Chapter XXIII: Geoletti Tells His Story

She came to me, dear love, the moment I had entered the house. Her sweet eyes, wet and wild, were full of sorrow and unmeant reproach. They gave one startled glance at the Italian, where he stood behind me, deferential in the shadows, and then came back in mute appealing to my face.

“Sit down here, Geoletti,” I said, “until I send for you.”

He obeyed, and I drew the girl into a room hard by, and shut the door, and held out impassioned arms.

“I could not help it, Ira; indeed, I could not. Things beyond my controlling have detained me.”

In a moment she had run to me--had abandoned herself to me, and was sobbing in my arms as if her heart would break.

“Richard, I have wanted you so! Such a dreadful thing!”

“Ira, my darling, what is this?”

“I don’t know what it is. You must go to him--you must go to him at once. He has been asking for you.”

“He? Who?”

“Lord Skene. O! she has gone away--left us! He has been questioning me--Uncle Charlie has--and I could tell him nothing. How could I? but you, Richard?”

“Hush, my dearest darling. Try and compose yourself. Who has gone away? Tell me in one word, now.”

“Aunt Georgie has.”

“She has gone away? run away, do you mean?”

“She left a letter. He will show it you. There must not be any scandal, Richard. Some plausible explanation must be given. She went away before lunch--on foot, and by herself. When I went to look for her, she was gone, and only the letter was left, and I took it to uncle, and he read it, and almost broke down before the servants. But you know what he is. In another moment no one would have thought anything was the matter--not until I had him alone. O, Richard! what is it? Everything seems dark and miserable. And you know, and you won’t tell me.”

“I will tell you if you ask me to; but you will not ask me, dear--not yet. I see another stroke of scoundrelism in this, perhaps. Why didn’t I send him to his death! I believe I should have, if I’d known--the smiling cursed devil!”

“Richard! Who?--you are terrifying me out of my senses.”

“My love, you must not. Look, little girl--little dear, dear girl. I am holding you--I am Richard, your lover--your lover who puts his strong arms about you, and tells you it shall all come right. Will you not trust me?”

“Yes, I will--I will, Richard. Only your violence makes me sick for you.”

“It makes me sick for myself, to think I cannot control it before my bird with her beating heart. Be quiet, little soft frightened heart! Now kiss me, Ira, as I hold you so; and then I will go to him without a moment’s more delay.”

Yet, for all my resolution, my own heart was beating violently as I went to seek the old man in his study, where he sat alone. He was at his desk, his head leaned upon his hand. The lights were lit, but not enough to flood the room, which lay in partial shadow. It gave me a pitiful shock, as he turned his face, to see how haggard it was, how unkempt his hair, so sprucely groomed in general, how all in a base moment his age had betrayed him. He started upon recognising me, and gave a heavy sigh, and rose as if to move, but, feeling his weakness, sank down again, with a forced laugh.

“Egad!” said he--“and I’ve drunk nothing. You must come to the mountain, Mahomet, as it can’t come to you.”

I took a chair by the desk, and, leaning forward, looked at him earnestly.

“Lord Skene,” I said low, “Miss Christmas has told me. You meant her to, I suppose?”

He hesitated an instant; then pushed an open letter towards me; but in the act withdrew it.

“One moment, my boy,” he said. “There are things that--the essentials are all you’ll need. Oblige me by reading only what I underline.”

He was busy a little, with a shaking hand; then thrust the letter towards me once more.

“There,” he said. “You’re her son anyhow. You’ll spare me any comments, Gaskett, but such as bear strictly upon the question of her flight and its reasons. I think it likely you’ll know more about those than I do. There seems a coincidence--damn it, boy, wasn’t there some damned conscious raven croaking in you the other day, when--there, read what I’ve underlined.”

He turned his face away impatiently as I took his letter, and read what he had marked:--

“_I could have faced the horror of that exposure once--could have braved it, even, as your wife, Charles--you will forgive me--I know your loving generosity so well. But as the mother of your child I cannot face it. ... My falsehood lies like a blight upon his little gentle life; his sweet truth finds a stranger in his mother. Perhaps, when I am gone, by God’s mercy, he will recover, and live to forget me. When just now we were alone together, and I whispered to him that I was going, I am sure he stirred and gave a little sigh as if he were already conscious of something lifted--some load passing from him. Oh, Charles, how cruel, though I have deserved it! I think if you knew--all my tears and penitence in the life I am about to seek--that sin against the Lamb! ... do not distress yourself about me. I shall be secure in the fold. Someday, after my final abjuration of the world, I will let you know ... make what terms you can and will with my betrayer, for your own sake, for the sake of our darling, dear, not for mine. ... This cannot continue--its way is madness. There is no possible foreseeing a limit to his exactions, or to my robbing you. Now, knowing me fled, he will be anxious, perhaps, to come to terms. ... Richard will tell you--my shame is his, but not the right to avenge it. Keep him, with all the force of your persuasion, from that horrible thought. ... Oh, Charles, forgive me!_”

His eyes had sought me again restlessly, as I read; and now, seeing me come to an end, he rose quickly and tremulously, and set to pacing up and down.

“What the devil does it all mean, Gaskett? We must stop her--get her back somehow before it’s too late and the scandal’s out. Have you any idea where she can have gone?”

“Give me time to think, sir. It is all very sad.”

“Time, time!” he protested irritably. “It’s just that we want to foreclose on. While it passes, she--good God! you don’t think she’ll do herself any hurt, do you?”

“I don’t think so, sir. You have her word. She’s seeking some asylum, from which she proposes writing to you by-and-by.”

“And you know the reason?”

“Yes. I think I may say I’m sure of it.”

He stared at me, where I had risen by the desk. His usual scrupulous jauntiness was all slack and unstrung. I noticed with concern that the bow of his shepherd’s-plaid tie was twisted an inch out of its place. He looked as if he had been out for many nights on end.

“It’s all deuced odd,” he said at last. “What devil’s abroad in the house of late? First you and your conundrums, and now this. Perhaps you’ll be telling me there’s some connection between the two.”

“Yes; I shall tell you that.”

“Ah!”

“There is a very close connection, sir, as regards one person.”

“What person?”

“Mr Dalston.”

The name obviously conveyed no meaning to him. He only pondered me, dumfoundered, fingering his lips.

“The man is an infernal scoundrel, sir,” I said with emphasis. “I intimated as much to you once before. What I did not, could not, touch upon at the time, was the strange coincidence of his double connection with your family. He was not only your son’s travelling tutor, sir; but he is also, by his own assertion, and in Lady Skene’s belief, _my_ father.”

For a moment his mind, grasping desperately at the significance of my words, slipped and went under.

“Dalston!” he muttered amazed. “Delane was Charlie’s tutor.”

“Delane or Dalston, sir--it is all the same. The man had his reasons for assuming a name not his own. It was to cover over the tracks of a very discreditable liaison he had had with a young woman, whom he had known when he was an usher at a school at Clapham.”

“At Clapham!” The word seemed to take him in the face. “Go on,” he said presently, with a sudden clinching intonation.

“Is it necessary, sir? You will comprehend me, I think.”

“She deceived me about you?”

“Yes.”

“Anything more?”

“This man, who calls himself my father, has come to trade upon his knowledge of that deceit.”

The old legal terrier was beginning to awake in him--to prick its ears and show its teeth.

“To trade? I understand. Hush-money, eh?”

“He has had one large sum from her already. I believe, on my honour, sir, it was his demanding a second this morning that drove her to this step.”

“Very likely--very probable indeed.”

He resumed his pacing again, plunged into frowning thought. I rejoiced to see this grasp, this stiffening, this recovery in him of an ancient forceful shrewdness, Presently he stopped.

“Do you guess where she is gone, Richard?”

“Yes, I guess, sir.”

“Where?”

“To Mr Pugsley’s.”

“O! Now, why?”

“For one thing, he is her spiritual adviser. For another, he was aware of her deceit from the first, and could even reconcile his condonation of it with his evangelical conscience. In the view of that, sir, I understand, the fraud was not only harmless but praiseworthy, in consideration of its object in reclaiming a brand from the burning.”

“Meaning me.” For the first time a faint smile twitched his lips. “You seem to have interested yourself successfully in your family history, Gaskett.”

“Yes, I have, sir; and to more purpose than this, even.”

“Wait a bit. If your surmise is correct, it would be useless to attempt to persuade her back until this man has been dealt with.”

“I think you would be most unwise to attempt it.”

“I quite agree with you. We must buy him out first.”

“_Buy_ him out, sir? A cur like that? Stone him out, don’t you mean?”

He was smilingly tolerant of me. His manner had become, almost in a moment, quite confident and reassured. I had guessed already that the deception, _per se_, would count for little with him; but I was not prepared for his cool reception of its consequences.

“Tut-tut, my boy!” he said. “If you had had my experience, you would know that compromise is nine parts of the law.”

“And a rope the tenth, sir, is it not? Well, you may play your nine parts for me; only I, for what remains, am going to hang Mr Dalston.”

The colour left his face. His new sprightliness was all gone in a moment. He returned to the desk, and seated himself, somewhat in his old tired attitude.

“Well, Richard,” he said. “What else?”

Emotion rose in me. I lingered on the blow I had to deal. But it must out at last.

“I made a point, sir, if you observed, of referring to him as _calling_ himself my father.”

“I noticed. He is not your father, then--only the vile deputy of another?”

“No more my father, sir, I do believe, than Lady Skene is my mother. I was born of quite other parentage.”

He held his eyes shaded with one hand. The shaking fingers of the other affected to toy with a pen.

“Go on,” he muttered. “Why do you stop?”

Without pause or hesitation, then, I gave him the full history of my inquisition, from the utterance of the first word which had launched me on it, to my final interview with his wife. And at the end, “Lord Skene,” I said, “judge all this as you will. There is still the worst to come--the corner-stone to such a monument of villainy as I never dreamed of unveiling when I started. I beg, sir, with all the passion of entreaty I can command, that you will brace yourself to hear a very dreadful truth. I told you, on that former occasion, that I had come by accident upon part of a letter written by your son to Mr Thesiger. Here it is.”

I laid the faded sheet before him. He read it through once, twice, three times; and looked up at me with a lost expression.

“Well?” he whispered hoarsely.

“It is your son’s, sir?”

“Yes, it is from Charlie.”

“The reference in it, sir--the ‘You-know-who’?”

“Yes--well?”

“Is to Mrs Dalston, I cannot doubt. _He_ was married to her first.”

“Who? Charlie?”

“Yes; and, because of it--O! sir, for all it means to you, compose yourself to meet the blow--_because of it, was done to death by the man who is now Mrs Dalston’s husband, and your own wife’s damned betrayer._”

His head sank low. I thought, for all my warning, I had risked too much. But in a moment he lifted it again, and the expression on it, stern, white, self-repressed, was such, I imagined, as might have marked its character when, in past days, he would rise, black-capped, to sentence a prisoner to the last awful penalty.

“On what authority,” he began, in a quick loud voice, which sank even upon its utterance--“on what authority?”--and the words died out in a whisper.

“On the authority, sir,” I said, “of a man who was in hiding near by at the time the crime was committed, and who sought afterwards, on the strength of his secret, to bleed the murderer’s pocket, as the murderer has since, on another count, sought to bleed your wife’s. But he proved himself no match against a desperate villain’s resourcefulness; and was caught in the net of his own spreading, and put away for years on a trumped-up charge. You will find his name there--Geoletti.”

Lord Skene looked up at me, and laughed--a painful, twisted, unnatural cachinnation.

“I had observed it already, Richard. I sentenced the man myself--good God!”

He buried his face in his hands, as if overwhelmed. And, indeed, the coincidence was staggering.

“Is that so, sir?” I said in a strained dry voice. “Well, it only remains to say that he has served his sentence to the hilt, and has emerged from it with one only purpose remaining to his ruined life--revenge on the author of his sufferings.”

I felt the question coming from him, and forestalled it.

“How I know this? The man had tracked his quarry home, and I came upon him, quite by chance, foundered by the way. But when he told me his name--great God, sir, I remembered the letter--your son’s letter--and then only a little questioning was needed to extract the whole accursed truth.”

“Where is he?”

“He is waiting outside at this moment.”

“Fetch him in.”

I was moving to obey, when he stopped me.

“Put down that light first. I must hear and see and not be seen. There, would he know me?”

“I believe it is quite out of the question.”

“Go, then.”

I stepped softly into the hall, and beckoning to the Italian, motioned him into the room and shut the door.

“Geoletti,” I said, “I want you now, clearly and briefly, to relate the whole history of your connection with Mr Dalston, from the first committal of the crime with which you charge him, to the moment when, through his wicked agency, you were sentenced, on a false charge, to a long term of penal servitude. You can trust me that the statement will help us all, if you omit nothing and extenuate nothing.”

He bowed his head gravely thereupon, and crushing his hat nervously in his hands before him, and moistening his dry lips, entered upon his narrative as follows:--

ANTONIO GEOLETTI’S STORY[2]

My name is Antonio Geoletti, and I am a Piedmontese. Twenty years ago I was by profession a guide of the Val d’Aosta. There was none equal to me in knowledge of that district. From the Glacier di Lys to the chain of Mon Iseran I knew it all, every acre. The valleys of Pellina, du Butier, d’Entreves, Veni, de la Tuile, Grisanche, Savera, di Cogne, Camporcier--they were hackneyed to me one and all. I could trace to its source every mountain torrent which poured from the high Alps into the upper waters of the Dora Baltea. The cravats of Mon Cervin, d’Oren, de Ferret, were no less my familiars than were the passes de la Seigne and of the great and little St Bernards, through which I would often conduct visitors bound adventurously for Savoy. My knowledge of the mountains was unique, wonderful--informed with secrets, moreover, hidden from all others. It was the possession of one such secret, alas! which betrayed me to my ruin.

In the Val d’Entreves are the village and baths of Cormayeur. There is also the Hospice of St Marguerite to which invalids resort. Thither, in the spring of 1860, came two ladies, Miss Lucie Love, a young English _héritière_ and orphan, and her only living relative, Madame Gondran, who was old and sick, with eyes like the dying hawk, and of a self-will and passion quite ungovernable. The young lady was the most beautiful in person and complexion; for which reason, it would appear, and because of the many gifts of health and wealth which Fortune had lavished upon its favourite, her aunt could never expend enough upon her her heart of venom and detestation. I think she would have liked to debar her for ever from all the profits of her estate of youth. But such a flower so sweet, and well-bequeathed, was not long to escape the marauding bee. There arrived to Aosta in these days two gentlemen making the tour, a young English milord and his Gouverneur, of whom the names were respectively Mr Charles Skene and Mr Delane. These two, then, exploring among the mountains, came very shortly across Miss Lucie; and straightway the die was cast. Milord would hear of nothing but that they transfer at once their quarters to Cormayeur; and so there they went and remained for six months and more.

In this interval what now has come to pass? You shall hear, as I heard--partly of gossip, partly of acquaintances employed in the Hospice, partly of my own ears; for the gentlemen engaged me constantly to convey them into the places of interest about the neighbourhood.

This, then, had happened. Milord and Miss Lucie were become inseparable lovers, and desirous of the plighted troth. But Madame Gondran she would not hear of it. She was all engaged herself to the seductiveness of the Gouverneur, and--for the chief reason that the young lady feared and disliked him in the exact opposite proportion--was determined to sanction him for her nominee to the covetable hand of Miss. He, this Mr Delane, was, of a surety, very pleasing and attentive with her, and the young man, his pupil, not at all; but, like a boy, arrogant and inconsiderate. Milord, no doubt, lacked the experience to know that the diplomacy of wooing is to propitiate the guardian before the ward. It is well, also, to warm a woman’s vanity, if you would see her melt to you.

So things went on; until presently a soft gossip began to make itself heard, with turnings of the head, and nudgings, and a pointing of the finger. There were whispers of a fondness betrayed, and of love beginning to reveal in itself the penalty of rashness. One was wondering how the truth could still hide itself from the eyes of the terrible invalid, when suddenly a startling calamity befell: Milord disappeared, and was never heard of again.

Now I quote what follows from the testimony of the Hospice walls, which were alway as full of ears and eyes as a honeycomb. It deals with the period before investigation had established the pretty moral certitude that Milord had met with some fatal accident on the mountains, and when he was still supposed, in the popular view, to have slipped away merely from the consequences of an intrigue. The young Madame, it appeared, quite incredulous at the outset, was driven presently, by her Aunt and the Gouverneur, into the conviction that she had been ruined and deserted by a scoundrel. In the first of her desperation, indeed, eager to vindicate both herself and her lover, she declared that they were husband and wife--that, in short, on a certain remembered day, when they had all joined in an expedition to Aosta, he and she had eluded the others for a time, and, by prearrangement, had been married before some civil functionary, who had afterwards certified to the fact in a document, preserved, she believed, by Mr Skene.

Well, if this confession was so unpalatable to the listeners as to add a hundredfold to Madame Gondran’s jealousy and hatred, it afforded at the same time a text for ample revenge. The match was no match, they declared, in English law; Miss Lucie was none the less for it betrayed and abandoned. Her seducer, of course, had only caught her into a very ancient snare, and, having tangled her in its meshes, had gone off laughing. Indeed, it would appear, he had hinted as much to Mr Delane before running away, and, by that shameless boast, had caused a rupture between himself and his tutor. He was gone, anyhow and finally, never to return, and utter ruin and disgrace were all that remained to the poor lady out of that short rhapsody of passion; unless--unless what? Why, grieved and shame-stricken though he was over this downfall of a cherished idol, the Gouverneur, still great and magnanimous in his love, would consent to save her reputation, at the cost of his own shattered ideals, by marrying her himself at a moment’s notice, and afterwards removing her to a place where gossip could find no data for detraction.

They may have lied, or spoken the truth--I know not. But this I know: she was wax in their powerful hands--a poor, dazed, heartbroken, will-less creature. They took her to Turin, we heard, and there the man married her. And there, on the very morrow of the wedding, the old witch Gondran was found dead in her bed--struck down, in the moment of triumph, by the ecstasy of her spite. She lies in the Cimitero on the Chivasso Road. I have seen the blasted flowers on her grave.

But now all this time I was thinking what to do. And all the time I was still thinking and thinking, when the suspicion first arose that Milord, instead of having taken himself off, as supposed, had really, in some adventurous wandering, come by his death in the mountains, since, indeed, he had never been seen to emerge from among them at any part. And suddenly there came over from England a lady, his relative, to inquire into his disappearance; and Mr Delane was questioned, and told all he knew, confessing he had thought Milord had bolted to evade the consequences of a scrape best not referred to. Then one day I went to learn more of what was doing, and found the inquestation over, and Mr Delane gone home to England with his wife. And again that set me to thinking more, and again more.

For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring booths of the fair--they could possess for me an equal madness of attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital? Yes, that was it--that might always have been the difficulty, had I not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then, was my potential.

What was it? What was this tremendous secret? It is uttered in a breath. I knew, I had known from the first, that Milord had never run away, but that he had been murdered, and his body hidden in a subterranean chamber, by the man who professed to be his friend and admonitor. I will explain.

High above Cormayeur, among the waste and desolation of the hills, there pours itself down a torrent which is called Lapluietonnante--the Rain of Thunder. Once and more, this torrent, entering through rocky ravines, plunges like a mad and foaming horse, until at length, too blind with terror to note where it is going, it leaps from a precipice, and crashes in a ruin of watery splinters on the rocks a score of yards below. Now, at the very point where the water springs from the gorge, there is a certain fissure in the wall of rock, not easily observable amongst others, but which, having once discovered and entered, one will find leads down by a fantastic passage into a chamber or grotto situated right behind the fall and opening on to it. Here was a secret of knowledge, I thought, my own exclusive property, until Milord came to disabuse my mind. He did not confess his discovery to me; but I gathered, from what he let fall, that his daring spirit had penetrated to the arcanum which heretofore had been my solitary possession. “I could show you, Geoletti,” said he once, “a cavern in the water that would be worth a little fortune to you in tips, if you knew it. But I’m going to keep it to myself till I go; and then perhaps I’ll let out.” I smiled to him, confessing nothing; but from that moment I was always on the watch to see if my suspicion were correct. There was a second fissure immediately above the other, but shallow, and with a projection of rock within it apt for cover; and there, when I knew Milord to be abroad in the neighbourhood, I would often hide myself, and spy to see him come. And once at last he came, and the Gouverneur with him.

They stopped beside the rock, and talked before they entered. It was then the time when scandal came to whisper of a young maid’s condition. That subject was on their lips.

“It’s done, and there’s an end of it,” said Milord in a heat. “I tell you I’ve married her, Mr Mark Dalston.”

“Why do you call me by that name?” asked the Gouverneur. He was very quiet and smiling; and he showed his white teeth always.

“Because it’s your real one, isn’t it?” said Milord. “And because I want to convince you that mine isn’t the only secret here that might lead to disturbances if revealed. I stand to take the consequences of _my_ deeds, Mr Dalston, whatever you may do.”

“Have you, then,” said the Gouverneur, “written to confess to your father?”

“No, but I’m going to,” answered Milord. “It can’t be delayed much longer. Only I’ll do it in my own time and way, and stand no dictating from anybody.” Then he seemed to soften a little. “Hang it, Delane!” he said. “I’m sorry if you are sweet on the girl yourself. But one could never tell from your manner--you’re such a deep chap.”

“Am I?” said the Gouverneur, and he laughed. “But you have beaten us all in depth, Skene. Well, as you remark, the thing’s done, and there’s no more to be said about it for the moment. Now show me the way into this wonderful cave you’ve discovered.”

They passed in, one after the other, Milord going first--and he never came out again. Only, presently, there jumped from the opening on to the grass a man very white but smiling still, who flicked the dust from his clothes, and sat down on a rock, looking into the curve of the fall as if his eyes were needles to pierce it. And suddenly he came to his feet.

“My God, Lucie!” he said to the water, “how I love you! My God, how I love you!” and with that he turned and went away.

And presently I too went down into the cave.

He had shot him with a pistol from the back. He lay on his face, and his head was like a trampled bush. Near the body, flung from it in its fall, was a little tin case such as they make for sandwiches; and in it I found, when I could force the nerve to look, the certificate of Milord’s marriage with Miss Lucie.

I put it back; I touched nothing more; like a murderer myself I stole away, and left everything as I had found it. From that day to this the cave shall have held its secret undiscovered. There still the body must be lying as when it fell never to stir again. You know the rest.

I knew it from his own lips: how, a few months after the married couple had returned to England, an Italian courier, discharged in Aosta for drunkenness, had persuaded Geoletti to profit by his knowledge of London, and go there with him; how, from Soho, the potential blackmailer had taken his bearings, and, by the aid of compatriots, run his quarry to earth, and forced an interview upon him and revealed his knowledge and his purpose; how Mr Dalston, temporising a moment, had referred him, for final settlement, to the house of a certain doctor in Kennington, to which he had gone by secret appointment and with what fatal results to himself. The listener needed only these links in the chain of evidence to complete the story for him; and, when they had been supplied, a deep and tragic silence fell upon the room.

Presently, not raising his head, he motioned to the narrator, a gesture of dismissal.

“Go,” I whispered to Geoletti, “and return to the lodge.”

I stood, when we were alone, a moment in indecision; then crossed the room softly.

“If the hurt has come from _my_ hand, sir,” I said, “you will know why I ask you to forgive me for it, will you not?”

He was muttering to himself; he hardly seemed to notice me.

“My God! poor Charlie--my God! poor Charlie”--over and over again.

Suddenly he got stiffly to his feet.

“Hush! Didn’t I hear the boy crying?” he said, listening in a startled way. “He’s left to me yet--he sha’n’t be disinherited--his mother must come back to me and end all this. There was never a woman so beautiful or so foolish in all the world.”

He seemed to recollect himself, and me, and my question; and now he answered that obliquely, not looking at me, but fingering some papers on his desk.

“You know your course, Gaskett? It’s obvious enough, I should think.”

The formal address, the reluctance of his manner, woke a strange chill in me.

“I think so, sir,” I said, withdrawing a little. “It is to visit Lady Skene’s mother again, and face her with a new and sufficient reason for confessing the truth.”

He drew in his breath softly, as if to a wince of pain; then turned to canvass me fully for the first time.

“Well,” he said, “you have hit me pretty hard in my old age, Gaskett; and you’ll not be surprised that I find your hand a bit stunning. You must grant me to-night to think it all over; and to-morrow I’ll give you my answer. Come up at midday. The man’s safe with you, I suppose. That’s all that it’s essential to ensure for the moment. I shall not come in to dinner. Good-night!”

The blows to which he had been subjected had tried him, no doubt, to the very limit of endurance; yet, somehow, this was not the sequel to them that I had expected. My heart was like a stone in me. I turned and went out of the room without another word.

And, then--sweet balm in Gilead!

She was waiting for me, flitting like a ghost-moth about the dark old panels of the room from which she had dismissed me a little while ago. She put her finger to her lips, and hushed me in, and shut the door. She had dressed for dinner during the interval of my absence, and was a lovelier, more fairy-like apparition by twenty degrees. I felt like taking a dream into my arms--the sweet soft fragrance of her hair, and lifted face, and young white innocent bosom. A thread of diamonds dewed her neck--she melted to me like a very dew of girlhood, and loved and clung to me, and whispered impassioned that I was hers, she could not spare me to another, and I might claim her when I would and she would come to me.

Her love, her rapture, her absorbing sympathy, were inexpressibly touching to me in my moody distress. Let all the world go by, so long as this dear flower of it sweetened on my heart.

“Ira,” I whispered, fondling her in an ecstasy, “I believe I know where your aunt has gone.”

“O, Richard!” she answered. “That is heavenly. Am I to know no more?”

“Wait a little, you lovely thing. I may want you all before long. I am very much alone. Perhaps--Ira, will you meet me to-morrow, under the old hawthorn?”

“Yes, Richard. Anywhere, and at any time you tell me.”

“Say at three o’clock.”

“Shall I make a note of it, Richard?”

“I’ll do it for you--look, on the inside of your elbow. Now bend your arm, and keep it hidden from everybody.”