The Law and the Lady

complete, between the married pair.

The last letter read was addressed to the prisoner in a woman's handwriting, and was signed by a woman's Christian name only.

'Ah, my poor Eustace, what a cruel destiny is ours!' the letter began. 'When I think of your life, sacrificed to that wretched woman, my heart bleeds for you. If we had been man and wife—if it had been my unutterable happiness to love and cherish the best, the dearest of men—what a paradise of our own we might have lived in! what delicious hours we might have known! But regret is vain; we are separated in this life—separated by ties which we both mourn, and yet which we must both respect. My Eustace, there is a world beyond this. There our souls will fly to meet each other, and mingle in one long heavenly embrace —in a rapture forbidden to us on earth. The misery described in your letter—oh, why, why did you marry her?—has wrung this confession of feeling from me. Let it comfort you, but let no other eyes see it. Burn my rashly written lines, and look (as I look) to the better life which you may yet share with your own

'HELENA.'

The reading of this outrageous letter provoked a question from the Bench. One of the Judges asked if the writer had attached any date or address to her letter.

In answer to this the Lord Advocate stated that neither the one nor the other appeared. The envelope showed that the letter had been posted in London. 'We propose,' the learned counsel continued, 'to read certain passages from the prisoner's Diary, in which the name signed at the end of the letter occurs more than once; and we may possibly find other means of identifying the writer, to the satisfaction of your lordships, before the Trial is over.'

The promised passages from my husband's private Diary were now read. The first extract related to a period of nearly a year before the date of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death. It was expressed in these terms:

'News, by this morning's post, which has quite overwhelmed me. Helena's husband died suddenly two days since of heart-disease. She is free—my beloved Helena is free! And I?

'I am fettered to a woman with whom I have not a single feeling in common. Helena is lost to me, by my own act. Ah! I can understand now, as I never understood before, how irresistible temptation can be, and how easily sometimes crime may follow it. I had better shut up these leaves for the night. It maddens me to no purpose to think of my position or to write of it.'

The next passage, dated a few days later, dwelt on the same subject.

'Of all the follies that a man can commit, the greatest is acting on impulse. I acted on impulse when I married the unfortunate creature who is now my wife.

'Helena was then lost to me, as I too hastily supposed. She had married the man to whom she rashly engaged herself before she met with me. He was younger than I, and, to all appearance, heartier and stronger than I. So far as I could see, my fate was sealed for life. Helena had written her farewell letter, taking leave of me in this world for good. My prospects were closed; my hopes had ended. I had not an aspiration left; I had no necessity to stimulate me to take refuge in work. A chivalrous action, an exertion of noble self-denial, seemed to be all that was left to me, all that I was fit for.

'The circumstances of the moment adapted themselves, with a fatal facility, to this idea. The ill-fated woman who had become attached to me (Heaven knows—without so much as the shadow of encouragement on my part!) had, just at that time, rashly placed her reputation at the mercy of the world. It rested with me to silence the scandalous tongues that reviled her. With Helena lost to me, happiness was not to be expected. All women were equally indifferent to me. A generous action would be the salvation of this woman. Why not perform it? I married her on that impulse—married her just as I might have jumped into the water and saved her if she had been drowning; just as I might have knocked a man down if I had seen him ill-treating her in the street!

'And now the woman for whom I have made this sacrifice stands between me and my Helena—my Helena, free to pour out all the treasures of her love on the man who adores the earth that she touches with her foot!

'Fool! madman! Why don't I dash out my brains against the wall that I see opposite to me while I write these lines?

'My gun is there in the corner. I have only to tie a string to the trigger and to put the muzzle to my mouth—No! My mother is alive; my mother's love is sacred. I have no right to take the life which she gave me. I must suffer and submit. Oh, Helena! Helena!'

The third extract—one among many similar passages—had been written about two months before the death of the prisoner's wife.

'More reproaches addressed to me! There never was such a woman for complaining; she lives in a perfect atmosphere of ill-temper and discontent.

'My new offenses are two in number: I never ask her to play to me now; and when she puts on a new dress expressly to please me, I never notice it. Notice it! Good Heavens! The effort of my life is not to notice her in anything she does or says. How could I keep my temper, unless I kept as much as possible out of the way of private interviews with her? And I do keep my temper. I am never hard on her; I never use harsh language to her. She has a double claim on my forbearance—-she is a woman, and the law has made her my wife. I remember this; but I am human. The less I see of her—except when visitors are present— the more certain I can feel of preserving my self-control.

'I wonder what it is that makes her so utterly distasteful to me? She is a plain woman; but I have seen uglier women than she whose caresses I could have endured without the sense of shrinking that comes over me when I am obliged to submit to her caresses. I keep the feeling hidden from her. She loves me, poor thing—and I pity her. I wish I could do more; I wish I could return in the smallest degree the feeling with which she regards me. But no—I can only pity her. If she would be content to live on friendly terms with me, and never to exact demonstrations of tenderness, we might get on pretty well. But she wants love. Unfortunate creature, she wants love!

'Oh, my Helena! I have no love to give her. My heart is yours.

'I dreamed last night that this unhappy wife of mine was dead. The dream was so vivid that I actually got out of my bed and opened the door of her room and listened.

'Her calm, regular breathing was distinctly audible in the stillness of the night. She was in a deep sleep: I closed the door again and lighted my candle and read. Helena was in all my thoughts; it was hard work to fix my attention on the book. But anything was better than going to bed again, and dreaming perhaps for the second time that I too was free.