And Olivia, with a faint smile of resignation, retained the bouquet and walked toward the house.
His lordship the bishop would have been rather surprised if he could have seen the bridegroom at that moment, for Mr. Bartley Bradstone looked anything but happy.
He, too, had lain awake and listened perforce to the record of the slowly moving hours, and all night he had seen the defiant, mocking face of the woman called Bella, and heard the scornful tones of her voice.
He had promised to meet her at four o’clock, and he lay there and cursed himself and her, for he knew that he dared not break the promise. Four o’clock! and the wedding was to take place at two. How should he manage to get away from the party and keep this appointment? For hours he tossed to and fro, scheming and planning, the mocking face of the woman dancing before him. He must slip away somehow, if only for half an hour.
Now and again a shudder of terror ran through him, and he sat up and shook as if with some horrible fear. Then he would fling himself down again, wiping the perspiration from his forehead and muttering: “No, I’ll go through with it. It’s too late to draw back now.”
When his valet came to him at nine, he found his master looking, as he expressed it afterward, “like a man who had been drinking all night,” and Bartley Bradstone bore out the resemblance by ordering a soda-and-brandy, which he took with a hot and shaking hand.
Then he went downstairs and drank a cup of coffee, and made a pretense of eating some breakfast; but the face of the woman hovered between him and the dish the butler handed to him, and his throat seemed dry and parched.
After breakfast he went into the library, and unlocking the safe which he had so delicately pointed out to his tool—Mr. Mowle—he got out a cash-box, and, counting out two hundred pounds in notes, placed them in his pocketbook. As he was putting the cash-box back he pushed some small, heavy article from a shelf, and, picking it up, saw that it was a revolver.
It was one of the silver-plated toys which nearly every man possesses, but, for all its smallness, it was deadly and dangerous.
He held it in his hot hand, looking down at it absently for a minute or two; then he tossed it back into the safe with a suddenness and force that made the iron side ring again, and shut the door with a clang.