A Life Sentence. Sergeant Adeline
for a second or two—then she was calm again. Her brother looked at her with an air of stupefaction.
"How dare you allude to that shameful episode in your life," he said sternly, "and to me, of all people!"
"If not to you, I should certainly speak of it to no one," she answered quietly. There was a sudden blaze of light in the red-brown eyes beneath the heavily-veined eyelids.
"You are my only safety-valve; I must speak sometimes—or die. Besides"—in a still lower tone—"I see nothing shameful about it. We have done no harm. If he loved me better than he loved his chattering commonplace little wife, I was not to blame. How could I help it if I loved him too? It was kismet—it had to be. You should not have interfered."
"And pray what would have happened if I had not interfered? What shame, what ruin, what disgrace!"
"It is useless for you to rant and rave in that manner," said Florence Lepel, letting her eyes drop once more to the open pages of her French novel. "You did interfere, and there is an end of it. And what an end! You must be proud of your work. He dead, Marion dying, the General nearly mad with grief, the man Westwood hanged for a crime that he never committed!"
"Westwood has been reprieved," said Hubert sharply.
"What a relief to you!" commented his sister, with almost incredible coolness.
He turned away from her, catching at his throat as if something rose to choke him there. His face was very pale; the lines of pain about his eyes and mouth were plainer and deeper than they had been before. Florence glanced up at him and smiled faintly. There was a strange malignity in her smile.
"You can tell me," she said, when the silence had lasted for some minutes, "what you meant by saying that the General would not find me here to-day."
"He has narrowly escaped a fit of apoplexy. He is to be kept quiet; he will not be able to see any one for some days to come."
"Oh! What brought it on?"
"The news," Hubert answered reluctantly, "of Westwood's reprieve."
Miss Lepel smiled again.
"Was he so very angry?" she said. "Ah, he would do anything in his power to bring his brother's murderer to justice—I have heard him say so a hundred times! You ought to be very grateful to me, Hubert, for remembering that you are my brother."
"I wish to Heaven I were not!" cried the young man.
"For some things I wish you were not too," said Florence slowly. She sat up, clasped her white hands round her knees, and looked at him reflectively. "If you had not been my brother, I suppose you would not have interfered," she went on. "You would have left me to pursue my wicked devices, and simply turned your back on me and Sydney Vane. I agree with you. I wish to Heaven—if you like that form of expression—that you were not my brother, Hubert Lepel! You have made the misery of my life."
"And you the disgrace of mine!" he said bitterly.
"Then we are quits," she answered, in the listless, passionless voice that she seemed especially to affect. "We need not reproach each other; we have each had something to bear at one another's hands."
"Florence," said Hubert—and his voice trembled a little as he spoke—"what are you going to do? It is, as you say, useless for us to reproach each other for the past; but for the future let me at least be certain that my sacrifice will avail to keep you in a right path, that you will not again—not again——"
"This is very edifying," said Florence quietly, as the young man broke off short in his speech, and turned away with a despairing stamp of the foot—his sister's face would have discomfited a man of far greater moral courage than poor Hubert Lepel—"it is something new for me to be lectured by my younger brother, whose course has surely not been quite irreproachable, I should imagine! Come, Hubert—do not be so absurd! You have acted according to your lights, as the old women say, and I according to mine. There is nothing more for us to talk about. Let us quit the subject; the past is dead."
"I tell you that it is the future that I concern myself about. Upon my honor, Florence, I did not know that you were here when I came down to-day! I thought that you had gone to your friend Mrs. Bartolet at Worcester, as you said to me that you would when I saw you last. Why have you not gone? You said that life here was now intolerable to you. I remember your very words, although I have not been here for weeks."
"Your memory does you credit," said the girl, with slow scorn.
"Why have you stayed?"
"For my own ends—not yours."
"So I suppose."
"My dear brother Hubert," said Florence, composing herself in a graceful attitude in the depths of her basket-chair, "can you not be persuaded to go your own way and leave me to go mine? You have done a good deal of mischief already, don't you know? You have ruined my prospects, destroyed my hopes—if I were sentimental, I might say, broken my heart! Is not that enough for you? For mercy's sake, go your own way henceforward, and let me do as I please!"
"But what is your way? What do you please?"
"Is it well for me to tell you after the warning I have had?"
"If you had a worthy plan, an honorable ambition, you could easily tell me. Again I ask, Why are you here?"
"Yes, why?" repeated Florence, her lip curling, and, for the first time, a slight color flushing her pale cheeks. "Why? Your dull wits will not even compass that, will they? Well, partly because I am a thoroughly worldly woman, or rather a woman of the world—because it is not well to give up a good home, a luxurious life, and a large salary, when they are to be had for the asking—because as Enid Vane's governess, I can have as much freedom and as little work as I choose. Is not that answer enough for you?"
"No," said Hubert doggedly, "it is not."
She shrugged her graceful shoulders.
"It should be, I think. But I will go on. I look three-and-twenty, but you know as well as I do that I am twenty-nine. In another year I shall be thirty—horrible thought! An attack of illness, even a little more trouble, such as this that I have lately undergone, will make me look my full age. Do you know what that means to a woman?" She pressed her eyelids and the hollows beneath her eyes with her fingers. "When I look in the glass, I see already what I shall be when I am forty. I must make the best of my youth and of my good looks. You spoiled one chance in life for me; I must make what I can of the other."
"You mean," said the young man, with white dry lips, which he vainly attempted to moisten as he spoke—"you mean—that you must make what the world calls a good marriage?"
She bowed her head.
"At last you have grasped my meaning," she said coldly; "you have hitherto been exceedingly slow to do so."
He looked at her silently for a moment or two, almost with abhorrence. Her fair and delicate beauty affected him with a sort of loathing; he could not believe that this woman with the cold lips and malignant eyes had been born of his mother, had played with him in childhood, had kissed him with loving kisses, and spoken to him in sisterly caressing fashion. It took him some minutes to conquer the terrible hatred which grew up within him towards her, as he remembered all that she had been and all that she had done; but, when at last he was able to speak, his voice was calm and studiously gentle.
"Florence," he said, "I will not forget that you are my sister. You bear my name, you come of my race, and, whatever you do and whatever you are, I cannot desert you. I promised our mother on her death-bed that I would care for you as long as you needed care; and, if ever you needed it in your life, you need it now! I have not done my duty to you during the past few weeks. I have left you to yourself, and thought I could never forgive you for what you had done. But now I see that I was wrong. If it would be of any service to you, I would make a home for you at once—I would place all my means at your disposal. Come back with me to London, and let us make a home for ourselves together. We are both weary, both have suffered; could we not try