Chapter XXV

If the duke's pale, wrathful valet had suddenly changed into the grinning skeleton which had seemed to Joan to mock and gird at her that night when she replaced the poison bottle in the cupboard after pouring its contents into Victor Mercier's brandy, she could hardly have shrunk back more absolutely terror-stricken.

At first she gazed, speechless, at Paul Naz's set, ghastly face, with those pale blue eyes flashing menace and scorn. Then that up-leaping instinct within her to defend herself came to her rescue.

"Are you mad, sir, to speak to me like this?" she haughtily said. "Leave me. If you presume to insult me, I will call for help."

For a moment her daring, her defiance, staggered Paul. Meanwhile, the sudden pallor of her beautiful features, the agony in her dark eyes, had strengthened his gradually formed, but confident, belief that Victor Mercier had been merely shielding a woman when he spoke of the Thornes owing money to his late father, and that he and Joan were either lovers, or had been so. Men did not dress up as men-servants to meet a woman who merely had some cash to repay. Then, he had seen other symptoms in Victor. He believed, when he had read the account of the inquest, that either Victor held Joan's promise of marriage, or that she was his secret and abandoned wife. To the story Victor had told Vera he attached but little significance. Men said such things sometimes to girls to cover unpalatable facts they need not be told.

Then, an interior conviction seemed to assert itself. "This is the woman," cried his soul. He gazed steadily at Joan.

"Mademoiselle, I am sorry to speak like this, but I know you knew my poor murdered friend well," he began in a low tone. "God forgive me if I misjudge you! But I feel you have been cruel to him. Time will show. Meanwhile, I wish to say to you that I will do nothing against you if you do not bring this noble gentleman I hear you are to marry to shame. I leave justice to the Creator, who invented it."

With which he made her a slight bow, turned, and stalked out of the conservatory. She sank into a seat breathless, and stared vacantly at the place where he had stood, for she seemed to see that white, scornful face with the pale blue eyes which to her excited fancy had been ablaze with lurid fire, still.

All was over, then! The mirage of happiness was a mockery. She was once more plunged, steeped, in the atmosphere of crime.

"I see," she told herself, in her mental writhings under this new scorch of pain. "He is a Frenchman; he is--was--Victor's accomplice, his spy. He told Victor of Vansittart. He has been watching me."

Her first insane idea was to tell the duke that his trusted servant was the miserable spy of unscrupulous wretches. Second thoughts said "madness! Keep it to yourself. What can the man do? He knows nothing of your visit to Hay thorn Street. If you say, or suggest, he is a spy, you arouse suspicions."

Upon these second thoughts she acted. She controlled her emotions, summoning all her force, her self-possession, to her aid. There was a long mirror in the corner. She composed her features and rubbed her cheeks and lips before it, regaining a semblance of composure and ordinary appearance only just in time, for as she leant back in her chair slowly fanning herself Vansittart came in, looking grave, troubled, although he smiled as their eyes met. Had _he_ seen or heard anything peculiar?

"Is it a breach of confidence to ask what his Grace wanted you for?" she asked, assuming a sprightly manner which shocked her even as she did so.

"Not at all," he said, a little abruptly; "something about a wedding present."

Then a manservant entered with a tray of champagne and the menu card, and until she had been revived by the food she forced herself to eat, and the champagne Vansittart insisted upon her drinking, she asked no more. But, in her strained state, her lover's pre-occupation was unbearable.

Desperate, she determined to know the worst. "Tell me," she began, leaning her fair elbow on the table and looking pleadingly into his face with those bewilderingly beautiful eyes. "You know you yourself proposed we should share our secrets. And, from your manner, I know--I am positive--the duke said something more than about a wedding present."

"If he did, it was nothing of any consequence," he fondly returned, gazing tenderly at the lovely face which was his whole world. "I would tell you at once, only you are such a sweet, innocent, sensitive darling, so utterly unsophisticated, unused to this rough planet and its still rougher inhabitants--you would make a mountain of what is far less than a mole-hill in one's way."

"What is it?' I would rather, really I would, know." She gave him a coaxing glance.

"Well, it is this," he replied, hardly. "Very little to annoy one. Only I am so absurdly vulnerable, that the merest breath which affects the subject of our marriage seems to shrivel me up. It is those wretched clubs; at least, the miserable gossip which the riffraff of the clubs seem to batten and fatten upon, drivelling, disappointed, soured units of humanity that they are! They seem to be prognosticating that our wedding will not 'take place,' because I have a secret wife somewhere, who is likely to turn up. Do you suspect me, darling?"

Her joyous laugh, born of infinite relief, almost startled him. When he reached his bachelor domain that night, and recalled the events of the evening, the sweetest delight of all was to remember how his beautiful darling took his hands, and with eyes brimming with love, drew him to her and nestled in his arms as some faithful dove might have flown confidently to his shoulder. That ensuing brief--all too brief--half hour, when, by their world seemingly forgot, and certainly their world forgetting, they interchanged tender words and still tenderer embraces, seemed to his passion-stricken nature to have so riveted them to each other that the very machinations of hell itself bid fair to be powerless to part them.

"Her absolute innocence makes her so immeasurably sweeter than all the other women," he told himself, as he stalked about his rooms in a hyper-ecstatic mood. "It is that which makes her so unsuspicious, so trusting. Now, if I had told something of what the duke said to me to an ordinary woman, she would have suspected me of goodness knows what in the past. She might have concealed it, but I should have known that she did. I believe it is my darling's being so 'unspotted from the world' which influenced me to love her as I do. Oh, may I be worthy of being her guardian; for my past is not the fair, white, unsullied page that hers is! No man's can be."

* * * * *

When the young doctor she had fetched in her frantic fear the night of Mercier's death, after finding Victor insensible upon the sofa, came to Vera in the little sitting room where she was kneeling at her poor trembling old stepmother's side and telling her with the assurance of desperation that Victor must, would, soon be better--why should he not be? He had never been subject to fits. He was so well-knit, so strong, so athletic--she gave the intruder an imperious gesture, and, springing up, led him out of the room, and, closing the door, leant against the lintel, and gazed at him with such wild agony that he flinched, alarmed. She looked uncanny, and at such a crisis it was disturbing.

"I know. He is dead!" she resolutely said. "But, for God's sake, have mercy on his poor old mother. He is all she has in life. There will be an inquest? So much the better. Now go in to her, and tell her he is very ill, and must be left to you and me."

The young practitioner demurred. His private opinion was that people ought to "face their fate." He was fresh from the hospitals.

But there was something witchlike about this girl. She commanded the wistful, shivering John Dobbs, a mild specimen indeed of the genus medico, to remain and solace her stepmother with as many white lies as he could generate at the moment; then, over-riding the objections of old Doctor Thompson, who, returning home and hearing of her wild condition from his house-maid, had proceeded to Haythorn Street at once, she insisted on accompanying them into the room where the dead man lay with that calm, sphinx-like smile upon his handsome lips, and remaining there until Doctor Thompson actually took her by the shoulder and, turning her out, locked the door.

But, like some faithful dog, she remained outside. She watched them seal up the room in a dead silence. After tenderly assisting her stepmother to bed, weaving fictions the while--"Victor was in bed and asleep, the doctors had gone, and their one direction was he should not be disturbed; his very existence depended upon his being kept quiet," etc.--she returned to her post, and spent the night crouched upon the landing, her cheek against the sealed door.

"My heart is dead; my life went with his," she told herself. "What there remains of me is left to find the woman who murdered him, and to bring her to justice."