CHAPTER III.—THE LETTER.
When Sir Sykes, left alone, addressed himself to the perusal of the crumpled letter which he had hitherto crushed in his clenched hand, it was with no light repugnance that he applied himself to the task. Slowly, and with shaking fingers, he unfolded and smoothed the ruffled paper, spread it on the table before him, and not hastily, but with a deliberate care that was evidently painful to him, read as follows: ‘Although a stranger to you, Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, I am no stranger to what took place on March 24, 18—. Should you wish this matter to remain, as it has hitherto done, untalked of by the world, I must request that you will meet me this evening at The Traveller’s Rest, by the cross-roads. I shall wait there for you until ten o’clock to-night, and will then name the terms on which alone you can reckon on my future silence.—Inquire for yours respectfully, Dick Hold, staying at The Traveller’s Rest.’
The baronet read and re-read this letter with the patient endurance of a sufferer under the surgeon’s knife. Nothing but his labouring breath and the deepening of the lines around his mouth and the furrows on his high forehead, betrayed the pain that this precious document, indited in a large sprawling hand, occasioned him. When he had gone through it for the second time, he rose, and filling a glass with water from a bottle that stood on a side-table, he drank a deep draught, and then paced to and fro with hasty irregular steps, as some men do when suddenly called upon for earnest thought and prompt decision.
‘I will not go!’ he said authoritatively, but in a low voice—‘I will not go.’
Such a peremptory summons as that which he had received implied more than it stated. It was couched in terms which were sufficiently civil; but the tone was still that of command, not of entreaty or persuasion. Most gentlemen of the degree of Sir Sykes would have treated such a demand either as a piece of insufferable insolence or as the freak of a madman. The baronet knew well enough what sort of reception his neighbours, Lord Wolverhampton, Carew of Carew, or Fulford of Carstennis, would have given to a request so impudent. He was, as they were, a justice of the peace and deputy-lieutenant, owner of a fine estate, one whose name was mentioned with respect wherever men did congregate.
The meekest of us all are apt to rebel against unwarranted dictation. And Sir Sykes was not meek. His friends and his servants—lynx-eyed as we are apt to be to the foibles of others—knew that he was in his unobtrusive way a proud man. The stronger, therefore, must have been the influence that drew him, as the magnet draws iron to itself, towards that unsavoury house of entertainment whence his unknown correspondent had dated his missive. The first dressing-bell clanged out its call unheeded, and it was only when the second bell rang that Sir Sykes recalled his wandering thoughts sufficiently to remember that it was time for him to dress, and that whatever cares might be busy at his heart, he must yet wear his mask decorously before the world. Dinner on that day at Carbery Court was not a peculiarly genial meal. The baronet had taken, with his accustomed regularity, his place at the table; but he was pale, and looked older by some years than he had done a few hours since. Yet he resented Lucy’s half-timid inquiry: ‘You are not ill, papa, I hope?’ and quietly declared that he was perfectly well. The domestic relations differ so much in varying conditions of life, that there are parents whose every thought and deed appear to be the common property of the home circle, and others who sanction no trespass on the inner self, the to auton of the Greeks, which each of us carries in the recesses of his own heart.
Sir Sykes Denzil was one of those men who, as husband and father, never carry their confidences beyond a certain convenient limit. He was no tyrant, and his daughters, who fondly loved him and who believed in his love for them, looked with regret on the cloud that so often rested on his yet handsome features. But he had known how to preserve his jealously guarded individuality from the encroachments of affectionate interference, so that it was but very rarely that his actions were the theme of open comment. Blanche and Lucy, therefore, though with feminine nicety of observation they noted that their father could not eat, but that he emptied his glass again and again, said nothing; while Jasper, as he watched Sir Sykes with a stealthy inquisitiveness, made the mental reflection that ‘the governor must be hard hit, very hard indeed;’ and secretly determined to turn the occasion to his own peculiar profit.
‘Jasper!’ said Lucy anxiously, some time after the dinner had come to an end; ‘what is the matter with papa? Do you know if he is really unwell, or if anything has gone wrong? I waited here for you, in case you might know what is amiss.’
Jasper, who had been intercepted as he was leaving the house for his customary twilight stroll, with a cigar between his lips, turned lazily round. ‘How can I tell, Lucy?’ he returned indifferently. ‘I’m not the keeper of my father’s conscience, as the Lord Chancellor, by a polite fiction, is supposed to be of the king’s.’
‘I only meant, has anything occurred, to your knowledge,’ pleaded Miss Denzil, ‘calculated to annoy or distress him? Anything, for instance, about you?’
‘How about me!’ demanded Jasper with a slight start and a slight frown.
‘Don’t be angry, brother; I only meant, dear, about your—debts,’ answered the girl, laying her hand on Jasper’s arm.
‘Has he been talking to you on that delightful subject?’ retorted the brother, almost roughly. ‘No; I see that he has not; at least not very lately. One would think, to hear that eternal refrain of debts, debts, debts for ever jangling in my ears, that I was the first fellow who ever overran the constable. Surely I’m punished enough, if I did owe a trifle, by being caged up in this wearisome old Bastille of a house, and—— There, there; Lucy, don’t cry. I’ll not say a word more against Carbery, and you may set your mind at rest. If the governor has anything to vex him, be assured that it is not in the least connected with so insignificant a person as myself.’ And, as though weary of the subject, he sauntered off.
It was Sir Sykes’s habit on most evenings to spend a short time, half an hour or so, in the drawing-room. He liked music; and Blanche, his younger daughter, who had been gifted with the sweet voice and delicate sense of harmony which are often found in conjunction with frail health, knew the airs and the songs that best suited him. He never, under any circumstances, remained long in company with his daughters, being one of those men to whom the society of women is in itself uncongenial; but on this particular evening he went straight from the dining-room to the library, and sipped his coffee there, while the twilight deepened into the gloom of night.
The day had been fine enough, but the sun had sunk in a cloud-bank of black and orange, and there were not wanting signs that a change of weather was at hand. The wind had risen, and the clouds gathered as the sun went down, and it seemed as though the proverbial fickleness of our climate would soon be illustrated. But Sir Sykes, as he went forth shortly after the clock on the turret had struck nine, paid no heed to the weather, save that once or twice he glanced upwards with a sort of half-conscious satisfaction at the darkling sky. The night, with its friendly shadows and its threats of a coming storm, suited far better with his purpose than cloudless azure and bright moonlight would have done. The moon, not as yet long risen, was young and wan, and her feeble lustre fell but at rare intervals through the wrack of hurrying clouds. The larches in the plantations quivered and the aspens by the trout-stream trembled as the gusts of wailing wind went by; while the giant trees in the park, each one a citadel of refuge to squirrel and song-bird, sent down a rustling sound, as though every one out of their million leaves had found a tiny voice of its own to give warning of the approaching gale. Sir Sykes skirted the lawn, passed through the shrubbery, and struck into a path seldom trodden except by the feet of his keepers, which led northwards through the park.
There is something ignominious in the very fact that the master of any dwelling, howsoever humble, should steal away from it with as earnest a desire to elude observation as though he had been a robber of hen-roosts or a purloiner of spoons. And perhaps such a proceeding appeared still more so in the case of the owner of so stately a place as Carbery. Sir Sykes felt as he glided, unseen as he hoped, past paling and thicket, at once angry and ashamed. So repugnant to him was the errand on which his mind was bent, that on reaching a private door in the northern wall of the park he came to a halt, and held as it were parley with himself before proceeding on the quest of the writer of the letter.
‘I do not know this fellow,’ he muttered wrathfully: ‘the man’s very name is strange to me. But the twenty-fourth of March—that can be no mistake, no coincidence. That fatal date has burned itself too deeply into my brain for me to disregard or to forget it. Yes, I must go; I suppose that I must go.’
And with a heavy sigh, the master of that fair demesne and of many a broad acre beyond it felt in his pocket for the key that would open the postern before which he stood, unlocked the door, went out, and reclosed and fastened it behind him. Then, without further hesitation, he entered into a lane, the straggling branches of the hazels that grew on the high banks to left and right almost brushing against his person as he walked briskly on. So long as he had been within the limits of Carbery Chase, Sir Sykes had done his best to escape notice, keeping as often as he could tree and bush and rising ground between himself and the grand house of which he was absolute proprietor. But now he ceased to turn his head and look or listen for any sign that he was followed, and pushed on, assured that his clandestine exit from Carbery was unknown to any but himself. Sir Sykes, however, was very much mistaken. He was dogged by the very pursuer whom, perhaps, of all others he would have wished to keep in ignorance as to his conduct. Jasper, whose feline vigilance, once awakened, could not readily be lulled to sleep, had kept watch upon his father’s actions with a quiet patient steadiness which nothing but vengeance or the greed of gain could possibly have inspired. There is a certain sympathy, especially with crooked motives, which enables us to anticipate the stratagems of those with whom we have intercourse, and of this Jasper had his full share.
He was scarcely surprised when from his place of espial he saw his father quit the house and thread his way through the grounds after such a fashion as made it manifest that the baronet desired his excursion to remain a secret to those beneath his roof. That something abnormal should happen as a consequence of the letter which Sir Sykes had received, and the reading of which had so powerfully affected its recipient, the captain had considered as so probable, that he thought it worth his while to lie in wait for the surprisal of the secret. Of two probable hypotheses, Jasper, whose imagination was of a chastened and practical order, had chosen rather to fancy that some stranger would arrive, than that the baronet should himself go forth to meet that stranger. But when he saw his father’s tall figure vanish amidst the shadows of the dense evergreens and leafy lime-trees, he was not in the least astonished.
‘When it was a question of nobbling the Black Prince,’ he said meditatively, ‘I wouldn’t trust myself, nor would Gentleman Pratt, to talking it over anywhere but on Bletchley Downs with the vagabonds who hocussed the horse, and who would for a fiver have sold their own fathers.’
Some recollection that he, Jasper Denzil, late a captain in Her Majesty’s service, was at that moment engaged, so far as in him lay, in the questionable operation of ‘selling’ his own father, here caused a twinge to his callous heart. But we are seldom without some moral anodyne wherewith to lull to sleep that troublesome monitor, conscience; and Jasper had but need to remember his debts, his difficulties, and the fact that men at his club spoke of him as ‘Poor Denzil—played out, sir!’ to assuage the momentary pang which some as yet smouldering sense of honour occasioned to him.
The skill with which he followed Sir Sykes, keeping the object of his pursuit fully in view, yet never for an instant compromising himself by coming into the range of vision, should the baronet, as he often did, turn his head, would have done credit to a Comanche Indian on the war-path. It was by a subtle instinct, not by practice, that he availed himself of the shelter of tree and brake and hollow, until at length, himself unobserved, he made sure that Sir Sykes was heading towards the private door in the northern wall of the park. There was a side-gate kept continually unlocked on account of the right of way, some six hundred yards to the eastward, and from this the captain could issue without difficulty. As for the private door, Sir Sykes had a key to fit its lock; Jasper had none. The latter’s mind was instantly made up.
Idle sybarite though he was, the captain was fleet of foot, an accomplishment perhaps more common among languid men about town than healthy hardy dwellers in the country would readily imagine. He had made money once and again by the lightness of his heels, and they did him good service now, as, after a rapid rush across the elastic turf of the park and a quick traversing of the heathery surface of the rugged common-land beyond, he caught a glimpse of his father’s stately figure as it passed in between the tall hedges of the lane.
‘It’s lucky I can run a bit!’ gasped out Jasper as he paused for an instant to take breath, and then passing his cambric handkerchief across his brow, on which the heat-drops stood thickly, plunged into the dark lane between the steep banks of which the object of his pursuit had disappeared. And now his task was the easier, in that Sir Sykes, intent on what lay before him, and confident that his manner of leaving his home was unknown, never once turned his head to look back.
A ghastly sight it was—had human eye been there to note it—which the wan moon shewed, when at uncertain intervals her white light fell on the pale faces of these two men, father and son, so much and so little alike, who were wending their way thus along the deep Devonshire lane. In front was Sir Sykes, moody indeed and downcast, but a gentleman of a goodly presence; while behind him came with feline footfall his only son, as craftily eager in the chase as even a garrotter, our British Thug, could have been. Once beyond the lane, the baronet and his kindred spy had to traverse a tract of ragged and desolate common, where the horse-road dwindled to a track of cart-wheels in the peaty soil, and where Jasper felt that concealment would have been difficult, had the baronet but looked behind him.
But the rain, long threatened, came on, urged by the strength of the sobbing wind, and Captain Denzil congratulated himself on the friendly darkness that ensued. Nor was it long before Sir Sykes caught sight of the dead tree, on a knotted bough of which was the signboard of The Traveller’s Rest, the dilapidated roof and battered front of which could dimly be seen through the gloom of night.
‘After all, why not?’ ejaculated Jasper, as he saw his father, after a moment’s hesitation, disappear within the ruinous porch of the roadside public-house.