The look of combined alarm and surprise which Jack's face betrayed was
sufficient to convince me of the truth. Aline was the woman from whom
he had fled; and she had visited him secretly. She had, it was
apparent, discovered his whereabouts, and rather than excite gossip by
coming to call upon him in the village, had met him clandestinely at
some point on the high road halfway between Stamford and Duddington.
Then I reflected upon all that he had told me on the previous night; of
how fondly he loved her, and of the curious dread in which he held her.
Were not my own experiences more extraordinary than those of mortal man?
Were not the changes wrought in my rooms by her influence little short
of miraculous?
Aline Cloud, although the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,
possessed a potency for the working of evil that was appalling. When I
thought of it I shuddered.
Perhaps Jack Yelverton had discovered this. Perhaps he, a clergyman, a
worker in the holy cause, had found out what evil influences emanated
from her, and on that account had held aloof. He had told me plainly
that he had come there to escape her. Did not that prove that he had
discovered, what I, too, had found out, that her influence was alluring,
that in her hand she held the golden apple?
He had been entranced by her beauty, but fortunately her witchery had
not been sufficient to allure him to his ruin. I remembered when, in a
moment of madness, I had declared my love to her, how she had told me
she could not reciprocate it. What more likely then, that she loved
Jack Yelverton?
That night I sat alone thinking it all over in the small, old-fashioned
sitting-room which had been my own den before I had left to live in
London. What, perhaps, puzzled me most of all was the fact that Muriel
possessed such intimate knowledge of Aline's actions and of my brief
period of madness; and somehow I could not get rid of a vague feeling
that she was aware of the truth concerning poor Roddy's sad end.
Oppressed by the knowledge of a terrible truth which he had sworn not to
divulge, and hiding from a woman whom he feared, Jack Yelverton was in
as strange a position as myself; therefore next day I called upon him to
give him an opportunity of telling me how this woman had at last
discovered him.
He, however, said nothing; and when I incidentally expressed my
intention of returning to London, and a hope that his whereabouts would
still remain a secret from the person whom he did not wish to meet, he
merely smiled sadly, saying--
"Yes. I hope she won't discover me. If she does--well, I must move
again. Should I disappear suddenly you will know the cause, old
fellow."
These words caused me to doubt the truth of my surmise. His manner was
as though he had not kept the appointment, as I had suspected, and
indeed I had no absolute knowledge that Aline and this woman whom he
held in fear were one and the same person. Thus I left him with my mind
in a state of indecision and bewilderment.