Wrostella's Weird (Ludgate Monthly serial)/Part 2
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
“O, dinna ye mind, love Gregory,
When we sate at the wine;
How we changed the napkins from our necks,
It's no sae lang, suisyne?”
A DOOR at the end of the corridor opened suddenly, and the face of Tim, pale, menacing, and strange, appeared in the aperture.
He was looking at his mistress as she descended the stairs to breakfast, her French heels tapping smartly on the boards; her French morning gown, a miracle of freshness and frivolity, trailing behind her; her little sleek head dressed with consummate skill, and the first roses in her cheeks that her hand had ever planted there.
As if all these outward and visible signs of health and prosperity were not sufficient, she was humming an air—and quite loud enough, too, to display the quality of a most charming voice—which seemed, however, to have no charm for Tim, who shook his fist frowningly at her vanishing back.
Breakfast was laid for two in the dining room, a French déjeuner à la fourchette, probably the daintiest, most delicious meal to which a human being can sit down, and when served by a cordon bleu, not to be matched by the finest dinner or supper ever invented by a culinary genius. M. Laurent was already there, and two menservants were busying themselves about the table, and in a quick whisper Noémie said to herself,
“Three.”
“You slept well, monsieur?” she said, calmly, when they were seated at table with the delicious fragrance of Alphonse's coffee diffusing itself in the air.
“Oh yes, madam,” he replied in French. “And you?”
He was helping himself from a silver dish as he spoke, preoccupied for the moment with the supreme happiness of a gourmet, who enjoys at once the pleasures of hope, and the certainty of their immediate gratification.
“Well enough,” she replied; then, with the same curiously intent eyes, looked at the serving-men, who blundered about as usual, and remained perfectly vacuous under her scrutiny.
“I must somehow manage to see every man who slept in this house last night,” she said to herself, as she pretended to eat; and it did not seem strange to her that yesterday she had been an unthinking child, and to-day she was a resolute woman, who, having committed a crime in a moment of madness, was able to calculate every risk, and hold herself ready to meet all emergencies.
“M. Fitzgerald returns to-day?” said M. Laurent, presently, whose epicurean enjoyment of his breakfast had been touched with but just one note of regret, that the charming figure opposite him was not to make the permanent adornment of his own morning meal through life.
SHE POINTED HER HAND TO HIS BREAST AND SAID, “THAT IS BLOOD.”
“M. Fitzgerald is detained,” said Noémie gravely; “he is grieved to appear inhospitable towards you.”
M. Laurent shot a quick glance at her. She was looking down, playing with a teaspoon; and her young mouth was curved in proud, firm lines. He saw at once the nameless change that had swept over her since yesterday, and his pulses throbbed, for was she not even more lovely and desirable to him now than then?
Never had she seemed so truly adorable to him as this morning, and the àplomb, with which all through she had accepted an embarrassing situation, enchanted him still more—not that it embarrassed him at all, indeed, it was a perfectly natural thing—and so French—that a married couple should quarrel and part, and accept consolation elsewhere.
Nearly all women made mistakes in their husbands (M. Laurent shrewdly opined that his own wife, when he got her, would make as big a mistake as any), and they all got over it, and were polite and cold and friendly to each other afterwards, that is to say, if they had any breeding about them.
And there was plenty of breeding, and pluck too, about this young wife who bore her husband's absence with such nonchalant grace, but had yet grown so pale under neglect, that pride had called to her aid a little rouge—which vastly became her.
But when their eyes met, he saw how very far from her thoughts he was, nay, to what pin-point insignificance he had dwindled in her mind, and his colour rose as he said,
“I am desolated, madam, to leave you; but I must intrude on your charming hospitality no longer, and will return to Londonderry to-day.”
“But why should you go?” she said, the enormous spiritual stride she had made in the past few hours seeming to have altered the very shape of her eyes, and the sound of her voice, so that she seemed miles away from him, and no longer a woman but a sphinx. Clearly, he thought, the change in her was not attributable to him.
“Because I am trespassing on your kindness,” he said in a flat voice.
“On the contrary,” she said, as the men arranged the fruit on the table, and prepared to leave, “I want you most particularly this morning”
She broke off suddenly to tell one of the servants that Tim was to be sent to her at once.
“Tim,” she said, as the door closed, “is my husband's henchman, his body slave—who has been with him all his life, and thinks that, like the king, he can do no wrong; except, perhaps, in marrying me,” she went on with a laugh that had little mirth in it. “On that point, I am convinced he thinks his master made a great mistake.”
A violent rap on the door came at this juncture, followed by the abrupt entry of a typical young Irishman, tall and well-grown, and of that turn of feature which is positively agreeable on some occasions and downright ferocious on others.
He stood just inside the door, looking scowlingly at the little charming and cosey interior, at the dainty table, and the two handsome young people sitting opposite each other, and his expression was positively malignant as he said,
“You sent for me, ma'am?”
Noémie had looked at him with the same curious intentness that had distinguished her glance at every man she had seen that morning; still, it was not the strangeness of his face that fixed her attention, but something on his white blouse that drew her away from the breakfast table and close up to him, when she pointed her hand at his breast and said:—
“That is blood.”
Her voice was so strange, that M. Laurent started up and came to look, and there, surely enough, making a wide stain on the white blouse the man wore, was the mark of blood.
“You have had an accident?” she said.
The man nodded.
“It is nothing,” he said, “an accident when I was cleaning firearms in the gallery; but no harm was done.”
“Then why didn't you change your blouse before coming in here to frighten madam?” said M. Laurent angrily, in his halting English.
“I was told to come at once. And I don't think Madam is easily frightened.”
But Noémie at that moment belied his character of her, for she staggered and fell into the arms of M. Laurent, whereupon Tim, with a malevolent look at the pair, promptly opened the door, and disappeared, leaving Noémie, for the first time in her life, unconscious. The night's events had changed her to a criminal—just one moment of mad panic, of unreasoning, cowardly fear, and the transformation was complete—and her first impulse had been to cover up her deed, until she could confess it to her husband, or until she was denounced by the man who had stolen in like a thief in the night, and got a thief's welcome.
She had pictured him dead or dying; and the revulsion of feeling with which she realised that it was Tim she had shot, without, apparently, his being much the worse for it, altogether overcame her; and her senses fairly forsook her, and did not seem in any hurry to return.
Suzette was summoned, and went through many graceful exercises in recovering her mistress, using her wits smartly all the while, and marvelling what hand M. Laurent had in the business, and thinking that life was certainly getting livelier at Wrostella. And glancing at the handsome Frenchman, so assiduous in his attentions, she thought Noémie must have been mad to jilt him for a poor Irishman, who neglected her, leaving her in a dungeon while he went off to amuse himself elsewhere.
The three French figures, the luxurious table, and a bit of the wainscoted wall beyond, formed one of those pictures that a clear hand would have converted into a masterpiece of genre painting; and M. Laurent, being a man of taste, felt the picturesqueness of the situation, and enjoyed it.
“She has long ago ceased to find me ridiculous,” he muttered, when she showed some signs of recovery; and when Suzette's eyes met his expressively, he smiled and withdrew.
CHAPTER II.
“O fause are the vows of womankind,
But fair is their fause bodie;
I ne'er wad hae trodden on Irish ground,
Had it no been for love o' thee.”
M LAURENT had appeared at a moment when Noémie was smarting severely under the affront her husband had put upon her, and when, like many another spoiled child, she longed with all her heart to give back slap for slap, and scorn for scorn, to the bitter end.
She entirely forgot the great provocation she had given him, and was only intensely alive to the humiliating position in which he had placed her; and when M. Laurent dropped apparently from the clouds, the devil whispered that here indeed was an instrument for the punishment of her lord, that she would be a fool indeed not to use skilfully.
But how to keep him here till Terry returned? One night perforce he must remain, and all aghast as he was at the cage which held Noémie, and perplexed at finding the master of the house absent, in spite moreover of the serious illness already creeping over him, M. Laurent spent a delightful evening in the young wife's company, and retired to bed deploring his loss of her more than ever.
M. Alphonse, overjoyed at having a well-known gourmet for whom to provide, exhausted the resources of his skill in sending up a dinner worthy of the occasion, and afterwards confided to Suzette that when gentlemen left their young Wives in a huff it was just as well that young wives should amuse themselves, instead of sitting down to cry.
And Noémie was amused, and if her gaiety were a little wild, it passed unnoticed, even by Tim, who assisted to wait on them, and whose glowering looks ought to have spoilt the flavour of every dish that passed through his hands.
It was life to Noémie to be in touch once more with her beloved Paris, to hear of her father, of the theatres, of fashions and bibélots, of the frivollings of her friends, and the little faux pas of her enemies; and as he talked to her, she seemed to breathe the very atmosphere of the city, to smell its flowers, the intangible aroma of its streets, and her heart throbbed with longing for the time when she would once more be in the midst of it all.
“She is sick of him already, and beginning to wish she had married me,” said M. Laurent, as he went to bed that night. “Heavens! to drive her to such a place as this, and to leave her alone here, with that eternal dirge, as for universal death, wailing on the shore!”
He shivered at the sound, but soon began to shiver in real earnest, and by morning was so seriously ill, that the extremely difficult task of getting a doctor had to be undertaken, Tim volunteering for the purpose, as he wished at the same time to execute a little commission for himself that he had no mind to entrust to anybody else.
The doctor came. He had been summoned once before to Wrostella, but on a different errand, and he glanced curiously at the shooting gallery, as he passed it, remembering what had lain there when last he had crossed its threshold.
“Does he walk still?” he said curiously to Tim, who was conducting him.
“Who says so, sir?” enquired the young Irishman quickly.
“Oh! then it doesn't,” said the doctor drily, and said no more.
He did his best for M. Laurent, wondering not a little at his presence there, and at the absence of the husband of the most lovely little creature he had ever beheld even in a country famous for its fair women, and went away at last with an odd feeling that he had stepped out of his own prosaic life into a bit of romance, in which all the figures were French and uncommon.
For Suzette and Alphonse between them nursed the sick man devotedly, the latter preparing all sorts of delicacies that the invalid could not touch; and Noémie, left alone, had ample leisure in which to reflect on Terry's misdemeanours, now more deeply aggravated by the fact that he had not written a line to her since his departure, so that she knew neither where he was, nor when to expect his return.
True, she had behaved outrageously at his departure, but his hot Irish temper had flamed out just as violently as hers, and he had treated her discourteously; and pride arose, forbidding her heart to ache tor the loss of his love, and actually suggesting the impossible feat of henceforth living her life without it.
Some women might do so, indeed many do—but Noémie was not one of them. As the days went by, a feeling of almost physical cold and wretchedness oppressed her, for it was a new and extraordinary sensation to her to be treated like a naughty child, and, as it were, put in a corner, and left to mind and care for herself, not knowing how. Her heart went out then to her father—the father whose life-long devotion she had slighted for this charming stranger, who had ceased so quickly to be charming, and who had seized the very first opportunity to leave her.
But all these phases of feelings, and many others, passed, and the girl, thrown at last entirely on her own resources, found them much greater than she had supposed. She was full of character, if capable of folly; and the sharp experience through which she was passing had a bracing instead of a depressing effect upon her, while the presence of M. Laurent at Wrostella gave a strong spice of excitement to the whole situation.
Mischief danced in her eyes at the thought of Terry's face, when he returned; and she rehearsed with much diablerie the scene when, as hostess to the convalescent, and right under Terry's nose, she should lavish upon him those attentions that his condition made perfectly excusable. For, of course, her husband might be back at any moment, and in her heart—which was of gold—Noémie knew that she would be very glad to see him, and was equally sure that he would be rejoiced to see her.
“DOES HE WALK STILL?” THE DOCTOR SAID.
All the same, she meant to lead him a dance; but as the days passed, and M. Laurent was sufficiently recovered to lie on the sofa in the drawing room, and sit at table with her, she grew impatient; and the play bored her, now that the central figure was left out.
It had been in such a mood that she had retired to rest on the night when one moment of mad, unreasoning panic had caused her rash act—an act that in less than twelve hours she had reason to believe was attended with no fatal results, and under the joy of which discovery her senses had forsaken her, as has been already told. A feeling of intense joy succeeded the moment of coming to herself; then she seized Suzette's arm, and cried,
“Fetch him—bring him back—this moment!”
“M. Laurent, madam?” said Suzette.
“No; Tim. Be quick!”
Suzette looked with amazement at her mistress, but departed to do her bidding.
Tim entered, clean and with a fresh blouse, but with his expression as sullen as before.
“Shut the door,” she said, “and come here.”
He did so; then, as their eyes met, something in his eyes—she could not at the moment tell what—frightened her, and she trembled.
“Tim,” she said, bravely, “you came into my room last night, and I shot you. I thought you were a thief. I was terrified and did not stop to think.”
He answered not a word, and her courage rose.
“You hear me,” she said, “answer.”
“I know nothing at all about it,” he answered gruffly.
“How did you get into the room?” she said, looking at him with eyes that glowed like fires in her small, pale face, “What business had you there?”
“I don't know what you are talking about,” said Tim, his obstinate upper lips looking longer than ever.
“But there is the wound,” she cried, “you can't deny that!”
“I did it myself, ma'am. It was just a graze—no more, You've been dreaming, and didn't shoot anybody.”
She shook her head.
“I could show you the revolver,” she said, “and there were—other things. Tim, do you walk in your sleep?”
Tim meditated,
“I may,” he said cautiously, “but don't you always lock your door, ma'am?”
“Yes. But there is some secret way into my room—I'm sure of it”
Tim's eyes flickered.
“And you know it,” went on the girl, rapidly. “Why won't you tell the truth?”
“You just dreamed it all, ma'am,” he said stubbornly.
“Does one dream blood?” she demanded.
“Blood?” exclaimed Tim, as if in astonishment
Noémie lost patience.
“When your master comes home, he shall get the truth out of you,” she said angrily, “and, after all, you only had your deserts. Now go!”
M. LAURENT.
But Tim lingered.
“If you'll take my advice, ma'am,” he said very earnestly, “you won't say a word to master about it—not one word. It'll breed mischief. He's got trouble enough just now”
“What trouble?” said Noémie swiftly.
Tim kept his eyes down so that she could not see the baleful light in them.
“Tim,” she said, with a proud dignity that sat well on her young face, “you have been many years with Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed all his life, and I have only known him a very few months. He—he did not want to worry me, and so he did not tell me why he went away in such a hurry. Was—was his errand a dangerous one?”
Tim's sharp wits seemed to be taking a long journey, and Noémie had to repeat her question.
“What I know, ma'am,” he said at last, “is more guesswork than anything else. But I think,”—he paused as if again seeking for spiritual direction—“I think he went to fight a duel.”
Noémie turned white as snow, and all the light in her beautiful eyes went out suddenly.
“About a woman?”
The question rushed out without her own volition.
“Yes, ma'am.”
Noémie turned her back on the man, that he might not see the furious scarlet that rushed up over brow and cheek, stinging her with a sense of shame. She threw out her hand with a gesture of dismissal, she could not have asked him another question to save her soul alive.
The door closed behind her. She had forgotten the catastrophe of the night before in the knowledge that her husband had loved some woman—loved her still sufficiently to fight a duel for her.
CHAPTER III.
“Yet God hath given to me a mind,
The which to shall prove as kind,
As any one that thou shalt find,
Of high and low degree.”
M LAURENT left on the following morning, profoundly puzzled and irritated by Noémie's sudden change from a delightful châtelaine, eager to please and be pleased, and by no means insensible to his many charms, to a mere dummy, who spoke, answered, and ate mechanically, moreover, without appearing to include him in her range of vision as a man at all.
“We shall meet in Paris,” he had said at parting, and she had looked at him vacantly and without response.
He said to himself as he jolted away, that she would even lose her beauty if she stayed much longer in this God-forsaken place, watching always for a churl who never came; and he wondered how much or how little he should tell M. Richepin when he saw him. And then the Frenchman smiled to himself courtly, triumphantly, for he knew women well, and the prospects of the future pleased him.
Immediately following his departure, indeed as if it had waited for it, with a politeness that is not common with ghosts, “Wrostella's Weird,” for so, with a fine mingling of a man, his house, and his fate, the ghost had been designated who was supposed to haunt the castle, walked in a way that was “painful and free,” frightening Suzette into fits, and greatly strengthening Alphonse's desire to return to his beloved Paris.
Only two persons in the castle seemed unaffected by the apparitions, and these were Noémie and Tim; the first because her whole attention just then was concentrated on herself, and Tim because as he averred “he was used to 'em,” and thought no more of a ghost's little ways than he did of a cook's tantrums.
The shooting gallery was the place most affected by the ghostly visitant, and as Tim had no duties to speak of during his master's absence, and spent a good deal of his time there cleaning and arranging the various arms it contained, it might reasonably be supposed that he would be able to give the servants “jim-jams” in the servants' hall, with accounts of what he saw there; but he related nothing, and, indeed, laughed to scorn the idea that the suicide's ghost was anywhere about.
And Noémie walked too—abroad among the peasants' miserable shanties, and for miles and miles along the sea-coast, until the people got used to seeing her come and go, and marking the change in her, how she had altered from a mere frivolous French fashion-plate into a woman who suffered in spirit even as they did in body, came to look at her with pity, and even say a word of greeting to her as she passed.
And she answered them at first timidly, then with pleasure, for the mere human kindness of their voices; and when she came to know them better, she saw how outrageous and wicked had been her fears of them; and the semi-famine in which they lived and which was now revealed to her, filled the girl with shame when she thought of Alphonse and his prodigal waste.
Very soon the meals were curtailed at the castle, but food and money found its way into the hovels on the shore; and in the joy of ministering to others—the greatest, the purest, surely, in the whole world—Noémie in part was freed from the anguish of apprehension, jealousy and anger, that Terry's continued absence caused her. Well, she had been a spoiled child, selfish and too happy, and wanted a good rousing lesson; and now she had got it—a lesson that would last all her life, aye, and perhaps ennoble it, did she but know it.
She envied these poor toilers who had no sins upon their consciences, who had not been, like herself, within an ace of taking a human life, and even Terry's faults grew pale beside the that she had done; and so, between suffering and jealous pain, she dwindled day by day, and alarmed Suzette to the point of making her write secretly to M. Richepin with alarming reports of her mistress's health.
Alphonse wrote by the same post to say that he was désolé to make such a communication, but he found no scope whatever at Wrostella for his talents, and would M. Richepin graciously recall him? His cooking lately had been mainly confined to baking bread for the peasants, and the kitchenmaid was even better able to do such work than he.
M. Richepin read Alphonse's communication first, sighed, and shrugged his shoulders. If the cook could not do anything for these young people, then no one else could—he, himself, least of all.
But when he had read Suzette's letter, he was greatly disturbed, and would have started for Wrostella at once, had not prudence mercilessly pointed out that if these two persons could not settle things happily by themselves, the interference of a third person was not likely to have the effect if bringing them together.
But he wrote at once to Noémie, asking for news of her, and saying with what pleasure he was looking forward to her approaching return to Paris. And he mentioned Terry as usual, though his heart was hot with rage within him, and he meant that there should be a heavy day of reckoning between them.
And it was as well that M. Richepin sent a letter instead of conveying himself thither, for on the very day it arrived, Terry himself walked into Wrostella.
CHAPTER IV.
“And she behaved herself that day,
As if she had never walk't the way;
She had forgot her gown of gray.”
“WHERE is your mistress?” he enquired of the man who stood in the doorway, staring at his master as at some perfectly unfamiliar person.
“She is visiting the poor people, monsieur—sir, I mean,” stumbled the man.
“Why do you call me Monsieur?” said Tim with a pale look that still further confused the man.
“I—I have got used to addressing M. Laurent, sir,” said the man, still with that odd look of doubt and wavering recognition.
“He is here?” said Terry sharply.
“He has left, sir.”
And the man, now convinced of his master's identity, hurried out to take the portmanteau from the car.
Unutterably cold and dreary looked the whole place, Terry thought, as he entered, and glanced up the staircase down which he and Noémie had so often romped together, and he turned abruptly and went out towards the sea-shore.
“Visiting the poor! What hypocrisy would she not practise next?” he asked himself savagely, as he picked his way among the huge boulders that cumbered the ground.
Terry's temper had altered considerably for the worse since his departure from Wrostella, so had his looks as well, and indeed it was difficult to recognise in this pale, thwarted, weary man, the bright-faced young fellow who had wooed and won difficult Noémie with such extraordinary completeness and despatch.
He had been away barely a month, and already—he saw it in a gasp of astonishment and rage—his own wife did not know him.
She came quickly out of one of the cabins, laughing, with a little child clinging to her skirts, and half-looking at him, looked away again as from a stranger, and turned to detach the little thin hands that would have held her back.
It was more than Terry could bear. He had loved her passionately, jealously, after the fashion of an Irishman, not an Englishman; and when she seemed to deny him thus openly, his blood took fire, and he sprang forward and seized her arm.
“Come home, madam!” he said. “Is the house so dull without your lover that you cannot bear to stay alone in it?”
She turned upon him a look of terror, thinking some madman had overtaken her, then turned pale as she recognised him and gasped out,
“Terry!”
“At your service,” he said, dragging her away, and Noémie all at once felt herself turning very cold and calm, and the contempt in her: voice was merciless as she said,
“You are bruising my arm. I can walk alone.”
A bitter east wind was blowing up from the sea, loosening her dark curls, and flapping the capes of his ulster about his ears, and driving his hat over his brows. He loosed her and put up both hands, but he was too late, the wind had carried away his hat, and with it—as Noémie, in one lightning moment of horror believed—his head.
She stood still aghast, watching him as he sprang after the two objects, now overtaking, now being eluded by them, until he finally captured both, and disappeared as if shot from a catapult, into Wrostella.
Well, Noémie was young, was healthy, she had not suffered long enough to become fundamentally changed, and finally, when she grasped the situation, she sat down on a boulder, and laughed—laughed till she nearly cried. In every possible character under the sun had she imagined Terry on his return, from Judas Iscariot down to Don Juan, but Terry in the character of a man who wore a wig had never occurred to her, and the discovery was even more ludicrous than startling.
Presently she wiped her eyes, which were as warm, as full of Southern glow as ever; and indeed, at the bottom of her heart was the vivifying, all-sustaining fact that Terry was alive, that she had got him back again, and whether he wore a wig, or had become in his manners perfectly brutal, Terry was here, and—joy broke out in every dimple and curve of her young face—more in love with her than ever.
No matter what duels be might have fought, or in what flagitious circumstances he might have entangled himself, Terry was jealous—jealous to the extent of forgetting that he was a gentleman—and that must mean very tremendous jealousy indeed.
So that it was in high spirits, and with all high tragedy knocked out of her head (indeed, she had quite forgotten all the high-falutin speeches with which she had intended to denounce and upbraid him), that she entered Wrostella, and sent at once to Alphonse to say that Mr. Fitzgerald had returned, and would he send in something very nice for luncheon?
That is a woman's way. Her own heart, her husband's comfort, these are the things that occupy her mind most.
NOÉMIE LAUGHED
Alphonse swallowed the insult magnanimously. When, indeed, had he ever failed to send in good things—even though he had been degraded to the post of baker in ordinary to the village? Then she ran up-stairs singing. But half-an-hour may make all the difference in one's mood, and when Terry and she met at luncheon—approaching the table from opposite ends of the house—there was not a whit to choose between the cold politeness with which they greeted each other, and passed the usual compliments of the table.
Tim, stationed once more behind his masters chair, was divided between radiant delight and alert curiosity as to what had passed between the pair; and if, under his smart serving-jacket some uncomfortable qualms threatened to arise, he choked them down, thinking, as Noémie had done, that nothing mattered much so long as Terry was there in the flesh before him.
Once in the midst of that thin formal talk, conducted without looking at each other, Noémie stole a glance at the sunny curls that still clustered thickly above Terry's white, thin face, and she thought that but for the uncourteous wind, she might never have discovered the fraud; and yet, in some subtle way, it produced a harsh note of dissonance in his whole appearance, that, together with his worn look, had made his own servant and his wife fail to recognise him.
And while she pondered as to what strange accident could have brought him to such sad necessity, he, on his part, was covertly watching her, and finding a great alteration in her looks and ways.
He had left a girl, he found a woman. The girl who had fallen out of love with him as passionately and quickly as she had fallen into it, was gone; and the woman who looked her mistake fully and resolutely in the face, and accepted it, was here.
She spoke casually of M. Laurent, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he should stay there in Terry's absence, and made no allusion whatever to the illness that had occasioned it.
Of Paris, and their approaching return to it, she spoke airily, and with keen pleasure; and as she sat there facing him, as politely charming as if he were an utter stranger, he told himself that this was marriage à la mode with a vengeance, but that he would be hanged if he played the rôle for which she had evidently cast him.
Anyway, Noémie most consistently maintained hers. From the moment that she had seen Tim arranging his master's effects in a room as far as possible from hers, she had abandoned all idea of attempting any understanding with her husband, and the longing she had felt to creep into his arms and tell him all the truth about that awful night, left her. Tim could tell him if he pleased, and Terry could think what he pleased, and indeed a strange look that she surprised sometimes on the face of the latter gave her reason to think that he did know, and regarded her with a kind of horror, as if her mad impulse of the moment had been a crime committed in cold blood, and rigorously to be expiated as one.
“NOEMIE NEEDED ALL HER COURAGE.”
“”
Noémie needed all her courage to carry her through that period of her life, and it did not fail her. Save at meal times, the husband and wife never met; but often, quite unsuspected by her, he watched her on her merciful errands among the poor; and while he scoffed at the idea of any real good being done (as well try to put the Atlantic through a sieve, he thought, as to materially improve the position of these people), he could not but see how such work ennobled and beautified her, for it is the universal and not the selfish love that raises man and woman.
He went to meet her one afternoon as she was coming homeward, and said, abruptly:
“Don't you think that you are rather a contradiction? that you can be so tender-hearted, yet try to kill a man?”
She drew a sharp breath, then looked at him with glorious brown eyes, full of scorn.
“My sin,” she said, “was unpremeditated—committed in a paroxysm of blind terror, but what of yours? I ask no questions—not of the woman for whom you went to fight a duel, not the reasons for the grotesque tricks you have played with your appearance, or why I have been tried, found guilty, and judged unfit to be your wife, without being allowed to say one single word in self-defence. You deserted me in sight of my household, you have returned to shame me openly in their presence, and I look to you no longer for the comfort, support, and help that you swore to me but a very few months ago, and now, you are no more to me than any stranger I may meet. Perhaps my heart might have broken, had I not found the one, the only alleviation to suffering, which is to do good unto others. And that joy,” added the girl triumphantly, “even you cannot take from me.”
They were at the doors of Wrostella by now, and passed in together.
Noémie moved towards the staircase, but he asked if she would mind coming for a moment into the study.
She came and stood in the bare, ugly room, with the cold wintry sunlight shining on her, waiting for him to speak.
The rose of her skin showed vividly against the blackness of her furs, she was absolutely lovely, but cold, unapproachable as ice, and as utterly indifferent to his authority as his love, and the thought of how entirely she had put him outside her life, stung him to madness, and he said:—
“Why did you not do your work more thoroughly while you were about it?”
Her lips curled, she turned to leave him, but he stood in her path.
“You looked me straight in the eyes,” he said, quietly, “before you fired; it was not a moment's madness, but a deliberate aim—and you meant to kill me. You were tired of me, and wished to replace me with M. Laurent.”
Noémie had fallen back before him, her arms outstretched as if to beat him off, her face a mere grey mask of quivering horror, half out of her senses with the shock of his words.
She tried to speak but could not, tried again, and gasped out in an unearthly whisper, “It was Tim!”
Quite unconsciously she had seized his arm and was shaking it with all her force.
He did not answer, and her dazed eyes wandered up to his head.
“Take it off,” she said suddenly, but he drew himself up to his full height and refused.
“Better not,” he said. “Wait till the wound has healed. It was only a scalp one, but” he paused, and his haggard, white face filled up the pause.
“Oh! my God!” cried Noémie, beating her breast, “and you thought I did it on purpose—I! Could I have become a murderess in the little time since you left me? Oh! there must be some means to rid the world of such a monster!” and she was rushing from the room when Terry caught her in his arms.
“Noémie! Little one!” he cried. “You did not want to put me out of the way, after all. It was me you loved, not Laurent?”
Eyes, voice, passionate embrace, all told the same story, and a faint colour came into Noémie's face, that seemed to have “wilted” suddenly during the violent emotions of the past moments. But she put both hands on his shoulders, holding 1im back, and said,
“How came you there, and by what secret way—to spy on me?”
Terry looked thoroughly ashamed, but the elixir of happiness had already made him himself again. Thin and pale he might be, and a country-made wig he might wear, but he was Terry, and the frost about Noémie's heart was melting fast.
“We parted in anger,” he said, “and I would not tell you that my best friend had been killed in a duel—or rather murdered, for there was foul play and his widow, not knowing that I was married, wrote imploring me to revenge his death. I found the man, and we fought on the French frontier, and he was severely wounded. I had left an address with Tim to which he could write, and on my return to town found a letter awaiting me. He said that my nest was being kept warm by a stranger, and I had better return at once—unobserved. He added that he would be on the watch at Wrostella from midnight till morning for me, and the second midnight after receiving his letter I arrived.”
Noémie drew herself out of his arms, and looked at him with proud enquiry and indignation.
“I don't know what he meant. He opened to me before I could knock, and led me upstairs. He showed me a secret door in the panelled wall of your room, explained to me how it opened from inside, and bade me go in, 'for that someone was expected.' I entered. I approached the mirror before which you sat, caught your words, and then—you looked me straight in the eyes, and fired from over your shoulder.... The shot took effect on my head. I fell for the moment, then dragged myself up, and noiselessly escaped as I had entered. It was all clear to me—that you recognised and meant to kill me, afterwards saying that you fired in self-defence, supposing me to be a stranger; and M. Laurent's presence in the house supplied the reason.”
I fainted outside from loss of blood; Tim carried me into the shooting gallery, tended me, and dressed the wound. Then he put me to bed in a small room beyond the gallery; and there, keeping every one away with stories of the ghost, nursed me till I was convalescent. The wound was not serious, but all my hair at the top came off, and when I was able to travel, I went by night to Londonderry and got fitted out—and very badly fitted—as you see. M. Laurent departed—I returned. At first I resolved on having the matter out with you, and I was violent, as you know, and natural. Then you were so cold that you froze me, and I thought, 'This is a duel—we will see whose pride lasts out longest.' But to-day—seeing you so sweet, so womanly to all the world but me—I broke down, and——”
“IT WAS TIM,” NOÉMIE GASPED.
He drew her gently but firmly into his arms.
“Forgive me, Noémie,” he said, “it was pure jealousy—jealousy right through, and that Iago, Tim—he may have meant well, but out he goes. Kiss me, Noémie, kiss me, sweetheart, and forgive me—forgive me and forget the past month.”
Her young arms went softly up and round his neck.
“I'll forgive it all and forget it all,” she said, with her lips to his ear, “if you'll only forget and forgive poor Noémie's crime.”