There was a time when I had hoped that we should go hand in hand together in doing this good work. That hope is at an end. I no longer expect you, or ask you, to help me. A man who thinks as you think can give no help to anybody--it is his miserable condition to have no hope. So be it! I will hope for two, and will work for two; and I shall find some one to help me--never fear--if I deserve it.
"I will say nothing about my plans--I have not read the Trial yet. It is quite enough for me that I know you are i nnocent.
When a man is innocent, there _must_ be a way of proving it: the one thing needful is to find the way. Sooner or later, with or without assistance, I shall find it. Yes! before I know any single particular of the Case, I tell you positively--I shall find it!
"You may laugh over this blind confidence on my part, or you may cry over it. I don't pretend to know whether I am an object for ridicule or an object for pity. Of one thing only I am certain: Imean to win you back, a man vindicated before the world, without a stain on his character or his name--thanks to his wife.
"Write to me, sometimes, Eustace; and believe me, through all the bitterness of this bitter business, your faithful and loving "VALERIA."There was my reply! Poor enough as a composition (I could write a much better letter now), it had, if I may presume to say so, one merit. It was the honest expression of what I really meant and felt.
I read it to Benjamin. He held up his hands with his customary gesture when he was thoroughly bewildered and dismayed. "It seems the rashest letter that ever was written," said the dear old man.
"I never heard, Valeria, of a woman doing what you propose to do.
Lord help us! the new generation is beyond my fathoming. I wish your uncle Starkweather was here: I wonder what he would say? Oh, dear me, what a letter from a wife to a husband! Do you really mean to send it to him?"I added immeasurably to my old friend's surprise by not even employing the post-office. I wished to see the "instructions"which my husband had left behind him. So I took the letter to his lawyers myself.
The firm consisted of two partners. They both received me together. One was a soft, lean man, with a sour smile. The other was a hard, fat man, with ill-tempered eyebrows. I took a great dislike to both of them. On their side, they appeared to feel a strong distrust of me. We began by disagreeing. They showed me my husband's "instructions," providing, among other things, for the payment of one clear half of his income as long as he lived to his wife. I positively refused to touch a farthing of his money.
The lawyers were unaffectedly shocked and astonished at this decision. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before in the whole course of their experience. They argued and remonstrated with me. The partner with the ill-tempered eyebrows wanted to know what my reasons were. The partner with the sour smile reminded his colleague satirically that I was a lady, and had therefore no reasons to give. I only answered, "Be so good as to forward my letter, gentlemen," and left them.
I have no wish to claim any credit to myself in these pages which I do not honestly deserve. The truth is that my pride forbade me to accept help from Eustace, now that he had left me. My own little fortune (eight hundred a year) had been settled on myself when I married. It had been more than I wanted as a single woman, and I was resolved that it should be enough for me now. Benjamin had insisted on my considering his cottage as my home. Under these circumstances, the expenses in which my determination to clear my husband's character might involve me were the only expenses for which I had to provide. I could afford to be independent, and independent I resolved that I would be.
While I am occupied in confessing my weakness and my errors, it is only right to add that, dearly as I still loved my unhappy, misguided husband, there was one little fault of his which Ifound it not easy to forgive.
Pardoning other things, I could not quite pardon his concealing from me that he had been married to a first wife. Why I should have felt this so bitterly as I did, at certain times and seasons, I am not able to explain. Jealousy was at the bottom of it, I suppose. And yet I was not conscious of being jealous--especially when I thought of the poor creature's miserable death. Still, Eustace ought not to have kept _that_secret from me, I used to think to myself, at odd times when Iwas discouraged and out of temper. What would _he_ have said if Ihad been a widow, and had never told him of it?
It was getting on toward evening when I returned to the cottage.
Benjamin appeared to have been on the lookout for me. Before Icould ring at the bell he opened the garden gate.
"Prepare yourself for a surprise, my dear," he said. "Your uncle, the Reverend Doctor Starkweather, has arrived from the North, and is waiting to see you. He received your letter this morning, and he took the first train to London as soon as he had read it."In another minute my uncle's strong arms were round me. In my forlorn position, I felt the good vicar's kindness, in traveling all the way to London to see me, very gratefully. It brought the tears into my eyes--tears, without bitterness, that did me good.
"I have come, my dear child, to take you back to your old home,"he said. "No words can tell how fervently I wish you had never left your aunt and me. Well! well! we won't talk about it. The mischief is done, and the next thing is to mend it as well as we can. If I could only get within arm's-length of that husband of yours, Valeria--There! there! God forgive me, I am forgetting that I am a clergyman. What shall I forget next, I wonder?
