AMONG the curiosities of my experience I reckon the incidents of the narrative I am about to relate.

A few years ago, a gentleman of considerable estate, one of the untitled nobility of England, called upon me, and explained that he had reason to suspect the fidelity of his wife. I did not recognise the force of these reasons. The facts on which this gloomy, although partial, faith in the lady’s impurity or falseness had been raised might, with strict literal accuracy, he described as “trifles light as air.”

This suspicion was, however, not to be wholly disregarded by a stranger, at the first blush of the case. My visitor’s station in life, his intellectual qualifications, and his affection for his wife, appeared like guarantees that he would not condemn her without cause. He did not, however, assert with confidence that she was guilty. All he had, or professed to have, was a doubt. He told me that nothing would give him more delight than a perfect conviction that he had been under a delusion about the lady.

Perhaps it would be well to describe somewhat more fully the actors in this curious little drama. Mr. Percival was the only son of a wealthy and improving land-owner in the county of Sussex. He had, in consequence, inherited his father’s whole landed estate, together with a large sum of money, and considerable investments in public funds and other reliable securities. His education had been well cared for. He lost his mother when only about fourteen years of age, and his character had, it is probable, suffered from want of the chastening influences of maternal care. This was, however, the only defect, if it were a defect, in his training. His father had anxiously watched the conduct and the development of his youth. He had been educated at Eton, where he excelled in more than one branch of study. At Oxford he took honours. He was a superior type of the class known as “country gentlemen.” His habits were those of a man of culture and a man of fortune.

Mrs. Percival was a lady of good, although comparatively poor, family. Her father rejoiced in the title of an Irish landlord; but the rent-roll of the estate was not very considerable, and it needed dexterous management to keep it from the withering grasp of the Encumbered Estates Court. Still, out of their slender resources, Mrs. Percival’s parents had given her a superior education. She could draw, she was a skilful and a good musician, she was an elegant horse-woman, and otherwise accomplished. Her manners were free and natural,—sometimes a little child-like or hoydenish. She was a little, and but a little, above the average stature of her sex; had a graceful mien, and a sweet face. If I were expert in drawing pen-and-ink sketches, after the manner of a novelist, I should describe this lady as an almost perfect woman.

The reader will understand that I have, in this description, anticipated the narrative so far as to let him know more of the lady and the gentleman than I could learn within a period of two months.

“You will excuse my candour, sir, I hope; but I fail to see the grounds for your suspicion of your wife.”

“I like your candour. It is reassuring. I may be mistaken. I devoutly pray that I am. You have, I am told, had great experience in such painful domestic affairs as that I now trouble you with. It is already a source of much comfort to me that I have consulted you. If you can remove the horrid doubts which oppress me, I shall esteem you my benefactor; but let me know the truth, whatever that may be.”

I again begged him to be a little more precise than he had been in detailing the cause of his suspicions.

“In solemn confidence, I may say that we were at a dinner-party at the house of Mr. Tallboyes, in Seymour Place, the week before last, and it was impossible to avoid noticing her freedom with young Lord Swellington and Colonel Foreshore.”

“The colonel!” I said; “he is a man of sixty. He has seen much hard service; and is ‘a lion’ in every party just now, I have heard. Were not your wife’s attentions the mere courtesies which all true women find pleasure in bestowing upon age and bravery?”

“That might be; but what do you say about her pleasantries with that conceited and empty-headed young fop, Lord Swellington?”

“These might be the innocent raillery and badinage of the purest woman. Ladies sometimes take a cruel pleasure in trifling with, just to mortify, the fop, in whatever grade of society he may be found.”

“I sincerely hope you are right; but, unhappily, these have not been the only causes of my grief. My wife is too fond of pleasure. We have lately been at two public breakfasts,—one given by Lady W——, at Kew; and another by the Marchioness of L——, at Chiswick.”

“That—pardon my suggesting, under the most adverse, and at the same time rational, estimate of human character—betrays only something of levity, quite consistent with purity of heart and the strictest rectitude of conduct.”

“You are not, I am glad to say, an uncharitable interpreter of human conduct.”

“Indeed I hope not; for although I have seen much wickedness, and a vast deal of subtle, as well as patent, crime, I have met with many instances in which unjust suspicions have provoked calamities. But was there any thing, and if so what was there, in the conduct of your wife to justify your suspicions about her?”

“Well, she flirted with every gentleman present at each party, young and old.”

“With every one?”

“Yes, or nearly so.”

“This is enough to show the groundlessness of your apprehensions. Mrs. Percival may have been too richly endowed with vivacity, but my suspicion is that her freedom arises, in great part, from her conscious guilelessness and her moral self-possession.”

“Again I say I hope you may be right, and I wrong.”

“Why so emphasise that word hope? Have you observed any other instances of what you deem your wife’s impropriety?”

“Yes,” he replied, with a sigh.

“Relate them.”

“The other day my wife induced me to take her to the flower-show held in the gardens of the Botanic Society, Regent’s Park.”

“She asked you to take her?” I interposed.

“Yes, and I did so. I yield every thing she desires; and why not, as I am not certain that her affections wander?”

“Quite correct; but did any thing occur there?”

“Perhaps you deem it nothing. She hung on the arm of Colonel Foreshore for a couple of hours.”

“The old Indian colonel?”

“Yes.”

“Well, really, I do not see any thing in that. I happened to be at that show myself with Mrs. Forrester and a distinguished relative of ours. I remember that among the flowers were several Oriental plants, which our florists have succeeded in naturalising. This is one of the most common incidents of a flower-show.”

“I wish I could look upon these things as you do. A single incident of the kind might not have aroused my apprehensions; but so many, and at various times furnish a collective evidence impossible to resist.”

“How long have you been married?”

“A little more than two years.”

“Any family?”

“No.”

I was quite convinced, as the reader must be, that there was really nothing in the conduct of Mrs. Percival to justify the cruel suspicions of her husband. His employment of me would, I saw, be one of the absurdest things he could very well do.

Should I allow him to employ me? Ought I to permit myself to be used as a spy upon his wife’s movements—being so firmly convinced, as I was, of her innocence?

The mystery of this jealousy was capable of a simple explanation. The lady had been endowed by nature with a somewhat mercurial disposition, which her education had done little to check. The very scenes in which her girlhood had been spent had inspired her with a wild or playful tendency. Nothing in her married life had yet happened to curb or control the innocent gaiety, or it might be waywardness, of her disposition. Had her union with Mr. Percival been blessed by offspring (of which, it is needless to say, there was yet no ground for despair), it is most probable that at dinner-parties she would have been a less attractive member, at public breakfasts she would have been less chatty or facetious, at flower-shows a less anxious inquirer.

But should I, or should I not, undertake to confirm or remove the unjust husband’s suspicions?

Upon this I could not make up my mind. I required time for consideration. It was arranged that Mr. Percival should see me again in three days.

During the interval between his first and second visits, I carefully balanced reasons for and against the engagement, and at length resolved to accept it. If I did not undertake it, I knew others would, if it were offered them. If they took it in hand, I was not at all sure that they would perform their task with becoming delicacy and consideration. I thought it not improbable that some rude or vulgar man might be instructed, and that he might, by starting on his inquiry with a foregone conclusion of the lady’s guilt, so interpret what he saw of her free conduct as to increase her husband’s jealousy. On the other hand, if I undertook the affair, I doubted not the result would be a vindication of Mrs. Percival in her husband’s eyes.

Mr. Percival punctually kept his appointment with me.

He was the first to speak.

“I hope,” he said, “you have agreed to assist me?”

“I have.”

“Well, I shall feel grateful to you when you have probed the truth—doubly grateful, if you can prove that my doubts about my wife are unfounded.”

“I expect to earn that double gratitude.”

“Be it so,” he said, with great emphasis. “It is no drawback on your professional merits, to my mind, that you have already formed an opinion that my wife is as good as I could wish her, and that I am a jealous fool. I should not like to know that you had condemned her beforehand. I am persuaded that you will do your duty faithfully towards me, and considerately towards her.”

I promised him that much.

There was a ball at Almack’s the very next day. Mrs. Percival was to be there, and so was her husband. They would go separately, after the manner of the ton—she in her brougham, and he in his cab.

I did not think Almack’s a desirable place to begin my inquiries in. It would not be easy for me to gain admission into this closest of all assemblies, although I could have encompassed that, as I had before. I preferred a stand-point of observation where etiquette was less rigid.

Next week there was to be a grand fancy-dress ball, under a potent body of lady patronesses, for the relief of starvation in Whitechapel; and Mrs. Percival, acting under the feeble light of conventional charity, thought it her duty to buy a ticket (price one guinea, of which an infinitessimal portion was netted for the indigent), and to largely patronise her dressmaker and milliner, in proof of her intense sympathy with the famishing poor.

I attended this ball, and was sickened by its palpable mockery of the distress it was ostensibly designed to relieve; but I must not get off the track of my narrative to moralise.

At this ball I saw nothing to justify a suspicion of impropriety on the part of Mrs. Percival; nor did I at a flower-show which was held in the grounds of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham; nor at a public breakfast which the Marchioness of L—— gave in her grounds at Chiswick. A more private scrutiny of the lady’s movements also went to prove her strictly virtuous in character.

I now got wearied and half-disgusted with my task, and brought it to an end by reporting to Mr. Percival my absolute conviction of his wife’s innocence and purity. He received my statement without offering any opinion upon it, and it was evident that he was not quite satisfied with it. It had, I dare say, weakened his suspicions, but it had not destroyed them. I was sorry for the imperfect result, but I could do no more than I had done for his satisfaction.

I often mused and reflected over this curious case. What could have given rise to these suspicions in the mind of such a man as Mr. Percival? I set it down to incompatibility of temper. He was a somewhat studious and retiring man. His wife, although as good a woman as ever drew breath, was a light and somewhat volatile person. In many respects, I argued, this is an incongruous union. I thought I saw inevitable misery for both husband and wife in the future.

About a year after I had finished my proper business with Mr. and Mrs. Percival, I was waited upon by an eminent London solicitor, who knew nothing of my former engagement, for the purpose of tracing the retreat of that gentleman, who had deserted his wife, and was hiding from all his friends. My visitor, the private solicitor of Mr. Percival, had not heard from him since or about his flight. It was not supposed that any violence had befallen him, although it was hard to say what harm might befall him. His physician had advised that he had been suffering from one of the thousand forms of one of the hundred branches of that disorder known by the familiar collective title of insanity. It was a mild and harmless type of the disease—a species of melancholia. The friends of the unfortunate gentleman were anxious to discover, and perhaps secretly watch over, him; at the worst, place him under gentle and temporary restraint. As he was known to be a man of high and honourable ambition—very likely to obtain and worthily fill a seat in Parliament, unless his prospects were marred—publicity, scandal, or gossip, on the subject of his bereavement, was to be deprecated.

I accepted this engagement, and I thought it desirable to let the solicitor know of the previous retainer given me by Mr. Percival, so that he might re-state the facts to the physician, who would thereby gain some insight into the secret of the gentleman’s misfortune.

We had no clue to Mr. Percival’s whereabouts. Certain facts led us to imagine he had not left this country; but I put myself in communication with the French and Belgian police, as the best mode of tracing him if he had crossed the sea. I had all the provincial papers filed at Peele’s and Deacon’s Coffee-houses critically scanned, so that if any harm befell him I should hear of it. This was a precaution I added to the usual police inquiry through the Hue and Cry.

One day I got intelligence through a West-of-England paper that a gentleman, answering to the description of Mr. Percival, had been found wandering along the coast, in a state which indicated mental disorganisation. I lost no time in proceeding to the spot, with the doctor, and with Mrs. Percival, who insisted upon being of the party.

We claimed the poor man, who yielded himself up to our control like an infant. We brought him to London, and took apartments for him in a western suburb, so as to be out of the eye of gossips, and near to that of his physician. It is, perhaps, needless to say that his wife attended on him mainly with her own hands, and would let none but the rudest offices be performed by any other person. Carriage rides, gentle exercise, and tonic medicines told beneficially on the patient day by day; so that in a few weeks, under the doctor’s advice, arrangements were made to take him, in his own yacht, to the north of Europe.

The physician explained to me that the secret of his malady was disappointed or impatient ambition. He was an only son. He had inherited, with his father’s property, that gentleman’s desire to establish a house. He feared that the curse of sterility had fallen on him or his wife, and the constant brooding over this thought had curdled jealousy in his heart.

In the north of Europe Mr. Percival’s mental health was completely restored. On his return to England he called upon me, and thanked me very sincerely for the part I had played in the narrative I have described—stating that if any thing could exceed the claims I had upon his gratitude for the attention I had bestowed upon him, it would be the faithful manner in which I had combated and sought to destroy his unfounded suspicions of his wife. A better or nobler woman did not, he said, exist. She had, he feared, impaired her health by her vigilant attention to him during his illness; and the only grief he now had was the apprehension that, being enceinte, the change of air, and Continental travel, which had just been recommended for her sake, would be inadequate to restore a vigour and tone to her delicate system. I am happy, however, in being able to state that these fears have not been realised. Mr. and Mrs. Percival, who are among the very happiest people in the world (the health of both, in mind and in body, being as nearly perfect as they can be), have two sons, with the prospect of contributing more guarantees against the termination of their pedigree in this generation.

THE END.

London:
Levey And Robson, Printers, Great New Street,
Fetter Lane.