Witness to the Deed Part 17

"Hi! What a while you've been."

"What the devil brings you here?" said Barron.

"To find you, of course," said the man sourly. "Thought you'd be there."

Barron looked quickly toward Sir Mark's house, turned, and said sharply:

"What is it?"

"Jump in, and I'll tell you," whispered the man. "Getting hot."

Barron jumped into the cab, which was rapidly driven off after instructions had been given through the trap to the driver, and the next minute it was out of sight.

Meanwhile, Edie had stood listening till she heard the hall door closed, and then turned to where her cousin was gazing thoughtfully at the window, not having moved since Barron left the room.

"Listening to his beloved footsteps, Myra?" said Edie sarcastically.

Myra turned upon her with her eyes flashing, but a smile came upon her lips, and she said:

"Well, Edie, am I to congratulate you, too?"

"What about?" flashed out the girl, bitterly mortified by the position in which she had been placed. "Being made a laughing stock for you?"

"What do you mean, dear?" said Myra, startled by the girl's angry way; but there was no answer, and, full of eagerness now, Myra caught her hands. "Mr Barron said just now that Mr Stratton came to propose for you."

"For me?" cried Edith bitterly. "Absurd!"

"But I always thought he was so attentive to you, dear. I always felt that you were encouraging him."

"Oh, how can people be so stupidly blind!" cried Edie, s.n.a.t.c.hing herself away. "It is ridiculous."

"But, Edie, he was always with you. When he came here, or we met him and his friend at auntie's--"

"Leave his friend alone, please," raged the girl. Then, trembling at her sudden outburst, she continued seriously:

"Always with me! Of course he was: to sit and pour into my ears praises of you; to talk about your playing and singing, and ask my opinion of this and that which you had said and done, till I was sick of the man.

Do you hear? Sick of him!"

A mist began to form before Myra's eyes, gradually shutting her in as she sank back in her chair, till all around was darkness, and she could not see the unwonted excitement of her cousin, who, with her fingers tightly enlaced, kept on moving from place to place, and talking rapidly.

But there was a bright light beginning to flash out in Myra's inner consciousness, and growing moment by moment, till the maiden calm within her breast was agitated by the first breathings--the forerunners of a tempest--and she saw little thoughts of the past, which she had crushed out at once as silly girlish fancies, rising again, and taking solid shape. Looks that had more than once startled her and set her thinking, but suppressed at once as follies, now coming back to be illumined by this wondrous light, till, in the full awakening that had come, she grasped the sides of the chair and began to tremble, as Edie's voice came out from beyond the darkness, in which externals were shrouded, the essence of all coming home to her in one terrible reproach, as she told herself that she had been blind, and that the awakening to the truth had come too late.

"How could you--how could you!" cried Edie in a low voice, full of the emotion which stirred her. "You thought I loved Malcolm? O Myry, as if I should have kept it from you if I had. Like him? Yes, always as the dearest, best fellow I ever met. I didn't mean it, dear. I never was sick of him; but he used to make me angry, because I felt that he almost worshipped you, and was making me a stepping-stone to get nearer. Well, why don't you ask me why I did not speak?"

There was no reply, and Edie went on as if she had been answered.

"Of course I could not say a word. One day I felt sure that he loved you, and would confide in me; the next time we met he was so quiet and strange that I told myself it was all fancy, and that I should be a silly, match-making creature if I said a word. Besides, how could I?

What would uncle, who has been so good to me, have thought if I had seemed to encourage it? And you, all the time, like a horrid, cold, marble statue at an exhibition, with no more heart or care, or else you would have seen."

Edie relieved her feelings by unlacing her fingers, taking out her handkerchief from her pocket and beginning to tear it.

"And now," she went on, "you tell me you believed that he cared for me, and suggest that but for this idea things might have been different.

But they would not have been. You are a hard, cold, heartless creature, Myra. He was too poor for you, and not likely to buy you diamonds and pearls like Mr Barron does. Promise me pearls, would he! Insulting me as he did this morning! Why, I would rather have Malcolm Stratton without a penny than Mr Barron with all the West Indies and East Indies, too, for a portion. Malcolm is worth a hundred millions of him, and I hope you are happy now, for I shouldn't wonder if you've broken the poor fellow's heart."

Myra could bear no more, and turning sharply toward her cousin she stretched out her hands imploringly, as her pale face, with its wild looking, dilated eyes seemed to ask for help. But the look was not seen, for, bursting into a fit of weeping, Edie cried:

"But it's too late now! I hope you'll be happy, dear, and uncle satisfied; but you will repent it, I am sure, for I don't believe you love Mr Barron the slightest bit."

As she spoke those last words she left the room, and Myra was alone with thoughts which grew and swelled till she felt half suffocated, while, like some vibrating, echoing stroke of a distant knell, came the repet.i.tion of those two words, quivering through every nerve and fibre of her being:

"Too late--too late--too late!"

For the bud of love had been lying dormant in her breast, waiting to expand, and it was opening fast now, as she felt, but only to be withered as its petals fell apart.

Hurried on by Barron's impetuous advances, approved as a suitor by her father, her betrothed's courtship had carried all before it. His attentions had pleased her, and she had reproached herself at times after he had complained that she was cold. One evening, when a.s.sailed by doubts of herself, she had appealed to her father and asked him if he wished her to marry Mr Barron, and she recalled his words when she had dreamily said that she did not think she loved him.

"Why, of course I wish it, my darling," he cried; "and as to the love-- oh, that will come. Don't let schoolgirl fancies and romances which you have read influence you, my child. You esteem Mr Barron, do you not?"

She had said that she did, and then let herself subside into a dreamy state, princ.i.p.ally taken up by thoughts of the change, the preparations for that change, and visions of the glorious country--all sunshine, languor, and delights--which Barron never seemed to tire of painting.

But now the awakening had come--now that it was too late!

That night, hollow-eyed, and as if he had risen from a sick bed, Malcolm sat writing in his chambers by the light of his shaded lamp. The old panelled room looked weird and strange, and dark shadows lurked in the corners and were cast by the flickering flames of the fire on his left.

Since his return from the Jerrolds' he had gone through a phase of agony and despair so terrible that his actions, hidden from all within that solitary room, had resembled those of the insane; but at last the calm had come, and after sitting for some time looking his position in the face, he had set to work writing two or three letters, and then commenced one full of instructions to Percy Guest, telling him how to act when he received that letter, asking his forgiveness, and ending by saying:

I cannot face it. You will call me a coward, perhaps, but you would not if you could grasp all. I am perfectly calm now, sensible of the awful responsibilities of my act, but after what I have gone through since I have been here alone to-day I know perfectly well that my reason is failing, and that in a few hours the paroxysm will return, finding me weaker than before. Better the end at once than after a few months' or years' living death, confined among other miserables like myself.

It was my all--my one aim, Guest, for which I toiled so hard, fighting for success. And the good fortune has come in company with a failure so great that the success is nothing.

Good-bye.

He read his letter over as calmly as if it contained memoranda to send to a friend prior to his departure on a short journey. Then, folding it, inclosing it in an envelope, he directed it, and laid it carefully beside the others on the table before sinking back in his chair.

"Is there anything else?" he said quietly.

At that moment the clock on a cabinet rung out the musical chimes of four quarters, and a deeper toned bell sounded the hour.

"Ten," he said, smiling. "Two hours more and then the beginning of a longer day."

He opened a drawer, took out a parchment label, and wrote upon it carefully:

To Edward Brettison, when time is no more for his obliged and grateful friend, Malcolm Stratton.

Rising from his chair he crossed to the cabinet, tied the label to one of the handles of the clock, then opened the door beneath, and laid bare a shelf of bottles, while a penetrating odour of camphor and other gums floated out into the room--a familiar odour to those who study natural history, and preserve specimens of insect or bird life.

He had to move two or three bottles to get at one with a large neck and stopper, which he shook up and loosened several pieces of dull looking white crystal. One of these pieces he turned out on to the table by his letters, hesitated, and jerked out another. Then, setting down the bottle, he crossed the room to where a table-filter stood on a bracket, and returned with the large _carafe_ and a tumbler, which he filled nearly full of water. These two he set down on the table, and taking up one of the lumps of crystal he dropped it into the gla.s.s, taking care that no water should sprinkle over the side.

He held it up to his lamp to see how quickly it would dissolve, set it down again, and dropped in the second piece before beginning to tap the table with his nails, watching the crystalline pieces the while.