“You love Sir Harold, after all?” taunted the companion, as she picked up the sinister slip of paper and burned it.
“No, no, but he trusts me; he loves me. There was a time, Artress, when I could not have harmed a dog that licked my hand or fawned upon me. And now—but I am not so bad as you think. I am base, unscrupulous, manœuvring, I know. My marriage was but part of a wicked plan, the fruit of a conspiracy against Sir Harold Wynde, but I shrink from the crowning evil we have planned. To play the viper and sting the hand that has warmed me—to wound to the core the heart that beats so fondly and proudly for me—to—to cut short the noble, beneficent, happy life of Sir Harold—oh, I cannot! I cannot!”
Her ladyship swept forward impetuously toward the hearth and knelt down before a quaint crimson-cushioned chair, crossing her arms upon it, and laying her head on her bare white arms. The firelight played upon the ruddy waves of her long robe, upon the gems at her throat and wrists, upon her picturesquely dishevelled hair, and upon her stormy, handsome face. She stared into the fire with her great black terrified eyes, as if seeking in those dancing flames some mystic meaning.
Her gray companion flitted across the floor to her side like an evil shadow.
“How very tragic you are, my lady,” she said, with a sneer. “It almost seems as if you were doing a scene out of a melodrama. No one can force you to any step against your will. You can do whatever you please. Sir Harold dotes upon you, and you can continue his seemingly affectionate wife, can receive his caresses, can preside over his household, and can soothe his declining years. He is not yet fifty-eight years old, vigorous and healthy, and, as he comes of a long-lived race, he will live to be ninety, I doubt not. You will, should you survive him, then be seventy. You can play the tender step-mother to his children. His daughter is sure to dislike you, and she may cause her father to distrust you. All this will no doubt be pleasant to you—”
“Hush, hush!” breathed Lady Wynde, with a tempestuous look in her eyes. “Let me alone, Artress. You always stir up the demon within me. Forty years of a dull, staid, respectable existence, when I might be a queen of society in London, might be married to one I have loved for years! Forty years! Why, one year seems to me an eternity. It seems a lifetime since I was married to Sir Harold. I—I will act upon the letter.”
The gray companion smiled.
“I was sure you would,” she said.
“But Sir Harold has not made a new will since our marriage,” urged Lady Wynde. “By our marriage settlements, I am to have the use of the dower house, Wynde Heights, during my lifetime, and a life income of four thousand pounds a year. At my death, both house and income revert to the family of Wynde. I have nothing absolutely my own, nothing left to me by will to do with as I please. Craven expected that I would have the dowry of a princess, I suppose, out of Sir Harold’s splendid property.”
“It is not too late to acquire it,” said the companion, significantly. “Sir Harold is clay in your hands. You can mould him to any shape you will. He has no child here to counteract your influence. He has money and estates which he intends to leave by will to his daughter Neva. If you are clever, you can divert into your own coffers all of Miss Wynde’s property that is not settled upon her already from her mother’s estate. It will do no harm to delay acting upon the message for a day or two, since something of so much importance remains to be transacted.”