But what of the man who, for his own vindictive purpose, had tried to poison his mind against the woman he loved? Even across that dark thought there streamed a ray of light. Their connection, the equivocal nature of which had of late galled him, must now be severed. The reason, the excuse was apt: and he, Geoffrey Herriard, would be a free man again, to stand or fall by his own abilities. That his marriage would make imperative; after this disclosure the break would be less painful; by it he would be absolved from ingratitude towards the man who had chosen to exploit his fortunes.
“He is dead,” Alexia had said, with a suggestion of relief; and Paul Gastineau was indeed dead to all the world save himself and Geoffrey Herriard. Could he come to life again—Herriard did not care to imagine the contingency except on its impossible side. It seemed heartlessly, cruelly ungrateful, but he could not help a feeling of subdued satisfaction at the thought that Dr. Hallamar the one man in Europe who might have cured him, had declared his case hopeless.
All this passed swiftly through Herriard’s mind as he sat startled into the silence of intense, almost bewildering thought.
“Geoffrey, what are you thinking of?”
The words, spoken with laughing concern, roused him to see Alexia’s grey eyes fixed on him with perhaps a suspicion of anxiety beneath the look of enquiry.
“I was wondering,” he answered, “what manner of man it could be who had the spite to persecute you, dearest.”
The animation seemed to fade from her face again. “You may wonder,” she replied. “The man was well known, although, I dare say, few who knew him guessed what lay beneath the surface of his character. I would rather you asked some one else than me to describe him, if you are curious to revive a memory which were better left to rest.”
The words seemed to stab Herriard. Who in the world knew Gastineau better than he? Like accusing spirits there now rose to his mind the quasi dead fighter’s vindictive attacks on men he had hated and envied, of which he, Geoffrey Herriard, poor tool, had been the mouthpiece; the venomous stinging thrusts he had been taught to deliver so deftly; the terrible, transcendent irony and sarcasm into which he had been coached with such untiring pains. Why should a man who had, by a strange combination of accident and choice, taken leave of the world, why should he retain and revel in all this eager vindictiveness, except that his soul was black as sin? Gastineau was a very Iago; a malicious spirit that could not rest under the idea of denial or disappointment, but must work for the compensating delight of other men’s discomfiture.
It was terrible; more terrible still, it seemed, in that atmosphere of love and nobleness, where vice looked by contrast the more hideous; and he, Geoffrey Herriard, sitting there, with that pure hand in his, breathing the very air of love and chivalrous devotion, had been, and, indeed, was still, the partner, the abettor of this son of evil. The very idea maddened him. He recalled the look of Gastineau’s face as he had last seen it that evening; grey, set with hate and, so far, impotent vindictiveness. He did not like to contemplate the picture, and, to veil it, he turned to Alexia with the eagerness of a man escaping from a disquieting thought.
But she was the first to break the silence. “Does your fate sadden you?” she asked, with a little uncertain smile.