CHAPTER XXXVIII
TWO FAREWELLS
Daintree was driven home before dusk, for his pocket-book was bloated with moist bank-notes, besides which, Lady Starkie positively refused to have him about the hotel that evening. It was against the rules for bridegrooms as laid down by her ladyship, who dined very solemnly with her niece alone, and got to bed at a reasonable hour for the first time that week. Claire then had their sitting-room to herself, and she drew out the oiled-silk packet which had fallen into her hands that afternoon. It was thin and oblong, like the letter it plainly contained. Under the lamp Claire’s name and the address of her old home were still legible beneath the silk, though they no longer stood out as when the skin was wet. And on the reverse side was written very small—
“For pity’s sake forward this.”
When? After his death? Fate had forwarded it before—should she read it or should she not? It was addressed to her, it was hers; should she read, or destroy, or return this letter to its writer—to the criminal who had confessed to her his crime? Some minutes after Claire Harding asked herself this question, she turned up the lamp, and cut the oiled silk open with a pair of scissors. She now saw that the letter had been written some time; yet it was with a strange thrill, a wonderment beginning at the heart, that she read the heading within. It was Newgate, and the date May 29 1837—the blackest day of all her life—the eve of that on which they would have hanged him.
Agitated as she was, however, by these dreadful memories, and touched by the mere fact of his having written to her on that awful Monday, it was the first sentence of his letter that ran into her heart like molten lead. He called himself an innocent man! From the brink of the grave came that lie, that blasphemy, which he had lived to confess to her with his crime! She read on mechanically. And all at once her pain ceased; she was lost and absorbed in the plain, straightforward, circumstantial story into which he plunged without preliminary. He told her everything from the moment they parted at the garden gate. Nothing was left out, nothing extenuated, nothing enlarged or even commented upon by the writer. Her heart was beating wildly long before she reached the end of this plain statement She had forgotten all about his confession. This rang true—this rang true.
“Sweetheart,” he went on, “—for I must call you so once more—I cannot tell you how I feel, for I vary from hour to hour. Now and then I feel the murderer they say I am, now and then an abject coward (without the pluck to show it), now and then a sort of Christian martyr! But with God’s help I hope to finish up a man. Do not grieve for the ugly way of it: there’s no disgrace in that, since it’s a mistake, and if there is a God never fear but He will make it up to me one day. Oh, but it is sweet to talk to you again! I used to tell you everything, and so I must until the end. Ah! if only I had been worthy of you I shouldn’t be here! I am punished; when I think of your white soul, and of mine that couldn’t even be its mirror, then I sometimes think that my punishment is not too great. Those are my Christian moods! They don’t live long. The turnkeys are looking through my grating now; they are telling each other what I am at, and coming back and back again to have a peep. My Christianity isn’t proof against that. I say nothing, but I could do the thing I’m going to die for—God help me, I may do it yet! You see how I change! There is only one thing in which I can never change—my grateful love and reverence for the great girl-soul that forgave me and would have given me another chance if this had not happened. Sweetheart, my love for you has grown in prison, it has been my only comfort in this vile place, and it will go with me where I go tomorrow—it will stay with my poor soul through all eternity. Only do not grieve for me, Claire, for I never was worthy of your sweet love. I would not leave this behind for you, I would not have you reminded of me for a single day, but for one selfish thing. Sweetheart, it is to make you believe in me. You have not done so yet—why should you? Nobody knows what you know and have so nobly hidden; but for all I said to you, I am innocent; he was alive when I left him; I did give him the receipt, and we shook hands at the end. That is God’s truth. I tell it you with the last words my hand will ever write. I meant to write to the kind fanatic who paid for my defence, and is working still (they tell me) for a reprieve. But now I cannot. If you could find him out, and thank him for me, I should be grateful; but my last words in this life must be to you. God bless you, dear, and give you somebody much better than I ever could have been. Only do know that I never did this thing; and when you realise that, think no more of me, my dear love, but pray tomorrow for the soul of your unworthy boy...”
His signature followed—better written than the rest—a touching effort to “finish up a man.” All the last pages were blurred with the condemned man’s tears; and now, after seventeen months, her tears were raining, raining, on the same paper, on the same words, that bore the blots of his.
This postscript remained—
“Reprieved at the last moment! I shall not send this now—but I hope that it may reach you when I am gone.”
Claire went to the window, and the rings rattled along the rod as she flung the curtains back. The sky swam with stars, her heart yearned for Heaven, and to the sweet stars her voice went up in broken and involuntary utterance of her soul’s pain.
“Oh, Tom,” it cried, “if you had died then it would be better now! I should be dead too. We should both be at peace. Oh, Tom, we might be together now!”
The hotel garden lay very still below. It was the back of the house, and now the hour was late. Suddenly there was a movement on the gravel underneath.
“Claire —is it your voice?”
His whispered—it was Tom.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Come up. I want to speak to you.”
“Now?”
“Yes! how is it you are still in the town?”
“I lost something. I have been hunting for it on the beach. I came back to have another look here.”
“I have it. Come straight up to the room you were in this afternoon.”
He appeared to hesitate.
“You —you are not alone?”
But Claire had left the window, and was waiting impatiently at the open door. How long he kept her! It seemed an age before his halting step was heard upon the stairs, while she, on fire to crave his forgiveness, and mindful of nothing else, could not imagine what held him back. Even when he came his eye was timid and his feet slow to cross the threshold: in fact, the inveterate conventionality of the male was not a little fluttered at her receiving him alone, at this hour of the night, and that night her marriage eve. Yet his qualms were entirely on her account. Nor could they quench the inextinguishable love-light in his honest eyes.
As for Claire, however, she forgot everything but the cruel wrong she had done the man before her, the sufferings cut so deep upon his bronzed face, and her own new and blinding realisation of his innocence and heroism. For a space she could but stand and gaze upon him with burning eye-balls; then, with the noble unconsciousness of a woman stirred to the soul, she took him by both hands, and drew him into the room, and besought his forgiveness upon her knees, but with his hands still clasped in hers.
Tom released his hands, shut the door nervously, and then almost brusquely asked her what he had to forgive.
“I thought you guilty,” she sobbed. “I said so—and you were innocent all the time! Oh, thank God—”
“Wait,” he interrupted. “How do you know that?”
“What you lost I found. I have it here. Oh, Tom, I have read every word! Oh, why did you not send it at the time? You were innocent—innocent! Can you ever forgive me?”
“Get up,” he said. “You have forgotten something.”
“Nothing,” she answered. “Your marriage has no more to do with it than mine.”
“My marriage! With whom, pray?”
“The wife you applied for—at some factory!”
She could not help her tone: it stung Tom into telling her the facts, and so inadvertently exposing Daintree’s chicanery. He instantly defended it as the accepted course.
“But that’s not what I meant at all,” he added hurriedly. “You must have forgotten what I told you the other day in the boat-shed!”
Claire had indeed forgotten that. The great truth had swallowed up the little lie, but true and false were now as plain to her as day and night. Moreover, she saw the meaning of the false.
“My hero!” she whispered. “You thought it best that I should never know. And so you said you were not an innocent man.”
“Nor was I,” he faltered. “You soon saw that for yourself. They may hang me yet!”
“And you wouldn’t have me think of you any more,” continued Claire, a spasm of pain crossing her face at his words. “But I will—I will! I’ll think of you till I die: my own hero!”
He fidgeted horribly, looking towards the door. She would compromise herself—she would do herself harm. That was still his first thought; she saw it, and it floated her to the crest of that emotional wave in whose trough he trembled.
“I believed you guilty—may God forgive me!” she cried. “But—shall I tell you something?”
“Well?”
“I loved you all the same!”
“I won’t believe it,” he said at last.
“I did—I know it now.”
“Then forget it!” he cried hoarsely. “For God’s sake, remember nobody but the man you are to marry to-morrow morning. What? Claire?” He started from her; she had shaken her head. She shook it more passionately for that; but she did not speak. So he began—hardly knowing what he said—but pleading for his best friend—pleading for her honour—pleading for sacred duty as his male eye saw it. She was going to marry a generous and brave man, to whom he owed, not only his life twice over, but any good that was left in him. Yet neither was the other a faultless man, though so generous and so brave, and his one great anchor to good sense and good living was his love for Claire. Tom spoke plainly, even eloquently, as he went on. He would have gone on longer, but there was no need. Claire sat meekly weeping; he bent over her—his face wrung with anguish now that hers was hidden—and so took her hand in his for the last time.
“God bless you always,” he whispered in a broken voice; “and make you good to him—and make him good to you!”
She clung passionately to his hand; she held it to her bosom, and looked piteously up into his face. The tears sparkled in her eyes and on her cheeks. Her sweet lips quivered; it was more than man could bear. He fell upon his knees, he threw his arms about her, and for a very little space these two torn hearts beat and sobbed as one.