a doubt had crossed her of Mr. Carlton; she could scarcely believe that she must doubt him now; but she felt sick and faint.
Frederick Grey was the first to break the silence. “Do you remember, Lady Jane, a meeting between me and Mr. Carlton on the Rise, to which you were an accidental listener?” he inquired in a low tone. “Do you remember the purport of the words I said to him?”
She made a gesture in the affirmative. “I have often recalled it, and the accusation you made upon him.”
“It tallies with this.”
There was another long pause.
“He must have been her husband,” resumed Jane, scarcely above a whisper.
“There’s no doubt of it. Had she not been his wife, the necessity for putting her out of his way could not have arisen. We must suppose that it was done to enable him to—to—marry another.”
The words were spoken hesitatingly in his delicacy of feeling, remembering who that other wife was. Jane groaned aloud; she could not help herself.
"How can Judith have kept that dreadful secret within her all these years?” was her next exclamation.
He took his elbow from the mantelpiece, where he had been so long standing, came forward, and sat down opposite to Jane. “I have been thinking it over, Lady Jane, and I really do not see—looking back—that Judith could have done otherwise. I confess my first impression was a selfish one, a sort of resentful feeling that she should not have declared what she knew, and so cleared my father. Now that I reflect upon it dispassionately, I do not think she could have done it. As she observes, none might have believed her. Think what a strange charge it would have been to bring against a medical man!”
“But if she had disclosed the few words of conversation she heard pass between Mr. Carlton and Clarice at their first greeting? That surely would have established previous relations between them, and been a clue to the rest.”
He shook his head. “Yes, had Judith been believed. It would all have lain in that. I think the chances are she would not have been; that Mr. Carlton could have crushed her and triumphed.”
“What is to be done now?” wailed Jane.
“Nothing. You would not like to proceed against Mr. Carlton, to bring any public accusation against him. Circumstances bar it.”
“Bring a public accusation against Mr. Carlton!” repeated Jane, recoiling in horror from the thought. “And Laura his wife! No, no; I did not allude to that; I did not think of it. Clarice and Laura stand to me in the same degree, both alike my sisters, and the one dead must remain unavenged for the sake of the one living. I spoke of Laura herself. What is to be done about her? She cannot be suffered to remain with Mr. Carlton.”
Frederick Grey drew in his lips. It was too delicate a point for him, and he preferred not to discuss it. “I can’t meddle with that, Lady Jane. She has been with him ever since, all these years.”
True. Jane saw not her way clear. “How could Mr. Carlton be so foolish as to keep that letter by him?” she said aloud, alluding to the letter found by her sister, and which she had been describing to Frederick Grey.
“Ah, that’s inexplicable,” was his quick reply. “At least it would be, but that we every day see guilty men commit the most unaccountable mistakes: mistakes that the world can only marvel at. It may be, that some fatal blindness overtakes their minds and judgments, causing them to bring upon themselves their own doom. We have a Latin proverb, Lady Jane: 'Quod Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.'"
But the reader—if he possesses any memory—can explain the fact, in this instance, better than Frederick Grey. Whatever mistakes Mr. Carlton committed in that unhappy business as against his self-preservation, this was not one, for the retention of the letter was unintentional. Do you remember that he searched for the letter and could not find it, and came to the conclusion that he had burnt it with some others, notes and trifles of no consequence? He put one letter away in his iron safe, supposing it to be a note from his father that he wished to preserve; the real fact being that this was the letter he put up, the one from his father he burnt. All in a mistake. A chance mistake, people might have said; but how many of these trifling “chances” may be traced in the chain leading to the discovery of some great crime. It happened that Mr. Carlton never had occasion to look at his father’s (supposed) letter again, and there it lay forgotten, waiting to do its mission, until it was at length unearthed by the jealous hands of Mr. Carlton’s wife. Had he not tried that wife, had he been always loyal to her, the past crime might never have been brought home to him during life.
For it was that letter that led to the final discovery; it was the turning point that drove home the guilt where it was due; and yet it may be said that the chain leading to it was linked by accident, more than by design.
Lady Jane, painfully perplexed, had brought away the letter when she quitted Mr. Carlton’s house that morning. She had it in her pocket