A SHORT RECKONING.
WHEN Chumney was gone Ebenezer Piper walked up and down the narrow
track in the pine plantation, ruminating upon what he had been told.
Why should any man, however princely in his ideas, make a gift of two
hundred and thirty guineas to another man’s wife? Such a thing could
hardly happen, without implying evil design in the giver. Bella might
be innocent, but this man was guilty. This gift of the horse was one
act of many, all tending towards a villanous conclusion.
And then there came back upon Mr. Piper’s mind the whole history of
his wife’s acquaintance with Captain Standish--how this man, whose
reputation had been made by an insolent exclusiveness, had been, from
his introduction at the Park, a constant visitor. Mr. Piper had been
flattered by this distinction, and had ascribed Captain Standish’s
preference to an Epicurean appreciation of his fine house, and an
intellectual pleasure in his conversation.
Now, all at once, he saw the past in a new light, and knew that he had
been blind, and deaf, and foolish. Bella’s pretty face had been the
attraction; Bella’s winning manners had been the lure.
‘If I thought that she had encouraged him, knowing his drift, if I knew
that she had been false to me by so much as one erring thought, I would
have done with her at once and for ever. She owes me too much. No, it
is impossible. It isn’t in human nature to be so base. And that pretty
little smiling face of hers--no, that could not lie.’
This was how he argued with himself. Yet there was no assurance in his
mind. His self-respect was strong still, his belief in his own claims
and merits still unshaken; but there had appeared to him a vision of a
phenomenal falsehood, a preternatural iniquity in woman.
‘If he spent his money for that horse, and she accepted the gift
knowingly, it was not his first gift,’ he said to himself. ‘There have
been letters passing between them, perhaps. I’ll search her room, and
if I find one shred of evidence against her she shall stand condemned.
I’ll have no half-measures. Either she’s my true and honest wife, or
she’s--something that shall have no shelter under my roof. She must be
all or nothing to me.’
He went back to the house.
‘Has your missus come back?’ he asked the footman idling in the hall.
‘No, sir.’
It was nearly three o’clock, long past the usual hour for luncheon.
Mr. Piper passed the open doorway of the dining-room, through which
he could see the table laid for the mid-day meal, with that modern
elegance and glow of colour which Bella had substituted for the
commonplace arrangements that had obtained before her time. He went
upstairs with a heavy step, and walked straight to his wife’s boudoir.
It was a gem of a room at the end of the corridor, with a large
bow-window overlooking the garden, a room bright with all the luxuries
and frivolities the second Mrs. Piper had accumulated during her brief
reign, buhl, Sèvre, ormolu, tortoiseshell, ivory, malachite, celadon,
turquoise, rose Du Barry, every colour and every substance, rosebud
chintz, old lace, a carpet of velvet pile.
Mr. Piper, standing at gaze and breathing his hardest, in the centre of
this crowded toy-shop-room, looked very like the traditional bull in
the china-shop, and an infuriated bull to boot. He had come there with
a purpose, but for the moment he paused irresolute. He felt ashamed of
himself for doubting his wife ever so little. The sight of this room
reassured him.
‘Didn’t I give her every one of these things?’ he said to himself. ‘How
can she help being fond of me?’
And then, just at that moment, his eye lighted upon something which
he had not given her. A Parian statuette, on a black marble base,
Danneker’s famous Ariadne.
‘No, I didn’t give her that,’ he said, ‘and it wasn’t among her wedding
presents. That’s something from _him_.’
The table was covered with books. He took up one in cream-coloured
calf, gilt edged, tooled, an exquisite specimen of Riviere’s
binding--Alfred de Musset’s poems.
On the fly-leaf there was a name written, a name that was almost
strange to Mr. Piper, though his second wife had signed it in the
marriage register.
Isabel.
Isabel, written in a bold masculine hand, beneath it a date, and two
words in a language that Mr. Piper knew not.
_Zum Gedächtniss._
He tossed the book aside, as if it were some reptile that had stung
him, and went on with his investigation. In front of the window there
stood an old Dutch escritoire, inlaid with many-coloured woods, a thing
of numerous drawers and recesses, and quaint hiding-places, in which to
keep secret store of money or documents. It might have been the joy of
some Dutch housewife in days gone by, or the private treasury of some
rich burgher, in the fat and fertile Low Countries, where life slides
gently by in an unostentatious prosperity.
Mr. Piper had seen his wife write her letters at this desk. The lid
was closely shut, locked. This exasperated him, though it was hardly
a circumstance to be wondered at that a lady should lock her desk. In
Mr. Piper’s present temper it seemed an evidence of guilt. He tried
to wrench open the lid by means of its delicate brass handles, and
failing in this, he took out a strong knife which he used for lopping
an occasional withered branch in his park or gardens, and prised
the lock. Within all things were neatly arranged. Packets of dainty
note-paper and envelopes, gold and ivory penholders, mother-o’-pearl
blotting-book, pigeon-holes filled with letters.
Mr. Piper emptied the pigeon-holes, and ran his eye rapidly over
their contents. The letters were all undeniably feminine. No, there
was nothing here from Captain Standish. But then these old cabinets
generally contain hidden receptacles for guilty secrets, sly nests, in
which to hatch state, or domestic, treason.
Mr. Piper seized the sandalwood beading that framed the pigeon-holes,
with both his hands, and drew them out bodily, in one piece, like a
drawer. Behind them appeared a row of neat little recesses, each with
its inlaid door.
‘This is where she would keep anything she wanted to hide,’ thought Mr.
Piper.
He was not mistaken. In one of the recesses he found some money lying
loose. A bank note and half a dozen sovereigns. In another there was
a morocco jewel-case, containing an opal cross set with diamonds, a
trinket which Mr. Piper had never seen till that moment. A third recess
was crammed with letters, this time unmistakably masculine.
Bella’s husband sat down before the desk, and read these letters one
by one, carefully. His commercial instincts came to his aid and kept
him wondrously cool. He arranged the letters according to their dates,
and after reading one, folded and endorsed it neatly before he laid
it aside, as if it had been a business document. Had he been a lawyer
preparing a case for the divorce court he could hardly have been more
deliberate.
The first ten or twelve letters were innocent enough. Courteous little
notes about archery--French novels--a volume generally accompanying
the letter that recommended it. Then the tone grew gradually more
familiar--the notes became letters; then came sentiment--as morbidly
sweet as the correspondence of Julie and her St. Preux, but happily
without Julie’s tendency to sermonizing. Then they grew still
warmer--the old, old story, abuse of the stern laws that set up the
accident of wedlock as a barrier against the divinity of passion.
There was a great deal Mr. Piper could not understand, but the gist
of all was very clear to him. He saw that to the bottom of her heart
his wife had been false, and that if she had hesitated on the brink
of criminal treason, it was because she loved Little Yafford Park and
the wealth that went along with it, not because she had one spark of
gratitude or affection for him, Ebenezer Piper.
There was no limit to her treachery. The husband saw himself ridiculed,
travestied--in the lover’s letters. His ignorance, his vulgarity, were
put forward as reasons why his wife should betray him. Such a man--to
put the insolent plea in plain words--was unworthy of pity; he was
beyond the pale of social law--the code of gentlemanly honour did not
recognise his existence. He was a cipher, like those wretched husbands
in the old feudal days, from whom the lord of the soil might take
everything, bride, honour, the right of property in a newly wedded
wife, as in the land they tilled and the harvest they reaped.
Mr. Piper made the letters up into a couple of neat bundles, and put
them in his pocket. There was a letter for every day in the week.
Captain Standish’s idleness had run into letter-writing. Then, pale to
the lips, but cold and firm, Mr. Piper replaced the pigeon-holes, shut
the escritoire, and went downstairs to see if his wife had yet come
home.
‘Home,’ he repeated. ‘No, she shall never call my house by that name
again.’
And then he remembered his first wife, with her humble dog-like
fidelity, her narrow spirit, troubled about many things, but always
true to him, reverencing him as the king of men, the epitome of wisdom.
Poor Moggie, who had been pretty and buxom once, and who had kept
his house so well in those happy days when he was beginning to grow
rich. Ah, how different from this beautiful viper, this living lie, a
creature that could smile at him and caress him while she kept those
letters in her desk!
‘She shall never cross my threshold again,’ he said to himself. ‘There
shall be no slander--no legal separation. I’ll give her a thousand a
year, and she may go to the devil her own way.’
The clock struck five as he went downstairs. A cold white mist veiled
the park, and crept into the house. The fire glowed redly on the hearth
in the hall, before which the footman sat in a Glastonbury chair,
reading the newspaper.
‘Mrs. Piper not returned yet?’ asked the master of the house.
‘No, sir.’
The man vacated the seat in his master’s favour, and went off to his
tea and toast in the servants’ hall--such buttered toast as could
never have been in the first Mrs. Piper’s time, when there were
close calculations weekly as to the pounds of butter that had been
consumed--‘made away with’ the late Mrs. Piper called it when she was
angry--during the last seven days.
Mr. Piper sat before the fire, looking straight into the glowing pile
of coal and wood, and thinking of the letters he had just read. His
mind was so full of these that the fact of his wife’s prolonged absence
troubled him not at all. It did not even strike him as strange that
she should be so long away. That other wonder, the strangeness of her
treachery, the wonder that any woman could so deceive, absorbed every
thought. He sat before the fire, meditating this great iniquity, and
with only a dreamy sense that the day had been long, and that evening
was drawing in.
So he sat, till he was startled by the sound of wheels upon the gravel
drive. He went to the door and looked out through the glass panel. A
carriage was coming slowly up the drive, followed by a man and woman
on horseback, Captain Standish and Miss Porkman. Then came a horse led
by a couple of men--a black horse, that walked lame, and hung his head
dejectedly.
Where was his wife among all these?
He opened the door and went out upon the broad stone steps. The
carriage came up at a foot pace. A man got out--little Mr. Namby, the
village surgeon.
He came up the steps to Mr. Piper. Captain Standish dismounted and
joined them.
Even in the autumn dusk Mr. Piper could see that his foe was ashy pale,
and moved by some violent agitation. Standish tried to speak, but the
words would not come.
‘You tell him,’ he said to Mr. Namby, and then turned his back upon
them both, and leant against one of the pillars of the portico, with
his face hidden.
‘My dear Mr. Piper,’ began the surgeon, tremulously, ‘something
dreadful has happened.’
‘I know it,’ answered Piper, curtly.
‘You have seen a great deal of domestic trouble--your first wife’s long
illness; but--I--I fear this is worse than anything you have had to go
through.’
‘It is,’ said Piper.
‘But how is this?’ asked the surgeon, with a puzzled air. ‘Has any
messenger come on to you? Have you heard----?’
‘Have I heard of what?’
‘The accident in the hunting-field, Mrs. Piper’s fall?’
‘Oh, she has had a fall, has she?’ said Mr. Piper, with a most
extraordinary coolness.
Mr. Namby thought he had gone suddenly mad.
‘Yes, a very bad fall. I fear it may be fatal. Will you send for her
maid, or some one? We are going to lift her out of the carriage. She is
quite helpless. She must be carried to her room.’
Vanessa Porkman had alighted from her horse, and came up the steps to
Mr. Piper.
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘it is too dreadful--a judgment upon us for going
after the hounds without your knowledge--or pa’s. It wasn’t I who
proposed it--indeed it wasn’t, dear Mr. Piper, but I feel myself guilty
for all that. Can you ever forgive me?’
‘Oh, you’ve been hunting, have you, my wife and you--foolish of her,
for she was never on a horse till I--I beg pardon--till Captain
Standish gave her one,’--this in tones loud enough for the ear of the
Captain, who stood close by.
Then Mr. Piper went down the steps and saw his wife lifted out of
the carriage, and carried slowly and carefully into the house. There
were two doctors, Mr. Namby, and Dr. Milroyd, from Great Yafford, who
had been in the field when Erebus balked himself at a bullfinch, and
rolled into the ditch with his rider beneath him. Bella’s maid and the
butler both assisted. There was no lack of aid, but Mr. Piper stood on
the steps and saw the little lifeless figure in the dark green habit
carried past him, and offered no help.
He was on the threshold of his door when he turned and confronted
Captain Standish. All the rest had followed Bella. These two were face
to face with each other, and alone.
‘What do you want in my house?’ asked Mr. Piper, sternly.
‘I should like to stop till--till the doctors have made their
examination--to know if things are so bad as they seem to think,’
faltered the captain, thoroughly crestfallen; and then, with a sudden
burst of passion, he cried, ‘Can’t you understand that I feel myself to
blame for this? It was I that put the notion of hunting in her head. I
feel myself her murderer.’
‘Yes, I understand perfectly,’ answered Mr. Piper. ‘I’ve got your
letters in my pocket--your letters to my wife. Do you understand that,
scoundrel? First you perverted her mind, and then you killed her.
That’s enough, I should think. You can want nothing more in my house;
but when you boast of having seduced my wife, tell your friends that
among all the husbands you have injured, one, at least, left a lasting
mark upon you.’
Mr. Piper seized the captain by the collar, and with one crushing
blow from his clenched fist sent him rolling down the steps. Captain
Standish was an accomplished pugilist, but that unexpected blow carried
all the force of a strong man’s outraged honour, and might have felled
an ox. The tall slim figure swayed to and fro, swerved to the left, and
fell face downwards against the base of a stone column.