Wyllard's Weird

All this was said hurriedly in English, while Monsieur Tillet discreetly occupied himself putting away his sketch-books. Mathilde had withdrawn, and was telling her mother about the unpleasant surprise that had greeted her return.

"How did you come to know these people?" asked Heathcote.

"Mdlle. Duprez brought me here. She has known the Tillets all her life. She will answer to you for their respectability."

"Well, we will think about it. Let me look at you, Hilda. You are not very blooming, my poor child. It does not seem to me that Paris agrees with you over well."

"Paris agrees with me quite as well as any other place," she answered quietly.

He took her hand and led her to the window, and looked thoughtfully into the sad, pale face, with its expression of settled pain. Yes, he knew what that look meant; he had experienced that dull, slow agony of an aching heart. She had surrendered all that was dearest in life, and she must live through the aching sense of loss, live on to days of dull contentment with a sunless lot. He who himself had never learned the lesson of forgetfulness was not inclined to think lightly of his sister's trouble.

"You look very unhappy, Hilda," he said. "I begin to question the wisdom of your conduct. Do you believe that Bothwell really cared more for this audacious widow than for you?"

"He had been devoted to her for years," answered Hilda. "I saw his letters; I saw the evidence of his love under his own hand. He wrote to her as he never wrote to me."

"He was younger in those days," argued Heathcote. "Youngsters are fond of big words."

"Ah, but that first love must be the truest. I never cared for any one till I saw Bothwell; and I know that my first love will be my last."

"I hope not," said Heathcote. "I hope you have acted wisely in your prompt renunciation. There were reasons why I did not care for the match."

"You surely have left off suspecting him," said Hilda, with an indignant look. "You are not mad enough to think that he was concerned in that girl's death!"

"No, Hilda, that suspicion is a thing of the past. And now let us talk seriously. You have set your heart upon pursuing your studies at the Conservatoire?"

"It is my only object in life."

"And you would like to remain in this family?"

"Very much. They are the cleverest, nicest people I ever knew – with the exception of my nearest and dearest, you and Dora – and Bothwell. They are all as kind to me as if I were a daughter of the house. The life suits me exactly. I should like to stay here for a twelvemonth."

"That is a categorical answer," said Heathcote, "and leaves me no alternative. I will make a few inquiries about Monsieur Tillet and his surroundings, and if the replies are satisfactory you shall stay here. But I shall send Glossop over to look after you and your frocks. It is not right that my sister should be without a personal attendant of some kind."

"I don't want Glossop. If she comes here, she will write to her friends in Cornwall and tell them where I am."

"No, she won't. She will have my instructions before she leaves The Spaniards. She shall send all her Cornish letters through me. And now good-bye. It is just possible that I may not see you again before I leave Paris."

"You are going to leave Paris soon?"

"Very soon."

"Then I suppose you have found out all you want to know about that poor girl who was murdered?"

"Yes, I have found out all I want to know."

"Thank God! It was so terrible to think there were people living who could suspect Bothwell."

"It is horrible to think there was any man base enough to murder that helpless girl – a man so steeped in hypocrisy that he could defy suspicion."

"You know who committed the murder?" inquired Hilda.

"I can answer no more questions. You will learn all in time. The difficulty will be to forget the hideous story when you have once heard it. Good-bye."

They were alone in the Tillet salon, Monsieur Tillet having retired while they were talking. He reappeared on the landing outside to hand Mr. Heathcote the parcel of sketches, and to make his respectful adieux to that discerning amateur.

"Monsieur your brother is the most accomplished Englishman I ever met," said the painter to Hilda, when his visitor had disappeared in the obscurity of the staircase.

He patted his waistcoat-pocket as he spoke. The sensation of having bank-notes there was altogether new. He had been fed upon the fat of the land by his devoted wife; he had been provided with petty cash by his dutiful children; but to touch a lump sum, the price of his own work, seemed the renewal of youth.

"Do you remember the curious name of that picture of Landseer's, ma chatte?" he said, chucking his wife under the chin when she came bustling in from her housewifely errands. "'Zair is lif in ze all dogue yet.' Zair is lif in ze all dogue, que voici. See here, I have been earning money while you have been flânochant."

He showed her the corner of the little sheaf of notes, coquettishly. She held out her hand, expecting to be intrusted with the treasure; but he shook his head gently, smiling a tender smile.

"No, mon enfant, we will not trifle with this windfall," he said. "We will treat it seriously; it shall be the nucleus of our future fortune, j'achèterai des rentes."

The tears welled up to the wife's honest eyes, tears not of gratitude, but of mortification. She knew this husband of hers well enough to be very sure that every sous in those bank-notes would have dribbled out of the painter's pockets in a few weeks; and that no one, least of all the squanderer himself, would know how it had been spent, or in what respect he was the better for its expenditure.

CHAPTER IX.

WAITING FOR HIS DOOM

Life for Dora Wyllard was more than ever melancholy after Hilda's disappearance. The girl's companionship had been her only ray of sunshine during this time of sorrow and anxiety. In her sympathy with Hilda's joys and hopes she had been able to withdraw herself now and then from the contemplation of her own misery. Now this distraction was gone, and she was alone with her grief.

Julian Wyllard had shown much greater anger at Hilda's conduct than his wife had anticipated. He had taken the lovers under his protection, he had been curiously eager for their marriage, had talked of it, and had hurried it on with an almost feverish impatience. And now he would not hear of any excuse for Hilda's conduct.

"She has acted like a madwoman," he said. "When everything had been arranged to secure her future happiness with Bothwell, her devoted slave, she allows herself to be driven away by the audacity of a brazen-faced coquette. I have no patience with her. But if Bothwell has any brains, he ought to be able to find her in a week, and bring her to her senses."

"Perhaps Bothwell may not care about running after her," speculated Dora.

"O, a man who is over head and ears in love will endure any outrage. He is a slavish creature, and the more he is trampled upon the better he loves his tyrant. It remains to be seen which of the two women Bothwell would rather marry – Hilda, with her rustic simplicity, or the widow, with her slightly damaged reputation and very handsome income."

"He does not waver for a moment between them."

"Ah, that is all you know; but if he does not give chase to Hilda, you may be sure it is because in his heart of hearts he hankers after the widow."

Bothwell had gone back to Trevena, intending to pay the builders for the work they had done, and suspend the carrying out of the contract indefinitely.

He would have to give them some compensation, no doubt, for delay; but they were good, honest, rustic fellows, and he was not afraid of being severely mulcted.

Julian Wyllard spoke of Bothwell and his love affairs with the irritability of a chronic sufferer, and Dora listened and sympathised, and soothed the sufferer as best she might. Her burden was very heavy in these days. To see her beloved suffer and to be unable to lessen his pain, that was indeed bitter. And in his case the palliating drugs which deadened his agony seemed almost a worse evil than the pain itself. The constant use of morphia and chloral was working its pernicious effect, and there were times, when the sufferer's mind wandered. There were dreams which seemed more agonising than wakeful hours of pain. Dora sat beside her husband's couch and watched him as he slept under the influence of morphia. She listened to his dull mutterings, in French for the most part. He rarely spoke any other language in that troubled state of the brain between dreaming and delirium. It was evident to her that his mind, in these intervals of wandering, habitually harked back to the days of his residence in Paris, ten years ago. And his hallucinations at this time seemed always of a ghastly character. The scenes he looked upon were steeped in blood, doubtless a reminiscence of those hideous days of the Commune, when Paris was given over to fire and carnage. She shuddered as she saw the look of horror in his widely-opened yet sightless eyes – sightless for reality, but seeing strange visions – shapes of dread. She shuddered at the wild cry which broke from those white lips, the infinite pain in the lines of the forehead, damp with the cold dews of anguish.

In his waking hours, when free from the influence of chloral, the sufferer's brain was as clear as ever; but the irritation of his nerves was intense. A sound, the slightest, agitated him. A footstep in the corridor, a ring at the hall-door, startled him as if it had been a thunder-clap. His senses seemed always on the alert. There was no middle state between that intense activity of brain and the coma or semi-delirium which resulted from opiates.

Sir William Spencer had been down to Penmorval twice since the invalid's return, but his opinion had not been hopeful on either occasion. On the second time of his coming he had seen a marked change for the worse. The malady had made terrible progress in a short interval. And now, on this dull gray autumn afternoon, within twenty-four hours of Heathcote's visit to the Rue du Bac, the famous physician came to Penmorval for the third time, and again could only bear witness to the progress of evil.

Wyllard insisted upon being alone with his physician.

"Sir William, I want you to tell me the truth about my case: the unsophisticated truth. There will be no end gained by your withholding it; for I have read up the history of this disease of mine, and I know pretty well what I have to expect. A gradual extinction, disfigurement and distortion of every limb and every feature, beginning with this withered, claw-shaped hand, and creeping on and on, till I lie like an idiot, sightless, speechless, tasteless, with lolling tongue dribbling upon my pillow. And throughout this dissolution of the body I may yet, if specially privileged, retain the faculties of my mind. I may be to the last conscious of all that I have been and all that I am. There is the redeeming feature. I shall perish molecule by molecule, feeling my own death, able to appreciate every change, every stage in the inevitable progress of corruption. That lingering process of annihilation which other men suffer unconsciously underground I shall suffer consciously above ground. That is the history of my case, I take it, Sir William."

"There have been such cases."

"Yes, and mine is one of them."

"I do not say that. The fatal cases are certainly in the majority; but there have been cures. Whatever medicine can do – "

"Will be done for me. Yes, I know that. But the utmost you have been able to do so far has been to deaden pain, and that at the cost of some of the most diabolical dreams that ever man dreamed."

"Let us hope for the best, Mr. Wyllard," replied the great physician, with that grave and kindly tone which had brought comfort to so many doomed sufferers, the indescribable comfort which a sympathetic nature can always impart. "As your adviser, it is my duty to tell you that it would be well your house were set in order."

"All has been done. I made my will after my marriage. It gives all to my wife. She will deal with my fortune as the incarnate spirit of justice and benevolence. I have supreme confidence in her wisdom and in her goodness."

"That is well. Then there is no more to be said."

Ten minutes later the physician was being driven back to the station, and Julian Wyllard was alone.

"'And Swift expires a driveller and a show,'" he repeated, in a tone of suppressed agony. "Yes, that is the horror. To become a spectacle – a loathsome object from which even love would shrink away with averted eyes. That is the sting. Facial anæsthesia – every muscle paralysed, every feature distorted. O, for the doomsman to make a shorter end of it all! The face has been spared so far – speech has hardly begun to falter. But it is coming – it is coming. I found myself forgetting common words this morning when I was talking to Dora. I caught myself babbling like a child that is just beginning to speak."

He took up a hand-mirror which he had asked his wife to leave near him, and contemplated himself thoughtfully for some moments.

"No, there is no change yet in the face, except a livid hue, like a corpse alive. The features are still in their right places, the mouth not yet drawn to one side; the eyelids still firm. But each stage of decay will follow in its course. And to know all the time that there is an easier way out of it, if one could but take it, just at the right moment, without being too much of a craven."

He glanced at the table by his sofa, a capacious table, holding his books, his reading-lamp, and his dressing-case with its elaborate appliances.

"If I did not want to know the issue of Heathcote's inquiries! If – O, for some blow from the sledgehammer of Destiny, that would put an end to all irresolution, take my fate out of my own hands! A blow that would annihilate me, and yet spare her – if that could be."

A loud ringing at the hall-door sounded like an answer to an invocation. Julian Wyllard lifted his head a little way from the silken-covered pillows, and turned his haggard eyes towards the door leading into the corridor.

After an interval of some moments there came the sounds of footsteps, the door was opened, and the servant announced,

"Mr. Heathcote."

Heathcote stood near the threshold, hat in hand, deadly pale, grave to solemnity, mute as death itself.

"You have come back, Heathcote?" asked the invalid, with an off-hand air. "Then I conclude you have accomplished your mission, or reconciled yourself to failure."

"I have succeeded in my mission beyond my hopes," answered Heathcote. "But my success is as terrible to myself as it must needs be to others."

"Indeed! Does that mean that you have solved the mystery of the French girl's death?"

"It means as much, and more than that. It means, Julian Wyllard, that I have solved the mystery of your life– that double life which showed to the world the character of a hard-headed financier, passionless, mechanical, while the real nature of the man, passionate, jealous, vindictive, the lover and the slave of a beautiful woman, was known to but a few chosen friends. It means that slowly, patiently, link by link, detail after detail, I have put together the history of your life in Paris – the secret door by which the financier left his lonely office at nightfall, to drink the cup of pleasure with his mistress – or his wife – and his boon companions. By the inevitable sequence of small facts, by the agreement of dates, by a pencil sketch of the murderer's face, made from memory, yet vivid as flesh and blood, I have been able to identify you, Julian Wyllard, with the man who called himself Georges, who was known to a few privileged Bohemians as the lover of Marie Prévol, and who disappeared from Paris immediately after the murder, so completely as to baffle the police. The murderer vanished utterly, before the crime was twelve hours old; yet he was known to have visited the grave of his victim up to March '74 – the exact period at which you, Julian Wyllard, left Paris for ever. It means that in you, the man who came between me and the happiness of my life, who stole my betrothed – in you, the successful speculator, the honoured of all men, I have found the murderer of Léonie Lemarque and of her aunt Marie Prévol, and of her aunt's admirer, Maxime de Maucroix. A man must have a mind and heart of iron who could carry the consciousness of three such murders with a calm front; who could clasp his innocent wife to his breast, accept her caresses, her devotion, her revering love – knowing himself the relentless devil that he is! Julian Wyllard, thou art the man!"

"I am!" answered the white lips resolutely, while the haggard eyes flashed defiance. "I am that man. I have obeyed my destiny, which was to love with a desperate love, and hate with a desperate hate. I have gratified my love and my hatred. I have lived, Heathcote; lived as men of your stamp know not how to live; lived with every drop of blood in my veins, with every beat of my heart: and now I am content to rot in a dishonoured grave, the abhorred of pettier sinners!"

"Julian!"

A wail – a cry of agony from a despairing woman – sounded in the utterance of that name.

CHAPTER X.

"ALIKE IS HELL, OR PARADISE, OR HEAVEN."

It was the despairing cry of a woman's breaking heart that came with that low wailing sound from the curtained doorway. Dora had been told of Heathcote's arrival, and had hurried from her dressing-room on the further side of the bedchamber. She had reached the threshold of the morning-room in time to hear Heathcote pronounce the dreadful word "Murder," and she had heard all that followed. She had heard her husband's proclaim himself triply an assassin.

"It is my wife's voice," said Wyllard quietly. "You knew that she was there, perhaps. You wanted her to hear."

"I did not know she was there; but it would have been my duty to tell her all I have discovered. She has lived under a delusion; she has lived under the spell of your consummate hypocrisy. It is only right that she should know the truth. Thank God, she has heard it from your own lips."

"You have not forgotten the day when we were rivals for her love," said Wyllard, with a diabolical sneer. "I won the race, heavily handicapped; and now your turn has come. You have your revenge."

Heathcote was silent. His eyes were fixed upon the figure which appeared against the glowing darkness of the plush curtain, and came slowly, totteringly forward to Wyllard's couch, and sank in a heap beside it. The white, set face, with its look of agony, the widely-opened eyes, pale with horror, haunted him for long after that awful hour. It was he who had brought this agony upon her, he who had unearthed the buried skeleton, he who, going forth from that house to do her bidding, her true knight, her champion, her servant, had come back as the messenger of doom. Was he to blame that Fate had imposed this hateful task upon him? He told himself that he was blameless; but that she would never forgive.

"I congratulate you upon your perseverance and your success," said Wyllard, after a pause. "You have succeeded where all the police of Paris had failed. Was it love for my wife, or hatred for me, that stood in the place of training and experience?"

"It was neither. It was the hand of Fate, the mysterious guiding of Providence, which took me from stage to stage of that horrible story."

"And it was my wife – my redeeming angel – who sent you forth upon your mission, who appealed to your love of the past as a claim on your devotion in the present. There is the irony of Fate in that part of the business," said Wyllard mockingly.

He had always hated Edward Heathcote; he had hated him even in the hour of his own triumph as Dora's accepted lover; hated him because he had once possessed Dora's love, but most of all because he had been worthy of it.

Julian Wyllard's head leaned forward upon his folded arms, and for some minutes there was silence in the room, save for the sound of suppressed sobbing from that kneeling figure by the sick man's couch. The face of the husband and the face of the wife were alike hidden. Dora's head had fallen across her husband's knees, her hands were clasped above the dark coils of her hair, in the self-abandonment of her agony.

Heathcote stood a little way off, feeling as if he were in the presence of the dead. The mystery of those two hidden faces oppressed him. He almost hated himself for this thing which he had done. He felt like an executioner – a man from whom the stern necessity of his craft had exacted a revolting service.

"Julian, is this true?" murmured Dora, after a long silence. "Is all or any part of this dreadful story true?"

Her husband looked up suddenly, as if vivified by the sound of her voice.

"What would you think of me if it were all or any of it true?" he asked hoarsely. "Look up, Dora. Let me see your eyes as you answer me. I want to know how I am to stand henceforth in the sight of the woman who once loved me."

She lifted her head, and turned her deathlike face towards him, tearless, but with a look of anguish deeper than he had ever seen before on any human countenance.

That other look, that last look of Léonie Lemarque's, which had haunted him waking or sleeping ever since the 5th of July, had been a look of horrified surprise. But here there was the quiet anguish of a broken heart.

"Who once loved you," she echoed. "Do you think such love as mine can be thrown off like an old gown? Tell me the truth, Julian – it can make no difference to my love."

Wyllard remained for some moments gazing dreamily at the low wood fire opposite his couch, silent, as if looking into the pages of the past.

"Yes, your story is put together very cleverly," he said, "and it is for the most part true. Yes, I am the murderer of Marie Prévol. I am that jealous devil, who in an access of fury destroyed the life that was dearer than his own. It was not that I believed her guilty. No, it was the agonising knowledge that her love had gone from me, in spite of herself – had gone to that younger, brighter, more fascinating lover. I saw the gradual working of the change – saw coldness, dislike even, creeping over her who had once tenderly rewarded my love – saw that my coming was unwelcome, my departure a relief. She, who of old had followed me to the threshold, had hung upon me with sweetest caresses at the moment of parting, now could scarcely conceal her indifference, her growing aversion. I saw all this, and Satan took hold of me. Again and again I was on the verge of unpremeditated murder. My eyes grew dim, veiled by a cloud of blood; but I held my hand before the deed was done. I have had my grip upon her throat – that milk-white throat, which was purer of tint and lovelier of form than that of the Louvre Venus. I have seen the pleading eyes looking into mine, asking me for mercy, and I have fallen at her feet and sobbed like a child. But there came a time when this sullen devil of jealousy and hatred took a firmer hold of me, and then I swore to myself that they should both die. There was no help, no other cure. If she lived, she would leave me for Maucroix. She, the wife I had honoured, would sink into the mistress of a fop and a fribble, to be cast off when his fancy staled. I knew that was inevitable, so I made up my mind, all of a sudden, when I got wind of her intended jaunt to Saint-Germain, from the spy I had employed to watch her. I put my revolver in my pocket, and followed her to the station, disguised by a pair of dark spectacles and a style of dress in which she had never seen me. I stood by the doorway of the waiting-room, and saw her sitting side by side with her favoured lover, they two as happy and as absorbed in each other as children at play in a garden. You know all the rest. Yes, it was I who watched in front of the Henri Quatre, saw those two laughing together in the candle-light: it was I who sprang out of the thicket in the forest and shot them down, one after the other, left them lying there side by side, dead. I had a strange wild feeling of happiness as I rushed away into the depths of the wood – a sense of triumph. I had won my love from her new lover. She had been mine only; and she would be mine now until the end. I had saved her from her own weakness – saved, her from the dishonour which her folly must have made inevitable."