Volume Three—Chapter Thirteen.
Retrospective and Progressional.
In order to explain Susan’s reappearance under these exceptional circumstances, it will be necessary that we should retrace our steps and return to a date some months back in our narrative.
It will be remembered that when Doctor Jolly paid his visit to Havre in the previous winter, he, after enquiring unsuccessfully for Susan at the house of the Mère Cliquelle, in the Rue Montmartre, went off for a walk (to pass the time until his ward should return) in the very same direction that Markworth and Susan, with Clara Kingscott dogging their heels, had taken—towards the heights of Ingouville.
The Doctor picked his steps carefully, for it was dusk, and he was in a strange place, and he wished to establish certain landmarks in his mind, by which he might regain the Rue Montmartre when his stroll was over, and he should think it time to return.
Doctor Jolly had the address of his hotel on a printed card in his pocket: he was not going to make another mistake, such as he had made earlier in the day; and if any doubts arose in his mind as to his exact latitude and longitude, he had resolved to hand the card of the hotel, which he had previously secured, to the nearest policeman or cabman. Oh! the doctor was very ’cute and business-like.
But he did not wish to return there just yet. He wanted to see Susan, and have his mind set at rest about her before the night was over. And so the doctor walked on in a desultory way, carefully studying the topography of the street as he sauntered along, and pondering over recent events in his mind.
He was wondering at the chain of circumstances which had brought him wandering about “this confounded foreign, outlandish place!” at nightfall, and “in the depth of winter too, by Gad!” he soliloquised, as he inhaled the foggy air of the dull November night, which made him puff and wheeze beneath the comforter, which in remembrance of Deb’s solicitude, he still kept carefully wrapped round his neck.
When he came to one of the roads leading up to the heights above, the doctor paused a moment to recover his breath; he had never been “any great hand at walking,” as he would have told you himself; and the distance he had already traversed, short though it was, had by this time affected his wind.
While he was resting a moment, and debating in his mind whether he should ascend the footpath in front of him, or yet retrace his steps to the Rue Montmartre, he heard a sound near him as of one groaning in pain. It was like the noise of the battle to the war-horse, or the salt smell of the sea to a mariner; and the doctor pricked up his ears, all his senses aroused at the idea of pain and suffering being suggested to him: to minister to the ills of nature was his special vocation.
He searched about and followed the sound—it led him up higher to a ledge on the cliff above; and there in the dim twilight he made out the form of a human figure lying stretched on the débris which had fallen away with it apparently from the summit above.
To see and perceive was, with the staunch old doctor, but secondary to acting.
He climbed up as hastily as his portly form would permit to the ledge, and bent over a figure, which was nearly motionless. “Bless my soul!” he ejaculated in alarm and surprise. “God bless my soul! Why, it is poor Susan! How on earth did she come here?” As he bent to lift her up she lay like a log in his arms.
The doctor however did not waste any time in vain regrets or in exclamations of wonder: he was a medical man, and his first care was to examine the motionless form of the girl, to see how far she was hurt. She had only fainted, he shortly perceived, and he set to work at once to revive her.
Thanks to a pocket flask of brandy, which he had fortunately brought with him, he soon contrived to put a little life into the girl; and he was able after a time to raise her up, when she opened her eyes and gave a groan of pain. She apparently did not know where she was or recognise the doctor; she only moaned, “Take me home! Take me home!”
One of her arms broken, and a cut on her head; but, otherwise, she had most providentially escaped. She had probably fainted at the time she shrieked out before falling backwards over the cliff. Being thus supine, she could not struggle; so instead of receiving fatal injuries as a man might have done, who attempted to resist his fall she was unhurt, with the exception of a few trifling injuries, which time would soon repair. But she was very much shaken, and the doctor did not know what to do with her, as she could hardly walk, and he was not strong enough to carry her, as he might have done in his earlier days.
The place was quite deserted. The doctor could not see a soul, and much as he disliked Frenchmen, he would have been glad to come across then the most “miserable foreign vagabond” who might have been sent on his way; but no one came, and as it was getting darker and darker, and night coming on, the doctor had to pull his wits together.
He was a man of action: to wager with possible improbabilities his creed, so he did not hesitate long. While the girl was sobbing and moaning to herself, and crying out in half-incoherent language “Allynne! Allynne!” he lifted her up bodily, and tried to get her home to her own place in the Rue Montmartre.
But the night was dark, as has been before observed, and the doctor missed the landmarks, which he had so carefully jotted down on the tablets of his memory. He was in the right direction, but when he got to the foot of the street of which he was in search, he lost altogether his carte du pays. Just then he saw a fiacre, and at the same time he arrived at a sudden determination; what it was, will be presently shown.
The doctor bethought him that he had come over to Havre especially to try and get Susan home, and separate her from Markworth. Why on earth should he take her back now to the place where she would still be with him? Here she was unconscious, and he was her proper guardian appointed by her father. He would—“Yes, I will, I’ll be damned if I don’t!” he said, to himself; “take her back to England on my own account, without asking anybody’s leave or license!” And the doctor carried his determination into effect between that night and the next day.
The fiacre arriving opportunely, the doctor hailed it; and lifting Susan in, gave the driver the card of his hotel, “The Queen of Savoy,” which he had kept so carefully in his waistcoat pocket for such an emergency as losing his way: he and his charge—now more recovered—were presently set down at that famous hostelry, where the doctor had Susan at once put to bed, guarding her all the while with jealous watchfulness: he was afraid Markworth might step in at the last moment to claim her, and that his trouble would be thrown away.
In the morning—Susan being still nearly unconscious—he had her carried on board the early packet for England; and the same evening the doctor, to his intense satisfaction, had her on English ground.
At Southampton, Susan was unfortunately taken very ill; and Doctor Jolly could not carry out his intention of removing her at once to his own house as he had intended.
The shock, the fall, the mental anxieties she had suffered, brought on an attack of brain fever; and Susan was for days struggling between life and death. When she was out of danger, the doctor, leaving her in the care of a trustworthy nurse, went home to see about his practice—which he thought must be at sixes and sevens from his prolonged absence—and to make preparations for Susan’s return to The Poplars.
When he got to Bigton, however, the doctor heard of the alarming illness of the old dowager, and his plans became upset.
He went off at once to Hartwood village, and found the old lady unconscious, although the respectable Dobbins, his locum tenens had treated her, the doctor allowed, as well as he could have done himself under the sudden paralytic shock she had sustained.
Doctor Jolly had consequently to neglect Susan for a few days, in order to attend to her mother; and when he did go back for her, he determined that he would not bring her home to The Poplars—where everything would remind her of her former life—but would take her to his own house at Bigton.
Here, accordingly, Susan was removed as soon as she was able to travel from Southampton; and here the good old Deb, the doctor’s sister, nursed the girl back to life, and to a knowledge of the past and present, with more than a mother’s care, tenderly aided by the doctor himself.
It may be remembered by the reader, in our retrospect, that Mr Trump met Doctor Jolly soon after he returned from abroad; and the two had some explanation together, which resulted in the fact of the lawyer being pleased with himself at having taken no active part in the proceedings of the French police after Susan’s disappearance and supposed death—although he had inserted a mortuary notice in the Times.
Mr Trump’s gratulation is thus easily explained. The advertisement of Susan’s death was not contradicted, in the first place because it was rather late in the day to do it now, and in the second, the doctor advised no steps being taken in the matter, or else Markworth might return and claim the girl.
Mr Trump, however, made one omission, which, as a lawyer, he ought to have attended to earlier. He did not communicate with the French police until some weeks had elapsed—not until in fact after Miss Kingscott had left Havre, in disgust at not hearing anything there of the hunted man, and come to prosecute her watch in London. Thus it was that she knew nothing of these revelations; and the polite Chef did not think it worth his while, or the expenditure of a dix centimes stamp, to inform cette femme diable, as he termed her, any more about the matter.
When Susan recovered her senses and her memory, the only thing remained fixed in her mind was the idea that Markworth had gone off and left her. She seemed to remember only the words which he had spoken before she had been alarmed and started back to the edge of the cliff that night. She remembered nothing of the fall, and her subsequent removal by the doctor to England. All the present was easily explained to her mind as a natural consequence of what Markworth had told her, that he had to go away, and that he was going to send her back home again; here she was accordingly.
As she became well, however—there could be no question of her reason now, for she was as sensible as possible, although timid in manner, as she always would be—she appeared to dread the idea of being taken back to her mother’s house, which very naturally the doctor had suggested.
As soon as the old lady was able to bear the unexpected news—the doctor and Lizzie had broken to her very gently the fact of Susan, her daughter, whom she supposed dead, and whose death she accused herself of causing, was still alive!—the dowager wanted her immediately to be brought to The Poplars; but when the doctor proposed it to Susan, she shrank back in alarm at the suggestion. The poor girl had such a nervous dread of ever beholding the painful scenes of her miserable childhood, and any allusion to the place or to her mother caused her such trembling fits, and seemed to make her to withdraw herself into herself, that the doctor saw that, for some time at least, the eventuality of Susan’s removal must be postponed.
When matters were explained to the dowager, she agreed with Doctor Jolly that Susan had better remain at his house, although she would not hear of it until he consented to accept remuneration. Fancy how changed the dowager was when she now was anxious to force money on one unwilling to receive it!
Susan still lived, therefore, at Bigton, undisturbed, with the doctor and his worthy sister; indeed, Deb took such a fancy to Susan, with her fair, grief-marked face, and frightened manner, that in a little while—although she at first grumbled at her coming there to interrupt the tête-à-tête life of Damon and her Pythias—she could not bear the idea of parting with her: there is no such pet in the world as an “old maid’s child.”
By-and-bye, when Susan was quite recovered, as she expressed a desire to see Havre again, and the house where she had lived so happily with Markworth, the doctor took her over. The Mère Cliquelle and her petit bon homme, were delighted to see La belle Madame again—it seemed like a resurrection from the dead to them, and they were in a great puzzle about all the circumstances of the case, which the doctor’s explanation, although delivered in his loudest voice, utterly failed to solve.
The Mère Cliquelle and her husband still let lodgings in their comfortable little house in the Rue Montmartre; and if you want un appartement bien garni, a cheerful hostess, and a landlord who “spiks Inglis,” decidedly broken, and has a partiality for chewing chocolate and bon-bons, you cannot do better than “take their first-floor!”
Although she was anxious to re-visit these scenes again, Susan did not care to stop after she got there. The place made her sad and melancholy, and she said she wished to go away the next day: the doctor, you may be certain, did not oppose her, and they returned to England immediately.
They crossed the Channel, however, via Folkestone, and went through London, as Mr Trump wished for Susan to sign some documents referring to the property she inherited under her father’s will—property which there was now no chance or loophole left for Markworth to lay claim to.
Thus it was that Doctor Jolly and Susan were both in London on the spot where Clara Kingscott had caught the man she pursued at last.
And here they now were in company with the lawyer, and the woman who so persistently hated him, in the presence of the dead man!
It was a sad shock to Susan; but a more fearful one to Clara Kingscott, who felt herself a betrayer, like Judas Iscariot when he discovered our Saviour with his accursed kiss. Remorse preyed upon her and gave her no rest. She afterwards, it is believed, entered a convent in the South of France, and is now a lay sister of the order of the Bleeding Heart!
Markworth’s death released him from all his liabilities! It can be imagined what a wail went up in Jewry when the knowledge that he had escaped them became fully known to those modern Shylocks, Solomonson and Isaacs. They tore their beards, they wept, they cursed by their gods the Gentile who had out-witted them; but it was of no use, they could not get their money back. Death is regardless of human bonds and obligations, and although the Shylocks got much additional avoirdupois weight of flesh beyond their original pound, the Jews thought themselves sadly victimised. They got no pecuniary satisfaction for the large sums they had advanced their former client; even the change which had been left out of Mrs Martin’s five pound note did not come to them: it was taken out of the pockets of the dead man by the Cerberus of the sponging-house, who thought it better to appropriate the said moneys to his own use rather than leave them to be a source of wrangling to others.
Seeing that nothing could be got out of him now, the harpies left Markworth’s body to its fate. An inquest was held, a verdict given, “Died by the visitation of God,” and the unfortunate schemer would have been buried at the expense of the parish, had it not been for Mr Trump, who defrayed the cost out of his own pocket.
Thus ended Markworth’s life. He had schemed and planned, it is true, to enrich himself at the expense of others, but he was not, perhaps, so bad altogether, as one would, perhaps, at the first blush suppose. If we were to analyse the men around us, and enquire into the motives which plan their actions, independently of the actions themselves, we might find many whose principles are like those of the man who has been depicted in these pages—many, perhaps, far worse.