"SHE STOOD UP IN BITTER CASE, WITH A PALE YET STEADY FACE."
The silence of night and slumber came down upon the world, shadow and darkness were folded round and about it. The ticking of the old eight-day clock in the hall, of the bracket clock in the corridor, and of half a dozen other time-pieces, conscientiously performing in empty rooms, took that solemn and sepulchral sound which all clocks, down to the humblest Dutchman, assume after midnight. Sleep, peace, and silence seemed to brood over all human and brute life at Mount Royal. Yet there were some who had no thought of sleep that night.
In Mr. Tregonell's dressing-room there was the light of lamp and fire, deep into the small hours. The master of the house lolled, half-dressed, in an armchair by the hearth; while his friend, Captain Vandeleur, in smoking-jacket and slippers, lounged with his back to the chimney-piece, and a cigarette between his lips. A whisky bottle and a couple of siphons stood on a tray on the Squire's writing-table, an open pistol-case near at hand.
"You'd better lie down for a few hours," said Captain Vandeleur. "I'll call you at half-past five."
"I'd rather sit here. I may get a nap by-and-by perhaps. You can go to bed if you are tired: I sha'n't oversleep myself."
"I wish you'd give up this business, Tregonell," said his friend, with unaccustomed seriousness. "This man is a dead shot. We heard of him in Bolivia, don't you remember? A man who has spent half his life in shooting-galleries, and who has lived where life counts for very little. Why should you stake your life against his? It isn't even betting: you're good enough at big game, but you've had very little pistol practice. Even if you were to kill him, which isn't on the cards, you'd be tried for murder; and where's the advantage of that?"
"I'll risk it," answered Leonard, doggedly, "I saw him with my wife's hand clasped in his—saw him with his lips close to her face—close enough for kisses—heard her promise him an answer—to-morrow. By Heaven there shall be no such to-morrow for him and for me. For one of us there shall be an end of all things."
"I don't believe Mrs. Tregonell is capable"—began Jack, thoughtfully mumbling his cigarette.
"You've said that once before, and you needn't say it again. Capable! Why, man alive, I saw them together. Nothing less than the evidence of my own eyes would have convinced me. I have been slow enough to believe. There is not a man or woman in this house, yourself included, who has not, in his secret soul, despised me for my slowness. And yet, now, because there is a question of a pistol-shot or two you fence round, and try to persuade me that my wife's good name is immaculate, that all which you have seen and wondered at for the last three weeks means nothing."
"Those open flirtations seldom do mean anything," said Jack, persuasively.
A man may belong to the hawk tribe and yet not be without certain latent instincts of compassion and good feeling.
"Perhaps not—but secret meetings do: what I saw at the Kieve to-day was conclusive. Besides, the affair is all settled—you and de Cazalet have arranged it between you. He is willing that there should be no witness but you. The whole business will rest a secret between us three; and if we get quietly down to the sands before any one is astir to see us no one else need ever know what happened there."
"If there is bloodshed the thing must be known."
"It will seem like accident?"
"True," answered Vandeleur, looking at him searchingly; "like that accident last year at the Kieve—poor Hamleigh's death. Isn't to-morrow the anniversary, by-the-by?"
"Yes—the date has come round again."
"Dates have an awkward knack of doing that. There is a cursed mechanical regularity in life which makes a man wish himself in some savage island where there is no such thing as an almanack," said Vandeleur, taking out another cigarette. "If I had been Crusoe, I should never have stuck up that post. I should have been too glad to get rid of quarter-day."
In Christabel's room at the other end of the long corridor there was only the dim light of the night-lamp, nor was there any sound, save the ticking of the clock and the crackling of the cinders in the dying fire. Yet here there was no more sleep nor peace than in the chamber of the man who was to wager his life against the life of his fellow-man in the pure light of the dawning day. Christabel stood at her window, dressed just as she had left the drawing-room, looking out at the sky and the sea, and thinking of him who, at this hour last year, was still a part of her life—perchance a watcher then as she was watching now, gazing with vaguely questioning eyes into the illimitable panorama of the heavens, worlds beyond worlds, suns and planetary systems, scattered like grains of sand over the awful desert of infinite space, innumerable, immeasurable, the infinitesimals of the astronomer, the despair of faith. Yes, a year ago and he was beneath that roof, her friend, her counsellor, if need were; for she had never trusted him so completely, never so understood and realized all the nobler qualities of his nature, as in those last days, after she had set an eternal barrier between herself and him.
She stood at the open lattice, the cold night air blowing upon her fever-heated face; her whole being absorbed not in deliberate thought, but in a kind of waking trance. Strange pictures came out of the darkness, and spread themselves before her eyes. She saw her first lover lying on the broad flat rock at St. Nectan's Kieve, face downward, shot through the heart, the water stained with the life-blood slowly oozing from his breast. And then, when that picture faded into the blackness of night, she saw her husband and Oliver de Cazalet standing opposite to each other on the broad level sands at Trebarwith, the long waves rising up behind them like a low wall of translucent green, crested with silvery whiteness. So they would stand face to face a few hours hence. From her lurking-place behind the trees and brushwood at the entrance to the Kieve she had heard the appointment made—and she knew that at seven o'clock those two were to meet, with deadliest intent. She had so planned it—a life for a life.
She had no shadow of doubt as to which of those two would fall. Three months ago on the Riffel she had seen the Baron's skill as a marksman tested—she had seen him the wonder of the crowd at those rustic sports—seen him perform feats which only a man who has reduced pistol-shooting to a science would attempt. Against this man Leonard Tregonell—good all-round sportsman as he was—could have very little chance. Leonard had always been satisfied with that moderate skilfulness which comes easily and unconsciously. He had never given time and labour to any of the arts he pursued—content to be able to hold his own among parasites and flatterers.
"A life for a life," repeated Christabel, her lips moving dumbly, her heart throbbing heavily, as if it were beating out those awful words. "A life for a life—the old law—the law of justice—God's own sentence against murder. The law could not touch this murderer—but there was one way by which that cruel deed might be punished, and I found it."
The slow silent hours wore on. Christabel left the window, shivering with cold, though cheeks, brow, and lips were burning. She walked up and down the room for a long while, till the very atmosphere of the room, nay, of the house itself, seemed unendurable. She felt as if she were being suffocated, and this sense of oppression became so strong that she was sorely tempted to shriek aloud, to call upon some one for rescue from that stifling vault. The feeling grew to such intensity that she flung on her hat and cloak, and went quickly downstairs to a lobby-door that opened into the garden, a little door which she had unbolted many a night after the servants had locked up the house, in order to steal out in the moonlight and among the dewy flowers, and across the dewy turf to those shrubbery walks which had such a mysterious look—half in light and half in shadow.
She closed the door behind her, and stood with the night wind blowing round her, looking up at the sky; clouds were drifting across the starry dome, and the moon, like a storm-beaten boat, seemed to be hurrying through them. The cold wind revived her, and she began to breathe more freely.
"I think I was going mad just now," she said to herself.
And then she thought she would go out upon the hills, and down to the churchyard in the valley. On this night, of all nights, she would visit Angus Hamleigh's grave. It was long since she had seen the spot where he lay—since her return from Switzerland she had not once entered a church. Jessie had remonstrated with her gravely and urgently—but without eliciting any explanation of this falling off in one who had been hitherto so steadfastly devout.
"I don't feel inclined to go to church, Jessie," she said, coolly; "there is no use in discussing my feelings. I don't feel fit for church; and I am not going in order to gratify your idea of what is conventional and correct."
"I am not thinking of this in its conventional aspect—I have always made light of conventionalities—but things must be in a bad way with you, Christabel, when you do not feel fit for church."
"Things are in a bad way with me," answered Christabel, with a dogged moodiness which was insurmountable. "I never said they were good."
This surrender of old pious habits had given Jessie more uneasiness than any other fact in Christabel's life. Her flirtation with the Baron must needs be meaningless frivolity, Jessie had thought; since it seemed hardly within the limits of possibility that a refined and pure-minded woman could have any real penchant for that showy adventurer; but this persistent avoidance of church meant mischief.
And now, in the deep dead-of-night silence, Christabel went on her lonely pilgrimage to her first lover's grave. Oh, happy summer day when, sitting by her side outside the Maidenhead coach, all her own through life, as it seemed, he told her how, if she had the ordering of his grave, she was to bury him in that romantic churchyard, hidden in a cleft of the hill. She had not forgotten this even amidst the horror of his fate, and had told the vicar that Mr. Hamleigh's grave must be at Minster and no otherwhere. Then had come his relations, suggesting burial-places with family associations—vaults, mausoleums, the pomp and circumstance of sepulture. But Christabel had been firm; and while the others hesitated a paper was found in the dead man's desk requesting that he might be buried at Minster.
How lonely the world seemed in this solemn pause between night and morning. Never before had Christabel been out alone at such an hour. She had travelled in the dead of the night, and had seen the vague dim night-world from the window of a railway carriage—but never until now had she walked across these solitary hills after midnight. It seemed as if for the first time in her life she were alone with the stars.
How difficult it was in her present state of mind to realize that those lights, tremulous in the deep blue vault, were worlds, and combinations of worlds—almost all of them immeasurably greater than this earth on which she trod. To her they seemed living watchers of the night—solemn, mysterious beings, looking down at her with all-understanding eyes. She had an awful feeling of their companionship as she looked up at them—a mystic sense that all her thoughts—the worst and best of them—were being read by that galaxy of eyes.
Strangely beautiful did the hills and the sky—the indefinite shapes of the trees against the edge of the horizon, the mysterious expanse of the dark sea—seem to her in the night silence. She had no fear of any human presence, but there was an awful feeling in being, as it were, for the first time in her life alone with the immensities. Those hills and gorges, so familiar in all phases of daylight, from sunrise to after set of sun, assumed Titanic proportions in this depth of night, and were as strange to her as if she had never trodden this path before. What was the wind saying, as it came moaning and sobbing along the deep gorge through which the river ran?—what did the wind say as she crossed the narrow bridge which trembled under her light footfall? Surely there was some human meaning in that long minor wail, which burst suddenly into a wild unearthly shriek, and then died away in a low sobbing tone, as of sorrow and pain that grew dumb from sheer exhaustion, and not because there was any remission of pain or sorrow.
With that unearthly sound still following her, she went up the winding hill-side path, and then slowly descended to the darkness of the churchyard—so sunk and sheltered that it seemed like going down into a vault.
Just then the moon leapt from behind an inky cloud, and, in that ghostly light, Christabel saw the pale grey granite cross which had been erected in memory of Angus Hamleigh. It stood up in the midst of nameless mounds, and humble slate tablets, pale and glittering—an unmistakable sign of the spot where her first lover lay. Once only before to-night had she seen that monument. Absorbed in the pursuit of a Pagan scheme of vengeance she had not dared to come within the precincts of the church, where she had knelt and prayed through all the sinless years of her girlhood. To-night some wild impulse had brought her here—to-night, when that crime which she called retribution was on the point of achievement.
She went with stumbling footsteps through the long grass, across the low mounds, till she came to that beneath which Angus Hamleigh lay. She fell like a lifeless thing at the foot of the cross. Some loving hand had covered the mound of earth with primroses and violets, and there were low clambering roses all round the grave. The scent of sweetbriar was mixed with the smell of earth and grass. Some one had cared for that grave, although she, who so loved the dead, had never tended it.
"Oh, my love! my love!" she sobbed, with her face upon the grass and the primrose leaves, and her arms clasping the granite; "my murdered love—my first, last, only lover—before to-morrow's sun is down your death will be revenged, and my life will be over! I have lived only for that—only for that, Angus, my love, my love!" She kissed the cold wet grass more passionately than she had ever kissed the dead face mouldering underneath it. Only to the dead—to the utterly lost and gone—is given this supreme passion—love sublimated to despair. From the living there is always something kept back—something saved and garnered for an after-gift—some reserve in the mind or the heart of the giver; but to the dead love gives all—with a wild self-abandonment which knows not restraint or measure. The wife who, while this man yet lived, had been so rigorously true to honour and duty, now poured into the deaf dead ears a reckless avowal of love—love that had never faltered, never changed—love that had renounced the lover, and had yet gone on loving to the end.
The wind came moaning out of the valley again with that sharp human cry, as of lamentation for the dead.
"Angus!" murmured Christabel, piteously, "Angus, can you hear me?—do you know? Oh, my God! is there memory or understanding in the world where he has gone, or is it all a dead blank? Help me, my God! I have lost all the old sweet illusions of faith—I have left off praying, hoping, believing—I have only thought of my dead—thought of death and of him till all the living world grew unreal to me—and God and Heaven were only like old half-forgotten dreams. Angus!"
For a long time she lay motionless, her cold hands clasping the cold stone, her lips pressed upon the soft dewy turf, her face buried in primrose leaves—then slowly, and with an effort, she raised herself upon her knees, and knelt with her arms encircling the cross—that sacred emblem which had once meant so much for her: but which, since that long blank interval last winter, seemed to have lost all meaning. One great overwhelming grief had made her a Pagan—thirsting for revenge—vindictive—crafty—stealthy as an American Indian on the trail of his deadly foe—subtle as Greek or Oriental to plan and to achieve a horrible retribution.
She looked at the inscription on the cross, legible in the moonlight, deeply cut in large Gothic letters upon the grey stone, filled in with dark crimson.
"Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord."
Who had put that inscription upon the cross? It was not there when the monument was first put up. Christabel remembered going with Jessie to see the grave in that dim half-blank time before she went to Switzerland. Then there was nothing but a name and a date. And now, in awful distinctness, there appeared those terrible words—God's own promise of retribution—the claim of the Almighty to be the sole avenger of human wrongs.
And she, reared by a religious woman, brought up in the love and fear of God, had ignored that sublime and awful attribute of the Supreme. She had not been content to leave her lover's death to the Great Avenger. She had brooded on his dark fate, until out of the gloom of despair there had arisen the image of a crafty and bloody retribution. "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." So runs the dreadful sentence of an older law. The newer, lovelier law, which began in the after-glow of Philosophy, the dawn of Christianity, bids man leave revenge to God. And she, who had once called herself a Christian, had planned and plotted, making herself the secret avenger of a criminal who had escaped the grip of the law.
"Must he lie in his grave, unavenged, until the Day of Judgment?" she asked herself. "God's vengeance is slow."
An hour later, and Christabel, pale and exhausted, her garments heavy with dew, was kneeling by her boy's bed in the faint light of the night-lamp; kneeling by him as she had knelt a year ago, but never since her return from Switzerland—praying as she had not prayed since Angus Hamleigh's death. After those long, passionate prayers, she rose and looked at the slumberer's face—her husband's face in little—but oh! how pure and fresh and radiant. God keep him from boyhood's sins of self-love and self-indulgence—from manhood's evil passions, hatred and jealousy. All her life to come seemed too little to be devoted to watching and guarding this beloved from the encircling snares and dangers of life. Pure and innocent now, in this fair dawn of infancy, he nestled in her arms—he clung to her and believed in her. What business had she with any other fears, desires, or hopes—God having given her the sacred duties of maternity—the master-passion of motherly love?
"I have been mad!" she said to herself; "I have been living in a ghastly dream: but God has awakened me—God's word has cured me."
God's word had come to her at the crisis of her life. A month ago, while her scheme of vengeance seemed still far from fulfilment, that awful sentence would hardly have struck so deeply. It was on the very verge of the abyss that those familiar words caught her; just when the natural faltering of her womanhood, upon the eve of a terrible crime, made her most sensitive to a sublime impression.
The first faint streak of day glimmered in the east, a pale cold light, livid and ghostly upon the edge of the sea yonder, white and wan upon the eastward points of rock and headland, when Jessie Bridgeman was startled from her light slumbers by a voice at her bedside. She was always an early riser, and it cost her no effect to sit up in bed, with her eyes wide open, and all her senses on the alert.
"Christabel, what is the matter? Is Leo ill?"
"No, Leo is well enough. Get up and dress yourself quickly, Jessie. I want you to come with me—on a strange errand; but it is something that must be done, and at once."
"Christabel, you are mad."
"No. I have been mad. I think you must know it—this is the awakening. Come, Jessie."
Jessie had sprung out of bed, and put on slippers and dressing-gown, without taking her eyes off Christabel. Presently she felt her cloak and gown.
"Why, you are wet through. Where have you been?"
"To Angus Hamleigh's grave. Who put that inscription on the cross?"
"I did. Nobody seemed to care about his grave—no one attended to it. I got to think the grave my own property, and that I might do as I liked with it."
"But those awful words! What made you put them there?"
"I wanted the man who killed him to be reminded that there is an Avenger."
"Wash your face and put on your clothes as fast as you can. Every moment is of consequence," said Christabel.
She would explain nothing. Jessie urged her to take off her wet cloak, to go and change her gown and shoes; but she refused with angry impatience.
"There will be time enough for that afterwards," she said; "what I have to do will not take long, but it must be done at once. Pray be quick."
Jessie struggled through her hurried toilet, and followed Christabel along the corridor, without question or exclamation. They went to the door of Baron de Cazalet's room. A light shone under the bottom of the door, and there was the sound of some one stirring within. Christabel knocked, and the door was opened almost instantly by the Baron himself.
"Is it the trap?" he asked. "It's an hour too soon."
"No, it is I, Monsieur de Cazalet. May I come in for a few minutes? I have something to tell you."
"Christabel—my——" He stopped in the midst of that eager exclamation, at sight of the other figure in the background.
He was dressed for the day—carefully dressed, like a man who in a crisis of his life wishes to appear at no disadvantage. His pistol-case stood ready on the table. A pair of candles, burnt low in the sockets of the old silver candlesticks, and a heap of charred and torn paper in the fender showed that the Baron had been getting rid of superfluous documents. Christabel went into the room, followed by Jessie, the Baron staring at them both, in blank amazement. He drew an armchair near the expiring fire, and Christabel sank into it, exhausted and half fainting.
"What does it all mean?" asked de Cazalet, looking at Jessie, "and why are you here with her?"
"Why is she here?" asked Jessie. "There can be no reason except——"
She touched her forehead lightly with the tips of her fingers.
Christabel saw the action.
"No, I am not mad, now," she said, "I believe I have been mad, but that is all over. Monsieur de Cazalet, you and my husband are to fight a duel this morning, on Trebarwith sands."
"My dear Mrs. Tregonell, what a strange notion!"
"Don't take the trouble to deny anything. I overheard your conversation yesterday afternoon. I know everything."
"Would it not have been better to keep the knowledge to yourself, and to remember your promise to me, last night?"
"Yes, I remember that promise. I said I would meet you at Bodmin Road, after you had shot my husband."
"There was not a word about shooting your husband."
"No; but the fact was in our minds, all the same—in yours as well as in mine. Only there was one difference between us. You thought that when you had killed Leonard I would run away with you. That was to be your recompense for murder. I meant that you should kill him, but that you should never see my face again. You would have served my purpose—you would have been the instrument of my revenge!"
"Christabel!"
"Do not call me by that name—I am nothing to you—I never could, under any possible phase of circumstances, be any nearer to you than I am at this moment. From first to last I have been acting a part. When I saw you at that shooting match, on the Riffel, I said to myself 'Here is a man, who in any encounter with my husband, must be fatal.' My husband killed the only man I ever loved, in a duel, without witnesses—a duel forced upon him by insane and causeless jealousy. Whether that meeting was fair or unfair in its actual details, I cannot tell; but at the best it was more like a murder than a duel. When, through Miss Bridgeman's acuteness, I came to understand what that meeting had been, I made up my mind to avenge Mr. Hamleigh's death. For a long time my brain was under a cloud—I could think of nothing, plan nothing. Then came clearer thoughts, and then I met you; and the scheme of my revenge flashed upon me like a suggestion direct from Satan. I knew my husband's jealous temper, and how easy it would be to fire a train there, and I made my plans with that view. You lent yourself very easily to my scheme."
"Lent myself!" cried the Baron, indignantly; and then with a savage oath he said: "I loved you, Mrs. Tregonell, and you made me believe that you loved me."
"I let you make fine speeches, and I pretended to be pleased at them," answered Christabel, with supreme scorn. "I think that was all."
"No, madam, it was not all. You fooled me to the top of my bent. What, those lovely looks, those lowered accents—all meant nothing? It was all a delusion—an acted lie? You never cared for me?"
"No," answered Christabel. "My heart was buried with the dead. I never loved but one man, and he was murdered, as I believed—and I made up my mind to avenge his murder. 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' That sentence was in my mind always, when I thought of Leonard Tregonell. I meant you to be the executioner. And now—now—God knows how the light has come—but the God I worshipped when I was a happy sinless girl, has called me out of the deep pit of sin—called me to remorse and atonement. You must not fight this duel. You must save me from this horrible crime that I planned—save me and yourself from blood-guiltiness. You must not meet Leonard at Trebarwith."
"And stamp myself as a cur, to oblige you: after having lent myself so simply to your scheme of vengeance, lend myself as complacently to your repentance. No, Mrs. Tregonell, that is too much to ask. I will be your bravo, if you like, since I took the part unconsciously—but I will not brand myself with the charge of cowardice—even for you."
"You fought a duel in South America, and killed your adversary. Mr. FitzJesse told me so. Everybody knows that you are a dead shot. Who can call you a coward for refusing to shoot the man whose roof has sheltered you—who never injured you—against whom you can have no ill-will."
"Don't be too sure of that. He is your husband. When I came to Mount Royal, I came resolved to win you."
"Only because I had deceived you. The woman you admired was a living lie. Oh, if you could have looked into my heart only yesterday, you must have shrunk from me with loathing. When I led you on to play the seducer's part, I was plotting murder—murder which I called justice. I knew that Leonard was listening—I had so planned that he should follow us to the Kieve. I heard his stealthy footsteps, and the rustle of the boughs—you were too much engrossed to listen; but all my senses were strained, and I knew the very moment of his coming."
"It was a pity you did not let your drama come to its natural dénouement," sneered de Cazalet, furious with the first woman who had ever completely fooled him. "When your husband was dead—for there is not much doubt as to my killing him—you and I could have come to an understanding. You must have had some gratitude. However, I am not bloodthirsty, and since Mrs. Tregonell has cheated me out of my devotion, fooled me with day-dreams of an impossible future, I don't see that I should gain much by shooting Mr. Tregonell."
"No, there would be no good to you in that profitless bloodshed. It is I who have wronged you—I who wilfully deceived you—degrading myself in order to lure my husband into a fatal quarrel—tempting you to kill him. Forgive me, if you can—and forget this wild wicked dream. Conscience and reason came back to me beside that quiet grave to-night. What good could it do him who lies there that blood should be spilt for his sake? Monsieur de Cazalet, if you will give up all idea of this duel I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life."
"You have treated me very cruelly," said the Baron, taking both her hands, and looking into her eyes, half in despairing love, half in bitterest anger; "you have fooled me as never man was fooled before, I think—tricked me—and trifled with me—and I owe you very little allegiance. If you and I were in South America I would show you very little mercy. No, my sweet one, I would make you play out the game—you should finish the drama you began—finish it in my fashion. But in this world of yours, hemmed round with conventionalities, I am obliged to let you off easily. As for your husband—well, I have exposed my life too often to the aim of a six-shooter to be called coward if I let this one opportunity slip. He is nothing to me—or I to him—since you are nothing to me. He may go—and I may go. I will leave a line to tell him that we have both been the dupes of a pretty little acted charade, devised by his wife and her friends—and instead of going to meet him at Trebarwith, I'll drive straight to Launceston, and catch the early train. Will that satisfy you, Mrs. Tregonell?"
"I thank you with all my heart and soul—you have saved me from myself."
"You are a much better man than I thought you, Baron," said Jessie, speaking for the first time.
She had stood by, a quiet spectator of the scene, listening intently, ready at any moment to come to Christabel's rescue, if need were—understanding, for the first time, the moving springs of conduct which had been so long a mystery to her.
"Thank you, Miss Bridgeman. I suppose you were in the plot—looked on and laughed in your sleeve, as you saw how a man of the world may be fooled by sweet words and lovely looks."
"I knew nothing. I thought Mrs. Tregonell was possessed by the devil. If she had let you go on—if you had shot her husband—I should not have been sorry for him—for I know he killed a much better man than himself, and I am hard enough to hug the stern old law—a life for a life. But I should have been sorry for her. She is not made for such revenges."
"And now you will be reconciled with your husband, I suppose, Mrs. Tregonell. You two will agree to forget the past, and to live happily ever afterwards?" sneered de Cazalet, looking up from the letter which he was writing.
"No! there can be no forgetfulness for either of us. I have to do my duty to my son. I have to win God's pardon for the guilty thoughts and plans which have filled my mind so long. But I owe no duty to Mr. Tregonell. He has forfeited every claim. May I see your letter when it is finished?"
De Cazalet handed it to her without a word—a brief epistle, written in the airiest tone, ascribing all that had happened at the Kieve to a sportive plot of Mrs. Tregonell's, and taking a polite leave of the master of the house.
"When he reads that, I shall be half-way to Launceston," he said, as Christabel gave him back the letter.
"I am deeply grateful to you, and now good-bye," she said, gravely, offering him her hand. He pressed the cold slim hand in his, and gently raised it to his lips.
"You have used me very badly, but I shall love and honour you to the end of my days," he said, as Christabel left him.
Jessie was following, but de Cazalet stopped her on the threshold. "Come," he said, "you must give me the clue to this mystery. Surely you were in it—you, who know her so well, must have known something of this?"
"I knew knowing. I watched her with fear and wonder. After—after Mr. Hamleigh's death—she was very ill—mentally ill; she sank into a kind of apathy—not madness—but terribly near the confines of madness. Then, suddenly, her spirits seemed to revive—she became eager for movement, amusement—an utterly different creature from her former self. She and I, who had been like sisters, seemed ever so far apart. I could not understand this new phase of her character. For a whole year she has been unlike herself—a terrible year. Thank God this morning I have seen the old Christabel again."
Half an hour afterwards the Baron's dog-cart drove out of the yard, and half an hour after his departure the Baron's letter was delivered to Leonard Tregonell, who muttered an oath as he finished reading it, and then handed it to his faithful Jack.
"What do you say to that?" he asked.
"By Jove, I knew Mrs. T—— was straight," answered the Captain, in his unsophisticated phraseology. "But it was a shabby trick to play you all the same. I daresay Mop and Dop were in it. Those girls are always ready for larks."
Leonard muttered something the reverse of polite about Dop and Mop, and went straight to the stable-yard, where he cancelled his order for the trap which was to have conveyed him to Trebarwith sands, and where he heard of the Baron's departure for Launceston.
Mystified and angry, he went straight upstairs to his wife's room. All barriers were broken down now. All reticence was at an end. Plainest words, straightest measures, befitted the present state of things.
Christabel was on her knees in a recess near her bed—a recess which held a little table, with her devotional books and a prie-dieu chair. A beautiful head of the Salvator Mundi, painted on china at Munich, gave beauty and sanctity to this little oratory. She was kneeling on the prie-dieu, her arms folded on the purple velvet cushion, her head leaning forward on the folded arms, in an attitude of prostration and self-abandonment, her hair falling loosely over her white dressing gown. She rose at Leonard's entrance, and confronted him, a ghostlike figure, deadly pale.
"Your lover has given me the slip," he said, roughly; "why didn't you go with him? You mean to go, I have no doubt. You have both made your plans to that end—but you want to sneak away—to get clear of this country, perhaps, before people have found out what you are. Women of your stamp don't mind what scandal they create, but they like to be out of the row."
"You are mistaken," his wife answered, coldly, unmoved by his anger, as she had ever been untouched by his love. "The man who left here this morning was never my lover—never could have been, had he and I lived under the same roof for years. But I intended him for the avenger of that one man whom I did love, with all my heart and soul—the man you killed."
"What do you mean?" faltered Leonard, with a dull grey shade creeping over his face.
It had been in his mind for a long time that his secret was suspected by his wife—but this straight, sudden avowal of the fact was not the less a shock to him.
"You know what I mean. Did you not know when you came back to this house that I had fathomed your mystery—that I knew whose hand killed Angus Hamleigh. You did know it, Leonard: you must have known: for you knew that I was not a woman to fling a wife's duty to the winds, without some all-sufficient reason. You knew what kind of wife I had been for four dull, peaceful years—how honestly I had endeavoured to perform the duty which I took upon myself in loving gratitude to your dear mother. Did you believe that I could change all at once—become a heartless, empty-headed lover of pleasure—hold you, my husband, at arm's length—outrage propriety—defy opinion—without a motive so powerful, a purpose so deadly and so dear, that self-abasement, loss of good name, counted for nothing with me."
"You are a fool," said Leonard, doggedly. "No one at the inquest so much as hinted at foul play. Why should you suspect any one?"
"For more than one good reason. First, your manner on the night before Angus Hamleigh's death—the words you and he spoke to each other at the door of his room. I asked you then if there were any quarrel between you, and you said no: but even then I did not believe you."
"There was not much love between us. You did not expect that, did you?" asked her husband savagely.
"You invited him to your house; you treated him as your friend. You had no cause to distrust him or me. You must have known that."
"I knew that you loved him."
"I had been your faithful and obedient wife."
"Faithful and obedient; yes—a man might buy faith and obedience in any market. I knew that other man was master of your heart. Great Heaven, can I forget how I saw you that night, hanging upon his words, all your soul in your eyes."
"We were talking of life and death. It was not his words that thrilled me; but the deep thoughts they stirred within me—thoughts of the great mystery—the life beyond the veil. Do you know what it is to speculate upon the life beyond this life, when you are talking to a man who bears the stamp of death upon his brow, who is as surely devoted to the grave as Socrates was when he talked to his friends in the prison. But why do I talk to you of these things? You cannot understand——"
"No! I am outside the pale, am I not?" sneered Leonard; "made of a different clay from that sickly sentimental worshipper of yours, who turned to you when he had worn himself out in the worship of ballet-girls. I was not half fine enough for you, could not talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Was it a pleasant sensation for me, do you think, to see you two sentimentalizing and poetizing, day after day—Beethoven here and Byron there, and all the train of maudlin modern versifiers who have made it their chief business to sap the foundations of domestic life."
"Why did you bring him into your house?"
"Why? Can't you guess? Because I wanted to know the utmost and the worst; to watch you two together; to see what venom was left in the old poison; to make sure, if I could, that you were staunch; to put you to the test."
"God knows I never faltered, throughout that ordeal," said Christabel, solemnly. "And yet you murdered him. You ask me how I know of that murder. Shall I tell you? You were at the Kieve that day; you did not go by the beaten track where the ploughmen must have seen you. No! you crept in by stealth the other way—clambered over the rocks—ah! you start. You wonder how I know that. You tore your coat in the scramble across the arch, and a fragment of the cloth was caught upon a bramble. I have that scrap of cloth, and I have the shooting-jacket from which it was torn, under lock and key in yonder wardrobe. Now, will you deny that you were at the Kieve that day?"
"No. I was there. Hamleigh met me there by appointment. You were right in your suspicion that night. We did quarrel—not about you—but about his treatment of that Vandeleur girl. I thought he had led her on—flirted with her—fooled her——"
"You thought," ejaculated Christabel, with ineffable scorn.
"Well, I told him so, at any rate; told him that he would not have dared to treat any woman so scurvily, with her brother and her brother's friend standing by, if the good old wholesome code of honour had not gone out of fashion. I told him that forty years ago, in the duelling age, men had been shot for a smaller offence against good feeling; and then he rounded on me, and asked me if I wanted to shoot him; if I was trying to provoke a quarrel; and then—I hardly know how the thing came about—it was agreed that we should meet at the Kieve at nine o'clock next morning, both equipped as if for woodcock shooting—game-bag, dogs, and all, our guns loaded with swan-shot, and that we should settle our differences face to face, in that quiet hollow, without witnesses. If either of us dropped, the thing would seem an accident, and would entail no evil consequences upon the survivor. If one of us were only wounded, why——"
"But you did not mean that," interrupted Christabel, with flashing eyes, "you meant your shot to be fatal."
"It was fatal," muttered Leonard. "Never mind what I meant. God knows how I felt when it was over, and that man was lying dead on the other side of the bridge. I had seen many a noble beast, with something almost human in the look of him, go down before my gun; but I had never shot a man before. Who could have thought there would have been so much difference?"
Christabel clasped her hands over her face, and drew back with an involuntary recoil, as if all the horror of that dreadful scene were being at this moment enacted before her eyes. Never had the thought of Angus Hamleigh's fate been out of her mind in all the year that was ended to-day—this day—the anniversary of his death. The image of that deed had been ever before her mental vision, beckoning her and guiding her along the pathway of revenge—a lurid light.
"You murdered him," she said, in low, steadfast tones. "You brought him to this house with evil intent—yes, with your mind full of hatred and malice towards him. You acted the traitor's base, hypocritical part, smiling at him and pretending friendship, while in your soul you meant murder. And then, under this pitiful mockery of a duel—a duel with a man who had never injured you, who had no resentment against you—a duel upon the shallowest, most preposterous pretence—you kill your friend and your guest—you kill him in a lonely place, with none of the safeguards of ordinary duelling; and you have not the manhood to stand up before your fellow-men, and say, 'I did it.'"
"Shall I go and tell them now?" asked Leonard, his white lips tremulous with impotent rage. "They would hang me, most likely. Perhaps that is what you want."
"No, I never wanted that," answered Christabel. "For our boy's sake, for the honour of your dead mother's name, I would have saved you from a shameful death. But I wanted your life—a life for a life. That is why I tried to provoke your jealousy—why I planned that scene with the Baron yesterday. I knew that in a duel between you and him the chances were all in his favour. I had seen and heard of his skill. You fell easily into the trap I laid for you. I was behind the bushes when you challenged de Cazalet."
"It was a plot then. You had been plotting my death all that time. Your songs and dances, and games and folly, all meant the same thing."
"Yes, I plotted your death as you did Angus Hamleigh's," answered Christabel, slowly, deliberately, with steady eyes fixed on her husband's face; "only I relented at the eleventh hour. You did not."
Leonard stared at her in dumb amazement. This new aspect of his wife's character paralyzed his thinking powers, which had never been vigorous. He felt as if, in the midst of a smooth summer sea, he had found himself suddenly face to face with that huge wave known on this wild northern coast, which, generated by some mysterious power in the wide Atlantic, rolls on its deadly course in overwhelming might; engulfing many a craft which but a minute before was riding gaily on a summer sea.
"Yes, you have cause to look at me with horror in your eyes," said Christabel. "I have steeped my soul in sin; I have plotted your death. In the purpose and pursuit of my life I have been a murderer. It is God's mercy that held me back from that black gulf. What gain would your death have been to your victim? Would he have slept more peacefully in his grave, or have awakened happier on the Judgment Day? If he had consciousness and knowledge in that dim mysterious world, he would have been sorry for the ruin of my soul—sorry for Satan's power over the woman he once loved. Last night, kneeling on his grave, these thoughts came into my mind for the first time. I think it was the fact of being near him—almost as if there was some sympathy between the living and the dead. Leonard, I know how wicked I have been. God pity and pardon me, and make me a worthy mother for my boy. For you and me there can be nothing but lifelong parting."
"Well, yes, I suppose there would not be much chance of comfort or union for us, after what has happened," said Leonard, moodily; "ours is hardly a case in which to kiss again with tears, as your song says. I must be content to go my way, and let you go yours. It is a pity we ever married; but that was my fault, I suppose. Have you any particular views as to your future? I shall not molest you; but I should be glad to know that the lady who bears my name is leading a reputable life."
"I shall live with my son—for my son. You need have no fear that I shall make myself a conspicuous person in the world. I have done with life, except for him. I care very little where I live: if you want Mount Royal for yourself, I can have the old house at Penlee made comfortable for Jessie Bridgeman and me. I daresay I can be as happy at Penlee as here."
"I don't want this house. I detest it. Do you suppose I am going to waste my life in England—or in Europe? Jack and I can start on our travels again. The world is wide enough; there are two continents on which I have never set foot. I shall start for Calcutta to-morrow, if I can, and explore the whole of India before I turn my face westwards again. I think we understand each other fully, now. Stay, there is one thing: I am to see my son when, and as often as I please, I suppose."
"I will not interfere with your rights as a father."
"I am glad of that. And now I suppose there is no more to be said. I leave your life, my honour, in your own keeping. Good-bye."
"God be with you," she answered solemnly, giving that parting salutation its fullest meaning.
And so, without touch of lip or hand, they parted for a lifetime.