Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  He shook his fist at the low fire as if he had seen the images of his wife and her kinsman looking at him out of the hollow coals; then rising with an effort, he took one candle from the table, blew out the other, and staggered off to find his way to the room in which he was to sleep.

  The house had been so familiar to him in the old squire’s lifetime, that, drunk as he was, he had no fear of losing himself in the gloomy corridors on the upper floor.

  The garden room was a large chamber, which had been added to the house about a hundred years before, for the accommodation of a certain whimsical lady of fortune, who had married old Squire Markham’s grandfather. It was a large apartment, with small diamond-paned windows overlooking a flower-garden, which had been laid out immediately after the accession of William the Third, and was called the Dutch garden — a stiff unpicturesque parterre with flower-beds cut in geometrical forms, trimly cut box borders, quaintly-shaped shrubs, and a fountain that had long been dry. A half-glass door opened on to a flight of stone steps, leading down into this garden; which advantage, in conjunction with the superior size and furniture of the apartment, had long made the garden room the state chamber at Compton Hall. A great square bed, with gilded framework, mouldering tapestry curtains, faced the casement windows and the half-glass door, which was shrouded in winter by a curtain of tapestry like the hangings of the bed.

  George Duke set his candle on a table near the fire and looked about him.

  Millicent had spoken the truth when she said that Mrs. Meggis had made a good fire, for long as it was since the chamber had been prepared for its inhabitant, the wood and coal burned brightly behind the bars of the wide grate. The Captain replenished the fire, flung himself into a comfortable tapestried arm-chair near the hearth, and kicked off his damp worn boots.

  “There isn’t a shred about me that would have held out a week longer,” he said, as he looked at his patched and threadbare blue coat, the tarnished lace on which hung in frayed fragments here and there. “So it’s no bad fortune that brought me back to look for Mistress Millicent.”

  There are some men upon whose nature good wine has a softening and even elevating influence. There are some topers so generous in their drunkenness that they would give away kingdoms if they had them to bestow; some so tender that they weep maudlin tears over the friend of the hour, and would fain clasp all creation in one tipsy embrace; some so exalted and inspired by rich wines that grand and noble sentiments and bright poetic fancies will flow like water from their feverish lips, until those who listen must needs believe that the gods have returned to earth, and that Bacchus himself discourses from the mouth of his votaries. But the finest vintages of sunny Burgundy were wasted on George Duke. For any genial influence which the wine exercised upon him, the Captain might as well have been drinking vinegar. Even in his drunkenness he took a malicious delight in the idea that he had returned to cheat and outwit his wife. He laughed aloud — a tipsy brutal laugh; and the eyes that had grown dull under the influence of strong drink lighted up once more with that red glimmer which the Captain’s enemies declared was like the diabolical brightness in the eyes of a fiend.

  He took off his coat and waistcoat, put a pair of pistols under the pillow, and threw back the counter-pane of the bed. Then, without further preparation, he flung himself down, half burying himself in the luxurious bed which the chatelaines of Compton had counted amongst their treasures for upwards of a century.

  “I wonder whether yonder glass door is bolted,” he muttered, as he dropped off to sleep; “of course it is, though — and little matter if it wasn’t: I’m not much afraid of the honest villagers of Compton-on-the-Moor. Folks who come from the place I have just left don’t often carry much to be robbed of.”

  Mechanically his wandering right hand sought the butt-end of the pistol beneath the pillow, and so with his fingers resting on the familiar weapon, George Duke dropped off to sleep.

  It is doubtful if he had ever said a prayer in his life. He said none that night.

  CHAPTER XVIII. WHAT WAS DONE IN THE GARDEN ROOM.

  FOR Millicent Duke there was no sleep that wretched hopeless night. She did not undress, but sat still and rigid, with her hands locked together, and her eyes staring straight before her, thinking. Thinking of what?

  What was she? It was that question which some weary monotonous piece of mechanism in her brain was for ever asking, and never answering. What was she, and what had she done? What was the degree of guilt involved in this fatal marriage, and for how much of that guilt was she responsible?

  She had opposed the marriage, it is true. She had striven hard against the tender pleadings of every memory of her youth and its one undying affection; but she had yielded. She had yielded, as Darrell had but truly said, against her better judgment; or rather against some instinctive dread, some shapeless terror, in defiance of the warning accents of a mystic voice, which had whispered to her that she was not free to wed.

  What was the extent of her guilt?

  She had been simply and piously educated. She had been educated by people whose honest minds knew no degrees of right or wrong; whose creed was made up of hard unassailable doctrines; and who set up the Ten Commandments as so many stone boundaries about the Christian’s feet, and left him without one gap or loophole by which he might escape their full significance.

  What would the curate of Compton say to her the next day when she went to him to fall at his feet and tell her miserable story? Strange weakness of poor human nature! It was of the Compton curate she thought rather than of his Divine Master. She dreaded that the priest would be pitiless, and forgot the illimitable tenderness, the inexhaustible compassion of Him whose example the priest was bound to follow. Her intellect was not strong enough to support her in this terrible crisis of her life. She exaggerated the enormity of her sin. She fancied herself the victim of some hideous fatality. Not Œdipus, in the hour when the revelation of his unconscious guilt burst fully on his tortured spirit, could have felt a deeper horror of his crime, than this poor frail fair-haired woman, who cast herself upon the ground, and lay grovelling there and tearing her pale golden hair, crying out again and again that she was a guilty and a miserable creature.

  Then, above even the thought of her sin, more horrible even than this consciousness of guilt, arose the black shadow of her future life — her future life, which was to be spent with him — with this hated and dreaded being, who now had a good excuse for the fall exercise of his jealous spite against her, suppressed before, but never hidden. She tried to think of what her life would be — the light of Heaven blotted out, the angry hand of offended Providence stretched forth against her, and the cruel eyes of George Duke watching and gloating upon her anguish, till her miseries wore her life away, and she dropped into her grave and went to meet the eternal punishment of her sins.

  The thought of these things maddened her. She went to a bureau opposite the empty fireplace and opened a drawer. She was in the room which had once been occupied by her dead father and mother, and she remembered that in this drawer there were some razors that had belonged to the old squire. She found the case containing them, and taking one of them in her hand looked at the shining blade. For one desperate moment she had thought that she would put an end to her wretched life, and thus cheat George Duke of his victim; but this gentle pious patient creature was not of the stuff out of which suicides are made.

  “O, no,” she cried piteously; “no, no, no, I cannot die with my sins unrepented of.”

  In her terror of herself and eagerness to escape temptation, she was awkward in shutting the razor; be awkward, that before she could succeed in doing it, the blade slipped between the old-fashioned handle and cut her across the inside of her hand. It was not a dangerous cut, nor yet a very deep one, but deep enough to send the blood spattering over the razor-blade and handle, the oak flooring, the open drawer of the bureau, and the skirt of Millicent’s mourning dress.

  She thrust the razor back into the case, and
the case into the drawer, bound up her hand with a cambric handkerchief, and sat down again by the empty hearth, “O, if Sally were here — my good faithful Sally — what a comfort she would be to me!” said Mrs. Duke.

  The stillness and loneliness of the house oppressed her. She opened the window and looked out at the snow-covered garden below. The feathery flakes still falling, always falling, thick and silently from the starless sky, shut out the world and closed about the old house like a vast white winding-sheet. The casement whence Millicent looked was at that angle of the house which was most remote from the garden room; but she could see at the further end of the terrace the reflection of the fire-light shining through one uncurtained window red upon the snow.

  The red reflection made a luminous patch upon the ground, peculiarly bright when contrasted with the surrounding darkness.

  As Millicent looked at this illuminated spot, some dark object crossed it rapidly, blotting out the light for a moment.

  It was such, a night of wretchedness and misery, that this circumstance, which at another time might have alarmed her, made no impression upon Mrs. Duke’s bewildered mind. She closed the casement, and returned to the fireplace, where she sat down again, in the same listless attitude, and with the same sad despairing face staring blankly at the cheerless hearth.

  But the silence and solitude became utterly intolerable to her: she took the candle in her hand, opened her chamber door, went out upon the landing-place, and listened. Listened, she knew not for what — listened, perhaps hoping for some sound to break that intolerable stillness.

  She could hear the ticking of the clock in the hall below. Beyond that, nothing. Not a sound, not a breath, not a murmur, not a whisper throughout the house.

  Suddenly — to her dying day she never knew how the idea took possession of her — she thought that she would go straight to the garden room, awake George Duke, make him an offer of every guinea she had or was likely to have in the world, and entreat him to leave her and Compton for ever.

  She would appeal to his mercy — no, rather to his avarice and self-interest; she knew of old how little mercy she need expect from him. She turned into the long corridor loading to the other end of the house, and walked rapidly towards her husband’s chamber. The door of the garden room was shut, and Mrs. Duke’s right hand being wounded, and muffled in a handkerchief, she was some time trying to turn the handle of the lock. The blood from the cut across her hand had oozed through the bandage, and left red smears upon the old-fashioned brass knob.

  Millicent was perhaps rather more than two minutes trying to open the door.

  All was still within the garden chamber. The firelight shone in fitful flashes upon the faded tapestry and the dim pictures on the walls. Millicent crept softly round to the side of the bed upon which Captain Duke had thrown himself. The sleeper lay with his face turned towards the fire, and his hand still resting on the butt-end of his pistol — exactly as he had lain an hour before, when he fell asleep.

  Millicent remembered how her brother Ringwood had lain in this very room, dead and tranquil, but three months before. Awe-stricken by the stillness, terrified by the thought of the desperate proposition she was about to make, Millicent paused between the foot of the bed and the fireplace, wondering how she should awake her husband.

  The firelight, changeful and capricious, now played upon the sleeper’s ringlets, lying in golden-brown tangles upon the pillow, now glanced upon the white fingers resting on the pistol, now flashed upon the tarnished gilding of the bed-posts, now glimmered on the ceiling, now lit up the wall; while Millicent’s weary eyes followed the light, as a traveller, astray on a dark night, follows a will-o’-the-wisp.

  She followed the light wherever it pleased to lead her. From the golden ringlets on the pillow to the hand upon the pistol, from the gilded bed-posts to the ceiling and the wall, lower and lower down the wall, creeping stealthily downwards, to the oaken floor beside the bed, and to a black pool which lay there, slowly saturating the time-blackened wood.

  The black pool was blood — a pool that grew wider every second, fed by a stream which was silently pouring from a hideous gash across the throat of Captain George Duke, of the good ship Vulture.

  With one long cry of horror, Millicent Duke turned and fled.

  Even in her blind unreasoning terror she remembered that it was easier to escape from that horrible house by the glass door leading to the garden than by the staircase and the hall. This half-glass door was in a recess, before which hung the tapestry curtains. Millicent dashed aside the drapery, opened the door, which was only fastened by one bolt, and rushed down the stone steps, across the garden, along the neglected pathways, and out on to the high road.

  The snow was knee-deep as she tottered through it onward towards the village street. She never knew how she dragged her weary limbs over the painful distance; but she knew that the clocks were striking three when she knocked at the door of the Black Bear.

  The door was opened by Samuel Pecker, whose limited intellect had sustained a severe shock from the events of the day, and who was yet more terrified by this unwonted knocking, which had aroused him from a muddled dream in which innumerable Captain Dukes and roast turkeys had gibbered at and mocked him in bewildering confusion. Pale as ashes, and with his garments flung upon him in picturesque disorder, Mr. Pecker came to attend this mysterious summons. Millicent had been knocking some time when he opened the door a few inches wide, and, candle in hand, looked out of the aperture.

  So had he opened that very door for the same visitor more than seven years ago, upon a certain autumn night, when Darrell Markham lay above stairs in the blue room, prostrate and delirious.

  “Who is it?” he asked, shivering in every limb.

  “It is I — Millicent. Let me in, let me in; for the love of God, let me in!”

  There was such terror in her voice as made the innkeeper forgetful of any alarm of his own. He gave way before this terrified woman as all men must yield to the might of such intense emotion, and opening the door wide, let her pass by him unquestioned.

  The hall was all ablaze with light. Darrell Markham, Mrs. Pecker, and the servants had come down half dressed, each carrying a lighted candle. The night had been one of agitation and excitement; none had slept well, and all had been aroused by the knocking.

  No unearthly shadow of the dead, or unholy double of the living, no ghost newly arisen in the grave-clothes of the long-buried, could have struck more horror to these people’s minds than did the figure of Millicent Duke, standing amidst them, her pale dishevelled hair damp with the melted snow, her disordered garments trailing about her, wet and blood-stained, her eyes dilated in the same fixed gaze of horrified astonishment with which she had looked upon the murdered man, and her wounded hand, from which the handkerchief had dropped, dyed red with hideous smears.

  She stood amongst them for some moments, neither speaking to them nor looking at them, but with her eyes still fixed in that horror-stricken stare, and her wounded hand wandering about her forehead till her brow and hair were disfigured with the same red smears.

  His own face blanched to the ghastly hue of hers, as Darrell Markham looked at his cousin. Some horrible dread — shapeless but unspeakably terrible — took possession of him, and for the moment he was powerless to question her. Sarah Pecker was the first to recover her presence of mind.

  “Miss Milly,” she said, trying to take the distracted girl in her arms; “what is it? What has happened? Tell me, dear.”

  At the sound of this familiar voice the fixed eyes turned towards the speaker, and Millicent Duke burst into a long hysterical laugh.

  “My God,” cried Darrell, “that man has driven her mad!”

  “Yes, mad!” answered Millicent, “mad! Who can wonder? He is murdered. I saw it with my own eyes. His throat cut from ear to ear, and the red blood bubbling slowly from the wound to join that black pool upon the floor. O, Darrell! Sarah! have pity upon me, have pity upon me, and never let me ente
r that dreadful house again!”

  She fell on her knees at their feet and held up her clasped hands.

  “Be calm, dear, be calm,” said Mrs. Pecker, trying to lift her from the ground. “See, darling, you are with those who love you — with Master Darrell, and with your faithful old Sally, and with all friends about you. What is it, dear? who is murdered?”

  “George Duke.”

  “The Captain murdered! But who could have done it, Miss Milly? Who could have done such a dreadful deed?”

  She shook her head piteously, but made no reply.

  It was now for the first time that Darrell interfered.

  “Take her upstairs,” he said to Mrs. Pecker, in an undertone. “For God’s sake, take her away! Ask her no questions, but get her away from all these people, if you love her.”

  Sarah obeyed; and between them they carried Millicent to the room in which Darrell had been sleeping. A few embers still burned in the grate, and the bed was scarcely disturbed, for the young man had thrown himself dressed upon the outside of the counterpane. On this bed Sarah Pecker laid Millicent, while Darrell with his own hands relighted the fire.

  On entering the room he had taken the precaution of locking the door, so that they were sure of being undisturbed; but they could hear the voices of the agitated servants and the innkeeper loud and confused below.

  Mrs. Pecker occupied herself in taking off Millicent’s wet shoes, and bathing her forehead with water and some reviving essence.

  “Blood on her forehead!” she said, “blood on her hand, blood on her clothes! Poor dear, poor dear! what can they have been doing to her?”

  Darrell Markham laid his hand upon her shoulder and the innkeeper’s wife could feel that the strong man trembled violently.