by Grant Allen
Logically speaking, of course, disproof of the allegation that Linda had administered the poison by no means implied disproof of the allegation of an intrigue between herself and Maclaine as the motive for the Duke’s extraordinary attitude. But the English people, having once made up its mind to acquit Linda upon the capital charge, was so much revolted by the Duke’s hideous attempt to bring home to his wife a false accusation of murder, that it jumped at once to the happy conclusion— ‘He must have been mad even to think she could be guilty.’ Basil Maclaine’s own bearing in the box contributed not a little to this fortunate result; while Linda herself, by calmly taking it for granted, in her own quiet way, that her acquittal must still every whisper of gossip that wagged its tongue against her, disarmed even the old maids of five o’clock tea through her resolute demeanour of perfect innocence.
Naturally, however, the events of the last few weeks had shaken her nerves a good deal. You can’t go through the ordeal of a trial for murder without feeling at the end a great deal the older for it. As soon as all was over, therefore, Linda went away with Cecil to the Continent, where they rested for awhile, under an assumed name, to avoid curiosity, in a remote and unvisited little Swiss village. Before leaving England, however, she had assured herself that Elizabeth Pomeroy would not suffer for her brave and timely disclosures. Further search had indeed confirmed Miss Pomeroy’s account in every particular; and the poor girl had formed so deep a hatred of Arthur Roper for his attempt to confine her to her room during the course of the trial, that she had no hesitation now in giving evidence against him on various charges of burglary, which resulted in that enterprising gentleman being ultimately removed for fourteen years from the exercise of the profession he adorned as head, to what he himself euphemistically described as ‘a position under Government’; while two or three of his less distinguished associates were similarly sequestered from their habitual pursuits by the strong hand of the law for just half that period.
Linda had wished Miss Pomeroy to leave England for good, after the police had done with her, and to begin a new life under fresh auspices in Canada; but Miss Pomeroy herself, her better nature now getting the upper hand altogether, wrote such a piteous letter praying for leave to remain always in Linda’s service, ‘because she loved her,’ that Linda couldn’t find it in her heart to refuse the poor penitent creature.
‘Now that I’m safe from that wretched man’s clutches,’ Miss Pomeroy wrote with all her usual frankness, ‘I think, if I had you always at my side, dear Duchess, I could manage to keep quite straight in future. It was all for him I lived that horrible, unnatural, wicked double life of mine. He caught me when I was an innocent girl of seventeen, moulded me as he would, and trained me to his hand to work evil as he ordered me. Now that I’ve freed myself from him at last, I hate myself for having ever yielded to him; but I need support and help, and you can give it me. If you will take me back as your maid, on what terms you will, you will never have cause to reproach me with ingratitude.’
And Linda, convinced the girl was right, wrote back to her at once to join them forthwith by the very first train in their little Swiss village. From that day forth, Elizabeth Pomeroy was the Duchess’s devoted slave, and Linda could only feel sorry at times that so clever and sensitive a woman as that should be wasting her years in dressing back hair, and arranging folds in an evening robe for one of her even Christians.
On London flags, meanwhile, Basil Maclaine, on the strength of the prominent part he had played for a week or two in the great Society scandal, found himself at once a nine days’ wonder. People would have preferred, of course, to catch the Duchess herself, if they could, for their ‘at homes,’ and their garden-parties and their ‘little musics;’ but failing the Duchess, retired to the Continent to recruit incog., the next best thing Society could do for itself was to catch the man who had been unjustly suspected of conspiring to murder her husband the Duke with her. Basil had suffered a good deal of mental torture during those weeks of suspense; but it was almost worth the suffering, he felt, to be thus popularly coupled in thought and speech by all the world with their graces of Powysland. Moreover, it had gradually oozed out — not, indeed, at the trial, but privately afterward — that that poor Mr. Maclaine, ‘who was so shamefully suspected by the dreadful Duke, don’t you know, had really once been very much in love indeed with the Duchess, before the Duke met her, or, at least, the Duchess with him — it’s all the same thing, you know — but they wouldn’t marry, my dear, for family reasons;’ and it was even whispered about in the highest circles that, as soon as the customary year of mourning was over, the poor dear Duchess would please herself at last, and bestow her hand and her American thousands upon the man she had first chosen in the heyday of her yet ungilded beauty.
This rumour was so rife indeed, at a certain club, usually well informed, that Basil almost began to give himself airs on the strength of his prospects, and discounted his future social grandeur by accepting the entrée to a great many of the best houses as the future husband of a dowager Duchess.
Things were going better, too, far better than of old, with Douglas Harrison. When that most briefless of barristers threw himself heart and soul into Linda’s case, it was certainly with no idea of personal or professional advancement that he worked for his client’s acquittal; he undertook her defence wholly and solely as a labour of love, and as a duty he owed to an innocent woman, of whose innocence he had a most profound and unalterable conviction. But none the less, the case incidentally made his fortune.
All the world knew that Mr. Douglas Harrison, of the Inner Temple, had constructed and carried through a most ingenious defence of a seemingly hopeless and hapless prisoner, as well as that he had anticipated in a most wonderful way the result of the evidence unexpectedly tendered at the last moment by Elizabeth Pomeroy. All the world knew, too, that he had succeeded in fully convincing the jury, against all previous conceptions, before Elizabeth Pomeroy came upon the scene at all, as to his client’s innocence. On the one hand, his own address and the testimony he had so ingeniously gathered together in support of his theory, must have produced their due effect, even had Elizabeth Pomeroy’s dramatic appearance never taken place; and on the other hand, that witness’s evidence, when she actually arrived, showed with what surprising acuteness and forensic skill he had built up, unaided, his psychological reconstruction of the dead Duke’s sentiments, motives, and actions. The whole Bar admitted it to be a remarkable success; and Douglas Harrison’s name filled a large place in everybody’s mouth for weeks to come as the rising barrister.
Briefs poured in upon him without delay, of course. All the circumstances of the great trial had naturally given his advocacy unusual prominence. Merely to have defended a Duchess on a capital charge was in itself alone already much — enough, perhaps, to secure any man a high legal reputation; to have successfully defended her in a difficult case which had been practically given up for lost by the ablest men in the legal profession was, of course, a triumph of the very first order. Douglas took his triumph modestly, however, as he took whatever else fell to his lot; and having a decided talent for his profession, now that the door was at last opened to him, he found money flow in upon him with that astonishing rapidity only known in the case of a new barrister who has suddenly made a great reputation by his conduct of a single important trial.
Time passed, and Linda remained abroad for six months, at first in Switzerland, but afterwards, with a gradual return to society, in Venice, Florence, and along the Riviera. She didn’t feel bound to express or to feign a regret; she didn’t now really in any way feel for the loss of her husband. The man had shown her too clearly the whole selfish wickedness of his inner nature in that last vile act of his ill-spent life to leave even the shadow of such a feeling possible to her. And Linda, happily, was not the sort of person to be crushed to the ground, even by so terrible and unexpected a shock as that which the final disclosure cost her. On the contrary, she determined bravely to
return to her usual mode of life as early as was seemly; and she had no hesitation, therefore, at the end of six months, in presenting herself once more in a very quiet way before the busy, eventful world of London.
The day before she was to return to town, Basil Maclaine sat in his easy-chair by the fire at Clandon Street, cigarette in hand, and pince-nez in place, discussing the fortunes of the future with Douglas Harrison; for through all changes of chance, they two still remained fellow-lodgers as of yore, in their familiar chambers.
‘I shan’t put it off, you know, Harrison,’ the frequenter of the Best Society was complacently observing. ‘I shan’t put it off one day longer. I don’t see why one should, indeed, under these peculiar circumstances. I haven’t written to Linda all the time she’s been away’ — Basil always spoke of her grace as plain Linda now, even to casual acquaintances: it was part of the discount system— ‘except, of course, in the most purely formal and friendly manner, to congratulate her upon her triumphant emergence from all the charges preferred against her, and to tell her how pleased and gratified I’ve felt from time to time to hear her health was gradually getting restored to the normal. But there’s a limit in all things — a limit in all things. I don’t think delicacy demands I should wait any longer. If affairs had turned out differently, to be sure — if Powysland had died in the ordinary course of events, for example, and Linda had been left a sorrowing widow: deep weeds, the dear departed, and all that sort of thing — the classical business — why, I wouldn’t have thought of approaching her on the subject, of course, before the usual period of a decent twelvemonth. But in this case, you see, things are so entirely exceptional. Powysland put himself altogether out of court, so to speak, by his outrageous behaviour. Linda isn’t bound to go on mourning indefinitely in crimped crape for a man whose very last act on earth was a vile and villainous attempt to take away her life and blast her character. As her earliest friend, and now her natural protector’ — Basil roped his moustache complacently— ‘I feel the sooner this matter is definitely arranged, the better for both of us. Besides, you see, our names have so often been coupled already; Society has discussed the thing so long and so intimately; there’ve been hints in Truth; there’ve been paragraphs in the papers — that I think we can’t do better than settle it off-hand, as it must be settled in the end, to prevent more talking.’
And Basil drew himself up very straight as he spoke, and looked as though he felt himself already almost a left-handed morganatic husband-in-law of the British aristocracy.
As a matter of fact, indeed, he had more than once written down on a piece of paper, just to see how it looked: ‘Fashionable Intelligence. — The Duchess of Powysland and Mr. Basil Maclaine have arrived for the season at No. 510, Upper Grosvenor Street.’ He even sometimes calculated the chances whether, by putting the screw upon the Government, through Hubert Harrison, M.P., he mightn’t make it at last ‘Sir Basil Maclaine, K.C.M.G., and the Duchess of Powysland.’ Linda’s money and title ought surely to secure a man of official experience and prepossessing exterior a paltry colonial governorship, with its usual reward of ultimate knighthood!
But Douglas, looking up from a pile of papers in ‘The Queen versus Longwood, Jones intervening,’ answered with a smile:
‘Don’t you think you ought to make sure of the Duchess’s feelings first by gradual stages — approach the matter obliquely, as it were, and see whether her affections remain unchanged towards you still? Time and circumstances may have wrought some alteration in her heart, possibly.’
But Basil only puffed out a white stream of smoke from his pursed-up lips, and replied with confidence:
‘Oh dear no! I can answer for Linda in that, as I can answer for myself. ‘Pon my soul, my dear fellow, I wonder you don’t know Linda better! She’s not the sort of woman who goes chopping and changing her mind, bless you! I could see how much moved she was when she met me at the Simpsons’; and ever since — though, of course, not a word of the sort has passed between us — I’ve noticed always how her eyes sparkled and her colour warmed up whenever I came near her. The hesitation was always upon my side. I know better now; I acknowledge my error; and I mean to accept the affection she offered me. Why, if it were only for the sake of avoiding scandal, my dear boy, you must surely see yourself she’d be bound to take me.’
CHAPTER LII.
THE DUCHESS ACCEPTS.
So, two days later, Basil Maclaine, in his best frock-coat and shiny silk hat, with bland smile on his face and moss-rose bud in his button-hole, sallied forth alone, on matrimonial thoughts intent, along the crowded Strand, to the door of the Métropole. Young love’s first dream was now to enact its due fulfilment. Basil Maclaine strode exalted through the streets, with the double exaltation of a man who means to call upon the long-lost sweetheart of his callow youth, and a man who means to ally himself in marriage with the Very Best People in this realm of England.
The Métropole is well-known as a convenient and central hotel for families and gentlemen; and Linda had engaged rooms there before choosing a new home for herself in town, because she couldn’t bear now to take up her abode at that hateful and gloomy old Powysland House, which she had refurnished and redecorated throughout for her unworthy husband, but had been prevented by circumstances from ever inhabiting. It was hers by Bertie’s will, unaltered in his eager haste to die — but she could accept nothing now that was ever the Montgomeries’. So she made it over, without one qualm, to his mother, to get the hateful thing off her hands once for all, and took rooms for herself meanwhile in a comfortable hotel, while she looked about her in London for her future resting-place.
She was alone in her sitting-room, and disconsolate enough, on this the first morning of her return to England, when on a sudden the door opened brusquely and a servant announced:
‘Mr. Basil Maclaine — to see her grace the Duchess!’
Linda rose with a faint blush and advanced with outstretched hand to greet him frankly. Basil stepped forward with an easy, jaunty confidence.
‘What, Linda!’ he cried, in his most familiar voice, seizing her hand in his like an old friend of the family, ‘this is just like old times — to see you back again once more in dear old England!’
Linda was quite taken aback at the sudden warmth of this friendly greeting from the man who once thought her so far beneath his notice; but she was always forgiving by nature, so she answered only in a dignified tone:
‘Thank you very much, Mr. Maclaine. I’m glad to be home again. Italy’s lovely, of course, and it has taught me so much; but, still, I feel every day my heart’s in England.’
‘No, really! you don’t mean to say so!’ Basil cried, delighted, interpreting her innocent patriotic remark as intended to convey to him a personal assurance. ‘That’s very kind of you, Linda,’ he went on, dropping into a seat on the sofa and leaning across towards her: ‘it was Linda in the old days, you remember, wasn’t it?’ he added with warmth, for he saw the Duchess looked down at him with a faint air of surprise; ‘so why shouldn’t it be Linda now — and always?’
‘Because,’ the Duchess faltered, settling down in an arm chair a little way off, at a safe distance, ‘so much has happened since, to make so great a difference.’
She spoke seriously — coldly; she meant him to understand such easy familiarity by no means pleased her. But Basil, too blind to see, and too self-confident to hesitate, went on with his brisk courtship, unabashed by her chilly response. He had only to come, see, and conquer, he knew: so why delay matters?
‘Not to you and me, Linda,’ he answered in his tenderest voice, looking across at her with a killing glance from those really fine eyes of his. ‘Not, I’m quite sure, to you and me ... Linda. I know you’re not one of those to whom mere wealth and title can make any difference in inner feeling. Where once you love — I feel confident, I feel certain — you love for ever.’
‘Mr. Maclaine — —’ Linda began, trying to explain to him at once, and deeply embarrassed. But
Basil would not hear her. He rose from the sofa, in a very melting mood, and drew a chair nearer to her side, as if by unconscious attraction. Linda tried to draw away, but he followed her up pertinaciously. This was mere coyness, he felt sure — her middle-class idea of what was rightly due to her womanly dignity. She thought she must be won — not give way too easily.
‘Linda,’ he murmured, coming closer, and speaking very low, ‘I must explain at once. I must be clear with you immediately. Not one day must you stay in London, under these peculiar circumstances, before our position is settled and announced to the world on our joint authority. I owe it as a duty to you; I owe it as a duty to myself as well. Questions will be asked, and gossip will get about. We’ve had more than enough of that already. We’ve suffered more than our due share from the curiosity of society. We must anticipate it now by a frank and immediate public statement.’
