Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/99

 decide on something! It is twelve o'clock now, and Mr. Hawes comes at one. What will you do, dear? What can we do?"

I ought to have told you that by this time James and I were alone. Ashley had been obliged to leave, and for the first time in our acquaintance I had not been sorry to see him go. He had been very kind to me and very cheery with James, but I shrank from him visibly; though he looked at me as people do look at something seen for the first time, and seemed almost as if he had found me out, after such a long period of overlooking! At any other time I should have been transported with his attention; it would have been my pride, my joy, my heaven, but now—I felt degraded by it, as if he wanted to buy my silence, to make me an accomplice in his crime through my love. Oh, Georgie, what an awful thing it is to feel that the one you love above all else in life is base and false!

Well! when I spoke to James like this I seemed to startle him as if from a dream.

"Yes, Rose, I remember," he said, getting up and pushing his dank fair hair from his white face. "I will go and make it all right with him. My poor little Rose! you have had a nasty fright, dear, and you are quite pale and trembling. Never mind now, it will soon be all right."

He kissed me tenderly, and before I could stop him, or even answer back his loving words, he too had left the house, and left me indeed alone.

I cannot tell you much more of what happened, for I only remember things very confusedly. I remember Mr. Hawes coming to the house, and I remember his loud angry voice and furious face; I remember a swarm of policemen in the room—the place seemed filled with them—and I remember Ashley's grand bearing and noble look in the midst of them. He seemed like a beautiful demon to me—like Lucifer: a god, but a fallen one. And then—oh, Georgie, do not let me think of it!—I remember a noise, as of men's feet, a tumult of voices, and a hustling at the door, and Something was brought in and laid tenderly on the bed. It was my brother—all that was of him now!—found dead in a lonely part of Kensington Gardens, with an empty bottle of poison in his hand. Proud and sensitive as he was, the shock and horror had been too much for him, and he chose to brave the wrath of God rather than undergo the doubt, the accusation of his fellow-men.

After this the newspaper reports can tell you the story better than I. You know that Ashley was arrested on suspicion, tried, and acquitted for want of sufficient evidence; acquitted but not cleared; for all that my dear Jamie's death divided the suspicion. The oddest part of it was that the hanaper could not be traced in the remotest way. It had apparently vanished off the face of the earth, and how it had gone, or what had become of it, was as much a mystery to the police as to us. It looked as if Ashley had taken it—and for my own part I never doubted it; but what had he done with it? who had he sold it to? and how was it that the police could not trace it? And how was it, too, that Ashley was suddenly so flush of money if he had not stolen it? He said an old aunt had died and left him a legacy. God forgive me! I did not believe a word of it!

And yet I loved him, Georgie! Unworthy as I believed him to be, and the cause of that poor boy's death, I loved him with my whole heart. I had grown into womanhood loving him; and, if even I had wished it, I could not have cut him out of my life now. But I would not marry him. He asked me more than once, and he pleaded passionately—for he suddenly quite changed towards me, as I have said, and from utter neglect passed into the most intense love. But I was firm. I could not have married him then! So he went away to America, and I came down here to Ambleside, as governess to the rector's children; and here I have been ever since—two years—two long, painful, weary years! And now I am going to America next week; my passage is taken, and in a fortnight's time I shall be standing on the quay at New York, with Ashley's Graham's hand in mine! If you read this letter you will see what has changed my life, and what has taken me as a penitent to the feet of the man I love, and have always loved.

She gave me an open letter written in a faint and trembling hand, and signed A. Thomson. It said that "he, the writer, being now at the point of death, wished to make confession, and reparation so far as he could, of the evil he had caused. For it was he who had taken the hanaper; and he had it under his large cloak while he stood by the open door of the room, and nodded, and spoke to Rose Mantell of the weather. It was a bold stroke," he said, "and the idea occurred to him only when he heard Ashley go out so early. Knowing the habits of the Mantells, and their hours, he had stolen down-stairs to James's room and found the door ajar. Ashley had