Then another thought struck him. If the more horrible side of Fordham’s scheme, as set forth in his revelation, were true, Mrs Daventer – so-called – could not be in ignorance of it. Could she, as a mother, – under no matter what pressure of circumstances – consent to become a party to so monstrous a crime? It did not seem possible. Yet, to poor Phil, now beginning to realise the sublimity of iniquity to which some will soar, it occurred that the woman acting under baser, stronger motives, might even have been brought to sacrifice her own daughter. Well, she would know, at any rate, and – she should tell.
Chance favoured him. It was late when he reached the house. Laura, having given him up for that night, had gone upstairs; but her mother was still sitting in the drawing-room reading. The French window, neither curtained nor shuttered, stood ajar, for the night was hot and stuffy. Standing there for a moment in the starlight, the fresh salt air fanning his brow, the murmur of the waves on the beach hard by, humming confusedly in his ears, Philip felt quite sick and faint. He had been continuously on the move since this horror had burst upon him – had eaten next to nothing, and had not slept a wink – and now it was all beginning to tell. Recovering himself, he pushed open the window and stepped into the room.
“Why, Philip! What a way to come back!” cried Mrs Daventer, recovering from the momentary start this unexpected invasion had thrown her into. “Laura will be delighted! Why – what is the matter? Has anything gone wrong?” she broke off, noting his haggard face and the miserable expression of his eyes; and her own cheeks grew livid with a horrible boding fear.
His first answer was to step to the door and turn the key.
“We had better not be interrupted for a few minutes,” he said shortly. “Now I want you to tell me. What is Cecil Garcia to you?”
She started, swayed, as if to fall, then recovered herself, as if by an effort of will.
“You know, then?” she gasped. “He has told you?”
“Everything?”
“Everything! Oh, the infamous fiend! He was always that way.”
“Maybe. Now I must have an answer to this! Who is Laura’s father? Cecil Garcia or – Sir Francis Orlebar?”
She started from her chair, and stood gazing at him, unutterable horror in her eyes, her lips livid and shaking. Her next words were gulped out, as though between the gasps of strangulation.
“He – told you – ?”
“That your daughter’s father is my father. That I had married my half-sister. Is it true?”
She tried to speak – the words would not come. The full horror – the diabolical ingenuity – of Fordham’s plan, burst upon her now – for the first time, and burst upon her with crushing force. This was the blow then. While the barest taint of such suspicion lurked in Philip’s mind, Laura might go through life alone. This was how Fordham had chosen to strike her. And she had half credited him with benevolent motives! Him, a devil in human shape!
“Is it true?” repeated Philip.
But his voice hummed in her ears with a far-away sound. She made a convulsive clutch at her throat, gasping as if to speak. No words would come. Then swaying heavily, with a low cry that was half a groan, she tottered and fell.
“She has answered the question,” said Philip to himself, as he caught her just in time and placed her on the sofa. “She has answered the question, and now I know the worst.”
Stepping to the door he unlocked it, just as Laura was turning the handle. She had heard her mother’s cry and the sound of voices. Among the latter she recognised that of Philip, and had flown down, grievously dreading that something had happened.
And at sight of him all her fears were realised. That pale, stern man with the haggard eyes, and the hand stretched forth as though to bar her approach, was that her bright-hearted Philip, who had left her so gaily, yet so lovingly, but the morning before? Heavens, what did it all mean?
“No; it is all over,” he said, putting forth his hand again, as she was about to fling herself upon his neck. “I know all now. Heavens – it is too horrible!” he added with a shudder. “But I suppose you are in the secret too. To think of it!”
“I think you have gone mad,” she answered, a defiant fierceness taking the place of the soft love tones wherein she had at first addressed him. “But – what have you been doing to my mother?” she added in half a scream, as she caught sight of the latter lying there white and still, and rushed over to her side.
“She has fainted. You had better see after her while I go for a doctor. The knowledge that I had been made aware of the infamous plot to which I have fallen a victim has been too much for her.”
Even in the midst of her attentions to her fainting mother the girl turned upon him with flashing eyes and a livid countenance.
“Infamous plot!” she cried. “You dare? Mark this, then. Never come near me again – never again until you have apologised most humbly to her and to me. I mean it! Do you hear?”
“That makes it easier,” he replied, with a faint sneer. “Now I am going for the doctor.” And he went out. “She is in it too,” he soliloquised as he sped along through the cool night. “It is a horrible business – horrible – horrible! But the mother? Well, she answered the question. Still, when she comes round, I shall insist upon her answering it again in words, or in writing.”
But his question was destined to remain unanswered, for Mrs Daventer never did come round. A couple of hours after Philip’s return with the medical man she died. But she never spoke again.
The doctors pronounced it a plain case of heart disease, though they wrapped their definition up in a layer of technical jargon that was anything but plain. So the only person who could have cleared up the doubt was silent for ever, and the true secret of Laura’s paternity lay buried in her mother’s grave.
Chapter Thirty Three
“For a Brother’s Blood.”
The wind soughed mournfully through the great beech-forests which cover the slopes leading up to the Roncevallés plateau.
It was early morning – gloomy and lowering. The two occupants of the open carriage wending its way at a footpace up the steep mountain road were well wrapped up, for at that elevation, late summer as it was, the air was biting and chill.
“And so you are determined to go through with this, Orlebar?” one of them was saying. “Can it not be arranged even now?”
“Certainly not,” was the brief, determined answer. “I am going to do my level best to rid the world of the most inhuman, damnable monster that ever disgraced it.”
“You will have to be as cool as – as this air, then, Orlebar. Your friend – your enemy I should say rather – is something like a dead shot. By the way, your story is one of the strangest I ever heard in my life; and not the oddest part of it to me is that you should still persist in choosing this place.”
“Because it is this place. You were here at the time of – of that other affair, Major. You will be able to place us upon the exact spot. I have a presentiment. On the very spot where that villain wounded my father I shall kill him. That is why I have chosen it.”
The other shook his head gravely. He was an older man than he looked – and he looked past middle age. Major Fox’s own career had been an eventful one. He had seen active service under the flag of two foreign powers severally, and, moreover, was reckoned an authority on hostile meetings of a private nature, at many of which he had assisted, not always in the character of second. That the object of this early drive was a hostile meeting the above fragment of conversation will clearly show.
Where is the sunny-tempered, light-hearted Philip Orlebar of old? Dead – dead and buried. He who now sits here, pale, stern, gloomy, with the aspect of a man upon whose life a great blow has fallen – whom that blow has aged a dozen years at least – surely these two personalities can have nothing in common?
Onward and upward, higher and higher wends the carriage. Then the acclivity ends, and surmounting the roll of its brow a great flat wooded space, with here and there the distant hump of a mountain jutting against the sky, lies spread out in front. It is the Roncevallés plateau.
A bell clangs forth, slow and sepulchral upon the raw morning air. Its measured, intermittent toll, heard beneath the gloomy lour of the overcast heavens, would be depressing enough under ordinary circumstances. But now it strikes the hearers as immeasurably ominous, for it is the death-toll.
Standing up, the Major, speaking in fluent French, impresses a few directions upon the Basque driver. The latter nods and whips up his horses. As they trot past the quaint, old-world monastery, with its red roofs lying against an appropriate background of foliage, dark hooded figures could be seen gliding about.
“That changes the scene again, Orlebar,” remarked Major Fox. “A few minutes ago one might almost have expected to meet Caesar and his legions emerging from the great beech-forests. Now this brings us to more mediaeval times again. Hallo! What is it?”
For the horses had been suddenly reined in. Then the driver drew them up to the side of the road.
A mournful, wailing, dirgelike sound was heard in front. Standing up in the vehicle, its occupants made out a number of white-clad figures advancing round a bend in the road. The dark-covered horizontal burden borne in the midst; the glitter of the crucifix moving slowly in front; the measured and solemn chant; the clang of the bell from the tower – all told the nature of that procession advancing along the desolate and lonely wooded plateau. Its errand was one of death; and they, the unlooked-for spectators, they, too, were bound upon an errand of death.
“Requiem aeternum dona ei Domine: et lux perpetua luceat ei” chanted the singers. The Basque driver doffed his beret and bent his head devoutly as the cortège went by, and the Major and Philip lifted their hats. But the words, the chant, struck upon the tatter’s ear with indescribable import, for they brought back a very different scene. He saw again the arching blue of the cloudless heavens above the Val d’Anniviers, the rugged cliff and the feathery pine forest, the vernal slopes and the flower-strewn graves. Again the dull roar of the mountain torrent rose upon the air, and Alma Wyatt’s voice was in his ears as upon that glowing morning in the churchyard at Vissoye. And now he heard it again, that chant for the dead, here in the wild solitudes of this Pyrenean forest country, swelling through the murk of the lowering heavens. And he himself was going forth to death – to meet death or to deal it out to another.
“Si iniquitates observaveris Domine: Domine quis sustinebit!” The chant rolled on, now sinking fainter as the funeral procession receded. Heavens! here was a comment on the errand of hate and vengeance – the errand of blood which had brought these two abroad that morning.
“If I were inclined to be superstitious, I should take that incident to be unlucky,” said the Major, with a jerk of his thumb in the direction followed by the receding cortège, “but I’m not, so it doesn’t matter. En avant, Michel.”
But the driver as he obeyed turned half round on his box to ask for directions, with the result that the carriage turned abruptly off into a bypath which penetrated deeper into the forest. A few hundred yards along this and the Major called a halt.
“We will leave the trap here, Orlebar. The place is close at hand, and the other party is sure to be on the spot.”
“You seem to know it well, Major,” said Philip. “Why, I couldn’t have ferretted it out to save my life.”
“My dear fellow, I have been here before – in times past,” was the answer, given with a touch of dryness.
Voices were now heard just ahead of them, and as they emerged into a sequestered open glade three figures were standing in a group chatting. They belonged to Fordham and two strangers – one mustachioed and grizzled, the other mustachioed and dark.
“Good morning – good morning,” said the Major, briskly, raising his hat as he stepped forward.
“M. le docteur Etchegaray – M. le Major Fox,” introduced Fordham.
The dark stranger bowed, and the Major bowed, and there was elaborate hat-lifting on both sides. Then the Major passed on the introduction to his principal, to whom he further effected that of the other stranger, who was Fordham’s second, and whom he named as “M. de Verrieux.”
Beyond a slight raising of the hat such as etiquette demanded, no recognition passed between the two principals. The seconds and the medical man drew apart for a few moments’ conference.
“Is it settled that the matter is to proceed, then?” said M. de Verrieux when this was ended. Both principals nodded. “Enfin – à l’affaire,” he went on.
On one side of the glade was a great dead tree trunk blazed by lightning. The seconds had decided to place their men twenty-five paces apart in such wise that the white trunk should be equidistant from either. The weapons were Colt’s revolvers, but each shot was to be fired by word of command.
The gloom of the morning deepened. A spot or two of rain fell upon the weapons as they were handed to the principals, and the wind moaned dismally among the tree-tops. They stood up, facing each other, those two who had been friends. They stood up, silent, motionless as that death which they were about to deal to each other. Again through the murky stillness there tolled forth from the monastery tower that distant dirge-bell.
“Attention, messieurs!” cried M. de Verrieux. “Un – deux – Trois!”
Both pistols cracked simultaneously. The hum of Philip’s ball passed just over his adversary’s head. Fordham, however, without moving his elbow from his side, had pointed his weapon almost vertically in the air, and had pressed the trigger. He stood cool, impassive, and motionless.
“The affair has proceeded with the greatest honour to both sides,” declared M. de Verrieux. “We may now, I presume, consider it closed?”
“I trust so,” said the Major, looking at Philip, whom he was heartily glad to get so well out of it. But the latter, to his dismay, replied shortly —
“By no means. I don’t consider it has begun.”
The seconds looked at each other, then at their principals. M. de Verrieux shrugged his shoulders.
“Enfin! Puisque Monsieur le désire,” he said.
“Take care he isn’t committing suicide,” said Fordham, with a queer flash in his eyes, and his brows met in that extraordinarily forbidding frown of his. But the remark was met by a somewhat sharp protest on the part of Major Fox, who declared that it was contrary to all precedent for one principal even to address the other under the circumstances, let alone utter what sounded uncommonly like a taunt. Fordham recognised frankly this infringement of etiquette, and apologised elaborately.
Again the two stood facing each other.
Never to his dying day would Philip forget that moment, and the still, sepulchral silence of the great forest, the faint earthy smell of moist vegetation, the sighing of the wind in the tree-tops, the mournful toll of the far-away dirge-bell. All the events of his later life swept through his mind in a flash – Alma Wyatt – the sweet, sunlit mountain slopes – the blue lake, and the shining glacier – then that other in her dark beauty – the dance and sparkle of the sea, and the expanse of yellow sand on the low-lying Welsh coast – then the frightful disclosure – his own horror – his father’s agony – the parting – Mrs Daventer’s death. All passed before him in vivid retrospect, as he stood there to receive the fire of the man whom up to a week ago he had reckoned his dearest friend.
The word was given. Again both pistols cracked together. Fordham only moving half his arm, had exactly repeated his former manoeuvre. He had fired straight up at the sky. At the same time he was seen ever so slightly to wince.
“Are you touched?” said the Frenchman, eagerly. “No? Ha – I thought – ”
“It doesn’t seem much like it,” answered Fordham, slowly.
Then the seconds had their innings. On one point they were thoroughly agreed. The affair could be allowed to go no further. It had been conducted in a manner which was to the last degree creditable to both gentlemen concerned, pronounced M. de Verrieux animatedly, and he trusted they would both do each other the honour of shaking hands with each other. After which pleasing ceremony he, the speaker, would be delighted if they and the whole party would do him the honour of breakfasting with him, and doing justice to the best wines the cellar of the country inn could supply. This the Major emphatically seconded, though he knew too well there would be no handshaking or any such friendly parting between his two fellow-countrymen.
Philip, for his part, said nothing. The decision of the seconds was final. Nor could he, whatever his wrongs, bring himself to go on firing at a man who was determined not to return his fire. Even then – so desperately contradictory is human nature – even then, without in anywise detracting from his own wretchedness and desperation, he was conscious of a weakness towards his old friend, a strange sense of relenting. At that moment he rejoiced that he had not the other’s death upon his hands.
“Well, since there is to be no more shooting,” said Fordham, at length, speaking in an easy, careless tone, “I may as well convince you that I was not bragging just now. Look at that knot in the blazed tree – there about four feet from the ground.”
He raised his pistol, and with scarcely a moment’s aim fired. The knot, a flat one, and about the size of a crown piece, was seen to splinter. The ball had made a plumb centre.
“Look again,” he went on, and again his pistol cracked. The knot split into a gaping gash and the splinters flew from it. He had planted his second bullet right upon the first one. Ejaculations broke from the spectators in their respective tongues.
“Well, Mr Fordham,” said the Major, “I think I may say, on behalf of my principal and myself, that we appreciate your courtesy to the full. M. de Verrieux, if you will do me the pleasure of meeting me this evening or to-morrow morning at St. Jean-Pied-de-Port as arranged, we will draw up the usual procés-verbal. Gentlemen, I have the honour to salute you, and to wish you good morning.”
Then, amid much elaborate hat-lifting, Major Fox and his principal walked away, while M. de Verrieux and the doctor lit their cigars and proceeded to put away the pistols. Suddenly a cry escaped the medico. It was echoed by the other. For Fordham was lying on the ground as pale as death. He was in a dead faint.
“And he said he wasn’t hit?” ejaculated the doctor. “I could have sworn I saw him wince. Yes! look there,” pointing to a hole in the fallen man’s trousers just above the left knee. “There it is. He held his hand over it all the time, do you see, very cleverly too. Too proud to give way before the young one. Well, well; he is a man. But it is wonderful – wonderful.”
All this while the speaker had been ripping up the leg of the prostrate man’s trousers.
“Here it is,” he went on triumphantly. “Ah, ça! But there will be no probing required. The ball has gone clean through.”
“Is the wound a dangerous one?” said the other. “It doesn’t seem to bleed much.”
“C’est selon!” replied the doctor, with a shrug of the shoulders. “The haemorrhage is, as you say, slight; but the tendon is badly torn – and —he will carry the mark of this day with him to his grave. He will walk with a limp for the remainder of his life.”
And Fordham waking up just then to consciousness under the influence of the cordial which his second was administering, heard the words, and smiled grimly to himself.
“Poetic justice, with a vengeance!” he thought.
Chapter Thirty Four
At the End of his Life
Midway between Nyon and Rolle, the steamer Mont Blanc was shearing her arrowy course through the blue waters of Lake Léman, heading for the latter place.
Her decks were covered with passengers, mostly of French nationality – light-hearted, chattering, cheerful souls, talking volubly and all at once – talking the harder apparently in inverse ratio to the interest of the topic under consideration.
Right in the stern of the boat, beneath the upper deck, his back against the end of the saloon, sat a solitary Englishman. He was smoking a cigar and pretending to read, but it was patent to the most casual observer that the book before him occupied very little of his attention indeed, for he was gazing out upon the sapphire surface of the lake and its green and gold setting of engirdling mountains, with an expression of settled sadness upon his extremely attractive countenance, which had no business to be seen upon the face of one so young.
Suddenly there was a rush of feet, and a hat came skimming along the lower deck, a broad-brimmed straw hat – a feminine hat. Springing from his seat he caught it, just in time to save it from going overboard, and turned to hand it to its pursuer and owner.
“Thanks so much,” said a sweet voice. Then the speaker stopped short in amazement and changed colour. “Why, it’s Mr Orlebar – pardon me – Sir Philip, I should have said.”
“It used to be ‘Philip’ at one time, Alma,” was the reply, with the ghost of a sad smile. And then these two stood looking into each other’s eyes in silence. Neither seemed able to say a word.
It was as she had implied. Sir Francis Orlebar was no more. Never recovering from the prostration into which he had been thrown by Fordham’s revelation, he had sunk into a decline and had succumbed three months later, tended by his son devotedly to the last. Then Philip, reserving enough for his modest wants, had apportioned the remainder between his stepmother and that other who had a legal claim upon him. This done, he had left Claxby Court and had started upon his travels again.
She who was his wife, in the eye of the law, he had never set eyes on since that fateful night. He had tried by every means in his power to find some channel through which the mystery might be cleared up, but in vain. The only person who could have done so was dead, and her last words, her last look, her last behaviour, conclusively confirmed him in his very darkest conjectures. The bare recollection of the subject was unutterably nauseous and repulsive to him now.
Old Glover had in due course served him with a writ in the threatened breach of promise action. Nothing could be more repellent than to be dragged forth into notoriety thus, yet what could he do? He was too poor to offer any compromise, even if it were not the persistently rancorous intention of that estimable British merchant to exact his pound of flesh in spite of everything, and that pound of flesh the dragging of him – Philip – into notoriety and a court of law. But at the last moment chance had befriended him. For the beauteous Edith had succumbed to the prismatic attractions of a ritualistic parson of fine presence and ample means, and this cleric had, under pain of cancelling his own engagement, laid a stern embargo on his future bride making an exhibition of herself in a public court. So, whereas it is manifestly impossible to bring an action for breach of promise failing the consent of the interesting plaintiff, old Glover was obliged to deny himself the gratification of his rancour, and to console himself characteristically with the sound commercial reflection that, after all, they had got much the better bargain of the two. For the parson was well off, and would very likely be a bishop one day, or, at any rate an archdeacon, whereas Philip Orlebar, though now a baronet, would always have been as poor as Job, and would never have done any good for himself or anybody else. In which conjecture he was probably right.
“It’s an odd thing I should not have seen you all this time,” said Philip at last, realising that it was necessary to say something. “Yet you must have come on board at Geneva.”
“No – at Nyon.”
“At Nyon! That would account for it. I have been sitting here almost ever since we left Geneva, and, of course, I can’t see the gangway from here, or who lands, or who embarks. Have you been staying there?”
“Only a few days. The people I am with were there to see some friends of theirs. But – between ourselves – it was rather slow.”
“You are not with the General then?”
“Oh no! Don’t I wish I was!” she added, with an eager lowering of her voice. “But there, I ought not to say that. These are a very kind sort of people, but a trifle ‘heavy.’ I am only travelling with them, not their guest.”
Now what the deuce did Philip care about the estimability or other idiosyncrasies of the people she was travelling with? He saw only her – her as he remembered her in times past – her as he had seen her many a time since, waking and in his dreams – her as he had seen her the first time of all, here on the deck of this very ship. He detected the sympathetic softening of the great grey eyes, the saddened inflection of that voice, the first note of which had thrilled his whole being, and his heart tightened. For, after all, he was young, and, in spite of the blow which had fallen upon his life, all possibilities for him were not dead.
And she? Knowing something of his history since they parted – though not the exact nature of the grim skeleton so carefully kept locked up – knowing something of his history, we say, for the world is small and tongues are long, she felt her heart go out to him as it had never done before, as she never thought possible that it could have done. The sunny laugh had gone out of his face for ever; leaving an expression, a stamp of hopelessness, which to her was infinitely pathetic. It was all that she could do to keep down the rush of tears which welled to her eyes as they looked up into his sad ones. What, we say, did he, did either of them, care about the heaviness or otherwise of the people she was travelling with? Yet of such trivialities will the lips force themselves to chatter while the heart is bursting.
“Where and how is the dear old General now?” he went on. “And your aunt?”
“They have gone to live at a place in the country – a few miles from Rushtonborough. That is near your home, is it not?”
“Yes,” he said eagerly, and the possibilities began to stir around and quicken into life. Then his tone relapsed again. “Do you ever go down there yourself?”
“I haven’t yet. They have only just gone there. And now” – hesitatingly, “I think I must go back to my people. They will be wondering what has become of me.”
“Not yet – Alma.”
The pleading tone melted her not very strongly formed resolution. She paused. The end of the saloon hid them effectually, though, of course, they only held this snug corner to themselves on the precarious tenure of chance.
“Tell me a little more about yourself,” he went on. “Are you still living at that place you hated so – Surbiton?”
“N-no,” as if the topic was distasteful. “By the way, I saw you there once.”
“But – I have never been there in my life,” he answered, very mystified.
“Not on land, perhaps – but by water. You were in a boat – and the one I was in as nearly as possible ran you down. I was steering – or rather, ought to have been,” she added with a little smile. “You didn’t see me, but I recognised you.”
“I remember now,” he said. “And was that you? Yes, I remember perfectly. Oh, Alma – if only I had seen you!”
It seemed to escape him in spite of himself, and it conveyed volumes. There had been just a spice of bitterness in the motive that had urged her to let him know she had seen him and with whom, but now she would have given worlds to withdraw the remark – such a turning of the knife in the wound did it seem. And now she realised plainer than words could tell, that if he had seen her on the occasion in question, it would have made all the difference in the world to her life and his.
“What is this place we are coming to?” he said, as the steamer’s bell begun to ring to the accompaniment of a sensible slackening of the paddles.
“Rolle. The next is Morges, and then Ouchy, where we land. We are going to stay a few days in Lausanne.”
“What, at this time of year? Why you will be roasted?”
“So we shall. But the Sitgreaves want to get some things there before going on to the mountains.”
“Are you going on to the mountains? Where? Perhaps we may meet again?” And once more the possibilities were all astir.
“Philip, I think we had better not,” she answered, with her eyes full upon his. “It would not be fair to – you.”
“Oh, I can keep myself in hand all right,” he replied, with a hard laugh from which he could not altogether eliminate the suspicion of a tremor. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve learnt a thing or two since we last had the pleasure of meeting.”
The steamer was under way again, skimming merrily over the sapphire surface. The chit-chat and laughter of the other passengers rose gleefully upon the air, and in the saloon the pop of corks, the clink of knives and forks. There is solitude in a crowd – stillness in noise.
“Where are you going to now, Philip?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t quite know! I’ve booked to Territet. Perhaps I’ll walk up and put in a few days at the old shop – perhaps I’ll go on to Saas or the Bel Alp and do some climbing. Can’t tell till I get there.”
She made no answer. This was not the easy, light-hearted talk of the old times. There was a bitter, reckless ring about it that was unmistakable. The speaker literally did not care where he went or what he did. Still she did not leave him.
“I wonder if it has ever occurred to you all this time Alma,” he went on in a softer tone, “that it was here – on board this very ship – we first met? Not exactly that perhaps, but first saw each other, which amounts to the same thing.”
“Yes, it has.”
“It has? Well, it seems a strange chance, a strange stroke of Fate, that we should meet here again – here of all places. How long ago was it? Ten years – twenty?”
“No; only three.”
“Well, it is like twenty to me. I tell you I feel as if I had come to the end of my life.”
“You must not say that – believe me you must not. Time will do wonders for you. You have a long life before you yet, and great opportunities.”