Wyllard's Weird

Bothwell did not go to London. He excused himself upon various grounds, and remained quietly at Penmorval. But from that hour his manner to Hilda changed altogether. From an unavowed lover he became an indifferent acquaintance. He set a watch upon his tongue that it should say no words of pleasantness. He vowed that he would not again suffer himself to be enmeshed in Lady Valeria's net: but until he had calmly and deliberately broken with her he could not be the lover of any other woman. He made up his mind that so soon as the General and his wife were settled at Fox Hill there should be a rupture – temperate, gentle, firm, and irrevocable.

Lady Valeria came to Fox Hill, and summoned her slave. He went, and there was no rupture – only a renewal of the old bonds. The bird was in the fowler's net again. Bothwell was often at Fox Hill. He spent long afternoons there tête-à-tête with Lady Valeria. She was less careful than she had been in India.

"We are not surrounded with busybodies here," she said. "I feel that I can do as I like in my own house."

He went to London to borrow money for her when she was in difficulties about that horrible book of hers: and Lady Valeria's normal state now was financial difficulty. Almost everybody knew that she was a gambler, except her husband. He was so thoroughly respected and beloved that no one had the heart to make him unhappy by breathing a word to his wife's discredit. He thought her faultless.

She had hardened in that false wicked life of hers: but she was more fascinating than ever, Bothwell thought, albeit he was far less under her spell than he had been in the old days at Simla. The very fever of her mind intensified her charm. She seemed such an ethereal creature – all life, and light, and sparkle. She was, to other women, as the electric light is to gas.

And now, half buried in his corner of the railway-carriage, Bothwell smoked the pipe of meditation. He looked back upon that fatal past, and cursed himself for the weak folly that had put such a chain round his neck. He looked back, and recalled the old scenes, the old feelings, and he almost wondered if he could be the same man who had so felt and so acted.

He drove to Fox Hill as fast as a cab-horse would take him, alighted a little way from the chief gates, and dismissed his conveyance, meaning to walk back to Plymouth after his interview. Fox Hill was four miles from the station, but Bothwell could walk four miles in an hour with that free swinging stride of his. A four-mile walk and a pipe might just serve to quiet his nerves after the ordeal he had to undergo.

The General's Devonshire home was an Italian villa, built on the southern slope of an amphitheatre of hills, and commanding the town, the dockyards, the Hamoaze, and the Hoe in all their extent. Distance lent enchantment to the view. Plymouth, seen from this sunny hillside, looked as picturesque as Naples.

The villa had been planned by an architect of taste and culture, and built regardless of expense. The house was not large when measured by the number of its rooms; but all the rooms were spacious, lightsome, and lofty. The decorations were of the simplest. The glory of the place was its conservatories, which were so arranged as to introduce flowers and tropical foliage into every part of the dwelling. A long marble colonnade, enclosed by plate-glass shutters in winter or bad weather, surrounded the house, and here bloomed and flourished all that is rarest and loveliest in modern horticulture. The central hall had a glass roof, and was more a conservatory than a hall. The corridors between drawing-room and dining-room, between boudoir and study, were indoor gardens. Flowers pervaded the house, and harmonised admirably with the elegant simplicity of the furniture, the draperies of delicate chintz and soft India muslin.

The villa had been built sixty years ago, in the days of the Georges, a period when Italian colonnades, Corinthian porticoes, and Pompeian conservatories were the rage; but the house suited Lady Valeria just as a well-chosen frame suits a picture.

On this summery September morning Lady Valeria was seated in the colonnade, half reclining in one of those very low chairs which she always affected, being one of the few women who can rise gracefully from a seat about a foot from the ground. She was half hidden by the foliage of oleanders and magnolia, and it was only by a glimmer of white amongst the glossy green that Bothwell descried her in the distance as he crossed the lawn. There was a fountain on the lawn here, just as at Simla; but the fountain was a late improvement, insisted upon by Lady Valeria.

"It will recall Simla, where we were so happy," she told her husband.

"And yet you were so impatient to leave India, towards the last," he said, almost reproachfully.

"Yes, I was very tired of India at the last. There is an end of all things."

Bothwell had obeyed Lady Valeria's instructions to the letter. He had entered the grounds by a side gate, so as to escape challenge at the lodge: and now he made his way boldly to the colonnade in front of her boudoir. The boudoir was not a particularly sacred apartment, as it formed one in the suite of rooms and conservatories which communicated along the whole length of the house. Italian villas of the Georgian era were not planned for seclusion.

Lady Valeria was sitting in her low chair, with a low table at her side, scattered with books and newspapers. The books were mostly new memoirs and French novels of the most advanced school. The papers were chiefly sporting. She looked up languidly as Bothwell approached, and gave him her hand, like an empress, without stirring from her graceful repose amidst embroidered silken cushions. She was not beautiful. Her charm lay in an extreme refinement of feature and figure, a delicacy of tint which verged upon sickliness. It was the refinement of a vanishing race, and recalled the delicacy of an over-trained racehorse.

Her complexion was almost colourless in repose, but the lips were of the tint of pale-pink rose petals, and every emotion flushed the waxen cheek with loveliest bloom. Her nose was long and thin, too long for perfect beauty. Her chin was a thought too sharp, her brow too narrow. But her eyes were exquisite. Herein lay her one grand charm, and Lady Valeria well knew the power of those large violet eyes, fringed with darkest lashes, accentuated by pencilled brows – eyes which seemed to fill with tears at will – eyes which could plead more eloquently than lips ever spoke since the days of Eve, first tempted and then tempter.

"I hope you are not really ill," said Bothwell, seating himself in the chair opposite Lady Valeria.

"Only worried to death," she answered, with an irritated air. "I have troubles enough to send me into an early grave."

"Money troubles?"

"Money troubles. Yes. I have other troubles, too, but the money troubles are the most urgent. They gnaw the sharpest."

"You have been losing again?"

"Yes. I was so lucky with my Goodwood book that I grew bold – determined upon a great coup at York, put every farthing I could scrape together upon Crofter, the second favourite for the Great Ebor. I had been assured that it was the safest thing in the world. I might back him with my wedding-ring, Sir George Varney said. And York has generally been lucky to me, you know. It is my own county, and I love every inch of it. The Knavesmire was the first racecourse I ever saw, the place where I first learned to love horses, and to understand them. My father used to tell me everything about the races. I was the only one of us who was really interested in his talk."

"I thought the money from Davis, and the money you won at Goodwood, cleared all your difficulties."

"Yes, for the moment. But this York business has made things worse than they were before. However, you need not disturb yourself about it. Varney has offered to lend me the money."

She said this slowly, with drooping eyelids, and a thoughtful air; but she stole a little look at Bothwell from beneath the long dark lashes, to see how he took her speech.

"You must not take a sixpence of his money – not a sixpence," said Bothwell sternly.

"No? That is exactly my idea. It would be very bad form for a woman in my position to borrow from Varney – who is – well, a man of the world. But I must have the money somehow. The bookmakers won't wait. They only give credit in my case because they know I dare not cheat them."

"Surely the bookmen do not know that you are their creditor?"

"They are not supposed to know. The bets are made in my brother's name – Otho's – who has been in Australia for the last two years. But I don't believe these men would trust Otho, even if he were in London."

"It is dreadful!" exclaimed Bothwell, deeply distressed. "You ought not to have entangled yourself again. What makes you do this thing, Valeria? It is worse than chloral, or any other form of feminine madness."

"Yes, it is a kind of madness, I suppose. I should not do it if I were happy. I shall have no need to do it when I am happy – by and by."

Again she stole a look at him, a tender pathetic look, which would have melted him a year ago. But it left him unmoved now. He felt only anger at her folly, her obstinate persistence in wrong-doing.

"You must not take Varney's money," he repeated, "not for worlds. To think that you should have secret dealings with such a man – a hardened scamp and roué!"

"I am not going to accept Sir George's offer – which was at least good-natured, so you need not be uncivil about him," replied Valeria coolly; "but I must get the money somehow. I don't want Otho's name to be posted at Tattersall's. There are too many people who would guess that Otho stands for Valeria in this case."

"It would be disgraceful, horrible."

"But it will happen, I'm afraid, unless I can get the money."

"I can find no more, Valeria. That last loan from Davis was most difficult to manage. I had positively no security to offer. The money was advanced on the strength of Wyllard's position, on the speculation that he would not see me broke."

"I am not asking you to pay my debts," she replied with her grand air: the air of a woman accustomed to be admired for every attribute of her character, good or bad, and to do wrong with impunity. "But the money must be found somehow, and perhaps you can tell me where I am to get it."

"From your husband," he answered impetuously. "Yes, Valeria, from your one true and loyal friend. The one man you can ask in all honour to pay for your follies."

"You advise me to go to him!" exclaimed Valeria, livid with anger. "You!"

"Yes, I – I, who have wronged him deeply by a most fatal engagement which I have regretted ever since it was made. Not because you are not lovely, fascinating, all that is fairest and most desirable in womankind: but because I am hateful to myself on account of that treachery. What! to be the affianced lover of a woman whose husband's hand I grasped in seeming friendship: to smile in his face, to accept his kindness, his friendship, his confidence, while all my life was one long waiting for his death, while you and I were saying to each other every day, by and by we will do this, by and by we will go here and there, sail our yacht in the Mediterranean, build our cottage on the Scotch moor, by and by, when that good man who trusted us both is in his grave! O, it has been a hateful position, Valeria, base, miserable, guilty, accursed, for both of us: and, by the God who made us, it must come to an end."

There had been tears in his voice almost from the beginning of his speech, and at the end he broke down altogether and sobbed aloud.

Valeria rose out of her low chair, and stood before him straight as a dart. The movement was so quick, so instinct with an unholy grace, that it recalled the image of a cobra he had once seen rise up straight before him in the midst of his path through the jungle.

"You are in love with another woman!" she hissed, like the serpent. "That is the meaning of this sudden outbreak of virtue!"

He could not deny it.

"You want to break with me, in order that you may marry some one else," she said, whiter than death, her eyes dilating, her lips quivering.

"Yes," he answered quietly. "I could form a happier tie if you set me free. But there is not one word which I said just now about the feeling of my own baseness which was not just as true two years ago as it is to-day. Such a bond as ours never could bring happiness, Valeria, to man or to woman."

"It gave us hope," she said; "a fair dream of the future. Well, it is all over. Whatever it is worth it is gone – like a tuft of thistledown blown into the air. Go, Bothwell Grahame, you are your own man again; go and marry your new love."

"It will not be a marriage of to-day or to-morrow," answered Bothwell gravely. "My new love and I will have to wait for better times. First, I am a pauper; and, secondly, there is a taint upon my name, inasmuch as the good people of Bodmin and the neighbourhood have taken it into their wise heads that I am a murderer, because I refused to answer some very impertinent questions at the inquest. Valeria, will you forgive me – will you believe – "

"That you were heartily tired of me ages ago, before you left India," she said, interrupting him with a feverish rapidity. She had sunk into her low chair again, and was seated with her hands clasped upon the basket-work, bedizened with trappings of Oriental embroidery, like an Arab's horse – her eyes gazing over the wide panorama of land and sea, the dockyards, the river, the lighthouse yonder, and the long line of surf dashing against the breakwater.

"Yes, I know that you were weary of me long before that bitter good-bye," she went on, breathless with passion, her sentences broken into short gasps. "I think I knew even then that you were false, though I pretended to myself that you were true. I don't believe you ever loved me. You just let me love you, that was all. If you had really cared for me – as other men have cared for other women – you would not have been so obedient. You would have flung prudence to the winds – you would have made scenes – you would have wanted to run away with me. No, you never loved me."

It would have been vain now for Bothwell to protest the reality of the old worn-out passion. It had never been of the strongest stuff that love is made of, and it had long been growing threadbare. He had received his release, and that was the boon he had come here to ask. But he could not leave the woman he had once loved without one word of peace.

"Valeria," he said gently, tenderly even, "I shall stay here till you forgive me."

"Would you stay until you have forced me to tell a lie? There can be no blacker lie than any word of mine that offered forgiveness to you. You have deceived me cruelly. You were my strong rock, and I leant upon you for comfort. O Bothwell, what is she like, this other woman for whom you forsake me? Is she so much more beautiful – so much younger – fresher than I?"

"She is good, and pure, and true, and has been brave and loyal when the world spoke evil of me! That is all I can tell you about her."

"But she is handsome, I suppose? You are not going to marry a plain woman, out of gratitude!"

"She is lovely in my eyes; and I believe she is generally considered a pretty girl."

"Who is she?"

"A lady. I can tell you no more yet awhile. Hark! there is the General's voice. I had better go. Stay, there is something you once gave me. You told me to wear it till – "

"Till you were tired of me. Yes, I remember," she said impatiently.

"Till the tie was broken between us, in somewise," he answered, taking out his watch.

There was about three inches of slender Trichinopoly chain on the swivel of the watch, and on the chain hung an old-fashioned hoop-ring of old Brazilian diamonds. The ring had belonged to Lord Carlavarock's grandmother, and had been Valeria's favourite jewel.

She snatched it from Bothwell's hand the moment he had taken it off the chain, and flung it with all her force into the nearest thicket of shrubs.

"So much for the token of worn-out love!" she said. "If one of the gardeners finds it, he will pawn it at Devonport, and spend the money in drink. A worthy end for such a souvenir. Good-bye, Mr. Grahame."

Bothwell bowed and left her; left her to crawl up to her bedroom like a wounded hind creeping to covert, and to fling herself face downwards on the floor, and lie there tearless, despairing, ready to invoke hell itself to help her in some kind of revenge, had she but believed in the devil. But Lady Valeria was an agnostic. She had not even Satan as a friend in the hour of trouble.

CHAPTER XI.

A FATAL LOVE

Monsieur Drubarde and his visitor descended the ladder, and entered the police-officer's apartment, which consisted of two small rooms, the outer an office and salon combined, the inner a bedchamber, which Mr. Heathcote saw through the open door: a neat little bachelor's nest, with a velvet-curtained bedstead, and walls lined with portraits of every kind – engravings, lithographs, photographs.

The salon was decorated with the same style of art, diversified by engravings from newspapers, all representing notorious crimes. "The Murder in the Rue de la Paix," "Germinie Latouche stabbed in the kitchen of the Red Cross Restaurant by her lover, Gilles Perdie;" "The Arrest of Victor Larennes for the great forgeries on the Bank of France;" "The Escape of Jean Bizat, the parricide." Art had represented all these scenes with due dramatic fervour. They were hardly pleasing subjects in the abstract; but to Félix Drubarde they were all delightful; for they recalled some of the most interesting and most profitable hours of his life. He was gratified to see his guest looking at those stories of crime, in artistic shorthand.

"Gilles Perdie would have got off, if it had not been for me," he said, with excusable pride. "The police had been hunting for him ten long days, when I put them on the right scent. We knew that he had not gone far from the scene of the crime – for there had been no time for escape, you see. The murder was found out an hour after the woman's death. He was hunted for in every hole and corner within a radius of a mile. No one had seen him leave the premises. No one had set eyes on him since the murder, which occurred in the early morning in October, when it is not light before six. 'How do you know that he ever did leave that house?' I asked one day, meaning the Red Cross, a workman's eating-house in the Rue Galande. He was cellarman there, cellarman and terreur combined. My comrades laughed at me. They had searched the Red Cross from cellar to garret, they had not left an inch of the building unexplored. 'Have you looked in the empty casks?' I asked. Yes, they had looked in the empty casks. The cellar was very neatly arranged, the empty casks in a row on one side, the full ones on the other. My friends protested that they were not such fools as to have overlooked an empty cask. 'Who knows?' I said; 'we will go there this afternoon and overhaul those barrels.' Need I tell you the result? It is history. There was one empty hogshead, artfully pushed in a corner, last in the rank of unbroached hogsheads. The open end had been turned towards the wall, and in that empty hogshead, in that rat-haunted cellar, Gilles Perdie had contrived to exist for ten days, by the aid of his victim's daughter, a child of seven years old, who lived in the house, and whom he threatened to kill as he had killed her mother, if she told any one about him, or failed to carry him food and drink twice a day. There, amidst vermin and ordure, he had lived, coiled up in his hogshead, and perhaps not much worse off than some among the poor of Paris, whose only crime is poverty."

"You have a right to boast of your scent, Monsieur, after such a triumph as that."

"A bagatelle, Monsieur, one of the feeblest of my cases: but it made a great hit at the time. My portrait appeared in three different newspapers, side by side with that of the murderer."

"A distinguished honour. And now, if you will be kind enough to give me the further information which you promised as to names and details?"

"Monsieur Effcotte, you are Mr. Distin's friend, and for you I will do what I would hardly do for my own brother. I will trust you with one of my books."

"You are extremely obliging."

"I know, sir, that there are some people who think nothing of lending a book; they can hand over a treasured volume to a friend – to an indifferent acquaintance even – without a pang; they can see him turn the leaves and violate the stiffness of the back. I, Monsieur, would almost as soon lend my arm and hand as one of those books; but for you I will make an exception. You shall have the volume which contains the report of the Prévol case, to read and take notes from at your leisure."

"You are more than good."

Monsieur Drubarde's library consisted of four rows of handsomely bound volumes, whose gilded backs shone behind a barricade of plate glass, in a locked bookcase. They were books which he had collected at his leisure, and which bore for the most part on his profession: the memoirs of Vidocq, the memoirs of Canler, of Sanson the executioner, and other biographies of equally thrilling interest. For literature of so lofty a stamp, Félix Drubarde had deemed no binding too luxurious; and he had clothed his favourites in all the pomp of purple, and green, and crimson, and sumptuous gilding. He had caused them to be enriched with the bookbinder's whole gamut of ornament – his fleurs-de-lis and roses, his foliage and acorns, and scrolls and emblems. Even the volume of printed reports which Drubarde handed to Mr. Heathcote was gorgeous in red morocco and gold.

"You will find the case fully reported in that volume," he said. "When you have read it, and made your own conclusions upon it, you can come back to me, and we will talk the matter over together."

"I will call upon you again to-morrow at the same hour, if you will allow me," replied Heathcote, laying a ten-pound note upon the table. "But I must ask you in the mean time to accept this trifle as an earnest of future remuneration. I do not on any account desire to impose on your good-nature."

Monsieur Drubarde shrugged his shoulders, declared that as a matter of feeling he would rather work gratuitously for any friend of Mr. Distin's, but that from a business point of view his time was valuable. He had a little place in the country, fifteen miles out of Paris; he had nephews and nieces dependent upon him; in a word, he had to work for others as well as for himself.

"Before you go, perhaps you will be so good as to tell me your motive for hunting up the history of this old murder," he said, with a keen look. He had been intending to ask this question from the beginning.

"I am searching out the details of an old murder in order to fathom the mystery of a new murder, or of a strange death, which I take to be a murder. Can you read English, Monsieur Drubarde?"

"I have a niece who can – a girl who was educated at a convent in Jersey. I am going to my country home this afternoon, and my niece can read anything you give me."

Mr. Heathcote took from his pocket-book the report of the inquest, cut out of the local papers, and pasted on slips of foolscap.

"If your niece will translate that report for you, I think you will understand the motive of my investigation," he said; and then bade Monsieur Drubarde good-morning.

He went down-stairs with the volume of reports under his arm, hailed a fly, and drove to the Hôtel de Bade, stopping on his way to engage a stall for that evening at the Comédie Française, the only recreation which he cared for in his present frame of mind. He had numerous acquaintances in Paris, but he did not care about seeing one of them just now, nor did he linger in the bright gay streets to mark the changes which a year had made in the aspect of that ever-varying city, as he would have done had his mind been free from care.

He had a sitting-room and bedroom on the second floor of the hotel, two nice little rooms opening into each other, and both overlooking the Boulevard; an outlook which on former occasions he had preferred to the monastic quiet of the courtyard, where there were no sounds but the splashing of the water with which the man-of-all-work sluiced the stone pavement at intervals of an hour or two on sultry summer afternoons, or the scream of a chambermaid arguing with a waiter, both talking as loud as if they had been communicating from the gate of Saint-Martin to the gate of Saint-Denis. To-day, with the report of the Prévol case open before him, Edward Heathcote could have found it in his heart to curse the Boulevard, with its roar and rattle, its incessant "ya-youp!" of coachmen on the point of running over passengers, and everlasting clamour of the lively Gaul. He would have preferred a hermit's cave, with never a sound but the sighing of the wind on the mountain-side.