She dropped her highly-bred tone; she lost her highly-bred manners. The sense of her injury (if this was true), the pang of her jealousy (if that woman was his wife), stripped the human nature in her bare of all disguises, raised the angry color in her cheeks, and struck the angry fire out of her eyes.
"If you can tell the truth, Sir," she said, haughtily, "be so good as to tell it now. Have you been falsely presenting yourself to the world--falsely presenting yourself to me--in the character and with the aspirations of a single man? Is that lady your wife?"
"Do you hear her? do you see her?" cri ed Mrs. Vanborough, appealing to her husband, in her turn. She suddenly drew back from him, shuddering from head to foot. "He hesitates!" she said to herself, faintly. "Good God! he hesitates!"
Lady Jane sternly repeated her question.
"Is that lady your wife?"
He roused his scoundrel-courage, and said the fatal word:
"No!"
Mrs. Vanborough staggered back. She caught at the white curtains of the window to save herself from falling, and tore them. She looked at her husband, with the torn curtain clenched fast in her hand. She asked herself, "Am I mad? or is he?"
Lady Jane drew a deep breath of relief. He was not married! He was only a profligate single man. A profligate single man is shocking--but reclaimable. It is possible to blame him severely, and to insist on his reformation in the most uncompromising terms. It is also possible to forgive him, and marry him. Lady Jane took the necessary position under the circumstances with perfect tact. She inflicted reproof in the present without excluding hope in the future.
"I have made a very painful discovery," she said, gravely, to Mr. Vanborough. "It rests with you to persuade me to forget it! Good-evening!"
She accompanied the last words by a farewell look which aroused Mrs. Vanborough to frenzy. She sprang forward and prevented Lady Jane from leaving the room.
"No!" she said. "You don't go yet!"
Mr. Vanborough came forward to interfere. His wife eyed him with a terrible look, and turned from him with a terrible contempt. "That man has lied!" she said. "In justice to myself, I insist on proving it!" She struck a bell on a table near her. The servant came in. "Fetch my writing-desk out of the next room." She waited--with her back turned on her husband, with her eyes fixed on Lady Jane. Defenseless and alone she stood on the wreck of her married life, superior to the husband's treachery, the lawyer's indifference, and her rival's contempt. At that dreadful moment her beauty shone out again with a gleam of its old glory. The grand woman, who in the old stage days had held thousands breathless over the mimic woes of the scene, stood there grander than ever, in her own woe, and held the three people who looked at her breathless till she spoke again.
The servant came in with the desk. She took out a paper and handed it to Lady Jane.
"I was a singer on the stage," she said, "when I was a single woman. The slander to which such women are exposed doubted my marriage. I provided myself with the paper in your hand. It speaks for itself. Even the highest society, madam, respects that!"
Lady Jane examined the paper. It was a marriage-certificate. She turned deadly pale, and beckoned to Mr. Vanborough. "Are you deceiving me?" she asked.
Mr. Vanborough looked back into the far corner of the room, in which the lawyer sat, impenetrably waiting for events. "Oblige me by coming here for a moment," he said.
Mr. Delamayn rose and complied with the request. Mr. Vanborough addressed himself to Lady Jane.
"I beg to refer you to my man of business. He is not interested in deceiving you."
"Am I required simply to speak to the fact?" asked Mr. Delamayn. "I decline to do more."
"You are not wanted to do more."
Listening intently to that interchange of question and answer, Mrs. Vanborough advanced a step in silence. The high courage that had sustained her against outrage which had openly declared itself shrank under the sense of something coming which she had not foreseen. A nameless dread throbbed at her heart and crept among the roots of her hair.
Lady Jane handed the certificate to the lawyer.
"In two words, Sir," she said, impatiently, "what is this?"
"In two words, madam," answered Mr. Delamayn; "waste paper."
"He is not married?"
"He is not married."
After a moment's hesitation Lady Jane looked round at Mrs. Vanborough, standing silent at her side--looked, and started back in terror. "Take me away!" she cried, shrinking from the ghastly face that confronted her with the fixed stare of agony in the great, glittering eyes. "Take me away! That woman will murder me!"
Mr. Vanborough gave her his arm and led her to the door. There was dead silence in the room as he did it. Step by step the wife's eyes followed them with the same dreadful stare, till the door closed and shut them out. The lawyer, left alone with the disowned and deserted woman, put the useless certificate silently on the table. She looked from him to the paper, and dropped, without a cry to warn him, without an effort to save herself, senseless at his feet.
He lifted her from the floor and placed her on the sofa, and waited to see if Mr. Vanborough would come back. Looking at the beautiful face--still beautiful, even in the swoon--he owned it was hard on her. Yes! in his own impenetrable way, the rising lawyer owned it was hard on her.
But the law justified it. There was no doubt in this case. The law justified it.
The trampling of horses and the grating of wheels sounded outside. Lady Jane's carriage was driving away. Would the husband come back? (See what a thing habit is! Even Mr. Delamayn still mechanically thought of him as the husband--in the face of the law! in the face of the facts!)
No. Then minutes passed. And no sign of the husband coming back.
It was not wise to make a scandal in the house. It was not desirable (on his own sole responsibility) to let the servants see what had happened. Still, there she lay senseless. The cool evening air came in through the open window and lifted the light ribbons in her lace cap, lifted the little lock of hair that had broken loose and drooped over her neck. Still, there she lay--the wife who had loved him, the mother of his child--there she lay.
He stretched out his hand to ring the bell and summon help.
At the same moment the quiet of the summer evening was once more disturbed. He held his hand suspended over the bell. The noise outside came nearer. It was again the trampling of horses and the grating of wheels. Advancing--rapidly advancing--stopping at the house.
Was Lady Jane coming back?
Was the husband coming back?
There was a loud ring at the bell--a quick opening of the house-door--a rustling of a woman's dress in the passage. The door of the room opened, and the woman appeared--alone. Not Lady Jane. A stranger--older, years older, than Lady Jane. A plain woman, perhaps, at other times. A woman almost beautiful now, with the eager happiness that beamed in her face.
She saw the figure on the sofa. She ran to it with a cry--a cry of recognition and a cry of terror in one. She dropped on her knees--and laid that helpless head on her bosom, and kissed, with a sister's kisses, that cold, white cheek.
"Oh, my darling!" she said. "Is it thus we meet again?"
Yes! After all the years that had passed since the parting in the cabin of the ship, it was thus the two school-friends met again.
Part the Second.
THE MARCH OF TIME.
V.
ADVANCING from time past to time present, the Prologue leaves the date last attained (the summer of eighteen hundred and fifty-five), and travels on through an interval of twelve years--tells who lived, who died, who prospered, and who failed among the persons concerned in the tragedy at the Hampstead villa--and, this done, leaves the reader at the opening of THE STORY in the spring of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight.
The record begins with a marriage--the marriage of Mr.