The Testing of Diana Mallory, Mrs. Humphry Ward [e book reader online TXT] 📗

the baccarat-table heavily in debt to one or two persons, including Sir Francis Wing. With the morning came a letter from her husband, remonstrating in a rather sharp tone on what her own letters--and probably an account from some other source--had told him of her life at Brighton; insisting on the need for economy, owing to his own heavy expenses in the great excavation he was engaged upon; and expressing the peremptory hope that she would make the money he had left her last for another two months--"

Sir James lingered in his walk. He stared out of window at the square garden for a few moments, then turned to look frowning at his companion.

"Then came her temptation. Her father had died a year before, leaving her the trustee of her only sister, who was not yet of age. It had taken some little time to wind up his affairs; but on the day after she received her husband's letter of remonstrance, six thousand pounds out of her father's estate was paid into her banking account. By this time she was in one of those states of excitement and unreasoning terror to which she had been liable from her childhood. She took the trust money in order to pay the debts, and then gambled again in order to replace the trust money. Her motive throughout was the motive of the hunted creature. She was afraid of confessing to her husband, especially by letter. She believed he would cast her off--and in her despair and remorse she clung to his affection, and to the hope of his coming home, as she had never yet done.

"In less than a month--in spite of ups and downs of fortune, probably skilfully contrived by Francis Wing and his accomplices--for there can be no question that the play was fraudulent--she had lost four thousand out of the six; and it is clear that more than once she thought of suicide as the only way out, and nothing but the remembrance of the child restrained her. By this time Francis Wing, who was a most handsome, well-bred, and plausible villain, was desperately in love with her--if one can use the word love for such a passion. He began to lend her money in small sums. She was induced to look upon him as her only friend, and forced by the mere terror of the situation in which she found herself to propitiate and play him as best she might. One day, in an unguarded moment of remorse, she let him guess what had happened about the trust money. Thenceforward she was wholly in his power. He pressed his attentions upon her; and she, alternately civil and repellent, as her mood went, was regarded by some of the guests in the house as not unlikely to respond to them in the end. Meanwhile he had told his wife the secret of the trust money for his own purposes. Lady Wing, who was an extremely jealous woman, believed at this time that he was merely pretending a passion for Mrs. Sparling in order the more securely to plunder what still remained of the six thousand pounds. She therefore aided and abetted him; and _her_ plan, no doubt, was to wait till they and their accomplices had absorbed the last of Mrs. Sparling's money, and then to make a midnight flitting, leaving their victim to her fate.

"The _denouement_, however, came with frightful rapidity. The Wings had taken an old house at the back of the downs for the summer, no doubt to escape from some of the notoriety they had gained in Brighton. There--to her final ruin--Juliet Sparling was induced to join them, and gambling began again; she still desperately hoping to replace the trust money, and salving her conscience, as to her sister, by drawing for the time on the sums lent her by Francis Wing.--Here at last Lady Wing's suspicion was aroused, and Mrs. Sparling found herself between the hatred of the wife and the dishonorable passion of the husband. Yet to leave them would be the signal for exposure. For some time the presence of other guests protected her. Then the guests left, and one August night after dinner, Francis Wing, who had drunk a great deal of champagne, made frantic love to her. She escaped from him with difficulty, in a passion of loathing and terror, and rushed in-doors, where she found Lady Wing in the gallery of the old house, on the first floor, walking up and down in a jealous fury. Juliet Sparling burst in upon her with the reproaches of a woman driven to bay, threatening to go at once to her husband and make a clean breast of the whole history of their miserable acquaintance. She was practically beside herself--already, as the sequel showed, mortally ill, worn out by remorse and sleeplessness, and quivering under the insult which had been offered her. Lady Wing recovered her own self-possession under the stimulus of Juliet's breakdown. She taunted her in the cruelest way, accused her of being the temptress in the case of Sir Francis, and of simulating a hypocritical indignation in order to save herself with her husband, and finally charged her with the robbery of her sister's money, declaring that as soon as daylight came she would take steps to set the criminal law in motion, and so protect both herself and her husband from any charge such a woman might bring against them. The threat, of course, was mere bluff. But Mrs. Sparling, in her frenzy and her ignorance, took it for truth. Finally, the fierce creature came up to her, snatching at a brooch in the bosom of her dress, and crying out in the vilest language that it was Sir Francis's gift. Juliet, pushed up against the panelling of the gallery, caught at a dagger belonging to a trophy of Eastern arms displayed on the wall, close to her hand, and struck wildly at her tormentor. The dagger pierced Lady Wing's left breast--she was in evening dress and _decolletee_; it penetrated to the heart, and she fell dead at Juliet's feet as her husband entered the gallery. Juliet dropped the dagger; and as Sir Francis rushed to his wife, she fled shrieking up the stairs--her white dress covered with blood--to her own room, falling unconscious before she reached it. She was carried to her room by the servants--the police were sent for--and the rest--or most of the rest--you know."

Sir James ceased speaking. A heavy silence possessed the room.

Sir James walked quickly up to his companion.

"Now I ask you to notice two points in the story as I have told it. My cross-examination of Wing served its purpose as an exposure of the man--except in one direction. He swore that Mrs. Sparling had made dishonorable advances to him, and had finally become his mistress, in order to buy his silence on the trust money and the continuance of his financial help. On the other hand, the case for the defence was that--as I have stated--it was in the maddened state of feeling, provoked by his attack upon her honor, and made intolerable by the wife's taunts and threats, that Juliet Sparling struck the fatal blow. At the trial the judge believed me; the jury--and a large part of the public--you, I have no doubt among them--believed Wing. The jury were probably influenced by some of the evidence given by the fellow-guests in the house, which seemed to me simply to amount to this--that a woman in the strait in which Juliet Sparling was will endeavor, out of mortal fear, to keep the ruffian who has her in his power in a good-humor."

"However, I have now confirmatory evidence for my theory of the matter--evidence which has never been produced--and which I tell you now simply because the happiness of her child--and of your son--is at stake."

Lady Lucy moved a little. The color returned to her cheeks. Sir James, however, gave her no time to interrupt. He stood before her, smiting one hand against another, to emphasize his words, as he continued:

"Francis Wing lived for some eighteen years after Mrs. Sparling's death. Then, just as the police were at last on his track as the avengers of a long series of frauds, he died at Antwerp in extreme poverty and degradation. The day before he died he dictated a letter to me, which reached me, through a priest, twenty-four hours after his death. For his son's sake, he invited me to regard it as confidential. If Mrs. Sparling had been alive I should, of course, have taken no notice of the request. But she had been dead for eighteen years; I had lost sight completely of Sparling and the child, and, curiously enough, I knew something of Wing's son. He was about ten years old at the death of his mother, and was then rescued from his father by the Wing kindred and decently brought up. At the time the letter reached me he was a promising young man of eight-and-twenty, he had just been called to the Bar, and he was in the chambers of a friend of mine. By publishing Wing's confession I could do no good to the dead, and I might harm the living. So I held my tongue. Whether, now, I should still hold it is, no doubt, a question.

"However, to go back to the statement. Wing declared to me in this letter that Juliet Sparling's relation to him had been absolutely innocent, that he had persecuted her with his suit, and she had never given him a friendly word, except out of fear. On the fatal evening he had driven her out of her mind, he said, by his behavior in the garden; she was not answerable for her actions; and his evidence at the trial was merely dictated either by the desire to make his own case look less black or by the fiendish wish to punish Juliet Sparling for her loathing of him.

"But he confessed something else!--more important still. I must go back a little. You will remember my version of the dagger incident? I represented Mrs. Sparling as finding the dagger on the wall as she was pushed or dragged up against the panelling by her antagonist--as it were, under her hand. Wing swore at the trial that the dagger was not there, and had never been there. The house belonged to an old traveller and sportsman who had brought home arms of different sorts from all parts of the world. The house was full of them. There were two collections of them on the wall of the dining-room, one in the hall, and one or two in the gallery. Wing declared that the dagger used was taken by Juliet Sparling from the hall trophy, and must have been carried up-stairs with a deliberate purpose of murder. According to him, their quarrel in the garden had been a quarrel about money matters, and Mrs. Sparling had left him, in great excitement, convinced that the chief obstacle in the way of her complete control of Wing and his money lay in the wife. There again--as to the weapon--I had no means of refuting him. As far as the appearance--after the murder--of the racks holding the arms was concerned, the weapon might have been taken from either place. And again--on the whole--the jury believed Wing. The robbery of the sister's money--the incredible rapidity of Juliet Sparling's deterioration--had set them against her. Her wild beauty, her proud and dumb misery in the dock, were of a kind rather to alienate the plain man than to move him. They believed her capable of anything--and it was natural enough.

"But Wing confessed to me that he knew perfectly well that the dagger belonged to the stand in the gallery. He had often examined the