by Ellen Wood
Mr. Hardcastle put on his spectacles, and she noticed that his hands trembled, she thought with agitation. “I have a nephew,” he said, “who lives principally upon the continent; a thankless scapegrace he is, and has caused me a world of trouble. He has not been in England for eighteen months now, and I hope he will not come to it in a hurry; but he is always threatening it.”
Mrs. Dundyke was surprised. “He told us, sir, that he had come from London recently; in fact, he said — he certainly implied — that he took a principal and active part in your house in Leadenhall-street.”
“All boast, madam, all boast. He has not anything to do with it, and we would not let him have. I wonder he should say that, too! He is tolerably truthful, making a confession of his shortcomings, rather than hiding them.”
“Is he at Genoa still, sir?”
“At where?” asked Mr. Hardcastle, looking at Mrs. Dundyke through his spectacles, which he had been all the time adjusting.
“He went on to Genoa, sir, from Geneva. I asked whether he was there still.”
“He has not been at Geneva or at Genoa,” said Mr. Hardcastle; “latterly, at any rate.”
“Yes he has, sir; he was at Geneva when we got to it in July, and he stayed some time. He then went on to Genoa.”
“Then he has deceived me,” said Mr. Hardcastle, in a vexed tone. “I don’t know why he should; it does not matter to me what place he is in. What is this, madam — the order? This is not his handwriting,” hastily continued Mr. Hardcastle, at the first glance, as he unfolded the paper.
“I saw him write it, sir,” said Mrs. Dundyke.
“Madam, it is no more like his writing than it is like yours or mine,” was the testy answer. “And — what is this signature, B. Hardcastle? My nephew’s name is Thomas.”
There was a momentary silence. Mr. Hardcastle sat looking at the written order, knitting his brow in reflection.
“Madam, I do not think he could have been at Geneva when this was dated,” he resumed; “I had a letter from him just about this time, written from Brussels. Stay, I will get it.”
He opened a desk in the room and produced the letter. Singular to say, it bore date the 10th of August, the very day that the order was dated. The post-marks, both in Brussels and London, agreed with the date.
“It is impossible that it could have been he who wrote this order, madam, as you must perceive. Being in Brussels, he could not have been in Geneva. That this letter is in my nephew’s handwriting, I assure you on my honour. You may read it; it is about family affairs, but that does not matter.”
Mrs. Dundyke read the letter: it was not a long one. And then she looked in a dreamy sort of way at Mr. Hardcastle.
“Madam, I fear you must have been imposed upon.”
“Have you two nephews, sir?”
“I never had but this one in my life, ma’am; and I have found him one too many.”
“His wife is a showy woman, very pale, with handsome features,” persisted Mrs. Dundyke, in a tone as dreamy as her gaze. Not that she disbelieved that venerable old man, but it all seemed so great a mystery.
“His wife! my nephew has no wife: I don’t know who’d marry him. I tell you, ma’am, you have been taken in by some swindler who must have assumed his name. Though egad! my nephew’s little better than a swindler himself, for he gets into debt with everybody who will let him.”
Mrs. Dundyke sat silent a few moments, and she then told her tale — told everything that had occurred in connexion with her husband’s mysterious fate. But when she came to hint her suspicions of Mr. Hardcastle’s having been his destroyer, the old gentleman was visibly shocked and agitated.
“Good heavens! no! Spendthrift though he is, he is not capable of that awful crime. Madam, how do you suppose your husband lost his life? In a struggle? Did they quarrel?”
“I know nothing,” answered poor Mrs. Dundyke.
“A quarrel and struggle it may have been. Mr. Hardcastle was a powerful man.”
“A what? A powerful man, did you say, this Mr. Hardcastle?”
“Very powerful, sir; tall and strong. Standing nearly six feet high, and as dark as a gipsy.”
“Thank Heaven for that relief!” murmured Mr. Hardcastle. “My nephew is one of the smallest men you ever saw, ma’am, short and slight, with fair curls: in fact, an effeminate dandy. There’s his picture,” added the old gentleman, throwing open the door of an inner room, “and when he next comes to England, and he is threatening it now, as you read in that letter, you shall see him. But, meanwhile, I will refer you to fifty persons, if you like, who will bear testimony that he is, in person, as I describe. There is no possible identity between them. Once more, thank Heaven!”
Mrs. Dundyke returned to her home. The affair seemed to wear a darker appearance than it had yet worn. And again her suspicions reverted to the man who had called himself Mr. Hardcastle.
We must now turn to Westerbury. That generally supine city was awakened out of its lethargy one morning, by hearing that Death had claimed Marmaduke Carr. On the very night that his grandson was at Mrs. Dundyke’s, he was dying: and in the morning, Westerbury heard that he was dead.
On the same day, the instant the news was conveyed to them, Squire Carr and his son and heir came over with all the speed that the train could bring them, and went bustling to the house of the dead man. There they found Mr. Fauntleroy, the solicitor to the just deceased Mr. Carr. He was a tall, large man, this lawyer; a clever practitioner, a fast-living man, and, by the way, the same scapegrace who had done that injury, in the shape of money, to Peter Arkell. But Mr. Fauntleroy had settled down since then, and had made an enormous deal of money; and he held some sway in Westerbury.
“Here’s a pretty go!” cried Mr. Fauntleroy, in his loud, blustering tones. “To think that he should die off like this, and nobody know of it!”
“I never knew he was ill,” said the squire. “I should, of course, have come over if I had.”
“Oh, he has been ill — that is to say, ailing — a good month now,” returned the lawyer. “And when these aged healthy men begin to droop, their life is not worth much.”
“Well, what’s to be done now?” cried Squire Carr.
“Nothing of consequence until we hear from the son. I sent down to the carpenter this morning about the shell, but I shall do nothing more until we hear from Mr. Carr in Holland. I wrote a line to him the moment I heard what had happened, and was in time to get it off by the day mail. He will come over, there’s no doubt.”
“You knew his address, then?” cried Valentine. It was the first word he had spoken, and he had stood, with his little mean figure, rather behind his father, and his little mean light eyes furtively scanning the lawyer’s countenance.
“I believe I know it,” replied Mr. Fauntleroy. “There has been an address in our books as long as I have had anything to do with the office, ‘Robert Carr, Messrs. something (I forget the name), Rotterdam.’ I once asked Mr. Carr if it was his son’s correct address, and he said it was, for all he knew. That is the address I have written to.”
“Are you sure that the old man did not make a will?” asked the squire, alluding to his relative, Marmaduke.
“I am sure that I never made one for him,” returned Mr. Fauntleroy. “Will? no, not he! The very mention of the subject used to anger him? Where was the use of his making a will, he said. His son would inherit just as well without a will as with one: he was heir-at-law.”
Squire Carr’s covetous heart gave vent to a resentful sigh. They were the very self-same words that Mr. Carr had used to him so many years ago, on the same topic. That old Marmaduke had not made a will, he felt as certain as that he should go to his own bed that night, but he could not help harping upon the contrary hope. As to Valentine, he could almost have found in his heart to forge one, had such doings not been unfashionable.
“Well, I must say Marmaduke might have remembered that he had other relatives besides that runagate son,” grumbled the squire.
“Had he been mine, I’d have cut him off with a shilling.”
“Not a bit on’t, Carr,” laughed the lawyer, in his coarse way. “You’ll not leave your chattels away from your own progeny; not even from the roving sheep, Ben.”
Now it was a singular coincidence, amid the many small coincidences of this history, that Marmaduke Carr’s son Robert should die at the same time as his father. But so it was. The exile of many, many years died without ever having seen his father, or sought for a word of reconciliation with him: he had died suddenly in a fit, before his father, but not above an hour or two; and without seeing one of his three children, for all were away from home when it occurred.
In reply to Mr. Fauntleroy’s letter there arrived a short note, written by a lady who signed herself “Emma Carr, neé D’Estival.” The language was English, and good English, too; but the handwriting was unmistakably French. In acknowledging the receipt of Mr. Fauntleroy’s letter, it stated that “her husband” was from home; and it gave the information that Mr. Carr was dead — had died after a few hours’ illness.
Nothing could exceed the commotion that this news excited at Squire Carr’s. Robert Carr dead! then they were the heirs-at-law. They beset the office of Mr. Fauntleroy; they took the conduct of affairs into their own hands; they ordered the funeral, and they fixed the day of interment. Not by any means a remote day; scarcely decently so, according to English notions of keeping the dead. It was hot weather, Valentine remarked; and that was true: but Westerbury said they wanted to get the poor old man under ground that they might ransack the house, and see what valuables were in it. Mr. Fauntleroy was rather taken aback at these proceedings; at the summary wrestling of affairs out of his hands; and he had promised himself some nice little pickings out of all this, the funeral and the acting for Robert Carr, and one thing or another; but he did not see his way clear to hinder it. If Robert Carr was dead, and the old man had left no will, Squire Carr was undoubtedly the heir-at-law.
It was not, however, to be quite smooth sailing. On their return home from the funeral — and the only stranger invited to it was Mr. Arkell, he and Mr. Fauntleroy, with the two Carrs forming the mourners — Mr. Fauntleroy produced from his pocket a letter which he had received that morning. It was from the Reverend Robert Carr, the son of the deceased gentleman in Holland, requesting Mr. Fauntleroy to take all necessary arrangements upon himself for the interment of old Mr. Carr, his grandfather, and regretting that he was prevented journeying to attend it, in consequence of the melancholy circumstances already known to Mr. Fauntleroy. It desired that the style of the funeral should be handsome, in accordance with the fortune and position of the deceased. It was signed Robert Carr.
“Robert Carr!” contemptuously ejaculated the squire. “What a fool he must be to write in that strain to us!”
Mr. Fauntleroy chuckled over the letter; especially over that part of it ordering a suitable funeral. In his opinion, and in the opinion of Westerbury generally, the funeral of Mr. Carr had not been suitable. There were no mutes, no pall-bearers, no superfluous plumes, no anything: none but a mean-minded man would have ordered such a one.
Mr. Fauntleroy wrote back to the Reverend Robert Carr. He gave him a statement of the case in a dry, lawyery sort of way, and told him that Squire Carr being, under the apparent circumstances, heir-at-law, had taken possession of the affairs and property. This elicited a most indignant reply from Robert Carr. There could not be the slightest doubt that his father and mother were married, he said, and he should be in Westerbury as speedily as he could to maintain his own rights.
“Does he think he can impose upon us, this young fellow of a parson?” cried Squire Carr, when the letter was shown him. “He will be for making out next that his mother, that Hughes girl, was my cousin’s wife. Let him prove it. Old birds are not caught with chaff.”
And Squire Carr took out letters of administration.
CHAPTER VII.
ROBERT CARR’S VISIT.
Mrs. Arkell sat in her drawing-room with a visitor. She was listening to what struck her as being the very strangest tale she had ever heard or dreamt of. The Reverend Mr. Prattleton, who had reached home the previous night, had come this afternoon to tell her of the disappearance of Mr. Dundyke.
“Your sister wished me to give you the particulars as soon as I got home,” he observed. “There was little, if any, acquaintance between you and Mr. Dundyke,” he said, “but she felt sure you would feel concern for him, now he was dead, and would like to hear the details. It is a sad thing; I may say an awful thing.”
“I never heard of such a thing,” exclaimed Mrs. Arkell, forgetting her contempt for the Dundykes in the moment’s interest. “It appears incredible that such a thing could happen. Do you really think he was murdered, Mr. Prattleton?”
“No, no; I don’t think that,” said the minor canon. “Of course there is the possibility; but I incline to the belief that he must have fallen into the lake, leaving his pocket-book on the shore. Indeed, I feel convinced of it, and I think Mrs. Dundyke felt so at last. In the first uncertainty and suspense, I hardly know what horrible things she did not fancy.”
“But surely all proper search was made for him!”
“Of course it was. I am not sure that the police took so much interest in it, all of us being foreigners, and temporary sojourners in the town, as they would have done if a native had been missing. It was with difficulty they were persuaded to take a serious view of the case. The gentleman had only gone off somewhere else, they thought, without telling his wife. However, they did their best to find traces of him; but it proved useless.”
“What could have taken them to Geneva?” exclaimed Mrs. Arkell.
“A desire for change and recreation, I suppose. The same that took me — that takes us all.”
“But —— those common working-people don’t require change,” had been on Mrs. Arkell’s tongue; but she altered the words. Mrs. Dundyke was her sister, and unfortunately she could not deny it. “But —— Geneva was very far to go.”
“Not very, in these days of travelling. It is twenty years, Mrs. Arkell, since I was on the continent, and one seems to get about there ten times as quick as formerly. It’s true I took the rail this time as much as I could; the Dundykes, on the contrary, preferred the old diligences, wherever they were to be had.”
“Did you see Mr. Dundyke?”
“No,” said the minor canon. “He had disappeared — is it not a strangely sounding word? — before we reached Geneva.”
“What a mercy that it was not after it!” thought Mrs. Arkell, remembering the graces of manner of the ill-fated common-councilman. “Mrs. Dundyke has returned home, you say?”
“Oh, yes. When all hope was gone, we left Geneva. She went on home direct, but we stayed in Paris. I very much wished to call upon her as we came through London, but we had remained beyond our time, and I could not. I assure you, Mrs. Arkell, I do not know when I have met with anyone that so won on my regard and on Mary’s, as your sister.”
Mrs. Arkell raised her eyes in pure surprise. Her sister, humble Betsey Dundyke, win upon anybody’s regard! It struck her that the clergyman must be saying it out of some notion of politeness; he could surely never mean it. The fact was, Mrs. Arkell had so long been accustomed to regard her sister in a disparaging point of view, that she could not look upon her in any other light.
“She was always a poor, weak sort of girl, between ourselves, Mr. Prattleton. Otherwise you know she never could have made such a marriage. The man was most inferior; dreadfully inferior.”
“Indeed! Then I think he must have got on well,” said Mr. Prattleton. “He was to have been one of the sheriffs, I believe, next year.”
Mrs. Arkell superciliously drew down her still pretty lips. “A great many of those civic London people are quite inferior tradesmen,” she said; “at least I have heard so. I only hope poor Betsey has enough left to keep her from want. When these business people die, it often happens that all they have d
ies with them, and — oh, William, Mr. Prattleton has brought us the strangest news! Mr. Dundyke — Betsey’s husband, you know — is either murdered or drowned.”
She had broken off thus on the entrance of her husband. Mr. Arkell, as he shook hands with the clergyman, listened in amazement little less great than his wife’s, and asked question upon question, greatly interested. You see there was sufficient — what shall I say? — uncertainty, about the matter still, to make them look upon it more as an uncleared-up mystery, than a certain tragedy, and perhaps the chief feeling excited in all minds when they first heard it, was that of marvel. In the midst of Mr. Prattleton’s explanations, the college clock struck three, and the bell rang out for afternoon service. It was the minor canon’s signal.
“I must go,” he said, as he rose; “it is my week for chanting. Mr. Wilberforce took the duty for me the two first days. I did intend to get home on Saturday last, but somehow the time slipped on.”
Mr. Arkell was going into the town, and he walked with Mr. Prattleton as far as the large cathedral gates; for the minor canon went round to the front way that afternoon, as it lay in the road for Mr. Arkell. Lounging about in an idle mood, now against the contiguous railings, now against a post of the great doorway, in a manner not often seen at cathedral doors, and not altogether appropriate to them, was a rather tall, bilious-looking young man, with fair hair. He did not see them; his head was turned the other way.
“Can’t you find anything better to do, George?”
The words came from the clergyman, and the young man turned with a start. It was George Prattleton, the half-brother of the minor canon, but very, very much younger. Mr. George held a good civil appointment in India, but he was now home on sick leave, and his days were eaten up with ennui. He made the Rev. Mr. Prattleton’s his home, who good-naturedly allowed him to do it; but he was inclined to be what the world calls fast, and, except at the intervals (somewhat rare ones) when he had plenty of money in his pocket, he felt that the world was a wearisome sort of place, of no good to anybody. A good-natured, inoffensive young fellow on the whole; free from actual vice; but extravagant, incorrigibly lazy, and easily imposed upon. He generally called his brother “Mr. Prattleton.” The difference in their ages justified it, and they had not been brought up together.