by D. J. Taylor
Come the end of the first week she was, if not recovered, then a dozen times better than she had been. Indeed she read to me, as we sat in our lodgings, a comical piece from Punch about a servant girl who mislaid her mistress’s things, and swore it was the cat, and was found drinking porter with the boots over a pair of pawn tickets, over which we both laughed much. I remember it above all, a Sunday morning with the bells ringing and the folk hurrying to service in the street below our window. (There is no Protestant church else we should have joined them.) She ate a good dinner, drank a glass of “clar’t” that Dr. Fitzgerald had prescribed for her—he is a Sligo man with the most uncouth brogue you ever heard—and seemed content, but for certain remarks that betrayed to me the febrile tenor of her mind. Thus, at one juncture, picking up a newspaper—this was after the Punch reading—she observed that the print swam before her, made it impossible for her to contemplate, that there were shapes she saw between the adjacent columns as clear as day to her tho’ perhaps not discernible to all…
Still, the afternoon waxing fine and there being no other occupation available to us, I determined to take her walking upon the sands. Indeed, she seemed to relish it, took off her stockings even—they are very free and easy here, the gentlemen march about the shore in their shirtsleeves—and paddled in the rock pools in such a droll way that I could not forbear to laugh. There was a little black-haired tinker girl playing nearby—I could see the family’s wagon drawn up on the shale and an old father smoking a pipe on its seat—and Isabel befriended her, searched with her among the rocks for crabs, walked with her to the sea’s edge and looked for ships, &c. All this was very poignant to me, a circumstance that I would have prolonged to its utmost limit, were it not that suddenly there came a terrible shriek from the water. Looking up from this reverie, I saw to my horror—you will scarcely credit it, but it is true nonetheless—that she had picked the child up in both arms, as one might seize a bolster, and dashed her into the waves. What was to be done? In an instant a crowd had gathered around us—the old father hastened across the sands yelling “Murther!”—and it was all I could do, having ascertained that the child was unhurt, to spirit Isabel away. The people looked at us very strangely as I half pushed, half pulled her along the street. Yet once taken to our lodgings, she grew tractable, did as I bade her, but sat in a chair by the window wearing the most desolate expression I have ever seen on a human countenance and pray that I shall not see again. Dr. Fitzgerald, who presently arrived in answer to my summons, looked very grave and vowed that he could do nothing, in fact insisted on our immediate return…
Since that time it has gone very hard with us. There is no pattern to her madness, which manifests itself first as a fury of self-reproach, then as stark dolorousness, then again as a curious silent melancholy. On our return I of course consulted Mr. Procter, formerly Her Majesty’s Commissioner—you will perhaps know him by his other name, Cornwall. Procter’s opinion was that an institution might suit, and to this end he conducted me around what he termed his “favourite place.” This, I freely confess, I feel quite sick to think of even now—a great grim house out in the wilds of Herefordshire, with bars on every window and wild-eyed women roaming the gardens. Procter shook his head about other places…
Lately she has been at Camberwell with Mrs. Baxter, a most respectable person, with experience of these cases, &c. Here she is humoured, has a parlour to herself, is kept clean and seems well enough. And yet I am filled with the gravest foreboding. Visiting her this Whit Monday past, thinking to take her to Peckham Fair or on some other jaunt, I found, to my disquiet, that she did not know me, merely stared up interestedly from beneath her bonnet, enquired of her keeper who was that man, why had he come, & so forth. On my asking her at one point if she would take a turn in the garden, she replied only, “Alas, sir, I had better not,” following this with some rigmarole about the Queen, the Houses of Parliament, like fragments of the morning’s Times, almost, picked up from the floor. The sadness is that in all other respects she is unchanged, the gracefulness of her form and gesture just as I remember. Half a dozen times indeed I found myself regarding her in the absolute confidence that her next utterance would make perfect sense, that the events of the past months had been no more than a ghastly nightmare. Alas, this was a delusion as grave as that which has afflicted her…
This has been an infernally long preface, my dear Dixey, to what is a simple request, but there was much that you should know and much to tell about our life since last you saw us. Rest assured that if you can find it in your heart to accommodate that which I now propose, I shall be eternally grateful, as indeed would Isabel, could she but grasp the nature of what I ask…
And then, quite unexpectedly, Mr. Ireland died. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine, which furnished a synopsis of the affair, he fell from his horse out riding in the Suffolk back lanes, was brought home with half his skull stove in and never spoke again. It was said also, though not in the Gentleman’s Magazine, that his wife, when the news was brought to her by the village clergyman, gave a solitary shriek of laughter and then resumed her embroidery. It was said, lastly, that at his funeral, during the singing of the final hymn, when the coffin was about to be removed to its accustomed resting place, a woman dressed all in black with a veil over her face appeared as from nowhere in the church porch only to vanish before anyone could address her, and that this woman was Mrs. Ireland.
The will was read and proved. Are not wills always proved? It is only in novels that mysterious strangers arrive to frighten the lawyers and codicils are discovered under the deceased’s bedstead. The property, being entailed, passed to a cousin of Mr. Ireland’s, the Fellow of an Oxford college, who, arriving to inspect his inheritance, pronounced it inconveniently rural and returned to his lecture rooms having left his benefactor’s two dozen fields and water meadows in the hands of a bailiff. Mr. Ireland’s money, such as it was, was reserved for the upkeep of his wife, the capital sum to be placed in a fund administered by certain trustees and released at so much per annum. All this was reported, and embellished, in that highly respectable Suffolk journal, the Woodbridge Chronicle and Intelligencer. Beyond that, however, lay much that those who took an interest in Mr. Ireland’s leavings professed to be unsatisfactory. There was talk, for example, of another sum of money, a substantial sum, the quidnuncs maintained, bequeathed to Mrs. Ireland by her late father. There was yet further talk, as there could hardly fail to be, of Mrs. Ireland herself. Where was the beneficiary of this testament, of whom nothing had been seen since the day of her husband’s death? Certainly not at the late Mr. Ireland’s house, which was shut up and administered by an old housekeeper. But if not there, then where? Why, answered the lawyers to whom this question was put, Mrs. Ireland had been placed in the care of a relative, expressly selected by her husband in the event of his early decease. Beyond this, Messrs. Crabbe & Enderby of Lincoln’s Inn did not care to elaborate. There were rumours about the lady’s situation, about an earlier bequest, about her condition—only rumours, to be sure, but there is many an established fact that begins life as a rumour.
All this, in fact, had the makings of a singular mystery. An evening newspaper that had once employed old Mr. Brotherton produced a very severe lead article baldly enquiring what had become of his daughter. A celebrated literary gentleman wrote a satirical essay in All the Year Round, “Lost, Stolen or Strayed: On a Vanished Young Lady,”* in which not a little fun was had at the expense of Messrs. Crabbe & Enderby and mention was made of the duties of the Lunacy Commissioners. And in this manner Mrs. Ireland’s whereabouts became, in a small way, a matter of public remark. She was supposed to have been seen variously at Brighton and at Edinburgh, in a hotel at Paris and on a steamer cruising the Rhine. A gentleman who had known her husband swore that he had glimpsed her on the platform of a metropolitan railway station in the company of a group of nuns, and for a week a rumour went round London that Mrs. Ireland was the victim of a popish abduction. To all these re
presentations, Messrs. Crabbe & Enderby replied in their blandest manner. They had followed their late client’s instructions; they were answerable only to his trustees. Of Mrs. Ireland’s lodgement, health, condition of mind and so forth, nothing could be said without prejudice to that high degree of confidentiality on which her late husband had insisted. So, at any rate, said Mr. Crabbe of Crabbe & Enderby when the matter was put to him.
Now Mr. Crabbe was the most persuasive old lawyer who ever presented his petition at the King’s Bench, but it was thought that in the business of Mr. Henry Ireland’s will he was not lying—for no lawyer ever lies—but not saying as much as he might have said. It was at this time, furthermore, that mention began to be made—nobody knew where the tales came from, but ever so many people believed them—of a certain Mr. James Dixey, of whom it was said that he knew everything about the case that was to be known. As to his connection with the Irelands, no one was exactly sure, but those people who made it their business to be cognisant of their fellow men, soon discovered that they knew all about Mr. Dixey: that he was an elderly man, somewhere between sixty and seventy, who lived in great seclusion at Watton in the county of Norfolk, occupying his time in correspondence with learned societies, and that he had once presented a pair of stuffed lions—acquired nobody quite knew where—to the Norwich museum. This was Mr. Dixey, of whom it came to be asserted that he was Mr. Ireland’s second cousin on his mother’s side, and the person to whom the care of his wife had been assigned.
When these facts became known—or rather when these speculations became prevalent—a body of opinion grew up whose aim was direct action. Let Mr. Dixey be addressed, this body proposed, let representations be made to him concerning Mrs. Ireland’s well-being, either by letter or in person, and then the mystery—and practically everyone had now assured themselves that there was a mystery—could be solved. But Mr. Dixey lived in West Norfolk, from which fastness he could rarely be enticed: letters sent to him came back unopened, for there is, alas, no law requiring a gentleman to answer his correspondence. At this, certain elements of the Ireland party waxed wrathful. Hot-tempered old ladies demanded that deputations should be sent to Watton, that raiding parties, even, should be encouraged to break down Mr. Dixey’s door for the purposes of confronting him. Needless to relate, no such steps were ever taken. Norfolk, to be sure, is a long way distant. Gentlemen, too, have their business to attend to. Further, it was felt that however uncertain the legal provisions surrounding his ward, when it came to outright trespass on his property Mr. Dixey might be supposed to have the law on his side.
Upon my word, John, I think something ought to be done!”
“Done! I don’t doubt that something should be done. The question is: who is to do it?”
The participants in this exchange were a mother and her son, the former a stout, grey-haired lady of perhaps sixty years, the latter a tall, bearded gentleman, clad in the latest metropolitan fashion, of about half that age. The scene of their conversation was a small back parlour in a house in the vicinity of Marylebone High Street and the time about ten of the clock on a bright morning in early March.
“Really, John! I sometimes think you are the worst person in the world for putting yourself forward. There is that young man from Oxford that is to have the property who never set eyes on poor Henry Ireland but once in his life.”
“Mother, the estate was entailed, as you very well know. I could no sooner have inherited it than could Lord John or the bench of bishops.”
“And then poor Isabel disappearing off the face of the earth and being forced to live with a dreadful old man in the country. And you that used to be so fond of her.”
“As to that, Mother, it’s all gammon. I don’t suppose I ever saw her since she was twelve years old. And though I never did care for Ireland I think we can take it that he knew what he was about when he made a will.”
“Even so, John.”
Mrs. Carstairs, as she stood regarding her son, was conscious that their conversation was not proceeding in quite the way that she had intended. She was aware, too, that much of what she had said was, to a degree, disingenuous. No doubt the property that Mr. Ireland had bequeathed to his distant cousin from Oxford was entailed. No doubt, too, a young gentleman of thirty can scarcely be induced to intervene on grounds of sentiment in the affairs of a young lady whom he last met when she was in short frocks. Nonetheless, despite this admission Mrs. Carstairs imagined herself to be rightfully aggrieved.
The connection between the Carstairs and the Brothertons—Mrs. Carstairs was a widow, John her eldest son—was this: that the late Mr. Carstairs had been the cousin of Isabel Brotherton’s father: not a very close cousin, it is true, but of sufficient proximity for there to have been dealings between the two families. These, for reasons that nobody could now remember, had ceased some fifteen years before. Yet Mrs. Carstairs, as she now poured out a third cup of tea for the young lord sitting before her, knew that she was driven by something more than considerations of mere loyalty. It occurred to her, for she was a shrewd and purposeful woman, that something was amiss about the entire undertaking—she could not at this point say what it was, but something nonetheless—and that justice, let alone the memory of the infant Miss Brotherton in her pinafore, required it to be investigated.
Shrewd and purposeful as she was, Mrs. Carstairs was not so sanguine as to suppose that she would secure the ready assistance of her son. For Mr. John Carstairs—this his mother had known for some years—was a weak man: a gentleman, a kindly man according to his lights, but a weak one. Three years previously the electors of a parliamentary borough in the Midlands had petitioned him to stand against the sitting member—for Mr. Carstairs was a political young man—but he had havered, vacillated, begged time to consult with his friends, &c., and when the election came the sitting member had been returned unopposed. Then again, a year since there had been talk of a young woman, the daughter of an East India merchant living in Russell Square with ever so many thousands a year, whose hand in marriage Mr. Carstairs might have commanded, it was said, by a single snap of his fingers. But somehow that snap had never been administered, the merchant’s daughter had gone off to be consoled by an earl’s grandson and Mr. Carstairs remained in a state of bachelorhood. All this Mrs. Carstairs had observed, and from it drawn certain conclusions. Knowing the nature of the man with whom she dealt, she now replaced upon its spigot the teapot that she held, gathered her hands before her, smiled fondly upon her son, who continued to drink his tea, and resumed her discourse in a rather more comfortable tone.
“I declare, John, it’s uncommonly pleasant to have you for company at breakfast.”
“Well, I suppose it is—uncommonly pleasant.”
“And let me see, at what hour are you expected at the office?” Mr. John Carstairs was employed in an undersecretary’s chamber at the Board of Trade, where it was not thought that he fatigued himself very greatly.
“Eleven o’clock. That is, perhaps half past.”
“Well, I wish you would oblige me—you know, you are the head of the family now, and such words must come from you—by calling at Mr. Crabbe’s chambers and enquiring”—here Mrs. Carstairs faltered just a little—“enquiring of the matter of which we spoke. It will take no more than a moment, and I should count it a great kindness, indeed I should.”
“D——t, Mother! I beg your pardon”—John Carstairs corrected himself hastily, seeing the expression on his parent’s face—“but I cannot see that it would do any good. I know old Crabbe. I meet him at the club and…and at other places. He is the civillest old file in Christendom, but I don’t doubt that he’d think it a piece of interference. In fact I should swear he would. There—I do not mean to be severe! I shall call at his chambers as you wish, but I’ll lay even money it’s a fool’s errand.”
And with that he picked up his hat, saluted his mother affectionately on the cheek, as was his custom, and quitted the house before further words could be exchanged, leaving M
rs. Carstairs to superintend the disposal of the breakfast things and reflect on the excellence of her understanding of human nature.
For myself I am inclined to believe that Mrs. Carstairs had not arrived at a true estimate of her son’s character. He was a weak man, but not perhaps as weak as his mother supposed him. In his heart he believed that there was something amiss in the matter of Miss Brotherton—Mrs. Ireland—and that it behoved persons such as himself to take an interest in her well-being. And yet his experience of the world told him that information about Mrs. Ireland would be difficult to come by. “After all,” he said to himself as he raised his hand for a cab on the pavement of Marylebone High Street, “old Crabbe has been the family lawyer for nigh-on half a century and will know what he is about.” Nonetheless, he had given his word to his mother, and so, not without all private misgivings, he directed the cab to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, sent in his card, was smiled upon by Mr. Crabbe’s clerk and conducted to Mr. Crabbe’s chamber to await that gentleman’s arrival.
It was here, however, that his courage began to fail him. I do not know that Mr. Crabbe’s office was any more forbidding than other legal chambers in which John Carstairs had at one time or another sat, but there was something about its arrangement, its faded damask hangings and its shelves of dusty law reports, that seemed to impress upon him the futility of his task. Five minutes passed, then ten, not one of which did anything to raise John Carstairs’s spirits. After a while he sprang from his chair and walked restlessly around the room with his hat in his hand, stood irresolutely before the great long window looking out over the square, peered into one of Mr. Crabbe’s black-backed law books with a kind of horror and examined the row of invitations on the mantelpiece, which told him nothing more than that Mr. Crabbe dined out perhaps three nights in the week. It was in this attitude that Mr. Crabbe discovered him as he came into the room, gliding in so silently and with so slight a disturbance to the door handle that John Carstairs gave a start, rather as if he were a burglar who proposed to make off with one of Mr. Crabbe’s deed boxes.