The Pit Town Coronet Volume Iii Part 2

"No, duke, not that. I haven't quite sunk to that yet, you know."

"Always _farouche_, dear Miss Warrender, but I apologize," he continued as he gave her his arm.

Perhaps the little hand that rested on it trembled slightly, but Lucy was a Warrender, and plucky; she nodded and bowed in every direction; she smiled and simpered as sweetly as of yore; she sat in the great restaurant at one of the little marble tables and sucked an _orangeade glacee_ through two straws, and then the Duc de la Houspignolle escorted her back to the Hotel de Russie with all respect, where Fanchette anxiously awaited her arrival.

Fanchette didn't ask her mistress how she had prospered, for her gesture as she flaccidly dropped into her lounge-chair told the woman all she wished to know.

"You can go, Fanchette," said Lucy; "if I want anything I'll touch the hand-bell."

The woman yawned, courtesied and departed.

Lucy Warrender opened her writing-case and commenced an affectionate letter to her uncle. In it she said incidentally:

"There are quite a number of people here that we know. The old Duc de la Houspignolle, still quite the old beau; and that dreadful old General Pepper, the man we met at Rome, and who was mixed up in Reginald's affair with poor Barbiche, and Colonel Spurbox. They talk of making up a party to run across to Nice. I think of joining them. If we go we shall leave the day after to-morrow; everything of course depends upon the weather. I----"

Here Lucy Warrender deliberately let her pen fall upon the paper. Then she got up, looked at herself in the gla.s.s and frowned; and then she did a thing she hadn't done for years. She knelt down at her bed-side and said her prayer to heaven, the very prayer she had been accustomed to say as a little child upon her nurse's lap. Then she took a printed receipt of the _Mont de Piete_ for a pair of brilliant solitaire earrings, and burnt it in the flame of the candle.

"No one will miss me," she muttered to herself, "no one, save Maurice Capt, for I have been an income to him, and Georgie, perhaps. Poor Georgie!" she added with a sigh. She never even thought of Lucius; she knew full well that even had the youth known she was his mother, _he_ would a.s.suredly not have missed her.

"I wonder whether the old duke will be there," she continued to herself; "all the English are sure to come. We never miss a funeral; it's one of our sad pleasures," she added with a hollow laugh. Then she took from her dressing-case a dark blue fluted medicine bottle; it was labelled, "The sedative mixture, a teaspoonful for a dose at bedtime.

POISON." The last word had a little special red label all to itself. The bottle was nearly full. Miss Warrender deliberately poured out seven-eighths of its contents into a tumbler, then she recorked the bottle, replaced it in her dressing-case and swallowed the contents of the tumbler at a draught, and then carefully and deliberately washed the gla.s.s and dried it with the towel. Then she sat herself down in the lounge-chair. In ten minutes she dozed; she soon slept peacefully and calmly. In half-an-hour she had ceased to exist.

"On the 23rd inst., at the Hotel de Russie, Monte Carlo, Lucy, the only daughter of the late Colonel George Warrender, of the H. E. I. C.

Service, aged 35, suddenly of heart-disease."

This was the first intimation to Lucy Warrender's friends in London of her sudden death.

"Poor thing!" said Mrs. Charmington, now quite the old woman, "I wonder how she managed that lovely-coloured hair."

CHAPTER III.

AN ANONYMOUS LETTER.

Mrs. Haggard and her husband, both in deep mourning, sat in the special boudoir at Walls End Castle which had been furnished and set apart for his grand-nephew's wife on her first arrival years ago by old Lord Pit Town. Haggard looked pale and weary, and well he might, for he had gone straight to Monte Carlo and had come straight back, stopping only forty-eight hours there, just time enough to lay Lucy Warrender in her grave. He had not gone alone; at his wife's insistance he had taken the young Lucius with him. He had been astonished at the determined manner in which Georgie pressed this arrangement upon him; he yielded, though with a bad grace. When he reached the Hotel de Russie, both he and Lucius had declined to look on the face of the dead woman. Haggard had a long interview with Fanchette, and then he called upon the Commissary of Police. The night before his mother was laid in her grave, Lucius Haggard, unknown to his companion, who was shut up in his room writing, visited the Rooms, won a couple of thousand francs, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

The next day the two men stood by the side of the shallow grave; graves are shallow in Monaco, for the ground is very rocky. A wandering English clergyman, of more than doubtful reputation, gabbled through the service for the burial of the dead. The stones and bits of rock rattled upon the coffin with a hollow sound, for the grave-digger didn't trouble himself much about the feelings of the relatives of the foreign heretic.

"I think my aunt Lucy went off tremendously in the last year," said young Lucius to his companion as they left the cemetery.

"Let her rest, boy, let her rest," was all the answer he got.

There was a sort of grey look of horror about Haggard's face, that the boy put down to grief for the departed. He was a hard-hearted youth, and was frankly surprised that Haggard showed any feeling at all.

The husband and wife, as we have said, sat in Georgie's boudoir. This was what pa.s.sed between them.

"Your cousin seems to have made a nice mess of it," said Haggard. "Why she was penniless."

"Well, that wouldn't much matter, Reginald; she could have written to Coutts' for more."

"Gad, they write me that she drew out the last farthing she had in the world two months ago. And that woman Fanchette, who is a very bad lot indeed, or I'm very much, mistaken, told me she p.a.w.ned her earrings the day before she--died."

Georgie nodded. "I remember them, a pair of large single-stone earrings.

I fancy she must have bought them when she first came into her property.

I saw them quite by chance last summer, for the first time; and when I admired them, she said that she had had them for years, that they had been her first folly and had cost her dear."

"Well, here they are at any rate," said Haggard; "she p.a.w.ned them for seven thousand francs, and I redeemed them after a lot of bother. And that's all that remains. She had spent or gambled away every farthing of the rest. I don't know whether I ought to tell you, Georgie," he continued in a softer tone.

"Tell me, Reginald, tell me what? Did you know?" and the light of love came back into Georgie Haggard's eyes, as she thought that perhaps her careless heartless husband had, from a wish to shield her cousin's honour, silently and deliberately allowed poor Lucy's b.a.s.t.a.r.d child to be fathered upon him. But the light quickly faded, and the eyes were suffused with tears, as her husband answered coa.r.s.ely:

"Did I know what? I know this--she poisoned herself, there's not a doubt of that."

And then, without the slightest attempt to soften the ghastly details, he brutally told his wife the particulars of her cousin's end.

"They manage these things much better there than here," he said. "Twelve Tom Fools are not called upon to sit in one's dining room and give their opinion. The Commissary of Police had the whole matter cut and dried. I saw the official doctor too--a hungry fellow that. Of course I had to bribe the pair of them. Lucy Warrender poisoned herself, Georgie. She did it artfully enough, with chloral. Why, they showed me the bottle; she had swallowed enough to kill half-a-dozen women. What a fool she was, when one comes to think of it! Why, she could have married well any number of times, if she'd liked; she could have had Spunyarn years and years ago, if she had chosen to lift her finger. What a fool she was!"

Yes, that was her epitaph: "What a fool she was!" You couldn't have put it more tersely and more truly, Reginald Haggard. What a thoughtless wicked fool she had been; she had wrecked her own life and her cousin's by her wicked folly. "What a fool she was!"

I verily believe that if Haggard had shown one spark of feeling in the matter of poor Lucy's death, his wife would have spoken, after a silence of twenty years; but his last words had checked the impulse, and Georgie merely nodded, while the tears rolled down her cheeks, as she silently accepted the justice of her husband's verdict.

As she sat and pondered over her cousin's sorry ending, she felt that the least she could do for the dead girl was still to jealously guard her miserable secret.

While the elders were talking, the two young men were walking in the great avenue that for nearly half a mile runs from the princ.i.p.al entrance of the park to the big hall door of Walls End Castle. Lucius had much to tell; he was full of the journey, and he went over all the details of the funeral to the younger man.

"Battling good place, that Hotel de Russie; they gave us an uncommonly good dinner, and ortolans. I didn't think much of them, but the governor was very enthusiastic, and ordered them again for breakfast. By Jove!

George," continued the young fellow, "he's so fond of them that I believe if mother, or even I, were to die to-morrow, the governor would order ortolans for breakfast if he could get them. I say, George," he added, "I'm in funds, and I don't mind doing the generous thing, if you like. I know you're hard up--beastly hard up--you always are. I'll make you a present of a pony, George."

Young George Haggard smiled, and took the five-and-twenty pounds, in crisp bank notes, which his father's heir produced from his waistcoat pocket. "I'll take it as a loan, Lucius," he said with a little laugh, "to be repaid when I become Lord Chancellor."

"All right, my boy," said the other. "Now if you can keep a secret, I'll tell you how I got it." And then he went off into a long description of the great Temple of Fortune on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. How he had retired early, on the plea of fatigue; how he had escaped undiscovered to the Rooms; how he had backed his luck and won his money.

"Eighty pounds wasn't bad for a first attempt, you know," he said. "I saw old Pepper," he continued, "in the thick of it; but I had to keep dark, you know, for I shouldn't have cared for the old boy to see me there."

George still held his brother's welcome present in his hand, and the boy twisted the notes nervously in his fingers. He hesitated, but not for long.

"Don't be offended, Lucius," he said; "I think I'd rather not take it, if you don't mind."

"As you please, my boy," said the other, holding out his hand willingly enough. "As they say in the schools, _Non olet_."

"It does to me, Lucius--it does to me."

The young men continued their walk up and down the great aisle of old beech trees, and Lucius returned to his ecstatic description of the scene in the Halls of Dazzling Delight; but I don't think the other young fellow heard him, for he was thinking of the dead woman who was sleeping in her lonely grave.

Lucky Lucy! dead a week, and you have two human beings who still mourn your loss.

"I always thought you were a fool, George; but you really are a bigger fool than even I ever took you to be. I actually hand you five-and-twenty pounds, which you decline with thanks. I don't understand you, George. You neglect your opportunities. Why don't you make up to the old man, or cultivate a taste for art, as I do; I mean to make art pay, my boy."