Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/308

300 "Not a lie—it was a joke. James was not such a fool as you, he took it as such. But you—"

Then Stephen Saltren drew his wife to her feet, and strode to the door, dragging her with him. She screamed. She supposed he was about to kill her; but he turned, and said gloomily, "I will not hurt you, I want to show you what you have done—with your joke."

He forced open the door, and drew her through the garden, out at the wicket gate, along the path, up the coombe. There was two ways thence to Orleigh Park, one down the coombe to the main valley and high-road, and round a shoulder of hill; the other way by a steep climb up a zig-zag path in the side of the hill to the top of the crag, thence over a stretch of some thirty acres of furzy down into the plantations and so into the park through them. The tortuous ascent began at the cottage, Chillacot, but Saltren drew his wife past the point whence it rose to where the evening sun cast the black shadow of the crag or "cleave" across the glen, and there—lying on broken, fallen stones, with his hands outstretched, his face to the clear sky, lay Lord Lamerton, dead.

Marianne Saltren cowered back, she was too frightened by what she saw to care to approach; but her husband's vice-like grasp did not relax for all her weeping and entreaties. He compelled her to come close to the fallen man.

His finger ends buried themselves in her wrists, and checked her pulse, that her hands became numb, and tingled.

He remained silent, for long, looking at the dead man, his own face scarcely less white, his muscles hardly less rigid, his features as set, and more drawn. There was no sunlight in the narrow valley where they stood under the great slate cleave, but above at the edge of the opposite hill were gorse bushes so covered with golden bloom that they