by Annie Haynes
“That made Lord Arthur think that there was something queer about the whole business. He told me that Sybil had acknowledged it to him, and by Lord Duxworth’s advice we carried the whole affair to Mr Barsly. He, as you know, had been seriously uneasy for some time about the way your cousin was disposing of her property. He thought that even paralysis did not account for the difference visible in some of her signatures, and he submitted them to an expert, who unhesitatingly declared two of them to be in Gillman’s handwriting. We can never be sufficiently thankful that they went down to make the arrest in time to save you, child.”
Cynthia covered her eyes with her hand.
“I can never bear to think of that time.”
Lady Duxworth’s eyes were full of compassion as she glanced at the girl’s white cheeks, hollowed now by illness and anxiety.
“It would be much better for you never to do so,” she agreed; “but if that is impossible it is just as well to talk about it, I think. The things that are never said are the ones that hurt the most, but there is another subject I should like to ask you about, Cynthia.”
Some prevision of what was coming tinged the girl’s pale cheeks with colour. She did not reply, but she fidgeted about uneasily and drew the silken coverlet more closely round her.
Lady Duxworth watched her anxiously for a minute or two, then she said slowly:
“I think you have guessed what I mean, Cynthia. When are you going back to your husband?”
“Never!”
Cynthia’s face was turned away now; Lady Duxworth could only see the great burnished knot of hair on the nape of her neck, and one of the little, shell-like ears.
“I am sorry to hear you say that,” she said gravely. “I know you think I ought not to interfere, but you have no mother. I knew and liked your father in the old days; your cousin, Lady Hannah, was my dearest friend. I cannot see you make a shipwreck of your life without at least trying to give you one word of warning. Your husband stayed with us a little time ago; he was looking sadly altered—aged and saddened. Do you not think your place is at his side?”
Cynthia put out her hands imploringly.
“No, no!” she said indistinctly. “Indeed I couldn’t! He—he is not a good man, Lady Duxworth.”
There was a pause; Lady Duxworth’s eyes looked puzzled and thoughtful. Lord Letchingham’s reputation was well known to her. Not for worlds would she have urged on a marriage between him and Cynthia, but now that it was an accomplished fact it seemed to her that the only thing to be done was for the girl to make the best of the situation and return to him.
“He is your husband, Cynthia,” she said, “and I cannot but think that it is too late to talk of what he may have been in the past. You must remember that we are none of us perfect.”
“No, no! I know that!” Cynthia covered her face with her hands; her voice sounded muffled and thick. “But he—oh, I should like to tell you about it, if you do not mind, Lady Duxworth—if it will not bore you.”
“I should be glad to hear.” Lady Duxworth was not without her share of Eve’s failing. The “affaire Letchingham” had been canvassed ad nauseam in the boudoirs of Mayfair, but she was much too tender-hearted a woman to be merely curious, and far deeper down there lay a very real affection for Farquhar, a sincere liking for Cynthia.
“I did not understand then,” Cynthia began, speaking with apparent difficulty and hesitation. “I did not love him—I never even fancied I did—but I thought he was a nice, kind old man who would be very good to me. Then, after the ceremony was over, I found out that he had ruined our greatest friend’s life. She wrote to me to warn me against him, to beg me not to marry him—and the letter was delayed. I opened it when I came back from church—so I went away. It was the only thing to do.”
Lady Duxworth uttered a shocked sound.
“My poor child! I can understand how terrible it was for you; but still I feel it is my duty to say it to you, Cynthia, that that is over and done with; it is quite impossible that it has not been sincerely repented of, and we are not one another’s judges. Besides, you have made certain definite vows, and it seems to me that Lord Letchingham ought to have an opportunity of explanation. Will you let me see him for you?”
“It would do no good.” She turned, and, catching Lady Duxworth’s hand, pressed her lips to it gratefully. “How good you are to me! But indeed that would not help matters. I taxed him with it, and he—he only laughed at me, and—oh, it was dreadful! I cannot bear to think of it!”
Lady Duxworth’s face was very grave and pitiful.
“Poor child! I am more sorry than I can say, Cynthia. At any rate you must stay with us as long as you like. I wish I could help you more effectually; but one thing must be done, dear. You must take your proper name; it is not fair either to yourself or others that you should pass as an unmarried girl.”
All Cynthia’s pallor had vanished now; her cheeks had flushed a hot, guilty red.
“I know what you mean,” she whispered faintly. “I—I am so sorry, Lady Duxworth, but indeed I did not understand. I will do just what you think best in the future.”
“Poor child!” Lady Duxworth said tenderly, laying her hand caressingly for a moment on the bright bent head. “Then you will stay with us a while, and later on we will try to see what is best.”
Cynthia made no reply save by pressing another kiss on the soft hand. So long did she lie silent that Lady Duxworth thought she had gone to sleep, and only glanced at her occasionally as she went on with her embroidery, her thoughts busy with the story she had just heard.
It was difficult to see any way out of the tangle in which the unfortunate girl had involved herself. Look at it as she would, the situation seemed to Lady Duxworth beset with difficulties, and it seemed impossible to tell which was the right course to be pursued. Presently her busy needle ceased to fly in and out of her canvas, and she had fallen into a reverie, when she heard the sound of a horse and cart being urged up the avenue at the utmost speed.
Cynthia sprang up.
“What is it?” she cried. “Lady Duxworth, it is Mr Barsly bringing news! I am sure of it!”
Lady Duxworth rose hurriedly; her face paled.
Was it possible that that search at Greylands, of which Cynthia knew nothing, had resulted in something which had given the clue to Lady Hannah’s fate? She laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Don’t excite yourself, child; it is probably nothing of any importance. Mr Barsly generally comes over to consult with Lord Duxworth when he is in the neighbourhood. He is our solicitor, too, you know.”
Cynthia’s agitation did not subside; she still sat up, her breath quickened, her eyes watching the door with a look of eager, almost feverish expectancy. Presently there was a knock, the door opened, and Lord Duxworth himself stood on the outside.
“Can you spare me a minute, Félicité?” he inquired. “There is something we want to show you.”
Lady Duxworth rose, and Cynthia threw herself forward and clutched eagerly at her skirts.
“Ask him to come in—tell him I must know too!” she cried. “See, I will be quiet. Indeed, I can bear anything but suspense.”
Lady Duxworth hesitated; there was a curious look on her husband’s face that warned her he had no good tidings to give them. She glanced at Cynthia’s flushed cheeks and fever-bright eyes, and then beckoned to Lord Duxworth to enter. The girl was right—any certainty was better for her than suspense.
“I think you bring us news!” she said. “You can speak before Cynthia; she has promised to be very brave.”
Lord Duxworth cleared his throat and looked reproachfully at his wife. His manifest unwillingness to speak heightened Cynthia’s anxiety. At length he said slowly:
“Barsly would have it that you were the only person we could come to, Félicité. It is most unfortunate that Farquhar should have gone up to town to-night. Barsly thinks you may have seen this—that you may recognize it.” He held out a small object in the palm o
f his hand.
Lady Duxworth went up to him quickly. Cynthia slipped back with a sigh of disappointment. After all, she had been mistaken, she thought. Lord Duxworth’s errand could have no connexion with her cousin’s fate.
Presently Lady Duxworth looked up.
“It is a miniature,” she said unsteadily, with trembling lips. “Though the glass is broken and stained with earth, I think, no, I am sure, that it is a portrait of Herbert Densham—Cynthia’s father—one he gave Hannah Hammond when they were first engaged. Where did you find it?” a dawning horror in her eyes.
“Where I fear there can be little doubt we have found Lady Hannah herself,” Lord Duxworth replied. “In the belt of pines round the house, beneath the oak saplings that Gillman has been planting.”
Lady Duxworth interrupted her husband with a little cry as she caught at the nearest table for support.
“You do not mean—then it is true—and he murdered her!”
“Some one laid her in the earth, poor thing, and there can be little doubt the same hand sent her there before her time,” Lord Duxworth said. “It is a terrible affair. Poor thing!”
He sprang forward just as Cynthia’s head fell back, a deadly pallor overspread her features and she fainted away.
When next she opened her eyes it seemed to her that the whole room was impregnated with a pungent odour of burnt feathers and brandy and water, while some one was holding a particularly evil-smelling bottle to her nostrils. She put up her hand to try to push it away as she began to cough feebly.
“That will do, Parkes. You can go now. I can manage quite well.”
At the sound of Lady Duxworth’s voice Cynthia awoke to a fuller measure of consciousness and looked round, bewildered. It seemed to her that a horrible black cloud hung over her. She had a vague feeling that something intolerably painful had happened; then as she met Lady Duxworth’s eyes she remembered.
“It—it can’t be true!” she said hoarsely. “It was some mistake!”
Lady Duxworth drew her to her motherly arms.
“It is a terrible thing. We can only be glad she did not suffer much. My husband says the doctor told him that as far as he could judge death must have been instantaneous.”
Cynthia lay still for a minute; then she raised her white face.
“I—I cannot help thinking that it was done the day I got there—that if I had been earlier—”
“Don’t think of it, child,” Lady Duxworth counselled amid her thickly-falling tears. “Poor Hannah! I shall always remember her as she was when we were girls together—when she loved your father, Cynthia.”
Cynthia’s thoughts could not be turned.
“He did it—her own husband—and Sybil—”
“She knew nothing of what had become of Lady Hannah, I believe, when Gillman persuaded her to help him with his impersonation scheme, but one cannot help fancying that of late she must have suspected.”
“How could she do it! How could she do it!” Cynthia moaned. “I was so fond of her at first, and in the end, you know, she saved my life!”
“Lord Duxworth says that so far as he can judge, and from what he can hear, she must have been a creature of infinite charm, but that her whole life has been warped by her love for Gillman. You know she was his wife, Cynthia?”
“No!” The girl sat up, her whole frame trembling. “Then Cousin Hannah—”
“He deceived her by a false marriage. Probably at that time he meant to get rid of Sybil. Later on he changed his mind, as we know, and it was poor Hannah who met her death. I cannot help thinking of the one to whom this will be a sore trouble—poor Donald Farquhar! She was like a mother to him for so many years, and I know he has blamed himself for the quarrel between them, and feared that the ensuing loneliness led up to that most unhappy marriage.”
“Ah, yes! It will be terrible for him now!” Cynthia sighed pitifully, her hand trembling in Lady Duxworth’s. “Poor Donald! And, oh, poor, poor Cousin Hannah!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
IT WAS sunset at Sermoneta; not a breath of air was there to stir the cypresses on the hills. Slowly the sun, a great red ball of fire, was sinking to rest, his last rays streaking the horizon with a reflected glory of glowing amber, of flame-like scarlet melting into crimson that dashed the blue waters of the lake with blood, turned the grey-green of the olives round its shores to a warm russet-brown.
To Luigi, the old postman, trudging bare-legged up the hill beside his faithful mule, with its burden of letters and parcels, it seemed that the distance to the Villa Perponchi was even longer than usual.
He was for ever climbing up there, too, he grumbled to a couple of peasants who sat by the wayside tossing contentedly for their small silver scudi, since the English milord came to the villa. Before it had been but once a week or so. Now it was every day, and twice a day. Apparently they had nothing to do—these mad English—but to sit scribbling their foolishness to one another all day long.
Meanwhile, in the open veranda of the Villa Perponchi, Lord Duxworth was impatiently pacing backwards and forwards, growling discontentedly to the occupants of the two hammocks slung at the farther end on the iniquities of foreign countries in general and of their postal arrangements in particular. That a man could not get his newspaper until it was a day and a half old apparently more than counterbalanced the beauties of Sermoneta in his eyes.
The appearance of Luigi with his mule created a pleasant diversion, and Lord Duxworth hurried across the grass to meet him. Lady Duxworth turned over in her hammock with a sigh of relief.
“Now we shall have a little peace; it is astonishing what a nuisance a man becomes if he does not get his newspaper regularly every morning.”
Lord Duxworth’s step was brisker as he came back, his face was glowing with satisfaction.
“Here’s a letter from Barsly; it seems there is some fuss about Wilcher’s lease. I’m not at all sure that I shall not have to run over for a day or two just to put matters straight, and leave you to look after Cynthia and Marion, eh, my lady? Here is your pile”—handing several letters to her—“and here, Cynthia, is one for you.”
Cynthia raised herself a little to receive it.
“From Sybil!” she cried with a flush of excitement.
Lady Duxworth looked interested.
“Is it over, my dear?”
“I think so,” Cynthia said as she began to read. “Yes, she entered upon her novitiate yesterday. Henceforth, she says, she will be known as Sister Dolores.”
“A very suitable name, poor thing!” Lady Duxworth said, with a sigh.
Cynthia did not reply; she was absorbed in her letter.
During the six months that had elapsed since the tragedy at Greylands she had been slowly creeping back to convalescence; the tinge of pink in her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes spoke of renewed health and strength.
Very seldom now did she mention any of the actors in that terrible drama, but Lady Duxworth knew that immediately after Gillman had paid the penalty of his crime Sybil, whom it was difficult to think of as Delphine Meldrum, had entered a convent. The time of probation was now over, it appeared, and the novitiate, as to which there had been some doubt at the convent, had now been formally entered upon.
Lady Duxworth was inclined to think it the best thing that could possibly have happened; it put an end to a very awkward situation, for Cynthia, whose gratitude to Sybil she secretly considered to be somewhat excessive, had positively refused to give up her friendship for the girl.
So far the question of Cynthia’s relations with her husband had remained in abeyance; Lord Letchingham had realized at the one brief interview which the doctors had permitted that the girl’s health had been so shattered by the terrible experience she had undergone that a long period of rest and quiet would be necessary before the matter could be even discussed.
Lady Duxworth knew that his patience would not last much longer, and she was very anxious about the future of the girl, whom she had learnt to
look upon as almost one of her own daughters. The passage of time had in nowise altered Cynthia’s feelings towards her husband; her dread of him had, if possible, increased, and her shrinking from him when Lady Duxworth had persuaded her to: consent to the interview upon which he had insisted had been painful in the extreme.
She was independent of him now, for besides the house of Greylands, bestowed upon her by the deed of gift which Gillman had tried in vain to get revoked, Lady Hannah’s latest will, drawn up by herself, had left an income of a thousand a year to her beloved cousin, Cynthia Frances Hannah, daughter of the late Herbert Densham. The rest of Lady Hannah’s money went, as had been expected, to Farquhar, and her husband was not as much as mentioned among the list of legatees—a circumstance which proved that the poor woman before her death had become aware of something of the character of the man she had married.
Farquhar, after Gillman’s trial, went to his estate in Scotland for a brief visit, and after setting his affairs in order betook himself to Central America on an expedition in search of big game. For the past three months they had heard nothing of him, and Lady Duxworth, knowing something of what had passed between him and Cynthia, and surmising more, was careful never to mention his name. Yet her thoughts were busy with him now as she went through her correspondence. An exclamation from her husband startled her.
“Bless my life! Poor old fellow! It is a bad job!”
“What is?” Lady Duxworth inquired, with some natural irritation. “Really, Duxworth, you forget that I do not know what you are talking about—I cannot read the paper from here.”
