“Why have you sent for her?” she cried, vexed and startled. “She is very well where she is—happy and well. The nurse told me so in her last letter. I can’t have her here. You know that, James,—you know how people would talk by-and-by—how they would ferret out the truth—by-and-by, when we want to stand clear of the past——”
“Evelyn, the past is long past, and our child is a woman—a sorrowful woman. I want you to take her to your heart again, if you have any heart left in you.”
“I have not,” she cried, with a sudden change, appalling in its instantaneousness. “My heart died within me twenty years ago, when you broke it; in this house, yes, in this house, James Dalbrook, God help me! I have been dreaming! I thought I was living here again in the old time, and that you had come home to me, as you used to come, before you broke your promise and abandoned me to marry a rich young wife. Heart! No, I have a fiery scorpion here, where my heart used to be. Do you think if I had had a heart I could have killed him—that young man who never injured me by so much as one scornful word? It was the thought of your daughter that maddened me—the thought of her happiness, the sound of the church bells and the cheering, and the sight of the flags and garlands and laurel arches—while my daughter, your nameless, unacknowledged child, was an outcast, and I who should have been your wife, and the happy mother of just as happy a bride, I was living in that silent solitary cottage alone and unloved—upon the land where my father and his forefathers had been owners of the soil. I had dreamed the dream and you had realized it. All through those moonlight nights I was awake and roaming about in the park, from midnight till dawn, thinking, thinking, thinking, till I felt as if my brain must burst with the agony of thought. And then I remembered Tom Darcy’s pistols, and I took one of them with me of a night. I hardly knew why I carried that pistol about with me, but I felt a necessity to kill something. Once I was near shooting one of the red deer, but the creature looked at me with its plaintive eyes, so bold and so tame in his sense of security, and I fondled him instead of killing him. And then I took to prowling about by the house, and I saw those two in the lamp-lit room, in their wedded happiness—their wedded happiness, James, not such a union as ours, secret, darkened by a cloud of shame. I saw your daughter in her bright young beauty, the proud, triumphant wife: and then a devilish thought took hold of me—the thought of seeing her widowed, broken-hearted; the thought that I might be her evil Destiny—that just by stretching out my arm and pulling a trigger I could bring down all that pride into the dust—could bring youth and beauty down to my level of dull despair.”
“It was a devilish thought.”
“It was; but it was my thought all the same; for three days and three nights it was never absent from my mind, God knows how I got through the common business of the day—how the few people with whom I came in contact did not see murder in my face! I watched and waited for my opportunity; and when the moment came I did not waver. There are old people at Cheriton who could tell you that Evelyn Strangway at fifteen years old was as good a shot as either of her brothers. My hand had not forgotten its cunning; and your daughter was a widow three weeks after she was made a wife. By so much as she was happier than I, by so much was her joy briefer than mine.”
She sank into a corner of the large arm-chair and covered her face with her hands, muttering to herself. He heard the words—“I made myself her Evil Destiny; I was her fate—Nemesis, Nemesis! The sins of the fathers! It is the Scripture.”
He could not stay in the room with her after that confession. She had been perfectly coherent in telling the story of her crime; and it seemed to him that even now she gloated over the evil she had wrought—that had it been in her power to undo her work by the lifting of her hand she would hardly have used that power. She seemed a malignant spirit, rejoicing in evil.
He went out into the passage and told the policeman’s wife to look after her, and then he went to the desolate drawing-room and walked up and down the bare boards waiting for the arrival of one or both of the doctors.
What would they think of her mental condition. She had been curiously coherent just now. The temporary delusion had passed away like a cloud. She had spoken as a person fully conscious of her acts, and accountable for them. Judged by her speech just now she was a criminal who deserved the sternest measure of the law.
But he who knew of those long years of brooding, he who knew the story of her wrongs, and how those wrongs must have acted upon that proud and stubborn spirit, to him there seemed little doubt that her mind had long lost its balance, and that her crime had been the culminating crisis of a long period of melancholia. He waited the verdict of the doctors with acutest anxiety, for only in an asylum did he see safety for this unhappy sinner. The finding of the pistol would inevitably be talked about at Cheriton, and it was possible that at any moment suspicion might take the right direction. To get her away, to get her hidden from the world was his most ardent desire; but this was not inconsistent with his desire to spare her, to do the best that could be done for her. The thought that he had ruined her life—that his wrong-doing was at the root of all her miseries—was never absent from his mind.