CHAPTER XIX.
MISS SILVER PLAYS HER FIRST CARD.
It was all very well for Sir Everard Kingsland to ride his high horse in the presence of Miss Sybilla Silver, and superbly rebuke her suspicions of his wife, but her words had planted their sting, nevertheless.
He loved his beautiful, imperious, gray-eyed wife with so absorbing and intense a love that the faintest doubt of her was torture inexpressible.
"I remember it all now," he said to himself, setting his teeth; "she was agitated at sight of that picture. She turned, with the strangest look in her face I ever saw there, to the American, and rose abruptly from the table immediately after. She has not been herself since; she has not once left her room. Is she afraid of meeting that man? Is there any secret in her life that he shares? What do I know of her past life, save that she has been over the world with her father? Good Heaven! if she and this man should have a secret between them, after all!"
The cold drops actually stood on his brow at the thought. The fierce, indomitable pride of his haughty race and the man's own inward jealousy made the bare suspicion agony. But a moment after, and with a sudden impulse of generous love, he recoiled from his own thoughts.
"I am a wretch," he thought, "a traitor to the best and most beautiful of brides, to harbor such an unworthy idea! What! shall I doubt my darling girl because Sybilla Silver thinks she recognized that portrait, or because an inquisitive stranger chooses to ask questions? No! I could stake my life on her perfect truth—my own dear wife."
Impulsively he turned to go; at once he must seek her, and set every doubt at rest. He ascended rapidly to her room and softly tapped at the door. There was no answer. He knocked again; still no response. He turned the handle and went in.
She was asleep. Lying on a sofa, among a heap of pillows, arrayed in a white dressing-gown, her profuse dark hair all loose and disordered, Lady Kingsland lay, so profoundly sleeping that her husband's knocking had not disturbed her. Her face was as white as her robe, and her eyelashes were wet, as though she had cried herself to sleep like a child.
"My love! my darling!" He knelt beside her and kissed her passionately. "And to think that for one second I was base enough to doubt you! My beautiful, innocent darling, slumbering here, like a very child! No earthly power shall ever sunder you and me!"
A pair of deriding black eyes flashed upon him through the partly open door—a pair of greedy ears drank in the softly murmured words. Sybilla Silver, hastening along with the artist's little note, had caught sight of the baronet entering his wife's room. She tapped discreetly at the door, with the twisted note held conspicuously in her hand.
Sir Everard arose and opened it, and Miss Silver's sudden recoil was the perfection of confusion and surprise.
"I beg your pardon, Sir Everard. My lady is—is she not here?"
"Lady Kingsland is asleep. Do you wish to deliver that note?"
With a second gesture of seeming confusion, Sybilla hid the hand which held it in the folds of her dress.
"Yes—no—it doesn't matter. It can wait, I dare say. He didn't mention being in a hurry."
"He! Of whom are you speaking, Sybilla?"
"I—I chanced to pass through the picture-gallery five minutes ago, Sir Everard, and Mr. Parmalee asked me to do him the favor of handing this note to my lady."
Sir Everard Kingsland's face was the face of a man utterly confounded.
"Mr. Parmalee asked you to deliver that note to Lady Kingsland?" he slowly repeated. "What under heaven can he have to write to my lady about?"
"I really don't know, Sir Everard," rejoined Sybilla, "I only know he asked me to deliver it. He had been looking for my lady's maid, I fancy, in vain. It is probably something about his tiresome pictures. Will you please to take it, Sir Everard, or shall I wait until my lady awakes?"
"You may leave it."
He spoke the words mechanically, quite stunned by the overwhelming fact that this audacious photographic person dared to write to his wife. Miss Silver passed him, placed the twisted paper on one of the inlaid tables, and left the room with a triumphant light in her deriding-black eyes.
"I have trumped my first trick," Sybilla thought, as she walked away, "and I fancy the game will be all my own shortly. Sir Everard will open and read Mr. Parmalee's little billet-doux the instant he is alone."
But just here Sybilla was mistaken. Sir Everard did not open the tempting twisted note. He glanced at it once as it lay on the table, but he made no attempt to take it.
"She will show it to me when she awakes," he said, with compressed lips, "and then I will have this impertinent Yankee kicked from the house."
He sat beside her, watching her while she slept, with a face quite colorless between conflicting love and torturing doubt.
Nearly an hour passed before Harriet awoke. The great dark eyes opened in wide surprise at sight of that pale, intense face bending so devotedly over her.
"You here, Everard?" she said. "How long have I been asleep? How long have you been here?"
"Over an hour, Harrie."
"So long? I had no idea of going asleep when I lay down; but my head ached with a dull, hopeless pain, and—What is that?"
She had caught sight of the note lying on the table.
"You will scarcely believe it, but that stranger—that American artist—has had the impertinence to address that note to you. Sybilla Silver brought it here. Shall I ring for your maid and send it back unopened, and order him out of the house for his pains?"
"No!" said Harriet, impetuously. "I must read it."
She snatched it up, tore it open, and, walking over to the window, read the scrawl.
"Harriet!"
She turned slowly round at her name spoken by her husband as that adoring husband had never spoken it before.
"Give me that note."
He held out his hand. She crushed it firmly in her own, looking him straight in the eyes.
"I can not."
"You can not?" he repeated, slowly, deathly pale. "Do I understand you
aright, Harriet? Remember, I left that note untouched while you slept.
No man has a right to address a note to my wife that I may not see.
Show me that paper, Harriet."
"It is nothing"—she caught her breath in a quick, gasping, affrighted way as she said it—"it is nothing, Everard! Don't ask me!"
"If it is nothing, I may surely see it. Harriet, I command you! Show me that note!"
The eyes of Captain Hunsden's daughter inflamed up fierce and bright at sound of that imperious word command.
"And I don't choose to be commanded—not if you were my king as well as my husband. You shall never see it now!"
There was a wood-fire leaping up on the marble hearth.
She flung the note impetuously as she spoke into the midst of the flames. One bright jet of flame, and it was gone.
Husband and wife stood facing each other, he deathly white, she flushed and defiant.
"And this is the woman I loved—the wife I trusted—my bride of one short month."
He had turned to quit the room, but two impetuous arms were around his neck, two impulsive lips covering his face with penitent, imploring kisses.
"Forgive me—forgive me!" Harriet cried. "My dear, my true, my cherished husband! Oh, what a wicked, ungrateful creature I am! What a wretch you must think me! And I can not—I can not—I can not tell you."
She broke out suddenly into a storm of hysterical crying, clinging to his neck.
He took her in his arms, sat down with her on the sofa, and let her sob herself still.
"And now, Harriet," he said, when the hysterical sobs were hushed, "who is this man, and what is he to you?"
"He is nothing to me—less than nothing! I hate him!"
"Where did you know him before?"
"Know him before?" She sat up and looked him half angrily in the face. "I never knew him before! I never set eyes on him until I saw him here."
Sir Everard drew a long breath of relief. No one could doubt her truth, and his worst suspicion was at rest.
"Then what is this secret between you two? For there is a secret,
Harriet."
"There is."
"What is it, Harriet?"
"I can not tell you."
"Harriet!"
"I can not." She turned deathly white as she said it. "Never, Everard! There is a secret, but a secret I can never reveal, even to you. Don't ask me—don't! If you ever loved me, try and trust me now!"
There was a blank pause. She tried to clasp him, but he held her sternly off.
"One question more: You knew this secret before you married me?"
"I did."
"For how long?"
"For a year."
"And that picture the American showed you is a picture you know."
She looked up at him, a wild startled light in her great gray eyes.
"How do you know that?"
"I am answered," he said. "I see I am right. Once more, Lady
Kingsland," his voice cold and clear, "you refuse to tell me?"
"I must. Oh, Everard, for pity's sake, trust me! I can not tell you—I dare not!"
"Enough, madame! Your accomplice shall!"
He turned to go. She made a step between him and the door.
"What are you going to do? Tell me, for I will know!"
"I am going to the man who shares your guilty secret, madame; and, by the Heaven above us, I'll have the truth out of him if I have to tear it from his throat! Out of my way, before I forget you are a woman and strike you down at my feet!"
She staggered back, with a low cry, as if he had struck her indeed. He strode past, his eyes flashing, his face livid with jealous rage, straight to the picture-gallery.
A door at the opposite side of the corridor stood ajar. Sybilla Silver's listening cars heard the last fierce words, Sybilla Silver's glittering black eyes saw that last passionate gesture of repulsion. She saw Harriet, Lady Kingsland—the bride of a month—sink down on the oaken floor, quivering in anguish from head to foot; and her tall form seemed to tower and dilate with diabolical delight.
"Not one year," she cried to her exultant heart—"not one month will I have to wait for my revenge! Lie there, poor fool! and suffer and die, for what I care, while I go and prevent your madly jealous husband from braining my precious fiancé. There is to be blood on the hands and the brand of Cain on the brow of the last of the Kingslands, or my oath will not be kept; but it must not be the ignoble blood of George Washington Parmalee!"