“Excuse me,” I persisted. “I had the honor of meeting Doctor Wybrow, for the first time, yesterday.
Permit me to refer you to Lord Loring, who has long known me as his spiritual director and friend.”
This account of myself settled the matter.
I drew out the necessary securities—and I have all the papers lying before me on my desk at this moment.
You remember how seals were broken, and impressed again, at the Roman post-office, in the revolutionary days when we were both young men?
Thanks to the knowledge then obtained, the extraordinary events which once associated Mr. Winterfield and Miss Eyrecourt are at last plainly revealed to me.
Copies of the papers are in my possession, and the originals are sealed again, with the crest of the proprietor of the asylum, as if nothing had happened.
I make no attempt to excuse myself.
You know our motto:—THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS.
I don’t propose to make any premature use of the information which I have obtained.
The first and foremost necessity, as I have already reminded you, is to give Penrose the undisturbed opportunity of completing the conversion of Romayne.
During this interval, my copies of the papers are at the disposal of my reverend brethren at headquarters.
THE STOLEN PAPERS.—(COPIES.) Number One.—From Emma Winterfield to Bernard Winterfield.
4 Maidwell Buildings, Belhaven.
How shall I address you?
Dear Bernard, or Sir?
It doesn’t matter.
I am going to do one of the few good actions of my life: and familiarities or formalities matter nothing to a woman who lies on her deathbed.
Yes—I have met with another accident.
Shortly after the date of our separation, you heard, I think, of the fall in the circus that fractured my skull?
On that occasion, a surgical operation, and a bit of silver plate in place of the bone, put me right again.
This time it has been the kick of a horse, in the stables.
Some internal injury is the consequence.
I may die to-morrow, or live till next week.
Anyway—the doctor has confessed it—my time has come.
Mind one thing.
The drink—that vile habit which lost me your love and banished me from your house—the drink is not to blame for this last misfortune.
Only the day before it happened I had taken the pledge, under persuasion of the good rector here, the Reverend Mr. Fennick.
It is he who has brought me to make this confession, and who takes it down in writing at my bedside.
Do you remember how I once hated the very name of a parson—and when you proposed, in joke, to marry me before the registrar, how I took it in downright earnest, and kept you to your word?
We poor horse-riders and acrobats only knew clergymen as the worst enemies we had—always using their influence to keep the people out of our show, and the bread out of our mouths.
If I had met with Mr. Fennick in my younger days, what a different woman I might have been!
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.
I let 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.