Transcriber’s Note
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LUCIUS DAVOREN
OR
PUBLICANS AND SINNERS
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’
ETC. ETC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. III.
[Illustration]
LONDON
JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
4 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
1873
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.
CONTENTS OF VOL. III.
Book the Third
(_Continued_).
CHAP. PAGE
XIII. HOW GEOFFREY ENJOYED THE GARDEN-PARTY 1
XIV. LUCILLE HAS STRANGE DREAMS 31
XV. THE DAWN OF HOPE 43
XVI. AN OLD FRIEND REAPPEARS 51
XVII. LUCIUS SEEKS ENLIGHTENMENT 75
XVIII. MR. AGAR’S COLONIAL CLIENT 86
XIX. LUCILLE’S CONFESSION 96
XX. LUCILLE MAKES A NEW FRIEND 132
Book the Last.
I. AT ROUEN 144
II. THE STORY GROWS CLEARER 164
III. JULIE DUMARQUES 184
IV. COMING TO MEET HIS DOOM 201
V. ‘’TIS WITH US PERPETUAL NIGHT’ 220
VI. LUCIUS IN QUEST OF JUSTICE 242
VII. THE END OF ALL DELUSIONS 256
VIII. AUNT GLENLYNE 264
IX. GEOFFREY HAS THOUGHTS OF SHANGHAI 291
X. LUCIUS SURRENDERS A DOUBTFUL CHANCE 314
EPILOGUE 330
LUCIUS DAVOREN
Book the Third.
CHAPTER XIII.
HOW GEOFFREY ENJOYED THE GARDEN-PARTY.
While Lucius Davoren was thus occupied at the east end of London,
Geoffrey Hossack was making the best of an existence which he had made
up his mind to consider utterly joyless, so long as adverse fate denied
him the one desire of his heart. For him in vain warm August skies were
deeply blue, and the bosky dells and glades of the New Forest still
untouched by autumn’s splendid decay. For him vainly ran the bright
river between banks perfumed with wild flowers. He beheld these things
from the lofty standpoint of discontent, and in his heart called Nature
a poor creature.
‘I would rather be mewed up in Whitecross-street prison, or in the
Venetian Piombi, with Janet for my wife, than enjoy all that earth can
give of natural beauty or artificial splendour without her,’ he said
to himself, when his cousins had bored him into a misanthropical mood
by their insistence upon the charms of rural life, as exemplified at
Hillersdon Grange.
‘I’m afraid you have no soul for Nature,’ said Belle, when she had
kept Geoffrey on his feet for an hour in the cramped old-fashioned
hot-houses, where she went in desperately for ferns and orchids, and
imitated Lady Baker on a small scale.
‘I’m afraid not—for Nature in flower-pots,’ answered Geoffrey, with an
unsympathetic yawn. ‘I daresay these Calopogons, and Gymnadenia, and
what’s-its-names are very grand, but I’ve seen finer growing wild in
the valleys on the southern side of the Rocky Mountains. You English
people only get nature in miniature—a poor etiolated creature. You have
no notion of the goddess Gea in her Titanic vigour, as she appears on
“the other side.”
‘Meaning America?’ said Belle contemptuously, as if that western
continent were something too vulgar for her serious consideration.
The sun shone upon Lady Baker’s fête as gaily as if fine weather
had been a matter within her ladyship’s power of provision, like the
luncheon from Gunter’s, or the costumes for the tableaux vivants. The
lady herself was radiant as the sunlight. Everybody had come—everybody
worth receiving, at any rate. She gave Geoffrey a smile of particular
cordiality as she shook hands with him, and murmured the conventional
‘How good of you to come early!’
Belle and Jessie were speedily told off for croquet: a sport for
which Geoffrey professed an unmitigated dislike, in a most churlish
spirit, his cousins thought. Thus released from attendance on these
fair ones, he roamed the vast gardens at large, finding solitudes in
that spacious domain, even on such a day as this. In these secluded
walks—where he only occasionally encountered a stray couple engaged in
that sentimental converse which he slangily denominated ‘spooning’—Mr.
Hossack indulged his own thoughts, which also were of a spooney
character. Here, he thought, Janet Davoren had been happy in the brief
summer-tide of her life; here she had felt the first joys and pains
of an innocent girlish love; and here, alas, had given that peerless
blossom of the soul, a girl’s first love, to a scoundrel. The thought
of this filled him with a savage jealousy.
‘I wish I had fired that shot out yonder instead of Lucius,’ he said
to himself. ‘Egad, I’d have made sure my ball went through him. There
should have been no shilly-shally about my fire.’
Luncheon found Mr. Hossack more attentive to the various Rhine wines
than to _pâté de foie gras_ or chicken-salad, or even the wants of
the damsel who sat next him. He was out of humour with all the world.
His artfully-worded advertisement had appeared several times, and had
produced no response. He began to think the Fates were opposed to his
happiness.
‘I suppose if a man is pretty well provided for in the way of
three-per-cents he must hope for nothing else from Fortune,’ he
thought, as he punished her ladyship’s cabinet hocks.
Luncheon over, Mr. Hossack conducted his damsel to the sunny
greensward, where enthusiastic archers—seven-and-twenty ladies to
five gentlemen—were stringing their Cupid bows for a grand match.
Here he shunted her into the care of one of the five male archers,
all of whom looked ineffably bored, and anon departed, whither he
cared not—anywhere, anywhere out of this world of luncheons, croquet,
flirtation, and frivolity.
Wandering at random, he came by and by to an obscure outskirt of
the Mardenholme grounds, given over to the cultivation of huge
rhododendrons, where there was a little wicket-gate opening into a
green lane. He made his escape from Mardenholme altogether by this
gate, glad to get away from the polite world, as represented by the
croquet-players and toxopholites, and above all by those exacting first
cousins of his, Belle and Jessie.
The green lane was rustic and secluded, well sheltered from the
westward sloping sun by spreading boughs of chestnut and sycamore, with
here and there the grander bulk of an oak, making an oasis of deep
shadow in the afternoon sunlight. Altogether a pleasant lane, even for
the indulgence of saddest thoughts.
It was on the side of a hill. Right and left of him stretched
undulating meadow-land, small enclosures between those straggling
unkempt hedges which make the glory of English landscape, and below,
almost at his feet as it were, lay a little village nestling in a
cup-shaped valley, so snugly sheltered by those gently-sloping meads,
so fenced from north and east by those tall screens of foliage, that
one might fancy the bleak winds of winter must roll high above those
modest roofs, ruffling no leaf in those simple gardens; that hails and
snows and frosts must waste their fury on the encircling hills, and
leave this chosen nook unassailed; that even the tax-gatherer must
forget its existence.
There were about half a dozen cottages, the perfection of
rusticity—gardens running over with roses, beehives, honeysuckle; a
village inn, so innocent and domestic of aspect that one would suppose
nothing could be farther from the thoughts of its patrons than strong
drink of any kind; a little high-shouldered old church, with a squat
square tower and crumbly whitewashed wall; a green burial-ground, all
ups and downs like the waves of the sea, overshadowed by two vast yews,
whose never-withering foliage canopied those rustic graves from January
to December.
There was a little patch of greensward in the midst of the scattered
houses, and some feet below the churchyard, no two edifices in this
village being on the same level. Here a meditative donkey cropped the
soft herbage at leisure, and here on the bosom of a crystalline pool
swam half a dozen geese, untroubled by forebodings of Michaelmas.
It was altogether a deliciously rustic picture, and Geoffrey, for the
first time since his return to Hampshire, felt reconciled to Nature.
‘This is better than all the tigered orchids in Lady Baker’s
collection,’ he mused, as he perched himself on a stile and took out
his cigar-case for a quiet smoke. ‘Why do great ladies cultivate
lady’s-slippers and pitcher-plants when for less money they might
surround themselves with model villages and happy peasantry? Has the
rôle of Lady Bountiful gone quite out of fashion, I wonder?’
He lighted his cigar and meditated upon life in general, dreamily
contemplating the cottages and wondering about their inmates, as
he had often wondered about the inhabitants of the dull old houses
in the dull old country towns. These cottages seemed above the
ordinary level, cleaner, brighter, more prosperous-looking. He could
not fancy wife-beating or any other iniquity going on within those
homely plastered walls. Those twinkling diamond-paned lattices seemed
transparent as a good man’s conscience, and in most of these dwellings
the outer door stood wide open, as if the inmates invited inspection.
He could see an eight-day clock, a dresser decked with many-coloured
crockeryware, a little round table spread for tea, a cradle, a snug
arm-chair, a wicker birdcage, a row of geranium pots—all the furniture
of home. He felt that he had alighted upon a small Arcadia.
While he sat thus musing, slowly smoking, very loth to go back to
the civilised world, pert country cousins, and tableaux vivants, and
tepid ices, and classical music, and general inanity, the door of that
solitary cottage whose interior did not invite inspection was suddenly
opened, and a child came skipping out—a child who wore a broad-brimmed
Leghorn hat, with long yellow tresses streaming beneath it, and a
pretty holland pinafore, and displayed symmetrical legs clad in blue
stockings—a child after the order of Mr. Millais.
Geoffrey made as if he would have fallen off the stile; the half-smoked
cigar fell from his hand. For a few moments he sat transfixed and
statue-like, and could only stare. Then, with a sudden rush, he darted
across the little strip of green, and clasped this butterfly child in
his arms.
‘Why, it’s my little Flossie!’ he cried rapturously, smothering the
small face with kisses, which the little maiden received without a
murmur. Had not Mr. Hossack endeared himself to her by all the arts
of bribery and corruption, in the shape of costly French bonbons,
_éditions de luxe_ of popular fairy tales and German hobgoblin stories,
and mechanical white mice that ran across the floor, and mechanical
mail-coaches that, on being wound up, rushed off at breakneck speed
to nowhere in particular, and came to grief after a few headlong
journeys? ‘It’s my precious little Flossie! My darling, where’s mamma?’
‘Mamma, mamma!’ screamed the child, looking back towards the cottage.
‘Come out and see who’s come.’ And then, turning to Geoffrey again, she
said with childhood’s candid selfishness, ‘Have you brought me some
more French bonbons in a box with a picture on the lid, like the last?’
‘My sweet one, I ought to be provided with a box of that very
description,’ replied Geoffrey, grasping the little maiden’s hand and
dragging her to the cottage; ‘but how could I anticipate such bliss as
to find you here in this O-for-ever-to-be-sanctified-village?’ cried
the lover, coining a Germanic compound in his rapture. ‘Is mamma in
there? O, take me to her, darling, take me!’
Tableaux vivants, pert cousins, Lady Baker, the claims of civilised
society, all melted into thin air amidst the delight of this discovery.
He was as unsophisticated as if he had been a Blackfoot, brought up in
the pathless hunting-grounds of the West.
‘Take me to her, thou dearest child,’ he exclaimed; and the little
one led him into the cottage garden, where the bees were humming in
the sunset, the air sweet with roses and carnations, happy swallows
twittering in the eves.
Here, on the threshold of the cottage door, framed like a picture by
the stout black timbers, stood that one woman whom his soul worshipped,
tall, slender, lovely, like a goddess who for a little while deigned to
walk this lower earth.
She looked at Geoffrey with a tender gladness, a wild surprise,
opposite feelings curiously blended in the expression of that eloquent
face.
‘O, Janet,’ said he, ‘how could you be so cruel as to run away from me?’
‘How could you be so unkind as to follow me?’ she asked reproachfully.
‘I have not followed you. ’Twas chance that led me here this afternoon.
There is a providence kind to true lovers, after all. I did not follow
you, Janet, but I was heartbroken by the loss of you. I went down to
Stillmington to carry you what I dared to think good news.’
‘Good news!’ she repeated wonderingly.
‘Yes, the tidings of your freedom.’
Janet’s pale face grew a shade paler.
‘Come in for a little while,’ she said; ‘we cannot stand here talking
of such things. Flossie, run and play on the green, darling; I’ll come
to you presently. Now, Mr. Hossack.’
She led the way into the simple cottage room, spotlessly clean, and
with that dainty brightness of furniture and whiteness of drapery
which industrious hands can give to the humblest surroundings. It was
a small square room, with two of its angles cut off by old-fashioned
corner cupboards whose shining glass doors displayed the treasures of
glass and china within. A dimity-covered sofa, a couple of basket-work
arm-chairs, an ancient bureau of darkest mahogany, and a solid Pembroke
table formed the chief furniture of the room. One of Flossie’s
fairy-tale books—Geoffrey’s gift—lay open upon the table, the mother’s
workbox beside it. A bowl of cut flowers adorned the broad sill of the
long low casement, and the afternoon sunlight was filtered through the
whitest of dimity curtains. To Geoffrey this old room, with its low
ceiling sustained by heavy black beams, was perfectly delightful.
‘Do you mean to tell me that my husband is dead?’ asked Janet, when she
had brought her visitor in and shut the door, looking him full in the
face with grave earnest eyes.
Geoffrey quailed beneath that searching gaze. In this crisis, which
involved the dearest wish of his heart, he had become the veriest child.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘he is dead. It is a most extraordinary story, and
as I have no evidence to prove my statement, you may be inclined to
doubt me. Yet I pledge my honour—’
‘I shall not doubt your honour,’ said Janet, with a superb smile, ‘but
I may doubt your discretion. How do you know that my husband is dead?’
‘I met him in America, and heard of his death there—heard it on the
highest possible authority.’
‘You met him in America. Why did you not tell me that at Stillmington?’
‘Because I had at that time no means of identifying Matchi, the man
I met in the West, with Mr. Vandeleur. I have seen your husband’s
portrait within the last fortnight, and I can take my oath that Mr.
Vandeleur and the man I knew in America are one and the same.’
‘Where could you see my husband’s portrait?’ asked Janet incredulously.
‘Lady Baker showed me a photograph of a group in which you and Mr.
Vandeleur both appear.’
‘Have you no other reason to suppose that this American traveller, whom
you call Matchi, and my husband are the same, except the evidence of a
photograph?’ asked Janet, somewhat contemptuously. ‘What more common
than an accidental resemblance between two men who are utter strangers
to each other?’
‘Not such a likeness as that which I am speaking of; nor is a genius
for music the commonest thing in the world. The violin-playing of the
man in the western pine-forest exactly resembled that which Lady Baker
described to me.’
‘What,’ cried Janet, with a wounded air, ‘you have been taking Lady
Baker into your confidence?’
‘Forgive me, Janet. I am bent upon bringing this matter to a happy
issue. Lady Baker is your true friend. She bitterly reproaches herself
for her part in bringing about your unhappy marriage; she went to
Melksham in search of you, when she accidentally learned that Mr.
Vandeleur had been seen there, and was deeply grieved at arriving too
late to find you.’
‘She is very good,’ answered Janet, with a sigh. ‘And now tell me about
this man you met in America. Tell me everything, without reserve.’
Without reserve; that would be rather difficult. Not for worlds—no,
not even to secure his own happiness—could Geoffrey Hossack betray his
friend.
He told his story as best he could; but in his fear of saying too much,
stumbled a little over the details. Altogether the story had a garbled
air, and before he came to the end he saw plainly enough that Janet was
unconvinced.
‘I can trust your truth,’ she said, looking at that frank honest face
with her clear eyes, ‘but I cannot trust your judgment. You had but
just recovered from a fever, in which your senses had been astray, when
you heard of his death. He was shot, you say, in the forest. Who shot
him?’
‘I—I cannot tell you,’ faltered Geoffrey, in a cold perspiration.
This Janet understood to mean ‘I do not know.’
‘See how vague your information is,’ she exclaimed, with an incredulous
laugh. ‘You were told that he was shot, but you were not told who shot
him; you were not told the motive of the murder. Even in the backwoods
I suppose people do not shoot each other quite without motive.’
Geoffrey stood before her dumbfoundered.
‘Did you kill him yourself?’ she asked, with a sudden flash of
suspicion.
‘No, I wish I had; there should have been no mistake about it then.’
‘Say no more, Mr. Hossack; this is a subject upon which you and I can
hardly agree. When you can bring me direct and legal evidence of Mr.
Vandeleur’s death, I will believe it.’
‘And if I ever can do that—and from the manner of his death it is
almost impossible—you will give me some reward for my fidelity—eh,
Janet?’
‘I will make no bargains,’ she answered gravely. ‘I beg you to hold
yourself entirely free, and for the sake of your own happiness I trust
you may speedily get rid of this boyish infatuation.’
‘Boyish!’ echoed Geoffrey, with the proud consciousness of his
eight-and-twenty years. ‘Why I am your senior by two years. Lucius told
me so.’
‘Sorrow does the work of time in some lives,’ said Janet, with her sad
smile; ‘I feel myself very old at six-and-twenty. Come, Mr. Hossack,
you have been always very good to me, and for once in a way I will
treat you as a friend. Little Flossie is very fond of you, and I know
she is dying for a long talk about her new pets, the tame rabbits and
the tortoiseshell kitten, whose acquaintance she has made down here.
Stop and drink tea with us, and tell me how you happened to find me out
in this quiet corner of the earth.’
‘You forget that we are not a mile from one of the gates of
Mardenholme,’ said Geoffrey, enchanted at the prospect of drinking tea
with his goddess.
‘True; but I didn’t think you knew Lady Baker.’
‘Didn’t you?’ said this Jesuit, in an artless tone. ‘Why, you see my
people live down hereabouts—Hillersdon Grange—and my cousins and Lady
Baker are uncommonly thick.’
Mrs. Bertram called to Flossie through the open window. The child
was walking up and down the little path by the beehives, nursing her
tortoiseshell kitten. She came bounding in joyfully at this summons,
and exhibited this feline treasure to Mr. Hossack, that good-natured
individual allowing the small member of the tiger tribe to make a
promenade upon his outstretched arm, and pur triumphantly from a lofty
perch on his coat-collar.
Mrs. Bertram rang a little tinkling handbell, and a decent old
woman—who must surely have been what is called ‘upon the listen,’
or she could hardly have heard that feeble summons—appeared with a
tea-tray, and spread the neat little table with the best china teacups,
a brown home-baked loaf, the yellowest of butter-pats, the richest of
cream in a little glass jug, a great wedge of golden honeycomb, a few
ripe apricots nestling in a bed of mulberry leaves,—a repast at once
Arcadian and picturesque.
‘But perhaps you may not care for such a womanish beverage as orange
pekoe,’ said Janet doubtfully, as Mr. Hossack surveyed the banquet from
his altitude of something over six feet, the kitten still promenading
his shoulder.
‘Not care for tea! Why, on the shores of the Saskatchewan the teapot
was our only comfort,’ exclaimed Geoffrey. ‘We had a cask or two of rum
with us, and had no end of trouble in hiding it from the Indians; but
they got the most of the fire-water out of us sooner or later, by hook
or by crook. We rarely took any of it ourselves, except as a medicine.
Travellers are a temperate race, I can assure you, Mrs. Bertram.’
They sat down to tea, the kitten now perambulating the backs of
their chairs, now sending forth appealing miaws for milk or other
refreshment. Geoffrey, who had been too much out of humour with the
world in general to do justice to Lady Baker’s luncheon, was ravenous,
and devoured bread-and-honey like the queen in the nursery rhyme, of
which Flossie did not fail to remind him. It was the first meal he
had ever eaten with the woman he loved. That fragrant tea was more
intoxicating than Lady Baker’s choicest Johannisberger or Steinberger.
He forgot that he was perhaps no nearer a happy issue to his suit than
he had been that day in the botanical gardens at Stillmington, when he
made his first desperate appeal to his inexorable goddess; he forgot
everything except the present moment—this innocent rustic interior, the
fair-haired child, whose gay laugh rang out every now and then, the
perambulatory kitten, the perfect face of the woman he loved, smiling
at him with that proud slow smile he knew so well.
‘So you went back to Stillmington,’ Janet said presently, when Geoffrey
had appeased the pangs of hunger with the contents of the honeycomb and
the crustiest side of the home-baked loaf, and had consumed three cups
of that exquisite tea.
‘Went back!’ repeated Geoffrey; ‘of course I went back. I should have
gone back exactly the same if Stillmington had been in the centre of
Africa, or on the top of Elburz. How cruel of you to leave no address!
They told me you had gone to the seaside.’
‘Well, I did not leave a very definite account of myself, certainly.
You see I was so tired of Stillmington and of my pupils; and thanks to
concert-singing and pupils, I had contrived to save a little money. So,
as my health was not quite so good as it might be—I had been working
rather hard for the last few years, you see—I thought I would give
myself a month or so of thorough rest. I had a fancy—amounting almost
to an irresistible longing—to see my old home once more—the graves
of those dear ones my ingratitude had wronged. I knew that to come
back to the scenes of my girlhood would be the keenest suffering,
yet I longed to come. I did not want to be very near Wykhamston, as
that would be to run the risk of recognition; but I wished to be
somewhere within the reach of the dear, dear old place. I thought of
this village and of Sally, my kind old nurse, who came to live here
in this cottage, which she had bought with her savings, when she left
the Rectory. I was only fourteen when she left us; and one of our
greatest treats—Lucius’s and mine and the dear sister we lost—was to
come here of a summer afternoon and drink tea with dear old Sally. So
I said to myself, “If God has spared my old nurse, I will go and ask
her to give me a lodging;” and Flossie and I came straight here—to this
out-of-the-way corner—to take our holiday. Flossie has been enraptured
with the rustic life, the pigs and fowls, and the old gray donkey on
the green, with whom she has formed quite a friendship. She feeds him
with bread-and-milk every morning, foolish child!’
She said this with the mother’s tender look at the fair-haired damsel,
who disposed of the bread-and-honey as fast as if she had laid a wager
with Geoffrey as to which of them should devour most.
‘And have you been happy here?’ asked Geoffrey.
‘Yes—after the first bitter pain of seeing my lost home, and
remembering how I lost it. I have been happier than I had hoped ever to
be again. After all, there is some magic in one’s native air.’
‘Yes,’ exclaimed Geoffrey, with an air of conviction, ‘of course there
is. I have a place in Hampshire myself, not a stone’s-throw, in a
rural point of view—that is to say, five-and-twenty miles or so—from
here. No end of arable and meadow-land, and copse and rabbit-warren,
and some well-wooded ground about the house, which my father took the
liberty to call a park; and a nice old house enough, of the Queen-Anne
period; stiffish and squarish and reddish, but by no means a bad kind
of barrack. I’ll give the sugar-broker notice—no, I can’t do that—I’ll
offer to buy back his lease to-morrow.’
‘The sugar-broker!’ repeated Janet, perplexed.
‘Yes, a fellow I was foolish enough to let my place to when I came of
age—seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years. He’s keeping it up uncommonly
well, I’m told; has put up a good deal of glass in the kitchen-garden,
and so on, and improved the farm-buildings. But he shall go. He’s on
for his fourteen years; so I can’t give him notice to quit, but I can
offer him a tempting price for the lease. I daresay he’s tired of the
place by this time. People always do get tired of their places.’
‘But what can you want with a great place like that?’ asked Janet.
‘I don’t know. Didn’t you say you were fond of this part of the
country?’ asked Geoffrey, in some confusion. Those cups of orange pekoe
had proved far more intoxicating than the vintages of Rhineland.
‘O, Mr. Hossack, pray do not let _my_ fancies influence your life!’
said Janet earnestly. ‘Remember we may never be more to each other than
we are now,—very good friends, who may meet once in a way, at some
chance turn in life’s road.’
Geoffrey pleaded his hardest, but felt that he was pleading in vain.
All arguments were futile. Honour counselled Janet to be firm, and she
was steadfast as a rock.
‘I will not tell you that you are indifferent to me,’ she said, in her
low sweet voice, unembarrassed by the presence of the child, who was
absorbed in the antics of her kitten, and troubled herself in no manner
about what Mr. Hossack might be saying to her mother, and presently,
having eaten to repletion, roamed out into the garden among the
clove-carnations and late roses and tall gaudy hollyhocks. ‘That would
be too ungrateful, after all the trouble you have taken for my sake.
I can only say that, until I have proof positive of my first husband’s
death, I shall continue to consider myself bound to him.’
‘But what stronger proof can you hope for than my assurance of the
fact? Remember that Mr. Vandeleur perished in a solitude where there
are no registrars to take note of a man’s death, no coroner to hold an
inquest on his body, no undertakers to give him decent burial; where a
rough-and-ready grave under the pine-trees would be the sole witness of
his end.’
‘We will trust in Providence, Mr. Hossack,’ answered Janet, with that
steadfast look he knew so well, and which made her seem a creature
so far above him—a being exempt from common temptations and human
passions. ‘If my husband died as you tell me he died, I do not doubt
that in due time there will arise some confirmation of your story.’
Geoffrey sighed, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘If the pine-trees or the songless birds of the wilderness could talk,
you might receive such confirmation,’ he said; ‘but from any other
source it is impossible.’
‘Why, my brother was with you all the time, was he not?’ inquired
Janet, with a wondering look. ‘He at least must be able to vouch for
the truth of your story.’
Geoffrey grew deadly pale, and for a few moments was speechless.
‘Unhappily,’ he faltered, after that awkward pause, ‘Lucius had a bad
attack—brain fever, or apoplexy he called it—just at the time of this
man’s death. His evidence would therefore hardly satisfy you.’
‘In point of fact, Mr. Hossack, it seems that neither you nor my
brother were in a condition to know anything about the event. You could
have only hearsay evidence. Who was your informant?’
This question was a home-thrust. To name Lucius would have been almost
to betray him; and again, he had just given her to understand that
Lucius was unconscious at the time of the event. Again there came a
pause, painfully awkward for Geoffrey. He felt that Mrs. Bertram was
watching him with gravely questioning eyes. How was he to reply?
‘There was a little German with us,’ he said at last, with a
desperate plunge, knowing not how near to his friend’s betrayal this
admission might lead him; ‘a sea-captain, a native of Hamburg, called
Schanck—Absalom Schanck—a very good fellow, who was with us—our
fellow-traveller. I—I think you must have heard me speak of him. He saw
the shot fired.’
‘And saw my husband die?’
‘Yes,’ answered Geoffrey, but not with perfect conviction; ‘I believe
so.’
‘And pray, where is Mr. Schanck? His evidence may be worth very little,
but it would be as well to hear it.’
‘Upon my word,’ said Geoffrey, crestfallen, ‘I’m afraid that at this
present moment Schanck is washing gold in San Francisco, unless he has
been made mincemeat of by larger diggers.’
‘We must wait for some other witness then,’ said Janet, in a tone of
calm certainty, which made reply seem impossible.
Geoffrey could but submit. He must needs obey this lovely image of
destiny.
‘So be it,’ he said, with a despairing sigh; ‘but you will let me come
to see you sometimes—won’t you, Janet?’ very tenderly, and evidently
expecting a reproof; instead of which his devotion was rewarded with a
smile. ‘And you’ll receive me just as you have done this afternoon, and
give me a cup of that delicious Pekoe?’
‘A cup!’ exclaimed Janet; ‘I think you had five.’
‘I may come to tea again, mayn’t I, once in three weeks or so, like a
boy who has a Saturday afternoon at home? Flossie likes me, you see,’
pleaded he jesuitically.
‘Well, you may come once a month, or so, if you happen to be in the
neighbourhood.’
‘Happen to be in the neighbourhood! I would cross the Balkan range in
January to obtain such a privilege.’
‘But remember you come only as my friend. If you talk to me as you have
talked this afternoon, I shall ring for Sally, and tell her to show you
to the door. It would be only a formula—as the street-door opens out of
this room—but I should do it nevertheless.’
‘There shall not be one word that can offend you.’
‘On that condition you may come; but, believe me, your own happiness
would be better secured by your utter forgetfulness of a woman who may
never be free to reward your fidelity. There are so many who would be
proud of such a lover. Amongst them you might surely find one who would
realise your ideal as well as, if not better than, I.’
‘Never!’ protested Geoffrey, with warmth. ‘I never knew what a great
love was till I knew you. I will never open my heart to a lesser love.’
Janet gave a little sigh, half regret, half satisfaction. After all,
a woman does not easily relinquish such devotion. She has a duty to
fulfil, and her little lecture, her few words of wise counsel, to
pronounce; and having done that duty, she is hardly sorry if her
foolish adorer refuses to hear.
So they parted—not briefly, for little Flossie hung about Geoffrey, and
impeded his departure; nay, at his and Flossie’s joint request, Janet
walked half the length of the lane with Geoffrey and the child. They
only parted within sight of the distant towers of Mardenholme.
‘How pleased Lady Baker would be if she knew you were so near!’ said
Geoffrey.
‘Pray, don’t tell her. She was very good to me, and I was fond of
her; but she would want me to go to that great house of hers, full of
strange faces, and sing to her company, and be made a show of. I have
contrived to keep very clear of her pathway so far, near as I am. Pray,
do not betray me.’
‘To hear is to obey. But you really do mean to stay here?’ inquired
Geoffrey anxiously. ‘When I come a month hence to claim that cup of
Pekoe, I sha’n’t find you fled, eh?’
‘I promise that if anything should induce me to leave Foxley—that’s
the name of our little village—I will write you a line to say where I
am going. But my present intention is to stay here till November—just
long enough for a thorough rest—and then go back to my pupils at
Stillmington.’
Geoffrey sighed. The thought of those sol-fa classes, and the hard
labour they involved, always smote him to the quick; and he was rioting
in the Three per cents, as he told himself.
He took his time in returning to Mardenholme; and the tableaux
vivants had begun when he pushed his way in among the crowd of young
men standing at the back of the picture-gallery, Lady Baker having
naturally invited a good many more guests than could find even standing
room. Here he stood patiently enough, and saw as much of the living
pictures after Frith, Faed, and Millais as he could conveniently
behold above the heads of the crowd in front of him. He was not deeply
interested in the performance, his mind indeed being rather occupied
with tender recollections of the humble tea-party at which he had
lately assisted than by the charms of the graceful young lady who
danced with Claude Duval, or of the pretty peasant lassie, with her
shepherd’s plaid and neatly-snooded hair, or the damsel in white satin,
who took a sad farewell of her Black Brunswicker under the glare of the
lime-light. He applauded mechanically when other people applauded, and
felt that he had done all that society could expect of him. His cousins
came out presently among the crowd, and straightway pounced upon him,
and reproached him with acrimony.
‘Why, Geoffrey, where have you been hiding yourself?’ asked Belle.
‘I’ve been strolling about the gardens a little,’ replied that arch
hypocrite. ‘It’s rather warm in here.’
‘Rather warm!’ exclaimed Jessie, who was evidently out of temper. ‘It’s
insufferably hot, and I’m tired to death. These tableaux are a mistake
after a garden-party. Lady Baker always tries to do too much. One feels
so dowdy, too, in morning-dress when the lamps are lighted. But, pray,
how have you managed to keep out of everybody’s way all the afternoon,
Geoffrey? I haven’t set eyes on you since luncheon.’
‘I hope you haven’t been looking for me all the time,’ said Geoffrey,
with unruffled coolness. ‘I’ve been meandering about the grounds,
enjoying nature.’
‘Which I thought was not worth looking at in England,’ remarked Belle.
‘But perhaps, now we have found you,’ with angry emphasis, ‘you’ll
be kind enough to get us some refreshment. I daresay you have had
something, but I know I am ready to sink.’
‘Yes, I’ve done pretty well, thanks. I had some bread-and-honey.’
‘Bread-and-honey!’ cried Jessie.
‘O, that’s to say, something in that way. Your sweets and kickshaws are
all the same to me—I never know what to call them. Come along, Belle,
we’ll fight our way to the refreshment-room. You sha’n’t sink if I can
help it.’
He piloted the two damsels through the crowd to a large room, which
had been arranged after the model of a railway refreshment-buffet,
save that it was liberally furnished with things good to eat. Here
Lady Baker’s men and maids dispensed strawberry ices, tea, coffee,
Italian confectionery, German wines and German salads, to the famishing
crowd; and here Geoffrey, by cramming them with ices, and creamy
vanille-flavoured pastry, contrived to restore his cousins’ equanimity.
There was some talk of dancing, and a few enthusiastic couples were
already revolving in the drawing-room; but Geoffrey pleaded that no
man could waltz in gray trousers, and thus escaped the infliction;
and having the good fortune to find his uncle, tired of vestry and
quarter-session talk and inclined to go home, this heartless young man
had the satisfaction of packing Belle and Jessie into the landau before
Lady Baker’s _fête_ was half over, as Jessie said discontentedly.
They avenged themselves by abusing the party all the way home.
‘Those huge garden-parties are detestable!’ exclaimed Belle. ‘I know
Lady Baker only gives them in order to be civil to a herd of people she
doesn’t care a straw about. She gives nice little parties for her real
friends. I wonder people can be so slavish as to go to her in droves.’
‘I thought you said Lady Baker’s parties were delightful,’ said
Geoffrey. ‘I know you wrote to me rapturously about her.’
‘I’m only just beginning to see through her,’ replied Belle, who
couldn’t get over the day’s annoyances. This tiresome Geoffrey had not
been the least good to them. He might just as well have been in Norway.
CHAPTER XIV.
LUCILLE HAS STRANGE DREAMS.
For a few nights, while Lucille’s fever was at the worst, Lucius
Davoren took up his abode in Cedar House, and established himself in
that little room adjoining Mr. Sivewright’s bedchamber which had been
lately occupied by Lucille. Here he felt himself a sure guardian of his
patient’s safety. No one could harm the old man while he, Lucius, was
on the spot to watch by night, and while Mrs. Milderson, the nurse, in
whom he had perfect confidence, was on guard by day. His own days must
needs be fully occupied out of doors, whatever private cares might gnaw
at his heartstrings; but after introducing the ex-policeman and his
wife, who came to him with a kind of warranty from Mr. Otranto, and
who seemed honest people, he felt tolerably satisfied as to the safety
of property in the old house, as well as about that more valuable
possession—life. He had locked the door of the room which contained
the chief part of Mr. Sivewright’s collection, and carried the key
about with him in his pocket; but there was still a great deal of very
valuable property scattered about the house, as he knew.
One thing troubled him, and that was the existence of the secret
staircase, communicating in some manner—which he had been up to this
point unable to discover—with Mr. Sivewright’s bedroom. He had sounded
Homer Sivewright cautiously upon this subject, and the old man’s
answers had led him to believe that he, so long a tenant of the house,
knew absolutely nothing of the hidden staircase; or it might be only
an exaggerated caution and a strange passion for secrecy which sealed
Homer Sivewright’s lips.
Once, when his patient was asleep, Lucius contrived to examine the
panelling in front of the masked staircase, but he could discover no
means of communication. If there were, as he fully believed, a sliding
panel, the trick of it altogether baffled him. This failure worried
him exceedingly. He had a morbid horror of that possible entrance to
his patient’s room, which it was beyond his power to defend by bolt,
lock, or bar, since he knew not the manner of its working. For worlds
he would not have alarmed Mr. Sivewright, who was still weak as an
infant, although wonderfully improved during the last few days. He was
therefore compelled to be silent, but he felt that here was the one
hitch in his scheme of defence from the hidden enemy.
‘After all, there is little need to torment myself about the mystery,’
he thought sometimes. ‘It is clear enough that these Winchers were
guilty alike of the robbery and the attempt to murder. The greater
crime was but a means of saving themselves from the consequences of
the lesser; or they may possibly have supposed that their old master
had left them well provided for in his will, and that the way to
independence lay across his grave. It is hard to think that human
nature can be so vile, but in this case there is scarcely room for
doubt.’
He thought of that man whom he had seen in the brief glare of the
frequent lightning—the man who had raised himself from his crouching
attitude to look up at the lighted window on the topmost story, and had
then scaled the wall.
‘The receiver of stolen goods, the medium by which they disposed of
their booty, no doubt,’ he said to himself; ‘their crime would have
been incomplete without such aid.’
Although all his endeavours to find the key belonging to the door of
the staircase leading to the upper story had failed, Lucius had not
allowed himself to be baffled in his determination to explore those
unoccupied rooms. Now that Lucille’s prostration and the Winchers’
dismissal had made him in a manner master of the house, he sent for a
blacksmith and had the lock picked, and then went up-stairs to explore,
accompanied by the man, whom he ordered to open the doors of the rooms
as he had opened the door of the staircase. There was little to reward
his perseverance in those desolate attic chambers. Most of them were
empty; but in one—that room whose door he had seen stealthily opened
and stealthily closed on his previous visit to those upper regions—he
found some traces of occupation. Two or three articles of battered
old furniture—an old stump bedstead of clumsy make, provided with
bedding and blankets, which lay huddled upon it as if just as its last
occupant had left it—the ashes of a fire in the narrow grate—a table,
with an old ink-bottle, a couple of pens, and a sheet of ink-stained
blotting-paper—an empty bottle smelling of brandy on the mantelpiece, a
bottle which, from its powerful odour, could hardly have been emptied
very long ago—a tallow-candle, sorely gnawed by rats or mice, in an old
metal candlestick on the window-seat—a scrap of carpet spread before
the hearth, a dilapidated arm-chair drawn up close to it: a room which,
to Lucius Davoren’s eye, looked as if it had been the lair of some
unclean creature—one of those lost wretches in whom the fashion of
humanity has sunk to its lowest and vilest phase.
He looked round the room with a shudder.
‘There has been some one living here lately,’ he said, thinking aloud.
‘Ay, sir,’ answered the blacksmith, ‘it looks like it; some one who
wasn’t over particklar about his quarters, I should think, by the
look of the place. But he seems to have had summat to comfort him,’
added the man, with mild jocosity, pointing to the empty bottle on the
chimneypiece.
Some one had occupied that room; but who was that occupant? And had
Lucille known this fact when she so persistently denied the evidence of
her lover’s senses—when she had shown herself so palpably averse to his
making any inspection of those rooms?
Who could have been hidden there with her cognisance, with her
approval? About whom could she have been thus anxious? For a moment the
question confounded him. He could only wonder, in blank dull amazement.
Then, in the next moment, the lover’s firm faith arose in rebuke of
that brief suspicion.
‘What, am I going to doubt her again,’ he said to himself, ‘while she
lies ill and helpless, with utmost need of my affection? Of course she
was utterly ignorant of the fact that yonder room was occupied, and
therefore ridiculed my statement about the open door. Was it strange if
her manner seemed flurried or nervous, when she had just been startled
by the sight of her father’s portrait? I am a wretch to doubt her, even
for a moment.’
He went up to the loft, and thoroughly examined that dusty receptacle,
but found no living creature there except the spiders, whose webs
festooned the massive timbers that sustained the ponderous tiled roof.
This upper portion of the house was vacant enough now; of that there
could be no doubt. There was as little doubt that the room yonder
had been lately occupied. There could but be one solution of the
mystery, Lucius decided, after some anxious thought. Jacob Wincher had
accommodated his accomplice with a lodging in that room while the two
were planning and carrying out their system of plunder.
This examination duly made, and the doors fastened up again in a
permanent manner, by the help of the blacksmith, Lucius felt easier in
his mind. There was still that uncomfortable feeling about the secret
staircase; but with the upper part of the house under lock-and-key,
and the lower part carefully guarded, no great harm could come from the
mere existence of that hidden communication. In any case, Lucius had
done his utmost to make all things secure. His most absorbing anxiety
now was about Lucille’s illness.
His treatment had been to a considerable extent successful; the
delirium had passed away. The sweet eyes recognised him once again; the
gentle voice thanked him for his care. But the fever had been followed
by extreme weakness. The sick girl lay on her bed from day to day,
ministered to by Mrs. Milderson, and had scarcely power to lift her
head from the pillow.
This prostration was rendered all the more painful by the patient’s
feverish anxiety to recover strength. Again and again, with a piteous
air of entreaty, she asked Lucius when she would be well enough to get
up, to go about the house, to attend to her grandfather.
‘My dearest,’ he answered gravely, ‘we must not talk about that yet
awhile. We have sufficient reason for thankfulness in the improvement
that has taken place already. We must wait patiently for the return of
strength.’
‘I can’t be patient!’ exclaimed Lucille, in the feeble voice that had
changed so much since her illness. ‘How can I lie here patiently when
I know that I am wanted; that—that everything may be going on wrong
without me?’
‘Was there ever such ingratitude and distrustfulness,’ cried the
comfortable old nurse, with pretended chiding, ‘when she knows I’m that
watchful of the poor old gentleman, and give him all he wants to the
minute; and that when things was at the worst you slept in the little
room next him, Mr. Davoren, so as to keep guard, as you may say, at
night?’
‘Forgive me,’ said Lucille, stretching out her wasted hand to the
nurse, and then to the doctor, who bent down to press his lips to the
poor little feverish hand. ‘I daresay I seem very ungrateful; but it
isn’t that—I only want to be well. I feel so helpless lying here; it’s
so dreadful to be a prisoner, bound hand and foot, as it were. Can’t
you get me well quickly somehow, Lucius? Never mind if I’m ill again by
and by; patch me up for a little while.’
‘Nay, dearest, there shall be no half cure, no patching. With God’s
help, I hope to restore you to perfect health before very long. But if
you are impatient, if you give way to fretfulness, you will lessen your
chances of a rapid recovery.’
Lucille gave no answer save a long weary sigh. Tears gathered slowly in
her sad eyes, and she turned her face to the wall.
‘Yes, poor dear,’ said Nurse Milderson, looking down at her
compassionately; ‘as long as she do fret and werrit herself so, she’ll
keep backarding of her recovery.’
Here the nurse beckoned mysteriously to Lucius, and led him out of the
room into the corridor, where she unbosomed herself of her cares.
‘It isn’t as I want to alarm you, Dr. Davoren’—Lucius held brevet rank
in the Shadrack-road,—‘far from it; but I feel myself in duty bound
to tell you that she’s a little wrong in her head still of a night,
between sleeping and waking, as you may say, and talks and rambles more
than I like to hear. And it’s always “father,” rambling and rambling on
about loving her father, and trusting him in spite of the world, and
standing by him, and suchlike. And last night—it might have been from
half-past one to two—say a quarter to two, or perhaps twenty minutes,’
said Mrs. Milderson, with infinite precision, ‘I’d been taking forty
winks, as you may say, in my chair, being a bit worn out, when she
turns every drop of my blood to ice-cold water by crying out sudden,
in a voice that pierced me to the marrow—’
‘_What_, nurse? For goodness’ sake, come to the point,’ cried Lucius,
who thought he was never to hear the end of Mrs. Milderson’s personal
sensations.
‘I was coming to it, sir,’ replied that lady, with offended dignity,
‘when you interrupted me; I was only anxious to be exack. “O,” she
cried out, “not poison! Don’t say that—no, not poison! You wouldn’t
do that—you wouldn’t be so wicked as to poison your poor old father.”
I think that was enough to freeze anybody’s blood, sir. But, lor,
they do take such queer fancies when they’re lightheaded. I’m sure, I
nursed a poor dear lady in Stevedor-lane, in purpleoral fever—which her
husband was in the coal-and-potato line, and ginger-beer and bloaters,
and suchlike—and she used to fancy her poor head was turned into a
york-regent, and beg and pray of me ever so pitiful to cut the eyes out
of it. I’m proud to say, tho’, as I brought her round, and there isn’t
a healthier-looking woman between here and the docks.’
Lucius was silent. His own suggestion of a possible attempt to poison
was sufficient to account for these delirious words of Lucille. It was
only strange that she should have associated her father’s name with
the idea; that in her distempered dream, he, the father—to whose image
she clung with such fond affection—should have appeared to her in the
character of a parricide.
‘We must try and get back her strength, nurse,’ said Lucius, after a
thoughtful pause; ‘with returning health all these strange fancies will
disappear.’
‘Yes, sir, with returning health!’ sighed Mrs. Milderson, whose
cheerfulness seemed somewhat to have deserted her.
This sick-nursing was, as she was wont to remark, much more trying
than attendance upon matrons and their new-borns. It lacked the lively
element afforded by the baby. ‘I feel lonesome and down-hearted-like
in a sick-room,’ Mrs. Milderson would remark to her gossips, ‘and the
cryingest, peevishest baby that ever was would be a blessing to me
after a fever case.’
‘You don’t think her worse, do you?’ asked Lucius, alarmed by that sigh.
‘No, sir; but I don’t think her no better,’ answered Mrs. Milderson,
with the vagueness of an oracle. ‘She’s that low, there’s no cheering
of her up. I’m sure, I’ve sat and told her about some of my reglar
patients—Mrs. Binks in the West Inja-road, and Mrs. Turvitt down by the
Basin—and done all I could think of to enliven her, but she always
gives the same impatient sigh, and says, “I do so long to get well,
nurse.” She must have been very low, Dr. Davoren, before she took to
her bed.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucius, remembering that sudden fainting-fit. ‘She had
allowed herself too little rest in her attendance upon her grandfather.’
‘She must have worn herself to a shadder, poor dear young creature,’
said Mrs. Milderson. ‘But don’t you be uneasy, sir,’ pursued the
matron, having done her best to make him so; ‘if care and constant
watchfulness can bring her round, round she shall be brought.’
Thus Lucius Davoren went about his daily work henceforward with a new
burden on his mind—the burden of care for that dear patient, for whom,
perchance, his uttermost care might be vain.
CHAPTER XV.
THE DAWN OF HOPE.
The glory of the summer had departed from the Shadrack-road. The
costermongers no longer bawled their fine fresh ‘Arline’ plums, their
‘gages’ at four-pence per quart; cucumbers had grown too yellow and
seedy even for the Shadrackites; green apples were exhibited on
the stalls and barrows; the cracking of walnuts was heard at every
street-corner; and the great bloater season—which was a kind of minor
saturnalia in this district—had been inaugurated by the first triumphal
cry of ‘Rale Yarmouths, two for threehalfpence!’ The pork-butchers,
whose trade had somewhat slackened during the dog-days—though the
Shadrackites were always pork-eaters—now began to find demand growing
brisker. In a word, autumn was at hand. Not by wide plains of ripening
corn, or the swift flight of the scared covey rising from their nest in
the long grass, did the Shadrackites perceive the change of seasons,
but by the contents of the costermongers’ barrows. At this time, also,
that raven cry of cholera—generally arising out of the sufferings of
those unwary citizens who had indulged too freely in such luxuries as
conger-eel and cucumber—dwindled and died away; and the Shadrackites,
moved by that gloomy spirit which always beheld clouds upon the
horizon, prophesied that the harvest would be a bad one, and bread dear
in the coming winter.
Lucius went among them day after day, and ministered to them, and
was patient with them, and smiled at the little children, and talked
cheerily to the old people, despite that growing anxiety in his own
breast. He neglected not a single duty, and spent no more of his
day in Cedar House than he had done before he took up his quarters
there. He ate his frugal meals in his own house, and only went to Mr.
Sivewright’s dreary old mansion at a late hour in the evening. He had
carried some of his medical books there, and often sat in his little
bedroom reading, long after midnight. His boy had orders to run on to
Cedar House should there be any call for his aid in the dead hours of
the night.
He brooded much over that small packet of letters which he counted
among his richest treasures—those letters from the man who signed
himself ‘H. G.,’ and the lady whom he wrote of as Madame Dumarques,
the lady whose own delicate signature appeared in clearest characters
upon the smooth foreign paper—written with ink that had paled with the
lapse of years—Félicie.
Lucius read these letters again and again; and the result of this
repeated perusal was the conviction that the writers of those lines
were the parents of Lucille. Why should they have been thus deeply
interested in Ferdinand Sivewright’s child, or how should he have been
able to put forward a claim for money on that child’s behalf?
Lucius had taken these letters into his custody with the determination
to turn them to good account. If it were within the limits of
possibility, he would discover the secret to which these letters
afforded so slight a clue. That was the resolve he had made when
he took the packet from Homer Sivewright’s desk—and time in nowise
diminished the force of his intention. But he had no heart to begin his
search just yet, while Lucille was dangerously ill.
In the mean time he thought the matter over, repeatedly deliberating as
to the best means of beginning a task which promised to be difficult.
Should he consult Mr. Otranto—should he commit his chances to the
wisdom and experience of that famous private detective?
His own answer to his own question was a decided negative. ‘No,’ he
said to himself, ‘I will not vulgarise the woman I love by giving the
broken links of the story of her birth to a professional spy, leaving
him to put them together after his own fashion. If there should be
a blot upon her lineage, his worldly eyes shall not be the first to
discover the stain. Heaven has given me brains which are perhaps as
good as Mr. Otranto’s; and constancy of purpose shall stand me in the
stead of experience. I will do this thing myself. Directly Lucille is
in a fair way to recovery, I will begin my task; and it shall go hard
with me if I do not succeed.’
The days passed slowly enough for the parish doctor’s hard-worked
brain, which felt weary of all things on earth, or of all those things
which made up the sum of his monotonous life. September had begun,
and a slight improvement had arisen in Lucille’s condition. She was
a little stronger, a little more cheerful—had rewarded her doctor’s
care with just a faint shadow of her once-familiar smile. She had
been lifted out of her bed too one warm afternoon, and wrapped in her
dressing-gown and an old faded Indian shawl that had belonged to Homer
Sivewright’s Spanish wife, and placed in an easy-chair by the open
window to drink tea with Mrs. Milderson. Whereupon there had been a
grand tea-drinking, to which Lucius was admitted, and in which there
was some touch of the happiness of bygone days.
‘Do you remember the first time you gave me a cup of tea, Lucille,’
said Lucius, ‘that winter’s night, in the parlour down-stairs?’
The girl’s eyes filled with sudden tears, and she turned her head aside
upon the pillow that supported it.
‘I was so happy then, Lucius,’ she said; ‘now I am full of cares.’
‘Needless cares, believe me, dearest,’ answered her lover. ‘Your
grandfather is a great deal better—weak still, but much stronger than
you are. He will be down-stairs first, depend upon it. I should have
brought him in to take tea with us this afternoon if I had not been
afraid of agitating you. I never had such a nervous excitable patient.’
‘Ah, you may well say that, Dr. Davoren,’ said Nurse Milderson, with
her good-natured scolding tone. ‘I never see such an eggsitable
patient—toss and turn, and worrit her poor dear self, as if she had
all the cares of this mortial world upon her blessed shoulders. Why,
Mrs. Beck, in Stevedor-square, that has seven children and a chandler’s
business to look after, doesn’t worrit half as much when she keeps her
bed, tho’ she knows as everythink is at sixes and sevens down-stairs;
those blessed children tumbling down and hurting of themselves at every
hand’s turn—and a bit of a girl serving in the shop that don’t know
where to lay her hand upon a thing, and hasn’t headpiece to know the
difference between best fresh and thirteen-penny Dorset.’
Altogether this tea-drinking had been a happy break in Lucius Davoren’s
life, despite those tears of Lucille. He had been with her once more;
it had seemed something like old times. He saw a great peril past, and
was thankful. After tea he read to her a little—some mild tender lines
of Wordsworth’s—and then they sat talking in the dusk.
Many times during her illness Lucille had embarrassed her lover by
her anxious inquiries about the Winchers. He had hitherto waived the
question; now he told her briefly that they were gone—Mr. Sivewright
had dismissed them.
She protested against this as a great cruelty.
‘They were devoted to my grandfather; they were the best and most
faithful servants that ever any one had,’ she said.
‘They might seem so, Lucille, and yet be capable of robbing their old
master on the first good opportunity. Your grandfather’s long illness
afforded them that opportunity, and I believe they took it.’
‘How can you know that? Was anything stolen?’ she asked eagerly.
‘Yes; some valuable pieces of old silver, and other property, were
taken.’
A look of intense pain came into the pale care-worn face.
‘How can you be sure those things were taken by the Winchers?’ she
asked.
‘Simply because there is no one else who could possibly get at them.
Jacob Wincher showed himself very clever throughout the business, acted
a little comedy for my edification, and evidently thought to hoodwink
me. But I was able to see through him. In point of fact, the evidence
against him was conclusive. So at my advice your grandfather dismissed
him, without an hour’s warning; and strange to say, his health has been
slowly mending ever since his faithful servant’s departure.’
‘What!’ cried Lucille, with a horrified look, ‘you think it possible
that Wincher can have—’
‘Tampered with the medicine by your grandfather’s bedside. Yes,
Lucille, that is what I do believe; but he is now safe on the outside
of this house, and you need not give yourself a moment’s uneasiness
upon the subject. Think of it as something that has never been, and
trust in my care for the security of the future. No evil-disposed
person shall enter this house while I am here to guard it.’
The girl looked at him with a wild despairing gaze—looked at him
without seeing him—looked beyond him, as if in empty space her eyes
beheld some hideous vision. She flung her head aside upon the pillow,
with a gesture of supreme dejection.
‘A thief and a murderer!’ she said in tones too low to reach the
lover’s ear. ‘O, my dream, my dream!’
CHAPTER XVI.
AN OLD FRIEND REAPPEARS.
Lucius had been working a little harder than usual on one of those
September afternoons, and was just a shade more weary of Shadrack-Basin
and its surroundings than his wont. He looked at the forest of spars
visible yonder above the housetops, and wished that he and Lucille
could have sailed together in one of those great ships, far out into
the wild wide main, to seek some new-made world, where care was not,
only love and hope. He had often envied the stalwart young Irishmen,
the healthy apple-cheeked girls, the strong hearty wayfarers from
north and south and east and west, whom he had seen depart, happy and
hopeful, from possible penury here to follow fortune to the other
side of the globe, in some monster emigrant-ship, which sailed gaily
down the river with her cargo of human life. To-day he had felt more
than usually oppressed by the fetid atmosphere of narrow alleys, the
dirt-poison which pervaded those scenes in which he had been called to
minister—human dens, many of them, which only he and the pale-faced
High-Church curate of St. Winifred’s, Shadrack-road, ever penetrated,
excepting always the landlord’s agent, who came as regular as Monday
morning itself, with his book and his little ink-bottle in his
waistcoat-pocket, ready to make his entry of the money which so very
often was _not_ to hand. He gave a great sigh of relief as he came out
of the last of the narrow ways to which duty had called him; a lane of
tall old houses, in which one hardly saw the sky, and where smallpox
had lately appeared—a more hateful visitor than even the agent with his
ink-bottle.
‘I must get the taint of that place blown out of me somehow before I go
to _her_,’ thought Lucius. ‘I’ll take a walk down by the docks, and get
what air is to be had from the river.’
Air in those narrow streets there was none; life in a diving-bell
could hardly have been much worse. The fresh breeze from the water
seemed more invigorating than strong wine. Lucius got all he could of
it—which was not very much—so completely was the shore occupied by tall
warehouses, stores, provision-wharfs, and so on.
He walked as far as St. Katharine’s Wharf, always hugging the river;
and here, having some time to spare before his usual hour for
presenting himself at Cedar House, he folded his arms and took his
ease, lazily watching the bustle of the scene around him.
He had been here before many times in his rare intervals of leisure—the
brief pauses in his long day’s work—and had watched the departing
steamers with a keen envy of the travellers they carried—a longing for
quiet old German cities—for long tranquil summer days dawdled away in
the churches and picture-galleries of quaint old Belgian towns—for idle
wanderings in Brittany’s sleepy villages, by the sunlit Rance,—for
anything, in short, rather than the dusty beaten track of his own dull
life. Of course this was before he knew Lucille; all his aspirations
nowadays included her.
On this bright sunny afternoon, a west wind blowing freshly down the
river, he lounged with folded arms, and watched the busy life of that
silent highway with a sense of supreme relief at having ended his day’s
work. The wharf itself was quiet enough at this time. A few porters
loitered about; one or two idlers seemed on the look-out, like Lucius,
for nothing in particular. He heard the porters say something about the
Polestar, from Hamburg—heard without heeding, for his gaze had wandered
after a mighty vessel—an emigrant-ship, he felt assured—which had just
emerged from the docks, and was being towed down the broadening river
by a diminutive black tug, which made no more of the business than if
that floating village had been a cockle-shell. He was still watching
this outward-bound vessel, when a loud puffing and panting and snorting
arose just below him. A bell rang: the porters seemed to go suddenly
mad; a lot of people congregated from nowhere in particular, and the
wharf was all life and motion, frantic hurry and eagerness.
The Polestar steamer had just arrived from Hamburg, three hours after
her time, as he heard the porters tell each other. Lucius looked
down at that vessel, with her cargo of commonplace humanity—looked
listlessly, indifferently—while the passengers came scrambling, up the
gangway, all more or less dilapidated by the sea voyage.
But presently Lucius gave a great start. Just beneath him, among those
newly disembarked voyagers, he beheld a little fat man, with a round
comfortable florid face, close shaven—a supremely calm individual,
amidst all that turmoil and hurry, carrying a neat little shiny
portmanteau, and resolutely refusing all assistance from porters.
Lucius had last seen this man on the shores of the Pacific. That round
contented Saxon visage belonged to none other than Absalom Schanck.
The sight of that once-familiar face had a powerful effect upon Lucius.
It brought back the memory of those dark days in the forest—the vision
of the log-hut—those three quiet figures sitting despondently by the
desolate hearth, where the pine-branches flared and crackled in the
silence—three men who had no heart for cheerful talk—who had exhausted
every argument by which hope might be sustained. And still more vividly
came back to him the image of that fourth figure—the haggard face, with
its tangled fringe of unkempt hair, the wild eyes and tawny skin, the
long claw-like hands. Yes, it came back to him as he had seen it first
peering in at the door of the hut—as he had seen it afterwards in the
lurid glare of the pine-logs—as he had seen it last of all, distorted
with a sudden agony—the death pang—when those bony hands relaxed their
clutch upon the shattered casement.
Swiftly did these hated memories flash through his mind. His time for
thought was of the briefest, for the little sea-captain had not far to
come before he must needs pass his old travelling companion. He looked
about him gaily as he mounted, his cheery countenance and bearing
offering a marked contrast to the dishevelled and woebegone air of his
fellow passengers. Presently, as his gaze roved here and there among
the crowd, his eyes lighted upon Lucius. His face became instantly
illuminated. He had been warmly attached to the captain of the small
band, yonder in the West.
‘Thank God,’ thought Lucius, seeing that glad eager look, ‘at least he
doesn’t think of me as a murderer. The sight of me inspires no horror
in his mind.’
‘Yase,’ said the sea-captain, holding out his plump little hand; ‘there
is no misdakes—it is my froint Daforen.’
He and his ‘froint Daforen’ grasped hands heartily, and suffered
themselves to be pushed against the wooden railing of the wharf, while
the crowd surged by them.
‘I thought you were in California,’ said Lucius, after that cordial
salutation.
‘Ah, zat is der vay mit von’s froinds. Man goes to a place, and zey
tink he is pound to sday there for the ewigkeit. He is gone, zey say,
as if he had the bower of logomotion ferlost. Man dalks of him as if
he vas dead. Yase, I have to Galifornia gebeen. I have diggit, and
golt not gefounden, and have come to England zuruck; and have gone
to Hampurg to see my families; and have found my families for the
mosten dead, and am come back to my guddy at Pattersea, vhere my little
housegeeper geep all things sdraight vhile I am avay. If I am in the
Rocky Moundains, if I am in Galifornia, it is nichts. She geep my place
didy. She haf my case-bottle and my bipe bereit vhen I go home. And
now, Daforen, come to Pattersea one time, and let us have one long
talk.’
‘Yes,’ answered Lucius thoughtfully. ‘I want a long talk with you, my
dear old Schanck. The time when we parted company seems to me something
like a dream. I can just remember our parting. But when I look back to
those days I see them through a mist—like the dim outline of the hills
in the cloudy autumn daybreak. Our journey through the forest with
those Canadians—our arrival at New Westminster. I know that such things
were, but I feel as if they must have happened to some one else, and
not to me. Yet all that went _before_ that time is clear enough, God
knows. I shall never lose the memory of _that_.’
‘Ah, you was fery ill—you valked in your head, for long time. If I hat
not mate one little hole in your arm, and let the blood spurten, like
one fountain, you might have shall died becomen been,’ said the German,
somewhat vague in his grasp of English compound tenses, which he was
apt to prolong indefinitely, ‘Yes, you valk in your talk—vat it is
you say? ramblen. But come now, shall ve dake a gab—it is long vays to
Pattersea—or vait for a steamer at Dowers Varf.’
‘The steamer will be quicker, perhaps,’ said Lucius, ‘and we can talk
on board her. There are some questions I want to ask you, Schanck. I
shall have to touch upon a hateful subject; but there are some points
on which I want to be satisfied.’
‘You shall ask all questions das you vish. Come quick to Dowers Varf.’
‘Stay,’ said Lucius, ‘I am expected somewhere this evening, and the
Battersea voyage will take some time. You want to get home at once, I
suppose, old fellow?’
‘That want I much. There is the little housewife. I want that she has
not run away to see.’
‘Run away to sea,’ cried Lucius, puzzled. ‘Has she any proclivity of
that kind?’
‘I want to see she not has run away. Where is it you English put your
verb?’
‘Well, just let me send a message, Salom’—Salom was short for Absalom,
a pet name bestowed on the little German in the brighter days of their
expedition—‘and I’m at your service.’
Lucius scrawled a few lines in pencil on a leaf of his pocket-book,
which he tore out and folded into a little note. This small missive he
addressed to Miss Sivewright, Cedar House, and intrusted to a porter,
whose general integrity and spotlessness of character were certified by
a metal badge, and who promised to deliver the note for the modest sum
of sixpence.
The note was only to inform Lucille that Lucius had an unexpected
engagement for that evening, and could not be at Cedar House till late.
It had become a custom for him to drink tea in the sick room, with
Lucille, and Mrs. Milderson, who was overflowing with sympathy.
This small duty accomplished, Lucius accompanied Mr. Schanck to Tower
Wharf, where they speedily embarked on a steamer bound for the Temple
Pier, where they could transfer themselves to another bark which plied
between that pier and Chelsea.
The boat was in no wise crowded, yet Lucius felt it was no place for
confidential talk. Who could say what minion of Mr. Otranto’s might
be lurking among those seedily-clad passengers, most of whom had a
nondescript vagabond look, as if they had neither trade nor profession,
and had no motive for being on board that boat save a vague desire to
get rid of time?
Influenced by this insecurity Lucius spoke only of indifferent
subjects, till, after stopping at innumerable piers, and lowering
their chimney beneath innumerable bridges, as it seemed to Lucius,
they came at last to Cadogan Pier, whence it was an easy walk across
Battersea-bridge to the sea-captain’s domicile.
This bit of the river-side has an old-world look, or had a few years
ago—a look that reminded Mr. Schanck pleasantly of little waterside
towns on the shores of the mighty Elbe. The wooden backs of the
dilapidated old houses overhung the water; the tower of Chelsea Church
rose above the flat; there were a few trees, an old bridge; a generally
picturesque effect produced out of the humblest materials.
‘It buts me in mint of my faterlant,’ said Absalom, as they paused on
the bridge to look back at the Chelsea shore.
Mr. Schanck’s abode was small and low—on a level with the river;
whereby at spring-tide the housewife’s kitchen was apt to be flooded.
A flagstaff adorned the little square of garden, which was not floral,
its chief decorations being a row of large conk shells, and two ancient
figure-heads, which stood on either side of the small street-door,
glaring at the visitor, painted a dead white, and ghastly as the
spectres of departed vessels.
One was a gigantic Loreley, with flowing hair; the other was Frederick
the Great; and these were the tutelary gods of Mr. Schanck’s home.
Within, the visitor descended a step or two—the steps steep and
brassbound, like a companion-ladder—to the small low-ceiled
sitting-room which Mr. Schanck called his cuddy. Here he was provided
with numerous cupboards with sliding-doors—in fact, the walls were
all cupboard—in which were to be found all a ship’s stores on a small
scale, from mathematical instruments and case-bottles to tinned
provisions and grocery. From these stores Mr. Schanck dealt out the
daily rations to his housewife, a little woman of forty-five or so,
whose husband had been his first mate, and had died in his service.
There was a small cellar, approached by a trap-door, below this
parlour or cuddy, where there were more tinned provisions, groceries,
ship-biscuit, and case-bottles, and which Mr. Schanck called the
lazarette. The galley, or kitchen, was on the other side of a narrow
passage, and a stair of the companion-ladder fashion—steep and
winding—led to three small staterooms or bedchambers, one of which was
furnished with the hammock wherein Mr. Schanck had slept away so many
unconscious hours, rocked in the cradle of the deep.
Above these rooms was the well-drained and leaded roof, which the
proprietor of the mansion called the poop-deck—the place where, in fine
weather, he loved best to smoke his long pipe and sip his temperate
glass of schiedam-and-water.
He produced a case-bottle and a couple of bright little glasses from
one of the cupboards, gave the housewife a tin labelled ‘stewed
rumpsteak’ out of another, and bade her prepare a speedy dinner. She
seemed in no wise disturbed or fluttered by his return, though he had
been absent three months, and had sent no intimation of his coming home.
‘All’s well?’ he said interrogatively.
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ answered the housekeeper. And thus the question was
settled.
‘The ship has leaked a bit now and then, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir, there was three feet of water in the lazarette last
spring-tide.’
‘Ah, she is one good ship for all that. Now, Daforen, you will make
yourself zu heim, and we will have some dinner presently.’
The dinner appeared in a short space of time, smoking and savoury. Mr.
Schanck, in the mean while, had laid the cloth with amazing handiness,
and had produced a little loaf of black bread from one of the
cupboards, and a sour-smelling cheese of incredible hardness; they may
both have been there for the last three months; and with these _hors
d’œuvres_ proceeded to take the edge off his appetite. Notwithstanding
which prelude he devoured stewed rumpsteak ravenously; while Lucius,
who was in no humour to eat, made a feeble pretence of sharing his meal.
Finally, however, Mr. Schanck’s appetite seemed to be appeased, or he
had, at any rate, eaten all there was to eat, and he dismissed his
housekeeper with a contented air.
‘Let us go up to the poop for our dalk and krok,’ he said; to which
Lucius assented. They would seem more alone there than in close
proximity to that busy little housewife, who was washing plates and
dishes within earshot.
They ascended the companion-ladder, the host carrying a case-bottle in
one hand, and a big brown water-jug in the other, and seated themselves
on a wide and comfortable bench, which had once adorned the stern
of Mr. Schanck’s honest brig. There was a neat little table for the
case-bottle and jug, the glasses and pipes.
‘This is what I gall gomfortable,’ said Mr. Schanck, who got more
English in his mode of expression, as he talked with Lucius, and forgot
his ‘families’ in Hamburg, with whom he had lately held converse.
The sun was setting behind the western flats out Fulham way; the tide
was low; the crimson orb reflected on the bosom of the shining mud,
with an almost Turneresque effect.
‘It was to live at Chelsea that made your Turner one great painter,’
said Mr. Schanck, with conviction. ‘Where else out of Holland could he
see such landscapes?’
They began to talk presently of those old days in America, but Lucius
shrank with a strange dread from that one subject which he was most
anxious to speak about. There was one faintest shadow of a doubt which
a few words from Absalom Schanck could dispel. That worthy, in talking
over past experiences, dwelt more on the physical privations they had
undergone—above all, on their empty larder.
‘When I count my tinned provisions—man improves daily in the art of
tinned provisions—I can scarcely believe I was one time so near to
starve. I sometimes feel as if I could never eat enough to make up for
that treatful beriod.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucius gloomily, without the faintest idea of what the
other had been saying. ‘I was very ill yonder, wasn’t I, Schanck, when
you bled me?’
‘Yes, and after. Vhen you did rave—ach, mein Gott, how you did rave!’
‘My brain was on fire when I shot that wretch. Yet I think, had I been
full master of my senses, which I believe I was not, I should have done
just the same. Tell me, Schanck, you who knew all, and were my witness
in that trying hour, did I commit a great crime when I killed that man?’
‘I think you gommit no grime at all vhen you did shoot him, and if you
had killed him it vould have been one very good job.’
‘_If_ I had killed him!’ cried Lucius, starting up. ‘Is there any doubt
of his death?’
‘Sit down, Daforen, be dranguil; the man is not worth that we should be
uneasy for him. You asked if there is any doubt of his death? There is
this much doubt, das when I saw him last he was alife.’
‘Good God!’ cried Lucius; ‘and I have suffered an agony of remorse
about that man, wretch as I knew him to be. I have carried the burden
of a great sin on my soul day and night; my dreams have been haunted,
my lonely hours miserable.’
He clasped his hands before his face with a passionate gesture, and a
hoarse sob broke from that breast, from which a load had been suddenly
lifted. The sense of relief, of thankfulness, was keen as the keenest
pain.
‘Tell me,’ he cried eagerly—‘tell me all about it, Schanck. Was not
that shot fatal? I aimed straight at his heart.’
‘And you hit him zumvare,’ answered the German, ‘for vhen I vent out
and looked apout for him an hour aftervarts, there were draces of bloot
on the snow; but it couldn’t have been his heart, or he vould hardly
have been able to grawl avay. I followed him a little vay by that drack
of bloot, and the broken snow through which he had tragged himself
along; but I could not go far; I was anxious about you, and I went back
to the hut. If the man lay dead in the snow, or if he was shifering
under the binedrees, kroaning with the bain of his vounds, I cared not.’
‘Was that the last you saw of him,’ asked Lucius—‘those traces of blood
on the snow?’
‘It vas the last for one long time. If you vill be patient I vill tell
you all the story.’
Then, with many peculiarities of expression—desperate compound
substantives, and more desperate compound tenses of the subjunctive
mood, which it were well to leave unrecorded—the little German told all
he had to tell of that which followed Lucius Davoren’s fire. How, while
Geoffrey slowly mended, Lucius lay in the torments of fever, brain
distracted, body enfeebled, and life and death at odds which should be
master of that frail temple.
‘You were still very ill when, by God’s mercy, the Canadian party came
our way. Geoffrey met them in the woods, while he was prowling about
with his gun on the look-out for a moose, or even a martin, for we
were as near starvation as men could be and not starve. We had kept
ourselves alive somehow, Geoffrey and I, on the pieces of buffalo
you brought home the night before your illness, and when those were
gone, on a tin of arrowroot which Geoffrey had the luck to find in his
travelling bag. When the Canadians offered to take us on with their
party, you were very feeble, helpless as a little child. Geoffrey and I
looked at each other; it seemed hard to lose such a chance. They had a
spare horse, or at least a horse only laden with a little baggage—their
provisions having shrunk on the journey—they offered to put you on
this horse, and we accepted the offer. Geoffrey walked beside you and
led the horse; we made a kind of bed for you on the animal’s back, and
there you lay tied safely to the saddle.’ This was, in brief, what the
sea-captain told him.
‘For Heaven’s sake, come to the other part of your story, when you saw
that man alive,’ cried Lucius; ‘never mind the journey. I have a faint
memory—as if at best I had been but half conscious—of travelling on
and on, under everlasting pine-trees, of perpetual snow that dazzled
my aching eyes, of pains in every limb, and a horrible throbbing in my
head, and a parching thirst which was the worst torment of all. I am
not likely to forget that journey.’
‘And you remember how we parted at New Vestminster? I left you and
Geoffrey to gome back to England your own way, while I went to the golt
dickens. Your dravels had been for bleasure; I had an eye to pusiness.
“Since I can make nothing out of furs,” I said to myself, “let me see
what I can do with golt. It can require no great genius to dik for
golt.” You puy a spade and pickaxe, and you dik; you get a bail of
vater, and you vash; dat is all.’
‘But the man?’ cried Lucius, in an agony of impatience. ‘When and where
did you see him?’
‘Dear heaven, how impatient he is!’ exclaimed the little German,
puffing stolidly at his pipe, and without the faintest intention of
quickening his accustomed jog-trot pace. ‘It was long ways off, it was
long times after I wisht you both farewell at New Vestminster. I leaf
you, and go off to San Francisco, and then to the dickens. Here I find
rough savage men. I have no chance among them; the life is hart. I am
knocked about; I am not strong enough for the work. I wish myself—ach,
how I wish myself at home here in my snug little guddy, or sitting to
watch the sun go down on my poop-deck! I begin to feel what it is to
be olt. One day after I have toiled—all zu nichts—I stretch my veary
limbs to rest unter my wretched shelter. At mitternacht I hear a lout
voice in a tent near at hant—the voice of a man playing at euchre with
other men—a voice I know. My heart beats fast and lout. “It is that
teufel,” I say to myself, “who eats his fellow-men!” I grawl out of
my tent along the ground, to the tent from which I hear the sound of
that voice—a tent which had been set up only that night; they are close
together, my own tent and this new one, just a little space between,
in which I am hidden, in the dark night. I lift the edge of the canvas
and look in. There are men playing cards on the head of a barrel by
the light of a candle. The candle shines on the face of one man. He is
talking, with loud voice and excited gestures. “If this new claim over
here turns out as well as our claim yonder, mates, a month longer I
shall go back to England,” he says. “Pack to England,” I say to myself;
“you are von vicked liar; for in the log-hut you tell us you have
never to England been.” I stopped to listen to no more. Varever your
pullet may have hit him—and it did hit him somevare, for I saw the
bloot—there he vas.’
‘You have mistaken some one else for him,’ said Lucius, ‘in that
doubtful light.’
‘Mistaken! Den I am’mistaken in myself; dis is not me, but only some
von like me. De light vas not toubtful. I see his face blain as I see
yours; dis eye-vink, dis moment, de teep-set plack eyes—such eyes, eyes
like der teufel’s—and ze little beak of hair on ze forehead. There was
no mistakes. No, Daforen, es war der mann.’
‘Did you see any more of him?’
‘Nein,’ answered the little man, shaking his head vehemently; ‘ein mal
vas enough. I vent back to San Francisco next day, and started for
England in the first fessel dat vould confey me. I had had enough of de
dickens.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘It is von year dass I am returned.’
‘A year!’ repeated Lucius dreamily. ‘And I did not kill that man after
all—grazed his shoulder perhaps, instead of shooting him through the
heart. The wretch was wriggling in at the window like an eel when
I fired, and care and famine may have made my hand unsteady. Thank
God—ay, with all my heart and soul—that his blood is not on my head.
He deserved to die; but I am glad he did not die by my hand.’
‘I do not pelieve he vill effer die,’ said Mr. Schanck. ‘He is a
deffil, and has more lifes dan a cat.’
‘He had made money,’ mused Lucius, ‘and was coming to England. He is in
England at this very moment perhaps, and may claim his daughter, or the
girl he called his daughter. It is time that I should solve the mystery
of those letters.’
This discovery materially altered the aspect of things. Ferdinand
Sivewright living and in England meant danger. Would he leave Cedar
House unassailed? Would he fail to discover sooner or later the fact
that it contained valuable property? Would he not by some means or
other endeavour to possess himself of that property?
He would come back to his old father with pretended affection, would
act the part of the remorseful prodigal, would cajole Homer Sivewright
into forgetfulness or forgiveness of the past, and thus secure the
inheritance of his father’s treasures.
Then a new idea flashed across Lucius Davoren’s brain. What if this
spirit of evil, this relentless villain, were at the bottom of the
robbery? He remembered that lithe figure seen so briefly in the glare
of the lightning, just such a form as that of the gaunt wanderer in
the pine-wood. What more likely than that Ferdinand Sivewright was the
thief, and Wincher only the accomplice? The old servant might have been
bribed to betray his master by promises of future reward, or by some
division of the plunder in the present.
‘In any case, at the worst, I think I have securely shut the door upon
this villain now and henceforward,’ thought Lucius.
Yet the idea of Ferdinand Sivewright’s possible presence in England
filled him with a vague anxiety. It was an infinite relief to feel
himself no longer guilty of this man’s death; but it was a new source
of trouble to know that he was alive. Of all men, this man was the most
to be feared. His presence—were he indeed the man Lucius had seen enter
Cedar House after midnight—would account for the poison. That secret
staircase might have given him access to his father’s room. Yet how
should he, a stranger to the house, know of the secret staircase?
Here Lucius was at fault. There was now a new element in that mystery,
which had so far baffled his penetration.
‘I will see old Wincher, and try to get the truth out of him,’ he said
to himself. ‘If he is, as I now suspect, only an accomplice, he may be
willing to inform against his principal.’
After this revelation, so calmly recited by the worthy Schanck, Lucius
was eager to be gone. The proprietor of the sea-worthy little dwelling,
having said his say, sat placidly contemplating the level Middlesex
shore, now wrapped in the mists of evening. He could not sympathise
with his friend’s feverish condition.
‘Led us have some subber,’ he remarked presently, as if in that
suggestion there was balm for all the ills of life. ‘A gurried rappit
vould not pe pad, or a lopster varmed in a zauzeban mit some mateira.’
Even these delicacies offered no temptation to Lucius.
‘I must get to the City as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘Good-bye,
Schanck. I’ll come and see you again some day; or you, who are an idle
man, might come to see me. Here’s my card with the address, ever so
far eastward of the wharf where you landed this afternoon. I thank
Providence for our meeting to-day. It has taken a great load off my
mind; but it has also given me a new source of anxiety.’
This was Greek to Mr. Schanck, who only sighed, and murmured something
about ‘subber,’ and ‘gurried rappit,’ strong in his supply of
tinned provisions. Lucius bade him a hearty good-night, and departed
from the calm flats of Battersea, eager to wend his way back to the
Shadrack-road.
CHAPTER XVII.
LUCIUS SEEKS ENLIGHTENMENT.
Lucius was more than usually solicitous for the security of the
old house in the Shadrack-road after his meeting with Absalom
Schanck; locks and bolts were adjusted with an almost mathematical
precision under his eye, or even by his own hand; and Mr. Magsby,
the ex-policeman, remarked to Mrs. Magsby, in the confidence of the
domestic hearth, that for a young gentleman, Mr. Davoring was the
fidgettiest and worritingest he had ever had dealings with. Whereupon
Mrs. Magsby, who entertained a reverential admiration for Lucius,
protested that she could see no fidgettiness in taking precautions
against thieves in a house which had already been robbed; and that
burnt children are apt to be timid of fire; and, in short, that in her
opinion, whatever Mr. Davoren did, he was always ‘the gentleman.’
Early on the day following his visit to Battersea, Lucius went in quest
of Jacob Wincher at the address which the old servant had given him at
departing.
Mrs. Hickett’s, Crown-and-Anchor-alley, was an abode of modest
dimensions, the ground floor being comprised by a small square parlour
with a corner cut off for the staircase, and an offshoot of an
apartment, with a lean-to roof, in the rear, which served as a kitchen.
The parlour, into which the street-door opened directly, was, in
the continental sense, Mr. and Mrs. Wincher’s ‘apartment,’ since it
constituted their sole and entire abode. That convenient fiction, a
sofa-bedstead, with a chintz cover which frequent washing had reduced
to a pale pea-soup colour, occupied one side of the apartment; a
Pembroke table, a chest of drawers, and three Windsor chairs filled the
remaining space, and left limited standing room for the inhabitants.
But if the domain was small, it was, in the eyes of the
Crown-and-Anchor world, genteel, if not splendid. There was a
looking-glass in a mahogany frame over the mantelpiece, with a pair of
black-velvet kittens, and a crockery shepherd and shepherdess in front
of it; a pair of fancy bellows hung from a nail on one side of the
fireplace, and a fancy hearthbrush adorned the other side. Altogether,
Mrs. Wincher felt that in Mrs. Hickett’s ground floor she was
sumptuously lodged, and could hold her head high in the Shadrack-road
when, in her own phrase, she ‘fetched her errands,’ with no galling
sense of having descended the social ladder.
She felt the strength of her position with peculiar force this morning
when she opened the door to Lucius Davoren.
Her first sensation on beholding him was, as she informed Mrs. Hickett
in a subsequent conversation, ‘astarickle.’ She fully believed he had
come to announce the apprehension of the thief, or the recovery of the
stolen property. But in the next moment her native dignity came to her
rescue, and she received her guest with a freezing politeness and an
assumption of profound indifference.
Some memory of the summer evenings when Mrs. Wincher had played the
duenna, the happy talk of a bright future to which she had listened
approvingly, came back to Lucius at sight of her familiar countenance.
He had once thought her the soul of fidelity; even now he preferred to
think her innocent of any complicity in her husband’s guilt.
Jacob Wincher was sitting by the fireless grate in a somewhat
despondent attitude. He had found ‘odd jobs’ harder to get than he had
supposed they would be, and enforced idleness was uncongenial. Nor was
his slender stock of money calculated to hold out long against the
charges of rent and living.
‘Good-morning,’ said Lucius with cold civility. ‘I should be glad to
have a few minutes’ talk with you alone, Mr. Wincher, if you’ll allow
me.’
‘I have no secrets from my good lady, sir. You can say what you have to
say before her. You haven’t found out who took that silver. I can tell
as much as that from your manner,’ said Jacob Wincher quietly.
‘I can’t say that I have actually found the thief,’ answered Lucius;
‘but I have made a discovery which may help me to find him.’
‘Eh, sir? What discovery?’
‘Mr. Wincher,’ said Lucius, seating himself opposite the old man and
leaning across the table to look into his face, ‘who was the man you
let into your master’s house, by the brewhouse door, between one and
two o’clock on the seventeenth of last month?’
‘Sir,’ said Jacob Wincher, steadily returning the questioner’s steady
gaze, ‘as surely as there is a higher Power above us both, that knows
and judges what we do and say, I have told you nothing but the truth. I
let no one into my master’s house on that night or any other night.’
‘What! You had no light burning long after midnight—you set no candle
in one of the upper rooms for a signal—you never gave your accomplice
a lodging in one of the attics? Why, I tell you, man, I found the bed
he had slept in—the ashes of the fire that warmed him—his empty brandy
bottle! If you want to go scot-free yourself, or to be paid handsomely
for your candour, the truth will best serve you, Mr. Wincher. Who was
the man you kept hidden in that upstair room at Cedar House?’
‘I can but repeat what I have said, sir. I never admitted any living
creature to that house surreptitiously. I never lodged so much as a
strange cat in those upstair rooms. How could I? Miss Lucille always
kept the key of the upper staircase.’
‘Pshaw! What was to prevent your having a duplicate key?’ exclaimed
Lucius impatiently.
This old man’s protestations sounded like truth; but Lucius told
himself they could not be truth. After all, when a man has once made
things easy with his conscience—settled with himself that he will not
attempt to square his life by the right angle of fair dealing—there
need be nothing so very difficult in lying. It can only be a matter of
invention and self-possession.
‘Come, Mr. Wincher,’ said Lucius, after a pause; ‘believe me, candour
will best serve your interests. I know the name of your accomplice,
and I am ready to believe that you were ignorant of the darker purpose
which brought him to that house. I am ready to believe that you had no
hand in the attempt to poison your old master.’
‘Sir,’ said Jacob Wincher, with another solemn appeal to the Highest of
all Judges, ‘all that you say is incomprehensible to me. I admitted no
one. I know nothing of any attempt to injure my old master, whom I have
served faithfully and with affection for five-and-twenty years. I know
no more of the robbery than I told you when I informed you of it. There
is some mistake, sir.’
‘What, will you tell me that my own senses have deceived me—that I did
not see the door opened and the light in the upper window that night?
Who was there in the house to open that door or set that beacon light
in the window except you—or Miss Sivewright?’
Or Miss Sivewright! What if it was Lucille who opened the door—Lucille
who gave the man shelter in that upper room? Was she not capable of
any act, however desperate, for the sake of the father she loved with
such a morbid affection? If he came to her as a suppliant, entreating
for shelter, pleading perhaps for her influence to bring about a
reconciliation between himself and his father, would this fond
confiding daughter refuse to admit him? Would she foresee the danger of
his presence in that house; or could her innocent mind conceive so deep
a guilt as that of the would-be parricide?
A new light broke in upon Lucius Davoren’s mind. He remembered all that
had been strange in Lucille’s manner and conduct since the evening
when they went up to the loft and he saw the opening of the attic
door. He remembered her anxiety on that occasion—her agitation on
every subsequent recurrence to the same subject—her impatient denial
of any foundation for his suspicions about the Winchers—how she fell
unconscious at his feet when he plainly declared his discovery; and
last of all, that fever in which the mind rather than the body had
been affected. He recalled her wandering words, in which the name of
father had been so often reiterated, and, most significant of all, that
strange appeal which Mrs. Milderson had repeated to him, ‘You couldn’t
be so wicked as to poison your poor old father.’ To whom but a son
could those words have been spoken? And could delirium suggest so deep
a horror if it were utterly baseless?
‘No, it was memory, and not a mind distraught, that shaped those
fearful words,’ thought Lucius.
He was silent for some time, pondering this new view of the question.
Jacob Wincher waited patiently, his poor old head shaking a little from
the agitation of the foregoing conversation. Jacob Wincher’s good lady
stood with her arms folded, like a statue of female stoicism, as if it
were a point of honour with her not to move a muscle.
‘Well, Mr. Wincher,’ said Lucius at last, ‘it is not for me to
decide whether you are guilty or innocent. You will hardly deny that
circumstances conspired to condemn you. I did what I felt to be my duty
when I advised Mr. Sivewright to dismiss you.’
‘After five-and-twenty years, and never a fault to find with neither of
us,’ interjected Mrs. Wincher.
‘The result has in a considerable measure justified that act. The
attempt to poison a helpless old man has made no further progress.’
Jacob Wincher cast up his eyes in mute appeal to heaven, but said
nothing.
‘We could have poisoned him in Bond-street, if we’d wanted to it,’
protested Mrs. Wincher. ‘It would only ’a been to cook his bit of
minced weal or Irish stew in a verding-greasy copper saucepan, and all
the juries as ever sat couldn’t have brought it home to us.’
‘Now, if you are, as you allege, an innocent man,’ pursued Lucius
thoughtfully, ‘you will be glad to give me the utmost assistance. I
have made a discovery that may in some measure affect this question.
Ferdinand Sivewright is alive, and probably in England!’
‘Then it was he who stole that silver!’ cried the old man, starting up
with sudden energy.
‘Is not that a hasty conclusion?’
‘You would not say so, sir, if you knew that young man as well as I
do. He was capable of anything—clever enough for anything in the way
of wickedness. The most artful man couldn’t be a match for him. He
deceived me; he hoodwinked his father, over and over again. There was
no lock that could keep anything from him. He robbed his father in
every way that it was possible for a man to rob, and looked in his face
all the time, and shammed innocence. His mother had trained him to lie
and cheat before he could speak plain. If Ferdinand Sivewright is in
England, Ferdinand Sivewright is the thief.’
‘And the poisoner?’ asked Lucius.
‘I don’t know! Perhaps. He did not shrink from stupefying his father’s
senses with an opiate, when it suited his purpose. He may have grown
more hardened in wickedness since then, and may be capable of trying to
poison him.’
‘Mind, I do not say that he is in England,’ said Lucius, ‘only that he
may be. Now, there is one thing very clear to me, namely, that whoever
put the arsenic in that medicine must have entered your master’s room
by the secret staircase. Mr. Sivewright’s door was kept locked at
night, and his room was carefully watched by day—especially during the
two or three days immediately before my discovery of the poison. Now,
you pretend to have been ignorant of the existence of that staircase
until I showed it to you.’
‘I have told you nothing but the truth, sir.’
‘But if you, who had lived in that house for several years, knew
nothing about it, how should a stranger, coming into the house by
stealth, discover it?’
‘I cannot tell you, sir,’ answered the old man helplessly.
‘Does your master know of that staircase, do you think?’
‘He may, sir, though he never mentioned it to me. He is a close
gentlemen at all times. He chose the room he now sleeps in for his
bedroom when we first came to the house. He would have no painting,
or whitewashing, or repairs of any kind done—saying that the place was
good enough for him, and he didn’t want to waste money upon it. My wife
cleaned up the rooms as well as she could, and that was all that was
done. There were no workmen spying about, to find out secret staircases
or anything else.’
‘From whom did your master take the house?’ asked Lucius.
‘From an agent, Mr. Agar, in the Shadrack-road.’
‘To whom does it belong?’
‘I’ve never heard, sir; but I believe it’s the property of somebody
that lives abroad. Mr. Agar always collected the rent half-yearly.’
‘Then, no doubt, Mr. Agar knows all about that staircase,’ said Lucius;
‘I’ll go to him at once.’
‘Heaven grant you may be able to come at the truth, sir; though I can’t
see how that staircase can help you.’
‘I don’t know about that, Mr. Wincher,’ returned Lucius; and with a
hasty ‘Good-morning,’ he departed.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MR. AGAR’S COLONIAL CLIENT.
Lucius went straight to Mr. Agar’s office—a little wedge-shaped box
of a place squeezed corner-wise off a larger shop, for space was
precious in the Shadrack-road. In this small temple of industry, Mr.
Agar professed himself ready to value property, survey estates, sell by
auction, let lands, houses, or apartments, collect rents, and even at a
push to undertake the conduct of genteel funerals.
Here Lucius found him—a busy little man, with a bald head, and an ear
that had been pushed into high relief by having a pen continually stuck
behind it.
‘Pray, what can I do for you, sir?’ he asked, with his fingers in his
order-book, ready to write an order to view any species of property
within a ten-mile radius of the Shadrack-road.
‘I want to ask you a few questions about a house in which I am
interested.’
‘As an intending tenant, sir, or purchaser?’ inquired Mr. Agar, turning
round upon his high stool, and nursing his leg, in an attitude which
was at once easy and inviting to confidence.
‘Certainly not as a tenant, for the house is let.’
‘As a purchaser, then?’ exclaimed Mr. Agar, stimulated by the vision of
five per cent. ‘Have we’—a very grand we—‘advertised the property?’
‘No, Mr. Agar; nor have I any reason to suppose that it is for sale.’
‘But you think that we might negotiate something—make a speculative
offer—eh?’ inquired the agent briskly. ‘My dear sir, in any delicate
little matter of that kind, you may rely upon my discretion—and I think
I may venture to say, upon my diplomatic powers.’
‘I want you to answer two or three plain questions, Mr. Agar—that is
all. Some years ago you let Cedar House to my friend and patient, Mr.
Sivewright.’
‘Cedar House—dear me, that is really curious; not an attractive
property, one would think—no frontage to speak of—house out of repair,
and yet—’
‘And yet what, Mr. Agar?’
‘Let me answer your inquiries first, sir.’
‘In the first place, then, to whom does the house belong?’
‘To two old maiden ladies, who reside in Paris. Their grandfather was
a great man in the City—a brassfounder, I believe—and lived at Cedar
House in very grand style, but not within the memory of anybody now
living. The house has degenerated since his day, but it is still a
valuable property. As a public institution, now, it would offer great
advantages; or it might be made the nucleus of a large fortune to a
medical practitioner in the shape of a private lunatic asylum,’ added
the agent, with a sharp glance at Lucius.
‘Mr. Agar, I am bound to inform you that I am not on the look-out for
a house for the purpose you suggest. But I am very curious to know all
about Cedar House. When you let it to Mr. Sivewright were you aware of
a secret staircase, which ascends from an outbuilding at the back to
the first floor?’
‘And to the attic floor,’ said the agent.
‘What, does it go higher than the first floor?’
‘It ascends to one of the rooms on the upper story, sir. A fact you
might have discovered for yourself if you had taken the trouble to
examine the staircase thoroughly; but it’s an abominably crooked
and dangerous place, and I don’t wonder you left some portion of it
unexplored.’
‘To which of the upper rooms does it ascend?’ asked Lucius eagerly.
‘To the north-east attic. There is a door at the back of the closet
in that room—you’d hardly distinguish it from the rest of the
panelling—communicating with that staircase.’
‘Did Mr. Sivewright know of the staircase when you let the house to
him?’
Mr. Agar was silent for a few moments, and rubbed his bald head
meditatively.
‘Well, no. I doubt if he heard of it; that is to say, I don’t remember
mentioning it. You see, to the candid mind,’ continued the agent,
taking a high moral tone, ‘there is something peculiarly repellent in
secrecy; even a secret staircase is not a pleasant idea. And the house
had acquired a queer reputation in the neighbourhood. Noises had been
heard—strange cats, no doubt—silly people even pretended to having seen
things; in short, the ignorant populace described the house as haunted.
Idle boys chalked “Beware of the ghost” on the garden wall; and when a
tenant came forward at last in the person of Mr. Sivewright—a somewhat
eccentric old gentleman, as you are no doubt aware, but most upright
and honourable in his dealings—I was glad to let him the old place at a
ridiculously low rent.’
‘And you did not show him the staircase?’
‘No, I certainly didn’t show it to him.’
‘Nor tell him anything about it?’
‘I cannot recall having mentioned it.’
‘Then I think we may take it for granted that he knows nothing about
it. By the way, how does the communication work with the room on the
first floor—it’s a sliding panel, I suppose?’
‘Yes; there’s a bit of moulding on one of the panels that looks rather
loose; press that inwards, and the panel slides behind the other part
of the wainscot. I don’t suppose it works very easily, for it must be a
long time since it was used.’
‘Do you know for what purpose this staircase was originally built?’
‘No, sir; that end of the house belongs, I believe, to Henry the
Eighth’s time. That staircase is built in what was once a great square
chimney—the chimney of the old banqueting-hall, in fact; for there was
a banqueting-hall in Cedar House in Henry the Eighth’s time, though
there’s nothing left of it now; that end is clean gone, except the said
chimney. I got an architect to look over the place once for the Miss
Chadwicks, my clients, with a view to reparation; but the reparations
mounted up so, that when the elder Miss Chadwick got the specification
she wrote and told me she and her sister would sooner have the place
pulled down at once, and sold for building materials, than lay out such
a lot of money; for they are rather close, are the Miss Chadwicks.
The architect didn’t seem to think that old chimney over safe either,
on account of their having pulled down the hall, and took away its
supports, in a measure. “But it’ll last our time, I daresay,” says
he; “and if it falls it’s bound to fall outwards, where it can’t hurt
anybody.” For, as I daresay you are aware, there’s only a bit of waste
ground—a cat-walk, as you may say—on that side of the house.’
‘Rather a hazardous condition though for a house to be left in,’ said
Lucius, thinking that this would give him a new incentive to find
a better home for Lucille speedily. ‘Then you don’t know why that
staircase was built, nor who built it?’
‘Well, no, sir; I can’t say I do. I’ve often wondered about it.
You see, the staircase may not have been a secret one in the first
instance, but may have been converted to a means of escape in the
troublesome times that came later. There is no allusion to it in any of
the deeds belonging to the house.’
‘You spoke just now of my inquiry being curious,’ said Lucius after a
pause; ‘why was that?’
‘I thought it rather strange that you should make an inquiry about
Cedar House, because some six weeks ago I had another gentleman here
who made the same inquiry.’
‘About the staircase?’
‘No, he didn’t inquire about the staircase. I told him about that
afterwards, in the course of conversation, and he seemed struck by
the fact. We had a good bit of talk together, first and last, for
he was a very free and open kind of a gentleman, and had just come
from Australia, or America, I really forget which, and he insisted
on standing a bottle of champagne—a thing I shouldn’t have cared to
partake of in the middle of the day, if he hadn’t been so pressing.’
‘What kind of man was he?’ asked Lucius, burning with impatience.
‘Well, a good-looking fellow enough, but rather peculiar-looking with
it. Tall and thin, with a sallow complexion, and the blackest eyes and
hair I ever saw in a European. The hair grew in a little peak on his
forehead, such as I’ve heard some facetious folks call a widower’s
peak. It was rather noticeable.’
‘The very man!’ muttered Lucius.
‘Do you know the gentleman, sir?’
‘Yes, I think he is a person I know. And pray what inquiries did he
make about the house?’
‘More than I can remember,’ answered the agent; ‘there never was such
a gentleman for asking questions, and so business-like too. He made
me take a sheet of paper and sketch him out a plan of the house in
pencil—how all the rooms lay, and the passages and stairs, and so on.
That’s how we came to speak of the private staircase. He seemed quite
taken aback by the notion. It might be handy, he said, and work into
something that he wanted.’
‘What motive did he state for these inquiries?’
‘They were made with a view to making an offer for the property, which
I had reason to think my clients, the Miss Chadwicks, would be not
unwilling to part with. The gentleman is trying to get a patent for
an invention of his, which will make his fortune when carried out, he
says, and he wants good roomy premises within an easy distance of the
docks. A thorough man of business, I can assure you, though only just
returned from abroad,’ added Mr. Agar, as if England were the only
country in which business was properly understood.
‘Has this gentleman made any attempt to forward the transaction?’ asked
Lucius. ‘Have you ever seen him since the day when he treated you to
champagne?’
‘Treated is hardly the word, sir!’ said Mr. Agar with dignity. ‘The
gentleman _stood_ a bottle of Peerer Jewitt. It was as much for his
pleasure as for mine.’
‘I have no doubt of that, Mr. Agar. But have you seen any more of this
agreeable gentleman?’
‘No, sir, he hasn’t been in here since. I fancy there’s some difficulty
about the patent. It isn’t easy to hurry things where you’ve got to
deal with Government offices. But I expect to hear from him before very
long. He was quite the gentleman.’
‘I doubt if you will ever see him again, Mr. Agar, gentleman or not; if
he be the man I take him for.’
‘Indeed, sir. Do you know anything to the gentleman’s disadvantage?’
‘Only that he is a most consummate villain.’
‘Good gracious me, sir. That’s a sweeping charge.’
‘It is, Mr. Agar; and I am unable just now to substantiate it. I can
only thank you for the information you have kindly given me, and wish
you good-morning.’
He left the little office, glad to be in the open air again to have
room to breathe, and to be able to contemplate this new aspect of
affairs alone.
‘He is here then, and henceforward it must be a hand-to-hand fight
between us two.’
CHAPTER XIX.
LUCILLE’S CONFESSION.
One of Lucius Davoren’s first thoughts, after that interview with
the house-agent, was of his sister Janet and of Geoffrey Hossack.
The discovery, which lifted a load from his conscience, changed the
aspect of Geoffrey’s fortunes. The man who had married Janet still
lived, and whether the marriage were legal or not—a fact difficult of
ascertainment in a life so full of double-dealing—Janet would doubtless
count herself bound to him. She had told Lucius, when they met at
Stillmington, that she did so consider herself; and he knew that calm
proud nature too well not to know that she would be firm, whatever
sorrow to herself were involved in such constancy.
Lucius lost no time in writing to Geoffrey, at the Cosmopolitan, the
only safe address for that nomadic gentleman. He knew that the people
at the Cosmopolitan were generally acquainted with Mr. Hossack’s
whereabouts, and had instructions to forward his letters.
Lucius wrote briefly thus:
‘Dear Geoffrey,—The last week has been full of discoveries. I have
seen Absalom Schanck, and learned from him that I am guiltless of that
scoundrel’s blood—a surprise which has infinitely relieved my mind,
but which has also given me new cause for uneasiness. To you, poor
old Geoff, I fear it will be a disappointment to learn that Janet’s
husband is still in the land of the living; but I hope that this
knowledge may have a beneficial effect, and help to cure you of a
foolish passion, which I told you from the first was hopeless. Would
to heaven, for your sake and Janet’s, that it were otherwise! But Fate
is stronger than man. And, after all, there are plenty of charming
women in the world who would be proud to call Geoffrey Hossack husband.
‘I try to write lightly, but I am full of anxiety. This man’s
existence means peril for those I love, and I know not what shape the
danger may assume. Let me hear of you soon.—Ever yours,
‘LUCIUS DAVOREN.’
Ferdinand Sivewright’s existence meant peril for his old father and for
the innocent girl who believed herself to be his daughter. Of that fact
Lucius had no doubt, and the one question was how to meet the danger.
That the old house was now securely defended, he felt tolerably sure—as
sure as one could be about a rambling old place which was all doors
and windows, and for aught he knew might still be approachable by some
hidden way that had escaped his ken. The great point now would be to
prove to Lucille that this man had no claim upon her; that no tie bound
her to him, not even the duty of common gratitude for any kindness
shown to her in her childhood, since he had made her existence an
excuse for extorting money from her father. He, Lucius, must show her
that the fancy which her girlish heart had cherished—the fond belief in
this father’s love—was more baseless than the dreams of fever, wilder
than the fancies of madness. How would he prove this to her? He might
show her those letters. But would the evidence of the letters be strong
enough to dispel so deep-rooted a belief, so long-cherished a fancy?
No, Lucius told himself. The letters, which told their story plainly
enough for him, might fail to convince Lucille.
‘I must have some stronger proof than the letters,’ he thought.
How to obtain that proof, how to begin the search that was to end
in the discovery of Lucille’s parentage, was the question which
now absorbed all his thoughts. He had made up his mind to seek no
assistance in this difficult task. Whatever blunders he might make,
however awkwardly he might transact a business so foreign to the bent
of his life, he would do this work for himself, and succeed or fail
unaided.
‘If there is a stain upon her birth, no one but I shall discover it,’
he said to himself.
Homer Sivewright had read those letters as relating to a secret
marriage, yet their wording might be taken to indicate a less
honourable relation between the gentleman who signed himself H. G. and
the lady who called herself Madame Dumarques.
Throughout the letters there was but one positive clue to the
identification of the writers. That lay in the address given by the
lady, at Rouen. She was staying in that city with friends—relations
perhaps. It was just possible that Lucius might be so fortunate as to
find some of these people still resident in the same city. The date
of the letters was only fourteen years ago, and in some slow tranquil
lives fourteen years make but little difference. The hair grows a shade
grayer; the favourite old dog or the familiar household cat dies,
and is replaced by a younger and less cherished animal; the ancient
asthmatic canary is found dead in his cage; the old Sunday silk gown,
which has been worn with honour for a decade, is converted into a
petticoat; the old husband takes to stronger spectacles, and shortens
his constitutional walk by the length of a couple of streets; the old
wife dies perhaps, and is buried and feebly mourned for a little while;
and with such faint ripples of change the slow dull river glides on to
the eternal ocean.
Lucius was hopeful that, in a quiet by-street in the city of Rouen,
he might find things very much as they had been fourteen years ago.
He made up his mind to start for that city on the following night. A
train leaving London-bridge at dusk would take him to Newhaven; he
would reach Dieppe by six o’clock next morning, and Rouen by breakfast
time. Once there he knew not how long his researches might detain him;
but he could so arrange his affairs, with the help of a good-natured
brother-medico in the Shadrack district, as to absent himself for a few
days without inconvenience to his numerous patients.
That one dear patient whose safety was so near to his heart was now out
of danger. The fever was past, and the only symptom which now gave him
cause for anxiety was a deep melancholy, as of a mind overburdened
with care, or weighed down by some painful secret.
‘Could I but dare to speak openly I might dispel some of those
apprehensions which now disturb her,’ thought Lucius; ‘but I cannot
venture to do that until she is better able to bear the shock of a
great surprise, and until I am able to confirm my statements.’
Lucille was now well enough to come down to the old wainscoted parlour,
where her lover had first seen her on that dark winter’s night which,
when looked back upon, seemed like the beginning of a new life. Mr.
Sivewright still kept his room, but had improved considerably, and had
relented towards Mrs. Milderson, whom he graciously allowed to minister
to his wants, and would even permit to discourse to him occasionally of
the domestic annals of those lady patients into whose family circles
she was from time to time admitted. He would make no farther protest
than an impatient sniff when the worthy nurse stood for a quarter of an
hour, cup-and-saucer in hand, relating, with aggravating precision of
date and amplitude of detail, the little differences between Mr. Binks
the chandler and his good lady on the subject of washing-days, or the
‘stand-further’ between Mrs. Binks and ‘the girl.’
Under the gentle sway of Mrs. Milderson, who was really an honest and
sober specimen of her race, demanding only a moderate supply of those
creature-comforts which the Gamp tribe are apt to require, life had
gone very smoothly at Cedar House. Mrs. Magsby took charge of the lower
part of the premises and her own baby (which seemed to absorb the
greater part of her attention), and was altogether a mild and harmless
person. Mr. Magsby, as guardian of the house, did nothing particular
but walk about with a somewhat drowsy air, and smoke his pipe in open
doorways, looking up at the sky, and enunciating speculative prophecies
about the weather, which, as he never went out of doors, could have
been of very little consequence to him.
Thus administered, what citadel could seem more secure than Cedar
House? Lucius, after thinking of the subject from every possible point
of view, decided that he could run no hazard in absenting himself for a
few days. He went at the usual hour that afternoon, when his day’s work
was done. Lucille seemed a little brighter and happier than she had
been of late, and the change cheered him.
‘My darling,’ he said fondly, as he looked down at the pale face,
which had lost something of its care-worn expression, ‘you have almost
your old tranquil look—that calm sweet face which came upon me like a
surprise one dark November night, nearly a year ago, when yonder door
opened, and you came in, carrying a little tray.’
‘How well you remember things, Lucius! Yes, I have been happier to-day.
I have been sitting with grandpapa, and he really seems much better.
You do think him improved, don’t you, Lucius?’
‘I think him on the high-road to recovery. We may have him hale and
vigorous yet, Lucille—sitting by the hearth in our new home.’
‘Our new home—yes,’ said the girl, looking round her with a perceptible
shudder, ‘I shall be glad to leave this dull old house some day. It is
full of horrible thoughts. But now that I am well again, I can take
care of grandpapa.’
‘Not quite well yet, Lucille; you want care yourself.’
‘I should think she do, indeed,’ said Mrs. Milderson, who came in with
the tea-tray, having discreetly allowed the lovers time for greeting;
‘and care she shall have, and her beef-tea reglar, and no liberties
took, which invalidses’ mistake is always to think they’re well ever so
long before they are. There was Mrs. Binks, only the other day, down
in the shop serving the Saturday-night customers, which is no better
nor Injun American savages in the impatience of their ways, before that
blessed baby was three weeks old.’
‘I think I can rely upon you to take care of both my patients, nurse,
while I am away for a few days.’
‘You are going away, Lucius?’ said Lucille anxiously.
‘Yes, dear; but for two or three days only. I think I may venture to
leave you in Mrs. Milderson’s care for that time.’
‘I should hope you could, sir,’ exclaimed that matron, ‘after having
had two years’ experience of me in all capacities—and even the old
gentleman up-stairs, which was inclined to be grumpy and standoffish at
first, having took to me as he has.’
‘I shall be quite safe, Lucius,’ said Lucille, ‘but I shall miss you
very much.’
‘It shall be only for a few days, dearest. Nothing but important
business would tempt me away from you even for that time.’
‘Important business, Lucius! What can that be? Is it another visit to
that tiresome friend of yours, Mr. Hossack?’
‘No, dear, it is something which concerns our own future—something
which I hope may bring you a new happiness. If I succeed in what I am
going to attempt, you shall know all about it, and quickly. If I fail—’
‘What then, Lucius?’ she asked, as he hesitated.
‘Better that you should never know anything, darling, for then you can
feel no disappointment.’
‘O!’ said Lucille, with a little sigh of resignation. ‘I suppose it
is something connected with your professional career, some ambitious
project which is to make me very proud of you if you succeed in it. Are
you going very far?’
‘To Rouen.’
‘Rouen!’ cried Lucille; ‘Rouen in France?’ with as much astonishment as
if he had said the centre of Africa.
‘To Rouen, in the department of the lower Seine,’ he answered gaily;
with assumed gaiety, for it pained him even to leave her for so brief a
span.
‘What can take you to France?’
‘Simply that ambitious project you spoke of just now. My dearest
girl, you look as distressed as if I were going to Australia, when my
journey is only a question of three or four days. I shall leave London
to-morrow evening, and be in Rouen before noon next day. A day, or at
most two days, will, I trust, accomplish my business there. I shall
travel at night both ways, so as to save time; and on the fourth day
I hope to be back in this dear old parlour drinking tea with you and
nurse.’
‘Of course!’ exclaimed Mrs. Milderson, as if she had known all about it
from the very beginning. ‘Do you suppose Dr. Davoren would go wasting
of his precious time in France or anywheres else, with all his patients
fretting and worriting about him—and left to the mercy of a strange
doctor, which don’t know the ins and outs of their cases, and the
little peculiarities of their constitushuns, no more than a baby?’
After tea Mrs. Milderson retired with the tray, and was absent for
some time in attendance on Mr. Sivewright, who took his light repast
of dry toast and tea also at this hour. Thus Lucius and Lucille were
alone together for a little while. They stood side by side at the open
window, which commanded no wider prospect than the bare courtyard or
garden, where a few weakly chrysanthemums languished in a neglected
bed, and two or three feeble sycamores invited the dust, while one
ancient poplar, whose branches had grown thin and ragged with age,
straggled up towards the calm evening sky. A high wall bounded this
barren domain and shut out the world beyond it.
‘We must go up to grandpapa presently,’ said Lucille; ‘he likes us to
sit with him for an hour or two in the evening now that he is so much
better.’
‘Yes, dear, we will go; but before we go I want to ask you about
something that has often set me wondering, yet which in all our talk we
have spoken of very little.’
‘What is that, Lucius?’
‘About your earliest memories of childhood, Lucille. The time before
you lived in Bond-street with your grandfather.’
To his surprise and distress she turned from him suddenly, and burst
into tears.
‘My darling, I did not mean to grieve you!’ he exclaimed.
‘Then never speak to me again of my childhood, Lucius,’ she said with
sorrowful earnestness. ‘It is a subject I can never speak of, never
think of, without grief. Never again, if you wish me to be happy,
mention the name of father.’
‘What?’ said Lucius; ’then that dream is over?’
‘It is,’ answered Lucille, in a heartbroken voice, ‘and the awakening
has been most bitter.’
‘Thank Heaven that awakening has come, Lucille—even at the cost of
pain to your true and tender heart,’ replied her lover earnestly. ‘My
dearest, I am not going to torture you with questions. The mystery of
these last few weeks has been slowly growing clear to me. There has
been a great peril hanging over us; but I believe and hope that it is
past. Of your innocent share in bringing that danger beneath this roof,
I will say not a word.’
‘What, you know, Lucius?’ she said, with a perplexed look.
‘I know, or can guess, all, Lucille. How your too faithful affection
has been traded upon by a villain.’
‘O, do not speak of him!’ she cried. ‘Remember, how ever dark his guilt
may be, I once loved him—once, and O, so long, believed in him; hoped
that he was only unfortunate, and not wicked; clung to the thought
that he was the victim of circumstances. Lucius, have some pity upon
me. Since that night when you first spoke of your dreadful fear—first
suggested that some one was trying to poison my poor old grandfather—I
have lived in a horrible dream. Nothing has seemed clear to me. Life
has been all terror and confusion. Tell me once for all, is it true
that some one tried to poison him—is it true?’
Words failed her. She stopped, stifled by sobs.
‘Lucille, do not speak of these things,’ said Lucius, drawing the
too fragile form to his breast, smoothing the loose hair on the pale
forehead. ‘Is it not enough to know that the danger is past? That
fatal blindness—the fatal delusion which made you cling to the memory
of a bad man—has been dispelled. You will never admit Ferdinand
Sivewright to this house again.’
He looked at the pale face resting on his shoulder as he made this
straight assertion. There was no indignant denial, not even surprise
in the look of those plaintive eyes which were slowly lifted to meet
his own—a beseeching look, as of one who asked forgiveness for a great
wrong.
‘I have been more than foolish,’ she said, with a shudder, as if at
some terrible memory. ‘I have been very wicked. If my grandfather had
died, I should have been an unconscious accomplice in his murder. But
he _is_ my father; and when he came to me, after so many years of
separation, shelterless, hopeless, only pleading for a refuge, and the
opportunity to win his father’s pardon—O Lucius, I can never tell you
how he pleaded, by the memory of his old love for me—’
‘His love for you! I trust you may soon know, dearest, what that love
was worth.’
‘Heaven grant I may never see his face or hear his name again, Lucius.
The memory of him is all horror.’
‘You shall not be troubled by him any more if I can help it,’ answered
her lover tenderly. ‘But you will never again keep a secret from me,
will you, dearest?’
‘Never, Lucius. I have suffered too much from this one sin against your
love. But if you knew how he pleaded, you would forgive me. You would
not even wonder that I was so weak. Think, Lucius; a repentant son
pleading for admission to his father’s house, without a roof to cover
him, and longing for a reconciliation with the father he had offended.’
‘My poor confiding child, you were made the dupe of a villain. Tell me
no more than you like to tell; but if it is any relief to you to speak—’
‘It is, Lucius. Yes, it is a relief to trust you. I thought I never
could have told you. The burden of this dreadful secret has weighed
down my heart. I dared not tell you. I thought you would bitterly
reproach me for having kept such a secret from you, and then it is such
pain to speak of him—now—now that I know he was never worthy of my
love. But you are so kind, and it will relieve my mind to tell you all.’
‘Speak freely then, darling, and fear no reproaches from me.’
‘It was while you were away at Stillmington, Lucius, that this secret
first began. I was in the garden alone, at dusk one evening.’
Lucius remembered what Mrs. Wincher had told him about Lucille coming
in from the garden with a pale horror-stricken face, and saying that
she had seen a ghost.
‘I was low-spirited because of your absence, and a little nervous.
The place seemed so dull and lonely. All the common sounds of the day
were over, and there was something oppressive in the silence, and the
hot smoky atmosphere, and the dim gray sky. I was standing in the old
summer-house, looking at the creek, and thinking of you, and trying
to have happy thoughts about brighter days to come—only the happy
thoughts would not stay with me—when I saw a man come from the wharf on
the other side of the water, and step lightly from barge to barge. I
was frightened, for the man had a strange look somehow, and was oddly
dressed, buttoned to the neck in a shabby greatcoat, and with his
face overshadowed by a felt hat that was slouched over his forehead.
He came so quickly that I had hardly time to think before he had got
upon the low garden wall, and dropped down close to the summer-house.
I think I gave a little scream just then, for he came in, and put his
hand across my lips. Not roughly, but so as to prevent my calling
out. “Lucille,” he said, “don’t you know me? Am I so changed that my
dear little daughter, who loved me so well once, doesn’t know me?” The
voice was like the memory of a dream. I had not an instant’s doubt.
All fear vanished in that great joy. The sad sweet thought of the past
came back to me. The firelit parlour where I had sat at his feet—that
strange wild music—his voice—his face—he had taken off his hat now, and
was looking down at me with those dark bright eyes. I remembered him as
well as if we had been only parted a few days.’
‘And was there nothing in his presence—in the tone of his voice, the
expression of his face—from which your better instinct recoiled? Had
nature no warning for you? Did you not feel that there was something of
the serpent’s charm in the influence which this man had exercised over
you?’
Lucille was silent for a few moments, looking thoughtfully downwards,
as if questioning her own memory.
‘I can scarcely tell you what I felt in that moment,’ she said. ‘Joy
was uppermost in my mind. How could I feel otherwise than happy in the
return of the father I had mourned as dead? Then came pity for him.
His worn haggard face—his threadbare clothes—spoke of struggle and
hardship. He told me very briefly the story of a life that had been
one long failure, and how he found himself at this hour newly returned
from America, and cast penniless and shelterless upon the stones of the
London streets. “If you can’t give me a hole to lie in somewhere in
that big house, I must go out and try to get lodged in the workhouse,
or steal a loaf and get rather better fare in a gaol.” That was what he
said, Lucius. He told me what difficulties he had encountered in his
search after me. “My heart yearned for you, Lucille,” he said; “it was
the thought of you and of the poor old father that brought me back from
America.”’
‘And no instinct warned you that this man was lying?’
‘O no, no; I had no such thought as that,’ answered Lucille quickly.
‘Yet I confess,’ she went on more deliberately, ‘there was a vague
feeling of disappointment in my mind. This long-lost father, so
unexpectedly restored to me, did not seem quite all that I had dreamed
him; there was something wanting to make my joy perfect—there was a
doubt or a fear in my mind which took no definite shape. I only felt
that my father’s return did not make me so happy as it ought to have
done.’
‘Did he see this, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. But when I hesitated about admitting him to the
house—unknown to my grandfather—he reproached me for my want of natural
affection. “The world is alike all over,” he said; “and even a daughter
has no welcome for a pauper; though he comes three thousand miles to
look at the girl who used to sit on his knee and put her soft little
arms round his neck, and vow she loved him better than any one else in
the world.” I told him how cruel this accusation was, and how I had
remembered him and loved him all through these long years, and how the
dearest wish of my heart had been for such a meeting as this. But I
said that I did not like to keep his return a secret from his father,
and I begged him to let me take him straight to my grandfather, and
to trust to a father’s natural affection for forgiveness of all that
had severed them in the past. My father greeted this suggestion with
scornful laughter. “Natural affection!” he exclaimed. “Did he show much
natural affection when he turned me out of doors? Did he show natural
affection to my mother when his cruelty drove her out of his house? Has
he ever spoken of me with natural affection during the last ten years?
Answer me that, Lucille!” What answer could I give him, Lucius? You
know how my grandfather has always spoken of his only son.’
‘Yes, dear; and I know what your grandfather’s affection concealed from
you—the shameful cause of that severance between father and son.’
‘I could give him no hopeful answer. “I see,” he said, “there has been
no relenting. Homer Sivewright is made of iron. Come, child, all I want
is a shelter. Am I to have it here or in the workhouse, or, in fault of
that, a gaol? If I sleep in the street another night I shall be in for
a rheumatic fever. I’ve had all manner of aches and pains in my bones
for some days past.” “You shall not sleep in the streets,” I said,
“while I have power to give you shelter.” I thought of all those empty
rooms on the top floor. I had the key of the staircase always in my own
charge, and thought it would be easy enough to keep any one up there
for weeks, and months even, without my grandfather or the Winchers
ever knowing anything about it. Or if the worst came to the worst, I
thought I might venture to trust the Winchers with the secret. “Have
you made up your mind?” asked my father impatiently. “Yes, papa,” I
said—and the old name came back so naturally—“I have made up my mind.”
I told him he must wait a little, till Mr. and Mrs. Wincher were safely
out of the way, and then I would take him into the house; unless he
would make up his mind to trust the Winchers with his secret. “I will
trust not a living creature but yourself,” he said; “and if you tell
any one a word about me, I shall have done with you for ever. I come
back to my father’s house as an outcast and a reprobate. Fathers don’t
kill their fatted calves nowadays for prodigal sons. I want no one’s
help, I want no one’s pity but yours, Lucille, for I believe you are
the only creature in this world who loves me.” This touched me to the
heart. What could I refuse him after that? I told him to wait in the
summer-house till all was safe, and that I would come for him as soon
as I could venture to do so. I went in and went straight up-stairs
to the attic floor, where I dragged that old bedstead into the most
comfortable room, and carried up blankets from down-stairs. I lighted
a fire, for the room felt damp, and made all as decent as I could. By
the time I had done this, the Winchers had gone to bed; and I unbolted
the door of the brewery as quietly as I could—but it is a long way
from the room where they used to sleep, as you know, so there was very
little fear of their hearing me—and went to the summer-house to fetch
my father. We crept slowly past the Winchers’ room and up the stairs,
for I was afraid of grandpapa’s quick ear, even at that hour. When I
showed my father the room I had chosen for him, he objected to it,
and asked to see the other rooms on this floor, which I had told him
were entirely unoccupied. He selected the room at the north end of the
house.’
‘Of course,’ thought Lucius; ‘he had been informed about the secret
staircase!’
‘I told him that this room was exactly over my grandfather’s, and that
he couldn’t make a worse choice if he didn’t want to be heard. “I’ll
take care,” he said; “I can walk as softly as a cat when I like. The
other rooms are all damp.” He carried the bedstead and an old table and
chair into this room, lit a fire, taking great care to make no noise,
and made himself tolerably comfortable, while I went down-stairs to get
what provisions I could out of our scantily-furnished larder. After
this he came and went as he liked; sometimes he would sleep away whole
days, sometimes he would be absent three or four days at a time. I had
to let him out at night or let him in, just as he pleased; sometimes
I sat up all night waiting for him. When he was away I had to keep a
candle burning in one of the back windows on the top floor, to show
that all was safe if he wanted to return. I cannot tell you the anxiety
I suffered all through this time. The power of sleep seemed to leave
me altogether. Even when I did not expect my father’s return, I was
always listening for his signal—a handful of gravel thrown up against
the window of my room. I knew that I was doing wrong, and yet could not
feel sorry that I had granted his request. It seemed such a small thing
to give my father an empty garret in this great desolate house. So
things went on till the day when you and I were in the loft together;
and when you saw the door of my father’s room opened and shut. You can
guess what I suffered then, Lucius.’
‘Poor child, poor child!’ he murmured tenderly.
‘And then came the day when you—No, I can’t speak of it any more,
Lucius. All that followed that time is too dreadful. I woke up to the
knowledge that my father had tried to—murder—’ The words came slowly,
stifled with sobs, and once more Lucille broke down altogether.
‘Not another word, darling,’ cried her lover. ‘You have no reason to
reproach yourself. When you admitted Ferdinand Sivewright to this
house, you only obeyed the natural impulse of a woman’s tender heart.
Had the most fatal result followed that man’s baneful presence no blame
could have attached to you; and now, dearest, listen to me. Brief as
my absence will be, I don’t mean to leave you here while I am away.
You have had enough of this house for the present. This faithful heart
has been too much tried—this active brain too severely tasked. As
your medical adviser, I order change of air and scene. As your future
husband, I insist upon being obeyed.’
‘Leave poor grandpapa! Impossible, Lucius.’
‘Poor grandpapa shall be reconciled to your departure. He is going on
very well, and is in excellent hands. Nurse Milderson is as true as
steel. Besides, you are not going to be absent long, Lucille. I shall
take you away to-morrow morning, and bring you back again, God willing,
a week hence.’
‘Take me away! Where, Lucius?’
‘To my sister Janet.’
He had spoken of this sister to his betrothed of late; rarely, but with
a quiet affection which Lucille knew to be deep.
The pale face flushed with a bright happy look at this suggestion.
‘I am to go to see your sister, Lucius!’ she cried. ‘I should like that
of all things.’
‘I thought so, darling. Janet is staying in a little rustic village in
my part of the country. I had a letter from her a week ago, telling
me of her change of residence. She is with an old woman who was
our nurse when we were little ones; so if you want to hear what an
ill-conditioned refractory imp Master Lucius Davoren was in an early
stage of his existence, you may receive the information from the
fountain-head.’
Lucille smiled through the tears that were hardly dry yet. Everything
relating to lovers is interesting—to themselves.
‘I daresay you were a very good boy, Lucius,’ she said, ‘and that your
old nurse will do nothing but praise you. I shall be so pleased to see
your sister, and the place where you were born—if grandpapa will only
let me go.’
‘I’ll get his permission, dearest. Be assured of that.’
‘And do you think your sister will like me—a little? I know I shall
love her.’
‘The love will be mutual, depend upon it, darling. And now I think
I’d better go up-stairs to Mr. Sivewright and talk to him about your
holiday.’
‘My holiday!’ cried Lucille. ‘How strange that sounds! I have not spent
a day away from this house since I came home from school three years
ago.’
‘No wonder such imprisonment has paled my fair young blossom,’ said her
lover tenderly. ‘Hampshire breezes will bring back the roses to my
darling’s cheeks.’
He left her to propose this somewhat daring scheme to Mr. Sivewright,
over whom he felt he had acquired some slight influence. In all his
talk with Lucille to-night—which had taken a turn he had in no manner
anticipated—he had not asked those questions he wished to ask about
her life before the Bond-street period. It did not very much matter,
he thought. Those questions could stand over till to-morrow. But
before he started for Rouen he wanted to fortify his case with all the
information Lucille’s memory could afford him.
‘And the recollections of earliest childhood are sometimes very clear,’
he said to himself, as he went up the dark staircase to his interview
with Homer Sivewright.
The old man granted his request more readily than Lucius had expected.
Lucille’s illness had served as a rousing shock for the selfishness of
age. Mr. Sivewright had awakened to the reflection that this gentle
girl, who had ministered to him with such patience and tenderness, and
had received such small requital for her love, was very necessary to
his comfort, and that even his dim gray life would be darkened, were
relentless Death to snatch her away, leaving him to end his journey
alone. He had hitherto thought of her as young and strong, and in a
manner warranted to live and thrive even under the least favourable
circumstances. His eyes were opened now. The change which illness had
wrought in her had impressed him painfully. For once in his life he
felt the sharp sting of self-reproach.
‘Yes, let her go by all means,’ he said, when Lucius had told him
his plan. ‘I daresay your sister’s a very nice person, and of course
Lucille ought to make the acquaintance of your relations. She has need
of friends, poor child, for it would be difficult to find any one more
alone in the world than she is. Yes, let her go. But you’ll not keep
her away long, eh, Davoren? I shall miss her sorely. I never knew that
her absence could make much difference in my life, seeing how little
sympathy there is between us, until the other day when she was ill.’
‘She shall not be away from you more than a week,’ answered Lucius.
‘She was strongly opposed to the idea of leaving you at all, and only
yielded to my insistence.’
He then proceeded to inform Mr. Sivewright of his intended journey to
Rouen. The old man seemed more than doubtful of success; but did not
endeavour to throw cold water on the scheme.
‘It’s a tangled skein,’ he said; ‘if you can straighten it you’ll do
a clever thing. I should certainly like to know the history of that
child’s birth; yet it will cost me a pang if I find there is no blood
of mine in her veins.’
Thus they parted, Homer Sivewright perfectly reconciled to the idea
of being left to the care of Mrs. Milderson and the Magsbys. Lucius
felt that justice demanded Mr. and Mrs. Wincher should be speedily
reinstated, and all stain removed from their escutcheon. Yet, ere
he could do this, he must tell Mr. Sivewright the true story of the
robbery, and of his son’s return; a story which would be difficult for
Lucius to tell, and which might occasion more agitation than the old
man, in his present condition, could well bear.
‘Let time and care complete his cure,’ thought Lucius, ‘and then I will
tell him all.’
He arranged the hour of starting with Lucille, after due consultation
of the South-Western timetable, which Mrs. Magsby fetched for him
from the nearest stationer’s. There was a train from Waterloo at a
quarter-past nine.
‘I shall come for you in a cab at a quarter-past eight,’ said Lucius
decisively.
‘Bless your dear hearts!’ exclaimed Mrs. Milderson, in a burst of
enthusiasm. ‘It seems for all the world as if you was a-planning of
your honeymoon; and I do think as how a fortnight in a quiet place
in the country, where you can get your new potatoes and summer
cabbages fresh out of the garden, and a new-laid egg and a drop of
rich cream for your breakfasts, is better than all your rubbiging ‘To
Paris and back for five pounds,’ which Mrs. Binks went when she and
Binks was married, and was that ill with the cookery at the cheap
restorers—everythink fried in ile, and pea-soup that stodgy you could
cut it with a knife, and cold sparrowgrass with ile and vinegar—and the
smells of them drains, as if everybody in the place had been emptying
cabbage-water, as her life was a burding to her.’
‘We’re not quite ready for our honeymoon yet, nurse,’ answered Lucius;
‘but depend upon it, when that happy time does come, we won’t patronise
Paris and the cheap restaurants. We’ll find some tranquil corner
in this busy world, almost as remote from the haunts of man as the
mountains of the moon.’
Mrs. Milderson charged herself with the responsibility of packing
Lucille’s portmanteau that night, though the girl declared herself
quite equal to the task.
‘I won’t have you worritin’ and stoopin’ over boxes and pulling out
drawers,’ said the nurse; ‘everythink shall be ready to the moment; and
if I forget so much as a hairpin, you may say the unkindest things you
can to me when you come back.’
Having settled everything entirely to his own satisfaction, Lucius
departed, after a tender farewell which was to last only till
to-morrow. He looked forward to this first journey with his betrothed
with an almost childish delight. Only two or three hours’ swift transit
through green fields, and past narrow patches of woodland, chalky
hills, rustic villages, nameless streams winding between willow-shaded
banks, white high-roads leading heaven knows where: but, with Lucille,
such a journey would be two or three hours in paradise. And then what
a joy to bring those two together—those two women whom alone, of all
earth’s womankind, he fondly loved!
The clocks were striking ten as he left Cedar House, after impressing
upon Lucille the necessity for a long night’s rest. His homeward way
would take him very near that humble alley in which Mr. and Mrs.
Wincher had found a shelter for their troubles. He remembered this, and
resolved to pay them a visit to-night, late as it was, in order to tell
Mr. Wincher that he stood acquitted of any wrong against his master.
‘I was quick enough to suspect and to accuse them,’ thought Lucius;
‘let me be as quick to acknowledge my error.’
Crown-and-Anchor-court was still astir when Lucius entered its modest
shades. It was the hour of supper beer, and small girls in pinafores,
who, from a sanitary point of view, ought to have been in bed hours
before, were trotting to and fro with large crockeryware jugs, various
in colour and design, but bearing a family likeness in dilapidation,
not one being intact as to spout and handle. There were farther
indications of the evening meal in an appetising odour of fried onions,
a floating aroma of bloaters, faint breathings of stewed tripe, and
even whispers of pork-chops. The day may have gone ill with the
Crown-and-Anchorites, and dinners may have run short, but the heads of
the household made it up at night with some toothsome dish when the
children—except always the useful errand-going eldest daughter—were
snug in bed, and there were fewer mouths to be filled with the choice
morsel.
A light twinkled in Mr. Wincher’s parlour, but he and his good lady had
sought no consolation from creature-comforts. A fragment of hardest
Dutch cheese and the heel of a stale half-quartern alone adorned their
melancholy board. Mrs. Wincher sat with her elbows on the table, in a
contemplative mood; Mr. Wincher came to the door chumping his dry fare
industriously.
‘My good people,’ said Lucius, coming straight to the point, ‘I have
come to beg your forgiveness for a great wrong. I have only this night
discovered the actual truth.’
‘You have found the property, sir?’ cried Mr. Wincher, trembling
a little from very joy, and making a sudden bolt of his unsavoury
mouthful.
Mrs. Wincher gave a shrill scream, followed by a shriller laugh,
indicative of that most troublesome of feminine ailments, hysteria.
Lucius knew the symptoms but too well. His lady-patients in the
Shadrack-road were, as a rule, hysterical. They ‘went off,’ as they
called it, on the smallest provocation. Their joys and sorrows
expressed themselves in hysteria; their quarrels ended in hysteria;
they were hysterical at weddings, christenings, and funerals; and they
prided themselves on the weakness.
After having tried all remedies suggested by the highest authorities
upon this particular form of disease, Lucius had found that the most
efficacious treatment was one ignored by the faculty. This simple mode
of cure was to take no notice of the patient. He took no notice of Mrs.
Wincher’s premonitory symptoms; and instead of ‘going off,’ that lady
‘came to.’
‘No, Mr. Wincher,’ he said, in answer to the old man’s eager question,
‘the property has not been recovered—never will be, I should think; but
I am tolerably satisfied as to the thief, and I know you are not the
man.’
‘Thank God, sir—thank God!’ cried Mr. Wincher devoutly. ‘I am very
thankful. I couldn’t have died easy while you and my old master thought
me a thief and a liar.’
The tears rolled down Mr. Wincher’s wrinkled cheek. He dropped feebly
into his chair, and wiped those joyful tears with a corner of the
threadbare tablecloth.
‘I wouldn’t be so wanting to my own self in proper pride, Wincher,’
said his wife, who was not disposed to forgive Lucius at a moment’s
warning. Had she not liked and praised him and smiled benignantly on
his wooing, and had he not turned upon her like the scorpion? ‘We had
the conscientiousness of our own innocence to support us, and with that
I could have gone to Newgate without blinching. It’s all very well to
come here, Dr. Davory, and demean yourself by astin’ our pardings; but
you can’t make up to us for the suffering we’ve gone through along of
your unjust suspicions,’ added Mrs. Wincher, somewhat inconsistently.
Lucius expressed his regret with supreme humility.
‘If ever I am a rich man,’ he said, ‘I will try to atone for my mistake
in some more substantial manner. In the mean time you must accept this
trifle as a proof of my sincerity.’
He pressed a five-pound note upon Mr. Wincher—a poor solatium for the
wrong done, but a large sum for the parish doctor to give away, on the
eve of an undertaking which was likely to be expensive.
‘No, sir—not a farthing,’ said Mr. Wincher resolutely. ‘You offered me
money before, and it was kindly done, for you thought me a scoundrel,
and you didn’t want even a scoundrel to starve. I appreciate the
kindness of your offer to-night, but I won’t take a farthing. We shall
rub on somehow, I make no doubt, though the world does seem a little
overcrowded. You’ve acknowledged the wrong you did me, Mr. Davoren, and
that’s more than enough.’
Lucius pressed the money upon him, but in vain.
‘Do you find life so prosperous, and work so plentiful, that you refuse
a friendly offer?’ he asked at last.
‘Well, not exactly, sir,’ replied Mr. Wincher with a sigh. ‘I do get
an odd job now and then, it’s true, but the now and then are very far
apart.’
‘And you find it hard to pay the rent of this room and live without
trenching on your little fund?’
‘Sir, our savings are melting day by day; but we are old; and, after
all, better people than we are have had to end their days in a
workhouse. There’s no reproach in such an end if one has worked one’s
hardest all the days of one’s life.’
‘You shall not be reduced to the workhouse if I can help it, Mr.
Wincher,’ said Lucius heartily. ‘If you are too proud to take money
from me—’
‘No, sir, not too proud; it isn’t pride, but principle.’
‘If you won’t take my money, Mr. Wincher, I must try to find you a
home. Come and live with me. My housekeeper has given me a good deal
of trouble lately; in fact, I’m afraid she’s not so temperate in her
habits as she ought to be, and I sha’n’t be sorry to get rid of her. I
am not in a position to offer you very liberal wages—’
‘Bless your heart, sir, we’ve not been accustomed to wages of late
years. “Stay with me if you like,” said Mr. Sivewright, “but I’m too
poor to pay wages. I’ll give you a roof to cover you, and a trifle for
your board.” And we contrived to live upon the trifle, sir, by cutting
it rather fine.’
‘I’ll give you what I give my present housekeeper,’ answered Lucius,
‘and you must manage to rub on upon it till my prospects improve. I
think you’ll be able to make my house comfortable—eh, Mrs. Wincher?—and
to get on with its new mistress, when I am happy enough to bring my
wife home.’
‘Lor, sir, I can do for you better than I did for Mr. Sivewright, who’s
a deal more troublesomer than ever you could be, even if you tried to
give trouble; and as to Miss Lucille, why, she knows I’d wear the flesh
off my bones to serve her, willing.’
It was all settled satisfactorily. Lucius was to give his housekeeper a
week’s notice, as per agreement. She had burnt his chop and smoked his
tea continually of late, despite his remonstrances. And Mr. and Mrs.
Wincher were to take up their abode with him as soon as he returned
from his foreign expedition. They parted on excellent terms with each
other.
CHAPTER XX.
LUCILLE MAKES A NEW FRIEND.
The sun shone on the lovers’ journey. It was almost the happiest day
in the lives of either; certainly the happiest day these two had
ever spent together. To Lucille, after perpetual imprisonment in the
Shadrack-road, those green fields and autumnal woods seemed unutterably
beautiful—the winding river—the changing shadows on the hill-side—the
villages nestling in verdant hollows.
‘How can any one live in London!’ she exclaimed, with natural wonder,
the only London she knew being so dreary and dingy a scene.
The judicious administration of half-a-crown on Lucius’s part had
procured the lovers a compartment to themselves. He was anxious to
ask those questions which he had meant to ask last night, when the
conversation had taken so unexpected a turn.
‘Lucille,’ he began, plunging at once to the heart of his subject,
‘I want you to grant that request I made last night. I am not going
to speak of Ferdinand Sivewright; put him out of your thoughts
altogether, as some one who has no further influence upon your fate. I
want you to tell me your first impressions of life, before you went to
Bond-street. Forgive me, dearest, if I ask you to recall memories that
may pain you. I have a strong reason for wishing you to answer me.’
‘You might tell me the reason, Lucius.’
‘I will tell you some day.’
‘I suppose I must be content with that,’ she said; and then went on
thoughtfully, ‘My first memories, my first impressions? I think my
first recollection is of the sea.’
‘You lived within sight of the sea, then?’
‘Yes. I can just remember—almost as faintly as if it were a dream—being
lifted up in my nurse’s arms, in an orchard on a hill, to look at the
sea. There it lay before us, wide and blue and bright. I wanted to fly
to it.’
‘Can you remember your nurse?’
‘I know she wore a high white cap and no bonnet, and spoke a language
that I never heard after I came to Bond-street—a language with a
curious twang. I daresay it was some French _patois_.’
‘Very likely. And your mother, Lucille? Have you no recollection of
her?’
‘No recollection!’ cried the girl, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Why, I
have cherished the memory of her face all my life; it was something too
sacred to speak of, even to you. She is the sweetest memory of those
happy days—a face that bent over my bed every morning when I awoke—a
face that watched me every night when I fell asleep; and I never
remember falling asleep except in her arms. It is all dim and dreamlike
now, but so sweet, so sweet!’
‘Is that anything like the face?’ asked Lucius, showing her the
miniature.
‘Yes, it is the very face!’ she cried, tearfully kissing it. ‘Where did
you get this portrait, Lucius?’
‘Your grandfather gave it me.’
‘Yes, I remember his showing me this miniature a long time ago. But of
late he has refused to let me see it.’
‘He may have feared to awaken sorrowful memories.’
‘As if they had ever slept. Will you give me this picture, Lucius?’
‘Not yet, dearest. I have a reason for wishing to retain it a little
while longer; but I fully recognise your right to possess it.’
‘It is a double miniature,’ said Lucille, turning it round. ‘Whose is
the other portrait?’
‘Have you no recollection of that face?’
‘No; I can recall no face but my mother’s—not even my nurse’s. I only
remember her tall white cap, and her big rough hands.’
‘You remember no gentleman in that home by the sea?’
‘Not distinctly. There was some one who was always taking mamma out
in a carriage, leaving me to cry for her. That gentleman must have
been my father, I suppose, yet my vague recollection of the face seems
different. I remember being told to kiss him one night, and refusing
because he always took mamma away from me.’
‘Were you happy?’
‘O yes, very happy, though I cried when mamma left me. My nurse was
kind. I remember long sunny days in the orchard on that hill, with the
bright blue sea before us, and a house with a thatched verandah, and
a parlour full of all kinds of pretty things—boxes and baskets and
picture-books—and mamma’s guitar. She used to sing every night to the
accompaniment of the guitar. We lived near the top of a high hill—very
high and steep—higher than any hills we have passed to-day.’
‘Is that all you can tell me, Lucille?’
‘I think so. The life seemed to melt away like a dream. I can’t
remember the end of it. If my mother died in that house on the hill,
I can remember no circumstance connected with her death—no illness,
no funeral. My last recollection of her is being clasped in her
arms—feeling her tears and kisses on my face. Then came a long, long
journey with my father. I was very tired, but he was kind to me, and
held me in his arms while I slept; and one morning I woke to find
myself in the gloomy-looking bedroom in Bond-street. I began to cry,
and Mrs. Wincher came to me; and soon after that some one told me that
my mother was dead. I think it was grandpapa.’
‘Poor child! poor lonely deserted child!’ said Lucius.
‘Not deserted, Lucius. My mother would never have abandoned me while
she lived.’
‘Enough, dearest! You have told me much that may help me to a discovery
I am anxious to make.’
‘What discovery?’
‘I must ask you to be patient, dear. You shall know all before long.’
‘I have had some practice in patience, Lucius, and to-day I am too
happy to complain. Do you think your sister will like me?’
‘It is not possible she can do otherwise. I sent her a telegram this
morning telling her to expect us.’
‘She will be at the station to meet us, perhaps,’ said Lucille with an
alarmed look.
‘It is just possible that she may.’
‘O Lucius, I begin to feel nervous. Is your sister a person who takes
violent likings and dislikings at first sight?’
‘No, dear. My sister has some claim to be considered sensible.’
‘But she is not dreadfully sensible, I hope; for in that case she might
think me foolish and emptyheaded.’
‘I will answer for her thinking no such thing.’
‘Can you really, Lucius? But is she like you?’
‘She is much better-looking than I am.’
‘As if that were possible,’ said Lucille archly.
‘In your eyes of course it is not.’
‘Mrs. Bertram is a widow, is she not?’ asked Lucille. ‘Pray don’t think
me inquisitive; only you have told me so little, and I might make some
awkward mistake in talking to your sister.’
‘She is not a widow; but she is separated from her husband, who is a
scoundrel.’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘Yes, dear; her life, since girlhood, has been a sad one. She made that
one fatal mistake by which a woman can mar her existence—an unhappy
marriage.’
‘I shall be careful never to mention Mr. Bertram. Indeed, we shall have
an inexhaustible subject of conversation in you.’
‘You will soon wear that topic threadbare. After all, there is not
often much interest in the childhood of great men. Here we are at the
station.’
‘How short the journey has seemed!’ said Lucille.
‘And yet we have been three hours on the road. Think of it as typical
of our life journey, dearest, which will seem only too brief if we but
travel together.’
The station was the most insignificant place in the world; yet all the
great folks who went to Mardenholme had to alight here. Foxley-road was
the name of the station, but Foxley itself was a long way off, so far
that the designation seemed intended to deceive. There was a stunted
omnibus to meet the train, labelled Mardenholme and Foxley—Foxley was
the name of that obscure spot where Geoffrey Hossack had found his
lost love—but not in the stunted omnibus was Lucille to travel to her
destination. Janet and Janet’s little girl were there to meet her in a
wagonette borrowed for the occasion, and driven by an ancient man in
knee-breeches, whose garments, though clean and tidy, diffused a faint
odour of pigs.
Before Lucille had time to wonder how Janet would receive her, she
found herself in Janet’s arms.
‘I am prepared to love you very dearly, for my brother’s sake and
for your own,’ said Janet with a calm protecting air, kissing the
poor little pale face. ‘I thought you’d like me to be here to meet
you and Lucille, Lucius; so I borrowed a neighbour’s wagonette and a
neighbour’s coachman.’
The piggy man grinned at the allusion. It was not often society
dignified him with the name of coachman; and he knew that his master
returned him in the tax-paper as an out-of-door labourer.
Little Flossie was next kissed and admired, and introduced to her
future aunt.
‘May I call you aunt Lucille, at once?’ she asked.
‘Of course you may, darling.’
Lucille’s portmanteau was deposited by the side of the piggy man, and
they all mounted the wagonette, and drove off through lanes still gay
with wild flowers and rich with balmy odours even in the very death of
summer. Lucille was delighted with everything.
‘You can’t imagine what a quiet corner of the earth you are coming to,’
said Janet. ‘I’m afraid you’ll find it very dull.’
‘Not duller than Cedar House,’ interjected Lucius.
‘And that you’ll soon grow tired of the place and of me.’
‘Dull with you! tired of you!’ exclaimed Lucille, putting her little
hand into Janet’s, ‘when I have been longing to know you.’
Half-an-hour’s drive in the jolting old wagonette brought them to
Foxley, the cluster of thatched cottages in the green hollow where
Geoffrey had discovered his lost love. Dahlias now bloomed in gaudy
variety to extinguish the few pale roses that lingered behind their
mates of the garden, like dissipated young beauties who stay latest at
a ball. There were even here and there early blooming china-asters, and
the Virginian creeper glowed redly on some cottage walls. Yet, despite
these evidences of advancing autumn, the spot was hardly less fair than
when Geoffrey had first seen it. There was that air of repose about the
scene, that soothing influence of placid dispassionate nature, which is
almost sweeter than actual beauty. No wide glory of landscape made the
traveller exclaim, no vast and various amphitheatre of wood and hill
startled him into wondering admiration; but the settled peacefulness of
the scene crept into his heart, and comforted his griefs.
To the eyes of Lucille, fresh from the grimy barrenness of the Cedar
House garden, the spot seemed simply exquisite. What a perfume of clove
carnations in the garden! what a sweet scent of lavender in the little
white-curtained bedroom! And then how genial the welcome of the old
nurse, with her benevolent-looking mob-cap and starched white apron;
and what an interesting personage she appeared to Lucille!
‘And you really remember Mr. Davoren when he was quite a little boy?’
said Lucille, as the dame waited on her while she took off her bonnet.
‘Remember him! I should think I did indeed, miss,’ exclaimed the dame.
‘I remember him so well as a boy, that it’s as much as I can do to
believe he can have growed into a man. “Can it really be him,” I says
to myself when I sees him come in at that gate just now, “him as I
remember in holland pinafores, two fresh ones every day, and never
clean half an hour after they were put on?”’
‘Did he make his pinafores very dirty?’ asked Lucille with a slight
revulsion of feeling. Lucius ought to have been an ideal boy, and
spotless as to his pinafores.
‘There never was such a pickle, miss; but so kind and loving with it
all, and so bold and open. Never no fibbing with him. And many a pound
he’s sent me since I’ve lived here; though I don’t suppose he’s got too
many of ’em for hisself, bless his kind heart.’
Lucille rewarded the lips that praised her lover with a kiss.
‘What a dear good soul you are!’ she said. ‘I’m so happy to have come
here.’
‘Yes, you’ll be happy with our Miss Janet, begging her pardon; but,
never having seen Mr. Bertram, I haven’t got him in my mind like when I
think of her. You’re sure to take to Miss Janet. She’s a little proud
and high in her ways to strangers, but she has as good a heart as her
brother.’
A nice little dinner had been prepared for the travellers. Lucius would
have only just time to dine, and then return to the station, in order
to be back in time for the Newhaven train from London-bridge. It would
be a hard day’s work for him altogether; but what was that when weighed
against the pleasure of having brought these two together thus—the
sister he loved and had once deemed lost, and the girl who was to be
his wife.
The parting cost them all a pang, though he promised to come back in a
week, if all went well with him, and fetch Lucille.
‘I could not stay away from my grandfather longer than that, Lucius,’
she said; ‘and,’ in a lower tone, ‘it will seem a very long time to be
separated from you.’
Book the Last.
CHAPTER I.
AT ROUEN.
It was still quite early in the day when Lucius entered Rouen, but the
bustle of commerce had begun upon the quays. Shrill voices bawled to
each other among the shipping, and it seemed as if a small slice of the
West India Docks had been transferred to this bluer stream. The bustle
of business here was a very small matter compared with the press and
clamour of the Shadrack-Basin district. Still the town had a prosperous
progressive air. Lofty stone-fronted mansions and lofty stone-fronted
warehouses glared whitely in the sunshine, some finished and occupied,
but more in process of construction. This mushroom growth of modern
commerce seemed to have risen all at once, to overshadow the quaint old
city where the warrior-maid was martyred. Lucius, who had not seen the
place for some years, looked round him aghast. This broad lime-white
boulevard, these tall lime-white buildings, were as new as Aladdin’s
palace.
‘What has become of _my_ Rouen?’ he asked himself dejectedly. The city
had pleased him five years ago, when he and Geoffrey passed through
it during a long-vacation excursion, but the queer old gabled houses,
older than the Fronde—nay, many of them ancient as the famous Joan
herself—the archways, the curious nooks and corners, the narrow streets
and inconvenient footways, in a word, all that had made the city at
once delightful to the tourist and unwholesome for its inhabitants,
seemed to be extinguished by those new boulevards and huge houses.
A quarter of an hour’s exploration, however, showed Lucius that
much that was interesting in _his_ Rouen still remained. There was
the narrow street with its famous sweetmeat shops, once the chief
thoroughfare; yonder the noble old cathedral; there St. Ouen, that
grandest and purest of Gothic churches. Modern improvement had not
touched these, save to renovate their olden splendour.
The traveller did not even stop to refresh himself, but went straight
to the Rue Jeanne d’Arques, a narrow quiet street in an out-of-the-way
corner, behind the Palais de Justice; so quiet, indeed, that it was
difficult to imagine, in the gray stillness of this retreat, that the
busy, prosperous, Napoleonised city was near at hand.
The street was as clean as it was dull, and had a peculiar neatness of
aspect, which is, as it were, the seal of respectability. A large white
Angora cat purred upon one of the doorsteps—a canary chirped in an open
window—a pair of mirrors attached to the sides of another casement, in
the Belgian fashion, denoted that there were some observing eyes which
did not deem even the scanty traffic of the Rue Jeanne d’Arques beneath
their notice. Most of the houses were in private occupation, but there
were two or three shops—one a lace-shop, another a watchmaker’s, and
the watchmaker’s was next door to Number 17.
Lucius crossed to the opposite side of the way and inspected this
Number 17—the house from which Madame Dumarques, Lucille’s mother,
had written to Ferdinand Sivewright. It had no originality in its
physiognomy. Like the rest of the houses in the street, it was dull
and clean—like them it looked eminently respectable. It inspired no
curiosity in the observer—it suggested no mystery hidden among its
inhabitants.
Should he pull that brightly-polished brass knob and summon the porter
or portress, and ask to see the present inmates of Number 17? There
might be two or three different families in the house, though it was
not large. His eye wandered to the watchmaker’s next door. A shop is
neutral ground, and a watchmaker’s trade is leisurely, and inclines its
practitioners to a mild indulgence in gossiping. The watchmaker would
in all probability know a good deal about Number 17, its occupants past
and present.
Lucius recrossed the street and entered the watchmaker’s shop. He was
pleased to find that mechanician seated before the window examining the
intestines of a chronometer through a magnifying glass, but with no
appearance of being pressed for time. He was old and gray and small,
with a patient expression which promised good nature even towards a
stranger.
Lucius gave a conciliatory cough and wished him good-morning, a
salutation which the watchmaker returned with brisk politeness. He gave
a sigh of relief and laid down the chronometer; as if he were rather
glad to be done with it for a little while.
‘I regret to say that I do not come as a customer,’ said Lucius. The
watchmaker shrugged his shoulders and smiled, as who should say,
‘Fate does not always favour me.’ ‘I come rather to ask your kindly
assistance in my search for information about some people who may be
dead long ago, for anything I know to the contrary. Have you lived any
length of time in this street, sir?’
‘I have lived in this street all the time that I have lived at all,
sir,’ replied the watchmaker. ‘I was born in this house, and my father
was born here before me. There is a little notch in yonder door which
indicates my height at five years old; my father cut it in all the
pride of a paternal heart, my mother looking on with maternal love. My
aftergrowth did not realise the promise of that period.’
Lucius tried to look interested in this small domestic episode, but
failed somewhat in the endeavour; so eager was he to question the
watchmaker about the subject he had at heart.
‘Did you ever hear the name of Dumarques in this street?’ he asked.
‘Did I ever hear my own name?’ exclaimed the watchmaker. ‘One is not
more familiar to me than the other. You mean the Dumarques who lived
next door.’
‘Yes, yes—are they there still?’
‘They! They are dead. It is not every one who lives to the age of
Voltaire.’
‘Are they all dead?’ asked Lucius, disheartened. It seemed strange that
an entire family should be swept away within fifteen years.
‘Well, no; I believe Julie Dumarques is still living. But she left
Rouen some years ago.’
‘Do you know where she has gone?’
‘She went to Paris; but as to her address in Paris—no, I do not know
that. But if it be vital to you to learn it—’
‘It is vital to me.’
‘I might possibly put you in the way of obtaining the information, or
procure it for you.’
‘I shall be most grateful if you can do me that favour. Any trifling
recompense which I can offer you—’
‘Sir, I require no reward beyond the consciousness of having performed
a worthy action. I am a disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau; I live
entirely on vegetable diet; and I endeavour to assist my fellow
creatures.’
‘I thank you, sir, for your disinterested kindness. And now perhaps you
will lay me under a farther obligation by telling me all you can about
these neighbours of yours?’
‘Willingly, sir.’
‘Were they tradespeople, or what, these Dumarques?’
‘Wait a little, sir, and I will tell you everything,’ said Monsieur
Gastin, the little watchmaker. He ushered Lucius into a neat little
sitting-room, which was evidently also his bedchamber, installed him
in an arm-chair covered with bright yellow-velvet, took a second
yellow-velvet chair for himself, clasped his bony hands upon his
angular knee, and began his story. Through the half-glass door he
commanded an admirable view of his shop, and was ready to spring up at
any moment, should a customer invite his attention.
‘Old André Dumarques, the father, had been in the cotton trade, when
the cotton trade, like almost every other trade, was a great deal
better than it is now. He had made a little money—not very much, but
just enough to afford him, when judiciously invested, an income that
he could manage to live upon. Another man with a family like his might
not have been able to live upon André Dumarques’ income; but he was a
man of penurious habits, and could make five-and-twenty centimes go
as far as half a franc with most people. He had married late in life,
and his wife was a good deal too young and too pretty for him, and the
neighbours did not fail to talk, as people do talk amongst our lively
nation, about such matters. But Madame Dumarques was a good woman, and
though every one knew pretty well that hers wasn’t a happy marriage,
still no name ever came of it. She did her duty, and slaved herself to
death to make both ends meet, and keep her house neat and clean. Number
seventeen was a model to the rest of the street in those days, I can
assure you.’
‘She slaved herself to death, you say, sir? What does that mean?’
inquired Lucius.
‘It means that she became _poitrinaire_ when her youngest daughter—she
had three daughters, but no son—was fifteen years old, and as pretty as
her mother at the same age. Everybody had seen the poor woman fading
gradually for the last six years, except her husband. He saw nothing,
till the stamp of death was on her face, and then he went on like a
madman. He spent his money freely enough then—had a doctor from Paris
even to see her, because he wouldn’t believe the Rouen doctors when
they told him his wife was past cure—and would have sacrificed anything
to save her; but it was too late. A little rest and a little pleasure
might have lengthened her life if she’d had it in time; but nothing
could save her now. She died: and I shall never forget old André’s face
when I saw him coming out of his house the day after her funeral.’
‘He had been fond of her, then?’
‘Yes, in his selfish way. He had treated her like a servant, and worse
than any servant in a free country would submit to be treated, and he
had expected her to wear like a machine. He had always been hard and
tyrannical, and his grief, instead of softening him, changed him for
the worse. He made his children’s home so wretched, that two of his
daughters—Julie and Félicie—went out to service. Their poor mother had
taught them all she could; for André Dumarques vowed he wouldn’t waste
his money on paying for his daughters to be made fine ladies. She had
been educated at the Sacré Cœur, and was quite a lady. She taught them
a good deal; but still people said they weren’t accomplished enough
to be governesses, so they got situations as lady’s-maids, or humble
companions, or something in that way.’
‘Was Félicie the youngest?’
‘Yes, and the prettiest. She was the image of her mother. The others
had too much of the father in them—thin lips, cold gray eyes, sharp
noses. She was all life and sparkle and prettiness; too pretty to go
out into the world among strangers at sixteen years old.’
‘Did she begin the world so young?’
‘She did. The neighbours wondered that the father should let her go.
I, who knew him, it may be, better than most people, for he made no
friends, ventured to say as much. “That is too pretty a flower to be
planted in a stranger’s garden,” said I. André Dumarques shrugged his
shoulders. “What would you?” he asked. “My children must work for their
living. I am too poor to keep them in idleness.” In effect, since his
wife’s death Dumarques had become a miser. He had been always mean. He
had now but one desire; and that was to hoard his money.’
‘Do you know to whom Félicie went, when she began the world?’
‘The poor child!—no, not precisely; not as to name and place. But it
was to an English lady she went—I heard as much as that; for, as I
said just now, Dumarques spoke more freely to me than to others. An
elderly English lady, an invalid, was passing through Rouen with her
brother, also elderly and English—she a maiden lady, he a bachelor. The
lady’s maid had fallen ill on the journey. They had been travelling in
Italy, Switzerland, heaven knows where, and the lady was in sore want
of an attendant; but she would have no common person, no peasant girl
who talked loud and ate garlic; she must have a young person of some
refinement, conversable—in brief, almost a lady. Her brother applied
to the master of the hotel. The master of the hotel knew something of
André Dumarques, and knew that he wanted to find situations for his
daughters. “I have the very thing at the ends of my fingers,” he said,
and sent his porter upon the spot with a note to Monsieur Dumarques,
asking him to bring one of his daughters. Félicie had been pining ever
since her mother’s death. She was most anxious to leave her home.
She accompanied her father to the hotel. The old lady saw her, was
delighted with her, and engaged her on the spot. That was how Félicie
left Rouen.’
‘Did you ever see her again?’
‘Yes, and how sorely changed! It was at least six years afterwards; and
I had almost forgotten that poor child’s existence. André Dumarques
was dead; he had died leaving a nice little fortune behind him,—the
fruit of deprivations that must have rendered his life a burden, poor
man,—and his eldest daughter, Hortense, kept the house. Julie had also
gone into service soon after Félicie left home. Hortense had kept
her father’s house ever since her mother’s death. She kept it still,
though there was now no father for whom to keep it. She must have been
very lonely, and though the house was a picture of neatness, it had
a melancholy air. Mademoiselle Dumarques kept three or four cats,
and one old servant who had been in the family for years; no one ever
remembered her being young, not even I, who approach the age of my
great countryman, Voltaire.’
‘And she came back—Félicie?’ asked Lucius, somewhat exercised in spirit
by the watchmaker’s _longueurs_.
‘She came back; but, ah, how changed! It was more like the return of
a ghost from the grave than of that bright creature I remembered six
years before. I have no curiosity about my neighbours; and though I
love my fellow creatures in the abstract, I rarely trouble myself
about particular members of my race, unless they make some direct
appeal to my sympathy. Thus, had I been left to myself, I might have
remained for an indefinite period unaware of Félicie’s return. But I
have a housekeeper who has the faults as well as the merits of her sex.
While I devote my leisure to those classic writers who have rendered
my native land illustrious, she, worthy soul, gives her mind to the
soup, and the affairs of her neighbours. One morning, after an autumnal
night of wind and rain—a night upon which a humanitarian mind would
hardly have refused shelter to a strange cur—my housekeeper handed
me my omelet and poured out my wine with a more important air than
usual; and I knew that she was bursting to tell me something about my
neighbours. The omelet, in the preparation of which she is usually care
itself, was even a trifle burned.’
‘I hope you allowed her to relieve her mind.’
‘Yes, sir; I indulged the simple creature. You may hear her at this
moment, in the little court without yonder window, singing as she
works, not melodious but cheerful.’
This was in allusion to a monotonous twanging noise, something between
the Irish bagpipes and a Jew’s-harp, which broke the placid stillness
of the Rue Jeanne d’Arques.
‘“Well, Margot,” I said in my friendly way, “what has happened?” She
burst forth at once like a torrent. “Figure to yourself then,” she
exclaimed, “that any one—a human being—would travel on such a night
as last night. You might have waded ankle deep upon the pavement.”
“People must travel in all weathers, my good Margot,” I replied
philosophically. I had not been obliged to go out myself during the
storm of the preceding evening, and was therefore able to approach the
subject in a calmly contemplative frame of mind. Margot shrugged her
shoulders, and nodded her head vehemently, till her earrings jingled
again. “But a woman, then!” she cried; “a young and beautiful woman,
for instance!” This gave a new interest to the subject. My philanthropy
was at once aroused. “A young and beautiful woman out in the storm last
night!” I exclaimed. “She applied for shelter here, perhaps, and you
accorded her request, and now fear that I shall disapprove. Margot,
I forgive you. Let me see this child of misfortune.” I was prepared
to administer consolation to the homeless wanderer, in the broadly
Christian spirit of the divine Jean Jacques Rousseau; but Margot began
to shake her head with incredible energy, and in effect, after much
circumlocution on her part, for she is of a loquacious disposition, I
obtained the following plain statement of facts.’
Here the little watchmaker, proud of his happy knack of rounding a
period, looked at Lucius for admiration; but seeing impatience rather
than approval indicated in his visitor’s countenance, he gave a
brief sigh, inwardly denounced the unsympathetic temperament of the
English generally, coughed, stretched out his neat little legs upon
the yellow-velvet footstool, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his
waistcoat, and continued thus:
‘Briefly, sir, Félicie Dumarques had returned. She had arrived during
that pitiless storm in a fiacre from the station, with luggage. My
housekeeper had heard the vehicle stop, and had run to the door in
time to see the traveller alight and enter the next house. She had
seen Félicie’s face by the light of the street-lamp, which, as you may
have observed, is near my door, and she told me how sadly the poor
girl was changed. “She looks as her mother did a year or two before
she died,” said Margot. “Her cheeks are thin, and there is a feverish
spot of colour on them, and her eyes are too bright. They have made her
work too hard in her situation. She was evidently not expected last
night, for the servant gave a scream when she saw her, and seemed quite
overcome with surprise. Then Mademoiselle Dumarques came down, and I
saw the sisters embrace. ‘Félicie!’ said Hortense. ‘Thou art like the
dead risen from the grave!’” And then the door shut, and my housekeeper
heard no more.’
‘You saw Félicie yourself, I suppose, afterwards?’
‘Yes. She passed my door now and then; but rarely, for she seldom went
out. Sometimes I used to run out and speak to her. I had known her
from her cradle, remember, and she had always seemed to like me in the
days when she was bright and gay. Now she had an air that was at once
listless and anxious, as if she had no interest in her present life,
but was waiting for something—sometimes hoping, sometimes fearing, and
never happy. She would speak to me in the old sweet voice that I knew
so well—her mother’s voice; but she rarely smiled, and if ever she
did, the smile was almost sadder than tears. Every time I saw her I
saw a change for the worse; and I felt that she had begun that journey
we must all take some day, even if we live to the age of the immortal
Voltaire.’
‘Did any one ever come to see her—a gentleman—an Englishman?’ inquired
Lucius.
‘Ah,’ cried the watchmaker, ‘I see you know her history better than I.
Yes, an English gentleman did visit her. It was nearly a year after
her return that he came, in the middle of summer. He stayed a week at
the hotel, the same to which Félicie went to see the English lady with
whom she left Rouen. This gentleman used to spend most of his time next
door, and he and Félicie Dumarques drove about in a hired carriage
together to different places in the neighbourhood, and for the first
time since her return I saw Félicie with a happy look on her face. But
there was the stamp of death there too, clear and plain enough for any
eyes that could read; and I think the Englishman must have seen it as
well as I. Margot contrived to find out all that happened next door.
She told me that a grand physician had come from Paris to see Félicie
Dumarques, and had ordered a new treatment, which was to cure her.
And then I regret to say that Margot, who has a wicked tongue, began
to say injurious things about our neighbours. I stopped her at once,
forbidding her to utter a word to the discredit of Félicie Dumarques,
and a short time after Margot came to me once more full of importance,
to say that I was right and Félicie was an honest woman. The old
servant next door had told my housekeeper that the English gentleman
was Félicie’s husband. They had been married in England, but they were
obliged to keep their marriage a secret, on account of the Englishman’s
uncle, who would disinherit him if he knew his nephew had married a
lady’s-maid; for this gentleman was nephew of the invalid lady who had
taken Félicie away.’
‘I begin to understand,’ said Lucius, and then, producing the double
miniature, he showed the watchmaker the two portraits.
‘Is either of those faces familiar to you?’ he asked.
‘Both of them,’ cried the other. ‘One is a portrait of Félicie
Dumarques, in the prime of her beauty; the other of the Englishman who
came to visit her.’
‘Did you hear the Englishman’s name?’ inquired Lucius.
‘Never, though Margot, who does not scruple to push curiosity to
impertinence, asked the direct question of the old servant next door.
She was repulsed with severity. “I have told you there is a secret,”
said the woman, “and it is one that can in no manner concern you.
Madame” (meaning Félicie) “is an angel of goodness. And do you think
Mademoiselle Hortense would allow the English gentleman to come here
if all was not right; she who is so correct in her conduct, and goes
to mass every day?” Even Margot was obliged to be satisfied with this.
Well, sir, the Englishman went away. I saw Félicie drive home in a
_voiture de remise_; she had been to the station to see him off. Great
Heaven, I never beheld so sad a face! “Alas, poor child,” I said to
myself, “all the physicians in Paris will never cure you, for you are
dying of sorrow!” And I was not far wrong, sir. The poor girl died in
less than a month from that day, and was buried on the hill yonder, by
the chapel of our Lady of Bons Secours.’
‘And her elder sister?’
‘Mademoiselle Hortense? She died two years ago, and lies yonder on the
hill with the rest of them.’
‘But one sister remains, you say?’
‘Yes, there is still Mademoiselle Julie. She went to Paris, to a
situation in a _magasin des modes_, I believe. She was always clever
with her needle.’
‘And you think you can procure me her present address in Paris?’
‘I believe I can, and without much difficulty. The house next door
belongs to Mademoiselle Dumarques. The present tenants must know her
address.’
‘I shall be beyond measure obliged again if you will obtain it for me.’
‘If you will be kind enough to call again this evening, I will make the
inquiry in the mean time.’
‘I thank you, sir, heartily. You have already given me some valuable
information, which may assist a most amiable young lady to regain her
proper place in the world.’
The disciple of Jean Jacques declared himself enraptured at the idea
that he had served a fellow creature.
‘There is one point, however, that I might ascertain before I leave
Rouen,’ said Lucius, ‘and that is the name of Félicie’s husband. You
say he stayed at the same hotel at which Félicie had seen the English
lady. Which hotel was it?’
‘The Britannique.’
‘And can you give me the date of Félicie’s interview with the lady?’
The watchmaker shrugged his shoulders.
‘I cannot say. The years in our quiet life are so much alike. Félicie
was away about six years.’
‘And I have a letter written by her after her return—dated. That
will give me an approximate date at any rate. I’ll try the Hôtel
Britannique.’
Lucius paused in his passage through the shop to select some trifling
articles from the watchmaker’s small stock of jewelry which might serve
as gifts for Lucille. Slender as his means were he could not leave a
service entirely unrequited. He bought a locket and a pair of earrings,
at the old man’s own price, and left him delighted with his visitor,
and pledged to obtain Mademoiselle Dumarques’ address, even should the
tenant of number seventeen prove unwilling to give it.