Sir Thomas Thorne was sincerely, honestly attached to his beautiful
young orphan niece--perhaps the sentiment was all the stronger for being
tinged with a latent remorse for his callous attitude towards her dead
parents in the still unforgotten past.
It was almost a shock to him to see Joan look so "awfully bad," as he
termed it to himself. As he placed his paper package, a round, light
one, on the nearest table in her bright, pretty bed-chamber, and seated
himself by her, he wondered, a little anxiously, whether she was not
perhaps ill with the insidious family disease which had "made short
work" of his younger brother, her father. Ill-health would account for
most of what he considered her "vagaries."
"I think you ought to see the doctor, Joan--really I do!" he exclaimed,
with concern, as he gazed at her. She was white as her cream cashmere
dressing-gown, and there were deep bistre circles round her more than
usually brilliant eyes. "Let me send for him----"
"Oh, I am all right!" exclaimed Joan, easily. She wondered at this new,
unwonted self-possession. It seemed to her as if she--she--Victor's
slayer--were standing aside--apart--and watching the doings of the
better self from which her past actions had for ever divorced her.
"What have you brought me?"
"Flowers, Vansittart said," replied her uncle, brightly. "I met him at
the club, and he seemed as if he were to have a lonely evening--it was
just one of those blank nights when one happens to have a lull in one's
engagements--so I asked him to come in to dinner. He came, and brought
this; but went away, as I said, when he heard you were out of sorts,
saying he would call round and inquire in the morning."
He tore away the paper covering and disclosed a basket of blue and white
flowers--a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a West-End florists. "Pretty, aren't
they?" he said, handing them to Joan, his head admiringly on one side.
"Very," she returned mechanically, making a pretence of appreciation.
The blue flowers were forget-me-nots. To her strung-up imagination they
looked like innocent child-eyes gazing at her with reproach. Once she
and Victor had sat by a stream, and she had picked some from the bank
and fastened them in his coat--he always liked a "button-hole"--Bah!
These horrible thoughts!--What was her uncle saying? "He said he
thought you looking ill. He wondered I had not sent to the doctor
before."
"He--who?" asked Joan, sharply. "Lord Vansittart? What has he got to
do with it?"
"There! You are going to faint," exclaimed her uncle, alarmed and
annoyed, as she paled to lividity, sank back in her chair, and thrust
the basket into his hands. Oh, the irony of fate! She had seen the
exact counterpart among the flowers of the thick, small-petalled white
blossom in Victor Mercier's coat that terrible last night--when she
poisoned him. The perfume recalled it all--the waxen, deathly face, the
still, silent form--the little room with the open window.
"It is the scent--it makes me feel faint when I am well, the odour of
daphne, or tuberose, or whatever it is!" she stammered, forcing herself
to speak with a gigantic effort. "And when one has a headache like mine
it is worse."
"I will put them outside," said he, consolingly. She watched him as he
did so, clumsily trying to tread softly as he went to the door. Poor,
kind uncle! If he knew--if he knew!
"Do you know," he began, scanning her livid features with solicitude as
he returned, and resuming his seat, pitched his voice in a low
undertone, which only succeeded in producing a hoarse croak, so unlike
his own cheery voice that in her hysterical, strained state she barely
repressed a shriek of agonized laughter. "I am almost sure, indeed, I
may say I feel convinced, that this headache of yours is a nervous
attack brought on by seeing those waxworks last night. I am sure you
went into the 'Chamber of Horrors,' and looked at the murderers. I did
when I was about your age, and it got on my nerves. My opinion is, that
that making effigies of terrible criminals who have dared to take their
fellow-creatures' lives, and exhibiting them for money, is wrong, and
ought to be forbidden. The law is right when it orders such human
monsters to be buried within the prison, and their bodies consumed with
quicklime. They ought not to be remembered! Every trace of their awful
crimes ought to be instantly obliterated--ah! I thought as much! You
shudder at the very recollection of those wicked faces! A delicate,
innocent young girl like you ought not to go to such places! What? You
did not go into the 'Chamber of Horrors?'"
"I don't think so," stammered Joan faintly, closing her eyes, and
wondering how long this crucifixion of her soul would last. All her
life? "But--what do you mean--the bodies consumed by quicklime? In the
prison?"
"Never mind, we won't talk of such things!" said he, cheerfully.
"Oh--poor little cold hand!" He was startled by the deathly icy touch
of the hand he had taken between his warm palms. "Ah! There is your
aunt! Come in, my dear! I was just telling Joan that I shall insist
upon her seeing the doctor----"
"I am sure you will insist upon nothing of the kind, Thomas," said Lady
Thorne, entering in her handsome, sober black dinner-dress, redeemed
from too great plainness by the diamond pins in the black lace
head-dress crowning her iron-grey hair, and the pearl and diamond
necklet and brooches around and about her lace-encircled throat, and
seeming to bring in a matter-of-fact atmosphere from the outer world of
ordinary commonplace, which jarred upon and supported Joan at one and
the same time. "Joan has nothing the matter with her but a little
neuralgia. She wants a good long sleep, and she will be as well as ever
to-morrow morning. You leave her to me, and don't meddle with what you
men, however clever you may be, know nothing about!" And Lady Thorne,
who remembered her own girlish "attacks" during her love anxieties, and
who had no mind for visits from a doctor who might order change of air
and nip the engagement with Lord Vansittart in the bud, bustled her
husband off, and administered a tonic to her niece in the form of a
good-humoured scolding.
"Men always want to make mountains out of mole-hills, doctors too--they
are all alike!" she ended by saying, after she had chidden her for not
forcing herself to eat and drink. "You did not sleep! Of course not!
Well, I promise you you shall to-night!"
She rang for some clear soup and wine, coaxed Joan to consume both,
then, after herself "seeing her to bed" and administering a good dose of
chloral--a drug she had in her amateur medical studies found was in the
opinion of certain authorities antidotal where there was a consumptive
tendency--sat by her until she was asleep.
And Joan slept--heavily. Only towards morning was her slumber visited
by dreams. The one which arrived with the grey dawn, when the birds
began to chirp in the trees below, was almost a nightmare.
She dreamt that she was a prisoner in the dock, being tried for the
wilful murder of Victor Mercier, alias a'Court. The jury were filing
back into the box amid an awful silence in the crowded court. She saw
each one of her twelve umpires, scanned each sober, serious face, with a
horrible presage of coming doom. She heard the sentence--"Are you all
agreed upon your verdict?" and the reply--the terrible fiat, "Guilty."
She saw the wizened features of the aged judge in his scarlet panoply
assume a grim and solemn expression, as, donning the three-cornered
"black cap"--a head-covering which gave him a grotesque, masquerading
appearance--he addressed her. At first she was too dazed to understand;
then, the concluding adjuration seemed to smite her ears, and stab her
heart.
"This man loved you, and made you his wife. A wife should be one to
stand by the man she marries 'for better, for worse'; which means that
when she takes the oath to do so, she accepts the man's sins with the
man--she becomes one with him, half of himself. There are wives who
have died for husbands as faulty, perhaps more so, than your unhappy
victim. But you! What have you done? When you had money at your
command, did you seek him out? Did you even endeavour to discover what
had become of him? No! Instead, you, as it seems by the evidence we
have heard--incontrovertible evidence of trustworthy witnesses--were
planning a bigamous marriage and secret elopement with another man; and
when, just before the consummation of your guilty plot, your lawful
husband appeared, you were tempted to get rid of the obstacle to its
accomplishment, and to kill him. How you executed the terrible deed we
have heard. You have had every chance which the goodness of your fellow
creatures, and their kindness to you has been almost unexampled, could
provide. You have had, I fear, more mercy than you deserve. For
myself, I cannot hold out any hope that your misguided and guilty life
can possibly be spared." Then Joan listened in mute agony to the
sentence which condemned her to be "hanged by the neck till she was
dead"; she heard the awful prayer, uttered with deep feeling by an aged
man to whom Death could not long remain a stranger, "and may God
Almighty have mercy on your soul!" and all became a blank.
A blank--but not for long. She seemed to be roused by the tolling of a
bell, and looking around, found herself in the condemned cell. Some one
was strapping her with small leathern straps which hurt her, and in
reply to her miserable, pathetic appeal, "oh, please don't," the man
dryly said it would be better for her to be submit to be tightly
bound--"it will be over all the sooner." It? What? Then she saw
serious averted faces--they belonged to men who were forming into
line--she heard the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," she
caught the gleam of a white surplice.
She struggled--fiercely--madly--and awoke.
Awoke--bathed in sweat from head to foot--her pulses beating
wildly--gasping, choking--but alive--free--free!
There was her dear familiar room, grey in the early morning light; the
bell was tolling from a neighbouring monastic church--she was
alive--alive! But--but--it might--come--true--that dream--
"Oh God, it must not!" she exclaimed, flinging herself out of bed and
upon her knees. "It would not be just! You know, my God, I did not mean
it! You know what he was! You must not let me be hanged!"