CHAPTER XX

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A WICKED WOMAN’S TONGUE.

“I heard you breathing,” Levallion said composedly. “No, don’t you struggle; I’ll let you go! Only be kind enough to tell me what earthly pleasure it gives you to look in my windows.”

“No pleasure,” said Hester Murray, after a minute, when her frightened heart had seemed to choke her, and the quick withdrawal of his contemptuous grasp to make her a thing of no moment. “Only misery. Oh, Levallion! Won’t you be less hard on me? If you let me come here and be friendly with your wife it would set things right again. It kills me to be alone without a friend in the world.”

“What things? What do you mean?” sharply.

She dared not tell him. He would never help her if he knew.

“Nothing much,” she said, shivering, only half-artificially. “I’ve lost all my money, and--and people seem to have dropped me! To stay in your house with the duchess might help me.”

“Has she dropped you, too,” he inquired, wondering if, after all his careful analysis, she was not such a fool as she seemed.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her lately,” though she knew well enough.

Levallion’s hawk eyes narrowed as he peered at her in the rainy darkness. Her wet hair strayed in lank locks down her face, that for once was not smiling. (How he had grown to loathe Hester’s smile!) He put up a suspicious hand on her thin shoulder and recoiled. She was wet to the skin, her thin house-dress a sticky, sopping mass.

“Look here, Hester!” he said almost kindly. “Better give up this business and go home. You won’t mend matters by being seen hanging about here after dark, merely get some very unpleasant illness.”

“I wish I’d died long ago.” There was something strained in her voice; even in the dark she did not look at him.

“I see what you mean about having no money.” It was odd how that queer note in her utterance killed the pity in him. “You had plenty.”

“There were debts--old debts,” she gasped, eagerly grasping at this chance, at least. “Debts from ten years ago----”

“You told me there were none,” he shrugged his shoulders. “If there were, ten-year-old debts are outlawed.”

“I had kept on paying a little on them. I didn’t know that obviated any time-limit. They sold me up for the principal and interest.” Only desperate hope made her speak the truth. “I tell you, Levallion, I haven’t a sou!”

“For an astute woman you haven’t managed well,” he said, after what seemed a long time. “If you had five hundred a year allowed you, quarterly, do you think you would be able to stay at home in the evenings?”

Five hundred a year to the woman who had had five times as many thousands spent on her! But she swallowed her rage, her contempt at his beggarly offer.

“I suppose--I could,” she said slowly. “But--oh! it’s not my poverty that hurts me, it’s----”

“Do go home, I beg of you!” said Levallion coldly. “You are not yourself. And, remember that you shall be supplied with what I consider an adequate income if you will leave this place and live elsewhere”--for, after all, he could not let the woman starve, dire and evil as had been her sins against him.

“I’ll go--I’ll do anything,” she muttered, with a sudden exhaustion that made her clutch the dripping bushes beside her. “But listen to me first. In spite of everything, I care for you still. I’d do anything for you. I’ve no pride left. If you will come and see me sometimes, your marriage shall be as if it had never happened----”

“Have the goodness,” interrupted Lord Levallion icily, “to leave my marriage out of the question. It concerns you in no way whatever.”

“It concerns me, because it kills me to see you taken in, deceived!” she cried fiercely, and so quickly that he could not stop her. “You could have seen it for yourself, not ten minutes ago, if you had not been besotted about her. Ask your wife what she knows about Adrian Gordon, and why she did not marry him,” utterly reckless now as to whether her lie about Adrian’s wife were found out or not. “She was engaged to him fast enough; but he was poor and you were rich. It was better to marry you, and have him come and stay in your house. Ask Sylvia Annesley--but she’ll lie to you! Ask that big-eyed brother of hers, who never lets his sister out of his sight. She never loved you, and she can love--in her girl’s way! Not like me, for I’ll love you till I die. Oh, Levallion!” panting, wild, she seized his arm, “don’t throw me over! Think of the boy, think how I have no world but you!”

“Don’t touch me,” said Levallion, with sudden acrid fury, as if he had waked from some bad dream in which he was bound and speechless. “Go!”

“Say that if you’re ever miserable--unhappy--you’ll come back to me!” She was pleading for her very life, as a fool does when death is certain. “Levallion!”

A curious stiffness came over the man from head to foot. When it broke he would have no power over tongue or hand; and this was a woman.

“Go away. Be quick!” he said hoarsely. “Because of what’s past you shall have your money, but not if you stay in my village. Your lies----”

“They’re truth,” contemptuously. “Ask, ask, and you’ll see!” She was so close to him that he felt her breath on his face. “Then perhaps you’ll come to me.”

“If you were dying in the gutter I would not come to you,” he spoke so evenly that she did not know that death stood closer to her than even Lord Levallion. “If you crawled after me on your knees, I would not change to you--or the boy! No matter what happened, neither you nor he shall ever get anything from me but the bread I would give to a beggar. Do you understand?” and in the dark she could not see his face.

“Oh! you think so now, I know. But when you find her out----”

That curious strained rigidity seemed to drop from him like a garment. A dreadful, fiery pain shot through his heart, ran in his blood, curved his fine hands.

“Go!” said Levallion thickly, “before I kill you with my hands.” But as he turned on her she had seen his eye.

She shrank away and ran, madly, where she neither knew nor cared. She had gone too far with him! He would murder her out here in the dark. Her dry, shut throat could make no sound in the terror that would not let her scream. Trembling, stumbling, falling and getting up again, Hester Murray fled through the darkness and rain. Her gown, that had been a soaked whisp, was a mass of filthy mud, her hands were caked with the clay of the roads, but she ran still, round and round sometimes, but, by degrees, more in the right direction. It was not till her breath absolutely would not come to her aching lungs, and the blood beat in her face, that she came to herself, and realized where she was. Alone on a country road, nearly at her own house, with not a soul following her, not a sign of those devilish eyes that had gleamed murder at her through the dark.

“He would have killed me!” she said to herself as soon as her choking heart-beats would let her. “I’ll never get anything from him but that five hundred a year that’s no use. Does he----” but a noise startled her, and she ran again like a drunken woman, staggering from side to side till she reached her own door.

Her wet hair down her back, her hands filthy, her black, gauzy gown an indescribable mass of mud and twigs and tatters, the blood purple in her pulsing face, she burst into her own drawing-room, where a lamp burned dimly, though there was no fire in the grate.

“Does he think I’m a fool? That I won’t pay him out, if I have to break myself to do it?” she cried fiercely, since her one maid went home at night, and there was no one to hear her.

But she was wrong, for a man’s voice answered her from the depths of a high-backed chair that was turned away from her.

“A fool! No one could see you and think that,” and the owner of the voice rose, looked at her, and recoiled with a quick word.

“But what is the matter with you? You are hurt--drowned--tell me quickly.”

Hester Murray, in her wet, unspeakable gown, sat down on one of her clean chintz chairs and told him. Whether the exact truth, or not, does not matter; but crimson-faced, glittering-eyed, she was a dreadful sight as the quick words came from her lips.

What he said, what she answered, she could not remember half an hour later, as she dragged her exhausted body up to bed, with a curiously compounded drink in a tumbler, which was to counteract the effects of exposure and fright. She fell asleep as soon as she felt the comfort of her warm bed, only muttering now and again as sleep gained on her:

“I’ll do it. He brought it on himself. It was--his fault. I hate him. I hate him!” and the fury of the thought wakened her for one burning, choking instant till her queer potion took hold of her, and she fell fast asleep, as they say men have done in the rack.

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