"Once more I am free!" was her last exultant thought before she slept.

"If I keep Victor at bay for a few days, I shall be off and away with _him_; and without those doc.u.ments Victor is practically powerless! If he gets another certificate, Joan Thorne might have been any one--some one married under an a.s.sumed name. He has nothing to support his a.s.sertions!"

CHAPTER XVIII

When Joan awoke after a few hours' slumber, it was to a sense of racking headache and utter exhaustion. She could only vaguely feel, rather than remember, the crucial events of the previous night.

"A punishment for having dared to drug poor unfortunate Victor," she told herself, as Julie, after administering tea, left her alone in the darkened room. She could almost pity Victor Mercier, now that she had circ.u.mvented him by stealing those incriminating doc.u.ments, and thereby, if not entirely destroying, certainly weakening, his hold upon her.

"His headache, if he has one, as I expect he has--he looked awfully ill lying there under morphia--can hardly be worse than mine," she mused.

It was a long, weary day of pain. Towards evening, however, her suffering abated. "I will get up, Julie!" she said, when her faithful attendant came in on tiptoe for about the twentieth time. "But I will not go down. I will have some tea up here. Yes; you may bring me a little chicken--I think I could eat that. And--Julie--let me see--yes--one or two of the evening papers."

As the dull weight had lifted from her weary head, she had begun to think again--and the dominating as well as tormenting misgiving she had felt on the subject of her escapade of the previous evening was anent that bottle with drugged brandy in it, which, wrapped in brown paper, she had left in the darkened entry of a house situated in some street the other side of Trafalgar Square.

"I wonder who found it?" she uneasily asked herself. What would the finder think of his or her discovery? Would he or she be sufficiently idiotic to partake of the contents--and if he or she did?

She shuddered. "No one would!" was her mental comment. She consoled herself with memories of the extraordinary accounts she had read of narcotic-consumers. Still, of course, those had been the _habitues_, who had gradually become accustomed to the drugs. Why, oh, why had she not thought of pouring away the wretched stuff before she threw away the bottle? It would then have been empty and harmless.

She was interrupted in her self-reproach by the entrance of her maid with the tea-tray and the evening papers.

"Mademoiselle must really eat some-ting," said Julie, coaxingly, as she arranged the enticing tray on the table at her mistress' elbow--Joan was lying back wearily in a big easy chair. "The chicken is delicious, I can a.s.sure mademoiselle--I saw it cut myself--and the tea--just as mademoiselle likes it!"

She poured out the tea and prattled on. As Joan was just languidly uncovering the chicken, hardly giving any attention to the girl's flow of talk--she was speaking of the actress she had seen perform the night Joan first met Victor in the Regent's Park--a certain word half startled her from her reverie--the word "suicide." Then, in her strung-up, nervous state, with that bottle on her mind, she was at once on the alert.

"Who? What suicide?" she sharply asked. "Not the girl you saw act, and liked so much?"

"No, mademoiselle, her brother," returned Julie earnestly. "Poor girl!

Such an awful thing! Robert, who always reads the _journaux_ when they arrive--he airs them, you know, mademoiselle--told me, for he knows I admired this Vera Anerley. It seems she had returned from the theatre to find her brother lying on the sofa--quite dead--alone in the house!"

Joan had clenched her hands on the chair as she listened incredulously.

What a horrible coincidence, she thought, that Julie should have such a grotesquely parallel tale to tell her--with such a tragic conclusion, when only last night she had seen Victor Mercier lying in that deathly sleep on the sofa, also alone in the house.

"Very dreadful for her, indeed," she slowly said, striving to recover from what was almost a shock in the circ.u.mstances, and sipping her tea.

"Is the--the--story in one of those papers you have brought me?"

"Yes, mademoiselle! I can find it--Robert read it me--"

"Never mind! I will find it myself, presently," interrupted Joan. Then she sent the eager girl downstairs with a message that "she could not come down that evening; she had had no sleep, and was going to bed immediately"--a mission invented more to get rid of her than anything else.

What was it which made her spring up from the door and lock it, almost as it closed upon Julie? Why did she dart back to the table, seize the paper her maid had taken up and laid aside again at her bidding, and holding it in her trembling hands, scan its pages feverishly with her strained eyes--eyes almost blinded by intense fear?

It was more an awful sense of certainty than mere dread. As she found the paragraph she sought, she fell limply into a chair, and staring madly at the cruel words, told herself it was no surprise. No! She had known something terrible had happened--all through those hours of cruel physical pain--she had known it!

"I knew it, I knew it!" she gasped, as for a third time she read the fatal words, with a mad hope that she was under a delusion.

"MYSTERIOUS DEATH IN HAYTHORN STREET, S.W.

"A tragic occurrence of more than ordinary public interest occurred in Haythorn Street, S.W., last night. The young actress, Miss Vera Anerley, whose attractive performances at the ---- Theatre we have already recorded, returned home to find her only and favourite brother, Victor a'Court, lying lifeless on the sofa in his room. The doctor, who was at once secured, p.r.o.nounced life extinct, and by certain appearances, suggested suicide. At the inquest some sensational evidence seems likely to be given."

"Yes," she thought, as she struggled to the window, flung it open, and leant against the lintel, gasping, fighting for breath in her threatened faintness--her eyes were unable to see properly, there was a surging and roaring in her ears--he was dead--dead! And she--legally his wife--had killed him.

"I poisoned him!" she mentally told herself, in a species of dazed, wondering incredulity. "I sent him to face G.o.d--all his sins on his soul--oaths on his lips! I am lost--eternally--for ever--lost!"

It seemed to her as if a huge, yawning gulf had arisen between her and all clean, honest human beings. Her past life lay the other side. She had done the worst of all deeds. She had destroyed a fellow creature.

"And--my own soul with him!" she groaned, in her extremity of fear and horror. The climax of her life seemed to her over, now that she knew--realized--the fact. After the first awful minutes, a dull, dead calm took the place of her overwhelming, hideous agony. She could see and hear again. As she leant against the wall she noted two smart young nurses in white, wheeling their perambulators out of the enclosure below. She saw one of them turn and lock the gate--she heard the key grate in the lock, and the other girl cry out sharply, "Master d.i.c.kie, leave it alone!" as a handsome little fellow in white knickers laid hold of the handle of the little carriage. Then a fox-terrier ran by, barking, and a tradesman's cart rattled swiftly along. A coster sent up his long-drawn-out cry in the distance. And--and--she was a murderess!

She laughed aloud, and then, frightened by the irresponsibility of her actions, she crawled slowly, miserably, across the room, gulped down a gla.s.s of water, and bathed her face. As she did so, she sickened--remembering how he had gasped--"water, water!" If only that choking prayer had told her that he was in danger--why, she would have risked discovery, disgrace, even the loss of Vansittart, to save the life she had endangered.

She recalled her former fancied love for the slim, handsome young foreigner. How she had admired him as he gazed fatuously at her in church! What a subtle, delicious excitement there had been in his veiled wooing, their hardly-obtained, schemed-for clandestine meetings!

Her mother's death had destroyed the glamour of the pseudo love affair.

Still, he had had sufficient compelling power over her emotions to bring her to marry him secretly. Then, of course, the thunderbolt had fallen which had destroyed her girlish pa.s.sion at a blow--the _expose_--the discovery that he was an absconding criminal.

"Still--nothing--nothing--can excuse me--from first to last," she acknowledged to herself, in despair. "I am--lost! Fit only to consort with the creatures who are for ever the enemies of G.o.d."

Just as she told herself this, with a pitiful sob, there was a knock at the door. "May I come in? I have something for you!" cried her uncle, cheerily.

One wild look round, then an almost savage instinct of self-preservation leaped up within her, forcing her into self-possession.

"Certainly," she said, crossing to the door and opening it.

"Are you better, dear? You don't look up to much," said Sir Thomas, gazing critically at her. "Vansittart has just been here, and left this for you. I had asked him to come in and have dinner with us. But hearing you were ill, he would not stay."

CHAPTER XIX

Sir Thomas Thorne was sincerely, honestly attached to his beautiful young orphan niece--perhaps the sentiment was all the stronger for being tinged with a latent remorse for his callous att.i.tude towards her dead parents in the still unforgotten past.

It was almost a shock to him to see Joan look so "awfully bad," as he termed it to himself. As he placed his paper package, a round, light one, on the nearest table in her bright, pretty bed-chamber, and seated himself by her, he wondered, a little anxiously, whether she was not perhaps ill with the insidious family disease which had "made short work" of his younger brother, her father. Ill-health would account for most of what he considered her "vagaries."

"I think you ought to see the doctor, Joan--really I do!" he exclaimed, with concern, as he gazed at her. She was white as her cream cashmere dressing-gown, and there were deep bistre circles round her more than usually brilliant eyes. "Let me send for him----"

"Oh, I am all right!" exclaimed Joan, easily. She wondered at this new, unwonted self-possession. It seemed to her as if she--she--Victor's slayer--were standing aside--apart--and watching the doings of the better self from which her past actions had for ever divorced her.

"What have you brought me?"

"Flowers, Vansittart said," replied her uncle, brightly. "I met him at the club, and he seemed as if he were to have a lonely evening--it was just one of those blank nights when one happens to have a lull in one's engagements--so I asked him to come in to dinner. He came, and brought this; but went away, as I said, when he heard you were out of sorts, saying he would call round and inquire in the morning."

He tore away the paper covering and disclosed a basket of blue and white flowers--a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a West-End florists. "Pretty, aren't they?" he said, handing them to Joan, his head admiringly on one side.

"Very," she returned mechanically, making a pretence of appreciation.