A small fire of logs crackled on the hearth. Autumn winds were cold, and he was not so young as he used to be.
It is wonderful how old a fit of loneliness can make one.
At that moment the light-hearted Steenie Berrington of Carlton House was an old man.
The hand that carried the gla.s.s to trembling lips shook.
An old man!
It must be so since he had taken to looking back.
He had been young once.
Lost youth stood mocking him in the shadows. Laughter, love, hope, and strength,--all had been his.
A mother"s hand seemed stretching out from the past years to smooth the fair hair from his forehead, whilst mother-eyes looked into his own laughing ones.
Those mother eyes! Had they ever looked anything but tenderly into his, though they had often been tear-dimmed in pain?
Pain he had inflicted carelessly enough, and, as carelessly, turned away.
Memory had bitter stabs for an old man sitting alone in the twilight.
Sir Stephen gulped down his punch and tried to hum a line of his favourite rhyme.
"Let"s drink and be jolly, and drown melancholy; So merrily, then, let us joy, too, and sing, So fill up your bowls, all ye loyal----"
The song broke off, snapped by another of memory"s shafts.
Where had he heard that song first?
At Dublin town.
Ah! Dublin held memories too.
A gay ballroom. A girl"s sweet face. A kiss, pa.s.sionate and long.
Norah, Norah--smiling, merry Norah.
He had loved her, too, for a short time--all too short for Norah.
And the boy?
Well! he had not been cut out for domesticity, and after a time Norah"s tears bored him far more than Norah"s smiles had ever charmed him.
Yet he had felt a pang of remorse when he heard she was dead. He might even have sought out his son had not the old man, his father, adopted him. It was better for Michael to be brought up at Berrington.
And, meantime, Steenie was finding that when one has a handsome face and jolly humour, it is easy to live by one"s wits, even though honour be in the mire.
So the years rolled by. He watched them go as the wood spattered and burnt on the hearth, spurting out little jets of flame or leaping up the chimney in long, red tongues of fiery heat.
Michael, his son! _His son_. His father, it seemed at times, for here was Sir Henry over again, save for sudden fits of wild, rollicking devilry, which came of an Irish birthright, and delighted Sir Stephen hugely.
Mike and he might have been the jolliest of comrades were it not for the young fool"s absurd ideas of honour.
Again Sir Stephen filled up his gla.s.s. He would at least drown melancholy and memory too.
After all, he hoped spoil-sport Mike would stay at Kernak. The lad took life like an old man, and left his father behind in the merry ranks of youth.
Yes! of youth. He was not old--_would_ not be old. He was young--merry. Laughter on his lips--in his heart, now the ghosts of the past were laid.
Confusion to memory! Con----
How darkly the shadows fell.
And behind him one was moving forward, nearer--nearer--nearer.
A stooping shadow, with a cap--blood-red in the dying light--on its head, and a face twisted and mocking.
But Sir Stephen was looking into the embers and seeing long years of laughter and song therein.
Oh, that stooping shadow! How stealthily it advanced.
Confusion to memory! Con----
An arm raised swiftly, and as swiftly descending.
Confusion----!
What followed? What followed?
A sudden, terrible pain, a suffocating sense of agony, a blinding rush of memories, of fear, of terror; and then a figure lurched forward, slipping sideways from the chair across the hearth, overturning a half-filled bowl of punch in its fall.
But Marcel Trouet stood cursing volubly in hot anger and dismay, for the features, upturned to his, were not those of Morice Conyers after all.
The moments crept by leaden-footed. But Marcel Trouet stood still--very still--looking down at that white face, those stiffening lips.
He had killed the wrong man.
It was a matter of regret.
Hardened in crime though he was, murder in cold blood had never come his way before, and the horror of a useless deed held him there, actually trembling a little as he watched the slowly oozing blood trickle across the white hearth.
And the twilight was deepening in the silent room.