"The side room" was a chamber leading from the hall, and conducting by a second door to the offices. It was used for humbler visitors, messengers who waited answers, dressmakers and the like. In the hot weather the window was generally open. "If they have shut it, I must go in by the usual way," she thought.
It was not shut. With a little spring she balanced herself on the sill, and slipped down upon the floor, to find that the room was not empty as she had expected. A slight person in deep mourning, who had been seated, rose and confronted her.
Joan stared at the white, stern, but beautiful face in sick dismay.
This was the woman who had given her the flowers--the posy with the strange, awful threat written on the label, when she was about to enter the bridegroom"s carriage as she left the church after her wedding.
"I see--you know me," said the girl. She spoke with icy composure. "I have come to speak to you of your danger."
The two looked into each other"s eyes unflinchingly--Vera with a cold condemnatory stare; Joan with the apathy of abject despair.
"Come this way, please," she said. Her garments dripped slowly on the polished floor; she glanced at the drops with a curious wonder, then led the way along a pa.s.sage, and held open a baize door. In another moment the two were shut into Joan"s boudoir, and Joan waved the girl that her wretched, so-called husband had loved, towards a chair.
She shook her head, impatiently. "I meant to wait to see you until you were in the dock," she began. "Your whole doings are known, from the first letter you wrote to poor Victor, to the hour I saw you in Haythorn Street, coming out of the house after you had poisoned him and left him to die! I had meant to tell all I knew to the detectives, but they came after me. All is complete--you may be arrested at any moment. Then will come your trial, your condemnation--your hanging. I expect you have dreamt the rope was round your neck; at least, if you have any feeling left in you. Murderess that you are, you have ruined my life, you have killed my dearest love, who loved me, not you--and I was gloating over the idea of your being hanged by the neck till you were dead, when I dreamt of my Victor. I dreamt a shadow--his shadow--bent over me, and said those very words that I thought meant your doom, "I will repay, saith the Lord!" I awoke, and knew that I was to come and warn you, that you may escape."
She stopped short, gazing curiously at Joan"s drawn, ashen features, features like those of an expressionless corpse. Her eyes, too, were dull, wandering.
"Escape?" she said, stupidly. Then she dropped into a chair, feeling half dead, half paralyzed. The thunder rolled faintly in the distance.
It seemed to her that she was still seated in the boat, rowing, rowing, and was dreaming this wretched misery.
"Yes, escape!" the other repeated, bitterly. "You must confess everything to your husband--mind! everything! Then, perhaps, as I, whom you have injured for life, have had mercy on you, he may! At all events, he may do something to save your neck. You have but a few hours"
safety--"
She started and stopped short. The door was flung open, and Vansittart entered, briskly, eagerly. He looked from one to the other, then went up to Joan, and reverentially lifting her hand, kissed it.
"Who is this lady, dearest?" he asked, gazing steadfastly at Vera.
CHAPTER x.x.xV
"I am Vera Anerley," said the pale girl, speaking in clear tones of deadly meaning. "I have come to tell your wife that the case against her is complete; that she may be arrested at any moment for the murder of Victor Mercier!"
Joan gave a faint cry, and buried her wet, dishevelled head in Vansittart"s coat-sleeve.
"Hush, darling, I am here!" he tenderly said. Then, supporting Joan"s fainting form, which was already a dead weight, he looked with cool scorn, with stern defiance, at the slender, black-clad figure, at the white, miserable face with those menacing eyes.
"Case, indeed," he exclaimed with scathing contempt. "A jealous woman"s vengeance, you should say! But your miserable plot to destroy my injured wife, woman, will succeed in injuring no one but yourself. I have this morning learnt every detail of the trumped-up charge, and given my instructions for the defence. If, indeed, the affair will go any further after my deposition on oath that on the night that--man--died--my future wife was with me until she met her maid to return home. And now, since you have succeeded in making Lady Vansittart ill, I must ask you to quit the house--I will have you driven to the station, if you like--"
Vera interrupted him with a groan.
"I forgot!" she wailed. "I forgot--a man will perjure himself to save the woman he loves! But your lies will fail to save her, my lord!
Husbands and wives are nothing in law, in a murder case! If you want to save her, you must take her away!"
With a sob she turned on her heel and went out. Vansittart gathered Joan in his arms, and sinking into a chair tried to kiss her back to life. "My darling, I know all! I will save you!" he repeated pa.s.sionately. What could she have been doing? She must have been exposed to the whole fury of the storm. Had the vindictive creature killed her? He had thought himself hopelessly crushed, body and soul, when he arrived at his lawyers" to find the distracted Sir Thomas with his awful tale of the charge to be brought against his niece, which Paul Naz had in compa.s.sion forewarned him of. But the sight of his darling--who looked dead or dying--who lay like a stone in his arms and hardly seemed to breathe--brought back life and energy, if it augmented his despair.
Her garments were wringing wet--what a frightful state she was in! With a half-frantic wonder what he had best do, he lifted her in his arms, so strong in his anguish that she seemed a mere featherweight, and carrying her upstairs to her room by a side staircase that was little used, laid her on the bed, and rang for Julie. While a man was despatched in hot haste for the doctor, the two cut and dragged off Joan"s soaking garments, and vainly endeavoured to chafe some warmth into her icy limbs. But at last insensibility had come to the rescue of Victor Mercier"s unfortunate dupe. Joan lay inert and senseless, and when the old doctor who had attended a couple of generations of Vansittarts in their Oxfordshire home came in, his wonted cheeriness changed to gravity.
Nothing could be done but wait patiently for the return of consciousness, and telegraph for nurses. He could make no prognosis whatever at that stage, but that Lady Vansittart"s health was in a critical condition.
"Do you mean that she may not recover?" asked Vansittart. They had adjourned to Joan"s boudoir, leaving Julie and the housekeeper in temporary charge of the patient.
Old Doctor Walters shrugged his shoulders and raised his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows. Vansittart was answered.
"When I tell you that I hope to G.o.d my wife will die, you will understand there is something terrible in all this!" he exclaimed--and the tone of his voice, as much as the meaning conveyed by such a speech, made the old man sit up in his chair aghast.
But he was still more horrified when the unhappy man he had known and tended since childhood told him the miserable story as he had gathered it from Joan herself, and from the dreadful tale told to Sir Thomas in its entirety by Paul Naz: the tale of a romantic schoolgirl secretly wooed and married by a man who immediately afterwards absconded, as he was "wanted" by the police on a charge of theft and fraud: her foolish dream dispelled when she learnt that fact, hiding her secret from the uncle and aunt who had adopted her; then, as the years went by and the husband-in-name made no sign, hoping against hope, and giving way to her great love for a man who adored her. Then, just as they were promised to each other, the man"s reappearance with threats of exposure, his compelling her visits to his rooms, and her succ.u.mbing to the temptation of mixing morphia in his brandy. The one item unknown was Joan"s motive for drugging Mercier. So the case looked terribly black to Vansittart and his friend in need, his good old doctor.
Good--and tenderhearted, for at once he offered to see them through their trouble--to the end.
"If the police appear with a warrant they cannot refuse to listen to me," he said. "So I shall take up my abode here, and leave my patients to my partner and our a.s.sistant."
The honeymoon was waning in the most dismal of fashions. The house was wrapped in gloom. Joan had recovered consciousness to suffer agonies of pain, and fall into the delirium of fever. The prolonged chill of being the sport of the storm, with so terrible a shock to follow, had resulted in pneumonia. A specialist was summoned from town. He gave no hope.
When his fiat was p.r.o.nounced a look of relief came upon Vansittart"s worn, lined features. The specialist went away wondering, but old Doctor Walters understood.
Then the stricken husband took up his position at his wife"s pillow, and banished every one. Whatever his life might contain in the future of hideous retrospection, for those few short hours left he would watch his erring darling yield up her soul to the great Judge who alone knew the frail clay he had made, without any human soul witnessing his agony.
Joan had been raving, madly, incoherently of the past and present, tossing and writhing, now and then clamouring and groaning. But a few minutes after Vansittart had banished the nurses and taken up his position by her side, she seemed to grow calmer.
Was it possible that at least she might die in peace, free from those horrible fantasies, those cruel pains?
He watched her anxiously hour after hour. As the delirium abated the restlessness ceased, and she seemed to fall asleep. He had come to her at midnight. When the grey dawn crept into the room Joan was asleep, and as he lay and gazed wearily at her, his head drooped until it rested on the pillow.
After a succession of wild, tormenting dreams--a purgatory of horrible physical sufferings--Joan slept. She was vaguely conscious of Vansittart"s nearness, vaguely sensible that relief had come. The sleep was like heaven after h.e.l.l.
Then at last another kind of dream was added to her sense of slumber.
She felt that something greater and n.o.bler had been added to her life, and that it was all around and about. In the tremendous vastness and solidity of the new influence all seemed petty, small; she knew that she, Vansittart, Mercier, Vera, all were but dancing specks in a gorgeous sunlight.....
Vansittart awoke with a start, a feeling of guilt, fear, and a pain in his arm from some heavy weight.
Then a horrible cry startled the nurse who was keeping vigil in the next room. She rushed in and up to the bed.
The following day three stalwart men descended from the quick train from London and chartered a fly to drive them to Lord Vansittart"s.
"A fine place," said one, almost regretfully--he was young, with a fresh colour, and his errand seemed ghastly to him--as they drove in at the open gates, past a lodge which was to all appearance empty.
"Yes," said the eldest of the trio. "Dear me," he added, looking out as the fly pa.s.sed out of the lime avenue. "What a melancholy looking house! All the blinds down, too!"
Arriving at the hall-door, the oldest and sternest-looking emerged and asked to see Lord Vansittart. The porter looked impressed, but unhesitatingly admitted him, and conducted him to the library, leaving him with a grave "I will tell his lordship."
"Strange; he did not ask who I was or what I wanted," murmured the man to himself. The silence in the great mansion was almost oppressive. He heard the servant"s footsteps, distant voices, the clang of a closing door, then a slight pattering, which grew gradually more distinct, and seemed to keep pace with the beats of his pulse. Advancing footsteps!
"They have heard, and they have all gone; the man is coming back with some fine tale or another," he told himself, exasperatedly. As the door opened he turned with ready resentment, which gave place to a startled, uncomfortable sensation as in the ghastly man in deep black who entered he recognised Lord Vansittart.
"I am very sorry, my Lord, but I have a most painful duty to perform,"
he began, taking the warrant from his pocket. "I am compelled to arrest Lady Vansittart for the wilful murder of Victor Mercier on the --th of June last."