"IN THE DEAD UNHAPPY NIGHT."
The first confusion and alarm which had ensued on Mr. Guyon's sudden
illness had subsided, and had been succeeded by the orderly hush of a
house in which mortal sickness had assumed its irresistible sway. Mr.
Guyon had been carried upstairs to the large bedroom formerly occupied
by Katharine, and which he had used since his daughter's marriage. The
doctor who had been found and brought to his assistance upon the
race-course, and his own physician, for whom the housekeeper had sent
at once, before she had despatched the footman to carry the evil
tidings to Mrs. Streightley, were busily but silently occupied with
the insensible form. The servants, frightened and helpless as servants
generally are, were standing about on the stairs and landing-place,
ready to obey such orders as were transmitted to them from time to
time from the grave gentleman in that awful room, through the medium
of the housekeeper. They whispered together solemnly at intervals, and
started when the door on which all their attention was fixed opened a
little, and Mrs. Clarke beckoned one of the two women towards her. Mr.
Stallbrass was in the dingy dining-room, awaiting the award of the
solemn tribunal upstairs. He was a kind-hearted fellow enough; and
having done so much, "having picked up the poor old boy," he thought,
"I may as well see it out." Mrs. Clarke had entreated him to
remain--her master's daughter, she said, would be here immediately,
and she would want to hear how it happened. So this modern type of
Good Samaritan, useful but not officious, and rather sheepish about
his good nature, stayed. The rain, which had begun to fall just as
they were getting Mr. Guyon away from the race-course, was now falling
in cold, pitiless, ceaseless streams, and the early darkness of a
winter's evening had added its gloom to the scene. The gas had
been lighted in the dining-room of Mr. Guyon's house, but the
window-shutters were unclosed, and Stallbrass walked disconsolately up
and down from the door to the window, stopping each time as he reached
the latter boundary to look out into the damp dreariness of the
street. His spirits were beginning to flag under the monotony of
this occupation, and he was seeking relief by furtive snatches of
reading--odd paragraphs in the _Field_ for last week, and little bits
of the current _Punch_--when Mrs. Clarke came in, looking very pale
and scared.
"Well," said Stallbrass abruptly, but kindly, "what news is there? Has
the lady come? She can't have come, though, or I should have seen
her."
"No, sir, she has not come; and I dread she won't while the breath is
in her father, which it's all it is, as far as I can understand the
doctors."
"Really! I'm very sorry--poor old gentleman! Has he not recovered
consciousness at all, then?"
"No, sir, not a bit--he has groaned a few times, and then they
thought he were coming to, but he didn't--but there, sir, there's a
carriage--there's Mrs. Streightley----" And the housekeeper ran
excitedly out, followed by Mr. Stallbrass, and threw open the door,
through which a gust of wind and a cold dash of rain drove into the
hall.
Stallbrass saw a tall young lady, whose face, pale and agitated,
struck him even then as being one of the most beautiful he had ever
seen,---who passed into the room he had just left, followed by the
housekeeper. He stood in the hall, the noise of wind and rain outside
mingling with the stamping of the horses, the jingling of their
harness, and the sound of the women's voices.
"What is all this, Clarke? is it true?" asked Katharine, as she
hurriedly untied her bonnet and flung it down, and threw off her
pelisse of velvet and fur.
"Yes, ma'am, it's all true. But O, why did you not come sooner? James
has been more than an hour gone to fetch you."
"I was out--they had to find me," she said, in the same hurried tone.
"What do they say it is? Let me see the doctor. Let me go up stairs."
"Yes, ma'am, directly," said Mrs. Clarke, down whose rosy and
unrefined cheeks tears were beginning to flow. "But first you must see
the gentleman that brought him home; he knows all about it; he
breakfasted with master this morning. If you please, sir,--Lord ha'
mercy, if he hasn't been left out in the hall!"
Katharine stepped hastily towards the door, as Mrs. Clarke, with many
voluble apologies, brought Mr. Stallbrass in. She thanked him briefly,
and entreated him to tell her all that had happened. She listened to
his story with painful eagerness, turning paler and paler as he went
on; and when she had heard it all, she thanked him again.
"And now I must go to him," she said, and held out her hand to the
stranger.
"I will wait a little longer, if you will allow me, for the chance of
a more favourable report," he said.
"Do so," she returned. "My carriage is at your disposal. Tell them to
come back here, Clarke, when they have taken this gentleman home."
Then she again bade him farewell and left him.
He walked up and down the room for half an hour, at the end of which
time the housekeeper came downstairs again;--this time crying
unrestrainedly.
"There's not a bit of hope, sir; but they think he will live for some
hours; and they hope he will get his senses back, and speak to his
daughter, or at least look at her before he dies."
"I hope so, I am sure," said Mr. Stallbrass solemnly.
"I was to ask your name, if you please, sir," said Mrs. Clarke with
some hesitation.
"Certainly; there is my card," and he laid one on the table. "I shall
call in the morning." Then he took up his hat and went away, having
declined the offer of the carriage. Mrs. Clarke ordered the coachman
to return to Portland Place, adding that his mistress would remain
with her father. "I wonder your master hasn't been here afore this,"
said the housekeeper in conclusion.
"Master's out of town; worse luck!" was the sympathetic answer of the
footman, as he jumped up beside the coachman, and they drove off.
Mrs. Clarke went slowly up the long staircase to the room about which
such awful suspense and interest gathered, unmindful of the card which
lay upon the table in the dining-room, and was swept away with other
rubbish afterwards and forgotten; and when she stood beside Katharine
by the dying man's bedside, all remembrance of the stranger had faded
out of the minds of both.
The dying man! Yes, the fiat had gone forth--he was dying. Ned Guyon,
the _ci-devant jeune homme par excellence_, the trifler by vocation
and profession, the man of all others with whom it was impossible to
associate an idea of solemnity, the dandy in dress, the _roué_ in
morals, the _persifleur_ in religion, the man in consideration of whom
it would have been particularly pleasant to disembarrass the mind of
belief in present and future accountability,--this man was dying. Not
slowly, with time and opportunity for reflection, for repentance, for
"setting his house in order;" but quickly, dumbly, as a stricken
animal might die--as men die in whom the brain is killed first, and
the machine has but a little while to labour on afterwards. His
daughter saw it all, realised it all in a minute, even as she crossed
the threshold of the room she had never entered since her wedding-day;
and there mingled with the horror and anguish of the moment a sudden
sense of recognition, and yet of strangeness, as she saw, without
looking at them, in the inexplicable vividness of perception which
comes in moments of strong emotion, the "soulless things" she had
lived amongst for so long in the old life gone for ever. And here was
another life going away for ever. She did not doubt it for one
instant; and when the physician, who had known her from her girlhood,
gravely took her hand, and whispered to her that there was no hope,
the dying man lying insensible to any sight or sound, she shuddered
strongly from head to foot, but she did not weep, or shrink from the
touch or the voice.
From the senseless figure upon the bed, over which the strange doctor
was stooping, his fingers busy with hopeless investigations at the
heart and the wrist--from the ghastly distorted face, so much more
terrible, with its rouge and cosmetics, its wig and its pearl powder
all removed, than any face of reverend old age, however worn and
wasted, can ever be--from the limp, bluish hand lying upon the
coverlet, with the heavy seal-ring and its pretentious blazon, with
the showy golden buttons hanging from the loosened sleeve--Katharine's
haggard gaze roamed over the room almost unconsciously. It was in most
respects the same as when she had inhabited it; but several of her
father's special belongings had been brought from the den, and
occupied the place of the feminine properties dispossessed. Her
dressing-table, none too large for Mr. Guyon's requirements, was in
its accustomed place, and the long glass had not been moved. But the
writing-table she had been accustomed to use was there no longer, and
in its place, in the recess beside the fireplace, stood a large
cabinet, whose heavy doors closed over a range of wide, shallow
shelves, and also shut in a desk. A basket, half full of scraps of
torn paper, stood between the burly carved legs of this old-fashioned
piece of furniture; and in front of it was the well-worn red-leather
arm-chair which Katharine remembered from her babyhood. The clothes
which had been taken off the insensible man were lying in a heap over
the back of this chair--bright in colour, juvenile in cut, and painful
to see, when one glanced from them to their wearer of a few hours ago.
A bunch of keys had fallen from the gaping coat-pocket upon the
ground, where it lay with a few crumpled papers, a card of the races
being conspicuous among them.
"I believe I can do no more," said the strange doctor, as at length he
relinquished his hopeless task. Then the two left the room together,
and after a little Katharine's old friend returned. By this time she
had drawn a chair to the bedside, and was seated there, gazing fixedly
on the rigid face, which looked as though death itself, when it should
come, would not seal it more utterly up from all impressions of the
outer world. She was lost in thought, and was quite passive while the
doctor gave his final directions to the housekeeper, who was to remain
all night with the dying man. She understood him to say that he must
go home now (he lived close by), but was to be summoned if any change
took place. He gave a few simple directions, which the two women could
carry out, and which were of a merely perfunctory character, and
designed to relieve them by giving them occupation, rather than the
patient, for whom there was nothing more to be done until the
undertaker's turn should have arrived; and he went away, whispering to
Katharine that if he were not sent for sooner, he would be with her at
seven on the following morning.
The night wore on, and Katharine and Mrs. Clarke kept their terrible
watch. They were for the most part quite silent; the one in the chair
beside the bed, the other seated at the fireside, and coming from time
to time to gaze disconsolately upon the dying man. No weariness came
upon Katharine as the hours crept on. The strong excitement kept her
up; and as she administered the few cares of which her father's
condition allowed, the enforced composure of her manner did not break
down. The silence of the room was awful, as silence under such
circumstances always is; the clock upon the chimneypiece ticked
loudly, the showy gold watch, with its trumpery bunch of trinkets,
which had been deposited upon the dressing-table, also ticked on,
till late in the small hours, when it stopped. The fire burned low and
dim, and flickered upon the housekeeper's weary figure in the deep
arm-chair, and upon the ribbons of her cap, as her head nodded
abruptly forward, in the uneasy snatches of broken slumber. Sometimes
a little flame sprung out and glimmered upon the silken folds of
Katharine's rich dress, upon the gold bracelet of the arm laid upon
the bed, upon the pale stern face keeping its wakeful watch.
There were times during those dread hours when the dying man groaned
heavily; and then the two women would bend eagerly over him, using the
prescribed restoratives, and trying to discern some symptom of
consciousness, even of pain; but it never came. Ned Guyon had spoken
his last words--had experienced his last emotion in this world; and
what they were has already been told.
It was about four in the morning; and the cold dismal chill peculiar
to that ghastly hour had stolen over the room; and Katharine had begun
to shiver and yawn under its influence. Mrs. Clarke woke with a guilty
start, softly raked the fire together and replenished it, and, in
answer to Katharine's beckoning finger, approached the bed.
"There's no change--no, no change," said Mrs. Clarke; and she shook
her head gravely.
"Are you sure?" said Katharine; "I thought his face looked colder and
grayer. Don't you think the eyelids are heavier and more nearly shut?"
Mrs. Clarke took a candle, and held it close to the wan face. There
was no change perceptible to her; and the "muffled-drum" beat of the
heart told of life still lingering.
"No, my dear," said the old woman compassionately; "he is not gone
yet, nor going; but Lor' ha' mercy, how cold you are! why, you're
shivering. I'll go and fetch a teapot and a kettle, and make some tea.
No; the kitchen-fire is alight. If you don't mind being alone, I'll
make it downstairs; it's quicker done; and I am sure you want it."
"I do want it, Clarke," said Katharine, shuddering. "The dawn is
coming, I suppose; and the cold strikes into my blood. I shall be glad
of the tea."
Mrs. Clarke went away on her errand. Katharine, all her senses
quickened, heard her step upon each stair until she reached the hall.
A strange, lonely, nervous feeling came over her, and she rose from
her seat by the bedside, and went over to the fireplace. As she stood
idly by the chimneypiece, an unusually strong nicker of the flame
shone upon something bright which lay upon the ground. Katharine
stooped, and picked up a bunch of keys and a handful of crumpled
papers. She laid the keys upon the mantelshelf, and mechanically
turned over the papers. The card of the races she threw into the fire,
the others she smoothed out; and finding some memoranda apparently
containing calculations among them, she thought it would be well to
put them away safely. With the intention of doing so, she took up the
keys again, and opened the heavy door of the oak cabinet.
Mr. Guyon, like many men devoted to the business of pleasure, was very
orderly in his arrangements, and kept all his papers with an enviable
degree of precision. The long shallow drawers of the cabinet had each
its neat parchment label, indicating the contents; and the lowest of
the range bore the superscription, "miscellaneous letters." Katharine
pulled the pendent brass ring attached to this drawer with a little
more force than was necessary to open it. The drawer slid out easily,
and the whole of its contents were exposed to her view. At the back,
in the right-hand corner, lay a small packet, slipped into an elastic
band, on which her quick eye caught her own name, written in a hand
she knew well--her own name, as it had been--"Miss Guyon"--and a date
scrawled in the corner. The blood rushed hotly into Katharine's face
as she took the packet out of the drawer and carried it to the
fireplace, where she examined it by the light of a [xxx ?] lamp. It
consisted of four letters: the uppermost that on which her name was
written: the undermost was placed in the bands so that the address did
not show; but a line was written on xxxx Mr. Guyon's hand--"shown to
R.S."
Katharine sat down in the chair vacated by the housekeeper and
deliberated. In her hand she held a packet of papers, which she felt
concerned her deeply. Here was a letter in Gordon Frere's hand--a
letter whose date was that of the very date which had begun her
hopeless watching and waiting, in the time which, until this moment,
had seemed so far, so illimitably past, but now in an instant was
brought near again, and revived in all its pain and anger. Here was a
letter which must have been written that day when he had sent her the
music and his card, as she had believed without a word. A vague sense
of treachery, something which led her intuitively to an approximate
suspicion of the truth, came into Katharine's mind. She glanced at the
bed, and turned away trembling. What was she about to learn?
Something, she felt instinctively, which must change all her life.
Then she drew out the note directed to "Miss Guyon," and read it. It
was that which Gordon Frere had written to Katharine, from Cramer's,
after he had left Charles Yeldham, with the intention of starting by
the next train, on his pilgrimage of hope, to his father's rectory. It
was a bright gay note, with a pleasant allusion to their talk about
the music; a strong expression of disappointment about Katharine's not
being at the ball; an intimation that his absence would be as short as
he could make it; and that he hoped to see her immediately on his
return. Katharine dropped the hand that held the note heavily into her
lap; had she received it, what might she have been now? An undefined
fear stole over her; this was foul play; this letter had been
intercepted. What did it mean? She drew out the second in order, and
opened it. Again, a letter from Gordon Frere; again, a letter to
her--a passionate, tender, pleading, frank, hopeful letter--such a
letter as a girl might well be glad and proud to receive from the man
she loved; such a letter as Katharine had dreamed of, had hoped for,
had longed for, in the days that were gone. It was that which Gordon
had written from his father's house in the full flush of his delight,
and the perfect but not presumptuous assurance of her love. Deadly
cold and sickness crept over Katharine as she read this letter; her
limbs grew heavy, her sight grew dim, her head grew dizzy. "I must be
near fainting," she thought; "and they are not all read." She forced
herself to rise from her chair, and went to the dressing-table, where
she found water and _eau-de-cologne_. She drank a glassful of the
mixture, and then returned to her task. All this time--it was in
reality only a few minutes--the insensible form upon the bed lay
motionless and silent.
The third letter was a short one, also written by Gordon Frere, and
addressed to Mr. Guyon. It was a straightforward, manly letter, in
which the writer acknowledged his unworthiness of the blessing he
asked with more sincerity than such matter-of-course acknowledgments
usually convey, and set forth his modest confidence in Miss Guyon's
consent to become his wife. Gordon stated the prospects then opening
upon him; and finally, in accordance with his father's wish, formally
requested Mr. Guyon's permission to address his daughter. (The
old-fashioned punctilio of the good rector had helped the unscrupulous
schemer considerably, as the virtues of good men are not seldom found
to aid the devices of knaves.)
The fourth letter, which was endorsed with the words "shown to R S.,"
and was the last contained in the packet, was in Mr. Guyon's
handwriting. As his daughter read it, all the truth revealed itself to
her; all the baseness of which she had been the victim stood in its
revolting nakedness before her eyes. As she read the flowery sentences
in which Mr. Guyon condoled with his "dear young friend," and pitied
himself for being the medium of so painful a communication, a grasp
seemed to tighten upon her throat and to press down her heart: still
she read on,--read that her father had written, on her behalf, to the
effect that, feeling she had been so unfortunate as to have conveyed a
totally unfounded impression to Mr. Frere, she had shrunk from a
personal explanation, and felt sure that, when Mr. Frere should know
that she was engaged to Mr. Streightley, and their marriage was to
take place very shortly, he would excuse her making a written
one;--read that, though Mr. Guyon hoped their future friendship would
be quite unaltered, he trusted Mr. Frere would abstain from any
communication, either personal or by letter, for the present, as such
would agitate Miss Guyon, and cause much unpleasantness; and that she
and her father united in every good wish for Mr. Frere's future
welfare.
Katharine read this terrible letter over many times--not before she
understood and believed the revelation it made, but before she got the
reality of it into her mind, before it connected itself with her own
self, and showed her the past and present laid utterly waste. It was
her father who had done this,--her father! who had been kind to her,
too, after a fashion--her father! Ay, _and her husband!_
_Shown to R.S_. Shown to Robert Streightley--shown to the rich man who
had bought her. Well, she had often told herself, bitterly enough,
that it was a bargain, a purchase; but now it was more--it was a
theft! Stolen from the man who loved her! made to believe him false,
duped--wretchedly, ignominiously duped! Good God! how was she to bear
this knowledge? _Shown to R.S_. There were the words, the fatal,
damning proofs which convicted the two men who were her nearest
friends, her only protectors, of the foulest conspiracy that ever two
rascals concocted against an unhappy woman. She crushed the letters in
her clenched hand, and rose to her feet. She had taken a step forward,
her eyes flaming, her face white and fixed,--far more changed than by
the earlier, weaker shock of this dreadful night,--when the door was
softly opened, and the housekeeper came in, carrying a trayful of
tea-things. At the sight of Katharine's face she set the tray down,
and said, in a hurried whisper:
"Were you coming to call me? Is he worse?"
"I--I don't know," stammered Katharine; "I think so."
"Poor dear!" said the woman compassionately; "no wonder you are
frightened. I shouldn't have left you alone."
Then she bent down to look closely at the patient. Closer and closer
still: she felt the hand, the heart; she touched the chill forehead.
Katharine stood still and watched her, quite silent, the papers in her
clenched hand covered by the folds of her dress. The woman's touch
suddenly became more reverent as she raised the chin and made the
passive blue lips meet, as she pressed her fingers on the half-shut
eyelids, and closed them over the sightless eyes. When she had drawn
the sheet over the still, stiffening face, she turned to the dead
man's daughter, and said,
"Come away, my dear. It's all over. I must send for the doctor, as he
told me."
* * * * *
The wintry sun had been up for many hours when Mrs. Streightley
returned to her own house from that in which her father lay dead. She
had sent for Mr. Guyon's solicitor, and had a long interview with him
in the dingy dining-room. She had been wonderfully calm and collected,
the servants said; but she had not reentered her father's room, though
"the corpse is laid out beautiful, to be sure," said James to the
coachman from Portland Place, while that functionary awaited his
mistress, or her orders. She came out, looking pale and absent; and
she took no notice of the sympathising looks of her maid when she
reached home. She went at once to her room, declined all attendance,
and directed that she was not to be disturbed.
The servants wondered whether their master had been sent for; had
James been sent to the telegraph office, did coachman know? Coachman
knew nothing about it; but the lawyer was there,--perhaps he had sent
for master. And then they discussed the death, and the dead man, with
much freedom and candour.
At about two o'clock in the afternoon the footman, doing his turn of
duty by looking out of window in the hall of Mr. Streightley's house,
was surprised by seeing his mistress come downstairs in her bonnet and
cloak, with her veil down, and carrying a square parcel in her hand,
"which it looked like a box done up in paper," the man said
afterwards, when questioned concerning the circumstance.
"Open the door, William, if you please," said Mrs. Streightley.
The man obeyed, wondering.
"I am going to Queen Anne Street. I don't require the carriage," said
Katharine. And she passed out of the door, and out of the footman's
sight.