Victor Carrington appeared at Hilton House early in the afternoon. He had calculated that his work must needs be very near its completion, and he came prepared to hear of Douglas Dale's mortal illness.

The blow that awaited him was a death-blow. Miss Brewer had told Douglas all: the lies, the artifices, by which the man Carton had contrived to make himself a constant visitor in that house. In a moment, without the mention of the schemer's real name, Heaven's light was let in upon the mystery; the dark enigma was solved, and the woman, so tenderly loved and so cruelly wronged, was exonerated.

Too late--too late! _That_ was the agonizing reflection which smote the heart of Douglas Dale, with a pain more terrible than the sharpest death-pang. "I have broken her heart!" he cried. "I have broken that true, devoted heart!"

The appearance of Victor Carrington was the signal for such a burst of rage as even his iron nature could scarcely brook unshaken.

"Miscreant! devil! incarnate iniquity!" cried Douglas, as he grasped and grappled with the baffled plotter. "You have tried to murder me--and you have tried to murder her! I might have forgiven you the first crime--I will drag you to the halter for the second, and think myself poorly revenged when I hear the rabble yelling beneath your scaffold!"

Happily for Carrington, the effects of the poison had reduced his victim to extreme weakness. The convulsive grasp loosened, the hoarse voice died into a whisper, and Douglas Dale swooned as helplessly as a woman.

"What does it mean?" asked Victor. "Is this man mad?"

"We have all been mad!" returned Miss Brewer, passionately. "The blind, besotted dupes of your demoniac wickedness! Paulina Durski is dead!"

"Dead!"

"Yes. There was a quarrel, yesterday, between these two--and he left her. I found her this morning--dead! I have told him all--the part I have played at your bidding. I shall tell it again in a court of justice, I pray God!"

"You can tell it when and where you please," replied Victor, with horrible calmness. "I shall not be there to hear it."

He walked out of the house. Douglas Dale had not yet recovered consciousness, and there was no one to hinder Carrington's departure.

For some time he walked on, unconscious whither he went, unable to grasp or realize the events that had befallen. But at last-dimly, darkly, grim shapes arose out of the chaos of his brain.

There would be a trial--some kind of trial!--Douglas Dale would not be baffled of vengeance if the law could give it him. His crime--what was it, if it could be proved? An attempt to murder--an attempt the basest, the most hideous, and revolting. What hope could he have of mercy--he, utterly merciless himself, expected no such weakness from his fellow-men.

But in this supreme hour of utter defeat, his thoughts did not dwell on the hazards of the future. The chief bitterness of his soul was the agony of disappointment--of baffled hope--of humiliation, degradation unspeakable. He had thought himself invincible, the master of his fellow-men, by the supremacy of intellectual power, and remorseless cruelty. And he was what? A baffled trickster, whose every move upon the great chessboard had been a separate mistake, leading step by step to the irrevocable sentence--checkmate!

The ruined towers of Champfontaine arose before him, as in a vision, black against a blood-red sky.

"I can understand those mad devils of '93--I can understand the roll-call of the guillotine--the noyades--the conflagrations--the foul orgies of murderous drunkards, drunken with blood. Those men had schemed as I have schemed, and worked as I have worked, and waited as I have waited--to fail like me!"

He had walked far from the West-end, into some dreary road eastward of the City, choosing by some instinct the quietest streets, before he was calm enough to contemplate the perils of his position, or to decide upon the course he should take.

A few minutes' reflection told him that he must fly--Douglas Dale would doubtless hunt him as a wild beast is hunted. Where was he to go? Was there any lair, or covert, in all that wide city where he might be safely hidden from the vengeance of the man he had wronged so deeply?

He remembered Captain Halkard's letter. He dragged the crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, and read a few lines. Yes: it was as he had thought. The "Pandion" was to leave Gravesend at five o'clock next morning.

"I will go to the ice-graves and the bears!" he exclaimed. "Let them track me there!"

Energetic always, no less energetic even in this hour of desperation, he made his way down to the sailors' quarter, and spent his few last pounds in the purchase of a scanty outfit. After doing this, he dined frugally at a quiet tavern, and then took the steamer for Gravesend.

He slept on board the "Pandion." The place offered him had not been filled by any one else. It was not a very tempting post, or a very tempting expedition. The men who had organized it were enthusiasts, imbued with that fever-thirst of the explorer which has made many martyrs, from the age of the Cabots to the days of Franklin.

The "Pandion" sailed in that gray cheerless morning, her white sails gleaming ghastly athwart the chill mists of the river, and so vanished for ever Victor Carrington from the eyes of all men, save those who went with him. The fate of that expedition was never known. Beneath what iceberg the "Pandion" found her grave none can tell. Brave and noble hearts perished with her, and to die with those good men was too honourable a doom for such a wretch as Victor Carrington.

CHAPTER XL.

"SO SHALL YE REAP."

Little now remains to be told of this tale of crime and retribution, of suffering and compensation. Miss Brewer told her dreadful story, as far as she knew it, with perfect truth; and her evidence, together with the evidence of the chemist who had supplied Madame Durski from time to time with the fatal consoler of all her pains and sorrows, made it clear that the luckless woman, lying quietly in the darkened room at Hilton House, had died from an over-dose of opium.

Douglas Dale could not attend that inquest. He was stricken down with fever; the fate of the woman he had so loved, so unjustly suspected, nearly cost him his life, and when he recovered sufficiently, he left England, not to return for three years. Before his departure he saw Lady Eversleigh and her mother, and established with them a bond of friendship as close as that of their kin. He provided liberally for Miss Brewer, but her rescue from poverty brought her no happiness: she was a broken-hearted woman.

Victor Carrington's mother retired into a convent, and was probably as happy as she had ever been. She had loved him but little, whose only virtue was that he had loved her much.

Captain Copplestone's rapture knew no bounds when he clasped little Gertrude in his arms once more. He was almost jealous of Rosamond Jernam, when he found how great a hold she had obtained on the heart of her charge; but his jealousy was mingled with gratitude, and he joined Lady Eversleigh in testifying his friendship for the tender-hearted woman who had protected and cherished the heiress of Raynham in the hour of her desolation.

It is not to be supposed that the world remained long in ignorance of this romantic episode in the common-place story of every-day life.

Paragraphs found their way into the newspapers, no one knew how, and society marvelled at the good fortune of Sir Oswald's widow.

"That woman's wealth must be boundless," exclaimed aristocratic dowagers, for whom the grip of poverty's bony fingers had been tight and cruel. "Her husband left her magnificent estates, and an enormous amount of funded property; and now a mother drops down from the skies for her benefit--a mother who is reported to be almost as rich as herself."

Amongst those who envied Lady Eversleigh's good fortune, there was none whose envy was so bitter as that of her husband's disappointed nephew, Sir Reginald.

This woman had stood between him and fortune, and it would have been happiness to him to see her grovelling in the dust, a beggar and an outcast. Instead of this, he heard of her exaltation, and he hated her with an intense hatred which was almost childish in its purposeless fury.

He speedily found, however, that life was miserable without his evil counsellor. The Frenchman's unabating confidence in ultimate success had sustained the penniless idler in the darkest day of misfortune. But now he found himself quite alone; and there was no voice to promise future triumph. He knew that the game of life had been played to the last card, and that it was lost.

His feeble character was not equal to support the burden of poverty and despair.

He dared not show his face at any of the clubs where he had once been so distinguished a member; for he knew that the voice of society was against him.

Thus hopeless, friendless, and abandoned by his kind, Sir Reginald Eversleigh had recourse to the commonest form of consolation. He fled from a country in which his name had become odious, and took up his abode in Paris, where he found a miserable lodging in one of the narrowest alleys in the neighbourhood of the Luxembourg, which was then a labyrinth of narrow streets and lanes.

Here he could afford to buy brandy, for at that date brandy was much cheaper in France than it is now. Here he could indulge his growing propensity for strong drink to the uttermost extent of his means, and could drown his sorrows, and drink destruction to his enemies, in fiery draughts of cognac.

For some years he inhabited the same dirty garret, keeping the key of his wretched chamber, going up and down the crumbling old staircase uncared for and unnoticed. Few who had known him in the past would have recognized the once elegant young man in this latter stage of his existence. Form and features, complexion and expression, were alike degraded. The garments worn by him, who had once been the boasted patron of crack West-end tailors, were now shapeless and hideous. The dandy of the clubs had become a perambulating mass of rags.

Every day when the sun shone he buttoned his greasy, threadbare overcoat across his breast, and crawled to the public garden of the Luxembourg, where he might be seen shuffling slipshod along the sunniest walk, an object of contempt and aversion in the eyes of nursery-maids and _grisettes_--a butt for the dare-devil students of the quarter.

Had he any consciousness of his degradation?

Yes; that was the undying vulture which preyed upon his entrails--the consuming fire that was never quenched.

During the brief interval of each day in which he was sober, Sir Reginald Eversleigh was wont to reflect upon the past. He knew himself to be the wretch and outcast he was; and, looking back at his start in life, he could but remember how different his career might have been had he so chosen.

In those hours the slow tears made furrows in his haggard cheeks--the tears of remorse, vain repentance, that came too late for earth; but not, perhaps, utterly too late for heaven, since, even for this last and worst of sinners, there might be mercy.

Thus his life passed--a changeless routine, unbroken by one bright interval, one friendly visit, one sign or token to show that there was any link between this lonely wretch and the rest of humanity.