Darwent, as he entered, could not see Dolly. Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh, like a very small grenadier and a middle-sized grenadier, stood at the foot of the bed.
And something was wrong. Not hostile, but wrong.
Mrs. Raleigh, with the lace-edged cap round her plump face, was ill at ease despite her determined brightness. Mr. Raleigh, cadaverous-faced and bald-headed, held a book with one finger between the leaves; he was on his dignity, but his kindly eyes looked almost frightened.
“La,” cried Mrs. Raleigh, throwing up her hands, “and see who’s here!”
Augustus Raleigh smiled a sepulchral smile.
“I have been reading,” he said, in the bass voice which seemed to rise up from his gaiters, “the new romance by the author of Waverley. It is very good. I am told …”
“What’s the matter?” Darwent demanded bluntly.
“Matter?” repeated Mrs. Raleigh, with a mouth of surprise.
“I am told,” said Mr. Raleigh, holding up the book and inspecting it, “that the author’s identity is well known to many persons, though it is still officially a secret. Now, Dick.” He stopped. “If I may call you so?”
He held up the book with determined cheerfulness. “The new romance, in three volumes, by the author of Waverley: whoever he may be. It is very good.”
“Thank you,” answered Darwent, as he passed Mr. Raleigh on the left-hand side of the bed, and pressed his arm. “Thank you both.”
“Why, Dick, there’s very little to …”
“’Lo, my dearest,” murmured Dolly, smiling as well as she could.
In this line of houses built flat against each other, only the front room and the back room would have been visited by day-tight if they had not constructed a narrow air well for the middle rooms. The heavy orange-yellow curtains, touched by the dim gleam of the crimson lamp, showed—on either side of the bed—gray windows spattered with rain.
“I’m awfully sorry,” Dolly said apologetically, and weakly stretched out her hand. “I must ha’ been more ill than I thought I was.”
Her brown eyes were turned up at him, under the shadow of the canopy where the bed curtains were looped back. Her yellow hair, again carefully done in curls, hung well below the ears. Only her white-silk nightgown, clearly belonging to Caroline and cut like an evening gown, showed her uneven breathing. But she still tried to smile.
“I’m as well as beans now, Dick,” she assured him. “Truly I am!”
“Well!” cried Mrs. Raleigh, as usual erupting into tears. “Here’s the poor girl half recovered, by a miracle it is because they wouldn’t give her the black medicine, and she thinks she’s well!”
“Emma, my dear,” her husband expostulated gently.
For a moment Darwent could not speak. He lifted Dolly’s hand, and pressed it to his lips, and sat down on the side of the bed.
In the curtain-hung room, despite its stuffiness, there was a chill of melted or melting ice. The ice had been packed into champagne coolers, which stood on marble-topped gilt tables and dripped with slow monotonous noise on the tables.
“I won’t have you troubled,” Dolly said suddenly, her eyes searching his face, “I won’t.”
“My dear,” he told her, pressing the hand to his cheek, “I’ve been cursing myself for bringing you here. There is so much I ought to have told you, and told you yesterday. I can’t understand why I couldn’t tell you.”
“About being the Marquess of Darwent?” smiled Dolly, her forehead wrinkled. “I could say why you wouldn’t tell me.”
“You could …?”
“’Cos I know you,” replied Dolly, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. “You were afraid we’d think you were lording it over us; and you can’t endure to lord it over anybody. But, oh, Dick, that’s what I’m a-terrified of!”
“Terrified of?”
Again Dolly’s eyes searched his face, and she pressed her hand more tightly against his cheek.
“’Cos you can’t endure for somebody to lord it over you.” Dolly laughed weakly. “It near crazes you, Dick. It always has. You’d cock a snook at the whole world, and have everybody against you. I—I love that. But you mustn’t, now you’re Lord Darwent.” She lowered her eyes. “Didn’t you fight a duel this morning?”
He lowered her hand from his cheek.
“Who told you that, Dolly?”
“Miss Ross did.”
“Miss Ross!”
“She’s been awful—awfully kind to me,” said Dolly. “She came in here this morning, a-crying and near a-raving, and saying you were going to be killed and it was all her fault. Mr. Hereford and Mr. Raleigh had to put her out; and, honest-truly, I pitied her. I didn’t cry, Dick. Do you know why?”
“Well?”
“’Cos I knew you’d win,” Dolly replied simply.
(How much did Dolly know about Caroline?)
Darwent twitched his head round to look quickly at the Raleigh’s. Emma Raleigh, again seated in a gilt-and-brocade chair at one side of the bed, stabbed rather blindly at a needlework frame. Augustus Raleigh, seated at the other side, was engrossed in reading Guy Mannering upside down.
Yet Darwent’s unspoken question so burned in the air, where iced water dripped monotonously on marble table tops, that Mr. Raleigh lifted his head.
“Nothing!” Mr. Raleigh said emphatically. “She has been told nothing about …!” Mr. Raleigh’s expressive eyes meant Caroline. “The rest, yes!”
“About Miss Ross?” asked Dolly, immediately and gently. Tenderness showed in her face, as well as a look of wonder that Darwent could be so stupid. “Oh, Dick, did you think I’d be vexed? Or jealous?”
“Well! In the past …”
“I know. I’ve been dreadful. But—”
Dolly leaned back against the propped-up pillows, and shuddered.
“I nearly lost you to Old Jack.” She meant Jack Ketch. “And I wasn’t there, Dick. I wasn’t there! After that … well, was it so very bad if you wanted to lie with another woman? Maybe I was just too awful ill to care; but I don’t care, or I didn’t. And as for bringing me here,” a ghost of the old mirth trembled in her throat, “I liked that best of all.”
“You liked—” Darwent paused, his wits whirling. “A swine’s trick for which I can never …”
“Oh, silly!” breathed Dolly, and she shook her head, apologized for impatience, and “regarded him with deep sincerity.
“And for some reason you say you liked it?”
“It was the awful, colossal sauce of you,” said Dolly simply. “Walking into her house.” Dolly’s eyes brightened with glee, “and saying you wanted the best room for your mistress, and nearly making Alfred drop dead. Maybe she wouldn’t be proud of that. But I am.”
“Listen, Dolly. About Miss Ross …”
“I’m not jealous of her. Truly I’m not!”
“There isn’t time to explain the—the situation between Miss Ross and myself!” he went on. “But understand this much: it can be changed.” He picked up both of Dolly’s hands, leaning forward so that he could press them against his breast, and spoke with all the earnestness in his nature.
“Dolly,” he said, “it’s a trumpery thing. I mention it, believe me, only because it is the only way I can say it. But will you honor me by becoming the Marchioness of Darwent?”
The aching emotion in that dim, crimson-lit room, where iced water splashed unheeded, could be felt with a keen pang even by Mrs. Raleigh, whose needlework ran awry, and Mr. Raleigh, unseeingly concentrated on the uttering of Meg Merrilees’ curse against the Laird of Ellengowan.
Darwent did not even notice them, nor did Dolly. Dolly looked back at him fixedly. Despite herself, despite shame and anger at herself, two tears welled up in Dolly’s eyes.
“No, I won’t,” she said.
“But why not?”
“Becos I shouldn’t like it,” she answered with that same simplicity, “and neither would you. You think you would; but you wouldn’t.”
“That’s utter nonsense, and you know it!?”
“Let’s be pleasant!” called Dolly in a voice of sudden cheerfulness. Fiercely she pushed him; and, even as she did so, he saw the stab of physical pain which went through her body under the padded silk coverlet.
How long since that ice bandage had been renewed?
“Let’s be pleasant!” Dolly repeated, smiling at him and then turning toward the Raleighs. “Before you came here, Dick, we were speaking of the wonderful times on the stage. Oh, and how we loved it!”
It was not as though an enchanter had brought both Raleighs to life; it was rather as though the enchanter had dug both of them with a long sharp pin.
“We were telling the child, Dick,” crowed Mrs. Raleigh, rearing up behind her embroidery frame, “that the stage is not what it was in our day,”
“Now there, my love,” corrected her husband, instantly putting down Guy Mannering, “I must ask you to speak for yourself. The giants of today are mightier than those of old.”
“Now really, Mr. R.!”
“I affirm it, Emma. I am not, of course,” intoned Mr. Raleigh in a voice like a tragedian, “a polished player like Dolly, or a skilled swordsman like Dick. At the same time …”
“Mr. R.,” cried his wife, “you underrate yourself. I won’t have it!”
“Well, well,” conceded Mr. Raleigh, with a ghostly smile, “it may have fallen to my lot, perhaps, to amuse the pit during some undue delays in shifting scenes. For juggling ninepins, for throwing up five oranges and catching them on a point, I was perhaps even famous. And you must own I had few rivals at a comic song.”
“Fie!” interposed Dolly, catching the spirit. “The comicalest times, Mr. Raleigh, was in the Old Price riots at Covent Garden.” She partly turned her head. “You remember, Dick? When the fools of managers put up the prices, and people wouldn’t endure it? Oh! No. You don’t remember. That was six years ago. You were … were at Oxford.”
“Dolly! Stop this gabble and listen to me!”
“Dick! Dear! Don’t!”
“The O.P. riots at Covent Garden Playhouse,” cried Mrs. Raleigh, “were a sin and a scandal.”
“I quite agree, my love,” said her husband, nodding gravely. “Especially when they brought in prize fighters to subdue the audience, with many injured and one dead. It could never have happened at Drury Lane.”
As Mrs. Raleigh’s emotions veered, the tears smarted into her eyes again.
“Of course, Mr. R.,” she observed acidly, “you would defend a management that gave you your walking papers overnight, and we without a penny saved to meet it!”
“One must be philosophical about these matters, my love,” answered Mr. Raleigh, with a stately wave of the hand. A faraway smile touched his lips. “You are quite right, of course, in your censure of the O.P. riots. Yet nearly seventy nights of fighting in the pit, with post horns blowing and pigeons released, with Lord Yarmouth and the Hon. Berkeley Craven fighting in the pit too … well, it was not without its lighter side.”
Dolly Spencer looked almost wistful.
“It was lovely,” she breathed. “Oh, how I wish there could be a rowdy do like that at the Italian opera!”
“The opera, my dear?” inquired Mrs. Raleigh, her eyebrows seeming to freeze as they rose.
“The opera?” repeated her husband, in a tone almost as freezing. “Pray reflect, my dear Dolly, that this opera is an inferior art.”
“Oh, inferior, yes.” Mrs. Raleigh shivered. “But—fashionable, Mr. R. Fashionable! La, but our quality must wear full court dress; and even in the pit the humbler ones must dress en grande tenue. Whereas we at our theater, of course, are mere buffoons.”
“But that’s it,” Dolly protested eagerly. “It’s so dainty and prim and dear me. Lord, how I’d adore to see someone hit in the face with a squashy orange! But it won’t ever happen: not there. The opera’s for fine ladies and pretty lordlings who …”
Suddenly realizing what she had said, Dolly stopped dead. Her mouth opened, and she turned round a face of consternation.
“Dick!” the stricken voice whispered. “I didn’t mean you!”
And he smiled at her.
“I know you didn’t, Dolly. And, if it pleases you, I am entirely at your service to hit someone with a squashy orange.” Then he burst out in wretchedness, “Dolly, can’t we return to our own affairs?”
“No. I won’t. Don’t torture me!”
“Have you the least fondness for me, Dolly?”
“I love you,” said Dolly, in a puzzled voice. “That’s why I daresn’t …” She stopped. “I’m no good,” she said. “You don’t even know where I was all that time you were in prison.”
“I don’t care where you were.”
The brown eyes wavered, hesitated, and weakened. Very slowly Dolly stretched out her hand.
At the same moment there was a low but imperative rap at the door. The door opened, and Caroline came in.
Caroline kept her smile and her poise, though in the very atmosphere was the sense that she had overheard much. Both the Raleighs rose to their feet with deep respect.
“Forgive this interruption, my lord!” she addressed Darwent formally. “But Mr. Hereford has just left, together with Mr. Cotton. Mr. Hereford bade me tell you that you have long overstayed your leave with our patient,” she looked kindly at Dolly, “and that you must go at once.”
Darwent rose up from the side of the bed.
It was Caroline’s vitality and fresh color which made him understand how exhausted, how spent and used up, were three of the persons in the Amber Room. Even the Raleighs, to say nothing of Dolly, looked haggard after a night’s vigil beside that bed. And there was death, still with one foot inside the door.
“I have been clumsy and a fool,” Darwent apologized, again lifting Dolly’s hand and kissing it. “I will return as soon as Mr. Hereford permits.”
“Of course!” murmured Caroline.
“But I’m ’most well,” Dolly cried out. “The sawbones said it. This afternoon I’m a-going to get up,” she felt her waist under the padded coverlet, “and take off this dreadful ice that makes me drip like a wet fish. I am!”
Mr. Raleigh turned on her his most sepulchral and terrifying look.
“You will not get up, my dear,” he said, “if I am compelled to hold you down. Those were my instructions from the surgeon.”
“He speaks a truth, Miss Spencer,” said Caroline. “My lord!”
Darwent, on his way to the door, swung round.
Caroline regarded him steadily, her blue eyes opaque and the palms of her hands pressed together.
“There is another reason,” she told him, as though he might have doubted her, “why I felt obliged to interrupt you. There is a caller to see you.” She bit at her lip. “I am sure,” Caroline added, “I made little of your conversation at the breakfast table. Yet this gentleman is agitated, he is … yes, I know you would wish to see him!”
“A caller? Who is he?”
“His name,” answered Caroline, “is Mr. Tillotson Lewis.”
Chapter XV
The Coachman from the Graveyard
“TILLOTSON LEWIS!” ECHOED DARWENT.
So elusive had been young Mr. Lewis, so much a pair of top boots striding ghostlike across the passage at White’s, that Darwent was as taken aback as though Caroline had mentioned a visit from Prester John or the wily Ulysses.
“May I ask where he is now?”
“I took the liberty of asking him to wait in the drawing room.”
“And—er—where is Mulberry?”
Caroline’s eyes clouded with uneasiness. She glanced at the door behind her.
“Until a moment ago, he was with me. Unfortunately,” and Caroline made a mouth less of repugnance than regret, “Mr. Mulberry was much disguised in liquor. I—I confess I was unwise to return to the drawing room and offer him brandy after breakfast. After your departure, my lord, he made some astonishing statements. Including
the fact that he had now solved the mystery.”
“Solved the mystery?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The dull crimson of the lamp darkened the sickly amber hangings of this room in the style of Louis the Well-Beloved. Dolly Spencer leaned back against the headboard of the bed, her long-lashed eyes closed. Mr. Raleigh, in utter weariness, leaned against one bedpost.
“Caroline!” said Darwent. “What did Mulberry tell you?”
“My lord, may I beg you to go downstairs and …”
“What did Mulberry say?”
“You may remember,” Caroline’s eyes shifted, “that he was standing at the head of the table, with a large bowl of fruit in front of him? That he had been eating an apple, which dropped out of his hand after the surgeon entered?”
“I remember it. And then?”
“My lord, I can recount it but imperfectly. After your departure, when Mr. Mulberry drank brandy, he became more and more fond of Latin quotations. I do not know,”—and Caroline smiled uneasily—“whether this was done to impress me. In any case. …”
“Go on!”
“He used a quotation which dealt with the sanctity of a Roman villa; and it brought him up as though he had seen a poisonous viper. Twice he repeated ‘Roman villa,’ and looked at the bowl of fruit as though it enlightened him.
“Whereupon,” continued Caroline, throwing out her arms, “to the astonishment of Mr. Cotton and myself, he must produce a number of keys from his pockets—half a dozen keys, at least—and flourish them. He cried out, ‘I have solved all this mystery,’ and insisted that he be taken up to see you.”
“Then where is he now?”
Caroline lifted her shoulders.
“As I indicated, he was—was not himself. Thomas,” she meant the second footman, “must escort him outside and put him into a hackney coach. My lord, have you forgotten that your life is in danger? Will you not go downstairs and see Mr. Lewis?”
“I will go,” answered Darwent; and closed the door behind him.
All over the dim house, as he descended to the first floor above the ground floor, the rustle of the rain deepened. A grandfather clock on the landing struck twelve noon.
The Bride of Newgate Page 17