by Ellen Wood
“To run away from my father’s home. I have read of it in books, but I never knew any one who did it in real life. And now that the time is coming near, I cannot tell you how I seem to shrink from it. We have been brought up to be so obedient.”
“Hush, Laura! You are falling into an unnecessarily grave view of this.”
She did not answer aloud, but she began asking herself whether too grave a view could be taken of a daughter’s leaving clandestinely her father’s home. Laura’s conscience was unusually alive to-night. A glimmer of the watery moon fell on her face through the trees, and Mr. Carlton saw how grave was its expression. He divined her thoughts, as by instinct, and answered them.
“Laura, believe me, you can take too grave a view of it. When a father is unreasonably despotic, a daughter is justified in breaking through her trammels. Surely you are not wavering! Laura, Laura! you will not be the one to frustrate our plans! you will not draw back from me at the last hour!”
She burst into tears. “No, I would not draw back from you,” she sobbed. “But — I don’t know how it is, I feel to-night frightened at everything; frightened above all at the unknown future.”
Mr. Carlton did his best to reassure her. Loving arguments, all too specious; sophistries, whose falseness was lost in their sweetness, were poured into her ear. It was only the old story; one that has been enacted many a time before, that will be enacted many a time again: where inclination and conscience are at war, and the latter yields.
“I could not live without you,” he passionately reiterated. “You must not draw back from me now.”
It may be that she felt she could not live without him. She suffered herself to be soothed, to be satisfied. Gradually, one by one, her scruples melted away; and she discussed with him finally their plans for getting away undetected, unpursued. The time for their purposed flitting was drawing very near: four-and-twenty hours more would bring it.
But it grew late; time for Mr. Carlton to be away, and for Laura to be indoors again, lest she should be missed. Mr. Carlton, with many a last word and many another, at length quitted her. Laura remained for a few minutes where she was, to still the beating of her agitated heart, to live over again the sweet, stolen interview. Only a few hours, and, if all went well, she should belong to him for ever!
The shrubs and trees around afforded a safe shelter. It was pretty dry there, and she had suffered the shawl to fall from her shoulders, never heeding where. But now she turned to look for it, and just at that moment the moon burst from behind a cloud, and Laura looked up at its glitter through the leaves of the trees. It was brighter then than it had yet been that night.
Taking up the shawl, she had thrown it round her, when a cry escaped her lips, and every pulse in her beating heart stood still. There, amidst the trees, stood some one watching her; some one that certainly bore the form of a human being, but a strange one. It wriggled itself forward and came nearer: near enough to speak in a whisper, and be heard:
“Laura Chesney, what have you to do with Lewis Carlton?”
She stood paralyzed with fright, with awe, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and saying nothing: her hands clutching the shawl, her eyes dilated.
“Have nothing to do with Lewis Carlton,” went on the voice. “If you care for your own happiness, perhaps your life, have nothing to-do with him. Ask him what he did to Clarice. Ask him if he deals in poison.”
With the faintest possible rustling, the figure and the voice died away to her sight and hearing. Laura Chesney felt as if her own heart, almost her life, were dying with it.
Now it happened that Mr. Carlton, after letting himself out at the gate, remembered a word he had forgotten to say to Laura, touching those plans of theirs for the following evening. He had gone a few paces down the road when he thought of it; but he retraced his steps, put his hand over the gate, pressed the spring, and turned in again. Only a few yards from him, right in front of the path, enveloped in what looked like a travelling cloak and cap, stood a man, a stout, very short man — as it seemed to Mr. Carlton. He supposed it to be some traveller coming perhaps from a journey, who might have business at the house; he supposed he had passed in at the gate in the minute that had elapsed since he himself had passed out of it. Conscious that he was not upon Captain Chesney’s premises on pursuits of the most honourable nature, the surgeon felt somewhat embarrassed. At that moment the stranger turned and raised his cap, and to Mr. Carlton’s horror he saw beneath it the face he had seen once before.
It was the same face he had seen on the staircase in Palace Street, the night of his patient’s death; the same severe face, with its intensely black whiskers, and its ghastly white skin. A creeping horror, as if the dead were about him, overspread Mr. Carlton: he knew not whether the figure before him was ghostly or human. He leaned his brow on his hand for one single instant to recover self-possession; and when he looked up, the figure was gone.
Gone where? Mr. Carlton could not say, could not think. That it had not come down the path was certain, because it must have brushed past him; and it was equally certain it had not gone on to the house, or it would not yet have been out of sight; neither was he disposed to think it had disappeared amidst the trees, for he had heard no sound of their being moved. He had hitherto considered himself a brave man, a man bolder than the common run, but he was strangely shaken now. The same undefined terror which had unnerved him that other night, unmanned him this. It was not a fear that he could grapple with. It was a vague, shadowy dread, perfectly undefined to his mind, partly indistinct; one moment presenting the semblance of a tangible fear, that might be run from or guarded against; the next, wearing to his conviction only the hues of a fanciful superstition. Never, in all his life, had Mr. Carlton believed in ghostly appearances; he would have been the first to laugh at and ridicule those who did believe in them; most singular, then, was it that the face he had seen that ill-fated night should have conjured up any superstitious fear in his mind of its being a visitant from the other world. It was singular that the same idea should arise, uncalled for, now.
With a face quite as ghastly as the one he had seen, — with shaken nerves that he strove in vain to steady, — with a sickening fear that ran through every fibre of his frame, Mr. Carlton stood still as death, taking a few moments’ respite; and then he penetrated to the spot where he had left Laura Chesney. Not to her did he purpose breathing a syllable of what had passed. What then was his astonishment to find her dart up to him, clasp him tightly for protection, and burst into deep sobs of terror, a terror as great as his own!
“Laura, my love, what means this?”
“Oh, Lewis, did you see it? did you see it?” she sobbed. “That figure which has been here?”
Mr. Carlton’s heart beat more violently than before; but still he would not betray that he knew anything.
“What figure, Laura?”
“I don’t know; I don’t know who or what it was. It was behind me, amidst the trees, and I saw it when I turned to look after my shawl. At the first moment I thought it was a woman; its voice sounded like a woman’s; but afterwards I thought it was a man. I don’t know which it was.”
“Its voice!” repeated Mr. Carlton. “Did it speak?”
“It spoke, and that was the worst; it warned me against you. Otherwise I might have thought it some curious passer-by, who had heard us speaking, and came intruding in at the gate to look. Oh, Lewis!” she added, with a burst of agitation that almost shook Mr. Carlton as well as herself, “it is not true, is it? Lewis! Lewis!”
Her emotion was so excessive that she lost all self-control, all recollection of the necessity for secrecy. Another fear attacked Mr. Carlton — that they might be betrayed.
“Hush, hush!” he whispered. “Be calm, and tell me what you mean. Is what true?”
“It — I say ‘it,’ because I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman — it warned me against you,” panted Laura. “It told me that I must have nothing to do with Lewis Carlton; t
hat if I valued my own happiness, perhaps my life, I should not.”
“Some envious fool who has penetrated our secret, and who would step between us,” interrupted Mr. Carlton in a tone of bitter scorn.
“Hear me out,” she continued. “It told me to ask you what you had done with Clarice: to ask if you dealt in poison.”
Mr. Carlton stood as one transfixed — as one confounded. “What Clarice?” he presently asked. “Who is Clarice?”
“I don’t know,” said Laura Chesney, her sobs subsiding into a wail. “Do you know any one of the name?”
“I do not know any Clarice in the world,” he answered.
“But about the poison?” shivered Laura: “what could the words mean? ‘Ask him if he deals in poison!’”
“I suppose they meant ‘deals in drugs,’” was the answer. “A medical man, in general practice, must have to do with them.” There was something in Mr. Carlton’s tone that frightened Laura worse than anything that had gone before. She started away to gaze at him. He was looking forward with a vacant stare, as if he had lost all consciousness of the present.
“Was it a pale face, Laura, with black whiskers?” he presently asked.
“I could see nothing distinctly, except that the face was ashy pale — or perhaps it only looked so in the moonlight. Why? Have you seen it?”
“I believe I have seen it twice,” returned Mr. Carlton. He spoke in a dreamy tone of self-communing, quite as if he had forgotten that any one was present; and indeed it seemed that he had lost self-control just as much as Laura had lost it. “I saw it outside that room the night of the death,” he continued, “and I saw it again this minute as I was coming back to you.”
The particular information, and the associations it conjured up, did not tend to reassure Miss Laura Chesney.
“The face you saw outside the lady’s room in Palace Street?” she said, with a faint shriek. “It never could be that face,” she added, relapsing into another fit of trembling. “What should bring that face here!”
“I know not,” cried Mr. Carlton; and it seemed that he was trembling also. “I am not sure, Laura, that it is either man or woman; I am not sure but it is a ghostly apparition.”
“Where did you see it? Where did it go to?”
“I saw it in the path, but I did not see where it went. It seemed to vanish. It is either that, or — or — some base villain, some sneaking spy, who steals into houses for his own wicked purposes, and deserves the halter. What should bring him here? here on your father’s premises. Was he dodging my steps? or yours?”
“Lewis, whose was the face, that night?”
“I would give half my allotted life to know.”
“There was a suspicion that he poisoned the draught. I am sure I heard so.”
“Just as he would poison the happiness of our lives,” exclaimed Mr. Carlton in agitation:—” as he would have poisoned your mind against me. Laura, you must choose between me and him; between his insidious falsehoods and my love.”
“Do not speak in that way,” she passionately uttered; “the whole world could not turn me against you. Oh, Lewis, my best beloved, soon to be my husband, do not be angry with me that I repeated his words; had I kept them to brood over alone, they would only have rankled in my heart.”
“Angry with you,” he murmured, “no, no. I am not angry with you. I am angry with — with that wicked one, who would have tried to separate us. One more night and day, my love, and then we may defy him and all the world.”
Laura stole back to the house by the path she had come, the side-path leading to the kitchen. Mr. Carlton stood and watched her safely indoors, and then departed on his way home. The garden, for all that could be seen of it, was perfectly free from intruders then, and Mr. Carlton could only believe it to be so.
But as he went down the road, lying so fanciful and still — still in the calm night, in its freedom at that hour from people, fanciful with its quaint patches of light and shade — Mr. Carlton walked as though he feared an enemy at every turn. Now he peered before him, now he glanced over his shoulder behind him, now he half turned to see what might be by his side; and once, as an old hare, lurking in the hedge, sprang out before him and scudded to the opposite field, he positively started from it with a sudden cry. Strangely unnerved that night was Mr. Carlton.
And Laura, after all, did not escape detection. It happened, when tea had been removed from the drawing-room, that Miss Chesney wanted an embroidery pattern, and went to Laura’s bedroom to ask her for it. Laura was not there: and Jane, fancying she heard a movement overhead, turned to the foot of the upper stairs, and called.
It was not Laura who was up there, but the maid, Judith. She came out of her chamber, looked down, and saw her mistress standing below.
“Did you speak, ma’am?”
“I called to Miss Laura, Judith. Is she upstairs?”
The only room in which Laura was likely to be, if she was upstairs, was the one occupied by Jane. Jane Chesney, ever self-denying, had given up the best lower rooms to her father and Laura, herself and Lucy sleeping above. Judith went and looked inside the chamber.
“No, ma’am, Miss Laura is not here. I’m sure she has not come upstairs, or I should have heard her.”
Jane called again, but there was no answer. She looked everywhere she could think of, and at last went into the kitchen. Pompey was there alone.
“Pompey, do you know where Miss Laura is?”
Pompey was, as the saying runs, taken to. He had had his eyes and ears open this last week or two, and had not been unconscious of Miss Laura’s stolen interviews outside the house in the dusk of evening. Pompey had no idea of making mischief; old Pompey was fond of pretty Miss Laura, and had kept the secret as closely as she could have kept it: but, on the other hand, Pompey had no idea, could have no idea, of denying any information demanded of him by his mistress, Miss Chesney. So Pompey stood and stared in bewildered indecision, but never spoke.
“I ask you, Pompey, if you know where Miss Laura is,” repeated Jane, certain anxieties touching Laura taking sudden possession of her and rendering her voice sharp. “Why do you not answer me?”
“She there, missee,” replied Pompey, at length, pointing to the garden. “She not catch cold; she got great big black shawl over her.”
“Who is with her? Pompey, I ask you who is with her?”
She spoke with quiet authority, though she had laid her hand on her heart to still its tumultuous beating; authority that might not be disputed by poor Pompey.
“I think it Misser Doctor. But she no stay very long with him, missee; she never does.”
Jane Chesney leaned against the dresser, feeling as if an avalanche had fallen and crushed her; feeling that if an avalanche fell and crushed the house for ever, it would be more tolerable than this disgrace which had fallen upon it. In that moment there was a slight rustle of silk in the passage; it whirled by the kitchen door, and was lost on the floor above; and Jane knew that Laura had come in and taken shelter in her room.
Come in from the clandestine meeting with Mr. Carlton, the surgeon; and the words of Pompey seemed to imply that these meetings were not infrequent! Jane Chesney turned sick at heart. The disgrace was keen.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE LETTERS.
AN incident occurred the following morning to cause some surprise at the house of Captain Chesney. When Pompey brought in the letters he presented them to Jane, as was customary. There were three. The first was addressed to Captain Chesney, and Jane immediately handed it to him across the breakfast-table; the second was addressed to herself; and the third bore the superscription, “The Right Honourable the Earl of Oakburn.”
It was not a pleasant morning, for the rain was pattering against the window panes. The breakfast-table was laid near the window in the drawing-room, where the captain, in his despotic will, chose that they should breakfast. He had taken a liking to the room; to its pretty glass windows that opened to the lawn.
; Captain Chesney unsealed his letter the moment it was handed to him, and became absorbed in its contents. Jane kept glancing at the one addressed to Lord Oakburn, but she would not interrupt her father to speak of it. When he had finished his letter, he looked up.
“Are both those for you, Jane?”
“Not both, papa. One is directed to Lord Oakburn. See. I cannot make out why it should have been sent here.”
Captain Chesney stretched out his hand for the letter, and turned it about to regard it, after the usual manner of people when a letter puzzles them.
“Yes, it is for him, sure enough. ‘The Right Honourable the Earl of Oakburn, Cedar Lodge, the Rise, South Wennock,’” continued he, reading the full superscription aloud. “He must be coming here, Jane.”
“I suppose he must, papa. It is the only conclusion I can come to.”
“Very condescending of him, I’m sure,” growled the captain. “It’s an honour he has not accorded me since he was at Eton. What is bringing him here, I wonder? Wants change of scene perhaps.”
Jane took alarm. “You don’t think he can be coming to stay, papa? We have nothing fitting to receive him; no establishment, no accommodation. He cannot surely be coming to stay with us!”
“If he comes he must take things as he finds them. I shall not put myself out of the way, neither need you. ‘Not able to do it, my lord,’ I shall say to him; ‘Frank Chesney’s too poor; had his family bestirred themselves, old Frank might have carried his head a notch higher. All you need do, Jane, is to see that he has a shakedown, a hammock slung for him somewhere. I suppose that can be managed; there’s the spare room off mine; and for the rest, let him take what he finds.”
“Still I can hardly understand why he should be coming,” resumed Jane, after a pause. “He—”
“Is he in London, or at Chesney Oaks?” interrupted Lucy, looking up from her bread and milk.
“At Chesney Oaks, my dear,” said Jane. “He went down a month ago, when his poor young wife was buried, and I think he has remained there.”