The Elixir of Love by Edgar Saltus

"I am married to a woman who is not my wife."

It was on a liner, after dinner. The big ship had lurched. Into the smoking-room where I sat Lord Silverbridge had lurched with it. He had dropped into a seat beside me. I had asked how he did. It was in answer to that question that he made this curious remark.

As he spoke he looked down and away and ran his long, thin fingers through his bright, thick hair.

"What! " I exclaimed.

"And she is one of your compatriots, too."

Lady Silverbridge -- formerly Miss Fanny Bunker -- was a Bostonian. Of that I was perfectly aware. At her wedding I had sent with my felicitations a fish-knife. I had not been previously honored with her acquaintance. But Silverbridge I had known through a series of tolerably orgiac semesters at Heidelberg, where his name was merely Jones.

Through what miracles of Death such processions of relatives were mown that from nobody he had become peer, it is idle to burden this narrative. Yet the fact that we had worn identical student caps and fought identical student duels had eluded time; it had eluded, too, transitions and still survived. It was to this survival that I attributed the rather intimate confidence of his curious remark.

Of the purport of it I had not so much as an idea. The day previous I had embarked at Cherbourg for New York and found Silverbridge on board. It was then early in August. His marriage had taken place in London late in May. At the time I was on the Continent. It was the fish-knife that represented me. Subsequently the press supplied me with accounts of the wedding, of the bride's beauty as well. I never believe a word I read in the papers. But of the girl's beauty I knew by repute. In her picture I had seen that she embodied the ideal, filled the heart, and stirred it, too -- just as Austin Dobson said of Autonoë -- with pulse of Spring.

These things take long in the telling. But when Silverbridge made his curious remark, memory promptly ladled them out. I throw them in here to get rid of them.

"What! " I repeated.

Silverbridge looked up. "Yes," he presently resumed, "it is beastly to boast, but I am up a bigger tree than any one you ever heard of. My wife is not my wife, and, though I am married to her, I am not her husband."

At this, of course, possibilities of anterior entanglements suggested themselves. It occurred to me that when Silverbridge was Jones, he might, in some unhallowed moment, have gone and done it.

"You are not beating about the bush to tell me that there is another of them, are you? " I asked.

He turned to me quickly. "How did you hit on it? Is it common -- in the States, I mean?"

"Common! Common! " I murmured. "I don't know that I should quite call it that. It seems to me devilish awkward. I haven't the Penal Code on the end of my fingers, but I fancy it must be ten years. How much do they give you in England?"

"For what? " he threw at me.

"Why, for bigamy," I threw back.

He turned to me anew. "I am not talking about bigamy."

"Then what in thunder are you talking about?"

"Something worse."