The banker and the man who was called the Major talked to each other earnestly enough throughout the short drive between Lisford churchyard and Maudesley Abbey; but they spoke in low confidential whispers, and their conversation was interlarded by all manner of strange phrases; the queer, outlandish words were Hindostanee, no doubt, and were by no means easy to comprehend.
As the carriage drove up to the grand entrance of the Abbey, the stranger looked out through the mud-spattered window.
“A fine place!” he exclaimed; “a splendid place!”
“What am I to call you here?” muttered Mr. Dunbar, as he got out of the carriage.
“You may call me anything; as long as you do not call me when the soup is cold. I’ve a two-pair back in the neighbourhood of St. Martin’s Lane, and I’m known there as Mr. Vavasor. But I’m not particular to a shade. Call me anything that begins with a V. It’s as well to stick to one initial, on account of one’s linen.”
From the very small amount of linen exhibited in the Major’s toilette, a malicious person might have imagined that such a thing as a shirt was a luxury not included in that gentleman’s wardrobe.
“Call me Vernon,” he said: “Vernon is a good name. You may as well call me Major Vernon. My friends at the Corner — not the Piccadilly corner, but the corner of the waste ground at the back of Field Lane — have done me the honour to give me the rank of Major, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t retain the distinction. My proclivities are entirely aristocratic: I have no power of assimilation with the canaille. This is the sort of thing that suits me. Here I am in my element.”
Mr. Dunbar had led his shabby acquaintance into the low, tapestried room in which he usually sat. The Major rubbed his hands with a gesture of enjoyment as he looked at the evidences of wealth that were heedlessly scattered about the apartment. He gave a long sigh of satisfaction as he dropped with a sudden plump upon the spring cushion of an easy-chair on one side of the fireplace.
“Now, listen to me,” said Mr. Dunbar. “I can’t afford to talk to you this morning; I have other duties to perform: When they’re over, I’ll come and talk to you. In the meantime, you may sit here as long as you like, and have what you please to eat or drink.”
“Well, I don’t mind the wing of a fowl, and a bottle of Burgundy. It’s a long time since I’ve tasted Burgundy. Chambertin, or Clos de Vougeot, at twelve bob a bottle — that’s the sort of tipple, I rather flatter myself — eh?”
Henry Dunbar drew himself up with a slight shudder, as if repelled and disgusted by the man’s vulgarity.
“What do you want of me?” he asked. “Remember that I am waited for. I am quite ready to serve you — for the sake of ‘auld lang syne!’”
“Yes,” answered the Major, with a sneer; “it’s so pleasant to remember ‘auld lang syne!’”
“Well,” asked Mr. Dunbar, impatiently, “what is it you want of me?”
“A bottle of Burgundy — the best you have in your cellar — something to eat, and — that which a poor man generally asks of his rich friends — his fortunate friends — MONEY!”
“You shall not find me illiberal towards you. I’ll come back by-and-by, and write you a cheque.”
“You’ll make it a thumping one?”
“I’ll make it as much as you want.”
“That’s the sort of thing. There always was something princely and magnificent about you, Mr. Dunbar.”
“You shall not have any reason to complain,” answered the banker, very coldly.
“You’ll send me the lunch?”
“Yes. You can hold your tongue, I suppose? You won’t talk to the servant who waits upon you?”
“Has your friend the manners of a gentleman, or has he not? Hasn’t he had the eminent advantage of a collegiate education — I may say, a prolongued course of collegiate study? But look here, since you’re so afraid of my putting my foot in it, suppose I go back to Lisford now, and I can return to you to-night after dark. Our business will keep. I want a long talk, and a quiet talk; but I must suit my convenience to yours. It’s the dee-yuty of the poor-r-r dependant to wait upon the per-leasure of his patron,” exclaimed Major Vernon, in the studied tones of the villain in a melodrama.
Henry Dunbar gave a sigh of relief.
“Yes, that will be much better,” he said. “I can talk to you comfortably after dinner.”
“Ta-ta, then, old boy. ‘Oh, reservoir!’ as we say in the classics.”
Major Vernon extended a brawny hand of rather doubtful purity. The millionaire touched the broad palm with the tips of his gloved fingers.
“Good-bye,” he said; “I shall expect you at nine o’clock. You know your way out?”
He opened the door as he spoke, and pointed through a vista of two or three adjoining rooms to the hall. It was rather a broad hint. The Major pulled the poodle collar still higher above his ears, and went out with only his nose exposed to the influence of the atmosphere.
Henry Dunbar shut the door, and walked to one of the windows. He leaned his forehead against the glass, and looked out, watching the tall figure of the Major, as he walked rapidly along the broad carriage-drive that skirted the lawn.
The banker watched his shabby acquaintance until Major Vernon was quite out of sight. Then he went back to the fireplace, dropped heavily into his chair, and gave a long groan. It was not a sigh, it was a groan — a groan that seemed to come from a bosom that was rent by all the agony of despair.
“This decides it!” he muttered to himself. “Yes, this decides it! I’ve seen it for a long time coming to a crisis. But this settles everything.”
He got up, passed his hand across his forehead and over his eyelids, like a man who had just been awakened from a long sleep; and then went to play his part in the grand business of the day.
There is a very wide difference between the feelings of the poor adventurer — who, by some lucky accident, is enabled to pounce upon a rich friend — and the sentiments of the wealthy victim who is pounced upon. Nothing could present a stronger contrast than the manner of Henry Dunbar, the banker, and the gentleman who had elected to be called Major Vernon. Whereas Mr. Dunbar seemed plunged into the uttermost depths of despair by the sudden appearance of his old acquaintance, the worthy Major exhibited a delight that was almost uproarious in its manifestation.
It was not until he found himself in a very lonely part of the park, where there were no other witnesses than the timid deer, lurking here and there under the poor shelter of a clump of leafless elms — it was not till Major Vernon felt himself quite alone, that he gave way to the full exuberance of his spirits.
“It’s a gold-mine!” he cried, rubbing his hands; “it’s a regular California!”
He executed a grim caper in his delight, and the scared deer fled away from the neighbourhood of his path; perhaps they took him for some modern gnome, dancing wild dances in the wet woodland. He laughed aloud, with a hollow, fiendish-sounding laugh, and then clapped his hands together till the noise of his brawny palms echoed in the rustic silence.
“Henry Dunbar,” he said to himself; “Henry Dunbar! He’ll be a milch cow — nothing but a milch cow. If —” he stopped suddenly, and the triumphant grin upon his face changed to a thoughtful expression. “If he doesn’t run away,” he said, standing quite still, and rubbing his chin slowly with the palm of his hand. “What if he should give me the slip? He might do that!”
But, after a moment’s pause, he laughed aloud again, and walked on briskly.
“No, he’ll not do that,” he said; “it won’t serve his turn to run away.”
While Major Vernon went back to Lisford, Henry Dunbar took his seat at the breakfast-table, with Laura Lady Jocelyn by his side.
There was very little more gaiety at the wedding-breakfast than there had been at the wedding. Everything was very elegant, very subdued, and aristocratic. Silent footmen glided noiselessly backwards and forwards behind the chairs of the guests; champagne, Moselle, hock, and Burgundy sparkled in shallow glasses that were shaped like the broad leaf of a water-lily. Dresden-china shepherdesses, in the centre of the oval table, held up their chintz-patterned aprons filled with some forced strawberries that had cost about half-a-crown apiece. Smirking shepherds supported open-work baskets, laden with tiny Algerian apples, China oranges, and big purple hothouse grapes.
The bride and bridegroom were very happy; but theirs was a subdued and quiet happiness that had little influence upon those around them. The wedding-breakfast was a very silent meal, for the face of the giver of the feast was as gloomy as the sky above Maudesley Abbey; and every now and then, in awkward pauses of the conversation, the pattering of the incessant raindrops sounded upon the windows.
At last the breakfast was finished. A knife had been cunningly inserted in the outer-wall of the splendid cake, and a few morsels of the rich interior, which looked like a kind of portable Day-and-Martin, had been eaten by one of the bridesmaids. Laura Jocelyn rose and left the table, attended by the three young ladies.
Elizabeth Madden was waiting in the bride’s dressing-room with Lady Jocelyn’s travelling-dress laid in state upon a big sofa. She kissed her young Miss, and cried over her a little, before she was equal to begin the business of the toilette: and then the voices of the bridesmaids broke loose, and there was a pleasant buzz of congratulation, which beguiled the time while Laura was exchanging her bridal costume for a long rustling dress of dove-coloured silk, a purple-velvet cloak trimmed and lined with sable, and a miraculous fabric of pale-pink areophane, and starry jasmine-blossoms, which the Parisian milliner facetiously entitled “a bonnet.”
She went down stairs presently in this rich attire, looking like a Russian empress, in all the glory of her youth and beauty. The travelling-carriage was standing at the door; Arthur Lovell and Mr. Dunbar were in the hall with the two clergymen. Laura went up to her father to bid him good-bye.
“It will be a long time before we see each other again, papa dear,” she said, in tones that were only loud enough for Mr. Dunbar to hear; “say ‘God bless you!’ once more before I go.”
Her head was on his breast, and her face lifted up towards his own as she said this.
The banker looked straight before him with a forced smile upon his face, that was little more than a nervous contraction of the muscles about the lips.
“I will give you something better than my blessing, Laura,” he said aloud; “I have given you no wedding-present yet, but I have not forgotten. The gift I mean to present to you will take some time to prepare. I shall give you the handsomest diamond-necklace that was ever made in England. I shall buy the diamonds myself, and have them set according to my own design.”
The bridesmaids gave a little murmur of delight.
Laura pressed the speaker’s cold hand.
“I don’t want any diamonds, papa,” she whispered; “I only want your love.”
Mr. Dunbar did not make any response to that entreating whisper. There was no time for any answer, perhaps, for the bride and bridegroom had to catch an appointed train at Shorncliffe station, which was to take them on the first stage of their Continental journey; and in the bustle and confusion of their hurried departure, the banker had no opportunity of saying anything more to his daughter. But he stood in the Gothic porch, watching the departing carriage with a kind of mournful tenderness in his face.
“I hope that she will be happy,” he muttered to himself as he went back to the house. “Heaven knows I hope she may be happy.”
He did not stop to make any ceremonious adieu to his guests, but walked straight to his own apartments. People were accustomed to his strange manners, and were very indulgent towards his foibles.
Arthur Lovell and the three bridesmaids lingered a little in the blue drawing-room. The Melvilles were to drive home to their father’s house in the afternoon, and Dora Macmahon was going with them. She was to stay at their father’s house a few weeks, and was then to go back to her aunt in Scotland.
“But I am to pay my darling Laura an early visit at Jocelyn’s Rock,” she said, when Arthur made some inquiry about her arrangements; “that has been all settled.”
The ladies and the young lawyer took an afternoon tea together before they left Maudesley, and were altogether very sociable, not to say merry. It was upon this occasion that Arthur Lovell, for the first time in his life, observed that Dora Macmahon had very beautiful brown eyes, and rippling brown hair, and the sweetest smile he had ever seen — except in one lovely face, which was like the splendour of the noonday sun, and seemed to extinguish all lesser lights.
The carriage was announced at last; and Mr. Lovell had enough to do in attending to the three young ladies, and the stowing away of all those bonnet-boxes, and shawls, and travelling-bags, and desks, and dressing-cases, and odd volumes of books, and umbrellas, parasols, and sketching-portfolios, which are the peculiar attributes of all female travellers. And then, when all was finished, and he had bowed for the last time in acknowledgment of those friendly becks and wreathed smiles which greeted him from the carriage-window till it disappeared in the curve of the avenue, Arthur Lovell walked slowly home, thinking of the business of the day.
Laura was lost to him for ever. The dreadful grief which had so long brooded darkly over his life had come down upon him at last, and the pang had not been so insupportable as he had expected it to be.
“I never had any hope,” he thought to himself, as he walked along the soddened road between the gates of Maudesley and the old town that lay before him. “I never really hoped that Laura Dunbar would be my wife.”
John Lovell’s house was one of the best in the town of Shorncliffe. It was a queer old house, with a sloping roof, and gable-ends of solid oak, adorned here and there by grim devices, carved by a skilful hand. It was a large house; but low and straggling; and unpretending in its exterior. The red light of a fire was shining in a wainscoted chamber, half sitting-room, half library. The crimson curtains were not yet drawn across the diamond-paned window. Arthur Lovell looked into the room as he passed, and saw his father sitting by the fire, with a newspaper at his feet.
There was no need to bolt doors against thieves and vagabonds in such a quiet town as Shorncliffe. Arthur Lovell turned the handle of the street door and went in. The door of his father’s sitting-room was ajar, and the lawyer heard his son’s step in the hall.
“Is that you, Arthur?” he asked.
“Yes, father,” the young man answered, going into the room.
“I want to speak to you very particularly. I suppose this wedding at Maudesley Abbey has put all serious business out of your head.”
“What serious business, father?”
“Have you forgotten Lord Herriston’s offer?”
“The offer of the appointment in India? Oh, no, father, I have not forgotten, only ——”
“Only what?”
“I have not been able to decide.”
As he spoke, Arthur Lovell thought of Laura Dunbar. No; she was Laura Jocelyn now. It was a hard thing for the young man to think of her by that new name. Would it not be better for him to go away — to put immeasurable distance between himself and the woman he had loved so dearly? Would it not be better and wiser to go away? And yet what if by so doing he turned his back upon another chance of happiness? What if a lesser star than that which had gone down in the darkness might now be rising dim and distant in the pale grey sky?
“There is no reason that I should decide in a hurry,” the young man said, presently. “Lord Herriston told you that I might take twelve months to think about his offer.”
“He did,” answered John Lovell; “but half of the time is gone, and I’ve had a letter from Lord Herriston by this afternoon’s post. He wants your decision immediately; for a connection of his own has applied to him for the appointment. He still holds to his promise, and will give you the preference; but you must make up your mind at once.”
“Do you wish me to go to India, father?”
“Do I wish you to go to India! Of course not, my dear boy, unless your own ambition takes you there. Remember, you are an only son. You have no occasion to leave this place. You will inherit a very good practice and a comfortable fortune. I thought you were ambitious, and that Shorncliffe was too narrow a sphere for your ambition, or else I should never have entertained any idea of this Indian appointment.”
“And you will not be sorry if I remain in England?”
“Sorry! No, indeed; I shall be very glad. Do you suppose, when a man has only one son, a handsome, clever, high-minded young fellow, whose presence is like sunshine in his father’s gloomy old house — do you think the father wants to get rid of the lad? If you do think so, you must have a very small idea of parental affection.”
“Then I’ll refuse the appointment, father.”
“God bless you, my boy!” exclaimed the lawyer.
The letter to Lord Herriston was written that night; and Arthur Lovell resigned himself to a perpetual residence in that quiet town; within a mile of which the towers of Jocelyn’s Rock crowned the tall cliff above the rushing waters of the Avon.
Mr. Dunbar had given all necessary directions for the reception of his shabby friend.
The Major was ushered at once to the tapestried room, where the banker was still sitting at the dinner-table. He had that meal laid upon a round table near the fire, and the room looked a very picture of comfort and luxury as Major Vernon went into it, fresh from the black foggy night, and the leafless avenue, where the bare trunks of the elms looked like gigantic shadows looming through the obscurity.
The Major’s eyes were almost dazzled by the brightness of that pleasant chamber. This man was a reprobate; but he had begun life as a gentleman. He remembered such a room as this long ago, across a dreary gulf of forty ill-spent years. The sight of this room brought back the memory of a pretty lamplit parlour, with an old man sitting in a high-backed easy-chair: a genial matron bending over her work; two fair-faced girls; a favourite mastiff stretched full length upon the hearth; and, last of all, a young man at home from college, yawning over a sporting newspaper, weary to death of all the simple innocent delights of home, sick of the companionship of gentle sisters, the love of a fond mother, and wishing to be back again at the old uproarious wine-parties, the drunken orgies, the card-playing and prize-fighting, the extravagance and debauchery of the bad set in which he was a chief.
The Major gave a profound sigh as he looked round the room. But the melancholy shadow on his face changed into a grim smile, as he glanced from the tapestried walls and curtained window, with a great Indian jar of hothouse flowers standing upon an inlaid table before it, and filling the room with a faint perfume of jasmine and almond, to the figure of Henry Dunbar.
“It’s comfortable,” said Major Vernon; “to say the least of it, it’s very comfortable. And with a balance of half a million or so at one’s banker’s, or in one’s own bank — which is better still perhaps — one is not so badly off, eh, Mr. Dunbar?”
“Sit down and eat one of those birds,” answered the banker. “I’ll talk to you by-and-by.”
The Major obeyed his friend; he unwound three or four yards of dingy woollen stuff from his scraggy throat, turned down the poodle collar, pulled his chair close to the table, squared his brows, and began business. He made very light of a brace of partridges and a bottle of sparkling Moselle.
When the table had been cleared, and the two men left alone together, Major Vernon stretched his long legs upon the hearth-rug, plunged his hands deep down in his trousers’ pockets, and gave a sigh of satisfaction.
“And now,” said Mr. Dunbar, filling his glass from the starry crystal claret-jug, “what is it that you want to say to me, Stephen Vallance, or Major Vernon, or whatever ridiculous name you may call yourself — what is it you’ve got to say?”
“I’ll tell you that in a very few words,” answered the Major, quietly; “I want to talk to you about the man who was murdered at Winchester some months ago.”
The banker’s hand lost its steadiness, the neck of the claret-jug knocked against the thin lip of the glass, and shivered it into half-a-dozen pieces.
“You’ll spill your wine,” said Major Vernon. “I’m very sorry for you if your nerves are no better than that.”
When Major Vernon that night left his friend, he carried away with him half-a-dozen cheques for different amounts, making in all two thousand pounds, upon that private banking-account which Mr. Dunbar kept for himself in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
It was after midnight when the banker opened the hall-door, and passed out with the Major upon the broad stone flags under the Gothic porch. There was no rain now; but it was very dark, and the north-easterly winds were blowing amongst the leafless branches of giant oaks and elms.
“Shall you present those cheques yourself?” Henry Dunbar asked, as the two men were about to part.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Dress yourself decently, then, before you do so,” said the banker; “they’d wonder what dealings you and I could have together, if you were to show yourself in St. Gundolph Lane in your present costume.”
“My friend is proud,” exclaimed the Major, with a mock tragic accent; “he is proud, and he despises his humble dependant.”
“Good night,” said Mr. Dunbar, rather abruptly; “it’s past twelve o’clock, and I’m tired.”
“To be sure. You’re tired. Do you — do you — sleep well?” asked Major Vernon, in a whisper. There was no mock solemnity in his tone now.
The banker turned away from him with a muttered oath. The light of a lamp suspended from the groined roof of the porch shone upon the two men’s faces. Henry Dunbar’s countenance was overclouded by a black frown, and was by no means agreeable to look upon; but the grinning face of the Major, the thin lips wreathed into a malicious smile, the small black eyes glittering with a sinister light, looked like the face of a Mephistopheles.
“Good night,” repeated the banker, turning his back upon his friend, and about to re-enter the house.
Major Vernon laid his bony fingers upon Henry Dunbar’s shoulder, and stopped him before he could cross the threshold.
“You’ve given me two thou’,” he said; “that’s liberal enough to start with; but I’m an old man; I’m tired of the life of a vagabond, and I want to live like a gentleman; — not as you do, of course; that’s out of the question; it isn’t everybody that has the good luck to be a millionaire, like Henry Dunbar; but I want a bottle of claret with my dinner, a good coat upon my back, and a five-pound note in my pocket constantly. You must do as much as that for me; eh, dear boy?”
“I don’t refuse to do it, do I?” asked Henry Dunbar, impatiently; “I should think what you’ve got in your pocket already is a pretty good beginning.”
“My dear fellow, it’s a stupendous beginning!” exclaimed Major Vernon; “it’s a princely beginning; it’s a Napoleonic beginning. But that two thou isn’t meant for a blind, is it? It’s not to be the beginning, middle, and the end? You’re not going to do the gentle bolt — eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to run away? You’re not going to renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and make an early expedition across the herring-pond — eh, friend of my soul?”
“Why should I run away?” asked Henry Dunbar, sternly.
“That’s the very thing I say myself, dear boy. Why should you? A wise man doesn’t run away from landed estates, and fine houses, and half a million of money. But when you broke that claret-glass after dinner, it struck me somehow that you were — shall I venture the word? —rather nervous! Nervous people do all manner of things. Give me your word that you’re not going to bolt, and I’m satisfied.”
“I tell you, I have no such idea in my mind,” Mr. Dunbar answered, with increasing impatience. “Will that do?”
“It will, dear boy. Your hand upon it! What a cold hand you’ve got! Take care of yourself; and once more — good night!”
“You’re going to London?”
“Yes — to cash the cheques, and make a few business arrangements.”
Mr. Dunbar bolted the great door as the footsteps of his friend the Major died away upon the gravelled walk, which had been quickly dried by the frosty wind. The banker had dismissed his servants at ten o’clock that night; so there was nobody to wait upon him, or to watch him, when he went back to the tapestried room.
He sat by the low fire for a little time, thinking, with a settled gloom upon his face, and drinking Burgundy out of a tumbler. Then he went to bed; and the light of the night-lamp shining upon his face as he slept, showed it distorted by strange shadows, that were not altogether the shadows of the draperies above his head.
Major Vernon walked briskly down the long avenue leading to the lodge-gates.
“Two thou’ is comfortable,” he muttered to himself; “very satisfactory for a first go-in at the gold-diggin’s! but I shall expect my California to produce a little more than that before we close the shaft, and retire upon the profits of the speculation. I think my friend is safe — I don’t think he’ll run away. But I shall keep my eye upon him, nevertheless. The human eye is a great institution; and I shall watch my friend.”
In spite of a natural eagerness to transform those oblong slips of paper — the cheques signed with the well-known name of Henry Dunbar — into the still more convenient and flimsy paper circulating medium dispensed by the Old Lady in Threadneedle Street, or the yellow coinage of the realm, Major Vernon did not seem in any very great hurry to leave Lisford.
A great many of the Lisfordians had seen the shabby stranger take his seat in Henry Dunbar’s carriage, side by side with the great banker. This fact became universally known throughout the parish of Lisford and two neighbouring parishes, before the shadows of night came down upon the day of Laura Dunbar’s wedding, and the Major was respected accordingly.
He was shabby, certainly; queer-about the heels of his boots; and very mangy with regard to the poodle collar. His hat was more shiny than was consistent with the hat-manufacturing interest. His bony hands were red and bare, and only one miserable mockery of a glove dangled between his thumb and finger as he swaggered along the village street.
But he had been seen riding in Henry Dunbar’s carriage, and from that moment he had become invested with a romantic interest. He was a reduced gentleman, who had seen better days; or he was a miser, perhaps — an eccentric individual, who wore shabby boots and shiny hats for his own love and pleasure.
People paid respect, therefore, to the stranger at the Rose and Crown, and touched their hats to him as he went in and out, and were glad to answer any questions he chose to put to them as he loitered about the village. He contrived to find out a good deal in this way about things in general, and the habits of Henry Dunbar in particular. The banker had given his shabby acquaintance a handful of sovereigns for present use, as well as the cheques; and the Major was able to live upon the best the Rose and Crown could afford, and pay liberally for all he consumed.
“I find the Warwickshire air agree with me remarkably well,” he said to the landlord, as he sat at breakfast in the bar-parlour, upon the second day after his interview with Henry Dunbar; “and if you know of any snug little box in the neighbourhood that would suit a lonely old bachelor with a comfortable income, and nobody to help him spend it, why, I really should have a very great inclination to take it, and furnish it.”
The landlord scratched his head, and reflected for a few minutes. Then he slapped his leg with a sounding and triumphant slap.
“I know the very thing as would suit you, Major Vernon,” he said — the Major had assumed the name of Vernon, as agreed upon between himself and Henry Dunbar —“the very thing,” repeated the landlord; “you might say it had been made to order like. There’s a sale comes off next Thursday. Mr. Grogson, the Shorncliffe auctioneer, will sell, at eleven o’clock precisely, the furniture and lease of the snuggest little box in these parts — Woodbine Cottage it’s called — a sweet pretty little place, as was the property of old Admiral Manders. The admiral died in the house, and having been a bachelor, and his money having gone to distant relatives, the lease and furniture of the cottage will be sold. But I should think,” added the landlord, gravely, looking rather doubtfully at his guest as he spoke, “I should think the lease and furniture, pictures and plate, will fetch a matter of eight hundred to a thousand pound; and perhaps you mightn’t care to go to that?”
The landlord could not refrain from glancing furtively at the white and shining aspect of the cloth that covered the sharp knees of his customer, which were exactly under his eyes as the two men sat opposite to each other beside the snug little round table.
“You mightn’t care to go to that price,” he repeated, as he helped himself to about three-quarters of a pound of cold ham.
The Major lifted his bristly eyebrows with a contemptuous twitch.
“If the cottage suits me,” he said, “I don’t mind a thousand for it. To-day’s Saturday; — I shall run up to town to-morrow, or Monday morning, to settle a bit of business I’ve got on hand, and come back here in time to attend the sale.”
“My wife and me was thinkin’ of goin’ sir,” the landlord answered, with, unwonted reverence in his voice; and, if it was agreeable, we could drive you over in a four-wheel shay. Woodbine Cottage is about a mile and a half from here, and little better than a mile from Maudesley Abbey. There’s a copper coal-scuttle of the old admiral’s as my wife has got rather a fancy for. But p’raps if you was to make a hoffer previous to the sale, the property might be disposed of as it stands by private contrack.”
“I’ll see about that,” answered Major Vernon. “I’ll stroll over to Shorncliffe, this, morning, and look in upon Mr. Grogson — Grogson, I think you said was the auctioneer’s name?”
“Yes, sir; Peter Grogson, and very much looked up to be is, and a warm man, folks do say. His offices is in Shorncliffe High Street, sir; next door but two from Mr. Lovell’s, the solicitor’s, and not more than half-a-dozen yards from St. Gwendoline’s Church.”
Major Vernon, as he now chose to call himself, walked from Lisford to Shorncliffe. He was a very good walker, and, indeed, had become pretty well used to pedestrian exercise in the course of long weary trampings from one racecourse to another, when he was so far down on his luck as to be unable to pay his railway fare. The frost had set in for the first time this year; so the roads were dry and hard once more, and the sound of horses’ hoofs and rolling wheels, the jingling of bells, the occasional barking of a noisy sheep-dog, and sturdy labourers’ voices calling to each other on the high-road, travelled far in the thin frosty air.
The town of Shorncliffe was very quiet to-day, for it was only on market-days that there was much life or bustle in the queer old streets, and Major Vernon found no hindrance to the business that had brought him from Lisford.
He went straight to Mr. Grogson, the auctioneer, and from that gentleman heard all particulars respecting the pending sale at Woodbine Cottage. The Major offered to take the lease at a fair price, and the furniture, as it stood, by valuation.
“All I want is a comfortable little place that I can jump into without any trouble to myself,” Major Vernon said, with the air of a man of the world. “I like to take life easily. If you can honestly recommend the place as worth seven or eight hundred pounds, I’m willing to pay that money for it down on the nail. I’ll take it at your valuation, if the present owners are agreeable to sell it on those terms, and I’ll pay a deposit of a couple of hundred or so on Tuesday afternoon, to show that my proposition is a bona fide one.”
A little more was said, and then Mr. Grogson pledged himself to act for the best in the interests of Major Vernon, consistently with his allegiance to the present owners of the property.
The auctioneer had been at first a little doubtful of this tall, shabby stranger in the napless dirty-white beaver and the mangy poodle collar; but the offer of a deposit of two hundred pounds or so gave a different aspect to the case. There are always eccentric people in the world, and appearances are very apt to be deceptive. There was a confident air about the Major which seemed like that of a man with a balance at his banker’s.
The Major went back to the Rose and Crown, ate a comfortable little dinner, which he had ordered before setting out for Shorncliffe, paid his bill, and made all arrangements for starting by the first train for London on the following morning. It was nearly ten o’clock by the time he had done this: but late as it was, Major Vernon put on his hat, turned his poodle collar up about his ears, and went out into Lisford High Street.
There was scarcely one glimmer of light in the street as the Major walked along it. He took the road leading to Maudesley Abbey, and walked at a brisk pace, heedless of the snow, which was still falling thick and fast.
He was covered from head to foot with snow when he stopped before the stone porch, and rang a bell, that made a clanging noise in the stillness of the night. He looked like some grim white statue that had descended from its pedestal to stalk hither and thither in the darkness.
The servant who opened the door yawned undisguisedly in the face of his master’s friend.
“Tell Mr. Dunbar that I shall be glad to speak to him for a few minutes,” the Major said, making as if he would have passed into the hall.
“Mr. Dunbar left the habbey uppards of a hour ago,” the footman answered, with supreme hauteur; “but he left a message for you, in case you was to come. The period of his habsence is huncertain, and if you wants to kermoonicate with him, you was to please to wait till he come back.”
Major Vernon pushed aside the servant, and strode into the hall. The doors were open, and through two or three intermediate rooms the Major saw the tapestried chamber, dark and empty.
There was no doubt that Henry Dunbar had given him the slip — for the time, at least; but did the banker mean mischief? was there any deep design in this sudden departure? — that was the question.
“I’ll write to your master,” the Major said, after a pause; “what’s his London address?”
“Mr. Dunbar left no address.”
“Humph! That’s no matter. I can write to him at the bank. Good night.”
Major Vernon stalked away through the snow. The footman made no response to his parting civility, but stood watching him for a few moments, and then closed the door with a bang.
“Hif that’s a spessermin of your Hinjun acquaintances, I don’t think much of Hinjur or Hinjun serciety. But what can you expect of a nation as insults the gentleman who waits behind his employer’s chair at table by callin’ him a kitten-muncher?”
Henry Dunbar arrived in London a couple of hours after Mr. Vernon left the Abbey. He went straight to the Clarendon Hotel. He had no servant with him, and his luggage consisted only of a portmanteau, a dressing-case, and a despatch-box; the same despatch-box whose contents he had so carefully studied at the Winchester hotel, upon the night of the murder in the grove.
The day after his arrival was Sunday, and all that day the banker occupied himself in reading a morocco-bound manuscript volume, which he took from the despatch-box.
There was a black fog upon this November day, and the atmosphere out of doors was cold and bleak. But the room in which Henry Dunbar sat looked the very picture of comfort and elegance.
He had drawn his chair close to the fire, and on a table near his elbow were arranged the open despatch-box, a tall crystal jug of Burgundy, with a goblet-shaped glass, on a salver, and a case of cigars.
Until long after dark that evening, Henry Dunbar sat by the fire, smoking and drinking, and reading the manuscript volume. He only paused now and then to take pencil-notes of its contents in a little memorandum-book, which he carried in the breast-pocket of his coat.
It was not till seven o’clock, when the liveried servant who waited upon him came to inform him that his dinner was served in an adjoining chamber, that Mr. Dunbar rose from his seat and put away the book in the despatch-box. He laid down the volume on the table while he replaced other papers in the box, and it fell open at the first page. On that first page was written, in Henry Dunbar’s bold, legible hand —
“Journal of my life in India, from my arrival in 1815 until my departure in 1850.”
This was the book the banker had been studying all that winter’s day.
At twelve o’clock the next day he ordered a brougham, and was driven to the banking-house in St. Gundolph Lane. This was the first time that Henry Dunbar had visited the house in St. Gundolph Lane since his return from India.
Those who knew the history of the present chief partner of the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby, were in nowise astonished by this fact. They knew that, as a young man, Henry Dunbar had contracted the tastes and habits of an aristocrat, and that, if he had afterwards developed into a clever and successful man of business, it was only by reason of the force of circumstances, which had thrust him into a position that he hated.
It was by no means wonderful, then, that, after becoming possessor of the united fortunes of his father and his uncle, Henry Dunbar should keep aloof from a place that had always been obnoxious to him. The business had gone on without him very well during his absence, and it went on without him now, for his place in India had been assumed by a very clever man, who for twenty years had acted as cashier in the Calcutta house.
It may be that the banker had an unpleasant recollection of his last visit to St. Gundolph Lane, upon the day when the existence of the forged bills was discovered by Percival and Hugh Dunbar. All the width of thirty-five years between the present hour and that day might not be wide enough to separate the memory of the past from the thoughts which were busy this morning in the mind of Henry Dunbar.
Be it as it might, Mr. Dunbar’s reflections this day were evidently not of a pleasant nature. He was very pale as he rode citywards, in the comfortable brougham, from the Clarendon; and his face had a stern, fixed look, like a man who has nerved himself to meet some crisis, which he knows is near at hand.
There was a stoppage upon Ludgate Hill. Great wooden barricades and mountains of uprooted paving-stones, amidst which sturdy navigators disported themselves with spades and pickaxes, and wheelbarrows full of rubbish, blocked the way; so the brougham turned into Farringdon Street, and went up Snow Hill, and under the grim black walls of dreadful Newgate.
The vehicle travelled very slowly, for the traffic was concentrated in this quarter by reason of the stoppage on Ludgate Hill, and Mr. Dunbar was able to contemplate at his leisure the black prison-walls, and the men and women selling dogs’-collars under their dismal shadows.
It may be that the banker’s face grew a shade paler after that contemplation. The corners of his mouth twitched nervously as he got out of the carriage before the mahogany doors of the banking-house in St. Gundolph Lane. But he drew a long breath, and held his head proudly erect as he pushed open the doors and went in.
Never since the day of the discovery of the forged bills had that man entered the banking-house. Dark thoughts came back upon his mind, and the shadows deepened on his face as he gave one rapid glance round the familiar office.
He walked straight towards the private parlour in which that well-remembered scene had occurred five-and-thirty years ago. But before he arrived at the door leading from the public offices to the back of the house, he was stopped by a gentlemanly-looking man, who came forward from a desk in some shadowy region, and intercepted the stranger.
This man was Clement Austin, the cashier.
“Do you wish to see Mr. Balderby, sir?” he asked.
“Yes. I have an appointment with him at one o’clock. My name is Dunbar.”
The cashier bowed and opened the door. The banker passed across the threshold, which he had not crossed for five-and-thirty years until to-day.
But as Mr. Dunbar went towards the familiar parlour at the back of the banking-house, he stopped for a minute, and looked at the cashier.
Clement Austin was scarcely less pale than Henry Dunbar himself. He had heard of the banker’s intended visit to St. Gundolph Lane, and had looked forward with strange anxiety to a meeting with the man whom Margaret Wilmot declared to be the murderer of her father. Now that the meeting had come to pass, he looked at Henry Dunbar with an earnest, scrutinizing gaze, as if he would fain have discovered the secret of the man’s guilt or innocence in his countenance.
The banker’s face was pale, and grave, and stern; but Clement Austin knew that for Henry Dunbar there were very humiliating and unpleasant circumstances connected with the offices in St. Gundolph Lane, and it was scarcely to be expected that a man would come smiling into a place out of which he had gone five-and-thirty years before a disgraced and degraded creature.
For a few moments the two men paused in the passage between the public offices and the private parlour, looking at each other.
The banker’s gaze never flinched during that encounter. It is taken as a strong proof of a man’s innocence that he should look you full in the face with a steadfast gaze when you look at him with suspicion plainly visible in your eyes; but would he not be the poorest villain if he shirked that encounter of glances when he knows full surely that he is in that moment put to the test? It is rather innocence whose eyelids drop when you peer too closely into its eyes, for innocence is appalled by the stern, accusing glances which it is unprepared to meet. Guilt stares you boldly in the face, for guilt is hardened and defiant, and has this one grand superiority over innocence — that it is prepared for the worst.
Clement Austin opened the door of Mr. Balderby’s parlour; Mr. Dunbar went in unannounced. The cashier closed the parlour-door and returned to his desk in the public office.
The junior partner was sitting at an office table near the fire writing, but he rose as the banker entered the room, and went forward to meet him.
“You are very punctual, Mr. Dunbar,” he said.
“Yes, I am generally punctual.”
The two men shook hands, and Mr. Balderby wheeled forward a morocco-covered arm-chair for his senior partner, and then took his seat opposite to him, with only the small office table between them.
“It may seem late in the day to bid you welcome to the bank, Mr. Dunbar,” said the junior partner, “but I do so, nevertheless — most heartily!”
There was a flatness in the accent in which these two last words were spoken, which was like the sound of a false coin when it falls dead upon a counter and proclaims itself spurious.
Henry Dunbar did not return his partner’s greeting. He was looking round the room, and remembering the day upon which he had last seen it. There was very little alteration in the appearance of the dismal city chamber. There was the same wire-blind before the window, the same solitary tree, leafless, in the narrow courtyard without. The morocco-covered arm-chairs had been re-covered, perhaps, during that five-and-thirty years; but if so, the covering had grown shabby again. Even the Turkey carpet was in the very stage of dusky dinginess that had distinguished the carpet on which Henry Dunbar had stood five-and-thirty years before.
“I received your letter announcing your journey to London, and your desire for a private interview, on Saturday afternoon,” Mr. Balderby said, after a pause. “I have made arrangements to assure our being undisturbed so long as you may remain here. If you wish to make any investigation of the affairs of the house, I——”
Mr. Dunbar waved his hand with a deprecatory air.
“Nothing is farther from my thoughts than any such design,” he said. “No, Mr. Balderby, I have only been a man of business because all chance of another career, which I infinitely preferred, was closed upon me five-and-thirty years ago. I am quite content to be a sleeping-partner in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby. For ten years prior to my father’s death he took no active part in the business. The house got on very well without his aid; it will get on equally well without mine. The business that brings me to London is an entirely personal matter. I am a rich man, but I don’t exactly know how rich I am, and I want to realize rather a large sum of money.”
Mr. Balderby bowed, but his eyebrows went up a little, as if he found it impossible to control some slight evidence of his surprise.
“Previous to my daughter’s marriage I settled upon her the house in Portland Place and the Yorkshire property. She will have all my money when I die; and, as Sir Philip Jocelyn is a rich man, she will perhaps be one of the wealthiest women in England. So far so good. Neither Laura nor her husband will have any reason for dissatisfaction. But this is not quite enough, Mr. Balderby. I am not a demonstrative man, and I have never made any great fuss about my love for my daughter; but I do love her, nevertheless.”
Mr. Dunbar spoke very slowly here, and stopped once or twice to pass his handkerchief across his forehead, as he had done in the hotel at Winchester.
“We Anglo-Indians have rather a magnificent way of doing things, Mr. Balderby” he continued, “when we take it into our heads to do them at all. I want to give my daughter a diamond-necklace as a wedding present, and I want it to be such as an Eastern prince or a Rothschild might offer to his only child. You understand?”
“Oh, perfectly,” answered Mr. Balderby; “I shall be most happy to be of any use to you in the matter.”
“All I want is a large sum of money at my command. I may go rather recklessly to work and make a large investment in this necklace; it will be something for Lady Jocelyn to bequeath to her children. You and John Lovell, of Shorncliffe, were the executors to my father’s will. You signed an order for the transfer of my father’s money to my account some time in last September.”
“I did, in concurrence with Mr. Lovell.”
“Precisely; Lovell wrote me a letter to that effect. My father kept two accounts here, I believe — a deposit and a drawing account?”
“He did.”
“And those two accounts have gone on since my return in the same manner as during his lifetime?”
“Precisely. The income which Mr. Percival Dunbar set aside for his own use was seven thousand a year. He rarely, spent as much as that; sometimes he spent less than half. The balance of this income, and his double share in the profits of the business, went to the credit of his deposit account, and various sums have been withdrawn from time to time, and duly invested under his order.”
“Perhaps you can let me see the ledgers containing those two accounts?”
“Most certainly.”
Mr. Balderby touched the spring of a handbell upon his table.
“Ask Mr. Austin to bring the daily balance and deposit accounts ledgers,” he said to the person who answered his summons.
Clement Austin appeared five minutes afterwards, carrying two ponderous morocco-bound volumes.
Mr. Balderby opened both ledgers, and placed them before his senior partner. Henry Dunbar looked at the deposit account. His eyes ran eagerly down the long row of figures before him until they came to the sum total. Then his chest heaved, and he drew a long breath, like a man who feels almost stifled by some internal oppression.
The last figures in the page were these:
137,926l. 17s. 2d.
One hundred and thirty-seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-six pounds seventeen shillings and twopence. The twopence seemed a ridiculous anti-climax; but business-men are necessarily as exact in figures as calculating-machines.
“How is this money invested?” asked Henry Dunbar, pointing to the page. His fingers trembled a little as he did so, and he dropped his hand suddenly upon the ledger.
“There’s fifty thousand in India stock,” Mr. Balderby answered, as indifferently as if fifty thousand pounds more or less was scarcely worth speaking of; “and there’s five-and-twenty in railway debentures, Great Western. Most of the remainder is floating in Exchequer bills.”
“Then you can realize the Exchequer bills?”
Mr. Balderby winced as if some one had trodden upon one of his corns. He was a banker heart and soul, and he did not at all relish the idea of any withdrawal of the bank’s resources, however firm that establishment might stand.
“It’s rather a large amount of capital to withdraw from the business,” he said, rubbing his chin, thoughtfully.
“I suppose the bank can afford it!” Mr. Dunbar exclaimed, with a tone of surprise.
“Oh, yes; the bank can afford it well enough. Our calls are sometimes heavy. Lord Yarsfield — a very old customer — talks of buying an estate in Wales; he may come down upon us at any moment for a very stiff sum of money. However, the capital is yours, Mr. Dunbar; and you’ve a right to dispose of it as you please. The Exchequer bills shall be realized immediately.”
“Good; and if you can dispose of the railway bonds to advantage, you may do so.”
“You think of spending ——”
“I think of reinvesting the money. I have an offer of an estate north of the metropolis, which I think will realize cent per cent a few years hence: but that is an after consideration. At present we have only to do with the diamond-necklace for my daughter. I shall buy the diamonds myself, direct from the merchant-importers. You will hold yourself ready after Wednesday, we’ll say, to cash some very heavy cheques on my account?”
“Certainly, Mr. Dunbar.”
“Then I think that is really all I have to say. I shall be happy to see you at the Clarendon, if you will dine with me any evening that you are disengaged.”
There was very little heartiness in the tone of this invitation; and Mr. Balderby perfectly understood that it was only a formula which Mr. Dunbar felt himself called upon to go through. The junior partner murmured his acknowledgment of Henry Dunbar’s politeness; and then the two men talked together for a few minutes on indifferent subjects.
Five minutes afterwards Mr. Dunbar rose to leave the room. He went into the passage between Mr. Balderby’s parlour and the public offices of the bank. This passage was very dark; but the offices were well lighted by lofty plate-glass windows. Between the end of the passage and the outer doors of the bank, Henry Dunbar saw the figure of a woman sitting near one of the desks and talking to Clement Austin.
The banker stopped suddenly, and went back to the parlour.
He looked about him a little absently as he re-entered the room.
“I thought I brought a cane,” he said.
“I think not,” replied Mr. Balderby, rising from before his desk. “I don’t remember seeing one in your hand.”
“Ah, then, I suppose I was mistaken.”
He still lingered in the parlour, putting on his gloves very slowly, and looking out of the window into the dismal backyard, where there was a dingy little wooden door set deep in the stone wall.
While the banker loitered near the window, Clement Austin came into the room, to show some document to the junior partner. Henry Dunbar turned round as the cashier was about to leave the parlour.
“I saw a woman just now talking to you in the office. That’s not very business-like, is it, Mr. Austin? Who is the woman?”
“She is a young lady, sir.”
“A young lady?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What brings her here?”
The cashier hesitated for a moment before he replied, “She — wishes to see you, Mr. Dunbar,” he said, after that brief pause.
“What is her name? — who — who is she?”
“Her name is Wilmot — Margaret Wilmot.”
“I know no such person!” answered the banker, haughtily, but looking nervously at the half-opened door as he spoke.
“Shut that door, sir!” he said, impatiently, to the cashier; “the draught from the passage is strong enough to cut a man in two. Who is this Margaret Wilmot?”
“The daughter of that unfortunate man, Joseph Wilmot, who was cruelly murdered at Winchester!” answered the cashier, very gravely.
He looked Henry Dunbar full in the face as he spoke.
The banker returned his look as unflinchingly as he had done before, and spoke in a hard, unfaltering voice as he answered: “Tell this person, Margaret Wilmot, that I refuse to see her to-day, as I refused to see her in Portland Place, and as I refused to see her at Winchester!” he said, deliberately. “Tell her that I shall always refuse to see her, whenever or wherever she makes an attack upon me. I have suffered enough already on account of that hideous business at Winchester, and I shall most resolutely defend myself from any further persecution. This young person can have no possible motive for wishing to see me. If she is poor and wants money of me, I am ready and willing to assist her. I have already offered to do so — I can do no more. But if she is in distress ——”
“She is not in distress, Mr. Dunbar,” interrupted Clement Austin. “She has friends who love her well enough to shield her from that.”
“Indeed; and you are one of those friends, I suppose, Mr. Austin?”
“I am.”
“Prove your friendship, then, by teaching Margaret Wilmot that she has a friend and not an enemy in me. If you are — as I suspect from your manner — something more than a friend: if you love her, and she returns your love, marry her, and she shall have a dowry that no gentleman’s wife need be ashamed to bring to her husband.”
There was no anger, no impatience in the banker’s voice now, but a tone of deep feeling. Clement Austin locked at him, astonished by the change in his manner.
Henry Dunbar saw the look, and it seemed as if he endeavoured to answer it.
“You have no need to be surprised that I shrink from seeing Margaret Wilmot,” he said. “Cannot you understand that my nerves may be none of the strongest, and that I cannot endure the idea of an interview with this girl, who, no doubt, by her persistent pursuit of me, suspects me of her father’s murder? I am an old man, and I have been thirty-five years in India. My health is shattered, and I have a horror of all tragic scenes. I have not yet recovered from the shock of that horrible business at Winchester. Go and tell Margaret Wilmot this: tell her that I will be her true friend if she will accept that friendship, but that I will not see her until she has learned to think better of me.”
There was something very straightforward, very simple, in all this. For a time, at least, Clement Austin’s mind wavered. Margaret was, perhaps, wrong, after all, and Henry Dunbar might be an innocent man.
It was Clement who had informed Margaret of Mr. Dunbar’s expected presence here upon this day; and it was on the strength of that information that the girl had come to St. Gundolph Lane, with the determination of seeing the man whom she believed to be the murderer of her father.
Clement returned to the office, where he had left Margaret, in order to repeat to her Mr. Dunbar’s message.
No sooner had the door of the parlour closed upon the cashier than Henry Dunbar turned abruptly to his junior partner.
“There is a door leading from the yard into a court that connects St. Gundolph Lane with another lane at the back,” he said, “is there not?”
He pointed to the dark little yard outside the window as he spoke.
“Yes, there is a door, I believe.”
“Is it locked?”
“No; it is seldom locked till four o’clock; the clerks use it sometimes, when they go in and out.”
“Then I shall go out that way,” said Mr. Dunbar, who was almost breathless in his haste. “You can send the carriage back to the Clarendon by-and-by. I don’t want to see that girl. Good morning.”
He hurried out of the parlour, and into a passage leading to the yard, followed by Mr. Balderby, who wondered at his senior partner’s excitement. The door in the yard was not locked. Henry Dunbar opened it, went out into the court, and closed the door behind him.
So, for the third time, he escaped from an interview with Margaret Wilmot.
For the third time Margaret Wilmot was disappointed in the hope of seeing Henry Dunbar. Clement Austin had on the previous evening told her of the banker’s intended visit to the office in St. Gundolph Lane, and the young music-mistress had made hasty arrangements for the postponement of her usual duties, in order that she might go to the City to see Henry Dunbar.
“He will not dare to refuse you,” Clement Austin said; “for he must know that such a refusal would excite suspicion in the minds of the people about him.”
“He must have known that at Winchester, and yet he avoided me there,” answered Margaret Wilmot; “he must have known it when he refused to see me in Portland Place. He will refuse to see me to-day, if I ask for an interview with him. My only chance will be the chance of an accidental meeting with Him. Do you think that you can arrange this for me, Mr. Austin?”
Clement Austin readily promised to bring about an apparently accidental meeting between Margaret and Mr. Dunbar, and this is how it was that Joseph Wilmot’s daughter had waited in the office in St. Gundolph Lane. She had arrived only five minutes after Mr. Dunbar entered the banking-house, and she waited very patiently, very resolutely, in the hope that when Henry Dunbar returned to his carriage she might snatch the opportunity of speaking to him, of seeing his face, and discovering whether he was guilty or not.
She clung to the idea that some indefinable expression of his countenance would reveal the fact of his guilt or innocence. But she could not dispossess herself of the belief that he was guilty. What other reason could there be for his persistent avoidance of her?
But, for the third time, she was baffled; and she went home very despondently, haunted by the image of her dead father; while Henry Dunbar went back to the Clarendon in a common hack cab, which he picked up in Cornhill.
Margaret Wilmot found one of her pupils waiting in the pretty little parlour in the cottage at Clapham, and she was obliged to sit down to the piano and listen to a fantasia, very badly played, keeping sharp watch upon the pupil’s fingers, for an hour or so, before she was free to think her own thoughts.
Margaret was very glad when the lesson was over. The pupil was a very vivacious young lady, who called her music-mistress “dear,” and would have been glad to waste half an hour or so in an animated conversation about the last new style in bonnets, or the shape of the fashionable winter mantle, or the popular novel of the month. But Margaret’s pale face seemed a mute appeal for compassion; so Miss Lamberton drew on her gloves, settled her bonnet before the glass over the mantel-piece, and tripped away.
Margaret sat by the little round table, with an open book before her. But she could not read, though the volume was one that had been lent her by Clement, and though she took a peculiar pleasure in reading any book that was a favourite of his. She did not read; she only sat with her eyes fixed, and her face very pale, in the dim light of two candles that flickered in the draught from the window.
She was aroused from her despondent reverie by a double knock at the door below, and presently the neat little maid-servant ushered Mr. Austin into the room.
Margaret started up, a little confused at the advent of this unexpected visitor. It was the first time that Clement had ever called upon her alone. He had often been her guest; but, until to-night, he had always come under his mother’s wing to see the pretty music-mistress.
“I am afraid I startled you, Miss Wilmot,” he said.
“Oh, no; not at all,” answered Margaret; “I was sitting here, quite idle, thinking ——”
“Thinking of your failure of to-day, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause, during which Margaret seated herself once more by the little table, while Clement Austin walked up and down the room thinking.
Presently he stopped suddenly, with his elbow leaning upon the corner of the mantel-piece, opposite Margaret, and looked down at the girl’s thoughtful face. She had blushed when the cashier first entered the room; but she was very pale now.
“Margaret,” said Clement Austin — it was the first time he had called his mother’s protégée by her Christian name, and the girl looked up at him with a surprised expression — “Margaret, that which happened to-day makes me think that your conviction is only the horrible truth, and that Henry Dunbar, the sole surviving kinsman of those two men whom I learnt to honour and revere long ago, when I was a mere boy, is indeed guilty of your father’s death. If so, the cause of justice demands that this man’s crime should be brought to light. I am something of Shakspeare’s opinion; I cannot but believe that ‘murder will out,’ somehow or other, sooner or later. But I think that, in this business, the police have been culpably supine. It seems as if they feared to handle the case to closely, lest the clue they followed should lead them to Henry Dunbar.”
“You think they have been, bribed?”
“No; I don’t think that. There seems to be a popular belief, all over the world, that a man with a million of money can do no wrong. I don’t believe the police have been culpable; they have only been faint-hearted. They have suffered themselves to be discouraged by the difficulties of the case. Other crimes have been committed, other work has arisen for them to do, and they have been obliged to abandon an investigation which seemed hopeless. This is how criminals escape — this is how murderers are suffered to be at large; not because discovery is impossible, but because it can only be effected by a slow and wearisome process in which so few men have courage to persevere. While the country is ringing with the record of a great crime — while the murderer is on his guard night and day, waking and sleeping — the police watch and work: but by-and-by, when the crime is half forgotten — when security has made the criminal careless — when the chances of detection are ten-fold — the police have grown tired, and there is no eye to watch the guilty man’s movements. I know nothing of the science of detection, Margaret; but I believe that Henry Dunbar was the murderer of your father; and I will do my uttermost, with God’s help, to bring this crime home to him.”
The girl’s eyes flashed with a proud light, as Clement Austin finished speaking.
“Will you do this?” she said; “will you bring to light the mystery of my father’s death? Will you bring punishment upon his murderer? It seems a horrible thing, perhaps, for a woman to wish detection to overtake any man, however base; but surely it would be more horrible if I were content to let my father’s murder remain unavenged. My poor father! If he had been a good man, I do not think it would grieve me so much to remember his cruel death: but he was not a good man — he was not a good man.”
“Let him have been what he may, Margaret, his murderer shall not go unpunished if I can aid the cause of justice,” said Clement Austin. “But it was not to say this alone that I came here to-night, Margaret. I have something more to say to you.”
There was a tenderness in the cashier’s voice as he said these last words, that brought the blushes back to Margaret’s pale cheeks.
“You know that I love you, Margaret,” Clement said, in a low, earnest voice; “you must know that I love you: or if you do not, it is because there is no sympathy between us, and in that case my love is indeed hopeless. I have loved you from the first, dear — yes, from the very first summer twilight in which I saw your pale, pensive face in the dusky little garden at Wandsworth. The tender interest which I then felt in you was the first mysterious dawn of love, though I, in my infinite wisdom, put it down to an artistic admiration for your peculiar beauty. It was love, Margaret; and it has grown and strengthened in my heart ever since that summer evening, until it leads me here to-night to tell you all, and to ask you if there is any hope. Ah, Margaret, you must have known my love all along! You would have banished me had you felt that my love was hopeless: you could not have been so cruel as to deceive me.”
Margaret looked up at her lover with a frightened face. Had she done wrong, then, to be happy in his society, if she did not love him — if she did not love him! But surely this sudden thrill of triumph and delight which filled her breast, as Clement spoke to her, must be in some degree akin to love.
Yes, she loved him; but the bright things of this world were not for her. Love and Duty fought for the mastery of her pure Soul: and Duty was the conqueror.
“Oh, Clement!” she said, “do you forget who I am? Do you forget that letter which I showed you long ago, a letter addressed to my father when he was a transported felon, suffering the penalty of his crime? Do you forget who I am, and the taint that is in my blood; the disgrace that stains my name? I am proud to think that you have loved me, Clement Austin; but I am no fitting wife for you!”
“You are a noble, true-hearted woman, Margaret; and as such you are a fitting wife for a king. Besides, I am not such a grandee that I need look for high lineage in the wife of my choice. I am only a working man, content to accept a salary for my services; and looking forward by-and-by to a junior partnership in the house I serve. Margaret, my mother loves you; and she knows that you are the woman I seek to win as my wife. Forget the taint upon your dead father’s name as freely as I forget it, dearest; and only answer me one question; Is my love hopeless?”
“I will never consent to be your wife, Mr. Austin!” Margaret answered, in a low voice.
“Because you do not love me?”
“Because I will never cause you to blush for the history of your wife’s girlhood.”
“That is no answer to my question, Margaret,” said Clement Austin, seating himself by her side, and taking both her hands in his. “I must ask you to look me full in the face, Miss Wilmot,” he added, laughingly, drawing her towards him as he spoke; “for I begin to fancy you’re addicted to prevarication. Look me in the face, Madge darling, and tell me that you love me.”
But the blushing face would not be turned towards his own. Margaret’s head was still averted.
“Don’t ask me,” she pleaded; “don’t ask me. The day would come when you would regret your choice. I could not endure that. It would be too bitter. You have been very kind to me; and it would be a poor return for your kindness, if ——”
“If you were to make me unutterably happy, eh, Margaret? I think it would be only a proper act of gratitude. Haven’t I run all over Clapham, Brixton, and Wandsworth — to say nothing of an occasional incursion upon Putney — in order to procure you half-a-dozen pupils? And the very first favour I demand of you, which is only the gift of this clever little hand, you have the audacity to refuse me point-blank.”
He waited for a few moments, in the hope that Margaret would say something; but her face was still averted, and the trembling hand which Mr. Austin was holding struggled to release itself from his grasp.
“Margaret,” he said, very gravely, “perhaps I have been foolish and presumptuous in this business. In that case I fully deserve to be disappointed, however bitter the disappointment may be. If I have been wrong, Margaret; if I have been deceived by your sweet smile, your gentle words; for pity’s sake tell me that it is so, and I will forgive you for having involuntarily deceived me, and will try to cure myself of my folly. But I will not leave this room, I will not abandon the dear hope that has brought me here to-night, until you tell me plainly that you do not love me. Speak, Margaret, and speak fearlessly.”
But Margaret was still silent, only in the silence Clement Austin heard a low, sobbing sound.
“Margaret darling, you are crying. Ah! I know now that you love me, and I will not leave this room except as your plighted husband.”
“Heaven help me!” murmured Joseph Wilmot’s daughter; “Heaven lead me right! for I do love you, Clement, with all my heart”
Mr. Dunbar did not waste much time before he began the grand business which had brought him to London — that is to say, the purchase of such a collection of diamonds as compose a necklace second only to that which brought poor hoodwinked Cardinal de Rohan and the unlucky daughter of the Caesars into such a morass of trouble and slander.
Early upon the morning after his visit to the bank, Mr. Dunbar went out very plainly dressed, and hailed the first empty cab that he saw in Piccadilly.
He ordered the cabman to drive straight to a street leading out of Holborn, a very quiet-looking street, where you could buy diamonds enough to set up all the jewellers in the Palais Royale and the Rue de la Paix, and where, if you were so whimsical as to wish to transform a service of plate into “white soup” at a moment’s notice, you might indulge your fancy in establishments of unblemished respectability.
The gold and silver refiners, the diamond-merchants and wholesale jewellers, in this quiet street, were a very superior class of people, and you might dispose of a handful of gold chains and bangles without any fear that one or two of them would find their way into the operator’s sleeve during the process of weighing. The great Mr. Krusible, who thrust the last inch of an Eastern potentate’s sceptre into the melting-pot with the sole of his foot, as the detectives entered his establishment in search of the missing bauble, and walked lame for six months afterwards, lived somewhere in the depths of the city, and far away from this dull-looking Holborn street; and would have despised the even tenor of life, and the moderate profits of a business in this neighbourhood.
Mr. Dunbar left his cab at the Holborn end of the street, and walked slowly along the pavement till he came to a very dingy-looking parlour-window, which might have belonged to A lawyer’s office but for some gilded letters on the wire blind, which, in a very pale and faded inscription, gave notice that the parlour belonged to Mr. Isaac Hartgold, diamond-merchant. A grimy brass plate on the door of the house bore another inscription to the same effect; and it was at this door that Mr. Dunbar stopped.
He rang a bell, and was admitted immediately by a very sharp-looking boy, who ushered him into the parlour, where ha saw a mahogany counter, a pair of small brass scales, a horse-hair-cushioned office-stool considerably the worse for wear, and a couple of very formidable-looking iron safes deeply imbedded in the wall behind the counter. There was a desk near the window, at which a gentleman, with very black hair and whiskers was seated, busily engaged in some abstruse calculations between a pair of open ledgers.
He got off his high seat as Mr. Dunbar entered, and looked rather suspiciously at the banker. I suppose the habit of selling diamonds had made him rather suspicious of every one. Henry Dunbar wore a fashionable greatcoat with loose open cuffs, and it was towards these loose cuffs that Mr. Hartgold’s eyes wandered with rapid and rather uneasy glances. He was apt to look doubtfully at gentlemen with roomy coat-sleeves, or ladies with long-haired muffs or fringed parasols. Unset diamonds are an eminently portable species of property, and you might carry a tolerably valuable collection of them in the folds of the smallest parasol that ever faded under the summer sunshine in the Lady’s Mile.
“I want to buy a collection of diamonds for a necklace,” Mr. Dunbar said, as coolly as if he had been talking of a set of silver spoons; “and I want the necklace to be something out of the common. I should order it of Garrard or Emanuel; but I have a fancy for buying the diamonds upon paper, and having them made up after a design of my own. Can you supply me with what I want?”
“How much do you want? You may have what some people would call a necklace for a thousand pounds, or you may have one that’ll cost you twenty thousand. How far do you mean to go?”
“I am prepared to spend something between fifty and eighty thousand pounds.”
The diamond merchant pursed up his lips reflectively. “You are aware that in these sort of transactions ready money is indispensable?” he said.
“Oh, yes, I am quite aware of that,” Mr. Dunbar answered, coolly.
He took out his card-case as he spoke, and handed one of his cards to Mr. Isaac Hartgold. “Any cheques signed by that name,” he said, “will be duly honoured in St. Gundolph Lane.”
Mr. Hartgold bent his head reverentially to the representative of a million of money. He, in common with every business man in London, was thoroughly familiar with the names of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
“I don’t know that I can supply you with fifty thousand pounds’ worth of such diamonds as you may require at a moment’s notice,” he said; “but I can procure them for you in a day or two, if that will do?”
“That will do very well. This is Tuesday; suppose I give you till Thursday?”
“The stones shall be ready for you by Thursday, sir.”
“Very good. I will call for them on Thursday morning. In the meantime, in order that you may understand that the transaction is a bona fide one, I’ll write a cheque for ten thousand, payable to your order, on account of diamonds to be purchased by me. I have my cheque-book in my pocket. Oblige me with pen and ink.”
Mr. Hartgold murmured something to the effect that such a proceeding was altogether unnecessary; but he brought Mr. Dunbar his office inkstand, and looked on with an approving twinkle of his eyes while the banker wrote the cheque, in that slow, formal hand peculiar to him. It made things very smooth and comfortable, Mr. Hartgold thought, to say the least of it.
“And now, sir, with regard to the design of the necklace,” said the merchant, when he had folded the cheque and put it into his waistcoat-pocket. “I suppose you’ve some idea that you’d like to carry out; and you’d wish, perhaps, to see a few specimens.”
He unlocked one of the iron safes as he spoke, and brought out a lot of little paper packets, which were folded in a peculiar fashion, and which he opened with very gingerly fingers.
“I suppose you’d like some tallow-drops, sir?” he said. “Tallow-drops work-in better than anything for a necklace.”
“What, in Heaven’s name, are tallow-drops?”
Mr. Hartgold took up a diamond with a pair of pincers, and exhibited it to the banker.
“That’s a tallow-drop, sir,” he said. “It’s something of a heart-shaped stone, you see; but we call it a tallow-drop, because it’s very much the shape of a drop of tallow. You’d like large stones, of course, though they eat into a great deal of money? There are diamonds that are known all over Europe; diamonds that have been in the possession of royalty, and are as well known as the family they’ve belonged to. The Duke of Brunswick has pretty well cleared the market of that sort of stuff; but still they are to be had, if you’ve a fancy for anything of that kind?”
Mr. Dunbar shook his head.
“I don’t want anything of that sort,” he said; “the day may come when my daughter, or my daughter’s descendants, may be obliged to realize the jewels. I’m a commercial man, and I want eighty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds that shall be worth the money I give for them to break up and sell again. I should wish you to choose diamonds of moderate size, but not small; worth, on an average, forty or fifty pounds apiece, we’ll say.”
“I shall have to be very particular about matching them in colour,” said Mr. Hartgold, “as they’re for a necklace.” The banker shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t trouble yourself about the necklace,” he said, rather impatiently. “I tell you again I’m a commercial man, and what I want is good value for my money.”
“And you shall have it, sir,” answered the diamond-merchant, briskly.
“Very well, then; in that case I think we understand each other, and there’s no occasion for me to stop here any longer. You’ll have eighty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds, at thereabouts, ready for me when I call here on Thursday morning. You can cash that cheque in the meantime, and ascertain with whom you have to deal. Good morning.”
He left the diamond-merchant wondering at his sang froid, and returned to the cab, which had been waiting for him all this time.
He was just going to step into it, when a hand touched him lightly on the shoulder, and turning sharply and angrily round, he recognized the gentleman who called himself Major Vernon. But the Major was by no means the shabby stranger who had watched the marriage of Philip Jocelyn and Laura Dunbar in Lisford Church. Major Vernon had risen, resplendent as the phoenix, from the ashes of his old clothes.
The poodle collar was gone: the dilapidated boots had been exchanged for stout water-tight Wellingtons: the napless dirty white hat had given place to a magnificent beaver, with a broad trim curled at the sides. Major Vernon was positively splendid. He was as much wrapped up as ever; but his wrappings now were of a gorgeous, not to say gaudy, description. His thick greatcoat was of a dark olive-green, and the collar turned up over his ears was of a shiny-looking brown fur, which, to the confiding mind of the populace, is known as imitation sable. Inside this fur collar the Major wore a shawl-patterned scarf of all the colours in the prismatic scale, across which his nose lacked its usual brilliancy of hue by force of contrast. Major Vernon had a very big cigar in his mouth, and a very big cane in his hand, and the quiet City men turned to look at him as he stood upon the pavement talking to Henry Dunbar.
The banker writhed under the touch of his Indian acquaintance.
“What do you want with me?” he asked, in low angry tones; “why do you follow me about to play the spy upon me, and stop me in the public street? Haven’t I done enough for you? Ain’t you satisfied with what I have done?”
“Yes, dear boy,” answered the Major, “perfectly satisfied, more than satisfied — for the present. But your future favours — as those low fellows, the butchers and bakers, have it — are respectfully requested for yours truly. Let me get into the cab with you, Mr. H.D., and take me back to the casa, and give me a comfortable little bit of perrogg. I haven’t lost my aristocratic taste for seven courses, and an elegant succession of still fine sparkling wines, though during the last few years I’ve been rather frequently constrained to accept the shadowy hospitality of his grace of Humphrey. ‘Nante dinari, nante manjare,’ as we say in the Classics, which I translate, ‘No credit at the butcher’s or the baker’s.’”
“For Heaven’s sake, stop that abominable slang!” said Henry Dunbar, impatiently.
“It annoys you, dear friend, eh? Well, I’ve known the time when —— But no matter, ‘let what is broken, so remain,’ as the poet observes; which is only an elegant way of saying, ‘Let bygones be bygones.’ And so you’ve been buying diamonds, dear boy?”
“Who told you so?”
“You did, when you came out of Mr. Isaac Hartgold’s establishment. I happened to be passing the door as you went in, and I happened to be passing the door again as you came out.”
“And playing the spy upon me.”
“Not at all, dear boy. It was merely a coincidence, I assure you. I called at the bank yesterday, cashed my cheques, ascertained your address; called at the Clarendon this morning, was told you’d that minute gone out; looked down Albemarle Street; there you were, sure enough; saw you get into a cab; got into another — a Hansom, and faster than yours — came behind you to the corner of this street.”
“You followed me,” said Henry Dunbar, bitterly.
“Don’t call it following, dear friend, because that’s low. Accident brought me into this neighbourhood at the very hour you were coming into this neighbourhood. If you want to quarrel with anything, quarrel with the doctrine of chances, not with me.”
Henry Dunbar turned away with a sulky gesture. His friend watched him with very much the same malicious grin that had distorted his face under the lamp-lit porch at Maudesley. The Major looked like a vulgar-minded Mephistopheles: there was not even the “divinity of hell” about him.
“And so you’ve been buying diamonds?” he repeated presently, after a considerable pause.
“Yes, I have. I am buying them for a necklace for my daughter.”
“You are so dotingly fond of your daughter!” said the Major with a leer.
“It is necessary that I should give her a present.”
“Precisely, and you won’t even trust the business to a jeweller; you insist on doing it all yourself.”
“I shall do it for less money than a jeweller.”
“Oh, of course,” answered Major Vernon; “the motive’s as clear as daylight.”
He was silent for a few minutes, then he laid his hand heavily upon his companion’s shoulder, put his lips close to the banker’s ear, and said, in a loud voice, for it was not easy for him to make himself heard above the jolting of the cab —
“Henry Dunbar, you’re a very clever fellow, and I dare say you think yourself a great deal sharper than I am; but, by Heaven, if you try any tricks with me, you’ll find yourself mistaken! You must buy me an annuity. Do you understand? Before you move right or left, or say your soul’s your own, you must buy me an annuity!”
The banker shook off his companion’s hand, and turned round upon him, pale, stern, and defiant.
“Take care, Stephen Vallance,” he said; “take care how you threaten me. I should have thought you knew me of old, and would be wise enough to keep a civil tongue in your head, with me. As for what you ask, I shall do it, or I shall let it alone — as I think fit. If I do it, I shall take my own time about it, not yours.”
“You’re not afraid of me, then?” asked the other, recoiling a little, and much more subdued in his tone.
“No!”
“You are very bold.”
“Perhaps I am. Do you remember the old story of some people who had a goose that laid golden eggs? They were greedy, and, in their besotted avarice, they killed the goose. But they have not gone down to posterity as examples of wisdom. No, Vallance, I’m not afraid of you.”
Mr. Vallance leaned back in the cab, biting his nails savagely, and thinking. It seemed as if he was trying to find an answer for Mr. Dunbar’s speech: but, if so, he must have failed, for he was silent for the rest of the drive: and when he got out of the vehicle, by-and-by, before the door of the Clarendon, his manner bore an undignified resemblance to that of a half-bred cur who carries his tail between his legs.
“Good afternoon, Major Vernon,” the banker said, carelessly, as a liveried servant opened the door of the hotel: “I shall be very much engaged during the few days I am likely to remain in town, and shall be unable to afford myself the pleasure of your society.”
The Major stared aghast at this cool dismissal.
“Oh,” he murmured, vaguely, “that’s it, is it? Well, of course, you know what’s best for yourself — so, good afternoon!”
The door closed upon Major Vernon, alias Mr. Stephen Vallance, while he was still staring straight before him, in utter inability to realize his position. But he drew his cashmere shawl still higher up about his ears, took out a gaudy scarlet-morocco cigar-case, lighted another big cigar, and then strolled slowly down the quiet West-end street, with his bushy eyebrows contracted into a thoughtful frown.
“Cool,” he muttered between his closed lips; “very cool, to say the least of it. Some people would call it audacious. But the story of the goose with the golden eggs is one of childhood’s simple lessons that we’re obliged to remember in after-life. And to think that the Government of this country should have the audacity to offer a measly hundred pounds or so for the discovery of a great crime! The shabbiness of the legislature must answer for it, if criminals remain at large. My friend’s a deep one, a cursedly deep one; but I shall keep my eye upon him ‘My faith is strong in time,’ as the poet observes. My friend carries it with a high hand at present; but the day may come when he may want me; and if ever he does want me, egad, he shall pay me my own price, and it shall be rather a stiff one into the bargain.”
At one o’clock on the appointed Thursday morning, Mr. Dunbar presented himself in the diamond-merchant’s office. Henry Dunbar was not alone. He had called in St. Gundolph Lane, and asked Mr. Balderby to go with him to inspect the diamonds he had bought for his daughter.
The junior partner opened his eyes to the widest extent as the brilliants were displayed before him, and declared that big senior’s generosity was something more than princely.
But perhaps Mr. Balderby did not feel so entirely delighted two or three hours afterwards, when Mr. Isaac Hartgold presented himself before the counter in St. Gundolph Lane, whence he departed some time afterwards carrying away with him seventy-five thousand eight hundred pounds in Bank-of-England notes.
Henry Dunbar walked away from the neighbourhood of Holborn with his coat buttoned tightly across his broad chest, and nearly eighty thousand pounds’ worth of property hidden away in his breast-pockets. He did not go straight back to the Clarendon, but pierced his way across Smithfield, and into a busy smoky street, where he stopped by-and-by at a dingy-looking currier’s shop.
He went in and selected a couple of chamois skins, very thick and strong. At another shop he bought some large needles, half-a-dozen skeins of stout waxed thread, a pair of large scissors, a couple of strong steel buckles, and a tailor’s thimble. When he had made these purchases, he hailed the first empty cab that passed him, and went back to his hotel.
He dined, drank the best part of a bottle of Burgundy, and then ordered a cup of strong tea to be taken to his dressing-room. He had fires in his bedroom and dressing-room every night. To-night he retired very early, dismissed the servant who attended upon him, and locked the door of the outer room, the only door communicating with the corridor of the hotel.
He drank a cup of tea, bathed his head with cold water, and then sat down at a writing-table near the fire.
But he was not going to write; he pushed aside the writing-materials, and took his purchases of the afternoon from his pocket. He spread the chamois leather out upon the table, and cut the skins into two long strips, about a foot broad. He measured these round his waist, and then began to stitch them together, slowly and laboriously.
The work was not easy, and it took the banker a very long time to complete it to his own satisfaction. It was past twelve o’clock when he had stitched both sides and one end of the double chamois-leather belt; the other end he left open.
When he had completed the two sides and the end that was closed, he took four or five little canvas-bags from his pocket. Every one of these canvas-bags was full of loose diamonds.
A thrill of rapture ran through the banker’s veins as he plunged his fingers in amongst the glittering stones. He filled his hands with the bright gems, and let them run from one hand to the other, like streams of liquid light. Then, very slowly and carefully, he began to drop the diamonds into the open end of the chamois-leather belt.
When he had dropped a few into the belt, he stitched the leather across and across, quilting-in the stones. This work took him so long, that it was four o’clock in the morning when he had quilted the last diamond into the belt. He gave a long sigh of relief as he threw the waste scraps of leather upon the top of the low fire, and watched them slowly smoulder away into black ashes. Then he put the chamois-leather belt under his pillow, and went to bed.
Henry Dunbar went back to Maudesley Abbey by the express on the morning after the day on which he had completed his purchase of the diamonds. He wore the chamois-leather belt buckled tightly round his waist next to his inner shirt, and was able to defy the swell-mob, had those gentry been aware of the treasures which he carried about with him.
He wrote from Warwickshire to one of the best and most fashionable jewellers at the West End, and requested that a person who was thoroughly skilled in his business might be sent down to Maudesley Abbey, duly furnished with drawings of the newest designs in diamond necklaces, earrings, &c.
But when the jeweller’s agent came, two or three days afterwards, Mr. Dunbar could find no design that suited him; and the man returned to London without having received an order, and without having even seen the brilliants which the banker had bought.
“Tell your employer that I will retain two or three of these designs,” Mr. Dunbar said, selecting the drawings as he spoke; “and if, upon consideration, I find that one of them will suit me, I will communicate with your establishment. If not, I shall take the diamonds to Paris, and get them made up there.”
The jeweller ventured to suggest the inferiority of Parisian workmanship as compared with that of a first-rate English establishment; but Mr. Dunbar did not condescend to pay any attention to the young man’s remonstrance.
“I shall write to your employer in due course,” he said, coldly. “Good morning.”
Major Vernon had returned to the Rose and Crown at Lisford. The deed which transferred to him the possession of Woodbine Cottage was speedily executed, and he took up his abode there. His establishment was composed of the old housekeeper, who had waited on the deceased admiral, and a young man-of-all-work, who was nephew to the housekeeper, and who had also been in the service of the late owner of the cottage.
From his new abode Mr. Vernon was able to keep a tolerably sharp look-out upon the two great houses in his neighbourhood — Maudesley Abbey and Jocelyn’s Rock. Country people know everything about their neighbours; and Mrs. Manders, the housekeeper, had means of communication with both “the Abbey” and “the Rock;” for she had a niece who was under-housemaid in the service of Henry Dunbar, and a grandson who was a helper in Sir Philip Jocelyn’s stables. Nothing could have better pleased the new inhabitant of Woodbine Cottage, who was speedily on excellent terms with his housekeeper.
From her he heard that a jeweller’s assistant had been to Maudesley, and had submitted a portfolio of designs to the millionaire.
“Which they do say,” Mrs. Manders continued, “that Mr. Dunbar had laid out nigh upon half-a-million of money in diamonds; and that he is going to give his daughter, Lady Jocelyn, a set of jewels such as the Queen upon her throne never set eyes on. But Mr. Dunbar is rare and difficult to please, it seems; for the young man from the jeweller’s, he says to Mrs. Grumbleton at the western lodge, he says, ‘Your master is not easy to satisfy, ma’am,’ he says; from which Mrs. Grumbleton gathers that he had not took a order from Mr. Dunbar.”
Major Vernon whistled softly to himself when Mrs. Manders retired, after having imparted this piece of information.
“You’re a clever fellow, dear friend,” he muttered, as he lighted his cigar; “you’re a stupendous fellow, dear boy; but your friend can see through less transparent blinds than this diamond business. It’s well planned — it’s neat, to say the least of it. And you’ve my best wishes, dear boy; but — you must pay for them — you must pay for them, Henry Dunbar.”
This little conversation between the new tenant of Woodbine Cottage and his housekeeper occurred on the very evening on which Major Vernon took possession of his new abode. The next day was Sunday — a cold wintry Sunday; for the snow had been falling all through the last three days and nights, and lay deep on the ground, hiding the low thatched roofs, and making feathery festoons about the leafless branches, until Lisford looked like a village upon the top of a twelfth-cake. While the Sabbath-bells were ringing in the frosty atmosphere, Major Vernon opened the low white gate of his pleasant little garden, and went out upon the high-road.
But not towards the church. Major Vernon was not going to church on this bright winter’s morning. He went the other way, tramping through the snow, towards the eastern gate of Maudesley Park. He went in by the low iron gate, for there was a bridle-path by this part of the park — that very bridle-path by which Philip Jocelyn had ridden to Lisford so often in the autumn weather.
Major Vernon struck across this path, following the tracks of late footsteps in the deep snow, and thus took the nearest way to the Abbey. There he found all very quiet. The supercilious footman who admitted him to the hall seemed doubtful whether he should admit him any farther.
“Mr. Dunbar are hup,” he said; “and have breakfasted, to the best of my knowledge, which the breakfast ekewpage have not yet been removed.”
“So much the better,” Major Vernon answered, coolly. “You may bring up some fresh coffee, John; for I haven’t made much of a breakfast myself; and if you’ll tell the cook to devil the thigh of a turkey, with plenty of cayenne-pepper and a squeeze of lemon, I shall be obliged. You need’nt trouble yourself; I know my way.”
The Major opened the door leading to Mr. Dunbar’s apartments, and walked without ceremony into the tapestried chamber, where he found the banker sitting near a table, upon which a silver coffee service, a Dresden cup and saucer, and two or three covered dishes gave evidence that Mr. Dunbar had been breakfasting. Cold meats, raised pies, and other comestibles were laid out upon the carved-oak sideboard.
The Major paused upon the threshold of the chamber and gravely contemplated his friend.
“It’s comfortable!” he exclaimed; “to say the least of it, it’s very comfortable, dear boy!”
The dear boy did not look particularly pleased as he lifted his eyes to his visitor’s face.
“I thought you were in London?” he said.
“Which shows how very little you trouble yourself about the concerns of your neighbours,” answered Major Vernon, “for if you had condescended to inquire about the movements of your humble friend, you would have been told that he had bought a comfortable little property in the neighbourhood, and settled down to do the respectable country gentleman for the remainder of his natural life — always supposing that the liberality of his honoured friend enables him to do the thing decently.”
“Do you mean to say that you have bought property in this neighbourhood?”
“Yes! I am leasehold proprietor of Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford and Shorncliffe.”
“And you mean to settle in Warwickshire?”
“I do.”
Henry Dunbar smiled to himself as his friend said this.
“You’re welcome to do so,” he said, “as far as I am concerned.”
The Major looked at him sharply.
“Your sentiments are liberality itself, my dear friend. But I must respectfully remind you that the expenses attendant upon taking possession of my humble abode have been very heavy. In plain English, the two thou’ which you so liberally advanced as the first instalment of future bounties, has melted like snow in a rapid thaw. I want another two thou’, friend of my youth and patron of my later years. What’s a thousand or so, more or less, to the senior partner in the house of D., D., and B.? Make it two five this time, and your petitioner will ever pray, &c. &c. &c. Make it two five, Prince of Maudesley!”
There is no need for me to record the interview between these two men. It was rather a long one; for, in congenial companionship, Major Vernon had plenty to say for himself: it was only when he felt himself out of his element and unappreciated that the Major wrapped himself in the dignity of silence, at in some mystic mantle, and retired for the time being from the outer world.
He did not leave Maudesley Abbey until he had succeeded in the object of his visit, and he carried away in his pocket-book cheques to the amount of two thousand five hundred pounds.
“I flatter myself I was just in the nick of time,” the Major thought, as he walked back to Woodbine Cottage, “for as sure as my name’s what it is, my friend means a bolt. He means a bolt; and the money I’ve had to-day is the last I shall ever receive from that quarter.”
Almost immediately after Major Vernon’s departure, Henry Dunbar rang the bell for the servant who acted as his valet whenever he required the services of one, which was not often.
“I shall start for Paris to-night, Jeffreys,” he said to this man. “I want to see what the French jewellers can do before I trust Lady Jocelyn’s necklace into the hands of English workmen. I’m not well, and I want change of air and scene, so I shall start for Paris to-night. Pack a small portmanteau with everything that’s indispensable, but pack nothing unnecessary.”
“Am I to go with you, sir?” the man asked.
Henry Dunbar looked at his watch, and seemed to reflect upon this question some moments before he answered.
“How do the up-trains go on a Sunday?” he asked.
“There’s an express from the north stops at Rugby at six o’clock, sir. You might meet that, if you left Shorncliffe by the 4:35 train.”
“I could do that,” answered the banker; “it’s only three o’clock. Pack my portmanteau at once, Jeffreys, and order the carriage to be ready for me at a quarter to four. No, I won’t take you to Paris with me. You can follow me in a day or two with some more things.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was no such thing as bustle and confusion in a household organized like that of Mr. Dunbar. The valet packed his master’s portmanteau and dressing-case; the carriage came round to the gravel-drive before the porch at the appointed moment; and five minutes afterwards Mr. Dunbar came out into the hall, with his greatcoat closely buttoned over his broad chest, and a leopard-skin travelling-rug flung across his shoulder.
Round his waist he wore the chamois-leather belt which he had made with his own hands at the Clarendon Hotel. This belt had never quitted him since the night upon which he made it. The carriage conveyed him to the Shorncliffe station. He got out and went upon the platform. Although it was not yet five o’clock, the wintry light was fading in the grey sky, and in the railway station it was already dark. There were lamps here and there, but they only made separate splotches of light in the dusky atmosphere.
Henry Dunbar walked slowly up and down the platform. He was so deeply absorbed by his own thoughts that he was quite startled presently when a young man came close behind him, and addressed him eagerly.
“Mr. Dunbar,” he said; “Mr. Dunbar!”
The banker turned sharply round, and recognized Arthur Lovell.
“Ah! my dear Lovell, is that you? You quite startled me.”
“Are you going by the next train? I was so anxious to see you.”
“Why so?”
“Because there’s some one here who very much wishes to see you; quite an old friend of yours, he says. Who do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, I can’t guess — I’ve so many old friends. I can’t see any one, Lovell. I’m very ill, I saw a physician while I was in London; and he told me that my heart is diseased, and that if I wish to live I must avoid any agitation, any sudden emotion, as I would avoid a deadly poison. Who is it that wants to see me?”
“Lord Herriston, the great Anglo-Indian statesman. He is a friend of my father’s, and he has been very kind to me — indeed, he offered me an appointment, which I found it wisest to decline. He talked a great deal about you, when my father told him that you’d settled at Maudesley, and would have driven over to see you if he could have managed to spare the time, without losing his train. You’ll see him, wont you?”
“Where is he?”
“Here, in the station — in the waiting-room. He has been visiting in Warwickshire, and he lunched with my father en passant; he is going to Derby, and he’s waiting for the down-train to take him on to the main line. You’ll come and see him?”
“Yes, I shall be very glad; I——”
Henry Dunbar stopped suddenly, with his hand upon his side. The bell had been ringing while Lovell and the banker had stood upon the platform talking. The train came into the station at this moment.
“I shan’t be able to see Lord Herriston to-night,” Mr. Dunbar said, hurriedly; “I must go by this train, or I shall lose a day. Good-bye, Lovell. Make my best compliments to Herriston; tell him I have been very ill. Good-bye.”
“Your portmanteau’s in the carriage, sir,” the servant said, pointing to the open door of a first-class compartment. Henry Dunbar got into the carriage. At the moment of his doing so, an elderly gentleman came out of the waiting-room.
“Is this my train, Lovell?” he asked.
“No, my Lord. Mr. Dunbar is here; he goes by this train. You’ll have time to speak to him.”
The train was moving. Lord Herriston was an active old fellow. He ran along the platform, looking into the carriages. But the old man’s sight was not as good as his legs were; he looked eagerly into the carriage-windows, but he only saw a confusion of flickering lamplight, and strange faces, and newspapers unfurled in the hands of wakeful travellers, and the heads of sleepy passengers rolling and jolting against the padded sides of the carriage.
“My eyes are not what they used to be,” he said, with a good-tempered laugh, when he went back to Arthur Lovell. “I didn’t succeed in getting a glimpse of my old friend Henry Dunbar.”
Mr. Dunbar leant back in the corner of his comfortable seat, with his eyes closed. But he was not asleep, he was only thinking; and every now and then he bent forward, and looked out of the window into the darkness of the night. He could only distinguish the faint outline of the landscape as the train swept on upon its way, past low meadows, where the snow lay white and stainless, unsullied by a passing footfall; and scanty patches of woodland, where the hardy firs looked black against the glittering whiteness of the ground.
The country was all so much alike under its thick shroud of snow, that Mr. Dunbar tried in vain to distinguish any landmarks upon the way.
The train by which he travelled stopped at every station; and, though the journey between Shorncliffe and Rugby was only to last an hour, it seemed almost interminable to this impatient traveller, who was eager to stand upon the deck of Messrs. ——‘s electric steamers, to feel the icy spray dashing into his face, and to see the town of Dover, shining like a flaming crescent against the darkness of the night, and the Calais lights in the distance rising up behind the black edge of the sea.
The banker looked at his watch, and made a calculation about the time. It was now a quarter past five; the train was to reach Rugby at ten minutes to six; at six the London express left Rugby; at a quarter to eight it reached London; at half-past eight the Dover mail would leave London Bridge station; and at half-past seven, or thereabouts, next morning, Henry Dunbar would be rattling through the streets of Paris.
And then? Was his journey to end in that brilliant city, or was he to go farther? That was a question whose answer was hidden in the traveller’s own breast. He had not shown himself a communicative man at the best of times, and to-night he looked like a man whose soul is weighed down by the burden of a purpose which must he achieved at any cost of personal sacrifice.
He could not hear the names of the stations. He only heard those guttural and inarticulate sounds which railway officials roar out upon the darkness of the night, to the bewilderment of helpless travellers. His inability to distinguish the names of the stations annoyed him. The delay attendant upon every fresh stoppage worried him, as if the pause had been the weary interval of an hour. He sat with his watch in his hand; for every now and then he was seized with a sudden terror that the train had fallen out of its regular pace, and was crawling slowly along the rails.
What if it should not reach Rugby until after the London express had left the station?
Mr. Dunbar asked one of his fellow-travellers if this train was always punctual.
“Yes,” the gentleman answered, coolly; “I believe it is generally pretty regular. But I don’t know how the snow may affect the engine. There have been accidents in some parts of the country.”
“In consequence of the depth of snow?”
“Yes. I understand so.”
It was about ten minutes after this brief conversation, and within a quarter of an hour of the time at which the train was due at Rugby, when the carriage, which had rocked a good deal from the first, began to oscillate very violently. One meagre little elderly traveller turned rather pale, and looked nervously at his fellow-passengers; but the young man who had spoken to Henry Dunbar, and a bald-headed commercial-looking gentleman opposite to him, went on reading their newspapers as coolly as if the rocking of the carriage had been no more perilous than the lullaby motion of an infant’s cradle, guided by a mother’s gentle foot.
Mr. Dunbar never took his eyes from the dial of his watch. So the nervous traveller found no response to his look of terror.
He sat quietly for a minute or so, and then lowered the window near him, and let in a rush of icy wind, whereat the bald-headed commercial gentleman turned upon him rather fiercely, and asked him what he was about, and if he wanted to give them all inflammation of the lungs, by letting in an atmosphere that was two degrees below zero. But the little elderly gentleman scarcely heard this remonstrance; his head was out of the window, and he was looking eagerly Rugby-wards along the line.
“I’m afraid there’s something wrong,” he said, drawing in his head for a moment, and looking with a scared white face at his fellow-passengers; “I’m really afraid there’s something wrong. We’re eight minutes behind our time, and I see the danger-signal up yonder, and the line seems blocked up with snow, and I really fear ——”
He looked out again, and then drew in his head very suddenly.
“There’s something coming!” he cried; “there’s an engine coming ——”
He never finished his sentence. There was a horrible smashing, tearing, grinding noise, that was louder than thunder, and more hideous than the crashing of cannon against the wooden walls of a brave ship.
That horrible sound was followed by a yell almost as horrible; and then there was nothing but death, and terror, and darkness, and anguish, and bewilderment; masses of shattered woodwork and iron heaped in direful confusion upon the blood-stained snow; human groans, stifled under the wrecks of shivered carriages: the cries of mothers whose children had been flung out of their arms into the very jaws of death; the piteous wail of children, who clung, warm and living, to the breasts of dead mothers, martyred in that moment of destruction; husbands parted from their wives; wives shrieking for their husbands; and, amidst all, brave men, with white faces, hurrying here and there, with lamps in their hands, half-maimed and wounded some of them, but forgetful of themselves in their care for the helpless wretches round them.
The express going northwards had run into the train from Shorncliffe, which had come upon the main line just nine minutes too late.
One by one the dead and wounded were earned away from the great heap of ruins; one by one the prostrate forms were borne away by quiet bearers, who did their duty calmly and fearlessly in that hideous scene of havoc and confusion. The great object to be achieved was the immediate clearance of the line; and the sound of pickaxes and shovels almost drowned those other dreadful sounds, the piteous moans of sufferers who were so little hurt as to be conscious of their sufferings.
The train from Shorncliffe had been completely smashed. The northern express had suffered much less; but the engine-driver had been killed, and several of the passengers severely injured.
Henry Dunbar was amongst those who were carried away helpless, and, to all appearance, lifeless from the ruin of the Shorncliffe train.
One of the banker’s legs was broken, and he had received A blow upon the head, which had rendered him immediately unconscious.
But there were cases much worse than that of the banker; the surgeon who examined the sufferers said that Mr. Dunbar might recover from his injuries in two or three months, if he was carefully treated. The fracture of the leg was very simple; and if the limb was skilfully set, there would not be the least fear of contraction.
Half-a-dozen surgeons were busy in one of the waiting-rooms at the Rugby station, whither the sufferers had been conveyed, and one of them took possession of the banker.
Mr. Dunbar’s card-case had been found in the breast-pocket of his overcoat, and a great many people in the waiting-room knew that the gentleman with the white lace and grey moustache, lying so quietly upon one of the broad sofas, was no less a personage than Henry Dunbar, of Maudesley Abbey and St. Gundolph Lane. The surgeon knew it, and thought his good angel had sent this particular patient across his pathway.
He made immediate arrangements for bearing off Mr. Dunbar to the nearest hotel; he sent for his assistant; and in a quarter of an hour’s time the millionaire was restored to consciousness, and opened his eyes upon the eager faces of two medical gentlemen, and upon a room that was strange to him.
The banker looked about him with an expression of perplexity, and then asked where he was. He knew nothing of the accident itself, and he had quite lost the recollection of all that had occurred immediately before the accident, or, indeed, from the time of his leaving Maudesley Abbey.
It was only little by little that the memory of the events of that day returned to him. He had wanted to leave Maudesley; he had wanted to go abroad — to go upon a journey — that was no new purpose in his mind. Had he actually set out upon that journey? Yes, surely, he must have started upon it; but what had happened, then?
He asked the surgeon what had happened, and why it was that he found himself in that strange place.
Mr. Daphney, the Rugby surgeon, told his patient all about the accident, in such a bland, pleasant way, that anybody might have thought the collision of a couple of engines rather an agreeable little episode in a man’s life.
“But we are doing admirably, sir,” Mr. Daphney concluded; “nothing could be more desirable than the way in which we are going on; and when our leg has been set, and we’ve taken a cooling draught, we shall be, quite comfortable for the night. I really never saw a cleaner fracture — never, I can assure you.”
But Mr. Dunbar raised himself into a sitting position, in spite of the remonstrances of his medical attendant, and looked anxiously about him.
“You say this place is Rugby?” he asked, moodily.
“Yes, this is Rugby,” answered the surgeon, smiling, and rubbing his hands, almost as if he would have said, “Now, isn’t that delightful?” “Yes, this is the Queen’s Hotel, Rugby; and I’m sure that every attention which the proprietor, Mr. ——”
“I must get away from this place to-night,” said Mr. Dunbar, interrupting the surgeon rather unceremoniously.
“To-night, my dear sir!” cried Mr. Daphney; “impossible — utterly impossible — suicide on your part, my dear sir, if you attempted it, and murder upon mine, if I allowed you to carry out such an idea. You will be a prisoner here for a month or so, sir, I regret to say; but we shall do all in our power to make your sojourn agreeable.”
The surgeon could not help looking cheerful as he made this announcement; but seeing a very black and ominous expression upon the face of his patient, he contrived to modify the radiance of his own countenance.
“Our first proceeding, sir, must be to straighten this poor leg,” he said, soothingly. “We shall place the leg in a cradle, from the thigh downwards: but I won’t trouble you with technical details. I doubt if we shall be justified in setting the leg to-night; we must reduce the swelling before we can venture upon any important step. A cooling lotion, applied with linen cloths, must be kept on all night. I have made arrangements for a nurse, and my assistant will also remain here all night to supervise her movements.”
The banker groaned aloud.
“I want to get to London,” he said. “I must get to London!”
The surgeon and his assistant removed Mr. Dunbar’s clothes. His trousers had to be cut away from his broken leg before anything could be done. Mr. Daphney removed his patient’s coat and waistcoat; but the linen shirt was left, and the chamois-leather belt worn by the banker was under this shirt, next to and over a waistcoat of scarlet flannel.
“I wear a leather belt next my flannel waistcoat,” Mr. Dunbar said, as the two men were undressing him; “I don’t wish it to be removed.”
He fainted away presently, for his leg was very painful; and on reviving from his fainting fit, he looked very suspiciously at his attendants, and put his hand to the buckle of his belt, in order to make himself sure that it had not been tampered with.
All through the long, feverish, restless night he lay pondering over this miserable interruption of his journey, while the sick-nurse and the surgeon’s assistant alternately slopped cooling lotions about his wretched broken leg.
“To think that this should happen,” he muttered to himself every now and then. “Amongst all the things I’ve ever dreaded, I never thought of this.”
His leg was set in the course of the next day, and in the evening he had a long conversation with the surgeon.
This time Henry Dunbar did not speak so much of his anxiety to get away upon the second stage of his continental journey. His servant Jeffreys arrived at Rugby in the course of the day; for the news of the accident had reached Maudesley Abbey, and it was known that Mr. Dunbar had been a sufferer.
To-night Henry Dunbar only spoke of the misery of being in a strange house.
“I want to get back to Maudesley,” he said. “If you can manage to take me there, Mr. Daphney, and look after me until I’ve got over the effects of this accident, I shall be very happy to make you any compensation you please for whatever loss your absence from Rugby might entail upon you.”
This was a very diplomatic speech: Mr. Dunbar knew that the surgeon would not care to let so rich a patient out of his hands; but he fancied that Mr. Daphney would have no objection to carrying his patient in triumph to Maudesley Abbey, to the admiration of the unprofessional public, and to the aggravation of rival medical men.
He was not mistaken in his estimate of human nature. At the end of the week he had succeeded in persuading the surgeon to agree to his removal; and upon the second Monday after the railway accident, Henry Dunbar was placed in a compartment which was specially prepared for him in the Shorncliffe train, and was conveyed from Shorncliffe station to Maudesley Abbey, without undergoing any change of position upon the road, and very carefully tended throughout the journey by Mr. Daphney and Jeffreys the valet.
They wheeled Mr. Dunbar’s bed into his favourite tapestried chamber, and laid him there, to drag out long dreary days and nights, waiting till his broken bones should unite, and he should be free to go whither he pleased. He was not a very patient sufferer; he bore the pain well enough, but he chafed perpetually against the delay; and every morning he asked the surgeon the same question —
“When shall I be strong enough to walk about?”
Margaret Wilmot had promised to become the wife of the man she loved; but she had given that promise very reluctantly, and only upon one condition. The condition was, that, before her marriage with Clement Austin took place, the mystery of her father’s death should be cleared up for ever.
“I cannot be your wife so long as the secret of that cruel deed remains unknown,” she said to Clement. “It seems to me as if I have already been, wickedly neglectful of a solemn duty. Who had my father to love him and remember him in all the world but me? and who should avenge his death if I do not? He was an outcast from society; and people think it a very small thing that, after having led a reckless life, he should die a cruel death. If Henry Dunbar, the rich banker, had been murdered, the police would never have rested until the assassin had been discovered. But who cares what became of Joseph Wilmot, except his daughter? His death makes no blank in the world: except to me — except to me!”
Clement Austin did not forget his promise to do his uttermost towards the discovery of the banker’s guilt. He believed that Henry Dunbar was the murderer of his old servant; and he had believed it ever since that day upon which the banker stole, like a detected thief, out of the house in St. Gundolph Lane.
It was just possible that Henry Dunbar might avoid Joseph Wilmot’s daughter from a natural horror of the events connected with his return to England; but that the banker should resort to a cowardly stratagem to escape from an interview with the girl could scarcely be accounted for, except by the fact of his guilt.
He had an insurmountable terror of seeing this girl, because he was the murderer of her father.
The longer Clement Austin deliberated upon this business the more certainly he came to that one terrible conclusion: Henry Dunbar was guilty. He would gladly have thought otherwise: and he would have been very happy had he been able to tell Margaret Wilmot that the mystery of her father’s death was a mystery that would never be solved upon this earth: but he could not do so; he could only bow his head before the awful necessity that urged him on to take his part in this drama of crime — the part of an avenger.
But a cashier in a London bank has very little time to play any part in life’s history, except that quiet r?le which seems chiefly to consist in locking and unlocking iron safes, peering furtively into mysterious ledgers, and shovelling about new sovereigns as coolly as if they were Wallsend or Clay-Cross coals.
Clement Austin’s life was not an easy one, and he had no time to turn amateur detective, even in the service of the woman ha loved.
He had no time to turn amateur detective so long as he remained at the banking-house in St. Gundolph Lane.
But could he remain there? That question arose in his mind, and took a very serious form. Was it possible to remain in that house when he believed the principal member of it to be one of the most infamous of men?
No; it was quite impossible for him to remain in his present situation. So long as he took a salary from Dunbar, Dunbar and Balderby, he was in a manner under obligation to Henry Dunbar. He could not remain in this man’s service, and yet at the same time play the spy upon his actions, and work heart and soul to drag the dreadful secret of his life into the light of day.
Thus it was that towards the close of the week in which Henry Dunbar, for the first time after his return from India, visited the banking-offices, Clement Austin handed a formal notice of resignation to Mr. Balderby. The cashier could not immediately resign his situation, but was compelled to give his employers a month’s notice of the withdrawal of his services.
A thunderbolt falling upon the morocco-covered writing-table in Mr. Balderby’s private parlour could scarcely have been more astonishing to the junior partner than this letter which Clement Austin handed him very quietly and very respectfully.
There were many reasons why Clement Austin should remain in the banking-house. His father had lived for thirty years, and had eventually died, in the employment of Dunbar and Dunbar. He had been a great favourite with the brothers; and Clement had been admitted into the house as a boy, and had received much notice from Percival. More than this, he had every chance of being admitted ere long to a junior partnership upon very easy terms, which junior partnership would of course be the high-road to a great fortune.
Mr. Balderby sat with the letter open in his hands, staring at the lines before him as if he was scarcely able to comprehend their purport.
“Do you mean this, Austin?” he said at last.
“Yes, sir. Circumstances over which I have no control compel me to offer you my resignation.”
“Have you quarrelled with anybody in the office? Has anything occurred in the house that has made you uncomfortable?”
“No, indeed, Mr. Balderby; I am very comfortable in my position.”
The junior partner leaned back in his chair, and stared at the cashier as if he had been trying to detect the traces of incipient insanity in the young man’s countenance.
“You are comfortable in your position, and yet you — Oh! I suppose the real truth of the matter is, that you have heard of something better, and you are ready to give us the go-by in order to improve your own circumstances?” said Mr. Balderby, with a tone of pique; “though I really don’t see how you can very well be better off anywhere than you are here,” he added, thoughtfully.
“You do me wrong, sir, when you think that I could willingly leave you for my own advantage,” Clement answered, quietly. “I have no better engagement, nor have I even a prospect of any engagement.”
“You haven’t!” exclaimed the junior partner; “and yet you throw away such a chance as only falls to the lot of one man in a thousand! I don’t particularly care about guessing riddles, Mr. Austin; perhaps you’ll be kind enough to tell me frankly why you want to leave us?”
“I regret to say that it is impossible for me to do so, sir,” replied the cashier; “my motive for leaving this house, which is a kind of second home to me, is no frivolous one, believe me. I have weighed well the step I am about to take, and I am quite aware that I sacrifice very excellent prospects in throwing up my present situation. But the reason of my resignation must remain a secret; for the present at least. If ever the day comes when I am able to explain my conduct, I believe that you will give me your hand, and say to me, ‘Clement Austin, you only did your duty.’”
“Clement,” said Mr. Balderby, “you are an excellent fellow; but you certainly must have got some romantic crotchet in your head, or you could never have thought of writing such a letter as this. Are you going to be married? Is that your reason for leaving us? Have you fascinated some wealthy heiress, and are you going to retire into splendid slavery?”
“No, sir. I am engaged to be married; but the lady whom I hope to call my wife is poor, and I have every necessity to be a working man for the rest of my life.”
“Well, then, my dear fellow, it’s a riddle; and, as I said before, I’m not good at guessing enigmas. There, my boy; go home and sleep upon this; and come back to me to-morrow morning, and tell me to throw this stupid letter in the fire — that’s the wisest thing you can do. Good night.”
But, in spite of all that Mr. Balderby could say, Clement Austin steadily adhered to his resolution. He worked early and late during the month in which he remained at his post, preparing the ledgers, balancing accounts, and making things straight and easy for the new cashier. He told Margaret Wilmot of what he had done, but he did not tell her the extent of the sacrifice which he had made for her sake. She was the only person who knew the real motive of his conduct, for to his mother he said very little more than he had said to Mr. Balderby.
“I shall be able to tell you my motives for leaving the banking-house at some future time, dear mother,” he said; “until that time I can only entreat you to trust me, and to believe that I have acted for the best.”
“I do believe it, my dear,” answered the widow, cheerfully; “when did you ever do anything that wasn’t wise and good?”
Her only son, Clement, was the god of this simple woman’s idolatry; and if he had seen fit to turn her out of doors, and ask her to beg by his side in the streets of the city, I doubt if she would not have imagined some hidden wisdom lurking at the bottom of his apparently irrational proceedings. So she made no objection to his abandoning his desk in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
“We shall be poorer, I suppose, Clem,” Mrs. Austin said; “but that’s very little consequence, for your dear father left me so comfortably off that I can very well afford to keep house for my only son; and I shall have you more at home, dear, and that will indeed be happiness.”
But Clement told his mother that he had some very important business on hand just then, which would occupy him a good deal; and indeed the first step necessary would be a journey to Shorncliffe, in Warwickshire.
“Why, that’s where you went to school, Clem!”
“Yes, mother.”
“And it’s near Mr. Percival Dunbar — or, at least, Mr. Dunbar’s country house.”
“Yes, mother,” answered Clement. “Now the business in which I am engaged is — is rather of a difficult nature, and I want legal help. My old schoolfellow, Arthur Lovell, who is as good a fellow as ever breathed, has been educated for the law, and is now a solicitor. He lives at Shorncliffe with his father, John Lovell, who is also a solicitor, and a man of some standing in the county. I shall run down to Shorncliffe, see my old friend, and get has advice; and if you’ll bring Margaret down for a few days’ change of air, we’ll stop at the dear old Reindeer, where you used to come, mother, when I was at school, and where you used to give me such jolly dinners in the days when a good dinner was a treat to a hungry schoolboy.”
Mrs. Austin smiled at her son; she smiled tenderly as she remembered his bright boyhood. Mothers with only sons are not very strong-minded. Had Clement proposed a trip to the moon, she would scarcely have known how to refuse him her company on the expedition.
She shivered a little, and looked rather doubtfully from the blazing; fire which lit up the cozy drawing-room to the cold grey sky outside the window.
“The beginning of January isn’t the pleasantest time in the year for a trip into the country, Clem, dear,” she said; “but I should certainly be very lonely at home without you. And as to poor Madge, of course it would be a great treat to her to get away from her pupils and have a peep at the genuine country, even though there isn’t a single leaf upon the trees. So I suppose I must say yes. But do tell me all about this business there’s a dear good boy.”
Unfortunately the dear good boy was obliged to tell his mother that the business in question was, like his motive for resigning his situation, a profound secret, and that it must remain so for some time to come.
“Wait, dear mother,” he said; “you shall know all about it by-and-by. Believe me, when I tell you that it’s not a very pleasant business,” he added, with a sigh.
“It’s not unpleasant for you, I hope, Clement?”
“It isn’t pleasant for any one who is concerned in it, mother,” answered the young man, thoughtfully; “it’s altogether a miserable business; but I’m not concerned in it as a principal, you know, dear mother; and when it’s all over we shall only look back upon it as the passing of a black cloud over our lives, and you will say that I have done my duty. Dearest mother, don’t look so puzzled,” added Clement; “this matter must remain a secret for the present. Only wait, and trust me.”
“I will, my dear boy,” Mrs. Austin said, presently. “I will trust you with all my heart; for I know how good you are. But I don’t like secrets, Clem; secrets always make me uncomfortable.”
No more was said upon this subject, and it was arranged by-and-by that Mrs. Austin and Margaret should prepare to start for Warwickshire at the beginning of the following week, when Clement would be freed from all engagements to Messrs. Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
Margaret had waited very patiently for this time, in which Clement would be free to give her all his help in that awful task which lay before her — the discovery of Henry Dunbar’s guilt.
“You will go to Shorncliffe with my mother,” Clement Austin said, upon the evening after his conversation with the widow; “you will go with her, Madge, ostensibly upon a little pleasure trip. Once there, we shall be able to contrive an interview with Mr. Dunbar. He is a prisoner at Maudesley Abbey, laid up by the effect of his accident the other day, but not too ill to see people, Balderby says; therefore I should think we may be able to plan an interview between you and him. You still hold to your original purpose? You wish to see Henry Dunbar?”
“Yes,” answered Margaret, thoughtfully; “I want to see him. I want to look straight into the face of the man whom I believe to be my father’s murderer. I don’t know why it is, but this purpose has been uppermost in my mind ever since I heard of that dreadful journey to Winchester; ever since I first knew that my father had been murdered while travelling with Henry Dunbar. It might, as you have said, be wiser to watch and wait, and to avoid all chance of alarming this man. But I can’t be wise. I want to see him. I want to look in his face, and see if his eyes can meet mine.”
“You shall see him then, dear girl. A woman’s instinct is sometimes worth more than a man’s wisdom. You shall see Henry Dunbar. I know that my old schoolfellow Arthur Lovell will help me, with all his heart and soul. I have called again upon the Scotland-Yard people, and I gave them a minute description of the scene in St. Gundolph Lane; but they only shrugged their shoulders, and said the circumstances looked queer, but were not strong enough to act upon. If any body can help us, Arthur Lovell can; for he was present at the inquest and all further examination of the witnesses at Winchester.”
If Margaret Wilmot and Clement Austin had been going upon any other errand than that which took them to Warwickshire, the journey to Shorncliffe might have been very pleasant to them.
To Margaret, this comfortable journey in the cushioned corner of a first-class carriage, respectfully waited upon by the man she loved, possessed at least the charm of novelty. Her journeys hitherto had been long wearisome pilgrimages in draughty third-class carriages, with noisy company, and in an atmosphere pervaded by a powerful effluvium of various kinds of alcohol.
Her life had been a very hard one, darkened by the ever-brooding shadow of disgrace. It was new to her to sit quietly looking out at the low meadows and glimmering white-walled villas, the patches of sparse woodland, the distant villages, the glimpses of rippling water, shining in the wintry sun. It was new to her to be loved by people whose minds were unembittered by the baneful memories of wrong and crime. It was new to her to hear gentle voices, sweet Christian-like words: it was new to her to breathe the bright atmosphere that surrounds those who lead a virtuous, God-fearing life.
But there is little sunshine without its attendant shadow. The shadow upon Margaret’s life now was the shadow of that coming task — that horrible work which must be done — before she could be free to thank God for His mercies, and to be happy.
The London train reached Shorncliffe early in the afternoon. Clement Austin hired a roomy old fly, and carried off his companions to the Reindeer.
The Reindeer was a comfortable old-fashioned hotel. It had been a very grand place in the coaching-days, and you entered the hostelry by a broad and ponderous archway, under which Highflyers and Electrics had driven triumphantly in the days that were for ever gone.
The house was a roomy old place, with long corridors and wide staircases; noble staircases, with broad, slippery, oaken banisters and shallow steps. The rooms were grand and big, with bow windows so spotless in their cleanness that they had rather a cold effect on a January day, and were apt to inspire in the vulgar mind the fancy that a little dirt or smoke would look warmer and more comfortable. Certainly, if the Reindeer had a fault, it was that it was too clean. Everything was actually slippery with cleanness, from the newly-calendered chintz that covered the sofa and the chair-cushions to the copper coal-scuttle that glittered by the side of the dazzling brass fender. There were faint odours of soft soap in the bed-chambers, which no amount of dried lavender could overcome. There was an effluvium of vitriol about all the brass-work, and there was a good deal of brass-work in the Reindeer: and if one species of decoration is more conducive to shivering than another, it certainly is brass-work in a state of high polish.
There was no dish ever devised by mortal cook which the sojourner at the Reindeer could not have, according to the preliminary statement of the landlord; but with whatever ambitious design the sojourner began to talk about dinner, it always ended, somehow or other, by his ordering a chicken, a little bit of boiled bacon, a dish of cutlets, and a tart. There were days upon which divers species of fish were to be had in Shorncliffe, but the sojourner at the Reindeer rarely happened to hit upon one of those days.
Clement Austin installed Margaret and the widow in a sitting-room which would have comfortably accommodated about forty people. There was a bow-window quite large enough for the requirements of a small family, and Mrs. Austin settled herself there, while the landlord was struggling with a refractory fire, and pretending not to know that the grate was damp.
Clement went through the usual fiction of deliberation as to what he should have for dinner, and of course ended with the perennial chicken and cutlets.
“I haven’t the fine appetite I had fifteen years ago, Mr. Gilwood,” he said to the landlord, “when my mother yonder, who hasn’t grown fifteen days older in all those fifteen years — bless her dear motherly heart! — used to come down to see me at the academy in the Lisford Road, and give me a dinner in this dear old room. I thought your cutlets the most ethereal morsels ever dished by mortal cook, Mr. Gilwood, and this room the best place in all the world. You know Mr. Lovell — Mr. Arthur Lovell?”
“Yes, sir; and a very nice young gentleman he is.”
“He’s settled in Shorncliffe, I suppose?”
“Well, I believe he is, sir. There was some talk of his going out to India, in a Government appointment, sir, or something of that sort; but I’m given to understand that it’s all off now, and that Mr. Arthur is to go into partnership with his father; and a very clever young lawyer he is, I’ve been told.”
“So much the better,” answered Clement, “for I want to consult him upon a little matter of business. Good-bye, mother! Take care of Madge, and make yourselves as comfortable as you can. I think the fire will burn now, Mr. Gilwood. I shan’t be away above an hour, I dare say; and then I’ll come and take you for a walk before dinner. God bless you, my poor Madge!” Clement whispered, as Margaret followed him to the door of the room, and looked wistfully after him as he went down the staircase.
Mrs. Austin had once cherished ambitious views with regard to her son’s matrimonial prospects; but she had freely given them up when she found that he had set his heart upon winning Margaret Wilmot for his wife. The good mother had made this sacrifice willingly and without complaint, as she would have made any other sacrifice for her dearly-beloved only son; and she found the reward of her devotion; for Margaret, this penniless, friendless girl, had become very dear to her — a real daughter, not in law, but bound by the sweet ties of gratitude and affection.
“And I was such a silly old creature, my dear,” the widow said to Margaret, as they sat in the bow-window looking out into the quiet street; “I was so worldly-minded that I wanted Clement to marry a rich woman, so that I might have some stuck-up daughter-in-law, who would despise her husband’s mother, and estrange my boy from me, and make my old age miserable. That’s what I wanted, Madge, and what I might have had, perhaps, if Clem hadn’t been wiser than his silly old mother. And, thanks to him, I’ve got the sweetest, truest, brightest girl that ever lived; though you are not as bright as usual to-day, Madge,” Mrs. Austin added, thoughtfully. “You haven’t smiled once this morning, my dear, and you seem as if you’d something on your mind.”
“I’ve been thinking of my poor father,” Margaret answered, quietly.
“To be sure, my dear; and I might have known as much, my poor tender-hearted lamb. I know how unhappy those thoughts always make you.”
Clement Austin had not been at Shorncliffe for three years. He had visited Maudesley Abbey several times during the lifetime of Percival Dunbar, for he had been a favourite with the old man; and he had been four years at a boarding-school kept by a clergyman of the Church of England in a fine old brick mansion on the Lisford Road.
The town of Shorncliffe was therefore familiar to Mr. Austin; and he looked neither to the right nor to the left as he walked towards the archway of St. Gwendoline’s Church, near which Mr. Lovell’s house was situated.
He found Arthur at home, and very delighted to see his old schoolfellow. The two young men went into a little panelled room, looting into the garden, a cosy little room which Arthur Lovell called his study; and here they sat together for upwards of an hour, discussing the circumstances of the murder at Winchester, and the conduct of Mr. Dunbar since that event.
In the course of that interview, Clement Austin plainly perceived that Arthur Lovell had come to the same conclusion as himself, though the young lawyer was slow to express his opinion.
“I cannot bear to think it,” he said; “I know Laura Dunbar — that is to say, Lady Jocelyn — and it is too horrible to me to imagine that her father is guilty of this crime. What would be that innocent girl’s feelings if it should be so, and if her father’s guilt should be brought home to him!”
“Yes, it would be very terrible for Lady Jocelyn, no doubt,” Clement answered; “but that consideration must not hinder the course of justice. I think this man’s position has served him as a shield from the very first. People have thought it next to impossible that Henry Dunbar could be guilty of a crime, while they would have been ready enough to suspect some penniless vagabond of any iniquity.”
Arthur Lovell told Clement that the banker was still at Maudesley, bound a prisoner by his broken leg, which was going on favourably enough, but very slowly.
Mr. Dunbar had expressed a wish to go abroad, in spite of his broken leg, and had only desisted from his design of being conveyed somehow or other from place to place, when he was told that any such imprudence might result in permanent lameness.
“Keep yourself quiet, and submit to the necessities of your accident, and you’ll recover quickly,” the surgeon told his patient. “Try to hurry the work of nature, and you’ll have cause to repent your impatience for the remainder of your life.”
So Henry Dunbar had been obliged to submit himself to the decrees of Fate, and to lie day after day, and night after night, upon his bed in the tapestried chamber, staring at the fire, or the figure of his valet and attendant; nodding in the easy-chair by the hearth; or listening to the cinders falling from the grate, and the moaning of the winter wind amongst the bare branches of the elms.
The banker was getting better and stronger every day, Arthur Lovell said. His attendants were able to remove him from one chamber to another; a pair of crutches had been made for him, but he had not yet been able to make his first feeble trial of them. He was fain to content himself with being carried to an easy-chair, to sit for a few hours, wrapped in blankets, with the leopard-skin rug about his legs. No man could have been more completely a prisoner than this man had become by the result of the fatal accident near Rugby.
“Providence has thrown him into my power,” Margaret said, when Clement repeated to her the information which he had received from Arthur Lovell — “Providence has thrown this man into my power; for he can no longer escape, and, surrounded by his own servants, he will scarcely dare to refuse to see me; he will surely never be so unwise as to betray his terror of me.”
“And if he does refuse ——”
“If he does, I’ll invent some stratagem by which I may see him. But he will not refuse. When he finds that I am so resolute as to follow him here, he will not refuse to see me.”
This conversation took place during a brief walk which the lovers took in the wintry dusk, while Mrs. Austin nodded by the fire in that comfortable half-hour which precedes dinner.
Early the next day Clement Austin walked to Maudesley Abbey, in order to procure all the information likely to facilitate Margaret Wilmot’s grand purpose. He stopped at the gate of the principal lodge. The woman who kept it was an old servant of the Dunbar family, and had known Clement Austin in Percival Dunbar’s lifetime. She gave him a hearty welcome, and he had no difficulty whatever in setting her tongue in motion upon the subject of Henry Dunbar.
She told him a great deal; she told him that the present owner of the Abbey never had been liked, and never would be liked: for his stern and gloomy manner was so unlike his father’s easy, affable good-nature, that people were always drawing comparisons between the dead man and the living.
This, in a few words, is the substance of what the worthy woman said in a good many words. Mrs. Grumbleton gave Clement all the information he required as to the banker’s daily movements at the present time. Henry Dunbar was now in the habit of rising about two o’clock in the day, at which time he was assisted from his bedroom to his sitting-room, where he remained until seven or eight o’clock in the evening. He had no visitors, except the surgeon, Mr. Daphney, who lived in the Abbey, and a gentleman called Vernon, who had bought Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford, and who now and then was admitted to Mr. Dunbar’s sitting-room.
This was all Clement Austin wanted to know. Surely it might be possible, with a little clever management, to throw the banker completely off his guard, and to bring about the long-delayed interview between him and Margaret Wilmot.
Clement returned to the Reindeer, had a brief conversation with Margaret, and made all arrangements.
At four o’clock that afternoon, Miss Wilmot and her lover left the Reindeer in a fly; at a quarter to five the fly stopped at the lodge-gates.
“I will walk to the house,” Margaret said; “my coming will attract less notice. But I may be detained for some time, Clement. Pray, don’t wait for me. Your dear mother will be alarmed if you are very long absent. Go back to her, and send the fly for me by-and-by.”
“Nonsense, Madge. I shall wait for you, however long you may be. Do you think my heart is not as much engaged in anything that may influence your fate as even your own can be? I won’t go with you to the Abbey; for it will be as well that Henry Dunbar should remain in ignorance of my presence in the neighbourhood. I will walk up and down the road here, and wait for you.”
“But you may have to wait so long, Clement.”
“No matter how long. I can wait patiently, but I could not endure to go home and leave you, Madge.”
They were standing before the great iron gates as Clement said this. He pressed Margaret’s cold hand; he could feel how cold it was, even through her glove; and then rang the bell. She looked at him as the gate was opened; she turned and looked at him with a strangely earnest gaze as she crossed the boundary of Henry Dunbar’s domain, and then walked slowly along the broad avenue.
That last look had shown Clement Austin a pale resolute face, something like the countenance of a fair young martyr going quietly to the stake.
He walked away from the gates, and they shut behind him with a loud clanging noise. Then he went back to them, and watched Margaret’s figure growing dim and distant in the gathering dusk as she approached the Abbey. A faint glow of crimson firelight reddened the gravel-drive before the windows of Mr. Dunbar’s apartments, and there was a footman airing himself under the shadow of the porch, with a glimmer of light shining out of the hall behind him.
“I do not suppose I shall have to wait very long for my poor girl,” Clement thought, as he left the gates, and walked briskly up and down the road. “Henry Dunbar is a resolute man; he will refuse to see her to-day, as he refused before.”
Margaret found the footman lolling against the clustered pillars of the gothic porch, staring thoughtfully at the low evening light, yellow and red behind the brown trunks of the elms, and picking his teeth with a gold toothpick.
The sight of the open hall-door, and this languid footman lolling in the porch, suddenly inspired Margaret Wilmot with a new idea. Would it not be possible to slip quietly past this man, and walk straight to the apartments of Mr. Dunbar, unquestioned, uninterrupted?
Clement had pointed out to her the windows of the rooms occupied by the banker. They were on the left-hand side of the entrance-hall. It would be impossible for her to mistake the door leading to them. It was dusk, and she was very plainly dressed, with a black straw bonnet, and a veil over her face. Surely she might deceive this languid footman by affecting to be some hanger-on of the household, which of course was a large one.
In that case she had no right to present herself at the front door, certainly; but then, before the languid footman could recover from the first shock of indignation at her impertinence, she might slip past him and reach the door leading to those apartments in which the banker hid himself and his guilt.
Margaret lingered a little in the avenue, watching for a favourable opportunity in which she might hazard this attempt. She waited five minutes or so.
The curve of the avenue screened her, in some wise, from the man in the porch, who never happened to roll his languid eyes towards the spot where she was standing.
A flight of rooks came scudding through the sky presently, very much excited, and cawing and screeching as if they had been an ornithological fire brigade hurrying to extinguish the flames of some distant rookery.
The footman, who was suffering acutely from the complaint of not knowing what to do with himself, came out of the porch and stood in the middle of the gravelled drive, with his back towards Margaret, staring at the birds as they flew westward.
This was her opportunity. The girl hurried to the door with a light step, so light upon the smooth solid gravel that the footman heard nothing until she was on the broad stone step under the porch, when the fluttering of her skirt, as it brushed against the pillars, roused him from a species of trance or reverie.
He turned sharply round, as upon a pivot, and stared aghast at the retreating figure under the porch.
“Hi, you there, young woman!” he exclaimed, without stirring from his post; “where are you going to? What’s the meaning of your coming to this door? Are you aware that there’s such a place as a servants’ ‘all and a servants’ hentrance?”
But the languid retainer was too late. Margaret’s hand was upon the massive knob of the door upon the left side of the hall before the footman had put this last indignant question.
He listened for an apologetic murmur from the young woman; but hearing none, concluded that she had found her way to the servants’ hall, where she had most likely some business or other with one of the female members of the household.
“A dressmaker, I dessay,” the footman thought. “Those gals spend all their earnings in finery and fallals, instead of behaving like respectable young women, and saving up their money against they can go into the public line with the man of their choice.”
He yawned, and went on staring at the rooks, without troubling himself any further about the impertinent young person who had dared to present herself at the grand entrance.
Margaret opened the door, and went into the room next the hall.
It was a handsome apartment, lined with books from the floor to the ceiling; but it was quite empty, and there was no fire burning in the grate. The girl put up her veil, and looked about her. She was very, very pale now, and trembled violently; but she controlled her agitation by a great effort, and went slowly on to the next room.
The second room was empty like the first; but the door between it and the next chamber was wide open, and Margaret saw the firelight shining upon the faded tapestry, and reflected in the sombre depths of the polished oak furniture. She heard the low sound of the light ashes falling on the hearth, and the shorting breath of a dog.
She knew that the man she sought, and had so long sought without avail, was in that room. Alone; for there was no murmur of voices, no sound of any one moving in the apartment. That hour, to which Margaret Wilmot had looked as the great crisis of her life, had come; and her courage failed her all at once, and her heart sank in her breast on the very threshold of the chamber in which she was to stand face to face with Henry Dunbar.
“The murderer of my father!” she thought; “the man whose influence blighted my father’s life, and made him what he was. The man through whose reckless sin my father lived a life that left him, oh! how sadly unprepared to die! The man who, knowing this, sent his victim before an offended God, without so much warning as would have given him time to think one prayer. I am going to meet that man face to face!”
Her breath came in faint gasps, and the firelit chamber swam before her eyes as she crossed the threshold of that door, and went into the room where Henry Dunbar was sitting alone before the low fire.
He was wrapped in crimson draperies of thick woollen stuff, and the leopard-skin railway rug was muffled about his knees A dog of the bull-dog breed was lying asleep at the banker’s feet, half-hidden in the folds of the leopard-skin. Henry Dunbar’s head was bent over the fire, and his eyes were closed in a kind of dozing sleep, as Margaret Wilmot went into the room.
There was an empty chair opposite to that in which the banker sat; an old-fashioned, carved oak-chair, with a high back and crimson-morocco cushions. Margaret went softly up to this chair, and laid her hand upon the oaken framework. Her footsteps made no sound on the thick Turkey carpet; the banker never stirred from his doze, and even the dog at his feet slept on.
“Mr. Dunbar!” cried Margaret, in a clear, resolute voice; “awake! it is I, Margaret Wilmot, the daughter of the man who was murdered in the grove near Winchester!”
The dog awoke, and snapped at her. The man lifted his head, and looked at her. Even the fire seemed roused by the sound of her voice! for a little jet of vivid light leaped up out of the smouldering log, and lighted the scared face of the banker.
Clement Austin had promised Margaret to wait for her, and to wait patiently; and he meant to keep his promise. But there are some limits even to the patience of a lover, though he were the veriest knight-errant who was ever eager to shiver a lance or hack the edge of a battle-axe for love of his liege lady. When you have nothing to do but to walk up and down a few yards of hard dusty high-road, upon a bleak evening in January, an hour more or less is of considerable importance. Five o’clock struck about ten minutes after Margaret Wilmot had entered the park, and Clement thought to himself that even if Margaret were successful in obtaining an interview with the banker, that interview would be over before six. But the faint strokes of Lisford-church clock died away upon the cold evening wind, and Clement was still pacing up and down, and the fly was still waiting; the horse comfortable enough, with a rug upon his back and his nose in a bag of oats; the man walking up and down by the side of the vehicle, slapping his gloved hands across his shoulders every now and then to keep himself warm. In that long hour between six and seven, Clement Austin’s patience wore itself almost threadbare. It is one thing to ride into the lists on a prancing steed, caparisoned with embroidered trappings, worked by the fair hands of your lady-love, and with the trumpets braying, and the populace shouting, and the Queen of beauty smiling sweet approval of your prowess: but it is quite another thing to walk up and down a dusty country road, with the wind biting like some ravenous animal at the tip of your nose, and no more consciousness of your legs and arms than if you were a Miss Biffin.
By the time seven o’clock struck, Clement Austin’s patience had given up the ghost; and to impatience had succeeded a vague sense of alarm. Margaret Wilmot had gone to force herself into this man’s presence, in spite of his reiterated refusal to see her. What if — what if, goaded by her persistence, maddened by the consciousness of his own guilt, he should attempt any violence.
Oh, no, no; that was quite impossible. If this man was guilty, his crime had been deliberately planned, and executed with such a diabolical cunning, that he had been able so far to escape detection. In his own house, surrounded by prying servants, he would never dare to assail this girl by so much as a harsh word.
But, notwithstanding this, Clement was determined to wait no longer. He would go to the Abbey at once, and ascertain the cause of Margaret’s delay. He rang the bell, went into the park, and ran along the avenue to the perch. Lights were shining in Mr. Dunbar’s windows, but the great hall-door was closely shut.
The languid footman came in answer to Clement’s summons.
“There is a young lady here,” Clement said, breathlessly; “a young lady — with Mr. Dunbar.”
“Ho! is that hall?” asked the footman, satirically. “I thought Shorncliffe town-‘all was a-fire, at the very least, from the way you rung. There was a young pusson with Mr. Dunbar above a hour ago, if that’s what you mean?”
“Above an hour ago?” cried Clement Austin, heedless of the man’s impertinence in his own growing anxiety; “do you mean to say that the young lady has left?”
“She have left, above a hour ago.”
“She went away from this house an hour ago?”
“More than a hour ago.”
“Impossible!” Clement said; “impossible!”
“It may be so,” answered the footman, who was of an ironical turn of mind; “but I let her out with my own hands, and I saw her go out with my own eyes, notwithstanding.”
The man shut the door before Clement had recovered from his surprise, and left him standing in the porch; bewildered, though he scarcely knew why; frightened, though he scarcely knew what he feared.