Wyllard's Weird/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI.
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND.
To be on the very threshold of Paradise, within the sound of celestial birds and the perfume of celestial flowers, to be on the point of entering the blissful place, with heart full of hope and pride, and to have the gates suddenly slammed in one's face, and to hear the voice of the angel at the gate crying "Ye cannot enter now," would be perhaps to feel as Bothwell Grahame felt after he had read and read again that calmly worded letter in which Hilda Heathcote renounced him and his love.
His senses staggered under the force of the blow. He cursed Valeria Harborough in the rage of his tortured heart. This was her work. This was the work of that serpent who had beguiled him to forfeit good faith and honour in the past, and who wanted to ruin his life in the present insignificance, as a well-born widow with so many thousands a year.
The infatuation which had once held him was a thing of the past, the glamour was over, the light extinguished. He looked back and wondered that he could have ever been so enslaved, so poor a creature as to worship a thoroughly artificial woman.
His first feeling about Hilda after reading her letter was one of anger. He told himself that this renunciation had another motive than that expressed in the letter. It was not in order to give him back to Lady Valeria that his betrothed revoked her promise. It was in order that she herself might escape from an engagement which for some secret reason had become distasteful to her.
"She draws back at the eleventh hour," he said to himself. "Perhaps even at the last she has begun to doubt me—to believe that I may be after all the miscreant my kindly neighbours thought me, the murderer of a helpless girl. Who knows? That idea was rooted in her brother's mind at the time. It may have transferred itself to her mind when she found herself on the eve of marriage with a suspected man. Women are given to curious fancies and caprices; and she—she whom I thought so brave, so noble, so straight—she too may have her crooked moments, her waverings, and unstableness, like the rest of her sex."
He read the letter again—tried to project his mind into the mind of the writer, to look behind the words, as it were, and by sheer intensity of thinking to get at the hidden meaning between those lines. No, she was not the unstable being he had been inclined to think her in his first agony of wounded feeling. No—a thousand times no. This letter of hers had been written in all simplicity, in all honesty. She gave him up to another, believing that his happiness lay that way. And it was Valeria who had done this thing—Valeria who had come between him and happiness. In his savage anger he felt inclined to rush off to Plymouth, to lie in wait for that old idol of his—that false goddess with feet of basest clay—to insult her before the face of society, to put some public inextinguishable slight upon her.
She was a woman, exempt in her feebleness; and he could do nothing except rage impotently at the thought of her iniquity, gnash his teeth at that inexcusable foolishness of his past life which had made him her slave.
Her slave? No, not her slave; that he would never be. Her victim, perhaps, yes. She might blast his hopes in their fulness; she might ruin his life; but she should never bend his neck to the yoke.
"Her money, her influence, my position as her husband! Are those the baits with which she tempts me to her net?" he said to himself. "How little she knows me! how little she knows the value of a true woman when weighed against a false one! My true love is more to me than an empress. Millions would not buy my allegiance to her."
He went to the inn stables where Glencoe was at livery, and saddled the powerful beast with his own hands, in his eagerness to be on the way to Bodmin. Glencoe had enjoyed a day of leisure and meditation in a very dark stable, and he left the little village of Trevena in a series of buck-jumps, arching his vigorous back and sniffing the ground with his quivering nostrils, shying ferociously at every stray pig, and standing up on end at the vision of a donkey, until the corrective influence of the spur brought him to a better state of mind, whereupon he collected himself, and settled into a grand rhythmical trot.
The hunter was white with dust and foam by the time Bothwell rode him into the stable-yard at The Spaniards, where nothing but disappointment awaited him. He heard that Miss Heathcote had left home early on the previous morning. One of the lads had taken her portmanteau to Bodmin Road, and she had walked there alone, in time for the eight-o'clock train for Plymouth. She had taken a ticket for Plymouth, the boy believed. Mr. Heathcote had not yet returned from France. There was nobody at home except Miss Meyerstein and the little girls.
Bothwell asked to see Miss Meyerstein, and was shown into the drawing-room, where that worthy woman soon came to him, full of trepidation. Her eyelids were swollen with weeping, and her cheeks were pallid with care.
"Mr. Heathcote may think it my fault," she said. "I have telegraphed to him; but there has been no answer yet."
"Do you know where Miss Heathcote was going when she left this house?"
"I haven't the faintest idea. All I know is what the boy told me. I have tried to make the best of things to the servants, for I don't want them to suppose that Hilda was running away; but they must have their own ideas about it, knowing as they do that she was going to be married next Tuesday."
"Never mind the servants," said Bothwell impatiently. "Let them think what they please. But have you no idea where she would be likely to go—to what friend, in what direction? She cannot have so many friends from whom to choose in such a crisis. She would go to the house where she was most sure of a welcome, where she would know that her secret would be kept. What friends has she in Plymouth?"
"None. She never went to Plymouth except for shopping, sight-seeing, concerts, or something in that way, with her brother, or with me. She knows no one in Plymouth except her old singing mistress."
"She may have gone to her," said Bothwell eagerly.
"Hardly likely. Mdlle. Duprez lives in two rooms. Hilda would scarcely ask for hospitality there."
"I don't know. She is very fond of Mdlle. Duprez. I have heard her say so. That is a clue, at any rate. I shall go to Mdlle. Duprez this afternoon. I must walk across to Penmorval and see my cousin first. She may know more of Hilda's plans than you do."
"That is very likely. Mrs. Wyllard is Hilda's most intimate friend."
"There was a lady came to call upon Miss Heathcote a few days ago," said Bothwell. "Did you happen to see that lady?"
"I did not," answered the Fräulein, looking at him curiously. "Yet I can but think that lady had something to do with Hilda's strange conduct. She is an old friend of yours, I believe—Lady Valeria Harborough."
"Yes, I have known her for some years. Was she long with Hilda?"
"She was closeted with her for at least an hour, and from that time to this I have not seen Hilda's face. She went to her room soon after Lady Valeria left. She excused herself from appearing at dinner on account of a headache, and when I went to her door later in the evening she refused to let me in, and I could hear from her voice that she had been crying. I went to her room again at seven o'clock next morning, for my mind had been uneasy about her all night; but she was gone. I found two letters, one for Mr. Heathcote, and one for me."
"Would you be kind enough to show me the letter she wrote to you?"
The Fräulein reflected for a few moments, being an eminently cautious person, and then produced Hilda's note from her pocket-book.
"I do not think there can be any harm in showing it to you," she said. "There is so little in it."
The letter ran thus:
"An old desire of her heart," said Bothwell slowly, staring at the letter, with the keenest mortification expressed in his countenance.
That cheerfulness which Hilda had assumed in her letter to the governess smote her lover to the heart. A man's mind is not subtle enough to cope with the subtleties of a woman's conduct. Hilda's chief aim in writing that letter had been to hoodwink the Fräulein, to satisfy her with the assurance that she, Hilda, was going away from home in tranquil spirits and with hopeful views of the future. Bothwell saw in this cheery letter the evidence of a stony heart, a heart that had never loved him.
"'An old desire of her heart,'" he repeated, with a helpless air. "What can that mean?"
"I haven't a notion," replied the Fräulein, reflecting his helplessness upon her own commonplace countenance, "unless it were that she has an idea of going on the stage. So many girls are mad about the stage nowadays. And Hilda is so pretty. I know when we had private theatricals here last Christmas for the twins' juvenile party, everybody was in raptures with Hilda's acting. People told her she would make a great sensation if she were to appear in London."
"People are a parcel of idiots!" cried Bothwell savagely. "Yes, I remember the theatricals. I was at the party, you know; and there was a cub who made love to Hilda. Yes, I remember."
The cub in question was the eldest son of a neighbouring landowner, and heir to a fine estate; but Bothwell had looked on the innocent lad with abhorrence, even in those early days when his own attachment to Hilda had been in its dawn.
"No, she would not think of going on the stage," said Bothwell, after a pause, during which he had paced up and down the room two or three times in an agitated way; "that is impossible. She would not be mad enough for that. There must be something else. The desire of her heart. What can it mean?"
The Fräulein could not offer any suggestion, except that idea of the stage. "She is so passionately fond of Shakespeare," she said. "I have heard her recite the whole of Juliet and Portia without faltering. She has such a memory. I shouldn't be surprised if she were to come out as Juliet at Covent Garden next week."
Miss Meyerstein's sole knowledge of the London stage was derived from biographies of the Kembles and their contemporaries. She believed in the two patent theatres as existing facts; and she thought that Shakespearean débutantes were appearing and taking the town by storm periodically all the year round.
"I must go to Plymouth by the five-o'clock train," said Bothwell hurriedly. "Will you kindly let my horse stay in your stables and be looked after till to-morrow morning, Miss Meyerstein? I rode him over here at a rather unmerciful rate, and he'll be all the better for a rest. I shall walk to Penmorval, and get myself driven from there to the station. Good-bye."
He had gone before the Fräulein could answer him; but that good-natured person rang the bell and requested that Mr. Grahame's horse might be taken care of for the night, and that anything he required might be given to him.
Bothwell found his cousin full of sympathy, but was unable to give him any advice or assistance, as Miss Meyerstein had been. To Dora he opened his heart fully, showing her Hilda's letter, and breaking out every now and then into angry denunciations of Lady Valeria.
"Hush, Bothwell, don't be so violent," pleaded Dora, putting her hand to his lips. "I agree with you that it was a wicked thing for Lady Valeria to do—to put forward her own weakness in the past and your wrong-doing as a claim upon you in the present. I can understand poor Hilda's conduct. She was only too ready to believe that you must naturally care more for Lady Valeria than for her."
"Help me to find her, Dora. That is all I want. I will soon teach her which it is I love best. But I don't believe she really cared for me. She had some other fancy—some other dream."
"No, Bothwell, no."
"I have seen it in her own handwriting," said Bothwell moodily; and then he told his cousin of that letter which Hilda had written to the Fräulein, and that curious phrase about an old desire of her heart.