A Woman Martyr
TextCHAPTER XXXIII
"Joan! What does it mean?" asked the bridegroom, white, stern, after the shock, still seeming to see those awful words, "Vengeance is Mine!" dancing before his dazed eyes in letters of blood.
"Mean? That I am hunted down-that they are after me, cruel creatures, for an act you yourself said was only childish folly!" She writhed, and gave a mad, wild laugh which seemed to freeze him. But her explanation-her allusion to that which she had told him-that wretched affair in which she had innocently helped to ally her school friend to an utterly worthless scamp-brought instantaneous relief from his sudden, over mastering terror that the label hinted at some unknown horror.
"That was your poor friend, then, dearest, that you unwittingly helped to injure!" He detached the label with the Scriptural quotation from the bunch of flowers, pocketed it, and flung them out of the carriage window. "But I thought she was quit of him? Why should she persecute you, now? When all is over?"
She gave him a desperate glance, and shrank away into the corner of the carriage. White, her eyes ablaze-even in his miserable dread, his anxiety, she reminded him of a celebrated singer he had seen at the opera a few weeks ago in "Lucia." Why, why was her agony so intense about a mere secondary trouble?
"Understand!" she hoarsely said. "If you cannot take me on trust, we had better part, we had better separate now, this very hour, and go our different ways-"
"How dare you!" he cried; and almost fiercely, in his anguish to hear such a suggestion from her lips, he placed his hands on her shoulders, ruthlessly ignoring the bridal finery, and gazed into her strained eyes. "You are my wife! It is an insult to me, what you say! I am your husband."
He took her peremptorily in his arms, and kissed her with mingled adoration and despair. The despair was involuntary-born of a huge misgiving that something was seriously wrong with his new-made wife, and that he had yet to learn what that something was.
"And now, here we are at your home!" he tenderly said. "You must try and pretend to be the happy bride I hoped you were!"
As he helped her to alight, and acting the part of the delighted, joyous bridegroom, led her through the little crowd of servants standing about the hall, acknowledging their murmur of congratulation, those melancholy words of his-so untrue in regard to her love for him-to her rejoicing in the midst of her misery that she was his wife-touched her to the quick.
"My poor love!" she gasped, as soon as they were alone in the flower-bedecked drawing-room, throwing herself upon his breast, and gazing adoringly into his face. "I-I had not the courage to tell you before, but I must-now! I told you my unhappy friend was free, but I did not tell you how! Her husband was that man that died-that Victor Mercier! Perhaps she had something to do with his death! That is what has been eating my heart out-that I had had a hand in killing a fellow-creature-killing-depriving some one of life-oh, it is awful! Sometimes I feel that if that man were alive again, I would willingly die myself-give up all our happiness-leave you for ever! Now perhaps you can imagine what I have been suffering, and what I suffered at the theatre listening to that Mr. Hunt talking of the woman with the brandy-bottle, dreading lest he might be speaking of her-my poor miserable friend!"
"My darling!" There was a world of compunction, tenderness, sympathy in his voice as he drew her down by him on a sofa, and lovingly clasped her cold, trembling hands in his. "But you ought to have told me before! I quite-see-all-now-and now I am to bear your troubles for you-troubles indeed, absurd cobwebs-trifles light as air! Your real trouble, my dearest, is being in possession of an over-sensitive conscience! Come-there is the first carriage-how quickly they have followed us up-try and look a little more as a bride ought to look. Your being pale doesn't matter-brides seem to be given that way-but unhappy? For my sake, darling, try to look a little less as if you had just been condemned to death instead of to living your life with me!"
He kissed some colour into her white cheeks and lips; and then the wedding party began to flock in. Carriage after carriage drove up, and the bridesmaids and young men, the older relatives and friends, crowded the drawing-room, and there were embracings and congratulations-not half over when luncheon was announced. It was a gay, or a seemingly gay wedding breakfast. Joan went through it all with a curious feeling of unreality. She heard herself and her loved husband toasted, she heard his eloquent yet well-balanced little speech. She smiled upon those who spoke to her with the almost reverential solicitude with which a bride is addressed on her marriage day, and she muttered some reply, although she did not seem to gather the meaning of their speeches. She cut the cake, she rose and adjourned upstairs when the rest went to the drawing-room. Happily, she had to hurry her "going away" toilette, which was presided over by her aunt, in the seventh heaven of delight at her only niece's splendid marriage, and by her aunt's maid-Julie having already started with Lord Vansittart's valet and the luggage, to be on board the yacht with everything ready when the bride and bridegroom arrived. Happily there was not a spare moment to be wasted if they meant to "catch the train" they had planned to start by. Before she was quite ready, Vansittart's voice was heard outside the door, hurrying them. They were obliged to hasten their farewells, and drive rapidly to the station-the terminus they were starting from no one knew but Sir Thomas, who was bound to secresy.
But even when the express was rattling across the sunlit country seawards, Joan feverishly told herself that she was not yet safe. Since that posy was offered her at the church door, since she had read those awful words written on the label, and had looked into those menacing blue eyes, a renewed, augmented fear had seemed to half paralyze her, body and soul; more than fear, worse than dread-a horrible conviction of coming doom.
It asserted itself even when she lay on her husband's breast in their reserved compartment, listening to the passionate utterances of intense and devoted love with which he hoped to dispel her nervous terrors-terrors which, although he began to understand that she had unfortunately been drawn into being one of the actors in an undesirable life drama, he regarded as mere vapours which could be dispelled by an equable, peaceful life shared by him and ruled by common sense. Those clear, threatening blue eyes seemed still gazing into hers, penetrating to the secrets hidden in her soul. All through Vansittart's endearing words, the bright pictures he verbally drew of their coming happiness, those words repeated themselves in her ears-"Vengeance is Mine! I will repay, saith the Lord!"
But when day succeeded day upon the yacht; when hour after hour she was calmed by the tender devotion of her husband; when sunlit summer seas under blue, tranquil skies were her surroundings by day, to give place to a dusky mystic ocean lit by glittering trails of moonlight, and reflecting myriads of stars at night-a certain calm, which was more stolidity than calm, a content which was more relief from dread than peace-came to her rescue.
They spent some weeks on the high seas, touching only at obscure foreign ports. At last Joan's latent fears began to reassert themselves. She urged Vansittart to make for a seaport where they might procure English papers.
This led to their return from a coasting tour of the Mediterranean Islands. The heat was intense, only tempered by sea breezes and by the appliances on board the luxurious craft. Still, Joan would not consent to go northward, where people would naturally expect them to be. Vansittart put in at Marseilles, went on shore alone, saw the papers, ascertained that there was nothing in them anent "the Mercier affair," about which his young wife was, in his opinion, so unreasonably conscientious, and brought them to her with secret triumph.
He hoped that now she would be "more reasonable," and to his content, his hope was so far realized that when he tentatively suggested a return home, she readily acquiesced. A week later they arrived at his favourite country seat-a pretty estate in Oxfordshire, near the most picturesque part of the Thames.
An old stone house which had seen the birth of generation upon generation of Vansittart's ancestors, Pierrepoint Court stood in a wide, undulating park. Rooks nested in the tall elms, shy deer hid among the bracken under the preserves. An atmosphere of calm, of unworldly peace, reigned everywhere, and seemed to affect the new mistress of the place, even as she entered upon her duties as its châtelaine.
A day or two passed so delightfully that she frequently told herself with mute gratitude to Heaven, that trouble was over-happiness had begun. She strolled through her dominion with her husband at her side, all his retainers and tenants welcoming and congratulating them. Most of all she enjoyed driving with him in a dog-cart to outlying farms, and rusticating among the orchards, visiting the poultry-yards and dairies. This was before they had written to announce their arrival to Sir Thomas and Lady Thorne. The morning their letters must have reached, they were starting for a long drive when a telegraph boy cycled up. Vansittart read the message, which was from Sir Thomas, and crumpling it up, thrust it deep in his pocket. "It is nothing," he said, smiling. But his heart misgave him. The words were ominous of trouble.
"Meet me at my solicitors' as soon after you receive this as possible. This is urgent."
CHAPTER XXXIV
"No answer," Vansittart said to the boy. Then he turned, his face pale, his lips twitching, and saying, "Come in for a moment," he took Joan's hand and led her back indoors, through the hall into the morning-room, where they had but just been laughing over their breakfast like two happy children.
"I must catch the next train to town, dearest, my lawyer wants me on important business connected with the settlements," he said. "Yes! Really, that is all! Am I pale? I confess that the sight of a telegram always upsets me-I am not as stolid as I seem. And now, darling, I must be off at once, if I mean to catch the next train!"
He embraced her fondly, adjured her to be most careful of herself, suggested that she should keep to the grounds while he was away-he did not like her "wandering about the country alone" – and promising to return as soon as his legal business was over, he left her.
She stood at the door watching the dog-cart speed away through the park until it disappeared into the avenue of limes; then feeling as if her heart were a huge leaden weight within her breast, she went to her boudoir, a room Vansittart had had refurnished for her in white and pale blue, and where they had sat together since their arrival when they were not out of doors. It was one of those close, thundery summer days which encourage gloom; and as she flung aside her hat and gloves and sank hopelessly into a chair, she wondered how she would contrive to get through those hours before his return.
Evidently Vansittart had become not only all in all to her, but she hardly dared face life without him. A nervous terror seized upon her. She felt, as she looked fearfully round, as if mocking spirits were rejoicing to find her without his protecting presence. Faint, jeering laughter seemed in the air, or was it only a singing in her ears?
"If I don't fight this awful feeling, he will find me mad when he comes home!" she wildly thought. So she rang the bell, and asked for the housekeeper, who presently came in in a brand-new, rustling silk, a little fluttered. But she felt gratified by her mistress asking so sweetly to be "shown everything," and the hours before the luncheon bell rang were whiled away by an inspection of the mansion and its contents from offices to attics and lumber-rooms.
Then came luncheon in the big, pompous dining-room: luncheon alone, with strange-looking ancestors painted by Vandyck, Lely, and others, gazing grimly out upon the slim girl in the white frock sitting in solitary grandeur at the table, obsequious men-servants in solemn, silent attendance. After that ordeal she felt she could bear no more, and tying on her hat fled into the grounds.
Here the extraordinary stillness of everything under the dense canopy of slowly massing clouds oppressed her still more. She felt more and more eerie and distraught as she wandered, until she came to the river. Here there was movement, something like life again. A faint breeze stirred the wavelets as the flood rushed steadily seawards.
"I will get out a boat and have a row. That may make me feel less horrible!" she determined. She went to the boathouse, chose a skiff, and was soon rowing rapidly up stream. She had learnt to row as a child. The boat sped cleanly along, as she neatly, deftly, handled the sculls.
Her melancholy slightly dispelled by the exercise, she forgot how time was going-how far she had rowed out of bounds, when suddenly an arrow of lurid lightning went quivering down athwart the dense grey horizon, followed by a detonating roar of thunder.
"I am in for it, there's no doubt of that!" she told herself, almost with a smile. Rain, storm, thunder, lightning-what items they were in the balance against a conscience bearing a hideous load such as hers! As she turned and began to row steadily homewards, she realized her mental state almost with awe.
Another flash illumined the whole landscape with a yellowish-blue glare, then a clap of thunder followed almost instantaneously. Down came such a deluge of rain that for a minute she was blinded; she sat still, wondering whether the slight craft would fill and be sunk.
Then, remembering her beloved, she urged herself to make an effort and return home. Although the downpour beat steadily upon her, upon the boat and the water around, although little runnels trickled coldly down her neck, and her straw hat was already pulp, she went steadily on and on, until at last she was at the boat-house, and had moored the skiff under its friendly shelter.
The rain had given place to hail, so she thought better to wait awhile before walking home. She sat there, wringing the water from her skirts, and wondering what Vansittart would say if he knew her plight, until the clouds parted, watery sunbeams cast a sickly lemon tint upon the river and its banks, and a rainbow began to glow upon the slate-coloured clouds.
Then she stepped from the boat and started to walk across the park. Her clinging garments made locomotion difficult. "What a drowned rat I must look!" she told herself. "What will be the best way of getting to my room without being seen? I know! The side room window!"
"The side room" was a chamber leading from the hall, and conducting by a second door to the offices. It was used for humbler visitors, messengers who waited answers, dressmakers and the like. In the hot weather the window was generally open. "If they have shut it, I must go in by the usual way," she thought.
It was not shut. With a little spring she balanced herself on the sill, and slipped down upon the floor, to find that the room was not empty as she had expected. A slight person in deep mourning, who had been seated, rose and confronted her.
Joan stared at the white, stern, but beautiful face in sick dismay. This was the woman who had given her the flowers-the posy with the strange, awful threat written on the label, when she was about to enter the bridegroom's carriage as she left the church after her wedding.
"I see-you know me," said the girl. She spoke with icy composure. "I have come to speak to you of your danger."
The two looked into each other's eyes unflinchingly-Vera with a cold condemnatory stare; Joan with the apathy of abject despair.
"Come this way, please," she said. Her garments dripped slowly on the polished floor; she glanced at the drops with a curious wonder, then led the way along a passage, and held open a baize door. In another moment the two were shut into Joan's boudoir, and Joan waved the girl that her wretched, so-called husband had loved, towards a chair.
She shook her head, impatiently. "I meant to wait to see you until you were in the dock," she began. "Your whole doings are known, from the first letter you wrote to poor Victor, to the hour I saw you in Haythorn Street, coming out of the house after you had poisoned him and left him to die! I had meant to tell all I knew to the detectives, but they came after me. All is complete-you may be arrested at any moment. Then will come your trial, your condemnation-your hanging. I expect you have dreamt the rope was round your neck; at least, if you have any feeling left in you. Murderess that you are, you have ruined my life, you have killed my dearest love, who loved me, not you-and I was gloating over the idea of your being hanged by the neck till you were dead, when I dreamt of my Victor. I dreamt a shadow-his shadow-bent over me, and said those very words that I thought meant your doom, 'I will repay, saith the Lord!' I awoke, and knew that I was to come and warn you, that you may escape."
She stopped short, gazing curiously at Joan's drawn, ashen features, features like those of an expressionless corpse. Her eyes, too, were dull, wandering.
"Escape?" she said, stupidly. Then she dropped into a chair, feeling half dead, half paralyzed. The thunder rolled faintly in the distance. It seemed to her that she was still seated in the boat, rowing, rowing, and was dreaming this wretched misery.
"Yes, escape!" the other repeated, bitterly. "You must confess everything to your husband-mind! everything! Then, perhaps, as I, whom you have injured for life, have had mercy on you, he may! At all events, he may do something to save your neck. You have but a few hours' safety-"
She started and stopped short. The door was flung open, and Vansittart entered, briskly, eagerly. He looked from one to the other, then went up to Joan, and reverentially lifting her hand, kissed it.
"Who is this lady, dearest?" he asked, gazing steadfastly at Vera.
CHAPTER XXXV
"I am Vera Anerley," said the pale girl, speaking in clear tones of deadly meaning. "I have come to tell your wife that the case against her is complete; that she may be arrested at any moment for the murder of Victor Mercier!"
Joan gave a faint cry, and buried her wet, dishevelled head in Vansittart's coat-sleeve.
"Hush, darling, I am here!" he tenderly said. Then, supporting Joan's fainting form, which was already a dead weight, he looked with cool scorn, with stern defiance, at the slender, black-clad figure, at the white, miserable face with those menacing eyes.
"Case, indeed," he exclaimed with scathing contempt. "A jealous woman's vengeance, you should say! But your miserable plot to destroy my injured wife, woman, will succeed in injuring no one but yourself. I have this morning learnt every detail of the trumped-up charge, and given my instructions for the defence. If, indeed, the affair will go any further after my deposition on oath that on the night that-man-died-my future wife was with me until she met her maid to return home. And now, since you have succeeded in making Lady Vansittart ill, I must ask you to quit the house-I will have you driven to the station, if you like-"
Vera interrupted him with a groan.
"I forgot!" she wailed. "I forgot-a man will perjure himself to save the woman he loves! But your lies will fail to save her, my lord! Husbands and wives are nothing in law, in a murder case! If you want to save her, you must take her away!"
With a sob she turned on her heel and went out. Vansittart gathered Joan in his arms, and sinking into a chair tried to kiss her back to life. "My darling, I know all! I will save you!" he repeated passionately. What could she have been doing? She must have been exposed to the whole fury of the storm. Had the vindictive creature killed her? He had thought himself hopelessly crushed, body and soul, when he arrived at his lawyers' to find the distracted Sir Thomas with his awful tale of the charge to be brought against his niece, which Paul Naz had in compassion forewarned him of. But the sight of his darling-who looked dead or dying-who lay like a stone in his arms and hardly seemed to breathe-brought back life and energy, if it augmented his despair.
Her garments were wringing wet-what a frightful state she was in! With a half-frantic wonder what he had best do, he lifted her in his arms, so strong in his anguish that she seemed a mere featherweight, and carrying her upstairs to her room by a side staircase that was little used, laid her on the bed, and rang for Julie. While a man was despatched in hot haste for the doctor, the two cut and dragged off Joan's soaking garments, and vainly endeavoured to chafe some warmth into her icy limbs. But at last insensibility had come to the rescue of Victor Mercier's unfortunate dupe. Joan lay inert and senseless, and when the old doctor who had attended a couple of generations of Vansittarts in their Oxfordshire home came in, his wonted cheeriness changed to gravity.
Nothing could be done but wait patiently for the return of consciousness, and telegraph for nurses. He could make no prognosis whatever at that stage, but that Lady Vansittart's health was in a critical condition.
"Do you mean that she may not recover?" asked Vansittart. They had adjourned to Joan's boudoir, leaving Julie and the housekeeper in temporary charge of the patient.
Old Doctor Walters shrugged his shoulders and raised his shaggy eyebrows. Vansittart was answered.
"When I tell you that I hope to God my wife will die, you will understand there is something terrible in all this!" he exclaimed-and the tone of his voice, as much as the meaning conveyed by such a speech, made the old man sit up in his chair aghast.
But he was still more horrified when the unhappy man he had known and tended since childhood told him the miserable story as he had gathered it from Joan herself, and from the dreadful tale told to Sir Thomas in its entirety by Paul Naz: the tale of a romantic schoolgirl secretly wooed and married by a man who immediately afterwards absconded, as he was "wanted" by the police on a charge of theft and fraud: her foolish dream dispelled when she learnt that fact, hiding her secret from the uncle and aunt who had adopted her; then, as the years went by and the husband-in-name made no sign, hoping against hope, and giving way to her great love for a man who adored her. Then, just as they were promised to each other, the man's reappearance with threats of exposure, his compelling her visits to his rooms, and her succumbing to the temptation of mixing morphia in his brandy. The one item unknown was Joan's motive for drugging Mercier. So the case looked terribly black to Vansittart and his friend in need, his good old doctor.
Good-and tenderhearted, for at once he offered to see them through their trouble-to the end.
"If the police appear with a warrant they cannot refuse to listen to me," he said. "So I shall take up my abode here, and leave my patients to my partner and our assistant."
The honeymoon was waning in the most dismal of fashions. The house was wrapped in gloom. Joan had recovered consciousness to suffer agonies of pain, and fall into the delirium of fever. The prolonged chill of being the sport of the storm, with so terrible a shock to follow, had resulted in pneumonia. A specialist was summoned from town. He gave no hope. When his fiat was pronounced a look of relief came upon Vansittart's worn, lined features. The specialist went away wondering, but old Doctor Walters understood.
Then the stricken husband took up his position at his wife's pillow, and banished every one. Whatever his life might contain in the future of hideous retrospection, for those few short hours left he would watch his erring darling yield up her soul to the great Judge who alone knew the frail clay he had made, without any human soul witnessing his agony.
Joan had been raving, madly, incoherently of the past and present, tossing and writhing, now and then clamouring and groaning. But a few minutes after Vansittart had banished the nurses and taken up his position by her side, she seemed to grow calmer.
Was it possible that at least she might die in peace, free from those horrible fantasies, those cruel pains?
He watched her anxiously hour after hour. As the delirium abated the restlessness ceased, and she seemed to fall asleep. He had come to her at midnight. When the grey dawn crept into the room Joan was asleep, and as he lay and gazed wearily at her, his head drooped until it rested on the pillow.
After a succession of wild, tormenting dreams-a purgatory of horrible physical sufferings-Joan slept. She was vaguely conscious of Vansittart's nearness, vaguely sensible that relief had come. The sleep was like heaven after hell.
Then at last another kind of dream was added to her sense of slumber. She felt that something greater and nobler had been added to her life, and that it was all around and about. In the tremendous vastness and solidity of the new influence all seemed petty, small; she knew that she, Vansittart, Mercier, Vera, all were but dancing specks in a gorgeous sunlight…
Vansittart awoke with a start, a feeling of guilt, fear, and a pain in his arm from some heavy weight.
Then a horrible cry startled the nurse who was keeping vigil in the next room. She rushed in and up to the bed.
* * * * *
The following day three stalwart men descended from the quick train from London and chartered a fly to drive them to Lord Vansittart's.
"A fine place," said one, almost regretfully-he was young, with a fresh colour, and his errand seemed ghastly to him-as they drove in at the open gates, past a lodge which was to all appearance empty.
"Yes," said the eldest of the trio. "Dear me," he added, looking out as the fly passed out of the lime avenue. "What a melancholy looking house! All the blinds down, too!"
Arriving at the hall-door, the oldest and sternest-looking emerged and asked to see Lord Vansittart. The porter looked impressed, but unhesitatingly admitted him, and conducted him to the library, leaving him with a grave "I will tell his lordship."
"Strange; he did not ask who I was or what I wanted," murmured the man to himself. The silence in the great mansion was almost oppressive. He heard the servant's footsteps, distant voices, the clang of a closing door, then a slight pattering, which grew gradually more distinct, and seemed to keep pace with the beats of his pulse. Advancing footsteps!
"They have heard, and they have all gone; the man is coming back with some fine tale or another," he told himself, exasperatedly. As the door opened he turned with ready resentment, which gave place to a startled, uncomfortable sensation as in the ghastly man in deep black who entered he recognised Lord Vansittart.
"I am very sorry, my Lord, but I have a most painful duty to perform," he began, taking the warrant from his pocket. "I am compelled to arrest Lady Vansittart for the wilful murder of Victor Mercier on the – th of June last."
Lord Vansittart bowed, asked to see the warrant, and then slowly said, "If you will come this way, I will take you to her ladyship, who has a complete answer to the charge."
The detective bowed, passing his hand across his lips to assure himself that he was not smiling-he had no wish to wound the wretched husband of a miserable murderess-and followed the proprietor of the richly-furnished mansion across the hall, up the grand staircase, and along the corridor. Vansittart paused at a door, opened it, and entered.
The detective followed, half suspicious, half uneasy. The room was hung with white-everywhere were piles, masses of red flowers. On the white-hung bed lay more blood-red blossoms. Lord Vansittart went up to it with bowed head, and folding back the sheet that was scattered with the crimson blooms, showed a beautiful waxen face surrounded by close-woven gleaming hair: waxen hands folded meekly on the breast.
"Good God! Dead!" The detective recognized her-he had no doubt as to the fact-but he felt it with a shock.
"No," said Lord Vansittart, grimly, turning to him with a look which he afterwards confided to his wife was the worst experience of his hard-working and disillusionary existence. "Alive! Men may torture and kill our bodies, man, but who can kill the soul?"