Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Ringwood Markham was by no means the best of guides. The coachman who drove the party had rather a bad time of it. First Ringwood was for going to Chelsea through Tyburn turnpike, and could scarcely be persuaded that Ranelagh and Cheyne Walk did not lie somewhere in that direction. Then the young squire harassed and persecuted his unfortunate charioteer by suddenly commanding him to take abrupt turnings to the left, and to follow intricate windings to the right, and to keep scrupulously out of the high road which would have taken him straight to his direction. He grew fidgetty the moment they passed Hyde Park Corner, and was for driving direct to the Marshes about Westminster, assuring his companions that it was necessary to pass the Abbey in order to get to Chelsea, for he had passed it on the night in question; and at last, when Darrell fairly lost patience with him, and bade the coachman to go his own way to Cheyne Walk without further waste of time, Millicent’s brother threw himself back in a fit of the sulks, declaring that they had made a fool of him by bringing him as their guide and then forbidding him to speak.

  When they reached Cheyne Walk, where they left the coach against Don Saltero’s tavern, and set out on foot to find the house occupied by Captain Fanny, Ringwood Markham was of very little more use than before. In the first place, he had never known the name of the street to which his friend had taken him; in the second place, he had gone to it from Ranelagh, and not from London, and that made all the difference in the finding of it, as he urged, when Darrell grew impatient of his stupidity; and then again, he had been with a merry party on that particular night, and had therefore taken little notice of the way. At last Darrell hit upon the plan of leading his cousin quietly through all the small streets at the back of Cheyne Walk, in hopes by that means of arriving at the desired end. Nor was he disappointed; for, after twenty false alarms, and just as he was beginning to give up the matter for a bad job, Ringwood suddenly came to a dead stop before the door of a substantial looking house, and cried triumphantly, —

  “That’s the knocker!”

  But the young squire had given Darrell and the constable so much tumble for the last hour and a half by stopping every now and then, under the impression that he recognized a door-step or a shutter, a lion’s head in stone over the doorway, a brass bell-handle, a scraper, a peculiarly shaped paving-stone, or some other object, and then, after a few moments’ deliberation, confessing himself to be mistaken, that, in spite of his triumphant tone, his cousin felt rather doubtful about the matter.

  “You’re sure it is the house, Ringwood?” he said.

  “Sure! Don’t I tell you I know the knocker? Am I likely to be mistaken, do you think?” asked the squire indignantly, quite forgetting that he had confessed himself mistaken about twenty times in the last hour.

  “Don’t I tell you that I know the knocker? I now it because I gave a sturdy knock with it, and Sir Lov — —’he — the Captain, said I was a fool for rousing the neighbours. It’s a dragon’s-head knocker in brass. I remember it well.”

  “A dragon’s bead is a common enough pattern for a knocker,” said Darrell, rather hopelessly.

  “Yes; but all dragon’s heads are not beaten flat on one side, as this is, are they?” cried Ringwood. “I remember taking notice how the brass had been battered by some constable’s cudgel or roysterer’s loaded cane. I tell you this is the house, cousin; and if you want to see George Duke, you’d better knock at the door. As I was a friend of Sir Lovel’s, and have received civilities from him, I’d rather not be seen in the matter; so I’ll just step round the corner.

  With which expression of gentlemanly feeling, Mr. Ringwood Markham retired, leaving his cousin and the constables upon the door-step. It had long been dark, and the night was dull and moonless, with a heavy fog rising from the river.

  Darrell Markham directed the two men to conceal themselves behind a projecting doorway a few paces down the street, while he knocked and reconnoitred the place. His summons was answered by a servant girl, who carried a candle in her hand, and who told him that the West-country baronet, Sir Lovel Mortimer, had indeed occupied a part of the house, with his servant and two or three of his friends; but that he had left three days before, and the lodgings were now to be let.

  Did the girl know where Sir Lovel had gone? Darrell asked.

  She believed he had gone back to Devonshire; but she would ask her mistress if the gentleman wished.

  But the gentleman did not wish to trouble her mistress, he said. The girl’s manner convinced him that she was telling the truth, and that Captain Fanny had indeed quitted the Chelsea lodging-house. He was so disappointed at the result of his expedition that ha scarcely cared even to make an attempt at putting it to some trifling use.

  But, as he was turning to leave the door-step, he stopped to ask the girl one more question.

  “This servant of Sir Lovel’s,” he said, “what sort of a person was he?”

  “A nasty grumpy disagreeable creature,” the girl answered decisively.

  “Did you know his name?”

  “His master always called him Jeremiah, sir; and some of the other gentlemen called him sulky Jeremiah, because he was always grumbling and growling, except when he was tipsy.”

  “Can you tell me what he was like?” asked Darrell. “Was he a good-looking fellow?”

  “O, as for that,” answered the servant girl, “he was well enough to look at, but too surly for the company of decent folks.”

  Darrell dropped a piece of silver into the girl’s hand, and wished her good night. The constables emerged from their lurking-place as the young man left the door-step.

  “Is it the right house, sir?” asked one of them. ‘‘Yes,” replied Darrell; “we’ve found the nest, sure enough, but the birds have flown. We must even make the best of it, my friends, and go home, for our warrant is but waste paper to-night.”

  They found Ringwood Markham waiting patiently enough round the corner. He chuckled rather maliciously when he heard of his cousin’s disappointment, “You’ll believe me, though, anyhow,” he said, “since you found that it was the right house.”

  “Yes, it was the right house,” answered Darrell, moodily; “but there’s little satisfaction in that. How do I know that this sulky servant of the highwayman’s was really George Duke, and that you were not deceived by some fancied likeness?”

  CHAPTER XI. AFTER SEVEN YEARS.

  THE star of the young squire, Ringwood Markham, shone for a very little longer in the metropolitan hemisphere. His purse was empty, his credit exhausted, his health impaired, his spirits gone, and himself altogether so much the worse for his few brief years of London life, that there was nothing better for him to do than to go quietly back to Compton-on-the-Moor and take up his abode at the Hall, with an old woman as his housekeeper, and a couple of farm labourers for the rest of his establishment. This old woman had lived at Compton Hall while the shutters were closed before the principal windows, the heavy bolts remained undrawn on the chief doors, and the dust gathering fast and thick upon the portraits of those dead-and-gone Markhams whose poor painted images looked out with wan and ghastly simpers from the oaken wainscoting. The old housekeeper had led a very easy life in the dreary darkened house while Ringwood, its master, was roystering in the taverns about Covent Garden; and she was by no means too well pleased when, in the dusk of a misty October evening, the young squire rode quietly up the deserted avenue, dismounted from his horse in the stable-yard, walked in at the back door leading into the servants’ regions, and, standing upon the broad hearth in the raftered kitchen, told her rather sulkily that he had come to live there.

  His coming made very little change in the domestic arrangements of the Hall. He established himself in the oak parlour, in which his father had smoked and drunk and sworn himself into his coffin; and after giving strict orders that only the shutters of those rooms used by himself should be opened, he determinedly set his face against the outraged inhabitants of Compton. Now these simple people, not being aware that Ringwood Markham had
spent every guinea that he was free to spend, took great umbrage at his eccentric and solitary manner of living, and forthwith solved the enigma of his existence by setting him down a miser.

  Sometimes in the dusk of the evening the squire crept out of the Hall gates, and strolled up the village street to honest Sally Pecker’s hospitable mansion, where he took his glass of punch in the best parlour, and made himself tolerably agreeable to the company assembled there. The honest Compton folks were glad to welcome the returned prodigal, and paid their homage to him as they had done to his father, when that obstinate-tempered and violent old gentleman had been pleased to hold his court at the Bear. Ringwood felt that, simple as the Cumbrian villagers were, they were wiser then the Londoners who had emptied his purse for him while they laughed in their sleeves at his dignity. Yes, on the whole, he was certainly happier at Compton than in his Bedford Street lodgings, or with his old tavern companions, in whose society he had been tormented sometimes by a vague idea that he was only a dupe and a fool. He had been used to lead a very narrow life at the best, and the dull monotony of this new existence gave him no pain.

  Millicent saw very little of her brother. He would sometimes drop into the cottage at dusk on his way to the Black Bear, and sit with her for a few minutes, talking of the village, or the farm, or some other of the everyday matters of life; but his sister’s simple society only wearied him; and after about a quarter of an hour he would begin to yawn drearily behind his hand, and then, after kissing her upon the forehead as he bade her good night, he would stroll away to Sarah Pecker’s, switching his light riding-whip as he walked, and pleased by the sensation his embroidered coat created amongst the urchins and the idle women gossiping at their doors. It had been agreed between Darrell and Ringwood that Millicent was to know nothing of the house in Chelsea and the young squire’s mysterious rencontre with George Duke or his double.

  People in Compton — who knew of Darrell’s encounter with the highwayman upon the moor, and of Mrs. Duke’s meeting with the ghost upon Marley Pier — said that the Captain of the Vulture was cursed with the attendance of a shadow which appeared sometimes to those belonging to him, and whose appearance was no doubt a sign of trouble and calamity to the Captain himself. Such things had been before, they whispered, let the parson of the parish say what he would; and there were some ghosts that all the Latin that worthy gentleman knew would never lay in the Red Sea.

  The quiet years rolled slowly by, unmarked by change either at the Hall, the Black Bear, or the little cottage in which Millicent spent her tranquil days. No tidings came to Compton of the Vulture or its captain; and though Millicent refused to wear a widow’s dress, the feeling gradually crept upon her that she was indeed a widow, and that the tie knotted for her by others, and so bitter to bear, was broken by the mighty hand which severs so many tender links, and seems so slow sometimes to loosen the chains of a cruel bondage.

  For the first year or two after Ringwood Markham’s return, it was thought that he would most likely marry and take his place in the village as his father had done before him. The Hall estate was considered to be a very comfortable fortune in the neighbourhood of Compton-on-the-Moor, and many a rich farmer’s daughter sported her finest ribbons, and pinned her jauntily trimmed hat coquettislily aslant upon her roll of glossy hair, in hopes of charming the young squire. But Ringwood’s heart was a fortress by no means easy to be stormed. Selfishness held her court therein, and a complete indifference to all simple pleasures, and a certain weariness of life, had succeeded the young man’s brief career of dissipation.

  As his fortune mended with the first few years of his new and steady life, something of the miser’s feeling took possession of his cold nature. He had spent his money upon ungrateful boon companions, who had laughed at him for his pains, and refused him the loan of a guinea when his purse was low. He would be warned by the past, he thought, and would learn to be wiser in the future. Small tenants on the Compton Hall estate began to murmur to each other that Master Ringwood Markham was a hard landlord, and that times were even worse now for poor folks than in the old squire’s day. These poor people spoke nothing hut the truth. As Ringwood’s empty purse filled once more, the young man felt a greedy eagerness to save money; for what purpose he scarcely gave himself the trouble to think. Perhaps when he did think very seriously, a shuddering fear came over him that his impaired constitution was not to be easily mended — that even the fine north-country air sweeping across broad expanses of brown moorland, and blowing in at the open windows of the oak parlour, could never bring a healthy glow back to his flushed cheeks; and that it might be that he inherited with his mother’s fair face something of his mother’s feebleness of constitution. But it was rarely that he suffered his mind to dwell upon these things. He found plenty of employment for himself in protecting his own interests. He was his own steward, and rode a grey pony about the farm, watching the men at their work, and gloating over the progress of the crops as the changing seasons did their bounteous work, and the bright face of Plenty met him in his way.

  Northern harvests are late, and that harvest was especially late which was garnered in the seventh autumn succeeding the last sailing of the good ship Vulture from the harbour at Marley Water. September had been wet and cold, and October set in with a gloomy aspect, as of an unwelcome winter come before its due time. In the early days of this chill and cheerless October they were still stacking the corn upon the Compton Hall farm, while Ringwood, on his grey pony, rode from field to field to watch the men at their labours, and to grumble at their laziness. The young squire was cautious and suspicious, and rarely thought that work was well done unless he was at the heels of those who did it.

  He paid dearly enough for this want of faith in those who served him, for it was in one of these rides that he caught a chill which settled on his lungs, and threw him on a bed of sickness.

  At the first hint of his illness Millicent was by his side, patient and loving, eager to soothe and comfort, to tend and to restore. Like all creatures of his class, weak alike in physical and mental qualities, the young man peculiarly felt the helplessness of his state. He clung to his sister as if he had been a sick child and she his mother. In the dead of the night he would awake, with the cold drops standing on his brow, and cry aloud to her to come to him. Then, comforted and reassured on finding her watching by his side, he would fall into a peaceful slumber with her hand clasped in his, and his fair head pillowed upon her shoulder.

  The Compton doctor shook his head ominously when he looked at the young squire’s hectic cheeks and sounded his narrow chest. Not satisfied with the village surgeon’s decision, Millicent sent to Marley Water for a physician to look at her sinking brother; but the physician only confirmed what his colleague had already said. There was no hope for Ringwood. Little matter whether they called it a violent cold, or a spasmodic cough, inflammation of the lungs, or low fever. All that need be told about him would have been better told in one word — consumption. His mother had died of the same disease before him, fading quietly away as he was fading now.

  In the dismal silences of those long winter nights in which the sick man awoke so often — always to see Millicent’s fair face, lighted by the faint glimmer of the night-lamp or the glow of the embers in the grate — Ringwood began to think of his past life — a brief life, which had been spent to no useful end whatever; a selfish life, which had been passed in stolid indifference to the good of others — perhaps, from this terrible uselessness, almost a wicked life.

  A few nights before that upon which the young squire died, he lay awake a long time counting the chiming of the quarters from the turret of Compton church, listening to the embers falling on the broad stone hearth, and the ivy-leaves flapping and scraping against the window-panes, with something like the sound of skeleton fingers tapping for admittance. And from this he fell to watching his sister’s face as she sat in a low chair by the hearth, with her large thoughtful blue eyes fixed upon the hollow fire, and the un
read volume half dropping from her loose hand.

  How pretty she was, he thought; but what a pensive beauty! How little of the light of joy had ever beamed from those melancholy eyes since the old days when Darrell and she had been friends and playfellows, before Captain George Duke had ever shown his handsome face at the Hall! Thinking thus, it was only natural for the sick man to remember his own share in forcing on this unhappy marriage; how he had persuaded his father to hear no girlish prayers, and to heed neither tears nor lamentations. Remembering this, he could but remember also the mean motive which had urged him to this course; the contemptible spite against his cousin Darrell, which had made him eager even for the shipwreck of his sister’s happiness, so that her lover might suffer. He was dying now, and the world, with all that was in it, was of so little use to him that he was ready enough to forgive his cousin all the old grudges between them, and to wish him well for the future.

  “Millicent!” he said by-and-by.

  “Yes, dear,” answered his sister, creeping to his side. “I thought you were asleep. Have you been awake long, Ringwood?”

  “Yes, a long time.”

  “A long time! my poor boy!”

  “Perhaps it’s better to be awake, sometimes,” murmured the sick man. “I don’t want to slip out of life in one long sleep. I’ve been thinking, Millicent.”

  “Thinking, dear?”

  “Yes, thinking what a bad brother I’ve been to you.”

  “A bad brother, Ringwood! No, no, no!” She fell on her knees by the bedside as she spoke, and wound her loving arms about his wasted frame.

  “Yes, Millicent, a bad brother. I helped to urge on your marriage with a man you hated. I helped to part you from the man you loved, and to make your young life miserable. You know that, and yet you’re here, night after night, nursing me as tenderly as if I’d never thought but of your happiness.”