Kitabı oku: «The Bride of the Tomb, and Queenie's Terrible Secret», sayfa 28
CHAPTER XXXVI
The angry husband followed Leon Vinton's leisurely steps, and quickly overtook him.
Placing one hand on the villain's shoulder with a grasp like steel, Captain Ernscliffe whirled him round face to face.
A malevolent sneer curved the lips of the handsome scoundrel as he recognized his assailant. He tried to shake himself free from that painfully tight grasp, but it was useless. He seemed to be held in a vise.
"Unhand me, sir," he said, in a voice of angry expostulation.
"Villain!" exclaimed Captain Ernscliffe, in a low, deep voice of concentrated passion. "How dared you speak to my wife? Apologize immediately for the insult."
Leon Vinton's face assumed a blank stare of astonishment.
"Does she consider it an insult to be recognized by an old friend?" he inquired, in a voice of mocking courtesy.
Captain Ernscliffe's brow grew as dark as night. He shook the sneering scoundrel by the shoulder as though he would have shaken the life out of him.
"How dare you claim her as an old friend?" he thundered. "You whose acquaintance is a disgrace to any woman. You, the most notorious and unprincipled villain in the city. Retract those words before I kill you."
"Come, come," answered Vinton, coolly and maliciously, "I am but speaking the truth. As for killing, let me remind you that two can play at that game. I have a pistol in my pocket, and I believe I am a better shot than you are. But your wife, as you call her, is not worthy the shedding of an honest man's blood! I will keep my weapon in its place, and all I ask you is to confront me with the lady whose honor you are so zealously defending. I think she will not dare to deny that once she claimed me as her dearest friend!"
Captain Ernscliffe drew back his hand to strike him in the face, but something in his enemy's words and looks seemed to stagger him. He hoarsely exclaimed:
"I will not pollute the pure air she breathes with your foul presence. As for you, liar, beware how you assert things that you cannot prove."
"Hard words break no bones," laughed Leon Vinton, seeming to take downright pleasure in tormenting the other. "I'm determined not to be angry with you, for I do not think the lady we are discussing is worth the trouble. I can prove all that I assert, and more besides."
"How? How?" exclaimed Ernscliffe, in sheer amaze at his unparalleled effrontery.
"I could prove it by the lady herself, but since you refuse to admit me to her presence, come with me to my home, a few miles from the city, and my housekeeper shall show you the elegant rooms Mrs. Ernscliffe occupied when she was my dear friend and guest for a year."
The cool, insolent assertion fell on Captain Ernscliffe's ears like a thunderbolt. He staggered back and stared at the calm, smiling villain in wonder mingled with indefinable dread.
"My God!" he muttered, half to himself, "you would not make such an assertion unless you could prove it."
"I can prove every assertion I have made," was the confident reply. "Queenie Lyle ran away with me the day her mother and sisters went to Europe. She lived with me nearly a year. I can prove this, remember."
"You married her!" gasped his adversary, his eyes starting, his face as white as death.
Leon Vinton looked at that pale, anguish-stricken face, and laughed aloud, the mocking laugh of a fiend.
"Married her?" he asked, sneeringly. "Oh, no, I am not one of the marrying kind. She knew that, but she loved me, and was content to live with me on my own terms."
There was a blank silence. Captain Ernscliffe dimly felt that the agony he was enduring was commensurate with the pains of hell.
Leon Vinton enjoyed his misery to the utmost.
"We lived together a year," he went on, after a moment. "At first we were very loving and very happy, but well—you know how such cases always terminate—we wearied of each other. She was a spit-fire and a termagant. She pushed me into the river and tried to drown me. She thought she had succeeded, and ran away home. Her family kept her fatal secret, and married her off to you."
"This is horrible if true!" ejaculated the listener.
"Come," said Leon Vinton, "go home with me. My carriage is outside the gate. I merely chose to saunter in the park. You shall see her letters to me, you shall hear what my housekeeper knows about the matter."
"I will go with you," said Captain Ernscliffe, rousing himself as from a painful dream. "But if I find that you have lied to me, Vinton, I will kill you!"
CHAPTER XXXVII
"My poor Queenie, my poor child, you erred greatly in the deception you practiced in the beginning. It was wrong to desert your home and family as you did, but I cannot upbraid you now. Your punishment has been bitter enough. May God help you, my little one!" said Robert Lyle, smoothing the golden head that lay upon his knee with a gentle, fatherly caress.
Queenie had come back from that ride which had begun so happily and found her Uncle Robert waiting for her in the drawing-room. He had declined her invitation to make his home with her, and taken quarters at a hotel, but there were very few days when he failed to visit her. To-day when she came staggering in, looking so fearfully white and death-stricken, he saw at once that some fearful thing had happened to her, and started up in alarm.
"Queenie, my dear, what is it? Are you ill?" he exclaimed, going to her, and taking her cold, nerveless hand in his.
She looked up at him, and Robert Lyle never forgot the tearless despair, the utter agony of her white face and wild, blue eyes. They haunted his dreams for many nights after. Yet she tried to smile, and the smile was sadder than tears.
"I—I—yes, I believe I am ill," she said, dropping down into a great arm-chair. "I will sit here and rest, Uncle Rob! I shall be better presently."
"Let me get you some wine," he said. "It will revive you."
"No, no, I will not have anything!" she said. "Nothing could help me."
The tone made his heart ache, it was so hopeless.
He bent over her and removed her hat and gloves as deftly and tenderly as a woman could have done.
His anxious looks, his tender solicitude made her think of her father.
The tender recollection broke down the barriers of stony calm she was trying to maintain. Bowing her face on her hands she wept and sobbed aloud.
Mr. Lyle was greatly shocked and distressed at her vehement exhibition of grief. He brought a chair, and sitting down beside her, put his kindly old arm about her heaving shoulders.
"Tell your old uncle what grieves you, pet," he said. "Perhaps I can help to set it right."
And after a little more passionate weeping she answered, without looking up:
"It is one of those troubles that nothing can set right, Uncle Rob, but I will tell you the truth, for perhaps you may hear it from other lips than mine soon."
She stole one hand into his and nestled her bright head against his shoulder.
"Promise not to hate me, Uncle Rob," she whispered through her tears. "I have only you now. Father, mother, sisters, husband—I have lost them all. In all the wide world I have but you to love me!"
"My dear, you talk wildly," he said, in wonder. "It is true that your mother and sister have shown hearts harder than the nether mill-stone to you, but you have the noblest and most loving husband in the world!"
"He will not love me any longer when he has heard all that I am going to tell you, Uncle Rob," she murmured through her choking sobs.
And then she told him the shameful story of that missing year of her life as she had told it to Sydney a few months before; but it was not so hard to tell now, for instead of her sister's scornful looks and cruel words, she had a listener as tender and pitying as her own father had been—a listener whose tears fell more than once on the golden head bowed meekly on his shoulder.
And when it all had been told and the weary head had slipped down to his knee, he had no reproaches for the suffering young heart that had already been so cruelly punished. He could only repeat:
"My poor little one, my poor little one, may God help you!"
"And you'll not desert me, Uncle Rob—not even if—if he does?" she murmured.
"No, never," he answered, fondly. "I'll stand by you, Queenie, if all the world forsakes you. You never meant to do wrong, I know that, and I will not scorn you because a devil in human shape has made desolate the fair young life that opened with such sweet promise. If Lawrence deserts you, we will go away together—you and I, pet—and wander around the world, restless and lonely, and yet not altogether desolate, for we shall still have each other for comfort and support."
"But, oh, Uncle Rob, I love him so, I love him so. How can I give him up now, when I have been so happy with him? It is more than I could bear. He had as well plunge a knife into my heart and lay me dead before him as to leave me now," cried the wretched young wife, giving way to a very abandonment of grief.
Uncle Rob could only say:
"My poor Queenie, my poor darling, let us hope for the best!"
He did not know how to comfort her, for he could not tell what course Captain Ernscliffe would pursue after hearing Leon Vinton's garbled version of Queenie's early error. He hoped for the best; but he feared the worst.
He could not bear to leave her in her sorrow, so he remained with her until the luncheon hour, hoping that Captain Ernscliffe might return while he—her uncle—was present, that he might defend her from his possible reproaches. But the hours passed slowly by, and dinner was announced, yet he failed to come.
They made no pretence at eating—these two sorrowing ones. They remained in the drawing-room alone, talking but little, and both on the alert for Captain Ernscliffe's coming. But the lovely, starry night had fallen, and the lamps were lighted before a strange step ran up the marble steps, and a letter was handed to Queenie.
"It is from Lawrence," she said, tearing it open with a sinking heart.
"Madam," her husband wrote, "I have heard the whole disgraceful story of the year you were supposed to have been absent in Europe from the lips of Leon Vinton and his housekeeper. I need not ask you if he told the truth. Your looks when you met him to-day were sufficient corroboration of his story. No wonder you looked so ghastly at the reappearance of the man you thought you had murdered. Oh, God! to think of it. You whom I have loved so madly, whom I thought so true and pure—you, a sinner, with a soul as black and unrepentant as a fiend in Hades!
"To-morrow I shall institute proceedings for a divorce. I can no longer lend the shelter of my name to one who has so basely deceived and betrayed me!"
CHAPTER XXXVIII
The letter dropped from Queenie's shaking hand, and she fell heavily into a seat, her slender form trembling with great, tearless emotion.
"Oh, God!" she moaned, "it is indeed a bitter cup that is pressed to my lips! A disowned daughter and sister, and a divorced wife!"
"What does he say, Queenie?" inquired her uncle, pausing in his weary march up and down the room.
She silently pointed to the letter that lay upon the carpet, where it had fallen from her hands.
He picked it up and read it, then turned his kindly blue eyes upon her with an expression of pity and distress.
"The scoundrel Vinton must indeed have traduced and maligned you to have elicited such a scathing letter from your devoted husband. Let me go and bring Lawrence to you, Queenie, that you may vindicate yourself."
But she shook her head sorrowfully yet firmly.
"No Uncle Rob; he asks for no defense from me; he tacitly accepts all that Vinton has told him as the truth. He will hear nothing from you or me. There is nothing left me but to hide myself somewhere in the great cruel world and die," she said, with inexpressible bitterness.
"Queenie, let me entreat you not to throw away your happiness thus. Let me explain everything to Lawrence as you have told it to me. He could not be hard upon you then. He would see how cruelly you had been wronged, and how much you had suffered for it. If he loves you as much as he has seemed to do he could not but forgive you."
She took the letter from his hand and glanced over its brief contents again.
"No, no, his love must have been dead indeed before he could write to me so cruelly as this. Let him think what he will, Uncle Rob. The best is bad enough; so why should I try to vindicate myself? He shall have his freedom since he wants it so much."
"But, my dear, surely you will not permit the divorce without contesting it? Think what a terrible thing it would be to remain silent in such a case. A divorced woman is always a disgraced woman in the eyes of the world, no matter how unjustly the verdict was given against her. It must not be permitted. We must engage a lawyer to defend your case. I do not believe that your husband could obtain a divorce from any court in the land if the truth of the matter were rightly known."
"Do you think that I would belong to him and bear his name against his will?" she exclaimed, with all the passion and fire of tone and gesture that had won her fame and fortune on the tragic stage. "No, never, never! I will not raise my hand to stay the divorce. I will be silent, whatever they lay to my charge. His quick unkindness, his readiness to believe evil against me, has been the bitterest of all to bear, but I will not speak one word to let him know it. My heart shall break in silence!"
He gave up the point, seeing that it was utterly useless to urge it upon her.
"Since you are determined to sacrifice yourself thus on the altar of Vinton's fiendish revenge," he said, "tell me what I can do for you, my poor child. You will not wish to remain at Ernscliffe's house, of course?"
"Of course not," she answered.
Then after a moment's thought, she said, abruptly:
"Why, Uncle Rob, I shall have to go upon the stage again. I had forgotten until this moment that I am poor, that I have nothing at all to live upon. When I gave up my theatrical career and returned to my husband, I deeded away, with his consent, all my earnings on the stage to build a free church for the poor of London."
"You shall never go upon the stage again with my consent," he answered. "I have enough for us both to live in luxury all our lives. It is true I have lost a few thousands recently by the failure of a bank, but that is a mere nothing. I am a very wealthy man yet. You shall be my dear and honored daughter so long as I live, Queenie, and my heiress when I die."
She thanked him with a silent, eloquent glance.
"And now," he continued, "it will not do for you to remain in Ernscliffe's house any longer than to-morrow. Let your maid pack your trunks for you to-night, and to-morrow I will take you away to some health resort—the mountains or the seashore—anywhere you like, so that I get you out of this city."
"And I shall never see my husband again," she said, clasping her hands with a gesture of despair. "Oh, how fleeting and evanescent was my dream of happiness! How can I live without him now, when I have been so happy with him?"
Uncle Robert took her tenderly in his arms, and kissed her white forehead.
"It is hard, dear," he said, "but we learn after awhile to do without the things that have been dearest to us on earth. I lost the darling of my heart many years ago. It was very hard to bear at first, but after awhile I learned patience and resignation."
"You have loved and lost?" she said, looking at him in great surprise.
"Yes, pet. Did you think I was a crusty, forlorn old bachelor from choice? No, no; I was betrothed to a sweet and lovely girl in my early youth, but she went away to live with the angels, and I have been true to her memory ever since."
"Poor uncle! I did not know you had so sad a secret in your life," she said, with the dew of sympathy shining in her beautiful blue eyes.
"Every heart knoweth its own bitterness," answered the kind, old man, sadly.
The next day he took her away to the seashore, hoping that the change of air and scene might divert her mind from its sorrows.
It was a vain hope. Her terrible trouble was too deeply graven on her mind. She became ill the day they took possession of their cottage, and for several weeks lay tossing with fever, closely attended by a skillful physician and two careful old nurses, while Mr. Lyle veered to and fro, his gentle heart nearly broken by this unexpected stroke of fate.
But at length, when they had almost begun to despair of her recovery, her illness took a sudden turn for the better.
She began to convalesce slowly but surely, and one day she turned the nurses out of the room and sent for her Uncle Robert.
"I want to ask you something," she said, putting her feverish, wasted little hand into his strong, tender clasp.
"I am listening, dear," he answered, kindly.
"Has—has that divorce been granted yet?" she inquired, flushing slightly.
"Oh, no, my dear. Your husband has applied for it, but they have been waiting since your illness to know what steps you will take in the matter—whether or not you would engage a lawyer and contest the divorce. I would not give them any satisfaction while you were sick, for I thought you might change your mind."
"I have changed my mind, Uncle Rob," she said. "I mean to contest the divorce. There is a reason now" (she blushed and drooped her eyes from his perplexed gaze) "why I should try to save my fair fame as much as I can. Not that I wish to live with Lawrence again, whether there is a divorce or not, but I wish to defend my own honor and leave behind me as pure a name as I can. You will secure an able lawyer for me, will you not, Uncle Robbie?"
"Yes, darling, you shall have the best counsel that money can procure," he answered, deeply moved at her earnest words.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Captain Ernscliffe sat alone in the spacious library of his elegant mansion.
The windows were raised, and the rich curtains of silk and lace were drawn back, admitting the bracing October air.
The playful breeze lifted the dark, clustering locks from his high, white brow, and wafted to his senses the delicate perfume of roses and lilies that filled the vases on the marble mantel.
The evening sunshine lay in great, golden bars on the emerald-velvet carpet.
But none of these beautiful things attracted the attention of the master of this luxurious mansion.
He sat at his desk with an open book before him, and a half-smoked cigar between his white, aristocratic fingers; but the fire had died out on the tip of his prime Havana, and the idle breeze turned the leaves of his book at its wanton will.
He sat there, perfectly still and silent, in his great arm-chair, staring drearily before him, a stern, sad look on his handsome face, the fire of a jealous, all-consuming passion smouldering gloomily in the beautiful dark eyes, half veiled by their sweeping lashes.
He had been trying to read, but the strange unrest that possessed him was too great to admit of fixing his attention on the author, yet now he slowly repeated some lines that caught his eye as the light breeze fluttered the book leaves:
"Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung."
"Ah! she is all that, and more," he exclaimed, bitterly, showing by those quick words where his thoughts were.
A slight cough interrupted him. He looked up quickly and saw Robert Lyle standing within the half-open door. The old man moved forward deprecatingly.
"Pardon my abrupt entrance, Captain Ernscliffe," he said; "I knocked several times without eliciting a reply, so I ventured to enter through the half-open door."
Captain Ernscliffe arose and shook his visitor's hand with a cordiality tempered by an indefinable restraint.
"Pray make no apologies, sir," he said. "They are quite unnecessary."
He placed a chair for the visitor, then resumed his own seat, gazing rather curiously at the pleasant-looking, kindly old gentleman, who reminded him so much of his wife's father.
What had brought him there, he wondered, with some slight nervousness at the thought.
Mr. Lyle looked a little nervous, too. He wiped the dew from his fine old forehead, and remarked that it was a warm day.
"I suppose so," assented the host in a tone that seemed to say he had not thought about it before.
"I have come on a thankless mission, Lawrence," Mr. Lyle said, with some slight embarrassment. "At least on an unsolicited one. I wish to speak to you of—of Queenie."
Captain Ernscliffe flushed crimson to the roots of his hair, and then grew deathly pale.
"I must refer you to my counsel, then," he answered, after a pause. "I have nothing to say about her myself."
"Lawrence!"
The gently rebuking tone in which the one word was uttered made the hearer start. He looked up quickly.
"Well, sir?"
"Do you know that you are treating my niece very unfairly in this matter. It is cruel to condemn her with her defense unheard."
"She condemned herself, Mr. Lyle, without a word from anyone else. Her guilt and shame were written all too legibly on her face the moment she looked upon Leon Vinton."
"Let us grant that she had reason to be ashamed of his acquaintance, Lawrence. Still may there not be some extenuation for her fault?"
"None, none! The more I think of it the blacker her dreadful sins appear. Oh, my God, to think of her with her face as lovely as an angel's, and her heart all black with sin! To think how I trusted and loved her, and how basely she repaid my confidence! How cruelly she deceived and betrayed me!" exclaimed the outraged husband, rising from his seat and pacing the floor excitedly.
"I cannot effect any compromise, then?" said Mr. Lyle, irresolutely. "You are bent on a divorce, I suppose. A separation would not content you?"
"Did she send you to ask this?" angrily exclaimed Captain Ernscliffe, pausing in his restless tramp to glare furiously at the would-be peacemaker.
"No, Lawrence, I told you I came on an unsolicited mission. Queenie knows nothing of my coming, and would not thank me for having asked that useless question. She asks no favors from you, but she means to defend her honor, and fight the divorce which would brand her with shame."
"My counsel and hers will settle that affair. In the meantime, why this useless dallying for long months on the pretence of illness? Why does she shirk appearing at court in answer to the summons? If not guilty, why does she not hasten to protest her innocence?"
"Queenie is ill, Captain Ernscliffe—has been ill for months. But we hope now that she may soon be able to appear at court and confront her accusers."
"Why does she not instruct her lawyer to manage the case without her if she is unable to be present herself? This suspense is unendurable. If this delay is continued much longer, I shall endeavor to push the matter without her. I am tired of this dilly-dallying!"
They looked at each other a moment in silence. Then the elder man said, with a repressed sigh:
"That is one thing I came to ask you, Lawrence. Grant us this much grace, my poor, unfortunate Queenie, and her fond, old uncle. Do not push the matter for a little while. Wait until she can come into court and tell her own story before her fiendish accusers."
"But, Mr. Lyle, I am growing too impatient to wait longer. I chafe at the bonds that bind me to that beautiful deceiver."
"They will not bind you much longer," Mr. Lyle answered, sadly. "Either death or the law will soon sever your hated fetters."
Captain Ernscliffe started and looked at the speaker wildly.
"Death," he said, with an uncontrollable shudder. "Why do you talk of death? What is this mysterious illness that has held her in its chains so long? She used to be strong and well. She never talked of weakness."
"I cannot tell what ails her, Lawrence," said Mr. Lyle, rising as if the conference were ended, "but I have the word of her physician to tell you that within a month she will either be able to appear in court, and do what is necessary to defend her rights, or she will be in her grave. In either case you will be free."
The words fell coldly on Lawrence Ernscliffe's hearing, chilling the hot and passionate tide of resentment that hurried through his heart.
He thought with an uncontrollable pang of all that bright, fair beauty he had loved so long and so fondly lying cold in the grave—those lips that had kissed him so tenderly sealed in death, the white lids shut forever over the heaven of love in those soft blue eyes.
"Will that content you, Lawrence?" asked the old man, wistfully, pausing with his hat in his hand. "A month is not so very long."
"That depends on the mood one is in," was the unsatisfactory reply.
"But you will wait?" Mr. Lyle said, almost pleadingly.
There was a minute's pause, and then the answer came, coldly:
"I will wait."
"Thanks—and farewell," said Mr. Lyle, passing silently out of the room.
The outraged husband was alone once more, the red glow of the sunset shining into the room and touching with its tender warmth his pallid, marble-like features.
He could not rest. Mr. Lyle's words re-echoed in his ears, turning his warm blood to an icy current that flowed sluggishly through his benumbed veins.
"In a month she may be in her grave—oh! the horror of that thought," he said, aloud.
Yes, it was horror. He thought he hated her—she had deceived him so bitterly—he thought he was anxious to sever the tie that bound them together; he thought he never wished to look upon her beautiful, false face again.
And yet, and yet those words of Mr. Lyle's staggered him. He reeled beneath the suddenness of the blow. He asked himself again as he had asked Mr. Lyle:
"What is this mysterious illness that holds her in its chains?"
He did not know, he did not dream of the truth. If he had known it, he must surely have forgiven her and taken her back. He could not have hated her longer, even though she had sinned and deceived him. For he had loved her very dearly, and she was his wife.
But he said to himself:
"Why should I care if she dies? She deceived me shamefully. She can never be anything to me again. In either case, as that old man said, I shall be free. What will it matter to me, then, if she be dead or alive; I shall never see her again!"
And then when he began to understand that she might die before her testimony was given before the court in her own defense, he became conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment. He knew now that he had been very anxious all along to hear what his wife would say when she stood face to face with her accuser. Perhaps, after all, she could vindicate herself. If not, why was she so anxious to make the attempt?
"Have I wronged her?" he asked himself, suddenly. "Should I have condemned her without hearing her version of that villain's story? Ah! he would not have dared deceive me!"
