The "ghastly serenade" it was called at Saltinville as the facts became
known.
That night Richard Linnell was standing with his teeth set, his throat
dry, and a feeling of despair making his heart seem to sink, watching
the white hand that was waved as soon as the sash was opened. Half
blind with the blood that seemed to rush to his eyes, he glared at the
window. Then a sudden revulsion of feeling came over him as a familiar
voice that was not Claire's cried, "Help!--a doctor!" and then the
speaker seemed to stagger away.
The rest was to Richard Linnell like some dream of horror, regarding
which he recalled the next morning that he had thundered at the door,
that he had helped to carry Claire to her room, and that he had
afterwards been one of the group who stood waiting in the dining-room
until the doctor came down to announce that Miss Denville was better--
that Lady Teigne was quite dead.
Then they had stolen out on tiptoe, and in the stillness of the early
morning shaken hands all round and separated, the Major remaining with
them, and walking with Colonel Mellersh and Richard Linnell to their
door.
"What a horror!" he said hoarsely. "I would not for the world have
taken you two there had I known. Good-night--good-morning, I should
say;" and he, too, said those words--perhaps originated the
saying--"What a ghastly serenade!"
Nine days--they could spare no more in Saltinville, for it would have
spoiled the season--nine days' wonder, and then the news that a certain
royal person was coming down, news blown by the trumpet of Fame with her
attendants, raised up enough wind to sweep away the memory of the horror
on the Parade.
"She was eighty if she was a day," said Sir Matthew Bray: "and it was
quite time the old wretch did die."
"Nice way of speaking of a lady whose relative you are seeking to be,"
said Sir Harry Payne. "Sweet old nymph. How do you make it fit, Matt?"
"Fit? Some scoundrel of a London tramp scaled the balcony, they say.
Fine plunder, the rascal! All those diamonds."
"Which she might have left her sister, and then perhaps they would have
come to you, Matt."
"Don't talk stuff."
"Stuff? Why, you are besieging the belle. But, I say, I have my own
theory about that murder."
"Eh, have you?" cried the great dragoon, staring open-mouthed.
"Egad! yes, Matt. It was not a contemptible robbery."
"Wasn't it? You don't say so."
"But I do," cried Sir Harry seriously. "Case of serious jealousy on the
part of some lover of the bewitching creature. He came in the dead o'
night and smothered the Desdemona with a pillow. What do you say,
Rockley?"
The Major had strolled across the mess-room and heard these words.
"Bah! Don't ridicule the matter," he said. "Change the subject."
"As you like, but the feeble flame only wanted a momentary touch of the
extinguisher and it was gone."
At the house on the Parade there had been terrible anguish, and Claire
Denville suffered painfully as she passed through the ordeal of the
examination that ensued.
But everything was very straightforward and plain. There were the marks
of some one having climbed up the pillar--an easy enough task. The
window opened without difficulty from without, a pot or two lay
overturned in the balcony, a chair in the drawing-room, evidently the
work of some stranger, and the valuable suite of diamonds was gone.
The constable arrested three men of the street tumbler and wandering
vagrant type, who were examined, proved easily that they were elsewhere;
and after the vote of condolence to our esteemed fellow-townsman, Stuart
Denville, Esq, which followed the inquest, there seemed nothing more to
be done but to bury Lady Teigne, which was accordingly done, and the
principal undertaker cleared a hundred pounds by the grand funeral that
took place, though it was quite a year before Lady Drelincourt would pay
the whole of his bill.
So with Lady Teigne the horror was buried too, and in a fortnight the
event that at one time threatened to interfere with the shopkeepers' and
lodging-letters' season was forgotten.
For that space of time, too, the familiar figure of the Master of the
Ceremonies was not seen upon the Parade. Miss Denville was very ill, it
was said, and after the funeral Isaac had to work hard at answering the
door to receive the many cards that were left by fashionable people,
till there was quite a heap in the old china bowl that stood in the
narrow hall.
But the outside world knew nothing of the agonies of mind endured by the
two principal occupants of that house--of the nights of sleepless horror
passed by Claire as she knelt and prayed for guidance, and of the hours
during which the Master of the Ceremonies sat alone, staring blankly
before him as if at some scene which he was ever witnessing, and which
seemed to wither him, mind and body, at one stroke.
For that fortnight, save at the inquest, father and daughter had not
met, but passed their time in their rooms. But the time was gliding on,
and they had to meet--the question occurring to each--how was it to be?
"I must leave it to chance," thought the Master of the Ceremonies, with
a shiver; and after a fierce struggle to master the agony he felt, he
knew that in future he must lead two lives. So putting on his mask, he
one morning walked down to the breakfast-room, and took his accustomed
place.
Outwardly he seemed perfectly calm, and, save that the lines about his
temples and the corners of his lips seemed deeper, he was little
changed; but as he walked he was conscious of a tremulous feeling in the
knees, and even when seated, that the curious palsied sensation went on.
On the previous night Morton had come in from a secret fishing
excursion, to find the house dark and still, and he had stood with his
hands in his pockets hesitating as to whether he should go and take a
lesson in smoking with Isaac in the pantry, steal down to the beach, or
creep upstairs.
He finally decided on the latter course, and going up to the top of the
house on tiptoe, he tapped softly at Claire's bedroom door.
It was opened directly by his sister, who had evidently just risen from
an old dimity-covered easy-chair. She was in a long white
dressing-gown, and, seen by the light of the one tallow candle on the
table, she looked so pale and ghastly that the lad uttered an
ejaculation and caught hold of her thin, cold hands.
"Claire!--Sis!"
They were the first warm words of sympathy she had heard since that
horrible night; and in a moment the icy horror upon her face broke up,
her lips quivered, and, throwing her arms around her brother's neck, she
burst into such a passion of hysterical sobbing that, as he held her to
his breast, he grew alarmed.
He had stepped into the little white room where the flower screen stood
out against the night sky, and as the door swung to, he had felt Claire
sinking upon her knees, and imitating her action, he had held her there
for some time till the attitude grew irksome, and then sank lower till
he was seated on the carpet, holding his sister half-reclining across
his breast.
"Oh! don't--don't, Claire--Sis," he whispered from time to time, as he
kissed the quivering lips, and strove in his boyish way to soothe her.
"Sis dear, you'll give yourself such a jolly headache. Oh, I say,
what's the good of crying like that?"
For answer she only clung the tighter, the pent-up agony escaping in her
tears, though she kissed him passionately again and again, and nestled
to his breast.
"You'll make yourself ill, you know," he whispered. "I say, don't. The
dad's ill, and you'll upset him more."
Still she sobbed on and wept, the outburst saving her from some more
terrible mental strain.
"I wanted to come and comfort you," he said. "I did not know you'd go
on like this."
She could not tell him that he was comforting her; that she had been
tossed by a horrible life-storm that threatened to wreck her reason, and
that when she had lain longing for the sympathy of the sister who now
kept away, saying it was too horrible to come there now, she had found
no life-buoy to which to cling. And now her younger brother had come--
the elder forbidden the house--and the intensity of the relief she felt
was extreme.
"Here, I can't stand this," he said at last, almost roughly. "I shall
go down and send Ike for the doctor."
She clung to him in an agony of dread lest he should go, and her sobs
grew less frequent.
"Come, that's better," he said, and he went on in his rough boyish
selfishness, talking of his troubles and ignoring those of others,
unconsciously strengthening Claire, as he awakened her to a sense of the
duties she owed him, and giving her mental force for the terrible
meeting and struggle that was to come.
For she dared not think. She shrank from mentally arguing out those two
questions of duty--to society and to her father.
Was she to speak and tell all she knew?
Was she to be silent?
All she could do was to shrink within herself, and try to make
everything pass out of her thoughts while she was sinking into the icy
chains of idiocy.
But now, when she had been giving up completely, and at times gazing out
to sea with horrible thoughts assailing her, and suggestions like
temptations to seek for oblivion as the only escape from the agony she
suffered, the life-raft had reached her hands, and she clung to it with
all the tenacity of one mentally drowning fast.
There was something soothing in the very sound of her brother's rough
voice speaking in a hoarse whisper; and his selfish repinings over the
petty discomforts he had suffered came like words of comfort and rest.
"It has been so jolly blank and miserable downstairs," he went on as he
held her, and involuntarily rocked himself to and fro. "Ike and Eliza
have been always gossiping at the back and sneaking out to take dinner
or tea or supper with somebody's servants, so as to palaver about what's
gone on here."
A pause.
"There's been scarcely anything to eat. I've been half-starved."
"Oh, Morton, my poor boy!"
Those were the first words Claire had uttered since the inquest, and
they were followed by a fresh burst of sobs.
"Oh, come, come. Do leave off," he cried pettishly. "I say it's all
very well for the old man to growl at me for fishing, but if I hadn't
gone catching dabs and a little conger or two, I should have been
starved."
She raised her face and kissed him. Some one else was suffering, and
her woman's instinct to help was beginning to work.
"What do you think I did, Sis? Oh, you don't know. I'd been up to
Burnett's to see May, but the beggars had sneaked off and gone to
London. Just like Franky Sneerums and wax-doll May. Pretty sort of a
sister to keep away when we're in trouble."
"Oh, don't, my dear boy," whispered Claire in a choking voice.
"Oh, yes, I shall. They're ashamed of me and of all of us. Just as if
we could help the old girl being killed here."
A horrible spasm ran through Claire.
"Don't jump like that, stupid," said Morton roughly. "You didn't kill
her."
"Hush! hush!"
"No, I shan't hush. It'll do you good to talk and hear what people say,
my pretty old darling Sis. There, there hush-a-bye, baby. Cuddle up
close, and let's comfort you. What's the matter now?"
Claire had struggled up, with her hands upon his shoulders, and was
gazing wildly into his eyes.
"What--what do people say?" she panted.
"Be still, little goose--no; pretty little white pigeon," he said, more
softly, as he tried to draw her towards him.
"What--do they say?" she cried, in a hoarse whisper, and she trembled
violently.
"Why, that it is a jolly good job the old woman is dead, for she was no
use to anyone."
Claire groaned as she yielded once more to his embrace.
"Fisherman Dick says--I say, he is a close old nut there's no getting
anything out of him!--says he don't see that people like Lady Teigne are
any use in the world."
"Morton!"
"Oh, it's all right. I'm only telling you what he said. He says too
that the chap who did it--I say, don't kick out like that, Sis. Yes, I
shall go on: I'm doing you good. Fisherman Dick, and Mrs Miggles too,
said that I ought to try and rouse you up, and I'm doing it. You're
ever so much better already. Why, your hands were like dabs when I came
up, and now they are nice and warm."
She caressed his cheek with them, and he kissed her as she laid her head
on his shoulder.
"Dick Miggles said that the diamonds would never do the chap any good
who stole 'em."
Once more that hysterical start, but the boy only clasped his sister
more tightly, and went on:
"Dick says he never knew anyone prosper who robbed or murdered, or did
anything wrong, except those who smuggled. I say, Sis, I do feel
sometimes as if I should go in for a bit of smuggling. There are some
rare games going on."
Claire clung to him as if exhausted by her emotion.
"Dick's been in for lots of it, I know, only he's too close to speak. I
don't know what I should have done if it hadn't been for them. I've
taken the fish I've caught up there, and Polly Miggles has cooked them,
and we've had regular feeds."
"You have been up there, Morton?" said Claire wildly.
"Yes; you needn't tell the old man. What was I to do? I couldn't get
anything to eat here. I nursed the little girl for Mrs Miggles while
she cooked, and Dick has laughed at me to see me nurse the little thing,
and said it was rum. But I don't mind; she's a pretty little tit, and
Dick has taught her to call me uncle."
Volume One, Chapter VIII.