"A TEDIOUS ROAD THE WEARY WRETCH RETURNS."
Mrs. Layburne poured out half a tumbler of brandy, propped the sick
man's head upon her arm, and put the glass to his lips. He drank
eagerly, gasping as he drank.
"Good!" he muttered, "that does me good, sister."
"Hush! not that word here, for your life."
"Not much use in saying it, eh! when it's no more than a word? Give me
some more."
"No, you have had enough for the present. How long have you been out of
prison?"
"How do you know I have been in prison?"
"Do you think I don't know gaol fever and gaol clothes? You have got
them both upon you. You have escaped out of some gaol."
"Guildford, last night. I was in the infirmary; got out at midnight,
when nurse and warder were both asleep. I had shammed dying, and they
had given me over and made themselves comfortable for the night--topers
both. I tore up my bed-clothes and let myself down out of the window,
dropped into the governor's garden, as neatly as you like for a sick un,
and trudged along the roads till daybreak, when I hid behind a haystack,
dozed there, and shivered there, and had bad dreams there all day; then,
with nightfall, up and on my legs again till I got here. And now perhaps
you'll find me a corner to lie in somewhere."
"He must not see you, or you'll soon be in gaol again."
"Curse him!" growled Roderick, "bears malice, does he?"
"He is not likely to forget that you tried to murder him."
"I was in liquor, and there was a knife handy. Yes, if luck had favoured
me that night, Squire Bosworth would have come to an early end, and your
wrongs would have been righted."
"I would rather right them myself."
"Ah, but you are of a slavish temper, like all women, however high they
pretend to hold themselves. You can live here, eat his bread, and be
called his servant, you who for years had him at your feet, led him like
your lap-dog. I have heard what the village people say of you. This is
not the first time I have been in your neighbourhood."
"No, I thought as much. 'Twas you robbed the London coach last
December."
"What! you knew my hand, did you, Bab?" he cried, with a hoarse chuckle.
His glassy eyes shone with a new light: the brandy seemed to have
rekindled the spark of life in him. "Yes; it was neatly done, wasn't it?
That knoll above the road was a capital station, and the old fir-trunks
hid us. There were only two of us, Bab, and we got clean off with the
plunder. But it was my last lucky hit. Nothing has gone well with me
since that night. I turned fine gentleman for a month or two on the
strength of that haul, and let my hand lose its cunning. And then for
the pettiest business you can conceive, a fopling's purse at the Opera,
as skinny a purse as you ever saw, Bab, I got quodded, and narrowly
escaped a rope. It was only one of your old admirers, who came forward
and spoke to my character, who saved me from the gallows."
"Are you too ill to go on to some safer shelter, if I were to give you
some money?" asked Barbara meditatively.
She was puzzled what she could do with him, if he must needs remain on
the premises. She knew that Roland Bosworth would show him little mercy.
They had always been foes, and one particular scene was distinctly
present to her mind's eye, as she knelt there by the kitchen fire,
looking down at the pinched face, with the glassy eyes and hectic
cheeks.
It was a scene after supper, in a gaily-lighted room, cards and dice
lying about on the tables, and on one a punchbowl, some lemons, and a
big clasp-knife. The guests were gone, and they three were alone, and a
quarrel had come about between Bosworth and Layburne, a quarrel
beginning in a dispute about gains and losses at cards, and intensifying
through bitterest speech to keenest, cruellest taunts, taunts flung by
the brother in the face of his sister's lover; and then hatred took a
more desperate form, and Roderick Layburne snatched up the Spanish
knife--his own knife which he had produced a while ago to cut the
lemons--and had tried to stab Bosworth to the heart.
The Squire was the bigger and stronger man, and flung his assailant
aside--flung him out of the room and down the steep London staircase, to
ruminate on his wrongs at the bottom; and from that night Mrs.
Layburne's brother had never been admitted to her lodgings in the
Haymarket.
This had happened just eighteen years ago, in the days when Barbara was
a famous actress, known to the town as Mrs. Belfield, and had titled
admirers by the score. They had never been more than admirers, those
dukes and lords who applauded her nightly, and thought it honour and
felicity to lose their money at hazard or lansquenet in her luxurious
lodgings. The only man she had ever cared for was Roland Bosworth,
though he had never been either the handsomest or the most agreeable man
among her followers. But women who are admired by all the world have
curious caprices; and it had been Mrs. Layburne's fancy to sacrifice
herself and her career to the least distinguished of her admirers. She
had her tempers, and did not make her lover's life a bed of roses.
Thrice he had been upon the point of marrying her; and each time some
wild outbreak of passion or some freak of folly had scared him away from
the altar. Then the time came when he wearied of her storms and
sunshines, and left her. She followed, content, as her brother said, to
become a slave where she had once been a queen.
Roderick groped with his hand for the tumbler, and his sister poured out
a little more of the brandy and gave it to him.
"That means the renewal of life," he said, "but not for long. No, Bab;
not if you were to offer me a thousand guineas could I budge another
mile, on foot or on horseback. I'm on the last stage of my last journey,
Bab. The gaol doctor was right enough when he told them yesterday
morning it was all over--only he didn't know what stuff I was made of,
or how long it would take me to die. Lungs gone, heart queer--that was
his verdict. And gaol fever for a gentle finisher. You must find me a
corner to die in, Barbara: it's all I shall ever ask you for."
She thought deeply. Take him into the house by a back door, hide him in
some room near her own? That might be done, but it would be too
hazardous. And when the end should come, there would be the difficulty.
It would be more perilous to remove the dead than to admit the living.
And then to let putrid fever into the house? Who could tell where the
evil would stop? Disinfectants and precautionary measures were almost
unknown in those days. Fever came into a house and did its fatal work
unopposed.
But there was one vast block of buildings at Fairmile Court, given over
to emptiness, buildings which no one ever explored. The old hunting
stables, where Roland Bosworth's grandfather had kept his stud, had been
disused for the last half-century. Loose boxes, men's rooms,
saddle-rooms, dog-kennels: there was space enough for a village
hospital.
"If I can but make one of those rooms fairly comfortable!" she thought,
remembering how bleak and desolate the rooms had looked when she
explored them soon after her first coming.
"I must go and see what I can do," she said after a pause. "It is early
yet, not eight o'clock. I will have you comfortably lodged by ten."
"The sooner the better, for it isn't over-pleasant lying on these
stones. If it had not been for that taste of cognac I should be dead
before now."
Barbara hurried away, begging the gardener and his wife to keep close
till her return, and to be ready to help her then. They were neither now
nor at any future time to breathe a word to mortal ears about anything
which had happened or which might happen to-night. Then she hastened
back to the house with those swift steps of hers, borne onward by the
fever of excitement that burned within.
All was quiet at Fairmile Court. The Squire was luckily in London, not
expected back till the end of the week. The few servants were snug in
the kitchen, with closed doors. Barbara provided herself with a lantern
and a bunch of keys, and went out to the old hunting stables, which were
further from the house than those smaller stables now in use. She
investigated room after room, little dens in which grooms had been
lodged, until she found one that suited her. It was in a less
dilapidated state than the others, and was provided with a fireplace,
which the others were mostly without. The window looked away from all
the other stables and the offices of the Court, and a light burning
within would hardly attract notice. The smoke from the chimney would be
almost hidden by the roof of a huge old brewery in the rear; and as the
brewery was now used as a laundry, and fires almost always lighted
there, the smoke from the lesser vent would in all probability be
mingled with that from the tall and capacious shaft, and provoke no
questions.
With her own hands, Barbara carried coals and wood and tinder-box,
mattress and pillows, blanketing and linen, from the house to the
groom's bedchamber, where the old furniture--a stump bedstead, a chest
of drawers, and a chair or two--still remained. With her own hands she
swept the chamber, lighted the fire, and made up the bed. The room had
almost a comfortable look in the red glow of the fire. She toiled thus
for nearly two hours, with many journeys to and fro in the wind and
rain, and before the first stroke of ten, all was to her satisfaction.
She had brought food and drink, all things that she could think of, for
the sick man's comfort. It could hardly be much more luxurious than the
prison infirmary from which he had escaped, but it had been his fancy to
come there to die, and she could but indulge him. He was her junior by
eleven years, and there was a time when she had loved him passionately,
almost with a maternal love.
She went back to the lodge, and the gardener and she contrived a kind of
impromptu ambulance out of an old truck, and a blanket which she had
carried with her. The sick man's limbs seemed to have stiffened since he
had crawled to that door, and had sunk exhausted upon that hearth.
"There isn't a crawl left in me," he said, as they lifted him on to the
truck, and wrapped the blanket round him.
For nearly a fortnight he lay in that lonely room, his sister attending
upon him, stealing to his lair again and again every day, often sitting
up all night with him, nursing and ministering to him with inexhaustible
patience. Her apprehension was of the hour when he should die, and there
would be the business of removing him or of accounting for his presence
in that place. It was an intense relief, therefore, when after a
fortnight of unwearying attention, with a liberal use of brandy and
strong soups, at an expenditure rare in that pinched household, Roderick
so far recovered that he was quite capable of being moved to another
shelter.
The hand of death was upon him--death's impress visible in hollow hectic
cheeks, glassy eyes, and difficult breathing. Consumption was doing its
subtle work, but typhus had been subjugated by good nursing.
No sooner had the fever left him than Mrs. Layburne planned how to get
rid of the patient. She had the rickety, blundering, old family coach at
her disposal whenever she wanted to go to the market-town to buy
groceries and other necessaries for the household. Roderick was well
enough to put on a suit of old clothes, some cast-off garments of the
Squire's which had seen hard service. She helped him to dress, and then
directed him what to do. He was to walk as far as he could along the
avenue towards the park-gates--or, if he had strength enough, beyond the
gates--and was to sit down by the roadside as a wayfarer who had sunk
from fatigue. She would stop the coach, and, affecting to take
compassion upon him as a stranger, would offer him a lift to Cranbrook,
the market-town. Here she would set him down at the Lamb, a humble
little inn she knew of, where, furnished by her with funds, he might
remain till he was well enough to resume the struggle for existence. In
her heart of hearts she knew that for him that struggle was nearly over,
and that it was doubtful if he would ever leave the Lamb. She would have
done all she could do for him, and Fate or Providence, God or the Devil,
must do the rest. Mrs. Barbara's spiritual ideas were of a very obscure
order, and ranked about as high as the tenets of the Indian
Devil-dancers, or the Fetish-worshippers of the South Seas.
Roderick assented to her plan. What could he do but assent, having not
another friend in the world, and being very anxious to leave that den in
the old rat-haunted stables? The coach went lumbering along the avenue
one fine afternoon while the Squire was up in London. Roderick had
started a good hour before the coach, and he had contrived to tramp the
whole length of the avenue, and pass the gardener's lodge, before the
vehicle overtook him.
Barbara stopped the coach, and played her little drama of womanly
compassion and charity. Old John Coachman wondered at this unaccustomed
beneficence in the housekeeper; wondered still more when she opened the
coach-door, and invited the tramp to ride beside her. So well had the
gardener and his family kept madam's secret that the house-servants had
heard nothing about that strange visitant of Mrs. Barbara's.
She pulled up her coach at the Lamb, and committed her brother, with
payment in advance for a month's board and lodging, to the tender care
of the landlady, who was a good homely soul, and so left him, with five
guineas in his pocket, and the promise of future help, would he but lead
an honest life, and keep out of gaol. Then she drove to the
market-place, and did her shopping in the sleepy, low-ceilinged,
old-established shops, where the tradesmen lived in a semi-darkness, and
made a profit of from thirty to fifty per cent upon everything they
sold.
"Thank God I am clear of that trouble!" ejaculated Mrs. Layburne, as
the coach passed the Lamb again on its way out of the town.
She congratulated herself somewhat too soon, as she had not seen the end
of evil; albeit the sick man only lingered for a few weeks longer,
before he was carried to his nameless grave in Cranbrook Church.