Volume Three—Chapter Eight.
The Friend in Need.
There was quite a meeting at little Miss Clode’s the next morning, after a heavy storm that had set in during the night; but, though the ordinary atmosphere was fresh, clear, cool and bright after the heavy rain, the social atmosphere grew more dense and lurid, hour by hour, as the callers rolled the news snow-ball on till Annie Clode’s eyes looked as if they would never close again, and her mouth formed a veritable round O.
Miss Clode herself was in a state of nervous prostration, but she forced herself to be in the shop and listen, gathering scraps of information which she sifted, casting aside the rubbish and retaining only what was good, so as to piece together afterwards, and lay before herself what was the whole truth.
The accounts were sufficiently alarming; and among others it was current that Sir Harry Payne was eloping with Claire Denville, when Mrs Burnett followed to stop them, and Frank Burnett in a fit of rage and jealousy, stabbed her and Sir Harry.
Another account stated that it was Sir Matthew Bray who had stabbed Mrs Burnett, and that he had been seized and put in prison for the deed, while Lady Drelincourt had gone mad from love and misery, and had been found by Fisherman Dick and a couple of friends six miles inland, lost on the Downs, drenched with rain, and raving so that she had had to be held down in the cart that the fishermen had been using to carry mackerel.
Everybody smiled at the word mackerel, and thought of French brandy for some reason or another.
This last business was as much canvassed as May Burnett’s injury, for subsequent inquiry proved that Lady Drelincourt really had been brought home by Fisherman Dick, and that she was delirious and attended by two doctors.
Sir Matthew Bray, too, was certainly in prison, and nobody troubled him or herself to discriminate between an arrest for debt set about next day by Josiah Barclay, and one for some criminal offence.
The whole affair was like a godsend, just when scandal was starving for want of sustenance, and Saltinville at its lowest ebb.
Some one had seen the postboys, and knew that Lord Carboro’ was up at the cross-roads, where he had gone to fight a duel with Colonel Mellersh over a card-table quarrel, and they happened to be just in time to help May Burnett when her sister stabbed Sir Harry Payne.
Some one else quarrelled indignantly with this version, for she knew from Lady Drelincourt’s maid that it was her ladyship herself, who in a fit of indignant jealousy had stabbed Claire Denville and Sir Matthew Bray, whom everyone knew she loved desperately, and that she had afterwards gone distracted because she had nearly killed Sir Matthew.
This narrator went off in high dudgeon on being openly contradicted, and told that she was entirely wrong, for the fact was that young Cornet Morton Denville, who saved Lady Drelincourt’s pet dog, and for whom her ladyship had bought a commission, had challenged Sir Matthew Bray to fight with swords at the cross-roads. They had met, but Lady Drelincourt, in alarm, had gone and told Morton Denville’s sisters, and they had all three gone up together in a post-chaise with Sir Harry Payne on horseback. They had come up just in the heat of the fight, and Sir Harry and Mrs Burnett had rushed between them, and both been wounded; and in her horror at being the cause of such bloodshed, Lady Drelincourt had exclaimed, “I would give my diamonds and everything I possess to be able to undo this terrible night’s work.”
Such minute knowledge carried all before it, and for quite an hour this was the accepted version.
Somehow, Louis Gravani, save with three or four of the witnesses of the tragedy, dropped entirely out of the affair, going as suddenly as he had come, though he seemed always present in the little bedchamber on the Parade, where May lay almost at the point of death, muttering feebly, and appealing to him not to be so cruel as to kill her, because she always thought that he was dead.
The surgeon had done all that was possible, and he had consulted with the principal physician as to the course to be pursued; and then, in the face of two grave wounds in the neck and breast of the frail, childish little creature, they had left her to the wild delirium that had set in—one whose fever was burning away rapidly the flickering life that was left.
The window was wide open, and the soft, low rush of the water upon the shingle floated in like soft, murmurous music through the flowers that it had always been Claire’s pleasure to tend. Then a faint, querulous cry, oft repeated, came from seaward, where the soft grey-plumaged gulls swept here and there, and dipped down at the shelly shoals laid bare as the tide ebbed and flowed. It was a weird, uneasy sound, that accorded well with the painful scene in the chamber given up to the sick girl, by whose side stood Claire, pale and anxious, ready to fan the burning face, or rearrange the bedclothes tossed uneasily away.
Near the foot of the bed sat the Master of the Ceremonies, grey, hollow-cheeked, and with a wild look of despairing horror in his eyes, as he gazed at his little fallen idol, for whom he had fought and schemed, and whom he had so obstinately held aloft in his own heart, to the disparagement of her patient, forbearing sister.
“Is it true, Claire?” he murmured at last; “is it true, or some dreadful dream? My child! My child!”
Then his face grew convulsed with horror, as May turned her face towards him, and began speaking rapidly:
“Don’t, Louis—pray: don’t.—No: I am afraid.—Take me away quickly, dear.—No one will know, and I hate him so.—Little mean wretch!—They made me marry him, and I hate him more and more.—Hush!”
Denville groaned, and, as his head drooped upon his breast, Claire heard him murmur:
“Is it a judgment—is it a judgment for the past?”
She shivered as she listened to his words, but a quick movement and a low cry of pain made her bend over her sister again.
“Take me away,” she said, after a few moments; and her pinched face bore a look of terror that stabbed those who watched with an agonising pain. “I tell you I hate Frank, and I dare not meet poor Louis now. It is not he, but something from the dead. Claire—Claire—hold me. Sister, help! Don’t let me go. Am I going to die?”
“May, May!” whispered Claire soothingly, as she laid her cheek against the burning face; and the sick girl sighed, and made an effort to cling to her, but her feeble arm dropped heavily upon the coverlid.
“Don’t let Louis come now. Is that Frank? Is that—”
She wandered off, muttering quickly and incoherently as she threw her head from side to side for a time; and then, utterly exhausted, seemed to sleep.
“Has—has Frank Burnett been?” whispered her father, looking timidly at Claire.
She shook her head sadly.
“No,” said Denville; “he will not come. He would not even if she were to die. She must get better; and we will do as you have often said: go right away, where we are not known, and where we shall be safe.”
In spite of herself, Claire darted at him a horrified look, which he saw and winced at, as he rose feebly, and began to pace the room, stopping at length before the window to gaze out at the sunlit sea.
“Strange!” he murmured; “the world so beautiful, and my life one dreary course of agony and pain. Claire, what do the doctors really think—that she will live?”
“I pray God they do!” said Claire solemnly.
“Yes; she must live and repent. There is pardon for those who suffer and repent, my child. Don’t look at me like that; you do not know. Claire, is this my punishment? Surely no worse suffering can befall me now.”
“Dear father,” whispered Claire; “let the past be dead.”
“Hush!” he cried, grasping her hand; “Don’t talk of death, girl—here. She must live, and we will go away before—before it is too late. Has Morton been?”
Claire shook her head mournfully.
“No; he would not come. He must not come,” said the old man quickly. “He is well placed, and he must not come near such pariahs as we are. No, no; don’t look like that,” he whispered passionately. “Why should he drag himself down? It is too much to ask of the boy.”
He went on tip-toe to the bed, and took the little feverish hand that lay outside the coverlid, and kissed and stroked it as he muttered to himself:
“Poor little wandering lamb! So weak and timid, and ready to go astray; but you are safe here with me. Oh, how wrong everything is!”
Claire glanced at him, half stunned by this new trouble; and, as her father talked of punishment, and the impossibility of a greater trouble than this befalling them, a cold hand seemed to clutch her heart, and a vague, black shadow of another horror came back with double force, she shuddered, and devoted herself more and more to her task of attending the sister sick apparently unto death.
As she sat there, with the shadow of death impending, after the first shock, it seemed to lose its terrors, and she found herself looking upon it as less dreadful than she had been wont to do. There was rest in it, and a cessation from the pain and suffering that had so long been her portion; and, as the hours rolled on, her throbbing brain grew dull and heavy, her own suffering lighter, and she seemed better able to attend to the sufferer at her side.
Towards noon there was a soft knock at the front door, and Isaac—who had been planning with Eliza an immediate flight from the grief-stricken house, on the ground that, even if they lost their wages, it was no longer a place for them to stay at—opened it, and told the visitor that Miss Denville could see no one.
“But me, young man,” said the caller, quietly entering. “You need not say I’m here. I shall go up soon, and you have got to go on to my house for another basket like this, only bigger.”
She patted the one she carried—one which she had crammed with such things as she thought would be useful at such a time.
Isaac gave way, allowed Mrs Barclay to go up to the drawing-room, and directly after called Eliza into his pantry to tell her that his mind was made up, and that they must go at once.
Mrs Barclay did not hesitate for a moment, but went softly up to the bedroom, tapped gently, and turned the handle to enter on tip-toe.
“I’ve only come to help, my dear,” she said softly, as she clasped Claire in her arms. “We weren’t quick enough, my dear,” she whispered, “or we might have saved all this.”
There was no reply, and after a time, in respect to Claire’s wishes, Mrs Barclay went downstairs.
“I shall be there if you want me, my dear. Don’t you go and think that you are left alone.”
Mrs Barclay had hardly seated herself in the dining-room, and taken some rather grubby work from her pocket, when she heard a peculiar noise, and the bump of something being placed heavily upon the floor.
She listened, and heard some one ascend the stairs again, and there was a whispering, which ceased as the whisperers ascended, and then there was silence, and Mrs Barclay took a stitch, and thought and wondered whether Cora Dean would come, or whether the Denvilles would be cut by everyone now.
Then she took another stitch, and nibbed her nose, which itched.
“Poor little soul!” she said to herself, “it’s come home to her at last. I never thought any good of her, but I’m not one to go on punishing those who’ve done wrong.”
Mrs Barclay took another stitch and began to think again.
“Jo-si-ah says if they catch the little Italian fellow, he’ll be transported for life, and if poor little Mrs Burnett dies, they’ll hang him. Well, I don’t hold with hanging people, so I hope she won’t die.”
She took another stitch and drew the thread through very slowly.
“Jo-si-ah says Sir Harry isn’t very bad, and the constable and a magistrate have been to see him, but he says he knows nothing hardly about it. Poor Claire! What a house this is! What trouble!”
She took another stitch.
“I wonder whether Richard Linnell will come. I shall begin to hate him if he doesn’t stand by the poor girl in her distress. He’s a poor shilly-shally sort of a fellow, or he’d believe in her as I do.”
There was quite a vicious stitch here.
“Perhaps, it isn’t his fault. She kept him at a distance terribly, and no wonder with the troubles she’s had; but of course he can’t understand all that, being impetuous, like my Jo-si-ah was, and I dessay it will all come right at last. Now, what are they lumping down the stairs, making a noise, and that poor child so ill?”
She threw her work on the table, got up softly, and, just as there was a fresh bump and a whispering, she opened the door to find Isaac and Eliza standing over a box which they had just set down in the passage beside another, while Isaac in plain clothes and Eliza with her bonnet in her hand started at seeing the visitor.
“Why, highty-tighty, who’s going away?” cried Mrs Barclay wonderingly.
Eliza glanced at Isaac, who cleared his throat.
“The fact is, ma’am, this young person and I have come to the conclusion that seeing how we suffered from arrears, and what goings on there are here, Mr Denville’s isn’t the service in which we care to stop any longer.”
“Oh,” said Mrs Barclay; “and have you told Mr Denville you are going?”
“Well, ma’am; no, ma’am. We have thought it is not necessary under the circumstances, and—”
“Nor yet, Miss Claire?”
“No, ma’am; she is too busy.”
“Then just you take those boxes up again, young man, and take off that finery, and put on your livery,” said Mrs Barclay in a low angry voice. “Now, no words. You do as I say—there take those boxes up.”
The tone of voice, manner, and a hint about the wages had their effect. Isaac and Eliza glanced at each other, and took the boxes away without a word, Isaac coming back in livery a quarter of an hour later to tell Mrs Barclay that “that soldier” was at the back door.
Mrs Barclay started and followed Isaac, to stare in wonder at the fine soldierly young fellow, who eagerly asked her a score of questions about Claire and May, and, declining to be questioned in turn, hurried away with troubled mien.