Within the Maze: A Novel, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by Mrs. Henry Wood

"It will be nothing of the sort--or Mr. Smith would not approve of it," retorted Mrs. Andinnian. "I must see my son, Karl: and how else am I to see him? I may not go to him where he is: it might bring suspicion on him; but I can go over to the Maze."

"Who is Mr. Smith?--and what has he to do with Adam?--and how comes he in the secret?" reiterated Karl.

But to this he could get no answer. Whether Mrs. Andinnian knew, or whether she did not know, she would not say. The one fact--that Mr. Smith held the dangerous secret, and must be conciliated, was quite enough, she said, for Karl Mr. Smith had Adam's safety and interest at heart, she went on to state; he wished to be near the Maze to watch over him; and she had given him the pretty cottage opposite the Maze gates to live in, calling him Sir Karl's agent, and appointing him to collect a few rents, so as to give a colouring of ostensibility to the neighbourhood. In vain Karl remonstrated. It was useless. The ground seemed slipping from under all their feet, but he could do nothing.

After all, poor Mrs. Andinnian did not live to see her most beloved son. Anxiety, torment, restlessness, proved too much for her, and brought on the crisis sooner than was expected. On the very day after she died, the tenants came to the Maze--at least, all the tenants who would be seen openly, or be suspected of inhabiting it. They arrived by the last evening train; Mrs. Grey and her attendants, the Hopleys; and took two flies, which were waiting in readiness, on to the Maze; the lady occupying one, Hopley and his wife the other. How Adam Andinnian reached the place, it is not convenient yet to state.

In the course of the next evening, Karl Andinnian went over to the Maze and saw his brother. Adam was much altered. In the fever, which had supervened on his injuries received at the escape, he had lost his hair and become pale and thin. But his spirits were undaunted. He should soon "pick up" now he was in the free open country air and on his own grounds, he said. As to danger, he seemed not to see it, and declared there was less risk of discovery there than anywhere else. Karl could play the grand man and the baronet for him at Foxwood--but he meant, for all that, to have a voice in the ruling of his own estate. Poor Karl Andinnian, on the contrary, saw the very greatest danger in the position of affairs. He would have preferred to shut up Foxwood, leaving only Hewitt to take care of it, that no chance of discovery should arise from either servants or other inhabitants there. But Sir Adam ruled it otherwise; saying he'd not have the Court left to stagnate. Hewitt was in the secret. It might have been neither expedient nor practicable to keep it from him: but the question was decided of itself. One evening just before Mrs. Andinnian's death, when Hewitt had gone to her sick-room on some errand at the dusk hour, she mistook him for Karl; and spoke words which betrayed all. Karl was glad of it: it seemed a protection to Adam, rather than not, that his tried old servant should be cognizant of the truth. So Karl went abroad again with his wife, and stayed until his keeping aloof from Foxwood began to excite comment in his wife's family; when he deemed it more expedient to return to it.

And now does the reader perceive all the difficulties of Karl Andinnian? There he was, in a false position: making believe to be a baronet of the realm, and a wealthy man, and the owner of Foxwood: and obliged to make believe. A hint to the contrary, a word that he was not in his right place, might have set suspicion afloat--and Heaven alone knew what would then be the ending. For Adam's sake he must be wary and cunning; he must play, so to say, the knave's part and deceive the world. But the dread of his brother's discovery lay upon him night and day, with a very-present awful dread: it was as a burning brand eating away his heart.

And again--you, my reader, can now understand the complication between Karl and his wife. He believed she had discovered the fact that Adam was alive and living concealed at the Maze; she, relying on Miss Blake's information, put down the Maze mystery to something of a very different nature. How could he suppose she meant anything but the dangerous truth? How could she imagine that the secret was any other than Miss Blake had so clearly and convincingly disclosed to her? In Lucy's still almost maidenly sensitiveness, she could not bring her lips to allude openly to the nature of her charge: and there was no necessity: she assumed that Karl knew it even better than she did. In his reluctance to pronounce his brother's name or hint at the secret, lest even the very air should be treacherous and carry it abroad, he was perhaps less open than he might have been. When he offered to relate to her the whole story, she stopped him and refused to listen: and so closed up the explanation that would have set the cruel doubt right and her heart at rest.

Sitting there with Adam to-night, in that closely curtained room, Karl entered upon the matter he had come to urge--that his brother should get away from the Maze into some safer place. It was, as Sir Adam expressed it, but the old story--for Karl had never ceased to urge it from the first--and he wholly refused to listen. There was no risk, he said, no fear of discovery, and he should not go away from his own land. Either from this little particular spot of land which was individually his, or from the land of his birth. It was waste of words in Karl to speak further. Adam had always been of the most obstinate possible temperament. But the (supposed) discovery of his wife had frightened Karl worse than ever. He did not mention it to them, since he was not able to say how Lucy had made it.

"As sure as you are living, Adam, you will some day find the place entered by the officers of justice!" he exclaimed in pain.

"Let them enter it," recklessly answered Sir Adam. "They'll not find me."