The Devil in a Domino by Chas L'Epine

Author:Chas L'Epine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX.

AND now, strangely enough, in the spring that followed, when all the world was bright, and young life answered to young life with throbbing veins and joyous heart, Marianne’s love rose again supremely towards her husband, and she wooed and won him a second time.

The news of the murder, and the fact of its locality, had at the moment given her an uneasy shock, but Aleck’s subsequent action in the matter, the humane and honourable light in which she saw him represented and heard him spoken of, swept the seeds of suspicion from her “one-folded” and infatuated mind, and as the days rolled on, and the effects of that fateful night when she had dogged him more and more declined, she, too, forgot that yellow-haired and mutilated woman, and felt, with the youth about her, her own youth and her love renewed.

“This barrier between us is perfectly absurd,” she said to her tried friend, Madame. “Are we both to live for ever apart when we love each other? I was content when I had deluded myself into believing there might be some cause for it into which I had better not enquire; but now I am sure it is all a misunderstanding. Aleck is morbidly inclined, and over-sensitive, and my behaviour has foolishly encouraged him. Whatever he may do, it has the sanction and approval of science, and I shall be a fool to let science be a successful rival any longer. Besides, my lonely life is insupportable: I begin to see ghosts, and commit murder in my sleep.”

Carried away by her new enthusiasm, Marianne forgot many things which ought to have retained their significance, and Madame, though she had heard of most of them, had not the heart to damp her new beauty and her ardour. She bade her follow the dictates of her mood. And so the yellow moon of the daffodil month, the dust of whose days is precious, smiled down upon the young wife’s second honeymoon.

Aleck was not difficult to win; like many warped and introspective brains he could act strongly in suppositious cases. He could resist temptation as he presented it to himself; he could scarcely refrain when it came to him powerfully in “objective” fashion.

Though the paradoxically successful failure of his first experiment had fearfully developed his bent, he still secretly adored his wife, and in the period of inactivity and re-action that followed the murder he was just in the mood to very willingly yield to the renewed tender of her love.

Had she remained aloof, the most sacred part of his feelings for her would have kept him a stranger to her till the end; but now he silenced his own arguments with his own crime, and when she gathered him in her arms, and vowed that nothing so commonplace as science should estrange them any more, he answered with a closer clasp, and long unused words of love.

“Only you might have trusted me, Aleck,” she murmured. “You tell me you are

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