Nearly a month had gone by since poor Philip’s remains had been carried back to the home of his fathers for burial. His successor, the new baronet, a distant cousin whom he had known but slightly, had hurried to the scene of the disaster, and much moved by his young kinsman’s most lamentable fate had spared no trouble and expense to ensure that every honour and care should surround the last lugubrious arrangements. But the awful strain of that horrible experience had told upon Alma, and for three weeks she was so ill and prostrate that she was forbidden to leave her room.
When, eventually, she was able to appear again, she would not leave the place. With a persistency which her friends more or less strongly condemned as morbid—impressing upon her the thankfulness she ought to feel that the explosion had not taken place a few minutes earlier, while she herself was standing on the fatal spot—she would make her daily pilgrimage to the scene of the disaster, for to her it was holy ground. To her had been spoken the very last words he ever breathed, and they had been words of love. Her lips had received the last kiss it had been in his power to bestow. “You will never regret it,” he had said. And did she? Not for worlds would she barter that sweet sad recollection. She loved him now—loved him with all her heart and soul and being. And it was too late. Too late! She might go to him, but never more could he return to her.
There in the noontide sunshine she stood, and, whatever way her eyes might turn, the whole scene around her brought back his memory. She could see the little white village of St. Gingolph sleeping beneath the great mountains on the opposite shore; and it brought back that day, when tossing on the furious billows of that sudden tempest, they had reckoned their hours as numbered—and there were times when in the bitterness of her soul she could find it in her heart to wish they had died together then. Again, there rose the green serrated ridges of the Chaîne des Verreaux, beneath whose shadow she had received his first declaration of love. She could see the distant arête of the Cape-au-Moîne heaved up against the blue sky, could mark the exact spot where they had cowered for shelter when exposed to the wild fury of the blast, up there on those dangerous heights, now so green and smiling in the sunlight, and she could see him in the sweet golden evening of that eventful day, so appealing, so winning in his brave young beauty, as he poured out his love at her feet. Then she hardly knew her own heart. Now she knew it. But—too late.
“How do you do, Miss Wyatt?”
She started violently. That familiar voice even, fitted with the picture she had been drawing. Turning she encountered the dark, piercing eyes of Fordham.
He had raised his hat, but he did not offer his hand. He stood there contemplating her with grave, saturnine expression as of old.
“Wretched business this,” he said, with a jerk of the head in the direction of the spot where the catastrophe had taken place. “Poor fellow, poor fellow! Well, I suppose even I can hardly be held so much as indirectly responsible for it.”
“I hardly know whether I am speaking to his friend or his enemy,” said Alma, who, while instinctively distrusting this strange being, yet was conscious of being in some degree held spell-bound, even as the historic wedding-guest, together with an unaccountable anxiety to hear what he had to say.
“Both, I suppose,” answered Fordham, impassively. “Formerly that is to say. Now only the first. You have heard of such a thing as a vendetta, I suppose, Miss Wyatt?”
“Of course.”