Mount Royal Volume Iii Part 24

"When he reads that, I shall be half-way to Launceston," he said, as Christabel gave him back the letter.

"I am deeply grateful to you, and now good-bye," she said, gravely, offering him her hand. He pressed the cold slim hand in his, and gently raised it to his lips.

"You have used me very badly, but I shall love and honour you to the end of my days," he said, as Christabel left him.

Jessie was following, but de Cazalet stopped her on the threshold.

"Come," he said, "you must give me the clue to this mystery. Surely you were in it--you, who know her so well, must have known something of this?"

"I knew knowing. I watched her with fear and wonder. After--after Mr.

Hamleigh's death--she was very ill--mentally ill; she sank into a kind of apathy--not madness--but terribly near the confines of madness. Then, suddenly, her spirits seemed to revive--she became eager for movement, amus.e.m.e.nt--an utterly different creature from her former self. She and I, who had been like sisters, seemed ever so far apart. I could not understand this new phase of her character. For a whole year she has been unlike herself--a terrible year. Thank G.o.d this morning I have seen the old Christabel again."

Half an hour afterwards the Baron's dog-cart drove out of the yard, and half an hour after his departure the Baron's letter was delivered to Leonard Tregonell, who muttered an oath as he finished reading it, and then handed it to his faithful Jack.

"What do you say to that?" he asked.

"By Jove, I knew Mrs. T---- was straight," answered the Captain, in his unsophisticated phraseology. "But it was a shabby trick to play you all the same. I daresay Mop and Dop were in it. Those girls are always ready for larks."

Leonard muttered something the reverse of polite about Dop and Mop, and went straight to the stable-yard, where he cancelled his order for the trap which was to have conveyed him to Trebarwith sands, and where he heard of the Baron's departure for Launceston.

Mystified and angry, he went straight upstairs to his wife's room. All barriers were broken down now. All reticence was at an end. Plainest words, straightest measures, befitted the present state of things.

Christabel was on her knees in a recess near her bed--a recess which held a little table, with her devotional books and a prie-dieu chair. A beautiful head of the Salvator Mundi, painted on china at Munich, gave beauty and sanct.i.ty to this little oratory. She was kneeling on the prie-dieu, her arms folded on the purple velvet cushion, her head leaning forward on the folded arms, in an att.i.tude of prostration and self-abandonment, her hair falling loosely over her white dressing gown.

She rose at Leonard's entrance, and confronted him, a ghostlike figure, deadly pale.

"Your lover has given me the slip," he said, roughly; "why didn't you go with him? You mean to go, I have no doubt. You have both made your plans to that end--but you want to sneak away--to get clear of this country, perhaps, before people have found out what you are. Women of your stamp don't mind what scandal they create, but they like to be out of the row."

"You are mistaken," his wife answered, coldly, unmoved by his anger, as she had ever been untouched by his love. "The man who left here this morning was never my lover--never could have been, had he and I lived under the same roof for years. But I intended him for the avenger of that one man whom I did love, with all my heart and soul--the man you killed."

"What do you mean?" faltered Leonard, with a dull grey shade creeping over his face.

It had been in his mind for a long time that his secret was suspected by his wife--but this straight, sudden avowal of the fact was not the less a shock to him.

"You know what I mean. Did you not know when you came back to this house that I had fathomed your mystery--that I knew whose hand killed Angus Hamleigh. You did know it, Leonard: you must have known: for you knew that I was not a woman to fling a wife's duty to the winds, without some all-sufficient reason. You knew what kind of wife I had been for four dull, peaceful years--how honestly I had endeavoured to perform the duty which I took upon myself in loving grat.i.tude to your dear mother. Did you believe that I could change all at once--become a heartless, empty-headed lover of pleasure--hold you, my husband, at arm's length--outrage propriety--defy opinion--without a motive so powerful, a purpose so deadly and so dear, that self-abas.e.m.e.nt, loss of good name, counted for nothing with me."

"You are a fool," said Leonard, doggedly. "No one at the inquest so much as hinted at foul play. Why should _you_ suspect any one?"

"For more than one good reason. First, your manner on the night before Angus Hamleigh's death--the words you and he spoke to each other at the door of his room. I asked you then if there were any quarrel between you, and you said no: but even then I did not believe you."

"There was not much love between us. You did not expect that, did you?"

asked her husband savagely.

"You invited him to your house; you treated him as your friend. You had no cause to distrust him or me. You must have known that."

"I knew that you loved him."

"I had been your faithful and obedient wife."

"Faithful and obedient; yes--a man might buy faith and obedience in any market. I knew that other man was master of your heart. Great Heaven, can I forget how I saw you that night, hanging upon his words, all your soul in your eyes."

"We were talking of life and death. It was not his words that thrilled me; but the deep thoughts they stirred within me--thoughts of the great mystery--the life beyond the veil. Do you know what it is to speculate upon the life beyond this life, when you are talking to a man who bears the stamp of death upon his brow, who is as surely devoted to the grave as Socrates was when he talked to his friends in the prison. But why do I talk to you of these things? You cannot understand----"

"No! I am outside the pale, am I not?" sneered Leonard; "made of a different clay from that sickly sentimental worshipper of yours, who turned to you when he had worn himself out in the worship of ballet-girls. I was not half fine enough for you, could not talk of Shakespeare and the musical gla.s.ses. Was it a pleasant sensation for me, do you think, to see you two sentimentalizing and poetizing, day after day--Beethoven here and Byron there, and all the train of maudlin modern versifiers who have made it their chief business to sap the foundations of domestic life."

"Why did you bring him into your house?"

"Why? Can't you guess? Because I wanted to know the utmost and the worst; to watch you two together; to see what venom was left in the old poison; to make sure, if I could, that you were staunch; to put you to the test."

"G.o.d knows I never faltered, throughout that ordeal," said Christabel, solemnly. "And yet you murdered him. You ask me how I know of that murder. Shall I tell you? You were at the Kieve that day; you did not go by the beaten track where the ploughmen must have seen you. No! you crept in by stealth the other way--clambered over the rocks--ah! you start. You wonder how I know that. You tore your coat in the scramble across the arch, and a fragment of the cloth was caught upon a bramble.

I have that sc.r.a.p of cloth, and I have the shooting-jacket from which it was torn, under lock and key in yonder wardrobe. Now, will you deny that you were at the Kieve that day?"

"No. I was there. Hamleigh met me there by appointment. You were right in your suspicion that night. We did quarrel--not about you--but about his treatment of that Vandeleur girl. I thought he had led her on--flirted with her--fooled her----"

"You thought," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Christabel, with ineffable scorn.

"Well, I told him so, at any rate; told him that he would not have dared to treat any woman so scurvily, with her brother and her brother's friend standing by, if the good old wholesome code of honour had not gone out of fashion. I told him that forty years ago, in the duelling age, men had been shot for a smaller offence against good feeling; and then he rounded on me, and asked me if I wanted to shoot him; if I was trying to provoke a quarrel; and then--I hardly know how the thing came about--it was agreed that we should meet at the Kieve at nine o'clock next morning, both equipped as if for woodc.o.c.k shooting--game-bag, dogs, and all, our guns loaded with swan-shot, and that we should settle our differences face to face, in that quiet hollow, without witnesses. If either of us dropped, the thing would seem an accident, and would entail no evil consequences upon the survivor. If one of us were only wounded, why----"

"But you did not mean that," interrupted Christabel, with flashing eyes, "you meant your shot to be fatal."

"It was fatal," muttered Leonard. "Never mind what I meant. G.o.d knows how I felt when it was over, and that man was lying dead on the other side of the bridge. I had seen many a n.o.ble beast, with something almost human in the look of him, go down before my gun; but I had never shot a man before. Who could have thought there would have been so much difference?"

Christabel clasped her hands over her face, and drew back with an involuntary recoil, as if all the horror of that dreadful scene were being at this moment enacted before her eyes. Never had the thought of Angus Hamleigh's fate been out of her mind in all the year that was ended to-day--this day--the anniversary of his death. The image of that deed had been ever before her mental vision, beckoning her and guiding her along the pathway of revenge--a lurid light.

"You murdered him," she said, in low, steadfast tones. "You brought him to this house with evil intent--yes, with your mind full of hatred and malice towards him. You acted the traitor's base, hypocritical part, smiling at him and pretending friendship, while in your soul you meant murder. And then, under this pitiful mockery of a duel--a duel with a man who had never injured you, who had no resentment against you--a duel upon the shallowest, most preposterous pretence--you kill your friend and your guest--you kill him in a lonely place, with none of the safeguards of ordinary duelling; and you have not the manhood to stand up before your fellow-men, and say, 'I did it.'"

"Shall I go and tell them now?" asked Leonard, his white lips tremulous with impotent rage. "They would hang me, most likely. Perhaps that is what you want."

"No, I never wanted that," answered Christabel. "For our boy's sake, for the honour of your dead mother's name, I would have saved you from a shameful death. But I wanted your life--a life for a life. That is why I tried to provoke your jealousy--why I planned that scene with the Baron yesterday. I knew that in a duel between you and him the chances were all in his favour. I had seen and heard of his skill. You fell easily into the trap I laid for you. I was behind the bushes when you challenged de Cazalet."

"It was a plot then. You had been plotting my death all that time. Your songs and dances, and games and folly, all meant the same thing."

"Yes, I plotted your death as you did Angus Hamleigh's," answered Christabel, slowly, deliberately, with steady eyes fixed on her husband's face; "only I relented at the eleventh hour. You did not."

Leonard stared at her in dumb amazement. This new aspect of his wife's character paralyzed his thinking powers, which had never been vigorous.

He felt as if, in the midst of a smooth summer sea, he had found himself suddenly face to face with that huge wave known on this wild northern coast, which, generated by some mysterious power in the wide Atlantic, rolls on its deadly course in overwhelming might; engulfing many a craft which but a minute before was riding gaily on a summer sea.

"Yes, you have cause to look at me with horror in your eyes," said Christabel. "I have steeped my soul in sin; I have plotted your death.

In the purpose and pursuit of my life I have been a murderer. It is G.o.d's mercy that held me back from that black gulf. What gain would your death have been to your victim? Would he have slept more peacefully in his grave, or have awakened happier on the Judgment Day? If he had consciousness and knowledge in that dim mysterious world, he would have been sorry for the ruin of my soul--sorry for Satan's power over the woman he once loved. Last night, kneeling on his grave, these thoughts came into my mind for the first time. I think it was the fact of being near him--almost as if there was some sympathy between the living and the dead. Leonard, I know how wicked I have been. G.o.d pity and pardon me, and make me a worthy mother for my boy. For you and me there can be nothing but lifelong parting."

"Well, yes, I suppose there would not be much chance of comfort or union for us, after what has happened," said Leonard, moodily; "ours is hardly a case in which to kiss again with tears, as your song says. I must be content to go my way, and let you go yours. It is a pity we ever married; but that was my fault, I suppose. Have you any particular views as to your future? I shall not molest you; but I should be glad to know that the lady who bears my name is leading a reputable life."

"I shall live with my son--for my son. You need have no fear that I shall make myself a conspicuous person in the world. I have done with life, except for him. I care very little where I live: if you want Mount Royal for yourself, I can have the old house at Penlee made comfortable for Jessie Bridgeman and me. I daresay I can be as happy at Penlee as here."

"I don't want this house. I detest it. Do you suppose I am going to waste my life in England--or in Europe? Jack and I can start on our travels again. The world is wide enough; there are two continents on which I have never set foot. I shall start for Calcutta to-morrow, if I can, and explore the whole of India before I turn my face westwards again. I think we understand each other fully, now. Stay, there is one thing: I am to see my son when, and as often as I please, I suppose."

"I will not interfere with your rights as a father."

"I am glad of that. And now I suppose there is no more to be said. I leave your life, my honour, in your own keeping. Good-bye."