‘A DARK TALE DARKLY FINISHED.’
Sibyl is free once more. She has been in durance scarcely a
fortnight, yet it is a new thing for her to come out into the light
of day, and feel that she is at liberty to go where she pleases. It
is a wondrous and a strange relief to know that the awful suspicion
which has been hanging over her, separating her from all the rest
of the world, is removed. But her first anxiety is to escape from
Redcastle. The place has become hateful to her. She knows that the
eyes of those who once flattered and courted her have been turned
upon her in cold unpitying curiosity, that of all her summer friends
not one has remained true to her in the hour of adversity, and she is
eager to get beyond ken of those cold hard faces, beyond the sound
of those false voices, which have spoken her fairly in the day of
prosperity, and kept silence when she had need of comfort.
‘I have no one but you, Alex,’ she says humbly; ‘no one but you and
dear old uncle Robert. I wonder that you are both so good to me.’
She goes straight from the court to Dr. Faunthorpe’s house, and is
curiously gentle and affectionate in her demeanour to her uncle and
the two girls. Marion plunges into vehement hysterics at sight of
her elder sister, and on recovering from that attack embraces Sibyl
warmly, and is more demonstrative of sisterly affection than she has
been for a long time. She is far more kindly disposed towards Sibyl,
penniless, and the mark of the world’s scorn, than she ever felt
towards the supposed heiress to Stephen Trenchard’s wealth. As for
Jenny, she goes fairly mad, hugs her sister to desperation, is very
proud of her own performance in the witness box, and finally rushes
out to the kitchen to ask Hester to make hot cakes for tea. No one
who has not eaten Yorkshire cakes, and seen them made and baked in a
Yorkshire kitchen, by a brisk and energetic Yorkshire housewife, can
have a just idea of the celerity with which this operation can be
performed.
But on this particular evening Sibyl is far too languid to be tempted
into injuring her digestion by the consumption of hot buttered cakes.
She sits in a corner of the old parlour sofa and takes her cup of
tea in pensive silence, and the anxious little doctor sees that the
events of the last few months have had a destroying influence upon
his favourite niece’s health and beauty. He creeps close beside her
and feels her pulse. It is quick and irregular.
‘You want rest, my love,’ he says, ‘you must stay with us for a few
weeks in your old room, and let me doctor you, and Hester nurse you,
till you get strong again.’
‘I like my old room, uncle Robert, and I love to be with you, but
I hate Redcastle. I should never get well here. Let me go with my
husband to his new home, if he will have me.’
She looks pleadingly at Alexis, and sees that she has been forgiven.
‘My home is yours, Sibyl, and I will take you there as soon as you
are free to go. But I think you had better accept your uncle’s
hospitality for a little while, as your evidence will be required
for Mr. Pilgrim’s trial.’
‘What?’ asks Sibyl, ‘is it not all over?’
‘No, my love, the trial has to come yet, and the witnesses examined
by the coroner and magistrate will have to repeat their evidence.’
‘How dreadful!’ sighs Sibyl.
‘It is an ordeal to be gone through, my love, but when that is over
we shall be free to go to Cheswold Grange, and all our troubles will
be over, I hope. And before the summer is ended your uncle and your
sisters must come and pay us a visit in Hampshire.’
‘That will be delightful!’ cries Jenny, rapturously; ‘Have you a nice
garden?’
‘A glorious old garden, Jenny, with about a mile of wall fruit. Such
plums and peaches!’
‘A nursery for English cholera,’ says the doctor.
‘And there’s a pony, Jane,--you’d like that, I think,’ observes
Alexis.
‘Shouldn’t I just!’
‘But before you come to Cheswold Grange I should like you to
cure yourself of one bad habit, Jane. I won’t mention it before
company, but if you recall to your mind a certain interview between
a gentleman and a young lady I dare say you will understand what I
mean.’
Jenny blushes vehemently, remembering that little romance about Mrs.
Yokohama Gray.
So all is forgiveness and peace in the shabby old house at the end of
the town, and Alexis, touched to the heart by his wife’s contrition,
and by those sad eyes of hers which have a weary look that tells of
suffering borne and hidden, feels that his old love for her is not
quite dead, and that after all, faulty though she has been, she is
the woman he would choose to sit by his fireside in the old house at
Cheswold.
Alexis returns to his hotel that evening, where there is much talk
of Joel Pilgrim and his arrest. No one has any doubt of his guilt,
and many go so far as to affirm that they have been convinced of
it from the first, and have declared their convictions to their
friends and acquaintance. These being called upon to bear witness to
this fact answer meanly that they don’t exactly remember: that such
opinions may have been expressed: but that they fail to recall them.
In any case Joel is prejudged in Redcastle, and there is a wonderful
reaction about Sibyl, who is exalted into a heroine and martyr, as if
to have been wrongfully suspected was equivalent to having performed
some great and noble action. Mrs. Stormont calls for the first time
in her life at the shabby old house at the lower end of the town, and
leaves quite a packet of cards for Dr. Faunthorpe and his nieces, and
one of the Colonel’s cards for the special benefit of Mr. Secretan;
for it has become known to Redcastle that Alexis has a pretty little
estate in Hampshire and is by no means that fortuneless adventurer he
was supposed to be on his first appearance upon the Redcastle stage.
Everybody is eager for the trial, and there is a great deal of
speculation as to the exact date at which it will ‘come on,’ and who
will be the Crown lawyer, and who will defend the accused. Before
midnight there runs a rumour that Pilgrim has secured the famous
Vallentyne for his defender, and there is an idea that he will get
off.
‘A clever counsel could shake the butler’s evidence, make the jury
disbelieve him altogether perhaps; and without his evidence how are
they to bring the crime home to Pilgrim?’ ask the knowing ones.
Before noon next day it is known that Joel Pilgrim has accepted
his earthly defeat, and has gone forth to meet the fiat of a more
terrible Judge than that sage and learned lawyer who would have sat
in judgment upon him at the forthcoming assizes. Early on the morning
following his arrest he has found means to elude the vigilance of his
warder, and has opened a vein with a small penknife, which he has
contrived to keep hidden in the silken lining of his coat-sleeve.
Lying quietly on his prison bed, the warder slumbering on a pallet
by his side, he has given himself his death-wound, and let life ebb
silently without a groan.
He has occupied the earlier part of the night in writing, and this
is the result, which is speedily devoured by the ravening maws of a
thousand different newspapers and given to the world. It figures on
the hoardings before newsvenders’ shops in fat black capitals:--
‘Startling Revelation--The Redcastle Murder--Dying Confession of
Joel Pilgrim!’
‘If it is any satisfaction to the world at large, which never
gave me anything that I did not obtain by an appeal to its
self-interest, to know the history of a man whose hours are now
numbered, I give it in a few words.
‘I am the son of Stephen Trenchard, the only offspring of his
marriage with a Hindoo dancing girl, and that marriage about
as legal an union as a European of some social standing cares
to contract with a low caste Indian. My mother had, I believe,
little except her beauty to recommend her to an Englishman’s
notice; but she was inoffensive, and she died young,--two merits
which secured her husband’s respect.
‘My father never acknowledged this marriage, or me as his son.
But he took me into his office at an early age, and finding
that I was tolerably shrewd, and of his own way of thinking in
commercial matters, had me well educated between the age of
eighteen and twenty-four, and at twenty-five took me for his
partner.
‘The fortunes of our house varied as years went on. We made
money very fast, but we had the misfortune sometimes to lose it
even faster. Our gains generally tempted us to make losses, and
each successful transaction brought an unlucky follower at its
heels. Thus if we made a hundred per cent. by indigo one year, we
perhaps lost a hundred and fifty per cent. by indigo the next,
being lured into some reckless speculation, time bargains, and
the rest of it. Our opium trade brought us most money, and we
trafficked in other goods which proved profitable merchandise,
but somewhat damaged the character of our house. In other words,
rather than let our vessels ground upon their beef-bones for
want of a remunerative cargo, we occasionally went in quietly
for the slave trade, supplied our Demerara friends with Coolies,
and shipped a good deal of live stock of this kind at different
ports. To put it briefly we were general dealers on a large scale.
‘The business had never been weaker than in that year when my
father suddenly took it into his head that it was time for him
to retire, and drew ten thousand pounds out of the house, some
thousands beyond our real capital. It left me with a crippled
business, and I felt that my father had done me a great wrong
by this selfish retirement. For the first year after his return
to England fortune favoured me, and the prospects of the house
brightened. I made one or two lucky hits and began to pluck up
spirit. But this state of things did not last long. I lost a
shipload of coolies under somewhat painful circumstances. The
ship and supposed cargo, not the coolies, were heavily insured.
The underwriters refused to pay, and there was some talk of
scuttling. This scandal, although strangled in the birth, did me
harm. A commercial man’s reputation is as delicate a blossom as
a hothouse flower, any chill wind nips it. When I found things
going to the bad in Calcutta, I came home, thinking that my
father might help me out of my difficulties, or at least enable
me to float my unwieldy ship a little while longer by the use of
a few of those thousands he had squeezed out of the business.
This he peremptorily refused, and had the injustice to accuse
me of bad trading. We had bitter words on the subject on many
occasions; and not content with refusing to help me, he urged me
to raise money to pay off the remaining ten thousand pounds due
to him by a deed of dissolution which he had made me sign before
he left Calcutta, he resigning his share of the business in
consideration of receiving twenty thousand pounds, ten thousand
at the time of the execution of the deed, ten thousand within
three years from that date.
‘The time had expired, and he urged me repeatedly to raise the
money. When he found that I had set my heart upon marrying his
niece--whom I naturally supposed to be a single woman, he made my
payment of this ten thousand pounds a condition of my marriage.
No money, no wife, he said--thus using my tenderest feelings as a
lever to wrench money out of me. I think this plan of proceeding
hardly comes under the head of fatherly affection.
‘Of the tragedy which terminated the story of my father’s
existence I have nothing to say. Time may perhaps make that
mystery clear. I shall not gratify idle curiosity by any
revelation, supposing it to be in my power to reveal anything
touching this question, which I leave as a subject for
speculation to that new school which devotes its labours to the
study of psychological mysteries.’
This is all--disappointing perhaps to the world in general, but
giving Redcastle a new subject for conversation.
‘Imagine that horrid Indian being Mr. Trenchard’s son after all!’
exclaims Mrs. Stormont, when she and her dear Mrs. Groshen meet to
discuss the latest scandal over their harlequin teacups. ‘I always
thought there was a likeness.’
‘I can’t say that I saw any resemblance. Such a difference in
complexion, you know. But what a horribly disreputable set these
Trenchards seem to have been!’ says Mrs. Groshen, in a wholesale way,
as if there had been a regiment of them.
‘Yes, selling slaves, and opium, and scuttling ships, and doing
everything horrid.’
‘And to think that we should have asked them to dinner!’ cries
the banker’s wife, remembering how often she has squandered her
housekeeping money upon hothouse fruit and flowers to decorate the
board at which Stephen Trenchard was to be the chief guest.
‘How lucky that dreadful Pilgrim never accepted our invitations!’
exclaims Mrs. Stormont. ‘I have no doubt he was afraid to show
himself in society. He eats with chopsticks, I dare say.’
‘I rather think that chopsticks are Chinese, my dear,’ replies Mrs.
Groshen, whose remembrance of the Child’s Guide to Useful Knowledge
has not been weakened by the lapse of so many years as have gone by
since her elder friend left a fashionable boarding school, carefully
finished in all those elegant accomplishments which take six years to
learn and can be comfortably forgotten in three.
Thus runs town talk in quiet Redcastle. There will be no trial, and
among the general public interest in Stephen Trenchard’s murder
languishes, and soon dies for want of nutriment.
EPILOGUE.
All through the rest of the summer weather, till the leaves change
from green to red and yellow, and the sturdy oaks, slow to bud and
last to succumb to Time the destroyer, have put on their russet
livery, Sibyl lies in the chief bedchamber at Cheswold Grange sick
nigh unto death. She has broken down utterly now that the struggle
is over, now that all storms are ended and her frail bark safe in
harbour. There is no violent illness, no raging fever of brain or
body, only an extreme prostration, which for a long time baffles the
skill of an intelligent physician and a careful family doctor.
She lies in the bright pretty bedroom, with its old paneled walls
painted pale pink and cream colour, its needlework pictures, its
quaint furniture, and many relics of a departed generation. There is
a wide window opposite her bed that extends from ceiling to floor,
and through this she listlessly contemplates the fair landscape, the
smiling garden, the autumnal glory of the park. She suffers little
pain, except such weariness as attends extreme prostration. She is at
peace, and even declares herself happy.
‘I have lived long enough, Alex,’ she says one day when her strength
has ebbed to the lowest point compatible with life, and the doctors
have begun to despair of the efficacy of the pharmacopeia in this
particular case. Alexis, deeply moved, sits by her bed, and holds her
feeble hand in the dim autumn twilight. ‘I am content for my earthly
race to finish here. You have forgiven me. That is enough.’
‘But have you no thought of me, Sibyl? Is it kind to talk like that?’
‘Dear Alex, you have been more than good to me, but I have not
forgotten what you said that evening of our meeting in the old room
at Mrs. Bonny’s. “Love is dead,” you told me.’
‘That was said under the influence of anger, Sibyl. I thought it was
true, but sorrow soon fastened the old knot again. Sorrow and peril
reunited us, Sibyl.’
‘And do you really love me? I know that you have forgiven me, but are
you sure you love me still?’
‘Very sure,--as much and as truly as I ever loved you in old
Kensington Gardens, under the elms, when I told the Hazleton children
fairy tales, and my life and yours seemed as sweet a fairy tale as
any of those old nursery stories, and as sure of a blissful ending.’
‘Oh, Alex, is that the truth?’
‘As I live, darling.’
‘Then I think I shall make an effort and get well,’ replies Sibyl,
with a sigh of utter contentment. ‘I have been willing to glide
gently out of life, believing that, however good you were to me, I
could never hope to win more than your forgiveness; but now I shall
try very hard to get well.’
She keeps her word. Whether her illness has reached its natural
turning-point--the tide of life flowing back to its source,--or
whether the ardent desire of the patient to live helps the work of
recovery, the medical men can not say. But from this time there is a
change. Slowly but surely health and youth come back to the pale wan
face. The lovely eyes lose their glassy lustre, and grow bright with
happy thoughts; faint gleams of carnation flit like the shadow of a
sunset cloud over the marble pallor, then linger, and warm the pallid
cheek into life and beauty.
‘Your love has won me back from the grave, Alex,’ whispers Sibyl,
four or five weeks after that talk in the twilight, when the
family doctor--that very Mr. Skalpel who attended Alexis after his
accident--has declared that Mrs. Secretan’s recovery is absolutely
marvellous.
When Sibyl is out of danger, Richard Plowden, who has been a faithful
friend and comforter throughout this time of trouble, and has acted
as Trot’s chief nurse and playmate into the bargain, departs somewhat
abruptly upon a journey, the business and destination whereof he does
not reveal to his dear friend Alexis.
‘It’s a little bit of a trip I’ve been meditating for a longish
time,’ he says; ‘I’ll tell you all about it when I come back. I think
I shall start to-morrow.’
‘You’ll write to us while you’re away, of course Dick?’
‘Well, yes, if I can manage it,’ replies Mr. Plowden, with rather a
sheepish air; ‘but you mustn’t be alarmed if you don’t hear from me.
I shall be moving about from place to place, you see, and I may be
out of the way of post offices--off the beaten track, you know.’
‘Good gracious!’ exclaims Alexis, ‘are you going to the centre of
Africa? Is my modest geographer coming out as a second Sir Samuel
Baker?’
Alexis is too much occupied with his wife’s recovery just now to
be very curious about his friend. He thinks Dick’s movements are
somewhat eccentric, and that is all.
‘Perhaps he objects to my being here,’ says Sibyl, who has learned to
think very humbly of herself of late.
‘Object to you, Sibyl! Why you must know that he is absolutely
devoted to you, and has been almost as anxious as I was during your
illness. He was prejudiced against you before he saw you, out of
affection for me, poor fellow, thinking that I had been hardly used;
but when once you came back to love and duty he was your slave.’
For about a month nothing is heard of Richard Plowden, and Alexis is
beginning to feel somewhat uneasy about his friend’s fate, when he
receives a letter, in Dick’s neat hand, posted at Cannes.
‘My dear friend,’ writes Richard, ‘when I left you and Mrs.
Secretan so abruptly I was departing upon so daring and so
wild an expedition, that I felt too much ashamed of my own
audacity to tell you my errand. I came to the south of France
to discover whether there was any hope of my ever winning, by
long years of patient devotion, the dearest and best, purest,
and most unselfish of women. You had told me to hope in the day
of my despondency, and I had hoped, although I scorned myself
for my foolishness in hoping. At last I told myself that it was
worse than foolish to go on hoping and dreaming. I must “put
it to the test, and win or lose,” as the old song says. So I
came here, found my sweetest Linda working industriously at her
art, pensive, but not altogether unhappy. She was delighted
to see me--not for my own sake, you may be sure, but because
I could tell her all about Trot. How I have blessed that dear
child! She was never tired of hearing me talk of him. I spent
all my evenings at her aunt’s house--such a dear old lady, the
aunt--talking about Trot, and a little about art and science,
and literature, and my own small views and ambitions. What happy
evenings they were!
‘Well, Alex, I am too proud of her--too ashamed of my own
unworthiness, to tell you much more. I can only say that God
has been very good to me--that I am more blessed than ever I
hoped to be--that if I had been born in the dear old fairy times
which I have told Trot so much about that I have grown almost
to believe in them myself--if I had been the special favourite
of some omnipotent good fairy, and had had a talking bird, and
Fortunatus’s purse, and an invisible cap, and a flying carpet,
and the princess with the golden locks for my bride, I could not
have been one whit happier than I am, or more astonished at my
own happiness.
‘I am in such a state of surprise that I am doubtful of my own
identity, and hardly feel sure that I have any right to sign
myself--your faithful friend, DICK PLOWDEN.’
* * * * *
Very happy are Alexis and his wife one sunny morning early in
December, when Sibyl, leaning on her husband’s arm, and with Trot at
her side, makes her first round of the Cheswold domain.
The hoar-frost whitens the lawn and meadows; yet there are late roses
still blooming on the wall. Alexis insists upon his wife seeing
everything--hothouses, stables, piggeries even--and Sibyl inspects
and admires rapturously enough to content an exacting lord of the
manor.
‘It is all lovely!’ she exclaims; ‘and what is best of all, the place
suits you, Alex, and you suit the place to perfection. You seem to
have been made for a country squire. How strange it is to know that
Providence held _this_ in store for you in that bitter time at Mrs.
Bonny’s! While I was waiting for a dead man’s shoes, you, who never
cringed to any man, or courted any inheritance, have been blest by
Fortune.’
THE END.
LONDON:
J. AND W. RIDER, PRINTERS,
BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE.
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences
within the three volumes of this work and consultation of external
sources. Some hyphens in words have been silently removed when
a predominant preference was found in the original work. Except
for those changes noted below, original spellings in the text and
inconsistent or archaic usage have been retained.
Page 13: “need no recompence” replaced with “need no recompense”.
Page 72: “lived century” replaced with “lived a century”.
Page 113: “post-mortem examintaion” replaced with “post-mortem
examination”.
Page 134: “thestep-ladder” replaced with “the step-ladder”.
Page 138: “trembles alittle” replaced with “trembles a little”.
Page 157: “head and salt” replaced with “bread and salt”.
Page 163: “form a will” replaced with “form of a will”.
Page 178: “told me black” replaced with “told me a black”.
Page 247: “stil moving about” replaced with “still moving about”.
Page 254: “shrew dlittle” replaced with “shrewd little”.
Page 263: “before the murler” replaced with “before the murder”.
Page 263: “urned upon that” replaced with “turned upon that”.
Page 298: “Coach and Ho rses” replaced with “Coach and Horses”.
Page 301: “that gentlemen” replaced with “that gentleman”.
Page 320: “ns everything relating” replaced with “us everything
relating”.
Page 336: “old panelled walls” replaced with “old paneled walls”.
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.