A Long Martyrdom.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 253, 23 October 1905, Page 6

A Long Martyrdom.

) By CHAKIXS W. KAEKAWA*, Antfcor of "A Bash -Vow," "Love's Guiding Hand," "Maijexie , ! Sweetieart," "Joseph Dane's Diplomacy/ 3 etc, «U.

CHAPTER TVXT. IX A DESPERATE STRAIT. Sabine looked at his visitor, and | again that pang of ft?a.r—moral fear, he ' was no physical coward—went through hinL j "My indictment/ he said, then, "is soon made. I want to know, I have a right to know, what is the. understanding between you and Alma Dene? Are you ber lover V ''No," implied Esmond quietly; 'Taut you have t<; thank mc, not her, that 1 am not She is quite ready top'ay you false for mc, as she played her husband, Herbert Dene, false for you!" i Sir Leicester sprang to Uis feet. His ■ face was livid. ' j "Its a lie!" he began, fiercely. j "Sit down," said the other, with stern : contempt, "and hear mc out; and, if you are wise, attempt no violence. I am armed, and not too scrupulous with such men as you—" "Traitor!" Sabine muttered between his teeth. . He dropped into the chair; a horrible sense of being betrayed and undone swept over him. '"Traitor?" repeated Esmond; "feratov to you?—to Alma Dene? Fools, both you and she, to be tricked and deceived. What had either of you to expect'at my hands t You, ruffian and coward, who deliberately ftung j-our wife in my way, that I might give you grounds for a divorce;- she, who never once held her hand, but, for her own base ends, urged you on in your disgraceful plans. Yet you believed that I could be to you bon eamarade, if not friend; she, that 1 could be her lover. I fooled you both, but it was for your \rife 5 3 sake, to dear her name from the black stain cast upon it, by proving that Eustace Carew was guiltless of the murder of Herbert Dent?, the victim of a vile conspiracy between you and Alma j Dene to shelter the real assassin— Dene's own wife!" . Once more Sabine sprang to his feet. "What do you mean?" he cried, hoarsely. "What can it be to you or to Vera whether Eustace Carew can be guilty or not ?" "What is it to her and to mc?" said Esmond. "The man your wife met in the woods, with whom she was absent oue night from your house, for whose sake she has endured a woman's most cruel martyrdom, the loss of her fair name, is Eustace Carew; and Eustace Carew is her father!" "Her father!" The two words fell from Sabine's lips in a whisper, and then he stood staring blankly at Vivian Esmond. He was utterly stunned by all that those words meant for him. He put up his hand vaguely to his forehead, then sank into a chair once more. "Go on!" he said, after a pause, "I can understand her now. Her father!" '*0f course," Esmond went on, speaking and quietly, as he had done all through, "that fact entirely nullifies the judgment of the divorce court. There will be no sort of difficulty in proving the fact that I have stated. Hundreds of witnesses, at home and abroad, can prove that Vera Bertram is Vera Carew; it was her father whose escape she aided the second time, as, in the guise of a nun, she had done the fiTst; the judgment will be quashed, your wife's name cleared." Sabine was silent. How much did Esmond know that he spoke thus confidently of a future in" which Eustace Carew must play the part of a free man? "Go on," he said, in a kind of desperate way, as Vivian paused; "'let mc hear it all." "2so matter when or how," , Esmond continued, "I suspected that the crime for which Carew suffers lay between you and Alma Dene. Enough for you that I did suspect, and set to work to follow out the lines of my suspicions. By'playing the expectant lover to Alma I wrung from her, one day, the inadvertent admission that she had known you in her husband's lifetime. "I traced the knife, which was found in the shrubbery at the Rosery, to you! Sit down! hear mc out. You bought it of Sylvain Marcel, now a curio dealer in Soao; then in., Paris. He identified the knife at Scotland Yard. He identified you at the theatre. "My next point was to gain the torn fragment of that letter which Alma Dene swore she sent to Eustace Carew, but which I was convinced was written to you; and that torn fragment you would have kept. "To that end I made friends with you. Your face anticipates mc, Sir Leicester. You know what I am going to say; that I have the fragment now in my possession—" In the mad instinct of sheer desperation Sabine sprang up, and tried to fling himself on his enemy; but Esmond, quick of eye and hand, caught him, and forced him back into "the chair, and in the same instant drew out the pistol. "Don't be a fool!" he said, with a coolness in curious contrast to toe other's frantic excitement. "You are in my power, checkmated at every turn, and the only thing you can do is to submit jto my terms. How did I gain possession of the paper? Easily. 1 discovered from your wife the three most likely places for you to have hidden the paper. Twice I drugged you; the first time to take impressions of the locks, the second time to search the cabinets with the false keys I had made. I found the scrap rather dever ly concealed in the cabinet in your dressing room." "Curse you!" said Sabine, scarcely articulate with fury and terror, for he saw the gulf at his feet. Curse you and your—" The word was never uttered, for Esmond's hand struck him across the 'mouth. n "Stop there!" said Vivian, with a passion that made the other's rage seem poor and puny, "or TU kiß you!" For a minute the two men faced each other; Sabiae with bloodshot eyes, his lip bleeding from the blow, bis breath rising and falling in heavy gasps; Vivian stern, resohite, white as ashes with the fierce passion he was crushing down; he must do no deadly violence to Vera's husband. Esmond spoke first.

"Toa are in a desperate strait. Sir Leicester, and votir only ebanee to esape a charge of murder is to make '■nil written confession, here, in my pre;enee, of the truth. Even then you vill be charged with conspiracy: there's 10 escaping that. r: The drops stood in beads upon Sajine*s brow; he sank into the chair tgain; he had plenty of brute courage. )ut no moral force to meet calamity, md a braver spirit might well ccrwer )eforr: tLe fate that had come upon him. i was simple destruction; the heavy ejral punishment for such a dime as iis was, in a war. the least part of it —it was social extinction —utter, hopees3 degradation. But after a few moments he rallied a ittle. and, stretching a shaking hand :oward a wine* bottle that stood near, x>ured out a tumbler full and drank it it a draught. "I laid no hand on Herbert Dene," he said, then. "Why should 1 commit a lseiess crime? He was smaller and weaker than I —l could have hurled him X) the ground with perfect ease. I did ny best to save Ahna. and Oarew's ; olly played into our hands. That mile I bought—there's no use in denying anything ' now; I gave it to Alma ,hree months before that night. I went ;o the house at the time she named. 1 whs near the open window of her bouJoir when I heard a loud, angry man's roiee, threatening; then there was a scuffle, a sort of gasping cry, and something fe'l heavily. I sprang forward then, and saw Alma standing, with the knife in her hand, and her husband lying across the threshold; he was quite dead. He had been suspicious of her, had come home unexpectedly, and upbraided her furiously, declaring he would divorce her; she "was mad with rage, and in terror every moment of my coming; she seized the "knife, which was in the drawer of a small table, and stabbed him. Then, to screen her, 1 helped her to hide the crime. We carried Dene out into the shrubbery, threw the knife among the bushes, and 1 tore off the tipper part of the letter so that she could swear it was written to Carew. You can't prove it murder." He had spoken in a dull, hopeless land of wav, so much unlike any manner of his that Esmond had ever seen, that he might have been another man. When he had finished he poured out more wine, and drank it off in the same way as fore. Esmond said quietly: "All that you have told mc must be written, as briefly as you choose. You might Tetract every word in evidence. - ' A curious gleam, which Esmond did not see, for Sabine's head wae bent down, flashed into Sir Leicester's eves. He an-

s wered: "Very well; I'm down, and you've got

tout foot on mc. Give mc paper and pen. As for Alma, let her suffer; she

would have played mc false!" Esmond placed paper and pen before Sabine, and, while the latter wrote, he went and stood by the mantelpiece. So passed ten minutes of a terrible silence, broken only by the soundof the pen, and once or twice by the roll of some vehicle

in the road. Then Sabine dropped th< pen. "There," he said, and again be poure< out wine and drank. Esmond took uj the paper, read it rapidly through, and folding it, up, put it in his breast pocket Then he turned to the door. Sir Leiees ter half started up, but dropped dowi

again. "What are you going to do?" he said, huskily. "To summon a policeman and hare you placed under arrest, Sir Leicester." "Very well; 1 don't care what you do now." Esmond made no answer to thi.3; he went out, locking the door on the outer side, and, leaving the hall door ajar, went into the road. He had to walk some little distance townward before he met a policeman, to whom he briefly explained his business, and the two turned back together. Esmond pushed open the house door and closed it behind them. "This way," he said, crossing the hall. He opened the library door, the policeman following; but Esmond staggered back with a smothered cry. Leicester Sabine lay full length on the Door, his arms flung out; by his side, as he had dropped it in falling, was a small revolver. "Bring the light eloee," Vivian said hoarsely; and, kneeling down, he tore upon the shirt, dyed with blood, of the prostrate man; the blood was still welling from a wound just over the heart. Leicester Sabine had done his work well. "He's dead, sir," said the policeman. Yes, Esmond knew it; yet he tried to staunch the bleeding, and, though he was outwardly calm and self-possessed, be was inwardly quivering like a girl. "Help mc to place him on the couch," he said, "and then go for a doctor; PII stay here. The servants are all in bed. You know Dr. Barnes, close by?" "Yes, sir." The policeman went out quickly, and Esmond was left alone with the dead man, who, "with all his sins upon his head," had passed through the gate of suicide into the Silent Land. What he thought or felt during that terrible watdx Vivian could never clearly remember; a sense there was of guilt in himself, . which in calmer moments he knew to be unjust; he had acted for justice, not revenge, and had he dreamed of this result he would have taken means to prevent it; but though he felt—only vaguely just now— how far better this ending was for Vera, how it freed her from a horrible bondage, strangely there was no thought of what that freedom meant for him. Hie brain was, in a measure, stunned; he

scarcely could realise that Leicester Sabiiie was dead. \ It was but a few minutes, scarcely ten, before the policeman came back with Dr. Barnes. But, as Esmond knew, there was nothing to be done; and the doctor shortly left the house. Then, while an inspector was fetched, Esmond went and roused Sir Leicester's valet, and another of the men servants, in whose care their dead master was left, and Esmond attended the inspector, who took down his brief disposition ajid the particulars. It was nearly fire o'clock in the morning before Vivian took his way homeward. He walked, for be felt the need of the air. -which to him was only cool I and refreshing; he was profoundly agi-; tated; to-night's experience had been a ( sort of climax to a long period of living j ( at hign pressure; but his work was by no . means ended; besides all that lay in the near future concerning the charge' against Alma Dene, and the action in the divorce court, there was the immediate necessity of breaking to Vera what .had happened. She must not hear it

first from careless lips, or the chance cry of some passing newsboy. But that ~" he himself should have to tell her! It ■was then-that it came to Vivian Esmond ■with a shock that now -was of something like horror—that the barrier between his life Tind Vera's was broken down! She was free! He reached his chambers in Piccadilly, and passed up to his sitting room; as he laid his hand on the knob, a half-open door near waa pushed open, and his valet, partially dressed, came oat. "I've been sitting up for you, sir." be said. "There's a letter for you on the table, sir. I was rung up an hour ag-o by the man who brought it: he said it was life and death—but 1 didn't know j where you were, sir." "Life and death!" , Esmond was in the room, with but one thought. "Edgar!", ! and the letter was in his liand. Yes. i iVera's writing; only a hastily scrawled J line: "Come at once. Edgar is dying." An hour ago! and he might be ioo J late. ' I Without a word he turned back, i i -sprang downstairs, and out into the j street. There was a hansom in sight; ihe hailed it, and sprang in. ; u No. Greek-street, Soho, : * he said; i "and drive for your life. You shall be j well paid." j And the cab went off like a whirlwind. (To be continued daily.}