Note: Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
http://archive.org/details/pittowncoronetfa03will
Project Gutenberg has the other two volumes of this work.
Volume I: see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42167
Volume II: see https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42168
THE PIT TOWN CORONET:
A Family Mystery.
by
CHARLES J. WILLS,
Author of
"In the Land of the Lion and Sun," etc.
In Three Volumes.
VOL. III.
Ward and Downey,
12, York Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C.
1888
[The right of translation is reserved, and the Dramatic Copyright
protected.]
Printed by
Kelly and Co., Gate Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C.;
and Middle Mill, Kingston-on-Thames.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I.--AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS 1
II.--AT MONTE CARLO 25
III.--AN ANONYMOUS LETTER 52
IV.--PALLIDA MORS 76
V.--A LITTLE RED BOX 100
VI.--LUCIUS HAGGARD IS BEWILDERED 131
VII.--ENTER MR. BROOKES 158
VIII.--THE HOLLOW BEECH TREE 179
IX.--MR. CAPT LEAVES SERVICE 203
THE PIT TOWN CORONET.
CHAPTER I.
AFTER SEVENTEEN YEARS.
Seventeen uneventful years had passed and had streaked Georgie Haggard's
abundant chestnut locks with grey. A lovely woman still. The innocent,
healthful, girlish beauty had developed into the sweet matronly dignity
which is so frequently seen among the happy wives and mothers of the
English aristocracy. Haggard was still proud of his wife, because even
he couldn't fail to see her beauty; and as for the old lord, he idolized
her much as old Squire Warrender had idolized her twenty years ago at
The Warren. Georgie Haggard was not demonstrative. Always quiet, she was
rather timid and subdued in her husband's presence; but with the old
lord, though perhaps a little more staid and dignified than of yore, she
was still the lovely and affectionate woman of the old happy times. Hers
was the beauty of the happy mother, the sweet matronly loveliness which
is perhaps the more touching when tinged by the slight dash of sadness
which idealises it and saves it from the commonplace. The smile was not
ever present, but it was none the less beautiful and touching from its
rarity.
Reginald Haggard and his family had been installed at Walls End Castle
ever since Lord Hetton's death. They had come originally upon a visit;
Mrs. Haggard's health had suddenly broken down, and at the old lord's
urgent entreaty the visit had been indefinitely prolonged. Although
Haggard was, as we know, a wealthy man, he could not afford to disregard
any suggestion of his great-uncle. At first he had looked on the whole
thing as a confounded nuisance; he had objected to his wife that they
might make themselves ridiculous by a too abject obedience to the whims
of the old nobleman.
But after all it was not so very bad for the Haggards. Lord Pit Town
took care to make it very apparent to everybody that it was at his
special desire that Haggard and his family remained at the Castle.
He let it be very plainly perceived that he considered Reginald
Haggard almost as his son, as well as his heir; for the permanent
under-secretary at the Home Office, at the conclusion of his official
duties, had quite enough to occupy his mind with his eternal whist at
the club till the small hours of the morning. The odd trick was far more
to him than the possession of Walls End Castle and the Pit Town title.
But Mr. Lancelot Haggard remained a plain esquire till his death, which
occurred seven years after that of the unfortunate Lord Hetton. When
his man-servant opened the study door one morning, for he had found the
bedroom empty, he saw Lancelot Haggard seated at the whist table, upon
which the four hands of an unfinished game were spread. Pole's "Treatise
on Whist" lay open at "The Echo of the Call," the candles had burnt out
in their sockets, there were tricks turned, and three cards were already
played of another one; and Lancelot Haggard sat bolt upright, the fourth
card between his fingers, stone dead, but with a peaceful smile upon his
lips.
Reginald Haggard, then, was practically in the position of Lord Pit
Town's son. Of course he was but plain Mr. Haggard still. He had got rid
of his father's place, thus "washing his hands," as he had threatened,
"of the whole bag of tricks;" for though Cunningham, the Scotch steward,
had succeeded in screwing three per cent. out of the place, yet he had
made himself so terribly unpopular in the process that he resigned in
despair in order to emigrate to New Zealand, and so become, as he
phrased it, his "ain mon again." When the steward resigned Haggard had
been very glad indeed of the excuse to send the place to the hammer. A
set of rooms in the huge mansion of the old lord in Grosvenor Square had
been placed at Haggard's disposal, and though he frequently ran up to
town, his _pied-à-terre_ was at the house which would one day be his
own, and the Haggards had no regular establishment in London. As for
Georgie Haggard herself, she invariably passed a portion of the summer
with her father at The Warren. She usually made her annual visit
accompanied only by the two boys, for Haggard invariably absented
himself in the summer either for Norway fishing, lengthy yacht voyages,
or as one of a little party of men of his own kidney, who sought their
sport further afield and went lion-hunting in South Africa, shooting
the hippopotamus on the White Nile, or chasing the fast-disappearing
buffalo upon the American prairies. But as a rule he would get home for
the shooting. Year by year the head of game in the Walls End preserves,
under Haggard's fostering care, had increased. In the old lord's name
Haggard had invited every year a select little party of crack shots; he
gave them a couple of days' _battue_ shooting, the other four in the
stubble and among the turnips, and at the end of the week they went away
to "wipe each others' eyes" over some other man's birds. For some years
the bags made at these little annual gatherings had been noted in the
daily papers. Haggard himself not infrequently headed the list, for he
was an enthusiastic sportsman and a brilliant shot.
Reginald Haggard at five-and-forty had quieted down. Years and years ago
he had taken his name off the books at the Pandemonium; he no longer
gambled, and he took a great interest in politics, as became a man who
was destined, in the ordinary course of events, and at no very distant
date, to become one of our hereditary legislators. Of course Haggard had
many friends, or rather acquaintances, all of whom were ready to kootoo
and truckle to the man who would be the next Earl of Pit Town; men whom
he would invite to dinner, and who would entertain him; generally men of
his own age, or club-room bucks with wrinkled cheeks; men whose clothes
were always in the fashion, and who as a rule ate and drank rather more
than was good for them; men who rode in the park on three hundred guinea
hacks, and who might be seen in the Drive in big mail-phaetons with
Brobdingnagian lamps, or driving noisy and rather miscellaneous parties
on their four-in-hands towards Richmond.
I don't know what Haggard would have done without that invaluable
esquire of his body, Mr. Maurice Capt. Capt accompanied him everywhere;
he had camped out with him in the Rockies, and his culinary skill there
had more than made up for the deficiencies of Bull-headed Bill, the
half-bred titular cook of the expedition. Capt was a silent man, and his
fellow servants were never able to extract any gossip from him
respecting his master's wanderings. But Haggard was lucky in retaining
one real friend; his old _fidus Achates_, Lord Spunyarn, was his friend
still; still a bachelor, no longer the unsuccessful amateur athlete of
former days, but developed into a full-blown philanthropist, the friend
of mankind in general, but of the destitute East-ender in particular.
Ever since Georgie Haggard, in her just indignation, had banished her
cousin from her presence, Miss Lucy Warrender, still a handsome woman,
had led a wandering life; the dove had found no rest for the sole of
her foot. Homeless and friendless, though her intimates and
acquaintances were innumerable, she was as restless and erratic in her
movements as the Wandering Jew. Miss Warrender was always in evidence
upon the Ascot Lawn; she was to be seen at Brighton during the season,
at German watering-places, at Deauville, Biarritz, and Eastbourne or
Scarborough in the summer, and occasionally even for a few days at The
Warren, where she invariably appeared at Christmas. For Lucy Warrender
had eight hundred a year of her own, which she had inherited from the
colonel, her father. I am afraid she had become a confirmed old maid;
she had flirted and philandered till she was thirty, and there were
plenty of the very smartest people who were quite ready to flirt with
her now, for Lucy Warrender still retained her good looks, her dreamy
blonde beauty, and her eyes still sparkled as of old. We have said Lucy
Warrender was homeless and friendless, and she had developed two master
vices: to drown her troubles she gambled as only a woman can gamble, and
she drugged herself with chloral and other abominations to procure a
temporary forgetfulness of a black shadow that incessantly pursued her.
The man Capt knew of the long-buried secret, and he persistently
blackmailed the unhappy Lucy Warrender; but Capt was far too wise a man
to kill the goose with the golden eggs. He considered that if he drove
her to extremity, and the trick which had been played upon Reginald
Haggard should ever become a public scandal, that he had nothing to gain
but everything to lose. He knew that the English laws against what the
French call _chantage_ were severe; he also knew enough of his master to
be quite certain that if Haggard's just indignation were once aroused,
he would be pursued with relentless ferocity. So he contented himself
with plundering Lucy Warrender, and kept her secret; not because he was
not perfectly ready to betray it, but because he saw no way of bringing
his knowledge to a better market.
As for the two young men, for they had already ceased to be adolescents,
they were certainty physically decidedly above the average. Lucius, the
elder, was, as we know, Lucy Warrender's child. His whole soul was
wrapped up in the fact that a few short years would see him the
possessor of the courtesy title and heir to his supposed father's ample
means and old Lord Pit Town's incalculable wealth. The young fellow had
even developed a taste for art, simply because he felt it was his
bounden duty to be able to appreciate the innumerable treasures which
must inevitably soon be his very own. Young Lucius Haggard had been
petted and spoiled from his earliest infancy, he had had his way in
everything; his nurses, his schoolmasters and his tutors had bowed down
to him; good-looking young fellow that he became in after years, a fact
of which he was perfectly aware; he was flattered and toadied to by the
golden youth of both sexes, and by most of his elders, who ought to have
known better, to an extent sufficient to have turned the head of any
ordinary young man of well-regulated mind. But Lucius Haggard's was not
a well-regulated mind. He was of his father's religion, but he carried
the religion further. Reginald Haggard was a self-worshipper, a man
determined to get the greatest amount of pleasure and amusement out of
this world, regardless of consequences to others, a man for whom trumps
were continually turning up, a man who felt he was a brazen pot among
the earthen ones floating down the stream, and to whom the annihilation
of the weaker vessels was a matter of utter indifference. Like Napoleon,
he believed in his star, and he had been right in doing so, for when at
two-and-twenty he had been turned out to take his chance, he had
rapidly become the possessor of wealth far beyond his needs; a little
later, after a short period of enjoyment of the free wild life in
America, he had returned to draw the prize in the matrimonial lottery,
which somehow inevitably falls to the lot of such as he. The good lives
which stood between him and the Pit Town peerage had all dropped, and
nothing now remained between him and what he considered his rights but
one frail old man. But the young Lucius had never for an instant been
submitted to the healthy influence of even temporary poverty, his
existence had never even been troubled by so much as a crumpled rose
leaf; the consequence was that his selfishness was utter and unaffected,
that he did not even wear it as a garment, but that it was absolutely a
part of himself. A tall handsome young fellow enough, fairly clever, who
did not conceal that he thought himself rather superior to the rest of
the world, and the rest of the world took pretty good care to coincide
in the young fellow's opinion.
As for George Haggard, he was the anti-type of Lucius. Equally
good-looking, he was the picture of old Squire Warrender in his youth;
his fair chestnut hair curled in profusion over his broad square
forehead. He was a muscular youth who shone at school and at the
university, in the cricket field and upon the river alike. But he was no
mere athlete, for he had a taste for reading, and he never forgot the
fact, which his father was continually pressing upon his mind, that he,
as a younger son, would have to get his own living. And George Haggard
was ambitious; he meant if possible to force his way into the arena of
political life, and had already determined to make a struggle for name
and fame at the Bar. But though George Haggard was ambitious, his was an
affectionate disposition; he idolized his mother, and he truckled to no
one, not even to his father or the old earl. George Haggard knew well
enough that he would be a comparatively poor man--a pauper, as his
brother pleasantly put it, but only a pauper from the point of view of
Lucius Haggard, the probable future possessor of immense wealth, for The
Warren acres would assuredly be his, and had George Haggard so willed
it, nothing would have been easier for him than to sit and twiddle his
thumbs and wait for old Squire Warrender's death; but as we have said,
George Haggard was ambitious.
The great new gallery at Walls End Castle, the Grecian temple which Dr.
Wolff had designed over twenty years before, was now less offensive to
the eye externally. It was a Grecian temple still, but its
spick-and-spanness had passed away. Two old gentlemen arm-in-arm slowly
walked down the principal saloon, the one a big grey-haired man whose
face was disfigured with many scars; as he walked he gesticulated, and
he spoke with a strong German accent in a loud voice. By his side ambled
his friend and companion of many years, a very old man this, who stooped
considerably and leant frequently upon a crutch-handle stick; the two
men were John, Earl of Pit Town, and Dr. Wolff.
"I never thought, Wolff, that I should be spared to fill the last space
on these walls. I certainly never expected to see the termination of my
labours. In art one cannot be too exacting. We made up our minds years
ago that there should be nothing doubtful here, and here is the only
remaining space filled at last, and filled, as it should be, by a
masterpiece. Yes," said the old nobleman, as he rubbed his hands, "thank
heaven there is nothing doubtful here. Nothing remains for me now,
Wolff, but to leave the treasures that it has been the labour of my life
to accumulate; my sight isn't what it was."
"No man is what he was, my good friend and master, but it is not well to
be sad. You set yourself a great task years ago, an almost superhuman
task. He is aggomblished."
"No, not accomplished yet, Wolff. I have only got through a part of it.
I have caught my white elephant, but what am I to do with him? I know
too well that my natural heir looks upon the contents of these galleries
but as so many hundred thousand pounds' worth of hard cash. He is an
honest man, and makes no secret of it."
"But his son, my lord, the young Mr. Lucius?"
"Ah! he is a mystery, Wolff, that I have failed to fathom. We have known
him, my friend, since he was a little child. I can't tell why, Wolff, I
have never trusted him. Perhaps the aged are over-suspicious. I confess
to you that if I thought he loved art for art's sake, he should have my
pictures, as he will ultimately have my title and what goes with it."
"You can tie them up, my lord."
"Yes, I know I can tie them up, but then the pictures I've loved would
suffer. Who will care for them, Wolff, when you and I are gone?"
"You have sometimes talked, my lord, of giving them _en bloc_ to the
nation."
"Yes, Wolff, I did once think of that; but since that time I have seen
that real Chamber of Horrors, the National Portrait Gallery. I should
not like to send her there," he said, as he pointed to the portrait of
wicked Bab Chudleigh, who simpered and smiled at him from the wall. "No,
Wolff, I shouldn't like my pictures to be hawked about as loans to one
East End or provincial exhibition after another, to be sneered at by
crowds of unappreciating yokels. It's a very heavy responsibility,
Wolff."
At this moment Reginald Haggard entered the gallery.
"I hear, my lord," he said, as he shook hands with the old nobleman,
"that you have hung the last long-sought treasure this morning. Is it
really so?"
The old lord nodded.
"I suppose you will begin the weeding process now?" continued Haggard.
The old man drew himself up a little stiffly. "If you can indicate to me
anything that is unworthy, you will confer an obligation; but I think
you'll find it difficult. In my opinion, Haggard," he continued, "and in
the opinion of others far better able to judge than I am, there is
nothing here requiring weeding out."
Haggard slightly flushed.
"I can only plead my ignorance," he said; "it is what most connoisseurs
do."
"Yes, there you're quite right; but most men begin collecting as the
amusement of their old age. I began it sixty years ago, and I'm afraid
my long life's labour is over, and that, useless old man that I am, I've
lived too long already."
"You look upon things in a melancholy light, my lord."
"No man is pleased when he finds his occupation gone; and perhaps it's a
little sad to me to find that you care for none of these things."
"I know you wouldn't wish me to affect an interest I do not feel," said
Haggard with an ingenuous smile.
"No, there you're right. For we should find him out, shouldn't we,
Wolff?"
The doctor of philosophy laughed. "It is our business to detect shams,"
he said. "Yes, I think we should have found you out."
"Then, Dr. Wolff, you'd better try your skill on Lucius; he poses as a
man of taste, I don't."
At that moment the two young men entered the gallery.
"Here he is to answer for himself," said Haggard; "and I'll leave him
to your tender mercies. If he be a sham Priest of Art, unfrock him by
all means, Dr. Wolff," said Haggard with a laugh, as he sauntered away.
The two young men greeted their aged relative with respect, and nodded
familiarly to Dr. Wolff.
"I verily believe, my lord, that this younger brother of mine has no
soul," said young Lucius Haggard; "he actually tells me that the
contemplation of pictures produces in him naught but headache."
"And a pain in the neck, Lucius; don't forget the pain in the neck,"
said his brother.
"Yes, his pain in his neck was his other symptom. He declares he sees
more beauty in a sunlit rustic hedge than in a landscape by Claude
Lorraine."
"And I added to my criminality, I fear, Dr. Wolff, by declaring that I
only liked a picture when it gave pleasure to my eyes, as does the
wicked wanton on the wall yonder," he added, kissing the tips of his
fingers to Mistress Barbara Chudleigh.
"Ach, my young friend, do not glory in being a _Philister_," sighed Dr.
Wolff.
"I fear, George, yours is but a low and sensuous ideal, if Sir Peter's
commonplace masterpiece is all that rouses your enthusiasm. Why, amidst
so much that is beautiful, so much that is spiritual, so much that
appeals to the higher nature, you should pick out the one commonplace
bit in the whole collection, I can't imagine," said Lucius with a sneer.
"You may call it commonplace if you like, Lucius. All I know is, that
whatever else she may have been, if Bab Chudleigh was like that picture,
she must have very closely resembled an angel."
"And have you seen them then, these angels, young sir, that you speak so
confidently?" said the German doctor, as a great smile ran over his
scarred face.
"Seen them? of course I have--hundreds of them. So did you, Dr. Wolff,
when you were my age, and I have no doubt so did his lordship there,"
said the boy with a glance at the old lord, who was peering into a
picture at some distance. "I'll be bound that Lucius here sees the
angels of his dream-fancies by the dozen. He goes in for poetry, you
know, and all that sort of thing, though I for my own part would rather
not see his angels, for I haven't been educated up to the pitch where
one admires the beauty of decay, as Lucius has, the creatures with the
pointed chins, the sandy towzled hair, the great hungry eyes, the
uncomfortable poses, the deficiency of adipose tissue and the prehensile
toes. I can't say that I appreciate green shadows under the eyes, nor do
I see anything poetic in a bilious air. But all these things are very
dear to Lucius, at least he says so. No, give me nature and Bab
Chudleigh, and I'll make Lucius a present of art and his bony angels,
and all Mr. Swinburne's clutching horrors into the bargain."
"Thank you, George; it's very noble and generous on your part to hand
over to me what you can't appreciate."
"My dear Lucius, we all have our failings. You go in for art and the
artificial, while nature is enough for me."
"When you are my age," said Lucius with the superior wisdom of an elder
brother, "you will cease to judge by externals, I trust. You will have
learned to peep behind the veil, and you will see the real soul seated
on its throne."
"Bosh!" said George shortly.
And so the idle talk went on, and Lucius continued to pose, while the
worshipper of nature took pains to fit on the Philistine's skin tighter
than ever.