“Certainly,” he exclaimed with sudden alacrity, and another little shrug; and so he left the room.
Then Damian, not looking at her otherwise than a well-bred old gentleman might, began to tell her of his journey, and fifty other things, and so drew her into talk; and now and then, adroitly, he insinuated a question; and after fifteen minutes or so, at the end of their interview, he said:
“You will be glad to hear I have no objection to your seeing Miss Medwyn, or any other friend who may call; you may write to any one you please, and your letters shall reach you without being opened. Your stay here will be a short one.”
Old Mr. Damian, wrinkled, haggard, grey, as he spoke these words, looked, she thought, like an angel of light. She could have dropped on her knees, and kissed his feet. He talked a little more, encouragingly and kindly. Maud could say nothing; she was crying.
By his direction Mercy Creswell returned; and to her he put many questions; all which she answered with the directness of fear. So she, in turn, was dismissed.
A few minutes more and he was sitting there alone, in deep thought. Presently he touched the bell, and sent for Antomarchi.
“Where is the letter you spoke of? Oh, here,” said Damian.
He put on his glasses, untied the red tape, and opened the paper.
“This is an agreement,” he observed.
He drew back his head a little from it, as if he had seen a centipede or a wasp on the page. He knit his brows and held it closer to the candle, and his countenance darkened as he read on; and when he had come to the end, with the same severe aspect, he read it over again more rapidly, and threw it down on the table. Then he looked to the index of the huge ledger, and opened at the folio indicated as that containing the account of Lady Vernon of Roydon, for her daughter, Miss Maud Guendoline Vernon, for residence, expenses, advice, &c. &c. He let the ledger shut with a heavy slap, and took a turn or two in silence up and down the room. At last he stopped at the other side of the table, looking stern and pale, and said:
“The evidence in Miss Vernon’s case looks very well on paper; but it won’t stand the test. I saw Lady Vernon to-day. She could not evade my questions. Those threats of suicide melt into mere follies of temper. I have examined Creswell respecting the alleged threat and attempt here. That was temper also. The girl had no more real idea of killing herself than Creswell had. If I had not believed her mother’s testimony on the point of suicide, I should have insisted on evidence of more developed symptoms than are set out in the statement. You observe there is no pretence of any delusion?”
Antomarchi assented and said: “That is not necessary to constitute insanity.”
“No, quite right,” said Damian. “We have had here too many cases of melancholia, of mania, in its slighter degrees — and of suicidal mania fully developed — to require the presence of delusion as a test. But there is no impulse to suicide here. The evidence of Elihu Lizard without this is not enough. It is explained away by the statement, very clear and sensible, of Miss Medwyn, which reached me last night in a letter from Mr. Dawe, and I am informed that Elihu Lizard is in custody, the judge before whom he appeared in a will case having directed a prosecution for perjury against him. Lastly, I have had a long conversation with the young lady. It has satisfied me. She shall leave this forthwith.”
Antomarchi smiled, but his face darkened.
“I am very glad, sir, you take so decided a view. I told Mr. Steele, and all Miss Vernon’s friends, that I should be for my part, only too glad to be relieved of the responsibility. It is an ugly case.”
“It was not an ugly case,” said old Damian, sternly, “until that letter was written and received. Has it been acted upon?”
“There has been the outfit, and the furniture and decoration.”
“How much money has been paid?”
“Two thousand five hundred pounds.”
“Five thousand a year for the maintenance of one girl!”
“With servants and carriage for her exclusive use,” said Antomarchi.
“All which would not have cost us seven hundred a year,” added Damian. “I wish I had known of the existence of that letter to-day,” and Damian struck the knuckles of his open hand upon it sharply, “and I should have held different language to my Lady Vernon.”
He turned and resumed his impatient walk up and down the room.
“If I had thought it the least excessive, I should have been the last man to agree to it, sir,” said Antomarchi, coldly.
“It can’t bear the light,” said Damian. “It is a very black case.”
“You’ll please not to apply such terms to anything I have sanctioned,” said Antomarchi. “I suppose we are to do something more than simply pay expenses here? I rather think we have a right to profits; and, considering all our labour and responsibilities, large profits too. I might have hid that letter from you if I had been what you, I think, dare not insinuate.”
He might have added that he had seriously thought of doing so, but rejected it as too hazardous a game.
“I have passed through life with honour,” continued Damian. “To think that my house and name should be abused to such a purpose!”
Antomarchi’s pale face glared angrily after the old man as he walked toward the upper end of the room.
“It is the right course,” mused Damian, gloomily, to himself. “I have been long enough here. I think I shall relinquish it.”
Antomarchi heard these words with a presentiment that the retirement which he had long looked forward to was imminent.
After an interval, Damian arrested his walk opposite to Antomarchi, and looking him sternly in the face, he said:
“I shall break up this establishment.”
“Break it up? Transfer it, I fancy, you mean,” remarked Antomarchi.
“Transfer it; to whom?” said Damian.
“To me, of course,” answered Antomarchi, doggedly.
“Certainly not,” answered the old man; “we part, you and I, forthwith.”
“You’ll think twice, before you try that,” said Antomarchi, his black beard and brows looking blacker as his face whitened and his eyes gleamed with fury. “See, old man; I have given many of the best years of my life to maintaining your enormous revenues, and, by my priceless exertions, supporting your undeserved reputation. I have no notion of being sold by your caprice. I’m a partner, and if you presume intentionally to hurt the business of this concern to the value of a guinea, I’ll make you repent it.”
“My powers, under our deed, are clear; I mean to act upon them,” said Damian, with cold decision.
“You mean to say that letter is a covenant to bribe us; that I have sold myself to a conspiracy, of which Lady Vernon is the mainspring, and her daughter the victim, and that your superior conscience or delicacy interposes to save her?” demanded Antomarchi.
Damian made him no answer.
“If you seriously meditate what you say, you have lost your head, and as your partner I shall look after my property, and see that you are restrained from inflicting the injury you meditate; I have more lines of defence and attack than you are, perhaps, prepared for.’’ Antomarchi smiled with a baleful eye on the resolute old man, as he said this. “You have taken the letter,” he added; “you will be good enough to replace it in the office desk.”
“One moment,” said Damian, who had been writing a few lines on two sheets of notepaper, and now rose and touched the bell. He desired the servant to send Mr. Darkdale, who forthwith was there.
“Take this copy, Mr. Darkdale, and compare, as I read the original aloud. Doctor Antomarchi, this is addressed to you.” And he read aloud a formal notice of the dissolution of partnership, which he then handed to Antomarchi.
“And take notice, Mr. Darkdale,” said Antomarchi, “original and copy are no better than waste paper.”
“Tonight, or tomorrow, which you please, you shall have a cheque for the liquidated sum to which, on retirement, you are entitled by the deed,” said o
ld Damian.
“You expect to get out of all this, sir,” said Antomarchi, with a sarcastic laugh, as Damian withdrew with the grim formality of a bow, “on particularly easy terms.”
Antomarchi was not a devil to be easily cast out. His cool and vigorous head was already scheming mischief.
In the mean time, having learned that Miss Medwyn was in the waiting-room, Damian proceeded thither, and having heard her request, instantly granted it; shook Mr. Marston by the hand, and added:
“I have carefully considered Miss Vernon’s case, and I am perfectly clear that she is, and always has been, of perfectly sound mind.”
After immense jubilation and many tears from Miss Medwyn, came the happy thought.
“And she may leave this, with me, tonight?”
“I see no objection; but you must give me a letter to say that you receive her only till her proper guardians shall have made their wishes known.”
CHAPTER LXXXV.
THE ANTECHAMBER.
I need not trouble you with details. That night Maud Vernon was free, and slept under the roof of the pleasant Hermitage.
Charles Marston passed the night at the Star and Garter, at Wybourne, whence he popped in upon the party at breakfast.
Never was so happy a breakfast; never was known, before or since, so delightful a ramble as followed, among the selfsame grassy slopes and lordly trees, near the ivy-bound walls and arches of the ruined manorhouse of Wybourne, among which Charles Marston had on a tumultuously happy afternoon, in the early summer, avowed his love for the beautiful stranger, who was resolved to remain a mystery.
Let us leave them to their happy recollections and foolish talk, and follow a less romantic rambler to his destination.
Mr. Dawe had driven through the town of Roydon the day before. His carriage pulled up at the door of Doctor Malkin. But the physician was making a visit to Lady Vernon, preliminary to his departure for Glarewoods.
So Mr. Dawe, changing his plans, decided on taking Mr. Tintern first.
He had some difficulty in finding him. He was taking a furious walk in his wide plantations, switching the heads off nettles, kicking the withered cones of the pines when they came in his way, and talking fiercely to himself. He found him, at last, in the depths of his solitudes of pine and larch.
Mr. Tintern knew nothing about the “young people,” and desired to know nothing. He hoped he might never see his daughter’s face again. He hoped they might come to the workhouse, and he had many other pleasant things to say in the same vein.
Mr. Dawe talked as if he took an interest in the young man, and confessed that he intended doing something handsome for him, if Mr. Tintern would contribute in a fair proportion; and now came Mr. Tintern’s bleak and furious confession of ruin, as he stood white under the black shadow of his pine-trees, shaking his walking-cane in his clenched fist in the face of an imaginary persecutor, and making the brown colonnades of his sober trees ring with threats, and boasts, and blasphemies; and then the thin old coxcomb, overcome by self-commiseration, on a sudden broke down, and began to cry hysterically.
“I say it’s awful; you ought to consider; it was you who brought that d — d fellow down here; and he has been more than half the ruin of me; and now that the thing is past cure, I think you are bound to use your influence with Lady Vernon to exercise her power of appointment under the will in my favour. It would enable me to do what you wish — for I could raise money on it, and she might as well do that, as give it to strangers, or let it go to charitable institutions, that no one cares about. I wish you would — won’t you? Do, like a good fellow; promise me; and, upon my soul, if I get it, I’ll make whatever settlements you ask me, in reason. You may believe me; by Heaven I will.”
Perhaps Mr. Dawe was thinking in the same direction, for he grunted rather in the tone of assent. And having heard enough of Mr. Tintern’s declamation, and observing that the sun was near the horizon, he took his leave, simply promising to see what could be done, and so made his escape. The conversation had never once touched upon the situation of Miss Vernon. Mr. Tintern was absorbed, for the present, by his last and greatest misfortune.
It was too late, by the time Mr. Dawe reached the town of Roydon, to think of going up to the Hall, to try whether Lady Vernon would see him. He therefore put up for the night at the Verney Arms, and next day walked up to Roydon Hall.
Mr. Dawe, with his usual forethought, had come provided with a note, at which, he thought, her doors would most likely open to him; and while the servant took it to his mistress he stood upon the steps, looking down the avenue, between the double files of lordly trees, whose foliage was already thinned and yellowed in the suns and winds of autumn.
That queer little black-wigged man had, perhaps, his feeling for the picturesque, as handsomer people have. He had paid more than you would have thought for the exquisite little landscapes that hung upon his walls at East Mauling. I should not wonder if he had his secret poetry, and deeper still, his secret romance. It is hard to say what may be in a man so reserved as he, and so sensitive that he takes vows of silence, and wears the habit of a cynic.
The footman now came to say that Lady Vernon will see him, and he follows, not to his left, as he enters, where, at the front of the house, lie the long suite of drawingrooms, but to the right, beyond the shield-room, where, at the rear, a different suite of rooms is placed.
Into one of these he is shown; a square room with a single window, through which you see the funereal yew worked into cloistered walls and arches, and a sombre tree standing near, which keeps the room in perpetual shadow. The heavy curtains hide part of the window, and increase the gloom. Some bygone Vernon seems to have got up this apartment under a caprice of melancholy.
There are three pictures, with something depressing in each. The first, a landscape; a cold, frowning forest glade, that looks as if sun had never shone there, nor bird sung in its leaves. Such a forest as Dante may have seen, with a black marble tomb with sombre weeds drooping over it, near the front, and a solitary figure like a shadow gliding away among the trees into the darker distance. Opposite the window is a fine picture of Cleopatra fainting, with the asp to her bosom. And at the right, scarcely the depth of a step, between the floor and the lower end of the frame, hangs a large repulsive painting of the death of Sapphira. It is powerful, but odious. She lies distorted on the oak flooring, a bit of carpet, with Dutch anachronism, torn in her convulsion from the nails in the boards, is in her dead hand, her jaw fallen, her eyes all white; almost the only light in the picture is that one beam which strikes on the bald head of Peter, who looks ferocious as a brigand. The “young men,” who are stooping to carry her out, smile like ghouls, and behind, row after row, till they disappear in the deepening shadow, the spectators, like ghosts awaiting judgment, stand with dim long faces, white and horror-stricken.
He has time enough to examine these saturnine old pictures, and has more than once peeped at his watch.
At length the thin figure of Latimer, in her accustomed black silk, appears in the doorway close beside the evil-minded “young men,” and the corpse in the shadow; and she looks like a lean matron introduced to show them the way to the dead-house.
“Please, Mr. Dawe, sir, her ladyship has a bad headache; nothing more, she desires me to say; but she is not equal to much exertion, and if you would please to excuse her dressing-gown and slippers, and to make any business you may have as short as you can, she would feel it a kindness.”
“Certainly, Latimer; not five minutes if I can help it,” said he.
“This way please, sir.”
And she led the way into a darksome, but long and stately room.
The shutters of the window next the door are partly open, but the blind down. Those of the remaining two are closed, and the curtains also. The whole room therefore is lighted by less that half a window; and so imperfectly at the upper end, that on first coming in you could not discern objects there.
CHAPTER LXXXVI.
“This is Mr. Dawe, please, my lady,” said Latimer, and withdrew softly.
“How do you do, Mr. Dawe?” said the well-known sweet voice from the darkened part of the room; “I’m suffering from headache; but take a chair, where there is a little light, and I’ll come as near as I can bear.”
He saw a white figure moving slowly towards him; and soon it emerged in the twilight; and Lady Vernon appeared. She had a loose grey dress on, of a very thick soft silk. She pointed to a chair, which accordingly Dawe took; she herself sat down, and appeared a little out of breath.
He was shocked at the change he observed. She had grown thin, and it seemed to him stooped, and was deadly pale except for a small hectic patch in each cheek, which used to come only with agitation. Her eyes looked larger and fiercer, but had the glassy look that strangely suited her peaked features.
She looked sinister as the woman of Endor. He thought the hand of death was on her.
He relented, though his brown corded face and prominent eyes showed no sign; and he said:
“You look ill, Barbara; you must be ill. Who is attending you?”
“No one; I prescribe for myself; it is not anything serious; and I know what suits me.”
“You ought to have the best advice from town,” he persisted. “And — and, Barbara, I have known you in your cradle; I have had you on my knee when you were a little child; you’ll shake hands with me.”
He had approached, with his brown hand extended.
“Another time; not to-day,” she said, coldly; “pray take my own account of it; I am not seriously ill; and be kind enough not to tell my friends that I am dying; I’m bored to death by calls and notes; I shall be quite well in a week. What about Elwyn? Do say at once; I implore of you, come to the point.”
“I find that Elwyn Howard, or Vivian, your son, is the person who has married Miss Ethel Tintern.”
“I knew it, I guessed it,” she said after a pause. “There is always a shock when evil surmises turn out true; but I was sure it was so.”
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 614