But Sir Roke Wycherly felt himself better and stronger every day. Though still an invalid, therefore, there was no reason he should think of another world yet, or trouble himself with any unearthly speculations. Very much of the earth, earthy indeed were his thoughts just now. A young lady, he thought, was fooling him. With a preposterous ambition, playing fast and loose with him, he had grown more eager and incensed than perhaps he ever had been before in a similar pursuit. And worthy of admiration is it in such enterprises with what a devilish perseverance and energy obstacles will inspire the most supine and despicable of men.
Over the evil and the good, the hale and the sick, the jocund and the sad, the morning rose, and the slanting beams of sunrise blushed and glittered across the valley. The songs of happy birds greeted the dawn; rural labourers awoke, and the pleasant sounds of life were heard all round. A new page was opened in the Book of Life, on which all sorts and conditions of men were to write their indelible inscriptions — their falsehood or truth — their virtue or wickedness, to be folded back in its turn, and see the light no more until the seal shall be broken in the glare of doomsday!
“What sort of person is that Mr. Sherlock, who sometimes comes in to breakfast?” inquired Sir Roke, after that meal, of Rachel Shadwell, with whom he was now chatting by the window. “An odd being he seems to be.”
“Oh! so odd, so simple and clever, and so really kind, and gentle, and affectionate,” she answered, forgetting her reserve, in a kind of enthusiasm; “poor old Carmel; he taught me — let me think — ever so much. He taught me writing, and arithmetic, and French, and Italian, and some German, and some music too; I’m very fond of good old Carmel Sherlock.” Sir Roke listened politely, and then with a shrug and a smile answered:
“An Admirable Crichton! but he keeps very late hours, and visits people’s apartments very oddly.”
Rachel stared, and Sir Roke laughed gently. “Yes, I assure you, he made me a call last night, and knocked me up, between three and four, to advise me to keep my door locked, and to instruct me in some of his admirable theology. I don’t know that I shall adopt his theology, but his advice about locking my door I certainly shall.”
“Yes, he is very odd,” she answered, joining slightly in Sir Roke’s laugh. “But he’s very grateful.”
“Odder still!” remarked the baronet.
“Papa has been very kind to him, and he is so devoted; I really think he would die for him.”
“Oh! He must be very much obliged, indeed, and very romantic also, because dying for a friend is a sort of politeness one can’t repeat. Life is a bird in the hand, which, if you let it fly, never returns. How charming the sun is to-day; how brilliant your flowers look!”
He pushed open the glass door which opened on the gravel walk, and paused. It was, however, so very genial a day that he was prepared to venture without his hat. He looked up, and waved his hand a little in the air, to be quite assured of its temperature.
“It is — yes — a charming day.”
And he invited her to redeem her promise, and tell him the names of half-a-dozen flowers which he particularly affected, and forth went Rachel, “herself the fairest flower;” and her father, looking through the window, observed with a reserved satisfaction the little scene, and fancied a tenderness in Roke’s manner, as he took the flowers from Rachel’s fingers, and a sentiment in his smirk that pleased him infinitely.
Why was Mark Shadwell’s head so full of the little comedy for whose opening scene he had rung the bell, and which he watched with an interest which perhaps no one but its cynical hero quite detected? He had never cared for Rachel; he had grown indolent and unsociable in his rural solitude, and he had no very active desire to return to the glare and excitement of his early life. But this great marriage would be a mortification to many on whom it would delight the proud and wounded recluse to retaliate the contempt with which he fancied they had treated him.
Rachel, besides, cost him money, which his discontent exaggerated; and she was, somehow, in his way. As for Miss Marlyn, she, he was sure, would not like to leave Raby — no, she should not go. Amy would require a companion, and Miss Marlyn would remain their guest. Poor Amy! their marriage had been a great mistake — such were his conceited ruminations. A woman of mind and ambition would have been a wife to comprehend, and to promote the fortunes of such a man.
Sometimes Mark Shadwell’s monstrous ambitions were relighted for an hour. He was, in his dreams, an M. P., high in office, the most brilliant reputation in England. His evening receptions crowded by personages and celebrities of all sorts, and certain personages peremptorily excluded — yes, that was a pleasant thought — sweetest drop in his mantling cup of nectar. These gorgeous dreams, however, it is but justice to say, were only occasional.
There were others worse, perhaps, but less fantastic, in which the scene was laid after the death of poor Amy — an event oftener in his mind than that pretty, fading, adoring little wife could have believed possible. That occurrence would be to him a liberation, and with it he connected a romance.
Miss Agnes Marlyn! Who so fit to be the wife of a man so gifted and aspiring as he? Clever, beautiful, energetic, how she would help to push his fortunes — how popular she would make him! What a little diplomatist she would be. How graceful, how elegant, how beautiful! Who could do the honours of his house when fortune should begin to shine, when he should sit for that borough which Roke had promised, so charmingly as she?
But these visions of active ambition, as I have said, depended on certain moods, and states of spirits, which were not always, nor indeed very often, his. And in his normal condition she was simply his future wife. Agnes Marlyn! without a guinea! Oh, Prudence! What a thought for a man not far from half a century old. Time was when proud, handsome, highly descended Mark Shadwell would not have admitted such a dream. But solitude makes us less worldly, and more self-indulgent.
CHAPTER IV.
LETTERS ON THE HEARTHSTONE.
Mark Shadwell was away that day among his woods and rabbits. During luncheon they heard the distant pop of his gun. His other shooting, thanks to the poachers, for Mark had long ceased to pay keepers, would not repay a trial. But his rabbits increased and multiplied; they swarmed in the burrowed woodlands, whose shades and solitudes accorded well with the indolent and dreamy habit of his discontented mind.
When he got among the knotted roots, the steeps and shadows of these sylvan uplands, he generally loitered away the whole day there. But on this occasion Mark had miscalculated his ammunition, and was out of powder early enough to make it worth his while to go back and replenish his oldfashioned powder-flask.
Things were brightening for Mark, and his head was full of pleasant chimeras. Had it been otherwise he would probably have loitered among the woods, powderless and morose, for the remainder of the day, with no occupation but his cigar.
Upstairs, in one of a suite of unfurnished rooms, Mark Shadwell kept his guns, fishing-rods, shot, and powder, and thither he went. Three rooms open en suite, and, contrary to his custom, and without any particular reason, he entered the first.
Standing near the window, with a shock, he saw Agnes Marlyn and Sir Roke Wycherly. The baronet was speaking in a low tone as he entered, and instantly was silent. If Mark had shot him with a pistol, he could not have eyed him for a moment with a stranger stare and gape. In another second the young lady had vanished through the distant door. Mark stood stock-still in the doorway, gaitered, in his rusty velveteen coat and wideawake hat, with his oldfashioned shot-belt across his breast, looking very pallid and foolish.
Miss Marlyn was gone, indeed, in a moment. But her face, with its strange look of guilt, was it? was caught and fixed in his brain.
If they had been allowed even one moment’s preparation, I dare say the beautiful Miss Agnes Marlyn and the withered Sir Roke would have met Mark with countenances so serene, and an air so plausible, that he would have been puzzled, and prepared to accept, or at least entertain, any expl
anation they might have chosen to offer. But Mark Shadwell, whom they had reason to believe to be more than a mile away at that moment, was standing, even before they saw him, in the doorway, and gazing at them with a countenance in which they both saw consternation and menace.
Sir Roke — a man of the world, inured to such small reverses, disciplined in dissimulation, and blessed with presence of mind — was quite himself before Mark had half recovered his shock.
“I thought I heard your voice, and I wasn’t wrong — just this moment, coming out of my room — and I fancied it came from here,” said Sir Roke, gaily, with his withered, impenetrable smile: “and as I entered at one door, Miss — Miss — what’s her name? came in at the other. Ha, ha, ha! I’m always in luck; I fancied she mistook me for you, and came in for instructions — your secretary, isn’t she? A very good idea; very agreeable; I quite envy you. She made so many apologies, and looked ready to sink into the earth — ha, ha, ha! I think she said she writes your letters.”
“Yes, my letters — that is, sometimes. You both thought, of course, that I was still away, shooting in the woods,” said Mark, fixing his eyes, with a strange look, upon Roke, and speaking in a measured way.
“I really had not been making conjectures on the subject — I can’t say, of course, how the young lady had been employed; for my part, I fancied, as I crossed the gallery, that I heard your voice here, and, the door being open, I walked in. I hope I have not done very wrong. I was making my excuses to the young lady when you came in; I must have heard your voice as you came up the stairs.”
“No, that couldn’t be; I did not speak — some mistake,” said Shadwell. “I’ve come in to get some powder. Should you like to take a gun for once, and try the rabbits?”
“No, thanks; I was just going out for a walk. Have you any notion where I should find my cousin Rachel?”
“Not the slightest,” said Mark, shortly.
“Well, I must only try. Pretty landscape that and Sir Roke, as he spoke, waved his hand towards the window, and smiled from the distance through it in such a way as ought to have made the flowers turn their innocent bells and cups towards him, and the birds sing more sweetly.
Thus smiling — with a little nod — Sir Roke was gone, leaving Mark Shadwell standing there, with his empty powder-flask rather tightly held in his hand.
Mark’s look was cast down on the floor, and there was a very angry tumult of suspicion, and other dark passions, at his heart. He entered the other room, where his powder and shot and fishing-tackle lay locked up in a press. It was simply the impetus of his first intention that carried him on, for powder and rabbits were now quite out of his mind.
On the middle of the floor of this room he stood with downcast eyes, and darkened face, I cannot say thinking, but rather stunned, and with the elements of fury indistinctly rolling in his breast.
He walked to the dim windows, stained with the old patterings of rain, and looked out, without an object. A pleasant female laugh sounded from beneath, and he saw Miss Agnes Marlyn talking with Rachel, on the grass. She seemed gay and at her ease, and the sight — suffering as he was — stung his pride with a momentary agony.
As he entered the room just now, and surprised her and Sir Roke in conference, a truth, though undefined, quite incompatible with accident or honesty, shocked him in their faces, transitory as one gleam of lightning, but fastened, with a dazzling chemistry, for ever in his brain. All Sir Roke’s rubbishy explanations — lies, lies, lies! How near he had been to tell him, at one moment, that he lied! He was glad now that he had not. To betray his rage would have been a humiliation. Was it possible, after all, that there was some truth in Roke’s explanation? No, it could not be. That one look that met him was detection.
With a sudden resolution he turned and walked swiftly across the room, along the silent gallery, and direct to Miss Agnes Marlyn’s room.
That room was simple, neat, nothing out of its place. Not a letter was lying about. He espied that little desk, inlaid with circles and fleur-de-lis of brass, quaint and rather pretty. He tried it, and found it locked. He tried his own keys, but they would not do. Mark Shadwell! Was it possible? in his governess’s room, a shabby spy and detective!
There was only this extenuation: he would have done precisely the same had her eyes been upon him. No; he was no spy, but the grand inquisitor, in his power and fury. He was not to be baffled by that artful little lock; his anger found a rough and ready way, and he carried the reserved and pretty little desk to the hearth, and with force, measured by his fury rather than its strength, dashed it upon the stone.
Delicate and obstinate little lock, decorative brass clasps, neat dovetailing and glue, all burst into wreck in a moment, and away flew, with a tiny clatter, broken bits of sealing-wax, a pencil-case, a seal, and two or three keys, over the floor; the letters lay among the wreck, and them he gathered up into a little pack, and laid them, methodically enough, on the small table near the window. There were not twenty in all. There was his wife’s gentle letter, which did not seem to hire, but to invite, Miss Agnes Marlyn — the beginning of all this!
The rest were in French; a few of two years since — adoring, fierce, sublime — from the constructor of the desk whose wreck lay on the hearthstone, violated. There were three in English, and they were from Sir Roke — the envelopes addressed in another, or a disguised, hand. The sneak! Mark gasped, and ground his teeth, unable to find a term of execration bitter enough for the man and the occasion. I don’t know that Sir Roke would have thought his procedure deserving of a much better one.
He read them carefully. Their meaning reached his angry brain but slowly, so many images excited and interrupted him. One of these letters, he thought, said, without seeming to say, that Sir Roke could not marry. Good Heavens! The sublime audacity of that little gipsy adventuress.
Had it not been for Mark Shadwell’s own dreams about the baronet, would he have regarded Miss Marlyn’s castle in the air with a contempt so exasperated and virulent? He actually laughed, with a kind of rage, over the idea.
He could not quite make out their relations by means of these three letters, two of which were very short. Sir Roke called her “provoking,”
“cruel,”
“unintelligible.” He talked of “encouragement” and “unreasonableness.” He said he had hoped that he had made “his difficulties and his hopes better understood.” He said, in another place, that he “honoured her motives” — hypocritical villain! — and that he knew, “so soon as she arranged that interview which she had promised,” he could “entirely satisfy, not only her honourable scruples, but her conscience” That he meant “altogether honourably, and she knew it.”
On the whole, thus much was clear: whatever the origin of their intimacy might be, that Sir Roke had come to Raby with no other object than to see Agnes Marlyn; that, as appeared from the tenor and date of one of his letters, she had evidently consulted him as to whether she should come to Raby. He fancied, from some faint allusion, too, that she had been describing him — Mark Shadwell — amusingly! What he would have given for a copy of the entire correspondence! It was enough, however. She should leave Raby peremptorily; and he would tell Roke, in plain terms, what he thought of him.
Thus resolved this proud, reserved, conceited man. His heart was wrung with a terrible mortification.
CHAPTER V.
ALONE, YET NOT ALONE.
When Mark Shadwell first picked up Sir Roke’s letters, he was trembling with eagerness for a collision with the shabby author of them. He could hardly wait patiently to read them through. But his pride helped him now. He had been spelling over these letters for more than ten minutes, and by the time he had mastered their contents, he was cool enough to act more in accordance with his haughty character.
The letters were now in his hand. But he had changed his mind. It would be time enough to talk to Roke by and by. It would not do to make a fracas about a little governess. It would be agony to betray that other d
isappointment. To no one — even to his wife, hardly to himself — could he endure to define that fraudulent insult. If, indeed, Roke had meant it — for there might have been something of chance; but no, it was a premeditated deception, and intended to mask his real object — what name could adequately describe such a man?
Mark had the letters in his hand; but he knew all they contained, and there was no need to satisfy any one, but himself upon the matter. He looked down on the coy, little, murdered desk, dislocated, gaping on the hearthstone, bleeding a stream of ink from its broken bottle; and his impulse was to tear the vile letters across, and fling them upon it. But that would have been but accumulating evidence of his irritation; and, instead, he placed them on the other letters that stood like a pack of cards, ready to be shuffled or cut, on the table.
Down stairs went Mark again. A quarter of an hour had done a great deal for him. Powder, shooting, gun, he forgot. From habit, he took his stick in the hall, and sallied forth, with quick strides, to stun the sense of pain with exercise. The sun was gone down from his sky, and the future a chasm.
Away to the sylvan solitudes he had lately left, he strode. Along their slopes and sides, under the congenial darkness of the branches, he walked, and sat down at last, at the entrance of a glade, upon the trunk of a prostrate tree. The summits of the wood were touched by the level beams of the declining sun, which here and there broke ruddily through the hoary stems of the forest.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 407