by Ellen Wood
We all screamed out in surprise. “Ben Rymer!”
“Ay,” said Cole, “Ben Rymer. Ben has got through and is a surgeon now, like the rest of us. And, upon my word, I believe the fellow has his profession thoroughly in hand. He will make a name in the world, the chances for it being afforded him, unless I am mistaken.”
Something like moisture stood in the Squire’s good old eyes. “If his father, poor Rymer, had but lived to see it!” he softly said. “Anxiety, touching Ben, killed him.”
“So we three doctors make a pilgrimage to Sir Dace regularly everyday; sometimes together, sometimes apart,” added Cole. “And, of the three of us, I believe the patient likes young Rymer best — has most confidence in him.”
“Shall you cure him?”
“Well, we do not yet give up hope. If the disease does set in, it will — —”
“What?”
“Run its course quickly.”
“An instant yet, Cole,” cried the Squire, stopping the surgeon as he was turning away. “You have told us nothing. How does the parish get on? — and the people? How is Letsom? — and Crabb generally? Tanerton — how is he? — and Timberdale? Coming here fresh, we are thirsting for news.”
Cole laughed. He knew the pater liked gossip as much as any old woman: and the reader must understand that, as yet, we had not heard any, having reached Crabb Cot late the previous afternoon.
“There is no particular news, Squire,” said he. “Letsom is well; so is Crabb. Herbert Tanerton’s not well. He is in a crusty way over Jack.”
“He is always in a way over something. Where is Jack?”
“Jack’s here, at the Rectory; just come to it. Robert Ashton’s bailiff is about to take a farm on his own account, and Jack came rushing over from Liverpool to apply for the post.”
Tod, who had been too much occupied with his fishing-flies to take much heed before, set up a shrill whistle at this. “How will the parson like that?” he asked.
“The parson does not like it at all. Whether he will succeed in preventing it, is another matter,” concluded Cole. And, with that, he made his escape.
Close upon the surgeon’s departure, Colonel Letsom came in; he had heard of our arrival. It was a pity, he said, the two brothers should be at variance. Jack wanted the post — he must make a living somehow; and the Rector was in a way over it; not quite mad, but next door to it; Ashton of course not knowing what to do between them. From that subject, he began to speak of the Fontaines.
A West Indian planter, one George Bazalgette, had been over on a visit, he said, and had spent Christmas at Maythorn Bank; his object being to induce Verena to accept him as her husband. Verena would not listen to him, and he wasted his eloquence in vain. She made no hesitation in vowing to him that her affections were buried in the grave of Edward Pym.
“Fontaine told me confidentially in London that he intended she should have Bazalgette,” remarked the Squire. “It was the evening we went looking for her at that wax-work place.”
“Ay; but Fontaine is changed,” returned the colonel: “all his old domineering ways are gone out of him. When Bazalgette was over here, he did not attempt even to persuade her: she must take her own course, he said. So poor Bazalgette went back as he came — wifeless. It was a pity.”
“Why?”
“Because this George Bazalgette was a nice fellow,” replied Colonel Letsom. “An open-hearted, fine-looking, generous man, and desperately in love with her. Miss Verena will not readily find his compeer in a summer day’s march.”
“As old as Adam, I suppose, colonel,” interjected Tod.
“Yes — if you choose to put Adam’s age down at three or four and thirty,” laughed the colonel, as he took his leave.
To wait many hours, once she was at Crabb, without laying in a stock of those delectable “family pills,” invented by the late Thomas Rymer, would have been quite beyond the philosophy of Mrs. Todhetley. That first morning, not ten minutes after Colonel Letsom left us, taking the Squire with him, she despatched me to Timberdale for a big box of them. Tod would not come: said he had his flies to see to.
Dashing through the Ravine and out on the field beyond it, I came upon Jack Tanerton. Good old Jack! The Squire had said Sir Dace was changed: I saw that Jack was. He looked taller and thinner, and the once beaming face had care upon it.
“Where are you bound for, Jack?”
“Not for any place in particular. Just sauntering about.”
“Walk my way, then. I am going to Rymer’s.”
“It is such nonsense,” cried Jack, speaking of his brother, after we had plunged a bit into affairs. “Calling it derogatory, and all the rest of it! I could be just as much of a gentleman as Ashton’s bailiff as I am now. Everybody knows me. He gives a good salary, and there’s a pretty house; and I have also my own small income. Alice and I and the little ones should be as happy as the day’s long. If I give in to Herbert and don’t take it, I don’t see what I am to turn to.”
“But, Jack, why do you give up the sea?” I asked. And Jack told me what he had told others: he should never take command again until he was a free man.
“Don’t you think you are letting that past matter hold too great an influence over you?” I presently said. “You must be conscious of your own innocence — and yet you seem as sad and subdued as though you were guilty!”
“I am subdued because other people think me guilty!” he answered. “Changed? I am. It is that which has changed me; not the calamity itself.”
“Jack, were I you, I should stand up in the face and eyes of all the world, and say to them, ‘Before God, I did not kill Pym.’ People would believe you then. But you don’t do it.”
“I have my reasons for not doing it, Johnny Ludlow. God knows what they are; He knows all things. I dare say I may be set right with the world in time: though I don’t see how it is to be done.”
A smart young man, a new assistant, was behind the counter at Ben Rymer’s, and served me with the pills. Coming out, box in hand, we met Ben himself. I hardly knew him, he was so spruce. His very hair and whiskers were trimmed down to neatness and looked of a more reasonable colour; his red-brown beard was certainly handsome, and his clothes were well cut.
“Why, he has grown into a dandy, Jack,” I said, after we had stood a minute or two, talking with the surgeon.
“Yes,” said Jack, “he is going in for the proprieties of life now. Ben may make a gentleman yet — and a good man to boot.”
That same afternoon, it chanced that the Squire met Ben Rymer. Striding along in his powerful fashion, Ben came full tilt round the sharp corner that makes the turning to the Islip Road, and nearly ran over the pater. Ben had been to Oxlip Grange.
“So, sir,” cried the pater, stopping him, “I hear you are in practice now, and intend to become a respectable man. It’s time you did.”
“Ay, at last,” replied Ben good-humouredly. “It is a long lane, Squire, that has no turning.”
“Don’t you lapse back again, Mr. Ben.”
“Not if I know it, sir. I hope I shall not.”
“It was anxiety on your score, you know, that troubled your good father’s mind in dying.”
“If it did not bring his death on,” readily conceded Ben, his light tone changing. “I know it all, Squire — and have felt it.”
“Look here,” cried the Squire, catching at Ben’s button-hole, which had a lovely lily-of-the-valley in it, “there was nothing on earth your poor patient father prayed for so earnestly as for your welfare; that you might be saved for time and eternity. Now I don’t believe such prayers are ever lost. So you will be helped on your way if you bear steadfastly onwards.”
Giving the young man’s hand a wring, the Squire turned off on his way. In half-a-minute he was back again.
“Hey, Mr. Benjamin? — here. How is Sir Dace Fontaine? I suppose you have just left him?”
So Ben had to come back at the call. To the pater’s surprise he saw his eyes were moist.
/>
“He is worse, sir, to-day; palpably worse.”
“Will he get over it?”
Ben gave his head an emphatic shake, which somehow belied his words: “Cole and Darbyshire think there is hope yet, Squire.”
“And you do not; that’s evident. Well, good-day.”
The next move in this veritable drama was the appearance of Alice Tanerton and her six-months-old baby at Timberdale. Looking upon the Rectory as almost her home — it had been Jack’s for many years of his life — Alice came to it without the ceremony of invitation: the object of her coming now being to strive to induce Herbert to let her husband engage himself to Robert Ashton. And this visit of Alice’s was destined to bring about a most extraordinary event.
One Wednesday evening when Jack and his wife were dining with us — and that troublesome baby, which Alice could not, as it seemed, stir abroad without, was in the nursery squealing — Alice chanced to say that she had to go to Islip the following day, her mother having charged her to see John Paul the lawyer, concerning a little property that she, Aunt Dean, held in Crabb. It would be a tremendously long walk for Alice from Timberdale, especially as she was not looking strong, and Mrs. Todhetley proposed that I should drive her over in the pony-carriage: which Alice jumped at.
Accordingly, the next morning, which was warm and bright, I took the pony-carriage to the Rectory, picked up Alice, and then drove back towards Islip. As we passed Oxlip Grange, which lay in our way, Sir Dace Fontaine was outside in the road, slowly pacing the side-path. I thought I had never seen a man look so ill: so down and gloomy. He raised his eyes, as we came up, to give me a nod. I was nodding back again, when Alice screamed out and startled me. She started the pony too, which sprang on at a tangent.
“Johnny! Johnny Ludlow!” she gasped, her face whiter than death and her lips trembling like an aspen leaf, “did you see that man? Did you see him?”
“Yes. I was nodding to him. What is the matter?”
“It was the man I saw in my dream: the man who had committed the murder in it.”
I stared at her, wondering whether she had lost her wits.
“Do you remember the description I gave of that man?” she continued, in excitement. “I do. I wrote it down at the time, and Mr. Todhetley holds it, sealed up. Every word, every particular is in my memory now, as I saw him in my dream. ‘A tall, evil-looking, dark man in a long brown coat, who walked with his eyes fixed on the ground.’ I tell you, Johnny Ludlow, that is the man.”
Her vehemence infected me. I looked round after Sir Dace. He was turning this way now. Certainly the description seemed like enough. His countenance just now did look an evil one; and he was tall and he was dark, and he wore a long brown coat this morning, nearly reaching to his heels, and his eyes were fixed on the ground as he walked.
“But what if his looks do tally with the man you saw in your dream, Alice? What of it?”
“What of it!” she echoed, vehemently. “What of it! Why, don’t you see, Johnny Ludlow? This man must have killed Edward Pym.”
“Hush, Alice! It is impossible. This is Sir Dace Fontaine.”
“I do not care who he is,” was her impulsive retort. “As surely as that Heaven is above us, Edward Pym got his death at the hand of this man. My dream revealed it to me.”
I might as well have tried to stem a torrent as to argue with her; so I drove on and held my tongue. Arrived at the office of Paul and Chandler, I following her in, leaving a boy with the pony outside. Alice pounced upon old Paul with the assertion: Sir Dace Fontaine was the evil and guilty man she had seen in her dream. Considering that Paul was a sort of cousin to Sir Dace’s late wife, this was pretty well. Old Paul stared at her as I had done. Her cheeks were hectic, her eyes wildly earnest. She recalled to the lawyer’s memory the dream she had related to him; she asserted in the most unqualified manner that Dace Fontaine was guilty. Tom Chandler, who was old Paul’s partner and had married his daughter Emma, came into the room in the middle of it, and took his share of staring.
“It must be investigated,” said Alice to them. “Will you undertake it?”
“My dear young lady, one cannot act upon a fancy — a dream,” cried old Paul: and there was a curious sound of compassionate pity in his voice, which betrayed to Alice the gratifying fact that he was regarding her as a monomaniac.
“If you will not act, others will,” she concluded at last, after exhausting her arguments in vain. And she came away with me in resentment, having totally forgotten all about her mother’s business.
To Crabb Cot then — she would go — to take counsel with the Squire. He told her to her face she was worse than a lunatic to suspect Sir Dace; and he would hardly get out the sealed packet at all. It was opened at last, and the dream, as written down in it by herself at the time, read.
“John Tanerton, my husband, was going to sea in command,” it began. “He came to me the morning of the day they were to sail, looking very patient, pale and sorrowful: more so than any one, I think, could look in life. He and I seemed to have had some estrangement the previous night that was not remembered by either of us now, and I, for one, repented of it. Somebody was murdered (though I could not tell how this had been revealed to me), some man; Jack was suspected by all people, but they could not bring it home to him. We were in some strange town; strangers in it; though I, as it seemed to me, had been in it once, many years before. All this while, Jack was standing before me in his sadness and sorrow, mutely appealing to me, as it seemed, to clear him. Everybody was talking of it and glancing at us askance, everybody shunned us, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town before, the man now murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman of note in the town; and a conviction came over me, powerful as a revelation, that it was he who had now committed the murder. I left Jack, and told this to some one connected with the ship, its owner, I think. He laughed at the words, saying that the gentleman I would accuse was of high authority in the town, one of its first magnates. That he had done it, however high he might be, I felt perfectly certain; but nobody would listen to me; nobody would heed so improbable a tale: and, in the trouble this brought me, I awoke. Such trouble! Nothing like it could be felt in real life.
“That was dream the first.
“I lay awake for some little time thinking of it, and then went to sleep again: and this was dream the second.
“The dream seemed to recommence from where it had left off. It was afternoon. I was in a large open carriage, going through the streets of the town, the ship’s owner (as I say I think he was) sitting beside me. In passing over a bridge we saw two gentlemen walking towards us arm-in-arm on the footpath, one of them an officer in a dusky old red uniform and cocked hat, the other a tall, evil-looking dark man, who wore a long brown coat and kept his eyes on the ground. Though I had never seen him in my life before, I knew it was the guilty man; he had killed the other, committed the crime in secret: but ere I could speak, he who was sitting with me said, ‘There’s the gentleman you would have accused this morning. He stands before everybody else in the town. Fancy your accusing him of such a thing!’ It seemed to me that I did not answer, could not answer for the pain. That he was guilty I knew, and not Jack, but I had no means of bringing it home to him. He and the man in uniform walked on in their secure immunity, and I went on in the carriage in my pain. The pain awoke me.
“And now it only remains for me to declare that I have set down this singular dream truthfully, word for word; and I shall seal it up and keep it. It may be of use if any trouble falls upon Jack, as the dream seems to foretell — and of some trouble in store for him he has already felt the shadow. So strangely vivid a dream, and the intense pain it brought and leaves with me, can hardly have visited me for nothing. — Alice Tanerton.”
That was all the paper said. The Squire, poring through his good old spectacles over it, shook his head as Alice pointed out the description of the guilty man, how exactly it tallied with the
appearance of Sir Dace Fontaine; but he only repeated Paul the lawyer’s words, “One cannot act upon a dream.”
“It was Sir Dace; it was Sir Dace,” reiterated Alice, clasping her hands piteously. “I am as sure of it as that I hope to go to heaven.” And I drove her home in the belief.
There ensued a commotion. Not a commotion to be told to the parish, but a private one amidst ourselves. I never saw a woman in such a fever of excitement as Alice Tanerton was in from that day, or any one take up a matter so warmly.
Captain Tanerton did not adopt her views. He shook his head, and said Sir Dace it could not have been. Sir Dace was at his house in the Marylebone Road at the very hour the calamity happened off Tower Hill. I followed suit, hearing out Jack’s word. Was I not at the Marylebone Road that evening myself, playing chess with Coralie? — and was not Sir Dace shut up in his library all the time, and never came out of it?
Alice listened, and looked puzzled to death. But she held to her own opinion. And when a fit of desperate obstinacy takes possession of a woman without rhyme or reason, you cannot shake it. As good try to argue with the whistling wind. She did not pretend to see how it could have been, she said, but Sir Dace was guilty. And she haunted Paul and Chandler’s office at Islip, praying them to take the matter up.
At length, to soothe her, and perhaps to prevent her carrying it elsewhere, they promised they would. And of course they had to make some show of doing it.
One evening Tom Chandler came to Crabb Cot and asked to see me alone. “I want you to tell me all the particulars you remember of that fatal night,” he began, when I went to him in the Squire’s little room. “I have taken down Captain Tanerton’s testimony, and I must have yours, Johnny.”
“But, are you going to stir in it?”
“We must do something, I suppose. Paul thinks so. I am going to London to-morrow on other matters, and shall use the opportunity to make an inquiry or two. It is rather a strange piece of business altogether,” added Mr. Chandler, as he took his place at the table and drew the inkstand towards him. “John Tanerton is innocent. I feel sure of that.”