He rose and paced the floor, his step halting, fighting out the struggle. Once he sat down and wrote, scarce seeing the lines his pen traced—and rose and paced the floor again. He took the black phial from its drawer, but put it back. There was something in him which in this fierce crisis disdained to blunt the pain.
After a while he left the library and went slowly up the stair to the little carved white bed. He sank into a chair and hid his face in his folded arms. The agony of childlessness came down on him. Home! A year ago how fondly he had desired it! Yet it had become the winding-sheet of his heart!
Mrs. Clermont saw him sitting there as she passed the door. By Lady Noël’s command, she had waited to pack some smaller articles, and was now ready for departure.
On the lower floor she entered the library for a last survey. Some loose sheets of paper were scattered on the desk, the ink scarce yet dry on them. Laying them together she slowly deciphered the tense, uneven handwriting. The lines had been dragged from the deeps of Gordon’s despairing, from his pent grief that found its natural vent in verse. Was it what it seemed—his heart’s final word to Annabel? Or rather was it a last yearning call to the woman he had dreamed her to be—an adieu to his lost ideal of her?
Mrs. Clermont’s eyes gloated. Two spots of dull vermilion grew in her sallow cheeks. Her hands shook with the delight of an inspiration. Bending over the table she muttered the written lines:
“Fare thee well! and if forever,
Still forever, fare thee well—”
How carefully she had gathered them all along—these garish strands of scandal which had come to her hands! How deftly her fingers had cast them here and there in the woof of dislike the great loom of London had been weaving! This was a thread of bright red for her to use. What if the poem were printed—now, now, with the first rumor of the separation? She could fancy what would be the world’s verdict on such an address, penned in the first hour of his bereavement, and offered to the public ostensibly by his own hand. Publicity would be just the note to make the whole strain ring false. It would recoil upon him in open disapproval and contempt! It would rouse new voices in the clarion-tongued clamor of abuse that her jubilant ear had heard swelling through the past year—forge a new link in the chain that would bind him to disgrace, the disgrace she believed he had had share in heaping upon her niece!
The mainspring of the woman’s hatred leaped. The world had coupled their names long ago, when the girl had first stolen away from the dreary Godwin house to the glamour and allurements of Drury Lane! And the world no doubt told the truth. If she could help to ruin him, line for line, name and fame—as he had ruined Jane Clermont!