"Good God, Sir!"
"A doctor!--Go for a doctor!" said Ellesborough hoarsely--"No--she's
gone!"
He sank down beside her, putting his ear to her lips. In vain. No sound
was there. The smiling mouth had settled and shut. Without a murmur or
a sigh, Rachel had passed for ever from this warm world and the arms of
her lover, at the bidding of the "fierce workman Death."
When Janet, a doctor, and the Superintendent of Police arrived, it was
to find Ellesborough sitting motionless beside the body, while the two
girls, a blanched and shivering pair, watched for Janet at
the door.
"Can you throw any light upon it, Sir?" said the Superintendent,
respectfully, at last, when the Doctor had finished his examination, and
still Ellesborough did not speak.
The Captain looked up.
"Her husband did it"--he said, quietly--"the man who was her husband."
A shudder of surprise ran through the room.
"Did I hear you right, Sir?" said the Superintendent. "Miss Henderson
passed for unmarried."
"She married a man called Roger Delane in Canada," said Ellesborough,
in the same monotonous voice. "She divorced him--for cruelty and
adultery--two years ago. A few days since he waylaid her in the dark, and
threatened her. I didn't know this till she wrote to me to-day. She said
that she was afraid of him--that she thought he was mad--and I came over
at once to see how I could protect her. We were engaged to be married."
The Superintendent drew a furtive hand across his eyes. Then he produced
his note-book, and took the evidence in order. Hastings came in from a
lantern search of the farm-buildings, the hill-side, and the nearest
fringes of wood, to report that he had found no trace of the murderer.
The news, however, had by this time spread through the village, and the
kitchen was full of persons who had hurried to the farm--Old Halsey and
John Dempsey among them--to tell what they knew, and had seen.
Ellesborough roused himself from his stupor, and came to assist the
police in the preliminary examination of witnesses and inspection of the
farm. Once he and Janet passed each other, but they did not attempt to
speak. Each indeed shrank from the other. A word of pity would have been
merely a deepened agony.
But the farm emptied at last. A body of police had been sent out to scout
the woods, to watch the roads and the railway stations. Ellesborough and
Hastings had lifted the dead woman upon a temporary bier which had been
raised in the sitting-room. Then Hastings had drawn Ellesborough
away, and Janet, with a village mother, had rendered the last offices.
When Ellesborough re-entered, he found a white vision, lying in a bare
room, from which all traces of ordinary living had been as far as
possible cleared away. Only the Christmas roses which Rachel had
gathered that afternoon were now on her breast. Her hands were folded
over them. Her beautiful hair lay unbound on the pillow--Janet's
trembling hands had refused to cut it.
At sight of Ellesborough, Janet rose from her kneeling posture beside the
dead, as white and frozen almost as Rachel herself--with something in her
hand--a small book. She held it out to Ellesborough.
"The Superintendent asked my leave to go into her room--in case there was
anything which could help them. He brought me this. She had been writing
in it--He asked me to look at it. I did--just enough to see--that no one
had any right to it--but you. She wrote it I think about an hour before
you came. It was her last word."
"I have her letters also"--said Ellesborough, almost inaudibly, as he
took the book--"You brought it--you kind woman! You were her good
angel--God reward you!"
Then at last a convulsion of weeping showed in Janet's face. She laid her
hand in his, and went noiselessly away.
Ellesborough sat beside his dead love all night. The farm was peaceful
again after that rush of the Furies through it, which had left this wreck
behind. Rachel's diary and letter lay before him. They were as her still
living voice in his ears, and as the words sank into memory they pierced
through all the rigidities of a noble nature, rending and kneading as
they went. He recalled his own solitary hour of bitterness after her
letter reached him. The story it contained had gone very hard with him,
though never for one moment had he even in thought forsaken her. There
was some comfort in that. But the memory which upheld him, which
alone kept him from despair, was the memory of her face at the window,
the sense still lingering in his own physical pulses of her young
clinging life in his arms, of the fluttering of her poor heart against
his breast, the exquisite happiness of her kiss--the kiss which death cut
short.
No--he had not failed her. That was all he had to live by. And without
it, it seemed to him, he could not have endured to live.
* * * * *
The two girls had sobbed themselves to sleep at last. But Janet did not
sleep. Tears came naturally as the hours went by--tears and the agonized
relief of prayer to one for whom prayer was a daily need of the soul. And
in the early morning there flooded in upon her a strange consciousness of
Rachel's spirit in hers--a strange suspicion that after all the gods had
not wrought so hardly with Rachel. A few days before she had attended the
funeral in the village church, of a young wife just happily married, who
had died in three days, of virulent influenza. Never had the words of the
Anglican service pleased her so little. What mockery--what fulsome
mockery--to thank God because "it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our
sister, out of the miseries of this troublesome world." But the words
recurred to her now--mysteriously--with healing power. Had it been after
all "deliverance" for Rachel, from this "troublesome world," and the
temptations that surround those who are not strong enough for the
wrestle that Fate sets them--that a God appoints them? She had met her
lover--after fear and anguish; and had known him hers, utterly and wholly
hers, for one supreme moment. And from that height--that perfection--God
had called her. No lesser thing could ever touch her now.
Such are the moments of religious exaltation which cheat even the
sharpest griefs of men and women. Janet would decline from her Pisgah
height only too soon; but, for the time, thoughts like these gave her the
strength to bear.
When the house began to move again, she went down to Ellesborough. She
drew him into the kitchen--made a fire, and brought him food. Presently
she found calm enough to tell him many details of the previous days. And
the man's sound nature responded. Once he grasped her hand, and kissed
it--as though he thanked her dumbly again, for himself and Rachel. It
seemed to Janet indeed, as she sat by him, that Rachel had left her a
trust. She took it up instinctively--from this first desolate morning.
For there are women set apart for friendship--Janet was one of them--as
others are set apart for love.
* * * * *
And with the first break of light on the new November day, the search
parties in the hills came upon what they sought. Some one remembered the
deserted hut--and from that moment the hunt was easy. Finally in the
dripping heart of the wood the pursuers found the murderer lying face
downwards in front of the dead fire, with the revolver beside him with
which he had taken first Rachel's life, and then his own. Some sheets of
paper were scattered near him, on which he had written an incoherent and
grandiloquent confession. But of such acts there is no real explanation.
They are the product of that black seed in human nature which is born
with a man, and flowers in due time, through devious stages, into such a
deed as that which destroyed Rachel Henderson.