CHAPTER VIII.
At the very time Mr Dulcimer was assisting Miss Wynter across the stepping-stones, the stranger whose unexpected appearance the previous night had so startled Madame De Vigne was pacing leisurely up the valley in the direction of the waterfall.
When, on inquiring for Madame De Vigne at the hotel that morning, he was told that she had gone out for the day with a picnic party, his suspicious nature at once took the alarm. Might she not by some means have discovered his presence in the hotel? he asked himself; and might not this story of the picnic be nothing more than a subterfuge, by means of which she would obtain a start of several hours in her efforts to escape from him? He at once ordered a fly and set off in pursuit. On reaching the place where the wagonettes had been left, he found that if he persisted in his search for Madame De Vigne, he would be compelled to do the rest of the distance on foot. He disliked walking, but in this case there was no help for it; accordingly, he set out on his way to the glen with such grace as there might be in him.
He was a man to all appearance about forty years of age—he might be a little older; but his figure was still as lithe and active as that of many a man of twenty. He had jet-black hair, and his closely cropped beard and moustache were of the same hue. He had large, white, carnivorous-looking teeth, and small black eyes as piercing as gimlets, with now and then a strange, furtively suspicious look glancing at you out of their corners. His features were aquiline, rather finely cut, and his complexion sallow. By the majority of people he would have been accounted a fairly handsome man. He was fashionably dressed, but it was after the fashion of a Parisian dandy, not that of a London swell; and there is a vast difference in the styles of the two.
When he had passed through the wicket which gave admittance to the glen and was within a few yards of the bridge, he paused and gazed around. Not a creature was to be seen, for, before this, Dick and Bella had gone on a further journey of exploration and were no longer visible.
‘So! This must be the place where they told me that I should find her,’ said the stranger to himself in French. ‘But she is not here. Well, I can wait.’ He advanced a few yards farther up the glen. ‘We could not have a better place for our meeting. There will be no one to overhear what we shall have to say to each other. Ah, ma chère Mora, what a surprise for you! How enchanted you will be to find that your brave Hector is not dead, as they wrote and told you he was, but alive, and burning to embrace you! What happiness for both of us!’
He had been climbing slowly up the ravine, and by this time he had reached the spot where Mora had been sitting but a short time before. Her sketch-book attracted his eye; he took it up and opened it.
‘Hers! Here is her name. She cannot be far away. A man’s head—a likeness evidently. The same again—and yet again. I must find out the name of this monsieur. I shall have much pleasure to introduce myself to him.’ A slight noise startled him. He shut the book and raised his eyes. ‘Ah! here comes my angel,’ he exclaimed. ‘Sacre bleu! she is handsomer than ever.’
For the moment Mora did not perceive him. When she did, she put a hand quickly to her heart and gave a great gasp.
‘Ah!’ What a volume of meaning that little word conveyed!
Monsieur De Miravel—for such was the name he now chose to be known by—advanced a step or two smilingly, and bowed with all a Frenchman’s grace. ‘Me voici!’ he said. ‘Hector—thy husband—not dead, but alive and’——
She stopped him with an imperious gesture. ‘Wretch—coward—felon!’ she exclaimed, and her voice seemed to express the concentrated passion and hatred of years. ‘I could never quite believe that I had been fortunate enough to lose you for ever. I had a presentiment that I should some day see you again. Why have you followed me? But I need not ask. It is to rob me again, as you robbed me before. Voleur!’
She stood before him drawn up to the full height of her magnificent beauty, her bosom heaving, her eyes dilating, her head thrown slightly back, her clenched hands hanging by her sides, her shoulders a little raised. Even the scoundrel whom she had addressed could not help admiring her as she towered before him in all the splendour of her passion.
A small red spot flamed on either cheek, but his voice had still a smile in it when next he spoke. ‘Ah ha!’ he said. ‘You are still the same charming Mora that you always were! You still call me by the same pretty names! How it brings back the days of long ago!’
‘How much money do you want of me?’ she demanded abruptly. ‘What price do you expect me to pay that I may rid myself of your presence?’
‘Softly, ma chère, softly. I have not been at all this great trouble and expense to discover you, without having something to say to you. I want to talk what you English call business.’
‘Name your price and leave me.’
‘Taisez-vous, je vous prie. You are here, and you must listen to me. You cannot help yourself.’
Madame De Vigne bit her lip, but did not reply.
De Miravel sat down, crossed his legs, leant back a little, and looked up at her with half-shut eyes. ‘Five years ago,’ he began, ‘you received a certain letter in which you were informed that I was dead. That letter, by some strange error, was forwarded to the wrong person. It was not I, your husband, who was dead, but another man of the same name—another Hector Laroche. When the mistake was discovered, you had left the place where you had previously been living, and no one knew what had become of you. Two years ago I found myself in Paris again. When I had arranged my private affairs, which had suffered during my long absence, I began to make inquiries concerning the wife from whom I had been so cruelly torn, and whom my heart was bleeding to embrace.’
‘Menteur!’ ground out Mora between her teeth.
He waved, as it were, the epithet aside with an airy gesture of his hand, and continued: ‘For a long time I could hear nothing concerning her, and I began to fear that I had lost her for ever. But at length a clue was put into my hands. I discovered that, in consequence of the death of a relative, my incomparable wife had come into a fortune of twelve thousand francs a year—that she had changed her name from Madame Laroche to that of her aunt, Madame De Vigne, and that she and her sister had gone to make their home in England. Naturally, I follow my wife to England, and here, to-day, me voici!’
‘Your price—name your price,’ was all that the lady deigned to answer.
‘Pardon. I am not in want of money—at present. It was my wife whom I sought everywhere, and now that I have found her, I do not intend ever to leave her again.’
‘Liar and villain!’
‘Doucement, je vous prie. Listen! I am no longer so young as I once was. I have travelled—I have seen the world—I am blasé. I want a home—I want what you English call my own fireside. Where, then, should be my home—where should be my fireside, but with my wife—the wife from whom I have been torn for so many cruel years, but whom, parole d’honneur, I have never ceased to love and cherish in my heart!’
‘Oh! this is too much,’ murmured Mora under her breath, the fingers of one hand griping those of the other like a vice. The tension was becoming greater than she could bear.
‘But there need be no scandal, no éclaircissement among my dear wife’s English friends,’ went on De Miravel with the same hard, set smile. ‘I have thought of all that. Madame Laroche is dead—Hector Laroche is dead. In their place we have here, Madame De Vigne, a charming widow; and Monsieur De Miravel, a bachelor not too antique to marry. Monsieur De Miravel has known and admired Madame De Vigne before her marriage to her late husband. What more natural than that he should admire her still, that he should make her an offer of his hand, and that she should accept it? So one day Madame De Vigne and Monsieur De Miravel are quietly married, and, pouf! all the respectable English friends have dust thrown in their eyes!’
For a moment or two Mora stared at him in silence; then she said in a low voice: ‘And you propose this to me!—to me!’
‘Sérieusement, ma chère—sérieusement. It is a beautiful little scheme.’
‘If you will not take your price and leave me, I at least can leave you,’ she answered in low, determined tones. ‘No power on earth can compel me to live with you for a single hour as your wife, and no power shall. I would sooner drop dead at your feet.’
The Frenchman bent his head and sniffed at the flower in his button-hole. When he lifted his face again there was a strange expression in his eyes, which his unhappy wife remembered only too well, and caused her to shudder in spite of herself. She felt that the scorpion’s sting of what he had to say to her was yet to come. When he next spoke, there was the same cold, cruel glitter in his eyes that travellers tell us is to be seen in the eyes of a cobra at the moment it is about to strike.
‘Mademoiselle your sister—what a beautiful young lady she is!’ he said, speaking even more softly than he had done before, and balancing his cane on a couple of fingers as he spoke. ‘I saw her this morning for the first time. She is to be married in a little while to the son of a rich English milord. Is it not so? Eh bien! I wonder what this rich milord, this Sir William, would say, and what the young gentleman, his son, would say, if they were told that the sister of the charming Mademoiselle Clarice was the wife of a déporté—of Hector Laroche, a man who had worked out a sentence of penal servitude at Noumea. Of course the rich Sir William would at once take Monsieur Laroche to lunch with him at his club, and the young gentleman would present him with a little cheque for five or six thousand francs; and he would be asked to give the bride away at the wedding, and he would sign his name in the register, thus—“Hector Laroche, ex-déporté, number 897.”’
For a moment or two it seemed to Mora as if earth and heaven were coming together.
‘So, fiend! miscreant! that is your scheme, is it?’
‘I have shown you my cards,’ he answered with a shrug. ‘I have hidden nothing from you. So now, chère Madame De Vigne, you have only to give your promise to marry your devoted De Miravel; and the moment you do that, Hector Laroche dies and is buried out of sight for ever, and neither Sir William nor his son will know that such a vaurien ever existed.’
‘Leave me—leave me!’ she exclaimed in a hoarse whisper.
He glanced at her keenly. It was evident that just at present she could bear no more. It was not his policy to drive her to extremities. He rose from his seat.
‘I will go and promenade myself for a little while,’ he said. ‘In half an hour I will return.’
He raised his hat as he might have done to a duchess. She stood a little aside, to let him pass, but did not allow her eyes to rest on him for a moment. He turned and took the path which led up the ravine.
Mora sank down wearily on the seat he had vacated. At that moment she felt as if she would have been grateful for the earth to open and swallow her up. She was appalled at the blackness of the gulf to the edge of which her husband had just dragged her. What should she do? Whither should she turn? To whom should she look for help? Alas! in all the wide world there was no one who could help her—least of all the man whose strong protecting love had seemed but yesterday as though it were able to shield her from every harm.
‘I am in the coils of a Python that will slowly but surely strangle me,’ she said. ‘Yes—death alone can release me. And only yesterday I was so happy! If I could but have died at the moment Harold pressed his lips to mine! Why does he not come? I must tell him everything—everything. And after that?’ She shuddered, and rose to her feet. ‘And he loves me so much!’ she said with a heart-broken sigh. ‘Poor Harold! Poor Harold!’
Scarcely conscious of what she was doing, she turned and took the same path that she had taken before when she went to watch for Colonel Woodruffe’s coming up the valley. Her one burning desire now was to see him; beyond that, her mind at present refused to go.
‘I am afraid that as an ambassador the colonel was a failure.’
The speaker was Mr Etheridge, and it was to Clarice Loraine that his remark was addressed.
Mr Etheridge had had pointed out to him and had duly admired the view so much extolled by the young girl, and the two were now slowly sauntering back to their starting-point. By this time Clarice felt herself quite at ease with her companion, so much so, indeed, that in her prettily confidential way she had told him all about how Archie and she became acquainted, how they grew to love each other, how Archie proposed and was accepted, and how surprised they all were afterwards to find that he was a baronet’s son. Then she went on to tell him of Archie’s letter to his father, the first result of which was Colonel Woodruffe’s visit at the vicarage.
‘Well, and what happened after the colonel’s visit?’ continued Mr Etheridge.
‘Archie wrote again, twice; but there came no answer till yesterday, when he received the telegram which summoned him to meet his father in London.’
‘Supposing Sir William should refuse his consent, what would the result be in that case?’
‘That is more than I can tell,’ she answered with a little trembling of her lips. ‘But before Archie left us, my sister told him that he went away a free man—that if his father were opposed to the marriage, we should look upon his promise as if it had never been given; and that if we never saw him again, we should know the reason why, and never blame him in our thoughts.’
‘And you agreed with what your sister said?’
‘With every word of it.’
‘That was very brave of you. But what had Mr Archie to say to such an arrangement?’
‘He laughed it to scorn. He said he would do all that lay in his power to win his father’s consent, but that—that’——
‘In any case, he would hold you to your promise, and come back and claim you for his wife? Mr Archie would find himself a very poor man if Sir William were to cut off his allowance.’
‘That is a prospect which does not seem to frighten him in the least.’
‘But doubtless it would not be without its effect upon you, Miss Loraine. You would hardly care to tie yourself for life to a pauper.’
‘O Mr Etheridge, what a strange opinion you must have formed of me! I would marry Archie if he had not a sovereign to call his own.’
‘The charming imprudence of a girl in love. Then you would marry him in opposition to his father’s wishes?’
‘Now you ask me a question that I cannot answer. That, and that only, would cause me to hesitate.’
‘Why should the wishes of a selfish valetudinarian—of a man whom you have never seen—cause you to hesitate, or be allowed to come between you and the happiness of your life?’
‘Ah! but could I ever be really happy with the knowledge for ever in my mind that I had been the cause of separating a father from his son, and that by becoming Archie’s wife I had blighted the fairest prospects of his life? And then, perhaps—who can tell?—after a time he might become a little tired of me—men do sometimes tire of their wives, don’t they?—and then he might begin to remember and regret all that he had sacrificed in marrying me; and that, I think, would nearly break my heart.’
The old man laid his hand caressingly on her arm for a moment. ‘Well, well, we must hope for the best,’ he said. ‘We must hope that Sir William will not prove a very flinty-hearted papa.’
She smiled up gratefully in his face. ‘Tell me, Mr Etheridge, is Sir William a very terrible person to have to do with?’
He broke into a little laugh. ‘Terrible, miss? No; hardly that, I think; but eccentric, if you please. The fact is that Sir William is one of those men of whom it can never be predicated with certainty what view he will take, or what conclusion he will arrive at, with regard to any matter that may be brought before him. He has an obnoxious habit of thinking and deciding for himself, and is seldom led by the opinions of others. Yes, undoubtedly Sir William is a very eccentric man.’
They had got back to the bridge by this time. ‘Why, I declare, yonder comes Colonel Woodruffe!’ exclaimed Clarice. ‘I am so pleased—and so will Mora be.’
‘Evidently the colonel is a favourite,’ said Mr Etheridge drily.
‘Of course he is. Everybody likes Colonel Woodruffe. But probably you know him already, Mr Etheridge?’
‘I have met him occasionally at Sir William’s house. I have no doubt he would remember me if you were to mention my name.’
‘I will go and speak to him, if you will excuse me for a few moments.’
Clarice sped quickly across the bridge. Mr Etheridge sat down on the parapet and fanned himself with his hat.
The colonel, who had been gazing round him in some perplexity, hurried forward the moment he perceived Miss Loraine.
‘Good-morning, Colonel Woodruffe,’ said the girl as she held out her hand. ‘I am delighted to find that you have discovered us.’
‘Your sister told me that you were all to be at High Ghyll to-day, so I have driven round in search of you. But where are the rest of the party?’
‘Gone in search of the picturesque, I have no doubt. Mora was here a little while ago; and see’—pointing with her finger—‘yonder are her sketch-book and shawl, so that she cannot be far away.’
The colonel had been gazing over Clarice’s shoulder at Mr Etheridge. ‘Whom have you yonder?’ he asked. ‘I seem to know his face.’
‘Such a dear old gentleman!—Mr Etheridge, Sir William Ridsdale’s secretary.’
‘Sir William Ridsdale’s secretary!’ echoed the colonel with an air of stupefaction.
‘Yes; he recognised you the moment he saw you. He says that he has met you occasionally at Sir William’s house.’
‘Oh, indeed! But what has brought him here, may I ask?’
‘He has come all the way from Spa with a letter for Archie from his father. But when he reached here this morning, he found that Archie had been telegraphed for last evening to meet his father in London.—It seems very strange, doesn’t it? But then, as Mr Etheridge says, Sir William is a very eccentric man.’
‘Very eccentric, indeed,’ responded the colonel absently.
‘So that of course accounts for it.—But yonder comes Mora.’
The colonel turned eagerly. ‘Then, with your permission, I will leave you to Mr Etheridge.’
‘We shall see you at luncheon, of course?’
‘You may rely upon me not to miss that,’ answered the colonel with a laugh.
Clarice kissed her hand to her sister, and then went back to Mr Etheridge. She wanted to afford the colonel an opportunity for a tête-à-tête with Mora, so she at once proposed another ramble to Mr Etheridge, who assented with alacrity.
The moment Colonel Woodruffe drew near Mora De Vigne, he saw that something was amiss. She looked an altogether different woman from her whom he had parted from only a few hours before with a tender light of love and happiness in her eyes. His heart misgave him as he walked up to her.
‘What has happened?’ he asked in anxious tones as he took her hand. ‘What has wrought this change in you? Your hand is like ice.’
She gazed up into his face for a moment or two without speaking, with a dumb, pitiful wistfulness in her eyes, that affected him strangely. Then she said: ‘Why did you not read the letter which I gave you last evening?’
He gazed at her for a moment. ‘You know my reasons for not reading it. But why do you ask that now?’
‘Because, if you had read it, you would have saved me from having to tell so much to-day, which, in that case, you would have known yesterday.’
‘Pardon me, but you speak in enigmas.’
‘You have read of earthquakes, although you may never have felt the shock of one. One minute all is fair, bright, and beautiful; the next, there is nothing but ruin, disaster, and death. Since I saw you yesterday, the foundations of my life, which I thought nothing could ever shake more, have crumbled into utter ruin around me.’
‘How can that be, while I am here to guard and cherish you? Yesterday, you gave me your love—your life. What power on earth can tear them from me?’
‘Ah me! Listen, and you shall learn.’
She sat for a few moments with bent head, as if scarcely knowing how to begin. The colonel was standing a little way from her, one of his arms twined round the slender stem of a sapling.
‘What I am about to tell you is the life-story of a most unhappy woman,’ she said, lifting her head and gazing sadly into his eyes. ‘My father was an Englishman, who was engaged for many years in business near Paris. I was educated in a convent, as girls are educated in France. I had left the convent about a year, and was keeping my father’s house—my mother having died meanwhile, and my sister being away at school—when a certain Monsieur Laroche became a frequent visitor. Before long, my father told me that his affairs were deeply involved. Laroche was the only man who could or would save him, and that only on condition that I became his wife. I was little more than a child in worldly knowledge; I knew that in France the question of a girl’s marriage is always settled by her parents; so, although I already detested the man, I yielded to my father’s entreaties, and became Madame Laroche. Within a year, my father died—by his own hand.’
‘My poor Mora!’
‘Whatever wreck of property he left behind, my husband contrived to obtain possession of. But before that time, I knew him to be an inveterate gambler, and worse! Of my life at that time I care not now to speak. Can there be many such men as he in the world—such tigers in human form? I hope not.
‘Some time after, when my life had become a burden almost greater than I could bear, there came news of the death of my godmother, and that she had left me a legacy of two thousand pounds. The money had not been six hours in my possession, before my husband broke open my bureau and robbed me of the whole of it, together with my own and my mother’s jewels. I was left utterly destitute. A few months later came the war, the siege of Paris, and the famine. Oh! that terrible time. I often live it over again in my dreams even now.’
‘And you have gone through all this!’ said the colonel.
‘I had no tidings of my husband till the war was over,’ resumed Mora. ‘Then came news indeed. He had been detected cheating at cards—there had been a quarrel—the lights had been blown out, and the man who had accused him had been shot through the heart. My husband was tried, found guilty, and condemned to a long term of penal servitude.’
‘A happy riddance for you and every one,’ remarked the colonel with a shrug.
‘I had friends who did not desert me in my extremity. I gave lessons in English, and so contrived to live. One day there came an official notification that my husband was dead. He had died in prison, and had been buried in a convict’s grave. Was it wicked to feel glad when I read the news? If so, then was I wicked indeed.’
‘No one but a hypocrite could have pretended to feel otherwise than glad.’
‘My sister was with me by that time. I never told her the history of my marriage, and my husband she had never seen. She knew only that I had been deserted and was now a widow. Our quiet life went on for a time, and then, by the death of an aunt, I came into possession of a small fortune. I changed my name, as requested in my aunt’s will, and after a little while Clarice and I came to England. The rest you know.’
The colonel looked puzzled. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘if I fail to see why you have thought it needful to tell me to-day that which I did not wish or ask to be enlightened about yesterday.’
‘I have told you this to-day because yesterday, a little while after you left me, I saw—my husband.’
‘Your husband!—But how’—— He stared at her as though he could not say another word. Mora was now the calmer of the two.
‘The letter which I received five years ago informing me of his death was sent to me in error. Another man bearing the same name as my husband—a déporté like him, had died; and somehow one convict would seem to have been mistaken for the other.’
‘O Mora, Mora, and am I then to lose you!’ cried the colonel.
She did not speak; but at that moment all the anguish of her soul was revealed in her eyes.
Involuntarily he moved from the place where he had been standing and sat down by her side.
‘And I love you so dearly!—so dearly!’
‘And I you!’ she answered scarcely above a whisper. ‘I may tell you this now—for the last time.’
Their hands sought each other, touched and clasped. In the silence that ensued, the leaves seemed whispering among themselves of that which they had just heard; while the stream went frothing and fuming on its way like some wordy egotist who cares for nothing save his own ceaseless babble.
‘And this miscreant has tracked you?’ said the colonel at length.
‘He was with me but just now. He may return at any moment.’
‘Such vermin as he have seldom more than one thought, one want—Money. I am rich, and if’——
Mora shook her head. ‘He wants more than money.’
‘Ha!’
‘You do not know Hector Laroche. As I said before, he is a tiger in human form. He loves gold; but he loves still better to have under his claws a writhing, helpless, palpitating victim, whom he can torture and play with and toss to and fro at his pleasure, over whose agonies he can gloat, and whose heart he can slowly vivisect and smile while he does it.’
‘And he would make such a victim of you?’
‘He has done it once, and he would do it again. He is now passing under a false name. What he demands is, that instead of claiming me as the wife whom he married several years ago, I shall go through a second form of marriage with him under the name he is now known by, and that by such means the dark story of his former life shall be buried for ever.’
‘There is no law, human or divine, that can compel you to accede to so monstrous a demand,’ exclaimed the colonel in tones resonant with indignation.
‘As I said before—you do not know the man. Should I refuse to accede to his wishes, he threatens to go to Sir William Ridsdale—for with his usual diabolical ingenuity, he has found out all about Clarice’s engagement—and say to him: “Are you aware that your son is about to marry a person whose sister is the wife of a déporté—of a man who has undergone a term of penal servitude?” And, O Colonel Woodruffe! if he does that—if he does that, what will become of my poor Clarice!’
‘A scheme worthy of the Foul Fiend himself!’ exclaimed the colonel as he sprang to his feet.
There was a painful pause. The colonel was thoroughly taken aback by what he had just heard. At length he said slowly: ‘Surely—surely there must be some way of escape.’
Mora shook her head. ‘I know of none,’ she answered simply.
A few moments later, there was a noise of approaching footsteps. The colonel drew a pace or two farther away.