Wyllard's Weird

"Would to God that blow had killed him!" she said to herself; and then she went across the room and knelt at her husband's feet, and took his strong hand in hers, and covered it with kisses.

"God bless you for defending me," she said. "I am not a good woman, I am not worthy of you, but I am not such a wretch as that man's words would make me. You will believe that – won't you, Walter?"

"Yes, my dear, I believe that. I cannot think you a false wife, Valeria, though you may be an unloving one. I have thought for a long time that the sweet words, and sweeter smiles which have made the light of my life might mean very little – might mean just the daily sacrifice which a young wife makes to an old husband, and nothing more. Yet I have contrived to be happy, Valeria, in spite of all such doubts; and now this man's foul taunt comes like a blast from a Polar sea, and freezes my blood. What did it mean, Valeria? I thought Bothwell Grahame was my friend. I have been almost as fond of him as if he were my son."

"He is your friend, Walter; yes, your true and loyal friend – more loyal than I have been as your wife."

"What disloyalty have you practised towards me?" he demanded, grasping her by the shoulder, looking into those frightened eyes of hers with his honest steady gaze, the look of a man who would, read all secrets in her face, even the worst. "What has there ever been between you and Bothwell which could involve disloyalty to me? Don't lie to me, Valeria! There must have been some meaning in that man's speech. He would not have dared so to have spoken if he had not known something. What has Bothwell been to you?"

"He loved me – " faltered the pale lips.

"And you returned his love?"

She only hung her head for answer, the beautiful head on the slim and graceful throat, circled with that string of pearls which had been her husband's last birthday gift.

"You returned his love, and you encouraged him to come to your husband's house, to be your chosen companion at all times and seasons, the 'nice boy' of whom you spoke so lightly as to disarm suspicion. By Heaven, I would as soon have suspected your footman as Bothwell Grahame!"

"He was never more to me than a friend. I knew how to respect myself," she answered, with a touch of sullenness.

"You knew how to respect yourself, and you spent half your days in the society of a lover! Is that your idea of self-respect? It is not mine. You respected yourself, and you were careful of your own interests so far as to refrain from running away with the man you loved. What need of an elopement, when the sands must soon run down in the hourglass, and the gray-haired veteran would be gone, leaving you a rich widow, free to marry the man of your heart? No need to defy the world, to outrage society, when everything would work round naturally to give you your own way. O Valeria, it is hard for a man to have his eyes opened after years of blissful blindness! I was better off as your dupe than I am as your confessor."

He laughed bitterly, a contemptuous laugh, at the thought of his own folly. To think that he had believed it possible this woman could love him – this lovely, spiritual creature, all light and flame; to suppose that such a woman could be happy as an old man's darling, that this young bright soul could be satisfied with the worship of declining years, the steady glow of affection, constant, profound, but passionless! No, for such a soul as this the fiery element was a necessity. Love without passion was love without poetry.

Well, the dream was over. He could believe that this proud woman had not dishonoured him, that she could stand before the eyes of men stainless, a faithful wife, as the world counts faithfulness. But he felt not the less that the dream of his declining years was over – that she could never more be to him as she had been, the sweet companion of his leisure, the trusted partner of his life. That was all over and done with. He was not going to revile her, or to torture her, or to thrust her from him. To what end? The gulf would be wide enough, they two living side by side. He would pay her all honour before the world to the end of his days. To live with her, and to be kind to her, knowing that her heart belonged to another, should be his sacrifice, his penance for having tied that young sapling to this withered trunk.

"I have noticed that Grahame has kept aloof from us of late," he said, after a long silence. "Why is that?"

"We agreed that it was better we should see no more of each other," his wife answered quietly.

"I hope you will always remain in that agreement," said the General.

He sat up till daybreak, and he occupied part of his time in writing the rough draft of a codicil to his will, which he meant to take to his London solicitors at the earliest opportunity.

The codicil lessened Lady Valeria's fortune considerably, and allotted 40,000£ to a fund, the interest of which was to be distributed in the form of pensions to twenty widows of field-officers who had died in impoverished circumstances. This subtraction would still leave an estate which would make Lady Valeria Harborough a very rich widow, and a splendid prize in the matrimonial market.

"She will marry Bothwell Grahame, and forget the days of her slavery," thought the General, as he wrote the closing paragraph of his codicil.

It was from no malignant feeling against his wife that he made this change in the disposition of his wealth. He felt that the act was mere justice. To the wife whom he had believed wholly true he bequeathed all. To the woman who had been only half loyal he left half. A mean man would have fettered his bequest by the prohibition of a second marriage; but General Harborough was not that kind of man.

He wondered whether Sir George Varney would take any action in the matter of that blow. He had assisted the fallen man to a chair in the verandah, and had taken him a tumbler of brandy, which Sir George drank as if it had been water. In his half-stunned condition the Baronet had sworn an oath or two, and had walked off muttering curses, which might mean threats of speedy vengeance.

"If he is the scoundrel I think him, he will send me a summons, in order to drag my wife's name before the public," thought General Harborough; nor was he mistaken, for the summons was served within two days of the assault. It was delivered at the villa in the General's absence. He had started for Bath by an early train that morning, in order to attend the funeral of an old friend and brother officer upon the following day. He had an idea of going on from Bath to London, to see his solicitors, and to execute the codicil which was to diminish Lady Valeria's future means.

At the station he met Bothwell Grahame, who was on his way to Dawlish.

There had been a reserve in the young man's manner of late which had puzzled the General. He had been inclined to put down the change to a deterioration in Grahame's character, a gradual going to the bad, for he had an instinctive prejudice against a soldier who could voluntarily abandon his profession. It was bad enough for a man to be thrown out of active service in the prime of life, in accordance with new-fangled rules and regulations; but that a young man should abandon soldiering for any other career seemed to General Harborough at once inexplicable and discreditable. "Bothwell Grahame is getting a regular hang-dog look," thought the General; "and I am not surprised at it. He has thrown away splendid opportunities, and is leading an idle, good-for-nothing life."

And now the General knew the meaning of that hang-dog look, that reserved manner which had struck him as the outward sign of an inward deterioration in the man he had loved as a son. He could understand what agonies of shame and remorse Bothwell must have felt when their hands touched, what self-contempt was expressed in that cloudy brow and furtive glance.

What, then, was his surprise this morning to see Bothwell approach him with a beaming countenance, holding out the hand of friendship!

"My dear General, I am so glad to see you. It is such an age since we met," he exclaimed, in cheeriest tones.

Yes, there was the old ring in his voice, the old heartiness which had made Bothwell so different from the race of languid foplings – the haw-haw tribe.

"Yes, it is some time since we met," answered the General coldly; "but I daresay you and my wife have seen each other pretty frequently during that time. You are the kind of man our neighbours call l'ami de la maison. We English have a less honourable name for the species. We call them tame cats."

Bothwell reddened, and then grew pale. Never before had those kindly eyes of the veteran's looked at him as they looked to-day. Never before had General Harborough addressed him in a tone which sounded like deliberate insult.

"I have been proud to be Lady Valeria's guest," he said quietly, his heart beating furiously the while, "and have never considered myself degraded by any attention I was able to show to her. I hope she is well."

"She is very well. How long is it since you were at Fox Hill?"

"Nearly a fortnight."

"So long?"

"I have been very much occupied," said Bothwell, divining that something had occurred to excite the General's suspicions, and that it behoved him to speak frankly of his new hopes. "I have been working a good deal harder than I have ever worked since I passed my last examination. But we are just going to start. May I get into the same carriage with you?"

"If you like," said the General, which hardly sounded encouraging; but Bothwell, who was virtuously travelling third-class, got into a first-class compartment with the General.

"And, pray, what new trade are you working at?" asked the old man, fixing Bothwell with the clear keen gaze of honest gray eyes, eyes which had almost the brightness of youth.

Bothwell explained his new plans, the General listening with polite attention, but with none of the old friendliness, that cheery kindness which had so often been to Bothwell as a whip of scorpions, torturing him with the sense of his own meanness.

"And, pray, what may be the motive of this industrious spurt?" asked the General. "What has inspired this idea of a useful life?"

"A very old-fashioned and hackneyed motive, General. I am engaged to be married, and have to think of how I can best provide a home for my wife."

"Indeed! Is the engagement of long standing?"

"Not at all. I have been engaged within the last fortnight; but I have known and admired the lady for a long time."

General Harborough looked at him searchingly. Was this a lie – a ready lie invented on the spur of the moment, to dispel suspicion? Bothwell had doubtless perceived the alteration in his old friend's feelings towards him; and he might consider this notion of an engagement the readiest way of throwing dust in a husband's eyes.

"Do I know the young lady?" he asked quietly.

"I think not. She has not been much away from her home, but her brother is a well-known personage in Plymouth. The lady is Hilda Heathcote, sister of Mr. Heathcote, the coroner for Cornwall."

"Indeed! I have heard of Mr. Heathcote. So you are going to marry Miss Heathcote? Rather a good match, I suppose?"

"I have never considered it from a worldly point of view. Miss Heathcote is a most lovable girl, and has all the charms and accomplishments which the most exacting lover could desire in his betrothed. I am infinitely proud of having won her."

He met the General's eyes, and the steady light in his own was the light of truth. General Harborough doubted him no longer. If he had ever loved Valeria, that passion was extinct, dead as the flames of Dido's funeral pyre. The man who sat face to face with General Harborough to-day was a happy lover, his countenance radiant with the light of a pure and authorised love.

"When are you going to be married?" asked the General, after a longish pause.

"As soon as I can set my house in order and induce Hilda to name the day," answered Bothwell frankly. "My dear girl has to be submissive to her brother's will in this matter, and he is now in Paris. Nothing can be finally settled till he comes back. I am stealing a march upon him to-day in going to see the lady – who has been sent to Dawlish to be out of my way."

"O, she is at Dawlish, is she?"

"Yes; she is staying there with her nieces and their governess. I am going to consult her about our house."

"Our house!" What pride there was in the utterance! The General's doubts were gradually melting away. He could not believe that a man who was so obviously in love with his betrothed could have ever cared much for Valeria. To have loved her, and to have exchanged her love for that of any other woman living, seemed to the General an impossibility. He began to think that his wife had exaggerated the situation the other night, in the overwrought state of her nerves, stung to madness by Varney's insolent speech, excited by her husband's retaliation. He began to think that there had been only the mildest flirtation between Bothwell and his wife – the ordinary up-country sentimentality, meaningless, puerile.

He tried to comfort himself with this view of the case. His natural kindness of heart prompted him to help Bothwell if he could. He wanted to respect the wife he loved, to think well of the man who had saved his life.

"My dear Bothwell," he said, "you have come to a crisis in life which most men find as costly as it is delightful. If by any chance you happen to be what our young people call 'short,' I hope you will allow me to be your banker."

"You are too good," faltered Bothwell, strongly moved. "You have always been too good to me – ever so much better than I deserved. No, I am wonderfully well off. My cousin has advanced me a sum of money which she wishes me to take as a gift, but which I intend to treat as a loan."

"That is generally a distinction without a difference – when the transaction is between relations," said the General, smiling.

"O, but in this case I hope the loan will be repaid, for the repayment will hinge upon my prosperity. I have opened a banking-account at Bodmin, and feel myself a moneyed man."

General Harborough encouraged Bothwell to talk of his sweetheart and his prospects all the way to Dawlish; and then, when the train stopped at the little station beside the sea, Bothwell and his old friend shook hands cordially; and Bothwell felt that he could clasp that honest hand without a pang of conscience. Little did he think that it was the last time that hand would rest in his.

"Let me know the date of your wedding," cried the General, as the train moved off; and Bothwell went in high spirits to look for the temple, in the shape of a pretty little house in a garden by the sea, which enshrined his goddess.

Fortune seemed to be showering her gifts upon him with a bounteous hand. Nothing could have been more propitious than this meeting with General Harborough, who had promised all the help his influence could afford to the army coach.

The General went on to his destination. The gay white city of Bath had no attraction for him upon this particular afternoon. He called on the widow of his old friend, and comforted her as much as it was possible for any one to comfort her in her great sorrow. He dined alone and sadly at his hotel; and as he sat and pondered on the events of the last week, he began to speculate how much or how little grief his widow would feel when her day of mourning came. Would her eyelids be puffy and red as poor Mrs. Thornton's had been this afternoon, when he was talking to her? Would her swollen lips quiver, and her distorted features twitch convulsively? Would her whole frame be shaken with sobs when she talked of the departed? He could not imagine Lady Valeria with puffy eyelids or swollen lips. He pictured her mourning gracefully, clad in softest white draperies, reclining in a darkened room, in an atmosphere perfumed with tuberose and stephanotis. He pictured her with a sphinx-like countenance, calm, beautiful, an expression which might mean deepest grief or stoniest indifference, as the world chose to construe it.

No, honestly, after considering the question from every possible point of view, General Harborough did not believe that his wife would grieve for him.

"It will be a relief to her when I am gone," he said to himself. "How could I expect her to grieve as Thornton's wife grieves? Those two were boy and girl together, had been husband and wife for thirty years."

His dinner had been only a pretence of dining, a mockery which had made the head-waiter quite unhappy. Nothing so distresses a good waiter as a guest who won't eat. The waiter would have been still more troubled in mind had he known that this fine-looking old man, with the erect figure and broad shoulders, had eaten hardly anything for the last three days. The General had been suffering all that time from a fever of the brain which had brought about a feverish condition of the body. He could neither eat nor sleep. He lay broad awake in the unfamiliar room at the hotel, staring at the blank white blinds, faintly illuminated by the lamps in the street below – he lay and thought over his wedded life, which unrolled itself before him in a series of pictures, and he saw the bitter truth underlying his marriage with Lord Carlavarock's daughter.

He had been nothing but a convenience to Valeria, the provider of fine houses and fine gowns, horses and carriages. She had not even cared for him as friend and protector. She had lived her own life; paying him for all benefits with sweet false words, and sweeter falser kisses.

And now the spell was broken; the dream had come to an end all at once. He could never believe in sweet words or kisses again. He had looked into the heart of this woman he had loved so well, and he knew that it was false to the core.

The next day was wild and stormy – rain and wind, wind and rain – a gray sky, a heavy pall of cloud, through which the sun pierced not once in the long bleak day; one of those days which Nature keeps in stock for the funerals of our friends.

General Harborough stood in the dreary cemetery, and let the wind and rain beat upon him unflinchingly for about forty minutes. He paid every tribute of respect that could be paid to his old comrade and then he went off to the railway-station, to go back to Plymouth by the train which left Bath at five o'clock, and would arrive in Plymouth a little before eleven. He had given up the idea of going on to London to execute the codicil. That could be done at Fox Hill, if need were. He felt tired and ill and shivery. He thought he had taken a chill in the cemetery, and that the best thing he could do was to go home.

He had a bad night, disturbed by a short, hard cough, which was worse next morning. Lady Valeria sent for the doctor, who pronounced the indisposition an acute attack of bronchitis. The patient was very feverish, and the utmost care was needed. Happily, the valet was a good nurse, and Lady Valeria seemed devoted. She sat by her husband's bedside; she read to him, and ministered to him with the tenderest care.

"You could not be better off," said the medical man, who was of the cheery old school. "We shall make you all right in a day or two," knowing perfectly well that the patient was in for a fortnight's close confinement and severe regimen.

The General endured his poultices and blisters meekly, but chafed at the hot room and the hissing steam-kettle.

"It is worse than being wounded on the field of battle," he said.

And then, half asleep and half delirious, he began to talk about Sir George Varney's summons.

"The scoundrel wants to make a public scandal," he muttered; "he will bring my wife's name before the public. 'I thought by this time you must have been tired of Bothwell Grahame,'" he said, repeating the words which had stung him almost to madness.

Valeria knelt by her husband's pillow and laid her head against it, listening intently to those muttered speeches. She found out that Sir George Varney had sent the General a summons to a police-court; that the story of the blow in the verandah would be sifted in a public inquiry; that the insult offered to the wife, the prompt retaliation of the husband, would be reported in the newspapers, written about, commented upon everywhere. It was just the kind of thing to get into the society papers: and although Lady Valeria's relations had not unfrequently figured in those very papers, with various degrees of discredit to themselves and amusement to the general public, she shrank with an abhorrent feeling from the idea of seeing her own name there.

The day named in the summons was a week off; and, judging from General Harborough's condition, it did not seem likely that he would be in a fit state to answer to the summons in person. The idea of it evidently preyed upon his mind, and added fuel to the fire of the fever.

The day came, and General Harborough had obeyed a mightier summons, and had gone to appear before the bar of a greater court. Lady Valeria was a widow.

The codicil had not been executed: so Lady Valeria was a very rich widow.

CHAPTER VIII.

WIDOWED AND FREE

Mr. and Mrs. Wyllard made their way slowly back to Penmorval. It was a melancholy journey for those two who had travelled so gaily in days gone by – the young wife so full of hope, so proud of her husband, who was her senior and superior, versed in the knowledge of that wide outer world of which the Cornish heiress knew so little. She had loved him with a reverent, admiring love, looking up to him, honouring him and deferring to him in all things, pleased to be dependent upon him: and now he was the dependent, looking to her for help and comfort.

He bore his calamity with an almost awful calmness, which at times was more painful to the tender, sympathetic wife than fretfulness and complaining would have been. The dull agony of neuralgic pain wrung no groan from him; he endured the anguish of racked nerves and aching limbs with stoical composure.

"It is not a surprise to me, Dora," he said quietly, when his wife praised his patience; "I have expected some such attack. There have been sensations – strange feelings at odd times – which, although slight enough, have not been without their meaning. Life was very smooth for me here at Penmorval. Very different from my life in the past; the struggles of my boyhood; the hard work and hard thinking of my manhood. Your love made existence full of sweetness. I had the world's esteem too, which must always count for something, let a man pretend to despise the world as he may. Yes; it was a full and perfect life, and I told myself that I had come off a winner in the lottery of Fate. And now all things are changed. There was this last lot waiting for me at the bottom of the urn."

"My dearest," murmured his wife, nestling closer to him among the heaped-up pillows of his sofa, "it would be too hard, too cruel that you should be thus smitten, if this life were all. But, praised be God, it is not all! There is a bright eternity waiting for us – a long day of rest in the land where there is neither sorrow nor pain."

Her husband answered with an impatient sigh.

"My dear Dora, I have neither your sweet simplicity nor your pious faith in the letter of an old book," he answered. "This life is so palpable and so painful just now, that I cannot comfort myself by looking beyond it towards a life of which I know nothing."

They were at Penmorval. Mrs. Wyllard had established her husband in her own particular sanctum, which was the prettiest room in the house – a spacious airy room on the first floor, with a large Tudor window facing southward, and an oriel in the south-western angle. Julian Wyllard had decorated and furnished this room for his young wife; and all things it contained had been chosen with reference to her tastes and pursuits. It opened into her dressing-room, and beyond the dressing-room there was the chief bedchamber of Penmorval, the chamber of the lord of the manor from time immemorial, the birth-chamber and the death-chamber. Its very spaciousness and grandeur gave to this state apartment an air of gloom, a gloom intensified by the prevailing tints of the tapestry, a series of hunting scenes, executed in a sombre gradation of bluish greens and grayish browns. The elaborately carved oak wardrobes were like monuments in a Gothic cathedral. The bed, with its embroidered velvet hangings, fluted columns, and plumed ornaments, suggested a royal catafalque: while the fireplace, with its sculptured pillars and heavy decoration in black and white marble, recalled the entrance to the Capulets' tomb. Not a room assuredly for the occupation of an invalid – not a room in which to suffer sleepless nights and long hours of dull, wearing pain.