“I have committed forgery,” he thought. “If my crime is discovered I shall be sent to Bermuda to work amongst gangs of murderous ruffians till I drop down dead. If my crime is discovered! How shall I ever be safe from discovery, when I am at the mercy of the wretches who helped me?”
Eleanor threw off her cloak, but she refused to sit down in the chair which Miss Sarah offered her. She stood divided by the width of half the room from her husband, with her face fronting his, in the full glare of the lamplight. Her large grey eyes were bright with excitement, her cheeks were flushed, her hair fell loosely about her face, brown in the shadow, and glittering like ruddy gold in the light.
In all the beauty of her girlhood, from the hour in which Gilbert Monckton had first seen her until to-night, she had never looked so beautiful as she looked now. The sense that she had triumphed, the thought that she held the power to avenge her father’s death, lent an unnatural brilliancy to her loveliness. She was no longer an ordinary woman, only gifted with the earthly charms of lovely womanhood: she was a splendid Nemesis, radiant with a supernatural beauty.
CHAPTER XLIV.
LOST.
“You asked me why I came here to-night,” she said, looking at her husband. “I will tell you, Gilbert: but I must tell you a long story first, almost all the story of my life.”
Her voice, resonant and musical, roused Launcelot Darrell from his gloomy abstraction. He looked up at Eleanor, and for the first time began to wonder how and why she had come there. They had met her in the garden. Why had she been there? What had she been doing there? Could it be possible that she had played the spy upon him? No! Surely there could be no fear of that? What reason should she have for suspecting or watching him? That terror was too cowardly, too absurd, he thought; but such foolish and unnecessary fears would be the perpetual torment of his life henceforward.
“You remember, Gilbert,” Eleanor continued, “that when I promised to be your wife, I told you my real name, and asked you to keep that name a secret from the people in this house; and from Launcelot Darrell.”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Monckton, “I remember.”
Even in the midst of the tortures which arose out of his jealousy and suspicion, and which to-night had reached their climax, and had taken entire possession of the lawyer’s mind, there was some half-doubtful feeling of wonder at Eleanor’s calm and self-assured manner.
And yet she was deceiving him. He knew that. He had long ago determined that this second hazard of his life was to result in ignominious failure, like the first. He had been deceived before; gulled, hoodwinked, fooled, jilted: and the traitress had smiled in his face, with the innocent smile of a guileless child. Eleanor was perhaps even more skilled in treachery than that first traitress; but that was all.