"But I have been very happy," she said earnestly. "Florence has always been kind, and dear mamma herself could not have done more for me. It is only that she seems cold and severe with Dick——Dear cousin Hubert, I hope you are not angry with me for saying what I have said about your sister?"
He was obliged to look at her when she addressed him thus directly. She was surprised by the expression of pain—bitter humiliating pain—upon his face. Was it sympathy for her loss, she wondered, or grief for little Dick's position, or distress at her accusation of Florence that caused his face to wear that look of positive anguish? She could not tell.
"Angry?" he said, stretching out his hand and laying it tenderly on her own, while the pain in his eyes softened into a melancholy as inscrutable as the pain. "Could I ever be angry with you, Enid? Poor little lonely motherless child! Heaven knows, if I could protect you from sorrow or pain henceforth, I would do so at the cost of my life!"
He withdrew his hand and walked away somewhat abruptly, without once looking round. Enid remained where he had left her, pale with emotion, overpowered by a feeling that was neither joy nor fear, but which partook of both.
CHAPTER XII.
Hubert felt that he had been betrayed into displaying an excess of emotion very foreign to the character of the cynic and the worldling which he was desirous to assume. Circumstances, he told himself, had been too strong for him. Even at the price of not making a study for a novel of poor little Enid's personality—and how could he ever seriously have thought of such a thing?—he must not risk close intercourse with her. Her innocent allusions to the past, her guileless confidence in himself, wrung his heart with shame and dismay. When he left her, he wandered away to the other side of the sheet of water in front of the house, until he came to a small fir plantation on the side of the hill which rose from the water's edge. He had not been there for years, and yet he had not forgotten a single turning in the narrow pathway that ran deviously between the fir-tree shrubs; the memory of the little open glade in the centre of the tiny wood had never lost its terrible distinctness. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could see every detail of the scene, every branch of the fir-trees against the darkening sky, every rise or depression in the mossy ground. The very scent of the woods gave him a sickening sensation; the crunch of a broken twig made him turn pale with the horror of a quick remembrance. For it was in the fir-wood that Sydney Vane had been found murdered—it was in the fir-wood that Hubert Lepel had first felt that his hand was red with his cousin's blood.
He had not at first felt all the horror of his deed. He told himself again and again that he had been justified in what he did. He had punished a man for a base and craven act; he had challenged him and met him in fair fight. By all the laws of honor he considered himself justified. It was better that Marion Vane's heart should be broken by her husband's death than by the news that he had deserted her. It was better that Enid should think of her father as a saint and martyr, than as a profligate whose hand no honest man or woman would care to hold. Hubert Lepel sternly told himself that he had done good and not evil in ridding the earth of a thoroughly bad man like Sydney Vane. If he might have avowed the deed and its motive, he felt that he could almost have gloried in it; but how to confess what he had done? At the first moment of all he had refrained, in terrible fear of implicating Florence, not knowing how far she would be mistress of herself; then, when he saw that she was well able to defend her own reputation and that he might confess the truth without bringing in her name at all—why, then he hesitated, and found that his courage had deserted him. Florence entreated him to conceal his act. He remembered that Sydney Vane had almost forced him to use weapons—a course which Hubert himself would never have suggested; and it was fatally easy to let things take their course. He hoped, in his youthful ignorance of the laws of circumstantial evidence, that the jury would bring in a verdict of suicide. When this hope was destroyed, he still thought that the matter would be left a mystery—so many mysteries were never cleared up at all! He did not think that any one else could possibly be suspected. He was horrified when suspicion fell upon Andrew Westwood, a poacher who had been vowing vengeance on Sydney Vane for the past three months.
To the very end of the trial he hoped that Westwood would be acquitted. When he had been condemned, Hubert vowed to himself that at any rate no man should suffer death in his place. If no reprieve could be obtained, no commutation of the sentence, he would speak out and set Andrew Westwood free. The message of mercy came only just in time. He was on the very point of delivering himself up to justice when news arrived that Westwood's death sentence had been commuted to one of imprisonment for life. Did that make things any better? Hubert thought that it did. And his heart failed him—he could not bear the thought of public disgrace, condemnation, punishment. He knew himself to be a coward and a villain, and yet he could not bring himself to tell the truth. When Miss Vane accused him of heartlessness because he explained his pallor by saying that he had spent the previous evening with friends, he was in reality suffering from the depression consequent on several nights of sleepless agony of mind. He was not silent for his own sake alone. He was afraid of implicating Flossy, the woman to whom Sydney Vane had proposed love, and about whom he had quarrelled with her brother. It was Flossy's share in the matter that sealed his lips; and from the moment of his conversation with Florence at the library window his mind was made up. He had gone too far to draw back—Andrew Westwood must bear his fate. Lifelong imprisonment scarcely seemed more terrible to Hubert Lepel just then than the life sentence of remorse which he had brought on his own head.
Since those days his heart had grown harder. He had resolved to forget—to fight down the secret consciousness of guilt which pursued him night and day—to live his own life, in spite of the haunting sense that he had sacrificed all that was good and noble in himself, all that really made life worth having. He was striving hard, as he said to Florence, to cast the past behind him, to live as if he were what he had been before he bore about with him the shadow of a crime.