"ALIKE IS HELL, OR PARADISE, OR HEAVEN."
It was the despairing cry of a woman's breaking heart that came with
that low wailing sound from the curtained doorway. Dora had been
told of Heathcote's arrival, and had hurried from her dressing-room
on the further side of the bedchamber. She had reached the threshold
of the morning-room in time to hear Heathcote pronounce the dreadful
word "Murder," and she had heard all that followed. She had heard her
husband's proclaim himself triply an assassin.
"It is my wife's voice," said Wyllard quietly. "You knew that she was
there, perhaps. You wanted her to hear."
"I did not know she was there; but it would have been my duty to tell
her all I have discovered. She has lived under a delusion; she has
lived under the spell of your consummate hypocrisy. It is only right
that she should know the truth. Thank God, she has heard it from your
own lips."
"You have not forgotten the day when we were rivals for her love," said
Wyllard, with a diabolical sneer. "I won the race, heavily handicapped;
and now your turn has come. You have your revenge."
Heathcote was silent. His eyes were fixed upon the figure which
appeared against the glowing darkness of the plush curtain, and
came slowly, totteringly forward to Wyllard's couch, and sank in a
heap beside it. The white, set face, with its look of agony, the
widely-opened eyes, pale with horror, haunted him for long after that
awful hour. It was he who had brought this agony upon her, he who had
unearthed the buried skeleton, he who, going forth from that house to
do her bidding, her true knight, her champion, her servant, had come
back as the messenger of doom. Was he to blame that Fate had imposed
this hateful task upon him? He told himself that he was blameless; but
that she would never forgive.
"I congratulate you upon your perseverance and your success," said
Wyllard, after a pause. "You have succeeded where all the police of
Paris had failed. Was it love for my wife, or hatred for me, that stood
in the place of training and experience?"
"It was neither. It was the hand of Fate, the mysterious guiding of
Providence, which took me from stage to stage of that horrible story."
"And it was my wife--my redeeming angel--who sent you forth upon your
mission, who appealed to your love of the past as a claim on your
devotion in the present. There is the irony of Fate in that part of the
business," said Wyllard mockingly.
He had always hated Edward Heathcote; he had hated him even in the hour
of his own triumph as Dora's accepted lover; hated him because he had
once possessed Dora's love, but most of all because he had been worthy
of it.
Julian Wyllard's head leaned forward upon his folded arms, and for some
minutes there was silence in the room, save for the sound of suppressed
sobbing from that kneeling figure by the sick man's couch. The face of
the husband and the face of the wife were alike hidden. Dora's head
had fallen across her husband's knees, her hands were clasped above the
dark coils of her hair, in the self-abandonment of her agony.
Heathcote stood a little way off, feeling as if he were in the presence
of the dead. The mystery of those two hidden faces oppressed him. He
almost hated himself for this thing which he had done. He felt like
an executioner--a man from whom the stern necessity of his craft had
exacted a revolting service.
"Julian, is this true?" murmured Dora, after a long silence. "Is all or
any part of this dreadful story true?"
Her husband looked up suddenly, as if vivified by the sound of her
voice.
"What would you think of me if it were all or any of it true?" he asked
hoarsely. "Look up, Dora. Let me see your eyes as you answer me. I want
to know how I am to stand henceforth in the sight of the woman who once
loved me."
She lifted her head, and turned her deathlike face towards him,
tearless, but with a look of anguish deeper than he had ever seen
before on any human countenance.
That other look, that last look of Léonie Lemarque's, which had haunted
him waking or sleeping ever since the 5th of July, had been a look of
horrified surprise. But here there was the quiet anguish of a broken
heart.
"Who once loved you," she echoed. "Do you think such love as mine can
be thrown off like an old gown? Tell me the truth, Julian--it can make
no difference to my love."
Wyllard remained for some moments gazing dreamily at the low wood fire
opposite his couch, silent, as if looking into the pages of the past.
"Yes, your story is put together very cleverly," he said, "and it is
for the most part true. Yes, I am the murderer of Marie Prévol. I am
that jealous devil, who in an access of fury destroyed the life that
was dearer than his own. It was not that I believed her guilty. No, it
was the agonising knowledge that her love had gone from me, in spite of
herself--had gone to that younger, brighter, more fascinating lover.
I saw the gradual working of the change--saw coldness, dislike even,
creeping over her who had once tenderly rewarded my love--saw that
my coming was unwelcome, my departure a relief. She, who of old had
followed me to the threshold, had hung upon me with sweetest caresses
at the moment of parting, now could scarcely conceal her indifference,
her growing aversion. I saw all this, and Satan took hold of me. Again
and again I was on the verge of unpremeditated murder. My eyes grew
dim, veiled by a cloud of blood; but I held my hand before the deed
was done. I have had my grip upon her throat--that milk-white throat,
which was purer of tint and lovelier of form than that of the Louvre
Venus. I have seen the pleading eyes looking into mine, asking me for
mercy, and I have fallen at her feet and sobbed like a child. But
there came a time when this sullen devil of jealousy and hatred took
a firmer hold of me, and then I swore to myself that they should both
die. There was no help, no other cure. If she lived, she would leave
me for Maucroix. She, the wife I had honoured, would sink into the
mistress of a fop and a fribble, to be cast off when his fancy staled.
I knew that was inevitable, so I made up my mind, all of a sudden,
when I got wind of her intended jaunt to Saint-Germain, from the spy I
had employed to watch her. I put my revolver in my pocket, and followed
her to the station, disguised by a pair of dark spectacles and a style
of dress in which she had never seen me. I stood by the doorway of the
waiting-room, and saw her sitting side by side with her favoured lover,
they two as happy and as absorbed in each other as children at play in
a garden. You know all the rest. Yes, it was I who watched in front of
the Henri Quatre, saw those two laughing together in the candle-light:
it was I who sprang out of the thicket in the forest and shot them
down, one after the other, left them lying there side by side, dead.
I had a strange wild feeling of happiness as I rushed away into the
depths of the wood--a sense of triumph. I had won my love from her new
lover. She had been mine only; and she would be mine now until the end.
I had saved her from her own weakness--saved, her from the dishonour
which her folly must have made inevitable."
He paused for a few moments, but neither Dora nor Heathcote spoke, and
after the briefest silence he went on with his confession.
"I never meant to survive my victims, except just so long as would be
necessary to put my affairs in order, and to transfer my securities
to England, where those of my own flesh and blood might profit by my
fortune. In order to do this I got quietly back to Paris, and began to
take up the threads of my business life with a view to closing the book
for ever. You know enough of my character and my history to understand
that I have always had perfect command over my emotions, and you will
therefore believe that I was able to go about my daily business, to mix
with my fellow-men, with as serene a manner and countenance as if not
a ripple of passion had crossed the stagnant surface of my plodding
nature. I had so trained myself that the man of passion and emotions
was one being, and the man of business another, a creature totally
apart. And now, for a while at least, the man of feeling was dead and
buried, and only the money-making automaton remained.
"It happened at that time that a cloud of disaster swept over the Paris
Bourse. Had I wound up my affairs at that period, I should have been
a heavy loser; and I, to whom the science of finance was a passion,
could not submit to losses which I knew how to avoid. So I delayed the
settlement of my affairs, and even allowed myself to be tempted into
fresh enterprises. Yet scarcely a night passed on which I did not look
at my pistols before I lay down to rest, and long for the time when I
should feel myself free to end my miserable life."
"And in those days you went frequently to the cemetery, to place your
tribute of roses on your victim's grave," said Heathcote.
"It was the only mark of affection I could show to the woman my love
had killed," answered Wyllard; "the only token of respect for my wife."
"Your wife?" exclaimed the other. "Then Barbe Girot was right in her
supposition. You loved Marie Prévol well enough to marry her."
"I loved her too well to degrade her," answered Wyllard. "It was
in the flood-tide of my financial success, when I was almost drunk
with fortune, and had not one thought above money-making, that Marie
Prévol's face awakened me to a new life. That lovely face--so like
yours, Dora--yes, it was the likeness to my good angel of the past
that drew me to you, my good angel of the present, my comforter, my
better-self. O, but for that second unpremeditated crime, the evil work
of a moment's savage passion, I might have gone down to the grave in
peace, believing that I had expiated that first murder, atoned for that
double bloodshed by the agonies that had gone before and after it. But
that last crime wrecked me. It revealed the blackness of my diabolical
nature--a nature in which the evil is inherent, the good only the
effect of education and surroundings.
"Yes, she was my wife, and I gave her all honour and reverence due
to a wife: though it was my caprice, my false pride perhaps, to keep
my relations with her a profound secret. I had won my reputation in
Paris as the stolid, unemotional Englishman; a man of iron, a creature
without passions or human weaknesses, a calculating machine. It was
this reputation which had helped most of all to bring me wealth. To be
known all at once as the lover and the husband of a beautiful actress
would have been social, and might have been financial, ruin. The men
who had trusted me with their money to stake on the speculator's wheel
of fortune would have withdrawn their confidence. I should have been
left to fight single-handed on my own capital, and my own capital,
large as it was by this time, was not large enough for my schemes.
The Crédit Mauresque was then in the front rank of public favour,
and it was generally considered that I was the Crédit Mauresque. Any
weakness on my part and the bubble would have burst. So I planned
for myself a dual existence. By day I was the cool-headed financier;
but when the stars were high and the lamps lighted I was Georges,
the American-Parisian, the Eccentric and Bohemian--the friend and
entertainer of a little band of choice spirits, journalists, musicians,
painters--the lover, husband, slave of Marie Prévol. Ah, Dora, for the
first two years of that midnight life there was compensation in it for
all the restraints of the day, for the anxiety, the fever, the fret of
a speculator's hazardous career.
"Yes, she was my wife. I married her in a village church in the Lake
country; a quiet little church half hidden among the hills which
encircle Derwentwater--a sweet spot. Do you remember once asking me
to take you to the English Lakes, Dora? I had to invent an excuse for
refusing. I could not revisit those scenes, even with you."
Again there was silence, broken only by the sound of Dora's weeping.
She was still on her knees beside her husband's couch; her hand still
clasped his. Not all the horror that had been revealed to her could
change her love to hate or scorn. Deepest pity filled her breast.
She, to whose nature deeds of violence were altogether alien, could
yet enter into and sympathise with the feelings of this sinner, whose
fatal passions had sunk him in an abyss of crime. She pitied him, and
clung to him, ready with words of comfort whenever such words might
be spoken. Even in her silence the very touch of her hand told of
consolation and of pity.
"I married my love in that quiet village church--married her under my
assumed name of Gustave Georges; but the marriage was sound enough in
law, and for me it meant a life-long bond. I had found Marie Prévol
pure and innocent in the tainted atmosphere of a Parisian theatre,
a creature incapable of guile. I honoured her for that innate purity
which was independent of surroundings and circumstances, which had
passed unscathed through the fiery-furnace of Bohemian Paris. The
first years of our wedded life were full of happiness, steeped in a
love which knew no change or diminution. My darling seemed to me, day
by day, more adorable, and it may be that the secrecy of my double
life, the long hours of severance, the narrow circle in which Marie
and I lived when we were together--it may be that these circumstances,
and the strangeness of our relations, intensified my passion, lending
to our wedded bliss all the charm of mystery and romance. Ah, how
sweet were our brief holidays at Biarritz or Pau, our wanderings in
picturesque old Spain, far away from the beaten tracks, choosing mostly
those places to which the world did not go! So far as it went, that
life of ours was a perfect life; and I was fool enough to think that it
would last for ever."
He sighed, and sank for some moments into a dreamy silence, his eyes
fixed in a vision of that past existence.
"My wife had an intense delight in the theatre, and her successes
there. She was never a famous actress; but her beauty had made her the
rage. She had a birdlike soprano voice, and a bewitching manner. She
was one of those adorable actresses who enchant their audience without
ever losing their own individuality. She was always Marie Prévol;
but the public wanted her to be nothing else. As I kept her entirely
secluded from society for my own reasons, I could not deny her the
pleasure of pursuing her profession. It pleased her to earn a handsome
salary, to know that she was not entirely dependent on me, to be able
to help her mother, who was a harpy, continually taking money from me.
So she remained on the stage, to my destruction; for it was there that
Maucroix saw her; and it was because she was an actress that he dared
to pursue her with attentions which she at first repulsed, but which
she afterwards encouraged.
"No, Dora, I will not dwell upon that hideous time, those days and
nights of madness and despair. I saw her love going from me. I saw
the subtle change from affection to indifference, from indifference
to fear, from fear to disgust, and then to horror. She was kind to me
still, from a sense of duty, meek, obedient, a gentle yielding wife.
But I saw her shiver at my approach; I felt her hand grow cold in mine;
I found repulsion instead of warm confiding love. Nor was I allowed
long to remain in ignorance as to the cause of the change. A kind
friend of mine was also an acquaintance of Maucroix. He informed me of
the young man's passion for Marie, of his having sworn to win her at
any cost--yes, even at the cost of the coronet which he had the power
to bestow upon her. He was independent, rich, able to do as he liked
with his life. He was one of the handsomest young men in Paris, and
was said to be the most fascinating. And I was a hard-headed man of
business, anxious, brain-weary, long past the flush of hopeful youth.
Could I wonder that Marie turned from me to her young adorer? I gave
her all credit for having struggled against her infatuation, for having
been true to her duty as a wife even to the last; but she had ceased
to love me, and the day was at hand when the barriers would be broken,
when that impassioned woman's heart of hers, that fond impulsive
nature, whose every pulse I knew, would yield at a breath, and she whom
I worshipped would fall to blackest depths of sin.
"Then, like Othello, I called this deed which I had to do, a sacrifice,
and not a murder.
"You have heard the story of my crime from the lips of your friend
here. He has unravelled the tangled skein with a wonderful ingenuity.
Yes, it was I who laid those roses on my victim's grave. I stayed in
Paris long enough to save appearances, the man Georges being supposed
to have fled to the utmost ends of the earth. I went about among my
fellow-men on the Bourse and in the clubs, and heard them discuss
the murder of Marie Prévol. Once I was told, by a man who had met me
as Georges, of my likeness to the supposed murderer; but those few
chosen friends who had known me as Georges were not men to be met on
the Bourse or in financial circles, and I had always eschewed mixed
society. My identity with the murderer was never suspected. I saved my
fortune, wound up my affairs, and left Paris, as I thought for ever,
went forth from that accursed city as I would have gone out of hell.
I came back to England with the brand of Cain, not upon my brow, but
upon my heart. I wandered in a purposeless fashion from place to place,
possessed of a restless devil. I had my office in London, where I tried
to find a distraction in the excitement of speculation, the financial
strategy which had once been my delight. Vain the effort. I was no
happier in London than I had been in Paris, within a few minutes walk
of the house that had sheltered my wife, the secret home in which I had
been so happy.
"Haunted always by the same dark thoughts, seeing only one image
amidst every change of surroundings, I came at last to this fag-end
of England. The rugged scenery, the wild coast-line, the sparsely
populated moors and fells pleased me better than anything I had
seen on this side of the Channel. The landscape harmonised with my
melancholy thoughts, and exercised a soothing influence upon my mind.
I became more reconciled to my life. Conscience, as you, Dora, or you,
Heathcote, may accept the word, had troubled me but little. I had
exercised what I held to be my right--my right to slay the woman who
had broken my heart, the man who had spoiled my life. I was oppressed
by no particular horror at the thought of blood-guiltiness. The agony
from which I suffered was the loss of Marie's love, the loss of the
woman who had once filled my life with happiness.
"I took kindly to your native soil, Dora. It might be a foreshadowing
of the love which was to gladden my latter days. My mind grew clearer,
the burden seemed to be lifted from me. And then in a happy hour I met
_you_.
"Do you remember that first meeting, Dora?"
"Yes, I remember," she said softly, her head drooping upon her
husband's pillow, her face hidden, an attitude of mourning, like a
marble figure bending over a funeral urn.
"It was in the picture-gallery at Tregony Manor. I had been taken there
as a stranger by the Rector of the parish, to see a famous Wouvermans.
Your mother received me in the friendliest spirit; and while we were
talking about her pictures you appeared at the other end of the
gallery, a girlish figure in a white gown, carrying your garden-hat in
your hand, surprised at seeing a stranger."
"I remember how you started, how oddly you looked at me," murmured his
wife.
"I was looking at a face out of the grave--the face of Marie Prévol;
younger, fresher, but not more innocent in its stainless beauty than
Marie's face when I first knew her. The likeness is but a vague one,
perhaps--a look, an air; but to me at that moment it struck home. My
heart went out to you at once. If my murdered wife had come back to me
in some angelic form, had offered me peace, and pardon, and the renewal
of love, I could not have surrendered myself more completely to that
superhuman bliss than I surrendered myself to you. I loved you from the
first, and swore to myself that you should be mine. I do not think I
used any dishonourable arts in order to win you."
"You knew that she was the betrothed of another man, knew that your
hands were stained with blood," said Heathcote, with suppressed
indignation. "Was there no dishonour in tempting a pure-minded girl
with your love? You, whose heart must be as a charnel-house!"
"I had put every thought of that dark past behind me before I entered
Tregony Manor. Was I a different man, do you think, because in one
dark hour of my life I had sinned against the law of civilised
society, and revenged my own wrongs according to the universal law
of unsophisticated mankind? I loved my new love not the less dearly
because of that crime. I loved her as women are not often loved. Dora,
speak to me; tell me if I have ever failed in any duty which a husband
owes to an idolised wife. Have I ever been false to the promises of our
betrothal?"
"Never; never, my beloved," murmured the low mournful voice.
"We might have lived happily to the end, perhaps, had Fate been kinder.
I had my dark dreams now and again, acted over my past crime, my old
agonies, in the helplessness of slumber; but this was only a transient
evil. My darling's influence could always soothe and restore me, even
in the darkest hour. All went well with me--better, perhaps, than life
goes with many a better man--until the fatal hour when I received a
letter from Marie Prévol's mother, written on her death-bed, asking me
to find a home in England for her orphan granddaughter, the child I had
heard of in the Rue Lafitte, and who had occasionally stayed there as
Marie's pet and plaything, but whom I had avoided at all times.
"I answered the letter promptly, in my character of a friend of
the missing Georges. It was in this character that I had contrived
from time to time to send money for the relief of Madame Lemarque's
necessities. I sent money to bring the girl to London, and arranged to
meet her at the railway-station. That was when I went ostensibly to buy
the famous Raffaelle, Dora. I was somewhat uncertain as to my plans for
the girl's future; but I meant kindly by her; I had no thought but of
being kind to her. If she should prove an amiable girl, with pleasing
manners, my idea was to bring her to this neighbourhood, to get her
placed as a nursery governess somewhere within my ken, to introduce her
to you, and to secure your kindness and protection for her. I had paid
for her education at a convent in Brittany; and I had been assured that
she left the convent with an excellent character. She was the only link
remaining with the terrible past, the only witness of my crime; but I
had been told that after her illness all memory of that crime had left
her. I had been assured that I should run no risk in having her about
me."
"Poor child," said Dora, with a stifled sob, recalling that summer
evening when Julian Wyllard came out of the station, a little paler
than usual, but self-possessed and calm, telling her in measured tones
of the calamity upon the line--the strange death of a nameless girl.
"I met her at Charing Cross in the early summer morning," he continued
quietly. "She was flurried and frightened--so frightened by the strange
faces and the strange language round about her, that she forgot to tell
me of the bag she had deposited in the waiting-room. But I succeeded in
putting her at her ease; and while she was taking breakfast with me in
a private room at the hotel, she told me all about her grandmother's
death, and her own education in the convent; what she could do in the
way of teaching. She was frank and gentle, and seemed a good girl, and
I had no thought but to do the utmost for her advantage. I could have
pensioned her and made her independent of all service; but I considered
that for a friendless girl there could be no better discipline than
the necessity of earning a living under reputable circumstances, and
protected by powerful friends.
"We drove together to Paddington--as your cabman informed you,"
continued Wyllard, addressing himself for an instant to Heathcote, whom
he for the most part ignored. "At Paddington I took a second-class
ticket for Plymouth, not quite resolved as to whether I should take
the girl on at once to Bodmin, or leave her in the care of the wife
of my frame-maker at Plymouth, an honest creature, who would, I knew,
be faithful to any trust I reposed in her. I put my _protégée_ in a
second-class carriage, in the care of some friendly people, and I rode
alone in a first-class compartment. I wanted to be free to think out
the situation, to decide on my line of conduct. I knew that she had
a packet of my letters--my early letters to Marie Prévol, written
without reserve, out of the fulness of my heart--letters identifying me
with the man Georges. It was vital that I should get these letters from
her before she left the railway-carriage. Yet, with a curious weakness,
I delayed making the attempt till we came to Plymouth. There would be
fewer people in the carriages then, I thought. It would be easier for
me to be alone with Léonie. I had by this time decided upon taking her
on to Bodmin, and finding her a temporary home in my steward's family.
"At Plymouth I left my own compartment, intending to go straight to
the second-class carriage in which I had placed Léonie: but on the
platform I was met by people I knew, who detained me in conversation
till the train was within two minutes of starting. While I was talking
to these people I saw Léonie wandering up and down the platform in an
aimless way, perhaps looking for me. I had told her that I would let
her know when she had come to the end of her journey, and now she was
mystified by the delay, and feared that I had forgotten her. About one
minute before the starting of the train I escaped from my troublesome
friends, and got into an empty second-class, into which I beckoned
Léonie as she came along the platform.
"We crossed the bridge and came into Cornwall; and now there was but
the shortest time for me to explain my views as to the girl's future,
and to get from her those fatal letters, which told the history of my
love for Marie Prévol, my double life as her husband, and which, by the
evidence of my own handwriting, identified me with her murderer. I was
determined that Léonie should not leave the train with that packet in
her possession, but I anticipated no difficulty in getting it from her.
"I told her my views, promised her that I would be to her as a guardian
and friend, so long as she should deserve my protection, assured her
that the happiness and prosperity of her future life were contingent
only on her good conduct. And then I asked her for the packet which
Madame Lemarque had told her to deliver to me. But to my astonishment
she refused to give it to me. Her grandmother had told her that she
was never to part with those letters. She was to keep the packet
unopened so long as I was kind to her, so long as she was protected by
my care; but if at any time I withdrew my help from her, and she was
in difficulty or want, she was then to open the packet and read the
letters. Her own good sense would tell her how to act when she had read
them. In a word, the letters were to remain in this girl's possession
as a sword to hang over my head.
"I tried to make the girl understand the infamy of such a line of
conduct--tried to make her see that her grandmother had schooled her in
the vilest form of _chantage_. 'You see me willing to help you freely,
generously, for the sake of an old friend,' I said; 'and surely you
would not use these letters as a lever to extort money from me.' All my
arguments were useless. The discipline of the convent had taught the
girl blind and implicit obedience to priests and parents. She would not
consider anything except the fact that certain instructions had been
given to her by her dying grandmother, and that her duty was to obey
those instructions.
"I was patient at the beginning; but the unhappy creature's dogged
resistance made my blood boil. Passion got the better of me. I caught
her by the shoulder with one hand, while I snatched the packet from
her feeble grasp with the other. I was beside myself with rage. While
I bent over her, holding her as in a vice, she gave a sudden shriek, a
shriek of horrified surprise.
"'The face in the wood,' she cried, 'the murderer! the murderer!'
"My hand relaxed its grip; she broke from me, and dashed open the
door of the carriage. 'I will tell people what you are!' she gasped,
breathless with fury. 'You shall not escape. Yes, I remember your face
now--the face I saw in my dreams--the savage face in the wood.'
"She was on the footboard, clinging to the iron by the window,
muttering to herself like a mad thing. God alone knows what she
meant to do. She wanted to make my crime known, to bring the train
to a standstill, to have me arrested then and there. While she stood
wavering on that narrow ledge, her life hanging by a thread, the train
rounded the curve and passed on to the viaduct. The stony gorge was
below, deep and narrow, like an open grave--tempting me--tempting me
as Satan tempts his own. One sudden movement of my arm, and all was
over. I had held her, for the first few moments. I had tried to save
her. Had she been reasonable, I would have saved her. But there was
no middle course. Ruin, unutterable ruin for me, or death for her.
One motion of my arm, and she was gone. Light as a feather, the frail
little figure fluttered down the gorge. Another minute, and the train
stopped. I had my railway-key ready before the stoppage, and did not
lose an instant in getting along the off-side of the line back to the
compartment I had left. Every head without exception was turned towards
the side on which the girl had fallen. The only witness of my crime
had been destroyed, and my letters were safe in my own keeping, to be
burned at the earliest opportunity."
"You burned them that night," said Dora. "I remember. And that tress of
hair which you were looking at when I went into the library--"
"Was cut from Marie's head after death. The mother had placed it
amongst those fatal letters. That night, after an interval of years, I
touched the soft bright hair on which my hand had so often lingered in
adoring love--that lovely hair which my hand had stained with blood."
There was no more to be told. An awful silence followed, a silence in
which even Dora's sobs no longer sounded. There was a tearless agony
which was deeper than that passion of tears.
She rose from her knees and turned towards Heathcote, white to the
lips, icy cold, looking at him as if he had been a stranger, and as if
she expected no more mercy from him than from a stranger.
"What are you going to do?" she asked. "You have come here alone; but
perhaps there are people waiting outside--policemen, to take my husband
to prison. He cannot run away from them; your victim is quite helpless."
"My victim? O Dora, how cruel that sounds from you!"
"Yes, I know," she said hurriedly. "I asked you to find out the mystery
of that murder, and you have obeyed me. My husband--my husband an
assassin!" she cried, flinging her clasped hands above her head in an
access of despair; "my husband, whom I believed in as the noblest and
best of men. He was tempted to blackest sin--tempted by the madness
of jealousy, wrought upon afterwards by a sudden panic. He was not a
despicable sinner--not like the man who poisons his friend, or who
kills the helpless for the sake of money. It was an ungovernable
passion which wrecked him--it was a fatal love which led him to crime.
Heathcote," falling at his feet with a wild cry of appeal, "have mercy
on him; for my sake, have mercy. Think of his helplessness. Remember
how low he has been brought already--how heavily God's hand has been
laid upon him. Have mercy."
Heathcote lifted her from her knees, as he had done once before in his
life, when she pleaded to him for pardon for her own falsehood.
"I would not hurt a snake if you loved it, Dora," he said. "Neither you
nor your husband have anything to fear from me. Parisian juries are
very merciful; but I will not submit Mr. Wyllard to the inconvenience
of a trial. As for the episode upon the railway--we will try to
think _that_ an accident, an unlucky impulse, unpremeditated, falling
considerably short of murder. No, Dora, I do not intend to deliver
up your husband to the law. The one person who has the highest right
to cry for vengeance has learnt the sublimity of submission to the
Divine Will. I have seen the widowed mother of Maxime de Maucroix; and
from her lips I have heard the reproof of my own revengeful feelings.
But although I am content to be silent, it would be well for Julian
Wyllard, when he shall feel the hand of death upon him, to write
the admission of his guilt; since that alone can thoroughly clear
your cousin Bothwell before his fellow-men. So dark a suspicion once
engendered may hang over a man for a lifetime."
"I will bear in mind your thoughtful suggestion," said Wyllard. "I
thank you, Heathcote, for your mercy to a fallen foe. A wretch so
abject, so smitten by the hand of Fate, would be too mean a creature
for your revenge. You are not like the noble Achilles, and would hardly
care to drag a corpse at your chariot-wheel, and wreak your rage upon
impotence. The play is played out, the lights are down. Let the curtain
fall in decency and silence. For _her_ sake be merciful."
"Make your peace with your offended God, if you can," answered
Heathcote. "You have nothing to fear from me."
He moved slowly towards the door, and at the last turned and held out
his hand to Dora. She hesitated for an instant, looking at her husband.
"Give him your hand, Dora," said Wyllard. "I can bear to see you
clasp hands with the man who has read the riddle of Léonie Lemarque's
death. I have come to a stage at which life and death make but little
difference to me, and even shame is dead. Give him your hand. You may
need his friendship and protection some day when I am under ground,
and when people look at you with a morbid interest, as the murderer's
widow. It will be wise to shuffle off my tainted name as soon as you
decently can. Change it for a better name, Dora."
"Julian, how can you be so cruel?"
She was by his side again, with her hand in his, forgetful of all
things except her love for him, her pity for his pain. All her natural
horror at his guilt was not strong enough to extinguish her love,
or to lessen her compassion. As she had pitied him for his physical
infirmity, so she now pitied him for his mental infirmity--a mind
swayed to crime by undisciplined passions.
Heathcote left the room without another word. He had come there as the
messenger of Fate. He had no further business in that house.
He had heard from the butler that Sir William Spencer and the local
physician had been in consultation together that afternoon, and that
the man had gathered from their talk as they left the house that Mr.
Wyllard's illness was likely to end fatally, sooner than Sir William
had at first supposed.
"Give me my sleeping draught, and then go, Dora," said Wyllard, when he
and his wife were alone.
She prepared to obey him. The nurse was taking her rest at this hour,
and it was the wife's privilege to attend upon her husband. The morphia
sleeping draughts had been administered with rigid care, Dora herself
watching the allotment of every bottle, lest the unhappy sufferer
should be tempted to take an overdose and end the tragedy of pain.
Once, when she had betrayed her anxiety by a word spoken unawares,
she had seen a curious smile upon her husband's pale lips, a smile
that told her he had read her thoughts; and now she felt the peril of
suicide was a much nearer dread. What had he to live for now--he who
stood confessed a murderer, before the wife who had revered him?
The sleeping draughts had been sent in from the local doctor, half a
dozen at a time, the patient taking two and sometimes three in the
course of the day and night. Dora kept them under lock and key in
the cabinet, where she kept her drawing materials, an old tulip-wood
cabinet of Dutch inlaid work that stood in a corner of the room, at
some distance from the sick man's sofa.
On the table by his side stood his dressing-case, with its glittering
array of silver-gilt-topped bottles--eau de cologne, toilet vinegar,
sal volatile. His medicine glass was on the same table.
And now, while Dora stood with her face towards the cabinet, Wyllard's
crippled hands were busied with one of those bottles in the
dressing-case. With a wonderful swiftness and dexterity, taking into
account the condition of his hands, he drew out one of the smallest
bottles in the case, and unscrewed the stopper. The bottle contained
about half an ounce of a clear white liquid.
Wyllard poured this liquid into a glass, which he held ready for Dora
when she brought him the sleeping draught. The colourless liquid would
have hardly showed in the bottom of the glass under any circumstances,
but Wyllard was careful to screen it with his hand.
Dora poured out the sleeping draught, looking at him all the while in
saddest silence. What could she say to him from whose familiar face the
mask had fallen? The husband she had loved and honoured was lost to
her for ever. The helpless wretch lying there was a stranger to her; a
sinner so begrimed with sin that only the infinite compassion of woman
could behold him without loathing.
"I drink this to your future happiness, Dora," he said solemnly, "and
remember that at my last hour I blessed you for your goodness to a
great sinner."
There was that in his tone which warned her of his purpose. She flung
out her arms, trying to seize the hand that held the glass, before he
could drink. But the table was between them, and the glass was at his
lips when he finished speaking. He drained it to the last drop, gave
one long sigh, and fell back upon his pillow--dead.
* * * * *
"Hydrocyanic acid," said the local practitioner when he came to look
at the corpse, "and a happy release into the bargain. I should like to
have given him an overdose of morphia myself, if the law of the land
would have allowed me; or to have operated on the base of his brain
and killed him tenderly in the interests of science, just to find out
whether Cruveilhier or Virchow was right in his theorising as to the
seat of the malady. I go for Virchow, backed by Gull."