The Queen of Hearts by Wilkie Collins
CHAPTER I.
IF you had been in the far West of England about thirteen years since,and if you had happened to take up one of the Cornish newspapers on acertain day of the month, which need not be specially mentioned, youwould have seen this notice of a marriage at the top of a column:
On the third instant, at the parish church, the Reverend Alfred Carling,Rector of Penliddy, to Emily Harriet, relict of the late Fergus Duncan,Esq., of Glendarn, N. B.
The rector's marriage did not produce a very favorable impression inthe town, solely in consequence of the unaccountable private andunpretending manner in which the ceremony had been performed. Themiddle-aged bride and bridegroom had walked quietly to church onemorning, had been married by the curate before any one was aware of it,and had embarked immediately afterward in the steamer for Tenby, wherethey proposed to pass their honeymoon. The bride being a stranger atPenliddy, all inquiries about her previous history were fruitless,and the townspeople had no alternative but to trust to their owninvestigations for enlightenment when the rector and his wife came hometo settle among their friends.
After six weeks' absence Mr. and Mrs. Carling returned, and the simplestory of the rector's courtship and marriage was gathered together infragments, by inquisitive friends, from his own lips and from the lipsof his wife.
Mr. Carling and Mrs. Duncan had met at Torquay. The rector, who hadexchanged houses and duties for the season with a brother clergymansettled at Torquay, had called on Mrs. Duncan in his clerical capacity,and had come away from the interview deeply impressed and interestedby the widow's manners and conversation. The visits were repeated; theacquaintance grew into friendship, and the friendship into love--ardent,devoted love on both sides.
Middle-aged man though he was, this was Mr. Carling's first attachment,and it was met by the same freshness of feeling on the lady's part. Herlife with her first husband had not been a happy one. She had made thefatal mistake of marrying to please her parents rather than herself, andhad repented it ever afterward. On her husband's death his family hadnot behaved well to her, and she had passed her widowhood, with her onlychild, a daughter, in the retirement of a small Scotch town many milesaway from the home of her married life. After a time the little girl'shealth had begun to fail, and, by the doctor's advice, she had migratedsouthward to the mild climate of Torquay. The change had proved to beof no avail; and, rather more than a year since, the child had died.The place where her darling was buried was a sacred place to her andshe remained a resident at Torquay. Her position in the world was nowa lonely one. She was herself an only child; her father and mother wereboth dead; and, excepting cousins, her one near relation left alive wasa maternal uncle living in London.
These particulars were all related simply and unaffectedly before Mr.Carling ventured on the confession of his attachment. When he madehis proposal of marriage, Mrs. Duncan received it with an excessof agitation which astonished and almost alarmed the inexperiencedclergyman. As soon as she could speak, she begged with extraordinaryearnestness and anxiety for a week to consider her answer, and requestedMr. Carling not to visit her on any account until the week had expired.
The next morning she and her maid departed for London. They did notreturn until the week for consideration had expired. On the eighth dayMr. Carling called again and was accepted.
The proposal to make the marriage as private as possible came from thelady. She had been to London to consult her uncle (whose health, sheregretted to say, would not allow him to travel to Cornwall to givehis niece away at the altar), and he agreed with Mrs. Duncan thatthe wedding could not be too private and unpretending. If it was madepublic, the family of her first husband would expect cards to be sentto them, and a renewal of intercourse, which would be painful on bothsides, might be the consequence. Other friends in Scotland, again, wouldresent her marrying a second time at her age, and would distress herand annoy her future husband in many ways. She was anxious to breakaltogether with her past existence, and to begin a new and happier lifeuntrammeled by any connection with former times and troubles. Sheurged these points, as she had received the offer of marriage, withan agitation which was almost painful to see. This peculiarity in herconduct, however, which might have irritated some men, and renderedothers distrustful, had no unfavorable effect on Mr. Carling. He set itdown to an excess of sensitiveness and delicacy which charmed him. Hewas himself--though he never would confess it--a shy, nervous man bynature. Ostentation of any sort was something which he shrank frominstinctively, even in the simplest affairs of daily life; and hisfuture wife's proposal to avoid all the usual ceremony and publicity ofa wedding was therefore more than agreeable to him--it was a positiverelief.
The courtship was kept secret at Torquay, and the marriage wascelebrated privately at Penliddy. It found its way into the localnewspapers as a matter of course, but it was not, as usual in suchcases, also advertised in the _Times_. Both husband and wife wereequally happy in the enjoyment of their new life, and equally unsocialin taking no measures whatever to publish it to others.
Such was the story of the rector's marriage. Socially, Mr. Carling'sposition was but little affected either way by the change in his life.As a bachelor, his circle of friends had been a small one, and when hemarried he made no attempt to enlarge it. He had never been popular withthe inhabitants of his parish generally. Essentially a weak man, he was,like other weak men, only capable of asserting himself positively inserious matters by running into extremes. As a consequence of thismoral defect, he presented some singular anomalies in character. In theordinary affairs of life he was the gentlest and most yielding of men,but in all that related to strictness of religious principle he was thesternest and the most aggressive of fanatics. In the pulpit he was apreacher of merciless sermons--an interpreter of the Bible by the letterrather than by the spirit, as pitiless and gloomy as one of thePuritans of old; while, on the other hand, by his own fireside he wasconsiderate, forbearing, and humble almost to a fault. As a necessaryresult of this singular inconsistency of character, he was feared, andsometimes even disliked, by the members of his congregation who onlyknew him as their pastor, and he was prized and loved by the smallcircle of friends who also knew him as a man.
Those friends gathered round him more closely and more affectionatelythan ever after his marriage, not on his own account only, butinfluenced also by the attractions that they found in the society ofhis wife. Her refinement and gentleness of manner; her extraordinaryaccomplishments as a musician; her unvarying sweetness of temper, andher quick, winning, womanly intelligence in conversation, charmed everyone who approached her. She was quoted as a model wife and woman by allher husband's friends, and she amply deserved the character that theygave her. Although no children came to cheer it, a happier and a moreadmirable married life has seldom been witnessed in this world than thelife which was once to be seen in the rectory house at Penliddy.
With these necessary explanations, that preliminary part of my narrativeof which the events may be massed together generally, for brevity'ssake, comes to a close. What I have next to tell is of a deeper and amore serious interest, and must be carefully related in detail.
The rector and his wife had lived together without, as I honestlybelieve, a harsh word or an unkind look once passing between them forupward of two years, when Mr. Carling took his first step toward thefatal future that was awaiting him by devoting his leisure hours to theapparently simple and harmless occupation of writing a pamphlet.
He had been connected for many years with one of our great MissionarySocieties, and had taken as active a part as a country clergyman couldin the management of its affairs. At the period of which I speak,certain influential members of the society had proposed a planfor greatly extending the sphere of its operations, trusting to aproportionate increase in the annual subscriptions to defray theadditional expenses of the new movement. The question was not nowbrought forward for the first time. It had been agitated eight yearspreviously, and the settlement of it had been at that tim
He had worked hard at his pamphlet, and had got more than half waythrough it, when he found himself brought to a stand-still for want ofcertain facts which had been produced on the discussion of the questioneight years since, and which were necessary to the full and fairstatement of his case.
At first he thought of writing to the secretary of the society forinformation; but, remembering that he had not held his office more thantwo years, he had thought it little likely that this gentleman would beable to help him, and looked back to his own Diary of the period to seeif he had made any notes in it relating to the original discussionof the affair. He found a note referring in general terms only to thematter in hand, but alluding at the end to a report in the _Times_ ofthe proceedings of a deputation from the society which had waited ona member of the government of that day, and to certain letters tothe editor which had followed the publication of the report. The notedescribed these letters as "very important," and Mr. Carling felt, as heput his Diary away again, that the successful conclusion of his pamphletnow depended on his being able to get access to the back numbers of the_Times_ of eight years since.
It was winter time when he was thus stopped in his work, and theprospect of a journey to London (the only place he knew of at whichfiles of the paper were to be found) did not present many attractions;and yet he could see no other and easier means of effecting his object.After considering for a little while and arriving at no positiveconclusion, he left the study, and went into the drawing-room to consulthis wife.
He found her working industriously by the blazing fire. She looked sohappy and comfortable--so gentle and charming in her pretty little lacecap, and her warm brown morning-dress, with its bright cherry-coloredribbons, and its delicate swan's down trimming circling round her neckand nestling over her bosom, that he stooped and kissed her with thetenderness of his bridegroom days before he spoke. When he told her ofthe cause that had suspended his literary occupation, she listened, withthe sensation of the kiss still lingering in her downcast eyes andher smiling lips, until he came to the subject of his Diary and itsreference to the newspaper.
As he mentioned the name of the _Times_ she altered and looked himstraight in the face gravely.
"Can you suggest any plan, love," he went on, "which may save me thenecessity of a journey to London at this bleak time of the year? I mustpositively have this information, and, so far as I can see, London isthe only place at which I can hope to meet with a file of the _Times_."
"A file of the _Times?_" she repeated.
"Yes--of eight years since," he said.
The instant the words passed his lips he saw her face overspread bya ghastly paleness; her eyes fixed on him with a strange mixture ofrigidity and vacancy in their look; her hands, with her work held tightin them, dropped slowly on her lap, and a shiver ran through her fromhead to foot.
He sprang to his feet, and snatched the smelling-salts from herwork-table, thinking she was going to faint. She put the bottle fromher, when he offered it, with a hand that thrilled him with the deadlycoldness of its touch, and said, in a whisper:
"A sudden chill, dear--let me go upstairs and lie down."
He took her to her room. As he laid her down on the bed, she caught hishand, and said, entreatingly:
"You won't go to London, darling, and leave me here ill?"
He promised that nothing should separate him from her until she was wellagain, and then ran downstairs to send for the doctor. The doctor came,and pronounced that Mrs. Carling was only suffering from a nervousattack; that there was not the least reason to be alarmed; and that,with proper care, she would be well again in a few days.
Both husband and wife had a dinner engagement in the town for thatevening. Mr. Carling proposed to write an apology and to remain with hiswife. But she would not hear of his abandoning the party on her account.The doctor also recommended that his patient should be left to hermaid's care, to fall asleep under the influence of the quieting medicinewhich he meant to give her. Yielding to this advice, Mr. Carling did hisbest to suppress his own anxieties, and went to the dinner-party.