"SWEET IS DEATH FOR EVERMORE."
Dismal hours, dreary days of monotonous melancholy, a hopeless
lassitude of mind and body, followed for Julian Wyllard's widow after
that awful sudden death. Every one was very kind; every one was
considerate; even the law was more than usually indulgent. The horror
of an inquest was spared to that desolate mourner. Things were made
very easy by Sir William Spencer's recent visit, by the fact that he
had been heard by the servants to pronounce Mr. Wyllard's condition
hopeless. Mr. Nicholls, the local practitioner, registered the cause
of death as muscular atrophy, and considered himself justified in so
doing, as to his mind suicide had been only a symptom of the malady,
a paroxysm of despair following quickly upon Sir William Spencer's
admission that the end was inevitable.
"If ever a man had a right to take his own life, that man had," said
Mr. Nicholls, when he argued the matter with his own conscience.
An inquest would have done good to nobody; but Mr. Nicholls was very
anxious for a post-mortem. He wanted to see if the muscles were much
wasted, if the medulla itself showed traces of disease--whether
Cruveilhier or Virchow had the best of the argument. But he was not
allowed this privilege.
Those early stages of bereavement, while the house was darkened--that
sunless autumn day on which the funeral train wound slowly over the
moor to the distant burial-ground, the reading of the will, the coming
and going of friends and legal advisers, were as an evil dream to
Dora Wyllard. She took no part in anything. She affected no interest
in anything. Just at the last she was asked if she would not like to
lay her offering upon the coffin--one of those costly wreaths, those
snow-white crosses of fairest exotics, which had been sent in profusion
to the wealthy dead--and she had shrunk from the questioner with a
shudder.
"Flowers upon _that_ coffin? No, no, no!"
Yet at the last moment, when the dismal procession was leaving the
hall, she appeared suddenly in the midst of the mourners, pale as
the dead, and broke through the crowd, and placed her tribute on the
coffin-lid, a handful of wild violets gathered with her own hands in
the melancholy autumn shrubberies. She bent down and laid her face upon
the coffin. "I loved you once!" she moaned, "I loved you once!" And
then kind hands drew her away, half-fainting, and led her back to her
room.
The blow had quite unsettled poor Mrs. Wyllard's mind, people said
afterwards, recounting this episode, at second, third, or fourth hand.
No one was surprised when she left Penmorval within a week of the
funeral, and went on the Continent with her two old servants, Priscilla
and Stodden.
Heathcote and Bothwell had planned everything for her, both being
agreed that she must be taken away from the scene of her sorrow
as speedily as the thing could be done; and she had obeyed them
implicitly, unquestioningly, like a little child.
What could it matter where she went, or what became of her? That was
the thought in her own mind when she assented so meekly to every
arrangement that was being made for her welfare. What grief that
ever widowed heart had to bear could be equal to her agony? It was
not the loss of a husband she had adored--that loss for this life
which might have been balanced by gain in a better life. It was the
extinction of a beloved image for ever. It was the knowledge that this
man, to whom she had given the worship of her warm young heart, the
enthusiastic regard of inexperienced girlhood, had never been worthy
of her love; that he had come to her weary from the disappointment of
a more passionate love than life could ever again offer to woman--the
first deep love of a strong nature--a love that burns itself into heart
and mind as aquafortis into steel. He had come to her stained with
blood-guiltiness--an unconfessed assassin--holding his head high among
his fellow-men, playing the good citizen, the generous landlord, the
patron, the benefactor--he who had slain the widow's only son. He had
lived a double life, hiding his pleasures, lest his gains should be
lessened by men's knowledge of his lighter hours. He, who had seemed to
her the very spirit of truth and honour, had been steeped to the lips
in falsehood--a creature of masks and semblances. This it was which
bowed her to the dust; this it was which weighed upon her spirits as no
common loss could have done.
With her own hands she explored her husband's desk and
despatch-boxes--the receptacles for all his more important papers--in
search of any written confession which should attest the dead man's
guilt, and for ever establish Bothwell's innocence. It would have been
unutterable agony to her to have made such a confession public--to have
let the curious eyes of the world peer in upon that story of guilt and
shame; yet had any such document existed, she would have deemed it her
duty to make it public--her duty to her kinsman, who had been made the
scapegoat of another man's crimes. Happily for her peace there was no
such paper to be found--not a line, not a word which hinted at the
dead man's secret; and happily for Bothwell the cloud that had hung
over him had by this time dispersed. The steadiness with which he had
held his ground in the neighbourhood, the fact of his engagement to
Miss Heathcote, had weighed with his Bodmin traducers; and those who
had been the first to hint their suspicions were now the readiest to
protest against the infamy of such an idea. Had Bothwell emigrated
immediately after the inquest at the Vital Spark, these same people
would have gone down to the grave convinced that he was the murderer.
But before the end of that year there occurred an event which was
considered an all-sufficient proof of Bothwell's innocence, and an easy
solution of the mystery of the unknown girl's death. A miner entered
a solitary farmhouse between Bodmin and Lostwithiel, in the dim gray
of a winter evening, and killed two harmless women-folk--an old woman
and a young one--for the sake of a very small booty. He was caught
red-handed, tried, convicted, and hanged in Bodmin Gaol: but although
he confessed nothing, and died a hardened impenitent miner, it was
believed by every one in the place that his was the pitiless hand which
had sent the French girl to her doom.
"She had a little bit o'money about her, maybe, poor lass, and he took
it from her, and when she screamed he pushed her out of the train.
Such a man would think no more of doing it than of wringing the neck
of a chicken," said an honest, townsman of Bodmin.
Thus having identified somebody as the murderer, Bodmin was content;
and Bothwell Grahame was more popular than he had ever been in the
neighbourhood. He gave the county town but little of his society,
notwithstanding this restoration to local favour. He rarely played
billiards at the inn, or loitered to gossip in the High Street. He
could not forget that people had once looked coldly upon him, that he
had suffered the shame of unjust suspicion. At Trevena he was happy,
for there no one had ever so wronged him; there he was a favourite with
everybody, from the rector to the humblest fisherman. At Trevalga, too,
and at Boscastle he had friends. He could afford to turn his back upon
the people who had been so ready to think evil of him.
One of Heathcote's first cares after the Penmorval funeral had been
to write to the Baronne de Maucroix. His letter was to the following
effect:
"It is my grave duty to inform you, Madame, that the
murderer of your son has confessed his crime, and also
that he has escaped from all earthly tribunals to answer
for his sins before the Judge of all men. A painful
malady, from which he had been for some time a sufferer,
ended fatally on the evening of the 19th inst., within
the hour in which he confessed his guilt. His case had
been pronounced hopeless by a distinguished physician;
but it is just possible the shock caused by the
unexpected revelation of his crime may have hastened his
end.
"Accept, Madame, my respectful homage, and permit me
also to express my admiration of that truly Christian
spirit which you evinced at our late interview. EDWARD
HEATHCOTE."
By return of post Heathcote received an answer to his letter; but the
answer was not in the handwriting of the Baronne de Maucroix. That hand
was at rest for ever. The letter was from the Baronne's friend and
confessor, the curé of the village adjacent to her château.
"Monsieur,--Under the sad circumstances prevailing at
the château, I have taken it upon myself, with the
permission of the late Baronne's legal representative,
to reply to your polite communication, which was never
seen by the eyes of my lamented friend and benefactress,
Madame de Maucroix. Upon that very evening which you
name in your letter as the date of the murderer's death,
I called at the château, soon after vespers, according
to my daily custom; being permitted at that period of
the day's decline to enjoy an hour's quiet conversation
with that saintly woman who has now been taken from us.
I was ushered as usual into the _salon_, where I quietly
awaited Madame de Maucroix's appearance, having been told
that she was in her son's room, that apartment which she
used as her oratory.
"I knew that it was her custom to spend hours in that
chamber of her beloved dead, absorbed in spiritual
meditations; so I waited with patience, and without
surprise, for more than an hour, musing by the fire.
Then, wondering at this unusual forgetfulness in one
always so considerate, I ventured to lift the _portière_
and to pass through the intervening _salon_, which was in
darkness, to the bedchamber, where, through the half-open
door, I saw a lamp burning.
"I pushed the door a little further open, and went
in. The Baronne was on her knees beside the bed, her
clasped hands stretched out straight before her upon the
satin coverlet, her face leaning forward. I should have
withdrawn in respectful silence, but there was something
stark and rigid in the dear lady's attitude which filled
me with fear. I wondered that she had not been disturbed
by the sound of my footsteps, for my heavy shoes had
creaked as I walked across the floor. I drew nearer to
her. Not a breath, not a movement.
"I bent over her and touched the clasped hands. They were
still for ever in death. It was a peaceful, a blessed
ending: such an end as they who best loved that noble
creature would have chosen for her.
"Accept, Monsieur, the assurance of my high
consideration. PIERRE DUPLESSI."