At last there came a time when the absence from Brent’s Rock became longer than before. Only a few days earlier there had been a quarrel, exceeding in bitterness anything which had
gone before; but this, too, had been made up, and a trip on the Continent had been mentioned before the servants. After a few days Wykham Delandre also went away, and it was some weeks before he returned. It was noticed that he was full of some new importance – satisfaction, exaltation – they hardly knew how to call it. He went straightway to Brent’s Rock, and demanded to see Geoffrey Brent, and on being told that he had not yet returned, said, with a grim decision which the servants noted:
‘I shall come again. My news is solid – it can wait!’ and turned away. Week after week went by, and month after month; and then there came a rumour, certified later on, that an accident had occurred in the Zermatt valley. Whilst crossing a dangerous pass the carriage containing an English lady and the driver had fallen over a precipice, the gentleman of the party, Mr Geoffrey Brent, having been fortunately saved as he had been walking up the hill to ease the horses. He gave information, and search was made. The broken rail, the excoriated roadway, the marks where the horses had struggled on the decline before finally pitching over into the torrent – all told the sad tale. It was a wet season, and there had been much snow in the winter, so that the river was swollen beyond its usual volume, and the eddies of the stream were packed with ice. All search was made, and finally the wreck of the carriage and the body of one horse were found in an eddy of the river. Later on the body of the driver was found on the sandy, torrent-swept waste near Täsch; but the body of the lady, like that of the other horse, had quite disappeared, and was – what was left of it by that time – whirling amongst the eddies of the Rhone on its way down to the Lake of Geneva.
Wykham Delandre made all the enquiries possible, but could not find any trace of the missing woman. He found, however, in the books of the various hotels the name of ‘Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Brent.’ And he had a stone erected at Zermatt to his sister’s memory, under her married name, and a tablet put up in the church at Bretten, the parish in which both Brent’s Rock and Dander’s Croft were situated.
There was a lapse of nearly a year, after the excitement of the matter had worn away, and the whole neighbourhood had
gone on its accustomed way. Brent was still absent, and Delandre more drunken, more morose, and more revengeful than before.
Then there was a new excitement. Brent’s Rock was being made ready for a new mistress. It was officially announced by Geoffrey himself in a letter to the Vicar, that he had been married some months before to an Italian lady, and that they were then on their way home. Then a small army of workmen invaded the house; and hammer and plane sounded, and a general air of size and paint pervaded the atmosphere. One wing of the old house, the south, was entirely re-done; and then the great body of the workmen departed, leaving only materials for the doing of the old hall when Geoffrey Brent should have returned, for he had directed that the decoration was only to be done under his own eyes. He had brought with him accurate drawings of a hall in the house of his bride’s father, for he wished to reproduce for her the place to which she had been accustomed. As the moulding had all to be re-done, some scaffolding poles and boards were brought in and laid on one side of the great hall, and also a great wooden tank or box for mixing the lime, which was laid in bags beside it.
When the new mistress of Brent’s Rock arrived the bells of the church rang out, and there was a general jubilation. She was a beautiful creature, full of the poetry and fire and passion of the South; and the few English words which she had learned were spoken in such a sweet and pretty broken way that she won the hearts of the people almost as much by the music of her voice as by the melting beauty of her dark eyes.
Geoffrey Brent seemed more happy than he had ever before appeared; but there was a dark, anxious look on his face that was new to those who knew him of old, and he started at times as though at some noise that was unheard by others.
And so months passed and the whisper grew that at last Brent’s Rock was to have an heir. Geoffrey was very tender to his wife, and the new bond between them seemed to soften him. He took more interest in his tenants and their needs than he had ever done; and works of charity on his part as well as on his sweet young wife’s were not lacking. He seemed to have set all his hopes on the child that was coming, and as he looked
deeper into the future the dark shadow that had come over his face seemed to die gradually away.
All the time Wykham Delandre nursed his revenge. Deep in his heart had grown up a purpose of vengeance which only waited an opportunity to crystallise and take a definite shape. His vague idea was somehow centred in the wife of Brent, for he knew that he could strike him best through those he loved, and the coming time seemed to hold in its womb the opportunity for which he longed. One night he sat alone in the living-room of his house. It had once been a handsome room in its way, but time and neglect had done their work and it was now little better than a ruin, without dignity or picturesqueness of any kind. He had been drinking heavily for some time and was more than half stupefied. He thought he heard a noise as of someone at the door and looked up. Then he called half savagely to come in; but there was no response. With a muttered blasphemy he renewed his potations. Presently he forgot all around him, sank into a daze, but suddenly awoke to see standing before him someone or something like a battered, ghostly edition of his sister. For a few moments there came upon him a sort of fear. The woman before him, with distorted features and burning eyes, seemed hardly human, and the only thing that seemed a reality of his sister, as she had been, was her wealth of golden hair, and this was now streaked with grey. She eyed her brother with a long, cold stare; and he, too, as he looked and began to realise the actuality of her presence, found the hatred of her which he had had, once again surging up in his heart. All the brooding passion of the past year seemed to find a voice at once as he asked her: –
‘Why are you here? You’re dead and buried.’
‘I am here, Wykham Delandre, for no love of you, but because I hate another even more than I do you!’ A great passion blazed in her eyes.
‘Him?’ he asked, in so fierce a whisper that even the woman was for an instant startled till she regained her calm.
‘Yes, him!’ she answered. ‘But make no mistake, my revenge is my own; and I merely use you to help me to it.’ Wykham asked suddenly:
‘Did he marry you?’
The woman’s distorted face broadened out in a ghastly attempt at a smile. It was a hideous mockery, for the broken features and seamed scars took strange shapes and strange colours, and queer lines of white showed out as the straining muscles pressed on the old cicatrices.
‘So you would like to know! It would please your pride to feel that your sister was truly married! Well, you shall not know. That was my revenge on you, and I do not mean to change it by a hair’s breadth. I have come here to-night simply to let you know that I am alive, so that if any violence be done me where I am going there may be a witness.’
‘Where are you going?’ demanded her brother.
‘That is my affair! and I have not the least intention of letting you know!’ Wykham stood up, but the drink was on him and he reeled and fell. As he lay on the floor he announced his intention of following his sister; and with an outburst of splenetic humour
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told her that he would follow her through the darkness by the light of her hair, and of her beauty. At this she turned on him, and said that there were others beside him that would rue her hair and her beauty too. ‘As he will, ’ she hissed; ‘for the hair remains though the beauty be gone. When he withdrew the lynch-pin and sent us over the precipice into the torrent, he had little thought of my beauty. Perhaps his beauty would be scarred like mine were he whirled, as I was, among the rocks of the Visp, and frozen on the ice pack in the drift of the river. But let him beware! His time is coming!’ and with a fierce gesture she flung open the door and passed out into the night.
Later on that night, Mrs Brent, who was but half-asleep, became suddenly awake and spoke to her husband:
‘Geoffrey, was not that the click of a lock somewhere below our window?’
But Geoffrey – though she thought that he, too, had started at the noise – seemed sound asleep, and breathed heavily. Again Mrs Brent dozed; but this time awoke to the fact that her husband had arisen and was partially dressed. He was deadly
pale, and when the light of the lamp which he had in his hand fell on his face, she was frightened at the look in his eyes.
‘What is it, Geoffrey? What dost thou?’ she asked.
‘Hush! little one, ’ he answered, in a strange, hoarse voice. ‘Go to sleep. I am restless, and wish to finish some work I left undone.’
‘Bring it here, my husband, ’ she said; ‘I am lonely and I fear when thou art away.’
For reply he merely kissed her and went out, closing the door behind him. She lay awake for awhile, and then nature asserted itself, and she slept.
Suddenly she started broad awake with the memory in her ears of a smothered cry from somewhere not far off. She jumped up and ran to the door and listened, but there was no sound. She grew alarmed for her husband, and called out: ‘Geoffrey! Geoffrey!’
After a few moments the door of the great hall opened, and Geoffrey appeared at it, but without his lamp.
‘Hush!’ he said, in a sort of whisper, and his voice was harsh and stern. ‘Hush! Get to bed! I am working, and must not be disturbed. Go to sleep, and do not wake the house!’
With a chill in her heart – for the harshness of her husband’s voice was new to her – she crept back to bed and lay there trembling, too frightened to cry, and listened to every sound. There was a long pause of silence, and then the sound of some iron implement striking muffled blows! Then there came a clang of a heavy stone falling, followed by a muffled curse. Then a dragging sound, and then more noise of stone on stone. She lay all the while in an agony of fear, and her heart beat dreadfully. She heard a curious sort of scraping sound; and then there was silence. Presently the door opened gently, and Geoffrey appeared. His wife pretended to be asleep; but through her eyelashes she saw him wash from his hands something white that looked like lime.
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In the morning he made no allusion to the previous night, and she was afraid to ask any question.
From that day there seemed some shadow over Geoffrey Brent. He neither ate nor slept as he had been accustomed, and his former habit of turning suddenly as though someone were
speaking from behind him revived. The old hall seemed to have some kind of fascination for him. He used to go there many times in the day, but grew impatient if anyone, even his wife, entered it. When the builder’s foreman came to inquire about continuing his work Geoffrey was out driving; the man went into the hall, and when Geoffrey returned the servant told him of his arrival and where he was. With a frightful oath he pushed the servant aside and hurried up to the old hall. The workman met him almost at the door; and as Geoffrey burst into the room he ran against him. The man apologised:
‘Beg pardon, sir, but I was just going out to make some enquiries. I directed twelve sacks of lime to be sent here, but I see there are only ten.’
‘Damn the ten sacks and the twelve too!’ was the ungracious and incomprehensible rejoinder.
The workman looked surprised, and tried to turn the conversation.
‘I see, sir, there is a little matter which our people must have done; but the governor will of course see it set right at his own cost.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That ’ere ’arth-stone, sir: Some idiot must have put a scaffold pole on it and cracked it right down the middle, and it’s thick enough you’d think to stand hanythink.’ Geoffrey was silent for quite a minute, and then said in a constrained voice and with much gentler manner:
‘Tell your people that I am not going on with the work in the hall at present. I want to leave it as it is for a while longer.’
‘All right sir. I’ll send up a few of our chaps to take away these poles and lime bags and tidy the place up a bit.’
‘No! No!’ said Geoffrey, ‘leave them where they are. I shall send and tell you when you are to get on with the work.’ So the foreman went away, and his comment to his master was:
‘I’d send in the bill, sir, for the work already done. ’Pears to me that money’s a little shaky in that quarter.’
Once or twice Delandre tried to stop Brent on the road, and, at last, finding that he could not attain his object, rode after the carriage, calling out:
‘What has become of my sister, your wife.’ Geoffrey lashed his horses into a gallop, and the other, seeing from his white face and from his wife’s collapse almost into a faint that his object was attained, rode away with a scowl and a laugh.
That night when Geoffrey went into the hall he passed over to the great fireplace, and all at once started back with a smothered cry. Then with an effort he pulled himself together and went away, returning with a light. He bent down over the broken hearth-stone to see if the moonlight falling through the storied window had in any way deceived him. Then with a groan of anguish he sank to his knees.
There, sure enough, through the crack in the broken stone were protruding a multitude of threads of golden hair just tinged with grey!
He was disturbed by a noise at the door, and looking round, saw his wife standing in the doorway. In the desperation of the moment he took action to prevent discovery, and lighting a match at the lamp, stooped down and burned away the hair that rose through the broken stone. Then rising nonchalantly as he could, he pretended surprise at seeing his wife beside him.
For the next week he lived in an agony; for, whether by accident or design, he could not find himself alone in the hall for any length of time. At each visit the hair had grown afresh through the crack, and he had to watch it carefully lest his terrible secret should be discovered. He tried to find a receptacle for the body of the murdered woman outside the house, but someone always interrupted him; and once, when he was coming out of the private doorway, he was met by his wife, who began to question him about it, and manifested surprise that she should not have before noticed the key which he now reluctantly showed her. Geoffrey dearly and passionately loved his wife, so that any possibility of her discovering his dread secrets, or even of doubting him, filled him with anguish; and after a couple of days had passed, he could not help coming to the conclusion that, at least, she suspected something.