"SHE STOOD UP IN BITTER CASE, WITH A PALE YET STEADY FACE."
The silence of night and slumber came down upon the world, shadow and
darkness were folded round and about it. The ticking of the old
eight-day clock in the hall, of the bracket clock in the corridor, and
of half a dozen other time-pieces, conscientiously performing in empty
rooms, took that solemn and sepulchral sound which all clocks, down to
the humblest Dutchman, assume after midnight. Sleep, peace, and silence
seemed to brood over all human and brute life at Mount Royal. Yet there
were some who had no thought of sleep that night.
In Mr. Tregonell's dressing-room there was the light of lamp and fire,
deep into the small hours. The master of the house lolled, half-dressed,
in an armchair by the hearth; while his friend, Captain Vandeleur, in
smoking-jacket and slippers, lounged with his back to the chimney-piece,
and a cigarette between his lips. A whisky bottle and a couple of
siphons stood on a tray on the Squire's writing-table, an open
pistol-case near at hand.
"You'd better lie down for a few hours," said Captain Vandeleur. "I'll
call you at half-past five."
"I'd rather sit here. I may get a nap by-and-by perhaps. You can go to
bed if you are tired: I sha'n't oversleep myself."
"I wish you'd give up this business, Tregonell," said his friend, with
unaccustomed seriousness. "This man is a dead shot. We heard of him in
Bolivia, don't you remember? A man who has spent half his life in
shooting-galleries, and who has lived where life counts for very little.
Why should you stake your life against his? It isn't even betting:
you're good enough at big game, but you've had very little pistol
practice. Even if you were to kill him, which isn't on the cards, you'd
be tried for murder; and where's the advantage of that?"
"I'll risk it," answered Leonard, doggedly, "I saw him with my wife's
hand clasped in his--saw him with his lips close to her face--close
enough for kisses--heard her promise him an answer--to-morrow. By Heaven
there shall be no such to-morrow for him and for me. For one of us there
shall be an end of all things."
"I don't believe Mrs. Tregonell is capable"--began Jack, thoughtfully
mumbling his cigarette.
"You've said that once before, and you needn't say it again. Capable!
Why, man alive, I _saw_ them together. Nothing less than the evidence of
my own eyes would have convinced me. I have been slow enough to believe.
There is not a man or woman in this house, yourself included, who has
not, in his secret soul, despised me for my slowness. And yet, now,
because there is a question of a pistol-shot or two you fence round, and
try to persuade me that my wife's good name is immaculate, that all
which you have seen and wondered at for the last three weeks means
nothing."
"Those open flirtations seldom do mean anything," said Jack,
persuasively.
A man may belong to the hawk tribe and yet not be without certain latent
instincts of compassion and good feeling.
"Perhaps not--but secret meetings do: what I saw at the Kieve to-day was
conclusive. Besides, the affair is all settled--you and de Cazalet have
arranged it between you. He is willing that there should be no witness
but you. The whole business will rest a secret between us three; and if
we get quietly down to the sands before any one is astir to see us no
one else need ever know what happened there."
"If there is bloodshed the thing must be known."
"It will seem like accident?"
"True," answered Vandeleur, looking at him searchingly; "like that
accident last year at the Kieve--poor Hamleigh's death. Isn't to-morrow
the anniversary, by-the-by?"
"Yes--the date has come round again."
"Dates have an awkward knack of doing that. There is a cursed mechanical
regularity in life which makes a man wish himself in some savage island
where there is no such thing as an almanack," said Vandeleur, taking
out another cigarette. "If I had been Crusoe, I should never have stuck
up that post. I should have been too glad to get rid of quarter-day."
* * * * *
In Christabel's room at the other end of the long corridor there was
only the dim light of the night-lamp, nor was there any sound, save the
ticking of the clock and the crackling of the cinders in the dying fire.
Yet here there was no more sleep nor peace than in the chamber of the
man who was to wager his life against the life of his fellow-man in the
pure light of the dawning day. Christabel stood at her window, dressed
just as she had left the drawing-room, looking out at the sky and the
sea, and thinking of him who, at this hour last year, was still a part
of her life--perchance a watcher then as she was watching now, gazing
with vaguely questioning eyes into the illimitable panorama of the
heavens, worlds beyond worlds, suns and planetary systems, scattered
like grains of sand over the awful desert of infinite space,
innumerable, immeasurable, the infinitesimals of the astronomer, the
despair of faith. Yes, a year ago and he was beneath that roof, her
friend, her counsellor, if need were; for she had never trusted him so
completely, never so understood and realized all the nobler qualities of
his nature, as in those last days, after she had set an eternal barrier
between herself and him.
She stood at the open lattice, the cold night air blowing upon her
fever-heated face; her whole being absorbed not in deliberate thought,
but in a kind of waking trance. Strange pictures came out of the
darkness, and spread themselves before her eyes. She saw her first lover
lying on the broad flat rock at St. Nectan's Kieve, face downward, shot
through the heart, the water stained with the life-blood slowly oozing
from his breast. And then, when that picture faded into the blackness of
night, she saw her husband and Oliver de Cazalet standing opposite to
each other on the broad level sands at Trebarwith, the long waves rising
up behind them like a low wall of translucent green, crested with
silvery whiteness. So they would stand face to face a few hours hence.
From her lurking-place behind the trees and brushwood at the entrance to
the Kieve she had heard the appointment made--and she knew that at
seven o'clock those two were to meet, with deadliest intent. She had so
planned it--a life for a life.
She had no shadow of doubt as to which of those two would fall. Three
months ago on the Riffel she had seen the Baron's skill as a marksman
tested--she had seen him the wonder of the crowd at those rustic
sports--seen him perform feats which only a man who has reduced
pistol-shooting to a science would attempt. Against this man Leonard
Tregonell--good all-round sportsman as he was--could have very little
chance. Leonard had always been satisfied with that moderate skilfulness
which comes easily and unconsciously. He had never given time and labour
to any of the arts he pursued--content to be able to hold his own among
parasites and flatterers.
"A life for a life," repeated Christabel, her lips moving dumbly, her
heart throbbing heavily, as if it were beating out those awful words. "A
life for a life--the old law--the law of justice--God's own sentence
against murder. The law could not touch this murderer--but there was
one way by which that cruel deed might be punished, and I found it."
The slow silent hours wore on. Christabel left the window, shivering
with cold, though cheeks, brow, and lips were burning. She walked up and
down the room for a long while, till the very atmosphere of the room,
nay, of the house itself, seemed unendurable. She felt as if she were
being suffocated, and this sense of oppression became so strong that she
was sorely tempted to shriek aloud, to call upon some one for rescue
from that stifling vault. The feeling grew to such intensity that she
flung on her hat and cloak, and went quickly downstairs to a lobby-door
that opened into the garden, a little door which she had unbolted many a
night after the servants had locked up the house, in order to steal out
in the moonlight and among the dewy flowers, and across the dewy turf to
those shrubbery walks which had such a mysterious look--half in light
and half in shadow.
She closed the door behind her, and stood with the night wind blowing
round her, looking up at the sky; clouds were drifting across the
starry dome, and the moon, like a storm-beaten boat, seemed to be
hurrying through them. The cold wind revived her, and she began to
breathe more freely.
"I think I was going mad just now," she said to herself.
And then she thought she would go out upon the hills, and down to the
churchyard in the valley. On this night, of all nights, she would visit
Angus Hamleigh's grave. It was long since she had seen the spot where he
lay--since her return from Switzerland she had not once entered a
church. Jessie had remonstrated with her gravely and urgently--but
without eliciting any explanation of this falling off in one who had
been hitherto so steadfastly devout.
"I don't feel inclined to go to church, Jessie," she said, coolly;
"there is no use in discussing my feelings. I don't feel fit for church;
and I am not going in order to gratify your idea of what is conventional
and correct."
"I am not thinking of this in its conventional aspect--I have always
made light of conventionalities--but things must be in a bad way with
you, Christabel, when you do not feel fit for church."
"Things are in a bad way with me," answered Christabel, with a dogged
moodiness which was insurmountable. "I never said they were good."
This surrender of old pious habits had given Jessie more uneasiness than
any other fact in Christabel's life. Her flirtation with the Baron must
needs be meaningless frivolity, Jessie had thought; since it seemed
hardly within the limits of possibility that a refined and pure-minded
woman could have any real _penchant_ for that showy adventurer; but this
persistent avoidance of church meant mischief.
* * * * *
And now, in the deep dead-of-night silence, Christabel went on her
lonely pilgrimage to her first lover's grave. Oh, happy summer day when,
sitting by her side outside the Maidenhead coach, all her own through
life, as it seemed, he told her how, if she had the ordering of his
grave, she was to bury him in that romantic churchyard, hidden in a
cleft of the hill. She had not forgotten this even amidst the horror of
his fate, and had told the vicar that Mr. Hamleigh's grave must be at
Minster and no otherwhere. Then had come his relations, suggesting
burial-places with family associations--vaults, mausoleums, the pomp and
circumstance of sepulture. But Christabel had been firm; and while the
others hesitated a paper was found in the dead man's desk requesting
that he might be buried at Minster.
How lonely the world seemed in this solemn pause between night and
morning. Never before had Christabel been out alone at such an hour. She
had travelled in the dead of the night, and had seen the vague dim
night-world from the window of a railway carriage--but never until now
had she walked across these solitary hills after midnight. It seemed as
if for the first time in her life she were alone with the stars.
How difficult it was in her present state of mind to realize that those
lights, tremulous in the deep blue vault, were worlds, and combinations
of worlds--almost all of them immeasurably greater than this earth on
which she trod. To her they seemed living watchers of the
night--solemn, mysterious beings, looking down at her with
all-understanding eyes. She had an awful feeling of their companionship
as she looked up at them--a mystic sense that all her thoughts--the
worst and best of them--were being read by that galaxy of eyes.
Strangely beautiful did the hills and the sky--the indefinite shapes of
the trees against the edge of the horizon, the mysterious expanse of the
dark sea--seem to her in the night silence. She had no fear of any human
presence, but there was an awful feeling in being, as it were, for the
first time in her life alone with the immensities. Those hills and
gorges, so familiar in all phases of daylight, from sunrise to after set
of sun, assumed Titanic proportions in this depth of night, and were as
strange to her as if she had never trodden this path before. What was
the wind saying, as it came moaning and sobbing along the deep gorge
through which the river ran?--what did the wind say as she crossed the
narrow bridge which trembled under her light footfall? Surely there was
some human meaning in that long minor wail, which burst suddenly into a
wild unearthly shriek, and then died away in a low sobbing tone, as of
sorrow and pain that grew dumb from sheer exhaustion, and not because
there was any remission of pain or sorrow.
With that unearthly sound still following her, she went up the winding
hill-side path, and then slowly descended to the darkness of the
churchyard--so sunk and sheltered that it seemed like going down into a
vault.
Just then the moon leapt from behind an inky cloud, and, in that ghostly
light, Christabel saw the pale grey granite cross which had been erected
in memory of Angus Hamleigh. It stood up in the midst of nameless
mounds, and humble slate tablets, pale and glittering--an unmistakable
sign of the spot where her first lover lay. Once only before to-night
had she seen that monument. Absorbed in the pursuit of a Pagan scheme of
vengeance she had not dared to come within the precincts of the church,
where she had knelt and prayed through all the sinless years of her
girlhood. To-night some wild impulse had brought her here--to-night,
when that crime which she called retribution was on the point of
achievement.
She went with stumbling footsteps through the long grass, across the low
mounds, till she came to that beneath which Angus Hamleigh lay. She fell
like a lifeless thing at the foot of the cross. Some loving hand had
covered the mound of earth with primroses and violets, and there were
low clambering roses all round the grave. The scent of sweetbriar was
mixed with the smell of earth and grass. Some one had cared for that
grave, although she, who so loved the dead, had never tended it.
"Oh, my love! my love!" she sobbed, with her face upon the grass and the
primrose leaves, and her arms clasping the granite; "my murdered
love--my first, last, only lover--before to-morrow's sun is down your
death will be revenged, and my life will be over! I have lived only for
that--only for that, Angus, my love, my love!" She kissed the cold wet
grass more passionately than she had ever kissed the dead face
mouldering underneath it. Only to the dead--to the utterly lost and
gone--is given this supreme passion--love sublimated to despair. From
the living there is always something kept back--something saved and
garnered for an after-gift--some reserve in the mind or the heart of the
giver; but to the dead love gives all--with a wild self-abandonment
which knows not restraint or measure. The wife who, while this man yet
lived, had been so rigorously true to honour and duty, now poured into
the deaf dead ears a reckless avowal of love--love that had never
faltered, never changed--love that had renounced the lover, and had yet
gone on loving to the end.
The wind came moaning out of the valley again with that sharp human cry,
as of lamentation for the dead.
"Angus!" murmured Christabel, piteously, "Angus, can you hear me?--do
you know? Oh, my God! is there memory or understanding in the world
where he has gone, or is it all a dead blank? Help me, my God! I have
lost all the old sweet illusions of faith--I have left off praying,
hoping, believing--I have only thought of my dead--thought of death and
of him till all the living world grew unreal to me--and God and Heaven
were only like old half-forgotten dreams. Angus!"
For a long time she lay motionless, her cold hands clasping the cold
stone, her lips pressed upon the soft dewy turf, her face buried in
primrose leaves--then slowly, and with an effort, she raised herself
upon her knees, and knelt with her arms encircling the cross--that
sacred emblem which had once meant so much for her: but which, since
that long blank interval last winter, seemed to have lost all meaning.
One great overwhelming grief had made her a Pagan--thirsting for
revenge--vindictive--crafty--stealthy as an American Indian on the trail
of his deadly foe--subtle as Greek or Oriental to plan and to achieve a
horrible retribution.
She looked at the inscription on the cross, legible in the moonlight,
deeply cut in large Gothic letters upon the grey stone, filled in with
dark crimson.
"VENGEANCE IS MINE: I WILL REPAY, SAITH THE LORD."
Who had put that inscription upon the cross? It was not there when the
monument was first put up. Christabel remembered going with Jessie to
see the grave in that dim half-blank time before she went to
Switzerland. Then there was nothing but a name and a date. And now, in
awful distinctness, there appeared those terrible words--God's own
promise of retribution--the claim of the Almighty to be the sole avenger
of human wrongs.
And she, reared by a religious woman, brought up in the love and fear of
God, had ignored that sublime and awful attribute of the Supreme. She
had not been content to leave her lover's death to the Great Avenger.
She had brooded on his dark fate, until out of the gloom of despair
there had arisen the image of a crafty and bloody retribution. "Whoso
sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." So runs the
dreadful sentence of an older law. The newer, lovelier law, which began
in the after-glow of Philosophy, the dawn of Christianity, bids man
leave revenge to God. And she, who had once called herself a Christian,
had planned and plotted, making herself the secret avenger of a criminal
who had escaped the grip of the law.
"Must he lie in his grave, unavenged, until the Day of Judgment?" she
asked herself. "God's vengeance is slow."
* * * * *
An hour later, and Christabel, pale and exhausted, her garments heavy
with dew, was kneeling by her boy's bed in the faint light of the
night-lamp; kneeling by him as she had knelt a year ago, but never since
her return from Switzerland--praying as she had not prayed since Angus
Hamleigh's death. After those long, passionate prayers, she rose and
looked at the slumberer's face--her husband's face in little--but oh!
how pure and fresh and radiant. God keep him from boyhood's sins of
self-love and self-indulgence--from manhood's evil passions, hatred and
jealousy. All her life to come seemed too little to be devoted to
watching and guarding this beloved from the encircling snares and
dangers of life. Pure and innocent now, in this fair dawn of infancy, he
nestled in her arms--he clung to her and believed in her. What business
had she with any other fears, desires, or hopes--God having given her
the sacred duties of maternity--the master-passion of motherly love?
"I have been mad!" she said to herself; "I have been living in a ghastly
dream: but God has awakened me--God's word has cured me."
God's word had come to her at the crisis of her life. A month ago, while
her scheme of vengeance seemed still far from fulfilment, that awful
sentence would hardly have struck so deeply. It was on the very verge of
the abyss that those familiar words caught her; just when the natural
faltering of her womanhood, upon the eve of a terrible crime, made her
most sensitive to a sublime impression.
The first faint streak of day glimmered in the east, a pale cold light,
livid and ghostly upon the edge of the sea yonder, white and wan upon
the eastward points of rock and headland, when Jessie Bridgeman was
startled from her light slumbers by a voice at her bedside. She was
always an early riser, and it cost her no effect to sit up in bed, with
her eyes wide open, and all her senses on the alert.
"Christabel, what is the matter? Is Leo ill?"
"No, Leo is well enough. Get up and dress yourself quickly, Jessie. I
want you to come with me--on a strange errand; but it is something that
must be done, and at once."
"Christabel, you are mad."
"No. I have been mad. I think you must know it--this is the awakening.
Come, Jessie."
Jessie had sprung out of bed, and put on slippers and dressing-gown,
without taking her eyes off Christabel. Presently she felt her cloak and
gown.
"Why, you are wet through. Where have you been?"
"To Angus Hamleigh's grave. Who put that inscription on the cross?"
"I did. Nobody seemed to care about his grave--no one attended to it. I
got to think the grave my own property, and that I might do as I liked
with it."
"But those awful words! What made you put them there?"
"I wanted the man who killed him to be reminded that there is an
Avenger."
"Wash your face and put on your clothes as fast as you can. Every
moment is of consequence," said Christabel.
She would explain nothing. Jessie urged her to take off her wet cloak,
to go and change her gown and shoes; but she refused with angry
impatience.
"There will be time enough for that afterwards," she said; "what I have
to do will not take long, but it must be done at once. Pray be quick."
Jessie struggled through her hurried toilet, and followed Christabel
along the corridor, without question or exclamation. They went to the
door of Baron de Cazalet's room. A light shone under the bottom of the
door, and there was the sound of some one stirring within. Christabel
knocked, and the door was opened almost instantly by the Baron himself.
"Is it the trap?" he asked. "It's an hour too soon."
"No, it is I, Monsieur de Cazalet. May I come in for a few minutes? I
have something to tell you."
"Christabel--my----" He stopped in the midst of that eager exclamation,
at sight of the other figure in the background.
He was dressed for the day--carefully dressed, like a man who in a
crisis of his life wishes to appear at no disadvantage. His pistol-case
stood ready on the table. A pair of candles, burnt low in the sockets of
the old silver candlesticks, and a heap of charred and torn paper in the
fender showed that the Baron had been getting rid of superfluous
documents. Christabel went into the room, followed by Jessie, the Baron
staring at them both, in blank amazement. He drew an armchair near the
expiring fire, and Christabel sank into it, exhausted and half fainting.
"What does it all mean?" asked de Cazalet, looking at Jessie, "and why
are you here with her?"
"Why is she here?" asked Jessie. "There can be no reason except----"
She touched her forehead lightly with the tips of her fingers.
Christabel saw the action.
"No, I am not mad, now," she said, "I believe I have been mad, but that
is all over. Monsieur de Cazalet, you and my husband are to fight a duel
this morning, on Trebarwith sands."
"My dear Mrs. Tregonell, what a strange notion!"
"Don't take the trouble to deny anything. I overheard your conversation
yesterday afternoon. I know everything."
"Would it not have been better to keep the knowledge to yourself, and to
remember your promise to me, last night?"
"Yes, I remember that promise. I said I would meet you at Bodmin Road,
after you had shot my husband."
"There was not a word about shooting your husband."
"No; but the fact was in our minds, all the same--in yours as well as in
mine. Only there was one difference between us. You thought that when
you had killed Leonard I would run away with you. That was to be your
recompense for murder. I meant that you should kill him, but that you
should never see my face again. You would have served my purpose--you
would have been the instrument of my revenge!"
"Christabel!"
"Do not call me by that name--I am nothing to you--I never could, under
any possible phase of circumstances, be any nearer to you than I am at
this moment. From first to last I have been acting a part. When I saw
you at that shooting match, on the Riffel, I said to myself 'Here is a
man, who in any encounter with my husband, must be fatal.' My husband
killed the only man I ever loved, in a duel, without witnesses--a duel
forced upon him by insane and causeless jealousy. Whether that meeting
was fair or unfair in its actual details, I cannot tell; but at the best
it was more like a murder than a duel. When, through Miss Bridgeman's
acuteness, I came to understand what that meeting had been, I made up my
mind to avenge Mr. Hamleigh's death. For a long time my brain was under
a cloud--I could think of nothing, plan nothing. Then came clearer
thoughts, and then I met you; and the scheme of my revenge flashed upon
me like a suggestion direct from Satan. I knew my husband's jealous
temper, and how easy it would be to fire a train _there_, and I made my
plans with that view. You lent yourself very easily to my scheme."
"Lent myself!" cried the Baron, indignantly; and then with a savage oath
he said: "I loved you, Mrs. Tregonell, and you made me believe that you
loved me."
"I let you make fine speeches, and I pretended to be pleased at them,"
answered Christabel, with supreme scorn. "I think that was all."
"No, madam, it was not all. You fooled me to the top of my bent. What,
those lovely looks, those lowered accents--all meant nothing? It was all
a delusion--an acted lie? You never cared for me?"
"No," answered Christabel. "My heart was buried with the dead. I never
loved but one man, and he was murdered, as I believed--and I made up my
mind to avenge his murder. 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
blood be shed.' That sentence was in my mind always, when I thought of
Leonard Tregonell. I meant you to be the executioner. And now--now--God
knows how the light has come--but the God I worshipped when I was a
happy sinless girl, has called me out of the deep pit of sin--called me
to remorse and atonement. You must not fight this duel. You must save
me from this horrible crime that I planned--save me and yourself from
blood-guiltiness. You must not meet Leonard at Trebarwith."
"And stamp myself as a cur, to oblige you: after having lent myself so
simply to your scheme of vengeance, lend myself as complacently to your
repentance. No, Mrs. Tregonell, that is too much to ask. I will be your
bravo, if you like, since I took the part unconsciously--but I will not
brand myself with the charge of cowardice--even for you."
"You fought a duel in South America, and killed your adversary. Mr.
FitzJesse told me so. Everybody knows that you are a dead shot. Who can
call you a coward for refusing to shoot the man whose roof has sheltered
you--who never injured you--against whom you can have no ill-will."
"Don't be too sure of that. He is your husband. When I came to Mount
Royal, I came resolved to win you."
"Only because I had deceived you. The woman you admired was a living
lie. Oh, if you could have looked into my heart only yesterday, you
must have shrunk from me with loathing. When I led you on to play the
seducer's part, I was plotting murder--murder which I called justice. I
knew that Leonard was listening--I had so planned that he should follow
us to the Kieve. I heard his stealthy footsteps, and the rustle of the
boughs--you were too much engrossed to listen; but all my senses were
strained, and I knew the very moment of his coming."
"It was a pity you did not let your drama come to its natural
dénouement," sneered de Cazalet, furious with the first woman who had
ever completely fooled him. "When your husband was dead--for there is
not much doubt as to my killing him--you and I could have come to an
understanding. You must have had some gratitude. However, I am not
bloodthirsty, and since Mrs. Tregonell has cheated me out of my
devotion, fooled me with day-dreams of an impossible future, I don't see
that I should gain much by shooting Mr. Tregonell."
"No, there would be no good to you in that profitless bloodshed. It is I
who have wronged you--I who wilfully deceived you--degrading myself in
order to lure my husband into a fatal quarrel--tempting you to kill him.
Forgive me, if you can--and forget this wild wicked dream. Conscience
and reason came back to me beside that quiet grave to-night. What good
could it do him who lies there that blood should be spilt for his sake?
Monsieur de Cazalet, if you will give up all idea of this duel I will be
grateful to you for the rest of my life."
"You have treated me very cruelly," said the Baron, taking both her
hands, and looking into her eyes, half in despairing love, half in
bitterest anger; "you have fooled me as never man was fooled before, I
think--tricked me--and trifled with me--and I owe you very little
allegiance. If you and I were in South America I would show you very
little mercy. No, my sweet one, I would make you play out the game--you
should finish the drama you began--finish it in my fashion. But in this
world of yours, hemmed round with conventionalities, I am obliged to let
you off easily. As for your husband--well, I have exposed my life too
often to the aim of a six-shooter to be called coward if I let this one
opportunity slip. He is nothing to me--or I to him--since you are
nothing to me. He may go--and I may go. I will leave a line to tell him
that we have both been the dupes of a pretty little acted charade,
devised by his wife and her friends--and instead of going to meet him at
Trebarwith, I'll drive straight to Launceston, and catch the early
train. Will that satisfy you, Mrs. Tregonell?"
"I thank you with all my heart and soul--you have saved me from myself."
"You are a much better man than I thought you, Baron," said Jessie,
speaking for the first time.
She had stood by, a quiet spectator of the scene, listening intently,
ready at any moment to come to Christabel's rescue, if need
were--understanding, for the first time, the moving springs of conduct
which had been so long a mystery to her.
"Thank you, Miss Bridgeman. I suppose you were in the plot--looked on
and laughed in your sleeve, as you saw how a man of the world may be
fooled by sweet words and lovely looks."
"I knew nothing. I thought Mrs. Tregonell was possessed by the devil.
If she had let you go on--if you had shot her husband--I should not have
been sorry for him--for I know he killed a much better man than himself,
and I am hard enough to hug the stern old law--a life for a life. But I
should have been sorry for her. She is not made for such revenges."
"And now you will be reconciled with your husband, I suppose, Mrs.
Tregonell. You two will agree to forget the past, and to live happily
ever afterwards?" sneered de Cazalet, looking up from the letter which
he was writing.
"No! there can be no forgetfulness for either of us. I have to do my
duty to my son. I have to win God's pardon for the guilty thoughts and
plans which have filled my mind so long. But I owe no duty to Mr.
Tregonell. He has forfeited every claim. May I see your letter when it
is finished?"
De Cazalet handed it to her without a word--a brief epistle, written in
the airiest tone, ascribing all that had happened at the Kieve to a
sportive plot of Mrs. Tregonell's, and taking a polite leave of the
master of the house.
"When he reads that, I shall be half-way to Launceston," he said, as
Christabel gave him back the letter.
"I am deeply grateful to you, and now good-bye," she said, gravely,
offering him her hand. He pressed the cold slim hand in his, and gently
raised it to his lips.
"You have used me very badly, but I shall love and honour you to the end
of my days," he said, as Christabel left him.
Jessie was following, but de Cazalet stopped her on the threshold.
"Come," he said, "you must give me the clue to this mystery. Surely you
were in it--you, who know her so well, must have known something of
this?"
"I knew knowing. I watched her with fear and wonder. After--after Mr.
Hamleigh's death--she was very ill--mentally ill; she sank into a kind
of apathy--not madness--but terribly near the confines of madness. Then,
suddenly, her spirits seemed to revive--she became eager for movement,
amusement--an utterly different creature from her former self. She and
I, who had been like sisters, seemed ever so far apart. I could not
understand this new phase of her character. For a whole year she has
been unlike herself--a terrible year. Thank God this morning I have seen
the old Christabel again."
Half an hour afterwards the Baron's dog-cart drove out of the yard, and
half an hour after his departure the Baron's letter was delivered to
Leonard Tregonell, who muttered an oath as he finished reading it, and
then handed it to his faithful Jack.
"What do you say to that?" he asked.
"By Jove, I knew Mrs. T---- was straight," answered the Captain, in his
unsophisticated phraseology. "But it was a shabby trick to play you all
the same. I daresay Mop and Dop were in it. Those girls are always ready
for larks."
Leonard muttered something the reverse of polite about Dop and Mop, and
went straight to the stable-yard, where he cancelled his order for the
trap which was to have conveyed him to Trebarwith sands, and where he
heard of the Baron's departure for Launceston.
Mystified and angry, he went straight upstairs to his wife's room. All
barriers were broken down now. All reticence was at an end. Plainest
words, straightest measures, befitted the present state of things.
Christabel was on her knees in a recess near her bed--a recess which
held a little table, with her devotional books and a prie-dieu chair. A
beautiful head of the Salvator Mundi, painted on china at Munich, gave
beauty and sanctity to this little oratory. She was kneeling on the
prie-dieu, her arms folded on the purple velvet cushion, her head
leaning forward on the folded arms, in an attitude of prostration and
self-abandonment, her hair falling loosely over her white dressing gown.
She rose at Leonard's entrance, and confronted him, a ghostlike figure,
deadly pale.
"Your lover has given me the slip," he said, roughly; "why didn't you go
with him? You mean to go, I have no doubt. You have both made your plans
to that end--but you want to sneak away--to get clear of this country,
perhaps, before people have found out what you are. Women of your stamp
don't mind what scandal they create, but they like to be out of the
row."
"You are mistaken," his wife answered, coldly, unmoved by his anger, as
she had ever been untouched by his love. "The man who left here this
morning was never my lover--never could have been, had he and I lived
under the same roof for years. But I intended him for the avenger of
that one man whom I did love, with all my heart and soul--the man you
killed."
"What do you mean?" faltered Leonard, with a dull grey shade creeping
over his face.
It had been in his mind for a long time that his secret was suspected by
his wife--but this straight, sudden avowal of the fact was not the less
a shock to him.
"You know what I mean. Did you not know when you came back to this house
that I had fathomed your mystery--that I knew whose hand killed Angus
Hamleigh. You did know it, Leonard: you must have known: for you knew
that I was not a woman to fling a wife's duty to the winds, without some
all-sufficient reason. You knew what kind of wife I had been for four
dull, peaceful years--how honestly I had endeavoured to perform the duty
which I took upon myself in loving gratitude to your dear mother. Did
you believe that I could change all at once--become a heartless,
empty-headed lover of pleasure--hold you, my husband, at arm's
length--outrage propriety--defy opinion--without a motive so powerful, a
purpose so deadly and so dear, that self-abasement, loss of good name,
counted for nothing with me."
"You are a fool," said Leonard, doggedly. "No one at the inquest so much
as hinted at foul play. Why should _you_ suspect any one?"
"For more than one good reason. First, your manner on the night before
Angus Hamleigh's death--the words you and he spoke to each other at the
door of his room. I asked you then if there were any quarrel between
you, and you said no: but even then I did not believe you."
"There was not much love between us. You did not expect that, did you?"
asked her husband savagely.
"You invited him to your house; you treated him as your friend. You had
no cause to distrust him or me. You must have known that."
"I knew that you loved him."
"I had been your faithful and obedient wife."
"Faithful and obedient; yes--a man might buy faith and obedience in any
market. I knew that other man was master of your heart. Great Heaven,
can I forget how I saw you that night, hanging upon his words, all your
soul in your eyes."
"We were talking of life and death. It was not his words that thrilled
me; but the deep thoughts they stirred within me--thoughts of the great
mystery--the life beyond the veil. Do you know what it is to speculate
upon the life beyond this life, when you are talking to a man who bears
the stamp of death upon his brow, who is as surely devoted to the grave
as Socrates was when he talked to his friends in the prison. But why do
I talk to you of these things? You cannot understand----"
"No! I am outside the pale, am I not?" sneered Leonard; "made of a
different clay from that sickly sentimental worshipper of yours, who
turned to you when he had worn himself out in the worship of
ballet-girls. I was not half fine enough for you, could not talk of
Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Was it a pleasant sensation for me,
do you think, to see you two sentimentalizing and poetizing, day after
day--Beethoven here and Byron there, and all the train of maudlin modern
versifiers who have made it their chief business to sap the foundations
of domestic life."
"Why did you bring him into your house?"
"Why? Can't you guess? Because I wanted to know the utmost and the
worst; to watch you two together; to see what venom was left in the old
poison; to make sure, if I could, that you were staunch; to put you to
the test."
"God knows I never faltered, throughout that ordeal," said Christabel,
solemnly. "And yet you murdered him. You ask me how I know of that
murder. Shall I tell you? You were at the Kieve that day; you did not go
by the beaten track where the ploughmen must have seen you. No! you
crept in by stealth the other way--clambered over the rocks--ah! you
start. You wonder how I know that. You tore your coat in the scramble
across the arch, and a fragment of the cloth was caught upon a bramble.
I have that scrap of cloth, and I have the shooting-jacket from which it
was torn, under lock and key in yonder wardrobe. Now, will you deny that
you were at the Kieve that day?"
"No. I was there. Hamleigh met me there by appointment. You were right
in your suspicion that night. We did quarrel--not about you--but about
his treatment of that Vandeleur girl. I thought he had led her
on--flirted with her--fooled her----"
"You thought," ejaculated Christabel, with ineffable scorn.
"Well, I told him so, at any rate; told him that he would not have dared
to treat any woman so scurvily, with her brother and her brother's
friend standing by, if the good old wholesome code of honour had not
gone out of fashion. I told him that forty years ago, in the duelling
age, men had been shot for a smaller offence against good feeling; and
then he rounded on me, and asked me if I wanted to shoot him; if I was
trying to provoke a quarrel; and then--I hardly know how the thing came
about--it was agreed that we should meet at the Kieve at nine o'clock
next morning, both equipped as if for woodcock shooting--game-bag, dogs,
and all, our guns loaded with swan-shot, and that we should settle our
differences face to face, in that quiet hollow, without witnesses. If
either of us dropped, the thing would seem an accident, and would entail
no evil consequences upon the survivor. If one of us were only wounded,
why----"
"But you did not mean that," interrupted Christabel, with flashing eyes,
"you meant your shot to be fatal."
"It was fatal," muttered Leonard. "Never mind what I meant. God knows
how I felt when it was over, and that man was lying dead on the other
side of the bridge. I had seen many a noble beast, with something almost
human in the look of him, go down before my gun; but I had never shot a
man before. Who could have thought there would have been so much
difference?"
Christabel clasped her hands over her face, and drew back with an
involuntary recoil, as if all the horror of that dreadful scene were
being at this moment enacted before her eyes. Never had the thought of
Angus Hamleigh's fate been out of her mind in all the year that was
ended to-day--this day--the anniversary of his death. The image of that
deed had been ever before her mental vision, beckoning her and guiding
her along the pathway of revenge--a lurid light.
"You murdered him," she said, in low, steadfast tones. "You brought him
to this house with evil intent--yes, with your mind full of hatred and
malice towards him. You acted the traitor's base, hypocritical part,
smiling at him and pretending friendship, while in your soul you meant
murder. And then, under this pitiful mockery of a duel--a duel with a
man who had never injured you, who had no resentment against you--a duel
upon the shallowest, most preposterous pretence--you kill your friend
and your guest--you kill him in a lonely place, with none of the
safeguards of ordinary duelling; and you have not the manhood to stand
up before your fellow-men, and say, 'I did it.'"
"Shall I go and tell them now?" asked Leonard, his white lips tremulous
with impotent rage. "They would hang me, most likely. Perhaps that is
what you want."
"No, I never wanted that," answered Christabel. "For our boy's sake, for
the honour of your dead mother's name, I would have saved you from a
shameful death. But I wanted your life--a life for a life. That is why I
tried to provoke your jealousy--why I planned that scene with the Baron
yesterday. I knew that in a duel between you and him the chances were
all in his favour. I had seen and heard of his skill. You fell easily
into the trap I laid for you. I was behind the bushes when you
challenged de Cazalet."
"It was a plot then. You had been plotting my death all that time. Your
songs and dances, and games and folly, all meant the same thing."
"Yes, I plotted your death as you did Angus Hamleigh's," answered
Christabel, slowly, deliberately, with steady eyes fixed on her
husband's face; "only I relented at the eleventh hour. You did not."
Leonard stared at her in dumb amazement. This new aspect of his wife's
character paralyzed his thinking powers, which had never been vigorous.
He felt as if, in the midst of a smooth summer sea, he had found himself
suddenly face to face with that huge wave known on this wild northern
coast, which, generated by some mysterious power in the wide Atlantic,
rolls on its deadly course in overwhelming might; engulfing many a craft
which but a minute before was riding gaily on a summer sea.
"Yes, you have cause to look at me with horror in your eyes," said
Christabel. "I have steeped my soul in sin; I have plotted your death.
In the purpose and pursuit of my life I have been a murderer. It is
God's mercy that held me back from that black gulf. What gain would your
death have been to your victim? Would he have slept more peacefully in
his grave, or have awakened happier on the Judgment Day? If he had
consciousness and knowledge in that dim mysterious world, he would have
been sorry for the ruin of my soul--sorry for Satan's power over the
woman he once loved. Last night, kneeling on his grave, these thoughts
came into my mind for the first time. I think it was the fact of being
near him--almost as if there was some sympathy between the living and
the dead. Leonard, I know how wicked I have been. God pity and pardon
me, and make me a worthy mother for my boy. For you and me there can be
nothing but lifelong parting."
"Well, yes, I suppose there would not be much chance of comfort or union
for us, after what has happened," said Leonard, moodily; "ours is hardly
a case in which to kiss again with tears, as your song says. I must be
content to go my way, and let you go yours. It is a pity we ever
married; but that was my fault, I suppose. Have you any particular views
as to your future? I shall not molest you; but I should be glad to know
that the lady who bears my name is leading a reputable life."
"I shall live with my son--for my son. You need have no fear that I
shall make myself a conspicuous person in the world. I have done with
life, except for him. I care very little where I live: if you want Mount
Royal for yourself, I can have the old house at Penlee made comfortable
for Jessie Bridgeman and me. I daresay I can be as happy at Penlee as
here."
"I don't want this house. I detest it. Do you suppose I am going to
waste my life in England--or in Europe? Jack and I can start on our
travels again. The world is wide enough; there are two continents on
which I have never set foot. I shall start for Calcutta to-morrow, if I
can, and explore the whole of India before I turn my face westwards
again. I think we understand each other fully, now. Stay, there is one
thing: I am to see my son when, and as often as I please, I suppose."
"I will not interfere with your rights as a father."
"I am glad of that. And now I suppose there is no more to be said. I
leave your life, my honour, in your own keeping. Good-bye."
"God be with you," she answered solemnly, giving that parting salutation
its fullest meaning.
And so, without touch of lip or hand, they parted for a lifetime.