“Did he ask you to leave him?”
“No;—but he called me that name which no woman should hear and stay. No woman should do so unless she had a purpose such as mine. He wanted back the price that he had paid, and I was determined to do nothing that should assist him in his meanness! And then, Harry, his last illness! Oh, Harry, you would pity me if you could know all!”
“It was his own intemperance!”
“Intemperance! It was brandy—sheer brandy. He brought himself to such a state that nothing but brandy would keep him alive, and in which brandy was sure to kill him;—and it did kill him. Did you ever hear of the horrors of drink?”
“Yes; I have heard of such a state.”
“I hope you may never live to see it. It is a sight that would stick by you forever. But I saw it, and tended him through the whole, as though I had been his servant. I remained with him when that man who opened the door for you could no longer endure the room. I was with him when the strong woman from the hospital, though she could not understand his words, almost fainted at what she saw and heard. He was punished, Harry. I need wish no farther vengeance on him, even for all his cruelty, his injustice, his unmanly treachery. Is it not fearful to think that any man should have the power of bringing himself to such an end as that?”
Harry was thinking rather how fearful it was that a man should have it in his power to drag any woman through such a Gehenna as that which this lord had created. He felt that had Julia Brabazon been his, as she had once promised him, he never would have allowed himself to speak a harsh word to her, to have looked at her except with loving eyes. But she had chosen to join herself to a man who had treated her with a cruelty exceeding all that his imagination could have conceived. “It is a mercy that he has gone,” said he at last.
“It is a mercy for both. Perhaps you can understand now something of my married life. And through it all I had but one friend;—if I may call him a friend who had come to terms with my husband, and was to have been his agent in destroying me. But when this man understood from me that I was not what he had been taught to think me—which my husband had told him I was—he relented.”
“May I ask what was that man’s name?”
“His name is Pateroff. He is a Pole, but he speaks English like an Englishman. In my presence he told Lord Ongar that he was false and brutal. Lord Ongar laughed, with that little, low, sneering laughter which was his nearest approach to merriment, and told Count Pateroff that that was of course his game before me. There, Harry—I will tell you nothing more of it. You will understand enough to know what I have suffered; and if you can believe that I have not sinned—”
“Oh, Lady Ongar!”
“Well, I will not doubt you again. But as far as I can learn you are nearly alone in your belief. What Hermy thinks I cannot tell, but she will soon come to think as Hugh may bid her. And I shall not blame her. What else can she do, poor creature?”
“I am sure she believes no ill of you.”
“I have one advantage, Harry—one advantage over her and some others. I am free. The chains have hurt me sorely during my slavery; but I am free, and the price of my servitude remains. He had written home—would you believe that?—while I was living with him he had written home to say that evidence should be collected for getting rid of me. And yet he would sometimes be civil, hoping to cheat me into inadvertencies. He would ask that man to dine, and then of a sudden would be absent; and during this he was ordering that evidence should be collected! Evidence, indeed! The same servants have lived with me through it all. If I could now bring forward evidence I could make it all clear as the day. But there needs no care for a woman’s honour, though a man may have to guard his by collecting evidence!”
“But what he did cannot injure you.”
“Yes, Harry, it has injured me; it has all but destroyed me. Have not reports reached even you? Speak out like a man, and say whether it is not so?”
“I have heard something.”
“Yes, you have heard something! If you heard something of your sister where would you be? All the world would be a chaos to you till you had pulled out somebody’s tongue by the roots. Not injured me! For two years your cousin Hugh’s house was my home. I met Lord Ongar in his house. I was married from his house. He is my
