REAPING THE WHIRLWIND.
To be on the very threshold of Paradise, within the sound of celestial
birds and the perfume of celestial flowers, to be on the point of
entering the blissful place, with heart full of hope and pride, and to
have the gates suddenly slammed in one's face, and to hear the voice of
the angel at the gate crying "Ye cannot enter now," would be perhaps
to feel as Bothwell Grahame felt after he had read and read again that
calmly worded letter in which Hilda Heathcote renounced him and his
love.
His senses staggered under the force of the blow. He cursed Valeria
Harborough in the rage of his tortured heart. This was her work. This
was the work of that serpent who had beguiled him to forfeit good faith
and honour in the past, and who wanted to ruin his life in the present.
Those ideas of fortune, of a lofty ambition to be realised through
Valeria's aid, which Hilda put forth in her letter, hardly entered
into his mind; but had Valeria been able to make him Prime Minister,
or Viceroy of India, by a motion of her hand, he would have cared for
her no more than he cared for her in her present insignificance, as a
well-born widow with so many thousands a year.
The infatuation which had once held him was a thing of the past, the
glamour was over, the light extinguished. He looked back and wondered
that he could have ever been so enslaved, so poor a creature as to
worship a thoroughly artificial woman.
His first feeling about Hilda after reading her letter was one of
anger. He told himself that this renunciation had another motive than
that expressed in the letter. It was not in order to give him back to
Lady Valeria that his betrothed revoked her promise. It was in order
that she herself might escape from an engagement which for some secret
reason had become distasteful to her.
"She draws back at the eleventh hour," he said to himself. "Perhaps
even at the last she has begun to doubt me--to believe that I may be
after all the miscreant my kindly neighbours thought me, the murderer
of a helpless girl. Who knows? That idea was rooted in her brother's
mind at the time. It may have transferred itself to her mind when she
found herself on the eve of marriage with a suspected man. Women are
given to curious fancies and caprices; and she--she whom I thought so
brave, so noble, so straight--she too may have her crooked moments, her
waverings, and unstableness, like the rest of her sex."
He read the letter again--tried to project his mind into the mind
of the writer, to look behind the words, as it were, and by sheer
intensity of thinking to get at the hidden meaning between those lines.
No, she was not the unstable being he had been inclined to think her
in his first agony of wounded feeling. No--a thousand times no. This
letter of hers had been written in all simplicity, in all honesty. She
gave him up to another, believing that his happiness lay that way. And
it was Valeria who had done this thing--Valeria who had come between
him and happiness. In his savage anger he felt inclined to rush off to
Plymouth, to lie in wait for that old idol of his--that false goddess
with feet of basest clay--to insult her before the face of society, to
put some public inextinguishable slight upon her.
She was a woman, exempt in her feebleness; and he could do nothing
except rage impotently at the thought of her iniquity, gnash his teeth
at that inexcusable foolishness of his past life which had made him her
slave.
Her slave? No, not her slave; that he would never be. Her victim,
perhaps, yes. She might blast his hopes in their fulness; she might
ruin his life; but she should never bend his neck to the yoke.
"Her money, her influence, my position as her husband! Are those the
baits with which she tempts me to her net?" he said to himself. "How
little she knows me! how little she knows the value of a true woman
when weighed against a false one! My true love is more to me than an
empress. Millions would not buy my allegiance to her."
He went to the inn stables where Glencoe was at livery, and saddled the
powerful beast with his own hands, in his eagerness to be on the way to
Bodmin. Glencoe had enjoyed a day of leisure and meditation in a very
dark stable, and he left the little village of Trevena in a series of
buck-jumps, arching his vigorous back and sniffing the ground with his
quivering nostrils, shying ferociously at every stray pig, and standing
up on end at the vision of a donkey, until the corrective influence of
the spur brought him to a better state of mind, whereupon he collected
himself, and settled into a grand rhythmical trot.
The hunter was white with dust and foam by the time Bothwell rode him
into the stable-yard at The Spaniards, where nothing but disappointment
awaited him. He heard that Miss Heathcote had left home early on the
previous morning. One of the lads had taken her portmanteau to Bodmin
Road, and she had walked there alone, in time for the eight-o'clock
train for Plymouth. She had taken a ticket for Plymouth, the boy
believed. Mr. Heathcote had not yet returned from France. There was
nobody at home except Miss Meyerstein and the little girls.
Bothwell asked to see Miss Meyerstein, and was shown into the
drawing-room, where that worthy woman soon came to him, full of
trepidation. Her eyelids were swollen with weeping, and her cheeks were
pallid with care.
"Mr. Heathcote may think it my fault," she said. "I have telegraphed to
him; but there has been no answer yet."
"Do you know where Miss Heathcote was going when she left this house?"
"I haven't the faintest idea. All I know is what the boy told me. I
have tried to make the best of things to the servants, for I don't want
them to suppose that Hilda was running away; but they must have their
own ideas about it, knowing as they do that she was going to be married
next Tuesday."
"Never mind the servants," said Bothwell impatiently. "Let them think
what they please. But have you no idea where she would be likely to
go--to what friend, in what direction? She cannot have so many friends
from whom to choose in such a crisis. She would go to the house where
she was most sure of a welcome, where she would know that her secret
would be kept. What friends has she in Plymouth?"
"None. She never went to Plymouth except for shopping, sight-seeing,
concerts, or something in that way, with her brother, or with me. She
knows no one in Plymouth except her old singing mistress."
"She may have gone to her," said Bothwell eagerly.
"Hardly likely. Mdlle. Duprez lives in two rooms. Hilda would scarcely
ask for hospitality there."
"I don't know. She is very fond of Mdlle. Duprez. I have heard her
say so. That is a clue, at any rate. I shall go to Mdlle. Duprez this
afternoon. I must walk across to Penmorval and see my cousin first. She
may know more of Hilda's plans than you do."
"That is very likely. Mrs. Wyllard is Hilda's most intimate friend."
"There was a lady came to call upon Miss Heathcote a few days ago,"
said Bothwell. "Did you happen to see that lady?"
"I did not," answered the Fräulein, looking at him curiously. "Yet
I can but think that lady had something to do with Hilda's strange
conduct. She is an old friend of yours, I believe--Lady Valeria
Harborough."
"Yes, I have known her for some years. Was she long with Hilda?"
"She was closeted with her for at least an hour, and from that time to
this I have not seen Hilda's face. She went to her room soon after Lady
Valeria left. She excused herself from appearing at dinner on account
of a headache, and when I went to her door later in the evening she
refused to let me in, and I could hear from her voice that she had been
crying. I went to her room again at seven o'clock next morning, for my
mind had been uneasy about her all night; but she was gone. I found two
letters, one for Mr. Heathcote, and one for me."
"Would you be kind enough to show me the letter she wrote to you?"
The Fräulein reflected for a few moments, being an eminently cautious
person, and then produced Hilda's note from her pocket-book.
"I do not think there can be any harm in showing it to you," she said.
"There is so little in it."
The letter ran thus:
"Dear Fräulein,--Do not be alarmed at my disappearance. I
have good and sound reasons for cancelling my engagement
with Mr. Grahame--not because of any wrong act upon his
part, but for motives of my own; and I have decided upon
leaving home for some time, as the best way of getting
over the difficulty. Pray let no fuss be made about this
sudden change in my plans. Very few of our neighbours
knew anything about the intended marriage; so I hope
there will be less talk than there usually is under such
circumstances. You need have no uneasiness about me,
as I am going to act under the advice of a clever and
experienced friend, and I mean to be quite happy in my
own way, amidst new surroundings, and to carry out an
old desire of my heart. You shall hear of me directly I
feel myself at liberty to tell you more.--Always lovingly
yours, HILDA."
"An old desire of her heart," said Bothwell slowly, staring at the
letter, with the keenest mortification expressed in his countenance.
That cheerfulness which Hilda had assumed in her letter to the
governess smote her lover to the heart. A man's mind is not subtle
enough to cope with the subtleties of a woman's conduct. Hilda's chief
aim in writing that letter had been to hoodwink the Fräulein, to
satisfy her with the assurance that she, Hilda, was going away from
home in tranquil spirits and with hopeful views of the future. Bothwell
saw in this cheery letter the evidence of a stony heart, a heart that
had never loved him.
"'An old desire of her heart,'" he repeated, with a helpless air. "What
can that mean?"
"I haven't a notion," replied the Fräulein, reflecting his helplessness
upon her own commonplace countenance, "unless it were that she has
an idea of going on the stage. So many girls are mad about the
stage nowadays. And Hilda is so pretty. I know when we had private
theatricals here last Christmas for the twins' juvenile party,
everybody was in raptures with Hilda's acting. People told her she
would make a great sensation if she were to appear in London."
"People are a parcel of idiots!" cried Bothwell savagely. "Yes, I
remember the theatricals. I was at the party, you know; and there was
a cub who made love to Hilda. Yes, I remember."
The cub in question was the eldest son of a neighbouring landowner, and
heir to a fine estate; but Bothwell had looked on the innocent lad with
abhorrence, even in those early days when his own attachment to Hilda
had been in its dawn.
"No, she would not think of going on the stage," said Bothwell, after
a pause, during which he had paced up and down the room two or three
times in an agitated way; "that is impossible. She would not be mad
enough for that. There must be something else. The desire of her heart.
What can it mean?"
The Fräulein could not offer any suggestion, except that idea of the
stage. "She is so passionately fond of Shakespeare," she said. "I have
heard her recite the whole of Juliet and Portia without faltering. She
has such a memory. I shouldn't be surprised if she were to come out as
Juliet at Covent Garden next week."
Miss Meyerstein's sole knowledge of the London stage was derived from
biographies of the Kembles and their contemporaries. She believed
in the two patent theatres as existing facts; and she thought that
Shakespearean _débutantes_ were appearing and taking the town by storm
periodically all the year round.
"I must go to Plymouth by the five-o'clock train," said Bothwell
hurriedly. "Will you kindly let my horse stay in your stables and be
looked after till to-morrow morning, Miss Meyerstein? I rode him over
here at a rather unmerciful rate, and he'll be all the better for a
rest. I shall walk to Penmorval, and get myself driven from there to
the station. Good-bye."
He had gone before the Fräulein could answer him; but that good-natured
person rang the bell and requested that Mr. Grahame's horse might be
taken care of for the night, and that anything he required might be
given to him.
Bothwell found his cousin full of sympathy, but was unable to give
him any advice or assistance, as Miss Meyerstein had been. To Dora he
opened his heart fully, showing her Hilda's letter, and breaking out
every now and then into angry denunciations of Lady Valeria.
"Hush, Bothwell, don't be so violent," pleaded Dora, putting her hand
to his lips. "I agree with you that it was a wicked thing for Lady
Valeria to do--to put forward her own weakness in the past and your
wrong-doing as a claim upon you in the present. I can understand poor
Hilda's conduct. She was only too ready to believe that you must
naturally care more for Lady Valeria than for her."
"Help me to find her, Dora. That is all I want. I will soon teach her
which it is I love best. But I don't believe she really cared for me.
She had some other fancy--some other dream."
"No, Bothwell, no."
"I have seen it in her own handwriting," said Bothwell moodily; and
then he told his cousin of that letter which Hilda had written to the
Fräulein, and that curious phrase about an old desire of her heart.