A Woman Martyr

by Alice M. Diehl

Vera interrupted him with a groan.

"I forgot!" she wailed. "I forgot--a man will perjure himself to save the woman he loves! But your lies will fail to save her, my lord! Husbands and wives are nothing in law, in a murder case! If you want to save her, you must take her away!"

With a sob she turned on her heel and went out. Vansittart gathered Joan in his arms, and sinking into a chair tried to kiss her back to life. "My darling, I know all! I will save you!" he repeated passionately. What could she have been doing? She must have been exposed to the whole fury of the storm. Had the vindictive creature killed her? He had thought himself hopelessly crushed, body and soul, when he arrived at his lawyers' to find the distracted Sir Thomas with his awful tale of the charge to be brought against his niece, which Paul Naz had in compassion forewarned him of. But the sight of his darling--who looked dead or dying--who lay like a stone in his arms and hardly seemed to breathe--brought back life and energy, if it augmented his despair.

Her garments were wringing wet--what a frightful state she was in! With a half-frantic wonder what he had best do, he lifted her in his arms, so strong in his anguish that she seemed a mere featherweight, and carrying her upstairs to her room by a side staircase that was little used, laid her on the bed, and rang for Julie. While a man was despatched in hot haste for the doctor, the two cut and dragged off Joan's soaking garments, and vainly endeavoured to chafe some warmth into her icy limbs. But at last insensibility had come to the rescue of Victor Mercier's unfortunate dupe. Joan lay inert and senseless, and when the old doctor who had attended a couple of generations of Vansittarts in their Oxfordshire home came in, his wonted cheeriness changed to gravity.

Nothing could be done but wait patiently for the return of consciousness, and telegraph for nurses. He could make no prognosis whatever at that stage, but that Lady Vansittart's health was in a critical condition.

"Do you mean that she may not recover?" asked Vansittart. They had adjourned to Joan's boudoir, leaving Julie and the housekeeper in temporary charge of the patient.

Old Doctor Walters shrugged his shoulders and raised his shaggy eyebrows. Vansittart was answered.

"When I tell you that I hope to God my wife will die, you will understand there is something terrible in all this!" he exclaimed--and the tone of his voice, as much as the meaning conveyed by such a speech, made the old man sit up in his chair aghast.

But he was still more horrified when the unhappy man he had known and tended since childhood told him the miserable story as he had gathered it from Joan herself, and from the dreadful tale told to Sir Thomas in its entirety by Paul Naz: the tale of a romantic schoolgirl secretly wooed and married by a man who immediately afterwards absconded, as he was "wanted" by the police on a charge of theft and fraud: her foolish dream dispelled when she learnt that fact, hiding her secret from the uncle and aunt who had adopted her; then, as the years went by and the husband-in-name made no sign, hoping against hope, and giving way to her great love for a man who adored her. Then, just as they were promised to each other, the man's reappearance with threats of exposure, his compelling her visits to his rooms, and her succumbing to the temptation of mixing morphia in his brandy. The one item unknown was Joan's motive for drugging Mercier. So the case looked terribly black to Vansittart and his friend in need, his good old doctor.

Good--and tenderhearted, for at once he offered to see them through their trouble--to the end.