RETROSPECTIVE.
The parish surgeon lay in his darkened bedchamber at Graybridge day after day and night after night, and Mr. Pawlkatt, coming twice a day to look at him, could give very small comfort to the watchers. George Gilbert had been ill nearly a fortnight—not quite a fortnight—but it seemed now a common thing for the house to be hushed and darkened, and the once active master lying dull, heavy, and lethargic, under the shadow of the dimity bed-curtains. Those who watched him lost all count of time. It seemed almost as if the surgeon had always been ill. It was difficult, somehow, to remember that not quite two weeks ago he had been one of the most active inhabitants of Graybridge; it was still more difficult to imagine that he could ever again be what he had been.
No patient, in the dull anguish of an obstinate fever, could have desired better or more devoted nurses than those who waited on George Gilbert. To Isabel this experience of a sick room was altogether a new thing. She had known her father to be laid up for the space of a day with a vague sort of ailment which he called "bile," but which generally arose after a dinner in London with certain choice spirits of his acquaintance, and a stealthy return to the sanctuary of his Camberwell home in the chill grey glimmer of early morning. She had known her step-mother to complain perpetually of divers aches, and pains, and "stitches," and stiffness of her ribs and shoulder-blades and loins, and other complicated portions of her bony structure, and to throw out dismal prophecies to the effect that she would be worried into a premature grave by the breakage and waste of boys, and the general aggravation of a large family. But illness, a real and dangerous malady, with all its solemn accompaniments of hushed voices and darkness, and grave faces and stealthy footsteps, was quite new to the Doctor's Wife.
If she had loved her sick husband with that romantic love which it had been her sin and her misfortune to bestow elsewhere, she could not have watched quietly in that darkened chamber. She would have fled away from the patient's presence to fling herself on the ground somewhere, wholly abandoned to her anguish. But she had never loved George Gilbert; only that womanly tenderness, which was the chief attribute of her nature, that sympathetic affection for everything that was suffering or sorrowful, held her to the invalid's bedside. She was so sorry for him, and she was so horribly afraid that he would die. The thought that she might step across the darksome chasm of his grave into those fair regions inhabited by Roland Lansdell, could not hold a place in her heart. Death, the terrible and the unfamiliar, stood a black and gaunt figure between her and all beyond the sick room. Edith Dombey and Ernest Maltravers were alike forgotten during those long days and nights in which the surgeon's rambling delirious talk only broke the silence. Isabel Gilbert's ever-active imagination was busy with more terrible images than any to be found in her books. The pictures of a funeral cortège in the dusky lane, a yawning grave in the familiar churchyard, forced themselves upon her as she sat watching the black shadow of the perforated lantern that held the rushlight, looming gigantic on the whitewashed wall.
And, thinking thus of that dark hour which might be before her, she thought much less of Roland Lansdell than in the days before her husband's illness. She was not a wicked woman; she was only very foolish. The thought that there was a handsome young country gentleman with a fine estate and fifteen thousand a year waiting to be her second husband, if death loosened her present bondage, could not have a place amongst those tender poetical dreams engendered out of her books. A woman of the world, hardened by worldly experience, might have sat in that dusky chamber watching the sick man, and brooding, half remorsefully, half impatiently, upon the thought of what might happen if his malady should have a fatal ending. But this poor sentimental girl, nourished upon the airiest fancies of poets and romancers, had no such loathsome thoughts. Roland Lansdell's wealth and position had never tempted her; it had only dazzled her; it had only seemed a bright and splendid atmosphere radiating from and belonging to the Deity himself. If, in some dreamy rapture, she had ever fancied herself far away from all the common world, united to the man she loved, she had only pictured herself as a perpetual worshipper in white muslin, kneeling at the feet of her idol, with wild-flowers in her hair. The thought that he had fifteen thousand a year, and a superb estate, never disturbed by its gross influence her brighter dreams; it was not in her to be mercenary, or even ambitious. That yearning for splendour and glitter which had made her envious of Edith Dombey's fate was only a part of her vague longing for the beautiful; she wanted to be amongst beautiful things, made beautiful herself by their influence; but whether their splendour took the form of a boudoir in May Fair all a-glow with wonderful pictures and Parian statues, rare old china and tapestry hangings, or the floral luxuriance of a forest on the banks of the Amazon, was of very little consequence to this sentimental young dreamer. If she could not be Mrs. Dombey, sublime in scornful indignation and ruby silk velvet, she would have been contented to be simple Dorothea, washing her tired feet in the brook, with her hair about her shoulders. She only wanted the vague poetry of life, the mystic beauty of romance infused somehow into her existence; and she was as yet too young to understand that latent element of poetry which underlies the commonest life.
In the meantime a very terrible trouble had come to her—the trouble occasioned by her father's presence in the neighbourhood of Graybridge. Never, until some days after his apprehension at Liverpool, had Mr. Sleaford's wife and children known the nature of the profession by which the master of the house earned a fluctuating income,—enough for reckless extravagance sometimes, at others barely enough to keep the wolf from the door. This is not a sensation novel. I write here what I know to be the truth. Jack the Scribe's children were as innocently ignorant of their father's calling as if that gentleman had been indeed what he represented himself—a barrister. He went every day to his professional duties, and returned at night to his domestic hearth; he was a very tolerable father; a faithful, and not unkind husband; a genial companion amongst the sort of men with whom he associated. He had only that awkward little habit of forging other people's names; by which talent, exercised in conjunction with a gang whose cunningly-organized plan of operations won for them considerable celebrity, he had managed to bring up a numerous family in comparative comfort and respectability. If any one had been good enough to die and leave Mr. Sleaford a thousand a year, Jack the Scribe would have willingly laid down his pen and retired into respectability; but in the meantime he found it necessary to provide for himself and a hungry family; and having no choice between a clerk's place with a pound a week and the vaguely-glorious chances of a modern freebooter, he had joined the gang in question, to whom he was originally made known by some very pretty little amateur performances in the accommodation-bill line.
Never, until after his apprehension, had the truth been revealed to any one member of that Camberwell household. Long ago, when Jack the Scribe was a dashing young articled clerk, with bold black eyes and a handsome face,—long ago, when Isabel was only a baby, the knowledge of a bill-discounting transaction which the clerk designated an awkward scrape, but which his employers declared to be a felony, had come suddenly upon Mr. Sleaford's first wife, and had broken her heart. But when the amateur artist developed into the accomplished professional, Isabel's father learned the art of concealing the art. His sudden departure from Camberwell, the huddling of the family into an Islington lodging, and his subsequent flight to Liverpool, were explained to his household as an attempt to escape an arrest for debt; and as angry creditors and sheriffs' officers had been but common intruders upon the peace of the household, there seemed nothing very unnatural in such a flight. It was only when Mr. Sleaford was safely lodged within the fatal walls of Newgate, when the preliminary investigations of the great forgeries were published in every newspaper, that he communicated the real state of the case to his horror-stricken wife and children.
There is little need to dwell upon the details of that most bitter time. People get over these sort of things somehow; and grief and shame are very rarely fatal, even to the most sensitive natures. "Alas, sweet friend," says Shelley's Helen, "you must believe this heart is stone; it did not break!" There seems to be a good deal of the stony element in all our hearts, so seldom are the arrows of affliction fatal. To Isabel the horror of being a forger's daughter was something very terrible; but even in its terror there was just the faintest flavour of romance: and if she could have smuggled her father out of Newgate in a woman's cap and gown, like Lady Nithisdale, she might have forgiven him the crimes that had helped to make her a heroine. The boys, after the first shock of the revelation, took a very lenient view of their father's case, and were inclined to attribute his shortcomings to the tyranny and prejudice of society.
"If a rich cove has a jolly lot of money in the bank, and poor coves are starving, the rich cove must expect to have it forged away from him," Horace Sleaford remarked, moodily, when debating the question of his father's guilt. Nor did the hobbledehoy's sympathy end here; for he borrowed a dirty and dilapidated copy of Mr. Ainsworth's delightful romance from a circulating library, and minutely studied that gentleman's description of Newgate in the days of Jack Sheppard, with a view to Mr. Sleaford's evasion of his jailers.
It was not so very bad to bear, after all; for of course Jack the Scribe was not so imprudent as to make any admission of his guilt. He represented himself as the victim of circumstances, the innocent associate of wicked men, entrapped into the folly of signing other people's names by a conspiracy on the part of his companions. Hardened as he was by the experiences of a long and doubtful career, he felt some natural shame; and he did all in his power to keep his wife and children dissociated from himself and his crimes. Bitterly though the cynic may bewail the time-serving and mercenary nature of his race, a man can generally find some one to help him in the supreme crisis of his fate. Mr. Sleaford found friends, obscure and vulgar people, by whose assistance he was enabled to get his family out of the way before his trial came on at the Old Bailey. The boys, ever athirst for information of the Jack-Sheppard order, perused the daily record of that Old Bailey ordeal by stealth in the attic where they slept; but Isabel saw nothing of the newspapers, which set forth the story of her father's guilt, and only knew at the last, when all was decided, what Mr. Sleaford's fate was to be. Thus it was that she never saw Mr. Lansdell's name amongst those of the witnesses against her father; and even if she had seen that name, it is doubtful whether it would have lived in her memory until the day when she met the master of Mordred Priory.
No language can describe the horror that she felt on her father's sudden appearance in Midlandshire. Utterly ignorant of the practices of prison life, and the privileges of a ticket-of-leave, she had regarded Mr. Sleaford's dismal habitation as a kind of tomb in which he was to be buried alive for the full term of his imprisonment. Vaguely and afar off she saw the shadow of danger to Roland, in the ultimate release of his enemy; but the shadow seemed so very far away, that after the first shock of Mr. Lansdell's story, it had almost faded from her mind, blotted out by nearer joys and sorrows. It was only when her father stood before her, fierce and exacting, hardened and brutalized by prison-life, a wretch for ever at war with the laws he had outraged,—it was only then that the full measure of Roland Lansdell's danger was revealed to her.
"If ever I come out of prison alive, I will kill you!"
Never had she forgotten the words of that threat. But she might hope that it was only an empty threat, the harmless thunder of a moment's passion; not a deliberate promise, to be fulfilled whenever the chance of its fulfilment arose. She did hope this; and in her first stolen interview with her father, she led him to talk of his trial, and contrived to ascertain his present sentiments regarding the man who had so materially helped to convict him. The dusky shadows of the summer evening hid the pallor of her earnest face, as she walked by Mr. Sleaford's side in the sheltered hollow; and that gentleman was too much absorbed by the sense of his own wrongs to be very observant of his daughter's agitation.
Isabel Gilbert heard enough during that interview to convince her that Roland Lansdell's danger was very real and near. Mr. Sleaford's vengeful passions had fed and battened upon the solitude of the past years. Every privation and hardship endured in his prison life had been a fresh item in his long indictment against Mr. Lansdell, the "languid swell," whom he had never wronged to the extent of a halfpenny, but who, for the mere amusement of the chase, had hunted him down. This was what he could not forgive. He could not recognize the right of an amateur detective, who bore witness against a criminal for the general benefit of society.
After this first meeting in Nessborough Hollow, the Doctor's Wife had but one thought, one purpose and desire; and that was, to keep her father in ignorance of his enemy's near neighbourhood, and to get him away before mischief arose between the two men. But this was not such an easy matter. Mr. Sleaford refused to leave his quarters at the Leicester Arms until he obtained that which he had come to Midlandshire to seek—money enough for a new start in life. He had made his way to Jersey immediately after getting his release, and had there seen his wife and the boys. From them he heard of Isabel's marriage. She had married well, they said: a doctor at a place called Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne—an important man, no doubt; and she had not been unkind to them upon the whole, writing nice long letters to her step-mother now and then, and sending post-office orders for occasional sovereigns.
Heaven only knows with what difficulty the poor girl had contrived to save those occasional sovereigns. Mr. Sleaford demanded money of his daughter. He had made all manner of inquiries about George Gilbert's position, and had received very satisfactory answers to those inquiries. The young doctor was a "warm" man, the gossips in the little parlour at the Leicester Arms told Jack the Scribe; a prudent young man, who had inherited a nice little nest-egg—perpetually being hatched at a moderate rate of interest in the Wareham bank—from his father, and had saved money himself, no doubt. And then the gossips entered into calculations as to the value of Mr. Gilbert's practice, and the simple eeonomy of his domestic arrangements; all favourable to the idea that the young surgeon had a few thousands snugly invested in the county bank.
Under these circumstances, Mr. Sleaford considered himself entirely justified in standing out for what he called his rights, namely, a sum of money—say fifty or a hundred pounds—from his daughter; and Isabel, with the thought of Roland's danger perpetually in her mind, felt that the money must be obtained at any price. Had her husband been well enough to talk of business matters, she might have made her appeal to him; but as it was, there was an easier and more speedy method of getting the money. Roland, Roland himself, who was rich, and to whom fifty pounds,—large as the sum seemed to this girl, who had never had an unbroken ten-pound note in her life,—must be a very small matter; he was the only person who could give her immediate help. It was to him therefore she appealed. Ah, with what bitter shame and anguish! And it was to deliver up the money thus obtained that she met her father in Nessborough Hollow on the night of that dismal dinner at Lowlands. The idea of telling Roland of his danger never for a moment entered her mind. Was he not a hero, and would he not inevitably have courted that or any other peril?
She thought of his position with all a weak woman's illogical terror; and the only course that presented itself to her mind was that which she pursued. She wanted to get her father away before any chance allusion upon a stranger's lips told him that the man he so bitterly hated was within his reach.