“Let him — let him — let him,” I thought; “let him mount the ladder; and when he reaches the highest round — then — then—”
In the following March there were some changes made in the office. Tyndale and Tyndale had a branch house of business in Thames-street, London; and into this house Christopher Weldon was drafted, with a salary nearly double that which he had received in Willborougrh.
The change came about very suddenly. They wanted someone of gentlemanly appearance and polished manners in the London office, and Weldon, they said, was the very man.
I had not spoken to Lucy Malden for upwards of two months; but I thought I would go and tell her this piece of news.
“I shall find out whether she really loves him,” I thought.
She sat at her old place at the window, in the cold spring twilight, when I followed her father into the house and bade her good evening.
She was not paler than usual, for she had always been pale; nor graver, for she was always grave; but in spite of this, I saw that she had suffered.
My presence had no more effect upon her than if I had been nothing more sentient than the clumsy high-backed oak-chair upon which I leaned as I stood talking to her.
She looked at me when I spoke, answered me sweetly and gently, and then looked down again at her tedious work.
I knew that I had come, coward as I was, to stab this tender innocent heart; but I could not resist the fiendish temptation.
“So our pretty fair-haired boy is going to leave us,” I said by and by.
She knew whom I meant, and I saw the stiff embroidery «hiver in her hand.
“Christopher?” she faltered.
“Young Mr. Weldon,” I said. “Yes, the gentleman clerk. He’s going away, never to come back here, I daresay. He’s going into the London house to make his fortune.”
She made me no answer, nor did she ask me a single question. She sat very quietly, going on with her work, sorting the gay-coloured silks, straining her eyes in the dusky light over the difficult pattern; but I saw — I saw how sharply I had struck this poor, pitiful, broken heart, and I knew now how much she had loved him.
Ten years from that day, I stood in the same room — she working at the same window — and asked her to be my wife.
“I do not ask,” I said, “for the love which you gave to another ten years ago. I do not ask for the beauty which those who speak to me of you say is faded out of your mournful face. You will always be to me the most beautiful of women, and your gentle tolerance will be dearer to me than the most passionate love of another. Lucy Malden, will you many me?”
She started up, letting her work fall out of her lap, and turning her face towards the window, burst into a passion of tears.
I had never seen her cry before.
At last she turned to me, with her face drowned in tears, and said, “Samuel Lowgood, ten years ago, day after day, and night after night, I waited for another to say the words which have just been said by you. I had every right to expect he should say them. He never did — he never did. Forgive me, forgive me, if it seems to break my heart afresh to hear them spoken by another!”
“He is a prosperous man in London,” I said. “Lucy Malden, will you be my wife?”
She dried her tears, and, coming slowly to me, put her little cold hand into mine.
“Does that mean yes?” I asked.
She only bent her head in answer.
“God bless you! and good-night.”
* * * *
A year and a half after our marriage, we heard great news in the old Willborough house. Christopher Weldon had married a nobleman’s daughter, and was about to become a partner in the house of Tyndale and Tyndale.
A night or two after we heard this news, there came a great rattling knock at the grim dragon’s-head knocker of the house-door. My wife and I lived in her old apartments, by permission of the firm, and I had advanced to be head clerk in the Willborough office.
I was sitting, going over some accounts that I had not been able to finish in the day; so she looked up at the sound of the knocking, and said, “I’ll answer the door, Samuel — you’re tired.”
She was a good and gentle wife to me, from the first to the last.
Presently I started from my desk, and rushed down the stairs. I had heard a voice that I knew in the hall below.
My wife was lying on the cold stone flags, and Christopher Weldon bending over her.
“Poor little thing!” he said; “she has fainted.”
“This decides me, this decides me!” I thought; “I’ll have my forty pounds’-worth before long.”
Christopher Weldon had come down to the house to announce to us, its custodians, that he was about to occupy it, with his wife, the Lady Belinda Weldon.
He brought a regiment of London upholsterers the next day, and set them to work tearing the gloomy old rooms to pieces. My lady came too, in her gilded chair, and gave orders for a chintz here and damask there, and could not find words to express her contempt for the place and her despair of ever making it habitable; but declared that whatever taste and upholstery could do for such a gloomy dungeon of a place, was to be done. After her ladyship’s departure, a prim housekeeper came to inform my wife that we must be prepared to leave the house in a month. In a month the place was transformed, and at the end of the month Christopher Weldon was to give a great dinner-party, at which Messrs. Tyndale and Tyndale were to be present, to inaugurate his partnership. As senior clerk, I was honoured by an invitation.
My enemy had mounted to the highest round of the ladder. Rich, beloved, honoured, the husband of a lovely and haughty lady, partner in the great and wealthy house which he had entered as junior clerk — what more could fortune bestow upon him?
My time had come — the time at which it was worth my while to crush him.
“I will wait till the dinner is over, and the toasts have been drunk, and all the fine speeches have been made; and when Tyndale senior has proposed the health of the new partner, in a speech full of eulogy, I will hand him the forged cheque across the dinner-table.”
The night before the dinner-party, I was in such a fever of excitement, that I tried in vain to sleep. I heard every hour strike on the little clock in our bedroom. Tyndale and Tyndale had given us a couple of empty offices on our being turned out of the great house, and enough of their old-fashioned furniture to fit them up very comfortably.
One, two, three, four, five, the shrill strokes of the clock seemed to beat upon my brain. The hours seemed endless, and I sometimes thought the clock in our room and all the church-clocks of Willborough had stopped simultaneously.
At last, towards six o’clock in the morning, I dropped off into a feverish troubled sleep, in which I dreamed of the forged cheque, which I still kept locked in the strong box inside the great chest in the back office.
I dreamed that it was lost, that I went to the strong-box and found the cheque gone. The horror of the thought woke me suddenly. The broad sunshine was streaming in at the window, and the church-clocks were striking nine.
I had slept much later than usual. My wife had risen, and was seated in our little sitting-room at her accustomed embroidery. She was always very quiet and subdued, and sat at her work several hours every day.
My first impulse, on waking, was to look under my pillow for my watch, and a black ribbon, to which was attached the key of the strong-box. The key of the chest hung on a nail in the office, as nothing of any consequence was kept in that. My watch and the key were perfectly safe.
My mind was relieved, but I was in a fever of excitement all day.
“I will not take the cheque out of its hiding-place till the last moment,” I said; “not till the moment before I put on my hat to go to the dinner-party.”
My wife dressed me carefully in a grave snuff-coloured suit, which I generally wore on Sundays; she plaited my ruffles, and arranged my lawn-cravat with its lace ends. I looked an old man already, though I was little more than thir
ty-three years of age; and Christopher Weldon was handsomer than ever.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the courtyard was all astir with sedan-chairs and powdered footmen. My wife stood in the window, looking at the company alighting from their chairs at the great door opposite.
“You had better go, I think, Samuel,” she said; “the Tyndales have just arrived. Ah! there is my Lady Belinda at the window. How handsome she is! How magnificent she is, in powder and diamonds, and an amber-satin sacque!”
“You’ve a better right to wear amber satin and diamonds than she,” I said.
“I, Samuel!”
“Yes. Because you’re the wife of an honest man. She is not.”
I thought for love of him she would have fired up and contradicted me; but she only turned her face away and sighed.
“You will be late, Samuel,” she said.
“I have something to fetch out of the back office, and then I shall be ready,” I answered.
* * * * *
The fiend himself must be in the work. It was gone — gone, every trace of it. At first, in my blind, mad fury, I blasphemed aloud. Afterwards, I fell on my knees over the open chest, and wept — wept bitter tears of rage and anguish. It was gone!
* * * * *
I had a brain fever after this, which confined me for nine weeks to my bed.
Christopher Weldon lived and thrived, a prosperous and successful merchant — honoured, courted, admired, and beloved.
My wife and I, childless and poor, used to sit at our windows in the dusk, and watch his children at play in the courtyard beneath us, and hear the innocent voices echoing through the great house opposite.
Thirteen years and five months after our wedding-day, Lucy died in my arms; her last words to me were these:
“Samuel, I have done my best to do my duty, but life for me has never been very happy. Once only since our marriage have I deceived you. I saved you, by that action, from doing a great wrong to a man who had never knowingly wronged you. One night, Samuel, you talked in your sleep, and I learned from your disjointed sentences the story of Christopher Weldon’s crime. I learned, too, your purpose in possessing yourself of the only evidence of the forgery. I learned the place in which you kept that evidence; and, while you slept, I took the key from under your pillow, and opened the strong box. The cheque is here.”
She took it from a little black-silk bag which hung by a ribbon round her neck, and put it into my hand,—” Samuel, husband, we have read the Gospel together every Sunday evening through thirteen years. Will you use it now?”
“No, Lucy, no — angel — darling — no. You have saved him from disgrace — me from sin.”
* * * * *
Every clerk in the house of Tyndale and Tyndale attended my wife’s funeral. Not only were the clerks present; but, pale, mournful, and handsome, in his long black cloak, Christopher Weldon stood amidst the circle round the grave.
As we left the churchyard he came up to me, and shook hands.
“Let us be better friends for the future, Samuel,” he said.
“My wife, when she died, bade me give you this,” I answered, as I put the forged cheque into his hand.
THE LAWYER’S SECRET
CHAPTER I. IN A LAWYER’S OFFICE.
“IT is the most provoking clause that was ever invented to annul the advantages of a testament,” said the lady.
“It is a condition which must be fulfilled, or you lose the fortune,” replied the gentleman.
Whereupon the gentleman began to drum a martial air with the tips of his fingers upon the morocco-covered office-table; while the lady beat time with the point of her foot.
The gentleman was out of temper, and the lady was out of temper also. It is sad to have to state such a fact of the lady, for she was very young and very handsome, and, though the angry light in her dark-gray eyes had a certain vixenish beauty, it was a species of beauty rather alarming to a man of a nervous temperament.
She was very handsome. Her hair was of the darkest brown, her eyes gray — those large gray eyes, fringed with long black lashes, which are more dangerous than all other eyes ever invented for the perdition of honest men. They looked like deep pools of shining water, bordered by shadowy rushes; they looked like stray stars in a black midnight sky; but they were so beautiful, that like the signal-lamp which announces the advent of an express upon the heels of a slow train, they seemed to say, “Danger!” Her nose was aquiline; her mouth small, clearly cut, and very determined in expression; her complexion brunette, and rather pale. For the rest, she was tall, her head set with a haughty grace upon her sloping shoulders, her hands perfect.
The gentleman was ten or fifteen years her senior. He, too, was eminently handsome: but there was a languid indifference about his manner, which communicated itself even to his face, and seemed to overshadow the very beauty of that face.
That any one so gifted by nature as he seemed gifted could be as weary of life as he appeared, was, in itself, so much a mystery, that one learned to look at him as a man whose quiet outward bearing concealed some gloomy secret.
He was dark and pale, with massive features, and thoughtful brown eyes, which rarely looked fully at you from under the heavy eyelids that half shrouded them. The mouth was spiritual in expression, the lips thin; but the face was wanting in one quality, lacking which it lacked the power which is the highest form of manly beauty; and that quality was firmness.
He sat drumming with his slim fingers upon the table, and looking down, with a gloomy shade upon his forehead.
The scene was a lawyer’s office in Gray’s Inn. There was a third person present, an elderly lady, rather a faded beauty in appearance, and somewhat over-dressed. She took no part in the conversation, but sat in an easy-chair by the fire, turning over the crisp sheets of the Times newspaper, which, every time she moved them, emitted a sharp, crackling sound, unpleasant to the nervous temperaments of the younger lady and the gentleman.
The gentleman was a solicitor, Horace Margrave, the guardian of the young lady, and executor to her uncle’s will. Her name was Ellinor Arden; she was sole heiress and residuary legatee to her uncle, John Arden, of the park and village of Arden, in Northamptonshire; and she had this very day come of age. Mr. Margrave had been the trusted and valued friend of her father, dead ten years before, and of her uncle, only lately dead; and Ellinor Arden had been brought up to think, that if there were truth, honesty, or friendship upon earth, those three attributes were centred in the person of Horace Margrave, solicitor, of Gray’s Inn.
He is to-day endeavouring to explain and to reconcile her to the conditions of her uncle’s will, which are rather peculiar.
“In the first place, my dear Ellinor,” he says, still drumming on the table, still looking at his desk, and not at her, “you had no particular right to expect to be your uncle John Arden of Arden’s heiress.”
“I was his nearest relation,” she said.
“Granted; but that was no reason why you should be dear to him. Your father and he, after the amiable fashion that frequently obtains among brothers in this very Christian country, were almost strangers to each other for the best part of their lives. You your uncle never saw, since your father lived on his wife’s small property in the North of Scotland, and you were brought up in that remote region until your said father’s death, which took place ten years ago; after your father’s death you were sent to Paris, to be there educated under the surveillance of your aunt, and you therefore never made the acquaintance of John Arden of Arden, your father’s only brother.”
“My father had such a horror of being misinterpreted; had he sought to make his daughter known to his rich brother, it might have been thought—”
“That he wanted to get that rich brother’s money. It might have been thought? My dear girl, it would have been thought! Your father acted with the pride of the Northamptonshire Ardens; he acted like a high-minded English gentleman: and he acted, in the eyes of the world, like a fool. You never,
then, expected to inherit your uncle’s money?”
“Never. Nor did I ever wish it. My mother’s little fortune would have been enough for me.”
“I wish to heaven you had never had a penny beyond it!” As Horace Margrave said these few words, the listless expression of his face was disturbed by a spasm of pain.
He so rarely spoke on any subject whatever in a tone of real earnestness, that Ellinor Arden, startled by the change in his manner, looked up at him suddenly and searchingly. But the veil of weariness had fallen over his face once more, and he continued, with his old indifference —
“To the surprise of everyone, your uncle bequeathed to you, and to you alone, his entire fortune, stranger as you were to him. This was an act, not of love for you, but of duty to his dead brother. The person nearest his heart was unconnected with him by the ties of kindred, and he no doubt considered that it would be an injustice to disinherit his only brother’s only child in favour of a stranger. This stranger, this protegé of your uncle’s, is the son of a lady who once was beloved by him, but who loved another, poorer and humbler than Squire Arden of Arden. She married this poorer suitor, George Dalton, a young surgeon, in a small country town. She married him, and three years after her marriage, she died, leaving an only child, a boy. This boy, on the death of his father, which happened when he was only four years old, was adopted by your uncle. He never married, but devoted himself to the education of the son of the woman who had rejected him. He did not, however, bring up the boy to look upon himself as his heir. He educated him as a man ought to be educated who has his own path to make in life. He gave young Dalton a university education, and sent him to the bar, where he pleaded his first cause a year before your uncle’s death. He did not leave the young barrister a shilling.”
“But—”
“But he left his entire fortune to you, on condition that you should marry Henry Dalton within a year of your majority.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1060