A Life Sentence. Sergeant Adeline
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Hubert felt that he had been betrayed into displaying an excess of emotion very foreign to the character of the cynic and the worldling which he was desirous to assume. Circumstances, he told himself, had been too strong for him. Even at the price of not making a study for a novel of poor little Enid's personality—and how could he ever seriously have thought of such a thing?—he must not risk close intercourse with her. Her innocent allusions to the past, her guileless confidence in himself, wrung his heart with shame and dismay. When he left her, he wandered away to the other side of the sheet of water in front of the house, until he came to a small fir plantation on the side of the hill which rose from the water's edge. He had not been there for years, and yet he had not forgotten a single turning in the narrow pathway that ran deviously between the fir-tree shrubs; the memory of the little open glade in the centre of the tiny wood had never lost its terrible distinctness. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could see every detail of the scene, every branch of the fir-trees against the darkening sky, every rise or depression in the mossy ground. The very scent of the woods gave him a sickening sensation; the crunch of a broken twig made him turn pale with the horror of a quick remembrance. For it was in the fir-wood that Sydney Vane had been found murdered—it was in the fir-wood that Hubert Lepel had first felt that his hand was red with his cousin's blood.
He had not at first felt all the horror of his deed. He told himself again and again that he had been justified in what he did. He had punished a man for a base and craven act; he had challenged him and met him in fair fight. By all the laws of honor he considered himself justified. It was better that Marion Vane's heart should be broken by her husband's death than by the news that he had deserted her. It was better that Enid should think of her father as a saint and martyr, than as a profligate whose hand no honest man or woman would care to hold. Hubert Lepel sternly told himself that he had done good and not evil in ridding the earth of a thoroughly bad man like Sydney Vane. If he might have avowed the deed and its motive, he felt that he could almost have gloried in it; but how to confess what he had done? At the first moment of all he had refrained, in terrible fear of implicating Florence, not knowing how far she would be mistress of herself; then, when he saw that she was well able to defend her own reputation and that he might confess the truth without bringing in her name at all—why, then he hesitated, and found that his courage had deserted him. Florence entreated him to conceal his act. He remembered that Sydney Vane had almost forced him to use weapons—a course which Hubert himself would never have suggested; and it was fatally easy to let things take their course. He hoped, in his youthful ignorance of the laws of circumstantial evidence, that the jury would bring in a verdict of suicide. When this hope was destroyed, he still thought that the matter would be left a mystery—so many mysteries were never cleared up at all! He did not think that any one else could possibly be suspected. He was horrified when suspicion fell upon Andrew Westwood, a poacher who had been vowing vengeance on Sydney Vane for the past three months.
To the very end of the trial he hoped that Westwood would be acquitted. When he had been condemned, Hubert vowed to himself that at any rate no man should suffer death in his place. If no reprieve could be obtained, no commutation of the sentence, he would speak out and set Andrew Westwood free. The message of mercy came only just in time. He was on the very point of delivering himself up to justice when news arrived that Westwood's death sentence had been commuted to one of imprisonment for life. Did that make things any better? Hubert thought that it did. And his heart failed him—he could not bear the thought of public disgrace, condemnation, punishment. He knew himself to be a coward and a villain, and yet he could not bring himself to tell the truth. When Miss Vane accused him of heartlessness because he explained his pallor by saying that he had spent the previous evening with friends, he was in reality suffering from the depression consequent on several nights of sleepless agony of mind. He was not silent for his own sake alone. He was afraid of implicating Flossy, the woman to whom Sydney Vane had proposed love, and about whom he had quarrelled with her brother. It was Flossy's share in the matter that sealed his lips; and from the moment of his conversation with Florence at the library window his mind was made up. He had gone too far to draw back—Andrew Westwood must bear his fate. Lifelong imprisonment scarcely seemed more terrible to Hubert Lepel just then than the life sentence of remorse which he had brought on his own head.
Since those days his heart had grown harder. He had resolved to forget—to fight down the secret consciousness of guilt which pursued him night and day—to live his own life, in spite of the haunting sense that he had sacrificed all that was good and noble in himself, all that really made life worth having. He was striving hard, as he said to Florence, to cast the past behind him, to live as if he were what he had been before he bore about with him the shadow of a crime.
But, in the very first endeavor which Hubert Lepel made to act as if the past were done away with, he was brought face to face with it again, and made to feel as he had seldom felt before, that he had wronged not only those who were dead, but those who were living—for he had let Florence become the wife of a man, the mother of a child, whom she did not love, and he had left the girl whom his own hand had made fatherless to Florence's care. As to Westwood's child, she was in a worse case than Enid Vane, for she was not only orphaned but homeless perhaps, and lost to all that was good and pure.
He thought of this as he stood in the fir-wood, surveying the scene where the suddenly-improvised duel had taken place; and, as the memory of it grew upon him, he cast himself down on the mossy ground and sobbed aloud. He had not shed a tear for years, and such as came now were few and painful and bitter as gall; but they would not be repressed. It was strange, even to himself, that he should be so beaten down by a little thing—a child's simple words about her mother, a moment's loneliness in the wood where her father had met his death. The world would not have recognised him, the cold, subtle, polished, keen-witted flâneur, the witty man of letters, critic, traveller, playwright, novelist, all in one, in that crushed figure beneath the firs, with head bowed down, hands clutched in agony, muscular frame shaken by the violence of convulsive sobs. The convicted sinner, the penitent, had nothing in common with Hubert Lepel, as known to the world at large.
Presently he came to himself a little and sat up, with his hands clasped round his knees. Some strange thoughts visited him in those quiet moments. What if he gave up the attempt to brave life out? What if he acknowledged the truth and cleared poor Westwood's name? England would ring from end to end with horror at his baseness. What of that if, by confessing, he could lay to rest the terrors that at time took a hold of his guilty soul—terrors, not of death, nor of what comes after death—terrors of life and of the doom of baseness reserved for the soul that will be base, the gradual declension of heart and mind for the man who said, "Evil be thou my good?" He was not one who could bear as yet to think of moral death without a shiver. He had fallen, he had sinned; but, for his misery and his punishment, his soul was not yet dead. What then if he should give himself up to justice after all? It seemed to him, in that moment of solitude, that only by so doing could he regain the freedom of mind, the peace of conscience which he had now forfeited, perhaps for evermore.
He sat thinking of the possibilities of life opening out before him, and decided that he could give them up without a pang. But there were persons to be thought of beside himself. To his relatives, to the relatives of the murdered man, the discovery of the truth would be a terrible shock. There was no person—except that missing girl, of whom he dared scarcely think—who could benefit by the clearing of Andrew Westwood's name. The only gain that would accrue from his confession would be, he considered, a subjective gain to himself. Abstract justice would be done, no doubt, and Westwood's character would be cleared; but that was all. He ought to have spoken earlier if he meant to do good by speaking. Confession, he said to himself would be self-indulgence now.
Hubert Lepel was wonderfully well versed, in subtle turns of argument—in casuistry of the abstruser kind. It was long since he had looked truth full in the face or drawn a sharp boundary-line between right and wrong. Not easy to him was it to get back from the varying lights and shadows of self-deception to the radiant sunshine of truth. With bitter remorse in his heart and a strangely passionate wish to do—now at least—the right, he yet decided to bear the burden of silence until his dying day—to say