Part 21 (1/2)

Then Ravengar approached Hugo, and, Hugo rising to meet him, their faces almost touched in the middle of the great room.

'You called me a cur,' he said. 'Yet perhaps I am not such a cur after all. You have beaten me. You mean to finish me; I can see it in your face. Well, you will regret it more than I shall. Do you know I have often wished to die? You are right in saying that there is no reason why I should live. I am only a curse to the world. But you are wrong to scorn me when you kill me. You ought to pity me. Did I choose my temperament, my individuality? As I am, so I was born, and from his character no man can escape.'

And he sat down, and Hugo sat down.

'When is it to be?' Ravengar questioned.

'In a few minutes,' said Hugo impa.s.sively, feeding his mortal resentment on the memory of those hours when he himself had waited for death in the vault.

'Then I shall have time to ask you how you came to know that Camilla Payne, or rather Camilla Tudor, is alive.'

'She is not alive,' Hugo explained. 'The suggestion contained in my decoy letter was a pure invention in order to entice you. As you tempted me into the vault, so I tempted you here on your way to the vault.'

'But she is alive all the same!' Ravengar persisted. 'It is the fact that she is not dead that makes me less unwilling to die, for a word from her might send me to a death more shameful than the one you have so kindly arranged for me.'

Hugo in that instant admired Ravengar, and he replied quite gently:

'You are mistaken. Where can you have got the idea that she is not dead?

She is dead. I myself--I myself screwed her up in her coffin.'

The words sounded horrible.

'Then you were in the plot!' Ravengar cried.

'What plot?'

'The plot to persuade me falsely that she is dead. Bah! I know more than you think. I know, for example, that her body is not in the coffin in Brompton Cemetery. And I am almost sure that I know where she is hiding. I should have known beyond doubt before to-morrow morning.

However, what does it matter now?'

'Not in the coffin?' Hugo whispered, as if to himself. His whole frame trembled, shook, and his heart, leaping, defied his intellect.

CHAPTER XVI

BURGLARS

When at eleven o'clock that same winter night Hugo stood hesitating, with certain tools and a hooded electric lamp in his hand, on the balcony in front of the drawing-room window of Francis Tudor's sealed flat, he thought what a strange, illogical, and capricious thing is the human heart.

He knew that Camilla was dead. He had had the very best and most convincing evidence of the fact. He knew that Ravengar's suspicions were without foundation, utterly wrong-headed; and yet those statements of his enemy had unsettled him. They had not unsettled the belief of his intelligence, but they had unsettled his soul's peace. And that curiosity to learn the whole truth about the history of the relations between Francis Tudor and Camilla, that curiosity which had slumbered for months, and which had been so suddenly awakened by Ravengar's lure of the morning, was now urged into a violent activity.

Nor was this all. Camilla was surely dead. But supposing that by some incredible chance she was not dead (lo! the human heart), could he kill Ravengar? This question had presented itself to him as he sat in the dome listening to Ravengar's a.s.severations that Camilla lived. And the mere ridiculous, groundless suspicion that she lived, the mere fanciful dream that she lived, had quite changed and softened Hugo's mood. He had struggled hard to keep his resolution to kill Ravengar, but it had melted away; he had fanned the fire of his mortal hatred, but it had cooled, and at length he had admitted to himself, angrily, reluctantly, that Ravengar had escaped the ordeal of the vault. And this being decided, what could he do with Ravengar? Retain him under lock and key?

Why? To what end? Such illegal captivities were not practicable for long in London. Besides, they were absurd, melodramatic, and futile. As the moments pa.s.sed and the fumes of a murderous intoxication gradually cleared away, Hugo had regained his natural, sagacious perspective, and he had perceived that there was only one thing to do with Ravengar.

He let Ravengar go. He showed him politely out.

It was an anti-climax, but the incalculable and peremptory processes of the heart often result in an anti-climax.

The night was cold and damp, as the morning had been, and Hugo s.h.i.+vered, but not with cold. He s.h.i.+vered in the mere exciting eagerness of antic.i.p.ation. He had chosen the drawing-room window because the panes were very large. He found it perfectly simple, by means of the treacled cardboard which he carried, to force in the pane noiselessly. He pushed aside the blind, and crept within the room. So simple was it to violate the will of a dead man, and the solemnly affixed seals of his executor!