here was a thing she had never feared, a possibility which had never presented itself to her imagination, brought at once fully before her. She had done this thing. One moment's want of caution, in the midst of a scene in which her nerves had been strung to their highest tension, and this had been the result. Had no other clue existed, these few lines of writing would furnish one leading unerringly to discovery. Supposing no other clue to exist, and Routh to pretend to inability to identify the writing, there were several common acquaintances of Dallas and Deane who could identify it, and render a refusal the most dangerous step which Routh could take.
She sat for several minutes perfectly still, her face colourless as marble, and her blue eyes, fixed with a painful expression of terror, under the shock of this new discovery. She had had no worse apprehension than that the letter would announce the day of George's intended return, and for that she was prepared; but this! It was too much for her, and the first words she uttered showed that her mind had lost its strict faculty of reasoning; they broke from her with a groan:
"I--I it is who have destroyed him!"
But, even now, weakness and exaggeration had no long duration in Harriet Routh's mind. By degrees she saw this in its true light, an alarming, a terrible coincidence indeed, an addition to the danger of their position, but not necessarily a fatal catastrophe. Then she saw new light, she caught at a new idea, a fresh, bright hope. This would avail with Routh; this would drive away his irresolution; this would really inspire him with the true conviction of their danger; this, which would throw the whole burden of identification upon him; this, which would establish a strong and intimate link between him and the dead man; for the "articles to be purchased," named in the memorandum of which George had sent her a copy, were simply shares in companies with every one of which Stewart Routh was connected. Only George's ignorance of such matters had prevented his recognizing the meaning of the memorandum.
And now Harriet rose; and as she paced the room, the colour came back to her cheek, the light came back to her eyes. A new life and fresh energy seemed to spring up within her, and she grasped George's letter in her hand, and struck it against her bosom with an action of the hand and a responsive movement of the breast which was almost triumphant. This thing which she had done, which had looked like ruin, would be her way of escape.
Routh's refusal to return home immediately annoyed, puzzled, and disheartened her. Why was he so hard to move, so difficult to convince, so insensible to danger? His plea was business; if this business was what she hoped and believed it to be, that of preparation, he should have come home to learn the new and urgent need for its expedition. Why was he so hard to her? Why had he no thought for her wishes, no compassion on her suspense? Harriet could not but ask herself that, though she strove against the deadly suffering the answer brought her.
Thus the time wore on drearily, until Harriet carelessly took from the table the slip of paper which contained a whole revelation for her.
Of the hours which succeeded she could not have given an account herself. How the fury of jealousy, of love betrayed, of faith violated, was reawakened ............