CHAPTER I

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VERY STRANGE TIDINGS.

On a certain sunny May morning, about forty years ago, the owner of Wyvern Towers stepped into a lovely glade of Barras Wood, which was a portion of his extensive property.

Felix Drelincourt was a man who stood a little over six feet in height. His black, silky hair had a careless wave in it, and his thin mustache, with its up curled tips, was the cause of his often being taken for a foreigner.

But his eyes were the most striking feature of a striking personality. They were black, and of an extraordinarily piercing quality, with a sort of veiled, somber glow in them at times, as it might be the glow thrown out from between the bars of some hidden furnace, the fire in which was eating its heart away in the flame of its own burning unrest. It was not easy to judge his age, but one might put it down as being somewhere between eight and twenty and four or five and thirty. This morning he was dressed in a velveteen shooting jacket, with cord breeches and leggings, and was wearing a low crowned felt hat.

"What has brought me here on this one morning of all mornings of the year?" he said. "Ah, what! Am I wrong in terming it a force--a magnetic attraction--I was powerless to resist? This is _her_ birthday. Where is she? Does an English sun shine here on this morning, or that of some far off land? Vain questions, and idle as vain."

He took a couple of turns from end to end of the glade with compressed lips and bent brows. Then his thoughts again took articulate form.

"This is the spot--the forest temple--the grove sacred to the memory of that hour--where, only three short years ago, Madeline told me that she loved me! Only three little years ago, and yet I seem to have lived through a cycle since then. Yes, here our lips met in love's first kiss, and here we vowed that nothing on earth should divide us. Poor fools that we were! We did not dream of treachery; we hardly knew there was such a word."

He came to a halt by a sturdy young oak at the upper end of the opening.

"It was in the bark of this tree that I cut her initials and my own. Here they are still to convince me I am not dreaming of something which never happened. Time's obliterating fingers have dealt tenderly with them, as though the old graybeard knew they were a lover's handiwork, and remembered a far off eon when he was young himself."

At this moment the clock of a distant church began to strike the hour. Drelincourt stood listening till the last stroke had died into silence.

"Nine of them," he said. "It's time to think of going back to the Cot. At what hour did I leave it? There's the mystery. It must have been near midnight before I fell asleep, dog tired. The rest is an absolute blank till I---- Ah! Some one is calling me. It sounds like Rodd's voice. What can he want with me at this hour?"

Taking a silver whistle from his pocket, he put it to his lips and blew. Its keen, shrilly scream cut the silence, like a knife.

Two minutes later a man came brushing roughly through the underwood. At the edge of the glade he paused for a moment, while he took off his hat and mopped his brow.

Drelincourt stood motionless, his eyes turned upon him. Under his breath he said: "He has the look of one charged with a message of doom."

The newcomer, Roden Marsh by name, was Felix Drelincourt's foster brother. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders which detracted considerably from his height. He had a long, thin face, a high ridged, prominent nose, thoughtful, deep set eyes, and a profusion of straw colored hair parted down the middle.

His clothes, generally more or less worn and threadbare--not from necessity, but because he was both indifferent to appearances and parsimoniously inclined--hung loosely on his lean and bony frame. By strangers he was often taken for the village schoolmaster.

As he advanced into the glade, any one familiar with his customary phlegmatic and unemotional manner would have seen at once that he was the bearer of no ordinary tidings.

"Thank Heaven I have found you!" were his first words, and there could be no doubt of the sincerity with which they were spoken.

"It is a small mercy to be thankful for," replied the other, with the ghost of a smile.

"A terrible discovery has been made at the Towers."

"Those are strong words, my dear Rodd, but they fail to convey any definite idea to my mind. They may mean much or they may mean very little."

"Mrs. Drelincourt has been murdered in her sleep."

"Murdered!" Drelincourt staggered back a pace or two, and then, putting forth his right hand, he caught hold of an oak sapling and gripped it hard. For a few seconds his body rocked like that of a man whose brain has been stunned and dizzied by some great shock.

"That is indeed a terrible discovery to have made," he went on, after a pause. "Kate dead! It seems incredible; altogether beyond belief."

"For all that, it is true."

"But what possible motive could any one have for the commission of such a crime?"

Roden's thin lips tightened. Evidently the question was one which he either would not or could not answer.

"When and by whom was the discovery made?" asked Mr. Drelincourt, after a brief pause.

"It was made by Lucille, nearly a couple of hours ago. She went as usual to take her mistress an early cup of chocolate, and--and found her dead in bed."

"Go on. Tell me all the particulars known to you."

"Mrs. Drelincourt had been stabbed to the heart, most probably while she was asleep."

"So! Has the weapon with which the deed was committed been found?"

"It had not when I left the Towers."

Drelincourt seated himself on the fallen trunk, and resting his elbows on his knees, he bent his eyes on the ground.

"As soon as the crime became known," resumed the other, "I sent off a groom on horseback to fetch Dr. Carew. On the way he met Mr. Ormsby and told him the news, and was ordered by him to at once communicate with the police."

"A very proper thing to do."

"Mr. Ormsby, accompanied by another gentleman, a stranger, had just reached the Towers before I left it."

"To come in search of me?"

"Exactly. It has taken me nearly an hour to find you. I hurried, first of all, to the Cot, but you were not there. Margery Trant had not heard you leave the house, and was unable to tell me in which direction you had gone. I set out to look for you, and it must have been instinct which directed my steps to this place."

He paused. A throstle in the wood piped a few notes and then ceased.

"Go on," said Drelincourt, without looking up. "You have something more to tell me."

"As I bent over Mrs. Drelincourt's dead body, I found this close by her pillow."

As he finished speaking, he drew from one of his pockets a white handkerchief bordered with a thin line of black, and having shaken it out, held it up to the light. On it were three or four crimson stains. "It is yours. Here are your initials in one corner," he said.

He had a softly modulated voice, but just now there was no more emotion either in it or his manner than if he had been discussing the state of the weather.

Drelincourt started to his feet, his face blanched to the lips. A moment or two he stared at the handkerchief as though it had for him a horrible fascination. Then the eyes of the two men met in a silence which seemed charged with hidden meaning.

"A dumb witness, but enough to hang a man," said Drelincourt at length, as he turned away with a shudder.

Marsh did not reply, but, after a keen glance round, as if to make sure there was no lurking onlooker, he let the handkerchief drop to the ground, and then, dropping on one knee, he set it alight with a match from his fusee box.

Drelincourt, his back supported by a tree, stood looking on in silence till the flame had burned itself out, and nothing was left save a little fine ash, which a wandering breeze presently caught up and frolicked off with into the depths of the wood.

"This also I found," resumed Roden. "It was lying open on the writing table in your dressing room at the Towers for anybody to see. It is in your writing, and is dated today."

As he spoke, he produced a letter from his breast pocket and handed it to Drelincourt, who took it mechanically and like a half dazed man. It was without an envelope, and was simply folded in two. Opening it, he read it in silence and with growing amazement.

"An unfinished letter to my friend, Professor Ridsdale. And you say that you found it in my dressing room at the Towers?"

"I do."

"It refers to certain chemical experiments in which my friend and I are interested. It is the very letter, almost word for word, which I made up my mind to write to him the first thing after breakfast this morning.. And yet I slept last night at the Cot, while you found this an hour or more ago at the Towers!"

Again the eyes of the two met in pregnant silence.

"Rodd, you must have guessed the truth?"

"I have, Felix." "Yes, no other explanation is possible. Yet it seems monstrous--unbelievable. And by my hand! Oh!"

He ended with a groan, turned his face aside, and was silent. For once this man, usually so proudly self-centered, so stoically self-repressed, was moved to the depths of his soul as never in his life before.

Crossing to him, Roden Marsh grasped one of his hands in both his own.

"Felix, between you and me not a word more is needed--I comprehend. You have suffered. Your life has been made a burden almost too bitter to be borne. I have seen and known it for long. I have suffered with your sufferings; my heart has bled for you times without number. I can speak now; hitherto I have had to look on and be dumb."

"Yes, you have seen something--perchance much; but you know no more than your eyes have shown you, whatever you may have guessed. Of the details of her treachery--_hers_, Rodd--which was black as hell, you know nothing. Sit you there and listen. The tale shall be told, now and here, from beginning to end."

Roden seated himself on the fallen trunk, while Drelincourt, pacing slowly back and forth, half a dozen yards this way and as many that, began his narrative.

"You will not have forgotten that about three years ago Colonel Fenwicke and his niece were staying with the Ormsbys at Denham Lodge, where I was an occasional visitor. I had met Madeline Fenwicke abroad in the course of the previous summer, and had fallen in love with her; but at that time I was comparatively a poor man, and marriage was not to be thought of. In the interim my father had died, and I had succeeded to the entail. There was no longer any reason why I should keep silent. It was in this very glade, Rodd--here--here--that I met my darling and told her my secret! It was here her lips touched mine in love's first kiss. O Heaven! To think of all that has happened between then and now!"

He took a turn or two in silence. Roden sat with crossed legs, nursing an elbow with one hand, his chin supported in the hollowed palm of the other.

"Madeline and Kate Ormsby had been schoolfellows, and the former had no secrets from her friend. The day following our interview I was called away to London by the illness of my aunt, Mrs. Gascoigne. At Denham Lodge there is a terrace with a stone balustrade, from which a flight of steps leads to the lower garden. As Madeline and Kate were leaning over this balustrade after dark a few evenings later, listening to a nightingale, two people came along the lower walk, a man and a woman, judging from their voices. Said the man, as they drew near:

"'The way Mr. Drelincourt has behaved to the girl is common talk in the village. Of course he can't marry her--she's too far beneath him for that--and now they say she's fit to break her heart because he refuses to have anything more to do with her.'

"'Perhaps he's grown tired of her and found somebody more to his liking. That's often the way you men have of treating us,' answered the woman.

"Oh, come! We're not all as bad as that,' said the man with a laugh, after which they passed out of earshot.

"An hour later Madeline wrote me that all was at an end between us. The letter, which should have reached me next morning, was kept back by Kate, and did not come to hand till three days later. Within four hours of receiving it I was at Denham Lodge, only to find that Madeline and her uncle had left there the day before.

"My aunt lingered on from week to week. I was her last living relative, and she would not hear of my leaving for longer than a few hours at a time. All I could do was to write a note to Madeline, begging for an explanation, and inclose it under cover to the colonel at his club. A week later my note was returned to me from Paris, together with a few lines from the colonel, stating that thenceforward all communication with me must cease, both on his part and that of his niece. What I had been guilty of which deserved such a sentence I was wholly at a loss to conceive. I could not comprehend the meaning of such an action.

"A month later my aunt died. As soon as I was at liberty, I set out for the continent, but nowhere could I come across a trace of those I was in search of. You know what followed a little later: how I was accidentally wounded while out shooting; how I was carried to Denham Lodge, and there nursed back to convalescence by Kate Ormsby."

"Some part of what you have now told me I know or guessed already," said Roden; "but not the whole of it."

"You did not know how, one day, Kate read to me a passage from a letter professedly written by her correspondent, Lady Linthorpe, in which it was stated that Madeline Fenwicke had been married a fortnight before at Rome. Within six weeks of that day Kate Ormsby had become my wife."

Seating himself on the tree by the side of Marsh, he began to manufacture a cigarette. By this time, to all outward seeming, he was thoroughly himself again.

The shock of the news brought him by his foster brother had stunned, and in a measure unmanned him for a little while, but his nature was too self-poised, and his nerves too thoroughly under control, to allow of his equanimity being seriously disturbed for any length of time. That which had happened, however much it was to be deplored, belonged to the past, and not all the powers of Heaven and earth combined could alter or undo it. The only thing left him was to face the consequences, and that he was prepared to do.

"It was not a fact, then, that Miss Fenwicke was married?" queried Roden, after a pause.

"The statement was false from beginning to end. No such letter was ever written by Lady Linthorpe; but not till about a month ago did that fact come to my knowledge, and not till then was I in a position to fathom the depths of my wife's treachery. It was she who arranged the conversation overheard by Madeline that evening on the terrace, the actors in it being the son of her father's bailiff and the governess to her two younger sisters. It was a damnable plot, but it succeeded."

He proceeded to light his cigarette, which done, he resumed his slow pacing to and fro.

"It was indeed a black business," said Roden. "Did you tell Mrs. Drelincourt of your discovery?"

"I did not fail to do so."

"And she----?"

"Laughed at me with that cold blooded laugh of hers which used to go through me like a knife. In those days, she said, she was such a simpleton as to fancy herself in love with me, and, in any case, she had vowed to herself that Miss Fenwicke should never be my wife. She will never laugh at me again."

"I am glad, Felix, you have told me this," said Roden presently. "It has served to make clear much that was obscure to me before."

"I have not done yet. Something more remains to be told."

Tossing away what was left of his cigarette, Drelincourt sat down again on the felled trunk.

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