Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

do. Gideon's own talk, too, about railways and coal-pits made them feel as if they were sitting upon a powder-magazine to which the train had been laid. Helen asked them no questions, and let their attempts to interest her in the increasing deafness of old Grimes ramble round her in vain. It was very far, indeed, from her intention to be impolite, but she was more tired out than she herself knew. She fancied herself ashamed at being so little moved by her return to the neighbourhood of her old home: whereas, in truth, her seeming apathy did not arise from the want, but from the fear, of feeling. She could not dare to let herself feel. . . . And so Bertha Meyrick was married! . . . "Yes, better die of a bullet than a heart-break," was the refrain to her thoughts that kept on ringing through her mind. She had her own views of what love and marriage ought to mean; and it was better for Alan to be safely dead than to have married one who could have cared for him so little as to marry another man before she could possibly have learned that her first lover was not still alive. Were all women, even Bertha, like herself? and was it by the very nature of their sex that they sold themselves to any satisfactory bidder? She was catching Gideon's own views about such things. “Well—I must drift on, like the rest," was the end that all her thoughts came to. No wonder the Miss Skulls thought her changed and dull. She made them feel dull themselves.

Presently Miss Sarah was summoned mysteriously from the drawing-room; and, when she came back, it was to say, with an awful gravity,

"Gideon says you are to go to him in the study at once. Something very strange has happened, Helen-something very strange, Anne. Mr. Waldron has called to see Christopher. I wonder what he can want to say? And Christopher is so little fitted to face excitement nowand Mr. Waldron once threw a lamp at his head, and broke it; he has never got over that shock, and never will. I wish Mr. Waldron would ask to see me. But, luckily, Gideon is there."

"Gideon wishes me to see Mr. Waldron ?" asked Helen, startled at last into taking an interest in one of her new aunt's speeches. "He could not mean such a thing. You must be mistaken, indeed."

"Gideon is not the one to make mistakes, nor I to be mistaken. If he wishes you to see that man, he has good reason for it, you may be sure," said Miss Sarah, whom something in Helen's tone did not please. "Helen must see him, too.' Those were his words."

"Must see him?" Well, then, if he said must,” said Helen, “I will go."

She meant a great deal more than met even her own ears. If she must henceforth drift, and surrender all that was left of her blind and useless will to the control of blinder chance and circumstance, then drifting could only mean implicit obedience to the will of Gideon Skull, in great things and small. If Walter Gray had been right, it was the only semblance of a duty left her: one cannot go on fighting with the wind all one's days. Where there is nothing to be gained by battle, one must at last, if only for sleep's sake, give oneself up to the blast, and let it drive one whither it will. To do something, anything, simply because she was told she must, was almost a luxury in her present mood, which was not likely to prove only a mood. As for seeing Waldron, that was nothing, after she had been brought to see Hillswick steeple again. It was better to meet the face of an enemy than to look upon that of a friend.

"Anne," said Miss Sarah, as soon as Helen had left the room, "there is something wrong between her and Gideon, mark my words. I hope he has got a good wife as well as a rich one, because I have always been strongly of opinion, and always shall be, strange as some people may think it, that a bad wife is a decidedly objectionable person, however rich she may be. I have always thought that, and nothing will ever make me think differently. And there was always something-something, you know-about Helen Reid. She never would take advice any more than that table, and was as obstinate as she was high."

"But she went when she was told," said Miss Anne.

"Yes, when Gideon said must," said Miss Sarah. "That's just where it is, Anne. I should like to see the man who would say 'must' to me !"

Helen went straight to the study, and did not pause before entering after she had once touched the handle of the door. There, by the light of a pair of candles, she saw her husband, his uncle, and

Walter Gray.

If this was drifting, it was drifting as we drift in dreams. It was so startling that she could scarcely feel surprise. She had been summoned to an interview with Victor Waldron, and she found herself face to face with Walter Gray. meant, or how it was possible. Bertha was married. And what might be ?

She did not ask herself what it Everything was possible, since did anything mean, whatever it

Nevertheless, she was too much absorbed in this new recognition

to note the expression of her husband's face as he watched the meeting between his false wife and her treacherous lover. He was bent upon probing to its depth every glance of the eye, every movement of the hand, every change of colour. And who ever looked for things of this sort that he failed to find?

Helen's eyes did become filled with a sudden light, her hand did tremble, and her colour came and went again. Such signs may mean a thousand things, from mere confusion and bewilderment to anything short of actual guilt: for actual guilt is the only thing that looks like innocence in the eyes of those who judge by visible signs. How far Helen's deepest heart was innocent there is no need to say. Sheer bewilderment, and nothing more, was the root of all she showed now. And there is nothing which looks so much like guilt as bewilderment, as all who do not judge by visible signs know well. In the eyes of Gideon Skull, who found what he looked for, she was already judged and doomed. His revenge was justified before it had begun.

He almost smiled as he said, " Mr. Victor Waldron-my wife, Mrs. Gideon Skull-but I forget: you two have met in Hillswick before."

He looked at Victor now. Victor, with the thought of his unanswered letter still stabbing him, only bowed. But Gideon could not fail to read the sublimity of hypocrisy in that bow. It was not returned by Helen: and Gideon read something worse than hypocrisy in her greater honesty.

"I am glad of the chance," he said, "that brought you to call upon my uncle Christopher, while I and Mrs. Gideon Skull "-he seemed to find a zest in dwelling upon the whole of her married name—" are here. It will save a great deal of trouble to us all : and, when a thing has to be done, the sooner the better. No time like now for an unpleasant thing."

[ocr errors]

"As you say no time like now," said Waldron. "And so"Yes-and so. You had better hear my-my wife's business with you before we come to your business with my uncle, whatever that may happen to be. Do you remember the day when my wife's father, the late Henry Reid of Copleston, died?"

"I don't think you need ask me that," said Victor. Go onwith whatever you have to say. Assume that I forget nothing, if you please."

He was speaking in this cold way to the man who had, like a scoundrel, as he held, tricked Helen-or rather say any woman—into a marriage she had learned to abhor. Gideon translated his tone into

the incapacity of a traitor to speak courteously to him who has it in his power to lay all his treachery bare. Each man was honest-each in his own way. For some moments neither said a word more. Victor was waiting for Gideon: Gideon was turning his triumph, so to speak, over with his tongue, and tasting it luxuriously, and meditating how he could use it the most effectively for making Waldron feel it with the greatest possible amount of defeat and humiliation. Helen must see her lover come out glaringly in his true colours-a beaten traitor, who had tried to pit himself against her husband, and had failed. She was not the woman he had learned to think her if, when she found him under another man's feet, her easily purchased love did not change to womanly scorn. But Helen's thoughts were for those moments of silence far away. She was realising that in truth Victor Waldron and Walter Gray were indeed one and the same : how could she have failed to identify her few days' friend with her old enemy? Yet-Victor Waldron, her brother's friend, the comrade who had last held his hand and seen him die! She no longer felt bewilderment: that is all too weak a word when chaos has come.

"You forget nothing?" at last asked Gideon. "So be it, then. I will not remind you how you came to England with the sole purpose of proving a fancied claim to Copleston—a claim which vanished, if I remember rightly, on a first inspection of a parish register. Nor will I remind you how you, nevertheless, obtained the whole estate because my wife's father-ay, and Alan Reid's father— died without a will. As you say you remember everything, we will

[blocks in formation]

"Gideon Skull," began Waldron eagerly, "I'

[ocr errors]

"Wait! I advise you to hear me out," said Gideon, with all the weight of his voice and manner, "before you say one word. Your turn shall come to say whatever you please—or whatever you can." He laid two documents, one in a blue envelope, upon the table, but kept one hand over them. "Read these first, and then say your say. But, before you read

[ocr errors]

And now Helen knew, or thought she knew, why she had been brought down from London to Hillswick, in order to be present at whatever interview might take place between Victor Waldron and Gideon Skull. No doubt, she imagined, since Copleston was to come to Gideon through her, it was necessary that she should authorise, by her presence, his claim in her name. And then, as if she had never dreamed for one single moment of surrendering her will to circumstances and Gideon

"I must speak first!" said she,

"Since you are Victor Waldron

-if you are--I will have nothing to do with taking Copleston from Alan's only friend. . . . his friend at last, whatever you once had been! Let things go. Let things be as they are. This is not my doing."

Gideon smiled no more. "I have no doubt Mr. Waldron perfectly understands you, Helen," said he. He meant to speak a biting sarcasm: but he only scowled, and his words fell without a meaning. "And you shall have your turn too. To go on with what I was saying "He paused: for he had so much to say, and so many ways of starting tempted him, that he scarcely knew how to begin. "As you remember so many things, Waldron-I beg your pardon-Mr. Waldron," he said at last, "you may remember my once telling you that what I had once done for you, and what you refused to recognise, I might be able to undo. Neither you nor I foresaw at that time that I should ever be in a position to make it my right, as well as my duty, to vindicate the claim, the right, of one of Henry Reid's children to what was his to leave them—my right, my duty, as the husband of Helen Reid, now Helen Skull. I tell you, as an honest man, that nobody ever regretted any deed on earth more than I regretted what I had so thoughtlessly done for you when you refused to-when I discovered, too late, what manner of man you turned out to be. I had believed in you as a Quixote, a Bayard, an Arthur: you turned out a-Waldron-a Victor Waldron: a man who would use a fool of a friend as a tool to rob widows and orphans, and then kick the tool away. It always seemed to me impossible that Henry Reid, knowing the nature of his marriage, should have left no will."

An angry colour was coming into Victor's face; but he showed no other sign of feeling Gideon's hammer-blows.

"I have here an affidavit," said Gideon, "on the part of a clergyman and a magistrate, the Reverend Christopher Skull, who is here. He states that Mr. Henry Reid of Copleston did make a will. He states- Wait till I have done. He states that Mrs. Reid induced him, by her arguments, to suppress that will, to humour her in some wild belief that her son would be ruined by suddenly becoming a man of fortune. He states, moreover, that"

"Is that so, Mr. Skull ?" asked Victor quickly, turning to Uncle Christopher. "I would rather not see your affidavit, if you please. I will take your word."

[ocr errors]

My poor friend did it for the best-for the best," stammered Uncle Christopher, "according to her lights. She convinced me for

« AnkstesnisTęsti »