CHAPTER X.

TOLD AT LAST.

Olive Deane had taken her leave of Lady Dudgeon and was crossing the hall towards the side door, close to which the fly that had brought her from Pembridge was still waiting, when suddenly the doors at the opposite side of the hall were opened, and, as they swung back on their hinges, a sight met her eyes that for a moment or two seemed to turn her to stone.

Supported on one side by Dr. Whitaker, and resting his other arm on the shoulder of Pod Piper, like a man newly risen from the tomb, Matthew Kelvin stepped slowly and painfully across the threshold. His thin, bent form, his long, bony fingers, the worn, hollow face, the pinched nostrils, the deep-sunk eyes, and the grave-like pallor that overspread his features, made up a figure that looked far more weird and startling when seen thus in the full glare of day than in the semi-obscurity and amid the appropriate surroundings of a sickroom.

A strange, fierce light sprang to the sick man's eyes the moment he saw who was standing there. Olive's cheek whitened as she looked, her breath came more quickly, she pressed her hand involuntarily to her heart, as though she were in pain; then she went two or three steps nearer, and then she halted again, as though in doubt or fear.

"Matthew! You here!" she said at last.

"So you are not gone yet!" was the answer. "It is well. I have something to say to you. Follow me."

Then the ghastly procession began to move slowly forward again, and, preceded by one of the baronet's servants, it crossed the hall and went in the direction of the library.

Olive stood aside to let it pass--stood aside with clasped hands, and with her heart on her lips, as it were, longing, yearning for one word, one look of kindness or recognition from her cousin, but in vain. Matthew Kelvin's eyes were set straight before him, and he looked neither to the right hand nor the left, till he reached the library, where the servant at once wheeled forward a large easy chair, into which he sank, breathless and exhausted.

Olive, following silently behind, was the last to enter the room. She shut the door behind her, and stood quietly in the background, unheeded for the time by everyone. Vague, dark forebodings were at work in her heart. What did it all mean? she asked herself again and again. That strange look in her cousin's eyes, the way he spoke to her, the presence of Dr. Whitaker--all signs and tokens of something that boded no good to her. Had everything been discovered? She shivered from head to foot as this question put itself to her.

As soon as Mr. Kelvin was seated, the servant and Pod Piper left the room.

"Why, bless my heart! is that you or your ghost?" cried Sir Thomas, starting up from his chair and rubbing his eyes.

He had been taking forty winks surreptitiously--a little weakness in which he indulged three or four times a day, without ever permitting himself to acknowledge that he had been asleep.

Gerald, in the act of reaching a book from one of the upper shelves, turned with the volume in his hand as Kelvin and the others came into the room.

"He will be better in a little while," said Dr. Whitaker to the baronet, who had crossed the room, and was now standing, with his hands under his coat-tails and pursed-up lips, gazing down with compassionate eyes at the half-conscious man before him.

"What a wreck! What a terrible wreck!" murmured the baronet. "I--I never dreamt that he was half as bad as this."

Dr. Whitaker put something to the sick man's nostrils, which he inhaled eagerly, and presently he began to revive.

"I trust. Sir Thomas, that you will pardon my intrusion," he said, at last, speaking in a strange, husky voice, that was little more than a whisper, and was totally unlike the well-remembered voice--clear and confident--of Matthew Kelvin. "That my business here is of a very pressing kind you may well believe, when you see me thus and so attended."

"Whatever your business may be, Kelvin," said the baronet, kindly, "it is almost a pity that you did not put it off till you were a little stronger, or else that you did not send for me. I would have gone to see you willingly. You know that."

"Yes, yes; I know all you can say," said Kelvin, a little querulously. "But it was necessary that I should come here in person, and without an hour's delay."

"You don't mean to say that there's going to be a dissolution of Parliament?" cried Sir Thomas, eagerly.

Kelvin, smiling faintly, shook his head.

"Ah! I was afraid there was no such luck," said the baronet.

"I am here on the same errand that brought Miss Deane here this morning."

"But Miss Deane has told us everything, and a queer story it is."

"She has not told you everything, Sir Thomas."

"Well, I hope there's not much more to tell. I hardly know already whether I'm topsy-turvey or how."

"You have, I presume, read the letter that I sent by Miss Deane?"

"Miss Deane gave me no letter. She told me a long rigmarole about----"

"Oh, Matthew! I lost the letter!" cried Olive, coming a step or two nearer. "I lost the letter; but I knew what you had written, and I delivered your message just the same."

"You could not know what I had written, unless you had read my letter," said Kelvin, coldly and sternly.

"Oh, Matthew! Why do you say such cruel things of me?" cried Olive, imploringly. "You know how I knew what the contents of your letter would necessarily be."

"Has the message which Miss Deane gave you been given also to Lady Dudgeon and to Miss Lloyd?" asked Kelvin of the baronet.

"Certainly--to both of them. They were told first of all."

"I hope you will not think that I am asking too much if I ask you to be kind enough to request the favour of Lady Dudgeon's and Miss Lloyd's presence here for a few minutes."

"We'll have them here in a brace of jiffeys," said Sir Thomas, heartily.

Gerald rang the bell, a servant came in, and a message was sent to Lady Dudgeon and Miss Lloyd.

"I felt sure there was some mistake in that queer story which Miss Deane told us a couple of hours ago," said the baronet, cheerfully. "Such things never happen in real life, you know. One sees them on the stage sometimes, and laughs at them."

Nobody answered him, and he began to whistle under his breath. Dr. Whitaker was busy giving his patient a cordial, which he had taken the precaution to bring with him in his pocket.

A minute later, Lady Dudgeon and Miss Lloyd entered the room.

"I suppose I ought to make myself scarce, but I shan't," said Gerald to himself. "I shall not leave the room unless they tell me to go. The climax is on us at last, and I think it will be found presently that I've as much right here as anybody. Besides, my darling may want me to back her up."

He dropped quietly into a chair in the background. Only one person there seemed to be aware of his presence. Who that person was need hardly be said.

Lady Dudgeon was genuinely shocked to see Mr. Kelvin looking so ill, and chided him gently for venturing so far from home. Eleanor went up to him, and shook hands with him. He saw the tears standing in her eyes, and his own eyes fell before her. Love and remorse were busy in his heart.

"How bitterly I have wronged her!" he groaned to himself "What a confession is this which I am here to make?"

"The letter which I wrote this morning," began Mr. Kelvin, struggling manfully with his weakness, "and which, by some strange mischance, appears to have been lost, was addressed to Miss Lloyd. It would appear, however, that my cousin, Olive Deane, who was certainly cognisant of most of the circumstances of the case, has told you what were the contents of the letter. There are certain other circumstances, however, of which as yet you know nothing, and it is of these that I am now here to speak."

He paused for a moment or two to gather breath, and to moisten his lips again with the cordial.

"I presume Miss Deane has told you," he went on, "that while recently wading through some of the late Mr. Lloyd's papers, I came across certain documents which prove conclusively that Miss Lloyd is only that gentleman's adopted daughter, and that, consequently, there being no will, she is not the heiress to his property. Is not that, may I ask, what Miss Deane has told you?"

"That is precisely what Miss Deane told us," said Lady Dudgeon; "and I hope, with all my heart, that you are now come to tell us that it's all a mistake, and that our dear Eleanor is Miss Lloyd after all."

"Hear, hear!" cried Sir Thomas, as if from the back benches of the House.

"I am sorry to say that what Miss Deane told you is perfectly true," said Kelvin. "There is no possibility of mistake as to the main facts of the case."

"Dear, dear! what a pity--what a very great pity!" interposed the baronet.

"You may remember, Sir Thomas," resumed Kelvin, "that some little time after Mr. Lloyd's death, I once or twice mentioned to you that amongst his papers I had not been able to find any clue as to where Miss Lloyd was either born or baptized. It was requisite, before taking out letters of administration, that I should have some trustworthy information on this point; but there being no particular hurry in the matter, and I being busy at the time with other important work, one week went on after another without my making any serious effort to supply the necessary link. Still, when the discovery did come, it was as great a surprise to me as it can possibly have been to any of you."

"Then you think there is not the slightest possibility of there being any mistake in the matter?" said her ladyship.

"I have in my possession a document, written and signed by Jacob Lloyd himself, in which he states that the young lady, supposed to be his daughter, was merely adopted by himself and his wife in her infancy."

"Is no clue given as to her real parentage?"

"None whatever. But I have also in my possession a sealed packet which I will presently give to Miss Lloyd--a packet addressed to her by Mr. Lloyd himself, but with instructions that it should not be given to her till after his death. Inside this packet I think it quite possible that Miss Lloyd may find all the particulars she would like to know."

"Does it not seem somewhat strange, Mr. Kelvin," said Lady Dudgeon, "that after bringing up Eleanor as his own child, Mr. Lloyd should have left her totally unprovided for?"

"I think there can be no doubt, madam, as to Mr. Lloyd's intentions. That he intended to provide handsomely for his adopted daughter, no one who knew him could doubt. But he was a very dilatory man in many ways, and he put off making his will from day to day and year to year, till at length death surprised him suddenly, and no time was given him to repair his fatal omission."

There was a pause. Dr. Whitaker whispered something in his patient's ear, but Kelvin only shook his head impatiently.

"You remarked just now, Mr. Kelvin," said Lady Dudgeon, "that there were some other circumstances connected with this remarkable case which you thought it desirable that we should become acquainted with."

"Precisely so, madam. It is for that purpose that I am here. The revelation I am about to make is a very painful one--very painful and humiliating to me. But I have made up my mind to make it, and I will not shrink from doing so whatever may be the consequences to myself."

Once more he paused and put the cordial to his lips. That he was deeply moved, all there could plainly see, but Olive Deane alone was in a position to guess the cause.

"This is the confession that I have to make," he began at last. "The news you have heard to-day respecting Miss Lloyd, has been in my possession not for a few days only, as you probably imagine, but for five long months."

"Oh, Mr. Kelvin!" cried Eleanor.

"Dear me, Mr. Kelvin, what a very strange person you must be!" cried her ladyship. "Are we to understand that this secret has been in your possession for five months, and that you have never spoken of it till now?"

"That is what I wish your ladyship to understand."

"But what could your motive possibly be for keeping a piece of information of that kind to yourself for so long a time?"

"I will tell you what my motive was--tell you all. Eighteen months ago I made Miss Lloyd an offer of marriage."

"Bless my heart! now who would have thought that?" cried Sir Thomas.

"Miss Lloyd rejected me. Six months later I tried my fortune again, but with no better result. It seemed to me--but I may have been mistaken--that in the second rejection there was an amount of disdain, of--of contempt almost--that stung me to the quick, and I vowed that if the opportunity were ever given me I would be revenged."

"Oh, Mr. Kelvin, how you misunderstood me--misread me!"

"To seek revenge on a woman because she rejected you! That was very despicable, Mr. Kelvin." This from her ladyship.

"I know it and feel it now. I did not know it or feel it at the time. My mind must have been warped by its own bitterness. So when an opportunity came, as I thought it had come when this secret respecting Miss Lloyd found its way into my keeping, I did not fail to seize it."

"And I certainly fail to see in what way the keeping to yourself of this information respecting Miss Lloyd could avenge a fancied slight in times gone by."

"There stands the temptress"--pointing to Olive Deane--"who first suggested the idea to me. She--she it was who said to me, 'By keeping back the information that has come into your possession so strangely, till Miss Lloyd has become accustomed to her new position, till a life of ease and self-indulgence shall have become, as it were, a second nature to her, till she has learned to love--perhaps till her wedding morn itself--then will her fall from wealth to poverty seem infinitely greater than it would do now: then will yours be a revenge worthy of the name!'"

All eyes were turned on Olive Deane, who was still standing in the background not far from the door. Her eyes were bent on the carpet and her face was deathly pale. Suddenly she lifted her eyes and flashed back a look of scorn, that took in every one there except her cousin; a bitter smile curled her thin lips for a moment, then she drew a chair forward and sat down without a word. No one spoke.

"I am telling you this," resumed Kelvin, "not as blaming my cousin for her suggestion, but as a confession of my own weakness and wretched folly. That my feelings were very bitter against Miss Lloyd, I need hardly tell you, and yet how I despised myself for doing as I was doing, no one but myself can ever know. Not once, but a hundred times, did I vow to myself that I would write to Miss Lloyd and tell her everything, and a hundred times the recollection of her look and her words when she rejected me, came to my mind and held me back. Then came my illness, which lasted so long that I began to fancy I should never get better again, but all through it the wrong that I had done Miss Lloyd lay with a terrible weight on my conscience, and the first day that I was strong enough to hold a pen I wrote to her that letter which she ought to have received this morning."

"All this was very, very wrong of you, Mr. Kelvin," said Lady Dudgeon. "Unfortunately, however, none of us can undo the past, and I am quite sure that in this case your own conscience will be your severest punishment. Miss Deane said something about a nephew of the late Mr. Lloyd being the real heir."

"Yes, a certain Mr. Gerald Warburton. Now that I have broken the news to Miss Lloyd, it will be my duty at once to communicate with Mr. Warburton--though, strange to say, I discovered for the first time this morning that he had already written to me during my illness, but that the letter had been purposely withheld from me." He looked steadily at Olive as he said these words, but whatever her feelings might be at learning that he had somehow discovered her treachery with regard to Warburton's letters, she still kept her eyes fixed stedfastly on the carpet, and gave him no answering look.

"And now, Miss Lloyd," resumed the lawyer, "I will give into your hands that packet which I ought to have placed there five months ago. I dare not ask you to forgive me for the wrong I have done you. Such forgiveness would be an excess of generosity such as I have no right to expect."

He took a small sealed packet from his pocket. Then he stood up and, weak as he was, would have walked across the room to Eleanor, but she crossed the floor hurriedly and took the packet from his hands.

"Oh, Mr. Kelvin, I forgive you fully and willingly!" she said with emotion. "Pray, pray do not let the thought of what is past ever distress you again!"

Then, when she saw that the packet was addressed to her in the handwriting that she remembered so well, she kissed it with tears in her eyes and went slowly back to her seat by Lady Dudgeon.

"Unfortunately, Sir Thomas," resumed Kelvin, "my confessions are not yet at an end, and I must crave your attention for a few minutes longer."

"No apologies are needed, Kelvin--none whatever," said Sir Thomas. "I am entirely at your service."

Kelvin bowed.

"At my recommendation, Sir Thomas," he said, "you, a little while ago, took into your service the gentleman who is now sitting there."

"Pomeroy, you mean. To be sure--to be sure. And a very useful fellow I've found him. I'm your debtor for recommending him to me, Kelvin."

"When I asked you to take him into your service, sir, I did not know one thing about him that I know now."

"Ay--ay--what is that? Can't know anything bad of Pomeroy. Good fellow, very."

"My dear! such remarks may be a little premature," interposed her ladyship gently.

"From something that came to my knowledge only a few hours ago, I have discovered that Mr. Pomeroy's chief motive in desiring to enter your service, was that he might have an opportunity of being near Miss Lloyd, and of thereby winning her affections and inducing her to become his wife."

"Bless my heart! I would never have believed that of Pomeroy--never!"

Again Kelvin looked fixedly at Olive but she still kept her eyes turned persistently from him. She was stupefied. How had all this knowledge come to him--first the knowledge of Gerald Warburton's letter, and now of the secret arrangement between Pomeroy and herself? Had that still darker secret come to his knowledge likewise?

"I can only apologise, Sir Thomas," resumed Kelvin, "for having inadvertently been the means of introducing, under your roof, a person whose designs were such as I have mentioned, and I trust----"

"You are not to blame, Kelvin--not in the least," said the baronet. "But this is very sad--very sad indeed. What have you to say, Pomeroy, to all this?"

"Only that what Mr. Kelvin has just stated is, to a certain extent, true," said Gerald coolly. "My inducement in seeking to enter your service was certainly the hope of being thereby brought into daily contact with Miss Lloyd, with whom I was specially desirous of becoming acquainted."

"That is easily understood," said her ladyship. "Miss Lloyd at that time was supposed to be worth twenty thousand pounds. Mr. Pomeroy's audacious candour is quite refreshing."

"I will be candid," said Gerald with an amused smile. "For me to see and become acquainted with Miss Lloyd was to love her, and when that fact became patent to me, it would not do to sail any longer under false colours. I told Miss Lloyd that I loved her--the confession slipped out one evening unawares--but the first time I met her afterwards I confessed to her what my reasons had been for entering this house, asking her at the same time to forgive the wrong I had done her, and to forget the words I had said. From that day to this Miss Lloyd and I have been good friends: nothing more."

"Bless us all! what goings on under ones very nose, and I to know nothing about them!" cried Sir Thomas.

"But this morning altered the position of affairs entirely," went on Gerald. "You, sir, a little while ago told me what Miss Deane had just told you--that Miss Lloyd was Miss Lloyd no longer, and had nothing in the world but her own sweet self that she could call her own. This being the case, I at once sought Miss Lloyd--found her--told her that my love was still unchanged, and would not leave her till I had won from her a promise to become my wife. That promise I hold, and I shall claim its fulfilment from her before she and I are many weeks older."

"Well done, Pomeroy! That's manly--that's as it should be!" exclaimed Sir Thomas. "I knew you would turn out a decent fellow at bottom."

Her ladyship was slightly scandalised. "My dear!" she pleaded, "you are too enthusiastic. You let your heart run away with your head."

She drew her skirts round her, pushed back her chair a little, and perching her double eye-glass on the bridge of her high nose, she stared curiously at Eleanor.

Lady Dudgeon's feelings just now were of a very mixed kind. Her affection for the girl, the growth of long years, struggled with her very natural vexation at finding how thoroughly she had been hoodwinked, how completely she had been ignored in the matter by everybody. On the other hand, there was a spice of romance about the affair that appealed to some hidden feeling, of whose existence she herself was hardly aware.

"Child! child!" she said in an aside to Eleanor, "if you had but given me your confidence! Two paupers! What are you to do? How are you to live? It's dreadful to contemplate!"

Kelvin's cheeks flushed as he listened to Gerald's words. He set his teeth and glared savagely out of his hollow eyes at his successful rival. Was it for this that he had humiliated himself by his recent confession? What a fool he had been to acknowledge so much before all these people! This mere adventurer had carried away the prize for which he had striven so boldly and sacrificed so much. Bitter indeed were his thoughts just then. The emotion was too much for his strength, and he fainted.

Olive was by his side in a moment, but Dr. Whitaker spoke sternly to her.

"Stand back, if you please," he said. "I will attend to Mr. Kelvin."

She flashed a look of hate and defiance at him. Her overwrought feelings could contain themselves no longer.

"I will not stand back," she said, speaking in her clear incisive way. "Who has more right by my cousin's side than I, who have nursed him through his long illness?"

Dr. Whitaker did not answer. He was trying to bring back his patient to consciousness. Olive sank down at her cousin's knees, and took his cold hand in hers and pressed it to her lips.

In a little while Matthew Kelvin opened his eyes and looked feebly round, as if striving to bring to memory where he was, and whose were the faces that were bent over him. Last of all, his eyes met those of Olive Deane, and with a flash, as it were, everything came back to him. Then he saw whose hand it was that was holding his. With a look of loathing and hate that almost killed the soul within her, he flung Olive's hand from him, and, trembling in every limb, he staggered to his feet.

"Poisoner!--begone! Quit my sight for ever!" he cried; and then he fell back into his chair.

As it were an echo, came the word "Poisoner!" from the lips of every one in the room. Olive, who had risen to her feet when her cousin flung away her hand, staggered back as if suddenly smitten.

Lady Dudgeon was the first to speak. "Surely, sir," she said, addressing herself to Dr. Whitaker, "there must be some terrible mistake in all this! The accusation just made by your patient can hardly be that of a man in his proper senses."

"I am afraid, madam," said Dr. Whitaker, very gravely, "that the accusation made by Mr. Kelvin is but too well founded. We have it on evidence which cannot be disputed that my patient has been the victim of an elaborate system of slow poisoning. Suspicion points in one direction, and in one only: in the direction indicated by my patient himself."

"It seems altogether incredible," urged her ladyship. "What possible motive could Miss Deane have for attempting so dreadful a crime?"

"Let Miss Deane answer you herself," said Olive.

She was standing as she had stood from the moment when her cousin hurled at her that terrible word. Everything was lost: she knew it but too well, and she nerved herself for one last supreme effort.

"Lady Dudgeon is curious to know my motive for doing that which I am said to have done. Her curiosity shall be satisfied. My motive was my love for Matthew Kelvin. He loved me once, or I dreamt that he did. A passing fancy on his part, perhaps--soon forgotten by him, but never by me. I have never ceased to love him, I would give my life for him at this moment. When I found how persistently his heart was set on Miss Lloyd, I thought--foolishly enough, no doubt--that if I could have him all to myself--if I could see him daily, hourly--if he were ill and I could nurse him--I might perhaps succeed in winning back the love which I could not believe had ever been wholly lost to me. He was taken ill, and I nursed him. But to think that I would have let him die--the man whom I loved with my whole heart and soul--is utterly absurd! I understood too well what I was about to fear any such catastrophe. I could bear to see him suffer, simply because I loved him so much, and wanted him so wholly and entirely to myself. But I would not have let him die. Your ladyship looks horrified. Be thankful, madam, that your affections move in a less erratic orbit--that yours is a heart whose equable pulsations could never be quickened as mine have been. But I--I was not born in the frigid zone. Love to me is existence itself--for what is life without love?"

"What a dreadful person! We might all have been murdered in our beds!" said Lady Dudgeon in a loud aside, as she felt in her pocket for her smelling-salts.

"Matthew!" said Olive, passionately, advancing a step nearer her cousin, "you have bid me begone, and I know that there is nothing left for me but to obey. All is over between us. I played for a heavy stake, and I have lost it. I leave you now, never to see you again. I go forth into the world--whither, I neither know nor care. Listen to these my last words--listen, and believe. I would shed my heart's blood for you. Had you died through me, I would have killed myself an hour afterwards. I never loved you more than at this moment. That love I shall carry with me. Nothing can deprive me of it. Time will soften the hardness of your judgment. Then sometimes you may think of me with a touch of the old kindness, and say to yourself, 'Her greatest fault was that she loved me not wisely, but too well.'"

Still keeping her eyes fixed on her cousin, but vouchsafing no glance to any one else, she moved slowly towards the door. She reached the threshold, and there for a moment she paused.

"Farewell, Matthew! farewell for ever!" she said; and her voice had a ring of pathos and despair in it that her hearers never forgot. Then she drew her veil over her face, and the next moment she was gone.