ARE YOU MY WIFE?
BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BARONET IS RELIEVED.—A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY.
The night was wild and stormy. The wind had risen to a hurricane, and drove the rain in Raymond’s face as he walked home through the park. It was driving the grass in cold ripples over the fields, and tossing the trees about as if it would break them. Columns of black clouds were trooping over the sky, and the moon broke through them as if she were pursued by the wind and flying for her life. Raymond was a long time getting to the cottage. Great gusts swept up from the valley, staggering him, so that he had to stand every now and then and cling to a tree until it passed. Then the rain beat against his face so that he could hardly profit by the fitful gleams of the moon as she dipped in and out of the clouds. He was dripping wet when he got to his own door and let himself in with his latch-key. He took off his coat, hanging it in the hall, and lighted his candle. Franceline had left it close to his hand with a match.
Mechanically he walked up to his room and began to divest himself of his drenched clothing. He hardly noticed that they were soaking and that he was wet through; he was flushed and heated as if he had come straight from a hot room. How the blast roared and shrieked, beating against the cottage till it rocked like a ship at sea, and trying the windows till they cracked and groaned! It whistled through the chinks so that the flimsy red curtain fluttered as if the window had been open. Raymond pushed it aside and opened the shutters, and looked out. The night was inky black, above and below, except when a star flickered in and out like a gas-jet swept by the wind, and showed the river like a bit of steel, as it flashed and quivered under the pelting rain and hurried away into blacker distance. All this angry roar was better than music to Raymond. The fury of the elements seemed to comfort him. Nature was in sympathy with him. It was kind of her to be angry and disturbed when he was so distraught. Nature had more heart than his fellow-men. These were talking over his despair quietly enough now—mocking him, very likely; but the world around was shaken, and tossed, and driven in sympathy with him. A great gust came swelling up from the river, growing louder and heavier as it drew near, till, gathering itself up like a mountainous wave, it burst with a crash against the cottage. M. de la Bourbonias leaped back, and, with a sudden impulse of terror, flew out into the landing, and knocked at Angélique’s door; but the sonorous breathing of the old servant reassured him that all was right there and in the room beyond. It was pitch dark, but the reflection from his own open door showed Franceline’s standing wide open. He listened, but everything was silent there. He stole noiselessly back to his room and closed the door, without disturbing either of the sleepers.
The storm had reached its crisis, and gradually subsided after this, until the wind was spent and died away in long, low wails behind the woods, and the moon drifted above the tattered clouds that were sweeping toward the east, leaving a portion of the sky stainless, with stars flashing out brightly. Raymond put out his candle and went to bed.
Under ordinary circumstances he would probably have paid for the night’s adventure by an attack of bronchitis or rheumatic fever; but the mental fever that had been devouring him warded off every other, and when he came down next morning he was neither ill nor ailing.
Franceline, like her bonne, had slept through the storm, and they were quite astonished to hear what an awful night it had been, and to see the fields strewn with great branches in every direction, gates torn up, and other evidences of the night’s work. But they saw no traces of another tempest that was raging still in a human soul close by them. Nothing betrayed its existence, and they guessed nothing—so securely does this living wall of flesh screen the secrets of the spirit from every outside gaze! Passions rise up in hearts whose pulses we fondly imagine close and familiar to us as our own, and the winds blow and the waves run high and make wild havoc there, turning life into darkness and despair, or, at the whisper of the Master’s voice, illuminating it as suddenly with a flood of sunshine; and we are blind and deaf to these things, and remain as “a stranger to our brother.” And mercifully so. Many a battle is won that would have been lost if it had not been fought alone. We hinder each other by our pity, perhaps, as often as we help.
Sir Simon had very little appetite for his breakfast when he came down next morning, sick at heart after a sleepless night, and found the pleasant meal thoughtfully spread in his favorite room, the library, with the table wheeled close to his arm-chair on the right side of the hearth. It all looked the very picture of comfort and refinement and elegance. But the cup was doubly poisoned to him now; last night’s adventure had added the last drop of bitterness to it. He could not think of Raymond without a poignant pang. He suspected—and he was right—that Raymond was thinking of him, wondering whether it was really all over with him this time, and whether he was bankrupt and his estate in the fangs of the creditors; and whether he was driving away from the Court never to see it again; or whether once more, for the hundred and ninety-ninth time, he had weathered the storm and was still afloat—even though on a raft. Raymond would have scarcely believed it if any one had informed him that he had been the instrument of destroying Sir Simon’s one chance of escape; that he had snatched the last plank from him in his shipwreck. It may have been an imaginary one, and Sir Simon, after the fashion of drowning men, may have been catching at a straw; but now that it was snatched from him, he was more than ever convinced that it had been a solid plank which would have borne him securely to shore. He did not ask himself whether Mr. Plover would have entered into his plans, and whether, supposing he found it his interest to do so, his fortune would have been equal to the demand; he only considered what might have been, and what was not; and thinking of this, his indulgent pity for M. de la Bourbonais shrank in the bitter reflection that he had ruined not only himself but his friend irretrievably. They were pretty much in the same boat now.
Sir Simon’s self-made delusions had cleared away wonderfully within the last forty-eight hours. He drew no comparison to his own advantage between Raymond’s actual position and his own. If M. de la Bourbonais was a thief in the technical sense of the word, he, Sir Simon, was a bankrupt; and a bankrupt, under certain conditions, may mean a swindler. He had been a swindler for years; his life had been a sham these twenty years, and he had not the excuse of circumstances to fall back on; he had been dishonest from extravagance and sheer want of principle. “Take it first and afford it afterwards” had been his theory, and he had lived up to it, and now the day of reckoning had arrived. Many a time he had said, half in jest, that Raymond was the richer man of the two. Raymond used to laugh mildly at the notion, but it was true. An ambitious, extravagant man and a contented poor one are pretty much on a level: the one possesses everything he does not want; the other wants everything he does not possess. The unprincipled spend-thrift and the high-minded, struggling man were then on an equality of fortune, or rather the latter was virtually the wealthier of the two. But now the distinction was washed out. The proud consciousness of unstained honor and innermost self-respect which had hitherto sustained M. de la Bourbonais and sweetened the cup of poverty to him was gone. He was a blighted man, who could never hold up his head again amongst his fellow-men.
“Good God! what delirium possessed him? How could he be so infatuated, so stupid!” broke out Sir Simon, giving vent to what was passing through his mind. “But,” he added presently, “he was not accountable. I believe grief and anxiety drove him mad.” Then he recalled that answer of Raymond’s, that had sounded so untrue at the time: “Yes, I can fancy myself giving way, if the temptation took a certain form, and if I were left to my own strength.” The words sounded now like a prophecy.
Of course we all know that, according to the canons of poetical justice, the brave, suffering man should have been in some unexpected way succored in his extremity; that some angel in visible or invisible form should have been sent to hold him up from slipping into the pit that despair had dug for him; and that, on the other hand, the wicked spendthrift should have been left to eat the bread of righteous retribution, and suffer the just penalty of his evil behavior. But poetical justice and the facts of real life do not always agree.
Sir Simon, after walking up and down the library, chewing the cud of bitter thoughts until he was sick of it, bethought himself that as breakfast was there he might as well try and eat it before it got cold. So he sat down and poured out his coffee, and then, by mere force of habit, and without the faintest glimmer of interest, began to turn over the bundle of letters piled up beside the Times on the table. One after another was tossed away contemptuously. The duns might cry till they were hoarse now; he need not trouble about them; he would be at least that much the gainer by his disgrace. Suddenly his eye lighted on an envelope that was not addressed in the well-known hand of the race of duns, but in Clide de Winton’s, and it bore the London postmark. The thought of Clide generally produced on Sir Simon the effect of a needle run through the left side; but he took up this letter with a strange thrill of expectation. He opened it, and a change came over his face; it was not joy—it was too uncertain, too tremulous yet for that. He must read it again before he trusted to the first impression; he must make sure that he was not dreaming, and the words that danced like a will-o’-the-wisp before his eyes were real, written with real ink, on real paper. At last he dropped the letter, and a heartier prayer than he had uttered since his childhood came from him: “My God, I thank thee! I have not deserved this mercy, but I will try to deserve it.”
He buried his face in his hands, and remained mute and motionless for some minutes. Then, starting up as if suddenly remembering something, he pulled out his watch. It wanted five minutes of ten. The law officer and the Jew creditor were to start by the train that left Charing Cross at a quarter past eleven. Sir Simon rang the bell sharply.
“Saddle a horse, and ride as fast as you can with this to the telegraph,” he said to his valet, who answered the summons; “and the moment you come back, get ready to be off with me to London by the mid-day train.”
The telegram prepared Mr. Simpson to see his client appear at his office at two o’clock that afternoon, and, in obedience to its directions, the Jew was there to meet him. Clide de Winton had seen Simpson the day before, and given him full authority to settle the Dullerton debts so as to set Sir Simon Harness free. He had only arrived in London that very morning, and it was the merest accident that led him to call on the family lawyer, who was also the family’s best friend, on his way from the station to his hotel. Simpson was discretion itself, and one of the attributes of that virtue is to know when to be indiscreet. Clide’s first inquiry was for Sir Simon, with a view—which the astute lawyer did not see through—of leading up to inquiries about other friends at Dullerton; whereupon Mr. Simpson bolted out the whole truth, told him of the baronet’s position, the long arrears of debt that had come against him, and which were to culminate in bankruptcy within twenty-four hours. It was as if the sky had fallen on Clide, or the ground opened under his feet.
“Thank goodness I am come in time!” he exclaimed; and there and then sat down and wrote to Sir Simon, telling him that proceedings were stopped, and that he, Clide, took them in his own hands.
“And this is what you call being a friend!” said the young man, as he and the baronet left Simpson’s office together, the one with a lightened purse, the other with a heart considerably more so. “To think of your letting things go to such lengths, and that if I had been a day later it would have been all over!”
“My dear boy! what can I say to you? How can I ever repay you?”
“By forgiving me. I’ve lived long enough to find out a secret or two. One is that it requires a very noble soul to forgive a man a money obligation, and that there is a deal more generosity in accepting than in conferring it. So if you don’t pick a quarrel with me after this, and turn your back on me, we are quits. Is it a bargain?”
He held out his hand, laughing; Sir Simon wrung it till the pressure made Clide wince. This was his only answer, and the only sentimental passage the occasion gave rise to between them.
It was more than a month since Clide had left St. Petersburg, although the season was still at its height there, and Isabel’s engagement was to have lasted until the end of it. This had, however, been brought to an abrupt and tragic close. She had acted for six weeks with unprecedented success; every night was a fresh triumph, and nothing was talked of in the salons and clubs but the wonders of her voice, the intense reality of her acting, and her rare beauty. Ophelia was considered her grandest part. She was playing it one evening to a crowded house, in the presence of the imperial family and the whole court, and seemed wrought up to a pitch of power and pathos that surpassed her finest preceding efforts. She was singing the mad scene with melting tenderness; the house was breathless, hanging enraptured on every note, when suddenly the voice ceased, the prima donna cast a wild look on every side of her, and then, with a shriek too terribly real to be within the compass of art, she flung her arms over her head, and, clasping her hands, fell insensible to the ground. Never did any opera-house witness so dramatic a scene. The spectators rose in a body from the pit to the gallery, shouting to know what had happened, and calling for help. Help was near enough. A man in plain clothes sprang from behind the scenes, and lifted the prostrate Ophelia before any of the actors could interfere. There were several medical men among the audience, and they rushed in a body to offer their services. It was feared for a moment that she was dead; but the doctors soon pronounced it to be only a swoon, though it was impossible to say what might follow on the awakening. The emperor sent one of his chamberlains to hear and see what was going on in the green-room, and inquire if the piece was to be continued; whereupon the luckless manager flew out before the footlights, and falling on his knees under the imperial box, as if he saw the knout suspended over his shoulders, called heaven to witness that he was a loyal subject and an innocent man, and flung himself on the imperial clemency. The prima donna had been seized with illness, and the opera could not be finished that night. The czar waved his clemency to the terrified man, who withdrew, invoking all manner of benedictions on the mercy of the Father of all the Russians, and flew to hear what the doctors were now saying of Ophelia. They were saying that she was acting out her part as it had never yet been acted, with the perfection of nature—she was raving mad.
This was not proclaimed at once. The affair was hushed up for a few days, and kept out of the newspapers, so that Clide only heard it accidentally at the club, where he happened to lounge in a week after the occurrence. He sent Stanton off at once to make inquiries at the house where Isabel lodged. But they could tell nothing of her there; she had been taken away the day after her seizure at the opera, and had left no address. Clide went straight to the lawyer, and asked if there was no way of getting access to her through the police; of learning at least whether she was in an asylum; for his first idea on hearing that she had been taken away was that they had placed her in some such confinement. The lawyer agreed with him that this was most probable, but did not promise much help in verifying the supposition. He seemed honestly willing to do what he could in the matter, but repeated the old warning that little could be done where imperial favor stood in the way. It was highly probable that the czar would still show his benevolence toward the beautiful artist by screening her hiding-place and the fact of her being mad, in hope of her being able to return and complete her engagement after rest and medical treatment.
His position now seemed worse to Clide than it had ever been. The thought of Isabel’s being in a mad-house, a prey to the most awful visitation that humanity is subject to, rudely, perhaps cruelly, treated by coarse, pitiless menials, was so horrible that at first it haunted him till he almost fancied he was going mad himself. The image of the bright young creature who had first stirred the pulses of his foolish heart was for ever before his eyes as she appeared to him that day—how long ago it seemed!—in the midst of the splendors of Niagara, and that he took her for a sprite—some lovely creature of the water and the sunlight. He remembered, with a new sense of its meaning, the strange air she wore, walking on as if half unconscious he had wondered if she were not walking in her sleep. Was it a phase of the cruel malady that was then showing itself? And if so, was she not, perhaps, blameless from the beginning? This blight that had fallen on her in her brilliant maturity might have been germinating then, making strange havoc in her mind, and impelling her character, her destiny, to fearful and fantastic issues. Some weeks passed while Clide was a prey to these harrowing thoughts, when he received a letter from the lawyer, saying he had something to communicate to him of interest.
“It is not good news,” he said, as the Englishman entered his office; “but it is better than complete suspense. The signora is not in St. Petersburg. All our researches were useless from the first, as she was carried off almost immediately to a lunatic asylum in Saxony.”
“And she is there still?”
“Yes; and she has been admirably treated with the utmost skill and care, so much so that it is expected she will be quite restored after a short period of convalescence.”
“How did you ascertain all this?” inquired Clide.
“Through a client of mine who has been for some time a patient of the establishment. He left it very recently, and came to see me on his return, and in talking over the place and its inmates he described one in a way that excited my suspicions. I wrote to the director, and put a few questions cautiously, and the answer leaves me no doubt but that the patient whom my client saw there a few days before his departure was the lady who interests you.”
“Did you hear who accompanied her to Saxony?”
“My client saw a person walking in the grounds with her once, and from the description it must be the same who travelled with her from England—her uncle, in fact: a middle-sized man with coal-black hair and very white teeth; ‘decidedly an unpleasant-looking person’ my client called him.”
“Strange!” murmured Clide. “That description does not tally with my recollection of the man who called himself her uncle, except that he had a forbidding countenance and was of medium height. He had a quantity of gray, almost white, hair, and not a sound tooth in his head.”
“Humph! White hair may turn black, and new teeth may be made to replace lost ones,” observed the lawyer. “I would not be put off the scent by changes of that sort, if the main points coincided.”
“Very true. I must start at once, then, for Saxony, and try and see for myself. I shall have difficulty in gaining the confidence of the directors of the place, I dare say. Can you help me by a letter of introduction to any of them?”
“Yes; I am well known to the principal medical man by name, and I will give you a line to him with pleasure.”
He wrote it, and shook hands with his client and wished him good-speed.
Clide travelled without halting till he drove up to the door of the asylum. His letter procured him admittance at once to the private room of the medical man, and, what was of greater importance, it inclined the latter to credit his otherwise almost incredible story. When Clide had told all he deemed necessary, the doctor informed him that the patient whom he believed to be his wife had already left the house and the country altogether; she had spent three full weeks under his care, and was then well enough to be removed, and had, by his advice, been taken home for the benefit of native air. It was just three days since she had left Saxony. The doctor could give no idea as to where she had gone, beyond that she had returned to England; he knew nothing of the whereabouts of her native place there, and her uncle had left no clue to his future residence.
Clide was once more baffled by fate, and found himself again in a dead-lock. In answer to his inquiries concerning the nature of Isabel’s disease, the medical man said that it was hereditary, and therefore beyond the likelihood—not to say possibility—of radical cure. This, it seemed, was the third attack from which she had suffered. The first was in early girlhood, before the patient was eighteen; the second, somewhat later and of much longer duration—it had lasted six years, her uncle said; then came the third crisis, which, owing, perhaps, to the improved general health of the patient, but more probably to the more judicious and enlightened treatment she had met with, had passed off very rapidly. It was, however, far from being a cure. It was at best but a recovery, and the disease might at any moment show itself again in a more obstinate and dangerous form. Perfect quiet, freedom from excitement, whether mental or physical, were indispensable conditions for preserving her against another crisis. It was needless to add after this that the career of an actress was the most fatal one the unfortunate young woman could have adopted. But in that, no doubt, she was more passive than active.
With this new light on his path, Clide hastened his return to England, farther than ever, it seemed, from his journey’s end, and laden with a heavier burden than when he set out. March! march! was still the command that sounded in his ears, driving him on and on like the Wandering Jew, and never letting him get nearer the goal.
He had not the faintest idea of Isabel’s native place. She had told him she was Scotch, and her name said so too, though she was perfectly free from the native accent which marked her uncle’s speech so strongly. But what did that prove either way? Was Cameron her name, or Prendergast his? He had taken a new name in his travels, and so had she. Still, feeble as the thread was, it was the only one he had to guide him; so he started for Scotland as soon as he landed in England, having previously taken the precaution to acquaint the police in London with his present purpose, and what had led him to it. If Isabel were sufficiently recovered to appear again in public, it was probable that the brutal man—who was in reality no more than her task-master—would have made some engagement for her with a manager, and she might at this moment be singing her brain away for his benefit in some provincial theatre. It was clear he shunned the publicity of the London stage. Clide thought of these things as he tramped over the purple heather of the Highlands, following now one mirage, now another; and his heart swelled within him and smote him for his angry and vindictive feelings toward Isabel; and tears, that were no disgrace to his manhood, forced themselves from his eyes. Poor child! She was not to blame, then, for wrecking his life, and coming again like an evil genius to thrust him back into the abyss just as he had climbed to safety, beckoned onwards and upwards by another angel form. She was a victim herself, and had perhaps never meant to deceive or betray him, but had loved him with her mad, untutored heart as well as she knew how.
The winter days dragged on drearily, as he went from place to place in Scotland, and found no trace of the missing one, heard nothing that gave him any hopes of finding her. The police were equally unsuccessful in London. Stanton had gone back there, very much against his inclination; but Clide insisted that he would be of more use in the busy streets, keeping his keen eyes open, than following his master in his wanderings up and down Scotland.
One dark afternoon the valet was walking along Regent Street, when he stopped to look at some prints in a music-shop. The gas was lighted, and streamed in a brilliant blaze over the gaudily-attired tenors and prime donne that were piling the agony on the backs of various operatic songs. Stanton was considering them, and mentally commenting on the manner of ladies and gentlemen who found it good to spend their lives making faces and throwing themselves into contortions that appeared to him equally painful and ridiculous, when he noticed a lady inside the shop engaged in choosing some music. She was dressed in black, and he only caught a glimpse of her side face through her veil; but the glimpse made him start. He watched her take the roll of music from the shopman, secure it in a little leathern case, and then turn to leave the shop. She walked out leisurely, but the moment she opened the door she quickened her pace almost to a run; and before Stanton knew where he was, she had rushed into the middle of the street. He hastened after her, but a string of carriages and cabs intervened and blocked the street for some moments. As soon as it was clear, he saw the slight figure in black stepping into an omnibus. He hailed it, gesticulating and hallooing frantically; but the conductor, with the spirit of contradiction peculiar to conductors, kept his head persistently turned the other way. Stanton tore after him, waving his umbrella and whistling, all to no purpose, until at last he stopped for want of breath. At the same moment the omnibus pulled up to let some travellers alight; he overtook it this time, and got in. The great machine went thundering on its way, and there opposite to him sat the lady in black, his master’s wife, he was ready to swear, if she was in the land of the living. He saw the features very indistinctly, but well enough to be certain of their identity; the height and contour were the same, and so was the mass of jet black hair that escaped in thick plaits from under the small black bonnet. Then there was the conclusive fact of his having seen her in a music-shop. This clinched the matter for Stanton. The omnibus stopped, the lady got out, ran to the corner of the street, and waited for another to come up, and jumped into it; Stanton meanwhile following her like her shadow. She saw it, and he saw that she saw it, and that she was frightened and trying to get away from him. Why should she do so if she were not afraid of being recognized? He was not a gentleman, and could see no reason for an unprotected young woman being frightened at a man looking fixedly at her and pursuing her, unless she had a guilty conscience. He sat as near as he could to her in the omnibus, and when it pulled up to let her down he got down. She hurried up a small, quiet street off Tottenham Court Road, and on reaching a semi-detached small house, flew up the steps and pulled violently at the bell. Stanton was beside her in an instant.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but I know you. I don’t mean to do you any ’arm, only to tell you that I’m Stanton, Mr. Clide’s valet; you are my master’s wife!”
He was excited, but respectful in his manner.
“You are mistaken,” replied the lady, shrinking into the doorway. “I know nothing about you. I never heard of Mr. Clide, and I’m not married!”
Stanton was of course prepared for the denial, and showed no sign of surprise or incredulity; but, in spite of himself, her tone of assurance staggered him a little. He could not say whether the sound of the voice resembled that of Mrs. de Winton. Its echoes had lingered very faintly in his memory, and so many other voices and sounds had swept over it during the intervening years that he could not the least affirm whether the voice he had just heard was hers or not. Before he had found any answer to this question, footsteps were audible pattering on the tarpauling of the narrow entry, and a slip-shod servant-girl opened the door. The lady passed quickly in; Stanton followed her.
“You must leave me!” she said, turning on him. “This is my papa’s house, and if you give any more annoyance he will have you taken into custody.” She spoke in a loud voice, and as she ceased the parlor door was opened, and a gentleman in a velveteen coat and slippers came forward with a newspaper in his hand.
“What’s the matter? What is all this about?” he demanded blandly, coming forward to reconnoitre Stanton, who did not look at all bland, but grim and resolute, like a man who had conquered his footing on the premises, and meant to hold it.
“Sir, I am Stanton, Mr. Clide’s valet; this lady knows me well, if you don’t.”
“Papa! I never saw him in my life! I don’t know who Mr. Clide is!” protested the young lady in a tremor. “This man has annoyed me all the way home. Send him away!”
“I must speak to you, sir,” said Stanton stoutly. “I cannot leave the house without.”
“Pray walk in!” said the gentleman, waving his newspaper towards the open parlor; “and you, my dear, go and take off your bonnet.”
“Now, sir, be good enough to state your business,” he began when the door was closed.
“My business isn’t with you, sir, but with your daughter, if she is your daughter,” said Stanton. “One thing is certain—she’s my master’s wife; there an’t no use in her denying it, and the best thing she can do is to speak out to her ’usband penitent-like, and he’ll forgive her, poor thing, and do the best he can for her, which will be better than what that uncle of hers ’as been doin’ for her, draggin’ her about everywhere and driving the poor creature crazy. That’s what I’ve got to say, sir, and I ’ope you’ll see as it’s sense and reason.”
The occupant of the velveteen slippers listened to this speech with eyes that grew rounder and rounder as it proceeded; then he threw back his head and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.
“My good man, there’s some mistake! You’ve mistaken my daughter for somebody else; she never was married in her life, and she has no uncle that ever I heard of. Ha! ha! ha! It’s the best joke I ever heard in my life!”
“Excuse me; it an’t no joke at all!” protested Stanton, nettled, and resolved not to be shaken by the ring of honesty there was in the man’s laugh. “You mayn’t know the person that calls himself her uncle, but I do, sir. Mayhap you are duped by the rascal yourself; but it’ll all come out now. I have it all in the palm of my hand.” And he opened that capacious member and closed it again significantly. “Your daughter must either come away with me quietly, or I’ll call the police and have her taken off whether she will or no!”
“I tell you, man, you are under some preposterous mistake,” said the gentleman, his blandness all gone, and his choler rising. “My name is Honey. I am a clerk in H—— Bank, and my daughter, Eliza Jane Honey, has never left me since she was born. She is an artist, a singer, and gives lessons in singing in some of the first houses in London!”
“Singer! Singing lessons! Ha! Just so! I know it all,” said Stanton, his mouth compressing itself in a saturnine smile. “I know it all, and I tell you I don’t leave this ’ouse without her.”
“Confound your insolence! What do you mean? You’d better be gone this instant, or I’ll call the police and give you into custody!
“No, sir, don’t try it; it won’t answer,” said Stanton, imperturbable. “It ’ud only make more trouble; the poor thing has enough on her already, and I’m not the one to make more for her. If you call in the police I’ve something ’ere,” slapping his waistcoat pocket, “as ’ud settle at once which of us was to be took up.”
Before Mr. Honey could say anything in answer to this, a voice came carrolling down the stairs, singing some air from an opera, rich with trills and fioriture.
“There it is! The very voice! The very tune I’ve ’eard her sing in the drawing-room at Lanwold!” exclaimed Stanton.
The singer dashed into the room, but broke off in her trills on seeing him.
“What! you are not gone? Papa, who is he?”
“My dear, he is either a madman or—or worse,” said her father. “It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard in my life!”
“Speak out, ma’am, and don’t you fear I’ll do you any ’arm; my master wouldn’t ’ave it, not for all the money he’s worth. Nobody knows the sum he’s spent on them detectives already to try and catch you; and it speaks badly for the lot to say they’ve not caught you long ago. But don’t you be afraid of me, ma’am!” urged Stanton, making his voice as mild as he could.
Eliza Jane’s answer was a peal of laughter.
“Why should I be afraid of you? I never laid my eyes on you before, or you on me; you mistake me for somebody else, I tell you. I never heard of Mr. Clide, and I am certain he never heard of me. The idea of your insisting that I’m his wife!” And she laughed again; but there was a nervous twitch about her mouth, and Stanton saw it.
“As like as two peas in a pod!” was his emphatic remark, as he deliberately scanned her face.
There was no denying the resemblance, indeed. The face was fuller, the features more developed, but the interval of years would explain that.
“Look at my hand! You see I have no wedding-ring? Ask me a few questions; you will find out the blunder at once, if you only try,” she said.
Stanton paused for a moment, as if trying to recall something that might serve as a test.
“I ’ave it!” he said, looking up with a look of triumph. “Open your mouth, ma’am, and let me look into it!”
He advanced towards her, expecting instant compliance. But Miss Honey rushed behind her father with a cry of terror and disgust. The movement was perfectly natural under the circumstances, but Stanton saw it in the light of his own suspicions.
“Ha! I guessed as much,” he said, drawing away, and speaking in a quiet tone of regret. “I was sure of it. Well, you give me no choice. I know my dooty to a lady, but I know my dooty to my master too.” He went toward the window, intending to throw it up and call for a policeman.
“Stop!” cried Mr. Honey. “What do you expect to find in my daughter’s mouth?”
“That, sir, is known to her and to me,” was the oracular reply. “If she has nothing in it as can convict her, she needn’t be afraid to let me look into it.”
Mr. Honey turned aside, touched his forehead with his forefinger, and pointed with the thumb toward Stanton. After this rapid and significant little pantomime, he said aloud to his daughter:
“My dear, perhaps it is as well to let the man have his way. He will see that there is nothing to see. Come and gratify his singular curiosity.”
The girl was now too frightened to see the ludicrous side of the performance; she advanced gravely to the table, on which a gas-burner threw a strong, clear light, and opened her mouth. Stanton came and peered into it. “Please to lift the left side as wide open as you can, ma’am; it was the third tooth from the back of her left jaw.”
She did as he desired, but, after looking closely all round, he could see nothing but two fine, pearly rows of teeth, all ivory, without the smallest glimmer of gold or silver to attest the presence of even an unsound one.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am! I beg a thousand pardons, sir! I find I’ve made a great mistake! I’ve behaved shameful rude to you and the young lady; but I hope you’ll forgive me. I was only doing my dooty to my master. I’m sorrier than I can say for my mistake!” Both father and daughter were too thankful to be rid of him to withhold their free and unconditional pardon. They even went the length of regretting that he had had so much trouble and such an unpleasant adventure all to no purpose, and cordially wished him better success next time, as he withdrew, profusely apologizing.
“Papa, he must be an escaped lunatic!” cried the young lady, as the hall-door closed on Stanton.
“I dare say they took me for a maniac, and indeed no wonder!” was Stanton’s reflection, as he heard a peal of laughter through the window.
The adventure left, nevertheless, an uneasy feeling on his mind, and the next day he called on Mr. Peckitt, the dentist, and related it. Mr. Peckitt had not seen the wearer of the silver tooth since the time he had attended her before her departure for Berlin; but he had seen her uncle, and made an entire set of false teeth for him. He took the liberty on first seeing him of inquiring for the young lady; but her uncle answered curtly that she was in no need of dental services at present, and turned off the subject by some irrelevant remark. Mr. Peckitt, of course, took the hint, and never reverted to it. This was all he had to tell Stanton; but he did not confirm the valet’s certainty as to the non-identity of Miss Honey on the grounds of the absence of the silver tooth. It was, he thought, improbable that his patient should have parted with that odd appendage, and that, if so, she should have gone to a strange dentist to have it replaced by an ordinary tooth; but either of these alternatives was possible.
This was all the information that Stanton had for his master when the latter returned from his bootless search in Scotland.
On the following day Sir Simon Harness came to London and heard of the strange adventure. He was inclined to attach more importance to it than Clide apparently did.
“Suppose this so-called Eliza Jane Honey should not have been Isabel,” he said, “but some one like her—the same whom you saw at Dieppe?” Clide shook his head.
“Impossible! I could not be deceived, though Stanton might. This Miss Honey, too, was fuller in the face, and altogether a more robust person, than Isabel, as Stanton remembers her. Now, after the terrible attack that she has suffered lately, it is much more likely that she is worn and thin, poor child!”
“That is true. Still, there remains the coincidence of the splendid voice and of her being an artist. If I were you, I would not rest till I saw her myself.”
“It would only make assurance doubly sure. Stanton has startled me over and over again for nothing. Every pair of black eyes and bright complexion that he sees gives him a turn, as he says, and sets him off on the chase. No; the woman I saw at Dieppe was my wife—I am as sure of that as of my own identity. I did not get near enough to her to say, ‘Are you my wife?’ but I am as certain of it as if I had.” He promised, however, to satisfy Sir Simon, that he would go to Tottenham Court and see Miss Honey.
While Clide’s tongue was engaged on this absorbing topic, he was mentally reverting to another subject which was scarcely less absorbing, and which was closer to his heart. His love for Franceline had not abated one atom of its ardor since absence and a far more impassable gulf had parted him from her; her image reigned supreme in his heart still, and accompanied him in his waking and sleeping thoughts. He felt no compunction for this. His conscience tendered full and unflinching allegiance to the letter of the moral law, but it was in bondage to none of those finer spiritual tenets that ruled and influenced Franceline. He would have cut off his right hand rather than outrage her memory by so much as an unworthy thought; but he gave his heart full freedom to retain and foster its love for her. He had not her clear spiritual insight to discern the sinfulness of this, any more than he had her deep inward strength to enable him to crush the sin out of his heart, even if he had tried, which he did not. It was his misfortune, not his fault, that his love for her was unlawful. Nothing could make it guilty; that was in his own power, and the purity of its object was its best protection. She was an angel, and could only be worshipped with the reverent love that one of her own pure kindred spirits might accept without offence or contamination. Such was Clide’s code, and, if he wanted any internal proof of his own loyalty to sanction it, he had it in the shape of many deep-drawn sighs—prayers, he called them, and perhaps they were—that Franceline might not suffer on his account, but might forget him, and be happy after a time with some worthier husband. He had been quite honest when he sighed these sighs—at least he thought he was; yet when Sir Simon, meaning to console him and make things smooth and comfortable, assured him emphatically that they had been both happily mistaken in the nature of Franceline’s feelings, and then basely and cruelly insinuated that Ponsonby Anwyll was in a fair way to make her a good husband by and by, Clide felt a pang more acute than any he had yet experienced. This is often the case with us. We never know how much insincerity there is in the best of our prayers—the anti-self ones—until we are threatened with the grant of them.
Sir Simon said nothing about the stolen ring. His friendship for Raymond partook of that strong personal feeling which made any dishonor in its object touch him like a personal stain. He could not bear even to admit it to himself that his ideal was destroyed. M. de la Bourbonais had been his ideal of truth, of manly independence, of everything that was noble, simple, and good. There are many intervals in the scale that separates the ordinary honest man from the ideal man of honor. Sir Simon could count several of the former class; but he knew but one of the higher type. He had never known any one whom he would have placed on the same pinnacle of unsullied, impregnable honor with Raymond. Now that he had fallen, it seemed as if the very stronghold of Sir Simon’s own faith had surrendered; he could disbelieve everything, he could doubt everybody. Where was truth to be found, who was to be trusted, since Raymond de la Bourbonais had failed? But meantime he would screen him as long as he could. He would not be the first to speak of his disgrace to any one. He told Clide how Raymond had lost, for him, a considerable sum of money recently, through the dishonesty of a bank, and how he had borne the loss with the most incredible philosophy, because just then it so happened he did not want the money; but since then Franceline’s health had become very delicate, and she was ordered to a warm climate, and these few hundreds would have enabled him to take her there, and her father was now bitterly lamenting the loss.
Clide was all excitement in a moment.
“But now you can supply them?” he cried. “Or rather let me do it through you! I must not, of course, appear; but it will be something to know I am of use to her—to both of them. You can easily manage it, can you not? M. de la Bourbonais would make no difficulty in accepting the service from you.”
“Humph! As ill-luck will have it, there is a coldness between us at present,” said Sir Simon—“a little tiff that will blow off after a while but meanwhile Bourbonais is as unapproachable as a porcupine. He’s as proud as Lucifer at any time, and I fear there is no one but myself from whom he would accept a service of the kind.”
“Could not Langrove manage it? They seemed on affectionate terms,” said Clide.
“Oh! no, oh! no. That would never do!” said Sir Simon quickly. “I don’t see any one at Dullerton but myself who could attempt it.”
“Well, but some one must, since you say you can’t,” argued Clide with impatience. “When do you return to the Court?”
“I did not mean to return just yet a while. You see, I have a great deal of business to look to—of a pleasant sort, thanks to you, my dear boy, but still imperative and admitting of no delay. I can’t possibly leave town until it has been settled.”
“I should have thought Simpson might have attended to it. I suppose you mean legal matters?” said the young man with some asperity. He could not understand Sir Simon’s being hindered by mere business from sparing a day in a case of such emergency, and for such a friend. It was unlike him to be selfish, and this was downright heartlessness.
“Simpson? To be sure!” exclaimed the baronet jubilantly, starting up and seizing his hat. “I will be off and see him this minute. Simpson is sure to hit on some device; he’s never at a loss for anything.”
TO BE CONTINUED.