"Are you mad?" he cried, with an oath. "Are you mad, or drunk? Who gave you leave to let that woman go? Who——?"
He couldn't finish the sentence. His throat grew dry, and he gasped for breath; while all the blood in his body seemed to rush into his swollen forehead.
"You sent Mrs. Marchmont to fetch my patient away, sir," exclaimed the woman, looking frightened. "You did, didn't you? She said so!"
"She is a liar; and you are a fool or a cheat. She paid you, I dare say! Can't you speak, woman? Has the person I left in your care, whom you were paid, and paid well, to take care of,—have you let her go? Answer me that."
"I have, sir," the woman faltered,—she was big and brawny, but there was that in Paul Marchmont's face that frightened her notwithstanding,—"seeing as it was your orders."
"That will do," cried Paul Marchmont, holding up his hand and looking at the woman with a ghastly smile; "that will do. You have ruined me; do you hear? You have undone a work that has cost me—O my God! why do I waste my breath in talking to such a creature as this? All my plots, my difficulties, my struggles and victories, my long sleepless nights, my bad dreams,—has it all come to this? Ruin, unutterable ruin, brought upon me by a madwoman!"
He sat down in the chair by the window, and leaned upon the table, scattering the Indian chessmen with his elbow. He did not weep. That relief—terrible relief though it be for a man's breast—was denied him. He sat there with his face covered, moaning aloud. That helpless moan was scarcely like the complaint of a man; it was rather like the hopeless, dreary utterance of a brute's anguish; it sounded like the miserable howling of a beaten cur.
CHAPTER XI.
BELINDA'S WEDDING-DAY.
The sun shone upon Belinda Lawford's wedding-day. The birds were singing in the garden under her window as she opened her lattice and looked out. The word lattice is not a poetical license in this case; for Miss Lawford's chamber was a roomy, old-fashioned apartment at the back of the house, with deep window-seats and diamond-paned casements.