Kissing the Rod: A Novel. (Vol. 3 of 3)

It was perhaps fortunate for Robert Streightley that the pressure of an immediate necessity for exertion was put upon him at the same time that he received his wife's letter. The blow was so frightful that it might have completely crushed him, had he not been forced to rouse himself from its first effect, to put the meaning of the terrible communication aside for a time, while he attended to the stern duties which were his, as the only representative of the dead man. The subdued bustle, the ceaseless coming and going, the people to be seen, the letters to be written, the innumerable demands upon his attention in reference to his deceased father-in-law, to say nothing of the exigencies of his own affairs, from which he had not an hour's respite, controlled him in spite of himself, and by suspending softened the intensity of the knowledge of the punishment that had overtaken him.

The suspense and perplexity into which Katharine's unexplained absence from home had thrown the household on the preceding day had prepared them to expect that some important intelligence was contained in the letter which had reached their master that morning; and the unhappy man comprehended the necessity of making some communication on the subject. He briefly informed Katharine's maid that she had left town for the present; and on being asked whether the woman was to join her mistress at Middlemeads, he said Mrs. Streightley was not there; that she had better wait for orders, and in the mean time ask no more questions. An injudicious answer; but Robert neither knew nor cared what would have been the judicious course to pursue. He knew only that his sin had found him out; that the chastisement had come; and that the woman whom he had so loved and so wronged had left him for ever--left him hating and despising him.

The hours of that dreadful day wore through somehow. Robert had been engaged during many of them in making arrangements consequent upon Mr. Guyon's death; he had been at Queen Anne Street, and at his office in the City, transacting business of different but invariably unpleasant kinds. He had seen several persons, but not any by whom the domestic calamity which had fallen upon him was suspected. He had written to his mother, informing her of Mr. Guyon's death, and requesting that Ellen would not come to Portland Place for the present; but giving no explanation of this request. All the day he had carried about with him the dreadful knowledge of what had befallen him--had been oppressed by its weight, darkened by its shadow; but he had not examined his burden--he had gone his appointed way, and done his relentless task, and the day had been got through somehow. Now he was going to look the truth in the face; he was going to force his mind to understand it, to take it in fully, and to suffer the torture at his leisure.

He shut himself up in his "study," and gave orders that no one was to be admitted. Then, with the door locked and sure of solitude, he read Katharine's letter again,--not that he needed to do so; every one of its few remorseless words seemed to have burned themselves into his brain,--and then he read the letter which hers had enclosed--the letter endorsed "Shown to R. S." He had not looked at it in the morning; it had sufficed him to know that the letter which Mr. Guyon had shown him on the day which had witnessed their disgraceful compact--the letter which they had tacitly agreed to suppress, still existed, for his conviction, for his condemnation, and had reached the hands to which it had been addressed at last: he had put it away with a shudder. But now he read it--steadily, and with utter amazement. There it was; and on the blank side of the sheet, in Mr. Guyon's hand, were the words, "Shown to R.S." But this letter was sill in Mr. Guyon's hand, and Robert had never seen it--had never heard of it; this was not the letter from Gordon Frere to Katharine which her father had shown to him; there was a dreadful mistake somewhere. As Robert read the heartless words in which Mr. Guyon rejected Gordon Frere on his daughter's behalf, he understood for the first time how the conspiracy which had resulted in so sad a success had been carried out. This, then, was the method Mr. Guyon had adopted, and into which Robert had never inquired. He saw it all--he understood it all now; and he honestly recoiled at the baseness by which his triumph had been secured. He even thought he would not have consented, had he known how the thing was to be done; but his conscience was not so deadened as to accept that sophistry, and another moment's thought taught him that he was as guilty as ever.

But how came the letter to be endorsed with words, intended by their writer only as a private memorandum, which were not true? This puzzled Robert, until he guessed, what really was the case, that Mr. Guyon had put Frere's letter and his reply away together, and had mistaken the one for the other. Why had he kept them at all? thought Robert; why had he put such dangerous and useless documents aside, thus running the risk of detection now realised? "He never could have intended to use them as a weapon against me," thought Robert, who had arrived at a tolerably correct appreciation of the character of his deceased father-in-law. "They convict him directly; me, though conclusively to her, only indirectly to others. Why on earth did he keep them?"

Ah, why? Why is half the mischief that is done in the world done by the instrumentality of letters, which ought to have been read and destroyed, being treasured up instead by foolish women, or read and left about by men whom experience has not availed to teach? If Robert Streightley had quite understood Mr. Guyon's character, he would have known, in the first place, that that gentleman had never been in the habit of contemplating the contingency of his own death, or of making any preparation, temporal or spiritual, for that event; in the second, that his vanity was of so ominous a kind that he liked to indulge in the recollection of successful enterprises, no matter what their nature, and treasured up the trophies of his fortunate coups, as other people might keep love-tokens or relics of departed friends,--a ghastly perversion, it is true, but a characteristic trait of Mr. Guyon, as Robert came to learn, when he had to examine all the dead man's papers and personal effects.

After all, it did not matter very much that this mistake had been made. Any one of the papers concerning this transaction, so endorsed, would have equally convicted her husband in Katharine's eyes. For a moment, when Robert perceived the error and recognised how it had occurred, a faint hope had sprung up in his heart that all might be explained, in explaining that he had never seen the draft of Mr. Guyon's letter to Gordon Frere; but it lasted only for a moment, and then left Robert more shame-stricken, more despairing than before.

The bitter remembrance of his resolutions of the day before came to torment him now. How futile they were! made all too late, and useless; how ridiculous they seemed, too! Would he ever have had the courage to tell the woman he had wronged the truth concerning himself and her? Cowering as he was now under the blast of her scorn and anger, he could not believe that he would; he heaped upon himself all the reprobation which the sternest judge could have measured out to him. His sin had found him out indeed, and nothing could save him now from the fullest retribution. It had come in its worst form, complicated with the death of his accomplice, as a double horror. Robert Streightley was not a man who could coldly contemplate such an event as Mr. Guyon's death. He had indeed retained but little personal regard for him; but that fact, the growing knowledge of the man which rendered such regard impossible, invested his death with additional horror to Robert. That such should have been the manner of the detection and the punishment, impressed him with awe. Standing, as he had done that day, by the dead man's bed, he had bowed his head submissively to the tremendous lesson which the scene conveyed. Where was their fine scheme now? Where was the wealth for which the father had sold the daughter? Gone--almost all gone; and if it had remained a million times told, what could it avail to the form of clay which lay there waiting for the coffin and the grave? Where was the beautiful wife whom the father's accomplice had purchased at the price of his honour? Who was to tell that to the wretched husband, who knew nothing but that she had detected them both, and fled from them both,--from the living and the dead?

As he thought these thoughts, and a thousand others which could find no utterance in words, no expression by the pen, the long hours of the night were wearing by. Up and down the room, long after the fire had died out, unnoticed, Robert Streightley walked, buried in his tormenting thoughts, full of horror, remorse, shame, the sense of righteous retribution and torturing grief. She was gone,--his darling, the one treasure of his life, the beautiful idol of his worship: the desolation of that knowledge had not come to him yet; he had had no time to think of the meaning of life without her; the fear, the excitement, the strangeness of the fact were all that he had as yet realised. The awful sorrow, the hopeless bereavement were for the future. The strokes of the rod were beginning to fall upon him; strokes which were to continue, ceaseless and stinging, until the end. Any one who has ever battled, quite alone, with a tremendous sorrow in its first hours of strife, knows how vain is the effort to collect his thoughts at the time, and to recall their order afterwards; knows how the merest trifles will intrude themselves on the attention at times, and at others how the faculties will seem to be suspended, and a kind of dull vacuity will succeed the access of raging pain. The story of Robert's suffering in no way differed from that of any other supreme agony. It had all the caprices, all the fantasies of pain; it had the dreadful vitality, and the intervals of numbness and wandering. Many times in the course of that night Robert sat down in a chair and fell asleep, to wake again--with a start, and an impression that some voice had uttered his name--to the renewed consciousness of his misery.

It was very long before he began to think about the circumstances of Katharine's flight from her home, before he began to speculate upon how she had gone, and whither. From the moment he had read her assurance that in this world he should never see her face again, he had been seized with a horrible conviction that this was literally true: he would seek her, of course; he would find out where she had gone to,--he did not even stop to think whether there would be much, or any difficulty about that--but he should see her face no more. No such wild notion as that Katharine would relent and forgive him ever crossed Robert's mind. He knew how cold and proud she was--how cold and proud when she was ignorant of his sin against her, and when he had lived only in the hope of winning her love some happy day before he died;--he knew how insensate any hope would now be, and he never cherished such a delusion for a moment. She was dead to him, and all the gorgeous fabric of the life he had built up for himself had crumbled away.