Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/577

Rh ed her when Otway, absent in London but for a few days, had his orders for Devonport and his regiment, and went without good-by, save a hurried letter to her. And from that time uncertainty had closed in upon her, distrust of the ever-ready gold, of the Earl's good spirits, of his sudden journeys made at an hour's notice—presumably to London. She remembered once how one day, thinking him far away in the city, she had seen him leaping a fence to meet a man whose face she could not see, but whose figure she knew for that of her brother's friend. She had been too proud to question, awaiting explanation. But the Earl was silent, though the next day he was once more merry and the house full of guests. And then—She had a hundred times forbidden herself any more to recall that last horror of his death and parting in the half-ruined Kentish farmhouse to which she had been summoned in such ghastly haste. Now she controlled herself once more, rose from her seat, and went on her way through the house. She was right. She had no more need for economies; all the money she required was saved: it had been saved coin for coin, paid out slowly for the attainment of her purpose—the arrest of the friend for whom the boy had been sacrificed.

These were her brother's rooms. Hither would my Lady Clemency presently lead her guest; here at last would her promise to the dead find its fulfilment.

The wind whistled; the sleet stung the casements. She looked out into the bitter, darkening afternoon,—to the right, on to deep brown oak woods; to the left, upon hills, through a little depression of which the road glimmered gray-white, two miles off—the road by which Major Romilly must come to Pages at dusk. The northeast wind would be driving direct in his face, she reflected. What if the snow thickened; what if he took the wrong road, were struck down by frost, were to be found dead,—dead before she could greet him as she thirsted to greet?

She passed out on to a wide landing to enter a small cabinet at the end of a curious little passage. It had been a hiding-place in the days when the Earls of Oxney had found such things needful for purposes of political or religious intrigue. A vague smile played about her mouth. Then the color of shame rose to her forehead. Had not intrigue as petty served to screen the one she loved? Base means, perhaps, but to what an end! The political guise thrown over the rumors of the Earl's death—who but herself had fostered this by her silence, her non-denial? Any rumor was preferable to the one which should couple his name with that of the false coiner, the treacherous friend. Not till the guilty man were trapped, not till his own lips had confessed the treachery, would she tell to the world the true story. And then a thousand trumpeters should hardly suffice for the telling—so bravely should the memory of the dead be lauded, so pitilessly blared the guilt of the living!

She locked the door of the closet on entering and stood still with her thoughts. It was her brother who had opened up this little corridor and used the small chamber at the end of it for his muskets and whips and swords and other tools. These, all but the sword he wore on the day of his death, she had moved, making the little place, with its deep projecting window, into a closet for retreat and solitary council. No one entered but herself; no hand but hers touched the few objects in the place. Inquisitive servants declared to the outside world that here hung two pictures, one of the Earl, the other of a lover who had wronged her ladyship. They were but partly right. There hung here only one portrait. It was not that of the Earl.

Lady Clemency drew aside the curtain over the picture. The man in it looked down upon her with grave composure, and she flung back a look, if fiercer, at least as fearless as his. He had been painted by Huysman, not in court dress or hunting costume as a fop would have it, but in his shirt and military breeches after sword exercise, his favorite pastime as an Irish soldier. Behind him was a rough curtain of brown sacking, such as a corner of the tent under which the Earl and he had slept like brothers when William of Orange summoned his militia upon the many alarms of French incursion that checkered the first years of his reign. The face