A STORM OF WIND.
The wind was rising. Coming in gusts from across the sea, it swept
round the Dolphin Inn with a force that seemed to shake the old walls
and stir the windowpanes--for the corner that made the site of the inn
was always an exposed one. Madame Guise, undressing slowly by the
expiring fire in her chamber, shivered as she listened to it.
The wind did not howl in this fashion around her own sheltered home in
the sunny Dauphine. There was no grand sea there for it to whirl and
play over, and come off with a shrieking moan. Not often there did
they get cold weather like this; or white snow covering the plains; or
ice in the water-jugs. And never yet before in her uneventful life,
had it fallen to her lot to travel all across France from South to
North with a little child to take care of, and then to encounter the
many hours' passage in a stifling ship on a rough and raging sea: and
after a night's rest in London to come off again in the cold English
stage-coach for how many miles she hew not. All this might have served
to take the colour from her face and to give the shiverings to her
frame--for land travelling in those days was not the easy pastime it
is made now.
But there was worse behind it. Not the cold, not the want of rest, was
it that was so trying to her, but the frightful whispers of a supposed
tragedy that had (so to say) greeted her arrival at the Dolphin. But a
few hours yet within its walls, and she had been told that him of whom
she had come in secret search, her husband, had disappeared out of
life.
For this poor young lady, Charlotte Guise, was in truth the wife of
Anthony Castlemaine. His wife if he were still living; his widow if he
were dead. That he was dead, hearing all she had heard, no doubt could
exist in her mind; no hope of the contrary, not the faintest shadow of
it, could enter her heart. She had come all this long journey in
search of her husband, fearing some vague treachery; she had arrived
to find that treachery of the deepest dye had only too probably put
him out of sight for ever.
When the father, Basil Castlemaine, was on his death-bed, she had
heard the charge he gave to Anthony, to come over to England and put
in the claim to his right inheritance; she had heard the warning of
possible treachery that had accompanied it.
Basil died. And when Anthony, in obedience to his father's last
injunctions, was making ready for the journey to England, his wife
recalled the warning to him. He laughed at her. He answered jokingly
saying that if he never returned to Gap, she might come off to see the
reason, and whether he was still in the land of the living. Ah, how
many a word spoken in jest would, if we might read the future, bear a
solemn meaning! That was one.
Anthony Castlemaine departed on his mission to England, leaving his
wife and little child in their home at Gap. The first letter Charlotte
received from her husband told her of his arrival at Greylands, and
that he had put up at the Dolphin Inn. It intimated that he might not
find his course a very smooth one, and that his uncle James was in
possession of Greylands' Rest. Some days further on she received a
second letter from him; and following closely upon it, by the next
post in fact, a third. Both these letters bore the same date. The
first of them stated that he was not advancing at all; that all kinds
of impediments were being placed in his way by his uncles; they
appeared resolved to keep him out of the estate, refusing even to show
him how it was left and it ended with an expressed conviction that his
Uncle James was usurping it. The last letter told her that since
posting the other letter earlier in the day, he had seen his Uncle
James; that the interview, which had taken place in a meadow, was an
unpleasant one, his uncle even having tried to strike him that he
(Anthony) really did not know what to be at, but had resolved to try
for one more conference with his uncle before proceeding to take legal
measures, and that he should certainly write to her again in the
course of a day or two to tell her whether matters progressed or
whether they did not. In this last letter there ran a vein of sadness,
very perceptible to the wife. She thought her husband must have been
in very bad spirits when he wrote it: and she anxiously looked for the
further news promised.
It never came. No subsequent letter ever reached her. After waiting
some days, she wrote to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, but she got no
answer. She wrote again, and with the like result. Then, feeling
strangely uneasy, not knowing how to get tidings of him, or to whom to
apply, she began to think that she would have to put in practice the
suggestion he had but spoken in jest, and go over to England to look
after him. A short period of vacillation--for it looked like a
frightfully formidable step to the untravelled young lady--and she
resolved upon it. Arranging the affairs of her petit menage, as she
expressed it, she started off with her child; and in due time reached
London. There she stayed one night, after sending off a note to
Greylands, directed to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, to tell of her
intended arrival on the following day; and in the morning she took her
seat in the Stilborough coach. These three letters, the two from Gap
and the one from London, were those that led to the dispute between
Mr. and Mrs. Bent, which Ethel Reene had disturbed. The landlord had
them safely locked up in his private archives.
Forewarned, forearmed, is an old saying. Anthony Castlemaine's wife
had been warned, and she strove to be armed. She would not present
herself openly and in her own name at Greylands. If the Castlemaine
family were dealing hardly with her husband, it would be more prudent
for her to go to work warily and appear there at first as a stranger.
The worst she had feared was, that Mr. James Castlemaine might be
holding her husband somewhere at bay; perhaps even had put him in a
prison--she did not understand the English laws--and she must seek him
out and release him. So she called herself Guise as soon as she landed
in England. Her name had been Guise before her marriage, and she
assumed it now. Not much of an assumption: in accordance with the
French customs of her native place, she retained her maiden name as
an affix to her husband's, and her cards were printed Madame
Castlemaine-Guise. Had her assertion of the name wanted confirmation,
there it was on the small trunk; which had GUISE studded on it in brass
nails, for it had belonged to her father. Her intention had been to
proceed to Stilborough, put up there, and come over to Greylands the
following day. But when she found the coach passed through
Greylands--which she had not known, and she first recognised the place
by the sign of the famous dolphin, about which Anthony had written to
her in his first letter--she resolved to alight there, the little
girl's symptoms of feverish illness affording a pretext for it. And so,
here she was, at the often-heard-of Dolphin Inn, inhabiting the very
chamber that her ill-fated husband had occupied, and with the dread
story she had listened to beating its terrors in her brain.
A gust of wind shook the white dimity curtain, drawn before the
casement, and she turned to it with a shiver. What did this angry
storm of wind mean? Why should it have arisen suddenly without
apparent warning? Charlotte Guise was rather superstitious, and asked
herself the question. When she got out of the coach at the inn door,
the air and sea were calm. Could the angry disturbance have come to
show her that the very elements were rising at the wrong dealt out to
her husband? Some such an idea took hold of her.
"Every second minute I ask whether it can be true," she murmured in
her native language; "or whether I have but dropped asleep in my own
house, and am dreaming it all. It is not like reality. It is not like
any story I ever heard before. Anthony comes over here, all those
hundreds of weary miles, over that miserable sea, and finds himself
amid his family; his family whom he had never seen. 'Greylands' Rest
is mine, I think,' he says to them; 'will you give it to me?' And they
deny that it is his. 'Then,' says he, 'what you say may be so; but you
should just show me the deeds--the proofs that it is not mine.' And
they decline to show them; and his uncle, James Castlemaine, at an
interview in the field, seeks to strike him. Anthony comes home to the
hotel here, and writes that last letter to me, and puts it in the post
late at night. Then he and the landlord go walking out together in the
moonlight, and by-and-by they see Mr. James Castlemaine go into a
lonely place of cloisters called the Friar's Keep, and he, nay poor
husband, runs in after him; and he never comes out of it again. The
host, waiting for him outside, hears a shot and an awful cry, but he
does not connect it with the cloisters; and so he promenades about
till he's weary, thinking the uncle and nephew are talking together,
and--and Anthony never at all comes out again! Yes, it is very plain:
it is too plain to me: that shot took my dear husband's life. James
Castlemaine, fearing he would make good his claim to the estate and
turn him out of it, has murdered him."
The wind shrieked, as if it were singing a solemn requiem; the small
panes of the casement seemed to crack, and the white curtain
fluttered. Charlotte Guise hid her shrinking face for a moment, and
then turned it on the shaking curtain, her white lips parting with
some scarcely breathed words.
"If the spirits of the dead are permitted to hover in the air, as some
people believe perhaps his spirit is here now, at this very window!
Seeking to hold commune with mine; calling upon me to avenge him. Oh,
Anthony, yes! I will never rest until I have found out the mystery of
your fate. I will devote my days to doing it!"
As if to encourage the singular fancy, that the whispered
story and the surroundings of the hour had called up in her
over-strung nerves and brain, a gust wilder than any that had gone
before swept past the house at the moment with a rushing moan. The
casement shook; its fastenings seemed to strain: and the poor young
lady, in some irrepressible freak of courage, born of desperation,
drew aside the curtain and looked forth.
No, no; nothing was there but the wind. The white snow lay on the
ground, and covered the cliff that skirted the beach on the right. The
night was light, disclosing the foam of the waves as they rose and
fell; clouds were sweeping madly across the face of the sky.
The little girl stirred in bed and threw out her arms. Her mother let
fall the window curtain and softly approached her. The hot face wore
its fever-crimson; the large brown eyes, so like her father's, opened
the red lips parted with a cry.
"Maman! Marie soif; Marie veut boire."
"Oh, is she fatherless?" mentally cried the poor mother, as she took
up the glass of tisane. "Oui, ma petite! ma chérie! Bois donc, Marie;
bois!"
The child seized the glass with her hot and trembling little hands,
and drank from it. She seemed very thirsty. Before her mother had
replaced it within the fender and come back to her, her pretty face
was on the pillow again, her eyes were closing.
Madame Guise--as we must continue to call her--went to bed: but not to
sleep. The wind raged, the child by her side was restless, her own
mind was in a chaos of horror and trouble. The words of the prophet
Isaiah in Holy Writ might indeed have been applied to her: The whole
head was sick and the whole heart faint.
Towards morning she dropped into a disturbed sleep, during which a
dream visited her. And the dream was certainly a singular one. She
thought she was alone in a strange, dark garden: gloomy trees
clustered about her, ugly looking mountains rose above. She seemed to
be searching for something; to be obliged to search, but she did not
know for what; a great dread, or terror, lay upon her, and but for
being impelled she would not have dared to put one foot before the
other in the dark path. Suddenly, as she was pushing through the
impeding trees, her husband stood before her. She put out her hand to
greet him; but he did not respond to it, but remained where he had
halted, a few paces off, gazing at her fixedly. It was not the husband
who had parted from her in the sunny South; a happy man full of glad
anticipations, with a bright fresh face and joyous words on his lips:
but her husband with a sad, stern countenance, pale, cold, and still.
Her heart seemed to sink within her, and before she could ask him what
was amiss she saw that he was holding his waistcoat aside with his
left hand, to display a shot in the region of the heart. A most
dreadful sensation of terror, far more dreadful than any she could
ever know in this life, seized upon her at the sight; she screamed
aloud and awoke. Awoke with the drops of moisture on her face, and
trembling in every limb.
Now, as will be clear to every practical mind, this dream, remarkable
though it was, must have been only the result of her own imaginative
thoughts, of the tale she had heard, of the fears and doubts she had
been indulging before going to sleep. But she, poor distressed, lonely
lady, looked upon it as a revelation. From that moment she never
doubted that her husband had been shot as described; shot in the heart
and killed: and that the hand that did it was Mr. Castlemaine's.
"I knew his spirit might be hovering about me," she murmured, trying
to still her trembling, as she sat up in bed. "He has been permitted
to appear to me to show me the truth--to enjoin on me the task of
bringing the deed to light. By Heaven's help I will do it! I will
never quit this spot, this Greylands, until I have accomplished it.
Yes, Anthony!--can you hear me, my husband?--I vow to devote myself to
the discovery; I will bring this dark wickedness into the broad glare
of noonday. Country, kindred, home, friends!--I will forget them all,
Anthony, in my search for you.
"Where have they hidden him?" she resumed after a little pause. "Had
Mr. Castlemaine an accomplice?--or did he act alone. Oh, alone; of a
certainty, alone," she continued, answering her own question. "He
would not have dared it had others been present; and the landlord
below says Mr. Castlemaine was by himself when he went into the
cloisters. Did he fling him into the sea after he was dead?--or did he
conceal him somewhere in that place--that Keep? Perhaps he buried him
in it? if so, his body is lying in unconsecrated ground, and it will
never rest.--Marie, then, my little one, what is it? Are you better
this morning?"
The child was awaking with a moan. She had been baptised and
registered in her native place as Mary Ursula. Her grandfather, Basil,
never called her anything else; her father would sometimes shorten it
to "Marie Ursule:" but her mother, not so well accustomed to the
English tongue as they were, generally used but the one name, Marie.
She looked up and put out her little hands to her mother: her eyes
were heavy, her cheeks flushed and feverish.
That the child was worse than she had been the previous night, there
could be little question of, and Madame Guise felt some alarm. When
breakfast was over--of which meal the child refused to partake, but
still complained of thirst--she inquired whether there was a doctor in
the place. She asked for him as she would have asked in her own land.
Is there a medecin here? and Mrs. Bent interpreted it as medicine,
comprehended that medicine was requested, and rejoiced accordingly.
Mrs. Bent privately put down the non-improvement to the tisane. Had a
good wholesome powder been administered over night, the child, she
believed, would have been all right this morning.
The doctor, Mr. Parker, came in answer to the summons: a
grey-haired, pleasant-speaking man. He had formerly been in large
practice at Stilborough; but after a dangerous illness which attacked
him there and lasted more than a year, he took the advice of his
friends and retired from the fatigues of his profession. His means
were sufficient to live without it. Removing to Greylands, for change
of air, and for the benefit of the salt sea-breezes, he grew to like
the quietude of the place, and determined to make it his home for
good. Learning that a small, pretty villa was for sale, he purchased
it. It lay back from the coach road beyond the Dolphin Inn, nearly
opposite the avenue that led to Greylands' Rest. The house belonged to
Mr. Blackett of the Grange--the Grange being the chief residence at a
small hamlet about two miles off; and Mr. Castlemaine had always
intended to purchase it should it be in the market, but Mr. Blackett
had hitherto refused to sell. His deciding to do so at length was
quite a sudden whim; Mr. Parker heard of it, and secured the little
property--which was anything but agreeable at the time to the Master
of Greylands.
There Mr. Parker had since resided, and had become strong and healthy
again. He had so far resumed his calling as to attend when a doctor was
wanted in Greylands, for there was none nearer than Stilborough. At
first Mr. Parker took to respond for humanity's sake when appealed to,
and he continued it from love of his profession. Not for one visit in
ten did he get paid, nor did he want to: the fishermen were poor, and
he was large-hearted.
After examining the little lady traveller, he pronounced her to be
suffering from a slight attack of inflammation of the chest, induced,
no doubt, by the cold to which she had been exposed when travelling.
Madame Guise informed him that they had journeyed from Paris (it was
no untruth, for they had passed through the French capital and stayed
a night in it), and the weather had become very sharp as they neared
the coast--which coast it had taken them two days and a night in the
diligence to reach; and the sea voyage had been fearfully hard, and
had tried the little one. Yes, yes, the doctor answered, the
inclement cold had attacked the little J girl, and she must stay in
bed and be taken care of. Madame Guise took occasion to observe that
she had been going farther on, but, on perceiving her child's symptoms
of illness, had halted at this small village, called Greylands, which
looked open and healthy--but the wind had got up at night. Got up very
much and very suddenly, assented the doctor, got up to a gale, and it
was all the better for the little one that she had not gone on. He
thought he might have to put a small blister on in the afternoon, but
he should see. A blister?--what was that? returned madame, not
familiar with the English word. Oh, she remembered, she added a moment
after--a vésicatoire.
"Yes, yes, I see it all: Heaven is helping me," mentally spoke poor
Charlotte Guise, as she took up her post by Marie after the doctor's
departure, and revolved matters in her mind. "This illness has been
sent on purpose: a token to me that I have done right to come to
Greylands, and that I am to stay in it. And by the good help of Heaven
I will stay, until I shall have tracked home the fate of my husband to
Mr. Castlemaine."