CHAPTER XXXI

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A BAD MOVE.

Two days afterward the great gates of Levallion Castle were opened wide to let out the funeral of the man who had been poisoned in his own house. Behind the hearse, before the long rows of country neighbors who came because they must and the flocking poor who came because the dead man had been good to them, walked the new Lord Levallion as chief mourner--and people stared as they saw Sir Thomas Annesley walking at his side. Sir Thomas, whose sister was a murderess, and lying in jail awaiting her committal for trial at the assizes.

“I wonder the boy can hold up,” said Lord Chayter to his companion. “I honestly believe she didn’t do it, though!” But when asked who did, he was silent.

Long and speechlessly the new Lord Levallion stood by his cousin’s grave. If there were men who would have spoken to him they dared not do it, so hard and hostile was his face. He turned without seeming to see his neighbors or the parson at his elbow; and to the surprise of every one drove off in the opposite direction from Levallion Castle.

He was not needed there, Levallion’s lawyer was in charge, and would remain so till it pleased Adrian Gordon to come back. There was no will to read, nothing to keep the heir from taking up his immediate residence. Except that his wife’s settlements and jointure were secured to her. Lord Levallion had arranged nothing. That consolation legacy to Adrian had never been made--or needed.

But all that was the last thing in Adrian’s head as he drove to the station from that ghastliest thing on earth, the funeral of a murdered man.

In the last two days he had ransacked the village, but of a Mrs. Murray no one had ever heard. The landlord of the raw new bungalows had gone away; the caretaker gave a description of Miss Brown, the defaulting tenant, which did not tally in any respect with Hester Murray, except that Miss Brown had yellow hair.

Bad as Hester might be, he had never known her to drink; and the village girl who had waited on the tenant of the bungalow swore that two days out of three her mistress would drink herself into a heavy sleep. She said, also, that Miss Brown never left the house except to go into the garden; that at night, from her cottage near-by--for she had never slept in the house--she had always seen the drawing-room lit up till all hours. And it was clear her story was true, for none of the village people had ever laid eyes on the levanting tenant during all the three months she had lived in the bungalow.

“That disposes of Hester,” Adrian said to himself. “She could never have lived cooped up like that. She’d have scoured the country for exercise.”

Levallion’s lawyer, too, poohpoohed the idea, as he furnished Mrs. Murray’s present address in London.

“She could not have been here, or his lordship would have mentioned it in his instructions to me. I was to pay quarterly to her account in the Starr Street branch of Lloyd’s Bank, five hundred a year, so long as she observed his lordship’s conditions of never going within a hundred miles of any of his country houses, or approaching him or his wife in any way, personally or by letters. I received those instructions one morning, and the next had a letter from Mrs. Murray herself, from a London address and posted in London. I think you may set aside all thought of her having been down here. Lord Levallion would have made no terms with her in that case, I am convinced. Three days afterward she drew her money and I made it my business to ascertain her whereabouts. She and her boy were at the address she had written from--Starr Street, Paddington.”

And to Starr Street Adrian was going, in hopes that if Hester Murray and the woman Tommy had seen were one and the same, he could terrify it out of her. For he owed her a long score.

It was pouring rain and pitch-dark when he found her number in the shabby street, a strange dwelling for a woman who had had the best house in Eaton Place. If he had any thought that she would not see him, he was mistaken; for he had barely entered the sordid lodging-house sitting-room when she came in, small, pretty, dainty as usual, but with something so unaccustomed in her dress that he started.

“Adrian!” she said prettily. “This is kind of you,” and she pretended not to see that he made no motion to take her outstretched hand. She sat down, not sure what had brought him, his own business or another’s. In spite of herself, her heart thumped.

“I didn’t come to be kind,” he said coolly. “But what’s the matter with you? Is Murray dead?” For she was dressed in new widow’s mourning, incongruously expensive for 15 Starr Street.

“No,” she answered quietly. “Levallion! And I--loved him.”

Some emotion she could not control convulsed her face.

“Your truthfulness with him showed it!” brutally. “But I fail to see why you wear widow’s weeds.”

“Because, in my own eyes, I am his widow,” she said. “You know that! Have you come here to insult me when I am heart-broken--or why?”

And to his astounding eyes there were the ravages of fearful grief in her face. But he was in no mood for pity.

“How dared you tell Lady Levallion, before her marriage,” he said--and it was not what she had expected--“that ‘Mrs. Gordon’ was my wife?”

“Because Sylvia Annesley made me, threatened me. And I did it in ignorance. If I had known what I was doing, do you think I would have stirred a finger to help Levallion to marry--to marry!” bitterly.

“I suppose not. Well, it’s some small comfort to think you ruined yourself! Were you trying to undo your work by passing yourself off as Miss Brown, at Levallion?”

But the sudden question never jarred her; she had been ready for it, since, for all she knew, Levallion might have told him. Her wide eyes opened innocently as she stared at him, and all the while it was sweeping over her acute brain that he was speaking by guesswork.

“I don’t know what you mean!” she cried, in her clear, high voice. “I know nothing about any Miss Brown.”

“Will you come down there and tell the caretaker you don’t?” quietly.

“Yes,” said Hester Murray, just as quietly; “if you can make me understand what you mean. Caretaker of what? and what has he to do with me? I have not been at Levallion Castle for three years, and you know it.”

“You’ve been living within a mile of it all summer!”

Pale as a sheet, she stood up in front of him.

“Are you mad?” she said. “Would I--I that he discarded, shamed, ruined, go near him and his new--wife? Whoever your Miss Brown was, she was not I! I’ve been ill, poor, starving, nearly dying, till Levallion heard of it and sent me money.”

“Have you been here all summer, then?” unconvinced.

He terrified her till she could scarcely answer him, and if she did not satisfy him she was ruined. She shook her head.

“I’ve been in France, Boulogne,” she said. “In a pension; you can write and ask them.” And thanked Heaven she dared to play the desperate card, though only yesterday she had loathed the means that put it into her hand.

“Day before yesterday--the last few days?” doggedly.

“I’ve been here. Oh, Adrian! Why are you asking me such questions? If I had been at Levallion, could I have stayed away from--him?”

Her low, broken voice, her puzzled misery, were perfect; and yet the man disbelieved in her because he knew her to be a liar.

“Do you expect me to believe it was not you who lived at Levallion, in that bungalow behind the village, all summer?” he said. “Because I think it was.”

“It was not I. And if it had been, it is none of your affair.”

Her change of tone startled him. He did not realize he had made a mistake when he said “think,” instead of “know.”

“Here,” she said, and she wrote an address on a bit of paper. “Write to Boulogne and ask. And now tell me what your Miss Brown has been doing that you should think I was she?”

Her face was haggard as she waited for the answer, yet something in it warned Gordon that to answer her would be sheer madness.

“Hester,” he said quietly, “has it occurred to you that it is I now who am Lord Levallion? What do you expect me to do about your allowance?”

Something cunning flashed into her eyes, and was gone.

“I have not asked you for money,” she returned. “And--I don’t think I will.”

“If you want it, you had better stay here till you hear from me. Do you understand?”

“Unless you hear from me--first,” she said slowly. And he could not understand the mixture of triumph and fright that was in her face.

“What do you mean? You’re powerless,” he cried sharply.

“Yes.” And for his life he did not know whether it was an assent or a question. He caught back the threat that was on his lips and went out.

In the street he called himself every sort of fool. As if it had been written on the black, rainy sky, he saw that he had betrayed his suspicion of her and she had cleared herself and then defied him. He had accomplished absolutely nothing of what he meant to do.

“She means mischief,” he said to the depths of his umbrella. “She’s going to do something.”

But just what Mrs. Murray had in her power never entered his brain.

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