But the mournful sound died away, and melted into the swelling murmur of the wind, drowned in the perpetual noise of the rushing water under the shadow of the steep bank. Then the master of Palgrave Chase shut the window, took the lamp from the table, and went through the firelit study into his spacious bedchamber.
He set the lamp down upon the dressing-table, and by chance saw his face in the glass. Of all the Palgraves who had been tenants of that chamber, not one among them had ever seen a ghastlier reflection of himself than the white haggard image which looked at Gervoise Palgrave to-night.
He turned away from the table with a groan, and flung himself, dressed as he was, upon the bed, to take what rest he might before the late winter morning. This was how the Earl of Haughton passed the eve of his bridal.
And through the rest of that long night, mingling with his dreams, and suddenly awakening him every now and then with a choking agony in his dry throat, and a cold sweat upon his face, the long, despairing cry of a human voice was blended with the hoarse roar of the waterfall.
CHAPTER XIV. AN UNINVITED GUEST.
DULL, dark, and drizzling was the morning which was to elevate Ethel Hurst to the peerage, an elevation that was very distasteful to numerous matchmaking mothers within a visiting distance of Palgrave Chase, who had hoped to see the young earl subjugated by the charms and accomplishments of one of their daughters, and who thought his preference a kind of insult to those fair young damsels.
Sir Langley’s six daughters were to officiate as their cousin’s bridesmaids, and to these young ladies the cold wet morning caused much disgust. They shivered in their diaphanous draperies of virginal white; and the broad scarlet sashes, which gave warmth and colour to their costume, were scarcely redder than the tips of their pretty noses. They bore their martyrdom with tolerable patience, however, satisfied with the knowledge that this day was to give them a countess for their cousin; a countess who might get them invited to court balls and concerts, and who would introduce them to the creme de la creme at her brilliant establishment in Park-lane or Grosvenor-square, for of course Lord Haughton would secure a town house immediately on his return from the honeymoon trip.
To Ethel the cold wet morning seemed of little importance, though the maid who dressed her in her bridal robes loudly lamented the ill augury. What could it matter whether she went through sunlight or darkness to give her hand to Gervoise Palgrave? She loved her chosen husband so dearly that she needed no omen of sunshine to assure her of future happiness. What sorrow could assail them so long as Heaven permitted them to dwell together? What but death could part them, by so much as a thought?
The wedding was to take place at Pendon Church, where Stephen Hurst and the Vicar of Avondale were to officiate. It seemed a hard and bitter thing for Stephen to utter the words which were to bind his cousin Ethel to his rival, but he consented to officiate in compliance with the loudly-expressed wishes of his family, and Ethel’s gentle appeal.
“You have promised to be all that a brother could be to me, Stephen,” she said timidly; “I shall think you are something less than my brother, or that you do not approve of my marriage, if you refuse to perform the ceremony.”
On this he consented.
“If ever you need a brother’s devotion, or a brother’s counsel, you shall not find me slow to perform my promise,” he said, with a gentle pressure of his cousin’s hand.
When the carriages reached the little gate of Pendon churchyard, Lord Haughton came out of the porch and along the narrow pathway leading to the gate.
The drizzling rain came down upon him, though he was an earl, and though he came bareheaded to receive his bride; somewhat to the surprise of the gaping villagers, who were inclined to wonder that the very elements themselves did not respect the lord of Palgrave Chase.
Ethel Hurst went up the narrow pathway by her uncle’s side, with Gervoise walking on her left hand, and the crowd had enough to do to stare at bride and bridegroom.
The Earl of Haughton’s pale, dark face might have been a study for a painter in its perfection of masculine beauty. But the darkest tints upon the artist’s palette would have been needed for his work, and the picture would have been rather a gloomy one.
Gervoise Palgrave did not at all satisfy the rustic and popular idea of a happy bridegroom. If this were the happiest day of his life, he had a strange maimer of wearing his happiness.
Everyone had expected to see the young earl’s countenance radiant with the sunshine of triumphant smiles, the brightness whereof should have atoned in some wise for the want of light in the heavens.
But it was not so. The earl had been standing in the church-porch, waiting for his bride, for upwards of a quarter of an hour, and though the rural populace had kept close watch upon him all that time, not one amongst them had seen Gervoise Palgrave smile.
It was natural to him to be pale, but to-day he was paler than usual. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face had a haggard look, like that of a man who has been deprived of his customary rest.
As he came up the soddened pathway now, he was not looking at his bride’s fair face, though he was walking by her side. His eyes turned uneasily from right to left, from left to right again, as if looking for someone or something in the crowd; as if looking for something or someone that he half expected and greatly feared to meet.
The churchyard was densely crowded in the neighbourhood of the pathway along which the bride and bridegroom walked. In spite of the miserable weather, in defiance of Lord Haughton’s desire that the wedding should be a quiet one, people had come from a very long distance in order to see the young heiress of Hyford Hall married to the master of Palgrave Chase.
As Gervoise and his two companions drew near the porch, the crowd about the gate opening from the meadows was suddenly pushed open, and something was brought into the churchyard.
The crowd parted and fell away from it. Until this moment there had been a buzzing noise of murmured remarks amongst the eager spectators, everyone of whom had found something or other to say about the bride. But all at once there was an awful silence. Every eye was turned away from the bride and bridegroom; every eye was directed towards that SOMETHING which had been brought into the churchyard. x It was a burden carried by two labourers upon a roughly-fashioned litter, made of a couple of planks hastily tied together. The burden was partially covered by a large freize coat that had been stripped from one of the bearers. It was covered, but it was not hidden.
Everybody present knew that the burden carried by those two men was a corpse.
The men went slowly through the churchyard with their burden. They had a vague idea that their presence there was somehow out of keeping with the great event of the day. Bat that was no fault of theirs. They had a certain business to do, and they were bound to do it, though a royal princess had been about to be married that day in Pendon Church.
Their business was to carry the body of a woman, lately found floating in the Avon, a couple of miles off, to the principal inn at Pendon, there to await the coroner and his jury; and their nearest way to the inn lay through the churchyard. This was the men’s business, and they did it without reference to Miss Ethel Hurst or the Earl of Haughton.
Ethel uttered a shriek as the ghastly burden was carried slowly past her.
“What is it, Gervoise?” she cried. “ O, what is it? — who is it? Is it somebody who has been hurt? — somebody who is—”
She clasped her lover by the arm, and looked up imploringly in his face, but he made no answer to her eager questions. He stood looking at the motionless figure on the litter, with every feature in his face as rigid as if flesh and blood had been suddenly transformed to iron.
“Who is it? Is the person ill, or is — is — she dead?” cried Ethel. “O, go and see, Gervoise; go and ask them what has happened?”
The two men had reached the gate opening into the highroad by this time, and the crowd had gathered round them and their dismal burden. Everybody was anxious to see t
he dead woman’s face, more eager even than they had been to see the bride herself in all the glory of her wedding dress. Everybody was eager to know who and what the dead woman was. Was it a stranger? Was it anyone from Pendon?
Gervoise obeyed his bride’s behest. He walked slowly to the gate, still bareheaded. The crowd made way for him as he approached, and he went straight up to one of the two labourers, and touched him upon the shoulder.
“Who is it?” Lord Haughton asked, pointing to the figure upon the litter.
The corpse was a woman; there was no doubt of that. The water dripped slowly from the folds of her shabby gown, and her feet — not large or coarse in shape, but, O, how miserably clad — were visible below the tattered edge of her skirt.
“Who is it?” asked the Earl of Haughton.
“It’s a pore woman, my lord, as was found floatin’ on the river out yonder, by me and my mate, betwixt here and Avondale, little better nor two hour ago. She’s drownded herself, pore sould, I suppose. She’s been one o’ them ‘fellers-de-see,’ I’m afeard, your honour; but I dessay as the pore thing’s young and reyther good-lookin’, the coroner’ll bring it in ‘trumperary insanity.’ Perhaps you’d like to see the pore creetur’s face, my lord?”
The crowd surged forward as the labourer’s rough hand moved towards the drapery that covered the face of the dead, and there was a breathless pause of expectation.
But the man waited to receive the word of command from Gervoise Palgrave himself.
“Would your lordship like to see the pore thing’s face?” he asked again.
“Yes,” answered the Earl of Haughton, drawing a long breath before he spoke.
The man lifted the coat from off the litter.
The dead woman’s face was terrible to look upon; for there was all the horror of sudden death in the fixed features, and the widely-opened eyes, with their blank, sightless stare.
But Gervoise Palgrave had no need to look long at that rigid face. He knew it too well — he knew it only too well! He went back, very slowly this time, to the church-porch, where Ethel was waiting for him.
“Who is it, Gervoise?” she cried; “is the person dead?”
“Yes, Ethel.”
“Dead! O, poor creature! But who is she, Gervoise?”
“How should I know, my dear?”
“She is a stranger here, then?”
“Yes, quite a stranger here.”
“And she is drowned?”
“Yes.”
“She threw herself into the river, I suppose, poor unhappy creature?”
“I suppose so, Ethel. The men who found her say as much. But, my dear love, you must not be unhappy about this.”
“How can I help feeling unhappy?” cried she. “We can only be happy while we forget that there is such misery in the world. And you look unhappy, Gervoise, as well as I.”
“Do I, Ethel?” asked the young man. “Well, certainly, dearest, such an event as this is scarcely very agreeable upon one’s wedding-day.”
The beadle in attendance in the background murmured something to the effect that such occurrences must be expected in a country where Tories were in the minority.
But Stephen Hurst and the Vicar of Avondale were waiting in the vestry, whither Gervoise Palgrave conducted his bride; and by and by the bridal procession went slowly up the aisle, and the wedding-party ranged themselves about the altar-rails.
The solemn service was read. There was no interruption — no one to forbid that aristocratic union.
Gervoise was quite free to wed whom he pleased. His first wife was carried to a village tavern by a couple of boors, with an inquisitive crowd following at the heels of her bearers, while her husband knelt before the altar to swear fidelity to a fairer bride.
Short widowhoods have been the fashion ever since the Prince of Denmark’s flighty mother consented to make Claudius a happy man; and certainly Gervoise Palgrave’s time of mourning was not a long one.
* * * * * *
Amongst the crowd that remained to fill the shadowy aisles of the old church during the marriage ceremony was one man who had kept himself completely hidden behind the rustic spectators in the churchyard, and had yet contrived to keep a watchful eye upon every detail of the strange scene enacted there. This man was the wandering artist, the tramp and tumbler, Volterchoker, who had been lately perambulating in solitary dignity, or “on his own hook,” as he elegantly termed it. Few market-days had passed on which the accomplished Volterchoker had not appeared, early or late, in the busy market-place of Avondale, to earn his modest reward by the spinning of basins, or dextrous handling of gilded balls; and he had never appeared in Avondale market-place without managing to obtain precise information as to the past, present, or probable future movements of Lord Haughton. He had thus kept himself fully au courant as to the proceedings of his late fellow-wanderer, while at the same time obtaining a decent living between Birmingham, Avondale, and two or three other towns within some twenty to thirty miles’ distance.
Thus it was that on the morning of the earl’s marriage, Herr von Volterchoker — duly forewarned of the event — was able to present himself at the church-gates modestly muffled in greatcoat and woollen comforter, unnoted by the rustic crowd. Nor in the church did he attract any more attention. He sat in a darksome little pew under one of the galleries; and Lord Haughton had no idea that this disreputable acquaintance assisted at his nuptials, and took note of the ghastly pallor which disfigured the bridegroom’s countenance, and the husky tones of the bridegroom’s voice.
CHAPTER XV. HIDDEN IN THE DEAD WOMAN’S HAND.
AFTER the wedding ceremonial was concluded, and the bridal procession had departed for Hyford Hall, Herr von Volterchoker lost no time in getting to the small town, or overgrown village, of Pendon, where he went straight to the Rose and Crown. The coroner’s jury were already assembled in a little parlour with a very low ceiling, made lower in reality by a ponderous beam that supported it, and made lower in appearance by reason of a dingy-brown paper that covered it.
Everybody about the Rose and Crown was full of the inquest, and the clown had no difficulty in obtaining all the information that was to be had upon the subject.
In the first place, the woman had been identified as a poor miserable tramp who had arrived at the King’s Head at Avondale upon the previous day.
The landlord of that hostelry was now in the parlour giving an account of what he knew before the coroner and his jury. The door of the parlour was open, though the assembly within was supposed to be a closed court, and there was a dense crowd in the low, narrow passage and on the threshold of the chamber.
Herr von Volterchoker had sharp elbows, and he was an unscrupulous pusher. He made his way through the crowd, and planted himself in the doorway, where he held his ground firmly, while the populace around and about him buffeted themselves into a temporary scarlet-fever.
“She were a pore tramp of a creetur’,” the landlord of the King’s Head was saying in reply to the coroner’s last question; “and, bein’ as it was market-day, Avondale was all of a stir like, and our place was full, and we didn’t take much notice of her. She asked if she could have a bed, and I told her no, we’d got no beds for such as her; and then she sat in the tap-room drinkin’ gin and cold beer — dog’s-nose them low sort of tramps call it; and then by and by she’d got no more money, I suppose, and she goes and clutters-up the doorway with a lot more, as very nigh drives me beside myself by not movin’ on; and then, when Lord Haughton and Miss Hurst came by on horseback, this rantipolin creetur’, she flew out at the horses’ heads, and was close upon run over. And she calls out something to my lord; and Miss Hurst she give a scream, and—”
“Stay. What did the woman say to Lord Haughton?” asked the coroner.
“I don’t know, your worship; I don’t think anybody heerd what the pore mad creetur’ said, but it must have been somethink wild-like, for Lord Haughton he says presently as she was mad, and everybody else says so too;
and he says, I Take care of the poor creetur’, and let her have whatever she wants.’ And she was took up unconscious; but she soon come-to, with vinegar and burnt paper, and such-like, held close to her nose; but she was stupid and sleepy like with drink, and we put her in a room over the stables, away from the house — a comfortable room enough, your worship, and as clean as the best room in the house; gentleman’s servants sleeps in it sometimes when the house is full. And the cook, she went to look after the pore woman; but she didn’t seem to want anythink, and she flung herself down on the counterpane in her clothes, and fell fast asleep. We didn’t hear any more about her, your worship — bein’ busy all the evenin’, and havin’ no time to go dancin’ attendance upon tramps and suchlike — until next mornin’, when I says to my wife, ‘How about the pore woman what slept over the stable? She’s to have her breakfast, and everythink comfortable, accordin’ to Lord Haughton’s directions.’ But my wife she makes answer, ‘Lor’, James, the woman’s gone; Bill’ — that’s Bill the ostler—’told me so this momin’. She went away last night.’ And if you’d like to hear all about it from Bill’s own lips, your worship,” added the landlord, “why you can, for he’s in the passage; and you may know him by his red hair, and he’s a’most always got a strawr in his mouth a-chewin’ of it,” added the landlord in a confidential undertone to the official who made a move towards the door, in the evident intention of going to seek Bill.
Bill the ostler was found by means of this description, and came lumbering into the room presently, with a grin upon his face, as on some festive occasion. He was duly sworn, and then was asked what he knew about the dead woman. A great deal of questioning was necessary before Bill could be got to state his case clearly; but after considerable beating about the bush, the following information was extorted from him:
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1078