CHAPTER XXXI—AN UNWELCOME VISITOR

BLAISE was seated at his study table, regarding somewhat dubiously a letter which lay open in front of him.

It was written in a flowing, foreign hand and expressed with a quaintly stilted, un-English turn of phrase. The heading of the notepaper upon which it was inscribed was that of a hotel in Exeter.

     “Dear Mr. Tormarin,” it ran. “You will, without doubt, be
     surprised to receive a letter from me, since we have met
     only once. But I have something of the most great importance
     to confide in you, and I therefore beg that you will accord
     me an interview. When I add to this that the matter
     approaches very closely the future of your fianc茅e, Miss
     Peterson, I do not doubt to myself that you will appoint a
     time when I may call to see you.”
 

The letter was signed M. de Varigny.

Blaise had received this thought-provoking epistle two days previously, and had been impressed by an uncomfortable consciousness that it foreboded something unpleasant. He could not imagine in what manner the affairs of Madame de Varigny impinged upon his own, or rather, as she seemed to imply, upon those of his future wife, and this very uncertainty had impelled him to fix the interview the Countess had demanded at as early a moment as possible. Disagreeables were best met and faced without delay. So now he was momentarily awaiting her arrival, still unable to rid himself of the impression that something of an unpleasant nature impended.

He glanced through the open window, facing him. Afterwards, he was always able to recall every little detail of the picture upon which his eyes rested; it was etched upon his mind as ineffaceably as though cut upon steel with a graver’s tool.

Although the mellow sunlight of September flooded the lawns and terraces, that indescribable change which heralds autumn had already begun to manifest itself. Not that any hint of chill as yet edged the balmy atmosphere or tint of russet reddened the gently waving foliage of the trees. It was something less definite—a suggestion of maturity, of completed ripening, conveyed by the deep, rich green of the grass, the strong, woody growth of the trees, the full-blown glory of the roses nodding on their stems.

To the left, in the shade of a stately cedar, Lady Anne and Jean were encamped with their sewing and writing materials at hand, and the rays of sunshine, filtering between the widespread branches above them, woke fugitive gold and silver lights in the down-bent auburn and white-crowned heads. Further away, in the valley below, the brown smudge of a wide-bottomed boat broke the smooth expanse of the lake whence the mingled laughter of Nick and Claire came floating up on the breeze.

It was a peaceful scene, full of intimate happiness and tender promises, and Blaise watched it with contented eyes. The voice of Baines, formal and urbane, roused him from a pleasant reverie.

“Madame de Varigny,” announced that functionary, throwing open the door and standing aside for the visitor to enter.

Blaise rose courteously to greet her, holding out his hand. But the Countess shook her head.

“No, I will not shake hands,” she said abruptly. “When you know why I am come, you will not want to shake hands with me.”

There was something not unattractive about the outspoken refusal to sail under false colours, more especially softened, as it was, by the charm of the faintly foreign accent and intonation.

Madame de Varigny had paused a moment in the middle of the room and was regarding her host with curiously appraising eyes, and as Blaise returned her gaze he was conscious, as once before at the fancy-dress ball at Montavan, of the strange sense of familiarity this woman had for him.

“I am sorry for that,” he said, answering her refusal to shake hands. “Won’t you, at least, sit down?” pulling forward a chair.

“Yes, I will sit.”

She sank into the chair with the quick, graceful motion of the South, and continued to regard Blaise watchfully between the thick fringes of her lashes. Had Jean been present, she would have been struck anew by the expression of implacability which hardened the dark-brown eyes. By that, and by something else as well—a look of unmistakable triumph.

“I have much—much to say to you, Monsieur Tor-ma-rin,” she began at last. “I will commence by telling you a little about myself. I am”—here she looked away for an instant, then shot a swift, penetrating glance at him—“an Italian by birth.”

A brief silence followed this announcement. Blaise was thinking concentratedly. So Madame de Varigny, despite her French name and her French mannerisms, was an Italian! He might have guessed it had the possibility ever definitely presented itself to him—guessed it from those broad, high cheek bones, those liquid, southern-dark eyes, and the coarse, blue-black hair. Yet, except for one fleeting moment at Montavan, the idea had never occurred to him, and it had then been swiftly dissipated by Jean’s explanation that the impressive-looking Cleopatra was the Comtesse de Varigny and her chaperon for the time being.

Italian! Blaise felt more convinced than ever now that Madame de Varigny’s visit portended unpleasant developments. Something, a voice from the past, was about to break stridently on the peaceful present. He braced himself to meet and counter whatever might be coming. Vaguely he foresaw some kind of blackmail, and he thanked Heaven for Jean’s absolute understanding and complete knowledge of the past and of all that appertained to his first unhappy marriage. There would be little foothold here for an attempt at blackmail, however skilfully worked, he reflected grimly.

He therefore responded civilly to Madame de Varigny’s statement, apparently accepting it at its mere face value.

“I am surprised,” he told her. “You have altogether the air of a Parisian.”

The Countess smiled.

“Oh, I had a French grandmother,” she returned carelessly. “Also, I have lived much in Paris.”

“Ah! that explains it,” replied Tormarin, leaning back in his chair as though satisfied. “It’s the influence of environment and heredity, I expect.”

He was fencing carefully, waiting for the woman to show her hand.

“I have also Corsican blood in my veins,” pursued Madame de Varigny. Then, as Tormarin made no answer, she leaned forward and said intently: “Do you know the characteristic of the Corsicans, Monsieur Tor-ma-rin? They never forget—nevaire”—her foreign accent increasing, as usual, with emotion of any kind. “The Corsican always repays.”

“Yes? And you have something to repay? Is that it?”

“Yes. I have something to repay.”

“A revenge, in fact?”

“She shook her head.

“No. I do not call it revenge. It is punishment—the just punishment earned by the man who married Nesta Freyne and brought her in return nothing but misery.” Tormarin rose abruptly.

“What have the affairs of Nesta Freyne to do with you?” he asked sternly. “As you are obviously aware, she was my wife. And I do not propose to discuss private personal matters with an entire stranger.” He moved towards the door. “I think our interview can very well terminate at that. I do not wish to forget that I am your host.”

“You are more than that,” said Madame de Varigny suavely. “You are my brother-in-law.”

“What?” Tormarin swung ’round and faced her.

“Yes.” The suavity was gone now, replaced by a curious deadly precision of utterance, enhanced by the foreign rendering of syllabic values. “I am—or was, until my marriage—Margherita Valdi. I am Nesta’s sister.”

Tormarin regarded her steadily.

“In that case,” he said, “I will hear what you have to say. Though I don’t think,” he added, “that any good can come of raking up the past. It is better—forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” Madame de Varigny seized upon the unlucky word. “Yes—it may be easy enough for you to forget—you who took Nesta’s young, beautiful life and crushed it; you who came like a thief and stole from me the one creature in the whole world whom I loved—my bambina, my little sister. Oh, yes”—her voice rose passionately—“easy enough when there is another woman—a new love—with whom you think to start your life all over again! But I tell you, you shall not! There shall be no new beginning for you—no marriage with this Jean Peterson to whom you are now fianc茅. I forbid it—I——”

Blaise stemmed the torrent of her speech with an authoritative gesture.

“May I ask how the news of my engagement reached you?” he asked, his cool, dispassionate question falling like a hailstone dropped into some molten stream of lava.

“Oh, I have kept watch. I have the means of knowing. There is very little that has happened to you since—since I wrote to you of Nesta’s death”—she stumbled a little over the words, and Blaise, despite his anger, was conscious of a sudden flash of sympathy for her—“very little that I have not known. And this—your engagement, I knew of that when it was barely a week old.”

“I’m really curious to know why my affairs should be of such surpassing interest to you. My engagement, for instance—how did you hear of it?”

“Oh, that was easy”—contemptuously. “There was another man who loved your Mees Peterson—this Monsieur Burke. I used him. I knew he was afraid that you might win her, and I told him that if ever you became engaged he must come and tell me, and I would show him how to make sure that you should never marry her. Oh! That was vairy simple!”

“I’m afraid you promised him more than you can hope to perform. I grant that you have every reason to dislike me—hate me, if you will. I acknowledge, too, that I was to blame, miserably to blame, for Nesta’s unhappiness—as much in fault as she herself. But there is nothing gained at this late hour by apportioning the blame. We each made bad mistakes—and we have each had to pay the price.”

“Yours has been a very light price—comparatively,” she commented with intense bitterness.

“Do you think so?”

Something in the quiet, still utterance of the brief question brought her glance swiftly, curiously, back to his face. It was as though, behind those four short words, she could feel the intolerable pressure of years of endurance. For a moment she seemed to waver, then, as though she had deliberately pushed the impression aside, she laughed disagreeably.

“Too light to satisfy her sister, at any rate.”

Tormarin froze.

“It is fortunate, then, that my ultimate fate does not lie in your hands,” he observed.

“But that is just where it does lie—in the palm of my hand—there!”

She flung out one shapely hand, palm, upward, and pointed to it with the other.

“And now—see—I close my hand—so!... And this beautiful marriage of which you have dreamed, your marriage with Mees Peterson—it does not take place!”

“Are you mad?” asked Blaise contemptuously, experiencing all an Englishman’s distaste for this display of unforced drama.

She shook her head.

“No,” she said quietly. “I am not mad.”

The air of theatricality seemed to fall suddenly away from her, leaving her a stem and sombre figure, invested with an intrinsic atmosphere of tragedy, filled with one sentiment only—the thirst for vengeance.

“No. I am not mad. I am telling you the truth. You can never marry Jean Peterson, because Nesta—your wife—still lives.”

Tormarin fell back a pace. For one moment he believed the woman had gone genuinely mad—that by dint of long brooding upon how she might most hurt and punish the Englishman whom she had never forgiven for marrying her sister, she had evolved from a half-crazed mind the belief that Nesta still lived and that thus she would be able to prevent his marriage with any other woman.

And then, looking into those seeming soft brown eyes with the granite hardness in their depths, he could see the light of reason burning steadily within them.

Madame de Varigny was quite sane, as sane as he was himself. And if so...

A great fear came upon him—the fear of a man who dimly senses the approach of some appalling danger and knows that it will find him utterly defenceless.

“Do you know what you are saying?” he demanded, his voice roughened and uneven.

“Yes, I know. Nesta is alive,” she repeated simply.

“Alive?”

The word was wrung from him, hardly more than a hoarse whisper of sound. He swung round upon her violently.

“But you yourself wrote and told me of her death?” She nodded placidly.

“Yes. I wrote a lie.”

“But the official information? We had that, too, later, from the French police, confirming your account. You had better be careful about what you are telling me,” he added sternly. “Lies won’t answer, now.”

“The need for lying is past,” she answered with the most absolute candour. “The French police wrote quite truthfully all they knew. They had found the body of a suicide, whom I identified as my sister. To strengthen matters I bribed someone I knew also to identify the dead girl as Nesta. She was a married woman, too, the poor little dead, one! So it was quite simple. And I took Nesta home—home to Ch芒teau Varigny. I had married by then. But she had heard of my marriage through friends in Italy and wrote to me from there, telling me of her misery with you and begging me to succour her. So I went to Italy and brought her back with me to Varigny. Then I planned that you should believe her dead. It was all very simple,” she repeated complacently.

“But what was your object in all this? Why did you scheme to keep me in ignorance? What was your purpose?”

“Why?” Her voice deepened suddenly, the placid satisfaction with which she had narrated the carrying out of her plan disappearing from it completely. “Why? I did it to punish you—first for stealing my Nesta from me and then because, after you had stolen her, you brought her nothing but misery and heart-break. She was so young—so young! And you, with your hideous temper and cold, formal English ways—you broke her heart, cowed her, crushed her!”

“She was old enough to coquette with every man she met,” came grimly between Tormarin’s teeth. “No husband—English or Italian, Least of all Italian—would have endured her conduct.”

“She would not have played with other men if you had loved her. She was all fire. And you—you were like a wet log that will not burn!” She gestured fiercely. “You never loved her! It was in a moment of passion—of desire that you married her!... But you were sure, eventually, to meet some other woman and learn what love—real love—is. So I waited. And when I saw you at Montavan with Jean—I knew that the day I had waited for so long would come at last. I knew that your punishment was ready to my hand.”

“Do you mean”—Blaise spoke in curiously measured accents—“do you mean that you deliberately concealed the fact that Nesta still lived so that——”

“So that you should not marry the woman that you loved when the time came! Yes, I planned it all! I kept Nesta safely hidden at Varigny, and I made little changes in her appearance—a woman can, you know”—mockingly—“the colour of her hair, the way of dressing it. Oh, just little changes, so that if by chance she was seen in the street by anyone who had known her as your wife she would not easily be recognised.” Oh once more with that exasperating complacence at her own skill in deception—“I thought of every little detail.”

Tormarin stood listening to her silently, like a man in a trance. His face had grown drawn and haggard, and his eyes burned in their sockets. Once, as she poured out her story of trickery and deception, she heard him mutter dazedly: “Jean... Jean,” and the anguish in his voice might have moved any woman to pity save only one who was utterly and entirely obsessed with the desire for vengeance.

But the intolerable suffering which had suddenly lined his face and rimmed his mouth with tiny beads of sweat was meat and drink to her. She gloried in it. This was her hour of triumph after long years of waiting.

She smiled at him blandly.

“I think I have behaved very well,” she pursued. “I might have waited till you were actually married. But I have no wish to punish the little Jean. She, at least, is ‘on the square,’ as you say—though it would have revenged my Nesta well had I waited. You ruined Nesta’s life; I could have ruined the life of the woman you love. I did think of it. Ah! You would have suffered then, knowing that the Jean you worshipped was neither wife, nor maid, but a——”

“Be silent, woman!”

Tortured beyond bearing, this final taunt, levelled at the woman he held more dear than anything in life, snapped his last thread of self-control.

He flung himself forward and his hands were gripping, gripping at the soft ivory throat from which the taunt had sprung. He felt the woman writhe, struggling to pull his hands from her neck. But it meant nothing to him. He did not think of her any longer as a woman. She was something vile—leprous to the very core of her being—a thing to be destroyed. The thing which had made of all Jean’s promised happiness a black and bitter mockery.

The mad Tormarin rage surged through his veins like a consuming fire. He would break her—break her and utterly destroy her just as one destroyed a deadly snake.

And then across the thunderous roar that beat in his ears came the beloved voice, the voice that would have power to call him out of the depths of hell itself—Jean’s voice.

“Blaise! Blaise! What are you doing? Stop!”