WHAT HAPPENED AT MAUDESLEY ABBEY.
Early the next day Clement Austin walked to Maudesley Abbey, in order
to procure all the information likely to facilitate Margaret Wilmot's
grand purpose. He stopped at the gate of the principal lodge. The woman
who kept it was an old servant of the Dunbar family, and had known
Clement Austin in Percival Dunbar's lifetime. She gave him a hearty
welcome, and he had no difficulty whatever in setting her tongue in
motion upon the subject of Henry Dunbar.
She told him a great deal; she told him that the present owner of the
Abbey never had been liked, and never would be liked: for his stern and
gloomy manner was so unlike his father's easy, affable good-nature,
that people were always drawing comparisons between the dead man and
the living.
This, in a few words, is the substance of what the worthy woman said in
a good many words. Mrs. Grumbleton gave Clement all the information he
required as to the banker's daily movements at the present time. Henry
Dunbar was now in the habit of rising about two o'clock in the day, at
which time he was assisted from his bedroom to his sitting-room, where
he remained until seven or eight o'clock in the evening. He had no
visitors, except the surgeon, Mr. Daphney, who lived in the Abbey, and
a gentleman called Vernon, who had bought Woodbine Cottage, near
Lisford, and who now and then was admitted to Mr. Dunbar's
sitting-room.
This was all Clement Austin wanted to know. Surely it might be
possible, with a little clever management, to throw the banker
completely off his guard, and to bring about the long-delayed interview
between him and Margaret Wilmot.
Clement returned to the Reindeer, had a brief conversation with
Margaret, and made all arrangements.
At four o'clock that afternoon, Miss Wilmot and her lover left the
Reindeer in a fly; at a quarter to five the fly stopped at the
lodge-gates.
"I will walk to the house," Margaret said; "my coming will attract less
notice. But I may be detained for some time, Clement. Pray, don't wait
for me. Your dear mother will be alarmed if you are very long absent.
Go back to her, and send the fly for me by-and-by."
"Nonsense, Madge. I shall wait for you, however long you may be. Do you
think my heart is not as much engaged in anything that may influence
your fate as even your own can be? I won't go with you to the Abbey;
for it will be as well that Henry Dunbar should remain in ignorance of
my presence in the neighbourhood. I will walk up and down the road
here, and wait for you."
"But you may have to wait so long, Clement."
"No matter how long. I can wait patiently, but I could not endure to go
home and leave you, Madge."
They were standing before the great iron gates as Clement said this. He
pressed Margaret's cold hand; he could feel how cold it was, even
through her glove; and then rang the bell. She looked at him as the
gate was opened; she turned and looked at him with a strangely earnest
gaze as she crossed the boundary of Henry Dunbar's domain, and then
walked slowly along the broad avenue.
That last look had shown Clement Austin a pale resolute face, something
like the countenance of a fair young martyr going quietly to the stake.
He walked away from the gates, and they shut behind him with a loud
clanging noise. Then he went back to them, and watched Margaret's
figure growing dim and distant in the gathering dusk as she approached
the Abbey. A faint glow of crimson firelight reddened the gravel-drive
before the windows of Mr. Dunbar's apartments, and there was a footman
airing himself under the shadow of the porch, with a glimmer of light
shining out of the hall behind him.
"I do not suppose I shall have to wait very long for my poor girl,"
Clement thought, as he left the gates, and walked briskly up and down
the road. "Henry Dunbar is a resolute man; he will refuse to see her
to-day, as he refused before."
Margaret found the footman lolling against the clustered pillars of the
gothic porch, staring thoughtfully at the low evening light, yellow and
red behind the brown trunks of the elms, and picking his teeth with a
gold toothpick.
The sight of the open hall-door, and this languid footman lolling in
the porch, suddenly inspired Margaret Wilmot with a new idea. Would it
not be possible to slip quietly past this man, and walk straight to the
apartments of Mr. Dunbar, unquestioned, uninterrupted?
Clement had pointed out to her the windows of the rooms occupied by the
banker. They were on the left-hand side of the entrance-hall. It would
be impossible for her to mistake the door leading to them. It was dusk,
and she was very plainly dressed, with a black straw bonnet, and a veil
over her face. Surely she might deceive this languid footman by
affecting to be some hanger-on of the household, which of course was a
large one.
In that case she had no right to present herself at the front door,
certainly; but then, before the languid footman could recover from the
first shock of indignation at her impertinence, she might slip past him
and reach the door leading to those apartments in which the banker hid
himself and his guilt.
Margaret lingered a little in the avenue, watching for a favourable
opportunity in which she might hazard this attempt. She waited five
minutes or so.
The curve of the avenue screened her, in some wise, from the man in the
porch, who never happened to roll his languid eyes towards the spot
where she was standing.
A flight of rooks came scudding through the sky presently, very much
excited, and cawing and screeching as if they had been an
ornithological fire brigade hurrying to extinguish the flames of some
distant rookery.
The footman, who was suffering acutely from the complaint of not
knowing what to do with himself, came out of the porch and stood in the
middle of the gravelled drive, with his back towards Margaret, staring
at the birds as they flew westward.
This was her opportunity. The girl hurried to the door with a light
step, so light upon the smooth solid gravel that the footman heard
nothing until she was on the broad stone step under the porch, when the
fluttering of her skirt, as it brushed against the pillars, roused him
from a species of trance or reverie.
He turned sharply round, as upon a pivot, and stared aghast at the
retreating figure under the porch.
"Hi, you there, young woman!" he exclaimed, without stirring from his
post; "where are you going to? What's the meaning of your coming to
this door? Are you aware that there's such a place as a servants' 'all
and a servants' hentrance?"
But the languid retainer was too late. Margaret's hand was upon the
massive knob of the door upon the left side of the hall before the
footman had put this last indignant question.
He listened for an apologetic murmur from the young woman; but hearing
none, concluded that she had found her way to the servants' hall, where
she had most likely some business or other with one of the female
members of the household.
"A dressmaker, I dessay," the footman thought. "Those gals spend all
their earnings in finery and fallals, instead of behaving like
respectable young women, and saving up their money against they can go
into the public line with the man of their choice."
He yawned, and went on staring at the rooks, without troubling himself
any further about the impertinent young person who had dared to present
herself at the grand entrance.
Margaret opened the door, and went into the room next the hall.
It was a handsome apartment, lined with books from the floor to the
ceiling; but it was quite empty, and there was no fire burning in the
grate. The girl put up her veil, and looked about her. She was very,
very pale now, and trembled violently; but she controlled her agitation
by a great effort, and went slowly on to the next room.
The second room was empty like the first; but the door between it and
the next chamber was wide open, and Margaret saw the firelight shining
upon the faded tapestry, and reflected in the sombre depths of the
polished oak furniture. She heard the low sound of the light ashes
falling on the hearth, and the shorting breath of a dog.
She knew that the man she sought, and had so long sought without avail,
was in that room. Alone; for there was no murmur of voices, no sound of
any one moving in the apartment. That hour, to which Margaret Wilmot
had looked as the great crisis of her life, had come; and her courage
failed her all at once, and her heart sank in her breast on the very
threshold of the chamber in which she was to stand face to face with
Henry Dunbar.
"The murderer of my father!" she thought; "the man whose influence
blighted my father's life, and made him what he was. The man through
whose reckless sin my father lived a life that left him, oh! how sadly
unprepared to die! The man who, knowing this, sent his victim before an
offended God, without so much warning as would have given him time to
think one prayer. I am going to meet _that_ man face to face!"
Her breath came in faint gasps, and the firelit chamber swam before her
eyes as she crossed the threshold of that door, and went into the room
where Henry Dunbar was sitting alone before the low fire.
He was wrapped in crimson draperies of thick woollen stuff, and the
leopard-skin railway rug was muffled about his knees. A dog of the
bull-dog breed was lying asleep at the banker's feet, half-hidden in
the folds of the leopard-skin. Henry Dunbar's head was bent over the
fire, and his eyes were closed in a kind of dozing sleep, as Margaret
Wilmot went into the room.
There was an empty chair opposite to that in which the banker sat; an
old-fashioned, carved oak-chair, with a high back and crimson-morocco
cushions. Margaret went softly up to this chair, and laid her hand upon
the oaken framework. Her footsteps made no sound on the thick Turkey
carpet; the banker never stirred from his doze, and even the dog at his
feet slept on.
"Mr. Dunbar!" cried Margaret, in a clear, resolute voice; "awake! it is
I, Margaret Wilmot, the daughter of the man who was murdered in the
grove near Winchester!"
The dog awoke, and snapped at her. The man lifted his head, and looked
at her. Even the fire seemed roused by the sound of her voice! for a
little jet of vivid light leaped up out of the smouldering log, and
lighted the scared face of the banker.
Clement Austin had promised Margaret to wait for her, and to wait
patiently; and he meant to keep his promise. But there are some limits
even to the patience of a lover, though he were the veriest
knight-errant who was ever eager to shiver a lance or hack the edge of
a battle-axe for love of his liege lady. When you have nothing to do
but to walk up and down a few yards of hard dusty high-road, upon a
bleak evening in January, an hour more or less is of considerable
importance. Five o'clock struck about ten minutes after Margaret Wilmot
had entered the park, and Clement thought to himself that even if
Margaret were successful in obtaining an interview with the banker,
that interview would be over before six. But the faint strokes of
Lisford-church clock died away upon the cold evening wind, and Clement
was still pacing up and down, and the fly was still waiting; the horse
comfortable enough, with a rug upon his back and his nose in a bag of
oats; the man walking up and down by the side of the vehicle, slapping
his gloved hands across his shoulders every now and then to keep
himself warm. In that long hour between six and seven, Clement Austin's
patience wore itself almost threadbare. It is one thing to ride into
the lists on a prancing steed, caparisoned with embroidered trappings,
worked by the fair hands of your lady-love, and with the trumpets
braying, and the populace shouting, and the Queen of beauty smiling
sweet approval of your prowess: but it is quite another thing to walk
up and down a dusty country road, with the wind biting like some
ravenous animal at the tip of your nose, and no more consciousness of
your legs and arms than if you were a Miss Biffin.
By the time seven o'clock struck, Clement Austin's patience had given
up the ghost; and to impatience had succeeded a vague sense of alarm.
Margaret Wilmot had gone to force herself into this man's presence, in
spite of his reiterated refusal to see her. What if—what if, goaded by
her persistence, maddened by the consciousness of his own guilt, he
should attempt any violence.
Oh, no, no; that was quite impossible. If this man was guilty, his
crime had been deliberately planned, and executed with such a
diabolical cunning, that he had been able so far to escape detection.
In his own house, surrounded by prying servants, he would never dare to
assail this girl by so much as a harsh word.
But, notwithstanding this, Clement was determined to wait no longer. He
would go to the Abbey at once, and ascertain the cause of Margaret's
delay. He rang the bell, went into the park, and ran along the avenue
to the perch. Lights were shining in Mr. Dunbar's windows, but the
great hall-door was closely shut.
The languid footman came in answer to Clement's summons.
"There is a young lady here," Clement said, breathlessly; "a young
lady—with Mr. Dunbar."
"Ho! is that hall?" asked the footman, satirically. "I thought
Shorncliffe town-'all was a-fire, at the very least, from the way you
rung. There _was_ a young pusson with Mr. Dunbar above a hour ago, if
_that's_ what you mean?"
"Above an hour ago?" cried Clement Austin, heedless of the man's
impertinence in his own growing anxiety; "do you mean to say that the
young lady has left?"
"She _have_ left, above a hour ago."
"She went away from this house an hour ago?"
"More than a hour ago."
"Impossible!" Clement said; "impossible!"
"It may be so," answered the footman, who was of an ironical turn of
mind; "but I let her out with my own hands, and I saw her go out with
my own eyes, notwithstanding."
The man shut the door before Clement had recovered from his surprise,
and left him standing in the porch; bewildered, though he scarcely knew
why; frightened, though he scarcely knew what he feared.