No time was lost by James Dugdale in acting upon the resolution which had been arrived at by him and his friend. The task of writing to Mr. Baldwin was one of the most painful which it had ever been his lot to fulfil, and as his pen traced the lines destined to carry such dismay, to cause such irremediable grief to his friend, and to the woman whom he had loved so well and so patiently, he thought somewhat bitterly of the strangeness of his fate. Twice he had been destined to traverse Margaret's path in the bright hours of her existence, twice he had been appointed to convey to her words of disappointment, of bitterness, of doom. Life had given him little, he thought, in proportion to that which he had been called upon to suffer. Only one human creature was very precious to him, and he was so little to her that she would never even comprehend the misery he had to suffer, and must still suffer, through her. A general sort of sympathy she would expect from him and recognise, but she would never know that he would cheerfully have borne anything in the shape of suffering that could have been debased, to save her from the knowledge of the facts which his hand was then recording on the paper so soon to meet and blast Fitzwilliam Baldwin's eyes. He had sometimes thought, just before her marriage, that Margaret had divined and partly penetrated his secret; but she did not think of it now, he felt assured, even if she had. All the fulness and beauty of life, all its best and brightest possibilities, had been opened to her, had been given to her in such lavish abundance, that her mind had no room for anything outside its own felicity.
Thus James thought; but in thus thinking he did not rightly understand Margaret. Her mind was more capacious, her nature was more stedfast, than he knew, and she had measured the depth and the strength of his love for her more accurately than he guessed, and held it in more dear, grateful, and compassionate remembrance than he would have dared to hope. At the very time when he was writing to her, Margaret, in her sunny Italian home, was thinking and talking of James to her husband and to Lady Davyntry, who had always entertained much regard for Mr. Dugdale of an unintelligible nature, for she admitted readily that she did not understand him.
"Nothing could be more acceptable to Gerty's godfather," Margaret was saying, "than a portrait of Gerty--and of me. He shall have the small one we have ordered; and the large one for papa must be begun as soon as we get his answer to my last letter."
"You ought to have heard from him before this about it, Madge, should you not?" asked Lady Davyntry, looking up from her work; "it is time for a letter."
"Not quite, according to papa's measurement, Nelly. He generally takes a fortnight to make up his mind about any question he is asked, and then another fortnight to put the result on paper. I had a letter from James, you know, but he said nothing about the picture."
"We'll have it begun at once, Margaret," said Mr. Baldwin, who was standing by the verandah, looking out upon the shining, blue, foam-flecked sea. "I don't like a thing of that kind being put off. I wonder Dugdale does not answer for your father. And, by the bye," he continued, crossing the room, and taking a seat beside his wife, "they are tolerably busy just now at Chayleigh; it must be about the time of Mr. Meredith's arrival. What date did Dugdale mention?"
"He thought about the 25th," said Margaret.
As she spoke, the colour in her cheek waned, and there was a slight change in the expression of her face, which was a bright face now, but always mobile and a sure index to her feelings; a change which indicated to her husband, on whom no look of hers was ever lost, that the mention of Hayes Meredith's name had a disturbing effect upon her. He saw it, and understood it, and it vexed him, for, not with, her.
This was the one weakness in Margaret which troubled her perfect peace and happiness, and through them his. Not all the unequalled contentment of her lot had power to obliterate the past for her so completely as to deprive association of its power to wound.
There was one evil which all her husband's love and care could not keep quite away from her--the dark shadow of the bad bygone days when he as yet had no place in her life. She tried hard to fulfil her promise to her husband; she lived for him as truly and completely as ever any woman lived for any man, and she was a wonderfully happy human being.
But this one weakness clung to her still. The feeling of dread, misgiving, reluctance with which she had heard at first of Hayes Meredith's intention of coming to England, had never changed or lessened. She tried to escape from it, to forget it; she condemned her own weakness much more severely than Mr. Baldwin condemned it, but there it remained all the same, as present as if she had not condemned it at all. She had felt that she escaped much by being abroad when Mr. Meredith should arrive, she had blushed for her ingratitude in feeling it, she had persuaded herself that when he should have arrived, and she should know that he was in England, this strange, for the present unconquerable, feeling might wear off. It must be in a great measure nervous, she thought; it had come upon her so often and oppressively before her child's birth--surely it would vanish then. Time had brought her such immeasurably rich compensation, "good measure, pressed down, and running over," she had but this one thing more to ask of time, and that would come.
It was on a glorious day, even for Naples, that Fitzwilliam Baldwin, happily alone when it arrived, received James Dugdale's letter. Margaret, her child, and Lady Davyntry had gone out, intending to remain away for some hours, to the villa of friends of Eleanor's, who rejoiced immensely in the society of the English family. Mr. Baldwin was to join them in the afternoon, a sociable arrangement tending to rescue the ladies from boredom, without subjecting the gentleman to the same.
The writing of the letter which came to the beautiful villa by the sea, that glorious day, had been attended with difficulties which are not easily described. Partly from his knowledge of the man, and partly from the gift of insight and sympathy which he possessed in a rare degree, James Dugdale could enter into the perplexity and intricacy of the trouble of which he was the harbinger, and could follow the inevitable workings of Mr. Baldwin's mind under the circumstances. Meredith had at first proposed that the truth should not be told to Baldwin, that he should only be prepared for important news of an unpleasant character, and urged to return as speedily as possible. But James would not agree to this.
"No," he said, "the truth must be told, and borne somehow; and a plain simple statement of it to a man like Baldwin is the best thing to be done, and will enable him to bear it best. If he is kept in suspense, he will be unable to keep her from suspicion, and that is the great point for him to secure."
That Mr. Baldwin would exert himself to the utmost to conceal his feelings until they reached England, James did not doubt; and that he would acquiesce in their view of the case he felt assured. With this view, and in this spirit, the terrible letter was written; how it was read, how the full knowledge of the meaning of its contents was endured, no human being ever knew.
In the midst of the great bewilderment which fell upon Fitzwilliam Baldwin, while he sat with his eyes fixed upon Dugdale's letter, in the midst of the rush of wildly-varying but all-painful feeling which took possession of him, two things were uppermost in his mind: the one that the news which had reached him might be hidden until their arrival in England from Margaret, the other that the birth of a son would set this dreadful matter right, as far as it was capable of rectification.
As the hours during which he was absorbed in deep and agonising reverie wore away, he saw these two points more and more clearly, and began to take comfort from them. Dugdale had laid so much stress in his letter upon the certainty of the truth being known to no one but Meredith and himself, upon the feasibility of such prompt and ready action, that it would be necessary only to let Margaret learn the need of the second marriage ceremony just before the time of its performance, and upon the fortunate circumstance that the little one so unintentionally wronged would be placed beyond the reach of injury when the expected event should have taken place, that the heart-stricken reader could not but see the force of his arguments.
He thought very little of himself in all this. A swift sharp pang of regret when he felt that he had failed in the great task he had set himself, the high privilege he had striven for--that the woman whom he loved with such love as his experience told him men very rarely had to bestow, was not placed by that love, and all the defences with which it had surrounded her, beyond the reach of the stings of fortune--a piercing, agonising sense of defeat, of failure,--and all he suffered in his own person, on his own account, was finished and over. But for her, for Margaret--she who, in the midst of her happiness, in the summertide of her pride, and the security of her good fortune, dreaded the slightest, most passing reference to the past, whose sensitiveness and delicacy was tortured even now with a sense of degradation in the clinging of the old associations of the past--for her, he suffered as much as it was in his nature--which had largely the faculty of pain--to suffer.
When the time drew near at which he must prepare to meet Margaret, to find himself under her calm, but, where he was concerned, keen observation, forced to deceive her in fact, and to feign a state of spirits utterly foreign to the truth, he started up with a sudden fear that the havoc which had been at work within him might have made its mark upon his face. He knew that his wife--and when the dear familiar word came into his thoughts, he shuddered at the sudden realisation it forced upon him of the awful truth, she was not his wife--that Margaret would detect trouble in his face with unerring keenness and certainty.
He must devise a pretext for their sudden return, Dugdale had said in the letter. Of course, and it must be found, must be decided upon, at once. He stood still before a mirror and looked at his face. It was pale and haggard, as though he had gone through a long illness, and had grown suddenly older in it. The pretext which would account to Margaret for this face of his must needs be a serious one. And if it must, why not make it the true pretext? Could he devise to tell her any trouble, loss, or calamity affecting him which she would not share to the full? Were they not, indeed, and in the holiest truth of that mysterious tie of love, one? Would she not grieve as much for an imaginary evil, if it could thus affect him, as for the real cross which she would have to carry? At first, his wondering gaze upon his own changed face in the glass, Fitzwilliam Baldwin thought--"Yes, I may as well tell her the truth; she cannot take it worse than she will take anything affecting me only!"
But, again, a little reflection stopped him. If the truth were revealed to Margaret now, it would be so far different from any trouble that could come to them in the ordinary course of their united life, that it must sever them. From the instant that Margaret should know that she was not his wife there would be no more liberty for her, but restraint between them, and the action of a feeling which would take strong root in her delicate and sensitive mind. No, he must guard her, as her warmhearted but cool-judging friends had decided, against the discovery--he should win her forgiveness afterwards for a small deception involving so much to be gained in this terrible crisis of their fate.
He roamed from room to room of the beautiful villa overhanging the sea, and looked drearily around him on all the familiar objects associated with their everyday life. They were all familiar, true, and yet they were so strange. On them all there was the impress of the dreariness and the desolation which sweeps in the wake of a great shock, of a sudden event after which life can never again be the same, over all the soulless things in the midst of which we live. These were Margaret's rooms, and she was flitting about them when he saw her and them last, and they could never look the same again--neither they nor Margaret. Could it be true? Was it real, or a dream?
He stopped and pulled out James's letter, and read it again; and once more the full terrible reality struck him as with a palpable physical blow. This, then, was the fulfilment of that vague dread which Margaret confessed to having felt, that "superstitious terror" which had pursued her often when her life was fullest of blessings and happiness. James Dugdale had not erroneously estimated the confidence which he believed to exist between Fitzwilliam Baldwin and Margaret. It was thorough, perfect, absolute. There had not been a thought of her heart hidden from her husband, and therefore he was fully able to comprehend all the depth and bearing, the full weight and severity, of the calamity which had come upon them.
What a mockery was the beauty of the scene on which he looked! What warmth or light was there in the sunshine now--what music was there in the play of the bright waves upon the c............