At half-past eight precisely, Mr. Sampson presented himself at the Manor House, and was shown into the library. This room was rarely used, as Mr. and Mrs. Treverton kept all their favourite books elsewhere. Here, on these massive oaken shelves, there was no literature that was not at least a century old. It was a repository for the genius of the dead. Travels, from Marco Polo to Captain Cook; histories, from Herodotus to Mrs. Catherine Macaulay; poetry, from Chaucer to Milton; all bound in soberest brown calf, all with the dust of years thick upon their upper edges. It was a long, narrow room, with three tall windows, curtained with faded crimson cloth. It had an awful and almost judicial look on this Sunday evening, dimly lighted by a pair of moderator lamps on the centre table, making a focus of light in the middle of the room, and leaving the corners in darkness. There was a good fire in the wide old basket-shaped grate, and Tom Sampson sat beside it, waiting for his host to appear. Trimmer had told him that Mr. Treverton would be with him presently.
Presently seemed to mean half an hour, for the clock struck nine while Mr. Sampson still waited. Not having any inclination to dip into the literature of the past, he had allowed the fire to draw him to sleep, and was slumbering placidly when the door opened and Trimmer announced Mr. Clare.
Tom Sampson started up, and rubbed his eyes, thinking for the moment that he had fallen asleep by the fire in his snuggery, and that Eliza had come to call him to supper—supper being another of those solaces which Mr. Sampson required to beguile the dullness of Sunday leisure.
The Vicar was surprised to see Mr. Sampson, and Mr. Sampson was equally surprised to see the Vicar. They told each other how they had been summoned.
“It must be something rather important,” said Mr. Clare.
“It must be something connected with the estate, or he would scarcely want you and me,” said Sampson.
John Treverton and his wife entered the room together. Both were very pale, but Laura’s countenance wore a look of keen distress, which had no part in the expression of her husband’s face. Secure of his wife’s allegiance, he was ready to meet calamity, whatever shape it might assume.
“Mr. Clare, Mr. Sampson, I have sent for you as the trustees under my cousin Jasper’s will,” he began, when he had apologised to the lawyer for letting him wait so long, and had placed Laura in a chair near the fire.
“That’s a misnomer,” said Sampson. “Our trusts under Jasper Treverton’s will determined on your wedding day. We are only trustees to the settlement made for Miss Malcolm’s benefit, sixteen years ago, and to your wife’s marriage settlement.”
“I have sent for you to tell you that I have been guilty of a fraud upon you, and upon this lady,” answered John Treverton, in a steady voice.
He was going on with his self-denunciation, when the door opened, and Trimmer announced Mr. Edward Clare.
The young man came into the room quickly, looking round him with a swift, viperish glance. He was surprised to see Laura, still more surprised at the presence of Tom Sampson. He had expected to find his father and Treverton alone.
John Treverton looked at the intruder with undisguised irritation.
“This is an unexpected pleasure,” he said, “but perhaps when I tell you that your father and Mr. Sampson are here to discuss a business of some importance to me—and to them as my wife’s trustees—you’ll be kind enough to amuse yourself in the drawing-room until we’ve finished our conversation.”
“I have come to speak to Mrs. Treverton. I have something to say to her which she ought to hear—which she must hear—and that without an hour’s delay,” said Edward. “Accident has made me acquainted with a secret which concerns her and her welfare—and I am here to communicate it to her, and—in the first instance—to her alone. It will be for her to act upon that knowledge—for me to defer to her.”
“If your secret concerns me, it must concern my husband also,” said Laura, rising and taking her stand beside John Treverton. “Whatever touches my happiness must involve his. You can speak out, Edward. Possibly your fancied secret is no secret.”
“What do you mean?” stammered Edward, startled by her calm look and resolute tone.
“Have you come to tell me that my husband, John Treverton, was for a short period of his life known by the name of Chicot?”
“Yes, that, and much else,” answered Edward, deeply mortified at finding himself forestalled.
“You wish to tell me, perhaps, that he has been suspected of murder.”
“So strongly suspected, and upon such evidence, that it will need all your wifely trustfulness to believe him innocent,” retorted Edward, with a malignant sneer.
“Yet I do believe in his innocence—I am as certain of it as I am that I myself am no murderess—and if the evidence against him were doubly strong, my trust in him would not fail,” said Laura, facing the accuser proudly.
“And now, Mr. Clare, since you find that your secret is everybody’s secret, and that my wife knows all you can tell her about me—”
“Your wife,” sneered Edward. “Yes, it is as well to call her by that name.”
“She is my wife—bound to me as securely as the law and the church can bind her.”
“You had another wife living when you married her—unless you have been remarried since your first wife’s death—”
“We have been so married. My wife was never mine, save in name, until I was a free man—free to claim her before God and the world.”
“Then your first marriage was a deliberate felony, and a deliberate fraud,” cried Edward, “a felony because it was a bigamous marriage, for which the law of the land could punish you, even now; a fraud because by it you pretended to fulfil the conditions of your cousin’s will, when you were not in a position to comply with
