Their wounds were healed; their lives were made happy; and so there was an end of his crime and its consequences. Fate had been very good to him. He walked back to Charles Street with his burden so far lightened that he thought he might come eventually to forget that he had ever taken a fellow-creature’s life, that he had ever carried about with him any guilty secret.
Easter was close at hand, and he was to spend Easter at Redwold Towers, within walking distance of Eve Marchant’s cottage. Easter was to decide his fate, perhaps.
CHAPTER XI.
“ONE THREAD IN LIFE WORTH SPINNING.”
Vansittart’s heart was lighter than it had been for a long time, the day he left Charles Street for Waterloo on his way to Haslemere. He longed to see Eve Marchant, with all a lover’s longing, and he told himself that he had tested his own heart severely enough by an absence of three months, and that he had now only to discover whether the lady’s heart was in any way responsive to his own. He knew now that his love for Eve Marchant was no passing fancy, no fever of the moment; and he also told himself that if he could be fairly assured of her worthiness to be his wife, he would lose no time in offering himself as her husband. Of her father’s character, whatever it might be, of her present surroundings, however sordid and shabby, he would take no heed. He would ask only if she were pure and true and frank and honest enough for an honest man’s wife. Convinced on that point, he would ask no more.
An honest man’s wife? Was he an honest man? Was he going to give her truth in exchange for truth? Was there nothing that he must needs hold back; no secret in his past life that he must keep till his life’s end? Yes, there was one secret. He was not going to tell her of his Venetian adventure. It would grieve her woman’s heart too much to know that the man she loved had to bear the burden of another man’s blood. Nay, more, with a woman’s want of logic she might deem that impulse of a moment murder, and might refuse to give herself to a man who bore that stain upon his past.
He meant to keep his secret. He could trust Lisa not to betray him. She and her kinswoman had pledged themselves to silence; and over and above the obligation of that promise he had bound them both to him by his services, had made their lives in some wise dependent on his own welfare. No, he had no fear of treachery from them. Nor had he any fear of what the chances of time and change might bring upon him from any other belongings of the dead man—so evidently had his been one of those isolated existences which drop out of life unlamented and unremembered. He was safe on all sides; and the one lie in his life, the lie which he began when he told his mother that he had not been to Venice, must be maintained steadily, whatever conscience might urge against it.
Easter came late this year, and April, the sunny, the showery, the capricious, was flinging her restless lights and shadows over the meadows and copses as he drove from the station. He had to pass Fernhurst on his way to Redwold Towers, and it was yet early in the afternoon as he drove past the quaint little cottage post-office in the dip of the hill, the tiny graveyard on the higher ground, the church and parsonage. It was early enough for afternoon-tea, and he had no need to hurry to Redwold. His sister had sent a groom with a dog-cart instead of coming to meet him in her capacious landau, a lack of attention for which he was grateful, since it left him his own master. He would have been less than human if he had not stopped at the Homestead, and being in his present frame of mind very human, he pulled up the eager homeward-going horse at the little wooden gate, and flung the reins to the groom.
“I am going to make a call here; wait five minutes, and if I am not out by that time take the horse to the inn and put him up for an hour.”
“Yes, sir.”