THE DUKE OF HARLINGFORD MAKES A DISCOVERY.
Esther Vanberg was buried in a churchyard north-west of London, a
rustic spot on the summit of a hill--a churchyard in which a poet
might love to lie and dream away the summer hours. Old yew-trees
spread their solemn shadows on the velvet grass, and the pure hues
of white marble monuments glimmered here and there among the dark
foliage.
The Jewess had noticed this spot once when riding a little way out of
town with her devoted lover; and she had said, half playfully, that
if she could choose her own grave she would desire nothing better
than to be buried in that sequestered churchyard.
Vincent Mountford, who forgot no sentiment that those beloved lips
had ever expressed, took care that this wish should be religiously
observed.
The Jewess was buried in one of the fairest spots in that rustic
churchyard. The funeral was entirely without ostentation, and there
was only one mourner; but perhaps there are few graves over which
such tears are shed as those which filled the eyes of Vincent
Mountford, while the rector was reading the solemn service of the
dead.
All was over, and the young man drove slowly back to town. All was
over! Alas, how much anguish is conveyed in those three little words!
The last office of love had been performed, and there was no more to
be done but to leave the quiet churchyard where the loved one lay in
a tranquil slumber,
Deeper than the frost can bite,
Deeper than the hail can smite,
Deep asleep by day and night,
Our delight.
For a time at least the Duke of Harlingford was a broken-hearted man.
The glories of his four-in-hand, the finest team in England, had
no further charm for him. Other men of his class were deep in the
delights and excitements of English races and regattas, or hurrying
off to ride in continental steeplechases, or to lose their money at
German spas. But Vincent Mountford felt as if these things could
give him no more pleasure; they were all alike “stale, flat, and
unprofitable,” and he turned from his familiar friends with a kind of
loathing.
“I never saw a fellow so awfully cut up,” said the Duke’s intimates
to each other dolefully. “There’ll be no shooting at Mountford’s
place this season, and no chance of his standing in for a moor with
Bothwell Wallace, as he talked of doing.”
It is a bad day for wild Prince Hal’s companions when the prince
takes to wearing sack-cloth and bestrewing his head with ashes.
There were some irreverent worldings who complained that it was
a hard thing Miss Vanberg must needs break her back before the
shooting-season, and at a time when the grouse promised more than
usually good sport.
Vincent Mountford wrote to one of the first sculptors in England,
begging him to design a monument for the grave of a dearly-loved
friend--a lady who had died in the zenith of her days; but he did not
reveal the name of her whose tomb that monument was to adorn.
“Let her sleep far away from the memories of her wasted life,” he
thought sadly; “and let those who look upon her resting place know
only that she was young and beautiful and beloved.”
A sad task remained for Vincent Mountford after the burial of the
Jewess. He had promised to examine her papers, to arrange the many
valuable things she left behind her, and to see that the proceeds of
their sale were handed over to the girl whom Esther Vanberg had so
deeply injured.
This girl was only known to the Duke as Miss Watson, the _figurante_
of the Circenses. From the stage-doorkeeper at the theatre he
obtained Violet’s address; then sent for his lawyer, and placed in
his hands the carrying out of Esther’s last wish.
But before the day appointed for the sale--before the auctioneer’s
assistants entered the _bijou_ little residence in Bolton-row, and
those expensive frivolities on which Esther had squandered a small
fortune _pour se distraire_, were duly set forth in the flourishing
language of a fashionable auctioneer’s catalogue--Vincent Mountford
went alone to examine and destroy the papers left by the Jewess, so
that nothing which she might have wished to keep sacred should fall
into the hands of strangers. The task was a very painful one; and
the young man would have encountered death in its most terrific form
with a pang less keen than he now felt as he went up the familiar
staircase in the bright summer noontide,--that staircase at the top
of which he had so often seen her standing looking down at him, ready
to scold or to praise him, as the humour of the moment prompted her,
but always charming to that one faithful slave who never found his
chains too heavy.
He entered alone into those elegant little rooms, which Esther’s
beauty had adorned, as some priceless jewel adorns the casket that
contains it.
The same exotics were blooming in the conservatory--the faded
bouquets, on whose fresh bloom the eyes of the dead had looked, still
remained undisturbed in the vases in which her hands had arranged
them.
The birds were singing gaily in the sunshine, though the white hands
that had so often tended them lay still and cold in their last
resting-place. A little dog, Esther’s favourite, whined piteously as
he looked up at the Duke, and this faithful creature was the only
object in those rooms that bore witness of the melancholy event which
had almost broken Vincent Mountford’s heart.
He took from his pocket the little bunch of keys given him by the
Jewess, and seated himself before the piece of furniture, half
cabinet, half writing-table, in which she had kept her papers.
Nothing could have been more careless than her habits. The Duke
sat for long hours, that would have wearied another man, trying to
introduce some order into that mass of bills and letters, notes of
invitation, tradesmen’s circulars, catalogues of pictures, playbills,
programmes of concerts, and crumpled receipts.
At last he had looked over them all, and had placed on one side every
fragment of paper which bore any of the beloved handwriting. These
he sorted and folded, as tenderly as a miser might fold a packet of
bank-notes; and when he had collected the last of them, he packed
them very neatly in a sheet of foolscap, and sealed the packet in
several places with his signet-ring.
Upon this packet he wrote only these few words:
“Esther’s papers. To be burnt immediately after my death--unopened.”
He had no wish that the prying eyes of strangers should ever inspect
those records of the woman he had loved; frivolous, meaningless,
though the greater number of them were. Nor yet could he bring
himself to destroy the smallest paper on which the beloved hand had
inscribed the most commonplace words.
The rest of the papers, with the exception of tradesmen’s bills and
receipts, he burnt.
Then he turned his attention to the few remaining contents of the
odorous sandal-wood pigeon-holes into which Miss Vanberg had thrust
papers, trinkets, faded flowers, and worn gloves, without the
smallest attempt at classification.
Among these there was a miniature set in a rim of pearls.
It was the picture of a lovely woman, a Spanish Jewess, whose face
proclaimed her at once the mother of the dead girl.
On the back of the gold case which contained the miniature was
engraved the inscription:
“FROM RUPERT TO HIS BELOVED LOLA.”
The Duke examined the miniature very closely and then it suddenly
occurred to him--
Was there not, perhaps, something more than this inscription--some
hidden spring in the case of the miniature, which might reveal a
secret that Esther Vanberg had been too careless to discover?
“I will take it to my jeweller,” muttered the young man; “if there is
anything hidden in this massive case--which seems needlessly thick
and heavy--he is the most likely person to find it out.”
The Duke was not slow to carry out this idea. He drove straight from
Bolton-row to a jeweller’s in Bond-street, and handed the locket to
one of the assistants.
“If there is anyone in your establishment who understands the
mechanism of these things better than you do, I should be very glad
if you would take him this, and ask him to examine it,” he said. “I
will wait while you do so.”
The Duke seated himself by the counter, and after he had been waiting
ten minutes, the jeweller’s assistant returned with an elderly man,
who held the locket open in his hand.
He had discovered a secret spring, the nature of which he explained
to Vincent Mountford.
“Nobody except a working jeweller could have opened the locket,” he
said in conclusion; “for the spring has evidently not been used for
years. It is a very peculiar piece of jeweller’s work, and has been
made by no English mechanic. The gold and the workmanship are both
undoubtedly foreign.”
The inner case of the locket contained a second miniature--the
portrait of a young man; a dark handsome face, which seemed very
familiar to the Duke of Harlingford.
As he drove away from the jeweller’s he brooded thoughtfully upon
that pictured face, trying, but without success, to remember when and
where he had seen a face resembling it.
“Those dark eyes, that peculiar mouth, are strangely familiar to me,”
he thought; “and yet I cannot tell whom they recall to my mind.”
The Duke drove across Waterloo Bridge, and sought out the obscure
street in which Clara Westford and her children had lived during the
days of their poverty. He had obtained the _figurante’s_ address from
the door-keeper at the Circenses, and he was now going to announce to
her with his own lips the news of her good fortune.
All the practical part of the business he left to his lawyer; but he
wished himself to tell Miss Watson of the money which had been left
to her; as he fancied that he should thus more completely carry out
Esther Vanberg’s dying request. He found the house in which Clara and
her daughter lodged; sent up his card by the servant with a request
that he might see Miss Watson on most urgent business.
He was shown immediately into the shabbily furnished sitting-room, to
which a certain air of refinement had been imparted by Mrs. Westford
and her daughter at a very small cost. A few books, a vase of
flowers, a caged bird, and a work-basket of graceful form, were the
most expensive ornaments Violet had been able to buy; but even these
small things relieved the sordid vulgar poverty of the room.
Clara Westford was sitting on one side of the little table, working;
while her daughter sat opposite to her, reading aloud.
She closed the book as the Duke of Harlingford entered.
He remembered Violet at the Circenses only as a very lovely
girl; he perceived now for the first time that she was a perfect
lady--self-possessed, and yet modest; and to Vincent Mountford’s
mind, more beautiful in her well-worn black dress and simple linen
collar than she had been in her brilliant stage costume.
He seated himself, at Mrs. Westford’s request; and then he told
Violet in a very few words that he was empowered to inform her of a
small fortune that had been left her by a person whose name was to be
kept a secret.
“The bequest consists of a balance in the hands of the testator’s
banker, and of personal property of a valuable character, which is to
be sold, in order that the proceeds of the sale may be handed to you
with the other money in one sum. The amount will not be a large one.
Four or five thousand pounds at most.”
Four or five thousand! It seemed an enormous sum to Violet, who had
felt the keenest pangs of poverty. She burst into hysterical tears;
for she was completely overcome by the thought that henceforward her
mother might be spared at least the anguish of want.
But suddenly she wiped her tears away, and addressed the Duke with
imploring earnestness.
“O, sir,” she exclaimed, “are you sure that no degradation attaches
to this mysterious bequest? Why should this money be left to me by a
person who conceals his name? Can you assure me, on your honour, that
I am justified in accepting this unexpected wealth?”
“I give you my word, as a gentleman, that you are justified in taking
the money that has been left you,” answered the Duke gravely. “It
is bequeathed by a lady who once did you an injury, and who most
sincerely repented that wrong before she died. The thought that the
gift of her fortune might do something to repair that injury was a
solace to her on her deathbed. And I assure you that you would be
actuated by a false pride were you to reject this bequest.”
“In that case, I will accept it, gratefully, gladly,” returned
Violet. “You would wish me to do so, would you not, mamma?”
“Yes, Violet; for if I can believe in the evidence of an honest face,
I am sure this gentleman would not advise you to take a false step,”
said Mrs. Westford.
The Duke bowed.
“I am here to execute the last wishes of the dead,” he answered
mournfully.
“But I never knew that anyone had wronged me,” exclaimed Violet,
“except one person; and that was not a lady, but a gentleman--or,
at any rate, a person whose rank gave him a right to be called a
gentleman.”
“You will never know the entire history of that wrong,” answered the
Duke. “I rejoice to see you here in safety with your mother, and to
know that you have therefore escaped from all serious peril. As for
the bequest, of which I have informed you, I beg you to accept it
when it reaches you without question, and let the dead be forgiven.”
Little more was said; and the Duke departed, pleased, even in the
midst of his grief, by the knowledge that Esther Vanberg’s fortune
had fallen into the hands of a deserving girl.
From Lambeth he drove to his club, where he dismissed his cab and
strolled into the reading-room.
He had no wish for society; but solitude was very terrible to him,
for it was haunted by the shadow of the dead--the mournful memories
of the loved and the lost.
He fell back, therefore, into his old habits, and took his accustomed
seat in the public reading-room, though not without a strange sense
of wonder that he should be able to take his place amongst other
men, to read the evening papers, and talk in the conventional manner
about the events recorded in them, while she was lying in that quiet
churchyard.
Could she indeed be there? Was it true? Was it possible? The
catastrophe which had caused her death he could realize--her death
itself; but not the fact that all was so completely finished,
so entirely a thing of the past; and that she was lying in her
grave--never to look upon him again on this earth, unconscious of his
love, regardless of his anguish, a creature for ever removed from him
and the world of which he was a part. He sat for upwards of an hour,
with a newspaper before him, brooding over the great mystery. There
were very few people in the reading-room at this time, for it was
late. The dusk was closing in already; and the _habitués_ of the club
were almost all of them dining in one of the larger apartments.
The Duke left his seat by-and-by, and walked to the window. The room
was very dreary in the waning daylight, and the street below the
windows was almost deserted, the West-end world having gone home to
dine.
A gentleman was seated close to the open window reading a paper; he
lowered the sheet from before his face and looked up, as Vincent
Mountford approached him.
This gentleman was Rupert Godwin, the banker. He had come to town
in search of Julia, and had dropped into the club, pale and worn
out by fatigue, to take a hasty dinner. He had heard nothing of his
missing daughter; and he had just returned from the office of a
private detective, whom he had been consulting as to the best means
of seeking her.
In his own words, the web was closing round him. Narrower and
narrower grew the fatal circle; and he scarcely knew which way to
step without finding himself face to face with some new danger.
As he looked up at the Duke of Harlingford, whom he had met very
frequently in society and in the familiar intercourse of the club
reading-room, he tried to affect some of his old ease of manner,
though the effort was a painful one.
“Good-evening, Duke,” he exclaimed. “How is it that I find you
here at an hour when you ought to be glorifying some Belgravian
dinner-table by your presence?”
The young man looked intently at that pale face, those un-English
black eyes, dimly seen in the gathering dusk. This face--the face
of Rupert Godwin the banker--was the image which had floated before
his mental vision since he had seen the hidden miniature in Esther
Vanberg’s locket. The face in the portrait was the youthful likeness
of that face on which Vincent Mountford now looked.
The Duke knew something of the banker’s history. He knew that Rupert
Godwin had, in his early manhood, been a resident in Spain, where a
branch house belonging to the banker had been carried on by a junior
partner.
Rapid as lightning an electric chain of ideas flashed through the
mind of the Duke.
This man, this banker, half Spaniard, half English, was the betrayer
of the beautiful Spanish Jewess, and the father of Esther Vanberg.
Occupied as Mr. Godwin was with his own thoughts, he could not help
perceiving the strange expression, the solemn earnestness, in the
Duke of Harlingford’s face.
“There is something amiss with you to-night, is there not?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Vincent Mountford: “I have lately lost one who was
most dear to me. It is but a very short time since I stood beside
the grave of the only woman I ever loved. Do you know the name of
Vanberg, Mr. Godwin?”
The banker started; and pale though his face had been, it grew a
shade paler as he looked up nervously at the Duke.
The young man handed him the miniature of the beautiful Jewess.
“Did you ever see this before?” he asked.
The shrinking, half-shuddering movement with which Rupert Godwin
recoiled from that faded miniature in its jewelled case told enough.
“Your daughter, your abandoned, forgotten daughter, would have cursed
you on her dying bed, Rupert Godwin,” said the Duke, solemnly, “if
the shadow of death had not softened all things before her eyes. She
uttered no word of love or forgiveness--she only told me the story
of her life. The days of duelling are past, or I might tell you more
plainly what I think of a man who leaves two helpless women to starve
in the streets of London. As it is, I will say only that you and I
had better meet as strangers after to-night.”
The Duke bowed gravely, and turned his back upon the man who had once
carried his head so proudly amongst the noblest frequenters of that
room. Now he had no word of defiance to utter. He felt that the fatal
circle was narrowing. A strange influence had been upon him for the
last few days, and all his old hardihood of spirit seemed to have
deserted him.