The Bishop's Secret Part 43

'There is no need for you to do so, Pendle. I know your secret.'

The bishop twisted his chair round with a rapid movement and stared at the sympathetic face of Graham with an expression of blended terror and amazement. Hardly could his tongue frame itself to speech.

'You--know--my--secret!' stuttered Pendle, with pale lips.

'Yes, I know that Krant did not die at Sedan as we supposed. I know that he returned to life--to Beorminster--to you, under the name of Jentham!

Hold up, man! don't give way,' for the bishop, with a heavy sigh, had fallen forward on his desk, and, with his grey head buried in his arms, lay there silent and broken down in an agony of doubt, and fear and shame.

'Play the man, George Pendle,' said Graham, who knew that the father was more virile than the son, and therefore needed the tonic of words rather than the soothing anodyne of medicine. 'If you believe in what you preach, if you are a true servant of your G.o.d, call upon religion, upon your Deity, for help to bear your troubles. Stand up manfully, my friend, and face the worst!'

'Alas! alas! many waters have gone over me, Graham.'

'Can you expect anything else if you permit yourself to sink without an effort?' said the doctor, rather cynically; 'but if you cannot gain strength from Christianity, then be a Stoic, and independent of supernatural aid.'

The bishop lifted his head and suddenly rose to his full height, until he towered above the little doctor. His pale face took upon itself a calmer expression, and stretching out his arm, he rolled forth a text from the Psalms in his deepest voice, in his most stately manner: 'In G.o.d is my salvation and my glory, the rock of my strength, and my refuge is in G.o.d.'

'Good!' said Graham, with a satisfied nod; 'that is the proper spirit in which to meet trouble. And now, Pendle, with your leave, we will approach the subject with more particularity.'

'It will be as well,' replied the bishop, and he spoke collectedly and gravely, with no trace of his late excitement. When he most needed it, strength had come to him from above; and he was able to discuss the sore matter of his domestic troubles with courage and with judgment.

'How did you learn my secret, Graham?' he asked, after a pause.

'Indirectly from Gabriel.'

'Gabriel,' said the bishop, trembling, 'is at Nauheim!'

'You are mistaken, Pendle. He returned to Beorminster this morning, and as he was afraid to speak to you on the subject of Jentham, he came to ask my advice. The poor lad is broken down and ill, and is now lying in my consulting-room until I return.'

'How did Gabriel learn the truth?' asked Pendle, with a look of pain.

'From something his mother said.'

The bishop, in spite of his enforced calmness, groaned aloud. 'Does she know of it?' he murmured, while drops of perspiration beaded his forehead and betrayed his inward agony. 'Could not that shame be spared me?' 'Do not be hasty, Pendle, your wife knows nothing.'

'Thank G.o.d!' said the bishop, fervently; then added, almost immediately, 'You say my wife. Alas! alas! that I dare not call her so.'

'It is true, then?' asked Graham, becoming very pale.

'Perfectly true. Krant was not killed. Krant returned here under the name of Jentham. My wife is not my wife! My children are illegitimate; they have no name; outcasts they are. Oh, the shame! Oh, the disgrace!'

and Dr Pendle groaned aloud.

Graham sympathised with the man's distress, which was surely natural under the terrible calamity which had befallen him and his. George Pendle was a priest, a prelate, but he was also a son of Adam, and liable, like all mortals, the strongest as the weakest, to moments of doubt, of fear, of trembling, of utter dismay. Had the evil come upon him alone, he might have borne it with more patience, but when it parted him from his dearly-loved wife, when it made outcasts of the children he was so proud of, who can wonder that he should feel inclined to cry with Job, 'Is it good unto Thee that Thou should'st oppress!' Nevertheless, like Job, the bishop held fast his integrity.

Yet that he might have some comfort in his affliction, that one pang might be spared to him, Graham a.s.sured him that Mrs Pendle was ignorant of the truth, and related in full the story of how Gabriel had come to connect Jentham with Krant. Pendle listened in silence, and inwardly thanked G.o.d that at least so much mercy had been vouchsafed him. Then in his turn he made a confidant of his old friend, recalled the early days of his courts.h.i.+p and marriage, spoke of the long interval of peace and quiet happiness which he and his wife had enjoyed, and ended with a detailed account of the disguised Krant's visit and threats, and the anguish his re-appearance had caused.

'You remember, Graham!' he said, with wonderful self-control, 'how almost thirty years ago I was the Vicar of St Benedict's in Marylebone, and how you, my old college friend, practised medicine in the same parish.'

'I remember, Pendle; there is no need for you to make your heart ache by recalling the past.'

'I must, my friend,' said the bishop, firmly, 'in order that you may fully understand my position. As you know, my dear wife--for I still must call her so--came to reside there under her married name of Mrs Krant. She was poor and unhappy, and when I called upon her, as the vicar of the parish, she told me her miserable story. How she had left her home and family for the sake of that wretch who had attracted her weak, girlish affections by his physical beauty and fascinating manners; how he treated her ill, spent the most of her money, and finally left her, within a year of the marriage, with just enough remaining out of her fortune to save her from starvation. She told me that Krant had gone to Paris, and was serving as a volunteer in the French army, while she, broken down and unhappy, had come to my parish to give herself to G.o.d and labour amongst the poor.'

'She was a charming woman! She is so now!' said Graham, with a sigh. 'I do not wonder that you loved her.'

'Loved, sir! Why speak in the past tense? I love her still. I shall always love that sweet companion of these many happy years. From the time I saw her in those poor London lodgings I loved her with all the strength of my manhood. But you know that, being already married, she could not be my wife. Then, shortly after the surrender of Sedan, that letter came to tell her that her husband was dead, and dying, had asked her pardon for his wicked ways. Alas! alas! that letter was false!'

'We both of us believed it to be genuine at the time, Pendle, and you went over to France after the war to see the man's grave.'

'I did, and I saw the grave--saw it with its tombstone, in a little Alsace graveyard, with the name Stephen Krant painted thereon in black German letters. I never doubted but that he lay below, and I looked far and wide for the man, Leon Durand, who had written that letter at the request of his dying comrade. I ask you, Graham, who would have disbelieved the evidence of letter and tombstone?'

'No one, certainly!' replied Graham, gravely; 'but it was a pity that you could not find Leon Durand, so as to put the matter beyond all doubt.'

'Find him!' echoed the bishop, pa.s.sionately. 'No one on earth could have found the man. He did not exist.'

'Then who wrote the letter?'

'Krant himself, as he told me in this very room, the wicked plotter!'

'But his handwriting; would not his wife have--'

'No!' cried Pendle, rising and pacing to and fro, greatly agitated, 'the man disguised his hand so that his wife should not recognise it. He did not wish to be bound to her, but to wander far and wide, and live his own sinful life. That was why he sent the forged letter to make Amy believe that he was dead. And she did believe, the more especially after I returned to tell how I had seen his grave. I thought also that he was dead. So did you, Graham.'

'Certainly,' a.s.sented Graham, 'there was no reason to doubt the fact.

Who would have believed that Krant was such a scoundrel?'

'I called him that when he came to see me here,' said Dr Pendle, with a pa.s.sionate gesture. 'Old man and priest as I am, I could have killed him as he sat in yonder chair, smiling at my misery, and taunting me with my position.'

'How did he find out that you had married Mrs Krant?'

'By going back to the Marylebone parish. He had been wandering all over the face of the earth, like the Cain he was; but meeting with no good fortune, he came back to England to find out Amy, and, I suppose, rob her of the little money he had permitted her to keep. He knew of her address in Marylebone, as she had told him where she was going before he deserted her.'

'But how did he learn about the marriage?' asked Graham, again.

'I cannot tell; but he knew that his wife, after his desertion, devoted herself to good works, so no doubt he went to the church and asked about her. The old verger who saw us married is still alive, so I suppose he told Krant that Amy was my wife, and that I was the Bishop of Beorminster. But, however he learned the truth, he found his way here, and when I came into this room during the reception I found him waiting for me.'

'How did you recognise a man you had not seen?'

'By a portrait Amy had shown me, and by the description she gave me of his gipsy looks and the scar on his cheek. He had not altered at all, and I beheld before me the same wicked face I had seen in the portrait.

I was confused at first, as I knew the face but not the name. When he told me that he was Stephen Krant, that my wife was really his wife, that my children had no name, I--I--oh, G.o.d!' cried Pendle, covering his face with his hands, 'it was terrible! terrible!'

'My poor friend!'

The bishop threw himself into a chair. 'After close on thirty years,' he moaned, 'think of it, Graham--the shame, the horror! Oh, G.o.d!'

CHAPTER x.x.x

BLACKMAIL