Richard Vont, as though he had been sitting there listening for the raising of the latch, was on his feet before David could enter the sitting room.
"The Lord's day has come," he muttered, dragging him in. "It's been a weary while, but it's come."
David threw off his overcoat in silence, and the old man looked wonderingly at his clothes.
"You've been taking your dinner up with them—at the house?" he asked.
David nodded.
"Yes," he assented. "Your note found me there. I came as soon as I could."
"I never doubted ye," the old man muttered. "I knew you'd come."
David, suddenly stifled, threw open the cottage window. When he came back into the little circle of lamp-light, his face was pale and set. He was filled with a premonition of evil.
"I want you to listen to me, uncle," he said earnestly. "I have something to say."
"Something to say?" the old man repeated. "Another time, my boy—-another time. To-night you have work to do," he added, with a fierce flash of triumph in his eyes.
"Work?"
"Aye!—to keep your oath."
"But to-night? What can I do to-night?" David exclaimed. "No, don't tell me," he went on quickly. "I'll have my say first."
"Get on with it, then. There's time. I'm listening."
"I have forgotten nothing," David began, "I am denying nothing. I remember even the words of the oath I swore."
"With your hand upon the Bible," Vont interrupted eagerly,—"your hand upon the Book."
David shivered.
"I am not likely to forget that night," he said. "What I swore we both know. Well? I have begun to keep my word. You know that."
"Aye, and to-night you'll finish it!" Vont cried, with uplifted head. "After to-night you'll be quit of your oath, and you can go free of me. I've made it all easy for you. It's all planned out."
"I must finish what I have to say," David insisted. "It's been on my mind like lead. He's a ruined man, uncle—beggared to the last penny. I've dishonoured myself, but I've done it—for your sake. Beyond that I cannot go."
"You cannot go?" Vont muttered blankly.
"I cannot. I don't know what this scheme of yours is, uncle, but leave me out of it. I'm in Hell already!"
"You think—"
Vont was breathing heavily. The words suddenly failed him, his fingers seemed to grip the air. David had a momentary shock of terror. Then, before he could stop him, the old man was down upon his knees, holding him by the legs, his upraised face horrible with a new storm of passion.
"David, you'll not back out! You'll not break that oath you swore when I lent you the money—all my savings! And it might have gone wrong, you know. It might have beggared me. But I risked it for this! You don't know what I've been through. I tell you there isn't a night, from darkness till nigh the dawn, I haven't toiled with these hands, toiled while the sweat's run off my forehead and my breath's gone from me. And I've done it! I've made all ready for you—and to-night—it's to-night, boy! If you go back on me, David, as sure as that Book's the truth, you shall know what it is to feel like a murderer, for I'll sit and face you, and I'll die! I mean it. As God hears me at this moment, I mean it. If you falter to-night, you shall find me dead to-morrow, and if it blackens my lips, I'll die cursing you as well as him—you for your softness because they've flattered you round, him because he still lives, with the wrong he did me unpunished."
David dragged him up by sheer force and pushed him back into his chair.
"What is it you want me to do?" he asked in despair.
"You can't refuse me," Vont went on, his voice strong enough now. "Watch me and listen," he added, leaning forward. "There's my hand on the Book. Here's my right hand to Heaven, and I swear by the living God that if you fail me, you shall find me to-morrow, sitting dead. That's what your broken oath will do."
"Oh, I hear," David answered drearily. "I'll keep my word. Come, what is it?"
Vont rose deliberately to his feet. All trace of passion seemed to have disappeared. He took an electric torch from his pocket and led the way to the door.
"Just follow me," he whispered.
They made their way down the little tiled path to the bottom of the garden. In the right-hand corner was what seemed to be the top of a well.
"You remember that, perhaps?"
David nodded.
"I know," he said. "I used to play down there once."
Vont rolled the top away, and, stooping down, flashed the light. There were stone steps leading to a small opening, and at the bottom the mouth of what seemed to be a tunnel. David started.
"It's one of the secret passages to Mandeleys!" he exclaimed.
"There are seven of them somewhere," his uncle replied, in a hoarse undertone—"one, they say, from Broomleys, but that's too far, and the air would be too foul, and maybe it don't lead where I want it to. I've made air-holes along this, David. You take the torch, and you make your way. There's nothing to stop you. It's dry—I've sprinkled sand in places—and there's air, too. When you come to the end there's a door. Four nights it took me to move that door. It's wide open now. Then you mount a little flight of stairs. They go round and round, and at the top there's a little stone landing. You'll see before you what seems to be blank wall. You press your palms on it—so—and soon you find an iron handle. It'll turn easy—I've oiled it well—and you step right into the room."
"What room?" David demanded, in bewilderment.
The old man's fingers clutched his arm.
"Into the bedchamber of the Lady Letitia Mandeleys!" he proclaimed triumphantly. "Keep your voice low, boy. Remember we are out of doors."
"Into the—! Are you mad, uncle?" David muttered, catching at his voice as though it were some loose quality that had escaped from him.
"There's never a saner man in this county," was the fierce reply. "It's what I've worked for. It's the worst blow I can deal his pride. Oh, I know she is a haughty lady! You'll step into her chamber, and she'll see you, and she'll shriek for her servants, but—but, David," he added, leaning forward, "they'll find you there—they'll find you there! The Marquis—he'll be told. The nephew of Richard Vont will be found in his daughter's chamber! There'll be explanations enough, but those things stick."
David suddenly found himself laughing like a madman.
"Uncle," he cried, "for God's sake—for Heaven's sake, listen to me. This is the maddest scheme that ever entered into any one's head. I should be treated simply like a common burglar. I should have no excuse to offer, nothing to say. I should be thrown out of the house, and there isn't a human being breathing who'd think the worse of the Lady Letitia. You don't know what she's like! She's wonderful! She's—"
"I'll not argue with you, boy," Vont interrupted doggedly. "You think I know nothing of the world and its ways, of the tale-bearing and the story-telling that goes on, women backbiting each other, men grasping even at shadows for a sensation. You'll do your job, David, you'll keep your oath, and from to-night you'll stand free of me. There'll be no more. You can lift your head again after you've crossed that threshold. Make what excuse you like—come back, if you will, like a frightened hare after they've found you there—but you'll have stood in her bedchamber!"
David shivered like a man in a fever. He was beginning to realise that this was no nightmare—that the wild-eyed man by his side was in sober and ghastly earnest.
"Uncle," he pleaded, "not this. Lady Letitia has been kind and gracious to me always. We can't strike through women. I'd rather you bade me take his life."
"But I don't bid you do anything of the sort," was the sullen reply. "Death's no punishment to any man, and the like of him's too brave to feel the fear of it. It's through her the blow must come, and you'll do my bidding, David, or you'll see me sitting waiting for you to-morrow, with a last message to you upon my dead lips."
David gripped the torch from his hand. After all, Hell might come to any man!
"I'll go," he said.
It was a nightmare that followed. Stooping only a little, flashing his torch always in front, he half ran, half scrambled along a paved way, between paved walls which even the damp of centuries seemed scarcely to have entered. Soon the path descended steeply and then rose on the other side of the moat. Once a rat paused to look at him with eyes gleaming like diamonds, and bolted at the flash of the torch. More than once he fancied that he heard footsteps echoing behind him. He paused to listen. There was nothing. He lost sense of time or distance. He stole on, dreading the end—and the end came sooner even than he had feared. There was the door that yielded easily to his touch, the steep steps round and round the interior of the tower, the blank wall before him. The iron handle was there. His hands closed upon it. For a moment he stood in terrible silence. This was something worse than death! Then he set his teeth firmly, pressed the handle and stepped through the wall.
Afterwards it seemed to him that there must have been something mortally terrifying in his own appearance as he stood there with his back to the wall and his eyes fixed upon the solitary occupant of the room. Lady Letitia, in a blue dressing gown, was lying upon a couch drawn up before a small log fire. There seemed to be no detail of the room which in those sickening moments of mental absorption was not photographed into his memory. The old four-poster bedstead, hung with chintz; the long, black dressing table, once a dresser, covered carelessly with tortoise-shell backed toilet articles, with a large mirror in the centre from which a chair had just been pushed back. But, above all, that look in her face, from which every other expression seemed to have permanently fled. Her lips were parted, her eyes were round with horrified surprise. The book which she had been reading slipped from her fingers and fell noiselessly on to the hearth-rug. She sat up, supporting herself with her hands, one on either side, pressed into the sofa. She seemed denied the power of speech, almost as he was. And then a sudden wonderful change came to him. He spoke quite distinctly, although he kept his voice low.
"Lady Letitia," he said, "let me explain. I shall never ask for your forgiveness. I shall never venture to approach you again. I have come here by the secret passage from Vont's cottage. I have come here to keep an oath which I swore in America to Richard Vont, and I have come because, if I had broken my word, he would have killed himself."
He spoke with so little emotion, so reasonably, that she found herself answering him, notwithstanding her bewilderment, almost in the same key.
"But who are you?" she demanded. "Who are you to be the slave of that old man?"
"I am his nephew," David answered. "I am the little boy who played about the park when you were a girl, who picked you up on the ice once when you fell. All that I have I owe to Richard Vont. He sent me to college. He lent me the money upon which I built my fortune, but on the day he lent it to me he made me swear a terrible oath, and to-night he has forced me to keep it by setting foot within your chamber. Now I shall return the way I came, and may God grant that some day you will forgive me."
Almost as he spoke there was a little click behind. He started round and felt along the wall. There was a moment's silence. Then he turned once more towards Letitia, his cheeks whiter than ever, his sunken eyes filled with a new horror. Even the composure which had enabled him to explain his coming with some show of reason, had deserted him. He seemed threatened with a sort of hysteria.
"He followed me! Damn him, he followed me!" he muttered. "I heard footsteps. He has fastened us in!"
He tore desperately at the tapestry, shook the concealed door and rattled it, in vain. Letitia rose slowly to her feet.
"You see what has happened," she said. "Richard Vont was more cunning than you. He was not content that you should make your little speech and creep back amongst the rats. Tell me, what do you propose to do?"
He looked around him helplessly.
"There is the window," he muttered.
She shook her head.
"We are on the second story," she told him, "and there is nothing to break your fall upon the flags below. To be found with a broken neck beneath my window would be almost as bad as anything that could happen."
"I am not afraid to try," he declared.
He moved towards the window. She crossed the room swiftly and intercepted him.
"Don't be absurd," she admonished. "Come, let us think. There must be a way."
"Let me out of your room on to the landing," he begged eagerly. "If I can reach the hall it will be all right. I can find a window open, or hide somewhere. Only, for God's sake," he added, his voice breaking, "let me out of this room!"
A flash of her old manner came back to her.
"I am sorry you find it so unattractive," she said. "I thought it rather pretty myself. And blue, after all, is my colour, you know, although I don't often wear it."
"Oh, bless you!" he exclaimed. "Bless you, Lady Letitia, for speaking to me as though I were a human being. Now I am going to steal out of that door on tiptoe."
"Wait till I have listened there," she whispered.
She stole past him and stooped down with her ear to the keyhole. She frowned for a moment and held out her hand warningly. It seemed to him that he could feel his heart beating. Close to where he was standing, her silk stockings were hanging over the back of a chair.—He suddenly closed his eyes, covered them desperately with the palms of his hand. Her warning finger was still extended.
"That was some one passing," she said. "I don't understand why. They all came to bed some time ago. Stay where you are and don't move."
They both listened. David seemed in those few minutes to have lost all the composure which had become the habit of years. His heart was beating madly. He was shaking as though with intense cold. Lady Letitia, on the other hand, seemed almost unruffled. Only he fancied that at the back of her eyes there was something to which as yet she had given no expression, something which terrified him. Then, as they stood there, neither of them daring to move, there came a sudden awful sound. It had seemed to him that the world could hold no greater horror than he was already suffering, but the sound to which they listened was paralysing, hideous, stupefying. With hoarse, brazen note, rusty and wheezy, yet pulled as though with some desperate clutch, the great alarm bell which hung over the courtyard was tolling its dreadful summons.
Letitia stood up, her cheeks ghastly pale. She, too, was struggling now for composure.
"Really," she exclaimed, "this is an evening full of incidents.—Don't touch me," she added. "I shall be all right directly."
For a single moment he knew that she had nearly fainted. She caught at the side of the wall. Then they heard a cry from outside. A spark flew past the window. A hoarse voice from somewhere below shouted "Fire!" And then something more alarming still. All down the corridor, doors were thrown open. There was the sound of eager voices—finally a loud knocking at the door which they were guarding. Letitia shrugged her shoulders.
"This," she murmured, "is fate."
She opened the door. There was a little confused group outside. The Marquis, fully dressed, stood with his eyes fixed upon Thain at first in blank astonishment,—afterwards as one who looks upon some horrible thing. Grantham in a dressing gown, took a quick step forward.
"My God, it's Thain!" he exclaimed. "What in hell's name—?"
Letitia turned towards her father.
"Father," she began—
The Marquis made no movement, yet she was suddenly aware of something in his expression, something which shone more dimly in the face of her aunt, which throbbed in Grantham's incoherent words. Her brave little speech died away. She staggered. The Marquis still made no movement. It was David who caught her in his arms and carried her to the couch. He turned and faced them. In the background, Sylvia was clinging to Grantham's arm.
"You gibbering fools!" he cried. "What if an accursed chance has brought me here! Isn't she Lady Letitia, your daughter, Marquis? Isn't she your betrothed, Grantham? Your niece, Duchess? Do you think that anything but the rankest and most accursed accident could ever have brought me within reach even of her fingers?"
No one spoke. The faces into which he looked seemed to David like a hideous accusation. Suddenly Gossett's voice was heard from behind.
"The fire is nothing, your lordship. It is already extinguished. Some one seems to have brought some blazing brambles and thrown them into the courtyard."
"Get some water, you fools!" Thain shouted. "Can't you see that she is faint?"
The Duchess began to collect herself. She advanced further into the room in search of restoratives. The Marquis came a step nearer to Thain.
"Tell me how you found your way into this room, sir?" he demanded.
"By the foulest means on God's earth," Thain answered. "I came through the secret passage from Vont's cottage."
"Without Lady Letitia's knowledge, I presume?" Grantham interposed hoarsely.
"No one but a cad would have asked such a question," David thundered. "I broke into her room, meaning to deliver one brief message and to go back again. Vont followed me and fastened the door.—Can't you read the story?" he added, turning appealingly to the Marquis. "Don't you know who I am? I am Vont's nephew, the boy who played about here years ago. I lived with him in America. He paid for my education at Harvard; he lent me the money to make my first venture. He has been all the relative I ever had. Out there I pledged my word blindly to help him in his revenge upon you, Marquis, in whatever manner he might direct. To-night he sprung this upon me. I was face to face with my word of honour, and the certainty that if I refused to fulfil my pledge he would kill himself before morning. So I came. It was he who rang the alarm bell, he who planned the pretence of a fire to trap me here. This was to be his vengeance.—Be reasonable. Don't take this miserable affair seriously. God knows what I have suffered, these last few minutes!"
Letitia sat up, revived. She was still very pale, and there was something terrible in her face.
"For heaven's sake," she begged, "bring this wretched melodrama to an end. Turn that poor man out," she added, pointing to David. "His story is quite true."
Every one had gone except the Marquis and Grantham. Neither of them spoke for several moments. Then the Marquis, as though he were awaking from a dream, moved to the door, opened it and beckoned to David.
"Will you follow me," he invited.
Very slowly they passed along the great corridor, down the broad stairs and into the hall. The Marquis led the way to the front door and opened it. Neither had spoken. To Thain, every moment was a moment of agony. The Marquis held the door open and stood on one side. David realised that he was expected to depart without a word.
"There is nothing more I can say?" he faltered despairingly.
The Marquis stood upon his own threshold. He spoke slowly and with a curious lack of expression.
"Nothing. It is the times that are to blame. We open our houses and offer our hospitality to servants and the sons of servants, and we expect them to understand our code. We are very foolish.—Since you have broken this silence, let me spare myself the necessity of further words. If your contrition is genuine, you will break the lease of Broomleys and depart from this neighbourhood without further delay. My agent will wait upon you."
Without haste, yet before any reply was possible, the Marquis had closed the great door. David was once more in the darkness, staggering as though his knees would give way. The avenue stretched unevenly before him. He started off towards Broomleys.
At a few minutes after nine, the following morning, the Marquis entered the room where breakfast was usually served. The Duchess, in travelling clothes and a hat, was lifting the covers from the silver dishes upon the sideboard, with a fork in her hand. She welcomed him a little shortly.
"Good morning, Reginald!"
"Good morning, Caroline," he replied. "Are you the only representative of the household?"
She snorted.
"Charlie Grantham went off in his little two-seater at eight o'clock this morning," she announced. "He is motoring up to town. Left apologies with Gossett, I believe—telegram or something in the night. All fiddlesticks, of course!"
"Naturally," the Marquis assented, helping himself from one of the dishes and drawing his chair up to his sister's side. "So exit Charles Grantham, eh?"
"And me," the Duchess declared, returning to her place and pouring out the coffee. "I suppose you can send me to Fakenham for the ten o'clock train?"
The Marquis considered for a moment.
"I am not sure, Caroline," he said, "that your departure is entirely kind."
"Well, I'm jolly certain I don't mean it to be," she answered bitterly. "I ask no questions, and I hate scenes. A week ago I should have scoffed at the idea of David Thain as a prospective suitor for Letitia. Now, my advice to you is, the sooner you can get them married, the better."
"Really!" he murmured. "You've given up the idea, then, of taking the young man to Scotland?"
"Entirely," the Duchess assured him emphatically. "I was an idiot to ever consider it. When people of his class find their way amongst us, disaster nearly always follows. You see, they don't know the rules of the game, as we play it. Whilst we are on this subject, Reginald, what are you going to do about it?"
The Marquis unlocked his letter case and shook out the contents.
"You mean about last night?" he asked. "Well, as I don't want to be the laughing-stock of the county, I shall keep as quiet as I can. I knew that something ridiculous would happen, with that poor lunatic sitting in the garden, poring over the Bible all day long."
The Duchess looked distinctly malicious.
"I am not at all as sure as I should like to be," she said, "that the old man is to blame for everything."
The Marquis looked at his sister intently. She bent over the milk jug.
"You leave me in some doubt, Caroline," he observed coldly, "as to what frame of mind you are in, when you make such utterly incomprehensible remarks and curtail your visit to us so suddenly. At the same time, I hope that whatever your private feelings may be, you will not forget certain—shall I call them obligations?"
"Oh, don't be afraid!" she rejoined. "I am not likely to advertise my folly, especially at Letitia's expense. I don't care a jot whether the young man came through a hole in the wall or dropped down from the clouds. I only know that his presence in Letitia's bedchamber—"
"We will drop the discussion, if you please," the Marquis interrupted.
There was just the one note in his tone, an inheritance, perhaps, from those more virile ancestors, which reduced even his sister to silence. The Marquis adjusted his eyeglass and commenced a leisurely inspection of his letters. He did so without any anxiety, without the slightest premonition of evil. Even when he recognised her handwriting, he did so with a little thrill of pleasurable anticipation. He drew the letter closer to him and with a word of excuse turned away towards the window. Perhaps she was wanting him. After all, it would be quite easy to run up to London for a day—and wonderfully pleasant. He drew the single sheet from its envelope. The letters seemed magnified. The whole significance of those cruel words seemed to reach him with a single mental effort.
Reginald, I was married to James Borden this morning. I suppose it is the uncivilised part of me which has been pulling at my heartstrings, day by day, week by week, the savage in me clamouring for its right before it is too late.
So we change positions, only whereas you have atoned and justified every one of your actions towards me since our eyes first met, I am left without any means of atonement.
Will you forgive?
Your very humble and penitent MARCIA.
The Marquis replaced the letter in the envelope. For several moments he stood looking across the park, beyond, to the well-cultivated farms rolling away to the distant line of hills. His brain was numbed. Marcia had gone!—There was a mist somewhere. He rubbed the windowpane, in vain. Then he set his teeth, and his long, nervous fingers gripped at his throat for a moment.
"Your coffee is getting cold," his sister reminded him.
He came back to his place. She watched him a little curiously.
"Any message from our pseudo-Lothario?" she asked.
The Marquis gathered up his other letters.
"There is nothing here from him," he said, "but I must ask you to excuse me, Caroline. There is an urgent matter which needs my attention."
He crossed the room a little more slowly than usual, and his sister, who was still watching him critically, sighed. There was no doubt at all that his walk was becoming the walk of an old man. The stoop of the shoulders was also a new thing. She counted up his age on her fingers, and, rising from her place, looked at herself in the mirror opposite. Her face for a moment was hard and set, and her fingers clenched.
"Years!" she muttered to herself. "How I hate them!"
The Marquis selected a grey Homburg hat of considerable antiquity, and a thicker stick than usual, from the rack in the hall. The front doors stood wide open, and he walked out into the pleasant sunshine. It was a warm morning, but twice he shivered as he passed down the broad sweep of drive and, with a curious sensation of unfamiliarity, crossed the little bridge over the moat, the few yards of park, and finally approached the palings which bordered Richard Vont's domain. The mist still seemed to linger before his eyes, but through it he could see the familiar figure seated in his ancient chair, with the book upon his knee. The Marquis drew close to the side of the palings.
"Richard Vont," he began, "I have come down from Mandeleys to speak to you. Will you listen to what I have to say?"
There was no reply. The Marquis drew the letter from his pocket.
"You are a cruel and stubborn man, Vont," he continued. "You have gone far out of your way to bring injury and unhappiness upon me. All your efforts are as nothing. Will you hear from me what has happened?"
There was silence, still grim silence. The Marquis stretched out his hand and leaned a little upon the paling.
"I took your daughter, Richard Vont, not as a libertine but as a lover. It was perhaps the truest impulse my life has ever felt. If there was sin in it, listen. Hear how I am punished. Month followed month and year followed year, and Marcia was content with my love and I with hers, so that during all this time my lips have touched no other woman's, no other woman has for a moment engaged even my fancy. I have been as faithful to your daughter, Richard Vont, as you to your vindictive enmity. From a discontented and unhappy girl she has become a woman with a position in the world, a brilliant writer, filled with the desire and happiness of life to her finger tips. From me she received the education, the travel, the experience which have helped her to her place in the world, and with them I gave her my heart. And now—you are listening, Richard Vont? You will hear what has happened?"
Still that stony silence from the figure in the chair. Still that increasing mist before the eyes of the man who leaned towards him.
"Your daughter, Richard Vont," the Marquis concluded, "has taken your vengeance into her own hands. Your prayers have come true, though not from the quarter you had hoped. You saw only a little way. You tried to strike only a foolish blow. It has been given to your daughter to do more than this. She has broken my heart, Richard Vont. She grew to become the dearest thing in my life, and she has left me.—Yesterday she was married."
No exclamation, no movement. The Marquis wiped his eyes and saw with unexpected clearness. What had happened seemed so natural that for a moment he was not even surprised. He stepped over the palings, leaned for a single moment over the body of the man to whom he had been talking, and laid the palm of his hand over the lifeless eyes. Then he walked down the tiled path and called to the woman whose face he had seen through the latticed window.
"Mrs. Wells," he said, "something serious has happened to Vont."
"Your lordship!"
"He is dead," the Marquis told her. "You had better go down to the village and fetch the doctor. I will send a message to his nephew."
Back again across the park, very gorgeous now in the fuller sunshine, casting quaint shadows underneath the trees, glittering upon the streaks of yellow cowslips on the hillside. The birds were singing and the air was as soft as midsummer. He crossed the bridge, turned into the drive and stood for a moment in his own hall. A servant came hurrying towards him.
"Run across the park to Broomleys as fast as you can," his master directed. "Tell Mr. Thain to go at once to Vont's cottage. You had better let him know that Vont is dead."
The young man hastened off. Gossett appeared from somewhere in the background and opened the door of the study towards which the Marquis was slowly making his way.
"The shock has been too much for your lordship," the man murmured. "May I bring you some brandy?"
The Marquis shook his head.
"It is necessary, Gossett," he said, "that I should be absolutely undisturbed for an hour. Kindly see that no one even knocks at my door for that period of time."
Gossett held open the door and closed it softly. He was a very old servant, and in great measure he understood.
Richard Vont was buried in the little churchyard behind Mandeleys, the churchyard in which was the family vault and which was consecrated entirely to tenants and dependents of the estate. The little congregation of soberly-clad villagers received more than one surprise during the course of the short and simple service. The Marquis himself, clad in sombre and unfamiliar garments, stood in his pew and followed the little procession to the graveside. The new tenant of Broomleys was there, and Marcia, deeply veiled but easily recognisable by that brief moment of emotion which followed the final ceremony. At its conclusion, the steward, following an immemorial custom, invited the little crowd to accompany him to Mandeleys, where refreshments were provided in the back hall. The Marquis had stepped back into the church. David and Marcia were alone. He came round to her side.
"You don't remember me?" he asked.
"Remember you?" she repeated. "Aren't you Mr. David Thain?"
"Yes," he admitted, "but many years ago I was called Richard David Vont—when I lived down there with you, Marcia."
Emotion had become so dulled that even her wonder found scanty expression.
"I remember your eyes," she said. "They puzzled me more than once. Did he know?"
"Of course," David answered. "We lived together in America for many years, and we came home together. Directly we arrived, however, he insisted on our separating. You know the madness of his life, Marcia."
"I know," she answered bitterly. "Was I not the cause of it?"
"It was part of his scheme that I should help towards his revenge," he explained. "I did his bidding, and the end was disaster and humiliation."
They stood under the little wooden porch which led out into the park.
"You will come up to Broomleys?" he invited.
She shook her head.
"Just now I would rather go back to the cottage," she said. "We shall meet again."
"I shall be in England only for a few more days," he told her gloomily. "I am returning to America."
She looked at him in some surprise.
"I thought you had settled down here?"
"Only to carry out my share in that infernal bargain. I have done it, I kept my word, I am miserably ashamed of myself, and I have but one feeling now—to get as far away as I can."
"But tell me, David," she asked, "what was this scheme? What have you done to hurt him—the Marquis?"
"I have done my best to ruin him," David replied, "and through some accursed scheme in which I bore an evil and humiliating part, I have brought some shadow of a scandal upon—"
He broke off. Marcia waited for him to continue, but he shook his head.
"The whole thing is too insignificant and yet too damnable," he said. "Some day, Marcia, I will tell you of it. If you won't come with me, forgive me if I hurry away."
He was gone before she could remonstrate. She looked around and saw the reason. The Marquis was coming down the gravel path from the church in which he had taken refuge from the crowd. She felt a sudden shaking of the knees, a momentary return of that old ascendency which he had always held over her. Then she turned and waited for him. He smiled very gravely as he held her hand for a moment.
"You are going back to the cottage?" he asked. "I will walk with you, if I may."
They had a stretch of park before them, a wonderful, rolling stretch of ancient turf. Here and there were little clusters of cowslips, golden as the sunshine which was making quaint patterns of shadow beneath the oaks and drawing the perfume from the hawthorn trees, drooping beneath their weight of blossom. Marcia tried twice to speak, but her voice broke. There was the one look in his face which she dreaded.
"I shall not say any conventional things to you," he began gently. "Your father's life for many years must have been most unhappy. In a way, I suppose you and I are the people who are responsible for it. And yet, behind it all—I say it in justice to ourselves, and not with disrespect to the dead—it was his primeval and colossal ignorance, the heritage of that stubborn race of yeomen, which was responsible for his sorrow."
"He never understood," she murmured. "No one in this world could make him understand."
"You know that our new neighbour up there," he continued, moving his head towards Broomleys, "was his nephew—a sharer, however unwilling, in his folly?"
"He has just told me," she admitted.
"I was the first to find your father dead," he went on. "When I received your letter, Marcia, I took it to him. I went to offer him the sacrifice of my desolation. That, I thought, would end his enmity. And I read your letter to dead ears. He was seated there, believing that all the evil he wished me had come. I suppose the belief brought him peace. He was a stubborn old man."
Marcia would have spoken, but there was a lump in her throat. She opened her lips only to close them again.
"I wished to see you, Marcia," he continued, "because I wanted you to understand that I have only one feeling in my heart towards you, and that is a feeling of wonderful gratitude. For many years you have been the most sympathetic companion a somewhat dull person could have had. The memory of these years is imperishable. And I want to tell you something else. In my heart I approve of what you have done."
"Oh, but that is impossible!" she replied. "I cannot keep the bitter thoughts from my own heart. I am ashamed when I think of your kindness, of your fidelity, of all that you have given and done for me throughout these years. And now I have the feeling that I am leaving you when you need me most."
He smiled at her.
"Your knowledge of life," he said gently, "should teach you better. The years that lay between us when you first gave me all that there was worth having of love in the world were nothing. To-day they are an impassable gulf. I have reached just those few years which become the aftermath of actual living, and you are young still, young in mind and body. We part so naturally. There is something still alive in you which is dead in me."
"But you are so lonely," she faltered.
"I should be lonelier still," he answered, "or at least more unhappy, if I dragged you with me through the cheerless years. Life is a matter of cycles. You are commencing a new one, and so am I, only the things that are necessary to you are not now necessary to me. So it is natural and best that we should part."
She pointed to the cottage, now only a few yards away. Its doors and windows were wide open, there was smoke coming from the chimney, a wealth of flowers in the garden.
"The cottage is mine," she said. "Sometimes I believe that it was left to me in the hope that I might come back with my heart, too, full of bitterness, and that I might take his place. It is yours whenever you choose to take it. I shall send the deeds to Mr. Merridrew."
He looked at it thoughtfully. For a moment the shadow passed from his face. He stood a little more upright, his eyes seemed to grow larger. Perhaps he thought of those days when he had stolen down from the house with beating heart, drawn nearer and nearer to the cottage, felt all the glow and fervour of his great love. There was a breath of perfume from the garden, full of torturing memories—a little wind in the trees.
"One of the desires of my life gratified," he declared. "Mr. Merridrew shall draw up a deed of sale. Look," he added, pointing to the drive, "there is some one waiting for you in the car there. Isn't it your husband?"
She glanced in the direction he indicated.
"Yes," she murmured.
"I will not stay and see him now," the Marquis continued. "You will forgive me, I know. Present to him, if you will," he went on, with some faint touch of his old manner, "my heartiest good wishes. And to you, Marcia," he added, raising the fingers of her ungloved hand to his lips, "well, may you find all that there is left in the world of happiness. And remember, too, that every drop of happiness that comes into your life means greater peace for me.—We talk too seriously for such a brilliant morning," he concluded, his voice measured, though kindly, his attitude suddenly reminiscent of that long, pictured line of gallant ancestors. "Take my advice and use some of this beautiful afternoon for your ride to London. There will be a moon to-night and you may enter it as the heroine in your last story—a fairy city."
He left her quite easily, but when she tried to start to meet her husband, her knees gave way. She clung to the paling and watched him cross the bridge and stroll up the little strip of turf, still erect, contemplating the great pile in front of him with the beneficent satisfaction of inherited proprietorship. She watched him pass through the front door and disappear. Then she turned around and drew her husband into the cottage.
"James," she cried, sobbing in his arms, "take me away—please take me away!"
During those few hours of strenuous, almost fierce work into which David threw himself after the funeral, he found in a collection of belated cablegrams which his secretary handed him an explanation of Letitia's half apology, an explanation, he told himself bitterly, of her altered demeanour towards him. The old proverb stood justified. Even this, the wildest of his speculations, had become miraculously successful. Pluto Oil shares, unsalable at a dollar a few weeks ago, now stood at eight. Oil had been discovered in extraordinary and unprecedented quantities. Oil was spurting another great fortune for him out of the sandy earth. He paused to make a calculation. The Marquis's forty thousand pounds' worth were worth, at a rough estimate, three hundred thousand.
"Extraordinary news, this, Jackson," he remarked to the quiet, sad-faced young man, who had been his right hand since the time of his first railway deal.
"Most extraordinary," was the quiet reply. "I congratulate you, Mr. Thain. You do seem to have the knack of turning everything you touch into gold."
"Do I?" Thain murmured listlessly.
"I took the liberty of investing in a small parcel of shares myself, just to lock away," the young man continued. "I gave seventy cents for them."
"Not enough to make you a millionaire, I hope?" Thain asked, with some bitterness.
"Enough, with my savings, to give me a very comfortable feeling of independence, sir," Jackson replied. "I have never aspired any further than that."
Thain returned to his desk. He gave letter after letter, and more than once his secretary, who had received no previous intimation of his master's intended departure, glanced at him in mild surprise.
"I presume, as you are returning to the States, sir," he suggested, "that we must try to cancel the contracts which we have already concluded for the restoration of this place?"
Thain shook his head.
"Let them go on," he said. "It makes very little difference. I have a seven years' lease. I may come back again. The letters which I gave you with a cross you had better take into your own study and type. I shall be here to sign them when you have finished."
The young man bowed and departed. David listened to the closing of the door and turned his head a little wearily towards the night. The French windows stood open. Through the still fir trees, whose perfume reached him every now and then in little wafts, he could see one or two of the earlier lights shining from the great house. Once more his thoughts travelled back to the ever-present subject. Could he have done differently? Was there any way in which he could have spared himself the ignominy, the terrible humiliation of those few minutes? There was something wrong about it all, something almost suicidal—his blind obedience to the old man's prejudiced hatred, his own frenzied tearing to pieces of what might at least have remained a wonderful dream. One half of his efforts, too, had fallen pitifully flat. The Marquis had only to keep the shares to which he was justly entitled, to free for the first time for generations his far-spreading estates, to take his place once more as the greatest nobleman and landowner in the county. If only it had been the other scheme which had miscarried!
His avenue of elms was sheltering now an orchestra of singing birds. With the slightly moving breeze which had sprung up since sunset, the perfume of his roses became alluringly manifest. Through the trees he heard the chiming of the great stable clock from Mandeleys, and the sound seemed somehow to torture him. His head drooped for a moment upon his arms.
The room seemed suddenly to become darker. He raised his head and remained staring, like a man who looks upon some impossible vision. Lady Letitia, bare-headed, a little paler than usual, a little, it seemed to him, more human, was standing there, looking in upon him. He managed to rise to his feet, but he had no words.
"I am not a ghost," she said. "Please come out into the garden. I want to talk to you."
He followed her without a word. It was significant that his first impulse had been to shrink away from her as one dreading to receive a hurt. She seemed to notice it and smiled.
"Let us try and be reasonable for a short time," she continued. "We seem to have been living in some perfectly absurd nightmare for the last few hours. I have come to you to try and regain my poise. Yes, we will sit down—here, please."
They sat in the same chairs which they had occupied on her previous visit. David had been through many crises in his life, but this one left him with no command of coherent speech—left him curiously, idiotically tongue-tied.
"I have thought over this ridiculous affair," she went on. "I must talk about it to some one, and there is only you left."
"Your guests," he faltered.
"Gone!" she told him a little melodramatically. "Didn't you know that we had been alone ever since the morning afterwards? First of all, my almost fiancé, Charlie Grantham, drove off at dawn. He left behind him a little note. He had every confidence in me, but—he went. Then my aunt. She was the most peevish person I ever knew. She seemed to imagine that I had in some way interfered with her plans for your subjugation, and although she knew quite well that no woman of the Mandeleys family could ever stoop to any unworthy or undignified action, she decided to hurry her departure. She left at midday."
"But Miss Sylvia?"
"Sylvia was most ingenuous," Letitia continued, her voice regaining a little of its natural quality. "Sylvia came to me quite timidly and asked me to walk with her in the garden. She wondered—was it really settled between me and Lord Charles? If it was, she was quite willing to go into a nunnery or something equivalent,—Chiswick, I believe it was, with a maiden aunt. But if not, she believed—he had whispered a few things to her—he was hoping to see her that week in town. It was most extraordinary—-she couldn't understand it—but it seemed that their old flirtations—you knew, of course, that they had met often before—had left a void in his heart which only she could fill. He had discovered his mistake in time. She threw herself upon my mercy. She left by the three-thirty."
"My God!" he groaned. "And this was all my doing!"
"All your doing," she assented equably. "They were all of them perfectly content to accept your story. There is not one of them who disputes it for a single moment. But you were there, with the secret door closed behind you, and, as my aunt said, there is really no accounting for what people will do, nowadays. And now," she concluded, "I gather that you are leaving, too."
"I am motoring up to town to-morrow morning," he said. "I haven't ventured to speak of atonement, but your coming here like this, Lady Letitia, is the kindest thing you have ever done—you could ever do. I have tried, in my way," he went on, after a moment's pause, "to live what I suppose one calls a self-respecting life. I have never before been in a position when I have been ashamed of anything I have done. And now, since those few minutes, I have lived in a burning furnace of it. I daren't let my mind dwell upon it. Those few minutes were the most horrible, psychological tragedy which any man could face. If your coming really means," he went on, and his voice shook, and his eyes glowed as he leaned towards her, "that I may carry away with me the feeling that you have forgiven me, I can't tell you the difference it will make."
"But why go?" she asked him softly.
His heart began to beat with sudden, feverish throbs. His eyes searched her face hungrily. She seemed in earnest. Her lips had lost even their usual, faintly contemptuous curl. If anything, she was smiling at him.
"Why go?" he repeated. "Can't you understand that the one desire I have, the one burning desire, is to put myself as far away as possible from the sight and memory of what happened that night? We have been telephoning through to London. I have taken my passage for America on Saturday. I shall go straight out to the Rockies. I just want to get where I can forget your look and the words with which your father turned me out of his house. And worse than that," he added, with a little shake in his tone, "their justice—their cruel, abominable justice."
Then what was surely a miracle happened. She leaned forward and took his hand. Her eyes were soft with sympathy.
"You poor thing!" she exclaimed. "You couldn't do anything else. I have been thinking it over very seriously. It was a horrible position for you, but you really couldn't do anything else, that I can see. You told your story simply and like a man. But wait. There is one thing I can't understand. Those shares—were they not to be part of that poor man's vengeance. You surely never intended that we should benefit by them in this extraordinary way?"
"I believed them," he told her firmly, "when I sold them to your father, to be, until long after he would have had to pay for them, at any rate, absolutely worthless. The wholly unexpected has happened, as it does often in oil. Your father's shares are worth a fortune. He can realise his idea of clearing Mandeleys. He can dispose of them to-day for three hundred thousand pounds. Lady Letitia, you have come to me like an angel. This is the sweetest thing any woman ever did. Be still kinder. Please make your father keep the shares. They are his. They were sold to ruin him. It is just the chance of something that happened many thousand miles away, which has turned them in his favour. He accepts nothing from me. It is fate only which brings him this windfall."
"I promise," she said. "To tell you the truth, I think father is as much changed, during the last few days, as I am. When I saw him, about an hour ago, and told him that I was coming to see you, I was almost frightened at first. He looks older, and I fancy that something which has happened lately—something quite outside—has been a great blow to him."
"Does he know, then, how kind you are being to me?" David asked.
She nodded.
"He rather hoped," she whispered, leaning a little closer still to him and smiling into his face, "that you would come back with me and dine."
David suddenly clutched her hands. He was a man again. He threw away his doubts. He accepted Paradise.
On their way across the park, a short time later, he suddenly pointed down towards the little cottage.
"You haven't forgotten, Letitia," he said, "that I lived there? You haven't forgotten that that old man was my uncle!—that his father and grandfather were the servants of your family?"
"My dear David," she replied, "I have forgotten nothing, only I think that I have learned a little. I am still full of family tradition, proud of my share of it, if you will, but somehow or other I don't think that it is more than a part, and a very small part, of our daily life. So let there be an end of that, please. You have done great things and I am proud of you, and I have done nothing except suffer myself to be born into a very ancient and occasionally disreputable family.... Oh, I must tell you!" she went on, with a little laugh. "What do you think father was settling down to do when I came out?"
David shook his head.
"I have no idea."
"I left him seated at his desk," she told him. "He is writing a line to Mr. Wadham, Junior, asking him to-day's price of the Pluto Oil shares."