CHAPTER XXXIII

"Joan! What does it mean?" asked the bridegroom, white, stern, after the shock, still seeming to see those awful words, "Vengeance is Mine!" dancing before his dazed eyes in letters of blood.

"Mean? That I am hunted down--that they are after me, cruel creatures, for an act you yourself said was only childish folly!" She writhed, and gave a mad, wild laugh which seemed to freeze him. But her explanation--her allusion to that which she had told him--that wretched affair in which she had innocently helped to ally her school friend to an utterly worthless scamp--brought instantaneous relief from his sudden, over mastering terror that the label hinted at some unknown horror.

"That was your poor friend, then, dearest, that you unwittingly helped to injure!" He detached the label with the Scriptural quotation from the bunch of flowers, pocketed it, and flung them out of the carriage window. "But I thought she was quit of him? Why should she persecute you, now? When all is over?"

She gave him a desperate glance, and shrank away into the corner of the carriage. White, her eyes ablaze--even in his miserable dread, his anxiety, she reminded him of a celebrated singer he had seen at the opera a few weeks ago in "Lucia." Why, why was her agony so intense about a mere secondary trouble?

"Understand!" she hoarsely said. "If you cannot take me on trust, we had better part, we had better separate now, this very hour, and go our different ways----"

"How dare you!" he cried; and almost fiercely, in his anguish to hear such a suggestion from her lips, he placed his hands on her shoulders, ruthlessly ignoring the bridal finery, and gazed into her strained eyes. "You are my wife! It is an insult to me, what you say! I am your husband."

He took her peremptorily in his arms, and kissed her with mingled adoration and despair. The despair was involuntary--born of a huge misgiving that something was seriously wrong with his new-made wife, and that he had yet to learn what that something was.

"And now, here we are at your home!" he tenderly said. "You must try and pretend to be the happy bride I hoped you were!"

As he helped her to alight, and acting the part of the delighted, joyous bridegroom, led her through the little crowd of servants standing about the hall, acknowledging their murmur of congratulation, those melancholy words of his--so untrue in regard to her love for him--to her rejoicing in the midst of her misery that she was his wife--touched her to the quick.

"My poor love!" she gasped, as soon as they were alone in the flower-bedecked drawing-room, throwing herself upon his breast, and gazing adoringly into his face. "I--I had not the courage to tell you before, but I must--now! I told you my unhappy friend was free, but I did not tell you how! Her husband was that man that died--that Victor Mercier! Perhaps she had something to do with his death! That is what has been eating my heart out--that I had had a hand in killing a fellow-creature--killing--depriving some one of life--oh, it is awful! Sometimes I feel that if that man were alive again, I would willingly die myself--give up all our happiness--leave you for ever! Now perhaps you can imagine what I have been suffering, and what I suffered at the theatre listening to that Mr. Hunt talking of the woman with the brandy-bottle, dreading lest he might be speaking of her--my poor miserable friend!"

"My darling!" There was a world of compunction, tenderness, sympathy in his voice as he drew her down by him on a sofa, and lovingly clasped her cold, trembling hands in his. "But you ought to have told me before! I quite--see--all--now--and now I am to bear your troubles for you--troubles indeed, absurd cobwebs--trifles light as air! Your real trouble, my dearest, is being in possession of an over-sensitive conscience! Come--there is the first carriage--how quickly they have followed us up--try and look a little more as a bride ought to look. Your being pale doesn't matter--brides seem to be given that way--but unhappy? For my sake, darling, try to look a little less as if you had just been condemned to death instead of to living your life with me!"

He kissed some colour into her white cheeks and lips; and then the wedding party began to flock in. Carriage after carriage drove up, and the bridesmaids and young men, the older relatives and friends, crowded the drawing-room, and there were embracings and congratulations--not half over when luncheon was announced. It was a gay, or a seemingly gay wedding breakfast. Joan went through it all with a curious feeling of unreality. She heard herself and her loved husband toasted, she heard his eloquent yet well-balanced little speech. She smiled upon those who spoke to her with the almost reverential solicitude with which a bride is addressed on her marriage day, and she muttered some reply, although she did not seem to gather the meaning of their speeches. She cut the cake, she rose and adjourned upstairs when the rest went to the drawing-room. Happily, she had to hurry her "going away" toilette, which was presided over by her aunt, in the seventh heaven of delight at her only niece's splendid marriage, and by her aunt's maid--Julie having already started with Lord Vansittart's valet and the luggage, to be on board the yacht with everything ready when the bride and bridegroom arrived. Happily there was not a spare moment to be wasted if they meant to "catch the train" they had planned to start by. Before she was quite ready, Vansittart's voice was heard outside the door, hurrying them. They were obliged to hasten their farewells, and drive rapidly to the station--the terminus they were starting from no one knew but Sir Thomas, who was bound to secresy.

But even when the express was rattling across the sunlit country seawards, Joan feverishly told herself that she was not yet safe. Since that posy was offered her at the church door, since she had read those awful words written on the label, and had looked into those menacing blue eyes, a renewed, augmented fear had seemed to half paralyze her, body and soul; more than fear, worse than dread--a horrible conviction of coming doom.

It asserted itself even when she lay on her husband's breast in their reserved compartment, listening to the passionate utterances of intense and devoted love with which he hoped to dispel her nervous terrors--terrors which, although he began to understand that she had unfortunately been drawn into being one of the actors in an undesirable life drama, he regarded as mere vapours which could be dispelled by an equable, peaceful life shared by him and ruled by common sense. Those clear, threatening blue eyes seemed still gazing into hers, penetrating to the secrets hidden in her soul. All through Vansittart's endearing words, the bright pictures he verbally drew of their coming happiness, those words repeated themselves in her ears--"Vengeance is Mine! I will repay, saith the Lord!"

But when day succeeded day upon the yacht; when hour after hour she was calmed by the tender devotion of her husband; when sunlit summer seas under blue, tranquil skies were her surroundings by day, to give place to a dusky mystic ocean lit by glittering trails of moonlight, and reflecting myriads of stars at night--a certain calm, which was more stolidity than calm, a content which was more relief from dread than peace--came to her rescue.

They spent some weeks on the high seas, touching only at obscure foreign ports. At last Joan's latent fears began to reassert themselves. She urged Vansittart to make for a seaport where they might procure English papers.

This led to their return from a coasting tour of the Mediterranean Islands. The heat was intense, only tempered by sea breezes and by the appliances on board the luxurious craft. Still, Joan would not consent to go northward, where people would naturally expect them to be. Vansittart put in at Marseilles, went on shore alone, saw the papers, ascertained that there was nothing in them anent "the Mercier affair," about which his young wife was, in his opinion, so unreasonably conscientious, and brought them to her with secret triumph.

He hoped that now she would be "more reasonable," and to his content, his hope was so far realized that when he tentatively suggested a return home, she readily acquiesced. A week later they arrived at his favourite country seat--a pretty estate in Oxfordshire, near the most picturesque part of the Thames.

An old stone house which had seen the birth of generation upon generation of Vansittart's ancestors, Pierrepoint Court stood in a wide, undulating park. Rooks nested in the tall elms, shy deer hid among the bracken under the preserves. An atmosphere of calm, of unworldly peace, reigned everywhere, and seemed to affect the new mistress of the place, even as she entered upon her duties as its _chatelaine_.

A day or two passed so delightfully that she frequently told herself with mute gratitude to Heaven, that trouble was over--happiness had begun. She strolled through her dominion with her husband at her side, all his retainers and tenants welcoming and congratulating them. Most of all she enjoyed driving with him in a dog-cart to outlying farms, and rusticating among the orchards, visiting the poultry-yards and dairies. This was before they had written to announce their arrival to Sir Thomas and Lady Thorne. The morning their letters must have reached, they were starting for a long drive when a telegraph boy cycled up. Vansittart read the message, which was from Sir Thomas, and crumpling it up, thrust it deep in his pocket. "It is nothing," he said, smiling. But his heart misgave him. The words were ominous of trouble.

"Meet me at my solicitors' as soon after you receive this as possible. This is urgent."