"Great Heaven!" exclaimed Heathcote, almost starting from his chair. "Then my instinct was right. It told me that I should get on the track of that man—it told me that you must have known him."
"The man was well known to me and to a chosen few, but only a few," replied Trottier. "He was a man of eccentric habits—a man of considerable talent and large intellect, who could afford to live his own life, and lived it. What he did with himself in the daytime none of us knew: whether he slept away half his daylight life, or shut himself in his den and smoked and dreamed and read. The latter idea seemed likely enough, for he was a man who had read widely. He was a delightful companion, brilliant, genial, lavish to his friends, a splendid host. I have supped with him and Marie Prévol many a night in this house—sometimes making the third in a cosy trio, sometimes one of that small choice circle with which he occasionally surrounded himself."
"Then I take it that he was known in general society, either the uppermost or the middle circles."
"Not the least in the world. He was a man who scorned society, hated ceremonies and conventionalities. I never saw him in a dress-suit. I doubt if he possessed one. When he went to a theatre, it was to sit in a dark corner, where he could see without being seen. He detested crowds. He had nothing to gain from the great world, and could afford to outrage all its rules and regulations."
"Was he a thoroughbred Parisian?"
"Far from it. He was an American, but he had lived so long in Paris as to be almost as Parisian as a citizen born and bred."
"Had he made his money, or inherited it?"
"Inherited it, without doubt. His habits were those of the spender, not the worker. He was one of the lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin. I take it that his father had been one of those daring speculators who in America begin with nothing and become millionaires in a year or two. As for the man himself, he had no more idea of business or finance than one of those dressed-up dolls of the Quartier Bréda. He took not the faintest interest in the transactions of the Bourse, and in that point alone revealed himself as no true Parisian."
"Do you believe that he committed the murder?" asked Heathcote.
Sigismond Trottier shrugged his shoulders, and shook back his long gray hair, as he slowly puffed his cigarette.
"Who knows?" he said. "I liked the man so well that I should hesitate at saying I believe in his guilt. And yet the fact of his disappearance from the hour of the murder is almost conclusive evidence; and I know that he was savagely jealous of Maucroix."
"You judged him a man of strong passions, a man capable of a great crime?"
"Yes, he was a man of intense feeling, strong for good or evil. A volcano glowed under that calm outward aspect, that easy-going, devil-may-care manner of his. I was very sorry for him. If Marie had been but true—"
"You believe that she was his wife?"
"I do. His manner to her was in all respects the manner of one who esteemed as well as loved her. He introduced her to his friends as his wife. He loved her too well to have refused her that title."
"But for a man who scorned conventionalities, what reason could there have been for concealment? Why should he not have introduced his actress-wife to society? Why should he not have established a home?"
"The first question is easily answered. As he loathed society for himself, he would hardly court it for his wife. The second can only be answered by the fact that the man was an eccentric. He preferred the freedom of an actress's lodging to the restrictions of a rich man's house. His happiest days were spent wandering southward with the swallows; yet so strange was the man's temper that he never stayed more than a fortnight or three weeks away from Paris. The city seemed to draw him back like a magnet."
"Yet he had no business here?"
"None that I ever discovered. He must have loved the city for its own sake. He was here all through the siege and the Commune. I have heard him say that the happiest days of his life were those on which the roar of the Prussian guns made his only music, and when Marie and he used to crouch and shiver over a handful of charcoal, and eat a supper of dry bread and Carlsbad plums."
"He must have had somepied-à-terreof his own, I conclude."
"He must have had his den somewhere in Paris; but none of us knew where it was. The only address he ever gave was that of Marie Prévol,aliasMadame Georges, in the Rue Lafitte. He met his friends on the Boulevard when the theatres were over. He was a man who enjoyed life to the full—after his own fashion. He was the master-spirit of his little circle—a daring wit, a bold politician, a trenchant critic. Paris is the city of brilliant talkers, yet I have known few who surpassed Georges as a conversationalist. I can see him now, with his long fair hair falling over his flashing eyes, his sarcastic lip, and the proud carriage of that leonine head. Not a common man by any means, and with a laugh that was like music—a man for a woman to adore; and yet Marie wavered in her fidelity directly a fashionable dandy made love to her."
"You have no idea what became of Georges after the murder?"
"If I had, I would not tell you. No, I have not the faintest inkling. He vanished as a bubble that bursts upon the surface of a stream. As a mere guess, I should say that he went back to the country of his birth—that if he is still living, he is to be found in America under another name."
"He was a rich man, you say. It is easier for a man to betake himself from one country to another than to transfer his fortune. What became of this man's French investments?"
"He may never have had any such investments. His fortune may have been invested solely in America. He was a man who declared that he valued liberty above all other blessings. He would scarcely have fettered himself by investing any portion of his wealth in a country where he was leading a life of pleasure, living as a pure Bohemian. His utter indifference to all rumours about the Bourse would show that he had no French investments. His wealth, I take it, came from some secure source on the other side of the Atlantic."
"Did you ever hear him talk of an English friend, or a friend who resided in England?"
"Never."
"And yet he must have had such a friend," said Heathcote.
He related the story of Léonie Lemarque's death, and the inducement that had taken her to England, where she was to have met a friend of her aunt's long-vanished lover. Sigismond Trottier listened with keenest interest. All social mysteries, whether criminal or not, had a charm for him.
"It is a very strange case," he said, "and I don't wonder that you are following it up earnestly. No, I never heard Georges mention any English friend. It was a bold stroke for the grandmother to send the girl to a man who was the friend of the murderer of her daughter. A drowning man will catch at a straw, says your proverb; and this poor woman, penniless and friendless on her death-bed, may have caught at the name of the only rich man upon whom she could advance the faintest claim. And what was the nature of that claim? A packet of Georges' love-letters. Compromising love-letters, perhaps, to be offered to Georges' friend as the price of protection and aid for the orphan girl. A strange story. And no one knows what became of those letters?"
"No one, as yet. No letters were found upon the girl. Even the handbag she carried with her had disappeared."
"A very strange story. I wish I could help you to read the riddle. Your interest in it I imagine to be something beyond the mere artistic interest in a curious case."
"Yes, I am concerned in arriving at the truth, for the sake of one whom I honour and revere. I shall be deeply grateful if you can help me."
"Then I will help you," answered the paragraphist quietly; and Edward Heathcote felt that in this amateur detective he had a stronger ally than in the old police-officer of the left bank.
Dreary days followed for Bothwell Grahame after that final interview with Lady Valeria. He had broken his bonds, he had escaped from the Circe whose fatal spells had held him captive so long. He was his own man again, he could stand up before his fellow-men and fear no reproach—nay, he could even dare to meet that kind old man whose friendship had never been withheld from him. He could look General Harborough in the face, and clasp his hand without feeling himself a craven and a traitor, and that is a thing which he had not been able to do for the last three years.
He was relieved, rejoiced at the breaking of that old tie, and yet there was a touch of pain in such a parting. There came a bitter pang of remorse now and again to disturb his sense of newly-recovered peace. Such severances can never happen without pain. The man who can be utterly indifferent to the agony of a woman he has once loved must have a heart of stone. Bothwell was not stony-hearted. He knew that Valeria Harborough was not a good woman—that she had been shamefully false to the best of husbands—that she had abandoned herself recklessly to the promptings of a fatal passion. But he had loved her once: and his heart bled for her now in her misery and abandonment. He was haunted by the vision of her face, as she had risen up before him, white as the very dead, her eyes flashing, her lips quivering, her voice subdued by passion to a serpent-like hiss, as she told him—
"You are in love with another woman!"
Yes, that was what it all came to. That was the sum-total of his scruples, his remorse of conscience: or at least that is what it must needs seem in the sight of the woman he abandoned. She would give him no credit for many a remorseful pang, many a sting of conscience in the past; yes, even in the noontide of passion, when he deemed that for him Fate held not the possibility of another love. In her sight he was a perjurer and a hypocrite. It was hard so to appear to the woman who had worshipped him; hard to know that there was a heart breaking for him yonder in the Italian villa on the hill above the sea.
"Why should I grieve about her?" he asked himself angrily. "I must be a coxcomb to fancy that she is making herself unhappy for my sake. She was angry with me the other day. It was rage, not wounded love, that flashed from those brilliant eyes of hers; the rage of slighted beauty. She is far more concerned for her losses on the turf than at the loss of me. If my Dido mounts the funeral pyre, it will be because she has made a bad book, and not for my sake."
But argue with himself as he might, Bothwell could not forget the agony in the face that had once been his delight, the despair in the voice which had bidden him farewell, the tremulous hand which had snatched the love-token to fling it away in deepest scorn.
Perhaps Bothwell would have more easily forgotten these things if he could have had the comfort of Hilda's society at this period of his life. But Hilda and the twins and Fräulein Meyerstein had all gone off to Dawlish for sea-bathing, and Mrs. Wyllard warned her cousin that he must not attempt to follow them.
"You are on your probation, my poor Bothwell," she said, "and you must be very careful how you act. If you were to go to Dawlish you would only distress Hilda, who has promised not to see you till her brother comes back from Paris."
"I am not going there. I would not distress her for worlds. I am to wait patiently till Heathcote has made up his mind that I am not in the habit of throwing girls over viaducts; and then I may go to my darling and claim her promise. In the mean time I can at least write to her."
And he did write, within a few hours of his final interview with Lady Valeria. His letter was full and straight in its significance.
"My dearest, I am my own man again. I am free, or as free as a man can be who is your most abject slave. I am told that I am not to be allowed to see you till I stand acquitted of the crime which Bodmin has judged me quite capable of committing. I think, little as you know of me, you know enough to be very sure that I am innocent upon that count."But there was another count upon which I confess myself guilty, Hilda—and it was that old sin which made me hang back months ago when I longed to tell you of my love. I have been guilty of a foolish attachment to a married woman, an attachment which lasted with varying fervour for over a year, but which had quite worn itself out before I left India. The flame burnt fiercely enough for a little while, and then came total extinction. Only it is not always easy for a man to shake off old fetters; and it was not till your pure and noble love gave me courage that I dared to stand up boldly and say, 'That old false love is dead; let us bury it decently.' And now the old love is buried, Hilda, and I am all your own. No one is any the worse for that old sentimental folly. Such flirtations are going on in India every day. Some end in guilt and misery, no doubt; but there are more that finish as mine has finished, like the blowing out of a candle."Can you forgive me, dear one, for having once cared for another? Remember it was before I knew you. Henceforward I am yours, and yours only. I claim your dear promise. I ask you to engage yourself to a man whom Bodmin looks upon askance as a possible murderer."No, love, I will not exact so much. I will only tell you that I am all your own, and that I adore you. We will not talk about engagements till your brother comes back from Paris, convinced of my innocence as to that one particular charge, and until Bodmin has begun to forget that it ever suspected me.—Your adoringBOTHWELL."
"My dearest, I am my own man again. I am free, or as free as a man can be who is your most abject slave. I am told that I am not to be allowed to see you till I stand acquitted of the crime which Bodmin has judged me quite capable of committing. I think, little as you know of me, you know enough to be very sure that I am innocent upon that count.
"But there was another count upon which I confess myself guilty, Hilda—and it was that old sin which made me hang back months ago when I longed to tell you of my love. I have been guilty of a foolish attachment to a married woman, an attachment which lasted with varying fervour for over a year, but which had quite worn itself out before I left India. The flame burnt fiercely enough for a little while, and then came total extinction. Only it is not always easy for a man to shake off old fetters; and it was not till your pure and noble love gave me courage that I dared to stand up boldly and say, 'That old false love is dead; let us bury it decently.' And now the old love is buried, Hilda, and I am all your own. No one is any the worse for that old sentimental folly. Such flirtations are going on in India every day. Some end in guilt and misery, no doubt; but there are more that finish as mine has finished, like the blowing out of a candle.
"Can you forgive me, dear one, for having once cared for another? Remember it was before I knew you. Henceforward I am yours, and yours only. I claim your dear promise. I ask you to engage yourself to a man whom Bodmin looks upon askance as a possible murderer.
"No, love, I will not exact so much. I will only tell you that I am all your own, and that I adore you. We will not talk about engagements till your brother comes back from Paris, convinced of my innocence as to that one particular charge, and until Bodmin has begun to forget that it ever suspected me.—Your adoringBOTHWELL."
Having written this letter, Bothwell had nothing to do but to ride about the hills, thinking of his sweetheart, till he received her answer.
She wrote with unstinted tenderness, and recoiled in nowise from the fulfilment of her promise.
"I hold myself engaged to you henceforward, dear Bothwell," she wrote, "through good or evil fortune, good or evil report. But as I have promised my brother not to see you while he is away, it might be well that we did not write to each other again until after his return. I think you know that I am steadfast, and that you can trust me."
Yes, he was very sure of her steadfastness. Was she not one woman in a thousand to have pledged herself to him just when any ordinary woman would have shunned him—would have recoiled from him as from some savage monster? She had been calm, and steadfast, and unfearing, a woman who could dare to judge for herself.
And now Bothwell Grahame felt that he had crossed the threshold of a new life. He was no longer a solitary waif, with no one to think of but himself. He had not only his own future to work out with patience and courage. He had to think of the young wife, whom it might be his blessed fate to claim before he was much older. He could no longer afford to be vague and wavering. The problem of a gentleman-like maintenance must be worked out by him somehow, and without loss of time.
He walked across the Cornish hills in those balmy afternoons of September, full of thought and full of care; happy, yes, ineffably happy in the knowledge of Hilda's love; but care went along with happiness. He had to provide for his beloved. Long and thoughtful self-examination brought him to one positive conclusion about himself. Whatever he was to do in the future, if he were to do it well, must be, in somewise, the thing that he had done in the past. He was a soldier to the marrow of his bones, and it was in military work, or military studies, that he must find his future living.
This was the plan which he worked out for himself during those solitary rambles on the moor, sometimes with gun and dogs, sometimes with no companion save his own thoughts. He would fall back upon the studious habits of his earlier years, work at the science of soldiery as he had worked then. He would take a house in one of the villages on the wild coast of North Cornwall—at Trevena perhaps, in King Arthur's country—some roomy old house with a good garden, and he would take pupils to cram for the military examinations. He knew that he could get on with young men. He had always been popular with the subalterns of his regiment. He would work honestly, conscientiously, devotedly as ever coach or crammer worked since the art of coaching and cramming was first invented. It would be a jog-trot humble kind of life, a life which could never lead to distinction, far from a brilliant future to offer to such a girl as Hilda Heathcote. Yet he told himself that it was such a life as would not be altogether distasteful to her. It was a life in which husband and wife need be but seldom parted, in which all their amusements and relaxations could be shared. They could hunt, and shoot, and ride, and boat together on that wild coast. The conventionalities would cost them very little. Fine clothes, fine living would not be required of them: and in their rustic seclusion they would escape the ghastly struggle to maintain showy appearances; they could afford themselves all the comforts of a homely unpretentiousménage.
Bothwell felt that it was in him to do good and honest work in such a career as this; surely better than sheep-breeding or gold-digging in some savage quarter of the earth, where the intellectual man must gradually sink to the level of his companion brutes. He pictured to himself the tranquil happiness of such a life. The long morning of conscientious work, followed by the afternoon ride or ramble. The summer holiday after a successful term; the adventurous excursion among Scottish lakes or in some foreign land; the cherished home, gradually developed and improved from its primitive homeliness into a thing of beauty. The garden in which wife and husband and pupils worked together towards the attainment of a lofty ideal. The union of a household which should be as one family.
Cheered by such visions, Bothwell took up his old technical books with an almost rabid hunger for study. He sent to London for the newest treatises on gunnery. He flung himself with heart and mind into the one line of study which had always interested him. Hilda had told him not to write to her; but he could not deny himself the delight of unfolding his newly-formed plan, which he explained to her upon five sheets of closely-written note-paper.
"Let me have just one more letter from you, dearest," he pleaded in conclusion, "to tell me what you think of my scheme, and where we ought to look for a house. Shall it be Trevena or Boscastle or Padstow or New Quay? I think we ought to be near the sea, so that our lads may get plenty of boating and swimming. And I could teach you to row. We would live at least half our lives in the open air, and we would study natural history in all its branches. I fancy myself an ideal coach. I know my pupils would adore me, while you would be to them as a divinity. Our evenings could be devoted to music; we could get up one of Sullivan's operas, and perform for the benefit of the school or the church. We should be the most useful people in our parish. It would be a humble jog-trot life, darling; but I believe it would be a happy one for both of us. I know that for me it would be Paradise."
The answer came by return.
"Yes, dear Bothwell, your scheme is charming. Trevena is a delicious place, and I should delight in living there. I shall have a little money when I come of age, I believe—more than enough to furnish our house. Shall we be mediæval or Chippendale? I say Chippendale. And we must get an old house, for the sake of the panelling and the staircase; and we must pull it all to pieces on account of the drains. And now you must not write to me any more till Edward comes home. I have had a curious letter from him. He is deeply absorbed in unravelling some dreadful mystery. He has not yet found the murderer of that poor girl, but I can see that he no longer suspectsyou. How could he ever have harboured that monstrous idea?"
"Yes, dear Bothwell, your scheme is charming. Trevena is a delicious place, and I should delight in living there. I shall have a little money when I come of age, I believe—more than enough to furnish our house. Shall we be mediæval or Chippendale? I say Chippendale. And we must get an old house, for the sake of the panelling and the staircase; and we must pull it all to pieces on account of the drains. And now you must not write to me any more till Edward comes home. I have had a curious letter from him. He is deeply absorbed in unravelling some dreadful mystery. He has not yet found the murderer of that poor girl, but I can see that he no longer suspectsyou. How could he ever have harboured that monstrous idea?"
Cheered by such a letter as this, Bothwell worked as if he had been on the eve of some great examination—worked as if his life depended on those long hours of toil. Yes, he would get a house at Trevena—the sooner the better. He had felt of late as if the atmosphere of Penmorval stifled him. He had been too long a hanger-on upon his rich cousin. He was angry with himself for having dawdled and procrastinated, and let life slide by him, while he waited as if for a vision from heaven, to point out the road, in which he should walk. And now the seraphic vision had been granted to him; but the angel wore the shape of Hilda Heathcote. Hilda had inspired him with the desire to stay in England, to earn his bread in his own country, and out of that wish had arisen this scheme of his. He would lose no time in putting his plan into execution. Of late he had read aversion in the eyes of Julian Wyllard—or it may have been contempt for his idle life, for his dependence. In any case there was that in Wyllard's manner which rendered existence at Penmorval hateful for Bothwell Grahame.
"I suppose he, too, suspects me," Bothwell told himself. "He thinks it quite possible that I flung that girl into the gorge. Society is always ready to impute evil to an idler. There is that old doggerel of Dr. Watts about the mischief that Satan finds for idle hands to do."
He rode across country to Trevena the day after he received Hilda's frank and loving letter. He was not going to wait until his darling was able to marry him before beginning his new life. He would set up his establishment as soon as the thing could be done, take pupils at once, get over all the roughness, the difficulty of the start, before he asked Hilda to share his home. Nor was he going to furnish his house with his wife's money. That was just one of the things he would not consent to do. He had his idea as to how he should furnish his house when he found one to his liking. Of course he was not going to decide upon any house until Hilda had seen it and approved the choice. But in the mean time he rode off to Trevena on a voyage of discovery.
It was a long ride, and a hilly road, but not too long for the new hunter Glencoe, an animal with a tremendous reserve of force that had to be taken out of him somehow, an accumulated store of kicks and plunges which a clever rider could compound for in a good fast trot along the road, or a swinging gallop across the moorland. Bothwell and his horse were on excellent terms by the time they had gone three miles together, although the brute had insisted on going through Bodmin in a series of buck-jumps.
Life at Penmorval had been just a shade more sombre in its hue for the last week. Dora Wyllard had not been able altogether to overcome her offended feeling at that unwarrantable burst of passion upon her husband's part, which had followed Edward Heathcote's visit. That he should upbraid and insult her, that he should be jealous—he for whose sake she had jilted an upright and honourable man, he to whom she had given all the devotion of her life! It seemed to her an almost unpardonable weakness and littleness on Julian Wyllard's part. And she had thought his character above all pettinesses common to meaner men. She had loved him because he was noble-hearted and large-minded.
His indifference to Bothwell's good name, his selfish coldness upon a question which to her was vital, had wounded her to the quick. She was not a woman to give way to sullenness, to shut herself up in the armour of angry pride, to give ungracious answers and scant courtesy to the husband who had offended her. Yet there was a subtle change in her manner and bearing which was perceptible to Julian Wyllard, and which he felt keenly.
Neither husband nor wife had recurred by so much as one word or hint to that scene in the yew-tree arbour. Life had glided by for these last few days in just the same manner as of old; but the shadow was there all the same. The mild genius of domestic love had veiled his face.
Dora was sitting in the library with her husband at post-time on the day of Bothwell's ride to Trevena. Julian Wyllard was at his desk writing, while his wife sat in her favourite window, absorbed in a new book, with the open box from Mudie's at her feet, when the servant brought in the post-bag. Dora watched her husband intently as he unlocked the bag and took out a pile of letters and papers. He looked up as he was sorting the letters, and surprised that earnest expression in his wife's eyes.
"You are expecting some important letter?" he said.
"Yes, I am anxious to hear from Mr. Heathcote," she answered quietly.
It was the first time that name had been spoken by either of them since the scene in the arbour.
"There is your letter, then, in Heathcote's hand, with the Paris post-mark."
"Thank you." She rose, and walked across to the desk to receive her letters. "I hope he has some good news for me."
She went back to the window, and opened Heathcote's letter, standing by the open window in the full light of the September afternoon, her husband watching her all the while. Her face brightened as she read. There was no need for him to ask if the news were good.
"Your letter seems satisfactory," he said, unfolding theTimesas he spoke.
"It is a good letter," she answered. "It tells me that Mr. Heathcote has begun to see how wrong he was in suspecting Bothwell. He has evidently made some discovery about that poor girl's fate. He, at any rate, has found out who she is."
"Indeed!" said Wyllard, deep in a leading-article. "He has found out who she is?"
"Yes. He writes her name as if I ought to know all about her. He is still groping in the dark, he says, but he hopes to fathom the mystery of Léonie Lemarque's death."
There was no answer. Mr. Wyllard was absorbed by the paper.
"You were not listening, Julian."
"O, yes, I was. Léonie Lemarque—a French name. We were right, then, in supposing that the girl was French?"
He laid aside the newspaper, and began to open his letters; but he said not a word more about Heathcote's news. Dora felt that he might have been more interested—more sympathetic. It was her cousin whose reputation and happiness were at stake. Affection for her should have made these things of greater moment to her husband.
Bothwell came home in time for the eight-o'clock dinner, and in excellent spirits. He had seen an old cottage standing in a large garden, with a fine old orchard adjoining, a cottage which could be converted, by considerable additions, into a capital house for himself and his pupils. The situation was superb. The cottage stood on a height, near the junction of two roads, and it commanded magnificent views of sea and coast.
"I could make the additions I want for three or four hundred pounds," he told Dora, when he was alone with her in the drawing-room after dinner. "I should be my own architect and my own builder. I should only have to pay for labour and materials. I did a goodish deal in the building line when I was in the army, you know, Dora, supervising the alterations of the Jungapore barracks. I know more about bricks and mortar than you would give me credit for knowing."
He had previously confided his idea of taking pupils, and Dora had approved, and had promised her heartiest cooperation. He was sure of her sympathy with all his endeavours to win an honourable independence at home. The idea of his emigrating had always been unwelcome to her.
"And now, Dora, I am going to make a very audacious proposition," he said, when he had finished his description of the cottage at Trevena. "I want you to lend me seven hundred pounds, to be repaid in half-yearly instalments of one hundred pounds during the next three years and a half, with or without interest, as you may think fit."
"Suppose we say nothing about the repayment, Bothwell," said his cousin, smiling at him as she looked up from her embroidery. "You shall have the seven hundred pounds; and we will decide by and by whether it is to be a loan or a gift."
"Dora, you are too generous—" he began.
"Nonsense, Bothwell. I always intended to furnish you with a small capital if you made up your mind to emigrate. I had much rather give you the money to invest at home. You are the last of my clan—my only near relative—and I don't want to lose you. I look to you and Hilda, and your children, to brighten the decline of my life."
"O Dora, that seems a poor substitute for those who should be nearer and dearer," cried Bothwell. In the next instant he would gladly have recalled his words, for he saw the tears well up to his cousin's eyes, and he knew that her childless marriage was a grief.
"You are too good, far more generous than I deserve," he went on hurriedly. "But let the money be at least called a loan. If fortune favour me within the next few years, it will be such a pleasure to give you back your money. And if Fate prove unkind, I shall know I have not a hard creditor. But I have made up my mind to be successful. I mean to work as men seldom work—to make everything I do a labour of love. And with such a wife as Hilda—"
"Hilda will be a wife in a thousand. I am sure your pupils will adore her; and you must make your house very pretty, for Hilda's sake. Seven hundred will not be half enough."
"It will be more than enough. You don't know how economically I can build, and how cleverly Hilda and I will contrive to furnish. We will ride over the country to overhaul all the cottages and farmhouses in quest of neglected old bits of Chippendale and Sheraton. We shall get lovely old things for a mere song, and find some clever jobbing cabinet-maker to make them as good as new—"
"And in the end you will find they will have cost you more than if you had bought them from Nosotti," said Dora, laughing at his eagerness. "I know how costly that kind of economy is apt to prove in the long-run. You had better get your Sheraton or your Chippendale furniture made on purpose for you, new and sound and convenient, and of more charming designs than Chippendale ever imagined."
"No, Dora. I am intense as a Chippendalist. I must have the real thing—old, and inconvenient even, if you like."
"What a boy you are still, Bothwell! And now I am going to tell you something that will please you."
"Hilda is coming here to-morrow," speculated Bothwell eagerly.
"No. Hilda is not coming back while her brother is away. That is not my good news, Bothwell. It is even better than that."
And then she told him the contents of Heathcote's letter.
"I am very glad," he said quietly. "That is at least one knocked off the list of my suspicious friends."
Julian Wyllard came into the drawing-room while the cousins were sitting together talking, their heads bending towards each other. The family likeness between them was very strong. They looked like brother and sister; and they looked very happy.
Dora was in the garden next day when the postman brought his bag. She was no longer anxious about her letters, having received the expected tidings from Paris. She was moving slowly about among her roses, armed with a basket and a pair of garden scissors, cutting off blind buds and shabby blooms, making war upon her insect enemies—enjoying the balmy air and warm sunshine of early autumn.
Julian Wyllard came out of the glass door while she was thus occupied. She looked up at the sound of the familiar footsteps, and went across the grass to meet him.
"My dear Dora, are you inclined to go for a week's holiday with me?" he asked, in his cheeriest tones.
"I am always ready to go anywhere with you. Is it because you have not been feeling well of late that you want to leave Penmorval?" she asked, looking anxiously at him, remembering his strange irritation, that burst of jealousy, which might be after all only the indication of an overworked brain.
"I have not been feeling over well—a little worried and irritable, and more than a little weak and languid," he answered. "But it is not on that account I want to go away. You remember my losing the Raffaelle last July?"
"Perfectly."
"Well, there is a still finer Raffaelle to be sold next week in Paris, at the Hôtel Drouot. The great Rochejaquelin collection comes to the hammer. There are some of the finest Greuzes in Europe. There are Meissoniers of the highest quality, and a famous Delaroche. I may not buy any of the pictures. No doubt the prices will be enormous. But I should like to see the collection once more, before it is scattered to the four winds. Would you mind running over to Paris with me for a week, or would you rather stay at home while I go?"
"I should like very much to go. I have never been in Paris with you, except hurrying through from station to station."
"Have you not? That is strange."
"I have never even seen the house where you lived when you were making your fortune in Paris."
"That would not be much to see. A ground floor near the Madeleine. A capital point for a business man; within ten minutes' walk of the Bourse, and in that central spot where the idlers and the workers alike congregate. A most uninteresting nest, Dora; nothing historical, or picturesque, or romantic, within half a mile."
"It will be enough for me that you lived and worked there. You must have worked very hard in those days."
"I was not one of the butterflies, I assure you."
"Mr. Distin told me that you turned your back upon all the dissipations and pleasures of Paris, that you were a man of one idea, working only for one end—to make a great fortune.
"That is the only way for a poor man to grow rich. I had to make brain-labour and concentration serve me instead of capital. I had the good luck to enter the Parisian Bourse at a period when fortunes might be made by hard thinking—when to win in the game of speculation was a question of mathematics. Nature and schooling had made me a decent mathematician, and I used all the science I had in fighting thecoulissierswith their own weapons. But I am talking a language which you can't understand, Dora. Let the past be past. You and I have only to spend the money I earned in those days."
"You are always spending your wealth for the good of others, Julian," his wife answered tenderly. "Providence ought to bless the riches you earned in your laborious youth. I cannot imagine you caring for money for its own sake."
"I never did so care for it, Dora. Money in my mind meant power. I began life as a poor man's son, and tasted all the bitterness of narrow means. In my boyhood I told myself that I would be rich before I grew old, and to that end I worked as few men work. I was able to surround my mother with luxury during the closing years of her life. I was able to give my sister a dowry that helped the man of her choice to make his way in the world years before he could have done so without that aid. She did not live very long to enjoy her happiness, poor girl; but her last days were brightened by prosperity. No, Dora, I was not a money-grubber, but I made speculation a science, and I turned the age in which I lived to good account. It is not often given to a speculator to live in such a golden age as the days of Morny and Jecker."
"I am sure you would do nothing that was not strictly honourable," said Dora, with her bright trusting look.
"O, I belonged to the honourable section of the Bourse," replied Wyllard, with a somewhat cynical smile. "I had my office and my agents in London, and was a power on the Stock Exchange; and when I had acquired a reputation as a financier on both sides of the Channel, I founded the firm of Wyllard & Morrison, with one of the richest merchants in London for my partner. A man in my position could soil his fingers with no doubtful enterprise. Well, Dora, it is agreed you will go to Paris with me?"
"With pleasure."
She was happier than she had felt since that cloud of anger had passed across her domestic horizon. Julian's manner was franker, fonder, more like his old self—the man who had won her away from that other noble-minded man to whom she had promised herself—the man for whose sake she had been willing to break her promise.
"Can you be ready to start to-morrow morning? The sale takes place three days hence, and I want to have a good look at the pictures before they come to the hammer."
"Yes, I will be ready whenever you like."
"Then we'll leave by the morning train, and go straight on to Paris by the night mail. You will be able to see Heathcote, and hear how his investigation progresses. Where is he staying, by the way?"
"At the Hôtel de Bade."
"I'll drop him a line, and ask him to call on us at the Windsor. It is an old-fashioned family hotel, where I think you will be more comfortable than at one of those huge palaces, where you may be surfeited with splendid upholstery, but rarely get your bell answered under a quarter of an hour. You will take Priscilla, I suppose?"
Priscilla was Mrs. Wyllard's maid, Cornish to the marrow, and a severe Primitive Methodist.
"Priscilla in Paris? No, I think not. She was so wretched in Italy. The very smell of the incense offended her."
"She will not be overpowered by incense in Paris nowadays. She is more likely to be offended by a new Age of Reason. However, if you think you can do without her—"
"I'm sure I can. We shall not be visiting, I suppose?"
"Hardly, I think. It is the dullest of dull seasons in Paris just now, and I had never a large visiting acquaintance in that city. I was too busy a man to go into society."
"You must have been a stoic to resist the temptations of Parisian society—the writers, the painters, singers, actors—all that is foremost and brightest in the intellectual world."
"There are circles and circles in Paris, as well as in London. I have been in Parisian assemblies that were eminently dull," said Wyllard.
They started from Penmorval after breakfast next morning, and were seated in the Dover mail at eight o'clock in the evening, after dining at the Grand Hotel. Dora was in excellent spirits. Change of scene had a brightening effect upon her mind, and she was very happy in the idea of Hilda and Bothwell's happiness. She had handed her cousin a cheque for seven hundred pounds, with which he was to open an account at the local bank. And then he had only to wait for Hilda to approve his choice, before he set to work with bricklayers and carpenters at improving a cottage into an Elizabethan Grange. That was his idea.
"We will have an Elizabethan Grange furnished with real Chippendale," he said. "Incongruous, but charming."
"Then be sure that very few of your windows are made to open," said Dora, laughing at his ardour, "if you want to be truly Elizabethan."
"Every casement shall open to its uttermost width—every corner of the house shall be steeped in light and air," protested Bothwell.
And now Dora Wyllard was reclining in her corner of the railway compartment, speeding towards Dover through the gray autumn night, by Kentish hayfields and stubble, and across the gentle undulations of a Kentish landscape, so different from the bold hills and deep gorges of her native Cornwall.
There was a reading-lamp hanging on Mrs. Wyllard's side of the carriage, and she had the October Quarterlies and a heap of papers to beguile the journey. Among the papers, was theTimessupplement, which she opened for the first time to look at the births, marriages, and deaths. Mr. Wyllard had read the other part of the paper before they reached Paddington, but he had not looked at the supplement.
While Dora was looking down the births, marriages, and deaths in a casual way, her eye was suddenly caught by an advertisement at the top of the second column.
"The person who was to have met Léonie Lemarque at Charing Cross Station on the morning of July 5th last is earnestly requested to communicate immediately with Messrs. Distin & Son, Solicitors, Furnival's Inn."
"How strange!" exclaimed Dora; and then she read the advertisement to her husband, who was sitting in an opposite corner, with closed eyes, as if half-asleep.
He started at the sound of her voice.
"I beg your pardon, Julian. I did not see that you were asleep."
"I was only dozing. Léonie Lemarque! that was the name of the girl who was killed, was it not? Then no doubt the advertisement is put in by Heathcote. The reference to Distin indicates as much."
"He must have made some further discovery about that unfortunate girl," said Dora thoughtfully. "He must have found out the date of her arrival in London, and that she came to meet some particular person. Do you think it was that person who killed her, Julian?"
"My dear Dora, how can I think about a business of which I know absolutely nothing? For anything we know, the girl's death may have been purely accidental, and this person who was to have met her at the station may be a figment of Heathcote's fancy, and this advertisement only a feeler thrown out in the hope of obtaining information from some unknown source. Why any of you should trouble yourselves to solve this mystery is more than I can understand."
"Why, Julian, did not you yourself send for Mr. Distin? did you not say that as a magistrate it was your duty—"
"To do all I could to further the ends of justice. Most assuredly, Dora. But having engaged the assistance of the cleverest criminal lawyer in England, and he having failed to fathom the mystery, I had no more to do. I had done my duty, and I was content to let the matter rest."
"So would I have been, if people had not suspected Bothwell. I could have no peace while there was such a cloud upon my cousin's reputation."
"That shows how narrow a view even the cleverest and most large-minded of women can take of this big world. Surely it can matter to no man living what a handful of people in a little country town may choose to think about him."
"Bothwell has to spend his life among those people."
"Well, you have had your own way in the matter, my dear Dora; and if you will only allow me to forget all about it, I am content that you and Heathcote should grope for ever in the labyrinth of that girl's antecedents. A lady's-maid or a nursery-governess, I suppose, who came to England to seek her fortune."
Dora was silent. Once again she felt that there was a want of sympathy upon her husband's part in this matter. He ought to have remembered that Bothwell was to her as a brother.
They were in Paris early next morning. Mr. Wyllard had telegraphed to the proprietor of the Windsor, and had secured charming rooms on the first floor, with a balcony overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries. The outer shell of the palace still stood there, a memorial of the brilliant historic past, and cabs and carriages and omnibuses and wagons were driving across the once sacred grounds, on the new road that had been lately cut from the Rue de Rivoli to the quay. It was a splendid Paris upon which Dora and her husband looked out in the clear freshness of the autumnal morning, but it was curiously changed from that Imperial Paris which Julian Wyllard had known twenty years before. It seemed to him this morning, looking across those ruined palace-walls, the daylight streaming through those vacant windows, as if he and the world had grown old and dim and feeble since those days.
Twenty years ago, and Morny was alive, and Jecker was a power on the Parisian Bourse, and Julian Wyllard was laying the foundation-stones of his fortune. He had started the Crédit Mauresque—that powerful association which had dealt with the wealth of Eastern princes and Jewish traders, had almost launched a company for the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem, had ridden gaily over the perilous ocean of public enterprise for some time, and had made great fortunes for the four or five gifted individuals whose second sight revealed to them the right hour at which to withdraw their capital from the scheme.
Yes, it had been a glorious Paris in those days, a city in which a young Englishman with a mathematical brain could court the goddess Fortune more profitably than in his native capital. Julian Wyllard had earned his bread upon the London Stock Exchange for some years before he changed the scene of his labours to Paris; but it was upon the Paris Bourse that he began to make his fortune.
Dora was tired after her journey, for she had been too full of thought to sleep in the train, and even now her brain was too active for the possibility of rest. So, after dressing and breakfasting, she accompanied her husband to the great Parisian auction rooms to look at the Rochejaquelin collection.
The inspection of the pictures lasted over two hours. Julian Wyllard was an ardent connoisseur, and his wife sympathised with him in his love of art. Together they criticised the gems of the collection, and stood in silent admiration before the famous Raffaelle.
"It will fetch thousands," said Wyllard.
"Why not buy it, if you really wish to possess it?" said Dora. "Why should we hoard our money? There is no one to come after us. Penmorval may be a show place when you and I are gone, and your picture-gallery will give pleasure to hundreds of tourists."
"Ah, there is the rub," sighed her husband, conscious of the latent melancholy in his wife's speech. "'No son of mine succeeding.' When you and I are gone there will be no one to care for Penmorval—no one to cherish your garden, and say, 'My mother planted these roses, or planned these walks'—no one to treasure the pictures I have collected, for any reason except their intrinsic value."
"Will you take me to see the house in which you lived and worked?" asked Dora, as they were leaving the auction-room.
"My dear Dora, I can show you the outside of that historic spot," answered her husband lightly; "but I doubt if I can introduce you to the rooms in which I worked. The present occupant may not be inclined to sympathise with your hero-worship.".
"O, but I should so like to see those rooms, and I am sure if the occupier is a gentleman, he will not refuse such a natural request. Here comes Mr. Heathcote," she exclaimed, as they turned into the Boulevard.
"I was coming to the Hôtel Drouot in quest of you," said Heathcote, as they shook hands. "I called at your hotel, and was told you had gone to the auction-room. How well you are looking, Mrs. Wyllard—as if Paris agreed with you!"
"Your letter took a weight off my mind," she said. "And now I hope you will be kind to Bothwell and Hilda, and not insist upon too long an engagement."
"It seems to me that Bothwell and Hilda have taken their lives into their own hands, and don't want anybody's kindness," he answered. "I have had a tremendous letter from Hilda, telling me her lover's plans. They are the most independent young people I ever heard of. And pray what brings you to Paris? Are you going on anywhere?"
"No, we have only come to look at the Rochejaquelin pictures," answered Wyllard. "I have two or three business calls to make in the neighbourhood of the Bourse. Wyllard & Morrison have still some dealings in Paris."
"And I am going to look at my husband's old apartments," said Dora. "I have never stayed in Paris since our marriage. My only knowledge of the city dates from the time when I spent a month at Passy with my dear mother. What a happy time it was, and how much we contrived to see! It was in sixty-nine, and people were beginning to talk about war with Germany. How little did any of us think of the ruin that was coming, when we saw the Emperor and Empress driving in the Bois!"
"Come back to the hotel and lunch with us, Heathcote," asked Wyllard.
"A thousand thanks; but I am too Parisian to eat at this hour. I breakfasted at eleven o'clock."
"And we breakfasted less than three hours ago," said Dora. "I am sure we neither of us want luncheon. Let us go and look at your old home, Julian."
"It is not to be called a home, Dora," answered her husband, with a touch of impatience. "A business man's life has only one aspect—hard work. However, if you want to see the offices in which a money-grubber toiled, you shall be gratified. The street is not very far off. Will you walk there with us?" he added, turning to Heathcote.
"Gladly. I am a free man to-day."
"Indeed! Then your criminal investigation, your amateur-detective work is at a standstill for the moment, I conclude?" said Wyllard, with an ill-concealed sneer.
"For the moment, yes," answered the other quietly.
"And you have made some startling discoveries, no doubt, since you crossed the Channel?"
"Yes, my discoveries have been startling; but as they relate to the remote past, rather than to the period of that poor girl's death, they are of no particular value at present."
"The remote past? What do you mean by that?" asked Wyllard.
"Ten years ago."
"May we ask the nature of these discoveries?"
"I'd rather tell you nothing at present. My knowledge is altogether fragmentary. Directly I have reduced it to a definite form—directly I have a clear and consecutive story to tell—you and Mrs. Wyllard shall hear that story. In the mean time I had rather not talk about the case."
"You have all the professional reticence. And I see that you and Distin are working together," said Wyllard.
"How do you mean?"
"We saw your advertisement in yesterday'sTimes".
"How did you know that I had inserted that advertisement?"
"The girl's name was conclusive—Léonie Lemarque: that was the name of the girl who was killed."
"Yes. But I did not think it was known to any one except Distin and myself."
"You mentioned the name in your letter to me," said Dora.
"Did I really? Then it was unconsciously. I meant to have told nothing till I could tell the whole story."
Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard and Heathcote walked on together to a quiet street near the Madeleine, a street of offices and wholesale traders.
The house in which Mr. Wyllard had occupied the ground floor was one of the best in the street, a large stone-fronted house, with a high doorway and carved columns—not so richly decorated as those palatial dwellings of Haussmannised Paris, built during the Second Empire, but a handsome and somewhat florid style of house notwithstanding. It stood at the corner of a narrow court, leading no one cared where. Doubtless to some obscure slum in which the working classes had one of their nooks—those hidden colonies which lurk here and there behind the palaces of great cities.
The ground floor was no longer the home of finance and grave transactions. The house in which Julian Wyllard had schemed and laboured was now occupied by wholesale dealers in foreign goods of all kinds, from china to toys, from travelling-bags to Japanese tea-trays, chinoiseries, unbreakable glass, German lamps, English electro-plate. The house had become one huge bazaar, which a stranger might enter without much ceremony; albeit there is a strict etiquette in such establishments, and no retail purchases were permissible. Only the trade was allowed to buy anything in that dazzling chaos of small wares.
While all the upper floors had been made into warehouses, the lower floor had been in somewise respected. The rooms in which Julian Wyllard had worked were used as offices by Messrs. Blümenlein Brothers, while one of the brothers had made his nest in Julian's old rooms at the back of the offices.
"Upon my word, Dora," said Wyllard, pausing on the threshold of his old abode, "I feel that we are going into this house on a fool's errand. I don't know what excuse to make."
"Why make any excuse at all?" replied his wife. "Leave the whole business to me, Julian. I want to see your old home, and I am determined I will see it. I am not at all afraid of Messrs. Blümenlein."
"In that case I will leave you and Heathcote to manage the matter between you," said Wyllard, with a sudden touch of impatience, of anger even, his wife thought. "I have a business call to make near here. Heathcote will take you back to your hotel."
He turned on his heel, and was gone before Dora could make any objection. Again she had seen that dark look in his face which had so startled and shocked her in the yew-tree arbour. Was it indeed jealousy of her old lover which so changed him? Her pride revolted at the idea of such want of faith in one to whom she had given so much.
She allowed no sign of disquietude to escape her, but went quietly into the office of Messrs. Blümenlein, followed by Heathcote.
"Pardon me for intruding upon you, gentlemen," she said in French to the two clerks who were seated at a desk in this outer room. "These offices were some years ago occupied by my husband, and I should esteem it a favour if you would allow me to see the rooms on this floor."
A middle-aged man, who was standing near a window looking through some papers, turned at the sound of her voice, and came over to her.
"With pleasure, Madame," he said. "Have I he honour of speaking to Mrs. Wyllard?"
"Yes, Monsieur, I am Mrs. Wyllard. You were my husband's immediate successor in these rooms, I conclude?"
"Yes, Madame, there was no other occupation. My brother and I bought this house in 'seventy-one, almost immediately after the war; but Mr. Wyllard was the occupant of this floor for some years after we were in possession."
"Exactly two years," said a second Mr. Blümenlein, appearing from an inner room. "Is it possible that Madame has not before seen these rooms, in which her distinguished husband transacted so much important business?"
"No, Monsieur, this is my first visit to Paris since my marriage. I am much interested in seeing these rooms."
"It will be an honour and a pleasure to us to show them," said the elder of the two brothers. "Gustav there, my younger brother, enjoys the possession of the private apartments almost exactly as Mr. Wyllard left them. He bought the furniture and fittings, pictures, bronzes, everything except the books,en bloc, when Mr. Wyllard gave up his Parisian establishment. Hardly anything has been altered. These offices can have little interest for you, Madame. They are thefacsimileof a thousand other Parisian offices. But the private apartments have a certain individuality. Gustav, show Madame the rooms which were once her husband's home."
There was a touch of German sentimentality about Mr. Blümenlein, in spite of his Parisian training. He was full of sympathy for the affectionate wife. He had lofty ideas about the sanctity of home.
The younger brother, Gustav, opened a padded door, and admitted the two visitors into his bachelor nest.
The first room which they entered was the library, lined from floor to ceiling with book-shelves, and lighted by a large skylight. It was a room that had been built out into a yard. It was furnished with carved oak, in the Henri Deux style, rich, antique, solid. The clock upon the chimney-piece was a gem of mediæval metal-work. The covers of chairs and sofas were of old tapestry, sombre, genuine, artistic.
Adjoining this was thesalonand dining-room in one, plainly furnished in the modern style. The walls were decorated with etchings of the most famous pictures of the Second Empire. It was a small room; an almost severe simplicity was its chief characteristic. Nothing here assuredly of the sybarite or the voluptuary, thought Edward Heathcote, as he contemplated the home of his rival's solitary manhood.
Bedroom and bathroom completed the suite of apartments, and even to these Mrs. Wyllard and her companion were admitted.
The bedroom was spacious, lofty, handsomely furnished in a solid and sombre style. But it was not a cheerful room. It was situated at the back of the house, and its windows, deeply recessed and heavily curtained, derived their light from a narrow court. The lower part of each window was of ground-glass; the upper sashes were violet-tinted, and gave an artificial colour to the daylight. The curtains were of dark-brown damask; the ponderous armchairs and sofa were upholstered in dark-brown velvet.
By the fireplace there was the secrétaire at which Julian Wyllard had worked, the large shaded lamp which had lighted his evening toil. Mr. Blümenlein showed these things with pride. Nothing had been altered.
"I am a man of somewhat studious habits, like Mr. Wyllard," he said, "and I often work late into the night. This room is a delightful room, for none of the noises of Paris penetrate here. The court is very little used after dark—a passing footstep, perhaps, once in half an hour. It is an almost monastic repose."
The bed was in an alcove in a corner, entirely shrouded by brown damask curtains like those which draped the windows.
"There is a door leading into the court, I see," said Heathcote, whose keen eyes had scrutinised every feature of the room.
"What, you have perceived that!" exclaimed Mr. Blümenlein, with marked surprise. "I thought it was quite hidden by the curtains."
"No, the top of the upper hinge is just visible above the curtain-rod."
"Strange! No one ever before noticed that door."
"It is not a secret door, I suppose?" said Heathcote.
"Certainly not. But it has never been used in my time, and I doubt if Mr. Wyllard made much use of it," said Mr. Blümenlein, drawing back the curtain. "The bed stood in his time just where it stands now, with the head against the door."
"The bedstead is light enough to be moved easily if the door were wanted," suggested Heathcote.
It was a small brass bedstead of English make. The voluminous curtains made a kind of tent, independent of the bedstead.
"No doubt it could," replied Blümenlein, "but I fancy it could have been no more wanted in Mr. Wyllard's time than it has been in mine. It may have been made by some former inhabitant of these rooms, who wanted free egress and ingress at any hour of the night, without exciting the curiosity of the porter."
"You conclude, then, that the door was an after-thought," said Heathcote, "and not in the original plan of the house."
"Decidedly. You will see how ruthlessly it has been cut through dado and mouldings. An after-thought evidently."
Mr. Blümenlein pulled aside the bedstead and showed Mr. Heathcote the door. It was a low narrow door, of plain oak, without panelling or ornamentation of any kind. The fastening was a latch-lock, a Bramah, with a small key, and a strong bolt secured the door on the inner side.
"A convenient door, no doubt," said Heathcote, "for a person of secret habits."
Dora looked lingeringly round the room. Its gloom oppressed her. The opaque windows, the tinted light from the upper sashes, the sombre colouring, the heavy furniture—all contributed to that gloomy effect. The only spot of brightness in the room was the writing-table, with its brass fittings, its handsome brass lamp, and large green shade. There her husband sat night after night, when the rest of Paris was gyrating in the whirlpool of fashionable pleasure, light as autumn leaves dancing in the wind. There he had sat brooding, calculating, plotting, striving onward, in the race for wealth. It was for money he had toiled, and to make a great fortune—not for science, or art, or fame—not to be useful or great—only to be rich. It seemed a sordid life to look back upon—a wasted life even—and Dora thought regretfully of those long evenings spent in this gloomy room. The idea of that monastic life had no charm for her. She would rather have heard that her husband had been the light of an intellectual circle—the favourite of fashion even. The picture of these studious nights spent in brooding over the figures in a share-list, the pages of a bank-book, chilled her soul.
And yet, in the maturity of his days, her husband had seemed to her the most generous and high-minded of men, setting but little value upon his wealth, caring nothing for money in the abstract.
"At the least he has known how to use his fortune nobly," she told herself, as she turned to leave that gloomy bedchamber. "I, who was born with good means, can hardly understand the eagerness of a penniless young man to win fortune. It is a foolish idea of mine, after all, that there is anything ignoble in working for riches."
"Well, Mrs. Wyllard, has your hero-worship been satisfied? Have you seen enough of the temple which once enshrined your god?" said Heathcote lightly.
"Yes, I have been very much gratified; and I must thank Mr. Blümenlein for his kindness and consideration."
The merchant protested that he had rarely enjoyed so great a privilege as that which Mrs. Wyllard had afforded him; and with exchange of courtesies they parted, on the threshold of the outer office.
Heathcote and Dora walked to the hotel together. It was not a long walk, and it took them only by crowded streets and busy thoroughfares, where anything like earnest conversation was impossible. And yet Edward Heathcote could but remember that it was the first time they two had walked together since Dora had been his plighted wife. Ah, how cruel a pang it gave him to recall those old days, and to remember all she had been to him, all she might have been, had Fate used him more kindly!
He stole a look at the beautiful face as they walked slowly across the Place Vendôme. Yes, she was no less lovely than of old; her beauty had ripened, not changed. There was a more thoughtful look, there were traces even of care and sorrow; but those indications only heightened the spirituality of the face.
O, what worship, what devotion he could have given her now in the bloom of her womanhood, in the maturity of his manhood—such whole-hearted, thoughtful love as youth can never give! And it was not to be. They were to be apart for ever, they two. They were to be strangers; since this assumption of friendship, to which he had tried to reconcile himself, was, after all, but a mockery. Chivalrous feeling might keep his thoughts pure, his honour unspotted; but in his heart of hearts he loved his first love as passionately as in the days of his youth.
And to-day, for the first time, he had heard her husband address her coldly and curtly, with a touch of anger even.
He was not likely to forget that curt, impatient tone, and the frown that had accentuated it.
"I was very glad to get your letter," she said presently. "Tell me once more with your own lips that you have ceased to suspect my cousin."
"Ceased to suspect would, perhaps, be too strong an expression. But in the discoveries I have made relating to that murdered girl there is certainly nothing that in any way points to Mr. Grahame."
"I wish you would tell me all you have discovered—how near you are to clearing up the mystery."
"I fear I am still very far from that. It is the history of a remote crime which occupies me at the present, and I hope in that history of the past to find the clue to poor Léonie's death. I shall know more in a few days."
"How so?"
"You saw my advertisement in theTimes. If that advertisement be not answered within a week, I shall conclude that the man who was to have met Léonie Lemarque on the morning of July 5th has some part in the guilt of her death."
"And then—"
"And then it will be my business or Mr. Distin's business to find that man."
They were at the door of the hotel by this time, and here Heathcote bade Dora adieu.
"We shall meet again before you leave Paris, I daresay," he said. "If Wyllard wants me he will know where to find me."
"You are not going home yet?"
"No; I am likely to stay here some little time."
"And poor Hilda is longing to have you back at The Spaniards. She will not see Bothwell while you are away. She is bound by the promise you exacted from her. Their future home—everything is in abeyance till you return," pleaded Dora.
"The home must remain in abeyance a little longer. It is hard, no doubt; but when I go back I may be able to give Bothwell some substantial help in the matter of that future home."
"He will need only your sympathy and your advice. He can manage everything else for himself."
"I understand. He has been helped already."
"Bothwell has always been to me as a brother and he can never be poor while I am rich," answered Dora, as they shook hands.
Heathcote walked slowly back to the Boulevard, thinking over this unexpected arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard in Paris. Why had they come? That alleged reason of the picture-sale seemed rather more like an excuse for a journey than a motive. True that Wyllard had been known to go up to London on purpose to attend a sale at Christie & Manson's, and there might, therefore, be nothing extraordinary in his going still further on the same errand. But it was strange that the picture-sale should coincide with Heathcote's presence in Paris. Could it be Dora's eagerness to know the result of his researches that had brought her and her husband to the Hotel Windsor? Was her impatience the motive of the visit?
Hardly, he thought, for he knew the candour of her nature, and he told himself that she would not have misrepresented the reason of her journey. She had told him that the visit was a sudden whim of her husband's, arising out of his passion for art.
Could it be that Julian Wyllard was so deeply interested in the question of Bothwell's guilt or innocence as to make an excuse for being on the scene of the investigation? He had seemed indifferent almost to unkindness. He had wounded his wife's feelings by his coldness upon this question. And now it seemed to Edward Heathcote that his real motive in coming across the Channel must be to watch the case with his own eyes. His manner to-day, when he inquired about Heathcote's progress, had been seemingly careless: but beneath that apparent indifference the lawyer had noted a keen expectancy, an intent watchfulness. Yes, it was something of deeper moment than a picture-sale which had brought Julian Wyllard to Paris, posthaste, at a day's notice. His angry manner to his wife an hour ago had indicated nervous irritation, a mind on the rack.
Yet, looking at the question from a worldly point of view—and Heathcote considered Wyllard essentially a man of the world—there seemed but little reason why he should be deeply concerned as to whether Bothwell was or was not suspected of foul play in the matter of the French girl's death. The evidence against the young man was of far too slight and vague a character to endanger his life or liberty. It was only just enough to cast a cloud upon his reputation; and that his cousin's husband should put himself out of the way on this account seemed to the last degree unlikely. Julian Wyllard's life, judged as Heathcote judged it, was that of a man who had lived exclusively for himself and his own happiness. An excellent husband to a wife whom he adored, a good master, a liberal landlord; yet a man with whom self had ever been paramount.
A week passed. Julian Wyllard attended the sale at the Hôtel Drouot, bought three of the smaller gems of the Rochejaquelin gallery, and allowed the Raffaelle to pass into a national collection. His wife and he had gone about Paris and its environs in the mean while; Dora very happy in revisiting the spots she had admired in her youth.
The week had gone, and there had been no reply to Heathcote's advertisement. But there had been a letter from Joseph Distin.
"The last few days have not been entirely barren in results," he wrote. "Léonie Lemarque's handbag has been found at the Charing Cross Station; it was left in the waiting-room on the morning of the 5th July, immediately after the arrival of the mail train from Dover. The bag is now in my office. It contains some linen, marked L. L., slippers, brush, and comb; but not a document of any kind. Nothing to afford the slightest clue to the girl's business in London. The police have found a hansom-cabman who drove a tall, gentlemanlike man and a French girl from Charing Cross to Paddington Station on the morning of the 5th of July, in time for the Penzance train. They had no luggage. The cabman believes that he should recognise the man if he saw him again, but can give no clear description of his appearance, except that he was a fine-looking man in the prime of life. He talked French to the girl, and the cabman supposes him to have been a Frenchman. He and the girl appeared to be on very good terms. The cabman saw them go into the Paddington Station together, about five minutes before the starting of the train. The photograph of the dead girl has been shown to this cabman, and he has identified it as the likeness of the little French girl he drove in his cab."
This was all the progress that Joseph Distin's agents had made at present. The facts looked dark against the man who had taken Léonie Lemarque from station to station. If he had been innocent of all wrong in relation to that helpless stranger, surely he would have replied to the advertisement; he would have come forward to say what part he had taken in the history of Léonie Lemarque.
Heathcote stopped the first advertisement, and inserted a second worded thus:
"Monsieur Georges, who resided in Paris in the year '71, and for some years previously, or any friend of Monsieur Georges now residing in England, is earnestly requested to communicate with Messrs. Distin & Son, Solicitors, Furnival's Inn."