GEOLETTI TELLS HIS STORY
She came to me, dear love, the moment I had entered the house. Her
sweet eyes, wet and wild, were full of sorrow and unmeant reproach.
They gave one startled glance at the Italian, where he stood behind
me, deferential in the shadows, and then came back in mute appealing
to my face.
“Sit down here, Geoletti,” I said, “until I send for you.”
He obeyed, and I drew the girl into a room hard by, and shut the door,
and held out impassioned arms.
“I could not help it, Ira; indeed, I could not. Things beyond my
controlling have detained me.”
In a moment she had run to me--had abandoned herself to me, and was
sobbing in my arms as if her heart would break.
“Richard, I have wanted you so! Such a dreadful thing!”
“Ira, my darling, what is this?”
“I don’t know what it is. You must go to him--you must go to him at
once. He has been asking for you.”
“He? Who?”
“Lord Skene. O! she has gone away--left us! He has been questioning
me--Uncle Charlie has--and I could tell him nothing. How could I? but
you, Richard?”
“Hush, my dearest darling. Try and compose yourself. Who has gone
away? Tell me in one word, now.”
“Aunt Georgie has.”
“She has gone away? run away, do you mean?”
“She left a letter. He will show it you. There must not be any
scandal, Richard. Some plausible explanation must be given. She went
away before lunch--on foot, and by herself. When I went to look for
her, she was gone, and only the letter was left, and I took it to
uncle, and he read it, and almost broke down before the servants. But
you know what he is. In another moment no one would have thought
anything was the matter--not until I had him alone. O, Richard! what
is it? Everything seems dark and miserable. And you know, and you
won’t tell me.”
“I will tell you if you ask me to; but you will not ask me, dear--not
yet. I see another stroke of scoundrelism in this, perhaps. Why didn’t
I send him to his death! I believe I should have, if I’d known--the
smiling cursed devil!”
“Richard! Who?--you are terrifying me out of my senses.”
“My love, you must not. Look, little girl--little dear, dear girl. I
am holding you--I am Richard, your lover--your lover who puts his
strong arms about you, and tells you it shall all come right. Will you
not trust me?”
“Yes, I will--I will, Richard. Only your violence makes me sick for
you.”
“It makes me sick for myself, to think I cannot control it before my
bird with her beating heart. Be quiet, little soft frightened heart!
Now kiss me, Ira, as I hold you so; and then I will go to him without
a moment’s more delay.”
Yet, for all my resolution, my own heart was beating violently as I
went to seek the old man in his study, where he sat alone. He was at
his desk, his head leaned upon his hand. The lights were lit, but not
enough to flood the room, which lay in partial shadow. It gave me a
pitiful shock, as he turned his face, to see how haggard it was, how
unkempt his hair, so sprucely groomed in general, how all in a base
moment his age had betrayed him. He started upon recognising me, and
gave a heavy sigh, and rose as if to move, but, feeling his weakness,
sank down again, with a forced laugh.
“Egad!” said he--“and I’ve drunk nothing. You must come to the
mountain, Mahomet, as it can’t come to you.”
I took a chair by the desk, and, leaning forward, looked at him
earnestly.
“Lord Skene,” I said low, “Miss Christmas has told me. You meant her
to, I suppose?”
He hesitated an instant; then pushed an open letter towards me; but in
the act withdrew it.
“One moment, my boy,” he said. “There are things that--the essentials
are all you’ll need. Oblige me by reading only what I underline.”
He was busy a little, with a shaking hand; then thrust the letter
towards me once more.
“There,” he said. “You’re her son anyhow. You’ll spare me any
comments, Gaskett, but such as bear strictly upon the question of her
flight and its reasons. I think it likely you’ll know more about those
than I do. There seems a coincidence--damn it, boy, wasn’t there some
damned conscious raven croaking in you the other day, when--there,
read what I’ve underlined.”
He turned his face away impatiently as I took his letter, and read
what he had marked:--
“_I could have faced the horror of that exposure once--could have
braved it, even, as your wife, Charles--you will forgive me--I know
your loving generosity so well. But as the mother of your child I
cannot face it. ... My falsehood lies like a blight upon his little
gentle life; his sweet truth finds a stranger in his mother. Perhaps,
when I am gone, by God’s mercy, he will recover, and live to forget
me. When just now we were alone together, and I whispered to him that
I was going, I am sure he stirred and gave a little sigh as if he were
already conscious of something lifted--some load passing from him. Oh,
Charles, how cruel, though I have deserved it! I think if you
knew--all my tears and penitence in the life I am about to seek--that
sin against the Lamb! ... do not distress yourself about me. I shall
be secure in the fold. Someday, after my final abjuration of the
world, I will let you know ... make what terms you can and will with
my betrayer, for your own sake, for the sake of our darling, dear, not
for mine. ... This cannot continue--its way is madness. There is no
possible foreseeing a limit to his exactions, or to my robbing you.
Now, knowing me fled, he will be anxious, perhaps, to come to terms.
... Richard will tell you--my shame is his, but not the right to
avenge it. Keep him, with all the force of your persuasion, from that
horrible thought. ... Oh, Charles, forgive me!_”
His eyes had sought me again restlessly, as I read; and now, seeing me
come to an end, he rose quickly and tremulously, and set to pacing up
and down.
“What the devil does it all mean, Gaskett? We must stop her--get her
back somehow before it’s too late and the scandal’s out. Have you any
idea where she can have gone?”
“Give me time to think, sir. It is all very sad.”
“Time, time!” he protested irritably. “It’s just that we want to
foreclose on. While it passes, she--good God! you don’t think she’ll
do herself any hurt, do you?”
“I don’t think so, sir. You have her word. She’s seeking some asylum,
from which she proposes writing to you by-and-by.”
“And you know the reason?”
“Yes. I think I may say I’m sure of it.”
He stared at me, where I had risen by the desk. His usual scrupulous
jauntiness was all slack and unstrung. I noticed with concern that the
bow of his shepherd’s-plaid tie was twisted an inch out of its place.
He looked as if he had been out for many nights on end.
“It’s all deuced odd,” he said at last. “What devil’s abroad in the
house of late? First you and your conundrums, and now this. Perhaps
you’ll be telling me there’s some connection between the two.”
“Yes; I shall tell you that.”
“Ah!”
“There is a very close connection, sir, as regards one person.”
“What person?”
“Mr Dalston.”
The name obviously conveyed no meaning to him. He only pondered me,
dumfoundered, fingering his lips.
“The man is an infernal scoundrel, sir,” I said with emphasis. “I
intimated as much to you once before. What I did not, could not, touch
upon at the time, was the strange coincidence of his double connection
with your family. He was not only your son’s travelling tutor, sir;
but he is also, by his own assertion, and in Lady Skene’s belief, _my_
father.”
For a moment his mind, grasping desperately at the significance of my
words, slipped and went under.
“Dalston!” he muttered amazed. “Delane was Charlie’s tutor.”
“Delane or Dalston, sir--it is all the same. The man had his reasons
for assuming a name not his own. It was to cover over the tracks of a
very discreditable liaison he had had with a young woman, whom he had
known when he was an usher at a school at Clapham.”
“At Clapham!” The word seemed to take him in the face. “Go on,” he
said presently, with a sudden clinching intonation.
“Is it necessary, sir? You will comprehend me, I think.”
“She deceived me about you?”
“Yes.”
“Anything more?”
“This man, who calls himself my father, has come to trade upon his
knowledge of that deceit.”
The old legal terrier was beginning to awake in him--to prick its ears
and show its teeth.
“To trade? I understand. Hush-money, eh?”
“He has had one large sum from her already. I believe, on my honour,
sir, it was his demanding a second this morning that drove her to this
step.”
“Very likely--very probable indeed.”
He resumed his pacing again, plunged into frowning thought. I rejoiced
to see this grasp, this stiffening, this recovery in him of an ancient
forceful shrewdness, Presently he stopped.
“Do you guess where she is gone, Richard?”
“Yes, I guess, sir.”
“Where?”
“To Mr Pugsley’s.”
“O! Now, why?”
“For one thing, he is her spiritual adviser. For another, he was aware
of her deceit from the first, and could even reconcile his condonation
of it with his evangelical conscience. In the view of that, sir, I
understand, the fraud was not only harmless but praiseworthy, in
consideration of its object in reclaiming a brand from the burning.”
“Meaning me.” For the first time a faint smile twitched his lips. “You
seem to have interested yourself successfully in your family history,
Gaskett.”
“Yes, I have, sir; and to more purpose than this, even.”
“Wait a bit. If your surmise is correct, it would be useless to
attempt to persuade her back until this man has been dealt with.”
“I think you would be most unwise to attempt it.”
“I quite agree with you. We must buy him out first.”
“_Buy_ him out, sir? A cur like that? Stone him out, don’t you mean?”
He was smilingly tolerant of me. His manner had become, almost in a
moment, quite confident and reassured. I had guessed already that the
deception, _per se_, would count for little with him; but I was not
prepared for his cool reception of its consequences.
“Tut-tut, my boy!” he said. “If you had had my experience, you would
know that compromise is nine parts of the law.”
“And a rope the tenth, sir, is it not? Well, you may play your nine
parts for me; only I, for what remains, am going to hang Mr Dalston.”
The colour left his face. His new sprightliness was all gone in a
moment. He returned to the desk, and seated himself, somewhat in his
old tired attitude.
“Well, Richard,” he said. “What else?”
Emotion rose in me. I lingered on the blow I had to deal. But it must
out at last.
“I made a point, sir, if you observed, of referring to him as
_calling_ himself my father.”
“I noticed. He is not your father, then--only the vile deputy of
another?”
“No more my father, sir, I do believe, than Lady Skene is my mother. I
was born of quite other parentage.”
He held his eyes shaded with one hand. The shaking fingers of the
other affected to toy with a pen.
“Go on,” he muttered. “Why do you stop?”
Without pause or hesitation, then, I gave him the full history of my
inquisition, from the utterance of the first word which had launched
me on it, to my final interview with his wife. And at the end, “Lord
Skene,” I said, “judge all this as you will. There is still the worst
to come--the corner-stone to such a monument of villainy as I never
dreamed of unveiling when I started. I beg, sir, with all the passion
of entreaty I can command, that you will brace yourself to hear a very
dreadful truth. I told you, on that former occasion, that I had come
by accident upon part of a letter written by your son to Mr Thesiger.
Here it is.”
I laid the faded sheet before him. He read it through once, twice,
three times; and looked up at me with a lost expression.
“Well?” he whispered hoarsely.
“It is your son’s, sir?”
“Yes, it is from Charlie.”
“The reference in it, sir--the ‘You-know-who’?”
“Yes--well?”
“Is to Mrs Dalston, I cannot doubt. _He_ was married to her first.”
“Who? Charlie?”
“Yes; and, because of it--O! sir, for all it means to you, compose
yourself to meet the blow--_because of it, was done to death by the
man who is now Mrs Dalston’s husband, and your own wife’s damned
betrayer._”
His head sank low. I thought, for all my warning, I had risked too
much. But in a moment he lifted it again, and the expression on it,
stern, white, self-repressed, was such, I imagined, as might have
marked its character when, in past days, he would rise, black-capped,
to sentence a prisoner to the last awful penalty.
“On what authority,” he began, in a quick loud voice, which sank even
upon its utterance--“on what authority?”--and the words died out in a
whisper.
“On the authority, sir,” I said, “of a man who was in hiding near by
at the time the crime was committed, and who sought afterwards, on the
strength of his secret, to bleed the murderer’s pocket, as the
murderer has since, on another count, sought to bleed your wife’s. But
he proved himself no match against a desperate villain’s
resourcefulness; and was caught in the net of his own spreading, and
put away for years on a trumped-up charge. You will find his name
there--Geoletti.”
Lord Skene looked up at me, and laughed--a painful, twisted, unnatural
cachinnation.
“I had observed it already, Richard. I sentenced the man myself--good
God!”
He buried his face in his hands, as if overwhelmed. And, indeed, the
coincidence was staggering.
“Is that so, sir?” I said in a strained dry voice. “Well, it only
remains to say that he has served his sentence to the hilt, and has
emerged from it with one only purpose remaining to his ruined
life--revenge on the author of his sufferings.”
I felt the question coming from him, and forestalled it.
“How I know this? The man had tracked his quarry home, and I came upon
him, quite by chance, foundered by the way. But when he told me his
name--great God, sir, I remembered the letter--your son’s letter--and
then only a little questioning was needed to extract the whole
accursed truth.”
“Where is he?”
“He is waiting outside at this moment.”
“Fetch him in.”
I was moving to obey, when he stopped me.
“Put down that light first. I must hear and see and not be seen.
There, would he know me?”
“I believe it is quite out of the question.”
“Go, then.”
I stepped softly into the hall, and beckoning to the Italian, motioned
him into the room and shut the door.
“Geoletti,” I said, “I want you now, clearly and briefly, to relate
the whole history of your connection with Mr Dalston, from the first
committal of the crime with which you charge him, to the moment when,
through his wicked agency, you were sentenced, on a false charge, to a
long term of penal servitude. You can trust me that the statement will
help us all, if you omit nothing and extenuate nothing.”
He bowed his head gravely thereupon, and crushing his hat nervously in
his hands before him, and moistening his dry lips, entered upon his
narrative as follows:--
ANTONIO GEOLETTI’S STORY[2]
My name is Antonio Geoletti, and I am a Piedmontese. Twenty years ago
I was by profession a guide of the Val d’Aosta. There was none equal
to me in knowledge of that district. From the Glacier di Lys to the
chain of Mon Iseran I knew it all, every acre. The valleys of Pellina,
du Butier, d’Entreves, Veni, de la Tuile, Grisanche, Savera, di Cogne,
Camporcier--they were hackneyed to me one and all. I could trace to
its source every mountain torrent which poured from the high Alps into
the upper waters of the Dora Baltea. The cravats of Mon Cervin,
d’Oren, de Ferret, were no less my familiars than were the passes de
la Seigne and of the great and little St Bernards, through which I
would often conduct visitors bound adventurously for Savoy. My
knowledge of the mountains was unique, wonderful--informed with
secrets, moreover, hidden from all others. It was the possession of
one such secret, alas! which betrayed me to my ruin.
In the Val d’Entreves are the village and baths of Cormayeur. There is
also the Hospice of St Marguerite to which invalids resort. Thither,
in the spring of 1860, came two ladies, Miss Lucie Love, a young
English _héritière_ and orphan, and her only living relative, Madame
Gondran, who was old and sick, with eyes like the dying hawk, and of a
self-will and passion quite ungovernable. The young lady was the most
beautiful in person and complexion; for which reason, it would appear,
and because of the many gifts of health and wealth which Fortune had
lavished upon its favourite, her aunt could never expend enough upon
her her heart of venom and detestation. I think she would have liked
to debar her for ever from all the profits of her estate of youth. But
such a flower so sweet, and well-bequeathed, was not long to escape
the marauding bee. There arrived to Aosta in these days two gentlemen
making the tour, a young English milord and his Gouverneur, of whom
the names were respectively Mr Charles Skene and Mr Delane. These two,
then, exploring among the mountains, came very shortly across Miss
Lucie; and straightway the die was cast. Milord would hear of nothing
but that they transfer at once their quarters to Cormayeur; and so
there they went and remained for six months and more.
In this interval what now has come to pass? You shall hear, as I
heard--partly of gossip, partly of acquaintances employed in the
Hospice, partly of my own ears; for the gentlemen engaged me
constantly to convey them into the places of interest about the
neighbourhood.
This, then, had happened. Milord and Miss Lucie were become
inseparable lovers, and desirous of the plighted troth. But Madame
Gondran she would not hear of it. She was all engaged herself to the
seductiveness of the Gouverneur, and--for the chief reason that the
young lady feared and disliked him in the exact opposite
proportion--was determined to sanction him for her nominee to the
covetable hand of Miss. He, this Mr Delane, was, of a surety, very
pleasing and attentive with her, and the young man, his pupil, not at
all; but, like a boy, arrogant and inconsiderate. Milord, no doubt,
lacked the experience to know that the diplomacy of wooing is to
propitiate the guardian before the ward. It is well, also, to warm a
woman’s vanity, if you would see her melt to you.
So things went on; until presently a soft gossip began to make itself
heard, with turnings of the head, and nudgings, and a pointing of the
finger. There were whispers of a fondness betrayed, and of love
beginning to reveal in itself the penalty of rashness. One was
wondering how the truth could still hide itself from the eyes of the
terrible invalid, when suddenly a startling calamity befell: Milord
disappeared, and was never heard of again.
Now I quote what follows from the testimony of the Hospice walls,
which were alway as full of ears and eyes as a honeycomb. It deals
with the period before investigation had established the pretty moral
certitude that Milord had met with some fatal accident on the
mountains, and when he was still supposed, in the popular view, to
have slipped away merely from the consequences of an intrigue. The
young Madame, it appeared, quite incredulous at the outset, was driven
presently, by her Aunt and the Gouverneur, into the conviction that
she had been ruined and deserted by a scoundrel. In the first of her
desperation, indeed, eager to vindicate both herself and her lover,
she declared that they were husband and wife--that, in short, on a
certain remembered day, when they had all joined in an expedition to
Aosta, he and she had eluded the others for a time, and, by
prearrangement, had been married before some civil functionary, who
had afterwards certified to the fact in a document, preserved, she
believed, by Mr Skene.
Well, if this confession was so unpalatable to the listeners as to add
a hundredfold to Madame Gondran’s jealousy and hatred, it afforded at
the same time a text for ample revenge. The match was no match, they
declared, in English law; Miss Lucie was none the less for it betrayed
and abandoned. Her seducer, of course, had only caught her into a very
ancient snare, and, having tangled her in its meshes, had gone off
laughing. Indeed, it would appear, he had hinted as much to Mr Delane
before running away, and, by that shameless boast, had caused a
rupture between himself and his tutor. He was gone, anyhow and
finally, never to return, and utter ruin and disgrace were all that
remained to the poor lady out of that short rhapsody of passion;
unless--unless what? Why, grieved and shame-stricken though he was
over this downfall of a cherished idol, the Gouverneur, still great
and magnanimous in his love, would consent to save her reputation, at
the cost of his own shattered ideals, by marrying her himself at a
moment’s notice, and afterwards removing her to a place where gossip
could find no data for detraction.
They may have lied, or spoken the truth--I know not. But this I know:
she was wax in their powerful hands--a poor, dazed, heartbroken,
will-less creature. They took her to Turin, we heard, and there the
man married her. And there, on the very morrow of the wedding, the old
witch Gondran was found dead in her bed--struck down, in the moment of
triumph, by the ecstasy of her spite. She lies in the Cimitero on the
Chivasso Road. I have seen the blasted flowers on her grave.
But now all this time I was thinking what to do. And all the time I
was still thinking and thinking, when the suspicion first arose that
Milord, instead of having taken himself off, as supposed, had really,
in some adventurous wandering, come by his death in the mountains,
since, indeed, he had never been seen to emerge from among them at any
part. And suddenly there came over from England a lady, his relative,
to inquire into his disappearance; and Mr Delane was questioned, and
told all he knew, confessing he had thought Milord had bolted to evade
the consequences of a scrape best not referred to. Then one day I went
to learn more of what was doing, and found the inquestation over, and
Mr Delane gone home to England with his wife. And again that set me to
thinking more, and again more.
For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I
had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and
wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a
selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring
booths of the fair--they could possess for me an equal madness of
attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty
pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it
would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on
the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital?
Yes, that was it--that might always have been the difficulty, had I
not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a
certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then,
was my potential.
What was it? What was this tremendous secret? It is uttered in a
breath. I knew, I had known from the first, that Milord had never run
away, but that he had been murdered, and his body hidden in a
subterranean chamber, by the man who professed to be his friend and
admonitor. I will explain.
High above Cormayeur, among the waste and desolation of the hills,
there pours itself down a torrent which is called Lapluietonnante--the
Rain of Thunder. Once and more, this torrent, entering through rocky
ravines, plunges like a mad and foaming horse, until at length, too
blind with terror to note where it is going, it leaps from a
precipice, and crashes in a ruin of watery splinters on the rocks a
score of yards below. Now, at the very point where the water springs
from the gorge, there is a certain fissure in the wall of rock, not
easily observable amongst others, but which, having once discovered
and entered, one will find leads down by a fantastic passage into a
chamber or grotto situated right behind the fall and opening on to it.
Here was a secret of knowledge, I thought, my own exclusive property,
until Milord came to disabuse my mind. He did not confess his
discovery to me; but I gathered, from what he let fall, that his
daring spirit had penetrated to the arcanum which heretofore had been
my solitary possession. “I could show you, Geoletti,” said he once, “a
cavern in the water that would be worth a little fortune to you in
tips, if you knew it. But I’m going to keep it to myself till I go;
and then perhaps I’ll let out.” I smiled to him, confessing nothing;
but from that moment I was always on the watch to see if my suspicion
were correct. There was a second fissure immediately above the other,
but shallow, and with a projection of rock within it apt for cover;
and there, when I knew Milord to be abroad in the neighbourhood, I
would often hide myself, and spy to see him come. And once at last he
came, and the Gouverneur with him.
They stopped beside the rock, and talked before they entered. It was
then the time when scandal came to whisper of a young maid’s
condition. That subject was on their lips.
“It’s done, and there’s an end of it,” said Milord in a heat. “I tell
you I’ve married her, Mr Mark Dalston.”
“Why do you call me by that name?” asked the Gouverneur. He was very
quiet and smiling; and he showed his white teeth always.
“Because it’s your real one, isn’t it?” said Milord. “And because I
want to convince you that mine isn’t the only secret here that might
lead to disturbances if revealed. I stand to take the consequences of
_my_ deeds, Mr Dalston, whatever you may do.”
“Have you, then,” said the Gouverneur, “written to confess to your
father?”
“No, but I’m going to,” answered Milord. “It can’t be delayed much
longer. Only I’ll do it in my own time and way, and stand no dictating
from anybody.” Then he seemed to soften a little. “Hang it, Delane!”
he said. “I’m sorry if you are sweet on the girl yourself. But one
could never tell from your manner--you’re such a deep chap.”
“Am I?” said the Gouverneur, and he laughed. “But you have beaten us
all in depth, Skene. Well, as you remark, the thing’s done, and
there’s no more to be said about it for the moment. Now show me the
way into this wonderful cave you’ve discovered.”
They passed in, one after the other, Milord going first--and he never
came out again. Only, presently, there jumped from the opening on to
the grass a man very white but smiling still, who flicked the dust
from his clothes, and sat down on a rock, looking into the curve of
the fall as if his eyes were needles to pierce it. And suddenly he
came to his feet.
“My God, Lucie!” he said to the water, “how I love you! My God, how I
love you!” and with that he turned and went away.
And presently I too went down into the cave.
He had shot him with a pistol from the back. He lay on his face, and
his head was like a trampled bush. Near the body, flung from it in its
fall, was a little tin case such as they make for sandwiches; and in
it I found, when I could force the nerve to look, the certificate of
Milord’s marriage with Miss Lucie.
I put it back; I touched nothing more; like a murderer myself I stole
away, and left everything as I had found it. From that day to this the
cave shall have held its secret undiscovered. There still the body
must be lying as when it fell never to stir again. You know the rest.
I knew it from his own lips: how, a few months after the married
couple had returned to England, an Italian courier, discharged in
Aosta for drunkenness, had persuaded Geoletti to profit by his
knowledge of London, and go there with him; how, from Soho, the
potential blackmailer had taken his bearings, and, by the aid of
compatriots, run his quarry to earth, and forced an interview upon him
and revealed his knowledge and his purpose; how Mr Dalston,
temporising a moment, had referred him, for final settlement, to the
house of a certain doctor in Kennington, to which he had gone by
secret appointment and with what fatal results to himself. The
listener needed only these links in the chain of evidence to complete
the story for him; and, when they had been supplied, a deep and tragic
silence fell upon the room.
Presently, not raising his head, he motioned to the narrator, a
gesture of dismissal.
“Go,” I whispered to Geoletti, “and return to the lodge.”
I stood, when we were alone, a moment in indecision; then crossed the
room softly.
“If the hurt has come from _my_ hand, sir,” I said, “you will know why
I ask you to forgive me for it, will you not?”
He was muttering to himself; he hardly seemed to notice me.
“My God! poor Charlie--my God! poor Charlie”--over and over again.
Suddenly he got stiffly to his feet.
“Hush! Didn’t I hear the boy crying?” he said, listening in a startled
way. “He’s left to me yet--he sha’n’t be disinherited--his mother must
come back to me and end all this. There was never a woman so beautiful
or so foolish in all the world.”
He seemed to recollect himself, and me, and my question; and now he
answered that obliquely, not looking at me, but fingering some papers
on his desk.
“You know your course, Gaskett? It’s obvious enough, I should think.”
The formal address, the reluctance of his manner, woke a strange chill
in me.
“I think so, sir,” I said, withdrawing a little. “It is to visit Lady
Skene’s mother again, and face her with a new and sufficient reason
for confessing the truth.”
He drew in his breath softly, as if to a wince of pain; then turned to
canvass me fully for the first time.
“Well,” he said, “you have hit me pretty hard in my old age, Gaskett;
and you’ll not be surprised that I find your hand a bit stunning. You
must grant me to-night to think it all over; and to-morrow I’ll give
you my answer. Come up at midday. The man’s safe with you, I suppose.
That’s all that it’s essential to ensure for the moment. I shall not
come in to dinner. Good-night!”
The blows to which he had been subjected had tried him, no doubt, to
the very limit of endurance; yet, somehow, this was not the sequel to
them that I had expected. My heart was like a stone in me. I turned
and went out of the room without another word.
And, then--sweet balm in Gilead!
She was waiting for me, flitting like a ghost-moth about the dark old
panels of the room from which she had dismissed me a little while ago.
She put her finger to her lips, and hushed me in, and shut the door.
She had dressed for dinner during the interval of my absence, and was
a lovelier, more fairy-like apparition by twenty degrees. I felt like
taking a dream into my arms--the sweet soft fragrance of her hair, and
lifted face, and young white innocent bosom. A thread of diamonds
dewed her neck--she melted to me like a very dew of girlhood, and
loved and clung to me, and whispered impassioned that I was hers, she
could not spare me to another, and I might claim her when I would and
she would come to me.
Her love, her rapture, her absorbing sympathy, were inexpressibly
touching to me in my moody distress. Let all the world go by, so long
as this dear flower of it sweetened on my heart.
“Ira,” I whispered, fondling her in an ecstasy, “I believe I know
where your aunt has gone.”
“O, Richard!” she answered. “That is heavenly. Am I to know no more?”
“Wait a little, you lovely thing. I may want you all before long. I am
very much alone. Perhaps--Ira, will you meet me to-morrow, under the
old hawthorn?”
“Yes, Richard. Anywhere, and at any time you tell me.”
“Say at three o’clock.”
“Shall I make a note of it, Richard?”
“I’ll do it for you--look, on the inside of your elbow. Now bend your
arm, and keep it hidden from everybody.”