“A woman!” exclaimed Gervoise; “a woman inquiring for me?”
“Yes; and very anxious she seemed to see you.”
“Did she ask for Mr. Jarvis?”
“No; she asked for some such name as Gil — stay! — Gilbert,” answered the clown, speaking slowly, and watching Gervoise’s face as he spoke.
“Gervoise Gilbert?”
“Yes, Gervoise Gilbert.”
“Was she a young woman with black eyes and hair?”
“She was.”
“Was it before you missed the child or after, that you saw this woman?”
“About five minutes before. She said she’d wait to see you, and I left her standing close to the opening in the canvas. I went round to the front of the circus to help Cadgers put out the lights. When I came back the woman was gone.”
“And the child was gone, too?” cried Gervoise.
“Yes; it was after that we missed the boy.”
“Then I understand it all!” exclaimed Gervoise Palgrave passionately. “The child has been stolen — my boy has been stolen by—”
He stopped abruptly.
“By whom, Master Gervoise?” asked Humphrey Melwood. “By the person who is the worst enemy he has in the world. Look you, Humphrey, and you, Volterchoker,” cried Gervoise impetuously, “you can both help me in this business. That woman has stolen the child; but she cannot have got far away yet. If we all three go different ways we may find her. You will recognise her, Volterchoker. You may know her easily, Humphrey — a dark woman with a fair-haired child. Run, run like good fellows. You sha’n’t find me slow to reward you.”
The three men separated. They went into the alleys between the gingerbread stalls, they searched the open spaces before the booths, they looked into every place where it was likely the woman might have hidden, they made inquiries of every creature they met; but their efforts were useless — they could discover no trace of the woman or the child. They wandered about, meeting one another every now and then, and communicating their bad fortune. They walked about until two o’clock in the morning. Every light was extinguished; it seemed as if every creature except these three men slept peacefully under the shelter of the canvas booths.
Herr von Volterchoker was as indefatigable as either of his companions. He made inquiries right and left of his comrades in the fair. Nearly everybody knew him and answered him civilly, and tried to give him what help they could; and so, indeed, did they show themselves willing to aid all three searchers. There was only one man, a surly-looking Italian, who was grinding away at a barrel-organ, and putting a tired monkey through a series of grotesque performances, who answered at all uncivilly when Gervoise Palgrave questioned him.
At last, when the Italian had left off grinding, and the monkey was at rest — when the silent tents were as quiet beneath the moonlight as the ghostly camp of some phantom army, and the solemn sound of Avondale church clock striking two floated up to the hilly common on the soft autumn air — the three men abandoned all hope, and went back towards Mr. Cadgers’s booth.
“I thank you both,” Gervoise Palgrave said; “and before a week is out, I will reward you both. I know the person who has taken the child, and, by the heaven above us, she shall be made to restore him to me! Good-night, Humphrey.”
He held out his hand to the gamekeeper, who grasped it warmly in both his own.
“Cheer up, Master Gervoise,” he said; “the child will be found, never doubt. But where will you sleep to-night?”
“I don’t suppose I shall sleep at all, Humphrey, for the matter of that,” Gervoise answered. “I shall go down to Avondale at once, and put this business into the hands of the police.”
“Then I’ll go with you, Mr. Gerver down the hill and through the meadows, into the quiet little town. They went straight to the police-station, and knocked up the officials. Geryoise stated his case, described the woman and child, and told the police-officer to issue a bill, offering a reward of a hundred pounds for the finding of the boy. Gervoise told the man who he was, under a pledge of secrecy; and Humphrey Melwood, who was well known to the police-officer, corroborated his foster-brother. The first glimmer of morning light was gray in the eastern sky by the time Gervoise went back to the booth upon the common.
Herr von Volterchoker lay fast asleep upon a heap of loose straw in a corner of the circus when Gervoise entered the tent; but he had not been asleep long. He had returned through the silent alleys in the fair during the new earl’s absence, and had found a feeble light glimmering in the caravan of the Italian organ-grinder. The clown had stopped at the door of this tent, talking to the Italian itinerant for about a quarter of an hour, and had then gone slowly back to Mr. Cadgers’s establishment.
When the sun rose next morning, and the traders and showmen made their preparations for the second day’s fair, there was no trace of the organ-grinder and the monkey. He had departed from Avondale common in the early morning, with the organ and the monkey, in his gaudily-painted little caravan.
Early upon that second day of the fair, Gervoise travelled up to London, and went straight to the offices of Messrs. Peck and Featherby. They had not heard of the accident at Avondale, and it was as much as they could do to believe Gervoise Palgrave’s account of the steeplechase, and the death of the new-born heir. But they did believe him at last, and congratulated him most heartily upon his unexpected good fortune. It mattered very little to Messrs. Peck and Featherby whether their client was Sydney Earl of Haughton, or Gervoise Earl of Haughton, so long as he gave them plenty of law-business to do, and paid long bills of costs without any vulgar examination or taxation of the same.
So there had been a sudden turn in the wheel of Fortune, and the penniless outcast was now the acknowledged master of Palgrave Chase; but a feeling of bitterness was mingled with his triumph, a drop of poison in the wine of life. The child for whose sake he had often prayed for fortune was lost to him, for a time at least; perhaps for ever. The boy had fallen into the power of that cruel and drunken mother, and if the new Earl of Haughton acknowledged his only son, he must also acknowledge his drunken wife.
The selfishness of the Palgrave race triumphed even over the feelings of the father.
“Better that I should lose the son I love than that I should burden myself with the wife I hate,” thought Gervoise Palgrave, as he drove away from Gray’s Inn with a cheque for a hundred pounds in his pocket, advanced by Messrs. Peck and Featherby, for his immediate requirements.
CHAPTER VIII. A NEW LIFE AND A NEW LOVE.
THE funeral of the Earl and Countess of Haughton was one of the grandest ceremonials ever beheld by the wondering eyes of Avondale within this present generation. Not since Elizabeth of England and her attendant train of all the flower of English nobility had ridden down the street, had there been a grander scene than these solemn funeral pomps furnished for the curious townsfolk, and the vast crowd of spectators who pressed into the town from all the country side.
The earl and his countess had been liked, and the regret felt for their sudden and melancholy fate was sincere and profound; but those who mourned for the king that was dead, were none the less interested in the sovereign who reigned in his place, and eager were the glances cast at Gervoise Palgrave, seventh Earl of Haughton, the chief mourner in that solemn train of sable chariots and horses, and plume-surmounted, silver-blazoned hearse.
The crowd pronounced the new earl a true Palgrave, as indeed he was, to the very core of his heart. Within a month of the funeral he took possession of Palgrave Chase, quietly, and without unnecessary demonstration of his new authority. The old servants he retained without exception. Humphrey Melwood’s position he improved so far as that very self-willed individual would allow it to be improved, and this was to no very great extent.
“Let me serve you, sir; that’s the only favour I ask, and that’s the only favour I’ll receive,” said the young man resolutely.
Gervoise improved the gothic lodge with some additional conveniences for the comfo
rt of his old nurse, to whom he presented a hundred-pound bank-note to buy her a new gown, as he said; and the dame, bewildered by the idea of such vast wealth, cried over and kissed him, declaring that she had always prophesied his greatness.
There are few nobler places in England than the mansion, park, and woods known as Palgrave Chase. A great quadrangular edifice of gray stone, surmounted at every angle by a massive gothic tower. On the southern and principal side, a range of three terraces, with stone balustrades, and broad flights of shallow steps. Within the quadrangle, a noble court, stone paved, with a sculptured fountain, Neptune and a group of sea-horses, in the centre. On the northern side, a range of gothic windows, terminating at each extremity with an oriel in the tower, looking down upon a broad rushing stream which crosses the park and woods of Palgrave Chase on its way to join the Avon.
Of this grand old mansion, of park and woods, of farmlands and homesteads, the leases whereof filled three large tin boxes, in the iron safes of the Palgrave muniment-room, was Gervoise master; he who had found it a hard and difficult thing to pay the weekly rent of a garret in St. Giles’s.
The sense of pride and rapture which went with this sudden, bewildering change of fortune, somewhat deadened the pain of that one bitter grief which had come upon him in the very hour of his triumph; but despite of this, the grief was poignant. His son, the boy who had been so sweet a care, so dear a companion in the day of his trouble, was lost to him in the day of his joy. By that broad stream glancing silvery bright beneath the dark foliage of forest-trees, those two should have wandered hand in hand; and the father paced the green turf alone, despondent. How sweetly the dear familiar childish voice would have echoed in those long stately corridors. But the corridors were silent as the grave, and the father felt that in all their splendour they were gloomy.
The earl omitted to take no step that could be taken to recover the missing child; but all his efforts were fruitless. Skilful detectives searched London for the little one, whom they were taught to recognise by the initials tattooed upon his wrist; but they sought in vain. In his intercourse with the Avondale police-constable, Gervoise had taken care to conceal his relationship to the child. In his intercourse with the metropolitan police he was still more cautious, and concealed his own identity, securing their confidence by liberal advances in the present, and their hearty cooperation by munificent promises for the future. All was without avail. In the great labyrinth of life the boy Georgey had vanished utterly from the ken of skilled detectives.
For a time, Gervoise Palgrave mourned his child honestly. He refused all invitations from those new county friends who had been so “uncommonly fond of that thundering rascal, but remarkably gentlemanly fellow, his father, you know,” and wanted “to do the civil thing for the fellow, you know; and introduce him to the big-wigs, and so on, you know.” All these invitations from strangers eager to do him service, Lord Haughton politely refused. He lived shut up in the luxurious suite of apartments that had been fitted up for the last earl, whose meerschaum-pipes he smoked, and whose horses he rode; for the last master of the Chase had not been given to pious meditation, or philosophical argument on the uncertainty of life, and had died intestate, whereby his personal, as well as his real, property passed to the cousin of whom he knew so little.
For a time, Gervoise mourned honestly; but with the thought of his son’s disappearance was ever mingled the dread of his wife’s reappearance.
“She knows nothing of my altered fortunes,” he said to himself, “or she’d be here, soon enough, to drag me into the mud. And to think that she should have traced me to Avondale, should have been there that very night, and should have turned her back upon me, ignorant of my altered fortunes!”
Time passed, and the poignancy of his grief lessened, and this intense feeling was followed by an utter weariness, a sense of the emptiness of his new life. The cup at first had seemed all sweetness save for that one drop of poison. Now it seemed vapid and tasteless, if not all poison. To live in that handsome house; to dine off plate that had been in the Palgrave plate-room since the Restoration, before which historic event it had been pledged to Dutch money-lenders for the service of the king; to ride a horse worth three hundred pounds; to sleep in the shade of black-velvet curtains whose heraldic embroideries in gold bullion and rose silk had been worked in the days of Queen Bess; — all these things after a little while ceased to delight the soul of Gervoise Palgrave. There was a void somewhere.
Early in November he determined to try whether this void in his soul could be filled by the pleasures of the chase. He appeared in the hunting-field, where he followed the Palgrave hounds, which he had pledged himself to maintain in all perfection, and showed himself a very fair horseman.
The county people were delighted. They declared that his seclusion during the period of mourning for the late earl and countess did credit alike to his head and heart; for no one supposed that the new earl could have any special grief of his own to keep him in the solitude of his ancestral halls.
His appearance in the hunting-field was taken as a sign that the period of his seclusion was ended. He was besieged with invitations; and one of these, in a most evil hour, he accepted.
It was an invitation to a hunting-breakfast at Sir Langley Hurst’s, a man of some standing in the county, but a man who owed his wealth and title to commerce. Sir Langley was a great man in the iron trade. His father, and his grandfather before him, had made fortunes out of iron, and his elder brother had died three years before this date, leaving a million of money — or an amount which Avondale and its neighbourhood were pleased to call a million — to an only child, a girl of nineteen.
This youthful millionaire, Ethel Hurst, resided under her uncle’s roof, and was the darling of that wealthy baronet’s household. Sir Langley boasted a patriarchal family of sons and daughters; amongst them there was one to whom Ethel was something dearer than cousin. This was Stephen Hurst, the baronet’s second son, who had taken high honours at Oxford, and for whom his father’s political influence had secured the living of Pendon, a pleasant settlement, something betwixt an overgrown village and a newly-blossoming town, between Avondale and Hyford Hall, the bran-new red-brick Elizabethan mansion of the Hursts.
Ethel’s wealth was partly derived from a very fine agricultural estate in the county, certain frontages and odd lots whereof were just beginning to ripen into building-land, and partly from very considerable investments in Consols. A finer fortune does not often fall to the lot of a light-hearted, unsophisticated damsel of nineteen, whose personal expenditure, inclusive of bounteous charities, had never exceeded five hundred a-year.
For Stephen Hurst’s poor, Ethel was the sweetest of ministering angels; for Stephen himself she was but too sweet, too lovely, too dear, since his clear perception had long ago enabled him to make a bitter discovery in the fact that, however dear Ethel might be to him, he was no more to Ethel than — a cousin. Sir Langley’s fondest hope had been that Ethel and his eldest son, Gordon Palgrave, godson of the old Lord Haughton, and captain in a crack Hussar regiment, would make a match of it, and thus unite the two branches of the Hursts, and the fine properties of Hyford and Culverly.
But the paternal scheme was not destined to prosper. Gordon Palgrave, the handsome young captain of Hussars, whose name, in the choice language of his comrades, “stunk of money,” had been spoiled by garrison belles of the fast and furious order, and stigmatised his pretty cousin with the vile epithet “muffish.”
“Goes about with flannel and tea and tracts to queer old parties in cottages,” said the young Brummel; “teaches in national schools, and pats the dirty little ruffians’ heads, and that kind of thing. Couldn’t stand that in a wife, you know. Course, man who marries must prepare himself for a good deal; wife running away with the only fellow he likes, you know, and that kind of thing, which really seems very hard upon a fellow to lose the only fellow he can get on with, in that disreputable manner 5 and ‘pon my soul, a woman who can rob a ma
n of his best friend must be a regular out-and-outer, lost to all sense of honour, and that kind of thing. But if a man’s wife begins with poking her nose into stuffy old cottages, where the dooce is she to end?”
To Ethel, the brilliant captain appeared a strange compound of idiotcy and impertinence. His eyeglass, his carefully-waxed moustache, his all-pervading odour of jockey-club, his contempt for everything under the sun except some half-dozen “fellows,” his bosom friends, — all these attributes of the modem young man were alike distasteful to her, and she always fancied the atmosphere clearer when the captain’s leave expired, and he withdrew his august presence from the paternal halls.
Fancy-free as the famed virgin sung by Shakespeare — who, by the way, never seems to have been in that blissful condition for one hour of her anxious life — is described to have been in the poet’s politic compliment, Ethel Hurst roamed the well-kept gardens of Hyford Hall, until that fateful day when Gervoise Palgrave, who had refused invitations from men of much higher standing, made his social début at Sir Langley’s hunting-breakfast.
Whether it was love at first sight who shall say? First sight showed Lord Haughton one of the fairest faces he had ever looked upon, a face as innocently bright as Milton’s Eve in the first bloom of her purity, a face in which loveliness of soul shone predominant over earthly beauty of tint and outline, though these were almost perfection. For some time Gervoise Palgrave was unconscious of any peril to his own peace of mind in the admiration which he felt for Ethel Hurst. Had he not a right to admire this lovely image of girlish innocence, just as freely as he admired the well-chosen pictures and statues wherewith Sir Langley had decorated his spacious rooms and broad Elizabethan corridors. He told himself that he had a right so to admire this fair candid girl, who met him always with the same sweet smile of welcome, and he told himself that the pleasure he felt in her society arose from no deeper feeling.
“What can she, or any other woman upon this earth, ever be to me,” he thought, “nearer or dearer than the beauty of a picture or a statue — something to admire from a distance? I had my dream and my fancy, and have paid the bitter price of that fool’s paradise which I chose for my earthly heaven. That’s all past and done with. And as for the folly men call love — je m’en moque! When the grim old suits of armour at the Chase come down from their pedestals, and go out to make love, I may be caught a second time. But it shall not be until then.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1074