‘What I want of you is, that you should leave me,’ she went on. ‘Leave me—that is all! Go where you were going when we met. Hear me out! I will give you everything I can give you; all I have you shall have; but save yourself, Horace, and go.’
‘Is it for me you are thinking?’ he said; and suddenly his heart melted, and he tried to take her hand.
‘Let me be! oh, let me be!’ cried Isabel, shrinking from him. ‘It is for you, too. How could we live and face each other, now I know? I would speak; it would burn out my heart, till, sleeping or waking, I would speak. And—they—would remember it was you. But never will I breathe your name when you are gone. Never will I say a word—never one word of blame. And I will—forgive you!’ she said, with a sudden cry.
She was capable of no more.
The servants, hearing no sound that alarmed them, began to move about in the house going to bed. The sound of the door being locked, and the shutters closed, roused the two from their deadly argument. After a while, one of the women came in to close the windows for the night, and see if anything more was wanted. This sudden breaking in of the ordinary and commonplace intensified beyond all power of description the tragic misery of the scene. It might have lasted through the whole night but for that. It might have led to any horrible conclusion. Isabel rose and went up to him, while the maid barred and bolted, and made all fast. ‘I have said all I have to say,’ she whispered in his ear with white, quivering lips. ‘Now, it is in your hands.’
It never occurred to him that these were her last words. When he looked up from his moody reverie and found her gone, it did not even strike him as strange. He followed her upstairs slowly after an interval of thought. The room was empty, a light burning, his pocket-book lying on the table, and all traces of his wife gone. The house was all silent, dark, and motionless. Then for the first time horror and fear came over him. He did not dare make a commotion in that stillness, or call for her to come back to him. Whatever might happen, the woman whom he had loved after his fashion had disappeared for ever out of Stapylton’s life.
CHAPTER XLVI
The night was a winter’s night—long and dark. Stapylton sat down in his solitary room, and tried to think. He would let her alone, was his first thought; he would leave her at peace. No doubt she had gone away to the baby who was her idol. She must have told him a lie when she said it was gone. But he would leave her to herself: he had plenty to think of, Heaven knew. ‘It was not I that killed him,’ he said to himself, as he had said a thousand times before. Oh, the intolerable night! so silent, so full of horrible suggestions; and that aching void into which all in a moment any horror might spring. He took up his candle, in his misery, and went wandering all over the house, trying every door. He went to the door of the room in which the servants had locked themselves, and heard them rustling in their beds, and whispering to each other in their panic; and he went to another door from which came no sound—‘Isabel, Isabel, come back to me!’ he said, and a sigh seemed to breathe through the house, but no answer came. He wanted her not so much to return to him and resume the common life, as to come and protect him at that awful moment, to keep spirits and appearances away from him. He had hours of darkness to get through, and how was he to live through them by himself? It was this panic that made him try the doors; but it sent a deeper panic into the hearts of the three women who listened to his movements in the silence. Isabel, alone in the room where her child had been, believed in her heart that he had come to kill her, as he said, and wound herself up in her misery to bear whatever she might be compelled to bear; and yet trembled and wept, in a stillness as of death.
For seven or eight awful hours of darkness this torture continued. No one closed an eye in the agitated house; and yet, save when Stapylton went or came, a horrible silence reigned in it, unbroken by any complaint or appeal for help. It was not daylight at last which aroused her from that century-long vigil—daylight did not come till about eight o’clock, when the morning was far advanced. It was the first sound of early life outside, which came like a voice from Heaven to Isabel. When she heard it she rose up softly from the cramped position she had maintained all night, thrust up into the corner, and very quietly, with trembling hands and heart, utterly unnerved by the horrors of the night, prepared to make her escape. She could bear it no longer. She had faced the man who had threatened to kill her, with dauntless resolution, on the previous night, feeling almost that such a conclusion would be as desirable as any other. But the night had taken away all her courage and force. She trembled like a leaf and could not command herself. Before her, like a vision of Heaven, appeared that little room at the Glebe, where her child no doubt was sleeping. If she could but reach that palace of peace! Stealthily, that no sound might betray her, she bathed her hot forehead, and put up her hair, and drew her cloak round her. It was more difficult to open the door without noise, and steal down the stairs, which creaked under her, soft as her steps were. When she stepped out at last into the darkness, which was no longer night but morning, and felt the chill air on her face, and heard behind her sounds of the early world beginning to stir, a certain excitement of hope rose in Isabel’s mind. She thought she had escaped.
But her husband had heard her movements, soft as they were. He was fully dressed as he had been on the previous evening, and, like her, feverish with passion and want of sleep. He took out a pistol from the box in which it reposed beside his desk. The pistol was old-fashioned as well as the desk, and he had been in the habit of calling the weapons curiosities. He charged it hurriedly in the dark, not knowing what he did, and put it in the breast-pocket of his coat, and rushed out after his wife into the rain and wind.