If Lady Newhaven yearned for revenge she had it then. They had both
forgotten her. But she saw Rachel's eyes change as the eyes of a man at
the stake might change when the fire reached him. She shrank back from
the agony in them. Hugh's face became pinched and thin as a dead man's.
A moment ago he saw no consequences. He saw only that he could not lie
to her. His mind fell headlong from its momentary foothold. What mad
impulse had betrayed him to his ruin?
"You drew the short lighter, and you let me think all the time he had,"
said Rachel, her voice almost inaudible in its fierce passion. "You drew
it, and you let him die instead of you, as any one who knew him would
know he would. And when he was dead you came to me, and kept me in
ignorance even--that time--when I said I trusted you."
The remembrance of that meeting was too much.
Rachel turned her eyes on Lady Newhaven, who was watching her
terror-stricken.
"I said I would not give him up, but I will," she said, violently. "You
can take him if you want him. What was it you said to me, Hugh? That if
you had drawn the short lighter you would have had to abide by it. Yes,
that was it. Your whole intercourse with me has been one lie from first
to last. You were right, Violet, when you said he ought to marry you. It
will be another lie on the top of all the others."
"It was what Edward wished," faltered his widow. "He says so in the
letter that has just been burned."
"Lord Newhaven wished it," said Rachel, looking at the miserable man
between them. "Poor Lord Newhaven! First his honor. Then his life. You
have taken everything he had. But there are still his shoes."
"Rachel!" said Hugh, suddenly, and he fell on his knees before her,
clasping the hem of her gown.
She pushed him violently from her, tearing her gown in releasing it from
his frenzied grasp.
"Leave me," she whispered. Her voice was almost gone. "Coward and liar,
I will have nothing more to do with you."
He got upon his feet somehow. The two gray desperate faces spent with
passion faced each other. They were past speech.
He read his death-warrant in her merciless eyes. She looked at the
despair in his without flinching.
He stood a moment, and then feeling his way, like one half blind, left
the room, unconsciously pushing aside Lady Newhaven, whom both had
forgotten.
She gave one terrified glance at Rachel, and slipped out after him.
CHAPTER LI
I thought, "Now, if I had been a woman, such
As God made women, to save men by love--
By just my love I might have saved this man."
--ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
"Has Lady Newhaven been here?" said the Bishop, coming into the study,
his hands full of papers. "I thought I saw her carriage driving away as
I came up."
"She has been here."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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