WYLLARD'S WEIRD
CHAPTER I.
LÉONIE'S MISSION.
The report of the interrogatory before the Juge d'Instruction was followed by a page of notes written by the police-officer Drubarde.
The child Léonie Lemarque was not again in a condition to give her evidence. A violent attack of brain-fever succeeded her second appearance before the Juge d'Instruction, and on her recovery from the fever it was found that her mind had suffered seriously from the shock she had undergone. Memory was a blank. The Juge d'Instruction visited her in her own home when she was convalescent, and tried to recall the impressions made upon her at the time of the murder, in the hope of identifying the murderer; but she had forgotten the whole circumstances of her aunt's death, and yet she suffered agonies from a vague terror associated in her enfeebled mind with the very name of that aunt.
As soon as she was well enough to travel she was taken to the Ursuline convent at Dinan by a good priest who had befriended her grandmother for many years. After this transference to the convent the police lost sight of the child Lemarque.
Throughout the evening, even amidst the distractions of a finely acted comedy by Augier, and in the wakeful intervals of a somewhat disturbed night, Edward Heathcote brooded over the details of the evidence which he had read, not once, but several times, before he closed the volume of reports.
The detective instinct, which is a characteristic of every well-trained lawyer's mind, had been suddenly developed into almost a passion. He no longer limited his desire to the unravelling of the web of Léonie Lemarque's fate; he ardently longed to discover the mystery of Marie Prévol's murder—to succeed where one of the most accomplished Parisian detectives had ignominiously failed. His eagerness to hear more about Drubarde's efforts and failures in this particular case led him to the Quai des Grands Augustins at an early hour, in time to surprise the worthy Félix in the act of breakfasting temperately upon café au lait and boiled eggs.
Monsieur Drubarde gave his new friend a cheery welcome. It was a lovely morning, balmy as midsummer, and the little garden on the leads was bright with gaily-coloured asters, nasturtiums, and geraniums, and agreeably perfumed with mignonette.
"Do you perceive the exquisite odours?" asked Drubarde.
"Your mignonette is delicious."
"My mignonette!" cried the police-officer scornfully. "Why, when the wind blows straight from the flower-market, as it does to-day, I can sit in my garden and enjoy all the perfumes of the Riviera. I can revel in orange-blossoms, drink my fill of tube-roses and stephanotis, Maréchal Niel and Jacqueline roses. And look what a view! Not a touch of the sculptor's chisel that I cannot see yonder on the old kings of Notre Dame; not a cornice or a column in the new hospital that does not stand clear in the morning light! And yet Paris is peopled with fools who do not make gardens on their housetops!"
"Perhaps every landlord would not be so complaisant as yours, Monsieur Drubarde, nor every housetop so adapted to horticulture."
"True, your Parisian landlord is a churl and a niggard, and a good many of our housetops are no doubt impracticable. But the inventive mind, the love of the beautiful, is more often wanting. I see you have been good enough to bring back my volume. You have read the report, I suppose?"
"Every line, every syllable, three times over."
"And you are interested?"
"Deeply. I was never more intensely interested in any case that has come within my knowledge: yet as a lawyer I have become acquainted with many strange stories. Yes, I am more interested than I can say in the fate of that unhappy actress, in the character of her mysterious lover: and yet I doubt if this former crime has any bearing upon the murder of Léonie Lemarque."
"It would certainly be going somewhat far to suppose a link between the death of a girl travelling alone in Cornwall—a death which may after all have been accidental—and the murder of her aunt ten years before in the forest of Saint-Germain. However, it is only by the minutest scrutiny of Léonie's past life that you can arrive at the motive which took her to England, and discover whether she had an enemy in that country—that is to say, if she was lured across the Channel in order to be made away with by that enemy. A very wild and far-fetched supposition I think you will admit, Monsieur, and one which our talented friend Mr. Distin would not entertain for five minutes."
"Professional acumen like Mr. Distin's is apt to run in grooves—to be too intent upon following the practical and the possible, to shut out the romantic element, to strangle the imagination, and to forget that it is very often by following the apparently impossible that we arrive at the truth."
"I see you are an enthusiast, Monsieur."
"I have never tried to subjugate my imagination. As a lawyer I found ideality the most useful faculty of my brain. Now, I have been thinking about Léonie Lemarque's fate from every possible point of view, from the standpoint of imagination as well as from the standpoint of common sense; and it has occurred to me that if the murderer of Marie Prévol were living, he would be Léonie's natural enemy."
"Why so?"
"Because she was the only witness of his crime. She alone would have the power to identify him as the murderer."
"You forget that it is just that power which the poor girl lost during her illness. The fever deprived her of memory."
"That effect of the fever may not have been permanent. The agitation which she showed at the mention of her aunt's name—when Sister Gudule questioned her about the silk handkerchief given to her by Marie Prévol—would indicate that memory was not a blank. And again, if she had forgotten the person of the murderer, or even the fact of the murder, he would not know that, and would regard her existence as a source of danger to himself."
Félix Drubarde smiled the superior smile of experience reproving folly.
"And you think that after having allowed this one witness of his crime to exist unmolested for ten years, the assassin all at once took it into his head to murder her; that with this view he carried her to your barbarous province of Cornuailles, and there flung her over an embankment. I am tempted to paraphrase the Scripture, Monsieur, and to exclaim, 'Are there not viaducts and embankments in this vast France of ours, that a man should go to the remote west of your little England in order to commit murder in that particular fashion!'"
Heathcote felt that the police-officer had the best of the argument.
"I grant that it would have been a clumsy method of getting rid of the girl," he said, "but murder has been clumsily done before to-day, and imagination can conceive no crime so improbable as not to be paralleled by fact. However, it is perhaps too soon to speculate that the murderer of Marie Prévol was also the murderer of Léonie Lemarque. What we have to do is to find out the reason of the girl's journey to England. But before we set about that task, I should like you to tell me what steps you took in your endeavour to trace the murderer after the examination before the Juge d'Instruction."
"I looked over the case in my note-book last night, as I was prepared for you to ask for those details," replied Drubarde. "It was a case that interested me profoundly, all the more so, perhaps, because I made so little headway in my investigations. My first endeavour was to trace the murderer's proceedings immediately after the crime. He must have made his escape from Saint-Germain somehow, unless he had killed himself in some obscure corner of the wood. Even then the finding of the body would have been a question of so many days, weeks, or months. Alive, it would have been impossible for him to remain in hiding in the forest for a week, as the wood was searched thoroughly during the three days immediately succeeding the murder. On the third day a hat was found in a boggy bit of ground, ever so far from the scene of the crime. The hat was a gentleman's hat, but it had been lying three days and nights in a bog. It had been rained upon for two days out of the three—there was no maker's name—no indication by which the owner of the hat could be traced. That it had been found so far off seemed to me to prove that the murderer had been roaming the wood in a wild and disordered frame of mind, and walking at a tremendous pace, or he could never have got over the distance between the time when he was seen by the waiter at the Henri Quatre, to turn the corner of the terrace, and the period of the murder."
"You believe, then, that the man seen by the waiter was actually the murderer?"
"I have no doubt of it. That spasmodic walk, that hesitancy, the looking back, and then hurrying on—all these indicated a mind engaged upon some agitating theme. The man was seen watching the window inside which Marie Prévol and her admirer were seated. He moved away when he saw himself observed. He had disguised himself as much as he could by turning up the collar of his coat; and who can doubt that this was the same man who had been seen by Léonie in the railway-station, watching Marie Prévol and her lover from behind the door of the waiting-room? The dark spectacles were part of a disguise. These are all details that point to one conclusion. The finding of the hat induced me to visit every shop in Saint-Germain where a hat could be bought. It was clear that the murderer could not have gone far from the forest bare-headed, without attracting attention. He must have procured a hat somehow; and it was not long before I ascertained that a hat had been bought late on that very evening. At a shop in an out-of-the-way corner of the town I was told that a boy, a gamin, had come in on the night of the murder, and had asked for a cloth travelling-cap. He had chosen one with flaps to protect the ears, a form of cap intended to give the utmost protection from cold. He paid for his purchase with a napoleon, and seemed in a great hurry to be gone, not even stopping to count his change. The shopkeeper had wondered at such a little ragamuffin being intrusted with a purchase of the kind. The man had been on the point of closing his shop, and therefore was quite positive as to the hour. It was his invariable habit to put up his shutters at nine o'clock, and the clock was striking as the boy came to the door of the shop, breathless and heated, as if he had been running for some distance."
"And you conclude that this travelling-cap was bought for the murderer?"
"Hear the sequel, and judge for yourself. I went from the hatter's to the railway-station, and there, after having been bandied about from pillar to post, I succeeded in finding a tolerably intelligent official who remembered the night of the murder—now ten days past—and who could recall most of the passengers who had left for Paris by the half-past nine o'clock train upon that particular night. The news of the murder had not been brought to the station before the starting of the train: a most criminal neglect on the part of the local police. No suspicious-looking person had been observed to enter the train; but upon my questioning him closely, the man remembered having noticed a traveller who wore a cloth cap with flaps over the ears—a seemingly needless protection upon a mild September evening. 'There is one who takes care of himself,' the railway official had thought. For the rest, this passenger had looked like a gentleman, tall, erect, well-built, a bigger man than the majority of Frenchmen—what the railway official permitted himself to call un bel homme. Had he appeared agitated, breathless, in a hurry? No, the official had noticed nothing extraordinary in his manner. He wore smoke-coloured spectacles, which concealed the expression of his eyes. He had a return-ticket for Paris. The train was scarcely out of the station when the police came to make inquiries. The murder had been known of at the police-station at a quarter past eight, and it was not until after half-past nine that the police thought of setting a watch upon the railway-station. That is how your rustic police favour the escape of a criminal."
"Did you trace your gentleman in the cloth cap any further?"
"Not an inch. No one had observed him at Saint-Lazare, nor at any intermediate station where the train stopped. I wearied myself during the next six weeks in the endeavour to trace the man called Georges, who must have had some local habitation in Paris besides Marie Prévol's apartment. In vain. In no quarter of Paris could I hear of any apartment occupied by a man answering to the description of this man who called himself Georges—rich, independent, handsome, in the prime of life. I could trace no such man among the prosperous classes of Paris, and my machinery for tracking any individual in the wilderness of this great city had hitherto proved almost infallible. This man baffled me. I 'touched on him' now and again, as you English say of your hunted fox, but I could never get upon a scent strong enough to follow; and in the end I gave up all hope of finding him. He must have sneaked out of France under the very noses of the police; for I had set a watch upon every probable exit from this country."
"No doubt he was clever enough to choose the most improbable point of departure. Did you see much of Madame Lemarque after the murder?"
"No. My interest in her ceased when I gave up the case as hopeless. I had fresh cases—new interests; and the murder of Marie Prévol remained in my mind only as a tradition, until you recalled the story of the crime."
"I telegraphed yesterday to the principal of the Ursuline convent at Dinan," said Mr. Heathcote, "and I have obtained from her the address at which Madame Lemarque was living two years ago, when her niece was sent back to Paris in company with other pupils. After leaving you I shall go to that address, and try to find Madame Lemarque. I may have the painful duty of informing her of her granddaughter's death; and yet I can but think that were the grandmother still living she must have heard of the girl's death, and would have communicated with the Cornish police."
"That is to suppose her more intelligent than the average Frenchwoman," said Drubarde, as if he belonged to another nation. "Suppose I accompany you in your search for Madame Lemarque? That ought to be interesting."
"I shall be delighted to secure your aid."
Monsieur Drubarde and his guest descended the ladder. The detective put on a gray overcoat, which concealed and subjugated the airiness of his summer attire. He put on the hat of sober commonplace existence, and contrived to give himself an almost patriarchal aspect before he left his lodging.
The street in which Madame Lemarque had been living when the nuns of Dinan last heard of her was a narrow and shabby little street between Saint-Sulpice and the Luxembourg. The house was decently kept, and had a respectable air, and was evidently not one of those caravanserais where lodgers come and go with every term. It had a settled sober appearance, and the brass plates upon the door told of permanent residents with reputable avocations. One of these plates informed society that Mesdames Lemarque and Beauville, Robes et Modes, occupied the third floor. The staircase was clean and quiet, and the first sound that saluted Mr. Heathcote's ears as he went up-stairs was the screech of a parrot, which became momentarily louder as the visitors approached the third floor.
On the door on the left of the landing appeared another brass plate—Mesdames Lemarque et Beauville, Robes, Modes, Chapeaux.
Heathcote rang the bell. He felt curiously agitated at the thought that in the next minute he might be face to face with the dead girl's grandmother.
The door was opened by an elderly woman in black, very sallow, very thin, with prominent cheekbones and hungry black eyes. She was neatly clad, her rusty silk gown fitting her fleshless form to perfection, her linen collar and cuffs spotlessly clean, her iron-gray hair carefully arranged; but poverty was stamped upon every fold of her gown, and written in every line upon her forehead.
"Madame Lemarque?" inquired Heathcote, while the ci-devant police-officer looked over his shoulder.
"No, I am not Madame Lemarque, but I am her business representative. Any orders intended for Madame Lemarque can be executed by me. I am Mademoiselle Beauville."
"Alas, Mademoiselle, it is not a question of orders," replied Heathcote, in his most courteous tones. "I have come on a painful errand. I have to impart very sad news to Madame Lemarque."
Madame Beauville sighed and shrugged her thin shoulders.
"Madame Lemarque is taking her rest in a place where all the events of this earth are alike indifferent," she said. "Take the trouble to enter my humble apartment, gentlemen. Madame Lemarque was my partner and my friend."
Heathcote and his companion followed the dressmaker into her little salon, where a dilapidated old gray cockatoo was clambering upon a perch, seemingly in danger of doing himself to death head downwards at every other minute. The salon was like the appearance of Mademoiselle Beauville, scrupulously neat, painfully pinched and spare. A poor little old-fashioned walnut table, polished to desperation, a cheap little china vase of common flowers, a carpet which covered only a small island in an ocean of red tiles, an old mahogany secrétaire with materials for writing, and by way of decoration the fashion-plates of Le Follet neatly pinned against the dingy wall-paper. There was a work-basket on the table, and Mademoiselle Beauville had apparently been busily remaking a very old gown of her own, in order to keep her hand in during the dead season.
Heathcote discovered later that Mademoiselle Beauville cherished one bitter and unappeasable hatred, and that was against Messrs. Spricht, Van Klopen, and the whole confraternity of men-milliners.
"Then Madame Lemarque is dead, I apprehend, Mademoiselle?"
"Madame Lemarque died last June."
"Suddenly?"
"No, she had been ailing for some time. But the end came more quickly than she expected. My poor friend had but a short time in which to arrange her affairs."
"Was her granddaughter Léonie living with her at the time of her death?"
"She was. But what do you know about Léonie?"
The ex-detective laid his hand hastily upon Heathcote's wrist before he could answer.
"Answer nothing until we have heard what she can tell us," he whispered.
"I know very little about her, but I am anxious to know more; and if you should be a loser by the waste of your time in answering my inquiries, I shall be most happy to recompense you for that loss," said Heathcote.
The spinster's hungry eyes sparkled. Decent poverty has depths unknown to the professed pauper. Mademoiselle's larder would have exhibited a touching spectacle to the eye of the philosopher or physiologist. The philosopher would have wondered that woman can endure privation with such patience: the physiologist would have been surprised that humanity can sustain life upon so little. For weeks past Mademoiselle Beauville's most luxurious idea of dinner had been an egg. For the last week her daily ration had been two halfpenny rolls.
"Tell me all you can about your friend and her grandchild," asked Heathcote eagerly. "I am particularly interested in knowing everything; but as it is dry work talking, and as neither my friend nor I have lunched, it might be a good idea to get a bottle of Bordeaux and a few biscuits, if Mademoiselle will permit us to refresh ourselves in her apartment."
His keen glance had noted the hollow cheeks and glittering eyes of the dressmaker, and he wanted an excuse for giving life and warmth to that impoverished form. Drubarde caught at the idea, thinking that his client's design was to loosen the lady's tongue by the agency of Bacchus. It was altogether an amateur's notion, crude, wanting in subtlety; but the genial Drubarde was willing to indulge a beginner who was feeling his way in the elements of a great art.
"I'll fetch a bottle of wine myself," he said cheerily; "I know where I can get one close by, and of the best."
"Bring two," said Heathcote. "Mademoiselle will accept the second bottle by way of souvenir."
"Monsieur, do you wish to make me a drunkard? I have not tasted wine since my poor friend's death," protested Mademoiselle Beauville, but there was a look in her face which told Heathcote that his gift would not be unwelcome.
Drubarde ran down-stairs like a boy, and was back in five minutes, carrying a couple of sealed bottles, labelled St. Estèphe, and a large bag of biscuits.
Mademoiselle had set out a tray in the mean time, with her poor little stock of glasses, three in all, and one of those cracked, and an old china plate for the biscuits. Again her eyes glistened when she saw the ample biscuit-bag.
"Let me look at the name on the bag," said Heathcote.
Strange, it was the very name upon that biscuit-bag which he carried at this moment, neatly folded in his pocket-book, the bag which had been found in the second-class compartment from which the girl fell!
"And now, Mademoiselle, tell me all you can about your deceased friend and her granddaughter. You had known Madame Lemarque for some time, I conclude?"
"I had lived with her for nearly ten years."
"For nearly ten years? Then you must have joined your fortunes with hers very soon after the murder of her daughter, Marie Prévol?"
"You have heard of that terrible event, then, Monsieur?" asked the dressmaker. "It is so long since it happened that I thought it had been forgotten by all the world except me."
"No, Mademoiselle; a tragedy so terrible as that can never be forgotten by those who study the physiology of crime. I am keenly interested in tracing the murderer of Marie Prévol."
"After ten years!" exclaimed Mademoiselle Beauville, with an incredulous smile. "Only a dreamer could think of such a thing, Monsieur."
"Then I am such a dreamer, Mademoiselle, and I hope you will help me to realise my dream."
"Does Monsieur know that Monsieur Mardoche, one of the most distinguished of our Juges d'Instruction, took up this case with enthusiasm; that the police were never more earnest than in their endeavour to find poor Marie Prévol's murderer? Does Monsieur know that it was a double murder, and that the Baron de Maucroix, a young man of high family and large fortune, was also a victim? Does Monsieur suppose that the Baron's friends were idle—that no inducement was offered to the police?"
"I am aware of all this, Mademoiselle, and I know that the cleverest police in the world——"
"Except Russia. We must always bow to the superior genius of the north," interjected Drubarde.
"I am aware that the police failed. But you must consider, Mademoiselle, that when the police of Paris were keenest in their pursuit of the assassin, the assassin was most upon his guard. The consciousness of his crime, the horror of his position, intensified his intelligence. He had but one thought—to escape detection. Every act, every movement, every word was planned with that purpose. But now ten years have gone by—ten years of security. The murderer may be less guarded, more open to detection. He will have grown careless—foolhardy even—believing that after such an interval detection must be impossible. If Mademoiselle will do me the honour to touch glasses, we will discuss this question at our leisure."
He had filled the three glasses, but he had perceived that the dressmaker had a delicacy in drinking the wine he had provided, so he took up his glass and offered the edge of it to hers; and, emboldened by this friendly movement, the spinster clinked her glass against the rim of his, then against that of the patriarchal Drubarde, while the cockatoo, wondering at this unwonted revelry, screeched his loudest.
"To your good health, gentlemen," faltered the dressmaker, before she sipped her wine.
"To the speedy discovery of Marie Prévol's murderer," said Heathcote.
"Did you know our poor Marie, Monsieur, that you are thus interested in her dark fate?"
"No, Mademoiselle."
"O, if you had but known her, I should understand your desire to avenge her death. She was so lovely. To know her was to adore her. Even a soured old maid such as I could but yield to her charm. She was as loving as she was lovable; a clinging disposition, a poetical nature. Her life was not blameless, perhaps—who knows? We will not scrutinise too closely. She was as different from those harpies whom one hears of in Paris as a wild rose in the hedge is different from a jewel that has gone the round of every Mont-de-Piété in the city. Her heart was pure as the heart of a child. She had no ambition but to love and to be loved. The man who absorbed her life for a long time, whose hand perhaps slew her, was rich, lavish. He would have loaded her with gifts if she had let him, he would have taken her off the stage and allowed her to play the fine lady; but to the last she preserved the same modest ideas—generous to others, careless of herself."
"Did you ever see the man who called himself Georges?"
"Never. He was a man of curious habits. He loved the night better than the day. Nothing delighted him more than a moonlight drive in the Bois after midnight, a supper at the Cascade. He patronised the restaurants that keep open half the night. Marie and he used to sup together at the Café de Paris, sometimes with one or two chosen friends, but much more often alone. I was not Madame Lemarque's partner at that time; but I occupied a room in the roof of this house, and I used to work by the day for Madame and for Marie. I have spent many days working for her in the Rue de Lafitte. I made all her gowns, and I was proud that she should challenge comparison with actresses who squandered their thousands upon such impostors as Spricht and Van Klopen. Imagine, Monsieur, a man—a stern rugged nature which can have no true feeling for the beauty of woman's dress—a being of angles and hard lines—a creature without grace or flou. No wonder that square shoulders and pointed elbows have come into fashion since men have dictated the dress of women!"
Mademoiselle had mounted her hobby, and was riding furiously.
"Doubtless it is a mistake in art, and one that must be discovered before long," said Heathcote soothingly. "But tell me, Mademoiselle, in all your visits to the Rue de Lafitte, did you never encounter Georges?"
"Never."
"Strange! And did your friend Mademoiselle Prévol talk much of this Monsieur Georges?"
"Yes, she used to talk to me a great deal about him at one time, poor child: I think she talked even more freely to me than to her mother. Madame Lemarque was just a little too fond of money, too eager for gifts from her child, and that wounded Marie's generous nature. 'You value people only for what they can give you,' she said once to her mother. 'If Georges were Satan, you would like him just as well—provided you got enough of his money.' And then there was a quarrel, as you may suppose, Monsieur. There were excuses to be made for Madame Lemarque, poor soul. She had been rich once—an atelier in the Rue de la Paix—a country house at Asnières—but these man-milliners had spoiled her trade, and at this time she was very poor, living in these rooms which you see, and working for half a dozen shabby customers who ground her to the dust by their meanness. And then when Marie gave her money she spent it recklessly—she ate and drank like a princess—she took a voiture de place, whenever she went out: she thought that Marie could never do too much for her or her son's orphan child Léonie."
"Léonie lived with her grandmother, did she not?"
"Yes, Madame Lemarque had kept her since she was three years old. It was a dull life for a child. She used to sit on a little stool in that corner, and thread needles for her grandmother. When she was eight years old she could work very neatly; she ran errands too. She earned her daily bread, poor child. But her happiest days were those she spent with her aunt in the Rue Lafitte."
"Mademoiselle Prévol was good to her?"
"Good to her? Yes, and to every one who came in her way. I tell you she was a creature made up of sweetness and love."
"And was she devoted to this Monsieur Georges?"
"At one time, yes. It was an adoration on both sides. Marie used to tell me of their journeys in foreign countries, under a southern sky. Of their happy life, far away from the crowd; of his boundless love for her, his generosity, his devotion. She had a fever in Venice, and he nursed her, and watched beside her bed day and night—thirteen days and thirteen nights—till she was out of danger. It was a love such as one reads of in poetry."
"Have you any reason to think that she was his lawful wife?"
"I cannot tell. His constancy and devotion were those of the best of husbands. She wore a wedding-ring, and she was always called by his name when they travelled, as well as in her lodgings. It was almost at the beginning of their attachment that he took her to England. I have sometimes thought that they were married in England."
"Did he introduce her to his friends in Paris?"
"Only a few artists and writers whom she used to meet at supper. They were some of the wildest young men in Paris."
"But he introduced her to no ladies—to no families of good standing?"
"I doubt if he could have had any such friends. He lived too eccentric a life to cultivate what you call respectable acquaintance."
"Was he himself an artist?"
"I think not. He was too rich for a painter or an author."
"And you have never heard of him since Marie Prévol's death?"
"Never."
"What became of the jewels and other property which had belonged to Mademoiselle Prévol?"
"They were sold by her mother, who lived upon the proceeds of the sale for some years. She paid for Léonie's schooling out of the same fund. It was only in the last years of her life that she again became poor. But to the very last she had means of her own—a small income, the source of which was unknown to me. She might have lived very comfortably if she had not been extravagant; but she had no prudence, and there were times when she was almost penniless. She took me into partnership very soon after her daughter's death. She had sent the little girl to a convent, and she felt lonely and nervous in these rooms. Her spirits never recovered from the shock of that terrible murder—the horror of the night in which Léonie was brought home to her by the police from Saint-Germain, who told her the history of the murder. She invited me to share her apartment, and to work for her, taking half the profits of the business. The profits were of the smallest, but she gave me my board and lodging, and I was too fond of Madame Lemarque, and of Jacko," added the spinster, looking fondly at the cockatoo.
"That is Madame Lemarque's parrot, I conclude?"
"Yes. He belonged to poor Marie. Ah, he could tell us a great deal, if he would but talk sense instead of repeating foolish songs. She bought him from a sailor at Marseilles, and brought him home with her after one of her autumn holidays. She used to teach him lines from the songs she sang at the theatre."
"Moi, je suis le radis noir!" shrieked the parrot.
"You were living with Madame Lemarque when her granddaughter returned from Dinan, I suppose?" said Heathcote.
"Ah, you seem to know all about it. Yes, I was with Madame when she went to Saint-Lazare to meet the child. Such a bright, pretty girl she had grown—so amiable, and clever, and industrious. I never thought she would act towards me as she has done."
"In what way has she acted badly?"
"She went to England directly after her grandmother's death—that is more than two months ago—and she has not written to me once since then. No doubt she has found powerful friends—rich friends—and has no need of a poor old woman like me."
"There may be some other reason for her silence," said Heathcote gravely.
"What other reason?"
"Some misfortune; an accident, perhaps. She had to travel by steamer and by railway. Might not something have happened?"
"I have thought of that sometimes," said the dressmaker, with a distressed look, "and if I had had a friend in England—one single friend—I should have written to ask that friend to make inquiries. But I have so few friends—hardly any one in Paris, no one outside Paris," she concluded dejectedly.
"But surely you knew Léonie's errand? You knew to whom she was going? You might have written to that person."
"I know nothing. The girl's errand was a secret from me. On her death-bed Madame Lemarque gave her granddaughter some commission. There were letters or papers of some kind, I think, which she was to take to somebody in England, and that person was expected to befriend her. The grandmother was very secret about it. She would not speak to Léonie on the subject while I was in the room, but on reëntering rather suddenly I saw some papers on the bed. I overheard a few words—-something about a friend of Monsieur Georges, rich, powerful."
"And it was to this friend of Georges, the murderer, that Léonie was to appeal for protection and help?"
"Remember we are not certain that Georges was the murderer. It is only a supposition."
"But a supposition so well grounded as to be almost certainty. An adoring lover, who disappears immediately after the murder of his mistress—a lover who had good ground for jealousy, and is known to have been madly jealous, mark you; a murder that could only have been inspired by madness or by jealousy. If these facts are not strong enough to condemn Monsieur Georges, what does circumstantial evidence mean?"
"Don't talk to me about it," muttered Drubarde impatiently. "Georges was the murderer. The police were at fault in their search for him, but they were never in doubt as to his guilt."
"And it was to a friend of her daughter's murderer that Madame Lemarque sent her granddaughter?"
"What other resources had she, do you think?" exclaimed the dressmaker. "She was dying, penniless, friendless, leaving her grandchild to the mercy of strangers. She knew that Monsieur Georges was a rich man, and that any friend of Monsieur Georges was likely to be well off. I daresay she knew no more than the name of this friend."
"Did you hear the name?"
"Never. I heard her tell Léonie that the gentleman was in London. He was living at some hotel, the name of which I forget."
"Would you recognise it if you heard it?" asked Heathcote.
"Perhaps. I am not sure."
He went over the names of the principal hotels, without success. Mademoiselle Beauville could not remember to have heard any one of them.
"You are sure that Mademoiselle Lemarque was to go to London," inquired Heathcote, "and no further than London? You heard no mention of Cornwall or Plymouth?"
He repeated the names of county and town—giving each the true Gallic intonation—but they suggested nothing to Mademoiselle Beauville.
"She was to go to London—nowhere else. But why do you ask?"
"I will tell you that presently. Did Léonie Lemarque leave Paris immediately after her grandmother's death?"
"She left the evening after the funeral. She did not even wait to get a mourning-gown made. She had worn a black gown belonging to me at the funeral, and she changed it for her gray alpaca gown before she left."
"Did she take no luggage?"
"Only a change of linen in a handbag."
"How did she travel?"
"She went from the Station du Nord at eight o'clock. I walked to the station with her, poor child. We were both very sad, and very tired. She was to cross from Calais to Dover in the night, and she would arrive in London early next morning. She promised me to write on the day of her arrival. I told her that I thought it was a dangerous thing for a young girl to go alone to meet a stranger, a man whose face she had never seen. She said her grandmother had told her that he was a good and honourable man, who had befriended her in her poverty, and she (Léonie) was to trust him. She begged me not to ask her any questions. Her grandmother had warned her to say nothing until after she had arrived in England, when she was to write to me and tell me of her new home. When I pressed her to give me her confidence, she began to cry; but I managed to find out that she was going to London with the idea of being placed in some rich and aristocratic family, where she would be a companion to the children and teach them her own language. She was not accomplished enough to be a governess of a superior kind."
"How did she get the money for her journey?"
"Her grandmother gave it her on her death-bed; but as there had been hardly any money in the house for the last week of Madame Lemarque's illness, I concluded that this money had been sent from the person in England in reply to an application from Madame Lemarque."
"Did you post any letter addressed to England during your friend's illness?"
"I did not; but Léonie may have done so. She went out every day upon some errand or other. And now, Monsieur, pray tell me how you came to know all about Léonie, and if you have any bad news for me."
"Alas, Mademoiselle, I have the worst possible news. Your young friend is dead."
"Dead! And there was no one to tell me. The gentleman who was to befriend her, to whom she went as to a protector and benefactor, he did not even take the trouble to tell me her fate."
"She may never have found him, poor child. She may have been lured away from her destination and from London by a villain. She met her death more than two hundred miles from London. She fell from a railway-bridge, and was killed instantly; but whether that death was an accident or a murder, no one yet knows, except the Great Judge of all human actions."
"You believe it was——"
"Murder. I am here to discover the motive of that crime."
[CHAPTER II.]
A STUDENT OF MEN AND WOMEN.
There was a silence of some minutes, during which Mademoiselle Beauville wept quietly. And then Heathcote and the ex-police-officer rose to take leave.
"I thank you sincerely, Mademoiselle, for having given me all the information in your power to give, and I must beg you to accept some small compensation for the time I have wasted," said Mr. Heathcote, slipping a couple of twenty-franc pieces into the dressmaker's hand.
The lonely spinster's eyes shone with a feverish light as her skinny fingers closed upon the gold. It was like manna dropped from heaven. Long and weary weeks had passed since her robes et modes had brought her so much money. Her chief customers of late had been the grisettes of the quarter, who had dribbled out their payments by two or three francs at a time, and who had exacted the maximum of labour for the minimum of pay. Mademoiselle's hollow cheeks were flushed with the warm red wine, her heart glowed with the thought that she could now pay her last term to the Harpagon landlord—not much worse, perhaps, than the rest of his species, but all landlords seem Harpagons when they claim their due from the needy.
"Monsieur is too good, too generous," murmured the seamstress; "I should refuse all remuneration, only work has been so slack of late——"
"Not one word, Mademoiselle. Stay, I have one more question, and that an important one, to ask before I take my leave. Can you give me the exact date upon which Léonie Lemarque left Paris for Dover?"
"Assuredly, Monsieur. It was on the 4th of July."
"The 4th! And it was on the evening of the 5th she met with her death. You say she carried a small handbag containing linen."
"Yes. Her clothes were of the fewest, dear child; but everything she had was neat and nice of its kind. She had a change of linen with her."
"Had she nothing else in the bag?"
"Nothing. I went into the room while she was packing, and I saw her take a small sealed packet from under her pillow, and put it in her bosom. I had seen the same packet under her grandmother's pillow before she died. It looked like a parcel of letters or papers of some kind."
"Do you know what station Léonie was to arrive at?"
"Yes. It was the terminus of Charing."
"Charing Cross?"
"Precisely. It was a double name like that."
"Good. Adieu, Mademoiselle. My friend and I may come to you again perhaps to make further inquiries."
"You shall be very welcome, Monsieur. And if you discover the secret of my poor young friend's fate, you will tell me——"
"Assuredly."
"One word, Monsieur. Where is our little Léonie buried? Has she a decent grave in your English land?"
"She lies in a rustic churchyard under a great yew-tree. There is a stone upon her grave, with a brief record of when and how she met her death. Her name and age shall now be added to the inscription."
"Indeed, Monsieur! But what kind friend was it who placed a stone over the grave of a nameless stranger?"
"That was my care. It was a very small thing to do."
"Ah, Monsieur, it is in doing these small things that a great heart shows itself."
Mr. Heathcote and his companion made their adieux, accompanied to the landing by the spinster, who felt as if she had entertained angels unawares; but when the sound of their footsteps had died away upon the stairs she went back to her room, and wept over the fate of her young friend.
"I have nothing left in this world to love but you," she said, piteously addressing the cockatoo.
"J'ai bien des chos's au Mont-d'-Piété," replied the bird.
It was one o'clock by the time Mr. Heathcote and Monsieur Drubarde left the dressmaker's apartment, so the Englishman suggested a light luncheon at the Restaurant Lapérouse, within a stone's throw of Drubarde's apartment; and the suggestion being received favourably by the ex-policeman, they were soon afterwards seated at a little table, in a private room with a window overlooking the river, ready to do justice to the plat du jour, a fricandeau aux épinards, and to a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild. The wine-bibbing at the dressmaker's apartment had been merely a benevolent excuse for providing the spinster with a little good Bordeaux.
"Now, Monsieur Drubarde, we are alone and at our ease. You have now all the facts of Léonie Lemarque's death well within your knowledge; and it is for you to give me your opinion."
"A very difficult case in which to come to a decided opinion," answered Drubarde. "At present my conclusions and yours are antagonistic. My niece wrote out a careful translation of your newspaper report. I have her translation in my pocket-book. You can look it over if you like, to see that it is faithfully done. I have read it three or four times, with keenest attention, and I can so far see nothing out of the common in Léonie Lemarque's fate. A pretty girl travelling alone, a common ruffian, a common murder."
"And you see no link between this crime and that former murder?"
"Not a thread—not a hair. A deed done ten years ago—unpunished, the murderer undiscovered."
"Do you forget that Léonie went to London with credentials to a friend of this very murderer? Perhaps a friend so devoted, so bound to the guilty man, that he might not stop at murder to get rid of the one witness of his friend's crime."
"To imagine that is to imagine an impossible friendship. Men do not risk their necks nowadays, whatever they may have done in the time of Damon and Pythias."
"Then you see nothing extraordinary or mysterious in the violent death of this girl, within twenty-four hours of her leaving Paris, carrying with her documents which may, in some manner, have betrayed the secret of the double murder. Perhaps a letter from the lover to his mistress, a letter written by a man maddened by jealousy, threatening to do the deed which was afterwards done. You see no sufficient ground for connecting one crime with the other, for seeking the secret of the second crime in the history of the first."
"Honestly, I do not," replied Drubarde, who had fastened his napkin under his chin, had nibbled a radish or two, and destroyed the symmetry of a dish of prawns, by way of preparation for the fricandeau. "I only wish I could see my way to such an opinion. It would make as pretty a complication as ever I was concerned in. However, there is no knowing what new discoveries we may hit upon, if we go to work patiently. My present view of the case is that Léonie Lemarque, being young, silly, and inexperienced, and not knowing a word of English, altogether a wrong person to attempt such a journey alone, got into bad hands at the very beginning. I believe that, instead of meeting this person who was to have befriended her, and who must have been a man of standing and respectability, or the old grandmother would not have sent her to him, she fell into the hands of a scoundrel, and was lured into your train for Cornwall."
"You must remember that Paddington Station is some miles from Charing Cross," said Heathcote. "The girl could not be smuggled from one train to the other unawares. She must have traversed half London on foot, or in a conveyance of some kind."
"Possibly. But, as likely as not, she was in the companionship of the wrong man. Consider her ignorance, her helplessness. What an easy prey for a villain!"
Heathcote was unconvinced.
"I cannot imagine a crime so motiveless as that which you suggest," he said thoughtfully.
He began to lose faith in the old sleuthhound. He began to think that Félix Drubarde was worn-out; that scent, and pace, and tongue were things of the past. He began to think that the work of finding the link between the two crimes must be done by himself rather than by Drubarde.
"What became of the girl's bag?" asked Drubarde, after he had eaten a liberal portion of veal and spinach. "There is no mention of a bag in your newspaper."
"There was no bag found. If there had been, the victim might have been identified earlier."
"And the sealed packet?"
"There was no packet. There was nothing but a little basket containing a few cherries and a biscuit-bag. There was no clue to identity. The murderer had done his work well."
"The best thing you can do is to put Mr. Distin in possession of the details you heard from Mademoiselle Beauville. He can make inquiries at the Charing Cross Station, where it is just possible the girl may be remembered by some of the porters. A girl travelling alone, and meeting a gentleman on the platform. The meeting may have been observed even there, where hundreds meet and part every hour. Railway officials are observant and keen-witted. It is within the limits of the possible that this poor girl may not have passed altogether unremarked."
"I will write to Distin this afternoon," said Heathcote. "And there is another thing I can do. If your theory is correct, Léonie Lemarque missed the person who was to have met her at the station, and fell into bad hands. If that is so, the fact ought to be arrived at easily by an appeal to the person whom she should have met."
He took out his pencil and pocket-book, and wrote the rough draft of an advertisement:
"The person who was to have met Léonie Lemarque at Charing Cross Station on the morning of July 5th last is earnestly requested to communicate immediately with Messrs. Distin & Son, Solicitors, Furnival's Inn."
He translated this advertisement to Monsieur Drubarde.
"Yes, that is a wise test," said the police-officer. "I see you have the true flair. If the man is innocent, he will answer that advertisement—always supposing that it come to his knowledge."
"I will repeat it so often in the Times that it will not be easy for the appeal to escape him," answered Heathcote.
"Then if there is no sign, we shall say guilty," said Drubarde.
"And in that case we have to find the villain."
"You may add a postscript to your letter to Monsieur Distin, advising him to inquire at the cloak-room of Charing Cross Station for an unclaimed handbag left there on July 5th. Something must have been done with that handbag, and, in our civilised condition, it is not easy to get rid of even a handbag."
After having made this suggestion, Monsieur Drubarde devoted himself entirely to the pleasures of the table. Heathcote ate very little, and was too troubled in mind to know what he ate. He saw himself no nearer a solution of the problem which he had pledged himself to solve. Yet this he felt, that the sky was growing clearer round Bothwell Grahame. The secret of the girl's death seemed to lie between the man whom she was to have met at Charing Cross and the phenomenal villain of Drubarde's imagination, who had lured her into the Cornish train with darkest intent.
He left Félix Drubarde directly after luncheon, and walked back to the Hôtel de Bade, where he devoted the afternoon to his correspondence. He wrote at fullest length to Joseph Distin, enclosing the advertisement for the Times, with a cheque, and an order for its daily appearance until further notice. He wrote a cheery letter to Hilda, telling her to be hopeful; and he wrote to Mrs. Wyllard, telling her that the result of his investigations up to the present hour had gone far to dispel his suspicion of her cousin's guilt.
"I am still groping in the dark," he concluded, "and am very far from having achieved any tangible result; but I am working with all my mind and all my strength, and I hope that Providence will not compel me to abandon my task until I have fathomed the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death."
He wrote thus, unconsciously forgetting that Dora Wyllard did not know even the name of the victim. The discovery of the girl's identity, made three days ago, at Dinan, seemed, to him an old history, so exclusively had his mind dwelt upon this one subject since his interview with the nuns. The fact that the name must be a new thing to Dora never struck him.
He dined alone in his private sitting-room, he who at any other time would have enjoyed the glitter and life of the Boulevard in all its evening brilliancy. He wanted to be free from all sound and movement, from the sight of strange faces, so that his mind should work undisturbed upon the problem he had set himself to solve.
And now over his solitary cutlet, with his pocket-book open before him, he marshalled his facts, and reflected upon each detail of the story.
The murderer of Marie Prévol and Maxime de Maucroix had escaped, and in all probability was still living. He appeared to have been rich, independent of all ties, a Bohemian in his habits, a man who could live in any country. Hardly possible that such a man would remain within a narrow radius of the scene of his crime. He was not to be looked for assuredly in Paris, or even in France. It was far more likely that he had crossed the Atlantic, and sunk his identity in that wider, freer society of the United States, where money and cleverness outweigh a man's antecedents, where no one asks what a man has been, only what he is, or is worth in the present. Or it might be that such a man as this Georges—a night-bird, a man of fervid temperament, a lover of pleasure rather than work, unambitious, a voluptuary—would turn his face to Southern America, and dream away the after stages of an exhausted life in some romantic city upon the Seaboard of the Pacific. Not in Europe—or not in the accessible quarters of Europe—should he be sought for.
But in the mean time, here in this city of Paris, there was something to be done. Vain to look for the man himself, perhaps; but those who had known the man—his chosen friends, the companions of his midnight orgies—might still be found. From them the man's antecedents might be learned; and possibly some glimmer of light could be obtained as to his adventures and whereabouts after the murder.
Edward Heathcote reviewed his Parisian acquaintance in search of such men as might be likely to have known this Monsieur Georges. It was almost impossible for a man, spending his money lavishly, the favoured admirer of a beautiful actress, not to be in some measure a man of mark, and widely known in the faster section of Parisian society.
Mr. Heathcote knew his Paris well, and loved it well. After that bitter loss which had changed the current of his life, he had found hard work in his office his best cure, and next best to hard mental labour he had found relief of mind in the society of the artistic and keen-witted idlers of the Boulevard and the Bohemian clubs. He had found a week in Paris—a week of Boulevard idleness and Boulevard society—the best remedy for the dulness and the depression that come from an unsatisfied heart and an overworked brain: and in these occasional plunges into Parisian society he had made a wider acquaintance with the artistic classes than it is often granted to a provincial Englishman to make.
He ran over the names of the men he knew best in Paris, trying to hit upon the likeliest person to suit his purpose. It must be a man who had been well to the fore ten years ago, when Marie Prévol was a famous beauty, and her lover was spending his nights and his fortune on the Boulevard. It should not be difficult, he thought, to hit upon such a man.
"Volney Dugarge, Bize, Pontruche, Trottier. Yes, Trottier. That is the man; a thorough-going Bohemian, a haunter of supper-tables and gambling-dens, a hanger-on of lorettes, steeped to the tips of his nails in the atmosphere of the demi-monde, a man who had known Gautier and Nerval and Gustave Planche, an habitué of the Boulevard theatres; poor, keen-witted, a member of the band of paragraphists, the men who invent scandals, political, social, literary, theatrical, according to the prevailing demand, who write smart paragraphs for the most audacious of the newspapers, and puffs for enterprising tradesmen."
Trottier, thus humble in his pursuits, a man utterly without pride, or, as his enemies said, without self-respect, was one of the most agreeable men in Paris. He had been a Boulevardier for the last thirty years, had seen the Boulevard extend its glittering length into regions which he had known as a wilderness of gloom and poverty. He remembered the time when the Palais Royal was the focus of Parisian gaiety, the temple of fashion and taste.
"If this man Georges had any status in Bohemian society, Sigismond Trottier must have known him," thought Heathcote.
The next thing was to find Trottier. He was a man who only began to live after dinner. He might be looked for on the Boulevard between nine o'clock and midnight. He might be found at a club much favoured by actors and journalists, a club which had taken for itself a name from the history of the mediæval drama, and rejoiced in the title of Les Enfants Sans Souci, more briefly known as the Sans Souci. The Sans Souci had its nest on an entresol in the Rue Vivienne, six low-ceiled rooms opening one out of another, three of them furnished with divans in true Oriental style. These were the smoking-rooms. Then came a fourth and much more spacious apartment, provided with numerous small tables, writing materials, and the newspapers. Tapestried portières on the right and left of the fireplace in this reading-room opened into the sanctuary of the club, two medium-sized rooms, furnished with green cloth tables for baccarat, thickly curtained, thickly carpeted, lighted only from the courtyard of the house, which was like a dry well.
Edward Heathcote strolled along the Boulevard, looking for his friend as he went. It was nearly ten o'clock, a delicious night, balmy, starlit, summer-like; a night upon which Sigismond Trottier might naturally have been found seated amidst the idlers clustered on the asphalte in front of a popular café. But in the groups which Heathcote passed between the Hôtel de Bade and the corner of the Place de la Bourse there was no sign of Trottier's ferret-face and long gray hair. So the Englishman continued his walk to the Rue Vivienne, and entered the lamp-lit vestibule which led to the mysteries of the Sans Souci.
He had been taken there more than once by Trottier, and had been amused and interested by the people he met.
"Can you tell me if Monsieur Trottier is here this evening?" he asked of the porter.
"Yes, Monsieur. He came half an hour ago. Monsieur Trottier generally comes here at the same hour every evening to write his article for the Taon."
The rooms were almost empty. Neither journalists nor actors mustered strong before midnight. In a comfortable corner of the writing-room, at a little table brilliantly lighted by a green-shaded lamp, Edward Heathcote found the man he came to seek.
Sigismond Trottier was at least sixty years of age, tall, spare to attenuation, with a long narrow face of almost livid pallor, and long gray hair, falling over a greasy olive-green velvet collar, choice ornament of a threadbare and faded olive-green frock-coat. His jaw was narrow and projecting, his lips were thin and pinched, his nose was long and sharp, his eyebrows were gray and shaggy. The only features that gave life or colour to the face were the restless and brilliant black eyes, small, keen, observant, the eyes of a creature always on the watch. Ah, how many of the darkest mysteries of Paris had that keen glance discovered, how many a loathsome depth had that ruthless gaze explored, how many a social ulcer, how many a domestic disease, how many a wound of heart and honour, how many an atrophy of purse and reputation had those eyes pierced and scrutinised, while all the rest of the world was still blind to the coming ruin, the inevitable disgrace! Sigismond Trottier was a student of society. It was his boast that he knew this Paris of the Third Republic as well as Saint-Simon knew the Paris of the great Louis; knew it in all its strength; and in all its weakness; knew it to the core of its rotten heart.
Needless to say that such a man was invaluable as a paragraphist. He had the same keen scent for a scandal that the well-trained detective has for a crime. A whisper, a shrug was enough to put him on the right track. He was a genius at that modern style of hint and innuendo which just stops short of libel. He had killed more reputations than any man in Paris: and he had never been to prison. His safety lay in the keenness of his perception, which never allowed him to fall into such mistakes as have ruined other society gossips. Whatever Sigismond Trottier wrote was true. He had an extraordinary power of winnowing the chaff from the corn in the floating scandals of the Boulevard. He knew what to accept and what to reject. His judgment was infallible. When Parisian society saw the hint of an elopement, the suggestion of a marital wrong signed by Sigismond's hieroglyphic—an Egyptian beetle—the thing was received as a fact. The pen of the unerring recorder had proclaimed a truth. Happily he was not a physical coward, though a professional assailant of man's honour and woman's reputation. He had given good proof of his courage on several occasions, had stood up before famous swordsmen, had faced marksmen of repute. That deep dint in his lean and livid cheek was the mark of a bullet from the Duke of Midlothian's pistol—that famous viveur who expired suddenly amidst the fading flowers and flaring tapers of a Boulevard supper-room—the very spirit of profligate pleasure extinguished in a breath. That long slanting scar upon the left jaw, a shade more livid than the normal lividity of the complexion, was the result of five minutes' sword-play between the Boulevard chronicler and the Marquis du Bois-Chaufonds, the reminiscence of a duel which set all Paris talking twenty years ago, when the Walewska was in the zenith of her charms. From scalp to sole the paragraphist could have shown the scars of past battles. He had never been known to refuse a challenge.
Trottier was so absorbed in his task when Heathcote approached his table as to be quite unconscious of any one's presence. Heathcote seated himself upon the other side of the table, and took up a newspaper, to wait till the journalist came to the end of a sheet.
He had not long to wait. Before he had read more than half a dozen paragraphs in the Taon, each signed with the familiar beetle, Sigismond paused to blot a page, looked up, and recognised his English acquaintance.
"Good-evening," he said. Then, with a mighty effort, he burst into English, and exclaimed, "'Owderyoudo?" all as one word, having achieved which feat he laughed long and loud, surprised at his own talent for foreign tongues. "We begin to talk your language of horses, we others," he said triumphantly. "We have taken all your words for the sport, and now we begin to take your greetings and salutations, your shake-hand, your 'owderyoudo. And what brings you to Paris, Monsieur Effcott, at the dead season?"
"I should rather ask what you, chosen chronicler of fashionable society, can find to record in the dead season?"
"My dear friend, the most stupendous scandals are those that happen in the dead season, when Paris is a desert, and a man thinks he can murder his neighbour or run away with his neighbour's wife with equal impunity. Ah, my friend, for the development of intrigue, for the ripening of social mysteries, the working out of domestic tragedies, there can be no better time than this dull blank interval of the year, when there is no one in Paris. What stolen meetings, what little suppers in closely-sealed cabinets, when Madame is at the seaside and Monsieur is shooting wild boar in Auvergne! Heaven only forbid that Monsieur and Madame should happen to take their supper in adjacent cabinets, and that Monsieur should recognise the voice of Madame on the other side of the lath and plaster! Yes, there is no richer harvest-time for the chronicler than the season when there is not a mortal in Paris."
"Cynic!" exclaimed Heathcote. "And so you still live by exposing the faults and follies of your fellow-creatures."
"I try to reform them by proving to them that sooner or later all social secrets are known. I am about the only preacher whose sermons scare them nowadays."
"Then you consider your trade a strictly honourable one, no doubt."
"In French no doubt means perhaps," replied Trottier, "vide Michelet. No, I will say nothing for my calling, except that a man must live. You may not see the necessity of my living, but the existence of the lowest of us has its value to the man himself. The world might get on very well without me, but I can't get on without the world."
"A man of your talent might have done well in any other line—"
"Pardon; mine is not a talent. It is a specialty. I should have succeeded in no other line. If I had been rich and high-placed, like Saint-Simon, I should have kept my impressions to myself while I lived, and should have left a big book behind me when I died. But I am poor and a nobody, so I have had to live upon my impressions."
"You put the case neatly," said Heathcote, "and you are right. We are most of us the thing which circumstances make us. The man who will not allow himself to be moulded by circumstance, who will strike out into the empyrean of ideal good, is one man in a thousand."
"And the odds are that your one in a thousand, your honest man, is an eminently disagreeable personage—like Diogenes or Thomas Carlyle," said Trottier.
"You have not finished your evening's work, I suppose?"
"No; I am in for another hour."
"Good," said Heathcote; "then at midnight you will be free. Will you sup with me at the Café de Paris when your work is done? I believe it is in your power to do me a material service merely by calling upon your recollection of the past. Will you meet me at the Café de Paris at twelve?"
"With pleasure; and if my poor memories of men and events can help you, the record is at your service."
"A thousand thanks. I will go and order supper, and stroll on the Boulevard till it is ready. Au revoir!"
"Until midnight!"
Sigismond Trottier was a man who kept his appointments. He was not neat in his person, or punctual in his payments. He never went to church, and he did not always wash. But if he promised a page of copy to a newspaper, the page was delivered in due time. If he offered to frank a friend to the theatre, in his quality as critic, he was waiting in the vestibule at the appointed hour, ready to keep his word. If he accepted an invitation to supper, he never kept his host waiting. Invitations to dinner he invariably declined.
"A dinner-party is an anti-climax," he protested. "A man gets drunk too early, and spoils his evening."
At midnight Monsieur Trottier's evening began, and he was ready for the feast.
Mr. Heathcote received him in one of the cosiest little rooms in the café. The Englishman's first act on entering had been to light all the wax candles on the mantelpiece, which the waiters had left unlighted. This established him at once as a man who knew his Paris, and his judicious choice of wines having strengthened his position, everything was ready when Trottier's shabby olive-green coat came meekly into the radiance of the wax candles. Trottier was known at the Café de Paris, and his shabby coat commanded the reverence of the waiters. Was he not a man who, as it were, carried reputations in his pocket, who could make a head-waiter famous by a stroke of his pen?
The supper was delicate, recherché, Parisian; the wine was Johannisberger of princely quality, and a magnum of Mumms decanted in a cut-crystal pitcher appeared with the last course. The two men talked of general topics during supper. It was only when the waiters had withdrawn, and when Sigismond Trottier had thrown himself back in his chair and lighted his cigarette, that Heathcote approached the business of the evening. It was half-past one o'clock, and the roll of wheels upon the asphalte below the open window had been gradually diminishing. There was no longer the roar of the Boulevard to disturb the speakers.
"If I can be of the slightest use to you, as an embodied chronicle of Paris, command me," said Trottier. "Here I am at your service—an open book. You have only to turn my leaves."
"Do you remember a double murder—the murder of an actress and her lover—which happened ten years ago, in the forest of Saint-Germain?"
"Do I remember? Yes, as if the thing had happened last week; and for a good reason. The man who was suspected—the lover, or, as some thought, the husband, of the actress—was my familiar friend."
"Great Heaven!" exclaimed Heathcote, almost starting from his chair. "Then my instinct was right. It told me that I should get on the track of that man—it told me that you must have known him."
"The man was well known to me and to a chosen few, but only a few," replied Trottier. "He was a man of eccentric habits—a man of considerable talent and large intellect, who could afford to live his own life, and lived it. What he did with himself in the daytime none of us knew: whether he slept away half his daylight life, or shut himself in his den and smoked and dreamed and read. The latter idea seemed likely enough, for he was a man who had read widely. He was a delightful companion, brilliant, genial, lavish to his friends, a splendid host. I have supped with him and Marie Prévol many a night in this house—sometimes making the third in a cosy trio, sometimes one of that small choice circle with which he occasionally surrounded himself."
"Then I take it that he was known in general society, either the uppermost or the middle circles."
"Not the least in the world. He was a man who scorned society, hated ceremonies and conventionalities. I never saw him in a dress-suit. I doubt if he possessed one. When he went to a theatre, it was to sit in a dark corner, where he could see without being seen. He detested crowds. He had nothing to gain from the great world, and could afford to outrage all its rules and regulations."
"Was he a thoroughbred Parisian?"
"Far from it. He was an American, but he had lived so long in Paris as to be almost as Parisian as a citizen born and bred."
"Had he made his money, or inherited it?"
"Inherited it, without doubt. His habits were those of the spender, not the worker. He was one of the lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin. I take it that his father had been one of those daring speculators who in America begin with nothing and become millionaires in a year or two. As for the man himself, he had no more idea of business or finance than one of those dressed-up dolls of the Quartier Bréda. He took not the faintest interest in the transactions of the Bourse, and in that point alone revealed himself as no true Parisian."
"Do you believe that he committed the murder?" asked Heathcote.
Sigismond Trottier shrugged his shoulders, and shook back his long gray hair, as he slowly puffed his cigarette.
"Who knows?" he said. "I liked the man so well that I should hesitate at saying I believe in his guilt. And yet the fact of his disappearance from the hour of the murder is almost conclusive evidence; and I know that he was savagely jealous of Maucroix."
"You judged him a man of strong passions, a man capable of a great crime?"
"Yes, he was a man of intense feeling, strong for good or evil. A volcano glowed under that calm outward aspect, that easy-going, devil-may-care manner of his. I was very sorry for him. If Marie had been but true—"
"You believe that she was his wife?"
"I do. His manner to her was in all respects the manner of one who esteemed as well as loved her. He introduced her to his friends as his wife. He loved her too well to have refused her that title."
"But for a man who scorned conventionalities, what reason could there have been for concealment? Why should he not have introduced his actress-wife to society? Why should he not have established a home?"
"The first question is easily answered. As he loathed society for himself, he would hardly court it for his wife. The second can only be answered by the fact that the man was an eccentric. He preferred the freedom of an actress's lodging to the restrictions of a rich man's house. His happiest days were spent wandering southward with the swallows; yet so strange was the man's temper that he never stayed more than a fortnight or three weeks away from Paris. The city seemed to draw him back like a magnet."
"Yet he had no business here?"
"None that I ever discovered. He must have loved the city for its own sake. He was here all through the siege and the Commune. I have heard him say that the happiest days of his life were those on which the roar of the Prussian guns made his only music, and when Marie and he used to crouch and shiver over a handful of charcoal, and eat a supper of dry bread and Carlsbad plums."
"He must have had some pied-à-terre of his own, I conclude."
"He must have had his den somewhere in Paris; but none of us knew where it was. The only address he ever gave was that of Marie Prévol, alias Madame Georges, in the Rue Lafitte. He met his friends on the Boulevard when the theatres were over. He was a man who enjoyed life to the full—after his own fashion. He was the master-spirit of his little circle—a daring wit, a bold politician, a trenchant critic. Paris is the city of brilliant talkers, yet I have known few who surpassed Georges as a conversationalist. I can see him now, with his long fair hair falling over his flashing eyes, his sarcastic lip, and the proud carriage of that leonine head. Not a common man by any means, and with a laugh that was like music—a man for a woman to adore; and yet Marie wavered in her fidelity directly a fashionable dandy made love to her."
"You have no idea what became of Georges after the murder?"
"If I had, I would not tell you. No, I have not the faintest inkling. He vanished as a bubble that bursts upon the surface of a stream. As a mere guess, I should say that he went back to the country of his birth—that if he is still living, he is to be found in America under another name."
"He was a rich man, you say. It is easier for a man to betake himself from one country to another than to transfer his fortune. What became of this man's French investments?"
"He may never have had any such investments. His fortune may have been invested solely in America. He was a man who declared that he valued liberty above all other blessings. He would scarcely have fettered himself by investing any portion of his wealth in a country where he was leading a life of pleasure, living as a pure Bohemian. His utter indifference to all rumours about the Bourse would show that he had no French investments. His wealth, I take it, came from some secure source on the other side of the Atlantic."
"Did you ever hear him talk of an English friend, or a friend who resided in England?"
"Never."
"And yet he must have had such a friend," said Heathcote.
He related the story of Léonie Lemarque's death, and the inducement that had taken her to England, where she was to have met a friend of her aunt's long-vanished lover. Sigismond Trottier listened with keenest interest. All social mysteries, whether criminal or not, had a charm for him.
"It is a very strange case," he said, "and I don't wonder that you are following it up earnestly. No, I never heard Georges mention any English friend. It was a bold stroke for the grandmother to send the girl to a man who was the friend of the murderer of her daughter. A drowning man will catch at a straw, says your proverb; and this poor woman, penniless and friendless on her death-bed, may have caught at the name of the only rich man upon whom she could advance the faintest claim. And what was the nature of that claim? A packet of Georges' love-letters. Compromising love-letters, perhaps, to be offered to Georges' friend as the price of protection and aid for the orphan girl. A strange story. And no one knows what became of those letters?"
"No one, as yet. No letters were found upon the girl. Even the handbag she carried with her had disappeared."
"A very strange story. I wish I could help you to read the riddle. Your interest in it I imagine to be something beyond the mere artistic interest in a curious case."
"Yes, I am concerned in arriving at the truth, for the sake of one whom I honour and revere. I shall be deeply grateful if you can help me."
"Then I will help you," answered the paragraphist quietly; and Edward Heathcote felt that in this amateur detective he had a stronger ally than in the old police-officer of the left bank.
[CHAPTER III.]
BOTHWELL BEGINS TO SEE HIS WAY.
Dreary days followed for Bothwell Grahame after that final interview with Lady Valeria. He had broken his bonds, he had escaped from the Circe whose fatal spells had held him captive so long. He was his own man again, he could stand up before his fellow-men and fear no reproach—nay, he could even dare to meet that kind old man whose friendship had never been withheld from him. He could look General Harborough in the face, and clasp his hand without feeling himself a craven and a traitor, and that is a thing which he had not been able to do for the last three years.
He was relieved, rejoiced at the breaking of that old tie, and yet there was a touch of pain in such a parting. There came a bitter pang of remorse now and again to disturb his sense of newly-recovered peace. Such severances can never happen without pain. The man who can be utterly indifferent to the agony of a woman he has once loved must have a heart of stone. Bothwell was not stony-hearted. He knew that Valeria Harborough was not a good woman—that she had been shamefully false to the best of husbands—that she had abandoned herself recklessly to the promptings of a fatal passion. But he had loved her once: and his heart bled for her now in her misery and abandonment. He was haunted by the vision of her face, as she had risen up before him, white as the very dead, her eyes flashing, her lips quivering, her voice subdued by passion to a serpent-like hiss, as she told him—
"You are in love with another woman!"
Yes, that was what it all came to. That was the sum-total of his scruples, his remorse of conscience: or at least that is what it must needs seem in the sight of the woman he abandoned. She would give him no credit for many a remorseful pang, many a sting of conscience in the past; yes, even in the noontide of passion, when he deemed that for him Fate held not the possibility of another love. In her sight he was a perjurer and a hypocrite. It was hard so to appear to the woman who had worshipped him; hard to know that there was a heart breaking for him yonder in the Italian villa on the hill above the sea.
"Why should I grieve about her?" he asked himself angrily. "I must be a coxcomb to fancy that she is making herself unhappy for my sake. She was angry with me the other day. It was rage, not wounded love, that flashed from those brilliant eyes of hers; the rage of slighted beauty. She is far more concerned for her losses on the turf than at the loss of me. If my Dido mounts the funeral pyre, it will be because she has made a bad book, and not for my sake."
But argue with himself as he might, Bothwell could not forget the agony in the face that had once been his delight, the despair in the voice which had bidden him farewell, the tremulous hand which had snatched the love-token to fling it away in deepest scorn.
Perhaps Bothwell would have more easily forgotten these things if he could have had the comfort of Hilda's society at this period of his life. But Hilda and the twins and Fräulein Meyerstein had all gone off to Dawlish for sea-bathing, and Mrs. Wyllard warned her cousin that he must not attempt to follow them.
"You are on your probation, my poor Bothwell," she said, "and you must be very careful how you act. If you were to go to Dawlish you would only distress Hilda, who has promised not to see you till her brother comes back from Paris."
"I am not going there. I would not distress her for worlds. I am to wait patiently till Heathcote has made up his mind that I am not in the habit of throwing girls over viaducts; and then I may go to my darling and claim her promise. In the mean time I can at least write to her."
And he did write, within a few hours of his final interview with Lady Valeria. His letter was full and straight in its significance.
"My dearest, I am my own man again. I am free, or as free as a man can be who is your most abject slave. I am told that I am not to be allowed to see you till I stand acquitted of the crime which Bodmin has judged me quite capable of committing. I think, little as you know of me, you know enough to be very sure that I am innocent upon that count.
"But there was another count upon which I confess myself guilty, Hilda—and it was that old sin which made me hang back months ago when I longed to tell you of my love. I have been guilty of a foolish attachment to a married woman, an attachment which lasted with varying fervour for over a year, but which had quite worn itself out before I left India. The flame burnt fiercely enough for a little while, and then came total extinction. Only it is not always easy for a man to shake off old fetters; and it was not till your pure and noble love gave me courage that I dared to stand up boldly and say, 'That old false love is dead; let us bury it decently.' And now the old love is buried, Hilda, and I am all your own. No one is any the worse for that old sentimental folly. Such flirtations are going on in India every day. Some end in guilt and misery, no doubt; but there are more that finish as mine has finished, like the blowing out of a candle.
"Can you forgive me, dear one, for having once cared for another? Remember it was before I knew you. Henceforward I am yours, and yours only. I claim your dear promise. I ask you to engage yourself to a man whom Bodmin looks upon askance as a possible murderer.
"No, love, I will not exact so much. I will only tell you that I am all your own, and that I adore you. We will not talk about engagements till your brother comes back from Paris, convinced of my innocence as to that one particular charge, and until Bodmin has begun to forget that it ever suspected me.—Your adoring BOTHWELL."
Having written this letter, Bothwell had nothing to do but to ride about the hills, thinking of his sweetheart, till he received her answer.
She wrote with unstinted tenderness, and recoiled in nowise from the fulfilment of her promise.
"I hold myself engaged to you henceforward, dear Bothwell," she wrote, "through good or evil fortune, good or evil report. But as I have promised my brother not to see you while he is away, it might be well that we did not write to each other again until after his return. I think you know that I am steadfast, and that you can trust me."
Yes, he was very sure of her steadfastness. Was she not one woman in a thousand to have pledged herself to him just when any ordinary woman would have shunned him—would have recoiled from him as from some savage monster? She had been calm, and steadfast, and unfearing, a woman who could dare to judge for herself.
And now Bothwell Grahame felt that he had crossed the threshold of a new life. He was no longer a solitary waif, with no one to think of but himself. He had not only his own future to work out with patience and courage. He had to think of the young wife, whom it might be his blessed fate to claim before he was much older. He could no longer afford to be vague and wavering. The problem of a gentleman-like maintenance must be worked out by him somehow, and without loss of time.
He walked across the Cornish hills in those balmy afternoons of September, full of thought and full of care; happy, yes, ineffably happy in the knowledge of Hilda's love; but care went along with happiness. He had to provide for his beloved. Long and thoughtful self-examination brought him to one positive conclusion about himself. Whatever he was to do in the future, if he were to do it well, must be, in somewise, the thing that he had done in the past. He was a soldier to the marrow of his bones, and it was in military work, or military studies, that he must find his future living.
This was the plan which he worked out for himself during those solitary rambles on the moor, sometimes with gun and dogs, sometimes with no companion save his own thoughts. He would fall back upon the studious habits of his earlier years, work at the science of soldiery as he had worked then. He would take a house in one of the villages on the wild coast of North Cornwall—at Trevena perhaps, in King Arthur's country—some roomy old house with a good garden, and he would take pupils to cram for the military examinations. He knew that he could get on with young men. He had always been popular with the subalterns of his regiment. He would work honestly, conscientiously, devotedly as ever coach or crammer worked since the art of coaching and cramming was first invented. It would be a jog-trot humble kind of life, a life which could never lead to distinction, far from a brilliant future to offer to such a girl as Hilda Heathcote. Yet he told himself that it was such a life as would not be altogether distasteful to her. It was a life in which husband and wife need be but seldom parted, in which all their amusements and relaxations could be shared. They could hunt, and shoot, and ride, and boat together on that wild coast. The conventionalities would cost them very little. Fine clothes, fine living would not be required of them: and in their rustic seclusion they would escape the ghastly struggle to maintain showy appearances; they could afford themselves all the comforts of a homely unpretentious ménage.
Bothwell felt that it was in him to do good and honest work in such a career as this; surely better than sheep-breeding or gold-digging in some savage quarter of the earth, where the intellectual man must gradually sink to the level of his companion brutes. He pictured to himself the tranquil happiness of such a life. The long morning of conscientious work, followed by the afternoon ride or ramble. The summer holiday after a successful term; the adventurous excursion among Scottish lakes or in some foreign land; the cherished home, gradually developed and improved from its primitive homeliness into a thing of beauty. The garden in which wife and husband and pupils worked together towards the attainment of a lofty ideal. The union of a household which should be as one family.
Cheered by such visions, Bothwell took up his old technical books with an almost rabid hunger for study. He sent to London for the newest treatises on gunnery. He flung himself with heart and mind into the one line of study which had always interested him. Hilda had told him not to write to her; but he could not deny himself the delight of unfolding his newly-formed plan, which he explained to her upon five sheets of closely-written note-paper.
"Let me have just one more letter from you, dearest," he pleaded in conclusion, "to tell me what you think of my scheme, and where we ought to look for a house. Shall it be Trevena or Boscastle or Padstow or New Quay? I think we ought to be near the sea, so that our lads may get plenty of boating and swimming. And I could teach you to row. We would live at least half our lives in the open air, and we would study natural history in all its branches. I fancy myself an ideal coach. I know my pupils would adore me, while you would be to them as a divinity. Our evenings could be devoted to music; we could get up one of Sullivan's operas, and perform for the benefit of the school or the church. We should be the most useful people in our parish. It would be a humble jog-trot life, darling; but I believe it would be a happy one for both of us. I know that for me it would be Paradise."
The answer came by return.
"Yes, dear Bothwell, your scheme is charming. Trevena is a delicious place, and I should delight in living there. I shall have a little money when I come of age, I believe—more than enough to furnish our house. Shall we be mediæval or Chippendale? I say Chippendale. And we must get an old house, for the sake of the panelling and the staircase; and we must pull it all to pieces on account of the drains. And now you must not write to me any more till Edward comes home. I have had a curious letter from him. He is deeply absorbed in unravelling some dreadful mystery. He has not yet found the murderer of that poor girl, but I can see that he no longer suspects you. How could he ever have harboured that monstrous idea?"
Cheered by such a letter as this, Bothwell worked as if he had been on the eve of some great examination—worked as if his life depended on those long hours of toil. Yes, he would get a house at Trevena—the sooner the better. He had felt of late as if the atmosphere of Penmorval stifled him. He had been too long a hanger-on upon his rich cousin. He was angry with himself for having dawdled and procrastinated, and let life slide by him, while he waited as if for a vision from heaven, to point out the road, in which he should walk. And now the seraphic vision had been granted to him; but the angel wore the shape of Hilda Heathcote. Hilda had inspired him with the desire to stay in England, to earn his bread in his own country, and out of that wish had arisen this scheme of his. He would lose no time in putting his plan into execution. Of late he had read aversion in the eyes of Julian Wyllard—or it may have been contempt for his idle life, for his dependence. In any case there was that in Wyllard's manner which rendered existence at Penmorval hateful for Bothwell Grahame.
"I suppose he, too, suspects me," Bothwell told himself. "He thinks it quite possible that I flung that girl into the gorge. Society is always ready to impute evil to an idler. There is that old doggerel of Dr. Watts about the mischief that Satan finds for idle hands to do."
He rode across country to Trevena the day after he received Hilda's frank and loving letter. He was not going to wait until his darling was able to marry him before beginning his new life. He would set up his establishment as soon as the thing could be done, take pupils at once, get over all the roughness, the difficulty of the start, before he asked Hilda to share his home. Nor was he going to furnish his house with his wife's money. That was just one of the things he would not consent to do. He had his idea as to how he should furnish his house when he found one to his liking. Of course he was not going to decide upon any house until Hilda had seen it and approved the choice. But in the mean time he rode off to Trevena on a voyage of discovery.
It was a long ride, and a hilly road, but not too long for the new hunter Glencoe, an animal with a tremendous reserve of force that had to be taken out of him somehow, an accumulated store of kicks and plunges which a clever rider could compound for in a good fast trot along the road, or a swinging gallop across the moorland. Bothwell and his horse were on excellent terms by the time they had gone three miles together, although the brute had insisted on going through Bodmin in a series of buck-jumps.
Life at Penmorval had been just a shade more sombre in its hue for the last week. Dora Wyllard had not been able altogether to overcome her offended feeling at that unwarrantable burst of passion upon her husband's part, which had followed Edward Heathcote's visit. That he should upbraid and insult her, that he should be jealous—he for whose sake she had jilted an upright and honourable man, he to whom she had given all the devotion of her life! It seemed to her an almost unpardonable weakness and littleness on Julian Wyllard's part. And she had thought his character above all pettinesses common to meaner men. She had loved him because he was noble-hearted and large-minded.
His indifference to Bothwell's good name, his selfish coldness upon a question which to her was vital, had wounded her to the quick. She was not a woman to give way to sullenness, to shut herself up in the armour of angry pride, to give ungracious answers and scant courtesy to the husband who had offended her. Yet there was a subtle change in her manner and bearing which was perceptible to Julian Wyllard, and which he felt keenly.
Neither husband nor wife had recurred by so much as one word or hint to that scene in the yew-tree arbour. Life had glided by for these last few days in just the same manner as of old; but the shadow was there all the same. The mild genius of domestic love had veiled his face.
Dora was sitting in the library with her husband at post-time on the day of Bothwell's ride to Trevena. Julian Wyllard was at his desk writing, while his wife sat in her favourite window, absorbed in a new book, with the open box from Mudie's at her feet, when the servant brought in the post-bag. Dora watched her husband intently as he unlocked the bag and took out a pile of letters and papers. He looked up as he was sorting the letters, and surprised that earnest expression in his wife's eyes.
"You are expecting some important letter?" he said.
"Yes, I am anxious to hear from Mr. Heathcote," she answered quietly.
It was the first time that name had been spoken by either of them since the scene in the arbour.
"There is your letter, then, in Heathcote's hand, with the Paris post-mark."
"Thank you." She rose, and walked across to the desk to receive her letters. "I hope he has some good news for me."
She went back to the window, and opened Heathcote's letter, standing by the open window in the full light of the September afternoon, her husband watching her all the while. Her face brightened as she read. There was no need for him to ask if the news were good.
"Your letter seems satisfactory," he said, unfolding the Times as he spoke.
"It is a good letter," she answered. "It tells me that Mr. Heathcote has begun to see how wrong he was in suspecting Bothwell. He has evidently made some discovery about that poor girl's fate. He, at any rate, has found out who she is."
"Indeed!" said Wyllard, deep in a leading-article. "He has found out who she is?"
"Yes. He writes her name as if I ought to know all about her. He is still groping in the dark, he says, but he hopes to fathom the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death."
There was no answer. Mr. Wyllard was absorbed by the paper.
"You were not listening, Julian."
"O, yes, I was. Léonie Lemarque—a French name. We were right, then, in supposing that the girl was French?"
He laid aside the newspaper, and began to open his letters; but he said not a word more about Heathcote's news. Dora felt that he might have been more interested—more sympathetic. It was her cousin whose reputation and happiness were at stake. Affection for her should have made these things of greater moment to her husband.
Bothwell came home in time for the eight-o'clock dinner, and in excellent spirits. He had seen an old cottage standing in a large garden, with a fine old orchard adjoining, a cottage which could be converted, by considerable additions, into a capital house for himself and his pupils. The situation was superb. The cottage stood on a height, near the junction of two roads, and it commanded magnificent views of sea and coast.
"I could make the additions I want for three or four hundred pounds," he told Dora, when he was alone with her in the drawing-room after dinner. "I should be my own architect and my own builder. I should only have to pay for labour and materials. I did a goodish deal in the building line when I was in the army, you know, Dora, supervising the alterations of the Jungapore barracks. I know more about bricks and mortar than you would give me credit for knowing."
He had previously confided his idea of taking pupils, and Dora had approved, and had promised her heartiest cooperation. He was sure of her sympathy with all his endeavours to win an honourable independence at home. The idea of his emigrating had always been unwelcome to her.
"And now, Dora, I am going to make a very audacious proposition," he said, when he had finished his description of the cottage at Trevena. "I want you to lend me seven hundred pounds, to be repaid in half-yearly instalments of one hundred pounds during the next three years and a half, with or without interest, as you may think fit."
"Suppose we say nothing about the repayment, Bothwell," said his cousin, smiling at him as she looked up from her embroidery. "You shall have the seven hundred pounds; and we will decide by and by whether it is to be a loan or a gift."
"Dora, you are too generous—" he began.
"Nonsense, Bothwell. I always intended to furnish you with a small capital if you made up your mind to emigrate. I had much rather give you the money to invest at home. You are the last of my clan—my only near relative—and I don't want to lose you. I look to you and Hilda, and your children, to brighten the decline of my life."
"O Dora, that seems a poor substitute for those who should be nearer and dearer," cried Bothwell. In the next instant he would gladly have recalled his words, for he saw the tears well up to his cousin's eyes, and he knew that her childless marriage was a grief.
"You are too good, far more generous than I deserve," he went on hurriedly. "But let the money be at least called a loan. If fortune favour me within the next few years, it will be such a pleasure to give you back your money. And if Fate prove unkind, I shall know I have not a hard creditor. But I have made up my mind to be successful. I mean to work as men seldom work—to make everything I do a labour of love. And with such a wife as Hilda—"
"Hilda will be a wife in a thousand. I am sure your pupils will adore her; and you must make your house very pretty, for Hilda's sake. Seven hundred will not be half enough."
"It will be more than enough. You don't know how economically I can build, and how cleverly Hilda and I will contrive to furnish. We will ride over the country to overhaul all the cottages and farmhouses in quest of neglected old bits of Chippendale and Sheraton. We shall get lovely old things for a mere song, and find some clever jobbing cabinet-maker to make them as good as new—"
"And in the end you will find they will have cost you more than if you had bought them from Nosotti," said Dora, laughing at his eagerness. "I know how costly that kind of economy is apt to prove in the long-run. You had better get your Sheraton or your Chippendale furniture made on purpose for you, new and sound and convenient, and of more charming designs than Chippendale ever imagined."
"No, Dora. I am intense as a Chippendalist. I must have the real thing—old, and inconvenient even, if you like."
"What a boy you are still, Bothwell! And now I am going to tell you something that will please you."
"Hilda is coming here to-morrow," speculated Bothwell eagerly.
"No. Hilda is not coming back while her brother is away. That is not my good news, Bothwell. It is even better than that."
And then she told him the contents of Heathcote's letter.
"I am very glad," he said quietly. "That is at least one knocked off the list of my suspicious friends."
Julian Wyllard came into the drawing-room while the cousins were sitting together talking, their heads bending towards each other. The family likeness between them was very strong. They looked like brother and sister; and they looked very happy.
Dora was in the garden next day when the postman brought his bag. She was no longer anxious about her letters, having received the expected tidings from Paris. She was moving slowly about among her roses, armed with a basket and a pair of garden scissors, cutting off blind buds and shabby blooms, making war upon her insect enemies—enjoying the balmy air and warm sunshine of early autumn.
Julian Wyllard came out of the glass door while she was thus occupied. She looked up at the sound of the familiar footsteps, and went across the grass to meet him.
"My dear Dora, are you inclined to go for a week's holiday with me?" he asked, in his cheeriest tones.
"I am always ready to go anywhere with you. Is it because you have not been feeling well of late that you want to leave Penmorval?" she asked, looking anxiously at him, remembering his strange irritation, that burst of jealousy, which might be after all only the indication of an overworked brain.
"I have not been feeling over well—a little worried and irritable, and more than a little weak and languid," he answered. "But it is not on that account I want to go away. You remember my losing the Raffaelle last July?"
"Perfectly."
"Well, there is a still finer Raffaelle to be sold next week in Paris, at the Hôtel Drouot. The great Rochejaquelin collection comes to the hammer. There are some of the finest Greuzes in Europe. There are Meissoniers of the highest quality, and a famous Delaroche. I may not buy any of the pictures. No doubt the prices will be enormous. But I should like to see the collection once more, before it is scattered to the four winds. Would you mind running over to Paris with me for a week, or would you rather stay at home while I go?"
"I should like very much to go. I have never been in Paris with you, except hurrying through from station to station."
"Have you not? That is strange."
"I have never even seen the house where you lived when you were making your fortune in Paris."
"That would not be much to see. A ground floor near the Madeleine. A capital point for a business man; within ten minutes' walk of the Bourse, and in that central spot where the idlers and the workers alike congregate. A most uninteresting nest, Dora; nothing historical, or picturesque, or romantic, within half a mile."
"It will be enough for me that you lived and worked there. You must have worked very hard in those days."
"I was not one of the butterflies, I assure you."
"Mr. Distin told me that you turned your back upon all the dissipations and pleasures of Paris, that you were a man of one idea, working only for one end—to make a great fortune.
"That is the only way for a poor man to grow rich. I had to make brain-labour and concentration serve me instead of capital. I had the good luck to enter the Parisian Bourse at a period when fortunes might be made by hard thinking—when to win in the game of speculation was a question of mathematics. Nature and schooling had made me a decent mathematician, and I used all the science I had in fighting the coulissiers with their own weapons. But I am talking a language which you can't understand, Dora. Let the past be past. You and I have only to spend the money I earned in those days."
"You are always spending your wealth for the good of others, Julian," his wife answered tenderly. "Providence ought to bless the riches you earned in your laborious youth. I cannot imagine you caring for money for its own sake."
"I never did so care for it, Dora. Money in my mind meant power. I began life as a poor man's son, and tasted all the bitterness of narrow means. In my boyhood I told myself that I would be rich before I grew old, and to that end I worked as few men work. I was able to surround my mother with luxury during the closing years of her life. I was able to give my sister a dowry that helped the man of her choice to make his way in the world years before he could have done so without that aid. She did not live very long to enjoy her happiness, poor girl; but her last days were brightened by prosperity. No, Dora, I was not a money-grubber, but I made speculation a science, and I turned the age in which I lived to good account. It is not often given to a speculator to live in such a golden age as the days of Morny and Jecker."
"I am sure you would do nothing that was not strictly honourable," said Dora, with her bright trusting look.
"O, I belonged to the honourable section of the Bourse," replied Wyllard, with a somewhat cynical smile. "I had my office and my agents in London, and was a power on the Stock Exchange; and when I had acquired a reputation as a financier on both sides of the Channel, I founded the firm of Wyllard & Morrison, with one of the richest merchants in London for my partner. A man in my position could soil his fingers with no doubtful enterprise. Well, Dora, it is agreed you will go to Paris with me?"
"With pleasure."
She was happier than she had felt since that cloud of anger had passed across her domestic horizon. Julian's manner was franker, fonder, more like his old self—the man who had won her away from that other noble-minded man to whom she had promised herself—the man for whose sake she had been willing to break her promise.
"Can you be ready to start to-morrow morning? The sale takes place three days hence, and I want to have a good look at the pictures before they come to the hammer."
"Yes, I will be ready whenever you like."
"Then we'll leave by the morning train, and go straight on to Paris by the night mail. You will be able to see Heathcote, and hear how his investigation progresses. Where is he staying, by the way?"
"At the Hôtel de Bade."
"I'll drop him a line, and ask him to call on us at the Windsor. It is an old-fashioned family hotel, where I think you will be more comfortable than at one of those huge palaces, where you may be surfeited with splendid upholstery, but rarely get your bell answered under a quarter of an hour. You will take Priscilla, I suppose?"
Priscilla was Mrs. Wyllard's maid, Cornish to the marrow, and a severe Primitive Methodist.
"Priscilla in Paris? No, I think not. She was so wretched in Italy. The very smell of the incense offended her."
"She will not be overpowered by incense in Paris nowadays. She is more likely to be offended by a new Age of Reason. However, if you think you can do without her—"
"I'm sure I can. We shall not be visiting, I suppose?"
"Hardly, I think. It is the dullest of dull seasons in Paris just now, and I had never a large visiting acquaintance in that city. I was too busy a man to go into society."
"You must have been a stoic to resist the temptations of Parisian society—the writers, the painters, singers, actors—all that is foremost and brightest in the intellectual world."
"There are circles and circles in Paris, as well as in London. I have been in Parisian assemblies that were eminently dull," said Wyllard.
They started from Penmorval after breakfast next morning, and were seated in the Dover mail at eight o'clock in the evening, after dining at the Grand Hotel. Dora was in excellent spirits. Change of scene had a brightening effect upon her mind, and she was very happy in the idea of Hilda and Bothwell's happiness. She had handed her cousin a cheque for seven hundred pounds, with which he was to open an account at the local bank. And then he had only to wait for Hilda to approve his choice, before he set to work with bricklayers and carpenters at improving a cottage into an Elizabethan Grange. That was his idea.
"We will have an Elizabethan Grange furnished with real Chippendale," he said. "Incongruous, but charming."
"Then be sure that very few of your windows are made to open," said Dora, laughing at his ardour, "if you want to be truly Elizabethan."
"Every casement shall open to its uttermost width—every corner of the house shall be steeped in light and air," protested Bothwell.
And now Dora Wyllard was reclining in her corner of the railway compartment, speeding towards Dover through the gray autumn night, by Kentish hayfields and stubble, and across the gentle undulations of a Kentish landscape, so different from the bold hills and deep gorges of her native Cornwall.
There was a reading-lamp hanging on Mrs. Wyllard's side of the carriage, and she had the October Quarterlies and a heap of papers to beguile the journey. Among the papers, was the Times supplement, which she opened for the first time to look at the births, marriages, and deaths. Mr. Wyllard had read the other part of the paper before they reached Paddington, but he had not looked at the supplement.
While Dora was looking down the births, marriages, and deaths in a casual way, her eye was suddenly caught by an advertisement at the top of the second column.
"The person who was to have met Léonie Lemarque at Charing Cross Station on the morning of July 5th last is earnestly requested to communicate immediately with Messrs. Distin & Son, Solicitors, Furnival's Inn."
"How strange!" exclaimed Dora; and then she read the advertisement to her husband, who was sitting in an opposite corner, with closed eyes, as if half-asleep.
He started at the sound of her voice.
"I beg your pardon, Julian. I did not see that you were asleep."
"I was only dozing. Léonie Lemarque! that was the name of the girl who was killed, was it not? Then no doubt the advertisement is put in by Heathcote. The reference to Distin indicates as much."
"He must have made some further discovery about that unfortunate girl," said Dora thoughtfully. "He must have found out the date of her arrival in London, and that she came to meet some particular person. Do you think it was that person who killed her, Julian?"
"My dear Dora, how can I think about a business of which I know absolutely nothing? For anything we know, the girl's death may have been purely accidental, and this person who was to have met her at the station may be a figment of Heathcote's fancy, and this advertisement only a feeler thrown out in the hope of obtaining information from some unknown source. Why any of you should trouble yourselves to solve this mystery is more than I can understand."
"Why, Julian, did not you yourself send for Mr. Distin? did you not say that as a magistrate it was your duty—"
"To do all I could to further the ends of justice. Most assuredly, Dora. But having engaged the assistance of the cleverest criminal lawyer in England, and he having failed to fathom the mystery, I had no more to do. I had done my duty, and I was content to let the matter rest."
"So would I have been, if people had not suspected Bothwell. I could have no peace while there was such a cloud upon my cousin's reputation."
"That shows how narrow a view even the cleverest and most large-minded of women can take of this big world. Surely it can matter to no man living what a handful of people in a little country town may choose to think about him."
"Bothwell has to spend his life among those people."
"Well, you have had your own way in the matter, my dear Dora; and if you will only allow me to forget all about it, I am content that you and Heathcote should grope for ever in the labyrinth of that girl's antecedents. A lady's-maid or a nursery-governess, I suppose, who came to England to seek her fortune."
Dora was silent. Once again she felt that there was a want of sympathy upon her husband's part in this matter. He ought to have remembered that Bothwell was to her as a brother.
They were in Paris early next morning. Mr. Wyllard had telegraphed to the proprietor of the Windsor, and had secured charming rooms on the first floor, with a balcony overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries. The outer shell of the palace still stood there, a memorial of the brilliant historic past, and cabs and carriages and omnibuses and wagons were driving across the once sacred grounds, on the new road that had been lately cut from the Rue de Rivoli to the quay. It was a splendid Paris upon which Dora and her husband looked out in the clear freshness of the autumnal morning, but it was curiously changed from that Imperial Paris which Julian Wyllard had known twenty years before. It seemed to him this morning, looking across those ruined palace-walls, the daylight streaming through those vacant windows, as if he and the world had grown old and dim and feeble since those days.
Twenty years ago, and Morny was alive, and Jecker was a power on the Parisian Bourse, and Julian Wyllard was laying the foundation-stones of his fortune. He had started the Crédit Mauresque—that powerful association which had dealt with the wealth of Eastern princes and Jewish traders, had almost launched a company for the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem, had ridden gaily over the perilous ocean of public enterprise for some time, and had made great fortunes for the four or five gifted individuals whose second sight revealed to them the right hour at which to withdraw their capital from the scheme.
Yes, it had been a glorious Paris in those days, a city in which a young Englishman with a mathematical brain could court the goddess Fortune more profitably than in his native capital. Julian Wyllard had earned his bread upon the London Stock Exchange for some years before he changed the scene of his labours to Paris; but it was upon the Paris Bourse that he began to make his fortune.
Dora was tired after her journey, for she had been too full of thought to sleep in the train, and even now her brain was too active for the possibility of rest. So, after dressing and breakfasting, she accompanied her husband to the great Parisian auction rooms to look at the Rochejaquelin collection.
The inspection of the pictures lasted over two hours. Julian Wyllard was an ardent connoisseur, and his wife sympathised with him in his love of art. Together they criticised the gems of the collection, and stood in silent admiration before the famous Raffaelle.
"It will fetch thousands," said Wyllard.
"Why not buy it, if you really wish to possess it?" said Dora. "Why should we hoard our money? There is no one to come after us. Penmorval may be a show place when you and I are gone, and your picture-gallery will give pleasure to hundreds of tourists."
"Ah, there is the rub," sighed her husband, conscious of the latent melancholy in his wife's speech. "'No son of mine succeeding.' When you and I are gone there will be no one to care for Penmorval—no one to cherish your garden, and say, 'My mother planted these roses, or planned these walks'—no one to treasure the pictures I have collected, for any reason except their intrinsic value."
"Will you take me to see the house in which you lived and worked?" asked Dora, as they were leaving the auction-room.
"My dear Dora, I can show you the outside of that historic spot," answered her husband lightly; "but I doubt if I can introduce you to the rooms in which I worked. The present occupant may not be inclined to sympathise with your hero-worship.".
"O, but I should so like to see those rooms, and I am sure if the occupier is a gentleman, he will not refuse such a natural request. Here comes Mr. Heathcote," she exclaimed, as they turned into the Boulevard.
"I was coming to the Hôtel Drouot in quest of you," said Heathcote, as they shook hands. "I called at your hotel, and was told you had gone to the auction-room. How well you are looking, Mrs. Wyllard—as if Paris agreed with you!"
"Your letter took a weight off my mind," she said. "And now I hope you will be kind to Bothwell and Hilda, and not insist upon too long an engagement."
"It seems to me that Bothwell and Hilda have taken their lives into their own hands, and don't want anybody's kindness," he answered. "I have had a tremendous letter from Hilda, telling me her lover's plans. They are the most independent young people I ever heard of. And pray what brings you to Paris? Are you going on anywhere?"
"No, we have only come to look at the Rochejaquelin pictures," answered Wyllard. "I have two or three business calls to make in the neighbourhood of the Bourse. Wyllard & Morrison have still some dealings in Paris."
"And I am going to look at my husband's old apartments," said Dora. "I have never stayed in Paris since our marriage. My only knowledge of the city dates from the time when I spent a month at Passy with my dear mother. What a happy time it was, and how much we contrived to see! It was in sixty-nine, and people were beginning to talk about war with Germany. How little did any of us think of the ruin that was coming, when we saw the Emperor and Empress driving in the Bois!"
"Come back to the hotel and lunch with us, Heathcote," asked Wyllard.
"A thousand thanks; but I am too Parisian to eat at this hour. I breakfasted at eleven o'clock."
"And we breakfasted less than three hours ago," said Dora. "I am sure we neither of us want luncheon. Let us go and look at your old home, Julian."
"It is not to be called a home, Dora," answered her husband, with a touch of impatience. "A business man's life has only one aspect—hard work. However, if you want to see the offices in which a money-grubber toiled, you shall be gratified. The street is not very far off. Will you walk there with us?" he added, turning to Heathcote.
"Gladly. I am a free man to-day."
"Indeed! Then your criminal investigation, your amateur-detective work is at a standstill for the moment, I conclude?" said Wyllard, with an ill-concealed sneer.
"For the moment, yes," answered the other quietly.
"And you have made some startling discoveries, no doubt, since you crossed the Channel?"
"Yes, my discoveries have been startling; but as they relate to the remote past, rather than to the period of that poor girl's death, they are of no particular value at present."
"The remote past? What do you mean by that?" asked Wyllard.
"Ten years ago."
"May we ask the nature of these discoveries?"
"I'd rather tell you nothing at present. My knowledge is altogether fragmentary. Directly I have reduced it to a definite form—directly I have a clear and consecutive story to tell—you and Mrs. Wyllard shall hear that story. In the mean time I had rather not talk about the case."
"You have all the professional reticence. And I see that you and Distin are working together," said Wyllard.
"How do you mean?"
"We saw your advertisement in yesterday's Times".
"How did you know that I had inserted that advertisement?"
"The girl's name was conclusive—Léonie Lemarque: that was the name of the girl who was killed."
"Yes. But I did not think it was known to any one except Distin and myself."
"You mentioned the name in your letter to me," said Dora.
"Did I really? Then it was unconsciously. I meant to have told nothing till I could tell the whole story."
[CHAPTER IV.]
THE HOME OF THE PAST.
Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard and Heathcote walked on together to a quiet street near the Madeleine, a street of offices and wholesale traders.
The house in which Mr. Wyllard had occupied the ground floor was one of the best in the street, a large stone-fronted house, with a high doorway and carved columns—not so richly decorated as those palatial dwellings of Haussmannised Paris, built during the Second Empire, but a handsome and somewhat florid style of house notwithstanding. It stood at the corner of a narrow court, leading no one cared where. Doubtless to some obscure slum in which the working classes had one of their nooks—those hidden colonies which lurk here and there behind the palaces of great cities.
The ground floor was no longer the home of finance and grave transactions. The house in which Julian Wyllard had schemed and laboured was now occupied by wholesale dealers in foreign goods of all kinds, from china to toys, from travelling-bags to Japanese tea-trays, chinoiseries, unbreakable glass, German lamps, English electro-plate. The house had become one huge bazaar, which a stranger might enter without much ceremony; albeit there is a strict etiquette in such establishments, and no retail purchases were permissible. Only the trade was allowed to buy anything in that dazzling chaos of small wares.
While all the upper floors had been made into warehouses, the lower floor had been in somewise respected. The rooms in which Julian Wyllard had worked were used as offices by Messrs. Blümenlein Brothers, while one of the brothers had made his nest in Julian's old rooms at the back of the offices.
"Upon my word, Dora," said Wyllard, pausing on the threshold of his old abode, "I feel that we are going into this house on a fool's errand. I don't know what excuse to make."
"Why make any excuse at all?" replied his wife. "Leave the whole business to me, Julian. I want to see your old home, and I am determined I will see it. I am not at all afraid of Messrs. Blümenlein."
"In that case I will leave you and Heathcote to manage the matter between you," said Wyllard, with a sudden touch of impatience, of anger even, his wife thought. "I have a business call to make near here. Heathcote will take you back to your hotel."
He turned on his heel, and was gone before Dora could make any objection. Again she had seen that dark look in his face which had so startled and shocked her in the yew-tree arbour. Was it indeed jealousy of her old lover which so changed him? Her pride revolted at the idea of such want of faith in one to whom she had given so much.
She allowed no sign of disquietude to escape her, but went quietly into the office of Messrs. Blümenlein, followed by Heathcote.
"Pardon me for intruding upon you, gentlemen," she said in French to the two clerks who were seated at a desk in this outer room. "These offices were some years ago occupied by my husband, and I should esteem it a favour if you would allow me to see the rooms on this floor."
A middle-aged man, who was standing near a window looking through some papers, turned at the sound of her voice, and came over to her.
"With pleasure, Madame," he said. "Have I he honour of speaking to Mrs. Wyllard?"
"Yes, Monsieur, I am Mrs. Wyllard. You were my husband's immediate successor in these rooms, I conclude?"
"Yes, Madame, there was no other occupation. My brother and I bought this house in 'seventy-one, almost immediately after the war; but Mr. Wyllard was the occupant of this floor for some years after we were in possession."
"Exactly two years," said a second Mr. Blümenlein, appearing from an inner room. "Is it possible that Madame has not before seen these rooms, in which her distinguished husband transacted so much important business?"
"No, Monsieur, this is my first visit to Paris since my marriage. I am much interested in seeing these rooms."
"It will be an honour and a pleasure to us to show them," said the elder of the two brothers. "Gustav there, my younger brother, enjoys the possession of the private apartments almost exactly as Mr. Wyllard left them. He bought the furniture and fittings, pictures, bronzes, everything except the books, en bloc, when Mr. Wyllard gave up his Parisian establishment. Hardly anything has been altered. These offices can have little interest for you, Madame. They are the facsimile of a thousand other Parisian offices. But the private apartments have a certain individuality. Gustav, show Madame the rooms which were once her husband's home."
There was a touch of German sentimentality about Mr. Blümenlein, in spite of his Parisian training. He was full of sympathy for the affectionate wife. He had lofty ideas about the sanctity of home.
The younger brother, Gustav, opened a padded door, and admitted the two visitors into his bachelor nest.
The first room which they entered was the library, lined from floor to ceiling with book-shelves, and lighted by a large skylight. It was a room that had been built out into a yard. It was furnished with carved oak, in the Henri Deux style, rich, antique, solid. The clock upon the chimney-piece was a gem of mediæval metal-work. The covers of chairs and sofas were of old tapestry, sombre, genuine, artistic.
Adjoining this was the salon and dining-room in one, plainly furnished in the modern style. The walls were decorated with etchings of the most famous pictures of the Second Empire. It was a small room; an almost severe simplicity was its chief characteristic. Nothing here assuredly of the sybarite or the voluptuary, thought Edward Heathcote, as he contemplated the home of his rival's solitary manhood.
Bedroom and bathroom completed the suite of apartments, and even to these Mrs. Wyllard and her companion were admitted.
The bedroom was spacious, lofty, handsomely furnished in a solid and sombre style. But it was not a cheerful room. It was situated at the back of the house, and its windows, deeply recessed and heavily curtained, derived their light from a narrow court. The lower part of each window was of ground-glass; the upper sashes were violet-tinted, and gave an artificial colour to the daylight. The curtains were of dark-brown damask; the ponderous armchairs and sofa were upholstered in dark-brown velvet.
By the fireplace there was the secrétaire at which Julian Wyllard had worked, the large shaded lamp which had lighted his evening toil. Mr. Blümenlein showed these things with pride. Nothing had been altered.
"I am a man of somewhat studious habits, like Mr. Wyllard," he said, "and I often work late into the night. This room is a delightful room, for none of the noises of Paris penetrate here. The court is very little used after dark—a passing footstep, perhaps, once in half an hour. It is an almost monastic repose."
The bed was in an alcove in a corner, entirely shrouded by brown damask curtains like those which draped the windows.
"There is a door leading into the court, I see," said Heathcote, whose keen eyes had scrutinised every feature of the room.
"What, you have perceived that!" exclaimed Mr. Blümenlein, with marked surprise. "I thought it was quite hidden by the curtains."
"No, the top of the upper hinge is just visible above the curtain-rod."
"Strange! No one ever before noticed that door."
"It is not a secret door, I suppose?" said Heathcote.
"Certainly not. But it has never been used in my time, and I doubt if Mr. Wyllard made much use of it," said Mr. Blümenlein, drawing back the curtain. "The bed stood in his time just where it stands now, with the head against the door."
"The bedstead is light enough to be moved easily if the door were wanted," suggested Heathcote.
It was a small brass bedstead of English make. The voluminous curtains made a kind of tent, independent of the bedstead.
"No doubt it could," replied Blümenlein, "but I fancy it could have been no more wanted in Mr. Wyllard's time than it has been in mine. It may have been made by some former inhabitant of these rooms, who wanted free egress and ingress at any hour of the night, without exciting the curiosity of the porter."
"You conclude, then, that the door was an after-thought," said Heathcote, "and not in the original plan of the house."
"Decidedly. You will see how ruthlessly it has been cut through dado and mouldings. An after-thought evidently."
Mr. Blümenlein pulled aside the bedstead and showed Mr. Heathcote the door. It was a low narrow door, of plain oak, without panelling or ornamentation of any kind. The fastening was a latch-lock, a Bramah, with a small key, and a strong bolt secured the door on the inner side.
"A convenient door, no doubt," said Heathcote, "for a person of secret habits."
Dora looked lingeringly round the room. Its gloom oppressed her. The opaque windows, the tinted light from the upper sashes, the sombre colouring, the heavy furniture—all contributed to that gloomy effect. The only spot of brightness in the room was the writing-table, with its brass fittings, its handsome brass lamp, and large green shade. There her husband sat night after night, when the rest of Paris was gyrating in the whirlpool of fashionable pleasure, light as autumn leaves dancing in the wind. There he had sat brooding, calculating, plotting, striving onward, in the race for wealth. It was for money he had toiled, and to make a great fortune—not for science, or art, or fame—not to be useful or great—only to be rich. It seemed a sordid life to look back upon—a wasted life even—and Dora thought regretfully of those long evenings spent in this gloomy room. The idea of that monastic life had no charm for her. She would rather have heard that her husband had been the light of an intellectual circle—the favourite of fashion even. The picture of these studious nights spent in brooding over the figures in a share-list, the pages of a bank-book, chilled her soul.
And yet, in the maturity of his days, her husband had seemed to her the most generous and high-minded of men, setting but little value upon his wealth, caring nothing for money in the abstract.
"At the least he has known how to use his fortune nobly," she told herself, as she turned to leave that gloomy bedchamber. "I, who was born with good means, can hardly understand the eagerness of a penniless young man to win fortune. It is a foolish idea of mine, after all, that there is anything ignoble in working for riches."
"Well, Mrs. Wyllard, has your hero-worship been satisfied? Have you seen enough of the temple which once enshrined your god?" said Heathcote lightly.
"Yes, I have been very much gratified; and I must thank Mr. Blümenlein for his kindness and consideration."
The merchant protested that he had rarely enjoyed so great a privilege as that which Mrs. Wyllard had afforded him; and with exchange of courtesies they parted, on the threshold of the outer office.
Heathcote and Dora walked to the hotel together. It was not a long walk, and it took them only by crowded streets and busy thoroughfares, where anything like earnest conversation was impossible. And yet Edward Heathcote could but remember that it was the first time they two had walked together since Dora had been his plighted wife. Ah, how cruel a pang it gave him to recall those old days, and to remember all she had been to him, all she might have been, had Fate used him more kindly!
He stole a look at the beautiful face as they walked slowly across the Place Vendôme. Yes, she was no less lovely than of old; her beauty had ripened, not changed. There was a more thoughtful look, there were traces even of care and sorrow; but those indications only heightened the spirituality of the face.
O, what worship, what devotion he could have given her now in the bloom of her womanhood, in the maturity of his manhood—such whole-hearted, thoughtful love as youth can never give! And it was not to be. They were to be apart for ever, they two. They were to be strangers; since this assumption of friendship, to which he had tried to reconcile himself, was, after all, but a mockery. Chivalrous feeling might keep his thoughts pure, his honour unspotted; but in his heart of hearts he loved his first love as passionately as in the days of his youth.
And to-day, for the first time, he had heard her husband address her coldly and curtly, with a touch of anger even.
He was not likely to forget that curt, impatient tone, and the frown that had accentuated it.
"I was very glad to get your letter," she said presently. "Tell me once more with your own lips that you have ceased to suspect my cousin."
"Ceased to suspect would, perhaps, be too strong an expression. But in the discoveries I have made relating to that murdered girl there is certainly nothing that in any way points to Mr. Grahame."
"I wish you would tell me all you have discovered—how near you are to clearing up the mystery."
"I fear I am still very far from that. It is the history of a remote crime which occupies me at the present, and I hope in that history of the past to find the clue to poor Léonie's death. I shall know more in a few days."
"How so?"
"You saw my advertisement in the Times. If that advertisement be not answered within a week, I shall conclude that the man who was to have met Léonie Lemarque on the morning of July 5th has some part in the guilt of her death."
"And then—"
"And then it will be my business or Mr. Distin's business to find that man."
They were at the door of the hotel by this time, and here Heathcote bade Dora adieu.
"We shall meet again before you leave Paris, I daresay," he said. "If Wyllard wants me he will know where to find me."
"You are not going home yet?"
"No; I am likely to stay here some little time."
"And poor Hilda is longing to have you back at The Spaniards. She will not see Bothwell while you are away. She is bound by the promise you exacted from her. Their future home—everything is in abeyance till you return," pleaded Dora.
"The home must remain in abeyance a little longer. It is hard, no doubt; but when I go back I may be able to give Bothwell some substantial help in the matter of that future home."
"He will need only your sympathy and your advice. He can manage everything else for himself."
"I understand. He has been helped already."
"Bothwell has always been to me as a brother and he can never be poor while I am rich," answered Dora, as they shook hands.
Heathcote walked slowly back to the Boulevard, thinking over this unexpected arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard in Paris. Why had they come? That alleged reason of the picture-sale seemed rather more like an excuse for a journey than a motive. True that Wyllard had been known to go up to London on purpose to attend a sale at Christie & Manson's, and there might, therefore, be nothing extraordinary in his going still further on the same errand. But it was strange that the picture-sale should coincide with Heathcote's presence in Paris. Could it be Dora's eagerness to know the result of his researches that had brought her and her husband to the Hotel Windsor? Was her impatience the motive of the visit?
Hardly, he thought, for he knew the candour of her nature, and he told himself that she would not have misrepresented the reason of her journey. She had told him that the visit was a sudden whim of her husband's, arising out of his passion for art.
Could it be that Julian Wyllard was so deeply interested in the question of Bothwell's guilt or innocence as to make an excuse for being on the scene of the investigation? He had seemed indifferent almost to unkindness. He had wounded his wife's feelings by his coldness upon this question. And now it seemed to Edward Heathcote that his real motive in coming across the Channel must be to watch the case with his own eyes. His manner to-day, when he inquired about Heathcote's progress, had been seemingly careless: but beneath that apparent indifference the lawyer had noted a keen expectancy, an intent watchfulness. Yes, it was something of deeper moment than a picture-sale which had brought Julian Wyllard to Paris, posthaste, at a day's notice. His angry manner to his wife an hour ago had indicated nervous irritation, a mind on the rack.
Yet, looking at the question from a worldly point of view—and Heathcote considered Wyllard essentially a man of the world—there seemed but little reason why he should be deeply concerned as to whether Bothwell was or was not suspected of foul play in the matter of the French girl's death. The evidence against the young man was of far too slight and vague a character to endanger his life or liberty. It was only just enough to cast a cloud upon his reputation; and that his cousin's husband should put himself out of the way on this account seemed to the last degree unlikely. Julian Wyllard's life, judged as Heathcote judged it, was that of a man who had lived exclusively for himself and his own happiness. An excellent husband to a wife whom he adored, a good master, a liberal landlord; yet a man with whom self had ever been paramount.
[CHAPTER V.]
A FACE FROM THE GRAVE.
A week passed. Julian Wyllard attended the sale at the Hôtel Drouot, bought three of the smaller gems of the Rochejaquelin gallery, and allowed the Raffaelle to pass into a national collection. His wife and he had gone about Paris and its environs in the mean while; Dora very happy in revisiting the spots she had admired in her youth.
The week had gone, and there had been no reply to Heathcote's advertisement. But there had been a letter from Joseph Distin.
"The last few days have not been entirely barren in results," he wrote. "Léonie Lemarque's handbag has been found at the Charing Cross Station; it was left in the waiting-room on the morning of the 5th July, immediately after the arrival of the mail train from Dover. The bag is now in my office. It contains some linen, marked L. L., slippers, brush, and comb; but not a document of any kind. Nothing to afford the slightest clue to the girl's business in London. The police have found a hansom-cabman who drove a tall, gentlemanlike man and a French girl from Charing Cross to Paddington Station on the morning of the 5th of July, in time for the Penzance train. They had no luggage. The cabman believes that he should recognise the man if he saw him again, but can give no clear description of his appearance, except that he was a fine-looking man in the prime of life. He talked French to the girl, and the cabman supposes him to have been a Frenchman. He and the girl appeared to be on very good terms. The cabman saw them go into the Paddington Station together, about five minutes before the starting of the train. The photograph of the dead girl has been shown to this cabman, and he has identified it as the likeness of the little French girl he drove in his cab."
This was all the progress that Joseph Distin's agents had made at present. The facts looked dark against the man who had taken Léonie Lemarque from station to station. If he had been innocent of all wrong in relation to that helpless stranger, surely he would have replied to the advertisement; he would have come forward to say what part he had taken in the history of Léonie Lemarque.
Heathcote stopped the first advertisement, and inserted a second worded thus:
"Monsieur Georges, who resided in Paris in the year '71, and for some years previously, or any friend of Monsieur Georges now residing in England, is earnestly requested to communicate with Messrs. Distin & Son, Solicitors, Furnival's Inn."
He had not much hope of getting a reply to this advertisement, after the failure of the previous appeal, but he thought it was well to advertise this name of Georges. Some insignificant person, some busybody who had known the man Georges at some period of his existence, might reply; and any information so obtained might form a link in the chain of that strange story of Marie Prévol and her mysterious lover.
Mysterious, Heathcote felt this man to have been, despite Trottier's idea that he was only a rich American who lived a Bohemian life as a matter of choice. It seemed to Heathcote as if there must have been some stronger ground than mere whim for an existence so secluded, so exceptional, spent in such a city as Paris, where the delight of the rich and the idle is to spend their days and nights before the eyes of an admiring crowd, and to have every movement and every caprice chronicled in the newspapers.
And this man had been in the prime of his manhood, good-looking, clever, brilliant, the lover of a beautiful actress. Hardly the kind of person to hide his light under a bushel, unless there was some strong motive for concealment.
What could that motive be? Heathcote wondered, as he brooded over the imperfect story of Marie Prévol and her niece. Was this Georges a swindler, who had come by his wealth in a criminal manner, and dared not show himself in the light of day? Was he one of the many tricksters and schemers of Paris, the birds of prey who live upon carrion, and who know themselves the scorn of their fellow-men? or had he a wife from whose jealous eye he was obliged to hide his devotion to Marie Prévol? Heathcote believed that there must have been some guilty reason for the life which shrank from the light of day.
He had been in Paris a fortnight, and he began to ask himself how long this investigation to which he had pledged himself was likely to last. At the beginning his progress had seemed rapid—triumphant almost. Starting from utter ignorance of the name and position of the dead girl, he had arrived in a few days at an exact knowledge of her name, surroundings, and past history. Yet he was constrained to confess to himself that, armed with all these facts, he was not one whit nearer to finding the man who had murdered her. Given this history of Léonie Lemarque's childhood and youth, it was still possible that Bothwell Grahame had thrown her out of the railway-carriage.
The man who took her in a hansom from Charing Cross to Paddington might have left her at the latter station. She might have gone alone upon her way towards Penzance, to encounter a villain on the road, and that villain might have been Bothwell Grahame. The thing was within the limits of possibility; though in Heathcote's present mood it seemed to him altogether unlikely. Yet firmly to establish the fact of Bothwell's innocence, he must find the man who was guilty.
It seemed to him that the man who met Léonie Lemarque at the station, who was known to have conducted her to another station, had in a measure condemned himself by his silence. If he had not been guiltily concerned in the girl's death, he would assuredly have replied to the advertisement. He would have been apprised by that advertisement that some evil had befallen Léonie Lemarque, and he would have been prompt to come forward and tell all he knew of the girl who had been sent to him for aid, a friendless orphan, a stranger in a strange land.
It seemed clear to Heathcote that Georges, the murderer, was still living, still in dread of the gallows; and that the girl who went to meet the friend of the murderer had fallen into a trap. The papers she carried were doubtless of a compromising character; the girl herself was the sole witness of the crime, the only living being who could recognise the murderer. Papers and witness had disappeared together.
Heathcote was fond of Paris. It was not irksome to him to stay there even in the dead season. He had the theatres for his evening amusement; he had two or three friends who had not fled to the mountain or the sea, and in whose drawing-rooms he was welcome. He had the National Library in the Rue Richelieu for his club; and he had the ever-varying life of the Boulevard for his recreation. Time therefore did not hang heavily on his hands; and he knew that while he watched and waited in Paris, Joseph Distin would not be idle in London. Every clue, were it the slightest, would be patiently followed by that expert investigator.
In his saunterings in the Rue de Rivoli and on the Boulevards Mr. Heathcote had hunted assiduously for a photograph of Marie Prévol; but so fleeting is the fame of beauty, which leaves nothing behind it save a tender memory, that for some time he had failed utterly in his quest. Her name was hardly remembered by the people who sold photographs. And yet twelve or thirteen years ago the portrait of Marie Prévol was in every shop-window. It had been sold by thousands, had adorned every album in Paris and Brussels, and had been hung over many a bachelor's mantelpiece, worshipped by half the beardless boys in France and Belgium.
At last Heathcote lighted upon an elderly shopman, who was a little more intelligent and had a much better memory than the men he had encountered hitherto. The man perfectly remembered Marie Prévol and her photographs.
"We had a photograph of her by Nadar," he said—"a portrait that was the rage. It was soon after her first appearance at the Porte Saint-Martin, and it was the costume in which she made her début. She was the Genius of Evil, in a black satin bodice and a black tulle skirt starred with gold. The close-fitting black bodice set off her graceful figure, and her superb shoulders, and her hair, which was positively magnificent, fell down her back in a horse's tail. It was like a stream of molten gold. I saw her in that character half a dozen times. All Paris rushed to see her, though she was never much of an actress. Her beauty made her famous all over Europe. We used to send her photographs to St. Petersburg. But there is a fashion in these things; and I daresay almost every one of those photographs has found its way to the rubbish-heap. If you call to-morrow I may be able to supply you with what you want; but I shall have to hunt over a good deal of our old stock to get at it."
"I shall be greatly obliged if you will do so," answered Heathcote. "I suppose Mademoiselle Prévol had the weakness of our lovely ladies in England, and was fond of being photographed."
"In the first year or so, when she began to be celebrated for her beauty, there were a good many different photographs of her—in this costume and in that; and, you know, in those fairy spectacles every handsome actress wears at least half a dozen costumes. But after that first year there were no more of Mademoiselle Prévol's photographs to be had for love or money. Our firm applied to her, offered her a liberal royalty—five sous upon every photograph—if she would sit to Nadar, in all her costumes, and give us the sole privilege of selling her portraits. But she declined. She was never going to sit again. She did not want herself vulgarised by having her portrait sold for a franc to every calicot in France. Our firm felt insulted by her reply, which was given to one of our principals, through an impertinent sempstress, who worked by the day for Mademoiselle Prévol, and who almost shut the door in our principal's nose. Our firm took the trouble to find out why Mademoiselle objected to the fame which photography can alone bestow upon beauty; and we discovered that there was a lover in the case—a mysterious lover; a man who kept himself curiously dark—"
"Stay!" exclaimed Heathcote. "I will give you a thousand francs for a photograph of that lover."
The shopman shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
"A liberal offer, Monsieur, and a very safe one. Except that the man's name was Georges, I know nothing about him. The police would have given me twice as much as you offer, for his photograph, if I could have furnished them with one ten years ago, immediately after the murder of Marie Prévol."
And then the man proceeded to relate the story of the actress's death, and the impression which it made in Paris at the time. Heathcote listened, and affected ignorance: for, even in these recollections, there might be some detail to suggest a clue. There was nothing, however. The man told the story as it had been told in the newspapers, and as it was already known to Heathcote.
He went back to the shop on the following day, and the shopman showed him three different photographs of Marie Prévol.
Two were of the carte de visite size, in costume. They had both grown pale with age, and had an old-fashioned look. They were full-length portraits, showing the perfection of an exquisite figure, as displayed in the scanty drapery of a burlesque costume: a graceful girlish form, delicately fashioned, a perfect face, small refined features, a head crowned with masses of platted hair. But, in these small photographs, the soul was wanting. Beyond the one fact, that the original was exquisitely lovely, they revealed nothing.
The third was of cabinet size, and here the woman herself appeared. Here, in the face of the photograph, Edward Heathcote looked back across ten years, and saw the face of the living woman, the smile on the lips, the light in the eyes. It was a head vignetted, the head only, carelessly draped with a cloud of tulle, which framed the oval of the face and veiled the rich masses of hair. It was an exquisite face, eyes large and dark and dreamy, shadowed by long dark lashes, an expression of pensive tenderness about the perfect lips, the nose small and straight, the chin delicately moulded. It was not the bold bright beauty of an actress, accustomed to challenge the admiration of the vulgar crowd; it was a beauty instinct with tender womanly feeling, and serious thought, an essentially feminine loveliness; and its chief characteristic was purity. It would have been impossible to associate such loveliness with an evil life, a dissolute mind.
The colour of this larger photograph was almost as good as if it had been taken yesterday: the portrait had a living look, which struck Heathcote painfully. It was sad to think that lovely face had been lying in the dust for years—that the sweet smile in those eyes was nothing more than a memory.
He was to dine at the Windsor that evening—a farewell dinner, since Julian Wyllard talked of leaving Paris next morning. He wanted to take his wife to Switzerland, perhaps to the Italian lakes. Dora was pleased at the idea of revisiting the scenes in which her honeymoon had been spent. They seemed far away in a dim past, those days of early married life, when all the world was decked in the vivid hues of hope and gladness. Her union with Julian Wyllard had been a happy one, but there had been something wanting. That lonely old house at Penmorval chilled her sometimes, with its silent corridors, its empty rooms. It would have been so sweet to her to hear baby feet pattering along those corridors—baby voices—that glad childish treble, which is like the piping of young birds, in those spacious rooms. There were so many rooms, there was so much vacant space in the old house which only children could have filled. And now she told herself that the dream was past and done with. She felt as if she were growing old, and that somehow, she knew not how, she and her husband were further apart than they had been. It might be that the disappointment of a childless union was preying upon his mind—that he felt the burden of a great fortune for which he had toiled over-much in his youth, renouncing every social pleasure, friendship, love, all things, only to heap up wealth for which there should be no heir.
The dinner at the Windsor was bright and pleasant, albeit Heathcote was the only guest. Julian Wyllard was in excellent spirits, full of plans for making the most of the bright weather in Switzerland. Dora was pleased at his gaiety. She had been going about a good deal with him, revisiting all the places she had seen with her mother—the churches, the galleries, the law-courts, that brand-new Palais de Justice, so splendid, so imposing, so uninteresting. They had been to Versailles.
"Did you go to Saint-Germain?" asked Heathcote. "There is not much to see in the chateau where poor old James Stuart shed the light of exiled royalty; but the old town, and the terrace, and the forest are delightful."
"No; we did not go to Saint-Germain. We had arranged to go yesterday, but Julian mistook the time at which the train started, and we reached the station too late for the only train that would have suited us."
"You have never been to Saint-Germain?" asked Heathcote.
"O yes; I was there with my mother years ago," answered Dora. "We stayed at the Henri Quatre for a week. I have ridden and rambled all over the forest. I was charmed with the place. I should like to have gone there again with Julian."
"There may be time when we return from Switzerland," said her husband.
"Why not delay your journey for a day, and let us all go to Saint-Germain to-morrow?" said Heathcote. "Suppose you dine with me at the Henri Quatre. I have a morbid interest in that hotel, and in the forest."
"Indeed! But why?" asked Dora.
Instead of any verbal answer, Heathcote took from his pocket the photograph of Marie Prévol, and handed it to Mrs. Wyllard. She and her husband looked at it together. She had drawn closer to him after dinner, as they sat at the small round table, and now they were sitting side by side, like lovers.
There was a silence as they looked at the portrait.
"What an exquisite face!" exclaimed Dora at last. "I don't think I ever saw lovelier eyes or a sweeter expression. Who is the original? Do you know her?"
"She has been dead ten years. I never saw her," answered Heathcote gravely.
"But what has this portrait to do with your morbid interest in the forest of Saint-Germain?" asked Dora.
"It is the likeness of a woman who was cruelly murdered there just ten years ago. She was an actress known as Marie Prévol. The murder made a great sensation at the time. You must have heard of it, Mr. Wyllard; for I think you were a resident in Paris in '71?"
"I was a resident in Paris till '73. Yes, I perfectly remember the murder of Marie Prévol and her admirer. But it was one of those crimes which do not excite any deep or lasting interest. The case was too common, the motive too obvious. An outbreak of jealous fury on the part of a jilted lover. Had the murderer and his victims belonged to the working classes, society would scarcely have heard of the crime, certainly would have taken no notice of it. But because she was an actress and her admirer a man of fashion, there was a fuss."
"Then you do not consider such a murder interesting?" asked Heathcote.
"Assuredly not," replied Wyllard. "To be interesting a murder must be mysterious. Here there was no mystery."
"Pardon me. I think you must have forgotten the details of the story. There was a mystery, and a profound one; but that mystery was the character of the man Georges, who was known to have been Marie Prévol's devoted lover, and who was by some supposed to have been her husband."
"Ah, yes, I remember," answered Wyllard. "These things come back to one's mind as one discusses them. Georges was the name of the supposed murderer. He got off so cleverly as to baffle the keenest police in Europe."
"Did you know any thing of him?"
"Nothing. He was a nobody, I believe. A man of ample means, but of no social standing."
"His life was a social mystery; and it is in that mysterious existence that I find an interest surpassing anything I have hitherto met with in the history of crime."
"Really!" exclaimed Julian Wyllard, with something of a sneer in his tone. "I perceive you have begun the business of amateur detective on a large scale. I understood from Dora that you were coming to Paris solely with a view to finding out anything there was to be discovered about that poor little girl who tumbled off the viaduct, and whom, I think, you call Louise Lemarque."
"Léonie Lemarque. That was the girl's name. Léonie Lemarque's death is only the last link in a chain of events beginning with the murder of Marie Prévol."
Julian Wyllard started impatiently from his chair.
"My dear Heathcote, I thought you the most sensible man I ever met, but really this sounds like rank lunacy. What in Heaven's name can the murder at Saint-Germain ten years ago have to do with the death of that girl the other day?"
"Only this much. Léonie Lemarque was Marie Prévol's niece: and I have the strongest reason for believing that she went to London to meet the murderer of her aunt."
[CHAPTER VI.]
STRUCK DOWN.
As Edward Heathcote uttered those words, the conviction of their truth flashed into his mind. In thoughtful days and wakeful nights this question as to the identity of the person who was to meet Léonie Lemarque at the railway-station had been a perplexity to him, the subject of many a new theory: and now it came upon him all at once that this assertion, which he had made on the spur of the moment, in the heat of argument, was the true solution of the mystery.
It was to Georges himself—her daughter's generous adoring lover, her daughter's suspected murderer—that Madame Lemarque had sent her granddaughter, as to one who, of all other men, would be most inclined to act generously to the orphan girl, were it only in remorse for his crime.
He tried to realise the thoughts of the lonely old woman, dying in penury, leaving her orphan grandchild to face the world without a friend. She would go over the list of those whom she had known in the past—those who were rich enough to be generous. Alas! how few there are who remain the friends of poverty! One man she had known of, although she had never seen him—rich, generous to lavishness. She had at one time believed him to be the murderer of her daughter. But it might be that she had afterwards modified her opinion, that she had received some communication from this Georges, that he had assured her of his innocence, that he had sent her money, had helped her to struggle on against adverse times, had helped her for a while, and then grown weary. And she, knowing the place of his exile, had, in her desperation, determined upon committing her grandchild to this man's care; rather than to the pitiless world of strange faces and careless hearts, the outside world, to which one helpless girl the more is but as one drop in the ocean of sorrowing humanity. She had sent Léonie Lemarque to meet this man, and the girl had recognised the murderer of her aunt.
And yet this could hardly be, since the cabman's evidence showed that Léonie had been on the best possible terms with the person in whose company she drove to Paddington Station.
After that speech of his, Edward Heathcote had no longer the power to withhold any details of his investigation from Julian Wyllard and his wife. He told them in fewest words all that he had discovered since he crossed the Channel.
Dora was intensely interested in the story. The passionate love and passionate jealousy were very human feelings that appealed to her womanly tenderness. She could not withhold her pity from the murderer.
"Strange that, in all your Parisian experience, you never met this Monsieur Georges," she said to her husband.
"Hardly, since I seldom went out in the evening; while this man was evidently a thorough Bohemian, who only began to live after midnight," answered Wyllard.
He was sitting in a thoughtful attitude, his elbow on the table, his chin leaning on his hand, and that photograph of Marie Prévol lying before him. He was looking intently at it, perusing every lineament.
Presently he raised his eyes, slowly, thoughtfully, from the photograph to the face of his wife.
"Yes," said Heathcote, "I know what you are thinking. There is a likeness. It struck me this evening when I came into this room. There is a curious likeness between the face of the living and the dead."
That morning, on studying the countenance in the photograph, Heathcote had been perplexed—worried, even—by a sense of familiarity in that face of the dead. It smiled at him as a face he had known of old—a face out of the past. Yet it was only in the evening, when he came into the salon at the Windsor, and Mrs. Wyllard turned towards him in the lamplight, that he knew what the likeness meant. It was not an obvious or striking likeness. The resemblance was rather in expression than in feature, but one face recalled the other.
"Yes, there is a likeness," said Wyllard coldly, passing the photograph back to its owner, who rose to take leave, just as the clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven.
"I shall look in to-morrow, and see if you are inclined for an afternoon at Saint-Germain," he said, as he shook hands with Dora.
"You are very kind," she said, "but your invitation is no longer tempting. You have spoiled my interest in that sweet old place. I shall always think of it as the scene of Marie Prévol's death."
"But surely that is an additional charm," said Wyllard mockingly. "If you are gifted with Mr. Heathcote's detective temper—the genius of the heaven-born police-officer—Saint-Germain will be all the more interesting to you on account of a double murder—and perhaps a suicide into the bargain; for it is not unlikely that the murderer's bones are mouldering in some gravel-pit."
"You forget Drubarde's story of the travelling-cap," said Heathcote.
"That was a shrewd hypothesis on your ex-police-officer's part, but it is by no means conclusive evidence," answered Wyllard.
Heathcote called at the Windsor upon the following afternoon, to inquire if Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard had left for Switzerland. He was shocked to hear that Mr. Wyllard had been taken seriously ill in the night, and that there had been two medical men with him that morning. Madame was terribly distressed, the waiter told him, but she bore up admirably.
Heathcote sent in his name, and was at once admitted to the salon, where Dora came to him after the briefest delay.
She was very pale, and there were signs of terror, and of grief in her countenance.
"I am glad you have come," she faltered. "I should have sent for you, only—" she hesitated, and stopped, with tears in her eyes, feeling that in another moment she might have said too much. He was her oldest friend, the man to whom her thoughts turned naturally in the hour of trouble, the man whom, of all others, she most trusted; but he was her old lover also, and she felt that never again could she dare to appeal to his friendship as she had done for Bothwell's sake.
"Is there anything very serious?" he asked.
"Yes, it is very serious. Paralysis. Only a slight attack, the doctors say. But there are signs of a physical decay which may end fatally—an overworked nervous system, the English physician says. And yet his life has been so easy, so placid, for the last seven years."
"No doubt; but his life in this city was a life of excitement and anxiety, the fever of the race for wealth. He is suffering now, most likely, for the high pressure of that period. Is his mind affected by the shock?"
"Not in the least. His mind was never clearer than it has been to-day."
"When did the illness begin?"
"Early this morning, five hours after you left us. We sat up till nearly one o'clock, talking of our trip to Switzerland and Italy. Julian was in wonderful spirits. I have never known him more cheerful. He planned a tour that would last all through the winter, as I told him. It was one o'clock when I went to bed, and I left him sitting in his dressing-room, reading. The door was half open, and I could see him, as he sat by the table, in the bright light of the lamp. I had slept for hours, as it seemed to me, when I was awakened by hearing my name called in a strange voice. I sprang out of bed; frightened by that unknown voice, and then I heard the name again, and knew all at once that it was Julian's voice, only altered beyond recognition. I rushed to him. He had sunk back into his armchair. I asked him what was the matter, and he told me that he could not move. There was numbness in all his limbs. His arms were as heavy as lead. I seized his hand and found it deadly cold. I rang the bell with all my might, and at last one of the women-servants came to my help. She roused the porter, and sent him to fetch a doctor. It was not quite four o'clock when she came to me, but it was past five o'clock before the doctor arrived. He told me at once that my husband had had a paralytic shock, and he helped me to get him to bed, while the porter went in search of a nurse. I wanted to have nursed Julian myself, without the help of any stranger, whose presence might worry him: but the doctor said that would be impossible. I must have a skilled nurse in attendance. There would be plenty for me to do in helping her, he said. So I submitted, and the nurse was with us in less than an hour—a nursing-sister of the order of St. Vincent de Paul, a very nice person."
"Is your doctor a clever man?"
"The Frenchman who came in the morning seems clever; and, at my request, he brought Dr. Danvers, an English physician. I am told he is the best English doctor in Paris. They are both of the same opinion as to the nature of the attack; but Dr. Danvers is inclined to look upon it more seriously than the French doctor. He declared that Julian's brain must have been frightfully overworked within the last few years; and when I told him that my husband's life had, to my knowledge, been one of rest and tranquil monotony, I could see by his face that he did not believe me."
"Mr. Wyllard is better, I hope, since the morning."
"Yes, he is much better. There is still a feeling of heaviness and dull pain; but he is so patient, he will hardly confess he is in pain, though I can see from his face that he suffers."
The tears rushed to her eyes, and she walked hastily to the window, where she stood for a few minutes holding her handkerchief before her face, with her back to Heathcote, who waited silently, knowing the uselessness of all consolatory speeches at such a time.
She conquered herself, and came back to her seat presently.
"Struck down in the prime of his manhood, in all the force of his intellect," she said. "It is a deathblow."
"Your English doctor may exaggerate the danger."
"God grant that it is so. I have telegraphed to Sir William Spencer, entreating him to come to Paris by to-night's mail. The question of cost is nothing; but I fear he may not be able to leave his practice so long—or he may be away from London."
"When did you telegraph?"
"An hour ago. I am expecting the answer at any moment. I hope he will come."
"What is it this Dr. Danvers apprehends?"
"He fears an affection of the spinal marrow, a slow and lingering malady, full of pain. O, it is too dreadful!" cried the agonised wife, clasping her hands in a paroxysm of despair. "What has he done to be so afflicted? how has he deserved such suffering, he who worked so hard, and denied himself all pleasures in his youth—he who has been so good and generous to others? Why should he be tortured?"
"Dear Mrs. Wyllard, pray do not give way to grief. The doctor may be mistaken. He ought not to have told you so much."
"It was right of him to tell me. I begged him to keep nothing from me—not to treat me as a child. If there is a martyrdom to be borne, I will bear my part of it. Yes, I will suffer with him, pang for pang, for to see him in pain will be as sharp an agony for me as the actual torture can be for him. He is resting now, dozing from the effect of the morphia which they have injected under the skin."
"I trust if Sir William Spencer come that he will be able to give you a more hopeful opinion."
"Yes, I am putting my trust in that. But I am full of fear. Dr. Danvers has such a shrewd clever air. He does not look the kind of man to be mistaken."
"But in these nervous disorders there is always room for error. You must hope for the best."
"I will try to hope, for Julian's sake. Goodbye. I must go back to my place at his bedside. I don't want him to see a strange face when he awakes."
"Good-bye. Remember, if there is any service I can render you, the slightest or the greatest, you have only to command me. I shall call this evening to hear how your patient progresses, and if Spencer is coming. But I shall not ask to see you."
He left the hotel full of trouble at the agony of one he loved. He thought of Dora in her helplessness, her loneliness, watching the slow decay of that vigorous frame, the gradual extinction of that powerful mind. What martyrdom could be more terrible for a tender-hearted woman?
He called at the Windsor in the evening. The patient was much the same. Sir William Spencer was expected at eight o'clock next morning.
Edward Heathcote was watching in front of the hotel when the physician drove up in a fly from the station. Dr. Danvers had gone into the hotel a few minutes before. Heathcote waited to see Sir William Spencer leave the hotel in the same fly, accompanied to the carriage door by Dr. Danvers. They were talking as they came out of the porte-cochère, and their faces were very grave. Heathcote felt that the great English doctor had not left hope behind him in those rooms on the first floor, with their sunny windows facing the palace-garden. He had not the heart to intrude upon Dora immediately after the consultation, though he was very anxious to hear Sir William's verdict. He watched the fly drive away, while Dr. Danvers walked briskly in the opposite direction: and then he strolled along the Rue de Rivoli towards the Palais Royal, hardly knowing where he went, so deeply were his thoughts occupied by the grief of the woman he loved.
What if Julian Wyllard were to die, that successful rival of his, the man who had stolen his plighted wife from him? The thought would come, though Heathcote tried to shut his mind against it, though he hated himself for harbouring so selfish an idea. The question would shape itself in his mind, would be answered somehow or other.
If Julian Wyllard were to die, and Dora were again free to wed whom she chose? Would the old love be rekindled in her heart? Would the old lover seem nearer and dearer to her than any other man on earth? Would she reward him for long years of patient devotion, for a faithfulness that had never wavered? Alas, no, he could hope for no such reward, he who had married within a year or two of losing her, who had, in the world's eye, consoled himself speedily for that loss. Could he go to her and say, "I never loved my wife; I married her out of pity; my love was given to you, and you alone!"
That was his secret. To Dora Wyllard he must have seemed as fickle as the common herd of men, who change their loves as easily as they change their tailors. He could put forward no claim for past constancy. No, were she once again free, it would be by the devotion of the future that he must win her.
And then he recalled what the physician had said about Julian Wyllard's malady. It would be a slow and lingering disease—a decay of years, perhaps. He saw the dark possibility of such a martyrdom. Dora's life would be worn and wasted in the attendance upon that decaying frame, that sorely tried mind and temper. She would sacrifice health, spirits, life itself, perhaps, in her devotion to her afflicted husband. And when the end at last came—the dismal end of all her care and tenderness—would she be a woman to be wooed and won? Would not life for her be over, all possibility of happiness for ever gone? Only a little respite, a little rest remaining before the grave should close on her broken heart.
No, there was no ground for selfish rejoicing, for wicked hope, in Julian Wyllard's malady.
Heathcote ordered a simple breakfast in one of the quietest cafés in the Palais Royal, and lingered over the meal and the newspapers till he was able to present himself with a better grace at the Windsor. He had some difficulty in reading the news of the day with attention, or even comprehension, so full were his thoughts. He recalled Julian Wyllard's manner and bearing during the last few months, and wondered at the vigour, the freshness of mind, the power which had been so obvious in every look, and tone, and gesture. That such a man could suddenly be struck down without a day's warning, without any imaginable cause, had seemed almost incomprehensible. Had the nature of the attack been different, the thing would have appeared less inexplicable. An apoplectic fit striking down the strong man in his might, as if from the blow of a Nasmyth hammer, would have seemed far more in character with the nature of the patient, his vigorous manhood, his appearance of physical power.
Heathcote called at the Windsor between twelve and one o'clock, and had only a few minutes to wait in the salon before he was joined by Mrs. Wyllard.
She was very pale, but she was more composed than on the previous day. Her countenance had a rigid look, Heathcote thought; as if she had schooled herself to composure by a severe mental effort. The hand she gave him was deadly cold.
"I trust you have good news for me," he said. "Is Spencer more hopeful than your Paris physician?"
"No, there is no hope. I had a long talk with both the doctors after their consultation. It was very difficult to wring the truth from them both—to get them to be quite candid. They seemed to pity me so much. They were full of kindness. As if kindness or pity would help me in my trouble for him! Nothing can help me—no one—except God. And perhaps He will not. It seems that in this life there are a certain number of victims, chosen haphazard, who must suffer mysterious, purposeless agonies. And Julian is to be one of those sufferers. It is bitter, inexplicable, cruel. My soul revolts against these fruitless punishments."
"Tell me what Sir William said."
"The worst. Julian's symptoms indicate a disease of the spinal cord: progressive muscular atrophy, Sir William called it, a disease generally caused by excessive muscular activity, but in this case due to the strain upon the mind. He will waste away inch by inch, hour by hour, and he will suffer terribly. Yes, that is the worst. This gradual decay will be a long martyrdom. He will be dependent on opiates for relief. I am to take comfort in the thought that his pain can be soothed by repeated injections of morphia; that a sleeping draught will give him a little rest at night. He is to exist under the influence of narcotics; he who a few months ago seemed the incarnation of health and vigour."
"A few months ago, you say. Then you have remarked a change in him of late?" inquired Heathcote.
"Yes, there has been a change, subtle, mysterious. I could not describe the symptoms to Sir William Spencer. But there was a curious alteration in his ways and manner. He was much more irritable. He had strange intervals of silence."
"Can you recall the beginning of this alteration?"
"Hardly. It was a change that seems to have had no beginning. It was so gradual—imperceptible almost. It was during that very oppressive weather early in August that I noticed he was looking ill and haggard. I thought that he was angry and worried about Bothwell, and that he was vexed at the stupidity of his bailiff, who had mismanaged one of the farms, and involved him in a law-suit with a tenant. I fancied these things were worrying him, and that the excessive heat was making him ill. I begged him to take medical advice; but he was angry at the suggestion, and declared that he never felt better in his life."
"What does Sir William advise?"
"That we should go back to Penmorval at once, or at least as soon as the proper arrangements can be made for the journey. I have telegraphed to Julian's valet to come here immediately, and Sir William will send a trained nurse from London by the evening mail. We shall have plenty of help. Fortunately it is Julian's own wish to go back to Cornwall."
"Is there any improvement in his state today?"
"I dare not say there is improvement. He is very calm, quite resigned. The physicians told him the nature of his malady; but they did not tell him that it is hopeless. They left his own intelligence to discover that; and I fear he knows the truth only too well already. Would you like to see him, if he is inclined to receive you?"
"Yes, I should much like to see him."
Dora went into the adjoining room, and closed the door behind her. She reopened it almost immediately, and beckoned to Heathcote, who went in with careful footstep and bated breath, almost as he might have entered the chamber of death.
Julian Wyllard was reclining on a sofa, his head and shoulders propped up by pillows, his legs covered with a fur rug. There was something in the very position of the body, so straight, so rigid a line from the waist downwards, which told of that death in life that had fallen upon the strong man; the man whom Edward Heathcote had last seen erect, in all the vigour of manhood, tall, broad-shouldered, powerful.
"Well, Heathcote, you have come to see the wreck of proud humanity," he said, with a half-sad, half-cynical smile. "You did not know when you were with us the other night that my race was so nearly run, that I was to break down in the middle of the course. I have had my warnings, but I made light of them, and the blow came unexpectedly at last. But it has left the brain clear. That is some comfort. Sit down; I want to talk to you—and Dora—seriously."
He was very pale—white even to the lips, and his wife was watching him anxiously, surprised at the signs of profound agitation in him who had been so calm after the physicians had left him.
"I am very sorry for you, Wyllard; sorry with all my heart," said Heathcote earnestly, as he took the chair nearest the sofa, while Dora seated herself on the other side, close to her husband.
"You are more than good. I am assured that everybody will—pity me," this with a smile of bitterest meaning. "But I want to talk to you about two people in whom you and Dora are both interested—your very lovable sister, and my wife's scapegrace cousin. They are devoted to each other; it seems, and except for this little cloud upon Bothwell's character, I take it you had no objection to the match."
"That was my chief objection."
"Forgive me for saying that it was a most foolish one. Because a few country bumpkins take it into their heads to suspect a gentleman—"
"Pardon me, Mr. Wyllard, if I confess that I was among those bumpkins. Mr. Grahame's refusal to answer Mr. Distin's questions, and his obvious agitation, led me to believe that he was concerned in that girl's death. I am thankful to be able to say that my discoveries on this side of the Channel all point in a different direction, while on the other hand my sister assures me that her lover has satisfactorily explained the reason of his peculiar conduct at the inquest."
"You have no further objection to Bothwell as a husband for your sister?"
"No, my esteem for the race from which he sprang is a strong reason why I should sanction the match; although worldly wisdom is decidedly against a girl's marriage with a man who was a soldier, and who is—nothing."
"It shall be our business—Dora's and mine—to reconcile worldly wisdom and foolish love. My wife tells me that her cousin has turned over a new leaf—that he has schemed out a new career, and has set to work with a wonderful amount of energy—just that strong purpose which has been lacking in him hitherto."
"I have heard as much, and a good deal more than this, from my sister."
"Well, then, my dear Heathcote, all I need add is that means shall not be wanting to my wife's kinsman to enable him to carry out the scheme of life which he has made for himself, comfortably and creditably. Dora and I are both rich. We have no children. We can afford to be generous in the present; and those we love must naturally profit by our wealth in the future. Dora's fortune will, in all likelihood, go to Bothwell's children. In a word, your sister is not asked to marry a pauper."
"I have never thought of the question from a financial standpoint."
"But it must be not the less agreeable to you to know that the financial aspect is satisfactory," answered Wyllard. "And now what is to hinder a speedy marriage? It is my wife's wish, Bothwell's wish, mine, everybody's, so far as I can understand, except yours. You are the only hindrance. Heathcote, I want to see Bothwell and Hilda married before I die."
"Julian!" cried his wife, with a stifled sob.
"O my dearest, I am not going to leave you yet awhile," answered her husband, clasping her hand, and raising it to his lips with infinite tenderness. "My doctors promise me a slow deliverance. But when a man has begun to die, were it never so gradually, it is time for him to set his house in order. I should like to see Bothwell and Hilda married in Bodmin Church, before the eyes of the people who have maligned my wife's kinsman. I should like the wedding to take place as soon as possible."
"I am sure Hilda's brother will not refuse your request," said Dora, with a pleading look at Heathcote.
"If Hilda and her lover can fulfil their own scheme of happiness by a speedy marriage, I will not be a stumbling-block," said Heathcote.
After this they talked for a little while on indifferent subjects, and of the journey back to Cornwall—that tedious journey of a helpless invalid which would be so different from any previous experience of Julian Wyllard's. He spoke of it lightly enough, affecting a philosophical disdain for the changes and chances of this little life: but Heathcote marked the quiver of his lip, the look of pain, which neither pride nor stoicism could suppress.
Yes, it was a hard thing for such a man, in the very prime of life, handsome, clever, prosperous, to be so struck down: and it could but be said that Julian Wyllard carried himself firmly under the trial.
Heathcote and Dora parted sorrowfully outside the sick-room.
"Is it not good of him to wish to see Bothwell's happiness secured?" she said.
"It is very good of him to think of any one except himself at such a moment," answered Heathcote.
"I am so glad he has won your consent to an early marriage. And now that you have given that consent—now that we are all assured of the folly of any suspicion pointing at Bothwell—I conclude that you will trouble yourself no more about the mystery of that poor girl's death."
"There you are mistaken. I shall go on with my investigation, in the cause of justice. Besides, Bothwell's character can never be thoroughly rehabilitated till the real criminal is found; and, for a third reason, I am interested in this strange story as a work of art. Good-bye, Mrs. Wyllard; if I can be of any use to you to-morrow in helping to move your invalid, pray send for me. If not, I suppose we shall not meet till I call on you at Penmorval. I leave the business of Hilda's marriage to your discretion. She cannot have a better adviser than you, and whatever plans you make I shall sanction."
He left the hotel and strolled slowly towards the Madeleine, hardly knowing what he should do with the rest of his day. He had an appointment with Sigismond Trottier in the evening. That gentleman and he were to meet at the Gymnase at the first performance of a new play, and they were to sup at Vachette's afterwards, when Heathcote was to hear any fresh facts that the paragraphist might have gathered for him relating to the mysterious Georges and the once celebrated Mdlle. Prévol. Trottier had promised to hunt up the few men who had been intimate with Georges, and to get all the information he could from them.
In front of the Madeleine Heathcote was overtaken by that good-natured merchant, Gustav Blümenlein, who had felt so much pleasure in showing his apartments to Mrs. Wyllard. They walked on together for a short distance, in the direction of the Blümenlein establishment, and Heathcote told the merchant of his predecessor's sudden illness.
Monsieur Blümenlein was interested and sympathetic, and as they were now in front of his office, he insisted upon Mr. Heathcote going in to smoke a cigarette, or share a bottle of Lafitte with him. Heathcote refused the Lafitte, but accepted the cigarette, not sorry to find an excuse for revisiting his rival's old abode. He blamed himself for this curiosity about Julian Wyllard's youth, as an unworthy and petty feeling: yet, he could not resist the temptation to gratify that curiosity which chance had thrown in his way.
They went through the offices, where clerks were working at their ledgers, and warehousemen hurrying in and out, and passed into the library—that handsome and somewhat luxurious apartment, which remained in all things, save the books upon the shelves, exactly as Julian Wyllard had left it.
"Did you know him twenty years ago?" asked Blümenlein, after they had talked of the late tenant, and his successful career in Paris.
"No, I never saw him till just before his marriage, about seven years ago."
"Ah, then you did not know him as a young man. I have a photograph of him in that drawer, yonder," pointing to a writing-table by the fireplace, "taken fifteen years ago, when he was beginning to make his fortune; when the Crédit Mauresque was at the height of its popularity. It went to smash afterwards, as, no doubt, you know; but Wyllard contrived to get out of it with clean hands—only just contrived."
"You mean to say that his part of the transaction was open to doubt?"
"My dear sir, on the Bourse, during the Empire, everything was, more or less, open to doubt. There were only two irrefragable facts in the financial world of that time. There was a great deal of money made, and a great deal of money lost. Mr. Wyllard was a very clever man, and he contrived to be from first to last on the winning side. Nobody ever brought any charge of foul play against him; and, in this matter, he was luckier, or cleverer, than the majority of his compeers."
"I should like to see that photograph of which you spoke just now," said Heathcote.
"You shall see it. A clever face, a remarkable face, I take it," answered Blümenlein, unlocking a drawer, and producing a photograph.
Yes, it was a fine head, a powerful head, instinct with wondrous vitality, with the energy of a man bound to dominate others, in any sphere of life; a master of whatever craft he practised. It was not the face of abstract intellect. The white, cold light of the student did not illumine those eyes, nor did the calm of the student's tranquil temper inform the mouth. There was passion in the face; strongest human feelings were expressed there; the love of love, the hate of hate.
"It is a marvellous face for a money-grubber," exclaimed Heathcote, "an extraordinary countenance for a man who could shut himself from all the charms of the world, such a world as the Second Empire—a man who could be indifferent to art, beauty, wit, music, social pleasures of all kinds, and live only for his cash-box and bank-book. Difficult to reconcile this face with the life which we are told Wyllard led in these rooms."
"It is more than difficult," said Blümenlein; "it is, to my mind, impossible to believe in so monstrous an anomaly as that sordid life endured for nearly ten years by such a temperament as that which the photograph indicates. I am something of a physiognomist, and I think I know what that face means; if faces have any meaning whatever. It means strong feeling, a fervid imagination, a mind that could not be satisfied with the triumphs of successful finance. It means a nature in which the heart must have fair play. Whatever Julian Wyllard's life may have appeared in the eyes of the men with whom he had business relations—however he may have contrived to pass for the serious genius of finance, old before his time, the embodiment of abstruse calculations and far-seeing policy—be sure that the life was not a barren life, and that fiery passions were factors in the sum of that existence."
"But his life seems to have been patent to all the world."
"Yes, Mr. Heathcote, the life he led in public. But who knows how he may have plunged into the dissipations of Paris after office hours? That little door in the alcove has its significance, you may be sure. I made light of it in Mrs. Wyllard's presence, for I know that women are jealous even of the past. Why should I deprive her of the pleasure of considering her husband a model of propriety, in the remote past as well as in the present? I affected—for that dear lady's sake—to believe the side door the work of a prior tenant to Mr. Wyllard. But I happen to have documentary evidence that Mr. Wyllard had the door made for him in the third year of his tenancy. I found the receipted account of the builder who made it, among some papers left by my predecessor at the back of a cupboard."
"Then you think that Wyllard was a man with two faces?"
"I do," replied Blümenlein: "I think that Wyllard, the speculator and financier, was one man—but that there was another man of whose life the world knew nothing, and who went out and came in between dusk and dawn by that side door in the court."
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE GENERAL RECEIVES A SUMMONS.
While Bothwell was working out the scheme of an industrious unpretentious life, to be spent with the woman he loved on that wild Cornish coast on which he had been reared, and which was to him as a passion, Lady Valeria Harborough was shining in the county and military society within twenty miles of Plymouth—admired, envied, to outward seeming the most fortunate of women. She went everywhere, she received every one worth receiving. She had brought something of the easy manners, the unceremonious gaiety, of Simla to her Devonshire villa. Her afternoon parties were the liveliest in the neighbourhood. Her weekly musical evenings were the rage. She engaged the best professional talent obtainable for these evenings. She rigidly eschewed the amateur element. She selected music and songs with an extraordinary tact, and contrived that no hackneyed composition should be ever heard at her parties. The newest ballads, the last successes in modern classical music, were first revealed to county society at Fox Hill. There people heard the gavotte that was going to be fashionable, the song that was to be the rage next season. And on these evenings, when the flowery corridors and the long suite of rooms were filled with guests, when the spacious music-room, with its two grand pianos and magnificent organ, was thrown open to the crowd, Lady Valeria circulated amidst the throng, a queen among women, not so beautiful as the fairest of her guests, but by far the most attractive of them all. There was a subtle charm in those dreamy eyes and in that languid smile. Beardless subalterns worshipped her as if she had been a goddess; and many a man, who could hardly have been included in Lady Valeria's list of "nice boys," felt his heart beat faster as she lingered by his side for a few minutes. She had a smile and a word for every one who crossed her threshold; the most insignificant guest was greeted and remembered. She seemed a woman who lived only for society, who had fulfilled her mission when she had been admired. The General was proud of his young wife's success, delighted that his house should be known as the pleasantest in the county. He could afford that money should be spent as if it were water. He never complained of the expenses of his establishment, but he knew the cost of everything, and paid all accounts with his own cheques. Unluckily for Lady Valeria, old habits of strict accountancy, acquired in the early days when he was adjutant of his regiment, had clung to him. He liked accounts, and was in some measure his own house-steward. There was no possibility of Lady Valeria's gambling debts being paid out of the domestic funds. Everything was done on a large scale, but by line and rule. A royal household could not have been managed more rigidly. Thus it was that Lady Valeria's money difficulties were very real difficulties; and it was only by a full confession of her folly that she could have obtained her husband's help.
It was just this confession, this humiliation, to which Lady Valeria could not bring herself. Candour was the very last virtue to which she inclined. She had not been brought up in the school of truth. Her father had been a tyrant, her mother a dealer in expedients, a diplomatist, a marvel of tact and cleverness, able to achieve wonders in domestic management and in social policy. But life at Carlavarock Castle had been a constant strain, and duplicity had become an instinct with mother and children. There had been always something to hide from the Earl—a son's debts, a daughter's flirtation, a milliner's bill, a debt of honour. Valeria had been oppressed with gambling debts before she was twenty. She had played deep, and borrowed money in her first season. She had married, hoping that General Harborough's wealth would be hers to spend as she pleased; but in this she had been disappointed. She had married the most generous of men; but she had married a man of business. He made a magnificent settlement before marriage; he made a will after marriage, leaving the bulk of his fortune to his young wife, to be hers, and in her own control, if there were no children—hers without an embargo against a second marriage. She had pin-money that would have been a liberal allowance for a countess; but she had not the handling of her husband's income. She could not have cheated him out of a five-pound note. He had told her in the beginning of their married life that it would be so. He was a man of business, and she was too young to be troubled with the sordid details of domestic life.
"Order what you like, love. Make our home as beautiful as you can. I will pay your bills, and take care that you are not cheated by your tradesmen."
At the outset Lady Valeria had accepted this arrangement as altogether delightful; but there came a time when she found that it had its inconveniences.
To-night, in the balmy September weather, the windows of the villa were all open to the sky and the garden, open to the music of the distant sea, and Lady Valeria was sitting in the verandah where a week ago she had bidden farewell to Bothwell Grahame. It was nearly midnight, and the crowd was concentrated in the music-room, where Herr Stahlmann was playing a new Sauterelle on his violoncello. The moon was shining over the sea yonder, gleaming upon the long white line of the breakwater; and the distant view of town and harbour looked even more Italian than in the daytime. Lady Valeria wore a long flowing gown of an almost Grecian simplicity, a gown of dead-white cashmere, bordered with a marvellous embroidery of peacocks' feathers, which fell in a slanting line from shoulder to hem, the brilliant colouring flashing in the moonlight, as the wearer slowly fanned herself with a large peacock-feather fan.
"Are you not afraid to wear so many peacocks' feathers?" asked a gentleman who was sitting at her elbow, a handsome man of about forty—a man who was not altogether good style in dress or manner, but who had a certain ease and authority which indicated good birth and the habits of fashionable society.
This was Sir George Varney, a personage in the racing world, but reputed to have been utterly broken for the last three years. In the racing world there is always a chance so long as a man can keep his head above water; and Sir George might still have a future before him. Although he was supposed to have spent his last farthing and mortgaged his last acre, he always contrived to get money when he wanted it; and he had contrived to lend money to Lady Valeria.
"Why should I not wear peacocks' feathers?" Lady Valeria asked languidly.
Her profile was turned to him, her eyes were looking towards the line of moonlight on the sea, the white walls of barracks and storehouses. She did not take the trouble to turn her face to her companion as she spoke to him. Pale, languid, dreamy, she seemed the very image of indifference.
"Because they are considered so"—casting about for a mild expression—"confoundedly unlucky. I remember the morning of the Oaks, the year my Cherryripe shut up like a telescope half a furlong from the winning-post, my sister Grace drove up to Hatchett's to meet the drag—I was to drive her and a lot of 'em to Epsom, don't you know—with an infernal pork-pie hat made out of a peacock's breast. 'What did you wear that damn thing for?' I asked. 'Because it's the fashion,' says she. 'Shouldn't wonder if my mare lost the race on account of your damn tile,' says I. Grace chaffed me for my superstition; but the mare made a most unaccountable mess of herself, don't you know, and the Devil himself or that peacock-feather hat must have been at the bottom of it."
"I don't think the peacocks' feathers will make any difference to me," replied Valeria wearily. "I have been unlucky all my life."
"Well, Fate has been rather hard upon you," said Sir George, drawing his chair a little nearer to hers, gazing at the delicate profile with a more ardent look than was quite within the lines of friendship and good-fellowship. "A beautiful young woman married to a man old enough to be her grandfather, carried off to broil away her existence in Bengal, when she ought to have been one of the queens of London society—stinted to a bare allowance of pin-money, hardly enough to pay her dressmaker, by Jove, when she ought to have had the command of her husband's purse. Why not cut the whole business, Valeria, and go to the south of France with me, directly after the Newmarket week? I stand to win a pot of money, and we can spend it merrily at Monaco. I know how to make plenty more when that's gone. And by and by, when the General goes off the hooks, we can make things fair and square with the world—or before, if you'd rather not wait. The thing can be so easily managed. Look at your cousin, Lady Cassandra, and the Colonel, and the Duke and his Countess—change of partners all round."
He tried to encircle the slim waist with his strong arm—the arm of a man who had won cups at Lillie Bridge in days gone by—but Valeria snatched herself from him with a disdainful laugh, rose from her chair, and walked to the other end of the verandah, he following her, sorely disconcerted. He had been watching for his opportunity, and he fancied the opportunity had come. He had neither creed nor principles of his own, and he believed that people who pretended to be better than himself were all hypocrites. Like Dumas' hero, he was ready to admit that there might be good women in the world, only he had never happened to meet with one.
He had made himself useful to Lady Valeria: had told her what horses to back, and had helped her to win a good deal of money since her return to England. Her losses had been the result of her own inspirations: and of late, when she had so lost, Sir George had found her the money to settle with the bookmen. And having done all this, and having devoted all his leisure to the cultivation of Lady Valeria's acquaintance, he deemed that the time was ripe for him to ask her to run away with him. He had run away with so many women in the course of the last twenty years that his manner of proposing the thing had become almost a formula. He modified his appeal according to the rank of the adored one—had his first, second, and third class supplications; but it was not in his nature to be poetical. Had he been making love to an empress, he could not have risen to any loftier height than that which he had reached to-night.
Lady Valeria turned at the end of the verandah, and faced him deliberately in the bright, cold moonlight, a white and ghostlike figure, with pale face and flashing eyes. She measured him from head to foot with a look of unqualified scorn; gazed at him steadily, with eyes that seemed to read all the secrets of his evil life; and then, slowly unfurling her peacock fan, she broke into a silvery laugh, long and clear and sweet, but with a ring of contemptuousness in its every note.
"You are mistaken, Sir George," she said quietly, moving towards the open window of the corridor, as if to return to the house. "Your almost infallible judgment is at fault. I am not that kind of person."
She would have passed him and gone into the house, but he put himself between her and the open window. He barred her way with all the hulk of his handsome, over-dressed person. That ringing laughter, the insolent sparkle in her magnificent eyes, goaded him to madness. Sir George had a diabolical temper, and the insensate vanity of a successful roué. That any woman could really despise him was beyond his power of belief; but a woman who pretended to despise him put herself beyond the pale of his courtesy.
"No," he muttered savagely. "You are not that kind of person. You are not that kind of person for me, because for the last three years you have been that kind of person for somebody else. I thought you must have been tired of Bothwell Grahame by this time, and that I should have had my chance."
In a breath, as if from the stroke of a Cyclops hammer, George Varney had measured his length upon the tesselated pavement under the verandah. It was an old man's arm that felled him; but an athlete of five-and-twenty could not have struck a firmer blow.
General Harborough had stolen into the gardens to smoke a solitary cigar, while Herr Stahlmann played his Sauterelle, and, coming quietly round the house, he had approached the verandah just in time to hear Sir George's last speech. He had not hesitated a minute as to the manner of his answer.
"Go to your guests, Valeria," he said, with quiet command; "I will see to this blackguard."
Valeria obeyed half mechanically. The shock of those last few moments had made thought impossible. Her mind seemed to have suddenly become a blank. She went through the brilliant rooms, wondering at the lights and flowers and smartly-dressed people, seeing everything vaguely, with a puzzled doubtfulness as to her own identity. She talked and laughed with more than usual animation for the rest of the evening. She had a friendly smile and a pleasant word for each departing guest. She enchanted the artists by her appreciation of their work; yet she had no more consciousness of what she said or to whom she spoke than a condemned criminal might have on the eve of his execution.
It was nearly two o'clock when she went to her own rooms—those spacious rooms, with their windows looking different ways, over hill and valley, town and sea; rooms beautified by all that art and wealth can compass in the way of luxury; rooms in which she had sat hour after hour, day after day, brooding treason, caring more for one look from Bothwell's dark eyes than for all that glory of sea and land, for all the luxuries with which an adoring husband had surrounded her.
She had seen the General moving about among his guests at the last. She had heard the strong cheery tones of his voice as he parted with some particular friend; and now she wondered if she would find him in her morning-room, where on such a night as this they had been wont to spend half an hour in light, careless talk, after the people were gone, he sitting out on the balcony, perhaps, smoking a final cigar.
Yes, he was there before her, sitting on a sofa, in a meditative attitude, with his elbow on his knee, far from the lamp, with its low, spreading shade, a lamp which shed a brilliant light upon Lady Valeria's own particular writing-table, and left all the rest of the room in shadow.
Then at the sight of that familiar figure, the bent head, the honoured gray hairs, all the horror of the scene in the verandah flashed back upon her. The unmitigated insult of Sir George's speech, such insult as might have been flung at the lowest woman in London, speech shaped just as it might have been shaped for such an one. That she, Lady Valeria Harborough, should have such dirt cast in her face, and that the man who had so spoken could live to tell other men what he had said, to boast of himself at the clubs!
"Would to God that blow had killed him!" she said to herself; and then she went across the room and knelt at her husband's feet, and took his strong hand in hers, and covered it with kisses.
"God bless you for defending me," she said. "I am not a good woman, I am not worthy of you, but I am not such a wretch as that man's words would make me. You will believe that—won't you, Walter?"
"Yes, my dear, I believe that. I cannot think you a false wife, Valeria, though you may be an unloving one. I have thought for a long time that the sweet words, and sweeter smiles which have made the light of my life might mean very little—might mean just the daily sacrifice which a young wife makes to an old husband, and nothing more. Yet I have contrived to be happy, Valeria, in spite of all such doubts; and now this man's foul taunt comes like a blast from a Polar sea, and freezes my blood. What did it mean, Valeria? I thought Bothwell Grahame was my friend. I have been almost as fond of him as if he were my son."
"He is your friend, Walter; yes, your true and loyal friend—more loyal than I have been as your wife."
"What disloyalty have you practised towards me?" he demanded, grasping her by the shoulder, looking into those frightened eyes of hers with his honest steady gaze, the look of a man who would read all secrets in her face, even the worst. "What has there ever been between you and Bothwell which could involve disloyalty to me? Don't lie to me, Valeria! There must have been some meaning in that man's speech. He would not have dared so to have spoken if he had not known something. What has Bothwell been to you?"
"He loved me——" faltered the pale lips.
"And you returned his love?"
She only hung her head for answer, the beautiful head on the slim and graceful throat, circled with that string of pearls which had been her husband's last birthday gift.
"You returned his love, and you encouraged him to come to your husband's house, to be your chosen companion at all times and seasons, the 'nice boy' of whom you spoke so lightly as to disarm suspicion. By Heaven, I would as soon have suspected your footman as Bothwell Grahame!"
"He was never more to me than a friend. I knew how to respect myself," she answered, with a touch of sullenness.
"You knew how to respect yourself, and you spent half your days in the society of a lover! Is that your idea of self-respect? It is not mine. You respected yourself, and you were careful of your own interests so far as to refrain from running away with the man you loved. What need of an elopement, when the sands must soon run down in the hourglass, and the gray-haired veteran would be gone, leaving you a rich widow, free to marry the man of your heart? No need to defy the world, to outrage society, when everything would work round naturally to give you your own way. O Valeria, it is hard for a man to have his eyes opened after years of blissful blindness! I was better off as your dupe than I am as your confessor."
He laughed bitterly, a contemptuous laugh, at the thought of his own folly. To think that he had believed it possible this woman could love him—this lovely, spiritual creature, all light and flame; to suppose that such a woman could be happy as an old man's darling, that this young bright soul could be satisfied with the worship of declining years, the steady glow of affection, constant, profound, but passionless! No, for such a soul as this the fiery element was a necessity. Love without passion was love without poetry.
Well, the dream was over. He could believe that this proud woman had not dishonoured him, that she could stand before the eyes of men stainless, a faithful wife, as the world counts faithfulness. But he felt not the less that the dream of his declining years was over—that she could never more be to him as she had been, the sweet companion of his leisure, the trusted partner of his life. That was all over and done with. He was not going to revile her, or to torture her, or to thrust her from him. To what end? The gulf would be wide enough, they two living side by side. He would pay her all honour before the world to the end of his days. To live with her, and to be kind to her, knowing that her heart belonged to another, should be his sacrifice, his penance for having tied that young sapling to this withered trunk.
"I have noticed that Grahame has kept aloof from us of late," he said, after a long silence. "Why is that?"
"We agreed that it was better we should see no more of each other," his wife answered quietly.
"I hope you will always remain in that agreement," said the General.
He sat up till daybreak, and he occupied part of his time in writing the rough draft of a codicil to his will, which he meant to take to his London solicitors at the earliest opportunity.
The codicil lessened Lady Valeria's fortune considerably, and allotted 40,000£ to a fund, the interest of which was to be distributed in the form of pensions to twenty widows of field-officers who had died in impoverished circumstances. This subtraction would still leave an estate which would make Lady Valeria Harborough a very rich widow, and a splendid prize in the matrimonial market.
"She will marry Bothwell Grahame, and forget the days of her slavery," thought the General, as he wrote the closing paragraph of his codicil.
It was from no malignant feeling against his wife that he made this change in the disposition of his wealth. He felt that the act was mere justice. To the wife whom he had believed wholly true he bequeathed all. To the woman who had been only half loyal he left half. A mean man would have fettered his bequest by the prohibition of a second marriage; but General Harborough was not that kind of man.
He wondered whether Sir George Varney would take any action in the matter of that blow. He had assisted the fallen man to a chair in the verandah, and had taken him a tumbler of brandy, which Sir George drank as if it had been water. In his half-stunned condition the Baronet had sworn an oath or two, and had walked off muttering curses, which might mean threats of speedy vengeance.
"If he is the scoundrel I think him, he will send me a summons, in order to drag my wife's name before the public," thought General Harborough; nor was he mistaken, for the summons was served within two days of the assault. It was delivered at the villa in the General's absence. He had started for Bath by an early train that morning, in order to attend the funeral of an old friend and brother officer upon the following day. He had an idea of going on from Bath to London, to see his solicitors, and to execute the codicil which was to diminish Lady Valeria's future means.
At the station he met Bothwell Grahame, who was on his way to Dawlish.
There had been a reserve in the young man's manner of late which had puzzled the General. He had been inclined to put down the change to a deterioration in Grahame's character, a gradual going to the bad, for he had an instinctive prejudice against a soldier who could voluntarily abandon his profession. It was bad enough for a man to be thrown out of active service in the prime of life, in accordance with new-fangled rules and regulations; but that a young man should abandon soldiering for any other career seemed to General Harborough at once inexplicable and discreditable. "Bothwell Grahame is getting a regular hang-dog look," thought the General; "and I am not surprised at it. He has thrown away splendid opportunities, and is leading an idle, good-for-nothing life."
And now the General knew the meaning of that hang-dog look, that reserved manner which had struck him as the outward sign of an inward deterioration in the man he had loved as a son. He could understand what agonies of shame and remorse Bothwell must have felt when their hands touched, what self-contempt was expressed in that cloudy brow and furtive glance.
What, then, was his surprise this morning to see Bothwell approach him with a beaming countenance, holding out the hand of friendship!
"My dear General, I am so glad to see you. It is such an age since we met," he exclaimed, in cheeriest tones.
Yes, there was the old ring in his voice, the old heartiness which had made Bothwell so different from the race of languid foplings—the haw-haw tribe.
"Yes, it is some time since we met," answered the General coldly; "but I daresay you and my wife have seen each other pretty frequently during that time. You are the kind of man our neighbours call l'ami de la maison. We English have a less honourable name for the species. We call them tame cats."
Bothwell reddened, and then grew pale. Never before had those kindly eyes of the veteran's looked at him as they looked to-day. Never before had General Harborough addressed him in a tone which sounded like deliberate insult.
"I have been proud to be Lady Valeria's guest," he said quietly, his heart beating furiously the while, "and have never considered myself degraded by any attention I was able to show to her. I hope she is well."
"She is very well. How long is it since you were at Fox Hill?"
"Nearly a fortnight."
"So long?"
"I have been very much occupied," said Bothwell, divining that something had occurred to excite the General's suspicions, and that it behoved him to speak frankly of his new hopes. "I have been working a good deal harder than I have ever worked since I passed my last examination. But we are just going to start. May I get into the same carriage with you?"
"If you like," said the General, which hardly sounded encouraging; but Bothwell, who was virtuously travelling third-class, got into a first-class compartment with the General.
"And, pray, what new trade are you working at?" asked the old man, fixing Bothwell with the clear keen gaze of honest gray eyes, eyes which had almost the brightness of youth.
Bothwell explained his new plans, the General listening with polite attention, but with none of the old friendliness, that cheery kindness which had so often been to Bothwell as a whip of scorpions, torturing him with the sense of his own meanness.
"And, pray, what may be the motive of this industrious spurt?" asked the General. "What has inspired this idea of a useful life?"
"A very old-fashioned and hackneyed motive, General. I am engaged to be married, and have to think of how I can best provide a home for my wife."
"Indeed! Is the engagement of long standing?"
"Not at all. I have been engaged within the last fortnight; but I have known and admired the lady for a long time."
General Harborough looked at him searchingly. Was this a lie—a ready lie invented on the spur of the moment, to dispel suspicion? Bothwell had doubtless perceived the alteration in his old friend's feelings towards him; and he might consider this notion of an engagement the readiest way of throwing dust in a husband's eyes.
"Do I know the young lady?" he asked quietly.
"I think not. She has not been much away from her home, but her brother is a well-known personage in Plymouth. The lady is Hilda Heathcote, sister of Mr. Heathcote, the coroner for Cornwall."
"Indeed! I have heard of Mr. Heathcote. So you are going to marry Miss Heathcote? Rather a good match, I suppose?"
"I have never considered it from a worldly point of view. Miss Heathcote is a most lovable girl, and has all the charms and accomplishments which the most exacting lover could desire in his betrothed. I am infinitely proud of having won her."
He met the General's eyes, and the steady light in his own was the light of truth. General Harborough doubted him no longer. If he had ever loved Valeria, that passion was extinct, dead as the flames of Dido's funeral pyre. The man who sat face to face with General Harborough to-day was a happy lover, his countenance radiant with the light of a pure and authorised love.
"When are you going to be married?" asked the General, after a longish pause.
"As soon as I can set my house in order and induce Hilda to name the day," answered Bothwell frankly. "My dear girl has to be submissive to her brother's will in this matter, and he is now in Paris. Nothing can be finally settled till he comes back. I am stealing a march upon him to-day in going to see the lady—who has been sent to Dawlish to be out of my way."
"O, she is at Dawlish, is she?"
"Yes; she is staying there with her nieces and their governess. I am going to consult her about our house."
"Our house!" What pride there was in the utterance! The General's doubts were gradually melting away. He could not believe that a man who was so obviously in love with his betrothed could have ever cared much for Valeria. To have loved her, and to have exchanged her love for that of any other woman living, seemed to the General an impossibility. He began to think that his wife had exaggerated the situation the other night, in the overwrought state of her nerves, stung to madness by Varney's insolent speech, excited by her husband's retaliation. He began to think that there had been only the mildest flirtation between Bothwell and his wife—the ordinary up-country sentimentality, meaningless, puerile.
He tried to comfort himself with this view of the case. His natural kindness of heart prompted him to help Bothwell if he could. He wanted to respect the wife he loved, to think well of the man who had saved his life.
"My dear Bothwell," he said, "you have come to a crisis in life which most men find as costly as it is delightful. If by any chance you happen to be what our young people call 'short,' I hope you will allow me to be your banker."
"You are too good," faltered Bothwell, strongly moved. "You have always been too good to me—ever so much better than I deserved. No, I am wonderfully well off. My cousin has advanced me a sum of money which she wishes me to take as a gift, but which I intend to treat as a loan."
"That is generally a distinction without a difference—when the transaction is between relations," said the General, smiling.
"O, but in this case I hope the loan will be repaid, for the repayment will hinge upon my prosperity. I have opened a banking-account at Bodmin, and feel myself a moneyed man."
General Harborough encouraged Bothwell to talk of his sweetheart and his prospects all the way to Dawlish; and then, when the train stopped at the little station beside the sea, Bothwell and his old friend shook hands cordially; and Bothwell felt that he could clasp that honest hand without a pang of conscience. Little did he think that it was the last time that hand would rest in his.
"Let me know the date of your wedding," cried the General, as the train moved off; and Bothwell went in high spirits to look for the temple, in the shape of a pretty little house in a garden by the sea, which enshrined his goddess.
Fortune seemed to be showering her gifts upon him with a bounteous hand. Nothing could have been more propitious than this meeting with General Harborough, who had promised all the help his influence could afford to the army coach.
The General went on to his destination. The gay white city of Bath had no attraction for him upon this particular afternoon. He called on the widow of his old friend, and comforted her as much as it was possible for any one to comfort her in her great sorrow. He dined alone and sadly at his hotel; and as he sat and pondered on the events of the last week, he began to speculate how much or how little grief his widow would feel when her day of mourning came. Would her eyelids be puffy and red as poor Mrs. Thornton's had been this afternoon, when he was talking to her? Would her swollen lips quiver, and her distorted features twitch convulsively? Would her whole frame be shaken with sobs when she talked of the departed? He could not imagine Lady Valeria with puffy eyelids or swollen lips. He pictured her mourning gracefully, clad in softest white draperies, reclining in a darkened room, in an atmosphere perfumed with tuberose and stephanotis. He pictured her with a sphinx-like countenance, calm, beautiful, an expression which might mean deepest grief or stoniest indifference, as the world chose to construe it.
No, honestly, after considering the question from every possible point of view, General Harborough did not believe that his wife would grieve for him.
"It will be a relief to her when I am gone," he said to himself. "How could I expect her to grieve as Thornton's wife grieves? Those two were boy and girl together, had been husband and wife for thirty years."
His dinner had been only a pretence of dining, a mockery which had made the head-waiter quite unhappy. Nothing so distresses a good waiter as a guest who won't eat. The waiter would have been still more troubled in mind had he known that this fine-looking old man, with the erect figure and broad shoulders, had eaten hardly anything for the last three days. The General had been suffering all that time from a fever of the brain which had brought about a feverish condition of the body. He could neither eat nor sleep. He lay broad awake in the unfamiliar room at the hotel, staring at the blank white blinds, faintly illuminated by the lamps in the street below—he lay and thought over his wedded life, which unrolled itself before him in a series of pictures, and he saw the bitter truth underlying his marriage with Lord Carlavarock's daughter.
He had been nothing but a convenience to Valeria, the provider of fine houses and fine gowns, horses and carriages. She had not even cared for him as friend and protector. She had lived her own life; paying him for all benefits with sweet false words, and sweeter falser kisses.
And now the spell was broken; the dream had come to an end all at once. He could never believe in sweet words or kisses again. He had looked into the heart of this woman he had loved so well, and he knew that it was false to the core.
The next day was wild and stormy—rain and wind, wind and rain—a gray sky, a heavy pall of cloud, through which the sun pierced not once in the long bleak day; one of those days which Nature keeps in stock for the funerals of our friends.
General Harborough stood in the dreary cemetery, and let the wind and rain beat upon him unflinchingly for about forty minutes. He paid every tribute of respect that could be paid to his old comrade and then he went off to the railway-station, to go back to Plymouth by the train which left Bath at five o'clock, and would arrive in Plymouth a little before eleven. He had given up the idea of going on to London to execute the codicil. That could be done at Fox Hill, if need were. He felt tired and ill and shivery. He thought he had taken a chill in the cemetery, and that the best thing he could do was to go home.
He had a bad night, disturbed by a short, hard cough, which was worse next morning. Lady Valeria sent for the doctor, who pronounced the indisposition an acute attack of bronchitis. The patient was very feverish, and the utmost care was needed. Happily, the valet was a good nurse, and Lady Valeria seemed devoted. She sat by her husband's bedside; she read to him, and ministered to him with the tenderest care.
"You could not be better off," said the medical man, who was of the cheery old school. "We shall make you all right in a day or two," knowing perfectly well that the patient was in for a fortnight's close confinement and severe regimen.
The General endured his poultices and blisters meekly, but chafed at the hot room and the hissing steam-kettle.
"It is worse than being wounded on the field of battle," he said.
And then, half asleep and half delirious, he began to talk about Sir George Varney's summons.
"The scoundrel wants to make a public scandal," he muttered; "he will bring my wife's name before the public. 'I thought by this time you must have been tired of Bothwell Grahame,'" he said, repeating the words which had stung him almost to madness.
Valeria knelt by her husband's pillow and laid her head against it, listening intently to those muttered speeches. She found out that Sir George Varney had sent the General a summons to a police-court; that the story of the blow in the verandah would be sifted in a public inquiry; that the insult offered to the wife, the prompt retaliation of the husband, would be reported in the newspapers, written about, commented upon everywhere. It was just the kind of thing to get into the society papers: and although Lady Valeria's relations had not unfrequently figured in those very papers, with various degrees of discredit to themselves and amusement to the general public, she shrank with an abhorrent feeling from the idea of seeing her own name there.
The day named in the summons was a week off; and, judging from General Harborough's condition, it did not seem likely that he would be in a fit state to answer to the summons in person. The idea of it evidently preyed upon his mind, and added fuel to the fire of the fever.
The day came, and General Harborough had obeyed a mightier summons, and had gone to appear before the bar of a greater court. Lady Valeria was a widow.
The codicil had not been executed: so Lady Valeria was a very rich widow.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
WIDOWED AND FREE.
Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard made their way slowly back to Penmorval. It was a melancholy journey for those two who had travelled so gaily in days gone by—the young wife so full of hope, so proud of her husband, who was her senior and superior, versed in the knowledge of that wide outer world of which the Cornish heiress knew so little. She had loved him with a reverent, admiring love, looking up to him, honouring him and deferring to him in all things, pleased to be dependent upon him: and now he was the dependent, looking to her for help and comfort.
He bore his calamity with an almost awful calmness, which at times was more painful to the tender, sympathetic wife than fretfulness and complaining would have been. The dull agony of neuralgic pain wrung no groan from him; he endured the anguish of racked nerves and aching limbs with stoical composure.
"It is not a surprise to me, Dora," he said quietly, when his wife praised his patience; "I have expected some such attack. There have been sensations—strange feelings at odd times—which, although slight enough, have not been without their meaning. Life was very smooth for me here at Penmorval. Very different from my life in the past; the struggles of my boyhood; the hard work and hard thinking of my manhood. Your love made existence full of sweetness. I had the world's esteem too, which must always count for something, let a man pretend to despise the world as he may. Yes; it was a full and perfect life, and I told myself that I had come off a winner in the lottery of Fate. And now all things are changed. There was this last lot waiting for me at the bottom of the urn."
"My dearest," murmured his wife, nestling closer to him among the heaped-up pillows of his sofa, "it would be too hard, too cruel that you should be thus smitten, if this life were all. But, praised be God, it is not all! There is a bright eternity waiting for us—a long day of rest in the land where there is neither sorrow nor pain."
Her husband answered with an impatient sigh.
"My dear Dora, I have neither your sweet simplicity nor your pious faith in the letter of an old book," he answered. "This life is so palpable and so painful just now, that I cannot comfort myself by looking beyond it towards a life of which I know nothing."
They were at Penmorval. Mrs. Wyllard had established her husband in her own particular sanctum, which was the prettiest room in the house—a spacious airy room on the first floor, with a large Tudor window facing southward, and an oriel in the south-western angle. Julian Wyllard had decorated and furnished this room for his young wife; and all things it contained had been chosen with reference to her tastes and pursuits. It opened into her dressing-room, and beyond the dressing-room there was the chief bedchamber of Penmorval, the chamber of the lord of the manor from time immemorial, the birth-chamber and the death-chamber. Its very spaciousness and grandeur gave to this state apartment an air of gloom, a gloom intensified by the prevailing tints of the tapestry, a series of hunting scenes, executed in a sombre gradation of bluish greens and grayish browns. The elaborately carved oak wardrobes were like monuments in a Gothic cathedral. The bed, with its embroidered velvet hangings, fluted columns, and plumed ornaments, suggested a royal catafalque: while the fireplace, with its sculptured pillars and heavy decoration in black and white marble, recalled the entrance to the Capulets' tomb. Not a room assuredly for the occupation of an invalid—not a room in which to suffer sleepless nights and long hours of dull, wearing pain.
This was what Dora thought; and at her order her dressing-room, which was airy and sufficiently spacious, was transformed into a bedroom for Mr. Wyllard, while her morning-room was arranged for his daily occupation. It would be easy to wheel his sofa from one room to the other. All her orders had been telegraphed beforehand, and everything was in its place when the sufferer arrived.
"It is a special privilege to be nursed by a good fairy," he said, smiling up at his wife, with that rare smile which had so peculiar a charm in her eyes—the smile of a man who has not the same set graciousness for all comers.
After this there came the dull monotony of suffering—the life of routine, that death-in-life from which all possibility of action is gone, all power of choice, all changes and chances of the outer world cut off for ever—a life in which a man feels that he has suddenly dropped back into infancy, and is as helpless as a child upon his mother's knee. The child has all the unexplored future before him, the infinitive potentialities of life. The man turns his sad eyes backward and reviews the past. All the things he has done and the things he has left undone pass in a shadowy procession before his mind's eye. He sees how much wiser he might have been. The faults and follies of those departed years are unrolled before him as on a magic scroll. His maturer judgment, his colder blood, condemn the sins of his passionate youth.
Dora was her husband's companion through many an hour of gloom and depression. There were times when he would talk to her with a kind of feverish animation—talk of the books he had read, or of the men he had known—recall the memories of his youth—his boyhood even.
"I can only live in the past," he said, "and in your love. You are my present and my future, Dora. Were it not for you and your love I should have anticipated annihilation. The grave could hardly reduce me to more complete nothingness than this death-in-life here."
He looked round the room with an impatient sigh. And then, touched by the pathetic look in his wife's face, he added,
"Were it not for you, Dora. I have infinite riches while I possess your love. If I were to lose that now——"
"You know that you can never lose it. My love is a part of my life."
"Yes, but there might come a crushing blow that would kill it. Or if I were to sink into feebleness and imbecility—if the mind were to decay like the body——"
"The only difference would be to make me love you more fondly, knowing that you stood in greater need of my love," answered his wife quietly.
"Yes, I believe you are noble enough for the extremity of self-sacrifice," he said, gazing at her with a searching look, a look of the deepest love and keenest pain, a look that told of anguish surpassing the common woes of humanity. "Yes, I believe it is within the compass of a woman's nature to love a human wreck like me, or even to love a creature stained with blackest sin. There is no limit to the sublimity of a woman's love."
His wife was kneeling by his couch, her head leaning against his pillow. There were times when she could find no words of comfort, when she could only comfort him with the light touch of her lips upon his brow, her sympathy, her presence, her hand laid gently upon his.
"I love to hear you talk of your youth," she said one day, when he had been talking of his boyhood at Marlborough, and at home—the dull old parsonage—the house-mother, always busy, and often scolding, troubled about many things; the father, chewing the cud of somebody else's sermon, in a shabby little den of a study, reeking of tobacco; a sermon to be dribbled out slowly next Sunday morning, in a style of elocution, or non-elocution, happily almost extinct.
"Tell me about your life in Paris," she went on, encouraging him to forget his present pains in those old memories. "That must have been full of interest."
"It was a life of grinding toil, and gnawing anxiety," he answered impatiently. "There is not a detail that could interest you."
"Everything in your past history interests me, Julian. I know how hard you worked in Paris. I saw your desk, the place where you sat night after night, the lamp that lighted you. Mr. Blümenlein has altered nothing in your rooms."
"Vastly civil of him," muttered Wyllard, as if revolting against patronage from a dealer in fancy goods.
"But however hard you worked, you must have had some associations with the outer world," pursued Dora. "You must have felt the fever and the excitement of that time. You must have been interested in the men who governed France."
"I was interested in the stocks that went up and down, and in the men who governed France, so far as their conduct influenced the Bourse. A man who is running a race, neck or nothing, a race that means life or death, has no time to think of anything outside the course. The external world has no existence for him."
"And you knew nothing of the master-spirits of the Empire, the men of science, the writers, the painters?"
"My child, how innocent you are! The men who write books and paint pictures have no more direct influence upon an epoch than the tailors who build coats and the milliners who make gowns. The master-spirits are the politicians and financiers. Those are the rulers of their age. All the rest are servants."
Bothwell had shown himself deeply moved by the affliction that had fallen on his cousin's husband. Every feeling of ill-will vanished in a breath before the face of that supreme misfortune—a life smitten to the dust. Bothwell was too generous-hearted to remember that the master of Penmorval had not been altogether kind in the past. His only thought was how he could help, were it by ever so little, to lighten Julian Wyllard's burden. He was all the more sympathetic when he found that the sufferer had thought of him and of his interests even in the hour of calamity, while the blow that crushed him was still a new thing.
"It was more than good of you to consider my happiness at such a time," said Bothwell, when Dora had told him of her husband's conversation with Heathcote.
"My dear Bothwell, my wife's interests are my own; and I knew that she was keenly interested in your happiness. Heathcote has not found out very much about the girl who was killed; but he has found out just enough to dispel his suspicions about you, and he withdraws all opposition to your marriage with Hilda. Now, it is my earnest desire to see you happily married before I am called away; and as life is always uncertain—trebly uncertain for a man in my condition—the sooner you are married the better."
"I shall not plead for delay," said Bothwell, "if I can win Hilda's consent to an early marriage. But I hope, my dear Wyllard, that you may live to see our children growing up."
"That is to hope for the indefinite prolongation of an incurable disease, and is hardly a kind wish on your part. All you have to do is to hurry on this marriage."
"Unfortunately the house I have pitched upon will want three or four months' work before it can be habitable."
"What does that matter? You can live at Penmorval till your house is ready. There is room for half a dozen families in this rambling old place. There will be no one here to interfere with your privacy. You may be almost as much alone as in your own home, and Hilda's presence in the house will help to cheer my poor wife. Hurry on your marriage, Bothwell, while Heathcote is in the humour to accept you. Don't be hindered by any absurd consideration about houses; secure your good fortune while you can."
He spoke with an almost feverish impatience, the fretfulness of a sick man who cannot bear the slightest opposition to his will.
"My dear Julian, you may be sure that Bothwell will be only too glad to act on your advice," said his wife soothingly.
"Let him do so, then, and don't let him talk about houses," retorted Wyllard.
Bothwell was to meet his betrothed the next day at Trevena, where she was to go with Fräulein Meyerstein to inspect the old-fashioned cottage which her lover wanted to turn into a commodious house. There could not be a better opportunity for pleading his cause.
He rode across country, and arrived in time to receive Hilda and her chaperon, who had posted from Launceston to Trevena. It was a delicious autumn day, and, after the cottage had been inspected and approved, the lovers wandered about the wild crest of Tintagel, utterly happy in each other's company; while that discreet spinster, Miss Meyerstein, sat on a grassy bank in the valley below, absorbed in a strip of honeycomb knitting, intended to form part and parcel of a counterpane, which great work had been in progress for the past ten years.
Bothwell was the bearer of a letter from Dora, entreating Hilda to go to her at the Manor, and stay there until Heathcote's return. Bothwell was to stay at Trevena meanwhile, and set the builders at work upon his improvements. The old cottage and the land about it had been secured on a lease for three lives, Bothwell being one, Hilda another, and one of the twins the third. Bothwell hoped to be able to buy the place long before any of these lives gave out.
"You and I have so much to arrange and to talk about," wrote Mrs. Wyllard—"your furniture, your linen, your trousseau. I venture to think I am your nearest friend, and the person you would be most likely to consult in these matters. Your presence will comfort me, dear, and hinder me from dwelling too exclusively on my great trouble. Julian, too, will be glad to have you in the house, and to hear your songs sometimes of an evening. He has his good days and his bad days; and there are times when he is cheerful and likes company. Do come to me at once, Hilda. I am sure you must be tired of Dawlish by this time. It is a very nice little place, but I can imagine a limit to its attractions, and the season is rather late for your favourite diversion of swimming. You shall be free to return to The Spaniards when your brother comes back to England; but in the mean time I am sure I want you more than Miss Meyerstein, who has those all-absorbing twins to occupy her cares and thoughts. I shall expect you the day after to-morrow, by the afternoon train. I shall send a carriage to meet you.—Yours lovingly, DORA WYLLARD."
What could Hilda say to such an invitation from one who had been to her as an elder sister, and whom she loved as fondly as ever sister was loved? She wrote to Dora at the hotel where they lunched and took tea, and gave her letter to Bothwell.
"You are going to Penmorval," he said.
"Yes, I am going there the day after to-morrow."
"And I am to be banished. I am to live here and see that my plans are carried out properly. I daresay my cousin thinks that if I were to stay at Penmorval while you are there I should forget all the serious business of life; lapse into a rapturous idiotcy of love. Well, I am too happy to complain. I shall be happy in the thought that I am building our nest. I shall watch every brick that is laid, every timber that is sawn. You shall not have a badly baked brick or a plank of green wood in your house. I shall think of the plans night and day, dream of them—leap out of my sleep in the dead of the night to make some improvement."
"If you chop and change too much you will have dear to pay," said Miss Meyerstein; and then she launched into a long story about a German Grand Duke, with an unpronounceable name, who built himself a summer palace which cost three times as much as he intended, because of his Serene Highness's artistic temperament, which had beguiled him into continual tampering with the plans.
Never in his life had Bothwell felt happier than on that breezy September day, pottering about the old cottage on the hillside, planning the house and gardens of the future—the study, the drawing-room, the ingle-nook in the dining-room, the little entrance-hall which would hardly be more than a lobby, the closets and clever contrivances, and shelves, and cosy nooks, which were to make this house different from all other houses—at least in the eye of its possessor—the quaint old lattices which were to be retained in all their primitive simplicity, and still quainter casements which were to be added—here an oriel and there a bow—an Early English chimney-stack on one side, and a distinctly Flemish weathercock on the other. Bothwell could draw well enough to show the builder what he wanted done. He had his pocket-book full of sketches for chimneys, pediments, doors and windows, and ornamental ventilators.
"One would think you were going to build a town," said the practical Fräulein.
Never had Bothwell been happier than as he rode across the moors in the fading daylight, thinking of the day that was over. What a simple domestic day it had been—so homely, so tranquil, so sweet; ending with the cosy tea-drinking in the parlour at the inn, Hilda presiding at the tea-tray, and as self-possessed as if she and Bothwell had been married for ten years. The time of tremors and agitations was past. They were secure in each other's love, secure in the consent and approval of those who loved them. Henceforward their lives were to sail calmly on a summer sea.
How different was this newer and purer love of his from the old passion, with its alternations of fever and remorse! How different his simple-minded sweetheart of to-day—gentle, unselfish, conscientious, religious—from the woman who had been all exaction and caprice; insatiable in her desire for admiration, self-indulgent, luxurious, caring not a jot how the world outside her own boudoir went on, who suffered or who was glad, provided her wishes were gratified and her vanity fed!
It was dinner-time when Bothwell arrived at Penmorval, and the dinner-hour was of all seasons the most melancholy, now that the master of the house was a helpless invalid on the upper floor, perhaps never again to enter that stately dining-hall, where the butler insisted upon serving Bothwell's dinner in just as slow and ceremonial a manner as if family and guests had been assembled in full force.
Vainly did Bothwell plead against this ceremony.
"I wish you would ask them to cook me a chop, Stodden," he said. "A chop and a potato would be ample. I hate a long dinner at any time, but most especially when I am to eat it alone. You need not take so much trouble as you do about me."
But Stodden ascribed all such speeches to overweening modesty on Mr. Grahame's part. The poor young man knew that he was in somewise an interloper; and he did not wish to give trouble. It was a very proper feeling on his part; and Stodden was resolved that he should not be a loser by his modesty. Stodden gave him an even handsomer dinner on the following day, and when remonstrated with smiled the smile of incredulity.
"Lor, sir, you know you like a good dinner," he said. "You mayn't wish to give trouble; but you must like a good dinner. We all like a good dinner. It's human nature."
After this Bothwell felt that remonstrance was useless.
Mrs. Wyllard dined with her invalid husband. She rarely left him except when he was sleeping under the influence of morphia, or when he asked to be alone. There were hours in his long and weary day in which even his wife's presence seemed a burden to him, and when he preferred to fight his battle in solitude.
Upon this particular evening of Bothwell's return from Trevena his cousin joined him at the dinner-table, an unexpected pleasure.
"I want to hear all your news, Bothwell," she said. "Julian is asleep, and I have half an hour free."
Bothwell told his news gladly, gaily.
"She is coming the day after to-morrow," he said, "and I am to be banished, like Romeo. But I am not afraid of Romeo's ill-luck. You won't give my Juliet a sleeping potion, and bury her alive while I am away, will you? I have taken two rooms in a cottage at Trevena, with an old goody who is to do for me. That will be ever so much cheaper than the inn; and you know that in my position I ought to be economical."
"You ought not to make yourself uncomfortable for the sake of a few pounds."
"Ah, that is your spendthrift's argument. He never can understand that he ought to save a few pounds; and so he dies a pauper; while the man who has a proper respect for pounds—and pence, even—blossoms into a millionaire. I shall be very comfortable with my goody. I shall be out all day, superintending the builder. I shall live upon chops and porter; and I shall sleep like a top every night, in a dear little bedroom smelling of lavender. My goody is clean to a fault. She cast an evil eye at my boots as I went up-stairs. All the articles of furniture in her rooms are veiled with crochet-work, as if the wood were too precious to be exposed to the light. But how grave you are looking, Dora! Has Wyllard been any worse to-day?"
"No; he has been much the same—a sad monotony of suffering. It was of you I was thinking, Bothwell. I saw some news in the county paper which I know will grieve you."
"There has been no accident between Launceston and Dawlish, has there?" gasped Bothwell, starting up from his chair; "the train got back all right——"
"You foolish boy! If there had been an accident, how do you suppose I could hear of it?" exclaimed his cousin, smiling at his vehemence. "How like a lover to imagine that any ill news must needs be about your betrothed, though you only left her three hours ago! No, Bothwell, my bad news concerns an old friend of yours, General Harborough."
"What of General Harborough?" asked Bothwell anxiously.
"The announcement of his death is in the county paper."
"His death? Impossible! Why, I met him less than ten days ago. He seemed hale and hearty as ever."
"He caught a severe cold at the funeral of a friend, and died of bronchitis after a very short illness. Poor Bothwell! I can sympathise with your sorrow for so staunch a friend. I have often heard you say how good he was to you in India."
Dora had heard of General Harborough only as an Indian friend of her cousin's. She knew of Lady Valeria's existence, and that was all. No rumour of Bothwell's flirtation with that lady had ever reached her ears. She did not know that Bothwell's frequent journeys to Plymouth had been on Lady Valeria's account; that his mysterious journeys to London had been made in her interests—troublesome journeys to interview Jew money-lenders, to renew bills and tide over difficulties.
And now Valeria was a widow, and would have been able to exact the fulfilment of old vows—breathed under tropical stars, far away in that Eastern land which they both loved: she would have been able to claim him as her slave, if he had not boldly broken his fetters in that last interview at Fox Hill.
"Thank God I delayed no longer!" he said to himself; "thank God I got my release before this happened!"
And then he thought sadly, affectionately, of his old friend; and he remembered with thankfulness that last meeting, that farewell grasp of the good man's hand which he had been able to return as honestly as it was given.
"Why did I ever sin against him?" he asked himself. "What an arrant sneak I must have been!"
"You will go to General Harborough's funeral, I suppose?" said Dora presently.
"Yes, of course I must be at the funeral. When does it take place?"
"To-morrow."
"Yes, I shall go without doubt. I shall join the procession at the cemetery. As I am not invited, there will be no need for me to go to the house."
"I suppose not. The poor widow will feel the blow terribly, no doubt."
"Yes, I have no doubt she will be sorry."
This was not a lie. Bothwell thought that even Valeria could not fail to feel some touch of sorrow for the loss of that chivalrous friend and benefactor, the man who had given so much, and had received so poor a return for his gifts. There would be the anguish of a guilty conscience; even if there were no other form of sorrow.
"But, as I suppose she is elderly too, perhaps she will not survive him very long," pursued Dora, infinitely compassionate for the woes of a broken-hearted widow.
"Lady Valeria elderly!" exclaimed Bothwell. "She is not thirty."
"What, was your good General Harborough so foolish as to marry a girl?"
"Yes. It was the only foolishness of his life that I have ever heard of; and he was so kind to the woman he married that he might be pardoned for his folly."
"I hope she was fond of him, and worthy of him."
Bothwell did not enter upon the question, and his reticence about Lady Valeria Harborough struck Dora as altogether at variance with his natural frankness. And then she remembered that unexplained entanglement which he had confessed to her—an entanglement with a married woman—and it flashed upon her that Lady Valeria might be the heroine of that story. He had spoken of General Harborough, but never of General Harborough's wife. There had been a studied reserve upon that subject. And now Dora discovered that Valeria Harborough was a young woman.
The invitation to the funeral came by next morning's post—a formal invitation sent by a fashionable firm of undertakers—and Bothwell had no excuse for staying away from Fox Hill, where the mourners were to assemble at three o'clock in the afternoon. He had no fear that Lady Valeria would be present upon such an occasion; but there was just the possibility that she might send for him when she knew he was in the house. She had always been reckless of conventionalities, carrying matters with such a high hand as to defy slander.
His heart sank within him as he approached the classic portico of the villa. Deepest regret for his dead benefactor, deepest remorse for having wronged him, weighed down his heart as he entered the darkened house, where rooms built for brightness and gaiety looked all the more gloomy in the day of mourning. The hall was hung with black, and in the midst stood the plain oak coffin, draped with the colours which the General had fought for forty years before among the wild hills of Afghanistan. Crosses and wreaths of purest white were heaped upon the coffin, and the atmosphere of the darkened hall was heavy with the perfume of stephanotis and tuberose; those two flowers which the General had always associated with his wife, who rarely decorated herself or her rooms with any other exotics.
Bothwell stood amidst the mourning crowd, with heavily-beating heart. There was no summons from Lady Valeria, and he heard some one near him telling some one else that her grief was terrible—a stony, silent grief, which alarmed her people and her medical attendant. She would see no one. Lady Carlavarock had come all the way from Baden, where the poor dear Earl was doctoring his gout; but Lady Valeria had only consented to see her mother for half an hour, and poor Lady Carlavarock had not even been asked to stay at Fox Hill. She had been obliged to put up at an hotel, which was a cruelty, as everyone knew that the Carlavarocks were as poor as church mice.
"Perhaps Lady Valeria has not forgiven her family for having sold her," said the second speaker, in the same confidential voice.
"Sold her! Nothing of the kind. She adored the old General."
"You had better tell that to—another branch of the service," muttered his friend, as Bothwell moved away from the group.
It was past five before the funeral was over, and there was no train for Bodmin till seven; so Bothwell strolled into the coffee-room of the Duke of Cornwall and ordered a cup of tea.
While he was drinking it he was joined by a young officer who had been at the funeral, and whom Bothwell had often met at Fox Hill—quite a youth, beardless, and infantine of aspect, but with a keen desire to appear older than his years. He affected to have steeped himself in iniquity, to have dishonoured more husbands and fleeced more tradesmen than any man in the service. He hinted that his father had turned him out of doors, and that his mother had died of a broken heart on his account. He was a youth who loved gossip, and who went about among all the wives and spinsters of Plymouth, the dowagers and old ladies, disseminating tittle-tattle. Hardly anything he said was true, hardly anybody believed him; but people liked to hear him talk all the same. There was a piquancy in slander uttered by those coral lips, which had not long finished with the corals of babyhood.
"My dear Bothwell, what a tragedy!" he exclaimed, as he seated himself in front of a brandy-and-soda.
"It is a sad loss for every one," Bothwell answered tritely.
"Sad loss—but, my dear fellow, what a scandal! Everybody in Plymouth is talking about it. There has been hardly anything else spoken of at any of the dinners I have been at during the last ten days."
"I thought old maids' tea-parties were your usual form," retorted Bothwell, with a sneer. "What is your last mare's nest, Falconer? The General's death, or the General's funeral?"
"The circumstances that preceded the dear old man's death. That's the scandal. Surely you must have heard——"
"Consider that I have been buried among the Cornish moors, and have heard nothing."
"By Jove! Do you mean to say that you don't know there was a dreadful row one night at Fox Hill? Sir George Varney insulted Lady Valeria—called her some foul name, accused her of carrying on with a young man. The General came up at the moment and smashed his head. Sir George went all over the place next day, abusing my lady, sent the General a summons to the police-court, where the whole story must have come out in extenso, as those, newspaper fellows say. A very ugly story it is—betting transactions, borrowed money, and a lover in the background. An uncommonly queer story, my dear Grahame. Plymouth was on the qui-vive for a tremendous scandal. You know what these garrison and dockyard towns are, and a man in the General's position is a mark for slander. The thing was altogether too awful, and the poor old General wouldn't face it. He wouldn't face it, old chap, and he died."
"You mean to say that he——"
"I mean to say nothing. There was no inquest. The poor old man kept his bed for a week, and the cause of death was called bronchitis; but there are people I know who have their own idea about the General's death, and a very ugly idea it is."
"Your friends have a penchant for ugly ideas, Falconer," answered Bothwell coolly.
He did not believe a word of the subaltern's story, and yet the thought of it troubled him as he sat alone in his corner of the smoking-carriage, trying to solace himself with a pipe, trying to think only of the girl he loved, and of his brightening prospects.
That mention of a lover! How much or how little did it mean? Could it be true that General Harborough had knocked a man down in his own house? Such an act on the part of the most chivalrous of men must have been the result of extraordinary provocation. Only a deliberate insult to a woman could excuse such an outrage against the laws of hospitality. He remembered that Lady Valeria had talked of borrowing money from Sir George Varney; and what could she expect but insult if she placed herself under obligation to a notorious roue? He had warned her of the folly of such a course. He had urged her to confide in her husband. And now that good and loyal friend and protector was gone; and this last act of his wife's had left her to face the world with a damaged reputation.
He told himself that there must be some grain of truth in the subaltern's story, some fire behind this smoke. The scandal too nearly touched actual facts to be altogether false.
"God help her if her good name is at the mercy of such a scoundrel as Varney!" thought Bothwell.
He left Penmorval in a dog-cart next morning, carrying his portmanteau and a box of books at the back. He was to have the use of the dog-cart and Glencoe while he stayed at Trevena, so that he should not feel himself altogether banished. He could ride over to Penmorval occasionally.
"You must not come too often, mind," said Dora, when she was bidding him good-bye. "Indeed; on reflection, I think you had better only come when you are invited. You may have no discretion otherwise. It will not do for you to be really living here, and only pretending to live at Trevena."
"It is unkind of you to suggest that a man must be an utter imbecile because he is in love, Dora," remonstrated Bothwell. "Of course I understand that I am sent away as a sacrifice to the proprieties. I am banished in order that Mrs. Grundy may be satisfied—that same Mrs. Grundy who was willing to suspect me of murder on the very smallest provocation. No, my dear Dora, I am not going to be troublesome. I will only come when I have your permission. I suppose I may come next Sunday?"
"O Bothwell, this is Wednesday; Sunday is very near."
"It will seem ages off to me. Yes, I shall certainly come on Sunday. Even servants are allowed to go and see their friends on the Sabbath. Is your cousin less than a hireling that he should be denied? I shall ride over in time for breakfast on Sunday morning."
"You will have to get up at six o'clock."
"What of that? I have had to get up at four, and even at half-past three, for cub-hunting."
He arrived at Trevena early in the afternoon, settled himself comfortably in his cottage-lodgings, and arranged his books in a corner of the neat little parlour, with its superabundant crochet-work and crockery, which ornamentation he artfully persuaded his landlady to put away in a cupboard during his residence.
"Men are so clumsy," he pleaded. "They always spoil things."
Goody confessed that the male sex was inherently awkward, and had an innate incapacity to appreciate crochet antimacassars. She sighed as she denuded her best parlour of its beauties. "The place dew look so bare," she said.
Bothwell gave up his afternoon to a long interview with the builder, who was a smart young man, and as honest as he was smart. The old cottage was thoroughly overhauled and inspected, with a view to the carrying out of those extensions and improvements which Bothwell had planned for himself, and for which he had made drawings that were very creditable to an amateur architect. His experience as an Engineer stood him in good stead.
He modified his plans somewhat on the advice of the smart young builder; but the alterations were to be carried out very much upon his own original lines—the builder's modifications were chiefly in detail. And then they had to fight out the question of time. The builder asked for six months; Bothwell would only grant four. Finally, time and cost were settled; everything was agreed upon; Bothwell having given up his original idea of being his own builder and buying his own materials; and the contract was to be taken to Camelford next day, to be put into legal form. For four hundred and fifty pounds the old cottage was to be transformed into a comfortable house. The two little parlours and the kitchen were to be made into three little studies or bookrooms, communicating with each other. These were for Bothwell and his pupils to work in. A new drawing-room, dining-room, and kitchen were to be built, and over these three good bedrooms.
"I shall add a billiard-room with a large nursery over it later on, when I am beginning to make my fortune," thought Bothwell. "I know we shall want a billiard-room; and I hope we shall want a nursery."
The builder had gone home to his young wife and baby, in a cheerful red-brick cottage of his own construction; and Bothwell was pacing the old neglected garden alone, in the autumn sunset, when he looked up suddenly, and saw a dark figure standing in the narrow path between him and the rosy western sky.
It was the tall slender figure of a woman, robed in black and thickly veiled. That black figure seemed to shut out all the warmth and beauty of the glowing west. Bothwell's heart grew cold within him at sight of it.
He had not a moment's doubt or hesitation, though the woman's face was hardly visible under the thick crape veil.
"Valeria!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, it is Valeria."
"How, in the name of all that's reasonable, did you come here?"
"A pair of post-horses brought me; that was easy enough when I knew where to find you. I heard at Bodmin Road station that you were here. You had been seen to drive by, and you told the station-master where you were going."
[CHAPTER IX.]
TWO WOMEN.
They stood face to face in the evening light, Bothwell and Valeria; those two who had loved each other, who had once been wont to meet with smiles and gladness, hand clasped in hand—they stood pale and silent, each waiting for the other to speak.
"How could you do so mad a thing as to come here, Lady Valeria?" Bothwell asked, at last.
His heart was beating passionately, not with love, but with anger. He was indignant at the unfeminine feeling shown by this pursuit of him, this persecution of a man who had frankly owned a new and wiser attachment.
"It is not the first madness I have been guilty of for your sake," she answered. "There was the madness of loving you, in the first instance; and the still greater madness of being constant to you; even when I suspected that you had grown tired of me. But it was not weariness of me that influenced you, was it, Bothwell? It was the false position which grew irksome; the falsehood towards that good, brave man. It was that which made you desert me, was it not? That is all over now. My bondage is over. I am my own mistress, answerable to no one for my conduct; and I am here to remind you of old vows made three years ago beside the fountain at Simla."
"Those old vows have been cancelled, Lady Valeria," said Bothwell coldly. "Surely you have not forgotten our last parting, and the old love-token which you threw away."
"I was beside myself with anger," she answered hurriedly. "You could not have meant all you said that day, Bothwell. You wanted to escape from a false position; you could not guess that my release was to come so soon, that in less than a month I should be free, that in a year I might be your wife."
"Stop!" he cried; "for pity's sake not another word. I am engaged to marry another woman—bound heart and soul to another. I have no other purpose in life but to win her, and to be happy with her."
Lady Valeria looked at him in silence for some moments. She had thrown back her veil when she first addressed him. Her face was almost as white as the crape border of her widow's bonnet, but on each cheek there was one spot of hectic—a spot that looked like flame—and in her eyes, there was the light of anger.
"It is true, then! You are in love with another woman!"
"It is true. I am in love with her; and I am bound to her by all those feelings which are sweetest and most sacred in the mind of a man—by gratitude, by love, by respect, by admiration for her noble qualities. I am to be married to her almost immediately. You can understand, therefore, Lady Valeria, that as I hope always to be your friend—your champion and defender, if need of championship should ever arise—I am justified in remonstrating with you for your folly in coming here alone, upon the day after your husband's funeral."
"My champion, my friend!" she repeated mockingly. "What amazing generosity, what sublime chivalry! You offer me your friendship—you who swore to be my husband, to give me the devotion of your life, whenever it pleased God to set me free from an unnatural union. You who were bound to me by the most sacred vows."
"You released me from those vows when you threw away the love-token. I asked you for my freedom, and you told me that I was free. You cannot recall that release, Lady Valeria."
"I released you from a false position. That is over now: and your alleged motive—your compunction, your remorse of conscience—must be over too."
Bothwell was silent. He had said all that could be said. He stood before Lady Valeria motionless, dumb, ready to bear the brunt of her anger and submit meekly to her reproaches, were they never so ungenerous.
"Do you know what you have done for me?" she demanded passionately. "Do you know what you have cost me—you who pretended to be my slave, who pretended to worship me, and whose flimsy passion could not stand the wear and tear of three short years? You have blighted my life; you have ruined my good name."
"That last charge cannot be true, Lady Valeria. You were much too careful of your reputation—you knew much too well how to keep your slave at a proper distance," answered Bothwell, with a touch of scorn.
"But I did not know how to hide my love for you. There were eyes keen enough to read that. Do you know that my husband assaulted Sir George Varney in his own house on my account?"
"Ah, then the story was true," muttered Bothwell.
"You have heard about it, I see. Did you hear the nature of the insult which provoked that punishment?"
"No."
"It was the mention of your name—your name flung in my face like an accusation—cast at me as if my position were notorious—as if all society knew that I had been guilty of an intrigue."
"Sir George is a blackguard, and no act of his would surprise me; but Sir George is not society. You need not be unhappy about any speech of his. If you want me to call him out, I am quite willing to go over to Blankenberghe and ask him to meet me there."
"You know that such an act as that would intensify the scandal. No, Bothwell, there is only one way in which you can set me right, a year hence, when my year of widowhood is over, when I can marry again without disrespect to my husband's memory. That is the only way of setting me right with the world, Bothwell; and it is the only way of setting me right in my own self-esteem."
"My dear Lady Valeria, I wonder that you have not learnt to understand society better—you, who are essentially a woman of society. Do you think the world would applaud you or respect you for making a very poor marriage—for uniting yourself to a man without pursuit or means or position? You, who with beauty, rank, and wealth, might marry almost any one you pleased. The world does not smile on such marriages, Lady Valeria. The world worships the star which mounts higher in the social firmament, not the star which bends earthward. You have your future before you, free and unfettered. You have wealth, which in this age means power. You can have nothing to regret in a foolish love of the past, love that drooped and died for want of a congenial atmosphere."
"Is that your last word upon this subject?" asked Valeria, looking at him intently with those angry eyes.
They were beautiful even in anger, those violet-dark eyes; but the light in them was a diabolical light, as of an evil spirit.
"My very last."
"Then we will say no more; and we will enter upon a new phase of our existence—the period of friendship. Perhaps you will be kind enough to take me back to the inn where I left my carriage, and order some tea for me?"
"I shall be very happy," said Bothwell quietly; and they walked off towards the inn, which was less than half a mile from the cottage.
"May I ask what you were doing in that deserted garden?" inquired Lady Valeria.
"I have been planning the improvement of my future home."
"Indeed! You are going to live in that desolate spot, with nothing but the sea and the sky to look at?"
"The sea and the sky, and some of the finest coast-scenery in England—the sands and the rocks and the wild hills. Don't you think that ought to be enough for any man to look at?"
"For a hermit, no doubt, not for a man. A man should have the city and the Forum. Ah, Bothwell, if you were my husband, there would be no limit to my ambition for you! And you are going to vegetate in a place like this?"
"I am going to work here, and to be useful in my generation, I hope. I shall help to make the soldiers of the future;" and then he told Lady Valeria his plans.
"What a drudgery!" she exclaimed; "what a wearisome monotonous round, from year's end to year's end! I would as soon be a horse in a mill. O Bothwell, the very idea is an absurdity. You a schoolmaster! You!"
She measured him from head to foot with a scornful laugh; trying to humiliate him, to make him ashamed of his modest hopes. But she failed utterly in this endeavour. Bothwell was too happy to be easily put out of conceit with his prospects. Even that opprobrious name of "schoolmaster" had no terrors for him.
"Tell me about my friend's last illness," he said presently, gravely, gently, anxious to bring Lady Valeria to a more womanly frame of mind.
He thought that she must surely have some touch of tenderness, some regret for the husband who had been so good and loyal in his treatment of her; the man to whom she had been as an indulged and idolised daughter rather than as a wife; escaping all wifely servitude, seeking her own pleasure in all things, allowed to live her own life.
Lady Valeria told Bothwell about those last sad days: how the strong frame had been burnt up with fever, the broad chest racked with pain; how patiently weakness and suffering had been endured.
"He was a brave, good man," she said; "noble, unselfish to the last. His parting words were full of love and generosity. 'You will marry again,' he said. 'I have left no fetter upon your life. My latest prayer will be for your happiness.'"
"I wish we had both been worthier of his regard," said Bothwell gloomily.
He wondered at the supreme egotism of a nature which could be so little moved by this good man's death.
"That is past wishing now. Nothing that you or I can do will cancel the past. No, Bothwell," she said, looking at him steadily, "nothing will cancel the past."
They were at the hotel by this time. Bothwell ordered tea, then went out to the stables to order the carriage. He left Lady Valeria to take her tea in mournful solitude, while he walked up and down in front of the hotel, waiting to hand her into her carriage. He was indignant with her for the unwomanly step she had taken. He wondered that he could ever have cared for such a woman, a woman who could assume the dignity of an empress, and yet stoop to follies at which a dressmaker's apprentice might have hesitated; a creature of caprice and impulse, governed by no higher law than her own whim.
He walked up and down in the autumn darkness, listening to the murmur of the waves, seeing the stars shine out, pale and far apart in the calm gray, glancing now and then at the window of the sitting-room, where Lady Valeria was seated in the glow of the fire, a tall slim figure in densest black.
She came out after the carriage had been waiting some time.
"O, you are there, are you?" she exclaimed, seeing Bothwell by the hotel-door. "I thought you had gone."
"I waited to hand you to your carriage."
"You are vastly polite. I hardly expected so much attention."
"There is a train from Bodmin Road a few minutes after nine. You will be in time for it if your coachman drives pretty fast."
"The road is not the safest in the world for fast driving, but you can tell him to catch the train, if you please. Good-night."
Bothwell told the coachman not to waste his time when he had a level road; and as the habit of Cornish coachmen is to spring their horses up-hill and canter them gaily down-hill, there was every chance that Lady Valeria would be in time.
The carriage drove off, and Bothwell went back to his lodgings, wondering whether he had seen the last of the lady. Her coming had introduced a new element of doubt and fear into his mind. A woman capable of such foolishness might stop at no desperate act. All the serenity of Bothwell's sky had become clouded over.
He turned his face in the direction of Penmorval, and looked across the hills, through the cool, dark night. O, what a different nature that was, the nature of the girl who was to be his wife! What rest, what comfort in the very thought of her love!
"God bless you, my darling," he said to himself. "I send my love and blessing to you, dearest, over the quiet hills, under the silent stars."
[CHAPTER X.]
ROSES ON A GRAVE.
While Bothwell was watching the builder's men upon the green hill beside the Atlantic, Edward Heathcote was slowly, patiently, laboriously following the thin thread of circumstantial evidence which was to lead him to the solution of Léonie Lemarque's fate. He had taken this task upon himself in purest chivalry, an uncongenial duty, entered upon in unselfish devotion to the woman he loved. He pursued it now with a passionate zest, a morbid interest, which was a new phase in his character. Never had he followed the doublings of some cunning old dog-fox across the moors and heaths of his native land with such intensity as he followed that unknown murderer of Léonie Lemarque. That she had been murdered—deliberately sacrificed—as the one witness of a past crime, was now his conviction. He had ceased to halt between two opinions. Léonie had gone to meet the murderer of her aunt, and she had fallen a victim to the folly of the dying woman who had sent her to seek protection from such a source.
Who was that murderer, and for what reason had he carried his helpless prey to a remote Cornish valley? Why should he not have tried to get rid of her in the great wilderness of London, where the crime would have excited much less curiosity, and would have been less likely to be discovered?
Entering deliberately into the thoughts of the assassin, following out the working of his mind, his fears, his calculations, his artifices, it seemed to Heathcote that a man familiar with the line between Plymouth and Penzance might scheme out just such a murder as that which had been committed, might fix on the very spot at which the deed was to be done, knowing that at that particular point the palisades had been removed, and the viaduct left unprotected. He would speculate that the fall of a strange girl at such a spot would be accepted as purely accidental. He would trust to his own cleverness for finding the way to disconnect himself from the catastrophe; he would imagine that in the hurry and confusion following such an event it would be impossible for the murderer to be identified. Who was to select from all the travellers in a train that one traveller whose arm had thrust the girl to her doom? A little cleverness and watchfulness on his part would render such identification impossible. A man provided with a railway key could get from one carriage to another easily enough, in the surprise and horror of the moments following upon the girl's fall. Few men are quite masters of their senses during such moments, and all eyes would be turned towards the gorge at the bottom of which the girl was lying; everybody's thought would be as to whether she was living or dead. Very easy in such a moment for an active man to pass from one carriage to the other, unobserved by any creature in or about the train.
Mr. Blümenlein's remark about the hidden door in the alcove had impressed Heathcote strongly: the door opening into a dark and obscure court, a narrow passage piercing from one street to another, and with only a side door here and there leading into a yard, and here and there the grated windows of a warehouse or an office; an alley in which, after business hours, there were hardly any signs of human habitation. Heathcote inspected this passage after he left the merchant's office. He followed it to its outlet into a narrow street, which led him into another and busier street parallel with the Rue Lafitte. A curious fancy possessed him; and he made his way, by narrow and obscure streets, behind the Grand Opera and the Grand Hotel, into the Rue Lafitte. By this way, which was somewhat circuitous, and which led for the most part through shabby streets, he avoided the Boulevard altogether.
That speech of Mr. Blümenlein's haunted him, like the refrain of a song. The words repeated themselves over and over again in his mind, with maddening reiteration.
"Wyllard, the speculator, was one man; but there was another man of whom the world knew nothing, and who went out and came in between dusk and dawn by that side door in the court."
It was a bold speculation on the part of the German merchant, and might have very little foundation in reality: yet the fact that such a side door had been made at Julian Wyllard's expense implied a desire for independent egress and ingress, a wish to be free from the espionage of porters and porters' wives, to go out and come in unobserved, to have no comment made upon the hours he kept.
For such a man as Wyllard had appeared in the eyes of the world, for a hard-headed plodder, a moneymaking machine, this easy access to the Boulevard and the pleasures of a Parisian midnight would have been useless.
But for a man who led a double life, who was the hard calculating man of business by day, and who at night took his revenge for the toil and dulness of the money-grubber's career in the dissipations of the gayest city in the world—for such a man the facility afforded by the side door in the court would be invaluable.
Had Wyllard been such a man? Had Wyllard lived a double life during the ten years of his Parisian existence?
Such a thing seemed to the last degree unlikely. Difficult to suppose that he could have given his nights to pleasure and folly—he who had succeeded as a foreigner in a field where native talent had so often failed; he who had penetrated the innermost labyrinths of the financial world, and had always been a winner in the hazardous game where the reckless and the idle must inevitably end as losers; he who had the flair for successful enterprises which had been spoken of to Heathcote as little short of inspiration; he who had been respected by the cleverest men on the Paris Bourse, looked up to as the hardest worker and keenest thinker among them all. No, such a man could not have given his nights to pleasure, could not have rioted among foolish revellers betwixt midnight and morning—to go back to his den in the early dawn, and to begin a new day, half rested, bemused by wine and folly.
No, such a man could not have habitually lived the Boulevard life, could not have been the associate of fools and light women. He could not so have lived without the fact of his folly being known to everybody in Paris. And Edward Heathcote had heard his rival praised for the sobriety and steadiness of his life, wondered at as a miracle of industry and good conduct, a man of one idea and one ambition. He had heard Julian Wyllard so spoken of by men who knew their Paris. He had heard his character discussed and sifted years ago, at the time of his marriage with Dora Dalmaine.
That Julian Wyllard could have lived a profligate life was impossible; but that theory of a double life did not necessarily imply dissipation or folly. What of a man who concealed from the world his inner life, the life of passion and emotion, who abandoned himself in secretness and obscurity to his all-absorbing love for a woman whom he dared not acknowledge before society? Such a man might verily be said to lead a double life—and Julian Wyllard might have been such a man.
Heathcote looked at his watch when he entered the Rue Lafitte. He had walked the distance in a quarter of an hour.
He had made a note of the number of the house in which Marie Prévol had lived. It was 117, about half-way between the Boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. It was to this house that he now directed his steps, impelled by the desire to see the rooms in which the beautiful young actress had lived—if it were possible to see them. In this dead season, when so many of the residents of Paris were absent, there was just the chance that some good-natured concierge—and the concierge is always amenable to the gentle inducement of a five-franc piece—might consent to admit a respectable-looking stranger to a view of the third floor of No. 117.
The house was a quiet reputable-looking house enough—one of the older and smaller houses of the street, untouched by the hand of improvement, and of somewhat shabby appearance externally.
The person who opened the door, and who occupied a little den at the back of the entrance-hall, was a woman of about forty, cleaner and fresher looking than the generality of portresses and caretakers. She was decently attired in a smart cotton gown, which fitted her buxom figure to perfection. Her face was clean, and her cap spotless. She had a pleasant open countenance, and Heathcote felt that he might believe anything she told him.
He asked if there were any apartments to be let in the house.
No, the portress told him. There were only old-established families living there. There had not been a floor to let for three years.
"Indeed! Not the third floor, for example?"
"No. But why does Monsieur inquire especially about the third floor?" the portress-asked, looking at him keenly with her bright black eyes.
"I confess to having a particular curiosity about the third floor," replied Heathcote, judging that frankness would serve him best with this outspoken matron, "and if by any chance the family were absent——"
"Monsieur would like to indulge a morbid curiosity," interrupted the portress, "to see the rooms which were occupied by a beautiful woman who was murdered. There was a time when I had twenty, forty, fifty such applications in a day, when all the idlers in Paris came here to spy about and to question. If the murder had been done in one of those very rooms instead of in the wood, I should have made my fortune. As it was, people stared and pried and touched things; as if the very curtains and the sofa cushions had been steeped in blood. But that was ten years ago. I wonder that Monsieur should feel any curiosity after all those years."
"You were living in this house ten years ago, at the time of the murder?" questioned Heathcote eagerly.
"Yes, Monsieur, and for three years before that. I was with Madame Georges from the day she first entered this house to the day she was carried out of it in her coffin. I am Barbe Leroux, born Girot. If you have heard of the murder of Marie Prévol, you must have heard of Barbe Girot, her servant. I was one of the chief witnesses before the Juge d'Instruction."
"Madame, I have read your evidence," replied Heathcote. "I am deeply interested in the history of that terrible murder, and I rejoice in having met a lady who can, if she pleases, help me to unravel a mystery which baffled the police."
"The police!" exclaimed Madame Leroux contemptuously; "the police are a parcel of no-great-things, or they would have found the man who killed my mistress and Monsieur de Maucroix in a week."
"Provided that he stopped in Paris to be found. But it seems evident that he got away from Paris, and instantly, or he would have been taken red-handed."
"I have reason to know that he was in Paris long after the murder," said Barbe decisively.
"What reason? Pray consider, Madame, that I am brought to this house by no idle curiosity, no morbid love of the horrible. It is my mission to discover the murderer of Marie Prévol. Give me your confidence, I entreat, Madame. You who loved your mistress must desire to see her assassin punished."
Barbe Leroux shrugged her shoulders with an air of doubt.
"I don't quite know that, Monsieur. Yes, I loved my mistress; but I pity her murderer. Come, we cannot talk in this passage all day. Will you walk into my room, Monsieur, and seat yourself for a little while? and then, if you are anxious to see the apartment in which that poor lady lived, it may perhaps be managed."
"You are very good," said Heathcote, slipping a napoleon into Barbe Leroux's broad palm.
Had it been half a napoleon she would have considered herself repaid for ordinary civility; but the larger coin secured extraordinary devotion. She would, in her own phrase, have thrown herself into the fire for this gentlemanly stranger, whose hat and coat were so decidedly English, but who spoke almost as a Parisian.
She ushered him into her little sitting-room, the very sanctuary and stronghold of her domestic life, since there was a bed in a curtained corner, while there was a cradle sunning itself in the few rays of light which crept down the hollow square of brick and stone on which the window opened. The pot-au-feu was simmering on a handful of wood-ashes in a corner of the hearth; and Madame Leroux's plethoric work-basket showed that she had been lately occupied in the repair of a blue linen blouse.
"Leroux is one of the porters at the Central Markets," she explained. "It is a hard life, and the pay is small; but there are perquisites, and between us we contrive to live and to put away a little for the daughter there," with a nod and a smile in the direction of the cradle, whence came the rhythmical breathing of a fat baby.
"The only one?" inquired Heathcote.
"Yes, Monsieur."
"And you have lived in this house for thirteen years, Madame Leroux?"
"Nearer fourteen, Monsieur, when all is counted. I was a dresser at the Porte-Saint-Martin when Mademoiselle Prévol first appeared there. It was a wretched life—bad pay, late hours, hard work. I caught cold from going to and fro on the winter nights, thinly clad; for I had an old mother to support in those days, and I could not afford warm clothing. I had a cough which tore me to pieces; but I dared not give up my employment, and my fear was of being sent away on account of bad health. I had not a friend in Paris to help me. Then it was, Monsieur, that Mademoiselle Prévol took pity on me. She spoke about me to a doctor who used to come behind the scenes and was on friendly terms with all the actors and actresses. She asked him to prescribe for me; but he told her that medicines would be of no use in my case. I was young, and I had a good constitution. All that was needed for my cure was warmth and comfort. I was not to go out of doors after dark, or in bad weather, if I wanted to cure myself. I almost laughed at the doctor for his advice. I lived on the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and had to walk to and fro in all weathers, good or bad. It was January at this time, and the snow was on the ground."
"It was then that Mademoiselle Prévol took you into her service?" speculated Heathcote.
"Yes, Monsieur. There are not many ladies in her position who would have cared what became of a drudge like me. She was new to the theatre, and she had just become the rage on account of her beauty. The papers had all been full of her praises. Cigars, hats, fans, shoes were called after her. The public applauded her songs and dances madly every night. Admirers were waiting in crowds at the stage-door to see her leave the theatre, in the shabby little forty-sous that used to take her home. She dared not walk, for fear of being followed and mobbed. She was young enough to have had her head turned by all this fuss; but she seemed to care hardly anything about it. One honest man's love would be worth all this rubbish, she said to me once, when I asked her if she was not proud of being the rage with all Paris. I was proud of dressing her; and I used to take the greatest care in everything I did for her; and I suppose it was this that made her so good to me. She knew that I loved her; and the poor dresser's love was honest love. In a word, Monsieur, she asked me if I would like to be her servant. She was going to leave her mother's lodgings, where she was not comfortable, and to take an apartment of her own. I might have to work hard, perhaps, she told me, and I should have to be careful and saving, as she had only her salary to live on. She was not like those ladies who rolled their carriages and lived in the Bois yonder; but she would feed me and lodge me well, and she would give me as much money as I was getting at the theatre, without either food or lodging."
"Naturally, you accepted?"
"With delight, Monsieur. And three days after, I came to this house. My young mistress had taken the third floor for five years. The landlord put the rooms in order for her; and she furnished them very modestly, scantily even, partly out of her little savings since she had been at the theatre, partly on credit. She was to pay so many francs a week to the upholsterer till all was paid for. She had no extravagant tastes, no craving for finery or luxurious living. If you had seen her rooms in those days, you might have thought them the rooms of a nun—all things so simple, so neat, so pure."
"But there came a change afterwards, I suppose?"
"There came a time when Monsieur Georges loaded her with presents, and the apartment changed gradually under his influence. He sent her easy-chairs, velvet-coloured tables, a bookcase, an escritoire, satin curtains, rich carpets, pictures, china, hothouse flowers. He showered his gifts upon her; but I knew that she would have been better pleased to live in her own simple way. She had a horror of seeming like those other ladies of the theatre, with their luxurious houses and fine clothes. She spent very little money on herself; she lived almost as plainly as a workman's wife."
"Was she called Madame Georges when she first came to this house?"
"No, Monsieur; she did not even know the name of Monsieur Georges at that time. She only knew that she had a mysterious admirer, who came to the theatre every night, who used to sit in a dark corner of a small private box close to the stage, who never showed himself to the audience, and who was always alone. This was all she knew of Monsieur Georges in those days."
"Do you know how their acquaintance advanced from this point?"
"No, Monsieur. I hardly know anything of the progress of their attachment. There were letters—gifts—which came to the house. And I know that, in the spring nights of that first year, my mistress used to walk home from the theatre, escorted by Monsieur Georges. But he never entered our apartment till after Madame's return from England, where she went during the summer vacation. She had been very silent about her strange admirer—she had told me nothing—but she had shed many tears on his account. That was a secret which she could not hide from me. She had spent many wakeful nights, breathed many sighs. When she told me she was going to England, I thought all was over. She had fought hard to be true to herself, poor girl: she had struggled against her fate: but this man's love had conquered her."
"She did not tell you that she was going away to be married?"
"No, Monsieur; but when she came back, after a fortnight's absence, she showed me her wedding-ring, and she told me that she was to be called Madame Georges henceforward. This I took to mean that Monsieur Georges had married her while in England, and I believe it still. He loved her too well to degrade her by making her his mistress."
"He loved her well enough to murder her," said Heathcote. "I suppose that is about the highest flight for a lover."
"He loved her as women are not often loved, Monsieur," replied Barbe, with conviction. "I saw enough to know that from first to last he adored her; that the jealousy which devoured him later—the jealousy which made him act like a madman many times in my hearing—was the madness of intense love. I have listened outside the door, trembling for my mistress's safety, ready to give the alarm to the house, to rush in and rescue her from his violence; and then the storm was lulled by her sweet words, her gentleness, and he became like a penitent child. Yes, Monsieur, he loved her as few men love."
"If this were so, why did he keep her in such a discreditable position? Why did he not introduce her to the world as his wife?"
"I cannot tell. There must have been reasons for his secrecy. He seldom came to this house before nightfall. He never showed himself anywhere with Madame till after the theatre."
"Since he was rich enough to be lavish, why did he not remove her from the stage?"
"That was one of the causes of unhappiness towards the last, Monsieur. It was his wish that she should leave the theatre, and she refused. I believe it was at this time she became acquainted with Monsieur de Maucroix."
"You stated before the Juge d'Instruction that you believed the acquaintance between your mistress and Monsieur de Maucroix to have been an innocent acquaintance. Is that still your belief?"
"It is my conviction, Monsieur. I never doubted my dear mistress's honour, though I doubted her wisdom in allowing herself to think about Monsieur de Maucroix. It must be pleaded for her excuse that he was one of the most fascinating men in Paris. At least that is what I have heard people say of him. I know that he was young, handsome, and remarkably elegant in his appearance."
"And now tell me how you happen to know that Georges remained in Paris after the murder? Did you ever see him?"
"Yes, Monsieur. It is rather a long story. If I were not afraid of tiring you——" Madame Leroux began deprecatingly.
"You will not tire me. I want to hear every detail, however insignificant."
"Then, Monsieur, you must know that in consequence of Madame's kindness and of the lavish generosity of Monsieur Georges, and also by reason of a good many presents from Monsieur de Maucroix, who threw about his money with full hands, I was very comfortably off at the time of Madame's sad death. I had buried my poor mother two years before, and I had been able to save almost every penny of my wages. I felt, therefore, independent of service. The term would have to be paid by Madame Lemarque, who inherited all her daughter's property, and as she had a horror of the rooms in which her poor daughter had lived, and could not bear to be alone in them for an hour, she asked me to stay till the end of the quarter. Then, as I told you, people came in crowds to see the rooms; and as I had power to show them, or to refuse to show them, just as I pleased, I need not tell you that I made a good deal of money in this way. I did not make a trade of showing the rooms, Monsieur; I never asked any one for money, but on the other hand I did not refuse it when it was offered to me. This continued for some weeks; then came the sale. All the handsome articles of furniture, all the pictures and ornaments, fetched high prices. They were bought by fashionable people as souvenirs of the beautiful Marie Prévol. But the plainer furniture, the things which my mistress had paid for out of her own earnings, were sold for very little, and these I bought. I had conferred with the landlord, and he had agreed to retain me as his tenant. With the furniture which I bought at the sale, and with other things which I picked up cheaply among the secondhand dealers, I contrived to make the rooms very comfortable as furnished lodgings, and from that time to this I have carried them on with reasonable profit. Three years later I was able to take the fourth floor; and two years after that, on the second floor falling vacant, I ventured to become tenant for that also. There remains only the first floor, which is let to an old lady of ninety; and if Providence prospers Leroux and me, we ought to be able to take the first floor by the time the old lady dies."
"You will then be lessees of the whole house; a bold speculation, Madame, but one which with your prudent habits will doubtless succeed. But to return to this man Georges, whom you saw in Paris after the murder."
"I was accustomed to go every week to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, Monsieur, to look at my dear mistress's grave, and to lay my humble offering of flowers upon the marble slab which had been placed there at Madame Lemarque's expense. It bore for inscription only the one word—Marie: Madame Lemarque dared not describe her daughter as a wife—she would not record her name as a spinster. Marie was enough. For the first month after her burial I found the slab covered with flowers, wreaths, crosses, bouquets of the costliest flowers that can be bought in Paris. I noticed that among the variety of flowers there was one wreath frequently renewed, and always the same—a wreath of Maréchal Niel roses—and I knew that these had been her favourite flowers, the flowers she always wore, and had about her in her rooms. I had often heard her call the Maréchal Niel the king of roses. Months passed, and on my weekly visits with my poor little bunch of violets, or snowdrops, or jonquils, I found always the wreath of yellow roses. All through the winter, when even other token had ceased to adorn the grave—when the beautiful actress was beginning to be forgotten—the yellow roses were always renewed. I felt that this could be done only by some one who had devotedly loved Marie Prévol. For her admirers of the theatre her death had been a nine days' wonder. They had covered her grave with flowers, and then had gone away and forgotten all about her; but the wreath of yellow roses, renewed again and again, all through the dark dull winter, was the gift of a steadfast love, a grief which did not diminish with time. I questioned the people at the gates, but they knew nothing of the hand which laid those flowers on my mistress's grave. I hoped I should some day surprise the visitor who brought them; but though I altered the days of my visits, never going two weeks running on the same day, I seemed no nearer finding out that constant mourner. At last, early in the February after my mistress's death, I resolved upon going to the cemetery every day, and remaining there, in view of the grave, as long as my stock of patience would allow me. I spent three or four hours there for six days running, till my heart and my feet were alike weary. But I had seen no one: the roses had not been renewed. The seventh day was a Saturday, the day I always devoted to cleaning the apartment, which was now in the occupation of an elderly gentleman and his wife. I was not able to leave the house till late in the afternoon. The day had been foggy, and the fog had thickened by the time I left the omnibus, which took me to the Rue de la Roquette. At the gates of the cemetery it was so dark that if I had not been familiar with the paths which led to my mistress's grave, I should hardly have been able to find my way to the spot. The grave is in a narrow path, midway between two of the principal walks; and as I turned the corner between two large and lofty monuments, I saw a man standing in the middle of the path in front of Marie Prévol's grave. A tall figure, in a furred overcoat, a figure I knew well. I had not an instant's doubt that the murderer of my mistress stood there before me, looking at his victim's grave."
"Did you accost him?"
"Alas, no! He was not more than a dozen yards from the spot where I stood, and I quickened my footsteps, intending to speak to him; but at the sound of those footsteps he looked round, saw a figure approaching through the fog, and hurried off in the opposite direction. I ran after him, but he had reached the other end of the path before I could overtake him; and when I got there it was in vain that I looked for any trace of him either right or left of the pathway. He had disappeared in the fog, which was thicker at this end of the path, as it was on lower ground. My mistress's grave was on the slope of the hill, and there the fog was less dense.
"I went back to the grave and looked at the flowers on the slab. A wreath of yellow roses, fresh from the hothouse where they had been grown, lay on the marble, surrounding that one word 'Marie.'"
"Are you sure that the man you saw was Georges?"
"Perfectly sure. I knew his figure; I knew his walk. I could not be mistaken in him. And who else was there in Paris who would come week after week, in all weathers, to lay the roses my mistress loved upon her grave? Many had admired her on the stage; but only two men had been allowed to love her, to know anything of her in her private life. Of those two, one was the murdered man, Maxime de Maucroix; the other was the murderer Georges."
"Did you find the flowers renewed after this day, or did the murderer take alarm and avoid the cemetery?"
"The roses were renewed week after week for more than a year after that foggy Saturday afternoon; but I never again saw the person who laid them there. I had, indeed, no desire to see him again. I had satisfied myself as to his identity. I did not want to betray him to the police. The shedding of his blood might have avenged my dear mistress's death, but it could not have restored her to life. It could have been no consolation to her in purgatory to know that this man, whom she had once loved, who had loved her only too well, was to die on the scaffold for her sake. I hated him as the murderer of my mistress, but I pitied him even in the midst of my hatred. I pitied him for the reality of his love."
"You say the flowers appeared on the grave for more than a year after that February afternoon?" said Heathcote. "Did the tribute fall off gradually? Was the wreath renewed at longer and longer intervals till it ceased altogether, or did the offering stop suddenly?"
"Suddenly. In the March of the second year after Madame's death I found a faded wreath on my weekly visit, and that faded wreath has never been replaced."
"That would be in March 1874?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"You never saw Georges again, either in the cemetery or anywhere else?"
"Never."
"I have been told that he was a French Canadian. Have you any knowledge as to his country or his family history?"
"None, Monsieur. I always supposed him to be a Frenchman. I never heard him speak in any other language."
"Did he speak like a Parisian?"
"No, Monsieur. He did not speak exactly like the people about here, or the actors at the Porte-Saint-Martin. I used to think that he was a provincial."
"Did you hear from your mistress what part of England she had visited?"
"I heard, Monsieur, but have forgotten. The names of places were strange to me—such queer names—but I know it was a place in which there were lakes and mountains."
"Was it in Scotland or Ireland?"
"No, it was in England. I am sure of that. And now, if Monsieur would like to see the third floor."
Heathcote said he was most anxious to do so; and he followed Madame Leroux up-stairs, to a landing out of which the door of the apartment opened. The rooms were small and low, but well lighted, and with a balcony looking out on the street. The little salon was neatly furnished, with those very chairs and tables which Marie Prévol had bought out of her first economies as an actress. The things were meagre and shabby after the wear and tear of years; but the perfect neatness and cleanliness of everything made amends. Barbe Leroux was one of those admirable managers who by sheer industry and good taste can make much out of little.
There was a tiny dining-room opening out of the salon, with a window overlooking chimneys and backs of houses, and this window had been filled with painted glass in the time of Monsieur Georges. All the other elegances and luxuries with which he had embellished the cosy little rooms had been disposed of at the sale of Marie Prévol's effects. There had been Venetian mirrors and girandoles on the walls of the dining-room, Barbe explained.
"Madame used to light all the wax candles when she came in from the theatre. There were candles on the supper-table with rose-coloured shades. There were fruit and flowers always. Everything was made to look pretty in honour of Monsieur Georges—and there had to be some delicate little dish for supper, and choicest wine. Monsieur was not a man who cared much what he ate or drank; but Madame wished that everything should be nicely arranged, that the supper-table should look as inviting as at the Café de Paris or at the Maison d'Or."
The bedroom opened out of the salon. There was a dressing-room between that and the little back room in which Barbe had slept, when she was in Mademoiselle Prévol's service. On her occasional visits Léonie Lemarque had occupied a truckle-bed in Barbe's room.
"How is it that Léonie Lemarque in all her visits never happened to see Monsieur Georges?" inquired Heathcote, when he had looked at all the rooms, peopling them in his imagination with the figures of the actress and her lover.
"Madame took good care to prevent that. She told me that Monsieur Georges hated children, and that the little one was to be kept out of his way."
"Did he never spend his mornings here? Was he only here at night?"
"Only at night. It was for that reason Madame Lemarque used to call him the night-bird. I think she was very angry because she was never allowed to see him—never invited to supper. Monsieur Georges used to take a cup of coffee early in the morning, and he left the house before most people were up. As early as five o'clock in summer, never later than half-past six in winter."
END OF VOL. II.
