He looked again at the ivory. His wife? No, no; innocence of life, ignorance of its passions and parades were there. His sister? Yes. The fair hair and blue eyes were alike. And now he caught a subtle resemblance of feature. She was dear to this brother, no doubt—dear as was his own half-sister to him, well-nigh the only being left in England who believed in him and loved him.
He looked up at a hail from the lake. A boat was approaching, bearing a single feminine rower. As he gazed, she looked over her shoulder to wave something white at the porch.
“It is Jane. She has been to the post,” cried Shelley from the terrace, and hastened down the bank.
Gordon thrust the ivory into his pocket as the skiff darted in to the landing.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DEVIL’S DEAL
As he took the two missives the girl handed him Gordon caught his breath, for one he saw was directed in Annabel’s hand. For a moment a hope that overleaped all his suffering rose in his brain. Had those months wrought a change in her? Had she, too, thought of their child? Had the cry he voiced on the packet that bore him from England struck an answering chord in her? He opened its cover. An inclosure dropped out.
He picked it up blankly. It was the note he had pencilled on the channel, returned unopened.
The sudden revulsion chilled him. He broke the seal of the second letter and read—read while a look of utter sick whiteness crept across his face, a look of rage and suffering that marked every feature.
It was from his sister, a letter written with fingers that soiled and creased it in their agony, blotted and stained with tears. For the thing it told of was a dreadful thing, a whispered charge against him so damning, so satanic in its cruelty, that though lip might murmur it to a gloating ear, yet pen refused to word it. The whole world turned black before him, and the dusk seemed shot through with barbed and flaming javelins of agony.
He crushed the letter in his hand, and, with a gesture like a madman’s, thrust it into Shelley’s, turning to him a countenance distorted with passion, gauche, malignant, repulsive.