“watching for me at the gate. She’s heard the news, perhaps. Poor soul, if I didn’t care about the fortune for my own sake, I should for hers. I think a disappointment would almost kill her.”
Again a coward’s argument,—a new loophole by means of which Launcelot Darrell tried to creep out of the responsibility of his own act, and to make another, in a manner, accountable for his sin.
CHAPTER XL. RESOLVED.
Eleanor Monckton walked slowly back to the house, by the side of her husband, whose eyes never left his wife’s face during that short walk between the garden-gate and the long French window by which the two girls had left the drawing-room. Even in the dusk, Gilbert Monckton could see that his wife’s face was unusually pale.
She spoke to him as they entered the drawing-room, laying her hand upon his arm as she addressed him, and looking earnestly at him in the red firelight.
“Is Mr. de Crespigny really dying, Gilbert?” she asked.
“I fear that, from what the medical men say, there is very little doubt about it. The old man is going fast.”
Eleanor paused for a few moments, with her head bent and her face hidden from her husband.
Then, suddenly looking up, she spoke to him again; this time with intense earnestness.
“Gilbert, I want to see Mr. de Crespigny before he dies; I want to see him alone—I must see him!”
The lawyer stared at his wife in utter bewilderment. What in Heaven’s name was the meaning of this sudden energy, this intense eagerness, which blanched the colour in her cheeks, and held her breathless? Her friendly feeling for the invalid, her womanly pity for an old man’s infirmities, could never have been powerful enough to cause such emotion.
“You want to see Maurice de Crespigny, Eleanor?” repeated Mr. Monckton, in a tone of undisguised wonder. “But why do you want to see him?”
“I have something to tell him—something that he must know before he dies.”
The lawyer started. A sudden light broke in upon his bewildered mind,—a light that showed him the woman he loved in very odious colours.
“You want to tell him who you are?”
“To tell him who I am? yes!” Eleanor answered absently.
“But for what reason?”
Mrs. Monckton was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at her husband.
“My reason is a secret, Gilbert,” she said; “I cannot even tell it to you—yet. But I hope to do so very, very soon. Perhaps to-night.”
The lawyer bit his under lip, and walked away from his wife with a frown upon his face. He left Eleanor standing before the fireplace, and took two or three turns up and down the room, pacing backwards and forwards in moody silence.
Then, suddenly returning to her, he said, with an air of angry resolution that chilled her timid confidence in him, and cast her back upon herself, “Eleanor, there is something in all this that wounds me to the very quick. There is a mystery between us; a mystery that has lasted too long. Why did you stipulate that your maiden name should be kept a secret from Maurice de Crespigny? Why have you paid him court ever since your coming to this place? And why, now that you hear of his approaching death, do you want to force yourself into his presence? Eleanor, Eleanor, there can be but one reason for all this, and that the most sordid, the most miserable and mercenary of reasons.”
George Vane’s daughter looked at her husband with a stare of blank dismay, as if she was trying, but trying in vain, to attach some meaning to his words.
“A sordid reason—a mercenary reason,” she repeated slowly, in a half whisper.
“Yes, Eleanor,” answered Gilbert Monckton, passionately. “Why should you be different from the rest of the world? It has been my error, my mad delusion to think you so; as I once thought another woman who deceived me as God forbid you should ever deceive me. It has been my folly to trust and believe in you, forgetful of the past, false to the teaching of most bitter experience. I have been mistaken—once more—all the more egregiously, perhaps, because this time I thought I was so deliberate, so cautious. You are not different to the rest of the world. If other women are mercenary, you too are mercenary. You were not content with having sacrificed your inclination for the sake of making what the world calls an advantageous marriage. You were not satisfied with having won a wealthy husband, and you sought to inherit Maurice de Crespigny’s fortune.”
Eleanor Monckton passed both her hands across her forehead, pushing back the loose masses of her hair, as if she would by that movement have cleared away some of the clouds that overshadowed her brain.
“I seek to inherit Mr. de Crespigny’s fortune,” she murmured.
“Yes! Your father no doubt educated you in that idea. I have heard how obstinately he built upon the inheritance of his friend’s wealth. He taught you to share his hopes: he bequeathed them to you as the only legacy he had to give—”
“No!” cried Eleanor, suddenly; “the inheritance I received at my father’s death was no inheritance of hope. Do not say any more to me, Mr. Monckton. It seems as if my brain had no power to bear all this to-night. If you can think these base things of me, I must be content to endure your bad opinion. I know that I have been very forgetful of you, very neglectful of you, since I have been your wife, and you have reason to think badly of me. But my mind has been so full of other things; so full, that it has seemed to me as if all else in life—except those thoughts, that one hope—slipped by me like the events of a dream.”
Gilbert Monckton looked half-fearfully at his wife as she spoke. There was something in her manner that he had never seen before. He had seen her only when her feelings had been held in check by her utmost power of repression. That