Stewart Routh left his house in Mayfair at an early hour on the day following that which had witnessed the eccentric proceedings and subsequent resolution of Jim Swain. Things were prospering with him; and the vague dread which had fallen on him had been dissipated. Hope and defiance divided his mind between them. His speculations were all doing well; there was money to be had--money easy to be realized, on which he could lay his hand at very short notice, and there was triumphant successful love. So much had hope to feed on--assuredly no insufficient aliment. Defiance reared itself against Fate. The time was drawing near, approaching with fearfully rapid strides, when the contingency, long contemplated, successfully eluded for a period beyond his expectation, kept off by such unlikely accidents and combinations as might almost have justified his daring faith in his luck, but recognized of late as inevitable, must be realized, when the identity of the murdered man must be known, and the perilous investigation must begin. So be it, he was ready to meet the danger if it must be met; but he hoped no such necessity would arise. His influence over the beautiful woman whom he now really loved with all the passion he had at first feigned was becoming every day stronger and more complete. He knew that the strength of his nature had subdued her; she had no pride, she had only vanity; and Stewart Routh made the mistake to which selfish and interested natures are prone. He forgot to calculate upon the influence of selfishness and calculation when their employ must necessarily be in opposition to him. His egotism injured the balance of his intellect, and now he had not the aid of Harriet's calm, cool, unerring judgment in his scheme to restore that balance. His position with regard to Harriet was the most troublesome topic of his thoughts just now. He tried to forget it often, but he did not succeed; not that any sentimental obstacle to the most complete oblivion presented itself. Routh never bestowed a backward glance upon the life of self-sacrifice and devotion to him, of fidelity which, however depraved in its manifestations, was still fidelity, fond and true as the best man who ever lived an honest and virtuous life in the face of heaven and earth might be proud to inspire, which had been that of the woman whom he had deliberately betrayed, and was now prepared deliberately to abandon. He would have sneered at such a suggestion as a contemptible weakness. Harriet had been undeniably useful to him. He did not attempt to deny the fact to himself; but circumstances had arisen which prevented his making use of her in the future, and consequently, as this instrument was unfortunately living, intelligent, peculiarly acute, and animated by one of the strongest of human passions, had become dangerous. Harriet had been agreeable to him too--it has been said that he had loved her after his fashion; but this had been all over months ago; and the deadest of all mortal things, to a man of Stewart Routh's stamp, is a dead love; it has not even the dreary faculty of ghostliness--it cannot haunt. The uncomplaining, active, hard-working, inventive, untiring comrade, the passionately loving wife, the shrewd, unscrupulous, undaunted, steel-nerved colleague, was nothing more to him now than a dangerously sharp-witted, suspicious woman, who knew a great deal too much about him, and was desperately in his way. The exhilaration of his spirits and the partial intoxication of his new passion had done away with the fear of Harriet which had taken possession of him, but they had intensified his dislike, and one thought presented itself with peculiar distinctness to Stewart Routh as he went City-wards that morning. It was:
"If it was only to get out of her sight, to be rid of her for ever, what a relief it would be!"
He had been at some pains to keep up appearance with his wife since their return to London. To the step which he meditated a quarrel with her was in no way necessary; and in the event of his failing to bring his plans to maturity before the inevitable discovery, it was all important that they should be agreed on the line of action to be taken. Harriet could not, indeed, oppose him successfully in his determination, if the occasion should arise, to throw the charge of the murder upon George Dallas; but she might render his position extremely perilous if she did not second him. What reason had he to fear? The estrangement between them had been growing wider, it was true, but it had not been exclusively of his making; she had held aloof from him as much as he from her, and he acknowledged that, if no infidelity had existed upon his part, it would still have taken place. From the moment they ceased to be comrades in expedients, and became accomplices in crime, the consequences made themselves felt. Routh did not believe in blessings or in curses, but he did not dispute the inevitable result of two persons finding out the full extent of each other's wickedness--that those two persons, if obliged to live together, will find it rather uncomfortable. The worst accomplice a man can have is his wife, he had often thought; women always have some scruple lurking somewhere about them, a hankering after the ideal, for the possibility of respecting a man in some degree. When he had been forced to see and to believe in the intensity of his wife's silent sufferings, it had occurred to him more than once to think, "she would not be so miserable if she had done it herself; she would have been much jollier. Nothing ever will cure some women of sentiment."
Did it ever occur to him that it had not been worth his while to do what he had done? that, on the whole, it had not paid? No, never. Routh had been angry with Harriet when the matter had been brought up between them, had complained that it was always "cropping up;" but the truth was, he thought of it himself much more frequently than it was impressed on him by any allusion from without; and he never ceased to remind himself that the deed had been necessary, indispensable. It had brought him money when money must have been had, or all must have ended for him; it had brought him money when money meant a clearing and brightening of his sky, an utter change in his life, the cessation of a hazardous and ignoble warfare, the restoration to a peaceful and comparatively safe career. He was in a difficult position now, it was true--a position in which there was peril to be surmounted only by dauntlessness, prudence, and coolness; but he was dauntless, prudent, and cool. Had all this never been, what might have been his position? When Deane and he had met, his luck had been almost at its lowest; and, in the comradeship which had ensued, there had always been burning anger and intense humiliation on Routh's part, and cool, sneering, heartless boasting on Deane's. Routh was the cleverer man of the two, and incomparably the greater villain; but Deane had elements of rascality in him which even Routh had felt himself entitled to despise. And he had hated him. Routh, in his cool manner of thinking things over, had not failed to take this feeling into due account. He would not have killed Deane only because he hated him; he was too true to his principles to incur so tremendous a risk for the simple gratification of even the worst sentiment, of even sentiment intensified into a passion, but he allowed it sufficient weight and influence effectually to bar the entrance of a regret when the larger object had also been attained. He had no pity for his victim, not even the physical sensation which is experienced by men whose organization and associations are not of the brutal kind, when temper, circumstances, or sudden temptation have impelled them to deeds of cruelty; he had hated Deane too much for that. He never thought of the crime he had committed without dwelling on the conduct which had made him resolve upon it. How the man had played with his necessities, had tricked him with compromising confidences, had duped him with false promises, had led him to the very brink of the abyss, and there had struggled with him--with him, a desperate man! Fool--fool! one must go over the brink, then; and who should it but be the weaker? who should hold his ground but the stronger--but he who had everything to gain? He thought over all these things again to-day, methodically, arranging the circumstances as they had occurred in his mind. He recalled the hours of suspense through which he had lived on that day when Deane had promised to bring him a sum of money, representing his own interest in the mining company, which sum was to secure to Routh the position he had striven hard to attain, and rescue him from the consequences of a fraudulent transfer of shares which he had already effected. It had come to a question of hours, and the impatience and suspense had almost worn out Routh's strong nerves, almost deprived him of his self-command. How well he remembered it; how he lived through all that time again! It had never been so vivid in his remembrance, with all the vitality of hate and anger, often as he had thought of it, as it was to-day.
The heartless trifling, the petty insolence of the rich rascal, who little guessed the strength and resolution, the daring and desperation, of the greater, if worse, villain, came back as freshly to Stewart Routh's vindictive memory as if he had not had his ghastly revenge and his miserable triumph months ago, as if he had suffered and winced under them but yesterday. And that yesterday! What a glorious day in his life it had been! Presently he would think about that, and nothing but that; but now he must pursue his task of memory to the end. For he was not his own master in this. Once set to thinking of it, to living it all over again, he had no power to abridge the history.
He had to remember the hours during which he had waited for Deane's coming, for the payment of the promised money; he had to remember how they waned, and left him sick with disappointment, maddened with apprehension; how he had determined he would keep the second appointment with Deane: he did not fear his failing in that, because it was for his own pleasure; and then, for the first time in his life, had felt physically unable to endure suspense, to keep up appearances. He had to remember how he had shrunk from the coarse insolence with which he knew Deane would sport with his fears and his suspense in the presence of George Dallas, unconscious of their mutual position; how all-important it was that, until he had wrung from Deane the promised money, he should keep his temper. He had to remember how the idea that the man who had so far broken faith with him already, and might break faith with him altogether, and so ruin him utterly (for if he had failed then, and been detected, hope would have been at an end for him), was within a few yards of him, perhaps with the promised money in his pocket, at that moment, had occurred to him with a strange fascination. How it had intensified his hatred of Deane; how it had deepened his sense of his own degradation; how it had made him rebel against and curse his own poverty, and filled his heart with malediction on the rich man who owned that money which meant safety and success to him. He had to remember how Deane had given no answer to his note, temperately worded and reasonable (Harriet had kept to the letter of the truth in what she had said of it to George Dallas), but had left him to all the tortures of suspense. He had to remember how the desire to know whether Deane really had had all day in his possession the money he had promised him, and had kept him expecting, grew imperative, implacable, irresistible; how he had hung about the tavern, and discovered by Deane's boasting words to his companion that he had guessed aright, had followed them, determined to have an answer from Deane. He had to remember how he strove with anger, with some remnants of his former pride, which tortured him with savage longings for revenge, while he waited about in the purlieus of the billiard-rooms whither Deane and Dallas had gone. He remembered how lonely and blank, how quiet and dreary, the street had become by the time the two came out of the house together and parted, in his hearing, with some careless words. He had to remember how he confronted Deane, and was greeted with a taunt; how he had borne it; how the man had played with his suspense, and ostentatiously displayed the money which the other had vainly watched and waited for all day; and then, suddenly assuming an air of friendliness and confidence, had led him away Citywards, without betraying his place of residence, questioning him about George Dallas. He had to remember how this had embittered and intensified his anger, and how a sudden fear had sprung up in his mind that Deane had confided to Dallas the promises he had made to him, and the extent to which their "business" relations had gone. A dexterous question or two had relieved this apprehension, and then he had once more turned the conversation on the subject in which he was so vitally interested. He had to remember--and how vividly he did remember, with what an awakening of the savage fury it had called into life, how Deane had met this fresh attempt--with what a cool and tranquil assertion that he had changed his mind, had no further intention of doing any business in Routh's line--was going out of town, indeed, on the morrow, to visit some relations in the country, too long neglected, and had no notion when they should meet again.
And then--then Stewart Routh had to remember how he had killed the man who had taunted, deceived, treated him cruelly; how he had killed him, and robbed him, and gone home and told his wife--his comrade, his colleague, his dauntless, unscrupulous Harriet. He had to remember more than all this, and he hated to remember it. But the obligation was upon him; he could not forget how she had acted, after the first agony had passed over, the first penalty inflicted by her physical weakness, which she had spurned and striven against. So surely as his memory was forced to reproduce all that had gone before, it was condemned to revive all that had come after. But he did not soften towards her that day, no, not in the least, though never had his recollection been so detailed, so minute, so calm. No, he hated her. She wearied him; she had ceased to be of any service to him; she was a constant torment to him. So he came back to the idea with which his reflections had commenced, and, as he entered on the perusal of the mass of papers which awaited his attention in his "chambers" in Tokenhouse-yard--for he shared the business-abode of the invisible Flinders now--he repeated:
"What a relief it would be to get away from her for ever!" Only a few days now, and the end must come. He was a brave man in his evil way, and he made his calculations coolly, and scanned his criminal combinations without any foolish excess of confidence, but with well-grounded expectation. For a little longer it would not be difficult to keep on fair terms with Harriet, especially as she had renewed her solitary mode of life, and he had taken the precaution of pretending to a revived devotion to play, since the auspicious occasion on which he had won so largely at Homburg. Thus his absence from home was accounted for; and as she had not the slightest suspicion that Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge was in London, had never displayed the least jealousy, except on the one occasion when he had shown her the locket, and had unhesitatingly accepted his explanation of their sudden return to England, he had no reason to trouble himself about her. To sedulously avoid exciting her suspicion and jealousy now, and when the proper time should arrive, to confirm the one and arouse the other so effectually by desertion, infidelity, and insult, as to drive her at once to free herself from him by the aid of the law--this was his scheme. It looked well; he knew Harriet, he thought, thoroughly, and he might safely calculate upon the course she would adopt. It was strange, if human inconsistency can ever be strange, that Stewart Routh, a man of eminently vindictive disposition, entirely forgot to take into account that the woman thus desperately injured might also seek her revenge, which would consist in declining to take her own freedom at the price of giving him his.
Perhaps if the depths of that dark heart had been sounded, the depths beyond its own consciousness--the unvisited, unquestioned, profound--it would have been discovered that this man was so entirely accustomed to the devotion of the woman who loved him with a desperate though intelligent love, that even in her utmost despair and extreme outrage of wrong he felt assured she would do that which it was his will she should do.
During all this mental review he had hardly bestowed a thought on George Dallas. He would be safe enough in the end, if the worst came to the worst. It had suited him to magnify the strength of the chain of coincidences, which looked like evidence, in discussing them with George, and he had magnified it; it suited him to diminish that strength in discussing them with himself, and he diminished it. A good deal of suffering and disgrace to all the "Felton-Dallas-Carruthers connection," as he insolently phrased it in his thoughts, must come to pass, of course, but no real danger. And if it were not so? Well, in that case, he really could not afford to care. When he had wanted money, Deane (he still thought of him by that name) had had to give way to that imperative need. Now he wanted safety, and Dallas must pay its price. There was something of the sublime of evil in this man's sovereign egotism. As he turned his mind away from the path it had been forced to tread to the end, he thought, "there is a touch of the whimsical in everything; in this it is the demi-semi-relationship between Harriet and these people. I suppose the sensitive lady of Poynings never heard of her stepfather Creswick's niece."
A letter for Mr. Routh, a delicate, refined-looking letter, sealed with the daintiest of monograms, the thick board-like envelope containing a sheet of paper to match, on which only a few lines are scrawled. But as Stewart Routh reads them, his sinister dark eyes gleam with pleasure and triumph, and his handsome evil face is deeply flushed.
"Bearer waits." Mr. Routh writes an answer to the letter, short but ardent, if any one had now been there to judge by the expression of' his face while he was writing it. He calls his clerk, who takes the letter to "bearer;" but that individual has been profiting by the interval to try the beer in a closely adjacent beer-shop, and the letter is laid upon a table in the passage leading to Stewart Routh's rooms, to await his return from the interesting investigation.
Another letter for Mr. Routh, and this time also "bearer waits." Waits, too, in the passage, and sees the letter lying on the table, and has plenty of time to read the address before the experimenting commissionaire returns, has it handed to him, and trudges off with it.
Presently the door at the end of the passage opens, and Routh comes out. "Who brought me a letter just now?" he says to the clerk, and then stops short, and turns to "bearer."
"O, it's you, Jim, is it? Take this to Mrs. Routh."
Then Stewart Routh went back to his room, and read again the note to which he had just replied. It was from Harriet, and contained only these words:
"Come home at the first possible moment. A letter from G. D., detained by accident for two days, has just come, and is of the utmost importance.Let nothing detain you."
The joy and triumph in his face had given way to fury; he muttered angry oaths as he tore the note up viciously.
"All the more reason if the worst has come--or is nearer than we thought--that I should strike the decisive blow to-day. She has all but made up her mind--she must make it quite up to-day. This is Tuesday; the Asia sails on Saturday. A letter from Dallas only cannot bring about the final crash: nothing can really happen till he is here. If I have only ordinary luck, we shall be out of harm's way by then."
A little later Stewart Routh made certain changes in his dress, very carefully, and departed from Tokenhouse-yard in a hansom, looking as unlike a man with any cares, business or other kind, upon his mind as any gentleman in all London. "Queen's-gate, Kensington," he said to the driver; and the last words of the letter, daintily sealed, and written on board-like paper, which was in his breast-pocket at that moment, were:
"I will wait for you in the carriage at Queen's-gate."
"I'm glad I see'd that 'ere letter," said Jim Swain to himself, as, deeply preoccupied by the circumstances of the preceding day, he faced towards Routh's house, "because when I put Mr. Dallas on this here lay, I needn't let out as I spied 'em home. I can 'count for knowin' on the place permiskus." And then, from an intricate recess of his dirty pocket, much complicated with crumbs and fragments of tobacco, Jim pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper. "Teddy wrote it down quite right," he said, and he smoothed out the paper, and transferred it, for safer keeping, to his cap, in which he had deposited the missive with which he was charged.
When Jim Swain arrived at his destination, and the door was opened to him, Harriet was in the hall. She seemed surprised that he had brought her a written answer. She had expected merely a verbal reply, telling her how soon Routh would be home. Jim pulled his cap off hastily, taken by surprise at seeing her, and while he handed her the note, looked at her with a full renewal of all the compassion for her which had formerly filled his untaught but not untender heart. He guessed rightly that he had brought her something that would pain her: She looked afraid of the note during the moment she held it unopened in her hand; but she did not think only of herself, she did not forget to be kind to him.
"Go down to the kitchen, and cook will give you some dinner, Jim," she said, as she went into the dining-room and shut the door; and the boy obeyed her with an additional sense of hatred and suspicion against Routh at his heart.
"I'm beginning to make it all out now," he thought, as he disposed of his dinner in most unusual silence. "The other one put Routh up to it all, out of spite of some kind. It was a plant ofhers, it was; and this here good 'un--for sheisgood--is a-sufferin' for it all, while he's a carryin' on." Shortly after Jim Swain took a rueful leave of the friendly cook, and departed by the area-gate. Having reached Piccadilly, he stood still for a moment, pondering, and then took a resolution, in pursuance of which he approached the house at which he had made a similar inquiry the day before, and again asked if there was any news of Mr. Felton. "Yes," the servant replied; "a telegram had been received from Paris. The rooms were to be ready on the following day. Mr. Felton and Mr. Dallas were coming by the tidal train."
"I've a mind to go back and tell her," said Jim to himself. "She must want to know for some particular reason, or she wouldn't have sent me to ask yesterday, and she wouldn't have let me catch her out in tellin' a crammer if there warn't somethin' in it. But no," said Jim sagely, "I won't. I'll wait for Mr. Dallas; there ain't long to wait now."
Jim Swain's resolution had an important consequence, which came about in a very ordinary and trifling way. If the boy had gone back to Routh's house, and had been admitted into the hall, he would have seen a piece of paper lying on the door-mat, on which his quick eyes would instantly have recognized the calligraphic feat of his accomplished friend, Teddy Smith; and he would have regained possession of it. But Jim did not return, and the paper lay there undisturbed for some hours--lay there, indeed, until it was seen by the irreproachable Harris when he went to light the gas, picked up, perused by him, and taken to his mistress, who was sitting in the drawing-room quite unoccupied. She looked up as the servant entered; and when the room was lighted, he saw that she was deadly pale, but took no notice of the paper which he placed on the table beside her. Some time after he had left the room her glance fell upon it, and she stretched out her hand wearily, and took it up, with a vague notion that it was a tax-gatherer's notice. But Harriet Routh, whose nerves had once been proof against horror, dread, suffering, danger, or surprise, started as if she had been shot when she saw, written upon the paper: "Mrs. Bembridge, 4 Hollington-square, Brompton."
"I do not know what he is doing," Harriet had repeated to herself in sore distress; "I do not know what he is doing. I am in the dark, and the tide is rising."
The jealous agony she had suffered at Homburg was harder to bear than the uncertainty which had been her lot since her return. The intense passion of jealousy sprung up within her was a revelation to this woman of the violence of her nature, over which a stern restraint had been kept so long that quiet and calm had grown habitual to her while nothing troubled or disputed her love; but they deserted her at the first rude touch laid upon the sole treasure, the joy, the punishment, the occupation, mainspring, and meaning of her life. Under all the quiet of her manner, under all the smoothness of her speech, Harriet Routh knew well there was a savage element in the desperation of her love for Routh, since he had committed the crime which sets a man apart from his fellows, marked with the brand of blood. She had loved him in spite of the principles of her education, in defiance of the stings of her conscience, dead now, but which had died hard; but now she loved him in spite of the promptings of her instincts, in spite of the revulsion of her womanly feelings, in defiance of the revolt of her senses and her nerves. The more utterly lost he was the more she clung to him, not indeed in appearance, for her manner had lost its old softness, and her voice the tone which had been a caress; but in her torn and tortured heart. With desperate and mad obstinacy she loved him, defied fate, and hated the world which had been hard to him, for his sake.
With the first pang of jealousy awoke the fierceness of this love, awoke the proud and defiant assertion of her love and her ownership in her breast. Never would Harriet have pleaded her true, if perverted, love, her unwavering, if wicked, fidelity, to the man who was drifting away from her; the woman's lost soul was too generous for that; but he was hers, her own;--purchased;--God, in whom she did not believe, and the devil, whom she did not fear, alone knew at what price;--and he should not be taken from her by another, by one who had done nothing for him, suffered nothing for him, lost nothing for him. Her combativeness and her craft had been called into instant action by the first discovery of the unexpected peril in which her sole treasure was placed. She understood her position perfectly. No woman could have known more distinctly than Harriet how complete is the helplessness of a wife when her husband's love is straying from her, beckoned towards another--helplessness which every point of contrast between her and her rival increases. She was quite incapable of the futile strife, the vulgar railing, which are the ordinary weapons of ordinary women in the unequal combat; she would have disdained their employment; but fate had furnished her with weapons of other form and far different effectiveness, and these she would use. Routh had strong common-sense, intense selfishness, and shrewd judgment. An appeal to these, she thought, could not fail. Nevertheless, theyhadfailed, and Harriet was bewildered by their failure. When she made her first appeal to Routh, she was wholly unprepared for his refusal. The danger was so tremendous, the unforeseen discovery of the murdered man's identity had introduced into their position a complication so momentous, so insurmountable, that she had never dreamed for a moment of Routh's being insensible to its weight and emergency. But he rejected her appeal--rudely, brutally, almost, and her astonishment was hardly inferior to her anguish. He must indeed be infatuated by this strange and beautiful woman (Harriet fully admitted the American's beauty--there was an element of candour and judgment in her which made the littleness of depreciating a rival impossible) when he could overlook or under-estimate the importance, the danger, of this newly-arisen complication.
This was a new phase in her husband's character; this was an aspect under which she had never seen him, and she was bewildered by it, for a little. It had occurred to her once, on the day when she last saw George Dallas--parting with him at the gate of his mother's house--to think whether, had she had any other resource but her husband, had the whole world outside of him not been a dead blank to her, she could have let him go. She had heard of such things; she knew they happened; she knew that many women in "the world" took their husbands' infidelity quietly, if not kindly, and let them go, turning them to the resources of wealth and pleasure. She had no such resources, nor could these have appeased her for a moment if she had had. She cared nothing for liberty, she who had worn the chain of the most abject slavery, that of engrossing passionate love for an unworthy object, willingly, had hugged it to her bosom, had allowed it, without an effort to alleviate the pain, to eat into her flesh, and' fill it with corruption. But, more than this, she could not let him go, for his own sake; she was true to the law of her life, that "honour rooted in dishonour" knew no tarnishing from her; she must save him, for his own sake--from himself, she must save him, though not to bring him back to her--must save him, in spite of himself, though she longed, in the cruel pangs of her woman's anguish, to have done with it--to have found that nothingness in which she had come to believe as the "end all," and had learned to look to as her sovereign good.
She had reached such a conclusion, in her meditations, on the night of the great storm at Homburg; she had determined on a course to be adopted for Routh's sake. She would discard fear, and show him that he must relinquish the desperate game he was playing. She would prove to him that fate had been too strong for him; that in Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge the fatality which was destined to destroy him existed; that her acquaintance with Arthur Felton, and her knowledge of Arthur Felton's affairs, into whose extent Routh had no possible pretext for inquiry, must necessarily establish the missing link. She would hide from him her own sufferings; she would keep down her jealousy and her love; she would appeal to him for himself; she would plead with him only his own danger, only the tremendous risk he was involving himself in. Then she must succeed; then the double agony of jealousy of him and fear for him in which she now lived must subside, the burning torment must be stilled. The time might perhaps come in which she should so far conquer self as to be thankful that such suffering had brought about his safety, for there could be no real security for them in London, the terrible fact of Deane's identity with Arthur Felton once known. After that discovery, no arguments could avail with George; the strength of all those which she had used would become potent against her, their weight would be against her--that weight which she had so skilfully adjusted in the balance. After all, she thought that night, as she sat in the darkness and idly watched the lightning, hearing the raging wind unmoved, what would a little more misery matter to her? Little, indeed, if it brought him safety; and it should, it must!
From this condition of mind she had been roused by Routh's startling announcement of their departure on the morrow. The effect produced upon Harriet was strange. She did not believe that Routh had been only to the gaming-rooms that night: she felt an immutable conviction that he had seen Mrs. Bembridge, and she instantly concluded that he had received a rebuff from the beautiful American. Inexpressibly relieved--though not blind enough to be in the least insensible to the infamy of her husband's faithlessness, and quite aware that she had more, rather than less, to complain of than she had previously believed;--for she rightly judged, this woman is too finished a coquette to throw up her game a moment before her own interest and safety absolutely obliged her to do so--she acquiesced immediately.
Had Stewart Routh had the least suspicion of the extent of his wife's knowledge of his life at Homburg, he could not have been lulled into the false security in which he indulged on his return to London. He perceived, indeed, that Harriet closely noted the state of his spirits, and silently observed his actions. But he was used to that. Harriet had no one to think of but him, had nothing to care about but him; and she had always watched him. Pleasantly, gaily, before;--coldly, grimly, now: but it was all the same thing. He was quite right in believing she had not the least suspicion that Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge was in London, but that was the sole point on which he was correct. Had he known how much his wife knew, he would have affected a dejection of spirits he was far from feeling, and would have disarmed her by greater attention to her during the few hours of each day which he passed at home.
Harriet was at a loss to account for his cheerfulness; but strong of mind and heart as she was, she was not altogether free from the weakness of catching at that interpretation of a mystery in which there was some relief for her own pain. So she concluded that he had been only passingly, and not deeply, hurt by the coquetry of the woman who had attracted him, and that he had recovered from the superficial wound, as soon as he became again immersed in the schemes which had awaited him in London.
He had told her little concerning these schemes, but she considered this reticence due to her own withdrawal from her former active participation in the business of his life, and it was an additional inducement to her to hope that Routh was taking the resolution which she desired. "When we get back to London I will think about it," he had said, and she clung to the hope, to the half-promise in the words. He was surely settling affairs so as to enable him to avoid the bursting of the storm. The tacit estrangement between them would account for his doing this silently; his vile temper, which Harriet thoroughly understood, and never failed to recognize in action, would account for his denying her the relief of knowing his intentions. Many small things in his daily life, which did not escape the quickened perception of his wife, betokened a state of preparation for some decided course of action. The time of explanation must necessarily come; meanwhile she watched, and waited, and suffered.
How she suffered in every hour of her life! Yet there was a kind of dulness over Harriet too. She recurred little to the past in point of feeling; she thought over it, indeed, in aid of the action of her reason and her will, but she did not recall it with the keenness either of acute grief for its vanished happiness, such as it had been, or of remorse and terror for its deep and desperate guilt. The burden of the day was enough now for this woman, whose strength had lasted so long, endured so much, and given way so suddenly.
But time was marching on, the inevitable end drawing near, and Harriet had been utterly unprepared for the second shock, the second unexpected event which had befallen. She had opened George Dallas's letter with the Paris postmark almost without an apprehension. The time for the thing she feared had not yet come; and here was a thing she had never feared, a possibility which had never presented itself to her imagination, brought at once fully before her. She had done this thing. One moment's want of caution, in the midst of a scene in which her nerves had been strung to their highest tension, and this had been the result. Had no other clue existed, these few lines of writing would furnish one leading unerringly to discovery. Supposing no other clue to exist, and Routh to pretend to inability to identify the writing, there were several common acquaintances of Dallas and Deane whocouldidentify it, and render a refusal the most dangerous step which Routh could take.
She sat for several minutes perfectly still, her face colourless as marble, and her blue eyes, fixed with a painful expression of terror, under the shock of this new discovery. She had had no worse apprehension than that the letter would announce the day of George's intended return, and for that she was prepared; but this! It was too much for her, and the first words she uttered showed that her mind had lost its strict faculty of reasoning; they broke from her with a groan:
"I--I it is who have destroyed him!"
But, even now, weakness and exaggeration had no long duration in Harriet Routh's mind. By degrees she saw this in its true light, an alarming, a terrible coincidence indeed, an addition to the danger of their position, but not necessarily a fatal catastrophe. Then she saw new light, she caught at a new idea, a fresh, bright hope. This would avail with Routh; this would drive away his irresolution; this would really inspire him with the true conviction of their danger; this, which would throw the whole burden of identification upon him; this, which would establish a strong and intimate link between him and the dead man; for the "articles to be purchased," named in the memorandum of which George had sent her a copy, were simply shares in companies with every one of which Stewart Routh was connected. Only George's ignorance of such matters had prevented his recognizing the meaning of the memorandum.
And now Harriet rose; and as she paced the room, the colour came back to her cheek, the light came back to her eyes. A new life and fresh energy seemed to spring up within her, and she grasped George's letter in her hand, and struck it against her bosom with an action of the hand and a responsive movement of the breast which was almost triumphant. This thing which she had done, which had looked like ruin, would be her way of escape.
Routh's refusal to return home immediately annoyed, puzzled, and disheartened her. Why was he so hard to move, so difficult to convince, so insensible to danger? His plea was business; if this business was what she hoped and believed it to be, that of preparation, he should have come home to learn the new and urgent need for its expedition. Why was he so hard to her? Why had he no thought for her wishes, no compassion on her suspense? Harriet could not but ask herself that, though she strove against the deadly suffering the answer brought her.
Thus the time wore on drearily, until Harriet carelessly took from the table the slip of paper which contained a whole revelation for her.
Of the hours which succeeded she could not have given an account herself. How the fury of jealousy, of love betrayed, of faith violated, was reawakened within her, and inflamed to the wildest and most desperate pitch; how she writhed under the shame and the scorn which her husband's baseness forced her to feel. She had had profoundest pity, readiest help for the criminal; but for this pitiful, cowardly, cruel liar nothing but contempt--nothing! Ah, yes, something more, and that made it all the harder--contempt and love.
The woman was here, then--here, in London, on the spot to ruin him, lured hither by him. His false heart planned; his guilty hands dug the pit into which he was to fall; and now his feet were close upon the brink. This rendered him deaf and blind; for this he had basely deceived her, his best, his only friend; for this he had come to regard and treat her as his enemy; and now Harriet had to make a desperate effort indeed to rally all her strength and courage. She had to put the suffering aside, to let all her hopes go, to face a new and almost desperate condition of affairs, and to think how he was to be saved. It must be in spite of himself. This time, it must be in defiance of himself.
She had passed through a long period of suffering--if time is to be measured by pain--before Routh came home. She had not nearly thought it out; she had only reached a resolution to be patient and peaceful, and to conceal her knowledge of his treachery, if any effort could give her the strength to do so, when she heard his key in the lock, and the next moment his hand on the door-handle.
There was confusion in the expression of Eolith's shifty black eyes, some embarrassment in the tone of his voice. They were slight; but she saw and understood them. Her heart gave one angry bound under the paper which lay securely in her bosom, but her steady face took no change from the pulsation.
"Sorry I couldn't get back. I got away as soon as I could," said Routh, as he threw aside his coat and put his hat down. Harriet pushed a chair towards him, and he sat down before she answered:
"I am sorry, too, Stewart. I can hardly think any business can have equalled in importance such an occurrence as this."
She put George Dallas's letter into his hand, and eagerly watched him, while with a face convulsed by anger, hatred, and all unholy passions, he read it.
If she could have seen his heart! If she could have read the devilish project that filled it! If she could have seen that in the discovery of the new and urgent danger he had seen, not blind to that danger indeed, but catching at the chance included in it, a means of realizing his atrocious plot against her! If she could have distinguished, amid the surging, passionate thoughts and impulses which raged within him, this one, which each second made more clear:
"This is my opportunity. All is settled, all is right; she and I are safe. I have triumphed, and this cursed letter gives me a better chance than any I could have formed or made. This infernal idiot is always my curse and my dupe; however, he has done me a good turn this time."
If Harriet, watching the changes in her husband's countenance, could have read these thoughts, she might have interpreted aright the ferocity which blazed in his wicked eyes, while a cynical sneer curled his lip, as he flung the letter violently on the floor, starting up from his chair.
Harriet had seen Routh in a passion more than once, though only once had that passion been directed against herself, and she was not a woman, even when its victim, to be frightened by a man's temper. But she was frightened now, really and truly frightened, not, however, by the violence of his rage, but because she did not believe in it. She did not understand his game; she saw he was playing one; why he feigned this fury she could not comprehend, but she knew it was feigned, and she was frightened. Against complicated deception of this kind she was powerless.. She could not oppose successful art to the ingenious skill with which he was courting his own ruin, to save him. She could not disentangle this thought from the confusion in her brain; she felt only its first thrill of conviction, she only shrank from it with swift, sharp, physical pain, when Routh turned upon her with a torrent of angry and fierce reproaches.
"This is your doing," he said, the violence of his simulated anger hurrying his words, and rendering them almost unintelligible. "I owe it to you that this cursed fool has me in his power, if the idiot only finds it out, and knows how to use it, more securely than I ever had him in mine. This is your skill and your wisdom; your caution and your management, is it? Like a fool, I trusted a woman--you were always so sure of yourself, you know, and here's the result. You keep this pretty piece of conviction in your desk, and produce it just in the nick of time. I don't wonder you wanted me home; I don't wonder you were in such a hurry to give me such a proof of your boasted cleverness."
Her clear blue eyes were upon him; his restless black eyes shifted under her gaze, but could not escape it. She did not release him for an instant from that piercing look, which became, with each word he spoke, more and more alight with scorn and power. The steady look maddened him, the feigned passion changed to real rage, the man's evil face paled.
She slightly raised her hand, and pointed to the chair he had left; he kicked it savagely away. She spoke, her hands still extended. "Stewart, I do not understand you, but I am not taken in by you. What are you aiming at? Why are you pretending to this violent and unreasonable anger?"
"Pretending!" he exclaimed, with an oath; "it is no pretence, as you shall find. Pretending! Woman, you have ruined me, and I say--"
"AndIsay," she interposed, as she slowly rose, and stood upright before him, her head raised, her steady eyes still mercilessly set on his, "this is a vain and ridiculous pretence. You cannot long conceal its motive from me: whatever game you are playing, I will find it out."
"Will yon, by--?" he said, fiercely.
"I will, for your own sake," she answered calmly. And, standing before him, she touched him lightly on the breast with her small white hand. "Stop! don't speak. I say, for your own sake. You and I, Stewart, who were once one, are two now; but that makes no change in me. I don't reproach you."
"Oh, don't you?" he said. "I know better. There's been nothing but whining and reproaches lately."
"Now you are acting again, and again I tell you I will find out why. The day of reproach can never--shall never--come; the day of ruin is near, awfully near--"
"You've taken care of that."
"Again! You ought to know me better, Stewart; you can't lie to me undetected. In time I shall know the truth, now I discern the lie. But all this is vain. Read once more." She took up the letter, smoothed it out, and held it towards him. He struck it out of her hand, and cursed her.
She looked at him in blank amazement for a moment, and then said:
"You are not drunk again, Stewart? You are not mad? If you are not, listen to me, for your fate is rushing upon you. The time may be counted by hours. Never mind my share in this new event, never mind what you really think, or what you pretend to think about it. It makes my appeal to you strong, irresistible. This is no fit of woman's terror; this is no whim, no wish to induce you to desert your harvest-field, to turn your back upon the promise of the only kind of life you care to live. Here is a link in the evidence against you, if suspicion lights upon you (and it must), which is of incontestable strength. Here, in Arthur Felton's writing, is the memoranda of the shares which you bought and paid for with Arthur Felton's money. Stewart, Stewart, are you blind and mad, indeed, that you stay here, that you let the precious time escape you, that you dally with your fate? Let us begone, I say; let us escape while we may. George Dallas is not our only foe, not our only danger--formidable, indeed; but remember, Stewart, Mr. Felton comes to seek for his son; remember that we have to dread the man's father!"
The pleading in her voice was agonizing in its intensity, the lustrous excitement in her blue eyes was painful, the pallor of her face was frightful. She had clasped her hands round his arm, and the fingers held him like steel fetters. He tried to shake off her hold, but she did not seem aware of the movement.
"I tell you," she continued, "no dream was ever wilder than your hope of escape, if those two men come to London and find you here; no such possibility exists. Let us go; let us get out of the reach of their power."
"By--, I'll put myself out of Dallas's reach by a very simple method, if you don't hold your cursed tongue," said Routh, with such ferocity that Harriet let go her hold of him, and shrank as if he had struck her. "If you don't want me to tell Mr. Felton what has become of his son, and put him on to George's trail myself, you'll drop this kind of thing at once. In fact," he said, with a savage sneer, "I hardly think a better way out of our infernal blunder could be found."
"Stewart, Stewart!" She said no more.
"Now listen to me, Harriet," he went on, in furious anger, but in a suppressed tone. "If you are anything like the wise woman you used to be, you won't provoke a desperate man. Let me alone, I tell you--let me get out of this as I best can. The worst part of it is what you have brought upon me. I don't want George Dallas to come to any serious grief, if I can help it; but if he threatens danger to me, he must clear the way, that's all. I dare say you are very sorry, and all that. You rather took to Master George lately, believed in his prudence, and his mother, and all that kind of thing; but I can't help that. I never had a turn for sentiment myself; but this you may be sure of--only gross blundering can bring anything of the kind about--if any one is to swing for Dean, it shall be Dallas, and not I."
A strong shudder shook Harriet's frame as she heard her husband's words. But she repressed it, and spoke:
"You refuse to listen to me, then, Stewart. You will not keep your promise--your promise which, however vague, I have built upon and lived upon since we left Homburg? You will not 'think of' what I said to you there? Not though it is a thousand times more important now? You will not leave this life, and come away to peace and safety?"
"No, no; a thousand times no!" said Routh, in the wildest fury. "I will not--I will not! A life of peace and safety; yes, and a life of poverty, and you--" he added, in a tone of bitterest scorn and hatred.
A wonderful look came into the woman's face as she heard his cruel and dastardly words. As the pink had faded into the white upon her cheeks, so now the white deadened into gray--into an ashen ghostly gray, and her dry lips parted slowly, emitting a heavy sigh.
He made a step or two towards the door, she retreating before him. And when he had almost reached it, she fell suddenly upon her knees, and flung her arms round him with desperate energy.
"Stewart," she said, in a whisper indeed, yet in a voice to be heard amid a whirlwind, "my husband, my love, my life, my darling, don't mind me! Leave me here; it will be safer, better, less suspicious. Go away, and leave me. I don't care, indeed. I don't want to go with you. Go alone, and make sure of your safety! Stewart, say you'll go--say you'll go!"
While she was speaking, he was striving to loosen her hold upon him, but in vain. A short brief warfare was waged in that moment in his soul. If he softened to her now, if he yielded to her now, all was undone. And yet what love was this--what strange, and wondrous, and potent kind of love was this? Not the kind of love which had looked at him, an hour or two ago, out of the rich black eyes of the American widow, that had trembled in the tones of her voice. But a vision of the beauty he coveted, of the wealth he needed, of the freedom he panted for, rose before Routh's bewildered brain, and the strife ended. Evil had its own way unchecked henceforth to the end.
He raised his right arm and struck her heavily upon the face; the clasp of her hands gave way, and she sank upon the floor. Then he stepped over her, as she lay prostrate in the doorway, and left the room. When she raised herself, she pushed back her hair, and looked round with a dreary amazement upon her troubled face, and she heard the key turned in his dressing-room door.
The day had dawned when Harriet Routh went gently upstairs to her bed-room. She was perfectly calm. She opened the window-shutters and let the light in before she lay down on her bed. Also, she unlocked a box, which she took from her wardrobe, and looked carefully into it, then put it away satisfied. As she closed her eyes, she said, half aloud, "I can do no more; but she can save him, and she shall."
At one o'clock on the following day, Harriet Routh, attired, as usual, in simple but ladylike dress, and presenting an appearance on which the most impertinent of pages would not have dared to cast an imputation, presented herself at No. 4 Hollington-square, Brompton. Mrs. Bembridge lived there, but Mrs. Bembridge was not at home, and would not be at home until late in the evening. Would the lady leave her name? 'No; but she desired Mrs. Bembridge might be informed that a lady had called, and would call again at the same hour on the morrow, who had found an article of dress lost at Homburg by Mrs. Bembridge, and which she would restore to Mrs. Bembridge in person, but not otherwise.
As Harriet was returning home, she walked down Piccadilly, and saw Mr. Felton and George Dallas alighting from a cab at the door of the house in which their lodgings had been engaged.
"Very fair, too," said Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge, when she received Harriet's message from her maid, "and very natural she should expect a reward. Ladies often take advantage of that kind of thing to give money to the poor. I shan't grudge her any thing she may ask in reason, I shall be so glad to get back my golden egg."