A Mad Marriage, May Agnes Fleming [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

CHAPTER PAGE

I.—Joan Kennedy’s Story—“The House that Wouldn’t Let” 9

 

II.—A Woman with a Secret 18

 

III.—The Decree of Divorce 25

 

IV.—A Strange Ending 32

 

V.—At Caryllynne 42

 

VI.—Gordon Caryll’s Story 50

 

VII.—How Lord Viscount Dynely Died 72

 

PART II.

 

I.—In the Royal Academy 78

 

II.—Terry 88

 

III.—Madame Felicia 100

 

IV.—Lady Dynely’s Thursday 107

 

V.—Love Took Up the Glass of Time 117

 

VI.—“The Lord of the Land” 130

 

VII.—A Week’s Reprieve 142

 

VIII.—“Who is She?” 151

 

IX.—Telling Terry 162

 

X.—Thinking It Out 174

 

XI.—At the Picnic 181

 

XII.—“They Shall Take Who Have the Power” 190

 

XIII.—Lightly Won, Lightly Lost 200

 

XIV.—“Once More the Gate Behind Me Falls” 214

 

XV.—“Stay” 224

 

XVI.—“Gordon Caryll” 230

 

XVII.—Through the Sunset 237

 

XVIII.—Killing the Fatted Calf 246

 

XIX.—How the Old Year Ended 263

 

PART III.

 

I.—How the New Year Began 273

 

II.—“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” 292

 

III.—In the Streets 307

 

IV.—Donny 317

 

V.—What Love’s Young Dream Sometimes Comes to 325

 

VI.—At the Varieties 335

 

VII.—“After Many Days” 346

 

VIII.—A Morning Call 357

 

IX.—“The Parting that They Had” 367

 

X.—“If any Calm, a Calm Despair” 375

 

XI.—M. Le Prince 385

 

XII.—At the Bal d’Opera 393

 

XIII.—After the Ball 400

 

XIV.—Chez Madame 408

 

XV.—“How the Night Fell” 416

 

XVI.—“Loyal au Mort” 424

 

XVII.—How the Morning Broke 438

 

XVIII.—While it was Yet Day 446

 

XIX.—“Post Tenebr�, Lux” 454

 

A MAD MARRIAGE.

 

CHAPTER I.

 

JOAN KENNEDY’S STORY—“THE HOUSE THAT WOULDN’T LET.”

 

It lay down in a sort of hollow, the hillside sloping up behind, crowned

with dark pine woods, shut in by four grim wooden walls, two dark

windows, like scowling eyes, to be seen from the path, and was known to

all as “THE HOUSE THAT WOULDN’T LET.”

 

It stood neither on street nor high road. You left the town behind

you—the queer, fortified, Frenchified town of Quebec; you passed

through St. John’s Gate, through St. John’s street-outside-the-gate, to

the open country, and, a mile on, you came upon a narrow, winding path,

that seemed straggling out of sight, and trying to hide itself among the

dwarf cedars and spruces. Following this for a quarter of a mile,

passing one or two small stone cabins, you came full upon

Saltmarsh—this house that wouldn’t let.

 

It was an ugly place—a ramshackle place, the lonesomest place you could

see, but still why it wouldn’t let was not so clear.

 

The rent was merely nominal. Mr. Barteaux, its owner, kept it in very

good repair. There was a large vegetable garden attached, where, if you

were of an agricultural turn, you might have made your rent twice over.

There was game in the woods; trout in the ice-cold brooks; but no

venturous sportsman took up his abode at Saltmarsh. It wasn’t even

haunted; it looked rather like that sort of thing, but nobody ever went

exactly so far as to affirm that it was. No ghastly corpse-lights ever

glimmered from those dull upper windows, no piercing shrieks ever rent

the midnight silence, no spectre lady, white and tall, ever flitted

through the desolate rooms of Saltmarsh. No murder had ever been done

there; no legend of any kind was connected with the place, its history

was prosy and commonplace to a degree. Yet still, year in, year out, the

inscription remained up over the dingy wooden gateway, THIS HOUSE TO BE

LET; and no tenant ever came.

 

“Tom Grimshaw must have been mad when he built the beastly old barn,”

the present proprietor would growl; “what with taxes, and repairs, and

insurance, there it stands, eating its own head off, and there it may

stand, for what I see, to the crack of doom. One would think the very

trees that surround it say, in their warning dreariness, as the

sentinels of Helheim used in Northern mythology:

 

“‘Who passes here is damned.’”

 

If this strong language rouses your curiosity, and you asked the

proprietor the history of the house, you got it terse and lucid, thus:

 

“Old Tom Grimshaw built it, sir. Old Tom Grimshaw was my maternal uncle,

rest his soul; it is to be hoped he has more sense in the other world

than he ever had in this. He was a misogynist, sir, of the rabidest

sort, hating a petticoat as you and I hate the devil. Don’t know what

infernal mischief the women had ever done him—plenty, no doubt; it is

what they were created for. The fact remains—the sight of one had much

the same effect upon him as a red scarf on a mad bull. He bought this

marshy spot for a song, built that disgustingly ugly house, barricaded

himself with that timber wall, and lived and died there, like Diogenes,

or Robinson Crusoe, or any other old bloke you like. As heir-at-law, the

old rattle-trap fell to me, and a precious legacy it has been, I can

tell you. It won’t rent, and it has to be kept in repair, and I wish

to Heaven old Tom Grimshaw had taken it with him, wherever he is!”

 

That was the history of Saltmarsh. For eight years it was to be let, and

hadn’t let, and that is where the matter began and ended.

 

Gray, lonely, weather-beaten, so I had seen the forlorn house any time

these twenty years; so this evening of which I am to write I saw it

again, with the mysterious shadow of desolation brooding over it, those

two upper windows frowning down—sullen eyes set in its sullen, silent

face. From childhood it had had its fascination for me—it had been my

Bluebeard’s castle, my dread, my delight. As I grew older, this

fascinating horror grew with my growth, and at seven-and-twenty it held

me with as powerful a spell as it had done at seven.

 

It was a cold and overcast February afternoon. An icy blast swept up

from the great frozen gulf, over the heights of Quebec, over the bleak,

treeless road, along which I hurried in the teeth of the wind. In the

west a stormy and lurid sunset was fading out—fierce reds and brazen

yellows paling into sullen gray. One long fiery lance of that wrathful

sunset, slanting down the pines, struck those upper windows of

Saltmarsh, and lit them into sheets of copper gold.

 

I was in a hurry—I was the bearer of ill news—and ill news travels

apace. It was bitterly cold, as I have said, and snow was falling. I had

still half a mile of lonesome high road to travel, and night was at

hand; but the spell of Saltmarsh, that had never failed to hold me yet,

held me again. I stood still and looked at it; at those two red

cyclopean eyes, those black stacks of chimneys, its whole forbidding,

scowling front.

 

“It is like a house under a curse,” I thought; “a dozen murders might be

done inside those wooden walls, and no one be the wiser. Will any human

being ever call Saltmarsh home again, I wonder?”

 

“This house is to let?”

 

I am not nervous as a rule, but as a soft voice spoke these words at my

elbow, I jumped. I had heard no sound, yet now a woman stood at my side,

on the snow-beaten path.

 

“I beg your pardon; I have startled you, I am afraid. I have been here

for some time looking at this house. I see it is to let.”

 

I stepped back and looked at her, too much surprised for a moment to

speak. To meet a stranger at Saltmarsh, in the twilight of a bitter

February day, was a marvel indeed.

 

I stood and looked at her; and I thought then, as I think now, as I will

think to the last day of my life, that I saw one of the most beautiful

faces on which the sun ever shone.

 

I have said she was a woman—a girl would have been the fitter word;

whatever her age might have been, she did not look a day over seventeen.

She was not tall, and she was very slender; that may have given her that

peculiarly childish look—I am a tall young woman, and she would not

have reached my shoulder. A dress of black silk trailed the ground, a

short jacket of finest seal wrapped her, a muff of seal held her hands.

A hood of black velvet was on her head, and out of this rich hood her

richer beauty shone upon me, a new revelation of how lovely it is

possible for a woman to be. Years have come and gone since that evening,

but the wonderful face that looked at me that February twilight, for