Her first insane idea was to tell the duke that his trusted servant was the miserable spy of unscrupulous wretches. Second thoughts said "madness! Keep it to yourself. What can the man do? He knows nothing of your visit to Hay thorn Street. If you say, or suggest, he is a spy, you arouse suspicions."

Upon these second thoughts she acted. She controlled her emotions, summoning all her force, her self-possession, to her aid. There was a long mirror in the corner. She composed her features and rubbed her cheeks and lips before it, regaining a semblance of composure and ordinary appearance only just in time, for as she leant back in her chair slowly fanning herself Vansittart came in, looking grave, troubled, although he smiled as their eyes met. Had _he_ seen or heard anything peculiar?

"Is it a breach of confidence to ask what his Grace wanted you for?" she asked, a.s.suming a sprightly manner which shocked her even as she did so.

"Not at all," he said, a little abruptly; "something about a wedding present."

Then a manservant entered with a tray of champagne and the menu card, and until she had been revived by the food she forced herself to eat, and the champagne Vansittart insisted upon her drinking, she asked no more. But, in her strained state, her lover's pre-occupation was unbearable.

Desperate, she determined to know the worst. "Tell me," she began, leaning her fair elbow on the table and looking pleadingly into his face with those bewilderingly beautiful eyes. "You know you yourself proposed we should share our secrets. And, from your manner, I know--I am positive--the duke said something more than about a wedding present."

"If he did, it was nothing of any consequence," he fondly returned, gazing tenderly at the lovely face which was his whole world. "I would tell you at once, only you are such a sweet, innocent, sensitive darling, so utterly unsophisticated, unused to this rough planet and its still rougher inhabitants--you would make a mountain of what is far less than a mole-hill in one's way."

"What is it?' I would rather, really I would, know." She gave him a coaxing glance.

"Well, it is this," he replied, hardly. "Very little to annoy one. Only I am so absurdly vulnerable, that the merest breath which affects the subject of our marriage seems to shrivel me up. It is those wretched clubs; at least, the miserable gossip which the riffraff of the clubs seem to batten and fatten upon, drivelling, disappointed, soured units of humanity that they are! They seem to be prognosticating that our wedding will not 'take place,' because I have a secret wife somewhere, who is likely to turn up. Do you suspect me, darling?"

Her joyous laugh, born of infinite relief, almost startled him. When he reached his bachelor domain that night, and recalled the events of the evening, the sweetest delight of all was to remember how his beautiful darling took his hands, and with eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with love, drew him to her and nestled in his arms as some faithful dove might have flown confidently to his shoulder. That ensuing brief--all too brief--half hour, when, by their world seemingly forgot, and certainly their world forgetting, they interchanged tender words and still tenderer embraces, seemed to his pa.s.sion-stricken nature to have so riveted them to each other that the very machinations of h.e.l.l itself bid fair to be powerless to part them.

"Her absolute innocence makes her so immeasurably sweeter than all the other women," he told himself, as he stalked about his rooms in a hyper-ecstatic mood. "It is that which makes her so unsuspicious, so trusting. Now, if I had told something of what the duke said to me to an ordinary woman, she would have suspected me of goodness knows what in the past. She might have concealed it, but I should have known that she did. I believe it is my darling's being so 'unspotted from the world'

which influenced me to love her as I do. Oh, may I be worthy of being her guardian; for my past is not the fair, white, unsullied page that hers is! No man's can be."

When the young doctor she had fetched in her frantic fear the night of Mercier's death, after finding Victor insensible upon the sofa, came to Vera in the little sitting room where she was kneeling at her poor trembling old stepmother's side and telling her with the a.s.surance of desperation that Victor must, would, soon be better--why should he not be? He had never been subject to fits. He was so well-knit, so strong, so athletic--she gave the intruder an imperious gesture, and, springing up, led him out of the room, and, closing the door, leant against the lintel, and gazed at him with such wild agony that he flinched, alarmed.

She looked uncanny, and at such a crisis it was disturbing.

"I know. He is dead!" she resolutely said. "But, for G.o.d's sake, have mercy on his poor old mother. He is all she has in life. There will be an inquest? So much the better. Now go in to her, and tell her he is very ill, and must be left to you and me."

The young pract.i.tioner demurred. His private opinion was that people ought to "face their fate." He was fresh from the hospitals.

But there was something witchlike about this girl. She commanded the wistful, shivering John Dobbs, a mild specimen indeed of the genus medico, to remain and solace her stepmother with as many white lies as he could generate at the moment; then, over-riding the objections of old Doctor Thompson, who, returning home and hearing of her wild condition from his house-maid, had proceeded to Haythorn Street at once, she insisted on accompanying them into the room where the dead man lay with that calm, sphinx-like smile upon his handsome lips, and remaining there until Doctor Thompson actually took her by the shoulder and, turning her out, locked the door.

But, like some faithful dog, she remained outside. She watched them seal up the room in a dead silence. After tenderly a.s.sisting her stepmother to bed, weaving fictions the while--"Victor was in bed and asleep, the doctors had gone, and their one direction was he should not be disturbed; his very existence depended upon his being kept quiet,"

etc.--she returned to her post, and spent the night crouched upon the landing, her cheek against the sealed door.

"My heart is dead; my life went with his," she told herself. "What there remains of me is left to find the woman who murdered him, and to bring her to justice."

CHAPTER XXVI

Old Doctor Thompson sat up in his study, smoking and listening to his nephew's theories anent Victor Mercier's death, while Vera, sleepless in her anguish, remained sifting her suspicions throughout that dismal night, limply leaning up against the sealed door which so cruelly barred her out from that silent room where her beloved lay on the sofa in the mystic sleep of death. "I have to revenge his murder--for he has been drugged--poisoned--I could swear it!" she told herself, over and over again. "That woman I saw--tall, well-dressed--stalking off--and staggering--she is the one who has killed him! It is she I must find--G.o.d help me!"

How impotent she felt, when all Mercier's belongings were under lock, key, and seal!

But she had enough to occupy her. The unhappy old mother was in a helpless state of grief--she alone had to "do for the household," since they kept no regular servant. Then, when she sent in her resignation, her admirer, the stage manager, Mr. Howard, urged the proprietors of the touring company to refuse to accept it. She had to go off and almost beg release upon her knees.

Then came the day of the inquest, and her statement; the grudgingly admitted verdict, and the consequent release from endurance of the worst of the bondage.

The purses of gold were all that they found which pointed to any one's visit the night of Mercier's death; and even Vera, despite her intense anxiety to find a clue which would bring her face to face with the wife he had told her of, the "hag," the "cat," whom he had spoken of so vindictively as the only barrier between them, could but think that the money might have been locked up in his desk since his return. He had spoken of possessing ample means for the immediate present, and had spent lavishly upon her of late.

They searched high and low, the poor mother clinging to the relics of the only son whose heir she was, as she had few relatives belonging to her, and his father, her first, cruel spouse, had no kith and kin that he had cared to acknowledge. But while they found more money--neither in boxes, nor chests of drawers, or pockets, did they come across any traces bearing upon the part of his life they knew nothing about. The letters and papers in his desk and trunk related to past business abroad, alone.

The funeral was a plain, but good one. It was a wet, gloomy day when the hea.r.s.e bearing the brown oaken coffin decorated with wreaths bought lavishly by Vera, and a few modest ones sent by the doctor's wife and some sympathizing neighbours, made its way slowly through the gaping crowd in Haythorn Street and the immediate neighbourhood, and proceeded more briskly northwards. Vera sat back in the first of the two funeral carriages--the two doctors were in the second--and as she vainly strove to comfort her weeping old step-mother, she gazed sternly out upon the familiar roads with a strange wonder at the ordinary bustle and movement. Life was going on as usual, although Victor Mercier's strong, buoyant spirit was quenched. They laughed and talked and screamed and whistled, those crowds, while he lay still and white within his narrow coffin under the flowers, his pale lips sealed for ever in that strange, wistful, unearthly smile.

"But they have not heard the last of him," she grimly thought. "The last will be far, far more startling than the first!"

Let him be laid to rest, and she would rouse like a sleeping tigress awakened to the defence of her young, and finding that wife of his, bring her to justice.

The belief that that woman had secretly visited him, and that by her means he had had his death-dose, strengthened every moment until it became a rigid, fixed idea. All had seemed to point to it. His careful dress to receive his visitor, the embroidered shirt, the diamond stud, the white flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole, a costume a.s.sumed after she had left him in his ordinary day suit. Then his shutting the cat into the parlour was doubtless lest she should cover his visitor with her hairs--and the cat only affected women, and had a trick of jumping up on feminine laps.

"There is justice in heaven, so I shall find some clue to her," thought she, as they pa.s.sed the stone-mason's yards on the cemetery road. The words haunted her--"Vengeance is Mine! I will repay, saith the Lord."

They should be inscribed on his tomb.

Presently the horses slackened in their speed--they proceeded at a funeral pace--then they stopped. They were at the cemetery gates. Vera heard the distant tolling of the bell. It had been like this when her own father was buried, in whose grave for two Victor was to lie.

"I must bear up," said the aged woman who leant against her, with a gasping sob. "Victor would not like to see me cry." And she tried to give a broken-hearted smile.

"No, mother," said the girl tenderly. But she was not really touched--it was as if her heart were turned to stone.

The funeral train went on with a jerk. A returning empty hea.r.s.e scampering home the wrong way had been the temporary obstruction.

Graves, rows of crosses and headstones--ponderous marble and granite tombs--the world of the dead was a well-peopled one. They halted--one of the solemn undertaker's men came and let down the steps. There was the coffin--

The beautiful words fell unheeded on Vera's ears. She was intent upon a small, pale man with fair hair, in black, who had joined them. Who was he? Was he the intimate friend Victor had casually spoken of?

As they stood in the narrow pews of the mortuary chapel, the first ray of sunshine which had pierced the clouds that day fell upon the close-cut hair of Paul Naz, who had determined not only to see the last of the friend anent whose fate he had such gruesome, horrible misgivings, but to offer his friendship to the charming young actress whom he now knew to have been more to the dead man than mere step-sister-in-law; and Vera said to herself, "It is an omen!"

As they stepped slowly out, following the coffin, she almost staggered as she vainly tried to support her half-fainting step-mother. Paul Naz helped her with a "Pardon, mademoiselle! I am his friend!" and she gave him a grateful glance.

They were at the grave. The clergyman was reading "He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower--" ... A thrush carolled loudly on a neighbouring bush. The sunlight broke through and shone upon the bra.s.s handles of the coffin as it was lowered into the grave. "My beloved, I will only live to avenge you, and take care of mother," murmured Vera, as she left the grave, and following her stepmother, who leant on Paul Naz's arm, listened to his affectionate talk of the dead man.

"I loved him, mademoiselle! And if I can help you, I beg you to send to me!" he said, earnestly, giving her a meaning, almost appealing look after he had helped Victor's mother into the carriage. Then he stood, bare-headed, and gravely watched them depart.

"He suspects!" Vera told herself, feverishly, as they drove home.

"Perhaps--oh, if it only is so! He knows something!"

Back in the empty house, she coaxed her step-mother to bed, and was proceeding to give orders to the charwoman about the tidying-up of the place, when there was a vigorous pull of the bell.

"I will see to it," she said to the woman. Proceeding to the hall-door and opening it, she was confronted with the landlady of the next-door lodging-house--a Mrs. Muggeridge, whose fowls had been hara.s.sed by the tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat, after which there had been ructions, and each house had cut its neighbour dead.

"I am sure I don't wish to hurt your feelings, or to intrude, Miss Anerley, but my mind is that troubled I must speak to you," said the old woman, who was stout and asthmatic, and looked pale and "upset." "I hope your poor mar is all right?"

"Yes, thanks! Will you come this way?" said Vera, who felt somewhat as a war-horse hearing the bugle, for she hoped to "hear something," and she conducted her visitor into the little parlour and closed the door.

Mrs. Muggeridge pantingly, with many interpolations, told her tale. She had a country girl as servant, "Sar' Ann, as good a gal as ever lived."