Mary Braddon - Mount Royal - A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

"Look!" said Jessie Bridgeman, pointing down at the stone.

There were marks of blood upon it – the traces of stains which had been roughly wiped away by the men who found the body.

"This is where he stood," said Jessie, looking round, and then she ran suddenly across to the narrow path on the other side. "And some one else stood here – here – just at the end of the bridge. There are marks of other feet here."

"Those of the men who came to look for him," said Christabel.

"Yes; that makes it difficult to tell. There are the traces of many feet. Yet I know," she muttered, with clenched teeth, "that some one stood here – just here – and shot him. They were standing face to face. See!" – she stepped the bridge with light swift feet – "so! at ten paces. Don't you see?"

Christabel looked at her with a white scared face, remembering her husband's strange manner the night before last, and those parting words at Mr. Hamleigh's bedroom door. "You understand my plan?" "Perfectly." "It saves all trouble, don't you see." Those few words had impressed themselves upon her memory – insignificant as they were – because of something in the tone in which they were spoken – something in the manner of the two men.

"You mean," she said slowly, with her hand clenching the rail of the bridge, seeking unconsciously for support; "you mean that Angus and my husband met here by appointment, and fought a duel?"

"That is my reading of the mystery."

"Here in this lonely place – without witnesses – my husband murdered him!"

"They would not count it murder. Fate might have been the other way. Your husband might have been killed."

"No!" cried Christabel, passionately; "Angus would not have killed him. That would have been too deep a dishonour!"

She stood silent for a few moments, white as death, looking round her with wide, despairing eyes.

"He has been murdered!" she said, in hoarse, faint tones. "That suspicion has been in my mind – dark – shapeless – horrible – from the first. He has been murdered! And I am to spend the rest of my life with his murderer!" Then, with a sudden hysterical cry, she turned angrily upon Jessie.

"How dare you tell lies about my husband?" she exclaimed. "Don't you know that nobody came here yesterday except Angus; no one else had the key. The girl at the farm told us so."

"The key!" echoed Jessie, contemptuously. "Do you think a gate, breast high, would keep out an athlete like your husband? Besides, there is another way of getting here, without going near the gate, where he might be seen, perhaps, by some farm labourer in the field. The men were ploughing there yesterday, and heard a shot. They told me that last night at the farm. Wait! wait!" cried Jessie, excitedly.

She rushed away, light as a lapwing, flying across the narrow bridge – bounding from stone to stone – vanishing amidst dark autumn foliage. Christabel heard her steps dying away in the distance. Then there was an interval, of some minutes, during which Christabel, hardly caring to wonder what had become of her companion, stood clinging to the hand-rail, and staring down at stones and shingle, feathery ferns, soddened logs, the water rippling and lapping round all things, crystal clear.

Then, startled by a voice above her head, she looked up, and saw Jessie's light figure just as she dropped herself over the sharp arch of rock, and scrambled through the cleft, hanging on by her hands, finding a foothold in the most perilous places – in danger of instant death.

"My God!" murmured Christabel, with clasped hands, not daring to cry aloud lest she should increase Jessie's peril. "She will be killed."

With a nervous grip, and a muscular strength which no one could have supposed possible in so slender a frame, Jessie Bridgeman made good her descent, and stood on the shelf of slippery rock, below the waterfall, unhurt save for a good many scratches and cuts upon the hands that had clung so fiercely to root and bramble, crag and boulder.

"What I could do your husband could do," she said. "He did it often when he was a boy – you must remember his boasting of it. He did it yesterday. Look at this."

"This" was a ragged narrow shred of heather cloth, with a brick-dust red tinge in its dark warp, which Leonard had much affected this year – "Mr. Tregonell's colour, is it not?" asked Jessie.

"Yes – it is like his coat."

"Like? It is a part of his coat. I found it hanging on a bramble, at the top of the cleft. Try if you can find the coat when you get home, and see if it is not torn. But most likely he will have hidden the clothes he wore yesterday. Murderers generally do."

"How dare you call him a murderer?" said Christabel, trembling, and cold to the heart. It seemed to her as if the mild autumnal air – here in this sheltered nook which was always warmer than the rest of the world – had suddenly become an icy blast that blew straight from far away arctic seas. "How dare you call my husband a murderer?"

"Oh, I forgot. It was a duel, I suppose: a fair fight, planned so skilfully that the result should seem like an accident, and the survivor should run no risk. Still, to my mind, it was murder all the same – for I know who provoked the quarrel – yes – and you know – you, who are his wife – and who, for respectability's sake, will try to shield him – you know – for you must have seen hatred and murder in his face that night when he came into the drawing-room – and asked Mr. Hamleigh for a few words in private. It was then he planned this work," pointing to the broad level stone against which the clear water was rippling with such a pretty playful sound, while those two women stood looking at each other with pale intent faces, fixed eyes, and tremulous lips; "and Angus Hamleigh, who valued his brief remnant of earthly life so lightly, consented – reluctantly perhaps – but too proud to refuse. And he fired in the air – yes, I know he would not have injured your husband by so much as a hair of his head – I know him well enough to be sure of that. He came here like the victim to the altar. Leonard Tregonell must have known that. And I say that though he, with his Mexican freebooter's morality, may have called it a fair fight, it was murder, deliberate, diabolical murder."

"If this is true," said Christabel in a low voice, "I will have no mercy upon him."

"Oh, yes, you will. You will sacrifice feeling to propriety, you will put a good face upon things, for the sake of your son. You were born and swaddled in the purple of respectability. You will not stir a finger to avenge the dead."

"I will have no mercy upon him," repeated Christabel, with a strange look in her eyes.

The inquest at the Wharncliffe Arms was conducted in a thoroughly respectable, unsuspicious manner. No searching questions were asked, no inferences drawn. To the farmers and tradespeople who constituted that rustic jury, the case seemed too simple to need any severe interrogation. A gentleman staying in a country house goes out shooting, and is so unlucky as to shoot himself instead of the birds whereof he went in search. He is found with an empty bag, and a charge of swan-shot through his heart.

"Hard lines," as Jack Vandeleur observed, sotto voce , to a neighbouring squire, while the inquest was pursuing its sleepy course, "and about the queerest fluke I ever saw on any table."

"Was it a fluke?" muttered little Montagu, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the proceedings. He and his companions were standing among a little crowd at the door of the justice-room. "It looks to me uncommonly as if Mr. Hamleigh had shot himself. We all know he was deadly sweet on Mrs. T., although both of them behaved beautifully."

"Men have died – and worms have eaten them – but not for love," quoted Captain Vandeleur, who had a hearsay knowledge of Shakspeare, though he had never read a Shakspearian play in his life. "If Hamleigh was so dead tired of life that he wanted to kill himself he could have done it comfortably in his own room."