They both looked at him quickly, but he was on his guard again. He shook hands with the earl. They never met again. He said adieu to Leslie, and begged that the portrait might be sent home as soon as possible. Then he went away. The earl and the artist looked after him.
"That is a dying man," said Gregory Leslie, slowly.
"If he dies," said the earl, "it will be love for my daughter that has killed him."
The earl was never any nearer to the solution of the mystery. That Lord Vivianne, who spoke so openly of having loved her, had any hand in her death, he never even faintly surmised. He took the picture home, and it hangs now in Linleigh Court, where the earl's children pause sometimes in their play to ask about their elder sister, Doris, whose name the picture says was "Innocence."
It was not long afterward that the fashionable world was startled from its serenity by the sad intelligence of the suicide of Lord Vivianne. Then they heard a strange story, although no one could solve it. His servants told how dreadfully he had suffered. Let those who laugh at the retribution that follows sin believe. Slowly, and in terrible torture, had that wretched life ended. He had rushed from the scene of his crime, mad with baffled love, with fiercest passion, with regret and remorse. Mad with the wild fury of his own passions—above all, with the terrible knowledge of her death—for many days and nights he neither slept, rested, ate, nor drank. He went away to Paris. It was not exactly that he feared pursuit—he knew that it was not likely that any suspicion should attach itself to him. But, wherever he went, he saw that dead face, that golden web with the crimson stain.
In Paris he plunged into the wildest dissipation. He tried drink—all possible resources—in vain. Where the sun shone brightest, where the gaslight flared, where painted faces smiled—he saw the same sight—a white face looking up, still and cold in death.
If by chance he were left alone, or in the dark, his cries were awful. His servants talked about him, but they never thought crime or remorse was busy with him; they fancied he had drank himself into a fit of delirium. They could have told, and did tell after his death, of awful nights when he raved like a madman—when he was pursued by a dead woman, always holding a knife in her hand; they told of frantic fits of anguish when he lay groaning on the floor, biting his lips until they bled, so that one's heart ached to hear him.
Let no man say that he can sin with impunity; let no man say sin remains unpunished.
The time came when he said to himself, deliberately, and with full purpose, that he would not live. What was this tortured, blighted life to him? Less than nothing.
Once, and once only, he asked himself if it were possible to repent—repent of his sins, his unbridled passions, his selfish loves? Repent? He laughed aloud in scornful glee. It would, indeed, be a fine thing, a grand idea for him, a man of the world; he who had been complimented on being the Don Juan of the day. He—to repent? Nonsense! As he had lived he would die.