“Suppose I informed him--as I inform you in confidence--that his son
_has_ gravely wronged Miss Silvester? And suppose I followed that up by
telling him that his son has made atonement by marrying her?”
“After the feeling that he has shown in the matter, I believe he would
sign the codicil.”
“Then, for God’s sake, let me see him!”
“I must speak to the doctor.”
“Do it instantly!”
With the will in his hand, Mr. Marchwood advanced to the bedroom door.
It was opened from within before he could get to it. The doctor appeared
on the threshold. He held up his hand warningly when Mr. Marchwood
attempted to speak to him.
“Go to Lady Holchester,” he said. “It’s all over.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
SIXTEENTH SCENE.--SALT PATCH.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-EIGHTH.
THE PLACE.
EARLY in the present century it was generally reported among the
neighbors of one Reuben Limbrick that he was in a fair way to make a
comfortable little fortune by dealing in Salt.
His place of abode was in Staffordshire, on a morsel of freehold land
of his own--appropriately called Salt Patch. Without being absolutely
a miser, he lived in the humblest manner, saw very little company;
skillfully invested his money; and persisted in remaining a single man.
Toward eighteen hundred and forty he first felt the approach of the
chronic malady which ultimately terminated his life. After trying what
the medical men of his own locality could do for him, with very poor
success, he met by accident with a doctor living in the western
suburbs of London, who thoroughly understood his complaint. After some
journeying backward and forward to consult this gentleman, he decided
on retiring from business, and on taking up his abode within an easy
distance of his medical man.
Finding a piece of freehold land to be sold in the neighborhood of
Fulham, he bought it, and had a cottage residence built on it, under his
own directions. He surrounded the whole--being a man singularly jealous
of any intrusion on his retirement, or of any chance observation of his
ways and habits--with a high wall, which cost a large sum of money,
and which was rightly considered a dismal and hideous object by the
neighbors. When the new residence was completed, he called it after
the name of the place in Staffordshire where he had made his money,
and where he had lived during the happiest period of his life. His
relatives, failing to understand that a question of sentiment was
involved in this proceeding, appealed to hard facts, and reminded him
that there were no salt mines in the neighborhood. Reuben Limbrick
answered, “So much the worse for the neighborhood”--and persisted in
calling his property, “Salt Patch.”
The cottage was so small that it looked quite lost in the large garden
all round it. There was a ground-floor and a floor above it--and that
was all.
On either side of the passage, on the lower floor, were two rooms. At
the right-hand side, on entering by the front-door, there was a kitchen,
with its outhouses attached. The room next to the kitchen looked into
the garden. In Reuben Limbrick’s time it was called the study
and contained a small collection of books and a large store of
fishing-tackle. On the left-hand side of the passage there was a
drawing-room situated at the back of the house, and communicating with
a dining-room in the front. On the upper floor there were five
bedrooms--two on one side of the passage, corresponding in size with the
dining-room and the drawing-room below, but not opening into each other;
three on the other side of the passage, consisting of one larger room
in front, and of two small rooms at the back. All these were solidly and
completely furnished. Money had not been spared, and workmanship had not
been stinted. It was all substantial--and, up stairs and down stairs, it
was all ugly.
The situation of Salt Patch was lonely. The lands of the
market-gardeners separated it from other houses. Jealously surrounded
by its own high walls, the cottage suggested, even to the most
unimaginative persons, the idea of an asylum or a prison. Reuben
Limbrick’s relatives, occasionally coming to stay with him, found the
place prey on their spirits, and rejoiced when the time came for going
home again. They were never pressed to stay against their will. Reuben
Limbrick was not a hospitable or a sociable man. He set very little
value on human sympathy, in his attacks of illness; and he bore
congratulations impatiently, in his intervals of health. “I care about
nothing but fishing,” he used to say. “I find my dog very good company.
And I am quite happy as long as I am free from pain.”
On his death-bed, he divided his money justly enough among his
relations. The only part of his Will which exposed itself to unfavorable
criticism, was a clause conferring a legacy on one of his sisters (then
a widow) who had estranged herself from her family by marrying beneath
her. The family agreed in considering this unhappy person as undeserving
of notice or benefit. Her name was Hester Dethridge. It proved to be
a great aggravation of Hester’s offenses, in the eyes of Hester’s
relatives, when it was discovered that she possessed a life-interest in
Salt Patch, and an income of two hundred a year.
Not visited by the surviving members of her family, living, literally,
by herself in the world, Hester decided, in spite of her comfortable
little income, on letting lodgings. The explanation of this strange
conduct which she had written on her slate, in reply to an inquiry from
Anne, was the true one. “I have not got a friend in the world: I dare
not live alone.” In that desolate situation, and with that melancholy
motive, she put the house into an agent’s hands. The first person in
want of lodgings whom the agent sent to see the place was Perry the
trainer; and Hester’s first tenant was Geoffrey Delamayn.
The rooms which the landlady reserved for herself were the kitchen, the
room next to it, which had once been her brother’s “study,” and the
two small back bedrooms up stairs--one for herself, the other for the
servant-girl whom she employed to help her. The whole of the rest of
the cottage was to let. It was more than the trainer wanted; but Hester
Dethridge refused to dispose of her lodgings--either as to the rooms
occupied, or as to the period for which they were to be taken--on other
than her own terms. Perry had no alternative but to lose the advantage
of the garden as a private training-ground, or to submit.
Being only two in number, the lodgers had three bedrooms to choose from.
Geoffrey established himself in the back-room, over the drawing-room.
Perry chose the front-room, placed on the other side of the cottage,
next to the two smaller apartments occupied by Hester and her maid.
Under this arrangement, the front bedroom, on the opposite side of the
passage--next to the room in which Geoffrey slept--was left empty, and
was called, for the time being, the spare room. As for the lower floor,
the athlete and his trainer ate their meals in the dining-room; and left
the drawing-room, as a needless luxury, to take care of itself.
The Foot-Race once over, Perry’s business at the cottage was at an end.
His empty bedroom became a second spare room. The term for which the
lodgings had been taken was then still unexpired. On the day after the
race Geoffrey had to choose between sacrificing the money, or remaining
in the lodgings by himself, with two spare bedrooms on his hands, and
with a drawing-room for the reception of his visitors--who called with
pipes in their mouths, and whose idea of hospitality was a pot of beer
in the garden.
To use his own phrase, he was “out of sorts.” A sluggish reluctance to
face change of any kind possessed him. He decided on staying at Salt
Patch until his marriage to Mrs. Glenarm (which he then looked upon as
a certainty) obliged him to alter his habits completely, once for all.
From Fulham he had gone, the next day, to attend the inquiry in Portland
Place. And to Fulham he returned, when he brought the wife who had been
forced upon him to her “home.”
Such was the position of the tenant, and such were the arrangements
of the interior of the cottage, on the memorable evening when Anne
Silvester entered it as Geoffrey’s wife.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-NINTH.
THE NIGHT.
ON leaving Lady Lundie’s house, Geoffrey called the first empty cab that
passed him. He opened the door, and signed to Anne to enter the vehicle.
She obeyed him mechanically. He placed himself on the seat opposite to
her, and told the man to drive to Fulham.
The cab started on its journey; husband and wife preserving absolute
silence. Anne laid her head back wearily, and closed her eyes. Her
strength had broken down under the effort which had sustained her from
the beginning to the end of the inquiry. Her power of thinking was gone.
She felt nothing, knew nothing, feared nothing. Half in faintness, half
in slumber, she had lost all sense of her own terrible position before
the first five minutes of the journey to Fulham had come to an end.
Sitting opposite to her, savagely self-concentrated in his own thoughts,
Geoffrey roused himself on a sudden. An idea had sprung to life in
his sluggish brain. He put his head out of the window of the cab, and
directed the driver to turn back, and go to an hotel near the Great
Northern Railway.
Resuming his seat, he looked furtively at Anne. She neither moved nor
opened her eyes--she was, to all appearance, unconscious of what had
happened. He observed her attentively. Was she really ill? Was the
time coming when he would be freed from her? He pondered over that
question--watching her closely. Little by little the vile hope in him
slowly died away, and a vile suspicion took its place. What, if this
appearance of illness was a pretense? What, if she was waiting to throw
him off his guard, and escape from him at the first opportunity? He put
his head out of the window again, and gave another order to the driver.
The cab diverged from the direct route, and stopped at a public house in
Holborn, kept (under an assumed name) by Perry the trainer.
Geoffrey wrote a line in pencil on his card, and sent it into the house
by the driver. After waiting some minutes, a lad appeared and touched
his hat. Geoffrey spoke to him, out of the window, in an under-tone. The
lad took his place on the box by the driver. The cab turned back, and
took the road to the hotel near the Great Northern Railway.
Arrived at the place, Geoffrey posted the lad close at the door of the
cab, and pointed to Anne, still reclining with closed eyes; still, as it
seemed, too weary to lift her head, too faint to notice any thing that
happened. “If she attempts to get out, stop her, and send for me.” With
those parting directions he entered the hotel, and asked for Mr. Moy.
Mr. Moy was in the house; he had just returned from Portland Place. He
rose, and bowed coldly, when Geoffrey was shown into his sitting-room.
“What is your business with me?” he asked.
“I’ve had a notion come into my head,” said Geoffrey. “And I want to
speak to you about it directly.”
“I must request you to consult some one else. Consider me, if you
please, as having withdrawn from all further connection with your
affairs.”
Geoffrey looked at him in stolid surprise.
“Do you mean to say you’re going to leave me in the lurch?” he asked.
“I mean to say that I will take no fresh step in any business of yours,”
answered Mr. Moy, firmly. “As to the future, I have ceased to be your
legal adviser. As to the past, I shall carefully complete the formal
duties toward you which remain to be done. Mrs. Inchbare and Bishopriggs
are coming here by appointment, at six this evening, to receive the
money due to them before they go back. I shall return to Scotland myself
by the night mail. The persons referred to, in the matter of the promise
of marriage, by Sir Patrick, are all in Scotland. I will take their
evidence as to the handwriting, and as to the question of residence in
the North--and I will send it to you in written form. That done, I shall
have done all. I decline to advise you in any future step which you
propose to take.”
After reflecting for a moment, Geoffrey put a last question.
“You said Bishopriggs and the woman would be here at six this evening.”
“Yes.”
“Where are they to be found before that?”
Mr. Moy wrote a few words on a slip of paper, and handed it to Geoffrey.
“At their lodgings,” he said. “There is the address.”
Geoffrey took the address, and left the room. Lawyer and client parted
without a word on either side.
Returning to the cab, Geoffrey found the lad steadily waiting at his
post.
“Has any thing happened?”
“The lady hasn’t moved, Sir, since you left her.”
“Is Perry at the public house?”
“Not at this time, Sir.”
“I want a lawyer. Do you know who Perry’s lawyer is?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And where he is to be found?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Get up on the box, and tell the man where to drive to.”
The cab went on again along the Euston Road, and stopped at a house in
a side-street, with a professional brass plate on the door. The lad got
down, and came to the window.
“Here it is, Sir.”
“Knock at the door, and see if he is at home.”
He proved to be at home. Geoffrey entered the house, leaving his
emissary once more on the watch. The lad noticed that the lady moved
this time. She shivered as if she felt cold--opened her eyes for a
moment wearily, and looked out through the window--sighed, and sank back
again in the corner of the cab.
After an absence of more than half an hour Geoffrey came out again.
His interview with Perry’s lawyer appeared to have relieved his mind of
something that had oppressed it. He once more ordered the driver to
go to Fulham--opened the door to get into the cab--then, as it seemed,
suddenly recollected himself--and, calling the lad down from the box,
ordered him to get inside, and took his place by the driver.
As the cab started he looked over his shoulder at Anne through the front
window. “Well worth trying,” he said to himself. “It’s the way to be
even with her. And it’s the way to be free.”
They arrived at the cottage. Possibly, repose had restored Anne’s
strength. Possibly, the sight of the place had roused the instinct of
self-preservation in her at last. To Geoffrey’s surprise, she left the
cab without assistance. When he opened the wooden gate, with his own
key, she recoiled from it, and looked at him for the first time.
He pointed to the entrance.
“Go in,” he said.
“On what terms?” she asked, without stirring a step.
Geoffrey dismissed the cab; and sent the lad in, to wait for further
orders. These things done, he answered her loudly and brutally the
moment they were alone:
“On any terms I please.”
“Nothing will induce me,” she said, firmly, “to live with you as your
wife. You may kill me--but you will never bend me to that.”
He advanced a step--opened his lips--and suddenly checked himself. He
waited a while, turning something over in his mind. When he spoke again,
it was with marked deliberation and constraint--with the air of a man
who was repeating words put into his lips, or words prepared beforehand.
“I have something to tell you in the presence of witnesses,” he said. “I
don’t ask you, or wish you, to see me in the cottage alone.”
She started at the change in him. His sudden composure, and his sudden
nicety in the choice of words, tried her courage far more severely than
it had been tried by his violence of the moment before.
He waited her decision, still pointing through the gate. She trembled
a little--steadied herself again--and went in. The lad, waiting in the
front garden, followed her.
He threw open the drawing-room door, on the left-hand side of the
passage. She entered the room. The servant-girl appeared. He said to
her, “Fetch Mrs. Dethridge; and come back with her yourself.” Then he
went into the room; the lad, by his own directions, following him in;
and the door being left wide open.
Hester Dethridge came out from the kitchen with the girl behind her. At
the sight of Anne, a faint and momentary change passed over the stony
stillness of her face. A dull light glimmered in her eyes. She slowly
nodded her head. A dumb sound, vaguely expressive of something like
exultation or relief, escaped her lips.
Geoffrey spoke--once more, with marked deliberation and constraint;
once more, with the air of repeating something which had been prepared
beforehand. He pointed to Anne.
“This woman is my wife,” he said. “In the presence of you three, as
witnesses, I tell her that I don’t forgive her. I have brought her
here--having no other place in which I can trust her to be--to wait the
issue of proceedings, undertaken in defense of my own honor and good
name. While she stays here, she will live separate from me, in a room of
her own. If it is necessary for me to communicate with her, I shall only
see her in the presence of a third person. Do you all understand me?”
Hester Dethridge bowed her head. The other two answered, “Yes”--and
turned to go out.
Anne rose. At a sign from Geoffrey, the servant and the lad waited in
the room to hear what she had to say.
“I know nothing in my conduct,” she said, addressing herself to
Geoffrey, “which justifies you in telling these people that you don’t
forgive me. Those words applied by you to me are an insult. I am equally
ignorant of what you mean when you speak of defending your good name.
All I understand is, that we are separate persons in this house, and
that I am to have a room of my own. I am grateful, whatever your motives
may be, for the arrangement that you have proposed. Direct one of these
two women to show me my room.”
Geoffrey turned to Hester Dethridge.
“Take her up stairs,” he said; “and let her pick which room she pleases.
Give her what she wants to eat or drink. Bring down the address of the
place where her luggage is. The lad here will go back by railway, and
fetch it. That’s all. Be off.”
Hester went out. Anne followed her up the stairs. In the passage on the
upper floor she stopped. The dull light flickered again for a moment
in her eyes. She wrote on her slate, and held it up to Anne, with these
words on it: “I knew you would come back. It’s not over yet between
you and him.” Anne made no reply. She went on writing, with something
faintly like a smile on her thin, colorless lips. “I know something of
bad husbands. Yours is as bad a one as ever stood in shoes. He’ll try
you.” Anne made an effort to stop her. “Don’t you see how tired I am?”
she said, gently. Hester Dethridge dropped the slate--looked with a
steady and uncompassionate attention in Anne’s face--nodded her head,
as much as to say, “I see it now”--and led the way into one of the empty
rooms.
It was the front bedroom, over the drawing-room. The first glance
round showed it to be scrupulously clean, and solidly and tastelessly
furnished. The hideous paper on the walls, the hideous carpet on the
floor, were both of the best quality. The great heavy mahogany bedstead,
with its curtains hanging from a hook in the ceiling, and with its
clumsily carved head and foot on the same level, offered to the view the
anomalous spectacle of French design overwhelmed by English execution.
The most noticeable thing in the room was the extraordinary attention
which had been given to the defense of the door. Besides the usual lock
and key, it possessed two solid bolts, fastening inside at the top and
the bottom. It had been one among the many eccentric sides of Reuben
Limbrick’s character to live in perpetual dread of thieves breaking into
his cottage at night. All the outer doors and all the window shutters
were solidly sheathed with iron, and had alarm-bells attached to them
on a new principle. Every one of the bedrooms possessed its two bolts
on the inner side of the door. And, to crown all, on the roof of the
cottage was a little belfry, containing a bell large enough to make
itself heard at the Fulham police station. In Reuben Limbrick’s time the
rope had communicated with his bedroom. It hung now against the wall, in
the passage outside.
Looking from one to the other of the objects around her, Anne’s eyes
rested on the partition wall which divided the room from the room
next to it. The wall was not broken by a door of communication, it had
nothing placed against it but a wash-hand-stand and two chairs.
“Who sleeps in the next room?” said Anne.
Hester Dethridge pointed down to the drawing-room in which they had left
Geoffrey, Geoffrey slept in the room.
Anne led the way out again into the passage.
“Show me the second room,” she said.
The second room was also in front of the house. More ugliness (of
first-rate quality) in the paper and the carpet. Another heavy mahogany
bedstead; but, this time, a bedstead with a canopy attached to the head
of it--supporting its own curtains. Anticipating Anne’s inquiry, on
this occasion, Hester looked toward the next room, at the back of the
cottage, and pointed to herself. Anne at once decided on choosing the
second room; it was the farthest from Geoffrey. Hester waited while she
wrote the address at which her luggage would be found (at the house
of the musical agent), and then, having applied for, and received her
directions as to the evening meal which she should send up stairs,
quitted the room.
Left alone, Anne secured the door, and threw herself on the bed. Still
too weary to exert her mind, still physically incapable of realizing
the helplessness and the peril of her position, she opened a locket that
hung from her neck, kissed the portrait of her mother and the portrait
of Blanche placed opposite to each other inside it, and sank into a deep
and dreamless sleep.
Meanwhile Geoffrey repeated his final orders to the lad, at the cottage
gate.
“When you have got the luggage, you are to go to the lawyer. If he can
come here to-night, you will show him the way. If he can’t come, you
will bring me a letter from him. Make any mistake in this, and it will
be the worst day’s work you ever did in your life. Away with you, and
don’t lose the train.”
The lad ran off. Geoffrey waited, looking after him, and turning over in
his mind what had been done up to that time.
“All right, so far,” he said to himself. “I didn’t ride in the cab with
her. I told her before witnesses I didn’t forgive her, and why I had
her in the house. I’ve put her in a room by herself. And if I _must_ see
her, I see her with Hester Dethridge for a witness. My part’s done--let
the lawyer do his.”
He strolled round into the back garden, and lit his pipe. After a while,
as the twilight faded, he saw a light in Hester’s sitting-room on the
ground-floor. He went to the window. Hester and the servant-girl were
both there at work. “Well?” he asked. “How about the woman up stairs?”
Hester’s slate, aided by the girl’s tongue, told him all about “the
woman” that was to be told. They had taken up to her room tea and an
omelet; and they had been obliged to wake her from a sleep. She had
eaten a little of the omelet, and had drunk eagerly of the tea. They had
gone up again to take the tray down. She had returned to the bed. She
was not asleep--only dull and heavy. Made no remark. Looked clean worn
out. We left her a light; and we let her be. Such was the report. After
listening to it, without making any remark, Geoffrey filled a second
pipe, and resumed his walk. The time wore on. It began to feel chilly in
the garden. The rising wind swept audibly over the open lands round the
cottage; the stars twinkled their last; nothing was to be seen overhead
but the black void of night. More rain coming. Geoffrey went indoors.
An evening newspaper was on the dining-room table. The candles were lit.
He sat down, and tried to read. No! There was nothing in the newspaper
that he cared about. The time for hearing from the lawyer was drawing
nearer and nearer. Reading was of no use. Sitting still was of no use.
He got up, and went out in the front of the cottage--strolled to the
gate--opened it--and looked idly up and down the road.
But one living creature was visible by the light of the gas-lamp over
the gate. The creature came nearer, and proved to be the postman going
his last round, with the last delivery for the night. He came up to the
gate with a letter in his hand.
“The Honorable Geoffrey Delamayn?”
“All right.”