The Parisian journals next day made a feature of the catastrophe. “Fall of part of a house in the Boulevard Louis Capet. Horrible death of one of the inmates.”
The English newspapers of a later date contained the account of the pursuit and arrest of Desrolles, his desperate resistance, and awful death.
Epilogue
Mr. and Mrs. Treverton went back to Hazlehurst Manor, and there was much rejoicing among their friends at John Treverton’s escape from the critical position in which the hazards of life had placed him. The subject was a painful one, and people, in their intercourse with John and Laura, touched upon it as lightly as possible. Those revelations about John Treverton’s first marriage, his Bohemian existence under an assumed name, his poverty, and so on, had created no small sensation among a community which rarely had anything more exciting to talk about than the state of the weather, or the appearance of the crops. People had talked their fill by the time Mr. and Mrs. Treverton came back, for they had spent a month at a Dorsetshire watering-place on their way home, for the benefit of Laura’s health, whereby the scandal was stale and almost worn threadbare when they arrived at the Manor House.
Only one event of any importance had happened during their absence. Edward Clare—the poet, the man who sauntered through life hand-in-hand with the muses, dwelling apart from common clay in a world of his own—had suddenly sickened of elegant leisure, and had started all at once for the Cape to learn ostrich farming, with the deliberate intention of settling for life in that distant land.
“An adventurous career will suit me, and I shall make money,” he told those few acquaintances to whom he condescended to explain his views. “My people are tired of seeing me lead an idle life. They have no faith in my future as a poet. Perhaps they are right. The rarest and finest of poets have made very little money. It is only charlatanism in literature that really pays. A man who can write down to the level of the herd commands an easy success. Herrick, if he were alive today, would not make a living by his pen.”
So Edward Clare departed from the haunts of his youth, and there was no one save his mother to regret him. The Vicar knew too well that John Treverton’s arrest was his son’s work, and treachery so base was a sin his honest heart could not forgive. He was glad that Edward had gone, and his secret prayer was that the young man might learn honesty as well as industry in his self-imposed exile.
To the exile himself anything was better than to see the man he had impotently striven to injure, happy and secure from all future malice. Weighed against that mortification the possible difficulties and hardships of the life to which he was going were as nothing to him.
The year wore on, and brought a new and strange gladness and a deep sense of responsibility to John Treverton. One balmy May morning his firstborn son opened his innocent blue eyes upon a bright young world, arrayed in all the glory of spring. The child was placed in his father’s arms by the good old Hazlehurst doctor, who had attended Jasper Treverton in his last illness.
“How proud my old friend would have been to see his family name in a fair way of being continued in the land for many a long year to come,” he said.
“Thank God all things have worked round well for us, at last,” answered John Treverton, gravely.
In the ripeness and splendour of August and harvest, when the heather was in bloom on the rolling moor, and the narrow streams were dried up by the fierceness of the sun, George Gerard came down to the Manor House to spend a brief holiday; and it happened, by a strange coincidence, that Laura had invited Celia Clare to stay with her at the same time. They all had a pleasant time in the peerless summer weather. There were picnics and excursions across the moor, with much exciting adventure, and some risk of losing oneself altogether in that sparsely populated world; and in all these adventures George and Celia had a knack of finding themselves abandoned by the other two—or perhaps it was they who went astray, though they always protested that it was Mr. and Mrs. Treverton who deserted them.
“I shouldn’t wonder if we came to a bad end, like the babes in the wood,” protested Celia.
“Imagine us existing on unripe blackberries for a week or so, and then lying resignedly down to die. I don’t believe a bit in the birds putting leaves over us. That’s a fable invented for the pantomime. Birds are a great deal too selfish. No one who had ever seen a pair of robins fight for a bit of bread would believe in those benevolent birds who buried the babes in the wood.”
Being occasionally lost on the moor gave Celia and Mr. Gerard great opportunities for conversation. They were obliged to find something to talk about; and in the end naturally told each other their inmost thoughts. And so it came about, in the most natural way in the world, that one blazing noontide Celia found herself standing before a Druidic table, gazing idly at the big gray stones half embedded in heather and bracken, with George Gerard’s arm round her waist, and with her head placidly resting against his shoulder.
He had been asking
