CHAPTER IX

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WAITING FOR THE VERDICT.

It was three weeks later, and the day of Gumley's trial.

In the same pleasant room, with its French windows opening on the lawn, already known to us, Mrs. Drelincourt was reclining on a lounge, engaged in some kind of fine needlework. On a small occasional table within reach of her hand lay an open telegram. She was alone, and had been so for some time, but she did not on that account think herself neglected. Indeed, she was one of those women, few and far between, who love solitude for its own sake, and can taste to the full its subtle charm.

Before long her reverie was broken by the entrance of Colonel Winslow.

"It's close upon three o'clock, and yet Felix has not returned," he said. "It is not often that he prolongs his ride so far into the afternoon."

"Very seldom indeed. I was becoming rather anxious about him when this came to hand." As she spoke, she handed him the telegram.

The colonel took it and read it aloud:

"'Drelincourt, Greystone Priors, to Mrs. Drelincourt, Fairlawn.--Selim has fallen lame. Shall leave him here, to be fetched by groom tomorrow, and return by train.' That fully accounts for his non-arrival," added the colonel, as he replaced the telegram on the table, and drew up a chair. "You have heard nothing yet, I presume, as to how Gumley's trial is progressing?"

"Nothing whatever. Roden Marsh is in attendance at the sessions house, and will bring us the news at the earliest possible moment."

"I am afraid the result is a foregone conclusion," remarked the colonel.

The subject was one Mrs. Drelincourt did not care to pursue.

"And must your visit really come to an end in the course of a few days?" she presently asked. "Cannot we persuade you to favor us with your company for a fortnight longer?"

"I'm afraid I have no option in the matter. Weeks ago I promised my sister to be with her on the twelfth of this month, and were I to break my word, I should render myself liable to pains and penalties without number."

"But we shall have you with us again later in the season?"

"I certainly hope so. It won't be my fault if you don't."

"I cannot tell you how grateful I feel for the change which your visit--for I can set it down to nothing else--has wrought in Felix. Not for years--nay, scarcely since our marriage--has he seemed so cheerful, so free from care, so little given to brooding over his experiments and shutting himself up among his books, as during the three weeks you have been with us."

"Ah ha! I do take some little credit to myself for having coaxed our snail out of his shell, for having wheedled our bookworm out of his seclusion; and it must be your care after I'm gone, dear Mrs. Drelincourt, to see that he doesn't revert to his hermit-like ways."

A little sigh escaped Mrs. Drelincourt.

"I am greatly afraid that when your enlivening presence is no longer here, everything will go on precisely as it did before your arrival."

"It is always wise to hope for the best. In any case, I won't fail to come and stir up Felix again in the course of the autumn."

Before more could be said, Marian, closely followed by Walter, each of them carrying a croquet mallet, made their appearance at one of the long windows, which, this balmy afternoon, stood wide open.

"Colonel Winslow," said the flushed and happy looking girl, "we want you to come and decide a point of the game for us about which we can't agree."

Left alone, Mrs. Drelincourt resumed her needlework. Her thoughts were busy with what had just passed between the colonel and herself.

"Yes, Felix has been a changed man from the day of his friend's arrival three weeks ago. And yet, there is something in the change which I fail to understand, and which, for that very reason, dulls the edge of my happiness. To me--but I may be fanciful--there seems something feverish and unreal about his gaiety. His mirth has an air of being assumed for the occasion; in his laughter there is an echo of mockery; it is as though he were laughing at himself for finding anything worth laughing about.

"At times there comes into his eyes a strange, impersonal look, as though he were gazing at something invisible to any one but himself. And why is it that of late he cannot rest at night? Why does he rise and quit the house at daybreak, and not be seen again till breakfast time? There is something below the surface of which I know nothing--something he is hiding from me. He thinks to deceive me by his assumption of gaiety, whereas--Ah!"

A slight noise had caused her to turn her head. There stood her husband, holding aside the portière and gazing smilingly at her. He had gone to the boudoir first in search of her. He now came forward, and having disposed of his hat and gloves on a side table, he bent over his wife and kissed her tenderly.

"My telegram reached you in due course, I see. I was afraid you would be growing uneasy."

"I had indeed grown very uneasy long before it arrived."

"I had gone for a longer ride than usual, when all at once Selim fell lame. I was compelled to dismount and lead him at a snail's pace as far as Greystone Priors, where I had his legs bandaged, and have left him till tomorrow." Then, having drawn up a chair, he asked, but without any apparent eagerness: "Anything fresh? Any news?"

"None whatever."

"Then Rodd has not returned?"--consulting his watch as he put the question.

"I have not seen anything of him. But the trial will scarcely be over as early as this, will it?"

"That is more than I can say."

Thrusting his hands into his pockets, and whistling under his breath a lively operatic air, he strolled to the garden window and stood gazing out for a little while. His wife followed him with her eyes. Now that his back was towards her, her face had grown suddenly aged and anxious looking.

"He is playing a part, and he thinks I cannot see through the pretense," she whispered to herself. "But love has keen eyes. What it is that he is hiding from me I cannot so much as guess, but sure I am that some secret trouble is gnawing at his heartstrings."

Presently Drelincourt turned from the window, and going to the piano, he sat down on the music stool and began to play a bar of the air he had been whistling.

Suddenly Marian appeared at the window, and seeing her father in the room, she laid a finger on her lips as a caution to her mother. Then she ran lightly across the floor, and next moment her arms were round his neck and her lips pressed to his cheek.

"You were gone this morning before I was down, so that I have not been able to thank you till now for your beautiful, beautiful present."

"Nor I an opportunity of wishing my little girl--ought I not rather to say my bouncing big girl?--many, very many happy returns of the day, which I now do from the bottom of my heart."

His arm was round her waist, and for the next few seconds she felt herself pressed close to him. Tears sprang to her eyes. "Dear papa!" she said to herself. "He loves me more than I thought he did."

At this juncture the colonel and young Deane came in by way of the farther window.

"And I have had other charming gifts," resumed Marian. "One from mamma, one from Wally, another from Colonel Winslow, and yet another from Roden Marsh. Am I not a fortunate girl? You must come and see them where they are laid out in mamma's dressing room."

A little later in the afternoon Drelincourt and Walter Deane happened to be left alone in the morning room.

Deane was turning over a book of engravings at one of the tables, but not without an eye for all that was going forward. Drelincourt was lounging against the framework of the farther window.

"In this suspense there lurks a torture worthy of a grand inquisitor," murmured the latter. "I wonder whether I or that poor devil awaiting sentence in the dock suffers the more on our invisible rack."

Having glanced at his watch, he took to slowly pacing the room, his hands behind his back.

"And yet, what need to wonder? He is but a clod, callous, brutalized, degraded; and though his life is doubtless as sweet to him as mine is to me, there are in me a thousand springs of feeling and emotion, each a separate source of torture, of which such as he can know nothing. In my case the stake is more, infinitely more, than is involved in the premature ending of a life by which I have never set any special store. There's the pity of it! If the issues of our actions affected ourselves alone, we could afford to suffer in silence, and bow our necks to the stroke with something like equanimity; but the Eumenides who wait on wrong doing ever contrive to stab us through the hearts of our dearest and our best."

Young Deane's furtive glances followed Drelincourt every time the latter's back was turned on him.

"I have never seen Mr. Drelincourt so restless as he seems this afternoon," he muttered to himself. "There's something on his mind--that's clear. Can it be that he's troubling himself about the result of the trial? Yet, why should he? It's not as if he were a vindictive man. However it may go, it can matter little to him."

"That boy is eying me and wondering what the deuce is the matter," was Drelincourt's unspoken thought. "_Eh bien!_ Let us give him something else to think about."

Drawing up a chair close to Deane, he seated himself astride it, and rested his crossed arms on its back.

"While I was out this morning," he began, "I was told something which put me about more than I like to own."

"Indeed, sir! I am very sorry to hear it," answered the young fellow, as he shut up the book of engravings and turned a sympathetic face toward the other.

"If I tell my wife, she will be greatly distressed, because she is acquainted with the people concerned; and yet I feel that she ought to know. I'm rather at a loss what to do."

Drelincourt paused to follow with his eyes the flight of a butterfly which had found its way into the room.

Walter wondered what was coming next.

"Some little while ago," resumed Drelincourt, "a friend of mine, whom I may be said to have known all my life, was charged on his own confession--a confession he need never have made had he not voluntarily chosen to do so--with the commission of what by the majority of persons would doubtless be regarded as a crime of a very heinous kind; although it is to be presumed that, had he thought well to do so, he could have alleged some justification at least of the crime of which he was guilty. But be that as it may, having made a clean breast of it, there seemed no course left open to him but suicide."

"Suicide! Oh, Mr. Drelincourt!"

"That touches him!" whispered the latter to himself. Then aloud: "Life had become too bitter to him; he could endure it no longer. Well, he had one child, a daughter, who was engaged to be married at the time of her father's death; but after that event, the man to whom she was betrothed broke off the affair on the plea that it was impossible for him to wed the daughter of a criminal and a suicide."

"The mean scoundrel!"

"The double blow--the loss at once of her father and her lover (not to speak of the social stigma which will inevitably cling to her in time to come) has all but broken poor Lucy's heart. On the other hand, there is, of course, much to be urged from young Melville's point of view, and I have no doubt the majority of men would be inclined to do as he has done. Who can estimate the harm it might have done his future career had he married the daughter of a man who, rather than face the consequences of his crime, had preferred to put an end to himself! Yes, on further reflection, I am inclined to think that he behaved with admirable prudence."

"While I, if he were here, would brand him for the coward and despicable wretch he really is!" exclaimed Deane.

His cheeks were flushed, a fine indignation shone in his eyes; there could be no doubt of the sincerity with which he spoke. Nothing of all this was lost on the elder man.

"But the young lady is well rid of him," he went on. "If in the darkest hours of her life he thus abandons her, what he miscalled his love is not a thing either to covet or regret."

"But consider," urged Drelincourt, "what the world would have said! Think of the shock to his friends!"

"In his place I should have thought only of her I loved. If the world and my friends chose to disapprove, they would have been welcome to do so. Oh, Mr. Drelincourt, what a miserable hound this fellow must be! Not to one man in a thousand in these days is the chance afforded of proving what stuff he's really made of. In King Arthur's time men had to win their wives after a fashion which revealed the coward and the cad in their true colors. What a pity that some such test is not enforced nowadays!"

Drelincourt smiled as he rose and pushed away his chair. "In that case, I'm afraid the number of compulsory bachelors would soon mount up to an alarming figure."

Walter also rose and went and stood by one of the windows. He wore a preoccupied air, as of one debating some question with himself.

Drelincourt's lips moved inaudibly.

"As I told Winslow, I had my reasons for affording Marian and this young fellow an opportunity of falling in love with each other. I do not think--no, I do not think that I am mistaken in him!"

Next moment a shadow darkened his face. Again he glanced at his watch. "The trial ought to be over by now. I thought I heard the sound of galloping hoofs." For a few seconds he stood in a listening attitude. "The sound was in my own brain only. So does expectation play the cheat with itself!"

Presently Deane turned from the window and went up to Drelincourt, who was standing at the center table, examining an etching through a magnifying glass. His face was pale, but his lips were firmly set, and his eyes shone with resolution.

"Mr. Drelincourt," he began, in a voice which had lost something of its customary assurance, "after what has just passed between us, I think it due to you to inform you that _I_ am the son of a man who committed suicide! Probably you will think that such a circumstance ought to have been brought to your knowledge long ago; and, indeed, I feel now that it was both cowardly and wrong on my part to keep it from you. The only excuse I can offer is that my father's memory is so dear to me that--that----"

The words broke on his lips; a mist dimmed his eyes; he turned away while he recovered himself.

Drelincourt laid a hand gently on his shoulder.

"Not a word more is needed," he said in grave, kindly accents. "My boy, all the sad circumstances connected with your father's end are known to me already."

"Mr. Drelincourt!"

"As also how every penny of your legacy was devoted to the payment of the debts he left behind him."

"You know all this, and yet----"

"Hush! Some one comes. Not another word."

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