When Joan awoke after a few hours' slumber, it was to a sense of racking
headache and utter exhaustion. She could only vaguely feel, rather than
remember, the crucial events of the previous night.
"A punishment for having dared to drug poor unfortunate Victor," she
told herself, as Julie, after administering tea, left her alone in the
darkened room. She could almost pity Victor Mercier, now that she had
circumvented him by stealing those incriminating documents, and thereby,
if not entirely destroying, certainly weakening, his hold upon her.
"His headache, if he has one, as I expect he has--he looked awfully ill
lying there under morphia--can hardly be worse than mine," she mused.
It was a long, weary day of pain. Towards evening, however, her
suffering abated. "I will get up, Julie!" she said, when her faithful
attendant came in on tiptoe for about the twentieth time. "But I will
not go down. I will have some tea up here. Yes; you may bring me a
little chicken--I think I could eat that. And--Julie--let me
see--yes--one or two of the evening papers."
As the dull weight had lifted from her weary head, she had begun to
think again--and the dominating as well as tormenting misgiving she had
felt on the subject of her escapade of the previous evening was anent
that bottle with drugged brandy in it, which, wrapped in brown paper,
she had left in the darkened entry of a house situated in some street
the other side of Trafalgar Square.
"I wonder who found it?" she uneasily asked herself. What would the
finder think of his or her discovery? Would he or she be sufficiently
idiotic to partake of the contents--and if he or she did?
She shuddered. "No one would!" was her mental comment. She consoled
herself with memories of the extraordinary accounts she had read of
narcotic-consumers. Still, of course, those had been the _habitues_,
who had gradually become accustomed to the drugs. Why, oh, why had she
not thought of pouring away the wretched stuff before she threw away the
bottle? It would then have been empty and harmless.
She was interrupted in her self-reproach by the entrance of her maid
with the tea-tray and the evening papers.
"Mademoiselle must really eat some-ting," said Julie, coaxingly, as she
arranged the enticing tray on the table at her mistress' elbow--Joan was
lying back wearily in a big easy chair. "The chicken is delicious, I
can assure mademoiselle--I saw it cut myself--and the tea--just as
mademoiselle likes it!"
She poured out the tea and prattled on. As Joan was just languidly
uncovering the chicken, hardly giving any attention to the girl's flow
of talk--she was speaking of the actress she had seen perform the night
Joan first met Victor in the Regent's Park--a certain word half startled
her from her reverie--the word "suicide." Then, in her strung-up,
nervous state, with that bottle on her mind, she was at once on the
alert.
"Who? What suicide?" she sharply asked. "Not the girl you saw act, and
liked so much?"
"No, mademoiselle, her brother," returned Julie earnestly. "Poor girl!
Such an awful thing! Robert, who always reads the _journaux_ when they
arrive--he airs them, you know, mademoiselle--told me, for he knows I
admired this Vera Anerley. It seems she had returned from the theatre
to find her brother lying on the sofa--quite dead--alone in the house!"
Joan had clenched her hands on the chair as she listened incredulously.
What a horrible coincidence, she thought, that Julie should have such a
grotesquely parallel tale to tell her--with such a tragic conclusion,
when only last night she had seen Victor Mercier lying in that deathly
sleep on the sofa, also alone in the house.
"Very dreadful for her, indeed," she slowly said, striving to recover
from what was almost a shock in the circumstances, and sipping her tea.
"Is the--the--story in one of those papers you have brought me?"
"Yes, mademoiselle! I can find it--Robert read it me--"
"Never mind! I will find it myself, presently," interrupted Joan. Then
she sent the eager girl downstairs with a message that "she could not
come down that evening; she had had no sleep, and was going to bed
immediately"--a mission invented more to get rid of her than anything
else.
What was it which made her spring up from the door and lock it, almost
as it closed upon Julie? Why did she dart back to the table, seize the
paper her maid had taken up and laid aside again at her bidding, and
holding it in her trembling hands, scan its pages feverishly with her
strained eyes--eyes almost blinded by intense fear?
It was more an awful sense of certainty than mere dread. As she found
the paragraph she sought, she fell limply into a chair, and staring
madly at the cruel words, told herself it was no surprise. No! She had
known something terrible had happened--all through those hours of cruel
physical pain--she had known it!
"I knew it, I knew it!" she gasped, as for a third time she read the
fatal words, with a mad hope that she was under a delusion.
"MYSTERIOUS DEATH IN HAYTHORN STREET, S.W.
"A tragic occurrence of more than ordinary public interest occurred in
Haythorn Street, S.W., last night. The young actress, Miss Vera
Anerley, whose attractive performances at the ---- Theatre we have
already recorded, returned home to find her only and favourite brother,
Victor a'Court, lying lifeless on the sofa in his room. The doctor, who
was at once secured, pronounced life extinct, and by certain
appearances, suggested suicide. At the inquest some sensational
evidence seems likely to be given."
"Yes," she thought, as she struggled to the window, flung it open, and
leant against the lintel, gasping, fighting for breath in her threatened
faintness--her eyes were unable to see properly, there was a surging and
roaring in her ears--he was dead--dead! And she--legally his wife--had
killed him.
"I poisoned him!" she mentally told herself, in a species of dazed,
wondering incredulity. "I sent him to face God--all his sins on his
soul--oaths on his lips! I am lost--eternally--for ever--lost!"
It seemed to her as if a huge, yawning gulf had arisen between her and
all clean, honest human beings. Her past life lay the other side. She
had done the worst of all deeds. She had destroyed a fellow creature.
"And--my own soul with him!" she groaned, in her extremity of fear and
horror. The climax of her life seemed to her over, now that she
knew--realized--the fact. After the first awful minutes, a dull, dead
calm took the place of her overwhelming, hideous agony. She could see
and hear again. As she leant against the wall she noted two smart young
nurses in white, wheeling their perambulators out of the enclosure
below. She saw one of them turn and lock the gate--she heard the key
grate in the lock, and the other girl cry out sharply, "Master Dickie,
leave it alone!" as a handsome little fellow in white knickers laid hold
of the handle of the little carriage. Then a fox-terrier ran by,
barking, and a tradesman's cart rattled swiftly along. A coster sent up
his long-drawn-out cry in the distance. And--and--she was a murderess!
She laughed aloud, and then, frightened by the irresponsibility of her
actions, she crawled slowly, miserably, across the room, gulped down a
glass of water, and bathed her face. As she did so, she
sickened--remembering how he had gasped--"water, water!" If only that
choking prayer had told her that he was in danger--why, she would have
risked discovery, disgrace, even the loss of Vansittart, to save the
life she had endangered.
She recalled her former fancied love for the slim, handsome young
foreigner. How she had admired him as he gazed fatuously at her in
church! What a subtle, delicious excitement there had been in his
veiled wooing, their hardly-obtained, schemed-for clandestine meetings!
Her mother's death had destroyed the glamour of the pseudo love affair.
Still, he had had sufficient compelling power over her emotions to bring
her to marry him secretly. Then, of course, the thunderbolt had fallen
which had destroyed her girlish passion at a blow--the _expose_--the
discovery that he was an absconding criminal.
"Still--nothing--nothing--can excuse me--from first to last," she
acknowledged to herself, in despair. "I am--lost! Fit only to consort
with the creatures who are for ever the enemies of God."
Just as she told herself this, with a pitiful sob, there was a knock at
the door. "May I come in? I have something for you!" cried her uncle,
cheerily.
One wild look round, then an almost savage instinct of self-preservation
leaped up within her, forcing her into self-possession.
"Certainly," she said, crossing to the door and opening it.
"Are you better, dear? You don't look up to much," said Sir Thomas,
gazing critically at her. "Vansittart has just been here, and left this
for you. I had asked him to come in and have dinner with us. But
hearing you were ill, he would not stay."