Читать книгу A Life Sentence - Sergeant Adeline - Страница 6

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Florence Lepel raised her beautiful eyes at last to her brother's face.

"I only repeat what you yourself have said. There is no way out of it—for you."

Her voice was quite even and expressionless, but Hubert's face contracted at the sound of her words as if they hurt him. He raised his cigar mechanically to his lips, found that it had gone out, and, instead of relighting it, threw it away angrily from him amongst the flowers. His sister, her eyes keen notwithstanding the velvety softness of their glance, saw that his hands trembled as he did so.

"I should like to have some conversation with you," he said, in a tone that betokened irritation, "if you can spare a little time from your duties."

"They are not particularly engrossing just now," said Miss Lepel evenly, indicating the book that lay upon her lap. "I am improving my mind by the study of the French language," she said. "The General knows nothing of French authors since the days of Racine, and will think me quite laudably employed in reading a modern French novel."

"The General is not likely to find you anywhere to-day, nor for many a day to come."

"Is he dead?" asked his sister, ruffling the pages of her book. She did not look as if anybody's death could disturb her perfect equanimity.

"Are you a fiend, Florence," Hubert burst out angrily, "that you can speak in that manner of a man who has been so great a benefactor, so kind a friend, to both of us? Have you no heart at all?"

"I am not sure. If ever I had one, I think that it was killed—three months ago."

Her voice sank to a whisper as she uttered the last few words. Her breath came a little faster for a second or two—then she was calm again. Her brother looked at her with an air of stupefaction.

"How dare you allude to that shameful episode in your life," he said sternly, "and to me, of all people!"

"If not to you, I should certainly speak of it to no one," she answered quietly. There was a sudden blaze of light in the red-brown eyes beneath the heavily-veined eyelids.

"You are my only safety-valve; I must speak sometimes—or die. Besides"—in a still lower tone—"I see nothing shameful about it. We have done no harm. If he loved me better than he loved his chattering commonplace little wife, I was not to blame. How could I help it if I loved him too? It was kismet—it had to be. You should not have interfered."

"And pray what would have happened if I had not interfered? What shame, what ruin, what disgrace!"

"It is useless for you to rant and rave in that manner," said Florence Lepel, letting her eyes drop once more to the open pages of her French novel. "You did interfere, and there is an end of it. And what an end! You must be proud of your work. He dead, Marion dying, the General nearly mad with grief, the man Westwood hanged for a crime that he never committed!"

"Westwood has been reprieved," said Hubert sharply.

"What a relief to you!" commented his sister, with almost incredible coolness.

He turned away from her, catching at his throat as if something rose to choke him there. His face was very pale; the lines of pain about his eyes and mouth were plainer and deeper than they had been before. Florence glanced up at him and smiled faintly. There was a strange malignity in her smile.

"You can tell me," she said, when the silence had lasted for some minutes, "what you meant by saying that the General would not find me here to-day."

"He has narrowly escaped a fit of apoplexy. He is to be kept quiet; he will not be able to see any one for some days to come."

"Oh! What brought it on?"

"The news," Hubert answered reluctantly, "of Westwood's reprieve."

Miss Lepel smiled again.

"Was he so very angry?" she said. "Ah, he would do anything in his power to bring his brother's murderer to justice—I have heard him say so a hundred times! You ought to be very grateful to me, Hubert, for remembering that you are my brother."

"I wish to Heaven I were not!" cried the young man.

"For some things I wish you were not too," said Florence slowly. She sat up, clasped her white hands round her knees, and looked at him reflectively. "If you had not been my brother, I suppose you would not have interfered," she went on. "You would have left me to pursue my wicked devices, and simply turned your back on me and Sydney Vane. I agree with you. I wish to Heaven—if you like that form of expression—that you were not my brother, Hubert Lepel! You have made the misery of my life."

"And you the disgrace of mine!" he said bitterly.

"Then we are quits," she answered, in the listless, passionless voice that she seemed especially to affect. "We need not reproach each other; we have each had something to bear at one another's hands."

"Florence," said Hubert—and his voice trembled a little as he spoke—"what are you going to do? It is, as you say, useless for us to reproach each other for the past; but for the future let me at least be certain that my sacrifice will avail to keep you in a right path, that you will not again—not again——"

"This is very edifying," said Florence quietly, as the young man broke off short in his speech, and turned away with a despairing stamp of the foot—his sister's face would have discomfited a man of far greater moral courage than poor Hubert Lepel—"it is something new for me to be lectured by my younger brother, whose course has surely not been quite irreproachable, I should imagine! Come, Hubert—do not be so absurd! You have acted according to your lights, as the old women say, and I according to mine. There is nothing more for us to talk about. Let us quit the subject; the past is dead."

"I tell you that it is the future that I concern myself about. Upon my honor, Florence, I did not know that you were here when I came down to-day! I thought that you had gone to your friend Mrs. Bartolet at Worcester, as you said to me that you would when I saw you last. Why have you not gone? You said that life here was now intolerable to you. I remember your very words, although I have not been here for weeks."

"Your memory does you credit," said the girl, with slow scorn.

"Why have you stayed?"

"For my own ends—not yours."

"So I suppose."

"My dear brother Hubert," said Florence, composing herself in a graceful attitude in the depths of her basket-chair, "can you not be persuaded to go your own way and leave me to go mine? You have done a good deal of mischief already, don't you know? You have ruined my prospects, destroyed my hopes—if I were sentimental, I might say, broken my heart! Is not that enough for you? For mercy's sake, go your own way henceforward, and let me do as I please!"

"But what is your way? What do you please?"

"Is it well for me to tell you after the warning I have had?"

"If you had a worthy plan, an honorable ambition, you could easily tell me. Again I ask, Why are you here?"

"Yes, why?" repeated Florence, her lip curling, and, for the first time, a slight color flushing her pale cheeks. "Why? Your dull wits will not even compass that, will they? Well, partly because I am a thoroughly worldly woman, or rather a woman of the world—because it is not well to give up a good home, a luxurious life, and a large salary, when they are to be had for the asking—because as Enid Vane's governess, I can have as much freedom and as little work as I choose. Is not that answer enough for you?"

"No," said Hubert doggedly, "it is not."

She shrugged her graceful shoulders.

"It should be, I think. But I will go on. I look three-and-twenty, but you know as well as I do that I am twenty-nine. In another year I shall be thirty—horrible thought! An attack of illness, even a little more trouble, such as this that I have lately undergone, will make me look my full age. Do you know what that means to a woman?" She pressed her eyelids and the hollows beneath her eyes with her fingers. "When I look in the glass, I see already what I shall be when I am forty. I must make the best of my youth and of my good looks. You spoiled one chance in life for me; I must make what I can of the other."

"You mean," said the young man, with white dry lips, which he vainly attempted to moisten as he spoke—"you mean—that you must make what the world calls a good marriage?"

She bowed her head.

"At last you have grasped my meaning," she said coldly; "you have hitherto been exceedingly slow to do so."

He looked at her silently for a moment or two, almost with abhorrence. Her fair and delicate beauty affected him with a sort of loathing; he could not believe that this woman with the cold lips and malignant eyes had been born of his mother, had played with him in childhood, had kissed him with loving kisses, and spoken to him in sisterly caressing fashion. It took him some minutes to conquer the terrible hatred which grew up within him towards her, as he remembered all that she had been and all that she had done; but, when at last he was able to speak, his voice was calm and studiously gentle.

"Florence," he said, "I will not forget that you are my sister. You bear my name, you come of my race, and, whatever you do and whatever you are, I cannot desert you. I promised our mother on her death-bed that I would care for you as long as you needed care; and, if ever you needed it in your life, you need it now! I have not done my duty to you during the past few weeks. I have left you to yourself, and thought I could never forgive you for what you had done. But now I see that I was wrong. If it would be of any service to you, I would make a home for you at once—I would place all my means at your disposal. Come back with me to London, and let us make a home for ourselves together. We are both weary, both have suffered; could we not try to console and strengthen each other?"

The wistfulness of his tone, of his looks, would have softened any heart that was not hard as stone. But Florence Lepel's pale face was utterly unmoved.

"You offer me a brilliant lot," she said—"to live in a garret, I suppose, and darn your stockings, while you earn a paltry pittance as a literary man, eked out by aunt Leo's charity! You know very well that sooner than do that I put up for two years with Marion Vane's patronage and the drudgery of the schoolroom! And now, when the woman who alternately scolded and cajoled me, the woman who once took it upon her to lecture me for my behavior to her husband, the woman whom I hated as I should hate a poisonous snake—when that woman is slowly dying and leaving the field to me, am I to throw up the game, give up my chances, and go to vegetate with you in London? You know me very little if you think I would do that."

"I seem to have known you very little all my life," said Hubert bitterly. "I certainly do not understand you now. What can you get by staying here?"

"Oh, nothing, of course!" she answered tranquilly.

"What is your scheme, Florence?"

"It is of no use telling you—you might interfere again."

The anguish of doubt and anxiety in his dark eyes, if she had looked at him, would surely have moved her. But she did not look.

"I mean to stay here," she said quietly, "teaching Enid Vane, putting up with aunt Leonora's impertinences as well as I can, until I get another chance in the world. What that chance may be of course I cannot tell, but I am certain that it will come."

"You can bear to stay in this house which I—I—infinitely less blameworthy than yourself—can hardly endure to enter?"

"The world would not call you less blameworthy. I am glad that you are so far on good terms with your conscience."

"Florence," he said, almost threateningly, "take care! I will not spare you another time. If I find you involved in any other transaction of which you ought to be ashamed, I will expose you. I will tell the world the truth—that you were on the point of leaving England with Sydney Vane when I—when I——"

"When you shot him," she said, without a trace of emotion manifest in either face or voice, "and let Andrew Westwood bear the blame."

The young man winced as if he had received a blow.

"It was to shield you that I kept silence," he said, passionate agitation showing itself in his manner. "It was to save your good name. But even for your sake I would not have let the man suffer death. If we had obtained no reprieve for him, I swear that I would have given myself up and borne the punishment!"

"You were at work then? You tried to get the reprieve for him?" said his sister, with the faintest possible touch of eagerness.

"I did indeed." Hubert's voice fell into a lower key, as if he were trying, miserably enough, to justify to himself, rather than to her, what he had done. "It would be almost useless to confess my own guilt. It would be thought that I was beside myself. Who would believe me—unless you—you yourself corroborated my story? The man Westwood was a poacher, a thief, wretchedly poor and in ill-health; he has no character to lose, no friends to consider. Besides, he was morally guiltier than I. I know that he was lying in wait for Sydney Vane; I know that he had resolved to be revenged on him. Now I—I met my enemy in fair fight; I did not lie in ambush for him."

But from the darkness of his countenance it was plain that the young man's conscience was not deceived by the specious plea that he had set up for himself. Beneath her drooping eyelids Florence watched him narrowly. She read him in his weakness, his bitterness of spirit, more clearly than he could read himself. Suddenly she sat up and leaned forward so that she could touch him with one of her soft cold hands—her hands were always cold.

"Hubert," she said, with a gentle inflection of her voice which took him by surprise, "I am perhaps not as bad as you think me, dear. I do not want to quarrel with you—you are my only friend. You have saved me from worse than death. I will not be ungrateful. I will do exactly as you wish."

He looked bewildered, almost dismayed.

"Do you mean it, Florence?" he asked doubtingly.

"I do indeed. And, in return, oh, Hubert, will you set my mind at rest by promising me one thing? You will give me another chance to retrieve my wasted, ruined life, will you not? You will never tell to another what you and I know alone? You will still shield me—from—from—disgrace, Hubert—for our mother's sake?"

The tears trembled on her lashes; she slipped down from her low chair and knelt by his side, clasping her hands over his half-reluctant fingers, appealing to him with voice and look alike; and, in an evil hour for himself, he promised at any cost to shield her from the consequences of her folly and his sin.