"Lettice! My Lettice!"
A harsh laugh grated on his ears. It came from the other side of the tree, and Alan sprang in the direction of the sound. He need not have hastened, for his wife had no desire to conceal her presence. She was coming forward to meet him; and there, in the middle of the Green, shrouded in almost complete darkness, the two stood face to face.
"Tiens, mon ami; te voila!"
She was in her mocking mood--certain to be quiet for a few minutes, as Alan told himself the moment he recognized her. What was she doing here?
He had thought that she did not know where Lettice lived; how had she discovered the place? It did not occur to him that his own folly had betrayed the secret; on the contrary, he blessed the instinct which had brought him to the spot just when he was wanted. "A spirit in my feet hath led me to thy chamber window, sweet!" All this pa.s.sed through his mind in a couple of seconds.
"Yes, I am here. And you! How came you here?"
"Nothing more simple. I came on my feet. But you walked quick, my dear; I could hardly keep up with you at times."
"You followed me!"
"Yes, I followed you--all the way from Alfred Place. I wanted so much to know where she lived, and I said, "He shall show me. He, who would not for worlds that I should know--he will be my sign-post." Pouf! you men are stupid creatures. I must be cunning with you, my good husband who would leave me to starve--who would divorce me, and marry this woman, and cut the hated Cora out of your life. But no, my poor child, it shall not be. So long as we live, we two, Cora will never desert you. It is my only consolation, that I shall be able to follow every step of your existence as I followed you to-night, without your knowing where I am, or at what moment I may stand before you."
"Let us walk," said Alan, "and talk things over. Why stand here?"
"You are afraid that I shall make another scandal, and rouse the virtuous Lettice from her pillow, with the sound of her name screamed out in the night? Ha, ha! How the poor coward trembles! Have no fear!
Twice in a week your brutal police have seized me, and I do not love their kind attentions. Now and then I may defy them, when I need an excitement of that kind; but not to-night. To-night I mean to be clever, and show you how I can twist a cold-blooded Englishman round my finger.
If you go, then I will scream--it is a woman"s bludgeon, my child, as her tongue is her dagger. Bah! be quiet and listen to me. You shall not divorce me, for if you try I will accuse you of all sorts of things--basenesses that will blast your name for ever."
"I am not afraid of you," said Alan. "For anything I know, you have a pistol under your cloak--shoot me. I took you to love and cherish, and you have made my life a h.e.l.l. What good is it? Shoot!"
"No; that makes a noise. In Paris I would shoot you, for it is you who have destroyed my life. But in London you do not understand these things, so that I must act differently. Listen! If you try to divorce me, and do not pay me my money, I have one or two little pistol-shots a l"anglaise which will suit you perfectly. Shall I tell you what I would say, to anyone who would listen to me--in court, in the street, anywhere?"
"As you please."
"First, that you fired at me at Culoz, and that I can bring forward witnesses of the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination."
"That is pure nonsense; I am not to be frightened by such child"s play."
"Second, so far as the divorce is concerned, that whatever my offence may have been, you have condoned it. Do you not understand, my friend?
Did I not find shelter in your rooms in Montagu Place? I would have a good lawyer, who would know how to make the most of that."
"Have you nothing stronger to rely on?"
"Listen; you shall tell me. My third pistol-shot is this--that you were wont to make private a.s.signations with Miss Lettice Campion, and that you had been seen dropping from her window, here in Brook Green, at midnight. What do you think of that, for example?"
"Vile wretch!" said Alan. "Your malice has robbed you of your senses.
Who would believe you?"
"Do not be a child. Are you English, and do you ask who would believe a woman telling these tales of a man? Do you not know that men are ruined every day in England by the lies of women? The better the man, the more abandoned the woman, the more incredible her lies, so much the more certain is his condemnation. Bah, you know it! I should not hesitate about the lies, and, if I made them sufficiently repulsive, your n.o.ble countrymen would not hesitate to believe them. Do you doubt it? What think you of my plan?"
He made no answer; he was trying to command himself.
"Now, tell me! Shall I have my money as usual?"
"Before I left the house," he said, "I had resolved that the money ought to be paid to you. So long as you are my wife, you ought not to starve."
"Good! It is an annuity for life!"
"No. I would give a hand or an eye to be free from you."
"They would be useless to me, my dear. Would you give the fair fame of Lettice? It will cost no less."
"Let that pa.s.s!"
"Yes, we will let that pa.s.s. Then, I receive my money as usual?"
"Go to Mr. Larmer to-morrow; he will pay it."
"I hate this Mr. Larmer--he is an animal without manners. But no matter.
I am glad you are reasonable, my friend. You buy a respite for a few weeks. I shall forget you with all my heart--until I have a migraine, and suddenly remember you again. But it is too cheap; I cannot live decently on this paltry sum. Good-bye, my child--and gare aux-migraines!"
She was gone, and Alan was left alone. He had dug his nails into the palms of his hands, in the effort to restrain himself, until the blood came; and long after the mocking fiend had departed he sat silent on the bench, half-stupefied with rage and despair.
Was he really the coward that he felt himself, to listen to her shameless threats, and tremble at the thought of her machinations?
Lettice had told him that she was not afraid; but ought he not to be afraid for her, and do all that was possible to avert a danger from her which he would not fear on his own account?
Ah, if he could only take counsel with her, how wise and brave she would be; how he would be encouraged by her advice and strengthened by her sympathy! But he knew that it was impossible to call to his aid the woman whom it was his first duty to protect from annoyance. She should never know the torture he was enduring until it had came to an end, and he could tell it with his own lips as an indifferent story of the past.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A SLEEPY NOOK.
Three miles from Angleford, on the other side of the river, and hidden away by trees on every side, sleeps the lazy little village of Birchmead. So lazy is the place--so undisturbed have been its slumbers, from generation to generation, that it might puzzle the most curious to think why a village should be built there at all. There is no ford through the river, and, though a leaky ferryboat makes occasional journeys from one side to the other, the path which leads to the bank is too precipitous for any horse to tread. The only route by which a cart can enter Birchmead branches off from the Dorminster Road, across a quarter of a mile of meadows: and when the gate of the first meadow is closed, the village is completely shut in on every side. The world scarcely knows it, and it does not know the world--its life is "but a sleep and a forgetting."
The place has a history of its own, which can be told in a couple of sentences. Two hundred years ago an eccentric member of the family to which the country-side belonged had chosen to set up here a little community on his own account, shaped on a model which, universally applied would doubtless regenerate the world. He built, out of stone, a farmhouse and barns, and a score of cottages for his working-men, and there he spent his life and his money, nursing for some thirty years his dream of hard work and perfect satisfaction. Then he died, and a farmer without his faith and wealth succeeded him, and the hamlet lost its originality, and became as much like other hamlets as its love of sleep and pride of birth would allow.
One thing saves it from desertion and extinction. It has a reputation, over half a county, for being one of the most healthy and life-prolonging spots in England. It certainly contains a remarkable number of old men and women, some of whom have come from the neighboring towns to end their lives in the weather-proof stone cottages and fertile allotments which remain at this day precisely as they were built and measured out by the philanthropic squire in the seventeenth century.
Other cottages have been run up in the meantime, and a few villas of a more pretentious character; but there is always a brisk compet.i.tion for the substantial domiciles, as snug and sound as any almshouse, which encircle the village green of Birchmead.
In one of these cottages Mrs. Bundlecombe found a refuge when Alan sent her away from London. It was in the occupation of an old friend with whom she had been on intimate terms at Thorley--a widow like herself, blessed by Heaven with a perennial love of flowers and vegetables, and recognized by all her neighbors as the best gardener and neatest housewife in the community. With Mrs. Chigwin, Alan"s aunt was happier than she had ever hoped to be again, and the only drawback to her felicity was the thought of her nephew"s troubles and solitude.
The next cottage to Mrs. Chigwin"s was inhabited by old Mrs. Harrington, the grandmother of Lettice"s first maid. There had been no love lost between Mrs. Bundlecombe and Mrs. Harrington, when they once lived in the same town. The grudge had arisen out of a very small matter. The bookseller"s" wife had sold a Bible to Mrs. Harrington, in the absence of her husband, for twopence more than Mr. Bundlecombe had demanded for the same book, from some common acquaintance of both parties to the bargain, on the previous day; and this common acquaintance having seen the book and depreciated it a few weeks later, the purchaser had an abiding sense of having been outrageously duped and cheated. She had come to the shop and expressed herself to this effect, in no moderate terms; and Mrs. Bundlecombe, whilst returning the twopence, had made some disparaging remarks on the other lady"s manners, meanness, dress, age, and general inferiority. The affront had never been quite forgotten on either side, and it was not without much ruffling of their mental plumage that the two old bodies found themselves established within a few yards of each other.
The squire"s cottages at Birchmead were detached, but their ample gardens had only a low wall between them, so that the neighboring occupiers could not well avoid an occasional display of their mutual disposition, whether good or bad. It was close upon winter when Mrs.
Bundlecombe arrived in the village, and very wet weather, so that there was no immediate clashing of souls across the garden wall; but in November there came a series of fine warm days, when no one who had a garden could find any excuse for staying indoors. Accordingly, one morning Mrs. Chigwin, who knew what was amiss between her friends, seeing Mrs. Harrington pacing the walk on the other side of the wall, determined to bring about a meeting, and, if possible, a reconciliation.
"Elizabeth, my dear, that gravel looks perfectly dry. You must come out in the sun, and see the last of my poor flowers."
"Martha Chigwin," said her visitor, with a solemn face; "do you see that woman?"
"Yes, I see her. What then?"