'Every word I now speak, sir, is of serious consequence to you and to me,' she said. 'Listen with your closest attention. When the woman calling herself Miss Garth came to see us in Vauxhall Walk, I knelt down behind the chair in which she was sitting and I cut a morsel of stuff from the dress she wore, which might help me to know that dress if I ever saw it again. I did this while the woman's whole attention was absorbed in talking to you. The morsel of stuff has been kept in my pocketbook from that time to this. See for yourself, Mr. Noel, if it fits the gap in that dress which your own hands have just taken from your wife's wardrobe.'
She rose and handed him the fragment of stuff across the bed. He put it into the vacant space in the flounce as well as his trembling fingers would let him.
'Does it fit, sir?' asked Mrs. Lecount.
The dress dropped from his hands, and the deadly bluish pallor—which every doctor who attended him had warned his housekeeper to dread—overspread his face slowly. Mrs. Lecount had not reckoned on such an answer to her question as she now saw in his cheeks. She hurried round to him, with the smelling-bottle in her hand. He dropped to his knees and caught at her dress with the grasp of a drowning man. 'Save me!' he gasped, in a hoarse, breathless whisper. 'Oh, Lecount, save me!'
'I promise to save you,' said Mrs. Lecount; 'I am here with the means and the resolution to save you. Come away from this place—come nearer to the air.' She raised him as she spoke, and led him across the room to the window. 'Do you feel the chill pain again on your left side?' she asked, with the first signs of alarm that she had shown yet. 'Has your wife got any eau-de-cologne, any sal-volatile in her room? Don't exhaust yourself by speaking—point to the place!'
He pointed to a little triangular cupboard of old worm-eaten walnut-wood fixed high in a corner of the room. Mrs. Lecount tried the door: it was locked.
As she made that discovery, she saw his head sink back gradually on the easy-chair in which she had placed him. The warning of the doctors in past years—'If you ever let him faint, you let him die'—recurred to her memory as if it had been spoken the day before. She looked at the cupboard again. In a recess under it lay some ends of cord, placed there apparently for purposes of packing. Without an instant's hesitation, she snatched up a morsel of cord, tied one end fast round the knob of the cupboard door, and seizing the other end in both hands, pulled it suddenly with the exertion of her whole strength. The rotten wood gave way, the cupboard doors flew open, and a heap of little trifles poured out noisily on the floor. Without stopping to notice the broken china and glass at her feet, she looked into the dark recesses of the cupboard and saw the gleam of two glass bottles. One was put away at the extreme back of the shelf, the other was a little in advance, almost hiding it. She snatched them both out at once, and took them, one in each hand, to the window, where she could read their labels in the clearer light.
The bottle in her right hand was the first bottle she looked at. It was marked—
She instantly laid the other bottle aside on the table without looking at it. The other bottle lay there, waiting its turn. It held a dark liquid, and it was labeled—POISON.
CHAPTER II.
MRS. LECOUNT mixed the sal-volatile with water, and administered it immediately. The stimulant had its effect. In a few minutes Noel Vanstone was able to raise himself in the chair without assistance; his color changed again for the better, and his breath came and went more freely.
'How do you feel now, sir?' asked Mrs. Lecount. 'Are you warm again on your left side?'
He paid no attention to that inquiry; his eyes, wandering about the room, turned by chance toward the table. To Mrs. Lecount's surprise, instead of answering her, he bent forward in his chair, and looked with staring eyes and pointing hand at the second bottle which she had taken from the cupboard, and which she had hastily laid aside without paying attention to it. Seeing that some new alarm possessed him, she advanced to the table, and looked where he looked. The labeled side of the bottle was full in view; and there, in the plain handwriting of the chemist at Aldborough, was the one startling word confronting them both—'Poison.'
Even Mrs. Lecount's self-possession was shaken by that discovery. She was not prepared to see her own darkest forebodings—the unacknowledged offspring of her hatred for Magdalen—realized as she saw them realized now. The suicide-despair in which the poison had been procured; the suicide-purpose for which, in distrust of the future, the poison had been kept, had brought with them their own retribution. There the bottle lay, in Magdalen's absence, a false witness of treason which had never entered her mind—treason against her husband's life!
With his hand still mechanically pointing at the table Noel Vanstone raised his head and looked up at Mrs. Lecount.
'I took it from the cupboard,' she said, answering the look. 'I took both bottles out together, not knowing which might be the bottle I wanted. I am as much shocked, as much frightened, as you are.'
'Poison!' he said to himself, slowly. 'Poison locked up by my wife in the cupboard in her own room.' He stopped, and looked at Mrs. Lecount once more. 'For
'We will not talk of it, sir, until your mind is more at ease,' said Mrs. Lecount. 'In the meantime, the danger that lies waiting in this bottle shall be instantly destroyed in your presence.' She took out the cork, and threw the laudanum out of window, and the empty bottle after it. 'Let us try to forget this dreadful discovery for the present,' she resumed; 'let us go downstairs at once. All that I have now to say to you can be said in another room.'
She helped him to rise from the chair, and took his arm in her own. 'It is well for him; it is well for me,' she thought, as they went downstairs together, 'that I came when I did.'
On crossing the passage, she stepped to the front door, where the carriage was waiting which had brought her from Dumfries, and instructed the coachman to put up his horses at the nearest inn, and to call again for her in two hours' time. This done, she accompanied Noel Vanstone into the sitting-room, stirred up the fire, and placed him before it comfortably in an easy-chair. He sat for a few minutes, warming his hands feebly like an old man, and staring straight into the flame. Then he spoke.
'When the woman came and threatened me in Vauxhall Walk,' he began, still staring into the fire, 'you came back to the parlor after she was gone, and you told me—?' He stopped, shivered a little, and lost the thread of his recollections at that point.
'I told you, sir,' said Mrs. Lecount, 'that the woman was, in my opinion, Miss Vanstone herself. Don't start, Mr. Noel! Your wife is away, and I am here to take care of you. Say to yourself, if you feel frightened, 'Lecount is here; Lecount will take care of me.' The truth must be told, sir, however hard to bear the truth may be. Miss Magdalen
