CHAPTER III.
ANOTHER ASTONISHMENT.
But a second and very different astonishment awaited Mr. Dempster.
Again one evening, on his return from the City, he saw a strange look
on the face of the girl who opened the door--but this time it was a
look of fear.
"Well?" he said, in a tone at once alarmed and peremptory.
She made no answer, but turned whiter than before.
"Where is your mistress?" he demanded.
"Nobody knows, sir," she answered.
"Nobody knows! What would you have me understand by such an answer?"
"It's the bare truth, sir. Nobody knows where she is."
"God bless me!" cried the husband. "What does it all mean?"
And again he sunk down upon a chair--this time in the hall, and stared
at the girl as if waiting further enlightenment.
But there was little enough to be had. Only one point was clear: his
wife was nowhere to be found. He sent for every one in the house, and
cross-questioned each to discover the last occasion on which she had
been seen. It was some time since she had been missed; how long before
that she had been seen there was no certainty to be had. He ran to the
doctor, then from one to another of her acquaintance, then to her
mother, who lived on the opposite side of London. She, like the rest,
could tell him nothing. In her anxiety she would have gone back with
him, but he was surly, and would not allow her. It was getting towards
morning before he reached home, but no relieving news awaited him.
What to think was as much a perplexity to him as what to do. He was
not in the agony in which a man would have been who thoroughly loved
his wife, but he cared enough about her to feel uncomfortable; and the
cries of the child, who was suffering from some ailment, made him
miserable: in his perplexity and dull sense of helplessness he
wondered whether she might not have given the baby poison before she
went. Then the thing would make such a talk! and, of all things,
Duncan Dempster hated being talked about. How busy people's brains
would be with all his affairs! How many explanations of the mystery
would be suggested on 'Change! Some would say, "What business had a
man like him with a fine lady for a wife? one so much younger than
himself too!" He could remember making the same remark of another,
before he was married. "Served him right!" they would say. And with
that the first movement of suspicion awoke in him--purely and solely
from his own mind's reflection of the imagined minds of others. While
in his mind's ear he heard them talking, almost before he knew what
they meant the words came to him: "There was that Major Strong, you
know!"
"She's gone to him!" he cried aloud, and, springing from the bed on
which he had thrown himself, he paced the chamber in a fury. He had no
word for it but hers that he was now in India! They had only been
waiting till--By heaven, that child was none of his! And therewith
rushed into his mind the conviction that everything was thus
explained. No man ever yet entertained an unhappy suspicion, but
straightway an army of proofs positive came crowding to the service of
the lie. It is astounding with what manifest probability everything
will fall in to prove that a fact which has no foundation whatever!
There is no end to the perfection with which a man may fool himself
while taking absolute precautions against being fooled by others.
Every fact, being a living fact, has endless sides and relations; but
of all these, the man whose being hangs upon one thought, will see
only those sides and relations which fall in with that thought.
Dempster even recalled the words of the maid, "It's mis'ess's," as
embodying the girl's belief that it was not master's. Where a man,
whether by nature jealous or not, is in a jealous condition, there is
no need of an Iago to parade before him the proofs of his wrong. It
was because Shakespere would neither have Desdemona less than perfect,
nor Othello other than the most trusting and least suspicious of men,
that he had to invent an all but incredible villain to effect the
needful catastrophe.
But why should a man, who has cared so little for his wife, become
instantly, upon the bare suspicion, so utter a prey to consuming
misery? There was a character in his suffering which could not be
attributed to any degree of anger, shame, or dread of ridicule. The
truth was, there lay in his being a possibility of love to his wife
far beyond anything his miserably stunted consciousness had an idea
of; and the conviction of her faithlessness now wrought upon him in
the office of Death, to let him know what he had lost. It magnified
her beauty in his eyes, her gentleness, her grace; and he thought with
a pang how little he had made of her or it.
But the next moment wrath at the idea of another man's child being
imposed upon him as his, with the consequent loss of his precious
money, swept every other feeling before it. For by law the child was
his, whoever might be the father of it. During a whole minute he felt
on the point of tying a stone about its neck, carrying it out, and
throwing it into the river Lea. Then, with the laugh of a hyena, he
set about arranging in his mind the proofs of her guilt. First came
eight childless years with himself; next the concealment of her
condition, and the absurd pretence that she had known nothing of it;
then the trouble of mind into which she had fallen; then her strange
unnatural aversion to her own child; and now, last of all, conclusive
of a guilty conscience, her flight from his house. He would give
himself no trouble to find her; why should he search after his own
shame! He would neither attempt to conceal nor to explain the fact
that she had left him--people might say what they pleased--try him for
murder if they liked! As to the child she had so kindly left to
console him for her absence, he would not drown him, neither would he
bring him up in his house; he would give him an ordinary education,
and apprentice him to a trade. For his money, he would leave it to a
hospital--a rich one, able to defend his will if disputed. For what
was the child? A monster--a creature that had no right to existence!
Not one of those who knew him best would have believed him capable of
being so moved, nor did one of them now know it, for he hid his
suffering with the success of a man not unaccustomed to make a mask of
his face. There are not a few men who, except something of the nature
of a catastrophe befall them, will pass through life without having or
affording a suspicion of what is in them. Everything hitherto had
tended to suppress the live elements of Duncan Dempster; but now, like
the fire of a volcano in a land of ice, the vitality in him had begun
to show itself.
Sheer weariness drove him, as the morning began to break, to lie down
again; but he neither undressed nor slept, and rose at his usual hour.
When he entered the dining-room, where breakfast was laid as
usual--only for one instead of two--he found by his plate, among
letters addressed to his wife, a packet directed to himself. It had
not been through the post, and the address was in his wife's hand. He
opened it. A sheet of paper was wrapped around a roll of unpaid
butcher's bills, amounting to something like eighty pounds, and a note
from the butcher craving immediate settlement. On the sheet of paper
was written, also in his wife's hand, these words: "I am quite
unworthy of being your wife any longer;" that was all.
Now here, to a man who had loved her enough to understand her, was a
clue to the whole--to Dempster it was the strongest possible
confirmation of what he had already concluded. To him it appeared as
certain as anything he called truth, that for years, while keeping a
fair face to her husband--a man who had never refused her anything--he
did not recall the fact that almost never had she asked or he offered
anything--she had been deceiving him, spending money she would not
account for, pretending to pay everything when she had been ruining
his credit with the neighbourhood, making him, a far richer man than
any but himself knew, appear to be living beyond his means, when he
was every month investing far more than he spent. It was injury upon
injury! Then, as a last mark of her contempt, she had taken pains that
these beggarly butcher's bills should reach him from her own hand! He
would trouble himself about such a woman not a moment longer!
He went from breakfast to his omnibus as usual, walked straight to his
office, and spent the day according to custom. I need hardly say that
the first thing he did was to write a cheque for the butcher. He made
no further inquiry after her whatever, nor was any made of him there,
for scarcely one of the people with whom he did business had been to
his house, or had even seen his wife.
In the suburb where he lived it was different; but he paid no heed to
any inquiry, beyond saying he knew nothing about her. To her relatives
he said that if they wanted her they might find her for themselves.
She had gone to please herself, and he was not going to ruin himself
by running about the world after her.
Night after night he came home to his desolate house; took no comfort
from his child; made no confession that he stood in need of comfort.
But he had a dull sensation as if the sun had forsaken the world, and
an endless night had begun. The simile, of course, is mine--the
sensation only was his; _he_ could never have expressed anything that
went on in the region wherein men suffer.
A few days made a marked difference in his appearance. He was a hard
man; but not so hard as people had thought him; and besides, _no_ man
can rule his own spirit except he has the spirit of right on his side;
neither is any man proof against the inroads of good. Even Lady
Macbeth was defeated by the imagination she had braved. Add to this,
that no man can, even by those who understand him best, be labelled as
a box containing such and such elements, for the humanity in him is
deeper than any individuality, and may manifest itself at some crisis
in a way altogether beside expectation.
His feeling was not at first of an elevated kind. After the grinding
wrath had abated, self-pity came largely to the surface--not by any
means a grand emotion, though very dear to boys and girls in their
first consciousness of self, and in them pardonable enough. On the
same ground it must be pardoned in a man who, with all his experience
of the world, was more ignorant of the region of emotion, and more
undeveloped morally, than multitudes of children: in him it was an
indication that the shell was beginning to break. He said to himself
that he was old beside her, and that she had begun to weary of him,
and despise him. Gradually upon this, however, supervened at intervals
a faint shadow of pity for her who could not have been happy or she
would not have left him.
Days and weeks passed, and there was no sign of Mrs. Dempster. The
child was not sent out to nurse, and throve well enough. His father
never took the least notice of him.
