Wyllard's Weird/Chapter 31
CHAPTER XXXI.
"ALIKE IS HELL, OR PARADISE, OR HEAVEN."
It was the despairing cry of a woman's breaking heart that came with that low wailing sound from the curtained doorway. Dora had been told of Heathcote's arrival, and had hurried from her dressing-room on the further side of the bedchamber. She had reached the threshold of the morning-room in time to hear Heathcote pronounce the dreadful word "Murder," and she had heard all that followed. She had heard her husband's proclaim himself triply an assassin.
"It is my wife's voice," said Wyllard quietly. "You knew that she was there, perhaps. You wanted her to hear."
"I did not know she was there; but it would have been my duty to tell her all I have discovered. She has lived under a delusion; she has lived under the spell of your consummate hypocrisy. It is only right that she should know the truth. Thank God, she has heard it from your own lips."
"You have not forgotten the day when we were rivals for her love," said Wyllard, with a diabolical sneer. "I won the race, heavily handicapped; and now your turn has come. You have your revenge."
Heathcote was silent. His eyes were fixed upon the figure which appeared against the glowing darkness of the plush curtain, and came slowly, totteringly forward to Wyllard's couch, and sank in a heap beside it. The white, set face, with its look of agony, the widely-opened eyes, pale with horror, haunted him for long after that awful hour. It was he who had brought this agony upon her, he who had unearthed the buried skeleton, he who, going forth from that house to do her bidding, her true knight, her champion, her servant, had come back as the messenger of doom. Was he to blame that Fate had imposed this hateful task upon him? He told himself that he was blameless; but that she would never forgive.
"I congratulate you upon your perseverance and your success," said Wyllard, after a pause. "You have succeeded where all the police of Paris had failed. Was it love for my wife, or hatred for me, that stood in the place of training and experience?"
"It was neither. It was the hand of Fate, the mysterious guiding of Providence, which took me from stage to stage of that horrible story."
"And it was my wife—my redeeming angel—who sent you forth upon your mission, who appealed to your love of the past as a claim on your devotion in the present. There is the irony of Fate in that part of the business," said Wyllard mockingly.
He had always hated Edward Heathcote; he had hated him even in the hour of his own triumph as Dora's accepted lover; hated him because he had once possessed Dora's love, but most of all because he had been worthy of it.
Julian Wyllard's head leaned forward upon his folded arms, and for some minutes there was silence in the room, save for the sound of suppressed sobbing from that kneeling figure by the sick man's couch. The face of the husband and the face of the wife were alike hidden. Dora's head had fallen across her husband's knees, her hands were clasped above the dark coils of her hair, in the self-abandonment of her agony.
Heathcote stood a little way off, feeling as if he were in the presence of the dead. The mystery of those two hidden faces oppressed him. He almost hated himself for this thing which he had done. He felt like an executioner—a man from whom the stern necessity of his craft had exacted a revolting service.
"Julian, is this true?" murmured Dora, after a long silence. "Is all or any part of this dreadful story true?"
Her husband looked up suddenly, as if vivified by the sound of her voice. "What would you think of me if it were all or any of it true?" he asked hoarsely. "Look up, Dora. Let me see your eyes as you answer me. I want to know how I am to stand henceforth in the sight of the woman who once loved me."
She lifted her head, and turned her deathlike face towards him, tearless, but with a look of anguish deeper than he had ever seen before on any human countenance.
That other look, that last look of Léonie Lemarque's, which had haunted him waking or sleeping ever since the 5th of July, had been a look of horrified surprise. But here there was the quiet anguish of a broken heart.
"Who once loved you," she echoed. "Do you think such love as mine can be thrown off like an old gown? Tell me the truth, Julian—it can make no difference to my love."
Wyllard remained for some moments gazing dreamily at the low wood fire opposite his couch, silent, as if looking into the pages of the past.
"Yes, your story is put together very cleverly," he said, "and it is for the most part true. Yes, I am the murderer of Marie Prévol. I am that jealous devil, who in an access of fury destroyed the life that was dearer than his own. It was not that I believed her guilty. No, it was the agonising knowledge that her love had gone from me, in spite of herself—had gone to that younger, brighter, more fascinating lover. I saw the gradual working of the change—saw coldness, dislike even, creeping over her who had once tenderly rewarded my love—saw that my coming was unwelcome, my departure a relief. She, who of old had followed me to the threshold, had hung upon me with sweetest caresses at the moment of parting, now could scarcely conceal her indifference, her growing aversion. I saw all this, and Satan took hold of me. Again and again I was on the verge of unpremeditated murder. My eyes grew dim, veiled by a cloud of blood; but I held my hand before the deed was done. I have had my grip upon her throat—that milk-white throat, which was purer of tint and lovelier of form than that of the Louvre Venus. I have seen the pleading eyes looking into mine, asking me for mercy, and I have fallen at her feet and sobbed like a child. But there came a time when this sullen devil of jealousy and hatred took a firmer hold of me, and then I swore to myself that they should both die. There was no help, no other cure. If she lived, she would leave me for Maucroix. She, the wife I had honoured, would sink into the mistress of a fop and a fribble, to be cast off when his fancy staled. I knew that was inevitable, so I made up my mind, all of a sudden, when I got wind of her intended jaunt to Saint-Germain, from the spy I had employed to watch her. I put my revolver in my pocket, and followed her to the station, disguised by a pair of dark spectacles and a style of dress in which she had never seen me. I stood by the doorway of the waiting-room, and saw her sitting side by side with her favoured lover, they two as happy and as absorbed in each other as children at play in a garden. You know all the rest. Yes, it was I who watched in front of the Henri Quatre, saw those two laughing together in the candle-light: it was I who sprang out of the thicket in the forest and shot them down, one after the other, left them lying there side by side, dead. I had a strange wild feeling of happiness as I rushed away into the depths of the wood—a sense of triumph. I had won my love from her new lover. She had been mine only; and she would be mine now until the end. I had saved her from her own weakness—saved, her from the dishonour which her folly must have made inevitable."
He paused for a few moments, but neither Dora nor Heathcote spoke, and after the briefest silence he went on with his confession.
"I never meant to survive my victims, except just so long as would be necessary to put my affairs in order, and to transfer my securities to England, where those of my own flesh and blood might profit by my fortune. In order to do this I got quietly back to Paris, and began to take up the threads of my business life with a view to closing the book for ever. You know enough of my character and my history to understand that I have always had perfect command over my emotions, and you will therefore believe that I was able to go about my daily business, to mix with my fellow-men, with as serene a manner and countenance as if not a ripple of passion had crossed the stagnant surface of my plodding nature. I had so trained myself that the man of passion and emotions was one being, and the man of business another, a creature totally apart. And now, for a while at least, the man of feeling was dead and buried, and only the money-making automaton remained.
"It happened at that time that a cloud of disaster swept over the Paris Bourse. Had I wound up my affairs at that period, I should have been a heavy loser; and I, to whom the science of finance was a passion, could not submit to losses which I knew how to avoid. So I delayed the settlement of my affairs, and even allowed myself to be tempted into fresh enterprises. Yet scarcely a night passed on which I did not look at my pistols before I lay down to rest, and long for the time when I should feel myself free to end my miserable life."
"And in those days you went frequently to the cemetery, to place your tribute of roses on your victim's grave," said Heathcote.
"It was the only mark of affection I could show to the woman my love had killed," answered Wyllard; "the only token of respect for my wife."
"Your wife?" exclaimed the other. "Then Barbe Girot was right in her supposition. You loved Marie Prévol well enough to marry her."
"I loved her too well to degrade her," answered Wyllard. "It was in the flood-tide of my financial success, when I was almost drunk with fortune, and had not one thought above money-making, that Marie Prévol's face awakened me to a new life. That lovely face—so like yours, Dora—yes, it was the likeness to my good angel of the past that drew me to you, my good angel of the present, my comforter, my better-self. O, but for that second unpremeditated crime, the evil work of a moment's savage passion, I might have gone down to the grave in peace, believing that I had expiated that first murder, atoned for that double bloodshed by the agonies that had gone before and after it. But that last crime wrecked me. It revealed the blackness of my diabolical nature—a nature in which the evil is inherent, the good only the effect of education and surroundings.
"Yes, she was my wife, and I gave her all honour and reverence due to a wife: though it was my caprice, my false pride perhaps, to keep my relations with her a profound secret. I had won my reputation in Paris as the stolid, unemotional Englishman; a man of iron, a creature without passions or human weaknesses, a calculating machine. It was this reputation which had helped most of all to bring me wealth. To be known all at once as the lover and the husband of a beautiful actress would have been social, and might have been financial, ruin. The men who had trusted me with their money to stake on the speculator's wheel of fortune would have withdrawn their confidence. I should have been left to fight single-handed on my own capital, and my own capital, large as it was by this time, was not large enough for my schemes. The Crédit Mauresque was then in the front rank of public favour, and it was generally considered that I was the Crédit Mauresque. Any weakness on my part and the bubble would have burst. So I planned for myself a dual existence. By day I was the cool-headed financier; but when the stars were high and the lamps lighted I was Georges, the American-Parisian, the Eccentric and Bohemian—the friend and entertainer of a little band of choice spirits, journalists, musicians, painters—the lover, husband, slave of Marie Prévol. Ah, Dora, for the first two years of that midnight life there was compensation in it for all the restraints of the day, for the anxiety, the fever, the fret of a speculator's hazardous career.
"Yes, she was my wife. I married her in a village church in the Lake country; a quiet little church half hidden among the hills which encircle Derwentwater—a sweet spot. Do you remember once asking me to take you to the English Lakes, Dora? I had to invent an excuse for refusing. I could not revisit those scenes, even with you."
Again there was silence, broken only by the sound of Dora's weeping. She was still on her knees beside her husband's couch; her hand still clasped his. Not all the horror that had been revealed to her could change her love to hate or scorn. Deepest pity filled her breast. She, to whose nature deeds of violence were altogether alien, could yet enter into and sympathise with the feelings of this sinner, whose fatal passions had sunk him in an abyss of crime. She pitied him, and clung to him, ready with words of comfort whenever such words might be spoken. Even in her silence the very touch of her hand told of consolation and of pity.
"I married my love in that quiet village church—married her under my assumed name of Gustave Georges; but the marriage was sound enough in law, and for me it meant a life-long bond. I had found Marie Prévol pure and innocent in the tainted atmosphere of a Parisian theatre, a creature incapable of guile. I honoured her for that innate purity which was independent of surroundings and circumstances, which had passed unscathed through the fiery-furnace of Bohemian Paris. The first years of our wedded life were full of happiness, steeped in a love which knew no change or diminution. My darling seemed to me, day by day, more adorable, and it may be that the secrecy of my double life, the long hours of severance, the narrow circle in which Marie and I lived when we were together—it may be that these circumstances, and the strangeness of our relations, intensified my passion, lending to our wedded bliss all the charm of mystery and romance. Ah, how sweet were our brief holidays at Biarritz or Pau, our wanderings in picturesque old Spain, far away from the beaten tracks, choosing mostly those places to which the world did not go! So far as it went, that life of ours was a perfect life; and I was fool enough to think that it would last for ever."
He sighed, and sank for some moments into a dreamy silence, his eyes fixed in a vision of that past existence.
"My wife had an intense delight in the theatre, and her successes there. She was never a famous actress; but her beauty had made her the rage. She had a birdlike soprano voice, and a bewitching manner. She was one of those adorable actresses who enchant their audience without ever losing their own individuality. She was always Marie Prévol; but the public wanted her to be nothing else. As I kept her entirely secluded from society for my own reasons, I could not deny her the pleasure of pursuing her profession. It pleased her to earn a handsome salary, to know that she was not entirely dependent on me, to be able to help her mother, who was a harpy, continually taking money from me. So she remained on the stage, to my destruction; for it was there that Maucroix saw her; and it was because she was an actress that he dared to pursue her with attentions which she at first repulsed, but which she afterwards encouraged.
"No, Dora, I will not dwell upon that hideous time, those days and nights of madness and despair. I saw her love going from me. I saw the subtle change from affection to indifference, from indifference to fear, from fear to disgust, and then to horror. She was kind to me still, from a sense of duty, meek, obedient, a gentle yielding wife. But I saw her shiver at my approach; I felt her hand grow cold in mine; I found repulsion instead of warm confiding love. Nor was I allowed long to remain in ignorance as to the cause of the change. A kind friend of mine was also an acquaintance of Maucroix. He informed me of the young man's passion for Marie, of his having sworn to win her at any cost—yes, even at the cost of the coronet which he had the power to bestow upon her. He was independent, rich, able to do as he liked with his life. He was one of the handsomest young men in Paris, and was said to be the most fascinating. And I was a hard-headed man of business, anxious, brain-weary, long past the flush of hopeful youth. Could I wonder that Marie turned from me to her young adorer? I gave her all credit for having struggled against her infatuation, for having been true to her duty as a wife even to the last; but she had ceased to love me, and the day was at hand when the barriers would be broken, when that impassioned woman's heart of hers, that fond impulsive nature, whose every pulse I knew, would yield at a breath, and she whom I worshipped would fall to blackest depths of sin.
"Then, like Othello, I called this deed which I had to do, a sacrifice, and not a murder.
"You have heard the story of my crime from the lips of your friend here. He has unravelled the tangled skein with a wonderful ingenuity. Yes, it was I who laid those roses on my victim's grave. I stayed in Paris long enough to save appearances, the man Georges being supposed to have fled to the utmost ends of the earth. I went about among my fellow-men on the Bourse and in the clubs, and heard them discuss the murder of Marie Prévol. Once I was told, by a man who had met me as Georges, of my likeness to the supposed murderer; but those few chosen friends who had known me as Georges were not men to be met on the Bourse or in financial circles, and I had always eschewed mixed society. My identity with the murderer was never suspected. I saved my fortune, wound up my affairs, and left Paris, as I thought for ever, went forth from that accursed city as I would have gone out of hell. I came back to England with the brand of Cain, not upon my brow, but upon my heart. I wandered in a purposeless fashion from place to place, possessed of a restless devil. I had my office in London, where I tried to find a distraction in the excitement of speculation, the financial strategy which had once been my delight. Vain the effort. I was no happier in London than I had been in Paris, within a few minutes walk of the house that had sheltered my wife, the secret home in which I had been so happy.
"Haunted always by the same dark thoughts, seeing only one image amidst every change of surroundings, I came at last to this fag-end of England. The rugged scenery, the wild coast-line, the sparsely populated moors and fells pleased me better than anything I had seen on this side of the Channel. The landscape harmonised with my melancholy thoughts, and exercised a soothing influence upon my mind. I became more reconciled to my life. Conscience, as you, Dora, or you, Heathcote, may accept the word, had troubled me but little. I had exercised what I held to be my right—my right to slay the woman who had broken my heart, the man who had spoiled my life. I was oppressed by no particular horror at the thought of blood-guiltiness. The agony from which I suffered was the loss of Marie's love, the loss of the woman who had once filled my life with happiness.
"I took kindly to your native soil, Dora. It might be a foreshadowing of the love which was to gladden my latter days. My mind grew clearer, the burden seemed to be lifted from me. And then in a happy hour I met you.
"Do you remember that first meeting, Dora?"
"Yes, I remember," she said softly, her head drooping upon her husband's pillow, her face hidden, an attitude of mourning, like a marble figure bending over a funeral urn.
"It was in the picture-gallery at Tregony Manor. I had been taken there as a stranger by the Rector of the parish, to see a famous Wouvermans. Your mother received me in the friendliest spirit; and while we were talking about her pictures you appeared at the other end of the gallery, a girlish figure in a white gown, carrying your garden-hat in your hand, surprised at seeing a stranger."
"I remember how you started, how oddly you looked at me," murmured his wife.
"I was looking at a face out of the grave—the face of Marie Prévol; younger, fresher, but not more innocent in its stainless beauty than Marie's face when I first knew her. The likeness is but a vague one, perhaps—a look, an air; but to me at that moment it struck home. My heart went out to you at once. If my murdered wife had come back to me in some angelic form, had offered me peace, and pardon, and the renewal of love, I could not have surrendered myself more completely to that superhuman bliss than I surrendered myself to you. I loved you from the first, and swore to myself that you should be mine. I do not think I used any dishonourable arts in order to win you."
"You knew that she was the betrothed of another man, knew that your hands were stained with blood," said Heathcote, with suppressed indignation. "Was there no dishonour in tempting a pure-minded girl with your love? You, whose heart must be as a charnel-house!"
"I had put every thought of that dark past behind me before I entered Tregony Manor. Was I a different man, do you think, because in one dark hour of my life I had sinned against the law of civilised society, and revenged my own wrongs according to the universal law of unsophisticated mankind? I loved my new love not the less dearly because of that crime. I loved her as women are not often loved. Dora, speak to me; tell me if I have ever failed in any duty which a husband owes to an idolised wife. Have I ever been false to the promises of our betrothal?"
"Never; never, my beloved," murmured the low mournful voice.
"We might have lived happily to the end, perhaps, had Fate been kinder. I had my dark dreams now and again, acted over my past crime, my old agonies, in the helplessness of slumber; but this was only a transient evil. My darling's influence could always soothe and restore me, even in the darkest hour. All went well with me—better, perhaps, than life goes with many a better man—until the fatal hour when I received a letter from Marie Prévol's mother, written on her death-bed, asking me to find a home in England for her orphan granddaughter, the child I had heard of in the Rue Lafitte, and who had occasionally stayed there as Marie's pet and plaything, but whom I had avoided at all times.
"I answered the letter promptly, in my character of a friend of the missing Georges. It was in this character that I had contrived from time to time to send money for the relief of Madame Lemarque's necessities. I sent money to bring the girl to London, and arranged to meet her at the railway-station. That was when I went ostensibly to buy the famous Raffaelle, Dora. I was somewhat uncertain as to my plans for the girl's future; but I meant kindly by her; I had no thought but of being kind to her. If she should prove an amiable girl, with pleasing manners, my idea was to bring her to this neighbourhood, to get her placed as a nursery governess somewhere within my ken, to introduce her to you, and to secure your kindness and protection for her. I had paid for her education at a convent in Brittany; and I had been assured that she left the convent with an excellent character. She was the only link remaining with the terrible past, the only witness of my crime; but I had been told that after her illness all memory of that crime had left her. I had been assured that I should run no risk in having her about me."
"Poor child," said Dora, with a stifled sob, recalling that summer evening when Julian Wyllard came out of the station, a little paler than usual, but self-possessed and calm, telling her in measured tones of the calamity upon the line—the strange death of a nameless girl.
"I met her at Charing Cross in the early summer morning," he continued quietly. "She was flurried and frightened—so frightened by the strange faces and the strange language round about her, that she forgot to tell me of the bag she had deposited in the waiting-room. But I succeeded in putting her at her ease; and while she was taking breakfast with me in a private room at the hotel, she told me all about her grandmother's death, and her own education in the convent; what she could do in the way of teaching. She was frank and gentle, and seemed a good girl, and I had no thought but to do the utmost for her advantage. I could have pensioned her and made her independent of all service; but I considered that for a friendless girl there could be no better discipline than the necessity of earning a living under reputable circumstances, and protected by powerful friends.
"We drove together to Paddington—as your cabman informed you," continued Wyllard, addressing himself for an instant to Heathcote, whom he for the most part ignored. "At Paddington I took a second-class ticket for Plymouth, not quite resolved as to whether I should take the girl on at once to Bodmin, or leave her in the care of the wife of my frame-maker at Plymouth, an honest creature, who would, I knew, be faithful to any trust I reposed in her. I put my protégée in a second-class carriage, in the care of some friendly people, and I rode alone in a first-class compartment. I wanted to be free to think out the situation, to decide on my line of conduct. I knew that she had a packet of my letters—my early letters to Marie Prévol, written without reserve, out of the fulness of my heart—letters identifying me with the man Georges. It was vital that I should get these letters from her before she left the railway-carriage. Yet, with a curious weakness, I delayed making the attempt till we came to Plymouth. There would be fewer people in the carriages then, I thought. It would be easier for me to be alone with Léonie. I had by this time decided upon taking her on to Bodmin, and finding her a temporary home in my steward's family.
"At Plymouth I left my own compartment, intending to go straight to the second-class carriage in which I had placed Léonie: but on the platform I was met by people I knew, who detained me in conversation till the train was within two minutes of starting. While I was talking to these people I saw Léonie wandering up and down the platform in an aimless way, perhaps looking for me. I had told her that I would let her know when she had come to the end of her journey, and now she was mystified by the delay, and feared that I had forgotten her. About one minute before the starting of the train I escaped from my troublesome friends, and got into an empty second-class, into which I beckoned Léonie as she came along the platform.
"We crossed the bridge and came into Cornwall; and now there was but the shortest time for me to explain my views as to the girl's future, and to get from her those fatal letters, which told the history of my love for Marie Prévol, my double life as her husband, and which, by the evidence of my own handwriting, identified me with her murderer. I was determined that Léonie should not leave the train with that packet in her possession, but I anticipated no difficulty in getting it from her.
"I told her my views, promised her that I would be to her as a guardian and friend, so long as she should deserve my protection, assured her that the happiness and prosperity of her future life were contingent only on her good conduct. And then I asked her for the packet which Madame Lemarque had told her to deliver to me. But to my astonishment she refused to give it to me. Her grandmother had told her that she was never to part with those letters. She was to keep the packet unopened so long as I was kind to her, so long as she was protected by my care; but if at any time I withdrew my help from her, and she was in difficulty or want, she was then to open the packet and read the letters. Her own good sense would tell her how to act when she had read them. In a word, the letters were to remain in this girl's possession as a sword to hang over my head.
"I tried to make the girl understand the infamy of such a line of conduct—tried to make her see that her grandmother had schooled her in the vilest form of chantage. 'You see me willing to help you freely, generously, for the sake of an old friend,' I said; 'and surely you would not use these letters as a lever to extort money from me.' All my arguments were useless. The discipline of the convent had taught the girl blind and implicit obedience to priests and parents. She would not consider anything except the fact that certain instructions had been given to her by her dying grandmother, and that her duty was to obey those instructions.
"I was patient at the beginning; but the unhappy creature's dogged resistance made my blood boil. Passion got the better of me. I caught her by the shoulder with one hand, while I snatched the packet from her feeble grasp with the other. I was beside myself with rage. While I bent over her, holding her as in a vice, she gave a sudden shriek, a shriek of horrified surprise.
"'The face in the wood,' she cried, 'the murderer! the murderer!'
"My hand relaxed its grip; she broke from me, and dashed open the door of the carriage. 'I will tell people what you are!' she gasped, breathless with fury. 'You shall not escape. Yes, I remember your face now—the face I saw in my dreams—the savage face in the wood.'
"She was on the footboard, clinging to the iron by the window, muttering to herself like a mad thing. God alone knows what she meant to do. She wanted to make my crime known, to bring the train to a standstill, to have me arrested then and there. While she stood wavering on that narrow ledge, her life hanging by a thread, the train rounded the curve and passed on to the viaduct. The stony gorge was below, deep and narrow, like an open grave—tempting me—tempting me as Satan tempts his own. One sudden movement of my arm, and all was over. I had held her, for the first few moments. I had tried to save her. Had she been reasonable, I would have saved her. But there was no middle course. Ruin, unutterable ruin for me, or death for her. One motion of my arm, and she was gone. Light as a feather, the frail little figure fluttered down the gorge. Another minute, and the train stopped. I had my railway-key ready before the stoppage, and did not lose an instant in getting along the off-side of the line back to the compartment I had left. Every head without exception was turned towards the side on which the girl had fallen. The only witness of my crime had been destroyed, and my letters were safe in my own keeping, to be burned at the earliest opportunity."
"You burned them that night," said Dora. "I remember. And that tress of hair which you were looking at when I went into the library—"
"Was cut from Marie's head after death. The mother had placed it amongst those fatal letters. That night, after an interval of years, I touched the soft bright hair on which my hand had so often lingered in adoring love—that lovely hair which my hand had stained with blood."
There was no more to be told. An awful silence followed, a silence in which even Dora's sobs no longer sounded. There was a tearless agony which was deeper than that passion of tears.
She rose from her knees and turned towards Heathcote, white to the lips, icy cold, looking at him as if he had been a stranger, and as if she expected no more mercy from him than from a stranger.
"What are you going to do?" she asked. "You have come here alone; but perhaps there are people waiting outside—policemen, to take my husband to prison. He cannot run away from them; your victim is quite helpless."
"My victim? O Dora, how cruel that sounds from you!"
"Yes, I know," she said hurriedly. "I asked you to find out the mystery of that murder, and you have obeyed me. My husband—my husband an assassin!" she cried, flinging her clasped hands above her head in an access of despair; "my husband, whom I believed in as the noblest and best of men. He was tempted to blackest sin—tempted by the madness of jealousy, wrought upon afterwards by a sudden panic. He was not a despicable sinner—not like the man who poisons his friend, or who kills the helpless for the sake of money. It was an ungovernable passion which wrecked him—it was a fatal love which led him to crime. Heathcote," falling at his feet with a wild cry of appeal, "have mercy on him; for my sake, have mercy. Think of his helplessness. Remember how low he has been brought already—how heavily God's hand has been laid upon him. Have mercy."
Heathcote lifted her from her knees, as he had done once before in his life, when she pleaded to him for pardon for her own falsehood.
"I would not hurt a snake if you loved it, Dora," he said. "Neither you nor your husband have anything to fear from me. Parisian juries are very merciful; but I will not submit Mr. Wyllard to the inconvenience of a trial. As for the episode upon the railway—we will try to think that an accident, an unlucky impulse, unpremeditated, falling considerably short of murder. No, Dora, I do not intend to deliver up your husband to the law. The one person who has the highest right to cry for vengeance has learnt the sublimity of submission to the Divine Will. I have seen the widowed mother of Maxime de Maucroix; and from her lips I have heard the reproof of my own revengeful feelings. But although I am content to be silent, it would be well for Julian Wyllard, when he shall feel the hand of death upon him, to write the admission of his guilt; since that alone can thoroughly clear your cousin Bothwell before his fellow-men. So dark a suspicion once engendered may hang over a man for a lifetime."
"I will bear in mind your thoughtful suggestion," said Wyllard. "I thank you, Heathcote, for your mercy to a fallen foe. A wretch so abject, so smitten by the hand of Fate, would be too mean a creature for your revenge. You are not like the noble Achilles, and would hardly care to drag a corpse at your chariot-wheel, and wreak your rage upon impotence. The play is played out, the lights are down. Let the curtain fall in decency and silence. For her sake be merciful."
"Make your peace with your offended God, if you can," answered Heathcote. "You have nothing to fear from me."
He moved slowly towards the door, and at the last turned and held out his hand to Dora. She hesitated for an instant, looking at her husband.
"Give him your hand, Dora," said Wyllard. "I can bear to see you clasp hands with the man who has read the riddle of Léonie Lemarque's death. I have come to a stage at which life and death make but little difference to me, and even shame is dead. Give him your hand. You may need his friendship and protection some day when I am under ground, and when people look at you with a morbid interest, as the murderer's widow. It will be wise to shuffle off my tainted name as soon as you decently can. Change it for a better name, Dora."
"Julian, how can you be so cruel?"
She was by his side again, with her hand in his, forgetful of all things except her love for him, her pity for his pain. All her natural horror at his guilt was not strong enough to extinguish her love, or to lessen her compassion. As she had pitied him for his physical infirmity, so she now pitied him for his mental infirmity—a mind swayed to crime by undisciplined passions.
Heathcote left the room without another word. He had come there as the messenger of Fate. He had no further business in that house.
He had heard from the butler that Sir William Spencer and the local physician had been in consultation together that afternoon, and that the man had gathered from their talk as they left the house that Mr. Wyllard's illness was likely to end fatally, sooner than Sir William had at first supposed.
"Give me my sleeping draught, and then go, Dora," said Wyllard, when he and his wife were alone.
She prepared to obey him. The nurse was taking her rest at this hour, and it was the wife's privilege to attend upon her husband. The morphia sleeping draughts had been administered with rigid care, Dora herself watching the allotment of every bottle, lest the unhappy sufferer should be tempted to take an overdose and end the tragedy of pain. Once, when she had betrayed her anxiety by a word spoken unawares, she had seen a curious smile upon her husband's pale lips, a smile that told her he had read her thoughts; and now she felt the peril of suicide was a much nearer dread. What had he to live for now—he who stood confessed a murderer, before the wife who had revered him?
The sleeping draughts had been sent in from the local doctor, half a dozen at a time, the patient taking two and sometimes three in the course of the day and night. Dora kept them under lock and key in the cabinet, where she kept her drawing materials, an old tulip-wood cabinet of Dutch inlaid work that stood in a corner of the room, at some distance from the sick man's sofa.
On the table by his side stood his dressing-case, with its glittering array of silver-gilt-topped bottles—eau de cologne, toilet vinegar, sal volatile. His medicine glass was on the same table.
And now, while Dora stood with her face towards the cabinet, Wyllard's crippled hands were busied with one of those bottles in the dressing-case. With a wonderful swiftness and dexterity, taking into account the condition of his hands, he drew out one of the smallest bottles in the case, and unscrewed the stopper. The bottle contained about half an ounce of a clear white liquid.
Wyllard poured this liquid into a glass, which he held ready for Dora when she brought him the sleeping draught. The colourless liquid would have hardly showed in the bottom of the glass under any circumstances, but Wyllard was careful to screen it with his hand.
Dora poured out the sleeping draught, looking at him all the while in saddest silence. What could she say to him from whose familiar face the mask had fallen? The husband she had loved and honoured was lost to her for ever. The helpless wretch lying there was a stranger to her; a sinner so begrimed with sin that only the infinite compassion of woman could behold him without loathing.
"I drink this to your future happiness, Dora," he said solemnly, "and remember that at my last hour I blessed you for your goodness to a great sinner."
There was that in his tone which warned her of his purpose. She flung out her arms, trying to seize the hand that held the glass, before he could drink. But the table was between them, and the glass was at his lips when he finished speaking. He drained it to the last drop, gave one long sigh, and fell back upon his pillow—dead.
"Hydrocyanic acid," said the local practitioner when he came to look at the corpse, "and a happy release into the bargain. I should like to have given him an overdose of morphia myself, if the law of the land would have allowed me; or to have operated on the base of his brain and killed him tenderly in the interests of science, just to find out whether Cruveilhier or Virchow was right in his theorising as to the seat of the malady. I go for Virchow, backed by Gull."