“Oh, no,” cried Bess, seizing his arm in her strong grasp. “Do you think I got you here to spend only five minutes in pleasant conversation? Not at all. I want some hours of your company on this spot.”
As she spoke, she made a signal, and before Hugo Stein knew what was happening to him, three masked men sprang from behind the hedge, seized and bound him hand and foot, and flung him down full length on the ground, a little way from Dicky’s grave.
“Lie you there, Hugo Stein,” cried Bess, standing over Hugo’s prostrate body. “Lie you there this night through. In yonder new-made grave lies the lad you murdered. Some day will you be judged for it, and judged for robbing your brother of his name and his estate. But before that awful judgment comes, you shall have this one night on which you shall suffer. Shout now, if you like,—no one will hear you or heed you until to-morrow morning. Proclaim it, if you like, through the country of Devon, bawl it through all England, bray it throughout Europe,—that you were bound hand and foot, and made to spend the night upon the bare ground, close to the grave of the innocent man you brought to the gallows. Would that you had been in his place! But not too close. I would not let them lay you too near the righteous dust of Richard Egremont,—’twould be to dishonor it. In the morning, some ploughman or dairymaid may perchance release you,—and then, go your way, Hugo Stein. But let me tell you one thing more,—something tells me you will not tarry long after this poor lad. Make you ready to leave this world,—for I feel it and I know it, that your soul will shortly be required of you.”
Within a week Bess Lukens was back in Paris. She lost not a minute in leaving England, never, as she promised herself, to return to it. Her first duty was to write a long and exact letter to Roger Egremont, detailing all the circumstances of Dicky’s last days, as he had told them to her; and of her getting his body by the power of money and bringing it to Egremont to be buried. When it came to telling of her beguiling Hugo Stein to the grave, for the first time she hesitated. Should she tell him that, or should she not? She had an instinctive feeling that a gentlewoman would not have done it; the particular gentlewoman she had in mind was the Princess Michelle. She in no wise repented of it, and would have done it all over again without the least hesitation; but—but—
Her native honesty triumphed, and she wrote Roger every detail, describing Hugo Stein’s writhing and cursing on the ground, and gnashing his teeth, and calling her vile names as she walked away and left him; but something like shame made her add,—
“Think not hard of me, Roger, for this; remember, after all, I am but Bess Lukens, no gentlewoman, but come of plain working stock, and I am not like a gentlewoman, and I know it; so judge me not by what a gentlewoman would have done.”
She took the letter to St. Germains, where the sad news of Dicky’s fate was known. She went to the château and handed her letter to the King’s secretary, that it might be forwarded to Roger Egremont. To her amazement, and her deep gratification, she was received almost as a heroine. The King and Queen sent for her, and when Bess, in her simple, but dramatic way, told her tale, she suddenly found herself moving her listeners as she had never done on the stage; and when, at last, her strong self-control gave way, and she burst into a passion of tears in describing Dicky’s last moments, no one who heard her was dry-eyed. Bess Lukens, the gaoler’s niece, left St. Germains with the respect of royal and noble persons, to which, in her wildest dreams, she had never aspired. She returned to Madame de Beaumanoir also, through the King’s secretary, the money the old lady had lent her, less a small sum she had used; and then, going back to Paris, she resumed her life of work and kindness, caring more tenderly for the old Mazets than ever, and doing cheerfully all the good that her hand found to do. Dicky’s death had sobered and softened her; but it did not greatly change her.
She had not gone to see Madame de Beaumanoir; first, because she did not feel equal to seeing the old lady then; and second, because she had a shrinking from anything that savored of association with the Princess Michelle. She supposed Michelle to be living in heartless splendor and frivolity, as reigning Princess of Orlamunde. Bess was not in the way of hearing anything about Orlamunde, especially as she went no more to St. Germains just then. Poor old Papa Mazet was growing daily feebler; and as Bess was obliged to be absent from home the evenings she sang at the Opera, she spent all the time which was her own closely in the tall old house where all her years in Paris had been passed. She watched and tended both of the old people constantly and tenderly, and so had no leisure to go anywhere.
It came to be September, and late one afternoon she sat alone in the large room on the ground-floor, where all the musical instruments were, and where she usually sang and played. She was not now always trilling and singing as she had once been. So many songs she loved brought with them the memory of Dicky’s violin, its sweet strains threading the melody after her voice and being almost another voice, that it broke her heart to sing them; and she had sung less since her return from England than ever before in her life.