WAITING FOR THE VERDICT.
It was three weeks later, and the day of Gumley's trial.
In the same pleasant room, with its French windows opening on the
lawn, already known to us, Mrs. Drelincourt was reclining on a lounge,
engaged in some kind of fine needlework. On a small occasional table
within reach of her hand lay an open telegram. She was alone, and had
been so for some time, but she did not on that account think herself
neglected. Indeed, she was one of those women, few and far between,
who love solitude for its own sake, and can taste to the full its
subtle charm.
Before long her reverie was broken by the entrance of Colonel Winslow.
"It's close upon three o'clock, and yet Felix has not returned," he
said. "It is not often that he prolongs his ride so far into the
afternoon."
"Very seldom indeed. I was becoming rather anxious about him when this
came to hand." As she spoke, she handed him the telegram.
The colonel took it and read it aloud:
"'Drelincourt, Greystone Priors, to Mrs. Drelincourt, Fairlawn.--Selim
has fallen lame. Shall leave him here, to be fetched by groom
tomorrow, and return by train.' That fully accounts for his
non-arrival," added the colonel, as he replaced the telegram on the
table, and drew up a chair. "You have heard nothing yet, I presume, as
to how Gumley's trial is progressing?"
"Nothing whatever. Roden Marsh is in attendance at the sessions house,
and will bring us the news at the earliest possible moment."
"I am afraid the result is a foregone conclusion," remarked the
colonel.
The subject was one Mrs. Drelincourt did not care to pursue.
"And must your visit really come to an end in the course of a few
days?" she presently asked. "Cannot we persuade you to favor us with
your company for a fortnight longer?"
"I'm afraid I have no option in the matter. Weeks ago I promised my
sister to be with her on the twelfth of this month, and were I to
break my word, I should render myself liable to pains and penalties
without number."
"But we shall have you with us again later in the season?"
"I certainly hope so. It won't be my fault if you don't."
"I cannot tell you how grateful I feel for the change which your
visit--for I can set it down to nothing else--has wrought in Felix.
Not for years--nay, scarcely since our marriage--has he seemed so
cheerful, so free from care, so little given to brooding over his
experiments and shutting himself up among his books, as during the
three weeks you have been with us."
"Ah ha! I do take some little credit to myself for having coaxed our
snail out of his shell, for having wheedled our bookworm out of his
seclusion; and it must be your care after I'm gone, dear Mrs.
Drelincourt, to see that he doesn't revert to his hermit-like ways."
A little sigh escaped Mrs. Drelincourt.
"I am greatly afraid that when your enlivening presence is no longer
here, everything will go on precisely as it did before your arrival."
"It is always wise to hope for the best. In any case, I won't fail to
come and stir up Felix again in the course of the autumn."
Before more could be said, Marian, closely followed by Walter, each of
them carrying a croquet mallet, made their appearance at one of the
long windows, which, this balmy afternoon, stood wide open.
"Colonel Winslow," said the flushed and happy looking girl, "we want
you to come and decide a point of the game for us about which we can't
agree."
Left alone, Mrs. Drelincourt resumed her needlework. Her thoughts were
busy with what had just passed between the colonel and herself.
"Yes, Felix has been a changed man from the day of his friend's
arrival three weeks ago. And yet, there is something in the change
which I fail to understand, and which, for that very reason, dulls the
edge of my happiness. To me--but I may be fanciful--there seems
something feverish and unreal about his gaiety. His mirth has an air
of being assumed for the occasion; in his laughter there is an echo of
mockery; it is as though he were laughing at himself for finding
anything worth laughing about.
"At times there comes into his eyes a strange, impersonal look, as
though he were gazing at something invisible to any one but himself.
And why is it that of late he cannot rest at night? Why does he
rise and quit the house at daybreak, and not be seen again till
breakfast time? There is something below the surface of which I know
nothing--something he is hiding from me. He thinks to deceive me by
his assumption of gaiety, whereas--Ah!"
A slight noise had caused her to turn her head. There stood her
husband, holding aside the portière and gazing smilingly at her. He
had gone to the boudoir first in search of her. He now came forward,
and having disposed of his hat and gloves on a side table, he bent
over his wife and kissed her tenderly.
"My telegram reached you in due course, I see. I was afraid you would
be growing uneasy."
"I had indeed grown very uneasy long before it arrived."
"I had gone for a longer ride than usual, when all at once Selim fell
lame. I was compelled to dismount and lead him at a snail's pace as
far as Greystone Priors, where I had his legs bandaged, and have left
him till tomorrow." Then, having drawn up a chair, he asked, but
without any apparent eagerness: "Anything fresh? Any news?"
"None whatever."
"Then Rodd has not returned?"--consulting his watch as he put the
question.
"I have not seen anything of him. But the trial will scarcely be over
as early as this, will it?"
"That is more than I can say."
Thrusting his hands into his pockets, and whistling under his breath a
lively operatic air, he strolled to the garden window and stood gazing
out for a little while. His wife followed him with her eyes. Now that
his back was towards her, her face had grown suddenly aged and anxious
looking.
"He is playing a part, and he thinks I cannot see through the
pretense," she whispered to herself. "But love has keen eyes. What it
is that he is hiding from me I cannot so much as guess, but sure I am
that some secret trouble is gnawing at his heartstrings."
Presently Drelincourt turned from the window, and going to the piano,
he sat down on the music stool and began to play a bar of the air he
had been whistling.
Suddenly Marian appeared at the window, and seeing her father in the
room, she laid a finger on her lips as a caution to her mother. Then
she ran lightly across the floor, and next moment her arms were round
his neck and her lips pressed to his cheek.
"You were gone this morning before I was down, so that I have not been
able to thank you till now for your beautiful, beautiful present."
"Nor I an opportunity of wishing my little girl--ought I not rather to
say my bouncing big girl?--many, very many happy returns of the day,
which I now do from the bottom of my heart."
His arm was round her waist, and for the next few seconds she felt
herself pressed close to him. Tears sprang to her eyes. "Dear papa!"
she said to herself. "He loves me more than I thought he did."
At this juncture the colonel and young Deane came in by way of the
farther window.
"And I have had other charming gifts," resumed Marian. "One from
mamma, one from Wally, another from Colonel Winslow, and yet another
from Roden Marsh. Am I not a fortunate girl? You must come and see
them where they are laid out in mamma's dressing room."
A little later in the afternoon Drelincourt and Walter Deane happened
to be left alone in the morning room.
Deane was turning over a book of engravings at one of the tables, but
not without an eye for all that was going forward. Drelincourt was
lounging against the framework of the farther window.
"In this suspense there lurks a torture worthy of a grand inquisitor,"
murmured the latter. "I wonder whether I or that poor devil awaiting
sentence in the dock suffers the more on our invisible rack."
Having glanced at his watch, he took to slowly pacing the room, his
hands behind his back.
"And yet, what need to wonder? He is but a clod, callous, brutalized,
degraded; and though his life is doubtless as sweet to him as mine is
to me, there are in me a thousand springs of feeling and emotion, each
a separate source of torture, of which such as he can know nothing. In
my case the stake is more, infinitely more, than is involved in the
premature ending of a life by which I have never set any special
store. There's the pity of it! If the issues of our actions affected
ourselves alone, we could afford to suffer in silence, and bow our
necks to the stroke with something like equanimity; but the Eumenides
who wait on wrong doing ever contrive to stab us through the hearts of
our dearest and our best."
Young Deane's furtive glances followed Drelincourt every time the
latter's back was turned on him.
"I have never seen Mr. Drelincourt so restless as he seems this
afternoon," he muttered to himself. "There's something on his
mind--that's clear. Can it be that he's troubling himself about the
result of the trial? Yet, why should he? It's not as if he were a
vindictive man. However it may go, it can matter little to him."
"That boy is eying me and wondering what the deuce is the matter," was
Drelincourt's unspoken thought. "_Eh bien!_ Let us give him something
else to think about."
Drawing up a chair close to Deane, he seated himself astride it, and
rested his crossed arms on its back.
"While I was out this morning," he began, "I was told something which
put me about more than I like to own."
"Indeed, sir! I am very sorry to hear it," answered the young fellow,
as he shut up the book of engravings and turned a sympathetic face
toward the other.
"If I tell my wife, she will be greatly distressed, because she is
acquainted with the people concerned; and yet I feel that she ought to
know. I'm rather at a loss what to do."
Drelincourt paused to follow with his eyes the flight of a butterfly
which had found its way into the room.
Walter wondered what was coming next.
"Some little while ago," resumed Drelincourt, "a friend of mine, whom
I may be said to have known all my life, was charged on his own
confession--a confession he need never have made had he not
voluntarily chosen to do so--with the commission of what by the
majority of persons would doubtless be regarded as a crime of a very
heinous kind; although it is to be presumed that, had he thought well
to do so, he could have alleged some justification at least of the
crime of which he was guilty. But be that as it may, having made a
clean breast of it, there seemed no course left open to him but
suicide."
"Suicide! Oh, Mr. Drelincourt!"
"That touches him!" whispered the latter to himself. Then aloud: "Life
had become too bitter to him; he could endure it no longer. Well, he
had one child, a daughter, who was engaged to be married at the time
of her father's death; but after that event, the man to whom she was
betrothed broke off the affair on the plea that it was impossible for
him to wed the daughter of a criminal and a suicide."
"The mean scoundrel!"
"The double blow--the loss at once of her father and her lover (not to
speak of the social stigma which will inevitably cling to her in time
to come) has all but broken poor Lucy's heart. On the other hand,
there is, of course, much to be urged from young Melville's point of
view, and I have no doubt the majority of men would be inclined to do
as he has done. Who can estimate the harm it might have done his
future career had he married the daughter of a man who, rather than
face the consequences of his crime, had preferred to put an end to
himself! Yes, on further reflection, I am inclined to think that he
behaved with admirable prudence."
"While I, if he were here, would brand him for the coward and
despicable wretch he really is!" exclaimed Deane.
His cheeks were flushed, a fine indignation shone in his eyes; there
could be no doubt of the sincerity with which he spoke. Nothing of all
this was lost on the elder man.
"But the young lady is well rid of him," he went on. "If in the
darkest hours of her life he thus abandons her, what he miscalled his
love is not a thing either to covet or regret."
"But consider," urged Drelincourt, "what the world would have said!
Think of the shock to his friends!"
"In his place I should have thought only of her I loved. If the world
and my friends chose to disapprove, they would have been welcome to do
so. Oh, Mr. Drelincourt, what a miserable hound this fellow must be!
Not to one man in a thousand in these days is the chance afforded of
proving what stuff he's really made of. In King Arthur's time men had
to win their wives after a fashion which revealed the coward and the
cad in their true colors. What a pity that some such test is not
enforced nowadays!"
Drelincourt smiled as he rose and pushed away his chair. "In that
case, I'm afraid the number of compulsory bachelors would soon mount
up to an alarming figure."
Walter also rose and went and stood by one of the windows. He wore a
preoccupied air, as of one debating some question with himself.
Drelincourt's lips moved inaudibly.
"As I told Winslow, I had my reasons for affording Marian and this
young fellow an opportunity of falling in love with each other. I do
not think--no, I do not think that I am mistaken in him!"
Next moment a shadow darkened his face. Again he glanced at his watch.
"The trial ought to be over by now. I thought I heard the sound of
galloping hoofs." For a few seconds he stood in a listening attitude.
"The sound was in my own brain only. So does expectation play the
cheat with itself!"
Presently Deane turned from the window and went up to Drelincourt, who
was standing at the center table, examining an etching through a
magnifying glass. His face was pale, but his lips were firmly set, and
his eyes shone with resolution.
"Mr. Drelincourt," he began, in a voice which had lost something of
its customary assurance, "after what has just passed between us, I
think it due to you to inform you that _I_ am the son of a man who
committed suicide! Probably you will think that such a circumstance
ought to have been brought to your knowledge long ago; and, indeed, I
feel now that it was both cowardly and wrong on my part to keep it
from you. The only excuse I can offer is that my father's memory is so
dear to me that--that----"
The words broke on his lips; a mist dimmed his eyes; he turned away
while he recovered himself.
Drelincourt laid a hand gently on his shoulder.
"Not a word more is needed," he said in grave, kindly accents. "My
boy, all the sad circumstances connected with your father's end are
known to me already."
"Mr. Drelincourt!"
"As also how every penny of your legacy was devoted to the payment of
the debts he left behind him."
"You know all this, and yet----"
"Hush! Some one comes. Not another word."