on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, mr. felton, accompanied by his nephew, called on mrs. ireton p. bembridge, who received the two gentlemen with no remarkable cordiality. coquetry was so inseparable from her nature and habits, that she could not forbear from practising a few of her fascinations upon the younger man and she therefore relaxed considerably from the first formality of her demeanour after a while. but george dallas was the least promising and encouraging of subjects for the peculiar practice of the beautiful widow, and he so resolutely aided his uncle in placing the conversation on a strictly business footing, and keeping it there, as to speedily convince the lady that he was entirely unworthy of her notice. she was not destitute of a certain good nature which rarely fails to accompany beauty, wealth, and freedom, and she settled the matter with herself by reflecting that the young man was probably in love with some pretty girl, to whom he wrote his verses, and considered it proper to be indifferent to the attractions of all female charmers beside. she did not resent his inaccessibility; she merely thought of it as an odd coincidence that mr. felton's nephew should be as little disposed to succumb to love as mr. felton himself, and felt inclined to terminate the interview as soon as possible. consequently, she made her replies to mr. felton's questions shorter and colder as they succeeded one another, so that he felt some difficulty in putting that particular query on which george had laid restricted stress. he did not perceive how deep and serious his nephew's misgivings had become, and george grasped at every excuse that presented itself for deferring the awakening of fears which, once aroused, must become poignant and terrible. he had learnt from mrs. ireton p. bembridge some of the facts which she had communicated to routh: young felton's intention of visiting homburg at about the period of the year which they had then reached; his departure from paris, and the unbroken silence since maintained towards her as towards mr. felton himself. the information she had to give was in itself so satisfactory, so tranquillizing, that mr. felton, who had no reason to expect obedience from his son, felt all his fears--very dim and vague in comparison with those which had assailed george's mind--assuaged. it was only when his nephew had given him some very expressive looks, and he had seen the fine dark eyes of mrs. ireton p. bembridge directed unequivocally towards the allegorical timepiece which constituted one of the chief glories of the schwarzchild mansion, that he said:
"my nephew has never seen his cousin, mrs. bembridge, and i have no likeness of him with me. i know you are a collector of photographs; perhaps you have one of arthur?"
"i had one, mr. felton," replied mrs. bembridge, graciously, "and would have shown it to mr. dallas with pleasure yesterday, but, unfortunately, i have lost it in some unaccountable way."
"indeed," said mr. felton; "that is very unfortunate. was it not in your book, then?"
"i wore it in a locket," said the lady, with a very slight accession to the rich colour in her cheek--"a valuable gold locket, too. i am going to have it cried."
"allow me to have that done for you," said mr. felton. "if you will describe the locket, and can say where you were yesterday, and at what time, i will take the necessary steps at once; these may not succeed, you know; we can but try."
so mrs. bembridge described the lost trinket accurately, and the visit came to a conclusion. as the two gentlemen were leaving the house, they met mr. carruthers, who accosted mr. felton with stately kindliness, and, entering at once into conversation with him, prevented the interchange of any comment upon the interview which had just taken place between the uncle and nephew. george left the elder gentlemen together, and turned his steps towards harriet's lodgings. in a few minutes he met her and joined her in her walk, as routh had seen from the window.
he stood there, long after george and harriet had passed out of sight, thinking, with sullen desperate rage, of all she had said. he felt like an animal in a trap. all his care and cunning, all his caution and success, had come to this. it was strange, perhaps--if the probability or the strangeness of anything in such a condition of mind as his can be defined--that he seldom thought of the dead man. no curiosity about him had troubled the triumph of routh's schemes. he had met so many men in the course of his life who were mere waifs and strays in the world of pleasure and swindling; who had no ties and no history; about whom nobody cared; for whom, on their disappearance from the haunts in which their presence had been familiar, nobody inquired; that one more such instance, however emphasized by his own sinister connection with him, made little impression on stewart routh. looking back now in the light of this revelation, he could not discover that any intimation had ever been afforded to, or had ever been overlooked by him. the dead man had never dropped a hint by which his identity might have been discovered, nor had he, on the other hand, ever betrayed the slightest wish or purpose of concealment, which probably would have aroused routh's curiosity, and set his investigative faculties to work. he had never speculated, even at times when all his callousness and cynicism did not avail to make him entirely oblivious of the past, on the possibility of his learning anything of the history of philip deane; he had been content to accept it, as well as its termination, as among the number of the wonderful mysteries of this wonderful life, and had, so far as in him lay, dismissed the matter from his mind. nothing that had ever happened in his life before had given him such a shock as the discovery he had made yesterday. the first effect on him has been seen; the second, ensuing on his conversation with his wife, was a blind and desperate rage, of a sort to which he had rarely yielded, and of whose danger he was dimly conscious even at its height. he was like a man walking on a rope at a giddy elevation, to whom the first faint symptoms of vertigo were making themselves felt, who was invaded by the death-bringing temptation to look down and around him. the solemn and emphatic warning of his wife had had its effect upon his intellect, though he had hardened his heart against it. it was wholly impossible that her invariable judgment, perception, and reasonableness--the qualities to which he had owed so much in all their former life--could become immediately valueless to a man of routh's keenness; he had not yet been turned into a fool by his sudden passion for the beautiful american; he still retained sufficient sense to wonder and scoff at himself for having been made its victim so readily; and he raged and rebelled against the conviction that harriet was right, but raged and rebelled in vain.
in the whirl of his thoughts there was fierce torture, which he strove unavailingly to subdue: the impossibility of evading the discovery which must soon be made; the additional crime by which alone he could hope to escape suspicion; a sudden unborn fear that harriet would fail him in this need--a fear which simply signified despair--a horrid, baffled, furious helplessness; and a tormenting, overmastering passion for a woman who treated him with all the calculated cruelty of coquetry--these were the conflicting elements which strove in the man's dark, bad heart, and rent it between them, as he stood idly by the window where his wife had been accustomed to sit and undergo her own form of torture.
by degrees one fear got the mastery over the others, and routh faced it boldly. it was the fear of harriet. suppose the worst, came to the worst, he thought, and there was no other way of escape, would she suffer him to sacrifice george? he could do it; the desperate resource which he had never hinted to her was within his reach. they had talked over all possibilities in the beginning, and had agreed upon a plan and direction of flight in certain contingencies, but he had always entertained the idea of denouncing george, and now, by the aid of jim swain, he saw his way to doing so easily and successfully. harriet had always been a difficulty, and now the obstacle assumed portentous proportions. he had no longer his old power over her. he knew that; she made him feel this in many ways; and now he had aroused her jealousy. he felt instinctively that such an awakening was full of terrible danger; of blind, undiscoverable peril. he did not indeed know by experience what harriet's jealousy might be, but he knew what her love was, and the ungrateful villain trembled in his inmost soul as he remembered its strength, its fearlessness, its devotion, its passion, and its unscrupulousness, and thought of the possibility of all these being arrayed against him. not one touch of pity for her, not one thought of the agony of such love betrayed and slighted, of her utter loneliness, of her complete abandonment of all her life to him, intruded upon the tumult of his angry mind. he could have cursed the love which had so served him, now that it threatened opposition to his schemes of passion and of crime. he did curse it, and her, deeply, bitterly, as one shade after another of fierce evil expression crossed his face.
there was truth in what she had said, apart from the maudlin sentiment from which not even the strongest-minded woman, he supposed, could wholly free herself--there was truth, a stern, hard truth. he could indeed escape now, taking with him just enough money to enable them to live in decent comfort, or to make a fresh start in a distant land, where only the hard and honest industries throve and came to good. how he loathed the thought! how his soul sickened at the tame, miserable prospect! he would have loathed it always, even when harriet and he were friends and lovers; and now, when he feared her, when he was tired of her, when he hated her, to contemplate such a life now, was worse--well, not worse than death, that is always the worst of all things to a bad man, but something too bad to be thought of. there was truth in what she had said, and the knowledge of what was in his own thoughts, the knowledge she did not share, made it all the more true. supposing he determined to denounce george, and supposing harriet refused to aid him, what then? then he must only set her at defiance. if such a wild impossibility as her betraying him could become real, it would be useless. she was his wife; she could not bear witness against him; in that lay his strength and security, even should the very worst, the most inconceivably unlikely of human events, come to pass. and he would set her at defiance! he kept up no reticence with himself now. within a few days a change had come upon him, which would have been terrible even to him, had he studied it. he hated her. he hated her, not only because he had fallen madly in love with another woman and was day by day becoming more enslaved by this new passion; not chiefly even because of this, but because she was a living link between him and the past. that this should have happened now! that she should have right and reason, common sense, and all the force of probability on her side, in urging him to fly, now--now when he was prospering, when the success of a new speculation in which he had just engaged would, with almost absolute certainty, bring him fortune,--this exasperated him almost to the point of frenzy.
then there arose before his tossed and tormented mind the vision of a blissful possibility. this other beautiful, fascinating woman, who had conquered him by a glance of her imperial eyes, who had beckoned him to her feet by a wave of her imperial hand--could he not make her love him well enough to sacrifice herself for him also? might he not escape from the toils which were closing around him into a new, a glorious liberty, into a life of wealth, and pleasure, and love? she had yielded so immediately to the first influence he had tried to exert over her; she had admitted him so readily to an intimacy to whose impropriety, according to the strict rules of society, she had unhesitatingly avowed herself aware and indifferent; she had evinced such undisguised pleasure in his society, and had accepted his unscrupulous homage so unscrupulously, that he had as much reason as a coarse-minded man need have desired for building up a fabric of the most presumptuous hope.
as these thoughts swept over him, routh turned from the window, and began again to stride up and down the room. his dark face cleared up, the hot blood spread itself over his sallow cheek, and his deep-set eyes sparkled with a sinister light. the desperate expedient to which he had resorted on the previous day had gained him time, and time was everything in the game he designed to play. the discovery would not be made for some time by george dallas. when it should be made, his triumph might be secured, he might be beyond the reach of harm from such a cause, safe in an elysium, with no haunting danger to disturb. the others concerned might be left to their fate--left to get out of any difficulty that might arise, as best they could. the time was short, but that would but inspire him with more courage and confidence; the daring of desperation was a mood which suited stewart routh well.
hours told in such cases. the fire and earnestness with which he had spoken to the beautiful widow had evidently surprised and, he thought, touched her. if the demonstration had not been made in his own favour, but in that of another, no one would have more readily understood than stewart routh how much beauty of form and feature counts for in the interpretation of emotion, how little real meaning there may be in the beam of a dark bright eye, how little genuine emotion in the flush of a rose-tinted cheek. but it was his own case, and precisely because it was, stewart routh interpreted every sign which his captor had made according to his wishes rather than by the light of his experience. indeed, he had little experience of a kind to avail him in the present instance; his experience had been of stronger, even more dangerous, types of womanhood than that which mrs. bembridge represented, or of the infinitely meaner and lower. as he mused and brooded over the vision which had flashed upon him, not merely as a possibility to be entertained, as a hope to be cherished, but as something certain and definite to be done, his spirits, his courage, his audacity rose, and the dark cloud of dread and foreboding fell from him. he had so long known himself for a villain, that there was not even a momentary recoil in his mind from the exceeding baseness of the proceeding which he contemplated.
"i can count upon a fortnight," he said to himself while completing a careful toilet, "and by that time i shall either be away from all this with her, or i shall be obliged to put george dallas in jeopardy. if i fail with her--but i won't think of failure; i cannot fail." he left a message with harriet, to the effect that he should not dine at home that day (but without any explanation of his further movements), and went out.
"i do not see the force of your reasons for objecting to my introducing you to my mother," said george dallas to harriet. mrs. carruthers had passed them in an open carriage during their walk, and george had urged harriet to make his mother's acquaintance.
"don't you?" she replied, with a smile in which weariness and sadness mingled. "i think you would, if you thought over them a little. they include the necessity for avoiding anything like an unpleasant or distressing impression on her mind, and you know, george," she said, anticipating and silencing deprecation by a gesture, "if she remembers your mention of me at all, she can remember it only to be distressed by it; and the almost equally important consideration of not incurring your stepfather's anger in any way."
"as for that, i assure you he is everything that is kind to me now," said george.
"i am happy to hear it; but do not, therefore, fall into an error which would come very easy to your sanguine and facile temperament. be sure he is not changed in his nature, however modified he may be in his manners. be quite sure he would object to your former associates just as strongly as ever; and remember, he would be right in doing so. will you take my advice once more, george? you have done it before--" she stopped, and something like a shudder passed over her; "let bygones be completely bygones. never try to associate the life and the home that will be yours for the future with anything in the past--least, oh least of all, with us."
"what do you mean, mrs. routh?" george asked her eagerly. "do you mean that you want to give me up? i know routh does--he has not spoken to me a dozen times of his own accord since he has been here---but you, do you want to get rid of me?"
she paused for a moment before she answered him. should she say yes, and be done with it? should she let things drift on to the inevitable end, yielding to the lassitude of mind and body which was stealing over her? should she gain another argument to use in a renewed appeal to her husband for the flight in which she saw the sole prospect of safety, by providing herself with the power of telling him a rupture had taken place between herself and dallas, and her power of guiding him was gone? the temptation was strong, but caution, habitual to her, instinctive in her, restrained her. not yet, she thought; this may be my next move. george repeated his question:
"do you mean that you want to get rid of me?"
"no," she answered, "i do not, george. i was only led into overstating what i do want, that you should conform to your stepfather's reasonable wishes. he has been generous to you, be you just towards him."
"i will," said george warmly. "i wonder how far he will carry his newly-found good will. i wonder--" he paused; the name of clare carruthers was on his lips; in another moment he would have spoken of her to harriet. he would have told her of the self-reproach, mingled, however, with hope, which daily grew and throve in the congenial soil of his sanguine nature; he would have pierced harriet's heart with a new sorrow, a fresh remorse, by telling her of another life, young, innocent, and beautiful, involved in the storm about to burst, whose threatenings were already sounding in the air. but it was not to be--the name of clare carruthers was never to be spoken by george to harriet. apparently she had not heard his last words: her attention had strayed; she was very weary.
"i must go home," she said abruptly. "we are close to your mother's house. you had better go to her now; she has returned from her drive."
"let me see you home," said george; "pray don't dismiss me in this way."
"no, no," she said, hurriedly; "let me have my own way, please. you will come to me to-morrow, and let me know your plans."
she stood still, and put out her hand so decidedly in the attitude of farewell, that he had no choice but to take leave of her. they parted on the shaded road, close to the garden gate of mr. carruthers's house. as harriet walked away with her usual rapid step, george looked after her very sadly.
"she is fearfully changed," he said; "i never saw anything like it. since i went to amsterdam she might have lived twenty years and been less altered. can it be that my uncle is right, that routh ill-treats her? i wonder if there's any truth in what those fellows said last night about him and mrs. ireton p.? if there is, it's an infernal shame--an infernal shame." and george dallas opened the little gate in the wall, and walked up the garden with a moody countenance, on which, however, a smile showed itself as he lifted his hat gaily to his mother, who nodded to him from the window above. his spirits rose unaccountably. the positive information which mrs. bembridge had afforded mr. felton relative to his son's expected arrival had immensely relieved george's mind. he was satisfied with the progress of his novel; day by day his mother's health was improving. his prospects were bright. the distressing recollection of deane, and the unhappy consequences of the tragedy, were becoming light and easy to him; sometimes he forgot all about it. if he could but win his stepfather's confidence and regard sufficiently to induce him to pardon his clandestine acquaintance with clare, he would be altogether happy. how serene and beautiful the weather was! he stood in the verandah, which extended into the garden, bare-headed, and inhaled the sweet air with keen pleasure. his impressionable nature readily threw off care and caught at enjoyment.
"it's such a glorious afternoon, mother," he said, as he entered mrs. carruthers's sitting-room; "i'm sure you must have enjoyed your drive."
"i did, very much," his mother replied. "the air seems rather closer, i think, since i came in. i fancy we shall have a storm."
"o, no," said george carelessly. then he said: "shall i read you my last chapter? i want to post it this evening. it's a funny chapter, mother. i bring in the queer old bookseller i told you about, who persisted in being his own banker."
"i remember, george. what are you looking at?" he had taken up a letter from the table beside her, and was scrutinizing the address closely. "are you admiring the handwriting? that is a letter from clare carruthers."
"o," said george. and he laid down the letter, and went to fetch his manuscript. so it was she who had forwarded mr. felton's letters to him! ellen must have asked her to do so--must, therefore, have talked of him--have mentioned him in some way. but had she done so in a manner to arouse any suspicion in clare's mind of his identity? did clare remember him? did she think of him? would she forgive him when she should know all? these and scores of cognate questions did george dallas put vainly to himself while he read to his mother a chapter of his novel, which certainly did not gain in effect by his abstraction. it pleased the listener, however, and she knew nothing of his preoccupation; and as he made the packet up for post he came to a resolution that on the following day he would tell harriet "all about it," and act on her advice.
with nightfall the wind arose, and a storm blew and raged over the little town, over the dark range of the taunus, over the lighted gardens deserted by their usual frequenters, and, all unheeded, over the brilliant rooms where the play, and the dancing, and the music, the harmless amusement and the harmful devilment, went on just as usual. it blew over the house where harriet lived, and raged against the windows of the room in which she sat in silence and darkness, except for the frequent glimmer which was thrown into the apartment from the street light, which shuddered and flickered in the rain and wind. hour after hour she had sat there throughout the quiet evening during the lull, and when the darkness fell and the storm rose she laid her pale cheek against the window-pane and sat there still.
the shaded roads were deeply strewn with fallen leaves next day, and the sun-rays streamed far more freely through the branches, and glittered on pools of water in the hollows, and revealed much devastation among the flower-beds. rain and wind had made a wide-spread excursion that night; had crossed the channel, and rifled the gardens and the woods of poynings, and swept away a heavy tribute from the grand avenue of beeches and the stately clump of sycamores which clare carruthers loved.
george had finished a drawing very carefully from the sketch which he had made of the avenue of beeches, and, thinking over his approaching communication to harriet, he had taken the drawing from its place of concealment in his desk, and was looking at it, wondering whether the storm of the past night had done mischief at the sycamores, when a servant knocked at the door of his room. he put the drawing out of sight, and bade the man come in. he handed george a note from harriet, which he read with no small surprise.
it told him that routh had been summoned to london, on important business, by a telegram--"from that mysterious flinders, no doubt," thought george, as he looked ruefully at the note--and that they were on the point of starting from homburg. "seven o'clock" was written at the top of the sheet. they were gone then; had been gone for hours. it was very provoking. how dreary the place looked after the storm! how chilly the air had become! how much he wished arthur would "turn up," and that they might all get away!
