CHAPTER XII.TWO INTERVIEWS.
It was a heavy oppressive afternoon—over Maryville a storm was brooding—the leaden sky seemed almost to touch the tops of the dark trees that hemmed in the house and grounds so closely that they might well have been likened to prison walls; not a sound within or without broke the stillness; in the fields the cattle lay panting with the heat; in the woods the birds kept silence, listening perhaps for the first roll of thunder, following swift after the leaping lightning.
It was a day to take the spirit out of any one, and Grace Moffat, as she sat alone in thelarge drawing-room, still insufficiently furnished, though some attempt had been made to fill its emptiness, felt miserable and depressed to a degree of utter wretchedness.
She had made up her mind what she ought to do, but she still hesitated and shivered at the idea of doing it. Nettie had been seriously ill for two days, and there could be no question that, although her malady had been at first merely inflammation of the brain, her disease was now complicated with the fever raging at the Castle Farm.
But Grace did not care for that—a new horror had cast out the old. If she had only been able to shake off the last task set for her, she would cheerfully have run the risk of contracting a dozen fevers; she had entreated Doctor Girvan to take it out of her hands, but he shook his head.
“Leave it till she gets better; there is time enough,” he said, but Grace knew there was not time enough—that what she had to do ought to be done at once.
Sometimes she thought of writing to LordArdmorne and requesting his advice and assistance in the matter; but having learnt all she knew through the delirious utterances of an unconscious woman, she felt herself charged with the weight of a fearful secret, which she was bound in love and honour to bear alone.
As for her tending Nettie without assistance, Dr. Girvan’s medical sense had told him any such proceeding was impracticable, quite as soon as Grace’s common sense had told her the same thing.
Without going through the ceremony of consulting him, Miss Moffat had despatched a messenger for her own little maid, mentioned once before in these pages.
“I want you to help me nurse Mrs. Brady, who is ill withFEVER,” she wrote. “If you are afraid, do not come.”
Back with the messenger, bundle in hand, came Nancy, trim and pretty as ever, radiant with delight at seeing her former mistress once more.
“What did your mother say, Nancy?” asked Grace, looking at the bright young facenot without a certain feeling of remorse for having brought it to a house where death might be lurking for its owner.
“Say, Miss—nothing, to be sure; wasn’t I coming to you!”
Miss Moffat walked to the window and back again, thinking in what form of words to tell the girl what she wanted with her.
“Nancy,” she began, “if it had been only to nurse Mrs. Brady I required help, I would never have asked you to help me. Plenty of women older and more experienced than you could have been found for such a duty, but what I really require is a person whom I can trust to keep silence. I want you to promise me that to no human being now or hereafter—unless I give you leave—you will ever mention a word of what you may hear in Mrs. Brady’s room.”
“I’ll be true to you, Miss Grace, what you bid me I will do; it’s my right and my pleasure too.”
Nancy had not been ten minutes installed in the sick room before Susan asked to speak a word with Miss Moffat.
“Now that you’re getting your own servants here, Miss,” she began, “you’ll likely not be wanting me any longer, and I just want to say I’ll go without any telling, if you like.”
“I am not getting my own servants here,” said Miss Moffat, bewildered at the sudden turn affairs had taken. “I do not want to meddle with the arrangements of any other person’s house; but I cannot nurse Mrs. Brady alone, you must know that, and I want to have some one with me I can trust.”
“You might have trusted me, Miss,” said the woman, with a smouldering fire in her dark eyes. “The Lord knows you might. Even though you have done this thing and brought a stranger to this sorrowful house, man nor woman shouldn’t wring from me what I know, nor—” she added after a pause, devoted possibly to conjuring up an effective finish to her sentence, “wild horses shouldn’t tear it. I never did like the mistress, for all her pretty face and quiet ways; but I came nearer liking her the other morning than ever I did before,when I found out how the trouble had been eating in like rust, when I heard her letting out everything she would have bitten her tongue off before she would have spoken in her right mind. It was her silence always beat me; but I’d have nursed her better than that slip of a thing can do, and I’d have died, Miss, before I let on she had been talking of anything beyond the common.”
Miss Moffat stood silent for a moment, then she said,—
“I think open speaking is always a good thing. So far as I am concerned I should be quite willing to trust you. I have been so sure of your good faith, I never asked whether Mrs. Brady had been talking strangely after I left her and went down to Doctor Girvan, but—I do not want to hurt your feelings—how was it possible for me to let you nurse her? Do not imagine I am setting myself up as a judge of you or anybody else; all I ask is, if you had been in her place should you have liked such an arrangement yourself?”
The woman did not answer direct, but she broke forth,—
“Do you want me to leave? I was fond of the children. I did my best by them, I am doing all I know how now.”
“No,” Miss Moffat replied; “I do not want you to leave; at present, I may tell you, it would inconvenience me beyond expression if you were to do so. When Mrs. Brady is better, no doubt she will wish you to go. I say this frankly, but when that day comes, if you want a chance for the future, if you want to wipe out the past and try to make a better thing of the rest of your life, I will help you.”
This time the answer came quick and sharp. “If there were more ladies like you, there would be fewer women like me,” said the poor sinful creature; her assurance vanquished, her insolence gone,—and, throwing her apron over her head, she went along the stone passage leading to the kitchen, sobbing—sobbing every step of the way.
Which evidence of contrition touched Miss Moffat beyond expression, and gave her much hope concerning Susan’s future. She hadlearned many things during the previous twelve months, but she had still to be taught that repentance for past errors is not by any means a guarantee for future good behaviour; that the tears wept over a crime committed and irrevocable, dry up almost as soon as shed, and form no lake of bitterness across which humanity finds almost insuperable difficulty in steering to another sin.
Nevertheless, to be done with the subject, it may as well be here stated that Miss Moffat’s generosity and Susan’s impressibility between them bore good fruits.
The woman sinned no more. To the end of her life she was perhaps scarcely a desirable person to know, but she married respectably a man who was acquainted with her antecedents, and the pair migrated to a strange country, where their children and their children are working their way to name and fortune.
So goes the world—the busy, busy world we live in. How would the Puritan Fathers have looked upon the man who should marry a woman notable for antecedents such as these?
Still Grace sat looking out at the funereal trees, at the garden full of flowers,—the common sweet-scented perennial flowers,—which made many an otherwise poor home so rich in colour and perfume before the present bedding-out system was invented by ingenious and enterprising nurserymen,—still she cast an occasional glance at the threatening sky; her thoughts divided the while between the murdered man who lay in a quiet little burying ground amongst the hills,—his day ended while it was still high noon, his power for evil over, his ability to vex and distress gone,—and the person who had dealt the blow which silenced the beating of that wicked heart, ended all its schemes, plots, hopes, purposes for ever.
As yet she had not written to Mr. D’Almarez; she had done nothing but think what had best be attempted in the matter—what it was possible to perform.
As to allowing things to remain as they were till Nettie got better, she put that idea aside as out of the question. To DoctorGirvan it appeared the only course to pursue; but then he shrank from responsibility. He was old, broken, feeble, and possessed of little moral courage; all his life long hisrôlehad been to know nothing, and pass from house to house leaving the secrets of each behind him, and why should he mix himself up with trouble and mischief now; or allow Miss Moffat to mix herself up in such an affair, if he could avoid doing so?
Grace, on the contrary, blamed herself for having permitted her own fears and disinclination to take so serious a responsibility on her own shoulders to influence her for such a length of time.
“If I can keep my own share in the transaction secret,” she thought, “I should like to do so; but if not, and that unpleasant consequences ensue, I shall face them bravely as I am able. I wonder whether I could be punished. I wish I dare ask Mr. D’Almarez. Shall I write and put the question to Mr. Nicholson? No. I must wait no longer, whatever comes of it; no more time ought to be lost.”
At this moment some one knocked gently on the panel of the drawing-room door, and thinking it could only be Susan or Mary, Miss Moffat said, “Come in,” without turning her eyes from the window.
Next moment, however, some indescribable feeling impelled her to look round, and there standing in the open doorway, like a picture in a frame, was a tall bearded man who appeared as much astonished to see her as she was at sight of him.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I expected to find Mrs. Brady here. I asked for her and the servant pointed to this door.”
“Mrs. Brady is dangerously ill,” Grace replied; “with fever,” she added, seeing the stranger advance into the room; then a second’s doubt and hesitation, and she exclaimed, holding out her hand,—
“Why, it must be John Riley!”
“And you,” he said, after an almost imperceptible pause, “must be Miss Moffat, though I should scarcely have known you.”
“I have had little rest and much anxietysince I returned to Ireland,” she answered, as if apologizing for the change in her appearance.
He smiled gravely; it was not the right time, and he was not the right person, to tell her she had altered almost beyond his recognition, merely because she was now the most beautiful woman he had ever met.
“I thought you were in England,” he said, putting aside the difficulty by changing the subject.
“So I was,” she replied, “until very lately. I came over here directly I heard about Mr. Brady, and I am glad I did come, for Mrs. Brady is very lonely and very ill. And that reminds me you ought not to stay here.”
“Why not?”
“For fear of infection.”
“I have lived in a climate where fever is so common people forget to fear it,” he said.
“But Mrs. Riley and your sisters have not,” she suggested.
“I am not staying at Woodbrook,” he answered. “I am at Lakemount, and the long ride back there will rid me of infection if I catch any here.”
Not at Woodbrook! Time was when Grace would have asked him the why and the wherefore of such an extraordinary proceeding, but she could not do this now. Neither could he tell her what a grievous disappointment his return home had proved; how terrible that life of shortness, meanness, discontent, complaining, had seemed to him after the wider and nobler career his Indian experience had opened to him. He had done for his family all a man could, and his family were dissatisfied with his efforts. Not merely were affairs no better than when he went away, but they were infinitely worse. The amount of the mortgage was increased, the land was deteriorated in value, the houses and cottages were dilapidated, and in many cases almost falling to ruin, whilst Woodbrook itself gave evidence at every turn, of neglect; shortness of money; lack of spirit to improve; lack of will to make the best of a bad position; lack of faith that time and patience and energy might work wonders in the way of repairing even the shattered fortunes of the Riley family.
Naturally, when absent, a man forgets the failings of those belonging to him, if indeed he ever knew them; and perhaps there is no greater trial than for a person to return to the home of his youth to find it and the people it contains different from the ideal, experience of the world has been gradually working up for him.
But these were things of which John Riley could not speak to any one. Right glad had he been to accept Lord Ardmorne’s invitation, and leave Woodbrook for Lakemount.
“Deserting his own flesh and blood,” said Mrs. Riley.
“It does not seem to me that his own flesh and blood made things very pleasant for him,” observed the General, his old spirit roused at the implied blame to his son.
Mr. John Riley’s visit to Maryville was prolonged perforce; for he had not been seated many minutes before a flash of lightning, followed by a loud sullen peal of thunder, announced that the storm so long threatened had come.
During the time he remained he spoke oflittle, except Nettie; her position and her future prospects. He had been informed there was no will, and that, consequently, the eldest son taking the freehold property, Mrs. Brady’s share of her late husband’s estate would probably be small.
“But, of course, all the children being young, she will have an allowance for their support,” finished Mr. Riley.
“Money,” thought Grace, “money again.”
Had any one put the question, however, to Miss Moffat, how people are in this world to live without money, she might have been slightly puzzled to tell them.
“If there is any way in which I can be of assistance to Mrs. Brady, I should regard it as a great kindness if you would let me know,” said Mr. Riley, when at length he rose to go.
In her friend’s name Grace thanked him, and then he went on,—
“You have warned me against this fever, Miss Moffat; but are you not running a terrible risk yourself in the matter?”
“No,” she answered; “I shall not take it.”
“How can you be certain of that?” he asked.
“I have a perfect conviction on the subject,” she said. “It is not intended I should have fever at present.”
“Are you a fatalist?” inquired Mr. Riley.
“On some points, yes,” she replied, and then he went; and Grace from an upper window watched him ride slowly away down the avenue, till the gloomy trees, dripping wet from the late storm, hid him from her sight.
For one second after she first recognized him, she had felt tempted to show her burden to this man who had once loved her, and ask him to take its weight and its responsibility. Only for one second. The formal Miss Moffat with which he addressed her cast the half-formed resolution to the winds.
How could she tell anything of the weary days, months, years, in which he had been schooling himself to forget the old familiar name, and think and speak of her only as Miss Moffat?
How could she, who had never loved him, understand the shock, the surprise, the misery, the pleasure, that sudden meeting had proved to him! How was it possible for her to comprehend anything save that he was changed, that the John Riley of her childish and girlish recollection was gone as utterly as the years which were past!
Dimly and yet certainly, watching his figure as it slowly disappeared, Grace grasped the truth, that when she refused him that evening, while the scent of summer flowers was around them, and the sea rippled in on the shore, she killed the John she had known so long—been associated with so intimately.
That John was dead and buried; and the John Riley, with the bronzed face and erect figure and bushy beard, who had answered her greeting so formally, was another man.
Over this interview, however, Grace had not much time to think. Another was impending that occupied her mind to the exclusion of almost every other topic.
“Shall I put it off?” she thought; “thelanes will be wet and the grass soaking.” And then she put the temptation from her.
“It must be done. Supposing I were to catch this fever, who would there be to see justice done; to save them both, if possible?”
If possible; she shivered at the suggestion contained in the words.
She went to her room, in a different part of the house from where Nettie lay; and putting on her travelling-dress, an old bonnet and coarse shawl she had found belonging to Mrs. Brady, looked in the glass to see if in the dusk might hope to pass through Kingslough unrecognized.
“With a thick veil I think I shall be safe,” she said; and then she took off the shawl, carrying it over her arm, and put a thick lace fall in her pocket, and taking the key of a side-door with her, passed through one of the drawing-room windows into the gardens, and so made her way unobserved out of the grounds of Maryville.
Once in the fields of the Castle Farm she knew every inch of the country, and thisknowledge enabled her to reach, by unfrequented roads and by-paths, that part of the shore lying beneath the hill on which Ballylough Abbey stood.
There on a great piece of rock she sat down to rest, and wait till the twilight deepened and darkened.
When it was fairly dusk she resumed her walk, still along the beach, never entering Kingslough till she reached the further end of the town, whence through narrow lanes and back streets she arrived at Mr. Hanlon’s surgery.
Her hand trembled so much at first that she could not pull the bell. At last she heard it tinkle, and to her great relief the door was opened by Mr. Hanlon in person.
“I wish to speak to you, if you please,” she said, in a voice so low and quivering, that the poor attempt she made to disguise it was unnecessary.
“Certainly; come in.”
“In private,” she suggested.
“You have come to tell me some greatsecret, I suppose,” he remarked jocularly; desiring, apparently, to put his timid patient at her ease. “Go in there,” he added, pointing to a parlour beyond the surgery, where he had no doubt been reading, for a lamp stood on the table, and a book lay open near it. “Now what is it?” he went on, placing a chair for his visitor, and taking one himself.
She did not speak, but turned her head in the direction of the door of communication which he had left ajar.
“If you wish it, by all means,” he said, answering that look, and he rose and not only shut but locked it.
“Now, what have you to tell me,” he asked.
She put back her veil and looked him straight in the face.
As she did so, he shrank as though he had received a blow, and every particle of colour left him.
“Miss Moffat!” he exclaimed. “You in Ireland?”
“Yes; at Maryville,” was her reply. “Now, you know why I am here.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, and unlocking the door passed out into his surgery. He was not a man addicted to stimulants. Even in these days he would have been accounted abstemious, and for those times when temperance had scarcely established itself as a virtue, he was reckoned, amongst wild young fellows who knew no better, and old ones who ought to have known better, a milksop who was “afraid to take his liquor because he could not carry it.”
Now, however, he unlocked a cupboard, and pouring himself out half a tumbler of raw spirit, swallowed it at a gulp; then he went back and said,—
“No, Miss Moffat, I do not know why you are here; though I can guess why you might have sent some one else.”
“Who else might I have sent?” she inquired.
“Why there is only one thing now to do, is there?” he retorted.
“What is that?”
“Give me up as I have lacked courage to give myself up,” he said desperately.
“Then you do not deny it?” she said.
“Deny it! Why should I deny it? Have not I known it must come to this some time? Have I ever ceased cursing my own vacillation in not going straight away to the inspector here, and telling him the whole story? People might have believed me then; but they will never believe me now.”
There was a moment’s silence which he broke by asking,—
“How did you get to know about this, Miss Moffat?”
“Mrs. Brady is too ill to keep many secrets,” was the reply.
“Ill! what is the matter with her?” he hurriedly inquired.
“Fever.”
“Who is attending her?”
“Doctor Girvan.”
“The old dotard will kill her,” he exclaimed.
“He will do no such thing,” answered Grace sharply. “Doctor Girvan will no more kill Mrs. Brady than you have killed ReubenScott. If she dies, it can only be because God willed she was to do so, not because she has lacked attention. Nevertheless,” added Grace reflectively, “I should have had further advice, only I feared—”
“Do not let that consideration influence you any longer,” he said, “I shall give myself up in the morning.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because there is nothing else to do,” he answered with a bitter laugh. “Because the game is played out, and I may as well throw down the cards as have them taken out of my hands.”
“Shall I tell you what you ought to do?” asked Miss Moffat.
“If you will be so good.”
She took no notice of the mocking defiance of his tone, the recklessness of his manner with which he tried to cover the abject despair that was mastering him; but went on, gathering courage as she proceeded,—
“You ought to leave Kingslough at once. Scott can be saved without you; and Mrs.Brady’s name should be kept out of this miserable affair altogether.”
“She is innocent,” he said. “Tell me any form of words of I can employ, sufficiently strong to assure you of that, and I will use them.”
Instinctively Grace drew back from the subject. “I am very certain she is innocent,” she replied. “I require no assurance on that point from any one.”
“I beg your pardon and hers,” he answered; more humbly than he had yet spoken. “You are quite right, Miss Moffat,” he continued, after a moment’s pause. “If I stay here I may not be able to save my own life. If I go I shall spare her—perhaps.”
“There is no perhaps in it. The greatest kindness you can do Mrs. Brady is to leave here at once.”
“Leave, to be brought back,” he said. “Fly, to make my return all the worse?”
“There is no occasion for you to be brought back,” she urged. “There is plenty of time for you to make your way to some country where you may be safe for the rest of your life.”
“There is no time,” he said; “once Scott’s innocence is declared, the law will be on my track like a bloodhound.”
“I have thought it all over,” she persisted, “Scott’s trial can, I am persuaded, be put off. Up to the present time, it may be supposed, no one knows anything of this except yourself and Mrs. Brady. Mrs. Brady is too ill to give evidence. Weeks must elapse before she can be questioned. Make use of those weeks. Go away as if for a visit, and stay away.”
He put his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands, and, as in some nightmare, the whole of his life passed in review before him. It had opened with such fair prospects; and behold, this was the end! He had hoped to win wealth, women’s smiles, golden opinions from his fellows; and the end, was a choice of two alternatives:—to remain, and, if he escaped the gallows, be sentenced to transportation, most probably for life; or to escape, and lead a fugitive existence, under an assumed name, for the rest of his days.
He thought of the sacrifices his father had made for him; he thought of the castles hismother had built with her son’s fame, or her son’s talent, or her son’s greatness for the foundation-stone of each; he thought of how proud he had felt of his own gifts; of how certain he had been of achieving success; and now he let his hands drop and looked at Miss Moffat with a face so white, so haggard, so aged, so hopeless, that Grace was forced to turn her eyes away. She could not bear to look upon a wreck so sudden and so complete.
“You ought not to be staying here,” he said, in a choking voice and with an evident effort. “You came by the shore, I suppose? You would not mind, perhaps, if I asked leave to walk part of the way back with you. I mean, you would not feel—afraid.”
“Afraid!” she only spoke that one word, but it was enough. He could feel there were tears and sorrow, and compassion and regret in her tone; tears, sorrow, compassion, and regret for him.
“If you will walk slowly along the beach I will follow you,” he said. “I—I want to tell you how it all happened.”
She bowed her head in acquiescence, drew the veil over her face once more, and passed out silently into the night.
She had not walked more than halfway to Ballylough Head before he was at her side.
Without waiting for him to speak, she said,—
“I do not know, Mr. Hanlon, whether you have a sister.”
Under the circumstances it seemed to him a curious question, but he answered,—
“I have.”
“Before you tell me anything, I want to know if I may, without giving you offence, speak to you as your sister if she were here might, and would?”
“If one of my sisters were speaking to me now,” he replied, “she would not, I am very sure, find much to say that was pleasant. They have built their hopes on me, and now—but go on, Miss Moffat, say anything you like, no matter how true it may be, I will try to bear it.”
“You mistake me a little, I think,” she said; “all I meant was that if a sister foundher brother in a sore strait as you are now, she would speak to him with no more reserve than I am about to do. Ever since I knew of this matter I have been thinking how it will be best for you to get away; what it will be best for you to do when you have got away. I suppose I am right in imagining you might find a difficulty in finding the means at once for a long journey.”
“I have done very well at Kingslough,” he replied, “and if I could only sell my practice, and I had an offer for it not long since, I should have no difficulty in going to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
“Yes, but by the time you had sold your practice it might be too late. If you can get any friend to take your place while you go away apparently for a holiday, you had better leave everything just as it is at this moment. Woman’s wit is quick, Mr. Hanlon, if it be not very profound, and my wit tells me every hour you lose in quitting Kingslough may prove nearer—nearer—that which we all want to avert. I have very little money here, but Ican send you a letter which will enable you to get all you may require. You are not offended I hope?” she went on hurriedly; “I know you cannot escape without sufficient money to do so, and it will be the happiest day of my life when I hear you have got safely out of the country.”
All the manhood which was in him rebelled against having to accept such help as this; and for a moment he bared his head and let the cool night wind play upon his temples to relieve the pain which seemed tearing his brain to pieces. Never had Theophilus Hanlon seemed such a poor creature to himself before; no,—not even when he fled from the side of the man he had murdered; never had he been thoroughly humbled in his own estimation previously. If she had loved him; if he could only for one moment have flattered himself she cared for him more than for the most ordinary acquaintance, the stab might not have pierced so deep.
As it was, he felt the wound was bleeding internally, and that it would continue to bleed at intervals throughout all the years to come.
“I have offended you,” she said. “Pardon my want of tact. I did not mean to hurt your feelings.”
“Hurt my feelings!” he repeated; in the interval during which he remained silent he had tested the truth of each word she said, and admitted, reluctantly it might be, but still certainly, that without such help as she offered, liberty and he might shake hands and part for ever. “Hurt my feelings! When a man has done what I have done, when he has failed to do what I have failed to do, he may reasonably be supposed to have no feelings left to hurt. And yet, Miss Moffat,” he went on, “I will be frank with you; just for a moment your offer cut me. It is so hard—oh! my God,” he broke out in a passion of agony, “what had I ever done that such a trouble should come upon me!”
“Hush!” said Grace. It seemed to her excited fancy as if in the darkness, his voice must travel more swiftly than in the light, to the Throne of Him whose justice and righteousness he questioned. “What have anyof us done that trouble should not come? But in our eyes it does appear hard,” she went on. “If you like—if it will not pain you—tell me how it all came about.”
“I do not know how it began,” he answered. “I supposed no one ever does. I could no more tell you how it was I came to care for Mrs. Brady than I could tell you how the grass grows, or the sea ebbs and flows. One thing, however, I do know, she never cared for me; never in that way. If she had, I should not be talking to you here now; if she had we would have been far away from Ireland long ago. I did not intend to tell her about it,” he continued, “but one day it slipped out; and then she turned round and laughed in my face, such a mocking, despairing, forsaken sort of laugh, it rung in my ears for many a week after.
“‘Keep that for the next young girl you meet, Mr. Hanlon,’ she said, ‘who knows no better. I have heard it all before. Do you suppose I should ever have left my home, poor as it was, and my friends, few as theywere, if he had not first thrown that glamour over me? A woman cannot be deceived twice; and there is no vow you or anybody else could swear, no temptation you could hold out, that could make me trust my future a second time in a man’s hands.’
“She loved her children as I never knew a woman love them before, though she was afraid to show her affection, lest he should find means of punishing her through it; and because I was kind to them, she had a feeling for me—gratitude, friendship, trust—I do not know what to call it—which would have prevented her from making any open breach between us, even if she had dared to tell her husband of the words I had spoken.
“But she did not dare to tell him. It was cowardly, I make no doubt, not to leave a woman so placed; but except for me she was friendless, helpless, in the hands of a demon, and I could not keep from trying to know how things were with her.
“They grew worse and worse. After his attempt to get General Riley’s estate failed,the life he led his wife baffles description, and yet she tried to hide what she suffered from every one, even from me. She wanted him to leave the country; she thought if she could separate him from his bad associates, it might be better for the children at any rate, if not for her. I have seen her wringing her hands about the stories which were told and the ballads that were written and sung; and she used to say she hoped it would be all gone and past, all forgotten and put out of men’s minds before the children grew up.
“‘For if not,’ she asked, ‘what is to become of them?’
“Then I prayed of her again to leave him. I offered to get her and the children away safely by some means if she would let me arrange it all, and take them where he could never find them.
“That time she did not laugh. She began to tremble all over, and said,—
“‘If you were a woman and made me the same offer, I would go this hour; but if I did what you want me, how could I ever look myboys in the face when they grew to be men—how should I teach my girls to be better than their mother had been. I would rather kill myself than do it. Never ask me such a thing again.’
“I went out of the house ashamed, Miss Moffat. I vowed to myself I never would ask her again, and I kept as much away as I could from Maryville, until after that morning when she stole into Kingslough, and, half distracted, tried to tear down the bills with which, as you have no doubt heard, the town was placarded. A man saw and pursued her. I happened to be returning from a bad case which had detained me all night, and she ran right up against me. There was only one thing to do, and I did it. I knocked the fellow down, and as she had fainted carried her into my surgery. When she was better I walked home with her, and from that time began the mischief which has ended as you know.
“So far as I could gather, the man I knocked down bore malice, and took occasion, when he was less than ordinarily sober, to jeer Mr.Brady about there being an understanding between me and his wife. Mr. Brady forbade me to set foot inside Maryville, and I obeyed him untilthatnight. Do I weary you?”
“No,” Grace answered. “I want to hear all you have to tell me. Some day she may be glad to have a person near her who knows the whole story.”
“The evening before, Scott had been with me. He came in the worse for drink, and talked excitedly of the Glendares and Mr. Brady and his own wrongs. He said when Robert Somerford came to be earl, if he ever did, he would not have an acre to call his own; that it had come home to the Glendares as it would come home to Mr. Brady; and then he went on in a maundering sort of way to speak—forgive my mentioning the matter, but it is connected with that which followed—of what a blessing it was you had never after all taken up, as he styled it, with Mr. Somerford. ‘Ay, it was a good and honest gentleman the first that asked her, if Miss Grace could have fancied him. There never was a Riley, Tories thoughthey are, would have broken his promise, and brought a poor man to beggary, as Th’ Airl has done by me.’
“‘But,’ he went on, ‘Brady did not get Woodbrook from his wife’s cousins, and it’s like, clever as he thinks himself, he won’t have the Castle Farm neither.’
“As the man spoke, it flashed through my mind that it was Mrs. Brady who had revealed her husband’s designs on Woodbrook. I lay awake the whole night thinking about it, and then I understood dimly, but certainly, that when she wished to meet you, it was to tell you of his plans, when she wrote to you it was to entrust you to frustrate them.”
“You are right,” Grace remarked as he stopped for a moment, living, perhaps, the misery of that anxious night over again once more.
“What I suffered thinking about her and her position after that no one can conceive. I knew the man’s nature. I had seen him mentally unclothed, and I was certain all she had endured previously at his hands would be nothing as compared with what would followif once a suspicion of the truth entered his mind. I felt I must see her once again, and warn her of the danger that menaced. Whatever they might have been before, my feelings then were unselfish. You believe me, Miss Moffat?”
“I do, but pray go on.”
“I knew he intended to go to Dublin the next day, and I saw him take the coach at Kilcurragh, where I made it my business to be. When I returned home, Scott had been round to say Reuben was worse, and so, putting some medicine for the lad in my pocket and Scott’s stick, which he had left in my room the previous evening, in my hand, I started for the Castle Farm, taking Maryville on my way. I did not want any one at the latter place to know of my visit. Mr. Brady had put the last insult on his wife, and—”
“I know,” Grace interrupted, “we need not talk of that—”
“After making sure there was no one about, I went into the flower-garden, and concealing myself behind some shrubs, looked into theroom where she generally sat. You know it, the small apartment adjoining the drawing-room. She was there alone; and when I tapped at the window, seeing who it was she came and undid the fastening for me.
“‘I must speak to you,’ I said. ‘Will you come out, or is it safe for me to speak to you here?’
“‘Quite safe,’ she answered, moving the candle so that no one from the outside could see me where I sat. ‘Now, what is the matter?’
“In a few words I told her what I suspected. She said I had guessed rightly.
“‘Are you not afraid,’ I asked, ‘of what may happen if Mr. Brady ever guesses it also?’
“‘No,’ she said; ‘I do not intend to wait for that.’
“‘Do you mean that at last—’ I began, scarcely able to believe the evidence of my senses, and in that very moment, when as it seemed all I had wished for was within my grasp, feeling a dull sick wish we hadnever met, that I had never loved, never tempted her.
“‘No, Mr. Hanlon,’ she answered; there was a composure and a peace about her I had never seen before; the hard restraint which usually characterized her was gone, and as she stood with the light streaming on her face, there was a hope which never previously shown in them gladdening her eyes. ‘No, Mr. Hanlon, I do not mean that, and some day you will be thankful for it. What I mean is this, John Riley has come home. He is in Ireland; I could trust my life in his hands. He will protect me; he will enable me to get free from my husband, and to keep my children all to myself. If you still wish to serve me, you can see him and repeat what I say; you can tell him all—all you have seen in this house, all you know I have gone through, and bid him find some way of helping me as I found a way of helping him and his.’
“We talked for a little time longer, and then I left her. As I was going she noticed what a heavy stick I carried, and asked with a smilesuch as had never lighted up her face in my knowledge of it, whether I was afraid of being stopped that I walked about with such a shillelagh.
“I said it belonged to Amos Scott, who had left it at my place the previous night, and that I was going to take it to the Castle Farm.
“‘They have fever there,’ she remarked.
“‘Yes, and a very bad fever too,’ I said. ‘Every word we spoke that night is printed on my heart.’
“‘Poor people, how they have suffered!’ she murmured, in a sort of whisper. ‘Ah! they have felt what it is to be in his power as well as I.’”
“As I had come through the gardens, I returned by them. It was a quiet beautiful night, and not a sound, not even the flight of a night-bird broke the stillness.
“I went by the fields to Scott’s house, and had got as far as the gate leading into the orchard, when I heard some one shout ‘Halloa!’ and a minute after a man came up panting to where I stood.
“It was Brady.
“‘I want to have five minutes’ talk with you, sir,’ he began, when he had recovered his breath a little, ‘but not here. Walk on with me a bit down the road, where we shall be out of the way of eaves-dropping.’
“He had been so lately engaged in the same business that the word came naturally to him.
“To cut a long tale short, Miss Moffat, his journey to Dublin had been all a blind. He wanted, he said, to know if the stories he was told of what went on in his absence were true, and he had returned to learn more than he bargained for.
“He went on for a time more like a madman than anything else; but at last calmed down a little, and said if I would promise him not to deliver Mrs. Brady’s message he would overlook her ‘Judasism’—so he styled her attempt to save her friends from ruin.
“This I flatly refused. I told him she had asked me to help her; and, heaven helping me, I would—”
The speaker stopped suddenly—he had been overwrought; he had been like a horse going across country till now; and now there came a double ditch, he remembered he ought not to have forgotten.
“Miss Moffat,” he slowly recommenced, “after that came something I hesitate to tell you.”
“Tell me,” she said. “It does not matter that I am young instead of old. If it can help Nettie, it cannot hurt me.”
“He bade me take her if she would. He said I had his full leave, and free to rid him of a wife who had been his curse from the day he brought her home—whom he hated—whom he might some day, and that soon, be tempted to kill.”
“Yes!” gasped Grace.
“And I said I would rid her of him that hour and that minute; for that I loved, and honoured, and respected her too much to make her name a bye-word and a reproach, and that I would take her straight away from Maryville to her own kith and kin at Woodbrook,where there were two men who would know how to protect a woman’s fair fame from a ruffian like himself.”
“Yes!” said Grace again breathlessly. The end was at hand.
“I turned to go back to Maryville. I swear to you, Miss Moffat, I should never have quitted the house, leaving her at his mercy, for I knew what she had to expect; but he barred my passage.”
“‘You villain,’ he said, ‘you shall never stir from here alive.’
“He put his hand in his pocket—I knew he went armed—and so I shortened the stick I held, turning it, and struck him over the head with the heavy end.
“I did not try to kill the man, God is my witness of the fact. In my examination I stated the simple truth. A man who meant to do mischief with such a blow could scarcely have dealt it. He dropped down on the instant, and then a horror seized me. I flung away the stick and knelt down beside him, and felt his pulse, and laid his cheek to mine.
“He was dead, and I had killed him. I heard footsteps coming and fled, thinking every moment some one was pursuing me. I have felt the same thing ever since. To-night you, Miss Moffat, have realized the ideal—that is, the end of the story I had to tell,” he said in a low suppressed voice.
But Grace had something still to ask. “Mr. Hanlon,” she began, “what did you mean to do about Amos Scott?”
“I meant to let him stand his trial, and if they found him guilty—confess.”
“You are sure of that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Then I think not, Mr. Hanlon,” she said. “As the temptation mastered you so far, it would have mastered you further; and we may all feel very thankful that through Mrs. Brady’s illness, you have been saved from so fearful an ordeal.”
The words might be cruel, but the tone in which they were uttered took all bitterness out of them. It conveyed less a reproach for his cowardly selfishness than a feeling ofgratitude that Scott’s torture was well-nigh over, without it being necessary for Mr. Hanlon to criminate himself, or Nettie to denounce him. That she would have done so eventually, Grace could not doubt; but whether before or after the trial was another question. In any event it was well neither of them had been called upon to save Scott by such extreme measures.
By this time Miss Moffat and her companion had reached the plantations which divided the grounds of Maryville from the Castle Farm.
“Do not come any further,” she said pausing. “I would rather you did not.”
He attempted no remonstrance, but stood silent before her.
“By eight o’clock to-morrow morning,” she said, “the letter I spoke of shall be in your hands.”
He did not speak; he made no sign for a moment, then suddenly he broke out wildly,—
“I cannot go; it is useless. You ask more from me than I am able to do.”
Utterly astounded; utterly at a loss as to what he meant she remained mute, till suddenly comprehension came to her.
“Surely,” she exclaimed, “you cannot be so mad as to imagine Mrs. Brady would ever voluntarily look upon your face again!”
“Forgive me,” he entreated humbly. “I was no more to blame for that outbreak than the patient who shrinks under the surgeon’s knife. I know what I have to do, and I will do it. May God bless you for helping me upon my weary way.”
He was turning to go without further leave-taking, when she held out her hand.
“Miss Moffat, you forget,” he said.
“No, I do not forget,” she answered. “Take it as a sign that the old has ended and the new begun.”
Stooping down, he pressed his lips upon it; then without uttering a word strode back along the path he had come.
She stood till she could distinguish his figure no longer, and watched him through the darkness drifting out of her life.
When she reached Maryville, she found Dr. Girvan waiting for her.
“I have come to tell you, Miss Moffat,” he began, “that I am ashamed of myself, and whatever may come of it, good or harm, I will go to him, we both know about, and say just whatever you bid me.”
“Thank you a thousand times over,” she answered. “But I have been to him to-night, and he will leave Kingslough to-morrow.”
“God be praised,” exclaimed the doctor devoutly.
The opportunity was irresistible to Grace.
“I hope you are not premature in your thanksgiving,” she said. “His successor may prove as great a thorn in your side as he has done.”
“Ah! how can ye!” expostulated the old man, shaking his head reproachfully at her as he left the room.