THE VAMPYRE’S FLIGHT.—HIS DANGER, AND THE LAST PLACE OF REFUGE.
Leaving the disorderly and vicious mob, who were thus sacrificing human
life to their excited passions, we return to the brothers Bannerworth
and the doctor, who together with Admiral Bell, still held watch over
the hall.
No indication of the coming forth of Varney presented itself for some
time longer, and then, at least they thought, they heard a window open;
and, turning their eyes in the direction whence the sound proceeded,
they could see the form of a man slowly and cautiously emerging from it.
As far as they could judge, from the distance at which they were, that
form partook much of the appearance and the general aspect of Sir
Francis Varney, and the more they looked and noticed its movements, the
more they felt convinced that such was the fact.
“There comes your patient, doctor,” said the admiral.
“Don’t call him my patient,” said the doctor, “if you please.”
“Why you know he is; and you are, in a manner of speaking, bound to
look after him. Well, what is to be done?”
“He must not, on any account,” said Dr. Chillingworth, “be allowed to
leave the place. Believe me, I have the very strongest reasons for
saying so.”
“He shall not leave it then,” said Henry.
Even as he spoke, Henry Bannerworth darted forward, and Sir Francis
Varney dropped from the window, out of which he had clambered, close to
his feet.
“Hold!” cried Henry, “you are my prisoner.”
With the most imperturbable coolness in the world, Sir Francis Varney
turned upon him, and replied,—
“And pray, Henry Bannerworth, what have I done to provoke your wrath?”
“What have you done?—have you not, like a thief, broken into my house?
Can you ask what you have done?”
“Ay,” said the vampyre, “like a thief, perchance, and yet no thief. May
I ask you, what there is to steal, in the house?”
By the time this short dialogue had been uttered, the rest of the party
had come up, and Varney was, so far as regarded numbers, a prisoner.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, with that strange contortion of countenance
which, now they all understood, arose from the fact of his having been
hanged, and restored to life again. “Well, gentlemen, now that you have
beleaguered me in such a way, may I ask you what it is about?”
“If you will step aside with me, Sir Francis Varney, for a moment,”
said Dr. Chillingworth, “I will make to you a communication which will
enable you to know what it is all about.”
“Oh, with pleasure,” said the vampyre. “I am not ill at present; but
still, sir, I have no objection to hear what you have to say.”
He stepped a few paces on one side with the doctor, while the others
waited, not without some amount of impatience for the result of the
communication. All that they could hear was, that Varney said, suddenly—
“You are quite mistaken.”
And then the doctor appeared to be insisting upon something, which the
vampyre listened to patiently; and, at the end, burst out with,—
“Why, doctor, you must be dreaming.”
At this, Dr. Chillingworth at once left him, and advancing to his
friends, he said,—
“Sir Francis Varney denies in toto all that I have related to you
concerning him; therefore, I can say no more than that I earnestly
recommend you, before you let him go, to see that he takes nothing of
value with him.”
“Why, what can you mean?” said Varney.
“Search him,” said the doctor; “I will tell you why, very shortly.”
“Indeed—indeed!” said Sir Francis Varney. “Now, gentlemen, I will give
you a chance of behaving justly and quietly, so saving yourself the
danger of acting otherwise. I have made repeated offers to take this
house, either as a tenant or as a purchaser, all of which offers have
been declined, upon, I dare say, a common enough principle, namely,
one which induces people to enhance the value of anything they have
for disposal, if it be unique, by making it difficult to come at.
Seeing that you had deserted the place, I could make no doubt but
that it was to be had, so I came here to make a thorough examination
of its interior, to see if it would suit me. I find that it will not;
therefore, I have only to apologise for the intrusion, and to wish you
a remarkably good evening.”
“That won’t do,” said the doctor.
“What won’t do, sir?”
“This excuse will not do, Sir Francis Varney. You are, although you
deny it, the man who was hanged in London some years ago for a highway
robbery.”
Varney laughed, and held up his hands, exclaiming,—
“Alas! alas! our good friend, the doctor, has studied too hard; his
wits, probably, at the best of times, none of the clearest, have become
hopelessly entangled.”
“Do you deny,” said Henry, “then, that you are that man?”
“Most unequivocally.”
“I assert it,” said the doctor, “and now, I will tell you all, for I
perceive you hesitate about searching, Sir Francis Varney, I tell you
all why it is that he has such an affection for Bannerworth Hall.”
“Before you do,” said Varney, “there is a pill for you, which you may
find more nauseous and harder of digestion, than any your shop can
furnish.”
As Varney uttered these words, he suddenly drew from his pocket a
pistol, and, levelling it at the unfortunate doctor, he fired it full
at him.
[Illustration: Varney suddenly shoots the doctor.]
The act was so sudden, so utterly unexpected, and so stunning, that it
was done before any one could move hand or foot to prevent it. Henry
Bannerworth and his brother were the furthest off from the vampyre;
and, unhappily, in the rush which they, as soon us possible, made
towards him, they knocked down the admiral, who impeded them much; and,
before they could spring over, or past him, Sir Francis Varney was gone.
So sudden, too, had been his departure, that they had not the least
idea in which direction he had gone; so that to follow him would have
been a work of the greatest possible difficulty.
Notwithstanding, however, both the difficulty and the danger, for no
doubt the vampyre was well enough armed, Henry and his brother both
rushed after the murderer, as they now believed him to be, in the route
which they thought it was most probable he would take, namely, that
which led towards the garden gate.
They reached that spot in a few moments, but all was profoundly still.
Not the least trace of any one could be seen, high or low, and they
were compelled, after a cursory examination, to admit that Sir Francis
Varney had again made his escape, despite the great odds that were
against him in point of numbers.
“He has gone,” said Henry. “Let us go back, and see into the state of
poor Dr. Chillingworth, who, I fear, is a dead man.”
They hurried back to the spot, and there they found the admiral looking
as composed as possible, and solacing himself with a pinch of snuff, as
he gazed upon the apparently lifeless form at his feet.
“Is he dead?” said Henry.
“I should say he was,” replied the admiral; “such a shot as that was
don’t want to be repeated. Well, I liked the doctor with all his
faults. He only had one foolish way with him, and that was, that he
shirked his grog.”
“This is an awful catastrophe,” said Henry, as he knelt down by the
side of the body. “Assist me, some of you. Where is Charles?”
“I’ll be hanged,” said the admiral, “if I know. He disappeared
somewhere.”
“This is a night of mystery as well as terror. Alas! poor Dr.
Chillingworth! I little thought that you would have fallen a victim
to the man whom you preserved from death. How strange it is that
you should have snatched from the tomb the very individual who was,
eventually, to take your own life.”
The brothers gently raised the body of the doctor, and carried it on to
the grass plot, which was close at hand.
“Farewell, kind and honest-hearted Chillingworth,” said Henry; “I
shall, many and many a time, feel your loss; and now I will rest not
until I have delivered up to justice your murderer. All consideration,
or feeling, for what seemed to be latent virtues in that strange
and inexplicable man, Varney, shall vanish, and he shall reap the
consequences of the crime he has now committed.”
“It was a cold blooded, cowardly murder,” said his brother.
“It was; but you may depend the doctor was about to reveal something
to us, which Varney so much dreaded, that he took his life as the only
effectual way, at the moment, of stopping him.”
“It must be so,” said Henry.
“And now,” said the admiral, “it’s too late, and we shall not know it
at all. That’s the way. A fellow saves up what he has got to tell till
it is too late to tell it, and down he goes to Davy Jones’s locker with
all his secrets aboard.”
“Not always,” said Dr. Chillingworth, suddenly sitting bolt
upright—“not always.”
Henry and his brother started back in amazement, and the admiral was
so taken by surprise, that had not the resuscitated doctor suddenly
stretched out his hand and laid hold of him by the ankle, he would
have made a precipitate retreat.
“Hilloa! murder!” he cried. “Let me go! How do I know but you may be a
vampyre by now, as you were shot by one.”
Henry soonest recovered from the surprise of the moment, and with the
most unfeigned satisfaction, he cried,—
“Thank God you are unhurt, Dr. Chillingworth! Why he must have missed
you by a miracle.”
“Not at all,” said the doctor. “Help me up—thank you—all right. I’m
only a little singed about the whiskers. He hit me safe enough.”
“Then how have you escaped?”
“Why from the want of a bullet in the pistol, to be sure. I can
understand it all well enough. He wanted to create sufficient confusion
to cover a desperate attempt to escape, and he thought that would be
best done by seeming to shoot me. The suddenness of the shock, and the
full belief, at the moment, that he had sent a bullet into my brains,
made me fall, and produced a temporary confusion of ideas, amounting to
insensibility.”
“From which you are happily recovered. Thank Heaven that, after all, he
is not such a villain as this act would have made him.”
“Ah!” said the admiral, “it takes people who have lived a little in
these affairs to know the difference in sound between a firearm with a
bullet in it, and one without. I knew it was all right.”
“Then why did you not say so, admiral?”
“What was the use? I thought the doctor might be amused to know what
you should say of him, so you see I didn’t interfere; and, as I am not
a good hand at galloping after anybody, I didn’t try that part of the
business, but just remained where I was.”
“Alas! alas!” cried the doctor, “I much fear that, by his going, I have
lost all that I expected to be able to do for you, Henry. It’s of not
the least use now telling you or troubling you about it. You may now
sell or let Bannerworth Hall to whomever you please, for I am afraid it
is really worthless.”
“What on earth do you mean?” said Henry. “Why, doctor, will you keep up
this mystery among us? If you have anything to say, why not say it at
once?”
“Because, I tell you it’s of no use now. The game is up, Sir Francis
Varney has escaped; but still I don’t know that I need exactly
hesitate.”
“There can be no reason for your hesitating about making a
communication to us,” said Henry. “It is unfriendly not to do so.”
“My dear boy, you will excuse me for saying that you don’t know what
you are talking about.”
“Can you give any reason?”
“Yes; respect for the living. I should have to relate something of the
dead which would be hurtful to their feelings.”
Henry was silent for a few moments, and then he said,——
“What dead? And who are the living?”
“Another time,” whispered the doctor to him; “another time, Henry. Do
not press me now. But you shall know all another time.”
“I must be content. But now let us remember that another man yet
lingers in Bannerworth Hall. I will endure suspense on his account no
longer. He is an intruder there; so I go at once to dislodge him.”
No one made any opposition to this move, not even the doctor; so
Henry preceded them all to the house. They passed through the open
window into the long hall, and from thence into every apartment of
the mansion, without finding the object of their search. But from
one of the windows up to which there grew great masses of ivy, there
hung a rope, by which any one might easily have let himself down; and
no doubt, therefore, existed in all their minds that the hangman had
sufficiently profited by the confusion incidental to the supposed
shooting of the doctor, to make good his escape from the place.
“And so, after all,” said Henry, “we are completely foiled?”
“We may be,” said Dr. Chillingworth; “but it is, perhaps, going too far
to say that we actually are. One thing, however, is quite clear; and
that is, no good can be done here.”
“Then let us go home,” said the admiral. “I did not think from the
first that any good would be done here.”
They all left the garden together now; so that, almost for the first
time, Bannerworth Hall was left to itself, unguarded and unwatched
by any one whatever. It was with an evident and a marked melancholy
that the doctor proceeded with the party to the cottage-house of
the Bannerworths; but, as after what he had said, Henry forbore to
question him further upon those subjects which he admitted he was
keeping secret; and as none of the party were much in a cue for general
conversation, the whole of them walked on with more silence than
usually characterised them.