TAKEN UNAWARES.
“You have a chapel?” asked Father Maurice.
He was an abstemious man; his vile dinner had not troubled him. Indeed,
if he had not been afraid to risk weakness, he would not have eaten a
crust in this house.
“Yes.”
The late owners of the place had been Catholics.
“But it is disused; in sad repair.”
“It is the only place for a marriage,” said the priest, and Raimond
smiled, remembering the inn parlor in which this very man had married
him to Andria Heathcote. “If you will allow me and provide me with some
candles, I will go and prepare it early in the morning. You wished to
have the wedding at seven?”
He looked at Raimond.
“At six. I should have liked you to have seen the bride to-night,
but----” he laughed, “well, she was shy! I could not induce her to come
down.”
“Yes, yes,” said the priest hastily, and rose, that they might not see
his face. “I will go to my room if you will excuse me. I am tired, and
must rise early.”
“Your friend may be trustworthy, but he’s damnably unpleasant,” said
Erceldonne, as soon as the priest’s back was turned.
“It won’t matter what he is to-morrow morning after the register is
signed.”
But even Erle was not easy about the task before him.
“Call Mrs. Fuller, will you? I want to talk to her.”
The low hum of their voices reached Father Maurice, where he paced
up and down his room. Regardless of the damp outside, he opened his
window and leaned out, and if there had been any one to see his face,
something in it might have made them marvel. It was not the face of a
fool, or of a friend of Raimond Erle’s.
Then he did a strange thing for a priest and a guest. He took off
his shoes, and left the room without a sound. He was gone perhaps ten
minutes, and when he came back there were only two voices in that
murmur from the room below. Mrs. Fuller’s was missing. He went to the
window again and scanned the misty darkness, as if he expected some
one, but nothing stirred.
“At dawn,” he thought. “I pray I have not acted unwisely. There are
many hours till dawn,” and he sat listening and watching, long after
the house was silent.
His task was abhorrent to him; he loathed this semblance of doing evil
that good might come, yet he saw no way out of it. When the night
changed to dawn, he went his way to a deserted chapel that stood in the
grounds.
It was open, and he lit candles on the desolate altar. He was strangely
pale after his night’s vigil, and he watched the growing light with
grudging eyes.
“Ah!” he said suddenly. He turned away into the moldy vestry and
knelt down to pray. When he came out into the empty chapel a beam of
sunlight struggled through the dusty glory of the stained windows, and
shone like an auriole round him as he stood in his vestments. But to
Erceldonne, who entered at that moment, it looked as if the priest were
bathed in blood.
Without speaking, he motioned to some one behind him.
Raimond Erle took a girl’s passive hand and laid it on his father’s
arm; and passed on to the right hand of the altar.
Step by step, Erceldonne advanced with a terror at his heart for which
he had no reason, since the license was right, by what means his son
best knew.
The bride, all in white, with a thick lace veil over her dusky hair and
pale face, never looked up as she leaned on his arm; made no sign of
surprise or dissent as she saw the waiting priest.
Father Maurice, book in hand, never moved as they approached him, but
as they sank on their knees he raised his hand, and his voice thrilled
through the cold chapel. But not in the familiar Latin Erceldonne, who
had been a Catholic when he was anything, expected.
“‘Behold, I will repay, saith the Lord,’” the strong, clear words rang
out over the kneeling wedding-party. “‘I have laid a snare for thee, O
Babylon; and thou art also taken, for thou wast not aware.’”
“The Presbyterian will come out!” thought Erle, mindful of the
priest’s history, and never stirred a finger at the magnificent cry of
denunciation.
But Lord Erceldonne knew better.
He had seen the priest’s finger that pointed to something behind him;
had turned his head, sprung up, and stood turned to stone.
The chapel was empty no longer.
Between him and the sunlight outside the open door, between him and the
desire of his eyes, stood two that were risen from the dead. Behind
them, strange men in plain clothes. To Erceldonne the place seemed
swarming. He could not draw his breath, and he shook from him the
terrified woman’s hand that clutched his arm.
The strange pause made the bridegroom turn. But even he could not speak.
Andria--Andria stood there, with her eyes on his. And Heriot held her
hand! Heriot, that was dead in Flores!
Father Maurice stepped to Erle’s side, and touched him lightly on the
shoulder.
“Be glad,” he said, “that you have not had time to take another sin
upon you! There stands your wife, whom you deserted and left to die.
Go to her, ask her pardon on your knees. You told her I was no priest;
that I had no right to marry you. I was a minister in the Church of
Scotland, and you know it. You were married as hard and fast as I could
marry you to-day, when I am an unworthy servant of the Catholic church.”
But Erle never answered. He stood as if he did not feel that hard,
light hand on his shoulder, and stared at the woman who was, after all,
his wife.
“It’s a lie!” cried Erceldonne fiercely. He caught his son’s nerveless
hand. “Raimond, it’s a plot! The priest’s in some one’s pay!”
“The priest,” said Father Maurice, “is in the service of God. Lord
Erceldonne, I am the chaplain of St. Mary’s Convent. It was Mother
Felicitas who sent me to find your son, and save an innocent girl.”
“Mother Felicitas!” But his jarring laugh stopped unfinished. There was
something in the priest’s face, something in the absolute silence of
the strange man at the door, that killed his laughter in his throat.
“Your Mother Felicitas is a--a--you fool, she was my mistress! She----”
“She is dead,” said Father Maurice, with a voice that rang. “Her sins
lie buried with her. Her confession is in my hands, her repentance in
the hands of God, her temptations--are put down to the account of a man
whose crimes cry aloud. Long ago, Lord Erceldonne, it seems to you,
you tried to take from an old man by violence his adopted daughter.
Adopted, not his own, as you well knew. Your elder brother saw you,
saved her in one of your own yacht’s boats, and married her. When your
elder brother died, leaving a wife and a young child, who was it sent
a woman to them? A woman, who thought herself your wife, who loved you
till she forgot God in heaven; a desperate, miserable woman, who saw
nothing but that her son and yours was disinherited if that little girl
lived. Who gave her the morphin that killed Lady Erceldonne? Who asked
no questions when the child disappeared and was never found? Who, when
a most unhappy woman came to him with all her sins on her head, laughed
and told her she was no wife of his--that she and her son were nameless?
“She had done your work. You had no more need of her. But, to keep her
lips shut, you promised to care for her boy, to bring him up away from
you, but happily, as long as she was silent. And silent she was--till
she learned how you kept your promise. How you wearied of supporting
the lad, and sent him to the other side of the world to be killed.
“You had no thought, Lord Erceldonne, that such a sinner would confess;
that the girl you kidnaped and meant to let die would be your ruin, as
soon as you found out that if she lived her mother’s money would set
you on your feet. You said she was a madman’s daughter, and you knew
all the time she was of the best blood in Spain. A child who was a
born dompteuse, an animal-tamer, who had run away to a circus, whose
owner retired and took her and his animals to his home in the Azores.
Her brother died a year ago; since then, you know best how every part
of the world has been ransacked for the daughter of the lost sister,
to whom he left his fortune. Beryl, she was christened, for a ring her
mother had always worn till she left the circus; Corselas, because
the murdered Lady Erceldonne always hoped to take the child to Spain
and find her relatives. It was under that name, which seemed a fancy
one, that she was left at the convent. That name, which has led to the
unraveling of all. The church’s arm is long, Lord Erceldonne, for you.
For that most miserable woman, Mother Felicitas, her mercy is infinite.”
“You have no proofs! It is a conspiracy, a lie!” said Erceldonne, but
his lips were white.
“This is not a court of justice, nor am I your judge,” returned Father
Maurice icily. He beckoned to the men at the door, but some one was
nearer, quicker than they.
From an empty vestry there ran a strange figure, bent almost double,
that screamed in Spanish as it ran.
“Liar! You said you knew nothing of her? You swore you had no brother.
You took the light from my eyes with your story of a stranger, and her
shame.”
Before any one could reach him, the jabbering thing had sprung at
Erceldonne’s back, and stabbed him with that very dagger that had lain
so long idle in his own house.
A shriek ran through the chapel, but it was not Lord Erceldonne’s; he
lay quiet on the stone floor, face down.
It was Salome, whom he had wronged, whose life had been hell through
him; and the shriek was savage, exultant.
“Be silent,” said Andria fiercely.
As she spoke, the madman flew by her, running and leaping like a
monkey, two of the strange men at his heels.
What was the matter with Beryl, that she neither spoke nor came to her;
that she never looked up as Heriot laid a hand on her shoulder? Had
they drugged her--was she----
Andria Erle ran to the strange figure that was hidden under the lace
veil.
“Beryl!” she cried, “it’s I, Andria! You’re safe!”
She put the veil back from the face and stared aghast.
A strange woman stood before her, painted, hollow-eyed; her head
covered with long locks cut from Beryl’s hair, wound deftly round it.
“Father! Father Maurice!” cried Andria, in the one breathless instant
before the priest could speak and tell her this strange bride was
part of his last night’s work. She turned and ran from the church
like an arrow from the bow after some one else who had also stared
unbelievingly at the false bride.
All she thought was that this was not Beryl, and that Raimond had had
a minute’s start of her in the confusion, when all eyes were on the
escaping madman and the dead man on the floor.
Across the wet grass, in the light of the wet morning sun, she ran,
into the desolate house. Up-stairs, through endless passages, sobbing,
stumbling, calling, she went in wild fear.
And each door she opened showed an empty room, each passage led to
nothing.
“Beryl!” she screamed. “Beryl!” and from somewhere heard a sound.
She was here, then. And she had read Raimond’s face aright.
“Heriot! Father Maurice!” Andria shrieked from a stair-window, and
dared not wait for their coming. She ran on blindly, and burst into the
room that was Beryl’s and Mrs. Fuller’s.
There, having waited irresolute a little too long, instead of running
to the carriage Father Maurice had told her would be waiting by the
chapel, was Beryl Corselas struggling hideously with a man, who had
also a carriage waiting with a bullet-headed boy for driver.
“Raimond!” Andria cried. “Run--they are coming! Let her go.”
At her voice he let Beryl go; stood an instant, staring.
“Go!” said Andria, in a dreadful whisper. “Go! Thank God that I am your
wife, and must hold my tongue. It is my shame that I ever loved you.”
“Andria,” said her husband softly, very easily. “The Lovely Andria!”
He came toward her, with the long, easy step she had loved.
“Devil!” he cried, and struck her between the eyes.
But there was no force in the blow. A girl’s whole weight had caught
him back from behind. He shook it off, and ran down a back stair. Lord
Erceldonne’s son had nothing to stay for.