_SPICED CLARET_
I did not lie down; but I despaired. I walked round and round the room,
wringing my hands in utter distraction. I threw myself at the bedside on my
knees. I could not pray; I could only shiver and moan, with hands clasped,
and eyes of horror turned up to heaven. I think Madame was, in her
malignant way, perplexed. That some evil was intended me I am sure she was
persuaded; but I dare say Meg Hawkes had said rightly in telling me that
she was not fully in their secrets.
The first paroxysm of despair subsided into another state. All at once my
mind was filled with the idea of Meg Hawkes, her enterprise, and my chances
of escape. There is one point at which the road to Elverston makes a short
ascent: there is a sudden curve there, two great ash-trees, with a roadside
stile between, at the right side, covered with ivy. Driving back and
forward, I did not recollect having particularly remarked this point in
the highway; but now it was before me, in the thin light of the thinnest
segment of moon, and the figure of Meg Hawkes, her back toward me, always
ascending towards Elverston. It was constantly the same picture--the same
motion without progress--the same dreadful suspense and impatience.
I was now sitting on the side of the bed, looking wistfully across the
room. When I did not see Meg Hawkes, I beheld Madame darkly eyeing first
one then another point of the chamber, evidently puzzling over some
problem, and in one of her most savage moods--sometimes muttering to
herself, sometimes protruding, and sometimes screwing up her great mouth.
She went into her own room, where she remained, I think, nearly ten
minutes, and on her return there was that in the flash of her eyes, the
glow of her face, and the peculiar fragrance that surrounded her, that
showed she had been partaking of her favourite restorative.
I had not moved since she left my room.
She paused about the middle of the floor, and looked at me with what I can
only describe as her wild-beast stare.
'You are a very secrete family, you Ruthyns--you are so coning. I hate the
coning people. By my faith, I weel see Mr. Silas Ruthyn, and ask wat he
mean. I heard him tell old Wyat that Mr. Dudley is gone away to-night. He
shall tell me everything, or else I weel make echec et mat aussi vrai que
je vis.'
Madame's words had hardly ceased, when I was again watching Meg Hawkes on
the steep road, mounting, but never reaching, the top of the acclivity, on
the way to Elverston, and mentally praying that she might be brought
safely there. Vain prayer of an agonised heart! Meg's journey was already
frustrated: she was not to reach Elverston in time.
Madame revisited her apartment, and returned, not, I think, improved in
temper. She walked about the room, hustling the scanty furniture hither and
thither as she encountered it. She kicked her empty box out of her way,
with a horrid crash, and a curse in French. She strode and swaggered round
the room, muttering all the way, and turning the corners of her course with
a furious whisk. At last, out of the door she went. I think she fancied she
had not been sufficiently taken into confidence as to what was intended for
me.
It was now growing late, and yet no succour! I was seized, I remember, with
a dreadful icy shivering.
I was listening for signals of deliverance. At every distant sound, half
stifled with a palpitation, these sounds piercing my ear with a horrible
and exaggerated distinctness--'Oh Meg!--Oh cousin Monica!--Oh come! Oh
Heaven, have mercy!--Lord, have mercy!' I thought I heard a roaring and
jangle of voices. Perhaps it came from Uncle Silas's room. It might be the
tipsy violence of Madame. It might--merciful Heaven!--be the arrival of
friends. I started to my feet; I listened, quivering with attention. Was
it in my brain?--was it real? I was at the door, and it seemed to open of
itself. Madame had forgotten to lock it; she was losing her head a little
by this time. The key stood in the gallery door beyond; it too, was open.
I fled wildly. There was a subsiding sound of voices in my uncle's room.
I was, I know not how, on the lobby at the great stair-head outside my
uncle's apartment. My hand was on the banisters, my foot on the first step,
when below me and against the faint light that glimmered through the great
window on the landing I saw a bulky human form ascending, and a voice said
'Hush!' I staggered back, and at that instant fancied, with a thrill of
conviction, I heard Lady Knollys's voice in Uncle Silas' room.
I don't know how I entered the room; I was there like a ghost. I was
frightened at my own state.
Lady Knollys was not there--no one but Madame and my guardian.
I can never forget the look that Uncle Silas fixed on me as he cowered,
seemingly as appalled as I.
I think I must have looked like a phantom newly risen from the grave.
'What's that?--where do you come from?' whispered he.
'Death! death!' was my whispered answer, as I froze with terror where I
stood.
'What does she mean?--what does all this mean?' said Uncle Silas,
recovering wonderfully, and turning with a withering sneer on Madame. 'Do
you think it right to disobey my plain directions, and let her run about
the house at this hour?'
'Death! death! Oh, pray to God for you and me!' I whispered in the same
dreadful tones.
My uncle stared strangely at me again; and after several horrible seconds,
in which he seemed to have recovered himself, he said, sternly and coolly--
'You give too much place to your imagination, niece. Your spirits are in an
odd state--you ought to have advice.'
'Oh, uncle, pity me! Oh, uncle, you are good! you're kind; you're kind
when you think. You could not--you could not--could not! Oh, think of your
brother that was always so good to you! He sees me here. He sees us both.
Oh, save me, uncle--save me!--and I'll give up everything to you. I'll pray
to God to bless you--I'll never forget your goodness and mercy. But don't
keep me in doubt. If I'm to go, oh, for God's sake, shoot me now!'
'You were always odd, niece; I begin to fear you are insane,' he replied,
in the same stern icy tone.
'Oh, uncle--oh!--am I? Am I _mad_?'
'I hope not; but you'll conduct yourself like a sane person if you wish to
enjoy the privileges of one.'
Then, with his finger pointing at me, he turned to Madame, and said, in a
tone of suppressed ferocity--
'What's the meaning of this?--why is she here?'
Madame was gabbling volubly, but to me it was only a shrilly noise. My
whole soul was concentrated in my uncle, the arbiter of my life, before
whom I stood in the wildest agony of supplication.
That night was dreadful. The people I saw dizzily, made of smoke or shining
vapour, smiling or frowning, I could have passed my hand through them. They
were evil spirits.
'There's no ill intended you; by ---- there's none,' said my uncle, for
the first time violently agitated. 'Madame told you why we've changed your
room. You told her about the bailiffs, did not you?' with a stamp of fury
he demanded of Madame, whose nasal roullades of talk were running on like an
accompaniment all the time. She had told me indeed only a few hours since,
and now it sounded to me like the echo of something heard a month ago or
more.
'You can't go about the house, d--n it, with bailiffs in occupation. There
now--there's the whole thing. Get to your room, Maud, and don't vex me.
There's a good girl.'
He was trying to smile as he spoke these last words, and, with quavering
soft tones, to quiet me; but the old scowl was there, the smile was
corpse-like and contorted, and the softness of his tones was more dreadful
than another man's ferocity.
'There, Madame, she'll go quite gently, and you can call if you want help.
Don't let it happen again.'
'Come, Maud,' said Madame, encircling but not hurting my arm with her grip;
'let us go, my friend.'
I did go, you will wonder, as well you may--as you may wonder at the
docility with which strong men walk through the press-room to the drop,
and thank the people of the prison for their civility when they bid them
good-bye, and facilitate the fixing of the rope and adjusting of the cap.
Have you never wondered that they don't make a last battle for life with
the unscrupulous energy of terror, instead of surrendering it so gently in
cold blood, on a silent calculation, the arithmetic of despair?
I went upstairs with Madame like a somnambulist. I rather quickened my
step as I drew near my room. I went in, and stood a phantom at the window,
looking into the dark quadrangle. A thin glimmering crescent hung in the
frosty sky, and all heaven was strewn with stars. Over the steep roof at
the other side spread on the dark azure of the night this glorious blazonry
of the unfathomable Creator. To me a dreadful scroll--inexorable eyes--the
cloud of cruel witnesses looking down in freezing brightness on my prayers
and agonies.
I turned about and sat down, leaning my head upon my arms. Then suddenly I
sat up, as for the first time the picture of Uncle Silas's littered
room, and the travelling bags and black boxes plied on the floor by his
table--the desk, hat-case, umbrella, coats, rugs, and mufflers, all ready
for a journey--reached my brain and suggested thought. The _mise en
scène_ had remained in every detail fixed upon my retina; and how I
wondered--'When is he going--how soon? Is he going to carry me away and
place me in a madhouse?'
'Am I--am I mad?' I began to think. 'Is this all a dream, or is it real?'
I remembered how a thin polite gentleman, with a tall grizzled head and a
black velvet waistcoat, came into the carriage on our journey, and said a
few words to me; how Madame whispered him something, and he murmured 'Oh!'
very gently, with raised eyebrows, and a glance at me, and thenceforward
spoke no more to me, only to Madame, and at the next station carried his
hat and other travelling chattels into another carriage. Had she told him I
was mad?
These horrid bars! Madame always with me! The direful hints that dropt from
my uncle! My own terrific sensations!--All these evidences revolved in my
brain, and presented themselves in turn like writings on a wheel of fire.
There came a knock to the door--
Oh, Meg! Was it she? No; old Wyat whispered Madame something about her
room.
So Madame re-entered, with a little silver tray and flagon in her hands,
and a glass. Nothing came from Uncle Silas in ungentlemanlike fashion.
'Drink, Maud,' said Madame, raising the cover, and evidently enjoying the
fragrant steam.
I could not. I might have done so had I been able to swallow anything--for
I was too distracted to think of Meg's warning.
Madame suddenly recollected her mistake of that evening, and tried the
door; but it was duly locked. She took the key from her pocket and placed
it in her breast.
'You weel 'av these rooms to yourself, ma chère. I shall sleep downstairs
to-night.'
She poured out some of the hot claret into the glass abstractedly, and
drank it off.
''Tis very good--I drank without theenk. Bote 'tis very good. Why don't you
drink some?'
'I could not', I repeated. And Madame boldly helped herself.
'Vary polite, certally, to Madame was it to send nothing at all for _hair_'
(so she pronounced 'her'); 'bote is all same thing.' And so she ran on in
her tipsy vein, which was loud and sarcastic, with a fierce laugh now and
then.
Afterwards I heard that they were afraid of Madame, who was given to cross
purposes, and violent in her cups. She had been noisy and quarrelsome
downstairs. She was under the delusion that I was to be conveyed away that
night to a remote and safe place, and she was to be handsomely compensated
for services and evidence to be afterwards given. She was not to be
trusted, however, with the truth. That was to be known but to three people
on earth.
I never knew, but I believe that the spiced claret which Madame drank was
drugged. She was a person who could, I have been told, drink a great deal
without exhibiting any change from it but an inflamed colour and furious
temper. I can only state for certain what I saw, and that was, that shortly
after she had finished the claret she laid down upon my bed, and, I now
know, fell asleep. I then thought she was _feigning_ sleep only, and that
she was really watching me.
About an hour after this I suddenly heard a little _clink_ in the
yard beneath. I peeped out, but saw nothing. The sound was repeated,
however--sometimes more frequently, sometimes at long intervals. At last,
in the deep shadow next the farther wall, I thought I could discover a
figure, sometimes erect, sometimes stooping and bowing toward the earth. I
could see this figure only in the rudest outline mingling with the dark.
Like a thunderbolt it smote my brain. 'They are making my grave!'
After the first dreadful stun I grew quite wild, and ran up and down the
room wringing my hands and gasping prayers to heaven. Then a calm stole
over me--such a dreadful calm as I could fancy glide over one who floated
in a boat under the shadow of the 'Traitor's Gate,' leaving life and hope
and trouble behind.
Shortly after there came a very low tap at my door; then another, like a
tiny post-knock. I could never understand why it was I made no answer. Had
I done so, and thus shown that I was awake, it might have sealed my fate.
I was standing in the middle of the floor staring at the door, which I
expected to see open, and admit I knew not what troop of spectres.