Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/196

186 the angle of the house on their way to the front entrance, whence Mr. Monckton and Miss de Crespigny had come into the garden, a dark figure shrouded in a loose cloak emerged from amidst the shrubs by the windows of the dead man’s apartments, and approached them.

“Who is that?” cried the lawyer suddenly. His heart began to beat violently as he asked the question. It was quite a supererogatory question; for he knew well enough that it was his wife who stood before him.

“It is I, Gilbert,” Eleanor said quietly.

“You here, Mrs. Monckton!” exclaimed her husband, in a harsh voice, that seemed to ring through the air like the vibration of metal that has been struck,—“you here, hiding in this shrubbery.”

“Yes, I came here—how long ago, Miss Sarah? It seems half a century to me.”

“You came here exactly twenty minutes ago, Mrs. Monckton,” Miss de Crespigny answered icily.

“And by a really remarkable coincidence,” cried Gilbert Monckton, in the same unnatural voice in which he had spoken before, “Mr. Darrell happens to be here too: only I must do you the justice to say, Mrs. Monckton, that you appear less discomposed than the gentleman. Ladies always have the advantage of us; they can carry off these things so easily; deception seems to come natural to them.”

“Deception!” repeated Eleanor.

What did he mean? Why was he angry with her? She wondered at his manner as she walked with him to the house. No suspicion of the real nature of her husband’s feelings entered her mind. The absorbing idea of her life was the desire to punish her father’s destroyer; and how could she imagine that her husband was tortured by jealous suspicions of this man: of this man, who of all the living creatures upon the earth was most hateful to her? How could she,—knowing her own feelings, and taking it for granted that these feelings were more or less obvious to other people,—how could she imagine the state of Gilbert Monckton’s mind.

She went into the hall with her husband, followed by Miss Sarah de Crespigny and Launcelot Darrell, and from the hall into the sitting-room usually occupied by the two ladies. A lamp burned brightly upon the centre table, and Miss Lavinia de Crespigny sat near it; with some devotional book in her hand. I think she tried her best to be devout, and to employ herself with serious reflections upon the dread event that had so lately happened; but the fatal power of the old man’s wealth was stronger than any holier influence, and I fear that Miss Lavinia’s thoughts very often wandered away from the page on which her eyes were fixed, into sundry intricate calculations of the cumulative interest upon Exchequer bills, India five per cents., and Great Western Railway shares.

“I must have an explanation of this business,” Mr. Monckton said: “it is time that we should all understand each other. There has been too much mystification, and I am most heartily tired of it.”

He walked to the fire-place and leaned his elbow upon the marble chimney-piece. From this position he commanded a view of every one in the room. Launcelot Darrell flung himself into a chair by the table, nearly opposite his aunt Lavinia. He did not trouble himself to notice this lady, nor did he bow to Eleanor; he sat with his elbow resting upon the arm of his chair, his chin in the palm of his hand, and he employed himself by biting his nails and beating his heel upon the carpet. He was still thinking as he had thought in the garden, “If I could only undo what I have done. If I could only undo the work of the last quarter of an hour, and stand right with the world again.”

But in this intense desire that had taken possession of Launcelot Darrell’s mind there was mingled no regretful horror of the wickedness of what he had done; no remorseful sense of the great injustice which he had plotted; no wish to atone or to restore. It was selfishness alone that influenced his every thought. He wanted to put himself right. He hated this new position, which for the last few minutes he had occupied for the first time in his life; the position of a deliberate criminal, amenable to the laws by which the commonest felons are tried, likely to suffer as the commonest felons suffer.

It seemed to him as if his brain had been paralysed until now; it seemed to him as if he had acted in a stupor or a dream; and that he now for the first time comprehended the nature of the deed which he had done, and was able to foresee the possible consequences of his own act.

“I have committed forgery,” he thought. “If my crime is discovered I shall be sent to Bermuda to work amongst gangs of murderous ruffians till I drop down dead. If my crime is discovered! How shall I ever be safe from discovery, when I am at the mercy of the wretches who helped me.”

Eleanor threw off her cloak, but she refused to sit down in the chair which Miss Sarah offered her. She stood divided by the width of half the room from her husband, with her face fronting his, in the full glare of the lamplight. Her large gray eyes were bright with excitement, her cheeks were flushed, her hair fell loosely about her face, and, brown in the shadow, glittered like ruddy gold in the light.

In all the beauty of her girlhood, from the hour in which Gilbert Monckton had first seen her until to-night, she had never looked so beautiful as she looked now. The sense that she had triumphed, the thought that she held the power to avenge her father’s death, lent an unnatural brilliancy to her loveliness. She was no longer an ordinary woman, only gifted with the earthly charms of lovely womanhood: she was a splendid Nemesis, radiant with a supernatural beauty.

“ asked me why I came here to-night,” she said, looking at her husband. “I will tell you, Gilbert: but I must tell you a long story first, almost all the story of my life.”

Her voice, resonant and musical, roused Launcelot Darrell from his gloomy abstraction. He looked up at Eleanor, and for the first time began to