Fordham's Feud

She started, swayed, as if to fall, then recovered herself, as if by an effort of will.

“You know, then?” she gasped. “He has told you?”

“Everything?”

“Everything! Oh, the infamous fiend! He was always that way.”

“Maybe. Now I must have an answer to this! Who is Laura’s father? Cecil Garcia or – Sir Francis Orlebar?”

She started from her chair, and stood gazing at him, unutterable horror in her eyes, her lips livid and shaking. Her next words were gulped out, as though between the gasps of strangulation.

“He – told you – ?”

“That your daughter’s father is my father. That I had married my half-sister. Is it true?”

She tried to speak – the words would not come. The full horror – the diabolical ingenuity – of Fordham’s plan, burst upon her now – for the first time, and burst upon her with crushing force. This was the blow then. While the barest taint of such suspicion lurked in Philip’s mind, Laura might go through life alone. This was how Fordham had chosen to strike her. And she had half credited him with benevolent motives! Him, a devil in human shape!

“Is it true?” repeated Philip.

But his voice hummed in her ears with a far-away sound. She made a convulsive clutch at her throat, gasping as if to speak. No words would come. Then swaying heavily, with a low cry that was half a groan, she tottered and fell.

“She has answered the question,” said Philip to himself, as he caught her just in time and placed her on the sofa. “She has answered the question, and now I know the worst.”

Stepping to the door he unlocked it, just as Laura was turning the handle. She had heard her mother’s cry and the sound of voices. Among the latter she recognised that of Philip, and had flown down, grievously dreading that something had happened.

And at sight of him all her fears were realised. That pale, stern man with the haggard eyes, and the hand stretched forth as though to bar her approach, was that her bright-hearted Philip, who had left her so gaily, yet so lovingly, but the morning before? Heavens, what did it all mean?

“No; it is all over,” he said, putting forth his hand again, as she was about to fling herself upon his neck. “I know all now. Heavens – it is too horrible!” he added with a shudder. “But I suppose you are in the secret too. To think of it!”

“I think you have gone mad,” she answered, a defiant fierceness taking the place of the soft love tones wherein she had at first addressed him. “But – what have you been doing to my mother?” she added in half a scream, as she caught sight of the latter lying there white and still, and rushed over to her side.

“She has fainted. You had better see after her while I go for a doctor. The knowledge that I had been made aware of the infamous plot to which I have fallen a victim has been too much for her.”

Even in the midst of her attentions to her fainting mother the girl turned upon him with flashing eyes and a livid countenance.

“Infamous plot!” she cried. “You dare? Mark this, then. Never come near me again – never again until you have apologised most humbly to her and to me. I mean it! Do you hear?”

“That makes it easier,” he replied, with a faint sneer. “Now I am going for the doctor.” And he went out. “She is in it too,” he soliloquised as he sped along through the cool night. “It is a horrible business – horrible – horrible! But the mother? Well, she answered the question. Still, when she comes round, I shall insist upon her answering it again in words, or in writing.”

But his question was destined to remain unanswered, for Mrs Daventer never did come round. A couple of hours after Philip’s return with the medical man she died. But she never spoke again.

The doctors pronounced it a plain case of heart disease, though they wrapped their definition up in a layer of technical jargon that was anything but plain. So the only person who could have cleared up the doubt was silent for ever, and the true secret of Laura’s paternity lay buried in her mother’s grave.

Chapter Thirty Three

“For a Brother’s Blood.”

The wind soughed mournfully through the great beech-forests which cover the slopes leading up to the Roncevallés plateau.

It was early morning – gloomy and lowering. The two occupants of the open carriage wending its way at a footpace up the steep mountain road were well wrapped up, for at that elevation, late summer as it was, the air was biting and chill.

“And so you are determined to go through with this, Orlebar?” one of them was saying. “Can it not be arranged even now?”

“Certainly not,” was the brief, determined answer. “I am going to do my level best to rid the world of the most inhuman, damnable monster that ever disgraced it.”

“You will have to be as cool as – as this air, then, Orlebar. Your friend – your enemy I should say rather – is something like a dead shot. By the way, your story is one of the strangest I ever heard in my life; and not the oddest part of it to me is that you should still persist in choosing this place.”

“Because it is this place. You were here at the time of – of that other affair, Major. You will be able to place us upon the exact spot. I have a presentiment. On the very spot where that villain wounded my father I shall kill him. That is why I have chosen it.”

The other shook his head gravely. He was an older man than he looked – and he looked past middle age. Major Fox’s own career had been an eventful one. He had seen active service under the flag of two foreign powers severally, and, moreover, was reckoned an authority on hostile meetings of a private nature, at many of which he had assisted, not always in the character of second. That the object of this early drive was a hostile meeting the above fragment of conversation will clearly show.

Where is the sunny-tempered, light-hearted Philip Orlebar of old? Dead – dead and buried. He who now sits here, pale, stern, gloomy, with the aspect of a man upon whose life a great blow has fallen – whom that blow has aged a dozen years at least – surely these two personalities can have nothing in common?

Onward and upward, higher and higher wends the carriage. Then the acclivity ends, and surmounting the roll of its brow a great flat wooded space, with here and there the distant hump of a mountain jutting against the sky, lies spread out in front. It is the Roncevallés plateau.

A bell clangs forth, slow and sepulchral upon the raw morning air. Its measured, intermittent toll, heard beneath the gloomy lour of the overcast heavens, would be depressing enough under ordinary circumstances. But now it strikes the hearers as immeasurably ominous, for it is the death-toll.

Standing up, the Major, speaking in fluent French, impresses a few directions upon the Basque driver. The latter nods and whips up his horses. As they trot past the quaint, old-world monastery, with its red roofs lying against an appropriate background of foliage, dark hooded figures could be seen gliding about.

“That changes the scene again, Orlebar,” remarked Major Fox. “A few minutes ago one might almost have expected to meet Caesar and his legions emerging from the great beech-forests. Now this brings us to more mediaeval times again. Hallo! What is it?”

For the horses had been suddenly reined in. Then the driver drew them up to the side of the road.

A mournful, wailing, dirgelike sound was heard in front. Standing up in the vehicle, its occupants made out a number of white-clad figures advancing round a bend in the road. The dark-covered horizontal burden borne in the midst; the glitter of the crucifix moving slowly in front; the measured and solemn chant; the clang of the bell from the tower – all told the nature of that procession advancing along the desolate and lonely wooded plateau. Its errand was one of death; and they, the unlooked-for spectators, they, too, were bound upon an errand of death.

“Requiem aeternum dona ei Domine: et lux perpetua luceat ei” chanted the singers. The Basque driver doffed his beret and bent his head devoutly as the cortège went by, and the Major and Philip lifted their hats. But the words, the chant, struck upon the tatter’s ear with indescribable import, for they brought back a very different scene. He saw again the arching blue of the cloudless heavens above the Val d’Anniviers, the rugged cliff and the feathery pine forest, the vernal slopes and the flower-strewn graves. Again the dull roar of the mountain torrent rose upon the air, and Alma Wyatt’s voice was in his ears as upon that glowing morning in the churchyard at Vissoye. And now he heard it again, that chant for the dead, here in the wild solitudes of this Pyrenean forest country, swelling through the murk of the lowering heavens. And he himself was going forth to death – to meet death or to deal it out to another.

“Si iniquitates observaveris Domine: Domine quis sustinebit!” The chant rolled on, now sinking fainter as the funeral procession receded. Heavens! here was a comment on the errand of hate and vengeance – the errand of blood which had brought these two abroad that morning.

“If I were inclined to be superstitious, I should take that incident to be unlucky,” said the Major, with a jerk of his thumb in the direction followed by the receding cortège, “but I’m not, so it doesn’t matter. En avant, Michel.”

But the driver as he obeyed turned half round on his box to ask for directions, with the result that the carriage turned abruptly off into a bypath which penetrated deeper into the forest. A few hundred yards along this and the Major called a halt.

“We will leave the trap here, Orlebar. The place is close at hand, and the other party is sure to be on the spot.”

“You seem to know it well, Major,” said Philip. “Why, I couldn’t have ferretted it out to save my life.”

“My dear fellow, I have been here before – in times past,” was the answer, given with a touch of dryness.

Voices were now heard just ahead of them, and as they emerged into a sequestered open glade three figures were standing in a group chatting. They belonged to Fordham and two strangers – one mustachioed and grizzled, the other mustachioed and dark.

“Good morning – good morning,” said the Major, briskly, raising his hat as he stepped forward.

“M. le docteur Etchegaray – M. le Major Fox,” introduced Fordham.

The dark stranger bowed, and the Major bowed, and there was elaborate hat-lifting on both sides. Then the Major passed on the introduction to his principal, to whom he further effected that of the other stranger, who was Fordham’s second, and whom he named as “M. de Verrieux.”

Beyond a slight raising of the hat such as etiquette demanded, no recognition passed between the two principals. The seconds and the medical man drew apart for a few moments’ conference.