CHAPTER XXXI.
WHY DON’T YOU TRUST ME?
That winter Sabbath was a dreary day for John Treverton. He walked home almost in silence, Laura wondering at his thoughtfulness, and speculating anxiously upon the possible reasons for this sudden change in his mood. Had this friend of the Clares brought him bad news? Yet how could that be? Must it not rather be that this meeting with an old acquaintance had recalled some painful period in that past life of which she knew so little?
‘That is my misfortune,’ she thought. ‘I am only half a wife while I am ignorant of all his old sorrows.’
She did not disturb her husband by questions of any kind, but walked quietly by his side through the wintry shrubberies, where the holly berries were gleaming in the mid-day sun, and the fearless robins fluttered from hawthorn to laurel.
‘I won’t come in to luncheon, dear,’ said John when they came to the hall door. ‘I feel a little dull and headachy, and I think it might do me good to lie down for an hour or two.’
‘Shall I come and read you to sleep, Jack?’
‘No, dear, I shall be better alone.’
‘Oh, Jack, why are you not frank with me?’ exclaimed his wife piteously. ‘I know there is something on your mind. Why don’t you trust me?’
‘Not yet, dear. You will know everything that can be knownabout me very soon, I dare say. But we need not anticipate the revelation. It will not be too pleasant for either of us.’
‘Do you think that anything I can ever learn about you will change me?’ she asked, with her hand upon his arm, looking up at him intently. ‘Have I not trusted you, and loved you, blindly?’
‘Yes, dearest, blindly. But how can I tell how you may feel when your eyes are opened?’
She looked at him for some moments in silence, trying to read his face; and then, with most pathetic earnestness, she said:—
‘John, if there is anything to be told to your discredit, if there is any act of your past life that you are ashamed to remember—ashamed to acknowledge—an act known to others, for pity’s sake let me hear it from you, and not from the lips of an enemy. Am I so severe a judge that you should fear to stand before me? Have I not been weakly fond, blindly trustful? Can you doubt my power to excuse and to pardon, where all the rest of mankind might be inexorable?’
‘No,’ he answered quickly, ‘I will not doubt you. No, dear love, it is not because I feared to trust you that I have tried to keep my secret. I wished to spare you pain; for I knew that it would pain you to know how low I had sunk before your influence, your love, came to lift me out of the slough into which I had fallen. But it seems the pain must come. Good and pure as you are, there are those who will not spare you that bitter knowledge. Yes, dear, it is best that you should learn the truth first from my lips. Whatever garbled version of this story may be told you afterwards, you shall have the truth from me.’
He put his arm round her, and they went up the broad old staircase side by side to the room that had been Jasper Treverton’s study, and which Laura had beautified for her husband. Here they were secure from intrusion. John Treverton drew his wife’s favourite chair to the fire, and sat down by her side, as they had sat on the night when Laura told her husband the story of Mr. Desrolles.
They sat for some minutes in silence, John Treverton looking at the fire, meditating how best to begin his confession.
‘Oh, Laura, I wonder whether you will hate me when you have heard what my past life was like?’ he said at last. ‘I will not spare myself; but even at this last moment I shrink from uttering the words that may destroy our happiness, and part us for ever. You shall be free to decide our fate. If, when you have heard all, you should say to yourself, “This man is unworthy of my love,” and if you should recoil from me—as you may—with disgust and abhorrence, I will bow my head to your decree, and disappear out of your life for ever.’
His wife turned her stricken face to him, pale as death.
‘What crime have you committed, that you can think it possible that I should withdraw my love from you?’ she asked, with tremulous lips.
‘I have committed no crime, Laura, but I have been suspected of the worst of crimes. Do you remember the story of a man whose name was bandied about in the newspapers nearly a year ago; a man whose wife was murdered, and whom some of the London papers plainly denounced as the murderer; the man called Chicot, whose disappearance was one of the social mysteries of the year?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, looking at him wonderingly. ‘What can you have to do with that man?’
‘I am that man!’
‘You? You, John Treverton?’
‘I, John Treverton,aliasChicot.’
‘The husband of a stage dancer?’
‘Yes, Laura. There have been two loves in my life. First, my love for a woman who had nothing but her beauty to make her dear to the hearts of men. Secondly, my love for you, whose beauty is the lightest part in your power to win and keep my affection. My history may be briefly told. I began life in a cavalry regiment, with a small fortune in shares and stocks. These were so handy to get rid of, that before I had been five years in the army I had contrived to make away with my last sixpence. I had not been particularly dissipated or extravagant; I had not vied with my captain, who was the son of a West-end confectioner, and spent money like water; or with my colonel, who was a man of rank, and £30,000 in debt; but I had kept good horses, and mixed in the best society, and the day I got my company saw me a beggar. There was nothing for it but to sell out, and I sold out; and being of a happy-go-lucky temperament, and tired of the confinement of country quarters, I crossed the Channel, and wandered over the loveliest half of Europe with a knapsack and a sketch-book. When I had spent the price of my commission I found myself in Paris, out at elbows, penniless, with a taste for literature and a facile pencil. I lived in a garret in the Quartier Latin, found friends in a thoroughly Bohemian set, and contrived to earn just enough to keep body and soul together. I began this life with the idea that I might one day win distinction in art. I had the will to work, and a good deal of ambition. But the young men among whom I lived, small journalists and hangers-on at the minor theatres, soon taught me a different story. I learned to live as they lived, from hand to mouth. All higher aspirations died out of my mind. I became a hanger-on at stage doors, a scribbler of newspaper paragraphs—a collaborateur in Palais Royal farces—happy when I had the price of a dinner in my waistcoat pocket and a decent coat on myback. It was at this stage of my career that I fell in love with Zaïre Chicot, a popular dancer at the theatre most affected by students in law and medicine. She was the handsomest woman I had ever seen. No one had a word to say against her character. She was not a lady; I knew that, even when I was most in love with her. But the vulgarities and ignorances that would have revolted me in an Englishwoman amused and even pleased me in this daughter of the people. She was fond of me, and I of her. We married without a thought of the future: with very little care even for the present. My wife—the popular dancer at a popular theatre—was so much the more important person of the two, that from the hour of my marriage I was known by her name—first, as La Chicot’s husband; then as Jack Chicot,tout court. We were reasonably happy together, till my wife began to fall into those wretched habits of intemperance which finally blighted both our lives. God knows I did my best to cure her. I tried my uttermost to hold her back from the dreary gulf into which she was descending. But I was powerless. No words of mine could ever tell you the misery—the degradation—of my life. I endured it. Perhaps I hardly knew the full measure of my wretchedness till the day on which I heard my cousin Jasper’s will read, and knew the happiness which might have been mine had I been free from that hateful bondage.’
Laura sat by his side in silence, her face hidden in her hands, her head bowed down upon the cushion of the chair, crushed by the deep shame involved in her husband’s confession.
‘There is little more to tell. When I first saw and loved you I was La Chicot’s husband—a man bound hand and foot. I had no right to come near you, yet I came. I had a vague, wicked hope that Fate would set me free somehow. Yet I tried, honestly, to do my duty to that unhappy woman. When her life was in peril, I helped to nurse her. I bore patiently with her violent temper after she recovered. When the year was nearly gone it came into my mind that my cousin’s estate might be secured to you by a marriage which should fulfil the terms of his will without making me your husband save in name. And then, if in some happier day I should be released from my bonds, we could be married again—as we were.’
He paused, but there was no answer from Laura except a half-stifled sob.
‘Laura, can you pity and pardon me? For God’s sake say that I am not utterly despicable in your eyes!’
‘Despicable? no!’ she said, lifting up her tear-stained face, ashy pale, and drawn with pain, ‘not despicable, John. You could never be that, in my eyes. But wrong, oh, so deeply wrong! See what shame and anguish you have brought uponboth of us! What was Jasper Treverton’s fortune worth to either of us, that you should be guilty of a fraud in your endeavour to gain it for me?’
‘A fraud?’
‘Yes. Do you not see that our first marriage, being really no marriage, was an imposition and a sham—that neither you nor I have a right to a sixpence of Jasper Treverton’s money, or an acre of his land. All is forfeited to the hospital trusts. We have no right to live in this house. We possess nothing but my income. We can live upon that, Jack. I am not afraid to face poverty with you; but I will not live an hour under the weight of this shameful secret. Mr. Clare and Mr. Sampson must know the truth at once.’
Her husband was kneeling at her feet, looking up at her with a radiant face.
‘My love, my dearest, you have made me too happy. You do not shrink from me—you do not abandon me. Poverty! No, Laura, I am not afraid of that. I have feared only the loss of your love. That has been my ever-present fear. That one great dread has sealed my lips.’
‘You can never lose my love, dear. It was given to you without the power of recall. But if you want to regain my esteem, you must act bravely and honourably. You must undo the wrong you have done.’
‘We will hold a council to-night, Laura. We will take Edward Clare’s cards out of his hands.’
‘What? Does Edward know?’
‘He knows that I and Chicot are one.’
‘Ah, then I can understand the look he gave you on the night of our first dinner-party—a look full of malignity. He had just been talking of Chicot.’
She shuddered as she pronounced a name associated with such unspeakable horror. And that name was her husband’s; the man branded with the suspicion of a hideous crime was her husband.
‘I am afraid Edward is your secret enemy,’ she said, after a pause.
‘I am sure he is—and I believe he is on the eve of becoming my open enemy. It will be a triumph in a small way for me to take the initiative, and resign the estate.’