Anne Hereford: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Altogether, the "diable" was not so black as my fancy had painted him; indeed, I began, as days went on, to doubt whether the word would apply to Mr. Edwin Barley at all. One does not grow wise in an hour; no, nor even in a year: youth clings to its prejudices, and it takes experience and age, and sober judgment, to subdue them.

Mr. Edwin Barley went home after quitting Chandos. Seated there, her things off, and a luncheon tray before her, with no trace of her luggage to be seen, was Charlotte Delves—Mrs. Penn of late years. Was she intending to take up her present quarters at his house? the question mentally occurred to Mr. Edwin Barley, and it did not tend to his gratification. Not if he knew it; he had not been upon cordial terms with Charlotte Delves for years; and what he had now heard of her line of conduct at Chandos vexed him.

There must be a word or two of retrospect. Shortly after Selina's death, Mr. Edwin Barley went abroad. Not a place on the European continent but he visited, one feverish object alone swaying him—the discovery of George Heneage. The detective police were at work in England with the same view: all in vain. At the end of three years he came back home; and almost close upon it there occurred some rupture between him and Charlotte Delves, who had remained at Hallam all that time as the house's mistress. People thought she cherished visions of becoming the house's bonâ fide mistress, its master's wife; if so, she was lamentably mistaken. Mr. Edwin Barley was wedded to Selina and her memory; he had no intention whatever of exalting another into her place. Whether Charlotte found out this in too sudden a manner; whether the cause was totally unconnected with this, certain it was a rupture occurred; and Charlotte threw up the housekeeping, and quitted the house. She took the same kind of service with an old man, a connexion also, of the name of Penn. He had married late in life, and had a young daughter, Lottie, who had been named after Charlotte Delves. Very much to the world's surprise—her little world—it was soon announced that Charlotte Delves was going to marry him. Mr. Edwin Barley, hearing of it, wrote to tell her what he thought of it in his own outspoken fearlessness: "Old Penn was quite a cripple, and three parts an idiot since he fell into his dotage. She would be better without him than with him, and would only make herself a laughing-stock if she married him." The gratuitous advice did not tend to heal the breach. Charlotte Delves did marry Mr. Penn, and very shortly afterwards was called upon to bury him. The young girl, Lottie, by whom her stepmother seemed to have done a good part, died within a year; and Mrs. Penn, left with a slender income, chose to go out in the world again. She became companion to a lady, and the years passed on.

Time softens most thing's. Mrs. Penn grew to forget her fleeting marriage and with it the episodes of her middle life; and went back to her old likings and prejudices. Her heart's allegiance to Edwin Barley returned; she was of his kin, and the wrongs inflicted by George Heneage, temporarily forgotten, resumed all their sway within her. While she was at Marden (travelling about from place to place with Mrs. Howard) some accidental occurrence caused her to suspect that George Heneage, instead of being abroad, was in concealment in England, and within a drive of Chandos. She at once wrote news of this to Mr. Edwin Barley, with whom she had held no communication since the advent of that letter of his at her marriage. It caused him to remove himself, and four or five of his household, to the vicinity of Chandos. There he took up his abode, and spent his time watching the house and the movements of Mr. Chandos, in the hope to gain some clue to the retreat of George Heneage. With this exception, the watching, which caused him to stroll at unorthodox hours into the groves and private paths, to peer in at windows by night, his watching was inoffensive. Mrs. Penn, on her side, seized on the opportunity afforded by Mrs. Freeman's illness (it was as though fortune favoured her), and got into Chandos. My presence in it might have been a serious counter-check, only that I did not recognise her. She did not recognise me in the first interview, not until the day when I sent in my name at Mrs. Marden's. Of course Mrs. Penn's object after that was to keep me in ignorance. She had really been to Nulle for a week or two; it was the autumn I first went there; had seen me at church with the school, and so tried to persuade me it was there I had seen her. Much as she wanted me away from Chandos in the furtherance of her own ends, cruel as were the means she used to try to effect it, she had, strange to say, taken a liking for me; and in her dislike to Mr. Chandos she had not much cared what wild untruths she told me of him, hoping to separate us effectually.

Of her effecting an entrance into Chandos as companion, Edwin Barley knew nothing. After she was settled there she looked out for him, and waylaid him in the grounds. While Mr. Edwin Barley had been ignorant of her life and doings for some years, there was no doubt she had contrived to keep herself acquainted with his, including his removal to the gates of Chandos. In this interview with him, which I had partially overheard—and I now think it was the first she held with him—she told him what her object was: the finding out all there was to be found out about George Heneage. With the change in Mrs. Penn's person and the remarkable change in her hair, Mr. Edwin Barley had some difficulty in believing it to be Charlotte Delves. The hair was an unhappy calamity. Mrs. Penn, beguiled by fashion and confidential advertisements to wish to turn her light flaxen hair to gold colour, had experimented upon it: the result was not gold, but a glowing, permanent, scarlet-red. She told him she was watching at Chandos for his sake. Mr. Edwin Barley, an implacable man when once offended, was cool to her, declining, in a sense, to accept her services. If she made discoveries that could assist in the tracking of George Heneage, well and good; she might bring them to him: and so the interview ended.

Mrs. Penn might have made a discovery to some purpose but for two things. The one was that she was a real coward, and believed the ghost haunting the pine-walk to be a ghost: the other was that she took up a theory of her own in regard to the west wing. She assumed that Lady Chandos had become mad; to this she set down all the mystery enacted in it; and this view she imparted to Mr. Edwin Barley. He neither asked her to bring tales to him, nor encouraged her to do it; if she worked, she worked of her own accord; and his doors remained closed to her. At least, Mrs. Penn did not choose to try whether they would be open. Until this day: and her entering of them now could not be said to be of her own seeking.

She sat taking her luncheon, cold partridge and sherry. Mr. Barley entered in silence, and stood with a dark expression on his lips. Charlotte knew it of old, and saw that something had not pleased him. Things had very much displeased him; firstly, the escape of the long-sought-for prisoner; secondly, Madam Charlotte's doings at Chandos. Mr. Edwin Barley might have winked at the peering and prying, might have encouraged the peeping into letters: but to steal things (even though but in appearance) he very much disapproved of, especially as he was looked upon as having instigated her.

"What's the matter, Mr. Barley?" asked Charlotte, helping herself to some more partridge. "He is there, is he not?"

"Who?"

"George Heneage. In the west wing."