Greta"s pale face flushed. "And your mother--has she also been the victim of a delusion?"
Hugh shrugged his shoulders, showed his teeth slightly, but made no reply.
"Answer me--tell me the truth--be frank for once--tell me, can you explain this mystery?"
"If I could explain it, how would it be a mystery?"
Greta felt the blood tingle to her finger-tips.
"Do you believe I have told you the truth?" she asked.
"I am sure you have."
"Do you believe I saw Paul in the lane?"
"I am sure you think you saw him."
"Do you know for certain that he went away?"
Hugh nodded his head.
"Are you sure he has not got back?"
"Quite sure."
"In short, you think what I saw was merely the result of woman"s hysteria?"
Hugh smiled through his white lips, and his staring eyes a.s.sumed a momentary look of amused composure. He stepped to the table and fumbled some papers.
This reminded Greta of the paper the parson had asked her to deliver. "I ought to have given you this before," she said. "Mr. Christian sent it."
He took it without much apparent interest, put it on the table unread, and went to the door with Greta.
The trap was standing in the court-yard, with Natt in the driver"s seat, and Brother Peter in the seat behind. The snow had ceased to fall, but it lay several inches deep on the ground. There was the snow"s dumb silence on the earth and in the air.
Hugh helped Greta to her place, and then lifted the lamp from the trap, and looked on the ground a few yards ahead of the horse. "There are no footprints in the snow," he said, with a poor pretence at a smile--"none, at least, that go from the house."
Greta herself had begun to doubt. She lacked presence of mind to ask if there were any footprints at all except Peter"s. The thing was done and gone. It all happened three hours ago, and it was easy to suspect the evidence of the senses.
Hugh returned the lamp to its loop. "Did you scream," he asked, "when you saw--when you saw--it?"
Greta was beginning to feel ashamed. "I might have done. I can not positively say--"
"Ah, that explains everything. No doubt mother heard you and was frightened. I see it all now. Natt, drive on--cold journey--good-night."
Greta felt her face burn in the darkness. Before she had time or impulse to reply, they were rolling away toward home.
At intervals her ear caught the sound of suppressed t.i.tters from the driver"s seat. Natt was chuckling to himself with great apparent satisfaction. Since the fire at the mill he had been putting two and two together, and he was now perfectly confident as to the accuracy of his computation. When folks said that Paul had been at the fire he laughed derisively, because he knew that an hour before he had left him at the station. But an idea works in a brain like Natt"s pretty much as the hop ferments. When it goes to the bottom it leaves froth and bubbles at the top. Natt knew that there was some grave quarrel between the brothers.
He also knew that there were two ways to the station and two ways back to Newlands--one through the town, the other under Latrigg. Mr. Paul might have his own reasons for pretending to go to London, and also his own reasons for not going. Natt had left him stepping into the station at the town entrance. But what was to prevent him from going out again at the entrance from Latrigg? Of course that was what he had done. And he had never been out of the county. Deary me, how blind folks were, to be sure! Thus Natt"s wise head chuckled and clucked.
At one moment Natt twisted his sapient and facetious noddle over his shoulder to where Brother Peter sat huddled into a hump and in gloomy silence. "Mercy me, Peter!" he cried, in an affrighted whisper, and with a mighty tragical start, "and is that thee? Dusta know I thowt it were thy ghost?"
"Don"t know as it"s not--dragging a body frae bed a cold neet like this," mumbled Peter, numbed up to his tongue, but still warm enough there.
CHAPTER IX.
Hugh Ritson was content that Greta should think she had been the victim of a delusion. He was not unwilling that she should be tortured by suggestions of the supernatural. If she concluded that Paul had deceived her as to his departure from Newlands, he would not be unlikely to foster the delusion. The one thing of all others which Hugh Ritson was anxious to prevent was that Greta should be led to draw the purely matter-of-fact inference that when she thought she saw Paul she had really seen another man.
But that was his own conviction. He was now sure beyond the hope of doubt that there was a man alive who resembled Paul Ritson so closely that he had thrice before, and now once again, been mistaken for him by unsuspecting persons. That other man was to be the living power in his own life, in his brother"s life, in his mother"s life, in Greta"s life.
Who was he?
Left alone in the court-yard when the trap drove away, Hugh Ritson shuddered and looked round. He had laughed with the easy grace of a man no longer puzzled as he bid Greta good-night, but suspense was gnawing at his heart. He returned hastily to his room, sat down at the table, picked up the paper which Parson Christian had sent him, and read it with eager eyes.
He read it and reread it; he seemed to devour it line by line, word by word. When he would have set it down his fingers so trembled that he let it fall, and he rose from his chair with rigid limbs.
What he had dreaded he now knew for certainty. He had stumbled into an empty grave. He opened a drawer and took out three copies of certificates that Mr. Bonnithorne had brought him. Selecting the earliest of these in order of date, he set it side by side with the copy of the extract from Parson Christian"s diary.
By the one--Paul, the son of Grace Ormerod, by her husband Robert Lowther, was born August 14, 1845.
By the other--Paul, the reputed son of Grace Ormerod by her husband, Allan Ritson, was an infant still in arms on November 19, 1847.
Paul Ritson could not be Paul Lowther.
Paul Ritson could not be the half-brother of Greta Lowther.
Hugh Ritson fell back as one who had been dealt a blow. For months he had been idly hatching an addled villainy. The revenge that he had promised himself for spurned and outraged love--the revenge that he had named retribution--was but an impotent mockery.
For an hour he strode up and down the room with flushed face and limbs that shook beneath him. Natt came home from the vicarage, put in his horse, and turned into the kitchen--now long deserted for the night. He heard the restless footstep backward and forward, and began to wonder if anything further had gone wrong. At last he ventured upstairs, opened noiselessly the door, and found his master with a face aflame and a look of frenzy. But the curious young rascal with the sleepy eyes had not time to proffer his disinterested services before he was hunted out with an oath. He returned to the kitchen with a settled conviction that somewhere in that mysterious chamber his master kept a capacious cupboard for strong drink.
Like master, like man: Natt brewed himself an ample pint of hot ale, pulled off his great boots, and drew up to warm himself before the remains of a huge fire.
Hugh Ritson"s bedroom opened off his sitting-room. He went to bed; he tried to sleep, but no sleep came near him; he tossed about for an hour, rose, walked the room again, then went to bed once more.
He was feeling the first pangs of honest remorse. A worse man would have accommodated himself more speedily to the altered conditions when he found that he had pursued a phantasm. To do this erring man justice, he writhed under it. A better man would have fled from it. If, at the outset, if when the first step in the descent had been taken, he had seen clearly that villainy lay that way, he would not have gone further. But now he had gone too far. To go on were as easy as to go back; and go on he must.
While he honestly believed that Greta was half-sister to the man known to the world as Paul Ritson and his brother, he could have stood aside and witnessed without flinching the ceremony that was to hold them forever together and apart. Then without remorse he could have come down and separated them, and seen that woman die of heart"s hunger who had starved to death the great love he bore her. There would have been a stern retribution in that, and the voice of nature would have whispered him that he did well.
But when it was no longer possible to believe that Greta and Paul were anything to each other, the power of sophistry collapsed, and retribution sunk to revenge.
He might go on, but there could be no self-deception. The blind earthworms of malice might delude themselves if they liked, but he could see, and he must face the truth. If ever he did what he had proposed to do, then he was a scoundrel, and a conscious scoundrel!
Hugh Ritson leaped out of his bed. The perspiration rolled in big beads from his forehead. His tongue grew thick and stiff in his mouth. The great veins in his neck swelled.
Without knowing whither he went, he walked out of his own into his mother"s room. A candle still burned on the table. The fire had smoldered out. A servant-maid sat by the bedside with head aslant, sleeping the innocent sleep. He approached the bed. His mother was breathing softly. She had fallen into a doze; the pale face was very quiet; the weary look of the worn cheeks was smoothed out; the absent eyes were lightly closed. Closed, too, on the rough world was the poor soul that was vexed by it.