The Verdict by Edgar Saltus

At this point Jones lost the thread for a moment. He was thinking of the eternal story, told first perhaps in Babylon and retold ever since -- the story of lovers irreparably parted at the beginning and inevitably united at the end. It is a famous story. However old, it is always new, and Jones wondered if he could not retell it, with Priscilla and Rochester -- under other names -- for leads.

Yet the manifest bribe to the coroner, and the antecedent object on the floor -- these things blocked him. In considering them he must have missed something, for when he caught up with Rochester again the latter was telling of Boston, where he had gone for a ring, and where he had run into Nina.

"When she told me," he was saying, "I experienced the curious and by no means enviable sensation of falling from an inordinate height. I had a sense of struggle with the intangible, in which my brain seemed to tip."

"When she told you what? " inquired Jones, getting back at it.

"About Priscilla. It appeared that for a year she had been secretly married. Nina had stood up with her, and she told me of it -- only, as she assured me, and as I realized, for my good. Yes, I realized that; but the goodness of it was that of the surgeon's knife. God, how it hurt!"

"And what," Jones asked, "did you say to the young woman when you saw her again?"

"I did not see her again -- at least, not for a long time. I couldn't see her. Yet I did, and constantly. She haunted me."

Jones nodded.

"I can understand that. But why was she so -- er -- well, clandestine?"

"Because of her father, who would not hear of the plumber."

"Oho! " Jones exclaimed. "It was the plumber, was it, whom she married?"

"Well, you see, from the way Nina put it, he was not an ordinary plumber; he was what you might call a wholesaler. It is true that -- "

"At the same time," Jones interrupted, "the fact could hardly console you."

"What could? I tried to forget -- not to remember, rather -- but with grief no one can argue. To banish it there is nothing but time and silence."

"And someone else," Jones maliciously cut in.

Rochester, exhaling smoke, looked through it at him.

"As you say. Nina became my wife. As such, and more particularly since she is no longer here, I cannot decently say anything against her. But that you may understand the situation, I can, and without discredit to her, admit that she suffered from an affliction which, probably congenital, was therefore not in the least her fault. She simply could not help it."

"You are referring to her heart?"

"Well, yes, her heart. Now in that novel of yours -- In Silk and Scarlet, isn't it -- how was it that you defined jealousy?"

"Jealousy! " Jones blankly repeated. "I am sure I don't know; but wait a second. ‘The barometer of the affections' -- was that it?"