Mr. Heathcote determined to call upon Joseph Distin before he crossed the Channel. He had thought the question out thoroughly during a sleepless night; and it seemed to him that it would be folly to enter upon his difficult task of investigation without having first armed himself with such advice as the criminal lawyer was able to give. Before acting upon his own opinion it would be well to know the opinion of a disinterested expert.
He called at Distin's offices the morning after his arrival in London. The offices were in Furnival's Inn, a quiet and convenient spot, not too far from the Old Bailey, and within a ten minutes' walk of the stuffy old law-courts, still extant in Chancery Lane. Mr. Heathcote sent in his card; and although at least half a dozen clients were waiting for Mr. Distin, he was admitted immediately, and received with marked cordiality.
"My dear Mr. Heathcote, charmed to see you. How good of you to look me up!" exclaimed Distin, as he pushed forward a morocco-covered armchair.
There was nothing æsthetic, picturesque, or newfangled in Mr. Distin's office, where the prevailing tone was a sober, substantial comfort. Most of the furniture looked at least fifty years old; but the Turkey carpet was the richest that the looms of Orient can produce; the spacious armchairs invited to repose, and to that ease of body which favours expansion of mind and friendly candour.
"Are you in town on business or pleasure?" inquired the lawyer, in his airy manner. "Going through to the north, perhaps; grouse-moor, eh?"
"Nothing is further from my thoughts than shooting grouse," replied Heathcote. "I am in London on my way to the Continent. I am going to hunt up the antecedents of that poor girl who was killed on our line; I want to find out who she was and how she came to be in the way of meeting her death in our locality."
The lawyer's airy manner was dropped in a moment, and he became intensely grave.
"O, you are going into that business, are you, and so late in the day? But why?"
"I would rather not discuss my motive, if you will kindly excuse me." Mr. Distin bowed. "I want to avail myself of your talent and experience to the uttermost before I begin to work on my own account."
"The most my talent can do for you in this matter is very little; to tell you the truth, I made a dismal failure of the business," returned Distin, with agreeable frankness. He was too successful a man to be ashamed to confess a failure. "But really now, Mr. Heathcote, by far the wisest counsel I can give you is to forget all about this sad story, and to let the world go on just as if that poor girl's death had never come within your ken. You did your duty as Coroner, you know. Nothing more could be asked or expected of you. Why, then, should you do more? You are very friendly with the family at Penmorval. Take my advice. 'Let sleeping dogs lie.'"
"That is what you said to Mr. Wyllard the morning you were leaving."
"I may have used that adage. It is a very good one."
"And you recommend me to drop this investigation, for the sake of my friends at Penmorval," said Heathcote. "I infer from that advice that you suspect Mr. Grahame of being concerned in the French girl's death."
"I confess to you that his whole manner and conduct were to my mind suggestive of guilt. Of course, manner and conduct are not evidence. At this present time there is not a shred of evidence to connect Mr. Grahame with the crime, except the one fact that he was in the train when the girl was killed; but that point would apply equally to everybody else in the train, or rather to any one who happened to be alone in a carriage as Mr. Grahame was. At present Mrs. Wyllard's cousin is safe. If his was the arm that thrust that girl off the footboard, there is nothing to bring the crime home to him. But go a few steps further, follow up any clue which you may happen to possess—you would not start upon such an investigation without some kind of clue," speculated Joseph Distin shrewdly—"pursue your trail a few yards further, and you may come upon evidence that will put a rope round your friend's neck, and bring lasting disgrace upon the family at Penmorval. I advised my old friend Wyllard to let this matter drop. I advise you to do the same."
"I cannot act upon your advice. There has been too much mischief done already. Mr. Grahame's refusal to answer your questions about his whereabouts on the day of the murder has condemned him in the minds of his fellow-townsmen. His name is blackened by a terrible suspicion, and I have sworn to clear it, if it can be cleared. If he is guilty—well, he can hardly be worse off with a rope round his neck than he is now, with all his old friends estranged from him. For my own part, in such a case I should infinitely prefer the rope. It would be a short way out of a difficulty."
"My experience of criminals is that when the crisis comes they would rather endure the ignominy than the halter," replied Distin. "Perhaps you have never seen a man within an hour of his being hanged?"
"Thank God I have not been obliged to do that, though I have had to look upon one an hour after."
"Ah, then you do not know to what manhood can descend—how it can grovel before the spectre of instant, certain death. Come now, cannot I persuade you to think better of your idea of investigating this mysterious business?"
"No. I have promised to do it. I must keep my promise."
"So be it."
And then Joseph Distin discussed the matter freely, with perfect frankness. He told Heathcote what means he had used to discover the girl's identity on this side of the Channel.
"I should have gone further and crossed the water, if I had not seen good reason to desist," he said, when he had explained his plan of inquiry at every likely lodging-house, and how that plan had totally failed.
"But what would you have done on the other side of the water, without any clue?"
"I should have gone across myself and put the case into the hands of Félix Drubarde, one of the cleverest police-officers in Paris. He would have been instantly on the alert to hear of any application made to the police by the relatives and friends of the missing girl. She could hardly disappear for any length of time without some one being concerned by her disappearance. The application to the police might not occur perhaps until months after her death; but it would be likely to occur sooner or later. And, again, Félix Drubarde has his allies in every quarter of Paris. He hears of events so quickly that it might be supposed he had a network of speaking-tubes all over the city. With his help I should have been almost certain to arrive at the identification of the dead girl."
"But I sent three advertisements to each of the best known Paris newspapers," said Heathcote. "How do you account for those advertisements not having been seen by the girl's friends?"
"Because French people of the lower classes are sometimes very illiterate, and live in a very narrow circle. Your papers may not have come within the range of the girl's friends. They would be likely to apply to the police when time passed and they received no tidings of her. But they would not be likely to see your best known papers—the papers of the upper classes, no doubt. And then your advertisements appeared immediately after the girl's death; at a time when the parents or friends had no reason for feeling alarmed as to her safety."
"That may be so," replied Heathcote thoughtfully. "I think you can help me very much in my undertaking, Mr. Distin, if you are willing to do so."
"In what way?"
"Give me a letter of introduction to this Parisian detective, and let me engage his aid by and by, when I go to Paris. I shall be happy to pay him liberally for his services."
"Drubarde is no extortioner. He will not fleece you," said Distin. "In fact the man is a gentleman, in his own particular line. He has made an independence, and he only works now as an amateur. Yes, I will give you a letter of introduction to him with pleasure, since you are bent on pursuing this business to the bitter end. I suppose you will go straight to Paris.
"No. I want first to follow up the only valuable clue I have. I shall go first to Dinan, in Brittany, to find the convent, where I have reason to believe this poor girl was educated."
Edward Heathcote left Waterloo Station for Southampton within an hour of leaving Mr. Distin's office, dined hastily at the Dolphin Hotel, and started for St. Malo in the South-Western steamer at seven o'clock in the evening. It was still early on the following morning when he landed on the long stone quay at St. Malo, and the picturesque old granite walls were still flushed with the rosy light of a newly-risen sun. The quaint island-citadel, with its exquisite bay and golden sands, had been familiar to Edward Heathcote in the past. He had lingered here to rest after a long ramble in Brittany, and he had an affection for the steep narrow streets and quaint old houses, with their all-pervading aspect of the seventeenth century, the days of Bourbons and Condés, kings and warriors, princely priests and priestly politicians.
Much as he loved the old-world town, Heathcote had no intention of loitering there on this September morning, lovely as the bay and the rocks and the smiling colony of white-walled villas yonder at Paramé looked in the early sunlight. He only waited to get his portmanteau through the Custom House in order to carry it to the little office attached to the Dinan steamer, where he ascertained the hour for the boat's departure.
Chance and tide favoured him. The steamer was to leave at eleven o'clock. This afforded time for a leisurely breakfast at the Franklin, and would enable him to reach Dinan early in the afternoon. He breakfasted briefly and temperately, as became a man whose mind was full of anxious thought, and then went for a stroll in the old streets, and looked in at the Cathedral.
He had reflected seriously upon his interview with the criminal lawyer. The fact that he had found his own original opinion about Bothwell Grahame shared by this man, so deeply versed in the ways of criminals, in the science of circumstantial evidence, was to the last degree startling and disconcerting. He felt that he was setting out upon a task which he could but perform in a half-hearted manner, struggle as he might against that first conviction of his. He had undertaken this task for Hilda's sake, for Dora's sake. What misery must result if Joseph Distin were right after all, and in an ill-judged attempt to gratify these two trusting women he should bring about the discovery of Bothwell's guilt! That guilt was at present but a dark suspicion which men hardly dared hint to each other; but if Distin's judgment was correct, any unlucky discovery might make the suspicion a fact.
But he had promised, and the pledge must be kept. He must follow up the clue which he held till it led him to other links in the chain of the victim's history; and the chances were that in the victim's history he would find a clue to the murderer's identity.
It was a lovely autumnal noontide, and the gay little town of Dinard, with its gardens rising stage above stage on the slope of the hill, its queer little bays and recesses of golden sand, was smiling in sunlight as the "Isle et Rance" steamed across the broad bay of St. Malo to the mouth of the Rance. There are few prettier rivers than this little Rhine of Brittany, and Edward Heathcote had loved it well in days gone by. But to-day he sat upon the bridge smoking his cigar, and gazing at the green hills and hanging woods, the villas and villages, and craggy cliffs and ever-varying shore, without seeing the objects upon which his eyes seemed to rest. The nearer he came to the task of investigation, the more irksome became his duty. His heart failed him as he took out the silver locket, and read the name upon the paper inside. It was the name of the woman who was to enlighten him about the dead girl, who was perhaps to put in his hand the clue which would lead him straight to the murderer.
And yet who could say that he would find Sister Gudule de la Miséricorde at Dinan? He did not even know the name of the convent in which she lived. She might be dead. And yet the date of the inscription was but two years old. There was every chance that the Sister still lived: and he must be dull if he failed to find her.
He stopped at the first church to which he came after leaving the boat—an old church in the lower part of the town. Here he asked his way to the presbytery, and called upon the priest, who told him that there was only one educational convent in Dinan, the Convent of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, an Ursuline convent situated in a quiet quarter of the town.
Mr. Heathcote left his portmanteau at one of the hotels in the market-place, and drove at once to the convent. It was a large white building, with plastered walls, far from beautiful in itself, and showing every sign of poverty; but the gardens were neatly kept, the rooms were exquisitely clean, and the clumsy old Breton furniture was polished to the highest degree.
Mr. Heathcote was received in the convent parlour by the Reverend Mother, a homely little tub-shaped personage, in a black serge habit and a picturesque white cap, which concealed every vestige of hair upon her broad intelligent forehead. She had kindly black eyes, and a frank benevolent smile, and Heathcote felt at once at his ease with her. She looked a little disappointed when, in answer to her preliminary question, he told her that he had not come to offer a new pupil. The pupils were the chief source of revenue for the convent, albeit thepensionwas of the smallest.
"Have you ever seen that locket before, madame?" he asked, laying the silver medallion before the Reverend Mother.
"I have seen many such," she answered. "The Holy Father allows us to dispose of them for the benefit of the convent."
"There is a little paper inside with some writing. Will you look at it, please?"
She opened the locket and unfolded the paper.
"Yes, this is Sister Gudule's writing. I know it very well indeed," said the nun, looking at her visitor with a puzzled air, as if wondering whether the gentleman had not gone a little astray, his real destination being the great monastic madhouse yonder on the crest of a wooded hill.
"Sister Gudule is still living—still with you, perhaps?"
"Yes?" interrogatively.
"And you remember Léonie, to whom that little picture was given?"
The Reverend Mother smiled her modest smile.
"Léonie is not an uncommon name," she replied. "We have had many pupils so called from time to time. Our school numbers over a hundred and fifty pupils, you must remember."
"Do you recall any pupil of that name who left you two years ago?" asked Heathcote.
"We have from thirty to forty pupils leaving us every year. Will you permit me to ask the object of your inquiry?"
"It is a very serious one, or I should be desolated to give you so much trouble," answered Heathcote courteously, in that polite language which he spoke almost as fluently as his native English. "The poor girl to whom that locket belonged met her death in my neighbourhood less than two months ago. She fell from a railway-carriage as the train was crossing a viaduct. Whether that death was accidental or the result of a crime remains as yet unknown. But there are those in my country to whom it is vital that the whole truth should be known. If you can help me to discover the truth, you will be helping the cause of justice."
"Sister Gudule will remember," said the Reverend Mother, ringing a hell. "She is one of our lay-sisters, a great favourite with all the children. She nurses them when they are ill, and takes care of them when they go out for a holiday, and plays with them as if she were a child herself."
A lay-sister, the portress, answered the bell, and went in quest of Sister Gudule.
"She has a very unprepossessing appearance," said the Reverend Mother. "I fear you may be a little shocked at first seeing her, but she is so amiable that we all adore her. She has been the victim of misfortune from her cradle. Her deformity is the consequence of a nurse's carelessness. It turned the heart of her mother against her, and she was a neglected and unloved child. Her family was noble, but the husband speculated in railways, and the wife was silly and extravagant. By the time Gudule was a young woman poverty had overtaken her father, and he was only too glad to acquiesce in the girl's resolution to enter a convent. She came to us penniless thirty years ago, and has worked for her bread ever since. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that she is the most valuable member of our community."
The door was opened softly and Sister Gudule appeared. This little preface from the Reverend Mother had not been unnecessary to lessen the shock of her personal appearance, which was startling in its unqualified ugliness.
Sister Gudule de la Miséricorde was the very type of the wicked fairy in the dear old child stories. She was short and squat, with broad shoulders and a decided hump. She had a nose like a potato, and a lower lip like that of the lady who moistened the spinster's yarn; she had an undeniable moustache and beard; yet in spite of all, there was something pleasant, conciliating, reassuring in her face. The low broad forehead suggested intellectual power; there was a humorous twinkle in the small gray eyes, as of one who could revel in a joke; the thick under-lip and prominent under-jaw were the indications of a boundless benevolence.
The Reverend Mother handed the locket and its enclosure to Sister Gudule.
"I must tell you that the Sister has a most miraculous memory," she said confidentially to Heathcote. "I have never known her forget the most trivial event in the history of our lives. She is our unwritten calendar."
"It is Léonie Lemarque's locket," said Sister Gudule. "How comes it here? Is my little Léonie in Dinan?"
"Léonie Lemarque!"
How glibly she pronounced the name; and how strange it seemed to Edward Heathcote to hear it! Like a name out of a tomb.
"The owner of that locket is dead," he answered gently.
"Dead! Léonie Lemarque! Dead at twenty years old! Dead! Why, there was not a healthier child in the convent, after we had once built up her constitution. She was in a sad way when she came to us."
"Léonie Lemarque!" repeated the Reverend Mother. "I never thought of her when Monsieur showed me the locket. Léonie Lemarque! Yes, she left us in 1879 to go to her old grandmother in Paris. And now she has met with a violent death in England. Monsieur will tell you."
Monsieur repeated his story, this time with further details, for Sister Gudule questioned him closely. She would have every particular. The tears streamed down her cheeks, hung upon her bristly moustache. She was deeply distressed.
"You don't know how I loved that child," she said, excusing herself to the Superior; and then to Heathcote, "Ah, Monsieur, you could never understand how I loved her. I saved her life. From the weakest frailest creature, I made her a sound and healthy child. Indeed, I may say that I did much more than this. With the help of God and the intercession of His Saints I saved her mind."
"It is quite true," said the Reverend Mother. "The child came to us under most peculiar circumstances. Sister Gudule took entire charge of her for the first year."
"And she rewarded me tenfold for my trouble," added Gudule; "she gave me love for love, measure for measure."
"Will you tell me all about her—every detail? The knowledge may help me to avenge her death," said Heathcote eagerly. "It is my belief, and the belief of others, that she was foully murdered."
He was intensely agitated. He felt as if he had taken into his hand the lever which worked some formidable machine—an instrument of death and doom, and that every movement of his hand might bring destruction. Yet the process once begun must go on. He was no longer an individual, working of his own free will; he was only an agent in the hands of Fate.
"Willingly, we will tell you all we can," said the Reverend Mother. "But you must allow us to offer you a little coffee. You have travelled, and you look white and weary."
The convent was proud of its coffee, almost the only refreshment ever offered to visitors. The portress brought a little oval tray covered with a snow-white napkin, a little brown crockery pot, a white cup and saucer, all of the humblest, but spotlessly clean.
"Léonie was with us eight years," said the Reverend Mother, while Sister Gudule dried her eyes and tried to regain her composure. "She was just ten years old when she was brought to us by her grandmother, a person who had been at one time a dressmaker in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris, but who had fallen upon evil days, and lived in a very humble way in a small lodging on the left bank of the Seine. Léonie was an orphan, the daughter of Madame Lemarque's only son, who had died young, broken-hearted at the death of his young wife. The child was brought to us by a priest, who came all the way from Paris with his little charge. She had but just recovered from a long illness, which was said to be brain-fever, caused by a very terrible mental shock which she had endured two months before."
"Were you told the nature of that shock?"
"No; the priest did not offer any information upon that point, and I did not presume to question him. He assured me that the case was one which merited the most benevolent consideration. Madame Lemarque had no means of educating the child herself, nor could she afford the pension demanded by a Parisian convent. The curé thought that our fine air would do much to restore the child to health and strength, and he knew that our system of education was calculated to develop her mind and character in the right direction. He guaranteed the regular payment of the child's pension, and we never had occasion to apply for it a second time."
"Did Madame Lemarque ever come to see her granddaughter?"
"Never. Léonie remained with us from year's end to year's end till after her eighteenth birthday, when, at Madame Lemarque's desire, we made arrangements for her travelling to Paris with other pupils who were returning to the great city."
"Then you never saw Madame Lemarque?"
"Never."
"Nor ever heard from her directly?"
"O yes, we had letters—very nicely-written letters—full of gratitude for what Madame Lemarque was pleased to call our kindness to Léonie. The child used to write to her grandmother monthly, while she was with us, and her letters were the best evidence that she was fairly used and happy."
"She was a sweet child," said Gudule, "and deserved every indulgence."
"Did she ever tell you anything about the shock which caused her illness?" asked Heathcote of the lay-sister.
"In her right senses never one syllable," answered Gudule. "I would not have questioned her upon that subject for worlds, for I believed that she had narrowly escaped madness. But during the six months in which I nursed her—for her health was completely broken, and it required all that time to build up her strength and calm her nerves—she used to sleep in a little bed close to mine, and in her troubled dreams I used to hear very strange things. How far the dreams were inspired by the recollections of real events, I cannot venture to say; but there were phrases that recurred so often—a horrible vision which so continually repeated itself, like a scene in a play—that I can but suppose it to have been the representation of some event which had really happened before the child's waking eyes."
"Can you recall the nature of that vision?" inquired Heathcote breathlessly.
It seemed to him that he was on the threshold of a new mystery—as terrible as the old one, and even darker: a tragedy hidden in the past, reflected only in a child's fever-dream.
"You should ask me if I can forget it, Monsieur," said Sister Gudule. "I wish with all my heart that I could. I have prayed many a prayer for oblivion. The poor child used to be feverish every night—a low fever, which only came on in the evening, but some nights were worse than others—and in her most feverish nights this dream seemed almost inevitable. I used to lie awake expecting it, dreading it."
"She used to talk in her sleep, then?"
"To talk, yes; and to scream—a terrible shriek sometimes, which would disturb every sleeper in the great dormitory adjoining my little room. She would start up on her pillow, and stare straight before her with wide-open eyes, being fast asleep all the time, you understand. 'Don't kill her, don't kill her!' she would cry; 'don't shoot her!' And then she would rock herself backwards and forwards, and moan in a low voice, 'The forest—the dark, dark forest; she is there, always there, with the blood running down her dress! Take her away, take away the dark forest—take away the blood!' Her words varied sometimes, but those words never: 'Take away the dark forest—take away the blood!'"
"And did she never tell you what the dream meant—you, her nurse and comforter, with whom she must have been on such confidential terms?"
"No, dear child. She loved me and trusted me with all the strength of her innocent heart, I believe; but she never told me the cause of that awful dream. And I never dared to question her. I was only anxious that she should forget the past—that if her nights were fevered and restless, her days should be peaceful and bright. I did everything I could to amuse and interest her, in studies, needlework, and play, and to help her to forget the past."
"And you succeeded, Sister," said the head of the convent approvingly. "I never saw a more wonderful cure. From a nervous hysterical child Léonie Lemarque grew into a bright merry girl."
"Yes, with God's help she was cured; but the cure was very slow. The shock which shattered her health, and for a time impaired her mind, must have been an awful one. Never before had I seen gray hairs upon the head of a child, but the thickly curling hair upon Léonie's temples when she came to us was patched with white; and it was years before the hair resumed its natural colour. For the first year her memory was almost a blank. It would have been useless for any one to attempt to teach her in class with the other children. She would have been despised as an idiot, laughed at perhaps, and her heart broken. I obtained the Reverend Mother's permission to keep her in my room, and to teach her in my own way, and little by little I awakened her memory and her mind. Both had been, as it were, benumbed, frozen, paralysed, by that awful shock of which we know so little."
"But you would guess that she had witnessed some dreadful scene, perhaps the death of some one she loved," speculated Heathcote. "Did she never talk to you of her childhood in Paris, her relatives?"
"Rarely of any one except her grandmother," answered Sister Gudule, "and of her she told me very little. Whether her illness had blotted out the memory of her childhood, or whether she shrank from any allusion to the past, I cannot tell. One day I asked her who had given her a blue satin neckerchief which I found in her trunk—a costly neckerchief, and much too fine for a child to wear. She told me that it was a New Year's gift from her aunt, but at the mention of the name she turned deadly pale, her eyes filled with tears, and her whole body shook like an aspen-leaf. I changed the conversation that moment, and I never again heard her speak of her aunt."
"You would infer from her agitation that the aunt was connected with the tragedy of the child's life?"
"Yes, Monsieur."
"Was perhaps the person whom she saw assailed when she cried out, 'Don't kill her; don't shoot her!'"
"I have thought that it must have been so. That dreadful cry of hers, 'Take away the blood! take away the dark forest!' No one who did not hear those cries of hers, no one who did not see the awful expression of her eyes, staring, dilated, full of horror; no one who had not seen and heard her as I did could ever understand how dreadful, how real that vision was to me as well as to the sleeper. I used to feel as if I had seen murder done, and had stood by without the power to prevent it."
"In a word, you felt, by pure sympathy, almost exactly what the child felt," said Heathcote.
Already he had begun to adore Sister Gudule, just as the children of the convent adored her. He forgot her hump, he forgave her the potato-shaped nose, he accepted her beard as a detail that gave piquancy to her countenance. He was subdued, subjugated by that intensely sympathetic nature which revealed itself in every word and look of the lay-sister.
But he had a task to perform, and it was necessary that he should proceed with his inquiries in a business-like manner. He had already taken certain notes in his pocket-book.
"Léonie Lemarque left you in 1879, and she had been with you eight years," he said, with pencil in hand. "She must have come to you in 1871."
"Yes, it was in 1871, not long after the troubles in Paris. It was early in November she was brought to us."
"And you were told that she had been ill two months in consequence of a mental shock?"
"Yes."
"Then one may fairly conclude that the event which caused her illness occurred early in the September of 1871."
"I think so."
"Good. I thank you most heartily, Madame," with a courteous bow to the Reverend Mother, "for the help you and Sister Gudule have so graciously bestowed upon me. But I would venture to ask one more favour, namely, that you would honour me with a line by way of introduction to the worthy priest who brought Léonie Lemarque from Paris."
"Alas, Monsieur, that is impossible! Father Sorbier died three years ago, just a year before Léonie left us."
"That is unfortunate. He doubtless knew the mystery of the girl's childhood, and perhaps might have helped me to unravel the secret of her strange death."
"Do you really believe that the two events have any bearing upon each other, Monsieur?" demanded Sister Gudule thoughtfully.
"I know not, Madame," replied Heathcote; "but it is only by working backwards that I can hope to arrive at any clue to the mystery which has puzzled us all in Cornwall. That poor girl must have had some purpose in going to England, in travelling to so remote a neighbourhood as ours. Even if her death were an accident, or an unpremeditated crime, her presence in that place cannot have been accidental."
Mr. Heathcote asked to see the class-rooms and the chapel before he left the convent, a request which was graciously accepted, as a compliment to the Reverend Mother. He was paraded along wide and airy passages, was shown an empty refectory, where plates and mugs and huge piles of bread and butter were arranged on long deal tables, covered with snow-white linen, in readiness for the afternoongoûter. He saw the chapel with its humble decorations, its somewhat crude copy of a well-known Guido, its altar, rich in gilded paper, home-made lace, and cheap china vases. All here spoke of small means; but the flowers on the altar were freshly gathered, and the neatness and cleanliness of all things in chapel and convent charmed the stranger's eye. He slipped a couple of sovereigns into the box by the door, praised the airy corridors, the spacious whitewashed rooms, and left the principal and the lay-sister alike charmed with his good French and his friendly manners.
The clock of the monastery on the opposite hill was striking five as he drove away from the convent, a silvery chime that could be heard all over Dinan.
He dined at thetable d'hôteat the Hôtel de la Poste, and walked on the terrace on the town walls after dinner. There is no fairer view in Brittany than the panorama of wooded hills from that walk above the town walls. The cool night air, the silvery moonlight, soothed Edward Heathcote's nerves. He was able to meditate upon his afternoon's work, to think over the story he had heard from Sister Gudule, and to speculate upon the chances of his being able to follow up this thread of a life-history until it led him to some point which would throw a light upon the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death.
Reflecting upon Sister Gudule's story, he could but conclude that the child Léonie had been the witness of some scene of violence in which a woman had been the victim—a murder possibly, or it might be only an attempted murder. Blood had been spilt. Hence that awful cry, "Take away the blood, take away the dark forest!"—a child's appeal to some unknown power to remove an object of terror.
One and one only clue had he obtained from Sister Gudule as to the person of the victim, and even that indication might be a false light leading him astray.
The girl's painful emotion at the utterance of her aunt's name suggested that the victim had been that aunt. The mere mention of the name would conjure up all the horror of that scene which had so nearly wrecked the child's reason.
It therefore seemed plain to Heathcote's mind that a murder, or an attempt at murder, had been committed in a dark wood, and that the victim had been Léonie Lemarque's aunt. So deeply interested was he in this mystery of ten years back, so powerfully moved by this strange story of a child's suffering, that he almost forgot that the business which had brought him across the Channel was to find out the true story of the French girl's death, and not to unravel the mystery of this old and perhaps forgotten crime in the unknown wood. So interested was he that he resolved at any cost of trouble to himself to discover the details of the scene reproduced so often in the child's fevered dreams.
"Who knows whether that may not be the surest way of arriving at the truth about the girl's death?" he argued with himself. "At any rate it is the only way that offers itself at present."
He walked late upon the walls of Dinan, enjoying the quiet of the moonlit scene, hearing the bells chime again and again, silver-clear across the vale, from the monastery where the madmen were dreaming their disjointed dreams, or wandering sane and healed in the spirit-land of the past, amid the faces of friends long dead. He walked late, thinking of a face that had looked at him with trusting eyes in the moment of parting, lovely eyes whose every expression he knew, but most of all that tender pathetic look which had once tried to soothe the agony of loss.
"To serve her and work for her, surely that is enough for a man's bliss," he thought, with a sad, half-satirical smile. "In the good old days of chivalry her knight would have deemed it happiness to bleed and perish for her sake far away in Palestine—glory and honour enough to have worn her colours in his helmet. Are we a meaner race, we men of the present, that we cannot love without hope of reward? Well, I have pledged myself to my crusade. I have put on my lady's colours, and I will work for her as faithfully as if my love were not hopeless. I will prove to her that there is some chivalry still left in this degenerate world, under the modern guise of disinterested friendship."
He started for Paris by the first train next morning, a fourteen hours' journey, a journey of dust and weariness, though the road lay through a fair country, with glimpses of the blue sea, and then by the widening river, till the tall houses and the many church-towers of the great city glimmered whitely before him, under the September moon. He put up at his old resting-place, the Hôtel de Bade, amidst the roar and hustle of the Boulevard; and he set out the next morning after an early breakfast in quest of Monsieur Drubarde's apartment, which was situated in that older and shabbier Paris of the left bank.
Monsieur Drubarde's apartment was on the Quai des Grands Augustins,au cinquième, a rather alarming indication to infirm or elderly legs, but which did not appal Edward Heathcote. He ran up the five flights of a dark wooden staircase, and found himself upon an airy landing, lighted and ventilated by a skylight.
The skylight was half open, and through it Heathcote saw flowers and greenery upon the roof. He also caught the odour of a very respectable cigar, which the soft west wind blew towards him through the same opening.
On a door opposite the top of the steep fifth flight appeared a brass plate, with the name, Félix Drubarde.
Heathcote rang, and his summons was answered almost instantly from an unexpected direction.
A large, round, rubicund face peered through the skylight, and a voice asked if Monsieur desired an interview with Félix Drubarde.
"I have come here in that hope, Monsieur," answered Heathcote, "and I venture to infer that I have the honour of addressing Monsieur Drubarde."
"I am that individual, Monsieur," replied the rubicund gentleman, opening the skylight to its widest extent. "Would it be too much to ask you to ascend to my summersalonupon the leads? It is pleasanter even for a business interview than the confinement of four walls."
There was a steep straight ladder against the wall immediately under the skylight. Heathcote mounted this and emerged upon the roof, face to face with Félix Drubarde.
The retired police-officer's appearance was essentially rustic. His attire resembled the holiday costume of thestation de bainsrather than the normal garb of a great busy metropolis. He was clothed from head to foot in white linen; his garments were all of the loosest, and he wore a pair of ancient buff slippers, which had doubtless trodden the bitter biting foam on the beach of Dieppe or the sands of Trouville. Altogether, Monsieur Drubarde looked the very picture of comfort and coolness on this warm September morning. He had made for himself a garden upon an open space of flat leaded roof, which was belted round with ancient chimney-stacks of all shapes and sizes, just as a lawn is girdled with good old oaks and beeches. On one side of his garden he had rigged up a light lattice-work from chimney to chimney, and his nasturtiums and Virginia creepers had clothed the lattice with green and gold. This he called hisallée verte, and he declared that it reminded him of Fontainebleau in the days of the famous Diana.
His garden was gorgeous with geraniums and roses, and perfumed with mignonette and honeysuckle. He had his morning coffee on a little iron table; he had a wicker-work easy-chair for himself, and another for a friend; and a smart rug, of the usual gaudy pattern to be seen in French lodging-houses, was spread under his slippered feet. He had his cigars and his newspaper, and, above all, he had a large and ancient black poodle of uncanny appearance, which looked as if he were the very dog under whose semblance the arch-fiend visited Dr. Faustus.
Before seating himself in the basket-chair which Monsieur Drubarde offered him, Heathcote took Joseph Distin's letter out of his pocket-book, and handed it to the ex-police-officer, who became convulsive with rapture when he saw the signature.
"Monsieur was welcome on his own account as a doubtless distinguished Englishman; as the friend of Monsieur Distin he is more than welcome. His visit is an honour, a privilege which an old member of the Paris police cannot too highly value," said Drubarde, with enthusiasm. "Ah, Monsieur, what a man is that Joseph Distin! what a commanding genius! I have had the honour to assist him in cases where that mighty intellect revealed itself with startling force, and where, I am proud to say, he must inevitably have failed, but for my humble assistance. Yes, Monsieur, old Drubarde has aflair, which even your great English lawyer envies. What a man, all the same!" Monsieur Drubarde paused for breath, and also to offer Mr. Heathcote a cigar, which was frankly accepted. And then the police-officer continued his eulogy of the English lawyer, with which he contrived to interweave a little gentle egotism.
"Had he been a Frenchman and lived under the first Emperor, he would have been greater than the Duke of Otranto, whom my father had the privilege to serve, and whom I remember seeing when I was a child. My father took me into the great chief's office one day, a little toddling creature, chubby, and, I am told, beautiful, in my little uniform of the Old Guard, a mother's fond fancy, Monsieur; the mothers of France love to make gracious pictures of their children. The Duke laid his hand upon my golden curls. 'What a lovely boy!' he exclaimed, deeply moved by my infantine beauty; 'I prophesy a brilliant future for him. This child will go far.' I hope, Monsieur, that my after-life has not belied the great man's prophecy."
"Mr. Distin assures me that you have won distinction in your calling," replied Heathcote, wondering how long the old gentleman's recollections of childhood were going to last. "Your narrative takes me back to a period that is classical. It assures me also that you who so vividly remember the events of sixty years ago—"
"More than sixty, Monsieur. I am past seventy years of age, I who speak to you."
Mr. Heathcote put on an appropriate expression of wonder.
"With such a memory for the remote past, it will hardly trouble you to recall the events of ten years ago," he continued, very eager to come to the point. "Now, exactly ten years ago, in this very month of September, there was a brutal murder, or attempted murder, of a woman, in a wood near Paris—"
"Do you mean the murder of Marie Prévol the actress, in the forest of Saint-Germain?" inquired the police-officer. "I was engaged in that case. A very strange story."
"And the woman was really murdered?" asked Heathcote, pale with agitation.
He was confounded by the ease with which the man fixed upon a notorious crime, upon a given date. It would have surprised him less to find that the child's vision of murder was a mere fever-dream—the repetition of some morbid hallucination—than to hear of the reality off-hand, in the broad light of day.
"Really murdered! yes, and her lover too, as dead as the Pharaohs. There never was a more genuine crime, a more determined murder. The actress and her lover had gone to Saint-Germain for a holiday jaunt. They went by rail, dined at the Henri Quatre, hired a carriage in the cool of the evening, drove on the terrace, and then into the forest. They left the carriage at a point where there were cross-roads, and pursued their ramble on foot."
"There was a child with them?" interrogated Heathcote breathlessly.
"Yes, a little girl, the actress's niece. She was the only witness of the crime. It was from her lips that theJuge d'Instructiontook down the history of the scene. They were walking quietly in the twilight, it was nearly dark, the child said, and she was beginning to feel frightened. The lovers were walking arm in arm, the child by her aunt's side. Suddenly a man sprang out upon them from the darkness of the wood, and confronted them with a pistol in his hand. He wore no hat, and he looked wild and furious. He aimed first at the man, who fell without a groan. The girl had just time to call out to him not to shoot her aunt, when he fired a second time, and then a third and a fourth, and again, quicker than the child could count. It was evidently a six-chambered revolver. Marie Prévol was found with her breast riddled with bullets. The driver heard the shots from his post at the cross-roads."
"And was the murderer never found?"
"Never. In spite of his wild appearance and his bare head, he got clean off, and all the police of Paris failed in tracing him."
"But was there no one suspected of the crime?"
"Yes. There was a former lover of Marie's, her first lover; and, as it was said, the only man she had ever really cared for. They had been a devoted couple—were supposed by some to be married—and until a short time before the murder Marie's character had been considered almost stainless. Then a younger admirer appeared on the scene. There were violent quarrels. The actress seemed to have lost her head, to be infatuated by this aristocratic lover, one of the handsomest men in Paris. She had known him only a few months when they went for this jaunt to Saint-Germain—a stolen adventure. They were supposed to have been followed by the other man, and that the murder was an act of jealous madness."
"And the crime was never brought home to him?"
"Never. Beyond the fact of his relations with Mademoiselle Prévol, and of his disappearance immediately after the murder, there was nothing to connect him with the crime."
"I thought it was difficult, indeed almost impossible, for any man to leave France without the knowledge of the police."
"It is difficult; and at that time it was particularly difficult, as the crimes of the Commune were still of recent date, and the police were more than usually alert. But this man did it. All the great railway-stations and sea-ports were closely watched for the appearance of such a man among the departures; but he was never identified."
"And you have no doubt in your own mind that this man was the murderer?"
"Not the shadow of doubt. There was no one else who had any motive for assailing Marie and her admirer. Except in her relations with these two she had been propriety itself. Unless you can imagine a motiveless maniac dashing through a wood and shooting the first comer, you can hardly conceive any other cause than jealousy for such a crime as this."
"Do you remember the name of the man who was suspected?"
"Not at this moment; but I have the whole history of the case in my workshop below, and if you would like to read it, there are details that might interest you."
"I should like much to read it."
While Edward Heathcote was on the other side of the Channel trying to find a solution for the problem of Léonie Lemarque's death, which should also be a complete acquittal of Hilda's suitor, Bothwell himself was bent upon solving his own particular problem, that great perplexity of his social life, which had weighed upon him more or less heavily for the last three years. He had been to Plymouth twice since his decisive interview with Hilda; but on each occasion it had been impossible for him to obtain so much as five minutes'tête-à -têtewith the lady he went to see; and that which he had to say to her could not be said in five minutes, or in five times five minutes. And now, while his champion was faithfully toiling in his interest, and while Hilda was giving him all her thoughts, and most of her prayers, Bothwell set out on his familiar Plymouth journey for the third time within ten days, and with a letter in his pocket which held out the hope of an opportunity for confidential talk.
"You looked miserable the last time you were here," wrote the lady, "and you looked as if you had something very serious to say to me. I am bored to death by the General's hangers-on—he is much too kind to the nobodies who besiege us here—and I hardly ever know what it is to be alone. But if you will come to-morrow, I will take care to keep other people out. I shall pretend a headache, and deny myself to everybody. You must walk boldly in by the garden, contrive not to meet any of the servants, and you will find me sitting in the colonnade. It will all seem accidental. When the General comes to his afternoon tea, he will find you there, and we shall tell him how you wandered in, and forced theconsigne. You are such a favourite that he will smile at a liberty from you which he would be the first to resent in any one else."
Bothwell sat in his corner of the railway-carriage, meditating upon this letter in his breast-pocket. How hard and cruel and false and mean the whole tone of the lady's correspondence seemed to him, now that the glamour of a fatal infatuation had passed from his brain and his senses; now that he was able to estimate the enchantress at her real value; now that his newly-awakened conscience had shown him the true colour of his own conduct during the last three years!
Three years ago and a stroke of good fortune had happened to Bothwell Grahame one day in the hill-country, when he and his brother-officers had gone out after big game. It had been his chance to save the life of one of the most distinguished men in the service, General Harborough, a man who at that time occupied an important official position in the Bengal Presidency. Bothwell's presence of mind, courage, and rapid use of a revolver had saved the General from the jaws of a leopard, which had crept upon the party while they were resting at luncheon, after a long morning's bear-shooting. General Harborough was the last man to forget such a service. He took Bothwell Grahame under his protection from that hour, introduced him to his wife, Lord Carlavarock's daughter, and one of the most elegant women in the Presidency.
Favoured by such friends, Bothwell Grahame's life in India became a kind of triumph. He was good-looking, well-mannered, a first-rate shot, and an exceptional horseman. He could sing a part in a glee or duet, and he waltzed to perfection. He was supposed to have a genius for waltzing, and to become master of every new step as if by a kind of inspiration. "What is the last fashionable waltz in London?" people asked him; and he showed them the very latest glide, or swoop, or twist, as the case might be. His friends told him all about it in their letters, he said. He always knew what was going on in the dancing world.
Such a man, not too young nor yet too old—neither a stripling nor a fogey—chivalrous, amiable, full of verve and enjoyment of life, was eminently adapted to the holiday existence at Simla; and it was at Simla that Bothwell Grahame became in a manner the fashion, looked up to by all the young men of his acquaintance, petted by all the women. Nor did it appear strange in the eyes of society that Lady Valeria Harborough should be particularly kind to him, and should have him very often at her bungalow, which was the centre of all that was gay, and elegant, andspirituelin the district. All the Simla jokes originated at the Harborough bungalow. All the latest English fashions, the newest refinements in the service of a dinner-table or the arrangement of afternoon tea, came from the same source. Lady Valeria led the fashion, gave the note of taste throughout that particular section of Indian society.
No, there was nothing exceptional in her kindness to Captain Grahame. In the first place, he had saved her husband from being clawed and mangled to death by a wild beast, a service for which a good wife would be naturally grateful; and in the second place, Bothwell was only one of a court of young men who surrounded Lady Valeria wherever she happened to be living—but most of all up at the hills. She always spoke of them as "boys," and frankly admitted that she liked their admiration on account of itsnaïveté.
For some time she talked of Bothwell Grahame as a "nice boy," in spite of his six-and-twenty years. She herself owned pensively to seven-and-twenty. Tergiversation would have been vain, since thePeeragewas open to all her friends, with its dryasdust record, "Valeria Hermione, born 1854."
She was twenty-seven years of age, strikingly elegant and interesting, if not actually handsome, and she had been two years married to a man who had lately celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday. She had accepted the General, and his splendid settlements, meekly enough. There had been no undue persuasion, no domestic tyranny. Her suitor was a thorough gentleman, wealthy, distinguished, and she was told that he could give her all good things which a woman need care to possess. She would spend two or three years with him in India, where he had an important official appointment; and then she would return to England, where he had two country seats—one a villa near Plymouth, the other a castle in Scotland—and a house in Grosvenor Square. As one of four sisters, it became her to accept the fortune that had fallen into her lap. She was, or she seemed to be, of a temperament that could be happy in an union with a man old enough to be her grandfather. She seemed one of those women born to shine and to rule rather than to love. No one who knew her intimately feared any evil consequences from her marriage with the elderly soldier.
"Valeria will make General Harborough an admirable wife," said the matrons and ancient maidens of the house of Carlavarock, "and she will be a splendid mistress for that fine old place in Perthshire."
Valeria had never known what passionate feeling meant till she gave her friendship to Bothwell Grahame. She had never thrilled at a man's voice, or listened for a man's footstep, till she began to start athisvoice and listen forhistread. The fatal love came upon her like a fever, struck her down in the strength of her proud womanhood, made her oblivious of duty, blind to honour, mastered her like a demoniac possession, and from a spotless wife she became all at once a hypocrite and an intriguer.
O, those fatal days at Simla, the long idle afternoons! The music and singing—the dances late in the night when cool winds were blowing over the hills—the garden lit with lamps like glowworms—the billiards and laughter, the light jests, the heavy sighs. There came a time when Bothwell Grahame found himself bound by an iniquitous tie to the wife of his most generous friend.
Their love was to be guiltless always—that is to say, not the kind of love which would bring Lady Valeria Harborough within the jurisdiction of the Divorce Court: not the kind of love which would make her name a scandal and a hissing in the ears of all her English friends, a theme for scorn and scoffing throughout the length and breadth of Bengal. But, short of such guilt as this—short of stolen meetings and base allies, the connivance of servants, the venal blindness of hotel-keepers—short of actual dishonour—they were to be lovers. He was to be at her beck and call—to devote all the leisure of his days to her society—to give not one thought to any other woman—to wait patiently, were it ten or twenty years, for the good old man's death: and then, after her ceremonial year of widowhood, all deference to the world's opinion having been paid, he was to claim Lady Valeria for his wife. This was the scheme of existence to which Bothwell Grahame had pledged himself. For all the best years of his manhood he was to be a hypocrite and an ingrate—the slave of a woman whose ascendency he dared not acknowledge, waiting for a good man's death. That was the worst degradation of all to a man of warm heart and generous feeling. All that was best and noblest in Bothwell Grahame's nature revolted against the baseness of his position. To grasp General Harborough's hand, and to remember how deliberately he and Valeria had calculated the years which the good old man had yet to live, had speculated upon the end drawing near, coming suddenly perhaps; to know that all their hopes of happiness were based upon the husband's speedy death. There were times, even in the first red dawn of passion, while he was proudest of this woman's love, when he almost hated her for her disloyalty as a wife. Could there be happiness or peace in a bond so made? And then the woman's fascination, the absolute power of a passionate, resolute character over a weak and yielding one, vanquished all his scruples, stifled the voice of conscience and honour. Not Samson at the feet of Delilah was a more abject slave than Bothwell in that luxurious idleness of the Indian hills, when the only purpose life held seemed to be the desire to get the maximum of frivolous amusement out of every day. There was no pastime too childish for Lady Valeria and her admirers, no sport too inane. Yet the lady contrived to maintain her womanly dignity even in the most infantine amusements, and was honoured as a queen by all her little court of worshippers, from the bearded major, or the portly lawyer, to the callow subaltern.
Bothwell's conduct towards her, and the lady's manner to him, were irreproachable. If there were any difference, she was a shade colder and more reserved in her treatment of him than of her other slaves: but there were moments, briefest opportunities—atête-à -têteof five minutes in a moonlit verandah, a little walk down to the fountain, a ride in which they two were ahead of the rest just for a few yards; moments when Valeria's impassioned soul poured forth its treasures of love at this man's feet, with the reckless unreserve of a woman who risks all upon one cast of the die. She, who had been deemed the coldest and proudest of women—Diana not more chaste, an iceberg not more cold—she, Valeria Harborough, had chosen to fall madly in love with a man who was her social inferior, and who had tried his uttermost to escape from the net she had spread for him. Weak as he was, he had not yielded willingly. He had fought the good fight, had tried his hardest to be loyal and true. And then, in one moment, the spell had been too strong for his manhood. One never-to-be-forgotten night, they two standing beside the fountain, steeped in the golden light of the southern stars, he had yielded himself up to the enchantment of the hour, to the witchery of luminous violet eyes, brighter for a veil of tears. He had drawn her suddenly to his heart, asked her passionately why she had made him adore her, in spite of himself, against reason and honour; and she, with tearful eyes looking up at him, had answered softly, "Because it was my fate to love you;" and then she told him, in short, disjointed sentences, broken by sobs, that she was not a wicked woman, that he must not scorn or loathe her, even if he could not give her love for love. Never, till she knew him, had she swerved by one hair's breadth from the line of strictest duty; never had she known a thought which she need wish to hide from her husband. And then, in an evil hour, he had become almost domesticated in her house, and his influence had gradually enfolded her, like a cloud spread by a magician, and she had awakened to a new life. She had learnt the meaning of that mystic word love.
From that night Bothwell was her slave. Touched, flattered, possessed by this fatal love—too glad weakly to echo the woman's favourite excuse, Fatality—he struggled no longer against this mutual madness, which was half bliss and half pain. He belonged henceforth to Lady Valeria—more completely enslaved than if she had been free to claim him before the world as her affianced husband. Her lightest word, her lightest look ruled him. He went where she told him, spent his days as she ordered. He had been one of the hardest working officers in India up to this time, and his branch of the service, the Engineers, was one which offered splendid chances of promotion.
General Harborough had promised to do all that his very considerable influence could do to push his young friend to the front; and it seemed to the men who knew him best that Bothwell Grahame's fortune was made.
"There are men whose heads are turned by the first stroke of luck, and who never do anything after," said a canny old Scotch major; "but Grahame is thorough, and is not afraid of hard work. Take my word for it, he'll get on just as young Robert Napier did forty years ago."
But, with the ball at his feet, Bothwell Grahame suddenly dropped out of the game. He left off working altogether. He was the slave of a woman who preferred her own pleasure in his society to his chances of distinction: who said, "Why should you work? There will be enough for both of us by and by."
By and by meant when the good old General should be lying in his grave. He was an old man: it was not possible to ignore that fact, though he was erect as a dart, active, full of dignity and intellect—a man of men. He was nearing the scriptural limit of threescore and ten, and the inevitable end that comes to us all must come to him before the world was many years older.
Nothing was further from Bothwell's thoughts than the idea of being maintained by a wife; but he let Lady Valeria tempt him away from his books or his laboratory, and suffered himself to become indifferent to his profession, to care for nothing but the life he led in her boudoir or her drawing-room.
And then there came new difficulties. Lady Valeria was at heart a gamester. The excitement of cards or betting had become a necessity to her in her Indian life. Soon after her arrival at Calcutta she had won a thousand pounds in the Umballa Sweep, and that one stroke of luck had been her ruin. She became a professional gambler, played high whenever there was a possibility of so doing, and had her book for every great English race. She awaited the telegrams that brought her the tidings of victory or defeat with feverish impatience. The natural result followed: she was often in money difficulties. Generous as her husband was, she feared to appeal to him on these occasions. She knew that, of all types of womanhood, he most hated a gambling woman. She had her pin-money, which was ample for all the ordinary requirements and even extravagances of a woman of fashion. She dared not ask her husband for more money. But she was not afraid to call upon her slave, Bothwell Grahame; and Bothwell had to help her somehow, this wife of the future, who, in the days to come, was to provide for him.
He helped her first by nominally lending—actually giving her—every sixpence of his own patrimony, disposing, bit by bit, of that little estate in Perthshire of which his ancestors had been so proud. When he had beggared himself thus, he began to borrow of the Jews—always for Lady Valeria—and finally found himself in such a mess, financially, that he had to leave the army.
General Harborough heard of his difficulties, and supposed they were all self-induced, but made the kindest excuses for the sinner. He offered to pay Bothwell's debts, and implored him not to throw up his career, with all its brilliant chances. The General was wounded to the quick when his offers were steadfastly refused.
"A gentleman knows how to accept a service as well as how to render one," he said. "You saved my life, and I have never felt burdened by the obligation."
Bothwell stood before him, grave, pale, silent, humiliated by his kindness.
"Forgive me, sir," he faltered at last. "Believe me, I am not ungrateful. There was a time when I would rather have accepted a favour from you than from any other man living. But I am tired of the army. I feel that I shall never get on. I have sent a statement of my affairs to my cousin's husband, who has a genius for finance. He will settle with my creditors, and I shall begin the world again, my own man."
Bothwell sighed involuntarily after those last words. What freedom, or manhood, or independence could there ever be for him, bound as he was bound?
He left India soon after this interview with the General, who was to return to England in the following year. Lady Valeria deeply resented her lover's conduct in leaving the East, while she was obliged to remain there. It was desertion, infidelity. He ought to have remained at any cost, at any loss of his own self-respect. She could never be brought to consider things from his standpoint. If he had loved her, she argued, he would have stayed. Love never counts the cost of anything. They parted in anger, and Bothwell went home with a sore heart, yet with a sense of relief in the idea of recovered freedom.
Then came a period of comparative liberty for Bothwell. He received an occasional letter from Lady Valeria, full of upbraidings and regrets. He answered as best he might—kindly, affectionately even; but he flattered himself that the fatal tie, the dishonourable engagement, was a folly of the past. He was all the more anxious to believe this, during that peaceful winter at Penmorval, on account of his growing esteem for another woman. O, what a different feeling it was, that winter love of his! Those happy half-hours amidst the rimy hedgerows, with the shrill north-easter swirling across the dark brown of the ploughed fields, the yellow light of a setting sun shining beneath a leaden sky. How curiously different was the girl's light happy talk in the English lane—talk which all the world might have heard—from those impassioned whispers beside the fountain, under the stars of Orient! At first it seemed to him that he was only soothed and cheered by his acquaintance with Hilda Heathcote. He affected to consider her a mere girl, hardly emerged from the nursery. He was surprised to find how rightly she thought upon the gravest subjects. Then all at once he awoke to the knowledge that he loved her: and while he was hesitating, doubting whether he were free to indulge this new and purer, sweeter, happier love, hardly daring to ask himself whether that old tie was or was not cancelled, he received a letter from Valeria, with the Paris postmark.
"We have just arrived here from Brindisi," she wrote. "We shall stay here for a few days while I order some gowns, and we shall be in London for a few weeks. After that we go to the General's place near Plymouth, where you must come and see me every day, just as you used at Simla. O Bothwell, I can hardly trust myself to write. I dare not tell you half the joy I feel in the idea of our meeting. If you cared for me you would come to London. It would be so easy to pretend business, and you would be warmly welcomed in Grosvenor Square. You might bring your portmanteau and stop with us. There is a barrack of empty rooms on the third floor. Ours is one of those huge corner houses, and the piggeries for the servants are over the offices at the back. I hope you will contrive to come. Your last letter seemed to me so cold and distant—as if you were beginning to forget, or as if you had not forgiven my anger at your desertion. Ah, Bothwell, you should have pitied me and sympathised with me in that cruel parting. You ought to have known that my anger was despair. But you thought only of your own dignity, your own self-respect—not of my sorrow. Men are so selfish."
Bothwell did not go to London. He excused himself upon various grounds, and remained quietly at Penmorval. But from that hour his manner to Hilda changed altogether. From an unavowed lover he became an indifferent acquaintance. He set a watch upon his tongue that it should say no words of pleasantness. He vowed that he would not again suffer himself to be enmeshed in Lady Valeria's net: but until he had calmly and deliberately broken with her he could not be the lover of any other woman. He made up his mind that so soon as the General and his wife were settled at Fox Hill there should be a rupture—temperate, gentle, firm, and irrevocable.
Lady Valeria came to Fox Hill, and summoned her slave. He went, and there was no rupture—only a renewal of the old bonds. The bird was in the fowler's net again. Bothwell was often at Fox Hill. He spent long afternoons theretête-à -têtewith Lady Valeria. She was less careful than she had been in India.
"We are not surrounded with busybodies here," she said. "I feel that I can do as I like in my own house."
He went to London to borrow money for her when she was in difficulties about that horrible book of hers: and Lady Valeria's normal state now was financial difficulty. Almost everybody knew that she was a gambler, except her husband. He was so thoroughly respected and beloved that no one had the heart to make him unhappy by breathing a word to his wife's discredit. He thought her faultless.
She had hardened in that false wicked life of hers: but she was more fascinating than ever, Bothwell thought, albeit he was far less under her spell than he had been in the old days at Simla. The very fever of her mind intensified her charm. She seemed such an ethereal creature—all life, and light, and sparkle. She was, to other women, as the electric light is to gas.
And now, half buried in his corner of the railway-carriage, Bothwell smoked the pipe of meditation. He looked back upon that fatal past, and cursed himself for the weak folly that had put such a chain round his neck. He looked back, and recalled the old scenes, the old feelings, and he almost wondered if he could be the same man who had so felt and so acted.
He drove to Fox Hill as fast as a cab-horse would take him, alighted a little way from the chief gates, and dismissed his conveyance, meaning to walk back to Plymouth after his interview. Fox Hill was four miles from the station, but Bothwell could walk four miles in an hour with that free swinging stride of his. A four-mile walk and a pipe might just serve to quiet his nerves after the ordeal he had to undergo.
The General's Devonshire home was an Italian villa, built on the southern slope of an amphitheatre of hills, and commanding the town, the dockyards, the Hamoaze, and the Hoe in all their extent. Distance lent enchantment to the view. Plymouth, seen from this sunny hillside, looked as picturesque as Naples.
The villa had been planned by an architect of taste and culture, and built regardless of expense. The house was not large when measured by the number of its rooms; but all the rooms were spacious, lightsome, and lofty. The decorations were of the simplest. The glory of the place was its conservatories, which were so arranged as to introduce flowers and tropical foliage into every part of the dwelling. A long marble colonnade, enclosed by plate-glass shutters in winter or bad weather, surrounded the house, and here bloomed and flourished all that is rarest and loveliest in modern horticulture. The central hall had a glass roof, and was more a conservatory than a hall. The corridors between drawing-room and dining-room, between boudoir and study, were indoor gardens. Flowers pervaded the house, and harmonised admirably with the elegant simplicity of the furniture, the draperies of delicate chintz and soft India muslin.
The villa had been built sixty years ago, in the days of the Georges, a period when Italian colonnades, Corinthian porticoes, and Pompeian conservatories were the rage; but the house suited Lady Valeria just as a well-chosen frame suits a picture.
On this summery September morning Lady Valeria was seated in the colonnade, half reclining in one of those very low chairs which she always affected, being one of the few women who can rise gracefully from a seat about a foot from the ground. She was half hidden by the foliage of oleanders and magnolia, and it was only by a glimmer of white amongst the glossy green that Bothwell descried her in the distance as he crossed the lawn. There was a fountain on the lawn here, just as at Simla; but the fountain was a late improvement, insisted upon by Lady Valeria.
"It will recall Simla, where we were so happy," she told her husband.
"And yet you were so impatient to leave India, towards the last," he said, almost reproachfully.
"Yes, I was very tired of India at the last. There is an end of all things."
Bothwell had obeyed Lady Valeria's instructions to the letter. He had entered the grounds by a side gate, so as to escape challenge at the lodge: and now he made his way boldly to the colonnade in front of her boudoir. The boudoir was not a particularly sacred apartment, as it formed one in the suite of rooms and conservatories which communicated along the whole length of the house. Italian villas of the Georgian era were not planned for seclusion.
Lady Valeria was sitting in her low chair, with a low table at her side, scattered with books and newspapers. The books were mostly new memoirs and French novels of the most advanced school. The papers were chiefly sporting. She looked up languidly as Bothwell approached, and gave him her hand, like an empress, without stirring from her graceful repose amidst embroidered silken cushions. She was not beautiful. Her charm lay in an extreme refinement of feature and figure, a delicacy of tint which verged upon sickliness. It was the refinement of a vanishing race, and recalled the delicacy of an over-trained racehorse.