Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  And, still averting her eyes from mine, standing so that her chair, a confounded big chair, was between us, she gave me a packet.

  I took it mechanically and I gazed at it — as soon as I could switch my thoughts on to it — as one stunned. My G — d, the despatches! The despatches! The worn and abraded leather case, strapped and sealed with Ellis’s seal! Which I had seen in his hands a dozen times, which had cost him his life, which had come near to costing me both life and honour!

  Conscious as she was, she could not refrain from a little fluttering laugh, as she viewed my astonishment. “It is all right — I hope?” she said.

  “Right?” I cried. “Right? It is indeed right! You have saved my honour as well as my life!” And precipitately, without another word, and very greatly, I must suppose, to her amazement, I turned and flew from the room, I bounded down the stairs. And not a moment too soon.

  As I leapt from stair to stair I heard Platen’s voice and the Governor’s in the hall below. Heavens, if they had already — but, no, they had not had time, and even as I framed the fear, I stood before them, panting and speechless — but holding out the packet.

  “Ah!” said Platen, taking in the position at a glance. “Fraulein Mackay!” I gasped. “She secured them through the Kammerjungfrau — before she slept!”

  “Ah!” said the Governor in his turn, and his eyes gleamed sardonically behind his spectacles. “You had better add her to the Service, I think.”

  Platen nodded. “A very remarkable young lady,” he commented. “Then that is over?”

  But by this time I had got myself in hand. “Not quite,” I rejoined. “ I owe you, Herr Governor, my humble apologies. And to you also, and even more to my friend, Herr Lieutenant Platen, the expression of my sincere and for-the-duration-of-my-life-lasting gratitude. I trust that you will honour me by shaking hands with me.” They did so a little stiffly. But then, seeing, I think, that my eyes were not dry, for I was deeply moved, they gave way and they kissed me coram publico on both cheeks. “Not,” said Platen, tapping me lightly on the breast above the place where I had deposited the precious packet, “that I am not tempted to rob you, even I. I wonder,” and there came a gleam of excitement, a glimmer of greed into the little man’s eyes, “what is in them. Those wonderful, those fateful, those fraught with all manner of mischief despatches!”

  “Ah, I wonder,” I rejoined, laughing foolishly, my heart lighter than it had been for weeks. “But you will both, I beg, sup with me to-night. I request the honour, Governor, I press it, and will take no denial. And our host shall give us of his best and of the oldest bin that he has in his cellar.”

  “To be sure,” Platen smiled. “You owe us that for the thousand thalers we recovered for you. And we will toast the Fraulein Mackay.”

  “A most remarkable young lady,” said the Governor again.

  “Yes,” I said, turning towards the stairs, my foot as light as a feather. “We will toast her. I had forgotten that. I must go to her now and thank her.”

  “A good journey!” Platen cried after me. The little man’s eye was keen.

  I rapped at her door — at any rate I ought to have done so, and I hope I did. But it mattered little, for I was sure that she expected me, perhaps even that she already knew my footstep. When I burst in upon her, she was standing in the middle of the floor, awaiting me, yes awaiting me, red as a rose and looking a little as if she would cry.

  And the big chair was no longer before her, or I took no heed of it. What was between us, what passed between us, how I broke that ground, how I said that which had seemed so difficult, so out of the question, so impossible a few minutes before — shall I tell it?

  No, a hundred times, no! There are blossoms so tender they fall at a touch, things so sacred that to tell is to tarnish.

  The more as it fell to my lot that day to do that which must be told. For late in the afternoon I heard that the Lieutenant of Police was inquiring for me in the hall, and going down I found him waiting. I fancied that he looked a little unlike himself, and he was tossing off a glass of Schnapps. “You’d better have one, too,” he said, and without consulting me he gave the order. “The young lady’s evidence,” he continued, dropping his voice as he drew me aside, “ is confirmed — to the letter. Our men have been digging in the cellar — over there, and we want you to identify.”

  I felt my colour fade, and with a hand that shook a little I raised the Schnapps to my lips and drank it. “It is necessary?” I asked, shrinking inwardly. “But no — I will come of course. I owe him that.”

  “He had been stabbed in the breast, precisely, as she said,” Platen explained in a low voice, as we went out and turning the corner of the Shoe Market, entered that detested lane. “Twice, but the surgeon says that the first blow was fatal. No doubt we could prove the identity without your assistance, Excellency, but the shorter way is the better.”

  I did not speak, I could not. I had a horror of the ordeal before me, which was not lessened by the surroundings which awaited us in that abandoned building, gloomy even at noontide. The way to the cellar was by a ladder, down which we groped, assisted by the yellow smoky beams that shone upward from the lanthorns of the knot that waited, silent or now and again conferring in awed whispers, round a gruesome opening in the earth.

  I staggered a little as I reached the foot of the ladder, but Platen took me by the arm and led me forward. The men drew aside to make way for me, and two of them at a sign from the lieutenant held up their lanthorns so as to throw a light on that which lay there — so pitiful, so pitiful a sight, framed as it was in the rough heaps of soil and rubble which the diggers had cast up out of the grave.

  He was not greatly changed — not as much as I had feared. I forced myself, though my flesh quailed, to take one long look. “I identify him,” I said, my words breaking the hush of expectation that surrounded me.

  “Murdered — foully murdered,” I added. And overcome by emotion, weakened by what had gone before, I turned away, unable to control my feelings. The face which I had last seen in the room at Wittenberg, from which I had parted in querulous anger, that face of one who, if we had not always agreed, had been long my companion and ever and always an upright, honest English gentleman — the face of one who in direst peril had given his last thought to his duty — no wonder that as I turned from it, pallid and earth-encrusted and sadly changed as it was, I bowed my head against the rough wall and wept.

  That all his hopes, his promise, his aims, his success should have led only to this! Should have ended here! And it might be, it might well be, I thought with bitter remorse, through me!

  Ah, that I had had more patience, more tolerance, a clearer prevision!

  For a moment Platen let me be while he gave some lowvoiced directions, and it was not until we stood outside those abhorrent walls, in the free air and blessed light of day, that he spoke, “Well, the worse for them,” he said, his face set in so grim a mould that I hardly knew the man. “ The earth will be rid of them. The Judge shall take the young lady’s evidence to-morrow, and we shall then be able to release her for the present.”

  The Governor had joined us, and partly to prove that I had regained my composure, partly because the point was not clear to me, “How did they lure him — into that place?” I asked.

  “Simply enough,” Platen replied.” Waechter — he, of course, was the postilion.”

  “Oh, but,” I cried, my attention caught, “that is not so. Waechter was not the postilion. I should have known the postilion in a moment! He had very thick black—”

  “Eyebrows,” Platen said drily. “ Just so. He had. But he was Waechter all the same. Did you notice that Waechter shaved his eyebrows? I knew him for a jail-bird by that — the moment I saw him.”

  I had not noticed it. I had only remarked a something sinister and unnatural in his face, but I had not traced it to its cause.

  “No doubt when your friend left the Governor’s house at nine o’clock he undertook to guide
him to the Coffee House. Probably he told him that he could take him in by a quieter way — the ball was in progress, the hall crowded. He brought him round the corner and opened the brewery door — perhaps at the last moment he hustled him in. The other two had been watching their movements and were there to meet them.

  “Inside, your friend took the alarm I expect, saw that his retreat was cut off, and, seizing a light which they had placed at hand, perhaps at the foot of the stairs, he must have ran up ahead of them hoping to barricade himself in some room! He reached the little room at the top opposite the gable of the inn, but he could not secure the door.”

  “But suppose — he had not gone to the Coffee House?” I suggested.

  “If he stayed the night in Perleberg — and they had made up their minds that he should — he must have gone to one or other of the two inns. Next door to the other inn, the Golden Crown, there was at this time an empty locked-up shop, and the Governor tells me that it was broken open that night — complaint was made to him next morning, but of course he did not connect it with the Envoy’s disappearance. So it is pretty certain that they had their trap set for him beside each inn.”

  “Well, I hope to heaven,” I cried, “that they will pay for it.”

  Platen smiled — a crooked smile. “Justus Gruner will see to that,” he said. “ You may trust him.”

  In the hall I parted from them, and I went upstairs with an aching heart. Poor Perceval! Poor Perceval! And in part, in part, alas, through my fault! I groaned.

  But, as I paused at the head of the first flight, I caught sight of a plaintive little face watching for me in the dusk of a passage, and I was comforted.

  QUEEN’S FOLLY

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CHAPTER XXXV

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  CHAPTER I

  THE COTTAGE

  MRS. SOUTH’S worn hand trembled on the yellowish ivory handle as she gave the teapot a last skilful twirl before she filled the three cups. Ruth’s tongue rattled on, and Rachel hung midway, her attention divided between the extravagant fancies that tripped lightly from the child’s lips, and the tender fears that brimmed the mother’s eyes as often as they rested on her elder daughter. To enter fully into those fears would have needed a longer experience of life than Rachel possessed, seeing that in the main her experience was bounded by the sheltering walls of the thatched fuchsia-clad cottage before which, and barely a hundred yards away, the sea murmured and rippled. But the imminence of the parting that lay before her, and many a waking fear sobered the girl’s thoughts, so that, even while she lent a half-willing ear to her sister’s rose-coloured tale, her lip trembled in sympathy with her mother’s apprehensions. She knew that she was leaving all whom she loved and all whom she knew, and leaving them to enter on a life unknown and untried. She knew that she was looking her last for many a day on the snug lamp-lit room, in which every object, from the kettle bubbling on the hob to the darned table-cloth and the dim oval mirror above the mantel, was familiar to her; and as her gaze took a slow farewell of each, a hand seemed to clutch her heart. She choked as she tried to swallow.

  But youth is the season of hope as of courage, and Rachel had a brave spirit in her slender form. Rather than that her mother should divine the momentary panic that seized her, she would have bitten her tongue. She turned the choke into a laugh, and flirted a crumb at Ruth. “Oh, foolish Ruth!” she said in her elder-sister’s voice. “Conquests and balls, silly child! Do you think that they come in the way of governesses? Little goose, I am going out for forty pounds a year and my coach-fare, and not for conquests. And to sit in my schoolroom with no fire on cold days and correct exercises, and not for balls. Balls, indeed! I am lucky, my dear, to get the place, and oh, mother, how it will help me afterwards — to have taught a Lady Ann! I wonder, shall I have to call her Lady Ann? Twelve years old and Lady Ann!”

  Mrs. South looked her perplexity. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she answered, diverted for the moment from her deeper anxieties. “I think you should ask Lady Ellingham.”

  “Yes, mother, I suppose so.”

  “But la!” Ruth exclaimed, “what fun it will be for you! To live in a great house with Lord This and Lady That! Do you think that they will all wear stars on their coats?”

  “My dear, I shall not see them once in a blue moon, and that will be at a mile off. I shall be upstairs with a globe and a blackboard and a pile of lesson-books. You may be sure that I shall see little enough of lords and ladies.” And involuntarily Rachel winced as she recalled her terrible, terrible interview with Lady Elisabeth in the Close — the dreadful old lady with the silver-headed cane and the green shade over her sightless eyes, who had engaged her; who had called her “the young person,” and had discussed her with her waiting-woman as freely and as inhumanly as if she had been a hundred miles away instead of standing, with trembling knees, within a pace of the old lady’s high-backed chair. That painful interview had indeed driven Rachel to within an ace of withdrawal. For half an hour she had been minded to withdraw. Then the thought of her mother, and their need, had renewed her courage and steeled her heart.

  But the memory remained. It had been a wretched ordeal. She might have been a stock or a stone for the little regard that had been paid to her sensibilities.

  “How is the young person dressed, Puncheon?” the old lady had asked.

  The waiting-woman had not even looked at her — her trained eye had taken all in at a glance. “In a tippet and a black bombazine with white spots, and a Tuscan trimmed black.”

  “No fringes or falbalas? You are sure of that?”

  “No, my lady, quite plain-like.”

  “What sort of an air has she? Is she respectable?”

  “I should say so, my lady.”

  “Handsome? Likely to take the fellows? And give trouble?”

  For the first time the woman had glanced at the flushed, indignant face, with a gleam of fellow-feeling, but no spark of humour in her eyes. “The young lady is not ill-looking, my lady, but quiet-like.”

  “Demure, eh? Umph! Nine times out of ten they are the worst. But if she’s no beauty she’ll not fly above the chaplain, and that’s his business. Ellingham is a rip, but he has an eye in his head and stoops only at game of a feather. Well, Mr. Dean answers for her French. Where,” and she had poked her cane at the trembling girl, “did you get your accent, girl? I’m told it’s passable.”

  “From M. Bourlay, the emigre, Madam.”

  “Umph! If poor George Selwyn were alive he’d like nothing better than to try her. “But,” she continued, fumbling in her lap for her gold snuffbox, “George and his kind are gone. There are no gentlemen now, Puncheon. They went out with wigs and silk stockings. Well, the young person may go. She’ll hear from me. It’s forty pounds and her coach-fare — d’you hear, Puncheon? And bid her behave herself in her station. But she’s young and a woman, and bidding’s no more than wind in the grass when a young spark makes a leg. There, let her go. I’m tired.”

  A dreadful in
terview and a terrible old lady! Rachel had gone from it to the Cathedral and had sat an hour, cooling her burning face and stemming the angry tears that would rise to her eyes. And for one-half of that time she had been minded to withdraw her application. But the thought of her mother, and a little also the thought of their good friend the Dean, who had recommended her, had prevailed. She had put the temptation from her, and gradually the unpleasant memory had faded, only to return with unhappy clearness now when it availed only to oppress the fluttering heart with a momentary panic.

  But her mother was speaking, and Rachel struggled to control her feelings. “It’s the servants I am afraid of,” Mrs. South said, speaking out of her little store of experience. “In those great houses they are impudent. You must keep them in their place, my dear, or they will encroach. And you’ll never forget, Rachel, that you are the great grandniece of Dr. South — Dr. South the divine, my dear. I hope you will never forget that, and tell them if it is necessary. I think they will respect you then.”

  “La, mother,” Ruth cried, “how often you’ve told us that. I believe you’d like us to go about with a label round our necks: ‘Great grandniece of Dr. South!’ I should laugh to death if I saw Rachel with one.”

  “My dear, the truth is the truth,” Mrs. South rejoined. “And where Rachel is going — among strangers — it will not he known. And she will be wise if she lets it be known, so that she may take her proper place. She might tell my lady, or the chaplain perhaps — he would be a proper person.”

  Rachel wondered — with a touch of irony, for already she was learning her worldly lesson — what Lady Elisabeth would have said to Dr. South. But she only replied that she would remember.

  “And if you are asked down in the evening — as I should expect when the family are alone — you have your white muslin. But you look so young in it that I am not sure after all that it will be wise. And as to caps, you need not have taken to them for the next five years, seeing you are only nineteen turned, but in your position it may be expected. You had better ask the Countess.”