A LITTLE MORE LIGHT.
Something fresh, though not much, had turned up, relating to the case
of the late Mr. Ollivera. That it should do so after so many years had
elapsed--or, rather, that it should not have done so before--was
rather remarkable. But as it bears very little upon the history in its
present stage, it may be dismissed in a chapter.
When John Ollivera departed on the circuit which was destined to bring
him his death, a young man of the name of Willett accompanied the bar.
He had been "called," but in point of fact only went as clerk to one
of the leading counsel. There are barristers and barristers just as
there are young men and young men. Mr. Charles Willett had been of
vast trouble to his family; and one of his elder brothers, Edmund, who
was home from India on a temporary sojourn to recruit his health, had
taken up the cause against him rather sharply: which induced a quarrel
between them and lasting ill-feeling.
An intimacy had sprung up between Edmund Willett and John Ollivera,
and they had become the closest of friends They took a (supposed)
final leave of each other when Mr. Ollivera departed on his circuit,
for Mr. Willett was on the point of returning to India. His health had
not improved, but he was obliged to go back; he was in a merchant's
house in Calcutta; and the probabilities certainly were that he would
not live to come home again. However, contrary to his own and general
expectations, as is sometimes the case the result proved that
everybody's opinion was mistaken. He not only did not die, but he grew
better, and finally lived: and he had now come to England on business
matters. The minute details attendant on John Ollivera's death had
never reached him, either through letters or newspapers, and he became
acquainted with them for the first time in an interview with the Rev.
Mr. Ollivera. When the unfinished letter was mentioned, and the fact
that they had never been able to trace out the smallest information as
to whom it was intended for Mr. Willett at once said that it must have
been intended for himself. He had charged John Ollivera (rather
against the latter's will) to carry out, if possible, an arrangement
with Charles Willett upon a certain disagreeable matter which had only
come recently to the knowledge of his family, and to get that young
man's written promise to arrest himself in, at least, one of his
downward courses towards ruin. The letter to Mr. Ollivera, urging the
request, was written and posted in London on the Saturday; Mr.
Ollivera (receiving it on Sunday morning at Helstonleigh) would no
doubt see Charles Willett in the course of Monday. That this was the
"disagreeable commission" he had spoken of to Mr. Kene, as having been
entrusted to him, and which he had left the Court at half-past three
o'clock to enter upon, there could be no manner of doubt. Mr. Willett
had expected an answer from him on Tuesday morning--it was the last
day of his stay in London, for he would take his departure by the
Dover mail in the evening--which answer never came. That Mr. Ollivera
was writing the letter for the nine o'clock night despatch from
Helstonleigh, and that the words in the commencing lines, "should I
never see you again," referred solely to Mr. Willett's precarious
health, and to the belief that he would not live to return again from
India, also appeared to be indisputable. If this were so, why then,
the first part of the letter, at any rate, was the sane work of a
perfectly sane man, and no more pointed at self-destruction than it
did at self-shampooing. The clergyman and Mr. Willett, arriving at
this most natural conclusion, sat and looked at each other for a few
moments in painful silence. That unexplained and apparently
unexplainable letter had been the one sole stumbling-block in Henry
William Ollivera's otherwise perfect belief.
But, to leave no loophole of uncertainty, Charles Willett was sought
out. When found (with slippers down at heel, a short pipe in his
mouth, and a pewter pint-pot at his elbow) he avowed, without the
smallest reticence, that John Ollivera's appointment for half-past
three on that long-past Monday afternoon in Helstonleigh, _had_ been
with him; and that, in answer to Mr. Ollivera's interference in his
affairs, he had desired him to mind his own business and to send word
to his brother to do the same.
This left no doubt whatever on the clergyman's mind that the commenced
letter had been as sensible and ordinary a letter as any man could sit
down to pen, and that the blotted words were appended to it by a
different hand--that of the murderer.
In the full flush of his newly-acquired information, he went straight
to the house of Mr. Greatorex, to pour the story into his uncle's ear.
It happened to be the very day alluded to in the last chapter--in the
evening of which you had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Roland Yorke
industriously putting his shoulder to the wheel, after the ordinary
hours of office work were over.
Mr. Greatorex had been slightly discomposed that day in regard to
business matters. It seemed to him that something or other was
perpetually arising to cause annoyance to the firm. Their connection
was on the increase, requiring the unwearied, active energies of its
three heads more fully than it had ever done; whereas one of those
heads was less efficient in management than he used to be--the second
of them, Bede Greatorex. Mr. Greatorex, a remarkably capable man,
always had more hard, sterling, untiring work in him than Bede, and he
had it still. With his mother's warm Spanish blood, Bede had inherited
the smallest modicum of temperamental indolence. As he had inherited
(so ran the suspicion), the disease which had proved fatal to her.
"I cannot reproach him as I would," thought Mr. Greatorex, throwing
himself into a chair in his room, when he quitted the office for the
day, urged to despair almost at this recent negligence, or whatever it
was, that had been brought home to them, and which had been traced to
some forgetfulness of Bede's. "With that wan, weary look in his face,
just as his mother's wore when her sickness was coming on, it goes
against me to blow him up harshly, as I should Frank. He must be very
ill; he could not, else, look as he does; perhaps already nearly past
hope: it was only when she was past hope that she suddenly failed in
her round of duties and broke down. And he has one misery that his
mother had not--trouble of mind, with that wife of his."
It was at this juncture that Mr. Greatorex was broken in upon by Henry
William Ollivera. The clergyman, standing so that the bright slanting
rays of the hot evening sun, falling across his face, lighted up its
pallor and its suppressed eagerness, imparted the tale that he had
come to tell: the discovery that he and Edmund Willett had that day
made.
It a little excited Mr. Greatorex. Truth to say, he had always looked
upon that unfinished letter as a nearly certain proof that his
nephew's death _had_ been in accordance with the verdict of the jury.
To him, as well as to the dead man's brother, the apparent
impossibility of discovering any cause for its having been penned, or
person for whom it could have been intended, had remained the great
gulf of difficulty which could not be bridged over.
In this, the first moment of the disclosure, it seemed to him a great
discovery. We all know how exaggerated a view we sometimes take of
matters, when they are unexpectedly presented to us. Mr. Greatorex
went forth, calling aloud for his son Bede: who came down, in return
to the call, in dinner attire. As Bede entered, his eye fell on his
cousin Henry--or William, as Mr. Greatorex generally liked to call
him--whose usually placid countenance was changed by the scarlet
hectic on its thin cheeks. Bede saw that something, great or little,
was about to be disclosed, and wished himself away again: for some
time past he had felt no patience with the fancies and crotchets of
Henry Ollivera.
It was Mr. Greatorex who disclosed what there was to tell. Bede
received it ungraciously; that is, in spite of disbelieving mockery.
Henry Ollivera was accustomed to these moods of his. The clergyman did
not resent it openly; he simply stood with his deep eyes fixed
watchingly on Bede's face, as if the steady gaze, the studied silence,
carried their own reproof.
"I believe, if some wight came down on a voyage from the moon, and fed
you with the most improbable fable ever invented by the erratic
imagination of man, you would place credence in it," said Bede,
turning sharply on Mr. Ollivera.
"Edmund Willett has not come from the moon," quietly spoke the
clergyman.
"But Charles Willett--lost man!--is no better than a lunatic in his
drinking bouts," retorted Bede.
"At any rate, he was neither a lunatic nor drunk today."
"His story does not hold water," pursued Bede. "Is it likely--is it
possible, I should almost say,--that had he been the man with whom the
appointment was held that afternoon, he would have kept the fact in
until now?--and when so much stir and enquiry were made at the time?"
"Edmund Willett says it is just exactly the line of conduct his
brother might have been expected to pursue," said Mr. Ollivera. "He
was always of an ill-conditioned temper--morose, uncommunicative. That
what Charles Willett says is perfectly true, I am as sure of as I am
that I stand hers, You had better see him yourself, Bede."
"To what end?"
"That you may be also convinced."
"And if I were convinced?" questioned Bede, after a pause. "What
then?"
"I think the enquiry should be reopened," said Mr. Ollivera,
addressing chiefly his uncle. "When I have spoken of pursuing it
before, I was always met, both by Butterby and others, with the
confuting argument that this letter was in my way. To say the truth, I
found it a little so myself always. Always until this day."
"Don't bring up Butterby as an authority, William," interposed Mr.
Greatorex. "If Butterby cannot conduct other cases better than he has
conducted the one concerning our lost cheque, I'd not give a feather
for him and his opinions."
For the purloiner of that cheque remained an undiscovered puzzle; and
the house of Greatorex and Greatorex (always excepting one of them)
felt very sore upon the point, and showed it.
"William is right, Bede. This discovery removes a mountain of
uncertainty and doubt. And if, by ventilating the unhappy affair again
we can unfold the mystery that attaches to it, and so clear John's
name and memory, it ought to be done."
"But what can be tried, sir, or done, more than has been?" asked Bede,
in a tone of reasoning.
"I don't know. Something may be. Of one thing I have felt a conviction
all along--that if John's life was rudely taken by man's wicked hand,
heaven will in time bring it to light. The old saying, that 'Murder
will out,' is a very sure one."
"I do not think it has proved so in every instance," returned Bede,
dreamily carrying his recollection backwards. "Some cases have
remained undiscovered always."
"Yes, to the world," acquiesced Mr. Greatorex. "But there lies a firm
belief in my mind that no man--or woman either--over committed a
wilful murder, but someone or other suspected him in their secret
heart, and saw him in all his naked, miserable sin."
"Don't bring woman's name in, father. I never like to hear it done."
Bede spoke in the somewhat fractious tone he had grown often to use;
that it was but the natural outlet of some inward pain none could
doubt. Mr. Greatorex put it down chiefly to bodily suffering.
"Women have done worse deeds than men," was the elder man's answer.
And Mr. Ollivera took a step forward.
"Whether man or woman did this--that is, took my dear brother's
life--and then suffered the slur to rest on his own innocent
self--suffered him to be buried like a dog--suffered his best
relatives to think of him as one who had forfeited Heaven's redeeming
mercy, I know not," said the clergyman. "But from this time forward, I
vow never to slacken heart, or hand, or energy, until I shall have
brought the truth to light. The way was long and dark, and seemed
hopeless; it might be that I lost patience and grew slack and weary;
perhaps this discovery has arisen to reprove me and spur me on."
"But what can you do in it?" again asked Bede.
"Whatever I do in it, I shall not come to you to aid me, Bede," was
the reply. "It appears to me--and I have told you this before--that
you would rather keep the dark cloud on my brother's name than help to
lift it. What had he ever done to you in life that you should so
requite him?"
"Heaven knows my heart and wish would be good to clear him," spoke
Bede, with an earnestness that approached agitation. "But if I am
unable to do it,--if I cannot see how it may be done,--if the power of
elucidation does not lie with me--what would you?"
"You have invariably thrown cold water upon every effort of mine. My
most earnest purposes you have all but ridiculed."
"No, Henry. I have been sorry, vexed if you will, at what I thought
the mistaken view you take up. Over-reiteration of a subject leads to
weariness. If I was unable to see any other probable solution than the
one arrived at by the coroner and jury, it was not my fault. As to
John--if by sacrificing my own life, at any moment since I saw him
lying dead, could have restored his, I would willingly have offered it
up."
"I beg your pardon, Bede; I spoke hastily," said the man of peace. "Of
course I had no right to be vexed that you and others cannot see with
my eyes. But, rely upon it, the avowal now made by Charles Willett is
true."
"Yes, perhaps it may be," acknowledged Bede.
"William," interrupted Mr. Greatorex, lifting his head after a pause
of thought--and his voice had sunk to a whisper. "It could not be
that--that--Charles Willett was the one to slink in, and harm him?"
A kind of eager light flashed into the dark eyes of Bede Greatorex, as
he turned them on his cousin. If it did not express a belief in the
possibility of the suggestion, it at least betrayed that the idea
stirred up his interest.
"No," said Mr. Ollivera. "No, no. Charles Willett has not behaved in a
straightforward manner over it, but he is cool and open now. He says
he has made it a rule for many years never to interfere voluntarily in
the remotest degree with other people's business; and therefore he did
not mention this until questioned today. Had he never been questioned,
he says, he would never have spoken. I cannot understand such a man;
it seems to me a positive sin not to have disclosed these facts at the
time; but I am sure he tells the whole of the truth now. And now I
must wish you good evening, for I have an engagement."
Bede went along the passage with his cousin, and thence was turning to
ascend the staircase. His father called him. "What is it?" Bede asked,
advancing.
"What is it?--why I want to talk to you about this."
"Another time, father. The dinner's waiting."
"You would go to dinner if the house were falling," spoke Mr.
Greatorex, in his hasty vexation.
"Will you not come, sir?"
"No. I don't want dinner. I shall get tea here and a chop with it.
Things that are happening worry me, Bede; if they don't you."
Bede went away with a heavy sigh. Perhaps he was more worried, and had
greater cause for it too, than his father; but he did not choose to
let more of it than he could help be seen.
Guests were at his table this evening, only some three or four; they
were bidden by Mrs. Bede, preparatory to going to the opera together.
It is more than probable that the suspicion of this assembly of guests
kept Mr. Greatorex away.
The dinner was elaborate and expensive as usual. Bede ate nothing. He
sat opposite to his wife and talked with the company, and took viand
after viand on his plate when handed to him; but only to toy with the
morsel for a few moments, and send it away all but untasted. Why did
his wife gather around her this continual whirl of gaiety?--he nearly
asked it aloud with a groan. Did she want to get rid of care? as,
heaven knew, he did. A looker-on, able to dive into Bede's heart,
might rather have asked, "Nay, why did he suffer her to gather it?"
The heat of the room oppressed him; the courses were long, but he sat
on--on, until quiescence became intolerable. When lights came in he
rose abruptly, went to the furthermost window, and threw it wide open.
Twilight encompassed the earth with her soft folds; the day's bold
garishness was over for at least some welcome hours. A woman was
singing in the street below, her barefooted children standing round
her with that shrinking air peculiar to such a group, and she turned
up a miserable, sickly, famine-stricken face to Bede, in piteous, mute
appeal. It was not ineffectual. Whatever his own cares and illness
might be, he at least could feel for others. Just as he flung the
woman a shilling, his wife came to him in a whisper, whose tone had an
unpleasant ring of taunt in it.
"Have you, as usual, the headache, tonight?"
"Headache and heartache, both, Louisa."
"I should suppose so, by your quitting the table. You might have
apologized."
"And you might give the house a little rest. How far I am from wishing
to complain or interfere unnecessarily, you must know, Louisa; but I
declare that this incessant strain of entertaining people will drive
me crazy. It is telling upon my nerves. It is telling in a different
way upon my father."
"I shall entertain people every day, when I am not engaged out
myself," said Mrs. Bede Greatorex. "Take a house for me away, in Hyde
Park, or Belgravia; or I'd not mind Portland Place; and then we should
not annoy Mr. Greatorex. As long as you are obstinate about the one, I
shall be about the other."
Bede seized her hand; partly in anger, partly--as it seemed--in
tenderness: and drew her nearer, that she might hear his impressive
whisper.
"I am not sure but your wish, that we should quit the house, will be
gratified--though not as you expect. My father's patience is being
tried. He is the real owner of the house; and at any moment he may say
to us, Go out of it. Louisa, I. have thought of mentioning this to you
for some little time; but the subject is not a pleasant one."
"I wish he would say it."
"But don't you see the result? You are thinking of a west-end mansion.
My means would not allow me to take a dwelling half so good as this
one. That's the simple truth, Louisa."
She flung his hand from her with a defiant laugh of power, as she
prepared to rejoin the guests. "_You_ might not, but I would."
And Bede knew that to run him helplessly into debt would have been
fun, rather than otherwise, to his wife.
Coffee came in at once, and Bede took the opportunity to escape. There
was no formal after-dinner sitting this evening, or withdrawal of the
ladies. As he passed along the corridor, Miss Channing was standing at
the door of the study. He enquired in a kind tone if she wanted
anything.
"I am waiting for Mrs. Greatorex--to ask her if I may go for an hour
to my brother's," answered Annabel. "Old Dalla will take me."
"Go by all means, if you wish," he said. "Why did you think it
necessary to ask? Do make yourself at home with us, Miss Channing, and
be as happy as you can."
Annabel thanked him, and he went downstairs, little supposing how very
far from happy it was possible for her to be, exposed to all the
caprices of his wife. Halting at the door for a moment he wandered
across the street, and stood there in the shade, mechanically
listening to the ballad woman's singing, wafted faintly from the
distance, just as he mechanically looked up at his own lighted
windows, and heard the gay laughter that now and again came forth from
them.
"I never ought to have married her," said the voice of conscience,
breathing its secrets from the cautious depths of his inmost heart.
"Every law, human and divine, should have warned me against it. I was
infatuated to blindness: nay, not to blindness; I cannot plead that:
but to folly. It was very wrong: it was horribly sinful: and heaven is
justly punishing me. The fault was mine: I might have kept aloof from
her after that miserably eventful night. I ought to have done so; to
have held her at more than arm's distance evermore. Ought!--lives
there another man on the face of the earth, I wonder, who would not?
The fault of our union was mine wholly, not hers; and so, whatsoever
trials she brings on me I will bear, patiently, as I best may. _I_
sought _her_. She would never have dared to seek me, after that night
and the discovery I made the day subsequently in poor John's room: and
the complication of ill arising, or to arise, from our marriage, _I_
have to answer for. I am nearly tired of the inward warfare: three
years of it! Three years and more, since I committed the mad act
of tying myself to her for life: for better or for worse: and it
has been nothing for me but one prolonged, never-shifting scene of
self-repentance. We are wearing a mask to each other: God grant that I
may go to my grave without being forced to lift it! For her sake; for
her sake!"
He paused to raise his hat from his brow and wipe the sweat that had
gathered there. And then he took a step forward and a step backward in
the dim shade. But he could not drive away, even for a moment, the
care ever eating away his heart, or turn his vision from the
threatening shadow that always seemed looming in the distance.
"Of all the wild infatuation that ever took possession of the heart of
man for woman, surely mine for Louisa Joliffe was the worst! Did Satan
lead me on? It must have been so. 'Be sure your sin shall find you
out.' Since that fatal moment when I stood at the altar with her,
those ominous words have never, I think, been quite absent from my
memory. Every hour of my life, every minute of the day and night as
they pass, does my sin find me. Knowing what I did know, could I not
have been content to let her go her own way, while I went mine? Heaven
help me! for I love her yet, as man rarely has loved. And when my
father, or any other, casts a reflection on her, it is worse to me
than a dagger's thrust. So long as I may, I will shield her from----"
It was at this moment that the soliloquy, so pregnant with weighty if
vague revelation, was broken in upon by Mr. Roland Yorke. Little
guessed careless Roland what painful regrets he had put a temporary
stop to. Bede, as was previously seen, went indoors, and Roland
departed with Miss Channing on her evening visit, dismissing Dalla
without the smallest ceremony.
The carriage, to convey Mrs. Bede Greatorex and her friends abroad,
drove up. Bede, somewhat neglectful of the rest, came out with his
wife, and placed her in it.
"Are you not coming with us?" she bent forward to whisper, seeing he
was about to close the door.
"Not tonight. I have some work to do."
"Sulky as usual, Bede?"
His lips parted to retort, but he closed them, and endured meekly.
Sulky to her he had never been, and she knew it. The carriage moved
away with her: and Bede lifted his hat; a smile, meant to deceive the
world, making his face one of careless gaiety.
Whether he had work to do, or not, he did not get to it. Sauntering
away from the door, away and away, hardly knowing and not heeding
whither, he found himself presently in the Strand, and thence at the
river-side. There he paced backwards and forwards with unequal steps,
his mind lost in many things, but more especially in the communication
made that day by Henry Ollivera.
The fragmentary letter connected with that long-past history, and the
appointment spoken of by Mr. Kene, that John Ollivera went out of
court to keep, had been as much of a puzzle to Bede Greatorex as it
was to other people. Upon reflection, he came now to think that the
present solution of the affair was the true one. Would it lead to
further discovery? Very fervently he hoped that it would not. There
were grave reasons, as none knew better than Bede, for keeping all
further discovery back; for, if it came, it would hurl down confusion,
dismay, and misery, upon innocent heads as well as guilty ones.
The river, flowing on in its course, was silent and dull in the
summer's night. A line of light illumined the sky in the west where
the sultry sun had gone down in heat: and as Bede looked towards it
and thought of the All-seeing Eye that lay beyond that light, he felt
how fruitless it was for him to plot and plan, and to say this shall
be or this shall not be. The course of the future rested in the hands
of one Divine Ruler, and his own poor, short-sighted, impotent will
was worse than nothing.