Black Sheep: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

"I wore it in a locket," said the lady, with a very slight accession to the rich colour in her cheek--"a valuable gold locket, too. I am going to have it cried."

"Allow me to have that done for you," said Mr. Felton. "If you will describe the locket, and can say where you were yesterday, and at what time, I will take the necessary steps at once; these may not succeed, you know; we can but try."

So Mrs. Bembridge described the lost trinket accurately, and the visit came to a conclusion. As the two gentlemen were leaving the house, they met Mr. Carruthers, who accosted Mr. Felton with stately kindliness, and, entering at once into conversation with him, prevented the interchange of any comment upon the interview which had just taken place between the uncle and nephew. George left the elder gentlemen together, and turned his steps towards Harriet's lodgings. In a few minutes he met her and joined her in her walk, as Routh had seen from the window.

He stood there, long after George and Harriet had passed out of sight, thinking, with sullen desperate rage, of all she had said. He felt like an animal in a trap. All his care and cunning, all his caution and success, had come to this. It was strange, perhaps--if the probability or the strangeness of anything in such a condition of mind as his can be defined--that he seldom thought of the dead man. No curiosity about him had troubled the triumph of Routh's schemes. He had met so many men in the course of his life who were mere waifs and strays in the world of pleasure and swindling; who had no ties and no history; about whom nobody cared; for whom, on their disappearance from the haunts in which their presence had been familiar, nobody inquired; that one more such instance, however emphasized by his own sinister connection with him, made little impression on Stewart Routh. Looking back now in the light of this revelation, he could not discover that any intimation had ever been afforded to, or had ever been overlooked by him. The dead man had never dropped a hint by which his identity might have been discovered, nor had he, on the other hand, ever betrayed the slightest wish or purpose of concealment, which probably would have aroused Routh's curiosity, and set his investigative faculties to work. He had never speculated, even at times when all his callousness and cynicism did not avail to make him entirely oblivious of the past, on the possibility of his learning anything of the history of Philip Deane; he had been content to accept it, as well as its termination, as among the number of the wonderful mysteries of this wonderful life, and had, so far as in him lay, dismissed the matter from his mind. Nothing that had ever happened in his life before had given him such a shock as the discovery he had made yesterday. The first effect on him has been seen; the second, ensuing on his conversation with his wife, was a blind and desperate rage, of a sort to which he had rarely yielded, and of whose danger he was dimly conscious even at its height. He was like a man walking on a rope at a giddy elevation, to whom the first faint symptoms of vertigo were making themselves felt, who was invaded by the death-bringing temptation to look down and around him. The solemn and emphatic warning of his wife had had its effect upon his intellect, though he had hardened his heart against it. It was wholly impossible that her invariable judgment, perception, and reasonableness--the qualities to which he had owed so much in all their former life--could become immediately valueless to a man of Routh's keenness; he had not yet been turned into a fool by his sudden passion for the beautiful American; he still retained sufficient sense to wonder and scoff at himself for having been made its victim so readily; and he raged and rebelled against the conviction that Harriet was right, but raged and rebelled in vain.

In the whirl of his thoughts there was fierce torture, which he strove unavailingly to subdue: the impossibility of evading the discovery which must soon be made; the additional crime by which alone he could hope to escape suspicion; a sudden unborn fear that Harriet would fail him in this need--a fear which simply signified despair--a horrid, baffled, furious helplessness; and a tormenting, overmastering passion for a woman who treated him with all the calculated cruelty of coquetry--these were the conflicting elements which strove in the man's dark, bad heart, and rent it between them, as he stood idly by the window where his wife had been accustomed to sit and undergo her own form of torture.

By degrees one fear got the mastery over the others, and Routh faced it boldly. It was the fear of Harriet. Suppose the worst, came to the worst, he thought, and there was no other way of escape, would she suffer him to sacrifice George? He could do it; the desperate resource which he had never hinted to her was within his reach. They had talked over all possibilities in the beginning, and had agreed upon a plan and direction of flight in certain contingencies, but he had always entertained the idea of denouncing George, and now, by the aid of Jim Swain, he saw his way to doing so easily and successfully. Harriet had always been a difficulty, and now the obstacle assumed portentous proportions. He had no longer his old power over her. He knew that; she made him feel this in many ways; and now he had aroused her jealousy. He felt instinctively that such an awakening was full of terrible danger; of blind, undiscoverable peril. He did not indeed know by experience what Harriet's jealousy might be, but he knew what her love was, and the ungrateful villain trembled in his inmost soul as he remembered its strength, its fearlessness, its devotion, its passion, and its unscrupulousness, and thought of the possibility of all these being arrayed against him. Not one touch of pity for her, not one thought of the agony of such love betrayed and slighted, of her utter loneliness, of her complete abandonment of all her life to him, intruded upon the tumult of his angry mind. He could have cursed the love which had so served him, now that it threatened opposition to his schemes of passion and of crime. He did curse it, and her, deeply, bitterly, as one shade after another of fierce evil expression crossed his face.

There was truth in what she had said, apart from the maudlin sentiment from which not even the strongest-minded woman, he supposed, could wholly free herself--there was truth, a stern, hard truth. He could indeed escape now, taking with him just enough money to enable them to live in decent comfort, or to make a fresh start in a distant land, where only the hard and honest industries throve and came to good. How he loathed the thought! How his soul sickened at the tame, miserable prospect! He would have loathed it always, even when Harriet and he were friends and lovers; and now, when he feared her, when he was tired of her, when he hated her, to contemplate such a life now, was worse--well, not worse than death, that is always the worst of all things to a bad man, but something too bad to be thought of. There was truth in what she had said, and the knowledge of what was in his own thoughts, the knowledge she did not share, made it all the more true. Supposing he determined to denounce George, and supposing Harriet refused to aid him, what then? Then he must only set her at defiance. If such a wild impossibility as her betraying him could become real, it would be useless. She was his wife; she could not bear witness against him; in that lay his strength and security, even should the very worst, the most inconceivably unlikely of human events, come to pass. And he would set her at defiance! He kept up no reticence with himself now. Within a few days a change had come upon him, which would have been terrible even to him, had he studied it. He hated her. He hated her, not only because he had fallen madly in love with another woman and was day by day becoming more enslaved by this new passion; not chiefly even because of this, but because she was a living link between him and the past. That this should have happened now! That she should have right and reason, common sense, and all the force of probability on her side, in urging him to fly, now--now when he was prospering, when the success of a new speculation in which he had just engaged would, with almost absolute certainty, bring him fortune,--this exasperated him almost to the point of frenzy.

Then there arose before his tossed and tormented mind the vision of a blissful possibility. This other beautiful, fascinating woman, who had conquered him by a glance of her imperial eyes, who had beckoned him to her feet by a wave of her imperial hand--could he not make her love him well enough to sacrifice herself for him also? Might he not escape from the toils which were closing around him into a new, a glorious liberty, into a life of wealth, and pleasure, and love? She had yielded so immediately to the first influence he had tried to exert over her; she had admitted him so readily to an intimacy to whose impropriety, according to the strict rules of society, she had unhesitatingly avowed herself aware and indifferent; she had evinced such undisguised pleasure in his society, and had accepted his unscrupulous homage so unscrupulously, that he had as much reason as a coarse-minded man need have desired for building up a fabric of the most presumptuous hope.

As these thoughts swept over him, Routh turned from the window, and began again to stride up and down the room. His dark face cleared up, the hot blood spread itself over his sallow cheek, and his deep-set eyes sparkled with a sinister light. The desperate expedient to which he had resorted on the previous day had gained him time, and time was everything in the game he designed to play. The discovery would not be made for some time by George Dallas. When it should be made, his triumph might be secured, he might be beyond the reach of harm from such a cause, safe in an elysium, with no haunting danger to disturb. The others concerned might be left to their fate--left to get out of any difficulty that might arise, as best they could. The time was short, but that would but inspire him with more courage and confidence; the daring of desperation was a mood which suited Stewart Routh well.

Hours told in such cases. The fire and earnestness with which he had spoken to the beautiful widow had evidently surprised and, he thought, touched her. If the demonstration had not been made in his own favour, but in that of another, no one would have more readily understood than Stewart Routh how much beauty of form and feature counts for in the interpretation of emotion, how little real meaning there may be in the beam of a dark bright eye, how little genuine emotion in the flush of a rose-tinted cheek. But it was his own case, and precisely because it was, Stewart Routh interpreted every sign which his captor had made according to his wishes rather than by the light of his experience. Indeed, he had little experience of a kind to avail him in the present instance; his experience had been of stronger, even more dangerous, types of womanhood than that which Mrs. Bembridge represented, or of the infinitely meaner and lower. As he mused and brooded over the vision which had flashed upon him, not merely as a possibility to be entertained, as a hope to be cherished, but as something certain and definite to be done, his spirits, his courage, his audacity rose, and the dark cloud of dread and foreboding fell from him. He had so long known himself for a villain, that there was not even a momentary recoil in his mind from the exceeding baseness of the proceeding which he contemplated.