noble and good, in pleasure.

And at last, you will hardly be surprised to

hear, I fell into my old madness of drink. I was horribly, quite horribly, you
understand, hopeless and unhappy. About my own people I say nothing—
to their own Master they stand or fall. I do not want to talk, or even think
about them. But by last autumn I had pretty well ruined my health. I had,
so the doctors told me, delirium tremens. I know my nerves were
shattered, and life seemed a perfect hell. As I lay ill and mad, Fédore came
to me. She nursed me, controlled me, pulled me through. She was most
true to me when others wished her to be most false. There were those, she
has told me since—as I suspected all along, even in the old days at Hover
—who would be glad enough for me to kill myself with debauchery. She
talked to me, reasoned with me. You yourself could not have spoken more
wisely. But I felt, Brownlow, I felt I could not stand alone. I must have
some one to lean on, to be loved by and to love. It is a necessity of my
nature, and I obeyed it. Fédore saved me, and I paid her by marrying her.
She refused at rst, warned me of my seeming folly, of what the world
would say; told me there were dif culties, that she, too, had enemies. But I
insisted.—Remember she had compromised herself, endangered her
reputation by coming to me.—At last she gave way, confessing, dear
creature, she had loved me all along, loved me from a boy.
‘You will say, what about the future? I defy it, snap my ngers at it. It
must take care of itself. It can’t, in any case, be more hateful than the past.
‘And so good-bye, dear old man. Judge me fairly at least; and keep my
secret—for secret our marriage must be as long as my father is alive.
Fédore sends kind remembrances, and bids me say when you know all—
and there is more behind—you will not think of her too harshly.’
Should I not? The woman had greater faith in my leniency—or
stupidity, which?—than I myself had. No harshness was too
[19]
great, surely, in face of the wrong she had done the boy by marrying
him. Yet two things were true. For that she loved him—according to her
own conception of love—I did not doubt; and that she had rescued him
from the demon of drink—for the time being—I did not doubt either. And
this last—let me try to be just—this last must be counted to her, in some
degree at all events, for righteousness whatever her ulterior object in so
rescuing him might have been.
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 But admitting that much, I had admitted all that was possible in her
favour. She had hunted the boy, trapped him, pinned him down, making his
extremity her own opportunity; cleverly laying him under an obligation,
moreover, which could not but evoke all his native sensibility and chivalry.
The more I thought of it, the more disastrous, the more abominable did
the position appear. So much so that, going back to his letter, I read it over
and over to see if I could make it belie itself and nd any loop-hole of
escape. But what was written was written. In Hartover’s belief he had
made Fédore, and done right in making her, his wife.
And there were those, then, who would gladly compass his death! The
last scene with Colonel Esdaile ashed across me; and other scenes,
words, gestures, both of his and of her ladyship’s. Was the boy really and
actually the victim of some shameful conspiracy? Only one life stood
between the Colonel and the title, the great estates, the great wealth. Was
her ladyship playing some desperate game to secure these for him and—
for herself, and for her children as his wife? She was still young enough to
bear children.—In this ugly coil that cardinal point must never be
forgotten. But how could Fédore’s marrying Hartover forward this? Had
the woman been set on as her ladyship’s tool, and then betrayed her
employer and intrigued on her own account?
Good Heavens! and Nellie was free now. At that thought I sprang up;
but only to sink back into my chair again, broken by the vast perplexity,
the vast complexity, of it all. Free? Did I not know better than that? Had
not her father’s tone, her father’s words in speaking of her, told me her
heart was very far from free? Should I so fall from grace as to trade on her
despair, and tempt her to engage herself to me while she still loved
Hartover? Would not that be to follow Fédore’s example—almost; and take
a leaf out of her very questionably virtuous or high-minded book? Besides,
how did I know Nellie would ever be
[20]
willing to engage herself to me
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