Chapter XXXI

“Why have you come back like this to spy on me?” demanded the young Earl. “What do you mean? You had better explain yourself. You’ve had an ill look the whole day, though this was an odd occasion upon which to endeavour to fasten a quarrel upon me.”

“Her bracelet!” repeated Oliver, with an ugly smile. “You’ve got her bracelet.”

“And I’ve told you how,” said Lucius coldly. “The day she left she was wearing them--you know that, I think; they were in the list of her ornaments.”

“And you let me put it there,” said Oliver, “knowing that you had it all the while!”

“I did not care to speak of it,” returned Lucius, “and that you may well understand. The clasp of the ornament was defective, and she let me take it when it fell. Why, she was careless about it, of course. I said ‘I’ll get this mended for you--it’s a poor clasp!’”

“Don’t put me off like that,” said Oliver; “don’t put me off with such rant, such lies! I found the fellow to that in Flimwel Grange--she went there, and dropped it; both the clasps were defective, it seems; I’ve got it now in my pocket.” And he took the ornament out of the pocket of his black coat, and held it on his palm: the fellow to the little bracelet of coral grapes and vine-leaves that Lucius held.

“Yes, I know,” remarked Lucius. “Amy told me. Again, why did you come back to spy on me?”

“I wanted to speak to you,” said Oliver. “I’ve been ill--damnably ill. A man can’t stand up against everything for ever, can he? And now, finding you with that bracelet, there is the less need for me to speak. She did not give it to you the morning she was lost.”

Lucius turned on him quietly, with the air of dealing with a man who must be pitied for not being in his right senses: endured because his brain is broken.

“When, then, do you think I got it?” he asked, in tone of compassion, “seeing no man has seen her since? You know she was wearing them that morning.”

Oliver Sellar looked on the ground, and said, in a low, raucous voice, as if he were repeating a lesson learnt by heart:

“I think she ran away to those people at Pen Hall Farm, and that they hid her. I think that she and one of them went down to Flimwel Grange and broke into the place. She had those mad whims, and a curiosity to see the house. And there she dropped the bracelet--she was wearing them, no doubt; she never could resist her fal-lals. Something made me go to that farm, again and again; the people were sullen and insolent--I thought half-witted; but I believe now she was hiding there all the time.”

“God help you!” cried Lucius impulsively. “For indeed your wits seem to me to be turned. You know that what you say is an impossibility; or should know it, if you preserved your reason!”

Oliver continued to talk rapidly, his black, scowling brows bent downwards and his hands clasped behind him.

“That boy--the boy I saw coughing over the fire, the boy who went into the boat with you, the boy who was shut up with you for six weeks, who was drowned…”

The younger man still continued to gaze with serene pity at his almost inarticulate agony.

“What has the boy to do with it?” he asked.

“That was why,” groaned Oliver, putting his hands to his forehead, which was damp with drops of pain, “I had to watch the lighthouse day and night.”

Lucius stared at him with darkening eyes.

“What was your reason for watching the lighthouse when I was on it?” he demanded.

“The reason was that she was with you, and you know it, and I knew it. I recognised her, even as she stepped into the boat; though my senses did not realise it then, though I was like one stunned and dazed, yet my heart knew it; but when I had grasped it, it was too late--there was half a mile of water and the gale between us already.”

Lucius did not immediately reply. He deliberately and carefully returned the bracelet to a small case, and the case to his pocket.

Oliver was wiping his forehead with a large, black-bordered handkerchief. Lucius remarked that his hair was now completely grey.

“How sad,” he said at length, “that grief should so upset a strong intellect, Sellar! You know that what you say--at least you should know,” he added, in a yet softer voice. “Oliver, look at me! Do you think--can you believe, that she and I were shut up in that lighthouse for weeks?”

“Alone for weeks,” returned Oliver, with a ghastly sigh that was half a groan.

“I pity you,” replied Lucius warmly, “if such a thought as that has been your companion during all these stormy weeks. Believe me, it is the wildest of all wild delusions!”

“You lie!” cried Oliver. “She was there with you; and if she be dead--I don’t know. Yet I think she isn’t dead, or I _should_ know. I’ve always felt that from the first--that if she were dead I should have known it, and I never thought she was; I thought she had escaped me and was in hiding somewhere--and so it proved to be.”

Lucius replied to him in a sterner tone.

“Oliver, I fear you wronged her while she lived; now she is dead you wrong her more, with these scandalous surmises and bitter suggestions. I pray you do not let them go farther than this room. Would you ruin all that is left of her to ruin--her reputation?”

Oliver made no reply to this, but strode a step nearer to the young man, and made a gesture as if to seize him by the shoulders; but then dropped his hand to his side. One of them still clutched the coral bracelet that he had found in Flimwel Grange.

“Was she drowned?” he asked. “Or did you get her off?”

“How do you think,” cried Lucius, “if I had had her there, I could have got her off in such a gale?”

“There was the French boat,” said Oliver. “Your story of the French boat; if that were true, you got her off then, I suppose. I dare say you had money somewhere; everything can be done with money. There was that Madame de Mailly waiting at Brest; you said the boat was bound for Brest.”

“Did I?” interrupted Lucius hurriedly. “No, I didn’t say bound for Brest, did I?”

“You did,” said Oliver, coming yet closer. “You may have got her off like that. I am going to the Continent to look for her there, and see if that Madame de Mailly is still waiting, or if she’s flown with--whom she waited for.”

Lucius turned away and stood with his back to him, resting his elbow on the mantelpiece; but he did this in a thoughtful, not an insulting, manner; and there was something in his air of gentle indifference which did much to quell the fury of the other man, who for the first time was pervaded with some doubt.

“I had not thought you had taken it so,” he muttered. “I had thought to surprise you into a confession, if I could see you face to face, Lucius.”

“Amy is waiting without, I think,” replied the young man, without moving, “and you had best go to her, Oliver; and for God’s sake stop this wild talk! Fanny is dead--to you and me and all of us she is dead--and do you endeavour to show some resignation. I will forget all you have said just now, as you must forget it.”

“Are you still going to marry Amy?” demanded Oliver harshly.

“Yes,” said Lucius immediately; “there is no reason why that marriage should be interrupted.”

“She still cares to take you, then, after what she’s said to me?”

“What did she say to you?”

“That it was all over and done with, as I should think it would be!”

“We are going to be married,” insisted Lucius coldly. “Do not plague me any more, I entreat you, Oliver!”

“And as to what I said?” demanded the elder man, “Do you still give me a rank denial? Do you still say that that was a poor boy from Falmouth whom you had on the lighthouse with you?”

“You have been often enough to Pen Hall Farm,” returned Lucius; “I hear your visits there have been frequent. You have tried to force them to say something of what you are saying now to me. Did you succeed?”

“No; I could not get a syllable from any of them. They were firm in the tale that it was a waif walked up from Falmouth.”

“I also am firm in that tale,” said Lucius. “Should you stand here and rant all day you would get no more out of me. Clear your brain of delusions!”

“You’re changed,” said Oliver, with a fell grin. “You’re not quite the puny boy that went on board St. Nite’s.”

“I had to change, or die,” replied Lucius. “And listen to this, Oliver: if your wild, fantastic tale had been true, and she and I had been together there all those weeks, she would have been none the worse for it, and I much the better. For she was innocency itself.”

At this Oliver laughed stridently and offensively.

“Come, come!” he cried. “If I stay here a moment or two longer I shall drive you to an admission! You’ll agree with my tale, however wild, fantastic and foolish you call it! You’ll say that you knew her almost the same moment that I did. She got up from the fireplace in the inn--at the ‘Drum and Trumpet.’ We were standing there in the half-dark parlour, you by the window, I by the door; do you recall? She got up, that ragged, coughing, haggard boy, with her face stained with walnut-juice and her hair cropped, wearing a suit of cheap slop clothes from Falmouth.”

“Stop!” cried Lucius. “Stop!”

“I won’t stop! That was the moment. She looked straight at you, and you knew her at once; and I--well, I knew her, but I couldn’t quite grasp it for a moment. I let you go--I was dazed. You were swift then; you saw it was she, and you took her away under my very eyes, under my eyes! You hurried her down the beach and into the boat, and I stood there like a fool--like a dunder-head--struck foolish! Then, as I say, when you were right out at sea, a speck, it all came to me. That was she--that was she whom I had seen lounging over the fire at Pen Hall Farm. She’d made friends with those people--given them jewels for the child. They hated me. Therefore they would have sympathised with her. And you know it; even as I speak to you now, you know I speak God’s truth!”

“I know you rave,” replied Lucius firmly. “You’ve moped and brooded over this, Oliver, till you know not what you say or do; and now leave me in peace! Would you force such things on me on such a day? Why,” he added, with the first flare of impatience that he yet had shown, “if it were true do you think that I would admit it, even at the last extremity?”

“I’ll make you admit it one of these days!” said Oliver. “Or I’ll choke the life out of you, Lucius! If you wish to be silent you’ll be silent where we saw your father put to-day!”

The door opened, and Ambrosia entered timidly. She was tired of waiting in the carriage below. It was cold and the coachman had complained, as he exercised his horses up and down, of the long wait in the bleak, windy carriage-drive.

“Oliver, aren’t you coming?” she asked in a sinking voice. She looked from one man to another, and saw their faces distraught and disfigured with emotion. A light foam flecked Oliver’s pale lips, and his eyes were sunk in his head. She saw in his strong, stiff fingers the coral bracelet.

“I’ve been cheated,” he muttered, “from the first--tricked and cheated, Amy!”

“Don’t say before her,” commanded Lucius, “what you have just said before me. You can at least respect Amy.”

Oliver glanced at his sister, and seemed to gain some measure of self-control from the sight of her frightened face.

“No,” he said, slowly and thickly. “This, perhaps, is not the time. You’re more stubborn than I thought, but I shall get it out of you soon.”

“Oliver, come away!” entreated Amy. “You can’t force any quarrel on Lucius to-day--the day his father was buried! Oh, Lucius,” she cried, turning to her betrothed, “please forgive him, for he is a very sick man!”

“Not sick,” muttered Oliver, “but fooled and cheated. What man wouldn’t be half lunatic who has had to support what I have had to support?”

“I am sorry for you,” replied the young Earl coldly; “yet be careful what you say, Oliver!” Then to the woman he said: “Amy, take no heed of him. He has just spoken to me most wildly. Shall I come back with you to Sellar’s Mead? The storm is rising again, and he is scarcely a fit companion for you.”

But Oliver appeared to have regained a certain amount of self-control. In quite a composed manner he made an ironic bow to the young lord, and said:

“My sister does very well with me, Lucius, I have nothing more to say just now. But you may guess, perhaps, what I shall have to say when we meet again!”

He turned towards the door. Behind his back Amy stretched out her hand to her lover.

“Come over and see us soon!” she entreated. “You are my one hope, Lucius!”

Was this a fair appeal? That question ran in her heart as she spoke; but she was past such fine honesty now. Fair or unfair, she would cling to him. What else had she, and who should ask from her such self-sacrifice as loneliness with Oliver?

Lucius pressed her hand warmly.

“I will come with you now,” he said.

But she, with her innate propriety and sense of the conventions, replied:

“No, Lucius; it is not fitting that you should leave the house to-day. I will go back. I have put in so many days at Sellar’s Mead,” she added with a wan smile, “that one or two more will make no difference. Come, Oliver, compose yourself!”

Oliver Sellar made no word or sign of protest. For the second time that day he left Lefton Park. This time he did not return, but got into the brougham beside his sister, and rode in silence back to his own house; and Amy wondered why, with a sort of hysteric fantasy, she must think that he disliked riding in carriages, and remember that day, which seemed a day in another life, when she had gone to the ferry to meet the Countess Fanny, and had seen that brilliant, alien figure come ashore, the apple-green bonnet and the striped shawl, and all her beauty and her radiance, and had disliked her… and Oliver had grumbled because they had brought the carriage and not the horse. Why must she think of that now? Why must remorse trouble her, and she say to herself:

“If I had been kinder, it might not all have happened?”

As they reached the park gates Oliver, waking from his gloomy meditation, said harshly:

“Lucius tells me that you and he are going to be married after all, Amy.”

“Yes,” said Amy nervously--she had been ready for that question--“we are; and can you wonder, Oliver? I cannot wither here for the rest of my life. I dare say it were a finer thing to refuse Lucius; for I know he does not greatly care for me.”

“You know,” interrupted Oliver, “that he loves Fanny. He always did love Fanny, from the first moment he saw her!”

“But Fanny is dead,” replied Amy, with a sob in her throat, clasping tight her mourning shawl across her bosom. “And a woman cannot always stand aside for the dead. I am alive, Oliver, and must grow old; and there are so many years ahead--you and I in that lonely house. Oh, Oliver, have a little pity and common humanity, and say that you understand that I must marry Lucius and go away.”

“Fanny will be between you always,” said Oliver. “Do you think he will ever forget her? Do you know what he was doing now, when I went back--staring at her little coral bracelet. And how did he get it, eh?”

“Did he not explain?” countered Ambrosia.

“He said that she had given it to him the morning she disappeared; and that’s a lie, no doubt!”

“But how else could he have got it?”

Oliver laughed in the darkness of his corner in the carriage.

“Don’t ask me that, Amy,” he replied. “Lucius’ll tell you, perhaps, some day. I’m sorry for you if you marry Lucius!”

Amy spoke hurriedly, more as if to justify herself to herself than to her brother:

“But they only knew each other for a few days! They’d scarcely met alone, and he is so young, he will forget. It must already be like a vision to him, and then, all those weeks alone on the lighthouse.…”

“Alone?” sneered Oliver. “Alone?”

“Yes, alone! You know it was quite early that the poor boy was drowned. How dreadful for Lucius, out there in the storm. That, I think, made him forget--made him forget me, perhaps--but her also.”

“He didn’t forget,” said Oliver, “He’ll never forget. And you’ll know it if you marry him.”

Ambrosia did not answer. She had to check the wild, passionate words that rose from her lips, lest she be altogether overcome, and seek the relief that she had so long despised--that of bitter tears.

When they reached home she went upstairs, and with something of a shudder put off her mourning dress. There was no need for her to go in her own house dressed in crape, though she must wear it abroad. She had not been any relation of the Earl, after all. How it oppressed her--these yards of mohair and crape and black bombasine!

As she passed the door of the room that had belonged to the Countess Fanny she saw that it was closed. Timidly opening it, she saw that it was dark. There was no fire on the hearth, and all the foreign girl’s trifles and ornaments had been put away.

She called Julia with a touch of panic.

“Julia--what’s this? Isn’t the Countess Fanny’s room to be kept ready as usual?”

“No, madam; master said that we were to stop that now, and put all her things away. No fire and no light, miss, and the bed dismantled, as you see. It’s a good thing, isn’t it, that the poor master, in a manner of speaking, has come to his senses.”

“He is convinced that she’s dead, then,” murmured Amy, shutting the door softly. “He doesn’t expect her back.”

She went downstairs. On the chair in the hall was Oliver’s tall black hat, his weeper and his gloves and long black cloak. And in the parlour was Oliver himself, still in his mourning suit, with the white cravat and shirt, growing up his ruined, haggard face and his ash-coloured hair; flung into the deep chair by the fire, drinking. The red light reflected in the bottle of port and the glass of port was like the redness of the Countess Fanny’s coral grapes.