It was with a face stern and hard as granite that Ralph listened to Mr. Tracy's disclosure of this horrible betrayal by his brother. He had been looking death in the face, and its visage had almost turned him to stone, although it could not make his high courage quail. It would have been bad enough if the traitor had been any other man, but that it should be his own brother, with whom he had played as a child, dreamed such fair dreams, and thought such long, long thoughts, was the most cruel blow fate had ever dealt him. He marvelled at the cool courage with which Melville had pitted himself against the devil, and played the game right to the end. He shuddered as he tried to picture what the end was like, when, with a certain pagan courage, Melville threw himself into death's cold embrace. The life was incomprehensible to him, but the death he could find it in his heart to commend.
With Mr. Tracy he left the prison, of which the high walls had been suffocating him so long.
"I will telegraph to Gwendolen at once," he said, "saying I will be home to-morrow night and asking her to await me there. I will go up to London with you now; there is a lot that I must do."
His whole occupation that first day of freedom was characteristic of the man. Everything that could be devised to spare his brother's memory he thought of and arranged—everything, that is, that did not detract from the absolute declaration of his own innocence. He provided for the payment of Melville's debts, from the greatest to the least, took possession of his personal effects, so that nothing might fall into the hands of curious strangers, and gave his whole wardrobe and a generous gratuity to Jervis on the understanding that he should preserve silence as to his late master's shortcomings. And Jervis acted loyally in accordance with the understanding, for he had been a good and even affectionate servant to Melville, who had always been kind and generous to him; he was, indeed, Melville's sincerest mourner.
Ralph thought of all who had contributed, in however small a degree, to his acquittal. Lucille was broken-hearted by Lavender's death, and would accept nothing at his hands.
"I don't need it," she said. "Mrs. Sinclair has left me everything she had, and they tell me I shall never need to work again. I'm going home to Geneva as soon as ever I can."
She listened gratefully to Ralph's words of sympathy.
"You've had a lot to put up with," she sobbed, "but don't you believe my mistress was a bad woman. She was frightened into holding her tongue. Your brother frightened her. She was a changed woman from the first unhappy day he crossed her path, and didn't dare stand up to him; but whatever she did, no one shall say to me that she was a wicked woman."
And when Ralph soothed her she looked up at him with eyes that were most pathetic.
"I don't know how you can be so forgiving when you've been so wronged, I can't forgive your brother. But oh! how I wish that it was you instead of him who came into her life! You could have told her, if she had done wrong by Sir Geoffrey Holt, how to put it right, and she would have done it. She never did a wrong thing knowingly in all her life;" and, indeed, until fear came upon her and upset her judgment as to the proportion of things, Lucille's epitaph upon her mistress was truer than many an epitaph graven on stone and lying in cathedrals.