The Baronet's Bride Part 51

"It is strange, but no less true than strange. I have never seen or heard of Mr. Parmalee since the afternoon preceding that fatal night."

"How did you see him then?"

"He had been up to London for a couple of days on business connected with my lady; he had returned that afternoon with another person; he sent for me to inform my lady. I met and spoke to him on the street, just beyond the Blue Bell Inn."

"What had he to say to you?"

"Very little. He told me to tell my lady to meet him precisely at midnight, on the stone terrace. Before midnight the murder was done.

What became of him, why he did not keep his appointment, I do not know.

He left the inn very late, paid his score, and has never been seen or heard of since.

"Had he any interest in Lady Kingsland's death?"

"On the contrary, all his interest lay in her remaining alive. While she lived, he held a secret which she intended to pay him well to keep.

Her death blights all his pecuniary prospects, and Mr. Parmalee loved money."

"Miss Silver, who was the female who accompanied Mr. Parmalee from London, and who quitted the Blue Bell Inn with him late on the night of the tenth?"

Again Sybilla hesitated, looked down, and seemed confused.

"It is not necessary, is it?" said she, pleadingly. "I had rather not tell. It--it is connected with the secret, and I am bound by a promise----"

"Which I think we must persuade you to break," interrupted the debonair attorney. "I think this secret will throw a light on the matter, and we must have it. Extreme cases require extreme measures, my dear young lady. Throw aside your honorable scruples, break your promise, and tell us this secret which has caused a murder."

Sybilla Silver looked from judge to jury, from counsel to counsel, and clasped her hands.

"Don't ask me!" she cried--"oh, pray, don't ask me to tell this!"

"But we must--it is essential--we must have it, Miss Silver. Come, take courage. It can do no harm now, you know--the poor lady is dead.

And first--to plunge into the heart of it at once--tell us who was the mysterious lady with Mr. Parmalee?"

The hour of Sybilla's triumph had come. She lifted her black eyes, glittering with livid flame, and shot a quick, sidelong glance at the prisoner. Awfully white, awfully calm, he sat like a man of stone, awaiting to hear what would cost him his life.

"Who was she?" the lawyer repeated.

Sybilla turned toward him and answered, in a voice plainly audible the length and breadth of the, long room:

"She called herself Mrs. Denover. Mr. Parmalee called her his sister.

Both were false. She was Captain Harold Hunsden's divorced wife, Lady Kingsland's mother, and a lost, degraded outcast!"

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

FOUND GUILTY.

There was the silence of death. Men looked blankly in each other's faces, then at the prisoner. With an awfully corpse-like face, and wild, dilated eyes, he sat staring at the witness--struck dumb.

The silence was broken by the lawyer.

"This is a very extraordinary statement, Miss Silver," he said. "Are you quite certain of its truth? It is an understood thing that the late Captain Hunsden was a widower."

"He was nothing of the sort. It suited his purpose to be thought so.

Captain Hunsden was a very proud man. It is scarcely likely he would announce his bitter shame to the world."

"And his daughter was cognizant of these facts?"

"Only from the night of her father's death. On that night he revealed to her the truth, under a solemn oath of secrecy. Previous to that she had believed her mother dead. That death-bed oath was the cause of all the trouble between Sir Everard and his wife. Lady Kingsland would have died rather than break it."

She glanced again--swift, keen, sidelong, a glance of diabolical triumph--at the prisoner. But he did not see it, he only heard the words--the words that seemed burning to the core of his heart.

This, then, was the secret, and the wife he had loved and doubted and scorned had been true to him as truth itself; and now he knew her worth and purity and high honor when it was too late.

"How came Mr. Parmalee to be possessed of the secret? Was he a relative?"

"No. He learned the story by the merest accident. He left New York for England in his professional capacity as photographic artist, on speculation. On board the steamer was a woman--a steerage pa.s.senger--poor, ill, friendless, and alone. He had a kindly heart, it appears, under his pa.s.sion for money-making, and when this woman--this Mrs. Denover--fell ill, he nursed her as a son might. One night, when she thought herself dying, she called him to her bedside and told him her story."

Clear and sweet Sybilla Silver's voice rang from end to end, each word cutting mercilessly through the unhappy prisoner's very soul.

"Her maiden name had been Maria Denover, and she was a native of New York City. At the age of eighteen an English officer met her while on a visit to Niagara, fell desperately in love with her, and married her out of hand.

"Even at that early age she was utterly lost and abandoned; and she only married Captain Hunsden in a fit of mad desperation and rage because John Thornd.y.k.e, her lover, scornfully refused to make her his wife.

"Captain Hunsden took her with him to Gibraltar, where his regiment was stationed, serenely unconscious of his terrible disgrace. One year after a daughter was born, but neither husband nor child could win this woman from the man she pa.s.sionately loved.

"She urged her husband to take her back to New York to see her friends; she pleaded with a vehemence he could not resist, and in an evil hour he obeyed.

"Again she met her lover. Three weeks after the wronged husband and all the world knew the revolting story of her degradation. She had fled with Thornd.y.k.e."

Sybilla paused to let her words take effect. Then she slowly went on:

"There was a divorce, of course; the matter was hushed up as much as possible; Captain Hunsden went back to his regiment a broken-hearted man.

"Two years after he sailed for England, but not to remain. How he wandered over the world, his daughter accompanying him, from that time until he returned to Hunsden Hall, every one knows. But during all that time he never heard one word of or from his lost wife.

"She remained with Thornd.y.k.e--half starved, brutally beaten, horribly ill-used--taunted from the first by him, and hated at the last. But she clung to him through all, as women do cling; she had given up the whole world for his sake; she must bear his abuse to the end. And she did, heroically.

"He died--stabbed in a drunken brawl--died with her kneeling by his side, and his last word an oath. He died and was buried, and she was alone in the world as miserable a woman as the wide earth ever held.

"One wish alone was strong within her--to look again upon her child before she died. She had no wish to speak to her, to reveal herself, only to look once more upon her face, then lie down by the road-side and die.

"She knew she was married and living here; Thornd.y.k.e had maliciously kept her _au fait_ of her husband and child. She sold all she possessed but the rags upon her back, and took a steerage pa.s.sage for England.

"That was the story she told Mr. Parmalee. 'You will go to Devonshire,' she said to him; 'you will see my child. Tell her I died humbly praying her forgiveness. She is rich; she will reward you.'

"Mr. Parmalee immediately made up his mind that this sick woman, who had a daughter the wife of a wealthy baronet, was a great deal too valuable, in a pecuniary light, to be allowed 'to go off the hooks,' as he expressed it, thus easily.