CHAPTER XXV

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A DEAD MAN’S SWEETHEART.

“Levallion’s drawing-room!” said Houghton to himself bitterly. “Inside his own house, that fools say is a man’s safest place.”

For he and his assistant had but now finished a hateful task, to Levallion’s friend, and if there was doubt about who had killed Levallion, there was none about the poison that had done it.

“There was enough prussic acid in his stomach to kill a horse, let alone a man!” Houghton thought, as his assistant departed with his ghastly paraphernalia. “And God knows what form it was given in, perhaps, but I don’t.”

With his own hands he made Levallion’s body ready for his grave, but not even Houghton’s skill could cross the dead hands on the breast. He lay as death had found him, with his arms outstretched to the woman he loved. Houghton drew the sheet up to the chin, and looked at the dead man’s face.

Handsome, in a hard-bitter way, Levallion had always been. Dead, the unearthly beauty of his face caught Houghton’s breath.

Every saturnine line, every sardonic curve, had been wiped off it. Over the hard eyes the white lids were gentle; the lips that had been weary so many a day under the dark mustache were set in ineffable peace. For all the majesty of that still, set face, there was a strange youth in it, as though death had brought him gently to a very far land, where there were neither the lies nor the shams he had scorned--and the joy of it was written on the dead man’s face.

“That was Levallion!” said Houghton involuntarily. Perhaps no one but he had known that, until six months ago, when Ravenel came into it, Adrian Gordon, Lord Levallion, had been weary of his life. Neither goodness, nor fair dealing, nor common chastity had the man ever met. Small wonder that his tongue was keen as his eyes, or that cynicism was written on the corners of his lips.

“The real Levallion, who had to die just as he cared to live. Well, God give his murderer justice!”

He did not know he spoke aloud, and he wheeled as some one answered him.

“There’s no justice,” said a voice that made his blood stop in him, “or I’d be there, and not he.”

Lady Levallion, all dressed as if it were day instead of seven o’clock in the morning, stood at his elbow.

“I beg your pardon!” said Houghton stupidly. For his life he could have made her no more sensible answer.

“I married him. I didn’t love him----”

If he had not seen her speak he would never have known it was Lady Levallion’s voice.

“I----”

He looked at her sharply. Every bit of color was gone from her face. She was grayer than the dead man.

“Go and rest. You’re doing no good here,” he said sharply, as people speak to hysterical patients. But there was no hysteria in her narrowed eyes.

“How can I rest? It’s all my fault,” she said slowly.

“Why do you say that? It’s nonsense.”

“I don’t know why, but I feel--no, no! I don’t mean it!”

She had broken off with terror in her voice, and for the first time Houghton doubted her. Yet a woman in grief will say anything. And in grief she was, for, as if she were alone, she fell on her knees by Levallion.

“I’d have died for you a hundred times, rather than this!” she was whispering in the ears that could not hear. “If you could only know that, I could bear it.”

Houghton turned away sharply to the door, so that no one else should see what was between two people--the living and the dead. The awful incongruity of the whole thing came over him. The man’s own drawing-room, all flowers and silk hangings and carved ivory, where, instead of rose-colored lamps, four unshaded candles burned at the head and foot of the couch where Levallion lay covered with a white sheet, where Lady Levallion knelt motionless in a plain serge gown that--or, perhaps, it was not the gown--made her ghastly.

“What am I to do?” she was muttering. “Levallion, what am I to do?”

With a strange passion she kissed his lips, his shut eyes.

“You believed in me, you trusted me,” she said, very low, but in the silent room the whisper carried. “Oh, wherever you are, trust me still! Even if I--hold my tongue.”

Doctor Houghton felt suddenly and physically sick. Then he remembered he had no right to have listened. No right to judge any woman who was mad with grief, as this one was. He went to her, to try and get her away, and something in her attitude made the suspicion in him die down again. Lady Levallion was crouched close to the dead man’s breast, pressed to him as a child in trouble to its mother. Whatever she meant to be silent about it was not any guilt of her own. For, as if it were her only refuge, she was clutching Levallion’s body.

“Come to your brother,” said Houghton softly. “Come away.”

“I only want Levallion,” she said very pitifully. “He was kind to me,” in the old parrot cry. “Let me stay with him.”

The man nodded, because he could not speak. In spite of himself he was assured that even if Lady Levallion got up at the inquest, and swore that she herself had killed her husband, it would not be true.

“I wish I’d died for him,” she said, with a strange involuntary turning to the man who a moment ago had judged her. And Houghton believed her.

In the silence he shivered, for the chill of death, as well as morning, was in the great room. He had had a hard night’s work and no sleep, but he could not go and leave Lady Levallion. Any chance comer might hear her say something senseless, might retail it at the inquest.

“Why did you bring him here?” she cried suddenly. “This awful room--he was alive here only a little while ago.”

“It seemed best.” The man could not say that one reason was lest he should disturb her by taking Levallion to his own room, so that she came in and saw him before he was made ready for his coffin; the other, that here the jury would more easily view the body. He thanked God she had not got here before he carried Levallion back from that bare table in the justice-room, that she had no thought of what had been done there.

“You must come with me,” he said, and for the first time she looked at him.

“You care!” she said sharply. “Oh, I thought there was no one who cared but me--and Tommy! And I never cared till to-night. God knows I’d sell my soul to have him back--even to know what he would like me to do.”

“Tell the truth!” said Houghton involuntarily, and saw freezing terror in her eyes for the second time that night.

Her answer was absent, curious.

“I’ve nothing to tell. In my inmost soul I believe, I will believe, I’ve nothing to tell. Oh, if I’d only made you happy, perhaps----”

“Look at his face,” said Houghton simply.

But she barely heard him.

Once more she drew to her breast--now that it was too late for the man who had longed for her love to feel it--the face she had never held there in life. With anguish she kissed the shut eyes--for there are two kinds of love in a woman’s heart, and if she had given one utterly to Adrian Gordon, it was the other, that is best and highest, that was Levallion’s now. If she cared this hour whether Adrian Gordon lived or died it was not for his own sake so much as Levallion’s.

“Good-by,” she whispered. “I’ll never see you again. You were too good for a little fool like me. And if I’ve brought you here, I’ll pay for it.”

She took no more heed of Houghton than if he had been a stick or a stone, as she let him follow her to where Celeste waited in the hall. But though Doctor Houghton went to bed the thoughts in his mind kept the sleep he needed away.

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