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The Butcher’s Bills
by
CHAPTER III.
ANOTHER ASTONISHMENT.
But a second and very different astonishment awaited Mr. Dempster. Again one evening, on his return from the City, he saw a strange look on the face of the girl who opened the door–but this time it was a look of fear.
“Well?” he said, in a tone at once alarmed and peremptory.
She made no answer, but turned whiter than before.
“Where is your mistress?” he demanded.
“Nobody knows, sir,” she answered.
“Nobody knows! What would you have me understand by such an answer?”
“It’s the bare truth, sir. Nobody knows where she is.”
“God bless me!” cried the husband. “What does it all mean?”
And again he sunk down upon a chair–this time in the hall, and stared at the girl as if waiting further enlightenment.
But there was little enough to be had. Only one point was clear: his wife was nowhere to be found. He sent for every one in the house, and cross-questioned each to discover the last occasion on which she had been seen. It was some time since she had been missed; how long before that she had been seen there was no certainty to be had. He ran to the doctor, then from one to another of her acquaintance, then to her mother, who lived on the opposite side of London. She, like the rest, could tell him nothing. In her anxiety she would have gone back with him, but he was surly, and would not allow her. It was getting towards morning before he reached home, but no relieving news awaited him. What to think was as much a perplexity to him as what to do. He was not in the agony in which a man would have been who thoroughly loved his wife, but he cared enough about her to feel uncomfortable; and the cries of the child, who was suffering from some ailment, made him miserable: in his perplexity and dull sense of helplessness he wondered whether she might not have given the baby poison before she went. Then the thing would make such a talk! and, of all things, Duncan Dempster hated being talked about. How busy people’s brains would be with all his affairs! How many explanations of the mystery would be suggested on ‘Change! Some would say, “What business had a man like him with a fine lady for a wife? one so much younger than himself too!” He could remember making the same remark of another, before he was married. “Served him right!” they would say. And with that the first movement of suspicion awoke in him–purely and solely from his own mind’s reflection of the imagined minds of others. While in his mind’s ear he heard them talking, almost before he knew what they meant the words came to him: “There was that Major Strong, you know!”
“She’s gone to him!” he cried aloud, and, springing from the bed on which he had thrown himself, he paced the chamber in a fury. He had no word for it but hers that he was now in India! They had only been waiting till–By heaven, that child was none of his! And therewith rushed into his mind the conviction that everything was thus explained. No man ever yet entertained an unhappy suspicion, but straightway an army of proofs positive came crowding to the service of the lie. It is astounding with what manifest probability everything will fall in to prove that a fact which has no foundation whatever! There is no end to the perfection with which a man may fool himself while taking absolute precautions against being fooled by others. Every fact, being a living fact, has endless sides and relations; but of all these, the man whose being hangs upon one thought, will see only those sides and relations which fall in with that thought. Dempster even recalled the words of the maid, “It’s mis’ess’s,” as embodying the girl’s belief that it was not master’s. Where a man, whether by nature jealous or not, is in a jealous condition, there is no need of an Iago to parade before him the proofs of his wrong. It was because Shakespere would neither have Desdemona less than perfect, nor Othello other than the most trusting and least suspicious of men, that he had to invent an all but incredible villain to effect the needful catastrophe.