by Ellen Wood
The glitter of the stars, twinkling in their dusky canopy, shone down upon him through the interstices of the trees, already somewhat thinning their leaves with the approach of autumn; and he remained on, amid the gloom, lost in reflection.
“I should be better off there,” he murmured, gazing upwards in thought at the Heaven that was beyond; “and it may be that Thou, O my God, knowest that, in Thy pitiful mercy. As Thou wilt. Life has become but a weary one here, full of pains and penalties.”
“Master!” came to him in a hushed, doubtful voice at this juncture. “Master, are you within hearing? My mistress is feeling anxious, and wants the door bolted.”
“Ay, bolt and bar it well, Ann,” he said, going forward. “But barred doors will not keep out all the foes of man.”
Meanwhile Karl had got through the maze; and cautiously, after listening, let himself out at the gate. No human being, that he could discern, was within sight or hearing; and he crossed the road at once. Then, but not before, he became aware that his agent, Mr. Smith, was in that favourite spot and attitude of his, leaning his arms on the little garden gate, his green glasses discarded — as they generally were after sunset.
“Good-night,” said Karl in passing. But some words of the agent’s served to arrest his progress.
“Would you mind stepping in for one moment, Sir Karl? I wanted to say just a word to you, and have been watching for you to come out.”
“Is it anything particular?” asked Karl, turning in at the gate at once, which Mr. Smith held open.
“I’ll get a light, sir, if you will wait an instant.”
Karl heard the striking of a match in-doors, and Mr. Smith reappeared in the passage with a candle. He ushered Karl into the room on the left-hand; the best room, that was rarely used.
“This one has got its shutters closed,” was the explanatory remark. “I generally keep the others open until I go to bed.”
“Tell me at once what it is you want,” said Karl. “It is late, and I shall have my household wondering where I am.”
“Well, Sir Karl, first of all, I wish to ask if you are aware that you were watched into the Maze tonight?” He spoke in the lowest whisper; scarcely above his breath. The agent’s one servant had been in bed at the top of the house long before: but he was a cautious man.
“No. Who watched me?”
“Two people, sir. One was Miss Blake, the lady staying with you at the Court; the other was a confounded fellow who is at Foxwood for no good, I guess, and is pushing his prying nose on the sly into everything.”
“Do you mean Mr. Strange?”
“That’s the name: a lodger at Mother Jinks’s. He and the lady watched you in, Sir Karl; they stood close by the gate among the trees; and then they walked off down the road together.”
Karl’s pulses beat a shade more quickly. “Why should they have been watching me? What could be their motive?”
“Miss Blake did not intend to watch — as I take it. I saw her coming along with a sharpish step from the direction of that blessed St. Jerome’s, late as it was — Cattacomb may have been treating his flock to a nocturnal service. When she was close upon the Maze she must have heard your footsteps, for she drew suddenly behind the trees to hide herself. After you were in, she came out of her shelter, and another with her — the man Strange. So he must have been hidden there beforehand, Sir Karl: and, I should say, to watch.”
Karl was silent He did not like to hear this. It seemed to menace further danger.
“I went in to warn Sir Adam against this man,” he observed; “to tell him never to be off his guard, day or night. He is a London detective!”
“What — Strange is?” exclaimed the agent, with as much astonishment as his low tones allowed him to express. “A London detective, Sir Karl?”
“Yes, he is.”
Mr. Smith’s face fell considerably. “But — what is he doing down here?” he inquired. “Who’s he after? Surely not Sir Adam?”
“No, not Sir Adam. He is after some criminal who — who does not exist in the place at all,” added Karl, not choosing to be more explicit, considering that it was the man before him whom he had suspected of being the said criminal, and feeling ashamed of his suspicions now that they were dispelled, and he had to speak of it with him face to face. “The danger is, that in looking after one man the police may come upon the track of another.”
The agent nodded his head. “But surely they do not suspect the Maze?”
“They do suspect the Maze,” replied Karl. “Owing to the tattling of the woman Mr. Moore took there — Nurse Chaffen — they suspect it.”
Mr. Smith allowed a very unorthodox word to issue through his closed teeth, applied not only to the lady in question, but to ladies in general.
“The man Strange has been down here looking after some one whom he can’t find; who no doubt is not in the neighbourhood at all, and never has been,” resumed Karl. “Strange’s opinion, however, was — and is — that the man is here, concealed. When he heard Chaffen’s tale of the gentleman she saw in evening dress at the Maze, but whom she never saw again and therefore concluded he was hidden somewhere about the house not to show himself to her, he caught up the notion that it was the man he was after. Hence his suspicions of the Maze, and his watchings.”
“It’s a very unfortunate thing!” breathed the agent. “You see now, Mr. Smith, how much better it would have been if Sir Adam had never come here. Or, being here, if he had been allowed to go away again.”
“He can’t attempt it now,” was the quiet retort of the agent. “With a detective’s eyes about, it would he only to walk straight into the lion’s mouth,”
“Just so. We all know that.”
“I wish to heaven I could get him away!” spoke the agent impulsively, and it was evident that his heart was in his words. “Until now I believed he was as safe here as he could be elsewhere — or safer. What the devil brings a confounded detective in this quiet place? The malignant fiend, or some implacable fate must have sent him. Sir Karl, the danger is great We must not shut our eyes to it.”
Alas, Karl Andinnian felt that, in a more cruel degree than the agent could. It was his work; it was he who had brought this hornet’s nest about his unfortunate brother’s head. The consciousness of it lay heavily upon him in that moment; throat and tongue and lips were alike parched with the fever of remorse.
“May I ask you for a glass of water, Mr. Smith?” broke next from the said dry lips.
“I’ll get it for you in a moment, sir,” said the agent, rising with alacrity.
Karl heard another match struck outside, and then the steps of the agent retreating in the direction of the pump. In his restlessness of mind he could not sit still, but rose to pace the room. A small set of ornamental book-shelves, hanging against the wall, caught his attention: he halted before it and took down a volume, mechanically, rather than with any motive. “Philip Salter. From his loving mother.”
The words met Karl’s eyes as he opened the book. Just for a moment he questioned whether his sight was deceiving him. But no. There they were, in a lady’s hand, the ink dry and faded with time. It was Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
“Is it Salter, after all?” mentally breathed Karl.
Mr. Smith came in again with the glass of water as the doubt was running through Karl’s mind. Thanking his agent for the water, he drank it at a draught, and sat down with the book in his hand.
“I have been amongst your books, you see, Mr. Smith. A sound old volume, this.”
“So it is, Sir Karl. I dip into it myself now and then.”
“Did you know this — this Mr. Philip Salter?” — holding the book open at the words.
For answer the agent threw his eyes straight into Karl’s face, and paused. “Did you know him, Sir Karl?”
“I never knew him. I have heard somewhat about him.”
“Ay, few persons but have, I expect,” returned the agent, with a kind of groan. “He was my cousin, s
ir.”
“Your cousin!” echoed Karl.
“My own cousin: we were sisters’ sons. He was Philip Salter; I am Philip Smith.”
Karl’s eyes were opened. In more senses than one.
“The fool that Philip Salter showed himself!” ejaculated Philip Smith — and it was evident by the bitter tone that the subject was a sore one. “I was in his office, Sir Karl, a clerk under him; but he was some years younger than I. He might have done so well: none of us had the smallest idea but what he was doing well. It was all through private and illegitimate speculation. He got into a hole where the mire was deep, and he used dangerous means when at his wits’ end to get himself out of it. It did for him what you know, and it ruined me; for, being his cousin, men thought I must have known of it, and my place was taken from me.”
“Where is he now?” asked Karl.
“I don’t know. Sometimes we think he is dead. After his escape, we had reason to believe that he got off to Canada, but we were never made certain of it, and have never heard from him in any way. He may be in some of the backwoods there, afraid to write.”
“And this was his book?”
“Yes. Most of his small belongings came into my hands. The affair killed his mother: broke her heart. He was all she had, save one daughter. Sir Karl, do you know what I’d do if I had the power?” fiercely continued Smith. “I would put down by penal laws all these cursed speculators who, men of straw themselves, issue their plausible schemes only to deceive and defraud a confiding, credulous public; all these betting and gambling rogues who lay hold of honest natures to lure them to their destruction. But for them, Philip Salter had been holding up his untarnished head yet.”
“Ay,” assented Karl. “But that will never be, so long as the greed of gold shall last. It is a state of affairs that can belong only to a Utopian world; not to this.”
He put out his hand to Philip Smith when he left — a thing he had never done voluntarily before — in his sensitive regret for having wronged the man in his heart: and went home with his increased burden of perplexity and pain.
CHAPTER X.
One Day in her Life.
LIFE was to the last degree dreary for Lucy Andinnian. But for the excitement imparted to her mind from that mysterious building, the Maze, and the trouble connected with it, she could scarcely have continued to go on, and bear. It was not a healthy excitement: no emotion can be that, which has either jealousy or anger for its origin. Let us take one day of her existence, and see what it was: the day following the one last told of.
A mellow, bright morning. The pleasant sun, so prolific of his bounties that year, was making the earth glad with his renewed light, and many a heart with it Not so Lucy’s: it seemed to her that never a gleam of gladness could illumine hers again. She sat in her room, partly dressed, after a night of much sleeplessness. What sleep she had was disturbed, as usual, by dreams tinged with the unpleasantness of her waking thoughts. A white wrapper enfolded her, and Aglaé was doing her hair. The woman saw how weary and spiritless her mistress was becoming; but not a suspicion of the true cause suggested itself, for Lucy and her husband took care to keep up appearances, and guarded their secret well. Aglaé attempted to say a word now and again, but received no encouragement: Lucy was buried in a reverie.
“We are growing more estranged day by day,” ran her thoughts. “He went to London yesterday, and never said why; never gave me the least explanation. After he came home at night, and had taken something to eat, he went out again. To the Maze, of course.”
“Will my lady please to have her hair in rolls or in plats this morning?”
“As you please, Aglaé” And, the weary answer given, her thoughts ran on again.
“I fancy Theresa had seen him go there. I can’t help fancying it. She had all her severe manner on when she came in last night, but was so pityingly kind to me. And I could bear all so much better if she would not be pitiful. It was past ten. That poor Mrs. Bell is likely to die, and Theresa had been to read to her. I kept hoping she would go to bed, and she did not Is it wrong of me to sit up, I wonder, to see what time he comes in) — would Margaret say it was) She got her silks and her work about, and I had mine. He has hardly ever been so late as last night. It was half-past eleven. What right has she to keep him, or he to stay) He said, in a light, indifferent kind of tone, by way of excuse, that he had been talking with Smith, and the time slipped by unheeded. Theresa drew in her lips till she seemed to have none at all, and gave him just one scornful glance. Yes: she had certainly seen him go in elsewhere, and she knew that the excuse was not true. I took my candle, and came up here — and have had one of my most wretched nights again — and neither I nor Aglaé could find that book that comforts me. It was very cruel of Karl to marry me: and yet — and yet — would I be unmarried if I could) Would I break even from this distressing life, if it involved a separation for ever) I fear not. The not seeing him day by day would be a worse fate even than this is.”
“Did my lady think to ask Sir Karl whether he had put away that book that is missing?” interposed Aglaé, quite unconscious that her lady had not seen Sir Karl since the book was missed, any more than she herself had: and moreover that he was not likely to see it.
“I have not asked him yet Perhaps I took it downstairs yesterday.”
“Which robe, my lady?”
“The Swiss muslin.”
Aglaé left her when she was ready, and Lucy took her Bible for a few minutes, and said her prayers. Never did prayers ascend from a more wrung or troubled heart The book she had mislaid was one of those little gems of consolation that can only be estimated in need. It had been given to Lucy by Miss Sumnor.
She stood a few minutes at the open window, gazing at the sunny morning. The variegated leaves of the changing trees — getting, alas! bare as Lucy’s heart felt — the smooth lawn, which Maclean was rolling, the still bright flowers, the sunlight glittering on the lodge. All these fair things were hers; and yet, she could enjoy them not.
She went down: putting away all the sadness from her face that she could put, and looking in her pretty dress as fair as the sunshine. Hewitt came in with the coffee, and Lucy took her place at table. They never waited for Miss Blake. St Jerome’s was exacting, and Mr. Cattacomb somewhat uncertain as to the precise time at which he let out his flock. Hewitt went across the lawn to tell his master, who was talking to Maclean, that the breakfast was ready.
Karl came in through the open doors of the window. She glanced up and hid her eyes again: the more attractive he looked — and he always did look attractive — the greater her sense of pain. The fresh air was sweet and pleasant, and a good fire burnt in the grate.
“Good morning, Lucy.”
She put down the sugar-tongs to give him her hand, and wished him good morning in a tone that no eavesdropper could have found fault with. They were quite civil to each other; nay, courteous; their intercourse much like that of true friends, or a brother and sister. After playing so long at this for the sake of keeping up appearances to their household and the world, it had become quite easy — a thing of habit.
“What shall I give you?” he asked.
“An egg, please.”
“Maclean thinks that fir-tree is dying.”
“Which fir-tree?”
“The large one by the ferns. He wants to root it up and make a bed there. What do you think?”
“I don’t mind how it is. Is your coffee sweet enough?”
“Yes.”
Hewitt appeared with the letters. Two for Miss Blake, one for Lady Andinnian, none for Sir Karl. Lucy read hers; glad of the help it afforded to occupation: for she did but toy with her breakfast, having little appetite now.
“It is from mamma,” said Lucy. “She is going to stay with my aunt in London. I suppose you did not call on Lady Southal yesterday?”
“I? No.”
“You have promised to do so for some time past.”
“But I have not been able. When the min
d is harassed with worry and business, social calls get put aside. Is Mrs. Cleeve well?”
“Yes, and papa better. He is going to stay at home himself. They desire to be remembered to you.”
Karl bent his head in acknowledgment. And thus, talking indifferently of this and that, the meal came to an end. Karl asked his wife if she would go out to look at the fir-tree, and hear what Maclean said — he was always scrupulous in consulting her wishes as the Court’s mistress. She brought her parasol at once.
Karl held out his arm, and she took it. As they went down the steps, Miss Blake appeared. They waited to greet her, and to shake hands.
“You must want your breakfast, Theresa. There are two letters for you on the table. Oh, and I have heard from mamma. She is going to stay with Aunt Southal in London.”
Lucy took Karl’s arm again, and they went off with the gardener. Miss Blake probably did want her breakfast; but she spared a minute or two to look after them.
“I wonder if anyone was ever so great a hypocrite?” ran her comment. “And to think that I once believed him to be the most noble and best of men. He dared to speak disparagingly of that pure saint, Mr. Cattacomb, the other day. Good patience! what contrasts there are in the world! And the same Heaven made them both, and permits both! One cannot understand it here. As to Lucy — but I wash my hands of her.”
Lucy was soon back again. Miss Blake had but read her letters, and begun her breakfast Karl had passed into his own room.