The Moon Rock by Arthur J. Rees (e novels to read TXT) 📗

not mean to listen,” she replied, flushing slightly. “I was going out to the cliffs—to the Moon Rock. I was very unhappy, and wanted to be alone with my thoughts. On my way past the door something my father was saying reached me. It concerned me. I did not take it in at first, or understand what it really meant. As I stood there, wondering, my eyes met my aunt’s through the opening in the door, and I saw her spring to her feet. I hurried away because I did not want to see her. I wanted to think over what I had just heard, to try and understand what it meant.

“I went down to the Moon Rock, and sat there, thinking and thinking. They were so strange and terrible, those words I had overheard, but they were so few that I did not really guess then all that they meant. All I knew was that there was some dreadful secret behind them, some secret of my mother’s which had something to do with me. I wished that I had heard more. As I sat there, wondering what I ought to do, you came—”

“To tell you that I loved you, that I shall love you as long as I live,” he interrupted eagerly.

Again a faint flush rose to her cheeks, but she hurried on: “I could not tell you that I loved you while those dreadful words of my father were ringing in my ears. I wanted to see him first, to question him, to know if I had partly guessed the truth, or if there was any loophole of escape for me. Oh, do not think any worse of me now if I tell you that I loved you then and shall always love you. I wanted to tell you so that day by the Moon Rock, but I knew that I must not.”

“Why not?” His louder voice broke in on her subdued tones impetuously. “You should not have sent me away, Sisily. That was wrong. It has brought much misery upon us both.”

“It was not wrong!” she replied, with unexpected firmness and a momentary hardness of glance, which reminded him of her father’s look. “It was because I was nobody—less than that, if what I thought was true. There was your position to think of. You were to come into the title—my father told me that before.”

“Damn the title!” the young man burst out furiously. “I told you that day I would have nothing to do with it. Why did you think about that?”

“Because I’ve heard of nothing else all my life, I suppose,” she rejoined with the ghost of a smile. “I couldn’t tell you then that I loved you, because of it, and other things. Now, it is different. It does not matter what I say—now.” She spoke these words with an underlying note of deep sadness, and went on: “When you told me that you loved me I saw my duty plainly. I knew I must go away and hide myself from you, from everybody, go somewhere where nobody knew me, where I would never be known. But I wanted to see my father first, to make sure.”

“I understand,” he muttered in a dull voice.

“I thought it all out on the way to the hotel with my aunt. I determined to go back and see my father that night. I felt that I could not sleep until I knew the whole truth. I left the dinner table as soon as I could, and hurried down to the station to catch the half-past seven wagonette to St. Fair.

“I got out of the wagonette at the cross-roads, and walked over the moors. When I reached Flint House I knocked at the door, and Thalassa let me in. I told him I wanted to see my father, and he said he would wait downstairs and take me back across the moors when I came down.

“I ran upstairs and knocked at the door of my father’s study. He did not reply, so I opened the door and went in. He was sitting at his table writing, and when he looked up and saw me he was very angry. ‘You, Sisily!’ he said—‘what has brought you here at this hour?’ I told him I had come to hear the truth from his own lips. I asked him to tell me everything. He gave me one of his black looks, but it did not frighten me—nothing would have frightened me then. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then said that perhaps, after all, it would be better if he told me himself.

“So he told me—told me in half-a-dozen sentences which seemed to burn into my brain. I sat still for a while, almost stunned, I think; then, as the full force of what he had told me came home to my mind, I did something I had never done before. I pleaded with my father—not for my own sake, but for my mother’s. I told him I would go anywhere, do anything, if he would only keep her secret safe. I might as well have pleaded with the rocks. He sat there with a stern face until I went down on my knees to him and begged him to think about it—to keep it secret for a little while at least. He grew angry, very angry, at that. I remember—I shall never be able to forget—his reply. ‘A little while?’ he said, ‘and the claim for the title is to be heard next week. I’m to postpone my claim for the sake of your mother, a ——’”

Sisily broke off suddenly, her white face flaming scarlet, her eyes widely distended, as though that last terrible scene was again produced before her vision. Charles Turold watched her mutely, with the understanding that nothing he could say would bring comfort to her stricken soul.

She continued after a pause—

“I left him then. I knew that I should never be able to speak to him again. Downstairs, Thalassa was waiting for me. He had a letter in his hand. He looked at me, but did not speak, just opened the door, and we went out across the moors. We went silently. Thalassa was always kind to me, and I think that somehow he understood. It was not until we were nearing the cross-roads that I turned to him and said quickly, ‘Thalassa, you must not tell anybody that I saw my father tonight.’ I wanted to keep it secret, I wanted nobody to know—never. I knew my father would not talk, it was not of sufficient consequence to him. He thought of nothing but the title. Thalassa promised that he wouldn’t. ‘Nobody will ever find out from me, Miss Sisily,’ he said.

“Thalassa went back, across the moors, and I waited by the cross-roads till the wagonette came. When I got back to the hotel I went up to my room and to bed. I do not know what time it was next morning when my aunt came into my room, and told me that my father was dead. She did not tell me much. There had been a terrible accident, she said, and he had been found dead in his room. I did not feel shocked, only … indifferent. I did not even wonder what had happened—not then. Afterwards I overheard one of the maids in the corridor telling another that it was suicide.

“That made no difference to me, except that I wanted more than ever to get away. I formed my plans quickly, to go to London that day, but not by the express. I knew my aunt would not go back that morning after what had happened, but I thought her husband might have to go on business. And the express is always crowded. I did not wish to be seen and brought back. So I decided the slow midday train would be safest for me. I waited for a time, and then I was able to slip away from the hotel without being noticed, while my aunt was out. I got to London that night, feeling lonely and miserable. I knew I had done right, but I could not help thinking … of you.”

She ceased. Charles Turold got up from his seat and took a turn round the room, then came back and stood looking down at her as she sat with her hand resting on the dark polished surface of the table. His first words seemed to convey some inward doubt of the adequacy of the motive for disappearance which her story revealed.

“You should not have gone away like that, Sisily,” he said soberly. “There was no reason, no real reason, I mean. Where was the necessity, after what I told you? Why should your father’s death have made you more anxious to go? It seems to me that you had no reason then.”

She looked at him sadly in her first experience of masculine incomprehension of woman’s exaltation of sacrifice in love, but she did not speak. He continued. “But we must think of what’s to be done.” He walked up and down the room again, considering this question with compressed brows. He stopped, struck by a thought, and looked at her. “The police have been trying to find out from Thalassa whether you went back to Flint House that night, but he will not tell them anything. So they suspect him also.”

She roused at that. “Oh, they must not!” she cried in distress. “Poor Thalassa! He must tell them the truth.”

“The question is—what is the truth?” It flashed through his mind as he spoke that his interrogation was the echo of one put to him by his father before he left Cornwall.

“The truth is, that Thalassa and I left the house together that night before it happened. Oh, cannot they believe that? Cannot it be proved?”

“I could tell them when you left,” he said in a low tone.

“You!” she cried, looking at him with a kind of fear. “How do you know?”

“Because I saw you. I was standing outside, close to the house.”

“Why were you there?” she put in quickly.

He was slower in answering. “I had gone to see your father—about you. I was standing there, thinking … waiting, when the front door opened, and you and Thalassa came out. I was surprised to see you, but it seemed to me an opportunity—a final chance—to speak to you again. I started after you, Sisily, once more to ask you to consider my love for you, but you and Thalassa were swallowed up in the darkness of the moors before I could reach you. I followed with the intention of overtaking you, but I got lost on the moors instead, and was wandering about in the blackness for nearly half an hour before I found my way back to Flint House again.”

“Could you not tell them—the police—that?” she asked, a little wistfully.

“It would be useless,” he solemnly replied.

“What do you mean?” she said breathlessly.

His rejoinder was a long time in coming. When his set lips moved the words were barely audible. “Because I would not be believed. Because I went straight up the path to the house, determined to see your father before it grew later. The front door was open, and the house seemed in complete darkness. I entered, and went upstairs. There was a light in your father’s study. I found your father—dead.” He fixed care-worn eyes upon her. “That story sounds incredible, even to you, doesn’t it? But—”

“Oh!” That startled cry seemed wrung from her involuntarily. Then, swiftly, as if her mind had detached itself to look on her own actions that night through his eyes: “You thought, you believed that I—” She checked herself, but her look completed the thought.

“I did not know what to think, but I did not think—that,” he gloomily rejoined. “Afterwards, the next night, I found out something which made me think—” He paused.

“Yes, yes, tell me what you thought,” she said nervously.

“I thought it was Thalassa.”

She shook her head.

“Who was it then? The latest theory of the police is that I had something to do with it. They’re looking for both of us. They must have found out that I was at Flint House that night. It’s too late to tell them the truth now, not that they were likely to have believed me at any time. Why, my own father believes that I did this thing.” He laughed discordantly. “I tried to convince your father’s lawyer of your innocence, and I might have told him the truth if he had been sympathetic. I don’t know, though,” he added anxiously. “I had to consider your position all along. If my story was disbelieved it only made it worse for you. If it was not Thalassa,