Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

TINSLEYS' MAGAZINE.

December 1877.

A MADDENING BLOW.

BY MRS. ALEXANDER FRASER,

AUTHOR OF GUARDIAN AND LOVER,' 'HER PLIGHTED TROTH,' 'ONLY A FACE,' 'A THING OF BEAUTY,' ETC.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE BLOW FALLS.

CROUCHED Over the dying embers, her feet on the fender, her elbows on her knees-her attitude one of utter hopelessness and helplessness.

A pallid thin-faced woman, with haggard black eyes, underlined by broad violet shadows-a woman whom a casual observer would have adjudged at thirty years.

Few would have recognised in her the girl of a twelvemonth back, whose superb physique had been too redundant of health, whose colouring had seemed almost meretricious in its vivid bloom and brilliancy.

It was a week-eight never-ending days-since Ursula had returned to Washington from Liverpool; and during that period she had moved and spoken more like an automaton than a being of flesh and blood.

'Come down-stairs !'

It sounded more like a command than a request.

She started, dropped her hands away from her face, and lifted up scared wondering eyes, like those of one aroused suddenly from a heavy and horrible dream.

The tall figure of John Lock

VOL. XXI.

loomed up beside her. He had stolen into the room so softly that she had not known of his presence until his voice fell on her ear-the low, silky, hypocritical voice that she had learned to hate.

'Who is below?' she asked, with dreary listlessness.

'Abel Wychcote-no one else.'

She turned away impatiently to the fire again, planted her feet once more on the fender, and drooped forward so that her face was hid from him.

'I shall not go down,' she replied sullenly.

'Why not? Are you ill, Ursula ?' 'Would it be good or bad news if I said I was ? she cried, breaking into a hard hacking cough.

John Lock stood an instant silent; then he went close up to the low chair on which she sat, and dropped a heavy brown hand on her shoulder.

'Look up at me!' he ordered, in a harsh imperative tone; 'I want to see your eyes. Ever since you came back from that accursed Liverpool you have been hanging over the fire like an invalid. Pshaw, girl! I believe it's all sham and

[ocr errors]

foolery. You assume illness to avoid me!'

A hot scarlet flushed the still beautiful and haughty face that Ursula turned up fully towards the man who called himself her husband. Two large black eyes, full of contempt, fixed themselves hardily upon him.

'I have no desire to contradict you,' she told him, with cutting scorn. It is perfectly true that I wish to avoid you!'

He grew positively livid with rage. The hand that still gripped her shoulder trembled violently, and he pressed his strong white teeth down hard on his sensual nether lip, as if to check the volley of bitterness that rose up to his tongue.

If you are not ill, why do you shut yourself in here? Have you convinced yourself that that young lover of yours--Bernard Keane-is not dead?'

The question came so suddenly upon her that she started visibly under his grasp.

'Aha, it is that!' he exclaimed angrily. By Heavens, if I was sure that he was alive-'

'What would you do what could you do?' she whispered, with mortal terror in her glance.

6

'Do? Why, take a journey across the millpond at once,' he averred, with a hoarse horrible laugh. And after that, mistress Ursula, I'll be bound you would have no more cause to fret and pine over the notion that he is not dead.'

She jumped up from her lowly seat, her mobile features all working with agitation, her eyes in their lurid light hot enough to scorch him as she scrutinised his expression, dislike and fear curiously mingling together in her own.

'That is, you would kill Bernard Keane!' she said, in a slow hushed voice.

'Not I! I am not of a mind to be hanged up for such as he; but nevertheless gold works wonders in all quarters of this mercenary globe, and the fellow would surely disappear.'

'And such a villanous thought is in your heart, such a foul scheme already hatched in your cowardly brain!' she flared out furiously, reckless of all save her inquietude for the lover and husband of a year back.

'Such a villanous thought is in my heart, such a foul scheme already hatched in my cowardly brain,' he repeated, in mocking accents; and, what's more, they'll be carried out unless you become yourself again. I give you three days to think over it. In that time, if you emerge out of your room bright and beautiful, ready to enter the society that is remarking on your strange absence, well and good. I ask no questions whether you do or do not know of Bernard Keane's life or death. I make no inquiries as to what passed between you and the miserable old man in Liverpool. Only I warn you, that if you persist in your present course of conduct, if you are fool enough to aggravate me, I— But I seldom threaten. Your father knows me well; perhaps you will do so in time.'

'But I am ill-ill!' she moaned, shivering in her chair. 'I am cold too-cold as ice.'

'I know it; but it is when I am near you,' he replied bitterly. Then he softened a little. 'Come, Ursula, my darling. I do not mean to be harsh to you; but this eternal avoidance on your part is beyond all endurance; human flesh and blood can't stand it. I have ordered a delicious little meal for you and me and Abel Wychcote. Come down.'

'I have no strength, no appetite,' she said wearily.

'No strength, no appetite! My wife, you pine like this over a man who ought to be dead if he isn't! When is all this to end?'

'End! oh, soon! It will end soon, I trust.'

'Will you or will you not come down, Ursula ?'

'Not to-day. I am not strong enough-well enough.'

Her pallid face carried out her assertion.

'Very well. To-day you shall have your way; but after to-day this nonsense must cease. I have not forgotten the hard things you have said to me-the threats of leaving me.'

'One says many rash things,' murmured Ursula faintly. Do not vex me with them now. I want quiet and rest.'

'Well, you shall have rest,' John Lock told her gently; 'but tomorrow you must come down as handsome and brilliant as everyou must promise me that.'

'I will promise anything-only let me have peace now.'

He looked at her a moment; then suddenly stooping, he lifted her lovely white face between his hands, and kissed it with a violence that fairly took away her breath.

Those kisses were loathsome. They hurt her more than stripes. She rose quickly to her feet, and, for the second time in her life, she struck him hard across his swarthy cheek, leaving upon it an angry blood-red wale.

John Lock reeled back like a drunken man; then, with the unbridled fury of a wild beast, he lifted up his brawny arm, and with one fell blow he dashed the woman who had struck him to the floor.

Ursula lay for a time half stunned; and when she rose up, she found herself alone with the deepening shadows in the room. There was a fearful look of hot loathing on her face that burnt up all its pallor.

John Lock had dealt her a maddening blow. She passed her hand hurriedly once or twice across her mouth, as though to remove the kisses he had implanted there. She had reached the culminating point of passionate wrath and revenge, and she swayed and shook from head to foot in her fury.

'Vengeance! Grant me vengeance upon him, God-O God!' broke again and again from her lips, like the hoarse and piteous cry of a wild bird.

She bolted her door and flung herself on the floor, her heart throbbing hard, her hands, cold ast death, writhing and clenching together, her mouth quivering, her teeth loudly chattering, in her mad excitement. Then steps, moving cautiously below, suddenly hushed her transport of rage, and Ursula crept to the door, and listened with bated breath.

Night had come. The house was still, and she heard the steps sounding clear on the tesselated marble of the hall; but in lieu of leaving the house they turned evidently in another direction.

At this moment the costly French clock, crowned with a group of amorous Dryads, chimed a quarter to midnight.

'What can it mean? It is the same sound that I have heard before at this hour,' muttered Ursula excitedly. "The steps are going down to the basement, after locking the hall-door. There must be something in it. It only happens when that wretch Abel Wychcote is here. I will know their secret!'

She opened the door softly, and listened with every nerve strained. The footsteps were still audible; but they grew fainter and fainter, and there rose a hushed murmur of human voices.

The carpet in the rooms and on the stairs of the magnificent dwelling was soft and yielding as moss, and

the satin slippers she wore sank into it as noiselessly as a fall of

snow.

She glided down-down to the very basement itself, looking like a ghost in the whiteness of her face and of her cashmere wrapper.

Close to where she paused a flight of narrow steep steps led down into the cellar. Presently a current of cold air, and a suppressed hum of words, led her downwards, creeping swiftly but noiselessly as a serpent.

It was an ordinary wine-cellarsquare and commodious, and only lit by a lantern, which John Lock held while Abel Wychcote removed a rack on which a few bottles, with their sealed corks visible, were conspicuously arrayed. There were half a dozen tumblers and wineglasses and a corkscrew hard by ; but it was not for the enjoyment of Perrier Jouet's 'pale dry' or of fullbodied Beaujolais that the two men had chosen this extraordinary carousing chamber at the mysterious and weird hour of midnight.

Ursula stood well in the dark, and watched their proceedings, terror and interest glittering in her eyes and mingling in her breast.

She saw the wine-rack lifted aside (it was evidently made of hollowed wood from the ease with which it was moved) from before a low, strong, iron door, that was sunk deep in the green dampstained wall.

That door Abel Wychcote opened with a key that had been hidden under a loosened brick, and he and his confederate went through.

Ursula stooped, hastily took off her fragile satin slippers, and glided after them.

The house occupied by John Lock had grounds and a thicklyplanted shrubbery around it, stretching over the space of half an acre. Directly facing the back entrance of the house, at the extremity of

the grounds, stood the stables, which were handsome and substantial buildings of stone, finished at the cost of any ordinary dwelling-house. It was towards the stables that the subterranean passage ran, which the two men traversed with their dark lantern.

The woman, full of hatred and revenge-a very Nemesis-tracked their path diligently. Suddenly they disappeared through a second door, and she was left in total gloom.

But Ursula was no frightened whimpering woman. She possessed nerves of iron, and they stood her now in good stead. She groped along the narrow humid passage, filled with close, damp, fetid air, and felt with her hands for an outlet.

A greed for vengeance sustained her. Even now she remembered that Bernard Keane, the man she loved, was in danger from John Lock, the man she abhorred. To save the former from ill she would have delivered up the latter to the hangman's grasp without a pang.

Her outstretched palms struck at last on some wooden fretwork. She could feel the carving of the squares. A strange sound met her ear; and putting her head close up, she found she could look through an aperture of some three or four inches.

This is what she saw. A huge vault, gloomy and ghostly, paved and walled with stone, and to which there was but one entrance, the fretted door at which she stood.

The two men, in their shirtsleeves, leaned over a printingpress. Abel Wychcote held a mallet in his hand, John Lock held the lantern.

'It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,' Wychcote remarked dryly. This obstinate or sulky pet luckily kept off until madame had done the best part of her work.'

'Yes,' answered the other; 'but I would willingly pitch her work overboard if that would bring her smiles back again. I tell you what, Abel, I have no heart for work or anything when I think of her and her conduct; and I was a madman to strike her. She'll never forgive it.'

"Tush, man! don't be downhearted. A woman, a dog, or a walnut-tree - you know the old rhyme. Give her time; give her jewels and plenty of fine dresses; and if they don't bring her round, I know nothing about the sex.'

'And how should you know anything about women like Mrs. Lock? Creatures of her stamp do not often appear in the life of a man like you,' John Lock exclaimed rudely and roughly. 'Come, are you ready to begin?'

'Yes; we had better make the most of our time while my lady keeps to her own room,' was the off hand insolent answer. 'When she condescends to make up with you, there will be an end to work unless I can manage it alone. Upon my word, my friend, I never expected to find you the slave of a woman like this."

[ocr errors]

'It strikes me that in this affair I have made her my slave,' Lock replied, with a crimson flush, pointing to a plate which the other was arranging for printing. And any how, there's no need for your meddling in my domestic matters so long as I let you fill your pockets.'

'Exactly,' murmured Abel Wychcote, with an oily smile, laying down his mallet. 'I am sure I am not complaining. I envy you too. Madame is a gem of beauty, and I know more than one fellow who raves of her.'

'Let them save themselves breath and trouble, the insolent vermin !' cried Lock, sharply and jealously. 'My wife is too fond of me to give any one else a glance even.'

'Aha!'

Aha, indeed! She is not demonstrative, of course, before such creatures as you; but I am perfectly satisfied.'

'That is fortunate for you. Now for it.'

The noise of the press, worked by both, broke in upon the conversation; but Ursula stood transfixed at her perilous post, staring steadily at them for full half an hour. Then she stole back to her own room, her pulse at fever-heat, and a strangely satisfied smile parting her scarlet lips.

CHAPTER XLII.

REVENGE IS SWEET.

Up and down, up and down, like a caged panther, she paced the floor; the pupils of her eyes dilated and gleaming, a vivid hectic flaming in her cheeks. Her whole soul was full of revenge; no throb of compunction or pity rose in her bosom. Christian charity were sealed words to her, as to a SouthSea Islander: the charity that' suffereth long, and is kind; seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked; beareth all things, endureth all things.'

If John Lock, the man who called her wife, went free, Bernard Keane, the man she called husband, would be in peril; she herself might become, perchance, amenable to the law as a bigamist.

Steadily refusing through the locked door all visitors or offers of food, Ursula counted with eagerness each moment that brought her nearer to vengeance. The day wore on, the evening shadows trailed their length in black bars across the floor, and as the clock struck ten she rang a gentle peal.

The carriage at eleven, and I

« ElőzőTovább »