To John Clare\'s wife the world of late had become a greatly-changed place. She was alone in London, without a single creature of her own sex whom she could call an acquaintance, much less a friend. She had broken both with her uncle and Luigi. For the latter she had never cared. He had impressed her from the first as being not only morally unscrupulous--that was a defect which she might not have experienced much difficulty in condoning--but as being sly and deceitful into the bargain, and, in short, one of those people who are almost as dangerous to, and as little to be trusted by, those whom they call their friends as by those to whom they owe a grudge which they would gladly wipe off.
Captain Verinder she had learnt to like after a fashion. He was her mother\'s brother, and that of itself was enough to create a tie between them which, under ordinary circumstances, she would have been one of the last people to ignore. She had liked him for his bonhomie, for his persistent good-humour and his half-quizzical, half-cynical way of looking at men and things, and last, but not least, for the frequent doses of flattery he had been in the habit of administering to her, which, even while conscious that it was nothing more than flattery, had possessed the delightful property of raising her in her own estimation, and of causing her to think more highly of herself than she had ever done before.
But this was a state of things which had now come wholly to an end. Giovanna\'s feelings were very bitter against her uncle. She blamed him and him alone for everything that had happened to her; at his door she laid the entire load of her misfortunes.
It was quite true--and the fact was never lost sight of by her, for she rarely argued crookedly, as Luigi habitually did--that, but for the interest taken by Verinder in her case, in all probability she would never have become aware that she was daughter-in-law to Sir Gilbert Clare. Yet, granting that point to the full, it was impossible for her to forget that it was wholly owing to his influence and persuasions that she had been lured into that career of fraud and double-dealing which, in her case, had ended in irremediable disaster. From her present knowledge of Sir Gilbert Clare she felt convinced that, had she have gone to him at first, as she had proposed to do, and told him the simple truth, far from turning his back upon her, he would have welcomed her as his son\'s widow, and have settled on her a liberal allowance, which would have been hers to the last day of her life. It made her hate her uncle when she thought of all that she had lost through weakly yielding to the glittering temptation he had so persistently dangled before her. Little by little she had wormed out of Luigi all the particulars of the Brussels episode, and she rightly argued that if Verinder had never introduced his nephew to the gaming-table the series of unfortunate events which resulted therefrom, and culminated in the discovery of Luigi in the strong-room, would never have come to pass. It was clearly the Captain and he alone who was to blame.
He had called upon her twice since their return to town, but her reception of him had been of the coldest; and when, on the occasion of his second visit, his request for a trifling loan of ten pounds was met by a distinct refusal, he perceived that his wisest course would be to keep away from his niece till time should in some measure have softened her rancour against him.
Giovanna had found a temporary home in one of those boardinghouses which abound in the neighbourhood of the west-central squares. But already she had begun to meditate a change. The demands on her purse were too many and, as it seemed to her, too exorbitant. Should she decide to stay in London, she must find cheaper rooms and make up her mind to live more economically in many ways. But just then she could not make up her mind to anything. She was a very lonely and a very miserable woman; indeed, the loneliness of her life sometimes appalled her. There were a number of other boarders in the house, and in the general drawing-room of an evening there was no lack of company of both sexes and of nearly all ages. But Giovanna, who had always been of a reserved and retiring disposition, had an utter distaste for associating with a mixed lot of people, with not one of whom she had anything in common, and, as soon as dinner was over, invariably went upstairs to her own sitting-room on the third floor. In the forenoons, when the weather was fine, she took long, solitary walks, sometimes in the Regents Park, sometimes through the miles of West End shops, but rarely pausing to glance into a window. Invariably dressed in black, and with the upper half of her face closely veiled, but leaving visible the firm and beautiful contours of the mouth and chin, her tall and stately form drew many eyes to it as she slowly threaded her way through the crowd of promenaders, so obviously indifferent to everyone and everything around her. There was about her, or so it seemed, an air of mystery, of romance even, which many of those who turned to gaze after her would have given something to be able to penetrate.
On a certain morning, just as Giovanna was getting ready to go for her usual walk, a message was brought her that there was a gentleman below who was desirous of seeing her. In the belief that it must be either her uncle or Luigi, they being the only visitors she had, she requested the servant to show him upstairs.
A minute later John Clare walked into the room.
Despite the changes which years had wrought in him, Giovanna knew him again the moment she set eyes on him, and the same instant a great fear took possession of her. An inarticulate cry broke from her lips; she shrank away from him with averting hands and terror-fraught eyes, and, when she could go no farther, she crouched trembling in a corner of the room. Her face wore the ghastly hue of death. She had never fainted in her life, and she did not now; but all the fibres of her being were stretched to that point of tension which touches the verge of madness. A little more and her brain would have given way. It was a strange mixture of terror that held her powerless, for, although she had at once recognised that this was no shadowy visitant from the tomb, there was about the affair an undoubted element of the supernatural. That her husband had come in the guise of an avenger one glance at his face had been enough to tell her, and surely it could be nothing less than a miracle which had brought him back to life! To Giovanna miracles were far from being the impossibilities which many of us deem them to be. She had grown up in an atmosphere of superstition, and not all the experience of after-life had quite served to eradicate the noxious weeds thus early implanted within her.
In the look with which John Clare regarded his wife there was an icy sternness such as might well strike with dread the heart of the unhappy woman. At that moment he bore a striking resemblance to his father, as Sir Gilbert had been before years and trouble had broken him down. For some moments he confronted his wife in silence as she cowered before him like some hunted creature driven to bay.
"At last we meet again!" he said, after a time. "You believed that I had died long years ago, but I am here, a living proof to the contrary. From me you have nothing to fear. I come neither to accuse nor to condemn. As you have dealt with the past, so will it deal with you; but certainly it is not for a fallible being such as I to set myself up as your judge."
He spoke slowly and unemotionally, without a trace of passion or the faintest tinge of invective.
"I am here on purpose to ask you certain questions," he resumed, "which............