第74章

Well, regrets of that kind are useless now.I am truly sorry, Bernard, for the evil that I have done to you; and I ask your pardon with a contrite heart.

You will at least allow it in my favor that your drunken wife knew she was unworthy of you.I refused to accept the allowance that you offered to me.I respected your name.For seven years from the time of our separation I returned to my profession under an assumed name and never troubled you.The one thing I could not do was to forget you.If you were infatuated by my unlucky beauty, I loved devotedly on my side.The well-born gentleman who had sacrificed everything for my sake, was something more than mortal in my estimation; he was--no! I won't shock the good man who writes this by saying what he was.Besides, what do you care for my thoughts of you now?

If you had only been content to remain as I left you--or if I had not found out that you were in love with Miss Eyrecourt, and were likely to marry her, in the belief that death had released you from me--I should have lived and died, doing you no other injury than the first great injury of consenting to be your wife.

But I made the discovery--it doesn't matter how.Our circus was in Devonshire at the time.My jealous rage maddened me, and I had a wicked admirer in a man who was old enough to be my father.Ilet him suppose that the way to my favor lay through helping my revenge on the woman who was about to take my place.He found the money to have you watched at home and abroad; he put the false announcement of my death in the daily newspapers, to complete your delusion; he baffled the inquiries made through your lawyers to obtain positive proof of my death.And last, and (in those wicked days) best service of all he took me to Brussels and posted me at the door of the English church, so that your lawful wife (with her marriage certificate in her hand) was the first person who met you and the mock Mrs.Winterfield on your way from the altar to the wedding breakfast.

I own it, to my shame.I triumphed in the mischief I had done.

But I had deserved to suffer; and I did suffer, when I heard that Miss Eyrecourt's mother and her two friends took her away from you--with her own entire approval--at the church door, and restored her to society, without a stain on her reputation.How the Brussels marriage was kept a secret, I could not find out.

And when I threatened them with exposure, I got a lawyer's letter, and was advised in my own interests to hold my tongue.

The rector has since told me that your marriage to Miss Eyrecourt could be lawfully declared null and void, and that the circumstances would excuse _you_, before any judge in England.Ican now well understand that people, with rank and money to help them, can avoid exposure to which the poor, in their places, must submit.

One more.duty (the last) still remains to be done.

I declare solemnly, on my deathbed, that you acted in perfect good faith when you married Miss Eyrecourt.You have not only been a man cruelly injured by me, but vilely insulted and misjudged by the two Eyrecourts, and by the lord and lady who encouraged them to set you down as a villain guilty of heartless and shameless deceit.

It is my conviction that these people might have done more than misinterpret your honorable submission to the circumstances in which you were placed.They might have prosecuted you for bigamy--if they could have got me to appear against you.I am comforted when I remember that I did make some small amends.Ikept out of their way and yours, from that day to this.

I am told that I owe it to you to leave proof of my death behind me.

When the doctor writes my certificate, he will mention the mark by which I may be identified, if this reaches you (as I hope and believe it will) between the time of my death and my burial.The rector, who will close and seal these lines, as soon as the breath is out of my body, will add what he can to identify me;and the landlady of this house is ready to answer any questions that may be put to her.This time you may be really assured that you are free.When I am buried, and they show you my nameless grave in the churchyard, I know your kind heart--I die, Bernard, in the firm belief that you will forgive me.

There was one thing more that I had to ask of you, relating to a poor lost creature who is in the room with us at this moment.