He showed her the certificate; she read the fatal words, "Walter Clifford." The rest swam before her eyes, and to her the world seemed at an end. She heard, as in a dream, the smooth voice of the false accuser, saying, with a world of fictitious sympathy, "I wish I had never undertaken this business. Mrs. Walter Clifford doesn't want to distress you; she only felt it her duty to save you. Don't give way. There is no great harm done, unless you were to be deluded into marrying him."
"And what then?" inquired Mary, trembling.
Monckton appeared to be agitated at this question.
"Oh, don't speak of it," said he. "You would be ruined for life, and he would get seven years' penal servitude; and that is a sentence few gentlemen survive in the present day when prisons are slaughter-houses. There, I have discharged the most disagreeable office I ever undertook in my life; but at all events you are warned in time."
Then he bowed most respectfully to her, and retired, exhaling his pent-up venom in a diabolical grin.
She, poor victim, stood there stupefied, pierced with a poisoned arrow, and almost in a state of collapse; then she lifted her hands and eyes for help, and saw Hope's study in front of her. Everything swam confusedly before her; she did not know for certain whether he was there or not; she cried to that true friend for help.
"Mr. Hope—I am lost—I am in the deep waters of despair—save me once more, save me!" Thus speaking she tottered into the office, and sank all limp and powerless into a chair, unable to move or speak, but still not insensible, and soon her brow sank upon the table, and her hands spread themselves feebly out before her.
It was all villainous spite on Monckton's part. He did not for a moment suppose that his lie could long outlive Walter Clifford's return; but he was getting desperate, and longing to stab them all. Unfortunately fate befriended the villain's malice, and the husband and wife did not meet again till that diabolical poison had done its work.
Monckton retired, put off his old man's disguise behind the fir-trees, and went toward another of his hiding-places, an enormous oak-tree which stood in the hedge of Hope's cottage garden. The subtle villain had made this hollow tree an observatory, and a sort of sally-port, whence he could play the fiend.
The people at the hotel were, as Mary told Julia Clifford, very honest people.