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Transcriber's Notes:
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        https://books.google.com/books?id=5cgBAAAAQAAJ
        (Oxford University)



KISSING THE ROD.

A Novel.

BY EDMUND YATES,
AUTHOR OF "BROKEN TO HARNESS," "RUNNING THE GAUNTLET,"
"LAND AT LAST," ETC.



"The heart knoweth its own bitterness."



IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.

LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18 CATHERINE ST. STRAND.
1866.

[_All rights of translation and reproduction reserved_.]



LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.



CONTENTS OF VOL. III.
CHAP.
       I. "IN BATTALLIONS."
      II. DELIBERATION.
     III. WINGED IN FLIGHT.
      IV. HUSBAND AND WIFE.
       V. FAILURE.
      VI. HESTER IN POSSESSION.
     VII. A SPLIT IN THE CAMP.
    VIII. THE PLEDGE REDEEMED.
      IX. SUCCESS.
       X. COMING HOME.






KISSING THE ROD.




CHAPTER I.
"IN BATTALIONS."


It was perhaps fortunate for Robert Streightley that the pressure of
an immediate necessity for exertion was put upon him at the same time
that he received his wife's letter. The blow was so frightful that it
might have completely crushed him, had he not been forced to rouse
himself from its first effect, to put the meaning of the terrible
communication aside for a time, while he attended to the stern duties
which were his, as the only representative of the dead man. The
subdued bustle, the ceaseless coming and going, the people to be seen,
the letters to be written, the innumerable demands upon his attention
in reference to his deceased father-in-law, to say nothing of the
exigencies of his own affairs, from which he had not an hour's
respite, controlled him in spite of himself, and by suspending
softened the intensity of the knowledge of the punishment that had
overtaken him.

The suspense and perplexity into which Katharine's unexplained absence
from home had thrown the household on the preceding day had prepared
them to expect that some important intelligence was contained in the
letter which had reached their master that morning; and the unhappy
man comprehended the necessity of making some communication on the
subject. He briefly informed Katharine's maid that she had left town
for the present; and on being asked whether the woman was to join her
mistress at Middlemeads, he said Mrs. Streightley was not there; that
she had better wait for orders, and in the mean time ask no more
questions. An injudicious answer; but Robert neither knew nor cared
what would have been the judicious course to pursue. He knew only that
his sin had found him out; that the chastisement had come; and that
the woman whom he had so loved and so wronged had left him for
ever--left him hating and despising him.

The hours of that dreadful day wore through somehow. Robert had been
engaged during many of them in making arrangements consequent upon Mr.
Guyon's death; he had been at Queen Anne Street, and at his office in
the City, transacting business of different but invariably unpleasant
kinds. He had seen several persons, but not any by whom the domestic
calamity which had fallen upon him was suspected. He had written to
his mother, informing her of Mr. Guyon's death, and requesting that
Ellen would not come to Portland Place for the present; but giving no
explanation of this request. All the day he had carried about with him
the dreadful knowledge of what had befallen him--had been oppressed by
its weight, darkened by its shadow; but he had not examined his
burden--he had gone his appointed way, and done his relentless task,
and the day had been got through somehow. Now he was going to look the
truth in the face; he was going to force his mind to understand it, to
take it in fully, and to suffer the torture at his leisure.

He shut himself up in his "study," and gave orders that no one was to
be admitted. Then, with the door locked and sure of solitude, he read
Katharine's letter again,--not that he needed to do so; every one of
its few remorseless words seemed to have burned themselves into his
brain,--and then he read the letter which hers had enclosed--the
letter endorsed "Shown to R. S." He had not looked at it in the
morning; it had sufficed him to know that the letter which Mr. Guyon
had shown him on the day which had witnessed their disgraceful
compact--the letter which they had tacitly agreed to suppress, still
existed, for his conviction, for his condemnation, and had reached the
hands to which it had been addressed at last: he had put it away with
a shudder. But now he read it--steadily, and with utter amazement.
There it was; and on the blank side of the sheet, in Mr. Guyon's hand,
were the words, "Shown to R.S." But this letter was sill in Mr.
Guyon's hand, and Robert had never seen it--had never heard of it;
this was not the letter from Gordon Frere to Katharine which her
father had shown to him; there was a dreadful mistake somewhere. As
Robert read the heartless words in which Mr. Guyon rejected Gordon
Frere on his daughter's behalf, he understood for the first time how
the conspiracy which had resulted in so sad a success had been carried
out. This, then, was the method Mr. Guyon had adopted, and into which
Robert had never inquired. He saw it all--he understood it all now;
and he honestly recoiled at the baseness by which his triumph had been
secured. He even thought he would not have consented, had he known how
the thing was to be done; but his conscience was not so deadened as to
accept that sophistry, and another moment's thought taught him that he
was as guilty as ever.

But how came the letter to be endorsed with words, intended by their
writer only as a private memorandum, which were not true? This puzzled
Robert, until he guessed, what really was the case, that Mr. Guyon
had put Frere's letter and his reply away together, and had mistaken
the one for the other. Why had he kept them at all? thought Robert;
why had he put such dangerous and useless documents aside, thus
running the risk of detection now realised? "He never could have
intended to use them as a weapon against me," thought Robert, who had
arrived at a tolerably correct appreciation of the character of his
deceased father-in-law. "They convict him directly; me, though
conclusively _to her_, only indirectly to others. Why on earth did he
keep them?"

Ah, why? Why is half the mischief that is done in the world done by
the instrumentality of letters, which ought to have been read and
destroyed, being treasured up instead by foolish women, or read and
left about by men whom experience has not availed to teach? If Robert
Streightley had quite understood Mr. Guyon's character, he would have
known, in the first place, that that gentleman had never been in the
habit of contemplating the contingency of his own death, or of making
any preparation, temporal or spiritual, for that event; in the second,
that his vanity was of so ominous a kind that he liked to indulge in
the recollection of successful enterprises, no matter what their
nature, and treasured up the trophies of his fortunate _coups_, as
other people might keep love-tokens or relics of departed friends,--a
ghastly perversion, it is true, but a characteristic trait of Mr.
Guyon, as Robert came to learn, when he had to examine all the dead
man's papers and personal effects.

After all, it did not matter very much that this mistake had been
made. Any one of the papers concerning this transaction, so endorsed,
would have equally convicted her husband in Katharine's eyes. For a
moment, when Robert perceived the error and recognised how it had
occurred, a faint hope had sprung up in his heart that all might be
explained, in explaining that he had never seen the draft of Mr.
Guyon's letter to Gordon Frere; but it lasted only for a moment, and
then left Robert more shame-stricken, more despairing than before.

The bitter remembrance of his resolutions of the day before came to
torment him now. How futile they were! made all too late, and useless;
how ridiculous they seemed, too! Would he ever have had the courage to
tell the