CHAPTER III.
A FATEFUL MOVE DECIDED UPON.
Notwithstanding that the sinister message, contained in the single line of the mysterious missive brought to Lady Wynde by her gray companion, had been long expected, it brought with it none the less a shock when it came.
The paper fluttered slowly from the unloosed fingers of the baronet’s wife to the floor, and into the liquid black eyes stole a look half of horror and half of eagerness. Unconsciously her voice repeated the words of the message, in a hoarse whisper:
“It is time to get rid of him. Now!”
Lady Wynde shuddered at the sound of her own voice, and she stared at her gray companion, her eyes full of shrinking and terror. Those ashen orbs returned her stare with one that was bold, evil, and encouraging.
“I—I haven’t the courage I thought, Artress,” faltered her ladyship. “It is a terrible thing to do!”
“You love Sir Harold, after all?” taunted the companion, as she picked up the sinister slip of paper and burned it.
“No, no, but he trusts me; he loves me. There was a time, Artress, when I could not have harmed a dog that licked my hand or fawned upon me. And now—but I am not so bad as you think. I am base, unscrupulous, manœuvring, I know. My marriage was but part of a wicked plan, the fruit of a conspiracy against Sir Harold Wynde, but I shrink from the crowning evil we have planned. To play the viper and sting the hand that has warmed me—to wound to the core the heart that beats so fondly and proudly for me—to—to cut short the noble, beneficent, happy life of Sir Harold—oh, I cannot! I cannot!”
Her ladyship swept forward impetuously toward the hearth and knelt down before a quaint crimson-cushioned chair, crossing her arms upon it, and laying her head on her bare white arms. The firelight played upon the ruddy waves of her long robe, upon the gems at her throat and wrists, upon her picturesquely dishevelled hair, and upon her stormy, handsome face. She stared into the fire with her great black terrified eyes, as if seeking in those dancing flames some mystic meaning.
Her gray companion flitted across the floor to her side like an evil shadow.
“How very tragic you are, my lady,” she said, with a sneer. “It almost seems as if you were doing a scene out of a melodrama. No one can force you to any step against your will. You can do whatever you please. Sir Harold dotes upon you, and you can continue his seemingly affectionate wife, can receive his caresses, can preside over his household, and can soothe his declining years. He is not yet fifty-eight years old, vigorous and healthy, and, as he comes of a long-lived race, he will live to be ninety, I doubt not. You will, should you survive him, then be seventy. You can play the tender step-mother to his children. His daughter is sure to dislike you, and she may cause her father to distrust you. All this will no doubt be pleasant to you—”
“Hush, hush!” breathed Lady Wynde, with a tempestuous look in her eyes. “Let me alone, Artress. You always stir up the demon within me. Forty years of a dull, staid, respectable existence, when I might be a queen of society in London, might be married to one I have loved for years! Forty years! Why, one year seems to me an eternity. It seems a lifetime since I was married to Sir Harold. I—I will act upon the letter.”
The gray companion smiled.
“I was sure you would,” she said.
“But Sir Harold has not made a new will since our marriage,” urged Lady Wynde. “By our marriage settlements, I am to have the use of the dower house, Wynde Heights, during my lifetime, and a life income of four thousand pounds a year. At my death, both house and income revert to the family of Wynde. I have nothing absolutely my own, nothing left to me by will to do with as I please. Craven expected that I would have the dowry of a princess, I suppose, out of Sir Harold’s splendid property.”
“It is not too late to acquire it,” said the companion, significantly. “Sir Harold is clay in your hands. You can mould him to any shape you will. He has no child here to counteract your influence. He has money and estates which he intends to leave by will to his daughter Neva. If you are clever, you can divert into your own coffers all of Miss Wynde’s property that is not settled upon her already from her mother’s estate. It will do no harm to delay acting upon the message for a day or two, since something of so much importance remains to be transacted.”
“I am thankful for even a day’s respite,” murmured Lady Wynde. “I have been eager to receive the message, intending to act upon it promptly. But I am not all bad, Artress, and I shrink from the consummation of our plans. If Sir Harold would only die naturally! If something would only occur to remove him from my path!”
She breathed heavily as she arose, shook out the folds of her dress, and moved toward the door.
“The phial I had when we came here I found was broken yesterday,” said Artress. “I shall have to go up to London to-morrow for more of that fluid, so that there must be a day’s delay in any case. We must be very cautious, for people will wonder at the sudden death of one so hale and strong, and should suspicion arise, it must find no foundation to build upon.”
Lady Wynde nodded assent, and opened the door and went out with a weary step. She descended the broad staircase, crossed the great hall, and entered the drawing-room.
Sir Harold was seated near the fire, in a thoughtful reverie, but arose at her entrance with a beaming face and a tender smile.
“It’s a wild night, Octavia,” he said. “Come forward to the fire my darling. How pale you are! And you are shivering with the cold.”
He gently forced her into the easy-chair he had vacated, bent over her with lover-like devotion, patting her head softly with his hand.
“You look unhappy, dear,” resumed the baronet, after a pause. “Is there anything you want—a ball, jewels, a trip to the Continent? You know my purse is yours, and I am ready to go where you may wish to lead.”
“You are very good!” said Lady Wynde, her black eyes fixed in a gaze upon the fire, and again she shivered. “I—I am not worthy of all your kindness, Harold. Hark! There is the dinner-bell. Thank fortune for the interruption, for I believe I was growing really sentimental!”
She forced a laugh as she arose and took her husband’s arm, and was conducted to the dining-room, but there was something in her laughter that jarred upon Sir Harold, although the unpleasant impression it produced upon him was evanescent.
At the dinner Lady Wynde was herself again, bright and fascinating, only now and then, in some pause of the conversation, there came again into her eyes that horrified stare which they had worn up stairs, and which testified how her soul shrank from the awful crime she contemplated.
After dinner the pair returned to the drawing-room. Sir Harold drew a sofa toward the corner of the hearth and sat down upon it, calling his wife to him. She obeyed, taking a seat beside him. Her face was all brightness at this moment, and Sir Harold forgot his late anxieties about her.
“I believe I am the happiest man in the world, Octavia,” he said thoughtfully, caressing one of her jewelled hands he had lifted from her knee, “but my cup of joy lacks a drop or two of sweetness still. You are all the world to me, my wife, and yet I want something more.”
“What is it you want, Harold?”
“I have been thinking about my children,” said the baronet. “It is over a month since I heard from George, and he does not intend to leave India this year, although I have urged him to sell his commission and come home. The boy has a passion for a military life, and he went out to India against my better judgment. I cannot have George home again this year, but there is Neva near me. I long to see her, Octavia.”
“You are the most devoted of fathers,” laughed Lady Wynde. “We have been married but little over a year, and yet you have made two trips alone to Paris to see Neva. She must be a very paragon of daughters to cause her father to forget his bride.”
Sir Harold’s fair cheeks flushed a little.
“You forget,” he said, “that Neva was my especial charge from the hour of her mother’s death till I sent her to that Paris school. My love for you, Octavia, cannot lessen my love for her. I begin to think that I have done wrong in not bringing you two together before. I had a most pathetic letter from Neva before the holidays, begging to be allowed to come home, but at your request, Octavia, I denied her natural entreaty and compelled her to remain at her school. Even Madame Da-Caret, the head of the establishment, thought it singular that Miss Wynde should, alone of all the English pupils, spend her holidays at the deserted institution. And now to-day I received a letter from Neva asking if she was to come home for the Easter holidays. I am afraid I have not rightly treated my motherless child, Octavia. She has never seen you; never been at home since you became mistress here. I fear that the poor child will think her exile due to your influence, to speak frankly, dear, and that she will regard you with dislike and bitterness, instead of the trust and confidence I want her to feel in you. You are both so dear to me that I shall be unhappy if you do not love each other.”
“There is time enough to form the acquaintance after Neva leaves school,” said Lady Wynde. “She is but a child yet.”
“She is seventeen years old, Octavia. I have decided to have her home at Easter, and I hope you will take some pains to win her trust and affection. She will meet you half-way, dear.”
“I am not fond of bread-and-butter school-girls,” said Lady Wynde, half frowning. “The neighborhood will be agape to see how I play the role of step-mother. And, to own the truth, Harold, I have no fancy to be called mother by a tall, overgrown girl, with her hair hanging down her back in two braids, and her dresses reaching to her ankles. I shall feel as old as Methuselah.”
Sir Harold sighed, and a grave shadow settled down upon his square massive brows.
“I hope that Neva will win her way to your heart, Octavia,” he remarked gently. “I thought it would look better if my daughter were to call her father’s wife by the endearing name of mother, but teach her to call you what you will. I have faith in your goodness of heart, my wife.”
“Perhaps I am a little jealous of her,” returned Lady Wynde, with a forced smile. “You fairly idolize her—”
“Have I not made her second to you?” interposed the baronet. “Has she not been banished from her home to please you since you entered it? When I think of her dull, dreary holidays in her school—holidays! the name was a mockery—my soul yearns for my child. Jealous of her, Octavia? What further proofs do you need that I prefer my wife in all things above my child?”
“Why,” said Lady Wynde tremulously, a hectic flush burning on either cheek, “look at the magnificent fortune she will have! While, if you should die I have only the pitiful income of four thousand pounds a year.”
“Pitiful, Octavia!”
“Yes, it is pitiful, compared to Neva’s. You have estates which you can convey away absolutely by will. Why should you not make me independently rich, with property that I can sell if I choose? What you leave to me is to be mine for life. What you leave to Neva is hers absolutely. This is monstrous, hateful, unjust!”
The baronet regarded his wife in amazement.
“You were satisfied with your marriage settlements when they were drawn up, Octavia,” he said.
“I was not satisfied even then, but I had no male relatives to speak to you about the matter, and it would have been indelicate for me to have said what I thought. But I hoped you would make things right in a will, as you can easily do. It is not right that such a distinction should be made between a daughter and a wife!”
“I am surprised at you, Octavia,” declared the baronet. “Neva inherits her mother’s fortune with something from me, but I cannot undertake to alter my intentions in regard to her. The provisions that were made for my mother are the same as those that have been made for you, and she found them ample. I can promise you nothing more; but, Octavia,” and he smiled faintly, “I have no intention of dying soon, and while I live your income need not to be limited to any certain sum. Let no jealousy of my Neva warp your noble nature, Octavia. I shall love you all the better if you love her.”
“Then you decline to make a new will, with further provision for me?” demanded the wife, her eyes downcast, the hectic spot burning fiercely on both cheeks.
“You surprise me, Octavia. Why are you so persistent about a subject of which I never dreamed you even thought? I do decline to make further provision for you, but not because I do not love and appreciate you, for I do both. So long as there is no issue to our marriage, the sum settled on you is ample for your own wants. If Providence sends us children, they will be provided for separately. We will let the discussion end here, Octavia, with the understanding that Neva will spend her Easter at Hawkhurst.”
Lady Wynde compressed her lips and looked sullen, but, as Sir Harold suggested, the discussion was dropped. The baronet was troubled, and disappointed in the wife he had believed faultless. The first shadow of their married life, the first suspicion of distrust of Lady Wynde in her husband’s mind had come at last, and they were hard to bear. Lady Wynde went to the piano and executed a dashing fantasia, all storm and violence, expressive of her mental condition. Sir Harold moved back from the fire and took up a book, but his grave, saddened face, his steady, intent gaze, and anxious mouth, showed that he was not reading, and that his thoughts were sorrowful.
When Lady Wynde had become tired of music, she went up to her rooms without a word to her husband. She entered her sitting-room, made beautiful by her husband’s taste, and going to the fire, knelt down before it on the hearth-rug. Artress and her maid were neither of them to be seen, and the baronet’s wife communed in solitude with her own deformed soul.
The winds tore through the trees in the park and on the lawn with a melancholy soughing, and the sound came to the ears of the kneeling woman. Her room was warm and bright with firelight, lamplight, and the glowing hue of crimson furniture. Every luxury was gathered within those walls dedicated to her use. Silken couches and fauteuils, portfolios of choice engravings, rare bronzes on the low marble mantel-piece, exquisite statuettes on carved brackets, albums of scenes in every hand done in water-colors, a beautiful cottage piano, and a hundred other articles made the room a very temple of comfort and beauty, yet in the spot where only loving thoughts of her husband should have had place she dared to harbor thoughts of crime! And that crime the most hideous that can be named—the crime of murder!
While she was kneeling there, the gray companion stole in softly and silently.
Lady Wynde slowly turned her head, recognized the intruder, and stared again with wide eyes into the flames.
“You look like a tragedy queen,” said Artress, with a soft laugh like the gurgling of waters. “You look as if you cast away all your scruples, and were ready to carry out the game.”
“I am,” said Lady Wynde, in a hard, suppressed voice.
“I thought you would come to it. Will Sir Harold make a new will?”
“No; he absolutely refuses.”
“Well, four thousand pounds a year need not be despised. And perhaps,” added Artress significantly, “we can make the sum larger. Am I to go to town to-morrow?”
“Yes, by the morning train. Go to Craven, and tell him the phial he gave you is broken and the contents spilled, and ask him for more of the—the preparation. I will find occasion to administer it. I have worked myself up to the necessary point, and would not scruple at any crime so long as I need not fear discovery. You will be back before dinner,” added Lady Wynde, her brunette complexion turning as gray as that of her companion, “and to-morrow night at this time I shall be a widow!”