The Light of Scarthey Part 59

"Oh, if I could die for you!"

"No, no," said Jack, with his sweet smile, "your life is too valuable, too precious to the world. Adrian, believe me, you can still do much good with it. And I know you will be happy yet."

It was the only allusion he had made to his friend's more personal sorrows. Before the latter had time to reply, he hastened to proceed:

"And now to business. All the gold entrusted to me lies at Scarthey and, faith, I believe it lies as weightily on my mind as if it was all stored there instead! Renny knows the secret hiding-place. Will you engage to restore it to its owners, in all privacy? This is a terribly arduous undertaking, Adrian, and it is asking much of your friends.h.i.+p; but if I know you, not too much. And it will enable my poor bones to lie at rest, or rather," with a rueful laugh, "hang at rest on their gibbet; for you know I am to be set up as a warning to other fools, like a rat on a barn door. I have, by the kindness of the chaplain, been able to write out a full schedule of the different sums, and to whom they are due. He has taken charge of the closed packet directed to you, and will give it to you intact, I feel sure. He is a man of honour, and I trust him to respect the confidence I have placed in him.... Egad! the poor old boys will be right glad to get their coin back in safety. A couple of them have been up here already, to interview me, in fear and trembling. They were hard set to credit me when I a.s.sured them that they would be no losers in the end, after all--barring the waiting. You see, I counted upon you."

"I shall never rest until it is done," said Sir Adrian, simply. And Captain Jack as simply answered: "Thank you. Among the treasure there is also 10,000 of my own; the rest of my laboriously acquired fortune is forfeit to the Crown, as you know--much good may it do it! But this little h.o.a.rd I give to you. You do not want it, of course, and therefore it is only to be yours that you may administrate it in accordance to my wishes. Another charge--but I make no apology. I wish you to divide it in three equal shares: two to be employed as you see best, for the widows and families of those poor fellows of the preventive service, victims of my venture; the third, as well as my beautiful _Peregrine_, I leave to the mate and men who served me so faithfully. They have fled with her, and must avoid England for some time. But Renny will contrive to hear of them; they are bound to return in secret for tidings, and I should like to feel that the misery I have left behind me may be mitigated.... And now, dear Adrian, that is all. The man outside grows impatient. I hear him shuffling his keys. Hark! there he knocks; the fellow has a certain rude feeling for me. An honest fellow. Dear Adrian, good-bye."

"My G.o.d! this is hard--is there nothing else--nothing--can indeed all my friends.h.i.+p be of no further help?--Hubert!"

"Hush, hush," cried Jack Smith hastily, "Adrian, you alone of all living beings now know me by that name. Never let it cross your lips again. I could not die in peace were it not for the thought that I bring no discredit upon it. My mother believes me dead--G.o.d in His mercy has spared me the crowning misery of bringing shame to her white hairs--shame to the old race. Hubert Cochrane died ten years ago.

Jack Smith alone it is that dies by the hangman's hand. One other,"

his voice softened and the hard look of pain left his face, "one other shall hear the secret besides you--but I know she will never speak of it, even to you--and such is my wish."

It was the pride of race at its last and highest expression.

There was the sound, without, of the key in the lock.

"One last word--if you love me, nay, as you love me--do not be there on Sat.u.r.day! This parting with you--the good-bye to her--that is my death. Afterwards what happens to this flesh," he struck at himself with his chained hands, "matters no more than what will happen to the soulless corpse. I know you would come to help me with the feeling of your love, your presence--but do not--do not--and now good-bye!"

Adrian seized his friend by the hands with a despairing grip, the door rolled back with its dismal screech.

The prisoner smiled at him with tender eyes. This man whom, all unwillingly he had robbed of his wife's heart, was broken with grief that he could not save the life that had brought him misery. Here was a friend to be proud of, even at the gate of death!

"G.o.d be with you, dear Adrian! G.o.d bless you and your household, and your children, and your children's children! Hear my last words: _From my death will be born your happiness, and if its growth be slow, yet it will wax strong and sure as the years go by_."

The words broke from him with prophetic solemnity; their hands fell apart, and Adrian, led by the jailer, stumbled forth blindly. Jack Smith stood erect, still smiling, watching them: were Adrian to turn he should find no weakness, no faltering for the final remembrance.

But Adrian did not turn. And the door closed, closed upon hope and happiness and life, shut in shame and death. Out yonder, with Adrian, was the fresh bright world, the sea, the suns.h.i.+ne, the dear ones; here the prison smells, the gloom, the constraint, the inflicted dreadful death. All his hard-won calm fled from him; all his youth, his immense vitality woke up and cried out in him again. He raised his hands and pulled fiercely at his collar as if already the rope were round his neck strangling him. His blood hammered in his brain. G.o.d--G.o.d--it was impossible--it could not be--it was a dream!

Beyond, from far distant in the street came the cry of a little child:

"Da-da--daddy."

The prisoner threw up his arms and then fell upon his face upon the bed, torn by sobs.

Yes, Adrian would have children; but Hubert Cochrane, who, from the beautiful young brood that was to have sprung from his loins would have grafted on the old stock a fresh and n.o.ble tree, he was to pa.s.s barren out of life and leave no trace behind him.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE ONE HE LOVED AND THE ONE WHO LOVED HIM

On the evening of the previous day Lady Landale and her Aunt had arrived at Pulwick. The drive had been a dismal one to poor Miss O'Donoghue. Neither her angry expostulations, nor her tender remonstrances, nor her attempts at consolation could succeed in drawing a connected sentence from Molly, who, with a fever spot of red upon each cheek only roused herself from the depth of thought in which she seemed plunged to urge the coachman to greater speed. Miss O'Donoghue tried the whole gamut of her art in vain, and was obliged at last to desist from sheer weariness and in much anxiety.

Madeleine and Sophia were seated by the fireside in the library when the unexpected travellers came in upon them. Sophia, in the blackest of black weeds, started guiltily up from the volume of "The Corsair,"

in which she had been plunged, while Madeleine, without manifesting any surprise, rose placidly, laid aside her needlework--a coa.r.s.e flannel frock, evidently destined for charity--and bestowed upon her sister and aunt an affectionate though unexpansive embrace.

She had grown somewhat thinner and more thoughtful-looking since Molly and she had last met, on that fatal 15th of March, but otherwise was unchanged in her serene beauty. Molly clutched her wrist with a burning hand, and, paying not the slightest attention to the other two, nor condescending to any preamble, began at once, in hurried words to explain her mission.

"He has asked for you, Madeleine," she cried, her eyes flaming with unnatural brilliance as they sought her sister's mild gaze. "He has asked for you, I will take you back with me, to-morrow, not later than to-morrow. Don't you understand?" shaking her impatiently as she held her, "he is in prison, condemned to death, he has asked for you, he wants to see you. On Sat.u.r.day--on Sat.u.r.day----" Something clicked in her throat, and she raised her hand to it with an uneasy gesture, one that those who surrounded her had grown curiously familiar with of late.

Madeleine drew away from her at this address, the whole fair calm of her countenance troubled like a placid pool by the casting of a stone.

Clasping her hands and looking down: "I saw that the unfortunate man was condemned," she said. "I have prayed for him daily, I trust he repents. I am truly sorry for him. From my heart I forgive him the deception he practised upon me. But----" a slight shudder shook her, "I could not see him again--surely you could not wish it of me."

She spoke with such extreme gentleness that for a minute the woman before her, in the seething turmoil of her soul, failed to grasp the meaning of her words.

"You could not go!" she repeated in a bewildered way, "I could not wish it of you--!" then with a sort of shriek which drew Tanty and Miss Sophia hurriedly towards her, "Don't you understand--on Sat.u.r.day--if it all fails, they will hang him?"

"A-ah!" exclaimed Madeleine with a movement as if to ward off the sound--the cry, the gesture expressive, not of grief, but of shrinking repugnance. But after a second, controlling herself:

"And what should that be now, sister, to you or to me?" she said haughtily.

Lady Landale clapped her hands together.

"And this is the woman he loves!" she cried with a shrill laugh. And she staggered, and sank back upon a chair in an att.i.tude of utter prostration.

"Molly, Molly," exclaimed her sister reprovingly, while she glanced in much distress at Miss O'Donoghue, "you are not yourself; you do not know what you are saying."

"Remember," interposed Sophia in tragic tones, "that you are speaking of the murderer of my beloved brother." Then she dissolved in tears, and was obliged to hide her countenance in the folds of a vast pocket-handkerchief.

"Killing vermin is not murder!" cried Molly fiercely, awakening from her torpor.

Miss O'Donoghue, who in the most unwonted silence had been watching the scene with her shrewd eyes, here seized the horrified Sophia by the elbow and trundled her, with a great deal of energy and determination, to the door.

"Get out of this, you foolish creature," she said in a stern whisper, "and don't attempt to show your nose here again till I give it leave to walk in!" Then returning to the sisters, and looking from Molly's haggard, distracted face to Madeleine's pale one: "If you take my advice, my dear," she said, a little drily, to the latter, "you will not make so many bones about going to see that poor lad in the prison, and you'll stop wrangling with your sister, for she is just not able to bear it. We shall start to-morrow, Molly," turning to Lady Landale, and speaking in the tone of one addressing a sick child, "and Madeleine will be quite ready as early as you wish."

"My dear aunt," said Madeleine, growing white to the lips, "I am very sorry if Molly is ill, but you are quite mistaken if you think I can yield to her wishes in this matter. I could not go; I could not; it is impossible!"

"Hear her," cried the other, starting from her seat. "Oh, what are you made of? Is it water that runs in your veins? you that he loves"--her voice broke into a wail--"you who ought to be so proud to know he loves you even though your heart be broken! You refuse to go to him, refuse his last request!... Come to the light," she went on, seizing the girl's wrists again; "let me look at you. Bah! you never loved him. You don't even understand what it is to love.... But what could one expect from you, who abandoned him in the moment of danger. You are afraid; afraid of the painful scene, the discomfort, the sight of the prison, of his beautiful face worn and changed--afraid of the discredit. Oh! I know you, I know you. But mind you, Madeleine de Savenaye, he wishes to see you, and I swore you would go to him, and you shall go, if I have to drag you with these hands of mine."

Her grip was so fierce, her eyes so savage, the words so strange, that Madeleine screamed faintly, "She is mad!" and was amazed that Miss O'Donoghue did not rush to the rescue!

But Miss O'Donoghue, peering at her from the depths of her arm-chair, merely said snappishly: "Ah, child, can't you say you will go, and have done! Oughtn't you to be ashamed to be so hard-hearted?" and mopped her perspiring and agitated countenance with her kerchief. Then upon the girl's bewildered mind dawned a glimmer of the truth; and, blus.h.i.+ng to the roots of her hair, she looked at her sister with a growing horror.

"Oh, Molly, Molly!" she said again, with a sort of groan.

"Will you go?" cried Molly from between her set teeth.

Again the girl shuddered.

"Less than ever--now," she murmured. And as Molly threw her from her, almost with violence, she covered her face with her hands and fell, weeping bitter tears, upon the couch behind her.

Lady Landale, with great steps, stormed up and down the room, her eyes fixed on s.p.a.ce, her lips moving; now and again a word escaped her then, sometimes hurled at her sister, sometimes only in desperate communing with herself.