Tom Sampson, sitting by his comfortable fire-side, solacing himself for the Sabbath dulness With a cup of strong tea and a dish of buttered toast, was also surprised by a letter from the Manor House, asking him to go there between eight and nine that evening.
“I am sorry to trouble you about business on Sunday, but this is a matter which will not keep,’ wrote John Treverton.
‘I never did!’ exclaimed Eliza Sampson, when her brother had read the brief letter aloud.
Eliza was always protesting that she never did. This fragmentary phrase was her favourite expression of astonishment.
And then Miss Sampson began to speculate upon the probable nature of the business which required her brother’s presence at the Manor House. People who live in such a secluded village as Hazlehurst are very glad of anything to wonder about on a Sunday evening in winter.
At half-past eight precisely, Mr. Sampson presented himself at the Manor House, and was shown into the library. This room was rarely used, as Mr. and Mrs. Treverton kept all their favourite books elsewhere. Here, on these massive oaken shelves, there was no literature that was not at least a century old It was a repository for the genius of the dead. Travels, from Marco Polo to Captain Cook; histories, from Herodotus to Mrs. Catherine Macaulay; poetry, from Chaucer to Milton; all bound in soberest brown calf, all with the dust of years thick upon their upper edges. It was a long, narrow room, with three tall windows, curtained with faded crimson cloth. It had an awful and almost judicial look on this Sunday evening, dimly lighted by a pair of moderator lamps on the centre table, making a focus of light in the middle of the room, and leaving the corners in darkness. There was a good fire in the wide old basket-shaped grate, and Tom Sampson sat beside it, waiting for his host to appear. Trimmer had told him that Mr. Treverton would be with him presently.
Presently seemed to mean half an hour, for the clock struck nine while Mr. Sampson still waited. Not having any inclination to dip into the literature of the past, he had allowed the fire to draw him to sleep, and was slumbering placidly when the door opened and Trimmer announced Mr. Clare.
Tom Sampson started up, and rubbed his eyes, thinking for the moment that he had fallen asleep by the fire in his snuggery, and that Eliza had come to call him to supper — supper being another of those solaces which Mr. Sampson required to beguile the dulness of Sunday leisure.
The Vicar was surprised to see Mr. Sampson, and Mr. Sampson was equally surprised to see the Vicar. They told each other how they had been summoned.
‘It must be something rather important,” said Mr. Clare.
“It must be something connected with the estate, or he would scarcely want you and me,’ said Sampson.
John Treverton and his wife entered the room together. Both were very pale, but Laura’s countenance wore a look of keen distress, which had no part in the expression of her husband’s face. Secure of his wife’s allegiance, he was ready to meet calamity, whatever shape it might assume.
‘Mr. Clare, Mr. Sampson, I have sent for you as the trustees under my cousin Jasper’s will,’ he began, when he had apologised to the lawyer for letting him wait so long, and had placed Laura in a chair near the fire.
‘That’s a misnomer,’ said Sampson. ‘Our trusts under Jasper Treverton’s will determined on your wedding day. We are only trustees to the settlement made for Miss Malcolm’s benefit, sixteen years ago, and to your wife’s marriage settlement.’
‘I have sent for you to tell you that I have been guilty of a fraud upon you, and upon this Lady,’ answered John Treverton, in a steady voice.
He was going on with his self-denunciation, when the door opened, and Trimmer announced Mr. Edward Clare.
The young man came into the room quickly, looking round him with a swift, viperish glance. He was surprised to see Laura, still more surprised at the presence of Tom Sampson. He had expected to find his father and Treverton alone.
John Treverton looked at the intruder with undisguised irritation.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he said, ‘but perhaps when I tell you that your father and Mr. Sampson are here to discuss a business of some importance to me — and to them as my wife’s trustees — you’ll be kind enough to amuse yourself in the drawing-room until we’ve finished our conversation.’
‘I have come to speak to Mrs. Treverton. I have something to say to her which she ought to hear — which she must hear — and that without an hour’s delay,’ said Edward. ‘Accident has made me acquainted with a secret which concerns her and her welfare — and I am here to communicate it to her, and — in the first instance-to her alone. It will be for her to act upon that knowledge — for me to defer to her.’
‘If your secret concerns me, it must concern my husband also,’ said Laura, rising and taking her stand beside John Treverton. ‘Whatever touches my happiness must involve his. You can speak out, Edward. Possibly your fancied secret is no secret.’
‘What do you mean?’ stammered Edward, startled by her calm look and resolute tone.
‘Have you come to tell me that my husband, John Treverton, was for a short period of his life known by the name of Chicot?’
‘Yes, that, and much else,’ answered Edward, deeply mortified at finding himself forestalled.
‘You wish to tell me, perhaps, that he has been suspected of murder.’
‘So strongly suspected, and upon such evidence, that it will need all your wifely trustfulness to believe him innocent,’ retorted Edward, with a malignant sneer.
‘Yet I do believe in his innocence — I am as certain of it as I am that I myself am no murderess — and if the evidence against him were doubly strong, my trust in him would not fail,’ said Laura, facing the accuser proudly.
‘And now, Mr. Clare, since you find that your secret is everybody’s secret, and that my wife knows all you can tell her about me — —’
‘Your wife,’ sneered Edward. ‘Yes, it is as well to call her by that name.’
‘She is my wife — bound to me as securely as the law and the church can bind her.’
‘You had another wife living when you married her — unless you have been remarried since your first wife’s death — —’
‘We have been so married. My wife was never mine, save in name, until I was a free man, — free to claim her before God and the world.’
‘Then your first marriage was a deliberate felony, and a deliberate fraud,’ cried Edward, ‘a felony because it was a bigamous marriage, for which the law of the land could punish you, even now; a fraud because by it you pretended to fulfil the conditions of your cousin’s will, when you were not in a position to comply with them.’
‘Stop, Mr. Edward Clare,’ exclaimed Tom Sampson, whose quick perception had by this time made him master of the case, ‘you are assuming a great deal more than you can sustain. You are going very much too fast. What evidence have you that my client’s first marriage was a legal one? What evidence have you that he was ever married to Mademoiselle Chicot? We know how very loosely tied such alliances are apt to be in that class of life.’
‘How do I know that he was married to her?’ echoed Edward. ‘Why, by his own admission.’
‘My client admits nothing,’ said Sampson with dignity.
‘He admits everything when he tells you that he was remarried to Miss Malcolm after Madame Chicot’s death. Had he known his first marriage with Miss Malcolm to be valid there would have been no occasion for a repetition of the ceremony.’
‘He may have erred from excess of caution,’ said Sampson.
‘John Treverton,’ said the vicar, who had been looking from one speaker to the other, the facts of the case slowly dawning upon him, ‘ this is very dreadful. Why is my son here as your accuser? What does it all mean?’
‘It means that I have been guilty of a great wrong,’ answered Treverton quietly, ‘and that I am ready to undo that wrong, so far as it lies in my power. But I cannot discuss this question in, your son’s presence. He has entered this room
to-night as my avowed enemy. To you — to Sampson — as the trustees under my cousin’s will, I am prepared to speak with fullest confidence — as I have already spoken to my wife — but I have no confession to make to your son, I recognise no right of his to interfere in my affairs.’
‘No, Edward, really, this is no concern of yours,’ said the Vicar.
‘Is it not?’ cried his son, bitterly. ‘But for my discovery, but for the presence of George Gerard in the church to-day, do you suppose this virtuous gentleman would have made his confession to his wife or his wife’s trustees? He saw himself identified to-day by the doctor who attended his first wife, who knows the story of his late career under the alias of Chicot. Finding himself face to face with an inevitable discovery, Mr. Treverton very cleverly yields to the pressure of circumstances, and makes a clean breast of it. Had Gerard never appeared in Hazlehurst, this honourable gentleman would have gone on till doomsday, untroubled by any scruples of conscience.’
The Vicar looked at his son wonderingly. Was this a loyal regard for truth and justice, or was it the spirit of hatred and envy which moved the youth so strongly? The good, easy-going Vicar, full of charity for all the world, except a Lad cook, could not bring himself all in a moment to think evil of his son. Nor was he ready to believe John Treverton the vilest of sinners. Yet, here was John Treverton accused by the Vicar’s own son of an unpardonable fraud, and suspected of the darkest crime.
‘If you will tell your son to retire, we may discuss this business without prejudice or passion,’ said John. ‘But as long as he is present my lips are sealed.’
‘I have no wish to remain a moment longer,’ answered Edward. ‘I hope Mrs. Treverton knows that I am ready to serve her with zeal and devotion, should she deign to demand my aid.’
‘I know that you are my husband’s enemy,’ answered Laura, with freezing contempt, ‘and that is all I know or care to know about you.’
‘That’s hard upon an old friend, Laura,’ remonstrated the Vicar, as Edward left the room
‘Has he not dealt hardly by my husband?’ answered Laura, with a stifled sob.
‘Now, let us try and look this business in the face,’ said Mr. Sampson, seating himself quietly at the table and taking out his note-book. ‘According to your confession, Mr. Treverton, you had a wife living at the date of your first marriage with Miss Malcolm, December the thirty-first of the year before last. We have nothing to do with your second marriage — except so far, of course, as the lady’s honour is concerned. That second marriage can’t touch the property. Now, I am sorry to tell you that if your marriage with the French dancer was a good marriage, you have no more right to be in this house, or to hold an acre of Jasper Treverton’s land, than the meanest hind in Hazlehurst.’
‘I am ready to deliver up all I hold, to-morrow. Let the hospital be founded. I acknowledge myself an impostor. Shameful as the act appears now that I contemplate it coldly, it seemed hardly a fraud when it first suggested itself to my mind. I saw a way of securing the estate to my cousin’s adopted daughter. I knew it had been his dearest wish that she should possess it. When I went through the ceremony of marriage with Laura Malcolm in Hazlehurst Church, I had but the faintest hope of ever being really her husband. When I made the postnuptial settlement which was to secure to her the full enjoyment of the estate, I had no hope of ever sharing that estate with her. On my honour, as a man and a gentleman, it was for this dear girl’s sake I did these acts, and with no view to my own happiness or aggrandisement.’
Laura’s hand had been in his all the time he was speaking. Its warm grasp at the close of this speech told him that he was believed.
‘If you make these facts public, you beggar yourself and your wife,’ said Sampson,
‘No, we shall not be penniless,’ exclaimed Laura. ‘There will be my income left. It is not quite three hundred a year, but we can manage to live upon that, can’t we, John?’
‘I could live contentedly on a crust a day in the dingiest garret in Seven Dials, if you were with me; answered her husband, in a low voice.
Mr. Clare was walking up and down the room in a state of suppressed excitement. The whole business was too dreadful: he was hardly able to realise the enormity of the thing. This John Treverton was a scoundrel, and the estate must all go to found a hospital. Poor Laura must leave her luxurious home. The parish would be a heavy loser. It was sad, and troublesome, and altogether fraught with perplexity. And the Vicar had a cordial liking for this John Treverton.
‘What have you to say about the murder of that poor creature — your first wife?’ he exclaimed, presently, walking up to the hearth by which Treverton and Laura were standing.
‘Only that I know no more who killed her than you do,’ answered John Treverton. ‘I did a foolish thing, perhaps a cowardly thing, when I left the house that night, with the determination never to return to it; but if you could know how intolerable my old life had become to me you would hardly wonder that I took the first opportunity of getting away from it.’
‘We had better look at things from a business point of view,’ said Mr. Sampson. ‘We are not going to do anything in a hurry. There will always be time enough for you to surrender the estate, Mr. Treverton, and to acknowledge yourself guilty of bigamy. But before you take such a step we may as well make ourselves sure of our facts. You married Mademoiselle Chicot in Paris?’
‘Yes, on the eighteenth of May, sixty-eight. We were married at the Mairie. There was no other ceremony.’
‘Under what name were you married ?’
‘My own naturally. It was only afterwards that I got to be known by my wife’s name.’
‘Were you known to many people in. Paris by your own name?’
‘To very few. I had written in the news papers under a nom de plume, — my sketches at that time were all signed “Jack.” I was generally known as Jack, and after my marriage I became Jack Chicot.’
‘How much did you know of your wife’s antecedents?’
‘Very little, except that she had come to Paris from Auray, in Brittany, about five years before I married her; that she lived reputably, although surrounded by much that was disreputable,’
‘But of her life in Brittany you knew nothing?’
‘I only knew what she told me. She was a fisherman’s daughter, born and reared in extreme poverty. She had grown weary of the hard monotony of her life, and had come to Paris alone, and for the most part of the way on foot, to make her fortune. Auray is a long day’s journey from Paris by rail. It took her nearly a month to travel the distance.’
‘That is all you know?’
‘Positively all.’
‘Then you cannot know that she was free to contract a marriage — and you cannot know that you were legally married to her?’ said Tom Sampson, triumphantly.
His interests as well as his client’s were at stake, and he was determined to make a hard fight for them. His stewardship was worth a good five hundred a year. If the estate came to be handed over for the establishment and main tenance of a hospital he would in all probability lose his position of land steward and collector of rents. Some officious committee would oust him from his post. His trusteeship would bring him nothing but trouble.
‘That is a curious way of looking at the question,’ said Treverton, thoughtfully.
‘It is the only right way. Why should any man be in a hurry to prove himself guilty of felony? How do you know that Mademoiselle Chicot did not leave a husband behind her at Auray? It may have been to escape from his ill-treatment that she came to Paris. That was a desperate step for a young woman to take — a month’s journey throng a strange country, alone, and on foot
‘She was so young,’ said Treverton.
‘Not too young to have married foolishly.’
‘What would you advise me to do?’
‘I’ll tell you to-morrow, when I’ve had time to think the matter over. I can tell you in the meantime what I would advise you not to do.’
‘Wh
at is that?’
‘Don’t surrender your estate till you — and we, as your wife’s trustees, — are thoroughly convinced that you have no right to hold it. Mr. Clare, I must ask you, as my co-trustee to Mrs. Treverton’s marriage settlement, to be silent as to the whole of the facts that have become known to us to-night, and to request your son also to keep his knowledge to himself.’
‘My son can have no motive for injuring Mr. and Mrs. Treverton,’ said the Vicar.
‘Of course not,’ replied Sampson; ‘yet I thought his manner this evening was somewhat vindictive.’
‘I believe he was only moved by his regard for Laura,’ answered the Vicar. ‘He took up the matter warmly because he considered that she had been deeply injured. I can but think so too, and I do not wonder that my son should feel indignant. As to the legal bearing of the case, Mr. Sampson, I leave you to judge that, and to deal with that as you best may for the interests of your client. But as to its moral aspect, I should do less than my duty as a minister of the Gospel if I were not to declare that Mr. Treverton has been guilty of a sin which can only be atoned by deep and honest repentance. I will say no more than that now. Good-night, Treverton. Good-night, Laura.’
He took her in his arms and kissed her with fatherly affection. ‘Keep up your courage, my poor girl,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I wish your husband well out of his difficulties, for your sake. Will you come home to the Vicarage with me, and talk over your troubles with Celia? It might be a relief to you.’
‘Leave my husband!’ exclaimed Laura. ‘Leave him in grief and trouble! How could you think me capable of such a thing?’ And then she drew the Vicar aside, and, in a tremulous voice, which was little more than a whisper, said to him, ‘Dear Mr. Clare, try not to think evil of my husband, for my sake. I know that he has sinned; but he has been sorely tempted. He could not judge the extent of the wrong he was doing. Tell me that you do not suspect him as he has been suspected; that you are not influenced by Edward’s cruel words. You do not believe that he killed his wife?’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 616