"Here in this lonely place--without witnesses--my husband murdered him!"

"They would not count it murder. Fate might have been the other way.

Your husband might have been killed."

"No!" cried Christabel, pa.s.sionately; "Angus would not have killed him.

That would have been too deep a dishonour!"

She stood silent for a few moments, white as death, looking round her with wide, despairing eyes.

"He has been murdered!" she said, in hoa.r.s.e, faint tones. "That suspicion has been in my mind--dark--shapeless--horrible--from the first. He has been murdered! And I am to spend the rest of my life with his murderer!" Then, with a sudden hysterical cry, she turned angrily upon Jessie.

"How dare you tell lies about my husband?" she exclaimed. "Don't you know that n.o.body came here yesterday except Angus; no one else had the key. The girl at the farm told us so."

"The key!" echoed Jessie, contemptuously. "Do you think a gate, breast high, would keep out an athlete like your husband? Besides, there is another way of getting here, without going near the gate, where he might be seen, perhaps, by some farm labourer in the field. The men were ploughing there yesterday, and heard a shot. They told me that last night at the farm. Wait! wait!" cried Jessie, excitedly.

She rushed away, light as a lapwing, flying across the narrow bridge--bounding from stone to stone--vanishing amidst dark autumn foliage. Christabel heard her steps dying away in the distance. Then there was an interval, of some minutes, during which Christabel, hardly caring to wonder what had become of her companion, stood clinging to the hand-rail, and staring down at stones and shingle, feathery ferns, soddened logs, the water rippling and lapping round all things, crystal clear.

Then, startled by a voice above her head, she looked up, and saw Jessie's light figure just as she dropped herself over the sharp arch of rock, and scrambled through the cleft, hanging on by her hands, finding a foothold in the most perilous places--in danger of instant death.

"My G.o.d!" murmured Christabel, with clasped hands, not daring to cry aloud lest she should increase Jessie's peril. "She will be killed."

With a nervous grip, and a muscular strength which no one could have supposed possible in so slender a frame, Jessie Bridgeman made good her descent, and stood on the shelf of slippery rock, below the waterfall, unhurt save for a good many scratches and cuts upon the hands that had clung so fiercely to root and bramble, crag and boulder.

"What I could do your husband could do," she said. "He did it often when he was a boy--you must remember his boasting of it. He did it yesterday.

Look at this."

"This" was a ragged narrow shred of heather cloth, with a brick-dust red tinge in its dark warp, which Leonard had much affected this year--"Mr.

Tregonell's colour, is it not?" asked Jessie.

"Yes--it is like his coat."

"Like? It is a part of his coat. I found it hanging on a bramble, at the top of the cleft. Try if you can find the coat when you get home, and see if it is not torn. But most likely he will have hidden the clothes he wore yesterday. Murderers generally do."

"How dare you call him a murderer?" said Christabel, trembling, and cold to the heart. It seemed to her as if the mild autumnal air--here in this sheltered nook which was always warmer than the rest of the world--had suddenly become an icy blast that blew straight from far away arctic seas. "How dare you call my husband a murderer?"

"Oh, I forgot. It was a duel, I suppose: a fair fight, planned so skilfully that the result should seem like an accident, and the survivor should run no risk. Still, to my mind, it was murder all the same--for I know who provoked the quarrel--yes--and you know--you, who are his wife--and who, for respectability's sake, will try to shield him--you know--for you must have seen hatred and murder in his face that night when he came into the drawing-room--and asked Mr. Hamleigh for a few words in private. It was then he planned this work," pointing to the broad level stone against which the clear water was rippling with such a pretty playful sound, while those two women stood looking at each other with pale intent faces, fixed eyes, and tremulous lips; "and Angus Hamleigh, who valued his brief remnant of earthly life so lightly, consented--reluctantly perhaps--but too proud to refuse. And he fired in the air--yes, I know he would not have injured your husband by so much as a hair of his head--I know him well enough to be sure of that. He came here like the victim to the altar. Leonard Tregonell must have known that. And I say that though he, with his Mexican freebooter's morality, may have called it a fair fight, it was murder, deliberate, diabolical murder."

"If this is true," said Christabel in a low voice, "I will have no mercy upon him."

"Oh, yes, you will. You will sacrifice feeling to propriety, you will put a good face upon things, for the sake of your son. You were born and swaddled in the purple of respectability. You will not stir a finger to avenge the dead."

"I will have no mercy upon him," repeated Christabel, with a strange look in her eyes.

CHAPTER IV.

"DUST TO DUST."

The inquest at the Wharncliffe Arms was conducted in a thoroughly respectable, unsuspicious manner. No searching questions were asked, no inferences drawn. To the farmers and tradespeople who const.i.tuted that rustic jury, the case seemed too simple to need any severe interrogation. A gentleman staying in a country house goes out shooting, and is so unlucky as to shoot himself instead of the birds whereof he went in search. He is found with an empty bag, and a charge of swan-shot through his heart.

"Hard lines," as Jack Vandeleur observed, _sotto voce_, to a neighbouring squire, while the inquest was pursuing its sleepy course, "and about the queerest fluke I ever saw on any table."

"Was it a fluke?" muttered little Montagu, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the proceedings. He and his companions were standing among a little crowd at the door of the justice-room. "It looks to me uncommonly as if Mr. Hamleigh had shot himself. We all know he was deadly sweet on Mrs. T., although both of them behaved beautifully."

"Men have died--and worms have eaten them--but not for love," quoted Captain Vandeleur, who had a hearsay knowledge of Shakspeare, though he had never read a Shakspearian play in his life. "If Hamleigh was so dead tired of life that he wanted to kill himself he could have done it comfortably in his own room."

"He might wish to avoid the imputation of suicide."

"Pshaw, how can any man care what comes afterwards? Bury me where four roads meet, with a stake through my body, or in Westminster Abbey under a marble monument, and the result is just the same to me."

"That's because you are an out-and-out Bohemian. But Hamleigh was a dandy in all things. He would be nice about the details of his death."

Mr. Hamleigh's valet was now being questioned as to his master's conduct and manner on the morning he left Mount Royal. The man replied that his master's manner had been exactly the same as usual. He was always very quiet--said no more than was necessary to be said. He was a kind master but never familiar. "He never made a companion of me," said the man, "though I'd been with him at home and abroad twelve years; but a better master never lived. He was always an early riser--there was nothing out of the way in his getting up at six, and going out at seven. There was only one thing at all out of the common, and that was his attending to his gun himself, instead of telling me to get it ready for him."

"Had he many guns with him?"

"Only two. The one he took was an old gun--a favourite."

"Do you know why he took swan-shot to shoot woodc.o.c.ks?"

"No--unless he made a mistake in the charge. He took the cartridges out of the case himself, and put them into his pocket. He was an experienced sportsman, though he was never as fond of sport as the generality of gentlemen."

"Do you know if he had been troubled in mind of late?"

"No; I don't think he had any trouble on his mind. He was in very bad health, and knew that he had not long to live; but he seemed quite happy and contented. Indeed, judging by what I saw of him, I should say that he was in a more easy, contented frame of mind during the last few months than he had ever been for the last four years."

This closed the examination. There had been very few witnesses called--only the medical man, the men who had found the body, the girl at the farm, who declared that she had given the key to Mr. Hamleigh a little before eight that morning, that no one else had asked for the key till the men came from Mount Royal--that, to her knowledge, no one but the men at work on the farm had gone up the lane that morning. A couple of farm labourers gave the same testimony--they had been at work in the topmost field all the morning, and no one had gone to the Kieve that way except the gentleman that was killed. They had heard a shot--or two shots--they were not certain which, fired between eight and nine. They were not very clear as to the hour, and they could not say for certain whether they heard one or two shots; but they knew that the report was a very loud one--unusually loud for a sportsman's shot.

Mr. Tregonell, although he was in the room ready to answer any questions, was not interrogated. The jury went in a wagonette to see the body, which was still lying at the farm, and returned after a brief inspection of that peaceful clay--the countenance wearing that beautiful calm which is said to be characteristic of death from a gun-shot wound--to give their verdict.

"Death by misadventure."

The body was carried to Mount Royal after dark, and three days later there was a stately funeral, to which first cousins and second cousins of the dead came as from the four corners of the earth; for Angus Hamleigh, dying a bachelor, and leaving a handsome estate behind him, was a person to be treated with all those last honours which affectionate kindred can offer to poor humanity.

He was buried in the little churchyard in the hollow, where Christabel and he had heard the robin singing and the dull thud of the earth thrown out of an open grave in the calm autumn sunlight. Now in the autumn his own grave was dug in the same peaceful spot--in accordance with a note which his valet, who knew his habits, found in a diary.

"Oct. 11.--If I should die in Cornwall--and there are times when I feel as if death were nearer than my doctor told me at our last interview--I should like to be buried in Minster Churchyard. I have outlived all family a.s.sociations, and I should like to lie in a spot which is dear to me for its own sake."

A will had been found in Mr. Hamleigh's despatch box, which receptacle was opened by his lawyer, who came from London on purpose to take charge of any papers which his client might have in his possession at the time of his death. The bulk of his papers were no doubt in his chambers in the Albany; chambers which he had taken on coming of age; and which he had occupied at intervals ever since.

Mr. Tregonell showed himself keenly anxious that everything should be done in a strictly legal manner, and it was by his own hand that the lawyer was informed of his client's death, and invited to Mount Royal.

Mr. Bryanstone, the solicitor, a thorough man of the world, and an altogether agreeable person, appeared at the Manor House two days before the funeral, and, being empowered by Mr. Tregonell to act as he pleased, sent telegrams far and wide to the dead man's kindred, who came trooping like carrion crows to the funeral feast.

Angus Hamleigh was buried in the afternoon; a mild, peaceful afternoon at the end of October, with a yellow light in the western sky, which deepened and brightened as the funeral train wound across the valley, climbed the steep street of Boscastle, and then wound slowly downwards into the green heart of the hill, to the little rustic burial place.

That orb of molten gold was sinking behind the edge of the moor just when the Vicar read the last words of the funeral service. Golden and crimson gleams touched the landscape here and there, golden lights still lingered on the sea, as the mourners, so thoroughly formal and conventional for the most part--Jack Vandeleur and little Monty amidst the train with carefully-composed features--went back to their carriages. And then the shades of evening came slowly down, and spread a dark pall over hill-side, and hedgerow, and churchyard, where there was no sound but the monotonous fall of the earth, which the gravedigger was shovelling into that new grave.