The clerk whose duty it was to show visitors into Richard Pellet's
private office ought to have been well paid, for he must have been a
valuable acquisition to his employer. Doubtless it was the result of
training--he was for ever supposing that "the firm" was engaged. It was
so when Jared last called. It was so when Harry Clayton determined to
try and make friends with the husband of his late mother, and appeared
at the office door. And it was so when, an hour after, a
plainly-dressed, pale-looking woman asked to see Mr Richard Pellet. But
if, the clerk said, she would give her name, he would go and see.
"Ellen Pellet," was the calm, quiet answer.
"Mrs Ellen Pellet?" queried the clerk.
"Yes," was the reply.
The man stared, hesitated, went half-way to the inner office, returned,
hesitated again, and then turned to go; while more than one head was
raised from ledger or letter to exchange meaning looks, after a glance
at the very unusual kind of visitor to Austin Friars.
"It ain't my business," muttered the clerk to himself, and passing down
the little passage, he opened the private office door of the firm,
heedless of a light, gliding step behind him, and announced Mrs Ellen
Pellet.
"Who?" roared Richard Pellet, leaping from his seat, and glaring at the
clerk.
"It is I," said a quiet voice in the doorway, and Richard sank back pale
and gasping in his seat.
For the visitor was already in the room.
"Oh yes! Ah, to be sure!" stammered Richard, striving hard to recover
himself, with a miserable mask-like smile overspreading his features.
"Glad to see you--sit down. That will do, Bailly; I'm engaged if any
one should call."
The clerk left the office, and closed the door, walking back to his
stool with a prominence in one cheek which drew forth sundry winks from
fellow-labourers in Pellet and Company's money-mill. But the door of
Richard Pellet's private office was thick and baize-lined, and no
inkling of the scene within reached the ears of the clerks.
No sooner had the door closed upon them, than the smile was driven from
Richard's face by a bitter scowl, and rising from his chair, he took two
or three strides to where his visitor stood, hissing between his
teeth--"Curse you! what brings you here?" Such a fierce aspect,
accompanied as it was by threatening gestures, would have made many
recoil; but Richard's visitor stepped towards him, and caught him by the
breast, exclaiming--
"I have been unhappy lately; I could not rest there. I want my child!"
"Curse your child!" cried Richard, in an angry whisper, and then, with a
cowardly, back-handed blow, he sent the poor creature staggering against
the wall; but her countenance hardly underwent a change, as, starting
forward again, she caught him once more by the coat, repeating her
words--
"I want my child!"
"How dare you come here?" he exclaimed, in a low, angry voice. "How
dare you come here to disgrace and annoy me? How came you away from--
from your lodging that I got for you?"
"I came away--I want my child!" was the only reply.
"There! hush! Don't speak so loud!" said Richard, in an angry whisper,
as he glanced uneasily at the door, and stepping to it, slipped into its
socket a little brass bolt. "Did I not tell you never to come here? and
did you not promise?"
"Yes, yes!" was the hoarse answer; "but I want, I will have, our little
one. I have been to the man who had it--I found him out; but he would
not give it to me. You have told him not. I could not rest for
thinking about it. I want my child, and then we will go far away
together."
"Go and seek it where it has gone," said Richard, brutally, almost
beside himself with suppressed rage;--"it is dead!"
"It is a lie--a lie!" cried the woman, excitedly, her pale face flushing
with anger. "That man told me the same; but he is in your pay, and you
have hidden it from me."
She clung to him now fiercely, clutching the ostentatiously-displayed
smoothly-plaited shirt-front, and turning it into a crumpled rag.
"Hush! hush! For God's sake, be still!" he exclaimed. "They will hear
you in the outer office. I have not got the child; it died months ago."
"It is a lie!" exclaimed the woman, more angrily. "You drove me mad
once with your ill-treatment, but you shall not do it again." Then,
raising her voice--"I will have my child!"
As Richard Pellet's face turned of a ghastly muddy hue, he glanced again
and again at the door, his hands trembling with the cowardly rage that,
under different circumstances, might have made the life of the woman
before him--his wife--not worth a moment's purchase. The coarse, heavy,
insolent smile was gone; for he was attacked in his weakest point, and
already in imagination he could see the side looks and laughter of his
clerks, and hear the sneering innuendoes of fellow-men of his own stamp
when there was a public _expose_, and Richard Pellet, the wealthy
banker, who for the sake of money had kept his weak insane wife in
obscurity for years, that he might commit bigamy for the fortune of the
Widow Clayton, was arraigned for his offence against his country's laws,
and the story of his wife's wrongs came forth.
What was he to do? He must get her away quietly--by subterfuge--he
could lead her in one way he knew, and she would not believe the truth.
The scandal, after so many years lying hidden, would now most certainly
be bruited abroad. Some men would have laughed it to scorn, and faced
it with brazen effrontery; but Richard Pellet was a religious man--a
patron of philanthropic societies--even now upon his table lay
half-a-dozen annual reports with his name thereon as steward or
committee-man, for all men to read. Why, his very sober beneficent look
carried weight, and he was always placed in the front rank upon the
platform at Exeter Hall meetings. In fact, in May, during the meetings,
he adopted white cravats and frills. And now, in spite of money, care,
secrecy, this matter would be spread abroad. He could hear it already;
and to hide this example of his cruel love of greed, had he dared, and
could have hidden the crime, he would have struck down the patient
sufferer whom he had treated with such a mingling of cruelty and
neglect, dead at his feet, with as little compunction as he had already
shown in sending her staggering to the wall.
But the wife of long ago, whose reason had gone astray years before, the
soft eyes, the pale face, and trembling lips were here no more; and
Richard Pellet, as he shrank from her, felt himself to be almost
helpless in the hands of one whose strength was augmented by her
position, for he dared not raise his voice. He knew, too, that now the
time had gone when he could command, and he must try subterfuge, and get
her away abroad, where she would be safely kept. He blamed himself now
that he had not placed her in an asylum, but he recalled his reason--it
would have been too public a proceeding; and in these fleeting moments
the question came, were the gold and position he had won worth the price
that he had paid?
As he stood there in her grasp, his mind was made up, and he said
quietly, "Sit down."
"No--no--no!" was the hasty reply, as if she dreaded his influence. "I
want my child: give me my child, and let me go."
"But, Ellen, this is madness and folly," he whispered. "You know it is
not here. He told you that it was dead, did he?"
"Yes," she cried, angrily; "but it was not true. You told him to say
so. Where is she now?"
"Look here!" said Richard, writing an address upon a card--that of one
of the boarding--houses in the neighbourhood. "Take this and go and
wait there till I come, and we will go and see about it. But, for my
sake, do not make a disturbance here--it would be ruin to me."
The poor creature, half reft of her senses, gazed earnestly in his face
for a few moments, while the angry light faded from her eye. In her
tigress-like rage for her lost little one, if met by anger she was ready
to dare, urged by her maternal instinct; but these gentle words disarmed
her resentment, and falling on her knees at Richard Pellet's feet, she
burst into tears, sobbing as she begged of him to let her have her
child.
"Yes, yes! you shall; only get up," said Richard. "It shall all be made
right, only go now."
"Then you will give her to me?" she said, imploringly. "I will not say
a word to any one about being your wife if you will give me my child. I
know now why you shut me up there with Mrs Walls. I have thought it
out: it was that you might marry some one rich; for I, when my head
went, was not fit to be your wife. But I could not help it."
"Well, well; go now," cried Richard, impatiently; "and we will talk
about that afterwards."
She rose to her feet slowly, clasping his hand in both her own, and
gazing earnestly in his face, as if trying to read his thoughts; and
they must have been plain to read, for, as if she saw in his face
cruelty, treachery, and a repetition of her long sufferings, she dashed
the hand away, and stood defying him once more, the former rage flashing
in her eyes as she repeated her demand--"Give me my child!"
"Go and wait for me there, then," said Richard, sullenly.
"I will never leave you till I have my child," she exclaimed.
Again the cruel, malignant look came into his face as Richard Pellet
cursed laws, protection, everything that stayed him from crushing out
the life that now rose in rebellion against him. He cursed his own
hypocrisy, which now fettered him with chains such as stayed him from
setting this burden at defiance and casting it off for ever.
"I told you before that she was dead," he now said, throwing himself
back in his chair.
"Dead--dead--dead!" echoed his wife, "and I told you it was a lie--a
cruel lie--like those you have told me before. But she is not dead.
She was too young, too beautiful to die. Why, I tried to die a hundred
times there, in that cold, bare room, in the bitter winters, and I could
not. She could not die. You have taken her away, and I will not be
cheated again. She is not yours, but mine--mine--my very own. Give me
my little one!" she cried, raising her voice.
"Here! come with me, then, and you shall have her!" cried Richard,
desperately; and snatching up an overcoat, and buttoning it closely over
his breast, he led the way into the outer office. "Back in an hour," he
said abruptly; and then, closely followed by his unwelcome visitor, he
passed into the street, called the first cab he encountered, and, after
giving some instructions to the driver, he motioned to his wife to
enter; but she refused until he had set the example, when, following
him, she took the opposite seat, and the door was slammed, and the
vehicle driven off.
The clerks in the outer office suspended work as soon as the heavy door
swung to, and began to give due attention to this strange visit, which
was on all sides declared to be "a rum go," when the door again opened,
and Harry Clayton entered.
"Mr Pellet returned?" he asked.
"Been at the office again, sir; but he has just gone out with a lady.
Said he would be back in an hour."
"I'll wait," said Harry, and he sat for an hour, and then for another,
but still Richard did not return, so he left, and slowly sauntered
towards London Bridge.
"I don't want to give him the opportunity of saying I avoided him,"
thought Harry, and then his thoughts turned towards money matters, and
the possibility of Richard being compelled to disgorge a portion of the
money that should by rights have been Mrs Clayton's son's--he did not
know that it was in his power to make him give up all. Then he began to
wonder what sort of a reception he should meet with. The last encounter
had been far from cordial, and since his mother's funeral, Harry's
letters had been but few and far between.
"I will see him, though," said Harry, "if I follow him for a week."
Volume 3, Chapter XX.