The blue flowers were forget-me-nots. To her strung-up imagination they looked like innocent child-eyes gazing at her with reproach. Once she and Victor had sat by a stream, and she had picked some from the bank and fastened them in his coat--he always liked a "b.u.t.ton-hole"--Bah!

These horrible thoughts!--What was her uncle saying? "He said he thought you looking ill. He wondered I had not sent to the doctor before."

"He--who?" asked Joan, sharply. "Lord Vansittart? What has he got to do with it?"

"There! You are going to faint," exclaimed her uncle, alarmed and annoyed, as she paled to lividity, sank back in her chair, and thrust the basket into his hands. Oh, the irony of fate! She had seen the exact counterpart among the flowers of the thick, small-petalled white blossom in Victor Mercier's coat that terrible last night--when she poisoned him. The perfume recalled it all--the waxen, deathly face, the still, silent form--the little room with the open window.

"It is the scent--it makes me feel faint when I am well, the odour of daphne, or tuberose, or whatever it is!" she stammered, forcing herself to speak with a gigantic effort. "And when one has a headache like mine it is worse."

"I will put them outside," said he, consolingly. She watched him as he did so, clumsily trying to tread softly as he went to the door. Poor, kind uncle! If he knew--if he knew!

"Do you know," he began, scanning her livid features with solicitude as he returned, and resuming his seat, pitched his voice in a low undertone, which only succeeded in producing a hoa.r.s.e croak, so unlike his own cheery voice that in her hysterical, strained state she barely repressed a shriek of agonized laughter. "I am almost sure, indeed, I may say I feel convinced, that this headache of yours is a nervous attack brought on by seeing those waxworks last night. I am sure you went into the 'Chamber of Horrors,' and looked at the murderers. I did when I was about your age, and it got on my nerves. My opinion is, that that making effigies of terrible criminals who have dared to take their fellow-creatures' lives, and exhibiting them for money, is wrong, and ought to be forbidden. The law is right when it orders such human monsters to be buried within the prison, and their bodies consumed with quicklime. They ought not to be remembered! Every trace of their awful crimes ought to be instantly obliterated--ah! I thought as much! You shudder at the very recollection of those wicked faces! A delicate, innocent young girl like you ought not to go to such places! What? You did not go into the 'Chamber of Horrors?'"

"I don't think so," stammered Joan faintly, closing her eyes, and wondering how long this crucifixion of her soul would last. All her life? "But--what do you mean--the bodies consumed by quicklime? In the prison?"

"Never mind, we won't talk of such things!" said he, cheerfully.

"Oh--poor little cold hand!" He was startled by the deathly icy touch of the hand he had taken between his warm palms. "Ah! There is your aunt! Come in, my dear! I was just telling Joan that I shall insist upon her seeing the doctor----"

"I am sure you will insist upon nothing of the kind, Thomas," said Lady Thorne, entering in her handsome, sober black dinner-dress, redeemed from too great plainness by the diamond pins in the black lace head-dress crowning her iron-grey hair, and the pearl and diamond necklet and brooches around and about her lace-encircled throat, and seeming to bring in a matter-of-fact atmosphere from the outer world of ordinary commonplace, which jarred upon and supported Joan at one and the same time. "Joan has nothing the matter with her but a little neuralgia. She wants a good long sleep, and she will be as well as ever to-morrow morning. You leave her to me, and don't meddle with what you men, however clever you may be, know nothing about!" And Lady Thorne, who remembered her own girlish "attacks" during her love anxieties, and who had no mind for visits from a doctor who might order change of air and nip the engagement with Lord Vansittart in the bud, bustled her husband off, and administered a tonic to her niece in the form of a good-humoured scolding.

"Men always want to make mountains out of mole-hills, doctors too--they are all alike!" she ended by saying, after she had chidden her for not forcing herself to eat and drink. "You did not sleep! Of course not!

Well, I promise you you shall to-night!"

She rang for some clear soup and wine, coaxed Joan to consume both, then, after herself "seeing her to bed" and administering a good dose of chloral--a drug she had in her amateur medical studies found was in the opinion of certain authorities antidotal where there was a consumptive tendency--sat by her until she was asleep.

And Joan slept--heavily. Only towards morning was her slumber visited by dreams. The one which arrived with the grey dawn, when the birds began to chirp in the trees below, was almost a nightmare.

She dreamt that she was a prisoner in the dock, being tried for the wilful murder of Victor Mercier, alias a'Court. The jury were filing back into the box amid an awful silence in the crowded court. She saw each one of her twelve umpires, scanned each sober, serious face, with a horrible presage of coming doom. She heard the sentence--"Are you all agreed upon your verdict?" and the reply--the terrible fiat, "Guilty."

She saw the wizened features of the aged judge in his scarlet panoply a.s.sume a grim and solemn expression, as, donning the three-cornered "black cap"--a head-covering which gave him a grotesque, masquerading appearance--he addressed her. At first she was too dazed to understand; then, the concluding adjuration seemed to smite her ears, and stab her heart.

"This man loved you, and made you his wife. A wife should be one to stand by the man she marries 'for better, for worse'; which means that when she takes the oath to do so, she accepts the man's sins with the man--she becomes one with him, half of himself. There are wives who have died for husbands as faulty, perhaps more so, than your unhappy victim. But you! What have you done? When you had money at your command, did you seek him out? Did you even endeavour to discover what had become of him? No! Instead, you, as it seems by the evidence we have heard--incontrovertible evidence of trustworthy witnesses--were planning a bigamous marriage and secret elopement with another man; and when, just before the consummation of your guilty plot, your lawful husband appeared, you were tempted to get rid of the obstacle to its accomplishment, and to kill him. How you executed the terrible deed we have heard. You have had every chance which the goodness of your fellow creatures, and their kindness to you has been almost unexampled, could provide. You have had, I fear, more mercy than you deserve. For myself, I cannot hold out any hope that your misguided and guilty life can possibly be spared." Then Joan listened in mute agony to the sentence which condemned her to be "hanged by the neck till she was dead"; she heard the awful prayer, uttered with deep feeling by an aged man to whom Death could not long remain a stranger, "and may G.o.d Almighty have mercy on your soul!" and all became a blank.

A blank--but not for long. She seemed to be roused by the tolling of a bell, and looking around, found herself in the condemned cell. Some one was strapping her with small leathern straps which hurt her, and in reply to her miserable, pathetic appeal, "oh, please don't," the man dryly said it would be better for her to be submit to be tightly bound--"it will be over all the sooner." It? What? Then she saw serious averted faces--they belonged to men who were forming into line--she heard the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," she caught the gleam of a white surplice.

She struggled--fiercely--madly--and awoke.

Awoke--bathed in sweat from head to foot--her pulses beating wildly--gasping, choking--but alive--free--free!

There was her dear familiar room, grey in the early morning light; the bell was tolling from a neighbouring monastic church--she was alive--alive! But--but--it might--come--true--that dream--

"Oh G.o.d, it must not!" she exclaimed, flinging herself out of bed and upon her knees. "It would not be just! You know, my G.o.d, I did not mean it! You know what he was! You must not let me be hanged!"

CHAPTER XX

Vera Anerley had never acted better than that night when Joan secretly visited Victor. Some subtle excitement--born, perhaps, of an unusually pa.s.sionate kiss of her beloved's when she left him alone in the house to interview the man he had spoken of--was perhaps the spur which had produced an access of fervour. Perhaps it was the approaching separation. Victor had announced that he would start on a journey in a few days. She herself was leaving for the North with the travelling company to which she was attached.

In any case, her disappointed would-be lover, the young stage-manager, came up to her with a smile at her final exit--a thing he had not done since she was betrayed into pushing him roughly away when he attempted an embrace--and condescendingly said a few words of praise, adding a proposal to introduce "a friend of his," who had been "much pleased."

"He is the dramatic critic of the _Parthenon_!" he pompously added, surprised when Vera knitted her brow and shook her head.

"You are very kind, Mr. Howard, but I must be getting home," she pleaded. What was the critic of the Parthenon to her in comparison with half-an-hour's _tete-a-tete_ with Victor? she asked herself, as she escaped into her dressing-room, leaving "Mr. Howard" anathematizing her "folly," and vindictively prophesying to himself that, in spite of her beauty and talent, she would "never rise an inch" in her profession.

"Mother," as she called Victor's mother, her late father's second wife, was out with the mild student, Mr. Dobbs, at the hospital entertainment.

She wanted to be home first!

"Put away all my things for me, won't you, Polly?" she said to the daughter of the veteran actress who took old women parts, and who travelled with the company as wardrobe keeper. "Thanks! You are a good sort!" and with a hasty hug of the girl she darted out of the dressing-room, along the pa.s.sage to the stage-door, and into the cool, quiet alley.

Then she ran--into the still glaring, thronged thoroughfare--it was a neighbourhood whose inhabitants kept late hours, and "did their shopping" mostly at night--hailed a loitering hansom, and was driven to Haythorn Street. Eagerly glancing out at the house, she had noticed a tall lady with a swinging gait coming along. She noticed her as hardly the kind of feminine visitor frequenting Haythorn Street, and because she seemed to swerve now and then. When she stopped and seemed to watch her alight and pa.s.s into the house, Vera wondered if the gentleman Victor expected--he had hinted that his visitor was one moving in higher circles--had brought her with him, and that she was waiting for him outside.

"But I suppose a gentleman would hardly bring a lady here at this hour of the night, still less leave her in the street," was her second and more lucid thought, as she opened the hall door with her latch-key, pa.s.sed in, and closing it, listened.

If there was any one with Victor upstairs, she knew she would hear voices. But the stillness was that of an empty house. As she stood, she heard the same loud, sober ticking of the kitchen clock which had seemed so almost terrible to Joan in her awful anxiety. Then came a plaintive "mew" from within the little front parlour--hers and her step-mother's. "Why, Kitty! Who could have shut you in?" she exclaimed, and she opened the door. The tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat--an old one troubled with a perpetually-moulting coat, ran out as she did so and rubbed itself against her old winsey "theatre skirt," purring loudly. "Victor must have shut her in," she mused, as she went slowly upstairs to find him.

Where was he? For the door of Mr. Mackenzie's, the absent lodger's, sitting-room stood open--and there was no sound within. Entering, for the first moment she deemed the room empty. Then she noted the two tumblers, one half full of dark liquid, and the gla.s.s jug of water, on the table--and her glance travelling further, alighted on the motionless form of her lover on the sofa.

"Asleep?" she wondered. It seemed strange--the mercurial, ever wide-awake Victor--so early in the evening, as he considered evenings, too! Still, she went towards him on tiptoe. "I will wake him with a kiss," she thought, with an incipient glow of pa.s.sion as she imagined him rousing from sleep to clasp her close and fasten those adored lips on hers with that warm, possessive kiss of his which she felt was unlike every other kiss which had been given and taken since Adam's fresh lips first touched the ripe, yet innocent mouth of Eve in Paradise.

When she reached him she gave a cry of terror. Something was wrong! He never looked livid, sunken, his eyes half-open, like that!

She seized his hand and gasped with relief; for it was warm and limp; then she stooped and kissed his brow. It was damp and cold as clay after a frost.

"He has fainted!" she wildly thought. "I must call some one!"

She flew downstairs, intending to ask help next door, in spite of a disagreement with its proprietress after a too intimate acquaintance of the moulting tortoise-sh.e.l.l with some fowls kept for laying purposes in the backyard; but as she opened the hall door, her stepmother and the thin, amiable Mr. Dobbs had just come up.

"Why, Vera! You are home early," began Mrs. Wright, surprised.

"But--why--child! what is it?" She stopped short, for Vera's eyes looked madly at her--the girl was deathly white.

"Victor is ill, I am going for a doctor," she gasped, distractedly--her efforts to be calm and self-possessed only seemed to aggravate her uncontrollable fear and anguish. "Do go upstairs and see to him, Mr.

Dobbs, won't you? I think he has fainted. I will be back directly!"

"Thank Heaven they came!" was her thought, as she ran swiftly up the street and round the corner to the doctor who always attended them, the kind, shrewd old pract.i.tioner, Doctor Thompson, and springing up the steps of the house vigorously rang the bell. She heard it clang within with that ominous toll some bells have, and peered through the coloured gla.s.s at the side of the door. Were they all dead? she asked herself impatiently, staring in at the empty entry, with its umbrella-stand and grandfather clock. What miserable mismanagement! Once more, although only a few moments had elapsed since the bell rang, she gave a tug to the bell-pull. A girl in hat and jacket came in sight within, put her fingers in her ears, and hurried to the door, looking disgusted. It was the housemaid, who had been to the hospital entertainment.

"I am sorry to have rung twice," exclaimed Vera, breathlessly, as she opened the door--she knew the girl. "But--is the doctor in? No? Oh, what shall I do?"

"It isn't the old lady, miss?--I saw her just now in the Priscilla Ward, a-larfin' fit to split her sides at the comic singing gentleman--what?

Your brother? The smart young gent with the black moustache? A fit?

My! Why don't you go round to young Doctor Hampton, who 'as just set up the dispensary? He's some sort of relation of master's, and I've heard master a-talkin' of his cleverness--round there, miss, two doors up--red lamp--you can't miss it!"

"She do seem put about," thought the young woman, as she looked out and watched Vera flit across the road like a black shadow. "Fancy takin' on like that about a brother!"

Wildly, telling herself pa.s.sionately that a moment's delay might mean death--death was in his face--Vera tore into the still open entry of the little house with the red lamp and gave such a violent knock and ring that the door opened before it was over.

A young man stared at her, astonished, as she clutched at his coat-sleeve, despairingly adjuring him to come and save her brother's life, he was in a fit. He felt quite shocked and concerned at being suddenly a.s.sailed with such a pathetic flow of appealing language from so young and beautiful a creature.

"Yes--certainly--at once! Only let me get my hat!" he exclaimed; and after he had seized upon the head-gear nearest at hand, which happened to be a cricket-cap, he also set off running at her side, entered by the open door of Number Twelve, Haythorn Street, and sprang up after this agile girl three steps at a time.