"I became acquainted with two charmingly pretty girls of the ages of
twenty-three and nineteen, and--forgive my apparent egotism--both fell
in love with me. It was the choice of Hercules over again, but
unluckily I chose the wrong lady, and married the elder. 'Hell has no
fury like a woman scorned,' so the younger soon hated me like poison,
and left Malta for England. I married the woman of my choice and then
my punishment commenced. She was a perfect devil, with nothing but her
beauty to recommend her. Her father boasted they had Arab blood in
their veins, and my belief is that the ancestor of the family must
have been Eblis himself. Often and often she threatened to kill me for
some petty thing, and I believe she would had not some instinct of
danger restrained her. If I looked at another woman, there was a storm
of reproaches--if I were away for a day, her jealous mind conjured up
a hundred infidelities--in short, our married life was a hell upon
earth. At last, after a year of this cat-and-dog existence, I
determined to leave her, and to this course she assented, after a good
deal of persuasion. A deed of separation was drawn up, by which I
allowed her a handsome income on condition that she resided in
Valletta. She agreed to this and, after a stormy parting, I went to
England, and lived there a moody, discontented man."
"You did not see the other sister?" asked Ronald.
"No," he replied; "I never set eyes on her again. She was a nice girl,
and I dare say I did treat her badly by leading her to believe I cared
for her.
"Well, I wandered all over the United Kingdom and, while staying with
some friends in the Highlands, I met the woman who made a better man
of me--for a time. She was an orphan was Elsie Macgregor. Her father
had been a soldier who died of consumption contracted in the trenches
of Sebastopol, during the Crimean War. Fair and slender, with quiet,
blue eyes and hair like yellow corn--I loved her devotedly--yes, too
well to wrong her innocence, and would have gone away in silence, but
she, with a woman's keen instinct, saw there was something wrong, and
begged me to tell her all. I did so, and she--oh, Monteith, what do
you think she did?--left her home and her friends--defied the sneers
of the world and the scornful looks of her own sex and became my
mistress. Yes--she saw that hers alone was the hand that could arrest
me in my downward course; so to save me she ruined herself. I lived
with her for one happy year, and always looked back to that time as
the brightest era in my life.