CHAPTER XIX

Sir Thomas Thorne was sincerely, honestly attached to his beautiful young orphan niece--perhaps the sentiment was all the stronger for being tinged with a latent remorse for his callous attitude towards her dead parents in the still unforgotten past.

It was almost a shock to him to see Joan look so "awfully bad," as he termed it to himself. As he placed his paper package, a round, light one, on the nearest table in her bright, pretty bed-chamber, and seated himself by her, he wondered, a little anxiously, whether she was not perhaps ill with the insidious family disease which had "made short work" of his younger brother, her father. Ill-health would account for most of what he considered her "vagaries."

"I think you ought to see the doctor, Joan--really I do!" he exclaimed, with concern, as he gazed at her. She was white as her cream cashmere dressing-gown, and there were deep bistre circles round her more than usually brilliant eyes. "Let me send for him----"

"Oh, I am all right!" exclaimed Joan, easily. She wondered at this new, unwonted self-possession. It seemed to her as if she--she--Victor's slayer--were standing aside--apart--and watching the doings of the better self from which her past actions had for ever divorced her. "What have you brought me?"

"Flowers, Vansittart said," replied her uncle, brightly. "I met him at the club, and he seemed as if he were to have a lonely evening--it was just one of those blank nights when one happens to have a lull in one's engagements--so I asked him to come in to dinner. He came, and brought this; but went away, as I said, when he heard you were out of sorts, saying he would call round and inquire in the morning."

He tore away the paper covering and disclosed a basket of blue and white flowers--a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of a West-End florists. "Pretty, aren't they?" he said, handing them to Joan, his head admiringly on one side.

"Very," she returned mechanically, making a pretence of appreciation. The blue flowers were forget-me-nots. To her strung-up imagination they looked like innocent child-eyes gazing at her with reproach. Once she and Victor had sat by a stream, and she had picked some from the bank and fastened them in his coat--he always liked a "button-hole"--Bah! These horrible thoughts!--What was her uncle saying? "He said he thought you looking ill. He wondered I had not sent to the doctor before."

"He--who?" asked Joan, sharply. "Lord Vansittart? What has he got to do with it?"

"There! You are going to faint," exclaimed her uncle, alarmed and annoyed, as she paled to lividity, sank back in her chair, and thrust the basket into his hands. Oh, the irony of fate! She had seen the exact counterpart among the flowers of the thick, small-petalled white blossom in Victor Mercier's coat that terrible last night--when she poisoned him. The perfume recalled it all--the waxen, deathly face, the still, silent form--the little room with the open window.

"It is the scent--it makes me feel faint when I am well, the odour of daphne, or tuberose, or whatever it is!" she stammered, forcing herself to speak with a gigantic effort. "And when one has a headache like mine it is worse."

"I will put them outside," said he, consolingly. She watched him as he did so, clumsily trying to tread softly as he went to the door. Poor, kind uncle! If he knew--if he knew!

"Do you know," he began, scanning her livid features with solicitude as he returned, and resuming his seat, pitched his voice in a low undertone, which only succeeded in producing a hoarse croak, so unlike his own cheery voice that in her hysterical, strained state she barely repressed a shriek of agonized laughter. "I am almost sure, indeed, I may say I feel convinced, that this headache of yours is a nervous attack brought on by seeing those waxworks last night. I am sure you went into the 'Chamber of Horrors,' and looked at the murderers. I did when I was about your age, and it got on my nerves. My opinion is, that that making effigies of terrible criminals who have dared to take their fellow-creatures' lives, and exhibiting them for money, is wrong, and ought to be forbidden. The law is right when it orders such human monsters to be buried within the prison, and their bodies consumed with quicklime. They ought not to be remembered! Every trace of their awful crimes ought to be instantly obliterated--ah! I thought as much! You shudder at the very recollection of those wicked faces! A delicate, innocent young girl like you ought not to go to such places! What? You did not go into the 'Chamber of Horrors?'"

"I don't think so," stammered Joan faintly, closing her eyes, and wondering how long this crucifixion of her soul would last. All her life? "But--what do you mean--the bodies consumed by quicklime? In the prison?"

"Never mind, we won't talk of such things!" said he, cheerfully. "Oh--poor little cold hand!" He was startled by the deathly icy touch of the hand he had taken between his warm palms. "Ah! There is your aunt! Come in, my dear! I was just telling Joan that I shall insist upon her seeing the doctor----"

"I am sure you will insist upon nothing of the kind, Thomas," said Lady Thorne, entering in her handsome, sober black dinner-dress, redeemed from too great plainness by the diamond pins in the black lace head-dress crowning her iron-grey hair, and the pearl and diamond necklet and brooches around and about her lace-encircled throat, and seeming to bring in a matter-of-fact atmosphere from the outer world of ordinary commonplace, which jarred upon and supported Joan at one and the same time. "Joan has nothing the matter with her but a little neuralgia. She wants a good long sleep, and she will be as well as ever to-morrow morning. You leave her to me, and don't meddle with what you men, however clever you may be, know nothing about!" And Lady Thorne, who remembered her own girlish "attacks" during her love anxieties, and who had no mind for visits from a doctor who might order change of air and nip the engagement with Lord Vansittart in the bud, bustled her husband off, and administered a tonic to her niece in the form of a good-humoured scolding.

"Men always want to make mountains out of mole-hills, doctors too--they are all alike!" she ended by saying, after she had chidden her for not forcing herself to eat and drink. "You did not sleep! Of course not! Well, I promise you you shall to-night!"

She rang for some clear soup and wine, coaxed Joan to consume both, then, after herself "seeing her to bed" and administering a good dose of chloral--a drug she had in her amateur medical studies found was in the opinion of certain authorities antidotal where there was a consumptive tendency--sat by her until she was asleep.

And Joan slept--heavily. Only towards morning was her slumber visited by dreams. The one which arrived with the grey dawn, when the birds began to chirp in the trees below, was almost a nightmare.

She dreamt that she was a prisoner in the dock, being tried for the wilful murder of Victor Mercier, alias a'Court. The jury were filing back into the box amid an awful silence in the crowded court. She saw each one of her twelve umpires, scanned each sober, serious face, with a horrible presage of coming doom. She heard the sentence--"Are you all agreed upon your verdict?" and the reply--the terrible fiat, "Guilty." She saw the wizened features of the aged judge in his scarlet panoply assume a grim and solemn expression, as, donning the three-cornered "black cap"--a head-covering which gave him a grotesque, masquerading appearance--he addressed her. At first she was too dazed to understand; then, the concluding adjuration seemed to smite her ears, and stab her heart.

"This man loved you, and made you his wife. A wife should be one to stand by the man she marries 'for better, for worse'; which means that when she takes the oath to do so, she accepts the man's sins with the man--she becomes one with him, half of himself. There are wives who have died for husbands as faulty, perhaps more so, than your unhappy victim. But you! What have you done? When you had money at your command, did you seek him out? Did you even endeavour to discover what had become of him? No! Instead, you, as it seems by the evidence we have heard--incontrovertible evidence of trustworthy witnesses--were planning a bigamous marriage and secret elopement with another man; and when, just before the consummation of your guilty plot, your lawful husband appeared, you were tempted to get rid of the obstacle to its accomplishment, and to kill him. How you executed the terrible deed we have heard. You have had every chance which the goodness of your fellow creatures, and their kindness to you has been almost unexampled, could provide. You have had, I fear, more mercy than you deserve. For myself, I cannot hold out any hope that your misguided and guilty life can possibly be spared." Then Joan listened in mute agony to the sentence which condemned her to be "hanged by the neck till she was dead"; she heard the awful prayer, uttered with deep feeling by an aged man to whom Death could not long remain a stranger, "and may God Almighty have mercy on your soul!" and all became a blank.

A blank--but not for long. She seemed to be roused by the tolling of a bell, and looking around, found herself in the condemned cell. Some one was strapping her with small leathern straps which hurt her, and in reply to her miserable, pathetic appeal, "oh, please don't," the man dryly said it would be better for her to be submit to be tightly bound--"it will be over all the sooner." It? What? Then she saw serious averted faces--they belonged to men who were forming into line--she heard the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," she caught the gleam of a white surplice.

She struggled--fiercely--madly--and awoke.

Awoke--bathed in sweat from head to foot--her pulses beating wildly--gasping, choking--but alive--free--free!

There was her dear familiar room, grey in the early morning light; the bell was tolling from a neighbouring monastic church--she was alive--alive! But--but--it might--come--true--that dream--

"Oh God, it must not!" she exclaimed, flinging herself out of bed and upon her knees. "It would not be just! You know, my God, I did not mean it! You know what he was! You must not let me be hanged!"