CHAPTER XXIV.
By half-past eight o'clock Edgar Adelon was at the door of the old workhouse at Langley. The building had long been disused, but though not in the best order in the world, it could not be said to have fallen into decay. When a harsh and parsimonious law was substituted for one which was excellent in itself, but had been long and sadly misused; when poverty was first virtually pronounced criminal, and punished by statute; when the vices of the past, and the follies of rich magistrates, were visited upon the present generation, and upon the heads of the poor; when those whom God had joined together were put asunder by legislation, and when a deputy parliament, irresponsible directly to the people, was created to make laws and regulations for those who are denied a voice in the senate, or a vote at an election; when the medical attendance of the sick and the needy was first contracted for by scores, as bullocks and sheep are paid for at a toll-gate; when charity put on a pedant's gown, and national benevolence was circumscribed by iron theories, the poor of Langley had been transferred to the union house, and the old workhouse had been put up to auction.
It was bought by a person who wished to establish a school: a wild, eccentric, clever philanthropist, who fancied that he could bend man's stubborn nature to his own Utopian schemes of excellence. The school, however, as might have been expected, proved a complete failure; and after keeping it up for two years, he abandoned it in despair. No purchaser could be found to take the building off his hands; and leaving the charge of it to an old man and his wife, he spent a few pounds annually in checking the course of decay, but seemed to forget it altogether, except when he paid the bills. There was a little space of ground round it, and a low wall; and within that wall Edgar Adelon now stood, waiting for the coming of his guide. He doubted not that the person he sought was to be discovered within the large, rambling old building: and finding that his impatient spirit had carried him thither a good deal before the time, he walked round it more than once, looking up to the windows, to see if he could discover the room which Norries inhabited. All was dark, however, except where, from a room on the ground floor, close to the door, streamed forth a solitary light; and mounting the steps, the young gentleman looked in, and perceived the old man in charge and his wife seated at their little fire. He now began to doubt that Norries was there. It might merely be a place of rendezvous, he thought; and as time wore on, he fancied that his guide was long in coming, and then that he would not come.
The night formed a strong contrast with the last: it was fine, and calm, and clear, and at length a step was heard at a good distance, approaching rapidly. Edgar would not wait for the new-comer's approach, but went to meet him, and in a few minutes he could perceive the figure of Martin Oldkirk.
"Ay, sir, you are too soon," said the man. "I am before my time; but come on, and we shall soon find him we want. Now, wait here for me a minute," he continued, when they reached the door of the workhouse; and walking round towards the back, he disappeared. After remaining impatiently for about five minutes, Edgar thought he heard a bolt withdrawn, and expected to gain admission; but the sound ceased again, and in an instant or two afterwards, he heard a step once more. The next moment the voice of Oldkirk called him; and he found the countryman standing at the western angle of the building.
"Stop a minute, Mr. Adelon," said the man; "are you very sure that you have not let out the secret to any one?"
"To no one upon earth," answered Edgar. "You surely do not suspect me of such baseness?"
"No, sir, I don't suspect you of baseness, at all," replied Oldkirk; "but young gentlemen will be imprudent sometimes."
"I have not in this instance, at all events," answered Edgar. "I have not said a word to anybody which could give the slightest idea of whither I was going when I came out."
"It is strange enough," answered the other, in a thoughtful tone. "There are two men and a little boy standing talking together at this hour of night, at the corner of the lane. They seem to be doing nothing. I wonder what they can want?"
"Nothing connected with me, depend upon it," answered Edgar, becoming somewhat impatient. "It seems to me nothing unusual that two men should be standing there talking."
"But the boy comes from a place close by Brandon," replied Oldkirk. "I dare say it is all right, however, so we had better go in;" and proceeding to the door, near which Edgar had been waiting, he opened it, first lifting the latch. The first room they came to was a little stone hall, where paupers had often waited for their daily allowance of bread, or meat, or soup, or for medical aid; and there Edgar Adelon paused, while Oldkirk shut and bolted the door.
"Now we must find our way in the dark," said the latter, as soon as he had completed his task. "It won't do to carry a light about here. Keep close behind me, sir."
Following his footsteps, Edgar went forward through a door, which closed behind them with a weight and pulley, and then along a stone passage, at the end of which the man said, "Here are the stairs;" and mounting about twenty steps, they came to the upper story of the building. It seemed, as far as the young gentleman could judge, a strange, rambling sort of place, with rooms on the right hand and on the left, and paved passages between them, through several of which he was led, till at length, stopping suddenly, Oldkirk said, "I will wait for you here. Go straight on, sir, till you see a light shining through the keyhole of a door; just push that open and go in, but don't be longer than you can help."
Edgar followed his directions without reply; and a moment after, in a turn of the passage to the left, saw the light the man had spoken of, not only shining through the keyhole, but through a chink of the door, which was ajar. Pushing it open, as he had been told to do, he took a step forward, and a scene unpleasant and even painful was before him.
The room was a small square chamber, lined with squalid panelling, and floored, like the rest of the building, with stone. The rain of the preceding night had come through the roof at one corner, staining the ceiling and the walls. There was but one window, covered not only with a large moveable shutter, formed of planks of wood, but with a blanket, pinned up with two forks, so as to prevent the slightest ray of light from finding its way out through the crevices. The air felt hot and close, although there was neither fire nor fire-place, and the night was cold. In one corner was a bed, of the most humble description, without curtains, and by its side stood a chair and a table, the latter supporting several phials partly filled with medicine, and a tea-cup, as well as a solitary tallow candle, with a long, unsnuffed wick, set in a large, dirty, tin candlestick. The bedding seemed to consist of a mattress or palliass, part of which was apparent, two or three coarse rugs and a sheet, with an ill-filled bolster, doubled up to support the head.
As soon as Edgar entered the room, the form of a man raised itself slowly and painfully up in the bed, supporting itself on the right arm, and a pair of hollow eyes gazed at him earnestly. The head was surrounded with a bandage, and the wild gray hair floated loose about it; while beneath appeared a countenance full of intelligence, but worn and haggard, apparently with sickness and suffering. The hue of robust health was totally gone; and the pale, yellow, waxy tint of the skin seemed more sallow from a black plaster down one check, and a gray and reddish beard of eight or nine days' growth. No one, probably, who had known Norries in health, would have recognised him at that moment; and Edgar Adelon who had never seen him, except once as a boy, imagined at first that there must be some mistake. Association, as it is called, is perhaps one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the human mind: not alone in the rapid power which it has of awakening recollection from the slumber of long years to the things of the past, but in the strange difference of the means by which it is itself excited. With one man it is a sight; with another, a sound; with another, an odour; with another, a taste, which calls up suddenly scenes and circumstances and persons, which have been long buried beneath the sand and rubbish of passing things in the course of years. With Edgar Adelon the exciting cause, in almost all instances, was sound; and the moment Mr. Norries spoke, he recollected his voice, and the place where he had last beheld him; and all that then took place flashed back upon his memory like a scene in a dream.
"Are you Mr. Adelon?" demanded the wounded man.
"The same," answered Edgar.
"What! not the boy who came to call upon Mr. Sherborne, with Sir Arthur Adelon, some six or seven years ago?" rejoined Norries. "How you are changed!"
"Greatly, I believe," replied Edgar; "but you are very much changed too, Mr. Norries, and I regret to see that the alteration has been effected by illness."
"Ay!" answered the other, gloomily, "they have brought the strong man to infant weakness, and the daring man to skulk in a hole like this. If others had been as resolute and as vigorous, the case would have been different. But I have not regrets for myself, Mr. Adelon. I regret that another opportunity has been lost for my country: an opportunity which may never return. I regret that my countrymen, in their feebleness and their timidity, have suffered the golden moment to slip from them, after boasting that they were ready to seize it, and to dare all odds to render it available to the common good. They fled, sir, like a flock of sheep, from a handful of men in red coats, and I am almost hopeless of them. I went down, it is true, almost at the first, with a bitter wound in my side, and my horse shot under me; but if they had then rushed on--ay, though they had trampled the soul out of my body--they would have gained the day, and I would have blessed them. Nevertheless, the time may yet come, and I will live for it. Only one success, to give them confidence in themselves, to knit them together, to prove to them that they can fight and conquer if they will, and all is secure. It is the novelty of the thing that scares them: and those Frenchmen, too, who ran at the very first shot, what do they deserve? But I forget; we are rambling from the point."
"You seem to have been badly wounded, indeed," replied Edgar, as the sick man sunk back upon his pillow, exhausted with the stern vehemence of his own thoughts; "but tell me, Mr. Norries, have you proper attendance here? Such wounds as yours would need a skilful surgeon."
"They were sharp ones," answered Norries, "and not few; for I had just staggered up, and was calling some few stout hearts around me, when the cavalry dashed in amongst us. One cut at me, and gashed my cheek, and another brought me down with a blow over the head. They passed on, thinking me dead; and so I should have been very soon if that brave fellow, Oldkirk, had not dragged me away, and hiding me and himself in a dry ditch, bound up my wounds and stanched the blood. There has been many a man ennobled for a worse deed; but he will have his reward here or hereafter. The people here are very kind to me, too. I saved their little property for them one time, by the few scraps of law I ever learned, and they are grateful: it is a marvel, as this world goes. I have a surgeon from a distant town, and I drink his drugs, and let him probe my wounds, and let him torture me as much as he will; not that I have any faith in him, but because it pleases the good people, who think that something is being done to serve me. I need no surgeon, Mr. Adelon, but nature and a strong constitution. Surgeons and lawyers, the craft is much the same; the one tortures and destroys the body, the other the mind--both rascally trades enough! But let us think of other things. You have been seeking me--why?"
"I thought Oldkirk had told you," replied Edgar. "I gave him all the needful particulars last night."
"He told me something of it," answered Norries, "but not the whole. Besides, I forget. Lying here in this gloomy sickness, my thoughts wander over many things, like the dove of the deluge, finding no place to rest upon. Let me hear the business from your own lips."
"It is very simple," replied Edgar Adelon. "A friend, for whom I have more deep regard than I feel for any man living, is accused of having killed the young Lord Hadley on the very night of the attack upon Barhampton. He went out from Brandon at about eight o'clock, and was followed by that lord: they were seen passing the lodge, and walking on together in high dispute. Lord Hadley was brought home dead, having been struck over the cliff by some one, whom the coroner's jury choose to believe was my friend: not without some grounds, it is true." And Edgar proceeded to detail the evidence given, dwelling minutely upon the circumstances, in order to show Norries the danger of the position in which Dudley was placed. "My friend," he continued, "declares that he went on to the very gates of Barhampton that night; that Lord Hadley parted from him at the spot where the path from the Grange crosses the high road, and that he never saw him after. He met several men near Mead's farm, it would seem; but we have reason to believe that there were others scattered along the whole line of road he took, and that some of them must have seen his parting from Lord Hadley, and be able to bear testimony to the fact. If you know, as we imagine, who these men were, and can give me information, so that their evidence may be obtained, I beseech you, Mr. Norries, to do so; for the lawyers who have been brought from London assure us that is the only hope of obtaining a favourable verdict for my friend Mr. Dudley."
"Mr. Dudley, the friend of one of the name of Adelon!" replied Norries, in a low, marvelling tone; "that is a strange phenomenon! An Adelon strive to save a Dudley! That is stranger still. But true, your mother's was kindlier blood. Is your father aware of what you are doing?"
"My father is in London, detained by business of importance," answered Edgar; "but I know to what you allude, Mr. Norries. Some quarrel existed in former years between my father and Dudley's, but that is no reason for enmity between their children."
"A quarrel!" exclaimed Norries, raising himself again upon his arm. "Do you know, Mr. Adelon, that your father ruined his? Do you know--but no, you do not; I will tell you. Dudley's mother was your father's first love. They had been rivals for honours at school, at the university, and they then became rivals for her hand. Sir Arthur was encouraged by the mother, but Charles Dudley was accepted by the daughter. He was successful here, as he had always been before, and your father is not a man to forget such things, sir. He ruined him, I say."
"It is false!" exclaimed Edgar. "It cannot be true."
"Not true!" cried Norries; "do you dare tell me it is not true? But this is all vain--lying here, the veriest child might insult me at will. But I tell you it is true, and I have the papers which prove it. He waited long for his revenge, but it came at last. He took advantage of a temporary pressure on his enemy--a pressure caused by his own acts, and offered in kindly words to lend money on a mortgage, merely and solely for the purpose of getting Dudley's title-deeds into his lawyer's possession; for that cunning lawyer had taught him that there never was a title in which a flaw could not be found. It was all done by his directions--all done for one object. The flaw was soon discovered, the title disallowed, the secret told to the next heir, and Mr. Dudley ruined. I can prove it step by step, the whole machinations from the beginning to the end, for that lawyer was my partner, and the papers are now in my possession."
"And you used them, Mr. Norries," replied Edgar, with a mixture of anger and sorrow in his tone, "to force my father on in a course which might be his ruin. Do not talk of ungenerous conduct, for surely this was not generous."
"I used them, sir," replied Norries, sternly, "to keep him to principles which he had long before asserted, to promote the deliverance of my country, to favour the people's right. I have since regretted, perhaps, that I did so; for I am weak, like other men, and the result having been unfortunate, may wish I had not employed the means which the object justified. I ought to have given those letters to Mr. Dudley, and will do so now, if he and I both live. And now, sir, with that knowledge before you, I will help you to save the young man, if you please."
Edgar sat silent for a moment or two, with his eyes bent fixedly upon the wall, and Norries at last asked, "What say you? would you save him?"
"Assuredly!" replied Edgar Adelon, with a start; "can you doubt it? Whatever be the consequences, can you suppose that I would hesitate to deliver my friend, or that I would see an innocent man suffer for a crime in which he had no share?"
"Then you are one of the noble and the true," replied Norries, warmly; "one of the few, the very, very few. Give me your hand, Mr. Adelon; and forgive me that I have pained you by such sorrowful truths."
Edgar gave him his hand, but turned away his head with a sigh, and Norries continued. "That every word I have uttered is true, you shall have proof," he said. "If I live, I will show you those letters."
"No!" answered Edgar, sharply; "I will not look into one page of them. He is my father, sir, whatever he may have done. To me he has no faults, nor would I willingly see any in his conduct to other men. If you will aid me to prove Dudley's innocence, Mr. Norries, I will thank you most deeply; but say no more to me of my father or my father's acts."
"So be it," answered Norries; "to Mr. Dudley's business, then. First, be sure he did not kill Lord Hadley. I may know, or at least guess, who did. But of that I can prove nothing. Secondly, there was but one man, as far as I recollect, near the spot where the two roads cross. My memory of that night is somewhat indistinct, indeed, and there may have been two. One certainly was Edward Lane, the blacksmith; the other, a man named Herries, living near Barhampton, but I am not sure of his station. Seek out Lane first, and tell him I sent you to him with my request that he will voluntarily tender his evidence. He must make some excuse for being there at that hour of the night. He is resolute and bold, but somewhat wrong-headed, and you may have trouble with him, though I think my name will satisfy him. The other man will tell you at once if he was there or not, if you but say that I desire it. Tell Mr. Dudley, for me, too, that I regret much what has happened, and that I cannot serve him farther. You say that he went as far as the gates of Barhampton--I know not what could bring him thither, and assuredly I did not see him there; but that is no marvel, for I had much to do."
"He went upon a kindly errand, Mr. Norries," replied Edgar, "and certainly was there, for he said it, and Dudley's word is not to be doubted. But I will detain you no longer to-night, as you seem exhausted, and perhaps our conversation has been too long already. I thank you much for the information you have given me, and I am sure Dudley will be grateful also." Thus saying, the young gentleman shook hands with the sick man, and left him.