Chapter III: At Bay

It is evening. Stephen Trenchard has retired to his room immediately after dinner, looking wan and wearied, worn out perhaps by that interview with Joel Pilgrim in the study. Sibyl has offered to go to his room and read to him, and has had her offer refused.

‘I am tired, my dear, and want sleep, if I can get it; but that seems harder for me to obtain now than for a pauper to get gold. One would think the voice of doom had cried out to me, as it cried to Macbeth, “Sleep no more”!’

‘Macbeth was a murderer, uncle. You should not compare yourself to him.’

‘No; I have never dipped my hands in blood. I have used the world pretty much as it has used me, I believe--give and take.’

Sibyl is alone in a small sitting-room adjoining her bedroom; a pretty little room which Mr. Trenchard has allowed her to appropriate to herself, and which she has adorned with various elegant trifles from the Redcastle shops--books, engravings, statuettes--the things that women love.

Here she sits to-night, a prey to something very near despair. She is now completely hemmed in. Only two modes of escape lie before her. The first and more obvious is flight. She can leave Lancaster Lodge. There is no constraint upon her. She is free to go away, penniless as when she came, leaving fortune behind her. The second and more hazardous alternative is to prevail upon Joel Pilgrim to abandon his design; to induce him, of his own accord, to give up the idea of marriage until he is able to return from Calcutta.

Ten o’clock strikes, and soon afterwards she hears the bell at the lodge entrance, and then wheels grinding over the gravel, and she knows that Mr. Pilgrim has returned with the licence. She has breathed more freely during his absence, and his return seems to bring an atmosphere of trouble and perplexity into the house. Will he come to her, or send for her to tell her that his hateful errand has been successfully accomplished? She sits listening for his detested footstep. The ears of hate are as keen as those of love, and she knows that footfall only too well.

Yes, there it comes along the carpeted corridor, slow and stealthy. ‘The jungle tigers walk like that, I dare say,’ thinks Sibyl.

Joel opens the door softly and comes in. The dull yellow of his complexion is relieved by a crimson flush on the smooth cheeks. His black eyes glitter with an unaccustomed light. Mr. Pilgrim has dined more generously than usual at York, and has refreshed himself with soda and brandy more than once during the homeward journey. He is altogether a different man from that Joel Pilgrim who recoiled from Sibyl this morning, abashed by her coldness.

‘I saw the light in your window, my pretty one,’ he says, seating himself at the table where Sibyl is reading, and drawing his chair close to hers, ‘and I knew where to find you.’

‘Hadn’t you better go downstairs and order some supper, Mr. Pilgrim? It is nearly eleven o’clock, and the house will be going to bed almost immediately.’

‘Let the house go to Gehenna,’ exclaims Joel; ‘I want nothing it can give me. I only want to see your lovely eyes, Sibyl, to hear your sweet voice, and to claim the kiss you denied me this morning. Look here,’ taking a paper from his breast pocket; ‘the Archbishop of York has given me permission to make you my wife; the knot is to be tied next Saturday; in four days, Sibyl--only four days, you who have been so cruel, you who have held me aloof so long, will be all my own. Yes, Sibyl; you who have pretended to hate me----’

‘Pretended!’ cries Sibyl, with an angry flash from her dark eyes. ‘My hatred has been very real.’

‘I am glad of that. They say extremes meet. It will be an easy transition from hatred to love; both are fiery passions. It is your lukewarm indifference that can never be kindled into affection.’

‘Now is the time,’ thinks Sibyl, ‘if I am to make an appeal to his forbearance, his pity, his self-interest. I can but try him.’

‘Mr. Pilgrim,’ she begins falteringly.

‘What a formal mode of addressing your affianced lover--the man who has his marriage licence in his pocket!’

‘I can call you by no other name,’ she answers. ‘I am going to be more candid to-night than I have ever been. You may betray my confidence, perhaps ruin me with my uncle; I cannot help it. Between you, you have driven me to bay.’

‘Very cruel of us,’ murmurs Joel, leaning back in his chair and looking at her with an admiring smile. She is very lovely in her agitation; cheeks faintly flushed, eyes brilliant, parted lips of carnation. Her suffering moves him not a jot.

‘You have seen how I have striven to avoid you. You have put my avoidance down to hatred, and this perhaps has galled your pride--you have felt a natural anger against me, and you have resolved to win me in order to revenge yourself upon my insolence.’

‘A very subtle way of putting the case. No, Sibyl; I resolved to win you because you are lovely, and I love you. I need no stronger reasons than those two.’

‘You could not be determined to make me miserable unless I had provoked your anger. Forgive me for my seeming hatred of you; it was not really hatred of you, but love for another. My heart has long been given to another. I have pledged myself to be faithful to him to the end of my life, no matter what obstacles might intervene to keep us asunder. There are reasons why I can never tell my uncle of this engagement, reasons why I must keep it faithfully in spite of the world.’

‘No reason can stand against the archbishop’s licence, and the fact that you and I are to be married on Saturday,’ replies Joel, with the same insolent smile--the smile of a schemer who has brought his plot to a triumphant issue.

Sibyl has one argument still to offer. The strongest.

‘You tell me that my uncle has made a will in my favour, that he will leave me all his fortune,’ she says.

‘Yes, that is a settled thing. You heard him say that we were to have his wealth--you and I.’

‘I did. And we can share it. Share it honourably and equally, without the hateful tie which would bring us nothing but misery. Release me from this entanglement, Mr. Pilgrim. Tell my uncle that you would rather defer our marriage until you return from Calcutta. He is not likely to see that day. Do this, and I will pledge myself in any way that you may consider most binding. I will sign any document you choose to put before me, engaging myself to deliver over to you half my uncle’s fortune, whatever it may be, the day I become possessed of it.’

‘A very liberal and business-like offer,’ exclaims Joel, with a quiet sneer, which freezes all hope. It is so pitiless! ‘But I would rather have the pretty wife and the whole of the fortune, as by the existing arrangement I shall. Of course I shall knock off a handsome sum for pin-money. Your uncle hints that your tastes are somewhat extravagant, and Calcutta is not a place to teach economy. I shall not be a severe husband, and I shall like to see my wife the queen of taste and fashion.’

Sibyl sits with her hands clasped on the table before her, unhearing, unheeding. She has made her last appeal, and she might as usefully have made it to stone. There is nothing for her now but flight. Yes, one alternative. She may confess all to Stephen Trenchard--tell him that she has been an impostor--that she has duped him into giving her his affection--that the wealth he has bequeathed to her will be shared by the son of his unforgiven foe.

No hope lies that way. She has played her desperate game to the last, and she must throw up the cards.

Once resolved, courage and calmness return together. She glances at the Swiss toy clock on the chimney-piece.

‘Eleven o’clock, Mr. Pilgrim, and I am very tired. I really must wish you good night.’

She rises, gathers together her dainty fancy work, closes her book, and holds out her hand to Joel Pilgrim.

But there is more of his native sunshine in Mr. Pilgrim’s veins to-night than there was at noon to-day, and he is not to be satisfied with so cold a salutation from his affianced bride.

‘You refused me my kiss this morning, Sibyl. I must exercise my privilege to-night.’

His arm is round her, he tries to draw her towards him, but that slim form recoils from him as from something more hateful than death.

‘Do not touch me,’ exclaims Sibyl, in a voice that is scarcely above a whisper. ‘You cannot guess how much I would dare to escape such pollution. Look at this,’ taking a small glass phial from her pocket, and holding it up before him. ‘Do you know what this is? Sure and instant death. I would rather this should pass my lips than that your lips should touch them.’

‘I did not know you were a member of the Borgia family, or that such delightful customs prevailed among young ladies in England,’ says Mr. Pilgrim, letting her go, and contemplating her excited countenance with a gloomy look. ‘But perhaps you are only playing with me, and that bottle of yours contains one of those homœopathic preparations so fashionable now-a-days, a globule of poison diluted with a gallon of water.’

‘It contains prussic acid, which I took from my uncle’s surgery a few days ago, so that I might have one resource against all evils, even the horror of your touch.’

‘Not very complimentary to the man who is to be your husband next Saturday. Don’t be foolish, Sibyl. Give me that bottle, and let me throw it under the grate.’

‘No, you shall not take it from me,’ exclaims Sibyl, clenching her hand upon the phial, so tightly that it would need some exercise of Mr. Pilgrim’s brute force to take it from her.

‘Keep it then,’ he cries savagely. ‘Keep it, and reconcile yourself to all the evil it may do you. You are a heartless and unreasonable woman, and deserve to suffer for your folly. Keep your deadly poison, but remember your English proverb which tells you that it is dangerous to play with edged tools. And so good night, Miss Faunthorpe. I’m afraid I shall have a vixen for a wife, and get the worst of it in our domestic quarrels.’

Thus, with a sneer, he leaves her.

‘No resource,’ murmurs Sibyl, ‘none but flight--or--’ she looks at the little bottle, full of a colourless liquid--‘or this.’