Wyllard's Weird/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
BOTHWELL BEGINS TO SEE HIS WAY.
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.
"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 adoring Bothwell."
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 unpretentious ménage.
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 suspects you. 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 the Times as 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 coöperation. 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 the coulissiers with 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 the Times supplement, 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's Times."
"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."