"What is the matter, dear husband? And you here, mother? Have I
been sick? Can it be?"
"Hush!" said the mother. "You have been sick ever since the night
of my marriage."
"Ah!" she exclaimed with an air of anxiety and pain, while pressing
her hand upon her eyes, "Ah! that night!"
A shudder shook her frame as she uttered this simple and
short sentence. Simple and short as it was, it seemed to possess
a strange signification. That it was associated in her mind with
some circumstances of peculiar import, was sufficiently obvious.
What were these circumstances? Ah! that question! I ran over in
my thought, in a single instant, all that array of events, on that
fatal night, which could by any possibility distress me, and confirm
my suspicions. That waltz with Edgerton--that long conference between
them--that lonely ride together from the home of Mrs. Delaney,
in a close carriage--and the subsequent disaster--her unconscious
ravings, and the strong, strange language which she employed,
clearly full of meaning as it was, but in which I could discover
one meaning only! all these topics of doubt and agitation passed
through my brain in consecutive order, and with a compact arrangement
which seemed as conclusive as any final issue. I said nothing; but
what I might have said, was written in my face. Julia regarded me
with a gaze of painful anxiety. What she read in my looks must have
been troublously impressive. Her cheeks grew paler as she looked.
Her eyes wandered from me vacantly, and I could see her thin soft
lips quivering faintly like rose-leaves which an envious breeze
has half separated from the parent-flower. Mrs. Delaney watched
our mutual faces, and I left the room to avoid her scrutiny. I only
re-entered it with the physician. He administered medicine to my
wife.
"She will do very well now, I think," he said to me when leaving
the house; "but she requires to be treated very tenderly. All
causes of excitement must be kept from her. She needs soothing,
great care, watchful anxiety. Clifford, above all, you should leave
her as little as possible. This old woman, her mother, is no fit
companion for her--scarcely a pleasant one. I do not mean to reproach
you; ascribe what I say to a real desire to serve and make you
happy; but let me tell you that Mrs. Delaney has intimated to me
that you neglect your wife, that you leave her very much at night;
and she further intimates, what I feel assured can not well be the
case, that you have fallen into other and much more evil habits."
"The hag!"
"She is all that, and loves you no better now than before. Still,
it is well to deprive such people of their scandal-mongering, of
the meat for it at least. I trust, Clifford, for your own sake,
that you were absent of necessity on Wednesday night."