by Ellen Wood
They breakfasted early. Adam’s active garden habits induced it. When Mrs. Andinnian descended, he was in the breakfast-room, scanning the pages of some new work on horticulture. He wore a tasty suit of grey, and looked well and handsome: unusually so in his mother’s eyes, for he had only returned the past evening from a few days’ roving absence.
“Good morning, Adam.”
He advanced to kiss his mother: his even white teeth and his grey eyes as beautiful as they could well be. Mrs. Andinnian’s fond and admiring heart leaped up with a bound.
“The nonsense people write whose knowledge is superficial!” he said, with a gay laugh. “I have detected half a dozen errors in this book already.”
“No doubt. What book is it?”
He held it out to her, open at the title-page. “I bought it yesterday at a railway-stall.”
“What a nice morning it is!” observed Mrs. Andinnian, as she was busy with the cups.
“Lovely. It is Midsummer Eve. I have been out at work these two hours.”
“Adam, I think that must be the postman’s step,” she remarked presently. “Some one is going round to the door.”
“From Karl, perhaps,” he said with indifference, for he had plunged into his book again.
Hewitt came in; one letter only on the silver waiter. He presented it to his master. Adam, absorbed in his pages, took the letter and laid it on the table without looking up. Something very like a cry from his mother startled him. She had caught up the letter and was gazing at the address. For it was one that had never before been seen there.
“Sir Adam Andinnian, Bart.”
“Oh my son! It has come at last.”
“What has come?” cried he in surprise. “Oh, I see: — Sir Joseph must be dead. Poor old fellow! What a sad thing!”
But it was not exactly Sir Joseph’s death that Mrs.
Andinnian had been thinking of. The letter ran as follows: —
“FOXWOOD, June 22nd.
“DEAR SIR, — I am truly sorry to have to inform you of the death of my old friend and many years’ patient, Sir Joseph Andinnian. He had been getting better slowly, but we thought surely; and his death at the last was sudden and quite unexpected. I have taken upon myself to give a few necessary orders in anticipation of your arrival here.
“I am, Sir Adam, very sincerely yours,
Sir Adam Andinnian.”— “WILLIAM MOORE.
The breakfast went on nearly in silence. Mrs. Andinnian was deep in thoughts and plans. Sir Adam, poring over his book while he ate, did not seem to be at all impressed with the importance of having gained a title.
“When shall you start, Adam?”
“Start?” he returned, glancing up. “For Foxwood? Oh, in a day or two.”
“In a day or two!” repeated his mother, with surprised emphasis. “Why, what do you mean?”
“Just that, mother.”
“You should be off in half an hour. You must, Adam.”
“Not I. There’s no need of hurry,” he added, with careless good humour.
“But there is need of it,” she answered.
“Why? Had Sir Joseph been dying and wished to see me, I’d not have lost a single moment: but it is nothing of the kind, poor man. He is dead, unfortunately: and therefore no cause for haste exists.”
“Some one ought to be there.”
“Not at all. The Mr. Moore who writes — some good old village doctor, I conclude — will see to things.”
“But why should you not go at once, Adam?” she persisted. “What is preventing you?”
“Nothing prevents me. Except that I hate to be hurried off anywhere. And I — I only came back to the garden yesterday.”
“The garden! — that’s what it is,” resentfully thought Mrs. Andinnian. He read on in silence.
“Adam, if you do not go, I shall.”
“Do, mother,” he said, readily. “Go, if you would like to, and take Hewitt. I hate details of all kinds, you know; and if you will go, and take them on yourself, I shall be truly obliged. Write me word which day the funeral is fixed for, and I will come for it.” Perhaps in all her life Mrs. Andinnian had never resented anything in her favourite son as she was resenting this. She had looked forward to this accession of fortune with an eager anxiety which none could suspect: and now that it was come, he was treating it with this cool indifference! Many a time and oft had she indulged a vision of the day when she should drive in to take possession of Fox wood, her handsome son, the inheritor, seated beside her.
“One of my sons ought to be there,” she said, coldly. “If you will not go, Adam, I shall telegraph to Karl.”
“I will telegraph for you,” he replied, with provoking good-humour. “Karl will be the very fellow: he has ten times the head for business that I have. Let him act for me in all things, exactly as though it were he who had succeeded: I give him carte blanche. It will save all trouble to you.”
Sir Adam Andinnian declined to be shaken out of his resolve and his inertness. In what might be called a temper, Mrs. Andinnian departed straight from the breakfast-table for the railway-station, to take the train. Her son duly accompanied her to see her safely away: she had refused to take Hewitt: and then he despatched a telegram to Karl, telling him to join his mother at Foxwood. Meantime, while these, the lady and the message, went speeding on their respective ways, the new baronet beguiled away the day’s passing hours amidst his flowers, and shot a few small birds that were interfering with some choice seedlings just springing up. —
Lieutenant Andinnian received the message promptly. But, following the fashion much in vogue amidst telegraphic messages, it was not quite as clear as daylight. Karl read that Sir Joseph was dead, that his mother was either going or gone to Foxwood; that she was waiting for him, and he was to join her without delay. But whether he was to join her at her own home and accompany her to Foxwood, or whether he was to proceed direct to Foxwood, lay in profound obscurity. The fault was not in Sir Adam’s wording; but in the telegraph people’s carelessness.
“Now which is it that I am to do?” debated Karl, puzzling over the sprawling words from divers points of view. They did not help him: and he decided to proceed home; he thought his mother must be waiting for him there. “It must be that,” he said: “Adam has gone hastening on to Foxwood, and the mother is staying for me to accompany her. Poor Uncle Joseph! And to think that I never once saw him in life!”
Mr. Andinnian had no difficulty in obtaining leave of absence: and he started on his journey. He was somewhat changed. Though only a month had gone by since the severance from Lucy Cleeve, the anguish had told upon him. His brother officers, noting the sad abstraction he was often plunged in, the ultrastrict fulfilment of his duties, as if life were made up of parades and drill and all the rest of it, told him in joke that he was getting into a bad way. They knew naught of what had happened; of the fresh spring love that had made his heart and this earth alike a paradise, or of its abrupt ending. “My poor horse has had to be shot, you know” — which was a fact; “and I can’t forget him,” Mr. Andinnian one day replied, reciprocating the joke.
The shades of the midsummer night were gathering as Karl neared the house of his mother. He walked up from the terminus, choosing the field-path, and leaving his portmanteau to be sent after him. The glowing fires of the departed sun had left the west, but streaks of gold where he had set illumined the heavens. The air was still and soft, the night balmy; a few stars flickered in the calm blue firmament: the moon was well above the horizon. This pathway over the fields ran parallel with the high road. As Mr. Andinnian paced it, his umbrella in his hand, there suddenly broke upon his ears a kind of uproar, marring strangely the peaceful stillness of the night. Some stirring commotion, as of a mass of people, seemed to be approaching.
“What is it, I wonder?” he said to himself: and for a moment or two he halted and stared over the border of the field and through the intervening hedge beyond. By what his sight could make out, he thought some polic
emen were in front, walking with measured tread; behind came a confused mob, following close on their heels: but the view was too uncertain to show this distinctly.
“Some poor prisoner they are bringing in from the country,” thought Mr. Andinnian, as the commotion passed on towards the town, and he continued his way.
“This is a true Midsummer Eve night,” he said to himself, when the hum of the noise and the tramping had died away, and he glanced at the weird shadows that stood out from hedges and trees. “Just the night for ghosts to come abroad, and — Stay, though: it is not on Midsummer Eve that ghosts come, I think. What is the popular superstition for the night? Young girls go out and see the shadowy forms of their future husbands? Is that it? I don’t remember. What matter if I did? Such romance has died out for me.”
He drew near his home. On the left lay the cottage of Mr. Turner. Its inmates seemed to be unusually astir within it, for lights shone from nearly every window. A few yards further Karl turned into his mother’s grounds by a private gate. —
Their own house looked, on the contrary, all dark. Karl could not see that so much as the hall-lamp was lighted. A sudden conviction flashed over him that he was wrong, after all; that it was to Foxwood he ought to have gone.
“My mother and Adam and all the world are off to it, no doubt,” he said as he looked up at the dark windows, after knocking at the door. “Deuce take the telegraph!”
The door was opened by Hewitt: Hewitt with a candle in his hand. That is, the door was drawn a few inches back, and the man’s face appeared in the aperture. Karl was seized with a sudden panic: for he had never seen, in all his life, a face blanched as that was, or one so full of horror.
“What is the matter?” he involuntarily exclaimed, under his breath.
Ay, what was the matter? Hewitt, the faithful serving man of many years, threw up his hands when he saw Karl, and cried out aloud before he told it. His master, Sir Adam, had shot Martin Scott.
Karl Andinnian stood against the doorpost inside as he listened; stood like one bereft of motion. For a moment he could put no questions: but it crossed his mind that Hewitt must be mad and was telling some fable of an excited brain.
Not so. It was all too true. Adam Andinnian had deliberately shot the young medical student, Martin Scott. And Hewitt, poor Hewitt, had been a witness to the deed.
“Is he dead?” gasped Karl. And it was the first word he spoke.
“Stone dead, sir. The shot entered his heart. ’Twas done at sunset. He was carried into Mr. Turner’s place, and is lying there.”
A confused remembrance of the lights he had seen arose to Karl’s agitated brain. He pressed his hand on his brow and stared at Hewitt. For a moment or two, he thought he himself must be going mad.
“And where is he — my brother?”
“The police have taken him away, Mr. Karl. Two of them happened to be passing just at the time.”
And Karl knew that the prisoner he had met in custody, with the guardians of the law around and the trailing mob, was his brother, Sir Adam Andinnian,
CHAPTER IV.
The Trial.
THE tidings of the unfortunate act committed by Adam Andinnian (most people said it must have been an accident) were bruited abroad far and wide. Circumstances conspired to give to it an unusual notoriety; and for more than the traditional nine days it remained a wonder in men’s minds. Sir Adam’s recent accession to the family honours; the utter want of adequate motive; the name of the young lady said to be mixed up with it: all this tended to arouse the public interest. That a gentleman of peaceful tendencies, an educated man and new baronet should take up his gun and shoot another in calm deliberation, was well nigh incredible. All kinds of reports, true and untrue, were floating. Public interest was not allowed to flag. Before a sufficient space of time had elapsed for that, the period of the trial came on. —
Sir Adam Andinnian was not fated, as top many prisoners are, to languish out months of suspense in prison. The calamity occurred towards the end of June; the assizes were held in July. Almost before his final examination by the magistrates had concluded, or the coroner’s inquest (protracted after the fashion of inquests, but in this case without any sufficient reason) had returned its verdict, the summer assizes were upon the county. The magistrates had committed Sir Adam Andinnian to take his trial for wilful murder; the coroner’s jury for manslaughter.
But now — what effect does the reader suppose this most awful blow must have had on Mrs. Andinnian?
If any one ever deserved commiseration it was surely she. To every mother it would have been terrible; to her it was worse than terrible. She loved her son with the love only lavished on an idol; she had gone forth to his new inheritance in all the pride of her fond heart, counting every day, ay, and every hour, until he should gladden it with his presence. If any mortal man stood on a pinnacle just then above all his fellows in her estimation, that man was her handsome son, Sir Adam Andinnian. And oh! the desolation that fell upon her when the son for whom she cared not, Karl, arrived at Foxwood to break the news.
And Karl? Hardly less keen, if any, was the blow upon him. Until then, he did not know how very warm and true was his affection for his brother. Staggering back to the town the same night after his interview with Hewitt — and it seemed to Karl Andinnian that he did really stagger, under the weight of his affliction — he found the prisoner at the police station, and was allowed to see him. Adam did not appear to feel his position at all. Karl thought the passion — or whatever other ill feeling it might have been that prompted him to the fatal deed — was swaying him still. He was perfectly calm and self-possessed, and sat quite at ease while the chief of the station took down sundry reports in writing from the policemen who brought in the prisoner.
“I have done nothing that I regret,” he said to Karl. “The man has but got his deserts. I should do it again to-morrow under the same provocation.”
“But, Adam, think of the consequences to yourself,” gasped Karl, aghast with dismay at this dangerous admission in the hearing of the officers.
“Oh, as to consequences, I shall be quite ready to take them” returned the prisoner, drawing himself up haughtily. “I never yet did aught that I was ashamed to acknowledge afterwards.”
The Inspector ceased writing for a moment and turned round. “Sir Adam Andinnian, I would advise you for your own sake to be silent Least said is soonest mended, you know, sir. A good rule to remember in all cases.”
“Very good indeed, Wall,” readily assented Sir Adam — who had previously been on speaking terms with the Inspector. “But if you think I shall attempt to disown what I’ve done, you are mistaken.”
“It must have been an accident,” urged poor Karl in a low tone, almost as though he were suggesting it. “I told Hewitt so.”
“Hewitt knows better: he saw me take up the gun, level it, and shoot him,” was the reply of Sir Adam, asserted openly. “Look here, Wall. The fellow courted his fate; courted it. I had assured him that if he dared to offend in a certain way again, I would shoot him as I’d shoot a dog. He set me at defiance and did it. Upon that, I carried out my promise, and shot him. I could not break my word, you know.”
Just then a doubt crossed the Inspector’s mind — as he related afterwards — that Sir Adam Andinnian was not in his right senses.
“And the mother?” breathed Karl.
“There’s the worst of it,” returned Sir Adam, his tone quickly changing to grave concern. “For her sake, I could almost regret it. You must go off to Foxwood to-morrow, Karl, and break it to her.”
What a task it was! Never in all Karl’s life had one like unto it been imposed upon him. With the early morning he started for Fox wood: and it seemed to him that he would rather have started to his grave.
It was perhaps somewhat singular that during the short period of time intervening before the trial, Lieutenant Andinnian should have been gazetted to his company. It gave Karl no pleasure. The rise he had hoped for, that was to
have brought him so much satisfaction, could now but be productive of pain. If the trial resulted in the awful sentence — Condemnation — Karl would not of course continue in the army. No, nor could he with any inferior result; save and except acquittal. Karl felt this. It was a matter that admitted of no alternative. To remain one amidst his fellow officers with his only brother disgraced and punished, was not to be thought of. And Karl would rather have remained the nameless lieutenant than have been gazetted captain.
The truest sympathy was felt for him, the utmost consideration evinced. Leave of absence was accorded him at his request, until the result of the trial should be known. He wanted his liberty to stand by his brother, and to make efforts for the defence. Make efforts! When the accused persisted in openly avowing he was guilty, what efforts could be made with any hope of success?
One of the hottest days that July has ever given us was that of the trial. The county town was filled from end to end: thousands of curious people had thronged in, hoping to get a place in court; or, at least, to obtain a sight of the baronet-prisoner. It was reported that but for the earnest pleadings of his mother there would have been no trial — Sir Adam would have pleaded guilty. It was whispered that she, the hitherto proud, overbearing, self-contained woman, went down on her knees to entreat him not to bring upon his head the worst and most extreme sentence known to England’s law — as the said pleading guilty would have brought — but to give himself a chance of a more lenient sentence: perhaps of an acquittal. It was said that Captain Andinnian would have taken his place in the dock to countenance and stand by his brother, but was not permitted.
The trial was unusually short for one involving murder, and unusually interesting. Immediately after the judge had taken his seat in the morning, the prisoner was brought in. The crowded court, who had just risen to do homage to the judge, rose again amidst stir and excitement. Strangers, straining their eager eyes, saw, perhaps with a momentary feeling of surprise, as grand a gentleman as any present. A tall, commanding, handsome man, with a frank expression of countenance when he smiled, but haughty in repose; his white teeth, that he showed so much, and his grey eyes beautiful. He wore deep mourning for his uncle, Sir Joseph; and bowed to the judge with as much stately ceremony as though he were bowing before the Queen. On one of his fingers flashed a ring of rare beauty: an opal set round with diamonds. It had descended to him from his father. Captain Andinnian, in deep mourning also, sat at the table with the solicitors.