CHAPTER XXXII.
ON HIS DEFENCE.
A letter was brought to the Vicar just as he was sitting down to his five o’clock dinner that Sunday evening in the bosom of his family. The Vicar dined at five on Sundays, giving himself an hour for his dinner, and fifty minutes for repose after it, before he left home for the seven o’clock service. There were those among his congregation who affirmed that the tone of the Vicar’s evening sermon depended very much upon his satisfaction with his dinner. If he dined well he took a pleasant view of human nature and human frailty, and was milder than Jeremy Taylor. If his dinner had been a failure the bitterest Calvinism was not severe enough for him.
‘From the Manor House, sir,’ said the parlour-maid. ‘An answer waited for.’
‘Why do people bring me letters just as I am sitting down to my dinner?’ ejaculated the Vicar pettishly. ‘From Treverton, too. What can he have to write about?’
Edward Clare looked up, with an eager face.
‘Wants to see me after church this evening—particular business,’ said the Vicar. ‘Tell Mr. Treverton’s man, yes, Susan. My compliments, and I’ll be at the Manor House before nine.’
Edward was mystified. Was John Treverton going to throw himself upon the Vicar’s mercy—to win that good, easy man, over to his cause—and persuade him to wink at the fraud upon the trusts under Jasper’s will? Edward had no opinion of his father’s wisdom, or his father’s strength of mind. The Vicar was so weakly fond of Laura.
‘I hate going out of an evening in such weather,’ said Mr. Clare, ‘but I suppose Treverton has something important to say, or he would hardly ask me to risk a bronchial attack.’
Tom Sampson, sitting by his comfortable fireside, solacing himself for the Sabbath dulness with a cup of strong tea and a dish of buttered toast, was also surprised by a letter from the Manor House, asking him to go there between eight and nine that evening.
‘I am sorry to trouble you about business on Sunday, but this is a matter which will not keep,’ wrote John Treverton.
‘I never did!’ exclaimed Eliza Sampson, when her brother had read the brief letter aloud.
Eliza was always protesting that she never did. This fragmentary phrase was her favourite expression of astonishment.
And then Miss Sampson began to speculate upon the probablenature of the business which required her brother’s presence at the Manor House. People who live in such a secluded village as Hazlehurst are very glad of anything to wonder about on a Sunday evening in winter.
At half-past eight precisely, Mr. Sampson presented himself at the Manor House, and was shown into the library. This room was rarely used, as Mr. and Mrs. Treverton kept all their favourite books elsewhere. Here, on these massive oaken shelves, there was no literature that was not at least a century old. It was a repository for the genius of the dead. Travels, from Marco Polo to Captain Cook; histories, from Herodotus to Mrs. Catherine Macaulay; poetry, from Chaucer to Milton; all bound in soberest brown calf, all with the dust of years thick upon their upper edges. It was a long, narrow room, with three tall windows, curtained with faded crimson cloth. It had an awful and almost judicial look on this Sunday evening, dimly lighted by a pair of moderator lamps on the centre table, making a focus of light in the middle of the room, and leaving the corners in darkness. There was a good fire in the wide old basket-shaped grate, and Tom Sampson sat beside it, waiting for his host to appear. Trimmer had told him that Mr. Treverton would be with him presently.
Presently seemed to mean half an hour, for the clock struck nine while Mr. Sampson still waited. Not having any inclination to dip into the literature of the past, he had allowed the fire to draw him to sleep, and was slumbering placidly when the door opened and Trimmer announced Mr. Clare.
Tom Sampson started up, and rubbed his eyes, thinking for the moment that he had fallen asleep by the fire in his snuggery, and that Eliza had come to call him to supper—supper being another of those solaces which Mr. Sampson required to beguile the dulness of Sunday leisure.
The Vicar was surprised to see Mr. Sampson, and Mr. Sampson was equally surprised to see the Vicar. They told each other how they had been summoned.
‘It must be something rather important,’ said Mr. Clare.
‘It must be something connected with the estate, or he would scarcely want you and me,’ said Sampson.
John Treverton and his wife entered the room together. Both were very pale, but Laura’s countenance wore a look of keen distress, which had no part in the expression of her husband’s face. Secure of his wife’s allegiance, he was ready to meet calamity, whatever shape it might assume.
‘Mr. Clare, Mr. Sampson, I have sent for you as the trustees under my cousin Jasper’s will,’ he began, when he had apologized to the lawyer for letting him wait so long, and had placed Laura in a chair near the fire.
‘That’s a misnomer,’ said Sampson. ‘Our trusts under Jasper Treverton’s will determined on your wedding day. We are only trustees to the settlement made for Miss Malcolm’s benefit, sixteen years ago, and to your wife’s marriage settlement.’
‘I have sent for you to tell you that I have been guilty of a fraud upon you, and upon this lady,’ answered John Treverton, in a steady voice.
He was going on with his self-denunciation, when the door opened, and Trimmer announced Mr. Edward Clare.
The young man came into the room quickly, looking round him with a swift, viperish glance. He was surprised to see Laura, still more surprised at the presence of Tom Sampson. He had expected to find his father and Treverton alone.
John Treverton looked at the intruder with undisguised irritation.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he said; ‘but perhaps when I tell you that your father and Mr. Sampson are here to discuss a business of some importance to me—and to them as my wife’s trustees—you’ll be kind enough to amuse yourself in the drawing-room until we’ve finished our conversation.’
‘I have come to speak to Mrs. Treverton. I have something to say to her which she ought to hear—which she must hear—and that without an hour’s delay,’ said Edward. ‘Accident has made me acquainted with a secret which concerns her and her welfare—and I am here to communicate it to her, and—in the first instance—to her alone. It will be for her to act upon that knowledge—for me to defer to her.’
‘If your secret concerns me, it must concern my husband also,’ said Laura, rising and taking her stand beside John Treverton. ‘Whatever touches my happiness must involve his. You can speak out, Edward. Possibly your fancied secret is no secret.’
‘What do you mean?’ stammered Edward, startled by her calm look and resolute tone.
‘Have you come to tell me that my husband, John Treverton, was for a short period of his life known by the name of Chicot?’
‘Yes, that, and much else,’ answered Edward, deeply mortified at finding himself forestalled.
‘You wish to tell me, perhaps, that he has been suspected of murder.’
‘So strongly suspected, and upon such evidence, that it will need all your wifely trustfulness to believe him innocent,’ retorted Edward, with a malignant sneer.
‘Yet I do believe in his innocence—I am as certain of it as I am that I myself am no murderess—and if the evidence against him were doubly strong, my trust in him would not fail,’ said Laura, facing the accuser proudly.
‘And now, Mr. Clare, since you find that your secret is everybody’s secret, and that my wife knows all you can tell her about me——’
‘Your wife,’ sneered Edward. ‘Yes, it is as well to call her by that name.’
‘She is my wife—bound to me as securely as the law and the church can bind her.’
‘You had another wife living when you married her—unless you have been remarried since your first wife’s death——’
‘We have been so married. My wife was never mine, save in name, until I was a free man,—free to claim her before God and the world.’
‘Then your first marriage was a deliberate felony, and a deliberate fraud,’ cried Edward: ‘a felony because it was a bigamous marriage, for which the law of the land could punish you, even now; a fraud because by it you pretended to fulfil the conditions of your cousin’s will, when you were not in a position to comply with them.’
‘Stop, Mr. Edward Clare,’ exclaimed Tom Sampson, whose quick perception had by this time made him master of the case; ‘you are assuming a great deal more than you can sustain. You are going very much too fast. What evidence have you that my client’s first marriage was a legal one? What evidence have you that he was ever married to Mademoiselle Chicot? We know how very loosely tied such alliances are apt to be in that class of life.’
‘How do I know that he was married to her?’ echoed Edward. ‘Why, by his own admission.’
‘My client admits nothing,’ said Sampson with dignity.
‘He admits everything when he tells you that he was remarried to Miss Malcolm after Madame Chicot’s death. Had he known his first marriage with Miss Malcolm to be valid there would have been no occasion for a repetition of the ceremony.’
‘He may have erred from excess of caution,’ said Sampson.
‘John Treverton,’ said the Vicar, who had been looking from one speaker to the other, the facts of the case slowly dawning upon him, ‘this is very dreadful. Why is my son here as your accuser? What does it all mean?’
‘It means that I have been guilty of a great wrong,’ answered Treverton quietly, ‘and that I am ready to undo that wrong, so far as it lies in my power. But I cannot discuss this question in your son’s presence. He has entered this room to-night as my avowed enemy. To you—to Sampson—as the trustees under my cousin’s will, I am prepared to speak with fullest confidence—as I have already spoken to my wife—but I have no confession to make to your son. I recognise no right of his to interfere in my affairs.’
‘No, Edward, really, this is no concern of yours,’ said the Vicar.
‘Is it not?’ cried his son, bitterly. ‘But for my discovery, but for the presence of George Gerard in the church to-day, do you suppose this virtuous gentleman would have made his confession to his wife or his wife’s trustees? He saw himself identified to-day by the doctor who attended his first wife, who knows the story of his late career under thealiasof Chicot. Finding himself face to face with an inevitable discovery, Mr. Treverton very cleverly yields to the pressure of circumstances, and makes a clean breast of it. Had Gerard never appeared in Hazlehurst, this honourable gentleman would have gone on till doomsday, untroubled by any scruples of conscience.’
The Vicar looked at his son wonderingly. Was this a loyal regard for truth and justice, or was it the spirit of hatred and envy which moved the youth so strongly? The good, easy-going Vicar, full of charity for all the world, except a bad cook, could not bring himself all in a moment to think evil of his son. Nor was he ready to believe John Treverton the vilest of sinners. Yet here was John Treverton accused by the Vicar’s own son of an unpardonable fraud, and suspected of the darkest crime.
‘If you will tell your son to retire, we may discuss this business without prejudice or passion,’ said John. ‘But as long as he is present my lips are sealed.’
‘I have no wish to remain a moment longer,’ answered Edward. ‘I hope Mrs. Treverton knows that I am ready to serve her with zeal and devotion, should she deign to demand my aid.’
‘I know that you are my husband’s enemy,’ answered Laura, with freezing contempt, ‘and that is all I know or care to know about you.’
‘That’s hard upon an old friend, Laura,’ remonstrated the Vicar, as Edward left the room.
‘Has he not dealt hardly by my husband?’ answered Laura, with a stifled sob.
‘Now, let us try and look this business in the face,’ said Mr. Sampson, seating himself quietly at the table and taking out his note-book. ‘According to your confession, Mr. Treverton, you had a wife living at the date of your first marriage with Miss Malcolm, December the thirty-first of the year before last. We have nothing to do with your second marriage—except so far, of course, as the lady’s honour is concerned. That second marriage can’t touch the property. Now I am sorry to tell you that if your marriage with the French dancer was a good marriage, you have no more right to be in this house, or to hold an acre of Jasper Treverton’s land, than the meanest hind in Hazlehurst.’
‘I am ready to deliver up all I hold to-morrow. Let thehospital be founded. I acknowledge myself an impostor. Shameful as the act appears now that I contemplate it coldly, it seemed hardly a fraud when it first suggested itself to my mind. I saw a way of securing the estate to my cousin’s adopted daughter. I knew it had been his dearest wish that she should possess it. When I went through the ceremony of marriage with Laura Malcolm in Hazlehurst Church, I had but the faintest hope of ever being really her husband. When I made the post-nuptial settlement which was to secure to her the full enjoyment of the estate, I had no hope of ever sharing that estate with her. On my honour, as a man and a gentleman, it was for this dear girl’s sake I did these acts, and with no view to my own happiness or aggrandisement.’
Laura’s hand had been in his all the time he was speaking. Its warm grasp at the close of this speech told him that he was believed.
‘If you make these facts public, you beggar yourself and your wife,’ said Sampson.
‘No, we shall not be penniless,’ exclaimed Laura. ‘There will be my income left. It is not quite three hundred a year, but we can manage to live upon that, can’t we, John?’
‘I could live contentedly on a crust a day in the dingiest garret in Seven Dials if you were with me,’ answered her husband, in a low voice.
Mr. Clare was walking up and down the room in a state of suppressed excitement. The whole business was too dreadful; he was hardly able to realize the enormity of the thing. This John Treverton was a scoundrel, and the estate must all go to found a hospital. Poor Laura must leave her luxurious home. The parish would be a heavy loser. It was sad, and troublesome, and altogether fraught with perplexity. And the Vicar had a cordial liking for this John Treverton.
‘What have you to say about the murder of that poor creature—your first wife?’ he exclaimed presently, walking up to the hearth by which Treverton and Laura were standing.
‘Only that I know no more who killed her than you do,’ answered John Treverton. ‘I did a foolish thing, perhaps a cowardly thing, when I left the house that night, with the determination never to return to it; but if you could know how intolerable my old life had become to me, you would hardly wonder that I took the first opportunity of getting away from it.’
‘We had better look at things from a business point of view,’ said Mr. Sampson. ‘We are not going to do anything in a hurry. There will always be time enough for you to surrender the estate, Mr. Treverton, and to acknowledge yourself guilty of bigamy. But before you take such a step we may as well make ourselves sure of our facts. You married Mademoiselle Chicot in Paris.’
‘Yes, on the eighteenth of May, sixty-eight. We were married at the Mairie. There was no other ceremony.’
‘Under what name were you married?’
‘My own, naturally. It was only afterwards that I got to be known by my wife’s name.’
‘Were you known to many people in Paris by your own name?’
‘To very few. I had written in the newspapers under anom de plume,—my sketches at that time were all signed “Jack.” I was generally known as Jack, and after my marriage I became Jack Chicot.’
‘How much did you know of your wife’s antecedents?’
‘Very little, except that she had come to Paris from Auray, in Brittany, about five years before I married her; that she lived reputably, although surrounded by much that was disreputable.’
‘But of her life in Brittany you knew nothing?’
‘I only knew what she told me. She was a fisherman’s daughter, born and reared in extreme poverty. She had grown weary of the hard monotony of her life, and had come to Paris alone, and for the most part of the way on foot, to make her fortune. Auray is a long day’s journey from Paris by rail. It took her nearly a month to travel the distance.’
‘That is all you know?’
‘Positively all.’
‘Then you cannot know that she was free to contract a marriage—and you cannot know that you were legally married to her!’ said Tom Sampson triumphantly.
His interests as well as his client’s were at stake, and he was determined to make a hard fight for them. His stewardship was worth a good five hundred a year. If the estate came to be handed over for the establishment and maintenance of a hospital, he would in all probability lose his position of land steward and collector of rents. Some officious committee would oust him from his post. His trusteeship would bring him nothing but trouble.
‘That is a curious way of looking at the question,’ said Treverton thoughtfully.
‘It is the only right way. Why should any man be in a hurry to prove himself guilty of felony? How do you know that Mademoiselle Chicot did not leave a husband behind her at Auray? It may have been to escape from his ill-treatment that she came to Paris. That was a desperate step for a young woman to take—a month’s journey through a strange country, alone, and on foot.’
‘She was so young,’ said Treverton.
‘Not too young to have married foolishly.’
‘What would you advise me to do?’
‘I’ll tell you to-morrow, when I’ve had time to think thematter over. I can tell you in the meantime what I would advise you not to do.’
‘What is that?’
‘Don’t surrender your estate till you—and we, as your wife’s trustees—are thoroughly convinced that you have no right to hold it. Mr. Clare, I must ask you, as my co-trustee to Mrs. Treverton’s marriage settlement, to be silent as to the whole of the facts that have become known to us to-night, and to request your son also to keep his knowledge to himself.’
‘My son can have no motive for injuring Mr. and Mrs. Treverton,’ said the Vicar.
‘Of course not,’ replied Sampson; ‘yet I thought his manner this evening was somewhat vindictive.’
‘I believe he was only moved by his regard for Laura,’ answered the Vicar. ‘He took up the matter warmly because he considered that she had been deeply injured. I can but think so too, and I do not wonder that my son should feel indignant. As to the legal bearing of the case, Mr. Sampson, I leave you to judge that, and to deal with that as you best may for the interests of your client. But as to its moral aspect, I should do less than my duty as a minister of the Gospel if I were not to declare that Mr. Treverton has been guilty of a sin which can only be atoned for by deep and honest repentance. I will say no more than that now. Good-night, Treverton. Good-night, Laura.’
He took her in his arms and kissed her with fatherly affection. ‘Keep up your courage, my poor girl,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I wish your husband well out of his difficulties, for your sake. Will you come home to the Vicarage with me, and talk over your troubles with Celia? It might be a relief to you.’
‘Leave my husband!’ exclaimed Laura. ‘Leave him in grief and trouble! How could you think me capable of such a thing?’ And then she drew the Vicar aside, and in a tremulous voice, which was little more than a whisper, said to him, ‘Dear Mr. Clare, try not to think evil of my husband, for my sake. I know that he has sinned; but he has been sorely tempted. He could not judge the extent of the wrong he was doing. Tell me that you do not suspect him as he has been suspected; that you are not influenced by Edward’s cruel words. You do not believe that he killed his wife?’
‘No, my dear,’ answered the Vicar decidedly. ‘First and foremost he is a Treverton, and comes of a stock I love and honour; and, secondly, I have lived in friendship with him for the last six months; and I don’t think I’m such a fool that I could live so long upon intimate terms with a murderer and not find him out. No, my dear, I believe your husband has been weak and guilty; but I do not believe—I never will believe—that he has been a cold-blooded-assassin.’
‘God bless you for those words,’ said Laura as the Vicar left her.
‘If Mrs. Treverton will go to bed and get a little rest after all this agitation, I shall be glad of some further conversation with you before I go home,’ said Sampson, when the door had closed upon Mr. Clare.
Laura assented, turning her white, weary face to her husband, with a look full of trust and love, as he went with her to the bottom of the staircase.
‘God bless and keep you, love,’ he whispered. ‘You have shown me the way out of all my difficulties. I can afford to lose everything except your affection.’
He went back to Tom Sampson, who was scribbling in his note-book, in a brown study.
‘Now, Sampson, we are alone. What have you to say to me?’
‘A great deal. You’ve got yourself into a pretty fix. Why didn’t you trust me from the beginning? What’s the use of a man having a lawyer if he keeps his affairs dark?’
‘We won’t go into that question now,’ said John Treverton. ‘I want your advice about the future, not your lamentations over the past. What do you recommend me to do?’
‘Get away from this place to-night, on the best horse in your stable. Take the first train at the furthest station you can reach by daybreak to-morrow. Let me see. It’s not much over thirty miles to Exeter. You might get to Exeter on a good horse.’
‘No doubt. But what would be gained by such a course?’
‘You would get out of the way before you could be arrested on suspicion of being concerned in your first wife’s murder.’
‘Who is going to arrest me?’
‘Edward Clare means mischief. I am sure of that. If he has not already given information to the police, depend upon it he will do so without delay.’
‘Let him,’ answered Treverton. ‘If he does, I must stand my ground. I got out of the way once; and I feel now that in so doing I committed the greatest mistake of my life. I am not going to fall into the same blunder again. If I am to be arrested—if I am to be tried for murder, I will face my position. Perhaps it would be the best thing that could happen to me, for a trial might elicit the truth.’
‘Well, perhaps you are right. Anything like running away would tell against you. But I recommend you to get to the other side of the Channel without an hour’s loss of time. It is of vital importance for you to find out your first wife’s antecedents. If you could be fortunate enough to discover that she was a married woman when she left Auray, that she had a husband living at the time of your marriage——’
‘Why do you harp so upon that string?’ asked Treverton impatiently.
‘Because it is the only string that can save your estate.’
‘I have no hope of such a thing.’
‘Will you go to Auray and hunt up your wife’s history? Will you let me go with you?’
‘I have no objection. A drowning man will cling to a straw I may as well cling to that straw as to any other.’
‘Then we’ll start by the first train to-morrow. We’ll leave the place in the openest manner. You can tell people you are going to Paris on business; but if young Clare does set the police on your track, I think they’ll find it hardish work to catch us.’
‘Yes, I’ll go to Auray,’ said John Treverton, frowning meditatively at the fire. ‘In my wife’s antecedents there may lie the clue to the secret of her miserable death. Revenge must have been the motive of that murder. Who was it whom she had so deeply injured, that nothing but her life could appease his wrath?’
‘Who, except a deserted husband or lover?’ urged Sampson.
‘Yet we lived together for two years in Paris, and no one ever assailed us.’
‘The husband, or lover, may have been out of the way—beyond seas, perhaps—a sailor, very likely. Auray is a seaport, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
It was agreed that they should start for Exeter by the seven o’clock train from Beechampton, catch the Exeter express for Southampton, and cross from Southampton to St. Malo by the steamer which sailed on Monday evening. From St. Malo to Auray would be only a few hours’ journey. They might reach Auray almost as soon as they could have reached Paris.