“And what do you make of it, dearest?” said Beatrice, after a long pause.
“I would rather hear your idea—you are her sister.”
“Charles,” said his wife, “that means that you suspect something very painful, and would not wound me by being the first to impute such a thing.”
“Dearest girl, what is one to think, when a wife suddenly leaves her home with an unknown gentleman, and the husband, without a word to any friend, takes away his daughter, and is heard of no more?”
“You know how fond he is of Clara. I do not see anything in his taking her rather than either of the boys.”
“Well, pass that for the moment. What is your key to the mystery?”
“I cannot arrange my thoughts in the least. I am simply at a loss to comprehend the affair. But, Charles, it is not an inexplicable story that shall make me think ill of darling Laura.”
“Nor me, and you do not want to be told my affection for Laura. We were joking over it only the other morning.”
“So we were, and little thinkingCharles, I am perfectly terrified at a thought that flashes upon me. The idea is almost too dreadful. Help me to crush it at once, before it begins to haunt me.”
“My dearest wife!”
“Is it—is it possible—but it is not,” she said, drawing closely to her husband, and speaking with agitation—” is it conceivable that the strange man, whom nobody knew, and who instantly removed Laura from her house, could have been a—a doctor? Say no.”
“I understand you,” said Hawkesley, turning pale. “But no, no, a thousand times no, my own one.”
“The idea came like lightning as you spoke this moment, and impressions which come like that are often true—”
“Banish it—dispel it—there is not the shadow of reason in it. My dear Beatrice, you have known Laura from babyhood, and can say for yourself whether there was ever the faintest defect in her beautifully ordered mind.”
“But is it not the most delicate minds that are most easily injured?”
“Assuredly not. That is one of the mistakes of ignorance—don’t be angry with the word, dearest; I use the strongest purposely. It is the machine in which there are flaws and damages that flics, the perfect one is true and safe to the last. Pray drive away the thought—reject it as absolutely as I do.”
“You do, entirely?”
“Utterly.”
“Then I will. And yet how the story would agree with such a misery. Laura is taken away in her husband’s absence: he could not bear to see her removed: a single stranger, in black—”
“Never heed the black. Unless you can suppose that she had been previously seen by two medical men, who must have been together in judgment in her case, the thing is impossible. It is impossible. In Heaven’s name, my dearest wife, do not let us pursue that terrible course of thought.”
“Then,” persisted Beatrice, “he cannot bear to be in the deserted house, and flies away with Clara, who reminds him of her mother—”
“Would a man who loved his wife take her image with him?”
“Yes, Charles, I think he would if she had been removed from him by death or misfortune—not if she had been wrong, perhaps. But who dares accuse Laura of that?”
“I would not hear it, but—”
“No, Charles, no. If there is truth and goodness and purity in woman, it is in my sister Laura. The other thought is dreadful, but not so dreadful as the idea that—; but that you will never believe,” she said, clasping both her husband’s hands.
“It would be almost the saddest hour I could live, if an hour should come to make me think ill of her, Beatrice. But do not let this abominable haze of anonymous letters and shopmen’s slanders blind us to other ways of accounting for the affair.”
“O, do you see any other ways? Anything to drive away the fearful thought of her possible insanity.”
“I beg you, darling, to reject that, whether we see at once any other solution or do not. There is one idea comes to me already; it seems a wild one, but the incidents of real life are so much wilder than anything one dares invent—”
“Yes, yes.”
“This man in black—by the way, who told us he was in black—are we beginning with a mistake?”
“You said it was Freddy.”
“Yes, but does a boy notice dress?”
“He said it before Walter.”
“Who had not seen him, I think,” said Hawkesley. “I must ascertain as casually as I can.”
He went out to speak to the boys, and returned in a few minutes.
“Freddy speaks positively to the black dress, and he had a good look at the stranger, who it seems interposed between the children and a visit to the Zoological Gardens. We may take the black for granted. Beatrice, dear, had Laura ever any Catholic leanings?”
“No,” said Mrs. Hawkesley, promptly, “certainly not, that I ever heard of. Poor Bertha used to be rather inclined to go to Catholic chapels, not from any particular convictions, for she had not many of them, but the music, and the incense, and novels about mysterious Jesuits, worked upon her at one time. But not Laura. What is your idea?”
“I hardly know, but stay a moment. Do you mean that Bertha at any time became a Catholic, or had any connection with the Catholics beyond attending their services?”
“I don’t think so. To tell you the truth, she did not get much mercy from me when she spoke of such things, for I knew that religion had nothing to do with her likings, and that they were the merest sentimentality.”
“Laura would be more tolerant?”
