Wrostella's Weird (Ludgate Monthly serial)/Part 1
INTRODUCTION.
THE many wax-lights on the broad toilette-table shed their soft brightness upon the silver-framed mirror and the shining racks of brushes, pin-holders, and jewel cases, on the unguents, essences, powders and pomades, in gold and silver boxes, and the whole paraphernalia, in short, of an old beauty, instead of the young fresh one, who sat in a big elbow-chair and talked to her own reflection in the glass for company. Behind her stretched a vast, gloomy room with catafalque-like bedstead, heavy furniture, and walls so darkly panelled that they appeared almost black when the fitful gleam of the fire (sunk deep in the wall) touched them; while, in strictest harmony with their melancholy, sounded, afar off, the sullen dirge of the surf as it washed unendingly on the sea shore. Surely the tripping measure of dance music, the triumphant gladness of song, would have been more suitable to the girl than this sorrowful beat of the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, but she did not seem to heed it, and when presently she sighed, it was more with the impatience of youth, and life, and hope, than for sadness' sake, or because she had anything real to trouble her.
“HE WILL BE HOME SOON,” SAID NOEMI
“He will be home soon,” she said, nodding at her reflection, “and I will tell him I am sorry—sorry I told him 'I wished him and his Wrostella at the bottom of the sea.' How it howls! It is like the ghosts of the dead, who cry and cry, and no one will let them in. And we were both angry—that is the way with people who love—one is kindest always to the persons to whom one is indifferent. And I have found out something. It is not wickedness, it is not absence, it is not temper, nor ugliness that kills love—it is ennui. He was jealous, and I provoking. We are both hot tempered and said lots of things we did not mean. And that is what that wicked old man intended when he condemned his heir to live here for three whole months in the year; but we will be happy yet, Terry and L in spite of him!”
She dug her dimpled elbows into the toilette-table, then, resting her little face in both palms, laughed mischievously.
“Ah-ha! Monsieur Terry,” she said, “what will you say to finding M. Laurent here? And is it my fault that the bleak place chilled him, and he fell ill, and so, while he came but for a day, he has remained a week? And I am not sorry. I am afraid of these people; they would do me a mischief if they could—and if I had not learned to shoot, yes, just like a man, I should not dare to lie down in my bed.”
She shifted her face a little to glance down at something lying among the litter of gold and silver toys, something plain and workmanlike, with steel barrels that shone brightly.
“Suzette will have it that we shall be robbed and murdered one night,” she went on musingly; “she says 'there are secret passages in the house, known to the peasants, and any one can get in who likes.'”
SHE POINTED THE MUZZLE OVER HER SHOULDER, AND FIRED.
“Alphonso locks his door—the poor fat fellow is a coward; perhaps M. Laurent does the same. Heigho! I shall be glad when Terry comes back. There will be only one month more and then Paris—and love—not the ennui of pretending to love when one is tired.”
HER PALM WAS RED WITH BLOOD.
She laughed, the rings of silky black hair on her forehead shading her dark eyes as she leaned forward; and, in the same moment, she saw something move in the darkness and shadow of the great room, and straining her sight as into a well of darkness, made out the figure of a man, and knew that it was moving slowly towards her.
Terror seized her—a mad, unreasoning panic dizzied her brain. Here was a murderer, one of those brutish creatures who hated her, and against whom she had been warned even while she mocked them, and it must be his life or hers. In a breath she snatched the pistol from the table, pointed the muzzle over her shoulder, and with wild eyes fixed upon the glass—fired.
A strangled cry, a groan, and all was still. She could not see at first for the mist as of blood before her eyes. When it cleared, the vision had faded like a breath that, but for the moment, had dimmed the mirror, which now gave back the semi-darkness of the vast and dreary room.
She wanted to turn, to look, to see the fruits of her handiwork, but she had no power to do anything but sit stupidly staring into the mirror, first at nothing, then at herself, who, in one moment of time, had become a criminal, perhaps a murderess.
The pistol had fallen from her hand. Mechanically she began presently to rub her little hands one against the other, looking at them furtively, as if expecting to see blood-stains upon them. What was going on in the darkness behind her? Had the wounded man dragged himself away by the secret way that he had come, or was he bleeding silently to death, or already dead?
The stupor of horror had slowly passed, and presently she got up, and groped her way backwards, a young slight shape, nearly lost in its white draperies, back and back till she came at last to the wall, against which she leaned with outstretched arms, and all the soft skin of her face dulled to a sick pallor, out of which her eyes looked blank and expressionless as a week-old babe's. The sad-coloured carpet stretched unbroken by any strange object before her. The door was shut, the room empty of any save herself, and silent as the grave.
Her glance travelled vacantly over the panelled walls, then downwards again in search to the floor. Presently, moving like a wavering, unsteady light that is blown hither and thither by the wind, she traversed the room, and, taking a candle from the table, kneeled down with it, and pressed her hand to and fro restlessly, seeking for that which she feared to find.
“THE POOR FAT FELLOW Is A COWARD.”
From knee to knee she groped, sweeping each inch of carpet with her palm, until she had advanced to almost the centre of the apartment, and still there was nothing—nothing—and the trembling hope was beginning to stir in her that perchance a too lively imagination had conjured up the eyes in the glass, when suddenly she felt her palm wet and sticky, and, holding it up, saw that it was red with blood.
A groan broke from her lips. It was true then—and she had slain a man, but who, who? If he could come and go unseen, might he not be somewhere near her now?
“Terry,” she said in a whisper, “why did you go away from me? Why did you bring me here? But learning to shoot was my fault, and if I had not learned, I should not—have—done—this. Perhaps they will hang me, and then you will be sorry that you got tired of me, and went away angry—and stayed away so long. And I will confess to no one but you what I have done—not to Suzette, who would scream and faint; not to M. de Laurent, who thinks a woman's hand should bear nothing but a rose; nor to my father, who hated my marriage, and Wrostella ... and so if no one comes to take me away, Terry, I will bear it alone until you come.”
She looked no more than a child as she kneeled there, gazing at the stain on her hand; but she had a woman's courage, too, for presently she rose, fetched cloths from a press, and set to work on the tiny pool of blood until all traces were removed and the dark, heavy pile looked as before.
Daylight found her kneeling still, but asleep, with arms outstretched as if to clasp the feet of the ivory Christ that hung on the wall by her bed.
CHAPTER I.
“O! better ye'd stay at hame, Helen,
And sew your silken seam;
For my house is in the far Hielands,
And ye'll hae puir welcome hame.”
WROSTELLA Castle, turning its sullen shoulders on the black bog-land that stretches in a broad slope from the sea shore to the range of mountains that go by the name of the Irish highlands, had been built, apparently, by some madman or misanthrope who intended to be well housed when he selected this dreariest, most God-forsaken spot in the whole island upon which to dwell.
Looking out from its windows, heavily and strongly built, as if to defy time, you could see nothing but the broad Atlantic, and the so-called settlements, many of them not more than eight to ten feet wide, that lie thickly scattered by the shore and on the promontories that jut out into the sea. All have been reclaimed from the wild bog-land by generations of toilers, but toil as they may, the peasants are always poor, nearly always hungry, and life to them means but one long tenacious struggle with death. So hopelessly barren is the ground, so few are the resources that, in this instance, nature in stepmotherly mood has provided them with.
They do not complain, theirs is the apathy of despair, that expects and hopes nothing; you cannot withdraw light from the lens in which no light has come, and not being used to help of any kind, or to do other than starve when their miserable crops of potatoes and oats failed, they did not murmur when from the fortress-like dwelling erected in their midst came neither money, nor food, nor kindness, nor any one of those little favours that it is surely the rich man's highest luxury to afford to the poor man at his gates.
One wild winter's day, Stephen Fitzgerald, travelling over a hundred miles from the nearest railway station in a jolting open car, had alighted, and standing in the midst of the desolate waste, decided that here, indeed, was a place where neither friend nor enemy would care to follow him, and partly out of the bogwood, partly with materials brought from a great distance, Wrostella was reared and furnished, and with some old servants, as sour of visage as himself, its master entered in, and dwelled there until he died.
Even if the castle had wished to buy, the starving peasants had nothing to sell, and for such things as might not be stored the bog-land was traversed once or twice a week by the cross old man who ruled the kitchen, and was in turn ruled by Mr. Fitzgerald, who lived entirely among his books, save when he took long walks by the sea shore, or for distraction visited the shooting gallery, which was the only unusual feature in the otherwise commonplace house. Here, with every modern appliance around him to test his skill, he would practice for hours, but what pleasure he found in his great proficiency it would be hard to say, unless, indeed, he expected an opportunity for testing it that never came.
What was the secret of his life? What had soured and driven him out from his kind to a solitary existence from which all! the sweet uses of life had been extracted?
Even his own family did not know; but one of them, having successfully tracked him to the desert, retired shuddering, and Stephen Fitzgerald was troubled by visitors no more.
With all his callousness to his fellow creatures, he was a just man, and his relations believed themselves secure of the very considerable fortune he had it in his power to leave; but when he died—of an accident in his shooting-gallery—it was charitably said, though others gave it a harsher name—it was found that he had affixed a curious condition to the inheritance of the property, viz.: that his heir should live for four consecutive months out of each year at Wrostella. If he refused to do this (or his frivolous wife for him, which was highly probable) the next heir should inherit, and if he, too, refused the condition attached, then the next, until all Stephen's desirable kin had been gone through till only the very poorest remained.
His heir did refuse. He was a rich man and able to throw up two thousand a year rather than cross his wife.
The next in succession being extravagant, and therefore needy, came over to Wrostella, shuddered, groaned, but decided that with the aid of a few choice spirits, French novels, French brandy, and a good cook, he might survive the ordeal, and accepted the heirship; but, before entering upon it, he went to Paris. Here, in his anxiety to take a good fill of pleasure before his enforced fast, he overdid the pleasure—and died.
Terence came next on the list—Terry, who had only a capful of sunny curls, a pair of Irish blue eyes, and Irish wit, an Irishman's warm heart, and a voice and way that made all the women love him almost before they had looked at him! Money he had none, or, perhaps, five and twenty would not have found him unmarried still; but he did not happen to be wanting to marry anyone very particularly when, after attending his cousin's funeral at Paris, he found himself the next heir, and immediately after—met Noémie.
A creole, born in the South and reared in the lap of Paris, with a father rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Noémie was lovely, spoiled, petulant, and the most charming little person possible, and far too dangerous to the peace of any man who saw her to be the very least in danger herself.
The father found her lovers a constant embarrassment, and at last, following the French fashion, selected a husband, whom he in every way considered suitable to her, and duly presented him to the young lady's inspection.
He was a Frenchman, young, rich, handsome and romantic; moreover, he had the reputation of being extreming successful with the fair sex,and Noémie's heart throbbed a little—not much his impassioned and practised love-making, and was indeed weighing him in the balance, when her father brought young Terence Fitzgerald home to dinner, and M. Laurent's chance was lost.
MR. FITZGERALD LIVED ENTIRELY AMONG HIS BOOKS.
Noémie's father cursed himself for a fool, when into the girl's
“dark eyes splendour,
Where the warm light loves to dwell,”
came a light that only the young Irishman had known how to bring there—an Irishman with nothing to offer, but a miserable castle in the middle of a bog, and a paltry two thousand a year, on which to keep a young woman steeped to the very lips in the luxuries and refinements of Paris!
It was not Terry who ventured to make any such outrageous proposal to her father, but Noémie herself who calmly informed M. Richepin that she loved Terry, that Terry loved her, and that if she were not allowed to marry him she would die.
Noémie's father laughed, and told her to begin at once, which she promptly did by refusing to eat; and meanwhile, Terry was forbidden the house, and M. Laurent was invited every day in his stead.
M. Laurent came with alacrity, for he passionately loved the girl, quite apart from her money, and did not believe in her having more than an ephemeral fancy for Terry.
When he kissed her hand, she promptly boxed his ears; when he tried his well-known, and usually effective style of love-making she laughed in his face, and, indeed, bid fair to extinguish any very real passion by making him look ridiculous.
A Frenchman's vanity is even a more delicate plant than an Englishman's, and when wounded, bleeds much longer than his heart; and M. Laurent, for all his love, never forgave Noémie, and might even pay her out some day if he ever got the chance. And meanwhile, she dwindled, faded; stifling the pangs of hunger with strenuous determination, and defying her father's mingled comments and entreaties, until, when from pure exhaustion, she could no longer leave her bed, M. Richepin gave up the unequal contest, and furiously told her to send for her Terry to take her away to his Irish bog, when, she would die in real earnest of ennui in a week.
She did send for him. He, too, had suffered considerably, seeing no prospect of overcoming her father's opposition; but love lit such warm fires in their eyes, and the shelter of each other's arms was so sweet, that the prospect of four months alone together in the wilderness sent Noémie into ecstasies; and if he shook his head, and said she would find him but a dull fellow for sole company, she did not believe him, and so the formal betrothal took place. Four months' exile out of each year in the wilderness, and an extremely limited income all the year round, did not, in the least, cool their transports, and in due course the formal betrothal took place.
TERRY CONQUERED, AND M. LAURENT'S CHANCE WAS LOST.
M. Laurent swallowed his disappointment and attended it, looking indeed so handsome and manly, that had Noémie not been blinded by love, she must have seen that he made even Terry compare unfavourably with him, while M. Richepin angrily shrugged his shoulders, feeling quite convinced that before three months were over she would be bitterly repenting her bargain. He knew his daughter's tastes better than she knew them herself, as fathers indeed often do know the characters of the children whom they have reared with the utmost devotion, only to be forsaken for the first wandering fancy that crosses their paths.
And his heart was full of bitterness when a month later he saw the untried girl set out with such blithe gladness for the distant town that he had never seen, with a man of whom he knew nothing save that he bore an honourable name, and had a charming appearance and manner—and very little else besides—or so thought M. Richepin.
Perhaps Noémie realized then what all his years of care and devotion had done for her, and all as it were for the reaping of a stranger, for she clung round his neck long and closely, and promised to come back soon, “for,” said she, “these four months will pass like a day, father, both to you and to me!”
He sighed as he gave her back to her husband, pitying her for her youthful haste and ignorance, but it was something more than a fancy that she took with her to Wrostella, packed in among her bibelots and laces, her jewels, and girlish vanities; it was a very true and tender heart that did not change easily, and that was, moreover, good to the very core.
Even the hundred and thirty miles jolt across country, all traces of civilization rapidly disappearing, and pleasant green fields but a memory, save for an occasional patch by some lonely lake, could not daunt their happiness, nor when they descended from the lofty mountains to ugly, squat, Wrostella, did their spirits sink, though the gloomy darkness of the house, and the forbidding looks of the old servants might have chilled less love-warm hearts than theirs.
They brought into the place a burst of life and sunshine, and the French cook and maid who followed them, being in the initial stages of courtship, also contributed their own gaiety with them, refusing to be influenced by the funereal surroundings, or the scowls of the “images,” as they irreverently termed the custodians of the castle. They even approved of the wild Atlantic, and went to walk on its shores, picking their steps delicately over the miserable cabins, that could scarcely be distinguished from the huge boulders that cumbered the ground, and, in French fashion, shrugging their shoulders at the squalor, which seemed as natural to these poor people as did all the comforts of life to them.
But Alphonse, though in love, had no idea of supporting the tender passion without sublime cooking of every description, and one of the most intelligent of the peasants spent the major part of his existence in fetching from Londonderry the necessary ingredients for those dinners which were served up as faultlessly as if for a dinner party in the Champs Elysées.
M. Richepin had lent the man, with a year's princely wages, to the young people for the time they would be at Wrostella, “because,” said he, “only the most excellent cooking will enable you two young folks to support existence entirely alone for four whole months, and when the usual monotony of love sets in, you will always be able to find distraction in Alphonse's inspirations, for lovers always say the same thing, but cooks are sometimes different.”
He had also asked leave to provide the young people's establishment with all they required during the period they resided at Wrostella, and he had given Alphonse carte blanche for all expenses.
“It was all that he could do for his daughter's happiness,” he said to himself cynically, and he had done it. If anything on earth could prolong the season of love for two young people, shut up for a month in a desert, it would be the genius of an inspired cook, and they had got him.
He would not have gone, this chevalier of the stew-pans, had not beauty drawn him “with a single hair,” and that hair growing on the dark head of Noémie's delightfully pretty maid, Suzette.
He had fallen in love with her at first sight, but his opportunities of seeing her in the Champs Elysées mansion were few, so that when M. Richepin, fully expecting a refusal, laid his commands on the chef to accompany the young pair, he was amazed at the celerity of the man's consent.
M. Alphonse, having a very good idea of what Wrostella would be, felt that, out of sheer ennui, Suzette would be obliged to smile upon him; and Suzette did.
The grim old servants, scandalized at the French sprightliness, airs, and ways of the smart pair below stairs, glowered, hovered awhile in the darkness, and fled.
THE CHEF AND THE MAID APPROVED OF THE ATLANTIC.
They were replaced by cheerful, buxom young maids and stalwart serving-men from Londonderry, who bore the appalling dulness for a longer or shorter period that varied with the charms of the women-folk; still, in one way or the other, the service of the house was suitably conducted, and, in addition to the French servants, Tim, an old adherent of Terry, remained from first to last through the many changes in the servants' hall. And outside, the peasants, who had received and expected nothing from the former Fitzgerald, looked for as little from the new comers, of whose doings, indeed, they knew nothing, and cared less, being ignorant, even beyond the comprehension of what luxury meant, for to rightly appreciate anything, one must be cognizant of its true value, and these people had never learned the value of anything, not even money, which they never touch, save when, by the sale of stock, fed on the rough mountain pastures, they scrape together sufficient for the rent of their lands and pay it over to their landlord.
The sea was alive with fish and they had but one boat between them. If their scanty crops of potatoes and oats failed, then so much the worse for them. The Atlantic was before, the bog behind, and the pitiless sky above them. Help from man! there was none. They were not to know that in the future a noble-hearted English-woman was to come to their assistance, giving her time, brains, and money, to help them to bring light into their heathenish ignorance of all domestic arts and slowly and painfully teach them such industries as enabled them to earn money enough to live in comfort and self-respect, and, in a word, to raise them from all-fours to upstanding, intelligent men and women who, happy in their honourable toil, this day verily rise up and call her blessed.
But, as yet, no such gracious figure had loomed on the horizon of these poor people from whom Terry rigorously kept his wife apart, having no wish to see her young brightness dimmed and her spirit saddened by their hopeless poverty—so hopeless, indeed, that only a rich man might successfully cope with it, and only then by devoting his whole time, as well as a fortune, to the task. And Terry had but one life to live, and in those days he was selfish in his new found happiness, and so long as he kept her happy, considered the first duty of his life performed.
IN THE SHOOTING GALLERY.
And Noémie was ignorant, too—ignorant of the harsher side of life, as but few French, and no English women are; and these strange people who never begged, never by word or sign acknowledged her presence when she passed them, appealed to her sympathy no more than if they had been cabbages, and it is almost a rule with selfish youth never to offer what is neither directly or indirectly asked for.
So Noémie never saw the inside of those miserable hovels, and indeed, would have been afraid to venture into one of them alone, for Terry (and this was wrong of him) encouraged her to think that every peasant was a Fenian in disguise, and their apathy seemed to her sullenness, and the fact that they possessed no firearms, did not deter her from drawing living mental pictures of them as masked assassins appearing at her bedside, in the dead of night, intent either upon her life or the jewels, that would enable them to launch a whole fleet of fishing boats upon the unfished sea.
Suzette shared in her mistress's feeling, so lowering were the glances cast upon her frivolous self and Alphonse in their walks abroad, glances that were not even appeased by the gracious permission he afforded the peasants to come up to the castle for such food as over-flowed its inmates' needs. Alas! their wants were too colossal to be satisfied by broken bread, and all along the sea-board, covering an area of nearly one thousand square miles, the same utter destitution prevailed. Indeed, it was just as well that Noémie did not know, and that they made her afraid instead of miserable, so afraid, indeed, that she took to studying ardently the art of self-defence, and passed long days in the shooting gallery, with Terry, and the story of which she also did not know, or probably nothing would have induced her to set foot inside it.
Every modern device that could encourage skill in a marksman was there, as well as every arm or instrument of warfare now used in any part of the globe. But it was in pistol-shot practice that Noémie delighted, and in which she at last became even more proficient than her husband. And he, only too eager to invent or discover new methods of passing time, was perfectly happy to attend and applaud her, so that soon the one quaintly rich apartment in the hideous house became the one they habitually occupied. And Suzette rubbed her little plump hands, and told Alphonse that now Madam's jewels would be safe, if by chance Mr. Fitzgerald should be called away—as husbands occasionally are—from their wives, especially when, mon Dieu! they were buried alive in such a place as Wrostella. She was well able to defend herself, and Terry, watching his wife as she shattered to atoms a swaying glass ball, at which, with the aid of a mirror, she aimed over her shoulder, thought so, too, and confessed himself fairly beaten out of the field.
CHAPTER II.
“O denia see yon castle, Helen,
That shines sae fair to see?
There is a lady in it, Helen,
Will sinder you and me.”
LOVE and kisses (apt to become monotonous if extended over too long a period and always with the same person) carried the young people over the first month's enforced sojourn in the wilderness; shooting, and M. Alphonse over the next; but with the third came, to three of the party, that intense nostalgia known only to true Parisians who have been born, as it were, on the Boulevards, have lived on them, and, as nearly as possible, die on them, for no other place seems so good to them under Heaven.
And Noémie, looking out at the wild wintry weather and the storm-lashed sea, longed for the life, the beauty, the movement of the great city, for the flowers, the cheerful voices, the gaiété de cœur with which Paris infects all its inhabitants; for the drives in the Bois that she had once valued so highly; for the new fashions that would make her present attire positively démodé; for the evening papers that she had taken as a matter of course, but now so sorely missed; for all the shifting, brilliant panorama, in short, of the life to which she had been accustomed. And, last, but by no means least, she missed very greatly the father whom she had loved better than anything in the world before Terry came—Terry who had possessed all the charms of the unknown, and who now stood confessed in all the faults of an intimate friend. For if Stephen Fitzgerald's hatred of his kind could have suggested one method of vengeance upon it more fiendish than another, it would have been the throwing of a young man and woman, almost entire strangers to each other, absolutely on one another's society, without a single extraneous source of enjoyment for months, and if his spirit walked, as it was popularly supposed to do, it must have been thoroughly happy in observing the signs of ennui that gradually crept over the pair.
A man can't change his nature because he has accidentally got married, and Terry loved an outdoor life, and excelled in hunting, shooting, fishing, and other manly exercises usually affected by persons whose muscles are in an inverse ratio to the quantity and quality of their brains.
He adored Noémie, but it is one thing to want a morsel of bread, and another to see loaves ranged in endless perspective on shelves, all waiting to be eaten; and the very kindest thing a friend could have done would be to separate this young pair for a considerable time, until a real hunger for the sight of each other's faces should overtake them.
They had plenty of books, papers, and music, and the immortal Alphonse took good care that a considerable part of their time should be devoted to the consideration of those masterpieces into which he threw his whole soul.
For he and Suzette, too, though having the immense advantage over their master and mistress that they were not married, had reached the point of almost yawning in each other's faces; and the soubrette, after the fashion of maids of all nationalities, contrived in various ways to make Noémie uncomfortable, and more and more dissatisfied with her dismal surroundings.
It would have been the height of folly to transport French furniture and French surroundings across a hundred or more miles of bog, but Suzette groaned over their absence all the same, and looked and felt as thoroughly out of her element as a dainty drawing room cat, who is suddenly lodged in an empty barn.
She found time to discover several grey hairs in Alphonse's head, and some serious defects in his temper, and if there had been a man in the place worthy of a glance from her soft, black eyes he would have got it. Her mistress was better off than she, for there was the shooting gallery, but, alas!
Noémie had learned all there was to learn in it, and the two young people sought in vain to hide from each other the weariness that threatened to consume their love, and the restiveness which daily and hourly enforced companionship must inevitably develop in even the most loving souls.
Perhaps the fault lay most with Noémie, for a woman never forgets that marriage is a chain with herself at one end and a man at the other, and when she places the man she loves under a microscope (as a man, indeed, very seldom puts a woman), it is seldom to his advantage, or her own peace of mind that she does so.
And Noémie expected too much, and was disappointed to find that her idol was not made of pure gold at all, but ordinary clay, though, as he had never pretended to be anything else, this was unreasonable on her part—and womanly. Gradually, in her mind, he took colour from her surroundings, which were hard, gray, and full of a great weariness to this true child of the South, who had been steeped to the lips in the luxury of the French capital and whose life had been full of warmth, and colour, and movement until now.
Possibly her father had understood this spoiled product of civilization better than she had understood herself, or rather, he knew very little of the depths of her heart, and a great deal of the power that the mere force of habit had over her, and bleak Wrostella, with its moaning seaboard, had seemed to him the very last place in which to face the disillusioning process of the first months of married life.
Gradually it became borne in upon Terry's mind—and, like most men of the better sort, he was naturally unsuspicious—that she was aware of having made a huge mistake, that she regretted it, and that after all M. Laurent would have been a much more suitable husband for her than himself.
And once that idea got firmly lodged in Terry's hot head—and he was not an Irishman for nothing—it was very hard to get out again, and being by no means disillusioned of Noémie, but only a little tired, after the fashion of men, he became passionately jealous, and, in due proportion, disagreeable, so that soon the “ruder words rushed in” compared with which their passing discontent had been as Paradise.
Noémie's bloom had begun to fade, the place was telling on her physically, and her temper—as passionate a one as Terry's own—suffered in consequence, so that both were in the mood when the merest spark would cause an explosion, and that spark came, when one day Terry received at breakfast a letter in the handwriting of a lady that disturbed him mightily, and the contents of which he did not communicate to his wife.
“I must leave you,” he said abruptly, as they rose from table, then rang, and gave orders that the car should be prepared at once, and a small portmanteau put ready.
“Where are you going?” said Noémie coldly.
“I am going on business, and may be three days absent—or more. My uncle's will only insists on my making a residence of this place for four months, it does not forbid my leaving it for a short time on an emergency.”
“If that is so, why could you not have broken the monotony by taking me away for a few days?” she said wearily.
“Have you found it so terrible?” he said, turning to look at her keenly, and Terry's blue eyes could be very keen sometimes, and even hard.
“I have found it dull,” she said, with a glance that cut him to the quick.
“And you would not have been dull with Laurent?” he said calmly.
“No.”
“And Wrostella is not Paris?”
“No, alas!”
“And you wish you had never come?”
“Yes; and I wish—I wish that you and your Wrostella were at the bottom of the sea before I had ever seen either of you!” cried Noémie, beside herself at his abrupt departure, his silence as to why he went, and the strangeness of his manner towards her.
“Do you mean that?” he said, turning upon her a face so strangely altered that she scarcely knew it.
Her heart cried out “No! No!” In that moment all her weariness of his company had vanished and she loved him as passionately as ever; but she was spoiled, and proud southern blood burned hot in her, and she said deliberately, “Yes.”
He came nearer and looked at her—at the young, alluring beauty that had made him her slave, and said, roughly—
“You wish that you had married M. Laurent?”
“I do,” she said, clenching her hands hard that she might not break down and fall upon his neck with tears and kisses.
“You may be able to do so yet,” he said, then went swiftly away, and in another minute had left the house.
But it was surely a misfortune that the very next day M. Laurent should come jolting across the bog from Londonderry, laden with gifts and messages om M. Richepin, who had taken advantage of the young Frenchman's visit to Ireland to obtain some news of his young daughter's well-being, of which he had had some serious doubts of late.
Did the experienced man, indeed, think that a little company might be good for these two poor, young people thrown so absolutely on each other, nay, that even a little jealousy might not be amiss in the deadly dulness of the Wrostella ménage? Any way, it was M. Richepin who suggested this journey across the bog,' and as the Frenchman was still more or less in love, and decidedly curious as to how the marriage had turned out, he duly undertook the jaunt, repenting himself bitterly of his folly when, after many hours' exposure, in very insufficient clothing, to the most inclement weather, and without having had the chance of breaking his fast on the road, he arrived at Wrostella, only to be caught, instantly, in the grips of pneumonia, and cast helplessly on a sick bed.
“I WISH YOU WERE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.”
Noémie, startled, had welcomed him coldly enough, but his real illness became so quickly apparent, that she had soon no thought but how his life might be saved, and when by extraordinary efforts a doctor had been obtained, and everything possible done, and when after three days of great danger the young Frenchman had turned the corner, the girl sat down to think of Terry, and Terry's extraordinary conduct. She had received a line from him, and the extent of the hurt inflicted upon him by her passionate words was shown by the resentment he evidently felt towards her.
And what would he say when he returned home, to find M. Laurent installed here? A stranger looking in one evening at the cosy interior made by a bright fire and lights, and flowers, by the beauty of the two young people, who sat and chatted together, might well have been excused for thinking that these were bride and bridegroom, who had brought their own sunshine into the dismal house of Wrostella.
And it was on that very night, when some of the old brightness had come back to the girl's voice and heart, that the sinister incident occurred of which mention has been made in the introduction to this story.
(To be concluded.)