 CHAPTERS 31 and 32 of One Life, One Love by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 31. Daisy's Diary. I will repay. This morning the question was mooted. Who was to give me away? It was just as breakfast was over and Mr. Arden had not yet gone up to his hermitage on the other side of the lane. Here, stepfather, is of course the proper person," said my mother, looking at her husband with her sweet gentle smile. A look I understand so well, a look which means kindness, esteem, respect, consideration, but which never yet meant love. No," I cried hastily. There is only one person who must give me to my husband, and that person is my mother. My dearest, it would be so unusual for a woman," began mother. Mr. Arden interrupted her hastily. Not in the case of a widow, Clara, he said in his calm measured way as if there were no hint of aversion in my hasty protest. I agree with Daisy. You are the fittest person to give your daughter to the man of her choice. The act will stamp your approval of the union, and Daisy is wise in wishing that it should be so. Twice he mentioned me by my old familiar name without the faintest emotion. No witness of that scene could have suspected from his tone or conduct, but there was any gulf between us. I sat with my eyes fixed upon the tablecloth, waiting for him to leave us before I could feel happy or at ease. It was on the morning after this that the dreadful shock came, and still this man of blood was calm and collected equal to the occasion. The newspapers are delivered at Riverlot at about ten o'clock, and on this particular morning we were late with an usual at breakfast, and the meal was only just over when Mead brought in his tray of papers ready-air and cut. My stepfather took the times, my mother the morning-post. I am only interested in Mead's tray on the mornings that bring the world, punch, or truth, so on Tuesday morning there was nothing to claim my attention, and I sat idly by while the other two read their papers. An exclamation from my mother startled me from a reverie. Oh, God! she cried, rising hurriedly and going over to her husband with the newspaper in her hand. It has come. It has come at last. Vengeance is mine. I will repay, said the Lord. My husband's murderer will be punished, after all these years. Ambrose, do you see? Do you know what has happened? Have you read? Have I read what? My dear Clara, are you mad? He asked, looking up at her, wonderingly, as she stood before him with white cheeks and dilated eyes. Have you read the French news? A dreadful murder, the murder of a woman by a man who was supposed to be her brother, by a man called Léon du Verdié, alias Claude Morel. Claude Morel, the man who killed my husband. No, I have not seen the French news, he answered slowly. A lie. The paper lay under his hand as he spoke and I saw the heading of the column, Paris, by Telegraph. Read then, read the account of the murder and of the man. He is in prison. He was caught at once this time, taken red-handed. The police in Paris are better than the feeble wretches who let my dear lover's murderer go scot-free. Read, read, read, Ambrose. She was beside herself with agitation. Her husband started to his feet, put his arm around her and held her to his breast, held her against that false and cruel heart whose baseness she knew not. Control yourself, Clara, for pity's sake. Remember we have not sure ground for believing that Morel was the murderer. Yes, yes, we have conclusive ground, the use of his sister's name to decoy my husband, that in itself was all sufficient proof. And now, see, the sister is murdered, brutally, savagely stabbed to death by the same hand. If there has been a murder done, the murderer will suffer for his crime, and in that case your husband will be avenged. No, no, that is not enough. That other more deliberate crime must be brought home to him. His judges must know what a wretch he is. French juries are so merciful. He will be recommended to mercy. Only the murder of a sister on the spur of the moment. There will be the plea of extenuating circumstances. But let them know how he lured an unoffending man to a lonely room and killed him in cold blood for sordid gain, and even a French jury must condemn him to death. My dearest, you are talking wildly. A man can only be tried for one crime at a time. If he be acquitted of murdering his sister, he can then be indicted for the murder of Robert Hatrell. You must be calm and patient. Let us go to Paris tonight. I will go there, if you like, and find out all about the man and his crime. It would be useless for you to go. No, no, I want to be there in the city where the murderer is waiting for his doom. My dear Clara, I cannot allow you to travel under such conditions. I would not answer for your reason if you were to go upon such a journey. Nor could you possibly leave your daughter on the eve of her marriage upon any such mad errand. Whatever has to be done I will do. I will go to night and I will remain in Paris until after this man's trial. I will find out who he really is, and if he is identical with the Claude Morel whose sister your husband once admired. You may rely upon me to do everything that is necessary or expedient. Only for God's sake, be calm, be reasonable. Remember how precious your life and reason are to your daughter and to me. Remember how both trembled in the balance years ago in this house. My poor dear mother commanded herself by a great effort. I could see how she struggled with her agitation, how earnestly she strove to be calm. I never thought that the hour of retribution would come, she said. Oh, the wretch, the heartless wretch, to strike a strong man down in the flower of his years to cut short so dear a life. No, I will not talk of him any more, Ambrose, she said in answer to a warning look from her husband. I will be calm and patient and wait for the end. It is coming, in God's own good time. You need not be afraid about me. Daisy and I will stay here quietly while you go to Paris, and you will send me daily reports. You will not keep me in the dark, not for an hour. They went out of the room together, mother leaning on his arm, confiding in him and relying upon him as if he were the best of men. I was left alone to think over what had happened and to consider how this new phase of our terrible history was likely to affect the dear mother. First I read the account of the murder in the Times, a brutal murder, the act of a thief and desperado. I will not sully this book by recording it here, since its only bearing on my life lies in the fact that this wretch who murdered his sister in a villa in the Wadboulang the night before last is in all probability the wretch who killed my father. I read the savage history and then I thought, and thought, and thought, but I only felt so much the more hopeless and miserable, and I saw how futile it was for me to think alone while the other half of me was not at my side to help me out of every difficulty. So I just ran into the lobby, put on my hat, and went out into the garden to see if I could find my dearest and best, who would be able to give me wise counsel, and whose very voice would enable me to keep up my courage where I hemmed round by difficulties. It is wintry weather everywhere in this last month of the year, but our gardens are so rich in conifers, laurel, and arbutus that they never look bare or cold, and the shrubbery is so sheltered by Deodar and cuprisis that an invalid might walk there even on the coldest morning. I knew it was Gilbert's habit to smoke his after breakfast cigarette on the other side of the fence, and that I was most likely to find him within call. Mother had allowed him to make a gait of communication between his shrubbery and ours, not many paces from the arbor where I first discovered that I adored him. I found him this morning standing close by this gait with a very grave countenance evidently on the watch for me and I saw at a glance that he had read all about the murder. He had, and we talked the hideous story over together. How will it affect Mr. Arden? I asked. If he is the guilty wretch you think him it may affect him most terribly. The man Morrell has been taken red-handed and cannot escape condemnation. If he is the murderer of Denmark Street, if your stepfather prompted that murder, as you believe, he may out of sheer devilry make a full confession before he goes to the guillotine denounce his accomplice and die in the odor of sanctity. And then my mother will know everything and the rest of her life will be made miserable, said I. My stepfather left us this evening. I felt sick with apprehension when I saw mother bidding him good-bye in the hall while the carriage waited to drive him to the station. She so full of kindliness and concern for his comfort on the cold night journey, he pale and somber, speaking with evident effort. You are looking so ill tonight, Ambrose, she said. I fear you are hardly equal to the journey and the trouble that may come afterwards. I must face both, Clara. My chief anxiety is about you and your peace of mind, he answered gravely. If you will only be true to yourself, I fear nothing. You have your daughter and her husband to think of. New duties, new ties, the beginning of a new existence. It seemed to me as if he were renouncing all share in her life all claim to her affection. He looked at me earnestly, questioningly, and then as I made no movement towards him he said quietly, Good night and good-bye, Daisy. He turned on the threshold and took my mother in his arms and kissed her forehead and her lips with a sudden fervor that transformed him. The pallid, care-worn face flushed and smiled, the dull and sunken eyes brightened. It was for a moment only. His valet warned him that there was no time to lose. He stepped into the room, the door was shut, and he was gone. 32 Daisy's Diary It is the eve of my wedding day, the eve of St. Valentine's Day. Gilbert is to be my Valentine tomorrow and for ever. And now in this deep silence of after midnight I will close the record of my life as an unmarried woman. The life that will begin tomorrow will mark the opening of a new volume in my history, but the old book shall be my friend and confidant still, for I shall be able to praise my husband in these pages as I should never dare to praise him to any living listener, least of all to his modest unpretending self. I shall close the record of my girlish years and with it I hope closes the tragedy of my own and my mother's life. God grant that bloodshed and guilt and treachery may have no further influence upon her life and mine, and that the road that lies before us may pass through a peaceful and a smiling land where crime and sin will have no part in our destiny. The interval between my stepfather's journey to Paris and the end of the year was a time of keenest anxiety for me and for Gilbert who shared enlightened all my cares. We watched the three principal Paris papers, which Gilbert ordered to be sent him daily, and watched with intense expectation for any notice of the murderer Morel. The actual facts recorded were few, beyond those particulars of the murder which had appeared in the first instance, but there was a great deal of descriptive writing bearing more or less upon the crime. Something of this kind appeared in one or other of the papers nearly every day. Sometimes there was a paragraph about the prisoner's antecedence, the part he took in the riots and brutalities of the commune, the manner of his escape when the Versailles troops got possession of Paris and many other facts or fictions about his past life. Gilbert told me that I must not believe more than one-fourth of any such article or paragraphs in a Parisian newspaper. One day there appeared a long account of the villa which was the scene of the murder, an article in which the luxury and splendor of the house were minutely described. Another article in the same paper gave a glowing description of the prisoner's cousin, a beautiful young woman married to one of the richest men in Paris. Scandal about this young woman and her mother was freely published, cruel imputations against their character, but there was not one line in any of the papers which hinted at Claude Morel's identity with the murderer of Denmark Street. The police know all about him, said Gilbert, but they are keeping dark. A man cannot be tried for two crimes at the same time. Were Morel acquitted he could be arrested and brought to London to be confronted with the witnesses, the landlady and the tailor's journeyman who could identify the murderer of Denmark Street, but I do not see the remotest chance of his acquittal. My stepfather remained in Paris for nearly a month, during which time he wrote at least twice a week to my mother. She read portions of his letters to me. He had seen the police and they had told him that there was very little doubt of the prisoner's execution. The crime was too utterly brutal to enlist the sympathies of even a French jury. He would be found guilty without extenuating circumstances. He would perhaps appeal to the court of Cassation, but his appeal would be rejected. In a later letter, my stepfather wrote that he had with great difficulty obtained an interview with the prisoner. He had taxed him with the murder in Denmark Street, but Morel had denied all knowledge of that crime. The letter described him as a nobdurate villain. This trial took place in the second week of December. The prisoner's cousin, Madame Perez, was the chief witness against him. She described how he had appealed to her for money or for jewels to convert into money two hours before the murder, and how she had refused to give him either money or jewels upon which he left the house angry and menacing. She described how she was startled from her sleep by the sounds of footsteps in her room and opening her eyes saw the prisoner standing before her toilet table, deliberately filling his pockets with her jewels which she had worn in great profusion upon that particular evening. She told the court how she had sprung from her bed intending to ring for help, but before she could reach the electric bell, the accused struck her to the ground. She remembered nothing after that blow which had inflicted a permanent injury upon the sight of one eye. She had only just recovered from a nervous fever which had followed upon her return to consciousness. The appearance of this witness in the court excited a profound interest at the papers. She is described as a very beautiful woman. Her evidence was given in some parts reluctantly at other times with a rush of indignant feeling. When asked by the prisoner if she had not been his mistress, she passionately repelled the accusation. She admitted that she had once loved him, but that was before she knew the worthlessness of his character. She spoke in the highest terms of the murdered Louise. She denied any knowledge of the fact that the brother and sister had adopted names which were not their own. She had never heard the name of Morel in association with either of them. The evidence of the gendarm who arrested the murderer red-handed was conclusive. The blood of his victim and the jewels which he had stolen were found upon him. There was little need of deliberation. The verdict was guilty without extenuating circumstances. The sentence was death. I can never forget my mother's face when Gilbert told her the doom of Claude Morel. We went together to the morning room where she was sitting at work, her great basket of flannel and calico on the hearth rug in front of her chair, her pale, anxious face intent upon her stitching. In all this time of suspense she had employed herself chiefly in visiting the poor and working for them. She told me that it was only by constant occupation, useful and mechanical work that she could steady her nerves and prevent herself from dwelling incessantly upon the tragedy of her life. She listened quietly while Gilbert read the verdict and the sentence, and then, with bent head and clasped hands, she murmured those awful words which she had spoken to her husband when she first read of Morel's crime. Vengeance is mine. I will repay, said the Lord. How often and how often in the time past she must have repeated that terrible text. She received a letter from her husband the same evening, but it could tell her nothing which the paper had not told her already, except that he intended to remain in Paris for a few days to see if there were any likelihood of a commutation of the sentence. Five days afterwards my stepfather walked into the drying room at nine o'clock in the evening, unannounced and unexpected. He had come from Paris by the morning mail. I waited till the eve of the execution, Clara. He said when my mother had welcomed him. Gilbert and I were sitting at chess in a nook near the fireplace. We stood up to greet him but kept aloof as if he had been a stranger. It is decided then, there will be no reprieve, said my mother. None. Then there will be at least one villain less in the world, said I. He looked at me. Never, to my dying day, can I forget the agonized reproachfulness of that look. It was a look that made me feel as if I were the ingrate and the traitor and he only the injured. I saw the picture of my happy childhood as they say a drowning man sees all his past life in the moment before death. I saw myself with my arms round that man's neck and my cheek against his breast, saw myself soothed then watched over in hours of childish illness, taught and counseled, and amused and trained by that keen intellect, loved and petted with an inexhaustible patience and an unvarying tenderness by that grave student for whom all the world of thought was an open book. How often, how continually day after day had he laid aside his dearest occupation to devote himself to the education and the amusement of a child? Yes, he had done all this. He had sacrificed his inclinations, he had made himself a slave for my mother's sake, and to win her he had plotted my father's death. My eyelids fell and my heart beat fast beneath that mute reproach, but for me his crime was an unpardonable crime. I dared not pity him even in his agony of remorse, for such pity would have been treachery to my dead father. My mother urged him to take some refreshment after his journey and gave her orders to the butler to that end, but he declared that he had dined in London. You must have had some time in town between the arrival of the Paris train and the departure of the 750 from Paddington, said my mother. Yes, I had nearly two hours, time enough to dine and to transact a little business in the city. In the city? But all the offices would be closed at that time. Not the office I wanted. He was looking very ill and had grown thinner in the few weeks of absence. I saw my mother observing him anxiously as he sat in front of the fire, warming his wasted hands before the burning logs. He talked with some show of cheerfulness, asked about the preparations for the marriage and for Christmas. Was it to be a gay Christmas at River Lawn? Gay, echoed mother, how could I think of gayity at such a time? My thoughts have been fixed upon one subject. Every effort of my mind has been not to think too perpetually of the man who is to die tomorrow. Of the man who is to die tomorrow? He repeated solemnly. Death cancels all wrongdoing, at least the law thinks so. The worse that you can do to a murderer is to kill him. He rose slowly and moved about the room in his old restless way and then came over to my mother and bent over her and kissed her. Don't sit up for me, Clara, he said. I have letters to write, proofs to look over, the accumulations of a month. I have sent aims over to the cottage with my dispatch box. I shall sit there very late, most likely. Not to night, ambrose, surely not to night. There will be plenty of time to moral, remonstrated mother. No, I have left everything to the last. There will be no time to moral. Good night, dear love. He nodded to Gilbert and me, a cool curtain-odd, and was gone before my mother could remonstrate further. How pale and haggard he looks, she said. I was wrong to let him go to Paris upon such a painful business in his weak health. What would Sir Andrew say to me if he knew how his advice had been disregarded? Sir Andrew recommended rest, I suppose, said Gilbert. He told my husband that it was essential for him to take life quietly. Ah, doctors tell us that, but will the heart and brain cease from troubling at a physician's bidding? My mother sighed and sank into melancholy silence, and our game went on slowly, quietly in the silent room where there was no sound but the light fall of wood ashes on the hearth. My mother came to me at seven o'clock next morning and told me that her husband had been at work all night. She had watched his lamp from her bedroom window, being herself too agitated to sleep or even to lie down for more than half an hour at a time. The lamp had been burning till daybreak when she saw it extinguished. I too had watched that lamp, wondering what the guilty soul was suffering in that long night, whether he wished himself in the condemned cell where that vulgar villain was waiting the dawn of his last day, whether he would have welcomed the knife as a short sharp cure for the pangs of a guilty conscience. My stepfather had never before spent a whole night at the cottage and indeed had seldom occupied himself in his library of an evening. This unaccustomed night watch made my mother uneasy and she asked me to go across the road with her to see if there was anything amiss. He may have fallen asleep at his desk, she said, and in a cold room, for I dare say he has not been careful to keep the fire burning all night. He had dismissed his valet when he went over to the cottage and was alone there, except for the existence of an elderly woman who lived in the back premises, cleaned and aired the rooms and made fires. We went across the road together, mother and I, in the bleak winter morning. The sky was red above the leafless elm tops towards London, but gray and gloomy in every other direction. The neglected garden and the cottage itself looked very dull and dreary in the chilly dawn, the sodden creepers hanging from the walls, the plaster blotted with damp. What a dismal house! To think that Ambrose and his son lived in it for ever so many years, murmured my mother. She had only to turn the handle of the door to go in, there was no bolt or lock to shut us out. I followed her into the dark passage and into the room on the right of the porch, the room which my stepfather called his den, a room lined with books from floor to ceiling. Yes, whispered my mother, he has fallen asleep. The atmosphere was close and hot and reeked with the odor of lamp oil. A pair of candles had burnt down to the sockets and the ashes were gray in the grate. My stepfather's head had fallen upon his folded arms and upon the table in front of him there was a long official envelope directed in a large, firm hand for my wife. I read the words across my mother's shoulder as she bent down to speak to her husband and I guessed what dreadful thing had happened and what new horror she would have to bear. Come away, mother, come away, I cried. He is dead. I know he is dead. She bent over him still and lifted the heavy head and looked at the ash incontinence. Yes, it was the end. Death cancels every wrong. Ambrose Arden's words at the night before came back to me as we stood there in that awful silence which his voice could never break again. Vane now all hope of keeping the truth from my mother. That envelope, no doubt, contained the admission of his guilt. She would know and she would suffer from that knowledge. She burst into tears as she hung over the lifeless clay. Oh, Daisy, she sobbed, he has gone from us forever. Our voices cannot reach him now. I was never half grateful enough for his love or his goodness to me. Don't lament him, mother, he was not worthy, I said, but my tears were streaming too and I saw the dead man as he seemed to me in my childhood before my father's death, before he had begun to plot murder. We knew before that day was ended that he had died from an overdose of chloral. He had had strength of will and purpose to throw the empty bottle under the grate where it was found broken among the cinders. Thus it was that mother and I did not suspect a suicide when we found him cold and lifeless at his desk. She has not told me the contents of the packet, but I know from her manner that she has nothing more to learn about my father's death, albeit Claude Morel died without having made any admission of his guilt. She has been full of sadness since her husband's funeral in spite of her brave attempt to sympathize with Gilbert and me. The wedding has been delayed for nearly two months in deference to my stepfather's memory and the Béceos. The coroner's inquest resulted in a verdict of death by misadventure. CHAPTER XXXIII Ambrose Arden's Confession Tomorrow morning before the day is old Claude Morel will expiate his last and worst crime on the scaffold. He is now sitting in his condemned cell writing his confession, the story of the murder in Denmark Street, the hideous history of his crime and of mine which he has sworn that he will leave behind him tomorrow morning to be published, broadcast to all civilized Europe before tomorrow night. This room where I sit in the deep of night in a silence rarely broken by some belated footfall in the lane, this room, lined round with books, cute companions of my joyless manhood is my condemned cell. The day that will dawn in a few hours will be as surely my day of doom as it will be Claude Morel's. The sentence of death that was pronounced upon him was a sentence of death pronounced upon me. His fate involved my fate. When I made him the instrument of my crime I made myself his slave. Oh, my beloved, the only idol of my life it is for you I write the history of my sin. No other eye but yours need ever look upon these lines unless you so will it, and I do not think you will expose this dark record of weak passion and unscrupulous crime to an indifferent public. Let the world know my story only as it will be told by my accomplice, a ghastly story, cruelly and brutally told, no doubt. These details of my temptation and my fall are for you alone, for you who may perhaps execrate my memory just a little less if I urge my one plea for mercy. I loved you with a love that was stronger than honour or manhood, stronger than all the instincts of a life that had been blameless whilst it was passionless, a love that made me a villain. I first saw Claude Morel at an Italian public house in Greek Street where I went to distribute some money collected from a few of my friends among the distressed communists who had come to London for a refuge and who were some of them almost starving. Most of the people assembled in that upstairs room over the tavern bar were depressed and dispirited by their necessities and had very little to say except to express their thankfulness for the aid which I took them. But Morel had a great deal to say about the political situation in France. He spoke well and I was interested in his fervent eloquence and in the latent passion which burned in every phrase. I put him down as a dangerous man in any country, a firebrand in such a city as Paris. He heard en passant that the friend who had given more than half the sum I had collected was Robert Hattrell. I saw the startling effect of that name upon him and I was hardly surprised when he followed me into the street and began to question me about my friend. I was surprised, however, at the malignity of his speech and the intensity of malice which betrayed itself in his tone and manner. He told me the story of a sister's wrongs. She had been fooled and duped by a wealthy Englishman who coolly refused any reparation for the wrong he had done or a girl's blighted name and broken heart. He was not very explicit in his charges, but this was the kind of thing which he gave me to understand and he was just as vindictive as if he had been certain of his facts. I heard the true story of the case from your husband afterwards and he gave me his honor that his worst offense had been a sentimental flirtation with a grisette, an innocent, unsophisticated girl with whom he had been almost seriously in love. His attachment had just stopped short of a serious passion and he had but just escaped the folly of a low marriage. I believed my friend's statement and thought no more of Morale's malignity which I did not suppose would ever take any overt form though I considered it my duty to warn Robert Hatrell of the existence of this vindictive feeling and to let him know that his enemy was in London. He laughed at the man's threats and the subject was dismissed by us both. I had almost forgotten it when I met Morale in Gower Street one afternoon on my way from the museum to the Metropolitan Railway Station. He told me his troubles, the difficulty of getting employment, his schemes and inventions which sounded chimerical in the last degree and his want of money. He talked again of my friend Hatrell but I stopped him peremptorily. I have heard your sister's story from my friend's own lips, I said, and I am convinced that your version is a tissue of lies. He was furious at this. He upbraided me for believing a gentleman in preference to a man of the people. It was the old story. The well-born seducer could always escape the consequences of his wrongdoing but for once in a way the world should see that retribution may follow wrong. Robert Hatrell had broken his sister's heart and had grossly insulted her and he meant to be even with him. He asked me for a half a sovereign but I had only a few shillings about me so he gave me a card with a written address upon it begging me to send him a post office order next day. I have since discovered that he had appealed to your husband for money and had been sternly refused and no doubt that refusal was a more unpardonable offense than any sin against his sister. It was within a week of this accidental encounter with Morrell that I received an unexpected visit from my father's old lawyer. He came to Lamford in order with his own lips to communicate some very wonderful news. A second cousin of my father's had lately died in Chicago leaving me his residual legatee and with some insignificant exceptions the inheritor of a large fortune acquired in trade. I had never even heard of Matthew Arden who had begun life with a small estate in the East Riding where he farmed his own land and had ended life as one of the richest merchants in Chicago. For me this fortune was a fortune dropped from the clouds. I was astounded but hardly elated by this sudden change from poverty to wealth. The studious life I was leading was the only life I should ever care to lead. Money, except so far as the indulgence of my taste as a collector of books, could be a very little use to me and even my taste in books was inexpensive. I did not pine for tall copies or rare additions. All I valued in a book was its contents. At this time I had not attained to the fine instinct of a collector. I told my old friend that I should make no difference in my mode of life and that I should tell my son nothing of this change in our fortunes for some time to come. I begged the good old family lawyer to exercise the discretion which had always been his distinguishing quality and to take care that no newspaper paragraphs descriptive of my unexpected luck had their source in his office. When the lawyer left me I sat alone among my books and thought over the change in my fortunes. A stroke of luck which would have made most men half mad with joy left me cold. What could wealth give me? Nothing, for it could not give me you. Yes, Clara, it was of you and you only that I thought as I tried to estimate the value of these riches that had fallen into my lap. What was their worth to me? What could they do for me? What could they buy for me? Nothing, nothing, nothing. I was still a young man, I was not ill-looking, and I had some pretensions to intellectual power. Hitherto poverty had exercised its restraining influence upon me. I had lived obscurely, remote from the world. I might now, if I pleased, make a figure in society, live in a fine house, and surround myself with fine people. I had no more inclination to do this than I had to head an expedition to the North Pole. Society had no pleasure to offer me. Neither house nor garden nor stable had any attraction for me. I was not a sportsman, I was not a yachtsman. I had never felt the faintest interest in a race on land or water. I had but one passion, one dream, one desire upon earth or beyond the earth, and that was you. My whole being resolved itself into one ardent longing to win you. I loved you from the first day I saw you. Oh God, how vividly I can recall that first day and hour, that casual meeting which decided the whole course of my life for good or evil. Your face flashes out of the shadowy distance beyond the lamp-light, a vision of gladness and beauty, as it shone upon me that clear October morning when you stood before me, leaning against your husband's arm, newly returned from your honeymoon, a two-month bride. You remember our first meeting, Clara, how I looked in through the open gate and saw you standing deep in conversation with your husband and his architect, who was holding an open plan for you both to look at. I had made Mr. Hattrell's acquaintance a few days before when he came down to Lamford alone and we happened to travel in the same railway carriage. He introduced himself to me as my future neighbor and insisted upon giving me a lift in his fly from the station, though I told him it was my habit to walk home. I want you to tell me all about the neighborhood, he said. This had broken the ice and on the second time of seeing each other we exchanged friendly salutations through the open gate and then as I lingered a little he called me into the garden and introduced me to his wife. I remember your courteous greeting, so courteous yet so careless. How could you dream that I was to be so potent a factor in your sum of life? How could you guess that the lovely face which you turned towards me, so unconscious of its power, was to change the whole current of my existence, to make me first your passionate lover and to next your husband's murderer? Yes, Clara, his murderer. From that hour I was fordoomed to do evil for your sake. I was fated to blight your happiness and to miss being happy even though I gained the wages of my crime. What did I think of you that day? Only that you were the most enchanting woman I had ever seen and that Robert Hattrell was a man for all other men to envy. My thoughts went no further than that on the first day. I thought of your loveliness as I should have thought of some rare flower, the white chalice of the Victoria Regia floating in the faint tropical haze of a still-water pool, the pale purple or vivid gold of some fairy-like orchid, something delicately beautiful that did not come within the scope of my life. I had no more definite thought of you than that. Yet afterwards I knew that I had loved you from the first. The change was in myself, not in my thoughts. A slow consuming fever was kindled in me that day which has never ceased to burn. Little by little, by infinitesimal stages it has burnt up heart and brain. Your husband liked me and you were always kind. For the first years of our acquaintance we met but rarely, and it was not till you were established at River Lawn that I came to be intimately acquainted with you both and gradually to be almost one of the family. Daisy was the link which united us. I had the good fortune to win the child's love and this assured me of the mother's friendship. You loved books while your husband cared little for reading or any intellectual pursuit being above all a man of action. I was able thus to supply something wanting in your life and to fill a place which he ought to have been able to fill. I was the advisor of your studies and the sharer of your ideas. I felt sometimes as if I were the husband of your intellect as he was the husband of your heart. Had I ever seen any wavering in your fidelity to him, any weariness of the tie that bound you to him, I do not believe that I should have tried to turn it to my own advantage. I could not have degraded you by one unworthy prayer. I could not couple dishonor with your image. There were times when our calm friendship, our mutual love for your child which kept us in touch with one another, seemed to me almost enough for my happiness. I felt as if I could have gone on contentedly thus to old age making a quiet third in your life, now with your husband, now with your daughter, always subordinate, the shadow beside your sunshine. And then, while I was cheating myself with these calm thoughts, a wave of passion would sweep over my being, a demon of jealousy would rent and tear me, and I could not endure to be with you in the serene atmosphere of domestic love. Your husband's every look and every tone tortured me. You have both of you reproached me sometimes for keeping aloof, for burying myself among my books and shunning the hospitalities of Riverlawn. If you could have seen me in those supposed studious intervals, you would have seen a man possessed of devils given over to perdition. Imagine these years of alternate storm and calm. Imagine a mind and heart burnt up by one devouring passion worn out with the monotony of despair, and then think what my thoughts must have been as I sat in my solitude and brooded over the worthlessness of my newly acquired wealth. Had you been free, fortune would have meant everything for me. Had you been free, the widow of a rich man, it would have been a hard thing to approach you as a pauper. My pride would have revolted against owing all to you, fortune as well as happiness. But now, now that I was rich, you're equal at least in fortune, my motives could not inspire doubt even in the meanest mind. Were I to wed you no malicious wordling could ever say of me, he gained all that by lucky marriage? Were you but free? I began to meditate upon the uncertainty of life and to picture to myself the accidents and sudden unforeseen diseases by which men as young and vigorous as Robert Hatrell are sometimes taken away. I thought of railway accidents and imagination conjured up the picture of some such catastrophe in all its vivid detail, an engine off the line, a coach or two wrecked, and Robert Hatrell lying dead upon the side of the embankment. I pictured the sudden horror of his homecoming upon the shrouded beer, your agony, your tears. I passed over those lightly thinking of how it would be my lot to console you, slowly, patiently, to win you back to happiness and a new love. I never doubted your love for him. I knew that your heart was entirely his, but I thought I had an influence over your mind which would speedily ripen into love he being removed. I understood you so little, you see, Clara. I had not fathomed the mystery of your heart. He has been dead nine years and you love him still. You have never loved me. I thought of the river, saw him rowing towards the sunset with his strong slow stroke in such a scene as our English landscape painters love, the village church beyond the low line of rushes, the clustering willows pale in the evening haze, the glory of the sunset behind church tower and tall elms. I thought that even on that placid river there were possibilities of danger, a boat of silly chattering cockneys upset, a strong man swimming to their rescue and losing his life in the struggle to save those unknown lives. Such things have been. I thought of fevers which seize men suddenly in the full vigor of youth. I thought of insidious diseases which creep upon a man unsuspected and sap the citadel before he knows that death in one of his numerous disguises is at the door. Last of all, I thought of Morrell and his threats of vengeance. I laughed at the notion. Harmless thunder no doubt. It is common enough for angry men to threaten, but threatened men live. There was something in my recollection of Claude Morrell which made me dwell upon his image in that long reverie as the lovely light of the June afternoon slowly faded and the gold of the western sky shone into my room dazzling my dreaming eyes. I recall the color of the sunset, the feeling of the air as it gradually cooled into evening. I recall every half unconscious impression of ours which marked the crisis of my life and saw me change from an honest man to a villain. There were in Morrell's tone and manner certain indications of a malignity which I had never seen in any other man. There was a concentration of purpose, a resolute intention to injure which must ultimately take some definite form, I told myself, unless cowardice should intervene. And I did not think Morrell a coward. The man had so little to lose. His fortunes were desperate enough to make him daring. What if the opportunity arose and he were to murder the man he hated, the man who had refused to help him in his distress? I implicitly believed Robert Hatrell's account of his love affair and I did not give Morrell credit for caring much about his sister's reputation. He had tried to make money out of the Englishman's caprice, but he had failed ignominiously. Hence and hence only that rancorous hatred. He was of the temper which in the hour of misfortune would turn like a tiger against the fortunate, the temper of men who surge up out of the paving stones and gutters of every great city in the time of revolution and who do evil for evil's sake. Upon the conscience of such a man as that, murder would sit lightly. What if he really meant murder? I pictured that sinister figure lurking in the rustic lanes, lying hidden in a dry, flowery ditch under the spreading hedgerow, ready with pistol or knife when his enemy passed by. Opportunity? Why, if he meant murder, it would be easy enough for him to create his opportunity. But when the thing was done, when that gnawing rage had satiated itself, there would be nothing gained but the gratification of his anger and there would be the hazard of the gallows. The murderer's craft may minimise that risk. The old saw that murder will out has proved a lying proverb of eight years. The art of murder has progressed with a march of civilisation, and the modern murderer is more than a match for the modern policeman. I recalled a murder which had interested me curiously years before when I read the account of it in a London newspaper, I being then remote from London amid the stillness of the Welsh hills. It happened in the days when trade union was called conspiracy and when the law of the land bore heavily upon workmen who banded themselves together against their employer. A certain set of men had conspired. There had been outrages and violence in a certain northern city and attempted arson. The ring leaders were denounced by one of themselves, were tried, found guilty and sentenced to transportation for life. The man who betrayed them dared not remain in his native city. There he knew himself to be a marked man, but he thought he would be safe in London under an assumed name. He came to London, got employment readily, for he was a clever workman, and funded the price of his treachery as a nest egg for his old age. Going homewards one day at his dinner-hour he walked along a quiet street in Soho which he was in the habit of passing through daily. Midway this street is intersected by a narrow alley. As the man came in front of the opening he was shot dead by someone standing in the alley waiting for him to pass. No one ever knew what hand fired the shot. It was in broad daylight in the heart of a busy district, but the murderer disappeared as easily as if he had been spirit and not flesh. I tell you of this long forgotten crime, Clara, because it was the nucleus of evil thoughts which slowly took the form of murder. My wicked scheme did not shape itself all at once. For many days and nights I was haunted by the image of Claude Morel, haunted by the tones of his voice, the lurid light in his eyes when he talked of his enemy. Again and again I found myself mentally measuring the force of that hatred which had expressed itself in biting tones and malevolent looks. Did it amount to so much or so much or so much? Was it really strong enough to plan and accomplish an assassination in broad daylight in the streets of London, indeed as daring as the murder of the workmen who betrayed his comrades? All this time my life went on upon the old lines, the calm monotony of rustic surroundings, the unvarying graciousness of your friendship. Your child sat beside me at her books under the willow or hung upon my shoulder in her exuberance of love and there was no instinct in her childish mind to warn her that the man she loved and trusted had given himself over to the powers of hell. I am not sufficiently orthodox to believe in a personal devil any more than I believe in a personal God, yet in those days I could not divest myself of the feeling that wicked influences outside my own existence had got hold of me, that the hideous hopes and schemes that I was forever revolving in my mind were prompted by a power of iniquity greater than my own. While the wicked web was slowly spreading, the man who was the incarnation of my own sinful longing appeared upon the scene. He had written me two or three begging letters after that chance meeting in Gower Street, and I had sent him small sums of money, such amounts as a man of my supposed means might send to such an applicant. These concessions had made him bolder, and he came to my house in the dusk of a summer evening having walked all the way from Staines. He had just the railway fare to Staines, he told me, and no more. I took him in and fed him and let him sit at my table and vapor about his inchoate inventions all birked for the want of capital. I let him talk of your husband, and I answered all his questions about the man he hated. I told him of Robert Hatwell's happy and peaceful life, his prosperity, his last fancy for sinking four thousand pounds in the purchase of a few acres of land to increase his pleasure grounds. In your native south I take it you would be able to buy an olive wood and a vineyard with that money, I said. He nodded yes and went on eating and drinking in a meditative silence. Now, were any man as savage a foe to Robert Hatwell as you pretend to be, I said after a long pause, he would have a good chance of taking his revenge and making his fortune sometime next week. He looked at me wonderingly, and I explained that Hatwell would have to pay for the land and bank of England notes. It was an old-fashioned dedicate with solicitors to expect to be paid in bank notes even when a man's check was as good as the bank paper. Hatwell would go up to London on an appointed day, cash his check at his bank, and then carry the money to the solicitor's office. I told him casually the name and address of the bank and the name and address of the solicitor, and I saw him sitting there before me, with his eyes kindling like two burning coals, and his underlip trembling curiously as his halting breath came and went. Hatwell and his money will be safe enough, he muttered at last. A man can't be robbed and murdered in broad daylight in such a city as London. There you show your foreign ignorance of our manners and customs, I said, and then I gave him the brief history of several metropolitan assassinations which had occurred within my memory. He became very serious and silent sitting before his empty plate with his chin drooping on his chest, his inky brows bent in a thoughtful frown. Suddenly, after an interval which seemed long, he lifted his head and turned and looked at me with a devilish cunning in his eyes. You hate Robert Hatwell as much as I do, he said. You are in love with his wife, I daresay. Nonsense! I am only trying to prove to you that all your talk about hatred and revenge is so much melodramatic bluster that you have in the slightest intention of injuring my friend. Your friend. Your friend. He repeated mockingly. And then, after another interval of silence, during which he walked over to the window and stood looking across the placid summer twilight in the direction of River Lawn, he came over to me and stood in front of me, looking at me fixedly and emphasizing every sentence with a sharp wrap of his knuckles upon the table. You want that man killed, so do I. Cela se comprend. I would kill him for six pence, kill him for the mere pleasure of making him understand that he was a fool to trifle with Claude Morel's sister and a greater fool to insult Claude Morel. I take too lofty a view of the situation, perhaps. That is in my blood. We Provençals do not easily pardon an injury or an insult. I would kill him for six pence, but I would much rather kill him for four thousand pounds. You say the purchase is to be completed next week. I nodded yes. My dry lips refuse to speak. Let me know the day and hour. Let me know if you can, the route he is likely to take from Palma to Lincoln's Inn Fields. Give me twenty pounds to be ready for what I have to do, and in order that I may have a few pounds about me to get out of England in case of failure. Do this, and you may lie down to-night secure in the thought that Robert Hatwell's days are numbered, and that his wife will soon be his widow. I gave him two ten-pound notes without a word. I'll think about the other part of the business, I told him. Remember, if I am to act you will have to be prompt and decisive, he said. I can't stir a step without exact details. I shall shift my lodgings to-morrow so as to be near the scene of action. My present quarters at Camden Town are too far afield. His devilish coolness was too much for me. I told him I had been talking at random. I meant nothing except to test him. He had proved himself a greater villain than I had thought possible, and I never wanted to see his face again. You will think better of that, he said. I'll telegraph my address to-morrow morning and I shall wait for your instructions. Not till the last moment. Not till I cross the threshold of the post office at Reading an hour after your husband left for London on that fatal day, did I make up my mind that I was going to do this hideous thing. Again and again and again with agonizing iteration I had argued the question. I had told myself that this horror could not be, that I, Ambrose Arden, was not the stuff of which murderers are made, and again and again and yet again my thoughts had gone back to the pit of hell and I had pictured you free to return my love and I had thought that such love must finally win its reward, that in all intense passion there is a magnetic power which can compel responsive passion, as fire will spread from one burning fabric to another that was dark and cold till the flame touched it. When your husband left the gate that morning I knew that I must act at once or never. I walked to the station, caught the slow train that left half an hour after the express by which he traveled, and went to Reading where the wording of my telegram was not likely to arouse official curiosity. I had only one fact to communicate, the hour of Hattrell's appointment with Louraston's solicitor. Morel knew the locality of the bank and it would be for him to watch and find out the route from Coxburg Street to Lincoln's Inn. Can you think what my feelings were that night when you came over to this house at ten o'clock to tell me that your husband had not returned? I knew then that one of the most halish schemes ever hatched had been carried out to the bitter end and that the murder had been done. Did Judas feel as I did, I wonder, before he went and hanged himself? I did not give myself up to that blind despair of remorse which moved him who betrayed his master. I was baser, harder, vileer than Judas, for I stood that night with your hands clasped in mine pretending to comfort you, repeating lying assurances that all would be well, while my heart beat madly with the thought that you were free and that it would be my life's dear labor to win your love. And through those days of doubt and horror I acted my part and hypocrisy came easy to me. Anything was easy, so long as I was with you, consoling, advising, sustaining, you leaning upon me in your innocent unconsciousness of the deep blood of passion that surged below the steadfast quietude which I had schooled myself to maintain. Throughout those days I was haunted by the fear that the murderer would be caught, tried and condemned, and that he would reveal my part in his crime. I feared that which has now come to pass, after a respite of nearly nine years. Then came the darkest period of all my hateful life, the period of your illness, when your life hung in the balance, when every day that dawned might be your last on earth. I lived through that time a time of fear and trembling which I shuttered even to remember years afterwards. And then, and then came my great reward, the reward of treachery and bloodshed, based betrayal of a noble friend, a long tissue of lies and hypocrisies. Then, after years of patience during which I had shrunk with an unconquerable hesitancy from putting my fate to the touch, I had the price of my sin. Your love? No. That love for which I had sinned was no nearer my winning after seven years' apprenticeship than it was while my victim lived. You gave me gratitude, gratitude to me who had blighted your happy life. You rewarded me for the steadfastness of a friendship which in some ways linked my image with that of your murdered husband. Oh, how you will abhor my memory when you look back upon yourself's sacrifice, your generous payment of a fancy debt. How you will hate yourself for having been trapped into a loveless union with a man who plotted your husband's death, who was to all intents and purposes, his murderer. Well, it is all over now. I grasped the dead seafood and tasted the bitterness of its ashen core. I knew that you did not love me, and I was more miserable as your husband than when I waited at your gate as a suitor. There were glimpses of paradise then, gleams of hope shining on my crime darkened spirit, but afterwards, when I had constrained you to be mine, when I had won all that fate could give me, I knew that your heart was with the dead. Nuts had, all spent, when our desire is got without content. That was the motto of my life. Then came a new horror, a haunting fear of the dead which I take to have been rather physical than mental. Could I, disciple of Schopenhauer and Hartman, I, who had graduated in the School of Exact Science and reduced every thought and feeling to its logical sequence, admitting nothing which my mind could not conceive? Could I be the sport of ghostly forms and unreal voices? I, to be haunted and paralyzed by the dread of a shadow. I, to tremble and turn cold on entering your husband's study, lest I should see a pale image of the dead seated with the living man used to sit. I, to walk those familiar gardens with an ever-present dread of a well-known footsteps sounding behind me, or when no imaginary sound pursued me with an absolute certainty that I was being followed by the noiseless movements of a phantom. I, to become the slave of such fears. I, who believe in nothing beyond the limitations of our understanding, who have restricted all my speculations to the real and the finite. I knew from the first that these horrors had their source in shattered nerves and broken health. I knew that I was as much a sufferer from physical causes as the victim of alcoholic poisoning who sees devils and vermin about his bed. Yet the thing was as real to me as if I had been the firmest believer in supernatural influences, and I suffered as much from these false appearances and imaginary sounds as the believer could have suffered. That is one form which retribution has taken. The other form has been my ever-present sense of disappointment in not having won your heart. Tortured, thus, life has been only a synonym for suffering, and I can look forward coldly and calmly to the coming daylight when I shall have ceased to live. How can I plead to you at the close of this full and deliberate confession? How dare I hope that you can have any feeling except a loathing for the writer of these lines? For myself, therefore, I will ask nothing. I ask only that you will be kind to my son, who, if Marel carries out his threat, must bear henceforward the burden of a name blurred by his father's infamy. He has a fine character and will reward your kindness. His mother was one of the best and purest of women. Think of him as inheriting her virtues and not my dark and evil spirit. It is not in his nature either to love as I have loved or to sin as I have sinned. Yes, you will be good to my son, I know, Clara. You will forget that there is one drop of my Judas blood in his veins. You may know now in this day of confessions why he left us, why he broke the tie between him and Daisy and shook the dust of his father's dwelling off his feet. He had found me out. Accident had put him in the way of hearing his father's guilt pronounced by the lips of the wretch who executed the crime which his father had only meditated in evil dreams. Claude Marel hunted me out in our house in London and forced his way into my study in order to ask me for money. It was not his first attempt upon my purse after our joint crime. I had been pestered by letters from him, sometimes at long intervals, sometimes in rapid succession, but I had answered none of those letters, and now when he dared to force an entrance into my house I was rigid in my refusal of money. I knew what the word chantage means for a Frenchman of his temper, and that if I once opened my purse to him I should be his slave forever. I was no coward in my relations with that scoundrel, although he threatened me with the one thing which I had to fear. He threatened to tell you the story of his crime and how he took the first hint of it from my lips. He had kept the telegram sent from Reading on the morning of the murder, the telegram giving the hour of your husband's appointment, and he swore that if I denied him substantial help he would tell his story to you and lay that telegram before you. I bad him do his worst, strong in the assurance that he would do nothing to incriminate himself and that he could not touch upon the subject of Robert Hatrell's death without jeopardizing his own safety. Least of all did I believe that he would reveal himself to you as your husband's murderer. No, I felt that I had nothing to fear beyond personal annoyance from the existence of Claude Morel, yet the memories which the man pressed upon me were so hideous, his presence was so intolerable, that I would have given half my fortune to be rid of him forever. It was as if my crime had taken a living shape and were dogging my steps. Most of all did I loathe his presence when he came upon me in my quiet study in this house, in the room where his crime and mine had first shaped itself in my disordered mind. He had resolved to weary me out, I believe, and to that end he had taken a lodging at Henley. He appeared upon my pathway at all hours and in the most unexpected places, but I was rock. We had several interviews before the one which was fatal to my son's peace of mind and which parted father and son forever. On that particular morning Morel overtook me in the lane near my cottage and urged his demands with a savage persistence rendered desperate, I suppose, by the disappointment of hopes which he had entertained from the hour he discovered that I was a rich man. You say that I knew you in London some years ago, I said, and that we had confidential conversations together in this place and that we two together plotted the murder of my best friend. You admit that you are a murderer and you ask me to believe that I am one by desire and intention and cooperation with you. I choose to deny all your assertions. I choose to say that I never saw your face till you forced your way into my London house. If you persist in the form of persecution which you have been carrying on for the last six weeks, it will be my duty to hand you over to the police and it will be their duty to discover whether you are a lunatic at large or whether you are really the man you pretend to be and the murderer of Robert Hatrell. In the latter case there must be people who can identify you. Some of those witnesses at the inquest who saw the murderer go in and out of the house in Denmark Street may still be within reach of a subpoena. If you annoy me any further in my own house or out of doors it will be needful for me to take this step and you may be sure I shall take it. I had never been cooler than when I gave him this answer. I had weighed and measured the situation and I did not believe he had power to harm me, be his malignity what it might. My crime might be even darker than his, but he could not touch my guilt with his little finger without his whole body being drawn into the meshes of the law. I knew that and I could afford to laugh at his fury. To give him money worth so much as a single sovereign would be in some ways to acknowledge his claim and to establish a link between us. There should be no such link. And over and above this motive I abhorred the man and his necessities had no power to touch my pity. He could do me no harm, I thought. Nor could he, but for the accident of my son's crossing the top of the lane while this man was with me and having his attention attracted by the strangeness of the man's gestures as he talked to me. The angry flourish of his arm as he poured his rancor into my ear suggested a threat of personal violence and my son followed us in order to protect his father should there be need of his interference. Once within earshot Cyril stayed his footsteps and listened to the end of a savage recapitulation of those suggestions of mine which led to the scheme of the murder and of the sending of the telegram that furnished the information which rendered the crime possible. He, my son, heard the history of my sin, heard and believed. I stopped at the end of the lane and looked round. Cyril stood a few paces from me, deadly pale, looking at me in terrible silence. Morrell turned and saw him stand there almost at the same moment and slunk aside. How dare you insult my father with your lunatic ravings! cried Cyril, lifting his stick threateningly. Be off with you, fellow! He pointed London words with his stick and Morrell crept slowly along the dusty road, leaving me face to face with my son. You don't believe, I began, but his face told me that he did believe Morrell's story and that nothing I could say would undo the mischief that Scoundrel's tongue had done. The story of the telegram had condemned me in my son's eyes, and perhaps, too, my guilt was written upon my brow, had been written there from the beginning in characters that had deepened with the passage of time. Oh, God! How often, sitting among you all within the sound of Daisy's innocent laughter, I have found the burden of my guilt so intolerable that I have been tempted to cry my secret aloud and make an end of my long agony. And now I saw all the horror of it reflected in my son's agonized face as he told me that he could never be Daisy's husband, that the murderer's son must not marry the victim's daughter. Oh, how she would hate me! he cried, if years after our marriage she found she had been entrapped into such a lonesome union! He told me that he should leave England at once and forever. He was not without pity for me, although my crime and the passion that prompted it lay beyond the region of his thoughts. To him such a character as mine was unthinkable. He who could renounce love when honour urged him could not understand the love that makes light of honour, truth, friendship, all things for love's sake. His happier nature has never sounded that dark-dep. And so we parted. I wanted him at least to share my fortune. There was no taint at the source of this. If he were to begin a new life I urged that he might as well begin it with independence and comfort, but he told me he could take nothing from me and he was absolute in his refusal. I am young enough to make my own way in the world, he told me. Thews and sinews must have their value somewhere. And so we parted. Just touched ice-cold hands and parted forever. End of Chapter 33 End of One Life, One Love by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Recorded by Céline Mejore