PROLOGUE.—PART I.
On a stormy afternoon in October, in the thirtieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign, a young doctor sat before the fire in his new home at the sleepy old Surrey town of Grayling, warming his hands, and thinking, not too cheerfully, of his prospects.
Ernest Netherbridge was not a genius, but he was a thoughtful, intelligent, painstaking, and unselfish man. Grayling had not yet found out his good qualities; the inhabitants, never greatly distinguished for lucidity of vision, had only had time to discover that his “bedside manner” was less soothing than that of his predecessor, and that he had an unpleasant trick of telling them that they ate and drank too much for their health. Young Dr. Netherbridge had also the bad taste to ascribe melancholy to “liver,” fainting fits and ladylike super-sensitiveness to “anæmia,” and hysterics to ill-temper. Consequently he was not popular, and he knew it.
No one, therefore, was more surprised than he when a handsome closed carriage, drawn by two splendid bays, was pulled up before his door, and a footman, after a reverberating rat-tat-tat, delivered a note, emblazoned with an imposing coat of arms, to Dr. Netherbridge’s housekeeper for her master.
On breaking the seal the doctor’s surprise increased. The letter was sent from the Chase, a very large estate, which extended for several miles in the vicinity of Grayling, and which belonged to Sir Philip Cranstoun, the representative of one of the oldest families in Surrey, a man reputed equally wealthy and eccentric, concerning whom wonderful tales were whispered round Grayling tea-tables. The letter was written in a small and cramped man’s handwriting, and ran as follows:
“Sir Philip Cranstoun, having heard that Dr. Netherbridge invariably speaks the truth to his patients, would be glad if he will at once proceed to the Chase in the carriage sent herewith, and give his opinion upon a patient there. Sir Philip wishes to inform Dr. Netherbridge that the abilities of Sir Curtis Clarkson, Sir Percival Hoare, and Dr. Tracey Wentworth have all been exerted in vain over this special case, the drawback in every instance being their inability to speak the truth. This, Sir Philip hopes to hear from Dr. Netherbridge.”
The doctor put down the letter, surprised and interested. Sir Curtis Clarkson and Sir Percival Hoare were names to conjure with, London physicians of great and established reputation, favored by royalty, and believed in unquestioningly by the wealthier middle classes. Dr. Tracey Wentworth was a highly popular practitioner from Guildford, in his profession a triton against a minnow when compared with the struggling young doctor who was now called to supersede him.
Ernest Netherbridge pondered for a few moments. After all, he reflected, although he might well fail over a case which had puzzled better heads than his, at least he could exercise his favorite and unpopular virtue of candor without fear of the consequences. Should he succeed in pleasing so great a local magnate as Sir Philip Cranstoun, a justice of the peace, and one of the largest landowners in the south of England, it would greatly help to establish his position and practice in the town of his adoption. The thing was at least worth trying for. Taking his overcoat and slipping a scarf round his neck, for he was by no means robust, Dr. Netherbridge stepped out of his house, and entering the roomy and comfortable carriage in waiting for him, was soon whirling along a quiet country road toward the great gates leading to the Chase.
The wind whistled through the scantily clad branches of the swaying trees, scattering their yellow and russet leaves, and whirling them in dancing eddies a little way above the moist earth below. Dr. Netherbridge had never been within the precincts of the great park; indeed, since his marriage three years previously, Sir Philip Cranstoun had discouraged visitors, and no one in Grayling appeared to have even seen Lady Cranstoun, concerning whose remarkable beauty, however, reports were freely circulated. Considerable interest and curiosity dominated the young doctor’s mind as he was driven rapidly along the wide avenue of over-arching giant elmtrees, which formed a characteristic feature of the Cranstoun Chase enclosure.
The house itself was a great rambling, gray stone mansion, closely covered with ivy, of ancient origin, and in some of the older portions possessing a thickness of wall suitable for the old ante-gunpowder days. From time to time the original building had been added to by various members of the family, but although numerous additions had been made in the course of the five hundred years since the first Squire Cranstoun erected his fortified hunting seat within the forest, the gray pile was dignified and imposing still, although it resembled more a fortress than a home.
A very broad flight of shallow steps led to the heavy Gothic entrance, on either side of which life-sized wolves in stone supported the Cranstoun arms. For many hundred years the wolf’s head, grasped in a mail-covered hand, had been the device of the family, to whom tradition assigned many of the wolf’s characteristics of treachery and vindictiveness, while the motto, “Cranstoun, Remember!” was said to be derived from a bloodthirsty legend of long delayed vengeance in the days of the Norman Conquest.
As the carriage drew up before the entrance, the heavy oak doors were thrown open and Dr. Netherbridge ascended the steps, and entered the house. The hall was spacious and impressive as the exterior, hung with ancient swords and spears, and guarded by four glistening figures in complete armor, which, as the firelight from a wide hearth below a massive marble mantelpiece struck them, added to the sombre appearance of the house.
A stout, elderly man, evidently the butler, and two footmen stood in the hall. Sir Philip was out, they informed the doctor. He had been absent since the morning, and had caused a message to be conveyed to his house, together with a letter for Dr. Netherbridge, which he had wished to have immediately delivered.
“Has Lady Cranstoun been ill long?” the doctor inquired.
“For some time, sir. But her ladyship’s maid will be able to inform you as to all that, if you will be so kind as to follow me.”
Lady Cranstoun’s apartments were little less gloomy than the hall. No flowers, no dainty knick-knacks relieved their mediæval simplicity. In the bedroom and the adjoining sitting-room the floors were polished and spread with rugs, the walls covered with moth-eaten tapestry, while the massive bed and the chairs were formed of dark oak. An oak settle was drawn before the fire in the sitting-room, which communicated by a recess draped with heavy velvet curtains with the bedroom beyond. On a fur rug thrown across the settle, a figure in white draperies lay with face turned to the firelight. On a chair near, a white-capped nurse sat, holding in her hand a book from which she had been reading, while a dark-complexioned, pleasant-faced woman, evidently a servant, stood at a little distance, with hands tightly clasped, and a look of keen anxiety printed on her features.
“It is the doctor, my lady,” the servant said, approaching the motionless, recumbent figure of her mistress.
Lady Cranstoun uttered a low exclamation of impatience.
“Of what use is a doctor to me?” she murmured. “Send him away, Margaret! What good have they done me yet?”
“But this is a new doctor, my lady. If you would only let him see you.”
The nurse rose at this point and added her entreaties to those of the old servant, before crossing the room to where the doctor stood.
“Lady Cranstoun lies like that hour after hour,” she whispered. “She neither eats nor sleeps, and she can hardly bear to be spoken to.”
Dr. Netherbridge came quietly forward, and placing himself between the oak settle and the fire, looked directly into Lady Cranstoun’s face. The invalid, raising her hollow eyes, perceived a small, slight man of about thirty, with a pale face, a dark mustache and beard, and singularly penetrating and reliable dark blue eyes. He on his part beheld a tall young woman of apparently not more than twenty years of age, and of truly remarkable beauty, even though her face and arms were now slender to emaciation, and her pallor was almost corpselike. Her face was small, her features were delicate, and her hair, of which she possessed a wavy abundance, was the blackest he had ever seen. But her beauty and her fragility, both of which were strongly apparent, were forgotten by the doctor in the effect produced upon him by her eyes, surely the largest, darkest, and most hopelessly sad in expression that ever gazed out of a despairing woman’s face.
Almost mechanically he raised her wrist, and began to feel her quick, feverish pulse. Her hand was extremely cold, although her dry, red lips looked hot and parched. A strong sympathy for her filled his mind as he drew a chair up to the oak settle, and began asking her some questions concerning her illness.
At first she answered in monosyllables and evidently at random, staring into the fire, and speaking in a scarcely audible voice. Gradually, however, she took to watching his face, and at last, sitting up with some show of energy, she asked the nurse to wait in the adjoining room while she described her symptoms to the doctor.
“Seeing you sitting there fidgets me,” she said. “I can’t collect my thoughts.”
She spoke English correctly enough, in a sweet, rich voice, yet something in her manner struck the doctor as rough and unusual in a woman of birth and breeding. As soon as the nurse had moved away, Lady Cranstoun turned impulsively to the dark-complexioned servant.
“Go after her, and prevent her from listening,” she whispered, rapidly, and the woman obeyed.
“Now draw your chair close up,” she said, imperiously, to the doctor. “I have a great deal to say. There is something about your face which makes me think I can trust you. And I do so badly need some one to trust. Stay, though; do you know Sir Philip Cranstoun?”
“I have never seen him in my life.”
“I’m glad of that! How did you come to be sent for?”
Thinking it might help him to gain her confidence, Dr. Netherbridge drew from his pocket Sir Philip’s summons.
Lady Cranstoun read it eagerly. After she had returned it to him, silence reigned for a few seconds. Her next question appeared startlingly irrelevant.
“The sessions are on at Guildford to-day, are they not?”
“I believe so.”
“And Sir Philip’s note was sent here from Guildford ordering the carriage to go for you?”
“No doubt he was very anxious about you,” said the doctor, hardly realizing what he was expected to say.
She stared at him for a few seconds, and then broke into a bitter, mirthless laugh.
“You don’t know, then?” she said. “After all, why should you? Yet I feel sure I can trust you. What is your name?”
“Ernest Netherbridge.”
“Dr. Netherbridge, Sir Philip hates me only a little less than I hate him.”
Silence again. It was obviously impossible to comment upon such an unexpected statement.
She stared at the fire, and then, suddenly clasping her thin white hands, she fixed her great eyes beseechingly upon his face.
“Will you help me?” she asked, in a whisper full of intensity. “I haven’t a friend in the house except Margaret. Every one is against me.”
“Surely your illness makes you fanciful,” he was beginning, when she cut him short impatiently.
“Ah! don’t talk like that—like the others did! Sir Philip so longs for an heir. We had a child, a boy, who died—I am glad, very glad that he is dead—and he wishes me to have every care now, not for my sake, but for the sake of the family name. I have been trying to starve myself; I suppose you can see that; but if you will give me the information I want, I will take your medicines or anything.”
“Tell me what you want me to do, Lady Cranstoun.”
“Find out for me all that took place in court to-day. Sir Philip went to Guildford early—I found out so much—but they will not let me see the papers, they will not let me hear!”
She was quivering from head to foot in fierce, ungovernable excitement, and her eyes were shining with a feverish glitter.
“There is some great anxiety on your mind,” he said, kindly. “Will you not confide in me more fully?”
She glanced nervously about her, and finally thrust her hand among the folds of her dress about her neck, and slipped in his hand a crumpled letter, ill-spelt, and written evidently by an imperfectly educated person.
“My Own Daughter Clare” (it began),
“Your brother Jim sets sail for America on Tuesday next, and we all hope if once he gets out in Canada with Uncle Pete he’ll do well. But you know what the boy always was about you. It was ever Clare first, and the rest of us nowhere. He won’t budge a foot without seeing you, and giving a good-by kiss to his little sister, for all she’s a great lady now. Now, my girl, it’s hard enough to have had never a sight of you for them three years, save now and again as you’ve drove past in your carriage, and that one time you contrived to slip off to the old cottage for half an hour. I’m hungering to speak to my beautiful girl. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve thought I seen a sad look on your face of late. It’s wicked and unnatural for Sir Philip to part flesh and blood, and as to us not being gentlefolks, he should have thought of that afore he took ye. What you say he threatened about shooting as poachers any on us as come within his property, that’s mere tall talk. What harm to anybody will it do for your father and brother to see you for ten minutes or so, and give you a good-by kiss, and tell you how dear you are to us still? So, my girl, to-morrow night, at any time between nine and eleven, do you slip out to the shrubbery at the back of the paddock. If it rains hard we shan’t expect you, but if it’s fine, seeing as the gray wolf is away, we know you’ll come, my pretty, to your loving brother, and your old father.”
Dr. Netherbridge read the letter carefully, and returned it to Lady Cranstoun. He was beginning to understand several things which had puzzled him. One point was very clear—Sir Philip Cranstoun had married beneath him, and had forbidden his young wife from communicating in any way with her relations.
“Did you go?” the doctor asked.
She supported herself on her elbow, and spoke in quick, gasping tones:
“It was a beautifully clear night. I thought Sir Philip was away, but he had returned from London without my knowledge. Somehow, some one—one of the spies who are about me, waking and sleeping—picked up and read this letter. I can only suppose this, for all I know is that as I crept out of the house at about half-past nine I was followed. Just as I reached the shrubbery, and caught sight in the moonlight of my father and brother in waiting under the dark shadow of the trees, I was seized from behind, something was thrust into my mouth and over my eyes, and I was carried back into the house. I fought and struggled, but to no purpose, and I could plainly hear several shots, the sound of a scuffle, and a great cry as of a man in mortal agony. From that day to this I have been able to learn nothing of what happened on that night. But yesterday Margaret overheard Sir Philip telling his steward that he was going to Guildford to-day, where the sessions are held, to appear as a witness against some poachers who were found in his grounds several weeks ago, and who have been in jail ever since. Dr. Netherbridge, I am certain he meant my father and my brother!”
“But how could that be?” he asked, trying to allay her fierce excitement. “Your father and brother are not poachers surely?”
A faint red color stole into her white cheeks.
“My people don’t see that the rich are injured by the loss of a hare or a rabbit now and again,” she muttered with lowered eyelids. “They should belong to the people, wild game like that, and a bird or two—but that’s not what we were talking of. It was no poaching brought out Jim and father that night. Sir Philip knew that right enough. He made me take a solemn oath never to betray to anybody what he called my disgraceful origin. Disgraceful!” she repeated, with burning cheeks. “A Carewe’s as good as a Cranstoun any day, as I’ve told him often enough. I’ve never broken my vow until to-day; not even Margaret knows who my people are. But I’ve told you, because I must and will know what has happened to my father and my brother Jim to-day.”
As he watched her talking, and noted the English nature of her beauty, the intense blue-blackness of her hair, and a certain touch of wildness about her free, graceful gestures and rapid speech, another conviction came home to Ernest Netherbridge’s mind, and this was that Lady Cranstoun, wife of Sir Philip Cranstoun, of the Chase, Surrey, Cranstoun Hall, in Aberdeenshire, and Berkeley Square, London, had in her veins the untamable blood of the true “Egyptian,” those despised wanderers over the face of the earth who are found and hated in all the chief countries of Europe.
In spite of his patient’s beauty, Dr. Netherbridge could not help wondering how so proud a man as Sir Philip was considered had ever been so far carried away by his feelings as to wed a girl of gypsy origin. Lady Cranstoun seemed to divine what was passing in his mind. Raising herself to a sitting position, she tapped one slender well-arched foot upon the ground while she said, as though in answer to his thought:
“Of course, you wonder how Sir Philip came to marry me. I can see that in your face. When I was only eight years old I got blamed for something, as we were on the road going from fair to fair in the summer. So I ran away in a rage, and walked till I was tired and fell asleep under a hedge by the wayside, in Devonshire. A rich lady drove by, the Hon. Mrs. Neville, a widow without children, Sir Philip Cranstoun’s eldest sister. Because I was so pretty, she had me lifted into her carriage, and took me to her beautiful home and had me educated, taught French, and music, and dancing, and drawing, and all that, meaning me to be a governess. Every now and then I broke loose and went tramping through the fields and lanes after my own people, whom I loved the best all along. Often and often, when my fingers ached with practising the piano, and I felt all stiff in tight clothes and shoes, I’d long for the old free life again. But when I saw my people, stealing out at night to them, they begged me to stay where I was. I could help them with money, and times were hard. Before my mother died she made me promise to remain a lady, and Mrs. Neville was kind enough to me by fits and starts, and very proud of what training and education had done. She used to show me off as a sort of successful experiment, too, before people, and that made me mad. She was a hard, capricious woman, like all the Cranstouns in nature, and was all for breaking what she called my absurd pride, and reminding me I’d only been a vagrant after all. But she didn’t do so much of that as she’d have liked, because I told her I’d run away, and that wouldn’t have suited her, as I played and read to her, and amused her, and she couldn’t well do without me. But I never could be reconciled to the notion of being a dependent, and so when Sir Philip Cranstoun came on a visit—he was a handsome enough man of five-and-twenty then, and me only a little bit over sixteen—and he glared at me, and could hardly let me out of his sight, and said he loved me, I got all excited between the notion of being a great lady and being loved and being free from Mrs. Neville’s taunts. But Philip wanted me to run away with him, but I wouldn’t hear of it, and refused to speak to him. I was very pretty then, prettier than you can think just seeing me now, and he was regularly crazy about me. So, early one morning, he made me meet him in a church at Torquay, and we were married. Just three years ago it was yesterday, a day I shall curse as long as I live!”
“Surely,” said the doctor, as she paused, apparently lost in sombre thought, “Sir Philip must have been very deeply attached to you?”
“Yes,” she returned, bitterly, “and for how long? First, nothing was too good for me, but that state lasted only a few weeks, and even then I was afraid of him. Then violent, raging scenes of jealousy if, when we were in Italy, I so much as looked at a waiter and asked him for bread. Then, forever storming at me, and reproaching me, if a gondolier so much as called me the ‘beautiful signora.’ And, after that, scenes constantly. I’ve a temper like fire myself, I own. We Carewes have never been known for meekness, and even when I was a baby child I’d been taught to think myself a princess. All his life Sir Philip had his own way in everything, and all who came in his path had obeyed him, cowed by his masterful temper and sullen fury. But I withstood him. I thought he loved me well enough to let me have my way, and when I found out my mistake I began to hate him, and more than once tried to run away from him. But he followed, and swore he would murder me if I dared, gypsy as I was, to bring disgrace upon his ancient name. Gradually, my will and my health seemed to be breaking down. Our first child pined away and died, because I could not care for it—could not look at it. It was his child, like him, I thought, even at that age, and so I could not love it. When his son died, Sir Philip was mad with anger, but I had grown past caring. It isn’t all my fault, Dr. Netherbridge,” she added, suddenly, while big tears rolled down her cheeks. “I may have been silly when I married, but I tried my utmost for over a year to love Sir Philip, and to please him, but he is more a fiend than a man, I think, and I would rather die than see a child of mine grow up resembling him. It is all these thoughts which, together with my awful anxiety for my father and Jim, are breaking my heart, and ruining my health. It is hate, and terror, and misery, and cruel, cruel anxiety, which make me starve myself and hope to die. But now that I have trusted you, and told you everything, you will befriend me, will you not? Come to-morrow early, and let me know everything—everything, mind—that took place in court to-day, and I will let you cure me, if you choose. Will you promise?”
“I promise,” he said, “to do everything in my power to serve you,” and with that assurance he took his leave.