KEEPING A PROMISE.
The moon was slowly rising behind a black belt of dense foliage,--a
noble screen of elm and beech that sheltered Lord Ruysdale's domain from
the common world without,--as Roland Lansdell crossed the lawn, and went
in amongst the thickest depths of the park. At Lowlands there were no
smooth glades, and romantic waterfalls, no wonderful effects of
landscape-gardening, such as adorned Mordred Priory. The Earls of
Ruysdale had been more or less behind the world for the last century and
a half; and the land about the old red-brick mansion was only a tangled
depth of forest, in which the deer browsed peacefully, undisturbed by
the ruthless handiwork of trim modern improvement.
The lonely wildness of the place suited Roland Lansdell's mood to-night.
At first he had walked very rapidly, even breaking into a run now and
then; so feverishly and desperately did he desire to reach the spot
where he might perhaps find that which would confirm his despair. But
all at once, when he had gone some distance from the house, and the
lights in Lady Gwendoline's drawing-room were shut from him by half the
width of the park, he stopped suddenly, leaning against a tree, faint
and almost breathless. He stopped for the first time to think of what he
had heard. The hot passion of anger, the fierce sense of outraged pride,
had filled his breast so entirely as to sweep away every softer feeling,
as flowers growing near a volcanic mountain may be scattered by the
rolling lava-flood that passes over them. Now, for the first time, he
lingered a little to reflect upon what he had heard. Could it be true?
Could it be that this woman had deceived him,--this woman for whom he
had been false to all the teaching of his life,--this woman, at whose
feet he had offered up that comfortable philosophy which found an
infallible armour against sorrow in supreme indifference to all things
under heaven,--this woman, for whose sake he had consented to reassume
the painful heritage of humanity, the faculty of suffering?
"And she is like the rest, after all," he thought; "or only a little
worse than the rest. And I had forgotten so much for her sake. I had
blotted out the experience of a decade in order that I might believe in
the witchery of her dark eyes. I, the man of half-a-dozen seasons in
London and Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg, had sponged away every base
record in the book of my memory, so that I might scrawl her name upon
the blank pages; and now I am angry with her--with her, poor pitiful
creature, who I suppose is only true to her nature when she is base and
false. I am angry with her, when I have only my own folly to blame for
the whole miserable business. I am angry with her, just as if she were a
responsible being; as if she could be anything but what she is. And yet
there have been good women in the world," he thought, sadly. "My mother
was a good woman. I used to fancy sometimes what might have happened if
I had known her in my mother's lifetime. I have even made a picture in
my mind of the two women, happy together, and loving each other. Heaven
forgive me! And after all her pretty talk about platonism and poetry,
she betrays me for a low intrigue, and a rendezvous kept in an
ale-house."
In all his anger against the Doctor's Wife, no thought of her husband's
far deeper wrong ever entered into Mr. Lansdell's mind. It was
_he_--Roland--who had been betrayed: it was he whose love was outraged,
whose pride was humiliated to the very dust. That there was a man, now
lying ill and helpless at Graybridge, who had a better right to resent
Isabel Gilbert's treachery, and wreak vengeance upon the unknown wretch
for whose sake she was thus base and guilty, never occurred to this
angry young man. It had been, for a long time past, his habit to forget
George Gilbert's existence; he had resolutely shut from his mind the
image of the Graybridge surgeon ever since his return to Midlandshire;
ever since the wrong he was doing against George Gilbert had fallen into
a deliberate and persistent course, leading steadily to a foregone
conclusion. He had done this, and little by little it had become very
easy for him to forget so insignificant and unobtrusive a person as the
simple-hearted parish surgeon, whose only sin against mankind was that
he had chosen a pretty woman for his wife.
So now it was of his own wrongs, and of those wrongs alone, that Mr.
Lansdell thought. All the circumstances of Isabel's visit to the Priory
came back to him. Came back? When had they left his mind, except for
that brief interval of passion during which his mind had been a chaos?
"The money she wanted was for this man, of course!" he thought. "For
whom else should it be? for whom else should she come to ask for
money--of her rejected lover--in the dead of the night, with all the
mean, miserable circumstances of a secret and guilty action? If she had
wanted money from me for any legitimate purpose--in any foolish feminine
confusion of debt and difficulty--why should she not have written to me
boldly for the sum she required? She must have known that my purse was
hers to command whenever she required it. But that she should come
secretly, trembling like a guilty creature,--compromising herself and me
by a midnight visit,--afraid to confess why she wanted the
money,--answering my straight questions by hesitation and prevarication!
What construction can I put upon her conduct of last night except
one--except one? And yet, even after last night, I believed in her. I
thought that she might have wanted the money for some relation. Some
relation! What relation should she meet alone, secretly, late at night,
in such a place as Nessborough Hollow? She who never, in all the course
of our acquaintance, mentioned a living creature beyond her step-mother
who had any claim upon her; and all at once some one comes--some one for
whom she must have fifty pounds; not in the form of a cheque, which
might be traced home to the person who received it. I cannot forget
that; I cannot forget that she refused to take my cheque for the money
she wanted. That alone makes a mystery of the business; and the meeting
that Raymond witnessed tells all the rest. This strange man is some old
lover; some jilted admirer of a bygone era, who comes now and is
clamorous and dangerous, and will only be bought off by a bribe. Oh,
shame, shame, shame upon her, and upon my own folly! And I thought her
an innocent child, who had ignorantly broken a strong man's heart!"
He walked on slowly now, and with his head bent, no longer trying to
make a short cut for himself among the trees, but absently following a
narrow winding path worn by slow peasants' feet upon the grass.
"Why should I be so eager to see this man?" he thought. "What can I
discover that I do not already know? If there is any one upon earth
whose word I can trust in, it is Raymond. He would be the very last to
slander this wretched woman, or to be self-deluded by a prejudice; and
he saw her--he saw her. And even beyond this, the base intrigue has
become common talk. Gwendoline would not have dared to say what she said
to-day without good grounds for her statement. It is only I,--I who have
lived apart from all the world to think and dream about her,--it is only
I who am the last to be told of her shame. But I will try to see this
fellow notwithstanding. I should like to see the man who has been
preferred to me."
Nessborough Hollow was some distance from Lowlands; and Mr. Lansdell,
who was familiar with almost every inch of his native county, made his
way thither by shadowy lanes and rarely trodden by-ways, where the
summer wild-flowers smelt sweetly in the dewy night. Never surely had
brighter heavens shone upon a fairer earth. The leaves and blossoms, the
long lush grasses faintly stirred by lazy summer winds, made a perpetual
whisper that scarcely broke the general stillness: and now and then the
gurgling notes of a nightingale sounded amongst the clustering foliage
that loomed darkly above tangled hedgerows, and broad wastes of moonlit
grass.
"I wonder why people are not happy," mused Mr. Lansdell, impressed in
spite of himself by the quiet beauty of the summer landscape. Intensely
subjective though our natures may be, external things will not be quite
put away, strive as we may to shut them out. Did not Fagin think about
the broken rail when he stood in the dock, and wonder who would mend it?
Was not Manfred, the supremely egotistical and subjective, perpetually
dragging the mountain-tops and Alpine streamlets into his talk of his
own troubles? So to-night, deeply absorbed though he was by the
consciousness of his own wrongs, there was a kind of double action in
Roland Lansdells mind, by means of which he was conscious of every
flickering shadow of the honeysuckle blossoms dark upon the silver
smoothness of the moonlit grass.
"I wonder how it is that people cannot be happy," he thought; "why can't
they take a sensuous pleasure out of this beautiful universe, and enjoy
the moonlight, and the shadows, and the perfume of new-mown hay upon the
summer air; and then, when they are tired of one set of sensations, move
on to another: from rural England to tropical India; from the southern
prairies to the snow-mantled Alps; playing a game at hide-and-seek with
the disagreeable seasons, and contriving to go down to the grave through
the rosy sunsets of a perpetual summer, indifferent as to who dies or
suffers, so long as the beauty of the world endures? Why can't people be
reasonable, and take life wisely? I begin to think that Mr. Harold
Skimpole was the only true philosopher. If he had been rich enough to
indulge his sensuous simplicity out of his own pocket, he would have
been perfect. It is only when the Skimpole philosopher wants other
people's pounds that he becomes objectionable. Ah, how pleasantly life
might glide by, taken à la Skimpole;--a beautiful waveless river,
drifting imperceptibly on to darkness! But we make our own election.
When we are wise enough to abjure all the glittering battle-grounds of
man's ambition, we must needs fall in love, and go mad because a
shallow-hearted woman has black eyes and a straight nose. With red hair
and freckles Mrs. Gilbert might go to perdition, unwept and unhindered;
but because the false creature has a pretty face we want to tear her all
to pieces for her treachery."
In that moonlight walk from Lowlands to Nessborough Hollow there was
time enough for Mr. Lansdell to fall into many moods. At one time he was
ready to laugh aloud, in bitter contempt for his own weakness; at
another time, moved almost to tears by the contemplation of his ruined
dreams. It was so difficult for him to separate the ideal Isabel of
yesterday from the degraded creature of to-night. He believed what
Charles Raymond had told him, but he could not realize it; the hard and
cruel facts slipped away from him every now and then, and he found
himself thinking of the Doctor's Wife with all the old tenderness. Then
suddenly, like a glare of phosphoric light, the memory of her treachery
would flash back upon him. Why should he lament the innocent idol of his
dreams? There was not, there never had been, any such creature. But he
could not hold this in his mind. He could not blot out of his brain the
Isabel of the past. It was easier for him to think of her as he might
have thought of the dead, dwelling fondly on vain dreams of happiness
which once might have been, but now could never be, because _she_ was no
more.
There was not a scheme that he had ever made for that impossible future
which did not come back to his mind to-night. The places in which he had
fancied himself lingering in tranquil happiness with the woman he loved
arose before him in all their brightest colouring; fair lonely Alpine
villages, whose very names he had forgotten, emerged from the dim mists
of memory, bright as an eastern city rising out of night's
swiftly-melting vapours into the clear light of morning; and he saw
Isabel Gilbert leaning from a rustic balcony jutting out upon broad
purple waters, screened and sheltered by the tall grandeur of
innumerable snow-peaks. Ah, how often he had painted these things; the
moonlit journeys on nights as calm as this, under still bluer skies lit
by a larger moon; the varied ways and waters by which they might have
gone, always leading them farther and farther away from the common world
and the base thoughts of common people; the perfect isolation in which
there should have been no loneliness! And all this might have been,
thought Mr. Lansdell, if she had not been so base and degraded a
creature as to cling blindly to a vulgar lover, whose power over her
most likely lay in some guilty secret of the past.
Twenty times in the course of that long summer night's walk Roland
Lansdell stopped for a minute or so, doubtful whether he should go
farther or not. What motive had he in seeking out this stranger staying
at a rustic public-house? What right had he to interfere in a wicked
woman's low intrigue? If Isabel Gilbert was the creature she was
represented to be,--and he could not doubt his authority,--what could it
matter to him how low she sank? Had she not coolly and deliberately
rejected his love--his devotion, so earnestly and solemnly offered to
her? Had she not left him to his despair and desolation, with no better
comfort than the stereotyped promise that she would "think of him?" What
was she to him, that he should trouble himself about her, and bring
universal scorn upon his name, perhaps, by some low tavern brawl? No; he
would go no farther; he would blot this creature out of his mind, and
turn his back upon the land which held her. Was not all the world before
him, and all creation designed for his pleasure? Was there anything upon
earth denied him, except the ignis-fatuus light of this woman's black
eyes?
"Perhaps this is a turning-point in my life," he thought during one of
these pauses; "and there may be some chance for me after all. Why should
I not have a career like other men, and try like them to be of some use
to my species? Better, perhaps, to be always trying and always failing,
than to stand aloof for ever, wasting my intellect upon vain
calculations as to the relative merits of the game and the candle. An
outsider cannot judge the merits of the strife. To a man of my
temperament it may have seemed a small matter whether Spartans or
Persians were victors in the pass of Thermopylæ; but what a glorious
thing the heat and din of the struggle must have been for those who were
in it! I begin to think it is a mistake to lounge luxuriously on the
grand stand, looking down at the riders. Better, perhaps, wear a
jockey's jacket; even to be thrown and trampled to death in the race. I
will wash my hands of Mrs. George Gilbert, and go back to the Priory and
sleep peacefully; and to-morrow morning I will ask Lady Gwendoline to be
my wife; and then I can stand for Wareham, and go in for
liberal-conservatism and steam-farming."
But the picture of Isabel Gilbert and the stranger meeting in
Nessborough Hollow was not to be so easily erased from Mr. Lansdell's
brain. The habit of vacillation, which had grown out of the idleness of
his life, was stronger in him to-night than usual; but the desire to see
for himself how deeply he was wronged triumphed over every other
feeling, and he never turned his face from the direction in which
Nessborough Hollow lay,--a little rustic nook in fertile Midlandshire,
almost as beautiful, after its own simple English fashion, as those
sublime Alpine villages which shone upon Roland Lansdell in his dreams.
He came near the place at last; a little tired by the long walk from
Lowlands; a good deal wearied by all the contending emotions of the last
few hours. He came upon the spot at last, not by the ordinary roadway,
but across a strip of thickly wooded waste land lying high above the
hollow--a dense and verdant shelter, in which the fern grew tall beneath
the tangled branches of the trees. Here he stopped, upon the top-most
edge of a bank that sloped down into the rustic roadway. The place
beneath him was a kind of glen, sheltered from all the outer world,
solemnly tranquil in that silent hour. He saw the road winding and
narrowing under the trees till it reached a little rustic bridge. He
heard the low ripple of the distant brook; and close beside the bridge
he saw the white wall of the little inn, chequered with broad black
beams, and crowned by high peaked gables jutting out above the quaint
latticed casements. In one low window he saw a feeble candle gleaming
behind a poor patch of crimson curtain, and through the half-open door a
narrow stream of light shone in a slanting line upon the ground.
He saw all this; and then from the other end of the still glade he saw
two figures coming slowly towards the inn. Two figures, one of which was
so familiar and had been so dear that despair, complete and absolute,
came upon him for the first time, in that one brief start of
recognition. Ah, surely he had never believed in her falsehood until
this moment; surely, if he had believed Charles Raymond, the agony of
seeing her here could not have been so great as this!
He stood upon the crown of the steep slope, with his hands grasping the
branches on each side of him, looking down at those two quiet figures
advancing slowly in the moonlight. There was nothing between him and
them except the grassy bank, broken here and there by patches of gorse
and fern, and briers and saplings; there was nothing to intercept his
view, and the moonlight shone full upon them. He did not look at the
man. What did it matter to him what _he_ was like? He looked at her--at
_her_ whom he had loved so tenderly--at her for whose sake he had
consented to believe in woman's truth and purity. He looked at her, and
saw her face, very pale in the moonlight,--blanched, no doubt, by the
guilty pallor of fear. Even the pattern of her dress was familiar to
him. Had she not worn it in one of their meetings at Thurston's Crag?
"Fool!" he thought, "to think that she, who found it so easy a matter to
deceive her husband, must needs be true to _me_. _I_ was ill at ease and
remorseful when I went to meet her; but she came to me smiling, and went
away, placid and beautiful as a good angel, to tell her husband that she
had been to Thurston's Crag, and had happened to meet Mr. Lansdell."
He stood as still as death, not betraying his presence by so much as the
rustling of a leaf, while the two figures approached the spot above
which he stood. But a little way off they paused, and were parting, very
coolly, as it seemed, when Mrs. Gilbert lifted up her face, and said
something to the man. He stood with his back turned towards Roland, to
whom the very expression of Isabel's face was visible in the moonlight.
It seemed to him as if she was pleading for something, for he had never
seen her face more earnest,--no, not even when she had decided the
question of his life's happiness in that farewell meeting beneath
Thurston's oak. She seemed to be pleading for something, since the man
nodded his head once or twice while she was speaking, with a churlish
gesture of assent; and when they were about to part he bent his head and
kissed her. There was an insolent indifference about his manner of doing
this that stung Roland more keenly than any display of emotion could
have done.
After this the Doctor's Wife went away. Roland watched her as she turned
once, and stood for a moment looking back at the man from whom she had
just parted, and then disappeared amongst the shadows in the glade. Ah,
if she had been nothing more than a shadow--if he could have awakened to
find all this the brief agony of a dream! The man stood where Isabel had
left him, while he took a box of fusees from his waistcoat-pocket and
lighted a cigar; but his back was still turned to Mr. Lansdell.
He drew two or three puffs of smoke from the cigar, assured himself that
it was fully lighted, and then strolled slowly towards the spot above
which Roland stood.
All that was left of the original savage in the fine gentleman arose at
that moment in Roland Lansdell's breast. He had come there, only to
ascertain for himself that he had been betrayed and deluded; he had come
with no vengeful purpose in his mind; or, at any rate, with no
consciousness of any such purpose. He had come to be cool, indifferent,
ironical; to slay with cruel and cutting words, perhaps, but to use no
common weapons. But in a moment all his modern philosophy of
indifference melted away, and left him with the original man's murderous
instincts and burning sense of wrong raging fiercely in his breast.
He leapt down the sloping bank with scarcely any consciousness of
touching the slippery grass; but he dragged the ferns and brambles from
the loose earth in his descent, and a shower of torn verdure flew up
into the summer air. He had no weapon, nothing but his right arm,
wherewith to strike the broad-chested black-bearded stranger. But he
never paused to consider that, or to count the chances of a struggle. He
only knew that he wanted to kill the man for whose sake Isabel Gilbert
had rejected and betrayed him. In the next moment his hands were on the
stranger's throat.
"You scoundrel!" he gasped, hoarsely, "you consummate coward and
scoundrel, to bring that woman to this place!"
There was a brief struggle, and then the stranger freed himself from Mr.
Lansdell's grasp. There was no comparison between the physical strength
and weight of the two men; and the inequality was sensibly increased by
a stout walking-stick of the bludgeon order carried by the black-bearded
stranger.
"Hoity-toity!" cried that gentleman, who seemed scarcely disposed to
take Mr. Lansdell's attack seriously; "have you newly escaped from some
local lunatic asylum, my friend, that you go about the country flying at
people's throats in this fashion? What's the row? Can't a gentleman in
the merchant navy take a moonlight stroll with his daughter for once in
a way, to wish her good-bye before he fits out for a fresh voyage,
without all this hullabaloo?"
"Your daughter!" cried Roland Lansdell. "Your daughter?"
"Yes, my daughter Isabel, wife of Mr. Gilbert, surgeon."
"Thank God!" murmured Roland, slowly, "thank God!"
And then a pang of remorse shot through his heart, as he thought how
little his boasted love had been worth, after all; how ready he had been
to disbelieve in her purity; how easily he had accepted the idea of her
degradation.
"I ought to have known," he thought,--"I ought to have known that she
was innocent. If all the world had been banded together against her, I
should have been her champion, and defender. But my love was only a
paltry passion after all. The gold changed to brass in the fire of the
first ordeal."
He thought this, or something like this, and then in the next moment he
said courteously:
"Upon my word, I have to apologize for my----" he hesitated a little
here, for he really was ashamed of himself; all the murderous instincts
were gone, as if they had never been, and the Englishman's painfully
acute perception of the ridiculous being fully aroused, he felt that he
had made a consummate fool of himself. "I have to apologize for my very
absurd behaviour just now; but having heard a very cruel and slanderous
report, connecting you as a stranger, and not as a near relation, with
Mrs. Gilbert, and entertaining a most sincere respect for that lady and
her husband, to say nothing of the fact that I had been lately
dining,"--Mr. Lansdell had not drunk so much as one glassful of wine
during the last four-and-twenty hours; but he would have been quite
willing to admit himself a drunkard if that could have lessened the
ridiculous element of his position--"in point of fact, I completely lost
my head. I am very happy to think you are so nearly related to the lady
I so much esteem; and if I can be of service to you in any manner,
I----"
"Stop a bit," cried Mr. Sleaford the barrister,--"stop a bit! I thought
I knew your voice. _You're_ the languid swell, who was so jolly knowing
at the Old Bailey,--the languid swell who had nothing better to do than
join the hunt against a poor devil that never cheated you out of
sixpence. I said, if ever I came out of prison alive, _I'd kill you_;
and I'll keep my promise."
He hissed out these last words between his set teeth. His big muscular
hands were fastened on Roland Lansdell's throat; and his face was pushed
forward until it almost touched that other handsome face which defied
him in the proud insolence of a moral courage that rose above all
physical superiority. The broad bright moonlight streaming through a
wide gap in the foliage fell full upon the two men; and in the dark face
glowering at his, Mr. Lansdell recognized the man whom he had followed
down to Liverpool for the mere amusement of the chase,--the man
described in the police records by a dozen aliases, and best known by
his familiar sobriquet of "Jack the Scribe."
"You dog!" cried Mr. Sleaford, "I've dreamt about such a meeting as this
when I was working the pious dodge at Portland. I've dreamt about it;
and it did me good to feel my fingers at your throat, even in my dreams.
You dog! I'll do for you, if I swing for this night's work."
There was a struggle,--a brief and desperate struggle,--in which the two
men wrestled with each other, and the chances of victory seemed
uncertain. Then Mr. Sleaford's bludgeon went whirling up into the air,
and descended with a dull thud, once, twice, three times upon Roland
Lansdell's bare head. After the third blow, Jack the Scribe loosed his
grasp from the young man's throat, and the master of Mordred Priory fell
crashing down among the fern and wild-flowers, with a shower of
opal-tinted rose-petals fluttering about him as he fell.
He lay very quietly where he had fallen. Mr. Sleaford looked about him
right and left along the pleasant moon-lighted glade. There was not a
living creature to be seen either way. The light behind the red curtain
in the little rustic tavern still glimmered feebly in the distance; but
the stillness of the place could scarcely have seemed more profound had
Nessborough Hollow been a hidden glade in some primeval forest.
Jack the Scribe knelt down beside the figure lying so quietly amongst
the tangled verdure, and laid his strong bare hand very gently above Mr.
Lansdell's waistcoat.
"He'll do," muttered the Scribe; "I've spoiled him for some time to
come, anyhow. Perhaps it's all for the best if I haven't gone too far."
He rose from his knees, looked about him again, and assured himself of
the perfect loneliness of the place. Then he walked slowly towards the
little inn.
"A low blackguard would have taken the fellow's watch," he mused, "and
got himself into trouble that way. What did he mean by flying at me
about Isabel, I wonder; and how does he come to know her? He belongs to
this part of the country, I suppose. And to think that I should have
been so near him all this time without knowing it. I knew his name, and
that's about all I did know; but I thought he was a London swell."
He pushed open the door of the little tavern presently--the door through
which the slanting line of light had streamed out upon the pathway. All
within was very quiet, for the rustic owners of the habitation had long
since retired to their peaceful slumbers, leaving Mr. Sleaford what he
called "the run of the house." They had grown very familiar with their
lodger, and placed implicit confidence in him as a jolly outspoken
fellow of the seafaring order; for these Midlandshire rustics were not
very keen to detect any small shortcomings in Mr. Sleaford's assumption
of the mercantile mariner.
He went into the room where the light was burning. It was the room which
he had occupied during his residence at the Leicester Arms. He seated
himself at the table, on which there were some writing materials, and
scrawled a few lines to the effect that he found himself obliged to go
away suddenly that night, on his way to Liverpool, and that he left a
couple of sovereigns, at a rough guess, to pay his score. He wrapped the
money up in the letter, sealed it with a great sprawling red seal,
directed it to the landlord, and placed it on a conspicuous corner of
the mantel-piece. Then he took off his boots, and crept softly up the
creaking corkscrew staircase leading to his bedroom, with the candle in
his hand. He came down-stairs again about ten minutes afterwards
carrying a little valise, which he slung across his shoulder by a strap;
then he took up his bludgeon and prepared to depart.
But before leaving the room he bent over the table, and examined the
heaviest end of his stick by the light of the candle. There was blood
upon it, and a little tuft of dark hair, which he burned in the flame of
the candle; and when he looked at his waistcoat he saw that there were
splashes of blood on that and on his shirt.
He held the end of the stick over the candle till it was all smoked and
charred; he buttoned his cut-away coat over his chest, and then took a
railway-rug from a chair in a corner and threw it across his shoulder.
"It's an ugly sight to look at, that is," he muttered; "but I don't
think I went too far."
He went out at the little door, and into the glade, where a nightingale
was singing high up amongst the clustering foliage, and where the air
was filled with the faint perfume of honeysuckle and starry wild roses.
Once he looked, with something like terror in his face, towards the spot
where he had left his prostrate enemy; and then he turned and walked
away at a rapid pace in the other direction, crossing the rustic wooden
bridge, and ascending the rising ground that led towards the Briargate
Road.