When Janet, a doctor, and the Superintendent of Police arrived, it was to find Ellesborough sitting motionless beside the body, while the two girls, a blanched and shivering pair, watched for Janet at the door.
"Can you throw any light upon it, Sir?" said the Superintendent, respectfully, at last, when the Doctor had finished his examination, and still Ellesborough did not speak.
The Captain looked up.
"Her husband did it"--he said, quietly--"the man who was her husband."
A shudder of surprise ran through the room.
"Did I hear you right, Sir?" said the Superintendent. "Miss Henderson pa.s.sed for unmarried."
"She married a man called Roger Delane in Canada," said Ellesborough, in the same monotonous voice. "She divorced him--for cruelty and adultery--two years ago. A few days since he waylaid her in the dark, and threatened her. I didn"t know this till she wrote to me to-day. She said that she was afraid of him--that she thought he was mad--and I came over at once to see how I could protect her. We were engaged to be married."
The Superintendent drew a furtive hand across his eyes. Then he produced his note-book, and took the evidence in order. Hastings came in from a lantern search of the farm-buildings, the hill-side, and the nearest fringes of wood, to report that he had found no trace of the murderer.
The news, however, had by this time spread through the village, and the kitchen was full of persons who had hurried to the farm--Old Halsey and John Dempsey among them--to tell what they knew, and had seen.
Ellesborough roused himself from his stupor, and came to a.s.sist the police in the preliminary examination of witnesses and inspection of the farm. Once he and Janet pa.s.sed each other, but they did not attempt to speak. Each indeed shrank from the other. A word of pity would have been merely a deepened agony.
But the farm emptied at last. A body of police had been sent out to scout the woods, to watch the roads and the railway stations. Ellesborough and Hastings had lifted the dead woman upon a temporary bier which had been raised in the sitting-room. Then Hastings had drawn Ellesborough away, and Janet, with a village mother, had rendered the last offices.
When Ellesborough re-entered, he found a white vision, lying in a bare room, from which all traces of ordinary living had been as far as possible cleared away. Only the Christmas roses which Rachel had gathered that afternoon were now on her breast. Her hands were folded over them. Her beautiful hair lay unbound on the pillow--Janet"s trembling hands had refused to cut it.
At sight of Ellesborough, Janet rose from her kneeling posture beside the dead, as white and frozen almost as Rachel herself--with something in her hand--a small book. She held it out to Ellesborough.
"The Superintendent asked my leave to go into her room--in case there was anything which could help them. He brought me this. She had been writing in it--He asked me to look at it. I did--just enough to see--that no one had any right to it--but you. She wrote it I think about an hour before you came. It was her last word."
"I have her letters also"--said Ellesborough, almost inaudibly, as he took the book--"You brought it--you kind woman! You were her good angel--G.o.d reward you!"
Then at last a convulsion of weeping showed in Janet"s face. She laid her hand in his, and went noiselessly away.
Ellesborough sat beside his dead love all night. The farm was peaceful again after that rush of the Furies through it, which had left this wreck behind. Rachel"s diary and letter lay before him. They were as her still living voice in his ears, and as the words sank into memory they pierced through all the rigidities of a n.o.ble nature, rending and kneading as they went. He recalled his own solitary hour of bitterness after her letter reached him. The story it contained had gone very hard with him, though never for one moment had he even in thought forsaken her. There was some comfort in that. But the memory which upheld him, which alone kept him from despair, was the memory of her face at the window, the sense still lingering in his own physical pulses of her young clinging life in his arms, of the fluttering of her poor heart against his breast, the exquisite happiness of her kiss--the kiss which death cut short.
No--he had not failed her. That was all he had to live by. And without it, it seemed to him, he could not have endured to live.
The two girls had sobbed themselves to sleep at last. But Janet did not sleep. Tears came naturally as the hours went by--tears and the agonized relief of prayer to one for whom prayer was a daily need of the soul. And in the early morning there flooded in upon her a strange consciousness of Rachel"s spirit in hers--a strange suspicion that after all the G.o.ds had not wrought so hardly with Rachel. A few days before she had attended the funeral in the village church, of a young wife just happily married, who had died in three days, of virulent influenza. Never had the words of the Anglican service pleased her so little. What mockery--what fulsome mockery--to thank G.o.d because "it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister, out of the miseries of this troublesome world." But the words recurred to her now--mysteriously--with healing power. Had it been after all "deliverance" for Rachel, from this "troublesome world," and the temptations that surround those who are not strong enough for the wrestle that Fate sets them--that a G.o.d appoints them? She had met her lover--after fear and anguish; and had known him hers, utterly and wholly hers, for one supreme moment. And from that height--that perfection--G.o.d had called her. No lesser thing could ever touch her now.
Such are the moments of religious exaltation which cheat even the sharpest griefs of men and women. Janet would decline from her Pisgah height only too soon; but, for the time, thoughts like these gave her the strength to bear.
When the house began to move again, she went down to Ellesborough. She drew him into the kitchen--made a fire, and brought him food. Presently she found calm enough to tell him many details of the previous days. And the man"s sound nature responded. Once he grasped her hand, and kissed it--as though he thanked her dumbly again, for himself and Rachel. It seemed to Janet indeed, as she sat by him, that Rachel had left her a trust. She took it up instinctively--from this first desolate morning.
For there are women set apart for friendship--Janet was one of them--as others are set apart for love.
And with the first break of light on the new November day, the search parties in the hills came upon what they sought. Some one remembered the deserted hut--and from that moment the hunt was easy. Finally in the dripping heart of the wood the pursuers found the murderer lying face downwards in front of the dead fire, with the revolver beside him with which he had taken first Rachel"s life, and then his own. Some sheets of paper were scattered near him, on which he had written an incoherent and grandiloquent confession. But of such acts there is no real explanation.
They are the product of that black seed in human nature which is born with a man, and flowers in due time, through devious stages, into such a deed as that which destroyed Rachel Henderson.